I really think
the heavier lifting of dissertation writing is already behind me, remaining just
a couple finishing touches here and there that can be done at a more leisurely
pace, which has given me a bit more time to peruse the web and explore a bit
more of its wonderful depths (or rather, not so wonderful shallows, you never
know how attuned to irony the scarce readers of these lines may be). One of the
areas I’ve been dabbling in is the vast expanses of the neoreactionary movement(Neo Reaction),
where you can find people sporting labels that sound dangerously similar to the
one I chose for my own political philosophy some years ago, and seemingly sharing
a distaste of the progressivism of traditional left-wing policies that I could
also easily identify with. I’ve been thus reading anarcho-monarchists (Anarcho Monarchist),
national-anarchists (National Anarchists) and flat out anti-democrats (AntiDemocrat) which consider the Republican party of the
USA a bunch of “cuckservatives” that ineffectually pretend to try to stem the
growing avalanche of corruption and degeneration that summarizes most of modern
society whilst they really facilitate
their advance, and thus even more deserving of their scorn and contempt than
their traditional leftist enemies (vaguely and derisively called “liberals”, “progressives”
and some more colourful made terms like “demotists” or, horror of horrors, “SJW’s”).
Well,
thankfully the precise label of anarcho-traditionalism doesn’t seem to have
been claimed yet, which suits me fine, as I consider I’m fully Marxist in that
respect (of Groucho’s persuasion, of course, never Karl’s), and “would never belong
to a club that accepted people like myself”, so had I found some
anarcho-traditionalist around I would have had to review how I defined my own
position. Not that I find all the views I’ve been acquainting myself with of
late entirely abhorrent (I can sympathize with some elements of their ideology,
and some proponents seem more intelligent/ interesting/ astute than others,
although I find their jeremiads and overtly apocalyptic tone not much to my
liking), but again I find substantial differences with my Weltanschaaung, and that has led me to think it would be good to
stake out my own position, so if in later times the always protean anarchist
(or traditionalist) movements honor their tradition of accelerated mutation and
production of spinoffs, I will be able to correct whoever claims to be an
anarchotraditionalist and to show that I thought of the term before, and that
whatever it is he or she understand by it is woefully incorrect.
What better,
then, than to define in this and some following posts the full Anarcho Traditionalist Manifesto (ATM). Damn,
the acronym is already taken, so I’ll need to think in something else. But in
the meantime, let’s get on with the action
Anarcho Traditionalist
Manifesto. Because a) current society sucks, and b) why not?
A spectre haunts
the developed world - the spectre that, although not awful by historical
standards, things could be much better than they are. Society produces unheard of quantities of
material goods, but millions teeter at the verge of poverty and destitution,
and even between those well-sheltered, well-dressed and well-fed the lingering
doubt of what may become of them if the business climate takes a turn for the
worse keeps them awake at night, and unable to rest or truly relax.
Periodic
crises rock the economic sphere (while the mouthpieces of the powerful try to
convince the masses that such crises are something of the past, and that the
last one will not be repeated in our lifetimes) and consign increasing numbers
to joblessness and despair (even in the countries with more generous safety
nets, as such joblessness is everywhere a searing stigma, not be lightly borne).
The threat of loosing one’s job keeps the workers in line, so that in every
upswing most of the increase in income, security and wealth flow to a minority
who is already rich beyond any historical precedent.
The mechanism
that makes the many participants and accomplices in their own subjection is
transparent enough for everybody to see: a socially sanctioned rationality that
maintains that
1. the ultimate and only reason for
acting, the true end of any human life, is to satisfy desires
2. there is only one desire: to improve
one’s position in the social hierarchy. Every other thing apparently desired is
so to the extent that it can be shown to the rest of the social body and
boasted about
3. there is only one measure of such
position: the possession of material goods and the access to experiences that
can be ranked and valued by the amount of money spent on them
Such rationality has developed historically
as the product of competing societies embodied in different (and opposed)
Nation States born after the peace of Westphalia in Europe in 1648. The
societies that adopted the 3 articles of faith more thoroughly outcompeted the
rest, produced more goods, equipped better armies and fleets, and dominated the
world in ever more comprehensive ways. Starting by the Dutch from roughly 1650
to 1770, the British from 1770 to 1900 and finally the Americans from 1900
until Today. The Americans have completed the “manifest destiny” of such
rationality extending its sway to the whole globe, so nowadays every single
society believes equally in the 3 articles, and they compete to indoctrinate both
their youth and their elders more fiercely in them so they keep on producing
more material goods in a zero sum game that is wreaking havoc with the environment
and with the psychical and spiritual well being of their citizens, ever more
pressed to devote all their energies to such game.
So the first step to get to a better
society, to the society that the technological level of development would allow
us to inhabit, is to denounce that kind of rationality, and to unmask the
chorus of sycophants that defend it by maintaining its supposed universality and
alleged support by “human nature”. It is but a contingent and accidental
development, whose sole justification is that it helped past societies in a
scenario of international competition to manufacture more muskets and more
gunpowder than their neighbors. But in the same way than helping our ancestors
to have more babies is no rational reason to adopt a maxim of morality (and
thus a morality based on evolutionary psychology in the end undermines itself,
and can be understood only as a consequence of the warped dominant reason we
hare thereby denouncing), helping our forebears to equip stronger armies is no
rational reason to pledge our allegiance to a self-destructive set of
principles for organizing social life.
It is high time then to discard
those principles and replace them with alternative ones that allow for greater
human flourishing, that do not force us to choose between an economic development
that transforms the whole Earth in a filthy dump and a “degrowth” agenda that
condemns untold millions to a life of squalor and underdevelopment, that allows
for the sensible enjoyment of the fruits of technology and of the art and
culture that past generations have bequeathed to us. We group those alternative
principles under the banner of Anarchotraditionalism,
as they are animated by two underlying visions:
·
Liberty
and freedom, respect for individual preferences, and minimal interference with
the choices every person makes regarding how to conduct their lives and what
ends to pursue are transcendent principles to be respected as long as they do
not impinge in the equally transcendent dignity to be accorded to any rational
being. We do believe historical anarchism has been the most coherent and
combative representative of that tradition, never compromising in its pursue of
maximum autonomy and lack of constraints (thanks in part to the fact of never
having been entrusted to actually govern any polity of any size beyond a few
months of revolutionary fervor, having always been crushed by forces which
ended up reasserting statism and control)
·
As
much as the Enlightenment attempted to reinvent moral rules ex novo and recognized as legitimate
only those maxims that could be ideally reached by every lone individual by
himself, regardless of history or particular circumstances, we consider that
attempt necessarily bound to fail and end in utter relativism, skepticism and
paralyzing doubt. Men and women are reared in rich traditions, out of which
they are incapable of assigning values, and value assignment is indeed the most
defining feature of rationality (see rationality as value assignment (and sex dolls)).
So rather than rejecting tradition and attempting to rebuild our ethical maxims
from scratch, something that will never work (and that is in the end contrary
to reason, forcing reason to do violence to itself), we advocate embracing such
tradition (including the Western literary and philosophical canon, classical
music, classical institutions and Christian religion) and making it an integral
part of what the good life consists in
Now just wishing things to be so will not make
almost four centuries of folly, greed and unbridled ambition to vanish in the
air. The coming of Anarchotraditionalism will require a long, protracted
struggle to dislodge the false beliefs that today reign in the hearts and
spirits of people without them even noticing, and just preaching about the
evils of their ways and the utopian bliss of what may lie ahead never changed
anybody’s mind (not to the better, at least). This is why we have written the present
tract, the ATM, to spell out in detail the program to upend the current way of
organizing society, not for ourselves or for our own enjoyment, but for that of
our children, and of our children’s children. We will construct it from the
ground up, starting with what we understand about man (in a Kantian sense: what
can we know? What can we expect? And how should we act?), following with the
kind of society we should live in (what minimal set of rules should we strive
to enact to balance the best of our tradition with the maximum decentralization
and freedom) and finishing with how we should organize the production and
distribution of goods and services so the differential ability to exclusively
command them stops being the only worthy goal of a live well lived.
But we will do that in subsequent posts, as
this one is already long enough.
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