So, to writing again.
Those of you who have followed my thoughts over the past year know that I have attempted to launch what I called “The Journeyman’s Game”, a protocol for developing the type of an amateur nobility. To my disappointment I have seen little interest in my first offerings of this idea, though I own the disappointment as stemming from the imperfection of my own efforts. There were probably many weaknesses to my initial treatment, but a friend of mine put his finger on the most signal of them; that I have not given sufficient body to the reason why such a project is useful or necessary or beautiful. Enthusiasm must prepare activity. I put the cart before the horse.
In a sense I put the cart before the horse intentionally, following the laudable impulse of preferring action to discussion; don’t talk but do. There is much goodness in this principle, but it does not fit with every time and season, and likely it jars with my natural talents. As much as I appreciate the direct, unexplicated action; as much as I flatter myself that I am a man of fair initiative in practical things, my gifts tend more toward Mercury than Mars, and so to neglect the communication of my ideas was unwise.
Therefore I will return to the opening out of my thought, which thought must float any of my prescriptions for practical actions, in the hope that thereby I can not only convince my few followers of the utility of my recommendations, but draw in a greater crowd of listeners with which to launch any effort. Yet I will continue to abjure “takes”, and eschew most of the received wisdom of internet writing in bolstering my audience. If I make that awful thing called “content” I will consider my work a failure. Already I have set myself out as a contrarian in the intellectual sphere I inhabit, so a dissident among dissidents, and so I intend to carry on; the promise I see in the dissident sphere is viewed through it; beyond to something else, past the accretions and conventions of “right wing”, “alternative” or “conspiracy” thinking. I would not write if I were not confident of the fact that I am seeing differently to the great majority of the despised minority, otherwise to speak would be pointless; only “content”. Though I must speak with humility, of course it would not be worth offering out my thought if I did not believe that ultimately I see better than the mass of my peers, or at least suffer from fewer cataracts of apprehension.
My forthcoming work will likely form the basis of a full book which arranges my thought more properly, with my long-thought-out practical project following on its heels. I will begin again, withdrawing all of my previous material and reiterating what was best in that without, I hope, irksome repetition, while broadening and deepening the scope of my reasoning. Let this be my opening salvo:
I allow myself to repeat this ad nauseam: that the “dissident right” is hobbled by its distance from the field of “conspiracy theory”; that these two spheres must coalesce to become fruitful and fulfill the promise of their form. I also restate that the dissident who sees clearly is not truly of the Right Wing. I have never called myself such no matter how much of vital truth is now kicked around largely on the Right of the field of thought, and it seems that already a number of my intellectual peers are emerging through the fog of political Rightism, and blinking, somewhat nonplussed, in the more even-coloured light outside of its heat. More than this, much of what is so cheaply maligned as Left Wing thought must also be consolidated for its wisdom to make men of effective vision. The Dissident Right has made a parlour game of mocking the obvious propensity of “the Left” to be self-enthralled by its own rampant tropes, but the same ferment of folly it evident also in their own house. Those groupings which have clotted around the identity of Left, Right and Conpiracist are all missing pieces which are only to be found in the other, and can only be aligned in compliment by something approaching wisdom.
This is not to say that each are equal partners in our day. The share of truth and sanity in each fluctuates, and the public presentation of each are caricatures to be rightly ridiculed, but in each camp have all become too comfortable. Nor am I proposing, must it be added, that the emulsion of these spheres is desirable; not by the mean average of their positions is wisdom found, placing ourselves by their answering tempers in the middle of the road. No; there are crucial elements missing to each, and wisdom missing to all. The manner by which things are united is the proof of their intelligent handling. A key is made for a lock and without it the door remains shut. We can agree that they are obvious compliments to one another. The man who would simply homogenise the different streams of dissident thought (as left, right, conspiracist) is like the man who wants to melt down lock and key together in a crucible, and so is left with a useless lump of brass. The cognizant man employs them in their fit by an action of understanding, each a limited object good only for its use, and proceeds into a larger room.
It has often been pointed out how Left Wing and Right Wing thought corresponds to the purported divide of mode between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. What is conceded less often is that both are plainly necessary counterparts, each with distinct powers than enable their opposing tendencies in spite of essential contradictions of nature. Moreover, both hemispheres work only under and by an animating power beyond them; the third element yet distinct from both poles.
Please do not take that I am opening onto some formulae for some effort at intellectual political unification. The prospect disgusts me with boredom even writing the foregoing sentence. Rather, in the varied things on which I would speak, wisdom can only be pursued by countenancing facts and ideas which have been corralled, kidnapped or bribed into cultural categories that we have learned to think of in political camps of “left” and “right”. Politics should come to be treated as a filthy word, though it is probably our usage to blame for its grubiness. It is a victim of its own elasticity, because truly one can claim that everything is political, but just because one can doesn’t mean one ought to do so. If we can liberate certain things from their treatment as political objects we will find what an unnecessary impediment it was all along to handle them so, and how the very label robbed them of their essential utility and significance.
I am considering the men who will accomplish a rectification of things in the world, and little of their concern will be political, and little of their acculturation will be harmonious with any of the groupings which have now formed in the “culture wars”. They are bound to move beyond these. I doubt also that what they rectify will be made of what we see around us now; it will be the erection of a new thing; for to rectify does not mean to repair, letalone to salvage.
Perhaps I might better say, I am considering the men who will accomplish the rectification of things in their worlds.
It is not folly to plan a utopia; for utopias can be found quite commonly; most of us have seen private homes which would constitute a paradise to the minds of normal men; a few verdant acres, a family bound with affection suffering no terrible poverty or disease, with lives reaching from the soil up to poetic heights of appreciation. Such are not impossibilities. Probably the folly is contained in the expectation to spread a utopia over the extent of the world, or expect it to persist to an age, which heaven seems to veto; but we are not banned therefore from dreaming of, working for, utopias of some greater extend and longer durability than happy flashes in the pan. But the project is poisoned from the start where it proceeds by the vehicle of politics, and if there is one superiority of the Right over the Left in the culture wars of our age, it is that the right appreciates this to some degree. Spiritual integrity, familial tranquility, heroic bearing are things which doubtless can be treated as political factors, but it is unclean to so handle them. Our work cannot be purely spiritual and rest on nothing but the inward uplift of men’s souls, but even the most prosaic considerations of system and material necessity are hobbled and tarnished by the name of Politics. If we are to characterise all of our efforts under one aegis (and we need not), let it al least be that all is Philosophical, and redeem that abused term by the soundness and variety of its application.
What we are looking for is a new pattern by which to work, and we must be willing to offend all conventions to establish it right and straight and true.