Aurelien (3) Nihilistic Political Philosophy

Aurelien warns that western political philosophy has become increasingly nihilistic, and consequently incapable.

We are dealing with the immense and still poorly understood psychological and spiritual consequences of forty years of Liberal Nihilism. (Yes, that’s a concept I just invented, I think.) What I mean by that phrase, is that the uncontrolled growth, and universal application, of Liberal social and political ideas in the last forty-odd years have produced the expected result: we are degenerating into isolated, alienated individuals, with no relations except economic ones, no society, no common points of reference, no hope and no future.

This is the natural result of the thorough-going application of an ideology which has no moral compass except short-term financial efficiency and total personal autonomy, and so as a result, we have lost not only the ability to manage and plan at the level of the community and the state, but even the awareness that such a thing might be necessary. It is also the natural result of an ideology which is fundamentally negative, which is always fighting against things, and so cannot express the positive except as the destruction of a negative: as a consequence we have lost our ability to act collectively, since each of us is a suspicious, hostile, monad, seeing others as a threat; an island entire of itself, as John Donne put it. But now, of course, the bell tolls for all of us.

All of this was entirely predictable, and was predicted, from the tenets of a political ideology of selfishness, that puts individual needs and wants before collective ones, and where the more power and money you have, the more your private needs will be fulfilled. China builds railroads while we build electronic currency markets. Russia does real mining while we do Bitcoin mining. Nobody forced our leaders to banish manufacturing industry abroad, to eviscerate public services in the name of management efficiency or to turn all activities, even education, even social life itself, into machines for generating money for those who have too much already. And now all we do have is money, or the luckiest of us, anyway, who mostly have other peoples’...

There was nothing inevitable to the change which eventually led to Liberal Nihilism: it depended on a series of decisions made by particular individuals at particular times and under specific circumstances. For all that real issues (competition from Japan, oil-price driven inflation, the need to modernise the Trades Unions) were prayed in aid, the actual process was one of deliberate, if incoherent, attempts to impose abstruse, unworkable and even dangerous economic theories, which nonetheless were strongly supported by certain groups, notably the rich.

This wasn’t a conspiracy though, much as some would be comforted to think it was. Nor were the pointy-headed economists behind it consciously evil : they were mostly just misguided and divorced from reality. And even the politicians who adopted these ideas do generally seem to have thought, in their confused and ignorant fashion, that they would be good for the economy, rather than injecting a potentially-lethal poison into it. Beyond a few nutcases, none of them would actually have wished to bring about the situation we have now. But then evil is always easier to deal with than incompetence...

This is why the current situation is so dangerous and so apparently hopeless: elites have so internalised “technical” solutions which are “effective” by the most banal of criteria, that they are literally incapable of thinking any other way even as disaster approaches. Failure to them simply means that the ideology has not been tried hard enough, and they continue to self-inflict pain, as did the Xhosa tribes who famously killed all their cattle in the 1850s, after a prophecy that it would restore their former greatness as a nation.

The worship of “technique” of course, is the opposite of “vision,” even in the debased sense in which that word appears on company PowerPoint slides. Our current leaderships have been trained in technique to the exclusion of everything else, and are obsessed with “technical” solutions to problems, the more complex the better. Ask them what the actual purpose of politics is, and they stammer incoherently. Its hard to believe that the Sunaks and Macrons of the world, with their mere smattering of genuine education, have really thought deeply about the policies they are trying to thrust on their populations: they are as much intellectual prisoners as everyone else. That Macron could possibly believe, at a time like this, that forcing French people to work longer for smaller pensions should be the highest priority for his government, may seem to defy belief. But the fact is that, when all you know is how to build Lego models, every problem looks like a Lego model needing to be built.

And so we live in a kind of Hell where nothing changes, or ever can change, except for the worse. CS Lewis observed once that the only people in Hell are the ones who want to be there, by which he meant that they were incapable of understanding and learning, and incapable of changing their minds. Escape from our current problems is thus dependent on the only thing that is excluded in principle: a change of mind...

We are more used these days to revolts and revolutions that have an eye towards the future, but for this you have to believe that a different future is in fact possible, and at least some vague idea what it may look like. For a long time, religion supplied a possible conceptual framework, as it still does with some fringe movements in Islam, but in the West its place has been taken by the secular apocalyptic cult I described a few weeks ago, whose ideology is precisely the absolute triumph of Liberal Nihilism. With the abandonment of Marxism, and even of reformist Socialism, and their effective suppression from political discourse in the West, there are no shared alternative frameworks within which a different and better future could even be imagined.

More at https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-years-midnight