by Potential Frolic

Teleology is the attempt to become an image of greatness, or perfection, or fruition.

Previously, we looked at reasons why Palingenesis has negative aspects attaching to its political program, and how these negative aspects mar its positive aspect, which is unification of a people.

In moving from a discussion of Palingenesis to a discussion of Teleology, we’re moving from the social level to the individual level. Palingenesis regulates how social entities relate to each other, using politics and philosophy as means. Teleology regulates the relation of men to themselves, within the confines of their own minds, using images and rationalization as means. It is thus more intimate, and much more interesting.

Teleology precedes palingenesis. This is because the ideological underpinnings of palingenesis were conceived for the purpose of realizing teleological striving. For example, it was the struggle of individuals to reconnect to historical precedents, a connection to which is only possible in imagination, which begot the political manifestation of same. It was the intelligent individual’s realization of his smallness on the historical stage, and his desire to draw to himself more weight and meaning, that forged the rhetorical connections to ancient Germania and Hellas in germans of the 19th century. This can be seen, for example, in the philological posturing of Friedrich Nietzsche, alledging a special connection to ancient Hellas, discovered uniquely by him in his readings. The actual accuracy of his assertions in The Birth of Tragedy - assertions not less sweeping than those he would make in later books - were demolished in a point-by-point critique by Wilamowitz. Not that this detracts from the philosophical content of his writings. It can be seen however, that the appeal to ancient greek authority is important in 19th century literary personality combat. One finds similar idea content in Evola.

Moving from the individual level of the philosopher-striving-for-greatness, to the social level of the nation-striving-for-greatness, we can see how the same images, and same appeal to authority, are used to construct political movements. Mussolini’s vision for Italy, and the idea of yet another “Reich”. But all this has its start in the individual, so we want to look more closely at the process of teleological self-relation.

Guessedworker has told us that a man cannot be an indefinite number of things. He can only truly be one thing - and all else is illusion. He has also told us that that which can be described, has no part in this. Only the self can know the self.

Therefore all labels, which have a proximate and relative meaning for social transactions, possess no higher meaning, and do not describe anything real in the metaphysical sense. It is therefore an illusion that a man could be, for example, “a hero”.

If you ask yourself what a hero is, you may realize that you are talking about an image. You contrast a man’s actions with those of surrounding people, find that he has risked more in combat situations, make some judgments about his character, and pronounce him a hero. Or not a hero. Yet the behaviors which, when we see them manifested, we label ‘heroic’, are controlled by a simple neurobiological circuit inside of man. It derives from the basic need to protect kin and progeny, and the instinctive, emotional and mental reflexes that have evolved to accomplish this need. This is the neurobiological realization of Hamilton’s rule, that gives a natural protective behavior, which is different from the heroism of teleology. This natural behavior is not ‘heroism’ because it does not proceed through the image, but through spontaneous instinctive action.

We have little need of this circuit nowadays, and this is posited - by those who have a need to make such pronouncements - as a reason for our supposed decadence.

I have observed that it is rarely combat veterans who posit the underdevelopment of this mental circuit as a reason for decadence. Generally I observe that those who add a teleological layer to military conflict in their thinking, are not experienced in conflict. I have simply never met a grown man who had actually been involved in war, who did not smirk at the idea of ‘heroism’. This is from conversations with veterans and relatives, who were thoroughly disabused of this teleological idea through the experience of combat. It washes out of them in the adrenaline bath - if they ever had it - the belief that extreme risk and the surmounting it constitutes the development of a higher inner power, or that war constitutes a crucible for the formation of man’s faculties. I think it would be instructive to actually say to a vietnam veteran, for example: “I want to be a hero”, and observe the response.

My understanding is that these experiences never resolve into the ice-cold desensitization which they are expected to, and that one remains shit-scared, watching one’s friends die, and grimly going about the business of waging war. Only through an act of self-hardening which is tantamount to cretinization, i.e. the loss of one’s higher feeling and emotive faculties, can one learn to live with gore and the constant threat of death as something not profoundly de-energizing. I use this reasoning to explain to myself a peculiar fact about the behavior of my grandfather and great-grandfather, men who had actually done the work necessary to earn the pompous title ‘hero’ (i.e. fighting at Gallipolli, blinded by mustard-gas, filled up with shrapnel; conducting multiple raids into enemy territory and seeing many partners blown up in front of one’s eyes). These men were absolutely unwilling to cash in their presumed social status points, and receive from us or anyone else the tribute owed to a supposed ‘hero’. They were zealous, absolutely zealous, in the pursuit of minor non-teleological things, such as gardening, upholstery, and spending time with their wives and daughters. As if, having seen the big and dangerous life of teleology, they simply could not get enough of small things. After casting them for years in the role of titanic hero, and viewing myself a non-entity for never being able to provide similar service, I one day woke up to realize that I had misunderstood them completely. 

There are many noble lies commonly used to ennoble violence. One of them is this: violence, when it occurs in an ideologically appropriate context,  is not horrible. The young swallower of lies seeks to show his resolution, by affirming that the noble lie is lodged so deep in his esophagous, that he is thus inured to genuine experience of the horrors of war. Fanaticism as anaesthetic. It is an easy posture, but just a posture.

One of the many collisions with reality which this paradigm is fated to suffer, is the realization of what ‘sacrifice’ looks like when it becomes more than social signalling. Any nationalist would sacrifice himself, in greater or smaller ways, for his nation’s greater good. Only it is profoundly unclear, especially in time of war, which acts of sacrifice are beneficial and which are not. There is often no way of knowing which acts of sacrifice matter and which are simply of no value to the group.

This is the ‘fog of war’ or chaos of war, where the neatly delineated meanings assigned to putative actions begin to break down, and the would-be fanatic’s ideological padding fails to protect him from the onset of anxiety, despair, and what comes after those. One could go on to speak of two probability distributions, putative risk and putative reward - and when an opportunity to sacrifice oneself finally arrives, does one even know it will bring a benefit to the group? Perfect knowledge of this form is scant now, and will be non-existent “then”. It could just as well be that a given sacrifice harms the group, by virtue of its cost in terms of future efforts not realized.

Believing that sacrifice ennobles a man is a dangerous belief, because it means sacrifice carries value independent of its actual strategic value. A teleological concept of heroism is stuck in this conclusion.

What is aimed at with all this ‘heroism’? Clearly, it is not the doing of the heroic acts themselves. The goal is cleary to *be* great, to *be* a hero. Yet Guessedworker says that we can only be one thing.

For those who have ceased to believe in pure-hearted motivations, and understand the need to look into motivation structures, this psychology is laid out quite transparently. The teleological desire to be something is the desire to prove oneself worthy. It stems from the belief that human beings are separated by gradations of rank based on their deeds, and that these reflect essential differences in their souls or characters. The implication is that someone (men of the past, typically) has reached this level before, but that most contemporaries have not, and hence the need to reach that level and prove oneself. This is the desire which underpins teleological dreaming. It is one reason, among others, why philosophers might be in continual comparison of themselves with past philosophers, and why men from military families look on themselves as less worthy, if they cannot earn their own respect by valorous deeds.

If one is seen to be a hero, one is presumably celebrated with garlands and in statuary. If one, as a nineteenth century philosopher, is associated with the ancient Greeks and Germans, one has taken for oneself a patch of their glorious raiment. The teleologist allows the past to distend to a frightening size: its figures loom large, and as they grow farther away they become more towering and ‘titanic’. He reasons that he can become like them, i.e. achieve the same internal quota of externally-measured success, and one day will be on an equal footing with past worthies. He has an image, and he is trying to become that image.

This striving also has a moral dimension, because those who believe in these hierarchies of ‘internal merit’ also subject others to them. A man who would subject himself to these strictures, measuring his internal merit by them, does the same for everyone else.

This hierarchy of internal merit is justified from two angles: apotheosis and duty. Apotheosis is the reward to the self, which is posited and promised, but often scarcely realized. This can be observed in the fact that the inexperienced are very eager for apotheotic rewards, while the experienced speak glibly or even mockingly about them. The apotheotic motivator carries men into an embrace of teleological ideals, as it whispers gently in their ears: “Become great, and you will feel good!” Or some equivalent of that. We know one form of the noble lie to be articulated in the line: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Some have had reason to doubt the veracity of that observation.

The dutiful aspect of maintaining the hierarchy of internal merit is its social angle: we need soldiers to protect the collective. One reasons then on the basis of thought models about group conflict. Yet these thought models are informed by past paradigms of weaponry and are perpetually inaccurate, just as the paradigms of officers in World War I and II were inaccurate. For example, the existence of bioweapons draws into question the idea of soldiery defending a nation state in an effective way. The mental modeling of these outcomes is sufficiently hedged with ambiguity, that one can conjur up any number of possible scenarios. It is therefore not a suitable model to base a belief governing self-relation on, given this arbitrariness. Closer examination of mental models of complex phenomena (i.e. one’s idea of how “things are going to play out in the future”) may reveal their inaccuracy. The ability to test mental models for veracity is not evenly distributed.

The apotheotic motivator merits further exploration. It implies that the exercise of this defensive/aggressive circuit will result in substantial change to a man’s being - or reflect a difference already present. It is as if one were to say that having sex will change a man’s essential being. The sexual circuit in man contains arousal, touching, hip-thrusting movements: yet we don’t imagine that when man has carried out the work of this circuit, that he has become a “sexo”. We do not presume that those who have not used this circuit, are somehow less than “sexos”, and we do not imagine that a man may be essentially devalued by the absence of this circuit. If we do imagine this, we have forgotten Guessedworker’s admonishment about the possibilities of being. All this we do when we think teleologically.

Teleology is a method of self-relation based on the idea that one can become an image, or that comparison with images can give clues to man’s essential nature. Images are socially acquired (“hero”, “good guy”, “loser”, “coward”) and are maintained by an internalized external reward system. This is the merit hierarchy - one strives to rise on the hierarchy, adding to one’s self worth. This is judged on the basis of a running comparison of oneself or others, with the image. One considers one’s actions in light of image-approximation systems. If I move closer to the hero image, I move higher in the hierarchy.

White nationalist teleologists are supposed to be constant wardens of the collective good, and their state of internal unrest gives this surface plausibility. But in reality the concern for the collective good is not the true motivator. The primary motivator is advancement within their own internal merit hierarchies, i.e. vindicating themselves in their own eyes. It is done in order to be “good enough” for their internal belief system, which judges internal merit based on external manifestation. In psychological jargon, this is ‘internalized external motivation’ - representing the absorption of external voices. It also extinguishes the possibility of freedom of choice in a man.

A teleological self-relation condemns a man to slavery, though the slavery be to an internal voice and measurement system, rather than an external other. Men give great weight to specific political ideas and strategies, but in fact the motivational structure underlying our thinking is much more formative and determines outcome more consistently than any combination of ideas we may adhere to.

To overcome teleology within oneself, is a gift. It lets us finally be men - which is a better thing to be than a hero, or a genius, or a great man.

This is supremely relaxing, and reminds me of a verse:

His servants he with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event
With peace and consolation hath dismist,
And calm of mind all passion spent.