The Invisible Ideology

2,538 words

German translation here

I must make a confession: I have a strong libertarian streak. I know, you don’t have to tell me. Yes, we’re supposed to be fascists, right? But sometimes, to my horror I wonder if I’m not a knee-jerk anti-fascist.

The thought nags me now and then, sort of like my fear that I might actually be part Cherokee (an old family legend – without basis, I assure you). It comes upon me every time I’m putting my shoes back on after having passed through the security theater at the airport. I try to smile and think of it all as performance art, but I can’t quite manage it. There’s something that really irks me about being commanded to take off my shoes and belt and marched through an x-ray machine with my hands raised surrender-style. (I usually extend my middle fingers just a wee bit as a subtle message.)

You know the feeling. Though I can’t ever recall being patted down or having my luggage opened, the experience still leaves me fuming. And as I slip my shoes and Thor’s Hammer back on, I reflect on my indignation and think “Boy, you’d make a lousy brownshirt.” (Or blackshirt.) Because, after all, didn’t those guys go around demanding “Papers please!” in a haughty nasal tone? And wouldn’t good party members have gladly marched through x-ray machines, without doing anything special with their middle fingers?

Or, consider my attitude about waterboarding. I was filled with moral indignation when I heard that the U.S. government was doing this to get information out of people. It really disgusted me. But then I heard, once more, that sharp, nasal voice in my head: “Ve hef vays to make you talk!” Wouldn’t I want to see those who threaten my people waterboarded? Like just about everybody in Washington, for instance? And wouldn’t I willingly supervise? I feel positively dizzy with moral confusion. Am I just a colossal hypocrite? The same goes for my feelings about wiretapping, surveillance, and the draft. I’m outraged! But wouldn’t I institute those things, given half the chance?

Perhaps most significant of all is my attitude toward propaganda. A couple of years ago I bought some package that gives me high-speed internet and, in addition, about a bazillion television channels. I didn’t want the TV, it just came with the other thing. But I couldn’t resist the temptation to watch a few programs, and was quickly reminded of why I stopped watching television years earlier. You just can’t escape the constant barrage of insipid, heavy-handed P.C. propaganda. Everyone has a multi-racial cast of friends. Everyone is miscegenating. Everyone has a brilliant black doctor. All males are weak and hapless (except the black ones), all females tough and capable. Black people have to live in fear of marauding bands of whites. Mexicans are tall and handsome. Gays are just like everybody else. And thank God we stopped Hitler from taking over the entire world and making everybody listen to ABBA.

Television is like a kind of alternative ideological reality. It’s a veil of maya which, if you watch enough of it, occludes your perception of reality. It envelopes you in a cloud of unknowing. Of course, you can’t escape the propaganda just by switching off the TV. It’s everywhere. And it repulses me and makes me seethe with anger – just as it does you. The content of it is infuriating. The ubiquity of it is positively oppressive. But here again I feel pangs of bad faith. Because if given half the opportunity, I would outdo Dr. Goebbels in getting my own message out. I’d saturate television with the Right messages. I’d ban rap and, yes, make everyone listen to ABBA. So, once more, I do some soul searching and ask myself if I’m not just a lousy hypocrite. And, to stick the knife in and twist it a bit (remember: I hate myself), I ask myself if I’m really any better than those leftists who do things like ban political parties in the name of protecting democracy.

Well, there are at least a couple of responses to my problem. Both have validity, but the second one goes a lot deeper than the first. The first response is simply this: things like Homeland Security, waterboarding, surveillance, and propaganda are conditionally, not intrinsically bad. They are bad only depending upon whose agenda they serve. If the cause is just – and the emergency real – then searching people, surveilling them, and even waterboarding them can be justified. An example that will immediately be persuasive to my readers is simply this: suppose we really had to do all those things to save our people and our culture? Ordinarily, waterboarding would, quite rightly, strike us as barbaric. But desperate times really do sometimes call for desperate measures. “But do the ends justify the means?” the people in John Lennon glasses will peep. Well, as Greg Johnson is fond of saying, “What else would justify the means?”

What makes me indignant about Homeland Security and waterboarding and surveillance is that they’re all being done to prop up a sick, decaying, morally bankrupt society. There was a time when America really did stand for individual freedom – for letting people alone to lead their lives as they chose, sort of on the Taoist principle that “He who governs best, governs least.” But that era lasted about thirty seconds, and is long gone. Since then America has stood for nothing except the dollar.

Whatever America may do in the world today, it’s never acting to preserve the freedom of Davy Cocketty individualists who simply want to be left alone to plow their own acre. It acts in the interests of fat cat sociopaths who see Davy and his acre as raw material to be exploited and plundered. These people never see further in time than the next financial quarter, and no further in space than the limits of the McMansion housing them and their spoiled, entitled spawn. These are the folks who didn’t want to pick their own cotton, and so bequeathed us die Schwarzenfrage. They brought us the coolies as well. And now they bring us the great tide of fertile brown Nibelungen, wreathed in sickly-sweet clouds of diversity gas (courtesy of the intellectual gas chambers that are our universities).

So, the way I see it is that I empty my pockets and have my organs irradiated because Daddy Warbucks can’t pay for his McMansion unless he can travel securely from coast to coast. Our fathers and grandfathers got drafted (i.e., had their liberty taken away), and fought and sometimes died to insure a good future for Mexican peasants. And Arabs and other suspicious-looking people get waterboarded to safeguard a society in which Shaneedra will always have sufficient food stamps to buy both the pickles and the grape soda, and will never have to choose between them.

In short, all these things that ruffle my libertarian feathers are bad only because they are serving the wrong system, the wrong ideology. “But,” someone might object, “ideology as such is oppressive. (That’s why being an ideologue is a bad thing, after all.) You’re just proposing to eliminate one smothering ideology and to smother people with another.”

But that’s not true actually, and this is where I introduce you to the other, deeper response to the fears I expressed earlier about my apparent hypocrisy. This is where I introduce you, gentle reader, to my invisible ideology.

You see, it’s not the case that people find any and all ideologies to be oppressive. The ideologies they find oppressive are the ones that somehow go against the grain of human life. The ones that require us to deny what we see with our own eyes; to engage in doublethink. The ones that require us to want things we don’t want, or to deny our deepest desires. The ones that deny us things that make life worth living, and demand that we work for the meaningless and unachievable. Communism, of course, is a classic example of such an ideology. And our Brave New World synthesis of soft-Marxism and consumerism is, if anything, worse. Communism killed a lot more bodies, but our system kills souls. (At least the Communists had ideals they were willing to die for.)

The great lesson of Plato’s Republic has to do precisely with the harmfulness of ideologies that go against the grain. Almost no one understands this book. It is usually taken at face value, as Socrates’s (or Plato’s) proposal for an ideal society. In fact, it is a critique of the very concept of an ideal society. Each of the major proposals Socrates makes somehow requires human nature to be changed, or ignored. He proposes that women should serve in the military, arguing – with transparent irony – that the difference in physical strength between men and woman is an irrelevant consideration. He proposes that marriage be banned, and that children be produced through arranged one-night stands. The children will be taken from their mothers and raised by professionals. Will the mother’s protest? No matter, we’ll just teach them to think differently. No one will know who their children are, or who their parents are. And everyone will be happy with this, because all the stories, and songs, and art that people are exposed to will have been carefully manufactured to send the right messages.

Plato’s society won’t work, because there really are significant, unchangeable differences between the sexes. And people have a natural desire to find life partners and marry. They fall in love, and want to form exclusive bonds with the object of their love. Mothers have a natural desire to keep their children close – and this desire can’t be eliminated through “re-education.” Fathers want to know who their children are, and to help their children advance in life. And all the stories, songs, and art of Plato’s city would fail to feed the soul, because they don’t sing of real life, but of its ideological perversion.

The ideology you and I advocate goes with the grain, not against it. It is “invisible,” because it is in conformity with life as such, and so does not “stick out” by requiring us to act against our nature. Ours is the Saville Row suit of ideologies: so beautifully tailored to the human form, it feels like you’re not wearing any ideology at all.

In fact, I’m sorely tempted not to call it “ideology” at all. For it is simply the truth. What we are all about is affirming and supporting natural necessities: seeing to it that men and women achieve happiness and fulfillment as men and woman; recognizing and utilizing natural inequalities of intelligence and ability; strengthening families; overcoming differences of wealth and social status by strengthening bonds based on racial or national identity; preserving folkways and traditions, the ways each people has evolved for being in the world. We are the party of life, and of reality. Ours is the one true way, the way in accord with life and the real. All else is mere “ideology”: floating systems of ideas detached from reality – every one of them a revolt against life.

To our opponents, of course, our way is very much a visible ideology – simply because it opposes their way. Their reaction to it can be likened to that of a mental patient caught up in delusions, but still capable of lucid moments. In those moments, one can confront him with the falseness of his delusions and one can see in his eyes the glimmer of recognition. But this is immediately followed by angry denial – denial that is just a bit too angry, too insistent. You see, the patient likes his delusions and is quite wedded to them. He knows, at some level, that they are false, but he does not want to wake up from them.

It’s just the same with leftists. They hate us and our “ideology” so much because it is an expression of the reality they do not want to wake to. Because leftists have bodies like the rest of us, with the exact same desires and drives that the rest of us do, they know in their guts that their ideas are false. We speak the truths of life, but life is a reproach to them. Why? How can they be so perverse, so disconnected from life? It’s the same old story Nietzsche told. And it all has to do, again, with the body. The mentally or physically weak, the misshapen, the dull, the talentless, the cowardly all have the capacity to respond to what life has handed them by envying and resenting those who got a better deal. And they erect ideologies to right the “wrongs” dealt by nature – moral smokescreens that hide the basest of all human motivations: revenge against life; against the healthy, the beautiful, the prosperous, and the good.

That there are such spiritually misshapen people is yet another natural necessity we must be cognizant of – and vigilant against. Because there are always going to be some human beings who will revolt against nature and spread destructive lies, our way has to involve safeguarding nature and truth. And that is going to have to involve such things as surveillance. Perhaps even having our papers checked now and then. And, yes, it may lead to waterboarding the enemies of life. Boo hoo.

What about propaganda? Well, the sort of “propaganda” we would spread is really nothing more or less than the truth. And mass therapy for the deluded: mass deprogramming of those whose minds have been warped by decades of manipulation by the anti-life party. But bad ideologies, because they are against life, aren’t too hard to kill. And after a while our propaganda would simply wither away and be replaced by the emergence once more of genuine art. Not art in the service of ideology like we find today, but art that celebrates life and expresses eternal verities.

Our ideology is invisible because it is just the natural way for man, recognized as such and put into words. At least, it is invisible once it is put into place – and becomes, once more, the accepted way. When that happens, it will feel as if there could never be another way, and no reason even to conceive of one. At the moment, of course, it is quite visible to us – because it is a concept, not yet a fact. It shows up as an “ideology” because it offers itself as an alternative idea to the dominant, unnatural ideology now strangling the Western world. My readers have all grown up under that ideology and been imprinted with it – even if they now seek to reject it. Our way thus appears to them as one of a number of ideologies, the one they happen to consciously adhere to.

But it is important to understand that our way is best described not as an idea but simply as the reality we have yet to wake to – as we are all of us, to one extent or another, caught in the dream world created by life-denying ideology.