Return of the Sith Lord: Evola & Traditionalism

[American Dream]

Gary Lachman on Dark Star Rising, Trump, and the Occult



The occult, historically, has had forward-thinking traditions (progressive, radical and experimentally left) as well as conservative. Can you give a brief summary of the Traditionalist occult impulse that influenced Trump’s ascendancy? For instance, Steve Bannon name-dropping Julius Evola or Rene Guenon.

One of the odder things following Trump’s election was an article published in the New York Times in February 2017, about a speech Bannon had given to a select group of Vatican churchmen in 2014. Amidst the usual rhetoric about the Global Tea Party movement, the war on Islamic Fascism, and the immigration crisis, the Times reporter noted that Bannon had mentioned Julius Evola. Julius Evola was an Italian esoteric philosopher who had far right political leanings. In the 1920s and 30s, he tried to ingratiate himself first with Mussolini and then with Hitler, with modest success. Post WWII he was a kind of intellectual éminence grisefor different Italian neo-fascist groups. Today he is one of the ideological heavy weights the alt-right point to, to differentiate themselves from white power skinheads and rednecks. He is an incisive thinker and is the most readable of the Traditionalist school.

Traditionalism was founded in the early twentieth century by the French scholar René Guénon. It’s central belief is that, in the dim past, mankind was given a fundamental revelation about the nature of reality and the relationship between God, man, and the cosmos. This revelation is at the heart of all the great religions, but over time it has been obscured until by now it is practically forgotten. History, Guénon believed, has been all downhill since that initial revelation. We have declined from the Golden Age to the Age of Iron. In Hindu terms, we are smack in the Kali Yuga, a very dark time. Guénon loathed the modern world and so did Evola. But where Guénon was a priest, Evola was a warrior – or at least he liked to think of himself as one. He wanted to actively help bring the west down – the liberal, democratic west – and build a Traditionalist society in its place. This would be based on an organic, caste-like vision of society, a true “body politic,” rather than the atomized self-seeking decadent democracies of the modern world.

Oddly enough, Evola practiced a kind of mental science or New Thought himself, and he also tried to have a magical influence on contemporary events. In the 1920s he contributed several articles under different pseudonyms to the UR journal, the publication of the UR group, an esoteric society to which he belonged. Evola contributed several articles about how the mind can alter and even create reality, through sheer will and imagination. And he and others in the group performed rituals with the intent of instilling the ancient Roman virtues into Mussolini’s fascists – Evola thought they were frankly rather poor material to work with. So just as Spencer, a reader of Evola, is supposed to have used magic to help Trump, Evola did the same in order to help Mussolini.

Alexander Dugin has been described as “Putin’s brain” (Foreign Affairs) or the “Russian Mystic” behind the alt-right (HuffPost). He seems to be a believer in Atlantis and has a rather esoteric history of the world, including a future where “Eurasia” becomes the center of a new spiritual, planetary civilization. I was struck by how radically different this is from the “planetary culture” in our own left-leaning consciousness community here the West (on Reality Sandwich, no less), or even the experimental futurist communities like Auroville in Pondicherry, India. What is Dugin all about here?

It was in fact in the context of alluding to Dugin that Bannon name dropped Evola. While speaking of Putin and expressing admiration for his embrace of “traditional values,” Bannon remarked that he, Putin, had in his orbit a follower of Traditionalism, someone who read Julius Evola. This someone was Dugin. Dugin has had an interesting career. He started out as an anti-Soviet punk dissident; he was arrested in the early 1980s, before perestroika, for singing an anti-Soviet song at a party. He then drifted into a strange, far-right, occult, science-fiction bohemia in Moscow, where he blended an interest in National Socialism with occultism, Guénon and Evola, and assorted other oddities. An important book at this time was The Morning of the Magicians, a wonderful grab bag of esoteric misinformation. Then, with collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90s, he realized he was really a “Soviet man,” and combined his fascist aesthetic with a nostalgia for Stalin. He continued through several ideological quick-changes and by the 2000s, emerged as an eccentric but respected authority on geopolitics.

His central idea is that with the collapse of the USSR, the world has become “unipolar,” meaning there is really only one superpower, the US. Opposed to this he wants to create a multipolar world, meaning one in which another superpower is able to oppose the increasing global dominance of the West. For him there is really only one fundamental struggle at work throughout history, what he sees as the clash between the sea-faring Atlanticist cultures – the US, UK, EU – who want to turn the planet into a global market place, and the mother of all continents, Eurasia, the single largest land mass on the planet. (Evola readers will see the basic clash between “becoming” and “being” here.) Where the Atlanticists are liberal, democratic, market oriented, and ‘free’, the Eurasianists prefer a traditional, authoritarian, highly ordered, organic society, that is based on values other than those of individual liberty, so prized in the west. Eurasia is the name Dugin gives to the new planetary culture that will arise from Russia in this century. It rejects the idea that Russia is a backward cousin of Europe, failing to catch up with it. Instead it is a new, original, unique civilization, with its roots in the East – the Mongols and Tatars – which will come into its own in the years ahead. He adopts Spengler’s idea that there is no linear progression of history and civilizations. Civilizations are organic; they are born, grow, and die. Spengler’s masterpiece is called The Decline of the West. For Dugin, it’s about time. He even suggests that we – those who agree with him – should help it along.

[American Dream]

Ronald Beiner
Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right

University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2018. 167pp., £19.99 hb
ISBN 9780812250596

Reviewed by Javier Sethness




In Dangerous Minds, Beiner discusses the influence Nietzsche has had on notorious contemporary ultra-rightists such as the U.S.-based white supremacist Richard Spencer and the Russian neo-fascist Aleksandr Dugin, as well as the historical Italian fascist Julius Evola, who was an “explicit disciple of Nietzsche” (3). Like Evola, Spencer declares himself a Nietzschean, and Dugin swears by the iconoclast’s ominous statement that “man [sic] is something that should be overcome” (2, 12). These prominent figures of an increasingly powerful Fascist International find inspiration in Nietzsche’s aristocratic differentiation between the putatively “elect” and “unfit peoples” (4) as well as the philosopher’s anticipation of Nazism’s practice of große Politik (“great [or noble] politics”) in his militaristic critique of Otto von Bismarck from the right, as György Lukács points out in The Destruction of Reason (1952), and his “imperialistic critique of nationalism” (136n2). Today’s far-rightists also admire the Nazi Heidegger, who himself took a great deal from Nietzsche, particularly his critique of liberal modernity as nihilistic. To date, reports Beiner, Dugin has dedicated four volumes to discussing Heidegger, with “more to follow” (139n27).

Yet it has not just been the right which has found Nietzsche and Heidegger of use; in fact, Beiner endorses Geoff Waite’s view that Nietzsche also left his mark on the Frankfurt School critical theorists, Albert Camus, and post-structuralists like Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, and Gilles Deleuze, among others. Whereas one finds few positive references to Nietzsche in Herbert Marcuse’s oeuvre, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno admittedly incorporated a Nietzschean skepticism toward instrumental rationality, though they both, like the other Frankfurt School thinkers, held an overall more Hegelian view of rationality, viewing it as also having strong emancipatory potential. As for Camus, his position is ambiguous, given his view in The Rebel (1951) that, on the one hand, Nietzsche’s appropriation by the Nazis represented a great injustice to the philosopher, while also acknowledging that “Nietzscheism was nothing without world domination” and that, when “[p]laced in the crucible of Nietzschean philosophy, rebellion, in the intoxication of freedom, ends in biological or historical Caesarism” (Camus 1951, 75-80). For his part, Beiner illustrates the relevance of Foucault’s adoption of Nietzsche’s critique of truth as power, yielding “post-truth” and “fake news.” Notably, Foucault’s Nietzschean-Heideggerian preference for pre-modern alternatives to capitalist modernity may help to explain his uncritical support for the Khomeinist faction of the Iranian Revolution, whose seizure of power in 1979 effectively put an end to the revolutionary process, as Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson (2005) detail.

Crucially, Beiner clarifies Nietzsche and Heidegger’s philosophical critiques of the modern world as being reactionary assaults on the egalitarian legacy of the French Revolution which quite openly sought to entrench imperialistic domination and re-establish feudalistic modes of social organization. Hence, Beiner argues, we should take Nietzsche seriously when he endorses the ideas of social castes and slavery (18, 144n35), just as we should take seriously Heidegger’s explicit admission in 1948 to his former student Marcuse of his uncritical view of Nazism, from which he had reportedly “expected […] a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety, a reconciliation of social antagonisms, and a deliverance of western Dasein [‘Being’] from the dangers of communism” (Marcuse 1998, 265-7). Such pseudo-radical posturing by a thinker who sides with the Nazi dictatorship is precisely what many far-rightists find so attractive in Heidegger: this dramatic perspective, shared by Nietzsche, Dugin, and also the Counter-Enlightenment traditionalist and irrationalist Joseph de Maistre, amounts to the paradoxical concept of ‘conservative revolution,’ whereby the socio-political goal becomes the overthrow of liberal society, the cancellation of the ideas of the French Revolution, and even the abolition of Christianity due to the egalitarianism of the doctrine of Jesus the Nazarene.

Indeed, Beiner argues that, for Nietzsche, “repudiation of Christianity constitutes the necessary condition of a return to an aristocracy-centered culture” (27 emphasis in original). Little surprise, then, that his The Anti-Christ (1895) has been adopted by contemporary white supremacists as a neo-pagan tract—and that his celebration of the idea of the Supermen (Übermenschen) who would overthrow egalitarianism necessarily presupposes “subhumans” (Untermenschen), as the Nazis rather catastrophically put in practice. Moreover, neo-Nazi movements have appreciated Nietzsche’s classification of Judaism and Christianity as ‘slave religions,’ a position that is inseparable from the philosopher’s analysis of compassion as reflecting resentment and weakness—a view which is arguably itself a reflection of rightist resentment. Nietzsche’s explicit affirmation of the “protracted despotic moralities”, which on his account predominated in premodern contexts, demonstrates the degree to which his philosophy is an inversion of that of Arthur Schopenhauer, who emphasizes compassion as being the basis of morality (32 emphasis in original; 161n72). Steeping himself in irrationalism, Nietzsche expressly saw his philosophy as a wholesale destruction—or, to use contemporary parlance, ‘owning’—of “the left,” understood as German Idealism, the principles of the French Revolution, Christianity, and even Platonic and Socratic rationalism.

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/review ... -sethness/

[American Dream]

“Demonic Texture”: Corrosive Subtext of Dugin’s 4th Political Theory



Alexander Dugin’s 4th political theory is a convenient cover for quite prosaic – albeit apocalyptic – political project, outlined to the best of his abilities in the Foundations of Geopolitics. However, there’s much more to it than that, even as an afterthought. In this video we’ll demonstrate how Dugin imagines that postmodernity should be beaten by postmodernity and consequences thereof. The most notable one is the subversion and further dissolution of those pre-modern principles he supposedly cherishes. As always, we’ll take a maximum advantage of his own words to demonstrate just what inherent destructive potential his ideas conceal.

Also, we point out the persistent mistake on behalf of Dugin’s mainstream critics of not getting him seriously and affirming that he builds his destructive project on quite correct assessment of our historical situation. Something they do at their own peril.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cttiPVK87hM

More: http://en.kalitribune.com/demonic-textu ... al-theory/

[American Dream]

http://wahidazal.blogspot.com/2018/08/a ... m-and.html

August 23, 2018

ANGLO-EUROPEAN NEO-PAGANISM AND THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITION



Neo-Paganism is an Anglo-European invention that has its roots in the Occult Revival of the 19th century spearheaded by people such as Eliphas Levi, et al. But first, one has to bracket all of the Indigenous as well as the Eastern traditions (Indo-European as well as East Asian) out of this "pagan/neopagan" category and equation. As such neo-paganism qua Neo-Paganism has no pedigree before this period of the late 18th/19th centuries -- and definitely nowhere outside of Anglo-Europa -- despite the spurious claims of some contemporaries who have attempted to claim unbroken chains of initiation and transmission from antiquity to the present (the Freemasons being among them). Prior to this period, while European occultists and esotericists actively engaged with the narratives and systems of pre-Christian Europe and the Orient (such as Ficcino in Florence with his Neoplatonic texts-Hermetica translation projects and Christian Kabbalah, etc), most of the figures associated with this sub-culture (and well into the early European Enlightenment timeline) identified themselves as Christians, Catholic or Protestant. Even the most eminent of non-Western Christian occult-esotercists of the Byzantine period, such as Gemithos Plethon (an Eastern Orthodox Christian), as well as Giordano Bruno in the Catholic West did not identify themselves as anything but Christians. There were also a few Jews in this period among this crowd, but we digress.

Given this, Neo-Paganism is a sui generis Anglo-European syncretic tradition fully located and contained within European modernity. There is nothing wrong with contemporary formulated syncretic traditions in and of themselves. However, people should be honest about what it is they are representing and not fabricate lineages that have no substantiated historical or trans-cultural loci or pedigrees whatsoever. But, to underscore the point again, the Indigenous spiritual traditions and Anglo-European Neo-Paganism cannot be conflated as the same thing. These are totally distinct entities.

Be that as it may, when one puts aside the attempts of Levy, the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, Gerald Gardner and others, the three genuine attempts to revive pre-Christian High Paganism within a European context were the attempts by the English Platonist Thomas Taylor during the 18th C., Julius Evola in the 20th and Algis Uzdavinys in the late 20th and early 21st. I will exclude Evola here due to his controversial far-rightist career and also especially because Evola's High Paganism was a syncretic one attempting to synthesize the sub-continental and Far-Eastern traditions with this purported European High Paganism. This attempt was already accomplished by Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society system, and the results are known (especially the political ones which were instrumental in spawning Hitler and the Third Reich).

Thomas Taylor and Algis Uzdavinys, on the other hand, attempted through their books and translations (and personal practice) to reconstruct the Platonic religion of late antiquity itself where the Hermetica was treated as this religion's Bible and where a system of spiritual exercises (similar but not identical to Yoga) was practiced together with a regimen of prayer cycles which can be found in the remaining corpus of the prayers attributed to Proclus. From what Taylor and Uzdavinys reconstructed of this High Pagan religion of late antiquity (as well as to some degree Ioan Couliano in his works) this was a rigorous path not unlike Sufism, Hesychasm, Hasidism, Tantric Yoga and similar. Adherence to such a path was not merely an identity and costume party which much of internet based Neo-Paganism in North America and Europe appears to have devolved into. Theurgy and theosis, as both the De mysteriis of Iamblichus as well as the prayers of Proclus amply show, was its ultimate goal. It was a rigorous path involving all manner of daily self-purification rituals, meticulous attention to the astrological calendar and seasons and adherence to prayer and meditaton cycles not unlike in Islam. This Platonic religion was, for all practical purposes and for lack of a better term, a form of High Pagan monasticism. But this is not remotely what contemporary Neo-Paganism is nor what its current adherents and advocates are about.

While attempts to revive this Platonic religion should be lauded and actively encouraged, all in all Anglo-American Neo-Paganism leaves me quite unimpressed. This is because so much of what drives and propels it is what animates the white Anglo-European market capitalist worldview with its literal colonization of everything it touches; and it is because of its locus of pedigree where Neo-Paganism (even through there are a variety of Neo-Pagans and Neo-Paganisms) has found in our time a fertile and willing host within the current fascist revival in the West. Nevertheless, those with any historical consciousness should be reminded, that this was also the case under Himmler, Wiligut and the SS as well who attempted the same thing as we are now witnessing today with groups like Asatru and similar.

That stated, Neo-Paganism as a function of Anglo-European liberal modernism is primarily a mechanism of the secularizing process of the West itself and particularly its love/hate relationship with the Abrahamic tradition, and the blood drenched, genocidal history therein. This is where things get quite tricky with this sub-culture and where a historical consciousness is paramount. But it also explains why Neo-Paganism specifically crafts itself as a tradition either juxtaposing itself or otherwise altogether standing opposed to the Abrahamic one; and it is in this particular function and process of juxtaposition/opposition to the Abrahamic tradition whereby the proverbial swastika begins to jot out from underneath various proverbial Neo-Pagan cloaks with the extremely problematic ideological Aryanism seeping through --- and here especially representatives of Indigenous traditions or even marginal Eastern and non-Pagan Western esoteric traditions need to be extremely careful with some Neo-Pagans. I speak from experience on that score.

[American Dream]

This Is Not Populism

by John Bellamy Foster

Today’s neofascism builds on these earlier fascist myths of the “legal revolution,” along with the notion of a more organized, efficient capitalist state, able to transcend the liberal-democratic impasse. It promises both policies of ethno-national exclusion and of revitalized economic growth and employment through infrastructure spending and military expansion. At the same time, it is often less inclined than the traditional right to attack the welfare state or to promote austerity. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Front has recently tried to remake itself as a more broadly “anti-establishment” party, exploiting popular discontent to attract a wider range of supporters, including some who formerly identified with the left. Despite this cynical rebranding, the party’s politics of petty-bourgeois resentment, reactionary Catholicism, and virulent xenophobia, together with its link to the upper echelons of the capitalist class, mark it as neofascist.34

Like the classical fascism of Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, neofascism arises from interrelated crises of capitalism and the liberal-democratic state, undermining the latter while seeking to shore up the former. Given that explicit identification with classical fascism remains taboo in mainstream politics, organized neofascism today is presented as formally democratic and populist, adhering to legal-constitutional structures. Nevertheless, like all movements in the fascist genus, neofascist ideology combines racist, nationalist, and culturalist myths with economic and political proposals aimed primarily at the lower-middle class (or petty bourgeoisie) in alliance with monopoly capital—while also seeking to integrate nationalistic working-class supporters and rural populations. Increasingly, neofascism draws support from relatively privileged wage workers that in the late twentieth century enjoyed a degree of prosperity and status—but who now find their living conditions imperiled in the stagnating advanced capitalist economy of the early twenty-first century.35

The single most important ideological figure in the growth of neofascism in Europe in the post-Second World War years, and in the promotion of its distinct cultural perspective, was the Italian philosopher Julius Evola (1898–1974). As Laquer has observed, Evola was at the “extreme wing of historical fascism,” influencing Mussolini with respect to race and racism, and later turning to Hitler as a more authentic representative of the fascist project. Significantly, Evola was present at Hitler’s general headquarters in 1943 on the very day when the Waffen-SS troops were to bring Mussolini there, following their rescue of him from imprisonment in Italy after he had been deposed. In the 1930s Evola wrote: “Everything that is heroism and the dignity of the warrior in our conception must be considered justified from a higher point of view: in the same way that we have to oppose, with complete precision and on all levels, everything that is a democratic and levelling disorder.”36 Evola was known for his virulent anti-Semitism, even by the standards of the time. He frequently criticized fascism for not being pure enough.

Following the Second World War, Evola was to develop a set of neofascist theoretical works under the mantle of “traditionalism,” including postwar editions of his fascist treatise Revolt Against the Modern World (1934), as well as such works as Men Among the Ruins (1953), Ride the Tiger (1961), The Path of Cinnabar (1963), and Fascism Viewed from the Right (1970). The fascism of Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, he argued, needed to be defended in its “positive” aspects and separated from the specific mistakes that Hitler and Mussolini made that led to its defeat in the Second World War. As Evola scholar H. T. Hansen put it in his “Introduction” to Men Among the Ruins, Evola came to be viewed as “the ‘spiritual father’ of a group of radical ‘neofascists’ (in the broad sense of the word)”—often under the innocuous rubric of “traditionalism.” Giorgio Almirante, party chairman of the MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano), heir to the old Fascist Party, called Evola “the Marcuse of the Right, only better.”37

Evola’s cultural analysis emphasized the values of tradition, spiritualism, idealism, hierarchy, and counterrevolution, and pointed to the need for a new “warrior” class.38 He wrote in Ride the Tiger: When material incentives don’t suffice, “the only influence over the masses today—and now even more than ever—is on the plane of impassioned and subintellectual forces, which by their very nature lack any stability. These are the forces that demagogues, popular leaders, manipulators of myths, and fabricators of ‘public opinion’ count on. In this regard, we can learn from yesterday’s regimes in Germany and Italy that positioned themselves against democracy and Marxism.”39 The pure-fascist or neofascist state would be organized around superior, elite racial stocks, divesting itself of “inferior races.” Aryanism needed to be interpreted not as related simply to the Germanic stock, but in a way that encompassed Europeans more broadly, or at least the “Aryan-Roman” race.40 Evola also wrote of the “decadence of modern woman” and the “feminist idiocy.” The revolt against the modern world included a revolt against science. “None of modern science,” he stated, “has the slightest value as knowledge.”41

Although Evola had no economic analysis to speak of, he insisted that the state of the new fascist era, like that of the old, should be based on private property and corporatism, with the destruction of any autonomous working class organizations. The state, though, should retain its relative autonomy, securing the entire system from above, through its monopoly of the use of force. Sovereignty, viewed in palingenetic, ultra-nationalistic, and authoritarian terms, needed to be “absolute.”42

Evola and other neofascist thinkers, such as the influential French theorist Alain de Benoist, created the ideological foundations for the transnational neofascist movement that emerged in Europe beginning in the 1970s and later spread to the United States. The movement was to gain a mass following as a result of the increasing economic stagnation in the advanced capitalist world—and has grown by leaps and bounds since the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–09. Nevertheless, the organizational roots of many of these developments were formed in Europe in the 1970s. This can be seen, for example, in the formation of what were called “Hobbit Camps” for neofascist youth in Italy (named after the creatures in J. R. R. Tolkien’s novels), with the notion of hobbits standing for the lower-middle class—the largely forgotten population, who were rising up to transform the world. This same idea was later to catch on with the alt-right in the United States.43 A key figure today in what Mammone calls the “transnational neofascist movement” is the Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, who has built his “fourth political theory” on Evola’s ideas (as well as those of Schmitt, de Benoist, and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger), attracting the favorable attention of the U.S. alt-right.

https://monthlyreview.org/2017/06/01/th ... -populism/

[American Dream]

Against the Gnostics: Anti-Traditional and Anti-Christian Core of Alexander Dugin’s 4th Political Theory




A Birth of Melodrama from the Spirit of Modernity

Doubtless, like every self-respecting Gnostic, Dugin would be pleased to know he provokes enantiodromia in his reader’s soul. After all, he sees himself as philosopher of radical “new beginnings”, and such endeavours require upheavals.

You know the drill: old vessels not fit for new wine must crumble, new world must rise on destruction of the old, temples must be cleansed, etc., etc.

Thus a “new beginnings” philosopher usually gets dangerously close to being a prophet of curious, rather obscure and, accordingly, rather confusing sort. Dugin’s Fourth political theory is as consciously prophetic and confusing an attempt at “new beginning” as it gets. Moreover, it is “an invitation” to a possibility of novel way of thinking and acting, the highly politicized – if not throughout politicizing what cannot and should not be politicized – new beginning, purportedly the either-or choice of destiny for contemporary man.

Will he remain in history or will he be bereft of it in an explosion of post-human freedom erasing the time itself? Will he reclaim his right to exist as a finite being endowed with a possibility of authenticity – a Dasein as Dugin’s mentor of choice Martin Heidegger called it? Or will he sink beneath the event horizon of dying time at the end of history?

Rather melodramatic propositions, don’t you think?

Well, this author has tremendous problem with melodrama in philosophy. There is something incredibly lazy in those apocalyptic notions coming from peak modern philosophers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche or Heidegger. They radically – a favorite expression of theirs – reduce things to what they see as a “historical destiny” to be affirmed and transcended in some kind of act that will bring about upheaval: choice of eternity over finitude, revaluation of all values or some other kind of semi-religious revelation of Being in epochal Ereignis.

They appear to be highly individualistic and, consequently, highly democratic in proclaiming their incurable insights as truths of the age, a message of destiny for all and no one. To an extent Dugin fits in this typical modern and postmodern frame of mind while at the same time seemingly advocating teachings like Traditionalism, Christianity and Platonism, i.e. modes of thought and existence radically opposed to modernity and it’s melodramatic martyrs. (For Dugin’s dubious Traditionalism, see: Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2004., cp 12.; Andreas Umland, “Is Alexandr Dugin a Traditionalist? ‘Neo-Eurasianism’ and Perennial Philosophy”)

He is apt in depicting the shortcomings of Western world – necessary shortcomings he would rightly add – but at the same time obscure about where exactly does he stand, and, as we shall see, necessarily so. It is no wonder that his insights on postmodernity awake interest in the West because he can be an extremely discerning observer, endowed with genuine philosophical talent and willing to take a deep look into dark corners were few bother to even cast a glance.

However, it is a contention of this author that Dugin’s proclivity for taking deep looks into darkness has lesser to do with pursuit of truth than with hope of darkness looking back at him; a genuine, to an extent even sensual, love for this twin sister of original Chaos – the ancient principle whose symbol he appropriated for banner of his Eurasian movement and for the title of last chapter of The Fourth Political Theory, a most revealing essay named “Metaphysics of Chaos”. And this makes him dangerous and profoundly misleading thinker and ideologue; one who’s invitation must be utterly and irrevocably rejected.

To argue the point we’ll stick to philosophy and not to geopolitics and sociological analysis, which is, unfortunately, rarely the case in approaching Dugin. Namely, the hint for understanding the core of Fourth political theory is to be found in Dugin’s reverence of Martin Heidegger, whose term Dasein he accepts as subject of both his political analysis and political movement. Therein, i.e. in Dugin’s urge to go down to fundamentals the way Heidegger has done it before, with his own – as he calls it in one of his early essays: “left hand” – radicalism, lies his profound madness.


Let our contemplation be as clear and farsighted as vintage RPG optics

More: http://en.kalitribune.com/against-the-g ... al-theory/

[American Dream]

Putin's brain?

ANTON SHEKHOVTSOV
12 September 2014


Age of vice
Dugin became involved in social activities in his late teens, when he joined the underground Yuzhinskiy literary circle, in which occultism, esotericism and fascist mysticism were the subjects of numerous discussions and a way to escape Soviet conformism. The works of French Traditionalist René Guénon (1886-1951) and Italian fascist thinker Julius Evola (1898-1974) exerted a particularly strong influence on the young Dugin and became a philosophical foundation of the doctrine that he developed many years later.


Aleksandr Dugin

At the core of Guénon’s Integral Traditionalism lies a belief in the “primordial tradition” that was introduced to humanity during the “golden age” and, as the world slid into decadence, gradually disappeared from people’s lives. This belief also implies that time is cyclic; hence, the “golden age” will necessarily succeed the current “age of vice”.
Evola politicized Guénon’s ideas of an unsurmountable opposition between the idealized past and decadent modernity even further. For Evola, this opposition was also the one between a closed and hierarchic model of society of the “golden age” and an open and democratic model of today’s “age of vice”. He also believed that a fascist revolution could end the present age of decay, and this would bring about a new “golden age” of order and hierarchy.

Young Dugin hated the Soviet reality and strongly associated it with the “age of vice”. Guénon’s and Evola’s works informed him of a delusive perspective of revolutionizing and re-enchanting history by ending the era of perceived degeneration and inaugurating the new era.

The projected renewal of the world required political activism, so in 1987, Dugin joined the National-Patriotic Front “Memory” (Pamyat), the most significant far-right organization at that time. In 1988, Dugin was elected a member of Pamyat’s Central Council but was expelled in early 1989, presumably for his attempts to change the ideology of the organization. In the early 1990s, Dugin began looking for contemporary western European followers of Guénon and Evola. His active participation in various conferences in western Europe introduced him to leading figures in the European New Right (ENR) – a network of European far-right intellectuals and journals.
The ENR has always been a metapolitical movement; rather than aiming to participate in the political process, it tried to pursue a strategy of modifying the postwar liberal democratic political culture. This strategy was adopted from the theory of cultural hegemony of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). In its New Right manifestation, this “right-wing Gramscism” stresses the importance of establishing cultural hegemony by making the cultural sphere more susceptible to non-democratic politics through ideology-driven education and cultural production, in preparation for the far Right’s seizure of political power. Cultural hegemony is considered to have been established once the ideology of the political force seeking to establish it is perceived as common sense within society.

Despite the metapolitical nature of the ENR, its ideas have influenced many radical right parties in Europe. One particular idea of the ENR, namely ethnopluralism, is especially popular among the ideologues of the party-political far Right, as it champions ethno-cultural pluralism globally but is critical of cultural pluralism (multiculturalism) in any given society. ENR thinkers supplied Dugin with the most important ideological ammunition for creating Neo-Eurasianism.

Despite the name, Neo-Eurasianism has a limited relation to Eurasianism, the interwar Russian émigré movement that could be placed in the Slavophile tradition. Rather, Neo-Eurasianism is a mixture of the ideas of Guénon, Evola and the ENR, as well as the classical geopolitics and National Bolshevism to which Dugin was introduced in the beginning of the 1990s by Belgian New Right author Robert Steuckers. In Russia, for the sake of political and cultural legitimacy, Dugin argued for continuity between interwar Eurasianism and his own ideology, but his Neo-Eurasianism is firmly rooted in the western, rather than Russian, far-right intellectual tradition.

Dugin’s Neo-Eurasianism
Despite the metapolitical nature of the ENR in general and Neo-Eurasianism in particular, Aleksandr Dugin did try to become involved in the political process in the 1990s and early 2000s. The first attempt was associated with the marginal National-Bolshevik Party (NBP). In 1995, Dugin even contested elections to the State Duma, but he obtained less than one per cent of the vote. His second attempt to get involved in politics is associated with the creation of the Eurasia party in 2002, but already in 2003 the party’s other co-founder expelled Dugin from the party.

Since then, Dugin firmly settled on taking the metapolitical course. He founded the International Eurasian Movement in 2003 and was appointed professor at Moscow State University in 2008. From 2005 onwards, he also became a popular political commentator who frequently appeared on primetime talk shows and published in influential newspapers. This allowed him to bring his Neo-Eurasianist ideas directly to the academic world, whilst using his academic title as a prestigious cover-up for his irrational ideas.

Dugin became especially famous in Russia for the Neo-Eurasianist version of classical geopolitics. His book The Foundations of Geopolitics (published in 1997) outlined his political and ideological vision of Russia’s place in the world. According to Dugin, there is an irresolvable confrontation between the Atlanticist world (principally the United States and the United Kingdom) and Eurasia (predominantly Russia, Central and Eastern Europe and Asia) that resists US-led globalization and ethno-cultural universalization. This confrontation is also placed on the metaphysical plane: the alleged hegemony of Atlanticism and liberal democracy is interpreted as the triumph of the “age of vice”, while the Eurasian revolution that would establish the Russia-led Eurasian empire is understood as an advent of the “golden age”.

Subscribing to the idea of ethno-pluralism, Neo-Eurasianism suggests that “Russians shall live in their own national reality and there shall also be national realities for Tatars, Chechens, Armenians and the rest”. At the same time, the Russians are considered to be “the top-priority Eurasian ethnos, the most typical one”, and “they are most fit for carrying out a civilizational geopolitical historical mission” of creating the Eurasian empire. However, the Russian people are seen as being in decline, hence, the improvement of the Russians’ “severe condition in the ethnic, biological and spiritual sense” should be addressed by appealing to “the most radical forms of Russian nationalism”. It is necessary “to consolidate our ethnic, ethno-cultural identity – Orthodox and Russian”, “to introduce norms of ethno-cultural hygiene”.

Neo-Eurasianist foreign policy is revisionist, expansionist and implacably opposed to the United States. It draws considerably on the theories of convicted Belgian Nazi collaborator Jean-François Thiriart (1922-1992), who proposed the creation of the “Euro-Soviet empire from Vladivostok to Dublin” in the late 1970s. Dugin reinterpreted the Euro-Soviet empire as the essentially similar Eurasian empire which includes not only Russia, but the whole of Europe as well, so the Neo-Eurasianist agenda implies the “liberation” of Europe from all Atlanticist influences. In 1938, Thiriart praised the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as he saw the Soviet-Nazi alliance to be a strong force against the US. For Dugin, too, the Berlin-Moscow axis is crucial in creating a Eurasian empire. Here, Moscow and Berlin are symbols of two geopolitical centres of power. Moscow is the centre of the Russia-dominated space that would include Russia, the countries of the northern Balkan Peninsula, Moldova, Ukraine (excluding western Ukraine), eastern Belarus, central Asia and Mongolia. Berlin is the centre of a Germany-dominated space called “Mitteleuropa” that would include Germany, Italy and most of the territories of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Ideology for sale
Dugin was a staunch opponent of Boris Yeltsin, but hailed the ascent of Vladimir Putin. In 2001, he wrote that Putin had completed six out of “Twelve Labours”: he prevented the failure of Russia in the Caucasus region; put local governors under control; introduced federal districts in Russia corresponding to the military districts; got rid of the oligarchs who controlled two of the main Russian TV channels; started the integration process in the post-Soviet space and announced the creation of the Eurasian Economic Union; and formalized the thesis concerning the need for a multipolar world. What Putin still needed to do was to fully complete the previous six “Labours”: to clarify his position towards the US; to recognize the dead-end nature of “radical liberalism” in the economy; to allow for a rotation of the elite; to form his own efficient team that would help him in reforming the country; and to assign the Eurasianist ideology as the fundamental worldview of the future Russia.

It seems plausible that Dugin wanted Putin to accept him as the ideologue of Russia and the projected Eurasian empire. In his speech at the inaugural congress of the Eurasia party, Dugin said that the party was going to rally around Putin and “delegate to him Eurasian models and plans of the Eurasian Project”. Nevertheless, Dugin was genuinely critical when Putin was allegedly friendly to the United States or Russian liberal economists.
After the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, Dugin apparently obtained funding from Putin’s Presidential Administration to establish the Eurasian Youth Union. It was one of several pro-Kremlin youth movements that were created to oppose the largely imaginary threat of a “colour revolution” in Russia. However, the Eurasian Youth Union was not the most successful of these movements and the Kremlin preferred to invest more money in the Nashi movement rather than Dugin’s initiative. The Kremlin clearly perceives Dugin’s ideas as useful. By being regularly present in the public sphere, Dugin and other Russian rightwing extremists extending the boundaries of a legitimate space for illiberal narratives make Russian society more susceptible to Putin’s authoritarianism.

In a 2007 interview for Russian internet TV, Dugin pompously stated: “My discourse rules, my ideas rule. […] Sure, there are wide circles, layers of people between me and the power structures. [These people] dilute […] my condensed idea of Eurasian geopolitics, conservative traditionalism and other ideals which I defend and develop, to which I dedicate a lot of my work – they create a diluted version of these. Eventually, this version reaches the power structures and they draw upon it as something self-evident, obvious, and easily accessible. […] That’s why I think that Putin is increasingly becoming Dugin. At any rate, he pursues a plan that I elaborate, in which I invest my energy, my whole life. […] In the 1990s, my discourse seemed mad, eccentric […] today our ideas are taken for granted.”

Dugin’s words, obviously, cannot be taken at face value, but his ideas evidently entered the mainstream political thinking.

Imperialist gamble
Dugin actively supported Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and craved for the complete occupation of that country. For Dugin, the war in Georgia was an existential battle against Atlanticism: “If Russia decides not to enter the conflict […] that will be a fatal choice. It will mean that Russia gives up her sovereignty” and “We will have to forget about Sevastopol.” Naturally, Dugin fanatically supported the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and urged Putin to invade south-eastern Ukraine. It was a dream that he had been cherishing since the 1990s: “The sovereignty of Ukraine represents such a negative phenomenon for Russian geopolitics that it can, in principle, easily provoke a military conflict. […] Ukraine as an independent state […] constitutes an enormous threat to the whole Eurasia and without the solution of the Ukrainian problem, it is meaningless to talk about continental geopolitics.”

In the spring of 2014, Dugin seemed to have reconsidered the Neo-Eurasianist idea of western Ukraine belonging to Mitteleuropa. He argued that, “in its liberationist battle march” not only will Russia not stop at Crimea, central and western Ukraine, but will aim at “liberating central and western Europe from Atlanticist invaders”. His inflammatory writings attracted a lot of media attention, and since his ideological narrative overlapped with the Kremlin’s actions in Ukraine he was called “Putin’s brain”.

However, the increased media attention eventually rebounded on Dugin and the management of Moscow State University – probably in agreement with, or even under pressure from, the Kremlin – decided not to extend his employment contract. Dugin accused Russia’s liberal “fifth column” of conspiring against him, but the reasons for his falling out of favour with the Kremlin are most likely different.

First of all, as in the case of Russia’s war in Georgia, Dugin perceived the invasion of Ukraine as the Kremlin’s fundamental duty. He claimed that if Putin did not fulfil his “historical Eurasianist mission”, then the Kremlin would betray Russia. Thus, Putin would turn into an enemy of Russian ultranationalists who would have a right to attack his regime. No matter whether Putin planned or did not plan to occupy Ukraine, the Kremlin could not accept such an ultimatum.

Second, there is a political circle close to the Kremlin that – being anti-American and imperialistic – considers Dugin’s connections to the western European farR Right and evidently non-Russian fascist sources of Neo-Eurasianism as damaging the “anti-fascist” posture of Moscow.

Third, Putin never revealed that his foreign policy was guided by any kind of ideology and always stressed the “pragmatic” nature of the Russian approach to the West. Had Putin named any particular guiding ideology, then he would have been challenged intellectually – a battle that he would have been doomed to lose. Moreover, the assumption that the Kremlin was following Dugin’s ideas made Putin predictable. At the end of the day, Dugin has put forward a very clear, “ready-to-use” geopolitical strategy, but it is Putin’s unpredictability that plays to his advantage in foreign relations.

Despite the fact that the Kremlin has clearly distanced itself from Dugin, this does not mean that his Neo-Eurasianism has been condemned. But does Putin support Neo-Eurasianism? There are obvious similarities between Dugin’s and Putin’s narratives: anti-westernism, expansionism and the rejection of liberal democracy among them. However, it would be wrong to suggest that any of these or similar ideological elements are exclusive to either Putin or Dugin, as they have been embedded in Russian politics for more than a century.

https://www.eurozine.com/putins-brain/

[American Dream]

http://www.philosophyforlife.org/perenn ... d-fascism/

Perennialism and fascism


Aldous Huxley and Rene Guenon

While I was in San Francisco, I got the chance to meet Michael Murphy, one of the founders of the Esalen Institute. It’s a cross between a spiritual retreat centre and an adult education college, perched on the cliffs of Big Sur next to some hot springs. It’s been very influential on transpersonal psychology and American spirituality.

Murphy and I discussed the cultural influence of the ‘mystical expats’ – Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, Alan Watts and Christopher Isherwood – on the vision of Esalen and on American culture in general. They helped to popularise the idea of the ‘perennial philosophy’ – the idea there is a common core of wisdom at the heart of all the great religious traditions, and one can use spiritual practices from various traditions. That idea is now at the centre of American culture – being ‘spiritual but not religious’ is the fastest-growing demographic in American religion.

It was a treat to hear Mike’s fond reminiscences about them – how he and Esalen co-founder Dick Price were turned on by hearing Huxley lecture on ‘human potentialities’, how they went to meet Gerald Heard in LA and came away mesmerized and burning with the desire to found Esalen, how Huxley and his wife Laura came to meet them in Big Sur and insisted on seeing the local butterflies, how they first dropped acid with Laura, how Alan Watts was the greatest spontaneous speaker Murphy ever heard.

I was particularly interested to hear Murphy make the connection between the San Francisco Renaissance – the cultural movement ranging from the Beats to the Hippies and arguably still ongoing in Silicon Valley – to the Bengal Renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th century.

The Bengal Renaissance was a cultural flowering involving creative thinking in politics, science, the arts and religion. One of its chief ideas was the perennial philosophy. One finds perennialism in the religious movement called ‘Brahmoism’, which was started by the great Bengali thinker and reformer Ram Mohan Roy in around 1850, and which suggests that all religions are partial formulations of the transcendent divinity within us. One also finds perennialism in the teachings of Vivekananda, dashing Bengali prophet of Vedanta, who caused a sensation when he visited the Parliament of Religions in Chicago and declared that all religions are true.

I often encountered the same cheerful perennialism while travelling in India last year – in the Theosophical Society’s headquarters in Chennai (which has temples to all the major religions), in the integral philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, in the teachings of Ramana Maharshi. I spent two weeks in a Zen / Jesuit retreat in Tamil Nadu, where we bowed to both Christ and the Buddha. This perennialism was a breath of fresh air after a period of desperately trying to be a Proper Christian.

Murphy pointed out to me that the ‘mystical expats’ helped to transmit the perennialist fire from Bengal to California. Heard, Huxley and Isherwood popularised Vedanta, the Hindu mysticism brought to the West by Vivekananda; while the evolutionary spirituality of Sri Aurobindo was transmitted into the Bay Area through the American Academy of Asian Studies – a small college that Alan Watts helped to found, which evolved into the California Institute of Integral Studies (Murphy was a student there). Watts also helped to transmit Zen and Daoist thinking into San Francisco, inspiring everyone from Jack Kerouac to John Cage. The perennialist spark caught fire in American culture, and now it’s widely accepted.

Perennialism and renaissances

It’s interesting that the ‘perennial philosophy’ was transmitted from one famous cultural renaissance to another. It got me thinking about perennialism and renaissances. If one looks back at the ‘American Renaissance’ – the sudden flowering of American literature led by Ralph Waldo Emerson and including Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville and others – one also encounters the perennial philosophy, particularly in Emerson and Thoreau. The stern Puritan soul of America suddenly relaxes, expands, and sees its smiling reflection in other cultures – in Platonism, in Hinduism, in a blade of grass.

One also finds the hot spring of the perennial philosophy bubbling up in the Romantic era, in Coleridge and Blake (‘all religions are one’) and, earlier, in the Italian Renaissance, at the Platonic Academy of Marsilio Ficino, who translated the works of Plato and ‘Hermes Trismegistus’, and sought to find a harmony between Christianity, Greek philosophy and Kabbalah. The optimism and creativity of this movement sings in the ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’ of Pico della Mirandola, and shines in the radiance of Botticelli and Raphael.

The perennialist stream bubbles up yet again in the Islamic Renaissance (more usually known as the Islamic Golden Age), which is usually connected by scholars to the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, where scholars translated the works of Greek and Roman philosophers and scientists. One can trace the connection between the perennial philosophy and cultural flowerings all the way back to the Athenian Golden Age of the fifth century BC, when again, the human soul looks up from narrow tribalism, and smiles. Socrates declares: ‘I am a citizen of the universe’, leading the Stoics to suggest that all humans have a spark of the divine logos within them.

These are important moments of collective epiphany and cultural evolution in the story of homo sapiens. What they seem to have in common is a strong sense of cultural self-confidence – ‘we are Indians!’, ‘we are Americans!’, ‘we are Athenians!’ etc – with an openness to other cultures and the best they have to teach. And there’s a sense of optimism in progress, a sense of humans rising up and realizing their inner divinity – you see this in Pico Della Mirandola’s Oration, in Emerson’s great sermon on self-reliance, in Huxley’s lectures on human potential.

The varieties of Perennialism

But then I thought, perennialism isn’t always optimistic and hopeful. While researching the perennial philosophy, you can’t help but come across a movement called Traditionalism. It was started by a French thinker called René Guénon in around 1920. Like the mystical expats, he was initially inspired by Vedanta, then he flirted with Catholicism, got into Taoism, before moving to Egypt and becoming initiated into a Sufi order. He inspired other traditionalists including Fritjof Schuon, Julius Evola and Mircea Eliade.

There’s a lot of similarities between Huxley et al’s Perennial Philosophy, and Guénon et al’s Traditionalism – they share the idea that western civilization has lost its soul in mechanical materialism, and that only a return to the core of wisdom at the heart of the great religious traditions will save civilization from collapse.

And yet Traditionalism is a much more pessimistic movement. Guénon and his successors, like the followers of Gurdjieff, thought wisdom could only ever be esoteric, reserved for the initiated elite. The masses would never get it. Traditionalists were constantly joining or creating esoteric secret societies, like the Gnostic Church, the Masons, the Maryamiya, the ‘Fraternity of the Cavalier of the Divine Paraclete’, or the ‘Legion of the Archangel Michael’.

They typically despaired of democratic politics, and flirted with the far-right – in Julius Evola’s case, this flirtation was quite explicit, as he tried to ingratiate himself first with Italian fascism and then with the Nazis. Mircea Eliade also had connections to the Romanian far-right. Where Huxley et al became cheery prophets of human potential, the Traditionalists were doom-mongers of the Apocalypse – they insisted we’re in Kali Yuga, a Hindu dark age of conflict and spiritual mediocrity. Humans aren’t ascending, we’re on the down-elevator, so the elite should withdraw and prepare for the deluge, or possibly seize power.

Reading about the Traditionalists yesterday, it struck me how human destinies can flow in such different directions from similar plateaus. I can well imagine Huxley et al becoming authoritarian Traditionalists. Huxley, like many modernists of his generation, was an aristocratic elitist – whenever he writes about bourgeois or proletarian mass culture, he invariably uses the word ‘squalid’. He and Gerald Heard often wondered if the perennial philosophy was suitable for the many, or just the initiated few. They pondered this in the 1950s and 60s with regard to psychedelics (Huxley decided they should just be for the intelligentsia). Heard, who in his last years became a guru to wealthy libertarian CEOs, suggested that spiritual education should focus on an elite – whom he called the ‘neo-brahmins’ – who could then rise to power. Particularly during World War 2, one finds the same note of deep cultural pessimism in Huxley and Heard’s writings as one finds in Guénon and Evola.

Why, then, did the mystical expats not become gloomy quasi-fascist Traditionalists? One reason is surely California. While Guénon was fulminating in a Cairo bedsit, Huxley and his gang were picnicking with Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin in the Hollywood Hills. They were living in gorgeous pads in Santa Monica. They were having too much fun to be fascist. Maybe the LA weather made them cheerier. Or maybe they found a culture more hospitable to their ideas – they were on the radio, on TV, lecturing away on campuses and at places like Esalen. Perhaps that gave them an optimism in human potential.

Another reason is Huxley and Heard had more faith in scientific progress than Guénon, who thought the urge to quantify everything was a symptom of the Kali Yuga. Huxley and Heard thought psychology could shed new light on the human psyche, that new psycho-spiritual methods could be discovered and disseminated, new drugs discovered. They may be right, although quantified spirituality has all kinds of risks – both Huxley and Heard can be over-credulous in their faith in new research.

Whatever the many causes, their lives ran in a different direction, and they took a bet on democratic mysticism – mysticism for the many, not the few.

Today, more and more of us are perennialists – a quarter of adult Americans are ‘spiritual but not religious’, and 35% of American millennials. Yet we can still see how many different directions a tide can break. We can see that Bay Area spirituality can easily become elitist – we the 1% are the spiritual supermen, the rest of society is screwed, let’s move to New Zealand, or space. We see that the perennial philosophy can still become deeply pessimistic and quasi-fascist – Steve Bannon and other alt-righters sing the praises of Julius Evola (my dark namesake) and argue that western civilization needs to re-embrace spiritual wisdom before it is over-run by immigrants.

I feel a strain of cultural pessimism in me too. Are we in an age of cultural ascent, or cultural decline? I’d probably go with Guénon and say we’re in the Kali Yuga. Thanks to people like Watts and Huxley, we have a very wide spirituality, with more and more people practicing wisdom techniques from Stoicism / Buddhism / Hinduism etc. But the width of participation seems to come at the cost of the height of attainment – where are the saints? Where are the masters? Every guru turns out to be a sex-pest. And, like Huxley, I worry about over-population and the damage we are doing to the ecosystem. It seems more likely to me that this century will be one of cultural collapse than spiritual ascent.

Clearly, I need to move to California and cheer up. Anyway, width of participation in spirituality is probably more important than height of practice. If several million people learn a bit of wisdom and suffer a bit less, that seems good to me. The ascent of humanity is very slow, but we’re getting there, together.

[American Dream]

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/19 ... mysticism/

Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism

Pankaj Mishra



“Men have to toughen up,” Jordan B. Peterson writes in 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos, “Men demand it, and women want it.” So, the first rule is, “Stand up straight with your shoulders back” and don’t forget to “clean your room.” By the way, “consciousness is symbolically masculine and has been since the beginning of time.” Oh, and “the soul of the individual eternally hungers for the heroism of genuine Being.” Many such pronouncements—didactic as well as metaphysical, ranging from the absurdity of political correctness to the “burden of Being”—have turned Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, into a YouTube sensation and a bestselling author in several Western countries.

12 Rules for Life is only Peterson’s second book in twenty years. Packaged for people brought up on BuzzFeed listicles, Peterson’s brand of intellectual populism has risen with stunning velocity; and it is boosted, like the political populisms of our time, by predominantly male and frenzied followers, who seem ever-ready to pummel his critics on social media. It is imperative to ask why and how this obscure Canadian academic, who insists that gender and class hierarchies are ordained by nature and validated by science, has suddenly come to be hailed as the West’s most influential public intellectual. For his apotheosis speaks of a crisis that is at least as deep as the one signified by Donald Trump’s unexpected leadership of the free world.

Peterson diagnoses this crisis as a loss of faith in old verities. “In the West,” he writes, “we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures.” Peterson offers to alleviate the resulting “desperation of meaninglessness,” with a return to “ancient wisdom.” It is possible to avoid “nihilism,” he asserts, and “to find sufficient meaning in individual consciousness and experience” with the help of “the great myths and religious stories of the past.”

Following Carl Jung, Peterson identifies “archetypes” in myths, dreams, and religions, which have apparently defined truths of the human condition since the beginning of time. “Culture,” one of his typical arguments goes, “is symbolically, archetypally, mythically male”—and this is why resistance to male dominance is unnatural. Men represent order, and “Chaos—the unknown—is symbolically associated with the feminine.” In other words, men resisting the perennially fixed archetypes of male and female, and failing to toughen up, are pathetic losers.

Such evidently eternal truths are not on offer anymore at a modern university; Jung’s speculations have been largely discredited. But Peterson, armed with his “maps of meaning” (the title of his previous book), has only contempt for his fellow academics who tend to emphasize the socially constructed and provisional nature of our perceptions. As with Jung, he presents some idiosyncratic quasi-religious opinions as empirical science, frequently appealing to evolutionary psychology to support his ancient wisdom.

Closer examination, however, reveals Peterson’s ageless insights as a typical, if not archetypal, product of our own times: right-wing pieties seductively mythologized for our current lost generations.

Peterson himself credits his intellectual awakening to the Cold War, when he began to ponder deeply such “evils associated with belief” as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and became a close reader of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. This is a common intellectual trajectory among Western right-wingers who swear by Solzhenitsyn and tend to imply that belief in egalitarianism leads straight to the guillotine or the Gulag. A recent example is the English polemicist Douglas Murray who deplores the attraction of the young to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and wishes that the idea of equality was “tainted by an ideological ordure equivalent to that heaped on the concept of borders.” Peterson confirms his membership of this far-right sect by never identifying the evils caused by belief in profit, or Mammon: slavery, genocide, and imperialism.

Reactionary white men will surely be thrilled by Peterson’s loathing for “social justice warriors” and his claim that divorce laws should not have been liberalized in the 1960s. Those embattled against political correctness on university campuses will heartily endorse Peterson’s claim that “there are whole disciplines in universities forthrightly hostile towards men.” Islamophobes will take heart from his speculation that “feminists avoid criticizing Islam because they unconsciously long for masculine dominance.” Libertarians will cheer Peterson’s glorification of the individual striver, and his stern message to the left-behinds (“Maybe it’s not the world that’s at fault. Maybe it’s you. You’ve failed to make the mark.”). The demagogues of our age don’t read much; but, as they ruthlessly crack down on refugees and immigrants, they can derive much philosophical backup from Peterson’s sub-chapter headings: “Compassion as a vice” and “Toughen up, you weasel.”

In all respects, Peterson’s ancient wisdom is unmistakably modern. The “tradition” he promotes stretches no further back than the late nineteenth century, when there first emerged a sinister correlation between intellectual exhortations to toughen up and strongmen politics. This was a period during which intellectual quacks flourished by hawking creeds of redemption and purification while political and economic crises deepened and faith in democracy and capitalism faltered. Many artists and thinkers—ranging from the German philosopher Ludwig Klages, member of the hugely influential Munich Cosmic Circle, to the Russian painter Nicholas Roerich and Indian activist Aurobindo Ghosh—assembled Peterson-style collages of part-occultist, part-psychological, and part-biological notions. These neo-romantics were responding, in the same way as Peterson, to an urgent need, springing from a traumatic experience of social and economic modernity, to believe—in whatever reassures and comforts.

This new object of belief tended to be exotically and esoterically pre-modern. The East, and India in particular, turned into a screen on which needy Westerners projected their fantasies; Jung, among many others, went on tediously about the Indian’s timeless—and feminine—self. In 1910, Romain Rolland summed up the widespread mood in which progress under liberal auspices appeared a sham, and many people appeared eager to replace the Enlightenment ideal of individual reason by such transcendental coordinates as “archetypes.” “The gate of dreams had reopened,” Rolland wrote, and “in the train of religion came little puffs of theosophy, mysticism, esoteric faith, occultism to visit the chambers of the Western mind.”

A range of intellectual entrepreneurs, from Theosophists and vendors of Asian spirituality like Vivekananda and D.T. Suzuki to scholars of Asia like Arthur Waley and fascist ideologues like Julius Evola (Steve Bannon’s guru) set up stalls in the new marketplace of ideas. W.B. Yeats, adjusting Indian philosophy to the needs of the Celtic Revival, pontificated on the “Ancient Self”; Jung spun his own variations on this evidently ancestral unconscious. Such conceptually foggy categories as “spirit” and “intuition” acquired broad currency; Peterson’s favorite words, being and chaos, started to appear in capital letters. Peterson’s own lineage among these healers of modern man’s soul can be traced through his repeatedly invoked influences: not only Carl Jung, but also Mircea Eliade, the Romanian scholar of religion, and Joseph Campbell, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, who, like Peterson, combined a conventional academic career with mass-market musings on heroic individuals.

The “desperation of meaninglessness” widely felt in the late nineteenth century, seemed especially desperate in the years following two world wars and the Holocaust. Jung, Eliade, and Campbell, all credentialed by university education, met a general bewilderment by suggesting the existence of a secret, almost gnostic, knowledge of the world. Claiming to throw light into recessed places in the human unconscious, they acquired immense and fanatically loyal fan clubs. Campbell’s 1988 television interviews with Bill Moyers provoked a particularly extraordinary response. As with Peterson, this popularizer of archaic myths, who believed that “Marxist philosophy had overtaken the university in America,” was remarkably in tune with contemporary prejudices. “Follow your own bliss,” he urged an audience that, during an era of neoconservative upsurge, was ready to be reassured that some profound ancient wisdom lay behind Ayn Rand’s paeans to unfettered individualism.

Peterson, however, seems to have modelled his public persona on Jung rather than Campbell. The Swiss sage sported a ring ornamented with the effigy of a snake—the symbol of light in a pre-Christian Gnostic cult. Peterson claims that he has been inducted into “the coastal Pacific Kwakwaka’wakw tribe”; he is clearly proud of the Native American longhouse he has built in his Toronto home.

Peterson may seem the latest in a long line of eggheads pretentiously but harmlessly romancing the noble savage. But it is worth remembering that Jung recklessly generalized about the superior “Aryan soul” and the inferior “Jewish psyche” and was initially sympathetic to the Nazis. Mircea Eliade was a devotee of Romania’s fascistic Iron Guard. Campbell’s loathing of “Marxist” academics at his college concealed a virulent loathing of Jews and blacks. Solzhenitsyn, Peterson’s revered mentor, was a zealous Russian expansionist, who denounced Ukraine’s independence and hailed Vladimir Putin as the right man to lead Russia’s overdue regeneration.

Nowhere in his published writings does Peterson reckon with the moral fiascos of his gurus and their political ramifications; he seems unbothered by the fact that thinking of human relations in such terms as dominance and hierarchy connects too easily with such nascent viciousness such as misogyny, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. He might argue that his maps of meaning aim at helping lost individuals rather than racists, ultra-nationalists, or imperialists. But he can’t plausibly claim, given his oft-expressed hostility to the “murderous equity doctrine” of feminists, and other progressive ideas, that he is above the fray of our ideological and culture wars.

Indeed, the modern fascination with myth has never been free from an illiberal and anti-democratic agenda. Richard Wagner, along with many German nationalists, became notorious for using myth to regenerate the volk and stoke hatred of the aliens—largely Jews—who he thought polluted the pure community rooted in blood and soil. By the early twentieth century, ethnic-racial chauvinists everywhere—Hindu supremacists in India as well as Catholic ultra-nationalists in France—were offering visions to uprooted peoples of a rooted organic society in which hierarchies and values had been stable. As Karla Poewe points out in New Religions and the Nazis (2005), political cultists would typically mix “pieces of Yogic and Abrahamic traditions” with “popular notions of science—or rather pseudo-science—such as concepts of ‘race,’ ‘eugenics,’ or ‘evolution.’” It was this opportunistic amalgam of ideas that helped nourish “new mythologies of would-be totalitarian regimes.”

Peterson rails today against “softness,” arguing that men have been “pushed too hard to feminize.” In his bestselling book Degeneration (1892), the Zionist critic Max Nordau amplified, more than a century before Peterson, the fear that the empires and nations of the West are populated by the weak-willed, the effeminate, and the degenerate. The French philosopher Georges Sorel identified myth as the necessary antidote to decadence and spur to rejuvenation. An intellectual inspiration to fascists across Europe, Sorel was particularly nostalgic about the patriarchal systems of ancient Israel and Greece.

Like Peterson, many of these hyper-masculinist thinkers saw compassion as a vice and urged insecure men to harden their hearts against the weak (women and minorities) on the grounds that the latter were biologically and culturally inferior. Hailing myth and dreams as the repository of fundamental human truths, they became popular because they addressed a widely felt spiritual hunger: of men looking desperately for maps of meaning in a world they found opaque and uncontrollable.

It was against this (eerily familiar) background—a “revolt against the modern world,” as the title of Evola’s 1934 book put it—that demagogues emerged so quickly in twentieth-century Europe and managed to exalt national and racial myths as the true source of individual and collective health. The drastic individual makeover demanded by the visionaries turned out to require a mass, coerced retreat from failed liberal modernity into an idealized traditional realm of myth and ritual.

In the end, deskbound pedants and fantasists helped bring about, in Thomas Mann’s words in 1936, an extensive “moral devastation” with their “worship of the unconscious”—that “knows no values, no good or evil, no morality.” Nothing less than the foundations for knowledge and ethics, politics and science, collapsed, ultimately triggering the cataclysms of the twentieth century: two world wars, totalitarian regimes, and the Holocaust. It is no exaggeration to say that we are in the midst of a similar intellectual and moral breakdown, one that seems to presage a great calamity. Peterson calls it, correctly, “psychological and social dissolution.” But he is a disturbing symptom of the malaise to which he promises a cure.

[American Dream]

“The Weightiest Questions in the Smallest Number of Words”: Retelling the Nietzsche Story

Skye C. Cleary interviews Sue Prideaux



Nietzsche’s friends Franz Overbeck and Peter Gast initially thought that he might be feigning or self-imposing his madness because they knew Nietzsche believed, as you say, “Insanity must be risked, if it was the crucible of knowledge,” and “only the fragile bark of madness could carry the human mind over the Rubicon that must be crossed to reach revelation.” He seems to have returned to such an infantile state in his final years that it’s hard to imagine that he was feigning it.

I think there’s no escaping from the fact that the end of his life was a terrible tragedy. He certainly wasn’t feigning it. But I have to say that I love the way that even his madness continues the debate that he provoked, relating back to the huge question he asked. Was his madness hubristic punishment? Had God reserved a special Dantean circle in Hell for the man who announced his death? Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad …

Can there be a worse fate for a brilliant intellectual than to be returned to the state of drooling, incontinent infantilism? Ten — nearly 11 — years in this ghastly state, helpless in the hands of his sister, whose beliefs were completely opposed to his own. Elisabeth was a friend of Hitler and an admiring correspondent of Mussolini. Nietzsche died in 1900 and Elisabeth in 1935. Elisabeth was an extremely competent publicist and networker and she spent those 35 years lying, forging, and cutting-and-pasting her brother’s literary estate to fit her own political convictions. Nietzsche, who had repeatedly stressed his hatred of nationalism, racism, and antisemitism, became the plaything of Nazism. It has taken 50 years of hard scholarship to unravel the injustice. That’s not irony, it’s very serious tragedy.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the ... che-story/

Ronald Beiner
Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right

University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2018. 167pp., £19.99 hb
ISBN 9780812250596

Reviewed by Javier Sethness

In Dangerous Minds, Beiner discusses the influence Nietzsche has had on notorious contemporary ultra-rightists such as the U.S.-based white supremacist Richard Spencer and the Russian neo-fascist Aleksandr Dugin, as well as the historical Italian fascist Julius Evola, who was an “explicit disciple of Nietzsche” (3). Like Evola, Spencer declares himself a Nietzschean, and Dugin swears by the iconoclast’s ominous statement that “man [sic] is something that should be overcome” (2, 12). These prominent figures of an increasingly powerful Fascist International find inspiration in Nietzsche’s aristocratic differentiation between the putatively “elect” and “unfit peoples” (4) as well as the philosopher’s anticipation of Nazism’s practice of große Politik (“great [or noble] politics”) in his militaristic critique of Otto von Bismarck from the right, as György Lukács points out in The Destruction of Reason (1952), and his “imperialistic critique of nationalism” (136n2). Today’s far-rightists also admire the Nazi Heidegger, who himself took a great deal from Nietzsche, particularly his critique of liberal modernity as nihilistic. To date, reports Beiner, Dugin has dedicated four volumes to discussing Heidegger, with “more to follow” (139n27).

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/review ... -sethness/

[American Dream]

The Menace of Eco-Fascism

Matthew Phelan


Hunter Michael Cole holding a Burmese Python during a nonnative snake hunt training session for capturing reptiles that are thought to be damaging the region’s endangered wildlife, Miami, February 22, 2010

We tend to assume that America’s environmental movement has clear analogues in other countries and cultures, but it might really be closer to an aberration. Forged in the crucible of Vietnam- and Civil Rights-era protest movements, and melding the traditions of Henry David Thoreau and Teddy Roosevelt with the ideals of the 1960s counterculture, American environmentalism bears little resemblance to some of its presumed allies abroad.

Across Europe, for example, a longstanding cultural relationship between Nature and Nation permeates environmental debate with a nativist sentiment stronger than is typically visible in the United States. In Germany, beginning around the turn of the twentieth century, die Wandervögel (the hiking birds) began to coalesce around a disdain for modernity and a romantic conception of the nation’s Teutonic agrarian past. The Hitler Youth eventually appropriated a lot of the Wandervögel aesthetic—including its early use of the swastika and its militant Boy Scout look—and the movement’s ideological obsessions; the way it tied local ecology to ethnicity in a “Blood and Soil” mythology is still echoed today by many on the far right. (The German Green Party has been periodically plagued by this tension, sometimes leading to the creation of splinter groups such as the Unabhängige Ökologen Deutschlands, the Independent Environmentalists of Germany, whose platform pairs ecological goals with the protection of “cultural identity” and racial purity.)

Russia today is seeing the rise of a similar eco-nationalist homesteading movement, sometimes dubbed “Ringing Cedars” after a series of fantasy novels by the Siberian author Vladimir Megre, whose mysticism and Old World nostalgia inspired readers to go “back to the land.” The catalyzing force of a popular fantasy series is oddly something that the Ringing Cedars communities share with the United Kingdom’s mid-century Green movement, which arose in tandem with a largely conservative longing for the English countryside, rekindled by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

Continues: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/10/2 ... o-fascism/

[liminalOyster]

"We are all fascist readers of Nietzsche; we are all revolutionary readers of Nietzsche. Our unity is a contradictory relation (hierarchy without mediation), just as the unity of Nietzsche is a contradictory and auto-critical unity." -- Francois Laruelle

[American Dream]

THE ABLEIST LOGIC OF PRIMITIVISM: A CRITIQUE OF “ECOEXTREMIST” THOUGHT

WHEN PRACTICAL REALITIES ARE EXAMINED, IT’S CLEAR THAT A PRIMITIVIST VISION OF THE FUTURE IS ONLY ACHIEVABLE THROUGH FASCIST EUGENICS.

https://proteanmag.com/2018/12/30/ablei ... imitivism/

Anton Shekhovtsov. The Palingenetic Thrust of Russian Neo-Eurasianism: Ideas of Rebirth in Aleksandr Dugin's Worldview1

In spite of the obvious antagonism and innate conflict between radical left-wing anarchism and fascism, Dugin does not hesitate to refer to Zerzan because of the strong palingenetic sentiment expressed in the works of the latter. The idea behind Zerzan's anarcho-primitivism is that of the recovery of a 'Golden Age' of natural harmony and simple way of life by 'dismantling' the present technology-based modernity and 'unmaking of civilization' itself. Primitivist thought aims at abolishing such crucial civilisational features as the concepts of time, language, number and culture, responsible for the present state of 'dis-ease'. Politically, however, Zerzan - as other anarcho-primitivists - rejects the establishment of any form of governmental rule, be it authoritarian, social-democratic, fascist or communist, as well as any hierarchical society structure in general. Dugin disregards this anarcho-primitivist antithesis to his own doctrine just as he ignores the entire essence of anarcho-primitivism, implying that its only 'healthy element' is the idea of an abolition of the liminoid conditions of modernity, diagnosed as abnormal and malignant, to be followed by the immediate coming of a new 'Golden Age', regardless of the political or cultural content of this 'new world'. Dugin is not the only extreme right ideologist interested in Zerzan's legacy. For instance, there was a short discussion entitled 'Evola and Zerzan on modern “civilisation”' in the Internet forum 'Stormfront White Nationalist Community'.43 Moreover, the first issue of the 'radical Traditionalist' magazine Tyr: Myth - Culture - Tradition featured a review of Zerzan's Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization written by American journalist Michael Moynihan,44 who also happens to be the leader of the countercultural music band Blood Axis.

Between nihilism and fascism

https://leftyhooligan.wordpress.com/201 ... d-fascism/

[American Dream]

A Fascist Tulpa in the White House? Right-wing ‘Meme Magic’ and the Rise of Trump

The notion of a ‘Tulpa’ derives from Tibetan Buddhism and has been used to describe thought-forms, creations of magical work that assume an apparent independent reality and could pass for human beings, maybe even Presidents of the United States! As Ian Vincent has demonstrated this conception of a Tulpa bears little relation to the actual meaning of the term in its Tibetan context, but it has been popularised through Western occultism and cultural works influenced by it such as David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return series (2017).

As a metaphor at least, Trump as a political phenomenon is plainly partly the creation of the accumulated grievances of assorted racists, nationalists and anti-feminists (among others), and the internet does provide a mechanism for their desires to be instantly circulated across the globe in a way that does directly affect social reality through influencing people’s thought, behaviour and voting patterns. The internet only appears as ethereal to its users, in reality it is built on a material infrastructure of cables, warehouses full of servers and devices made in factories in China and elsewhere. Nevertheless the magical paradigm of will/intent >symbol>emotional charge>result does kind of describe how internet use helps shapes culture. Whether or not this activity can also give some kind of nudge that affects reality in a non-linear way independently of the internet is another matter – even most serious practitioners who believe in the efficacy of magic would say it takes more than a virally circulated picture of a frog to force the hand of chance and achieve limited results, let alone swing an election.

In any event, results magic is ethically and politically neutral. In its conscious form, it has been used by radical magical activists as well as fascist occultists, and they too have drawn on Chaos Magic, Crowley, Wicca and other currents. Indeed as Lachman himself mentions, since February 2017 witches, pagans and others have been undertaking a monthly ‘mass spell’ aimed at ‘binding’ Trump and his associates and prevent them doing harm. The call for this act of #MagicResistance was first made by Michael M Hughes in Baltimore and has since spread to become a global action undertaken on the waning crescent moon with a ritual including an orange candle, a picture of Trump and the Tower tarot card. Does this get results? Maybe not on its own, but Hughes claims that ‘Far from being ineffectual “slacktivism,” the ritual (and others developed by participants) helps many of us stay focused, committed, and invigorated for our everyday activism and resistance’.


‘Bind Trump Sigil’ developed for ‘Bind Trump’ spell’

Others have advocated less spectacular approaches for similar ends. Anthony Nine (2017), a contemporary sorcerer with roots in London chaos magic but now a Miami-based Espiritista and Vodouisant, has advised: ‘Aiming directly for the main figurehead is rarely the best angle… You get better results if you break things down into their moving parts and try to identify the fault line’. He suggests focusing on stirring up schisms and tensions within the far right: ‘Keep your ego out of it. Don’t make a big fucking parade out of it and the fact that you are doing it. There is magic designed as performance art and agitprop theatre, and there is magic designed to get a thing done. This is the latter. Do it quietly. Do it effectively. Make it happen. Put these Nazi pricks back down in their hole for another 80 years’.

If we are looking for forms of far right occultism per se, a starting point would be the traditionalist milieu which is the other main focus of Lachman’s book. He describes the history of traditionalist ideas characterised by a rejection of ‘democracy and socialism, all forms of mass culture, and materialism’ and advocating some kind of hierarchical theocratic state. With their taste for self-proclaimed elite secret societies, ritual and uniforms, traditionalists have tended to be drawn to some of the more ceremonial forms of occultism as well as to the most conservative and hierarchical strains of Christianity (whether within Catholic or Orthodox churches).

Lachman looks at the 19th century origins of traditionalism in the work of ‘eccentric French occultist Joseph Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre’ who advocated ‘synarchy’ (that is total government) in opposition to ‘anarchy’ (no government) and dreamed of a ‘totalitarian caste-bound organic social ordering’ headed by a supreme leader. Rene Guenon picked up this mantle in the early 20th century, combining esoteric interests with extreme right wing dabblings including in the interwar years with the proto fascist Action Francaise. Also in France, sometime Theosophist Schwaller de Lubicz founded a group known as Les Veilleurs (the Watchers) in 1919 who combined traditionalism, fervent anti-semitism and wearing a uniform attire of ‘boots, riding pants, and a dark shirt’.

All of this was preparing the way for the traditionalist figure whose ideas have the most current influence -Julius ‘Mussolini wasn’t fascist enough for me’ Evola (1898-1974). As well as arguing in ‘Fascism is not enough’ for ‘more radical, more intrepid Fascism, a really absolute Fascism, made of pure form, inaccessible to compromise’ , Evola wrote numerous charming texts including ‘Aspects of the Jewish Problem’ and ‘Outline of a Racist Education’. He was also involved in the occultist activities of the UR Group and wrote of how ‘the power of an ‘I’ expands from being the power of thought to that of magical imagination and self-persuasion: to that of persuading others and, ultimately, of persuading and altering reality itself’.

Evola’s notion of an occult war between the forces of ‘global subversion’ and the defenders of Tradition seems to find echoes in Dugin’s geopolitical vision of a civilizational confrontation between the forces of liberalism, individualism and globalisation (which he associates with ‘the Atlanticists’) and ‘the defenders of religion, order, and tradition, the people of Eurasia’ (Lachman summarising Dugin’s The Foundations of Geopolitics). Evola has also been name checked by Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon, who likewise fantasises about a clash of civilisations, this time between the West and Islam (and possibly China too).

Read: https://datacide-magazine.com/a-fascist-tulpa-in-the-white-house-right-wing-meme-magic-and-the-rise-of-trump/

[Jerky]

Very interesting stuff, AD. Thanks for the link!

I'm in the middle of reading Lachman's book, myself, and taking extensive notes with which I will create a "concordance" to share with people who a) can't afford to buy the work and/or b) don't have time to read the whole thing, but could make good use of the information contained therein. I'll be posting a link to that concordance here, as soon as it's finished, once in this thread, and once in the data dump.

Thanks again for providing me with an excellent new bookmark (Datacide Magazine)!

J.