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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 9 months

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By: Allan Stratton

Published: Jul 23, 2023

Toronto is one of the most tolerant, multicultural cities in the world. And yet, according to many of its progressive journalists, academics, and politicians, it’s actually a den of systemic racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. Unless you’re a straight white man, daily life is supposedly an exhausting and dangerous struggle. If you live in the United States, the UK, Australia, or elsewhere in Canada, I’m guessing you’ve been told similar things about your own society.

I’m a gay man for whom these reports bear no relationship to the real world. Certainly, hate-crime statistics show a sharp increase in physical and verbal abuse against specific demographics, including my own. And there are even rare incidents of murder and arson. But to suggest that minorities live under constant threat from a bigoted majority is apocalyptic nonsense. This is especially true of Canada, an especially open, diverse, and welcoming country. Western nations, more generally, are incontrovertibly the most tolerant on the planet.

My heretical view (among fellow progressives, at least) may be due to my “positionality” (this being a faddishly woke jargon term that most English speakers would call “perspective”). The Holocaust and the internment of Japanese North Americans ended a mere six years before I was born. The pass system that turned Canadian Indigenous reservations into open-air prison camps was still in force. The United States was segregated by Jim Crow and redlining. Cross burnings and lynchings went unpunished. Marital rape was legal. Spousal abuse and unequal pay were commonplace. Gay sex and cross-dressing were criminalized, with outed individuals losing their jobs and children. “Fag bashing” was treated as public entertainment.

In the relatively few decades since, western governments have implemented universal civil and human rights protections for racial and sexual minorities. The speed and depth of this transformation has been so remarkable that it seems inconceivable that we ever lived as we once did. Has any other culture critiqued its failings and set about reforming itself so quickly?

This is not to suggest that everything is sunshine and lollipops. Human nature has not been repealed. Police departments without effective civilian oversight, for instance, continue to invite corruption and abuse. Nonetheless, we now have the tools to press for accountability, such as human rights tribunals and whistleblower protections.

It’s also important to acknowledge that while the relative increase in reported hate crimes may seem shocking, that rise is based on a remarkably low baseline. For instance, 2021 saw a 65 per cent increase in incidents (over 50 per cent of these comprising verbal slurs) targeting Canada’s LGB and T communities. But that still represents just 423 cases in a country of 40-million people. That’s hardly a “tsunami of hate.” The number is infinitesimal compared to the 114,132 domestic assaults and 34,242 sexual assaults recorded against women.

One often hears that a reversion to the backward ways of the past is just around the corner. And it is true that abortion rights now hang in the balance in many conservative U.S. states. But the idea that any Western country (especially Canada) is on the cusp of a wholesale rejection of liberal principles is absurd. Women will never again need their husband’s signature to open a bank account. Racial segregation is unthinkable (except, ironically, in certain progressive institutions). Marriage equality for same-sex couples is constitutionally protected in North America, and enjoys a historic 70 per cent level of support in the United States.

So, unlike those on the left who came of age in the 90s and the decades that followed, I don’t see an intolerant society destroying civil rights and minority safety. Rather, what I am now witnessing is a period of progressive overreach, led by ideologues with no (apparent) historical memory or understanding of how our liberal social contract evolved. They have turned language inside out so as to render words such as “woman,” “safety,” and “genocide” essentially meaningless; pursued policies that lock one-time progressive allies in a zero-sum culture-war conflict; recast free speech as hate speech; confused wishes (and, in some cases, fantasies) with rights; and punished dissenters from their Borg-think with social exclusion, “re-education,” and firing.

This radical attempt to unilaterally impose a new social order based on race and gender essentialism has ignited a widespread public backlash, which has been weaponized by the far right, destroyed public goodwill, and done more damage to the progressive cause than anything its reactionary enemies have done in recent years.

The civil-rights movements of the last century won victories by liberal means based on liberal values. This included an insistence on free speech and civil liberties; and an appeal to the universal values of dignity and equality, which in turn underpin the case for protecting individual human rights and freedoms.

In part, this was because we liberals understood math. We needed white, straight, male legislators to support our causes, a project that could only be engaged through free and open debate. Empathy-based co-operation enabled us to create bridges among our diverse groups: The Gay Liberation Front raised money for the Black Panthers. In turn, its leader, Huey Newton, supported the gay liberation and women’s liberation movements. Meanwhile, Jewish groups applied their historical understanding of discrimination to help lead the fights for women’s rights (Betty Friedan), gay rights (Larry Kramer), and black voting rights, with some even giving their lives as Freedom Riders

By contrast, today’s illiberal left explicitly rejects the principles of free speech and universality. It ignores the lessons of past civil-rights successes, often denying that such successes even took place. After all, how can one insist on the dismantling (or “decolonization”) of a system that has shown itself capable of self-correction and continuous improvement? The only framework that validates the progressive narrative of ongoing oppression and white supremacy is one that ahistorically presents mainstream liberal values as a failure.

The switch in social-justice circles from liberal to authoritarian ends and means has at least three major causes. The first is structural: As (originally) liberal rights groups such as the ACLU achieved their objectives, they were required to rewrite their mission statements and pretend away their past successes — this being the only way to justify their ongoing existence.

Far from seeking to “burn it all down,” most of us within the original LGB and T movements simply wanted equality within existing social structures. We used liberal “respectability politics” to make our case, and (for the most part) folded our tents when we achieved our goal. The unwitting effect of this was to leave our old organizations to the radicals, who had long condemned us as sellouts to the patriarchy. Their goal is nothing less than the remaking — or “queering” — of society, a vaguely defined project infused with a deep suspicion of, or even hostility to, capitalism and the nuclear family. The liberal LGB and T wish to live and let live is now the authoritarian “live as we live.”

The second factor is generational change. Just as children separate from their parents in their passage to adulthood, so does each generation define itself in contradistinction to its immediate predecessor. Without personal memory of past struggles, present conditions are taken for granted. And so the battle against current injustices (real or otherwise) is seen as humanity’s defining and timeless struggle.

My generation mocked our parents’ conformity and stoic, suck-it-up ethos, forgetting that these traits had been necessary social adaptations during the Great Depression and World War II. Similarly, activists of this generation attack our commitment to free speech and integration within society, forgetting that these strategies were necessary for us to be heard during the Cold War, when outsiders were suspected as potential fifth columnists.

But perhaps the most significant factor has been the academic trend toward postmodernism, which instructs adherents that neither objective reality nor human nature exist in any certain, provable way. Reason, logic, and objective facts are rejected — or at least put in scare quotes — as are appeals to history and science. These are all held to be mere artifacts of language, which is itself presented as a reflection of existing power structures. And since these structures are presumed to systematically oppress the powerless, they must be deconstructed, dismantled, and decolonized, root and branch.

This kind of thinking isn’t just claptrap that flies in the face of day-to-day human experience. It also encourages a kind of intellectual nihilism that precludes amelioration of the injustices and power imbalances that supposedly concern many postmodern thinkers: After all, what could possibly replace our current power-based intellectual constructs except new power-based intellectual constructs?

Nonetheless, postmodern habits of mind (often flying under the banner of “critical” studies of one kind or another) have infected academic humanities and social science departments all over the west, much like the fungal parasite on The Last of Us. Its professorial hosts now work to dismantle their own institutions, attacking the “colonial” concepts of science and empiricism in favour of undefined and unfalsifiable “ways of knowing.” Meanwhile, their students have incubated its spores and spread them into the wider society, including corporate human-rights offices.

Progressives (rightly) have denounced Donald Trump and his supporters for their paranoid belief that the 2020 U.S. election was “stolen.” But these right-wing conspiracy theorists are not so different from campus leftists when it comes to their à la carte approach to accepting or rejecting reality according to passing ideological convenience

In particular, the idea that pronouns serve as magic spells that can turn a man into a (literal) women is no less ridiculous than anything Trump has ever said. The same goes for the mantra that while girls who cut themselves need therapy, girls seeking a double mastectomy require “affirmation.” Likewise: Racial segregation is a bigoted practice … except when it represents the very acme of progressive enlightenment. “Defund the police” doesn’t mean abolish the police, except when it means exactly that.

And then there’s Schrödinger’s Antifa, which presents these street thugs either as a very real force that rose up as a morally laudable reaction to fascism … or as something that exists only in Tucker Carlson’s fever dreams, depending on context.

But postmodernism and critical theory have done more than just damage our societies’ intellectual cohesion. Their denial of universal human nature eliminates empathy as a tool to bridge differences among groups, which are instead presented as warring sects prosecuting unbridgeable race (or gender) feuds. Since power is presented as the singular currency of the realm, the ability to shut the other side up is valued more than the ability to persuade it.

Gay men such as Andrew Sullivan and Andrew Doyle have been among the most prominent dissenters against wokeism — in part because we instinctively recognize the destructive nature of this power-fixated mindset. Our experience suggests that empathy and reason are far more important than threats and cultural power plays.

Dave Chappelle has said that the LGBT movement won public support more quickly than its black counterpart because of racism. But I believe the truth is different: Unlike racial and ethnic minorities, we exist in every demographic, every family, every ethnic category. When we gay men came out en masse during the 1980s AIDS pandemic, all communities realized that we were among its children, parents, and siblings. People have a harder time discriminating against their own than against outsiders.

Traditionally, the left has appealed to a sense of camaraderie and shared purpose. The resulting project of alliance-building has entailed negotiation among different groups, all of which may have different priorities and perspectives. But that alliance-building project becomes impossible when one sect or another demands that disagreement be treated as a form of thoughtcrime. Deplatforming doesn’t just hurt the target; it also hurts the movement, since the summary excommunication of dissidents means that adherents never need to acknowledge or address counterarguments, internal logical inconsistencies, or the off-putting nature of their message.

Indeed, ideologues such as Nikole Hannah-Jones claim that politics has a colour: Blacks who aren’t “politically black” are traitors who collaborate with “whiteness.” As seen through this lens, Asian-Americans who fight anti-Asian discrimination in the context of affirmative action are supposedly puppets of white supremacists, and the LGB Alliance, by standing up for same-sex attraction, is smeared as a transphobic hate group. (For asserting that biology is real, Stonewall UK even tried to destroy the career of one of the LGB Alliance’s founders, Allison Bailey, a lifelong social justice advocate who happens to be a black, working-class lesbian, and the child of immigrant parents. Thankfully, Stonewall did not prevail.)

Opponents of cancel culture often focus on its negative effects on conservatives. But it’s often woke organizations that end up imploding under its strains, typically due to internal battles over victimhood status and linguistic control. In recent years, many of these groups have been driven off the rails by single-issue gender activists who are willing to support misogyny and homophobia in the name of trans rights; or BLM activists willing to permit racism directed at “model minorities.” Even antisemites have been allowed to infiltrate left-wing political parties, the arts establishment, and anti-racist education initiatives. No wonder everyone involved with this movement is always complaining about how emotionally “exhausted” they are: They’re surrounded by toxic fellow travellers who gaslight them as right-stooges if they dare raise a complaint.

Another notable feature of militant social-justice movements is the sheer joylessness of their leaders and supporters, a condition that often seems to blur into a collectively embraced state of clinical depression and paranoia. This posture flows from their presupposition that they suffer endlessly due to the malignant primordial character of “whiteness” and heteronormativity (or, yet worse, cisheteronormativity). The language of individual agency and hope, which animates liberalism, is replaced with a soul-dead idiom by which the activist presents as a self-pitying victim of oppression, constantly at risk of suicidal ideation, erasure, and genocide.

Even privileged “allies” are encouraged to dwell on their whiteness, straightness, cisness, “settler” status, and other marks of intersectional Cain. By erasing the possibility of redemption, the movement alienates liberal allies who are seeking to build bridges with others en route to living successful and fulfilling lives in a way that escapes the politics of identity. The social-justice puritan, being primarily concerned with advancing his status within a cultish inward-seeking subculture that’s constantly inventing new grievances, on the other hand, finds such a goal unthinkable.

The use of words such as “harm” and “violence” to describe the microaggressions known to the rest of us as “daily life” is a particularly unattractive feature of social-justice culture. In the 1980s, gays and lesbians responded to daily discrimination with the chant, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” Today, the children and grandchildren of that generation, now enjoying full civil rights and perches within elites sectors of government, culture, and high society, instead tell us, “We’re here, we’re queer, and … we’re terrified to step outside.” As a gay man, it’s humiliating to hear this kind of maudlin rhetoric uttered in my name.

The broad public, long sympathetic and accommodating, has had it. People have no time for hysterical activists who whine, bully, and hector them about things they didn’t do and over which they have no control. This is particularly true when those same activists demand the elimination of women’s sex-based rights, the medical sterilization of children and teens, and the explicit exclusion of job applicants by race. The more that ordinary men and women came to learn about gay marriage, the more they accepted it. By contrast, the more that ordinary men and women come to learn about trans-activist demands and critical race theory, the more they’ve become repulsed.

Support for Black Lives Matter collapsed when the woke trivialized the arson and looting that accompanied the George Floyd protests. The public was completely onside with the left’s demand for police reform, but horrified by the extremist push to dismantle public security, and enraged that the left justified breaking pandemic restrictions for protests while insisting that grieving families be kept from their dying relatives in hospitals.

Likewise, Lia Thomas tanked support on gender radicalism. The public had long welcomed trans civil rights, sympathized with those suffering dysphoria, and accepted that even non-dysphoric trans-identified individuals should be able to live and present as they wished. But the sight of a strapping, butch male taking women’s prizes and opportunities was a breaststroke too far.

Facing resistance, the woke doubled down, insisting on automatic gender affirmation for everyone, including rapists and children. The result gifted social conservatives an issue of concern to majorities across the political spectrum. Now, progressives in the U.S. face a raft of bills that, among other things, resurrect false charges of Alphabet paedophilia. No wonder LGB groups are jettisoning the T: In the space of just a few years, trans activists have undone the good work that gay activists did over multiple generations.

The progressive movement must stand up to its extremists. We must restore the liberal social compact that won our civil and human rights. That means we should root our claims in areas of common ground, demanding fair treatment, but not the right to dictate what others think.

The most intense theatres of culture-war combat involve the education of children, an area in which liberal attitudes must be allowed to hold sway. Popular free speech principles should be applied to school libraries and curricula — which means opposing campaigns to root out books demonized by both the left and the right alike. In classrooms, an open exploration of history can provide a context for kids to discuss how injustices were overcome in the past and how they might be handled in the present. Students can be taught to brainstorm how to use their advantages to help the less fortunate, and how others in their situation have dealt with adversity. But they should never be taught that personal relationships and moral hierarchies are determined by the colour of one’s skin.

Likewise, boys and girls should be allowed to play and dress free of gender stereotypes, with a no-bullying policy strictly enforced. They should learn who they are by themselves, and be taught that they are more than the sum of their parts. They should not be labelled by ideological adults consumed by a mania for gender theory. In school, I skipped with the girls, had a lisp, and liked to play with china elves. That didn’t make me a girl, just as dressing butch and dreading the effects of a puberty doesn’t turn a lesbian into a boy. (I shudder to think what might have happened were I a child today.)

We should also return to the left’s traditional focus on class. Diversty, equity, and inclusion initiatives enrich the small group of well-educated profiteers who proselytize the DEI faith, but they’re actually worse than useless when it comes to workplaces, exacerbating intolerance among the hapless workers forced to submit to tedious seminars and questionnaires. Resources from the DEI industry’s rapidly metastasizing bureaucracies should be redirected to programs that materially help the poor: Unlike affirmative action programs, investments in deprived neighbourhoods disproportionately assist minorities without the creation of double-standards and racial left-behinds that serve to energize white nationalists. They also support social mobility and economic inclusion.

“I just want to say—you know—can we, can we all get along?” is how Rodney King put it in 1991. While many of us might read the underlying sentiment as self-evident, the militant social-justice left now treats it as a forbidden lie, since the entire movement is based on the conceit that peaceful and harmonious coexistence is impossible within a pluralistic liberal society that doesn’t forcibly “queer” itself, endlessly hector citizens about their bigotry, and segregate workers and students by skin colour.

I believe we can all get along. As a progressive, a gay man, a Canadian, and a liberal, I want no part of any movement — whatever it calls itself — that insists we can’t.

[ Mirror: https://archive.is/es3Q4 ]

To the extent that liberal principles are actually being rejected, it's coming from both the authoritarian reactionary right, and the authoritarian postmodern left.

#Allan Stratton #liberal ethics #liberal values #liberalism #illiberalism #antiliberalism #anti liberal #critical social justice #social justice #wokeism #cult of woke #wokeness as religion #woke #toxic wokeness #religion is a mental illness

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sublimeballooncoffee · 8 months

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Faxx

#antiwoke #antiliberalism #conservatism #conservatives #right wing #politicmemes

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lewbornmann · 2 years

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Democracy’s Decline

It seems to me…. “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” ~ Isaac Asimov[1]. Global freedom has continuously declined every…

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jornalcompanheiro · 1 year

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"Na queda-de-braço entre liberais e sociais-democratas o único vencedor é o fascismo"

J. Companheiro

#anarquismo #anarquista #fascismo #liberalismo #social democracia #jcompanheiro #queda de braço #antifascismo #antiliberal #antisociademocrata

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radhachip · 2 years

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(via Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder Capsule Mask by cosmicreative) Disclaimer: This artwork is only for fun, not intended to hurt someone’s ideology.

#findyourthing #redbubble #anti liberalism #antiliberal #antiliberalmovement

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philosophybits · 10 months

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Ceding the terrain of emotion-shaping to antiliberal forces gives them a huge advantage in the people’s hearts and risks making people think of liberal values as tepid and boring.

Martha Nussbaum, Political Emotions

#philosophy #quotes #Martha Nussbaum #Political Emotions #emotions #liberalism #politics

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jgmail · 3 months

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Entrevistas inéditas de Julius Evola a Othmar Spann

Traducción de Juan Gabriel Caro Rivera

Introducción al texto escrita por Maxim Medovarov

Publicamos estas dos entrevistas hechas por el tradicionalista italiano Julius Evola al importante filósofo y estadista austriaco Othmar Spann. Spann fue un pensador muy importante tanto para los emigrados rusos, debido a sus vínculos con eurasiáticos como Trubetskoi y Karsavin, como para el conservadurismo europeo de su tiempo. Fue muy apreciado en la Italia de Mussolini, en la cual Julius Evola era tildado por los periódicos oficiales del gobierno, especialmente en sus secciones culturales, de un “hereje” del fascismo. Por otro lado, las ideas de Spann eran conservadoras, católicas y feudales, siendo incompatibles en muchos puntos con el fascismo. Muchas de ellas fueron aplicadas por el Canciller austriaco Dollfuss para la formación de su “estado de clases”, el cual fue destruido en 1938 por los nazis. Spann sufrió la represión alemana y sobrevivió a las torturas que sufrió en el campo de concentración de Dachau.

La publicación de esta entrevista busca informar sobre los antecedentes históricos y la crítica de fuentes, siendo totalmente ajena a la propagación de ideologías prohibidas en Rusia. Tampoco busca reevaluar los crímenes cometidos por el régimen fascista italiano. El libro de la Filosofía de la Historia (2005, Universidad Estatal de San Petersburgo) de Othmar Spann es un clásico para entender la teoría y la metodología de la historia en nuestro país, además de que hay docenas de libros traducidos de Julius Evola al ruso. La conversación entre estos dos destacados pensadores nos permite contextualizar su importancia en la actual cultura intelectual rusa y ampliar los campos de investigación de la historia, la filosofía, la sociología, el Estado y el derecho en nuestro país. Ambos pensadores depositaron muchas de sus esperanzas en los regímenes políticos de la Italia y la Alemania de su época, pero estas ilusiones terminaron por desvanecerse pocos años después de que esta entrevista fue hecha. Por otro lado, es imposible exigirle a Spann el reconocimiento de la multiparidad, algo que sería sumamente ahistórico. En cualquier caso, el diálogo directo y abierto entre el campeón austriaco del catolicismo político y el neoplatónico italiano defensor del Imperio acerca de temas como las clases y las jerarquías, al igual que el Estado corporativo, es particularmente importante para la reflexión del pensamiento jurídico estatal de nuestros días, especialmente en un momento donde la teología política, la concepción hegeliana del Estado y la revisión del derecho internacional están a la orden del día.

Parte 1: El Régimen Fascista, 14 de junio de 1933

El nombre de Spann quizás ya es conocido por muchos de nuestros lectores. Puede decirse que es una figura destacada en la filosofía política, la sociología y la economía de la naciente nueva cultura alemana. Se caracteriza principalmente por el hecho de que su pensamiento no se agota en el plano empírico y particularista, sino que sus concepciones políticas poseen un sólido fundamento filosófico e incluso metafísico.

Si es considerado como un defensor de un Estado orgánico antiliberal y antidemocrático se debe a que tal ideal no es más que la aplicación y la deducción de una visión general del mundo y la vida que es igualmente orgánica, espiritual y anti-mecanicista. Libros como El verdadero Estado, La doctrina de la sociedad o La ciencia viva y la ciencia muerta son muy leídos en Alemania y Austria, hasta el punto de que no pocas veces son citados por importantes políticos nacional-socialistas o germano-nacionalistas. Spann ha escrito otras obras como La doctrina de las categorías o El proceso creador del Espíritu en los cuales aborda los temas más fundamentales de la especulación tradicionalista. Políticamente, busca superar tanto el individualismo (liberalismo, capitalismo) como el marxismo y cualquier forma de estatolatría niveladora mediante un concepto superior del Estado, diferenciado y jerárquico, fuertemente apoyado sobre la dignidad personal.

Podría clasificarse a Spann como una especie de prefascista, si es que este término puede ser aplicado a un extranjero, ya que, inmediatamente después de la guerra, inició una campaña en contra de las decadentes doctrinas liberales y sociales modernas, al igual que aboga por la creación de un supra-fascismo. Hace poco una revista italiana adoptó la misma línea de pensamiento hablando de una “revolución integral” y los squadristi, como Fanelli, que esperaban la revolución fascista – que él declaró como un fenómeno providencial no solo para Italia, sino para toda Europa – esperaban liquidar los residuos que aún persistían en la mentalidad fascista o antifascista de la vieja cultura y enseñanza académica liberal.

Nos reunimos con Spann en el Hotel Bristol y a continuación relatamos algunos puntos de nuestra cordial conversación en ese lugar.

Queriendo hablar de la reciente polémica entre Gentile y Orestano sobre la relación del Estado hegeliano y el Estado fascista, le preguntamos a Spann que pensaba, desde su punto de vista, de este problema:

“La principal objeción que se puede hacer al Estado hegeliano”, responde Spann, “es su excesivo centralismo. No respeta suficientemente lo que yo llamo el momento de la Ausgliederung, es decir, la diferenciación orgánica de los diversos elementos. En este sentido, la doctrina hegeliana, sobre todo si se toma de forma unilateral y superficial, puede dar lugar a un peligroso punto de inflexión. En Rusia existen quienes consideran que el Estado hegeliano no se contrapone en nada al Estado soviético salvo, naturalmente, en sus aspectos espirituales y supra-económicos que son vistos como superestructuras burguesas anticuadas”.

“Desde un punto de vista filosófico más técnico, pero que no debe pasarse por alto a la hora de precisar el verdadero significado de un Estado orgánico o de un Estado fascista, el lugar en el que, en el sistema general de Hegel, aparece el concepto mismo de Estado es importante, ya que este nace después de los ‘escalones’ anteriores como la ‘familia’ y la ‘sociedad’, que son formas que preceden al denominado ‘espíritu absoluto’. Ahora bien, el principio fundamental del Estado orgánico – y creo que esto también se aplica al Estado fascista – es que éste, como realidad espiritual y ética primera, precede y determina cada una de las formas particulares, prácticas, sociales y culturales en que se realiza y, finalmente, se reasume como su culminación orgánica. Así tenemos relaciones jerárquicas significativamente diferentes a la concepción hegeliana de las mismas y, sobre todo, una idea de su formación desde dentro, casi de un alma que organiza un cuerpo político, más que de una transición ‘dialéctica’”.

Le preguntamos a Spann cómo superar tal concepción del estatismo, dada esta prioridad configuradora atribuida al “espíritu” del Estado con respecto a todo individuo y a toda función social.

“La dificultad es fácil de superar”, responde Spann, “si distinguimos lo que usted llama con razón el espíritu del Estado del Estado como institución real. Me ayudaré de una imagen para hacerme entender y diré que la información que pasa por los sentidos es elegida y organizada por el intelecto para expresarse en diversas palabras y oraciones múltiples con las cuales se expresa y cuyo conjunto será reproducido luego de forma objetiva. Así es como debe pensar el Estado. El individualismo pretende que el significado puede surgir de un conjunto de sonidos incoherentes, es decir, de individuos libres, desprovistos de toda conexión íntima e indiferentes a cualquier principio trascendente. La unidad de una idea debe, por el contrario, preceder a cada uno de estos elementos, si es que no se quiere reducir las palabras del Estado a pura palabrería vacua. Pero esto no significa en absoluto despojar a cada uno de estos elementos de su propia personalidad. Al contrario, sólo en este caso cada uno de ellos puede tener su justo lugar, su función adecuada y libre, su sentido. En definitiva, la idea orgánica recoge la máxima clásica del suum cuique, que es la que más se ajusta a una realidad política diferenciada, personalizada y ordenada, ya que en ella ‘cada uno tiene lo suyo’ en el conjunto del sistema”.

“De este modo”, añade Spann, “[si] tuve la oportunidad de defender el principio corporativo incluso antes de que el fascismo lo afirmara en [Italia], también encuentro peligrosas aquellas tendencias ‘de izquierdas’ que quieren hacer de las corporaciones un preludio de la estatización o de una especie de socialismo de Estado. Para mí, la idea de corporación es un bálsamo curativo tanto en contra del [mito] liberal como del marxismo y debe entenderse en un sentido más bien descentralizador que centralizador. A pesar de estar estructurada jerárquicamente, [cada] corporación debe mantener su propia ‘vida’, correlativa a su propio ‘esprit de corps’ y a su propia tradición íntima como fundamento ético de la colaboración de sus distintos elementos, igual a como funcionaban los antiguos Gremios y Gildas”.

Le preguntamos a Spann si su concepción jerárquico-orgánica se podía aplicar igualmente al plano internacional y qué consecuencias se derivarían de ello:

“En el plano internacional, el pluralismo de las diversas naciones, incapaces de ver más allá de su propio interés inmediato y de su egoísmo”, dice, “es el equivalente exacto del individualismo en el derecho natural, que dentro de una misma nación vacía al Estado de toda su realidad propia y lo reduce todo a un acuerdo contingente entre los individuos según sus propios intereses más que el reconocimiento de un principio ético superior”.

“Desde mi punto de vista, las distintas naciones deberían actuar, en su interior, como las distintas corporaciones, manteniendo cada una su propia vida interior, pero incluidas todas ellas dentro de una realidad superior y única. Se trata de un principio internacional basado en un ideal orgánico que propone el doble principio de la autonomía material y la jerarquía espiritual. En definitiva, frente a la Sociedad de Naciones como institución fundada sobre las ideología democrático-liberal es preferible la organización supranacional basada sobre la idea romana y romano germánica del Reich, del Imperium, compuesta por una autoridad superior, supra-política y espiritual que es mucho más real que las unidades políticas individuales que, sin embargo, deben encontrar entre ellas las verdaderas condiciones para el entendimiento y la solidaridad creadora”.

Teniendo intenciones un tanto diabólicas le preguntamos a nuestro interlocutor cómo él resuelve el problema de la posible unidad universal y espiritual del Imperio con respecto a la Iglesia, que podría terminar desencadenando una antítesis parecida a la lucha medieval entre güelfos y gibelinos. Después le preguntamos por que medios y a través de cuales razas piensa que esta nueva idea del imperio universal podría imponerse en toda Europa.

El profesor Spann nos sonríe y responde: “En cuanto al primer punto, confieso que en principio no tendría objeciones de fondo contra la idea pagano-gibelina que usted defiende. Quiero decir que podría reconocer el derecho superior del emperador ante la Iglesia, de una autoridad a la vez imperial y pontificia, regia y sacerdotal, como la que existió en las antiguas civilizaciones precristianas y que trató de reafirmarse a través de los emperadores del Sacro Imperio Romano Germánico. Pero ¿a qué fe, a qué contenido religioso concreto podría remitirse ahora el hombre occidental, si no es al cristianismo, la única tradición espiritual que le queda?”

“En cuanto al segundo punto, también puedo estar de acuerdo en gran medida con ideas muy queridas por usted como lo el mito de las ‘dos Águilas’. Quiero decir que también pienso que las razas italiana y germánica parecen tener hoy, entre todas las demás, la mayor posibilidad de elevarse al nivel de una idea universal, y de preparar así, en su unión, el preámbulo para una Europa unificada no de forma ‘federalista’ e internacionalista, sino ‘orgánica’ e imperial”.

“Además”, concluye Spann, “la prueba más importante de ello se ha producido en los últimos días. Mussolini, como promotor y ejecutor del Pacto Cuatripartito, demostró que la Italia fascista sabe ver más allá de un horizonte estrecho y tiene un alma dispuesta a acoger esa misión ultra-nacional: el pueblo alemán no dudó en seguirle en su generosa iniciativa ‘europea’”.

Parte 2: El Régimen Fascista, 2 de febrero de 1936

El profesor Othmar Spann, de la Universidad de Viena, de cuyas opiniones sobre la actual situación europea y el problema de la Sociedad de Naciones queremos informar a nuestros seguidores, no necesita de ninguna presentación entre nuestros lectores. Es una de las eminencias intelectuales más importantes en campos como la sociología, la filosofía y la economía política en toda Europa. Su doctrina es un reflejo de su propia visión orgánica de la vida y el Estado que, indudablemente, guarda cierta relación con los valores profesados por el fascismo. Spann tuvo que defender sus ideas en el tormentoso y oscuro período de posguerra en donde nuestros lectores recordaran que defendió sus opiniones antimarxistas, antidemocráticas, orgánico-corporativistas y autoritarias del Estado sin miedo, en un momento donde las revueltas socialistas hacían estragos y los demás corrían perseguidos por una multitud de banderas rojas.

Es por eso que nos pareció interesante plantear al profesor Spann, en el curso de nuestras conversaciones cordiales, algunas preguntas sobre los graves problemas europeos puestos de manifiesto en las guerras italianas:

“Lo que hay que reconocer”, nos dice el profesor Spann, “es la vitalidad, el coraje y la determinación que demuestra la nueva Italia. Mientras que las naciones más ricas y poderosas están impregnadas por la psicosis del pacifismo y oscilan entre ficciones y compromisos de todo tipo, Italia, a pesar de no disponer de las mismas posibilidades, no dudó en salir al campo y demostró ser la primera nación capaz de llevar el problema revisionista del plano teórico al práctico mediante una acción que se propone proseguir hasta el final y de la que asume toda la responsabilidad”.

“Pero aún más importante es el hecho de que la acción italiana puso en cuestión indirectamente el sentido, el alcance y el derecho de existencia de la Sociedad de Naciones. Las dificultades contra las que Ginebra está luchando actualmente, a este respecto, son un signo indudable de un defecto fundamental en la organización corporativa de tal institución que necesita de una reforma profunda”.

¿En qué sentido cree que debe producirse dicha reforma?, le preguntamos. “Para mí no hay duda de que la Sociedad de Naciones tiene una verdadera razón de ser, en la medida en que cumple, en primer lugar, la tarea de ser una organización supraestatal europea”, responde Spann. “Una organización semejante ya existió en la antigüedad bajo los dos grandes símbolos espirituales del Imperio y de la Iglesia. Según la doctrina orgánico-universalista, que yo defiendo, ningún Estado es completamente soberano: sólo puede alcanzar una plenitud de vida si es parte orgánica de una unidad superior mucho más vasta, en la que, naturalmente, su propia naturaleza y su relativa autonomía – como en la imagen que antes describí de las funciones individuales al interior de un organismo superior – no se vean menoscabadas, sino confirmadas. Ahora bien, el intento de unificar Europa a través de la Sociedad de Naciones debe seguir considerándose un fracaso”.

“Existen dos causas muy visibles de ello. En primer lugar, el hecho de que la Sociedad de Naciones no incluya a todos los Estados europeos y sí, en cambio, a otros no europeos, entre los cuales se encuentran algunos de los más exóticos y espurios, resultado de su indiferentismo nivelador”.

“En segundo lugar, los presupuestos democráticos de su estructura. Soy de la opinión”, continúa Spann, “de que la Sociedad de Naciones repite a gran escala el mismo absurdo e inmoralismo que, dentro de un Estado se da con respecto al régimen parlamentario-democrático. Tras la apariencia de igualdad y de ‘mayoría’ democrática quienes realmente mandan son los más ricos y poderosos. Del mismo modo, tras el aparente legalismo igualitario de Ginebra, dominan los intereses de las naciones más ricas y materialmente más fuertes”.

Entonces, ¿en qué dirección debemos actuar?, preguntamos a nuestro interlocutor: “En primer lugar, deberíamos tener el valor de abordar de lleno el problema revisionista, no con vanas discusiones sino con soluciones prácticas, de acuerdo con las necesidades que Italia siempre ha hecho presentes: reconocer que sobre la base de la situación creada por los tratados de paz es imposible organizar Europa a largo plazo. En segundo lugar, el principio de solidaridad europea debe aplicarse esencialmente en la Sociedad de Naciones. Es absurdo hacer valer tanto el voto y el derecho de una gran potencia europea como el de un pueblo exótico o de naciones sin historia ni tradición. Por lo tanto, habría que llegar a una primera diferenciación en virtud de la cual cualquier nación no europea que quisiera permanecer en la Sociedad de Naciones no podría pretender poseer una igualdad incondicional con las primeras. En tercer lugar, es necesario poner fin a la ficción democrática y reconocer que toda verdadera organización necesita de la unidad de gestión, del Führerprinzip. Pero debido al estado actual de las cosas debemos contentarnos con una solución temporal que satisfaga las necesidades fundamentales del equilibrio. Es decir, pienso en un sistema europeo de Estados, que estaría guiado unánimemente por el grupo de las grandes Potencias. Por eso estoy convencido de que la idea del Pacto Cuatripartito de Mussolini constituyó el intento más feliz y constructivo de una reorganización de Europa y de una reforma estructural de la Sociedad de Naciones: por eso hay que lamentar que este intento no haya podido tener, en su tiempo, posibilidad de desarrollo y no haya sido comprendido en todo su significado”.

“Pero es muy posible que, en un futuro muy próximo, debido a la fuerza de los acontecimientos, tal idea sea retomada y colocada en el centro de una nueva fase de actividad de una Sociedad de Naciones que todavía quiere vivir y que está a la altura de las verdaderas tareas que debe resolver.”

Preguntamos al profesor que al principio recordaba con razón el ejemplo de las grandes unidades supranacionales medievales que tales unidades eran posibles sobre la base no tanto de intereses comunes como de un punto de referencia trascendente, de un símbolo absolutamente espiritual. Y también según su doctrina, sólo cuando el espíritu es la fuerza unificadora puede lograrse esa solidaridad orgánica en la que – en antítesis al internacionalismo – se concilian e integran entre sí la multiplicidad y la jerarquía, la autonomía particular y el derecho general. Si, de una forma u otra, este sigue siendo la condición de toda unidad europea, ¿cómo encontrar hoy tal punto de referencia, algo que pueda unificar el sistema europeo de Estados ‘desde arriba’, si no es a través de los intereses temporales más o menos contingentes de un grupo de grandes Potencias?

El profesor Spann sonríe y responde “Quiere usted llevarme a un campo minado. Estoy de acuerdo con las premisas y es inútil ocultar que quien se sitúa en un nivel superior debe ver el futuro de una forma bastante oscura. Pero tal como están hoy las cosas, ya sería un gran paso conseguir establecer, de forma decisiva, una unidad ‘europea’ superior y liquidar definitivamente todo residuo democrático y racionalista. Más allá de esto, pensar en una organización espiritual europea semejante a las antiguas resulta prematuro. Ello únicamente será posible cuando se den otros presupuestos espirituales y, esencialmente, un nuevo clima civilizacional. Todo lo que podemos hacer por ahora es dar a aquellos que viven en cada uno de los diferentes Estados y que luchan por una renovación espiritual de la mente, a pesar de lo difícil de sus circunstancias, logran permanecer unidos por una fuerza invisible que los mantiene firmes en su acción y que, poco a poco, prepararen, quizás en un mañana próximo, a las nuevas generaciones que darán nacimiento a una nueva comunidad cultural y espiritual europea”.

#historia #revolución conservadora #julius evola #othmar spann #política #tradicionalismo

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dopaminerjic · 1 year

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If the titanic happened in 2023, it would be WOMEN and NONBINARY only.. Lol!

#antiwoke#antiliberal#checkmateliberals#trueamericanpatriot#factsnotfeelings#realamericancomedy#sayitlikeitis

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 9 months

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By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Jul 26, 2023

As our culture war rumbles on, there are hordes of denialists at hand to reassure us that it either “doesn’t exist”, or that it is a mere “distraction”. Labour MP Ben Bradshaw warns us that we need “to resist the Tory culture war”, as though it had been concocted by the very party that has presided over its worst excesses. Writing in The Scotsman, Joyce McMillian claims that the SNP’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill is “being used as a culture-war distraction”. Times columnist Matthew Parris insists that the “Why-Oh-Why War with Woke” is “not a real culture war”, and if we “stop thinking about it, stop talking about it, it will finally go away”.

Wishful thinking only explains so much. A cynic might take the view that all this talk of “distraction” is a way to minimise the significance of the culture war, a tactic likely to appeal to those who support the creeping authoritarianism of our times. But perhaps the better explanation is that culture warriors have been so successful in misleading the public when it comes to their methods and objectives. The claim that the culture war is a “distraction” is, in other words, a distraction.

This is not to deny that some tabloid “woke-gone-mad” stories are frivolous. It is, of course, eminently sensible to shrug off bitter screeds about vegan sausage rolls or reports of young people tweeting about how old sitcoms are “problematic”. All conceivable opinions are available on social media if one searches long enough. Just as the devil can cite scripture for his purpose, so too a lazy tabloid columnist can quote “the Twitterati” to confect some juicy clickbait.

That said, these kinds of trivialities are often symptomatic of a much deeper cultural malaise. We may laugh at the university that appended a trigger warning to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, informing students that it contains scenes of “graphic fishing”, but the proliferation of such measures is an authentic concern. It points to an increasingly infantilising tendency in higher education, one that accepts the dubious premise that words can be a form of violence and that adults require protection from ugly ideas. Worse still, it is related to growing demands that certain forms of speech must be curtailed by the state. Only this month, a poll by Newsweek found that 44% of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 believe that “misgendering” should result in criminal prosecution.

Such developments are anything but a distraction. What has become known colloquially as the “woke” movement is rooted in the postmodernist belief that our understanding of reality is entirely constructed through language, and therefore censorship by the state, big tech or mob pressure is fully justified. In addition, this group maintains that society operates according to invisible power structures that perpetuate inequality, and that these can only be redressed through an obsessive focus on group identity and the implementation of present discrimination to resolve past discrimination. This is why the most accurate synonym for woke is “anti-liberal”.

When James Davison Hunter popularised the term “culture war” in his 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, he was describing tensions between religious and secular trends as well as alternative visions of the role of the family in society. He was using the term in its established sense, where any given “culture war” has clearly defined and oppositional goals (such as the Kulturkampf of the late-19th century, which saw the Catholic Church resisting the secular reforms of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck). Hunter’s application of the term mapped neatly onto accepted distinctions of Right versus Left in American politics, which is perhaps why the notion of a “culture war” is still so often interpreted through this lens.

But our present culture war is not so simple. The goals are certainly oppositional, but the terms are vaguely defined and often muddied further through obfuscation. Rather than a reflection of antipathies between Right and Left, today’s culture war is a continuation of the age-old conflict between liberty and authoritarianism. John Stuart Mill opened On Liberty (1859) with an account of the “struggle between Liberty and Authority”; the only difference today is that the authoritarian impulse has been repackaged as “progressive”. This would help explain why a YouGov poll last week found that 24% of Labour voters believe that banks ought to be allowed to remove customers for their political views.

The idea that defending liberal principles is a kind of “distraction” amounts to an elaborate form of whataboutism. Contemporary critics of Mill might well have argued that in writing On Liberty, he was allowing himself to be distracted from more pressing causes. Why wasn’t he writing about social reform, for instance, or the Franco-Austrian war? Similarly, while some commentators ask why we are discussing climate change during a cost-of-living crisis, an environmentalist might well ask why we are discussing the cost-of-living crisis in the midst of climate change. The extent to which we are being “distracted” is very much dependent on our individual priorities.

That is not to suggest that there are not important issues that are being neglected. Matthew Syed has observed the curious lack of interest in the possibility that we are facing self-annihilation due to our rapidly advancing technology. As he points out, in an age when the full sequence of the Spanish flu can be uploaded online and reconstructed in a laboratory, “how long before it is possible for a solitary fanatic to design and release a pathogen capable of killing millions, perhaps billions?” And why, Syed asks, aren’t world leaders devoting time and money to confront these existential threats?

Syed writes persuasively, and I certainly share his concerns. But I part company when it comes to his diagnosis of our culture war as “a form of Freudian displacement”, that “the woke and anti-woke need each other to engage in their piffling spats as a diversion from realities they both find too psychologically threatening to confront”. Syed is right that there are some who specialise in the trivial, but there are many more who are undertaking in earnest the crucial task of halting the ongoing erosion of our freedoms.

The liberal approach to redressing injustices, one now routinely dismissed as “anti-woke”, has a long and illustrious history. We might look to Mary Wollstonecraft, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King and many others who understood that freedom of speech and individual liberties were fundamental to human progress. Identity politics in its current form is directly opposed to the ideals of these great civil rights luminaries. While many of today’s culture warriors promote polarising narratives of distinct and incompatible group identities, the proponents of universal liberalism — as embodied in the movements for black emancipation, second-wave feminism and gay rights — have always advanced individual rights in the context of our shared humanity.

Far from being a distraction, then, our culture war still cuts to the heart of what kind of society we wish to inhabit. While it continues to be misapprehended as a conflict between Left and Right, those of us who are urging vigilance when it comes to the preservation of our freedoms will continue to be mistrusted and maligned. The likes of Matthew Parris are free to assert that ignoring the agents of authoritarianism will make them “go away”, but I am not aware of any historical precedents that support this view. When it comes to the culture war, apathy is tantamount to surrender.

#Andrew Doyle #culture war #anti liberal #antiliberalism #wokeism #cult of woke #wokeness as religion #woke #liberal ethics #liberalism #liberal values #freedom of speech #free speech #authoritarianism #woke authoritarianism #religion is a mental illness

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