Collapse: The Blog

What To Do With the Left?

So leftism is essentially (not accidentally) evil: the vanguard of the Satanic spirit of the present age, champion of atheism, unreason, hedonism, and disorder. At the very best, leftism is insanity and madness; how else to describe someone who denies that reality is real?

We on the far right are, of course, in no position to do anything about them. The best we can do is pray, try to salvage our own souls from the mess they've made, and hope they don't snap and try to kill us all (again).

But let's have a thought experiment: suppose (through some extraordinary act of divine intervention) there was a coup, the left was deposed from all centers of power and authority was vested in the hands of us far-rightists. What would we do about the left?

Let us not hold out hope that they would join in and sing kumbaya (er, Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring) with us. The leftist would be incapable of joy, living in our society. He would either rebel against it violently (communists probably would), withdraw from it completely, kill himself, or seek to subvert the social order. I'm thinking the respective proportions would be 5%, 5%, 20%, and 70%.

Those in the first category would have to meet the same fate as those in the third; those in the second can be left well enough alone. (I don't care if you consent to my vision of society as long as you assent to it and keep your reservations to yourself). It's the subversives I'd worry about, the one's that aren't actively violent but who seek to undermine the social order through concerted intellectual effort, public preaching (although, really, what would the leftist equivalent of Paul even sound like? "Yay, I say unto thee, follow me and thou shalt get thy dick wet"?), and lesser acts of rebellion like graffiti or distributing  subversive newsletters or something.

What to do with the mad subversive types? Seriously, I don't know. Put them in straitjackets and lock them away? Exile them to islands where they can live out the logical conclusions of their ideals without contamination by Christian morality, until the last survivor emerges from the pile of corpses with bits of entrails dangling from between his teeth? Line them up against a wall and shoot them?

Obviously, something must be done. History has taught us that even a vast and dedicated majority cannot withstand the concerted onslaught of a tiny minority. One impious jackass can ruin an entire funeral.

You tell me. Obviously, I'm not concerned about ever having to actually deal with this problem: I imagine the modern leftist hegemony only solidifying until the second coming. But it's an important one to ask, nonetheless, because it speaks to us as individuals. We already know how our enemies would (and do) deal with us. How would we deal with them?

To Reduce to Absurdity

I can easily imagine someone claiming that the argument advanced in my post a few days ago -- that leftists don't actually believe in "rights" at all, since they don't believe in metaphysics; that what they call "rights" are, to them, really only fluid social conventions borne of individual preferences; and that continuing leftist control of the West's social and political dynamics will lead to the destruction of everything traditionally called rights and the advent of a new and horrid set of "rights" -- is unfair, because it's a reductio ad absurdum.

Well, yes, it is a reductio ad absurdum. But it's not unfair.

A reductio ad absurdum isn't really a logical fallacy in and of itself: it's only fallacious when it rises to the level of a non sequitur, that is, when Z does not logically follow from A.

But Z (a "right" to public masturbation free of the judging remarks of others, which would become a punishable crime) does follow logically from A; or at least there is nothing stopping A from leading to Z.

(And I am not asserting that a right to publicly masturbate, paired with the criminalization of objecting to people's preferences, will necessarily follow from the liberal conception of "rights." I am simply using that as an illustrative example).

What is there to stop such a change in the future, if you grant the liberal rejection of realism, essentialism, natural law, teleology, and theism -- if, that is, you reduce all "rights" to mere social conventions (and therefore do away altogether with what rights actually are)?

Certainly not the "right to free speech" or the "right not to be offended," since these are merely conventions, too, which can be done away with as the mood strikes us.

Certainly not the fact that such behavior is perverse, since you don't accept the idea of there being any such thing as a "perversion" -- since man, after all, has no intrinsic nature, and his faculties have no intrinsic teleologies, and at any right, since "rights" are really just conventions, you don't have a "right" to protection from exposure to perversions.

Certainly not the fact that you happen to dislike such behavior, since your preferences (you, yourself, are no doubt willing to admit) would be irrational and arbitrary, and at any rate you can easily be shouted down at some point in the future by masses of people who don't dislike that kind of behavior.

And that is the crux of it: there is literally nothing standing between modern society and a litany of horrors except a bit of lingering (more or less explicitly Christian) morality, which you regard as oppressive and are struggling to do away with.

Nothing except a few years' time and the random-chance development and propagation of ideas.

Yes, the leftist conception of rights does in fact reduce to absurdity (in fact, it doesn't reduce at all, it simply is). Worse still -- leftists imagine that is its greatest strength.

Whence Rights?

Leftism is a curious phenomenon in that it simultaneously rejects every tradition, authority, institution, or convention which has the capacity to infringe on what it would call individual rights, yet has no clear metaphysical basis for asserting these rights.

Where do rights come from? Most far-rightists would agree that our rights derive from our duties and the duties of others (so that, for instance, if I take out a loan, I have a duty to pay it back and the right to do so, and the lender has the right to be paid back and the duty to accept my payments -- one man's duties being another man's rights). These duties, in turn, arise from human nature, so that men, whose physiology contains an innate calling to fatherhood, has a duty to protect the weak, provide for his wife and children, and so on. But leftists, being nominalists, reject the idea that there is any such thing as "human nature" from which rights can be said to arise; for them, the universe is a mess of radically particularized, constantly colliding entities moving randomly and chaotically through open space.

Most center-right types believe our rights derive from God -- that they are either granted by Him (explicitly or implicitly) or else derive from the duties He has proscribed for us -- but leftists, generally being atheists, don't believe in God, either.

Some say rights derive from the "innate dignity" of the human person. There doesn't seem to be any reason for believing in such a thing, though, if one rejects the idea of "humanity" as anything more than a useful heuristic for a completely dissimilar mass of beings about whom nothing can be meaningfully said, or if one rejects the idea of a "God" from whom man derives his dignity by virtue of his likeness to Him. So "dignity" is, at best, a useful supplement to a theistic or essentialist conception of rights; it cannot be a replacement for it.

It's in the works of Hume, Hobbes, and Rawls that we find the liberal basis for the idea of "rights," which is merely convention. Masses of moving entities, threatened with the prospect of collision, agree upon some framework of rights wherein they are permitted to maintain their momentum and speed but required to alter their trajectories -- harmonious movement being, in their minds, impossible to achieve and undesirable, anyway.

But conventions are negotiable, alterable, dynamic. Indeed, they must be those things; if they were fixed, they would not be able to serve the purposes which conventions serve, as adaptations to the social reality. Therefore "rights" which derive from them are not rights at all but merely concessions, the terms of a contract which may be renegotiated unilaterally at some future date without your consent, perhaps without even your notice.

Hence every decade or so we discover a new "right" which no previous society acknowledged, such as the right to manufacture and sell meth or to "marry" bits of fence post. And every few decades we cease to recognize a right which previous societies not only cherished but held to be the central and self-evident facts on which society was predicated, such as the right to speak religious truths.

And hence, when a leftist declares that something is a "right" -- or an "inalienable right" -- or a "natural right" -- or, most odious of all, a "human right" -- he is almost always confused and incoherent (at best) or deliberately lying (at worst).

He is not saying: "Man, by virtue of his nature, his dignity, and his status as a subject of God, enjoys, forever and without condition, the right to do or say or believe X."

He is saying: "I happen to like X, so I think society ought to tolerate, then endorse, and, ultimately, subsidize its practice."

Extrapolate this trend  forward, supposing no interruptions, and it will end in something like a society where people are free to murder their elderly parents in their sleep or masturbate in a public park -- while those object to such outrages on religious grounds are summarily imprisoned.

On the Modern Catholic Mass

From chapter 4 ("The Mass of All Times versus the Mass of Our Time") of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre's Open Letter to Confused Catholics:

Then, from being puzzled Catholics you become worried Catholics: is the Mass at which you have assisted valid? Is the Host you have received truly the Body of Christ?

It is a grave problem.  How can the ordinary faithful decide? For the validity of a Mass there exists essential conditions: matter, form, intention and the validly ordained priest. If these conditions are filled one cannot see how to conclude invalidity.  The prayers of the Offertory, the Canon and the Priest's Communion are necessary for the integrity of the Sacrifice and the Sacrament, but no, for its validity. Cardinal Mindzenty pronouncing in secret in his prison the words of Consecration over a little bread and wine, so as to nourish himself with the Body and Blood of Our Lord without being seen by his guards, was certainly accomplishing the Sacrifice and the Sacrament.

A Mass celebrated with the American bishop's honeycakes of which I have spoken is certainly, invalid, like those where the words of the Consecration are seriously altered or even omitted. I am not inventing anything, a case has been recorded where a celebrant went to such an extent of creativity that he quite simply forgot the Consecration! But how can we assess the intention of the priest? It is obvious that there are fewer and fewer valid Masses as the faith of priests becomes corrupted and they no longer have the intention to do what the Church--which cannot change her intention--has always done.  The present-day training of those who are called seminarians does not prepare them to accomplish valid Masses.  They are no longer taught to consider the Holy Sacrifice as the essential action of their priestly life.

Furthermore it can be said without any exaggeration whatsoever, that the majority of Masses celebrated without altar stones, with common vessels, leavened bread, with the introduction of profane words into the very body of the Canon, etc., are sacrilegious, and they prevent faith by diminishing it. The desacralization is such that these Masses can come to lose their supernatural character, “the mystery of faith,” and become no more than acts of natural religion.

Your perplexity takes perhaps the following form: may I assist at a sacrilegious Mass which is nevertheless valid, in the absence of any other, in order to satisfy my Sunday obligation? The answer is simple: these Masses cannot be the object of an obligation; we must moreover apply to them the rules of moral theology and canon law as regards the participation or the attendance at an action which endan- gers the faith or may be sacrilegious.

The New Mass, even when said with piety and respect for the liturgical rules, is subject to the same reservations since it is impregnated with the spirit of Protestantism. It bears within it a poison harmful to the faith. That being the case the French Catholic of today finds himself in the conditions of religious practice which prevail in missionary countries. There, the inhabitants in some regions are able to attend Mass only three or four times a year. The faithful of  our country should make the effort to attend once each month at the Mass of All Time, the true source of grace and sanctification, in one of those places where it continues to be held in honor.

I'm interested in the thoughts of my Catholic friends on this passage. It's a striking thought, that the mass which the vast majority of Catholics attend is invalid -- that millions of Catholics are going without sacramental grace. (Lefebvre's objection is that Vatican II, a pastoral council, had no authority to substantively alter the Tridentine Mass, which was established eternally by Pius V). But if true, how could our Lord permit the Church to fall to so low a level that would positively participate in the damnation of souls?

Democracy Sucks

Even the political class is starting to catch on:

Speaking to a Cary Rotary Club today, N.C. Gov. Bev Perdue suggested suspending Congressional elections for two years so that Congress can focus on economic recovery and not the next election.

"I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won't hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover. I really hope that someone can agree with me on that," Perdue said. "You want people who don't worry about the next election."

The comment -- which came during a discussion of the economy -- perked more than a few ears. It's unclear whether Perdue, a Democrat, is serious -- but her tone was level and she asked others to support her on the idea.

Oh wait, there's more -- from Peter Orszag, former director of the Office of Budget and Management:

During my recent stint in the Obama administration as director of the Office of Management and Budget, it was clear to me that the country’s political polarization was growing worse—harming Washington’s ability to do the basic, necessary work of governing. If you need confirmation of this, look no further than the recent debt-limit debacle, which clearly showed that we are becoming two nations governed by a single Congress—and that paralyzing gridlock is the result.

So what to do? To solve the serious problems facing our country, we need to minimize the harm from legislative inertia by relying more on automatic policies and depoliticized commissions for certain policy decisions. In other words, radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic.

Perdue now claims she was joking, and Ezra Klein is hurriedly insisting that Orszag actually believes we don't have enough democracy, but this strikes me as the sort of whisper campaign that always precedes the major initiative, in which some nobody bureaucrats with zero futures to have to worry about squandering advance some idea that's given a few months or years to germinate on the periphery of people's subconscious. Then some high-profile individual (perhaps a Congressman, perhaps a well-known journalist) begins to seriously advocate it. His credibility and perhaps career are destroyed in the process, but by then the avalanche has already begun. A decade or two later, it's gay men sodomizing each other in public streets and state Supreme Courts declaring an inalienable right to gay "marriage."

This would be a refreshing trend if only it weren't leftists advocating it. Democracy does suck, after all; its basis is a gross misconception of the nature of man (and reality itself), and it is invariably conducive to rank utilitarianism. But the left's proposed alternative -- government by an ever-multiplying number of technocratic committees (in the case of Orszag) or government by one massive unelected committee (apparently Perdue's) is worse: it amplifies all the worst aspects of democracy while removing the one that has the potential to mitigate its abuses.

 What's amusing to me is that people can complain seriously about gridlock and nothing getting done and the business of the American people being left unfinished and blah blah blah, yet it never occurs to them that these problems are essential to democracy and not merely incidental to it. A democracy incapable of gridlock isn't democratic at all, it's merely government by a committee of elected tyrants. Nobody even seems to be aware that this talk is wholly antithetical to the rationale for which democracy was instituted in America in the first place, which was to create a government that could not at all legislate in the absence of broad consensus. In our utterances, we have already all become anti-democratic. It's as if we're living in a slow-motion anti-revolution in which the outward forms of a society are preserved while its interior rationale and institutions are gutted and destroyed. But then modernity is nothing if not dishonest: it requires us all to believe things we intuitively know are absurd, obscene, false, and even evil.

Karl Denninger (a libertarian) wants Perdue deposed by the people, but even he knows it won't happen and that he's wasting his breath saying it. The American people do not care about democracy anymore: they don't have the energy, the patience, the intellect, or the will for it. Their hearts are elsewhere. They will swoon into the arms of the first strong man to come along and thank him for relieving them of the burden of governance, for which they are clearly unsuited.

It's time we all just admit it: the American experiment is over. It has failed. The Founders foresaw its eventual doom and now that doom is here. Its name is Collapse, and the price of its visitation will be death and privation on an appalling scale.   Some romantic cowboy-poet types will no doubt pen odes to its lost beauty, and future generations will study our collapse and learn all the wrong lessons from it (if, indeed, we're lucky to have future generations capable of study). Meanwhile, the rest of the world will get its head out of its ass and write off the whole democracy thing as the philosophical and moral junk it's always been, its inadequacies now at long last exposed to the light of day.

EDIT: The audio of Perdue's speech sounds conspicuously serious, contrary to her claims.

Collapse and the Culture of Death

Let us taken as a given, for the moment, that something like a large-scale economic collapse is on the immediate horizon -- perhaps no more than 12 months away, as the rat-faced predator Alessio Rastani predicts with barely-concealed glee. And let us take as a given, furthermore, that this collapse will instantly erase at least the last thirty years of economic progress (or, more appropriately, expose all that "progress" as fraudulent), resulting in a catastrophic decline in standards of living vastly in excess of the Great Depression. Finally, let us assume that this is severe enough to result in largescale death from a combination of starvation, exposure to the elements, disease, and civil disorder, especially among the elderly, the disabled, and children.

How will our culture of death handle such a collapse? I foresee a few different possible outcomes:

1. Suicide. One of the advantages to having as our enemy a culture that fetishizes death is that you don't have to fight them for long. Under a "cultural suicide" scenario, the moderns that don't die largely kill themselves in the ensuing years of privation and misery, deprived at long last of the hedonistic distractions that made life bearable for them. David P. Goldman ("Spengler") suggests Islam is in the midst of an ongoing cultural suicide, an "act of existential despair," borne of their inability to reconcile themselves to modernity. Note that this need not be a literal suicide but a kind of political suicide, a withdrawal from participation in the polity and community into a shell of perpetual masturbatory navel-gazing that renders modernity just as good as dead. I would also classify as a "suicide" scenario one in which the collapse results in the thorough intellectual bankruptcy of the moderns, to such an extent that the true right or a reasonable facsimile thereof is able to seize control and put things aright.
   
   
2. Metastasis. The total converse of a cultural suicide event, under a "metastasis" scenario, the collapse is so hard and felt so keenly by so many that the culture of death booms, capturing the hearts and minds of nearly everyone who comes into contact with it and rendering marginalized and impotent everyone who already opposed it. This is a Nazi Germany/World War II outcome.
   
   
3. Metamorphosis. This seems the least likely outcome to me, but suppose the collapse precipitates a dramatic metamorphosis of the modern project -- that it compels it along the next step of its logical evolution.
   
   
4. Retrogression. This also strikes me as unlikely, but I suppose I can't discount the possibility of it. A "retrogression" event is characterized by the culture of death's shucking of those aspects of its gestalt that are clearly dysfunctional, and its return to a comparatively primitive but perhaps more humane and stable form, such as classical liberalism or Christian humanism.

To keep things simple, I'm excluding here the possibility of fragmentation, according to which society fractures along different lines with the fragments going their separate ways (one could easily see southern secessionism producing a half-society that has retrogressed to the social conditions of the mid-19th century, while Left Coast types hurl themselves off of skyscrapers). Are there more possibilities I'm missing? If so, by all means, please correct me.

But suppose the next stop on the road of the future is only this four-way intersection. What should we on the far-right regard as most likely? And what should we regard as most desirable?

In terms of likelihood, I see either a metasis or a metamorphosis as most likely, and more likely a metastasis. For one thing, it's clear that the moderns are firmly in the saddle; we on the right are simply being dragged along for the ride, so we are already mostly powerless to alter the zeitgeist in a positive direction. For another, metamorphosis strikes me as impossible precisely because I think the culture of death is the logical conclusion of the modern philosophical project; having already embraced heresy, unreason, madness, and evil, it has nowhere to go but Hell. I suppose it's possible that, by some Herculean intellectual effort, some well-meaning modernists might be able to salvage a few worthwhile elements from the wreckage and transform it into a functional creed, although even in that case I could not foresee it lasting more than a few centuries (the track record of social stability since the collapse of the spiritual society of the Middle Ages has been one of a tightening spiral of social collapse and rebirth) before we hit yet another existential, society-destroying crisis.

But in terms of desirability, it seems to me that cultural suicide or retrogression would be preferable, and I lean slightly toward suicide. Retrogression might be more humane in the short term, but it would produce a society predicated just as much on falsehoods as the present one is and there's no guarantee it wouldn't follow through to the same grim conclusions it did last time. The suicide of the moderns, on the other hand, whether literal or figurative, would at last rid the world of a deleterious and frankly Satanic influence on society and the men who comprise it, or at least serve to mitigate its power, while placing either the far-right or an approximation of it in charge. The meek would inherit the earth while the strong overdose on Xanax and drown themselves in their bathtubs.

Death Wish

I recently came across Just Thomism, run by James Chastek. It's a great philosophy blog, and Chastek's musings are deeply insightful and very intelligble, even to a numbskull like me. Of particular interest to me was his recent post about the West's death wish, a phenomenon which my own blog has probably inflated by approximately 8 million percent:

But to call it a death wish is to name it after what is most dramatic in [it] and not what is most real. Nature doesn’t think about death, and our desire doesn’t terminate in it. We want the new birth on the other side of the collapse. This desire for a new birth has been building at least for the last century, and it is most apparent in our contemporary art. We have spent the last century trying to destroy the very idea of art. Warhol’s soup can or Duchamp’s urinal are brilliant pieces of art, if reckoned according to their goal, which was to infect the popular imagination with the idea that art was anything you called art – in other words, that there was no art. Taken as pure nihilism, both are trite and pointless, but they are more than that, which is why they fascinate. The desire is to kill art altogether, all the way down to its foundations, so that we might come out on the other side with a clean slate and a pristine consciousness.   The civilization has grown tired. Let’s burn down the forest to clear the path and fertilize the earth. Philosophy has run on a path similar to art – we have destroyed all the systems by critique, and we strive to deconstruct and complicate thought to the point where the life of the mind stops altogether. All the sciences and humanities strive to complicate, to befuddle, to leave anyone who wanders into them in a complete state of bewilderment. The degree of truth in all fields is measured by the degree of specialization, and the degree of specialization by the extent to which no one can understand what you are saying – including yourself. It would be one thing to say that all of this just happens – there would be nothing confusing in that. But we want this to happen, and are horrified that the whole thing might not hit its consummation. Why?

Read the rest.

The Empire at Twilight

London gives us a sign of things to come:

London is reeling from three nights of rioting that's poured hundreds of people into the streets, leaving several local neighborhoods in shambles. One man is dead, dozens injured and arrested.

The protests have now spread to other cities, with violence reported in parts of Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol.

Great Britain and other parts of the world are experiencing unrest at a time of global economic uncertainty and stock market volatility.

A society built on the premise that a person finds the fullest expression of his character by his participation in the market place, which then systematically denies many people the ability to do just that, is a sick and fatally corrupt one.

As I've mentioned before, most people don't realize that chronic unemployment is a relatively recent phenomenon -- perhaps no more than a century old. There is nothing in history that parallels it. Its effects on the average person's life are pronounced and severe. His ability to provide for himself and his family is markedly diminished, especially in the United States, where health insurance is largely tied to gainful employment. He loses a key connection to the greater body of society; he becomes purposeless and unintegrated. If he is lucky enough to have a reasonable amount of savings (and, remember, our monetary system ensures this is impossible for most people), he will be sure to exhaust it in short order. Unless he is able to find work quickly, the odds become quickly stacked against him that he will be reemployed. And the longer he is unemployed, the worse the deterioration of his psyche: depression, anxiety, sleeping problems, and self-loathing emerge, and a general sense of ennui, helplessness, and despair emerge.

The issue is not, as our degenerate Marxist establishment is wont to assert, merely one of material deprivation, and by saying as much, they assert nothing but their materialism and their ignorance of man's nature. Never before has the welfare state been as massive or as powerful as it is today. Even a society dominated by massive institutions of unrivaled historical size, government's social spending bureaucracy dwarfs them all. A laid-off person under many circumstances is entitled to severance pay followed by unemployment insurance; if his economic situation becomes dire, he is entitled to welfare payments, food stamps, and government-subsidized health care.

These things are important to help ensure that unemployed people don't descend into utter depths of indignity. But they cannot endow their lives with meaning and purpose; they cannot integrate them into the community. Only employment can do that.

Ours is becoming a particularly schizophrenic society. We ship jobs overseas by the thousands in the name of economic freedom, and are then appalled when the labor force participation rate shrinks. We import lower-wage foreigners by the millions and then gasp with horror when incomes fall. We indulge in gross monetary policy manipulations and are shocked when people can no longer afford to shop at anything but dollar stores.

We spend the formative years of children's lives telling them that society is run by bigots and fascists and then are surprised when they riot!

Why shouldn't people riot? They've every right in the world to be angry. They've been lied to, constantly, about everything, and denied a share in the commonwealth to boot. Perhaps the rioters are monsters; but they are the monsters that can only be produced by an insane and immoral society.

Thankfully for all of us, collapse is coming.

The West Is Not Worth Killing For

Bonald at Throne and Altar and some of his commenters recently concluded that Norweigian killer Anders Behring Breivik's politics are best described as "anti-cosmopolitan":

This tradition originates with Herder.  Although he associated with social conservatives, Maurras belonged to this school.  These conservatives emphasize, against liberal universalism, the right and duty of every people to protect its own cultural integrity and to foster intra-group loyalty in its members.  Mark Richardson ably expresses this view on the internet today.

Justin, at The Truth Shall Set You Free, cites a few relevant excerpts from Breivik's manifesto; head over there if you care to see, but suffice to say they are, I think, sufficient to establish that Breivik's motivation was chiefly to protect the West against the effects of Muslim immigration. If commenter Arthur at Oz Conservative is accurate, at all, Breivik endorsed moving conservatism in an "anti-racist pro-homosexual, pro-Israeli line of thought" direction. He thus comes off as a kind of Mark Steyn/Jonah Goldberg-style pseudoconservative, happily carrying the torch for any of the left's horrid cultural triumphs so long as it gives him the opportunity to beat up on Muslims and their apologists. Like Sarah Palin, vapidly asserting her feminism to the cheers of a "conservative" crowd. There's a weird circularity here, that Breivik endeavored to murder the cultural elites whose victories he was hoping to protect from their own incompetence.

I can't say I get it. First, there's nothing about the West worth preserving, much less killing for. Ours is a corrupt and degenerate civilization.  It deserves to perish. We are the Canaanites to the Muslims' Israelites, and ours is the spiritual cancer being cut away by means of their gradual demographicide.

Second, has European conservatism really become so denatured that the only thing they're trying to "conserve" now are the left's cultural victories from 10 years ago? For Heaven's sake, let the left defend its own works from the scourge it's welcomed. There is surely a more worthwhile European heritage to preserve than mere taxpayer-subsidized anal buggery.

About a week ago, there was a post over at In Mala Fide asking why the left keeps winning. The answer, it appears, is simple: there's no one to oppose them.

Revolution Isn't Enough

"Come, my friends, / 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world."

--Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses" (1842)

Modern society sucks.

The men have degenerated into either belligerent, chest-thumping knuckle-draggers with drinking problems or simpering beta-male weaklings with terminal testosterone deficiency. The women have become zeppelin-sized, overbearing neurotic hussies, veering between spells of paleolithic sluttiness and stone-cracking frigidity.  The rule of law has been broken up and distributed among favored political constituencies, the latest victim of the remorseless entitlement creep that's blown up the size of the federal government beyond all reasonable constraints of cost or desirability. Our fossilized media waxes enragedly on every hyperexaggerated racial slight against minorities while stubbornly refusing to acknolwedge gruesome black-on-white hate crimes when they occur.  The Constitution has been shredded beyond recognition. Civility has perished. The economy is shit and its prospects for improvement are non-existent.

Are eight things enough, or do I need to keep going? Because I can.

The desire to destroy all of this, to tear down this great machine of injustice and inhumanity, isn't just rational; it's practically a duty. No one who truly values human dignity, and would suffer to see it realized and respected, could tolerate this madness.

But destroying it isn't enough.

Here's the problem: a movement that is entirely oppositional in nature, and which exhausts itself in criticism of a system, derives its legitimacy from that system. If that system collapses, so does the movement. Thus, we must not only oppose society as currently instituted but demand a positive, alternative organization of it.

This is exactly where Marxism went wrong. What began as a revolutionary movement, one that sought the overthrow of the existing system of bourgeois capitalist democracy, eventually degenerated into mere left-wing trade-unionism. Before, what hurt capitalism was good for Marxism, as the destruction of the system and its replacement with an alternative was its chief goal; after, what hurt capitalism also hurt Marxism, because it had become merely another faction within liberal democracy and merely sought to realign the priorities of the existing system.

It is exactly the reason why neither church nor military have succeeded in devising a new social creed to replace our failed conception of economic society. The church is oppositional in nature: it can criticize the excesses of society but it cannot concoct a coherent vision of how it ought to be ordered, since its goal is to prepare individuals for the afterlife. And the military, to the extent it isn't just a job-skills training force for the lumpenproletariat, cannot be a foundational organization in society because its objective is to prepare men to die -- hardly a basis for a society that must live. (To the extent the military simply acts as a job-skills training force for the otherwise unemployable lumpenproletariat, it's even less suitable, since it exists firmly within and seeks to support the collapsed paradigm of Economic Man).

The Founders, incidentally enough, understood this, and that was their genius. They did not merely rise up in opposition to the centralizing Enlightenment despotism of George III; they rose up in defense of the Society of Economic Man, with the intention of creating a nation with institutions capable of realizing it. Their victory enabled them to come into that society fully and freely, and it enabled the success of Burkean conservatives in England, as well. It's time for us to repeat at least their political and philosophical genius (although it's not necessarily required that we also emulate their violent secessionism).

Thus, destroying or reforming existing institutions isn't enough. We may encounter some mild success in this strategy, in much the same way the Marxists had success in instituting their reforms of society (although see where that got them as a revolutionary movement?). But a purely negative philosophy is not enough for society. It must have values worth dying for, and more importantly, worth living for. And those of us who have rejected existing society, and who can most clearly see the forest through the trees, must formulate those values while there's still time to do so.

The alternative is to continue exhausting ourselves in opposition while a generation of bright and worthwhile young men destroy themselves in nihilistic despair.