Sorel (5)

Why are people who are starving to death in a police state nightmare land such as North Korea more satisfied with life than are Europeans?

North Koreans are probably happier than Swedes. Why do otherwise ordinary and seemingly decent people in the West go loony when they discuss Israel and Geo. W. Bush? Why are normal people suddenly irrational? Why do they veer from discussing the price of groceries to justifying homicide bombers in Tel Aviv? What's wrong?
We can blame the media or the universities or the moon for being in Virgo. But what we should do is examine the origins of our ideas, and in that we will find a clear course of thought that is concrete and sensible leading from a reaction to the Industrial Revolution to today. We see that during the French Revolution many people were against it for reasons that remain with us today, but like the proverbial iceberg, only the very tip shows. Who is Georges Sorel, and why is he important to us today? Why is the multi-culti view of the world predominant in the West, and what does it have to do with an obscure 19th century French social theorist?

Our ideas don't just pop up out of nowhere. Ideas have conceivers; and today's ideas, the ideas we take as normal, that homicide bombers are just doing what they must by whatever means they have at their disposal, these ideas come from thinkers we often don't know of. They have origins. Once we know those origins and their meanings we can expose them to scrutiny. We can examine those ideas and see if we agree with them or if we hate them. We need not be naive and be led around by the nose to follow programmes we truly do no like but can't quite put our fingers on the problems of. Below we will continue our look into the history of our modern ideas, and there we'll see more of why we hold the opinions we do, opinions we probably don't like when we see them for what they are.

Life without theos is not worth living. We use the term theos not in its usual Judeo-Christian sense but in its original Hellenic sense. And it is there that we deem the Modern world to be atheist. In our modern world we find ourselves believing in science without understanding the nature of science, being scientistic rather than scientific. We believe in this or that trivial thing, but we don't really have a central unifying belief in the nature of our lives that gives us a meaning universally. In that sense, we are atheists. We believe stupidly in trivial things. Because of that banality of Modernity we can state here that citizens of North Korea are likelier to be happy in their personal lives than are citizens of Sweden. What, after all, makes Swedish life worth living. North Koreans have a dear leader. They've got the greatest man since Adam, and he's in charge of everything. It can't get much better. Swedes have welfare, vodka, marijuana, and easy sex. I'd pick North Korea. So would Georges Sorel.


If we are to understand the nature of Left dhimmi fascism we must understand that we are faced with an attractive conception of life therein: that primitivism is good for people, that hardship and violence and death make people vital and alive so long as they live. Mediocrity and boredom, apathy and despair arise from atheism, from disbelief in the inner greatness of the Human struggle to have power gained from triumphant action. If everything is easy, people lose interest, right down to losing interest in having children and surviving at all. People need the power of Myth to give themselves something to live for, even if it means dying violently and needlessly.

Left dhimmi fascism appeals to modern intellectuals because they are bored and pampered and sated, and primitives, rolling around in filth and blood and want are at least alive to the pain of it. They, primitive and nasty and violent and disgusting, believe in some great thing that allows them to transcend the boring daily routine of office work and mediocrity. Left dhimmi fascists live vicariously through the average death-worshipping Muslim fanatic. Our Left dhimmi fascists are a pathetic lot with no souls of their own, and they wish only for something to do other than to wait for Godot. There is nothing for them. Thus, they idolize Muslim primitives. They cheer on the maniacs who seem to have the vitality the Left dhimmi fascists lack in their own miserable and sterile lives. The only true feeling the Left dhimmi fascist can muster is hatred of himself and his own, and because that slim feeling is as real as it gets, he feels superior to his fellows whom he condemns as totally unfeeling. "If you can't get a life, get a gun. Go out and kill some one. It's lotsa fun." And when people find their greatest thrill in life is scoring big-time savings on diet soda at Walmart, then it's reasonable to think North Koreans are better off with nothing more than Dear Leader.

Sorel, as Berlin writes, felt that "reason was a feeble instrument compared with the power of the irrational and the unconscious in the life both of individuals and societies." (Berlin: p. 317.) If Sorel is correct, then we can assume that North Korean life is superior to Swedish life. Swedish life is reasonable, rational, and boring. There is no myth. They believe in nothing. They are atheists.

Not theoretical knowledge but action, and only action, gives understanding of reality. Action is not a means to preconceived ends, it is its own policy-maker and pathfinder.... The intellect freezes and distorts.... Reality must be grasped intuitively, by means of images, as artists conceive it, not with concepts or arguments or Cartesian reasoning. This is the soil which gave birth to Sorel's celebrated doctrine of the social myth which alone gives life to social movements. (ibid: p. 317.)

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Sweden and the West generally lack any kind of overarching Myth to give a reason to live. Muslims have such myth. Communists had a myth but lost it. Today we, living without belief in myth, face a force determined to destroy us, and if we don't have a counter of some meaningful kind, will die. We will become Swedish and dead.

"The function of myths is to bind a society, create a structure governed by rules and habits, without which the individual may suffer from a sense of isolation and solitude...and this in its turn leads to lawlessness and social chaos." (ibid p. 317.)

Berlin claims that Sorel doesn't care for myth as utilitarian, as a way of keeping people happy or well-adjusted, it is to "direct energies and inspire action. They do this by embodying a dynamic vision of the movement of life, the more potent because not rational, and therefore not subject to criticism and refutation by university wiseacres.... [Myths] affect men not as reason does, nor education of the will, nor the command of a superior, but as ferment of the soul which creates enthusiasm and incites to action, and if need be, turbulence. Myths need have no historical reality; they direct our emotions, mobilize our will, give purpose to all that we are and do and make; they are above all not utopias.... Sorel's myths are ways of transforming relationships between real facts by providing men with new visions of the world and themselves.... (ibid. p. 318.)

Irrationalism as epistemology is a pillar of fascism. We cannot condemn the good simply due to its use by the evil. We do need myth in our lives, theos, if we are to have a reason to live as vibrant individuals and in vital cultures. North Korea has myth. Sweden does not. We, like North Koreans, need the irrational myths of life but in conjunction with the Reason of our Modernity. What that is must wait.

Modern science stripped Man of innate meaning, reducing him to sets of determined laws, analysable by methods constructed by social scientists. Man, in the machine age, became a machine. Except that he isn't. Man is in revolt.

"[B]arbarism is, after all, an antidote to decay.... Sparta rather than Athens." (Berlin: p. 329.)

We are orphans from the Age of Enlightenment. Caught today between the glories of Reason and the meaningfulness of irrational myth we languish in apathy and despair, letting primitives overrun our lands, and we do not have the will to resist. We have no counter-myth to challenge the primitive Muslim, nothing to hold up as our standard other than decayed relativism gleaned from social siciences of the late 19th century. We have oil, our adversaries have blood. We need myth. We require theos. We need a Dear Leader of the mind of Modernity. We gotta believe in something.