Ideological Archeology: The Counter-Enlightenment (I)

Reposted from March 3, 2008

The idea of the creation of a personalised universe, or rather a personal version of the universe originates with Protagoras (Πρωtaγόρaς, 490-420 BC), who said "man is the measure of all things", he meant individual man, rather than mankind.

The sophists of the rough, second generation, notably Trasymachus, a character in Plato's Republic, put that notion of subjectivism to good use. In classical Greece the sophists used language, not in the service of truth or the transfer of information, but as a strategy for political point-scoring. The sophists held that justice is in the interest of the stronger: might makes right.

Objectivist philosopher Stephen Hicks in "Explaining Postmodernism" claims that

"postmodernists - coming after two millennia of Christianity and two centuries of social theory - simply reverse that claim: Subjectivism and relativism are true, except that the postmodernists are on the side of the weaker and historically-oppressed groups. Justice, contrary to Trasymachus, is the interest of the weaker."

Contemporary postmodernists have harnessed this form of political correctness to today's version of the class struggle, the dialectic, a tool to perpetuate into eternity the struggle of 'oppressed' minorities against the 'fake tolerance' of the white, male 'power structure'. The latter should not be understood as 'whoever is in power', but rather 'whoever is in power, other than us'.

Although we have not always seen it for what it was, during the last two and a half centuries or so the fruits of reason have been pitted in an existential dog fight with the reactionary forces of anti-realism. The movement in generally termed 'the Counter-Enlightenment', to underscore the culture's fundamental rejection of reason and the Enlightenment.

In his ground-breaking book Hicks posits two theses: that the failure of epistemology (philosophy's study of human knowledge) made postmodernism possible; and that the failure of Socialism made postmodernism necessary. What Rousseau, Kant and Hegel were for church authority, the postmoderns are for collectivism: their raison d'être is a desperate 'rationalization' for holding on to a rejected system.

The emergence of the Counter-Enlightenment represents the turning point of the age of reason. The era between 1780 and 1815 was a defining period in modernism, as Anglo-American and German culture split into respectively the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment.

The former began in England, and was picked up by the French. But Roussseau's followers wrested the Enlightenment inspired revolution away from John Locke's (1632 -1704) followers. This quote is from Locke's 2nd Treatise §3:

"In order to preserve the public good, the central function of government must be the protection of private property ..."

... compare that to Rousseau:

"For the creation of a society of 'common will', the people need only accept the dictates of the state" ...

The French Revolution turned it into the Jacobin Reign of Terror, the particularly bloody, third and last episode. The Germans thereafter, already suspicious of the culture of reason, began a counter movement in an effort to rescue religion from what they saw as the onslaught of reason. When the Enlightened French despot, Napoleon Bonaparte jumped into the vacuum left by the Reign of Terror and conquered Europe, the still largely feudal German states knew for sure what the age of reason had wrought.

The reaction was a counter movement by a brand of collectivist philosophers and intellectuals - politically on the Left as well as on the Right, some religious, later on also atheists - with a number of themes in common: Jean-Jacques Rousseau inspired "anti-individualism, the need for strong government, the view that religion is a matter of state (whether to promote or suppress it), the view that education is a process of socialisation, ambivalence about science and technology, and strong themes of group conflict, violence and war.

Hicks: "Left and Right have often divided bitterly over which themes have priority and over how they should be applied. Yet, for all of their differences, both have consistently recognised a common enemy: Liberal capitalism, with its individualism, its limited government, its separation of church and state, its fairly constant view that education is not primarily a matter of political socialisation, and its persistent Whiggish optimism about prospects for peaceful trade and cooperation between members of all nations and groups."

"By the early twentieth century (...) the dominant issues for most continental political thinkers were not whether liberal capitalism was a viable option - but rather exactly when it would collapse - and whether Left or Right collectivism had the best claim to being the Socialism of the future. The defeat of the collectivist Right in World War II then meant that the Left was on its own to carry the Socialist mantle forward."

"Accordingly, when the Left ran into its major disasters as the twentieth century progressed, understanding its fundamental commonality with the collectivist Right helps to explain why in its desperation the Left has often adopted ''Fascistic'' tactics."

Another fateful innovation was set in by the counter movement. As had been the logic during the long period of Church authority over arts and science, all modern mainstream Enlightenment thinkers had accomodated the new advances in science and mathematics into Christian belief. Defying Aristotlean wisdom, human nature, as well as Hume's Law - the confusion of 'is' with 'ought' - the Counter-Enlightenment philosophers following Rousseau, Kant and Hegel - even the atheists - reversed this orthodoxy.

Instead - perhaps even subconsciously or by implication - they developed political models, which reflected religious ideals, the re-creation of paradises on earth, perhaps in an effort to fill the void left by the Ancients Regimes. These political models sought to mirror the heavens, on the basis of 'as above, so below', macrocosm - microcosm: the ideal society. The tenets of the Enlightenment were abandoned and replaced by opposing principles: realism made way for Idea-lism, and individualism for collectivism; emotions, intuition and Revelation were adopted as sources of knowledge rather than reason and experience, social theories replaced liberal capitalist theory.

Universal Enlightenment values were applied, but were limited to specific themes. In these themes God was replaced by whatever fitted the theme: nationalists replaced God with the nation, state adolators deified the state, Socialists society, etcetera. We'll return to that after having a look up close at the main, early protagonists of the Counter-Enlightement drama.

Up next: ... Swiss-French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's (1712-1778) personal life is marked by traits sounding akwardly contemporary ...

Related dossiers

- "Postmodern Ravages"

- "The Dialectics"

- "Pomo Lingo"

- "The Unholy Alliance"

- "Science as a Narrative"

- "Justice, Pomo Style"

Communitarianism, Another Great Equalizer

We have received word from "Stop Common Purpose" that they have identified Barack Obama, not as a Socialist or as a Communist, but as a Communitarian. This statement may require further explanation.

First of all, let's jog our memory what is Common Purpose. In case of a total blank on the reader's part we can best refer you to our dossier on the subject. This nefarious, Sorosian fifth column - CP, for short - has its tentacles all over Britain where it is quietly subverting all walks of life without so much as a by your leave. It is rapidly expanding globally.

CP, rooted in the early history of mass psychology and in the British Labour Party, stands for a new, post-democratic, borderless world order, also known as Transnational Progressivism. Stop CP's home page and their page on CP's philosophy explain the matter in detail. This organization is beyond the Marxist/Fascist, Left/Right dichotomy. They are far worse: CP is Pragmatically collectivist and the collective is ... the world.

Those who assure themselves that all is well and that the New World Order is just a conspiracy theory pursued by unhinged paranoids can disabuse themselves of the illusion here and now by reading Glenn Beck's transcript of UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown's recent statements on the international financial crisis, which gives world leaders in his opinion an unique opportunity to establish the global society.

Oh, and before leaving the wonderful world of CP to 'act beyond authority', hi, Sarah Lambert, have a nice day!

Communitarianism is yet another amoral, Pragmatism driven hybrid of collectism that Europeans love to love. It may also be seen as a version of Tony Blair's and Bill Clinton's Third Way politics, but they're moderates in comparison to some highly 'ethical' interpretations (enjoy this tract, if your physique allows). Americans may also know it as radical centrism as advocated by the Responsive Communitarian movement of Amitai Etzioni.

I'm not altogether sure, but I believe his ideas might have been partly triggered by the Neocon push for a democratic Middle East as an antidote to Islamic radicalism. Since then, we see memes entering the blood stream of "democracy, sooo overrated!" It would appear Etzioni is the man responsible for making enlightened dictatorships acceptable to polite society.

He counsels parley with Muslim 'Illiberal Moderates' (moderate, as in coercion of political correctness, rather than the violence of the bomb), appeasement at the expense of social liberties. Ladies, get your niqab out of the moth balls, because that's the Communitarian price to be left in peace!

- Caption: bronze, by Michael Wilkinson -

Barack Obama may be specifically attracted to the hybrid, because of its infestation with positive rights, the reliance on overgrown superstates, and its contempt of individualism. Whereas Stop CP may find the ideology hard to pin down, followers of Ayn Rand can make short shrift. Such hybrid ideologies are just a matter of evil in degrees, all variations on a single collectivist theme.

The core of this philosophy is, that individuals have a duty to subordinate to a society that, in this case, caters to racial and cultural factions (also known as multiculturalism). In case of dereliction of duty, society/ the state/ the collective may enforce the moral obligation. So the key question is, what form will this evil take, and to what degree will it be implemented? This of course, depends on the whim of the ones wielding the stick of power (asigned reading: News Busters: "Obama Spokesman Says 'Obama Ready to RULE on Day 1'").

Whatever name we want to give them, One Worlders, progressives, Socialists, Communitarians, neotots, they find creation - as it stands - a vile, imperfect place replete with social injustice, inequality and insustainability.

One of the most entrenched misunderstandings about Socialists is the equality principle. Most observers take their zeal for an egalitarian society as a signal of their holy belief in human equality. But the contrary is the case. No, to them all men aren't equal, but they ought to be. Hence the vigorous pursuit.

Confusing 'is' with 'ought' (Hume's Law) they'll never stop experimenting with people's lives, social engineering and cajoling human behavior until they've reshaped reality into an egalitarian Hobbotshire in which every hobbot voluntarily sacrifices to the organic, moral Whole.

The allegory of Plato's Cave is useful in more ways than one. You can see the mechanism explained in this home video. Plato and Kant are the originators of the Subjectivist fallacy that thought creates reality. They teach that the physiological world isn't real at all, but a product of our own projections. Their actual world is situated in some parallel universe. Knowledge of this true world is out of reach for us mere mortals, as Plato explains in his allegory of The Cave.

- Caption: Plato's Cave by Ken Stout, 2007, oil on panel -

But the story is not just useful in explaining Subjectivist philosophy. It is also indicative how they think they can pull the wool over people's eyes: not by debate on the basis of verifiable, objective information, but through shadows, smoke and mirrors: passions, constructed perceptions and vacuous projections of 'hope' and 'change'. Here's an exquisite animated version of The Cave.



- Files on Articles in "The Dystopia of Paradise" -

The Anti-Modernism of the Counter-Enlightenment

The idea of the creation of a personalised universe, or rather a personal version of the universe originates with Protagoras (Greek: Πρωtaγόρaς, ca. 490-420 BC), who said "man is the measure of all things", he meant individual man, rather than mankind.

The sophists of the rough, second generation, notably Trasymachus, a character in Plato's Republic, put that notion of subjectivism to good use. In classical Greece the sophists used language, not in the service of truth or the transfer of information, but as a strategy for political point-scoring. The sophists held that justice is in the interest of the stronger: might makes right.

Objectivist philosopher Stephen Hicks in "Explaining Postmodernism" claims that "postmoderns - coming after two millennia of Christianity and two centuries of social theory - simply reverse that claim: Subjectivism and relativism are true, except that the postmodernists are on the side of the weaker and historically-oppressed groups. Justice, contrary to Trasymachus, is the interest of the weaker."

Contemporary postmoderns have harnessed this form of political correctness to today's version of the class struggle, the dialectic, a tool to perpetuate into eternity the struggle of the 'oppressed' minorities against the 'fake tolerance' of the 'power structure'. The latter should not be understood as 'whoever is in power', but rather 'whoever is in power, other than us'.

Althought we have not always seen it for what it was, during the last two and a half centuries or so the fruits of reason have been pitted in an existential dog fight with the reactionary forces of anti-realism. The movement in generally termed 'the Counter-Enlightenment', to underscore the culture's fundamental rejection of the Enlightenment.

In his ground-breaking book Hicks posits two theses: that the failure of epistemology (philosophy's study of human knowledge) made postmodernism possible; and that the failure of Socialism made postmodernism necessary. As Rousseau, Kant and Hegel were for church authority, the postmoderns are for collectivism: their raison d'être is a desperate 'rationalization' for holding on to a rejected system.

The emergence of the Counter-Enlightenment represents the turning point of the age of reason. The era between 1780 and 1815 was a defining period in modernism, as Anglo-American and German culture split into respectively the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment.

The former began in England, and was picked up by the French. But Roussseau's followers wrested the Enlightenment inspired revolution away from John Locke's (1632 -1704) followers. This quote is from Locke's 2nd Treatise §3:

"In order to preserve the public good, the central function of government must be the protection of private property ..."

... compare that to Rousseau:

"For the creation of a society of 'common will', the people need only accept the dictates of the state" ...

... here Rousseau was advocating what became later known as Communism.

The French Revolution turned it into the Jacobin Reign of Terror, the particularly bloody, third and last episode. The Germans thereafter, already suspicious of the culture of reason, began a counter movement in an effort to rescue religion from what they saw as the onslaught of reason. When the Enlightened French despot, Napoleon Bonaparte jumped into the vacuum left by the Reign of Terror and conquered Europe, the still largely feudal German states knew for sure what the age of reason had wrought.

The reaction was a counter movement by a brand of collectivist philosophers and intellectuals - politically on the Left as well as on the Right, some religious, later on also atheists - with a number of themes in common: Jean-Jacques Rousseau inspired "anti-individualism, the need for strong government, the view that religion is a state matter (whether to promote or suppress it), the view that education is a process of socialisation, ambivalence about science and technology, and strong themes of group conflict, violence and war.

Hicks: "Left and Right have often divided bitterly over which themes have priority and over how they should be applied. Yet, for all of their differences, both have consistently recognised a common enemy: Liberal capitalism, with its individualism, its limited government, its separation of church and state, its fairly constant view that education is not primarily a matter of political socialisation, and its persistent Whiggish optimism about prospects for peaceful trade and cooperation between members of all nations and groups. (...) the collectivist Right and Left are united in their major goals and in identifying the opposition."

"By the early twentieth century (...) the dominant issues for most continental political thinkers were not whether liberal capitalism was a viable option - but rather exactly when it would collapse - and whether Left or Right collectivism had the best claim to being the Socialism of the future. The defeat of the collectivist Right in World War II then meant that the Left was on its own to carry the Socialist mantle forward."

"Accordingly, when the Left ran into its major disasters as the twentieth century progressed, understanding its fundamental commonality with the collectivist Right helps to explain why in its desperation the Left has often adopted ''Fascistic'' tactics."

Another fateful innovation was set in by the counter movement. As had been the logic during the long period of Church authority over arts and science, all modern mainstream Enlightenment thinkers had accomodated the new advances in science and mathematics into Christian belief. Defying Aristotlean wisdom, human nature, as well as Hume's Law - the confusion of 'is' with 'ought' - the Counter-Enlightenment philosophers following Rousseau, Kant and Hegel - even the atheists - reversed this orthodoxy.

Instead - perhaps even subconsciously or by implication - they developed political models, which reflected religious ideals, the re-creation of paradises on earth, perhaps in an effort to fill the void left by Ancients Regimes. These political models sought to mirror the heavens, on the basis of 'as above, so below', macrocosm - microcosm: the ideal society. The tenets of the Enlightenment were abandoned and replaced by opposing principles: realism made way for Idea-lism, and individualism for collectivism; emotions, intuition and Revelation were adopted as sources of knowledge rather than reason and experience, social theories replaced liberal capitalist theory.

Universal Enlightenment values were applied, but were limited to specific themes. In these themes God was replaced by whatever fitted the theme: nationalists replaced God with the nation, state adolators deified the state, Socialists society, etcetera. We'll return to that after having a look up close at the main, early protagonists of the Counter-Enlightement drama.

- Filed on Articles in "The Dystopia of Paradise", cat. Postmodernism -

New Year's Resolution? We Help You Kick the Habit!

The nanny super state continues to enlarge its role. It's holding a sway over people's minds, taking over chunks of normal human responsibilities that are considered too hefty for 'us victims'. This permanent status of ward-of-state allows us the luxury of never really having to grow up. Evil conspiracy theorists have suggested that mass control on such a scale is only possible, if large sections of society enslave themselves on a voluntary basis. Enter sex, drugs and rock 'n roll, Narcissism induced arrested development, coupled with extreme social incontinence.

The continued 'discoveries' of all kinds of addictions, from alcohol and mood enhancers to chemical drugs of any description, and from strychnine laced tobacco to glue, sex and Internet, are peeps into human dependence that seemingly have more to do with the prosperity of the rehab industry than with any real addiction. It's also the outcome of state and industry sponsored academic research into the population's state of health. It is a well known phenomenon that the results obtained, invariably suit the agenda of the sponsor.

Take kicking the smoking habit, which is supposedly one of the hardest things to do, until one realises that the stories surrounding smoking and the associated withdrawal symptoms are just myths. The debunking of these myths - erected on the one hand by the promotional policies of the tobacco companies, and on the other by the victim-based legal industry - is about eighty percent of the work of nicotine 'rehab', as advocated by author Allen Carr.

Smoking today does nothing for your public image, nor does it settle the nerves, or assist concentration. Smoking paves both the pulmonary system and the teeth with tar, causes cancer, and stinks.

Kicking the habit on the other hand leads to a better health and freedom from addiction, not to mention the relief - wow! - of being able to sit through an entire meeting without having to balance the prevailing weather conditions against the intensity of 'the urge'!

The latter - far from being life threatening - is a brief moment in time of craving a cigarette: what Carr calls "the little monster that must be starved out of existence". It usually doesn't last much longer than a minute or so; it cannot be timed accurately, because awareness of the sensation wouldn't stop in such case. As the 'starvation' process continues, the frequency and intensity of craving a smoke diminishes. The trick is, not to give it more substance than it warrants: the sooner it is ignored, the quicker it passes out of consciousness - least said, soonest mended is the best means of controling the little monster!

But - as the legal industry claims - that the heavily addictive substance of strychnine is added to cigarettes by the tobacco companies to better enslave the consumer, how come there's the occasional smoker (restricted to weekends or parties)? Or people who smoke only during evenings? Right ... myth debunked!

Carr's method helped me quiting overnight, twice, with a packet of cigarettes in full view and eventually forgotten until long after I kicked the habit. That is no boast on my part: the beauty of the reality method is, that it doesn't involve will-power.

We are mentally enslaving ourselves through our own ingrained beliefs in addiction and the associated mythology that is part and parcel of the problem. There's no such a thing as sex addiction! There are just people who misguidedly believe that every single urge needs to be rewarded if they are to lead the long, happy, and healthy lives as prescribed by postmodern society centered around the Ego and its self-devised Personal Universe. The contrary is the case!

Motivated by reasons best known to themselves, the psychologists producing these addiction myths 'discover' new ones all the time - sitting next to ludicrous and inappropriate polls - filling up third rate websites, weekend editions of newspapers, and girly magazines: the postmodern equivalent of the old wives' tale.

The realization we are enslaving ourselves through the belief in these myths is about eighty percent of quitting. The balance twenty percent is made up by the joyous anticipation of freedom from psychological enslavement to an unhealthy product.

The psychological mechanism is perhaps best illustrated by a variation of Plato's Allegory of the Cave: chained prisoners sit in a cave, backs to the entrance. The shadows of things moving outside are projected by the light onto the inner wall of the cave. Since the prisoners have never been outside the cave, they believe the shadows to be reality. As one succeeds in escaping, he realizes that he has lived all his life in the shadow of an illusion. This is not part of the actual allegory, but now imagine the chains not to have been there at all, but a figment of the prisoners imagination made possible by the darkness of the cave. The chains are their addiction and enslavement.

Is your New Year's resolution to kick the habit and regain control over your own actions? Keep the above in mind, and above all - ignoring the urge isn't lethal! If you decide you need further guidance by reading the book, then - and this is key - do not make any attempts to quit before you've read the book cover to cover. If health issues are at stake, do not delay and go to the book shop - now!

Good luck! And by all means, drop us a line if you think it may help.

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- Filed in Articles on "Addiction, Enslavement, Dependence", cat. Control