Spenglerian thoughts.
In this essay, I will use the Spenglerian concept of Pseudomorphosis, and the idea that an embryonic/early High Culture suffering from Pseudomorphosis will exhibit resentment and hostility to the offending established High Culture, to diagnose the presence of a very early stage new High Culture, and to gain some insights into its characteristics. To illustrate this possibility, I will use my idea of an Overman High Culture as a model.
See this. White Nationalism 3.0 alert - a Turk writes for Counter-Currents attacking Russians. The Counter-Currents article is well-written and does in fact make several interesting arguments, although some commentators point out how the thesis of that article is being over-stretched to fit a potentialy misleading narrative. Of course, questioning motives instead of arguments would be ad hominem, so I will not ascribe the article to the historical grievances of Turks against Russia nor of that of homosexuals against Putin's Russia.
My “take” on this issue is as follows and is based not only on my reading of history, but also “anecdotal” real-life experience knowing a reasonable number of Eastern European immigrants (real Eastern Europeans, not Jews), as well as having travelled in Eastern Europe, staying with private citizens, not in hotels, and meeting a variety of people. Russia can be considered a separate civilization from the West but it is not necessarily hostile; Russian-Western relations is contingent on history. Being invaded by Swedes, French, and Germans has not helped. If Russia was treated differently after the “end of the Cold War” then the situation today could be quite different. I agree that there are some civilizational tensions between Russia and the West but there is also opportunity for cohesion and collaboration, as two heads of a single European organism. As regards non-Russian Eastern Europeans (especially the Orthodox), while they are not fully of the West, they are not fully non-Western either. They fall somewhere in between the West and Russia, with the Catholic ones being more oriented toward the West, and the Orthodox ones more oriented toward Russia (culturally, not politically), but they are all (potentially) assimilable to the West. The Faustian Western High Culture - not the modern degeneration of it - has possibilities in Eastern Europe. Even Yockey (an extreme Western chauvinist) wrote, in The Proclamation of London, that there were elements in Russia amenable to the West.
A general thesis of Spengler, O'Meara, and the Counter-Currents article is that Russia may be the center of its own High Culture, which is still in its early embryonic form. Of course, any High Culture can only arise if the human material is there, and a “Russian High Culture” cannot arise without the Russian people, who are being race replaced as are all other Whites. One other thing – High Cultures, and civilizations in general, are emergent properties of large numbers of particular Race-Culture types living in a defined territorial space. Let us assume that Russia is indeed a separate civilization. However, small numbers of Russians can assimilate into the Western culture. Certainly, Russian-Americans do not behave significantly different from other White Americans. However, masses of Russians, living amongst themselves – particularly on their native soil to which they have a historical connection – will likely manifest civilizational differences to the West. Just as a crowd takes on a distinct “personality” independent of the individuals of which it is composed, so does a culture emerge from a mass effect. Also see this for a more materialistic explanation for the adherence of certain peoples to particular cultural forms as part of their “racial soul.” The emergent “twist” on the idea in that "empirical racial soul" post is that these tendencies may be weak on an individual basis, but manifest in a synergistic fashion when masses of similar “racial souls” congregate together. An individual, or small groups of individuals immigrating over a period of time, likely will, or can, assimilate into another cultural form, but a large group introduced, particularly en masse, into an different culture likely will not.
The same Turk elsewhere:
Wouldn’t it be amazing if Eastern and Northern Europe were the most powerful and influential among Western countries? Oh wait… They can be. Time for Intermarium.
Surprise! A Non-European Caucasian (NEC) wants to divide Europeans, and exclude Southern Europeans from a narrower White subgroup. I am shocked, shocked I say! Indeed, it is almost as shocking and surprising as the sun rising in the morning.
If only, say, Germany and the UK would be as “powerful and influential” in Europe as Italy or Greece...If only the power center in France would be in Paris in the north rather than Marseille in the south…If only Sweden was as influential in Europe as Portugal, if only Madrid was as influential as Brussels. Oh wait…
Note to mendacious alien Turk - Northern Europe IS the "most powerful and influential among Western countries." That is precisely why we are in the predicament we are in.
You can always count on NEC concern trolls to attack the Pan-European ideal, either directly or indirectly. Every. Single. Time.
Back to the Counter-Currents article:
He termed such cultural amalgamation where a certain cultural realm is forced to express itself under alien cultural forms imported or imposed from elsewhere as Pseudomorphosis. Oswald Spengler thus predicted a century earlier that Russia will be moving away from the European (Faustian) Civilization and asserting its own unique identity.
One vivid example of historical Pseudomorphosis is the pre-Islamic Middle East, which Spengler called Magian Culture, being dominated by Rome and hence forced to express itself through the forms of Graeco-Roman (Apollonian) Culture, which was entirely alien to it. Only with the advent of Islam did the Magian Culture free itself from Graeco-Roman influence and could express itself organically in line with its own nature.
It is therefore quite likely that Russia is undergoing a process similar to that which the Middle East underwent in the 6th and 7th centuries, when with the rise of Islam, it emphatically asserted its own nature. As a matter of fact, throughout the centuries of Roman rule and domination of the Classical cultural norms the Middle East was seething with apocalyptic hatred towards Rome and everything Roman. In this regard, Islam can be viewed as the consummate form of expression of the deepest longings of the Magian world. At the same time, it was the medium through which the ressentiment towards the Graeco-Roman culture manifested itself. The intensity of that ressentiment was huge due to centuries of cultural suppression under Rome and being forced into the mould of the forms of Apollonian Culture, which were unnatural to the Magian Culture.
This explains the enmity the Islamic (i.e. Magian) world today manifests towards the West, which is represented by Christianity and which they view as the continuation of Rome…
…Importantly, the liberation of an emerging culture from the grip of Pseudomorphosis often unleashes a deep-seated hatred and ressentiment toward the dominant culture that once suppressed it. This phenomenon can be observed across various historical contexts…The Crusades can therefore be seen as the Faustian world’s emphatic rejection of the Eastern cultural dominance that had constrained it for centuries, marking a decisive moment in the assertion of Western identity and independence.
The following analysis in my post is based on the premise that Pseudomorphosis is a valid concept and the idea that it can breed resentment and hostility is correct.
The concept of pseudomorphosis is one that Spengler borrows from mineralogy and is introduced as a way of explaining what he calls half-developed or only partially manifested Cultures. Specifically, pseudomorphosis refers to an older Culture or Civilization being so deeply ingrained that a young Culture cannot find its own form and full expression of itself. In Spengler's words, this leads to the young soul being cast in the old molds, young feelings then stiffen in senile practices, and instead of expanding creatively, it fosters hate toward the older Culture.
Spengler believed that a Magian pseudomorphosis began with the Battle of Actium, in which the gestating Arabian Culture was represented by Mark Antony and lost to the Classical Civilization. The battle was different from the conflict between Rome and Greece, which had been fought out at Cannae and Zama, with Hannibal being the representative of Hellenism. He said that Antony should have won at Actium, and his victory would have freed the Magian Culture, but his defeat imposed Roman Civilization on it.
In Russia, Spengler saw a young, undeveloped Culture in a pseudomorphosis under the Faustian (Petrine) form. He said that Peter the Great distorted the tsarism of Russia to the dynastic form of Western Europe. The burning of Moscow, as Napoleon was set to invade, he described as a primitive expression of hatred toward the foreigner. In the following entry of Alexander I into Paris, the Holy Alliance and the Concert of Europe, he said that Russia was forced into an artificial history before its culture was ready or capable of understanding its burden. This would result in a hatred toward Europe, which Spengler said poisoned the womb of an emerging new Culture in Russia. While he does not name the Culture, he said that Tolstoy is its past and Dostoyevsky is its future.
It is possible that a new High Culture emerges without ever having had experienced Pseudomorphosis. But let us focus on the possibility that Pseudomorphosis does in fact take place. Imagine a new High Culture – the very earliest stages, the “pre-cultural” phase as well as the earliest glimmers of the new civilization – arising on the territory occupied by the old, preceding, late stage High Culture. You would expect the new High Culture, particularly as it physically overlaps the old and is subject to the sociopolitical power of the old, will suffer from Pseudomorphosis, and will exhibit resentment toward the older culture.
Let us forget about the Russian High Culture for a moment. The focus of this essay is this – if a purely European (including the Diaspora) new High Culture is emerging, or will emerge, among the ruins of the Faustian Western Culture, then what signs would be observed of this based on the phenomenon of resentment due to imposed Pseudomorphosis? Would these signs point to us the existence of a possible new High Culture and of some possible characteristics that it will manifest? In other words, can we use a diagnostic Pseudomorphosis, observing reactions to possible Pseudomorphosis to diagnose the existence of pre-cultural or early state High Culture and to identify its characteristics? I would think that any future European High Culture would, if it is in any sort of existence today, be in the exceedingly early pre-cultural stage. Therefore, one would need to look extremely hard for this embryonic culture, and try very hard to dissect out signs of resentment of that early cultural form toward the older culture among all the "background noise" of modern life.
Further, one needs to look for such resentment coming specifically from the Right, particularly the Far Right. Why? Two reasons.
First, we are considering here only potential purely European High Cultures. Whether or not some type of non-White, mixed-raced, multiracial High Culture emerges is of no interest to me. By definition it is not what I am looking for. The Left is opposed to the survival of European peoples and, to be honest, the Mainstream Right is as well. Only the Far Right is focused on saving European peoples and so it is reasonable to expect that a new European High Culture will emerge from a milieu that is purely European and that is focused on preserving the European peoples. One cannot expect a purely European High Culture to emerge from a multiracial morass intent on exterminating Europeans.
Second, one would expect to see resentment from the Left with respect to the West under all circumstances, regardless of Pseudomorphosis. How can one tease out leftist resentment toward the West due to Pseudomorphosis (that would be imposed on a possible embryonic Left-Woke High Culture) from run-of-the-mill leftist hatred of the West and Whites, or from hatred toward the West from non-White civilizational blocs that already exist? One could not distinguish the signal of a Pseudomorphosis-driven resentment from the background noise of generalized leftist and non-White hatred of the West. Never mind that it is unlikely that the degeneracy of the Left, the mish-mash of multiculturalism, will give birth to any new High Culture – it is the opposite of High Culture and anathema to civilization. On the other hand, the Far Right is typically well disposed to the Western High Culture, and does not naturally have resentment to that High Culture. Therefore, the presence of anti-Western Far Right resentment should be a diagnostic clue, a warning sign, a ringing alert bell that something is going on, and that something could be resentment due to an embryonic new European High Culture suffering from Pseudomorphosis from the Faustian West.
Three caveats: First, with respect to Pseudomorphosis, the resentment from the Far Right has to be against the authentic Faustian Western High Culture, not the degenerate “West” exemplified by the Woke Left System. Second, the resentment cannot be in the form of resentment based on adherence to old, passed cultural forms, e.g., hostility to Christianity because one adheres to Classical Greco-Roman values or because one is an Odinist pagan. The resentment has to derive from the suppression of a new value system, a new cultural form. Third, although resentment from a political and artistic direction is expected from the (Far) Right in the scenario described here, it is also possible to have, in certain contexts, apolitical resentment as well. This apolitical resentment would likely come from the realm of science. Most scientists today are leftists and would share the typical generalized leftist resentment of the West described above. However, among more objective, apolitical, dispassionate White scientists, demonstrations of cultural resentment, or even frustration, may be a sign of a reaction to Pseudomorphosis. Of course, the few rightist scientists, typically well disposed toward the West, can be particularly useful "canaries in the coal mine" with respect to possible resentment toward the West - if even they demonstrate such resentment in particular contexts, what does that tell us? Perhaps it is a reaction to Pseudomorphosis in the realm of science and due to frustration with the underlying metaphysics of the dominant older culture. So, resentment due to Western Pseudomorphosis does not necessarily have to be politically rightist, it could be apolitical (as in science), but it most definitely would not be expected from the Left.
In my Overman essay, I wrote:
…of course a High Culture is an organic phenomenon that cannot be created in a pre-planned form and artificially imposed on a people. However, it is possible to plant the seeds and to have some choice as to which seeds are planted. And then, we can nurture the seedling as it grows, and as it develops according to its own inherent character. This we can do and this we must do.
Of course dogmatic Spenglerians would reject that idea of "planting seeds," and also reject the idea that we can predict the form a new High Culture would take. But I am not a dogmatic Spenglerian, so let us proceed with my hypothesis outlined in this post, based on its assumptions of analyzing a model system of a potential new High Culture.
Therefore, I will use my Overman idea as a model for this analysis. I know others have offered alternative possibilities for a future European High Culture. One example is a High Culture based on Spenglerian cyclicity; thus, instead of a worldview based on upward-looking Faustian overcoming, it will instead be based on a view that everything moves in cycles and the entire metaphysics and epistemology and cultural artifacts of the society would be based on that. However, I see it as too convenient to use Spengler’s central idea to predict a High Culture based precisely upon that central idea. Of course, others would make similar critiques of my Overman High Culture; they would argue that it is too convenient for someone from a Faustian High Culture to predict a new High Culture than further transcends the Faustian in its upward impulses. Very well. But we cannot really predict any of this, so I will proceed with my Overman-based analysis; I have already made clear that it is being used as a model system to illustrate how potential reactions to Pseudomorphosis could be used to diagnose these issues.
Just as Yockey talked about several types of Culture Disease, here I discuss Culture Diagnosis. The overall idea applies to whatever form a new High Culture may take, as long as Pseudomorphosis and a reaction to that is present. If there is no Pseudomorphosis then obviously one cannot base diagnostics on that, and would simply need to be attuned to what the early, embryonic stages of a new High Culture would be like, which is a much more general non-specific approach. Is speculating about High Cultures itself an embryonic form, or sign, of such a culture? Who knows? But back to Pseudomorphosis.
What exactly is the Faustian Western High Culture? See here. That is a somewhat confused essay. Duchesne argues – as Oliver did and I once did (I have changed my mind on this after reading Quigley) – that Ancient Greece and Rome at least partially fit with the Faustian ideal. But then he, somewhat approvingly, cites Spengler’s idea of the Nordic origins of Faustianism. Unfortunately for the Nordicists, current available genetic data do not support that the Ancient Greeks and Romans were Nordic. If the Faustian ideal is Nordic and if the Ancient Greeks and Romans exemplified this ideal before the historical emergence of Germanic Faustianism, but the Greeks and Romans were not Nordic, you have a problem. You could of course just say the Faustian idea is European – that would also fit with the Faustian Portuguese explorers who also were not Nordic – but Nordicism is an obsession that is impermeable to facts and logic.
Side note: If the focal point of the birth of the modern West according to Quigley was France (I suppose Spengler would stress the Germanic peoples) and if we accept Quigley’s idea that a new culture springs up, in a geographic sense, on the periphery of the old (e.g., France compared to the Greco-Roman world), then perhaps a new European High Culture will originate in Southern and/or Eastern Europe (by Eastern I would exclude Russia if we are to accept that they are potentially birthing their own High Culture), which are on the periphery of France and Germany, whuch are generally considered the center of the Faustian cultural form.
Duchesne writes:
If I had to choose one word to identify the uniqueness of the West it would be “Faustian.” This is the word Oswald Spengler used to designate the “soul” of the West. He believed that Western civilization was driven by an unusually dynamic and expansive psyche. The “prime-symbol” of this Faustian soul was “pure and limitless space.” This soul had a “tendency towards the infinite,” a tendency most acutely expressed in modern mathematics. The “infinite continuum,” the exponential logarithm and “its dissociation from all connexion with magnitude” and transference to a “transcendent relational world” were some of the words Spengler used to describe Western mathematics. But he also wrote of the “bodiless music” of the Western composer, “in which harmony and polyphony bring him to images of utter ‘beyondness’ that transcend all possibilities of visual definition,” and, before the modern era, of the Gothic “form-feeling” of “pure, imperceptible, unlimited space” (Decline of the West, Vol.1, Form and Actuality [Alfred Knopf, 1923] 1988, pp. 53-90).
This soul type was first visible, according to Spengler, in medieval Europe, starting with Romanesque art, but particularly in the “spaciousness of Gothic cathedrals,” “the heroes of the Grail and Arthurian and Siegfried sagas, ever roaming in the infinite, and the Crusades,” including “the Hohenstaufen in Sicily, the Hansa in the Baltic, the Teutonic Knights in the Slavonic East, [and later] the Spaniards in America, [and] the Portuguese in the East Indies.” Spengler thus viewed the West as a strikingly vibrant culture driven by a type of personality overflowing with expansive impulses, “intellectual will to power.” “Fighting,” “progressing,” “overcoming of resistances,” battling “against what is near, tangible and easy” — these were some of the terms Spengler used to describe this soul (Decline of the West, pp. 183-216).
A variety of words have been used to describe or identify the peculiar history of the West: “individualist,” “rationalist,” “imperialist,” “secularist,” “restless,” and “racist.” Spengler’s term “Faustian,” it seems to me, best captures the persistent, and far greater, originality of the West since ancient times in all the intellectual, artistic, and heroic spheres of life.
According to Spengler, the Faustian culture began in Western Europe around the 10th century, and had such expansionary power that by the 20th century it was covering the entire earth, with only a few regions where Islam provided an alternative world view. He described it as having a world feeling inspired by the concept of infinitely wide and profound space, the yearning towards distance and infinity.[clarification needed] The term "Faustian" is a reference to Goethe's Faust (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had a massive effect on Spengler), in which a dissatisfied Intellectual is willing to make a pact with the Devil in return for unlimited knowledge. Spengler believed that this represented the Western Man's limitless metaphysic, unrestricted thirst for knowledge, and constant confrontation with the Infinite.
In my Overman article, I quoted an older version of the Wikipedia article that importantly stated:
His description of the Faustian civilization is one where the populace constantly strives for the unattainable—making Western Man a proud but tragic figure, for while he strives and creates he secretly knows the actual goal will never be reached.
Note: "unattainable." To which I wrote in my Overman essay:
Here we see two defining characteristics of the “Faustian” civilization of the modern (i.e., post-Classical) West: first, a focus on infinity and the unknown, and second, that the striving toward that focus will always be unsuccessful; the objectives of Western Man are always “unattainable.”…
…I would argue that the Christian foundation of the Faustian High Culture is responsible for the fact that the ultimate goals that Western man strives toward end up being “unattainable”—and secretly known by him to be “unattainable.” The Christian mindset places inherent limits within the mind of Western man, so he is doomed to ultimately fail even if full success is theoretically possible…The full development of Western man has been restrained by an alien religion that has placed shackles on his mind and his soul…The motto of the Classical World was “Know Thyself,” while that of the Faustian Age was a combination of “Thou Shalt Not Know” with “Thou Shalt Try to Know and Thou Shalt Fail.” I propose that the new High Culture of the West have the motto: “Thou Shalt Know and Thou Shalt Overcome.” This will usher in an era in which Western Man unlocks his potential by unlocking the shackles imposed by an assumed inferiority to imaginary gods…In other words, no imaginary gods. It is Man that will become “God.”…No more “proud, tragic” failure in “striving for the unattainable” in the “Faustian” culture—instead the Overman Culture will be characterized by the proud successful attainment of the infinite. That is what a hopeful individual can project as the new High Culture of the West, with links to the Classical and the Faustian, but surpassing both in the aim and objective of the human spirit.
So, we begin to observe differences between the Western (Faustian) and Overman High Cultures.
Another difference that I now add to my original thesis is that while the Faustian culture has the view of unlimited expansion upward and outward, the Overman culture has that view AND an unlimited expansion inward and downward as well, thus not only to the macro infinity but also to the micro infinity. Further, the Overman High Culture has a worldvieview associated with entangled essences, and relative frames of reference. Thus, from a metaphysical standpoint – and please forget for the moment about “Jewish influences” (e.g., agonizing over Einstein) – is it possible that such things as quantum mechanics and relativity theory are not merely the “materialistic degeneration” of the Winter of the West, but the seeds of a new formulation in opposition to Western ideas of classical reality and Newtonian mechanics? The inward expansion is suggested by quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, and genetics (and the whole molecular and cellular basis of life, in contrast to organismal and comparative anatomy) – thus, micro infinity. Entangled essences and relative frames of reference are associated with quantum mechanics (micro infinity) and special relativity (macro infinity), respectively. General relativity yields a quite different metaphysical view of space and gravity - macro infinity - than Newtonian physics does. In the old view, time flows; in the new metaphysics, time is a compilation of static realities connected by causality. The outward impulses toward the infinite are in one sense constrained by these new theories, but in another sense liberated from clockwork Newtonian and Copernican ideals, possibly opening up novel ways to break through the “try to transcend and fail” limitations of Faustianism. Perhaps the Faustian inevitably fails because its metaphysics sets it up for failure by not understanding views of realty that would be better comprehended by a different culture. Perhaps there is Pseudomorphosis at work here. Thus, we cannot understand the underlying realty of these new metaphysical laws because our way of thinking is constrained by Western Newtonian metaphysics. We believe that we are rejecting Newtonian ideals, but those ideas are so part of our worldview that the proper development of the alternative metaphysics is stifled. We believe that we are rejecting the old ways of thinking but we are still prisoners of them, and then fume in frustration when we come up against unknowns and “paradoxes” that seem to emerge from the new metaphysics.
The same Pseudomorphosis may hold true in art. An archetypical expression of the Western soul is this, which is valued as a high form of expression by those who adhere to the Western tradition. However, such traditional Western art forms may be suffocating alternative artistic expression from a new High Culture, an embryonic example of which may be this. A representative of the Western culture would look at those two images and think that the David is a perfect example of Western artistic beauty that speaks to the Faustian soul, while the Chronos is a degenerate monstrosity. A representative of the Overman culture would acknowledge that the David is an important piece of work and would instrumentally value it as a creation of European genius (just as Westerners can admire products of the Classical civilization), but they would view the Chronos as representing the soul of the Overman civilizational worldview. And, yes, there may well be resentment that the Western art forms (e.g., David) are dominant within the rightist milieu and that more futurist cultural artifacts (e.g., Chronos) are dismissed and not properly comprehended. This here is another example of an artwork that may resonate more with an embryonic Overman sensibility while being rejected by Western traditionalists as “degenerate." Also consider this as another representation of a new artistic sensibility perhaps not properly understood by the defenders of the Western tradition..
We can bridge the gap from art to politics by considering futurism. Was the futurist movement an example of late stage Western culture, or was it a protest by an embryonic High Culture against the Pseudomorphosis imposed by Western art forms and by Western sociopolitical conventions? Note the importance of Italy in the futurist movement – was that an example of an embryonic High Culture emerging on the periphery of the Franco-German epicenter of the modern West? A radical idea – what if the Romanian Legionary Movement suffered from Pseudomorphosis by their embrace of Christianity as a core of their belief system? What if the New Man was actually the authentic core of that movement, reflective of the values of an embryonic new European High Culture (again in the periphery of the older, established Western one, given the geographic location of Romania), and so could one find in some of the more aggressive cult-like activities of the Legion hidden resentment against this Westernized Christian Pseudomorphosis?
Are all these things signs of resentment against Pseudomorphosis imposed by the Faustian culture? We observe the new scientific perspectives that aggressively reject old structures but find themselves struggling to articulate their metaphysics in a manner truly independent of the old. We see artistic movements that aggressively reject old forms. Fascism was perhaps a political revolt against Western political forms – Pseudomorphosis here was manifested by the defeat of Fascism by the democratic and economic (including Marxism) axes of the late-stage West, akin to the Magian High Culture being defeated by the Apollonian/Classical High Culture at Actium. Also note the links between futurism and Italian fascism. One wonders. Is the Yockey Imperium idea characteristic of a late stage Western High Culture or is it an idea that instead fits better with a fresh civilizational perspective?
Moral and ethical resentment against Western Christianity from a Nietzschean perspective may fit here – was Nietzsche less of a figure of old Western culture and more a Dostoevsky-like figure of an embryonic new High Culture? Certainly, Nietzsche – despite his tirades against ressentiment – demonstrated much hostility to restrictive old Western moral and ethical forms.
Let us consider Francis Parker Yockey, a paragon, an aggressive defender, of the Western Faustian High Culture. Yockey in Imperium (emphasis added) demonstrates his inability to understand the new science, exactly what one would expect from a representative of one High Culture trying to understand the metaphysics of another:
The down-going of science as a mental discipline had long preceded the World War. With the theory of Entropy (1850), and the introduction of the idea of irreversibility into its picture, science was on the road which was to culminate in physical relativity and frank admission of the subjectivity of physical concepts. From Entropy came the introduction of statistical methods into systematic science, the beginning of spiritual abdication. Statistics described Life and the living; the strict tradition of Western science had insisted on exactitude in mathematical description of reality, and had hence despised that which was not susceptible of exact description, such as biology. The entrance of probabilities into formerly exact science is the sign that the observer is beginning to study himself, his own form as conditioning the order and describability of phenomena.
The next step was the Theory of Radioactivity, which again contains strong subjective elements and requires the Calculus of Probabilities to describe its results. The scientific picture of the world became ever more refined, and ever more subjective. The formerly separate disciplines drew slowly together, mathematics, physics, chemistry, epistemology, logic. Organic ideas intruded showing once more that the observer has reached the point where he is studying the form of his own Reason.
A chemical element now has a lifetime, and the precise events of its life are unpredictable, indeterminate.
The very unit of physical happening itself, the ―atom,‖ which was still believed in as a reality by the 19th century, became in the 20th century a mere concept, the description of whose properties was constantly changed to meet and prop up technical developments. Formerly, every experiment merely showed the ―truth‖ of the ruling theories. That was in the days of the supremacy of science as a discipline over technics, its adopted child. But, before the middle of the 20th century, every new experiment brought about a new hypothesis of ―atomic structure.‖ What was important in the process was not the hypothetical house of cards which was erected afterwards, but the experiment which had gone before.
No compunction was felt about having two theories, irreconcilable with one another, to describe the ―structure‖ of the ―atom,‖ or the nature of light. The subject-matter of all the separate sciences could no longer be kept mathematically clear. Old concepts like mass, energy, electricity, heat, radiation, merged into one another, and it became ever more clear that what was really under study was the human reason, in its epistemological aspect, and the Western soul in its scientific aspect.
Scientific theories reached the point where they signified nothing less than the complete collapse of science as a mental discipline. The picture was projected of the Milky Way as consisting of more than a million fixed stars, among which are many with a diameter of more than 93,000,000 miles; this again as not a stationary cosmic center, but itself in motion toward Nowhere at a speed of more than 600 kilometers a second. The cosmos is finite, but unlimited; boundless, but bounded. This demands of the true believer the old Gothic faith again: credo quia absurdum, but mechanical purposelessness cannot evoke this kind of faith, and the high priests have apostatized. In the other direction, the ―atom‖ has equally fantastic dimensions — a ten-millionth of a millimeter is its diameter, and the mass of a hydrogen atom stands to the mass of a gram of water as the mass of a post card stands to the mass of the earth. But this atom consists of ―electrons,‖ the whole making up a sort of solar system, in which the distances between the planets is as great, in proportion to their mass, as in our solar system. The diameter of an electron is one three-billionth of a millimeter. But the closer it is studied, the more spiritual it becomes, for the nucleus of the atom is a mere charge of electricity, having neither weight, volume, inertia nor any other classic properties of matter.
In its last great saga, science dissolved its own psychical foundations, and moved outside the world of the senses into the world of the soul. Absolute time was dissolved, and time became a function of position. Mass became spiritualized into energy. The idea of simultaneity was discarded, motion became relative, parallels cut one another, two distances could no longer be said absolutely to equal one another. Everything which had once been described by, or had itself described, the word Reality, dissolved in the last act of the drama of science as a mental discipline.
Let us focus on this excerpt from Yockey’s diatribe:
…the strict tradition of Western science had insisted on exactitude in mathematical description of reality, and had hence despised that which was not susceptible of exact description, such as biology. The entrance of probabilities into formerly exact science is the sign that the observer is beginning to study himself, his own form as conditioning the order and describability of phenomena.
Thus, we see the contrast between the metaphysics of the Faustian West and the metaphysics of what could be the embryonic beginning of a new High Culture.
It is true that we do not observe scientists demonstrating overt resentment and hostility based on contrasting metaphysics, but that may be expected from a group that allegedly represents objective rational academic dispassionate discourse. What we observe instead is frustration due to a lack of understanding of the new concepts, and due to the fact that a thorough understanding of the new metaphysics may be impeded by viewing everything through the lens of Western metaphysics. Of course, the majority of scientists, who are on the Left, do in fact demonstrate resentment and hostility toward the West, but this is derived from leftist political ideology, not metaphysics. The White Left shares the same basic metaphysics as does the West and that metaphysics is not compatible with a true understanding of the newer concepts. Further, the reason non-White scientists are unable to fully understand these concepts would not be due to Pseudomorphosis (as it is with rightist or apolitical Whites) but simply because these new concepts derive from an embryonic High Culture that derives from Europe and from which an inner spiritual connection is barred to non-Europeans. Note that I do not sense the same frustration from non-Whites concerning these concepts, simply a lack of full understanding that they, as culture aliens, accept with more equanimity.
Let us back up a bit. How can we succinctly describe the basic metaphysics of relevant civilizations?
The basic metaphysics of the Apollonian/Classical High Culture was said to be locality - the present time (locality in time) and locality in space, the Magian High Culture was focused on “the world as cave or cavern,” and the Faustian/Western High Culture was (and is) characterized as "thrusting upward into infinite space.” The Overman High Culture instead could have a metaphysics of reality as information, observation, interaction, structure, and space expanding infinitely both outward and inward. Thus, we observe the primacy of genetic information as opposed to phenotype (see my work, pssobly rpresentative of the new perspective?), quantum mechanics (observation, interaction), relativity theory (structure of spacetime), nuclear physics, etc. Quantum mechanics and nuclear physics expand inward, while relativity theory expands outward, but in a structured manner (e.g., Minkowski spacetime diagrams). The new perspective considers dimensionality as important, not only in spacetime but in the human experience. Let us consider the (first iteration of) opening of the famous TV series The Twilight Zone (putting aside complaints of “Jewishness”). The “fifth dimension” is one related to human experience and the unknown, and there is a sense of existentialism; indeed, a right-wing existentialism that is not traditionalist could delve into aspects of a new cultural zeitgeist.
I will actually answer the “but you are referring to Jewish activities” complaints. Yes, Jews are of the Magian High Culture and are not part of the West and I doubt that they will be part of any future European High Culture. But Jews are a clever people and as Yockey noted they know how to exploit other High Cultures to promote their interests, even their personal interests (fame, money, status, etc.), never mind their group interests. It is therefore possible that some Jews have sensed a change in the civilizational zeitgeist and therefore they formulate memes and activities that leverage interest in these changes.
Let us consider some examples. Relativity theory is “Jewish” but Einstein in his thought experiments extrapolated from the work of Maxwell and other Europeans to produce Special Relativity; General Relativity is a further extrapolation from the Special theory. So, relativity may be “Jewish” but it tapped into ideas originating among Europeans and (unknowingly) situated these ideas in a novel theory that could fit into the metaphysics of a new High Culture. Quantum mechanics and genetics, as well as information theory, have been mostly European products, with later Jewish contributions. Nuclear physics is a mixed European-Jewish affair; the original work was European. With respect to politics and the arts, fascism and futurism are of European origin. Note that the most “Avant Garde” fascism is French in origin and futurism has strong Italian connections. They are not Jewish. To the extent that The Twilight Zone reflected existentialist themes, existentialism is essentially European. So, we cannot say that in these things that Jewish influence was absolutely decisive, and in any case such influence reflects undercurrents that are ultimately of European origin.
To summarize with respect to possible manifestations of resentment and hostility of an embryonic new (Overman) European High Culture to Pseudomorphosis from the Western High Culture, we can say the following. In politics and the arts, the signs are more clear, and with respect to philosophy, Nietzsche and the existentialists may reflect this as well. The more dispassionate nature of science makes resentment and hostility more difficult to detect, but one can say there is, at least, frustration with respect to serious problems in being able to understand and articulate a new (scientific) metaphysics given limitations imposed by a Western Faustian background.
However, note that the major objective of this essay is NOT to “prove” that another European High Culture is coming, what its characteristics would be, that it is the Overman High Culture, and that we can see definitive signs of resentment and hostility due to Pseudomorphosis. No, instead the argument, based on using the Overman example as a model system, is that in theory we may be able to discern something about an embryonic High Culture by considering how Pseudomorphosis from an older High Culture may affect the newer form, and then looking carefully for reactions – resentment and hostility, or at least frustration – to point us in the direction of some characteristics of the new form and how it is being impeded by Pseudomorphosis. Thus, the argument here is that Diagnostic Pseudomorphosis is possible. Whether such an exercise can yield useful information is another matter.
