"As was already mentioned, the meaning of publicity and propaganda is understood by only a very few people. The public by and large sees only their business aspects and explains them by the rules of competition, the economic struggle which is conceived as part of the struggle for survival. But why is it that advertising and propaganda are marching apace with technical progress? Why is it that they are becoming the foremost exploits of that progress and spread all over the earth? Why is it that publicity experts and professional propagandists begin to practice psychology in order to increase still more the penetrating, insinuating, enchanting power of their claims? Finally, what is the greatest obstacle which impedes the success of these endeavors? It is simply that the promises are not credible, and that it is not easy to hide the large portion of humbug they contain. Hence that pasted-on, poster-like quality of these claims; hence also their invariable appearance as fillers of bare spots and empty places."

This helps us understand 'woke capital' better than anything else. The promises of capital were no longer credible to the average person, middle class and working class Westerners. To maintain the promises and hopes of bourgeois governance new figures were needed, and the simplest practise was to mobilise all groups previously outside of chance and promise. Of course, the occupations and general dissent also forced a second crisis upon the government, which accelerated the process into madness.
At the same time, the focus on refugee economics offered a level of enchantment, and displacement for a failing war. The collapse of empire can only be replaced by a dead mythology, to which the refugee offers the promise of return.

Economy is only ever a dominant form of life in moments of crisis, of total collapse – and it is here that the theological qualities are revealed. This becomes confused to the highest degree in our time since the economic appears everywhere, but this is rather like the appearance of medical services after an accident, or field hospitals set up for great battles. The mass distribution of supplies, the frantic work of doctors and labourers crop up as types of armament and response to crisis, but tell us little of the crisis itself. Neither its meaning nor its judgement can be understood from the surface activity.

Today, such forces become more powerful than ever and the polarity between them creates an empty space where thought and sight are both abandoned. This too accelerates the crisis, as the responses become confused with all the other frantic activity. Here it becomes necessary to situate the crises within the world order, however impossible it may seem.

If we are to see the great events which begin the millennium there can be no doubt that those in power abandoned all previous laws and values. 9/11, the declaration of a permanent emergency, the nationalisation of the economy, economic collapse, establishment of the total intelligence institutions, and the beginning of a world war all reveal a world order dominated by military decision, escalation of conflict, and subterfuge of political movements. There is no possibility of seeing our economic condition without first recognising the total crisis.

And it is here that we see the collision of the imperial and domestic economies, the neutralisation of territories based upon distribution of emergency supplies. It may not seem this way in the domestic sphere, but one can look back to the image of the door-to-door salesmen with their shopping carts filled with junk. These street capitalists were no different from the homeless and refugees. This suggests a dissolution of identity which preceded the fanaticism of the new progressives, and total pauperism was the only possible response.

Here we see that the mobilisation of non-citizens serves two functions: first, in giving the new pauperism a sense of continued growth and progress. Second, in the total dispersal of the crisis away from the political. Just as the colour revolutionaries are a sort of forward unit of the neutralisation in foreign territories, the new progressives act as human shields within the social war at home. Both are a development from the partisan within the world civil war, they are a result of impossible earth forces, not their cause.

What does Las Meninas tell us about the twilight of the monarchs?

The very figures of the painting would not have been possible if Velasquez had not been one with the family. What we see is a new order of the court, completely at ease with a new set of laws which would bring judgement through wealth and the exchange of artistic creation. A new grounding appears in which domestic life and the simple must meet with every being, but also in which technical measures, the legislation of daily activities is a constant reordering. Aside from being at peace with the family, the wealth of a democratising nobility, there is also the hidden image of time - of the portrait for which there is no time. Where for some kings the portrait became the whole of their dwindling nobility, others cast themselves within the new formative order, the metamorphoses of nature as it began to enter the castles, courtyards, and family rooms.

(These posts were written before the Queen's death. And this one long ago, so they are not a commentary on current events.)

"For all the discussion about what the WEF can and can't do, think of them as analogous to the Roman senate. Here was a body of men with no official power, no formal sovereignty, and yet the Roman state always consulted them and all but did as they said. The Romans called this auctoritas, and our word is almost the same."


There can be no comparison between Auctoritas as a virtue and authority in the technical-historical sense, its spirit acts against the need for all commutative justice – the nomos precedes and surpasses the conflicts of the will. Authority in our time is precisely the opposite of the senate or judicial counsel, it negates and neutralizes sovereignty, each man wants to be consulted so that the mass may never be overcome by any power, no matter how great.


For the ancient world, counsel served a higher function than law, to say that the very body which decides sovereignty exists without it is to lose sight of the state. One overlays the past with the historical conditions of one's own time, which always leads to mistakes of this type. It is not that the economic is a form of elite power in our time, where economic and technological thought becomes the standard there is the total mobilisation of spaces to this new thinking – it is applied to all things, even the opposed forms to which the economic is an inadequate justification. This is not a hierarchical justification, but lateral. Economic valuisation supplants all previous orders, but it is also its own order, it is not only a weakening. A new race of men is being formed of its levelling power, its unlimited sense of space speaks to this – the entirety of the world is its frontier. And from such a perspective it may not be enough to speak of race, nor even the human species, but of a new genus of being.

Can we say anything of these figures that is like the old elites? One cannot imagine a Marie-Antoinette in our time, for even the greatest elite in our time is less than the old plebeians and lumpenproletarians. He is a figure which desires total annihilation, and to witness it in comfort – as if his creations were freed of his hand. Total autonomy of the technical apocalypse. He could only offer cake literally, and without any sense of taste – this is a true test for him of standing with the people. He too eats the insects, the processed sludge with the direct lineage of 'fast food'. Or he will at least make a show of it, which goes to show that political leaders are only comic figures – they point to what is a mere anomaly while we wait for the return to the fields of self-carving meat.

Here too we see that Libya, North Korea, and Hungary, all the smallest nations where a sense of nationalism and the old order held out, are exceptions. One cannot use their example as the order of our age, they stand apart from it either through chance or industrious effort of their own kind. The dictator is the exception of democracy, yet he is also its highest example. To revere the man, to uphold heroics of iron is not anything ancient in itself. This may only be a technical representation of the great men, while standing apart from how they saw themselves. Indeed, the noble individual was without self-pathos, he had no sentimentality for his own private force – this arises with decadence and its revaluation of itself as eternal.

A mistake of historical thinking overestimates individual power over his time; another its general forces and laws. Here, both mistakes are made together, and conflated into the pathos of a new conservatism. Man himself becomes "an exaggerated system of general causes," one who promotes deeds but not works. Ideas and institutions have moved the world, often to a greater degree than any man, even the greatest – this is particularly true in our era. This does not deny the man. For the democratic man is his own type with his own power. He too overcame the old ideas and institutions, and the great men who were predicted to win by the conservatives only served as a type of museum of state power.

Democratic man toppled the monarchs, and was mobilised by them. One can even see the first principles of democracy in the late monarchs. To topple this order is not necessarily anti-democratic, it may only be a repeat of its valuisations. The libertarian and new conservative nostalgia for the absolute monarchs establishes a link in a chain which would seem to contradict all ideological grounds, but nevertheless speaks to our era's reason.

Those who would have us return to the first principles of democratic ideas and institutions deny the greater, ineluctable force of our time. They want "ueless remembrance" of old continents and not the labyrinth of a new millennium.

https://news.1rj.ru/str/ImperiumPressOfficial/1442

Some notes on my recent article "Ideology vs Worldview" by Wald. https://futurismforever.com/2022/09/11/a-response-to-gios-ideology-vs-worldview-article-by-wald/

I'll take this as a good sign.

We feel that this warrants discussion.

I still think Empedocles' elements should replace Left and Right.

"And the elements incessantly exchange their places continually,
Sometimes by Love all coming together into one,
Sometimes again each one carried off by the hatred of Strife."

The left-wing and right-wing of government only had meaning for a single moment: conflict over the absolute veto power of the king. With the defeat of the monarchies a new era begins, and politicisation acts to secure victory or accept defeat. This is the point at which conservatives lost all sense of decision – that all political acts are a type of judgement which absolutely resolve or elevate struggle becomes a damaged nerve. To maintain a loyal opposition, a parliamentary mediation which acts against sovereignty, is only to create a political interim and abyss.
It is no mistake that the left-wing began to take on conservative elements once the right-wing acquiesced, then disappeared from politicisation itself. The old conservatives performed the greatest act of progress, or neutralisation, with the gutting of cities in the 1980s and 1990s. This absolute neutralisation of territory ended the era of liberal politics – after which, the only question could be, "To which post-liberal party do we give an absolute veto?"
Today, our social revolutionaries do not know what decisions are to be made of their votes and conflicts, even though the answer has become obvious. There is no connection, not even at the highest levels. Conflict can only dissipate and expand, until it is reconstituted as an elemental power.

The inability to keep 4chan on 4chan and twitter on twitter is a microcosm of borderless spaces.As with periods of apprenticeship and ceremonial service one should demonstrate their own path towards dominion before condemning the new laws of borders and spaces. If a single man cannot defend himself from the incursions of nihilism how can an entire nation expect a greater result?
There are enough examples that it would serve no purpose to point them out. Rather than herd instincts, today we have only what is left behind after the stampede and constant evacuation.

This idea of future shock - the overwhelming of time and territory by the advance of technology – is the law of the last man, the delimited man. In his hands technology becomes something more powerful than culture, its character resembles civil war, the toppling of monuments, and the burning of cities. Time marches on against positions of defense, and each city has an underworld which can erupt to the surface at any moment. Technology introduces this force into every space, and in every moment one expects a total, final assault.

The levelling of territory and culture can only coincide with a shift in their laws, their conception. That one can no longer anticipate limits is demonstrated in the first skyscrapers, which are not so much a symbol of hierarchical growth as the enormous eruption of underworld forces and delimited space. As with the abutment of a bridge the city centers must equal the forces of expansion – the neutralisation of every last space of the continents.

It is inevitable then that the loss of classical spaces will also change man's view of his borders, which at the very least represent a limit or boundary. As with the form of war which mobilises a total force to take the smallest lines of territory, the new law of space demands constant incursions – grinding away at territory, not so much against the enemy but the thin line which marks expansion. The borders are a type of sharpened knife, which requires the wearing away of crystalline material to keep its shape.

Endless expansion and neutralisation can only create permeable layers, not territories. And this is final, until the world comes down upon the last man, making a terror of his private life. Where there is nothing of law and character in a land man himself cannot be distinguished from its qualities. The titanic man is at home in any land; and any other man in his.

"No one can argue you out of being your father's son. If your foundational identity is something you can be argued into or out of, you are a civic nationalist."

There is a paradox in the idea that man is confined to his biological family, can never escape it, and so is duty-bound to it – no matter the consequences. What should be obvious is the meaning this has for dissidents confronting liberalism: that it too is the family which man must serve. Biology constrains us to thinking that our father is closest to us; only spiritual thinking could link a man today to a figure hundreds of generations past. Here too all sense of family conflict is lost, the great tragedies, the afflictions which point to things at once greater and lesser than the family.

The irony is lost on the late-stage nationalists, who cannot even see their own genealogy, despite its being limited to all-too-recent years. This limited thinking suggests that theories of primordial nationalism amount to little more than sending off blood samples for testing in some foreign country, as if an international map could link us to our true self, then be discarded, returned to national conceptions of race. What is revealed here is a race which does not know itself, not even its weaknesses.

Another paradox is that nationalism and historiography are themselves 'propositional' ways of seeing the world. In fact, there may be nothing more propositional than searching out the original error of man, that single moment in which it all went wrong for nationalists. A magic dirt theory of time. And of course, if the body really was superior to the mind, one would think that at some point during the 10,000 year decline it would have overcome this error of the mind – or at least sensed it.

https://news.1rj.ru/str/ImperiumPressOfficial/1499

Left and right are two sides of the same coin.
Just as the titanic races are the colours of a roulette wheel.

Applying friend-and-enemy to left and right is something like cutting off the arms of the Leviathan. First it has no arms, then they grow back as if nothing ever happened. It is like the prey-animal who sacrifices a limb to escape – yet the Leviathan wields its sacrificial limbs like a lure. In its mythic iteration it is a monstrous fish, an octopus-like creature with countless tentacles and an infinite number of valves to smother its foes. Thus the tentacles of the Leviathan are less significant than the limbs of the social body, and also infinitely more powerful.

The left and right have countless iterations in the history of democracy, they are like the tentacles of the Leviathan in that they shift positions, even form of previous physical constructions. Those who reduce friend-and-enemy to left and right are the Kabbalists who "eat the flesh of the beasts who mutually kill each other, remove the skin, and from the hide build themselves fine tents and celebrate a fine, millennial feast."

The basic problem is that to the extent AA may be correct - superficially, and regarding a limited problem - this is ruined by a rigid and lifeless view, not unlike the ideology he attacks. While there is certainly a tendency towards post-hoc rationalisation today this may represent something other than ideology. It is more correct to say that ideology perfects an efficient distance from power, the sovereign. This not only explains the contemporary situation, but the historical development of ideology as well.

Ideology has become the sole concern of the bourgeois, the private man, whereas in its origins it was a system for the perfection of governmental mechanisms and thought – it was aristocratic in nature. This process of European revolutions was justified - or at least it represented an inevitability or decision within a providential shift - in that the absolute monarchs had introduced the anti-aristocratic policies, acting both against the old concept of divine right and the general will. The monarchs began the levelling process and the will to equality that is central to democracy. If this process of legitimisation fails it does not imply a purification of the original worldview, or ideology, it only implies failure.

That the defeat of liberalism returns to a concept of the bourgeois man (who is only a type of democratic man, limited to security and private concerns) and abandons the project of legitimacy positions him closer to the absolutist monarchs than the first liberals. It is in this sense that the economic neutralisation and sale of cities is closer to the practises of Louis XIV than Rousseau, who was for a theological austerity regarding economic relations. The monarch's practise of selling government offices and the right to vote, then immediately appropriating these properties for resale, did more to ensure a general will and a groundless democracy than anything liberals ever invoked. It ensured democratisation and mobilisation of the lowest will.

One can go further and compare state justification within the same governmental type. Does it matter how a state is justified, how it comes to power? From a Schmittean viewpoint there is a major difference in the moment of decision, the extent and degree of judgement can alter the entire course of the state. Whether Hitler took the knife into his hand, or it was pressed into his hand is an essential distinction, more significant than anything in the ideology. Schmitt's view was that Hindenburg had to invoke a state of exception, outlaw both the extremes of left and right, becoming dictator. That Hitler came to power through the incapacity of the government to invoke a decision was really a failure to invoke a state of exception, and rather than a dictatorship Hitler's reign was a continuation of the liberal state and its indecision. This does not imply an inevitability of failure, but it does act like something of a curse that Hitler would have to overcome, invoking dictatorship and severing the ties to the origin of the state in liberalism.

What does this mean? Not only that ideology matters but within a given ideology there can be conflicts which approach the destructive power of a civil war. In this case post-hoc rationalisation is nothing more than an incapacity to decide: ideology in principle, resignation in practise. Ideology takes on its formal appearance and increases this appearance where true power has already been defeated. This is the post-ideological world, a shift as distinct as the chasm which opened up in the sciences in the 18th century. It comes to prominence in the state which has retired, where the people have resigned themselves to an automatic power. What this also means is that there is something higher than ideology or action. Today what may be perceived as action may only the norm of the mechanics of government – here action and ideas are equally distant from decision.

World wars were fought over different ideologies, so it's ridiculous to say that ideology has no effect, no power to influence people or even determine their positions. Much of dissident conflict is based on ideology, as is the divide of Atlanticism and Eurasianism. For the East liberal ideology is seen as a power which threatens the integrity of entire spaces, even the whole. Such power is like that of radiation which can ruin regions, zones, then entire nations. Such a power is greater than the old nations, or at least impedes their possible return for the time being.

There is no real divide between ideas and action, and significantly it is ideology that combines ideas and action, forges it into a scientific system of political power. This is why it is so powerful, along with the economy and technology it forms a superstructure or synthetic construction of the nation-states and great spaces. From a modern war standpoint nine-tenths of war takes place in this region, and not on the battlefield. What this means is that ideology is not only the erosion after war - what the violent eruption can decide on the battlefield - but also the tremors beforehand.

We see this also in art and psychology. Who can say that the great movements had any less effect than the world wars? Much of the defeat of Germany occurred in the interwar period, in the occupation, through the shift of a national superstructure to that of a global superstructure. The ideological battles, and the clashes of intelligence agencies, were central to this defeat. There are spheres of influence and neutralisations, and ideology serves as something of a rearmament during the shifts of spatial power.

The news cycle itself is ideological, it is a scientific and egalitarian distribution of information. As communication of the general will the citizens remain in constant contact with world events, government procedures, and potential dangers. This type of organisation develops not out of hierarchical power, an elite method of control, but due to the specific type of man and his political means of communication. Decisions or actions resulting from the news may be small but they are constant. There may be no better image of erosion and progress, every day the old information with its events and dangers disappears and a new series of information takes place. The nomos makes constant and secure changes apart from any sole figure, and any group that might betray the law of equality.

If any group threatens this communication system it is militaristic, the criminal underground of the state. Elites are not opposed to the news cycle, nor do they exist outside it, if anything they are simply the greatest representatives of a humanitarian system. Their status derives from this quality, and not from power in the classical sense.

Latest posts are regarding the Woods, AA, and Imperium Press discussion on ideology. And also my own essay with Futurism Forever.

https://news.1rj.ru/str/actaeonjournal/89

https://news.1rj.ru/str/keith_woods/3152

Cujus regio ejus religio.
Cujus regio ejus natio.
Cujus regio ejus oeconomica.
Cujus regio ejus ideologica.
Cujus regio ejus praeco.

"He who rules decides..."
These few axioms give an idea of the extent of decision in various states. In spatial terms the power of decision is much greater in the ordering of religion than in ideology; the ground of the nation has a destructive capacity and range of conflict that is not possible with the news. At the same time, the news relates to the nation in a way that myth, theology, literature, and art cannot. "Only a newspaper can deposit the same thought in a thousand minds at once." And only a myth can impose an absolute moment of mystery in a thousand minds, make a thousand ideas pregnant with meaning at once.

In war the strength of decision and capacity for mobilisation is raised to the highest. All of the violence, on and off the battlefield, erupts to face the immediate, the incursion into sovereignty by an enemy and a third, neutralising territory. War is a national reversal in life just as tragedy is in death. Only myth, with its onrushing meaning and metamorphoses can explain this – the danger of a third territory and death of a nation.

The news can only refer defeat, as in the world wars when the newspapers became overwhelmed with obituaries. Such frequency of death, a war that can never end, can never have anything like the recitation of a Catalogue of Ships. The Unknown Soldier is an Achilles in the underworld, and cannot be visited by an Odysseus.

Here one may begin to see why nationalists, just like the post-nationalists, cannot think the myth of war – only news or professional wrestling are capable of communicating his relation to war. Xenophon describes a dance of soldiers, the carpaea, with one side playing the part of farmers and the other the barbarians. "A man is sowing and driving a yoke of oxen, his arms laid at one side, and he turns about frequently as one in fear; a robber approaches; as soon as the sower sees him coming, he snatches up his arms, goes to meet him, and fights with him to save his oxen." The readiness of the farmer for war is mixed up in the aesthetics of the dance in a dionysian, or empedoclean, way. With his weapons ready-to-hand the farmer can immediately become a warrior, just as the warriors performing the dance use it as a secondary type of training and drilling. Or perhaps it is the primary training. The noscripted and fake fighting of professional wrestlers is ideal because they represent figures for whom true struggle is never possible, for whom war is little more than entertainment, the relaying of events in the backyards of Turkey. It is something even less than the news, a dance of death for those who think they will never have to face it.