2,497 words
Alexander Solzhenitsyn once asked, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
A similar challenge eventually confronts every individual who takes up the cause of the New Right in relation to modernity, as we’re all to varying degrees and in varying manners captivated by the liberal narrative. Dr. Mark Dyal’s recent essay, “Epistemology and the New Right,” grapples directly with this challenge. We must indeed purge ourselves of liberal premises, principles, and narratives lest we sink inexorably back into the cesspit of decadence we’re trying to claw our way out of. We must do more than merely defeating our obvious opponents to the left of us, we must defeat the left within ourselves.
I struggled, however, with his rather indifferent attitude about race and dismissive approach to our concerns about race. I believe, for instance, that he overreaches when he claims that “For a racialist, race is everything; for a culturist, it is culture.” This statement is misleading, at least for myself and most thoughtful racialists I’ve encountered. My racial advocacy is front and center because our biological inheritance is a prerequisite upon which vital things depend. Who wouldn’t rank breathing as a chief concern when there’s a boot on his neck? Would I be rightly described as an ‘oxygenist’ who believes breathing is ‘everything’ as I gasped for air?
I think not.
It’s as if we were discussing plans for the new house we’re going to have built, only to be sidetracked by a proposal that we not be the ones to live in or own the house. Refusing to budge on this question, the question of whether or not our future belongs to us, makes me a “White Nationalist.” People who are trapped in the liberal narrative — including a good share of folks who identify as White Nationalists — see White Nationalism as an ideology and worldview all its own, one in which “race is everything.”
For the foreseeable future, the outside world will assuredly see us first and only as “racists” and “anti-Semites.” For the foreseeable future, our skirmishes with the outside world will be with those who wish to deprive us of these fundamental prerequisites (sovereignty and identity). That’s fine, and those battles should be fought with vigor and without apology. But we mustn’t internalize the left’s narrative, one in which we’re anachronistic conservative relics standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” Within the drawing room, among the architects, our chief concern must be replacing the Bourgeois Myth with our own.
Dyal declares, in apparent contrast to racists like myself, that for him, “knowledge is everything.” He then asks how knowledge works, declaring that “Knowledge is affective. It . . . produces . . . action. Plain and simple, it is the story needed to motivate a narratively driven species – such as our own – to move.”
Knowledge is not everything. While it is indeed true that we humans are driven almost exclusively by the narrative we’ve internalized, there’s a complex interaction between power and knowledge which determines how narratives are formulated and how narratives propagate and perish. I agree that the task of the North American New Right is to erect an alternative epistemology and resultant narrative. This process must, however, be informed by an understanding of how knowledge interacts with power, lest we remain impotent ideologues with no power or influence.
The Mercantile Age
The idea of a “social contract” is an enlightening example of the interaction between knowledge and power. It is odd that if society really did emerge from the negotiations and agreements of autonomous agents, such a fundamental notion went unremarked from the dawn of history until it was supposedly discovered in the 17th century. But once this story was accepted, it became difficult to perceive relationships between men and their society in any other way. That’s the power of a worldview. In the centuries since Hobbes and Locke, the West has marched along to their narrative, gradually conforming our founding documents, legal codes, moral habits, and even military institutions to a worldview in which the autonomous individual reigns supreme.
This worldview was not really constructed by Hobbes or Locke. They merely provided a systematic description of a worldview organically bubbling up around them: the worldview of the merchant. In every civilization throughout history, the niche of the merchant has existed, and that niche forms the worldview of its occupants. Long before modern democratic institutions, the ancient bazaar was the place where nobility, ancestry, and creed were secondary to egalitarianism, autonomy, and opportunism. After all, a merchant who refused to purchase his wares from Moors or gave them away for free to noblemen couldn’t compete against a merchant who purchased his wares from the optimal supplier and resold them at the highest price the market could bear.
This mercantile worldview is the only possible thing the victorious merchants could impose on the West once they gained power, because it’s the only worldview they can possibly have. It’s their operating system, and they’re as surely unwitting victims of it as those they’ve been imposing it on. But the merchants didn’t win in the West because their mercantile worldview is superior, or because the philosophes and Freemasons promoted it so persuasively. They won because dramatic changes in Western civilization’s habitat engorged them with sufficient wealth to orchestrate a coup against the Ancien Régime. The Age of Discovery and Colonialism flooded Western civilization with a tsunami of wealth which its native merchants and Jews rode into power over the corrupt and brittle traditional elites.
While the aristocracy or the Catholic Church could have hypothetically subverted and controlled this massive influx of wealth, they were also victims of their respective narratives and only understood power in terms of martial codes and sacred laws, respectively. They could have, in essence, rode the tiger. It was the Jews who managed to successfully mount the tiger while our priests and princes tried in vain to slay it in the anachronistic manners prescribed by their obsolete narratives. China’s managerial elite appears to be meeting this challenge, as well, harnessing and leveraging the power of capitalism to serve their interests. Putin seems to be accomplishing a similar objective in disempowering the capitalist “oligarchs” in favor of his favored bureaucratic and ecclesiastical elites.
What all these successful elites have in common is that they’re shrewdly playing by the fixed rules of the modern world while upholding a worldview other than the mercantile one that remains hegemonic in the West. If the North American New Right is to succeed, it must also pull off this hat trick of succeeding as an anti-mercantile force in a mercantile age.
As is becoming more apparent by the day, our mercantile elites integrally and absolutely lack the spirit of stewardship and sacrifice necessary to rule. Even if their Jewish partners in crime were more or less benign, like the Overseas Chinese who rule over subject populations in a more or less benevolent and sustainable manner, it would be imperative to reclaim our sovereignty. Given their pathological hatred of us, deposing and deporting them is an existential imperative.
Wisdom vs. Knowledge
Where Mark Dyal and many other New Right ideologues go astray is that they are so eager to purge themselves of the mercantile narrative and its artifacts that they dispose of much that the merchants get right. While it is perhaps folly to entrust a mere tradesman to rule — which is, after all, not his trade — tradesmen are definitively superior to priests and warriors at a certain type of knowledge: vulgar material knowledge. While a brave warrior might find a metallurgist’s intense focus on his craft, his banal lifestyle, and internal narrative dull and uninspiring, he still benefits from a sword which doesn’t break in the heat of battle.
Like René Guénon, Mark Dyal falls directly into the trap of dichotomizing wisdom and knowledge . . . of choosing between materialism and anti-materialism. Material reality isn’t the only thing. It’s not the most important thing. But a cultural and political movement that rejects scientific knowledge and eschews technology altogether because those things are (indeed) primarily the product of mere tradesmen with a woefully limited material worldview will surely fail. A New Right that establishes itself on this (ironically reactionary) approach to modernity will fail.
There is, as Greg Johnson suggested, a distinction between history and historiography . . . between facts and narratives. There is an objective concrete history of events, one which exists separately from historiography. There is a objective concrete difference between human races. While we shouldn’t dwell exclusively in the material world as our opponents do, we’ll surely break our swords in the heat of battle if we don’t understand the difference between objective information and the jaundiced perspective of the mercantile caste which dutifully recorded that objective information.
Mark Dyal casually dismisses racialism as a modern thing. He’s more right than wrong on this count. While an awareness of racial differences existed well before liberalism, the vulgar and dehumanizing chore of measuring, cataloging, and categorizing those differences has been a modern project undertaken by godless scientists. Scientists are to a mercantile order what priests are to a managerial order, and both the ideological and financial drive behind modern science comes from an oligarchy that perceives the world exclusively in material terms. Much of the narrative constructed around the facts of race was quite clearly designed by capitalists to justify their greed. As capitalism’s colonial framework has transitioned into a global framework, its narrative has transitioned from the overtly White Supremacist colonial one of yesteryear to the overtly anti-White globalist one of today.
The White Supremacist narrative of yesteryear conveniently overlooked the impressive intelligence of Jews and East Asians, inferring that our role among the races was that of overlords. It justified our kinsmen’s rapacious spree of conquering and subjugating populations around the world to profit from their labor and strip them of their resources. The new narrative overlooks different facts and emphasizes other ones in order to arrive at an internally consistent justification of its new globalist strategy for profiteering.
As I’ve explained in my review of Mugabe and the White African, White Liberalism is merely White Supremacism with a smile. It’s a necessary inversion of the familiar narrative brought about by the rising political power of the non-White races. For one generation, the farm uses cheap Black labor because the Black is inferior and rightly exploited. For the next generation, the farm uses cheap Black labor because it seeks to enrich and empower the noble Black workers. The narrative can be tweaked from time to time as political winds blow in different directions, but the vital thing for the merchant is operating the farm profitably . . . with cheap Black labor.
The liberal merchant’s narrative is transparently self-serving and eventually soils everything it touches. Both of these perspectives, the White Supremacist and the Anti-White one, are integrally decadent. The mercantile caste seeks to commoditize and consume, to metastasize like a cancer, erasing everything that stands between it and material profit. Borders, tribal loyalties, creeds, and traditions will eventually be destroyed if it remains unchecked, as they’re all obstacles to maximizing profit potential. While materialist episteme studiously investigates and documents the very real and vital differences between human populations, it does so as a hunter studying its prey.
Riding the Tiger
One of the great moral conundrums of the 20th century has been whether or not it’s moral to use knowledge arrived at by bad people. The classic example for the post-WWII generation is Dr. Mengele’s nefarious experiments on Jews in the Nazi concentration camps. Should that data be destroyed? Should it not be used by people who aren’t National Socialists? Should we have refused to hire Nazi rocket scientists whose research and talent played a pivotal role in our making it to the moon? Just as medical facts and astrophysical facts exist independently of the narrative possessing the people who discovered them, racial and technological facts exist independently of modernity.
We would be fools to embrace the European New Right’s muddled and indifferent perspectives on race and science, as they’re quite clearly incompatible with and largely ignorant of the facts . . . both tabular ones in research libraries and experiential ones Americans and others in the European diaspora possess through having more intimately grappled with racial issues in our travels outside Europe’s (until recently) racially homogeneous milieu. We must find a way to envision a future which includes at least a subset of our technological “progress,” which reacts intelligently to what we’ve learned about race, and in which we successfully compete materially and economically without reducing ourselves and our narrative to a strictly material and economic one.
This is only a revelation to American and Western European (including, evidently, New Right) audiences. China’s inner party is rejecting the mercantile worldview while defeating us at our own game. In Russia, a similar process is taking place. The Muslim Brotherhood is shrewdly competing for resources and successfully procuring capital, while rejecting our merchant’s narrative. The Jews have been a religious priesthood competing profitably in a mercantile context for centuries. While no civilization should be ruled by the bazaar’s merchants (or their elected representatives), no civilization can get by without a bazaar. No vanguard which discards all of the knowledge and material at our disposal in the modern age in favor of creating our own facts and realities can make any real progress at all.
The task before us is to dislodge the bazaar from political power over our destiny and also from epistemological power over our internal narratives. Our task is to put it back in its rightful tertiary place beneath priestly stewardship and martial leadership. It’s not to destroy the bazaar or all the useful and necessary items it produces. We must raise up an elite which is capable of challenging our corrupt and destructive mercantile elites both politically and philosophically, just as the merchants did to the Ancien Régime centuries earlier.
The first step in that process is to figure out what our worldview will be. I hope it’s not one which is willfully ignorant of the facts derived from scientific research or naively indifferent to the very real threat that an alien people will exploit our muddled thinking on racial matters to deprive us of our very existence or crowd us out of the future we’re designing for ourselves and our posterity.
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29 comments
This might be the most important essay I’ve ever read here. I urge everyone to take the time to read and re-read it. Big Stuff and True.
After years of resisting the Left’s unholy trinity of Race, Gender and Class as the defining issues in politics and life (since the Left recognizes no life outside politics), I have finally caved. But on two of these three issues, Race and Gender, I have come down squarely in favor of Whites and Men. Economics, being less well known to me, remains a puzzle.
Mr. Parrot’s reflections, based on the traditional Hindu castes of priests, warriors, merchants and workers, throw into relief the dominance of the merchant in the modern world and some of its apparently logical effects. So much so that it seems simply a fact of nature. Which he makes clear it is not.
I shall continue my amateur ruminations on economics, but this particular form of “class analysis” was a help.
Matt,
I am puzzled by your statement that humans “are driven almost exclusively by the narrative we’ve internalized”.
Taking the simplest approach, the human animal does not wake, walk about, eat food, socialize, and rest because it is motivated by a “narrative”; it does so because it is alive. It might pursue a future-oriented strategy based on the principles of an ideology, but to the extent that it does so in exclusion of its animal preoccupations, it is a maladapted animal. Yes or no?
If Yes, then pursuing ideology – or “narrative” – is basically maladaptive if not in service of its animal preoccupations (food, shelter, greed [Nietzsche’s reflection that an organism always wants “more”], recreation, reproduction).
And isn’t that at the heart of your objection to Dyal’s insistence on a free-floating warrior ideology which takes no account of its own material preconditions?
The writers at CC are on a hamster wheel. The sign out front reads “Kulchur”. Everyone wants to think, despite vociferous anti-Christianity, that in the beginning was indeed the Word and “thus”, the Word is the precondition for regeneration.
Are we agreed that that is logocentric hogwash? that biological communities do not spring unseeded from kulchural amusements of however refined a character?
“If Yes, then pursuing ideology – or “narrative” – is basically maladaptive if not in service of its animal preoccupations (food, shelter, greed [Nietzsche’s reflection that an organism always wants “more”], recreation, reproduction).”
Good point. A true ideology or narrative must account for the nature and needs of the human animal, both material and spiritual. But I guess I don’t see the writers here as being hamsters on a treadmill because I believe that such narrative or narratives are being hashed out here, and as bright as the writers here are nobody is likely to do it on their own, on their first try.
Uh,
Perhaps I conceded too much to Dr. Dyal in embracing the primacy of narrative in driving human behavior. I believe; however, that much of what you refer to is merely private and custodial…and therefore politically irrelevant–at least in a situation like our own where the problems are abstract in nature.
When thinking abstractly and about the future, narrative weighs more heavily than visceral and selfish motives, no? And, given that our people are decidedly very comfortable (if slightly less so than they were a decade ago), narrative is key, no? Within the relevant scope and context, the internal narrative is cardinal, even conceding that there are indeed things which can take precedence over internal narrative.
Disclaimer: Describing a phenomenon in biological and evolutionary terms is not incompatible with a spiritual framework. The two can be (and are) complementary.
A definitive no. The habitat of civilization is one which requires individuals to coalesce into increasingly complex and stereotyped emergent group behaviors. As such, the memeplex (tradition) is to be judged as adaptive in the group context rather than in the individual context. A preparedness on the part of the individual to sacrifice himself for both the tribe and tradition is adaptive for the individual, as tribes or traditions lacking that quality in their members will be displaced and replaced by those which possess that quality in their individuals.
I suppose we could reflect on the optimality for the individual, from his individual perspective, of pursuing his selfish interests while mouthing collectivist platitudes. While a system could conceivably tolerate a certain number of these, it can also encourage community engagement, compulsory military service, reproduction, and other strategies to maximize the amount of overlap between a person’s interests and those of the memeplex and population.
From my perspective, I see Counter-Currents as being superior to alternative Rightist schools in that it does not flake out on tribal and biological prerequisites. I believe Dr. Dyal’s essay was an exception to a pattern of agreeing on the prerequisite custodial matters…that this is a future we’re planning for ourselves, that there’s a defined us, and that “success” and “progress” within our philosophical framework will translate into concrete conventional political success in the form of an “us” mastering our own destiny and thriving in the sense of having land, food, offspring, and so on.
I was troubled by Dyal’s apparent dismissal of science and biology. He used arguments that closely parallel arguments made in left academia. His stance of science denial, if that is his stance, is problematic because it requires accepting the prevailing epistemic regime rather than rejecting it. It’s also a fallacious position in and of itself because biology is real independent of any cultural narrative or interpretation.
“Knowledge is not everything. While it is indeed true that we humans are driven almost exclusively by the narrative we’ve internalized, there’s a complex interaction between power and knowledge which determines how narratives are formulated and how narratives propagate and perish. I agree that the task of the North American New Right is to erect an alternative epistemology and resultant narrative. This process must; however, be informed by an understanding of how knowledge interacts with power, lest we remain impotent ideologues with no power or influence.”
I enjoyed Dyal’s piece. But I think this is a very valid criticism of his emphasis on knowledge, particularly as Dyal himself is a Nietzschean. (It’s not a very Nietzschean thing to say that “knowledge is everything”; it’s actually quite a Socratic sentiment which is the very thing Nietzsche saw as the source of decay for high culture.) In fact, the Socratic pursuit of arguing everyone in the streets into the ground was perhaps rightfully seen as indecent every bit as much as falsifying something scientific (or acting in bad faith) can be seen as indecent. They’re almost two sides of the same coin. One side is hostile to the human spirit of high culture and transcendence and the other to knowledge itself. It’s the former that needs real attention and nourishment; more of one cannot be substituted for the other, either. In fact, if you look at the Western philosophical tradition, it’s around the time the Western thinkers became obsessed with epistemology (in light of scientific breakthroughs) over how one ought to live (“what is the good life?”) or questions about nature itself (pre-Socratic queries) where we begin to see emergence of processes in thought that have lead us to where we are today. Surely, these vogues had a “softening” effect on the resoluteness of the elite classes within Western civilization.
Now, I don’t want to dismiss knowledge, either. Because, as it’s already been explained, “nuts ‘n’ bolts” knowledge, scientific knowledge (like knowledge about race and biology), certainly has a role to play within varying intersections or whatever narrative it is we adopt. However, the vast majority of whites lack a sense of greater purpose because of the “bazaar narrative” or “merchant narrative” (excellent terminology, Mr. Parrot) that’s been melded to their mind; they don’t know what to do with the knowledge they do have (which is substantial compared to past epochs given the availability of information) or how it should be applied in a certain way or WHY it should be applied in a certain way. All considerations of what amount to ultimately religious significance. Perhaps they’re too fixated on Philip K. Dick questions (epistemology) and not focused enough on Aeschylus’s Agamemnon which has created a vacuum for the “bazaar narrative” to run things by default– a total lack of Will. In fact, I think the ancients of Aeschylus’s day would ridicule the almost childish fixation we have on Philip K. Dick questions in the presence of what sits before us. So yes, knowledge is clearly NOT everything. I agree, one hundred percent.
People of European ancestry need to have the hairs on the back of their necks stand up in relation to their own sense of identity. Art and literature take on an even greater importance than “knowledge” who invented this or how white this ancient civilization may have really been or whatever. Relying on knowledge by itself won’t work because it is sterile just as rejecting it to attain “respectability” is has its consequences.
“Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of ‘touching’ a man’s heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.” — G.K. Chesterton
Another way of saying it might be that it’s the sentiment of the Romantics at the end of the 18th century and not Enlightenment “knowledge” emphasis on rationality that can save the prospects for the world we want to see created in the future. That’s the spiritual counterbalance the “bazaar” hegemony has no real room for. Case in point, there are many many articles that have been published even in rags like the New York Times that have a race realist perspective. Yet, the liberal world of egalitarian sentiment didn’t stop or meltdown. That’s not how the human mind works on a mass level of zeitgeist. We, as a culture, are not all composed of “rational agents” motivated purely by knowledge. Knowledge is a tool, not a religion or source of Will. The issue of Western civilization that concerns us has religious significance.
If you want to convince a sudra, you beat him; a vaisya, you bribe him; a ksyatria, you best him; a brahimin, you convince him. The ksyatrias are difficult since you might be right and but not able to best them. And look at businesmen: many if not most of the big ones are acually ksyatrias in the wrong caste. They don’t care about money per se, much less luxury – they want to win and this is how it’s done in today’s world. They will not go down easily. Craftily, they have corrupted the military to make it putty in their hands.
Craftsmen are traditionally considered to be in the sudra or laboring caste – a weakness of the Vedic system in my view. But neither are they Vaisyas as Mr Parrot intimates. The best ones do what they do out of love for the thing itself – not for the get or monetary gain. They suffer greatly now since few can afford their own shops as of old. In their psychic purity, they approach the Brahmans – a kind of earthly contemplatives.
This all seems very valid on the individual level. But how does an internet movement (armed with mostly words at this point) implement those prescriptions (short of starting some sort of fight club)? It can’t. So how does it move from being ineffectual to becoming a difference maker if he’s not Tyler Durden? My comment about Romanticism (again, not a Romanticism that denies science but one that does sort of idealize culture) being of greater value than the hyper-rational approach which tends toward race and IQ debates (Am. Renaissance) and that sort of thing had more to do with how I think any pro-white “movement” will gain steam where perhaps later on organizations are formed to address the specifics.
Obviously, biological reality shouldn’t be glossed over or downplayed like the European New Right is charged with doing (I’m no expert on the European New Right) but at the same time I think embracing biological reality causes some of us to take our eye of the ball. The hyper-rational approach (itself a hallmark of the liberal approach to reality), as others have pointed out in the past, leads some pro-white advocates to excuse Asian demographic takeovers of once white areas because they are “model citizens” or “more intelligent than whites.” Of all the pro-white sites I’ve come across, Counter-Currents, despite its hyper-intellectual nature, does a very good job of packaging itself and finding a balance between the rational and the irrational in a way where whites will want to relate to our cause irrespective of some psycho-metric reading in a twins IQ study as interesting and useful as that information may be. An acceptance of scientific information is a must in order to be credible but there has to be a greater context around the movement in which the science is accepted.
UFASP,
You make some great points that many of us, including myself, have been thinking about. Taking a totally scientistic-rationalistic approach was a mistake from the start because it does not touch some of the most important aspects of the human mind. Perhaps the reason it takes a lot of “hyper-intellectual” people to understand this at this point is because it takes a lot reading and thinking to overcome the sheer science-worship and reason-worship that dominates modern society. For me, it took reading Yockey, Spengler, Rosenberg, Evola, Eliade, and Klages, plus some extra personal reflections on these authors’ ideas to finally completely understand how to correctly look at things.
Concerning the New Right, it is actually not true that the New Right rejects biological reality, it is only true that some members of the New Right do this. However, in general they realize the importance of the biological side of human beings, but only emphasize that that is not the end of what a human being actually is in its totality. Check out Sunic’s and O’Meara’s books on the New Right and you’ll know what I’m talking about.
“UFASP,
You make some great points that many of us, including myself, have been thinking about.”
Thank you.
“Taking a totally scientistic-rationalistic approach was a mistake from the start because it does not touch some of the most important aspects of the human mind. Perhaps the reason it takes a lot of “hyper-intellectual” people to understand this at this point is because it takes a lot reading and thinking to overcome the sheer science-worship and reason-worship that dominates modern society.”
Absolutely. People see reason as transcendent rather than as a tool. Even among people in these circles. But at least the Platonics who see “Reason” (Tradition) as indisputable in principle are largely on our side. I’m content not to argue with those people.
“For me, it took reading Yockey, Spengler, Rosenberg, Evola, Eliade, and Klages, plus some extra personal reflections on these authors’ ideas to finally completely understand how to correctly look at things.”
I have Rosenberg’s book sitting on my bookshelf. I haven’t gotten to it yet. I don’t know what to expect there. Yockey, Spengler, and Nietzsche (as well as Heidegger in a more convoluted way) speak to me more so than Evola, Guenon, Plato, or Hegel do even though I can certainly find inspiration from the latter chunk’s writings as well. This affinity toward one set over the other is perhaps due to the anti-religious streak within my own being (though, unlike some “enlightened” liberal like Dawkins, I have no designs on exporting this feeling of mine as its very personal and would make me not so unlike a dogmatic, myself).
In short, I suppose you could say that I’m attracted to Heraclitus (and his descendants)– the universe is a rubbish heap of “flux”– over Parmenides (and his descendants)– the world is One beneath appearance. (Of course, Hegel took his cues from Heraclitus but also misinterpreted him in the process.)
“Concerning the New Right, it is actually not true that the New Right rejects biological reality, it is only true that some members of the New Right do this.”
I know Guillaume Faye does not. I’ve only really read Alain de Benoist at any length, though. My understanding is that the latter de-emphasizes race more so than the former among other key differences. In general, though, I think Faye is someone I’d more likely find myself agreeing with but obviously at this point I can’t say that with any certainty.
“However, in general they realize the importance of the biological side of human beings, but only emphasize that that is not the end of what a human being actually is in its totality. Check out Sunic’s and O’Meara’s books on the New Right and you’ll know what I’m talking about.”
Thanks for the recommendations. Sunic is always spoken of in glowing terms and I know O’Meara is very important as far as the North American New Right project is concerned.
UFASP: “I know Guillaume Faye does not. I’ve only really read Alain de Benoist at any length, though. My understanding is that the latter de-emphasizes race more so than the former among other key differences. In general, though, I think Faye is someone I’d more likely find myself agreeing with but obviously at this point I can’t say that with any certainty.”
I also think Faye is more agreeable than Benoist; the latter, while still being useful to us in some ways, has really made too many compromises with the enemy. However, I think it’s important to remember that there are many crucial New Right thinkers that have not even been translated yet. Out of the French Nouvelle Droite, we have no translations other than a few quotes and brief articles from Dominique Venner, perhaps the most notable intellectual next to Benoist and Faye. But you should not forget about the German Neue Rechte, where you have such people as Armin Mohler, Pierre Krebs, Karlheinz Weissmann, and so on. It seems that, despite the good quality of their works, no book from the Neue Rechte intellectuals has been translated except Krebs’s “Fighting for the Essence.”
I enjoyed the observation that White supremacism and anti-racism both serve a mercantile worldview – makes perfect sense and never heard that quite before – a worldview that holds power that must be overcome if we are to preserve our race. *
While the project of overcoming this facet of modern epistemology does indeed require asserting facts of racial differences, it also requires, probably even more necessarily, a somewhat less factually contingent, transcendent narrative, of how those facts count (viz. in protracted process) for us as Whites over and against otherwise arbitrary facts – a narrative coherence which is not readily trampled by just any arbitrarily asserted fact that might conflict with the value of our people in a moment or episode.
The need for this semi transcendence among Whites is a point missed in this vigilance for the vacuum packed facts – an insufficient liberation from the modernist narrative, as it were.
While race was not a mere creation of modernity, and the roots of its empirical quest lie much farther back, the search for its merely factual basis was nevertheless a distinctive part of modernity – the scientific notion of “race.” More importantly, what Dyal might have noted, had he been truly sympathetic to White interests, is that it, empirical quest, divested us from the concept, the supra-empirical grasp of patterned facts which we seek to maintain (through narrative, metaphor and the like) in classification which discriminates on behalf of its own maintenance and is not swayed by every fact – nor misapprehended and opportunistically abused at premature stages of evolutionary or lifespan processes as that would violate the integrity of the classification – of our social whole in its developmental processes and ecological niches.
That is why I prefer to say “the class”, the white class, rather than the race – to reassert this supra- empirical order and to not fall prey to anachronistic misunderstandings and limitations of modernity – defying modernist incitement against tradition, yet using our traditional classification as the measure and gauge for scientific and technological contribution to our reconstruction and advance, as a people.
It is that classification which is a difference that makes a difference from the merely scientific notion of race to which Dyal alluded.
It is the White class which will stand in contrast to the “facts” of mulatto supremacism and the crass would be over-men who would-be complicit.
It is this classification which allows the qualitative meanderings of developmental processes to unfold in the life-time and in evolution beyond to meet and fulfill their requirements in our health, defense and expanse.
Thus, it is not especially elitist other than asserting our elite priority of our race, our White class in full, rather than an over focused and sectioned off elite, which would parcel out stages of the process of the race’s system to the detriment of its whole. For that too, equality inequality, is a part of the universally comparable narrative of modernity which runs rough-shod over qualitative differences that make an important difference – the new paradigm. Nor does the class deny that there are those who do some things better and are owed reward for that, the elite part of the process, as it were.
…nor those who do things worse and ought to be accountable, and limited if not banished.
How else to gauge accountability but through classification?
It is in our assertions of the classification that the facts of our race will dwell and stave off the fact that we can interbreed with other races – scientifically – therefore our claims to race as an unassailable factual sovereignty are not – but as a transcendent liberation from mere facticity are more than valid and are imperative.
“It’s just a matter of skin tone, a few other minor genetic markers” and the like that you might let remain in the scientistic barf.
This is why I prefer to refer to we as the White Class (or European Class), so as to be rid of the scientistic project as it was unaided by proper judgment and accountability.
* We are, after all, separatists, if we have a wit. Separatist ecology will surely ensconce us if we are to overcome that mercantile narrative. Better or worse is not a central point, as it is in the hideous mulatto supremacist narrative – anti-biological, anti-optima and anti-White man as it is.
Let’s have a moment’s tribute for Neil Armstrong – are we that far removed from his genetics or is it the mulatto narrative perspective that looks upon the White man with disrespect?
Thank you for the breath of fresh air. I mean let’s not feel inferior because we’re American and allow ouselves to get lost in the Byzantine maze of European New Right thinking. Hitler admired and believed the results of American Racial Science – and applied them in his eugenics program. It would be tragic indeed if White Nationalism became some kind of high brow thing that despised the very people who they are supposed to be serving. It would just be more business as usual.
Good retort to My Dyal. The biological underpinnings of Western Culture have been ignored for more than a millenium. Much of our genetic capital has been lost. We need to focus on this intensely. I know that the European Right has something to add. But if we had to choose between them, I would vote for American Racialism hands down. Luckily we don’t have to.
When Sulieman the Magnificient was planning to invade Western Europe from the Sea, Italian Merchants began to do business with the Turks. He was the heavy odds on favorite after all. They are a lower caste and people should be reminded of that unceasingly. The ones who cooperate with the New Order will be allowed to do well. For the rest, nothing.
I agree with much of this article, apart from the “Franch Revolooshion wus teh ind of da world” blathering that is sadly common among New Right types (I personally feel more sympathetic to the French people at that time, than to the rotten cosmopolitan nobles who ruled them. Also, I might add that ethnic nationalism wouldn’t have developed without the French Revolution, most notably in Germany. This idealization of old-world aristocracy (which didn’t have a racial consciousness in the modern sense) is a bit absurd, to put it mildly. It seems that many “traditionalists” can’t decide if their worldview is based on social class or on ethnic kinship.)
Other than that, I agree with Parrott. The observation that anti-racists serve a materialistic worldview is an especially good one.
“I agree with much of this article, apart from the “Franch Revolooshion wus teh ind of da world” blathering that is sadly common among New Right types (I personally feel more sympathetic to the French people at that time, than to the rotten cosmopolitan nobles who ruled them.”
My negative attitude about the French Revolution is with respect to the significance of the events themselves– what they represent for the Western mind. It’s not necessarily me choosing teams. Certainly, the French people had legitimate grievances; but the banner they organized under (“liberty,” “fraternity,” “equality”) has been disastrous for Western civilization. This is where reading people like Edmund Burke really comes in handy. You have to separate the grievances these people had from what they thought would fix those grievances– liberalism.
“Also, I might add that ethnic nationalism wouldn’t have developed without the French Revolution, most notably in Germany.”
Yeah. That strong sense of ethnic nationalism came at the expense of our race, I think. May I refer you in this regard to Lothrop Stoddard or Oswald Spengler?
“This idealization of old-world aristocracy (which didn’t have a racial consciousness in the modern sense) is a bit absurd, to put it mildly.”
Not really. Aristocracy is all about order and rank. There is no reason why race cannot be incorporated into such a hierarchy even if it may not have been to our satisfaction in the past. The anatomy of aristocracy is in many ways correct even if the specific text it operated under had flaws. Sure, they may not have had what we’d call racial consciousness in the modern sense of the idea. But so what? That’s beside the point of whether or not the idea aristocracy (elitism) could serve us well or not.
“It seems that many “traditionalists” can’t decide if their worldview is based on social class or on ethnic kinship.)”
It seems like you’re serving up a false dichotomy here.
It seems to me that NM buys into the ultimately groundless assertion that certain egalitarians make claiming that people before the French Revolutionary times had no sense of value of race or ethnicity (without actually being an egalitarian himself [NM]). There’s already plenty of good arguments and evidence that people in ancient times recognized the reality of race as well as saw the importance of ethnic and cultural differences (of course, there were times when they neglected these, obviously). Perhaps there was no “nationalism” in the modern sense, but that doesn’t mean that there was never any recognition of ethnicity (which, I might note, is an entirely different issue from race) and the importance of differences between ethnic groups. NM also doesn’t seem to understand that the term “aristocracy” has a large number of contradictory meanings. Clearly some people need to do a bit of extra studying.
“It seems to me that NM buys into the ultimately groundless assertion that certain egalitarians make claiming that people before the French Revolutionary times had no sense of value of race or ethnicity (without actually being an egalitarian himself [NM]).”
Right. But the good news is that we can take comfort in knowing that his point, while perhaps well-meaning and instructive, is utterly fallacious. I’ve said it on other discussion threads that I think racialists/traditionalists often fall into this trap of “over-idealizing” the past as a reactionary measure against the rot they see today. I catch myself doing it. I do see people (not so much here as on other sites) tending toward this belief in Hyperborean golden ages and noble-blooded leaders of “pure” Aryan white ancestry who never failed to keep the trains running on time. Although I’m for revering the past, it’s good to have people snap us out of any vices that may arise from our more romantic tendencies.
The fact of the matter is that people are less ignorant today on the whole. They have more information and knowledge at their finger tips. Our beef is with the interpretative current in which all information is funneled. Or that’s the way I see it. So aristocracy is still valid even if it may have really “sucked” or been “oppressive” back then. It’s all beside the point.
Pro-democracy people don’t think that rotten democracies disprove the idea of democracy. And they don’t, necessarily. But a greater examination of human behavior in relation to how democracies themselves tend to behave does seem to discredit the idea heavily or at the very least make one weary of its tendencies. So in the same way, I don’t think that bad aristocracies disprove the idea of an aristocracy in the same way a Catholic is right to say that sinning priests don’t discredit the idea of “one holy apostolic Church.”
And unlike democracy, I think aristocracy is actually something capable of producing a higher level excellence within man.
“There’s already plenty of good arguments and evidence that people in ancient times recognized the reality of race as well as saw the importance of ethnic and cultural differences (of course, there were times when they neglected these, obviously). Perhaps there was no “nationalism” in the modern sense, but that doesn’t mean that there was never any recognition of ethnicity (which, I might note, is an entirely different issue from race) and the importance of differences between ethnic groups.”
I tend to think that nationalism actually eroded biological distinctions among different sets of man.
UFASP,
Just to clarify, when I said that “aristocracy” was a term that had been given different and contradictory definitions, I was not actually attacking the concept, but rather defending it. There are different forms of “aristocracy,” and some are generally negative in character or results while others are generally positive. I think people like NM fail to make this kind of distinction. Failure to understand that words are defined differently or may represent different concepts usually leads to false judgements.
NM,
I threw out the words “corrupt”, “brittle”, “anachronistic”, and “obsolete” in my description of the priests and nobility. Their dereliction and decadence made the revolt possible.
While Romantic Nationalism as a historical phenomenon was indeed one of the sticks the mercantile caste briefly employed to beat the Ancien Regime, ethnic tribalism is rooted in biology and manifests organically where it’s not actively suppressed.
Our tribe’s self-destructive racial problem originated in a class conflict and remains the product of class conflict. We have a White elite which is collaborating with an alien elite to import an alien folk so that it may enrich itself at our folks’ expense. That’s a class conflict problem. To solve the racial problem, we must solve that class problem.
“That’s a class conflict problem. To solve the racial problem, we must solve that class problem.”
To resolve the interior class stratification, it is necessary to look upon Whites/native Europeans as a class of classes in entirety – these classes being processes, not so much of hierarchical, but horizontal divisions favoring qualitative distinctions – the “White class” in its entirety being looked upon as systemically homeotsatic processes of parts buffering and symbiotically enhancing its overall maintenance.
Toward that end, it is necessary to identify traitors to the class in its entirety, whether low or high, and to have the capacity to punish them.
The modern world is not a product of a narrative but rather the narrative is a product of the modern world. With few exceptions, elites merely reinforce the narrative as they are both products and beneficiaries of it. The aristocrat disappeared because he no longer had a place. The noble / warrior derived from a world that no longer exists in the West. We cannot just create a bureaucracy to infuse a noble/ warrior ethos in the people. I was always critical of Nietzsche on this point.
Today, most everyone is involved in business or practical matters (invention) and I don’t see how that will change in a functioning society. It appears though the future may present different circumstances, one’s in which the Noble and the Spiritual may again find their place. And that is our only hope.
Thank you Mr. Parrott and CC for this response. I’m too honored to be upset about how my piece was read – especially as Parrott completely understood my problems with our movement and its racial basis. However, I think some of the apparent differences between the two essays are just that.
Firstly, I think Parrott just wrote a better essay on the subject – and he repeated the only points I want repeated from my own. Running through some of the essay, let me say that my statement that “knowledge is everything” was not meant to diminish someone else giving primacy to race or culture. My intellectual mission has been to understand why we know what we know, not to dismiss forms of knowledge that don’t comport with Tradition. If someone thinks we know what we know because of race, well, that’s another conversation. But not even Parrott said that.
My critique of materialism is not as a rejection of such for the sake of an ideal world. In fact, I thought it would be clear that I’m saying the material has a profound effect on knowledge, or narrative. Whether via Foucault’s power knowledge or truth regimes, we are talking about a social basis for the ability to conceptualize.
I guess I differ with Matt and others here because I am not ready to say that genetic race factors in that process.
Also, if I make any distinctions between types of narrative (knowledge and wisdom), they are based on Nietzsche’s critique of modernity and the triumph of information over wisdom. Only the latter has any value for me. We should struggle for what we know and be willing to fight for it. I think I made my thinking on this clear in the Otto review and the Blade essay.
Secondly, I am here because I am fighting for our future. Just as Matt Parrott, Greg Johnson, Collin Cleary, “uh,” Daniel et al. Just because I reject the transcendental value of the race concept does not preclude me from understanding that “our people” is nearing extinction. If I have to jump through some hoops while I come to terms with how you all use race that is my problem. All I can say is you’ll find me at your side. Perhaps now that race, as it benefits our people, is counter-modern, I’ll have a better time dealing with the concept.
Thirdly, I guess I should say that I don’t reject science as much as contextualize it. But, in reference to Lew, science does not discover, it creates. Thus biology cannot preexist its creator. The material basis of life can preexist science (if we maintain the modern binary opposition between spirit and matter), but biology is a SCIENCE. It is beholden to epistemes, truth regimes, and power, as MP brought to the fore.
Finally, to my new friend UFASP, I only use knowledge to designate a non-particular form of discursive information. Narrative is a better word. Even if we believe and use biological and technical knowledge, this is still a narrative that is motivating us to act and to create something in their image. As for how my conceptualization of narrative and the human relates to Nietzsche vis-a-vis Socrates, I am not arguing that discourse become the basis of politics, war, greatness, value, or anything else. I perish the thought. I have every reason to believe that Socrates marks the origins of our degeneration. Nietzsche, however, gives us ample reason to think that valuation and evaluation are, in effect, the basis of being human. His problem, as “uh” reminded us, is that we value and evaluate in ways that diminish our bodily (non-Nietzscheans may say racial) vitality.
I hate the comment thing. It works like Facebook, letting us vent all the energy needed to actually research and write something. I love – LOVE – that Matt Parrott wrote an article instead of a long comment. We should all do so, within reason I guess. In any case, feel free to email me or even send me a text if you have something to say, because I don’t always see these comments.
OK, someone apologize to John Morgan for me, as I’ve spent my day here instead of writing a review of the new Dugin book; which, based on this comment thread, most, if not all, of you will hate and abhor.
Mark,
You will be happy to learn that our latest piece, #88 this month, is: https://counter-currents.com/2012/08/epistemologia-e-a-nova-direita/ Yes, Mark Dyal in Portuguese.
I hope you are planning to send us that Dugin review when you are done!
Best,
Greg
“Finally, to my new friend UFASP, I only use knowledge to designate a non-particular form of discursive information.”
I see. I apologize for the straw man. It’s hard to read that word “knowledge” and not have a bearded Socrates or rigidly postured Kant spring up into one’s head within the context of a philosophical discussion. It’s just that the connotation of that word often signifies a property that is non-interpretative (“objective” and “universal”) unlike say, the word “understanding.”
I should perhaps re-read your article as I found it odd that the Nietzsche quote you used at the beginning of it *seemed* to actually contradict your sentiment when the reality is that some of what you were saying probably just went over my head. But now I see that this misunderstanding was more from a problem inherent within language from time to time (in addition to me overlooking other contextual cues, in all likelihood).
“Narrative is a better word. Even if we believe and use biological and technical knowledge, this is still a narrative that is motivating us to act and to create something in their image.”
I agree. It drives the religious (or spiritual) aspect of the Will home. It has some correlation with Hegel’s “geist” but Nietzscheans understandably see that as something too abstract and “detached,” I think.
“As for how my conceptualization of narrative and the human relates to Nietzsche vis-a-vis Socrates, I am not arguing that discourse become the basis of politics, war, greatness, value, or anything else. I perish the thought. I have every reason to believe that Socrates marks the origins of our degeneration.”
I’m conflicted about Socrates, the man himself. I think the way you worded it here is very fair to the man in that he “marks” the origins of degeneration. It at least implies that Socrates didn’t come out of a vacuum– that he himself is a symptom of something far larger than himself (an overall loss of Greek vitality) rather than a cause of some terrible historical woe as some may be apt to see him after reading Twilight of the Idols.
“Nietzsche, however, gives us ample reason to think that valuation and evaluation are, in effect, the basis of being human. His problem, as “uh” reminded us, is that we value and evaluate in ways that diminish our bodily (non-Nietzscheans may say racial) vitality.”
Right. Hence the problem of “knowledge” in the Socratic sense of the word. It’s like a Frankenstein that wonders around independently that we are fixated on irrespective of our actual health; it can easily be used to vilify the instincts of/for life.
But does using the word “racial” conflict with Nietzschean philosophy in some way? I know Nietzsche talks about the “racial swindle,” (or something to that effect) but I thought that had more to do with measuring skulls and looking for “purity” perhaps than any sort of linguistic handle one may use to denote a differences among collections of individuals.
And then there are times where he gets very explicit about “types” in a racial sense such as when he ponders over the fact that the Aryan blood among Europeans may be getting overtaken by the darker, aboriginal blood.
Thanks for the sensible critique. Me and my neighbor were just preparing to do a little research about this. We got a grab a book from our area library but I think I learned more from this post. I’m very glad to see such magnificent info being shared freely out there.
Excellent article. I definitely feel that the vedic division of society is much more insightful than the 3 Estates system. Afterall, if the Bourgeois and the Proletariat had already been defined and legally distinguished in the 18th Century, the French Revolution against the first two estates may have never worked.
I’ve always enjoyed your contribution in podcast interviews and look forward to seeing more of your articles.
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