The future is not blank, but nor is it written.
Some people will find it impossible to live without the digital consolations that make life seem to make sense.
How will politics develop, and what kind of people will it serve or service?
In this post I share some thoughts about the present and the possible future. What will we do when the show is over? Where shall we find our home?
FANTASY AND FACTIONS
Stability will sell soon better than sensation. Real hunger may well replace the void of desire that liberation from restraint has made of modern man.
I think polities will fragment into already present and emerging factions.
The bondless will be subjects of the bound. Some will turn to machines for better masters, others will cleave to fantasies of a lost paradise. To think of your children is better than to plot the fate of enemies.
When empires fall, the result is seldom orderly. Ours is a vacuum which will soon be exposed by two sudden intakes of breath: the withdrawal of US security guarantees to the “crypto-state” of Europe, and the widespread collapse of belief in any official messaging which is accelerated by attempts to control information with artificial intelligence.
Power in security and in propaganda is vanishing. The West will cease to function as it did in the strange, long funeral of the Communist experiment. People will go mad with the sudden absence of any directive but to carry on as if things were normal.
We can never go back to normal.
POWER POLITICS
The power of Russia is real in its nuclear arsenal, its vast resources and in its management of its own domestic disasters by its traditional authoritarianism.
It was ravaged in a sort of feeding frenzy for the shock doctrineers, who never foresaw that the tremors would shatter their homelands.
The claim of Hungary to lead the future of Europe may not seem so preposterous in two years’ time.
It has survived to model one family-based path out of the near total corruption of Liberal democracies, being only mildly corrupt, and bearing a standard for the division of some degree of the wealth and power of the state with the fortunes of its own people.
To survive as a nation families are needed. That this must be said is a sign of the depth of the crisis. Reality is hard to avoid in family life. A lack of prudence, an excess or absence of consequence for action and for inaction, and the breakdown of cohesion brings immediate and serious results which all concerned suffer.
Lies may live long behind its doors, but everyone knows the truth. Such is the state of our nations, whose doors are off the hinges, and whose lies now walk abroad, lit by the lamp at noontide - searching for a single face they might still illuminate.
Our leaders are actors whose audience is deserting the theatre.
Others will emerge with better and more appealing promises than virtual rewards for actual sacrifice. We will see the coming of Bonapartes and Malapartes.
If you would like to know what a Malaparte is, see here on his guide to the technique of the coup d’etat:
Promises will be made to the long neglected needs of the mass of the people, and some will be kept, some causing regret. A slow realisation will grow that things will not improve by themselves, as the downward revision of expectations accompany the intrusion of reality on the liberal-utopian self delusion.
If you would like to know what I mean by “Bonapartes”, I have written a series on this sort of post-liberal “Caesarism” here:
Prion disease appears to be one result of the mass injection of spike proteins. This degrades the brain tissue with dementia-like plaques. It is a symptom of our system that a medicine mandated in a media frenzy has likely produced an epidemic of headcases.
Mass society has driven people so mad they will accept illness as a remedy for hysteria.
The trust in “science” will suffer as a result, as will that in medicine and progress generally. The nations which adopt green measures against a process no one can control will destroy themselves, whilst more prudent ones will dominate.
The personal lesson is to refuse to go insane no matter the state, or the state of the world, whether in representation or in reality.
SURGERE QUI CURAT POPULO?
Who will help the people who strive to rise again1?
Populism has no future. It is a nemesis, a counter-liberalism which will vanish along with its reflection. People radicalised by the reality created by liberalism are populists. This is a reaction, a necessary one, but there is no future in an argument with an idiot. Passers-by cannot tell the difference.
The future will be about material things minus their spiritual promises. Roads without holes that lead somewhere worth going. Laws which punish the guilty, and do not criminalise the innocent. Competence and the instinct to approach or avoid. Belief returned to its rightful object, which is not in Man.
A widespread mistrust in explanations, an aversion to jargon, an opportunity for a prosaic practical wisdom. We have had so many talented in breaking things - it is time for people who can fix them.
When the confusion of the present condition clears, then the politics of the future will emerge. We are all struggling to shake off the hangover of a three decade binge of limitless self indulgence, in which saying so made things so - or so it seemed. This after a century of fantasies - of man liberated beyond his limits, and the power to transform the world at will. We have chained ourselves to a dream machine that has broken down forever.
Is it worse that it should die before we do?
The resulting comedown or disenchantment breeds an appetite for inspiration and revenge. Who did this to us? Who will do it back to them?
It is to be hoped and it is by no means certain that vengeance and simple rage will not result in a bloodshed which refuses all direction, like the science and the progress which led us here.
BUT I AM NOT ONE OF THEM
The liberal world was the world of both Roosevelts, of Adenauer and of Reagan and Thatcher. Many yearn for this past, which was a liberal one. It is all we have known, and its lessons are all some of us have learned.
Rights and the resulting laws are a liberal idea. The belief there should be limits to the actions of the state and of religion share the same origin. Liberalism was to be the best of states of being because it was tolerant of all others.
Now it does not even tolerate itself.
For a more detailed look at the limits of Liberalism, see here:
If you believe in racism, in women’s rights, if you think that discrimination results in legal equality before the law, and if you imagine some contract is honoured between you and your state you believe in the legal fictions of liberalism.
There is no law between states but force, and the legal fictions of liberalism are nowhere else exampled. The law in liberal states is now partly an ideological means of self defence, whose application results in self harm.
To escape this trap we must liberate ourselves from the fantasies of social justice, which are a better mannered and generalised personal resentment.
Better times require better men to make them. What is the good life, if not the life of waking dreams and wish thinking? It is the life we have in the crepuscule.
This may be a dawn or a darkness. What we soon demand may decide on whether we next see the light or the night.
BETTER THAN WORSE
The liberal idea now promotes grievance more than liberty. These grievances have functioned as a form of entertainment, for people with no real power to do anything else but nurse their fantasies of envy and of gratification.
It is inevitable that a pure pleasure principle of ethics would arrive at sadism.
To move beyond the necessary evils of an ideology of fantasy will require a discipline superior to the appetite for vengeance. This is not only theologically and morally desirable, it is practical, for no politics motivated by reaction can exceed the reach of its stimulus. We cannot shake off the ghost if we are fixed on strangling its corpse. A requiem will suffice.
The better world is one that makes sense without explanation. It is a world of human scaled community, of meaningful consequences for wrongdoing, a world of duties over rights, a world beyond the horizons of the self and the twinned oblivions imagined by the rationalist managers as the beginning and end of us all, and of everything.
Men may better hope to be masters of themselves instead of the world, and this can be done whether there is tyranny or anarchy outside. Life can be seen as more than the search for distraction. It is a task with no end but death.
Men used to believe that the point of life was to prepare for this moment, which will come to us all regardless.
VIRTUE AND VICE
In this limited endeavour the scale of human ambition can regress to a mean that is meaningful and true: we may become better than ourselves, but never something else entirely. To be less bad is a noble aim. It is practical.
Vice is harmful generally and dissipation an insult to life. If men wish to waste themselves in pleasure they should be free to do so, but not without recognition.
Vice passes unremarked, a symptom of our xenophilia. It is welcomed in excess as a portrait of human endeavour in the possible. We have become spectators of the naive art of the insane, passing through the gallery with a smirk.
One of the most insidious ideas of the late liberal age is the rationalist delusion of the harm principle. This is another necessity born of evil, which excuses any contract of vice.
What people do makes culture. To admit the validity of perversion is to make the pageant of life an avenue of banal obscenity.
Though people may subvert the standard, if subversion be the standard the result is universal degradation.
There is nothing to live for but the ephemeral reward of loyalty to an insane creed. That, and the fleeting satisfaction of a bargain. It is a cut-price life, bought on credit, for which all our children - if we have them - will pay.
To think seriously of the future is to think beyond the self, what is mine, and what I wish for. Others are here, and they think likewise. Separation is better than conflict, and it should be made simpler than violence.
If you wish again for a homeland, start with your home.
You can support my campaign to be imprisoned for memes here:
Here is John Henry Newman’s translation of Alma Redemptoris Mater, which you can listen to here.
Mother of the Redeemer, who art ever of heaven
The open gate, and the star of the sea, aid a fallen people,
Which is trying to rise again; thou who didst give birth,
While Nature marveled how, to thy Holy Creator,
Virgin both before and after, from Gabriel's mouth
Accepting the All hail, be merciful towards sinners.
The Latin original is here:
Alma Redemptoris Mater, Quae pervia coeli porta manes Et stella maris, succurre cadenti Surgere qui curat populo: Tu quae genuisti Natura mirante tuum sanctum Genitorem Virgo prius ac posterius, Gabrielis ab ore sumens illud Ave Peccatorum miserere.
While I’m no fan of the man, Ronald Reagan is responsible for one of my favorite quotes:
“Don’t be afraid to see what you see”
It kind of perfectly sums up the problem of modernity and its solution in one sentence.
James Fenimore Cooper-a great writer!
MacGregor certainly has the vision and has identified the Money Power as behind it all. But he is keeping his cards close to the vest on where and when he will jump into the 2024 election. He told me personally he will not be a candidate. Will he step in to support Trump? That's my guess.