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Enlightenment Francis Parker Yockey

4th of July

“The alien-minded minority in control of the cinema, the radio, and the newspaper and magazine press has poured out a constant stream of propaganda with the intent of gaining complete spiritual power over the minds of young Americans.” (1939)

“The monstrosity called America can intervene in Europe, can frustrate it, can perhaps destroy it.” (ca. early 1950s)

“The Jewish-American entity is Jewish as respects its head, American as respects its body… [It] will not surrender, since the very existence of Jewry is at stake, and the whole United States and its population is there to secure the existence of Jewry.” (1960)

Francis Parker Yockey (1917-1960)
– probably killed at prison –

Lex-and-ConcordUpdate:

American Renaissance is completely clueless that Murka was the product of bad history (see AmRen’s entry: here)!

Murka’s triple helix—Christianity, capitalism and Enlightenment dogmas (“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”)—are larger factors of white decline than the Jewish problem, even when considered in isolation, as demonstrated in this site and elsewhere.

Categories
1st World War 2nd World War Civil war Enlightenment Francis Parker Yockey French Revolution Friedrich Nietzsche Hegel Jean-Jacques Rousseau Liberalism Philosophy of history Women

Liberalism, 3

Imperium Eagle

This piece has been moved
to a single entry: here.

Categories
Democracy Enlightenment Francis Parker Yockey Individualism Jean-Jacques Rousseau Liberalism Monarchy Philosophy of history Thomas Hobbes

Liberalism, 2

Imperium Eagle

This piece has been moved
to a single entry: here.

Categories
Democracy Enlightenment Francis Parker Yockey Individualism Liberalism Philosophy of history

Liberalism, 1

Imperium Eagle

This piece has been moved
to a single entry: here.

Categories
Egalitarianism Enlightenment

The Dark Enlightenment

Or:

Society is just as religious as ever it was

 

gerrit-dou-the-astronomer“The fundamental realization of the Dark Enlightenment is that all men are not created equal, not individual men, nor the various groups and categories of men, nor are women equal to men; that these beliefs and others like them are religious beliefs, that society is just as religious as ever it was, with an official state religion of progressivism, but this is a new religion, an evil religion…

The Dark Enlightenment does not propose that leftism went wrong four years ago, or ten years ago, but that it was fundamentally and terribly wrong a couple of centuries ago, and we have been heading to hell in a handbasket ever since at a rapidly increasing rate—that the enlightenment was dangerously optimistic about humans, human nature, and the state, that it is another good news religion, telling us what we wish to hear, but about this world instead of the next.”

Categories
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Enlightenment Individualism

Solzhenitsyn

In his 1978 Harvard Address Solzhenitsyn let academics know that the West and their America are, to put it succinctly, full of shit. More recently, the blogger Iranian for Aryans has gone further. He has pointed out that even pro-white advocates “are extreme individualists who don’t practice what they preach. Moreover, they are breathing the same cultural miasma as their ‘unenlightened’ coevals.”

Below, my abridgement of Solzhenitsyn’s address:

Solyenitsin

Harvard’s motto is “VERITAS.” Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us as soon as our concentration begins to flag, all the while leaving the illusion that we are continuing to pursue it. This is the source of much discord. Also, truth seldom is sweet; it is almost invariably bitter. A measure of truth is included in my speech today, but I offer it as a friend, not as an adversary.

How short a time ago, relatively, the small world of modern Europe was easily seizing colonies all over the globe, not only without anticipating any real resistance, but usually with contempt for any possible values in the conquered people’s approach to life. It all seemed an overwhelming success, with no geographic limits. Western society expanded in a triumph of human independence and power. And all of a sudden the twentieth century brought the clear realization of this society’s fragility.

We now see that the conquests proved to be short lived and precarious (and this, in turn, points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests). Relations with the former colonial world now have switched to the opposite extreme and the Western world often exhibits an excess of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns, will be sufficient for the West to clear this account.

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.

Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?

When the modern Western states were being formed, it was proclaimed as a principle that governments are meant to serve man and that man lives in order to be free and pursue happiness. (See, for example, the American Declaration of Independence.) Now at last during past decades technical and social progress has permitted the realization of such aspirations: the welfare state.

Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and in such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness, in the debased sense of the word which has come into being during those same decades.

The individual’s independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed; the majority of the people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about; it has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, preparing them for and summoning them toward physical bloom, happiness, and leisure, the possession of material goods, money, and leisure, toward an almost unlimited freedom in the choice of pleasures. So who should now renounce all this, why and for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good and particularly in the nebulous case when the security of one’s nation must be defended in an as yet distant land?

Even biology tells us that a high degree of habitual well-being is not advantageous to a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to take off its pernicious mask.

The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

On the other hand, destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom and to be counterbalanced, in theory, by the young people’s right not to look and not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

This tilt of freedom toward evil has come about gradually, but it evidently stems from a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which man—the master of the world—does not bear any evil within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be corrected. Yet strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still remains a great deal of crime; there even is considerably more of it than in the destitute and lawless Soviet society. (There is a multitude of prisoners in our camps who are termed criminals, but most of them never committed any crime; they merely tried to defend themselves against a lawless state by resorting to means outside the legal framework.)

The press can act the role of public opinion or miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters pertaining to the nation’s defense publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion into the privacy of well-known people according to the slogan “Everyone is entitled to know everything.” But this is a false slogan of a false era; far greater in value is the forfeited right of people not to know, not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life has no need for this excessive and burdening flow of information.

Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block dangerous herd development.

In America, I have received letters from highly intelligent persons—maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but the country cannot hear him because the media will not provide him with a forum. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to a blindness which is perilous in our dynamic era. An example is the self-deluding interpretation of the state of affairs in the contemporary world that functions as a sort of petrified armor around people’s minds, to such a degree that human voices from seventeen countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will be broken only by the inexorable crowbar of events…

But should I be asked, instead, whether I would propose the West, such as it is today, as a model to my country, I would frankly have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through deep suffering, people in our own country have now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just enumerated are extremely saddening.

A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human personality in the West while in the East it has become firmer and stronger. Six decades for our people and three decades for the people of Eastern Europe; during that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. The complex and deadly crush of life has produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting personalities than those generated by standardized Western well-being.

After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.

There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, a decline of the arts or a lack of great statesmen. Indeed, sometimes the warnings are quite explicit and concrete. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.

But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive. You can feel their pressure, yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?

How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present debility?

This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very foundation of thought in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was born in the Renaissance and has found political expression since the Age of Enlightenment. It became the basis for political and social doctrine and could be called rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the pro-claimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of all.

The turn introduced by the Renaissance was probably inevitable historically: the Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, having become an intolerable despotic repression of man’s physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. But then we recoiled from the spirit and embraced all that is material, excessively and incommensurately. The humanistic way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself our guide, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshiping man and his material needs.

Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims.

Subsequently, however, all such limitations were eroded everywhere in the West; a total emancipation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming ever more materialistic. The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistic selfishness of the Western approach to the world has reached its peak and the world has found itself in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century’s moral poverty, which no one could have imagined even as late as the nineteenth century.

As humanism in its development was becoming more and more materialistic, it also increasingly allowed concepts to be used first by socialism and then by communism, so that Karl Marx was able to say, in 1844, that “communism is naturalized humanism.”

This statement has proved to be not entirely unreasonable. One does not see the same stones in the foundations of an eroded humanism and of any type of socialism: boundless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility (which under Communist regimes attains the stage of antireligious dictatorship); concentration on social structures with an allegedly scientific approach. (This last is typical of both the Age of Enlightenment and of Marxism.) It is no accident that all of communism’s rhetorical vows revolve around Man (with a capital M) and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today’s West and today’s East? But such is the logic of materialistic development.

I am not examining the case of a disaster brought on by a world war and the changes which it would produce in society. But as long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we must lead an everyday life. Yet there is a disaster which is already very much with us. I am referring to the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness.

It has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects.

We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West. This is the essence of the crisis: the split in the world is less terrifying than the similarity of the disease afflicting its main sections.

Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities should be ruled by material expansion above all? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our integral spiritual life?

If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.

The ascension is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage. No one on earth has any other way left but—upward.

Categories
2nd World War Democracy Egalitarianism Enlightenment Free speech / association Indo-European heritage Kali Yuga Liberalism Michael O'Meara Tom Sunic Universalism

The new Babylon

babylon


Michael O’Meara, the first white nationalist author I ever read, has said that the United States, as the architect of the prevailing world system, is the source of all evil. But a humble book by Tomislav Sunić is even more focused on the subject. In fact, to me it is the key to understand the West’s darkest hour.

Here there are a few quotes:

“America is the least homogeneous country in the Western hemisphere… But there is one common feature which is characteristic for all Americans, regardless of their social and racial background or status; namely their rejection of their previous roots.”

Homo Americanus, pages 1-2


“The American species, Homo americanus, exists all over Europe now…

Following the Second World War, hundreds of European and American authors were removed from library shelves on the basis of their allegedly extremist, racist and unscientific character.”

Homo Americanus, pages 5, 7


Lawrence R. Brown, in his magnum opus The Might of the West… acknowledges that the Declaration was a form of political theology, compatible with the spirit of the time of Enlightenment, and therefore replete with platitudes and “self-evident” truths. The Preamble of the Declaration could very well fit into the Middle Ages.

Homo Americanus, page 17


“Not a single politician will ever admit that America is a theocratic system with a peculiar political theology.”

Homo Americanus, page 3


“Ethnic or racial discrimination, let alone charges of anti-Semitism, are viewed in postmodern Americanism as the ultimate intellectual sin… Certain dogmatic views, particularly those regarding the sacred Jewish question and inherent goodness of non-European races, are imposed by force and must be accepted by all…”

Homo Americanus, page 14


“However, there seems to be a contradiction in their [white racialists] analyses regarding the waning of the Euro-American world. While they bewail the passing of the white race, they fail to critically examine the economic foundations of Americanism, i.e. an ideology that is fully propitious for low wage non-European immigrant workers… Why should one worry about the passage of the great white race if that race has only been involved in endless economic transactions? This seems to be a feature of many white American racialists who stubbornly refuse to criticize capitalism…”

Homo Americanus, page 23


“It must be recalled that the passionate American desire to make the world safer for democracy also led, after World War II, to the creation of the Nuremberg Tribunal whose legal structures make up the judicial framework of the postmodern European Union, including the European Criminal Code… They opened up, long ago, a Pandora Box.”

Homo Americanus, page 60


Both the American and the Soviet experiments were founded on the same principles of egalitarianism… At the beginning of the third millennium, the immense egalitarian meta-narrative, encapsulated in Americanism, is very much alive… Both Homo sovieticus and Homo americanus herald the slogan that all men are created equal… All academic discussions about genetic or racial differences are quickly neutralized by the all-encompassing words such as “racism” or “hate speech.”

Homo Americanus, pages 55-56


Categories
Americanism Civil war Conservatism Egalitarianism Emigration / immigration Enlightenment Individualism Liberalism Thomas Hobbes

An overly traveled road to extinction

by Hajo Liaucius



Klan-sheet-music

As a distant observer of the American White Nationalist scene, I am struck by its utter irrelevancy in public discourse outside of being a fund-raising tool for anti-Occidental activists[1] and as a subject of lurid speculation. In part, this distressing situation is a product of the typical pathologies and corruption endemic to counter-culture groups but I am not inclined to cover the endless scandals that have in large part defined the White Nationalist scene during the last fifty years or so. While the character issue and other matters should be approached, the issue of what exactly American Occidental advocacy presently entails in terms of an ideological foundation is of paramount importance.

Currently paleoconservatism dominates what little racialist discourse occurs in the States. Given that the mainstream of racialist thought in the states since the reconstruction era has been remarkably consistent, it matters little if one refers to it as Americanism, racial populism or racial paleoconservatism in terms addressing its ideological validity. Before considering the present-day applicability of the paleocon doctrine I think a consideration of the golden era of modern American racialism is worthwhile simply because it provides an excellent case study of the consequences of the character issue alluded to earlier as well as the utility of a racially based paleoconservatism as a governing ideology.

The golden age of American racialism coincided with the birth of what is commonly referred to as the Second Klan Era, which was founded by the publisher of The Jeffersonian newspaper and U.S. senator Thomas Watson in 1915. Watson built the Klan into a nationwide organization with more than four million members (about 15 percent of the white male Protestant population of the country at the time) that was particularly powerful in the Midwest and Southern states. The influence attained by the Second Klan Era far exceeded the accomplishments of American racialism at any time since as they managed to gain control of state legislatures in Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon as well as electing a governor in Indiana and several Congressmen and Senators. Most impressive of all, they managed to heavily influence the Democratic Convention of 1924 and helped get a Klansman on the Supreme Court.

The combination of segregation, constitutionalism, opposition to Southern/Eastern European immigration, Protestant fundamentalism, isolationism and economic populism were all popular causes fully within the mainstream of public social and political thought at the time. Simply put, the Second Klan Era enjoyed a nearly ideal historical context in which to transform America into a society far more reflective of Occidental values. Yet they achieved little in terms of societal reform and lapsed into obscurity very quickly. The reason for this failure was largely a result of the limitations of the paleoconservative ideology they promoted, as will be shown.

The Second Klan Era was largely, with the notable exception of The Black Legion, committed to working within the confines of electoral politics for the purpose of advancing its public policy agenda. That agenda consisted of the preservation of the constitutional order of the day, maintaining the predominance of Europeans of Nordic, Western and Celtic origins in cultural and political terms; restoring Protestant fundamentalism to a place of preeminence, the maintenance of American neutrality, advancing prohibition and advancing the economic populist agenda of the time.

Needless to say, the reelection of Wilson in 1916 resulted in America’s subsequent entry into the First World War (as well as numerous imperialistic adventures in Central and South America during the 1920s), and the entry into the League of Nations ended American neutrality and weakened its sovereignty. On the domestic front Klan influence failed to slow the flood of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, the suffragette movement’s triumph, the decadence of the 1920s or the rise of the anti-Occidental mass media during the 1930s. In short, they failed to preserve the societal order that defined America at the turn of the century or protect the ethnic and religious interests they held dear despite being given an ideal opportunity to do so.

While the Klan was heavily involved in promoting prohibition and progressive economic policies popular during the first two decades of the 20th century, the passage of such measures happened because they were promoted by popular sentiment across major portions of the political spectrum (including Negroes, organized labor, fundamentalist Protestants and women) as well as the efforts of significant portions of the political establishment that were entirely unsympathetic to the Klan. As a result, it is very unrealistic to view the Second Klan Era as anything more than one of several significant factions promoting progressive reforms and prohibition.

The collapse of the Second Klan Era began in large measure as a result of Stephenson scandal of 1925. Under Stephenson’s guidance, Klan membership swelled to 300,000 in the State of Indiana and, in the 1924 elections, Klan-backed candidates won all but one of Indiana’s U.S Congressional seats as well as the Governor, Lieutenant Governor and the Secretary of State. Stephenson was the most charismatic leader the Klan ever had as he was a gifted orator and a popular leader throughout much of the country as well as the Grand Dragon of Indiana which was a major Klan stronghold at the time. Yet all he is remembered for now is the extremely brutal kidnapping, rape and subsequent suicide of Madge Oberholtzer. The resultant media coverage devastated the Klan and turned formerly cordial elite opinion against the organization resulting in a dramatic and rapid decline of its influence and popularity.

In 1936 the kidnapping and murder of Charles Poole and the subsequent crackdown on the Black Legion (a paramilitary offshoot of the Klan active in Illinois, Michigan and Ohio) sped the disintegration of what remained of the Klan forcing its sale in 1939 and it subsequently bankrupted because of tax avoidance in 1944, thereby ending the Second Klan Era and hastening the decline of racially-based paleoconservatism. The lesson provided by the Black Legion is that poorly planned, sporadic political violence can’t threaten state power but it does motivate repression and the political marginalization of would-be revolutionaries.

Any post-mortem analysis of the Second Klan Era naturally raises the matter of what would have happened had the rape and subsequent death of Oberholtzer been concealed, or conjecture about how history might have been different had Stephenson been able to control his depraved instincts. Such conjecture doesn’t seem fruitful given that sexual psychopaths tend to behave in ways that are incompatible with the rational life of self-sacrifice needed of anyone that aspires to revolutionary political leadership. In light of the savagery directed against Oberholtzer it appears obvious that his bestial nature couldn’t be controlled nor concealed indefinitely. His arrest for sexual assault in 1961 after spending decades in prison seems to confirm his unsuitability for life among Occidental people although other aspects of his conduct during the 1920s paint a very troubling portrait of the man as well as the organization that he led.

On a more fundamental level, the problem of the Second Klan Era was metapolitical in nature, which is to say that they ceded the parameters of discourse which predetermined the sorts of policies and tactics they adopted. Accepting the paleoconservative notion of Americans meant that the Second Klan Era accepted contemporary egalitarian notions about democracy while promoting a narrow form of racialism. Practically what this meant was that they hoped to restrict enfranchisement to the old Nordic/Western/Celtic racial base with no meaningful thought given as to how pragmatically exclude the already substantial Southern and Eastern European populations within the confines of universal suffrage, nor how the established party system could be dissuaded from catering to emerging demographics. Long-term Negro demographic trends in the South and Midwest made the Klan’s strategy of regional race-based enfranchisement unviable in the long term, which wasn’t surprising given the overwhelming financial, institutional and cultural strength of the establishment that dominated the rest of America.

Although an aristocratic remnant survived in the South as late as the 1930s, an adherence to democratic dogma and the economic/social populism of the period meant that the acceptance of the foundations of capitalism negated any consideration of natural hierarchies as a basis for establishing both rights and responsibilities, as well as a means of providing for greater social cohesion. The old Southern aristocracy provided a bulwark against Eastern financial interests in the antebellum and reconstruction eras, making such a choice tactically questionable and ideologically puzzling for an allegedly conservative movement based in the South. However, since no thought at all was given to syndicalism, guildism or corporatism, the Klan was left with populist prescriptions for state-based restraints upon the influence of capital which had proven to be a dead-end by the beginning of the 1930s.

While the Second Klan Era paid homage to the Confederacy, any serious discussion about secession simply didn’t exist within its circles at the time. Instead, lots of effort was spent praising constitutionalism resulting in the Klan seeing itself as the standard bearer of a contemporary Americanism rather than as a revolutionary secessionist movement. Unaddressed was the matter of how the constitution failed to stop the transformation of the country into a society dominated by North Eastern plutocrats or how a regional movement like the Klan could formulate a long term defensive strategy against a national leadership animated by a deep malevolence to all that the Klan stood for.

When one considers the obvious unsuitability of its foundations and practical experiences that should have been gleaned from what was then recent history, it is reasonable to presume that the Second Klan Era was content with being a regional force with no long-term strategy for remaining relevant. It appears instead that they hoped that somehow state-level autonomy could be maintained with current societal trends.

A consideration of contemporary written material clearly indicates that the Second Klan Era lacked any metapolitical foundation or coherent ideology but instead was a manifestation of incoherent but well-intended sentiments opposed to Occidental dispossession in the American South and Midwest. In a practical sense, the Second Klan Era was purely defensive and reactive and destined to fail even if Stephenson’s sexual psychopathy would have been concealed or repressed.

The ideology promoted by the Klan and like-minded groups since the Reconstruction Era is extremely similar to the ideology promoted by the mainstream of American racialist groups such as Stormfront, American Renaissance, Liberty Lobby, VDARE, the Council of Conservative Citizens, various Klan factions, the American Nationalist Union, the recently disbanded National Vanguard [2] and several other organizations as well.


American paleoconservatism

Given the failure of paleoconservatism to preserve Occidental interests in America within the nearly ideal historical context that presented itself in the Second Klan Era, honest men should question the suitability of the ideology within the current era even if most in the White Nationalist community refuse to do so, as has been the case for nearly ninety years.

obsolete constitution

As an adherent of the Revisionist Integralism/Organicism school, my critique of paleoconservatism is metapolitical in nature rather than drawn from a historicist perspective or bound by a narrowly conceived ideological preference.[3] As such, I would maintain that a foundational consideration of the paleoconservative disposition is needed.

Fundamentally, paleoconservatism should be about the preservation of that which makes a people or a nation-state unique. Yet within the American context that uniqueness has unfortunately come to mean classical liberalism, capitalism, constitutionalism and a less permissive form of Christianity.

The single greatest flaw with such an ideology is that the things it wishes to preserve are already dead. The constitutional republic of the founders so revered by the paleocons is like any other legal doctrine: it can’t help but die along with the societal conditions that gave rise to it.

It died when the states ceased to be sovereign entities able to withdraw from the union. The ordinal constructs that succeeded it are as alien to the vision of the 18th century liberals that created the constitution as the founders compared to the typical Obama voter or Howard Stern fan. When American paleocons speak of an American Order they incorrectly presume that a consistent legal and governing doctrine upon which public life is ordered has suffered degradations over time while still being salvageable and relevant by means that have never been meaningfully articulated. Such a view ignores the legal doctrines of the Confederated Republic era or simply presumes it to be a consistent, logical precursor to a perfected legal doctrine that began in 1789 and degraded to a major extent sometime after 1861 yet still represents an ideal that can be restored via the subverted institutions that have perverted America beyond recognition if some unspecified populist course of action is taken by a population wholly removed from the societal framework that gave birth to it.

In philosophical terms a major challenge to the notion of ordinal continuity so beloved of American paleocons and the angst about the decline of the republic is the reality that history has thus far given birth to six distinct American ordinal eras. With the exception of the First Federal Republic, the fundamental reordering of American life has involved a commixture of constitutional amendments and the practical nullification of constitutional rule via legislation, executive orders and the natural Dissipative effects inherent in liberalism.[4]

The paleoconservative notion of the American Order is premised upon an institutional and civic societal construct that hasn’t existed for several generations. Instead, it is more accurate to see American history defined by ordinal epochs characterized in terms of the degree to which Occidental folkways and mores within society had been dominating, are in decline, or nonexistent. Within the American context Permanence had always been undermined by the Degenerative aspects inherent in classical Liberalism. When Dissipationist forces became ascendant to such an extent that the order of the area became fundamentally changed, a new, more degenerate order with a new set of systemic contradictions comes into being giving birth to a new ordinal era.[5]

In the briefest of all possible terms these ordinal eras are:

1.- The Confederated Republic (1781-1788). This period was characterized by an extremely decentralized and weak confederation of effectively sovereign agrarian states whose cooperative association formed a republic defined by the radical liberalism of the late 18th century and an expansionist, racial supremacy led by Occidentals. This order was Generative in nature.

2.- The First Federalist Republic (1789-1861). This period was characterized by strong sub-national governments that voluntarily became part of a federated national state defined by a less radical form of liberalism and an expansionist racial supremacy led by Occidentals. Although agrarian economic interests dominated a large portion of the country, industrial elites had obtained substantial financial and political power during this era. This order was Generative in nature.

3.- The Second Federalist Republic (1861-1912). This period was characterized by sub-national governments with high degrees of autonomy involuntarily forced to remain part of a federated national state with significant centralization of power, typical of 19th century liberalism. For most of this period America was still defined in terms of an expansionist racial supremacy led by Occidentals although an ascendant Jewish minority held major influence in media, finance and government. This period was also characterized by experiments with imperialism and a decline of agrarian societies and a typically liberal consolidation of wealth. This order was characterized by a tension between Regenerative and Dissipationist forces with dominion of the former, but in decline.

4.- The Third Federalist Republic (1913-1954). This period was characterized by sub-national governments with significant but declining autonomy consistent with the progression of 20th century liberalism. America was for most of this ordinal era defined in terms of a preservationist racialism that had fully abandoned the Celtic/Nordic/Western core identity in favor of a pan-European ideal held together by propositional nationalism. Although still nominally led by Occidentals, an ascendant Jewish minority held a major (or arguably a dominant) position in media, finance and government. This period was also characterized by experiments with imperialism, the establishment of Chesterton’s Servile State, and the ascendancy of globalism. This order was characterized by a tension between Regenerative and Dissipationist forces with the latter ascendant.

5.- The First Post-Federal Republic (1954-2001). This period was characterized by sub-national governments with moderate and declining autonomy and centralization of power consistent with typical late 20th century liberalism. America was for most of this period defined in Cultural Bolshevik terms of racial nihilism, globalism and Chesterton’s Servile State. America’s ruling elite by this time was characterized by a mixture of racialist Asian, Mestizo and Negro factions as well as deracinated Occidentals subservient to Jewish power. This order principally represented Transience with Regenerative forces in steep decline.

6.- The Second Post-Federal Republic (2001 to the present). This period is characterized by sub-national governments without any meaningful degree of autonomy forced to remain part of a federated national state with a far greater centralization of power consistent with typical 21st century liberalism. The current American order is defined as an increasingly militant expression of Cultural Bolshevism which is manifested in terms of racial nihilism, familial collapse, globalism and an increasingly common form of authoritarianism created by the merger of finance and statist authority. America’s current ruling elites differ from that of the previous order in terms of the militancy used in the service of the destruction of America’s Occidental remnant and its growing insolvency. This order represents the triumph of Transience with Regenerative forces playing a negligible societal role.

The essence of the paleocon perspective on the constitution is that it can somehow resurrect a classically inspired form of liberalism while ignoring the reality that the foundational elements of Liberalism are naturally Dissipative. Instead of representing a force of Continuance the constitution has been reinterpreted and restructured to serve successive orders whose values are fully divorced from those created by those that founded their nation state.[6]

One endlessly hears commentary about the sacred glory of the constitution and debate among paleocons over its relevance in various contemporary controversies. Constitutionalists at best ignore and often celebrate that the constitution failed to protect Occidental children from literally being militarily forced to attend publicly funded indoctrination centers extolling the virtues of miscegenation while being physically abused by racial aliens.

In fact the constitution made of such travesties a celebrated basis of decades of legal doctrine. Although the constitution failed to prevent Occidentals in America from being dispossessed by an endless tidal wave of flotsam from the third world, it has granted the invaders legal equality with those that created a nation state. The constitution failed to prevent America from becoming a client-state of Israel just as it failed to prevent the rise of Bush’s Orwellian surveillance state.

The constitution has been powerless to stop the ascension of a multi-billion dollar industry based upon sexual debasement and an economic order in which tens of millions of Americans live the lives of serfs for global enterprises which buy legislators, presidents and judges. Although Constitutionalism has done absolutely nothing to prevent cultural Bolshevism dominating American life, it has given legal license to every manner of social malignancy one can imagine. And yet for more than one hundred and fifty years American paleocons cling to the fantasy that the very same legal/governmental doctrine that gutted the republic they love will somehow restore it back to the halcyon days of the 1950s, the early 1900s, the antebellum South, 1789 or whatever nostalgic fantasy they aspire to.

The reason that such a tragedy has come to pass is because such an outcome is a consequence of the individualistic nature of liberalism without which cultural Bolshevism simply would not have been possible.

What little remains of the paleocon movement is committed to racial egalitarianism and the notion that Occidental civilization can be perpetuated by races other than the one that created it. Mainstream paleocons believe that racial aliens can be assimilated to accept and even advance Occidental culture ignoring the realities of racial psychometrical differences and evolutionary psychology, and historical evidence to the contrary. In short, they embrace a major cause of Occidental decline (multi-racialism) and even uphold it as an example of enlightened Western values while bemoaning the societal disintegration it engenders.

Although racially conscious paleocons have been relegated to the margins of political and cultural discourse for several decades, they have continued to embrace classical liberalism because they fail to understand that the liberalism of the 18th century has cultural Bolshevism as its logical consequence.[7]

In part this stems from the egalitarianism and individualism expressed in the American constitution. America as a nation state can’t be understood to be an organic national entity in any meaningful sense of the term since it was not the product of the confluence of blood and soil and the folkways produced from such a dynamic. Rather, the old republics came about as an expression of the liberal idealism of the late 18th century and as such they exemplified a rejection of Occidental traditionalism with its emphasis upon communal responsibilities, privileges and hierarchy which are the foundational elements of Occidental social existence. The afore-mentioned confluence animates a society by defining its strengths and contradictions as well as determining what attempts are made to resolve said conflicts from the standpoint of furthering national uniqueness and survivability.

Liberalism is expressed economically as capitalism and socially as atomistic individualism.

Restorative forces are incompatible with capitalism because social interactions are determined largely by financial prowess and conformity to fleeting consumerist fads. Within such an environment, communing with ancestors and descendants becomes impossible when individuals can at best think in terms of family welfare and the occasional act of charity while typically they become defined by crass materialism or merely serfs living at the edge of subsistence.

The_worship_of_Mammon

The Worship of Mammon by Evelyn De Morgan (1909)

A notion often promoted in mainstream paleocon and White Nationalist circles is that modern day capitalism (often termed super-capitalism) is somehow substantially different than capitalism of whatever era they romanticize. Such a notion is absurd because it fails to recognize the antisocial nature inherent in capitalism.

Such destructiveness is demonstrated by the accumulation of financial power via usury which results in an extreme consolidation of wealth distorting so-called market forces, allowing oligopolies and/or monopolies to control markets and limit competition. In so doing they further consolidate their economic power by creating an economy in which purchasing decisions, competition and chances for individual enrichment suffer. Oligopolies and/or monopolies also subvert supposedly free markets and democratic institutions when they inevitably discover that legislation, and political parties and public office holders can be purchased as easily as any other commodity.
In effect, highly concentrated capital is able to nullify popular will via well-funded lobbying campaigns, dramatically manipulative electoral campaigns and molding public opinion to suit plutocratic interests. In practical terms the so-called private sector can be just as an effective oppressor as an omnipotent state although some would argue that the engineering of consent via a highly concentrated, corporate media creates a propasphere[8] that is far more capable of controlling dissent than any state could.

Paleocon economic thought is like mainstream libertarianism in that they both prefer to believe the flagrant lie that capital is not inevitably concentrated and/or that such concentration does not distort the market nor cause, social havoc.

Surveying the formally Occidental portions of the world makes it apparent that the political power of concentrated finance often cannot be overcome by regulatory regimes or tax policies consistent with the current liberal gestalt because the means by which such policies are crafted are owned by the very interests they seek to regulate. To the extent that various Western states have implemented social-democratic inspired controls over capital, the same dynamics of alienation remain in part because excessive statist regulation and taxes have simply shifted the power of capital to the state rather than to society at large. Statist regulation of capital is ineffective as transnational finance has far more power culturally and politically than any nation state can possibly muster within its own boarders. This unfortunate reality has been the case from the earliest days of the East India Trading company and remains so today.

Racially aware paleocons are cognizant of the reality that culture is a biologically based construct and that demographics determine the destiny of nations. Unfortunately they fail to realize that capitalism shapes demographics to suit the interests of those able to control capital.

When racial paleocons look upon the Antebellum South under the soft, uncritical glow of an unfocused nostalgic yearning for that which never was, they choose to ignore the enslavement of Europeans and the misery that was inflicted upon free White men forced to compete with slave labor. In the case of Rhodesian and South African segregation and the concentration of political power in White hands did not translate into economic security for working-class Occidentals who were forced to compete with far more abundant Negroid labor while paying higher taxes to support parallel social services for two separate races. Elsewhere in the Western World slave labor came to be supplanted by an endless supply of low-cost alien labor when it became technologically and politically possible to do so during the second half of the 20th century.

If by some miracle the racial paleocons of the likes of American Renaissance take power tomorrow, bringing back segregation and ending the influx of alien peoples, the twin forces of third world fertility and capitalism’s need for ever cheaper labor will do away with whatever demographic gains the racial paleocons may achieve in short order. Because a nation’s demographics determine its destiny, any such a White Nationalist democracy will be faced with disenfranchised alien masses that will have common cause with the plutocrats whose economic logic demands a system highly similar to what the formerly Occidental world has now.

While mainstream and racial paleocons alike pay homage to Burke’s famous call for self-determination from Madras to Manchester, they ignore that the traditionalism of both will perish when left to so-called market forces. Since capitalism views individuals as any other commodity, why should one expect tradition to be anything more than a marketing tool, discarded when something else can be sold with a greater return on investment? The same market forces which imported slaves nearly two centuries ago for higher profits while taking bread from the mouths of White laborers exports Occidental jobs for higher profits today.

With rare exceptions, rebellion within the context of a consumerist society has nothing to do with upholding traditionalistic values. Instead, uniqueness is based upon purchasing items which convey a pseudo-rebellion likely to win approval from one’s peers or reaffirm the carnality and nihilism sanctioned by the media.

Occidentals must confront the discomforting reality that we are faced with a relentless marginalization and a looming extinction for the benefit of an elite that hold us in contempt, rather than as individual members of a transcendent order in which commonality of purpose extends beyond material advancement and fashionableness. When a societal consensus is based upon ever fluxuating fads and the need to produce wealth for others with ever greater efficiency. Promiscuity, homosexualism, substance abuse, familial disintegration and delinquency will follow.[9]

Capitalism, and the individualism which gave birth to the classical liberalism of yore, and the liberty so cherished by those that claim to be conservatives, have seen the legal doctrines and institutions they cherish transformed into mere tools for competing interest groups and ascendant racial entities seeking to impose themselves over groups of individuals lacking any sense of common identity and purpose. Such an outcome is to be expected as Occidental peoples have had any sense of organically derived sense of purpose torn from them by design. Occidentals of all nations have no sense of an inherent uniqueness and value extending across countless generations of the past and those yet to be born, and are doomed to extinction as long as such a mindset persists. Occidentals merely produce greater profits for a global plutocracy which uses those returns to fund our displacement with no thought of communal purpose beyond our grandchildren (if that).

Surveying the decaying remnants of the Occidental world after more than two centuries of Liberalism in action has, without exception, meant cultural devolution, the rise of the anti-culture and our demographic decline culminating in the apocalypse slowly unfolding upon us. Segregationist efforts and slavery have uniformly failed to preserve a liberalism meant to serve Occidental humanity because of the inerrant contradictions within liberalism necessitate either continued Devolution or Restorative revolution. Realizing the uniformity of the Dissipative effects of liberalism upon Occidental societies, the only sensible conclusion one can reach is that liberalism cannot be fine-tuned or reformed into a Restorative force. We will not vote our way out of Annihilation and our tormentors won’t simply collapse, allowing a return to some halcyon era that never was. A viable attempt at a Restorative revolution has never been based upon liberalism because liberalism as an ideal intrinsically serves Transience.

Given that mainstream as well as racial paleocons lack the fortitude to realize the corrosive effects of capitalism and atomistic individualism upon what remains of the liberal democratic order, they cannot help but bemoan the demise of our traditions—while hoping that institutions controlled by racial aliens and deracinated Occidentals will once again serve the vision of the liberals of the late 18th century. A return to the liberalism of ages past presumes an electoral awakening of masses of lemmings motivated by gut and groin. Since history and current experience proves otherwise the continued paleocon adherence to such a fantasy demonstrates a Fourierian contempt for reality every bit as unreal as skull shapes being explained by Boasian anthropology.

A legal code is nothing more than a mechanism for articulating and balancing competing interests for the greater good of a society, as reflected within the confines of texts recognized as reflecting some transcendent truth. For a collection of texts to have such authority depends upon a nation being defined in terms of a people with a sense of common purpose, history and destiny. To pretend that such an authority can be instilled in a fractious collection of rival cultures bound by force and avarice (as is the case in the post-Occidental West) simply cannot hold up to even a mildly honest bout of cognizance.

The vast material disparities and attendant political/societal dispossession we suffer should be seen as an inevitable consequence of capital becoming ever more focused resulting in the amplification of the social and economic Hobbesian struggle of all against all. Given that paleocons have chosen to accept the foundational elements that have gutted our civilization and will continue to do so, it is sensible to conclude that constitutionalism has no chance of reviving Burke’s proud submission to the responsibilities of class and providence revealed in custom. Instead, recent generations have inherited the negation of those things, resulting in the end of common identity and purpose which has been replaced by the current anti-culture abhorred by all who reject the modern crapulence of liberalism.

What now is termed paleoconservatism is simply a sentimental attachment to the vestigial institutions of a largely mythical and deceased liberalism. Paleoconservatism is in practice nothing more than the collective delusion of viewing an apparition as a viable basis for restoring society to an idealized past.

Raspail is right when he sees us as Hermit Crabs inhabiting the bounty of an ancestry we neither build upon, preserve, appreciate nor recognize. Instead they identify with a romanticized concept of institutions and doctrines that once gave prosperity within a highly unique historical and demographic context which they refuse to understand. That such a context also conflated license for freedom making our current decrepitude inevitable is also ignored. Paleocons of all sorts as well as libertarians have done so partly out of ignorance and nostalgia, but also out of cowardice. The cowardice I speak of is that what they imagine to be prudence is nothing more than a hope—in opposition to reason that submission will ingratiate them to those that loath them and control the institutions that destroyed the ideals held dear so as to be co-opted by their tormentors. In the end all the paleocons of any description can hope for is the demented fantasy that, contrary to evidence and reason, revolutionary change can be avoided by merely fine tuning the legal code; withering the state, praying more fervently, or that assimilation will magically transform aliens into Occidentals as we fade as an anthropological curiosity.

Such a perspective is a biological and ideological distraction the Occidental world hasn’t been able to afford for several generations. A genuine conservatism, given the current demographic and institutional context, must be revolutionary in its rejection of the foundational assumptions of liberalism. Paleoconservativism and libertarianism never have and will never rescue a decadent, deracinated people from oblivion, nor even have made a credible attempt at doing so.

By contrast National Revolutionary doctrine has done so several times during the last century. Occidental man requires a revolutionary traditionalism totally divorced from liberalism. Anything else is merely an overly traveled road to the extinction of Occidental humanity.


__________________

Endnotes:

[1] The services provided by white nationalist groups in the U.S. seem to be to generate scary stories published by the ADL/OPP/SPLC etc., which get old Jewish ladies and paranoid urban hipsters to give money to those groups.

[2] National Vanguard was founded by William Pierce but it degenerated after read Pierce’s death. (Note of the Ed.)

[3] Like its Iberian/French/Italian predecessors, the Revisionist Integralism/Organicism school is principally concerned with the goal of societal unity as a means for the preservation and expansion of the nation which is understood as a product of the confluence between a homogenous folk and the land it inhabits. History is principally the record of how the national organism comes to define itself it in experiential terms and produce a communal entity reflective of providential will.

Both schools see the innate value of the individual realized within the context of a communion with ancestors, decedents and the living in which transcendent responsibilities to the values of Permanence shape collective and individual identity.

Like its predecessors, the school maintains that economic, political and spiritual matters can’t be seen as distinct from each other as the coherent expression of a nation is a prerequisite for survival in an anarchic world of rival nations and forces antithetical to all nations. Both perceive folkways as an expression of what is termed the associative/formative drive or verbunden Bildungstrieb of a nation and that state legitimacy is a product of how well it reflects and maintains a communion of ancestors, the living and descendants of a folk.

The Revisionist Integralism/Organicism differs from its predecessors in that it perceives human social existence primarily in terms of folk-specific conflicts between foundational elements that animate a society and how attempts to resolve such conflicts further national uniqueness and survivability. While historically Integralism often wasn’t explicitly concerned with the biologic foundation of national organicism, Revisionist Integralism/Organicism attributes the associative formative drive of a folk as well as the culture produced by it as unintelligible outside of a racial context.

Likewise, cultural and biologic decline is seen as inseparable tendencies although the mechanism that initiates the decline is seen as resulting from an interaction between the inherent contradictions with the application of folk’s verbunden Bildungstrieb and Mosca and Pareto’s understanding of elite degeneration. The practical resolution of the contradictions mentioned above usually involves blended elements of corporative, syndicalist, guildist and distributivist prescriptions within an explicit biologic and revolutionary conservative context broadly compatible with the formulations of the original Integralist movements.

[4] The concept of Dissipationism is an aspect of a broader metapolitical weltanschauung known as Integralism or Organicism and its successor movement, Revisionist Integralism/Organicism. Dissipationism is a force that is manifested as a range of social movements animated by a utilitarian reason that serves the ascendance of the Transience ideal. In practical terms Dissipationism is appositional to Burkian notions of prejudice, prudence and civilization as a consequence of biologic uniqueness formed by the confluence of genetics and geography which has historical progression and culture as it’s byproduct.

Examples of expressions of Dissipationism include feminism, globalism, egalitarianism, anti-racism, organized expressions of libertine lifestyles, liberalism and trans-humanism. Transience as an ideal is effected when social relations have wholly, or nearly so, dispensed with any sense of communion between the descendants and ancestors of the living in favor of social propositions that are not resultant from anything uniquely attributable to a genetically distinct folk.

[5] The concept of systemic contradictions within the Revisionist Integralist/Organic school posits that all political doctrines and the societal constructs that create them have inherent contradictions that are an expression of the folkish character that produced them. These contradictions consequently give rise to alienation within individuals, a class or society at large which lessens societal cohesion giving rise to Dissipative forces.

[6] The diametrical ideal to Transience is Permanence which when effected entails the ordering of social relations resulting from the confluence of genetics and geography which define history so as to provide a continuity of uniqueness and purpose to a genetically distinct folk expressed in terms of an organic state and society. Forces that are Generative are in effect when the ideal of Permanence is in ascendance or dominates social discourse. When the Transience ideal is in ascendance or dominates social discourse the oppositional forces are said to be Regenerative.

[7] Within the context of Revisionist Integralist/Organicist thought America’s radical liberalism of the Confederated and the First Republican orders owe their regenerative qualities only partly to the biologic qualities of the colonizers and the positive aspects of liberalism specific to a given era and place. The vitalism of the fist two republican eras is owed in equal measure to a combination of the Paleolithic condition of the American aboriginal folk dispossessed by Occidental colonizers, the geographic isolation and natural resources of the New World and the limited technological options then available to capital acting upon its naturally Dissipative tendencies.

[8] Propasphere: A sphere of propaganda. (Note of the Ed.)

[9] Alienation within the Revisionist Integralist/Organicist context refers not to the Marxist use of the term but rather to a process by which individuals, social groups or entire societies become disassociated from the values of Permanence.

Alienation is a product of the anti-culture in which societies and the constituents that comprise them cease to maintain a communion with the land and as an integral component of current, past and coming generations with a common purpose and identity. The forming of identity on the basis of shared banalities in the form of propasphere generated sports or media consumption present the most obvious and ubiquitous manifestations of alienation although in some instances thematic strains within such unwholesome diversions can be harnessed into efforts that have some utility to the Restorative cause.

Categories
Conservatism Egalitarianism Enlightenment Individualism Liberalism

Liaucius’ metapolitical essay (2)

Moved into a single entry:

https://westsdarkesthour.com/2013/08/10/liaucius-metapolitical-essay-3/

Categories
Aristotle Enlightenment Philosophy Plato Science

On Francis Bacon

Or:

Time to kick the philosophers in the balls


For Francis Bacon (1561-1626) the metaphysicians were like spiders that constructed their webs with a substance segregated from their insides, resulting in that their conclusions kept little if any connection to empirical reality. Here there are some chosen excerpts from Will Durant’s chapter on Bacon in his splendid book, The Story of Philosophy. Pay attention how Bacon differs from Buddha-like opinions on human desires:

Pourbus_Francis_Bacon


At the age of twelve Bacon was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge. He stayed there three years, and left it with a strong dislike of its texts and methods, a confirmed hostility to the cult of Aristotle, and a resolve to set philosophy into a more fertile path, to turn it from scholastic disputation to the illumination and increase of human good…

Nothing could be so injurious to health as the Stoic repression of desire; what is the use of prolonging a life which apathy had turned into premature death? And besides, it is an impossible philosophy; for instinct will out…

He does not admire the merely contemplative life; like Goethe he scorns knowledge that does not lead to action: “men ought to know that in the theatre of human life it is only for Gods and angels to be spectators”…

All through the years of his rise and exaltation he brooded over the restoration or reconstruction of philosophy, Meditor Instaurationem philosophiae. It was a magnificent enterprise, and—except for Aristotle—without precedent in the history of thought. It would differ from every other philosophy in aiming at practice rather than at theory, at specific concrete goods rather than at speculative symmetry… Here, for the first time, are the voice and tone of modern science.

Just as the pursuit of knowledge becomes scholasticism when divorced from the actual needs of men and life, so the pursuit of politics becomes a destructive bedlam when divorced from science and philosophy…

Philosophy has been barren so long, says Bacon, because she needed a new method to make her fertile. The great mistake of the Greek philosophy was that they spent so much time in theory, so little in observation. The predecessors of Socrates were in this matter sounder than his followers; Democritus, in particular, had a nose for facts, rather than an eye for the clouds. No wonder that philosophy has advanced so little since Aristotle’s day; it has been using Aristotle’s methods. Now, after two thousand years of logic-chopping with the machinery invented by Aristotle, philosophy has fallen so low that none will do her reverence. All these medieval theories, theorems and disputations must be cast out and forgotten…

Philosophers deal out infinites with the careless assurance of grammarians handling infinitives. The world as Plato describes it is merely a world constructed by Plato, and pictures Plato rather than the world…

Knowledge that does not generate achievement is a pale and bloodless thing, unworthy of mankind. We strive to learn the forms of things not for the sake of the forms but because by knowing the forms, the laws, we may remake things in the image of our desire. So we study mathematics in order to reckon quantities and build bridges…

And when the great minds of the French Enlightenment undertook that masterpiece of intellectual enterprise, the Encyclopédie, they dedicated it to Francis Bacon.