Bowden on Bowden
You Can Never Be Too Right Wing!
Jonathan Bowden
506 words
Edited by Alex Kurtagić
Editor’s Note:
The following excerpt is from Jonathan Bowden’s Frenzy, a book he finished writing before April 3, 1994. The text has been mildly edited for punctuation, spelling, and capitalization.
As far as my own political views are concerned, I do not believe you can be too Right wing. My own views are based on a form of active “nihilism,” which believes that nothing can be defined—although this does not mean that nothing is true and everything is permitted, in the words of Hassan i Sabbah, the spiritual leader of the Assassins, a Mediaeval Islamic death-squad. Indeed, the fact that nothing exists makes it imperative that humans beings give a meaning to the world. The fact that existence has no meaning or purpose makes it incumbent upon us to dredge up a meaning from the void. It is as if the contingency and aimlessness of existence has to be replaced by an act of Will. As a consequence, I believe that humanity itself is an act of Will, which looks to itself as a form of strength. All of which means that I look to the purposeless energy of existence that gives life meaning.
The reason why I support the Right against the Left is that the Right supports structures that already exist and that give life meaning. The Right, in other words, supports those structures that exist at the present and that communicate value and identity to the citizen. Of course, everything the Left says about the Right is true, and this is why the Right needs to be supported against the Left. The Left declares quite correctly that the Right is racist, sexist, and elitist—all of which is correct because you cannot have a civilization that is not hierarchical and elitist. If you like, the Right preserves difference, inequality, between groups, and it gives meaning to life because it orders things hierarchically. If things are to be defined, if they are to be named, then they have to be placed on different levels—a definition that is based on equality, an absence of distinction, is null and void. Or, at least, it is a purely temporary expedient: a ploy: something that people believe in because it suits their case. As a consequence, a civilization cannot exist without hierarchy or inequality—the poor will always be with us—and without social inequality there is nothing to aspire to. There will always be a working class, a middle class, and an upper class, with a certain amount of movement between them, but class stratification will always exist. It is necessary for the preservation of a civilized order, in that without inequality there can be no distinction, and without distinctiveness there is an absence of social meaning. For something to have a meaning, in short, it has to be different from something else: it has to take the measure of its own distance. Or—as Moeller van den Bruck remarked in Germany’s Third Empire, a revolutionary conservative or neo-restorationist work—once a prole, always a prole.
Source: http://www.wermodandwermod.com/newsitems/news080220131623.html
5 comments
Surely there is more to aspire to in life than one’s place within a hierarchy?
“Surely there is more to aspire to in life than one’s place within a hierarchy?”
You have to measure yourself against something. Try “aspiring” to something without role models, goals, judges, tests, standards, and measurements of some kind – that’s what hierarchy is and that’s what hierarchy does. Without hierarchy of some kind, you can “aspire” to whatever you want but it is pretty meaningless if you “win” simply because you are a unique snowflake just like all the other unique snowflakes.
No one should trust their own judgement solely without some external reality checks. Even wildly individualistic types have their own hierarchies. It’s not necessarily a hierarchy of the Powers-that-be but it is a hierarchy of a kind.
A society that knows how to fit people together usefully into these hierarchical groups is going to function together better than one that tells everyone they are all equally special and then abandons them to try to figure out their place on their own. Modern social apathy is directly linked to this rejection of hierarchy; the social machinery is broken and we tell people that this is the way things are supposed to be and they are now “free to choose” their own path when we’ve wrecked the path.
I wonder if Jonathan would have written these same words 10 years later. If this was the definition of the Right he had in 1994, his view seems to have deepened and got more sophisticated later. It actually reminds me a bit of justifications that Communist intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre gave in defense of their politics – life has no essential meaning apart from what we give it, so why not become Communists? His argument here could be summed up as, “Well, the Right wants to defend institutions that already exist, and they worked well, and besides, societies can’t function without hierarchies.” Not terribly convincing, in my view. Personally, I don’t see how one could be both a nihilist and a Rightist, and Jonathan’s later lectures don’t sound nihilistic in spirit to me.
Thank you for saying what you said Mr. Morgan. When I read this, I went running to find a definition of nihilism. There are many, but the one that caught my mind was a 1941 essay by Leo Strauss about German Nihilism. It was very clever and well argued except for the fact he used as his authority Hermann Rauschning. That name rang a bell and he wrote Hitler Speaks. I read that book because in one of Savitri Devi’s books she goes off on a tangent about Rauschning. Also, revisionists have debunked the facts in his book. It was very clear to me that she was right. It was an imaginative discourse claiming to be true. True as in the many tales of Auschwitz that could not have possibly happened. I realized that oh dear, I was entering verboten territory. Who am I to dispute the great Leo Strauss? But the question really is who has he fooled? If he is wrong here, where else is he wrong? Clearly, something I cannot answer. I have only read his Persecution and the Art of Writing which I found both sinister and fascinating and beyond me in many ways.
It is almost IMPOSSIBLE to exaggerate the damage the liberal left has done to Western Nations. It would take a large tome, to even begin to state the horrible consequences of allowing leftist control to reign in the Western World for some hundred years now. Mr. Bowden diagnoses the problem accurately, “…….the right supports structures that already exist and give life meaning”. This is the key, the answer, to why the Western World is in a total state of chaos today.
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