The laws of progress, Part one

Since the end of the ideological battle of the cold war between capitalism and communism the notion that ideologies are dead or dying have gained a wide range of supporters, in this essay I would like to portray a different perspective, ideologies in the classical sense are not dead they are rather misinterpreted and misused.

 The notion that ideologies as a concept can disappear, be forgotten and lost all together or that a single one of them should stand above the others are both flawed and should be rejected.

The main factor behind the perceived failure of ideologies or political idealism in general is not lack of conviction as their followers would suggest but an abundance of conviction.

The fault that politicians and especially their supporters commit, politicians being naturally scared of interfering with the status quo due to self-interest, is that they view political ideas as equal to religion when the fact of the matter is that they are fundamentally different.

An ideology should be regarded as a perspective of how to govern society, the communist manifesto is not a bible, Mein Kampf is not the Quran and the U.S. Constitution is not the Torah. It is not a divine truth and should never be portrayed as such.
 
Some might claim that religion in its essence isn’t more than a way to control society, which in a sense is correct but religion has it’s largest value not in a discussion regarding governance in the material world but as a spiritual motivator and as a guide for self-improvement. It doesn’t have its own ideas about matters such as economics or foreign policy other than supporting everything that helps spreading the word of their prophets.

It is also in it’s very being a foreigner in the political world since it’s main focus lies on issues beyond this world and the present whilst ideologies on the other hand is extremely materialistic in it’s approach to different issues.

They are merely a political tool of governance and should be viewed as such, a ruler if you will to straighten the crooked line that is human society. They all contain the potential to not only harm our civilization but actually ending human existence if they are left unchallenged and therefore free to enter a phase of totalitarianism.

As history has proven utopianism, whether in the form of Hitler’s reactionary expansionism, Marx’s Communism or the democratic imperialism that is being used to justify the wars of our time, is a threat to human life.

The culprit guilty of this folly is the gullible follower of mentioned ideologies and their leaders constant misuse of the powers granted to them. Every ideology is in it’s very nature elitist, the notion that a certain set of ideas shall govern every aspect of our lives with complete disregard of local conditions and dilemmas can’t be called anything but elitist, almost on the verge to madness.

Despite that, the ambition to reach a universal standardization of ideas has a widespread acceptance even though it will always end up being a threat to diverse societies of any kind whether it is diverse in the sense of its religion, its ethnicity, its class system or any other form of social organisation with a unique belief system that somehow differs from the principals of the ideology.

Therefore every single-minded ideology will fail to become universal due to lack of popular support. By stubbornly clinging on to power through force and thereby failing in its mission to improve mankind it will always end up being contraproductive.

Every ideology have gained recognition during a time of specific conditions, socialism was created when enclosures and rough competition drove farmers of their land and forced them to move to the cities where they could be easily exploited as labourers. Capitalism gained support first after the technological advances started benefitting the general public.

Nationalism rose in a time of war and when the need to protect the group from outer threats was high. The powerful theocracies of the past have always occurred when man has been confused in his search for an explanation to his place in a complex universe.

To suggest that one of these ideologies would overpower the other one and govern society until the end of time is to suggest that our socioeconomic and emotional conditions would stay the same for just as long.

Communism is the most resent example of this, in it’s desperation to stay in power it became what it despised, and it failed in its mission, lost its soul and then ultimately its power despite all the desperate efforts to keep it. No social movement has been able to regain initiative since.

The most reasonable conclusion to draw from these historical facts is that opposition to the strongest ideas of any society, which is often presented as truths, is always justified.

The truth of the matter is, even though the combatants would never admit it to each other, that every ideology is needed. Early political thought teaches us that the workings of human society are the same as those of a living organism. Every ideology has a value in being the representative of its particular group. In turn every group is needed in order to guarantee that the organism is functioning.

A highly valuable theory in this context is the theory of the four classes, it’s been a social fact in our world since the dawn of man, the theory was made famous by the communists and perfected by Julius Evola in The Metaphysics of War even though mentioned just briefly.

It’s not enough to understand everything that happens in society but it provides us with a model which can be used to explain and investigate further in order to increase the knowledge about ourselves and the times we live in. 

The theory suggests that mankind is divided into four castes which throughout our history have been struggling for power over the other three in order to dominate the pack. The four castes are the slaves, the bourgeois, the warriors and the priests. Ideologies are only an extension of these four castes and their principals.

 Evola himself talks of the hierarchical quadripartition, “which interprets most recent history as an involutionary fall from each of the four hierarchical degrees to the next. This quadripartition – it must be recalled – is what in all traditional civilisations gave rise to four different castes; the slaves, the bourgeois middle class, the warrior aristocracy, and bearers of a pure spiritual authority.

Here caste does not mean - as most assume- something artificial and arbitrary but rather the place where individuals, sharing the same nature, the same type of interests and vocation, the same primordial qualifications gather.

A specific truth, a specific function, defines the castes in their normal state and not vice versa.

This is not therefore a matter of privileges and ways of life being monopolised on the basis of a social constitution more or less artificially and unnaturally maintained.

The underlying principle behind all the formative institutions in such societies, at least in their more authentic historical forms, is that there does not exist one simple ,universal way of living one’s life, but several distinct spiritual ways, appropriate respectively to the warrior, the bourgeois and the slave, and that ,when the social functions and distributions actually correspond to this articulation there is – according to the classic expression – an order secundum equum et bonum, according to truth and justice. “

He’s suggesting that humans have a natural hierarchy that throughout the centuries have been tampered with and been cast aside, now the result is chaos, where every faction fights exclusively for its own benefit and not to the benefit of the whole which is slowly killing the organism. He also suggests that different people belong to different castes based on the nature of their spirit more than on social factors such as one’s upbringing or general surroundings.

In other words a man of warrior spirit would always be of a warrior spirit, no matter where he was born or what times he live in, his spirit would be suppressed if he lived in an age where any of the other castes where superior but it would never be totally erased, it’s as much a natural part of him as his heart, his lungs or his hands.  And it will always present itself fully when the opportunity comes.

He goes on further “Only such cases, in which this straight and normal relationship of subordination and co-operation exists are healthy, as is made clear by the analogy of the human organism, which is unsound if, by some chance, the physical element(slaves) or the element of vegetative life (bourgeois) or that of the uncontrolled animal will(warriors) takes the primary and guiding place in the life of a man, and is sound only when spirit constitutes the central and ultimate point of reference for the remaining faculties – which, however, are not denied a partial autonomy, with lives and subordinate rights of their own within the unity of the whole. “

Each respective caste or force if you will, represents not only a certain caste, a social group with diverse needs and perspectives but it also represents a universal principal, for instance the warrior caste’s key principal would be strength whilst the slave caste’s would be suffering,
a society focused only on the needs of the strong would suffocate the weak.

 A current example is the technological race for nuclear arms, where the need to become stronger and stronger in order to keep ahead results in a situation where the quest for strength endangers the very people it was supposed to protect, for instance by throwing the world into a nuclear war.

A society focused mainly on the needs of the very weakest would in turn endanger the group by creating a society without the ability to sustain itself, in many communist and socialist countries it’s been common practice to imprison and in many cases even execute the best and the brightest, In Cambodia during the Red Khmer regime it was a guiding principle, there just the appeal of being intellectual could be enough to be executed, people with university diplomas or just owners of a pair of glasses were in the danger zone.

Any society which fails in analyzing and solving these inner conflicts run a risk of being stuck in a permanent state of imbalance, with lasting consequences for every member, there is a constant unwillingness to realize the need for harmony within a group and there lies a grave danger in not taking every principal of the castes into account before making decisions, it threatens the continued existence of the entire group, even of our species, this imbalance is the greatest threat to any society, it is guilty for the fall of every empire, it’s to blame for every civil war and revolution.

The imbalance of our hierarchy where we choose to fight internally for dominance is unique in its extent, incomparable to that of any other social animal. It can be explained through our role in nature’s food chain, most other animals have a subordinate role in the food chain where they have another group of animals both above and below them, the group above them endangers the group and through that serves the purpose of keeping the group together, the group that is below the animal serves the purpose of being easily exploited and used as a means for sustenance.

Mankind has reached the top of the food chain through military and technological prowess and lacks another animal positioned above it and the rewards gained by exploiting the animals below them are not big enough to satisfy it's needs and wants, it is therefore forced to fight internally to determine who gets to play the role of exploiter and who is to be exploited.

According to this point of view humanity was governed by the spiritual authority, the priests in prehistoric times and up towards the decline of the Roman Empire and after followed the time of the warrior aristocracy that ended around the 17^th Century and was replaced with the rule of the bourgeois and the industrial revolution who are the primary forces behind the world order we live in today, an attempt to take over was made by the slave caste during the 20^th century but failed with the end of the Cold war and the fall of the Soviet Union.

It’s been suggested that what rather happened was that the USA and the USSR, the physical manifestation of these primarily spiritual forces reached a point where neither force could dominate the world and essentially compromised, even though the USSR itself was dismantled the slave castes cultural and economic influence was enormous even though it’s influence decreased slightly with the disintegration of its empire.

The bourgeois have been largely at power throughout the world since then and its ideas have the strongest influence on our daily lives but it could never have been achieved without the approval of the slave caste who gave their support to the bourgeois vision for the world in exchange for the creation of the welfare state.