Editor’s Note: Adapted from an address to NPI’s 2016 Conference by F. Roger Devlin

I also wanted to speak about the current political situation, since we are all thinking about Trump’s victory. The main point I wanted to make was the necessity of prompt and decisive action on the part of the incoming administration, especially on immigration related issues. But everyone else I have read on our side has been making the same point. So rather than repeat them, I will limit myself to a brief cautionary tale about the consequences of delaying action on those fleeting occasions when all the political stars align perfectly.

It concerns Ronald Reagan. I am pleased that we have a fairly young audience here, but that means many of you are likely to have a distorted view of Reagan and his presidency. It is stunning how quickly the history of a single generation ago has been spun, rewritten and in parts forgotten: a process which began as the events were still unfolding. The failure of Ronald Reagan’s presidency—by its own declared standard of judgment—is the single best-kept secret of the American Right.

This is what actually happened. Reagan the candidate was analogous in many ways to Donald Trump, a political outsider distrusted by the elites but popular with the plain men and women of the United States. He began his march to the White House in 1976 by challenging an incumbent Republican president, thereby earning the hostility of the party establishment.

In 1980, they would have greatly preferred to nominate George Bush, Sr. When they were unable to do so, they presented Reagan with an ultimatum: put Bush on the ticket or we will not support your candidacy. Thus, the disastrous Bush dynasty was foisted upon our country. I have sometimes wondered what would have happened if Reagan had just said “screw you” and gone on to run without the party’s support. Trump certainly showed it can be done.

In any case, Reagan’s message resonated powerfully with ordinary Americans, many of whom crossed over from the democratic party to vote for him. In part this is because his campaign rhetoric was almost as radical as Trump’s talk of “draining the swamp.” Reagan aptly summarized his politics in the aphorism that “Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.” He vowed to cut the size of the Federal government drastically. Two departments he promised to abolish outright: transportation and education.

Immediately after taking office, Reagan made a few inconsequential cuts to the federal payroll, after which the Federal government resumed its previous rate of growth, and nothing was ever heard again about cutting it. At the end of eight years, Reagan left the Federal Behemoth significantly larger than when he had found it—including the departments of transportation and education.

He bore responsibility for other egregious failures as well, such as the 1986 Amnesty. That was supposed to combine legalization for a million or so aliens with strict enforcement ever after. What we got instead was legalization of over four million and no enforcement. Hence the precarious situation we are in today.

Columnist Joe Sobran got it right when he wrote that the Reagan administration had in reality marked an historic failure of nerve. Placed at the levers of power, Reagan flinched from the radicalism of his own campaign rhetoric. He satisfied himself with administering the welfare state he had promised to go at with hammer and tongs.

But perhaps even more disturbing than this failure itself was that it did not really matter to his followers. Having gotten a self-described “conservative” elected turned out to be enough for them. To true believers, Reagan’s whole presidency was like an eight-year- long inaugural ball. Some of them are celebrating to this day.

And after Reagan, the right would never get a second chance to go after the welfare state. We would never—until now, when it is almost too late—get another chance to go after mass immigration. By the Obama years, if not before, the Reagan presidency could just as well never have happened.

We cannot afford a failure of nerve today. We are no longer talking about overregulation hampering economic growth, as in Reagan’s time, but about whether we shall survive as a people at all. And it is easy for those who remember the excitement over Reagan to imagine a future in which every hack politician operating in the dwindling White enclaves of what used to be America will be fishing for votes by piously describing himself as a “Trump conservative.” If this happens, it will mean we have failed. I don’t say this is going to happen, but preventing it is our task for the next four years.

Now, to conclude my remarks I want to offer some thoughts to our younger followers and those who have joined us recently. Popular accounts of the Alt Right highlight the phenomenon of “trolling,” in other words saying things in order to shock or provoke our enemies. We’ve seen a lot of this since the election, especially. In my view, trolling is not a worthwhile activity and does nothing to advance our cause. It may have been more excusable when the anti-White Left’s grip on power seemed unassailable. But we have just won a great victory, and we need to raise our sights. We need to understand that the kind of people we may be tempted to troll are simply not worth your time. Let’s leave them to talk only with one another. We have more important work to do.

Much of this work involves educating ourselves and others. If you wish to play an active role in the transformation we are trying to effect, you must go beyond tweets and blogs. The section of the Radix site called “The Red Pill” is a good place to start, and we are going to be adding to it in the coming months. When you do speak to those outside our movement, ignore declared enemies and concentrate your efforts on ordinary Whites : “normies,” as we call them. Remember that you will catch more flies with honey than with gall.

Our movement sometimes gets into internal disputes over how best to label itself: Alt Right, nationalism, White advocacy, and so forth. Past a certain point, such disputes can become unprofitable. But if we must bear a label, my personal favorite is “the Reality Based Community.”

The universalistic liberalism we oppose is forced by its very nature to ignore or deny certain realities: human differentiation by race and by sex, the universality of the tribal instinct and ethnic conflict. We are simply people who strive conscientiously to study these realities objectively and to shape prudent policy with a view of them. We believe this will benefit our own people without doing any injustice to others. And it is an infinitely more rewarding and profitable activity than attempting to rivet any ideological mold upon the living reality of human society.

Editor’s Note: Adapted from an address to NPI’s 2016 Conference by F. Roger Devlin

Thank you all. And thank you to Richard for inviting me to speak to you today. I have a lot of matters I would like to address, so this talk may get a little disjointed. But I think we can live with that. Many of you have probably seen my byline but not know me by sight. I write a lot about men and women and their mutual relations. Sometimes the men in our movement fail to appreciate sufficiently the relevance of this subject to our political struggle as a people. Women don’t usually have that problem. They know that they control the perpetuation of our race, and in the final analysis, that’s almost all that matters. Feminists are the ones who like to say that the personal is political, and on this point at least, they are correct.

Today, I would like to begin by drawing your attention to an article published in a Norwegian newspaper three and a half years ago. [A translation of the original article can be found here.] Those of you who have been in our movement that long may remember the flurry of discussion it occasioned at the time. The article appeared in one of the few Norwegian publications not dependent on government subsidies, and therefore free to tell the truth about the situation in that country. It was based on interviews with two young men from Grorudalen, a suburban area outside Oslo that has enjoyed more cultural enrichment than any other place in that country, mostly Pakastani and Somali Muslims. The two young men reflect on the challenges of coming to manhood in such an environment.

They report that there is a clear hierarchy among the local boys, and native Norwegians are at the bottom of it. They are often physically attacked by the immigrant boys in the local schools. Authority figures such as teachers tell the Norwegian boys never to retaliate, even when punched. The immigrant boys are to be pitied, they are told, because they come from countries which have suffered from war—even though some are third generation by now.

The young Muslims are quick to perceive their inviolability, of course, and take advantage of it. As one of the interviewees put it, “they talk about respect, but they don’t show any.” They have various contemptuous slang terms for their Norwegian peers, such as “whitey” and “potato.” They stare aggressively at them on the streets, and the Norwegian boys must lower their gaze first if they do not want to face an unequal fight there and then.

And the fights are always unequal. The European concept of a “fair fight” does not exist in the Muslim mind. “If you meet them alone,” said one interviewee, “they are cowards.” They travel and hunt in packs like dogs, and only attack where they enjoy a clear superiority of force. Seven or eight against one is not uncommon. Furthermore, practically all of these boys dispose of a large family network: brothers, uncles, cousins who are glad to help them avenge any slights. Most of the Norwegian boys’ parents are divorced and they are living with their mothers. Because of the low native birth rate, most of them have no male siblings at all.

Some Norwegian boys have actually begun to mimic the grammatical mistakes and limited vocabulary of the immigrant boys in an effort to raise their status. A handful have actually convert to Islam.

But the most interesting part of this article to me is one interviewee’s description of the sexual consequences of this social experiment. The Muslim boys, he says, can:

chase Norwegian girls, but we cannot go after theirs. It’s something you learn early on. You just don’t go after a Pakistani girl, but Norwegian girls are available to immigrant boys. Norwegian girls prefer them. I don’t know why. That they are tough, that they have money despite not having jobs. The girls don’t see that they fight in packs, that they are cowards. I asked my best female friend if we could get romantically involved, and she told me that I have the right personality, but the problem was that I’m Norwegian. She wants to become involved with a foreigner.

Well, that young man may not understand why Norwegian girls prefer immigrant boys, but I do, and I am going to tell you. Sexual behavior is controlled not by the prefrontal cortex which is responsible for rational thought, but by the limbic system, sometimes popularly known as the “reptilian brain.” The female’s instinct is to mate with socially dominant men—and it does not matter how such dominance is achieved. Reptiles are even farther from grasping the concept of a fair fight than Muslims. The limbic system of Norwegian girls is unconcerned that their male peers face overwhelming odds, that the entire political and social regime of their country has been set up as if with the specific intention of disadvantaging them at the expanse of low-IQ thugs from the slums of Karachi. All the girls see is that it is the Norwegian boys who are getting beaten up and the immigrant boys who are doing the beating. Their natural impulse is to mate with the beaters, not the beatees.

Speaking more generally, women are less loyal to the tribe into which they are born than are men, and there are evolutionary reasons for this. In our environment of evolutionary adaptation, our remote ancestors lived in bands of fifty or a hundred persons whose men were frequently fighting one another. To be successful in such fights, men had to practice loyalty to the other men of their own tribe. When they were successful, they took the women of the vanquished tribe for themselves. This did not generally create any problem for the women of the defeated tribe. Women are naturally equipped to form new bonds with such conquerors quickly and easily. Their instinct is to subordinate all other considerations to the successful rearing of children. Loyalty to their defeated menfolk interferes with the fulfillment of this natural imperative, so they have generally not cultivated such loyalty to any great degree. At least, such is a woman’s natural inclination.

Not all women are entirely reptilian, however, and so there have been historical exceptions to this pattern. For example, all the sources agree that the Yankee soldiers who took part in the military occupation of the American South during reconstruction got absolutely nowhere with the local women. The wives and sisters of men who had been overwhelmingly defeated—crippled and killed in many cases—remained loyal to these men, or to their memory, even at the expense of their own reproductive success. I’m not sure anything else I have read about the Civil War has struck me with greater admiration for the defeated South. Female loyalty to tribe is certainly possible, and I hope we will know how to honor it where it occurs. At the same time, we would be wise not to count too much upon it. As I said, our evolutionary history has given women a facility in adapting to circumstance and a natural preference for the victorious, even in the unfairest of fights.

I hope that when the time comes, Norwegian men will have the strength not to take back those of their women who have crashed and burned after a fling with foreign men. And crash and burn they will. The Muslim men despise these women, whom they call “Norwegian whores.” This is one reason the women are so attracted to them. But in these men’s eyes, non-Muslim women are for gratification, with or without their consent. That’s what Islamic law tells them. They stick to their own women when it is time to raise a family. So exogamous Western women generally end up alone once they hit their thirties.

Now, if you want to discourage undesirable behavior on the part of such women, nothing is more effective than total ruthlessness. It’s masculine, it’s dominant, it’s attractive, and it’s one reason they go for Muslim men in the first place. So in this respect, if no other, European men would be wise to imitate the foreign men among whom they are forced to live and learn to be ruthless.

Let me give you an historical analogy. It is recorded that there was once a wave of suicides by young women in ancient Athens. If this happened today, emergency hotlines would be set up and psychotherapists dispatched to counsel the girls and find out what was troubling them. But instead the city assembly simply decreed that the next girl to commit suicide would be displayed naked in the middle of the Agora. It wasn’t “nice,” but there were no further suicides.

Similarly, a policy of writing off women who take up with their swarthy oppressors would be one way for Western man to regain a part of his dignity. It would also be Eugenic, as tending to flush disloyalty from our gene pool. If you didn’t take pity on those bimbos weeping over Hillary Clinton’s defeat last week, you certainly shouldn’t need to take pity on women who have come crawling to you as a last resort.

From the 19th century through the 1960s and 70s, World History books were quite fair in their assessments of the varying accomplishments of all civilizations, but most authors and teachers paid more attention to the achievements of European civilization in the making of modernity and in the shaping of global politics, particularly after the European discovery of the Americas, the consolidation of Newtonian science, and the spread of Western-created industrial technology. This fairly realistic assessment was increasingly rejected from the 1960s on by historians who felt that all the peoples of the earth deserved equal attention and that it was “ethnocentric” to elevate European achievements above others. How can Europeans be portrayed as the primary players in modern world history if all the races of the world are equal and the task of liberal-minded academics is to nurture cultural harmony, overcome the belligerence exemplified in World War II, and produce “global citizens” in an increasingly interconnected world? But an obvious difficulty confronted this feeling: how can a new history of all humans—“universal” in this respect—be constructed in light of the clear pre-eminence of Europeans in so many fields?

It soon became apparent that the key was to do away with the idea of “progress,” which had become almost synonymous with the achievements of the West. In the political climate in the mid- to late ’60s, the West was at the center of everything that seemed wrong in the world: the threat of nuclear destruction, the prolonged Vietnam War, the pollution inflicted by European consumers; and the West was opposed to the brave new world taking shape: pan-Arabic and pan-African identities, the “liberation movements” in Latin America, the Black civil rights riots, the feminist struggle against patriarchy, etc.^[1]

Not to be underestimated, this was the time when a highly influential school of thought, Dependency Theory, emerged, arguing that the reason Europeans modernized, in the first place, was that they stole the resources of other civilizations, enslaved their inhabitants, and enriched themselves unfairly. The once backward West had managed to surpass other cultures, starting in the late 15th century, by positioning itself, through dishonesty, duplicity, and violence, at the center of the world economy. The “progression” of the West was predicated on the systematic exploitation of the rest of the world. Millions of students were taught that the capitalist West, in the words of Karl Marx, had progressed to become master of the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”^[2] Old dead white males^[3] should no longer be praised for launching the modern world, but should instead be held guilty for holding back the development of other civilizations and creating a world capitalist system in the “core” Western world that held down the “peripheral” Third World.

Accordingly, the idea of “progress,” articulated since the Enlightenment in close association with the history of Europeans, was rejected by the late 1970s,^[4] soon to be replaced by the idea of “world history connected.”^[5] Students would now have to learn that all humans were alike as Homo sapiens, similarly capable members of the same planet, creators of different but equally worthwhile cultures. We all had a common origin in the “first” humans who evolved in Africa, migrating to the rest of the world, occupying different ecological settings and creating “richly diverse” cultures, yet interacting with each other through trade, wars, empires, and migrations, and thus making world history together. There were no separate civilizations; the history of the world had been made together by all humans in the same “mother earth.”^[6] But the aim of these equalizers was hardly that Europeans were creatively involved in the creation of Chinese, Mesopotamian, or Mayan civilization; it was that they were morally and economically responsible for the “underdevelopment” of civilizations that were once more developed than the Germanic Barbarians of the Dark Ages—while insisting simultaneously that non-Europeans were the ultimate originators or co-participators of every great epoch in Europe’s history.

But before this great fabrication was imposed on unsuspecting White students, a preparatory, though by no means identical, idea had been articulated by a German named Karl Jaspers: the notion that in ancient times, roughly between 800 and 200 BC, the major civilizations of the Old World experienced, more or less at the same time, a “spiritual process” characterized by a common set of religious, psychological, and philosophical inquiries about what it means to be “specifically human.”^[7] The argument was that humanity, at this point in history, together, came to pose universal questions about the meaning of life with similar answers. The ideological aim behind this idea was that Europeans were not exceptional, did not carve out a unique historical path beginning with the achievements of the Greeks. Rather, all humans had developed a common cultural outlook at more or less the same time, an outlook that was to shape their histories along similar trajectories, with the West only “rising” in recent times due to a combination of “unusual circumstances.” This idea of an “Axial Age” was a boon to the ideological drive after World War II to envision the history of all cultures as a “collective” undertaking between “connected” peoples. The behavior of Germany during Second War was testimony, apparently, of what happens when an otherwise modern culture decides to defend its ethnic integrity rather than join with the world of cosmopolitanism. Germany had strayed from the course of “human history” by envisioning itself as “special people” with a unique destiny for greatness. The Europeans who had defeated Germany must abandon any notion of exceptionalism and envision themselves as members of a common history.

When Karl Jaspers first articulated this idea in 1949, he saw it as an exceptional age in which the major civilizations of the world accomplished similar intellectual and spiritual breakthroughs between 800 and 200 BC. He saw this age as an example of how relatively isolated cultures had shown a common humanity in producing rather similar moral ideas and rules with universal intent. But while Jaspers believed that the civilizations of the world diverged greatly after the Axial Age, and agreed with the then general consensus that Western history was characterized by a “special quality” in the generation of far more cultural novelties, historians in subsequent decades gradually came to the view that axial-age thinking was the product of the “common” and “connected” nature of the entire history of “humanity” and that its thinking “spread and shaped thoughts and feelings in every clime and continent.”^[8]

I believe, to the contrary, that there was no Axial Age, but that instead this epoch witnessed a dramatic contrast between the revolution in thought in ancient Greece and in the other civilizations combined. This argument can be made successfully even if we restrict ourselves to the Presocratic thinkers of the sixth and fifth centuries BC and leave out the amazing intellectual and artistic originalities of the classical Greeks. The Presocratics, I will argue, were the originators of the uniquely Western idea that there is a logos in the universe, a pattern, a structure in the way all things are. This idea teaches us that humans have a faculty within their soul, or natural constitution, that can be identified as “rational,” which allows them to offer arguments about the logos of the world and “to speak” or use words in a reasoned way about the way the world and humans are structured and the way humans should live in accordance with this order. This paper will also examine the way Western scholars came to extend the Axial Age to the entire history of the world in an effort to dilute the uniqueness of Europeans generally, in the name of a “world history connected” that would suit the expectations of egalitarianism and the promotion of diversity.^[9] Finally, I will contrast the Chinese “embedded” way of seeing things to the “analytical,” and ultimately far more creative, worldly, and universal way of seeing things of Europeans.

THE GOAL OF JASPER’S AXIAL AGE

Jaspers, to this day a highly respected German philosopher, argued in The Origin and Goal of History, published in 1949 in German, a few years after the end of World War II, that Western culture was not uniquely gifted with ideas that bespoke of mankind generally and the course of history universally; other major civilizations, too, had espoused outlooks about humanity together with moral precepts with universal content.

Jaspers believed that this ability was “empirically” made possible by the occurrence of a fundamental “spiritual” change between 800 and 200 BC, which gave “rise to a common frame of historical self-comprehension for all peoples—for the West, for Asia, and for all men on earth, without regard to particular articles of faith.”^[10] Believing that these spiritual changes occurred simultaneously across the world, Jaspers called it the “Axial Period.” It is worth quoting in full Jasper’s identification of the main protagonists of this period:

The most extraordinary events are concentrated in this period. Confucius and Lao-tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti, Chuang-tse, Lieh-tsu and a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to skepticism, to materialism, sophism and nihilism; in Iran Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance, from Elijah, by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the Philosophers — Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato — of the tragedians, Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India, and the West, without any one of these regions knowing of the others.^[11]

Jaspers used certain amorphous philosophical phrases to bring out what was novel spiritually about this Axial age: “man becomes conscious of Being as a whole… He asks radical questions… By consciously recognizing the limits he sets himself the highest goals. He experiences absoluteness in the face of self hood.”^[12] But in some instances, Jaspers offered more concrete sentences: “hitherto unconsciously accepted ideas, customs and conditions were subjected to examination, questioned and liquidated.”^[13] Essentially, in this Axial Age, the age of myths came to “an end.”

The Greek, Indian and Chinese philosophers were unmythical in their decisive insights, as were the prophets [of the Bible] in their ideas of God.^[14]

A number of religious figures, philosophers and prophets came to rely more on their own judgments, visions, and reasoning powers: logos was set “against mythos.”^[15] Humans were now willing to rely on their rationality to make sense of the cosmos, to draw a clearer contrast between the inner world of consciousness, reflection, and the outer of accepted norms and beliefs, subject and object, spirit and matter. Combined with this spiritual awakening, came the idea of a transcendental One God as the basis of a new ethics against unreal demons and as the locus for thinking what was morally right for all.

It is not that the philosophical outlooks of these civilizations were identical, but that they exhibited similar breakthroughs in posing universal questions about the “human condition”: What is the ultimate source of all things? What is our relation to the universe? What is the Good? What are human beings?

Prior cultures were more particularized, tribal, polytheistic, and devoid of self-awareness regarding the universal characteristics of human existence. From the Axial Age onward, “world history receives the only structure and unity that has endured—at least until our own time.”^[16]

The central aim of Jasper’s book was to drive home the notion that the different faiths and races of the world were once running along “parallel lines” of spiritual development, and that we should draw on this “common” spiritual source to avoid the calamity of another World War. The fact that these civilizations had reached a common spiritual point of development, without any direct influences between them, was likely, in his view, the “manifestation of some profound common element, the one primal source of humanity.”^[17] We humans have much in common, despite our differences.

GERMAN GUILT REQUIRES A COMMON HISTORY

This notion of an Axial Age, with which Jaspers came to be identified, and which has been accepted by many established world historians, historical sociologists and philosophers,^[18] is also a claim he felt in a personal way (as a German) in the aftermath of the Second World War. According to Jaspers, after the end of the Axial Age around

200 BC, the major civilizations had ceased to follow “parallel movements close to each other” and instead began to “diverge” and “finally became deeply estranged from one another.”^[19] The Nazi experience was, in his estimation, an extreme case of such divergence.

It should be noted, in this vein, that Jaspers, whose wife was Jewish, was the author of a much discussed book, The Question of German Guilt,^[20] in which he extended culpability to Germany as a whole, indeed, to every German, even those who were not members of the Nazi party. A passage from this book, cited upfront in a BBC documentary, “The Nazis—A Warning from History,”^[21] reads:

That which has happened is a warning. To forget it is guilt. It must be continually remembered. It was possible for this to happen, and it remains possible for it to happen again at any minute. Only in knowledge can it be prevented.

The intention behind the idea of an Axial Age was to induce in humans an awareness of themselves as beings with a profound spiritual unity, nurturing a sense of “human solidarity.” But this was only the beginning of what was soon to become a culture-wide effort on the part of Western elites to do away with any notion of Western uniqueness, by framing its history as part of a “common” historical narrative of interacting and mutually evolving civilizations. It was also the beginning of an effort to instill on European natives the belief that they were citizens of “proposition nations,” and since these propositions could be held in common by all humans, they were “citizens of the world”—and all inhabitants of the world were potential citizens of their nations. “Germanness,” in the words of Jürgen Habermas, would “no longer be based on ethnicity, but founded on citizenship.”^[22] Habermas, a keen admirer of Jaspers, would be one of countless others embracing this civic/cosmopolitan notion of citizenship.

HANNAH ARENDt

An interesting figure drawn to the idea of a common historical experience, in the early days after the Second World War, was Hannah Arendt, a student of Jaspers. She obtained a copy of The Origin and Goal of History as she was completing her widely acclaimed book The Origins of Totalitarianism. It is quite revealing that, in a short essay titled “Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Identity,”^[23] Elisabeth Young-Bruehl traces the roots of Arendt’s cosmopolitanism to the role of the Jews of Palestine as one of the Axial Age peoples. Together with Jaspers, Arendt came to share

the project of thinking about what kind of history was needed for facing the events of the war and the Holocaust and for considering how the world might be after the war. They agreed that the needed history should not be national or for a national purpose, but for humankind. ^[24]

Arendt agreed with Jaspers, Young-Bruehl writes, that the way for Westerners to overcome “the ill effects of their own prejudices and technological progress, which had made the worldwide war possible,” was to open up to the world and think in a “cosmopolitan way about the future of humanity.” In light of her Jewish identity, as one of the Axial peoples victimized by German and European prejudices, Arendt further developed the arguments of Jaspers by invoking the cosmopolitanism exhibited by the Jews in the Axial Age, both as an “antidote to tribalist Jewish thinking” and to European ethno-nationalism. Young-Bruehl continues:

It is Arendt’s Jewish identity—not just the identity she asserted in defending herself as a Jew when attacked as one, but more deeply her connection to the Axial Age prophetic tradition—that made her the cosmopolitan she was.

But what kind of history writing does cosmopolitan thinking require, given that civilizations, according to Jasper, diverged in their cultural development after the Axial Age? For Arendt, this was beside the point, she was not a historian preoccupied with the actual documentation and diverging histories of civilizations and nations. Her goal was to create a new state of mind among Europeans in the way they viewed themselves in relation to the world. She thus called upon Europeans to:

• “enlarge” their minds and include the experience and views of other cultures in their thinking;

• overcome their Eurocentric prejudices and encompass the entire world in their historical reflections;

• develop a sense of the “human condition” and learn how to talk about what is “common to all mankind”;

• learn how they are culturally shaped both by their particular conditions and the conditions and experiences shared by all humans on the planet.^[25]

THE UNIQUENESS OF THE WEST—REJECTED

This call by Arendt would coalesce with similar arguments about the “inventions of nations,”^[26] the “social construction of races,” and the idea that we are all primordially alike as Homo sapiens. Jaspers, at least in his book The Origin and Goal of History, did not go this far, but in fact retracted, in later chapters, from the general statements he made in the Introduction about the Axial Age being a common spiritual experience across the planet, acknowledging the obvious:

it was not a universal occurrence… There were the great peoples of the ancient civilizations, who lived before and even concurrently with the [Axial] breakthrough, but had no part in it.^[27]

He further noted that the Egyptian and Babylonian peoples “remained what they had been earlier … destitute of that quality of reflection which transformed mankind,” even though they interacted with the Axial cultures.^[28] As it is, Jaspers admitted that after the Axial Age, the respective civilizations traversed very different spiritual pathways, which begs the question as to why they would cease to exhibit “parallel developments” despite increasing interaction. Perhaps even more important was his recognition that there was a “specific quality” to the West in the way it exhibited “far more dramatic fresh starts,”^[29] whereas

in Asia, on the other hand, a constant situation persists; it modifies its manifestations, it founders in catastrophes and re-establishes itself on the one and only basis as that which is constantly the same.^[30]

In the end, Jaspers could not avoid the ultimate historical question about why the

West followed such a diametrically different path:

[I]f science and technology were created in the West, we are faced with the question: Why did this happen in the West and not in the other two great cultural zones?^[31]

The answer he offered was essentially the same as Hegel’s heavily Eurocentric perspective about the unique pre-occupation of Europeans with freedom and reason. He actually delimited the veracity of the Axial thesis with the observation that only the ancient Greeks came to know “political liberty,” in contrast to the “universal despotism” of the East; and that “in contrast to the East, Greek rationality contain[ed] a strain of consistency that laid the foundations of mathematics and perfected formal logic.”^[32]

Here are more special qualities mentioned by Jaspers about the West:

• “Tragedy is known only to the West.”
• While other Axial cultures spoke of mankind in general, in the West this universal ambition regarding the place of man in the cosmos and the good life did not “coagulate into a dogmatic fixity.”^[33]
• “The West gives the exception room to move.”
• In the West “human nature reaches a height that is certainly not shared by all and to which … hardly anyone ascends.”
• “[T]he perpetual disquiet of the West, its continual dissatisfaction, its inability to be content with any sort of fulfillment.”^[34]

This is the language of Spengler’s “Faustian Soul.”^[35] Some in the New Right don’t like this perpetual restlessness about the West and would prefer to see the West become one more boring “traditional culture.” But this cannot be, for “in contrast to the uniformity and relative freedom from tension of all Oriental empires”:

the West is typified by resoluteness that takes things to extremes, elucidates them down to the last detail, places them before the either-or, and so brings awareness of the underlying principles and sets up battle-fronts in the inmost recesses of the mind.^[36]

None of these substantial qualifications would matter in the end. The inquiries Jaspers started would mushroom way beyond his expectations, leading to the complete abolition of the teaching of “Western Civ” courses and the imposition of World Multicultural History. The Axial Age Jaspers had limited to the period 800–200 BC would come to be extended to the entire course of human history! A. G. Frank and Kenneth Pomeranz would announce in their best sellers, ReOrient (1998) and The Great Divergence (2000) that the cultural and economic trajectories of Europe and Asia were “surprisingly similar” up until a sudden “accidental” divergence occurred around 1750–1830. Humans are all the same, have always been connected through migrations, race mixing, trade, and cultural borrowings. We have always been part of one big family. Europeans who talk about their uniqueness and complain about mass immigration and the incredible gifts of Islamic culture^[37] to the West are ignoramuses in need of replacement.

Yet there never was an Axial Age: the Presocratics were dramatically different in their inquiries, and far more universal and original in their reasoning, than the prophets of the Old Testament, the major schools of Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism in China, and the Hindu religions of India. As far as I know, no one has explained this seemingly paradoxical combination of extreme Western uniqueness and extreme universalism.

THE HERITAGE OF WORLD CIVILIZATIONS

The acceptance and popularization of the Axial Age has come in varying degrees and ways, but a good way to access its impact and general characteristics is to examine its incorporation in college textbooks. Many world history texts could have been chosen to show how far ahead the idea of an Axial Age was extended, but for our purposes the following two, very successful, texts, will suffice: The Heritage of World Civilizations (2003), by Albert M. Craig et. al. This 2003 publication is the sixth edition; the text was first published in 1990, and it is already in its 10th edition as of 2010. The other book I will examine briefly is the The World—A History (2007), by the internationally celebrated Fernandez-Armesto. This book was released with a huge splash, evaluated by more than a hundred reviewers from around the world and “class-tested” at 15 academic institutions in the United States. The third edition of this text came out in 2011, with another edition planned for 2015.

These two texts make for an interesting contrast between the initial phases in the acceptance of an Axial Age, as understood by Heritage, which is now seen as an outdated text written by old White men close to retirement, retired, or dead, still employing “unsound” terms like “civilizations,” and what is currently seen as a truly progressive version of the Axial Age, as understood by Armesto’s The World.

The authors of Heritage, Craig, William Graham, Donald Kagan, Steven Ozment, and Frank M. Turner, are known as relatively conservative historians in academia. Kagan has a reputation as a “neoconservative”,^[38] and Turner, no longer alive, as a “historian of the ideas that shaped Western civilization.”^[39] All in all, they are/were solid academics from a generation that has now been practically replaced by outright promoters of diversity. In the sixth edition of Heritage, they humbly write about improvements in the text, such as the consolidation of four chapters on European peoples into two chapters, thereby offering “a more balanced treatment of world history.”^[40]

We should not be surprised at their efforts to march in step with the cultural Marxist expectations of the time. In fact, not only do they follow Jaspers, but they go further in solidifying and expanding historically Jasper’s rather moderate assessment, making the following key observations about this age:

There is more than an obvious similarity between the Jewish Messiah, the Chinese sage-king, and Plato’s philosopher-king… Each would reconnect ethics to history and restore order to a troubled society… The reason is not that humans’ creativity dried up after 300 BCE, but that subsequent breakthroughs and advances tended to occur within the original [Axial] traditions … Once a cultural pattern was set, it usually endured. Each major culture was resistant to the others and only rarely displaced [my emphasis].^[41]

While they agree with Jaspers that in subsequent centuries, once each tradition was set, each culture tended to follow its own tradition, we are made to believe that they remained equally attached to the fundamental ideas of the Axial Age. Chinese thought had greater staying power than Greek thought,” as Greek thought was “submerged by Christianity,” becoming “the handmaiden of theology” until it “reemerge as an independent force in the Renaissance.”^[42] So, overall, the West more or less continued the axial-age thinking of the Greeks, with the difference that it then brought in the tradition of “the Jewish Messiah,” submerging the Greek one under it, until Greek thought managed to reemerge again in the Renaissance, leading to the rise of modern science.

To its credit, Heritage examines each of the four traditions of the Axial Age separately, bringing out some key differences, backed by solid, old fashion sources. Yet the text cannot help playing up the idea that we are all homo sapiens, who have come together historically through “globalization” and that no citizen in the West can “escape the necessity of understanding the past in global terms.”^[43] The current global course of history dictates the way we should see the past. We have always been moving towards the creation of cosmopolitan citizens, and this book hopes to contribute to this process.

THE WORLD—A HISTORY

Once we get to Fernandez-Armesto’s text, all these qualifications about divergent paths and Western dissimilarities are thrown out the window. I have already examined this text in The Uniqueness of Western Civilization and will not rehash the flagrant manner in which it deals with European history. Suffice it to say that he allocates a meager 40 pages or so to ancient Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance combined, but 23 pages to the Mongols alone, whom he praises as tolerant and liberal. He then goes on to claim, for the modern era, that there were “comparable” revolutions in science, industry, and in Enlightenment thought in China, India and in the Near East. The paramount message of the text is that the history of the peoples of the earth must be presented in a “unified” or in a “global context.” This is the message right from the opening chapters on the evolution of humans. What, then, is so different about the Axial Age?

After some cheerful chapters about how “all the people that we now recognize as human” evolved in Africa, the emphasis, leading up to a chapter titled “The Axial Age, from 500 BCE to 100 CE,” is about how humans moved “out of Africa” and ended up “peopling the earth.” We hear endearing stories about how “Eve’s children” migrated out of their native “homeland” in Africa to other continents. Did you get this students? We are all immigrants … except, of course, for Africans!

Armesto then goes on to say that most cultures across the world made similar transitions to herding and farming on their own initiative, everyone developing civilizations.^[44] The old definition of “civilization” is now rightfully “discredited as a word,” for all cultures are civilizations, since any agrarian engagement with an environment is a form of civilization.^[45] As Armesto puts it in Civilizations (2000),

In reality, civilization is an ordinary thing, an impulse so widespread it has transformed almost every habitable landscape.^[46]

It became widespread through diffusion; there may have been more, but we know of only six civilizations originating on their own. Armesto imagines himself a provocateur in academia. He condemns the “crude perversion” of Kenneth Clark^[47], who claimed “the Apollo embodies a higher state of civilization than the [African] mask.”^[48] All civilizations are equally ordinary, or no better than foraging societies.

The importance of the Axial Age is simply that “the thinkers of the time anticipated and influenced the way we think now.”^[49] Whereas Jaspers saw the Axial Age as a unique epoch, world historians nowadays see it as a continuation of past “connected” trends characterized by new intellectual trends. Whereas Jaspers observed divergent paths after this age, with the West following a “special” path, Armesto views the West as no different from the other civilizations; every place was similarly “anticipated and influenced” by “the common content of the minds” of the Axial thinkers. In the many centuries after this age, the West, just like the Rest, “added so little to it.”^[50]

Armesto, however, adds that the Axial Age was not restricted to Eurasia, but was a “worldwide story” because of the way axial-age thinking later spread and shaped thoughts and feelings in every clime and continent.^[51]

The other areas were co-participants as members of trade networks, as colonial areas, or plainly as members of the same species that migrated out of Africa, supporting the core regions in their endeavors while adding their own cultural motifs. World history is a wonderful tapestry of cultures working together.

THE GREATNESS OF ANCIENT GREECE

But anyone with some knowledge of Ancient Greece would know that the number of thinkers coming from that world was vastly greater than the number coming from all the other civilizations combined, which were each large and heavily populated. Much as Armesto tries to portray the thinkers outside Greece as saintly, lofty and exalted sages, while ignoring most of the Greek thinkers—referring to Plato as a “member of an Athenian gang of rich aristocrats” who idealized “harsh, reactionary, and illiberal” states, “militarism,” “regimentation,” “rigid class structure,” and “selective breeding of superior human beings”^[52]—the achievements of Asia cultures barely compare in originality to the Greek invention of tragedy as a literary form, dialogical reasoning, deductive method in geometry, prose, citizenship politics, the science of geography, cartography, historical writing, and other achievements.

First, the region of Persia, South West Asia, produced only one global thinker, known as Zoroaster, from the late seventh and early sixth centuries BC. In the case of India, we have Vardhamana Jnatrputra, also dated without precision to the sixth and early fifth century BC. He founded Jainism. We also have Gautuma Siddharta, who “probably” lived in the mid-sixth and early fourth centuries BC, associated with the foundation of Buddhism. Concerning the Israelites, we have “the monotheistic revolution” associated with the “Book of Deuteronomy,” the fifth book of the Hebrew Bible, dated from about the eighth to the fifth century BC. There are no clear names here other than prophets such as Hosea and Jeremiah, both roughly dated to this period. Some add Jesus to this group, Armesto for one, “as an independent-minded Jewish rabbi.”

What about the much talked about “Hundred Schools” in China? As far as we know, there were three major schools: Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism, together with some other important figures known as “Logicians,” “Mohists,” “Cosmologists,” and “Rhetoricians.” The original great thinkers were: Confucius (born 551 BC), Mencius (370–290 BC), who offered an idealistic version of Confucian thought, Mo-tzu (470–391 BC), founder of Mohism, Lao-tzu (fifth or fourth century BC), founder of Taoism, and Sun-tzu (sixth-fifth century BC), author of The Art of War. This is an impressive list, with other less significant names.

To make the case that something very different transpire in the Western world, it will suffice to contrast China’s contribution to Greece’s contribution to Axial thinking. China is the only civilization that contributed thinkers that were actually not religiously oriented and, in this respect, China is closer to the criteria that Jaspers sets, according to which this age saw not only a brake with tribal gods and values but a new style of thinking emphasizing reason and argumentation—logos. Armesto confounds his students by placing the main ideas of the Axial thinkers under such generic terms as “Monotheism,” “New Political Thinking,” “Math,” “Reason,” and “Science.”

The number of great thinkers in the Presocratic era alone is greater than the number of all the thinkers of all the other civilizations combined. I am using primarily as my source for this list the very authoritative text, The Presocratic Philosophers, by Jonathan Barnes, backed by respected Encyclopedia links as well as Wikipedia entries.^[53] These are not obscure or secondary names. I will leave out date of birth and death, except to say that they are essentially thinkers of the sixth and fifth centuries BC. We have a total of 17 great Presocratics:

• Anaxagoras
• Anaximander
• Anaximenes
• Democritus
• Diogenes
• Empedocles
• Gorgias
• Heraclitus
• Leucippus
• Melissus
• Parmenides
• Philolaus
• Protagoras
• Pythagoras
• Xenophanes
• Thales
• Zeno.

I am leaving the great figures associated with Greece’s most creative period, the Classical period, which borders with the Presocratic era but extends into the fourth century BC. The Axial Age for Greece, in truth, extends through the Hellenistic period, usually accepted to begin in 323 BC and to end in 31 BC, which produced not just the major philosophical names of Epicurus, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Ariston, Pyrrho, and Aristippus, but the first true scientists in human history, as argued by Lucio Russo in The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn.^[54] What Russo argues in great detail, mind you, has long been known by classicists; for example, Marshall Clagett, in Greek Science in Antiquity (1955), calls the Hellenistic period “the great period of Greek science,”^[55] correctly identifying the Presocratics as philosophers rather than scientists, and offering an overview of the original Hellenistic writings of Strato, Aristarchus, Eudoxos, Erastosthenes, Hipparchus, and Archimedes.

It can be argued, actually, that the Greek accomplishment, which can be extended beyond 31 BC to cover the ideas of Euclid, Ptolemy, and Galen in the first two centuries in mathematics, solid and fluid mechanics, optics, astronomy, and anatomy, found no parallel in ancient, medieval, and modern China. The reasons for this lack of a breakthrough in the cultivation of a proper scientific method has been much discussed recently. I will refer here to James McClellan and Harold Dorn’s Science and Technology in World History, which sums up some of the key differences:

• Chinese society did not witness a distinct profession of scientists; there were many sciences but these were practical and there was “no notion of pure science pursued for its own sake.”
• Despite producing great algebraists, Chinese mathematicians did not cultivate a formal geometry with logical proofs.
• The Chinese style of thinking was correlative or associative, and strove to find analogies and relations between diverse things, rather than looking at nature as a separate entity working according to universal laws that could be understood in terms of cause-effect relations, self-evident definitions, and logical inferences.^[56]

The Presocratics had already come to view nature as working according to rational laws explainable through the proper employment of rational arguments. This contrast was a key difference, among others, setting the West apart as a civilization driven by the movement of reason freed from external hindrances, arguments for or against, with a dynamic of its own, producing, through the process of proving arguments and receiving criticisms, refutations, new conjectures and new-proof-generated concepts, leading to the accumulation of knowledge.

IN THE BEGINNING WAS LOGOS

To fully appreciate this immense contribution of the Presocratics, we need to go beyond the quantitative observation that Presocratic Greece produced more original thinkers than the rest of the Axial world combined; more important still is the qualitative fact that the Presocratics, and only they, invented a style of thinking capable of producing knowledge and truthfulness. Once this style was inaugurated, there was no end to the ideas Europeans could produce continuously beyond the Axial Age.

The faculty of reason is the generator of knowledge, and the more reason is freed from extra-rational constraints—and is able to rely on its own internally generated principles, axioms, and inferential dynamic—it will inevitably produce novel ideas about nature, man, and society, since there is an infinite number of things to be discovered and learned about. Novel facts engender empirical progress, corroborate existing ideas or call for new explanations. In philosophy generally, reliance on open debate, through reason’s own criteria, for and against, thesis and antithesis, in-through blind alleys and aimless meanderings, produces new ideas and ways of observing reality. This emphasis on reason has also taught Western man, through the dialogic of question and answer, that there are other forms of poetical and artistic knowledge.^[57]

There is a key word, which is sometimes defined to mean “the word,” which captures the essence of the Presocratic Revolution—logos. There is much ambiguity about the meaning of this word due to successive appropriations, misappropriations and disputations, going back to ancient times,^[58] but it seems to me that the core meaning of logos is that there is a ratio, a principle, a proportion, a measure in the world that can be accounted for by human reason through the use of words, explanations, and arguments. Humans can be cogitators of this logos, so long as they engage in reasoned, balanced, proportionate debate, in a way that is commensurate with the order of the world.

Armesto tries to sound profound and cosmopolitan by writing about how everyone in the Axial Age was asking ponderous questions about the nature of reality, the divine, the proper form of government; in reality, only the Greeks were rationally arguing about these questions, and only they managed to think universally about the nature of things and rise above ideas based on mere assertions, religious authority, feelings, or dogma. I will go over some of the arguments offered by the Presocratics to illustrate this point, comparing them to the diametrically different style of thinking of the Chinese sages.

Logos means to argue with words, not “word” as used in grammar, but in the sense of giving an account through speech, through discourse, that is, to offer reasons, engage in conversation through the use of arguments. Perhaps a key to understanding the European accomplishment in the Axial Age is to bring out standard definitions of the words “argue” or “arguing,” since these words capture what logos is about, and what non-Europeans are not about:

• give reasons or cite evidence in support of an idea, action, or theory, typically with the aim of persuading others to share one’s view;
• to present reasons for or against a thing;
• to contend in oral disagreement, debate;
• to persuade or influence (another), as by presenting reasons;
• to engage in a quarrel, dispute;
• to say or write things in order to change someone’s opinion about what is true, what should be done

The Presocratics were a group of men no longer satisfied with the taken-for-granted beliefs of their times, asking, for example, “why should we believe mythical stories about the origins of the universe.” “Do you have good reasons to believe them?” Thales offered reasons about the underlying nature of all things, arguing that water must be the primeval stuff, since water is essential for the nourishment of all things living and it is the only naturally occurring substance that can change from solid to liquid to gas. But Anaximander then went on to question Thales, countering that, if we are to find the original source of all things, there must be something that itself has no beginning, which he called the “infinite” or the “Boundless.” The Boundless “encompasses all things,” and “steers all things.” It is not water but the Boundless that is the ultimate source.

But how does the Boundless engender the many individual things we experience in the world? Anaximander offered an answer to this question, unsatisfied with simply stating, in Lao-Tzu’s fashion, “Tao is empty but inexhaustible, bottomless, the ancestor of all.”^[59] Anaximander argued that the Boundless generates the many through its own vortex motion, which results in the lightest objects moving up and the heavy ones down, leading to the ordered arrangement we see around us of fiery stars, airy sky, watery clouds, and earthly objects.

Xenophanes explicitly challenged the notion that the gods had “revealed all things from the beginning to mortals,” and the poets’ claim to divine revelation; humans must look for themselves what is true “by seeking,” by asking questions: How much can we know? How can we know it? This is epistemology, a branch of philosophy uniquely European. It involves thinking about what distinguishes justified belief from mere opinion; it is the study of knowing, of what it means to have knowledge—logos.

Heraclitus in particular uses the term logos to refer to the in-built patterns of change he discerned in the world. He argued that things become through opposing forces and conflict; everything is in a state of continuous becoming; driven by a logos wherein everything that exists results from the opposition of forces, and this is the way things must be—justice—since all things presuppose their opposite; there can be no light without darkness. This endless movement is the basic principle, the logos, the ground of all things. Only the few can apprehend it:

This logos holds always but humans always prove unable to understand it, both before hearing it and when they have first heard it. For though all things come to be in accordance with this logos, humans are like the inexperienced when they experience such words and deeds as I set out, distinguishing each in accordance with its nature and saying how it is.^[60]

Strife and opposition are not evil but part of the order of things. One can apprehend this pattern not with eyes and ears but by looking within oneself, within one’s mind, and discovering therein the logos, which is the truth, and which is common to all things. As Heraclitus once said: “I thought for myself.”

But Parmenides, known for his insistence that one must go wherever “reasoning” takes you, even if it contradicts the senses, came to the conclusion that there can be no becoming, no change, no beginnings or endings, since something that is, cannot cease to be, for that would mean that there is always a point at which it is passing into what it is not, and what is not cannot be thought, reasoned about, for it is nothing; therefore, all things that exist must be “all at once, one and continuous.” The ultimate is present in all things, and it is one, eternal, and indivisible. This led Zeno to propose his famous paradoxes revolving around the idea that motion is impossible because it contains the contradiction that something is and is not simultaneously.

THE CHINESE AND THE WESTERN MINDS

Needless to say, these summations are oversimplifications, but my aim is to outline the Presocratic argumentative style rather than the particular theories of the Presocratics, in order thereby to contrast them to the Chinese style of thinking. My estimation is that Chinese civilization produced the greatest thinkers after the West, and so a comparison—albeit very brief—is quite useful in this respect, unlike a comparison, say, with Mayan thinkers.

Discussion on the differences between Western and Asian ways of thinking are not new; one popular account is Richard Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why.^[61] Nisbett observed that “East Asian thought tends to be more holistic,” that is, spread out in the way it takes account of the “entire field” without making categorical distinctions based on formal logic. East Asians take contradictions as part of the nature of things, and instead of trying to reach a precise definition, a point of certainty, they look for “multiple perspectives, searching for the ‘Middle Way’ between opposing propositions.” In contrast, “Westerners are more analytic,” using rules, including formal logic, to differentiate objects and thereby explain and “predict its behavior.”^[62]

The academic world loves this stuff—how “holistic” non-European cultures are and how cold blooded and narrow minded Westerners are. The difference, as I see it, is that the Chinese are more embedded to their surroundings, the culture they are a part of, the natural world around them, the norms, rules, and habits of their society, which they follow without critical reflection, and so their reasoning has less autonomy from the “entire field.” It is not that the Chinese have, as Nisbett wishes us to believe, a broader, more comprehensive outlook. The “multiple perspectives” they express are merely an expression of the multiple norms, circumstances, and bodily impressions surrounding them and unconsciously coalesced with their reasoning. Their minds have remained lodged in the world, trapped to their surrounding and millennial customs. The East Asian self is determined by the flux and fusion of “inside” and “outside” forces. Their minds have remained undifferentiated from the world around them.

The Presocratics realized, or made evident in their philosophies, that the soul, as Plato then articulated in The Republic^[63], consists of various parts, bodily appetites, emotions, and reasoning; and that the reasoning part can unify the self by self-consciously acting as the legislator and master of the pursuit of knowledge, and in this way, they were able to contrast the “inside” from the “outside” field of forces and disturbances. It is not that Westerners, as the inheritors and developers of the Presocratic discovery of reason, have been unable to see the “entire field,” incapable of appreciating others perspectives.

Searching for a fixed, supra-temporal ground, an objective method, a consciousness that is cleansed of any subjective disturbances, has been a singularly Western disposition, but it has not been the only one in its dialogical search for truth. There is a sense in which Westerners came to apprehend reason as the one faculty that can be self-conscious of its own actions and understand the nature and role of other forces and surrounding circumstances. There have been Western thinkers, to be sure, since ancient times, who have questioned the powers of reason, such as Sextus Empiricus (160–210 AD), who questioned the possibility of an ultimate ground by arguing that any first principle always requires a justification, which, in turn, requires a justification through or by means of another justification, ad infinitum. But this questioning itself testifies to the restless proving, self-examination, calibration, and objectivity of Western reason, in that it never takes anything for granted, dogmatically, but takes account of many possibilities, pitfalls, refuting claims, and new ways of thinking and improving.

It is said that Nisbett’s findings challenged the prevailing assumption among psychologists that the way the human mind works is universal. This is true, but it does not go far enough. The way the European mind works is very rare, but it is also the only way to achieve universal knowledge of the cosmos, human nature, and history. It is not surprising that Nisbett is a Westerner. It is always Westerners who tell other Westerners that they have a very limited understanding of other cultures, without realizing that, in so saying, they are exhibiting a Western tendency to show a deeper understanding of other cultures. Only Westerners have the peculiar attribute of apprehending things universally, of stepping outside their culture and seeing the other in its own terms—while at the same time claiming that they are the only ones who don’t have this attribute and implying that backward cultures devoid of a rich intellectual traditions do!

The promoters of a “common history” are doing the same in proposing world histories that apprehend the histories of everyone. But as cultural Marxists, even though they are Westerners, their goal is to downplay and do away with the unique tendency of Westerners to think in universal terms by merging their histories and culture with the ways of everyone and claiming that we are “all one” in our diversity. They thus fall into the trap of cultural relativism. Leftists believe that all cultures have to be seen in their particular contexts, and yet, in so thinking, they fail to recognize that they are presuming that all other cultures are also universally capable of seeing different cultures in their own terms.

The higher interest Europeans have shown in understanding other cultures is not an expression of their relativity but of their universalism. Since the Greek invention of ethnography,^[64] through Julius Caesar’s account^[65] of the Germanic tribal ways, Westerners have always been curious about the ways of others, writing extensive traveling accounts, from Marco Polo through Margaret Mead to Napoleon Chagnon, inventing “entire fields” of knowledge, proper methodologies for each subject matter, anthropology and cultural psychology. The claim that the Chinese mind has a broader perspective is a mirage of the Western academic mind; the Chinese have been geographically trapped in their surroundings, making circumscribed maps with China at the center of the world surrounded by their neighbors without any sense of the world beyond East Asia. On the other hand, the ancient Greeks were the progenitors of the science of geography, of offering explanations about the form and magnitude of the earth, the shape and size of lands and oceans, the nature and extent of human habitation of the earth. This science culminated, in the second century AD, in the Geography of Ptolemy, who also produced the first world map, Universalis Tabula, which offered a comprehensive view of the world way beyond Greek lands, a horizon that included Rome, India, China itself, South East Asia, the British Isles.^[66]

Nisbett’s talk about the comprehensive outlook of the Chinese and the narrow specialism of the West is gibberish. But Westerners—instead of appreciating their development of the disciplinary techniques required to understand other cultures and have a comprehensive view of all peoples in the world—have turned against their unique universalism, without fully understanding it, and under the supposition that by intermixing it with the parochial ways of others they will achieve a higher form of universalism. We have a book exemplifying this tendency, dealing exactly with the subject at hand, contrasting the Chinese allusive way of thinking with the “direct” Greek/Western way, titled Detour and Access: Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece (2000). This book is authored by the French academic Francois Jullien, who lauds his immersion into Chinese thinking as

a case study through which to contemplate Western thought from the outside, and, in this way, to bring us out of our atavism.^[67]

He condemns the “ethnocentric prejudices” based “on a colonial relationship” of past accounts of China’s culture.^[68] He is voicing what hundreds of Westerners have been voicing for a long time without reflecting back on the way his own study exemplifies a uniquely Western disposition to study other cultures and then reflect back on one’s culture. Obviously, some Westerners have made judgments about other cultures without immersing themselves in them. Jullien is rather typical in wishing to relinquish his culture for the sake of others, learning about other ways while condemning his way as incomplete. Meanwhile, “the Other” is barely interested in engaging his culture, except to relish in Jullien’s submissive words that China is becoming “the greatest world power.”^[69]

But the main point I want to conclude with is that Jullien does agree that there is a difference between what he calls the “allusive,” “oblique,” “circuitous,” “diffused” Chinese way, and the “straight,” “direct,” “frontal,” “antagonistic” Western way. He observes that the Greeks face-to-face style of infantry warfare found an equivalent in the

agonistic structure … in the organization of the theater [competition for prizes and tragic accounts of conflicts], the tribunal, and the assembly. Indeed, whether in the dramatic, the judicial, or the political realm, the debate manifested itself like a force or against something, in which the upper hand was gained only by the sheer strength and number of arguments either side amassed.^[70]

Jullien does not like this antagonism, and would like Westerners to learn how to be more Chinese. He writes positively about the Chinese style for “detour,” “dodging,” “insinuating,” rather than directly stating their thoughts; we are made to think that this is a more sophisticated way, as it allows one to be “craftier,” avoiding an explicit delineation of one’s views, making it possible for one not to “exhaust” one’s views right away. There is apparently something deep in Chinese thought, latent, implicit, “endlessly” filled with alternative meanings, “Inexhaustible.” Many Westerners are, indeed, thrilled by such aphorisms as: “Tao does nothing, but leaves nothing undone.” Jullien thinks that the Western search for “essences,” for concepts that “represent” or “reproduce the real” is limited, narrow, and would stand to benefit by kneeling before the Chinese:

What if generalizations were not the goal of thought, or speech tended not to define (to build a universality of essences) but to modify itself—to reflect the circumstances? In short, what if consciousness did not strive to reproduce the real in order to ground it in transcendence (of being or of God)? And what if the purpose of speaking about the world, to make it intelligible, were not to arrive at Truth.^[71]

These questions should be answered with a strong sense of the history of Western thinking. First, the West is the one civilization to have “endlessly” originated multiple philosophical outlooks, including styles of reasoning emphasizing the social and historical contents of the structures of the experience of consciousness in an anti-reductionist, anti- Cartesian way, at the same time that it developed an experimental and mathematical method of explaining things leading to continuous innovations and discoveries.

Second, when Westerners set out to propose contextual styles of thinking, such as phenomenological investigations, they did so in full awareness of the importance of the “broader” experiences of consciousness and the limited perspective of the scientific method. It was not that they were falling back to a pre-rational world, absorbed by the world surrounding them, lacking critical distance from it, as was (and is) the case with the Chinese. As Romantics in the early 1800s expressed—as well as the proponents of hermeneutics, most fully Hans-Georg Gadamer in his book, Truth and Method (1960)—there are many truths that pertain to the nature of human experience that cannot be adequately expressed through the methods of the natural sciences. Painting, poetry, and drama have truthfulness, and they are forms of knowing, and not merely aesthetic experiences. But their modes of knowing do not meet the exactitude of the sciences, for the reason that they are about other aspects of human experience beyond the powers of abstraction.

Third, and contrariwise, the Chinese style of not facing up to the claims at hand by directly contesting them, proving or disproving them, pushing relentlessly ahead wherever the argument takes you, rather than circumventing the views of others, repeating aphorisms, without judging their claims to veracity, remaining embedded to “circumstances” and not letting reason be the judge, explains why the basic ideas of Axial China remained in place right up until the West shook its world from its circuitous slumber. It is also testimony of a typically Oriental-Asian inclination to engage in deception, not be direct, sneak their way into things that serve their interest; ergo, deceive naïve academics like Jullien, who have ceased to have the mental toughness that produce so much originality in the West, but are terrified of getting spanked by the feminists that dominate their departments.

While the Axial Age was just the beginning of Western creativity, it was the apex of Oriental creativity. The “world historians” of the modern academia are, in their way, pathologically anti-Western. Their concern is not with “what happened in the past” but with teaching a history that justifies the political goal of transforming European nations into multicultural and multiracial societies. We must overcome them if we are to re-establish our connection with the logos the Presocratics handed to us.

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RICARDO DUCHESNE is a professor in the department of social science at the University of New Brunswick Saint John. He completed a BA in History at McGill University and Concordia University, Montreal.

In 1987, he obtained an MA at Concordia, where he wrote his thesis on the origins of the French Revolution under the supervision of George Rudé, one of the founders of “history from below.” In 1994 he was awarded a doctorate in the renowned multidisciplinary program of Social & Political Thought at York University. His main fields of concentration were modern European history, political economy, and the philosophy of Hegel.

He studied with one of the foremost Hegelian scholars in the English language, H.S. Harris, and with Thomas T. Sekine, a Japanese economist considered to be one of the most important theorists on the field of Marx’s theory of value. His Dissertation, “All Contraries Confounded: Historical Materialism and the Transition-to-Capitalism Debate”, was awarded the “Doctoral Prize Award for Best Dissertation of the Year,” Faculty of Arts, 1995.

In 1995, Dr. Duchesne was appointed assistant professor in the department of social science at the University of New Brunswick, where he has remained since. Dr. Duchesne has published thirty-one articles and review essays.

His publications include one book, 45 refereed articles, one chapter, 13 encyclopedia entries, and 18 non-refereed articles. His book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, a major work of 528 pages, was released in February 2011. Currently he is doing research on multiculturalism and the identity crisis of the West.

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Editor’s Note: Posted from JuliusEvola.net here, all quotations come from “Men Among the Ruins“

In order to head toward a united Europe, the first step should consist of a concerted exit of all European nations from the United Nations, which is an illegitimate, promiscuous, and hypocritical association. Another obvious imperative should be to become emancipated in every aspect and in equal measure from both the United States and the USSR. […]

[…] Here I will only hint at what concerns the form and the spiritual and doctrinal presuppositions of a united Europe. […] The only genuine solution must have an organic character; the primary element should be a shaping force from within and from above, proper to an idea and a common tradition. […]

[…] As I have indicated in another chapter, the concepts of fatherland and nation (or ethnic group) belong to an essentially naturalistic or “physical” plane. In a united Europe, fatherlands and nations may exist […] What should be excluded is nationalism (with its monstrous appendix, namely imperialism) and chauvinism—in other words, every fanatical absolutization of a particular unit. Thus “European Empire,” and not “Nation Europa” or “European Fatherland” should be the right term, in a doctrinal sense. In the Europeans we should appeal to a feeling of higher order, qualitatively very different from the nationalistic feeling rooted in other strata of the human being. […]

The scheme of an empire in a true and organic sense (which must clearly be distinguished from every imperialism, a phenomenon that should be regarded as a deplorable extension of nationalism) was previously displayed in the European medieval world, which safeguarded the principles of both unity and multiplicity. In this world, individual States have the character of partial organic units, gravitating around a unum quod non est pars (“a one that is not a part,” to use Dante’s expression)—namely, a principle of unity, authority, and sovereignty of a different nature from that which is proper to each particular State. But the principle of the Empire can have such a dignity only by transcending the political sphere in the strict sense, founding and legitimizing itself with an idea, a tradition, and a power that is also spiritual. The limitations of the sovereignty of the single national units before an eminent right of the Empire have as their sole condition this transcendent dignity of the Empire; as far as structure is concerned, the whole will appear as an “organism composed of organisms,” or as an organic federalism similar to that realized by Bismarck in the second German Reich, which was not acephalous. These are the essential traits of a true Empire.

What are the conditions and the opportunities for the realization of such an idea in Europe today? […] Because what is needed is an organic unity, the premise should rather be the integration and consolidation of every single nation as a hierarchical, united, and well-differentiated whole. The nature of the parts should reflect the nature of the whole. […] What matters is the synergy and the opportunity for every common action.

Every organic unit is characterized by a principle of stability. We should not expect a stability of the whole, where there is no stability guaranteed in its very components. Even from this point of view, the elementary presupposition of an eventual united Europe appears to be the political integration of the single nations. European unity would always be precarious if it leaned on some external factor, like an international parliament lacking a common, higher authority, with representations from various democratic regimes; such regimes, because they are constantly and mutually conditioned from below, cannot in any way ensure a continuity of political will and direction. […]

What is required is not to impose a common regime on every European nation; however, an organic, hierarchical, anti-individualistic, and antidemocratic principle should be adequately implemented, even though in various forms adopted to different circumstances. Thus, the preliminary condition is a general antidemocratic cleansing, which at the present appears to be almost utopian. Democracy, on the one hand, and a European parliament that reproduces on a larger scale the depressing and pathetic sight of the European parliamentary systems on the other hand: all this would bring ridicule upon the idea of a united Europe. In general, we should think of an organic unity to be attained from the top down rather than from the bottom up. Only elites of individual European nations could understand one another and coordinate their work, overcoming every particularism and spirit of division, asserting higher interests and motives with their authority. […] A well-established “center” should exist in every nation; as a result of the harmony and the synergy of such centers, the higher European unity would organize itself and operate.

Overall, what should be promoted is a twofold process of integration: on the one hand, national integration through the acknowledgment of a substantial principle of authority that is the basis for the organic, anti-individualistic, and corporative formation of the various sociopolitical national forces; on the other hand, supernational European integration through the acknowledgment of a principle of authority that is as super-ordained toward that which is proper of single units (individual States), as it is toward the people included in each of these units. Without this, it is useless to talk about an organically united Europe.

Having put the problem in these terms, there are serious difficulties regarding the spiritual, not merely political, foundations required to implement this European unity. Where should we find these foundations? […]

Obviously, it would be a pure Utopia to yearn to oppose in practical terms all the material aspects of modern civilization: among other things, this would involve surrendering the practical means that are necessary today for every defense and attack. However, it is always possible to establish a distance and a limit. It is possible to enclose that which is “modern” in a well-controlled material and “physical” domain, on the plane of mere means, and to superimpose upon it a higher order adequately upheld, in which revolutionary-conservative values are given unconditional acknowledgment. The Japan of yesterday demonstrated the possibility and the fecundity of a solution of this type. Only in that case could Europe represent something different, distinguish itself, and assume a new dignity among world powers. […] The first European detoxification should concern this obsession with “antifascism,” which is the catchphrase of the “crusade” that has left Europe in a pile of rubble. However, we cannot side either with those pro-European sympathizers who can only refer to what was attempted in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany before the war, toward the creation of a new order. These groups fail to recognize that Fascism and National Socialism were movements and regimes in which different and even contrasting tendencies coexisted; their development in the right, positive, revolutionary-conservative sense could have occurred only if circumstances had allowed for an adequate, further development, which was stricken down by the war they ignited and by their ensuing defeat. This is how we should at least proceed to a precise distinction, if we want to draw reference points from those movements.

Besides doctrinal difficulties, which I have examined, a radical European action finds its major obstacle in the lack of something that could represent a starting point, a firm support, and a center of crystallization. Before 1945 we could at least witness the wonderful sight of the principle of a supernational European Army, and the legionary spirit of volunteers from many nations who, having been organized in several divisions, fought on the Eastern front against the Soviets; at that time the foundation was the Third Reich. Today the only concrete, though partial, European initiatives of various governments are taken on a mere economic plane, without any deep ideological and ideal counterpart. Those who are sensitive to the idea of a united Europe in a higher sense are only isolated individuals, and not only are they not supported, but also they are even opposed by their own countries; and much more so, let me add, if their necessary antidemocratic and anti-Marxist profession of faith is openly declared. In effect, a European action must proceed in parallel with the rebirth and the revolutionary-conservative reorganization of the individual European countries: but to recognize this also means to acknowledge the disheartening magnitude of the task ahead.

Despite this, we could suggest the idea of an Order, whose members would act in the various nations, doing what they can to promote an eventual European unity, even in such unfavorable conditions. The enthusiasm of young militants who conduct an active propaganda should be commended, but it is not enough. We should count on people with a specific qualification, who occupied or intended to occupy key positions in their own nations. What kind of men could be up to this task? Assuming bourgeois society and civilization as a reference point, it is necessary to win over to the cause and to recruit people who neither spiritually belong to the bourgeoisie nor are affected by it, or who are already beyond it. A first group should be composed of members of ancient European families that are still “standing” and who are valuable not only because of the name they carry, but also because of who they are, because of their personality. It is very difficult to find such men but there are some exceptions, and even during and after the last World War, some of these figures emerged. Sometimes it is a matter of awakening something in the blood that has not been entirely lost but still exists in a latent state. In these elements we would expect to find the presence of congenital, “racial” dispositions (racial in the elitist and non biological-racist sense of the term) that guarantee an action and a reaction according to a precise and secure style, free from theories and abstract principles, in a spontaneous and complete adherence to those values that every man of good birth considered obvious before the rise of the Third Estate and of what followed it.

In regard to a second and more numerous section of the Order, I have in mind men who correspond to the human type shaped here and there through selections and experiences of an essentially warrior character, and through certain disciplines. Existentially speaking, this type is well versed in the art of “demythologization”: it recognizes as illusion and hypocrisy the entire tenacious legacy of the ideologies that have been employed as instruments, not to bring down this or that European nation, but to deal a deadly blow to the whole of Europe. These men harbor a healthy intolerance for any rhetoric; an indifference toward intellectualism and politicians’ gimmicks; a realism of a higher type; the propensity for impersonal activity; and the capability of a precise and resolute commitment. In the past, in some elite fighting units, today among paratroopers and analogous corps (e.g., Marines and others), some disciplines and experiences favor the formation of this human type, which displays the same traits in various nations. A common way of being constitutes a potentially connective element, beyond nationalities. By winning over these elements to the European cause, we could constitute, with a “force at the ready,” the most active cadres of such an Order. If direct and integrating communications were established between these two groups (which is not as difficult as it may first appear), the foundation would be laid. For these men, the most important concerns should be the European idea in terms of values and of worldview, followed by the Order and then by the nation.

Naturally, the personality of an authentic leader at the center and head of the Order is of the utmost importance. Unfortunately, no such person exists today: it would be dangerous and rash to see him in any of the figures who are currently working here and there, albeit with the best of intentions, selflessly and bravely, to form European groups. One has to consider here that no one could have detected in advance the potential of any of the men who later became leaders of great movements. Nevertheless, it is easy to see the great advantages in the case where such a man, in whom authority and status now became manifest, had been there from the beginning.

We do not need to repeat what the basic requirement is for such a European action to mature and bear any results. One must first get rid of the political class, which holds the power in almost all European countries in this time of interregnum and European slavery. This would be immediately possible if a sufficient mass of today’s peoples could be reawakened from their stupefied and stultified condition that has been systematically created by the prevailing political-social ideas.

But the greatest difficulty for the true European idea is the deep crisis of the authority principle and the idea of the State. This will seem contradictory to many, because they believe the strengthening of that principle and that idea would bring in its wake a schismatic division and thus a rigid, anti-European pluralism. We have already shown why this is not at all the case, when we were speaking of the Männerbünde and indicating the higher level that characterizes the idea of a true State and its authority, in contrast to everything that is merely “folk” or “nation.” For the individual, true political loyalty includes, besides a certain heroic readiness, a certain degree of transcendence, hence something not merely nature-bound. There is no break, but rather continuity when one crosses from the national level to the supernational: the selfsame inner readiness will be required as in the times of Indo-European origins and of the best feudal regimes, in which it was also a matter of the voluntary union of free powers, proud to belong to a higher order of things that did not oppress but rather embraced them. The real obstacles are only fanatical nationalism and the collapse of society and community.

In summary, let it be said that breaking through into more thoughtful minds is the idea that in the current state of affairs, the uniting of Europe into a single bloc is the indispensable prerequisite for its continuation in a form other than an empty geographical concept on the same materialistic level as that of the powers that seek to control the world. For all the reasons already explained, we know that this crisis involves a dual inner problem, if under these circumstances one hopes to establish a firm foundation, a deeper sense, and an organic character for a possible united Europe. On the one hand, an initiative in the sense of a spiritual and psychic detoxification must be taken against what is commonly known as “modern culture.” On the other, there is the question of the kind of “metaphysics” that is capable, today, of supporting both a national and a supernational principle of true authority and legitimacy.

The dual problem can be translated into a dual imperative. It remains to be seen which and how many men, in spite of it all, still stand upright among so many ruins, in order that they may make this task their own.

I would like to propose victory conditions for our movement. For me, it’s essentially this: a cultural revolution whereby genetic quality and homogeneity are recognized as self-evident social goods and goals in all of our countries.

Our views on history, political systems, and international relations essentially derive from this more fundamental postulate. The European is a creative breed: set the goal posts and he will do his darnedest. Even when, as in the case of Equality, the goal is actually impossible. How much more satisfied he will be when his unquenchable ambition is set upon something which is both achievable and elevating!

That genetic quality should be a goal should be self-evident for every person who claims to believe – as liberals do – in Darwinian evolution. In general, scientists have found that human physical and mental traits are about 50% heritable. This means there are limits on what can be achieved solely through education and upbringing. Whether we meet our potential is determined by one’s life trajectory, but that potential is genetically predetermined.

The liberal, especially the vulgar “I fucking love science” type, will typically be the most hysterical in claiming heredity has no public policy implications. That is intellectual incoherence and moral cowardice. If you have concerns about the consequences of eugenics, then tell us how best to move forward, but not deny that heredity has massive public policy implications.

Two-thousand-five-hundred years ago, the great Greek philosopher Plato argued that the composition of the gene pool was an obvious matter of public interest and that, in his ideal Republic, the ruling elite and people would breed themselves better over time, just as we have bred innumerable strains of plants and animals according to our goals and interests.

The value of genetic homogeneity is evident in the degree of cohesion in nations like Japan or Denmark, as opposed to the conflict and tensions evident in multiethnic societies.

This is a question of blood: if peoples can form one ethnic group, then their tribal instinct becomes a positive force, as they identify and are solidarity with one another. But, with genetic diversity, they cluster into different racial categories with different temperaments, different preferences, and no inter-ethnic solidarity.

Scientists recently showed that Denmark – Bernie Sanders’ favorite country – has (or had) “remarkable” genetic homogeneity. This homogeneity and the fact that a Jewish social democrat would cite such a Nordic country as his model, would not have surprised the world’s most famous Viennese café-conspirator.

Of course, I do not advise being more homogeneous than native Danes, as that would mean inbreeding depression. Systematic cousin-banging is a traditional Judaic and Islamic custom but certainly not a European one. As in everything, one must aim for the Aristotelian mean.

It goes without saying that in cultivating our genetic quality and homogeneity, our European identity must be preserved at all costs. As a rapidly-shrinking global minority, who ultimately face extinction, we Europeans must take our own side.

I also believe that our existence can be justified in universalist or Kantian terms. The Ancients believed that morality is in harmony with the laws of universal nature. And that nature does not stop at the borders of race and nation, even though, by their genetic and cultural specificities, these laws express themselves somewhat differently.

Practically, the fact is that the European peoples, from ancient times to today, have contributed more to civilization, culture, and science than all of the other peoples put together. I am not denying others’ contributions, particularly of the Chinese and Japanese, but it obviously follows that the preservation of European peoples is a supreme moral objective even from a universalist point of view.

Following the Kantian moral imperative, we ask: would the world be better off if all peoples cultivated their genetic quality and homogeneity?

The answer is obviously yes: the world would be smarter, there would be less civil conflict, and the chances of mankind escaping the surly bonds of Earth would be maximized.

In evolutionary terms, we can maximize European, and also mankind’s, survivability by pursuing genetic quality and genuine diversity. Species are best adapted when they have the best traits for their environment but also have, as a bonus, a wide variety of subspecies with various traits which might be useful for survival if circumstances change. Where we know what the best is, we pursue that, when we do not know, we allow for variety.

The “U.N.-World” proposed by the globalists would be an evil monoculture: one global economic and cultural space, the same socio-political norms, all nations (or at least ours) semi-blended into an ethnic mush with the usual stratification: Jews, East Asians, Whites, browns, and blacks. This system would be dominated by ethno-plutocratic elites – whoever has the perfect combination of social intelligence and hypocritical clannishness – all the while paying lip service to an impossible Equality. Hillary Clinton already embodies this today: owned by Wall Street banks, largely funded by Jewish oligarchs, and race-baiting blacks and Mestizos against the traditional majority.

Who is foolish enough to believe that Paul Krugman and his ilk consider White gentiles, let alone blacks and Mestizos, their “equals”?

The globalists’ world would be one without identity or solidarity, it would be a global favela, governed by nothing but envy, lies, and hypocrisy. And, actually, I believe that whatever the technological gains, this world would be bad for mankind’s survivability and ultimately unsustainable.

I propose Eurocentric Hereditarianism. Today, we chase after G.D.P. and Equality, tomorrow: the genetic and cultural cultivation of our people.

Even if we manage to impose genetic quality and homogeneity as fundamental goals of our society, that will not be enough. We must also vanquish individualism and egalitarianism, fancy words for personal selfishness and vanity. Hereditarian norms must be culturally hegemonic to such an extent that people care more about the well-being of future generations, especially genetic well-being, than about their empty caprices and their personal ego.

This will be the hardest part. With the free debate on the Internet, a very substantial subculture recognizing genetic realities is emerging. But will it have the will to really affirm these principles in the real world?

That will be much more difficult: we are talking about deciding, as a society, who has babies and how they have babies. One hundred years ago, life was still tough, and people were willing to countenance the ruthless imposition of their racial interests over both other races and their own community. Today, we have grown very soft and sentimental indeed.

In truth, the idea that the individual is more important than the whole is a modern piece of solipsism with no basis in tradition. Without the community, the individual dies, and that is that. Thus, when the public good and the individual good clash, the public must prevail. Even the men of the Enlightenment recognized this. Article I of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen states: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be founded only on the common good.” It is obvious that advocates of Jim Crow or the Nuremberg Laws believed their “social distinctions” were “founded on the common good.”

Or another example; the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights reads:

“Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family.”

Well, suppose you were on a rough island able to support 100 people of reasonable intelligence. Would the State not be justified in regulating reproduction to prevent overpopulation and stultification? Or would, as today, individuals be “free” to mate blindly according to their instincts even if it means the destruction of the entire society?

I used to be very, very pessimistic about demographic developments in the sense that I believed them to be more-or-less irreversible and I could not countenance putting millions of people on boats. Today, I affirm two things:

1) The survival of our people must be pursued by whatever means necessary.

2) These means, with new technology, would not necessarily be “inhumane.”

William Shockley proposed voluntary sterilization of those with an IQ of less than 100 in exchange for cash. Steve Sailer has proposed a very humane “one-and-done” policy whereby people with bad genes can have only one child.

Recently, I have thought about the possibilities of embryo selection. Suppose you required all prospective parents to fertilize 10 or 20 embryos and then had them (actually, I don’t think they would need much prodding) choose the genetically most desirable one. William Pierce once said: “from mongrelization, there is no recovery.” But actually, I am not so sure. (A Dutch comrade, with perfectly northern Europe pallor, tells me he is one-sixteenth Indonesian.)

With such measures, and others I am sure, we can improve the gene pool generation by generation. And, rather than an essayist telling you that, we should have the best scientific minds of the entire European world working on this, so as to address the problems that would occur (e.g. excessive spread of harmful recessive genes). In any case, I doubt the Jews or the Chinese will wait for us.

In principle, non-Europeans also have some genes which it would be desirable for us to acquire, but I’ll not speculate on that.

Today, humans are increasingly coming to resemble a vast swarm of billions of hamster-locusts. Hamsters in the sense that we live in little boxes and are very comfortable, feeling very entitled to lodging, food, running water, flat-screen TVs, laptops, WiFi, etc. This logically ends in Bern Victims’ “Stoner Communism.” Locusts in the sense that, to maintain this basically subhuman lifestyle for every featherless biped on the planet – as is the goal of the United Nations – we are ravenously consuming our Earth’s natural resources with a downright Tanakhian contempt for the natural world of which we are a part.

This planet, mankind, and European man would all be better off with less and better humans. Even Africa would do OK if, instead of spawning to 4 billion, they were limited to their Talented Tenth.

The point is, that we need to both have the right ideas and be strong enough to impose these ideas in the face of individualism and egalitarianism. Once we get the trajectory right, we can proclaim victory, so long as we ensure that the European garden will be steadily cultivated and perfected from generation to generation. We would again have a home and a future. We would be psychologically healthier and more alive because our in-born emotional longing for tribe and spirit will be met by this Eurocentric civil-religion. Our people’s existence will be secure and we will again look to the future with hope. If this is done, we will work with eternity.

Pepe, Asianization, and the End of Western Civilization

There is a spectre haunting the interwebs. It is the spectre of a laid back, occasionally Nazi-cosplaying green frog and his dead gorilla sidekick.

And the establishment doesn’t quite know what to do about it.

But even the Alt-Right is not quite sure what Pepe is or even if he’ll stick around. Memes, by their very nature, are transient and ever changing, and Pepe casts a nervous glance over his shoulder at the Mighty Harambe, who, in turn casts, a nervous glance over his shoulder at . . .

OK, stop right there!

Now you see what’s happening, don’t you?

A grown man—me!—in an attempt to explain something, has ended up writing what is essentially complete drivel within the accepted means of discourse. It is not the first time and Pepe has turned this trick and it certainly won’t be the last.

This is because Pepe–and the associated 4chan culture from which he spawned–is essentially something alien to Western values and norms. Only by understanding him in this sense–as something truly alien, a significant category mistake–do we stand a chance of relating Pepe and the 4chan Alt-Right to the wider world, culture, and political process.

In short, while some see Pepe as a saviour of the White race and Western Civilization, he is, in effect, just another harbinger of that race and civilization’s decline and downfall. In truth, as the invokers of Kek have intuited, Pepe has much more in common with the pre-Christian pagan and Oriental mentalities than with anything truly White and Western. This is why tryhard efforts to pin Pepe down by “respectable” news sources are doomed to laughable failure.

All generations of White and European man since the early Middle Ages have existed within a culture that is based on a Greek Classical and Judeo-Christian basis. That is until now.

The Millennials may, in effect, be the first post-White or post-Western generation of Whites, in that their essential culture has lost many of the salient points of White, European culture as it has been known for so long.

I first started to suspect this one or two decades ago, when I noticed how supine, evasive, wishy-washy, feckless, and “make-do” so many young people in the West were becoming. They were starting to define themselves by a low-grade pragmatism, flexible values, coyness, tweeness, and what can best be described as a general “off-centredness.” An earlier generation might have described it as spinelessness or a lack of backbone.

Consider the more obvious evidence, the Millennials are the generation of irony, memes, cosplay, gaming, RPGs, gay marriage, transgenderism, socking up, trolling, shitposting, doing things for LULZ, insincere racism (Milo is right to a large degree), and going with the flow (while also pissing in the flow), etc.

The defining characteristics are listlessness, playfulness, effeteness, constant shapeshifting, neoteny, and a sense of passive fatalism.

With my extensive experience of Asia, I soon started to realize the affinities that young White men (and women) were showing with the fundamental Asian type, which shares many of these characteristics.

Vis-à-vis the traditional European type, the Asian is regarded as self-effacing, less rigidly moral, less logical, more superstitious, dogmatically syncretic, etc.

This dichotomy also operates rather well between the younger generation in the West and its predecessors. Post-Christian generations like the Boomers and Generation-X felt almost as much need for moral validation as their Christian predecessors, which is what gave us terms like “Racism” and “Sexism,” “Save the Whales,” and those harpies of shrill morality called SJWs.
Earlier Western generations, right up to Gen-X, operated within a corrupted form of what was essentially still Western culture–defined by a high degree of moral rigidity and a Manichean sense of good and evil, stemming both from aspects of Christianity, Judaism, and the Platonic wing of Classical culture.

This is exactly what people like David Duke and Hillary Clinton share in common, although how they process that rigid Black-and-White dichotomy differs markedly. Trump by contrast is a more “Asian” type—although why is a question for another day.

But how did this great generational shift come about? There are, as usual, several factors. The previous generation was subjected to some of the same forces, but resisted them, so the switch, when it came, happened quite dramatically.

The two most important factors pushing it were (a) the destruction of the “moral bubble” of the West and (b) the isolating and reconnecting of individuals in a self-selecting manner, freed from a social consensus.

The morality of Western Civilization was always a moral construct bolted onto a previous pagan substrate, in many ways a distortion of more organic and natural patterns of social, spiritual, and moral organization. This is what gave our civilization its greatness and its architectonic structure. In the same way that North Korea enforces its own rigid ideology by isolating the state from the World, Western Civilization was enforced by excluding all that could not be controlled (the period of defense, 900 to 1492 AD) or by controlling all that could not be excluded (1492 to 1990 AD).

This was comparatively easy to do–especially in religious, moral, cultural, and media terms–until the turn of the millennium, when the gatekeeper media started to give way to the mass-market, globalized Internet connectivity.

This opened up each individual to whole worlds, where basic Western morality simply did not exist or operate, or did so very feebly. The essentially Asiatic “4chan mentality” of the Millennial generation was empowered by a combination of porn, perversion, gaming, and access not only to alien cultures but the Id-directed undersides of those cultures.

This was the significance of manga and anime culture: presenting millions of young kids with a world where Western values—epitomized by the shrill moral signaller that has been with us at least since St. Augustine—was not only ignored, but not even known to exist.

This—combined with the isolation caused by atomization and the self-selecting reconnection of people through the Internet via social media (the echo chambers)—created a world of variable, organic moral textures, rather than the universalist sheen of standardized morality.

This is why tryhard efforts to pin Pepe down by conventional analysis fail. He operates at the level of ever mutating animism, and/or as a left-handed Zen kōan catalyst. Aim at him directly, and you’ll miss, as Eugen Herrigel might have inferred if he were alive today.

This led to the world we have today, with such phenomena as gender-fluidity or kids typing “Feels Good Man” to memes of gas chambers for lulz and keks; a world stalked by Heliogalabian types like Milo, leading “moral” insurrections, and where a presidential candidate with serious health problems ends up shouting at a cartoon frog—and the cartoon frog even shouts back.

We have, without realizing it, slipped into Asianization, or perhaps into our own long-repressed pagan past. The West is dead and Generation X may well be the last true generation of White men.

Sometime in the near future, in an America crippled by degeneracy and stifling bureaucracy, two men of stature fight in the streets. One, an aging billionaire fed up with his society’s imminent collapse, has become a polarizing threat to the governing establishment.The other, a compromised but well-meaning foreigner wrapped in an American flag, bringing a false and used-up patriotism to a disenfranchised population.

The men I speak of are not Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, but the World’s Finest themselves—Batman and Superman.

In this future, your average American might look into the sky as an object flies overhead, but it’d just be a bird or a plane. The era of the superhero is over—their presence banned as a threat to democratic normalcy. The Cold War is hotter than history has recorded. Meanwhile, Gotham is slowly succumbing to the decay of street gangs and low-energy politicians too incompetent or comfortable to bother themselves. Homeless doomsayers trudge through the streets prophesying the end times. The superhero has been reduced to the realm of legend for young generations, who, with no heroes of their own, are drawn to the seductive promises of miscreant gang chieftains.

Published in 1986, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns breathed life into a comic-book industry suffocated by the creativity-killing censorship of the self-imposed Comic Code Authority (not so different from the “private” censorship of social media today.

DKR not only ushered in an era of creative vitality, bringing a dying medium back to its feet, but to this day it serves as a clever and relevant work of modern satire. The Cold War may be over, but just as in Miller’s dystopia, we’re living in a Kali Yuga—an age void of heroes, when eccentric mediocrities are fetishized by the 20-square-inch boxes in our living rooms, and all hope is almost lost . . . almost.

While every work of art is defined by the vision of its artist, there comes a point in the life cycle of all great works where art takes on a new life beyond its author’s intent—a point in which the piece no longer belongs to the author, but to the culture.

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In this sense, The Dark Knight Returns serves as an Alt Right hero’s journey, in so far as it chronicles Western man’s spiritual struggle towards superhuman reawakening against modern egalitarian mediocrity—including a necessary break from American conservatism. It is a battle cry, not just for a creative revolution in the stuffy recesses of the comic book medium, but a call to arms against the existential lethargy of modern man.

The Dark Pill

The time has come. You know it in your soul. For I am
your soul… You cannot escape me… you are puny, you are small—you are nothing—a hollow shell, a rusty trap that cannot hold me… you cannot stop me—not with wine or vows or the weight of age—you cannot stop me but but still you try—still you run—you try to drown me out—but your voice is weak…

Enter millionaire Bruce Wayne, age 55. Ten years ago, he hung up his cape and cowl—swearing an oath he would never don it again. A restrained titan among Last Men, his purposeless life draws on, as he drinks by himself during the day, dreaming of a perfect death—a perfect death to take away the pain—the pain of watching his beloved Gotham City slowly sink into the abyss of rot and chaos—as good men do nothing.

All that is left for the former crime fighter is nostalgia and baseless thrill-seeking. Behind what appears to be a life of futility broods a malevolent demon—the Batman persona incarnate, transcending masked vigilantism and biological decrepitude—urging, no, compelling the fruitless Bruce Wayne to become who he is. No longer can Bruce Wayne stand by as news station after news station regurgitates the same deterministic and sanitized murder stories. As we are learning today, Wayne can ignore reality no longer.

The threat is here and it is time to act. In a blaze of glory, Batman sweeps the streets of Gotham—revitalizing hope in Gotham’s citizenry.

There is little doubt that Miller, the man who called Occupy Wall Street “nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists” and author of the unabashedly identitarian 300 and “Islamophobic” Holy Terror, was channeling many of the same concerns back in [1986 that the Alternative Right is facing today. While the West is certainly sick, it is a sickness it has brought on itself. Unlike European colonialism of the 19th century, The Global South’s colonialism today is strictly the result of self-imposed ethno-masochism of a civilization defeated by centuries of victory (to paraphrase Bane from The Dark Knight Rises) and internal waring.

While DKR is not, by any means, a commentary on modern immigration, it challenges the same wounded spirit of the modern world. Like his fellow supermen in tights, Batman quit because he chose to quit. There was no one to stop him. He gave up by his own volition, but something deep inside him urges that the war goes on.

A Reflection

I close my eyes and listen. Not fooled by sight, I see him … as he is. I see him. I see … a reflection.

Due to Batman’s successful return to crime fighting and subsequent public approval, a coalition consisting of the media, politicians, and “public intellectuals” arises devoted to stomping out the new public champion threatening their authority. Sound familiar?

Arkham

Asylum Home for the Emotionally Troubled releases two of Batman’s greatest foes, Two-Face and The Joker, upon psychological evaluation by Dr. Bartholmew Wolper—a curly black-haired whiny and narcissistic psychoanalyst, who occupies the airwaves crying out against the “reactionary” crime fighting of the Dark Knight, while he sits cozily in a television recording studio in his pali sandals, while donning an ironic (or not so ironic) toothbrush mustache and Superman t-shirt.

Wolper, accompanied by the narrative of the mainstream media, inspires the release of the two by demanding that they are not murderous villains, but misunderstood outsiders victimized by Batman’s “fascist obsessions.” As is customary, soon after their releases, both go on the greatest terroristic murder sprees of their careers. (It’s worth noting that Dent’s plan involves blowing up Gotham’s “Twin Towers”—mind you, this was written in 1986).

Even Wolper, the primary advocate behind the anti-Batman controversy and release of Gotham’s most dangerous, is murdered by the Joker on a live late-night talk show, as a public relations attempt to clear the Joker’s name goes awry.

Like the refugees in Europe and the Black Lives Matter crowd, the Joker knows how to game the progressive establishment. He has been crystal clear in his unwillingness to live peacefully in society, yet the metropolitan liberals refuse to see this. A great irony of Islam’s disdain toward the West is that it is derived from the very “weak horses” (to borrow from the Lion Sheik himself) who defend Muslims at every turn.

Like Leftists today, Wolper defends civilization’s enemies, despite the fact that it is the likes of him who they hate most of all.

To move on to the central point, the irony of Batman and the Joker lies in their stark contradictions. One, a hero, looks like a brooding monster; the other, who looks like a childhood circus performer, is a mass murdering maniac. As Nolan’s The Dark Knight captures perfectly, the Joker is chaos incarnate. He is the Dionysus to Batman’s Apollo. Batman’s recurring conflict with the Joker represents his attempt to bring order to the randomness of existence that took the lives of his parents. Batman is the virility that is birthed in the midst of chaos. Just as the Joker only awoke from a coma upon hearing of Batman’s return—a coma that was induced by Batman’s disappearance from public eye—Batman cannot exist in a world without chaos (embodied in the Joker). Western man is no different. Western man reaches his potential only when his back is against the wall. The refugee crisis, and the innumerable attacks and rapes that have followed, though an immediate threat to our long-term existence, could be just the thing to spawn a new flowering era in Western history.

It’s worth recognizing that Miller initially frames Batman’s moral crusade, quite true to character, as one of ressentiment. The very Batman persona, itself, grew out of Bruce Wayne’s deep seeded frustration with the seemingly unintelligible disarray of life’s suffering. It is for this very reason that Batman’s existence has been thematically bound to the Joker over the decades. Batman exists so that he can create a world where he will not have to exist. For many identitarians, it’s easy to fall into this same temptation—hating one’s enemy more than loving one’s own.

But by the climax of the penultimate issue, Batman paralyzes the Joker, who subsequently commits suicide to frame him. Batman has now overcome his greatest existential threshold. His journey must now be self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating, or he must die.The manhunt for the Batman that ensues only confirms the inevitable—that Batman’s crusade must take on the establishment sooner or later.

Two Face also reflects Batman’s persona. After finally being apprehended, Dent tragically reveals that despite his recent plastic surgery to correct his disfigured face—a procedure funded by Wayne himself in a naive humanitarian attempt to rehabilitate his old foe—Dent’s shadow-self has overcome him entirely. This symbolic gesture foreshadows Wayne’s own transformation: in a conflict of wills (Wayne vs. Batman), it is inevitable for one to win out in the end. This is true not just within the soul, but in the world.

Conservatism fails for this reason. Deep inside, every conservative recognizes nature’s iron law of inequality, masked by the current year’s egalitarian paradigm. Conservatism making the way for the much purer and harder Alt Right was only a matter of time.

The Way of the Gang is the Way of the Demon

They can’t be arrested. You could never hold them all. They have to be defeated. Humiliated.

In between his conflict with his old foes, Batman confronts the Mutant Gang (who are not actual mutants by the way). He recognizes that to beat them he must crush their head. After Batman beats the Mutant leader to a bloody pulp, the disillusioned Mutant Gang, with their proverbial god now proverbially dead, soon dissolves (reminiscent of the decapitation of James Earl Jones in Conan the Barbarian). Unlike Conan, however—and in a way much more accurate to human nature—many of the former gang members find in their enemy a new god worthy of their reverence. Donning woad and jackboots, the Sons of Batman cult are born-devoting themselves to mercilessly crushing crime and those too cowardly to fight it themselves. More on them later. . .

Superhuman, All Too Superhuman

“Yes”—you always say yes—to anyone with a badge—or a flag.

As his name suggests, Superman was in fact named after the Übermensch from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Writing in a time when Nietzsche was more closely associated with the fascistic tenets of National Socialism, Jewish cartoonists Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster sought out to reshape the “Super-man” in their image. No longer the hierarchical freethinker of insurmountable willpower, their Superman™ was an egalitarian strongman, an alien, whose might lay not in his will but raw materialistic faculties. Like the neoconservative establishment, Superman is a foreign entity wrapped in our flag.

Originally depicted as a hard-boiled “champion of the oppressed” in 1938, at the dawn of America’s entrance into the Second World War, Superman, with Old Glory and bald eagle in hand, became a distinctly American icon alongside Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty. The Man of Steel became a symbol of “American exceptionalism”—his red and blue uniform inspired young boys to scrounge up scraps of metal in the streets for democracy’s war effort.

Copies of the monthly Superman comic book featured the Big Blue Cheese whopping Hitler to a pulp with his fists. When Superman punched Hitler in the jaw it was as if we were punching Hitler in the jaw. And that was good enough for us.

What happens when you run out of bad guys? Such a dilemma is explored in DKR. Superman is still the same walking propaganda poster he has been, here Miller treats him subversively. In DKR, America is, much as it is today, a flabby managerial state, flimsily held together by the flag and the people’s bourgeois unwillingness to resist force, micromanaging the status quo and stomping out anything opposing it. Unlike the rest of his fellow superhumans, Superman is still at large—but only because he is on the U.S. government’s payroll.

For decades, virginal nerds have been arguing over who would win in a showdown between Batman and Superman. Recently it has been fascinating to watch fewer and fewer relate to Superman and more to Batman. This says something about our culture. Like the conservative establishment of today, fighting for “truth, justice, and the American way” isn’t enough anymore.

Modern culture, or anti-culture, as it should more appropriately be called, shuns truth. “Justice,” as it is defined today, has been reduced to “virtue signaling” and guilt tripping. And what exactly is “the American way” anymore?

Superman™ Versus Superman

“You sold us out, Clark. You gave them the power—that should have been ours. Just like your parents taught you to. My parents taught me a different lesson—lying on this street— shaking in deep shock—dying for no reason at all—they showed me that the world only makes sense when you force it to.

In Angus, George C. Scott says “Superman isn’t brave. Superman is indestructible, and you can’t be brave if you’re indestructible.” Perhaps Superman is, in fact, a perfect description of modern America. For the past century, Americans have had the privilege of being the big kid on the block. Geographically we have the protection of the world’s two largest oceans. However, for the first time since perhaps the War of 1812, America is beginning to taste nonexistence. Victory, and the spoils of war, that have defeated America. For so long Superman had the comfort of knowing no one posed an immediate threat to his existence.

Once this changes, he doesn’t know what to do. How was it possible for mighty Rome to fall into oblivion while the tiny Jews, persecuted and bounced around through history, are as old as history itself? Why is Europe, at its height of scientific discovery, succumbing to the barbarism of a bunch of brown goblins who haven’t moved past the Middle Ages?

When you don’t know suffering you won’t be ready for it when it arrives.

Miller’s reinvented Batman, however, is a superman in the Nietzchean sense—beginning as a disaffected Gothamite, by the end he transforms into more than just a man. Unconcerned over the well-being of the status quo and democracy, as societal order breaks down due to nuclear detonation by the Soviets, it is Batman, with the “Sons of Batman” (former disaffected youths to whom he has given purpose) at his command, who takes the reigns of authority and declares “Tonight, I am the law!” as Gotham is consumed in fire and chaos.

Earlier, despite his highly weaponized, and expensive, arsenal, Wayne couldn’t even defeat a brute gang lord. Now, a spiritually awakened Batman is taking on the most physically powerful threat on Earth, and wins in the showdown that made the “Superman vs. Batman” debate exist in the first place. When Superman fan boys belly ache that “the only reason Batman could beat Superman is because Batman is willing to do what Superman isn’t,” they are conceding that Batman is more powerful. Power is the ability to change, to force, to will. It doesn’t matter how much intelligence or capital you have, if you aren’t willing to use it what good are you?

Batman, having proven the establishment’s illegitimacy by cleaning up their country better than they ever could, forces the ventriloquists to bring out their mightiest puppet, the Man of Steel, in a last ditch effort to stomp him out once and for all.

Gone are the days of punching Hitler in the jaw.

In that climactic street fight, Superman rips Batman’s helmet off, stripping away his masked identity and exposing his human identity to the world. No longer does Batman need a mask. Bruce Wayne is of no more value—there is no longer anything to hide. This consummates his becoming.

The Dark Knight as the Third Way

”I couldn’t judge it. It was too big. He was too big…”

What we’re witnessing today in the United States is an establishment whose elites, caught up in a political paradigm limited by a bipartite party system, are finding themselves with their pants down when faced with alternative, non-centrist Third-way politics. You can choose rootless multiculturalism on the left or rootless globalism on the right but nothing else. Until recently, this has been the paradigm of the age.

The Dark Knight Returns is sprinkled with panels of television broadcasters arguing over the exploits of the recently resurfaced Cape Crusader. For some, talking heads and citizenry alike, he is a menace to the established order—an “outdated fascist reactionary.” To others he is a patriotic Minute Man of sorts, restoring Gotham to its status quo. But like the Alt Right of today, he is so much more than this. He is a revolt against the modern world altogether and all its bourgeois insecurities.And as he learns by the end of the novel, he must “bring sense to a world plagued by worse than thieves and murderers.” Batman is in a spiritual war—first within himself, now the world, and in order to change the world, just as his spirit was reborn in the cave, his flesh must be “reborn” to take on the world. Batman was good while it lasted, but like all life, it must either die or evolve.

By the end, Batman realizes that there is more wrong with the world than street crime. The problem with it is the world itself, and in order to reestablish a sense to a its madness, the only solution is letting go of this life and, as Jack Donovan might say, start the world. Batman won the streets by defeating its leader. He must win the world by defeating its leaders as well.

When it comes down to it, that’s what makes the Alt Right so vital. Conserving the status quo is no longer sufficient—for the status quo does not belong to us anymore. It belongs to the Last Men and spiritual rejects. If we are to win, we must refuse to accept death, no matter how glorious it may be, as our end game, but the reaffirmation of life and order toward a rebirth.

By the end, no longer is Bruce Wayne awaiting a good death. No. There is no future in death. He, as a superman, in search of a good life—a life void of mediocre leaders, a life where heroes will once again roam the skies.

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Zachary O. Ray is a freelance writer. More of his work can be found at plugging-out.blogspot.com