In this post I will look at the question of “what is to be done” after Liberalism.
How can we learn to live again, when for so long life has been exhausted in the soul-shrinking effort to animate man’s creations?
I will examine how following the failed god of science has led us not into enlightenment but a rational barbarism, following the pattern of previous attempts to exceed the limitations of man by his own inventions.
THE CAPTURE OF LIFE
Any utopia must be dystopian, for a life of rational harmony is the death of the soul1
The music has stopped, and we shall play statues no more. Some movement is urged by the moment - but what? The grand illusion of the Liberal dream has made us think of words as actions, and consider fantasies as facts.
Perhaps its chief trick in this spellbinding has been to blind us to the fact that we have been passive in the performance of taking liberties.
Before we try to act beyond reaction, it is important to consider what to do.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
Lenin asked2 in 1901 “what is to be done?”. He was not the first, nor was he the only man to dream of the remoulding of mankind who had no sense of beauty.
His book which prefigured a revolution made real by Trotsky was an argument against reality, like the work of Chernyshevsky from which he took its title.
Chernyshevsky wrote in 1863, combining a vigorous socialism with an appeal to the duty of intellectuals to lead a scientific remodelling of civilisation.
In our own time, this habit continues. It is hard for men to discard the fantasy of a Homo Superior, redeemed through his own machinations. It is harder still because we inhabit a vast machine which has driven men mad in the pursuit of fantasies.
In Barry Jones’ 2020 reboot3, the question What is to be done? again recasts mankind as a problem to be solved by following the science.
For more on science as salvation, see here
Jones, a left-liberal Australian politician, believes that political power can reshape the natural world, which is an illusion. The change of the climate cannot be halted by policy or by sacrifice, and his argument in this regard is that nations should handicap themselves into subjugation to those who do not.
Jones’ prescription for the future is a rationalist utopia. He believes, as many liberals do, that the scourges he imagines can be remedied with reason. He believes that education can enclever men to the point they become, presumably like himself, freed from their limitations.
The Enlightenment which he worships is about to enter its fourth century. History since the Discourse on the Method4 has demonstrated the devastating power of the belief that man can be made rational by his betters.
The Jacobins made a religion of Reason, and also constructed special boats with which to drown thousands of men,women and children in “national baptisms”.
For more the romance of death in revolution, see here
Today France still refuses to record data pertaining to the race of its citizenry outside the national census, believing that men are made French by words.
As an anti-racist, this nonsense is sense to the liberal mind of Mr Jones.
The science he believes provides salvation appears to have created both the covid virus and the toxic remedies of novel mRNA injections, which research suggests may threaten an epidemic of brain-wasting prion disease.
It was the Enlightenment which romanced men into the fairytale of self-emancipation. It is the modern mind which looks within and finds nothing, seeking refuge in make belief, to keep safe his dreams from the dread confinement of the human condition.
The dream is over. Many are waking into a world from which they thought themselves exiled. Science has guided them into experiments whose results it cannot control. The prudent declined to participate.
See the social experiment in the same light, and you may see beyond the tunnel.
“They shall meet with darkness in the day, and grope at noonday as in the night.”
Book of Job, 5:14
Before we learn to walk away from the leading lights of Liberalism, we should ask “into what?”.
The Chinese model of a technocratic dystopia, or a feudalism absent any obligation to the dispossessed? A vacuum sucks at everything, born of the benighted void at the heart of the West. It begs to be filled with purpose.
To some people, this is a moment to repeat the mistakes that made it. Once more, with feeling.
BEFORE THE FALL
Barry Jones speaks for the back-to-basics Liberals. At least Lenin and Chernyshevsky had novelty on their side, which makes any product appealing. His political programme is a sort of fundamentalism, a return to a prelapsarian Liberal age, with parallels to the Islamism of Sayyid Qutb5.
Islamism, much in the news today, is a story of the fall of man. It explains the decline of the muslim world as a loss of religious purity, and says Islam must re-establish its orthodoxy by political means to restore its glory.
Like Liberalism, it too seeks to do this through re-education and the capture of policy. The envy directed towards Islam indicates the absence of a similar resilience of purpose in the West, which is discovering the cost of the devil’s bargain, whilst refusing to acknowledge what it has lost.
The glory of Liberal Britain did not flow from the pages of Darwin, but from the bank-loaned power of Palmerston. This was thrown away in wars which are now worshipped to defray the pain of loss. The banks have survived. Our gunboats cannot secure the Suez today.
The Liberal idea cannot be restored in a time when the West no longer controls the majority of the world’s resources.
Whilst it did, secured by military supremacy under red white and blue flags, it could enchant itself with fairytales. One such fable was that following the science will save us.
For more on the fairy tales (and fascism fantasies) of our time, see here:
The theory of evolution is a pillar of science. It has nothing to teach us about how to live, and has no direction or destination6.
Like the ethics which has developed alongside it, it shows the maximisation of advantage by adaptation. Hedonistic utilitarianism7 adds the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain to this aimless map of life, to which no real place corresponds.
“The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions
PROHIBITION BLOWBACK
Men are not the sum of their reason, and their desires do not indicate a destination beyond themselves.
The rights championed by liberals are destroying their own nations. Birth rates have collapsed alongside the triumph of the woman’s right to terminate the lives of those that would have become her children.
Conventions based on human rights prevent governments from securing their own borders. Refusing to apply the law to illegal entrants, they seek to legalise the influx in the absence and presence of action, whilst moving to criminalise those natives who protest.
Campaigns of censorship and propaganda are the result of the misguided belief that objections to the politics of Utopia can be educated away. Hungary, the only state in Europe to reverse the precipitous decline in the birth rate, and to secure its borders, has been vilified and sanctioned by the European Union for its example of what is possible given political will.
The Hungarians’ boast that it will become the future example for Europe no longer seems idle nor premature.
Prohibition has replaced the provision of security and prosperity, with a sanctimonious mission to code any practical alternatives to chaos as extremism.
This project of liberal mental hygiene codes populism as a disease without recognising its cause, which is liberalism itself. What is the remedy?
To the Liberal, education is a sort of therapy with which to treat dissidents, whose rejection of the ideal society must indicate some maladjustment to the permanent revolution of Progress.
This education extends beyond schools, with pupillage including the saturation of a population of patients with palliative propaganda at work, online, and in every public place.
SANITY AS SEDITION
What would Dr. Walter Reich make of this? In 1982, Reich travelled to the Soviet Union to investigate the classification of dissidents as mentally ill.
A psychiatrist, Reich was a fellow at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington. His account is one which illustrates the estrangement from reason by means of reason itself.
In the context of Soviet society, I reasoned, dissidents constitute a deviant element. They behave and speak in ways that are different from other Soviet citizens, and, for that reason, they come to be seen as strange.
After all, I asked, isn't it strange when someone openly does and says things that, under the conditions of Soviet political life, everyone knows to be dangerous?
In fact, there is good evidence, based on dissident accounts, that, upon encountering dissidents, many K.G.B. and other Soviet officials are often struck by a sense of strangeness, a sense that is compounded when the dissidents start lecturing them about their rights under the Soviet Constitution.
The sense that someone is strange is not infrequently followed by the suspicion that the strangeness may be due to mental illness.
And as soon as that suspicion arises in the minds of Soviet authorities, they have powerful reasons to call upon psychiatrists to examine the dissidents.
He concluded that not only did the authorities find dissidents “strange”, but that the secret police and the psychiatrists genuinely believed they must be insane.
I was saying that in many and perhaps most instances of such diagnosis, not only the K.G.B. and other responsible officials but the psychiatrists themselves really believed that the dissidents were ill.
This, I said, was even more frightening to me than the usual picture of Soviet psychiatric abuse, the monochromatic picture of the K.G.B. ordering and the psychiatrists obeying. What does it mean, both about Soviet psychiatry and about Soviet society, that such a state of affairs could have developed?
True believers consider dissent as the viewpoint of the unsaved. The liberal extremists today will tolerate no deviance, whether real or imagined. Loyalty will not be enough, the fanatic demands the extinction of the strangers to unreason.
The questions which determine the extremism normalised by liberal laws cannot be solved by arguments about rights. The legal system is now a weapon of ideology. The system is evil, as it panders to the intense passions of the morally void, who see nothing real beyond their own fantasies but something to destroy.
True religion asserts the counter-example of God, in whose absence there is only faith in a nowhere yet to be realised. Faith in utopia is a fanaticism which extinguishes the soul, prescribed by the zealots of reason as a sort of escape from the confines of humanity. It invariably succeeds when it is sincere, and the results are horrific.
As John Gray notes, talk of “humanity” always precedes a massacre.
In his conclusion, Reich noted a forgotten aspect of civilisation, foreign to the ideologues of doctrinal sanity.
The ancient Greeks took it for granted that, in a civilized state, people not only have the right to speak but the duty to listen.
Liberals cannot and will not hear anyone but themselves. They speak for the abstract noun of “humanity”, in service of another - “progress”. Neither can be touched, as neither exist beyond words, but speaking of them is touching to some.
What will touch us next will not be the ridiculous legal privilege of people driven mad by mass society and the delimiting of desire as a substitute for meaning.
History shows that the religions of man all resolve into barbarism. The classification of unpersons has begun. What will save us may be the weakness of the institutions likely to be employed in its escalation, and the fact that the late liberal idea is the religion of a dedicated minority, observed only in fading custom by the growing ranks of the disenchanted.
Its belief system has died faster than that of the God it mocks, and its promises convince no one who does not enjoy the insulation from reality that it once provided to its commissars. The excluded majority do not care for purity spirals, and their wishful thinking is directed towards a society in which things work.
The media, the politicians, the so-called public servants, the “philanthropists” and their NGOs, and all the fighters for the rights based solvent of all social bonds may well collapse into fighting among themselves, as this is the fate of all palace factions.
They are refugees from the real, whose safe space is being eroded by the outgoing tide of prosperity. It is their own policies which have stranded them. The tide of folly is fast going out, and now begins a new chapter.
They must learn to live with the natives they despise. The feeling is mutual. Do not surrender to the blood-dimmed tide.
The ruling ideology of national and cultural suicide should be permitted to kill itself. This is the process that you inhabit. You are not obliged to join the party.
If you would like an explanation of the policies of national suicide, see here:
“The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions
INTO WHAT?
What comes after Liberalism? Will we escape the dream of man as a rational machine, to be improved by the instruction of his betters?
No therapist advertises a cure. One might ask into what we are to emerge without the consolations of liberal-doctrinal dependence.
The limits of life and the ambit of desire are not partners but rivals in the struggle to define our civilisation.
What is required to escape the dream machine is to stop believing in it.
No ardent wish can close the fact-value gap. Men cannot be programmed for the better, in a process which privileges the worst of their weakness.
If there is no appetite for God in the West, it is better to turn to the ethics of virtue than to sink into the mire of delimited desire. To exit the cave is to blink at the light, to confront the shock of the real.
The future of politics can still be decided by those who refuse the refuge of the digital cave, and its shadow world of sprites and enchantment. This is against and not for Plato, whose best men were dignified by their insistence on the primacy of an imagined perfect world.
You must find the courage to speak against the modern gnosticism which says the right to rule is reserved to those elites who believe in their fantasies as the ultimate reality. Against this, there is the duty of self government versus the predisposition to self indulgent vice. Do not surrender to the madness.
To not go mad along with the class whose privilege is vanishing is the first task. To avoid or resist the vengeance of those robbed by reality of their delusions may be another.
In the coming crisis there will be danger and opportunity. Begin the work of being a better example of life, and cooperate now with whomever you can to secure it.
Finally, there must be some higher purpose than shopping for status through proxy victimhood and persecution.
Man cannot save himself from himself.
The next God must be one who cannot fail.
The New Leviathans - Thoughts After Liberalism, John Gray, 2023. Gray’s book is excellent, but even he cannot admit the degree of degradation exampled in the industry of permanent war which funds the current dispensation. It is a war against reality, whose techniques and fanaticisms have now corrupted our own regimes.
The attendant madness in policy and ideology is more a result of SCALE than of captured institutions. The vain delusion that mass society can be rationally directed ignores man’s limitations, and has produced a vast mental illness factory to manufacture ever more extreme models of personal adjustment to its chaos.
What is to be done?, V.I. Lenin, 1901-2. Lenin’s argument was for a “vanguard” of the enlightened to lead the masses into Utopia.
What is to be done? Barry Jones, 2020.
Jones argues that “education” can cure racism, Trumpism and misogyny, and can build support for political action to “save the planet”. He believes opposition to covid measures is another symptom of irrational ignorance - which, as with all others - can be cured by rational indoctrination.
Descartes thought that animals might be machines, and he tested this hypothesis by dropping cats out of windows - to observe their reply to his experiments.
Sayyid Qutb was sent to America in 1948 by the Egyptian government - to study methods of American education. He returned with an impression which would shape his Islamism - that the Americans were savages with advanced technology.
He spent time in Europe and absorbed much of the literature of the Enlightenment, including the works of Darwin and the poetry of the Romantics. His experiences are recounted in this article.
Qutb’s ideas are understood to have inspired practically every form of political Islam today, fusing the necessity of a return to religious orthodoxy and the establishment of Islam as the complete political solution with the application of modern techniques and technologies of power.
He was executed in 1966 for his role in promoting a coup d’etat against Abdel Nasser, who had himself overthrown British proxy rule in a nationalist coup which followed the Suez Crisis.
To this day, Egyptian politics is syncopated by the repression and resurgence of Qutb’s Muslim Brotherhood movement.
Here is part of my own answer:
https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/02/food-sovereignty/
I am sore today from digging out weeds to prepare this year's garden. Thomas Jefferson had a great garden.
Here is something else I recommend to people seeking direction:
http://www.kober.com/prayers.php
Well written. Shared far and wide on multiple platforms.