Materialism: Racial Identity Politics and Nihilism in the Modern World.
Figured I've argued against trends in Liberalism and Socialism enough that it's time that I make some criticism against some fascist and "AltRight" trends to--though from the perspective of a friend who simply wants lead them away from fundamental errors in their philosophy.
Now the occultist Peter J. Carroll argues for the existence of three philosophical "paradigms" he outlined as Materialist, Transcendentalist, and "Magical", whilst I have some quibbles over the third, he provides an undoubtedly useful distinction in these talks so I'll be borrowing his paradigm system, if only to discuss Transcendental and Materialist philosophy throughout their respective "epochs".
Generally I find the chief issue in the study and discussion of history is that we live in an epoch where it's categorically impossible for the "average" person to truly think like their ancestors--what I mean by that is that the Crusades, for example, are something completely inconceivable to your average person, the idea of nobility and Knights selling all they have to do battle in the Holy Land and the factors motivating them are completely incomprehensible to a person born in a world of comfort and placid Christianity, that any depictions of the time period have to essentially "bridge the gap" by chalking it up to material causes: "They could get plunder abroad" or "They were really angry." The transcendental state of mind has utterly vanished from most of the western world from at least as far back as The Enlightenment.
The distinction between the transcendental outlooks versus materialist perceptions lies fundamentally in the conception of the world: the materialist sees the universe as nothing but matter, the mechanical relationship of matter acting upon matter, the conception of the I as a collection of cells and chemical reactions that accidentally developed a series of independent reactions we call "free will"; the transcendentalist sees a universe built on fostering a relationship with the divine other, that a kind of "spirit" exists independent of matter, with apocalyptic beginnings and endings, and the sum of life being based on a divine relationship between the I in the form of the soul and God.
To the Materialist, the Transcendental view is one of baseless assumptions and guesses. To the Transcendentalist, the Materialist has given into the age old sin of Pride and has arrogantly deified his own knowledge and physical observations. Both views are based on a kind of faith--being either faith in God or faith in everything we see being everything that exists.
Focusing almost entirely on the materialist view, which developed in part thanks to the Enlightenment and Industrial revolution, we saw the quick degeneration from hope to nihilistic despair, then postmodern parody. If you take a brief look at how people imagined the future in the midst of industrial revolution, you'd see a kind of scientific utopianism: I recall one claim that man would eventually tinker with nature to such a degree that he'd exterminate horses given their lack of utilitarian use and to eliminate by consequence a species of fly quite annoying to man's sense of comfort--this was depicted as a good thing mind you. Moving further we see Socialist and Capitalist idealism, in the case of the latter we had Keynes imagining a world where people have so much free time that they wont know what to do with it all, in the case of the former we had this imagined world of total equality, an end to conflict, scientific advancement, the "star trek" dream.
Faith in the future was shattered once in WWI, twice in WWII, and then the corpse was beaten further during the cold war. Humanity stopped envisioning a world where science solves all of our problems, but rather that the long march of progress was going to rob us of our humanity and destroy anything worth actually valuing in the world. Communism, the materialist Christian parody of the rational age, had faith in it shattered by Soviet Tyranny and the mass suffering it caused, futures of scientific advancement gave way to Cyberpunk aesthetics and imagined worlds not better than the one we have, but arguably worse, with scientific advancement came climate change and visions of a world where the earth is this disgusting black mire with humanity living in squalor.
Star Trek, freed from its Utopian Socialist roots, has become a parody of Star Trek, the current series as of writing--Discovery--taking place in a galaxy with a harsh emphasis on war and conflict with throwbacks to modern identarianism to give it some semblance of meaning.
The materialist philosophy has lost any kind of hope it had in making the world a better place, the authors and works we celebrate now are either blatant escapism--in the form of fantasy literature and media--misanthropic and cynical depictions of humanity and the future, horror authors such as the great H.P. Lovecraft portraying a world of complete insanity and evil on all sides, and more. As materialist philosophy degenerated from a kind of humanistic hopefulness, to nihilistic cynicism, to postmodernism--which is in some sense an attempt to reclaim power from nihilism by trying to laugh at it, to see the universe as one big joke and its complete meaninglessness as something funny we now enter into an epoch where identity has evolved alongside postmodernism.
Postmodernism, as I said, laughs at nihilism to reclaim power. Identity--especially racial identity--embraces certain biological factors to reclaim a sense of self. Lacking the conception of a soul or inner self which communicates with the divine other, even lacking a concept of transcendental self in the "nontheistic" Buddhist manner with the lack of a soul but still an ever-fluctuating "self" you must make peace with/overcome. Instead these groups turn to Race and then bring race into the political sphere both to create a concept of self, but also to have a goal of changing or bettering the self in a purely materialistic manner.
Thus rather than seeing their consciousness as dependent on a series of chemical reactions, rather than trying to identify the self in a purely rational manner as just the brain--as the self would be in a materialist conception of the world--the self becomes the race, the disability, the sexuality, whatever biochemical reaction you can claim defines you and elevates you from a brain in a rapidly decaying shell.
Whilst this manifests most virulently in SJWs, it also is an issue in the right in the form of White Nationalism--I don't say "supremacy" because those people are rare enough and don't have much in the way of influence anymore. Now, White Nationalism is not inherently bad, in fact for the most part it's better than what we have now given the chaos that demographic displacement is causing and the the fact that even before there was a concept of "race", a new people moving in and rapidly growing larger than yours has always been seen as an invasion rather than the new terms we give it: "immigration".
Yet this becomes especially an issue because the AltRight borrows doctrines of an especially spiritual nature, it's not enough to merely be White, there's also the issue of degeneration and the moral failings that come with it, to the point where many on the AltRight likely hate "libshits" and White Leftists over other races. However this also causes some degree of hypocrisy, given both the lionizing of Hispanics like George "Can't Flim Flam the Zim Zam" Zimmerman, and of course the "Yellow Fever" gripping many influential far right figures.
Thus you get confusing racial doctrines much like what afflicted the Nazi regime, wherein Slavs were "subhumans" but Arabs and the Japanese had a "significant Aryan strain", far too often these White Nationalists argue that Asians and individuals like George Zimmerman are "Honorary" in a sense washing away the "foreignness" of them in a manner that's completely contradictory to their materialist racial obsessions and causes no end of cognitive dissonance.
What many on the far right fail to realize is that Religion provides a perfectly rational solution to their conundrum, namely that of the equal dignity of the human soul, Zimmerman will never be White according to "AltRight" standards, there's no definition you can use that wouldn't include what many on the far right would derogatorily call "beaners" among other, even less savory words. The Japanese are no more "White" than Arabs, yet they still have a very human soul under the transcendental model, and the traits that make Asians seemingly desirable among the Far-Right--namely their women's supposed "femininity" compared to "degenerate" White Women can exist just fine without trying to add a materialist-biological component to one's worldview, to see the self beyond the biological and towards the soul, obsession over "racial purity" whilst also being concerned over the degenerative state of Modernity is too contradictory and weak, something will have to give, and its far better to make alliances on spiritual grounds rather than racial ones.
However this isn't a cry to act like the cucked "civil nationalists" whimpering that "at least I have muh constitution" as their culture is stripped out from under them, opposition to the kind of globalist imperialism that seeks to demographically and culturally destroy countries cannot ever be a point the far right drops, a sense of homeland and of people is healthy for all peoples, what fundamentally matters is an end to the culture wherein such rampant, avaricious destruction in the name of economy is possible, and that can only be done through spiritual renewal and the overthrowing of the materialist paradigm. The enemy is not something divided along racial lines, but rather the whole of the modernist heresy, the Dutch-Protestant battlecry of "Better Turkish than Papish" should be renewed with a new slogan: "Better Islam than Modernity".
Posted Mar 26, 2018, 6:42 PM UTC
Postmodernism isn't materialist at all. It rejects objective reality, so there is no place left for materialism. That's why there are postmodernist thinkers attempting to criticise scientific works. They believe text is more fundamental than particles and fields. Communism of course claims to be faithful to materialism, but that's nothing but sleight of hand to pose communism as scientific theory and avoid all the difficult moral and aesthetic questions. Hegelian dialectics on which Marxism stands is purely idealistic. Hegel rejected objective reality as superfluous in the philosophical system he was playing with. Funnily enough the more thorough materialist position that was coming out of natural sciences and medicine was rejected and ridiculed by Lenin as "vulgar materialism." Commies resent the fact that scientists generally don't support their ideology even if those scientist are hard core physicalists. It might very well be true that there is nothing but the physical, but that does not mean we have all the answers. The most precise physical models can calculate an atom or two, there is not much insight physics can bring to these philosophical questions. Last but not least there are Catholics who like to use materialism to bundle up all secular philosophies into one fat straw man and reject them without a thought. I find the way Catholic theology deals with Hellenism absolutely insufficient. Jewish theology at least recognises there is such a thing as Epicureanism, Catholics were and often still are shamelessly denying there even is any secular tradition besides that which they adapted to complement their theology.
Forgive me because I'm unfortunately sick and exhausted, but to clarify: I chart postmodernism as in a sense an offshoot of Nihilism (and Dadaism), or perhaps something of a nihilistic reaction, nihilism in turn grows from materialist rejections of the spirit and the values found therein and rather takes that materialism to its logical next step: the transcendental morality we've grown up with--as a civilization--are illogical and indeed conflict with the purely materialist view we've adopted.
Thus I see postmodernism as an entirely emotional affair; one of its founding thinkers was essentially a man upset that he was abused as a child for homosexuality and thus rejected almost all social norms as a response. The movement in turn is founded on an emotional response to the same contradictions that led to nihilism, but it has a sarcastic veneer to seemingly "take back" power from nihilistic despair, that if you laugh at it hard enough you have some control in admitting you have none.
To use a metaphor, there are three "epochs" of comics; you have the "golden age" at its beginning, slowly sliding into the silver and then bronze age, where the medium transformed from blatant propaganda to sell warbonds, to fantastic stories meant to entertain people/earn a profit, to gradually adopting more mature themes. After the "metal" epoch you had the "Dark Age" of comics, where Anti-Heroes prevailed, it seemed each comicbook tried to one up its predecessor in terms of how dark it could make it, and so on. Finally we enter the modern age, which keeps some elements of the dark age in terms of tone, but has left behind the worst excesses of it for a kind of psuedo-retro veneer, it mimics on some level the better aspects of the "silver age" but the stories are decidedly more "down to earth" on some level, the typical superhero tropes are at times lightly parodied, deconstructed, and at least somewhat reconstructed, and they tend to go about plots with a degree of self-awareness.
In short each age could represent, on a level, materialist philosophy's gradual decline from hopeful idealism to nihilistic despair (though I'd argue Nihilism is not the same as cynicism) to post-modern thought. Sure in the modern age you still have "acknowledgement" of the dark age, some characters get killed, or raped, or what have you, but its all given this almost cartoony, colorful aesthetic with retro throwbacks and the heroes take their job with a sense of self-awareness, an "Ohh boy, now time to change into some spandex!"
I'm sure that metaphor wasn't really helpful, but I'm barely conscious right now; the point being that a thing like Postmodernism could only come about in a materialist system, even Gnosticism at its worse still held onto some kind of ethos and a concept that there is a reality, even if it wasn't this one.