Ideological Foundations of The Nouvelle Droite
Part 6

3,776 words

The Struggle Against the System

On this point in particular, I refer to the respective articles in the selected texts of the Nouvelle Droite. However, in order to expand upon the reflections contained there, I will summarize the essential lines of Guillaume Faye’s book Le Système à tuer les peuples.

According to the author, this macro-structure, based on the organization of technology and the economy, bears the characteristics of a System, [1] that is, something mechanical, timeless, and anorganic (lacking inner life).

The System has no other legitimacy than the nihilism of the pursuit of happiness and well-being, no other sovereign than an abstract individual, Homo universalis, based on artificial, homogeneous, planetary needs, and no other government than a confused coordination of economic networks and interests, likewise economic and transnational in character.

The criteria chosen by the System as determinants of membership are techno-economic rather than political-territorial. The inhabitant of the Western System is not defined by his nationality, but by his lifestyle, his mode of consumption. The planet is no longer experienced as a space, but rather as a zonal ensemble serving as an instrumental support for goods and services. Territoriality is interpreted solely as an instrument of economic and commercial security (preservation of exchange networks, extraction centers for raw materials, maintenance of market-zones for the sale of commercial products). The planet is experienced instrumentally and perceived as a juxtaposition of specialized zones. The nations of the Western world are not differentiated by their inner substance, but by their functional characteristics. Each nation is a technical and economic sub-set of the Western world. Differences between nations end up as ornamental, folkloric matters, becoming tourist curiosities necessary to maintain the fiction of diversity. The System does not impose itself upon ethno-national realities, but superimposes itself upon them. Its praxis, economic, cultural, and financial in nature, empties national reality of all inner content, and its cosmopolitanism erodes every notion of territorial origin. Its cultural products synthesize elements from all provenances, in order to sell the product to the greatest possible number of consumers across the world, since it has been reduced to the lowest common cultural denominator. The System proceeds not by conquest or repression, but by the slow digestion of the dominant forms of life within a society, which are gradually marginalized by the material and spiritual structures of the System.

The System employs the same procedure as the Church, which through religious syncretism superimposed its dogmas and rites upon pagan religions, which were progressively forgotten.

Its developmental logic is synchronic and escapes any idea of tradition or destiny. Its nature is not to live as an organism, but to function as a machine. The System desires nothing other than the end of history, since history implies a metamorphosis in the meaning of the world and of things, whereas the System wishes only to transform forms and maintain its current stable equilibrium, in which business and the globalization of behaviors are not hindered by any unforeseen event. Drawing on the progressivism of humanist rationalism, it never contemplates that history might change direction against it. History can only be the quantitative accumulation of the economic and moral progress already achieved.

The System has a historical precedent in Christendom. The Western System would be the secular, material, and late fulfillment of the universal Christian commonwealth. The factors of homogenization were once religious, moral, and ritual; today they are technical, ideological, and economic. Specificity was then combated in the name of the principles of Judeo-Christian monotheism; today it is combated in the name of the humanitarian and economic ideal of individualism.

The System produces the homogenization of customs which leads to the establishment of a single human type (the planetary petty-bourgeois). Homogenization spreads according to a cultural-economic logic, affecting first customs, that is, choices of consumption. Cultural behaviors correspond to economic preferences; and given that Western companies aspire to create international markets, they must unify lifestyles (and therefore consumption patterns). The imposition of the Western “system of objects” entails the adoption of simplistic cultural symbols based on simple, manufactured desires or sensations, atomized, individual, and strictly material.

To accustom populations to this homogeneous type of consumption, their minds must first be prepared.

Advertising strategies modify mental structures in the direction of an acculturation based on the habits of the international consumer. Once these consumer habits are established, the institutionalization of economic habits and consumer objects (goods and services) will ensure the permanence of Western mental structures.

The consolidation of the System will take place through fashion, which maintains the fiction of “pseudo-novelty,” counterbalancing a way of life that is increasingly homogeneous. These movements of fashion are essential to the maintenance of the System, since they create artificial passions and divert the energy of peoples, who no longer focus on the political and the historical, but on infra-artistic mobilizations that are nothing more than frenzied leisure. At the same time, individual depersonalization goes hand in hand with the superficiality of lifestyles that are justified not by tradition, but by desires controlled and programmed by marketing specialists.

The Western System must be understood as the planetary extension not of the United States as a nation, but of American society, of the globalizable part of that society—namely, that which embodies the greatest universality and is common to all mental structures, and therefore the most primitive. It is not a copy of American society, but since the Western System is based on the same ideological foundations, it adopts the same social ends. It is not a matter of premeditated political will; the United States simply leads this movement because it is best adapted to this globalist environment. However, the strictly American hegemony over the modes of life of the Western macro-system now tends to decline. In the future, we will witness a “de-Americanization” of the West, concomitant with an increasing Americanization (“Americanomorphism”).

The System operates through incentive-based self-regulation. A series of separate, short-range strategies meet or converge, without any conscious will animating the whole with long-term decisions. The System functions on its own, with no end other than its own expansion. Crises are not resolved through anti-crisis decisions but are steered and used as means of internal regulation. Furthermore, this self-regulation is carried out by a planetary technocratic class of administrators, managers, and officials whose motivation is the internal logic of their own organizations.

The philosophy of the System is based on rationality and the claim that no problem exists that cannot be formulated technically, which means that public decisions are increasingly expressed in quantifiable and mathematizable terms. The mode of domination of the System eliminates direction in favor of regulation by short-term concerted micro-decisions.

The System presents itself as an addition of strategies without an overall political design. These strategies from public administrations, large public and private corporations, and the technical, commercial, and investment operations of multinational centers obey no national or imperial policy. They merely coexist through the common and implicit ideology of establishing a global mercantilist society.

The System is based on a depoliticized form of domination. Social consensus is not obtained through coercive (political) or persuasive (ideological) means, but through private economic adherence to a mode of life, consumption, and production. The conservative power of the System lies in the fact that it has inculcated forms of life, already internalized, to which no one is willing to renounce. Furthermore, individuals are the authors of their own alienation, since their participation in the sectors of techno-economic activity in which they are deeply involved, given their hyper-pragmatic nature (consumption, leisure, profession, administrative networks), leads them to have a vested interest in its maintenance.

The System depoliticizes peoples through the false politicization of public opinion. The System uses it to demonstrate that it is based on general consent. Public opinion is the simulacrum of popular opinion as the System would like it to be. Consequently, the people are given a falsified image of themselves, and they imagine that this image, served by the mass media, corresponds to reality. From there, mimicry and conformism take root in society, since individuals believe that this model is the one held by the majority.

The founding fathers of liberalism and democratic ideology are responsible for the globalist order. Liberalism, already in the 18th century, preferred the socio-economic model to political communities and the State; commercial and contractual ties were deemed preferable to relations based on historical and political bonds. Furthermore, it had already posited that the best antidote to politics, which generates conflict, was commerce. Marxism likewise draws its inspiration from the same idea of a pacified, denationalized, and depoliticized universe.

As for the philosophical roots of the System, they must be sought in the rationalist tradition (Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz), thinkers who present a mechanistic thought based on physics and geometry. Descartes’ dualist thought opposes the quantifiable (extension, motion) to the non-quantifiable, in his opinion of lesser importance. This leads him to base his thought on what is mechanically calculable and objectifiable, and on the preeminence of what is useful and practical. Hobbes, for his part, does not see the people as an organic community, but as a mass of individuals that must be organized through coercion. Moreover, for Hobbes, law is the cause of order. This “nomocracy” leads to identifying the political with the juridical, to mistrusting any politics that arises from the will of a people, and to preferring a strategy dictated by a techno-economic normativity of universal value. John Locke would reinforce this mechanistic and abstract conception of the people. For him, the social contract, understood as an addition of individuals, is the creator of the social bond. Moreover, in his ideological view we find the idea that common sense, a sort of natural reason, transcends institutions.

In this way, the ideological foundations of Western civilization are constructed: peoples do not possess by historical genealogy the order that suits them; this order must be created by reason. The aim of society is to realize a technical mechanism that benefits individuals, and in no case to assume the political history of a people. In these ideologies we find the foundations of the preeminence of functional activity over community life, the dominance of pragmatic concern over spiritual mobilization, and finally, the formulation of social individualism: the group is reduced to the mathematical sum of individuals; the people have no specific historical reality; all peoples are interchangeable; and what must count are the mechanisms and laws that produce the same effects everywhere.

The ideology of the System conceals its latent totalitarianism through two ideas: the philosophy of human rights and its technocratic optimism. The American version of the ideology of human rights insists less on the political rights of citizens than on the pursuit of happiness and the right to resist any sovereignty. The purpose assigned to politics is to allow human beings to enjoy their goods. Such a philosophy, inspired by Anglo-Saxon hedonists and by Locke, establishes the doctrinal foundations of the Welfare State, in which the management of public well-being prevails over the political determination of the nation’s destiny. Moreover, this philosophy of human rights has the mission of converting the entire world, determining for all human beings, beyond their cultures, a single ideal (free will, well-being), assigning to all governments the task of satisfying it. This pretension is based both on the belief in the existence of natural rights and on the feeling of divine election in which Americans believe. Likewise, the American version of human rights implies the idea that the individual constitutes the basic unit of life. The historical destiny of a people is provisional in relation to the existential destiny of the individual.

The legitimization of the System is also based on an interpretation of science and technology as activities rationally directed toward the attainment of individual (economic) well-being. Technology is considered only in a prosaic manner, as an instrument for the planned regulation of existence and the world, for the elimination of the unforeseen, of adventure, and of politics. This scientism is based on the pragmatic illusion that all problems will be solved by technology, and all human aspirations will be satisfied. It is only a question of technical competence. For liberals, a crisis is explained by a lack of technical competence, and for a Marxist by the non-application of dialectical materialism, reputedly scientific. In both cases, technical objectivism prevails. Phenomena of power, nationality, and the mentality of peoples are considered imponderables to be eliminated, so that technical solutions can be imposed. Historical aspirations and cultural myths are not legitimate, because they are not measurable.

This disappearance of historical consciousness in favor of practical functionalism is an involution toward animality. Animal consciousness depends on a biological program of practical and technical response to the imperatives of survival. The System intends to transform the planet into a kind of stable bio-mechanical machine, but the biological structures of man make him an unpredictable and unprogrammed being, who replaces the technical programming of the animal with historical consciousness, based on voluntary, risky, and multiple decisions.

The System not only seeks the end of history, but the material construction of a stable world order. The System has replaced macro-variations with an amplification of micro-variations, which maintain an illusion of progress and are a substitute for history. Our systems of objects are in perpetual mutation, but the meaning of our existence remains unchanged. The System directs technical novelties which, far from inciting us to adventure, immerse us even further into domestic comfort.

Crises are not suffered but managed. The System is about to undertake a readjustment, a redeployment of its main economic and industrial structures. Thanks to this crisis, new zones of the Third World and the socialist countries will be integrated into the global System.

Western civilization celebrates, but does not live its historical and cultural past. The past is not internalized, but placed beside the present as a nostalgic and aesthetic décor. In this way it loses all proper historical value capable of awakening the memory of peoples. While the past of a people remains organically alive and present, the characteristic of the System is that it systematizes traditions, that is, it includes them as fixed structures of a planned subsystem (of leisure or education). Orphaned peoples find in this intellectualization of the search for their roots and in the nostalgia of the past the necessary drug to admit the absence of popular destiny. In this way, the cult of the past fulfills an ornamental and exculpatory function, in which the uprooted tragically believe that they exist as something.

The System does not create traditions and does not preserve memory of itself. The System is polarized around temporary ways of life and activity, which generate almost no evolution in its own development. Daily life, made up of the consumption of goods and fashions that soon fall into oblivion, is by definition obsolescent and does not become fixed in mental structures.

The theme of progress also serves as a mythical spring for the Western system. In this conception, it is a matter of reinforcing what already exists, in an additional and quantitative way. This conception of progress does not incite the System to dynamism and self-evolution, but rather consolidates its stability and fixation. In this way, the function of progress is to divert peoples from a true perception of the future, understood as a changing, adventurous, and revolutionary destiny.

This desire for hyper-stability, security, pacification, and well-being is a protozoan desire that reduces human aspirations to the pursuit of a biological homogeneity. Whereas popular cultural values are evolutionary, differentiated, and ever more complex, the System unifies all ideals in the maximization of the same biological drives, calculated and formulated mathematically. By basing its universal ideal of civilization on a practical response to those biological impulses common to the entire species, the System falls into primitivism and a common, infra-cultural, and regressive model.

Western societies have ceased to be organic, and society is composed of a disordered juxtaposition of techno-economic and administrative sectors, rationally organized, each with its own logic. The whole of this civilization has no overall meaning; it responds instead to sectoral, pragmatic, instrumental ends. Institutions are confused with technical gears, with technical apparatuses that take over activities traditionally produced by human processes. Techniques do not extend institutions; they modify them. This phenomenon is meta-biological and brings about a second human nature (the technological apparatus is our own organic act). In this way, man can for the first time objectify himself totally.

Civil society, segmented, is permeated only by practical issues, constituted by concerns whose formulation and solution are perfectly technical, mechanical, and procedural. Practical concerns, having no specific cultural formulation, appear everywhere according to the same structural schemas. Whereas traditions, which vary from one group to another, allow all types of behaviors to subsist, the System’s single code of life, based on the coldness of techno-economic requirements, implies a regression of customs which, on the biological plane, weakens humanity’s adaptive capacities by making most possible human behaviors disappear.

Society is not experienced as a coherent whole, but as an unconnected aggregate of intersecting circuits. Reference centers disappear, and the domination of the System is based on uprootedness. Existence in this hyper-pragmatic society unfolds through a movement of relationships planned along vectorial axes, rationally organized (programmed circuits). Carried along by the vectorial movement of his programmed existence, the individual is uprooted from his people. The pursuit of his comfort dissuades him from any political interest and isolates him from his community.

Supporters of the System are found both in the most masochistic left on the terrain of humanitarianism and in the right most attached to mercantilism and the elitist cult of money. This liberal right finds in the Western System the justification of its economic interests and its political philosophy: the defense of freedom, understood as the law of the jungle and as a pretext for overriding ethno-cultural communities, so troublesome for world-scale economies; the defense of the West, that is, of the Nipponic-Atlantic co-prosperity sphere, which pays scant heed to the historical unity of European civilization. The social-democratic left pays lip service to criticizing the System, but expects the System to realize the world society of humanism and fraternity, overlooking the System’s defects, since its distrust of states and nations is great, and its illusion that the melting pot of global well-being will wipe away human misfortunes is greater still.

Nor do environmentalists or pacifists truly contest the System, for by radicalizing the individualist postulate of egotic happiness, by constructing a pseudo-communitarian model that eliminates the idea of destiny and combativeness, by resorting to false regionalisms that are nothing but a way of fleeing the harsh reality of life, by fully sacrificing themselves to the moral idols of the secular religion of human rights, these ideologies, apparently dissenting, are nothing more than the impatient and exacerbated expression of hyper-bourgeoisism.

For it is these pseudo-dissenters who strive to live, with obsessive intensity, the bourgeois norms of existence: narcissistic well-being, a social sphere without exigencies, the primacy of individual pleasures over communal mobilizations, the rejection of any demographic or ethnic discipline. Since they advocate total hedonism, they are the System’s bad conscience and its consummate conscience.

Nor do Christian currents—ecumenical, vaguely dissenting from the Church, or simply leftist—truly combat the System. By adhering to a worldwide ideal, endorsing the individualism of human rights, legitimizing the hedonistic needs of the “children of God,” entities as abstract and undifferentiated as consumers, and preparing minds for the prestige of the paradigm of the fusion of peoples, Christians objectively build the mental structures that lead to an egalitarian society of global consumption.

By contrast, all those who share the vital philosophy of Europe’s pagan mentality rise up against the System: creative will, attachment to the community, considered as a springboard for adventures, for conquest, and for political and cultural combat; all those who reject cosmopolitanism, bourgeoisism, hedonism, and the New York model of subculture.

Only from national and popular revolutions can a rebellion arise against the planetary civilization of mediocre well-being and the Gulag. Only a revolution can allow each people to recover history and act according to its destiny. Now, it is possible to undertake a revolutionary critique of the System while salvaging technique, conceived in the manner of Jünger and Heidegger as a possibility of “mobilization” and “seizing hold” of the world. European peoples will not confront the System by taking refuge in neo-agrarianism or Paleolithic dreams, but will be able to affirm themselves as peoples once they subject technique to a historical project grounded in the desire for discovery, adventure, and the domination of matter. One must not forget that the destiny of technique is not comfort and laziness, but the realization of the myths inscribed, since the dream of Icarus, in the subconscious of the European peoples.

Only peoples and nations, acting separately, will resolve crucial international questions—never an international bureaucracy. Only through the political will of states, by creating alliances based on concrete projects centered on relations of power and mutual interest, will the challenges at the end of the century be met. The salvation of humanity is an empty phrase. What is at stake is the future of each people. The human species will survive only if peoples preserve not merely their differences, but enter into competition with one another.

Finally, it is worth qualifying here the expression “right to difference,” [2] which the ND has popularized. According to them—and here they differ from the attempt by egalitarian ideologies to co-opt the term—true difference is not that of contemporary mercantile society, a tribal society segmented, divided into ghettos and watertight compartments, differentiated according to an individualist logic. For the ND, this false conception of difference corresponds to the construction of a homogeneous humanity composed of similar nation-states within which appear heterogeneous and disparate societies without common historical and cultural bonds, in the manner of American society, which is the universal model of the West.

Rather than a homogeneous world composed of juxtaposed, heterogeneous societies, a heterogeneous world composed of homogeneous and rooted peoples is preferable.

The struggle of the future, which has already begun, has nothing to do with a right–left confrontation, nor with the East–West dialectic, nor with the North–South conflict; it is the struggle for the cause of peoples, the struggle of life, as an ever-changing plurality, against egalitarian regression, against the programmed amnesia of the System, and against the stoppage of history.

Translated into English by Francisco Albanese.

Notes

[1] Faye, Guillaume: Le Système à tuer les peuples, Copernic, Paris, 1981, pp. 21-177

[2] Faye, Guillaume: “Faire éclater le Système,” in: La Troisième Voie, op. cit., p. 28