The dissident right is utterly unaware that it is merely the obverse of leftism. While the project of the Left (particularly since the emergence of the New Left and the Congress for Cultural Freedom) has been the blind affirmation of any obscure and unconventional identity that might appear in the furtherance of liberalism, the Right's project for some time has been the attenuation of identitarian notions (be they racial, sexual, etc.) in furtherance of liberalism.
The dissident right's conception of society is merely liberalism in a different Fregean sense than the left's: rightoids are bent on constructing a 'eugenic' 'meritocracy' whereby individuals are ranked ordinally so as to maximize society's output of abstract value, but still in such a way that a conception of society as an ensemble of disembodied individuals coming together to interact with bourgeois property (the "cultus of abstract man" as per Marx) is still reified. It's not all that different from Rush Limbaugh or Freshwater school economics laundered through references to ancient Greece. This worldview is all aesthetic, a crude pastiche of old right aristocratic values.
"Antileftism is the solemn recognition that when this day comes, the cruelty of this process must be done out of sheer survival instinct, not matricidal resentment."
Cruelty is unavoidable? The system - global economy - is almighty (like God)? Human minds, souls, hearts are helpless, don't matter? I hope this is not true. I hope I misunderstood you (although I appreciate many thoughts in this essay).
Yes, cruel acts and cruel decisions are unavoidable on the grand historic scale, especially at critical moments in the unfolding of history. We can take conscious precautions against allowing them occur but they will occur nonetheless as we do not and will never live in a perfect world. Consider the situation between Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen of Scots. Elizabeth hesitated in executing Mary despite decades of reasonable suspicion that she was positioning herself to usurp Elizabeth, but ultimately knew that if she didn't, Mary wouldn't stop trying to kill her. It was cruel, but ultimately unavoidable unless Elizabeth allowed some cruel act of Mary's to befall her.
No economy is almighty, but they are all larger than any individual, thus why it takes entire nations (or acts of God) centuries to wholly transform their substance. The economy can only emerge on top of what God has already provided for life to take advantage of. It is more like an ecosystem or a super-organism (similar to a beehive) than a God in its own right. Each organism in this ecosystem plays a role within it, each acts as a vessel for and entropic transformer of energies which have existed since before the earth itself, but that doesn't make any past or existing or future ecosystem God. In this way, some individuals act within the man-made ecology more akin to decomposers, some act more akin to predators, some parasites, some scavengers, etc. Any of these can be a viable survival strategy depending on the ecological context, and all of them play necessary ecological roles which sustain the others. It is extraordinarily difficult for any individual to impose solely his own will upon it since it is made up of all human activity which has hitherto taken place, plus the resources which existed before we did, plus all of our waste products and their respective confounding variables, plus all of our own inefficiencies in measuring and adjusting these things. God is still God, God already knows how everything is bound to play out, but since we can't see things from His unbound perspective we do what we can with our limited perspective as agents within it to survive.
Human souls are not helpless and do matter, but this is outside the scope of the essay. The economy is one small aspect of God's Kingdom, even if it does have an outsize effect on how we live our individual lives and how we individually see the world.
Thank you very much for your answer. It gives me a lot to think about. Of course I know there is truth in what you say, but I still feel worried to a certain degree. I'll try to figure it out, I'll take my time. Thank you for your inspiring ideas. They are challenging for me, and I like that.
While this peace makes some individually correct points, it utterly fails to combine them into a meaningful whole.
In the end the author has no idea what he wants, or why he wants it beyond a vague sense that he doesn't like the direction the world is currently headed, a rather common problem on the so-called "Dissident Right". Thus he ends up reduced to playing basically meaningless wordcel games with the words "left", "right", and "liberalism".
It doesn't matter what he or anyone "wants". You can make up whatever little political program you want. Any attempt to alter the "system" via politics just propels it forward because the system itself is in flux. Its entire purpose is perpetual transformation.
He defines the "left" and "right" as concrete entities. He only uses those terms because that is how those groups refer to themselves and each other. His point is that they both serve largely the same function at different points in their dialectical movement. The left and right are two cylinders on the same engine. They convert energy to motion under the same mechanical principles but at different points in time. Same cycle, different phases.
I don't think the author is trying to say that we should just bend over and accept being fucked by gay race communism. He's describing certain dynamics to demonstrate that
imprudent/performative opposition to "leftism" ends up working in service to it.
> It doesn't matter what he or anyone "wants". You can make up whatever little political program you want. Any attempt to alter the "system" via politics just propels it forward because the system itself is in flux. Its entire purpose is perpetual transformation.
In other words he's effectively defined "the system" as everything besides his preferred ideology, and he doesn't even know what that is.
I state pretty clearly at the end that I am a liberal by default. It's not the content of the beliefs espoused on the radical left or right which determine what make them part of the "the system," but their actual political role within it. Both the right and left of 20 years ago, 40 years ago, 80 years ago, had wildly different views from the right and left of today, but their functional role was essentially the same then as it is now. If I were to have claimed a specific end goal or positive political project, I would have undermined the entire point of the essay.
I didn't claim otherwise, although that's a point that can be debated (and indeed is discussed within this very essay). I said the content of their beliefs don't determine what their role is.
Capitalism survived both World Wars, each of which on its own nearly thrust Europe into famine. The global economy will see widespread restructuring and a major depression within my lifetime, I'm sure of it, but I doubt the damage will be severe enough to trigger famine in developed countries, which likewise suggests it will not be enough to completely supplant liberalism as the dominant ideology.
There are still new crops of young people to fill in gaps, there are just fewer of them and they're dumber but not to a civilization-ending extent. Even the Plague, arguably the closest thing to hell on earth, didn't bring down the feudal economy to nothingness. Our economy is much more flexible than that, as 2020 proved.
And if not capitalism, what to call it then? Not only leftists use it as a descriptor for today's economy, and it's definitely not the same economy as what existed prior to industrialization; it demands a name, this is the one that stuck.
Yes, and it will give. Declining fertility and passing on of technical expertise are the greatest economic threats today and are already leading to profound social disruptions. I still do not think this will be enough to fundamentally reshape the world.
The bourgeoisie do still run the world. Though the bureaucratic state has exploded in influence since the 1930s, those bureaucracies and the intellectual class which comprise them are still functionaries of the world's financial elite, who are definitionally bourgeois. B. Cryptofash explores this in his critique of Alvin Gouldner, who claimed intellectuals will become the new ruling class when they abandon searching for a revolutionary subject and become their own.
In the US, the bourgeois class funds and foments all political agitation and cultural reformation. In the EU, which is much more bureaucratized than the US, that bureaucracy has developed according to the needs of their own (and the US's) elite. In China, the most powerful country to have a bureaucracy which actually challenges the power of their bourgeois class, their party functionaries still set the conditions to allow that bourgeois class to grow post-1979 and cannot afford to eliminate them altogether else they repeat the disasters of the Mao era. It is their bureaucracy which is expendable, not the bourgeoisie. Even central banks, which exert enormous control over the global economy, cannot take certain actions without causing devastating capital strikes and a forced change in leadership.
What definitively ended in the 1930s was the laissez-faire era, and it only ended because industry cartels the world over saw a need for its end in order to reshape and restabilize the world's economic and political systems in the wake of the Depression. The era we're in today is just a more advanced form of the same economic system. Should state and corporate bureaucracies exert even more power in the near future (which they will, as Trump and Biden's consecutive terms suggest) they would still be in service of the same leadership, who themselves act only as living stores of capital.
But I may be completely off the mark in assuming what developments you think led to the end of bourgeois control of the economy, and if so, I'd appreciate your clarification.
I put “bourgeois “ in quotes as it is a term with diverse meanings.
Industry cartels did not support the 1930s bureaucratization of the world. In the US they considered a coup against FDR and his backing group of intelligentsia and popes. While this could be seen as a continuation of a bourgeois regime, it was capitalism being dead and buried.
Leftism or rightism are both strategies for power-seeking within the social superorganism and today both are strongly reactive to accelerating technological "progress". We live in the daze of Tofflers' "Future Shock" wherein the rate of change or the speed of the struggle (how rapidly the punches are being thrown on each side) is disorienting.
The only irony is that this the cattiest reply I've ever received on any of my essays so far. You spent 200 characters tiptoeing around calling me a f*g in a reply to a piece criticizing the right for embracing transgenderism. I won't mince my words: You are a massive f*gg*t.
This is a very good piece. I wrote an article forwarding a similar thesis this summer as well: https://pikulexpedition.substack.com/p/the-suspect-genesis-of-the-anti-woke.
The dissident right is utterly unaware that it is merely the obverse of leftism. While the project of the Left (particularly since the emergence of the New Left and the Congress for Cultural Freedom) has been the blind affirmation of any obscure and unconventional identity that might appear in the furtherance of liberalism, the Right's project for some time has been the attenuation of identitarian notions (be they racial, sexual, etc.) in furtherance of liberalism.
The dissident right's conception of society is merely liberalism in a different Fregean sense than the left's: rightoids are bent on constructing a 'eugenic' 'meritocracy' whereby individuals are ranked ordinally so as to maximize society's output of abstract value, but still in such a way that a conception of society as an ensemble of disembodied individuals coming together to interact with bourgeois property (the "cultus of abstract man" as per Marx) is still reified. It's not all that different from Rush Limbaugh or Freshwater school economics laundered through references to ancient Greece. This worldview is all aesthetic, a crude pastiche of old right aristocratic values.
"Antileftism is the solemn recognition that when this day comes, the cruelty of this process must be done out of sheer survival instinct, not matricidal resentment."
Cruelty is unavoidable? The system - global economy - is almighty (like God)? Human minds, souls, hearts are helpless, don't matter? I hope this is not true. I hope I misunderstood you (although I appreciate many thoughts in this essay).
Yes, cruel acts and cruel decisions are unavoidable on the grand historic scale, especially at critical moments in the unfolding of history. We can take conscious precautions against allowing them occur but they will occur nonetheless as we do not and will never live in a perfect world. Consider the situation between Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen of Scots. Elizabeth hesitated in executing Mary despite decades of reasonable suspicion that she was positioning herself to usurp Elizabeth, but ultimately knew that if she didn't, Mary wouldn't stop trying to kill her. It was cruel, but ultimately unavoidable unless Elizabeth allowed some cruel act of Mary's to befall her.
No economy is almighty, but they are all larger than any individual, thus why it takes entire nations (or acts of God) centuries to wholly transform their substance. The economy can only emerge on top of what God has already provided for life to take advantage of. It is more like an ecosystem or a super-organism (similar to a beehive) than a God in its own right. Each organism in this ecosystem plays a role within it, each acts as a vessel for and entropic transformer of energies which have existed since before the earth itself, but that doesn't make any past or existing or future ecosystem God. In this way, some individuals act within the man-made ecology more akin to decomposers, some act more akin to predators, some parasites, some scavengers, etc. Any of these can be a viable survival strategy depending on the ecological context, and all of them play necessary ecological roles which sustain the others. It is extraordinarily difficult for any individual to impose solely his own will upon it since it is made up of all human activity which has hitherto taken place, plus the resources which existed before we did, plus all of our waste products and their respective confounding variables, plus all of our own inefficiencies in measuring and adjusting these things. God is still God, God already knows how everything is bound to play out, but since we can't see things from His unbound perspective we do what we can with our limited perspective as agents within it to survive.
Human souls are not helpless and do matter, but this is outside the scope of the essay. The economy is one small aspect of God's Kingdom, even if it does have an outsize effect on how we live our individual lives and how we individually see the world.
Thank you very much for your answer. It gives me a lot to think about. Of course I know there is truth in what you say, but I still feel worried to a certain degree. I'll try to figure it out, I'll take my time. Thank you for your inspiring ideas. They are challenging for me, and I like that.
While this peace makes some individually correct points, it utterly fails to combine them into a meaningful whole.
In the end the author has no idea what he wants, or why he wants it beyond a vague sense that he doesn't like the direction the world is currently headed, a rather common problem on the so-called "Dissident Right". Thus he ends up reduced to playing basically meaningless wordcel games with the words "left", "right", and "liberalism".
Or maybe you failed to understand the meaning?
It doesn't matter what he or anyone "wants". You can make up whatever little political program you want. Any attempt to alter the "system" via politics just propels it forward because the system itself is in flux. Its entire purpose is perpetual transformation.
He defines the "left" and "right" as concrete entities. He only uses those terms because that is how those groups refer to themselves and each other. His point is that they both serve largely the same function at different points in their dialectical movement. The left and right are two cylinders on the same engine. They convert energy to motion under the same mechanical principles but at different points in time. Same cycle, different phases.
I don't think the author is trying to say that we should just bend over and accept being fucked by gay race communism. He's describing certain dynamics to demonstrate that
imprudent/performative opposition to "leftism" ends up working in service to it.
> It doesn't matter what he or anyone "wants". You can make up whatever little political program you want. Any attempt to alter the "system" via politics just propels it forward because the system itself is in flux. Its entire purpose is perpetual transformation.
In other words he's effectively defined "the system" as everything besides his preferred ideology, and he doesn't even know what that is.
I state pretty clearly at the end that I am a liberal by default. It's not the content of the beliefs espoused on the radical left or right which determine what make them part of the "the system," but their actual political role within it. Both the right and left of 20 years ago, 40 years ago, 80 years ago, had wildly different views from the right and left of today, but their functional role was essentially the same then as it is now. If I were to have claimed a specific end goal or positive political project, I would have undermined the entire point of the essay.
> It's not the content of the beliefs espoused on the radical left or right which determine what make them part of the "the system,"
The content of those beliefs actually matter, because they affect how people will act.
I didn't claim otherwise, although that's a point that can be debated (and indeed is discussed within this very essay). I said the content of their beliefs don't determine what their role is.
You have a great deal of faith in the global economy to continue powering liberalism.
Capitalism survived both World Wars, each of which on its own nearly thrust Europe into famine. The global economy will see widespread restructuring and a major depression within my lifetime, I'm sure of it, but I doubt the damage will be severe enough to trigger famine in developed countries, which likewise suggests it will not be enough to completely supplant liberalism as the dominant ideology.
It’s easy to survive famine and calamity when there is new crops of young people to fill the gaps.
(Calling it “capitalism” is a leftist tell)
There are still new crops of young people to fill in gaps, there are just fewer of them and they're dumber but not to a civilization-ending extent. Even the Plague, arguably the closest thing to hell on earth, didn't bring down the feudal economy to nothingness. Our economy is much more flexible than that, as 2020 proved.
And if not capitalism, what to call it then? Not only leftists use it as a descriptor for today's economy, and it's definitely not the same economy as what existed prior to industrialization; it demands a name, this is the one that stuck.
Each smaller generation has to the pay the debts of larger ones that came before it. Something must give.
The leftist frame is seeing the world as one where capital or “the bourgeois “ hold power - this system did actually perish in the 30s.
Yes, and it will give. Declining fertility and passing on of technical expertise are the greatest economic threats today and are already leading to profound social disruptions. I still do not think this will be enough to fundamentally reshape the world.
The bourgeoisie do still run the world. Though the bureaucratic state has exploded in influence since the 1930s, those bureaucracies and the intellectual class which comprise them are still functionaries of the world's financial elite, who are definitionally bourgeois. B. Cryptofash explores this in his critique of Alvin Gouldner, who claimed intellectuals will become the new ruling class when they abandon searching for a revolutionary subject and become their own.
In the US, the bourgeois class funds and foments all political agitation and cultural reformation. In the EU, which is much more bureaucratized than the US, that bureaucracy has developed according to the needs of their own (and the US's) elite. In China, the most powerful country to have a bureaucracy which actually challenges the power of their bourgeois class, their party functionaries still set the conditions to allow that bourgeois class to grow post-1979 and cannot afford to eliminate them altogether else they repeat the disasters of the Mao era. It is their bureaucracy which is expendable, not the bourgeoisie. Even central banks, which exert enormous control over the global economy, cannot take certain actions without causing devastating capital strikes and a forced change in leadership.
What definitively ended in the 1930s was the laissez-faire era, and it only ended because industry cartels the world over saw a need for its end in order to reshape and restabilize the world's economic and political systems in the wake of the Depression. The era we're in today is just a more advanced form of the same economic system. Should state and corporate bureaucracies exert even more power in the near future (which they will, as Trump and Biden's consecutive terms suggest) they would still be in service of the same leadership, who themselves act only as living stores of capital.
But I may be completely off the mark in assuming what developments you think led to the end of bourgeois control of the economy, and if so, I'd appreciate your clarification.
I put “bourgeois “ in quotes as it is a term with diverse meanings.
Industry cartels did not support the 1930s bureaucratization of the world. In the US they considered a coup against FDR and his backing group of intelligentsia and popes. While this could be seen as a continuation of a bourgeois regime, it was capitalism being dead and buried.
One of the best pieces I've read on substack in ages. Got me thinking real good.
Leftism or rightism are both strategies for power-seeking within the social superorganism and today both are strongly reactive to accelerating technological "progress". We live in the daze of Tofflers' "Future Shock" wherein the rate of change or the speed of the struggle (how rapidly the punches are being thrown on each side) is disorienting.
The only irony is that this the cattiest reply I've ever received on any of my essays so far. You spent 200 characters tiptoeing around calling me a f*g in a reply to a piece criticizing the right for embracing transgenderism. I won't mince my words: You are a massive f*gg*t.