Oeaohoo

Very true… In this context, however, I am talking about the “progress” which has taken place within the modern capitalist system. In Spiral Progress terms, we could say that you are describing “Stage Blue” religious communities whereas here we are discussing “Stage Green” communitarianism, in between these being the pure capitalist system of “Stage Orange”. I will admit that there is a slight issue with the wording of this whole thing. By capitalism and communism, it may be better to read the ideologies of Anglo-America and Russo-China, though I don’t think this is ideal either.

You should be able to read this book here. I haven’t read it for quite a while but I was just reading the opening again and it made me roll around with laughter. It’s always refreshing how aloof Guénon is from all of the banal mediocrity of our times. This passage particularly: ‘Many no longer doubt the possibility of a world crisis, using the latter word in its most usual acceptation, and this in itself marks a very noticeable change of outlook: by sheer force of circumstance certain illusions are beginning to vanish, and for our part we cannot but rejoice that this is so, for it is at any rate a favourable symptom and a sign that a readjustment of the contemporary mentality is still possible - a glimmer of light, as it were - in the midst of the present chaos. In keeping with this, the belief in an endless “progress,” which was held until recently as a sort of intangible, indisputable dogma, is no longer so general, there are those who perceive, though in a vague and confused manner, that the civilization of the West may not always go on developing in the same direction, but may some day reach a point where it will stop, or even be plunged in its entirety into some cataclysm. It is possible that such persons do not see clearly where the danger lies; the fantastic or puerile fears they sometimes express are proof enough that their minds still harbour many errors, but it is at any rate something that they realize there is a danger, even if it is felt rather than really understood, it is something too that they can conceive that this civilization with which the moderns are so infatuated holds no privileged position in the history of the world, and that it may meet the same fate which has befallen so many others that have already disappeared at more or less distant epochs, and some of which have left traces so slight as to be hardly noticeable, let alone recognizable.’ Yeah! Preach it!

As conservatives, we are the undeveloped and physiologically retarded. We inhabit the Third World, not of geopolitics, but of stages of psycho-spiritual development. In the interests of transcending the self-bias that our survival imposes, we must recognise that in the contemporary progressive climate there are only two options for us: submit or die. That is why I have decided to openly and willingly acknowledge our genetic inferiority to liberals. Sure, we can try to rationalise it this way and that… but deep down we know that they are simply better than us in every way. Science has shown that this inferiority is hardwired into the structures of our brains. We can never hope to match the cosmopolitans in their open-mindedness, their love of team sports and pop music, their superficiality and sentimentality… I’ll never be able to admire postmodern art, all of those squiggles of paint chaotically thrown onto the canvas in a childish frenzy… Nor will I ever have the joy of penetrating the depths of the relativistic thinkers: neither Derrida, Adorno, nor even the greatest genius of all history, Albert Einstein, will ever mean anything to me; I will forever be stuck in a world of absolutes. How will I even survive? A life without deconstruction is like a world without oxygen! Some of us conservatives will learn our lesson. We’ll learn to humbly prostrate ourselves before the liberal elite, and the cosmopolitan world that they must succeed in bringing about. Unfortunately, however, some of us won’t… Who knows what horrors we might bring about in our resistance to progress. It chills me to even think about it. The good news is that… soon all of us conservatives will be dead! Then there’ll be nothing more to worry about.

By the way, what I am suggesting here is much weirder than simply suggesting that we are heading towards the terminal phase of “late capitalism” or that progressivism is going to lead us to a “new communism”. Extrapolating our situation to its conclusion, I see a situation where “capital” is completely subservient to the “community” at the same time that the “community” is completely subservient to “capital”! A paradoxical situation: neither will be dominant whilst both are. If this system comes to pass, it will be the ultimate parody of the primordial social order, organised around a sort of inverted non-duality.

*grabs popcorn* What do you mean by this? Why is it arbitrary? I agree that it is nonsense but it is worse than just being arbitrary. Like all of the models from which it inherits - evolutionary progressivism, psychoanalytic developmental studies, and various other vain attempts to fuse modern science (which is not to say the empirical approach itself) and religion - it is a systematic inversion of the truth.

I thank you for your sincere words of encouragement, but I’m not so sure that he would be. He very much believes in the dialectic between communism and capitalism and always used to talk about how “the West got it right”. By the way, when someone as small-minded as “DrugsBunny” criticises you, it is a good sign that you are onto something! Of course I am talking about more than just vaccines. The vaccines were a decent example of the public-private partnership and a good demonstration of just how far we have already come but there are many others. Do you believe that “progress” has taken place in the capitalistic West over the last 70 years? I think it is safe to assume that the answer is “yes.” Now, it is obvious that you are someone who would consider “progress” to be “protecting people from dangerous misinformation” by enforcing the modern love of safety, sensitising majority groups to minority struggles, enhancing the welfare state, and on the most tautological level, imposing “progressive” values. How is this all done but by state intervention in people’s lives? It is highly suspect to deny that something has happened whilst simultaneously celebrating it: that is what you people would call “gaslighting”. I’m trying not to talk so much here about whether any of this stuff is good or bad. This is a model of why things have changed in the way that they have and what these changes converge upon. It is also worth pointing out that this convergence is not complete yet, so that the West is obviously still more capitalist than communist. I see what you were saying here. Whilst it is true that a lot of what belonged to the earlier form of progressivism could be considered under the headings of “liberalism” and “capitalism”, it is still the case that the older progressivism heavily influences the new one. This is particularly true with respect to technological innovation and the modern obsession with the uses of technology for the enforcement of progressivism: AI, what Foucault called “bio-politics”, eco-technology, surveillance states, transhumanism and so on.

All of that being said, the term “Woke” is relevant even to the earlier form of progressivism, given the way that it framed itself: the “Renaissance”, the “Enlightenment”, “Illuminism”… These are all inverted adaptations of religious terminology in the same way that “Woke” is a complete parody of spiritual awakening. Sure. I suppose in relation to the theme here, it is two things: on the one hand, everything which emphasises left-wing forms of communitarianism, and on the other, the increasing intervention of the state in people’s lives. As well as what I mentioned in a comment above, the increasing intervention of the non-governmental capitalist elite in people’s lives! That’s not what I meant. Renaissance Humanism and, even more so, Enlightenment Rationalism explicitly promoted progressivism. They even gave it a capital letter: Progress! A god worthy of such decadent times… Ok, sorry to assume the worst.

As far as something short, read The Crisis of the Modern World by René Guénon! The follow-up to this book, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Time, is better but also much more intensive. Maybe I could be more specific if something interested you? If you want something easier than a book, there is a lot of overlap between my interests and the YouTube guru Shunyamurti.

…and these are the people who accuse others of gaslighting… I have no idea where to start with that. Maybe I shouldn’t have used the word “Woke”, given how bound up it is with banal political commentary, but still… Not to mention that it is obvious that, just like in the other thread, you are pretending to be genuinely posing a reasonable and harmless question, when in reality you already think you know the answer to your question. It might be useful to distinguish between two different kinds of progressivism. There is the earlier progressivism which originated around the time of the Renaissance, which emphasises liberalism, free thought, technological innovation, emancipation from the strictures of organised religion, and so on. Then there is the form of progressivism which has been predominant since World War 2, which views all of Western history through the distortion filter of Nazi Germany (even the nations which fought against them!) and creates a pseudo-religious parody of Christianity out of “marginalised communities” and the way that they have “suffered for our sins”. Both forms of progressivism are extremely dominant in contemporary discourse, on the left and the right; the so-called “conservative” parties of European nations constantly appeal to them both. Progressivism is just the cultural water that we swim in. Maybe you are like the fish in the joke from David Foster Wallace’s This is Water speech: “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

I see this as being part of the same thing because “power” in this context is essentially the ability to manipulate and exploit what people want, which is only possible because they don’t really know what they want. This is also part of the phenomenon that I am describing because the accumulation of power by a capitalist elite creates a kind of surrogate state within each state. This financial surrogate state can then demand obedience in the same way that a communist state would. The governmental state and the financial state also collaborate with each other through things like public-private partnerships. Also, this contributes to the global ideology of “communist capitalism” because, unlike the governmental elite, the financial elite is relatively borderless. @lisindel Your criticism seems pedantic to me. For example, will you admit that a State with very high taxation is more communistic than one with very low taxation? If so, I don’t see why there should be any issue with the loose idea of a “capitalisation” of communism and vice versa. Neither of these things are absolutes, except in hypothetical terms. As to your other criticisms, whilst both ideologies do reduce life to socioeconomic factors, there is undeniably an overarching “communitarian” sentiment to communism and an “individualistic” one to capitalism.

This reminds me a lot of Leonard Cohen’s funny song Death of a Ladies Man. Wonderful closing lyrics: ‘So the great affair is over, but whoever would have guessed / It would leave us all so vacant and so deeply unimpressed! It’s like our visit to the moon or to that other star / I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far!’ Exactly how I feel about all the great strides made in the name of “progress”…

Some of his earlier music is less strange. If you are having a Nietzschean phase you ought to love his Fifth Sonata and his symphony, “The Poem of Ecstasy”.

Of course. One of the main weapons of progressivism is the “cult of normalcy”.

If that’s what you want to tell yourself, so be it! Whether it is Eros or Thanatos, it is nevertheless a regression to the subconscious mud of life. For what it’s worth, the two concepts became increasingly blurred in later Freudianism. My favourite composer Scriabin - inspired by the Russian mystic Solovyov, as well as the more questionable philosophies of Theosophy, Schopenhauerian idealism and Nietzschean vitalism - captures the consumption of our decadent world in the Heraclitean fires of divine purgation perfectly in his ode to scintillating devastation, Towards the Flame!

I agree. Though I think the world we currently inhabit is changing very radically and so this might not apply for much longer! To be frank, I think that the true and generally unconscious purpose of evolutionary progressivism is to terminate our decadence as quickly as possible. It represents a sort of “race to the finish line” and a political expression of Thanatos (Todestrieb or the “Death Drive”). In its own way, then, it is a beneficent phenomenon: destroying all of that which is no longer worth conserving. Maybe not in such a rigorously formulated manner, but still: variations on the same theme.

…until it doesn’t… You’re right, though I don’t see this as contradicting anything that I said above. Evolutionary progressivism is a myth which suits a certain mentality and attitude towards life. It will last for as long as this mentality and attitude last. Of course, however, from the traditional perspective it is evolutionary progressivism which is obscure and topsy-turvy! I don’t agree with this. There is only an element of deconstruction in what I am saying because I think that this forum is extremely biased towards a certain worldview. It has nothing to do with being a postmodernist and certainly not a nihilist.

“Comrades, have you noticed that we are ruled by a malicious and tyrannical elite?” “You don’t understand! They are simply better than us! As the vanguard of the future, the super-developed minority, they deserve to rule over us. That’s not a bug, that’s a feature!” “That’s not a bug, it’s a small creature!”

I’ve always despised the term straw-manning anyway. It reduces everything to an abstract logical debate, divorced from practical realities. It also fails to distinguish between the irrational and the super-rational. I imagine being in some Communist hell-realm and pointing out the ugliness that surrounds us. My devoted comrades would immediately respond: “But that’s just a straw-man! You have failed to understand the deep intelligence of Communism! You need to read Marx’s Capital 10-15 more times!” Even if a belief system is logically coherent, its practical consequences might not be.

You are playing a game here, holding all conservatives to the standards of the most mediocre brand of contemporary “conservatism” whilst selecting the best examples of liberalism. It is you who is straw-manning, I am just returning the favour. If you were really interested in steel-manning conservatism, you would contrast someone like René Guénon with Wilber, the cultural relativism of Vico and Spengler with postmodern relativism, something like the Dark Enlightenment to Daniel Schmachtenberger and “Game B”… All you are really interested in, however, is desperately clinging to your personal progressive biases whilst posing as some deep “Tier 2 systems thinker”. This isn’t Fox News versus Daniel Schmachtenberger. That is the straw-man!

I would very much like to wrap this up here as this forum gives me a headache! Will you at least admit this basic fact? If you were born in another time, you would almost certainly view history differently. The way that we conceive of history is inevitably shaped by where we find ourselves in history. To offer a very brief and inevitably simplified overview, this is how the view of history has changed over time: Hinduism offers the most advanced system which has survived into the modern day: the fractal process that you are describing is laid out in terms of a complex system of Manvantaras and Yuga Cycles, which each have an ascent (kalpa) and a descent (pralaya). Given the many shared aspects of Indo-European culture, it is safe to assume that other traditional civilisations had similar models, which were lost through the very process that I am describing here. This view was reappropriated and narrowed down by the great Empires of historical antiquity (Ancient Persia, Greece, Rome) so that only the present Yuga cycle remained, in the form of the myth of the “Four Ages of Man”: Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age. This was then further reduced by the so-called Abrahamic religions into a linear view of history, as a personalised doctrine of fallenness and salvation: a fall from Divine Grace culminating in the eventual redemption of the world in the Revelatory Apocalypse. The final stage of this process is the modern, progressive and evolutionary view, which is a systematic inversion of all of its predecessors. The radical revolutionaries and ideologues who formulated the ideology of “progress” were well aware that they were engaged in an inversion of traditional doctrine. This has been described in an academic setting as “inverted exegesis”: the turning of a doctrine on its head, so as to subvert and ultimately destroy it. Each view of history is a reflection of the material and spiritual dispositions of those who created it. The earliest view reveals a universalism which is the complete antithesis of modern uniformity: a view of history relatively untainted by personal biases. The second view reveals a decadence in comparison to the first, providing a framework for statecraft and Empire-building as well as a mythic-religious creed. The third view, that of the Abrahamic religions, justified a life of penitence and prostration before the theistic God. We decadent moderns, on the other hand, are obsessed with change, the future, endless innovation, the flux of becoming, the wheel of samsara... To this end, we have invented a whole historiographical framework (“evolutionary progressivism”) to justify this obsession. The whole thing is a post-hoc rationalisation for an irrational attachment to progress and all of its synonyms. That is what I mean when I say that: evolution is just an alibi for people who have regressed to the level of apes.

Frozen in timelessness! The Ubermensch is the immature and unrefined version of Zarathustra’s doctrine. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the gradual refinement of this idea: from the Ubermensch, through the Will to Power, culminating in the Great Midday and the revelation of the Eternal Recurrence. Do you recall what the Goddess of Life says to Zarathustra towards the end of the Third Part of Zarathustra? “Thereupon Life looked pensively behind her and about her and said softly: 'O Zarathustra, you are not true enough to me! 'You have long not loved me as much as you say you do; I know you are thinking that you want to leave me soon. 'There is an ancient heavy heavy booming-bell: at night its booming comes all the way up to your cave: and when you hear this bell at midnight strike the hour, between the strokes of one and twelve you think—you think then, O Zarathustra, well I know, of how you want to leave me soon!' 'Yes; I answered hesitantly, 'but you also know that—' And I said something into her ear, right through her tangled yellow crazy locks of hair. ‘You know that, O Zarathustra? No one knows that.—‘“ Zarathustra here realises something more profound than the Superman who stays true to life and to the earth. There is some validity to his assault on the “preachers of death” and “other-worldliness”, in the sense that embracing the earth can be a means of transcending it, whilst denying it can keep you stuck upon it. The ultimate form of his teaching, however, is transcendence of life; it is just not a transcendence which defines itself in opposition to “life” and “the earth.”

Unity and uniformity are antithetical. You are conflating Esoteric Unity with exoteric diversity.

Because it is what Frithjof Schuon, one of the truest embodiments of the “utopian conservatism” that I am describing, called The Transcendent Unity of Religions. Recognising the inherent oneness which underlies all humans shouldn’t translate to a fanatical (and truly utopian!) “humanitarian” program of annihilating all distinctions in the name of a bland and homogenising uniformity. You just don’t want anyone bursting the bubble of your degenerate little project, annihilating all distinctions in the name of “actualizing” bug-man style liberal cosmopolitanism on a global scale.

There are two simultaneous aspects to the phenomenon of cyclical manifestation: a linear descent and a cyclical ascent and descent. Let us take the historical example of Christianity. Of course, the Christian religion was most potent when Christ was still alive. It has become increasingly impotent in the times following. This is the linear descent. However, the culture of Christendom as an embodied phenomenon was quite weak when Christ was alive. It took a millennia of cultural development (the ascent) for Christendom to become a dominant material power. It has also taken hundreds of years of cultural development (the descent) for Christianity to be deconstructed: the so-called “Renaissance”, the so-called “Enlightenment”, the secular ideologies of the twentieth century, all culminating in contemporary Clown World (in which, heresy is orthodoxy and orthodoxy is heresy, or as the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth say “Fair is Foul and Foul is Fair”). There is a hierarchy, it’s just not a hierarchy of “evolution”. To use Mircea Eliade’s phrase, it is a hierarchical descent, from the Sacred to the profane. Isn’t it strange that, amongst all of these cultures, we do not find a single claim to animal origins or “evolution”, but to noble and divine origins? One of the first things I said when I came back to this forum is: evolution is just an alibi for people who have regressed to the level of apes. I love this phrase and it is completely true. Nice quote, though I prefer his saying: “Progress is merely a modern idea, that is to say a false idea!”

The fundamental problem with this whole model is conflating the difference between esoterism and exoterism with that between historicised stages of development.