I have been a keen observer of politics, philosophy, and the ongoing culture wars of the industrialized world since 2013. Nine years have passed and my views have evolved as I’ve grown older; which is to say my worldview is much the same and yet different in certain – better – ways. It goes without saying that this list is not exhaustive. As someone who writes under his real name and not some anonymous pseudonym, this kind of exercise is as important as it is cathartic.
This is part one, in which I discuss some of my views on metaphysics, religion, and politics.
Metaphysics
Metaphysics literally translates to beyond-physics. What is the underlying foundation of Reality? Where does Reality come from?
“This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made. But it always was and will be: an ever-living fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going out.”
— from Clement Miscellanies 5.103.3
“We must know that war is common to all and strife is justice, and that all things come into being through strife necessarily.”
— DK B80, from Origen, Against Celsus 6.42
“War is the father of all and king of all; and some he shows as gods, others as men, some he makes slaves, others free.”
— DK B53, from Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies 9.9.4
Heraclitus had it right: The organizing principle of the world is fire, strife, and endless change. Plato got a bit closer. And since all philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, one would do well to pay close attention to what these two had to say on the matter.
I have yet to discover a better or more explanatory system of metaphysics than the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. His body of work, most notably Process and Reality, is the culmination of three thousand years’ attempt to understand the question of what the universe is made of, why there is something rather than nothing, and what the underlying fabric of the universe may be. He completes a rich line of enquiry that includes Spinoza, Heraclitus, Leibniz and Hume. Whitehead was a great mathematician – he cowrote the Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, and he brought an unparalleled degree of mathematical precision and rigour to his philosophical enquiry.
Here I run the risk of greatly oversimplifying and misrepresenting Whitehead’s metaphysics, so instead of rediscovering fire, I shall quote at length from Richard Lubbock’s excellent biography of Whitehead. I highly recommend you read the whole thing.
We tend to believe, after Sir Isaac Newton, that the simple location of matter in space truly describes the world. Newton decreed that the world at each instant is made of hard, massy particles of 'stuff' set at definite places in an arena called 'space'. If you take snapshots of space at various instants, the positions of the particles will change from picture to picture. Reality is a heap of these snapshots as they present themselves one after another. We rely on a mathematical myth called 'gravity' to tell us which new places the particles will move to between the snapshots. However, there's no logical reason why we should connect the pictures at all (even though instinctively we must, and do); and apart from the gravity myth there's no rule to determine what order the shots should be in (even though we know in our bones what the proper order is).
[…]
Today we know that the doctrine of simple location is just plain wrong. Quantum theory predicts--and experiment confirms--that each and every 'particle' exerts its influence everywhere and all at once. Our everyday idea of space has evaporated. Einstein detested this principle of non-locality, this denial of space; and most of the grand panjandrums of science still refuse to buy its implications, because it's not dreary enough for them. Science detests enjoyment.
Whitehead's argument is not that space and time don't exist: they are simply secondary appearances, not the main feature of objective reality. In denouncing the fallacy of simple location Whitehead is asserting that no entity, nor any man, is an island. Every time we move, or think, we disturb the whole universe. As St. Paul wrote, we are members of one another. That is what the Jewel Net of Indra means. It fits well with the quantum mechanical view that the observer and the observed are entangled into one, even while they possess unique personal selves.
[…]
Whitehead says that the first thing you've got to understand is that science is deluded: the world isn't made of atoms, electrons, gravity, or whatever. There is only one kind of entity; and even that perishes as soon as it comes into being. That entity is an aesthetic moment of choice, of feeling.
There are no fundamental "things," or "objects" in the world of Whitehead. Whitehead's ontology, or parts-list of the universe, contains only processes.
Life, the Universe and Everything consists of myriads of little emotions. Only feelings exist; no particles exist; and all the feelings have the same form: that of the human mind. Atoms, electrons, bodies and brick walls arise later.
[…]
For Whitehead, the actual world we inherit, woven out of the creativity, eternally perishes. God and the process are eternal, but the world is eternally perishing. When Whitehead lays out this tangled relationship between God, the world and the ultimate creativity, one fact stands out: the philosophy of organism is a one-substance doctrine. The process alone is reality.
Most of us have learned to live with the two-substance philosophy of Rene Descartes, who took mind and matter for his two ultimate substances. Since then, people have been trying to show that the properties of mind follow logically from the properties of matter; or else that mind doesn't exist at all. To deduce mind from matter continues to be the aim of some computer theorists, but it is a futile quest. In a Cartesian world, mind and matter must forever remain distinct.
In Whitehead's world, God is the agent that separates the single, beauty-seeking process of the world into mind and matter. If the Creativity did not have God to teach it, it could have no power, and so would not exist. But equally God could not exist apart from the process that acts out his suggestions. God and the world enjoy a state of mutual dependence: a bootstrap relationship.
[…]
[H]is writings clearly describe a cosmic net of mutually creative moments. Every moment flows to its own purpose; everything perishes; each spark of experience relies on the whole net for its value; the final cause of the cosmos is beauty in action.
Religion
Up until 2017 I was agnostic. Religion for me… was kind of like a blind person trying to understand colors. Those people who talk about colors clearly aren’t crazy, but I didn’t see what they see. I couldn’t grasp actual belief in a god (I used to when I was a child, and I wished I could again) but I was smart enough to recognize the social and evolutionary benefits1 of such belief – and the inherent human need for transcendence and purpose to comfort man in his solitariness.
2017 came and went and I gradually began to gravitate back towards the faith. I started praying again, first by accident, second by design.
From what I understand, the West2 killed their god 150 years ago. Without God, the intelligent/High IQ population have become Nietzsche’s Last Men (a human version of the Beautiful Ones from John Calhoun’s rat utopia experiment) and have ceased to strive or reproduce.
The dumb continue to exist on a primitive level, but I doubt will be able to maintain the technology needed for their survival without social breakdown and mass warfare/starvation. What’s probable is that the intelligent are currently going through an evolutionary bottleneck. Those who emerge on the other end will be High IQ and religious, and even likely to have more children per family.
The future belongs to those who show up, and therefore current trends suggest that they will inherit the earth.
On a non-materialist note however, religion is important because religiosity is an innate part of the human experience. Religiosity being at base a recognition that we exist in a cosmos filled with divinity, created by a higher power, and organized along transcendental principles. Absent a formal religion or belief in God, the human being transfers (psychologists might say sublimate) their religious impulse onto manmade objects such as nation-states, consumerism, celebrities and ideology. And this is dangerous because we are imputing the power of an infinite-personal BEING to finite-personal THINGS. Folks, it is a recipe for heartbreak ten times out of ten.
There are many paths to the top of the mountain and the name of the mountain is God. I do not discriminate if you are Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu. The path of the missionary is not my path. If your heart is pure and sincere and consecrated to God, I am with you. Even agnostics I can be friends with, because an agnostic has the courage to admit that he or she doesn’t know.
Deists I don’t much care for because they use belief in some unspecified creator or higher power but do not have the courage or conviction to take the plunge and commit fully to ONE faith. Religion for them is moral therapy; there is no sacrifice at all. If there is no sacrifice there is no worship.
Atheists… I don’t take them seriously. If you don’t believe in God, contrary to your claims, you don’t lack belief. It just means you believe in something lower or manmade. You will put your faith in science, humanity, money, nature, or the universe (which is a blind, uncaring idiot god). No transcendence whatsoever. It’s kind of sad.
Politics
“For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.”
- Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
When thinking of politics one of the main questions anyone should consider is ‘who rules?’
In a monarchy, the answer is obvious – the King/Emperor rules. As we have passed through three centuries of Enlightenment thought with the ascendance of liberal democracy, the answer to this question becomes muddy and unclear. In fact, even the asking of this question is rare enough so as to display the wilful ignorance of all players involved.
In a democracy, if one asks ‘who rules?’, is it the People - the Demos? Absolutely not. The Greeks knew it, the Romans knew it, and only a people as stubbornly delusional as we 21st century moderns could think that the Demos rules in a democracy.
The nature of democracy is that there is no central sovereign, not in any meaningful sense of the word. So what then is a sovereign? I shall for now define a sovereign as the figure who makes the laws and keeps them. He is the repository of a nation’s power. Which is another way of saying all power is secured. There exists a Rule of One.
Consider the United States. Who is sovereign?
It can’t be a citizen as a citizen performs neither function.
Is it the judge? No. Is it a senator? He has more power than the average man, still not sovereign.
Is it Congress? No.
Is it the president? No.
Is it the Supreme Court? Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. The Supreme Court is the closest thing America has to a King, even moreso than the President, by virtue of its legislative power, and its comparative longevity.
I contend that one of the necessary traits of a sovereign is that the sovereign’s reign is long term, which disqualifies any kind of elected leader with a term limit. 4 years is not long term. 8 years is not long term. A sovereign must think in decades, the measure of his rule is the measure of his life. It is in his best interest to play the long game instead of pandering to the day to day whims of the masses. The Supreme Court can play the long game. Just look at the 20th century.
So in democracy there is no long-term central repository of power, which acts to create laws and enforce them.
Power is unsecured.
And as such there exists a Rule of None.
And if we observe the maxim that nature abhors a vacuum, so too does power abhor being unpossessed. It abhors being distributed and disparate. It wants to flow back downstream to the source. We have seen this in Athens and Rome, and we see it clearly now.
Democracies start out with maximal distribution of power, with the citizenry holding the largest possible share of power (1 man, 1 vote, 1 time). Democracies gradually pass through representative democracy (which is a preliminary condensation of power) into oligarchy. An oligarchy is rule by the few, and democracies with long-lived political parties all fall into this category.
Previously we have seen no political parties - each election cycle some actors might form alliances of convenience or necessity. But just as the citizen gives up his power to the representative, the representative gives up his power to the political party, which becomes a power bloc. And whoever steers this power bloc is beginning to have some sovereign power. Don’t believe me? Look at how party leaders can dictate who is and who isn’t a true Communist/Socialist/Republican/Democrat.
We see that in every – if not all – modern democratic nation, the same pattern plays out; political entities consolidate and monopolise power, turning into power blocs, contending with one another and subverting one another to gain primacy.
Again, let’s look at the US. Division of power between the State, Legal and Executive branch? The history of America is the history of these 3 branches fighting for the top, and trying to stay there. These institutions acquire a life and a vigour of their own; they become miniature sovereigns, each trying to become the full sovereign. Think of the Immortals from Highlander. At the end of the day, they know: there can only be one.
On a long enough time scale, and I believe 200 years is plenty, their pattern of intrigues becomes crystallised, invisible as air to the demos, the president, even to some members of the branches themselves. This becomes the status quo.
A government is like a living organism.
Living organisms enjoy a status quo, or homeostasis. One of the functions of government is to preserve the status quo of the nation.
In a healthy, ordered society, the status quo is already robust and well-ordered; it is anti-entropic.
In a degenerate/degenerating society, the status quo is entropic, trending to self-annihilation. Governments possess the mechanisms to subsist, self-regulate and stay on whatever track they are already on.
But a democratic government cannot put the nation wholly on another path even if it is the path they need. Who voted for this? It sounds suspiciously like totalitarianism!
It is here that we see yet another role of the sovereign - the sovereign is the man who sees the path. He steers the whole damn thing. If he sees his nation’s people merrily trundling down the slope to hell in a shopping trolley, he must stop it. And they will curse and swear and wail when he acts to do so, because it is the nature of humans to stick to their comfortable ways even if those habits hurt them.
Western nations are on a path to self-annihilation because there are no sovereigns. There is no one to steer. Gentle reader, you might protest: “What about the PEOPLE? Surely some citizens are smart and wise enough to see their own tragedy and can act accordingly.” Yes, perhaps some. But these are too often castigated or ridiculed as fearmongers. The normie wants to block out reality and chant“Everything is awesome!” Absent a strong sovereign the words of the wise go unheeded. And that is why we learn about Athens and the Roman Republic only in history books.
But I digress, let us get back to my question at the beginning: who rules in a democracy? If it isn’t the demos, Congress, any of the branches, the President, or even the Supreme Court, who steers? Enter the Deep or Permanent State. It is the confluence of political entities and state institutions and values that set or determine, as it were, the trajectory of a particular society. They comprise a major part of the survival and self-regulating mechanism of a society’s government. From this they derive the power to act. And where is action directed? To what ends? That is where values come in. For values are ideology.
If your society believe in winning and a manifest destiny of ruling the world, you can be damn well sure that government will lock that in as the status quo. Case in point: Edwardian and Victorian Britain.
If your demos values egalitarianism and pacifism and social justice, then these players will conspire to make it so. Even at the cost of long term stability/prosperity to the demos. The Permanent State doesn’t care about the demos insofar as there is enough of it around to guarantee its own survival. And it has no vested interest in the composition of the demos staying the same…
Perhaps this ideology comes from those pesky intellectuals. That seems to be what happened with Marx and Lenin. And it is said that Harvard’s (or Stanford’s) values in the 1960s are the values the governments of the US and European Union have today.
Perhaps this ideology arises from the sentiments of the people. Germans feel immense guilt over their actions in World War II, and their politicians play on this guilt, engaging in virtue signalling to show whose guilt is purer, more intense. The more guilt you feel, it appears, the more open you are to letting in immigrants and refugees who have no interest in assimilating to your culture, and indicate a pretty clear interest in erasing/replacing your people. That’s the power of values. Marx had it part right: ideology is the opiate of the masses.
Any healthy political movement in the 21st century therefore must understand this power dynamic, internalise and understand its implications fully, then act in such a way that sovereignty is accounted for and conserved. Ideology in its present form is a volatile and therefore poor fuel for this type of movement. And so it appears as if democracy as it is currently practiced will go the way of the dodo, and be overtaken by more robust civilization-states that eat rice, drink vodka, and don’t give a shit about whose feelings get hurt.
I can’t help but wonder how many of the wise men of the distant past did not believe but still acted and lives as if they did because they knew it was for the greater good.
As regular readers of this newsletter already know, the developed world is Western now. So if you have access to the internet this applies to your country too.
FIRE, CROSS, AND RULE OF NONE.
"Heraclitus had it right: The organizing principle of the world is fire, strife, and endless change."
He got the part about endless change right, at least. Everything else, not so much.
All of reality comes into being only through desire. In order to desire, you must first know what you do not want. Then, you know what you do want. The release of this tension is what causes desires to manifest into reality, and to expand into more than it was before.
Desire is the engine which drives the expansion of reality. You will suffer in your desires, and your task is to be joyful in the suffering, that we may all experience what is born from it.
Wait, you forgot „eat rice, are 4 foot tall, ..“ 😂 I’ve been to rural china 😅