I’m going to write down a few thoughts on the present socio-political situation.
The problem is multi-layered.
The Western civilization is essentially conducting an experiment which started somewhere around the French revolution and American independence. The basic assumptions of this experiment are as follows:
- This life is all there is. If God exists, He left us to create our own destiny and laws according to which we will govern ourselves, so, for all intents and purposes, God is dead. It is up to the ones who are awakened to this fact to create a new future, one that will part with the gods and traditions of old. The past can no longer guide the future.
- All humans are essentially equal, and given the same opportunities, will have the same or very similar outcomes. Education and empowerment of the masses will have the result of reducing social inequality and essentially remove the social pyramid, by placing everybody on top.
- Since humans are basically the same, social hierarchy is not the result of superior nature of those in power, or the mandate of heaven, but of Machiavellian scheming and power grabs. Hierarchies are not to be trusted and instruments are to be put in place to limit the extent and duration of any individual’s hold on power. Also, all social inequalities are the result of the old obsolete system, and need to be removed.
- Science and technology are the means of human and societal emancipation and, since all problems are material in nature, if they are at all solvable, their solution is to be attempted through science and technology.
- The old system of government, that was based on tradition, religion, superstition and unjust initial distribution of wealth through robbery, violence and other forms of power, is to be completely removed and all its consequences reversed. All evil in the world can be explained as a consequence of the relics of the old system. Since this system creates and perpetuates all evil, all means are permissible in the war against it.
So, this was the blueprint for the slaughterhouse that was the French revolution, as well as the two world wars. However, this was not all; other parameters existed, which created the framework in which such a theoretical model was plausible:
- Religion was widely discredited. Due to the internecine wars between the Catholics and the Protestants, as well as the corruption within the Catholic Church which originally caused the problem, the moral authority of religion was largely destroyed, opening the door to other possible ways of interpreting and organizing existence.
- Sophisticated thinking within the Catholic Church gave birth to science, as well as leaving the greatest minds dissatisfied with the answers provided by religion. Also, the obvious corollary of renaissance was that the Bible obviously didn’t have all the answers and things can be improved if we introduce other factors, such as ancient Greek and Roman literature. Also, since it can be improved by Greeks and Romans, including reformulation of Christian philosophy using Plato and Aristotle, why not simply conclude that the Bible is only one source of information among many, and not necessarily the best one at that. Furthermore, if scientific experimentation can produce theories that are more valid than the biblical ones, why not simply dispense with the Bible altogether and just stick to what we can figure out and prove?
- Based on scientific experimentation, technological advancements were at first hinted, and then actually made. The level of technological advancement since the widespread adoption of the scientific method was unprecedented. This apparently confirmed the assumptions from the enlightenment era, weakened all possible criticisms, and created societal readiness for radical implementations of those modernist theories, as in the communist revolutions in Russia, China and elsewhere, and the ascent of fascism across Europe in the first third of the 20th Essentially, we can observe the communists and the fascists as minor variations of the same phenomenon: the fascists simply decided to dispense with the assumption of universalism, and decided to advance only their own race/nationality at the expense of others, deciding it’s not just the old system holding them back, but other races/nations as well, and were ready to dispense with them using brutality typical for modernist systems, as witnessed in the French revolution and since. Here I completely disagree with Slavoj Žižek, who claims that communism and fascism are two inherently different phenomena, where fascists were evil people who promised to do evil things, and, having come to power, delivered on the promise, while the communists were good people with noble ideas which somehow went wrong for some unknown reason – assuming, perhaps, that if someone else were in charge of implementation of those ideas and if the circumstances were different, those ideas could legitimately be tried out again, expecting more success. I completely and fundamentally disagree with that. Both communists and fascists in fact start from the same modernist assumptions, that God is dead and it’s up to us to dispense with the old system and create a better future based on science and technology. The difference is that the communists applied this idea to the working class, which needed to be liberated from the results of the unjust initial distribution of capital, the means of production need to be returned to the wide masses, and bright future will ensue. All who oppose this plan are evil, and need to be dispensed with mercilessly. Since humans are all equal, and some have more, this is necessarily the result of injustice, so the rich need to be robbed of their unjustly obtained wealth and it is to be returned to the impoverished masses. The fascists essentially replaced the working class with nation – in case of Germany, their nation is assumed to be superior, morally just and biologically more evolved, other races obtained societal superiority by deception and theft, the results of that need to be reversed and those who oppose such distribution should be mercilessly dispensed with. Since the essence of the problem is seen as biological, instead of class warfare and the purge of “kulaks” they practiced racial warfare and the purge of the “inferior races”. So, essentially, both fascism and communism are narcissistic modernist systems of belief who had no scepticism regarding their theories, who used demagoguery to appeal to the wide masses, and had absolutely no moral restraints on the use of violence and cruelty, including genocide.
- During most of this, the feudal system and therefore “old money” was still in place; essentially, a class of people no longer had the level of power necessary to keep the level of control of resources and the influence in society that they inherited. The vast transfer of power from nobility to capital was in place. Since it was obviously just that the captains of industry control what they created, and questionably just that the noblemen keep the vast property that they inherited based on the feudal divisions of power, the modernist ideas in the old world were hard to dispute from a moral standpoint. In America, there were no remnants of feudalism to speak of, and the entire country was based on the modernist enlightenment principles to begin with, which explains why both world wars started in Europe. One can perceive them as a process of societal thermodynamics, where the hold over resources was redistributed violently according to the new realities of power.
- Widespread education created problems that previously didn’t exist, such as abundance of educated people with essentially no jobs and no place in society for them. This created discontent in the intelligentsia, which tended to form and join revolutionary movements. The states tried to control this by trying to create workplaces for those people in the administration, but this had the unwanted effect of creating the huge state apparatus which created more problems than it solved, for instance contributing greatly to the dissolution of the Austria-Hungary empire. The revolutionary movements also used the ineffectiveness of the state administration as an argument in their favour, claiming that things would improve once they were in power. However, since both sides were working with the modernist assumptions about education, they were both contributing to the problem. Also, it turned out that education didn’t change much in the divisions of power in society, and the modernist assumption about education as the solution to all problems was disproved. Essentially, you can force-educate everybody, but most people simply don’t know what to do with the acquired knowledge, which indicates that lack of education initially wasn’t caused by external but internal limitations, which then disproves the assumption of equality of all people, and, also, the assumption of injustice of societal and economic inequalities.
Essentially, the modernist idea was that everything will be perfect once we disempower and kill those who try to hold the mankind back; with the Nazis, they recycled the Theosophical concepts of fourth and fifth race, stating that they are the pure fifth race and in order for mankind to go forth into a bright future, the remnants of the fourth race that hold it back need to be killed off. As for the communists, they drew a conclusion consistent with the thesis that all men are equal, and concluded that all societal and economic differences are the result of injustice perpetrated by those with power and possession, who need to be disempowered and killed off in order for mankind to go forth into a bright future. Essentially, those narcissists had no problem with the assumption that they got it all right and had no problem killing tens and hundreds of millions of people, especially since the population doubled since the ascent of the industrial revolution, so killing of a significant percentage of the population wasn’t seen as a big deal.
The problem with those theories is that they all work within the essentially identical moral and intellectual framework, starting with the similar assumptions, from which it is easy to come to very similar conclusions, which are basically that whenever something is wrong in society, it can be solved by finding and killing those who are to blame. When that doesn’t work, corrections are made by revising the concept of the oppressor-group and the victim-group, and finding more people to kill. When this worsens the situation immensely, the original assumptions about the world, man and society that created the worsening are never questioned; only the methods of implementation are. That’s why people like Slavoj Žižek are dangerous: he doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with communism/socialism, he just thinks it was not implemented properly.
I, however, think that not only communism is wrong – both intellectually and morally – but it is also wrong in a way in which every single modernist system is wrong. They all assume that people are equal, and they explain the differences by the bad old system. They assume that if you lift the societal limitations, you will get some kind of a dreamlike utopia. When this was attempted, and the results were not as expected, instead of acting like scientists and admitting that the initial assumptions were disproved by evidence, they acted like ideologues and just found more people who are to be killed in order to produce their ideal utopia. The French revolution, as the first attempt at modernist reform of society, was the least refined in its brutality and hypocrisy, killing scientists in the name of a new system based on science and not superstition, all the while never actually applying the scientific method on their own societal experiments. One would think that they learned to be more subtle with time, but that never happened – the solution to all problems seems to be to forcefully introduce equality, and kill everyone who gets in the way, and they always assume to be right and morally justified, because narcissism is the fundamental implicit property of all modernist systems – God is dead, and they now decide who God is, what law is, what right and wrong is. They decide who lives and who dies, because they just took the power to do so, and they aren’t afraid of killing every single person who disputes them the right to do so, until only those in perfect agreement with them are left standing. No discussion about the fundamental assumptions of modernism and its corollary belief systems is allowed, because the very idea makes you a member of the enemy-group that is to be dispensed with mercilessly. So, obviously, the matter is never brought up.
And, of course, that’s what I do.
The problem with modernism isn’t that it wasn’t implemented properly. The problem is that all of its basic assumptions were faulty from the start, and when they were tried in practice, they resulted in disaster.
First of all, there is a God. Not only that, but God is the fundamental reality, the deepest and most profound level of reality, compared to which everything else is an illusion. Ignorance of God is akin to suppressing the physical reality with virtual reality goggles and immersion in simulations, only several levels more profound. This means you can’t just make shit up: you can’t invent your own morality, you need to discover the pre-existing one and adjust your actions accordingly. Consequences of not doing so are in essence reality-defying. If the reason behind resorting to science is to discover the pre-existing laws of the material Universe, the reason to use the same principle to discover the pre-existing laws of the underlying, deeper realities of existence is even more valid. If you can’t just invent your own laws of gravity, but instead you need to discover and understand the pre-existing ones, you also can’t just invent your own morality; you need to discover and understand the pre-existing relevant principles. Existence of soul that outlives physical incarnation and has purposes within and beyond it, changes things so dramatically that all genocidal attempts at “improvement” of the world, that we had to endure in the last few centuries, would have been avoided, had the fact of soul been acknowledged by the theoreticians of society.
Also, it is true that humans are very similar biologically; biodiversity within the human species is very low, despite all the racist narcissisms of small differences. However, human souls are vastly different, and they exist in the range between simplistic astral structures and God-aspects. Those vast differences do not necessarily determine the entirety of outcomes in human lives on Earth, and they also don’t mean that the better souls have better outcomes, but those differences contribute to the complexity of human existence and make it impossible to attribute inequalities of outcome to a singular causal principle. Also, there are evolutionary differences between races and sexes which contribute greatly to the differences in outcome. Some modernist systems accept that, while others do not, but the fact remains that differences in outcomes cannot be wholly attributed to extrinsic causes. Also, considering how “ancien régime” seems to acknowledge all of that, and the modernist revolutionaries deny it, and no amount of violent social experimentation of the modern times managed to solve the main problems it professed to solve, it seems that we can split the modern times into two parts: that of disastrously bloody and genocidal social experiments, and that of science and technology whose enormous successes in improving the quality of life of vast numbers of people masked the failures of political philosophy to a great extent. It is only due to science and technology that we can see the last few centuries as an improvement over the past. Unfortunately, when theoreticians of evil want to show success of their wicked ideas, the successes of science and technology are exactly what they point to, as if they had anything to do with it. Science and technology works in capitalist, communist and feudal societies. It works perfectly well in democratic America and Europe, and in dictatorial Singapore. If you pump enough oil money into a feudal dictatorship of Saudi Arabia, you get wealth and wellbeing.
Also, some things that are widely acclaimed as results of progress are possibly very dangerous experiments that might result in total civilizational collapse within a century from their introduction. If anything, the Western civilization is in a state of serious flux since the industrial revolution, and it’s all an experiment that might end very badly, and there are in fact signs that something of that kind might be imminent. The problem with societal experimentation is that you can’t just reset the experiment if things go wrong. You only have one civilization to experiment on, and if you kill the patient, it’s game over. There’s an assumption that equality is the ultimate goal, and that democracy is good since it promotes that goal; furthermore, universal suffrage is widely lauded as an achievement, and it might turn out that it was a fatal mistake that managed to wreck both economic and societal structure of the West, in only a few decades that it had been exercised. What if equality is irrelevant, and the true goal is allowing the worthiest individuals to achieve greatest success? What if a Confucian meritocratic monarchy is a better system than democracy? What if a republic with only the most powerful stakeholders having a say, and not the wide underachieving masses, is a superior solution? Why do I keep hearing that democracy is a better solution than all others, when I constantly see the disastrous results of egalitarianism whenever it is attempted?
We hear the arguments about all the empires that fell, and hear them compared with our democracy, always in a self-congratulatory manner, but those making the arguments forget that those empires lasted for millennia, during which time they had their ups and downs, and our democratic experiment, in its full suffrage version, started around the first world war, so it’s only a century old, and this century has been the century of slaughter and economic disasters in its first half, and of moral emptiness, virtue signalling and vacuous political correctness and the resulting purges of the “intolerant ones” in the second half, with the entire civilization showing signs of being unable to procreate, inability to exist without incurring debt, and inability to define itself as worthy of existence and defence, compared to the unwashed masses of Muslim invaders. Egalitarianism, eventually, produced its logical consequence of individuals being unable to explain why they are worthy of success, or even life, or why they should not be replaced with another generic individual. If you can’t say why you are better than others, and why you deserve to live at the expense of others, lest you be called a Nazi for thinking you are better than anyone else, you have a civilization of meaningless, not really individual existences, who define their own value only in terms of equality with others, and for both a civilization and a human being this is the end. At the very instant this civilization is faced with outsiders who have no problem stating they are better than you, you will yield and be either enslaved or killed to make space for those who don’t apologize for existing, and for thinking they are superior. By rejecting Christianity, the West also renounced its “mandate of heaven” – it renounced it claim to superiority that was derived from being the people who listened and accepted to God’s message, and accepted the duty to live according to God’s laws on this Earth, in order to become worthy of the eternal life. By renouncing this, it became vulnerable to any cult of idiots, such as Islam, which was on the verge of extinction a century ago, where even Ataturk renounced it as perfectly useless and counterproductive for a modern Turkey, and yet, as the West renounced Christianity, it created a vacuum that will be filled by all kinds of alternatives, mostly worthless and villainous.
Another problem is that this technological civilization is so complex, it is completely beyond intellectual comprehension of the majority of the population, and in their desire to have at least some degree of control over their existence, those people will resort to all kinds of weird conspiracy theories and religious cults, which will perform their eternal purpose of feeding the narcissism of fools. This problem is not a minor one, because a civilization always rests upon the foundation of acceptance of common goals, by the common people. If the common people no longer see themselves as participating in a greater common goal, the civilization is in free fall.
And the biggest problem is that people are starting to recycle old ideas, because everything has already been tried, and proved to be a dead end, so now they are recycling the dead-ends of socialism, of fascism, of nation-state borders, as if most of today’s failures aren’t the result of someone trying to remedy the failures of those past ideas and concepts. They are trying to go to Mars, as if it’s the 19th century when such an idea made sense, because we didn’t know that Mars is a lifeless wasteland without a magnetic field, bathed in cosmic and solar radiation, that makes no sense to colonize and terraform, and there are no Martians there for us to encounter, and nothing in our solar system is really appealing to a rational person. The 19th and 20th century Universe was a different place, mostly unknown, where many things could possibly be. However, we now know more, and all the possibly appealing worlds are lightyears, or even thousands of lightyears away, completely beyond the reach of our technology. In the 20th century, even the good, scientifically educated science fiction writers toyed with the ideas about intelligent life on Mars and Venus, and I mean people like Asimov and Clarke, not authors of Marvel and DC comic books. Nobody can write such things now, at least not with a straight face. As we learned more, we pruned the Universe of the 19th century, rejecting things that seemed plausible, and discovering things they wouldn’t have thought of in their wildest imagination, and yet the philosophers of that 19th century, who lived under the influence of ideas that had since been proven false, are still appealing to so many. Considering how Chaldean astrology is still considered plausible and authoritative by some people, I can only conclude that bad ideas never completely die; they just continue living in their niche parallel psychosis of a reality. For instance, materialism stopped being a viable interpretation of reality somewhere in the 1980s, when due to massive advances in reanimation of the clinically dead patients we managed to gather a large number of completely convincing evidence about soul’s survival of physical death and its independent existence. This evidence isn’t accepted by the so-called scientists not because there’s something wrong with the evidence, but because it negates their fundamental worldview, represented by the assumptions that I enumerated at the beginning of this article. Also, materialism was disproved by physics, which first found evidence for the existence of atoms, the indivisible fundamental particles of matter, apparently proving the basic precepts of materialism; and then almost immediately progressed to break those atoms into yet smaller particles, until it was left with mere symbols and entities which decay into energy within infinitesimally small fractions of a second. As far as today’s physics is concerned, multiverse and virtual reality theories are perfectly plausible, and nothing is really proven, except that it is completely implausible for our current Universe to exist as a singular reality. Its basic constants are so finely tuned, that the only plausible explanations are that it was created as such by an act of an intelligent being, or that there simply happen to be infinite Universes in existence, and anthropic principle mandates that the one in which we exists happens to be the one within which our existence is possible. And yet in the 1980s we had to endure that insufferable fool Carl Sagan who told us that Universe is all that is, was and ever will be. But yes, bad ideas never really die after they are disproved. However, some bad ideas result in individual lives, and lives of entire civilizations, that are so unsustainable that the entire thing ends.
I don’t se how it would be possible for this civilization to accept that everything it is based on was proven to be false. I think it will simply continue to reiterate on its errors until it is put out of its misery by another force. However, I have another theory. Mankind in general is out of ideas. It’s at an impasse. Everything that was supposed to produce a revolution proved to be a dead end. It’s extinction time.
And I have an even better theory. Jesus was right, and this world was originally created with a fixed, albeit secret, termination date, known only to God. This world was given to Satan to prove his wicked theories, and I can see no better time for it to end than now, when nobody really has a clear idea what else to try, when everything was already tried, all alternatives to God have been tried and produced nothing but hell, and now their best ideas are to recycle the past failures. No, I don’t think so. We seem to be at an end, and I come to the same conclusion regardless of the approach I take in the interpretation of what I observe. It’s harvest time, and it is up to God to separate the wheat from the chaff, which is where the idea of egalitarianism will face its final demise.