Majorityrights Central > Category: Political Philosophy

By exPF

Guessedworker asked what our answer is to the liberal concept of “happiness” which has been so vital to human life post-1787.

The answer is: tragedy. Or, as Dostoevsky described it: “the spiritually regenerative power of suffering.”

Nietzsche once commented that happiness and sadness are twin sisters, they either grow large together, or they grow small together. A life full of happiness has to be equally full of suffering; likewise, a life lacking in suffering has to be equally lacking in happiness.

What this means concretely is that, in order to truly become anything, one needs to go through processes which consist largely of negative experiences. Suffering tends to push one further down the road towards becoming, towards change - simply because when we experience suffering that is serious or profound, we tend to alter our approaches and ourselves in response to these painful stimuli. Having changed, having become something new, we can reap the benefits of our new state of existence, and thus have a higher degree of pleasure than we previously knew.

The lack of suffering, or pleasure, tends to facilitate continued being - i.e. people are lazy and will continue doing something as long as it continues to please them. Like electrons, humans tend to take the path of least resistance.

A person who experiences only pleasure after pleasure, finds little reason to become anything.

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The period covered by Red Riding - 1974 to 1983 - came as the classical Marxist cycle, with its prostitution of trade union activism for class-warfare, lost all traction and before the “cultural” cycle, with its bourgeois values of hyper-individualism, radical egalitarianism and anti-discrimination, gained any.  We plainly see that working-class life has completely lost its motor.  A strong sense of moral hiatus is present.  We are invited to supply meanings, and that is what I am doing in these essays.

I’ll pick up where we left off with Part 1 and get straight to the point.  That’s my point, of course.  Whatever the point that Tony Grisoni and, before him, David Peace intended to make – and they are wellnigh certain to be left-leaning so it wasn’t mine, I’m sure - the one that comes barrelling out of the TV screen and knocks you sideways is the power and meaning of a general and secular redemption.

In the world of Red Riding, in which innocence is so finally and absolutely betrayed, the redeeming agent is simple fidelity to that innocence.  Thus the corrupt but guilt-tortured Maurice Jobson finds redemption in confessing to the child-like Michael Myshkin (David Mays), a Stefan Kiszko figure whom he had framed eight years earlier for the abduction, rape and murder of three young girls .

The gluttonous and seedy John Piggott, the very model of the failed male, finds his redemption in the defining moment of the whole six hours of Red Riding … the moment when he recovers the missing child Hazel Atkins alive from some old underground workings.  These workings connect to a pigeon loft owned by the now very late Martin Laws.  The wordless, slow-motion emergence of Piggott, with Innocence in his arms, from darkness into a space whitened with rising pigeon feathers and shot through with sunlight is beyond poetic.  It has all the luminancy of archetype.

I think it deserves a closer look.

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By exPF

What lasts forever? Well, the mineral composition of the planets has a pretty impressive longevity.  The constellations of stars, with their long-forecasted death dates, make an impressive claim on time. The tendency of leftist philosophers to acknowledge the changing nature of the universe with a shrugging admission that everything is immutable, and the search for transcendent order thus useless, is a relatively fixed and unchanging pattern, albeit newly emergent.

The knee-jerk leftist shrug of “I see no transcendent order, so there can be no compelling imperative inherent in circumstances” pressages the inevitable return to resigned live-for-the-moment hedonism: you can continue chasing your tails gentlemen. Its all just as meaningless as we set out to prove it to be.

Looking to the cosmos is really a step too far considering that our evolutionary environment only knew the heavens as a playground for our ancestors’ anthropomorphizing imaginations (if one assumes, as I do, that a transcendent order has to be rooted in our existence and being, rather than in that of a creator). We may want to touch “forever” and play in the grandest theater accessible to us, but objectivity demands we stick to the facts of human life and ask, rather than what lasts forever (since we ourselves do not last forever): “what is always with us?”

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by exPF

In doing the philosophical work necessary to completely dismantle liberalism and postmodernist thought, we struggle and strive with a body of values and thinking, which so often seems to elude us. We look to see where it is codified - despite its marvelous consistency on many questions, it is apparently nowhere codified. We look to see its arguments - despite the ubiquity of its conclusions, we see no arguments as such anywhere; with the exceptions of the murmuring of leftist cliques in the Frankfurt School, Boasian anthropology and psychoanalysis. Yet how did the lib in the street absorb the conclusions of these movements while being totally ignorant of the movements themselves?

The schools of thought we are striving to displace - liberalism, postmodernism, aracialism - seem to have been disseminated in a way that is historically unique. Whereas we treat them with the dignity reminiscent of classical intellectual movements, attempting refutations of them and doing what we can to attack their premises, it seems to me that these philosophies actually were not disseminated through reasoned argument, but rather absorbed through watching television. Hence the ubiquity of our ideological enemies’ representatives, hence their permeating the entire cultural sphere- hence the general ignorance with which these positions are accepted. What we have are the results of 50 years of television’s echo chamber being left to imprint itself on the Western mind. Hence the pre-rational nature of so many people’s attachments to liberal ideas.

What is the nature and philosophical dimensions of the “Argumentum ex Television”?

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by exPF

Note: this is a response to Skeptical’s comment in A religious image:

To wantonly cast aside so many centuries of European Man’s development simply because Christianity has a remote, Jewish origin is nothing short of narcissism. The barbaric ideal is just another romantic fiction that creates more problems than it can solve.

I’m going to give this particular quote a long response. This will ultimately be a restatement of previous arguments in favor of ‘cultural pessimism’. It is a view that I have consistently advocated on this blog, which amounts to essentialism relating to blood in spite of varying levels of civilizational advancement and the ups and downs of prosperity, learning, culture, etc.

The development of European man’s civilization is not the same as the development of European man.

I refuse as too simplistic the notion that European man has ‘developed’ into some kind of higher, superior form viz-a-vis his former self. Advantages - spiritual, physical, mental - which accrue to us a result of our historical development, are not the same as essential traits which become part of our nature through natural selection.

I have always been skeptical of using metrics of civilizational development in assessing the viability of a race or nation. This is because most of these metrics are based on refinements in memes, and work done by the upper 1% of thinkers and scarcely understood by the rest - mostly they are refinements of mental modules and toolsets which, grand as they might be, are ultimately phenotypic rather than genotypic. The wealth of accumulated cultural inheritance has grown so great that it leads us to continuous hubristic over-evaluation of our own merits and abilities both as individuals and as nations.

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I thought I might follow up the Herder post from 13th January with a quick intro to another of the founding figures of German Idealism and of German nationalism, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762 - 1814).  Below the fold I will reproduce one of his famous series of Addresses to the German Nation.

Fichte was an original thinker and offered important contributions to the theory of consciousness and to freedom of thought and speech.  But it was only in his later years that his theory of an autarkic (or self-sufficient) government appeared, and he began to flesh out a notion of state, individual and fatherland that earned him his place in the nationalist pantheon.

He was no Judeophile, describing Jews as a “state within a state” that could “undermine” the German nation. He suggested the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

In 1807-8 he took to circularising his Reden an die deutsche Nation, or Addresses to the German Nation, from the then French-occupied Berlin.  Here, to give you a pretty strong flavour of early German Idealist thought and German patriotism, is one from 1807:-

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Hat-tip to Andy on Troy’s New Right Forum for this re-run of a 2003 article on Johann Herder at Robert Steuckers’ Euro-Synergies website.

Johann Gottfried von Herder (August 25, 1744 – December 18, 1803) was a philosopher considered, with Johann Gottlieb Fichte, to be one of the fathers of German nationalism and romanticism.  He was a figure of sufficient substance to have approved of the French Revolution - and upset German royalty thereby.  He rejected Kant and also Hamann’s Sturm und Drang, and was an early inspiration to Goethe.

The article, which is by M. Raphael Johnson and which I will reproduce in full below the fold, interests me for two reasons.  First, I think the history of the ideas of European nationalism, which flow from the reservoir of continental Idealist philosophy, is something of which all those who call themselves nationalists should have an understanding.  And while it’s true that historical circumstances change enormously, there is still much in Herder’s analysis which chimes for us today.

Of the Volk, of whom he was a champion and, in the ideational sense, the inventor, he said:-

“What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.”

And of the inner motivations of those who proclaimed the universalist cause he said:-

“Those that embrace the entire universe with love for the most part love nothing but their narrow selves.”

Second, it is obviously impossible to contemplate the meaning of, and the towering need for, synthesis without the poles of nationalist thought, and of Western philosophy generally, being well fixed in the mind.  Ideas matter, and the history of ideas matters.

M. Raphael Johnson quite vividly and insistently explicates the bad faith and intellectual snobbery which exists, and has always existed, among continental European thinkers for their analytical Anglo-Saxon counterparts.  Science, they say, is the epistomology of the lab sample.  All higher organic meaning is lost or distorted through the empirical prism.  The Idealists, you see, are unique in knowing the meaning - and, therefore, appreciating the beauty - of things.

You may disagree, but you had better have some damned good arguments why.

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Last February, by way of an introduction, I put up a post about the great German jurist Carl Schmitt.  He is a highly useful guide to the ways of Power.  His elucidation of the theoretics of state power in extraordinary times established the framework employed by many, and probably most, thinkers in this, let’s say, increasingly topical field.  In particular, Schmitt’s concepts of the decision and the state of exception open up the operation of total power for examination like a dead butterfly on a display board.

As Tom Sunic wrote in Homo Americanus: child of the postmodern age:-

Carl Schmitt ... realized an age old truth; namely, political concepts acquire their true meanings only when the chief political actor, i.e. the state and its ruling class, find themselves in a sudden and unpredictable state of emergency. Then all former interpretations of “self-evident” truths become obsolete. One could witness that after the terrorist attack of 9/11 in America — an event that was never fully elucidated — the ruling class in America used that opportunity to redefine the legal meaning of the expressions “human rights” and “freedom of speech.” After all, is not the best way to curb real civic rights the adoption of abstract incantations, such as “human rights” and “democracy”?

What just about everyone with a triple-digit IQ understands is that the events of 11th September 2001 and the subsequent War on Terror have been ruthlessly exploited throughout the West to advance a profoundly undemocratic and disturbing domestic security agenda.  Whether a true state of exception ever existed is highly doubtful.  But Power decides what is moral and what is, in a vulgar sense,  true.  It has decided that its officers shall usurp the legal code at will, and shall stipulate on their own authority the terms under which its citizens go about their business.

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