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How do we know our world and our lives? Do we look at the world as controlled by spirits and gods and daemons and sprites? Do we look at our lives as controlled by the stars or by the whims of tarot cards? Those who do are Irrationalists. Their epistemological base is founded on intuition, on feeling, on hunches, on things that come in the night we know not from where. Irrationalism is a philosophical position, and more and more it is the ruling ethos of our time in the Modern West. It's got us as a culture into the state we're in today, which we'll look at below.
"Irrationalists deny that the world can be comprehended by conceptual thought, and often see the human mind as determined by unconscious forces."
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Yes, Freud and Jung are Irrationalists. Freud tries to take a rational approach to understanding the irrational man, but still, at heart, Man is irrational. There are more things in Heaven and on Earth, dear reader, than are dreamed of in your philosophies.
There are mysteries, things known only to those with deep mystical vision, et cetera. One must be in touch with the spirit of the universe, and so on. Insh'allah. Shit happens.
Our Western world turned from that unexamined life of the mind roughly 500 years ago. Some Westerners said that there are other approaches to knowing about the world than simple faith and superstition. We gave up the Edenic life of acceptance of the nature of things as being outside the control of Man, and we took it upon ourselves to ask what we can do to make nature conform to our wishes and will. Easily found and read surveys by Daniel Boorstin and Jacques Barzun, as examples, lay out 500 years of extraordinary creativity and invention and triumph of reason over passive acceptance of the way it is. These past 500 years show a course of Human thought unknown before then, and also one that cuts us off from the main body of our own history and existence as Humans before and elsewhere. We in the Modern West are revolutionaries, utterly different from those who came before us, totally different from those who live outside our world of Modernity, and increasingly divided from our own who refuse to live in our Modernity. The high price Man pays for Modernity is too great for many even among us who benefit from it throughout the whole course of their lives. Modernity isn't free: it demands a sacrifice that some, and even many in our lands, and nearly all outside, are not willing to pay; and many if not most are willing to die to destroy our Modernity, and to kill themselves in doing so. For some, for many, maybe for most, this 500 year turn from the course of prior Human history is an outrage that must stop, must be destroyed, and must be forgotten. Those who struggle to destroy Modernity are Irrationalists.
Smart people can be Irrationalists. Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, and C.G. Jung are intellectual Irrationalists. The list of names is very long, and we accept those people as mentors at great risk to our Modernity. They have a clear philosophical position that is in clear conflict with Modernity. Irrationalism is a clear philosophical approach to deciding what we know and deciding that what we know is true. It's the opposite of science for a start. Irrationalism is a way of knowing the world not by observation followed by testing our observations against other observable tests but by observing the world and then coming up with answers about the nature of things based on feelings, intuitions, great leaps of flowing genius, just plain knowing that what is is the way it is because it's naturally right. Irrationalism tells us that the world is thus because we can sense it in our bones or know it through our vibrations or that Mother Nature tells us things are as they are. We can read of the "collective unconsciousness" or the power of myth or intuitive knowledge and the superiority of native spiritual healing rituals and think it's meaningful and pretty, and we can like Carl Jung, and we can draw mandalas on our table cloths and wear love beads, and we can get in touch with our feelings and baby-sit our inner child; and there's no great harm in it until we realize we're naively sliding into fascism. We find ourselves valuing the irrational over the real. We find ourselves saying things about our own lives that are in conflict with our own lives, and we don't know where we went wrong. Is it our lives that are wrong? our societies? our ways of life? Or is it that our approach to epistemology is all askew? Maybe we've half understood some very smart people who have lead us to the brink of ruin, to the edge of the abyss into which we are seemingly ready to throw ourselves because we have lost sight of the value of our Modernity, thinking that we've gone wrong by losing touch with the authentic values of life, that we've become materialists, consumers, philistines, and valueless people with a destructive mode of production, i.e. capitalism, rapacious and world destroying. We've listened to the siren songs of the smartest of the smart Irrationalists till we are at the rim of ruin. It's time to look clearly at where we stand.
Teleology is the study of the purpose of Man. Many people refuse the idea that Man has any purpose at all. Some argue that Man's purpose is up to God, not Man. Here we state clearly and unapologetically that Man is the centre of the universe, and Man is the purpose of Man's life as a species. The proper study of Mankind is Man, to quote Alexander Pope. He does not write that the proper study of Man is Mankind. No, the proper study of all men is Man, the person. The Irrationalist does not follow us there. For the Irrationalist the proper study of Man is the spirit world, and the epistemology of spirit is intuition and superstition. the Irrationalist rejects Reason as the road to knowledge, and more, he hates Reason with a passionate intensity, even a murderous intensity. The proper study of Man is not Man for the Irrationalist, it is to study the unknowable to know not Man but Mystery. Man is not important to the Irrationalist, only is Mankind, the collective Mankind, the Spirit of Mankind, and so on. It is there that we find our Modernity threatened from within by the naive fascism of our own Irrationalists in the shopping malls and discotheques and offices of the West. We have given the lead to the Irrationalists to take us into the dark past of Human epistemology, to the days before Modernity when men were farm animals and the priests of unreason ruled by whim and privilege and title. We have given up our cause of Modernity in many cases to those who would rule by fiat, by reference to the stars, to the Oneness of Mother Nature, to the Myth of the collective Will. The purpose of Man is to obey his masters and the state they rule.
In 1789 we chopped off a lot of empty heads to rid Western Europe of the feudalists and reactionaries who ruled the people like gods herding sheep. Since then and to this our own time, the old guard has scratched and scrambled to regain their past and lost positions of rulership. we are silently and slowly and unknowingly giving back our freedom as individual men and women to the neo-feudalists as we let go of Reason in favor of Irrationality. Our revolutions of Modernity are crumbling before our eyes, and most of us only know consciously that something, some unidentifiable something is wrong. The Eurocrats and the entitled and the priests are sneaking back into places and palaces of power, and we don't see them clearly, they coming into our lives like rats sneaking into our rooms in the dark of night. We've lost sight of the purpose of Man. Our collective gaze is turned to the aether of Mysteries and Spirit. We are the children, we are the children of the world. We are family. We are all one. We are screwed.
When we view our Modernity as corrupted by Irrationalism things make some sense as they are. Rather than prize our accomplishments as the fruit of intellectual endeavour and Reason rationally pursued logically, we toss it out in fits of nervousness and insecurity, thinking we've lost our roots, lost touch with Nature, lost our authenticity as beings in the world. We look to primitives and barbarians as more valid then we, and we elevate them in our own minds as somehow better than us because of their naturalness, their closeness to Nature, their innate spirituality. We who live in concrete jungles, who eat chemicals, who dress in plastic, who are cut off from the real meaning of life by television, we long for authentic life the way the barbarians seem to live it, so romantically, so heroically. And because we see ourselves as rapacious in our pursuit of oil and capital, we see ourselves as destructive of the Real people who are not tied to the work-a-day routine of paper and machines. We see ourselves as petty and trivial compared to the heroism of the noble savage. We see our speeding bombers destroying villages that have sustained simple-living people for generations untold, and we feel that we have violated something almost
--even-- scared. We tell ourselves we are not murderers who kill for the sake of plastic goods. We say to ourselves that we do not wage war for the sake of profits. We say we are wrong, and that we, as individuals, object; and that because our nations wage these campaigns against the primitives, it must be our system that is at fault and not us. We rebel against our nations and thereby against our Modernity in favour of sentimentality and philobarbarism. We long to compromise, to make peace with the primitives, to share our wealth with them, our goods, our Modernity, and to do so we will also cut back on our Modernity so we do not continue to displease them. And the less satisfied with our efforts they are the more we blame ourselves for not doing enough to accommodate them. We think we have gone totally wrong, and that somehow the primitives are right to hate us and to kill us. We are unnatural, and they should hate us for who we are and what we do to them. We, having lost touch with Nature, have lost our Humanity, and they, who still have theirs, are better than we. Our horoscopes tell us so. Our gurus tell us so. Our spiritual counsellors tell us so, and our gut reactions and intuitions tell us so. We should be more Natural. Then things will be better. We are all One. We are Mankind.
When we examine the universe and life within we need a position from which to make our decisions about the nature of things. Science, we are told, is simply one form of grand narrative, one concocted by dead white men 500 years ago that lead to capitalism and atomic individualism, an approach that really only benefits the few who are rich, some others to a lesser extent who are the dupes of the rich, and at the expense of the masses of the world's people who live in harmony with Nature until we invade and kill them in our pursuit of oil and profits. Science is a bad thing. A good thing is returning to our roots as natural beings at one with the ecosystem. A good thing is relying on the wisdom of Earth Mothers who know things from the female spirit. Who sense deeply the mystical union of all souls in touch with the higher powers of the universe. These things are known, not by the dead hand of science but through intuition and spiritual knowledge, through feeling, which cannot come to those cut off from Nature in cities and in the midst of machines and artificial corporate environments. To know is to move back to nature, to become one with the Spirit of the Universe as it is, to become again authentic, though never so much as those who are indigenous to The Land. No, we who are cut off from The Land and who are on The Land as interlopers cannot ever be truly valid on the land because our roots are elsewhere, in Europe, and we have there a ground of existence soaked in innocent blood of the victims of our heartless aggressions for thousands of years of Christianity. Our best hope is to be second fiddlers to the best of the authentic people who are still Natural and Pure. Oh, we learn so much from them, like herbal remedies and spiritual growth.
We have to take a position to know where we stand so we can face reality accordingly. We can choose to be Irrationalists, and we can choose not even to think about it but to merely accept what others around have chosen of accepted from above or outside or somewhere. But we do take a position of epistemological bias. We value intuition or we value Reason. In today's world we accept submission to Islam, the religion of peace, a beautiful religion, a religion misunderstood by most, a world religion of great importance, or we are Islamophobic and racist, cut off even further from nature and submission to the will of Allah, the Will of the Universe, the Natural, the primitive and the vital, we who walk on plastic soles and concrete paths.
We can long for the Romance of prior times, for the Golden Age before the capitalists came to wreck everything, and before the cold and heartless scientists came to rip the soul out of the Human experience; or we can look at the world as Rational, at men as self-actual and the ground of their own existence, as Feuerbach writes, a the proper subject of the study of Mankind. We can look at Man as the ultimate good in the universe, and we can look at Man as something to know by logic, by empirical study, by reason and rationality, and we can look at science as the highest plane of our thoughts on the discoveries of the way things are likely to be. We can look at science as reason, and we can look at the scientist who has no intuition as being little more than a clerk. Yes, there is a necessary place for imagination and intuition, and even for irrationality in science. But we, if we choose to continue our progress into the revolutions of Modernity, cannot lapse into primitivism and nostalgia and Irrationality as valid epistemology. Nor can we compromise with irrationalality. Irrationalism is not the path of Modernity. Nor is the piling up of cold fact upon cold fact science. Rationalism is more, not even a synthesis of Reason and intuition but a creative science of the study of Man.
We in the Modern West are at war with the primitives of the world and those who would draw us back to the pre-industrial world, into a new feudalism, into a new Dark Age of life as farm animals and savages living in fear of spirits and under the heel of fascist Islam. Our enemies are Muslims and Left dhimmi fascists. They would raise up the irrational and tear down the Reason of our lives. We must understand that if we do not value our outlook on reality as Rationalists, as people dedicated to the pursuit of universal Truth, and as men and women who are willing to fight and die for the continued progress of our revolutions that we will whither and die and return to the cycles of nature, living from generation to generation with nothing more than the faint hope of Heaven to console us. That, if it is the future of Man, is not worth living for. We have allowed the primitives and their friends, our own intelligentsia, to concoct a dream value of the right life of Man, and we have accepted it at face value. It's time for us to look at that face of our received reality and to decide whether we wish to slap it silly and choose something better than the grinning death-mask of dhimmitude and barbarism we see before us.
Are we to continue our Modernity? Are we to surrender to the barbarians and live like farm animals? It will depend on our epistemological postion. Who will control our lives? If we allow the Irrationalists to do so, they will control us through spritis and the will of Allah, infantalized and tormented by ghosts and daemons. If we chose to control our own destinies as free and individual men and women then we had better shake of the idiocies of Romantic sentimentalism and the ingantalization of our nations and people. We either live like adults responsible for our own destinies or we live like beasts for the sake of our rulers's pleasures. What kind of people are we?
In coming posts on identity we'll look more at this irrationalist approach to life and Man. Next we hope to look at the atavistic approach to Identity. In coming posts further we will continue this theme by looking at more on ecology fascism.
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