Economic censorship

Jan 15th, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
12 comments

This blog post revisits a topic I started writing about long ago in the 1980s. Back then, Al Gore thought the flavor of the week was social conservative on the heels of the Reagan Revolution, and so he pimped out his crazy wife Tipper on a scheme to put obscene content warning stickers on music.

The idea was that these little stickers would warn us that the music we were about to purchase contained excessively sexual, profane, Satanic, violent or drug promoting themes. The illusion was that this would aid parents, who were only too happy to ignore whatever Junior was listening to in his bedroom.

In reality, the result was a whole lot of brouhaha that went nowhere. The right cheered and the left claimed it was the new Hitler. In the meantime, record stores began demanding IDs in advance of purchase, regardless of the visual appearance of the purchaser.

As might be predicted, the ensuing drama lasted for another couple years until everyone forget and ran on to a new trend. Parents went back to griping about what the kids listened to and doing nothing to interrupt it. Kids went back to buying music, letting it program their brains, and then the next craze.

But as they say, watch an experienced gambler. One hand does something that attracts your attention while the other covertly makes the move you should be worrying about. Those who desire to manipulate mass opinion learned a lot from the Parents Music Resource Center debacle (for that’s what it was called).

What they learned is this: if you want to censor something, the dumbest move you can make is to make a law. Don’t bother — instead, gather 500 of your closest friends and start making calls. Call the record labels and the record stores. Threaten lawsuits, threaten boycotts, but even more, find a good taboo.

For example, no one cares these days about sex, drugs and Satan. Permissiveness allows our controllers even greater power. First, it breaks down social standards except those taught in schools as political dogma.

Next, it means everyone is doing something wrong at all times, which provides probable cause, which then gets investigators into the door with a warrant. If you know your target likes drugs, piracy, illegal porn or weapons, it’s easy to get him or her booked into the system and turn them informant.

A good taboo is something that is politically offensive, meaning that it is perceived by many people as threatening their way of life. The biggest ones are Communism, pedophilia and racism. If you accuse any person of these, it’s considered proof that they are Hitler or worse.

After all, we fought wars for universal equality. The Communists were against freedom, hated Coca-Cola and were probably closet racists too. Every one of the pillars of belief upon which we build this great nation is against Communism, pedophilia (think of the children!) and racism.

These lessons came to bear in the next half-decade when political correctness took over. It took over not because the new generation wanted it, but because the Baby Boomers had finally gotten old enough to run departments. The hippie revolution was underway in its second phase, that of adulthood.

It rubbed us the wrong way the same way any stodgy adult “you must do this” proclamation did, but also because these people wanted us to re-live their lives and in doing so, forget our own. What also unnerved us was how effective economic censorship was.

If you wanted something destroyed, accuse it of Communism, pedophilia or racism. Call up the employers of those who supported it; they got fired. Call advertisers; ads went away, and it went bankrupt. Protest in front of stores or list them as racist Communist sympathizers, and they went out of business.

A new tool of great power was in the hands of those who disagreed with ideas. All groups could use it; all you needed were enough cash-spending followers to cause economic damage, and you had virtual control over what could be seen, heard, bought or sold.

The best part was that it was not censorship. Censorship we are told implies a government or some other with singular power preventing freedom of the press or speech. Economic censorship allows you to publish whatever you want, but anyone caught with it loses their job and so no one pays attention to it.

It’s not just America. In any liberal democracy, we don’t need censorship: we simply determine that your ideas should be unpopular, and we spread the word through media, and soon consumer pressure hides the offensive material from sight.

Over the weekend, MSNBC President Phil Griffin said that Buchanan was not allowed on the air indefinitely after the release of his latest book, and has not decided whether to allow the commentator to return.

The book, Suicide of a Superpower, brought to MSNBC calls from several civil rights groups and the Anti-Defamation League to drop Buchanan for its incendiary racial and anti-Semitic remarks, among which are, according to the Times, claims that America is being damaged “ethnically, culturally, morally, politically” by the rise in minority populations and the lament that the “European and Christian core of our country is shrinking.” Griffin described the ideas in the book as not being “really appropriate for national dialogue, much less the dialogue on MSNBC.” – Mediaite

We’ve gone from banning Satanic drug-addicted hyper-sexual heavy metal and obscene hip-hop to chasing down the political enemies of the State, and busting them for offending us by violating the moral norms of our society. How bitter, calcified, antiquated and unstable.

Yet it remains popular because we get our cake and eat it, too. We have free speech, and we also get rid of any ideas that interrupt the constant pursuit of pleasures of the self. This way, we can maintain the pleasant anesthetized feeling that everything is just fine… until the end, of course.

Posted in: Politics.
Tagged: · · ·

Easy answers

Jan 14th, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
3 comments

This election cycle it is dismaying to see the Right again in disarray, unable to find a candidate who is a clear winner. There are many reasons for this but the primary failing is a lack of commonality of purpose among the right, which makes any candidate but a generic candidate a risky venture.

Without a clear purpose, people turn to easy answers, which means convenient semi-truths which are inoffensive. This means that we pick our leaders not on the basis of the most important problems that we face, but the least consequential ones. Politics becomes a game of symbols and emotions.

Since 1968, the American and European right-wing parties have become conservative in name only. During the tumultuous events of that decade, it became clear that social pressures win out over substantial issues, and that leftism ideas are always more socially successful because they are the easiest answers.

Leftism gives us a primitive view of the world that is comforting in its simplicity. If everyone just did whatever they wanted to, leftists reasons, no one would be upset and we could all get along. That would mean a lack of problems between people, which leftists assume are caused by dissatisfaction.

Herein is revealed the predominantly negative nature of leftism. Since its thesis is that dissatisfaction is our problem, it seeks causes for dissatisfaction so it can fight them and if that fails, blame them for its failing. It is an airtight alibi, the kind of binary worldview that makes cults thrive.

The right has nothing to compete with this but has been trying to adopt the leftist method. In Europe, the New Right has adopted a victim mentality similar to that of liberalism where it blames corporations, NATO, and religion for its problems.

In America, the right has retreated even further into a bastard form of leftism called “neoconservatism,” which reduces conservatism to patriotism based on the liberal values of freedom, democracy and equality — and commerce, which supports all three.

The sad fact is that by the numbers, most humans want to believe easy answers and do not care if those answers are a lie. When the Cold War was raging, it was de rigeur among Western intellectuals to embrace Communism as “a better way,” even as the evidence of its failure mounted.

In fact for each killing field, mass starvation, dreary everyday life and eventually systemic failure, the leftist intellectuals strengthened their pro-Communist stance. They did not care about the results of Communism. They cared about it as a symbol, or a social idea, that said “I’m not like the others — see me do the ironic and unexpected and support this radical viewpoint.”

The right will never be as popular as the left because the right is not based on easy answers and social symbols. The right is based on results. It is failing now because it is trying to appeal with easy answers, but has none to offer.

If the right wants to succeed, its salvation lies in telling the truth: our civilization is falling apart, and this process was accelerated by the 1968 unrest. We need to re-construct so that live in a nice place that’s going somewhere again, instead of trying to get more comfortable with the ruin.

This stance would require the right-wing to drop the pretense and come out with some actual right-wing opinions, despite them being un-PC. For example, recognizing that most people don’t have a clue about politics and this is why leftism is popular. Or that taxes are high enough, and the problem is that governments waste money like drunken sailors.

We cannot undo the past. It is here. We can instead point ourselves toward better goals for the future. These goals can aim for results instead of pleasing social symbols and easy answers. That is the essence of the right and until we rediscover our voice in its praise, we will forever be adrift.

Posted in: Politics.
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Fishkill

Jan 13th, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
16 comments

Nature provides for us examples — “metaphors,” even — of informationally-similar events and their outcomes, which enables us to see how our own actions will turn out.

Economics, or the study of the flow of resources, provides the most fertile ground for comparison. Take for example an analysis of large government, which conservatives oppose.

Large government creates opportunities that do not exist in reality. It does this through regulation, which creates needs that did not previously exist (like car inspections) and through hiring people to serve in its ranks, which can create a new class of workers.

But it has consequences. When we fertilize our fields, and rain carries the fertilizer into streams, it creates a rush of nutrients that results in a bloom of algae. This in turn absorbs oxygen that fish need, suffocating many of them. In addition, our big nuclear and manufacturing plants can generate huge outflows of warm water, which support species that normally do not exist in the area, and cause them to reproduce rapidly, choking out native species. The result in both cases is a fishkill, or the death of thousands or millions of local fish at once.

When conservatives criticize large government, they are attacking it on several levels. First of course is its tendency to be ineffective at high cost; that’s the primary problem. The secondary problem is that big government creates the equivalent of a fishkill in our economy and society.

The Federal Government is our nation’s largest employer, hiring over 2 million people at an average salary of $74,403 per year each 1. One analysis found that state and federal workers earned 35 percent higher wages and 65 percent higher benefits than private-sector employees 2. Another survey found that federal workers earned double what their private-sector counterparts did 3. Another report showed that the number of government workers earning $150,000 or more has surged tenfold in the past five years, doubling under Obama 4.

We should also look at opportunities government creates with regulation. 59.2% of tax forms were filed by paid preparers in 20075. The government estimates we spend 2-5% of our GDP on tax preparation expenses, including paid preparers 6. Every government-required regulation or statute generates some form of cost, and many of them are quite high. The mention of car inspection is a mild one — about $50 per year — but think of every area which government regulates. Each regulation means more bureaucrats, more rules, and more paid preparers and experts on the outside, from immigration lawyers to diversity consultants and disability-compliant web design. All of that cost is ultimately passed on to you.

This is not to say that we as a society should not address these issues. We should in many cases. However, government is perhaps the least efficient tool. Its employees have no incentive to perform and are virtually un-fireable, so results are poor.

Even worse is that it creates these weird pockets of sudden wealth. The normal middle class is squeezed out and replaced with opportunists, professional bureaucrats, carpetbaggers and parasites. This is the economic equivalent of fishkill, and like the real thing it is miserable and leaves a massive stench.

Posted in: Politics.
Tagged: · ·

Paradox

Jan 12th, 2012
by Forest Johnson.
14 comments

The Left is right. They have it sorted out. Sort-of…

You didn’t expect to read that, here, did you?

Go on: have a little giggle. You know you want to. Scoff a bit, and ridicule. Then settle down to some serious consideration of what it is you’re scoffing at.

There’s something seriously slippery going on when it comes to grasping exactly what it is that’s going on, whenever one tries to make any sense of the weird ways of leftism. It defies description. It goes on defying description, until, quite suddenly, it doesn’t.

I met someone, not so long ago, online, who became so wrapped up in my written words, that he became what could be described as a ‘disciple‘. A follower. One who looks-up-to. One who admires, and consequently starts trying to emulate.

Some people would enjoy being placed on such a pedestal. It would boost their feelings of self-esteem, and provide them with a pleasant self-satisfaction.

It didn’t do that for me. Quite the contrary. It made me not only uncomfortable, but quite annoyed. And why was that?

Because. My admirer started taking words I had written, and repeating them to others. Which sounds like it might be a good thing. But it was not a good thing at all. Because…

Words – any words – are no more than symbols. They describe something, but are not the thing they describe. The original words may be accurate, or as accurate as mere words can ever be, but they describe only that which the speaker – or writer – is describing.

The reader – or listener – who repeats those words, is not describing anything. He is merely repeating. Describing a description. Thus something is missing. And that something is of far greater importance than the words that describe it. Do you see? Read that bit again, until you are sure you do see.

The original is real. What follows is removed from the real, and becomes something else entirely. At best, it is an interpretation of the real, that, being repeated to a new recipient, gets to be interpreted by that new recipient, and thus becomes ever less real, and ever less accurate a description of the original reality.

Many people will have less trouble wrapping their heads around such concepts, than I do. Possibly because they will not bother with trying to actually understand those concepts. They are, after all, rather twisty-turny things, that seem to say not much. But they do say much. Are you satisfied you realize how much?

So there I had this admirer, clearly not understanding my words in the first place, repeating those words to others, as if they were his own words.

Thus the words became completely empty vessels, conveying nothing.

The words, that had begun their journey, containing a close description of reality, had now become completely unreal, and were conveying nothing.

Their only function – in fact – was to manipulate the reader – or listener – into believing that the writer – or speaker – was something that he was actually not. Was wiser, more insightful, smarter, more experienced, than he actually was…

The real, had become a parody of reality. The wisdom had become an insipid package, promising much, but containing nothing. All hype, and no content. Appearing to be genuine, while being no such thing. Do you see?

And so it is with leftists.

Much of what they say, the dogma they repeat, carries the ring of truth, the seeds of sanity. While – in truth – containing nothing at all but destructive doublethink.

Leftists need to be the bringers of The Message, without ever having understood what The Message is.

To the leftist, The Message arms them against lesser beings. It gives them credentials. It automatically makes them better than the recipient of The Message. More caring. More human. More giving. More whatever. And this more-ness, this better-ness, stands in for ever actually being any of these things. Instant gratification. The reward without the price.

Does this begin to sound familiar?

Leftism should not be discarded as completely value-less. In its maddening lunacy, resides some great truth. But remember, always, that this truth has been unintentionally rendered paradoxical, by the isolation of that truth from its result.

Leftism can be useful, even broadly beneficial, once one shoots the messenger, and considers The Message, for oneself. There actually is A Reality out there, and anything applies, in some way, to understanding it. No information is entirely useless.

Paradox is a thing to keep careful watch for. True, while being not true. Valid, while being invalid. Wise, while being idiotic. It all has value, or not, depending upon the use to which it is put, and the angle from which one views it. The thing that has has no value, whatsoever, is the prophet who has no understanding of what he preaches. The messiah that promotes only his own self-esteem. The leftist!

Posted in: Politics.
Tagged: · ·

Christianity

Jan 11th, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
91 comments

Blog posts are most pleasing when they give us simple answers, even if negative answers. Even if we disagree with a blog post, having it come out with a simple solution gives us a sense of control, even as we mock the proposed solution.

It’s disturbingly similar to sporting events. As soon as the other team is on the field, we all know where we stand. We have strong group identities and the resulting comforting position among the group’s members. We know what we want and for a few moments, we can forget about the larger questions of life and focus on the simpler task before us.

This blog post will gratify none of those desires. An excellent discussion of religion popped up in the comments to the fourth segment of our interview with John Morgan, Editor-in-Chief of Arktos. The question we stumbled into was one of religion.

Among those who study history and can speak honestly about it without trying to win brownie points from others by repeating political orthodoxy, it is well-known that diversity of any kind makes for a failing civilization while relative homogeneity makes a stable one. This includes religion.

On the other hand, many of us have issues with Christianity because it seems to be a spiritualist form of liberalism. “The meek shall inherit the earth” and other charitable notions translate into a false altruism based on pity for those beyond help, and using that public charity to prove higher moral status.

One poster kicked the whole debate off by cautiously opining that, although a Nietzschean, he believed religion was necessary and that Christianity might be the religion of the West and thus worth supporting. Others mentioned the positive role Christianity has had in shaping the modern West.

Zooming out from our immediate experience, it is clear that Christianity is thriving. Christians reproduce faster than atheists and disaffected urban intellectuals, which guarantees us that the next generation will speak more Bible than Foucault. Even more, Christianity seems to emphasize many positive values, such as family, chastity, traditional gender roles, moral behavior and loyalty to culture.

To get really heretical, we can take this a step further. “Christianity” is a label for a set of beliefs, customs, rituals and symbols. It arose from an amalgam of Greek, Jewish, Hindu, Middle Eastern and European pagan beliefs. After it rose, it was extensively modified. Like all things, it is a work in progress.

It is not unheard of for nations or generations to modify Christianity to suit their own needs. After all the Bible is like a vast index, and depending on which talking points and examples you pick, you can use it to support many interpretations.

Since Christianity is part of the West, unlikely to go away, and a strong advocate of conservative values, it would be unthinkable to cast these people aside because of our reservations about the current interpretation of Christianity. Even more, we can see the failings ascribed to Christianity showing up in pre-Christian societies like ancient Greece.

The ancient Hindus viewed all religions as sects of Hinduism. Their explanation was that since there is only one world, and thus one divine source, all religions are different languages attempting to describe that reality, and should be accepted much like academics accept contemporaries and their arguments.

Religions are more similar than we may think. The difference between Christianity and an idealized conservative warrior pagan faith may be small — perhaps 10% difference — and so the path of least resistance would be to accept Christianity, but in exchange for that, demand a few changes in interpretation.

The main difference between modern Christianity and its pagan forbears is that Christianity presents a moral absolute based on method, while paganism asserts a morality of social order based on the results of our actions. An evil act with a good result is a good act in paganism, and possibly in future modified Christian sects.

True, that is playing with fire. Religion and factionalism have destroyed more societies than they have saved. However, as those who would rebuild a dying civilization, it is our job to make dangerous decisions, and take great risks, in order to claim the greatness that sleeps within us.

Posted in: Politics.
Tagged: ·

Origin of supernatural probabilities

Jan 10th, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
19 comments

A: There is something greater-than-material.

Q: But why?

A: Because it is good.

Q: Which part?

A: The whole. Ignore the parts: focus on how they fit together.

Q: Why does this matter?

A: To choose.

Q: Why?

A: Because we are part of it; there is only One and all are parts of that.

Q: There is no One Removed?

A: There is only One.

Q: But there is war and hatred.

A: Part of the One. Relationship between parts, interaction, process and context.

Q: But there is death.

A: Functionality is more important than persistence.

Q: What of the soul?

A: If it has been created, it exists in the One.

Q: Forever?

A: There is no time at that level. It is a state necessary for time, but not prior to it.

Q: But you are a nihilist.

A: I believe nothing is inherent, no truth can be communicated, and there are no universal values. All is choice. Choice is what defines us, and what in part effects what will be.

Q: Why choose this path?

A: Because the whole is good, I pursue the good, so more good occurs.

Q: Why do you care?

A: Because good is more beautiful than anything else.

Q: And there is no inherent purpose?

A: No inherent purpose, only an inherent process. The singular will becomes dumb parts and reconstructs itself. It is a non-linear, architectonic balancing of all parts against each other.

Q: And if I don’t want to believe?

A: That is your role, and is part of the One. Even opposing the One is One-ness, because you have emphasized its centrality.

Q: The One is divided against itself?

A: In order to be One, it must include both unity and division. All must be included; however, each must meet with the consequences of its direction.

Q: Do you have a metaphor?

A: Seeds scattered on a forest floor. Each chooses its path semi-arbitrarily based on where it lands. None must grow toward the light. Those that do, may prosper.

Q: What is “the light,” for us humans?

A: A unity of the material and tangible and the invisible, abstract and yet also real, while not projecting our own confusion onto reality.

Q: How do we reach that?

A: A process of thinking, testing and accumulating knowledge. The scientific method as a counterpart and parallel to natural selection. The process of thought itself.

Q: And what does that teach us?

A: Beauty is truth, and truth, beauty. The same order is present in all things. That which functions matches this order. High level function is beauty.

Q: And why should we care?

A: Because it is good.

Posted in: Ontology.
Tagged: · · ·

Interview with John Morgan of Arktos

Jan 9th, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
137 comments

This is a continuation of our interview with John Morgan, Editor-in-Chief of Arktos. This innovative firm publishes books about alternatives to modernity, including traditionalist, new right and ecofuturist literature. John was kind enough to take the time answer a lengthy interview, of which the final part is presented here.


In The Problem of Democracy, Alain de Benoist re-states many of the criticisms Plato had of Greek democracy. Is this a recurring problem? What’s your assessment of de Benoist’s thesis?

The New Right authors frequently refer to the Greeks when analyzing modern civilization, since in those ideas we get a sense of what civilization was back then, before all the accretions of our time. While I found much food for thought in that book, I must admit that de Benoist’s ultimate point remains muddled to me. At points he seems on the verge of advocating a return to rule by an aristocratic elite, but then pulls back and calls for direct democracy and frequent referendums. I don’t see what that would achieve apart from making society even more chaotic than it already is. While I think de Benoist’s achievement is unparalleled by any other living philosopher, I do think that he’s worked too hard to try to escape the (inaccurate) “neo-fascist” label with which he’s always been burdened.


Do you think the division between Left and Right is accurate? This question exists on two levels: first, the concepts themselves – do Left and Right exist separately as concepts? The second level is political parties. Do we have any true Leftist or Rightist parties today?

I assume we’re talking about the United States? As I mentioned earlier, if we apply the traditional, European concepts of Left and Right, there has never been a true Right in America, since the true Right is anti-democratic, hierarchical, and anti-secular. The Constitution itself is based on liberal principles, which is what the American Revolution was about in the first place. That’s why I’ve never understood why some people in our circles are so obsessed with Ron Paul. Yes, he seems marginally better than the other candidates, but ultimately, there’s not much in his thought that corresponds to the true Right. That being said, I do draw distinctions between different schools of American politics. The paleoconservatives, and voices such as Pat Buchanan’s, are much closer to the ideals of the true Right than anything we see in mainstream politics today. I see very little of interest in any of the political parties. The Republicans may make an occasional ideological gesture, but it’s always done to placate their base and never amounts to any lasting change in American society. And these days, the neoconservatives have come to play such a prominent role in Republican discourse, which, as many writers have shown, has its roots in Trotskyism!


Do you think the New Right and the more ideologically consistent elements of the American Right, like the paleoconservatives, can be reconciled? It seems the New Right is not fond of Americanization, but they are less clear about America itself.

I’m not certain. While there is definitely common ground between the two, there are also very big differences. One of the most important is the New Right’s identification, following Nietzsche, of Christianity as the root of the West’s ills. The paleoconservatives are very concerned with the preservation of America’s Christian identity. While I am sympathetic to the New Right intellectually speaking, I think it’s definitely true that it won’t be possible to build any effective political ideology around the idea of rejecting Christianity.

As for the issue of Americanization, the issue there is the exportation of the worst of American culture into all the corners of the globe, not so much an issue with America in itself. I don’t have any problem with that. Popular culture in America has been detrimental to the nature of our own society, so it’s hard to imagine how it could have a positive effect in other countries. But it’s certainly not the case that the New Right rejects America and its people as a whole.


As an American, do you think American hegemony has brought anything positive to the world? What would you prefer that your birth-country would do with its time?

I don’t embrace knee-jerk anti-Americanism. To say that everything in America or that America does is bad is incredibly simplistic. I’ve come to appreciate that most acutely after living in India. At the same time, I think America was at its best in its early decades, when America (mostly) kept to itself and the government didn’t intrude into its citizens’ lives. Things started to go wrong with the Civil War, when the government placed itself at the disposal of northern bankers and industrialists and declared war on a segment of its own population. In the twentieth century, America has convinced itself that it has a God-given obligation to convert the rest of the world into a facsimile of itself, through bombing campaigns if necessary, while enriching itself by peddling the most degenerate cultural products known in all of history. Meanwhile, the government has been continually eroding the rights of its own citizens. As the economy slides further into the toilet, I really do think they are preparing for the day when we are all serfs on an enormous, Third World plantation. I think America needs to be reorganized along communitarian lines, as the New Right advocates. Even the New Right authors themselves acknowledge that many of the ideas they discuss actually have their origins in some of the more radical American social thinkers, such as the Southern Agrarians. America has the unique distinction of being the only country that was founded on abstract principles rather than on tribal necessity. In one sense, it’s a weakness, since we lack the traditions and rootedness that other nations possess by their very nature, but it can also be a strength, since we have a long tradition of living in communities that try to retain their unique identity while living in harmony with the others (provided that they are not under threat). So, in one sense, America is inherently a “New Right” country!

In the twentieth century, America has convinced itself that it has a God-given obligation to convert the rest of the world into a facsimile of itself, through bombing campaigns if necessary, while enriching itself by peddling the most degenerate cultural products known in all of history.


What is “liberalism”? Is it a philosophy, or aggregate of negative opinions toward other philosophies?

I have recently been reading a book by the recently-deceased American Catholic conservative scholar, Thomas Molnar, entitled The Counter-Revolution. In it, he identifies the common aspect of all liberal movements dating from the French Revolution, whether we are talking about the Soviet Union or present-day Democrats in America, as atheism. I think that’s ultimately what it is at its root. Without God, we can only think in terms of workers, productivity, comfort, “human rights” (whatever that means), and so on – all the things that liberals advocate, and all of which are based upon a reduction of humanity to utilitarianism. All that is best in any culture is that which strives for the ineffable and the transcendent.


If you could publish new works through Arktos, what would they be? Are you looking forward to any original works that are being written now? If so, how do budding authors submit their works, and what would be required for those works to be considered?

Oh, there are literally hundreds of books we’d like to do! Plus we keep getting new submissions all the time. It’s just a question of resources and what we can acquire the rights to do. Personally, I would love to publish some of Ernst Jünger’s works in English, as well as some of the works of other Conservative Revolutionary authors. I would also like to do more Evola, and branch out into the wider world of traditionalism. There’s always been a sharp divide between Guénonians, Schuonians and Evolians. I don’t know if it’s possible, but I would love to have Arktos be the first publisher to bridge those chasms. We’ve already done so in a small way with our journal, The Initiate, which has published both Evolian and Guénonian/Schuonian articles side-by-side. I’d also like to see us get into more American material, especially paleoconservatism.

As for original works, we do have several coming up. There’s the Tito Perdue novel I already mentioned. We will also be publishing The Clash of History by Dominique Venner, a French author who has been quite influential in France for decades but who is virtually untranslated. This is a book he wrote specifically with Arktos in mind, and features Socratic dialogues between himself and various figures from European history. We also plan to publish a translation of a book of Alain de Benoist’s essays on the current global financial crisis. There will likely be another book by Kerry Bolton on the horizon as well.

If someone has a manuscript to submit to us, we’re more than happy to consider it. You can send it directly to me (john-at-arktos.com) or to info-at-arktos.com (replace -at- with @). Just please be certain that your work is a serious one that says something original and that will continue to have relevancy for some time into the future – overly topical works which will go out-of-date quickly aren’t worth the effort involved in publishing them in book form.

Parts I II III IV.

Posted in: Books.
Tagged: · ·

Reality

Jan 8th, 2012
by Forest Johnson.
39 comments

There’s been a lot of talk, here, recently, about the nature of ‘reality’.
Philosophers have been going on about it forever, and the more people that become interested in philosophy, and philosophers, the more they go on about it, too.
Maybe that’s good, maybe not. But it can get a little tiresome, hearing people endlessly quote someone else’s view of this slipperiest of things, and their often uninformed opinions of it.

So here’s what I’m gonna do:
While other people have been busy leading more or less ‘normal’ lives, I’ve been not-so-busily engaged in living a completely different sort of life. A life of adventure, uncertainty, no little danger, and complete material poverty.
This has given me some rather unusual life-experience. I’ve done, been, seen and known things that very few people ever get to approach. And since I’ve just knocked back some rather good Mead, the traditional drink of warriors and shamans, I’m gonna hold forth on some of those more unusual things I’ve run into, along the way.
Well, OK, not some of those things, but rather one of those things…
Reality.

It probably started, many years ago, with an LSD trip. A tiny pill called a microdot: scarcely larger than a pin-head.
People who don’t know, think LSD is a drug. It isn’t. The dose one ingests is so incredibly minuscule that it couldn’t possibly have the effect it does, if were merely a drug.
No. LSD is a catalyst. It works in parallel with chemicals already present within the body, and increases their function many-many-fold.
That first LSD trip is the only one that counts. Subsequent experiences are like trying to shoot a hole-in-one, a second time. Not gonna happen, see?
The first one makes it unmistakably obvious that our everyday perceptions of life are almost totally arbitrary, and almost completely dulled-down. We may as well be sleep-walking, while dreaming the most boring of dreams, and one that never, ever changes.
That’s almost all I’m gonna say about LSD, since it’s a whole study in itself.
It’s a jump-start to consciousness, is all. Not consciousness itself.

Following the LSD experience, I chanced to read a weird book by some odd chap named Lobsang Rampa.
It was about the ‘third eye‘. That’s right. And you thought you only had two. Wrong!
Finding this third eye, however, is troublesome, and even now I’m not sure I know any more about it than I did then. But no matter. The point is, it caused me to embark upon a lifelong quest to plumb the depths – or scale the heights – of spirituality and consciousness. How many people do you know that have made a career of something like that? None, I’ll bet. So read on: you may never get another chance to read anything quite like this…

Drugs, of any kind, don’t do it. They are toxic, expensive, illegal, and can only hint at something that cannot be attained under their influence. Forget drugs.
The only thing that will do the trick is breathing. Yes, you read that right.
Westerners hardly breathe at all. Are you ever aware of your breathing, except when you are short of breath, or sick? No. If you are, you’re pretty unusual.
Anyway: to get anywhere, consciousness-wise, you gotta get down and breathe. Consciously. Deeply. Slowly, and deliberately. And you gotta do it for months!
Then you gotta clear everything out of your mind. Every image. Every sound. Every thought.
No memories and no hopes. No plans and no regrets. No expectations and no illusions.
Nothing.

Don’t try this at at home, unless you’re deadly serious. It’s actually dangerous. You can go insane. OK? You have been warned.

I did all these mildly dangerous things, over months, even years, along with many other things that may or may not have influenced the final outcome. Which went something like this…

“I” ceased to be human, and I ceased to be “me”. I became identity-less, and instead blossomed out into – first – a mountain. Then the mountain and the earth it rested upon. Then these things, plus the planet they were part of. Then the space they occupied. Then the whole universe, and beyond that, into everything, everywhere, always.

I started laughing, because of the realization that this was God. Not some moody old man somewhere in the sky. Me, it, this, everything. This was God. Aha! And how absurdly simple everything was, and that is why it is so invisible to people, who expect anything worth going-for, to be very complex and difficult to achieve.

Knowledge. What is knowledge? It is air in the lungs. It exists. With or without lungs to breathe it. It is there. Always. When you need some of it, it is there.
It is not something that can be owned, learned, taught, remembered, or kept.
Exactly like the enlightenment I was now experiencing.
What it is, when it is, and nothing more, or less.

Reality is reality, whether it is witnessed, lived through, experienced, or not.
It is the lattice that ties everything together. Pure energy. Pure consciousness.
Dumb-ass scientists are finally beginning to uncover this impossibility, on the quantum level.
They have gone to an awful lot of expense and trouble to “discover” this stuff, when all it needed was a bit of applied breathing.

Sub atomic particles have no default condition. They do what they feel like doing. They live.
You and I consist of these sub atomic particles. So does everything else.
God is their sum total.

Got it?

Don’t worry about reality, and what – exactly – it is.
You’ll never know, if you’re busy with trying to define it.
When you are able to detect it, you will no longer wonder.
You will have become it, and ‘you’ will no longer matter.
Not that ‘you’ ever did, in reality.

Posted in: Ontology.
Tagged: · · ·

Leftist

Jan 7th, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
16 comments

In times of political confusion, people distrust the very words they need to use to explain what they want.

For example, you will often hear that left and right no longer mean anything, or that terms like “leftist” are made-up nonsense. Even worse, people use terms like liberal, leftist, left-winger and progressive as if they meant different things.

And if you do use a term like “leftist,” some burn-out person will show up and accuse you of xenophobia — of grouping everyone who does not agree with you into one big camp, and using the convenient label “leftist” to show they’re not part of the cool kids crowd.

It’s not hard to puzzle this one out. First we start by realizing that no thing has an exact term for it; terms are symbols we use because we agree on what they refer to. Next, we have to look at those meanings, and see where they are common and where they differ.

Liberal, progressive, leftist, socialist, classical liberal, Marxist, Communist, neoconservative, anarchist and liberal democrat: these mean the same thing. Every one of them has one idea that is not held in common with other beliefs, and that idea is the central notion of liberalism.

This notion is individual equality, which is a vague term that means that society is obligated to treat any thought, notion, desire or judgment from any individual as “equally valid,” or as a reasonable idea, even if contradicted by reality.

Let’s drill that down: humankind comes before nature. Whatever a human being wants to think is true is more important than nature and her laws, which regulate the consequences of that behavior. Liberalism is a blank check to ignore the effects of one’s actions and to focus instead on human Feelings about them.

You will see this in every liberal law or policy. They will talk about moral imperatives, or even political necessities, but at the heart these philosophies endorse the same idea, which is that it is socially pleasing to treat everyone as “correct” and thus we must do away with reality.

Appearing in the latest edition of The Journal of Politics published by Cambridge University Press, the research focused on 2,000 subjects from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. By matching genetic information with maps of the subjects’ social networks, the researchers were able to show that people with a specific variant of the DRD4 gene were more likely to be liberal as adults, but only if they had an active social life in adolescence.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter affecting brain processes that control movement, emotional response, and ability to experience pleasure and pain. Previous research has identified a connection between a variant of this gene and novelty-seeking behavior, and this behavior has previously been associated with personality traits related to political liberalism. – “Researchers Find a ‘Liberal Gene’,” Science Daily, October 27, 2010

Novelty-seeking requires that you put aside the results of your actions and instead focus on how they make you feel. You might need to do something to achieve a result, but that’s boring, so focus on sensations instead and do something new or otherwise stimulating.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are stimulated by results and not the process used to reach it. For conservatives, reality and natural law comes before human feelings, desires and judgments. The world is bigger than us, and results matter more than sensations.

These differing viewpoints manifest themselves in different goals that each group seeks. As you can see, these two goal-sets are incompatible, and the only reason American politics “works” is that we pretend two groups with radically different needs can occupy the same country.

As liberals tend to like pluralism, or the idea that many contradictory viewpoints can exist at once in the same place, this plays into their hands. The less order in a society, the stronger the liberal viewpoint, because the individual alone is sovereign and thus opts for a self-based point of view.

To gauge participants’ physiological responses, they were shown a series of images on a screen. Electrodes measured subtle skin conductance changes, which indicated an emotional response. The cognitive data, meanwhile, was gathered by outfitting participants with eyetracking equipment that captured even the most subtle of eye movements while combinations of unpleasant and pleasant photos appeared on the screen.

While liberals’ gazes tended to fall upon the pleasant images, such as a beach ball or a bunny rabbit, conservatives clearly focused on the negative images – of an open wound, a crashed car or a dirty toilet, for example. – “Biology of politics: Liberals roll with the good, conservatives confront the bad,” Science Blog

Conservatives focus on the negative because their goal is to avoid the negative as a result. Liberals focus on the positive because it is their goal to feel a positive experience. Those who are worried about end results focus on those before feelings, because feelings can be deceptive.

Above it was said that a series of terms amounted to the same thing because they have the same basic meaning. It’s more accurate to say that they all converge on the same thing, meaning that they are different degrees of the same idea and all end up in the same place.

All movements left of center become liberal, and advocate for humanism, egalitarianism, individualism, utilitarianism, equality and pacifism. They value any idea that suggests what humans want to be the truth is the truth. Like The Enlightenment, they replace god/nature with the human form and desires.

All movements right of center become rightist, and advocate for Social Darwinism, naturalism, reverence, structure and everything that suggests natural law determines “truth” by the results of causes, not by human intentions, morality, desires or socially popular ideas.

If the American experience has taught us anything, it is to respect this difference because it is the only difference that matters. We can invent a hundred terms for each of these two ideas, but they remain the same in substance.

All that remains is for each of us to ask ourselves: where on this spectrum do we fall? Closer to the left, or to the right? And we should consider the bedfellows we will have, and what type of society that will produce, before we answer.

Posted in: Politics.
Tagged: · ·

The end of liberalism

Jan 6th, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
25 comments

Humankind can act quickly based on its own notions, but then we wait for nature and its natural laws to shape the end result. Even when we control the material means of our future, consequences are governed by the non-material interaction of forces, like information or mathematics.

Starting with The Enlightenment, European society went liberal with the idea that each individual’s thoughts, desires and judgments were equally valid. Mankind became more important than nature. This meant that our thoughts were more important than the consequences of our actions.

It took several centuries to see this, which was only appropriate, because it took several centuries to reach that stage of degeneracy. The root of liberalism was probably a prosperous society which sheltered its incompetents, malcontents and manipulators.

From that view, the following article takes on a different tone:

Eighty years on, it would be easy to sit back and reassure ourselves that the worst could never happen again. But that, of course, was what people told each other in 1932, too.

The lesson of history is that tough times often reward the desperate and dangerous, from angry demagogues to anarchists and nationalists, from seething mobs to expansionist empires. – The Daily Mail

They are telling us that when times are bad, the bad come out of the woodwork.

An alternate history: when times are good, the bad are able to rule because of the complacency of most people, who can’t think past when their next paycheck will arrive.

In fact, what we see through the last 2000 years of history is a process of overcoming. The intelligent rise despite the others dragging them down, and societies survive because when things are bad, the people who have been pointing out the incompetence of our social system are able to temporarily win out.

Think about the people you know. Which is more likely, that they live in denial, or that they’re magical geniuses who have everything under control until they are periodically interrupted by violent realists?

With the hazy years of The Enlightenment, we declared that each human being is more valid than nature, which is a way of talking about natural laws and the consequences of our actions determined by such laws. This legitimized denial of reality and endorsed illusions.

It just took a while to play out. Eventually, it found a voice in modern liberalism/leftism in 1789. This movement snowballed and when war was declared on the nationalists — the archetype of right-wing ideas — in China, Japan, Germany, Austria and Italy during WWII, the left found itself on top.

Its only problem after that was Communism, which is an extreme form of leftism like fascism is an extreme form of rightism. Communism was the new bogeyman.

Communist theory teaches them to believe that the most effective way to break the will of the opposition is to de-legitimize its ruling class, degrade its culture, destroy its confidence in its own institutions and its own way of life.

Hu Jintao believes that the West is waging a conscious memetic war against Communist China – because he knows that Communists including himself have been waging a conscious memetic war against Western civilization since the 1840s. Sadly, this is not yesterday’s news.

What Jintao can also see, and the reason he is actually right to fear memetic warfare, is that the West has been seriously damaged by Communist successes at memetic subversion. The damage didn’t end when the Soviet Empire collapsed, because too many people in the West internalized and naturalized Soviet attack propaganda. Many of its tropes have become tribal shibboleths of major Western political tendencies, despite being just as wrong and just as toxic as when they were first uttered. – Eric S. Raymond

The leftists pondered this, and then introduced Marxist ideas in a new way — through culture. This culminated in the West in the hippie revolutions of 1968, which showed a cultural and social force overcoming knowledge of history, politics, economics and even common sense.

When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991, the cultural Marxists reached out to their most promising allies, namely those in the commercial world. They did not ally themselves with the established industries, but “alternative” service industries like entertainment, media and art.

Eventually they expanded into other industries. The two were ideal pairs: consumerism and commerce benefit from having zero standards so they can sell whatever they want to an audience that, lacking a cultural or moral center, needs lots of products to fill the void. And leftists want permissiveness.

This new movement coincided with the 1968 generation making it into their 40s and 50s. During the 1990s, it seemed that hippie ideals had grown up, put on suits and won out over everything else. At least, they were more popular by the numbers.

After a brief interruption for a Republican president in the United States, this movement made a bold move to seize power in 2008 with the election of Barack Obama. But then a curious thing happened: leftist ideology requires the notion of an oppressor, or an opposing force, holding it back.

As of 2009, nothing held it back. It implemented its grand designs and in response, people in society began to endorse its ideas. This coincided with the results of the grandparents of those ideas, put into motion a half-century before, becoming apparent.

Results did not match promises.

As a result, in 2009 the reign of 1789 unofficially came to an end. World liberalism collapsed because its ideas simply did not work. Most people are still unaware of this, but like all truly profound social shifts, this one is occurring underground.

It is now widely accepted that the years of New Labour government were an almost unalloyed national disaster. Whichever measure you take – moral, social, economic, or the respect in which Britain is held in the world – we went into reverse.

Nevertheless, historians may come to judge that these 13 years of Labour misrule served a vital purpose. In retrospect, the Brown/Blair period may be seen as a prolonged experiment which taught the liberal Left that its ideas cannot work, do not work, and have no chance of ever working.

…So rampant and all-pervasive was the influence of this liberal-Left elite that by the end almost every meaningful action taken by the democratically elected John Major government could be sabotaged or blocked outright by a progressive alliance, which stretched through the Civil Service, the BBC, and the universities.

…A sea change is at work. In practically every area of British public life – state spending, the economy, education, welfare, the European Union (where Ed Miliband refused to condemn Cameron’s pre-Christmas veto), mass immigration, law and order – Conservatives are winning the argument and taking policy in their direction. – The Telegraph

Right now, world liberalism retains one primary strength: it is still very popular. Liberalism offers the idea that we can change our world by altering the effects of our actions without changing our actions, and that is a pleasing notion. It suggests we can keep doing what we want and turn out OK.

However, an increasing group have recognized that like drug addiction or other forms of denial, liberalism will destroy our society just as all denial has destructive effects. As a result, a backlash has formed and while we must be very patient, the downfall of liberalism has begun.

Posted in: Globalism.
Tagged: · ·

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