(or, Employing Liberal Individuality to Form a New Collectivism)
4292 words.
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely. Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
– Carl Jung
Those who take an essentialist view of tradition, as many on the broad political Right generally will, regularly list the tribulations currently prohibiting us from the ideal state of being, one of the top examples being Liberalism itself. In our current historical period, it’s easy to see why people across the political spectrum decry Liberalism, especially if you weld “Neo” as a prefix. This declaration of opposition springs from a variety of conflicting zones, from Muslim Fundamentalists to Marxist Radicals to Ecofascists.
They will claim that is Western Liberalism that has led to social atomization, the breakdown of tradition, the disintegration of community through rampant urbanization, the rise of homosexuality, and indeed Capitalism itself. All the social ills, we are told, emerge out of Liberalism which has dominated global affairs, and as such it must be annihilated. Rarely do those advocating the decline of Liberalism explore the rise of Liberalism, opting to speak as if it is an extraterrestrial mind virus descended upon humanity, or global bureaucratic subterfuge without an organic cause.
As nations across the world fall under the sway of the dominant Liberal world order championed by Western powers, perhaps it is only those who have generated Liberalism who have the power to maintain, change, or unravel it. And as such, only those who understand Liberalism are equipped to grapple with it rather than appeal to strange new gods for its collapse.
Is the Prison of Bars or of Gravity?
Critics would be wise to investigate the history of Liberalism outside of what Liberals mythologize, which is that Liberal values are simply the progress of the continual incline of enlightenment stretching back to antiquity; everything we do now is superior to the past, all distinctions are consigned to the dustbin of history, and the key to universalization has been attained. According to Liberals, liberalism is inevitable, and this is their primary response to criticism. This is exemplified best in the famous work “The End of History and the Last Man” by Francis Fukuyama, where by accepting this framing of constant upward progress we assume that the present situation is inherently superior to anything that came before, and that each moment we progress into the future is superior to the last. By assuming this, a scientifically inclined mind asks: is there an perfected endpoint to development? The answer, to Liberals, is a resounding yes, and we are living in it. With all human development having concluded, we are now left only to tinker with the minutiae in the prevailing Liberal world 1.
“Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an “end of history”: for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.”
– Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man.
While certainly Western Liberals would not recite this line for line, it nonetheless represents the core of their position. They will claim that everything is as good as it has ever been – especially in materialist terms – and since they are the only ones concerned with human happiness, every critique must be interpreted as anti-happiness , anti-development, and anti-stability. Since Liberalism has a unique claim to the very concept of progress, any criticism of it is a subversive attack to plunge us not only into the past, but into objective failure since everything that came before is worse.
If one were to dismiss the revisionist history put forward by modern Liberals, the creation of Liberalism can be traced back to a small window of time in a very distinctly European set of historical circumstances. Far from being the universal code hidden behind antiquated social corruptions, Liberalism reveals itself as the final practical form of the Enlightenment era, itself a social revolution grown out of the Scientific Revolution that preceded it.
In his book “The Crisis of the European Mind,” Paul Hazard summarizes this time not as a heroic victory of idealism, but a bedlam of political ideation seeking to rework our understanding of the world in a dozen different ways; a war of critique that endeavored to unpack every assumption we had about everything, hurling every European civilization towards nihilism by way of academia and its force amplifier of politics. Rather than a steady evolution, it was an intellectual knife fight where exiled radicals took on their monarchical enemies, atheists took on religion, a newly self-aware populous took on the ruling classes, and every traditional convention was questioned 2. From the outset it was deeply political.
Here we saw the birth of Rationalism as the prime contender to fill the hole that was gouged so savagely by this critique, and it is this worldview that dominated the European identity to this day. If the Enlightenment was an outgrowth of uniquely European inquiry, Rationalism was its sharpening to a scalpel and aimed outward.
“Time was, long ago, when the idea of the Gentleman had been regarded as the creation of Reason. But that was the whole point; Reason was something different now from what it did in those days. Reason was now no longer a meditating power, imposing an order based on accommodations, compromises, give-and-take. It was a critical force whose main duty was to enquire, to examine, to question. To this sort of Reason, which was never satisfied with the way things were, the Gentleman was not persona grata.”
– Paul Hazard, Crisis of the European Mind
Why did Liberalism emerge in Europe in the sixteenth century and nowhere else? And why does Liberalism seem to graft so incoherently onto other cultures when it is attempted? The obvious reason appears to be that it is a distinctly European conflagration of ideologies, which themselves can only be arrived at through the distinct political situations and religious histories local to the Western continent. In this sense, Liberalism is an outgrowth from the European spirit, rather than a bad ideology that fell out of the sky one day. Or according to some, a wretched plot designed to sabotage Europe from within. Thus it cannot be surgically removed.
Liberalism codified sovereignty to the lowest atomic unit of the civilization, and corruption by way of the critique of rationality tasked those individuals with dismantling everything around them. Once the pillars of tradition, spirituality, historic institutions were cleared away, civic nationalism energized with scientific universalism emerged to fill the hole. This is the fully realized paradigm of Political Liberalism: the legalistic compromise to keep nihilistic self-annihilation at bay.
The roots of our current predicament were are embedded in the soil of European Man’s quest for absolute truth and the inescapable desire explore the unknown, which Europeans cannot remove from their identity lest risk becoming regressive peasants. The irony is that while Liberalism births the distinct atomization we often currently decry, it also establishes the importance of the individual as an active participant in the larger structure rather than a passive asset. Despite what would eventually become of Liberalism as we now know it, one thing it granted the individual was ownership over the system they are a part of, and thereby acting akin to white blood cells rather than unengaged human capital. While this sense of self would be common in tribal or paleolithic societies, it is commonly lost in more advanced civilizations.
“Our European Mission is to create the Culture-State-Nation-Imperium of the West, and thereby we shall perform such deeds, accomplish such works, and so transform our world that our distant posterity, when they behold the remains of our buildings and ramparts, will tell their grandchildren that on the soil of Europe once dwelt a tribe of gods.”
– Francis Parker Yockey
While we are daily confronted by the corruptions and fallen states directly caused by the collapse of tradition and our eager wading into the unknown in all directions, the solution now is to explore how complex ideas can live in the individual, rather than how to make the population more docile. Collectivism failed on a large scale because it was overestimated the depth of the grave of the traditionalist soul inside the Last Man. Liberalism can boast psychology and psychiatry as outgrowths of the scientific and individualistic worldview, and while many will correctly identify the multitude of incorrect assumptions and mistakes birthed by these movements, we routinely employ the terms pioneered by them. Which is to say, we may hate the manipulative nature of psychology, but we accept that such a thing as the unconscious exists, or how dreams are significant, or that childhood trauma can direct a man’s entire life. While we may hate the application of psychology as a convenient method to dismiss or imprison, to dismiss and forget what we have learned from it would put us at a disadvantage. We would be throwing a great many of our tools into the ocean.
To summarize, perhaps Liberalism is a trial by fire that the Western man must pass through, and at present those who have no walked the same path cannot provide solutions to the societal problems that plague us. The collectivist lionization of the worker rings as hollow as that of the peasant; it holds no truck to the 21st century mind. Even those who lash at Liberalism cannot escape thinking and behaving within the Liberal context.
The only way out is through.
How do we increase the duties, capabilities, and ideological depth of each individual to match that of the collectivist horde? More directly: can the schematic of an empire be coded into a single white blood cell?
Vectorization Creates the Empire Man
Individuality grants you power but that power can be hijacked and wielded against the system which you are a part of. Your oppressors see you not as a monument to unknowable individuality, but rather a vector for a targeted group that can be exploited in the name of chaos. We are in an epoch of mind control, color revolutions, and information warfare. You are viewed as a weapon to be utilized against your own sovereignty, whether that takes the form of a nation, a religion, or some other identity.
“Colonel Boyd identified these three new levels [of war] as the physical, the mental, and the moral levels. Furthermore, he argued that the physical level – killing people and breaking things – is the least powerful, the moral level is the most powerful, and the mental level lies between the other two. […] The fact that the root of Fourth Generation war is a political, social, and moral phenomenon, the decline of the state, means there can be no purely military solution to Fourth Generation threats. Military force is incapable, by itself, of restoring legitimacy to a state.”
– William S. Lind, 4th Generation Warfare Handbook
We exist in an era of Total Politics, where warfare includes targeting hearts & minds of entire populations, and civilians are part of the battlefield. This takes for form of active insurgents and spies, but also leveraging the population of a nation to destabilize its own power structures, as seen during the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union. While we may bicker about which specific instances have been executed in the recent decades, we all understand that nations at odds can allocate capital to a variety of agitators to upset stability with plausible deniability. Nobody has the luxury of being a noncombatant3. Whether you like it or not you are seen as a soldier, and whether you like it or not you are effectively your own nation given the knowledge central powers have over your identity, your goals, and your behavior. This power, hammered into shape upon the anvil of liberalism, can be deployed against anyone on Earth regardless of culture, religion, or ethnicity.
With such a highly advanced infrastructure directed squarely upon you, novel defenses are required to protect oneself. One must ask themselves, “is my rebellion serving outside interests?” Darker still, “are my dissident actions approved and directed by my own government?” Evading the surveillance state is a non-starter, and in fact you will only identify yourself as troublesome if you create a gaping hole where the all-seeing eye surveys, increasing its focus until it inevitably finds you. How is one to generate a movement that isn’t identified and ultimately approved by the government it seeks to separate from? Rather than avoid the deep state, you must wage a private war of disinformation to confuse it. For instance, instead of having a single online presence, you deploy a multitude across every platform and so no patterns are immediately distinguishable. Your total absence from social media itself will be a red flag, so you create dummy accounts with different personalities. Or rather than keeping your personal identifying information a closely guarded secret – your dox – you tie dozens of probable leaks to yourself. In this sense your online footprint must become schizophrenic. This will become easier with the evolution of AI deepfake technology where you can feed contradictory evidence into the public and set a standard where nothing discoverable can be totally trusted. On an individual level, you will employ strategies that would have formerly only been available to entire nations, and you will function as one as you sit at the center of an evolving web of complexity.
Small changes are representative of the whole no matter what we do. This is what Benoit Mandelbrot was attempting to capture in his book “The (Mis)behavior of Markets,” where the innovator of the concept of fractals applied his methodology to the real world, specifically economics. While fractals are most well known in the world of mathematics, it’s important to acknowledge the entire purpose of fractal geometry was to reapply mathematics to the real world rather than the pure abstract world it had become accustomed to.
In this sense, fractals – a measure of roughness and complexity – were designed to apply to the complicated lived reality we experience every day, primarily for practical reasons. For example, measuring from a distance proves to be a smooth and coherent exercise, but the more one zooms in and measures the same area, we notice that the measurable distance changes and irregularities introduce themselves. The closer we look, “roughness” becomes apparent, and this is where Mandelbrot attempts to drag mathematics from its preferred world of beautiful symmetry into our lived reality of jagged imperfection4. This is the root of fractals: the study of complexity, and in the case of economics, randomness.
“If you look at coastlines, if you look at that them from far away, from an airplane, well, you don’t see details, you see a certain complication. When you come closer, the complication becomes more local, but again continues. And come closer and closer and closer, the coastline becomes longer and longer and longer because it has more detail entering in.”
– Benoit Mandelbrot, The (Mis)behavior of Markets
Nature is not straight lines; it is hidden complexity that scales up as the measurements scale down, just like zooming in on a fractal. We cannot tell nature to recede to a Platonic and Euclidean conceptualization where everything is more convenient; we are forced to dwell in a world where we understand the roughness exists and we need to tailor our models to take this into account. As it stands, our ideologies have not taken in the developments and our understanding of complexities. Our current ideological models are like pure math in the sense they endeavor to model human systems, and they have an extremely low resolution understanding of how the individual has inexorably changed in the centuries within the secular liberal framework. Ironically Marxism had the truest understanding of the task before it and planned a surgical war on the individual in an attempt to strip it from its roughness. Of its plethora of failures, the one that stands tallest is that the tool it had at its disposal was a magnifying glass when in reality it needed an electron microscope.
So while roughness in society – in the form of individual psychology, tradition, spirituality, and everything that proves inconvenient to the Pure State – is inevitable, it has maximized in the dominant Liberal context. And while both governments and firms have taken this into account, it is frequently lost on those targeted groups who instead dream of abstract organizational coherence.
Dare to be Unabsurd
Our present investigation into establishing new concepts of unity in an inescapable paradigm of individuality is made possible by the layperson’s advanced understanding of psychology. Like liberalism, there’s no shortage of detractors across all ideological persuasion that lament, in one form or another, the psychiatric revolution. Be it the spiraling catastrophe of the trans movement, extrajudicial imprisonment on mental health grounds, or armchair self-diagnosis leading to substance abuse, there is no shortage of grievances from nearly every group. Yet as valid as those criticisms are, we still enjoy the fruits of it. We decry the Freudian analysis of sexuality while accepting the existence of the unconscious, or we correctly denounce psychiatric gaslighting while acknowledging the importance trauma and how it can shape the mind. If you believe in the effectiveness of persuasion – by torture or trickery – you appreciate psychology.
Our knowledge of how the human mind generally functions can be appropriated for our ends. In his book “The Society of Mind,” Marvin Minsky expounds a model for mental development that not only gives us a working understanding of how our minds construct themselves gradually beginning in infancy, but therefore helps us develop artificial intelligence. The reasoning being that if we truly understand how the human mind is generated, we ought to be able to recreate it.
Beginning from the day humans are born, Minsky makes a case for how we learn, how we build our cognitive faculties over time from basic coordination to complex reasoning, and how our mental software aggregates in complexity over time. How lower-level functions cluster to accomplish increasingly complex ones seems logical enough, but what’s more interesting is how we create a unique internal context to compare circumstances. One of the core tenets that is applied to machine learning is that as we learn basic processes – picking up objects, moving around, creating signals for attention – we begin to automate them with what are known as K Lines. In short, a K Line is a process formed by the discovery of complex tasks, and by grouping movements and functions together we can create shortcuts when they need to be repeated in the future 5. K-Lines are synonymous with memories themselves, and they are formed when you connect one function to another function contextually to attempt more complex tasks. This is why most of your memories are tied to you learning something new, rather than the mundane.
As our minds develop in complexity, we no longer actively think of these lower-level actions and they seem to operate automatically, like breathing or chewing. As we grow, smaller k-lines connect to larger ones, like the function of building with blocks connecting to building a house. As we age we scale up, and as we do we cease paying attention to the lower-level functions, and in fact lose the ability to coherently interface with our baser operating system.
“The words and symbols we use to summarize our higher-level goals and plans are not the same as the signals used to control lower-level ones. So when our higher-level agencies attempt to probe into the fine details of the lower-level submachines that they exploit, they cannot understand what’s happening. This must be why our language-agencies cannot express such things as how we balance on our bicycles, distinguish pictures from real things, or fetch our facts from our memory.”
– Marvin Minsky, Society of Mind
You will notice this if you have ever become keenly aware of your own breathing, or the left-foot-right-foot process of walking. Once we kick up to the more advanced level dominated by long-term goals and abstract communication, living more simply is an impossibility. The human mind, as in human organizations, cannot simplify itself, yet those developmental actions – some could say traditional rituals – remain ever present, even when we lose direct consciousness – or control – of them.
To borrow from the mythological, Thomas Carlyle addresses this as a much broader phenomenon in his classic work “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History” wherein he surveys the landscape of human history, focusing on the different types of heroic figures that define each era. While there are many divergent details to be found with such a large sample size, we find that as we move into the modern era, the type of hero we permit in our culture changes, while the heroes of times past struggle to exist. For example, in the ancient world it was far more common to see Hero As Divinity, as in the case of Odin and man literally occupying the space of a god. As time marches on we see cultures shifting Hero As Prophet, exemplified by the Abrahamic figures such as Jesus and Mohammad6. The man is not himself a god, but he has a special status as an intermediary between humans and the divine. Later, we see Man as Poet, like Dante and Shakespeare, who can perhaps channel the divine but has no direct relationship with it. In fact, the idea of a man speaking directly with God would be seen as unacceptable in these times. Following that we see Hero as Priest, Hero as Men of Letters, and finally Hero as King where we have the modern revolutionaries like Napoleon all the way to Donald Trump. The Kings of our eras serve God no differently than any citizen, and perhaps a King saying he could commune with God would be cause for concern amongst the intermediary powers. Most importantly, even in cases where we do see prophets emerge in the 19th and 20th century, they are widely regarded as frauds at best; we simply will not tolerate any man who says he has a new message from God, and we are unequipped to tolerate a Hero from the past to solve our modern problems. With the possible exception of Mormonism, there are far more examples in Scientology and personality cults. In the 21st century, can you imagine anyone claiming to occupy a space of divinity being taken seriously?
“I consider Hero worship to be the grand modifying element in that ancient system of thought. What I called the perplexed jungle of Paganism sprang, we may say, out of many roots: every admiration, adoration of a star or natural object, was a root or fiber of a root; but Hero-worship is the deepest root of all; the tap-root, from which in a great degree all the rest were nourished and grown.”
– Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History
Ideological frameworks exist in part due to our inherent drive to withstand the entropic nature of nihilism, which even as a violent critique Liberalism had to answer for. Our goal remains to fight nihilism as effectively as possible operating within the Rationalist paradigm that is currently in crisis by no longer possessing the ability to answer novel questions as cancer. Why can’t a child consent to body mutilation? Why can’t slavery be endorsed as long as superior material conditions are achieved? Why shouldn’t society take an anti-natalist position for academic reasons? There was a time when these questions were only the purview of fringe minds not accepted in polite society, but now that they have achieved dominance it is revealed that Liberalism truly cannot contend with the evolved agents of 21st century nihilism.
This can be accomplished by reaffirming those things nihilism seeks to destroy, but they must be reaffirmed in new ways. A great many movements in the Contemporary Right only endeavor to combat degeneration with absurdity, and reaffirm what absurdities apparently harm its enemies. At a deeper level, they will attempt to invigorate traditionalism with the same language and context of the past, which fails to inspire the folk at scale. Any sarcasm directed at nihilism feeds it, and any critique of nihilism justifies it. We succeed only in whispering cruelty in the heart of a tornado, while dreaming of a hyperreality that can build no home in our soul.
The antidote to nihilism is practicing extreme and unironic ownership over ideals, and to have those ideals be non-invertible. This must be done like placing bricks to build the cathedral, and having the empire be these carefully constructed cathedrals. Th very concept of collectivization must change, as Western dissidents will forever operate within the Liberal frame. Indeed, the only people who will be able to transcend Liberalism are those who have passed through it; salvation will not be found in the savage fantasies of modern Third Worldism. This is all to say, there is no way to employ the assumed unity enjoyed by the ancient world. A cloud will survive where an obelisk fails, and you cannot become cancer to fight a tumor.
- 1.Fukuyama F. The End of History and the Last Man. Free Press; 2006.
- 2.Hazard P. The Crisis of the European Mind: 1680-1715. NYRB Classics; 2013.
- 3.Lind WS. 4th Generation Warfare Handbook. Castalia AG; 2016.
- 4.Mandelbrot B. The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence. Basic Books; 2006.
- 5.Minsky M. Society Of Mind. Simon & Schuster; 1988.
- 6.Carlyle T. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. Independently Published; 2022.