Counterpoint by Mark Nicol – What if versus what Is

What if we could secure a radiant prospectus, for all living beings on this planet? What if we applied real intelligence, commitment, and discipline to procure that glowing Symbiotic State, 250 years from now, harmony amongst mankind, between man and beast, our avatars venturing to seed life amongst the stars?

But the What Is fraternity, cleaving inchoately, desperately to various dim orders of volitional thinking, action, currently have the floor. Philistines, dominating the world stage, blinkered in their Ancient World empire building visions, steer us towards apocalypse. Conversely, pathetic Western ideologists clamour to save, exalt every human incompetent, underling, freak, this Tyranny of the Meek heading as surely towards doom as the Tyranny of the Mighty.

What are the chances that we might save life on Earth, attain that glowing condition of the exultant Symbiotic State? Under the current ideological and political mandates, Ancient and Modern, the chances are three fifths, of five eighths, of …

The Western What Is brigade, clinging to dysfunctional ideologies – the free market, participatory democracy, liberal moral conception, areligious conviction, is culpable. Only the West has cultured the intellectual pedigree capable of leading, executing that next modal jump in cultural evolution to assert a futurist volitional mandate.

If we are to survive our gathering geoecological, geopolitical crises, to transcend, a new visionary culture must self-generate in the West, wipe the existing order clean, grasp control of the human destiny, the fate of life on Earth. Those with enough intelligence, decency to supercede the Tyranny of the Mighty and Tyranny of the Meek must resolve a New Moral Intelligentsia taking command of global politics.

All that stands as what is, all those who stand for what is – stand in the way.

The wearers of the sacred habit, upholders of the status quo, are by definition conservatives. What is it that they conserve? A functional order, physical or moral. Why do they seek to conserve that order? Firstly, because it is conceived to be functional. Why fix what ain’t broke? If it is functional, it serves.

But then come the attenuate conservative reasons, insidious, decadent if that order is, in fact, physically, morally dysfunctional. In this category manifests vested self-interest, intellectual and moral conceit, outright volitional indolence, mania.

It was vested self-interest, sustained on the part of ruling autocrats, theocrats, and those who profitably sustained them, which upheld the despotic edifice of the Ancient Regime for 5,000 years. Not a black and white situation, because, despite the inherent tyranny, cruelty, the order proved physically and psychically functional. Food was put on the table, via a very regimented if brutal logistical order. And even the common, suffering underling, as a conscripted ideological servant of monarchy, theocracy, serviceably manifest belief in the system.

Yes, we’re all marching forward in physical unity, moral harmony, until those fissures in the sustaining mortar become gaping cracks, holes that constitute irrational edifice, lies, sufferance. It was the enormous pain, moral dysfunctionality writ into the sustaining, deceptive edifice of the Ancient Regime, which aroused two monumental movements aiming at Commons outbreak. The first failed, monumentally.

Why did it fail, that great wave of emancipatory ideologies which swept across the late Ancient civilized world, from the Middle East to India, China, between the mid-1st Millenniums BC and AD? Why did Athenian democracy, Christian altruism, Vedic, Buddhist transcendentalism, and Taoist, Confucianist ethics, as ideological orders all basically aimed against autocratic tyranny, unanimously fail?

There are two factors we may cite as causes for this first attempt, comprehensive failure to break out of the Ancient Regime. Firstly, we look to irrational insufficiencies scripted in those New Wave social designs.

The Athenians, subsumed with the workings of their ideal political culture, failed to watch their backs. Consequently, their small military State was just crushed by a new monolithic empire. Christian altruistic ideology is not a rational, workable conception of social order. Its turn the other cheek adherents, conscripted to incredulous divine conception, beg to be subjugated, duped. The Romans duly obliged.

Transcendentalist offshoots from India’s Vedic religious cult, these were also subverted by autocratic, theocratic manipulation. The civil code proposed by Confucius, the transcendent ethics conceived by Lao-tze? Whilst these doctrines meaningfully coexisted with feudal imposition, still manifest beneath autocratic edifice, these were not modes of thinking aimed at deconstruction of the existing social order. Which fact brings us to the second, telling reason for failure.

Some two thousand years later, in West European civilization, a new momentum for Ancient Regime outbreak generated over the course of some centuries. We may mark the year 1215, the signing of the Magna Carta, and the full institutionalization of Western Democracy at the beginning of the 20^th Century as bookends, the initiation and final fulfillment of the outbreak process.

Why did the Second Wave commons emancipation quest clearly succeed, where the First Wave attempts all failed? How does this lesson apply to modern mankind, beset with a multitude of self-made problems, clearly struggling to assert one ratified, sustainable, and noble prospectus, a mature volitional vision?

Second-tier holders of wealth in 13^th Century England, via enforcement of the Magna Carta pact, initiated a protracted process ceding economic holdings, political powers away from the Ancient Regime autocracy, ultimately towards the Commons. Progressive Renaissance artists conceived moral iconography liberated from theocratic proscription, works celebrating beauty freely writ in man, nature.

Reformation activists drew power away from centralized theocratic control, Rome, unwittingly paved the way for the final deconstruction of the Ancient Regime. It was the progressive philosophers of the Enlightenment who deconstructed the rational and moral validity of monarchy, theology, theocracy.

They paved the path for revolutionary establishment of the Modern Liberal State, its breakaway institutions of democracy, free enterprise, political secularization, common law, and free expression in every sphere of human conception.

Success in a revolutionary project relies upon realizing the decadence, dysfunctionality writ in the existing moral and political order, deconstructing that in total, and then scripting a whole new volitional vision.

But, funny, if you told a citizen of Western Europe, even in the 1500s, that autocratic control of politics, the social economy, religion, law, and common expression would soon enough be supplanted by new liberalist institutions?

He, she would just look at you, incredulously.

Funny, if you say to a Western citizen, today, that these modern liberalist institutions, all of them, are now not fit for purpose, must be superceded by a whole new volitional order? He or she will just look at you, incredulously.

Yet many Western citizens, today, are convinced that their philosophical, political thinking is progressive. Funny, because so much of it is redolent of naive conceptions generated 2,000 years ago, more: living in a conceited civil culture, ignoring brute geopolitical realities, just like the ancient Athenians; intoxicated with insipid humanitarian ideology, a culture begging to be subjugated, like the early Christians.

The buzz word mantras of the progressives – diversity, inclusiveness, liberalism? These are just pallid reconfigurations of standard Enlightenment ideological ware – liberty, equality, fraternity. These are tired ideas over inflated by a new ideological mania, awaiting, again, for the skin of cruel reality to burst.

How is that fraternity credo now relevant?

It defines the new breed and alliance of tyrants, vicious upholders of the Tyranny of the Meek, anti-hate puppets still hooked on Marx’s strings, on Jesus’ strings. How gratifying it is, to be so forever oppressed, suffering, bearing an eternal cross.

Forgive me for not subscribing to such salving progressive thinking, seeing the issues of black, female, homosexual, multicultural ascensions in Western society as critical, when net human forces are steering us towards likely, imminent geoecological apocalypse. In ecological terms the planet is already devastated, so vastly is it overloaded with dumb, gluttonous, butcherous human beings.

Human beings? I think we need to have a discussion about that terminology.

I still believe, faintly, that mankind might be able to reclaim the Garden of Eden, seed glorious new gardens in vacant lots of the cosmos.

But, not transfixed upon pure technological possibilities like the inspiring but myopic Elon Musk, I would not sign to mankind, the creature that is, planting flag upon another celestial domicile.

As our emblematic life assassins on this planet today we have in one corner Xi Jinping, a subhuman ideological automaton, a deranged ethnic egoist intent upon cadaverous conquest. In the other we have Sarah Hanson-Young, an estrogen driven ideological naif, suckering every human incompetent to her breast, thinking that that one dim act of nurture will save the world.

I, for one, am not signing to mankind’s ongoing, devastating imperialistic march upon this planet. Neither am I linking arms with happy clappy naifs, to unknowingly script and inclusively enjoy the final dawn on this planet, singing We Are the World.

The start of the New World Order begins with outing degenerate dysfunctionality in the existing. So we talk, next week, about decommissioning all existing Social Science departments in Western universities.