Counter-Currents
Ludwig Fahrenkrog (1867–1952), “Allvater,” 1906
3,220 words
Portuguese translation here
Sometime in the early 1970s, William Pierce (1933–2002) — founder of the white nationalist organization the National Alliance — was invited to speak at a private high school in Maryland. That he was invited to speak at any school is surprising. That it is was the Indian Spring Friends’ School, operated by Quakers is truly remarkable. Pierce spoke to his young audience about his belief that whites must form a strong sense of racial identity and pride if they are to survive as a people. After his talk, Pierce was rendered speechless by one young (white) man’s question: “Why do you think it’s so important for the white race to survive?” Now, one would think that Pierce, of all people, would have had a ready answer to this question. But in fact he didn’t — or didn’t yet.
The incident got Pierce thinking, and he came to the conclusion that he could not convince whites to save their race simply through an appeal to “love of one’s own.” No, whites needed a reason why their race should be saved. The race itself needed a justification; it needed to be justified to itself. That justification took the form of what Pierce came to call Cosmotheism.
He first set forth the thesis of Cosmotheism in a 1976 essay entitled “Our Cause” (in which he does not yet employ the term Cosmotheism itself). (Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent quotes are from this essay.) After a long lead-in (which includes the story of his visit to the Indian Spring Friends’ School), Pierce introduces Cosmotheism by first suggesting that it is a world-view of which all whites are unconsciously aware, just by virtue of being white:
We know it because deep inside all of us, in our race-soul, there is a source of divine wisdom, of ages-old wisdom, of wisdom as old as the universe. That is the wisdom, the truth, which we in the National Alliance want to make the basis of our national policy. It is a truth of which most of us have been largely unconscious all our lives, but which now we have the opportunity to understand clearly and precisely.
From there, Pierce goes on to speak of the cosmos as “the whole” — by which he means something more than the physical universe. “The universe,” he writes, “is the physical manifestation of the whole.” Nothing within the universe can be said to be an end-in-itself: not mankind, not the planets, nothing. Only the whole is an end-in-itself. Further, the whole is continuously changing and evolving toward more and more complex forms.
The development of life on earth from non-living matter was one step in this never-ending evolutionary process. The evolution of man-like creatures from more primitive forms of life was another step. The diversification of these creatures into the various races and sub-races, and the continued evolution of these different races in different parts of the world at different rates, have been continuations of this process.
Now it helps to know that Pierce was trained as a physicist. He earned a doctorate in physics from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1962, and subsequently taught for several years at Oregon State University before abandoning his academic career. Cosmotheism is very much a physicist’s philosophy (or, as we shall see, religion). In particular, Pierce seems to have been influenced in part by the “strong version” of a theory referred to by physicists as “the anthropic principle.” Interestingly, this theory first gained currency in the early 1970s — the very time when Pierce was looking for some kind of philosophy to ground his political movement. He continues:
The entire evolution of life on earth from its beginning some three billion years ago, and in a more general sense, the evolution of the universe over a much longer period before the appearance of life, is an evolution not only in the sense of yielding more and more highly developed physical forms, but also an evolution in consciousness. It is an evolution in the self-consciousness of the whole.
Essentially, Pierce argues that the whole — which he calls “the creator,” who is “self-created” — is evolving toward consciousness of itself. The evolution of new and ever more complex forms is to be understood as a process in which the whole is seeking to become aware of itself. In this process, the human race plays the crucial role, for it is over the course of human development that the creator (which, again, just means the whole) comes to know itself. This seems like an awfully strange idea, but it can be explained rather simply. Human beings are themselves manifestations of the whole — the result of billions of years of its evolution. We are ourselves of the whole. Therefore, our efforts to do science and philosophy and (in general) to seek knowledge of the whole constitutes the whole’s attaining knowledge of itself. The whole achieves self-awareness through us.
“Our purpose,” Pierce tells us, “is the purpose for which the earth was born out of the gas and the dust of the cosmos.” And our destiny “will be godhood.” This last remark adds a new wrinkle to things. If man plays the cosmic role of bringing the whole (the creator) to self-consciousness, this means that we complete God. And doesn’t that in a way make us divine beings ourselves? Pierce goes on to speak of our task as the achievement of “full consciousness of our oneness with the whole, achieving full consciousness that we are a part of the creator and that our destiny is to achieve the single purpose for which the universe exists — the self-realization of the creator.” And he tells us that implicit in this is our “recognition and acceptance of our responsibility for the future of the universe.”
But Pierce is not speaking of humanity generally. He believes that it is preeminently through white, European man that this cosmic purpose is achieved.
Our purpose, the purpose with which we must become obsessed, is that for which the best, the noblest, men and women of our race down through the ages have struggled and died whether they were fully conscious of it or not. It is the purpose for which they sought beauty and created beauty; the purpose for which they studied the heavens and taught themselves Nature’s mysteries; the purpose for which they fought the degenerative, the regressive, and the evil forces all around them; the purpose for which, instead of taking the easy path in life, the downward path, they chose the upward path, regardless of the pain, suffering, and sacrifice that this choice entailed. No other race can travel this path, our path, for us.
Pierce speaks of the tremendous responsibility and burden that following this path places upon the race. His is a cosmological vision of “the white man’s burden”:
The acceptance of our truth not only burdens us with the responsibility that other men have shunned throughout history, it bestows on us a mantle of moral authority that goes along with the responsibility, the moral authority to do whatever is necessary in carrying out our responsibility. Furthermore, it is an acceptance of our destiny, an unlimited destiny, a destiny glorious beyond imagination, if we truly have the courage of our convictions. If we truly abide by the demands that our truth places upon us, it means that while other men continue to live only for the day, continue to seek only self-gratification, and continue to live lives which are essentially without meaning and that leave no trace behind them when they are over, we are living and working for the sake of eternity. In so doing, we are becoming a part of that eternity.
Satisfied that he had found a philosophical basis for his movement, Pierce took things one step further and declared Cosmotheism to be a religion. In 1976 he founded the “Cosmotheist Community Church.” Nine years later Pierce acquired nearly 400 acres in Mill Point, West Virginia as a location for the National Alliance and his Cosmotheist church. He apparently tried to have the land declared exempt from federal, state, and local taxes on the grounds that it was a church. In the end, only sixty acres of the property were declared tax exempt, and had to be used exclusively for Cosmotheist church-related activities (the rest of the land was used for National Alliance operations).
Pierce continued to set forth his Cosmotheist ideas in three further essays: “The Path” (1977), “On Living Things” (1979), and “On Society” (1984). In these essays he adopted an oracular tone that sounds at times like the Bible or Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. “The Path,” for example, begins with the words “LIFE IS SHORT, our brothers and sisters. Must it also be empty? Must it also be bitter? Must its passing hold terror?” The ideas expounded in these essays do not greatly amplify those set forth in “Our Cause.” However, in “The Path” greater emphasis is placed on the idea of (white) man’s potential divinization through the achievement of knowledge of the whole:
Man stands between sub-man and higher man, between immanent consciousness and awakened consciousness, between unawareness of his identity and his mission and a state of Divine Consciousness. Some men will cross the threshold, and some will not. Those who attain Divine Consciousness will ascend the Path of Life toward their Destiny, which is Godhood; which is to say, the Path of Life leads upward through a never-ending succession of states, the next of which is that of higher man, and the ultimate that of the Self-realized Creator. . . . Eternal nothingness is the destiny of those who are spiritually empty. But he who has attained a state of Divine Consciousness partakes of the immortality of the Whole in the way of higher man: his body perishes, but his spirit remains with the Whole. (“The Path”)
This makes it sound as if Pierce believes in immortality of the soul. No doubt, on one level, he wanted some of his followers to believe that that is indeed what Cosmotheism promises. He makes it clear, however, that this “immortality” is actually achieved through the continuance of the race and its cosmic mission:
He who is a member of the Community of Divine Consciousness is not annihilated by death, because his consciousness is one with that of the Community. So long as the Community lives, his consciousness lives; and so long as the Community serves the One True Purpose, he who served that Purpose before the perishing of his body serves it in eternity. . . . The Community of Divine Consciousness is the Community of the Awakened, the Community of the Climbers of the Path, the Community of the People of the Rune of Life, the Community of the Ordained Ones.
“On Living Things” emphasizes the hierarchical nature of life; how some creatures — as well as some men — are more advanced and better able to serve the One True Purpose than others. “On Society” sets forth Pierce’s thoughts on the basic organization of society. Here, as one would expect, he emphasizes that the main role of government is protection of the race. And this calls for a certain ruthlessness. Pierce writes: “If a man teaches others that the mixing of stocks is permissible or that all men are of equal value or that human life has no purpose, then the Community shall make him an outlaw and drive him out” (“On Society”).However, the race is not protected as an end-in-itself: its future is secured so that it may continue to perform its cosmic mission.
Now, whatever one may think of Pierce and his political views, this is a fascinating, audacious, and strange theory. It is by no means original, however. Essentially, Cosmotheism is identical (in broadest outline) to the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel — right down to the racialist component. Cosmotheism is, in truth, a philosophical theory which Pierce chose to put forward as a religion.
But considering it first as a philosophy (and setting Hegel aside), what evidence is there to support Cosmotheism? Pierce, in fact, presents no arguments for the basic tenets of Cosmotheism. He presents no arguments for why we should consider “the whole” to be God. Cosmotheism does not rest on a set of arguments at all. It is a vision — a grand vision — which we are either captivated by, or we are not.
Thus, in the final analysis it might indeed be better to see Cosmotheism as religion rather than as philosophy. But here too there are serious problems.
First of all, Cosmotheism is really a form of monotheism, and it exhibits many of the same problems we see in other monotheistic religions. Chief among these is a highly abstract conception of God divorced from lived experience, and divorced from nature. According to Cosmotheism, we do not find God within nature (as we do in the paganism of our ancestors). Nature is “part of the whole,” but it is not the whole itself. Thus, the God of Cosmotheism transcends nature and the senses entirely. In this regard, Cosmotheism is actually a worse form of monotheism than Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, since it presents us with a God completely without any personal properties. Worse yet, an “incomplete” God on whom we must put the finishing touches. This is truly a “God of the philosophers” and not the stuff of religion. It is not the sort of thing that could be believed in (let alone understood) by people of all walks of life.
Further, there are more similarities between Cosmotheism and the Judeo-Christian tradition than the simple fact that both are monotheist. Pierce’s Cosmotheism speaks of a specific race charged with a special mission vis-à-vis God. What can this remind us of except God’s covenant with the Israelites, the Chosen People? In fact, certain forms of Jewish Kabbalism actually claim that it is the task of the Jewish people to “complete” God’s creation through the observance of the Law. In recent times the Israeli writer Mordekhay Nesiyahu formulated a kind of secularized version of this doctrine, which he actually termed “Cosmotheism”! (I have no idea if William Pierce knew about this, but if he did I’m sure he must have found it disturbing.)
In sum, Pierce’s theory is very much in the Judeo-Christian spirit. It is monotheist. It sees a particular people as (in effect) entering into a special covenant with God and playing a role of cosmic importance. It has a linear conception of time: it raises the history of scientific progress up into the dimension of the sacred. It even promises a kind of immortality to the members of the race who accept this mission and take part. If we find the Judeo-Christian tradition problematic, then we must find theories like Cosmotheism problematic as well.
And, like Christianity, Cosmotheism is de facto a universalistic religion. Now, this will seem a strange claim since Pierce offers it as an ethnic religion — a religion for whites exclusively. But consider the following. Pierce would certainly have acknowledged that there are members of other races who have the ability to advance scientific knowledge. He might have argued that their numbers are small, but he would have conceded that they exist. In Pierce’s terms, such non-whites are therefore capable of playing a role in “completing God.”
If whites adopted Cosmotheism, eventually — far into the future — this point would be made. Eventually the pietistic teenaged sons and daughters of affluent white Cosmotheists would argue that it is unfair to exclude so-and-so from the great cosmic project since, after all, isn’t he exceptional? Hasn’t he proved himself to be a gifted physicist, or what have you? Can’t he help advance the self-consciousness of the Creator? And in this way what had begun as an ethnic religion would morph into a universalistic one.
But let’s now set aside the details of the Cosmotheist theory and consider first the remarkable fact that it was put forward at all. When we do, we find that Pierce’s Cosmotheism — for all its flaws — reveals something very unusual about white people. Pierce arrived at Cosmotheism as a result of his realization that he needed to offer white people a justification for saving their race. If we stop and think about it, this ought to seem very peculiar. Other peoples do not seem to need to “justify” protecting and preferring their own. They simply feel a natural affinity for their own kind and seek to promote the interests of others like themselves.
A race or ethnicity is simply a group of genetically-similar people. So is a family. Suppose that a man needed a “justification” for preferring his own family to others or for protecting his family and promoting its interests. Suppose that John Smith saw his wife and children in harm’s way and said “Can you give me any good reason to protect them? Are they worth saving?” Or suppose that when faced with the necessity of providing for their future he said “But why should I set aside money for my own family, and not someone else’s? Perhaps some other family deserves it more.” We would consider such a man to be oddly twisted and defective. We would think that he is missing something very important. And that something is, of course, a feeling of love of one’s own — something felt by most people in the absence of any “justifications” or rational arguments.
On one level, Pierce’s Cosmotheism and his conviction that it is necessary reveal something very singular about white, European people: they have a tendency to feel that they must justify their very existence, in one way or another. To be sure, this is not true of all of them. But generally the greater their intelligence and their capacity for abstract reasoning (especially reasoning in terms of moral principles) the more they feel that in order to love their own people and protect them, their people must be worth loving and worth protecting. Again, my impression is that this is not so true of other peoples – even the intelligentsia of other peoples. They seem to have a stronger tendency to identify with and promote the interests of their own people, just because they are like each other. This is, arguably, a much healthier mindset – at least if one thinks that the survival and flourishing of one’s own group is a value.
One wants to say to William Pierce, “If your mission is saving your race, why don’t you just encourage them to be like other peoples and love their own simply because it is their own? Why do you set forth this grand philosophical (or religious) vision — open to a whole host of queries and objections — and have everything hinge on that?” But the answer is, again, that white Europeans are different. Needing to become worthy of being saved, needing a mission that justifies us, is simply part of our nature. There is no getting around this. Arguably, it is a terrible flaw. Of course, one can also argue that it is a great virtue. Either way, it looks like we Europeans are stuck with it.
And so we can imagine Pierce responding to the above criticism by saying “All right, if not Cosmotheism, what then?” It is an excellent question, to which I have no answer.
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32 comments
Hegel was a conscious White Supremacist and not just a German Supremacist – and thus only an indirect advocate for the White Race? Only in these degenerate times could someone imagine that a non White could be a German.
Love for ourselves was once quite common. As one of the Greeks said, no man loves his city because it is great, but because it is his. English Literature is full of similar sentiment. When Chrisitianity became worldly instead of supernatural, we tried to assume the role that God once had and the lesser loves were banished by the Universal Agape. Of course, some reveled in the subhuman but even those who abstained adored the Negro as the “real thing” and Whites as mere abstractions compared to Him. Obama, as half White and half Black is the Christ, half human and half divine.
But I grant you we are strangely susceptible to the lure of the Universal. And we are obviously the most Promethean Race by far. The two seem to go together in us. So Pierce’s endeavor makes sense on a certain level. But will it serve? Doubt it since anyone smart enough to need it will see it for what it is. And it is too cold to serve as a religion for most people below that level. In any case, the idea that one create a religion negates the idea of a religion as something beyond or above man. I’ll stick with the Great Tradition – even though none of the Great Paths serves the White Race per se. Perhaps Orphism and Zoroastrianism once did, but the first is gone and the second moribund and for others now. We must face this bravely and try to incorporate our own paganism into our lives – even while admitting that it is insufficient. We can only hope and pray for our own Teacher someday. The Homeless Jack stories by Millard feature this and make them a worthy contribution ot Cosmotheism.
The East Asians have the Universal Ideal as well in the figure of the Bodhisattvas and Buddhas. Thus the ideal of Agape is well established but without the Promethean. The East Asian is saved by an intense practicality and natural love of his own. The idea of flooding his nation with aliens in order to “save” them would never occur to a Zen Master anymore than to a traditonal Catholic Saint. So if the two religons are both universal, why do we fall and not them? Two possibilities: they are just naturally more ethnocentric and/or our religon has been tampered with by aliens and alien ideas.
East asians are hyper-ethnocentric, but I’ve seen no evidence of pan-asian racial consciousness amongst them, except perhaps some of those living in America. The Japanese for instance take no particular interest in Korean or Chinese survival.
Perhaps whites are the same — I’m sure you could get many millions of people to agree that Germans or Russian or French people “ought to survive.” “White race” survival by contrast only gets a few thousand.
Come to think of it, what peoples truly have “racial” as opposed to “ethnic” or “tribal” consciousness? The people who have it seem to be blacks living in white lands, and whites and asians living unpleasantly in the midst of large numbers of blacks.
A theory of why there is ethnocentrism comes from social-biology. The rational for preferring to mate with and work for the well being of your ethnic group is practically self-evident. To the extent that your ethnic neighbors share your genes (“Love thy neighbor as thyself”) helping your neighbors children thrive helps your genes survive. To the extent that your mate’s genes are similar to yours both you and your mate get a double genetic survival benefit from nurturing you common child.
This explains why the small “family nations” Europe were ethnocentric. Even though they were all white there where minor differences in gene frequencies that gave rise to the ethnocentrism. So Danes lived among and mutually assisted other Danes, Italians ditto, Poles ditto.
There probably is no such thing as “racism” in this same sense. Our ethnocentric instincts grew out of competition between small groups living in close enough proximity to be in genetic competition, but the proximity also implies they were genetically much closer than the three major races are today. Since races developed mainly through lack of contact almost by definition racism couldn’t have evolved by the processes of social-biology. Only ethnocentrism could have evolved that way.
But if you recognize that someone is not of your race that means they damn well aren’t a fellow Dane. So you have “racism” which might be termed ethnocentrism that is being driven into near panic mode by the mind boggling, instinct boggling, in you face differences.
Richard Wright, a black Marxist intellectual, noted when he traveled to fascist Spain in the 1950’s that the Spanish, in cities and rural villages alike, seemed to “have no racial consciousness whatsoever”, unlike the white Spanish upper classes in South America who saw their European (as opposed to just Spanish) heritage as more essential to their identity. There’s definitely a sense in which any group identity requires an “other” to oppose itself to. Bavarian to Prussian, German to Russian, white European to black African, human to animal, living to non-living. This is probably why it is easier now, in a globalized world with large migration patterns, to talk about a European unity than it has been since the time of Christendom.
“Love for ourselves was once quite common. As one of the Greeks said, no man loves his city because it is great, but because it is his. English Literature is full of similar sentiment.“
This is an important point. The reason it was common was because it was natural. It never needed to be rationally explained before. We never had and never will have an inherent white trait that demands we justify our own existence to ourselves.
The problem is not a white defect, the problem is Jewish cultural brain washing (assisted by the usual white liberal suspects.)
With enough cultural control you can persuade people to do far more than just indulge in a slow process of racial suicide that will end in racial death a couple of centuries hence. With enough cultural control you can literally make people commit to their own immediate personal suicide.
Learn from the Jones Town Massacre, Guyana 1978.
Near the end of the tape, the white survivor quotes Jones “America will see that 900 BLACK people (my emphasis) would rather die than come back to racist America.”
“Witness to Jonestown Massacre”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DtxJKqoyos
The vulnerability to fatal brain washing is not a white defect. It is a human trait.
If out of what I suspect is a sneaky secret racial pride we really believe whites are the only ones who are truly universalistic, we will make a potentially fatal mistake. We will waste effort trying to “prove” to other whites that we have a racial right to exist.
We don’t need fancy logic, we need simple counter propaganda. We need “practical politics.” KISS.
To quote Captain Martin in “Patriot”
Benjamin:”And perhaps that’s his weakness.” Gabriel:”Sir?” Benjamin:”Pride. Pride’s a weakness.” Jean:”Personally I would prefer stupidity.” Benjamin:”Pride will do.”
Read more at http://www.hark.com/clips/whvkxgphhj-prides-a-weakness#JPvKUuWCvJPk3lat.99
The young white man had been brainwashed into accepting the demise of his own race.
This is not normal. And thus there is no need to theorize a justification for our continued existence.
The theory we have to come up with do is not why we should exist, the theory we need to find is why it was possible to brainwash this young man into racial suicide.
Shortly before he died Pierce himself nailed the most important part of coming to understand why people can be brought to racial suicide. Pierce wrote (or said, I can’t remember if I read this or listened to him) that he had come to the conclusion that it was normally necessary for the vast majority of the people in any culture to subconsciously seek to be politically correct. In order to be united against the external world a troop of baboons has to fear the anger of their own group and their own leader more than they as individuals fear the fangs of an opposing troop when fighting over a drying water hole.
As George Patton put it; “I’m a better general because I’m the best ass kicker in the U.S. Army. My men fear me more than they fear the enemy.”
And individuals in a society need to fear their fellows more than they fear the enemy. That is what makes the Jewish P.C. tactics work. It’s that basic human instinct to try to be “average” in their thinking. Without most people desperately wanting to be normal and accepted you couldn’t have political correctness. You couldn’t have a culture of race suicide.
Remember the Jones Town Massacre in Guyana in 1978? Jim Jones illustrated for us how cultural brainwashing can even control people to the point they will voluntarily commit literal mass suicide, let alone race suicide.
Merely asking the question, why should the White race be saved, even if little more than an example of adolescent show-off contrariness, indicates that something is wrong.
I recently did a thought experiment. The US population is currently 65% White, 13% Black, 15% Latino, 5% Asian, 1%Amerindian and maybe 5% Other.
I started combining and, more importantly, subtracting, these groups the list and speculating on the effects. If you want to know why the White race needs saving, take the 65% out of the US equation and leave the country to the remaining 1/3: Blacks, Latinos, etc.
Instant 3rd world.
QED.
So our race’s continued existence depends upon we serve to make the United States a First Wold country? For whose benefit, exactly?
Well, mine. I don’t want to live in a 3rd world country.
Seriously, though, it was a simple and concrete example that might have provoked Dr Pierce’s young inquirer to answer his own question at his level.
I am generally in favor of using this quick-and-dirty method in a wide variety of settings to help assess the worth of a wide variety of things: remove it from the equation and what happens?
I understand, but I wonder if you are not committing yourself unknowingly to a false moral premise.
The author does a good job of critiquing it from the standpoint of paganism, so allow me to offer a few from the point of view of Tradition.
First, of course, is his point of view of the Supreme Reality, what he calls the Cosmos. He seems to view this reality from a “developing” viewpoint, which seems limited. Tradition attempts to go beyond that which is “becoming”, and achieve liberation through realizing the eternal, or Being. Scientifically speaking, it appears that, at the highest dimensional levels, we conceive of a reality now where all possible universes are already manifest. This seems to coincide well with the doctrine expressed in Eastern Orthodoxy that God is “pure action”, that there is no “potential”. Guenon talked about the “states of being” in humans which were different ways that this Supreme Reality manifested, which we can use to achieve inner states better reflecting this Reality. Though there is some similarity here between Cosmotheism and Tradition, the former’s concentration on a changing reality means that it does not go far enough and is thus a regression with respect to Traditional metaphysics.
Moreover, there is the racial component. The idea that the white race alone is the way through which the Cosmos achieves this development, whether or not Pierce himself really believed this, appears nonsensical on its face. Presumably, most on here would have no problem agreeing that Yukio Mishima, Sun Tzu, and Suleiman the Magnificent are rather more “complex”, than a white man who spends his days drinking and brawling and living on welfare. The author has already pointed this out rather well. Tradition, of course, is also something in which anyone capable of any race can take part. It is by definition “universal” in being absolutely True, even if the white race or humanity or even life as a whole did not exist. Hence, the spiritual aspect of race that Evola promoted. That said, most Traditional faiths, if not all, have recognized the multiplicity of races and peoples as good (even Islam).
A healthy self-love, self-respect and ethnocentrism is all that is needed, in my view, for the European peoples to walk the appropriate middle path between ethnic masochism on the one hand, and fanatical self-worship on the other. Europeans can and must love themselves, but by that love strive to improve themselves as individuals, nations and Europeans, and realize that this love is perfectly consistent with working with and appreciating the physical, cultural and spiritual production of other races.
Nicely done
Bravo!
WP was too smart and rational to really believe in Cosmotheism. He used the idea as a metaphor, but most WNs aren’t intelligent enough to grasp that aspect of his theory and sermons.
Only a racist physicist could come up with Cosmotheism, which adds to its merit, not detracts. Racism needs redefinition as something Neitzschie would endorse- it’s noble, dignified, and given who is arrayed against it, thoroughly aristocratic.
Christian racism is pretty good, too. We believe that Jesus died for our sins, which means we are sinners. We aren’t supermen, but we do hope for a supreme future.
Good essay. An essay upon an essay.
The original contains some disturbing ideas:
“We must think of ourselves instead as the beginning — the barest beginning — of a mighty army whose task is not to clean out a cave full of robbers, but is to conquer an entire hostile world.”
Because overreach worked out so well the first time.
“All matter, living and non-living, is ordered in a hierarchy: animate above inanimate, conscious above unconscious. The Urge is toward higher consciousness; the purpose of all material things is the implementation of the Urge, the service of the One Purpose; and the value of each thing is its potential for serving the One purpose.”
And this is frankly, immoderately, non-Darwinian. There is no living species that is not adapted to its natural environment, that being the purpose of adaptation. The built environment of man is what alienates species, starting with its maker. There is certainly no proof that consciousness deserves to be capitalized as the supreme urge.
I never read Pierce. The more I do, the more I find him shockingly bad. I prefer Matt Nuenke: http://www.neoeugenics.net/
Do whites need any metaphysical.religious beliefs in order to survive?
I believe that instincts,deep-rooted emotions ,pride are supreme.
Can you be indifferent to destruction and humiliation to you and your family just because you are white ? And you should consider as a family member any white regardless of their ethnic or religious background. That is how other races look at you as “white”.To be indifferent or even welcome your destruction means betrayal of your ancestors.Pride should be your succour.
William Luther Pierce was a man of Western thought and inclinations. He seemed, to me at least, a remnant of high-culture, stuck in a bog of apathy and misunderstanding; even amongst his own peers. The ‘conservative’ element of his day looked at him, not up to him; this would have made them look impotent.
Then, even as now, you had your intellectuals and your activists, and only a very few were a combination of Both. Dr. Pierce was a creator, and he, unlike many of his peers, searched for much more than the mundane; this was both his appeal and gave ammunition to his detractors, as they sensed he was a ‘pie-in-sky’ sort of man.
Man, Western man, has searched in his own fashion, for these answers belonging to Life, as he perceives it. In his primitive state, that is, before the modern, western man has responded to life in different ways but, more often than not, it has been an instinctual aggression to the forces of nature which, as the case might be, caused him to fear that which would destroy him; that which threatened his survival. He did, regardless of the modern’s position that early man was ‘devoid’ of spirituality, that is to say, that ‘he understood his presence in the world’.
That Western man believed, really believed in something ‘outside’ of himself is manifest by every attempt he made to ‘record’ his presence in the ‘art’, ‘motifs’, ‘totems’ and relics which he has left, a legacy for us to partake in. Whatever the ‘belief’ was, is pure speculation on our, the children of these spirits, part. Whether this belief was seen, or performed through say, for instance, a tree, stone, river, or lake, it was and extension of what he believed. This belief was absolute. It could not be separated from him; it was all he knew. He ‘prayed’ and, if that prayer came to pass, well, it was a ‘magical’ thing; it became, in our words, mystical. He gave up his soul, willingly, to that which blessed him, and which had answered by delivering to him his ‘need’ or ‘desire’. This ‘mental’ state is the ‘healthy state’ of faith. This is belief, which denies all ‘outside’ reason. This is the ‘faith’ of a child.
This, then, is the essence of ‘all’ religion: Without faith, there can be no value. Alternatively, without value, there can be no morality, this is the purpose stated, or unstated of all of man’s religions. However, subjective reality dictates that ‘morality’ proper, as an extension of each individual or its racial components, the race-culture, are subjective by each racial experience, its history, its location/territory, and all the factors, which predispose a People to be who they are, even as we see them. So, the question is now asked, “Are there morals for some, but not for others?” If there are various degrees of morality, or at least a perception of morality, by which, precisely, is the morality, which we mark the higher-man, hence the higher-culture?
Dr. Pierce saw a correlation in science and religion; of this I am certain. He knew, instinctively, that outside of the day-to-day activities, of struggle and chaos, the balance of spirit was precious to him. Like his political endeavors, his Cosmotheism was akin to a spiritual meditative quality – all men who delve deeply into a struggle for the lives of their fellows is gifted with this type of duality.
Religion is for the Individual Consciousness, which created it.
I think Dr. Pierce understood this, explicitly.
Science, for him, gave him boundaries which, in the abstract, gave him unlimited access to the ‘limitless’ boundaries of his chosen discipline. Revilo Oliver was very similar, although castigating the ‘believers in Spooks’ he, as well as Pierce, saw the Race as its own mystical motif – that all thought and power came from a continuum of thousands of generations of ‘souls’ – these men, in particular, may have had differences of opinion, but both were very spiritual men in their own unique ways.
I like the term ‘race-culture’, which presupposes this continuum as a collective trans-migration of souls – a Celtic form of Reincarnation – but is Race specific; this is not hard to fathom, once one accepts the premise that we, all of us, are ‘particular aspects’ of our ancestors. As were our progenitors, the Seed which is left to the ‘flow of our people’ is manifested time and time again, with various and unique aspects spread to thousands, yet sympathetic to each other. Some men, for instance, have ‘traits’ and ‘proclivities’ which seem as natural as rain, without any significant training or instruction, this is the finely tuned spirituality of blood and bone which defines us all as a unique and important specie.
William Galey Simpson had a similar view based, in part, on his study of Nietzsche and Spengler. He believed that the White Peoples of the Earth should, and would, develop a ‘religion’ to take them into the future, but was quick to add that this inception could not be forced; if one forced this concept, it would be artificial in the most crass way: it would be Institutionalized.
I have become enamored with a body of works which details much of what we are discussing, and will offer these few quotes from Rise of The West: http://www.amazon.com/Rise-The-West-Frank-DeSilva/dp/1461001501/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1343350962&sr=8-2&keywords=rise+of+the+west
William Pierce saw us all as a organism, living and breathing in tandem with one another, a body-politic which rose or fell with a synchronicity which could only be applied to the knowledge of physics; this could be seen in his sedate, yet revolutionary world-view, as he was both an intellect and activist – the Poet warrior, with the scale dipping towards the poet.
In those early days, white nationalism was gestating, and would not become sentient for a few more years, but Dr. Pierce had the luxury of knowing William Galey Simpson, and showed much in his cosmological outlook that, in my mind, could only have come from the delicate spirituality of WGS.
In relation to this, it is precisely ‘the spirit of Western Man’ which makes our struggle (both from a inner/outer perspective) of such pertinent and permanent value in our struggle:
Did William Pierce offer us a solution? I don’t think even he knew the width and breadth of his cosmology. It is worthy of speculation however, and in the minds of these ‘searchers for truth’ will come a time and a place, in which we all can sense this change; when this change happens, I hope that those of us who have benefit of this historical glance at Pierce andothers, will aid us in formulating our own world-view and, perhaps, this will congeal:
In his own way, Pierce was a Creator; how could he not be?
In the beginning of the article, Mr. Carver prefaced the beginning with the assertion that Dr. Pierce and NA were White Nationalists – I would agree by degrees – and would also assert that in this early beginning, not only was Pierce among a few that saw a ‘future’ in which all of us would congeal and unify under a socio-political banner – what name or orthodoxy was not known early on, but ‘white nationalism’ was already invoking its own evolution and synthesizing its own eschatology. Dr. Pierce was a part of this, just as we all are.
In another quote from: http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-The-Twenty-First-Century/dp/1463562217/ref=la_B002MG6O0A_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343352469&sr=1-1 Dr. Pierce, in fact, is mentioned in the Dedication:
I have always like the concept of distillation.
It seems to me, that in the distillation of our Western ethos, even in certain ‘christian’ ethics, there is, fundamentally, a passion and spiritual disposition to our Struggle – and being a White Nationalist is about preparation, struggle, sacrifice; of Art and War. You cannot have one (Art), without a sense of ‘spirituality’, and one cannot have War without a sense of passion – in fact, both elements are about Love of something – and most of us see this as centering on our Race, our flesh and bone. This seems to me, to envelope all that Dr. Pierce has to say, as well as so many of our other thinkers here, in America.
Truly, we have men in this country who are known by their Deeds, and it is only right and proper that we pay our respects and acknowledge their ‘deeds’, in both the spiritual and physical realm.
The infighting and egoism of others pales in comparison to those ‘true-believers’ like William Luther Pierce.
Short question, quick comment, for there is much to be said in response to your analysis.
Faustus citing deSilva in blockquote:
Question: Is that “Rise of the West”?
Faustus in blockquote:
I think this section works perfectly as the foundation for answer(s) to the questions asked by “Lew” in the “Paganism without Swords” thread; to wit, what is the most effective and appropriate vehicle for such transformation without the glorification of that which is merely egoistic, at the direct expense of carrying the Race forward?
I have argued that the Northwest Republic as the temporal bridge for the metapolitical order would best be served by a spiritual component manifesting as a religion, the Restatement of Christianity (the Greater Reformation of Christianity might be more appropriate). Within such an Order we could have, following the example of the very popular among your sons Warhammer 40K Universe, the various Orders, including the Orders Militant.
“Militant,” of course, in an “apple pie, strictly legal, sort of way.” (HT: Jim Giles)
It is the spiritual foundation of that militancy of Devotion and Service that might deserve attention.
Thank you for a well-written, well-argued commentary. I hope to do it justice in my later comments.
Thank you for your kind words.
And yes, (ROTW) was from Rise of The West.
Looking forward to your commentary.
Faustus in blockquote, cites in italics:
Faith/Value/Morality/Religion is one formulation; another might be that the spiritual forces wich operate on people of a Culture are seen through the Lens of “religion.” As the connection with the spiritual foundation (“Inspiration”) from which the Culture is derived fades, so does the Race, and the religion.
The dichotomy between science and religion oes not exist, save to those whio choose to become limited by their egoistic materialism. Indeed, at one point, Heisenberg, contemplating a problem, experienced samadhi. To his credit, he did not become trapped in it, but continued to work on solving the problem.
This is very close to the beginning of “Imperium.”
Yet, what is being DONE to develop this concept to fruition? The “Cosmotheist” didn’t leave behind a priesthood to carry the Work forward. THIS would have been a perfect opportunity for Bob Mathews, and many, many more like him.
And yet, what is left to carry this Work forward? Simpson sparked the fire within the soul of Pierce.
And THIS is the metaphysical foundation of the new, organic Natural Aristocracy of the New Order. THIS is a concept well worthy of much more discussion. Pierce was silent on this, of course.
So, as the Culture developed, so did the lens of Religion through which the Culture defined the spiritual foundation of Reality. The question of Intentionality presents itself.
Can we, you and I, create our own ‘good’ and ‘evil’? This, of course, would be the great doing as Nietzsche put it. Do you believe, are you able to envision this actualization? This is the question: Are you willing to try? Let us, then, resist the evil, and embrace the good. Thus, to our rising.
In his own way, Pierce was a Creator; how could he not be?
A “Creator” who did not develop the foundation of his Creation past himself, much less his lifetime. The fruits of this died with him, and can’t we wonder why?
Historically, self-identified “White Nationalists” have been incredibly “small-minded and myopic.” Pierce did little enough to form an organizational – i.e.; EFFECTIVE – counterforce to this. Why” Surely, Kevin Alfred Strom could easily have been the Living Foundation of such an Order.
THIS ties perfectly into the “Paganism Without Swords” thread. Intensity – a focused, disciplined quality of Will – is required to true Create, and achieve the fulfillment of a unique Destiny.
I’m not sure that last sentence came out the way you meant it. Works for me, though. Remember, Pierce, at the end of the day, was all about Pierce – no organization, no Spiritual Orders within “Cosmotheism,” nothing left after his passing but some writings, some American Dissident Voices, and some good people with good memories, all of which he could have done from a rented room in any number of places.
Nothing to stand after your passing, as a matter of your deliberate choice; if that isn’t a definition of “egoism,” I don’t know what is.
Now, as to The Way Forward…
Clarifying and extending (slightly!) one comment I made in my response to Faustus:
Fourmyle of Ceres in blockquote:
Modify it to:
“Surely, Kevin Alfred Strom could easily have been the Contemplative Aspect of the Living Foundation of such an Order, and David Eden Lane the Active Aspect of the Living Foundation of such an Order.”
Thank y0u.
It works as a Myth – and we need a Myth. I mean what other race seeks knowledge for its own sake? What other race dreamed of going into space and then did it? What other people would climb high mountains in Alaska in the middle of winter? Or any high mountains at any time for that matter? We are different and need a way to understand ourselves.
But will the Elite really believe it? Perhaps not, but if it helps people value our Race, then it is validated. It certainly wont serve as a religion for ordinary people – nor for spiritual seekers who want Experience or real contact with the numinous. So more is needed. Perhaps if a Teacher manifests, he could make use of Cosmotheism and “ensoul” it – as Christianity did for Greek Philosophy.
Both the Orthodox and Latin Churches make use of it, but different uses. Orthodox focus more on the moral and epistemological aspects of Aristotle. As far as using him as a spring board towards science, that was left to the Latins of Western and Northern Europe. Metropolitan Anthony, one of the great Orthodox Churchmen of the 20th Century, said that the spirit of the Gothic repelled him. The great spires of the Cathedrals to him indicated a search for God – or in other words, a denial of the Incarnation. But to us, it is an expression of our ardour and love for the yet unseen God. Yes Christ came but did even his Disciples see him as He was? Did not Christ say, the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth itself to be taken by violence and the violent bear it away? Thus the union of the gentle Christian Spirit and the Promethean is affected. Our great buildings and achievements can themsleves be a way of worship – or not if built ugly or with the wrong motive or with stolen money or slave labor. But they are not wrong per se as the Metropolitan seemed to feel. His culture is different, that is all.
Very well said.
I am not familiar with Pierce, but if we were to link his Cosmotheism with Hegel’s philosophy, as suggested in this essay, but then pushed aside by Carver, it might be possible to offer a defense of Pierce’s claim that there is something singular about the way the white race came to a deeper understanding of the self-consciousness of the whole — without tying this claim to any notion of a Chosen People. It can be done through an appreciation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, and the way this book is an account of the actual conceptual experience of the Western mind as it gains a deeper awareness of itself as free self-consciousness in the course of time. This phenomenology (= experience) can only be a narrative of the Western mind, since only this mind came to understand itself as the source of its own actions and thoughts, not in isolation but as a socialized mind belonging to a particular place and culture, able to recount its own experience in a self-conscious way, becoming aware of the entire sequential forms of consciousness it developed, to the point that it was able to break free from any extra-rational postulate, be it God’s, Nature’s, or Society’s commands. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit should not be seen as an account of the experiences of the human spirit but of the Western spirit. The forms of consciousness exhibited in this book are all Western. Hegel was thoroughly steeped in the Western experience, and gave his mind over to that experience, reenacting its historical course within his own mind, in order to determine and bring to full consciousness its state of being at the time of his writing, which he called “absolute consciousness” — absolute in the sense that in his philosophy the Western mind had come to the realization that it was free activity, self-determined, aware of the whole trajectory it has undergone, and thus the completion of God as Spirit.
China’s consciousness is devoid of a developmental pattern and for this reason it is impossible to write a phenomenology of its spiritual history. The Judaic (or Magian consciousness) is dualistic, a struggle between opposites without a dynamic beyond the same eternal forces. It is static, whereas Western consciousness is dynamic and with a directional pattern — the theory of progress is uniquely Western — a struggle between opposing forces which undergo change in the course of time.
Yet his sytem was corrupted by Marx. And some say the Elite still use the dialectic in their plots against Western Humanity.
China has the I Ching system of yin and yang. The dialectic would be the moving line. Just food for thought – I’m not sure if this is an exact parallel. Jung thought very highly of it. And Ezra Pound of Chinese poetry: all the Western themes are there, but in a different “key”.
On the masthead of Dr. Pierce’s National Vanguard magazine it reads:
“Towards a new consciousness, a new people, a new order”.
Simply put, the onward and upward momentum of the White race. to godhood.
Another point: For Hegel, Western man cannot but feel/think himself obligated to offer a rational explanation for every belief he holds, and so, from this perspective, Pierce was correct that it is necessary to offer a reason as to why white people should exist within a land that is theirs. I disagree with Carver’s wording of this point, according to which, for Pierce, “European people: they have a tendency to feel that they must justify their very existence, in one way or another. To be sure, this is not true of all of them. But generally the greater their intelligence and their capacity for abstract reasoning (especially reasoning in terms of moral principles) the more they feel that in order to love their own people and protect them, their people must be worth loving and worth protecting”.
This may be Pierce’s reason, I don’t know, but if Pierce was influenced by Hegel, and perhaps implicitly from Pierce’s viewpoint, it is not that white people feel a need to justify their existence because they are smarter or think they are, or because they feel their people must be worth loving on the strength of their intelligence. White people have developed in such a way that they must freely articulate in a rational way whatever it is that they think is worth believing. They cannot accept or take it as given and natural, on the basis of their ethnocentric instincts, the need for white preservation, their minds must demonstrate to themselves that it is worth doing so. Pierce felt he had to offer reasons rather than simply appeal to the natural instincts of whites for preservation. Non-whites have not achieved a point of spiritual development wherein the human spirit demands free expression rather than mere obedience. The historical experience of whites has brought them to a point where they are required to offer freely articulated grounds for whatever it is they decide to act upon and accept as true.
A new people: the eugenic aspect is the most concrete and practical. To make ourselves smarter, healthier, and more beautiful – better vehicles for the spirit to manifest. No great violinist would play a beat up old fiddle if a stradavarius was available. We know how – it’s a question of Will and the political and social structures that would support such a choice. And obviously some difficult moral choices and sacrafices from some.
But it must be remembered that the form side is only half the story. Many Traitors have been men of pure and high Nordic blood. The inner man must live up to his endowment. Morality and Character are not inherited. Alexander the Great was preparing to betray his culture when he died. He loved being the God King of Babylon. He hated the way his old comrades talked back to him – in Europe, the King was merely first among equals among the nobles. So he was raising up a young army of Persians. They were the new apple of his eye. Had he lived, he planned to take them west to put down Greece and ultimately to take on the rising star of Rome.
Perhaps Pierce should have familiarized himself with the Eddas or the work of von List rather that trying to concoct a new religion, a la Scientology.
Cosmotheism represents belief in progress on steroids. It is a millenarian intellectual construct.
Millenarianism, the belief in a future utopia, has been characteristic of various sectarian groups of whites throughout history. Judaism, too, is utopian, as are its secular off-shoots like Communism.
The other stRiki-Eiking characteristic of Cosmotheism, noted by Carver, is its universalism. Universalism seems inherent in all forms of pantheism or panentheism, to which whites, or a large subset of them, are strongly drawn.
I am most familiar with this in the form of New Thought, developed by New England mystics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (but still alive today) influenced by Emersonian Transcendentalism. New Thought bears many resemblances to Cosmotheism, with the exception, of course, of any pro-whiteness. Its ideology is multiracial.
“The universe,” [Pierce] writes, “is the physical manifestation of the whole.” Nothing within the universe can be said to be an end-in-itself: not mankind, not the planets, nothing. Only the whole is an end-in-itself. Further, the whole is continuously changing and evolving toward more and more complex forms.
That is a universalist vision. Non-whiteness is inherent in it.
Universalism is extremely difficult to write about in a few postings; still, it is the case that the West produced a scientific methodology which all the civilized cultures of the world have adopted. The ideals of freedom and the impartial use of reason in political affairs are Western but these ideals have not had the same influence on the East. Nevertheless, these ideals are universalist in their ambitions. So, while one can say that “non-Whiteness” is inherent in these rational and liberal ideals, in light of their implications, I don’t see how one can deny that Whites have not been the most universalist-seeking race. This is why I think Pierce felt compelled to offer a rational explanation for the preservation of the white race.
This does not mean that whites lack basic ethnocentric instincts or in-group tendencies. It means that whites, at the level of intellectual discourse, demand rationally based explanations, and free settings for debate. Rational studies on genetic interests, IQ measurements, are almost all Western. The roots of this go back to ancient Greece, and I don’t see a way around it. We want reasons; we need to explain why “reason” and “freedom” are uniquely white traits which cannot be transmitted to non-whites as if they were mere propositional values.
Interesting essay by Revilo P. Oliver here: https://counter-currents.com/2011/07/william-gayley-simpsons-which-way-western-man/
They don’t make men like this anymore – but we can try.
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