Tucker Carlson's Dishonest Film about the Fatherhood Crisis

Tucker on Fatherhood: Here’s What He Forgot​
TOM GOLDEN

Fatherhood matters.

That’s the message at the heart of Tucker Carlson’s documentary Fathers Wanted—and it’s a message worth hearing.

A man who gives his time, his energy, and his life to his children is doing something deeply meaningful. There’s no controversy there.

But as I watched the film, I kept noticing something else.

Not what it said.
But what it didn’t.

Because by the end, the story felt strangely incomplete—like watching a documentary about lung cancer that never once mentions smoking.

The framing begins immediately.

Within the first moments, we are told that young men are choosing pornography, video games, and drugs over marriage and family. The implication is clear: the problem is not just that fatherhood is declining, but that men are turning away from it—opting for comfort, distraction, and indulgence instead.

That may be true in some cases.

But starting the story this way does something important. It establishes, from the outset, that the primary driver of fatherlessness is male behavior.

Everything that follows is filtered through that lens.

The film goes on to frame fatherlessness largely as a cultural and moral failure.

Men, we’re told, are retreating. Avoiding responsibility. Choosing comfort over commitment. Losing faith. Losing purpose.

By the end, the message is unmistakable:
good men step up, bad men walk away.

And if a father abandons his children, Carlson makes it clear—he deserves contempt.

That’s a powerful claim.

But it rests on a narrow frame.

Because what the film barely examines—if at all—is the system in which modern fatherhood actually exists.

There is no serious discussion of:

family courts

custody outcomes

child support structures

no-fault divorce

or how fathers often lose daily access to their children

These are not minor details.

They are central to understanding what happens to fathers in the real world.

In many cases, fathers do not simply walk away.

They are separated—from their children, from their role, from their identity as fathers—by processes largely outside their control.

A man can go from being an everyday presence in his child’s life to being a visitor—or, in some cases, a paycheck.

And yet, culturally, the outcome is often interpreted the same way:

He left.

But that is not always what happened.

There is another layer here the film only partially acknowledges.

For decades, men have been broadly portrayed as:

oppressive

emotionally deficient

disposable

dangerous

​toxic

These ideas have been reinforced across media, education, and public discourse—under the influence of feminist frameworks that carry a deep skepticism and contempt toward men.

At the same time, we have seen something very different happen on the other side.

Single motherhood has increasingly been framed not as a difficult circumstance to be supported and stabilized, but as something to be celebrated—even idealized. Cultural messaging often elevates the strength and independence of mothers raising children alone, while saying very little about the cost of a father’s absence.

The contrast is striking.

Fathers are questioned.
Their role is diminished.
Their presence is treated as optional.

While single motherhood is often presented as sufficient—sometimes even preferable.

The result is a contradiction we rarely confront:

We tell men they are not needed.
We question their value.
We undermine their role.

And then we ask why they hesitate to step into it.

​When structural forces are ignored, a complex social problem ​can get reduced to a simple moral failure.

And when that happens, the burden of explanation—and blame—falls almost entirely on individuals.

In this case, on men.

Carlson is right about something important:

Fatherhood matters.

But if we want more fathers present in their children’s lives, we need to do more than praise the ideal.

We need to examine the systems that shape the reality.

Because until we do, we will keep asking the same question—

Why aren’t men stepping up?

—without fully understanding what they are stepping into.

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Tom Golden
MenAreGood offers a sharp red-pilled contrast to the default negative cultural views of masculinity.

https://substack.com/redirect/acdfd2c8-e2fb-44b9-a9aa-9d9ef2434d14?j=eyJ1IjoiMXBvcTY0In0.bpX_Ri4UrVVzEcwn2tPJZmntoRqzSx0aLRc9mOX6Iw8

***

StephenBaskerville.com
Tucker Carlson's Dishonest Film about the Fatherhood Crisis
Are we back in the 1990s?

It is truly sad to see Tucker Carlson producing this kind of vapid drivel. Many people admire Carlson, and his influence is enormous. But this is beyond belief.

Carlson just released a new video: “Fathers Wanted”. It may be a tribute to his sense of shame that he refrains from narrating it himself, and he seems to make only two appearances. One (54:00) is to scold fathers for “abandoning” their children.

This is a throwback to the 1990s/2000s. For those too young to remember, we were inundated with propaganda about “responsible” fatherhood and “good fathering”. The underlying message was that most fathers are ir-reponsible and their “fathering” needs improvement. But the insult added to injury was precisely the falsehood that Carlson reserves for himself to utter: Fathers whose children are confiscated by crooked tyrannical family courts have “abandoned” them.

Vice-President Al Gore initiated a White House program, and many state governors and even foreign governments followed suit: conferences, books, articles, films, TV shows — all filled with the same sentimental cliches and empty platitudes as Carlson’s video, scolding and nagging men to practice their officially accepted version of this “fathering”. (Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently displayed similar dishonesty by recycling the deception.) Federally funded scholars like David Blankenhorn and David Popenoe produced books touting the party line. The media credulously joined the witch hunt. We heard no objections from anyone (except feminists, ironically and perfunctorily), though of course fathers themselves were never allowed to be heard — as they are not in Carlson’s film.

None of the “fatherhood advocates” explained how government officials could “promote” fatherhood or “encourage” good fathering — or (another theme) “reconnect fathers with their children”. It turned out that “good fathering” meant feminist-approved fathering and feminist psychotherapy, and “reconnecting” with your children meant paying child support.

Meanwhile governments intensified ongoing efforts to disconnect more children from their fathers in order to fill their coffers with more child support. President Bill Clinton’s “Welfare Reform” tried (in vain) to reduce the welfare roles by “cracking down” on alleged “deadbeat dads”. Here too the media showed credulity rather than scepticism or scrutiny toward the government. Journalist Bernard Goldberg said, “We’ve done a million stories at the networks on deadbeats dads…but almost none on how too many divorced women use custody and visitation as weapons to punish their ex-husbands.” And absolutely zero on how family court judges were ripping millions of children away from fit and legally innocent fathers in order to plunder them for the “child support” that was really judge support, because it funded their own salaries and those of other functionaries.
This, not fathers “abandoning” their children, is the cause of this crisis — entirely.

Now, according to Carlson, fathers are to blame even when they are not fathers, because they refuse to marry unappealing, litigious women and find their children judicially kidnapped by juridical gangsters. The message is the same: Fathers cause problems when they are present, when they are “absent”, and even when they are never fathers in the first place. And still not a word about the corruption of family courts or injustices of the divorce industry.

It is hardly surprising that, 30 years on, the problem is worse than ever, because those programs could never do anything other than make it worse. Even amid Covid, election rigging, multiple forever wars, and impending economic catastrophe, former gang leader John Turnipseed still calls fatherlessness “the biggest problem we have in the nation”, and Jason Whitlock, Candace Owens, and Larry Elder say the same. (DeSantis recently showed, yet again, how to evade and worsen it.)

This should provoke a major outcry from throughout the “Manosphere”. If men can coalesce around rejection of this lie, this film may do some good in getting the abuses that Carlson avoids onto the public agenda.
~~~
This is by far the most dishonest and cowardly thing I have ever seen from Tucker Carlson.

I have criticized him repeated for his dishonesty on this topic and for his obvious fear of the divorce industry. But until now, I have tried to be charitable. He has long given indications that this topic interests him deeply. Little asides in his commentaries, hinting at things he dares not say. On other other hand, I happen to know that he is well aware of the real cause of this ongoing crisis, but like the rest of the mainstream media he chooses mendacity instead of truth.
By this, he signals that he is part of the problem: pretending to address a problem by blaming those who suffer under it because you fear offending those who are perpetrating it.
I have also published numerous articles about this dirty scam in mainstream and scholarly journals, as well as my books, starting with Taken Into Custody: The War on Fathers, Marriage, and the Family:

• “Is There Really a Fatherhood Crisis?” www.independent.org/tir/2004-spring/is-there-really-a-fatherhood-crisis/
• “The Failure of Fatherhood Policy” www.lewrockwell.com/2004/09/stephen-baskerville/the-failure-of-fatherhood-policy/
• “The Federal Bureau of Marriage” www.academia.edu/34065959/The_Federal_Bureau_of_Marriage
Sadly, none of these are out of date, because nothing has changed, except for the worse.

If you want to read more analysis that will push you to think “outside the box,” you will find it in my recent book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” — and What to Do about It — available from Amazon.

Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics (retired) at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw. His books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.










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Tucker Carlson's Dishonest Film about the Fatherhood Crisis
Are we back in the 1990s?
STEPHEN BASKERVILLE
APR 30

 




READ IN APP
 
It is truly sad to see Tucker Carlson producing this kind of vapid drivel. Many people admire Carlson, and his influence is enormous. But this is beyond belief.


Carlson just released a new video: “Fathers Wanted”. It may be a tribute to his sense of shame that he refrains from narrating it himself, and he seems to make only two appearances. One (54:00) is to scold fathers for “abandoning” their children.

This is a throwback to the 1990s/2000s. For those too young to remember, we were inundated with propaganda about “responsible” fatherhood and “good fathering”. The underlying message was that most fathers are ir-reponsible and their “fathering” needs improvement. But the insult added to injury was precisely the falsehood that Carlson reserves for himself to utter: Fathers whose children are confiscated by crooked tyrannical family courts have “abandoned” them.

Vice-President Al Gore initiated a White House program, and many state governors and even foreign governments followed suit: conferences, books, articles, films, TV shows — all filled with the same sentimental cliches and empty platitudes as Carlson’s video, scolding and nagging men to practice their officially accepted version of this “fathering”. (Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently displayed similar dishonesty by recycling the deception.) Federally funded scholars like David Blankenhorn and David Popenoe produced books touting the party line. The media credulously joined the witch hunt. We heard no objections from anyone (except feminists, ironically and perfunctorily), though of course fathers themselves were never allowed to be heard — as they are not in Carlson’s film.

None of the “fatherhood advocates” explained how government officials could “promote” fatherhood or “encourage” good fathering — or (another theme) “reconnect fathers with their children”. It turned out that “good fathering” meant feminist-approved fathering and feminist psychotherapy, and “reconnecting” with your children meant paying child support.

Meanwhile governments intensified ongoing efforts to disconnect more children from their fathers in order to fill their coffers with more child support. President Bill Clinton’s “Welfare Reform” tried (in vain) to reduce the welfare roles by “cracking down” on alleged “deadbeat dads”. Here too the media showed credulity rather than scepticism or scrutiny toward the government. Journalist Bernard Goldberg said, “We’ve done a million stories at the networks on deadbeats dads…but almost none on how too many divorced women use custody and visitation as weapons to punish their ex-husbands.” And absolutely zero on how family court judges were ripping millions of children away from fit and legally innocent fathers in order to plunder them for the “child support” that was really judge support, because it funded their own salaries and those of other functionaries.

This, not fathers “abandoning” their children, is the cause of this crisis — entirely.

Now, according to Carlson, fathers are to blame even when they are not fathers, because they refuse to marry unappealing, litigious women and find their children judicially kidnapped by juridical gangsters. The message is the same: Fathers cause problems when they are present, when they are “absent”, and even when they are never fathers in the first place. And still not a word about the corruption of family courts or injustices of the divorce industry.

It is hardly surprising that, 30 years on, the problem is worse than ever, because those programs could never do anything other than make it worse. Even amid Covid, election rigging, multiple forever wars, and impending economic catastrophe, former gang leader John Turnipseed still calls fatherlessness “the biggest problem we have in the nation”, and Jason Whitlock, Candace Owens, and Larry Elder say the same. (DeSantis recently showed, yet again, how to evade and worsen it.)

This should provoke a major outcry from throughout the “Manosphere”. If men can coalesce around rejection of this lie, this film may do some good in getting the abuses that Carlson avoids onto the public agenda.

~~~

This is by far the most dishonest and cowardly thing I have ever seen from Tucker Carlson.

I have criticized him repeated for his dishonesty on this topic and for his obvious fear of the divorce industry. But until now, I have tried to be charitable. He has long given indications that this topic interests him deeply. Little asides in his commentaries, hinting at things he dares not say. On other other hand, I happen to know that he is well aware of the real cause of this ongoing crisis, but like the rest of the mainstream media he chooses mendacity instead of truth.

By this, he signals that he is part of the problem: pretending to address a problem by blaming those who suffer under it because you fear offending those who are perpetrating it.

I have also published numerous articles about this dirty scam in mainstream and scholarly journals, as well as my books, starting with Taken Into Custody: The War on Fathers, Marriage, and the Family:

“Is There Really a Fatherhood Crisis?” www.independent.org/tir/2004-spring/is-there-really-a-fatherhood-crisis/

“The Failure of Fatherhood Policy” www.lewrockwell.com/2004/09/stephen-baskerville/the-failure-of-fatherhood-policy/

“The Federal Bureau of Marriage” www.academia.edu/34065959/The_Federal_Bureau_of_Marriage

Sadly, none of these are out of date, because nothing has changed, except for the worse.

If you want to read more analysis that will push you to think “outside the box,” you will find it in my recent book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” — and What to Do about It — available from Amazon.


Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics (retired) at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw. His books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.

If you liked this post from Stephen Baskerville's Newsletter, please share it.

More of my work can be found at www.StephenBaskerville.com.

The Greatness of Ellites

 Introduction  By Alexander Jacob

Maurice Muret (1870–1954) was a Swiss journalist and author who studied in Lausanne, Leipzig, Paris and Munich. He became editor of the Journal des débats in 1895 and contributed to the Foreign Affairs section of the Gazette de Lausanne from 1909. Muret was an anti-Dreyfusard and follower of Charles Maurras and the Action française. He published a book on L’esprit juif (The Jewish mind) in 1901 and disseminated German and Italian literature in France. During the First World War, Muret was decidedly Francophile and wrote two works condemning Germany’s role in starting the war, L’orgueil allemand (German arrogance) (1915) and L’évolution belliqueuse de Guillaume II (The belligerent development of Wilhelm II) (1917). He published a work entitled Le crépuscule des nations blanches in 1925, which was translated into English by his American wife, Charlotte Touzalin, as The Twilight of the White Races (1926). His next works included L’Archiduc François-Ferdinand (1932) and Guillaume II (1940). His defence of aristocratic and heroic cultures was crystallised in two further works, Grandeur des élites (Paris, Albin Michel, 1939) and France héroïque (1943), whose heroes range from Vercingétorix to Maréchal Pétain.

*

Muret’s book on the elites is a social history in the form of a shimmering tapestry of characters, both historical and fictional, who exemplify the elites of the cultured societies of Western Europe from ancient Greece to early twentieth-century Britain. Thomas Carlyle had maintained that great historic periods are propelled by heroic individuals, who give their life to the realisation of an ideal while Marx put forward the contrary theory that it was not individuals who led the masses but the masses that led the individuals. Rejecting both these notions, Muret insists that it is elites that constitute the essence of a great period of history. He gainsays Carlyle by pointing out that ‘[t]he great man has something immoderate and excessive whereas the Western genius, considered in its most noble creations, always contains something measured, tempered, balanced’. In other words, it is not sufficient to have enlightened personages to direct the affairs of an entire nation in a particular direction but there must be an elite class, or caste, that is capable of moulding society in its image. The essential basis of the elites of Europe is identified by Muret as the humanist ideal, and it is this that constitutes the strongest bulwark against the rising tide of the mass mentality emerging from Bolshevist Russia. 

Muret notes that, even though the decline of the European aristocracy began with the French Revolution, the individual was still glorified in Western Europe and the concept of mass rule did not fully arise until the advent of Marxism. The Russian Revolution thus was a more alarming manifestation of the rise of the masses and the proletariat and this, Muret surmises, is partly because the aristocracy in Russia was not a very enlightened one and its loss was not felt by the Russian people as a very deleterious event. However, in its glorification of the proletarian, Bolshevism remains an extreme danger to the traditionally elitist societies of Western Europe since, according to Muret, hierarchical societies cannot be abruptly dismantled in order to make way for the rule of the lowest elements of the population. Rather, such societies should be preserved in an organic manner by a social mobility that allows upward movement only in carefully graded stages. Now that the mass ethos of Bolshevism was threatening the Western countries as well, Muret believes that only the Western ideal of humanism could offer an effective resistance to the Asiatic invasion from Russia. 

Humanism is essentially a Graeco-Roman phenomenon that was revived in Italy during the Renaissance and further developed in the court of Louis XIV in the seventeenth century. Although it underwent a relative decay in the eighteenth century under the pressure of the Englightenment’s adoration of reason and empiricism, it was restored in a striking manner in the English ideal of the gentleman that rose to prominence in the Victorian Age. In the aftermath of the devastating First World War, both Italy and Germany turned to statism as a political bulwark against Bolshevism. But Muret considers statism as not sufficiently related to society to be able to create the elites necessary to counter the Bolshevist rulers of the future society. Germany’s racialism too is opposed to humanism and to Christianity, which Muret sees as the indispensable foundation of European morality and culture. He therefore hopes that France and England will be able, through their existing elites, to continue the humanistic social paradigm that alone can resist the Bolshevist propaganda of the dictatorship of the proletariat. While the British are not naturally part of the Graeco-Latin humanist culture — even though they still study it carefully in their schools — the French indeed have a longer traditional affiliation with it. As he says, ‘Hellenism and Latinism have entered the blood of France to such an extent, the prestige of Classicism and the elites that it engendered remains so strong in this country that they try more to hoard its advantages for the benefit of the masses than to suppress them radically.’

*

Muret believed that elites are formed initially under enlightened autocrats such as Pericles in fifth century B.C. Greece and Louis XIV in seventeenth-century France. The original formation of an elite in the classical world is identified by Muret in the aristocratic democracy of Periclean Greece. Here the Greek adoration of beauty combined with virtue resulted in the cultivation of what was called kalokagathia, or the combined beauty of mind and body in the well-formed Greek aristocrat. The Greek civilisation was essentially an urban one, even though it benefited from maritime trade as well. Athenian culture was centred around the polis, or city, with the agora,1  or public square, serving as the open-air meeting place for talented young men and their philosophical masters. Its generous humanism was devoted to the cultivation of literary eloquence and artistic excellence and, like its leader Pericles himself, it was opposed to both Spartan chauvinism and militarism. 

The democracy of Athens was an aristocratic one insofar as its government was constituted of eupatrides, or men of good Greek ancestry, and only Athenian citizens voted in the assemblies to the exclusion of slaves and immigrants. Pericles embodied all the virtues of an aristocratic Greek, having first served in the army and then devoted his life to the public service of Athens, which he fulfilled with astonishing taste and judgement as patron of the imposing public works and arts that fill even modern minds with awe. His demagogic opponent, Cleon, on the other hand, was a symptom of the decay that Greece was soon to suffer with the decline of the aristocratic democratic government of Athens. Cleon was opposed to the Athenian aristocracy and when he took over the leadership on Pericles’ death in 429 B.C., his reign was marked by bad government as well as bad manners. This decay was accelerated by the Hellenic expansion of Greece under the Macedonians and the substitution of Eastern luxury for the older kalokagathia civic virtues of Athens.

*

With the rise of Rome, a new variant of aristocracy emerged in the West that was to have a lasting impact on the whole of Western European culture. Roman aristocracy was in its origins a rustic and military one. The original patricians were, rather like the later English squires, raised on estates in the country and served in the army, as the legendary figure of Cincinnatus, for example, did in the fifth century B.C. Although Rome began as a monarchy, it was, in 510 B.C., replaced by an aristocratic Republic ruled by patricians. The patricians were at first clearly distinguished from the commoners, or plebeians. However, gradually the two were increasingly intermixed. The aristocratic ethos was a rather austere one and practical. The hatred that Cato the Elder manifested for Carthage in the second century B.C. (‘Carthago delenda est’) was the hatred of a Roman peasant-soldier for the mercantile luxury of the Carthaginians. It was also the hatred of a land-based civilisation for the maritime one of the Phoenician. The Romans were also not a particularly scientific people and their devotion to the arts was not so original as that of the Greeks. However, the discipline that marked the Roman aristocracy was extremely impressive and constituted the foundation of the laws that were formulated in the Twelve Tables of the fifth century B.C. and later extended over the empire as Roman Law. Muret points out that the Romans were preoccupied with laws because they loved justice for its own sake and not, like the Hebrews, in order to foster petty tribalistic chauvinism.

Rome was distinguished in its developed phase by imperialism and the imposition of systematic laws both in Italy and in the expanding colonies of the Roman Empire. The Roman conquests were, to be sure, marked by cruelty and celebrated in triumphs that were humiliating for the conquered princes and armies. But the subsequent rule of the Romans in the colonies did not disturb the local traditions of the colonised but instead incorporated these nations systematically, under the Roman Law, into the famous pax romana. In fact, some defeated princes even voluntarily gave up their kingdoms to Rome and its superior legal and adminstrative organisation. 

The rule of the colonies by the governors was generally honest but, with the increasing wealth acquired through Rome’s colonial possessions, the gap between the rich and the poor increased and the latter had to be pacified through the organisation of proletarian games, such as gladiatorial fights, which betrayed a vulgarity and brutality of taste that still shock modern historians. Finally, with the advent of Christianity and its personal as opposed to state religion, Rome was undermined in its very foundations, which were the Roman ‘polis’ and the extended state. The Roman Empire was soon turned into a Christian one and the new religious empire was marked by Christian morality and its doctrine of Love. However, the Roman aristocratic imperium continued, in the subsequent centuries, to exercise a radiant influence over the whole of Europe through its stunning civilisatory achievements aptly crystallised in Pliny the Elder’s words: ‘May this divine benefit last forever which seems to have given to the world the Romans, like a second sun, in order to enlighten it!’

*

The revival of classical Graeco-Roman learning in the Renaissance was accompanied by a focus on individualism that acquires a bravado almost anticipatory of Nietzsche’s ‘superman’. However, unlike Nietzsche’s ideal, the Renaissance man remains mostly Christian in his faith and achieves in the ideal of humanism a perfect blend of the classical sources of European culture with the Christian moral doctrines that had penetrated Europe since the early Middle Ages. There is no doubt that the Christian religion had assumed the mantle of the pagan Roman Empire with considerable ease and dignity and unified even greater expanses of Western Europe than the Roman Empire had done. It also exalted religion to the same level as politics in forming a dual reign of Emperor and Pope. And, just as it had absorbed several elements of the Graeco-Roman cults into its ritual and theological framework, it also accepted and codified the Germanic feudal system into an impressive hierarchical social institution. It thus succeeded in refining the Germanic knights through the chivalric institutions that came into the fore in the Middle Ages. 

The earliest Renaissance poets, like Dante and Petrarch, are marked by their admiration of classical learning and focus on the Italian language and identity. In France too, ever since the High Middle Ages, there are signs of an impending change of worldview. The discovery of ancient Greek literature served to increase the scientific spirit just as the voyages of exploration expanded the horizons of the southern European princes. While it is true that mediaeval scholasticism too displayed elements of classical learning and even certain scientific formulations, it was confined mainly to the monasteries, and the antique ideas did not penetrate secular society until the Renaissance. The establishment of the Platonic Academy of Florence by Cosimo de’ Medici in the fifteenth century is a significant landmark in Western European history in that it successfully combined classical learning with the Christian faith. Muret points particularly to Pico della Mirandola as a proponent of Renaissance individualism and humanism since his view of man was not confined to the traditional Christian one with its stress on the original sin of the first man. Rather, Pico focused on the free will innate in man, which allows him to choose between a debased earthly life and a spiritual godlike one. Apart from Pico, Muret adduces the example of Leon Battista Alberti, who was a typical Renaissance man talented in several disciplines, being ‘a mathematician who was also a jurist, this moralist who was also a painter, a sculptor, an orator and a physician’. Alberti’s most remarkable achievements were in architecture but he was, no less than Leonardo da Vinci, a polymath typical of his astonishingly creative age. Leonardo himself combined scientific curiosity with aesthetic feeling and it must be remembered that, in spite of his intensive scientific experimentations, he too died a Christian. 

The Renaissance doubtless also suffered a weakening of the Christian spirit that had predominated in the Middle Ages. Thus Boccaccio reveals considerable impiety in his compositions and Machiavelli’s pragmatic cunning can clearly not be considered a model of Christian morality. Further, the unrestrained personality in the Italian Renaissance was often a surprising combination of aesthetic taste and judgement with amoral and even criminal social behaviour. Muret gives two brilliant examples of this apparent contradiction — that of Sigismondo Malatesta, who was at once utterly amoral in his personal life and one of the greatest patrons of the arts in the period, and of Benvenuto Cellini, who was not only a superlative sculptor and goldsmith but also a customary assassin. 

The reactions against the untrammelled individualism of the Renaissance geniuses were not absent but unfortunately they were directed in a quasi-Protestant manner that did not make a serious effort to unify the classical outbursts of the Renaissance with Christian faith. Thus we have the example of Girolamo Savonarola, the proto-Protestant reformer who rebelled against the Medici rule in Florence but was not supported by Pope Alexander VI, who excommunicated and had him executed. Similarly, when the Italian Renaissance moved north through Johannes Reuchlin, who was deeply influenced by humanist learning, it did not succeed in establishing a unity of classical artistic exuberance with the Roman Catholic doctrines. Rather, the Germans who followed Luther tended to separate the classical world from their more Puritanical, iconoclastic view of Christianity. Thus the unity of Europe itself, which might have been achieved through a unity of the Renaissance ideals with a reformed Church, remained unaccomplished.

*

Muret’s next exemplars of European elites are those of the high society of the time of Louis XIV, which, in the view of the Comte de Saint-Simon, was ‘a long reign of the vile bourgeoisie’. Indeed, Louis XIV, in his opposition to the nobility (the ‘gentilhommes’), favoured members of the bourgeoisie who formed now a new class of gentlemen (‘honnêtes hommes’) and who sought to enter either the court or the high society of the reputable literary salons hosted by aristocrats like the marquise de Rambouillet. The world created by such hostesses was one of extreme refinement, where women were always present and it was the constant endeavour of the male guests to please them with their wit and gallantry. Pleasing thus became more important than edifying or moralising, even though the guests included great literary figures like Corneille and Boileau. What was cultivated in these salons was decorum, graciousness, gentility and a general light touch that abjured pedantry and scholarly erudition in favour of a more generous and liberal attitude to life and letters. The Chevalier de Méré thus declared that ‘[i]t is to be hoped, in order to be pleasant always, that one would excel in everything that suits gentlemen without however being too interested in anything, I mean, without doing anything that does not present itself of its own accord and without saying anything that might prove that one wants to assert oneself.’ And La Rochefoucauld too advocates restraint in the expression of one’s feelings so as to avoid confrontation with one’s interlocutors. As Joseph Joubert put it, France in this century produced ‘an uninterrupted succession of generations not scholarly but friends of knowledge and accustomed to the pleasures of the mind who multiplied in France, that country in the world where this education was best offered and perhaps best received.’ 

Though the Grand Siècle produced some of the finest literary products of France, the universal man of the French seventeenth century was gradually turning away from the asceticism and mysticism of the Middle Ages to a more reasonable, and sentimental, view of the world. However, the seventeenth century bourgeois was still ruled not by Reason itself but by Right Reason, which did not go beyond the limits of Christian morality. As Racine remarked to his son, ‘one cannot be a gentleman without paying all one’s debts first to God and then to men, and there is only religion that teaches us the methods and helps us to satisfy both men and God.’ And in Madame de La Fayette’s novel La Princesse de Clèves, one gets a moving example of the force of the right reason governing human relationships in this society in Monsieur de Clèves’ words to the unfaithful princess: ‘In the mood in which you are, by allowing you your liberty I set stricter restrictions than I could have imposed on you.’

The delicate balance between society manners and morality in the seventeenth century, however, was too fragile to be universally sustainable. Bossuet for one criticised the high society values of his time forcefully: ‘The society people’, he would say of the Chevalier de Méré and those who resemble him, ‘lie to God and lie to themselves in claiming to conduct side by side a life of pleasure and true piety. These two things exclude each other absolutely.’ The fascinating equilibrium represented by the high society of the seventeenth century could not be sustained with the growing rationalism and empiricism of the eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century, right reason was replaced by reason itself in the works of Voltaire and the Encylopedists, who rejected Christian morality, and of Rousseau, whose sentimentality even condoned the Terror of the French Revolution. As for the older aristocratic notion of honour, it was replaced by the more bourgeois one of ‘conscience’, which, being too personal and not associated with a whole class of people, could no longer serve as a foundation of social morality. Honour does reappear intermittently in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century but only in a military context, when Napoleon reorganised French society in an imperialistic fashion.

*

The ideal of refinement evident in the French bourgeois high society of the seventeenth century is evident also in England in the eighteenth century. But the British gentleman has a different origin than the French honnête homme. Derived from the warrior nobility, the British gentleman is less sociable than the French gentleman and more snobbish. Indeed, the upper class character of the gentleman was an accepted part of the traditionally hierarchical society of Britain that dates back to the Plantagenets — who were indeed, as Augustin Filon suggested,2   the original founders of the British aristocratic culture. The social strata below the nobles and the gentlemen — that is, the middle class not elevated through knighthoods, and the working class — aspired to the status of a gentleman and there was little criticism of his social eminence. However, the British nobles and gentlemen gradually lost their warrior affiliations with the entry into the peerage of wealthy members of the middle class. Unlike the Prussian nobility who retained their military character during most of their existence, the British gentleman turned, like his French counterpart, into a high society figure. 

While the British gentleman was originally not particularly religious and even somewhat brutal in his manners, the eighteenth century infused a religious element into social life that is exemplified in Joseph Addison’s fictional character Sir Roger de Coverley. Religion gained a greater foothold in gentlemanly society in the nineteenth century under the reign of Queen Victoria, who was essentially a ‘bourgeois’ sovereign. The Bible regained its importance after having lain dormant from the time of the Puritans, and sartorial style and church-going respectability were combined in the typical Victorian model of a gentleman. Muret gives as a prime example of the British gentleman of the Victorian age the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, who was considered the most elegant gentleman of his time.

Unlike the French gentleman, however, the British was not a particularly literary-minded one and showed less appreciation for the fine arts. He retained from his original warrior background the impassibility that marked the mediaeval knights and the traditionalism that became characteristic of the country squires. He also inherited from his warlike origins a taste for brutal team sports, like cricket and football, and willingly subjected himself to the harsh discipline of corporal punishment in the elite public schools of England. Yet, all this discipline was enforced on lives geared to monetary success in the Industrial Age, since Puritanical Christianity advocated not only hard work but also its material rewards. The original cast of the British gentleman, however, continued to survive in the soldierly gentleman of the British Empire, as evidenced, for example, in the characters depicted by Rudyard Kipling in his short story ‘His Private Honour’.

After the Great War, the gentlemanly ideal suffered increasing attacks from socialistic fronts and authors like Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells. While Wells criticised ‘the aristocratic prejudice’ of the English and hoped for a regeneration of English society through science and socialism, Bennett hoped for the destruction of the bourgeois order through ‘the alliance of ‘the intellectual and the proletarian’. Muret, however, brushes aside such socialistic criticisms and insists that the British gentleman still represents a valuable ideal of individual liberty since ‘[p]olitics, in his view, must not suffocate the human being for the benefit of a God or a king but make him serve both to the degree to which it is just while retaining his independence.’ Muret is, in general, rather partial to the bourgeois, whom he considers to have been, at least in the nineteenth century, the successor of the aristocrat and propagator of traditional culture. But he does acknowledge the weakness of the ability of the bourgeoisie to withstand the assaults of the masses below it once the latter become aware of the exploitation to which they are subjected by the bourgeois: 

… demos is in the process of making these classes, whose mastery they no longer wish to suffer, pay dearly for their faults. One could console oneself of this if all sorts of rules valid for all well-ordered societies were not in the process of perishing along with the bourgeoisie: the respect for tradition, the cult of the family, the spirit of order, prudence and economy. This entire bourgeois morality, a tested mixture of principles that were already dear to antiquity and of doctrines spread by the Gospel, is an execration to the masses because it imposes a brake on the naturally perverse instincts of man while the masses tend to shake off all manner of constraint.

He does not, however, like Willliam Lecky and Anthony Ludovici, denounce the bourgeois themselves for their plutocratic ambitions.3  And the transformation of the Anglo-Saxon gentleman, British and American, in the Atlanticist empire of today, into a mercantile individualist hardly distinguishable in his taste and judgement from a proletarian is a prospect that Muret in 1939 obviously did not envision.

In his concluding chapter, Muret reiterates the importance of the gentlemanly ideal as exemplified in the French Grand Siècle and in the British Victorian Age as modern representatives of the ancient Greek notions of kalokagathia and of the Roman pride in Roman citizenship. However, the special merit of Muret’s study of elites is indeed the stress he places in it on humanism as the essence of the high culture that they represent. He points out that, right from Graeco-Roman antiquity and through the Renaissance to the First World War, the greatest value of the elites has been their general devotion to humanism, for it is this that most fully embodies the glory of Western European civilisation. As Muret puts it: 

Humanism is the continuous and constant awareness of humanity. It invites us to know ourselves better, it invites us to love our neighbour better. It is at once the child of Plato and of Jesus Christ. It re-establishes man in his dignity, it gives him the knowledge of his duties. Between the past and the present it constructs a solid and safe bridge.

Maurice Muret 

The Greatness of Elites 

Armin Mohler and the Conservative Revolution

 

Between 1918 and 1933, German cultural and political life was shaped by a powerful spiritual movement which declared itself determined “to clear away the ruins of the nineteenth century and to establish a new order of life.” This movement took form, with more or less vigour, across almost all of Europe; but it was in Germany that it marked every domain of life and society most profoundly. It has been named the Konservative Revolution, the ‘conservative revolution.’ This ‘metapolitical’ phenomenon has been examined many times (and all too often by its enemies and on the basis of preconceived notions); but all in all, despite its fundamental historical importance, we still understand it quite poorly. In 1950, Dr. Armin Mohler aimed to fill in this lacuna by publishing his doctoral thesis, which he had defended the previous year at the University of Basle under the supervision of Professors Karl Jaspers and Herman Schmalenbach. This successful publication would be reedited into a veritable handbook and augmented by an imposing bibliography of nearly four hundred pages, which suffices to demonstrate the importance and richness of the writers of the Konservative Revolution.

A Thousand Directions  

The task Armin Mohler took on was extremely arduous. Between 1918 and 1933, the Konservative Revolution never presented one unified aspect, one sole visage. Groping after a path of is own, it proliferated in a thousand apparently divergent directions, investing as much in art as in philosophy, in literature as in politics. Therefore, the Konservative Revolution formed a universe of its own whose depth and breadth may amaze those who come to it for the first time. Men as diverse as the ‘first’ Thomas Mann (exiled in 1933), Ernst Jünger and his brother Friedrich Georg, Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West) Ernst von Salomon (The Outlaws), Alfred Baeumler (who became some sort of official academic philosopher of National Socialism), Stefan George and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the jurist Carl Schmitt, the biologist Jacob von Uexküll, the anthropologist Hans F. K. Günther, the economist Werner Sombart, the archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna, Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer and Hans Grimm, Hans Blüher and Gottfried Benn, Ernst Wiechert and Rainer Maria Rilke, Max Scheler and Ludwig Klages, to just a few of the most famous: all were men of the Konservative Revolution. The works of these men instigated and animated, in ever-renewed impulses, a host of schools of thought and ‘circles of friends,’ secret and semi-secret organizations of an esoteric sort, literary cenacles, political parties and ‘groupuscules,’ associations aligned with the Freikorps, with the ‘underground’121  (already!), and of the most diverse orientations and around the most diversely articulated concerns and intentions.

These currents’ kinship is apparent; though their shared mentality can be apprehended only with difficulty as long as one adopts a perspective exterior to the movement. On the other hand, the sense they all had of this ideological kinship did not keep them from nurturing enmities and fierce hatreds among themselves (more against those condemned as ‘traitors’ than against enemies). So it was that Walther Rathenau, whose works belong to the margins of the Konservative Revolution, was assassinated by terrorists who were no less “conservative-revolutionary.” This affair is well-known from Salomon’s account of it in Die Geächteten (The Outlaws).

Finally, as the author affirms in the preface, its ‘spiritual proximity’ to National Socialism wrongfully compromises the Konservative Revolution and risks skewing any analysis by casting a shadow over the facts of the matter. While recognising that this problem is all but insurmountable, Dr. Mohler tried to avoid the difficulties attendant on this uncomfortable proximity by bracketing the whole National Socialist phenomenon, whose historical destiny represents a distinct question, a ‘lack of distance’ from which still precludes an analysis today. He does remark, though, that the National Socialists, once they had come to power, made a priority of attacking certain representatives of the Konservative Revolution who refused to join. The ‘Night of the Long Knives,’ to cite only one event, settles scores not only between wings of the National Socialist movement but also between the Nazis and conservative-revolutionary ‘Trotskyists.’

‘Trotskyists’  

‘From a formal point of view,’ writes Dr. Mohler,

participants in the Konservative Revolution might be understood as the Trotskyists of National Socialism. Here, as in any great revolutionary movement, including communism, we find a large mass-party of uniform weight, on the one hand, and a myriad of little circles, on the other, distinguished by an intense intellectual life, exerting only a weak influence on the masses and, in terms of party-formation, managing at most to provoke marginal splits in the larger party, indulging in the organization of explosive sects and little elitist, barely coherent groups. When the larger party goes bankrupt, then comes the hour of the Trotskyist heresies.

We should note, in this connection, that, in fact, the Konservative Revolution underwent the inverse process, and that it was the serial bankruptcy of the little ‘Trotskyist’ sects that cleared National Socialism’s path to power. But from Armin Mohler’s perspective, this is of secondary importance, since his purpose is not to analyse a revolutionary machine but to sketch, as he states, a typology of the Konservative Revolution.

‘Guiding Images’  Having noted that the origins of the Konservative Revolution date around the midpoint of the nineteenth century, Armin Mohler then tries to recover and describe what he calls the Leitbilder, the ‘guiding ideas’ (or, better, ‘images’) shared by all the writers of the Konservative Revolution.

He situates the origin of the ‘world-image’ (Weltbild) of the Konservative Revolution in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche: the Nietzsche of Zarathustra above all, but also the Nietzsche of The Will to Power and the Genealogy of Morals. Indeed, every Leitbild he adduces springs from Nietzsche’s vision. One of these ‘leading ideas’ is without a doubt fundamental. This is the ‘spherical’ conception of history, as opposed to the linear conception shared, among others, by Marxism and Christianity. For the participants in the Konservative Revolution, history is not an infinite and indefinite progression. It is an eternal return. Mohler rightly emphasizes that this eternal return is best expressed not by the circle but by the sphere (Kugel), which ‘means, to the conservative-revolutionary eye, that everything is contained in every moment; that present, past and future coincide.’ He cites Nietzsche:

Everything goeth, everything returneth; eternally rolleth the wheel of existence. Everything dieth, everything blossometh forth again; eternally runneth on the year of existence. Everything breaketh, everything is integrated anew; eternally buildeth itself the same house of existence. All things separate, all things again greet one another; eternally true to itself remaineth the ring of existence. Every moment beginneth existence; around every ‘Here’ rolleth the ball ‘There.’ The middle is everywhere. Crooked is the path of eternity.122 

Nihilism and Regeneration  A second Leitbild, arising immediately from the first, is the Interregnum: ‘We live in an Interregnum: the old order has crumbled; and the new order is not yet visible.’ We are on the eve of a ‘historical turning’ (Zeitwende). To the eyes of the men of the Konservative Revolution, Nietzsche is the prophet of this ‘turning.’ Better, he marks this turning in Time when ‘something is dead and nothing else is yet born.’ One of the most characteristic representatives of the Konservative Revolution, the writer Ernst Jünger, also states: ‘We are at the turning between two ages, a turning whose meaning is comparable to that of the passage from the Stone Age to the Ages of Metal’ (cited by Wulf-Dieter Müller).

In its day-to-day struggle, following the itinerary outlines by Nietzsche, the Konservative Revolution adopted the Leitbild of nihilism: a positive nihilism whose goal is not nothingness for the sake of nothingness (the end of history, we might say) but the pulverization of the ruins of the old order, the condition sine qua non of the new order’s advent, of regeneration (Wiedergeburt). This positive, ‘German’ or ‘Prussian’ nihilism advocated by the Konservative Revolution is not an end in itself but a means: the means to reach the ‘magic point beyond which no man may advance but he who arms himself with new and invisible sources of power’ (Ernst Jünger). This ‘magic point’ is a Leitbild in itself: the ‘reversal’ (Umschlag), that is, the moment and the location at which destruction morphs into creation, at which the end reveals itself to be a new beginning. It is the moment at which ‘each recovers his own origin,’ Zarathustra’s ‘Great Noontide’ when historical time is suddenly regenerated.

Eternal Returns  

All these Leitbilder display the preference of the Konservative Revolution for formulae that unite antagonistic terms: Konservative Revolution, Prussian nihilism, socio-aristocracy, National Bolshevism, etc. True revolution is quite literally ‘re-volution, an about-turn, the reproduction of a moment that has already been.’ ‘In the beginning was the word,’ writes Hans V. Fleig.

And now present circumstances compel us to pay close attention to the original meaning of the word ‘revolution.’ During an age of revolution which lasted a hundred and fifty years, Europe has frittered away and left behind the heritage of many centuries. This heritage is the Western community as it was in the spirit of Christianity. Nowadays, foul weather has rusted the Cross and, every way one turns, the Western community disintegrates with startling rapidity. Old gods, whom we thought long murdered by evangelism, go in search of their buried temples. The Western ‘superstructure,’ this community of Germanic, Latin and Slavic peoples, which traces its roots, in the last analysis, to the Christian oecumene, is melting like snow in the sun. in the incandescent fire of a Saturnine star proclaiming the dawn of a new Antiquity, Western thought disintegrates into dust.

Friedrich Hielscher, a disciple of Jünger’s, declares: ‘Homo revolvens plays his part on the great world-stage; he will have no peace until the museums have been restocked. The stone altars of sacrifice will stand once more in the clearings; and the crucifixes will be shut up in the museum’s cabinets…’

Here, ideology demands an immediate move into political action. But this is always sustained by a metapolitical vision. Even Ernst Jünger, a writer inclined to literary botany, cannot suppress this political impulse: his famous Arbeiter (The Worker) intends to be the manifesto of a ‘new politics.’ Armin Mohler, sensitive above all to the literary and poetic aspects of the conservative-revolutionary Weltanschauung, somewhat neglects those Leitbilder more directly bound to political action. Sensing the historico-temporal dimensions of the universe he studies with precision and clarity, he is less concerned to discover its socio-spatial dimensions.

If Marxism is a theory which must necessarily be prolonged in practice, we might call the Weltbild of the Konservative Revolution a metapolitics that entrusts its ultimate designs on man to politics. It therefore seems that, in the eyes of the participants in the Konservative Revolution, the ‘temporal’ Leitbild of regeneration has its ‘spatial’ counterpart in the Leitbild of the ‘German people’ (Volk). This is considered the only ‘true people,’ since it is the only people to have preserved the ‘conscience of its origins’ and, as such, is invested with a ‘redemptive’ mission from which all mankind will benefit. The Leitbild of the “German mission,” from Fichte and his famous Discourse to Wagner, which Armin Mohler emphasizes somewhat less, is one of the major sources of the Konservative Revolution. Similarly, the ‘temporal’ Leitbild of the eternal return and the spherical conception of history corresponds to the ‘spatial’ Leitbild of aristocratic superhumanism and the hierarchical conception of society, notions which are also foregrounded in Nietzsche’s thinking; and, inversely, the linear conception of history corresponds to the egalitarian conception of society.

In the last analysis, the ‘conservatives’ of the Konservative Revolution want to destroy everything that surrounds them: for everything is already a corpse. What they want to conserve, we now see clearly, is man’s historicity — that is, the possibility of new eternal returns — as opposed to the ‘end of history’ offered, explicitly or implicitly, by their adversaries. They work towards the return of the past. But this past is not the past of memory: it is the past of an imagination that plunges its roots into Sehnsucht, into a nostalgic and passionate urge towards a regenerated future following the crumbling of civilization.

A Religious Revival  

The tendencies that formed within the Konservative Revolution might be characterized according to the different emphases they placed on different Leitbilder belonging to the movement as a whole: images only vaguely discerned by one group played predominant roles in others.

Armin Mohler proposes the classification of these tendencies into five groups: the Völkischen, the Jungkonservativen (‘young’ or ‘neo-conservatives’), the Nationalrevolutionäre (‘national revolutionaries’), the Bündischen (‘leaguists’), and the Landvolkbewegung (‘peasant movement’). Strictly speaking, these groups were of different natures. The first three, Dr. Mohler specifies, are ‘ideological movements’ seeing to realize their ideas. The other two were ‘concrete historical outbursts, from which it was subsequently attempted to draw an ideology.’ Nevertheless, it was the former that exercised the greater influence over the political domain.

All three foreground the Leitbild of the Volk; but each casts a different light on it. For the Völkischen, it was a matter of opposing the ‘process of disintegration’ that endangered the people and of inciting a greater self-consciousness in the people. The Völkischen emphasized ‘race,’ understood as fundamental to the Volk’s specificity. But their conceptions, even their definitions of race were strikingly variable. Some saw it from a purely biological perspective’ others saw it as the exemplary unity of ‘bodily’ and ‘spiritual.’ While, for Spengler, race is ‘that which takes form’ (its own form), Jünger speaks of ‘blood’ (Blut), but a blood that appears in the ‘dazzle’ of German Mediaeval mysticism, and still more in the Wagnerian Grail. In fact, there was a profound völkisch religiosity which generally sought to express itself in anti-Christian religious revival: either the proclamation of a ‘German Christianity’ or ‘German faith’ (Deutschglaube) or the attempt to resuscitate the cult of ancient deities in a modern context, as with the movement around Ludendorff and his wife Mathilde. The völkisch movement also evinced a tendency towards esotericism whose abstruse manifestations sometimes help to discredit the movement. This esotericism permeated, among other the notorious Thule-Gesellschaft to which the poet and dramaturge Dietrich Eckart belonged.

Young Conservatives  

On the other hand, the Jungkonservativen were primarily concerned to realize the ‘mission of the Volk,’ which was, in their eyes, the construction of a new Empire (Reich). Their intellectual leaders, Edgar J. Jung (a future victim of the ‘Night of the Long Knives’), Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Henrich von Gleichen, etc., saw the Reich as ‘the organization of peoples into a supra-statal whole, dominated by a higher principle, under the supreme responsibility of a single people.’ This is not a matter of nationalism, however. The Jungkonservativen condemned nationalism, considering it to ‘transplant the egotistic doctrines of the individual to the level of the nation-state.’ In their vision, the German people is not a people like the rest. It is, as Fichte proclaimed, the only people that has remained ‘conscious of its origins’ and, consequently, a lone ‘true people’ in a sea of mass-peoples. From this it follows, said Novalis, that ‘there are Germans everywhere.’ In 1917, a few days before perishing on the Front, the poet Walter Flex, one of the most typical bündisch writers, author of the famous song ‘Wild Geese’ (‘Wildgänse rauschen durch die Nacht’), wrote:

If I have spoken of the eternity of the German people and the redemptive mission of Germanness, it had nothing to do with national egotism. Rather, it was an ethical conviction, perhaps one that realizes itself in defeat or, as Ernst Wurche has written, in the heroic death of a whole people. Nevertheless, I have always imposed a clear limit on this conception. I believe human evolution attaints its most perfect form in the people and that universalist humanism implies a dissolution inasmuch as it liberates and strips naked the individual egotism till then trammelled by love of one’s people…

Meanwhile, Edgar J. Jung declared:

Peoples are only equal in a metaphysical sense, just as men are only equal before God. He who would transplant this metaphysical equality to the earthly realm sins against nature and against reality. Demographic power, race, intellectual aptitude, historical development, geographical situation: all this necessitates an earthly hierarchy of peoples, which is not established by chance or by caprice.

In fact, the Jungkonservativen, who did not care all that much about philosophy, often thought it possible to reconcile Christian metaphysics with an essentially anti-Christian conception of history. Armin Mohler does not fail to note that this quirk allowed the ‘Neo-Conservatives,’ alone among the currents of the Konservative Revolution, to be admitted as the worthy interlocutor of the Weimar ‘system’ (and remarks upon the obvious logical contradiction in this peculiarity).

National Bolshevism  

Almost to a man, the national revolutionaries were moulded by the experience of the storms of steel and ‘comradism’ of the trenches. For them, the ‘nation’ is just the Volk rallied and ‘set in motion’ by war. The national revolutionaries embraced technological progress not because they succumbed to the ‘dangerous temptation to admire it’ but because they wanted to ‘dominate it — nothing more.’ For them, it was a matter, as one of their leaders, Franz Schauwecker, said, of ‘doing away with linear time.’ Living in the Interregnum, they think the time ripe for positive nihilism. Their revolutionary urgency and Prussian discipline combine to sustain their will to destroy the ‘bourgeois order’; their ‘nationalism of soldiers’ unites with the ‘socialism of comrades.’ An acutely tragic sense of history and life becomes the backdrop, at once sombre and luminous, of their revolutionary adventure. The deeds of the Freikorps (‘free corps’), the putsch by the Wikingbund led by Captain Erhardt, the exalted terrorists of the ‘outlaws’ dramatized by Salomon, the literary attitudes of the ‘socio-aristocrat’ Jünger, the ‘Prussian Socialism’ of Oswald Spengler, the Black Front of Otto Strasser, the (old Prussian) dream of an ideological alliance between Bolshevism and the Konservative Revolution to bring about a (Germano-Soviet) ‘Reich from Vlissingen to Vladivostok’: all this potent but chaotic agitation, thrown together upon the tragedy of a Germany bruised and humiliated by defeat, lent the emergence of the Weimar Republic its most vivid colours.

Migratory Birds  

Contrarily, the Bund movement arose before the First World War, growing out of the enormous youth movement (Jugendbewegund) in the first years of the century, itself linked to the Wandervogel (migratory birds) — a sudden explosion of a particular cast of mind, without definite political persuasion, sweeping across the whole of Germany. With the Bund, the youth of the Interregnum vaguely discern that the future is at their charge and that the immense task of bringing about the ‘return of historical time’ falls to them. Above all, the Bündische Jugend expresses an attitude to life ruled by a sort of collective unconscious. ‘Movement and mobility with no goal,’ writes Mohler, ‘with no programme, with no ideal but the explosion of the young bourgeois mind into a new adolescence, a new, secret, instinctual energy.’ At once a ‘youth movement’ and a ‘society of men,’ the Bund intended to form an elite, bound to disperse, upon coming of age, in all sort of directions, but which was to spread the conservative-revolutionary cast of mind far and wide. In every political camp, left, right and centre, one saw a flourishing of youth-groups (and of paramilitary formations) all nurturing the concerns and preoccupations of the Konservative Revolution, sometimes unconsciously and despite declared political persuasions — which explains the surprising developments during the political Gleichschaltung (coordination) under the Third Reich.

Armin Mohler saw the Landvolkbewegung or ‘peasant-movement’ as the fifth tendency within the Konservative Revolution. In fact, this movement was just a modern jacquerie, a spasm of corporative life amidst a teetering and tattered social system. It is nonetheless true that the corporative demands of the Landvolk, compelled by circumstance to express themselves politically, fell almost inevitably within the orbit of the Konservative Revolution, whose participants heaped it with sincere and vigorous support. It was then undetectably absorbed by National Socialism under the pressure of historical evolution and thanks to the personal efforts of Walther Darré, theoretician of the Bauernadel (‘peasant aristocracy’).

The sentences which end the book have a certain prophetic resonance. ‘In the Konservative Revolution and its five tendencies,’ writes Mohler, ‘the ideas of 1789 are confronted with the absolute negation of their values. The struggle which this unleashed is not yet over.’ In particular, Armin Mohler believes that today, despite the ideology with which it is linked, this ‘confrontation’ still carries some germs of the Konservative Revolution. Though unaware of it, rendering its agitation vain and sometimes ridiculous, ‘the ideas and mythemes of the Konservative Revolution are nearly always examined with prejudice, on account of its embarrassing proximity to National Socialism.’ ‘The situation this creates,’ he concludes, ‘is nothing new: genuine confrontation of these problems remains the preserve of circles of an esoteric type … while vulgar sects gain strength, whose clumsy and distorting interpretations risk winning over the fanatical masses at any moment.’

Despite its brevity, this final text deserves close attention: for here Locchi not only alludes to the confusion with which his work America, or, in the Italian and Spanish translations, The American Disease, written collaboratively with Alain de Benoist, was received by some, but also newly advances, in a very condensed form, the idea of a ‘projectual’ Europe still to be achieved, drawing on Heidegger, which still has the historico-spiritual strength to regenerate its presence in the world and not to die of ‘occidentalist alienation.’ This text is Giorgio Locchi’s response to a question by the journal Intervento (no. 69, published under the title ‘Europe Is Not an Inheritance: It Is a Future Mission’) and later republished in Margini, no. 43, a publication of the Edizioni di Ar, July 2003. Its inevitable anachronism (it dates to the time when Europe was still bound by the Treaty of Yalta) removes none of its relevance.

Giorgio Locchi 

Defintions: The Texts That Revolutionised Noncomformised Culture 

What Women Are Attracted To

 

The fact that women decide who can have sex and who can reproduce has very far-reaching consequences. Deep down, men know that if they lose this power, if women themselves gain control over their sexuality, women will be overpowering them. Men are prepared to do almost anything to get sex. The Western man would even rather give up his manhood than risk losing the favour of women.

That’s how Swedish men become nice wimps, “svennar,” not real men. Male qualities such as courage, honour, self-confidence and self-discipline are lost. Our leaders can’t defend our Western culture because they don’t know how to behave as men. They have lost their masculinity. They do not dare to fight back.

Swedish boys are cowards, as many immigrant boys learn at school. Men from Africa and the Middle East countries only respect strong men, not strong women. They see women as weak. Men who behave like women are also weak. Then you can do what you want.

As the quick-witted actress Mae West once put it: “When women get stray, men follow in their tracks.”

Women have their biological radar set on men who can protect them and their children. Aggression and masculine charisma are qualities that attract women. For nice guys who go out of their way to please women, it can be hard to digest that women so often fall for men who will make them miserable.

The fact that women do not think the same way as men when choosing a partner is shown, for example, by what a seventeen-year-old girl wrote in Expressen, after a major highway robbery:

Another reason for stealing cars and robbing old ladies is to get what you want. I’m not referring to things you can buy in stores. I’m talking about getting the most attractive girls and getting respect from the most influential guys. I don’t know how it is in the rest of Sweden, but where I live I know that there are few girls who are really looking for the Big Love. Another word that explains them is: Golddiggers. Who would say no to the guy in the new Porsche? Who would say no to the guy in the new villa? Who would say no to a date in the most expensive restaurant? Well, when you’re a student, almost completely broke and unemployed, not many people would say no. Especially if the guy in question is ”famous” in the area.

A guy friend of mine had been in love with a girl for almost three years. He was classed as the school nerd and no one even looked his way. You know how the story ends. He chose the criminal path, got filthy rich and could choose anyone he wanted. Including the chick he’d been chasing for so many years. Pathetic, isn’t it?24 

I am not suggesting that this is a common and “normal” way for young women to choose partners but am limiting myself to the observation that among women, there is a biologically based attraction to strong men, and that strength can be interpreted in many ways. This does not prevent most people from realising that the best choice is the good-looking young man who is investing in his accountancy studies. But then it is reason and not biology that rules. Like men, women are biologically shaped to live in a bygone society, more brutal and more primitive.

Another example of how women think differently from men is that men in prison often receive love and admiration mail from women they do not know:

Anders Eklund, who murdered ten-year-old Engla in Stjärnsund and Pernilla Hellgren in Falun, was contacted by a mother of two who began visiting him in prison after he was convicted of the murders and placed in prison. Christer Karlsson, President of the Association for the Revenge of Criminals in Society, experienced first-hand the attraction of convicted criminals. He was placed in the forensic psychiatric clinic in Huddinge for an investigation after being convicted of drug and violent crimes. He placed a personal ad with the headline “Prisoner looking for…” He immediately received 50 responses.25 

Women’s power is further enhanced by the fact that they are more social and group/consensus oriented than men. Once they begin to gain positions of power, they are backed by their peers. Moreover, as they advance to important positions in politics and to managers in the media, they can influence the flow of information in society. This becomes a self-reinforcing process which, when it has gone as far as it has in Sweden, is almost impossible to stop. In today’s Sweden, women control a large part of both formal and informal power.

The men become insecure. Less than ever, they understand women. In feminist Sweden, the good men don’t really know how to act. But they do know that women are dangerous, that they can turn on them, whether it’s Gudrun Schyman’s heiress on the prowl, or some #MeToo trend sweeping through society.

This does not mean that women “win.” They also lose. Encroaching on men’s territory does not make women happy. It is not power but community and harmonious interaction that makes both women and men happy. Where there is a struggle for power, there is little room for love. We live in a time when the interplay between the sexes is out of kilter. Aristotle’s and Darwin’s idea that human ethics must be based on human nature no longer applies.

Karl-Olov Arnstberg 

Sweden Syndrome 

Endo-Rhetoric and Disgust Exercises

 Solitude Techniques: Speak to Yourself!

The second of the aforementioned preconditions for existence in recessive subjectification, the regulation of language, must be strictly applied and constantly reaffirmed, as the adept can only sustain their efforts on the path to self-governance if there is a constant flow of stabilizing information from the closed language game circle of salvific and practice knowledge. This requirement is fulfilled through the establishment of a methodically regulated praxis of conversation with oneself. Here, incidentally, one can easily show how and why the practising life, contrary to what popular clichés about the mystical or supra-rational quality of spiritual processes might suggest, depends very significantly on rhetorical phenomena that have been turned inwards, and that a cessation of the endo-rhetorical functions – aside from such rare states of meditative trance as samadhi – brings about the end of spiritual life as such. What is known as ‘mysticism’ is, for the most part, an endo-rhetorical praxis in which the rare moments without speaking have the function of fuelling endless words about the wonders of the unspeakable.

From the universe of endo-rhetorical methods – which are augmented in theistic practice systems by prayers, ritual recitations, monologies (one-word litanies) and magical evocations, which do not concern us here – I shall highlight three types without which the existence of recessively stabilized practice carriers would be inconceivable. Thomas Macho’s concept of ‘solitude techniques’ can be applied to all these forms of speech; the term refers to procedures whereby humans learn to keep themselves company in retreat.27 With their help, the recessively isolated manage, as shown by the history of hermits and countless other secessionaries, not to experience their more or less rigid self-exclusion from the world as banishment. Instead, they mould their anachoresis into a salvatory concentration on what is now considered essential. The central trait of the solitude-technical procedure consists, as Macho shows, in the ‘self-doubling’ of the contemplator. It offers an indispensable stratagem for all who are halfway along the practice path: it shows them a way to be in good company after withdrawing from the world – at least, in better company than would be available to the withdrawn individual if they remained alone with themselves undoubled.

Self-doubling only makes sense if it does not produce two symmetric halves – then the contemplator would encounter their own identical twin, who would confront them again with their muddled state in a superfluous act of mirroring. Those who practise successfully rely without exception on an asymmetrical self-doubling in which the inner other has the association of a superior partner, comparable to a genius or an angel, who stays close to its charge like a spiritual monitor and gives them the certainty of being constantly seen, examined and strictly assessed, but also supported in case of a crisis. While loneliness makes the conventional depressive sink into the abyss of their insignificance, the well-organized hermit can profit from a privilege of notability, as their noble observer – Seneca sometimes calls it their custos, guardian – constantly supplies them with the feeling of having a good companion, in fact the best, albeit while under strict supervision. In the Benedictine Rule, the friars were reminded that a monk must know that he is watched (respici) by God at every moment, that he must take into account that his every action is witnessed from a divine observation point (ab aspectu divinitatis videri) and constantly relayed upwards (renuntiari) by the angels.28This plausibly shows how recessive subjectivity can develop into a forum for intense dialogues, even passionate duels between the self and its intimate other. As the Great Other only gains a clearer presence through retreat from the multiplicity of daily themes – a procedure from which psychoanalysis and related therapeutic techniques also profited in the twentieth century – the withdrawn individual gains mental intensity by isolating themselves monothematically. They learn from their inner other who they themselves are meant to be, and their daily self-examination tells them what state they are in. One must admit, however, that in this arrangement they remain a split subject for the meantime – they live as a solitary, perhaps not quite coram Deo, but under the gaze of the master or angel whom they fear disappointing. At this level of concern for oneself, one cannot yet speak of any unification with the Great Other or a dissolution of the duality between real and ideal self, as taught in Neoplatonism and the Indian schools of non-duality.

Endo-Rhetoric and Disgust Exercises 

There are essentially three forms of speech that can be given at the inner forum as part of the recessive subject’s psychogymnastic exercises: firstly, separation speeches, which are devoted to reinforcing the recession; then training speeches, with which the practising person seeks to improve their spiritual immune situation; and finally vision speeches, which enable the contemplator to direct their gaze at the whole and to the heights – and from imaginary heights back down to the depths.

Speeches of the first type are especially important for the stabilization of the recession, as they fight the practising person’s inclination to regress to the experiential mode of the worldlings. It is clear enough that the position of exclusive self-concern is existentially far more improbable, and thus in far greater need of cultivation, than the formerly practised lifestyle of unspoilt participative pluralism, where individuals were allowed to unburden themselves via group drift, collective curiosity and mediocre diversion. Heidegger, following Kierkegaard’s example of a philosophical insulting of the audience,29 famously described the modus essendi of this form of self in his analysis of the ‘they’ in Being and Time: everyone is the other, and no one is themselves. He went in search of a path to authenticity that would no longer lead through a withdrawal to the enclave, but rather through a renewed participation in the historic ‘event’ that is elevated to the call of being. As long as the spiritual call to withdrawal applies, however, nothing must be fought more ardently than the constantly reappearing inclination to find ordinary life with its little refuges and communitary anaesthetics attractive. Whoever starts dreaming of the joys of ordinariness again after their withdrawal is spiritually lost. That the primitive truth of existence in normal situations, the participative embeddedness in natural and co-personal circumstances (as post-metaphysical spherological analysis explains with comprehensive descriptions), must be sacrificed is part of the price of life under increased vertical tension. This context demands the denaturing of normality and the transformation of the improbable into second nature.

Attacks of homesickness for the lost normality can be remedied through endo-rhetorical exercises from the angle of disgust arousal. They are effective because they fight the root causes of the temptation to find, on occasion, the external world left behind attractive. Thus Marcus Aurelius notes:

Just as taking a bath seems to you a matter of oil, sweat, dirt, scummy water, all of it offensive, so is every part of life and every kind of matter.30

This shows in a highly suggestive manner how the genesis of the external also includes ethical and affective distancing mechanisms. Sensory disgust arousal is assisted by disillusioning and disenchanting analysis:

Altogether, human affairs must be regarded as ephemeral, and of little worth: yesterday sperm, tomorrow a mummy or ashes.31

In this context, ancient atom theories find their moral place: they show how all phenomenal life is based on momentary groupings of particles. In the long run, only the spiritual soul can confront the vanitas of the particle flurries. One need hardly point out how much Buddhism owes to the use of the atomic theory, and more generally to the analytics of the composite – and how strongly the obligatory motifs of disgust arousal and disillusionment affected it. The doctrine of the not-self (anatman) so characteristic of Buddhism likewise has less of a theoretical than an aversive purpose: it persuades its adepts to accept that even if there were such a thing as the self or the soul, these would be dissoluble – which is meant to put us off the whole thing from the start.

The contemplation of organic metamorphoses goes a step further: 

Observe every object and realize that it is already being dissolved and in process of change, and, as it were, coming to be from decay or dispersion, and how each is born, in a sense, to die. 32

In this context one can appreciate Ovid’s achievement, the poetic retrieval of transformative phenomena. It was the honour of poetry to protect the space of normality from devastation by a disillusioning analysis that had got out of control. In addition, there is a wealth of self-admonitions intended to render any affective attachment to the non-own impossible through constant exercises in separation and disaffection – recall Epictetus’ suggestion to parents not to kiss their child without bearing in mind that death could take it away from them the very next day. The practising person had to have such maxims of self-admonition and self-training ‘to hand’ day and night, like a spiritual first aid box – in the terminology of the school, such mentally handy material was called the procheíron, and whoever still speaks today of having some thing or other ‘ready’ is quoting the conventions of a lost practice culture from a distance. Endo-rhetorical phrases with comparable tendencies can be found in abundance in the practice systems of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, spiritual Islam and others. We are all familiar with images of Indian sadhus meditating next to pyres on cremation grounds (shmashâna). For the notorious Aghori, who fall into a trance state while sitting on corpses, the cemetery symbolizes ‘the totality of psychomental life, fed by consciousness of the “I” ’.33 Shaivite extremists insist on eating and drinking from the skulls of Brahmans – and noisily bearing witness to it. One can easily imagine what they say to themselves in their inner monologues on the charnel ground: ‘You must transcend all this.’ Those with a Catholic upbringing will remember the Ignatian exercises, which constitute one great rhetorically structured persuasion of the meditator to participate in the passion of Christ and turn away from the recklessness of worldly life. In the Protestant camp, in Puritanism, the believer’s day is structured by admonitions to withdraw from worldly temptations. Most people are familiar with the ominous processions in Shi’ite Iran, where grown men walk through the streets of their cities lamenting and bleeding, striking their heads with broad knives amid monotonously tormenting monologues to commemorate the martyrdom of Husayn. 

There is no need to list examples for the methods of immunization and training speeches, or for vision and worldview speeches directed at one’s own intellect. The two are closely connected, as the striving for a transvital self-securing beyond death aims directly for the highest-level symbolic immune system. In Stoic doctrines, this is presented as the totality of nature: dissolving into it must be viewed as the highest form of integration, even if it is accompanied by the disintegration of that conglomerate of atoms which I provisionally think of as my body. In Christianity, by contrast, death is understood as a transition from this life to eternal life. In those spheres dominated by the idea of karma, the final immunity is attained by disabling the guilt-driven causal impetus; thus only a life that had completely ceased to produce suffering would be safe from the repercussions of those products. In this sense, Nirvana refers less to a place than to a state in which all injury and contamination by the effects of being has ceased.

To consider such ideas of dissolution, transition and final immobilization existentially plausible, the practising would constantly have to call to mind their own finitude and endo-rhetorically anticipate its sublation into absolute immunity in keeping with the conventions of their cultural area. In doing so, they speak to themselves from the position of perfect teachers attending to this student as if there were no others. Recessive subjectivity always takes private tuition from the universe, from God, from Nirvana. The three absolutes would be bad teachers if they did not encourage their students to view the impossible as if it were close enough to touch; but they would be equally bad if they did not occasionally threaten to end the tuition if there were no clear improvements in performance.

The practising life is thus a continuum of self-persuasive acts. Without these, nothing whatsoever can happen among the practising, not even those who have devoted themselves to a largely non-verbal mode of practising, as is the case in the majority of Asian school systems. Many doctrines incessantly emphasize the vast difference between the desired inner states and the rational level with its linguistic reference points. Nonetheless, the cult of non-verbalizable states drifts towards an endless stream of speeches on stages and nuances of ascent. All exercises, be they of a Yogic, athletic, philosophical or musical kind, can only take place if carried by endo-rhetorical processes in which acts of self-admonition, self-testing and self-evaluation – in line with the criteria of the respective school tradition – play a decisive part, and with constant reference to the masters who have already reached the goal. Were this not the case, recessively isolated subjectivity would return to its diffuse initial situation in a very short time, mingling once more with uncultivated conditions.

YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE

On Anthropotechnics 

PETER SLOTERDIJK