Schmitt - Concept of the Political

[Anonymous No.20520557]

There's a burgeoning movement of right-leaning anons on /lit/ who think that Schmitt and his book, the Concept of the Political, is able to refute the grounds of cosmopolitan liberal democracy. I sympathize with them, truly. It's hard to stomach clown world as it is, and it's poised to only get worse. But I think few of these neo-Machiavellians realize that, with his enshrining of the friend-enemy distinction, Schmitt merely turns back the clock to the founding of modern liberalism, 17th century England, without offering a suitable alternative. Writing in an era of boundless political and religious bloodshed, motivated over quibbling legal and theological concerns, Hobbes sought in Leviathan a political science to permanently end concerns over sovereignty forever.

Schmitt returns to Hobbes by retracing his footsteps to the state of nature, but as Leo Strauss points out, Schmitt fails to abandon the path that leads to the "horizon of liberalism." Schmitt accepts the Hobbesian state of nature, that we are destined for conflict, but he does little to interpret said idea nor discuss its implications. No war is ever fought for its own sake. Why do we go to war? To preserve our resources, our customs, our ways of life, and our understanding of the good... and ultimately to seek peace. But what fundamentally *grounds* the good? Schmitt, in his modernist approach to religion, has no answer to this question, except to repeat the Machiavellian idea that there is an ideology of religious character behind every political order. In essence, Schmitt only advocates for another form of nihilism.

1/3

>dear jannies, philosophical discussion is allowed with references to books. I have referenced two here, Concept of the Political and Leviathan, and I am striving to cultivate a high quality literary discussion. Please allow this thread to stay up.

[Anonymous No.20520560]

Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction isn't even a novel concept—it was discussed to death in Plato's Republic and ultimately rejected as an insufficient explanation for justice. So what do we ought to consider in its stead? Unlike Schmitt, Hobbes does have an answer to this question in his Leviathan—the distinctions between groups are ultimately arbitrary material arrangements (nominalism). Thus, why preserve them? The only common goal that survives the nominalist razor is the desire to seek peace. Eventually, after surrounding our "rights" (the ability to do what whatever can please with their own powers) to the absolute sovereign, these arbitrary differences will level out, and peace can be achieved. It may be a gray peace, but it is better than death.

Is Hobbesian liberalism also nihilistic? Sure. Does managerialism obscure the centers of power through indirect government, as Machiavelli would have liked? Does liberalism have an uncomfortable relationship with power? OF COURSE. The Cathedral is supposed to run like an autonomous machine, distributing power evenly among the financial elites, who themselves can never be powerful enough to dominate the rest of the oligarchy, allowing the (a)political project can continue unabated for the time being. The whole point of liberalism is to cheapen the drive behind politics, to channel its thumotic energy into economic ventures because it is so destructive when it is unchained.

2/3

[Anonymous No.20520567]

By siphoning away the Dionysian elements of life, liberalism offers us a slow path towards death, one of amusement, consumption, and mediocrity. But at least it also chastens the flame on the wicker, buying us time to come up with a better, life-affirming political solution in the future. In lieu of religion, this advantage alone makes modern liberalism superior to whatever Schmitt has to offer—the desire to pull back the curtain, expose the gaping chasm in the heart of Western society, and then crash the ship with no survivors. How do we go beyond Schmitt, Burnham, Francis, and company to defeat the plague of modernity? Must we return to the ancients? Divine revelation? If so, how do we bring about a metapolitical change? I'd like to see these questions answered. Those conversations would be far more productive than another dissection of the Cathedral or a nostalgic longing for any of three failed modernist ideologies (capitalism, communism, third positionism... all liberal humanisms when examined at their roots).

3/3

[Anonymous No.20520568]

I would puff a ring of cigar smoke in the face of this faggot and all nu-rightoid thinkers like Spergler and Evola.
Heil Imperator Favci

[Anonymous No.20520581]

>>20520568
You may as well. Until we get behind the veil of reality and see it for what it is, we might as well enjoy ourselves in this hysterical bacchanal.

[Anonymous No.20520591]

Nazism is not liberal humanism retard. It's quite clearly something distinct and worse. Anyway, I don't care about spirituality or anything gay like that. I just want a well-ordered state, if that makes me a liberal Enlightenment humanist then so be it.

[Anonymous No.20520600]

>>20520591
>Nazism is not liberal humanism retard
Who do you think invented nationalism in the first place?

[Anonymous No.20520606]

(Gemjak dialogue since that's all that Twitter migrants understand)
Gemjak: Spirituality. Aristocracy. Retvrn. Democracy is bad/fake.
Chad: Eugenics. Space colonization. Vote Macron.
Gemjak: Ancient/Medieval nostalgia.
Chad: Futurism. Burn history books.

[Anonymous No.20520614]

>>20520600
Nobody "invented" nationalism. It's primordial.

[Anonymous No.20520623]

>>20520614
>t. presentist history retard

[Anonymous No.20520626]

>>20520614
lol

[Anonymous No.20520641]

>>20520623
That defines people who think the only nationalism to have ever existed is a form that from a very narrow period of history (~17th-19th century) better though.

[Anonymous No.20520661]

>>20520600
Explain how mystical Aryan supremacy is liberal humanism. Nazism was a lot different than "German nationalism."

[Anonymous No.20520682]

>>20520661
A society's chosen political ideology will eventually assume a quasi-mystical posture. This is Schmitt's critique of liberal democracy, and it equally applies to German nationalism. I think it's worth pointing out that Nazi ideology was far from consistent, often casting a wide net that hoped to include everyone from neo-Pagans to Catholics in the project of the Nazi state. In other words, they had their own "kulturterror" going on to mirror the convoluted, hypocritical, and ugly mishmash of peoples, ideas, customs, etc., that the America brought to WW2 in pic-related.

[Anonymous No.20520683]

>>20520560
Where in Plato?

[Anonymous No.20520684]

>>20520557
Schmitt has other books but midwits only ever discuss this one. Sad!

[Anonymous No.20520697]

>>20520567
>defeat the plague of modernity
It is truly amazing how stupid you all are, and the books you claim to read do nothing to help, since they were penned by your fellow morons. You express the very conquest of modernity simply by being alive. You are almost certainly part of the dead weight of your society and do almost nothing that adds value, and this situation is only possible because of a vast surplus, and your lack of control over this surplus makes you anxious, because you hate the people who appear to exercize control over it for various reasons—something this site has been seething over now for the better part of a decade. But your liberal, modern masters are ultimately quite benevolent, they've allowed you makework and an education and have trained you on how to least violently consume the obscenely large surplus, by participating in a highly denominated economic life wherein each thing to desire has its price and you must set aside your own leftovers to get their leftovers. They haven't liquidated you—it's truly remarkable. You haven't been made to die in war, nor shut up in a monastery or a rectory. You are "free" and there is no way to truly rebel against freedom—it's too appealing. There will be no defeat of modernity any more than there was a defeat of feudalism or classical imperialism or whatever else. You will never be a kshatriya or whatever the larp of the month is. You either have power to command others or you don't. No rearranging of old symbols will produce this.

[Anonymous No.20520703]

>>20520557
Thumos is definitely a valuable concept

[Anonymous No.20520705]

>>20520682
Nazi ideology was very clear and included the eventual elimination of Catholicism and every other form of Christianity.

[Anonymous No.20520712]

>>20520683
Books I and V of The Republic.

[Anonymous No.20520718]

>>20520705
Nazi ideology is hardly clear about anything except the supremacy of the state and anti-Semitism. They were making it up as they went along.

[Anonymous No.20520729]

>>20520557
Read Ellul.

[Anonymous No.20520735]

>The politics of the conceptual

[Anonymous No.20520736]

>>20520557
Read The Nomos of the Earth.

[Anonymous No.20520741]

>>20520684
>>20520736
nomos of the earth gets BTFO'd by the logos of God

[Anonymous No.20520745]

>>20520568
People like you are why I wake up everyday and count my blessings that I'm not a soulless npc sowing the seeds of my own destruction

[Anonymous No.20520747]

>>20520729
Has he written about everything?

[Anonymous No.20520750]

>>20520623
Go to hell

[Anonymous No.20520755]

>>20520697
seethe, SEETHE

[Anonymous No.20520762]

>>20520750
nations exist on a spectrum mediated by geographical and political circumstance. you don't get "nationalism" until you start drawing lines on a map for one reason or another. you tell me why some lines make more sense than others. or why some cutouts of the map deserve more importance than the others.

[Anonymous No.20520774]

>>20520718
Those things were both in conflict with Christianity and this was made clear in the private writings and even some public statements of leading party officials.

[Anonymous No.20520776]

>>20520755
>he said, using his leisure time to gainlessly argue with strangers about how impotent he is

[Anonymous No.20520783]

>>20520776
you're locked in here with me, yet I'm the only one who's having fun. I think I have the power over you, impotent one. I'll use my freedom to make fun of a system that can't articulate the goodness in freedom, and you will have to sit there and take it like a little bitch.

[Anonymous No.20520793]

>>20520557
War is it’s own justification. Peace is a vice.

[Anonymous No.20520800]

>>20520762
You’re less intelligent than a chimpanzee or a wolf. Even they understand the concept of territory; why it should be held and expanded if possible.

[Anonymous No.20520808]

>>20520800
wolves don't understand anything except the survivalist instinct. the minute you give a wolf consciousness, they'll begin to doubt whether their territories are justly held, whether wolfpacks are the optimal form of wolf organization, if the runts of the pack deserve extra scraps, etc.
>>20520793
war for the sake of war eventually cancels its own existence out in a fiery blaze.

[Anonymous No.20520819]

>>20520762
Nations are primarily created by either ethnic predispositions or eternal myths, something soulless commies will never understand

[Anonymous No.20520827]

>>20520819
>Nations are primarily created by either ethnic predispositions or eternal myths, something soulless commies will never understand

[Anonymous No.20520831]

>>20520819
>yeah bro, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Russians are all totally different people
>Czechs and Slovaks? COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.
>bro trust me it's myth
>NO NOT THE CHRIST MYTH, THAT'S JEWISH PROPAGANDA
at least commies can keep their story straight

[Anonymous No.20520836]

>>20520808
>wolves don't understand anything except the survivalist instinct
Indeed, and the formation of territory-holding social groups based on blood relations which compete against other similar social groups is advantageous to survival of yourself and your genetic lineage.

[Anonymous No.20520841]

>>20520736
Filtered.
Plebs shouldn't read Schmitt.

[Anonymous No.20520845]

>>20520831
>anon can’t into ethnogenesis

[Anonymous No.20520859]

>>20520683
He might be talking about the distinction between the Hellenic oikumene (where conflict results in stasis, or civil strife) and the barbarian world outside the oikumene (where conflict is war, and thus total and zero-sum) described in Book V, IIRC. I wouldn't quite say that it's "rejected as a possible definition of justice" however. It's at the tail end of the half-fanciful description of the ideal state, when Socrates turns to talking about the state's foreign policy, and it's stated pretty matter of fact. Most commentators assume that Plato/Socrates is being perfectly ingenuously "pro-Greek" in saying that the Greeks have a natural kinship that separates them from outsiders, and that while they might fight amongst themselves they have a certain duty to treat each other as, fundamentally, friends and compatriots. It's not quite a theoretical disquisition on the foreign policy of states in general.

OP I don't want to be rude but I have a feeling you are getting your Schmitt strained through a "Straussian" reading that is itself not really Strauss' reading, but a third generation Straussian reading of Strauss that tries to read him as a Fukuyamian avant la lettre, and based on your use of "Cathedral" I'm assuming you're getting this itself strained through some Twitter or Twitter-adjacent blogger ecosystem. I can tell you're making a lot of the "standard" references, the so-called hidden dialogue between Strauss and Schmitt around the Concept of the Political, a second or third generation Straussian reading of Hobbes as a kind of proto-Lockean slayer of the dragon of "political theology" (a term misused by Straussians), etc. But it's all in a jumble and I think in your third post in particular you start to say things that almost are almost internally contradictory.

The essential point you're missing, which is Schmitt's entire point and a point I feel Strauss understand as well but willfully obscured, whereas his disciples seriously misunderstand and vulgarise it, is this: ALL politics is inverted theology. Hobbes' too. You aren't surmounting Schmitt by being a "Hobbesian" (i.e. Straussian "Hobbes would have been a Lockean if he were a little less pessimistic" Lockean-Hobbesian) liberal, because their assumption that liberal societies (in Straussian: "open societies") conclude in a "gray peace" is itself an implicit theology, which has the force and structure of revealed law. This is why it's dangerous to have these things in such a jumble, because getting them directly from the sources (Strauss & Schmitt) would keep the terms clear. For instance, because one would know that Strauss himself is very cognizant of the Nietzschean critique of the "last man" and bourgeois "passive nihilism." Knowing how Strauss himself responded to Nietzsche allows one to bypass the vulgar, latter day Straussians' simplification of Strauss into a "Hobbesian-Lockean" technology.

[Anonymous No.20520862]

>>20520836
>Indeed, and the formation of territory-holding social groups based on blood relations which compete against other similar social groups is advantageous to survival of yourself and your genetic lineage.
and? what's the point?
>>20520845
ethnogenesis is based. I think every nation right now ought to be split into at least a thousand new unique, incompatible, and sovereign ethnicities. just for its own sake. I'm like a schizo scientist, and Earth is my petri dish

[Anonymous No.20520863]

>>20520859
(2)
Schmitt responds to this entire neo-Straussian position in a single page of the Concept of the Political, where he says the political can and by all appearances will emerge from the most thoroughly "depoliticised," i.e. in Strauss' and Schmitt's terms de-"theologised," society. You seem to turn to this yourself in your third post but I don't understand how it relates to your embrace of the gray peace.

>If so, how do we bring about a metapolitical change?
That is what Schmitt is trying to tell you. He has no particular theory of what content should "in-form" the political, which is why he is a metapolitical thinker. Strauss is right to call this nihilistic in a sense, i.e. because it's not realist with regard to a natural law (or Recht as Strauss preferred, to distinguish it from revealed law). But to back to The Republic, the most charitable reading of Strauss' position is that he is saying roughly what Socrates says in book 6, when he turns from the preliminary DESCRIPTION of the ideal state to the possibility and likelihood of realising the ideal state. He first of all says, probably the most famous line in the Republic and one of the most famous lines in the history of philosophy, that only when philosophers rule or rulers become philosophers will the state truly be well-governed. But he adds to this that the reason that philosophers are generally not rulers and vice versa: the multitude can't recognise a philosopher, and even it does, it rarely wants to listen to him, and even worse, it tends to recognise impostors and demagogues as wise statesmen.

So to get a well-governed state you not only need philosophers who overcome their natural reluctance to rule (otherwise they wouldn't be philosophers, but impostors, since wisdom always brings reluctance to rule), you need masses capable of recognising AND willing to recognise the philosophers. And paradoxically one of the only ways to do this is to attune the entire culture morally toward the recognition of the wise and virtuous, which only wise and philosophical rulers will do. This clarifies the meaning of the first part of the Republic, which is to give a provisional ideal type of the OUTCOME of any state fortunate enough to have the preconditions of a virtuous society already in place.

[Anonymous No.20520867]

>>20520863
(3)
The most the philosopher can do in the world of actuality and contingency is attune himself to the natural law, or natural right, which cannot be codified and has to be renewed continuously through virtue, in the hopes that people will be virtuous enough to recognise him as a beacon of virtue and to cooperate with him in governing the state in accordance with natural right. Plato's whole point is that natural right can never be "given," despite it always being "there" to be grasped. All we can do as humans is attune ourselves to it and live in accordance with it, trying to clarify our instinctive yearning for it through knowledge, which can at best form continuous a tradition that brings more people into the fold of wisdom. The same rule apply to our internal, individual lives and to the lives of states: the Good is there to be discovered, and anything that falls short of it or falls away from it is ipso facto tending toward the bad. Only fresh and regular intuition of the Good can acquaint either the individual or the state with the Good. In a state, the highest function of the individual is to know and thus make known to others the Good.

The most charitable reading of Strauss is that he is a natural law or right philosopher in this sense. But you can see from Plato's unwillingness to prescribe political formulae as rationalistic abstractions (he DESCRIBES, and then says that the abstract forms of things will naturally FOLLOW if we are aligned with the Good - for example when he says that there is no point in over-legislating things like "don't litter," since people will just naturally figure this shit out and make adequate laws if their society is wise) that Strauss, if he is following Plato, equally cannot be prescriptive or deal in abstractions. He can only prescribe wisdom and "see for yourself" intuition, by reminding people of the inner longing that (he would claim) everyone always already feels toward direct intuition of the Good. That is the essence of Platonism.

There is a much darker side to Strauss, the side that advocated open societies over closed societies at all costs, which is an prescriptive act and the de facto commitment to the abstraction of the open society, which he knew very well led to Nietzsche's last man. And it does not even accord well with the Greek ideal, which was a closed society, or rather many closed societies that recognised each other as friends but also fought - something much closer to what Schmitt saw as the default. Strauss also tended toward Jewish ethnonationalism all his life, especially in his final decades (at least according to friends like Klein), and always made an exception for Israel, which was to remain a closed society (see Gottfried's extensive coverage of this hypocrisy in his book on the Straussians).

[Anonymous No.20520874]

>>20520867
(4)
The much less charitable reading of Strauss is that he was being unphilosophical and dishonest: at the surface he is promoting a gentle Platonic love of wisdom, but this is just a cover for allowing the Nietzschean last man to triumph, which he knows is the de facto result of recommending "Platonic" detachment to a dying post-liberal society with no way of renewing itself and attaining anything like the greatness of Greece or Europe in its "spring" phase (to use Spengler's term) ever again. Why do this? Because, an uncharitable reading would go, he knows that the only alternative to this sad, lingering death is a cataclysmic rebirth of Europe along basically the lines suggested by the fascists. The price of new life is always a springtime of barbarism, and a self-purgation of the foreign. Anything "incidental" in the organism is purged as parasitic. A natural victim of this would be, as it was in the fascist nations' rebellion against the "gray peace" of Anglo-American finance and stateless "red capitalist" Bolshevik terror, the nationless and rootless Jewish people.

So basically, Strauss wants a globalist Fukuyamian gelded humanity with a single exception: Israel, which is organised like the Lacedaemonian state with the whole world as its Helots.

Schmitt doesn't need to counterpose his own theology of ethnonationalism to this. All he has to say is that it's inconsistent, and that people may resist it, and indeed did resist it.

[Anonymous No.20520878]

>>20520862
>and? what's the point?
To survive, persist, and spread. These are goals worth pursuing in-of-themselves to any evolutionarily fit beast. If you do not pursue them, then you can just die out I guess.

>ethnogenesis is based. I think every nation right now ought to be split into at least a thousand new unique, incompatible, and sovereign ethnicities. just for its own sake. I'm like a schizo scientist, and Earth is my Petri dish
They’d promptly whittle eachother down. It’d sure be fun to watch.

[Anonymous No.20520885]

>>20520783
>having fun
>we gotta dufeat muhdernitee
>repeat every two hours
>since 2015+7
yeah you must be having a blast with the same shelf of jeremiads to read over and over, assuming you read at all

[Anonymous No.20520926]

>>20520859
You make a lot of assumptions, yet you fail to jump to the immediate recognition of the friend-enemy distinction within the first few pages of The Republic, when Socrates debates Polemarchus on the nature of justice (where Polemarchus attempts to define justice as doing good to friends and harm to enemies). That's an elementary mistake. It's a shame you wasted all that time trying to posture as a superior scholar of the genealogy of Western philosophy, only to overlook so many obvious references and concepts, when you could have simply tried to engage with the ideas as *you* understand them and come up with your own solution.
>OP I don't want to be rude but I have a feeling you are getting your Schmitt strained through a "Straussian" blah blah blah
I don't care about the commentary insofar as they provide food for thought. You and your ilk will be straining yourself over who had the "correct" commentary and why until the lights of civilization burn out.
>But it's all in a jumble and I think in your third post in particular you start to say things that almost are almost internally contradictory.
Tell me, what do you think? What's jumbled?

[Anonymous No.20520954]

>>20520557
>Schmitt merely turns back the clock to the founding of modern liberalism, 17th century England, without offering a suitable alternative.

No, that's not what he does. He revives Hobbes by saying that the friend-enemy distinction can't be done away with no matter how much liberalism tries to depoliticize it. No matter how many times liberalism tries to transform the enemy into an economic competitor or a debate adversary under a defined set of universal rules, the existential battle between friend-enemy will always come back and wars will happen. It's inevitable.

Schmitt was a traditionalist Catholic, so the "suitable alternative" is implied in his beliefs; since he was a Hobbesian, and was religious, it's highly likely that he was an absolute monarchist like de Maistre, but had to settle for dictatorship because monarchism had been destroyed by WW1.

[Anonymous No.20521027]

>>20520859
>>20520863
>>20520867
>>20520867
>>20520874
>>20520926
I didn't realize that you had a number of posts planned in the works until I made my first reply, so I apologize for accusing you of being coy with your critique. Disregard that post.

A few clarifying thoughts. I am not a defender of the Hobbesian "gray peace." Rather, I think of it as a valid challenge to alternative political ideologies in the works that I've been following for a few years now. Forgive me for using one term or another: administrative state, Cathedral, managerial society, etc., all these terms are meant to triangulate the same observable problems we can observe and provide cues for at least triple digit IQ readers to enter the thread and share their thoughts. Which, apparently, was successful. And I'm not interested in adhering to one particular line of commentary or another. Commentaries are meant to provide insight into philosophical works. They're not meant to replace the act of philosophizing, lest we get entangled into an endless web of commentary, missing the point of philosophy which is to spread insight and actualize change.
>>20520863
>Schmitt responds to this entire neo-Straussian position in a single page of the Concept of the Political, where he says the political can and by all appearances will emerge from the most thoroughly "depoliticised," i.e. in Strauss' and Schmitt's terms de-"theologised," society. You seem to turn to this yourself in your third post but I don't understand how it relates to your embrace of the gray peace.
I don't embrace the "gray peace", and I agree that Schmitt refutes the Anglo-American cosmopolitan dream of "gray peace" by rendering it incoherent, impossible, and even aesthetically repulsive. I just don't see how Schmitt offers anything new besides the promise of a recurring cycle of bloodshed. What even is the endgame, here? You may argue that Strauss had ulterior motives (and honestly? I agree with you), but at least his exoteric philosophy resurrects the fundamental question of political philosophy: what is justice, what is the good life, etc. However, what disturbs me the most about the Straussian perversion of Platonic philosophy is its own nihilism, reducing philosophy to a form of hedonism. If philosophy is the love of wisdom, then the goal is to eventually acquire it. Once we have it, we return to the business of life. We're back to the questions I posited at the end of my third post:
>In lieu of religion, this advantage alone makes modern liberalism superior to whatever Schmitt has to offer—the desire to pull back the curtain, expose the gaping chasm in the heart of Western society, and then crash the ship with no survivors. How do we go beyond Schmitt, Burnham, Francis, and company to defeat the plague of modernity? Must we return to the ancients? Divine revelation? If so, how do we bring about a metapolitical change? I'd like to see these questions answered.

[Anonymous No.20521044]

>>20520954
Didn’t he write some stuff on Caesarism and imply dictatorship was the path to monarchy?

[Anonymous No.20521050]

>>20520878
What's the best form of survival? Why don't we reduce the human race to a primitive, hardy, and r-selected organism so it won't be stupid enough to question the necessity of life once again? e.g., return to the savage man articulated by Rousseau? Our consciousness and lack of self-confidence is far more dangerous than anything else. And we COULD do it if we truly wanted to. Human nature is malleable enough from the perspective of many generations.

[Anonymous No.20521067]

>>20521044
He never spells it out, he just implies it. And I think the reason is probably because he didn't want to piss off his protestant friends in the university structure.

[Anonymous No.20521166]

>>20520874
>Schmitt doesn't need to counterpose his own theology of ethnonationalism to this. All he has to say is that it's inconsistent, and that people may resist it, and indeed did resist it.
and then what? people will resist ethnonationalism. who literally cares about it? nations come and go. tell me why they should stay. didn't think Schmitt was THIS pedestrian as a philosopher lmao. your hateboner over Strauss is basically a retarded dispute over which nation ought to dominate: the Aryan or the Jew.

[Anonymous No.20521189]

>>20521050
Civilization developed because it had evolutionary benefits. We’re far, far more numerous today than we were in the Stone Age. Whether it turns out to be “worth it” depends on whether or not we can export this human endeavor beyond earth, I think.

[Anonymous No.20521195]

>>20521166
>nations come and go. tell me why they should stay
I want mine to stay, therefore it should stay. QED

[Anonymous No.20521210]

>>20521189
>human endeavor
you want to export THIS into outer space?!?! wtf is wrong with you

[Anonymous No.20521215]

>>20520718
>Doesn't know who is Rudolph Jung
>Think Nazism is when your mean to da joos
Suicide yourself.

[Anonymous No.20521223]

>>20521210
Misanthropy is deeply cringe.

[Anonymous No.20521227]

>>20521223
I don't hate people. I hate our way of life.

[Anonymous No.20521237]

>>20521227
It’s not the best, which is why I propose galavanting across the galaxy instead. I long for the distant stars and the company of the beings that inhabit them

[Anonymous No.20521258]

>>20521237
so you can harness them for resources and fuel this >>20521210, except with trillions of humanlets who are barely clinging to sentience?

it doesn't make any sense. it's not about the what, but rather the why and how. these are questions you sidestep by focusing on "evolutionary survival", especially when technology can remove all the virtue necessary to do it.

[Anonymous No.20521268]

>>20520718
>Nazi ideology is hardly clear about anything except the supremacy of the state and anti-Semitism
And the fact that they planned to exterminate every slav to make room for german settlers. Everybody forgets this for some reason.

[Anonymous No.20521274]

>>20520557
tl:dr get a substack incel

[Anonymous No.20521291]

>>20521258
It’d be cool. Space piracy, lasers, exploring other worlds.

[Anonymous No.20521314]

>>20521291
exploring other worlds so we can glass them and transform them into endless pod-metropolises
>broooo it's like outer space
you can go back to r*ddit

[Anonymous No.20521348]

>>20521268
https://drive.google.com/file/d/10VQzYSPa2S4_Vs0DmhhKbSN0NC5Nt8Ig/view?usp=sharing

The plan here even says that they cannot colonize the land without the native population and that they should refrain from "evacuating" them all.

The percentages at the end basically talk about parts of the population that can be germanized and counted as "german" settlers. the rest of the (non-germanized) population could live there but as second-class citizens (Jews)

And we are talking here about specific regions, not the whole of eastern europe. The primary settling areas are around Crimea and in the Baltics. The plan assumes the areas outside the colonies are still majority slavic. The plan does not call for the genocide of all slavs.
Would it have sucked as a Slav and (Balt)? absolutely. They would have been evacuated to make room for german, germanic and germanized settlers after the war, but honestly, it would have been impossible considering the losses.

The Idea behind the plan is to use these colonies as territory from the which they can control the surrounding hostile areas.

[Anonymous No.20521372]

>>20521348
nationalism is so pathetic
i am glad that slowly but surely the traditions and myths of the pasts days are being eradicated
a world-state which would replace the concept of nations would sure be comfy

[Anonymous No.20521384]

>>20521372
>one-stop shop for financial cronyism would be heckin' comfy
post nose

[Anonymous No.20521416]

>>20520718
>>20520705
Even within Hitler's lifetime they would have compromised with Italy and tolerated Roman Catholicism, even if they controlled the Pope. Like anon said, nothing was set in stone.

[Anonymous No.20521424]

>>20521384
globohomo is a necessary evil to remove the garbage of the past
you don't need to agree since your opinions won't stop your country and traditions from stopping to exist in the future

[Anonymous No.20521433]

>>20521424
>no goyim, old evil is bad. new evil is better
okay coomer

[Anonymous No.20521460]

>>20521433
the insult doesn't even fit
how boring

[Anonymous No.20521497]

>>20521460
you're a coomer for novelty

[Anonymous No.20521509]

>>20521372
Post nose

[Anonymous No.20521536]

>>20521509

[Anonymous No.20521563]

>>20521536
Imma boop that Semitic schnozz!!!

[Anonymous No.20521597]

>>20521067
No I’m pretty sure I recall reading something by him where he uses the exact word “Caesarism”.

[Anonymous No.20521607]

>>20521291
If only sounds cool because I’m envisioning the Gundam universe, not the real universe. In Gundam space travel is cool. In real life you wear a diaper.

[Anonymous No.20521632]

>>20521372
B8

[Anonymous No.20521686]

>>20520874
What a wonderful post anon, thank you. You have encapsulated my beliefs succinctly and with genuine understanding.
>>20521166
> nations come and go. tell me why they should stay?
Men live and die, tell me why you should live? Because you will it, and if you do not, then you will die. I don't need a reason or an explanation for my politics, all that is necessary is knowing whether you oppose me or not, and all that is left to do is find out the victor. What are you going to do about it?

[Anonymous No.20521699]

>>20521686
>all that is necessary is knowing whether you oppose me or not, and all that is left to do is find out the victor.
You seem to be on the losing side then, mein lieber Feind.
>>20521563
Freund.

[Anonymous No.20521707]

>>20521686
Okay. I'll support the more powerful faction then. And that appears to be Jews. They seem all-powerful and in charge of things. The fact that such a small clique of people are able to accomplish so much is awe-inspiring. They are indeed the master race.

[Anonymous No.20521712]

>might makes right!!!
why is it always the losers of history who make this argument? are they cucks? even Thrasymachus got verbally pistol-whipped by Socrates

[Anonymous No.20521966]

>>20521699
>>20521707
>okay, I'll support the more powerful faction
>you're losing :^)
Weak men who believe in nothing and would not die for anything, doing as they are told to save their skin. They are right to call you goyim.

[Anonymous No.20521969]

I consider myself a Fascist and a European supremacist. These are my 'Left Values' results. What should I do?

[Anonymous No.20522213]

>>20521966
weak men lose. you're losing friend

[Anonymous No.20522328]

>>20520557
>>20520560
>>20520567
holy fuck you have 0 clue about what schmitt was all about.

[Anonymous No.20522356]

>>20522328
this is a reply so stupid it could have only originated from the brain of a goy

[Anonymous No.20522430]

>>20520567

Western Civilisation will likely collapse within our lifetimes. Historical conditions will determine what comes next, more than conscious political ideologies or movements. History isn't a Paradox game, where you change the ruling class and its worldview by ticking a box.

By collapse I don't mean that it will devolve into some kind of Mad Max scenario, but rather Westerners will become cowed minorities in their own lands, having lacked the willpower or self-belief required to secure their own existence.

[Anonymous No.20522438]

>>20522430
>Historical determinism
Kys Spenglertranny

[Anonymous No.20522540]

>>20520591
how about you read something for a change instead of talking about politics on /lit/?

[Anonymous No.20522573]

>>20522430
This is the collapse retard. The world ended in 1945. Welcome to hell. I celebrate it!

[Anonymous No.20522685]

>>20520567
>In lieu of religion, this advantage alone makes modern liberalism superior to whatever Schmitt has to offer—the desire to pull back the curtain, expose the gaping chasm in the heart of Western society, and then crash the ship with no survivors.

I see no downsides to this.

The only way out is through. I have determined for my part that liberalism, democracy, and the architecture of rights and liberties is uniquely harmful to things I cherish. In particular, it is uniquely harmful to my Catholic faith. The Church cannot survive in liberalism. It withers, fades, and falls apart, in the atmosphere of liberal democracy. Even the attempted reconciliation of Vatican 2 has proved to be a waste of time. Catholicism and liberalism cannot get along. They do not mix.

So, for that reason, I want liberalism to be destroyed, and if Schmitt can get the job done, more power to him.

As for what comes next: who the fuck cares? We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Kill the beast first, then we'll decide what comes next. It's no good talking about what we'll do when the dragon is slain while the dragon is still flying around breathing fire. First things first. Slay the dragon. Kill the beast. Destroy liberalism, using Schmitt and others. THEN we can talk about what the future looks like. The only way out is through. The only way to the future is to murder the present.

[Anonymous No.20522796]

>>20520819
Or just you know genes and geography feedback looping and creating something we call "culture", which then competes with neighbouring cultures about recources and influence. Wow so mythical and REAL.

[Anonymous No.20522800]

>>20522796
If you believe in it, it's real.

[Anonymous No.20522812]

>>20521969
>I consider myself a Fascist and a European supremacist. These are my 'Left Values' results. What should I do?
Engels was very clear just how the reactionary races should be treated. Him being a German would probably hail Brevik a hero and as an example of the class antagonism created by capitalism.

[Anonymous No.20522823]

>>20522812
can anyone refute this? no marxist can, no marxist who is serious and blind to racial makeup of society, which both marx and engels supported.

[Anonymous No.20522840]

>>20520614
Hahaha

[Anonymous No.20522850]

People always say that nationalism was made up in the Enlightenment.
But isn't nationalism really just an expanded version of tribalist instincts that we have always had? By expanded I mean instead of a small tribe it has grown into a larger nation.

[Anonymous No.20523173]

>>20520614
My dick in your mothers ass is primordial

[Anonymous No.20523275]

>>20522800
No, but I agree that if enough believe in it, it can seem quite real, which is such a great tool for any collective

[Anonymous No.20523397]

>>20523275
Your thoughts are in fact real, my dude.

[Anonymous No.20523615]

Schitt is a more mendacious Thrasymachus

justice is the rule of the stronger is the philosophy of dogs

[Anonymous No.20523647]

>>20520697
Only sane post in this thread.

[Anonymous No.20523834]

>>20522850

[Anonymous No.20523962]

>>20520836
>you should reproduce
>why? because, it-it-it’s well… erm…
>YOU JUST SHOULD, OKAY CHUD?!

[Anonymous No.20524105]

>>20522850
Nation is a secular church that worships itself. Protestants have introduced local churches instead of The universal Church, and then you substitute Jesus with some Lady Freedom or Germania or smth else personified and return to ancestor worship (cf. Nazism).
Genocidal intersectarian wars of the Reformation turned into genocidal international wars of Late Modernity.

[Anonymous No.20524117]

>>20520697
>classical imperialism
You mean the invasion of Germanic barbarians?
>defeat of feudalism
The French Revolution?

[Anonymous No.20524125]

>>20524117
I keep telling people to read Marx. Why does no one listen to me? All of those people complaining about 'modernity' Marx already predicted to be the future of bourgeoise society.

Marx is so good, I don't understand why people conflate him with modern wokism. Undoubtedly some form of bourgeoise character assassination. Mussolini read and practiced Karl Marx's theories.

[Anonymous No.20524135]

>>20524125
Marx is a hyperliberal nihilist who wanted the equivalent of a Minecraft sandbox IRL for everyone. Rousseau retroactively refuted him in the 2nd Discourses by deductively pointing out that social inequality existed before economic inequality.

[Anonymous No.20524140]

>>20524135
Marx is not arguing for equality in the first place. wtf is a hyperliberal? and how was marx a nihilist?

[Anonymous No.20524141]

>>20524125
The more I read actual history the more I realize Germans and Jews are the two main causes of general decline.

[Anonymous No.20524148]

>>20524141
An honorable mention to the eternal Anglo as well but they're not quite as bad.

[Anonymous No.20524149]

>>20524141
decline in what.

[Anonymous No.20524161]

>>20524149
the federally secured gf supply

[Anonymous No.20524165]

>>20524140
>he hasn't read Nietzsche

[Anonymous No.20524166]

>>20524140
Read his essay on the Jewish Question and his work The German Ideology. Marx’s main criticism of liberalism is that it doesn’t go far enough to emancipate the individual. And in lieu of cosmological ends (all are manmade, products of the superstructure), there is only one choiceworthy goal—continuing the process of history until it reaches its end with the elimination of all limits on freedom (thanks to the consequence of natural and social impediments through sufficient and proletarian economic productivity). That is communism—he’s basically telling liberals to not blow their load until they have achieved their superlative freedom. Marx can’t conceive of a greater end than freedom, no goal to achieve with that ultimately freedom only a vague posturing of the ability to explore human “completeness”, the essence of our “species-being”, yadda yadda yadda. Hence he’s a hyperliberal nihilist.

[Anonymous No.20525089]

>>20520567
Man this is stupid, if you can make a leap of faith towards divine revelation, you could just as well make one towards anything like a state grounded within a certain tradition.

[Anonymous No.20525161]

>>20525089
the state is immanent, God is transcendent. it's not the same thing. they are worlds apart.

[Anonymous No.20525306]

>>20523834
I thought he was anti-nationalist.

[Anonymous No.20525385]

>>20522850
>But isn't nationalism really just an expanded version of tribalist instincts that we have always had? By expanded I mean instead of a small tribe it has grown into a larger nation.

As an American, I agree with you. But America is in some ways unique, in that it rests on certain propositions, rather than the brute fact of blood and soil. Leftists want to divide and destroy that tribalist instinct that largely (although not entirely) prevailed in America until Obama was elected. Now it seems like a thing of the past. Obama and his cohort deliberately stirred division, because they frankly seek to destroy the America that prevailed, say, at the end of WWII.

[Anonymous No.20525436]

>>20525385
lmao Obama isn't your enemy.

[Anonymous No.20525521]

>>20520827
>>20520831
They mad?

Yeah they mad

[Anonymous No.20525526]

>>20522796
You mad too..

[Anonymous No.20525575]

>>20524117
The Germans did not try to restore the Roman republic. And the French revolution did not attempt to restore the Frankish kingdom. There was no sense among these actors that they were going to turn back the clock on a degenerated society to an immeditately prior model they idealized and revert all the social, technological, intellectual etc. developments which had taken place. To pray for end of the world is the same spirit of nihilism that animates certain religions.

[Anonymous No.20525633]

>>20521712
The fact that they lost doesnt prove the assertion wrong. Quite the opposite.

[Anonymous No.20525641]

>>20525633
I mean, true. It's just weird that they're doing apologetics for their enemies. It's a cuck move.

[Anonymous No.20525852]

>>20525641
They hoped to be victorious so they were really doing apologetics for their desired conclusion. Unfortunately for them, their wisdom was greater than their strength.

[Anonymous No.20525871]

>>20521027
>However, what disturbs me the most about the Straussian perversion of Platonic philosophy is its own nihilism, reducing philosophy to a form of hedonism. If philosophy is the love of wisdom, then the goal is to eventually acquire it. Once we have it, we return to the business of life.
But philosophy isn't merely the love of wisdom, but the recognition that one's desire for it is because of a recognition of its lack. If wisdom is available and one had wisdom, one would be like a god (as much as possible for a man); if wisdom were not simply available, then the second best (and more probable) life is that spent seeking it. In this, Strauss is consonant with Plato's depiction of Diotima's account of love of wisdom in Symposium and Socrates' love of wisdom as described in the last two pages of Phaedrus. It's hard to see how that would be a distortion from Strauss.

[Anonymous No.20525883]

>>20522685
>The Church cannot survive in liberalism.
Doesn't the Nietzschean critique come in here? If the Christianity's love of truth, charity, equality of all before God, etc., set the stage for liberalism, isn't any appeal to the church in the future just kicking the can down the road for some other future equivalent to the Enlightenment?

[Anonymous No.20525918]

>>20525633
actually it doesn't prove something either true or false, dumbass, unless you subscribe to might makes right.

Ironic.

[Anonymous No.20525941]

>>20525883
>If the Christianity's love of truth, charity, equality of all before God, etc., set the stage for liberalism
anglo-germanic tribal customs set the stage for liberalism

[Anonymous No.20526074]

>>20525871
>But philosophy isn't merely the love of wisdom, but the recognition that one's desire for it is because of a recognition of its lack. If wisdom is available and one had wisdom, one would be like a god (as much as possible for a man);
And what about divine revelation?
>if wisdom were not simply available, then the second best (and more probable) life is that spent seeking it.
You can always question what you have. Skepticism is always available. That's the nature of the human condition. Philosophical hedonism is always possible, even if you possess wisdom.

[Anonymous No.20526734]

>>20524141
>>20524148
Why does the hate always go to Germans and Anglos and yet the French are given a pass??
This site in general has had an extreme anti-Germanic bias for the last few years, possibly because people want to distance themselves from /pol/.

[Anonymous No.20526753]

>>20526734
This place is haven for coomers and homosexuality why do you think frogs are given a pass?

[Anonymous No.20526798]

>>20526753
That would explain all the people pretending to be religious fundamentalists

[Anonymous No.20526800]

>>20526074
>And what about divine revelation?
What do you have in mind? I'm just trying to characterize Strauss; do you have an objection in mind or are you asking what his stance might be re: revelation?

>You can always question what you have. Skepticism is always available. That's the nature of the human condition. Philosophical hedonism is always possible, even if you possess wisdom.
This is certainly true, but I think Strauss might point to Socratic practice; philosophizing comes into its own by inquiring into the truth of the opinions of the city, and while philosophers are uncommon at all times, they both have an easier practice in democracies, and they're more likely to run into fellow seekers they can more openly consort with.

[Anonymous No.20526808]

>>20525941
And Christianity. Descartes and Bacon weren't arguing for republicanism via the Germans.

[Anonymous No.20526828]

>>20520682
this poster goes so fucking hard

[Anonymous No.20527222]

>>20526808
The Nietzschean critique is incoherent unless Christianity is necessary and sufficient to bring about liberalism all by itself, as opposed to arguing VIA something.
The Byzantines had over a thousand years of para-republicanism inherited from the ancients, to the extent of actual humanism, and their system cannot be called remotely liberal.
Republicanism was reborn when this garbled message reached the merchant-princes of the Italian oligarchies, and liberalism itself was born when the secular rulers of the German, Dutch, and English appealed to their very secular customs to overturn the moral monopoly of the Catholic Church.

[Anonymous No.20527269]

>>20526800
Democracies are a double-edged sword. They're a return to a civilized state of nature. Anarchic. Chaotic. Unstable. But they allow ideas to flourish like an unchecked petri dish. You don't want to remain in the civilized state of nature for long. I'm reminded of Plato's devolution of the regime and the typical account of the state of nature. Why did we form societies? To escape the brutality of the wilderness and each other. But it's crucial that the right person lead us out of the abyss. With so much erosion of civic virtue, it's almost guaranteed that the leader who leads us out of the wilderness will be a tyrant instead of a philosopher-king.

Also, I think it's worth noting that Strauss and the Straussians have a habit of de-mystifying philosophers who almost certainly had a deep religious bent. e.g. Plato and his initiation into Orphism.

[Anonymous No.20527288]

>>20526800
>What do you have in mind? I'm just trying to characterize Strauss; do you have an objection in mind or are you asking what his stance might be re: revelation?
Strauss the type of nigga to find the answer and keep looking

[Anonymous No.20527427]

>>20527269
>I'm reminded of Plato's devolution of the regime and the typical account of the state of nature. Why did we form societies? To escape the brutality of the wilderness and each other. But it's crucial that the right person lead us out of the abyss.
Yes, but as Socrates notes in Republic bk. 8 when talking about democracy, it's the only regime where you can shop around for others as he and interlocutors are doing in the Republic itself. Churchill's phrase "least worst evil" comes to mind to bring out the ambivalence of Plato and Strauss toward democracy.

>Also, I think it's worth noting that Strauss and the Straussians have a habit of de-mystifying philosophers who almost certainly had a deep religious bent. e.g. Plato and his initiation into Orphism.
Strictly speaking, the accounts linking Plato to Orphism all arise about 300 years later. Socrates compares the sophists in Euthydemus to Mystery figures, a backhanded compliment if any, and what you get from Middle and Neoplatonism in arguing for a relation to the mysteries is a simultaneous denigration of philosophy (seeking wisdom) in favor of sophistry (having wisdom); even if it's noble sophistry, it's sophistry all the same.

[Anonymous No.20527467]

>>20527222
It need not be necessary and sufficient, but as long as it holds to its nature as a revelation of theological truth (compared to Judaism and Islam's political revelations of law) combined with equality in spirit before God, the possibility of the two-pronged movement towards science and political liberalism will always remain. Hypothesize the restoration of the old hierarchies and customs, and the future in which some rabble demands the church live up to its teachings of equality before God and simultaneously desires truth guided by the theological character of Christianity's revelation isn't only not impossible but likely to repeat. Secularism may have some roots in medieval governance, but the explosion was from within the church. Galileo's revolution rests on churchmen like Copernicus and the Oxford Calculators.

[Anonymous No.20527475]

>>20527427
>Yes, but as Socrates notes in Republic bk. 8 when talking about democracy, it's the only regime where you can shop around for others as he and interlocutors are doing in the Republic itself.
The point of shopping is to get what you want and get it. There's nothing virtuous about a democracy, which Socrates locates towards the end of the life of the city. The idea that Plato was a secret democrat is a hilariously tortured reading.

[Anonymous No.20527476]

>>20526798
Who said we're pretending?

[Anonymous No.20527490]

>>20527427
>Yes, but as Socrates notes in Republic bk. 8 when talking about democracy, it's the only regime where you can shop around for others as he and interlocutors are doing in the Republic itself.
The point of shopping is to get what you want then get out. Unless you're addicted to window shopping (like the Straussians seem to be). There's nothing virtuous about a democracy, as the Straussians seem to forget that Socrates locates towards the end of the life span of the city, after several stages of declining virtue. The idea that Plato was a secret democrat is a hilariously tortured reading.

[Anonymous No.20527633]

>>20525871
Different poster, but I sense an evasion. Surely there is a lot between fresh and regular intuition of the good (already not a mute, merely private intuition surely), and political formulae as rationalistic abstractions (though what counts as one of these?) and the kind of cynical overlegislation we have now.

I find it hard to ignore the Straussian window-dressing of Platonic innocence and "love of wisdom" covering over this lack. Plato himself was not that "Platonic". Is it a transgression of the love of wisdom not only to claim wisdom for oneself but to recognize more and less wisdom? How can mute or paralyzed wisdom be human wisdom? Is there not the pride of a god in that? As you point out, this stance covers some questionable political choices on Strauss's part. And then he forces on us his quibble of Athens vs. Jerusalem which is interminable by design. It all seems very self-serving.

[Anonymous No.20527922]

>>20521372
Kojeve was literally the antichrist and I found that out pretty quickly

[Anonymous No.20527946]

>>20525436
he's more implicit in both class and cultural division than any president post-Lincoln

>>20522812
Engels was also responsible for a lot of the feminist claptrap that muddies up current year Socialism too.

[Anonymous No.20527985]

>>20521969
https://counter-currents.com/tag/breaking-the-bondage-of-interest/

[Anonymous No.20528225]

Glad to see a Schmitt thread here, please don't let it die.

[Anonymous No.20528306]

>>20521268
One one side you have concept of Blood and soil - mythical connection of people to the land which shapes them and on the other hand of the same concept you have need to expand and settle West on land populated by Slavs.
What is to say that land you populate won't reshape those colonizing Germans same way it shaped Slavs?

Nazis in general took ideas, be they left, liberal or right - from Nietzsche to and rehashed them as they suited them. Here they borrow from biblical promised land and American manifest destiny.

Also didn't Fritz Fischer find and publish Imperial German government document that had same plan?

From the begining they aren't even consistent, they tolerate Croats(who Ustaše try to rebrand as Goths) and Bulgarians as allies. They try to Germanize Czechs, Slovenes and Sorbs who are "Slavnizied Germans" in their eyes
Slovaks, Hungarians and Romanians too and all of those 3 had German Volkdeutsche minorities in their countries.

They made up most things on the way, even genocial antisemitism, they toyed with idea of deporting Jews to Madagascar and Palestine, but ultimately decided on genocide.

[Anonymous No.20528345]

>>20522823
Current Marxists just accept those views and try to explain why they were held.
They go to the sources and find some American white Indian dress-up larper who weebed for Indians while trying to do some pseudo anthropological work.

>feminist claptrap that muddies up current year Socialism
Funnily enough they got these ideas from reading Lewis H. Morgan, too. Ultimately whole primitive communism and solution needed for "state withering away" goes to this LHM's studies on Native Americans, he provides synthesis to Marx's problems.

[Anonymous No.20528537]

>>20520581
>pic
That only applies to fully evolved humans, you tiger-riding faggot.
We're surrounded by hostile subhumans and their sociopathic, demonic handlers. They don't give a rat's ass about "justice and human good".

[Anonymous No.20528546]

>>20520557
>There's a burgeoning movement of right-leaning anons on /lit/ who think that Schmitt and his book, the Concept of the Political, is able to refute the grounds of cosmopolitan liberal democracy.

Eh maybe give Derrida a read

[Anonymous No.20528575]

>>20527985
>counternigga
Cringe.

[Anonymous No.20528623]

>>20520682
Big-tenting the german people is not the same as trying to include all possible people, even if the mechanics are similar.

[Anonymous No.20528745]

>>20527490
Your criticisms of democracy aren't wrong, but with respect to my point, there's a difference between noting that the license of democracy allows you to openly look at regimes and asserting that democracy is thereby wholly good. Plato indicates in bk. 2's discussion of poetic narrative types that a text like the Republic itself would have to be banned in kallipolis because it uses mixed narrative; something of philosophy paradoxically suffers in a regime concerned with justice while in a defective regime it seems to flourish. I didn't in any way assert the ridiculous proposition that Socrates or Plato were democrats, either overtly or in secret, but the qualification is right there at 557c-d:

>"Then I suppose that in this regime especially, all sorts of human
beings come to be."
>"How could they fail to?"
>"It is probably the fairest [lit. "Most beautiful"] of the regimes," I said, "Just like a many-colored cloak decorated in all hues, this regime, decorated with all dispositions, would also look fairest, and many perhaps," I said, "like boys and women looking at many-colored things, would judge this to be the fairest regime."
>"Quite so," he said.
>"And, what's more, you blessed man," I said, "it's a convenient place to look for a regime."
>"Why is that?"
>"Because, thanks to its license, **it contains all species of regimes**, and it is probably necessary for the man who wishes to organize a city,
**as we were just doing**, to go to a city under a democracy. He would choose the sort that pleases him, like a man going into a general store of regimes, and, once having chosen, he would thus establish his regime."

This is both bot an argument for the simple good of democracy, but it also means democracy isn't without certain advantages. The democracy that put Socrates to death waited until he was 70 before putting him on trial, only succeeded by 30 votes in light of an intentionally provocative defense speech, and was willing to look the other way if his friends were to persuade him to go elsewhere. None of this denies the faultiness of democracy, but Plato's criticisms come with qualifications.

[Anonymous No.20528813]

>>20520697
>There will be no defeat of modernity any more than there was a defeat of feudalism or classical imperialism or whatever else
So what comes next?

[Anonymous No.20528825]

>>20527633
>I find it hard to ignore the Straussian window-dressing of Platonic innocence and "love of wisdom" covering over this lack. Plato himself was not that "Platonic". Is it a transgression of the love of wisdom not only to claim wisdom for oneself but to recognize more and less wisdom? How can mute or paralyzed wisdom be human wisdom? Is there not the pride of a god in that? As you point out, this stance covers some questionable political choices on Strauss's part. And then he forces on us his quibble of Athens vs. Jerusalem which is interminable by design. It all seems very self-serving.
These are good questions and observations, but what window dressing is there in Strauss? He emphasizes all the time how dangerous it is for the philosopher to keep asking "what is x" questions that reflect back on the city.

As for wisdom itself and claims upon it, one response might be to point to the Apology and Socrates' claim that human wisdom seems to be meager. Of course, this being a public speech somewhat explaining himself to political authorities makes this suspect enough to not take a face value. But Socrates, while affecting something, isn't merely lying. Consider the following:

-The one thing Socrates consistently asserts he knows and has an art of (in Symposium, Phaedrus, Lysis, and Theages) is erotics
-That Symposium, *the* dialogue on Eros denies that Eros is god, identifies philosophic Eros with knowledge of ignorance (the supposed summit of Diotima's ladder is prefaced by Socrates saying "she spoke like a complete sophist"
-Because Eros is identified with knowledge of ignorance in the Symposium, we can look back to Socrates' assertions of knowledge of erotics in the aforementioned dialogues and likewise identify him as referring to his knowledge of ignorance; similarly, in the so-called aporetic dialogues when he admits or concludes he doesn't know something, he's being "erotic"

In any case, I'm only repeating a point made in the dialogues themselves:

>“For here is the way it is, not one of the gods philosophizes, any more than he desires to become wise— for he *is*— and whoever else is wise, he does not philosophize either.” (Symposium 204a)

>Socrates: If he has composed these things, knowing where the truth lies, and being able to assist, when he goes into refutative examination of the things that he has written about, and has the power, when he himself speaks, to show forth the written things as slight— such a man must not be said to be named after these things, but named after those things that he has taken seriously.
>Phaedrus: What names, then, do you distribute to him?
>Socrates: To call him wise, Phaedrus, to me at least seems to be a big thing and to be fitting for god only. But either philosopher or some such thing would fit him better and would be more harmonious. (Phaedrus 278c-d)

[Anonymous No.20528854]

>>20528745
democracy is a novelty-addicted city edging for the greatest possible coom right before it dies, David Carradine style

[Anonymous No.20529596]

>>20524135
This is so clearly not the case; Marx is actually recognizing that the modern conception of bourgeois freedom INAUGURATED by Rousseau in the 2nd discourse has come into crisis under capitalism—Marxism is an attempt to preserve this freedom and realize the desiderata of bourgeois society.

[Anonymous No.20529686]

>>20520697
Hello Nietzschean

[Anonymous No.20530033]

>>20529596
You get the freedom, and then what? You'll eventually end up with social inequality again because humans are social creatures who act on their preferences and cluster around leaders, and the entire process begins anew.

[Anonymous No.20530670]

Schmitt? Strauss? No thanks, I prefer Christ.

[Anonymous No.20531054]

>>20530670
onions

[Anonymous No.20531429]

>>20520859
This is fantastic stuff, thanks so much for sharing it—do you have any recommendations for secondary literature that doesn't fall into the pitfalls you've outlined?

[Anonymous No.20531671]

>>20531429
Both Schmitt and Strauss have pitfalls. Just read them both and think critically about their implications. They're both atheistic nihilists, but Strauss wants to gatekeep nihilism, while Schmitt wants to unleash it.

[Anonymous No.20531692]

>>20520557
liberalism also names enemies. So it is in line with Carl Schmitt's theories.
You are the enemy

[Anonymous No.20531938]

>>20528813
lemurian guerilla time-warfare

[Anonymous No.20531967]

>>20531692
Lol no.

[Anonymous No.20532009]

>>20531938
Nick Land has aged terribly.

[Anonymous No.20532041]

>>20532009
I think the thesis is still pretty solid that (1) a necessarily anti-human future must assemble itself using human elements of the present and (2) such elements would oppose the outcome if they were schizos. Everyone else gets some sort of carrot/stick arrangement from the what is being built but the schizo, heir to the religious mind of the previous age, recognizes that anything done in time leads to enslavement. Land himself did age very poorly and morphed into a twitter boomer whose only redeeming quality is an above average iq

[Anonymous No.20533590]

bump

[Anonymous No.20533689]

>>20528825
Human wisdom is meager, which is why treating wisdom as only human by assumption leads apparently to disaffection and despair. Strauss and those who follow him get what they put in.

[Anonymous No.20534321]

bump

[Anonymous No.20534411]

>>20520697
shitskin detected

[Anonymous No.20534415]

>>20534411
>>20520697
shitskin with ressentiment detected*

[Anonymous No.20534517]

>>20520557
>>20520560
>>20520567
Fair enough, I think that liberalism has the problem that it is essentially just like any other form of government. And this in turn makes liberalism uncomfortable with weilding power, but history tells us that this is a vicible weakness, not an outright deficiency.

Part of the issue is that an educated people must know that the state governs by inventing crises to deflect from the state's own lack of authority and power, and to cement legitimacy by quashing dissent under a heap of philosophical or religious bullshit, in addition to the fact that civil society can give us vain entertainments that stifle our curiosity about how we are governed. Eventually though, even the lliberal state is scorned by an educated people for the inherent weaknesses of its limp-wristed attempts to assert legitimacy.

I would say that the course we have taken is unalterable; that natural law theory will not grant the state its lost legitimacy, and that positive law has won in demonstrating that the law and the state need only be adequate. I do not generally believe that even the liberal state is necessary to this project, all that is necessary is that people cannot find an ideology capable of contending with a purely mechanicistic cosmos.

In fact, all I see as a future state, is that both the East and the West will die of stupidity before the century is out; in the East, Commmunism is the last bastion of natural law theory, and Communism is not long for this world as a theory, meanwhile in the West, "muh science" will disssappoint as an ideological foundation for a natural law state.

[Anonymous No.20534532]

>>20533689
Plato recognized this very well, hence the dialogue Cleitophon or the section of the Republic devoted to warning against teaching the young about dialectic. Arguably Strauss recognized this too, hence his lectures presenting the material with, on the one hand, something like doctrine for those just wanting to get involved in political life (so, folks like Jaffa), and puzzles for those who love thinking.

It's definitely the case that quite a few of his students, typified by Pangle, miss this.

[Anonymous No.20534560]

>>20520836
and you are losing

[Anonymous No.20534603]

>>20520885
>yeah you must be having a blast with the same shelf of jeremiads to read over and over, assuming you read at all

you're projecting, criticizing is not complaining

[Anonymous No.20534608]

>>20534517
What do you think about integralism, essentially the attempt to more closely wed church and state?
>>20534532
What do you think Plato’s thoughts on mysticism and the divine were?

[Anonymous No.20534685]

>>20520568
you probably wouldn't, kaspar

[Anonymous No.20534733]

>>20534608
>Integralism, goal to wed more closely the church and state
I live in an integralist society; UK, the church and state are so close that parlement passes Acts about the liturgy.

In my experience, as an Anglican who wants church worship to be without politics, this is a mild disaster; like watching your dog piss on a Persian rug. The problem is that church does not influence state, typically state influences church. This is very bad in an era where gays have somehow captured significiant political power through the LGTB lobby. Also, the political powers that be want marriage to mean nothing at all, like a pagan marriage. Consequently, Anglicanism is not only deserting my eternal interests, but my temporal interests as well (being able to make a stable family, without the state undermining the marriage contract).

So no, integralism is ass and I have a mind to do something about it.

[Anonymous No.20534746]

>>20534608
>Integralism cont;
But yes, we have a nice liturgy; there is an infinite pocketbook for ostentatious religiosity when the taxpayer picks up the cheques.

[Anonymous No.20534761]

>>20534733
>>20534746
It sounds like you like integralism but would rather have a more powerful church with soft power.

[Anonymous No.20534785]

>>20520557
cringe. is this your gay polisci homework?

[Anonymous No.20534792]

>>20534761
Possibly, it would certainly defend my interests if divorce were outlawed, or if at least a petitioner had to prove adultery in divorce-court. This would be much better economically than "I'm leaving & I expect my half" which seems to be the liberal consensus.

Then again, if the state simply got rid of the very concept of chilld/spousal support, then I shouldn't complain.

As for my eternal interests though, my thinking is that the church is meant to suffer persecution and to militate against the state in favour of the common man and his needs. This is what Christ taught, and so the church and state cannot be too closely organized; to do so is to miss the point of Christian religion. Although obviously this does mean that I am in favour of the Church cultivating large amounts of soft-power and using it as aggressively as possible.

[Anonymous No.20536167]

>>20523834
Only good post,

[Anonymous No.20536437]

>>20534411
>>20534415
Don't you have a supermarket to sweep? And you're no blonde beast either.

[Anonymous No.20537538]

>>20534608
>What do you think Plato’s thoughts on mysticism and the divine were?
Hard to say. I'm vastly aware of what most of the Middle and Neoplatonists assert about his relationship to the mystical and divine, but it's very ambiguous in the dialogues, and I'm tempted sometimes to say he's not far from Spinoza (not in specific definitions, but in approach). The most direct reference to the Mysteries (where they don't stand for something else or are used by way of comparison) is in the Meno with Socrates noting Meno, a man Xenophon reports betrayed the Greeks, was at the lesser Mysteries the day before. The sophists in the Euthydemus are compared to Corybantes. The mystical third speech of Diotima is prefaced by Socrates describing her as speaking "like a perfect sophist". Maybe the most non-controversial way to describe what the divine for Plato is would be to suggest it's that which is eternal and unchanging and somehow the cause of things, but it doesn't seem to be providential unless one weights the Good in the Republic (which is itself treated as ontological). I'd say he's atheistic *with respect to the traditional Olympians by a literal understanding*, but he seems otherwise to be agnostic and open to there being something.

[Anonymous No.20538534]

bump

[Anonymous No.20539728]

concept of the /pol/shittical

[Anonymous No.20541461]

>>20539728
/pol/schmittical

[Anonymous No.20541512]

>>20522850
Correct
Primordialism is true and anti-nationalism, either from the reactionary or the neoliberal perspective, is cringe

[Anonymous No.20542037]

>>20520557
>>20520560
>>20520567
Kek OP I think you made these posts cause we had a lil debate in some other thread a few days ago about this. I will agree with something that seems implicit in your critique—there isn't enough (any?) prescriptive content in the Concept of the Political and that is potentially an issue. The social role of Leviathan is just ecumenism and thus liberalism by another name? Also might be a good point. Actually read a socialist that made a point like this once kek.

I would still say though that Schmitt's real commitment to real politics mostly refutes the idea that he wanted the state to be an impartial, thus liberal, agent serving the role of referee between arbitrary groups. I don't see how National Socialism was an agent of greyness at all. Maybe this
>the gaping chasm in the heart of Western society, and then crash the ship with no survivors.
would have been all it amounted to in victory, but such a state would still have been fresher soil for metapolitical change than anything I can think of. As much as I wish we could we simply can't *do this*
>Must we return to the ancients? Divine revelation?
precisely for the reasons this guy >>20520697
explains. You can't think your way out of a world-historical political order. It has to actually be overthrown. Schmitt was definitely committed to that

[Anonymous No.20542123]

>>20542037
>Kek OP I think you made these posts cause we had a lil debate in some other thread a few days ago about this.
That might have been us! I just wanted to see this topic get critiqued enough, and I'm pretty satisfied with it.
>I don't see how National Socialism was an agent of greyness at all.
I'm thinking more about fascism than national socialism, given what I've read about Gentile, actual idealism, and Risorgimento. There's an implicit nominalism within the fascist state. The Italian nation was constructed arbitrarily, and at some point, the fascist state will have to expand the national project, eventually growing to encompass everything, forging it all under one cultural banner. Hence, globohomo from the right. Within the core of a supposedly illiberal Fascist Italy lies a secular liberalism, of the positive kind. There was an Telos press article about it, if you can get it. I can't make any coherent critiques of national socialism because it was all over the place and didn't really have a consistent ideology.
>precisely for the reasons this guy >>20520697
explains. You can't think your way out of a world-historical political order. It has to actually be overthrown.
You can think your way out. It's just that somebody else will take on the task, eventually. And that's the great thing about this historical period. All of this convenience, yet I can choose to shit in the proverbial punch bowl for the sake of it, Underground Man style.

[Anonymous No.20542460]

>>20542037
>>20542123
You cannot think your way out of historical periods. You should read some stuff you don't feel you'd agree with, it might surprise you. Writers like Bataille and Deleuze had to come to terms with the reality that marxists can't overthrow bourgeois states, no matter how much they admired the idea of a revolution or could advocate it with the pen. Conservatives are yet to figure out that you can't vote to repeal the latest cultural or economic excesses of liberalism. Some of them are starting to think you can shoot at liberalism, which is very funny, because it means they are behaving like turn of the 20th century anarchists, which I suppose could be a "conservative" approach—those kinds of extremist propagandists of the deed certainly predate whatever lived period conservatives have nostalgia for. Yet liberalism has a way of hardening in response to that kind of opposition—it's all too easy to identify the miscreants as bigger threats to freedom (and security) than they actually are, to mobilize opinion against them. And that, dear anon, is because liberalism is powerful. Yes, the limp-wristed, hedonistic, godless degenerates are more powerful than their opponents. They command people their opponents do not command. More people. Higher status people. People with greater resources. And they'll cut you in if you become enough of a problem. Because they're ultimately just a very very very large street gang. And you are either paying protection money or collecting it.

[Anonymous No.20543127]

>>20542460
Not either of those anons, but just my thoughts point-by-point:
historical changes are in a mutual feedback loop with ideology, and thinkers are important, as shown by the role of payrolled intellectuals in liberalism's intentional development by mercantile elites;
po-mo post-leftist points about futility make sense because leftism and liberalism are axiomatically related, meaning lasting subversion of leftism is possible, whereas the various conservatisms are diverse images of pre-liberal aesthetic which can be completely purified of liberal tendency (yes, even in masonic America);
conservatives are right-libs who are getting ideas of coups and militia war, some in a revolutionary sense in the conventional right-lib way, some giving that up and trending towards embryonic neofascisms;
Incel mass shooters are not cons, generally not even coherently political, and certainly not carrying out "propaganda of the deed" with rare exceptions like Breivik;
and your point about power and the mechanism of governance is in fact a point about state power, not specifically liberalism, which has held true throughout history and has never saved any government or ruling elite from base entropy and inevitable change