It's no secret that in the dialectical battle over the future of meta-theory, the disparate groups of writers, internet trolls and e-philosophers which make up the vacuous online movement known as the Meta-Right, and the political metamodernism espoused by the Nordic school, as defined by one Hanzi Freinacht, have been entirely at odds. Indeed, one could even say that the M-R has been anything from a constant thorn in the flesh to an omnipresent boogeyman that has hounded Freinacht (the fictional mouthpiece used by bloggers Emil Friis and Daniel Gortz) since it emerged in the early days of the 2010s.
Recently, the reelection of one Donald J. Trump to the presidency of the United States back in November may have been the last straw to have broken the proverbial camel's back, as Friis, using the Hanzi character, took to Facebook to publish a series of posts (later consolidated into a Substack article) where he laments the recent rise in "fascism," something that he has publicly lamented over since the events in 2015-16 which culminated in the first Trump presidency, although realistically, probably far earlier than that.
Starting on January 30th, ten days after Trump was sworn in, Freinacht cryptically warns,
The irony lost on Hanzi was that the Jacobin Revolution of 1789 which overthrew the French monarchy resulted in one of the bloodiest regimes that inaugurated the Early Modern Era. I suppose when you're on the Left, you can neatly sweep away atrocities such as the genocide in the Vendee and the Reign of Terror under the rug of historical oblivion. But, because the Jacobins weren't the ever-loathsome National Socialists, Robespierre and the butchers who made up the Revolutionary Tribunal get a pass. After all, they were on the right side of history.
In what I'm certain is almost certainly a re-post, Hanzi, or rather Friis, goes on to write that,
So I would define political metamodernism as the successful integration of postmodernism into a developmental pathway for people and society. It points us towards a real, concrete updating of our institutions: local, national, transnational and global.
The neo-reactionaries are where the 21st century forces corresponding to 20th century Nazism will grow from: a sick, murderous force—all due to a developmental imbalance, to a disembodied and inauthentic attempt to transcend postmodern values without properly including them.
I guess the conclusion is obvious: integrate pomo. Don't fall into the abyss. Most of all, don't mistake them for metamodernists; they are our twisted little sister.
For the next ten years or so, twisted sister is probably going to run the world stage, until her edginess reveals its lack of imagination and political impotence. The times aren't yet ripe for political metamodernism. Today's 15-25 year olds will likely be stamped with this sickness, watching Peterson clips hysterically and going on about Judeo-Christian identity and even Julius Evola.
Ironically sincere metamodernists must make the best of these brief dark ages of the global psyche. We must begin to prepare the ground for institutional shifts into deeper democracy, sustainability, transnationalism, expansions of human rights, free information and sharing economies. That's why we must begin to act now, even if our day is in another 10-15 years.
Hanzi defines "political metamodernism" as the "successful integration of postmodernism into a developmental pathway for people and society" which will eventually point us towards "a real, concrete updating of our institutions: local, national, transnational and global." The problem with this is that postmodernism is the negation of values, it is a cultural critique of the materialistic excesses which arose out of the triumph of modernism as the reigning cultural paradigm over Medieval Scholasticism and Greco-Christian assumptions over how the cosmos supposedly operates. I say "supposedly" because I am generalizing for the sake of brevity.
The Ancient, Classical and Medieval worlds had access to a form of knowledge which today we would classify as "metaphysics," and which Hanzi has designated as belonging to the "post-Faustian" Value Meme. However, to the Traditional or "post-Faustian" people of the Axial Age and onward, metaphysics meant something completely different from what it means now; as something pertaining to books on witchcraft, crystals, interpretation of dreams, viz., what Freinacht has termed "magical thinking." Metaphysics, as it is conceived of now, has a spurious definition that is not at all in alignment with what the Traditional world once knew. Metaphysics, to the Traditional world, meant access to pure or a priori knowledge, not the analytical knowledge of the Rationalists, but intuitive knowledge which came from initiation and transcendence of naturalistic existence, or what today might be derogatively dismissed as "altered states of consciousness."
Metaphysics, after all, is made up of the cognates μετά, meaning above or beyond, and φυσικά, meaning what occurs naturally. This is to say that metaphysics was the study of what is beyond nature; it was the supreme science which informed, sanctified and gave meaning to the more natural or profane sciences. I say this because this all leads back into what I was saying earlier with regards to modernism and its eventual sublimation into postmodernism. Modernism could produce explanations for various natural phenomenon, in addition to the marvelous and terrible technological wonders that came out of the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions, but it could not, and cannot, provide meaning to the discoveries which its subjugation and implementation of the natural sciences produced.
A frequent and often erroneous explanation for the birth of chemistry is that it came out of the "pseudoscience" that was ancient alchemy. This bifurcation separates "scientific" chemistry, which is thus true, from "pseudoscientific" alchemy, when in fact, according to the Traditional view, both alchemy and chemistry belonged to a single branch of authentic knowledge where alchemy represented the higher aspect, which led to pure knowledge and mastery over oneself (the transmutation of lead into gold must be interpreted allegorically), and chemistry, which represented the more natural and profane aspect of the same science leading to the study of the behavior of matter. And herein lies the rub: it is precisely because of the systematic mastery of chemistry, which has given modern civilization the power it has over matter and the natural world, which has led to chemistry being valued so much more highly, and thus seen as more "true," than pseudoscientific alchemy, because the aspect which determined its value inherently lies in its usefulness to modern civilization.
Okay, so why this sudden discourse on alchemy? All of this has been said to make a point, and that is that Traditional or "post-Faustian" values, what corresponds to the Blue Value System of Spiral Dynamics, had access to true developmental pathways which led to authenticity and interiority, the recovery of which, from the vantage point where I'm standing, is what the metamodernists and the Integral theorists both seek to attain. Modernism (i.e., the Orange Value System) usurped the previous system of values by maximizing what it could produce using the profane aspects of the sciences at the expense of the higher, and nobler, aspects of those same sciences. This is origin of the meaning-crisis.
The problem, though, is that by pointing this out, one is immediately denounced as a "reactionary" for having given into foundationalism, essentialism and magical thinking. What strikes me as so bafflingly hypocritical is that Hanzi praises the benefits of transcendental meditation, Haṭha-yoga and even "ayahuasca-tourism" (although he does lament that these same practices have been commodified by the "yoga bourgeoise") provided that they are completely divorced from the philosophico-religious context in which these practices or meditative traditions originally developed. Imagine trying to divorce Haṭha-yoga from Shaivism, the Jesus Prayer from hesychasm, or the namu-amidha-buttsu from Pure Land Buddhism. Ken Wilber's and later Integralists appropriation of Madyamaka Buddhism is at least more sincere.
Contra the Traditionalists, I do believe that there are aspects of postmodernism that can, and I would even go so far as to say must be integrated into the coming cultural paradigm which eventually supplants postmodernism, but they cannot come from the progressive teleology which Hanzi presupposes, and will most certainly not lead to his "green social liberal" definition of what he presumes metamodernism to be. The fact he dismisses any attempt to arrive at a post-postmodern paradigm by using true values which he deems as being "pathological positions, all failing from the developmental transition from pomo [postmodern] to metamodern" leads me to conclude that Hanzi takes as his axiomatic starting point the assumption that all potential values and value creation must inevitably be "integrated," although a more fitting word might as well be "absorbed," into a Left-wing praxis which presumes progressive teleology as its ultimate telos.
However, it is from his latest post that I am forced to conclude that he has finally gone off the deep end, having finally given into this neuropathological "fascist" hysteria which was certainly brought on by a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome or (TDS). He writes,
There are moments where I believe that I've gotten so used to histrionic lefties crying fascist that normally I'm able to just roll my eyes and keep doom scrolling though whatever post my thumb happens to land on, but every once in a while, the occasional rage bait catches my eye. You would think, in the current year two-thousand and twenty-five, that maybe these people would come up with new material, but no. Leftism, even into Late Modernity, continues to show itself haunted by the ghostly specter of Adolf Hitler. I've already covered the prospect of these "Brown Scares" in the past, as far back as 2018. Suffice to say that nothing has changed. The Left will continually cry "Nazi!" until Judgement Day. However, I think it's safe to say that we've reached the point where no one cares.
In two decades, World War II will be an event that happened a century ago, and the last person with any memory of that war will be laid to rest in a pinewood box and buried six feet deep. And when that day eventually comes, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Hideki Tojo will be consigned to the ever-growing list of would-be world emperors who thought their imperial aspirations would stand the test of time alongside figures such as Napoleon Bonaparte, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, Alexander III of Macedon, Nebuchadnezzar, Sennacherib, and Sargon of Akkad.
It is the first line of this post by Hanzi that I want to focus on in particular, because it was what initially inspired me to pen this response in the first place. The "meaning-crisis" is a conundrum that has befuddled the Liminal Web and, although it goes by a different name in other circles, has also hounded Traditionalists, conservatives, and other Dissident Right types, including the Meta-Right.
In fact, it might be more appropriate to call the meaning-crisis the everything-crisis, given that so much of what has come to define the postmodern cultural landscape has been the absence of meaning, the devaluation of all values, alienation in the face of consumer capitalism and a rapidly changing demographic reality in the Western world, environmental degradation, vast and sudden changes in technology which have shaken up once taken for granted truisms in the economy and business, in social life and dating, and in education and communication within the course of only a few decades. Oh, and increased moral degeneration, too, if you're into that sort of thing.
What really gets my goat however is that Hanzi so boldly declares that the meaning-crisis is effectively over—C'est fini—in light of the fact that Donald Trump was reelected president of the United States, or that the "Special Military Operation" in the Donbass is in its third year, or that Elon Musk is acting as an advisor of sorts to the Trump administration, as if somehow these events are uniquely foreboding. Not to mention how all of this handwringing and allusive language is just so incredibly banal, as if we weren't already warned by these pearl clutching moralizers that fascism was destined to come to America once Orange Man was sworn into office during his first term, or that the patriotic revolt that occurred on January 6th, 2024, was worse than over nine-thousand 9/11's.
I've said it before: if Donald Trump was truly the Caesarian figure that the Left imagined him to be, and the Right hoped that he was, he would have seized upon the patriotic fervor of January 6th and crowned himself Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. But he didn't, and he won't, because even his own delusions of self-grandeur only go so far. What does Hanzi expect reasonable people to do in this situation? Look up in righteous consternation as Trump ascends to his apotheosis as Super Dictator of the United States? Resolve in their hearts that this must not come to pass? Play the Internationale? Announce the general strike? Form La Résistance? For the Listening Society! So, say we all.
Oh, please.
Barring any unforeseen catastrophe or black swan event, Donald Trump will most likely continue to govern as a populist president who will probably give some more kickbacks to billionaires in addition to extending his tax cuts for everyone else and continue to glaze the Israel lobby just like he did during his first term. After his four years are up, he will peacefully leave office and power will be transferred to whoever succeeds him, whether Democrat or Republican, with his legacy cemented as a mild reformer. Whereupon he will retire to his sub-tropical hide-away at Mar-a-Lago where he will play golf between sips of Diet Coke until he gracefully expires like an American Sulla.
So, what exactly will Hanzi's reaction be when Trump eventually leaves office? Isn't dictatorship supposed to be one of the defining aspects of fascism? One would be hard pressed to find a concrete definition for fascism in anything that Hanzi has published, as it usually just comes down to, as it does with nearly every explanation from the Left, as a thing-I-don't-like. These things-I-don't-like which could be said to constitute "fascism" range anywhere from Christian conservative objections towards transgenderism and queer identity, libertarian critiques of socialism, both in its revolutionary and democratic forms, Euroscepticism from populist parties across the pond, or demographic realism from people on the Right more broadly. Fortunately, Friis does provide us with a definition for what he believes fascism to be as laid out in his Substack article, describing fascism as "faustian values in modern society."
For the uninitiated into the language of the Liminal Web, the Faustian Value Meme, or the Red Value System of Spiral Dynamics, corresponds to the system of values preceding the post-Faustian (i.e., Traditional) or Blue Value System. Faustian values are, supposedly understood, as those values which align with tribalism, power politics or what may generally be described as the way of the gang (Jack Donovan) or a Bronze Age mindset (Costin Alamariu).
But herein lies the problem. Fascism, according to Friis, is effectively power politics applied to "modern society." But all politics are power politics. Politics is, after all, activity in relationship to power. Hanzi himself has even described politics as being "games for power." So, from this line of reasoning, are we to assume that all political activity must, by the definition set forth by Friis, as either fascistic or a conduit which leads to fascism?
This issue is resolved when one just accepts that Hanzi—meaning neither Friis nor Gortz—are serious political thinkers. In fact, there is nothing political at all about "political metamodernism." Political metamodernism is not an attempt at putting forth a new political theory or even engaging in sincere political activism. The metamodernism of the Nordic School is not political, but socio-psychological, as it concerns itself with human psychological development, which has nothing to do with the political.
The political, as that one genius who solved all questions in the realm of political science famously put it, concerns itself only with that subject which can concretely make a decisive and effective distinction between friend and enemy. Hanzi concerns himself with issues pertaining to society, not with political units which are able to draw deliberate lines between friend and enemy; as there is only one entity that is able to do decide upon this distinction, which is to say, the State.
Society and the State are not the same thing, not even remotely. Society is made up individuals who participate in economico-social activity, a State is formed by persons who engage in political activity, viz., activity in relationship to power. "Political metamodernism" presumes the existence of the liberal democratic or the social democratic State on axiomatic grounds. It takes for granted the idea that no other State is conducive to human flourishing or development. This is why the telotic end of political metamodernism is the "Listening Society" and not the "therapy State," or even a union of States, who organize themselves in a particular way as a response to the reality where the possibility of conflict exists, because the possibility of conflict is not seriously accounted for in the Hanzian-metamodern model, it simply seen as a regression to lower value systems.
Simply put, political metamodernism cannot be called political in any real sense of the word. It is armchair sociology at best, which seeks to find its praxeological completion in a kind of anarchism from above.
The concept of the State, not society, presumes the concept of the political. As we have already said, all political activity is activity in relationship to power and power can only be defined as a relationship of control between two beings. This conclusion, however, is untenable to a man like Friis, and I would suspect to Left-metamodernists more generally. This is because "power politics," or what has already been termed "Faustian" values, are condescended to a degree where they represent a much lower and regressive form of human socio-psychological development and not, as they should be understood, as the thing-in-itself of political existence—of both States and human actors who participate in political activity.
For Hanzi, a "return to traditionalism, hierarchy, and power-worship" always represents a "regression," never an act of "transcendence." But the recognition of collective wisdom, hierarchy and power politics has nothing to do with either regression or transcendence—it is simply fact.
Fascism, Communism and Reactionary Politics
The Oxford dictionary defines the word reactionary as: "(a person or a set of views) opposing political or social liberalization or reform." This is generally how the word is used by the contemporary Left today. However, much like the use of the word "Nazi," there's something that is implicitly dishonest about how the word "reactionary" is used as a pejorative meant to both dismiss and shut down discourse which opposes liberal or Left-wing policies. This is because, I believe, that both the word reactionary and reactionary politics have become misunderstood, since they have been completely removed from the historical context in which both these terms arose in the first place.
The origin of the word réactionnaire goes back to its use by the instigators of the Jacobin (i.e., "French") Revolution when it was used to describe both individuals and political factions, mainly monarchists and Catholics, who opposed to the establishment of the First Republic or who sympathized with the former monarchy.
Today, use of the word reactionary has come to be used as a blanket term for anyone who disagrees with or opposes revolutionary socialism. This accusation isn't just raised against conservatives or suspected fascists, merely, but also liberals who are believed to support the status quo by subscribing to capitalism whom, although they might view capitalism as flawed and as an occasional driver of socioeconomic inequality, believe it can be reformed through Keynesianism, Fabianism and the establishment of an advanced welfare state. But, for the sake of the argument that I will be making, lets settle on this definition of what constitutes a reactionary for the duration of this article—a reactionary refers to any person who opposes revolutionary politics.
Revolutionary politics represents the antithesis of the aristocratic tradition. However, the revolutionary tradition of politics that emerged in the West does not begin with the Jacobins in 1789, but arguably the English Civil War (1642-1646) as this would set into motion a sequence of events that would lead up to not only the revolution in France, the American Revolution (1776) against the British Crown after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the revolutions across Europe in 1848 and finally in the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917. The revolutionary tradition, whether liberal, nationalist, socialist-communist or anarchist, challenged and subsequently abolished the divine right of kings, with most of the nations of the West having adopted some form of either constitutionalism or republicanism in the aftermath of the First World War.
To be a reactionary is to outright reject revolutionary politics. In one sense, to be on the Right means to be a reactionary, as Leftists themselves assert. But what if this was not the case? What if there was a form of revolutionary politics that came out of the Right that as a response to both Jacobinism, Americanism and Marxism? Enter fascism.
I will be making a bold argument here, one that perhaps only a few others in my position have made, and that is that fascism, whilst politically speaking, belongs squarely on the Right, does not belong to the aristocratic tradition, but to the revolutionary tradition of politics. Fascism, far from being a throwback to previous forms of cultural or political values, was wholly modernist in its political outlook, futurist even, and as such, cannot be said to constitute a political reaction such as restoring the monarchs of Europe to their previous places as heads of state. Fascism, to be absolutely clear, sought to establish something new, something based on ideological principles, not something which served as a superficial appeal towards traditional forms of the past.
Fascism was only reactionary in so far as it served as a reaction against Bolshevism. There would have been no Brownshirts had there not been Spartacists to kick of the German Revolution of 1918-19. In fact, when one looks at the history of the authoritarian Right and the totalitarian Left, one can only come away with the conclusion that the fascist and other social nationalist movements which successfully repulsed Bolshevization dissolved peacefully after the threat of communism was squarely dealt with.
With the exception of Nationalist Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy, every other fascist state transitioned into a liberal democracy after the strongman who founded that state passed away: The Estado Novo established by Salazar was dissolved by the Carnation revolution (1974), Spanish Dictator Francisco Franco died in 1975 but made Spanish King Juan Carlos his appointed successor before his death, thus paving the way back to constitutional monarchy, and the South African general election of 1994 opened up the electoral process to where South Africans of all races were able to take part, a generally peaceful process which formally ended Apartheid.
While not traditionally considered "fascist" states by the classical European standard, I would also like to throw in Peronist Argentina and Indonesia under Suharto's "New Order." Peron himself would be overthrown in a military coup, the instigators of which themselves would in turn be overthrown in a succeeding series of coups, after which, a fragile democratic consensus would be established. Suharto would voluntarily give up power after an authoritarian 31-year rule as "president" after the 1997 Asian financial crisis weakened the legitimacy of his reign.
"Fascism," now understood the historical context in which it emerged out of, should come to refer to the various social nationalist movements which sought to oppose the growth of and neutralize the threat posed by communism as it began to sweep the continent and would eventually dissolve once the threat of subversion had been dealt with. The exception to this rule, of course, would be the German "Third Reich," Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy, whose leaders sought to divide the world between themselves.
Could the same be said looking Leftward, however? Which communist state or "socialist republic" was formed organically and by popular consent of the people? Having looked into the history of Leftism, one finds that not a single communist state was formed through the democratic process. In every single case, from Lenin and the Soviets to Mao Zedong and Red China, to Kim Il-Sung and the DPRK to the Vietcong and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia to the overthrow of traditional monarchies of Ethiopia (1974) and Nepal (2008), Leftism universally relies on a hardened cadre of revolutionaries to instill upon the population of whatever bereaved country it comes to find itself dominating the values of the revolution. This is because the values of the Left are fundamentally inorganic.
The ideas of the revolution could only come out of academic cloisters and intellectual parlor rooms, and not from the beer halls and taverns of the peasantry, who would always side with the traditional Church and Crown in every single instance where revolutionary activity broke out—the ideas of the Left are fundamentally the ideas of the city dweller, the cosmopolitan, the urbanite. It is the ancient battle between the World-City and the provinces, between cold academic rationalism and parochial peasant wisdom. Between "progress" and tradition.
At least, this was the argument made by the true reactionaries. Men like Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle, Joseph de Maistre and Donoso Cortes who had either lived through or were contemporaneous spectators of the Jacobin Revolution in France. This same argument would be made by the Conservative Revolutionaries of the early and mid-twentieth century whose names include Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Othmar Spann, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Junger, Oswald Spengler, and with some controversy, Julius Evola.
The problem has always lay with how the Left quantifies terms like "fascism" or "reactionary," as these are almost without exception used pejoratively and are typically devoid of the context in which they arose. For the Left, "fascism" refers to a behavior pattern across time and not, as it should, to a form of Right-wing authoritarianism that arose to challenge both liberalism and communism for ideological dominance during the interwar period. Fascism, for the Leftist, does not describe a limited historical phenomenon, but an anterior feeling that emerges temporally to challenge the values of either liberalism or socialism.
For the Leftist, the Confederates of the American Civil War were "proto-fascists" just like how the critics of Leftism or liberal democracy of today, regardless of whether they identify with those regimes of the 20th century, are "neo-fascists." For the Leftist, fascism is not an identity, it is behavioral pathology. But why stop there? Taking this line of thinking to its obvious conclusion, regimes as different across time as they are across cultures also fall into this same category of behavior. Pharaonic Egypt is as fascist as Achaemenid Persia and both as fascistic as the slave-holding republics of ancient Greece and Rome.
To reemphasize: for the Leftist, fascism doesn't describe a modern form of government based on militarism or ultranationalism, but merely a certain mode of thinking and behaving. Again, we return to the Hanzian definition of fascism: i.e., "faustian" values, or power politics, applied to "modern society." This is why anything and everything that smacks of illiberalism, heroism, and a referential starting point in the values of the past cause the Leftist to go into hysterics—it is the fascist creep, the Brown Scare, the ghost of the revenant Blackshirt come to haunt the sensitive and refined sensibilities of the cosmopolitan.
Put simply, it is a word that has come to signify nothing.
Progressive Teleology and Neoliberal Progressivism
For a movement to be revolutionary in character it must be in opposition to a status quo. For a revolution to be successful, the values of the ancien régime must be replaced with the values of the revolution. What is this status quo of today and who are its defenders? Hanzi himself describes the reigning meta-ideology of our times as being "Green social liberalism," a kind of catch-all term meant to neatly describe the cultural "software" or attitudes prevalent in Western Europe, and to some extent the greater Western world as we stand now at the early twenty-first century.
With respect to Hanzi, I think a little clarification might be in order, or rather, let me be as so bold as to throw in my own two cents into the equation: "Green social liberalism" is actually an outgrowth of the real reigning meta-ideology, the cultural software embedded in the fleshy solid-state drives of our Western minds—Neoliberal Progressivism.
Okay, well, what's the difference? They both sound the same, aside from the prefix "neo," right? Sure, maybe at first glance. But I am choosing my words carefully here. While Hanzi has talked about transcending capitalism by gradually "outcompeting it," it doesn't actually take into account the seriousness of which the reign of capital controls every aspect of our lives. Hanzi's critique of capitalism, as well as his potential replacement of it, is just as non-serious as his proposition for a Listening Society as an effective replacement for the political. It also presumes, as with everything he has proposed, that the capitalist welfare state, and more to the point, the post-industrial luxury economy which has allowed it to exist in the first place, will endure uninterrupted until the end of time.
Hanzi is correct in stating that, "Postmodernism can’t abolish or replace capitalism because it doesn’t provide any means to compete with the logic of money capital." This is because, and I am in agreement with the late Frederic Jameson here, that postmodernity and postmodernism are effectively the logic of Late Capitalism which began with the post-War Bretton Woods consensus that ensured that Neoliberal Progressivism would be the reigning paradigm once the fascist empires were squarely squashed under the Allied boot.
Neoliberal Progressivism expresses itself differently depending on the area of life or sphere of thought and action where it has come to dominate. In politics, it known as globalism, in economics, neoliberal finance-capitalism, in ethics, social liberalism, in law, it is expressed through the power the supernational criminal courts such as the ICC and the European Court of Human Rights, as well as the police actions organized by the United Nations and Atlanticist powers, in religion, secular humanism, in aesthetics, Frutiger Aero, Corporate Memphis and Flat Design as well as artistic tendencies within postmodernism.
Suffice to say that the status quo of our day and age is the Neoliberal Progressive consensus. I say that this consensus is neoliberal because of 1). the endurance of the Bretton Woods monetary system since 1944, and that it is progressive because, 2). underpinning the entire philosophic outlook of this entire system in an enduring, unshakeable belief in the myth of social progress. I have already alluded to this view as progressive teleology.
Where progressive teleology originally came from is a matter of debate. There are neopagans who say it began with Christianity, while Christians say it began with the Reformation, the Enlightenment and birth of revolutionary politics. The cardinal sin and ultimate failure of all Left-wing or liberal thought projects are that they assume progressive teleology as both their axiom and telos. In opposition to the Right, which believes that societies, cultures, and even entire civilizations gradually go through phases of birth, growth, maturity and decline. Leftism—and this is the Ding an sich of Leftism—assumes that at the end of history, off in the always-not-yet-here, is a great big loot box containing the all the happiness and utilitarian pleasure that is and ever will be to be equally redistributed by those fortunate enough to live to see the final society—the workers' paradise, the socialist world republic, the classless society of the Diggers and anarchists, and, perhaps potentially, the Listening Society.
Progressive teleology is so deeply embedded into our everyday assumptions that it is almost impossible to attempt to imagine a world without it. One could even say that it is easier to imagine a world without capitalism than it is to imagine one without the belief in progress.
By "progress" I mean unlimited progress which assumes that at some point in the near or distant future there will eventually be a society where disease, hunger, alienation, greed, injustice, and discrimination will (for the most part) cease to be, and freedom and justice will run free like the waters of life from the base of the living tree in a secular New Jerusalem. Contrasted to this is the idea of limited or conditional progress, which is simply asking ourselves, either individually or collectively, "How do we get from point A to be point B?" Of course, the problem is what yardstick do we use to measure "progress?" With the honest answer being that no such yardstick exists. It is one thing if we, collectively, as ancient Greek citizens of a polis, wished to build a new amphitheater, temple or public bathhouse for the use and enjoyment of the entire demos, it is another matter entirely if we want to build paradise on earth.
Now, again with respect to Hanzi, he at least makes the difference between utopias, protopias and eutopias so I can't accuse him of falling for the error of progressive teleology, at least not completely. The problem, however, is that the protopian ideals of political metamodernism only serve to act in service to Neoliberal Progressivism and its continued perpetuation of international finance-capitalism upon the earth. If anything, political metamodernism serves as mere reformist tendency within the Neoliberal Progressive monologue. Monologue is the appropriate word here, as I mean to emphasize that there is only a monologue, and not a dialogue, taking place from within Neoliberal Progressivism itself.
Not even revolutionary socialism and global intifada is enough to shake Neoliberal Progressivism off its throne. This is because socialism has already been coopted by the reigning liberal meta-ideology. In Western politics, one can be a "conservative" liberal, a "socialist" liberal or a "progressive" liberal as long as you don't threaten the status quo with what it fears most—illiberalism, viz., the idea that maybe ideas such as democracy, egalitarianism, and multiculturalism aren't all what they're cracked up to be. That is unacceptable. Is it any wonder then that the majority of Western European "conservative" parties are further to the Left than the US Democratic Party?
Besides, the Radical Left is an aged thing, a creature that lost its teeth decades ago. Try walking into the World Bank, the Pentagon, the Halls of Congress and start rolling around on the floor, shouting, "Black lives matter!" "No human is illegal!" "End the occupation!" until you're frothing at the mouth. While you might get some curious looks, chances are most of the onlookers would agree with what you're saying. Such is the reality of the American Federal Empire.
We have now established that the dominant meta-ideology is Neoliberal Progressivism, the ideology that all other ideologies, whether liberal, socialist, social democratic, populist or conservative, all find themselves amalgamated into. Political metamodernism, therefore, serves to reinforce the status quo, not challenge it. With that said, it can now be established that political metamodernism is not an ideology of revolutionary change, but that of preserving the status quo. What force can then be said to be operating in opposition to the status quo?
Enter the Meta-Right.
The Meta-Right is not conservatism, because it understands the age of kings has passed. The Meta-Right is not Traditionalism, although it makes use of traditional wisdom. The Meta-Right is not fascism, although it understands perfectly well nature of power and its application to politics, the allure of a sleek black uniform, the temptation to be the "brute in the boot." The Meta-Right is not libertarianism, because it understands that the State is the only true political subject. However, the Meta-Right is also not mere statism, as it understands the personal dignity of every citizen and the inviolability of his property.
For all this nonsense about the supposed "reactionary" tendencies of the Meta-Right, I myself am not seeing it. This is because the Meta-Right is, if anything at all, a futurist ideology. Moreover, it is an ideology of re-capturing lost futures. Futures that have either been interrupted or denied us because of Late Capitalism, or the World Wars, or simply because the course of history meandered another way.
Moreover, I don't think its correct to label the Meta-Right a political ideology either. That is one thing that it shares with "political" metamodernism. If political metamodernism is a socio-psychological movement attempting to style itself as political, then the Meta-Right is an aesthetic movement which is also attempting to style itself in the same way. But the thing about real political movements is that they are all founded for the express purpose of attaining, securing and executing power.
It makes no difference whether the movement in question is a group of wignat separatists, a revolutionary worker's party or an eco-conscious Green party who want to promote de-growth and gender affirmation surgery for all. The goal of political parties to participate in politics, viz., to pursue activity in relationship to power. To the best of my knowledge, neither the Meta-Right nor Hanzian political metamodernism have seriously pursued this. This is because, I believe, metamodernism itself is still primarily an aesthetic movement, or rather, a movement of cultural criticism.
And here's the rub: it would be far more accurate to say that there are multiple "metamodernisms" than there is a unified coherent theory of metamodernism as such, with each of these "metamodernisms" seeking to achieve different goals. I have already written about this in the past, but to summarize, there is an academic metamodernism which deals with cultural criticism within the sciences and humanities (Zavarzadean, Vermuelen and van der Akken, Storm, Henriques), a metamodernism centered on socio-psychological development and a gradation of cultural stages (Hanzi Freinacht and Lene Rachel Anderson), and finally, the metamodernism, if one can call it at that, of the Meta-Right.
The Meta-Right seeks to successfully integrate elements of modernity (and yes, even postmodernity) without fully rejecting the past. And this, in my view, is the great error of "Hanzimodernism," because while Hanzi and friends accuse the Meta-Right and other "neo-reactionaries" (who apparently have nothing to do with the Dark Enlightenment) of failing to successfully integrate postmodernism, Hanzi and his disciples consistently fail to integrate the "lower" Value Memes. They fail to see the potential benefits, I would even argue the necessity, of incorporating ancient wisdom. I say "ancient wisdom" because I find it to be something of a neutral term. I would say Tradition, but perhaps that would be too Evolian; too reactionary.
What is postmodernism after all but an internal culture of criticism? In fact, I would say this entire response has been an exercise in postmodern critique leveled at Hanzimodern assumptions about developmental progress. The guns of postmodernism have been turned away from the smoldering ruins of institutionalism towards his Alpine redoubt, and this time, those intellectual canons are in the hands of the Right.
The problem with postmodernism is that it assumes that the whole, or context, is greater than the sum of its parts. Postmodernism hollows out the parts at the expense of the whole; the whole remains, although rendered vacuous, because the parts have been rendered meaningless by way of deconstruction. Or in another way, postmodernism claims that objectivity cannot formally exist but assumes the position of objectivity in its assumption of the context.
Such a position can be a useful tool but ultimately fails at integrating a system of values. Modernism was about valuation, postmodernism devaluation, and metamodernism transvaluation. For the time being, we are still stuck in the postmodern quagmire of hollowing out, of deconstruction and word games, of being a critic and not a participant.
But the Right is no stranger to its own kind of postmodernism. One could even say that the philosophy espoused by thinkers like Alexandr Dugin is simply postmodernism merged with Radical Traditionalism. This way of thinking could also be applied to the Nouvelle Droite and the Dark Enlightenment. In fact, if one wanted to be so bold, one could even say that Rene Guenon and the Traditionalist School was the birth of Right-wing postmodernism, as it emerged as both a reaction against and critique of modernism and the modern world. But perhaps I won't go that far.
But other examples exist. It is very common for people on the Right to style themselves as both a "nationalist" and a "traditionalist," but in reality, this is actually a contradiction. Nationalism is a product of the modern world, not the Traditional world. Nationalism had its genesis with the American and Jacobin Revolutions and, up until nationalism's cooption by fascism, nationalism had a decisively liberal character such as the European revolutions of 1848 as well as those in Latin America against the Spanish Crown. Traditionalism, by contrast, emphasizes the importance of assuming one's social duties as assigned by one's caste or estate, of obedience to one's liege lord.
Traditionalism is the Holy Roman Empire, nationalism is the Kaiserreich.
Traditionalism is the House of Savoy, the Papal States, the Two Scillies, the Most Serene republics, nationalism is the Risorgiomento.
Traditionalism is the Empire; modernism is the nation-state. And this, too, represents an oscillation between two structures of feeling.
For the Left, metamodernism is an academic proposition that Marxism represents an incomplete critique of capitalism due to postmodernism's failure to generate social capital and the realization that postmodernism is unable to produce anything other than deconstruction and criticism.
For the Right, metamodernism is the convergence between symbol and time, as opposed to function and form. That time is neither exclusively linear nor cyclical but both—that time is fractal and that history is ultimately an exercise in ontology—that our experience of both time and history, of both symbol and language, of both Will and desire acting within temporal space is a great Mandelbrot set just beyond our senses, imperceptible in everyday life but perceptible when we orient the "I" towards what emerges from sentiment, and that it is this which produces our image of the self.
For us, metamodernism, and more to the point, our future metamodernity, is a synthesis of past and future, an attempt to create a resonant eternal present, our own "end of history," a completion of the Hegelian dialectic where the physical and metaphysical, the immanent and transcendent, the existential and the ideal, the personal and the universal are united into a single mythos. For us, it is the return of myth, the final triumph of mystical philosophy over cold unfeeling rationalism.
For us, it is an attempt to drunk off of our own progressive teleology, knowing full well that such an endeavor is doomed to failure even before it begins, with the knowledge that all Golden Ages must pass, that the Dark Ages must come, but even in the midst of the Dark Age the possibility of a new time of heroes is made possible, and thus a new Golden Age along with it.
Transnationalism and the Civilization-State
Looking at the state of the world today, it is clear that the neoliberal world order has taken its share of its beatings. This, I believe, is the thing that has terrified Hanzi, as well as believers in progressive teleology, more than anything else. The success of Viktor Orbán's Hungary, Poland's continued ability to defy the EU's immigration mandates, the victory of the Taliban over the American Federal Empire, the growth and spread of illiberalism and illiberal ideas not only in Russia and China, which never had a tradition of democracy to begin with, but across the Western world, attest that the hegemony that liberalism has held since 17th and 18th centuries is once again being challenged.
No matter which way you look at it, cracks are emerging in the neoliberal world order with the existence of liberalism, with many having once held the Fukuyamian belief that liberalism would remain unchallenged until Kingdom Come, are now questioning if it will survive this century.
For people on the Left, as well as for liberals, this represents, as Friis and others have already shouted to the rafters, a descent into lower forms of socio-psychological development. The spread of illiberalism represents a return to barbarism, to medievalism, to savagery, superstition and fascism. For those of us on the Right, this merely represents a fundamental and inevitable correction in the nature of the human condition.
The nature of the human condition has been defined by and has evolved alongside the family, religion and collective identity. Take any one of these three away and what you have is not the blueprints for further stages of human evolutionary and psychological development but the sowing of the seeds of an anti-Culture which is antithetical to anything authentically human. The end result is always the same wherever the eviction of one or more of these three fundamentals has been tried, and that is with genocide, bloodshed and unnecessary human suffering. This is due in part to the eclipsing of ideology over religion.
Ideology is the antithesis of religion, ideology represents modernism's (the "Mean Orange Meme") attempts to demystify and desacralize the world by replacing it with human notions of how the world should work, not necessarily how it is, or how ancient wisdom unanimously held it to be. Ideology is modernity's attempt to impose itself as the new religion, and this has manifested in the three "great" ideologies of modernity—communism, fascism, and liberalism.
While admittedly nowhere as bloody as communism or fascism, liberal totalitarianism has, in a way, been far more insidious and far more corrosive. You can't take away a people's religion and replace it with superhero movies and mindfulness seminars. People need myth. In the absence of myth, people will turn to political radicalism, and with no priesthood in place in order to check and regulate human behavior; to provide rites of absolution and make clean what is ceremonially unclean, the results will inevitably speak for themselves.
For all their bluster about the benefits of socio-psychological developmental practices, people on the Left are far worse off mentally than any other group of people in the post-industrialized world. They are the most heavily medicated, the most likely to seek out therapy, and often the most deeply unhappy. It's easy for us on the Right to laugh and shake our heads at these people who think that Donald Trump and Elon Musk represent the re-ascendence of National Socialism, but for Leftists, this is no joking matter—they genuinely believe that it has been March 1933 on and off the world over for over eight years.
This has been due to relative success of national conservative parties and populist movements both in Europe and in the United States, again, a testament to the enduring fact that humans do better when they have some semblance of a collective identity and cultural consciousness. Human beings are not little units of labor and capital that can be whisked around willy-nilly across the planet to generate revenue and profit for faceless multinationals. Conversely, they are also not mere proletarians or bourgeoise whose human identity is defined solely by their tax brackets.
Every human community is made up either of a people, nation or State. In some instances, all three of these categories are united into what has been come to be defined, in modern parlance, as the nation-state. A people is any form of grouping that is bound together by a consciousness greater than its own. The protestors who established the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone were, in the most basic sense, a "people" insofar as they were bound together by a psychic impulse that transcended their mere individual existence. The tension between us-ness and other-ness is all that is needed in the most rudimentary sense for the creation of a people.
A nation is any people who bear within themselves a cultural idea. As outlined in our previous example, a people can be little more than a mob led by a simple herd consciousness, no different than football hooliganism. A nation is a people who are united by some concept of a shared cultural identity. Typically, this is expressed by a common language, religion, history, folk dress and customs. The existence of a State is not necessary to the existence of either a people or a nation, as the Palestinian, Kurdish, Tibetan, Uyghur, Maya or Cherokee nations demonstrate. In some cases, a burgeoning nation can be absorbed into a greater national identity as was the case with the Novorossiyan people-nation into the Russian Federation or Lotharingia into Germany and the Frankish kingdom in the 10th century.
The creation of nations is usually the result of external pressures from either their neighbors or environment. The Latin refugees who fled the Hunnic invasions into Italy during the 5th century and settled by the Adriatic coast would eventually become the Venetian nation, the Norse settlers who would go on to populate an uninhabited island in the North Atlantic would eventually become the Icelanders, the Zaporozhian Cossacks who settled beyond the Dnieper were the ethnogenesis for the Ukrainians; the British colonists would founded colonies across the planet would in time burgeon into the American, Canadian, and Australian people-nations. The same can be said with the Dutch farmers would eventually become the Boer nation whose republics encompassed much of western South Africa.
The existence of a State is the highest form self-determination a people-nation can attain. The State (again, not society) is the culmination of all political activity. A State is nation in form, which is to say, primed for action, for activity in relationship to power. In some cases, this can split the nation into two—one could really say that there were two Englands during the war between the Parliamentarians and the Cavaliers, two Americas during the war between the Union and the Confederacy, two Chinas during the war between the Nationalists and Communists, with each of these factions representing a differing political trajectory for cultural soul of the nation.
In other cases, the emergence of the State represents a gradual transition from people to nation, to the State. For example, the European Jews who settled in Palestine were simply European Jews, the eventual emergence of a cultural consciousness founded on Zionism, the Hebrew language, and the founding of the State of Israel was the final competition of the Israeli people as a distinct political reality from Jewishness as mere ethno-religious marker. In cases where settler colonialism is not present, the emergence of the State is usually the result of the foundation of a dynasty or the establishment of an independent political unit from a preexisting suzerain.
All of this has been said to lead up to the following: that even the people-nation-State model is itself an emanation of higher cultural forces. It is Culture that produces nations, which each nation being the embodiment of a specific Culture-Idea. In our own day in age, we are beginning to see the sublimation of parochial nationalism towards what has been described by Lucian Pye and Bruno Maçães as the Civilization-State.
One does not need to be a student of Alexandr Dugin to realize that the world is shifting away from a unipolar order, characterized by American imperial hegemony, towards a multipolar order characterized by the monopolization of certain world-spaces by regional or great powers—Russia over the Eurasian landmass, the United States over North America, France and Germany in West Europe, China over East Asia and the Pacific, Iran and Turkey in the Middle East, Turkey and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus, Venezuela and Brazil in Latin America, and so on.
Neoliberal Progressivism takes for granted that the Global American Empire will defend capitalism and enforce liberalism and liberal ideas ad infinitum, but the shifting away from Europe by the Trump administration towards a focus on internal security at home and jingoism in the Western Hemisphere has left this in doubt. Without American imperial intervention, it is dubious whether West Europe can actively pursue a policy of Russian pacification in Ukraine and possibly Transnistria and the Baltics as well.
The emergence of the Civilization-State represents true transnationalism and transpersonalism. One can say that nations such as England, France or Germany, represent historical realities, have a real and distinct meaning, and one would be correct. Outside of Europe, one could also apply this to Jews, Muslims, Druze, Yazidi, Maronites, Syriac and Coptic Christians living in the Middle East, and one would still be correct. One could also say that Europe, Eurasia, the Sinosphere, Arkhand Bharat, the Ummah, and Africa, have a higher historical meaning and reality and the answer would still be the same.
The problem with Hanzimodern transpersonalism and transnationalism is that it is effectively an outsourcing of identity. One can be for the emancipation of Palestine, Tibet or the Karen people of Burma, yes, but only as a friend and only as an outside observer. In the end, one is bound, and ultimately conditioned, by the people, nation or language that one is born into. The issues between Americans and Europeans matter because both peoples belong to Western civilization, the movements within and beyond the Arab or Muslim worlds matter precisely because one is either an Arab or a Muslim, the legacy of colonialism in Africa can only make sense because one is an African.
Friis says that the "antidote" for "reactionary thinking" is to constantly expand "[y]our circle of solidarity, your cognitive complexity, your emotional depth" and that "[t]he moment you contract, the moment you build walls instead of bridges, the moment you choose resentment over integration—that’s the moment you start sliding backward, no matter how sophisticated your excuses" all the while he hypocritically fails to expand his own social circle towards those he deems to be "neo-reactionaries."
However, in the end like can only be known by like, never by what is fundamentally alien. The end result of this way of thinking is situation in Sweden and Canada today, which now resemble both Africa and the Muslim world and India and China, respectively, rather than the West. A Somali or Iraqi Muslim in Malmö will always have more in common with a Somali or an Iraqi back home than anything with a Swede. The end of multicultural democracy will always be ethnic tribalism, conflict and dictatorship.
Dictatorship represents the ultimate failure of the democratic system. It is a parody, the "ape" of monarchy; entirely lacking the true principles from which the latter emerged. From the ancient Greek tyrannies to the dictatorships of the modern world, a dictator can only emerge because public order has broken down to the point that his existence becomes fundamentally necessary to the State's existence. Let me be clear: dictatorship is never a good thing, but sometimes, it is necessary.
It may be, at the very end, that Western Europe will have its own series of dictators who will use terror and imprisonment to "defend" liberalism from "fascists" and "reactionaries" who seek to abolish liberal democracy, much like how Napoleon justified his conquests as spreading the liberal ideas of the Revolution even after he had crowned himself l'empereur. This will be the natural conclusion of neoliberal progressivism, of the ancien régime, of the old neoliberal world order that is now, finally, beginning to pass away.
And let me be clear, Neoliberal Progressivism, and the ancillary ideologies associated with it, do in fact represent the established political order, in the form of political globalism. Again, one need not be a student of Alexandr Dugin to realize that what we need, after the waning of liberalism, is a fourth political theory, but not necessarily the Fourth Political Theory. This is because it will be ideology, not religion, that will continue to proliferate among the Western minds, despite what some handwringers may say about the growth of "Christian nationalism."
Christianity will almost certainly remain a force for cultural normalization or aesthetic unity and revitalization, but nothing more than that. It is in this sense that modernity, represented by ideology and nationalism over Church and Empire, will continue to endure.
Civilizational Development as Trauma
No one can say what the final collapse of liberalism due to its inherently contradictory nature will look like. It may very well be violent; it may very well be gradual and peaceable, needless to say, it positively will happen.
This is where the Meta-Right comes in. It is the task of the M-R to shape to take the aesthetic reigns and through writing, poetry, music, painting, and digital art and bring to life those futures that were lost as well as inspire what possible futures that could be with the passing of liberalism and postmodernity.
My message to Hanzi is this: despite what he might otherwise think, liberal democracy is unsustainable, but my message to the Right is that we need not continue "posting aesthetic montages of Roman statues as a cure for the 'degeneracy of the West'" (although perhaps pictures of neon lit poolrooms, and liminal spaces might be more preferable). Before any potential political movement can be begin, we must first win the battle for aesthetic dominance.
Even this isn't foreign to Hanzi and the metamodernists, with their images of a future after postmodernism, (which has been fully integrated though, don't you forget!) of a solarpunk protopia with non-binary and afrofuturist elements populated by racially diverse post-Europeans. Juxtaposed to this are Meta-Right visions of post-cyberpunk futuristic cityscapes where cities of marble and glass are bathed in the purples and yellows of neon light, where the massive domes of crypto banks rise to meet the sky, where the occasional pedestrian passes by an augmentation clinic where one can have one's limbs outfitted with bionics (perfectly legal in this world, of course).
Before we can win the future, we must first be able to imagine it. And while all of this artistic daydreaming might sound silly, it is meant to illustrate a purpose—that another world is possible.
It doesn't matter if the future after postmodernity is a solarpunk protopia or 19A0s vapor-futurist corporatism. The fact that no one can predict the future with absolute certainty is what makes it so fearful and exciting. Between solarpunk or cyberpunk post-postmodern futurescapes, the future after postmodernity could very well devolve into an ecofascist global genocide, a Malthusian population collapse, then transition into voluntarist post-agrarianism or, through an intensification of hypermodernism, might accelerate into full blown hypercapitalism or fully automated gay space communism. Other possible futures could include an archeofuturist clan world, an interplanetary civilization, Project Venus or a technocratic theocracy. Any future after postmodernism is entirely possible.
Throughout this article I have made reference, for the sake of convenience, to the Value Memes of both Hanzian metamodernism and Spiral Dynamics. This has been for simplicities sake, not because I am convinced in the reality of these Value Memes, but simply because I acknowledge their usefulness to easily condense certain phases of human, or more to the point Western, sociological development. I myself am not a believer in progressive teleology, I do not a believe that a higher state of moral development, whether that be Turquoise or "Coral" exists beyond the emerging post-postmodern cultural consensus, or in the belief that a chosen few will apotheosize into Yogic supermen who only need to subsist on green tea and the mystical woo energy of the universe.
Spiral Dynamics, Integral Theory and Hanzimodernism are products of progressive teleology. Because Ken Wilber is a liberal, and Hanzi a "green social liberal," these believe that human moral and psychology must keep ascending through certain phases of development until they reach a kind of secular theosis. But I am a man of the Right, and I do not believe in the idea of progress, either objectively or philosophically. The truth of the matter is that Cultures, or civilizations if one prefers, go through phases of constant adaption to internal and external stimuli which cause that civilization to develop or redevelop in certain ways. This is what the different colors of spirals really represent.
Why is it then that only Western civilization has reached the "higher phases" of cultural and socio-psychological development? Why is Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, the Orthodox-Slavic oikumene, the Indosphere and much of the Sinosphere still languishing behind at the levels of Faustian and post-Faustian values?
Why is it that fate entrusted the development of the "Yellow" or metamodern Value Meme to Scandinavia and Germany? What course brought providence to see fit that 18th century England would be the birthplace of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution which produced the "Orange" Value Meme? Why was Spain, during that same time period, the birthplace of Ultramontanism, and thus a resurgence of "post-Faustian" values? The only real explanation is that Spiral Dynamics only makes sense, not as a system of ascending values, but as intra-cultural system of analysis for describing phases within Western culture itself. Spiral Dynamics, and by extension Hanzimodernism, are thus exercises in Eurocentrism.
The object of focus should not be on supposed Value Memes, but on cultural phases in the life of a civilization. It is not the cultivation of developmental skills or the expansion of one's social network, but how one responds to trauma which defines both people and civilizations.
And trauma is the correct word here.
It is through events such as wars, plagues, foreign invasions, revolutions, economic crashes, conflicts between classes or estates, and population shifts that cause civilizations to develop and redevelop in the way that they do. The West would develop the concept of the separation of Church and State precisely because it experienced the Investiture Crisis, that centuries long conflict between the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy, contrasted to this is the conception of symphonia in Eastern Christendom or the Islamic conception of sharia and the caliphate.
Why is it that the self-styled gurus within the Integral community frequently draw from the non-dualist traditions of Advaita Vedanta or Madhyamaka Buddhism of India as inspiration for their higher levels of psychological development when the Culture that produced these non-dualist philosophies was unambiguously "post-Faustian?" The West, whose spiritual foundations lie with Gothic Christianity, never had an indigenous tradition of philosophical non-dualism. This view had to be imported by these same self-styled gurus, hippie yogis and aspiring cult leaders—an Indian patina applied onto a Gothic cathedral.
Even the "Green" or postmodern Value Meme, as we understand it, could only have come about because of the Allied victory in World War II and the triumph of American innovation over Soviet manpower at the end of the Cold War period. Had it been fascism or communism that had emerged victorious during either of these historical backdrops, our conception of what it means to be "postmodern" would be entirely different and would have been developed, either as an extension of fascist or communist thought, or more likely, as an Anglo-American reaction to the German Reich or Soviet Union's predominance in global politics.
It is civilizational trauma which causes Culture's, on the macro level, and people, on the micro level, to develop in the ways that they do. There is no, and never has been, any proof of an emerging global human consciousness. Higher consciousness is concentrated within High Culture's, and out of the Culture's pour forth the myriad nations, classes, castes and estates, great people—artists, scientists, generals, merchants, engineers, prophets—ways of courtship, styles of architecture, technology, languages, folk customs, religions, philosophies and mathematics.
And now we return to where we are at today.
We stand at a crossroads and, depending on which route we take, will ultimately determine which new phase of Western culture, and its impact on other Cultures, emerges from the postmodern paradigm. Phase, and not Value Meme, is the correct word here, as the ultimate fate of liberalism and Neoliberal Progressivism, whether it continues to endure for another century, morphs into something else or vanishes completely, will ultimately be decided here, in the near future, in the Western world.
The world order established by Neoliberal Progressivism since 1945 has come to an impasse. It looks around the world, sees that its hegemony is being challenged, that every year the forces of the Right inch ever forward, not only in the West, but as far as Brazil, Russia, India, Korea and Japan.
The original question of this article was who among us are the real reactionaries? And to my mind, the answer could not be clearer. It is those forces which oppose the coming spirit of the age, who deep within their guts are terrified by the possibility of a real revolutionary fervor, who seek comfort in the old comfortable and familiar bosom of the neoliberal order.
The revolutionary tradition must be picked up by the Right as much as the Right has come to be defined by the aristocratic tradition. In a sense, we must become post-reactionary. No other option is available to us. The Meta-Right cannot be a mere backward-looking romanticism, it cannot be led by a gaggle of tweed wearing Roger Scruton clones. That way is failure, that way is death. To desire to return to previous culture forms means to consign oneself to encyclopedism and antiquarianism. It is the failure of the conservative; that pathetic creature who can only find value in the accomplishments of the past, utterly incapable of producing any new form of value creation.
This does not mean, however, that we are ungrateful to our ancient forebears and the inheritance that they have handed down to us. Far from it. We must always seek to incorporate ancient wisdom, however, without becoming Legalists, afraid of anything new or innovative.
In the 19th century, the political future of Europe would be decided in a climactic battle between Napoleon, representing the revolutionary tradition, and the forces of the Holy Alliance. As history shows, Napoleon would be defeated and the Concert of Europe would be established, chaired by Chancellor Klemens von Metternich. Metternich and the Concert of Europe represented the aristocratic tradition of European politics, and thus, could be said to be the righteous ancestors of the political Right. Regardless, the seeds which Jacobinism had sewn had already come to bear fruit and Metternich and other European princelings would be ousted in the Revolutions of 1848. Liberalism was an idea whose time had come.
But liberalism is an idea that is over three centuries old. It is an idea which has survived the World Wars, outlived the communist States of the previous century who, having once occupied one-third of the planet, have now been reduced to only five countries. But the tides, once again, are turning, and this sea change is beginning to take the wind out of its sails.
The future of those young people growing up in the liberal democracies of the West today will be one of doublethink and contradictions—liberalism, at its core, espouses freedom from government, but the liberal and social democracies of Europe imprison dissenters of West Europe's runaway immigration policies that have rapidly changed the continent's ethnic and cultural landscape, perhaps permanently.
Europe will have to learn to be multicultural, in a way that America has had to be for some time, and already the consequences of Hart-Cellar have already made themselves manifest in the land of free. But as Europe becomes more multicultural, it will eventually become less liberal, precisely because of the presence of non-Westerners. For a young person living in Europe or America today, one will eventually find oneself living among people who have no history of liberal democracy, no desire for liberal democracy and will inevitably have to compete and interact with them in the world economy which sees neither race, culture, or creed, only a profit margin which must always go up. Inevitably, by interacting with these non-Westerners, one will eventually have to learn to abandon liberalism itself.
Democracy, I believe, will endure. In some way, at least. But democracy must learn to purify itself from liberalism if the democratic tradition, which has set apart the nations of the West from the rest of the world, intends to survive in any meaningful way. Perhaps, in this scenario, elements of liberalism will be incorporated into the future Meta-States that emerge out of Neoliberal Progressivism's carcass, the remnant of a previous "Value Meme" made redundant by the updating of our cultural software.
In these future States founded by the Meta-Right, one can imagine that in the neon-lit cities of that future there exist transgender neopagans, BDSM hobbyists, eco-conscious save-the-earther's, Zen Buddhists and milquetoast social democrats living peaceable alongside Christian survivalists and crunchy homesteading tradwives, paleolibertarian cryptobros, Southern Baptists and dweeby theology obsessed Thomists, each of them having their own spaces and perhaps, their own intentional communities, existing in relative tolerance under a holistic panarchy of sorts. Conversely, it is possible that some of these future States may be more authoritarian, more Nietzschean, perhaps desiring to incorporate new technologies into the human frame, aspiring towards a kind of transhumanist supremacy.
Anything is possible, after all.
