Social Matter

One of the critiques I have seen in the past few months comes from the concerned conservative or libertarian observer and goes something like this:

“Reactionaries are no different from liberals, because they support social engineering. They want to forcibly change how people think, while conservatives just want people to be free from big government.”

Well, the first thing to be said here is that the conservative is essentially jacking a libertarian argument for his own uses. Conservatism, as I have pointed out previously, is not the same thing as libertarianism and instead can be likened to liberalism’s shadow, preserving its advances by validating them as a baseline from which no person may venture any further to the right.

Imagine a road spanning leftward, with the liberal marching along it at a leisurely pace. The conservative is the dutiful construction worker a few feet behind him putting up cones and signs in his own wake saying, “Road ends here!” “No further right!”

But let’s be generous and say the conservative is genuinely concerned about human freedom from tyranny, and that what aspects of social conservatism he supports is mainly because they are conducive to keeping society free. Typically this is couched in arguments to the effect that a strong family-oriented culture reduces the need for welfare in a society, and thus prevents the government from growing in size and scope.

The problem here comes from the first assumption, namely that smaller government and more individual liberty is a prime utility that must be promoted at all costs–or at least emphasized far above alternative justifications for the family. Where did this concept come from, beyond stating that it is libertarianism’s gift to conservatism?

We come back to the philosopher John Locke, and to a nearly equal extent the earlier works of Thomas Hobbes. Both declared the past existence of something called the ‘state of nature’ from which we have evolved, though they disagreed on what this natural state actually looked like. According to Hobbes, the state of nature was bleak and hostile, virtually unlivable, and so man created ‘society’ in order to survive. According to Locke however, the state of nature was far less unlivable, but was insecure and so required ‘society’ in order to safeguard natural rights.

Both of these men viewed society as an unnatural form of contract, a necessary vice for which we sacrifice some of our liberty (the prime utility).

This is a profoundly ignorant view of human nature. Human society is no less natural than the beehive or the anthill. How we construct our homes, our agricultural facilities, our industries, and our seats of government, are no less natural than the honeycomb and the labyrinthine network of chambers within a termite mound. It’s not something we build to compensate for a crippling deficit, but rather something we do because we are human.

The natural state of the human being is in society. The stable family, the legal structure, and the church are not essential because we must begrudgingly accept them in order to live comfortably. Far from it. These are the things that make us live in the first place. We would cease to live truly human lives without such wondrous structures. It would raise eyebrows to find an ant that had gone ‘rogue’ and now foraged for itself as a traveling bachelor. This state is just as unnatural for us.

With this in mind, you might be wondering if the conservative or libertarian has any case at all. Perhaps the ‘big government’ he rails against is in fact the natural state? Not so. The theme of a functioning society with both its simple and intricate support mechanisms (the biggest of which being the governing authority) is not analogous to every facet thereof or a metastasized component inherent to.

Julius Evola describes the nation state that is in accordance with the World of Tradition as the ‘organic state,’ that is, the general kind of society that humans are naturally predisposed to create. So no, this doesn’t include the Environmental Protection Agency, or your nest of Cathedralite professors we now call a college. It includes the structures fundamental to our flourishing: the marketplace, the temple of divine worship, the seat of power, the modest home and hearth.

In seeking the revival of the organic state, new elites must necessarily be committed to altering the frame of mind of the populace, so that they accept and build this condition for human life. As it stands, at least in the West, they do not exhibit the mindset that would allow such a society to exist once more.

Does this make us social engineers?

If you take that term in its most general sense, then yes, but in this sense it even manages to encapsulate the most ardent libertarian. After all, he must want to prime society so that a libertarian environment can be sustained, even if he doesn’t often think of it in those sorts of terms.

If we narrow the definition, we can say that social engineering is defined as ‘activities pursuant to the aim of priming people for an existence in an imagined societal condition for which they currently are not accustomed, and may not be naturally accustomed.’

The kind of society the reactionary proposes is one that a human being, unmolested by our current and very deliberate liberal social engineering, would thrive in. The aim of this political project is not to lead man further out to sea and yet in a new direction to horizons unheard of, but rather to bring him back to the shores from which he waded. Our modes of society are the straight and narrow path from which man deviated during the ‘Enlightenment,’ and on which he had traveled for the most part unflinchingly up to that point.

To demonstrate this, we only have to take a cursory look at history. The traditional ideal emerged spontaneously across vast geographical distances, over untold centuries uninterrupted, in cultures completely isolated from each other. Modernity can make no such claim. It has its roots in Europe, and can be traced from point to point with stunning accuracy from there with the onset of globalization, like tracking how a viral infection spreads. Tradition is the natural state of human beings. Your nation shouldn’t need a Frenchman arriving on a wooden boat to tell you about it.

My works will always advocate the abandonment of this rather unhelpful paradigm created by liberals and conservatives, that is, the power of the state in tension with the power of the people. Politics should not be viewed in in these terms; they are only ancillary to a greater struggle: between good governance and bad governance, between stable society and entropic society, between tradition and modernity. That is a truer political dichotomy.

For their part, the modernist has had to struggle, fight, kill, lie, cheat, steal, and demolish in order to bring into the world with great labor pains this festering cultural virus that now serves as their ideology.

We never had to do any such thing for our world to be realized in the beginning. It came with us, it was a part of us, wherever we were on the globe, God given, and worthy of being defended to the last man.