New Discourses
Politics • Spirituality/Belief • Writing
National Divorce Is National Suicide
February 01, 2024
Guest contributors: ConceptualJames
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Should the United States split up? The country is more polarized than it ever has been, at least since the Civil War, having divided not so much geographically but culturally and ideologically. The two broad factions in this split are what we might call the “Red Team” (conservatives) and the “Blue Team” (progressives)—the irony in these color designations not being lost on many. Now that things are so divided, might it just be better to go our separate ways as peacefully as possible so we can get on with life? Might it be time for a “National Divorce”? Blue Team can keep the beach house, and Red Team can have the farm, and we can all move on to live happily ever after on our own terms?

No. National Divorce is National Suicide, and we’re only considering it because we’re being driven into the despair necessary to commit it.

Straight away, we can see that National Divorce means the death of the nation in the most banal and uninteresting way. If the United States splits, it won’t be united anymore, and so the nation we have today will have committed suicide. That’s not what I mean, though. If we were to proceed with a National Divorce, it will not be peaceful, and the ultimate result will be a state I refer to as Game Over—global tyranny under exactly the evil force provoking us to this extreme in the first place.

On Terminology

I’m going to use the term “National Divorce” for a catch-all for anything that breaks up the existing United States into more than one piece. This would include some split of states, like we might imagine, the secession of even a single state, or the outbreak of a second civil war. It also includes attempts to balkanize or “regionalize” the existing United States into contiguous geographical areas that declare some kind of sovereignty apart from the federal union we call the United States. Quibbling over the difference between these circumstances is distracting from the point and would require far too much development.

I have already introduced the terminology “Red Team” (conservatives) and “Blue Team” (progressives). These terms refer to the current rough big-tent political factions in the United States that roughly but inexactly correlate with support for the Republican Party, which is coded red, and Democratic Party, which is coded blue. They are meant to describe even people who tend to lean one way or the other in this rough divide and is not meant to indicate support or alignment with the political parties in any way. Perhaps think of it as “likely to vote ‘red’ or ‘blue’ in a national election.” Since it’s a placeholder, don’t take it too seriously.

These will develop into the terminology “Red State” and “Blue State” following the “National Divorce.” I am using those terms to signify the approximate new political entities after a binary division. Further balkanization doesn’t need to be discussed because it only makes matters worse.

“Game Over,” as indicated, represents the state in which the global tyrannical program, which is roughly enough Communist in its approach and structure, is able to move inexorably to a pan-Western or even global government under its control. It means the death of liberty. To put a finer point on it, if we reach Game Over, your children will grow up to be slaves, and most of your remaining years will suck.

The Case for National Divorce

This section will admittedly be cursory because it’s not the point. A National Divorce is a terrible idea, but, if we’re going to show that, it’s worth reviewing what people believe it will accomplish in the most charitable terms possible. In my opinion, these terms are fantastical, and the primary driver of these ambitions is catharsis—the letting go of pent up frustration against the corrupt regime, which seems to admit no outlet. That is, I want people to understand that “National Divorce” is not a serious or wise option but an emotional outlet for people who feel trapped and desperate. The goal of this essay is to discuss the possibility of a National Divorce in real terms in the world we actually inhabit and to urge people to understand we are making enough progress not to need to follow unrealistic but cathartic paths of action.

There are three primary arguments for National Divorce, one of which isn’t even really an argument. These are (1) to escape tyranny and live on our terms in new states; (2) to allow the Red Team to consolidate resources and power with which to fight back against Blue Team more effectively; and (3) it’s inevitable anyway (the non-argument). As you can imagine, I don’t believe in (3) at all and don’t think it’s doing anyone any good to believe in it, and I think (1) and (2) will not be allowed to occur in reality given the nature of what’s happening in the world and why. The bulk of this essay is dedicated to painting a picture of what I think would really happen instead.

Both (1) and (2) depend on the belief that Red Team will be able to create Red State that is no longer subject to the tyrannical overreaches of the current U.S. federal government. (Last reminder: “Red State” might represent more than one actual state, but we’re staying in the binary situation for simplicity.) Freed from the tyrannical overreaches of the current U.S. federal government and even international organizations like the United Nations, Red State could then chart its own course, build its own economy and society unfettered, build its own military, and engage in all the activities of a functional nation—perhaps even a mature Constitutional republic—which is impossible under the current U.S. federal government. The strongest argument in favor of National Divorce in this vein is that the current U.S. government and global environment present a genuine threat not just to our livelihoods and liberties, but to those of our children. For reasons that aren’t hard to imagine, it would even be able to out-compete its new Blue State neighbor and thus become the thriving nation the United States should be today, or at least something like that. Furthermore, freed from tyranny, it could also consolidate the necessary economic and military power to be a significant player on the world stage, if needed, and keep its enemies at bay.

Proponents of National Divorce often argue that such a move is not only beneficial but necessary. Some, on the more extreme end, posit that the U.S. Constitution, thus the United States itself, is already functionally destroyed with no hope of recovery. National Divorce would therefore allow us to reconstitute a new state (“Red State,” here) that enables us to recover the most of what the United States stood for and preserve the American way of life. This despairing sentiment is common, though not always stated so extremely, throughout the movement. Proponents also tend to argue that we don’t know what will happen and that we may well drastically overestimate the power of the national and global Blue Team, if not also their malice.

The justification for the need for such a split is that our differences, Red Team and Blue Team, are so irreconcilable that it isn’t possible to share a single political entity with one another. Each side finds the other side’s way of life, values, and aspirations inadequate to building a society worth living in, if not repugnant or degenerate. Since the rift is so significant and perhaps permanent, it’s time to go our separate ways as peacefully as possible. They tend to insist the essence of the National Divorce—it’s Geist, so to speak—has already occurred, as evidenced by the irreconcilable differences and irreparable rift between “blue” and “red.” They liken the situation to spouses who are legally still married even though their marriage in all meaningful respects has already died. Certain challenges will arise, but through the normal operation of statecraft, diplomacy, economy, and whatever else, the new states can settle into a new political arrangement on the North American continent and ease the pressure of this extreme, maybe deadly polarization.

National Divorce Lite: The Big Sort

Before moving into National Divorce properly, we need to discuss its precondition, which is known as “The Big Sort.” The reasons we need to discuss it are two: first, it ends in National Divorce, and, second, it’s being encouraged now, especially by elements on Team Red. (Arguably, Team Blue is doing the opposite and trying to infiltrate currently “Red” areas as heavily as it can afford to.) The general idea is that people should move to areas that match their politics, so conservatives should move to “red” areas and states and progressives to “blue” ones. Further, at least in “red” areas, the increased concentration in political power should be leveraged to make those areas more “red.” Everyone generally agrees that “blue” areas will do this kind of consolidation of power by default, though it will be accelerated by increasing their proportions in areas conservatives abandon. Many who encourage National Divorce consider this to be unstoppable anyway, so conservatives might as well circle their wagons in “red” areas, though they would never characterize it as running away. This Big Sort is a terrible idea.

Naturally, there’s already a “Big Sort” in the United States, but it’s not drawn very neatly on state lines except in presidential electoral maps. The divide is much more accurately urban versus rural, and all fifty states at present contain both urban and rural areas that tip either “red” or “blue.” It has been identified for at least fifteen years as a major problem and driver of destabilizing political polarization in the United States. A national Big Sort would amplify that dynamic tremendously and at scale, with the same dialectical conflict playing out in the urban/rural divide within each state, particularly the “red” ones. What this suggests is that a deliberate state-level Big Sort, or even increasing the urban/rural Big Sort (“get out of cities!”) will push us into more polarization, not less, and increase the chances of a National Divorce, which I argue ends in Game Over.

“The Big Sort” is therefore best thought of as “National Divorce Lite.” The term “The Big Sort” actually comes from a book from 2009 by Bill Bishop titled The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing Us Apart. The primary point of the book is to argue that people were already moving to more like-minded areas, though he focused primarily on the urban/rural and urban/suburban divides, and that this dynamic was creating conditions that accelerate political polarization. Bishop was offering a diagnosis for American political polarization, to be clear, not prescribing some globalist plan, and his diagnosis wasn't good. The urban/rural “Big Sort” he identified was characterized as “tearing us apart,” he argued, threatening national unity going forward.

The idea of a “Big Sort” wasn’t limited to a book that only a relative few are aware of. At least as recently as 2022, for example, state propaganda outlet NPR was publishing articles about The Big Sort, by that name, which it insisted was being accelerated at the state-to-state level by Covid-19 policies. “America is growing more geographically polarized—red ZIP codes are getting redder and blue ZIP codes are becoming bluer. People appear to be sorting.” Their conclusion generally agrees with Bishop’s: “‘The Big Sort’ may be making Americans more politically extreme.”

That’s not how the article ends, however. It ends somewhere more encouraging of The Big Sort: “Moving to areas with people you agree with has advantages.” It’s worth reading the final portion of the article in its entirety for how instructive it is about the dynamic:

What a difference a new city makes. Twelve-year-old Mya Wooten is taking a social justice class at her private school in downtown Austin, an opportunity they would not have found in Greenfield. 

Mya says a recent assignment was to pick an issue to protest. “It was ocean pollution, women’s rights, or LGBTQ rights,” she says. “So my topic was women’s rights, and I made a poster of an open woman's mouth and it said, ‘I have the right to be heard.’” 

By moving to Austin, the Wootens joined The Big Sort. They made Greenfield a tad less purple, and Austin a smidgeon bluer. Tiffany sometimes wonders if they've done the right thing. 

“I’m not sure that it’s super healthy for us to be completely putting ourselves in a box and saying, ‘I’m gonna be with the blue people because they think exactly like me.’ We need to be able to communicate with each other even if we do not fully agree with each other.” 

The Wootens miss having their ideas challenged and engaging with the other side. On the other hand, she says, “We feel among our people in Austin.”

NPR, in other words, seemed to be encouraging The Big Sort in 2022, even while acknowledging that it increases the political polarization of local, state, and national politics. From this fact, we might conclude that The Big Sort is advantageous to the political objectives pushed by NPR.

Why would that be the case? You might be thrilled to find out there’s a proposed solution to The Big Sort, and it even has a name you’ll likely recognize now. The proposed solution to The Big Sort is called “The Great Reset.” 

As it turns out, The (Ze) Great Reset is not just some big evil plan by the executive chairmain of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, means to be initiated and accelerated by Covid-19 after being officially inaugurated by now-King Charles (then Prince). It started out as an innovative new idea in urban planning that could solve The Big Sort, as detailed in a 2009 book by Richard Florida titled The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity. The premise of the book is that “history teaches us that periods of ‘creative destruction,’ like the Great Depression of the 1930s, also present opportunities to remake our economy and society and to generate whole new eras of economic growth and prosperity.” The Big Sort is characterized as part of such an “opportunity,” although the book’s primary focus is the Great Recession of 2008.

“We’ve reached the limits of what George W. Bush used to call the ‘ownership society,’” Florida warns in the earliest pages, after discussing how Karl Marx analyzed the upheavals and “resets” characterizing the birth of that period. Economic polarization between urban centers and suburbs, as well as between cities and rural areas, overlaps with ethnic and sociopolitical polarization under the economic Big Sort. His solution is a “Great Resettle” into the urban centers of what he calls economic “megaregions,” which appear to operate effectively like an early draft of what we would today call SMART 15-Minute Cities.

Of some note, on the cover of the newest edition of The Great Reset, Florida’s 2019 book The Rise of the Creative Class is mentioned and promoted. Of course, “the creative class” is exactly what the World Economic Forum today says will be the upper, or ruling, class of the new world, as opposed to the “useless” class of dispossessed laborers who have all their labor performed by machines and artificial intelligence. Taken as a whole, these points raise some serious red flags about the willful political separation of the United States, however frustrating it is to live nearby complete idiots who hate your way of life.

The Israeli Disengagement Experiment

Big withdrawals of a more extreme kind may also provide some clues as to the wisdom of encouraging The Big Sort. For example, in 2005, Israel formally disengaged from Gaza under a plan proposed by then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The Israelis dismantled twenty-one settlements in the Gaza Strip as part of the “Disengagement Plan Implementation Law,” compensating Israelis living in Gaza to relocate into Israel as residential areas were fully demolished.  The rationale was straightforward. Lacking any possibility for a possible peace with the Arabs calling themselves “Palestinians,” who were largely represented by the radical Palestinian Liberation Organization and the terrorist group Hamas, Sharon decided to disengage to strengthen its control in the State of Israel. In other words, this is the same logic as is driving conservatives in the United States toward a National Divorce plan.

The results are, in fact, that Israel was able to consolidate its power, which was already considerable due to U.S. and U.K. support, within the State of Israel, and it was pressured into a permanent defensive posture by allowing a permanent antagonistic terrorist quasi-state to develop on its borders with the chartered intention of destroying Israel completely. As it turns out, the bad guys were able to consolidate power in the unchecked environment too.

There are many parallels to draw from this experiment for an American Big Sort or National Divorce. By fleeing your “blue” state as a conservative—perhaps because Conservative Influencers, some of whom have a financial stake in it—told you to, that “blue” state loses some of the remaining capacity to check the power growing within it. That power is broadly Communist, so it can be expected to operate in a permanently antagonistic and even terroristic way because it hates everything that isn’t Communist, including you. It will be able to do so not just in “blue” states but also from within “blue” cells located inside your “red” state, located heavily in every “blue” city. 

Far from weakening the Blue Team, in exchange for some temporary reprieve in your conditions (and, of serious note, safety for your children), this action enables a great consolidation of Communist power in regions under their control and thus weakens and eventually ends any capacity to drive those agendas and develop outward-facing political force. Since free people do not willingly move to Communist regions very often, this migration is effectively one-way, replicating some of the conditions of the Israeli Disengagement Experiment.

In return, you’ll be able to consolidate “Red Team” power in your “red” states, though, right? No. You will not successfully consolidate “Red Team” power anywhere, really. People who aren’t Communists—unless they are Fascists—don’t act like Communists, so they don’t readily consolidate power. Furthermore, the “red” states will remain fully infiltrated since their cities are already “purple” or “blue,” complicating the situation. This leaves “red” states with a constant internal and external pressure dynamic to turn “blue” or to go all bad by embracing Fascism. Supposing those regions want to stay “red,” they eventually therefore have to abandon the Constitution and turn increasingly Fascistic, which, among other things, leads to undermining and throwing out the Constitution and its protections on individual liberty, which just so happens to coincide with the Communist goal on the ever-concentrating Blue Team.

Eventually, in other words, this path results in rupture, which can look like secession of one state or several together or in serial, (civil) war, or National Divorce, which I'm using as a catch-all term for these phenomena. The point is, The Big Sort is a precondition for the Leftist agenda because it ends here, as both the polarizing logic of The Big Sort and the evidence of the Israeli Disengagement Experiment indicate.

National Divorce

What would happen, realistically, if the United States fractured because of Blue Team (Communist) provocation from the federal government, intolerable conditions in “blue” states, foreign interference, and an escape campaign from the Red Team that definition isn’t nice to call “running away from their responsibilities to their own backyards”? Nothing good. First of all, the United States wouldn't exist anymore, and both remnants—Red State and Blue State—would be weaker. This end of the United States is the banal end of the United States mentioned near the start of this discussion, which is not the same as Game Over. The Constitution, however, would be dead, and both Red State and Blue State would have to decide on how to re-constitute themselves.

It isn’t hard to imagine what would happen in the Blue State in that regard. It would immediately modify the Constitution to look rather like Canada or California, in order to “fix” it. Whatever its political construction, which would likely include a drastic increase in executive power, it would almost certainly limit free expression (First Amendment), eliminate the right to bear firearms (Second Amendment), and encode “equity” into the fundamental “rights” of its citizens (Fourteenth Amendment). In other words, it would trend softly Communist immediately. It would also ally itself with the rest of the “civilized” world, including the European Union, the U.K., Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and very likely China.

For its part, the Red State would likely attempt to maintain something very much like the present Constitution, at least at first, though there would immediately be huge internal strife over whether any liberties should be curtailed in order to prevent turning “blue” or to handle “blue” infiltration, which is already significantly present, entrenched, and incorporated institutionally within its borders. These debates would be furious and polarizing. The Red State would likely be declared a rogue state, and it will find allyship with other nations to be difficult, if not impossible, in the present global environment, which will likely be primed to turn against it, despite economic possibilities. This will suit the isolationists but will not be strongly to the advantage of the Red State in a global political context.

Meanwhile, we can also bet that the rest of the world will not be idle during this turmoil. Lacking the stabilizing presence of the united United States military on the global stage, we can presume nations like China, Iran, and Russia, at the least, will make some significant territorial and other moves to maximize their own advantage during RIP-America’s turn into political chaos and reorganization. Israel may or may not survive. Taiwan almost certainly wouldn’t. South Korea is an open question.

Neglecting the world stage (for the most part), two paths run from here, and both are terrible. Nobody wins this. This “divorce” includes a Communist (narcissistic abuser) side who will not live and let live, so bad stuff is coming. I don't know which of the following two paths is more likely, however, for one specific reason: nuclear weapons exist.

National Divorce Scenario 1, The Fast Option

After divorce, the Red State will find itself in the aforementioned turmoil, with issues internal and external. Getting organized will not necessarily be a smooth process, and elements on at least two factions of the Red Team and at least two locations (internal and external) of the Blue Team will be working against its unity. This circumstance will, at least temporarily, severely cripple Red State, which is not to its advantage.

Another consequential fact also bears here: former U.S. military and nuclear arsenal installations are still on Red State lands. Blue State won't just give them up. In fact, they’ll go to great lengths over them. Conflict rapidly escalates in this scenario, and Blue State will immediately call upon its global allies and the United Nations, at the very least to secure the nukes. Simultaneously, those military bases become a real problem. For context, Fort Sumner in Charleston Harbor played inside this story in 1861, and that specific conflict started the Civil War. Should that happen over a military installation in a National Divorce situation today, we rapidly progress to Game Over for the reasons that will be made clear below, just put on a more urgent timeline.

Because of the nuclear arsenal and the likely standoff over Blue State ("U.S.") military installations inside Red State, the instability of a National Divorce would immediately trigger a global emergency, demanding every possible sanction and pressure on Red State to prevent it from being a nuclear-armed rogue state. The more aggressively Red State works to take over a military base or, worse, secure a nuclear installation, the more urgent and powerful the global response will be against it. At best, the resulting war will be terrible. In reality, Red State has few realistic prospects in such a conflict, even without the massive internal turmoil weakening its chances.

Imagine what such a scenario would look like. The Vertically Integrated Messaging Apparatus all around the rest of the globe will immediately insist that this is the New Confederacy but with nukes, and it will be the focus of the entire world's resources to break it immediately, even in its new-nation disarray. The military in those bases will be divided, and with the Constitution undermined, their loyalties will be confused. The former United States, which is now Blue State, will insist these are theirs. They also control the necessary operational codes for the nuclear installations. Attempts to seize a nuclear installation will be met with ungodly force with all the urgency that nuclear deterrence demands.

You might be cowboy enough to think Red State could fight its way through that, but that's not likely and would leave a wrecked world. You might die on your feet, but you and your kids still die, and it's not remotely desperate enough a situation in the currently existing United States to justify that risk yet. In fact, however, Red State will almost certainly not be organized or cowboy enough to secure operable nuclear weapons for itself in this scenario. Even tampering with them would demand a global response, including a nuclear response. Red State isn't the US; it's a rogue state, so it would be globally justified. Almost all of the world would declare itself Red State’s enemy with nuclear urgency.

You can imagine it easily. Blue State is allied with the UN, China, and the other Five Eyes nations. The entire West Coast, New England and several Atlantic states, and all of Canada immediately open themselves as water and land routes for a full-scale invasion to secure America’s teetering nuclear arsenal and control Red State as a rogue actor. Supply lines will largely be cut to Red State from the rest of the globe, crippling its nascent economy, supposing it even has a military to equip. The operation would be quick, brutal, and total. Red State would cease to exist with many of its intrepid citizens dead.

This is the “Fast Option” because Red State would likely last only a few months before collapsing under global pressure or all-out war. Then it's over. This is Game Over. Anything in the process that triggers civil war, with a National Divorce formal or not, triggers this outcome, and it will be quick. Nothing is left to stop the Left Globalists, who therefore win. Everyone who survives is a global slave (“global citizen”) and the resistance is destroyed. We all arrive at Game Over.

National Divorce, scenario 2: The Slow Option

There is a more insidious path that is also more typical of the evil we’re dealing with in the world today. A National Divorce leading us onto this path would, as just outlined above, depend upon a more-or-less peaceful full nuclear disarmament of Red State plus the sacrifice of most of its potential military capacity, which it might not make. Supposing it makes the necessary concessions to Blue State and the world to avoid the Fast Option to Game Over, however, it enters onto the Slow Option to Game Over.

In the Slow Option, the states separate somehow or another more or less peacefully into Red and Blue, the Red is forced to let Blue take back most of the former U.S. military and all of the U.S. nuclear arsenal as a minimal price of entry to a peaceful divorce. There’s little doubt about that. Otherwise, it will be the fast option to Game Over.

The next two years or so of the Slow Option are going to be awesome for most former U.S. citizens in the two usual ways. Blue State, after rapidly completing its soft Communist revolution will leave the revolutionary phase and enter the phase of “building socialism.” That means it will rapidly clean itself up like San Francisco did and dedicate itself to rapidly building an economy in the model of China. It will likely receive major global help. Things will be much cleaner and efficient. Their alliance with China, the UN, and the rest will be tight. Life will become very good in Blue State. Business will thrive, people will make money, stuff will work again. Blue State residents just have to deal with the Woke “Sustainable and Inclusive” program, but not to the extent that it disrupts business or energy production. Those will be deemed necessary to Build Back Better, given the circumstances.

People from Red State will also have it relatively good, at least psychologically. They will be free from Woke “Sustainability and Inclusion” and able to start growing as a new, freer nation (unless they go Fascist). There will be some internal turmoil, and life will be relatively hard but exciting and largely free again. Of course, Red State residents will be propagandized to the fullest extent Blue State powers can reach to encourage them to move to the seemingly utopian Blue State, which abandoned the worst of its destructive ways. They will be allowed to move to Blue State whenever, but only through thoroughly renouncing their “red” values, and this demand will be reinforced by law, social credit, and a new Constitution that “fixes” the old one. This will be the minimum precondition to enter into the Built Back Better Blue State world. More than a few will leave, but few will come the other way, to Red State.

That’s because for all its potential, Red State will find it difficult to make friends on the world stage and, by demand of the “global community,” will in many ways be sanctioned by the rest of the world. Having lost much of its coastline, it will be limited in trade and national defense. Still, there will be all kinds of building up, Red State style! Homesteading, “making it happen,” developing a new economy, growing up a homegrown militia as the new Red State military—these will all occur more or less unhindered except by the limitations of the global environment. Access to supply lines will be limited, prices will be high, but there won’t be heavy restrictions.

Of course, former Blue Team residents of Red State will be a constant problem, at least those who stay—and many will, as spies, subverters, and infiltrators. Blue State and foreign entities will almost certainly encourage this, and Red State will find it difficult to maintain freedom against this constant internal problem. It may find itself having to jettison many of the Constitutional freedoms it separated specifically to try to preserve, and this will be encouraged by its radical contingent within. It’s likely Red State will become a version of exactly what it sought to escape, just with different priorities, in the need to deal with these issues and under the pressure of its own “redder” radicals.

Nevertheless, Red State will have access to just enough to be able to struggle forward, but life will actually improve. It must be allowed to gain strength, but Blue State will be a far nicer place. This will cause brain drain, population issues, talent issues, etc., for Red State. Again, at the same time, Red State is likely to drift or even lurch at times further “red,” which is to say toward Fascism. The Constitutional protections of the United States that Red State presumably sought to preserve somewhere will mostly be lost by necessity. All of this will be amplified by the global community’s Vertically Integrated Messaging Apparatus into relentless propaganda against Red State, which it will destroy your social credit to question or challenge.

Red State must be allowed to consolidate and grow in strength, maybe even with a Fascist-style government that has no use for “lib’rals” and throws them out, strengthening Blue State, which would already be beyond tolerating useless radicals—but that would fund them to be exactly that while they remain in Red State. Constitutional protections will be jettisoned to prevent re-subversion, and this will keep conflict high inside, and the “global community” will be forced to become more and more wary of Red State and its trajectory. Sanctions and other international issues would likely mount for Red State, adding to its challenges.

A few years down the road, notably after Red State develops a functional semblance of its own military, the world together with Blue State will simply provoke a war with Red State. The pretext might be the increasingly Fascistic turn Red State was forced to take. It might be that Red State feels a bit of its new strength and decides it’s time to take action to remedy the unfairness of its global standing. In any case, it will come about in the typical Blue Team way: through a provocation that sets Red State up to be the first militant actor. Now the world has to act and it must act decisively to “preserve democracy” on “the global stage,” or some such rhetoric. 

This event, which immediately becomes an urgent global emergency against the rogue Red State launches the world back onto the Fast Option pathway to Game Over. Maybe Red State can put up more of a fight in the short term, but it will be the entire world against Red State, which hasn’t had a chance to organize sufficiently to deal with such an onslaught. The world will be led to believe through the by-then-very-sophisticated Vertically Integrated Messaging Apparatus that Red State is the aggressor it was always painted out to be. The Slow Option therefore also ends at Game Over and gets there at full velocity.

National Divorce Is National Suicide

National Divorce, which starts with The Big Sort and through pushing desperation into foolish action even before such a sort could be accomplished, results in Regime Change (Game Over) ultimately, and the Red Team has no realistic pathways to coming out on top. We might feel great for a little while, but it’s a short road to Game Over.

To divide the United States and break the reach of its Constitution and Bill of Rights will create a scenario in which all the power tips to the Global Enemy. You, no matter where you find yourself in that world, will not have a future unless you brainwash yourself and join the Global Collective. Your children will not have a future unless they are part of the Global Collective. This is not a peaceful path to restoring anyone’s way of life. This isn’t 1776. These aren’t the British. We are dealing with Global Communists who have already entrenched themselves in massive arrays of power and are making a legitimate bid for global control.

You might believe, like mentioned near the beginning of this discussion, that what is described above is inevitable, so we might as well “rip the Band-Aid off.” That’s not true. A National Divorce is not inevitable. In fact, it's completely avoidable, allowing us to assert the power of the Constitution of the United States to secure the rights of our people and then to be a beacon of freedom and life to the world again, the world’s “last best hope.” We’re already making incredible strides in that direction, and rather than directing our enmity at our complicit countrymen as new challenges arise, we can continue to channel that into justification to expose and ultimately dismantle the revolution banging against our doors. Every evil move they make can be turned into discrediting them with a far broader audience. The rats orchestrating the revolution will jump ship if the deal looks like it’s going bad, and then they can be incentivized to talk. When they talk, the Enemy—not the country—goes into a downward spiral. The Constitution can prevail, and American can be made great again, with the rest of the free world behind it.

We are already making progress, even in hard states like California. The Courts are siding with us more and more. People are awakening. DEI and ESG are damaged badly. We know how they play their games and do their tricks. We realize how much bait they put in front of us. Their scams and schemes are backfiring. Inconvenient truths for their continued power surface week by week. The tide is turning.

The way out begins with faith in our nation, its Constitution, and most of all its good people. Faith in God, including the sacrifices you need to make and courage you need to show to prove that faith, is also warranted. Winning, though, also means taking the difficult road of sticking up for the place you live.

If you live in a “blue” place, and being as much sand in the gears against the Communists as you can. By organizing—which is impossible if you leave—you can consolidate local-level and eventually greater power that can keep the Communists from taking another inch. Look at Take Back Alberta in Canada, which is a country worse off than the U.S. Look at Garry Tan and his stand for San Francisco. Look to the millions of Americans waking up to the fact that they have to win back control over their back yards by standing and fighting, not retreating to some desperate last stand for them and their kids. Groups like Moms for Liberty are activating parents in almost every state and making progress, taking the fights to the local and state levels first so that we can keep all fifty stars on our Star-Spangled Banner. These examples are the real stuff. Be careful with what ideas you get from influencers. Edge sells but loses. Not all of them are even honest. Communists infiltrate and then rise up from within, leading patriots into traps.

Keep faith and fight for the integrity of the US and its Constitution! A National Divorce is National Suicide. Suicides are deaths of despair. The Communists are provoking us to despair so we’ll, as a nation, take our own life. They want us thinking this is Cowboys versus Communists so they can get us to make the very mistakes outlined in this discussion. It’s not. It’s those who have faith in the integrity and strength in this nation and its founding ideals against those who do not, and we’re showing up far too successfully to throw it all away with delusional fantasies of a “National Divorce.”

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The "New Atheism" movement, which lasted more or less from 2005 until 2015, was a cringey and curious thing, and it has become an object of much mythology, particularly on the highly online, largely Christian Right. Unfortunately, they don't know much about it, leading them to turn it into propaganda for a cause that mirrors it more than many might find comfortable. In this casual episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay goes through quite a lot of the history of the New Atheism movement as it really was and compares it against Critical Religion Theory, Marxism, and, ironically, the Woke Right. Join him for a surprising and refreshing discussion.

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"To rebel is justified," Mao told his young Red Guard, loosing them on China at the beginning of the brutal Cultural Revolution. He wanted them to expose the "capitalist roaders" who had ruined everything in the Great Leap Forward and afterwards, as he led them to believe. "Smash the Four Olds!" he commanded, and his young, thoughtless followers did, breaking every taboo of Chinese culture to vent their frustrations with a situation they were led to believe was intolerable because of their class enemies and wrong thinking. Today, it's not Mao; it's MAGA influencers. It's not capitalist roaders being hunted; it's "neocons," whatever they mean by that. It's not the Four Olds that must be smashed; it's "Boomer mentality." In this long episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay sends a chilling and important message to young conservatives in America and beyond, warning them of how they might be being used, only to be ruined and discarded later.

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May 27, 2025

Terrifically good podcast interview of James on gnostic and hermetic political influences in western culture and woke both left and right
Someone asked about where James refers to the satanic influences of these
He mentions that here st 40-50 mins and 1 hour 29
In various new discourses James mentions how Marx and gnostics equate Yahweh with the demiurge who created the world and locks people (who are supposedly really gods themselves) in a prison of material reality which must be destroyed to get back to the spiritual reality of the paradise that they deserve. Gnosticism is essentially a satanic project of usurping power based on entitlement or identity not qualification or capability
in one of the early podcasts about the United Nations James mentioned the fetzer Institute having a occult ties and being very important in the founding of the UN that Annie Besant a key figure in both the founding of the UN and the founding of the Fabians established a press called the Lucifer press as the ...

May 22, 2025

False flags, market saturation, and just plain ran out of things to talk about after the 10,000th podcast by the 10 millionth podcaster.

I do smile at the "find the next Joe Rogan" line. Um, ya know you had Joe for at least a decade, you CHASED him out, like so many others (RFK, Gabbard, and so on).

This isn't really so much about two political parties as it is about one that went bat s*** crazy and enacted related policies. They haven't learned a single thing. It's not a messaging issue. I have not heard a single, "You know, our policies sucked and that's why we are where we are."

So, I imagine we will be seeing a lot of false flag podcasts and what not. Destabilization is a primary tool. $$$ can make it happen.

Fasten our seat-belts, here it comes............

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May 18, 2025
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Douglas Murray, Dave Smith, and the Troubling Rise of Wokespertise
by Logan Lancing

The recent “current thing” between author and journalist Douglas Murray and comedian and cultural critic Dave Smith, which took place on the Joe Rogan Experience, revealed the devastating blow Leftists have dealt to our civilization in recent years. Expertise is out, and “just asking questions” is in. The TL; DR version of the story goes a bit like this–

Murray appeared on Rogan’s podcast, ostensibly to discuss his new book On Democracy and Death Cults. But, rather than do that, Murray was asked to have a conversation with Smith (debate, really) about the war between Israel and Hamas. Murray rushed in swinging, taking issue with the fact that Smith, admittedly, does not wield expertise of the relevant facts and details of the conflict. Smith (and Rogan) defended himself, using Murray’s arguments from previous years about “experts,” “expertise,” and gatekeeping to apparently reveal the incoherence and irony of Murray’s current attack vectors. The narrative following the interview was “Murray has gone Woke, using the same BS arguments he has spent a career destroying! WE DON’T TRUST EXPERTS!”

Well, should we? As all three—Rogan, Smith, and Murray—pointed out correctly, we have been badly lied to and misled by our “experts” and their institutions in recent years. Their “credentials” were revealed in so many cases not to represent competence and expertise but willingness to push the Party Line. As Murray argued, our experts failed us catastrophically, but expertise itself must still matter.

In the wake of this conversation lay bad actors, grifters, cringy “Elucks” (X users chasing “Elon Bucks” in the X monetization program, which merely prioritizes certain types of content engagement), and, most importantly, confused and disoriented people. These people are confused by Murray’s argument that expertise matters when discussing complicated issues. Why? Because real, genuine expertise actually does matter.  On the other hand, perhaps more importantly, those people just survived Covid-19. By this, I mean they just survived the largest psychological warfare campaign ever waged on the minds of men.

Therefore, people lay confused because they’ve learned that the experts were dead wrong. And not only were the experts dead wrong, they knew that we knew they were dead wrong and still skate parks were sandbagged, sons and daughters had to say their final goodbyes from the parking lot, kids were locked out of school for years, and hard-working men and women lost their jobs because…reasons. All the while, the “experts” laughed, dined, danced on TikTok, and told us from the podium of the President of the United States of America that we would face a winter of severe illness and death for not believing them.

Though people may have forgotten, Murray has largely built a career on challenging “the experts,” particularly with regard to immigration and Islam. So, yeah, people were confused by Murray’s apparent about-face on the central issue of his and Smith’s conversation. Why is Murray now supporting experts? (Think also about “gender affirming care experts” and “climate experts,” to name some of the most egregious examples.)

Enter something I’m calling Wokespertise, which is a selective favoring of outsider narratives perhaps sprinkled with a generous dash of conspiracy theorizing. Wokespertise is what you get when interpreting society through a Woke conspiracy theory about how society works to elevate the knowledge of a privileged few and a marginalized and oppressed many. Woke people therefore favor alternative knowledges and other ways of knowing. Alternative to what? Established knowledge. Other how? By methods different than those of the prevailing experts, who are deemed (rightly or wrongly) corrupt. More importantly, Woke people favor them not because the sitting experts are corrupt or wrong, as they often are, but because they’re alternative, other, and outsider-based. Wokespertise is knowing things you’re “not allowed” to know.

We can think of tons of examples, say from Critical Race Theory. In Critical Race Theory, disparate impact implies discrimination—that’s a pillar of CRT Wokespertise. So if there are proportionally fewer black people than white people who go hiking (perhaps a fact), then “hiking is racist.” This Wokespertise game can be repeated anywhere Woke lives. Consider feminists claiming the reason fewer women are computer coders than men is sexism in tech, for example. Or consider that anyone who has visited the Israeli war zone, or Israel at all, must have been given bad, Potemkin misinformation from the IDF and so understands the situation there less, not more, for having been there. Thus, alternative explanations, particularly ones that blame Israel for engaging in the conflict somehow wrongly, are preferred to journalistic accounts based in due diligence.

Here's the thing, though. Experts exist, and expertise matters. This is immediately evident when you overhear a discussion about a field you are an expert in. For instance, I know and understand Critical Race Theory deeply, and I sometimes will see people online who have started to study Critical Race Theory share conclusions that are flat out wrong, even when those conclusions contain several correct facts. This is a real problem because, when you’re not an expert in the field, and especially if you’re hearing about something that’s mostly foreign to you, any surface level, boneheaded understanding of a topic may sound and feel like expertise when you hear it. And this especially goes for boneheaded understanding that forwards facts that appear to support the narrative.

For example: “CRT is just anti-white racism! Look at this school targeting white kids!”

Expert Opinion: Technically, no, although it often manifests as “anti-white” on the ground floor, as it is designed to generate and maximize racial conflict and awaken a politically activated racial consciousness in all racial groups in various different ways. Critical Race Theory’s central stated goal is to “abolish whiteness as (bourgeoisie) private property,” which is very different from being “anti-white.” “Whiteness,” can be summarily described as “success-generating Western values,” especially those that underwrite the US Constitution.

Now, I don’t want to get too lost in the weeds here, but you can imagine how differently one would approach the fight against CRT if one thought it was “just anti-white racism” vs. anti–success-generating Western Values. One of these approaches fights CRT; the other of these approaches walks into the spells cast on racial groups throughout society by CRT.

There are two primary reasons why CRT is still running roughshod through education, I would argue. The first is that the CRT advocates are relentless Race Marxists. Another is because many Americans, especially white conservatives, fell for the more easily monetizable anti-CRT marketing package in “It’s just anti-white racism!” which CRT actually promotes. So, when parents don’t see blatant administrator-driven and institutionalized anti-white racism in schools, they imagine CRT must be gone.. Or, what’s worse, even when they do witness it, they assume a politically activated white racial consciousness must be the answer, fueling the fire. (So much to say here—maybe another time—but if you feel “it’s just anti-white racism, then why discriminate against Asians in admissions? Why say they are against “neutral principles of constitutional law”? Why is Larry Eldar “The Black Face of White Supremacy?”)

My point is, expertise matters because Truth matters, and experts are those who reliably strike closer to the Truth than others. We’re all limited, so expertise doesn’t shield anyone from criticism or error, obviously. But, in general, we blindly trust experts every single day of our lives because we must. We can’t all be roofers, undersea cable layers, cattle ranchers, IT wizards, prison wardens, or Olympic coaches. We trust that each of us develops expertise in specific domains of knowledge that we can then share with each other to make the world go round.

All that said, let’s return to the JRE debate between Murray and Smith. Smith’s performance was widely considered online (I don’t buy it, though! For those that follow me on X, think “5GW”) to be a massive double-leg takedown of the titanic Murray. Smith was not “the expert” and was “just asking questions” and stating “facts” that “the experts” suspiciously ignore, apparently. Murray was the arrogant hot-head, “hiding behind expertise” to shield himself from actually debating the issues.

These takes were boringly familiar to me. I’ve observed and read about situations like this for years now. This is how it works, which may ring familiar with you, too.

The Expert: I’m an expert on this particular subject for reasons x, y, and z, and I’m here to discuss where I believe your interpretation of reality is a faulty one.

Wokespert: I’m just asking questions. Here’s some facts, woven together as a counter-narrative to your narrative based on “expertise.” [CRT Wokespertise calls this a “counterstory.”]

The Expert: Sure, those facts check out, but the conclusions you’ve derived from them are false, and here’s why. [Deliberately misleading people with selective true statements is possible and even has an obscure name: paltering.]

Wokespert: But what about this fact? You never discuss that one. What else are you hiding or perhaps unwilling to notice? You’re supposed to be “the expert”?! You are blinded by your membership in the expert class. You’re part of the system that wants to keep this fact away from people! [Insider knowledge is corrupt according to Wokespertise and its defining conspiracy theory, which holds that it’s only considered “knowledge” for corrupt reasons.]

The Expert: You can state facts, and I may or may not agree with them, and we can discuss that. But, even if I do, a fact isn’t an argument. Sure, if we agree to your factual claim, we can move on to discussing the implications of that claim and why I think the implications you’ve derived are faulty and wrong. [Expertise isn’t just understanding facts but how they fit together into an accurate portrayal of reality.]

Wokespert: Listen, I’m not an expert. I’m just asking questions, and I find it weird that it feels like I’m not allowed to ask these questions. I find it weird that you seem unwilling to acknowledge and talk about X, Y, and Z facts. Why might that be? My ability ask the questions you experts aren’t allowing me to ask makes me more trustworthy, and actually makes me more of an expert than you! You’re blind! How could you not know about these facts they’ve hidden from you. Wake up, man! [Wokespertise claims unearned intellectual and moral superiority by claiming to stand outside the corruption alleged by the conspiracy theory at its heart.]

(Quick aside: To be completely fair, two things. Again, our expert classes are severely corrupted, but the question here is about throwing out the baby (expertise) with the bathwater (corruption and bogus credentialism). Also, there were certainly moments in the debate where Murray did himself no favors with his responses or his frustrated tone, and there were certainly points were Smith butchered facts. But, I’m not here to discuss my feelings about the “debate,” but rather pull out the phenomenon that took place and explain why it’s confusing people and where it can lead us. I’m not at all interested in a line-by-line analysis, because that misses the point entirely)

If the Wokespertise game isn’t clear yet, let’s try to rehash this example in language we’re now all familiar with.

The Expert: I’m an expert on this particular subject for reasons x, y, and z, and I’m here to discuss where I believe your interpretation of reality is a faulty one.

Critical Race Theorist (Wokespert): I’m just asking questions. Here’s some facts, woven together as a counter-narrative to your expertise. [Critical analysis plus counter-storytelling.]

The Expert: Sure, those facts check out, but the conclusions you’ve derived are false, and here’s why.

Critical Race Theorist (Wokespert): But what about this fact? You never discuss that one. What else are you hiding or perhaps unwilling to notice? You can’t be a true expert because you are blinded by your “whiteness.” You’re part of the system of White Supremacy Ideology that wants to keep this fact away from people. You’re protecting your own power and privilege. [Outsider knowledge is necessary because of the Woke conspiracy theory at the heart of their approach.]

The Expert: You can state facts, and I may or may not agree with them, and we can discuss that. But, even if I do, a fact isn’t an argument. Sure, if we agree to your factual claim, we can move on to discussing the implications of that claim and why I think the implications you’ve derived are faulty and wrong.

Critical Race Theorist (Wokespert): Listen, I’m not white, nor do I have access to whiteness, which makes me more of an expert than you! You’re blind! How could you not know about these facts they’ve hidden from you. Wake up, man! Be Woke! Give me the keys to the car or else.

This Uno-Reverse Card (dialectical inversion combined with DARVO) flips the script – I’m not an expert and I’m just asking questions, which actually means I’m more of an expert because I will ask the questions and state the facts we’re not allowed to ask and state. This tactic is one the Woke have used for decades to redefine expertise as adherence to Woke doctrine and activism (that is, Wokesptertise).

So, here we arrive at the thing confusing everyone: Expertise is real and reliable, insofar as we define expertise as deep knowledge of a particular field or subject. However, those working to subvert Liberty and Truth weasel their way into positions where they can wear “expertise” as a costume that obscures their agenda and goals. So, many of the “experts” that have been rammed down our throats in recent decades were never experts at all—they were commissars. The point, to spell it out plainly, is that we can reject commissars without adopting a counter-Wokespertise of our own!

These commissars (posing as our “experts”) were ushered in mostly by a 21st century DEI program modeled on a nearly identical program found in the early Soviet Union. They were equitably placed and included in the positions they hold because they’re politically awakened and active, holding diverse, counter-hegemonic views. They are an expert political class wearing “expertise” as a skin suit. Their credentials are entirely political, due in large part to the takeover of our educational system by Woke people, chiefly in the 80s and 90s.

So, now we arrive at a place and time where people are supremely skeptical of experts because they’ve been tricked into believing experts and commissars (Wokesperts) are the same thing. They are not.

The Woke Left has spent decades destabilizing society. Everything they do is meant to generate conflict and destabilize society until the revolution happens and Utopia arrives through years of long toil under their totalitarian control. One of their most successful attack vectors has been to convince people that no one can be trusted, and everyone must be approached with suspicion, even the pilot flying your airplane. That is, unless they have the correct political consciousness. The goal in this domain has always been to replace experts with commissars. This allows them to capture institutions that they can, while burning down those they can’t.

And here’s a neat trick. Because they’re replacing experts with commissars, they actually make their criticisms of expertise come true, wrongly. People see corrupted “experts” in one light when there are in fact two—experts and commissars—and they blame belief in expertise itself for the problem. Thus, when the Woke critique of expertise cannot fully succeed directly by its own hand, it completes itself through its enemies by getting them to abandon expertise too. At that point, all that’s left is power struggles between the expert-free factions, which they hope they’ve positioned themselves to ultimately win.

The confused and disoriented people I’ve been discussing are those left in the wake of this catastrophically successful attack. They are the people the Woke Left couldn’t win over—those who couldn’t be “awakened” and initiated into the Woke cult. So what do you do with them? You can’t just let them go, potentially becoming active counter-revolutionaries. So, you make sure if you can’t get them, no one can. You leave the entire game board destabilized, with any people that get away with nowhere to flee to. You create psychological casualties—people who don’t trust experts at all and only trust this claim or that because of tribalistic group belonging and feelings rather than rational and reasoned thought, to say nothing of the actual truth.

Murray has spent his career mostly challenging commissars, or Wokesperts, referring to themselves as “the experts,” not experts. He’s leveled brilliant attacks against political commissars who’ve sold themselves as “the experts,” revealing to everyone that “the experts” are in fact commissars who can’t be trusted. He knows, I presume, based on my eyes and ears, that experts are real and important, and that expertise matters. And he’s right. Now he’s facing down a new brand of counter-Wokesperts, and he’s still right. Expertise still matters. Wokespertise is still fraudulent.

We need to recover the distinction between genuine expertise and ideological credentialism. I’m not suggesting experts cannot embrace error. I’m suggesting that expertise should be judged by its proximity to truth, not by loyalty to a totalizing worldview. The people we once trusted lose credibility because they got a few things wrong. They lost it because they were captured by a religious cult that reoriented them away from reality and truth and towards activism.

If we don’t rebuild a culture that values truth over narrative and competence over credentials, we’ll keep mistaking commissars for craftsmen. And when that happens, everything breaks and we all have a bad time.

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Man With Three Faces: Politics, Pathology, and the Modern Selves
by James Lindsay

When I was doing the primary research for my 2019 book with Peter Boghossian, How to Have Impossible Conversations, I took the time to read a fascinating volume from the Harvard Negotiations Project called Difficult Conversations (Peter and I chose the title for our book before we knew of this book’s existence). One point it raised has always stuck with me in a profound way. Simplifying to the extreme, it’s that conversations take place on three levels at once: “what’s happening,” emotional, and identity. Given the title of the book, the authors’ point is about how these different levels of conversational phenomena lead to conversational breakdowns and how to fix them.

Their point is simple enough. Most of the time, everyone believes they’re talking about the facts, the “what’s happening” level of conversation, but sometimes they’re really talking about something deeper. Emotions are deeper than facts in human relationships (so, indeed, it is that feelings don’t care about your facts), and identity is even deeper still—imagine the effect “Woke” identity politics has here, then. They make the case that when conversations or negotiations are going awry, it’s often playing out on the “what’s happening” factual level when the real issue is emotional hurt or a challenge to one or both parties’ senses of identity. The solution is to step back and drill down to where the deeper issue is, take time to resolve it, and then come back up to the facts when that’s addressed.

Basically, deeper level disruptions completely derail conversations, they argue, making them impossible until those disruptions are dealt with, and deepest of all are issues that challenge someone’s identity. If you challenge someone’s sense of self or their capacity to evaluate themselves as a person of some standing in communities and within other social milieux they esteem, there’s no hope of hashing it out over the facts. An incredible amount of the sociopolitical dysfunction we have experienced over the last highly polarized and insane decade (and beyond) can be attributed to this fact—and that everything is identity now, and every identity is political now too.

The Person in the Political

We have the feminists to thank for that sociocultural catastrophe, though as much as I’d love to ride my “‘the personal is political’ is the most toxic doctrine in the universe” hobbyhorse for a whole essay, a brief word will suffice. When you make your personhood an object of politics, you will define yourself in terms of your politics too. Every political disagreement becomes a challenge to identity, and every political conversation is doomed to go off the rails. If you wonder what this looks like, ladies and gentlemen (itself a controversial statement that challenges identity in threatening, intolerable ways now too), it looks like the twenty-first century in the West.

Recently, I’ve realized this sword cuts the other way too, though. While it is only slightly true that the personal is political, it strikes me that it may be much more important how the political is personal. What I mean by this statement is that our political dispositions at their very deepest levels very likely stem from deep-seated views held about our identities—that deep who are we? lurking in every human heart—and much that goes awry in our social and political discourse and philosophy may well stem from this fact.

One Plus One Plus One Equals Two

Speaking of philosophy, another idea I often think about comes from my philosopher friend Stephen Hicks, who is a remarkable thinker in many ways, not just for his unbelievably categorical account for how we ended up with postmodernism in the first place (Explaining Postmodernism, spoiler: it’s those damned Marxists). Hicks has been quite eloquent and articulate on the deepest problem of philosophical dichotomies: when we think there are two positions in opposition, there are usually three.

Take, for example, the idea that our political spectrum is “Left” and “Right.” Where are Liberals on that spectrum? The Right will tell us they’re Left; the Left will tell us they’re Right; and Liberals themselves will tell you we’re neither and that both Left and Right are lunatics. Hicks could step in and explain this easily, even if the example is simple. “Left and Right” isn’t an adequate model for describing political reality because where we think there are two sides there are actually three positions that have fundamentally different commitments, not just on political views but also on fundamental, deep issues of philosophical orientation like epistemology and metaphysics.

Hicks brilliantly engages this problem from the perspective of underlying philosophical commitments and exposes the error—or even the fraud. People have surprisingly different relationships to reality sometimes. Conservatives have a traditionalist-tilted Burkean epistemology not shared by others. Leftists have social constructivism, which doesn’t just play with epistemology but with ontology as well (it’s anti-realist!). What are we to make of this? Gratefully, Hicks has provided a bright lamp to shine through this fog.

Does Something Human Precede Our Philosophies?

Philosophy, indeed, and it’s in light of this quandary that maybe half a year ago (I’ve been chewing on this one for a while) I was listening to an old interview with my friendly acquaintance Patrick Deneen, one of those arch-evil “post-liberal” conservatives and a philosopher at Notre Dame. Deneen is famous for his books Why Liberalism Failed and Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, the titles of which pretty clearly expose his political views. In and around those books he gives an argument that is as common on the “New Right” (Woke Right) as it is irksome and just plain wrong (and he should know better!). From Deneen’s perspective, in my oversimplified wording that will make sense to you very soon, Liberalism failed because it is Leftism, which is also to say that it is not Conservatism.

He gives a very curious argument about Liberalism that, as a fairly highly self-aware Liberal, I find absolutely unrecognizable, not just about the political philosophy (though that too) but more importantly about who Liberals are. See, Deneen characterizes Liberalism in a way that I had never considered before, and it’s therefore with my gratitude to him that I can present this much clearer and better discussion to you after much thought. He says Liberals have subscribed to some philosophy of self that he has called the “Self-defined Self.” That is, Liberals, in his telling, are defined by the will to define themselves absent anything grounding, including tradition, clan, community, and even reality.

I can only assume—though I do not know—that Deneen got this completely mistaken idea from Carl Trueman and his incredibly frustrating treatise (also popular on the “New Right”) The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, the very concept (Begriff) of which lends itself to my present thesis. Why would I call this book frustrating, you might ask. I asked myself, at least. The answer is because it’s clearly wrong and very hard to tell why it’s wrong, at least if you’re reading it as a Liberal. Deneen is frustrating in precisely the same way for precisely the same reason. So are the post-liberals in their wake, namely the duly named “Woke Right.”

But what if these guys are pointing at something deep without realizing it? What if it’s the case that our politics are extensions of who we see ourselves to be and, more to the point, who we—and others—should be? Now, that’s a question.

Clearing Away Error to Develop the Thesis

To begin by clearing away the gross error in Trueman, Deneen, and the “New/Woke Right,” Liberals do not define themselves or subscribe to a “Self-defined Self” philosophy of selfhood. Leftists do that. Any Liberal who knows the difference knows this immediately and is probably equally frustrated that Conservatives don’t and, seemingly, can’t. This got me wondering: what is the Liberal philosophy of self, then, if we had to give it a name like that?

The answer is that Liberals believe in something I decided to call a Discovered Self, which is very different to the self-definition of Leftists (NB: see the final appendix to this essay for a complication I’ll ignore throughout). Liberals believe there’s a self and that there are true things that can be known about it, even if that’s somewhat open-ended, so as we look around the world and experience some things for ourselves, we discover who we are, sometimes by experiment and sometimes by observation and most frequently by unconsidered intuition operating on autopilot as it tends to do. The unexamined life is not worth living, it has been said, and Liberals would generally believe whoever we are, we find it out through living and examining.

It would be easy here, by the way, to lump in “I think, therefore I am” as another expression of this same concept, this time from Rene Descartes. That’s incorrect. Descartes did not express a fundamental realism and sense of discovery, even though his skeptical quest took the form of discovering what the self is, in a way. Descartes was radically skeptical of all that, even famously postulating a hypothetical “demon” who tricks humanity into believing in a reality that isn’t there—a seventeenth century version of “we live in a simulation.” His radical skepticism orients him with Leftism, not Liberalism, because all that’s certain is that there’s a thinker who must exist and therefore is left only with the task of defining himself from that bare beginning. Much else in Descartes confirms this hypothesis, but it is a long digression.

Who, Then, Are Conservatives?

This level of exploration raises another pair of questions immediately. First, what philosophy of self do Conservatives hold? And second, why can’t Conservatives see the difference between discovery of self and definition of self? Maybe, I thought, the answers lie deep within how each of these political dispositions or moods views selfhood in the first place. In fact, maybe it is that our political dispositions are at first dispositions about what it means to be someone in this wide, confusing world.

Anyone who is even cursorily familiar with the father of philosophical Conservatism, Edmund Burke, immediately knows who the Conservative Self is. It’s the Received Self. Man—because it has to be grander for conservatives—is the product of a vast system of people, place, and tradition, none of it of his choosing, and it is up to him to receive this selfhood and grow into its duties and expectations. What matters most to who he is are, in some order or another, his God, his faith, his family, his clan, his community, and his nation, to all of which he owes his life and very existence (and some ordo amoris that prioritizes them). In fancy Modernist language, Man is a product of his historicity, and this is right and good. Contrast this with the belief in Leftism that people are the products of their historicities, and this is oppressive and bad.

Why the Confusion, Then?

But in answering the first question, we also immediately answer the second, after which the world opens up to us in a new way. Why is it that Conservatives can’t distinguish a Discovered Self Liberal from a Self-defined Self Leftist? Because, to the Conservative, both commit the same cardinal sin against selfhood itself: they reject tradition. For my friend, if I might make so bold, Patrick Deneen, the rejection of tradition is the acceptance of self-definition. The self is either defined by tradition or it is not, so this fallacy of affordance goes, and since “liberals” all reject tradition, all that’s left is to define themselves. Put another way, either your a product of your community or you think you can go it alone, and the “liberals” have aligned themselves with Karl Marx and declared themselves capable of self-definition (or, at least, self-redefinition). In other words, Deneen thinks the problem with Liberals is that they’re Leftists, like I said—which they are not!

So why is Deneen wrong here? Because, first of all, neither Liberals nor Leftists reject tradition, shocking as that will be to the Conservative sensibility. Liberals don’t reject tradition. They consider tradition (and the ordo amoris and that which it orders) and accept what they deem reasonable from it according to other measuring sticks than the weight of tradition itself. Tradition is one of those features of reality so far as being a self is concerned—as are faith, family, clan, community, and nation—that might at times and in ways be arbitrary, flexible, or unnecessary. Or not. It depends. That’s the Liberal view. They choose from traditions, but they don’t reject it out of hand.

Leftists also don’t reject tradition. They rebel against it, and they do so because they see it as an imposition against the “potentiality” of their selves; that is, as a prison. The difference between rejection and rebellion is subtle but important. Rejection implies breaking away from; rebellion means doing the opposite to, which therefore keeps them bound to the original through the act of inversion. As it turns out, Leftists can feel similarly about reality too, though when it occurs that is what they mostly reject (“I reject your reality and substitute my own”), which no Conservative misses about them, ever. So, Liberals see tradition and social location as factual but potentially arbitrary, or not, and Leftists see them as intolerable and oppressive limitations on their would-be unlimited selves that they can’t break away from but can deconstruct through grotesque parody. Those aren’t the same thing.

Funnily enough, I must add, Leftist commit the same sin against discernment in the opposite direction. Leftists see Liberals as “the Right” or Conservatives, allegedly because they uphold the “status quo,” which is oppressive. Both Liberals and Conservatives find this confusing, but it’s straightforward. Deneen, wrong about “liberals,” has Leftists’ number here. Both Liberals and Conservatives reject the idea of self-definition. So, from the perspective of the Left, they’re the same, and evil. It’s different in each case though, isn’t it?

Conservatives and Liberals both reject self-definition because they believe there are profound limitations on the self, but each sees the matter differently. The Conservative, as the Received Self, limits the self through tradition, and the Liberal, as the Discovered Self, limits the self to reality. These aren’t the same, but from the position of the Self-defined Self, they’re both just rejections of the limitless “potentialities of being,” as Michel Foucault had it.

Liberals Don’t Get a Free Pass Here

For their part, Liberals do a similar smashing and flattening of the political universe, though with slightly more nuance. They see both Right and Left as defining themselves arbitrarily, though because they’re not flattening in a single direction they can see the difference. That is, they see the infamous horseshoe. They know there’s a fundamental difference between Left and Right, even at the most extreme ends, thought they get very close together in extremism, radicalism, authoritarian tendencies, and even totalitarianism as you get way out to the edges. Tradition, they know, is at best only partially arbitrary. Self-definition, they tend to recognize, is often whimsical or even psychotic. Arbitrary power is eventually required to enforce arbitrary selfhood, they understand, because, being arbitrary in its basis, it’s ultimately the only way to deal with the people who refuse the program.

The Point, Which Is About Self-centered Politics in a Literal Sense

To summarize and state my thesis, then, it is this. Political identity is preceded by deeper philosophies of self that vary across at least the three major political dispositions, namely Conservatism, Liberalism, and Leftism (Libertarians are in the appendix, like usual). People who land clearly in each of these broad political camps do so, I insist, at least partly because they understand themselves accordingly first. That is, Conservatives are Conservatives because they believe the self, itself, is a Received Self; Liberals are Liberals because they believe the self, itself, is a Discovered Self; and Leftists are Leftists because they believe the self, itself, is a Self-defined Self.

Put another way that’s even more to the point, I’m claiming Conservative politics is what you get from people whose philosophy of self is a Received Self, which they extend to others in the name of proper social ordering for people like themselves. Liberal Politics is what you get from extending a Discovered Self philosophy of selfhood as the proper organizing principle of society for everyone. Leftism is what you get when the philosophy of selfhood abandons reality for self-definition, proceeding from a Self-defined Self, as Deneen partly rightly shudders at. Nearly everything else proceeds from there, and from this picture most of the world opens up to us with unprecedented clarity.

Politics as Extension of Self

For example, the fact that there are these three fundamental positions and that from each it is deemed that there are only two fundamental positions (theirs and other) and all the discord this causes is immediately clarified. That is, the unjust collapses of position can be understood and pulled back from. Liberals can be distinguished from Leftists when looking from their Right and from Conservatives when looking from their Left, and Leftists and Conservatives aren’t just both crazy post-liberal lunatics who get everything wrong, especially about Liberals. So we can see in a new light the cause of so much political dysfunction and talking past one another. Not only do we see that there are three positions posing as two, but we also see why each of the three positions thinks there’s only really one other and therefore misses a great deal that’s important.

Also clarified is the parallelism in the “horseshoe theory.” Both Conservatives and Leftists feel that the self is defined—one for good, one in evil—in terms of the contingencies of our historicity and positionality in own society. That Liberals reject this is also clarified, as is the fact that they sometimes bend “Right,” when they see the value in tradition, family, faith, or nation, for example, and at other times bend “Left,” as when they go looking for themselves to see what they might find or resist attempts to prevent them from doing so.

Curiously, this model may also explain why the enigmatic and evil Aleksandr Dugin, purported to be the philosopher to Vladimir Putin, though that’s doubtful, proposes that there have been in the Modern Era only three political theories: Liberalism, Communism, and Fascism, each acting like stages a country must pass through. These three correspond to the three political selves, though at least two of them in pathological, disordered form. Dugin proposes as an answer to this problem a so-called Fourth Political Theory (pdf) that is supposed to aufheben the three and move forward. It’s completely schizophrenic, of course, and yet again we can see why. If these political orientations of selfhood are in fact primal and precede political organization, rather than following from it, all we can expect is different presentations of these models in different eras of history. Perhaps it is the case that we’re in Postmodernity now, but no amount of deconstruction or Deleuze can weld together three fundamentally different dispositions about who we are in a way that gives over to mass movement politics, which are by definition deranged by excess.

We could go on and on, but particularly relevant to my own work is an explanation for why the generally Gnostic disposition arises so clearly in Leftism. Consider Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and her exploration of what it means to be woman. She was seeking self-definition, not yet detached from reality, a woman absent her comparison to man and absent her role in so-called “patriarchy.” Frau an sich, we might have it: the self-defined woman, in herself. Obviously, a Leftist with a Self-defined Self behind her eyes, had to invent self-defined woman. She wasn’t quite ready to leave the boundaries of reality, of sex, to be fair, but her ideological progeny got there in the end. Michel Foucault did the same with “the homosexual” in virtually the same way, giving birth to Queer Theory, though with much less concern for reality. In both cases the result was the same: “the personal is political,” and the political self became, well, political about it, at least on the Left.

So, Who Are We?

The fact is, and this is part of my essential thesis, none of these selves is totally right or totally wrong. All three, in fact, are aspects of a healthy human existence, and many people may wander through each them at different times for different reasons. Testing boundaries with self-definition can actually be liberating from tradition that has become sclerotic or relations that are toxic or stifling. Reality always matters. Tradition, family, and faith bring us home and integrate us into the places we actually are. Wisdom, it has been said, is knowing when to break the rules, but this implies knowing when not to and remembering that reality always bats last and is the thing you run into when you get it wrong. Maybe wisdom, then, lies in knowing when to prioritize which aspect of a more integrated selfhood.

So long as we stay sane, that is…

Pathologies of the Modern Selves

Understanding politics as an extension of selfhood this way also gives us insights into how each of these views of self can go pathological, which they will in the hands of people who are themselves pathological. Alongside the three political selves, we arrive at the three pathological political selves, each of which pursues its own brand of tyranny.

We should start by acknowledging a simple point from Jordan Peterson that is somehow far more controversial than it has any right to be. Crazy people—or, more fairly and less personally, psychopathologies—can exist anywhere in the political universe. Narcissism, particularly, is everywhere, and psychopathy gravitates to anything that gives it a path to power and domination.

In other words, Leftism, contrary to popular opinion, has no more monopoly on antisocial behavior than Conservatism has a monopoly on the so-called authoritarian personality. And what is psychopathology? Well, in at least one way of viewing it (which also simplifies drastically), it is a derangement of the self. It stands to reason, then, that there are derangements of our political selves that give rise to deranged and authoritarian politics, if my basic thesis is correct (that political disposition follows from the basic philosophy of the self).

Going too far into self-definition obviously becomes a problem. It is possible to lose connection with ourselves if we get a little too “just the facts.” Rigidity in tradition really is stifling. These pathologies slide down slopes toward new monstrous selves, the Mister Hydes to our usual Doctor Jekylls, and they produce political systems that are, in the Modern Era, the worst nightmares of human existence.

The Self-defined Self can see reality itself as an oppressive social construct and become what we could call Liberated Self. The overemphasis of a Discovered Self can lose everything numinous and aesthetic and become Positivistic Self. Our good Conservative can get so fixated and rigid in his Received Self that he transforms into Theodor Adorno’s monster projected unfairly from his Leftism onto all Conservatives, the Obeisant Self, with his authoritarian personality. (Notice this is the same mistake Deneen makes in the reverse direction.) All three selves, in other words, can go toxic. These are, of course, our Marxists, our Technocrats, and our Fascists, respectively, when they push for an equally toxic and sweeping program of political rule by their selves and no others.

Psychopathology and Tyranny

Tyranny in this light, then, could be characterized as the attempt by the pathological few to force everyone in society tightly into a single mode of political selfhood, and it is trimodal under the Modern Selves. In Marxism, it is the enlightened few who truly understand liberation who must rule over everyone else until they believe in it too. Then it will work this time. In Fascism, it is those who understand the necessity of what the Nazis called the Führerprinzip, a pyramidal top-down structure of absolute authority, to the right ordering of society and its progress into an ideal future. Under technocracy, the scientists—or the artificial intelligence—must rule all because it’s the only thing logical enough. All three are doomsday projects for the overwhelming majority in their societies.

My case, though, is that these modes of tyranny and evil proceed not from the ideologies that define them. Ideologies are just the carriers for mind viruses. These modes of tyranny extend from the views of selfhood that underlie them in both pathological and normal forms. Nazis and Fascists adopt the Führerprinzip because they regard themselves as the Obeisant Self with many Received Selves as sympathizers. Communists, Theosophists, New Agers, New Thought cultists, and so on, do what they do because they are Liberated Selves who believe it can only work when enough people believe in and enact the reality-defying and self-defining terms of “liberation.” Obviously, the Self-defined Selves out there aren’t hard to bring along for the ride. Finally, the technocrats are so positivistic because they are Positivistic Selves, and a damn-sight too many Liberals lose the plot and go along with “rigorous” methods of societal organization because they are Discovered Selves who believe the best methods on the largest scale will produce the best results for the largest number of people.

Riddles of History

Helpfully, this approach answers another riddle for us. Is Fascism “Right-wing” or “Left-wing,” and is the controversy the result merely of Communist propaganda and Liberal confusion? The approach tells us we’re asking the wrong question. The correct answer is that Fascism is pathological, but it is a pathological extension of the Conservative view of self—it’s the Right-wing that forgot what it means to be Right-wing at all in its madness for power and control. Schizophrenic, then, becomes an ideal word for it (NB: today’s young neo-Fascists project “schizophrenia” onto their ideological opponents at almost every turn). In its own descriptions of itself, Fascism is romantic, idealistic, and progressive (hence the eugenics), but it is “we” under complete obeisance who will collectively self-define all together as One under the identity we receive from Dear Leader and the Fascist State.

It also clarifies the fundamental, parallel, inverted paradox of Communism, which everyone simply understands to be Left-wing even though its primary obsession is recovering the State of Nature of Man. Marx himself characterized Communism as “a complete return of man to himself as a social, i.e., human, being” (pdf).

Whether it’s a problem of my nomenclature or a subtlety of necessity because “liberation” cannot and will not ever arrive, certainly not from reality and almost as certainly not from social norms, hierarchy, and history, there’s a progressive subtype nested between “Self-defined Self” and “Liberated Self,” the latter of which is just an idealized vision anyway. It is “(Socially) Constructed Self.” (The parallel midway points between sanity and psychopathy would be something like the Puritanical or maybe Nationalistic Self for the Conservatives and the Managerial or Administrative Self for the Liberals.) The paradox of “Liberation,” or as Frank Dikötter called it, it’s tragedy, is that the closest reality can provide is forcing everyone to pretend in whatever it’s supposed to constitute as hard and long as they can, on threat of unimaginable horror and pain if they don’t play along.

Communism, therefore, the ideal of the “Liberated Self,” is not only impossible but generates by necessity exactly the opposite condition. Rather than self-definition leading to liberation of any type, it leads to and absolute totalitarianism where every mind has to be transformed to believe what cannot be already is. Adopting a (Socially) Constructed Self ironically does not liberate anyone but instead makes every man a complete and total slave to what everyone else is willing to—or can be forced to—believe through paralogical and paramoral social constructions that uphold the fundamental idealism and pathology of the whole project as a basic condition for personhood. The “tragedy of liberation,” then, is that it is not only absolute tyranny but, in its complete break from reality, absolute collapse.

They’re the Same, Differently

Here, then, we come to understand the “horseshoe” as well in a deeper way. Both Communism and Fascism are in their pathology pointed at what we should call “Omega Man,” the Last Man, the one who exists only at the prophesied End of History. The Communist will liberate him to be his original State-of-Nature self (Alpha Man) who somehow retains all the benefits of his Fall and toil in the divided, Manichean world. The Fascist will discipline him to the optimal state of human development, which, ironically, the Communist will be forced to do as well. In both cases, everyone will be of one mind—we will all return to being One—and we will maximize human development and flourishing. The picture of the End of History and of the Last Man (not pathological “Liberal” Fukuyama’s, but Hegel’s) differs in the details, and the path differs in its mechanisms, but in abstract generality they’re the same. The real divide is in how much Hermeticism motivates the program.

Even more ironically, the undeniably progressive project of Fascism not only operates by regressive means, like we discussed, but will spiral into ever deeper regression in its relentless march forward (Avanti!). The Fascist Obeisant Self mind conceives of the failure of society as having deviated from the ideals of a more glorious past, which it has romanticized into Socrealist absurdity. Man isn’t to “self-define” in Fascism. He’s supposed to define himself according to the ridiculous romantic vision of who he used to be, according to the ridiculous Fascist imaginary. One might recognize this as self-definition by other means, but we’re presently discussing the spiral. The issue there is that you can’t return to what never existed, and so when Fascism eventually fails to deliver because it runs out of neighbors to loot and plunder or meets resistance, the only direction it can look is further backwards. The last point, wherein Man will optimize his future, the Fascist Omega Man, will be realizable only when he models himself off his original State of Nature again (Alpha Man re-enters the chat), yet again at a higher level of organization arrived and extended through the Total State under a fully integrated Führerprinzip. Where Communism is regression by progressive means, we find Fascism is progression by regressive means. Both seek the final form of Alpha-and-Omega Man (God Man, Homo Deus) by different organizational principles and with different views as to what that perfected state of Man is.

Pathology Points Toward Utopia

To simplify that discussion a bit, the Communist and the Fascist both believe that the project of History itself is for Man to reenter into his inheritance in the Kingdom of God, from which he has been wrongly alienated. Their visions of the Kingdom are different, however, and therefore the methods for achieving return to it are also different. Relevant here is that both of these visions extends from the senses of political self each holds taken to idealization through psychotic pathology.

The Communist views Heaven, which it calls Communism—a stateless, classless society where everything is in plenty, culture is high, and everyone is perfectly equal, liberated from toil and necessity—as a perfectly egalitarian place where everyone can be exactly as they want to be without restriction or further judgment. Heaven is one big happy family in which we are all One with each other and One with God in that We are God and realize it. Obviously, this is the universalized and idealized extension of the Self-defined Self through (Socially) Constructed Self into Liberated Self, positing a complete and universal liberation of all of mankind who know realizes who he really is: Liberated Self.

The Fascist, by contrast, views Heaven as not just highly ordered but perfectly ordered and hierarchical. It is also a land of milk and honey and absolute abundance, but this is because of its organizational principle, which is ultimately a deified Führerprinzip. God is on top, absolute Führer. The Hosts of Angels are beneath God in a perfect and inflexible hierarchy, and they are all totally obeisant to God without freedom of will, which was alone reserved for humans—that they might emulate angels, that art in Heaven. Man’s role is to receive this order and actualize it on Earth, as it is in Heaven. The Führer is the Lord of Hosts in Fascism, and plenty flows through the absolute imposition and reception of order. Heaven is when every man knows precisely who he is and lives up to it: Obeisant Self.

The Liberals aren’t off the hook here. The two tyrannical models are not the only tyrannical models. They too are obsessed with Omega Man, who arrives at the End of History, beyond what has been called the “Omega Point” by French Jesuit nutjob Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. They’re just going to construct it—it being Skynetpositivistically through the most ordered and logical society possible, run by advanced artificial intelligence as soon as may be. Its Heaven is Star Trek, but forgetting that Commanders Spock and Data don’t captain the Enterprise, nor does “Computer.” Captains James Tiberius Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard are emphatically not Positivistic Self, nor even strictly Discovered Self. They’re far more human than that, and even the advances of the twenty-fourth century cannot override the need for the integrated human being who understands there’s more to life than data and math. Theirs, too, is a tyrannical vision based on pathology pointing at utopia.

Conclusion

Humorously, for all his schizophrenia and malice, Aleksandr Dugin is almost right here, in roughly the same way Patrick Deneen is almost right, perhaps through a glass, darkly. In fact, he points us to two truths, both of which discredit him completely. First, the pathological, tyrannical modes given over to mass-movement politics, are all unified in their desire for a complete ordering of human existence through their favorite flavors of authority, and thus they can share, one to another. In fact, since they all point at the Omega Point, though by different means and with different conceptions of what it implies, they must converge as they trend further into tyranny and pathology. Thus, a “Fourth Political Theory” that tries to draw from each while inspiring mass movements and hoping to drag them back to sanity is merely a schizophrenic and inverted project whose underlying motivations and impossibility become visible this way.

Secondly, what Dugin inadvertently points to is, in fact, the need for an integrated and tolerant politics that understands the trimodal Self and its Modern expressions. It is pathology, and pathocracy, we must reject, and that cannot be found in any of the three dispositions alone but in an expression that admits some of each while gatekeeping their unhealthy and pathological modes.

Therefore, a politics of limited tolerance and understanding is revealed to be a resolving factor between the deep realities of politics as an extension of self and self-understanding—exactly the opposite of what Dugin demands. It is sanity in our politics, and a gatekeeping against all of these pathologies in governance, that we must cleave to. Within the boundaries of sanity, whatever Michel Foucault had to say about it, lies the path to peace and prosperity.

Postscript

Because this model is somewhat complex and confusing, I want to offer this simple set of very simple diagrams in each mode of self conception as they range from sane to insane.

Leftism: Self-defined Self → (Socially) Constructed Self → Liberated Self → Omega Man

Liberalism: Discovered Self → Managerial Self → Positivistic Self → Omega Man

Conservatism: Received Self → Puritan/Nationalist Self → Obeisant Self → Omega Man

I think the right construction for this model is therefore a triangle with the three healthy expressions along a line defining its bottom with the lines converging to “Omega Man” at the top.

The modes of social organization these models give would look like this:

Leftism: Socioeconomically liberal progressive → Socialism → Communism → Utopia

Liberalism: Classical liberalism → Managerial/Administrative State → Skynet/1984 → Utopia

Conservatism: Traditional society → Conformist/Repressive society → Fascism → Utopia

I present this model in the hopes of opening avenues for more and better discussion about the circumstances we find ourselves in, which are increasingly unpleasant, perhaps because of our short understanding and tendency toward tribalistic collapse of the bigger picture.

Additional Note About the Forgotten People

With the Liberal “Discovered” Self and its progression, there is actually a bifurcation with two distinct paths. I have left this unexplored partly because I haven’t worked out yet where to place it and partly because it unnecessarily complicates the above big-picture discussion. That second “Liberal” path is the Libertarian path.

There is, of course, sane and valuable Libertarianism, which generally defines itself through individualism, property rights, and, crucially, anti-statism, which it tends not to be shared by republicanist Liberals. There are also pathologies that follow generally the same pathways and that should be made identifiable and avoided. This late appendix discussion will allow me to bring out a feature of the pathological modes that I haven’t yet, partly because it tends to be done in the three cases above to be obscured by increasing collectivism, which Libertarians reject on principle, revealing the importance of the other pathologizing factor, which is Critical Theory, a particularly nasty invitation into Manichean dualism in social theory that people tend to fail to recognize for what it is.

It seems difficult to define the theory of selfhood that produces Libertarians. They’re ultimately realists, in the strict sense, who also want to define themselves. It isn’t fair to call them a Rebellious Self, though it is clear why one might want to. The closest I have arrived at is a spin from a sad and ugly side of internet culture that I don’t want to apply to them with its full connotative capacity: Selves Going Their Own Way. Individualist Self almost catches this vibe in a more generous way, but it’s also too generous, particularly in that it’s also by default unfair to the Liberals, who share this value with them but (only) slightly differently.

Libertarians, in distinction to the Conservatives, also tend to be anti-traditional and for a blend of the reasons given by Liberals and Leftists. They believe in reality and want to discover themselves but at the same time resent being told what to do and how to be in a way that exceeds that of mere Liberals. Their general anti-authoritarian and anti-statist stances prevent them from following pathologization track through increasing tyranny, though their vision does pathologize ultimately to utopia that can also be described as a progressive escape back to our State of Nature.

The progression for Libertarians away from sanity follows a road paved by their skepticism of government—not merely their government, but government at all—and like with Conservatives and Leftists, their deranging factor is critical theory. Liberals, by contrast, derange toward the Establishment as they become increasingly positivistic; Libertarians derange away from it on something they call “principle,” though “reflex” is a more accurate term. In general, Libertarians derange into the pathological as they become increasingly critical, in the sense of Critical Theory, of the very concept of government.

This means that the sane Libertarian Self Going Its Own Way eventually gives way to the Critical Government Theorist, who presents a genuinely Oppositional-Defiant Self, which simply won’t be told what to do by reflex. This image of self deranges further into a twist on the Liberated Self of the Leftist characterized by anarchocapitalism, which in practice is cartel-style anarchotyranny. It’s tempting to call this the Atomized Self except that all the ones who get this far paradoxically seem to think and act the same way, which is what happens when “don’t tread on me” goes wrong. Anarchist Self may do a better job of it.

Anarchocapitalism that works is their utopian state, at any rate, and the tendency toward it is what makes them increasingly irascible but not necessarily tyranical, like their counterparts in the other political dispositions tend to become. Libertarians don’t want to force you to become a certain way by fiat or appeal to the “common good” but by the negative manufacture of almost Hobbesian circumstance (substitute Mad-Maxxian here if you don’t know what Hobbesian means), which I hasten to point out was another Enlightenment-era hypothesis (read: obsession) about Man’s true self in his State of Nature. They aren’t asking you to like it. They’re actually asking you to hate anything that prevents it.

To draw out the highlight and close this appendix, it is the Critical Theory of government of all forms that leads them down this path. This is not the same as the criticism of government or especially of government actions. Critical Theory is quite different. What this disorganized portion of the discussion presents, then, is a bright light on the fact that Critical Theory is itself a deranging force that brings people into pathology that increasingly gets conflated with the sense of who they are and, more importantly, who they are not allowed to be (Gnostic pathology).

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Emergency and the Philosophy of Leftism
by James Lindsay

The philosophy of the Left has been overwhelmingly defined by Marxism since the 1840s, and most of us think of it as a fully ultra-progressive ideology. This philosophy gives rise to a certain condition among those who adopt it, a condition of emergency that Progress itself hasn’t already happened. Stelios Panagiotou, the staunch classical liberal at the mostly post-liberal British philosophy club called “Lotus Eaters,” has expressed the intrinsic crisis of Leftism this way:

The philosophy of the left, for the most part, seems to stem from a deep resentment of the past, which makes one view the present as a condition of emergency that requires the grandest possible oppression as a means for achieving a future utopia.

Panagiotou gets it right, but there’s a lot more to the story. The problem is that while Marxism is ultra-progressive in the sense discussed—that all progress no matter how fast is always too slow—it is also strangely and obviously regressive. In fact, it isn’t possible to understand Marxism, or the philosophy of the Left, without understanding that it is firstly deeply regressive, though in a dialectical way. Marxism is regressive by progressive means.

At bottom, the philosophy of the Left is ultimately obsessed with the human State of Nature and seeks to return to it, and it works very hard to preserve elements of yesteryear and the present, sort of. Communism as a system of societal organization describes a return to Eden on man’s own terms in open defiance of God. Going back to Eden is full regression, however, and the paradox of Marxism is that it anticipates accomplishing this full regression through relentlessly marching forward until the circle returns back to its beginning.

In a prosaic sense, think of their obsessions about cultural preservation with "indigenous" peoples, for example. What they are angry about in the Modern and Postmodern Eras is the development of Western Civilization, which they believe has stripped mankind of access to his State of Nature (thus, “alienation”). To the Marxist, Western Civilization and individuality, through the false doctrine of private property. have stripped mankind of what makes it human.

Marx was explicit about this. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), he explained that Communism represents a “compete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being.” His entire theory of alienation revolves around that idea—that mankind has a social (communistic) State of Nature that truly defines him as human. The tool of alienation is given as private property, which ultimately enables individuality (opposite his “social” nature) and which is defined through what lawyers call “the fundamental right to exclude” (cf. Woke “Inclusion” as a priority). Marxism is believing that one person being able to say to another “this is rightfully mine so you can’t have it” is the downfall of humanity’s humanity.

That angry focus and ressentiment against this alienation on principle is why they want to preserve other cultures in living time capsules and simultaneously tear down Western Civilization to and beyond its foundations. The time-capsules are actually preservation sites against the ravages of Western Civilization and potential leverage points for the tokenizing Soviet korenizatsiya program against the “great power” of Western Civilization—never let a crisis go to waste. Further, indigenous cultures (as they view them) and outsider cultures are ones that have been less contaminated by the evils of Western Civilization, which makes them noble because in certain ways they're closer to the State of Nature they idealize. For the Marxist, man’s State of Nature is genuinely and truly communistic, as in communal owning and sharing of all in relative plenty.

Marx particularly defined “history” itself as mankind leaving his State of Nature, which was primitive communism, and marching through various stages of civilization. Whether blurry or sharply defined, each of these stages is defined by its exploitative economic circumstances, all predicated on private property as the alienating force of Man from his communal true nature.

Marx was deeply religious in his Communism, and his Communism is fundamentally Manichean, so he believed this great evil must have some purpose that is eventually sublated to ultimately good. That purpose is to advance through “history” to gather civilization and then to aufgehoben (keep, abolish, and lift up) it in a mighty return to the human State of Nature (communist) on a higher level of development and expression that retains all of the gathered civilization of “history.” He was so obsessed with this alchemical, magical notion that he referred to this contradiction as “the riddle of history” (how do we return to State of Nature while keeping the benefits of history?) and said Communism is “the riddle of history, solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”

It is the processes of history, which is the process of man’s becoming, not its beginning (alpha) or end (omega) that worry the Leftist. Indeed, as Marx indicated via the “riddle of history” construction, they, the Communists, are both the Alpha and the Omega of mankind—Alpha Man as mankind in his State of Nature and Omega Man as the ultimate civilized man, both socialist but only one indudstrial and civilized.

This is none other than believing “history,” as the process of man’s becoming, is the process of his becoming God. As he famously wrote in his 1843/4 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right with a subtle nod to the Persian/Aryan Mithraic cults,

The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

The problem to the philosophy of Leftism is “history” itself. The various manifestations of “history” as it progresses—“history” being when private property and individuality dominate in one way or another—are just an ugly means to a glorious end in true Manichean fashion. That end is the telos of the Communist project: to dialectically synthesize and make concrete a world filled with Rousseau's romantic, self-absorbed nonsense called “savages made to live in cities.” That is, it is to live once again in the communistic human state of nature while selfishly retaining all the benefits of individualist hard work and success.

The emergency Panagiotou referenced for them is that “history” has this grand, transformative, Manichean telos but only Leftists understand it. This means that we are constantly delayed from our eschatological gratification in the Communist Kingdom of Mankind-as-its-own-God until we expose the contradictions between our current ways of living (in Western Civilization) and what our true nature is and could be if we just understood more and better. Everyone who doesn't understand and join in the project is the source of human suffering and alienation from our true Being. They’re also selfish, thus a manifestation and cruel beneficiary of the central evil of the human drama called “history” at its present stage (the “status quo”), which they desire to maintain because it’s relatively good for them, others be damned. They are also to be dealt with by Manichean means, as with all evils in Manichean cults.

This philosophy is therefore not exactly a deep resentment of the past. It’s a resentment that the deepest human past hasn’t returned in glory and established a new Jerusalem over the world. It’s a romantic resentment of history as civilization itself.

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