By Fiach MacAodh for the American Sun
First off, I must say that I have great respect for BAP. I firmly believe that without him dissident right would today be a pathetic, unaesthetic shamble of autism not worthy of any name. Great emphasis on health, fitness, and physical excellence has helped the innumerable men of the movement beyond belief, both as part of the movement and in their own personal lives. But on his latest article I must say I DISAGREE!
Second off: Let us drop any pretences that we deal in anything other than broad sweeping statements and generalisations. It is a good thing. To generalise is to think, to think is to imagine. Too often in modernity is all impetus to great creativity in thought strangled by the pathetic envious cries of pink-collar academics to “specialise, specialise, specialise”. The posts held and salaries received by such vermin are the greatest insult to the European academic heritage, and a shame unbearable.
Unexamined Liberalism
The recent trend on the Right has been one of emphasising the importance of prioritising society over the individual. I personally view this new emphasis, which sees individualism as being a primary root evil of liberalism and modernity, as being correct, but, as I will expand further on, it is only half the truth. My issue with BAP’s piece however, is that he views this as innately leading towards an all suffocating and smothering matriarchal longhouse commune.
Certainly such a situation is a great evil, but why does any de-prioritisation of the individual have to lead to this? I can’t help but think that this notion is some kind of permanent ingestion, or more accurately a long buried and un-exorcised Liberal assumption. This Liberal assumption is, namely, to suppose that both the individual–collective dichotomy AND the individual–collective distinction are valid. Both are key products of what Bond termed Liberal Ontology, namely that the individual is prior to society.
The dichotomy is absurd as by opposing this thing called “the collective” against the individual, it immediately conflates, equates, and implies sameness between near-innumerable kinds of social bodies which are as infinitely varied towards each other as they are towards an “individual”. How it is assumed by the Liberal that somehow a family, a religious congregation, or a nation are similar things because they are all “collectives” is utterly beyond me. Instead an Absolutist Ontology, which subordinates the position of the individual, ought to recognise that instead of a idiotic duality of “individual” vs “collective” that there is a great plurality of social organisations, all with significant differences between them for good and bad.
Likewise I would also challenge the distinction between individual and collective. Certainly there is the obvious experiential dimension of individualism, it is no small thing being the only one who sees out through your own eyes – “feel the rain on your skin, no one else can feel it for you.” However, how much else of what you think to be so purely you comes from elsewhere? Look here to Nietzsche, is not one of the fundamental teachings of his work this; that so much of what we view to somehow be innately a part of ourselves, our thoughts, our musings, our beliefs, that so much of this is really a product of influences external to ourselves? You create a belief, and think like Descartes “ah this is something that comes from the I, the I that thinks and therefore is”, and yet as Nietzsche points out, had you thought in another language, or even eaten better food for lunch, how different your thoughts would be!
Instead, as Buddhism would perhaps teach, and a teaching I’m sure you would find reflected among so many other great belief systems and among other great peoples, this individual subject who sits at the centre, who is the essence, the REAL you, IS ILLUSORY! IS VOID! Likewise search for all the parts that constitute yourself, that ARE your special individual self and be assured you will find that all those parts come from elsewhere. Your physical makeup is inescapably the product of genetic inheritance. As Jung, in my opinion great psychological heir of Nietzsche, shows us, even the intimacy of our mental unconscious is filled to the brim with the inherited imagery from eons of our ancestry. I would here make my own distinction between the “individyool” and Jung’s concept of the individuated person, that the full mature acceptance of one’s self is the acceptance that one’s self is inexorably part of something greater.
Turn to the etymology of the word “individual” then; “that which can be divided no further”, in other words the “atom” or the base unit of society. But the individual is divisible, and all the parts divided come from elsewhere, so the individual is not really divisible from society either. Great observation of Maurras, consider the helplessness of the infant for the first several years of life, the extended infancy of humans a unique marker of the species, no human being can come into being without society, and cannot have a feasible separate existence from it either.
I’m sure people are aware of many of these points, but I think it is important to lay to rest the grand illusion of individualism, being a great sickness which afflicts us.
Mammy Commune is Borne of Individualism
BAP warns us against the slide into mammy-commune by prioritising society over individual, and this is a righteous and good concern. But instead I would warn that it is individualism which leads us into this scenario, not sociality! Total individualism is Hobbes’ “War of All Against All”. However, while we tend to envision this war as a GTA free for all or something cool like this, the truest manifestation of a “War of All Against All” is actually crabs in a bucket. Not perpetual violent conflict (which would induce heroism and bring men together in brotherly bands!) but instead a perfect stagnation, where all individuals either endeavour to keep their peers down because they value the indulging of their own ressentiment over the good and glory of their tribe, or where individuals themselves don’t stand up or venture out for fear of their individual self being cut down by their peers.
The total redirection of all resource and innovation merely to fill belly and make comfort, as would be done under matriarchal femoid leadership, would NOT be done from any true empathy, or true social feeling, but from their own narcissistic desire to appease their personal feelings of pseudo-empathy. A mother who spoils her children because she can’t bear to hear them cry in the moment is truly selfish, indulging her own momentary feelings, while the mother who makes the harsher decision to send her children to their rooms although it pains her makes the truly unselfish decision that is for the well-being of all.
Individualism is what has prevailed for the past several decades, and it is under it that we have come closer to the smothering mammy longhouse un-society than ever before!
Communitarians American and European, Liberal and Illiberal
I personally cannot think of any exact examples of these communitarians who were spoken of in the other piece, but I imagine this is likely due to either my twatter circle being small, or me being offline for a number of months. However, I can understand the concern with the formation of a kind of deracinated, milquetoast communitarianism which pops a veneer of “trad” over itself but which would soon devolve to a mammy-commune. Although I haven’t seen it personally, I can imagine this happening quite vividly, and specifically so in an American context.
Such a form of communitarianism would have its own decline and death terminally inbuilt into it by its emergence from such a context. It would lack a defined “cause of community”, in other words a mandate or divine imperative. Here in Ireland such communitarian thought, or corporatist thought more accurately, appeals more instinctively to us because our mandate already exists in the form of our ETHNOS. A millenia old legacy of culture, history, and heritage already lies at our feet, compelling us to put aside our individual selves in service to its cause. This is very much the case for other European nationalists too.
In modern America by contrast, and perhaps all over other New World European nations, there is no clearly defined calling for such community and sociality. On what grounds to call people together into a “trad” community? “because we are all whyte/ Catholic/ like guns?” Whatever the answer, any such community once established would be hard pressed to overcome the reality of how elective its membership is. The sense of Belonging to these communities would not be as unconditional as it is for Old World Europeans, and this is key.
For the more conditional and elective the membership of a community is to the members, the more it is tacitly viewed by those members not as a true community or society at all. Instead the deep-buried Liberal priors (we all have them) re-emerge so that they view it as a “collection of consenting individuals”. Then the way is paved to the mammy commune, especially if the role of waman is too prominent at this early stage, as it will seek to manage equilibrium and equality between all the individual constituents, because it is only seeking the survival of a community which has no greater mission beyond itself. When communitarians approach the prioritisation of society from a “collection of individuals” perspective this is where the evil returns.
There must instead be a recognition of a qualitative rather than a quantitative form of society whose membership is virtually without condition. The true community, the true society, must be something which is greater than the sum of its parts. Above the material dimension of the community (the individuals who compose it at any given time) there must be a higher, transcendent, and spiritual dimension.
I mentioned earlier that the need to prioritise the community over the individual is only half the truth, for the other half is the community’s subordination to this higher spiritual dimension of itself. There is an immediate nation here and now, in its degenerated modern-liberal state, but there is also a higher spiritual nation encompassing all previous iterations stretching into the primordial immemorial past and vaunting forward into the grand vistas of future destiny. Belonging to it grants man a true death-transcendence. Contribution to its survival and glory compels him and his fellows on to acts of greatness and heroism. It is the bridge between him, his ancestors, his descendants, and once long ago, and hopefully someday once again, the Gods!
Too often Conservative retards quote Burke to speak of a society of “Little Platoons”, trying to muster up an idealised liberal fever dream of a “corporate” society which is fully composed of “consensual” and “voluntary” social bodies. Too rarely do they focus on the “germ of affection”, which was for Burke the blood ties that bound the French aristocracy together, deriving its strength precisely from its non-elective and unconditional nature.
Whither the “Trad” Communitarians of America?
I often make a personal distinction between “Alt” and “New” Right to respectively label the dissident Rightist strands of America and Europe. This is because while the struggle for us is the same in nearly all respects, on either side of the Atlantic there is a key difference. As mentioned, in Europe the national identities and causes already stand as defined, and the question for us is how we are to proceed. In America however these national identities are not yet defined, simultaneous to their struggle with Liberal-Modernity they must also undergo their process of ethnogenesis. Certainly there are older European-American populations with already well-formed identities, I think mainly of Southern Whytes, but the greater mass of them, who are descended from recent Ellis Island immigrants, have yet to choose the cause and identity for the communities.
Their ethnogenesis is as such at an embryonic stage, yet they are in great peril. It is to be a process of manifold ethnogeneses all cast into the furnace of a great conflict, to survive or perish. It is my sincere belief that the U.S. will not maintain its veneer of stability much longer than three more election cycles. Then it’s real status as a third-world country will be baptised with the emergence of a true chaos. We will see a scenario which, if you were to dramatize it, would look like a three-way crossover of Breaking Bad, The Wire, and The Turner Diaries. In this scenario what will ensure the survival of European Americans as they undergo their various ethnogeneses? My answer; Brotherhood!
My first introduction to this movement was reading Jack Donovan’s Way of Men, and I can find very little in his work I can depart with all these years later. Here what comes to mind is this; that every society begins and ends with a gang of men.
At the essence and core of each great society is the mannerbund, the band of brothers in arms. The culture which loses sight of this essence is cursed to insectoid existence, sweating in dung-stink irrigation trench, and that which keeps it to heart is destined to great excellence, of great acts of transcendental beauty in its works and actions, destined to cities of marble guarded by stoic battalions of iron.
Against the claim that it’s “Man’s Faustian and aristocratic aloneness” which feeds innovation and heroism, I instead claim that it comes from a balance of competition and support which only a brotherhood gives. He cites the vision of Crusoe, but I cite another classic, The Three Musketeers! Not a vision of a lone sui generis man on an island, but of men who are dedicated to one another and to common adventure, honour, and glory. Acting alone does D’Artagnan fall prey to the wicked tricks of M’Lady, but only together with his comrades do they bring justice to wicked waman!
It will be such gangs of men, brotherhoods compelled together, partially by some commonality of vision, but mostly of necessity of survival and then desire for triumph in intense conflict, it will be from these warbands that the new plurality of Euro-American nations will emerge. The unconditional loyalty that makes a true community will be learned between men thrown into the forge of steel and the heat of conflict. It cannot be learnt by some “consensual” coming together, usually at the beck and call of wamans who, smelling danger, seek the pre-emptive creation pseudo-community for their own protection and emotional comfort.
In fact, such forging in the face of danger is already well underway. The awakening and the persecution of the awakened has already created this conflict, although at a lower level of simmering heat. I know, see, and have already met so many of these brother bands who have undergone the early years of their forging. American sons of Europe, fear not! All is in hand!
Concluding Thoughts
I wrote this piece as a response to BAP’s article but I feel ultimately the disagreement is not so great. More times than I count have I heard furious arguments between men of our movement which, after a while, turn out to ultimately be very violent agreements, as they arrive at the same conclusions from different roads. I have discussed individual vs collective but I think this is perhaps even secondary to the greater concerns, concerns with what spirit moves a society, questions of hierarchy or egalitarianism, of matriarchy or patriarchy?
BAP says he wishes for “fascism or even worse”, the rule over society of a caste of military men dedicated to a eugenic cause, and I can’t disagree. But I say that far from being a vision threatened by ideas of sociality, it is a fundamentally anti-liberal and hence anti-individualistic vision and it will therefore be primarily threatened by individualism. It will be threatened by an egoism which would cause men, who might otherwise support their brotherhoods to ends of greatness, to instead tear them apart for personal gain.
But in contrast to de-racinated “communitarians”, who support community for community’s own sake, and are ultimately little more than self-obfuscated liberals, I say the achievement of this vision is best supported by two steps! First, subordination of the individual to their collective, to their mannerbund; Second, subordination of that mannerbund to a higher cause of spirit.
Go forward, by the right hand of God.