Amerika

History runs in cycles, and those cycles are composed of arcs. Arcs happen in the time between when an idea becomes popular and when it is revealed to be empty through the bad results that it achieves. You might think of them like fads or trends; everyone must have the new gadget, but six months later, no one is thrilled with it.

The West right now is falling out of love with modernity, which is the time defined by mass culture and mob rule. We did away with social order and, following the Renaissance™ and Enlightenment™ mandates, replaced it with the individual, which means that leadership happens through an aggregate or collective, which we call a crowd.

Over the last 229 years, the West has been ruled by its rampant plebs and their merchant-caste overlords, and this gang of criminals has systematically adulterated everything good in order to strengthen its parasitic hold on the dying civilization. People went along with it because it seemed to lead to peace, wealth, and equanimity.

With the Obama/Merkel years, however, people saw something else: the Leftist endgame. In this final stage of the takeover, the native people are marginalized and replaced with a mixed-race herd with allegiance to nothing but television and government. People correctly saw this as genocide and totalitarianism.

It seems paradoxical that the movement dedicated to individualism becomes a collectivism that ultimately suppresses individuality, but ideology and history are full of such turnarounds. Our actions are causes, and their effects are necessarily different, which means that what we intend and what we get are often radically different.

In the case of Leftism, it turns out that because Leftism is based on the idea of what we should do and not what is, the ideal naturally requires enforcement. This bonds individualists together into a collective that is necessarily intolerant of any who do not share its views.

They do not have to oppose Leftism; merely not being Leftist enough is reason for enmity in the eyes of the Leftist ideology. This makes Leftism evangelical and, like a bunch of Mafia goons demanding protection money, compulsory. It also has a cult-like effect on its followers.

For centuries, they have told us that they are the party of peace; however, Leftism has claimed more victims than any other force in history. And now, new research uncovers the tendency toward totalitarian behavior in the Left:

The preliminary findings, published in the scientific journal Political Psychology, suggest liberals could be just as likely to be authoritarians as conservatives.

…Conway and his colleagues developed a measure of left-wing authoritarianism, which was adapted from the right-wing authoritarianism scale developed by psychologist Bob Altemeyer.

…The researchers found that left-wing authoritarianism was associated with liberal views, dogmatism, and prejudice among both samples of participants, suggesting it is a valid concept.

“Our data suggest that average Americans on the political left are just as likely to be dogmatic authoritarians as those on the political right. And those left-wing authoritarians can be just as prejudiced, dogmatic, and extremist as right-wing authoritarians,” Conway told PsyPost.

At this point, we realize that both groups want the same thing: a society which enforces its standards. Now it makes sense to look at the differences between these groups.

The Right bases itself on cause and effect. It trusts that which is known to produce optimum results, and distrusts “new” ideas because none are new and most are bad. It focuses on maintaining social, religious, and mental order because it realizes that most individuals are chaotic and self-destructive.

We might see the Right as the side of Darwinism and morality. We know we cannot force people to be good, but like nature, we can select the good and elevate them above the rest. We have no over-arching theory of everything, but instead a few principles and behaviors that we apply from the real to the abstract.

The Left seeks control, meaning that it tries to regulate method (effect) in order to manipulate outcome without considering causes. As a result, it seeks to manage every detail of life according to one over-arching philosophy that is applied from the abstract to the real, resulting in a disconnect from reality.

It has one real idea, equality, which is never really defined and as a result, has no context. This means that it invades all areas of life and thought and anything which deviates from that is then viewed as an attack. For this reason, Leftists feel justified in assuming control.

Comparing these two approaches, we can see how Right-wing authoritarianism consists of suppressing all behavior but the good, where Leftist authoritarianism consists of shaping all behavior into obedience to ideology. The Right-wing version targets enemies; the Left-wing version targets non-conformists who fail to obey the control methods.

When Rightists say we want freedom, we mean freedom from control. We want Darwinism and morality: a chance to prove ourselves and be rewarded to the degree that we do well. Leftists, who are individualists, want everyone to be rewarded equally so that no individual is constrained in his individualism.

Leftist authoritarianism quickly becomes totalitarian, or dedicated to managing every aspect of the lives of those living under its rule. This was the case with the French Revolutionaries, the Soviets, and to a lesser degree, every Leftist group since.

During the Obama/Merkel years, it became clear that we were in a “soft totalitarian” regime that was as controlling as the Soviets, but did so through social methods instead. If you failed to enthusiastically affirm the narrative, your job, friends, family, wealth, and good name would go away when the crowd attacked.

As a result, the years of Leftism — including liberalism, a quasi-freedom-oriented version — have come to an end as a sea change of a cultural wave rejects Leftism:

Submission is still very clearly a dystopian novel—an increasingly popular genre these days—but, more than that, it is a meditation on the aimlessness of late-stage Western liberalism, where there is nothing much to be believe in, and nothing much to fight for, except the never-ending expansion of personal freedom. The controversy aside, Submission is strangely intriguing. Houellebecq is among a growing number of Western intellectuals flirting with anti-liberalism: Perhaps liberalism is not the unmitigated good most of us are raised to believe it is.

…In fiction and nonfiction alike, liberalism—referring here not to the left of American politics, but to the political order that privileges non-negotiable rights, personal freedoms, and individual autonomy—has come in for a beating, or at least a challenge.

…Liberalism, in dismantling traditional structures, encouraging “privatism,” and empowering an ever-expanding state, has created an existential crisis, he argues. And insisting on yet more liberalism as a corrective has only made matters worse. “One of the liberal state’s main roles,” he writes, “becomes the active liberation of individuals from any limiting conditions.” Liberty, which he argues was once about freedom from “one’s own basest desires,” was redefined to encourage the ceaseless pursuit of those very same desires.

…As Deneen puts it: “The identities and diversity thus secured are globally homogenous, the precondition for a fungible global elite who readily identify other members capable of living in a cultureless and placeless world defined above all by liberal norms.” This is a new global aristocracy, one defined by liberal ideas of “rational” education and sensibility.

While this was not designed as an attack, it reveals a great deal about individualism: it ends in a state where there is “nothing much to be believe in, and nothing much to fight for, except the never-ending expansion of personal freedom.” Much as in the French and Soviet experiments, we go out chasing a chimera of “freedom.”

This creates a “cultureless and placeless world defined above all by liberal norms” or in other words, an ideological total state where there is nothing but the dogma and narrative. The “active liberation of individuals from any limiting conditions” also removes the connections beyond the individual that give life meaning.

The “dismantling [of] traditional structures’ results in “an existential crisis” because “non-negotiable rights, personal freedoms, and individual autonomy” do not address the question of purpose, and through that civilization. We need things like race, caste, ethnicity, sex, family, class, and identity. They give context to purpose.

By succeeding, Leftism has failed: it has achieved equality, but much as might think that would be a state of heat-death where any choice is as good as any other and thus not worth making, this state of egalitarianism reduces us to trivial decisions and a repetitive existence because there is no goal outside of our material comfort and convenience as individuals.

Another way to say that is that we have lost a sense of purpose because purpose requires us to choose values, and those are native to a culture and the genetic group that perpetuates it, not universal like individual human rights. Without purpose, we have no way of saying that one path is appropriate and the others are not. We have an existential crisis because we do not know what to do with ourselves, and so instead we waste time on trivial materialism.

We need a way to choose a path into the future; this requires us to have an aesthetic or moral sense of what makes “the good life” for our specific group. This requires that instead of rationalizing our decisions based on the material conditions among which we find ourselves, we see form or idea as more important than substance and use it to guide the direction in which we shape the material world, not the other way around:

Several centuries worth of materialist, atheist, and Philistine indoctrination have convinced Modern man that Sovereignty is exclusively a matter of territorial and military authority. This doctrine proclaims the paramount importance of indoctrinating men into believing that there is nothing less important than doctrine; that man is a machine programmed for physical self-preservation by a play of unconscious biological processes and the non-thinking physical environment that takes place prior to, and beneath the threshold of, conscious awareness; that Man, pace Jeremy Bentham, has been placed under the jurisdiction of two Sovereign masters, pain and pleasure, and that the real motive force of all action is the satisfaction of physical appetite and the fear of physical punishment, with the moderating role of the soul dismissed as a ridiculous pre-scientific myth and the intellect accordingly deprecated as the mere slave of the passions where every other age, race, and civilization of Man said the exact opposite. Man, in this conception, is an animal with a huge stomach, a faint heart, and no head.

…In any complex system, information controls energy; thus, to the extent that biological and social systems aren’t corrupted or pathological, the body obeys the brain, reason controls the passions, and the Church subsumes the State in its order (and, where the Church has been ousted, the Cathedral quickly takes its place). Divine and Natural law trump positive or human law, and, as a corollary, the strong are destined by God and Nature to be directed by the wise.

The Leftist arc is ending because we are realizing that we can either have a purpose, or our purpose becomes ourselves, at which point we dissolve into a herd of selfish individualists joined in a mob whose purpose is to obliterate all mention of reality so the Roman holiday can continue.

Along with the Leftist arc, other notions based on individualism are also dying. The middle class notion of bourgeois respectability is dying. Urbanization is dying. Our reliance on material science and popularity is being replaced by a notion that we should do what is both right and excellent.

Instead of materialism, people are looking to the question of purpose and how to make life meaningful through connection to something larger than the self, per Fred Nietzsche:

Let us face ourselves. We are Hyperboreans; we know very well how far off we live. ‘Neither by land nor by sea will you find the way to the Hyperboreans’—Pindar already knew this about us. Beyond the north, ice, and death—our life, our happiness. We have discovered happiness, we know the way, we have found the exit out of the labyrinth of thousands of years. Who else has found it? Modern man perhaps? ‘I have got lost; I am everything that has got lost,’ sighs modern man. This modernity was our sickness: lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous uncleanliness of the modern Yes and No. … Rather live in the ice than among modern virtues and other south winds! We were intrepid enough, we spared neither ourselves nor others; but for a long time we did not know where to turn with our intrepidity. We became gloomy, we were called fatalists. Our fatum—abundance, tension, the damming of strength. We thirsted for lightning and deeds and were most remote from the happiness of the weakling, ‘resignation.’ In our atmosphere was a thunderstorm; the nature we are became dark—for we saw no way. Formula for our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.

We live in fascinating times of mass change. What our intellectuals, shopekeepers, peasants, and enemies wanted us to believe was profound for the past thousand years has turned out to be a path to death. “Everyone” agreed, and “everyone” can be wrong, we have discovered.

This means that some kind of strong social order — often confused for authoritarianism — is in our future. We want hierarchy, customs, and values to come back. The only one that will work without destroying us is a Rightist one, and so it is a Right-wing future for humanity, if it desires to survive.

Tags: authoritarianism, leftism, liberalism, rightism, totalitarianism