A few topics have plagued me this past week: globalism, ecology, the United Nations, chaos, and conspiracy. It was only Monday that things clicked.
There is a little known concept in ecology and environmentalism called the ‘Olduvai Theory‘ which forwards the idea that industrialization is a temporary state fed by finite resources and reliant on transient conditions for its survival. It reaches an apex and then crashes as situations and means change. This theory has been used in a cosmological context to explain why perhaps, even if extraterrestrial life was possible, we have seen no sign of it, no contact, not a word, the implication being that a boom in technological development will implode long before the means are devised to initiate interstellar travel. The theory is old and worse for wear as the time frame has extended, but it has influenced the United Nations greatly, as like us, they have seen trouble on the horizon.
Granted, the trouble they see is largely environmental, namely of anthropogenic global warming, but also problems of the industrial age, like topsoil erosion and water acidification. This muddies up the progressive punchbowl, but not to worry.
We can still progress as a species, though the entire world will have to change in order to achieve it. And when I say the entire world, I mean the entire world. Iran, China, North Korea, the United States, Cape Verde, all of them will have to follow the same blueprint, and what better organization to spearhead and plan such an effort than the United Nations?
SDG is shorthand for ‘Sustainable Development Goals,’ something the UN has cooked up as its dogmatic doctrine for the imposition first of Modernity onto the world ensemble of countries, and then finally a totalitarian control system, which will sap the sovereignty of nations to determine their own affairs. Utopian goals like ending poverty and hunger are top of the list.
Tied into this, of course, is the scheming of organizations like the World Bank and the IMF, as well as social agendas that have activists drooling. Imagine, a body which could impose abortion and same-sex marriage on the whole world in the interest of equality. No more meddling Croat referendums or high Indian courts to deal with. But the real goal of this is to have in place a lockdown code on the entire planet, so that when the chickens come home to roost for the Modern World, those in the mold of Christine Lagarde retain power, even if it has to be imposed with a jackboot. If environmental, financial, or social disaster strikes, the world government will be there not to help necessarily, but to make sure there isn’t a disruption to the greater order of things. Everyone has to be wired in for the survival of ‘spaceship earth,’ whether they like it or not.
What conspiracy cranks get wrong is just how unsuccessful this movement has been, and the truth is that as diabolical as men like George Soros and the Bilderbergs are, they are swimming against a tide of human nature that is swelling to a cascade, and now threatens to drown the entire project.
If he accepts the probability of global calamity in the near future, then the committed Modernist must design a system to safeguard Modernity, and the only solution is totalitarianism, an Orwellian world where wind farms meet wealth redistribution (and for all those feeling the Bern, wealth redistribution here means from the global rich to the global poor, so bad luck). Remember when nationalism was a pillar of left-wing thought? They walked that off the plank pretty quickly, so don’t be surprised when what’s left of participatory democracy gets given the boot, as well. If it’s in the way of Progress, dump it. Again, I will emphasize that this project of theirs, while succeeding in some areas, is failing in the macro. The world doesn’t want to play ball and achieve those sustainable development goals, and why should it? Why should China stunt its own economy to ensure the welfare of Gabon? That isn’t how the world works. People are already predicting the failure of this effort, and it is barely out of the gate.
Something that has always puzzled me about Aleksandr Dugin’s work is his praise of chaos. Reactionaries like to see themselves as the vanguards of order and stability, but let us consider the Russian philosopher’s words:
“To make an appeal to the Chaos is the only way to save Logos. Logos needs a savior for itself, it couldn’t save itself, it needs something opposite to itself to be restored in the critical situation of Post-Modernity. We could not transcend the Post-Modernity. The latter can’t be overcome without appeal to something that has been prior to the reason of its decay. So we should resort to other philosophies than the Western one.”
The Cathedral is not chaos. We have identified in it institutions: an occult motivator, interconnected parts operating in often predictable fashion, even some level of warped hierarchy. The Cathedral is a type of order, but a negative type. We represent the positive type. Should global events become the chaos that Modernism has ultimately led us to via governmental mistakes and societal entropy, then its adherents have two options: give in to that chaos, or impose a merciless and draconian version of the negative order, the oft-mentioned ‘New World Order,’ where nations are governed under law, and then eventually are governed under government. In slow and deliberate fashion, we will be weaned off fossil fuels, just as we will be weaned off all sense of identity and humanity. For a price, we will have avoided that fate that might have befallen those interstellar travelers we never hear from.
And so, the choice now falls to us. Will it be Progressive totalitarianism, or chaos? Do we trust ourselves and our fate to Soros Inc. or to the black sea of anarchy, from which our people at least have a fighting chance of emerging alive?
If there is a mission of action for the Reactionary, it is to see the goals of the United Nations, the real seat of the Liberal intelligentsia now that nations themselves are passé, and to oppose them at every turn, hinder and sabotage them. Where they call for peace, pine for war. Where they demand unity, sow discord. Where they curry trust, disseminate doubt. They wish to extend this spectacle for another few hundred years, by reducing the entire world to an ethnic soup of fearful and zombified children, easy to placate with baubles while rumors abound of head-shrinking viruses and water shortages. This is their ‘sustainable development.’ No, I think the spectacle ends before the turn of the next century, a finale of noise and heat from which only one force worthy of leadership, the one nourished with timeless truths, will emerge.
René Guénon left us these words of wisdom in his essay ‘A Material Civilization‘:
“It is written in the Gospel: “All they that take the sword shall perish by the sword”; those who unloose the brute forces of matter will perish, crushed by those same forces, of which they are no longer masters when they rashly set them in motion, and which they cannot claim to hold back indefinitely once launched on their fatal course; forces of nature or forces of mass man, or both in combination, it makes little difference, because in either case it is the laws of matter which come into play and which will inexorably destroy those who believed it possible to manipulate them without themselves rising superior to matter.”
A controversial claim. I’m not sure I buy it. (I’m also not sure I don’t.) Yes, the Cathedral is a type of order—an unnatural type of order that exists to war against natural orders. This is I think the defining characteristic. People have likened the Cathedral to the Medieval Catholic Church (a powerful international conspiracy), but the Medieval Church was not at war with local peoples and natural hierarchies. I guess one could quibble with that, but let’s at least admit the the vision of the good promoted by the Medieval Catholic Church was not hostile to particularities qua particularities.
The institution (i.e., the loose conspiracy among institutions) of the Cathedral
is, of course, not chaos itself, but an inherently chaotic creature. The key feature of it seems that power will flows into it and within it in a perfectly informal, and not very predictable way. It is basically a gnostic power cult. A gnostic power cult that managed to take over the world.
At root, the occult motivator behind what we witness is a solvent, a dissoluting agent which corrodes all formed of Tradition, yet in what we might call its ‘vehicular’ form, it is simply an inversion of caste, not the destruction thereof, which would only be the final outcome stemming from the damage caused by this unholy regression.
Therefore, it seems logical to distinguish the Liberal from the Anarchist.
The Anarchist, if he is sincere, wishes to live in a world governed by chaotic forces, and in his mind these forces (despite their flaws) are preferable to the risks involved with established authorities (sources of order). Such a place might not even look like the kind of dystopian warzone which we imagine when we think of ‘anarchy’, and so it is vital we don’t apply a cartoonish version of ‘chaos’ to the Anarchist’s real vision.
The Liberal however, instead wants a type of order, but an inorganic ‘negative’ type. Going down the list, most of what Liberals value goes down the drain in a chaotic system, ‘safe spaces’ being a good example that springs to mind.
But, because the Liberal vision is inorganic, it will unintentionally trend towards a chaos as the body they have turned inside out begins to rot from the exposed flesh. This explains why there is no ‘end of history’, only a prolonged and agonizing death. Totalitarianism of the type described gives the Liberal his best chance of survival on an increasingly vanishing peninsula which the tides of chaos lash. If I understand Dugin correctly, he wants to make sure they drown sooner rather than later, hence an abstract and rather sly appeal to chaos.
What does this mean? What are you speaking of? Why is this important?
Noel, you need to be more specific as to which part you’re having trouble with.
Leftism always, inevitably creates the opposite of what it sets out to create. For example Marxism, which sought to create universally equal prosperity among perfected men, in fact created poverty and misery among hopeless drunks living in cramped, crumbling apartment blocks.
I have no doubt that The Cathedral seeks to create order. Now, what do they *actually* create? The Bataclan and Cologne sure don’t look like any sort of order I’d recognize. The Cathedral has been made the uplift of the black ghetto one of its top priorities for half a century – drive around one (if you dare) and tell me: does that seem like order to you?
The key to seeing through leftism is to remind yourself that it doesn’t matter what someone can promise, only what they can actually deliver. Any crank, quack, con-man, or snake oil salesman can promise you the moon and the stars. That doesn’t matter, and nobody with a brain should care about it. The only thing that matters is: what does past history tell us that these people actually, consistently deliver?
The left – The Cathedral – everywhere promises order, and may even deliver it for a short while (in the same sense that Wile E. Coyote may stop for a second after running off a cliff, look around a bit, and give a worried look before plummeting into the canyon below), but in the end, all they bring – in fact, all they *can* ever deliver – is chaos.
This raises the important point of the left’s failure to deliver their intangible utopia, but I would still say there is an order. If there wasn’t, there would be no arrests for hate speech or hierarchies of ‘holier than thou’ status signaling. You point to specific areas of pandemonium (black ghettos, Islamic terrorist attacks), but these are in large part isolated and contained incidents (for now), kind of like leakage from an oil drum.
Let’s take Cologne as a really great example. The mass rape of Cologne was a scene of chaos, right? An incendiary incident without police intervention in which something very bad happened very fast. However, zoom out and run the clock forward. There was an organized media campaign to blame the far right, to stifle reporting, and exonerate the criminals. Then came social media censorship, more political maneuvering. Not for a second was the situation not ultimately under control by the ruling powers. They didn’t prevent the incident (they either couldn’t or chose not to), but were more than equipped to prevent any response.
I’m sure Ukraine during the Holodomor was pandemonium, in fact we have vivid descriptions of emaciated bodies in the streets and mass cannibalism (doesn’t get much more chaotic than that), however in the macro, the Soviet Union’s Communist order was barely bruised. 9/11 did not render the United States equivalent to Somalia, although it was certainly chaotic.
It is not merely about what the Left promises, one would be right to dismiss that, but what they deliver, even if only temporarily. I’m saying that we live under an inversed order, rather than a chaos, and that this inversed order will have to become more totalitarian in the future if it is to stave off its own inevitable dissolution which stems from its inherent contradictions.
I wouldn’t see it as too controversial to hypothesize and indeed to observe that the Left will do anything to maintain their grip on power in light of oncoming chaos rising behind the dam (caused and fostered by them of course), and that such efforts should be hindered where possible. They should not be allowed to prevent themselves being eaten by the dogs they have unleashed.
They should not be allowed to prevent themselves being eaten by the dogs they have unleashed.
And so, is this Christian Apocalypse you’re speaking of? You’re just waiting to be raptured?
Not at all. As I’ve said, apocalyptic predictions are ultimately a waste of time. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen, right? We should always assume that the apocalypse is not upon us, by default.
But, with regard to societal entropy, we can certainly see increasing and endemic problems going forward (see our recent Ascending the Tower podcast where we discuss civilization decline) that the Cathedral will not be able to deal with using their current social technology, so it makes sense to anticipate this shift towards a more totalitarian form of Progress.
Their society is going to collapse of exhaustion, just as all other civilizations prior. The time frame is what is in question here. They wish to extend it. In my opinion, the sooner they are gone the better, within limits of course.
Leftism is often able to deliver on its promises for a short time. Any visitor to Moscow in 1935 would surely have been impressed. The Communists built paved roads and skyscrapers, and rural electrification happened quickly. As someone (I forget who) noted, when Stalin came to power, Russia was a land of illiterate peasants pushing wooden plows, and when he died, Russia was a nuclear superpower on the brink of launching the first satellite into space. But we all know that communist “progress” fizzled out before very long at all. I have a blog post scheduled for the upcoming 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster that will detail all the ways in which Chernobyl was both the ultimate product of, and the ultimate symbol of, the Communist mindset.
Leftism promises order, and for a while may actually deliver it. In the end, it will deliver only chaos. Between starting point and destination, however, there will be a whole lot of anarcho-tyranny, which is what we have now.
There is no disagreement from me with regards to your assessment, at least in the general, but my thesis was to draw distinction between the principle of chaos, which itself takes only the political form of an absence of order, and the warped form of order we observe when Liberalism maintains control over a state (or Marxism, or any other Modernist political deviation). Liberalism has of course proven itself the most resilient.
It is unsustainable and will trend in the direction of chaos, but not willingly. It will resist the dissolution of the society it has created, the equivalent of sending tanks into Czechoslovakia.
Throughout history, chaos is a constant companion of order, often arising at the natural collapse of empires and preceding the birth of new empires. The problem for the Liberal is that during such periods, one of which is fast approaching, people worrying about gender pronouns are likely to end up on pikes rather than university campuses.
It seems to me then that the practical problem with globalist modernity (if we can leave its massive moral and spiritual problems aside for a moment) is not whether it intends to create chaos or order, but that globalization by its nature creates a single point of failure – economically, politically, culturally, spiritually, and scientifically, When Rome fell, things got very bad very quickly inside its territory, and stayed that way for a very long time, but the Empire’s borders served as firewalls that limited the damage (and at that, limited it to only the Western Empire – sixty years into the “Dark Ages”, Justinian was building Haghia Sophia within the walls of a bustling Constantinople). If a globalized system suffers a catastrophic failure, then noplace is safe, and instead of one nation (or even one empire) facing an existential crisis, all of humanity suddenly faces one.
This feeds into an upcoming blog post I have planned for the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Ever driven past an American-built nuclear power plant and seen one of those big round domes they have over the reactor? Those are made of ten-foot-thick steel-reinforced concrete, and can be sealed air-tight. If an identical accident had ever taken place at an American nuke plant, the containment building would simply have been sealed off and that would have been the end of it. But there was no containment building around the Chernobyl reactor at all, because built into the left’s sense of its own inevitability is a congenital inability to ask itself: “Hey, what happens if we’re wrong? What’s our Plan B?”. The right side of history doesn’t need a Plan B – in fact, even having a Plan B would involve the traitorous, disastrous admission of even the smallest possibility that you weren’t really on the right side of history after all.
“If a globalized system suffers a catastrophic failure, then noplace is safe, and instead of one nation (or even one empire) facing an existential crisis, all of humanity suddenly faces one.”
Indeed, which is why on the AtT podcast I said, while there are comparisons we can draw to the fall of Rome, this is an entirely different ballgame.
What? Explain? Examples?
Me, Noel? It’s hard to tell who you are replying to because of the format, sorry. If me, what specifically would you like explained, or examples provided for?
It’s elling that this post has exactly zero mention of Artificial Intelligence/Tech Singularity (stated another way, deus ex machina) or Capital.
From Land: “What (Capital) is in itself is only tactically connected to what it does for us — that is (in part), what it trades us for its self-escalation. Our phenomenology is its camouflage.”
What did you expect Capital to demand in trade for becoming “Deus ex Machina”?
I do not believe the Technological Singularity is attainable, hence why I hinted at it in mention of the Olduvai Theory. The diffusion of advanced technology across populations, empowering singular individuals regardless of their motive or mental state with thousands of times more power to affect change than their ancestors ever had, is a recipe for chaos. People are right to predict the coming of new technologies, but any notions that this becomes Star Trek are misguided in my view. Mad Max is far more likely in the end.
I do not believe the Technological Singularity is attainable
Such belief is not required.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
And we can even compound the error by stating “Any sufficiently advanced technology (whose processes are not understandable by humans) is indistinguishable from magic.”
From the wiki on artificial neural networks:
[Ed. Rescued from spam. Sorry for the delay.]
I do not believe the Technological Singularity is attainable
Such belief is not necessary.
To avoid the obfuscation charge:
Actual tech singularity is not a precondition for the mechanism to come into force.
Please, elaborate. Particularly what you distinguish as the ‘Mechanism’ from tech singularity.
Read this. Especially the parts about science/empiricism’s attempt to negate the role of judgment.
The Technological Singularity has already happened. It happened the day that the first consumer brought home a television set and plugged it in. Here’s Fred Reed on that:
“No dictator has ever enjoyed such a tool for social control, for near absolute power over what people see, over the news, over a culture. Like the bite of a leech, television is painless. Two decades later, the country is unrecognizable.
We underestimate the box. It is tasteless, dumbed-down, and commercial, yes, yes. All the adjectives apply. We have heard them. We agree with them. But we miss the point. We miss the point because the fare is so contemptible: Nothing that stupid can be dangerous.
Oh yes it can.
The lobotomy box gives to Hollywood and New York limitless sculpting access to the minds of our children, limitless power to condition all of us. For hours a day, week after month after year after decade, each generation sees what the two cities want it to see. It sees nothing else. Because the programming does not come from the formal government, because it seems to counsel only the purchase of New! Improved! Whatever! because we hold it in contempt while spending our lives before it, we—many of us—do not see what it really is.
The content of television is neither merely banal nor merely commercial. This would not matter. Instead it is subliminally didactic, unendingly instructive. It has agendas unrelated to soap. Remember that the advertising and television industries are tightly entwined. Those commercials, seemingly almost invertebrate in their tiresomeness, in fact are the product of decades of manipulative experience by highly intelligent people who have studied the psychology of the audience.
If you want to change the behavior of an audience or a country, if you want to replace their deeply held values with your own, you don’t tell them what to do or what to believe. They might resist. We do not like getting orders. No, you show the things being done—over and over and over. In the beginning you only imply the desired behavior or point of view, leave it in the background so that it is hardly noticed. Over and over and over you imply it. Gradually you make it more explicit. It takes years, but people come to accept whatever they see, and then to imitate it.”
I know you were all hoping for something a little more… cyberpunk. Sorry about that. But the Technological Singularity happened, and was banal, leftist, and awful.
The word sustainable means one thing to a farmer, and quite another thing to a parasite.
The chaos proposed by Dugin is the definition of eternity given by Plotinus in the Fifth Ennead, minus the candid beauty of the latter.
For the UN to achieve the SDG and a New World Order a drastic reduction of the world population is indispensable. The chaos here proposed might be the needed justification for the mass extermination of the excess of population.
That’s an interesting comparison you’ve drawn between Dugin and Plotinus. Definitely worth further study.
I would say there is certainly a de-population element. Even in very mediocre, college level, discussions of SDG, reducing fertility is a MASSIVE concern for these people. But I think mass ‘extermination’ is unlikely, because as I’ve pointed out, the whole project isn’t very successful. Alex Jones likes to think there will be a kind of ‘death camp USA’ in the future, but I don’t see it unless everyone just rolls over and lets it happen. We shouldn’t give the enemy too much credit.
The extermination will be of us, Westerners. It will be like a surgical event, explosive in nature, and very efficient. After that, the reign of terror, the hunger and despair will do the rest.
I wish I have your optimism, Mr. Citadel.
Can it be assumed since liberalism is a paradox that when they promise “sustainability”, they actually mean something completely unsustainable.
Goal 1 – no poverty
how could you ever achieve that