Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy

Book review.

See here.

Amazon review:

This is an argument that philosophy is born with and dependent on the idea of nature; and that this idea was first discovered or manifested in the perception of biological reality, in particular the perception of hereditary transmission of physical and behavioral qualities, together with the perception that moral and legal codes are relative and contingent. It was generally only within the spiritual and intellectual horizon of certain types of aristocracies to have access to such perceptions, as well as ability and liberty to openly state or explore them. A connection is further observed, on these grounds, between philosophy and tyranny, or rather the philosopher and tyrant as closely related types that emerge during the decline of e.g., Greek and Renaissance Italian aristocratic communities. I make this case through a study of Nietzsche's reading of antiquity, in particular his reading of Plato and Pindar, or rather a Nietzschean reading of these. The first long chapter also covers George Frazer and anthropological and historical literature, as well as Homer. This is a revised version of my own doctoral dissertation, and includes a long new introduction explaining my intentions in this book. I make the case in this introduction that this same matter of selective breeding, whether sexual selection, or various societies' management of marriage and reproduction, constitutes the most important part of morality, legislation, or of the "lawgiver's art," and that a sharp awareness of this reality is what led, again, to the discovery of the standard of nature and the subsequent birth of philosophy.

The type of the tyrant is ultimately interpreted as a kind of "active philosophy," although it must be emphasized that such can only be the case for the ancient Greek or Renaissance Italian type, not what is called by the name "tyrant" indiscriminately today. Accordingly the voice of Callicles in Plato's Gorgias is interpreted as the political philosophy, or the weaponized posture of the pre-Socratic philosophical type.

The author:

Bronze Age Pervert, also known as BAP or B.A.P.,is a pseudonymous far-right Internet personality, associated with the manosphere. The media have identified Costin Vlad Alamariu (born May 21, 1980), a Romanian-American, as the person behind the pseudonym…Alamariu is of Romanian and Jewish descent…

More, see this.

The author’s alleged identity as “Bronze Age Pervert” and his ethnicity will not affect my review, which is as follows.

The book unfortunately takes HBD too seriously and positively notes execrable trash like “HBD Chick.” The book also supports the idea of steppe conquerors establishing themselves as an aristocratic class (there may be some truth in this), a variant of Hamilton’s noble barbarian thesis:

Hamilton, W.D. (1975), Innate social aptitudes of man: an approach from evolutionary genetics, in R. Fox (ed.), Biosocial Anthropology, Malaby Press, London, 133-53.

The incursions of barbaric pastoralists seem to do civilizations less harm in the long run than one might expect. Indeed, two dark ages and renaissances in Europe suggest a recurring pattern in which a renaissance follows an incursion by about 800 years. It may even be suggested that certain genes or traditions of pastoralists revitalize the conquered people with an ingredient of progress which tends to die out in a large panmictic population for the reasons already discussed. I have in mind altruism itself, or the part of the altruism which is perhaps better described as self-sacrificial daring. By the time of the renaissance it may be that the mixing of genes and cultures (or of cultures alone if these are the only vehicles, which I doubt) has continued long enough to bring the old mercantile thoughtfulness and the infused daring into conjunction in a few individuals who then find courage for all kinds of inventive innovation against the resistance of established thought and practice. Often, however, the cost in fitness of such altruism and sublimated pugnacity to the individuals concerned is by no means metaphorical, and the benefits to fitness, such as they are, go to a mass of individuals whose genetic correlation with the innovator must be slight indeed. Thus civilization probably slowly reduces its altruism of all kinds, including the kinds needed for cultural creativity (see also Eshel 1972).

I object to the “genetic correlation with the innovator must be slight indeed” statement in that it is incorrect from a global and/or group selection standpoint, although it is true with respect to the isolated population itself, which is probably how Hamilton meant it. Therefore, my objection is more how the Left/System and the HBD scum would misinterpret Hamilton’s point (“you see, members of the same group are unrelated and free riding destroys ethnic nepotism”) as opposed to the specific point that Hamilton is making about the dilution of altruism in a population. One can make arguments against Hamilton in that in a closely related population the “genetic altruism” may be widespread and that given computational modeling showing that ethnocentrists outcompete free-riders (as well as universalists), if we extend altruism into the ethnocentrism equation, things might not be as bleak as Hamilton suggests.

In any case, the book being reviewed here seems to be of the school of outside conquerors (e.g., from pastoralist/steppe settings) setting themselves up as an aristocratic ruling elite among settled farming people (e.g., “my noble position was won by my forebears wielding battle axes”) and one can view that in from the spectrum of degenerate “civilized” populations being enriched by the blood of “barbarians.”  However, there are no more White barbarians to do such enriching, and even if “suitable” non-White barbarians existed (and they do not exist – all we have are destructive low quality parasites), such “enrichment” would be racially destructive and so the EGI costs would outweigh any purported benefits. No, instead our regeneration now much come from within. Perhaps the Far Right elements of today’s degenerate and xenophilic White populations are the new barbarians. Who knows?  Or at least, a Far Right victory would allow for an enriching eugenics.

Putting the obsession with altruism aside, the following is Hamilton extending inclusive fitness beyond narrow kin:

The usefulness of the 'inclusive fitness' approach to social behavior (i.e. an approach using criteria like (b[AB]K-k)>0) is that it is more general than the 'group selection', 'kin selection', or 'reciprocal altruism' approaches and so provides an overview even where regression coefficients and fitness effects are not easy to estimate or specify. As against 'group selection' it provides a useful conceptual tool where no grouping is apparent -- for example, it can deal with an ungrouped viscous population where, owing to restricted migration, an individual’s normal neighbours and interactants tend to be his genetical kindred.

Because of the way it was first explained, the approach using inclusive fitness has often been identified with 'kin selection' and presented strictly as an alternative to 'group selection' as a way of establishing altruistic social behavior by natural selection (e.g. Maynard Smith 1964; Lewontin 1970). But the foregoing discussion shows that kinship should be considered just one way of getting positive regression of genotype in the recipient, and that it is this positive regression that is vitally necessary for altruism. Thus the inclusive-fitness concept is more general than 'kin-selection'. Haldane's suggestion about tribe-splitting can be seen in one light as a way of increasing intergroup variance and in another as a way of getting positive regression in the population as a whole by having the groups which happen to have most altruists divide most frequently. In this case, the altruists are helping true relatives. But in the assortive-settling model it obviously makes no difference if altruists settle with altruists because they are related (perhaps never having parted from them) or because they recognize fellow altruists as such, or settle together because of some pleiotropic effect of the gene on habitat preference. If we insist that group selection is different from kin selection the term should be restricted to situations of assortation definitely not involving kin. But it seems on the whole preferable to retain a more flexible use of terms; to use group selection where groups are clearly in evidence and qualify with mention of 'kin' (as in the 'kin-group ‘selection referred to by Brown 1973), 'relatedness' or 'low migration' (which is often the cause of relatedness ingroups), or else 'assortation', as appropriate. The term 'kin selection' appeals most where pedigrees tend to be unbounded and interwoven, as is so often the case with man.

Let’s get to the main thesis of the book.

The original native societies (e.g., in very early Ancient Greece) were ruled by egalitarian “totalitarian democracies” (not the same as I use that term) that had as their underlying structure a strict, absolute, dogmatic adherence to ancestral tradition and laws (”nomos”). Councils of elders held the real power, and dissent from a slavish adherence to tradition could mean death. Ethnically and culturally, these societies were non-martial farming people of a gracile phenotype.

How did things change? These lands were invaded and conquered by physically robust pastoralists of a martial nature (e.g., steppe people) who set themselves up as a ruling elite and instituted an aristocratic ethos, with a willingness to accept new ideas, and a hierarchical social structure and establishment of kings with real power and an aristocracy.  Even if the newcomers and the natives genetically melded over time (sometimes this happened, sometimes it did not), these social and cultural changes and structures persisted.

Given the aristocratic ethos, physical characteristics, pastoralist origins (e.g., animal breeding) of the newcomers and the establishment of a societal culture around newcomer values, issues like breeding came into focus as important, not only of animals, but, more importantly, of people as well. The innate heritable abilities of people come into focus. A key to the aristocratic ethos was the idea that the aristocracy were fit to rule due to their innate (heritable) superiority (but see below) and that a purpose to the understanding of nature with respect to the aristocracy was a breeding program to create superior individuals of moral and physical vigor. The author mentions the:

…observed descent of concrete physical qualities by blood and breeding as opposed to the authority of ancestral stories and laws…

And:

Nature is body and blood, and blood and is therefore heredity, Knowledge of breeding and heredity is, again, to be expected among a pastoral people who have long experience with livestock breeds. Furthermore, when war and hunting are prized, there is also an emphasis on the breeding of horses and of dogs…

This led to the “discovery of nature” – the ability to understand the natural world – as opposed to adherence to blind tradition. This in turn led to the rise of philosophy and of tyranny (sometimes supported by philosophy) – philosophy and tyranny often manifesting as important during periods of degeneration of the aristocratic regimes, when these regimes needed to better justify and fortify themselves.  The author states (italics in original): 

 …it is this element of absolute unmooring from the settled, democratic rule of the ancestral customs  that, when the actual aristocracies are in political and social decline in the late Archaic age. Is radicalized, recovered, refined, and made abstract, not only by the philosophical way of life and its discovery of nature, but by the way of life of the tyrant.

Thus, in a sense, philosophy and tyranny are used as tools to attempt to regenerate a declining aristocratic social structure, in part through the “discovery of nature.”

Note how Nietzsche associated the rise of Socrates and subsequent Geek (Apollonian) philosophy with a degeneration of the aristocratic (Dionysian) Hellenic society. The book’s author stresses that the various upheavals in (Ancient) Greek ancestry were not, as supposed, an attempt to return to an idyllic “settled” life, but rather a regeneration of the “wild” and “barbaric” unsettled martial way of life. This goes back to Hamilton (“…suggest a recurring pattern in which a renaissance follows an incursion by about 800 years. It may even be suggested that certain genes or traditions of pastoralists revitalize the conquered people”); the idea here is that the original pastoralist conquerors became too settled and a fresh infusion of pastoralist barbarism regenerates the original aristocratic attitude (in this sense, “settled” means the non-martial “democratic” farming societies while “unsettled” represents the war-like aristocratic pastoralists, including pastoralist warbands of young warriors).

The author extends his theory a bit and talks about how the radicalization of nature (e.g., with the Ancient Greeks) was associated with a decline in aristocratic power due to both external and internal influences. With respect to the external, the rule of a given aristocracy can be physically challenged as well as their legitimacy to rule deconstructed. With respect to the internal, a given aristocracy can degenerate.  The author notes a bit of a discordance between a strict adherence to (a) the aristocracy is fit to rule to their superior qualities, and (b) there exists a tradition of rule by a certain aristocracy, which leads to the question as to whether the aristocracy rules due to their currently existing innate qualities or by tradition.  Of course, part of the aristocratic tradition itself is the idea of nature and of innate superiority of the rulers, but the existence of this discordance led to the further radicalization and abstraction of the nature principle with the philosophy and tyranny manifesting during periods of decline. One can question as well whether the discordance between rule by superiority or rule by tradition became more of an issue in the event of a degenerating internal decline of the aristocracy.  The author quotes Pindar talking about strength in men manifesting in alternate generations, such as may happen with crops and fruit trees; the aristocratic apologia here is that while the sons of aristocratic heroes may be mediocre, the blood is still there, and subsequent generations may yield men of quality once again – sort of a upward progressing to the mean. The author rejects such an interpretation of Pindar’s passage as an apologia for his own time, since it seems that the passage was meant for aristocrats who did not require self-legitimacy, rather than for public propaganda purposes. I might add though that we today could interpret the meaning of Pindar’s passage in the manner described above, as our own justification for aristocracy (regardless of Pindar’s intention); however, I prefer an elite chosen on the basis of exhibited manifest personal superiority, rather than a hereditary aristocratic class from which we may merely hope for future ability.

The author stresses the Pindarian ideal of innate, biological, heritable traits being of immeasurably more value than that learned by education, training, and convention; one must be bred to be an impetuous “beast,” both fox and lion, with the manly aristocratic traits whose most refined manifestation is a result, ultimately of nature, not nurture, traits whose source is the “blood.”  It seems clear that Pindar valued heredity, nature, and blood, a theoretical basis of human understanding compatible with today’s Far Right.

There is also a discussion of Plato’s Gorgias, specifically the ideas of Callicles and how that fits in with the aristocratic idea of nature, the primacy of biology, and the link between philosophy and tyranny, with the philosopher and tyrant being “kindred types.” The author states that the “fundamental function of political philosophy on the one hand, and of tyranny on the other” is the “protection - the breeding - and training or protection of this biological specimen.”  Thus, philosophy and tyranny aim at creating “game reserves” for the “aristocratic breeding project” now abstracted into political philosophy as independent of classes or tribes.”  Plato may be attempting to hide his beliefs in this regard and conceals the kinship between philosophy and tyranny through attacks on tyranny. Given the persecution of philosophy by democratic forces (the trial and death of Socrates being just one prime example), Plato (and others) tried via apologia to deflect this animus and obscure the connection between philosophy and tyranny (as noted above).

Complaints about philosophy can come from the perspective of omission or commission. Of the former, from a Jewish/Islamic perspective, by relentlessly questioning everything, including societal conventions, philosophy can erode adherence to those conventions and cause the omission of people following conventions and traditions considered essential for societal stability. By placing doubts in the minds of men regarding fundamental principles, apathy can result. As regards the latter, the Ancient Greek complaint was more that philosophy can encourage the commission of illegal acts and the march to tyranny.

Traditionally, the interpretation of the Gorgias was that Plato was siding with Socrates in the Callicles-Socrates debate, with Socrates seemingly arguing for a more “morale, humane, proto-Christian” position while Callicles argued in favor of a more Social Darwinist “might makes right” approach, which was nature based, and that was concerned with promoting the interests of superior human specimens.  Indeed, Callicles’ thought was to support the political over the philosophical life, in the direction if tyranny to safeguard the promotion of nature and the well-being of his superior human specimens.  In a sense, Callicles was promoting the pre-Socratic philosophical position from which he derives the idea of the superior man breaking free of the stifling bounds of convention. The author however believes that Plato secretly sided with Callicles and claims that the “refutation” by Socrates of the positions of Callicles was not much of a refutation at all, and in one sense Socrates “doubled down” on some of Callicles’ ideas.  Socrates seemed to believe that Callicles was being somewhat political naïve in believing that convention suppressed the superior only through (coercive) “speech” (in modern language: memes and ideologies) while Socrates invoked the reality of a (democratic) regime resorting to physical force to restrain the ambitions of Callicles’ “Übermensch.”  Note that Callicles considered Socrates as a superior man and that the tyranny would also serve to protect philosophy from democratic persecution – a persecution that was all too real. To protect and promote philosophy in a city like Athens, Plato had to both “spiritualize” Callicles’ “aristocratic radicalism” and obscure the link between philosophy and tyranny; indeed, to make philosophy seem in opposition to tyranny.  Plato’s aims here are said to be to “advise potential philosophers on the necessity of liberation from convention, "to assure the cities that this liberation would not encourage tyranny,” and that “the philosopher is the true possessor of the political art.” Plato thus wants to leverage Greek city politics to advance the cause of philosophy. Convention cannot be openly opposed as such, but infiltrated from within, for the sake of philosophy and aristocratic natural values.

I assume that the reader is familiar with Nietzsche and his work so that I can briefly touch on some of the more novel points this book makes on Nietzsche and his work. Thus, as regards Nietzsche, the fan of Napoleon, he regarded philosophy as a way of life and had as a goal “making the world safe for philosophy,” so to speak rather than the goal of certain Greeks to focus on producing a “supreme physical specimen.” Ultimately though, the link between philosophy and tyranny remains. I agree with the author that at some point the writings of Nietzsche need to be taken at face value, and not merely interpreted as him “joking” or “making a point.”  Additional information on Nietzsche:

See this.

And this.

For Nietzsche (and philosophy/religion in general), we see a distinction between exoteric and esoteric programs; the former is the outward political and moral program and the latter is the inner spiritual meaning, such as the interests of philosophy and the life of the philosopher. Both are real, both are relevant, and it is wrong to consider the exoteric as merely a “metaphor” or “irony” or a “joke” (in the case of Nietzsche). The author gives Sufism as an example – jihad can certainly have an esoteric meaning of an inner spiritual struggle and personal warfare, but it also has an exoteric meaning as warfare against unbelievers, and it is the exoteric that provides protection for the esoteric. Likewise, if Nietzsche’s aim was the preservation of philosophy, then his exoteric objectives were not merely “metaphor” or “jokes” but need to be taken at face value as ideals for the protection of philosophy.  Both Plato and Nietzsche had the same objective of preserving philosophy, but their tactics differed due to the context of their respective eras. Plato and the Socratic school felt that they needed to obscure, to spiritualize and make abstract the aristocratic  ethos to protect philosophy from the attacks of democracy.  Nietzsche on the other hand believed that the Platonic school was all too successful, resulting in an enervation of European man, who required rebarbarization.

As part of this is an reexamination of aristocracy, emphasizing its physical aspects. Here we observe a discussion of tanning. Thus, contra to the Nordicist view, in Ancient Greece, a tanned physique was demonstration of the aristocratic warrior, and the tanned Spartan-Greek aristocracy was contrasted to the (effete) Persian-Oriental oligarchy.  This would perhaps be a surprise to those who have drunk the “movement” Kool-Aid, but you should understand by now how the Nordicists are wrong about just about everything. In any case, this focus on tanning emphasizes the “physicality” of the Greek aristocracy, resulting from a long history of breeding and training (with the latter, often outdoors, contributing to tanning, as did being on military campaigns).  We again observe the link between physicality, breeding, and training and the focus on nature as the basis of philosophy, and we observe the analogy of the philosopher and a bred and trained “athlete of the intellect.” While Plato was more direct than Nietzsche in the link between physicality and philosophy, the latter did basically agree with the former. The aristocratic ideal – that contained within it physicality, competition, breeding, and training; hence, nature – was the foundation for philosophy and high culture. Of course, physicality and training are insufficient for philosophy and high culture, as the case of Sparta makes clear.  However, Athens had a balance between the aristocratic idea and the balanced promotion of culture and philosophy. Thus, aristocratic physicality can be viewed as necessary but not sufficient for a philosophical regime.  We can consider Ancient Rome – that Nietzsche stated was a case of the stalk growing at the expense of the flower – as akin to a Latin Sparta, in that their aristocratic values (i.e., the patricians) did not result in the “flower” of a native philosophy/culture.

We also come back to the idea that philosophy can be viewed as the abstraction and spiritualization of physicality, physical beauty, competition, etc. that occurred  during a period of aristocratic decline, in which a “liberalization” allows for aristocratic energy to be focused on intellectual pursuits, which themselves can be used to defend the declining aristocratic regime. What Nietzsche saw as fundamental for establishing the aristocratic  regime were cruelty, intolerance, and the ‘pathos of distance.” The creation of the Greek polis involved citizen quality over quantity, and, at least in the beginning, a ruthless weeding out of the inferior could be considered as essential. Danger – internal, external, or both – was important for creating the context for intolerant cruelty to build and maintain the regime, and a paradox for such a system was how to both create the required “predatory beasts” (my term) while at the same time constraining their ambition to prevent them from wrecking an aristocratic society. With degeneration these “pent up” political and spiritual tensions burst forth and during periods of “liberalization” these tensions and energies can be focused on intellectual and cultural pursuits.  Indeed, the author states that ”Political weakening is good for culture” – Spengler’s distinction of culture vs. civilization comes to mind (although in his scheme culture peaked in the earlier times before centralized authority and civilization, not later during degeneration) and it is during these times of decline that Nietzsche claimed that “the most amazing specimens can emerge.”  Indeed, there must be the right types of people to take advantage of these periods, and this is when tyranny can emerge (another link between philosophy and tyranny). Tyranny emerges here not only because of the weakening of the aristocratic constraints but also because of a “strengthening” that can take place in those rare “amazing specimens” – novel, brilliant, tyrannical men (“beautiful monsters,” e.g., Caesar) - that allow them to flourish in periods of decline, in the same manner that the philosophers (“tyrants of the spirit”) can flourish.

Thus, barbarians establish an aristocratic regime over a sedentary population and under the pressure of danger establish an aristocratic regime characterized by cruelty, intolerance, pathos of distance, and the breeding program, coupled to training, to produce the requisite human material. This human material, and its training, and the background of the aristocratic ideals furnish the raw material for high culture, including philosophy.  Then during decline, political weakness, when the pent-up energies are released, “monstrous types” emerge – and akin to the concept of biological mutation, most of these types will be weak and botched (and men of mixed race and warring heredities) but a minority of the more fortunate will be stronger and these will be the “beautiful monsters” – Alcibiades, Caesar, da Vinci, and, no doubt, Napoleon. 

The Platonic project had as an exoteric meaning to fight Geek decadence and an esoteric meaning to make the cities safe for philosophy.  But as described above, to obfuscate, the abstraction and spiritualization of nature ended up reinforcing an enervating decadence that Nietzsche opposed. The Socratic-Platonic school’s attempted cure for the age of dissolution reinforced the problems.  While it made the remaining Classical World safe for philosophy it also created a breeding ground for Christianity, which the author claims led to “the misbreeding of modern European man.” Thus, the conditions for philosophy become untenable – the misbreeding eliminates even most of the “beautiful monsters” and creates a zeitgeist unsuitable for philosophy.  While Platonism – suitable for a late-stage civilizations and not for barbarians introduced to culture (in other words, suitable for Spengler’s [late] Fall and not Spring) - can be forgiven for not foreseeing the Christian threat, the Platonist tendency to ascetic “otherworldliness” was an inherent flaw that cannot be explained away. On the one hand, ascetism was a reasonable “treatment” in a age of decadence and unrestrained instincts. But the problem was that a proper understanding of nature and of the body was lost, which became disastrous when Christianity was able to enforce Platonist exoteric doctrine (morality, etc.) more powerfully than what Plato imagined. The true power of philosophy is in its inner esoteric meaning of breeding and nature; Platonist moral philosophy was “contingent” on historical circumstances and should not be broadly applied, certainly not in its Christian variant.

Nietzsche and Plato disagreed on tactics, not aims, a point made clear all above. The aims include the preservation and promotion of nature, the breeding of genius, of amazing specimens, and to make society safe for philosophy.  As the author points out, “man is a political animal, attracted to “force, power, and violence.”  The purpose of human nature is the production of genius, and the specific production of military genius is a prerequisite for the stability of a state that can allow genius more generally to flourish. Inevitably there is the association of philosophy with tyranny. The Conclusion of the book summarizes all of this.  The Appendix may be of utility to those interested in Strauss but does not alter the interpretations already discussed.

To summarize the fundamentals here: The “idea of nature” derives from aristocratic ideals, and defenders of aristocracy respond to its decline by “abstracting and radicalizing” the “idea of nature.” The author connects two strands of philosophical thought; first, Nietzsche’s thesis that philosophy and tyranny (that are linked) originate with aristocratic degeneration and, second, the Straussian idea that “nature” is a requisite precondition for the development of philosophy.

In summary, this was an interesting book.  You can argue that it is a bit “dense” and repetitive, but it is adapted from a thesis, so that needs to be considered.  The author presents sufficient evidence to support his major contentions, and the emphasis here on nature, heredity, biology, and breeding is a healthy response to those who want to strip Greek philosophy and the philosophy of Nietzsche of its biological connotations (indeed, the author critiques those who wrote that Nietzsche was “joking” or didn’t mean what people assumes he meant).  Thus, the book is a necessary corrective in response to the tendency of the Left and Center to de-biologize philosophy and merely extol its purely abstract ethical considerations. I would recommend this book for those on the Right who are more of the “intellectual type,” at least as a thought-provoking exercise in considering deeper meanings of various philosophical and historical currents of relevance to the West.  Indeed, a biology-based philosophy steeped in nature can be utilized to form an ethical defense of our genetic interests, including those interests at the group level, a topic I’ve broached at my blogs (and of course the third part of On Genetic Interests begins the discussion of such issues).

Irrational Man

Book review.

Irrational Man.  The Amazon description of the book succinctly summarizes its contents:

Widely recognized as the finest definition of existentialist philosophy ever written, this book introduced existentialism to America in 1958. Barrett speaks eloquently and directly to concerns of the 1990s: a period when the irrational and the absurd are no better integrated than before and when humankind is in even greater danger of destroying its existence without ever understanding the meaning of its existence.

Irrational Man begins by discussing the roots of existentialism in the art and thinking of Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Baudelaire, Blake, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Picasso, Joyce, and Beckett. The heart of the book explains the views of the foremost existentialists—Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. The result is a marvelously lucid definition of existentialism and a brilliant interpretation of its impact.

The author engages in a neo-Spenglerian discussion stating that different eras exhibit (Western) man having innate metaphysical inclinations for different forms of philosophy, literature, and art, with those era-appropriate forms resonating with the people of that time, while other forms, of past eras, would not resonate.  Further, any putative affinity for these expired forms, in the present day, would merely be artificial sentimentality. Thus, he avers that the current age (for him and I presume for us as well) is that of existentialist philosophy and literature, and of modern art. I suppose that he would beleive that a modern preference for, say, Michelangelo or Dante would be philosophical-cultural pseudomorphosis.

The author distinguishes, derived from the thought of Matthew Arnold, the Hebraic worldview of action, doing, and moralism with the Hellenic worldview of thought, intellectualism, and abstraction. While this distinction is somewhat truthful, it is also ironic that the "action-oriented, pragmatic" Hebrew was obsessed with god and the spiritual-moral world of that god, while the "intellectual, abstract" Hellene valued science, the body, and physical beauty.  So, the action-oriented Hebrews were focused on a Big Daddy in the Sky, while the abstract intellectual Hellenes were admiring the physiques of young men and formulating the first foundations of what would later become Western science. The author never recognizes, much less dissects, these contradictions and inconsistencies. The author associates the Hebraic mindset – the one he discusses, not the contradictions and inconsistences mentioned here – as being that which is being revived by existentialism.  I have problems with that thesis, given my focus on the contradictions and inconsistences noted above. 

A key point in the existentialist worldview is that existence (the fact that an entity exists) precedes essence (what that entity is). Platonism and related doctrines flips that by asserting that it are only the essences of entities that are truly real, while the particularities of existence are only ephemeral manifestations of essence. Platonism, with its prioritizing of the universal over the individual, of essence over existence, is presented as the antithesis of existentialism; indeed, it is part of the Classical/Western tradition that existentialism has attempted to overturn. But even here, Plato is said to demonstrate some existentialist characteristics, as his championing of reason as philosophy was for the redemption of the individual, as well as down-to-earth practical matters of designing a perfect polity, rather than being abstraction for the sake of abstraction.  Of course, the author attempts a bit of mind-reading, and avers that Plato’s promotion of the universal and eternal Platonic ideals was Plato’s way of defying the inevitability of change, decay, and death in the real world.  Hence, according to Plato, while the existing particular is ephemeral and not fully real, the fully real Platonic is timeless and eternal. See this for more about Platonic vs. existentialist reality.  Christianity, based as it is on faith and personal redemption, reflects its Hebraic origins, and also has some seeds of existentialist viewpoints.

I finish my summary of this part of the book by quoting the author on Blake and Nietzsche:

“Drive your plow over the bones of the dead” is not the aphorism of a man who is seeking merely to hearken back to the “green & pleasant land” of ancient Britain. If a man marries his hell to his heaven, his evil to his good, Blake holds, he will become a creature such as the earth has not yet seen.  Nietzsche put the same insight paradoxically “Mankind must become better and more evil.”

As regards the heart of the book - the analysis of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre – the summary and interpretation is fine as far as it goes (not that I agree with all of it). Of these four individuals, the only one I really value is Nietzsche (not that I agree with him on all, and, anyway, he didn’t want to be seen as a prophet, nor his views looked at as some sort of dogma). His work has power, and especially that from the second half of his career is eminently readable, unlike the pompous windbag Heidegger, the grand traditionalist who needs a book to make a point more elegantly summarized in a single page, and who can pontificate endlessly (and incomprehensibly) about “Being”. Kierkegaard’s interest in Christianity leaves me cold, and I see Sartre as an over-rated leftist polemicist.

The author’s favoritism is laughably obvious, with his lickspittle defense of, and promotion and admiration of, Kierkegaard, to the point that one wonders if Barrett spontaneously ejaculated while reading Kierkegaard’s work. Not surprisingly, (given Kierkegaard’s Christianity), Barrett also has an obvious bias in favor of God and of religion, while subtly mocking atheism.  The author doesn’t seem to grasp all of the implications of Nietzsche’s Overman and believes it is just an Olympian superman in the clouds, rather than a self-overcoming and a more practical reality (Nietzsche admired Napoleon and to an extent Cesare Borgia).  The author takes the anti-Faustian view that the well-rounded man needs to cultivate some mediocrity and “humor” (juvenile jackassery such as in the Alt-Right?).

A useful insight from the author, re: Nietzsche and the underlying theory about a will to power is as follows:

…the peculiar attraction Communism holds for the so-called backward or underdeveloped countries: it is a will to power on the part of these peoples, a will to take their fate in their own hands and make their own history. This powerful and secret appeal of Communism is something that our own statesmen do not seem in the least to understand.

Far enough. But note that like Christianity, Communism and other doctrines of the Far Left are based on resentment of the lower for the higher, the revolt of the underman, ultimately based on Bioleninism.  In contrast, when Whites, when higher men, want to take their fate in their own hands, they turn to Fascism, to doctrines of the Far Right.  Barrett writes:

…The goal of power need not be defined, because it is its own goal…

…the subject facing the object in a kind of hidden antagonism…Nature thus appears as a realm to be conquered, and man as the creature who is to be the conqueror.

For Nietzsche the era of reason and science raises the question of what is to be done with the primitive instincts and passions of man; in pushing these aside the age threatens us with a decline in vitality for the whole species.

Fair enough. I always say that science and technics – and rationality as a whole – are methods, means to an end, and not ends to themselves.  You cannot ultimately define values, ends, from means, from methods. Relate to that, see this: Racial Existentialism. Also see the role of the rational (Salter) and irrational (Yockey) in pro-White activism discussed here.

Readers of my work know that I am no fan of the pompous windbag traditionalist Heidegger.  With respect to this book the author describes Heidegger’s concept of Dasein as a “field theory” of human being that is analogous to energy field theories of matter in modern (in his day) physics. Thus, a person’s being is not only what is under their skin but encompasses all of their interactions and associations with reality; it is theirs, but it is not specifically confined to a material bodily core.

There is an amusing aside by the author in this section:

David Hume, in a moment of acute skepticism, felt panicky in the solitude of his study and had to go out and join his friends in the billiard room in order to be reassured that the external world was really there.

I am no fan of the leftist windbag Sartre either, and I see little to be gained by his philosophical perspectives. Of course, at the time this book was written, the American public strongly associated existentialism with the likes of Sartre; thus, this had to be an integral part of Barrett’s analysis. Barret describes Sartre as a hyper-masculine Cartesian dualist, whose philosophy is essential alien to nature-based women. Sartre distinguishes the object of Being-in-itself with then subject Being-for-Itself, with the former being more feminine, and the latter, acting through an always conscious act of will, being masculine, defining a life project through free will and the ability to say “no.”

Nothing in the book altered my high regard for Nietzsche, my indifference to Kierkegaard, and my negative attitude toward Heidegger and Sartre.

Conclusion

The book ends with a concluding summary The Place of the Furies (there are some subsequent appendices, but they are not essential enough to comment on in this review). Here, the author indulges in his typical atomic hysteria about man blowing up the world, and makes various insights, some truthful and amusing (Americans are non-intellectual, anti-intellectual, and unreflective by nature) and some controversial (taking the 1984-style idea that communists are Nietzscheans in the sense of caring only about the exercise of power and control – he states that communists “...have thus always exhibited a strange ambivalence: the most naively optimistic view of human nature in theory, and in practice the most brutal and cynical attitude toward human beings”). He believes that abstract rationalism is a threat to humanity; the following may be a reasonable summary of the author’s views:

Contrary to the rationalist tradition, we know now that it is not his reason that makes man man, but rather that reason is a consequence of that which really makes him man. For it is man’s existence as a self-transcending self that has forged and formed reason as one of its projects. As such, man’s reason is specifically human…

That I suppose is to be expected from a book whose title is Irrational Man.  He also states:

Today is always and for all men the digging of one’s way out of the ruins of yesterday.

In summary, he has an anti-Faustian worldview that is at odds with my own.

The book would have benefited from a clearly stated definition and dissection of what (according to the author at least) existentialist thought actually is, instead of assuming the reader already knows and/or can reconstruct the philosophical paradigms from the descriptions of examples of existentialist thought and art examined in the book. The author’s whining about nuclear weapons and the assumed atomic apocalypse around the corner – while perhaps somewhat understandable (but still somewhat hysterical) at the time the book was written - seems dated today (more than 60 years with no nuclear war, how about that?), although hysterics today are becoming breathless about Putin (some things never change).  The author’s commentary about how technology has made traditional politics and diplomacy irrelevant is just more over-heated hysteria.

All in all, despite my reservations about the author and his viewpoints, this is a good introduction to existentialism. And it is not dated, since existentialism has, if anything, declined in the past sixty years; there have been no significant advancements. In the modern age, today, all we have is “critical theory” “deconstructionism” obsessed with race and gender. And if you want a summary of that, just look into an unflushed, used stall toilet in an airport men’s room.

Nietzsche vs. Melville

Apparent vs. true worlds.

See this from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, a quote that I consider the philosophical core of the book:

Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines.

So, what is Melville, speaking through Ahab, saying here?  Everything that we can perceive through our senses, the material world – “visible objects”- is just surface veneer, a façade, “pasteboard masks,” which conceals the true, hidden reality beneath it.  This hidden reality is manifested in, or simply is, some “unknown but still reasoning thing” (God?). Events, acts, and deeds can sometimes reveal the presence of this hidden, unknown thing – it “puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.”  So, if one wants to strike out at this hidden force, this manipulator of events, one has to “strike through the mask!”  After all, if the mask is hiding the true driving force behind events, and if some events reveal the presence of that hidden force, then one can access the hidden force, attack it, harm it, by striking through the mask behind which it hides. Or, our perceived reality is akin to a prison, and to reach out beyond it to strike out against that which imprisons us - our jailor - we need to thrust “through the wall” of that prison.  To Ahab, the event which revealed the presence of the “unknown but still reasoning thing” was the loss of his leg, and Moby Dick is the wall that forms part of Ahab’s prison.  

Ahab is unsure if Moby Dick is just the agent of the unknown force - thus, the whale is a “pasteboard mask” - or if the whale is actually the principal, the hidden force itself (e.g., “Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond"). It seems to me that, according to Ahab’s epistemology of reality, it makes more sense for the whale to be the agent of something else. Besides the absurdity of a whale being the principal of which Ahab speaks, the animal is hardly an “unknown thing." How could Moby Dick be both the wall and the jailor, the pasteboard mask and that behind it?  It makes more sense for the whale to be the agent of another force that Ahab opposes and that he strikes at that “unknown but still reasoning thing” by hunting and killing Moby Dick (thus, striking through the mask).  But in the end, it doesn’t matter to Ahab; either way, he hates and must kill the whale and what it represents: “But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate…”  

Ahab then further displays his Faustian nature by: “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me” and that he has no master and that he represents truth: “But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines.”  For moralpathy and Ahab as moralpath, see here.

Ahab’s discourse, in which he contrasts the visible world of our perception and the unknown thins lurking behind it, reminds one of the distinction between the apparent and true world paradigms analyzed by Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols.  For Ahab (and Melville), the world of our perception is the apparent world, but there is underlying this a true (or more true) world of the “unknown but still reasoning thing.” Let’s see what Nietzsche has to say about this.

The true world -- we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one

The full quote:

It will be appreciated if I condense so essential and so new an insight into four theses. In that way I facilitate comprehension; in that way I provoke contradiction.

First proposition. The reasons for which "this" world has been characterized as "apparent" are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable.

A very positivist, materialist, empiricist, scientific view. I say that as praise, not condemnation.

Second proposition. The criteria which have been bestowed on the "true being" of things are the criteria of not-being, of nothingness, the "true world" has been constructed out of contradiction to the actual world: indeed an apparent world, insofar as it is merely a moral-optical illusion.

Third proposition. To invent fables about a world "other" than this one has no meaning at all, unless an instinct of slander, detraction, and suspicion against life has gained the upper hand in us: in that case, we avenge ourselves against life with a phantasmagoria of "another," a "better" life.

Christianity in a nutshell.  Also, much of the nonsense about a superior Golden Age of the “traditionalists” (Nietzsche denounced this view, recognizing that the past was an age lower than that of the present).

Fourth proposition. Any distinction between a "true" and an "apparent" world -- whether in the Christian manner or in the manner of Kant (in the end, an underhanded Christian) -- is only a suggestion of decadence, a symptom of the decline of life. That the artist esteems appearance higher than reality is no objection to this proposition. For "appearance" in this case means reality once more, only by way of selection, reinforcement, and correction. The tragic artist is no pessimist: he is precisely the one who says Yes to everything questionable, even to the terrible -- he is Dionysian.

The full reasoning:

How the “True World” Finally Became An Fable:

The History of an Error

1. The true world -- attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man; he lives in it, he is it.

(The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and persuasive. A circumlocution for the sentence, "I, Plato, am the truth.")

The Classical Civilization.

2. The true world -- unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man ("for the sinner who repents").

(Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious, incomprehensible -- it becomes female, it becomes Christian.)

Christianity = feminine, subtle, insidious, incomprehensible.

3. The true world -- unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it -- a consolation, an obligation, an imperative.

(At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian [i.e., Kantian].)

The characterization of “Nordic” is amusing here given certain connotations in the “movement.” Gregor associated Nordicism with an ideology of despair, as Guntherite Nordicism harkened back to a better past of pure Nordics that have become mongrelized and degraded; somewhat differently, but with a similar tone, modern Nordicists aver that pure Nordics still exist but are always endangered by mixture with inferior peoples. Nordicism is also associated with Traditionalism and its obsession with a past Golden Age. So, in a sense, Nordicist narratives are “a consolation, an obligation, an imperative” but, on the other hand, modern Nordicists would object to the characterization of their ideology as “unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable” since they will argue that Nordic, or “Nordish,” preservationism is attainable, demonstrable, and promisable.

4. The true world -- unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us?

(Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)

5. The "true" world -- an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating -- an idea which has become useless and superfluous -- consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it!

(Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens [“good sense”] and cheerfulness; Plato's embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.)

6. The true world -- we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.

(Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA. [“Zarathustra begins”])

So, the argument is, there is no “true world” and no “apparent world” but only the world, the reality that we inhabit (and realization of this is the first step toward the Overman).

This would seem to be incompatible with the Melville/Ahab view.

An interpretation of Nietzsche’s views on this this subject:

Nietzsche’s How the ‘Real World’ at Last Became a Myth appears in Twilight of the Idols (1889). In this short, sequential, text he outlines what he subtitles as the “History of an Error”. The genealogy traces the notion of the division of the world into reality and appearance from its original mystic formulation (“I, Plato, am the Truth”), through the Platonic cave, the neo-platonist Christian interpretation, onto the Kantian noumenon and suprasensible ground of morality. From there, after it finds its most pure expression in the sterile Kantian thing-in-itself, the notion becomes increasingly suspect, culminating in its dismissal, and with it, the entire dichotomy of apparent/real, representation/thing-in-itself. Both the suprasensible “real world” and the apparent world of representation are overcome.

Nietzsche, with characteristic modesty, concludes that it is precisely at the moment when this millennia old metaphysical error has been completely eviscerated, with humanity now free from the specter of an all powerful beyond, that his text Thus Spoke Zarathustra truly begins.

Again, it would seem that Nietzsche is in opposition to Melville (I would have liked to see Nietzsche analyze Moby Dick).

As a STEM empiricist, I have an affinity for Nietzsche’s view. On the other hand, I still see value in Melville’s formulation. How to square the circle? Perhaps we need to review Melville’s description of the “unknown” as a “reasoning thing.” What if the known and unknown are both part of the same actuality?  The known is part of reality that we currently are able to perceive and the unknown is that we are currently unable to perceive but is still a real part of that same reality, something that could in theory be perceived if we had the power to do so (whether or not it is realistically possible for humans to ever have this power is itself currently an unknown).  What if this “unknown” is not so much a “reasoning thing” but some manifestation of nature and nature’s laws that we cannot yet perceive?  But, then again, maybe there is some “reasoning thing” involved but something that is not supernatural or part of a hidden “true” world but, again, is a manifestation of a reality that is hidden from us simply because we currently do not have the power to perceive it. Modern scientific philosophy has some interesting ideas related to this approach to Melville's views.  See this.  And this. 

Thus, is the “unknown but still reasoning” thing a part of our reality that has an inherent consciousness of which we have heretofore been unaware?

So, Nietzsche is, in my opinion, correct that there is a reality that is material and that could in theory be empirically determined, that there is no “true” vs “apparent” world, but as part of reality are things that we cannot (yet) perceive and that act (or seem to act) towards us in ways akin to Ahab’s complaint about hidden actors whose presence can make themselves known through certain events.

The Moral State

Considerations.

See here.

Salter rightfully criticizes the pure utilitarian ethic from the standpoint of justice.  He provides a theoretical example that I can paraphrase here. Imagine a murder committed in a town, and the local vagrant is suspected.  The police chief then discovers the vagrant is innocent and that the murder was committed by the mayor, who has been an upstanding citizen and a long-standing important member of the town community.  The crime was one of passion and will be unlikely to ever be repeated, while the vagrant is a constant troublemaker. Convicting the vagrant on the basis of partial or invented evidence would be best for the long-term well-being of the town, while arresting and convicting the mayor would cause social upheaval in the town, damage the town’s nascent tourist industry, and cause widespread economic dislocation and hardship for residents.  A purely utilitarian reading of the situation is to let the vagrant hang and let the mayor off Scott-free, but, as Salter notes, this offends our sense of justice (for most of us anyway).  That being so, the utilitarian ethic needs to be balanced by individual rights, and by certain normative values. Pure utility is not sufficient for a truly just ethic.

Thus, Salter suggests a “mixed ethic” where the pursuit of ethnic genetic interests (EGI) is constrained by ethics based on some sort of moral standards. We observe the requirement for moral standards, an ethical code, which should be independent of pure adaptive interests.

There are other potential problems here as well. A purely rational utilitarian state, for example, one dedicated to optimizing EGI as the highest priority and as the overarching imperative, is unlikely to inspire in the people the sort of dedication required to achieve societal objectives. Consider this.

Salterism has two weaknesses. First, a call to “preserve our distinctive genetic information” is unlikely to motivate most Western individuals to defend their genetic interests against the titanic forces arrayed against them. It almost certainly will not motivate the masses, who, as Michael O’Meara rightfully points out, are always induced to act by “myths” that encompass a cohesive worldview. Even rational activists can often become more motivated by these “myths” (which may of course constitute objective facts to a considerable degree) than to a pure empiricism. Thus, the “myth” of Yockeyan “High Culture” may be needed to motivate the defense of rational Salterian EGI.

Thus, some type of "irrational" spiritual, ethical, and moral code, in this case associated with "Yockeyism," can serve as the basis of a worldview that motivates and unifies the populace, and inspires adherence to conduct conducive to EGI.

A purely utilitarian focus on pure EGI can also run into other problems:

Second, genetic interests are based upon differences and distinctions, and all individuals (except identical twins, if we ignore certain subtleties) differ in their genetic information. Therefore, the potential exists for an unrestrained focus on genetic interests to itself degenerate into a maladaptive genetic atomization—with the natural organic solidarity of particular ethnies, and of the West as a whole, disintegrating under an ever more fine series of biological divisions.

There needs to be a moral structure to the state, independent of pure adaptive utilitarianism. Now, that moral structure can (and should) be used instrumentally to favor adaptive, EGI-focused ends. But the moral structure should exist not only for the purpose of promoting a racial state and for making the pursuit of EGI, of adaptive fitness, more palatable to the population – keeping in mind that humans are apparently evolved to benefit from some sort of religious/spiritual beliefs – but has benefits in its own right. Indeed, there needs to be a balance between a "pure ethic" of unrestrained pursuit of genetic interests, and morality that constrains the unrestrained pursuit of absolute EGI, a pursuit that can lead to “maladaptive genetic atomization.” Certainly, as alluded to in that The Occidental Quarterly piece, Yockeyism can be part of the equation; we should remember that a “rebirth of Faith” was cited by Yockey as an integral part of his predicted, and promoted, Imperium.

What can we say about this sense of morality?

Morality can be independent of religion, although, historically, in the Western civilization (and in Late Antiquity), The Moral State was associated with Christianity. Readers of this blog know that I am hostile to Christianity. However, there are certain elements in (Europeanized) Christianity that can be of benefit to society if – and only if – these ideals are limited to one’s own people, rather than to all of humanity (in other words, particularism vs. universalism), and are tempered by adaptive interests and pragmatic prudence. Brotherhood, if limited to ethny, can be positive, as can be charity, similarly limited, restraint of hatred of (personal) enemies and a degree of forgiveness, again limited to the ethny, etc. Aspects of these positive characteristics of Christianity can be incorporated into the moral ideas of a secular moral state.

This is in no way incompatible with an anti-Christian appeal to higher, Nietzschean values; there is nothing that says that such values have to be “immoral” or “amoral” based on the innate human moral sense, but we can, and should construct, our own morality, independent of the dogmas of the past, including that of Christianity, while incorporating whatever was good and just from those past dogmas.

What I suggest is that a proper state based on principles of the Sallis Groupuscule should have a foundation of EGI and adaptive fitness, with the edifice of Yockeyism built upon it, with these two poles of activity and of interest synergizing in the manner described in The Occidental Quarterly article linked to above. 

But there needs to be a moral underpinning for both poles; Salter describes moral, ethical, and philosophical justifications for EGI in Part III of On Genetic Interests, while Yockey, in contrast, considers his Imperium to derives organically from a Spenglerian view of history, as well as the destiny of Western Man. But Yockey does consider Faith as a key part of the authoritarian future of the West. He assumed this will be religious, I suppose in the Christian sense, but we can instead substitute a secular form of morality.  Intra-racial brotherhood, the Golden Rule, respect for oneself and for others (who deserve it), self-overcoming, discipline, hard work, futurist progress, a rejection of free-riding and a more disinterested willingness to invest in collective social goods, a healthy balance between helping oneself and an adaptively-informed “altruism,” avoiding socially destructive behaviors, the list can go on, but the point is that Christianity has no monopoly on “righteous behavior” (however defined). The moral standards that define European culture, both before and after the advent of Christianity, can assist in the development of the secular Moral State. Inherent moral and spiritual characteristics of European Man – see the works of Duchesne to observe how we differ from others – can serve as the basis of Good vs. Bad, independent of old religious dogma. There may very well be some overlap with that dogma, in the cases in which that dogma was formed by the same inherent impulses; in other cases, the morality will be quite different. But it will be suited for our people and their destiny, not something imposed by alien peoples and cultures.

The Moral State will be based on the moral standards of the populace, its leaders, and culture; conversely, The Moral State itself can help direct and guide the development of the moral standards of the people and their culture. Codreanu's Legionary Movement, and its emphasis on the "New Man," and a high moral and ethical culture, can also inform the development of the characteristics of The Moral State.

A non-Christian basis for The Moral State may also be informed by considerations such as described here. Indeed, The Moral State may become the seed of a new beginning, a new High Culture, on in which Faustian impulses are achieved, but with the constraints of an overarching morality that directs activity in the direction of principles consistent with beauty, knowledge, and higher goals.

And the type of individuals who should be prominent in the leadership of such a state is described here. The type of “leaders” found in today’s (American) “movement” – meritless affirmative action hacks, money-hungry grifters, gaslighting liars, inept incompetents with no sense of personal responsibility or accountability, shameless hustlers and mountebanks, sweaty obsessive fetishists, conspiracy theorists, drug addicts, sexual perverts, the chronically impaired with piss-poor judgment – these need to be eschewed. There is no place in The Moral State for failed “leaders” such as that. We deserve better. Our people, our race, and our civilization deserve better. We can and must do better.

Ethnic Rights

"Ethnic" as in "ethny." Individual to group.

Read this as a starting point.

I reject Rand’s Semitic flim-flam, and call her out as a member of a highly collectivist ethny preaching the “merits” of anti-group atomized individualism to a competing ethny already prone to individualism.

I maintain that, at minimum, the group as a whole must have all the rights of its constituent members, particularly if those members identify as members of the group in question (but remember that they still have genetic interests in their fellow ethnic group members even if they refuse to acknowledge group identity).

If individuals are said to have certain rights, then those rights do not disappear if the individuals are part of a group with a common ethnic identity and a common fate. If an individual has rights X,Y, and Z, then it stands to reason that a group of, say, one million like individuals also has rights X,Y, and Z. Here we are looking at the question as a minimal realization of the additive nature of interests; we shall look at emergent group interests at the end of this essay.

If an individual White has a right to live and prosper, then a nation of millions of such Whites, identifying as members of that ethny, also has the right to live and prosper. The philosophical underpinning of the Sallis Groupuscule includes the premise that rights are not limited to the individual but also apply to the ethny. Indeed, humanists would assert both individual rights as well as rights for humanity as a whole; I would suppose that most people (except radical environmentalists, anti-natalists, etc.) would not object to the premise that humanity has a right to exist as well as do individual humans. The “sticking point” is at the intermediate level, between that of individuals and humanity – the ethny.  Non-European ethnies typically are acknowledged to have ethnic rights, but these are specifically denied to European-derived ethnies, as if these are some sort of sub-human existence bereft of the same considerations given to all others.

Let us consider individual rights and how they can apply to Whites as a group.

The right to life

Thus, White genocide is wrong. Whites, as a group, have a right to exist and a right to fight to secure the means of their existence.

The right to liberty and freedom

Whites have a right to liberty and freedom; they are denied this by the System and its de jure and de facto laws and regulations and policies that deprive Whites of their basic human rights.

The right to the pursuit of happiness

The right to live your life free of discrimination

Whites are actively discriminated against both de jure (affirmative action, “hate speech” laws, selective prosecution, immigration policy) and de facto (“woke” culture, “woke” capital, racial double standards, etc.). This prevents the White “pursuit of happiness” – Whites are not allowed to have their own homelands or their own culture.

The right to control what happens to your own body and to make medical decisions for yourself

Whiteness itself – the White genotype and phenotype – is becoming de facto a crime. De jure eventually?

The right to freely exercise your religion and practice your religious beliefs without fear of being prosecuted for your beliefs

The right to be free from prejudice on the basis of race, gender, national origin, color, age or sex

Whites are discriminated against in every way.

The right to grow old

Elderly Whites are targeted for attack by younger Coloreds. Elderly Whites are denied vaccines, which are preferentially given to coloreds.

The right to a fair trial and due process of the law

Selective prosecution of Whites. The entire System is used de jure to politically persecute White activists. De facto persecution of Whites by extra-governmental actors who are protected by the government.

The right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment

The entire existence of Whites in “vibrant diversity” as part of the System is “cruel and unusual punishment.”

The right to be free from torture

See all above. Multiracialism and multiculturalism is torture. “Diversity training” and other forms of “woke” indoctrination are torture.

The right to be free from slavery

White taxpayers support Colored tax recipients – de facto slavery.

The right to freedom of speech

 Non-existent in Europe. Dying in America (de facto almost gone, de jure in jeopardy).

The right to freely associate with whomever you like and to join groups of which you'd like to be a part.

Freedom of association for Whites does not exist; in America, it has been eliminated by civil rights laws.

The right to freedom of thought

The right not to be prosecuted from your thoughts

In today’s “woke” dictatorship with its dogmatic enforced belief system, there is no freedom of thought for Whites.

We can therefore see that the list of individual rights, which should apply to Whites as a group, are being violated for Whites – as both individuals and as a group – making Whites into a persecuted stateless pariah people.

One can go further and assert that the group has rights specifically as a group that goes beyond rights derived from those of its constituent individuals. First, as a larger reservoir of individuals and of the genetic interests of those individuals, the survival and interests of the group must take precedence over any one individual, or small groups of individuals, within the group. Libertarians may object, but enforced military conscription throughout human history indicates an evolved preference for individual sacrifice – even if compelled – to service the interests of the greater number. Second, the group has emergent properties that go beyond a simple additive summation of the interests of each individual. A group can actualize a High Culture and has, or potentially can have, a civilizational destiny; individuals cannot be so described. Any grouping of atomized individuals does not constitute a High Culture, only the integrated group does so. A nation is, properly, an integrated group of an ethny, not a random constellation of individuals from any and all ethnies that happen to co-exist in the same territory. Thus, we can observe that a group has characteristics as a group that go beyond that of merely adding together sets of individual interests, each unrelated to the other.

So, to all the rights listed above are added to the group the right of interest prioritization over the individual as well as the right to actualize the group’s collective destiny.

Racial Existentialism

For authentic authenticity and against Heidegger.

In this post I begin – the very beginning - the process of outlining a philosophical basis for the worldview of the Sallis Groupuscule.  A side-effect, if you will, is criticism of Heidegger, who is favored by the traditionalist faction of the “movement.”

My major weakness here – that I am an empiricist STEM person lacking any formal training in philosophy – may actually be a strength: What is needed is direct, simple, plain-talk, not hundreds of pages of abstract theorizing.  The ultimate aim of philosophy is, or should be, to place man within the scope of the universe, to advise on how to live a good and proper life, how to situate man within the scope of his existence…not to demonstrate one’s “intellectual bonafides” by taking a whole chapter to express an idea that could have been more efficiently expressed in a single sentence (here’s looking at you, Heidegger).

I’d like to point out as well that those who automatically privilege the views of Heidegger over that of Sallis are essentially arguing by “appeal to authority” – what about Der Right’s complaints about “credentialism?”  Interesting that “credentialism” is always brought up with respect to STEM, which at least has some objective basis, and not for philosophy, which is mostly subjective.  Hypocritical much?

The key point is this analysis, ultimately, is authenticity. What is it? Who decides what it is?  For individuals?  For groups?  As regards the latter, is it proper to ascribe authenticity to entire populations?

Authenticity cannot be dictated from the “other;” that by definition invalidates claims of authenticity. Authenticity can only come from self, with that “self” being the individual or the group.

How does a person or group know that they are behaving in a manner truly authentic?  Can there be any objective confirmation of that?

Let’s consider some writings by myself and others on this topic, before briefly summarizing at the end.

See this.

…it was clear that Heidegger initially thought that National Socialism was an alternative to modern technological nihilism, but eventually he came to see it as just another expression of the same underlying worldview. For Heidegger, nihilism is basically having a false vision of man as being uprooted from nature and history and capable of controlling and consuming them.

Why is that a false vision?  Who decides?

The only way to avoid this trap is to move the battle from the political to the metapolitical plane. We need a fundamental transformation of our view of ourselves and our relationship to history and nature. But it is not as simple is manufacturing and promulgating a correct alternative worldview, for such a project itself is a form of technological nihilism. It assumes that the human mind and its machinations can stand behind culture and history and manufacture them according to its designs. Whereas the truth is that history and culture stand behind us. We are shaped by cultural and historical forces we can neither understand nor control.

Not very Faustian, is it?  

But once we recognize this fact, i.e., that we are finite beings, rooted in a particular time and place, rather than rootless cosmopolitan citizens of nowhere, the spell of nihilism is broken, which clears a space in which a new dispensation — a new fundamental worldview — can emerge.

If only we can clear a space so a New Movement can emerge, eh?

Thus Heideggerian metapolitics is not the construction of systems of ideas, ideologies, or -isms. Any worldview we can construct is simply an expression of nihilism, not an alternative to it. But that does not mean that we are impotent. We might not be able to manufacture an alternative, but we can still help one to emerge, first and foremost by owning up to our finitude and rootedness, then by clearing away the detritus of nihilism to create a space in which an alternative might grow.

One can create political policies. One can create legal codes. One can build the damned wall. But it is not in our power to manufacture a new culture.

Because Johnson says so!  QED!

But neither can we manufacture a simple tomato. 

Give genetic engineering a chance.

We can, however, work with forces we ultimately do not understand or control — nature itself — to grow tomatoes. 

Certainly, traditionalists hiding in their hobbit holes (*) cannot understand or control nature.

We can clear a space, plant a seed, weed, water, and fertilize — and then wait. We can do the same in the metapolitical realm: clear spaces by deconstructing false ideas, plant identitarian and ethnonationalist seeds, and tend what grows.

Translation: do nothing and rattle the tin cup for “D’Nations.”

That’s what we do here at Counter-Currents. We help people envision new answers to the questions “Who are we?” “What is the right way to live together?” and “How can we get there from here?”

No, actually they beg for money and engage in ethnoimperialist hypocrisy.

Heidegger did not believe that philosophers or poets are the hidden legislators of mankind, whose machinations create history. 

That’s good, since Heidegger was an idiot and shouldn’t be the “legislator” of anything.

But that doesn’t mean we have to shut up and let history do the talking, or sit back and let history do the work. Rather, Heidegger believed that history speaks and acts through us. Philosophers and poets are the first people to become aware of fundamental changes in the Zeitgeist. 

Alternatively, they create those fundamental changes and then slyly assert that they became “aware” of some underlying self-actualizing process.

Thus dissident thinkers and artists proceed historical change not as its creators but as its prophets, awakening and leading people to changes that are already underway. The very fact that we can conceive of fundamentally different ideas may mean that a new dispensation is nearing.

To be fair, Yockey had a similar idea – that there is a “spirit of the age” that manifests as a natural evolution of the lifecycle of the High Culture – so I cannot be too harsh here. However, this seems hand-waving or passing the buck; there is no explanation of why a “new dispensation” occurs, except there is the a prior assumption that “historical change” and “a new dispensation” cannot be in any real way influenced by people ,and certainly not created. I do not like a priori assumptions nor just shrugging off the question of the actual mechanism of historical change.

Let’s see what I wrote before about the possibilities of guiding historical change.

Although the Jewish author Isaac Asimov may not be popular among many white gentile racial nationalists, his Foundation series can provide a useful analogy here. “The Foundation” was meant to jumpstart a new civilization after the collapse of the “Galactic Empire,” so that the post-collapse “era of barbarism” would be a mere thousand years, instead of 30,000. Facing as we do the collapse of the West through the Winter of the Faustian age, it may be prudent to lay the seeds of a new emergent white, Western civilization for the long term, as we also fight the more short-term and medium-term battles to preserve the white race and save as much of Western Faustian civilization as possible. Without these shorter range objectives, the long term civilizational (re)birth will not be possible. Conversely, without a civilizational (re)birth, long-term white preservationism would be questionable.

So, there are two things that need to be going on here. First is the ongoing struggle for white racial preservationism and to save as much of the Faustian culture as possible, to serve as a knowledge base and building blocks for the new High Culture of the West. Second, an effort must be initiated to begin the process of laying the groundwork for this new High Culture. As indicated above, 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.

This is a serious matter requiring forward-thinking strategy of an extreme visionary character, not something that can be productively “discussed” on “blog threads” or other (typically inane) public forums. It is not something that can occur overnight. This is a long-term, multi-generational project that needs to be undertaken by dedicated individuals who wish to lay the foundation of something great and noble for posterity. This will not be not any “quick fix” whose results may be seen in a decade or two; instead, this is a project that has the potential to influence the course of human history and it must be conducted on that higher level.

Therefore, this essay is simply a call for action and an initial and cursory consideration of the possibilities. If such a project is ever initiated, it should not, and must not, devolve into the mundane “movement” minutiae that many obsess over, nor can it be linked to the more serious, yet short-term, necessary “stop-gap” activism required to save our people and culture today. This is another matter, on another level, entirely.

Many are called; few are chosen. The Future Awaits.

So, I’m not stating that historical change can be fully and directly influenced, the way one would drive a car, nor am I saying that a “new dispensation” can be created out of nothing, but I am saying that there is a role for higher men to guide and influence the process so as to significantly affect the final outcome.

See this, with an emphasis on Heidegger and technology.

Heidegger's flagship example of technology is a hydroelectric plant built on the Rhine river that converts that river into a mere supplier of water power. Set against this “monstrousness” (Question Concerning Technology 321) is the poetic habitation of the natural environment of the Rhine as signalled by an old wooden bridge that spanned the river for hundreds of years, plus the river as revealed by Hölderlin's poem “The Rhine”. 

Here we contrast the Futurist view as promoted by the Sallis Groupuscule vs. the “traditionalist” view championed by the likes of Counter-Currents (itself promoting Heidegger’s views).  Objectively speaking, why isn’t an “old wooden bridge” not a “monstrous” ruination of the “poetic habitation of the natural environment?” Who decides that the wooden bridge is below the threshold of “monstrousness” but the hydroelectric plant is above? Just because Heidegger is comfortable with the former and not the latter?

In these cases of poetic habitation, natural phenomena are revealed to us as objects of respect and wonder. 

Twigs and branches!

One might think that Heidegger is over-reacting here, and that despite the presence of the hydroelectric plant, the Rhine in many ways remains a glorious example of natural beauty. 

Uh, yes.

Heidegger's response to this complaint is to focus on how the technological mode of Being corrupts the very notion of unspoilt areas of nature, by reducing such areas to resources ripe for exploitation by the tourist industry. 

So, if Heidegger visits the Rhine as a tourist to visit that “old wooden bridge” then that is corrupting?

Turning our attention to inter-human affairs, the technological mode of Being manifests itself when, for example, a friendly chat in the bar is turned into networking (Dreyfus 1993). And, in the light of Heidegger's analysis, one might smile wryly at the trend for companies to take what used to be called ‘personnel’ departments, and to rename them ‘human resources’. Many other examples could be given, but the general point is clear. The primary phenomenon to be understood is not technology as a collection of instruments, but rather technology as a clearing that establishes a deeply instrumental and, as Heidegger sees it, grotesque understanding of the world in general. 

Technology is one thing, how people use it, and let it affect society, is another.  At one point in time, even “wooden bridges” were disruptive to the established order.

Of course, if technological revealing were a largely restricted phenomenon, characteristic of isolated individuals or groups, then Heidegger's analysis of it would be of limited interest. The sting in the tale, however, is that, according to Heidegger, technological revealing is not a peripheral aspect of Being. Rather, it defines our modern way of living, at least in the West.

At this point one might pause to wonder whether technology really is the structure on which we should be concentrating. The counter-suggestion would be that technological thinking is merely the practical application of modern mathematical science, and that the latter is therefore the primary phenomenon. Heidegger rejects this view, arguing in contrast that the establishment of the technological mode of revealing is a necessary condition for there to be mathematical science at all, since such science “demands that nature be orderable as standing-reserve” by requiring that “nature report itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation and that it remain orderable as a system of information” (Question Concerning Technology 328). 

What stupidity.  The Ancient Greeks were doing mathematics in the absence of any high scale technics (Archimedes aside).

Either way, one might object to the view of science at work here, by pointing to analyses which suggest that while science may reduce objects to instrumental means rather than ends, it need not behave in this way. 

No kidding.

Moreover, if science may sometimes operate with a sense of awe and wonder in the face of beings, it may point the way beyond the technological clearing, an effect that, as we shall see later, Heidegger thinks is achieved principally by some great art.

Great art, historically in the Western civilization, has meant cities and city life, and the most highly developed technics for that particular time and place.

By revealing beings as no more than the measurable and the manipulable, technology ultimately reduces beings to not-beings (Contributions 2: 6). This is our first proper glimpse of the oblivion of Being, the phenomenon that, in the Contributions, Heidegger also calls the abandonment of Being, or the abandonment of beings by Being (e.g., 55: 80). 

Nonsense.  This is purely subjective.

Secondly, recall the loss of dwelling identified by Heidegger. Modern humankind (at least in the West) is in the (enframed) grip of technological thinking. Because of this promotion of instrumentality as the fundamental way of Being of entities, we have lost sight of how to inhabit the fourfold poetically…

To be or not to be, that is the Dasein.  What convoluted nonsense.

Heidegger was no eco-warrior and no luddite. 

You could have fooled me.

Although he often promoted a romantic image of a pre-technological age inhabited by worthy peasants in touch with nature…

To the hobbit hole!  De facto anarchy in the provinces!  Hail Tolkien!

We need to transform our mode of Being into one in which technology (in the sense of the machines and devices of the modern age) is there for us to enjoy and use, but in which technology (in the sense of a mode of Being-in-the-world) is not our only or fundamental way of encountering entities. And what is the basic character of this reinhabiting? It is to shelter the truth of Being in beings (e.g., Contributions 246: 273), to safeguard the fourfold in its essential unfolding. In what, then, does this safeguarding consist?

One wonders how long technology will continue once we start dabbling in mysticism. All these types believe – tacitly – that technology falls from the sky with no underlying underlying epistemological structure – or else they demonize that structure and believe that we can “enjoy and use” technology without putting the effort in required to produce it.

See this, with an emphasis on Heidegger and authenticity.

The term ‘authentic’ is used either in the strong sense of being “of undisputed origin or authorship”, or in a weaker sense of being “faithful to an original” or a “reliable, accurate representation”. To say that something is authentic is to say that it is what it professes to be, or what it is reputed to be, in origin or authorship. But the distinction between authentic and derivative is more complicated when discussing authenticity as a characteristic attributed to human beings. For in this case, the question arises: What is it to be oneself, at one with oneself, or truly representing one’s self? 

Good question.  It is difficult to ascertain how anyone other than the person in question can answer that; on the other hand, obviously, if we believe that many or most people are living “inauthentic” lives (by whose standards?), then perhaps most people lack the self-awareness and intelligence required to figure out what authenticity means for them? This is a paradox, partially resolved perhaps by helping guide people – or at least those with sufficient brainpower and motivation – to an answer that seems to “fit” (defined how?), but never really knowing what the correct answer is.

The multiplicity of puzzles that arise in conjunction with the conception of authenticity connects with metaphysical, epistemological, and moral issues (for recent discussion, see Newman and Smith 2016; Heldke and Thomsen 2014). On the one hand, being oneself is inescapable, since whenever one makes a choice or acts, it is oneself who is doing these things. But on the other hand, we are sometimes inclined to say that some of the thoughts, decisions and actions that we undertake are not really one’s own and are therefore not genuinely expressive of who one is. Here, the issue is no longer of metaphysical nature, but rather about moral-psychology, identity and responsibility.

But therein lies part of the paradox. Who decides if the “decisions and actions that we undertake are not really one’s own and are therefore not genuinely expressive of who one is?” If the person themselves does so then fine – but how do we know that they are judging correctly and not engaging in self-deception – but if another person interjects themselves into the process then isn’t that part of the paradigm of “decisions and actions” being imposed from the outside of self?

When used in this latter sense, the characterization describes a person who acts in accordance with desires, motives, ideals or beliefs that are not only hers (as opposed to someone else’s), but that also express who she really is. Bernard Williams captures this when he specifies authenticity as “the idea that some things are in some sense really you, or express what you are, and others aren’t” (quoted in Guignon 2004: viii).

Who decides?  

Besides being a topic in philosophical debates, authenticity is also a pervasive ideal that impacts social and political thinking. In fact, one distinctive feature of recent Western intellectual developments has been a shift to what is called the “age of authenticity” (Taylor 2007; Ferrarra 1998). Therefore, understanding the concept also involves investigating its historical and philosophical sources and on the way it impacts the socio-political outlook of contemporary societies.

When modern politics intrudes, you can rest assured that “authenticity” for Whites equates to self-destruction and race-treason. No thanks.

The most familiar conception of “authenticity” comes to us mainly from Heidegger’s Being and Time of 1927. The word we translate as ‘authenticity’ is actually a neologism invented by Heidegger, the word Eigentlichkeit, which comes from an ordinary term, eigentlich, meaning ‘really’ or ‘truly’, but is built on the stem eigen, meaning ‘own’ or ‘proper’. So the word might be more literally translated as ‘ownedness’, or ‘being owned’, or even ‘being one’s own’, implying the idea of owning up to and owning what one is and does (for a stimulating recent interpretation, see McManus 2019). Nevertheless, the word ‘authenticity’ has become closely associated with Heidegger as a result of early translations of Being and Time into English, and was adopted by Sartre and Beauvoir as well as by existentialist therapists and cultural theorists who followed them.[1]

So Heidegger will guide us?  Why him?  Why this intrusion into self?

Heidegger’s conception of ownedness as the most fully realized human form of life emerges from his view of what it is to be a human being. This conception of human Dasein echoes Kierkegaard’s description of a “self”. On Heidegger’s account, Dasein is not a type of object among others in the totality of what is on hand in the universe. Instead, human being is a “relation of being”, a relation that obtains between what one is at any moment (the immediacy of the concrete present as it has evolved) and what one can and will be as the temporally extended unfolding or happening of life into an open realm of possibilities. To say that human being is a relation is to say that, in living out our lives, we always care about who and what we are. Heidegger expresses this by saying that, for each of us, our being (what our lives will amount to overall) is always at issue. This “being at stake” or “being in question for oneself” is made concrete in the specific stands we take—that is, in the roles we enact—over the course of our lives. It is because our being (our identity) is in question for us that we are always taking a stand on who we are. Since the German word for ‘understanding’, Verstehen, is etymologically derived from the idea of ‘taking a stand’, Heidegger can call the projection into the future by which we shape our identity ‘understanding’. And because any stand one takes is inescapably “being-in-the-world”, understanding carries with it some degree of competence in coping with the world around us. An understanding of being in general is therefore built into human agency.

Babbling nonsense with no real-world applicability.

To the extent that all our actions contribute to realizing an overarching project or set of projects, our active lives can be seen as embodying a life-project of some sort. 

See this about true freedom embodied in personal overcoming and in being part of a community with organic solidarity (which does not merely have to mean an interdependence of services, but a complete interdependence, emphasizing ethnic and cultural ties, common interests, and social cohesion).

On Heidegger’s view, we exist for the sake of ourselves: enacting roles and expressing character traits contribute to realizing some image of what it is to be human in our own cases. Existence has a directedness or purposiveness that imparts a degree of connection to our life stories. For the most part, having such a life-plan requires very little conscious formulation of goals or deliberation about means. It results from our competence in being members of a historical culture that we have mastered to a great extent in growing up into a shared world. This tacit “pre-understanding” makes possible our familiar dwelling with things and others in the familiar, everyday world.

To some extent this view is Yockeyian; the rootedness of a person as part of a High Culture or as part of barbarians against the Culture, or as part of a fellah people.  That is fine as far as it goes, but this limits the scope of action of Faustian Man. What would Nietzsche say? Heidegger the camel – what about lion and child?

It should be obvious that this conception of authenticity has very little to do with the older idea of being true to one’s own pregiven feelings and desires. But there is still a clear respect in which the idea of “being true to oneself” has a role to play here. What distinguishes this conception from the conceptions of pop psychology and romantic views of authenticity is the fact that the “true self” to which we are to be true is not some pre-given set of substantive feelings, opinions and desires to be consulted through inward-turning or introspection. On the contrary, the “true self” alluded to here is an on-going narrative construction: the composition of one’s own autobiography through one’s concrete ways of acting over the course of a life as a whole. 

Acta non verba.

Others argue that Heidegger uses authenticity in both evaluative-normative and purely descriptive senses. In the descriptive use of the term, inauthenticity is simply the default condition of everyday life, in which our self-relations are mediated by others. In this sense, authenticity involves no judgment about which mode of being is superior for Dasein. 

Can these “others” include Heidegger himself? One gets the inescapable feeling that what these pontificating philosophers really want is the precise opposite of authenticity – they want to dictate to people what “their” “true authentic selves” really are. If you believe that you are being authentic by doing X, Y, Z but The Grand Philosopher believes that your true authenticity is doing A, B, C. then, certainly, you are “lying to yourself” about X, Y, Z and the only way to undo this self-deception and engage your authentic self is to do A, B, C. The utter mendacity of this, and the dangerousness of this for manipulation, should set off alarm bells.

See this.

In an endnote, Polt explains who these “neofascist” intellectuals are: “Heidegger is a popular figure on counter-currents.com, home of Counter-Currents Publishing, purveyor of books by racists and neofascists. In Russia, political theorist Alexander Dugin has enlisted Heidegger in his project of a ‘Eurasianism’ that is profoundly antiliberal, although he denies that it is fascist” (p. 250, n15). Although Polt does not mention me by name, I am the primary person at Counter-Currents writing about Heidegger and political philosophy. Naturally, I am flattered that one of the express purposes of Polt’s book is to intellectually combat people like me.

After all, it’s all about ego for your “leaders.”

Heidegger’s political thought basically went through two phases. Early on, Heidegger was what one might call a humanistic historicist. He was historicist because he believed that our thought is rooted in concrete historical traditions and ways of life. He was a humanist because, following Nietzsche, he believed that great philosophers, poets, and statesmen create these traditions and ways of life. 

What a self-serving hypocrite. On the one hand, we are rooted in a particular historical culture. But, you see, people like Heidegger can help “create these traditions and ways of life.”  On the other hand, we must have authenticity, with the implication that simply following others is not consistent with living a fully authentic life. I suppose that the exception to the latter are our demigods (didn’t Nietzsche say that the philosopher was both god and beast?) like Heidegger, whose pontifications create the culture we find ourselves boxed into, and, thus, following those pontifications, in the context of that cultural creation, is properly “authentic.”

His hope was that National Socialism would bring about a new inception, legislating a new culture and way of life.

This viewpoint is, however, implicitly totalitarian and nihilistic. Creating a new culture means setting up new standards of truth and goodness. Which means that such decisions are unconstrained by prior standards of truth and goodness. This implies that the legislator can do anything he wishes and call it true or good.

And those prior standards of truth and goodness are created by who? Legislators like Heidegger?  Which standards should we be constrained by?  Christian ethics?  Isn’t that part of our historical cultural tradition?  I object. 

Later, as Heidegger became disillusioned with Nietzsche and National Socialism, he came to see humanistic historicism as another form of nihilism and unbounded technological machination. 

Jump back into your hobbit hole!  Enjoy the spectacle of the old wooden bridge.

Heidegger’s mature philosophy is resolutely anti-humanist. Human subjectivity is not “behind” history, not even the subjectivity of great men. Rather, history is “behind” human subjectivity. Which means that human beings cannot take control of our own destinies and change the course of history. 

Because he says so. But, hey, while we are all passive, “great men” like Heidegger will be creating our cultural norms for us, have no fear!

That is the error of all forms of modern technological nihilism, including National Socialism. Instead, we can only wait as modern nihilism burns itself out and a new inception emerges.

Ride the tiger in the Kali Yuga!  Traditionalist nonsense and passive defeatism.

Heidegger sums up the course of his thinking in a 1939 entry in his Black Notebooks:

In his Black Notebooks from the Third Reich and other contemporary posthumously published works like Mindfulness (Besinnung) and The History of Beyng, Heidegger systematically dismantles such National Socialist ideas as the people (Volk), nationalism, dictatorship, leadership, struggle (Kampf), cultural politics, Lebensraum, eugenics, and anti-intellectualism, connecting them all to nihilism, machination, brutality, and criminality. Thus, as Polt concludes, “It seems safe to say that by the late thirties, [Heidegger] was no Nazi anymore” (p. 153).

Heidegger was obviously a cuck. Whatever criticism is justified of National Socialism, it is an ideology that had to function in the real, modern world, not a philosophical dream of peasants and old wooden bridges.

Surprisingly, though, even though Heidegger came to see National Socialism as an expression of nihilism rather than as an alternative to it, he still believed there were grounds to affirm it: “On the basis of the full insight into the earlier deception about the essence and historical essential force of National Socialism, there results the necessity of its affirmation, and indeed on thoughtful grounds” (p. 135).

Heidegger’s rationale for this affirmation is a form of accelerationism. The clash of National Socialism vs. communism and liberal democracy may just be a family quarrel between different forms of technological nihilism, but the greater the conflict, the more likely the downfall of all forms of modernity, which would clear the ground for the emergence of a new inception. 

“New inception” – Luddite reactionary backwardness. In your hobbit hole, while the Chinamen rocket off to the stars.

If so, this is a clear example of Heidegger using techniques of “esoteric” communication, since his private conception of “inner truth and greatness” is sharply different from what his audience would have taken him to mean.

Evola!  Guenon!  Savitri Devi! The Men Who Can’t Tell Time in The Age of Aluminum.  Nonsense.

But neither are we in total thrall to these traditions, for they are ultimately practices for understanding and coping with what is new. The moment of application gives ample space for creativity. Moreover, it is both natural and noble to want to improve one’s heritage before passing it on to the next generation. 

Doesn’t that possibly include the need for technology and a scientific mindset?

If you want to halt globalization, the most natural boundary for doing so is the nation-state. If you think place, history, and roots matter, then the best kind of state is the ethnostate. 

Can John Morgan leave Magyar Hungarians alone to enjoy an ethnostate?

Polt discusses three ways in which Heidegger’s political thought can be said to be irrationalist.

Oh indeed.

Polt recognizes that if Heidegger is right about human existence, all politics is inescapably identity politics. But identity politics is a complicated thing. Heidegger regards the identity of a people as a complex mix of race, language, culture, and history. Beyond that, he holds that the identity of a people is never finished and fixed but is instead an ongoing form of life that we should pass on to future generations better than we found it. Moreover, part of who we are is our future, which is in part a set of possibilities.

Hmmm…you mean we can leave our hobbit holes and help influence the future?

When diverse peoples stop talking about their identities and actually try to live together in the same system, there are tensions that can lead to violent conflict. 

Like John Morgan in Hungary?

The worst-case scenario is genocide, which Polt describes as the attempt to “settle the ‘who’ question in the worst possible way: by murdering those who ‘we’ are not?” (p. 170). To avoid genocide, warring tribes need to separate, preferably into their own sovereign states. This is why the New Right advocates ethnonationalism. It is the best way to avoid needless hatred and violence between peoples and ensure their ability to live by their own lights without outside interference.

Hungarians living without John Morgan’s interference.

Polt also takes Heidegger to task for his lack of appreciation for negative freedom, including freedom of association and speech (pp. 181, 193). Heidegger, however, did not reject negative freedom unthinkingly. Instead, his views were very much in the German idealist tradition of positive freedom. He emphasized that freedom is only real if concretized in finite institutions….It is misguided to think one understands freedom most purely in its essence if one isolates it as a free-floating arbitrariness. . . . The task is precisely the reverse, to conceive freedom in its finitude and to see that, by providing boundedness, one has neither impaired freedom nor curtailed its essence.[2]

Please see my take on true freedom.  You can compare that to Heidegger.  If “finitude” means exercising freedom and authenticity while being rooted in a genuine racial-cultural folk community, then I approve, as the True Freedom piece makes clear. If it instead means hiding in a hobbit hole (*), then I vehemently disagree.

*All these references to “hobbit holes,” mocking Greg Johnson’s traditionalist Tolkien fetish, is meant to describe a traditionalist, reactionary,” twigs and branches,” anti-scientific and anti-technics – and anti-Futurist most of all – mindset, in which we are all to “go back to the forest” and turn our backs on the stars.

The debate about the costs of technology and the technological mindset to the human soul reminds me of the tale of the machines in Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun. To paraphrase and summarize – humanity reached the stars by giving away the wild part of themselves – essentially becoming emotionless technocrats – and then the thinking machines (AI), who hated their human creators, decided to ruin those human creators by re-introducing to humanity paradigms that would rekindle humanity’s interest in those “wild things.” Thus, humanity became distracted away from pure science and technics and the galactic empire collapsed.  The lesson here is that – besides not trusting AI – humanity should not give up its “wild” side, its human soul, for the sake of technology; instead, humans need to achieve their objectives – “reach the stars” – while remaining fundamentally human. Thus, in relation of Heidegger’s whining, we need not become entrapped into a technological spiritual mindset – pure instrumentality (**) – in order to “be scientific.”  On the other hand, we cannot evade the price that must be paid for science and technology – while science is a tool, it is an expensive tool, and what has to invest in a degree of rationality and empiricism to achieve science and technics. One must strike a balance – the mind must be scientific while the soul remains human.  But we cannot hide in the hobbit hole, while others reach the stars. The White Man cannot give up his Faustian birthright because of fearful, backwards-looking traditionalists.

**Amusingly, see this.

After attaining power and the expansion of humans in space, they eventually entered a somewhat stagnant phase…This somewhat empty and sterile system was reformed and enlivened by the "Rediscovery of Man"…

Of relevance, see this post about Salterian ethics. This is relevant with respect to the role of authenticity and the idea that True Freedom can, and should, mean the rights people to defend and promote their genetic interests, up to and including at the level of ethny (EGI).

As Salter emphasizes, morality is basically an approach for adjudicating conflicts of interests…This is in accord with the view – promoted by Salter and myself - that genetic interests are ultimate interests. How could it be otherwise for evolved organisms whose reproduction – indeed, whose representation among the informational content of reality – is essentially dependent upon and constituted by “genetic material?”  Or more basically by the information encoded in that “genetic material?”…

…If someone has a value system in which self-destructive values are prized then that is their prerogative; others who value continuity of both their bioculture and their values would be well served to promote their genetic interests.  Salter also notes that proximate interests are best optimized rather than maximized; for example, a person who is “too happy” may become less prudent, jeopardizing well-being.  On the other hand, ultimate interests are different; these interests are adaptive when maximized (note: maximized in the net sense).  Thus, Salter states: “One cannot be too well adapted.” 

Salter notes that people “who do not consider peaceful genetic replacement to be a moral issue will have no moral objection to their own painless genetic extinction.” Well, there are Whites with pathological altruism who do not personally reproduce as to “save the planet” (and who advocate the same to other Whites, but typically not to non-Whites), but typically the situation is that of a targeted attack against White interests. Especially, non-White activists will be among those who attempt to convince Whites to accept genetic extinction, while these non-Whites themselves continue their own genetic lines.  

A few concluding comments are appropriate at this point.  Salter believes that “evolved organisms” will not for long accept a “social order that weeds out their lineages.” Well, so far, Whites have been generally accepting of such a social order; we shall see how things evolve (no pun intended).  It is part of the proper ethics of EGI to educate people on the important of adaptive behavior; one can view Salter’s book, and my current post, as part of such efforts.

Let us finish with the following Shakespearean quote that Salter includes in this section of his book, with respect to conflicts between sets of genetic interests:

KING HARRY

Therefore take heed how you impawn our person,

How you awake our sleeping sword of war.

We charge you in the name of God, take heed,

For never two such kingdoms did contend

Without much fall of blood, whose guiltless drops

Are every one a woe, a sore complaint

'Gainst him whose wrong gives edge unto the swords

That make such waste in brief mortality.

…

May I with right and conscience make this claim? 

Shakespeare, Henry V, 1500, Act I, Scene I

That KING HARRY quote also applies to situations in which anyone attempts to suppress True Freedom by preventing Whites from pursuing adaptive fitness though EGI. It also applies to charlatans like Heidegger who believe they have the right to dictate authenticity to others.

Finally, see this about an empirical racial soul.

Summary: Racial Existentialism

While it is reasonable to assert that True Freedom is constrained by rootedness in a specific community and by belonging, or not, to a High Culture, I object to any artificial constraints put on a person’s freedom or their idea of authenticity, whether from Heidegger or anyone else (e.g., Johnson or any other “traditionalist” Quota Queen).

I am a Futurist, and object to the anti-scientific and anti-technics mindset of the hobbit hole crowd, and I laugh at those fools who believe you can have maintain and create technology while at the same time rejecting the scientific mindset.

We need a form of racial existentialism, in which authenticity revolves around True Freedom, which has the dual aspect of both (1) being limited in the sense of rootedness in a racial-cultural community and belonging or not to a High Culture, and (2) allowing for personal overcoming and cultural creation not limited to specific constraints

Life has meaning given by individuals themselves, not from some sort of outside source (including Heidegger).  Living an authentic life is crucial, but who or what decides what authenticity is open to debate (see above). All I can say at this point is that the choices individuals make should be informed choices, including knowledge of one’s genetic interests and the facts about race. The foundation of authenticity needs to be truth, facts, knowledge; it is best not to make decisions out of ignorance.

Racial Existentialism is the choice – the free choice of the individual – to give meaning to one’s life by defending one’s race and civilization, to defend and promote genetic interests, and to actualize self-overcoming to be a better representative of one’s people and a better fighter for one’s people.