Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain

Over the course of history Human freedom isn't seen as a good thing. Human freedom is seen as a war against order and right, as a rebellion against God and King, Church and State. Human freedom is seen as an assault against family and morality. Human freedom is seen as a violent effort to destroy community and tribe. Freedom is generally considered to be a bad thing throughout history. Heretics, atheists, apostates, all are seen as enemies of the group. Free thinkers are the enemies of the collective. Very little changes even in these modern times.

We of the modern West are revolutionaries in terms of Human history. We who value individuality and personal freedom are a direct threat to the order of the communitarian ethos. We are not tribal. We do not own slaves. We are free men and women, and we expect all others to be free as well. We go so far as to wage war on others to expand our conceptions of freedom to those who do not share our view of the good of Human freedom. And in turn, the tribalists and communitarians fight against us. Today they, our enemies, are fascist Muslims and Left dhimmi fascists. They are the enemies of Human freedom. They have many legitimate points in their favor. And still they are our enemies. Those who wage war against the West do so to restore the world to a pre-revolutionary state of primitive fascism. As absurd and irrelevant as it might seem to the average person, the war we fight today is one of defining the nature of history. We might think we don't care but the fact is that how we view history and man's place therein is central to the war itself, to our identities, to our survival as a culture of Modernist Revolutionaries, as Westerners, as free individuals.

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Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The dead weight of tradition lies upon the minds of the living like an mountain.

Karl Marx, Eighteenth Braumaire of Louis Bonaparte

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicism
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So sayeth Marx. Marx tries to save himself from an infinite regress by claiming that man can adjust the details of his personal history, but what bunkum. His idea of historical determinism won't float in the real world. It is men who make history, and history, not a force in-itself, follows in Man's wake. The ship of state and men with it sails because men make the state and guide it here or there and the Great Man theory of history that so infuriates the historical dialecticians sails at a clip through the fog banks of ideology. The cast-aways of philosophy are still screaming about being stranded and who cares? Well, most of the world's population still cares. Most are left on the beach ranting. Worse, even though our ship of state is piloted by men, it is piloted by men who don't understand the nature of their duties, who don't really understand that it is Man who propels history. We are under the guidance of men asleep at the wheel, drifting on a rudderless course. What are they smoking in those cigarettes?

Below we have a short entry on Hegel's view of history, as well as some further commentary on those who followed. It is important to understand these basics of historical determinism and communitarianism because today, enthralled by Left dhimmi fascism as are most of our leaders in the West, we must know what it is that's wrong with our governance so we may challenge with some hope of articulate argument a better course. Our social problem today is one of unconscious adherence to fascism. Once we realise the nature of our ideas, the etymology of our social discourse, as it were, we have a chance to redirect our course.
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Hegelian historicism

The historicist position proposed by Hegel suggests that any human society and all human activities such as science, art, or philosophy, are defined by their history, so that their essence can be sought only through understanding that history. The history of any such human endeavor, moreover, not only builds upon but also reacts against what has gone before; this is the source of Hegel's famous dialectic teaching usually summed up by the slogan " thesis, antithesis, and synthesis." (Hegel did not use these terms, although Fichte did.) His famous aphorism, "Philosophy is the history of philosophy," describes it bluntly.

Hegel's position is perhaps best illuminated when contrasted against the atomistic and reductionist view of human societies [individual people] and social activities self-defining on an ad hoc basis through the sum of dozens of interactions. Yet another contrasting model is the persistent metaphor of a social contract. Hegel sees the relationship between individuals and societies as organic, not atomic [You are the State]: even their social discourse is mediated by language, and language is rooted in etymology and unique character. It thus preserves the culture of the past in thousands of half-forgotten frozen metaphors. To understand why a person is the way he is, you must put that person in a society [Man has no identity outside his state because he is nothing in comparison to anything]: and to understand that society, you must understand its history, and the forces that shaped it [Those forces being the Spirit]. The Zeitgeist, the "Spirit of the Age," is the concrete [?] embodiment of the most important factors that are acting in human history at any given time. This contrasts with teleological theories of activity, which suppose that the end is the determining factor of activity, as well as those which believe in a tabula rasa, or blank slate, view, where individuals are defined by their interactions.

These ideas can be taken in several directions. The Right Hegelians, working from Hegel's opinions about the organicism and historically determined nature of human societies, took Hegel's historicism as a justification of the unique destiny of national groups [cf "authenticity"] and the importance of stability and institutions. Hegel's conception of human societies as entities greater than the individuals who constitute them influenced nineteenth century romantic nationalism and its twentieth century excesses [Nazis, to those of us who can read the fine print.]. The Young Hegelians, by contrast, took Hegel's thoughts on societies shaped by the forces of social conflict for a doctrine of progress, and attempted to chart a course that would manipulate these forces to lead to various improved outcomes. Karl Marx's doctrine of "historical inevitabilities" and historical materialism is one of the more influential reactions to this side of Hegel's thought. Significantly, Marx's theory of alienation comes full circle to the thought of the Hegelian right, arguing among other things that capitalism disrupts the rooted nature of traditional relationships between workers and their work.

Hegelian historicism is related to his ideas on the means by which human societies progress, specifically the dialectic and his conception of logic as reflecting the inner essential nature of reality. Hegel attributes the change to the "modern" need to interact with the world, where as ancient philosophers were self-contained, and medieval philosophers were monks. In his History of Philosophy Hegel writes:

In modern times things are very different; now we no longer see philosophic individuals who constitute a class by themselves. With the present day all difference has disappeared; philosophers are not monks, for we find them generally in connection with the world, participating with others in some common work or calling. They live, not independently, but in the relation of citizens, or they occupy public offices and take part in the life of the state. Certainly they may be private persons, but if so, their position as such does not in any way isolate them from their other relationship. They are involved in present conditions, in the world and its work and progress. Thus their philosophy is only by the way, a sort of luxury and superfluity. This difference is really to be found in the manner in which outward conditions have taken shape after the building up of the inward world of religion. In modern times, namely, on account of the reconciliation of the worldly principle with itself, the external world is at rest, is brought into order - worldly relationships, conditions, modes of life, have become constituted and organized in a manner which is conformable to nature and rational. We see a universal, comprehensible connection, and with that individuality likewise attains another character and nature, for it is no longer the plastic individuality of the ancients. This connection is of such power that every individuality is under its dominion, and yet at the same time can construct for itself an inward world. [See Marx above.]

This view, that entanglement in society creates an indissoluble bond with expression would be an influential question in philosophy going forward, namely, the requirements for individuality. It would be taken up by Nietzsche, John Dewey and Michel Foucault directly, as well as in the work of numerous artists and authors. There have been various responses to Hegel's challenge. The Romantic period focused on the ability of individual genius to transcend time and place, and use the materials from their heritage to fashion works which were beyond determination. The modern would advance versions of John Locke's infinite malleability of the human animal. Post-structuralism would argue that since history is not present, but only the image of history, that while an individual era or power structure might focus on a particular history, that the contradictions within the story would hinder the very purposes that the history was constructed to advance.
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If one agrees that one is only authentic only in relation to ones social conditions one is agreeing to passivity generally, and specifically agreeing that one may only work for social change within a determined course of historical inevitability. What, exactly, is a force of history? What is the Spirit of the Age? What, other than lack of imagination, prevents a man from thinking? The linguistic determinism of von Herder, mentioned here before is a fascist dead end that is the ruling thesis today in the West. Look again at the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. It is ridiculous. What, in Aristotelian terms, is the Prime Mover? What is the First Cause? From whence the determinate?

If, as the determinists would have us swallow whole, man is only authentic in relation to his own state, then the state, being supreme, defines the being of man himself, man being a mere manifestation of the General Will. Homo Sovieticus is the creation of the State determinate. Change the social conditions and you will allow the social conditions of the state to form the man. Change the way people speak and you will change the way they think. Make them speak German, and they will be German. Make people say "mail person" and they will be non-sexist people. Take away the individual and you can make the unformed being into whaterver the state requires of him. Take away a man's privacy, his ownership of his own being, and the state will make man in its own image. The free individual, being not-state is anti-state. That free individual is a heretic, an apostate, an atheist, an outsider and a rebel. That is the condition of the Modernist Man, a man outside historical determinism and outside the fascist triumph that is the vast record of history. We are revolutionaries! We must know our own history to save our course from the reefs of ignorance.

Understanding our history is essential for free men. Understanding history as objective rather than as conventional is essential. Understanding the nature of "post-modernist" relativist historiography as fascism is essential if we as free thinking individuals are to claim our posts as captains of the revolutions we inherited. If we do not, we will fall victims to the pirates of feudal post-modernist Left dhimmi fascism.

Neil Postman puts history in its proper place in Technopoly, Alfred A Knopf: New York. 1992.

To take as our starting point Postman's today's radical conservativism "Modern secular education is failing because it has no moral, social, or intellectual centre," (p. 186) we confront immediately the ire of relativists in the West.

And so be it. To atomise history and to replace history with random "narratives" of authenticity emerging from the zeitgeist based on language and the mystical union of the soul's blood purity with "the land" is plain Nazi rubbish that those who cry for ethnic identity and communions of membership in the group would have us believe is multi-culturalism. The Left is fascist.

To teach for example, what we know about biology today, Postman continues, without also teaching what we once knew, or thought we knew, is to reduce knowledge to a mere consumer product. It is to deprive students of a sense of the meaning of what we know, and of how we know it.... It is also to know where your ideas come from and why you happen to believe them; to know where your moral and aesthetic sensibilities come from. It is to know where your world, and not just your family, comes from. (p.189-190.)

Postman is writing, of course, about history as human events rather than as economic forces upon which men are acted. This is the history of individuals with private lives. Our Left fascist dhimmi relatives cannot see history as other than a Capitalist concoction of false narratives put forth to justify their rape of Mother Nature and as mystification of their theft from the people, mostly today those of the Third World, the primitives.

Postman writes: [K]nowledge is not a fixed thing but a stage in human development, with a past and a future.... The history of subjects teaches connections; it teaches that the world is not created anew each day, that everyone stands on someone else's shoulders. (p.190.)

We should point out here that Postman is not an historian. He is a school teacher.

It will be objected that this idea--history as comparative history-- is too abstract for students to grasp, he writes. But that is one of the several reasons why comparative history should be taught. To teach the past simply as a chronicle of indisputable, fragmented, and concrete events is to replicate the bias of Technopoly, which largely denies our youth access to concepts and theories, and to provide them with only a stream on meaningless events. (p.190.)

And that is the state of our schools. History, if it's taught at all, is reduced to a pomo travesty of fascist ideology from the late 18th century extending through to the collapse and underground existence of fascism today as mainstream multiculturalism: You can do nothing in the face of History, it's inevitable, everything is relative, there is no objectivity, there is no truth, there is no history. There is no point trying to do anything. Everything is the state. Leave it to the professionals. Leave it to the experts. You are not a real person, only a reflexion of your community and your tribe. Oh, captain, oh my captain!

Our leaders are not guiding the ship of state. Most of them are idiots too stupid to follow this blog in its various details, and too stupid to read others. They follow along with the zeitgeist itself, not knowing the fascist nature of the ideologies they blindly follow. They do not understand the nature of the fascism that is counter-modernity today. They have knowledge, knowledge everywhere, but not a drop they think.

We, as free men and women must think and understand the nature of our time if we are to continue our struggle to sustain and expand Modernity in its revolutionary cause. No one who is not free will love us for it. We must impose freedom on others to maintain it for ourselves. Freedom is in danger, as it has been from the beginnings of our revolutionary times, and it will remain so. Most people on Earth today hate individualism and Human freedom. We are at war with them, and I want to beat them. More than likely, if you've followed this far, you do to. We are not fascists. We are free men and women. What is to be done?