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 Skynet—positivistically 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).
