Social Matter

Language transcends rationality. There is little logic to the human condition, yet plenty of emotion, errors, and discord. So we have language, a malleable band of symbols we manipulate to survive.

Our lexicon bears the record of countless conquests and revolutions beginning in primeval obscurity when the Indo-European culture advanced West. Human events are embedded in our words like chunks of sediment in fossilized rock. Little fragments of the eccentric kings, strident Norsemen, Roman slang, and Muslim invaders all echo out of the continuously arguing mouths of English speakers.

Both Runes and Latin were mystical technologies. The spell of language is to distort or magnify, annihilate or protect, despair or inspire. Most importantly: to create. Even to destroy, you have to create the implement with which you destroy. If the enemy has a stronger alternative, then the new weapon is no good.

The advancement of new ideological arguments is comparable to smelting a new alloy or forming a structure. Rational argument is not sufficient to “win” any intellectual conflict. You must design passionate elaborations, ornamentation, and intimidating gargoyles warning deserters. You appropriate. You have to govern a body of language.

As the source of all truth-telling and all lying propaganda, language assembles macro-political contests from the top down. The basis of every conflict is the realm of communications.

Arguments create structures. A line of questioning can take the shape of a winding labyrinth. When you have a three-dimensional philosophy, a living system, you have mobile parts, supporting arguments, the mechanisms to retain or convert terms, with gears manipulating the multiplicity of words. A philosophic system, although never perfect, can be honed into an engineering marvel. This is how I would describe the eugenic and positive-reinforcing qualities of traditionalism in its native environment. In today’s alien world, traditional structures are dysfunctional, incapable of keeping up with both technology and the hostile advance of liberal memetic innovation.

Ideological systems and technical systems interact constantly all around us. Like a power-generating reactor, ideologies can also meltdown via chain-reaction. Many consider Chernobyl to be a major contributing factor to the Soviet collapse, and a defunct Soviet culture having caused the meltdown.

The feedback system of liberalism, best symbolized by a zombie horde or an experimental virus unleashed in the atmosphere, has long been described as a contagion whose test-tube can be found in the Institute for Social Research.

The Frankfurt School has been a recent topic of discussion across the reactosphere and in traditionalist circles. As Samo Burja importantly wrote in Frankfurt School Not Cause of Progressivism:

The Frankfurt School was first a social science research institution and then a school of Neo-marxist social theory, it was an organized group of essentially Communist intellectuals who set out to systematically alter society by using social science both as a tool and also as a political weapon to attack and change social structures they understood as necessary for the existence of capitalism.

He then goes on to describe how the progressive movement did not originate there, which should be obvious.

What is often missed about the Frankfurt School, and what is so important to understand, are the specific achievements of that intellectual campaign, and what ingredients were mixed together to create the socially corrosive feedback loop they unleashed.

As we will see, these techniques became the choice weapons of cultural appropriation. With tools garnered from the advancing discipline of psychoanalysis, their studies in social science uncovered the choice methods of manipulation – via guilt, shame, the desire for individuality, fear of alienation, etc. – all reachable through subtle alterations of language. This was a linguistic effort to annex internal psychological processes. It advanced alongside consumer advertising, from the same origin in social science. The offensive, on its deepest metaphysical level, was against any “binary” or “dialectical” social structure. The polarity of sexuality, seen as vulnerable after Freud’s studies in female hysteria, was a subject. Ethnicity often composed a more important element of social order than income, so it became a subject. And religion, an obstacle to cultural relativism with its binary “sins” and “virtues” had to be destabilized. Stalin used bulldozers, Critical Theorists used the unwitting liberal clergy.

Like good communists, members of the Frankfurt School saw this as a stage in the historical development of dictatorship of the proletariat. However, the peculiarities of this school of thought bore almost no resemblance to economic collectivism. It’s worth mentioning that Marx never discussed any of this – nothing even close. His interest was economics. In many ways, Social Marxism is a kind of radical liberalism, comparable to efforts by French revolutionaries to remake the calendar or create an atheist religion. The Social Marxist obsession with destabilizing the nuclear family has since become far more important than “democratizing the means of production,” which is scarcely mentioned. The hybridization, then, seems roughly composed of revolutionary socialist tactics – moving a radical liberal agenda – with insight from psychosocial research – supported by access to academic and government power that was hungry for new policy content after the largest ideological war in history.

The Frankfurt school’s most monumental achievements were in the field of linguistics, which has a mechanical influence over internal psychology, and therefore cultural systems. Their course was almost entirely steered by chaotic world events leading up to the 1960s.

An ancient ideological conflict was well underway during the demotist genocides of WW2. The cultural cost of that war was as vast as its human tragedies. This was a bottleneck period in the evolution of social philosophy.

After the fall of the Third Reich, in which 9 million Germans died, fascism was culturally purged from history. This was far more ruthless than earlier purges of royalists in revolutionary France, Spain, England, and Russia. It was panoramic. As we all know, being called “Hitler” by modern governments/media is still equivalent to being marked for death. Anti-fascist, and anti-reactionary laws remain in effect across Europe.

Because much of National Socialism and European fascist intellectualism had been synthesized from archaic reactionary or traditionalist sources, these clades became part of the symbolic infrastructure of the vanquished Axis polity, even though their origins bore little resemblance to the regimes that had incorporated them. Much of Europe’s remaining occult paganism and esoteric Christianity also became a collateral victim of de-Nazification. Non-Soviet Europe was placed under the tutelage of liberal puppet regimes that vigorously prosecuted both Communist and Reactionary activity, whether it be nationalistic, or whatever.

Liberalism is “the third” form of totalitarianism.

Asiatic Communism had endured thus far, but the collectivist Soviet/Maoist regimes were seemingly incompatible with radical liberal individualism. This would have been a problem for the American left, if a hybridization wasn’t already underway on an academic level. This is where the “Social Marxist” synthesis originates.

As the 60s transformed into an extraordinary popular hysteria, the linguistics of the left climbed from academic acid-test-like babblings into active programs.

As a Post-Marxist liberal school, the Critical Theorists were not only confronted with a lack of existing words to describe the megalomaniacal program they envisioned, but they had to separate themselves from the language of earlier Communist discourse. The entire vocabulary of leftism was haunted by the Iron Curtain.

As a philosophic construction, Communism was becoming radioactive. This was due to the Maoist/Stalinist genocides, Korean/Vietnam Wars, and irreconcilable conflicts with radical individualism. Being structurally condemned, the words that had come to assemble its edifice all had to be abandoned, replaced, or sanitized for recycling. Again, this linguistic undertaking was the main effort of Social Marxism throughout the Cultural Revolution.

Two influential constituents of this project were Deconstructionism and Postmodern Art. The latter was covertly funded by the CIA for many years, acknowledged as a significant component of America’s Cold War intellectual arsenal.

Meanwhile, Jacques Derrida composed a tangent within postmodern philosophy that redefined the course of Western history. Phenomenology, Derrida’s alternative to the “rational bias” of Western philosophy, was an ideology of self-proclaimed “post-structural” goals. Derrida argued that there is no objective truth to be sought, and the only truth your personal feelings, – dialectics of right/wrong being learned “binaries” that did not really exist. He heralded the era of post-rational discourse.

If modernism was the ideological clash of rational arguments (including Marxist dialectical materialism) then postmodernism was the purge of any system subjugating radical individualism to structural logic.

For people unfamiliar with Deconstructionism, this is the deep structure of cultural relativism. History itself had to be deposed from discourse. This is the deepest philosophic axis of fanatical universalism: modern multiculturalism, gay activism, feminism, and atheism. It is a revolutionary moral system that made it forbidden to forbid. “How dare you criticize that Muslim with two wives who are his cousins! That’s xenophobic!” or “How dare you criticize that gay who has sex with a different man every night, that’s homophobic!” Everything. Is. Permitted.

All things being equal, humans are just another animal species or bio-chemical phenomenon foolishly “rationalizing” its own existence.

Derrida produced dozens of books, spawning an army of militantly liberal, postmodern academics.

Their issue with language was found not simply in the words, but in the way things are said, – the explicit structure of communication. This concept would sprout numerous (applied) post-structural policies Derrida likely never anticipated.

Their targets are inside the language, which is organically transmitted as the fundamental building blocks of culture. These organic processes had to be disrupted. They laid a linguistic siege on Western social tradition.

Here is a practical example:

Before the marital institution could be terminally deformed with “no-fault” divorce and “gay marriage,” the language of marriage itself had to be disfigured to realign its social architecture. One way this was done was the elimination of “Mrs.” and “Miss” in exchange for “Ms.” – an androgynizing, hermaphroditic term which became a celebrated achievement of 60s radical feminism. Ms. Magazine.

This was a linguistic innovation that spread rapidly, women adopting the practice without any thought about the impacts on culture or identity in any way. Men were being regularly punished for not acknowledging the newly invented unisexual masculinization of  “Mrs.” They’re alienated as “chauvinist” or “misogynist” or “reactionary.” A deconstructionist would argue that the “binary logocentrism” of wed and unwed females had been “unified,” therefore “absolving the metaphysical conflict.”

A more recent example includes so-called “micro-aggressions” – which refers, not to the content of what is said, but the subtleties of how something is expressed, including who is saying it. Race is a very troubling area of deconstructionism because it contains such vast historical, genetic, and geo-political content. Every culture has conflicts between male/female, man/wife, but only certain areas have to regularly contend with racial structures, which is unique on a localized hierarchical level.

“Affirmative action,” called “positive discrimination” in the UK, contains a clever bit of word-craft that would make a Critical Theorist proud. The practice seeks to destabilize ethnic relations on a local level because “race does not exist” because “binaries” are “Western inventions,” and does this work under linguistic camouflage, leaving people to condone something they do not fully comprehend, – but still feels good.  This epitomizes both phenomenological solipsism (“feels good” – must be good), and relativism (everything is the same in my head so we should force it to be the same in reality), while utilizing linguistic deconstruction to achieve those ends.

Today, postmodernism is an enforced legal system.

The situation is such that the postmodernists are the reactionaries and traditionalists are the revolutionaries, fighting to assert dialectical concepts over a public that has become alienated from their own culture, language, sexuality, ethnicity, – even biology!

A process for creating an adaptable, evolved traditionalism is already making headway. I don’t want to give away the secrets of neoreaction to any postmodernists who may be reading this, but even terms such as “human biological diversity” represent successful adaptations of older concepts. But the transformation must be far deeper.

George Lakoff, a liberal cultural theorist who had great influence on both Howard Dean and Obama, wrote a book called Don’t Think of an Elephant. Lakoff both describes the landscape of communications, and provides guidelines for what not to say. Lakoff finds that who is saying what matters more than what is said, and that people must superimpose meaning onto neutralized “unified” political statements. In reading his political theory, one gets the impression that a post-rational state of discourse is already fully normalized. Logical arguments may no longer even provide an alternative macro-philosophic route.

Where will the new answers lie? Can they found in the conflict with Islam, as Muslim territories seem impervious to liberal postmodernism? Will it only arrive with a multipolar world?  Will postmodern consumerism have to fully collapse, like Soviet communism? Will it be forced to undergo a metamorphosis into something more efficient, but equally ugly, as occurred with Chinese socialism? Or will a complete answer emerge sooner, as postliberalism gradually becomes radioactive?  Perhaps post-rational thought, in its march towards transcendence, will open the gates to new religious movements?

Marshall Mcluhan, the famed Canadian communications philosopher, believed we are entering an era of neo-tribal conflict, as new “cybernetic” media reconnects those with common cause to their digital campfires.

“WW3 will be an information guerrilla war in which there is no distinction between soldiers and civilians,” wrote McLuhan. This is an information war that, like all conflict, arises from deep metaphysical friction. It’s a conflict we cannot resolve without retaking control of our own language.