I think this quote sums up both the promise and the difficulty of the present situation: "The only conceivable strategy for the new right is to bring into ideological coherence the need for a postliberal order."
The promise, as laid out in this excellent article, is that there is a massive opening for a new movement to emerge which is not beholden to the old orthodoxies and categorizations of the left and the right and which rejects the increasingly dystopian woke-technocratic neoliberalism the world is being subjected to. On the right, one can see faint glimmers of a growing rejection of neoliberal economics in the emergence of the "postliberals" and "national conservatives" in the US, for example. Moreover, the popular base of support for right-wing politics has never, in my view, derived its support for rightist parties from a love of big business or corporate domination which are the consequences of neoliberalism, but instead from a cultural conservatism, a defense of tradition, localism, and a rejection of interference from a distant Big Government in people's private lives and small businesses. That the base of right-wing support is largely indifferent to neoliberal economics allows for the possibility of a unraveling of the "fusionism" that married neoliberalism with the rest of the conservative movement and thus a receptivity for postliberalism amongst the popular supporters of the right.
On the left, one can see a significant bloc which is turning away from the excesses of a deracinating, homogenizing, socially destructive, technocratic, and toxically identitarian woke-left-liberalism (the same left-liberalism described in this article) in those segments of the "heterodox" left that have had such success on places like Substack (Kingsnorth being a prominent example). One can see a backlash to elite left-identity-progressivism amongst the popular base of left wing support, too, for example in San Francisco where a deep-blue voting populace has nonetheless rejected excessively woke DAs and school boards, or in NYC where a fairly conservative mayoral candidate handily beat a number of woke challengers.
So much for the promise of a possible postliberal movement. The difficulties such a movement would face are obvious. Putting to one side the ferocious opposition from the current liberal establishment that any viable "postliberal" movement would encounter (and indeed already has in the repression of the trucker protests and the yellow vests), there is a deeper, ideological and philosophical difficulty that has yet to be resolved by anyone I've read so far.
Beyond mere opposition to creeping wokism and technocracy, what would a "postliberal" movement actually *want*? What might a "postliberal order" *actually look like*? In the past, when Maurras was writing for example, there was a concrete alternative to the liberal order whose memory was still fresh, and which provided a lodestar for reactionaries to push for: monarchism and the attendant structures of the ancien regime. No such return to a monarchical past is palatable to any but the most extreme neo-reactionaries today. Some sort of roll-back of current liberalism and a return to the social order of a more tame liberalism is no solution either, and for a host of reasons, not the least of which is that such a move would be no more than a holding action before the inevitable return of the extreme liberalism we see today. As Patrick Deneen has so lucidly illustrated, the seeds of our current situation can be credibly understood to have been sown concurrently with the birth of liberalism in the Enlightenment; any "return" to a more palatable liberalism can thus do no more than delay the march of "progress".
I've found that when the "postliberals" are pressed, their policy prescriptions amount to little more than policy tweaks that don't even approach the root of the problem. The vague outlines of a coherent "postliberal" policy can be seen if you squint, but far too dimly to provide sufficient coherence for a political movement: localism and decentralization; a return to and appreciation of tradition and especially of some form communal religion; a rejection of neoliberal economics and the domination of global corporate interests and consumerism in favor of small business and self-sufficient smallholders; a love of place and a more rooted environmentalism; a rejection of the bio-political surveillance and security state which both pre-dates and has grown massively dangerous during COVID; rejection of identitarian-woke race and gender politics. I would support whole-heartedly any movement that could bring this all together in a coherent, concrete platform, but see nothing too promising on the horizon.
Thus, I agree with the author: the prime political question for dissidents today is how to bring "ideological coherence" to the idea of a "postliberal order". I think whoever or whatever movement can do so will reap rich political rewards (and hopefully bring some hope to our bleak political landscape). I just haven't yet been convinced that such a move is possible.
Kai, I loved your description of the "vague outlines of a "postliberal policy." I also agree with you and the author that a "...prime question for dissidents today is how to bring ideological coherence to these ideas about a postliberal order."
One small step in this direction might be an attempt to discuss the different psychological dimensions of contemporary social atomization ( for example, isolation, lack of social bonds, sense of meaninglessness, anxiety, depression, anger, ressentiment--see Mattias Desment "The Psychology of Totalitarianism,") as potentially being minimized/partially alleviated through localism, decentralization, appreciation of tradition, etc.)--trying to take on simultaneously the issue of new right insensitivity to linkages between institutional structures and individual psychology and well as the ultra-left "ontological suspicions of small--scale forms of voluntary association.
Liberalism is fragile to disruption from postmodern social conditions and techno-economic change (global neoliberalism).
Thus post-liberalism will need to be anti-fragile. The Game~B community has developed a set of practices for instance for fending off attacks by "Woke" cancel culture creeps, while remaining sensitive to multiculturalism.
John Vervaeke, a cognitive scientist and "post-liberal", discussed that in detail in his "Crisis of Meaning" talks.
That is excellent and mostly correct, IMO. But there have been various people and small groups that have been working on the problem for some time [almost 100 years], going back to Sri Aurobindo and Jean Gebser. Aurobindo was the "most dangerous revolutionary" in the Indian Independence movement, according to the British Empire.
Aurobindo's and Gebser's theories were pioneering examples of both post-metaphysics and post-liberalism.
re: IDW-ish stuff / Game~B
What has been added to their work over the last 40 years or so is a lot of evidence from cognitive science, evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution that expose deep failings, a lack of anti-fragility to disruption, in the conventional form of corporate-state liberalism/neoliberalism.
Interesting. I've read a bit of Aurobindo before, but only from a spiritual angle. What political works of his would you recommend?
I've not seen the Jordan Hall piece before, but it is excellent, and I think he's completely correct that the increase in complexity (technological and population-wise) is at the root of many of the problems we're worried about. Thank you for pointing it out.
Sorry, dunno. I'm not sure that Aurobindo had a specific political theory, beyond the Independence/Democracy movement in India (which I assume he saw as part of the problem of imperialism in general).
Integral Yoga was presumably an attempt at defining a post "left-vs-right" (post-liberal) framing of human awareness, but just getting India out of medieval caste politics and into a "liberal-democratic" mode was a huge problem that had to be solved before post-liberal politics was on the table. (???)
I'm reminded of some polling released a few days ago ranking the priorities of the polled population versus the priorities of the media/journalists. The difference was glaring. The most important concerns for the people were economic issues and immigration. For the media it was social issues such as environment, abortion rights, racism.
The emergence of a new aristocracy, for that is what the neoliberal "centrist" elitists are, seizing the mantel of liberalism but governing in distinctly illiberal ways and even introducing a new hierarchy of privileges based on protected groups of people (which includes "experts" along with the various "oppressed" groups), is now too blatantly obvious. Just as what passed for the media in the ancien regime was used to protect the aristocracies by suppressing criticism of them, the modern media plays the same role.
All very interesting. The remaining question, however, is what is their goal? The ancien regime aristocracy justified their existence because they deeply believed in the natural inequality of men and aristocratic rule was necessary, a reflection that some people were superior and others inferior. But the modern neoliberal elite ostensibly believe all people are technically equal, so the heart of their regime has a corruption that the aristocrats did not. They are not honest, they speak the language of democratic equals and rights for everyone, but govern increasingly like oligarchies and brutally abuse the norms of a liberal democracy to preserve their power, mainly through the entrenchment of unelected bureaucrats and the sycophant media, using the latter two to preserve their rule regardless of whatever populist party may temporarily win an election. Take the case of Donald Trump, for all his many (and I do mean many) flaws, it's also undeniable that Democratic figures in alliance with entrenched bureaucrats invented the Russian collusion - very illegally - to try to destroy him.
How this new elite class plays out in the long run is anyone's guess.
My understanding (mainly from reading paleo-libertarian Leonard Liggio) is that the ancien regime wasn't actually ancien, rather it was a "modern" construct aligned with the rise of Absolutism, Imperialism and Colonialism from about 1492 on (regression to "oriental despotism").
Prior to 1492, "classical liberalism" emerged in decentralized, pre-nation-state politics, after the Carolingian reforms, as the gene pool in NW Europe became less clannish and inbred (due to the Church's ban on cousin marriage). Outbreeding and the rise of the nuclear family under Frankish Manorialism led to the selection of higher IQ and "liberal personality traits", which made high-social-trust possible, and then an expanding urban commoner class, market economics as river and sea trade expanded (Hanseatic League), etc.
Ancien regime is the common term for the political and social system that dominated France till 1789 when hereditary monarchy and the feudal privileges of the nobility was abolished. I would go further to argue that ancien regime should be used to describe a governing model that rests upon an aristocracy with beliefs in its inherent superiority and disinclination to accept meaningful equality of people. This was the mindset behind feudalism despite equality of faith within the church. It was also the mindset of almost all developed societies till the rise of the enlightenment giving birth to the notion that no, all men are actually created equal. The last time we saw a meaningful equality would be in localized small tribal groups.
The rise of classical liberalism did take many centuries to develop and surely was greatly aided by Christianity itself through various guises. But it must also be acknowledged that into the 19th century the Church was a partner of the aristocracies and monarchies in perpetuating feudal-based class systems.
A lot of what is now France, in the south, wasn't even part of any nation state in the modern sense, power was decentralized. The local warlord/prince operated on the basis of fealty-oaths by knights. Eventually such clannish social forms gave way to the rule of law. That was one of a number of social transformations that resulted from outbreeding.
According to Liggio, before 1492, elements of the church, such as the Cluniac Abbeys, promoted reforms such as peasant's rights, and cessation of war.
In his review, he brilliantly covered a blind spot of my essay, and since I completely agree with his analysis, I'm copying it here as a post scriptum . Here's what Rhyd wrote:
The only thing missing in that essay is the really unstable nature of the social system and the really ridiculous relationship the French have with it. Everyone I knew (including my roommates) had a complex plan to stay on unemployment and housing benefits as long as possible, including some who would take very short term work contracts specifically because they knew they could get another year of being paid for not working. Everyone was gaming the system, except for the few bitter bastards who wanted a bit more from life and resented that everyone they knew was partying on a Tuesday night while they had to work early the next morning.
That thing conservatives warn us leftists that socialism will become is pretty much what’s happened in France, and it’s crumbling. Macron’s attempts to fix it at the behest of the banks are awful, but so too is what has become of the French left. What was especially notable about the Gilets Jaunes was that they were protests by people actually working, rather than the radical anti-work crowds. The same also with the protests against the passe sanitaire, the national COVID vaccine program. Other protests tend to be driven by those who are out of work and are trying to hold on to the social programs that make not working a perfectly viable option.
Historically, peasant rebellions were rarely successful, and when they were, it was after a large percentage of the population was killed off by plague, or wars had caused economic collapse, weakening the ruling elites.
And, that was usually in the context of an expanding urban commoner class that had clear goals: to advance "classical liberalism" (increase high-social-trust), consolidate improvements in literacy, numeracy and education, stabilize middle class wealth production, advance technological and scientific innovation, create or make democratic institutions and practices sustainable, etc.
As the article notes, the "cultural-left" is currently trying to destroy 1,000 years of "classical liberalism", which is possible because classical-liberalism is *not anti-fragile to disruption* from postmodern social conditions and technology disruption.
Thus the need for an anti-fragile, post-liberal, post-postmodern stage of cultural evolution.
Confession. As alluring as I find commentary like this - and instinctively compelling - there is always a moment when I come to explain it to others when it just feels like smoke. This is the nature of meta-anything and I’m desperate to fix onto some concrete policy frameworks that might, for example, describe ‘localism’ in practice.
While this may be an intellectual failing on my part, I doubt that anyone in my circles has the foggiest idea that there may be another way beyond what we have now. So how does it move beyond an intellectual conceit?
You aren't wriong and neither is François Furet quoted in the piece “condemned to live in the world as it is.” you delve into the solutions offered by liberalisms critics on the left, right and elsewhere and its just word salads - no concrete examples and nothing that works as good as what we have now despite all its flaws...ivory tower academics like Patrick Deneen and the others really have nothing to offer in the way of solutions that hold up in the light of real life practical use on a nation-state scale. I really like the phrase 'extreme center' to describe the ruling elites/cathedral/ham samwich, use whatever name you like - but we should be very careful about implementing radical solutions to fix their pathologies - its just as likely we end up in a worse place than we are today than a better place - or that current horrible elites are replaced with suimilarly bad elites just bad in other ways...modern life really isn't bad in a western country is it - compared to 100 years ago - 200 years ago - there should be some appreciation paid to just how good we got it and the system that brought it about...
"the United States and what might be called its hubristic “Project for a New American Century 2.0.” Even more so than the original from the 2000s, this new imperialistic adventure sounds like a “Planetary Confederacy of Goodness,” shrouded in empty symbolism and virtue signaling."
Love this too:
"To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, drilled, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality."
There is hope brewing. I believe the West is going to defeat this monster. The only question is are we going to step on its neck, or allow it to fester and boil to the point it again threatens the free world?
Extract from my November 2021 piece (The coming obsolescence of North American borders):
"The 2020-30’s might also bring into the mix a confrontation between a technocratic elite, highly mobile and educated workforce concentrated in cities that is open to a larger bureaucratic supra-national government vs a more disenfranchised citizenry living outside of metropolitan areas feeling alienated by a far away political power that does not bring any added value to its daily life."
Do you agree with Curtis Yarvin’s assertion that the Canadian trucker protests were a total strategic failure because they changed nothing and only provided the technocratic elite with valuable experience in how to crush future, similar protests?
With that in mind, how long before similar suppression tactics are rolled out in the Netherlands etc? Or do the physicals have something else up their sleeve?
I think it's too soon to say. The truckers got crushed, but they have clearly inspired further action, and those movement may learn lessons from them. They also served an important role, I think, in tearing the mask off the "extreme center" regimes: after Trudeau froze their bank accounts, the authoritarianism entrenched in the system across the West was starkly exposed for all to see.
What I do know is that the Canadian truckers protest made me aware of their plight and I was furious about how condescending and arrogant Trudeau and his ilk were towards these hard working blue collar workers.
Now, look at what is happening in the Netherlands and all over Europe with tractors, truckers, farmers, etc., all hard workers fighting to keep their lively hood AND FEED THE REST OF THE WORLD!
N.S., I much appreciate the intelligence I gather from your writings, Paul Kingsnorth’s (https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com), and now your guest, Renaud Beauchard – and there are no doubt others of like value.
I’ve been edified by your Reality Honks Back post, and even more by The World Order Reset (https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-world-order-reset?s=r), when you speak of “…two different possible configurations of geopolitical power, both pivoting around the Europe’s direction of alignment”, referring to the Trans-Atlantis coalition vs the Euro-Asian / trans-Eurasian landmass.
My interest in such discerning intelligence may be thought passé or obscure by some, but as a student of Biblical prophecy and the configuration of coalitions pertaining to the doing and undoing of geopolitical alliances at the end of the age, I find your insights of great value.
In the symbolic / spiritual language of the New Testament’s apocalyptic masterpiece, a world-system coalition called Babylon shall be dethroned from its headquarter nation’s supremacy – first with shattering calamities, and then, evidently nuclear, violence – and the coalition headed by the victorious aggressor will pursue (or continue pursuing) its agenda of world domination through the implementation of elite technocrats’ control of finances, food, water, and police-military force. This agenda? A dystopian dream of the master sorcerer.
Sorcery. A topic of immense value in our days – in a nutshell, the psychedelic agents (including grass) promoted by Babylon basically starting with the U.S.’s Woodstock generation, allowing alien spirits from their realm into the collective human consciousness, and utterly – after over 50 years of us steeping in this brew – befouling the zeitgeist.
As I’ve put it in my own writing,
“A spiritual discernment, alongside the geo-political, cultural, intellectual, economic, and military aspects of what is going on in the world is AS germane to comprehending our times as these other aspects, IF NOT MORE, for God and the devil are both in the mix.”
Living presently in Cyprus, caring for a small spiritual community, I benefit immensely from listening to voices in the arena of consciousness. And I appreciate your voice speaking out!
Western "liberty" traditions are more pagan/anarchist than Christianity, assuming that Christianity and Judaism are defined as being "eastern" renunciation-salvation religions in their historical origins.
... as I argue in (my free eBook book) Rousseau and the Real Culture War ([broken link]), from the belief of conservatives in some form of the doctrine of original sin. Conservatives may be non-Christian or even atheists, but they distrust human nature (implicitly accepts the anti-human part of the doctrine) and see the State as necessary for society to function. They may concede that spontaneous order is possible in the economic realm, but not in the social realm.
... Rothbard’s notion of the court intellectual versus the opposition intellectual, the Enlightenment was one of the rare times the opposition intellectuals were partially victorious. Christ and Paul were unwitting court intellectuals. As Rothbard said in Anatomy of the State,
[->] one trick of the court intellectuals is to disparage human nature, which leads to the conclusion that the State is necessary to keep evil humans in line.
The creation of the doctrine of original sin was a great moment for the State.
On a related note, Christianity as I define it, is anti-this world. I define it as a salvation religion revolving around the radical fall of and resulting utter depravity of man; the death and resurrection of a savior, Christ; and the need for humans to accept Jesus as their savior in order to avoid the eternal fires of hell, a supposedly just punishment levied on Adam’s heirs for “the original sin” (in Adam’s fall, we sinned all). One can define Christianity differently, and then the conclusion would be different, but based on my definition, I side with the young pagans Dr. Gottfried talked about in the article.
[->] The pagan West was basically culturally healthy before it was infected by an Eastern disease, Christianity. To the extent it remained healthy, it remained pagan.
For a long time, the Catholic mass was spoken in Latin by near illiterate parish priests who didn’t know Latin. No message was spread that way. And until the printing press, it would have been difficult for local priests to “get the memo,” that is, receive and understand directives from above. At the peasant level, Europeans continued to tell pagan folk stories and even perform pagan rituals like having sex in the fields to encourage a good harvest. At the aristocratic level, court priests (there’s a term) actually wrote pagan inspired Chivalric romances to edify and entertain the lords and ladies.
So Dr. Gottfried is right that Cultural Marxism is a Christian heresy and he’s right that traditional Christians should see Cultural Marxism as their enemy ...
...
John Gray:
...
In the polytheistic cults of the Greeks and Romans, it was accepted that humans will always live different ways. When there are many gods no way of life is bonding on all. Worshipping one god, Christians have always believed that only one way of life can be right.
“Enlightenment thinkers like to see themselves as modern pagans, but they are really latter-day Christians: they too aim to save mankind. The ancient pagans did not believe that the mass of mankind could be saved. Or, for that matter, that it was worth saving.”
"the felicitous promises of the greatest illusion of all, the illusion of progress, are now gone, and have left behind a full-blown techno-totalitarian nightmare – one which the COVID years have now laid bare. We are at a junction where we have no other choice than to conceive of that other society, or let the “ultra-minority” continue its onslaught. This is at the same time exciting and frightening."
That hit the nail on the head. Actually about a dozen nails.
The last few paragraphs are somewhat vague about what sort of transformation would be best, and most politically feasible.
My vote would be for something aligned with Robert Kegan's evolutionary "stage 5" ("fluid" mode), beyond postmodernism, beyond the left-vs-right narrative:
I think this quote sums up both the promise and the difficulty of the present situation: "The only conceivable strategy for the new right is to bring into ideological coherence the need for a postliberal order."
The promise, as laid out in this excellent article, is that there is a massive opening for a new movement to emerge which is not beholden to the old orthodoxies and categorizations of the left and the right and which rejects the increasingly dystopian woke-technocratic neoliberalism the world is being subjected to. On the right, one can see faint glimmers of a growing rejection of neoliberal economics in the emergence of the "postliberals" and "national conservatives" in the US, for example. Moreover, the popular base of support for right-wing politics has never, in my view, derived its support for rightist parties from a love of big business or corporate domination which are the consequences of neoliberalism, but instead from a cultural conservatism, a defense of tradition, localism, and a rejection of interference from a distant Big Government in people's private lives and small businesses. That the base of right-wing support is largely indifferent to neoliberal economics allows for the possibility of a unraveling of the "fusionism" that married neoliberalism with the rest of the conservative movement and thus a receptivity for postliberalism amongst the popular supporters of the right.
On the left, one can see a significant bloc which is turning away from the excesses of a deracinating, homogenizing, socially destructive, technocratic, and toxically identitarian woke-left-liberalism (the same left-liberalism described in this article) in those segments of the "heterodox" left that have had such success on places like Substack (Kingsnorth being a prominent example). One can see a backlash to elite left-identity-progressivism amongst the popular base of left wing support, too, for example in San Francisco where a deep-blue voting populace has nonetheless rejected excessively woke DAs and school boards, or in NYC where a fairly conservative mayoral candidate handily beat a number of woke challengers.
So much for the promise of a possible postliberal movement. The difficulties such a movement would face are obvious. Putting to one side the ferocious opposition from the current liberal establishment that any viable "postliberal" movement would encounter (and indeed already has in the repression of the trucker protests and the yellow vests), there is a deeper, ideological and philosophical difficulty that has yet to be resolved by anyone I've read so far.
Beyond mere opposition to creeping wokism and technocracy, what would a "postliberal" movement actually *want*? What might a "postliberal order" *actually look like*? In the past, when Maurras was writing for example, there was a concrete alternative to the liberal order whose memory was still fresh, and which provided a lodestar for reactionaries to push for: monarchism and the attendant structures of the ancien regime. No such return to a monarchical past is palatable to any but the most extreme neo-reactionaries today. Some sort of roll-back of current liberalism and a return to the social order of a more tame liberalism is no solution either, and for a host of reasons, not the least of which is that such a move would be no more than a holding action before the inevitable return of the extreme liberalism we see today. As Patrick Deneen has so lucidly illustrated, the seeds of our current situation can be credibly understood to have been sown concurrently with the birth of liberalism in the Enlightenment; any "return" to a more palatable liberalism can thus do no more than delay the march of "progress".
I've found that when the "postliberals" are pressed, their policy prescriptions amount to little more than policy tweaks that don't even approach the root of the problem. The vague outlines of a coherent "postliberal" policy can be seen if you squint, but far too dimly to provide sufficient coherence for a political movement: localism and decentralization; a return to and appreciation of tradition and especially of some form communal religion; a rejection of neoliberal economics and the domination of global corporate interests and consumerism in favor of small business and self-sufficient smallholders; a love of place and a more rooted environmentalism; a rejection of the bio-political surveillance and security state which both pre-dates and has grown massively dangerous during COVID; rejection of identitarian-woke race and gender politics. I would support whole-heartedly any movement that could bring this all together in a coherent, concrete platform, but see nothing too promising on the horizon.
Thus, I agree with the author: the prime political question for dissidents today is how to bring "ideological coherence" to the idea of a "postliberal order". I think whoever or whatever movement can do so will reap rich political rewards (and hopefully bring some hope to our bleak political landscape). I just haven't yet been convinced that such a move is possible.
Kai, I loved your description of the "vague outlines of a "postliberal policy." I also agree with you and the author that a "...prime question for dissidents today is how to bring ideological coherence to these ideas about a postliberal order."
One small step in this direction might be an attempt to discuss the different psychological dimensions of contemporary social atomization ( for example, isolation, lack of social bonds, sense of meaninglessness, anxiety, depression, anger, ressentiment--see Mattias Desment "The Psychology of Totalitarianism,") as potentially being minimized/partially alleviated through localism, decentralization, appreciation of tradition, etc.)--trying to take on simultaneously the issue of new right insensitivity to linkages between institutional structures and individual psychology and well as the ultra-left "ontological suspicions of small--scale forms of voluntary association.
Liberalism is fragile to disruption from postmodern social conditions and techno-economic change (global neoliberalism).
Thus post-liberalism will need to be anti-fragile. The Game~B community has developed a set of practices for instance for fending off attacks by "Woke" cancel culture creeps, while remaining sensitive to multiculturalism.
John Vervaeke, a cognitive scientist and "post-liberal", discussed that in detail in his "Crisis of Meaning" talks.
https://vervaekefoundation.org/what-is-the-meaning-crisis/
That is excellent and mostly correct, IMO. But there have been various people and small groups that have been working on the problem for some time [almost 100 years], going back to Sri Aurobindo and Jean Gebser. Aurobindo was the "most dangerous revolutionary" in the Indian Independence movement, according to the British Empire.
Aurobindo's and Gebser's theories were pioneering examples of both post-metaphysics and post-liberalism.
re: IDW-ish stuff / Game~B
What has been added to their work over the last 40 years or so is a lot of evidence from cognitive science, evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution that expose deep failings, a lack of anti-fragility to disruption, in the conventional form of corporate-state liberalism/neoliberalism.
Examples:
https://medium.com/deep-code/understanding-the-blue-church-e4781b2bd9b5
---
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/202005/the-hammer-the-dance-and-the-red-religion
---
Eric Weinstein explains how the IDW got its name:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr0OX6ai4Qw
---
deep dive on the "red insurgency" (jargon warning)
https://medium.com/rally-point-journal/collective-intellignce-and-swarms-in-the-red-church-49f6a6d04825
Interesting. I've read a bit of Aurobindo before, but only from a spiritual angle. What political works of his would you recommend?
I've not seen the Jordan Hall piece before, but it is excellent, and I think he's completely correct that the increase in complexity (technological and population-wise) is at the root of many of the problems we're worried about. Thank you for pointing it out.
Sorry, dunno. I'm not sure that Aurobindo had a specific political theory, beyond the Independence/Democracy movement in India (which I assume he saw as part of the problem of imperialism in general).
Integral Yoga was presumably an attempt at defining a post "left-vs-right" (post-liberal) framing of human awareness, but just getting India out of medieval caste politics and into a "liberal-democratic" mode was a huge problem that had to be solved before post-liberal politics was on the table. (???)
Glad you liked the Jordan Hall article.
It is an excellent essay.
I'm reminded of some polling released a few days ago ranking the priorities of the polled population versus the priorities of the media/journalists. The difference was glaring. The most important concerns for the people were economic issues and immigration. For the media it was social issues such as environment, abortion rights, racism.
The emergence of a new aristocracy, for that is what the neoliberal "centrist" elitists are, seizing the mantel of liberalism but governing in distinctly illiberal ways and even introducing a new hierarchy of privileges based on protected groups of people (which includes "experts" along with the various "oppressed" groups), is now too blatantly obvious. Just as what passed for the media in the ancien regime was used to protect the aristocracies by suppressing criticism of them, the modern media plays the same role.
All very interesting. The remaining question, however, is what is their goal? The ancien regime aristocracy justified their existence because they deeply believed in the natural inequality of men and aristocratic rule was necessary, a reflection that some people were superior and others inferior. But the modern neoliberal elite ostensibly believe all people are technically equal, so the heart of their regime has a corruption that the aristocrats did not. They are not honest, they speak the language of democratic equals and rights for everyone, but govern increasingly like oligarchies and brutally abuse the norms of a liberal democracy to preserve their power, mainly through the entrenchment of unelected bureaucrats and the sycophant media, using the latter two to preserve their rule regardless of whatever populist party may temporarily win an election. Take the case of Donald Trump, for all his many (and I do mean many) flaws, it's also undeniable that Democratic figures in alliance with entrenched bureaucrats invented the Russian collusion - very illegally - to try to destroy him.
How this new elite class plays out in the long run is anyone's guess.
The notion that Russian collusion was invented, rather than being a very plausible inference from known and uncontested facts, is completely absurd.
My understanding (mainly from reading paleo-libertarian Leonard Liggio) is that the ancien regime wasn't actually ancien, rather it was a "modern" construct aligned with the rise of Absolutism, Imperialism and Colonialism from about 1492 on (regression to "oriental despotism").
Prior to 1492, "classical liberalism" emerged in decentralized, pre-nation-state politics, after the Carolingian reforms, as the gene pool in NW Europe became less clannish and inbred (due to the Church's ban on cousin marriage). Outbreeding and the rise of the nuclear family under Frankish Manorialism led to the selection of higher IQ and "liberal personality traits", which made high-social-trust possible, and then an expanding urban commoner class, market economics as river and sea trade expanded (Hanseatic League), etc.
https://weirdpeople.fas.harvard.edu/joseph-henrich
Ancien regime is the common term for the political and social system that dominated France till 1789 when hereditary monarchy and the feudal privileges of the nobility was abolished. I would go further to argue that ancien regime should be used to describe a governing model that rests upon an aristocracy with beliefs in its inherent superiority and disinclination to accept meaningful equality of people. This was the mindset behind feudalism despite equality of faith within the church. It was also the mindset of almost all developed societies till the rise of the enlightenment giving birth to the notion that no, all men are actually created equal. The last time we saw a meaningful equality would be in localized small tribal groups.
The rise of classical liberalism did take many centuries to develop and surely was greatly aided by Christianity itself through various guises. But it must also be acknowledged that into the 19th century the Church was a partner of the aristocracies and monarchies in perpetuating feudal-based class systems.
A lot of what is now France, in the south, wasn't even part of any nation state in the modern sense, power was decentralized. The local warlord/prince operated on the basis of fealty-oaths by knights. Eventually such clannish social forms gave way to the rule of law. That was one of a number of social transformations that resulted from outbreeding.
According to Liggio, before 1492, elements of the church, such as the Cluniac Abbeys, promoted reforms such as peasant's rights, and cessation of war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_and_Truce_of_God
Rudimentary Constitutional law was established in Catalonia about 500 years before 1492 (when most of what is now Spain was Moorish).
The WASP historical narrative has some flaws.
Rhyd Wildermuth warmly recommended my essay on his Substack, From the Forests of Arduinna.
https://rhyd.substack.com/p/horror-at-the-heart-circle
In his review, he brilliantly covered a blind spot of my essay, and since I completely agree with his analysis, I'm copying it here as a post scriptum . Here's what Rhyd wrote:
The only thing missing in that essay is the really unstable nature of the social system and the really ridiculous relationship the French have with it. Everyone I knew (including my roommates) had a complex plan to stay on unemployment and housing benefits as long as possible, including some who would take very short term work contracts specifically because they knew they could get another year of being paid for not working. Everyone was gaming the system, except for the few bitter bastards who wanted a bit more from life and resented that everyone they knew was partying on a Tuesday night while they had to work early the next morning.
That thing conservatives warn us leftists that socialism will become is pretty much what’s happened in France, and it’s crumbling. Macron’s attempts to fix it at the behest of the banks are awful, but so too is what has become of the French left. What was especially notable about the Gilets Jaunes was that they were protests by people actually working, rather than the radical anti-work crowds. The same also with the protests against the passe sanitaire, the national COVID vaccine program. Other protests tend to be driven by those who are out of work and are trying to hold on to the social programs that make not working a perfectly viable option.
Interesting piece. The “ultra-minority “ is a fascist disgrace. They must be removed and held accountable. They are a scourge
Historically, peasant rebellions were rarely successful, and when they were, it was after a large percentage of the population was killed off by plague, or wars had caused economic collapse, weakening the ruling elites.
And, that was usually in the context of an expanding urban commoner class that had clear goals: to advance "classical liberalism" (increase high-social-trust), consolidate improvements in literacy, numeracy and education, stabilize middle class wealth production, advance technological and scientific innovation, create or make democratic institutions and practices sustainable, etc.
As the article notes, the "cultural-left" is currently trying to destroy 1,000 years of "classical liberalism", which is possible because classical-liberalism is *not anti-fragile to disruption* from postmodern social conditions and technology disruption.
Thus the need for an anti-fragile, post-liberal, post-postmodern stage of cultural evolution.
Confession. As alluring as I find commentary like this - and instinctively compelling - there is always a moment when I come to explain it to others when it just feels like smoke. This is the nature of meta-anything and I’m desperate to fix onto some concrete policy frameworks that might, for example, describe ‘localism’ in practice.
While this may be an intellectual failing on my part, I doubt that anyone in my circles has the foggiest idea that there may be another way beyond what we have now. So how does it move beyond an intellectual conceit?
You aren't wriong and neither is François Furet quoted in the piece “condemned to live in the world as it is.” you delve into the solutions offered by liberalisms critics on the left, right and elsewhere and its just word salads - no concrete examples and nothing that works as good as what we have now despite all its flaws...ivory tower academics like Patrick Deneen and the others really have nothing to offer in the way of solutions that hold up in the light of real life practical use on a nation-state scale. I really like the phrase 'extreme center' to describe the ruling elites/cathedral/ham samwich, use whatever name you like - but we should be very careful about implementing radical solutions to fix their pathologies - its just as likely we end up in a worse place than we are today than a better place - or that current horrible elites are replaced with suimilarly bad elites just bad in other ways...modern life really isn't bad in a western country is it - compared to 100 years ago - 200 years ago - there should be some appreciation paid to just how good we got it and the system that brought it about...
Phew. It’s not just me then.
Love this:
"the United States and what might be called its hubristic “Project for a New American Century 2.0.” Even more so than the original from the 2000s, this new imperialistic adventure sounds like a “Planetary Confederacy of Goodness,” shrouded in empty symbolism and virtue signaling."
Love this too:
"To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, drilled, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality."
There is hope brewing. I believe the West is going to defeat this monster. The only question is are we going to step on its neck, or allow it to fester and boil to the point it again threatens the free world?
Extract from my November 2021 piece (The coming obsolescence of North American borders):
"The 2020-30’s might also bring into the mix a confrontation between a technocratic elite, highly mobile and educated workforce concentrated in cities that is open to a larger bureaucratic supra-national government vs a more disenfranchised citizenry living outside of metropolitan areas feeling alienated by a far away political power that does not bring any added value to its daily life."
For more: https://thenomadhistorian.substack.com/p/the-coming-obsolescence-of-north?r=pgobs&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Do you agree with Curtis Yarvin’s assertion that the Canadian trucker protests were a total strategic failure because they changed nothing and only provided the technocratic elite with valuable experience in how to crush future, similar protests?
With that in mind, how long before similar suppression tactics are rolled out in the Netherlands etc? Or do the physicals have something else up their sleeve?
I think it's too soon to say. The truckers got crushed, but they have clearly inspired further action, and those movement may learn lessons from them. They also served an important role, I think, in tearing the mask off the "extreme center" regimes: after Trudeau froze their bank accounts, the authoritarianism entrenched in the system across the West was starkly exposed for all to see.
What I do know is that the Canadian truckers protest made me aware of their plight and I was furious about how condescending and arrogant Trudeau and his ilk were towards these hard working blue collar workers.
Now, look at what is happening in the Netherlands and all over Europe with tractors, truckers, farmers, etc., all hard workers fighting to keep their lively hood AND FEED THE REST OF THE WORLD!
It’s scary.
N.S., I much appreciate the intelligence I gather from your writings, Paul Kingsnorth’s (https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com), and now your guest, Renaud Beauchard – and there are no doubt others of like value.
I’ve been edified by your Reality Honks Back post, and even more by The World Order Reset (https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-world-order-reset?s=r), when you speak of “…two different possible configurations of geopolitical power, both pivoting around the Europe’s direction of alignment”, referring to the Trans-Atlantis coalition vs the Euro-Asian / trans-Eurasian landmass.
My interest in such discerning intelligence may be thought passé or obscure by some, but as a student of Biblical prophecy and the configuration of coalitions pertaining to the doing and undoing of geopolitical alliances at the end of the age, I find your insights of great value.
In the symbolic / spiritual language of the New Testament’s apocalyptic masterpiece, a world-system coalition called Babylon shall be dethroned from its headquarter nation’s supremacy – first with shattering calamities, and then, evidently nuclear, violence – and the coalition headed by the victorious aggressor will pursue (or continue pursuing) its agenda of world domination through the implementation of elite technocrats’ control of finances, food, water, and police-military force. This agenda? A dystopian dream of the master sorcerer.
Sorcery. A topic of immense value in our days – in a nutshell, the psychedelic agents (including grass) promoted by Babylon basically starting with the U.S.’s Woodstock generation, allowing alien spirits from their realm into the collective human consciousness, and utterly – after over 50 years of us steeping in this brew – befouling the zeitgeist.
As I’ve put it in my own writing,
“A spiritual discernment, alongside the geo-political, cultural, intellectual, economic, and military aspects of what is going on in the world is AS germane to comprehending our times as these other aspects, IF NOT MORE, for God and the devil are both in the mix.”
Living presently in Cyprus, caring for a small spiritual community, I benefit immensely from listening to voices in the arena of consciousness. And I appreciate your voice speaking out!
Western "liberty" traditions are more pagan/anarchist than Christianity, assuming that Christianity and Judaism are defined as being "eastern" renunciation-salvation religions in their historical origins.
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https://attackthesystem.com/2009/12/18/on-paleocons-and-pagans/
excerpts:
... as I argue in (my free eBook book) Rousseau and the Real Culture War ([broken link]), from the belief of conservatives in some form of the doctrine of original sin. Conservatives may be non-Christian or even atheists, but they distrust human nature (implicitly accepts the anti-human part of the doctrine) and see the State as necessary for society to function. They may concede that spontaneous order is possible in the economic realm, but not in the social realm.
... Rothbard’s notion of the court intellectual versus the opposition intellectual, the Enlightenment was one of the rare times the opposition intellectuals were partially victorious. Christ and Paul were unwitting court intellectuals. As Rothbard said in Anatomy of the State,
[->] one trick of the court intellectuals is to disparage human nature, which leads to the conclusion that the State is necessary to keep evil humans in line.
The creation of the doctrine of original sin was a great moment for the State.
On a related note, Christianity as I define it, is anti-this world. I define it as a salvation religion revolving around the radical fall of and resulting utter depravity of man; the death and resurrection of a savior, Christ; and the need for humans to accept Jesus as their savior in order to avoid the eternal fires of hell, a supposedly just punishment levied on Adam’s heirs for “the original sin” (in Adam’s fall, we sinned all). One can define Christianity differently, and then the conclusion would be different, but based on my definition, I side with the young pagans Dr. Gottfried talked about in the article.
[->] The pagan West was basically culturally healthy before it was infected by an Eastern disease, Christianity. To the extent it remained healthy, it remained pagan.
For a long time, the Catholic mass was spoken in Latin by near illiterate parish priests who didn’t know Latin. No message was spread that way. And until the printing press, it would have been difficult for local priests to “get the memo,” that is, receive and understand directives from above. At the peasant level, Europeans continued to tell pagan folk stories and even perform pagan rituals like having sex in the fields to encourage a good harvest. At the aristocratic level, court priests (there’s a term) actually wrote pagan inspired Chivalric romances to edify and entertain the lords and ladies.
So Dr. Gottfried is right that Cultural Marxism is a Christian heresy and he’s right that traditional Christians should see Cultural Marxism as their enemy ...
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John Gray:
...
In the polytheistic cults of the Greeks and Romans, it was accepted that humans will always live different ways. When there are many gods no way of life is bonding on all. Worshipping one god, Christians have always believed that only one way of life can be right.
“Enlightenment thinkers like to see themselves as modern pagans, but they are really latter-day Christians: they too aim to save mankind. The ancient pagans did not believe that the mass of mankind could be saved. Or, for that matter, that it was worth saving.”
...
President just now has a mild breakthrough of COVID.
Taking plaxlovid.
Last night Tucker Carlson said Biden announced that he (Biden) has cancer because of an oil slick on his mother's car's windshield.
Was that a joke? In more ways than one?
https://www.newsweek.com/tucker-carlson-mocks-joe-biden-cancer-delaware-it-rains-oil-1726566
They, Fox, clarified that Biden was referring to when years prior had skin cancer like many people living in Delaware then.
"the felicitous promises of the greatest illusion of all, the illusion of progress, are now gone, and have left behind a full-blown techno-totalitarian nightmare – one which the COVID years have now laid bare. We are at a junction where we have no other choice than to conceive of that other society, or let the “ultra-minority” continue its onslaught. This is at the same time exciting and frightening."
Yep
That hit the nail on the head. Actually about a dozen nails.
The last few paragraphs are somewhat vague about what sort of transformation would be best, and most politically feasible.
My vote would be for something aligned with Robert Kegan's evolutionary "stage 5" ("fluid" mode), beyond postmodernism, beyond the left-vs-right narrative:
https://meaningness.com/meaningness-history
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https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
(the above is linked from: https://metarationality.com/essays )
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