Category: Political Philosophy

The communitarian critique of liberalism left and right

by Graham Lister

For the philosophical communitarian, the Sartrean cogito, spontaneously reinventing itself ex nihilo, permanently free to choose and revise its definition of the good, is a fiction that pervades all modern liberalism. From Hobbes, Locke and Kant, through to Mill and Rawls, the rootless, solitary and “unencumbered self”, as Michael Sandel describes it, prior to and independent of its ends and rationally deliberating on the value of its voluntary attachments, is adopted as the starting point of social analysis.

This conception of the subject, it is argued, precludes from the start the possibility of genuinely communal forms of association, of “constitutive” communities “bound by moral ties antecedent to choice”. This is why communitarians stress the cultural constitution of the subject, the way the individual forms his or her identity, sense of self, and intuitive system of values by inheriting and passing on an unchosen legacy of collective orientations, shared meanings and standards, networks of kinship and pre-contractual forms of solidarity which are a prerequisite for, rather than the outcome of, the subject’s capacity for moral commitment.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Sunday, February 5, 2012 at 06:51 AM in Political Philosophy
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Ethics and morality: the absolute ideal of race

by Grimoire

Recently, in the thread to Mr Rod Cameron’s Idealist Critique, Mr Leon Haller asks:

I see that my suggestion that it would be a useful exercise for someone to attempt (at the understood risk of oversimplification) a 3 paragraph summary of the lead post has not been pursued. Neither has any rebuttal been offered to my implied assertion that ethics is a more fruitful philosophical discipline for nationalists than ontology.

I repeat: why, in simple and straightforward language, is it thought that nationalists should seek to reformulate ontology, instead of ethics?

And I agree with these questions.  The summation I leave as self-evident and up to Mr. Cameron, but the ethics question I thought important.  Also, in discussion with Mr. Cameron this idea came up as a point of disagreement also with GW et al, the result being general disagreement ... I expect no less.

Normally, I wait to make any positive statements except critique, since I am usually in complete disagreement with the general temper.  But Mr Haller has asked an honest and direct question that I feel I should answer regarding the role of Ethics in Nationalism, which I believe are paramount, and an “absolute idea” of our race [viz-a-vis Leon’s own insistence that European Man is Ethical Man - Ed].

The root of my disagreement is deep, and branches into many facets of the problem of the psychology of modern man - particularly that emanating from the problem of predicate thinking, of which I will write later.  But now i want to write briefly as possible, per Mr. Hallers request, on the the role of Ethics in Race.

I have protested to many here that they do not understand the implications of the rhetoric of Darwinist theory in practice on Mankind - or the theories of “Natural Selection” and “Survival Of The Fittest” - and its predicate assumptions regarding evolution, that there is a vast difference between evolutionary psychology and true evolution, and that these are in direct conflict with that which created our Race.  For it is ethics and morals which create race and human evolution, as most of you will vehemently deny.  I will tell you why I think you are wrong.  I already understand most of you will resist this with vigour.  So I will be brief.

“Evolutionary Adaptation”, “Survival of the Fittest” and “Natural Selection” are theories derived from zoology, not anthropology.  In anthropology they are associated only through predication, as these loose catch-all syllogisms are at best folk-wisdom with the imprimateur of science.  Only the most rabid Darwinists support the idea, and most educated people feel, in the words of a historian of culture and ideas:

A modern imagination predisposed to a belief in science ... will generally find that neither creation nor evolution overcomes its profound conviction of ignorance.
- Jacques Barzun

The reason is intuitive sense; theories that apply to animals do not apply to Man.  Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest apply to animals because they live in their natural environment.  Man does not.  In man’s environment, “Natural Selection” and “Survival of the Fittest” kills the courageous, the noble, those who resist injustice and deselects and disadvantages through progeny those who are of advanced intelligence.  Natural Selections favours bestiality and stupidity … and continually selects in a manner devised to return Mankind to animality and a state of nature in coherence with the great apes.

Ethics and Morality are the counter of this, and serve as a method of un-natural selection and adaptation.  Ethics and Morality place un-natural environmental burdens over and above the natural environment ... such as monogamy and enduring, extended family and values that support cohesion and endurance as a social unit.  These accrue to Race.  These create Race.  Race is a result of limits imposed by ethics and morality.  All Race, culture and language arise out of these limits, and distinguishes between the ultimate values of ethics and morality and through this distinguish between peoples.  The result leads to our un-natural civilization.  For Mankind is not natural, as it is understood regarding all other life-forms on this planet.

The Aryan concept of history is of the constant de-evolution of mankind, and is shared with all great classic cultures, and all eastern Aryan derived cultures.  It is the central tenet concerning history.  This tenet also contains the warning that when the values of a Race are discarded, you get Africa to put it succinctly. The Modern idea of the evolution of mankind is in direct contradiction to what you see around you if you walk the streets of any western metropolis.

So in summation:

Ethics and morality are a foundation of Western culture.  And those who propose “evolutionary” or “Darwinist” values are in discord with the values that have preserved the branches of the Aryan race from the dawn of its history.

Posted by Guest Blogger on Tuesday, July 5, 2011 at 08:33 AM in Political Philosophy
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Nationalist axiality

It must be five years ago that there was a rash of interest at MR about creating a political compass to process nationalist political affiliation.  It arose because the standard model, based as it is on conventional social and economic measures and, needless to say, the charming and by no means goy-hostile thoughts of Theodore Adorno and Wilhelm Reich, cannot process ethnocentric political attitudes and values.  So nationalists who take the test find most of the questions irrelevant, and the results puzzling.

For example, I’ve just taken it again and find that:

... I’m a centrist, damn it!  And that’s despite slamming in a string of strongly agree/disagree answers that should have shaken things up.  They didn’t.  My politics just don’t compute.

When we looked at the issue before there was some debate about whether we should be trying to develop a bi-axial compass like this model, a triaxial one that allowed for degrees of awakening, so conventionalists could take the test and get a relevant result, or a simple binning system.  I recall that there was already a test around that could bin nationalist sentiments, but it did not impress.

However, we never progressed beyond the first stumbling block, which was the axiality.  If authoritarian ? libertarian and social ? economic measures describe the liberal paradigm, what describes nationalism?  At least one of the measures has to accord with the reality of the human psyche (the standard compass’s authoritarian ? libertarian axis is recognised by psychologists as doing so).  I’ve argued here that the primary axis of nationalism is being ? becoming, and this seems too fundamental to human life to be anything other than correct.  It’s in metaphysics.  It’s in religion.  It’s good enough.  But that second axis!  That’s the tough one.

In the standard model it’s also the one that relates to purely political concerns: the social left ? the economic right.  Nationalist political concerns do not accord with the liberal value of endless progress.  There is, though, some valuational overlap with the social element, based on the care which flows from kinship.  But that would seem to dictate an opposite in elitism, and indeed the elitism of the aristocracy and of the imperium is an object of regular genuflection among some nationalists.  Norman Lowell, the Eurasianists and our friend Neo-Nietzsche would be pleased, I don’t doubt.  But it doesn’t sit quite right with me.

I confess, I haven’t grasped the whole picture to my own satisfaction.  I know I’m not thinking clearly enough.  Any ideas?

Posted by Guessedworker on Monday, December 20, 2010 at 07:00 PM in Political Philosophy
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Logic: our sometime-friend, sometime-enemy

by PF

Dedicated to: the red-headed Spice girl.

I will try to clarify something which GW said to Notus on the Gödelian thread.  Notus asked:

How do you mean that logic can be used to relativise all these things?

This is a critique voiced often by GW and myself which runs along the following lines.

It was really the belief in the susceptibility of complex social realities, and ultimately the reality of our Being, to extremely primitive analytical tools, which formed the basis for social engineering experiments such as have destroyed our Folk.  Marx really perfected this as a tool of destruction - his “scientific” view of history, which was based on a simplistic and in hindsight, very arbitrary analysis of certain historical trends.

Thinkers are obviously obsessed with deconstructing the complex reality that is human experience over time, and finding in it “the central meaning”. This is “the meaning of history”. As a student of Nietzsche (ie, I read and thought about him for a few years), I saw how big N was doing this all over the place. It was for him a way of projecting his likes and dislikes across vast distances of time - and it really was basically that idiosyncratic and subjective. I hope I can belabor this point a little bit without boring everyone because it is one of the central ideas to me, although everyone here probably knows already what I have to say about it.

Nietzsche hated that his mother in Naumburg wanted to force him into the role of soft-hearted Christian do-gooder. He was a radical, adventurous, crazy man - in his own way, and suffered greatly under this constraint. Yet he could never part with his family, in some sense they were almost his only stable social contact throughout his life. So he conjured in his works a vision of Christianity which ridiculed this Naumburg strain of Protestantism, claiming of course that his critique applied to all Xtianity. F Lea, his biographer, has shown how much N’s “Christianity” was actually “Naumburg social constraint” and not the historical Christianity. Nevertheless, he said some things which have stuck, and his critique is in the main, incisive, at least from my anti-Christian perspective.

He likewise held up an ancient ideal of Greece during the time of the Tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides) - and I hate to personalize things so much (too bad they are, in fact, so personal), but this had very much to do with the fact that he experienced moments of elation and higher meaning (“am” experiences in my lingo) while reading this at Schulpforta as a young student. His life-long endeavor was to show what ancient Hellas meant and how it could be an alternative model for a reborn Germany and Europe. Wilamowitz, in his critique of N’s philological treatment of ancient Greece in TBOT, basically demolished every substantial assertion of N’s about historical Hellas, showing the extent to which N was being an artist, in his construction of past ages, rather than a scientist.

What remains difficult is the fact that N, being so brilliant, inevitably spoke a great deal of truth when he spoke of these things. But look at how huge the human experience is, how difficult to synthesize - and you will realize that each man can forge his own idiosyncratic view, and many of them - where they depart from specific facts - will become mutually contradictory.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Friday, September 3, 2010 at 05:43 AM in Political Philosophy
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Critique of Palingenesis II: The State of Emergency

by PF

In the first Critique of Palingenesis we considered some aspects of the total phenomenon that is palingenetic nationalism. Some of these included:

- Centralization of social narrative / happy unity, and resulting tendency to groupthink

- Mythicization of concepts relating to national life

- Weaponization/militarisation of national life

- Cretinization of the ‘tough boy’ class by apotheosizing the weaponization of man

In the follow-up piece, The End of Teleology, we named and described the psychological mechanism which has driven so many statesman, philosophers, politicians and military men to don variously-styled masks of greatness, and seek to appear before us and themselves as Geniuses, Heroes, World-Architects, and Philosopher-Kings.

This illustrated the psychological antecedent of palingenetic politics, by showing how multiple interests act in collusion to ‘scale the heights of Olympus’ and win for themselves make-believe laurels, trophies, fame, etc.. The thinker reaches back to Athens and Shakespeare, and becomes a genius; the philosopher of history reaches back with transhistorical ‘decadence’ critique to the thinker and lacsadaisically to the hype surrounding Shakespeare, and becomes a world-architect, creating a vision of epochal changes; the statesman reaches back to the philosopher of history and lacsadaisically to the thinker, and becomes a philosopher-king; the soldier reaches back to a foggy understanding of all of these, elevated by the philosopher-king’s vision, and becomes a hero. Last of all comes the teleological WN blog commentator, who also thinks to clothe his nakedness by reaching back to these men. If you are able to look closely at real instances of this - occuring again and again with great regularity - you can see how these images of greatness conflict with one another and also with the nature of the men who sport them as costume. Time spent in dead earnest study of these men will reveal that a non-insignificant amount of lying went into crafting this charade, as it is hard for a man to become an image of perfection. One might even say it is impossible. 

Now we return to the investigation of one particular psychological aspect of Palingenesis. Not the teleology that precedes its formulation as a philosophical system, but the mechanism that precedes and justifies the uptake of palingenetic memes after they are formulated as a system and put on the political market.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at 04:12 AM in Political Philosophy
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RISE

Posted by Søren Renner on Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 10:38 AM in Political Philosophy
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Subject and Interrogation: Zizek, Dugin, and the Rough Beast

From Slavoj Zizek’s Interrogating the Real:

Along the lines of this constitutive ‘homelessness’ of philosophy, one should rehabilitate Kant’s idea of the cosmopolitan ‘world-civil-society’ (Weltburgergesellschaft), which is not simply an expansion of the citizenship of a nation state to the citizenship of a global trans-national state; instead, it involves a shift from the principle of identification with one’s ‘organic’ ethnic substance actualized in a particular tradition to a radically different principle of identification.  Recall Deleuze’s notion of universal singularity as opposed to the triad of Individuality-Particularity-Universality - this opposition is precisely the opposition between Kant and Hegel.  For Hegel, ‘world-civil-society’ is an abstract notion without substantial content, lacking the mediation of the particular and thus the force of full actuality, i.e., it involves an abstract identification which does not substantially grasp the subject; the only way for an individual effectively to participate in universal humanity is therefore through a full identification with a particular Nation-State (I am ‘human’ only insofar as I am German, English…).  For Kant, on the contrary, ‘world-civil-society’ designates the paradox of the universal singularity, of a singular subject who, in a kind of short-circuit, bypasses the mediation of the particular by directly participating in the Universal.  The identification with the Universal is not the identification with an encompassing global Substance (‘humanity’), but an identification with a universal ethico-political principle - a universal religious collective, a scientific collective, a global revolutionary organization, all of which are in principle accessible to everyone.  This is what Kant, in the famous passage of his ‘What is Enlightenment?’, means by ‘public’ as opposed to ‘private’: ‘private’ is not one’s individuality as opposed to one’s communal ties, but the very communal-institutional order of one’s particular identification; while ‘public’ is the trans-national universality of the exercise of one’s Reason.  The paradox is thus that one participates in the universal dimension of the ‘public’ sphere precisely as singular individual extracted from or even opposed to one’s substantial communal identification - one is truly universal only as radically singular, in the interstices of communal identities.  And what we find at the end of his road is atheism - not the ridiculously pathetic spectacle of the heroic defiance of God, but insight into the irrelevance of the divine, along the lines of Brecht’s Herr Keuner:

Continued...

Posted by Søren Renner on Saturday, March 27, 2010 at 11:17 AM in Political Philosophy
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My latest teleology

by Rod Cameron

I see one of the brothers has recently been writing about the end of teleology. I am a fan of teleology and whatever the brother was on about, it was not teleology. I wish he had found another word for his angst. Speculation about the future is what keeps us on the political margins going, so I thought I would show what it is about. Teleology is about joining a few dots to predict a glorious future. We all do it: take a few premises and cantilever an extrapolation till it crashes and burns. The critics of teleology say it is not within a million miles of being a pseudo-science, and they are right, but it is a lot of fun and I am actually serious, especially since the answer to the first question, “Where are we?” is damn obvious.

We are in a post-ideological age; we are beyond the debates based on political economy – Easy. Next dot, “What does that mean?” It means we are beyond trying to understand the world in terms of good and evil; we are beyond ethics. Dot 3, “Enlarge on that”. Basically ethics was behind ideology and in the end ethics had nothing to do with predicting the eventual answer which is known as liberal democracy or democratic capitalism. Dot 4, “So?” Well, look at our particular situation. Instead of a debate on immigration we get an ethical invective, “Racist!” And do we buy that as a comprehensive response? Does any-[intelligent]-one continue to think politics is applied ethics? Dot 5, “So?” Liberalism and its mate ethics are shagged-out. With their inane reply to the anti-immigrant protest they are begging us to say something really intelligent that will bury their faith in ethics. They are destined to be replaced and we have to get in early with some new Absolutes to replace the worn-out, simplistic one commonly associated with shagged-out Christianity. Dot 6, “You are sure history is against ethics?” All ethical absolutes finish up in the same place – the philosophy dump. Dot 7, “And you no doubt have a few Absolutes handy to fill the vacuum after ethics and thereby predict future developments in the world of ideas?” Yeah. And that is enough dots to get me started. I will have to make a few points before the teleology is launched.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 08:42 PM in Political Philosophy
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The Oldest of the Old in Western Thought

True, as we look through Being itself, through time itself, and look into the destiny of Being and the extending of time-space, we have glimpsed what “Appropriation” means.  But do we by this road arrive at anything else than a mere thought-construct?  Behind this suspicion there lurks the view that Appropriation must after all “be” something.  However:  Appropriation neither is, nor is Appropriation there.  To say the one or to say the other is equally a distortion of the matter, just as if we wanted to derive the source from the river.

What remains to be said?  Only this:  Appropriation appropriates.  Saying this, we say the Same in terms of the Same about the Same.  To all appearances, all this says nothing.  It does indeed say nothing so long as we hear a mere sentence in what was said, and expose that sentence to the cross-examination of logic.  But what if we take what was said and adopt it unceasingly as the guide for our thinking, and consider that this Same is not even anything new, but the oldest of the old in Western thought:  that ancient something which conceals itself in a-letheia?  That which is said before all else by this first source of all the leitmotifs of thinking gives voice to a bond that binds all thinking, providing that thinking submits to the call of what must be thought.

The task of our thinking has been to trace Being to its own from Appropriation—by way of looking through true time without regard to the relation of Being to beings.

To think Being without beings means:  to think Being without regard to metaphysics.  Yet a regard for metaphysics still prevails even in the intention to overcome metaphysics.  Therefore, our task is to cease all overcoming, and leave metaphysics to itself.

If overcoming remains necessary, it concerns that thinking that explicitly enters Appropriation in order to say It in terms of It about It.

Our task is unceasingly to overcome the obstacles that tend to render such saying inadequate.

The saying of Appropriation in the form of a lecture remains itself an obstacle of this kind.  The lecture has spoken merely in propositional statements.

Martin Heidegger, “On Time and Being” translated by Joan Stambaugh, ISBN:0-022-32375-7, p 23-24

I present this for discussion by those more familiar with continental philosophy than I because I have a hunch it is as important as it pretends.

Posted by James Bowery on Saturday, July 25, 2009 at 12:46 PM in Political Philosophy
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Prologue to a déjà vu?

Ian Jobling needs little or no introduction.  He’s known as an anti-anti-Semite whose mission is to make WN safe for Jews.  My first direct experience with Jobling was in response to his post on Genetic Similarity Theory.  After publishing some of my comments, he refused to publish another.  I suspect it was either because he was having problems defending his position (which didn’t impress many of the regulars), or he was upset that I made a reference to his avoiding the JQ (which might have made it through moderation because initially he did not seem to understand the point). 

Is it even worth talking about him?  Prozium has recently made a number of excellent posts critiquing the  ‘moderate’ race realists.  Most of us already know why Jobling is wrong.  But Jobling has now made it official that he wants to develop his own version of a political philosophy for the pro-White movement (PWM).  This is a good opportunity to understand exactly what it is that Jobling wants.  Pointing out the flaws in his thinking will also help draw those new to the PWM away from moderate positions that compromise White interests.

Jobling says that he wrote this, what he calls the prologue to a series of essays on pro-White political philosophy, because his attempts to create a manifesto for a new political party earlier in the year were hampered by his not understanding what its foundational political philosophy would be.  He says that the PWM “is mired in confusion, teeming with knotty contradictions, unexamined premises, and dubious logic”.  Is this true?  Certainly there are competing positions (particularly with regards to the role of Jews in the PWM).  Perhaps this is Jobling being honest about contradictions in his own position that he has not addressed adequately.  In this essay, he seeks to outline the issues and questions that will be addressed by a coherent, consistent pro-White political philosophy.

Continued...

Posted by Dasein on Friday, July 10, 2009 at 08:35 AM in Political Philosophy,  That Question Again,  White Nationalism
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False identity

A few thoughts about an imaginary problem

“Identity” is not a word that need ever pass our lips - not if we have zero respect for the liberal analysis, and wish to be free of its formative power.  For this is a word of the left, and like all words of the left it pressages on us a modern conception of Man which is fatally light and relativistic.

How so?  Well, shouldn’t it be a grave and weighty responsibility for a man to define who and what he is?  After all, modernity places the highest possible value on the individual, denying all bonds, all blood their primacy.  To use the Schmittian formulation, “None but the individual shall dispose of the life of the individual.”  Surely, then, that life should be sufficiently valued by its owner to imbue the exercise with a high seriousness and a desire for some specificity.  Yet in practice the reverse is the case.  We live in the Age of the Left.  It is an age when realization of the Self, once the preserve of the religious and Chivalric orders, has been democratized and, in democratization, has been relativised.  When the measure of a life is mere personal taste all claims are equal.  There is salience but there is no depth.  There is “progress” but there is no movement.  Something vital, something authentic and original has fallen out of the equation.

In the sociological sense what remains is the modern us and the meaning of us.  For well over a century nationalist and traditionalist thinkers have judged that meaning in historical terms and found it wanting.  The ineluctable conclusion is that we are moving away from our truth as men, and putting on the cloth of an increasingly artificial self.  And we are doing this, most of us, because we are ignorant of politics and of ourselves, and we are weak and suggestible.

Artificiality in the modern conception of Man (modern in the context of an industrialised and, later, consumerised society) is precisely a sign of lost being.  It seems improbable, somehow, that the men and women of pre-industrial European societies, filled as those societies were with brothers to the ox, with men listed in the Orange and the Blue, and their widows in the pews, and the widows of the sea, would have had any reference point at all to the narcissism of a self-ascribed “identity”.  Geoffrey Chaucer’s pilgrims assuredly did not define themselves according to their fascinations with the Self.  They were fixed by their relation to kin, to the soil and the seasons or the tides and the wind, to the economy as manor, town or village, to Nature and to God.  These were givers of riches aplenty for all but the high elites of the Court and Barony, of the Church, and of learning.

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 07:54 PM in Political Philosophy
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Thoughts on the preface and introduction of The Triumph of the Therapeutic by Philip Rieff

by DanielJ

From the Preface to this work, Rieff quoting two historians’ summary of his work:

“If the dominant character type of the twentieth century is really what Rieff calls ‘psychological man,’ the consequences for western society are quite incalculable.”

This is certainly true. If man is a psychological creature than we must use the weapons of psychology to turn him to toward the defensive weaponry of Christianity, ethnic solidarity, epistemology, etc. Simply concentrating on Van Tillian presuppositionalism will do no good when men are no longer motivated by philosophies, but by psychologies.

From the Introduction:

Literature and sociology have long supplied eloquent and knowing professional mourners at the wake for Christian culture. After Matthew Arnold, much of modern poetry [he quotes Yeats in the very beginning of the Intoduction] constitutes an elegiac farewell ... to the religious culture of the West. After Auguste Comte, much of modern sociology has struggled for diagnostic ideas refined and yet wide enough to encompass the spectacle of a death so great in magnitude and subtlety. Now the dissolution of a unitary system of common belief, accompanied, as it must be, by a certain disorganization of personality, may have run its course.

Rieff seems to be stating in this passage that the central crisis of our time - this dissolution of personhood and entropy of personality - is a culture war where the combatants are fighting to “organize” (this has the faint smell of technocratic and bureaucratic totalitarianism parading itself as scientific management with disinterested and rationalized dispassionate concern only for the psychological well being of mankind) the human psyche.

He goes on to state that the:

...long period of deconversion, which first broke the surface of political history at the time of the French Revolution, appears all but ended.

and that:

several systems of belief (are) competing for primacy in the task of organizing personality in the West.

Hence, the “culture war.” The “cult” is the cult of personality.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Saturday, June 20, 2009 at 05:32 PM in Political Philosophy
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Winner redux

An interesting debate has sprung up on the BNP election thread, And the winner is ....  I’ve moved the relavent comments here at the request of one of our esteemed commenters.

The debate was/is a response to the notion that the existential threat all European peoples face in the West today is completely new in historical terms, and calls forth new restorative ideas.  In an intellectually free and creative age ... an age not labouring under the weight of the 20th century ... radical thinkers would respond with towering expositions of the European life.  The existential threat would be countered with a flood of vivifying ideologies tailored to the times, and the best and most inspiring of them to all times.

The 20th century fascist ideologies would be properly understood as vigorous but really quite narrow responses to the threats of their time, enlivened in the case of the German model by some rough and ready social darwinism.  They would not be seen as a solution for all times, or for ours.  For now, the revolutionary wave which fascism resisted has washed over us, and the sickly decadence which National Socialism bled out of German society has penetrated us.  Those lines have been breached, and the battle has been carried forward to the final redoubt of our very existence.  A few decades from now we shall be on the Westwall and in Berlin.  We shall be on Senlac Field, and in Stalingrad ... everywhere that men have known their very being is on the line.

It is the clarification of that first verb “to be” which matters now.  Our people must know what it means to be “us” - as a part of subsistent Nature, as men and as Europeans.  They must know what is and is not true of us and in us, and they must know we have the right “to be” ... the right to live sovereign and free, and the right to live with ourselves and with no others, if that is what we choose.

That is my prescription.  It has, so far as I am aware, not been expounded in the past, probably because no man ever thought that we Europeans would ever find ourselves where we are today.  But here we are, nonetheless, and we have no time - none at all - to waste on philosophical distractions which answer the wrong question.

Below the fold are the comments from the “winner” thread.  I hope I’ve not left out any substantive ones.

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, June 10, 2009 at 01:10 PM in Political Philosophy
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A reply to Happy Cracker

HC,

In my own mind I’ve been turning over this problem of European survival for three decades or thereabouts.  Fred has talked of his emergence into the light beginning with an encounter with Steve Sailer’s writings.  I can’t really say for sure how or when I began.  I know how I proceed.  It is a journey that is osmotic in method, like a salmon smelling one molecule from the stream of its birth amid the billions of tonnes of seawater around it, one then another then another.

The molecules, however, are not the stream.  I have never found any source of knowledge that wholly satisfies me or about which I could say, yes, that is the solution that we must all place our shoulder behind.  I have only found signposts.  And, of course, that’s the point.  That’s the tragedy of the European situation.  Even at this perillous moment, there are still only signposts.

The ground is thick with them, in fact.  There’s Alain de Benoist, but he despises analytic materialism and so, naturally enough, finds himself mounting only a cultural defence.  Which is no bloody use.

There’s Alex Linder who visited us one time to press the case for the Single Jewish Cause, castigated me for being “in philosophy” not politics, and then let it be known that he is a libertarian.  More or less.

There’s the popular nationalist movements on the edges of European politics.  Actually, most, like the BNP, are broad churches of nativism - not really nationalist at all.  But image is everything, and you can’t blame them for thinking they are nationalists.  How many, though, could really define the word?

And then there’s Kevin MacDonald.  Let’s look at his prescription in greater detail.

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Monday, May 11, 2009 at 08:20 PM in Political Philosophy
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Didacticism and virality: A rant

by Happy Cracker

One thing that I really regret about the philosophical discussions on this website is that they are never distilled into bullet-point form that can be appropriated by the masses. The highest level discussions in any arena always looks like a mess: scattered manuscripts, little ‘chits’ with scribblings on them, and red marker. Yet, at the end of the day, you are supposed to always hand the simple-minded man an index card with the main points underlined. Except we never seem to get around to doing that around here.

Imagine MR were to end tonight. What has the average Englishman profited from its existence? What new memes have we brought him, what aides in his ideological struggle? That is the question you must always be asking yourself if you want to avoid being lead astray by corrupting influences.

Its not philosophical endeavor itself that frustrates me - its the fact that we can’t even really explain what we are talking about to each other. I have contributed many articles to this website, yet when the main writer GW addresses me, I understand only vaguely what he is actually talking about. This makes me quite mad, because it looks as though all this has been in vain. I am supposedly a part of the inner circle and I don’t even get what is being discussed.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Monday, May 11, 2009 at 12:01 PM in Political Philosophy
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Usefulness of a Founding Document?

by Happy Cracker

I was pondering what memetic support we can provide which might concretely help in the establishment of a government that adheres to our philosophy. At some point I came to the consideration of founding documents, and asked myself: what sort of a founding document would we produce to articulate our political philosophy?

What I came up with will be easy to criticize on the grounds that it is obvious, and that it is ultimately just another statement.  But I hope you’ll give the following example a fair hearing.

“Charter of the Existence of the English Nation”.

This would be a document which establishes, in a persuasive and accessible style:

1. The existence of the English nation,

2. What constitutes membership of that nation,

3. The value that the English nation has for its members,

4. The fact that the nation can die, and thus needs to be preserved,

5. The existential threat posed by loss of territory, esp. via mass immigration

6. Calls for the death of the English nation (cite: Steyn, Darby, Derbyshire, others),

7. The right of the English nation to exist into futurity,

8. The right of members of this nation to puts its preservation as foremost priority.

9. Further reading: reference MacDonald’s works and others.

I can imagine a very embellished version, possibly even giving specific genetic data to delineate the boundaries of the nation.

At the very least, a stripped-down and simplified version could be written for distribution to schoolchildren; it might take the form of a pamphlet.

Its my opinion that nationalists and those raised in right-leaning households will view many of these memes as being self-obvious and barely worthy of being stated. I disagree, which is why I wrote this and will proceed to write the document. I think that there is a benefit to be had from stating these things explicitly and on paper.

My reasoning is that, despite the obviousness of this to some, the left has been able to insert so much relativizing logic and uncertainty into discourse, that even while within one’s own four walls nationalism may reign, in the public space, all of these things are regarded as “up in the air”. Basically the left maintains an air of permanent skepticism about all assertions of nationhood. It is perhaps shocking to some that people believe enough in this to actually state it. Put simply: there is value in being explicit.

Suggestions welcome.

Posted by Guest Blogger on Saturday, May 9, 2009 at 04:13 PM in Political Philosophy
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‘La Loi’ de Frédéric Bastiat

by Happy Cracker

Frédéric Bastiat was a Frenchmen who lived from 1801 to 1850, in the last decade of his life producing several treatises on free market economics and political economy. He was an enemy of socialism and wrote several books demonstrating the absurdity of socialist economic premises. His writing is notable for its clarity and conciseness; and readers who value their time will no doubt be grateful for his mercifully paired-down writing style, which lets several of his works be read in an afternoon. In addition to these traits, he has value to us for being a non-Jewish voice in the advocacy of economic liberty and against socialism.

I’m going to publish here a smattering - no, make that two smatterings - of various quotes from his work ‘La Loi’ (The Law), a work primarily aimed against socialism and the laws inherited from the government of Robespierre.

Bastiat is credited with the analogy of the Broken Window (sometimes called the Broken Window Fallacy) which basically refutes the idea, common to certain readings of economics, that the breaking of a window as a consequence of a children’s ball game could be seen as causing economic growth, because the glazier has to be paid to put in a new window, thus generating money. He disproves this by showing that the store proprietor has to pay the cost of the broken window; thus while the broken window does lead to increased “economic activity”, it doesn’t in fact result in net wealth creation. Some important statistics frequently used by modern economists have this fallacy built into them, for example, the national GDP - probably the most commonly cited economic indicator in the economic press - would reflect the action of the glazier to repay the window, and could thus be explained by pundits (or any public figure) as signifying economic growth. [Chip in on the comments thread if you know the other reasons why GDP is less useful than commonly supposed.]

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Monday, April 20, 2009 at 07:39 PM in Political Philosophy
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Returning to Old Order vs. Letting a New Order blossom from the Understanding of Original Order

by Happy Cracker

LindsayWheeler brought up an interesting point yesterday about a return to the Old Order, which he defines as being monarchical rule and Christianity. Permit me to think aloud ...

It seems to me that a fraction of New Right thinkers, who may or may not be represented on this website, desire a return to an even Older Order - i.e. to an order which predates Christianity.

Now we can “return” to an old order, if that order was historically well-documented, simply by imitating the outlines and defining characteristics of that order. In fact, there is no other way we can return except by pretending to uphold the old order and declaring its advent politically. What we are essentially doing is trying to re-enliven a set of past historical circumstances by aping the essential features of those circumstances in our own lives. A fitting analogy would be to say that this is like trying to relive a specific phase of your adolescent past, by gathering together the items you have from those days and doing the activities you did in that phase.

The first thing to understand about this is that this would be a profoundly superficial process. It would necessarily be a matter of recreating the outward symbols and manifestations of the Old Phase, while the context of these actions and the meanings attached to them have been irretrievably altered by intervening experience. One would walk through the forests of one’s youth, dressed in clothes harkening back to those bygone days, all the while listening to music that one listened to at the time: yet the old context cannot be fully retrieved, and what can be retrieved will be viewed through an intervening layer of meta-context which knows this to be a re-enactment of past events. Its strange for human beings to behave in this insincere way.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Friday, April 17, 2009 at 08:14 PM in Political Philosophy
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Left vs. Right: An Easter Egg Hunt for Historical Truth

by Happy Cracker

Trying to summarize for myself the difference between left and right, here are some ideas I came up with.

The difference between left and right is the question of the right of the struggle for existence to exist. (source: a Soren Renner speech). More precisely, it is a debate of the proper boundaries in which this struggle should be contained.

Both left and right can be broken down into two camps: principled devotees and unprincipled devotees. Either side could be said to have a principle around which it is organized.

The principle of the right is: life is necessarily a struggle to exist.

It follows from that that no intervention is necessary to change that reality. It is the prerogative of the family to ameliorate that struggle - not of the state. The right would merely retain the struggle for existence within it’s ancient boundaries, pre-nation-state. Some exponents of rightist thought would use the state as a means to further pursue the conflicts inherent in this struggle (i.e. the ones the left is seeking to ameliorate).

The principle of the left is: life is either unjustly or unnecessarily a struggle to exist.

It follows from that that intervention is necessary to change that reality. The nearest available mechanism to accomplish that intervention is the modern nation state, and it is the prerogative of the state to ameliorate that struggle - not the prerogative of the family (i.e. citizens and ethny left to themselves). The left seeks to contain the struggle for existence, so that inequality and competition between groups, ethnies and families or classes is contained by the “balancing” (leveling) action of the state.

The Superstate, the Welfare-state, the Command economy, are the result of this principle.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 11:40 AM in Political Philosophy
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The Importance of Tragedy

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.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Tuesday, April 7, 2009 at 04:43 PM in Political Philosophy
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The Red Riding Trilogy: the utility of redemption, Part 2

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.

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Monday, April 6, 2009 at 12:14 PM in Political Philosophy
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What is always with us?

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?”

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Monday, March 30, 2009 at 05:40 PM in Political Philosophy
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Argumentum ex Television

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”?

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Thursday, March 12, 2009 at 12:46 PM in Political Philosophy
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The ‘Heroicist’ case for cultural pessimism

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.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Saturday, March 7, 2009 at 06:40 AM in Political Philosophy
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Johann Gottlieb Fichte - the other father of German nationalism

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:-

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 07:37 PM in Political Philosophy
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