Amerika

Almost no one understands what “equality” means. To the man on the street, it signifies that he can do whatever he wants as long as he can pay for it. In politics, it means subsidizing those who are not thriving. In reality, it has a more significant meaning.

Our nervous minds seek ways to make the world feel safe. They do this by creating symbols that make the world seem simple and easily manipulated. The primal archetype of this is to treat the world as one single thing, with a personality that we can reason with, and which will reward us if we do what is sociable, pacifying that personality.

Every primitive superstition involves appeasing a blood-god, and this might be the most honest form of this widespread human pathology. In modern times, we use “equality” to render the rest of humanity into a single entity that we can control with language and symbol.

The pathology of equality treats other humans as a fungible commodity which can be commanded to do what is necessary. If humans are regulated solely by external forces like incentives and punishments, the individual ego can feel safe that it can manage other people, without having to get into the nitty-gritty of how they are different and what actually motivates them.

One might term this a “consumerist” view of the world because it treats other people like products, machines or objects on a factory assembly line. All of the troublesome detail of life is left out, replaced by the self versus a world of identical people who can be controlled.

If equality has a founding myth, it is the notion of universal human reason, an idea which comes to us from The Enlightenment.™ They are manipulated by their reason, because they rationally respond to incentives and punishments. This requires us to assume that all people think alike and understand exactly the same thing from our words and symbols.

Consider a typical misunderstanding of Fred Nietzsche:

Nietzsche has been blamed for a more silent disaster: the rise of relativism and the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth. Seldom now, especially in academia, do you now read the word ‘truth’ written without those doubting – and even contemptuous – inverted commas. One of the most resilient doctrines of our times is that all knowledge depends on who is saying it and for what motive. This relativism is invariably traced back to Nietzsche.

This is largely to do with French philosopher Michel Foucault’s rehabilitation of Nietzsche. Foucault’s writing on power and knowledge in the 1960s and 1970s, which has been widely disseminated in society ever since, drew upon quotes from Nietzsche that ‘truth’ stems from the desire for power and has no eternal objective foundation. In his landmark lectures, ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’, delivered in 1973, Foucault said of the myth of ‘pure truth’: ‘This great myth needs to be dispelled. It is this myth which Nietzsche began to demolish by showing… that behind all knowledge [savoir], behind all attainment of knowledge [connaissance], what is involved is a struggle for power. Political power is not absent from knowledge, it is woven together with it.’

As the author of a book on nihilism, it behooves me to offer a comparison to the definition of nihilism:

Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated.

For convenience, we separate this into three parts:

1. All values are baseless
2. Nothing can be known
3. Nothing can be communicated

How do we reach relativism, or the idea that all truths are relative to the individual, from this? We filter it through equality. Equality demands that we affirm that what each individual sees as true is actually true, so instead of rejecting that, we say that they have truths which are true to them.

A more sensible version would be esotericism, which would say that truth is discovered in degrees according to natural ability and how much of the cumulative underlying truths one has discovered so far. In other words, reality is real, but people are discovering it like a detective uncovering a mystery, with some getting farther than others. But that is anti-egalitarian.

Back to the topic, what Nietzsche affirmed is the end of equality: all “truths” are symbolic manipulation expressed in self-interest, but those of the highest type of human tend toward being as accurate as possible because their intelligence allows them to see the value of accurate information.

This follows from his statement “there are no truths, only interpretations” and his comments in his initial work that defined the scope of what was to come, On Truth And Lies In A Non-Moral Sense (more accurately translated as “On Truth And Lies In A Sense Outside Of Morality”).

So, now we see the modern time as a struggle between relativism and esotericism. In one, everyone is equal and everything is true; in the other, truth is a question of degree that varies with the observer, much as it does with the quality of instrument such as microscopes, which come in varying degrees of magnification and lens acuity.

This means a number of things, including that we cannot have a society without caste, because if we want good results, we have to put those who are more sensitive instruments at the top of the hierarchy. We also cannot have democracy, because the “reason”-ing ability that people use to vote is actually a rationalization of whatever they think makes their lives seem perfect and reasonable, a measurement of appearance and not actuality.

Tom Wolfe described this mentality as the fiction-absolute:

Even before I left graduate school I had come to the conclusion that virtually all people live by what I think of as a “fiction-absolute.” Each individual adopts a set of values which, if truly absolute in the world–so ordained by some almighty force–would make not that individual but his group . . . the best of all possible groups, the best of all inner circles. Politicians, the rich, the celebrated, become mere types. Does this apply to “the intellectuals” also? Oh, yes. . . perfectly, all too perfectly.

Through that lens, we see not reasoning man, but rationalizing man. If you want to know why society is inverted, or that its most fundamental terms seem to mean the opposite of what they should mean if used descriptively, it is that human thinking movies backward from conclusion to reason why. Cause and effect are reversed in order.

Lawrence Auster, one of the bright lights of modern conservatism, described one instance of this pathology as the unprincipled exception:

The unprincipled exception is a non-liberal value or assertion, not explicitly identified as non-liberal, that liberals use to escape the inconvenient, personally harmful, or suicidal consequences of their own liberalism without questioning liberalism itself.

Alternatively, the unprincipled exception is a non-liberal value or assertion, not explicitly identified as non-liberal, that conservatives use to slow the advance of liberalism or to challenge some aspect of liberalism without challenging liberalism itself.

Brainwashed by the notion of equality, conservatives see hypocrisy in it. But really, it is another self-interested animal rationalizing its choices by what makes it “feel” comfortable in the life it has chosen. This is a moral challenge; individuals are not just arguing for their own wealth, but that their choices were right by others, by logic, by any gods they believe in.

A Leftist (liberals are one variant of Leftist, or those who endorse egalitarianism, but it a matter of degree, much as Libertarians and Communists both agree on equality) will enact Leftist policies in order to gain wealth and power, but also to justify lifestyle choices made by the Leftists and previous Leftist policy, even if it has turned out poorly.

In turn, conservatives — who are those who accepted the new order, and by doing so were able to sit on the right side of the National Assembly in post-Revolutionary France — by the virtue of having accepted equality, cannot act in any way other than to affirm equality, which forces them to thwart the oncoming decay as much as they can but never attack its core.

Its core is the concept of equality.

With that in mind, we on the Alt Right must look toward the future: the decline of the West, as Plato tells us, began when people became more interested in wealth than in doing what is right by civilization alongside natural and divine order. The philosophy of prioritizing short-term self-interest over the need for logical planning for the future is known as individualism, and it afflicts high-IQ societies through rationalization, or the inverted and backward thinking caused by relativism.

Let us look at how this confusion afflicts even underground conservatives like the Alt Right:

The recent defeat of Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election has predictably triggered yet another tidal wave of haughty pronouncements by Alt Right adherents scornfully rejecting elections as a means of achieving our goals. “We’ll never vote our way out of this!” “Elections are a waste of time!” “Democracy doesn’t work!” The same chorus of noisy negativity broke out into mournful song the instant Trump began to cuck for the establishment last month.

This is a perennial phenomenon among the Alt Right, or I should say within the so-called white nationalist movement. We try to win through elections, we get our hopes up, we work our asses off, we get defeated – and we immediately begin wailing, gnashing our teeth and shaking our fists at the heavens as we swear off elections forever.

Let us first look at where this writer is correct: on the Right, we get our hopes up before elections, and then when the herd follows its usual mix of self-interest and “don’t rock the boat” complacency, we become enraged that we were betrayed again, as we have been by every election in varying degrees since those elections in Athens so long ago.

After that, he loses the train of thought.

His statement divides the questions of goal and method. As far as methods go, he is correct: when one lives in a democracy, it makes sense to do as much as possible with democratic methods. They involve little bloodshed, are relatively civilized, and can be influenced by a cultural wave such as the Alt Right.

However, in terms of goals, we must admit that the core of the Alt Right, which is a desire for Nietzschean traditionalism instead of a modern System that we think will swing our way, rejects egalitarianism. There is no human equality. All people and groups have different degrees of accuracy regarding the perception of reality, act in self-interest, and rationalize the result with abstract theory.

Our goal is to replace democracy with kings, an egalitarian social order with hierarchy, regulated markets with competition limited by culture, and diversity with nationalism. We are anti-egalitarian. If we try to escape that, we become mainstream conservatives and will invert our most sacred values through relativism.

Any deviation from this clear goal will guarantee our defeat. We must, as Bruce Charlton says, first become clear in our minds about what is logically true, and after that, make our way toward it, learning as we go.

Tags: ahab, bruce charlton, democracy, egalitarianism, friedrich w. nietzsche, lawrence auster, leftism, nihilism, relativism, tom wolfe, truth