“Is the Left a Gnostic Death Cult?”

— with this provocative question headlining a livestream in 2022, Keith Woods reignited debates over the religious shades of modern liberalism.

In The Gnostic Question, Richard Storey and Keith Woods confront the dark underbelly of modernity, exploring how ancient religious ideas and archetypes underlie the crisis of the modern West. From liberal statecraft and the frenzy of wokeism to the cult of technology, they offer competing diagnoses of the metamorphosis of Western civilisation, yet converge on the need to recover the deeper spiritual roots of the European soul.

In addition to the perspectives exchanged between Storey and Woods, The Gnostic Question features additional commentary in an editorial foreword by Arktos Editor-in-Chief Dr. Jafe Arnold, an afterword by Tyler Hamilton of the Theopolitics podcast, and a section of critical appreciations offered by respected scholars: Prof. John Milbank, Prof. Frank van Dun, and Dr. Paul Tyson.

Join the debate: order your copy of The Gnostic Question on Amazon or from Arktos.

Remigration? Fine — but for who, and how many? Between Alain de Benoist, the foremost philosopher of the New Right, and Jean-Yves Le Gallou, author of Remigration: For a Europe for Our Children, agreement on the diagnosis is not enough to mask disagreements over the modalities of remigration. It is a long way from reversing migration flows to reversing the course of affairs. Hence this debate on fundamentals, which obliges us to ask all the questions, the ones too often brushed aside: Who must leave? Based on what criteria? This is a taste of the conference to be held on Saturday, 31 October, in Paris: “Remigration – Let’s Open the Debate.”

— François Bousquet, editor-in-chief of Éléments, author of Anti-White Racism: The Forbidden Investigation.

ÉLÉMENTS: Alain de Benoist, in your latest editorial in Éléments, you raise the possibility of “implementing a policy of reversing migration flows.” Jean-Yves Le Gallou, for his part, speaks of remigration. Aren’t you quarrelling over the word more than the thing? What separates you: the scale, the means, or the very principle of remigration?

ALAIN DE BENOIST: The definitions of remigration given by those who wish to put it into practice vary a great deal. More than a matter of agreement or disagreement, the question is where remigration begins, and also where it ends. In his book on remigration, Jean-Yves Le Gallou lists the first categories targeted: illegal immigrants, parasites, delinquents, and so on. Up to that point, I am in complete agreement with him (and in agreement, too, on abolishing birthright citizenship). For all these categories, Jean-Yves Le Gallou lists perfectly acceptable grounds for expulsion. These grounds concern things for which the members of these categories can legitimately be reproached: things they have done (or should not have done), rules they have not respected, reprehensible conduct.

But these categories represent only a fraction of the population of immigrant origin: three million perhaps, at best. What about the others (the majority), to whom none of these grounds apply? In the ten pages of his book devoted to “repatriation,” Jean-Yves Le Gallou says little on the subject and leaves things vague. That is why questions can be raised. If one stops sanctioning individuals for what they have done and starts sanctioning them for what they are, one enters an entirely different perspective. One is no longer punishing delinquents; one is designating surplus people. So I would like to know whether the aim is to halt migration flows or to set in motion a process of ethnic cleansing. They are not the same thing. My political ideal is not a racist or segregationist state.

Races exist; recognizing this is in no way racist. For more than fifty years, the Nouvelle Droite [New Right] has advocated an antiracism of the ethnopluralist or differentialist type. Put plainly: neither apartheid nor generalized mixing. That position has never ceased to be mine. I have written three books against racism (one of them, published in Spain, is in fact titled Contra el racismo [Against Racism]), in which I explain why racist theories are, in my view, as false as they are harmful. Racism, the infantile disorder of the metaphysics of subjectivity, is in my eyes a modern ideology whose origins must be sought in the internal contradictions of universalist historicism. History has shown, moreover, that every politics founded on race is doomed to failure. I therefore condemn without reservation every form of racism (including of course, and first and foremost, anti-white racism). This also applies to Occidentalism when it dons the impolitical costume of “white nationalism.”

READ MORE from Alain de Benoist, brought to you by Arktos:

ÉLÉMENTS: Alain de Benoist speaks of the “judges’ lock”; you speak of a JUGEXIT. Aren’t the various courts, French and European, the main obstacle to a policy of remigration today?

JEAN-YVES LE GALLOU: JUGEXIT means blowing up the judges’ lock. An example: politicians regularly propose depriving the parents of delinquent children of welfare benefits. But that is impossible as long as the Constitutional Council strikes down the laws. Others propose instituting mechanisms of national preference or national priority: again impossible without overriding the Constitutional Council. The Council of State1, the administrative courts, and the National Court of Asylum Law (CNDA) must also be shaken up. In short, political power must take back… power. And not only in France. The ordinary courts in Italy, the High Court of Justice in Great Britain, the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe in Germany, and the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg are paralyzing powers that hold the upper hand over security and immigration policy.

ÉLÉMENTS: You have spoken, in connection with remigration, of a risk of political arbitrariness, even if it were a sovereign choice. So be it. But then why would the return of the political be legitimate against government by judges (or the rule of law) yet illegitimate when it comes to deciding the criteria for belonging to a political community? All things considered, doesn’t the choice of remigration fall under the categories dear to Carl Schmitt: Who decides? Who is sovereign? Law or the political?

ALAIN DE BENOIST. I have trouble understanding your question. Arbitrariness, which designates a decision not motivated by rational or logical necessity, is by no means synonymous with sovereignty. Wishing for the return of the political is one thing (and of course I subscribe to it); pointing to the need to avoid political mistakes, or recalling that political power can also degenerate — not into “dictatorship” in the Roman sense of the term, but into despotism or tyranny — is another. In a democracy, balance is established both by decision (from above) and by consent (from below), that is, by the conjunction of national sovereignty and popular sovereignty.

ÉLÉMENTS: It is one thing to say that the hand of the political must not tremble; it is another to determine the criteria for belonging to the French nation or to Europe. Take a third-generation Frenchman, a dual national, married to a Frenchwoman, with French children: on what basis does one decide that he must remigrate? And to where, given that such a man may never have set foot in his country (or countries) of origin?

JEAN-YVES LE GALLOU: There are a great many people to remigrate before we even reach the very real question of dual nationals: illegal immigrants (1 million), foreign delinquents at large (100,000 to 200,000), foreigners living mainly, if not exclusively, on welfare or unemployment benefits (2 million). And above all — above all — all new immigration must be stopped. Then there remains, of course, the question of dual nationals. Three categories must be distinguished: assimilated dual nationals (no problem); unassimilated but non-hostile dual nationals (they should be encouraged, without being forced, to go back: they will be better off in their country of origin); and unassimilated, hostile dual nationals. The last should be stripped of citizenship when they are delinquents or take part in demonstrations hostile to the French and to France. Put differently: the parents of delinquents and rioters must clear out along with their offspring. Let me add that many dual nationals have, as you put it, already “set foot in the country of origin”: they call it “going back to the bled”2. Here is how it works: they generally leave on an Algerian passport (or another) and come back on a French one.

ÉLÉMENTS: Alain de Benoist, you write that the partisans of remigration are “very great optimists,” because they believe the catastrophe is still avoidable, whereas you consider that “it has already happened.” Doesn’t your realism risk turning into fatalism? Jean-Yves Le Gallou, doesn’t your voluntarism risk mistaking wishes for realities?

ALAIN DE BENOIST: Do not confuse lucidity with resignation, or pessimism with amor fati. For having announced the decline of the West, Oswald Spengler was constantly accused of “pessimism”; today we can see how things stand. Had I ever been tempted by fatalism, I would certainly not have set out on the path I chose. I have always thought, on the contrary, that even in the darkest night one must work for the return of the light. But one must still remain realistic, as Julien Freund used to say. Politics consists in making possible what is necessary, not in making necessary what is impossible! Setting oneself the program of emptying France of nearly a third of its current population seems to me neither possible nor reasonable. One does not do good work by repeating like a mantra that “will is enough,” that one must not “drive Billancourt to despair”3, and that “faith moves mountains.” Sorry, but mountains do not move. And when one is waging war, one better harbor no illusions about the lay of the battlefield. Otherwise, the result is failure and disillusionment. One clarification in passing: the “catastrophe” you speak of corresponds, for me, to the domination of the world by the values of planetary capitalism. That is why I think that even if the immigration problem had never arisen (but it has!), we would still be living in an abject world.

JEAN-YVES LE GALLOU: One can indeed choose to do nothing. Provided one weighs the consequences:

1. The demographic tipping point when, in 8-15 years, European newborns will be a minority in maternity wards in France (and in other neighboring countries). In a word: the disappearance of the original identity.

2. The electoral tipping point in favor of the most pro-immigration parties of the left within 10 years. Perhaps sooner. Because the votes of native voters are split among the various parties, while the communal votes of minorities concentrate on the far left (in France on LFI, in Germany on Die Linke). In the end, this means the loss of sovereignty for the original people.

In short, if one acknowledges the Great Replacement (a demographic reality) and anti-white racism (a sociological reality), then one has no choice but to work for remigration by widening the Overton window and stressing the extreme urgency of remigration.

A clarification all the same about the numbers! Even in its most maximalist definition, remigration does not concern “a third of the French population.” Let us not hide behind our little finger4: everyone knows perfectly well that the problem is non-European immigration — Muslim and African in particular. So let us look at the figures: there are (excluding illegals) 4 million non-European foreigners; as foreigners, they have no right to permanent residence. As for non-European dual nationals, they number around 7 million. Once again, no worry about those who are assimilated. But the racailles5 who insult the French, burn down high schools, and assault “gwers”6 have no place in France. Alain de Benoist and our readers may rest assured: that does not add up to 23 million people!

OUT NOW from Arktos:

This book is an investigation in two parts. First, it uncovers the unspoken truths and lies behind the official discourse about “systemic racism.” Second, it plunges into the dirty underbelly of the everyday reality of anti-White racism.

Beyond an ideological critique, this book gives a voice to the victims — those who are silenced because acknowledging their suffering would shatter the dominant narrative. Through in-depth interviews, case studies, and an exploration of cultural context, Anti-White Racism reveals how insults, discrimination, humiliation, and violence experienced in everyday life form part of a larger normalization of racial hostility that official policy and the media seek to deny, but whose effects they can no longer hide.

In this courageous, unsettling, and richly documented investigation, François Bousquet exposes the rising reality of anti-White racism — and asks how long the silence can last.

ÉLÉMENTS: How can one defend remigration while proclaiming oneself liberal and capitalist? Isn’t there a contradiction in promoting a market economy based on the free movement of everything except people? In other words, how can remigration be carried out without at the same time opting for deglobalization?

JEAN-YVES LE GALLOU: One need only observe the facts: Japan is liberal, capitalist, and globalized, yet it remains closed to immigration. The United States is liberal, capitalist, and globalized, yet it has embarked on a policy of remigration, driven by Trump, Vance, and Musk. And I am not even going to talk about China.

In a market economy, adjustments happen through prices: if labor is scarce in a sector, then working conditions and wages must be improved.

National preference, which is currently prohibited, must also be legalized: as things stand, a restaurant owner (or a building contractor) has no right to choose French employees or employees of European origin. If he does, he will be criminally prosecuted and exposed to severe penalties. Here is a law that could be repealed with positive consequences for liberty and for identity.

And then let us look at the facts: even more than labor immigration, what we are suffering from is an immigration of welfare predation. Here again, let us take an example: the unemployment rate in Seine-Saint-Denis is 50% higher than the Île-de-France average, and that department has 84,000 households receiving the RSA and 949,000 beneficiaries of the various CAF benefits.7 It is the welfare state that acts as a suction pump for immigration. The Danish Social Democrats have understood this well: to protect their social model, they close off access to it to the whole world. In short, a great deal can be undertaken without making exit from globalized capitalism a precondition, as some do, or exit from the European Union, as others do.

I nonetheless acknowledge the effectiveness of communism in preventing immigration: in ten years of chavismo (2015–2026), not one immigrant entered Venezuela, but 5 million Venezuelans left.

ALAIN DE BENOIST: I wrote in the editorial of the latest issue of Éléments: immigration is an invention of capitalism, or at least one of its consequences. “The economy massively demands immigration,” proclaims Patrick Martin, president of the Medef8 — this at least has the merit of clarity. Market society obeys only the law of supply and demand. It knows nothing of peoples, only of individuals; it knows nothing of citizens, only of consumers. When capitalist countries refuse immigration, they can do so only in violation of their own principles. In other words, they cherish the causes whose consequences they refuse. That is the whole problem with liberal conservatism.

ÉLÉMENTS: Alain de Benoist, you recall the following trilemma: immigration, growth, or birth rate. With a falling birth rate, it is impossible to maintain both economic growth and ethnic and cultural continuity without immigration. Which of these terms would you sacrifice?

ALAIN DE BENOIST: Here too I gave my answer clearly in the editorial already mentioned: “In a period of demographic crisis, fighting mass immigration means no longer making growth an absolute.” That is why I reject both the choice of today’s European leaders, who imagine they can reconcile growth with “controlling immigration,” just as they imagine they can “moralize capitalism” or rely on “sustainable development,” and the choice of Japan, which is staking everything on robotics, thereby taking part in the great replacement of man by the machine (allow me to add that, if I am ill, I would far rather have an immigrant nursing assistant at my bedside than a robot!).

JEAN-YVES LE GALLOU: Ethnocultural continuity obviously takes priority. The population can decline, so long as it keeps its identity. It will be possible to set off again. If it is diluted in multiracial and multicultural chaos, that will be more difficult. In short, it is better to follow the model of Japan than that of England. As long as there remain Europeans of blood and spirit, everything will be possible.

ÉLÉMENTS: Citizenship or identity? National preference or civilizational preference? If belonging can produce no criterion other than legal nationality, what can be done to uphold European peoples’ right to their historical continuity?

ALAIN DE BENOIST: Civilizational preference. But perhaps the question should rather be: citizenship or nationality? If the European peoples wish to continue their history and give themselves a destiny, the first rule is to see what ought to be staring us in the face — namely, that we are entering a world of a kind never seen before. Jacobin nationalisms, like “the values of the one and indivisible Republic,” are no longer able to settle anything. Nations cannot become multicultural or multiethnic without disintegrating. That is not the case for empires (or federations). The Europe of the future will be built with all those it has managed to convince to take part in its imperial destiny.

JEAN-YVES LE GALLOU: This is a particularly delicate subject. Identity is the bedrock of the city.

Yet we have cheapened our citizenship by granting nationality automatically or semi-automatically, to people from elsewhere, very few of whom were able, willing, or knew how to assimilate to our culture and our civilization. It cannot be denied that there is a problem with certain dual nationals. For the short term, three directions seem desirable to me:

1. The abolition of deferred birthright citizenship — that is, the automatic acquisition of French nationality at 13 or 18 for the children of foreigners born in France;

2. A moratorium on naturalizations so as not to aggravate the problem;

3. Stripping unassimilated and hostile dual nationals of citizenship.

How can one not think of Renaud Camus’ words:

“It is with nations as with education: they have their foundation in segregation.”

Originally published in Éléments on October 5th, 2026

Translated by Alexander Raynor

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The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, born in 1942, was one of those thinkers to whom broadly speaking left-wing intellectuals readily referred in the early 2000s; whereas Emmanuel Levinas was associated with the period’s endlessly repeated concept of “the Other,” homo sacer was Agamben’s term. Both were, unsurprisingly, used to delegitimize opposition to immigration and national sovereignty, a lazy habit which always entailed the instrumental trivialization of thinkers who were valuable in certain respects.

Agamben was, and remains, a rewarding observer of history and society, not least through his interest in sovereignty and the dichotomy between zoe and bios. He is a continental philosopher; the influence of, among others, Dumézil, Heidegger, and Schmitt is obvious, and among his friends over the years we find names such as Debord, Pasolini, and Negri.

Although the pro-immigration left made use of Agamben and attempted to connect immigration to homo sacer, he has also at times come closer to both the genuine and the more populist right. His thoughts on Europe and the EU were an example of the former, his criticism of the handling of the pandemic an example of the latter. This was, not least, a logical consequence precisely of homo sacer, the human being reduced to the purely biological, as well as of Agamben’s interest in sovereignty and biopolitics. Agamben’s blog Una voce contains several worthwhile articles (the internet has several translation tools for those who do not speak Italian).

We recognize the gloomy, pessimist perspective from Adorno; it recurs frequently in Agamben, which should hardly be surprising. The world in which he grew up no longer exists—neither its culture, its demography, its nature, nor its morality—and he has explicitly written that we live “among the ruins.”

In The Failure of Humanity, Agamben compares our species to an insolvent debtor, unable to

“repay the debts it has successively incurred with regard to the earth on which it lives (including the atmosphere, which is no less polluted than the earth). The creditors’ committee would, in addition to representatives of all aspects of the earth and air, include living species that have disappeared or are threatened with extinction.”

This is humanity in “a state of complete spiritual collapse.” Further, Agamben describes

“the real problem with artificial intelligence as being that it was made possible by a general loss of the capacity for imagination, almost as if its emergence had been preceded by the establishment of an all-encompassing artificial imagination.”

He interprets Trump and Netanyahu through Christian, eschatological concepts, writing about them that “anomos, the lawless, is not an external principle, but the form that the institution itself assumes in its decline.” His pessimism about history is almost devastating: he speaks not only of the end of the West, but also of the end of Judaism through Zionism, the coming downfall of Ukraine and the EU, the disappearance of the Italian people, and the last days of humanity.

All of this is intellectually stimulating and at times brilliant, including the attempt to interpret the history of the West through Indo-European grammar, but the absence of a historical subject makes it all rather unedifying. In a certain sense, this suggests the limitations of continental philosophy.

Agamben and Imperium Europa

The historical subject that at times can be glimpsed in Agamben after all is Europe, though not in its present Eurocratic form. He does not hesitate to call Italy a protectorate: “

According to international law, a nation that has as many bases (some of them secret and equipped with atomic bombs) on its territory as the United States has in Italy does not have sovereignty over its foreign policy, but only over its domestic policy; that is, technically speaking, it is a protectorate.”

Agamben has wrestled with the question of European unity for a long time. In a text on Kojève and the Latin Empire, among other things, he wrote that

“a Europe that claims to exist exclusively on an economic basis and ignores real affinities in lifestyle, culture, and religion is today displaying all its fragility, particularly at the economic level.”

Although he lacks Evola’s crystal clarity, there is an edge directed against the American empire’s occupation of Europe. Agamben writes in this regard:

“the only appearance of unity is achieved when Europe acts as a vassal under the United States and participates in wars that in no way correspond to common interests, still less to the will of the people.”

Agamben and continental philosophy thus readily end up close to some form of European federalism, which also entails an affinity with the New Right:

“the idea of a European constituent power is the specter haunting Europe today, a specter that no one dares to invoke.”

READ MORE about Europe’s imperial potential — hot off the press from Arktos:

Agamben and the Pandemic

Agamben’s thoughts on the pandemic clearly connect to his broader perspective; concepts such as the state of emergency, homo sacer, and biopolitics permeate his texts.

In the days of COVID-19, he also carried out a more explicit political intervention than usual. At the same time, he skillfully balanced between conspiracy theory and razor-sharp social analysis. Agamben wrote, among other things, concerning the lockdown of societies:

“it is difficult not to think that the situation they are creating is precisely what those who govern us have repeatedly tried to achieve: that universities and schools should finally be closed and teaching conducted exclusively online; that people should stop meeting and talking for political or cultural reasons and instead exchange only digital messages; that machines should, wherever possible, replace all contact—all contagion—between human beings.”

Thus, he interpreted social distancing through the lens of Canetti’s theory of the masses:

“what social distancing and panic have created is certainly a mass—but an inverted mass, so to speak, consisting of individuals who keep their distance from one another at all costs.”

The essay “Medicine as Religion” compared medicine to both Christianity and capitalism, while the vaccine was interpreted against the background of homo sacer.

Overall, Agamben is an interesting and rewarding thinker, hardly surprising given his use of thinkers such as Dumézil, Schmitt, and Heidegger. Attacking the consensus during the pandemic was not entirely without risk, but Agamben’s thoughts on geopolitics are also controversial in places. His pessimism is something best consumed in limited portions.

EXPLORE MORE Continental philosophy with Arktos:

Michael Millerman’s Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin and the Philosophical Constitution of the Political is essential reading.

Continued from Parts 1 & 2

7. Niklas Luhmann and the Autopoietic Nature of the Liberal-Capitalist System

What could a relatively unknown German theorist of “social systems,” writing before mass immigration became a central political issue, teach us about White ethnocide? Although Niklas Luhmann produced a large body of work—sixteen of his books have been translated into English—and has been praised as “the closest the social sciences have come, in a long time, to an actual thinker,” he remains largely unknown outside a narrow circle of systems theorists. Most educated Westerners, if they have heard of him at all, know him only through his 1971 debate with Jürgen Habermas.

Because Luhmann accepted Talcott Parsons’s view that the object of sociology is to explain how society maintains order and reproduces itself, and because in the post-1960s mainstream sociology was already committed to progressive activism, Luhmann came to be widely regarded as a conservative defender of the status quo interested in the orderly functioning of societies, receiving thereby far less attention than countless third-rate Leftist theorists offering to “emancipate humanity.”

In Germany, however, public and academic admiration for the undeniable theoretical sophistication of Luhmann’s work began to grow in the late 1980s. As Habermas came to be regarded as the “state philosopher” of institutionalized progressivism, a growing number of younger academics turned to Luhmann precisely because they found his systems theory more original and less subservient to the standard progressive claim that the purpose of sociology and education is the endless “radical critique” of “oppressive conditions.”

Now, while Luhmann accepted Parsons’s premise that society is a system whose continuance must be explained, he rejected Parsons’s claim that order is maintained through a shared culture, arguing instead that order is maintained through the ongoing self-reproduction of differentiated function systems, each operating according to its own cognitive codes. He argued that the defining characteristic of modernity was the differentiation of society into multiple “autopoietic” (self-reproducing and operationally closed) institutional systems. Luhmann borrowed the concept of autopoiesis from the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, who first elaborated it in the late 1970s and early 1980s as an answer to the question of what constitutes the defining characteristic of living systems. The term combines two Ancient Greek words, auto meaning “self”, and poiesis meaning “creation” or “production”.

Focusing on the living cell, Maturana and Varela define an autopoietic system as

“a closed topological space that continuously generates and specifies its own organization through its operation as a system of production of its components, and does this in an endless turnover of components.”

The cell, in other words, is an autonomous system with a capacity to produce and continuously regenerate its own components, organize them into a coordinated whole, and thereby maintain itself as a distinct unity without assistance from another external system.

The key point here is that anything a cell (or system) does is determined by its internal structure (the components inside the cell and the relations among them). While autopoietic systems exist within environments that shaped them, they are operationally autonomous. Maturana and Varela thus came up with the term “structural coupling” to designate the selective exchanges between a system and its environment (which includes other functionally differentiated systems), where each system produces “irritations” or perturbations inside other systems, without losing its identity or operational autonomy.

Luhmann transferred the theory of autopoietic biological systems to social systems, arguing that modern society is characterized by the functional differentiation of relatively autonomous subsystems (economy, law, politics, science, education, mass media, art, religion), each of which operates according to its own internal binary code and discourses. For example, science operates on the code true/false, the economy on payment/non-payment, politics on power/no power (or government/opposition), and the media on information/noninformation. A function system can be identified only to the degree to which it has differentiated itself from its environment and from other systems.

This is what Luhmann means when he writes, in a highly erudite lecture course subsequently published under the title Introduction to Systems Theory (2015), that “a system is the difference – the difference between system and environment”.

Function systems differentiate themselves, and attain “operational closure,” when they develop a specialized discourse, pedagogy, key texts, organizations, and experts that shape how problems are framed, how judgements are reached, and how events are conceptualized. The internal operations of social systems, accordingly, occur through communications, not metabolic processes. The systems reproduce themselves by linking communications to communications according to their own binary codes and discourses, remaining operationally closed while remaining open to irritations from their environment. These irritations are processed only insofar as they are translated into the code of each system.

There is no overriding system, no state power or theocratic order, that regulates the cognitive dynamics of the individual systems. Cognition is always specific to each system. Luhmann admits that he is a “radical constructivist”. This may seem odd given the associations of systems theory with science and objectivity. According to him, however, each systems produces knowledge through its own operations, not by mirroring the world as it is in itself. When he writes that the code of the function system of science is true/false, he means what the scientific community itself means when it communicates in terms of a specific methodology characterized by logical consistency, controlled observation, and empirical testing. Science applies this methodology to the slice of the world it is concerned with. This code is not arbitrary; thus, papers are accepted or rejected in referred journals, or experiments are validated or rejected according to whether they meet (or fail to do so) this experimental criteria.

Although every system is aware of its “environment” and interacts with other systems (including biological systems and psychic systems of thoughts and emotions), external events only produce “irritations” that the system translates according to its conceptual apparatus. As Hans-Georg Moeller quotes Luhmann:

“Every function system can only perform its own function. No one can in the event of a crisis or on a continuing or supplementary basis sit in for another one. When there is a government crisis, science cannot help out with truths. Politics does not have its own means to create economic success – as much as it may be politically dependent on it and as much as it pretends to be able to do so. The economy can let science take part in the conditioning of money payments, but it cannot produce truth with all the world’s money. Through financing one can attract, one can irritate, but one cannot prove anything. Science honors financing with ‘acknowledgments,’ not with provable argumentation.”

Science, therefore, cannot determine the nature, or constitute the foundation, of the other systems. Politics does not become true or false because a paper published in a referred science journal says that a government policy counters the findings of genetics. Likewise, a law does not become legal or illegal because it goes against the standards of the system of education. Each system uses its own code. Evolutionary psychologists who claim that they have discovered the “foundations” of society are stepping outside the system of science, as if science can occupy a position “beyond all systems”. Science is incapable of observation “without itself being a system”:

“namely, a system with a network of communication, a system with certain institutional arrangements, a system with certain value preferences, a system with individual careers, and a system that depends on society”.

Scientific knowledge is possible precisely because the system of science is “operationally closed” with its own methodology, expertise, and focus on certain aspects of reality. It is impossible to observe “the entire world” as it is in itself. Luhmann’s systems theory does not make any such transcendental claims. His own theory, he writes is “second-order observation”. By this he means that as a systems theorist he observes how other systems observe without claiming to dictate how any other system should function. Systems theory itself operates inside the function system of science and its code; it does not stand outside society, but is a construction of reality from the perspective of systems theory.

Luhmann saw this differentiation as the great achievement of modernity in its allowance of social complexity and prevention of total domination by any single logic, as happened in pre-modern stratified societies or totalitarian Communist regimes. Under conditions of functional differentiation, society becomes largely indifferent to traditional forms of identity. As Hans-Georg Moeller writes in his introduction to Luhmann, “it does not matter which region, religion, or race functions — as long as it functions.” Modern function systems are thus, in principle, open to everyone and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity because they operate according to functional rather than traditional or ascriptive criteria.

Although Luhmann did not write specifically about mass immigration or liberal progressivism, his framework offers powerful conceptual tools for understanding the resilience of the fused liberal-capitalist order. One must be careful, however, in applying, without reservations, Luhmann’s model toward understanding the current dynamics of the Western world. He tended to treat modern society as a neutral, technocratic system of differentiated codes without adequately appreciating the inherently progressive nature of modern liberal society, particularly from the 1960s on, and how this progressivism has penetrated and coordinated multiple subsystems. While he does recognize social movements like environmentalism and welfare programs, he treats them as “irritations,” rather than as central to progressivism.

I will employ his theory to argue that in the contemporary West, liberal universalism no longer functions as a mere critique, but as a widely shared meta-code inscribed into the supposedly neutralized codes of the subsystems. The ability of progressivism to become a meta-code should not be difficult to envision, since the major subsystems of Western modernity were themselves shaped by classical liberal principles. Thus, the economy was shaped by freedom of trade, property rights, and freedom of contract; the legal system by equality before the law, contract law, maritime law, corporate law, and the like; and the educational system by the ideal of open inquiry and the liberal arts. Once these systems had been constituted along liberal lines, with their ideal that everyone should enjoy equality of liberty, the conditions were set for the post-1960s version of liberalism to act as an overseeing meta-code across all sub-systems.

READ MORE from Arktos:

In the new global era, the peoples of the Earth find themselves under the monstrous tentacles of a techno-economic system which sees only numbers. Spawned by the American mercantile order but now supplanting it, this system uproots, domesticates, and homogenizes national identities, replacing them with an anonymous global society under “scientific” management. Instead of nations and cultures, histories and visions, only consumers and “standards” remain. This mindless, self-serving system gnaws away at consciousness and the will to live. In exchange for cubicles, cars, and TV shows, it kills peoples, deletes history, and smothers destiny.

Faced with this totalitarian spectacle, which dresses itself in the virtues of human rights and socio-economic well-being, Guillaume Faye summons us to pinpoint the system’s workings, decode the pitfalls of modern ideologies, and defend the right of peoples to be themselves and go their own ways.

The Ethnocide System, the first magnum opus of one of the most provocative and inspiring masterminds of the New Right, now translated into English for the first time, is a tour de force of the desperately needed showdown between the peoples of Earth and the globalist machine.

Today, this meta-code is powerful enough that even “objective” science, with its commitment to the true/false code, now faces prohibitions on research into racial or IQ differences. Scientific American and Nature, two of the leading science journals, explicitly refuse to publish or even consider race-realist research. More recently, in August 2026, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article claiming that the questioning of Jason Arday’s credentials was an instance of racial persecution (despite the decisiveness of the evidence showing that he was a plagiarist with a CV full of falsehoods, which violated the modern code of the education subsystem).

We are past the relatively sane and neutral world of Luhmann’s time, when universities still retained, despite their liberalism, a commitment to meritocracy and to the pure code of education/non-education. The majority of universities now declare that one of their key missions is diversity, equity, and inclusion. It is almost impossible now for a professor (or a graduate student seeking an academic position) to question the merits of mass immigration, feminism, or racial integration. The economy continues to operate on the code of profitable/unprofitable, yet businesses are expected to adopt progressive stances on race, gender, and immigration. The legal system still distinguishes legal/illegal, but the content of law is heavily shaped by civil-rights doctrine, anti-discrimination rules, and equity considerations. In this sense, liberalism behaves as a self-referential, self-reinforcing meta-system that keeps the subsystems “progressive” in their operations. It has established its own meta-binaries across all the systems—liberal/illiberal, inclusive/exclusive, progressive/reactionary—structuring their internal operations and actions.

To be clear, functional differentiation still prevails; no function system controls, dictates, or acts on behalf of any other. Science cannot prescribe its way of doing things to politics any more than politics can prescribe to science the direction of scientific research. My point is that the specific codes of all the subsystems in the progressive West operate within a meta-liberal post-Fordist order.

Luhmann underappreciates this meta-moralizing power because he understands liberalism primarily as a “semantics” invented to fit the requirements of functional differentiation rather than as an ideology with independent moral force. He regards the language of universality, human rights, personal freedom, and individualism as simply the most suitable semantics for a society no longer organized by hierarchical or stratified principles. As he writes,

“Freedom and equality are now [semantically established] because all limitations and inequalities are set up only by the codes and programs of the individual function systems since general directives for the whole of society no longer exist.”

He notes further (as cited by Moeller) that

“new principles of inclusion are sought and found that are given the names of freedom and equality and that take on the form of civil or even human rights… Equality means that no other principles of inclusion are accepted besides those determined by the function of the systems themselves.”

This perspective explains why it largely escapes his attention that liberalism may constitute a meta-code with its own cognitive construction of reality. Ironically, in some of his writings he does sense the extraordinary power of this ideology, even describing the ideas of human rights as the “true” fundamentalism of our time that semantically grounds the structures of contemporary society.

The case of contemporary China further demonstrates the limits of the reductionist claim that liberalism is merely a “semantic” by-product of modern functional differentiation. China is already a highly modern, functionally differentiated society in which markets operate according to the economic code, and education and science largely follow their own respective codes. Yet China is definitely not liberal in the Western sense. A strong ruling party maintains overarching control, prioritizes ethnic homogeneity (even Han supremacy), and subordinates the subsystems to nationalist goals.

This demonstrates that functional differentiation does not inevitably produce openness, universalist inclusion, or indifference to race and ethnicity. Given that Luhmann’s research was almost entirely focused on Western modernity, perhaps we should not be surprised that he missed the dynamic reality of liberalism and capitalism, like a fish in water.

Despite these drawbacks, Luhmann’s concepts of autopoiesis and operational closure remain extremely valuable. His theory elucidates how social subsystems such as politics, law, media, education, and the economy are self-referential, and how they process external “irritations” or events like grooming scandals, populist revolts, or Black violence, through their cognitive structures and internal codes (filtered through the progressive meta-code) rather than viewing “reality as it is,” or as critics of immigration claim it to be. It teaches how institutions prioritize self-reproduction, systemic continuity and cognitive coherence, over solving external “real” problems.

Reading Luhmann allowed me to see with keener eyes how the fusion of liberal universalism and capitalist optimization has become an autopoietic mega-system. It reproduces itself through institutions, law, media, NGOs, and corporate incentives. This is the “deep liberal state” that everyone talks about, but which no one explains.

8. The Path-Dependent Civilizational Trap of the West

The Great Replacement is now on a path-dependent trajectory that will be extremely difficult to reverse. The concept of path-dependency is relatively common in the social sciences. It describes institutions or patterns of development in which past decisions constrain or define later ones, locking systems into old and inefficient ways of doing things simply because changing course has become too costly or difficult.

The trap the West is experiencing, however, is different. It is dynamic and optimizing. The West remains highly effective (compared to other nations) at generating short-term economic growth, opportunities for elite status, openness to multiple lifestyles, entertainment, and self-reproduction. The problem is that the Western promise that multicultural capitalist optimization would overcome the ethnic conflicts that have “plagued humanity” is generating exactly the opposite result: increasing ethnic tensions across the West, grooming gangs in the UK, disproportionate Black violence in the US, permanent welfare dependency, no-go zones, and migrant assaults throughout Europe. Instead of creating a new world order of racial harmony, it is systematically undermining the demographic and cultural foundations of European societies.

Many dissident analysts reject the idea of a path-dependent trap. They are guided by the Platonic ideal that if only people are educated about the costs of immigration, the liberal establishment would eventually “see reason” and change course. This expectation rests on an outdated understanding of what liberalism has become. We are no longer in the world of classical liberalism. The liberalism that ushered in the 1700s and 1800s, eloquently embodied in the writings of Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill, was oriented toward criticism of tradition, church authority, hereditary privilege, and obscurantism. It truly cherished reason, evidence, and reform.

By contrast, progressive liberalism, especially since the post-1960s and the post-Fordist era, has largely abandoned that critical spirit when it comes to its own (institutionalized) values. Its supposed pluralistic tolerance has become a self-righteous and authoritarian mode of thinking. This attitude was already implied in John Rawls’s belief that liberal societies cannot be fully neutral, that they must actively propagate attitudes of diversity and tolerance across all major institutions while systematically discouraging and marginalizing illiberal or traditional norms. It is implied in Jürgen Habermas’s argument that liberal values are already built into human communication itself, which aims at “mutual understanding” and the creation of a public sphere in which individuals rely on their rational capacities freed from the “distorted communication” of illiberal traditions and particular ethnic groups.

Liberalism is dedicated to the expansion of equality of rights among all social groups and the dismantling of sexist, ethnocentric, Islamophobic, or nationalist prejudices. Its claim that the good life emerges from the propagation of diverse cultural and sexual lifestyles makes it inherently antagonistic to outlooks rooted in ethnic particularism, biologically established sexual identities, or “rigid” traditions. For this reason, inconvenient facts that point to major failures in multiculturalism are not treated as evidence of failure, but are interpreted, rather, as proof that the progressive project has not gone far enough, or as that society needs to improve its behaviours through further “re-education.” The system is no longer primarily seeking truth in the Enlightenment sense.

This is why Niklas Luhmann’s concept of autopoiesis is so useful for understanding the path-dependent trap. The main goal of Western institutions is not to maximize truth or the culture of Whites. These institutions are designed for economic growth, the actualization of its progressive ideals, and self-reproduction. This is why the system is so reluctant to speak openly and honestly about the failures of multiculturalism. It processes migrant problems and populist reactions as “irritations” or perturbations through its own binary codes (racist/anti-racist, progressive/reactionary, legitimate/illegitimate), treating them as further confirmation that more anti-racism, more diversity training, or more suppression of “hate speech” is needed.

Operationally closed systems cannot directly interfere with the operations of other systems. What happens in one system does not bring about a determinate reaction in another; it can only produce, in the words of Luhmann, “irritation” and “resonance.” Each system constructs its own observations according to its cognitive apparatus and binary code. Thus, when a migrant crime is reported, the legal system evaluates it not only in terms of whether a law has been broken but in terms of whether criticism of immigrants creates a “hostile and discriminatory climate” for “minorities”. The legal system is not designed to investigate the merits of immigration. The mass media is designed to offer information and reports of news (that draw an audience) without deviating from the liberal meta-code. It deems any information that focuses on the criminal behavior of particular immigrant or racial groups as either “discriminatory” or as “irresponsible” information that undermines the multicultural cohesion. This was notoriously evident when the editor of The Economist accused Elon Musk (earlier this year) of creating tensions and undermining integration efforts with his X postings about migrant crimes. Similarly, the political system tends to interpret rejection of multiculturalism as a threat to integration and to order itself, since the code of the system is power/no power within the meta-code of peaceful integration of diverse cultures. In the Western world of our times, the maintenance of order coincides with the maintenance of the progressive project.

The popular argument that what is currently occurring in the West is primarily the result of “Bioleninist” or “Communist” voters and leaders does apprehend some proximate aspects of Western politics today. It can’t be denied that a sizable proportion of leftist activists are no longer motivated by a desire to make Western societies more functional but, rather, by a resentful desire to see stable White communities dismantled. This explains why these groups persist with their “destructive” policies, like blaming “institutional racism” for Black assaults and thievery, calling for more Muslims, Somalis, and Haitians despite repeated evidence of high welfare costs, nepotism, and violence.

However, as I see it, this mindset has itself been generated—and is now reinforced—by the progressive meta-code that treats White racism as the supreme evil, holds that Whites are still unfairly gaming the system for their own benefit, and blames them for the wars and inequalities of the world. Radical activists sincerely feel they are justified in their vindictiveness. Moreover, now that large non-Western populations are inside the system with full political rights, at the same time that they are categorized as victimized “minorities”, while having strong in-group racial identities, we cannot but expect an increase of statements such as the one Hasan Piker made a few months ago: “We’re here to destroy the White race, bitch”.

We need to be careful, however, not to lose sight of the fact that the West is still controlled by business elites, a managerial educated class, trained scientists, and lawyers. While excessive wokeness and equity mandates can have deleterious effects on business maximization, the West still innovates in technology, finance, consumer culture, limbic business, and now AI. What needs to be understood is how this dynamism is framed within a liberal order that associates the continuance of multiculturalism with the preservation of order. Even when elites privately sense that something has gone badly wrong, that the post-WWII promise of harmonious diversity has instead produced persistent racial tensions and populist backlash, it can’t contemplate turning the ship around. The Western multicultural system is now deeply path-dependent.

But how exactly does this trap operate? First, as Milton Friedman famously put it, “the sole social responsibility of the firm is to maximize profits,” which in the post-Fordist age entails importation of immigrant labor. The costs in welfare, the loss of cultural identity, and the migrant violence we read about at X are either spread out over large populations or not inconsistent with GDP maximization. The people who benefit right now (corporations, politicians, academics, entertainers, NGOs, and non-Whites) don’t really feel those costs in their daily lives.

Second, liberal universalism has turned diversity and non-discrimination into the most sacred values. It is extremely hard for someone to build a career or profession while advocating openly for remigration, race realism, or White identity. The elites would rather ignore information about failures of multiculturalism than admit that culture and ethnicity matter, that Blacks and many immigrant groups don’t integrate well, that social trust has deteriorated, and that liberal multiculturalism is therefore based on fundamentally flawed premises.

Third, whole industries and professions have been incentivized to support the status quo: diversity consultants, immigration lawyers, refugee organizations, corporate HR departments, and large parts of the welfare state, including schools and universities. Politicians get praised for sounding humane (even conservatives strive to look “compassionate”). Businesses get “flexible workers”. NGOs and academics get funding and moral prestige. Changing this path would require dismantling entire institutions and eliminating the careers of millions who are heavily invested in the system.

Fourth, the ethnic composition of a large number of Western cities is already demographically locked in. In the metropolitan cores where capital, media, universities, and political power are concentrated—in cities like Houston, Miami, Dallas, Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, London, Paris, Birmingham, Toronto, Malmö, Stockholm, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Vienna, Frankfurt, Vancouver, Manchester, Leicester, Brussels, Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, and a growing list of others—the native White population is either aging rapidly or reproducing well below replacement.

The next generations that will shape the next decades are already substantially more diverse. This non-White population not only has full legal rights, but rapidly growing political influence. Once a city becomes majority non-White, local politics, school boards, the concerns of police departments, and government departments at large tend to favor the new diverse citizens. Any attempt to bring about a serious program of remigration would bring about widespread court challenges, intense media reactions about “ethnic cleansing,” and major economic disruptions.

It is getting worse. The trap is now being strengthened and deepened by the fusion of limbic capitalism and artificial intelligence that will make escape even harder. The regular style of control involving deplatforming and financial exclusion (executed through conventional administrative, legal, and corporate decisions) is already being supplemented by more effective AI tools for surveillance, content moderation, algorithmic personalization, and synthetic media designed to shape public opinion and to control the wiring inside the brain of the masses. We may be heading into an AI-limbic technocratic trap of atomized race-mixed individuals combined with Chinese methods of control but without ethnic cohesion.

9. Can the West Escape the Trap?

The intention of this article is not to instill pessimism and defeatism. Its purpose is diagnostic. It is focused on identifying and explaining the root causes of the current trajectory of the West. From a Luhmannian perspective, it is naïve to believe that society can be redirected simply because enough people discover the negative facts about diversity, “as if society were not a system.”

If we agree that social systems operate autopoietically, it follows that they cannot be steered from the outside simply because a party eliminates DEI in some institutions, abolishes the teaching of transgenderism in primary schools, or takes a tougher stand on black criminality. The election of a populist party (on its own) can only “irritate” the liberal-capitalist order or alter the “environment” (via new regulations on immigration, or legal constraints on the excesses of wokeness) to which other systems respond. It cannot, however, override or impose an alternative comprehensive worldview upon the economy, law, media, or education. These systems will continue to operate according to their own discourses, as they are filtered through the prevailing liberal meta-code. The capitalist economy will remain operationally closed, processing events according to its own code of profitability versus unprofitability in the age of post-Fordism.

Many popular alternative explanations fall short because they lack an adequate theoretical grasp of society as a structured order of systems. Insofar as they assume that “society consists of concrete human beings and relations between human beings,” without seeing that individuals act under the structural imperatives of function systems, they treat the great replacement as the product of particular intellectual elites or particular leaders, and thus as mere ideas or leaders that could be reversed or replaced by electing new elites or by persuading those in power with better ideas. Luhmann’s theory, however, teaches that the communications and operations that reproduce the function systems are not the products of individual subjects.

From this Luhmannian perspective we can see that while Nathan Cofnas’s critique of the “equality thesis” is factually true, it naively assumes that current elites can be rationally persuaded to reject the belief that all human groups are biologically equal and to adopt race realism independently of the institutional imperatives of liberalism and the structural dynamics of post-Fordism. Christopher Rufo focuses on civil rights law and DEI as the primary problem, believing that repealing them would restore color-blind meritocracy, while ignoring the institutional logics of demographic replacement. Helen Andrews’s article on “race communism” explains well how the redistribution of positions and resources by race no longer makes sense in an American nation that is now populated by millions of non-White immigrants without a past experience of slavery or discrimination and where Whites are set to become a minority. Yet she assesses this problem from a strictly ideological and legal perspective, assuming thereby that a solution can be found through the mere revocation of old civil rights legislation. Gad Saad’s simple theory of “suicidal empathy” offers a truncated psychological account of the “WEIRD” psychology of Whites, which he wrongly assumes to prevail among Westerners in general, including Jews and non-Whites, even though only Whites exhibit a characteristically weak ethnocentric disposition. Saad’s approach, moreover, remains at the individual level and implies that Westerners can gradually be persuaded to become less sympathetic simply by reading him. These approaches, all in all, treat the problem primarily as one of bad ideas, bad laws, or personal inclinations, underestimating the path-dependent and autopoietic character of the regime.

Jared Taylor is right that Helen Andrews ignores the empirical reality of IQ racial differences and therefore underestimates how hard it is to restore color-blind meritocracy in a society that is now thoroughly multiracial. We need to ask indeed: why has the liberal order, across the entire West and not merely the United States, so consistently refused to absorb the findings of behavioral genetics and psychometrics? Clearly, it is not lack of awareness; research on IQ differences has been public for decades. Universities have the resources to discuss those findings openly.

My view is that race realism can’t be popularized for the simple reason that it is incompatible with the institutional realities of a society dedicated to liberal multiracialism. Steven Pinker seems to have sensed this when he recently adopted the position, despite being an Enlightenment liberal and a defender of free inquiry, that it is better not to popularize Black–White IQ differences in the public sphere, because the social costs would outweigh the gains. Even though he is the most famous critic of blank slatism, and does not deny IQ differences between racial groups, he seems to recognize, even if only tacitly, that in a society already committed to multiracial liberalism, open acceptance of group racial differences would result in the widespread belief that Black individuals are members of the “dumb race”. Race realism cannot be construed as a merely neutral theory, as Bo Winegard would like it to be. In its implications, it is a direct attack on the sacrosanct liberal meta-code that all humans, regardless of race, have equal dignity. It does not matter if the classical liberal insists that he judges individuals on the basis of merit alone and recognizes that there are Blacks with a high IQ. The reality is that full meritocracy in a multiracial society inevitably entails de facto racial ranking.

Kevin MacDonald’s work deserves open discussion for its scholarly substantiveness and historically grounded arguments. MacDonald argues that Jewish intellectual and political movements, such as Boasian anthropology, Freudianism, Frankfurt School critical theory, multiculturalism, and Neoconservatism have played a disproportionate and leading role in undermining Western ethnic cohesion. He places particular emphasis on the Jewish leading role in the implementation of the Celler Immigration Act of 1965, among many other ideas and policies that “serve Jewish group evolutionary interests” while demonizing any expression of White identity. He frames this as a “group evolutionary strategy” rooted in Jewish ethnocentrism and high verbal intelligence. In his later work Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, MacDonald clearly argues that Jewish promotion of universalism and multiracialism appealed to Whites precisely because these ideas resonated with their historically rooted individualism and low ethnocentrism.

However, it seems to me that as much as MacDonald understands that the inordinate role of Jews requires an understanding of the Western liberal tradition itself, his critique remains primarily ideological and focused on individual actors.

What Luhmann has conveyed to me is that social systems cannot be derived from the intentions of persons or groups. When politicians, judges, company managers, or professors speak or act, they do not communicate as self-legislating individuals in terms of their personal conscience, religious values, or “greedy” interests. They do so as occupants of positions through which the social system reproduces itself. The style and tenor of communication may vary from one person to the next, but this does not mean that newcomers can recode the systems. In the course of time, we see generations of individuals passing through the same positions, reproducing the systems, not remaking them anew.

While MacDonald’s account goes deep into the evolutionary selection of individualist behavioral traits among prehistoric Europeans, and while it explains a whole host of cultural and political dynamics in American society (Israel lobby, the inordinate influence and spread of many radical leftist movements, Hollywood, and other topics), it lacks a deep analysis of the economic and institutional structures behind the diversity regime. Jewish influence is minimal in many Western countries outside the United States, France, and the UK, yet we find similar patterns of mass immigration driven by native business associations and progressive groups. The disproportionate influence of Jews is better framed within the prior institutional logic of liberal universalism and the post-Fordist capitalist logic.

But what about the common complaint that mass immigration was never demanded by the native population through any clear democratic mandate, that it was a project orchestrated by elites? This view also ignores the systemic institutional dynamics of our times. The elites who initiated diversity “from above,” and the generations who continued to enforce it thereafter, were/are reproduced inside the same liberal institutions. The systems of law, economy, education, and media, and the liberal meta-code, continue to process claims against immigration from non-White nations as morally illegitimate, and the “newcomers” as necessary for the functioning of the economy. From the beginning, elites have been of the opinion that opposition to diversity is a temporary situation that an education in progressive values, combined with economic growth and a new generation of “open-minded” diverse individuals, would eventually overcome.

By examining this debate, from a Luhmannian perspective, I have come to the conclusion that reversing this order will require a prolonged sequence of cascading events and crises leading to major ruptures capable of undermining the liberal meta-code itself and the institutional conditions under which liberalism reproduces itself.

There are three potential rupture points in the Western order:

• Economic or Energy Breakdown: A severe, prolonged economic collapse and energy crisis could make the current model unsustainable. The question is how large this crisis would have to be to break the system. The 2008 financial crisis, seen as the greatest since the Great Depression of the 1930s, barely disrupted the system; it was absorbed through bailouts, political consensus across party lines, and the attribution of blame to isolated personalities, without leading to fundamental policy reversal. It is worth remembering that the Great Depression did not push the West out of its liberal-capitalist path, but instead accelerated its progressive dynamic. It seems that only a much deeper crisis, or the simultaneous occurrence of crises in other systems, would be required. Would there be viable political parties with extensive networking across the systems of society capable of exploiting such a chaotic breakdown and redirecting one (or two or three) Western nations out of their current paths?

• Geopolitical or Military Defeat: What about a major external shock such as a double strategic defeat of NATO and the US military in both Iran and Ukraine-Russia? The post-WWII liberal international order is built on the perception of Western (especially American) military and technological supremacy. Simultaneous failure against Iran and a loss against Russia would no doubt constitute major setback for liberal NATO and American power. It could ignite further populist anger, intensify questions about the “incompetence” of liberal elites, trigger energy shocks, and undermine the notion that liberal interventionism is the best way to create a “rules-based international order”. However, it is hard to conceive how the systems of politics, education, law, media, and the meta-code of liberalism in the domestic sphere would break down from such defeats. Previous disasters (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan) were absorbed without any serious abandonment of liberal interventionism (other than policy changes away from outright nation-building projects). This is not to deny, however, that additional defeats of the magnitude of Iran and Ukraine would likely bring about the end of American unipolarism and the consolidation of multipolarity.

• Major Legitimation Crisis: What if enough native Europeans (including growing segments of the middle class and cultural producers) lose faith in the moral legitimacy of the diversity project? Jürgen Habermas teaches that a legitimation crisis occurs when a society’s institutions lose public trust, undermining their perceived right to govern even while they retain political power and legal authority. We can envision a situation in which sustained, visible failures of mass immigration, such as continuously high welfare costs of migrants, persistent migrant violence, rising native discontent with the loss of national and cultural identities, and other problems eventually result in widespread erosion of the liberal ideals of diversity. We could anticipate a situation in which widespread acceptance of arguments such as Kevin MacDonald’s on Jewish influence, or the case for race realism, could undermine the dominant post-WWII moral narrative about “anti-racism” and “ethnic nationalism is evil,” thereby undermining double standards against European ethnic identity.

Of the three rupture points, I am inclined to believe that a deep legitimation crisis offers the best realistic chance of breaking the trap, because it directly attacks the moral and ideological meta-code sustaining the system. Luhmann’s theory of the mass media system offers useful insights here. As he observed, “Whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media.” The media is “structurally coupled” to many other systems in that it constructs a common reality (or “environment”) that politics, law, education, and the economy largely take as given. The media, as Luhmann explains, is always observing, and reporting about “the observations of the other systems”. It is not oriented toward consensus or problem-solving; rather, it continuously generates novelty, conflict, moralization, and drama. The media system accelerates the tempo of society by continuously providing new irritations and new information.

If the media aimed for total consensus, it would lose one of its essential functions, as happened in the Soviet Union, where the media eventually lost all credibility and popular attraction. As Luhmann observes, in liberal societies “viewers are not expected to join in any consensus of opinion. They are at liberty to agree or disagree.” This is, I would add, intrinsic to liberal pluralism and its cultivation of multiple lifestyles, which generates a permanent state of diverse opinions, notwithstanding the liberal dislike for “illiberal” views. Luhmann is persuasive in arguing that, when the media world is taken in its totality (not only news but books, magazines, videos, and podcasts), it “contains and reproduces differences of opinions in plenty,” offering audiences conflicting views, different values, and choices. This allows for a “restless,” contested reality with opportunities for dissidents to challenge the liberal order, to create exciting alternative perspectives that draw attention.

The position of the media as a common environment for all the other subsystems, combined with its dynamism, thus makes it a unique platform for change. If dissident voices, media like X, and powerful figures like Elon Musk, succeed in undermining the information monopoly of progressives, they may be able to create a strong counter-narrative. Musk is not your average libertarian; he has adopted many populist ideas in his call for remigration and his rejection of “anti-White” narratives. He has genuinely widened the Overton window. The media, particularly through X, may thus afford dissidents, independent thinkers, alternative media, and so-called “cultural creators” significant opportunities to bring about a legitimation crisis.

10. Conclusion: Media, Legitimation, and the Possibility of an Overdetermined Rupture

We must avoid false hopes, however. The media is only one system among others, which means that even if dissident voices and platforms seriously augment their influence, the other subsystems will continue to construct their own reality according to their own codes and discourses.

There are, moreover, inherent limitations in the capacity of the media to generate a cohesive social movement capable of reversing our current trajectory. This is what Luhmann’s complete theory, as articulated in The Reality of the Mass Media (1995), shows. The media, by its very nature, is not meant to generate a cohesive world view that would be required to counter the institutionalized power of liberalism and limbic capitalism. The media is structurally geared to select information with the qualities of surprise, conflict, quantities (about crimes, inflation, immigration, drug addiction) without much context, stories that are scandalous and point to norm violations, and that entail moralization, celebration or condemnation of personalities. It is not designed for sustained analysis and elaboration of plans to bring about institutional change.

X itself thrives on excitement, conflict, personality contests, and limbic stimulation. Most participants, including many dissidents, are primarily concerned with the number of followers and their own personal popularity, unconnected to any mass movements. They are, in other words, all too liberal. X both reflects and stimulates this individualism through its monetization and its limbic system of likes and reposts. Its founding principles remain structured by the liberal meta-code.

A legitimation crisis requires elite dissent inside other function systems: inside universities, corporations, legal institutions, the administrative state, and parts of the economy. There is, as of now, no comprehensive counter-ideology in the West, no counter-elites, and no kinship network standing outside the system from which liberal modernity, with its total control of all subsystems, even X, can be redirected away from its current trajectory. Fascism was tried and defeated. Traditionalism is unrealistic in a White population that is epigenetically WEIRD.

Does this mean that we are stuck with only minor populist reforms?

I believe that one of the ways the current path-dependent trap could be broken is through a situation in which things “skid out of control.” This can happen through a cascading sequence of failures and crises in which multiple systems begin to fail simultaneously, producing what the structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser called an “overdetermined” revolutionary rupture, a situation in which contradictions accumulate across the economic, political, legal, media, and cultural subsystems, seriously undermining the liberal meta-code.

Here is a scenario in which the trap may be broken. Due to increasing failures of immigrant integration and growing rejection of the multicultural narrative, a strong populist party comes to power in a major European country. Let’s use Germany’s AfD as the most likely real case example. Alice Weidel has said that in the first hundred days her party will “close the borders, eliminate social benefits for migrants, and carry out Germany’s largest deportations” of illegal and undocumented immigrants. Such a government might indeed carry out a program along the lines set down by Martin Sellner’s Phase A (“Immediate Stabilization of Asylum Chaos”): close national borders and increase security forces to prevent entry of undocumented migrants, “stop abuse of asylum system,” and repatriate illegals.

During this initial phase, these measures are implemented so that they are still processed through existing legal and administrative codes, without targeting legal immigrants, invoking race realism, or identifying citizens in terms of their “Germanic” ancestry. Nevertheless, these moderate measures agitate the radical Left, the woke media, universities, courts, political parties, and segments of the bureaucracy. There is a concerted condemnation of these measures as “existential threats” to “democracy and freedom” that “cannot be tolerated in an open society.” This intensifies polarization, court challenges, street protests, and elite resistance, leading thereby to the beginnings of the cascade.

The AfD, however, not only remains determined to go through with its remigration policies, but it then implements Sellner’s Phase B, “Repairing the Migration System,” and perhaps more. It calls for an end to “legal replacement migration,” termination of “all residence permits for migrants who burden [Germany] economically, financially, and criminologically,” and starts to push for German pride and abolition of multicultural programs. A remigration department is created, with a dedicated staff in charge of remigration flights. The AfD starts to ban Islamic minarets, imposes dress rules in public institutions, and condemns “parallel societies.” More than this, it decides to take legal and punitive actions against “woke extremists” who destroy property, burn things down, and disrupt the functioning of institutions, with thousands actually incarcerated for “illegal activities.”

This is the point when the cascade really starts: when the AfD starts to recode German society, by remigrating settled citizens and giving preferential treatment to citizens of German ancestry, and implementing a program of public de-Islamization. These measures lead to extreme polarization.

As this polarization grows, the diversity regime’s failures coincide with (or are preceded by) the onset of a geopolitical rupture, such as the defeat of NATO in Ukraine, along with the breakup of NATO, leading the AfD, or other populist parties, to formally abandon liberal unipolarism in geopolitics. At the same time, or around the same time, an economic recession hits, after prior decades of environmental policies and growing AI unemployment, coupled with the determination of Muslims to preserve and expand their “parallel” Islamic communities, a housing crisis in the major cities, and continuing sexual migrant violence. Native German populations, especially working and middle classes, grow more impatient and complain that the reforms are too slow or not strong enough. Calls for the remigration of millions spread from the fringe to mainstream discourse in the media.

A full legitimation crisis hits Germany and other Western nations. Community trust collapses; schools cannot perform properly due to racial, cultural, and religious tensions. Non-Whites start to promote the creation of parallel political orders operating on their own. In fact, we can speculate that in other European nations the elections of populist parties would come in the wake of, or together with, the rise of more “Mamdani-type” figures, explicitly acting in racial ways, attacking Whites as Whites, winning local and then national offices, openly advocating for their in-group interests. Defections among members of the professional and business classes finally begin, with the authority of the state fragmenting. The media system, operating according to what Luhmann calls its “selectors” (conflict, norm violation, moralization, novelty), amplifies every incident.

Violence, previously sporadic, increases on both sides. Alternative media, with a mass following, document the daily failures of diversity, how most non-Whites are not interested in integration, and how they are actually organizing as a political force to take power. The liberal meta-code can no longer control the narrative; its legitimacy erodes among growing elite segments of the native population. At this point, or as these events are unfolding, more “extreme” elements within the AfD gain popularity (or more determined populist parties gain in popularity in other Western nations, even gaining power at various levels of government). More radical policies are implemented, such as concerted actions against “Islamization” and parallel societies, outright rejection of multiculturalism, and mandated financial incentives for millions of immigrant citizens to remigrate. White identity politics spreads.

Eventually, multiple pressures converge. Economic recession, geopolitical setbacks, energy shocks, bringing about a full legitimation crisis within the liberal meta-code. Non-White political organizations, parties, and street movements grow more confrontational, interpreting White identity politics as an existential threat that can only be met with escalating violence. Native White populations, feeling demographically and politically cornered, realize that their “backs are against the wall.” White parallel institutions, self-defence networks, and more radical political organizations, start to spread. The progressive meta-code finally loses its capacity to reframe events. Elite defections become widespread. Members of the security forces, army and police, local administration, businesses, schools and universities, and mainstream media producers start choosing sides based on racial interests. The old liberal consensus collapses.

At this point, the situation resembles Althusser’s overdetermined crisis in which no single contradiction is decisive, but their “condensation” leaves a power vacuum with a chance for populists and German nationalists to take full power. The political system can no longer process the conflict through normal elections and legal procedures. Violence becomes more organized, resembling the “civil-war” situation outlined by David Betz, with major cities sliding into political warring zones (“feral cities”), and the state losing effective control of the rule of law.

Thus, what began as limited populist reforms has “skidded out of control” into a true revolutionary situation.

Of course, we can’t assume that this condensation of crises will automatically translate into a new ideological meta-code. A new meta-code would have to be constructed before or at least emerge from within the “overdetermined” crisis itself, otherwise the economy, law, and other remaining administrative and educational systems and organizations would continue to process events according to their own liberal logics. There would have to be a cultural revolution, a sweeping set of transformations of the existing subsystems. The “overdetermined crisis” could well generate liberal emergency measures and imposition of a full authoritarian order, rather than yielding to an ethno-national revolutionary transformation.

It might indeed be the case that a populist party, recognizing that events are “skidding out of control” if it presses too hard, risking a destructive civil war, settles down for moderate policies, such as the ones visible under Trump and among other populists. This would mean limiting itself to the removal of illegals with criminal records, cutting back on legal immigration, and cultivating a stronger sense of civic nationalism. It would also entail cutting back DEI and racial preferences; and reasserting color-blind meritocracy and individual rights. That is, it would limit itself to measures that could be handled by the existing legal, economic, and political codes, and the liberal meta-code itself — and that could easily be reversed as a more liberal party gets back into power with the support of immigrants.

We could witness a scenario in which populist or strong conservative governments spread across the West, determined to meet populist expectations beyond past conservative leaders, because they finally realize that the only way a “multiracial democracy” can be successful is through greater public safety, less welfare dependency among migrants, less anti-White narratives, and less economic hardships for the native populations. These governments would allow European nations to preserve some degree of their ethnic and cultural identities without trying to reverse the reality of multiracialism, aiming to create a more manageable liberalism, and thereby avoid risking a bloody civil war.

This ending brings to mind the words of Antonio Gramsci:

“The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

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One of the standard institutions associated with labour today is the labour union. Labour unions have been around for almost 150 years, having emerged from three converging developments in the late nineteenth century. The first was industrialisation, initially in Britain and later in continental Europe. The second was the influence of Marxist, socialist, and even anarchist thought concerned with protecting the worker. A third component, which developed somewhat later, was conservative Christian social thought, in which empathy and social responsibility played a role in further shaping labour unions as institutions of worker protection.

Labour unions are therefore usually associated with the political Left, as much of their intellectual heritage stems from socialism and Marxism, and for most people unions are understood as left-leaning in one way or another. In unions’ own rhetoric and self-presentation, this association is largely correct.

Yet in their actual structure and operation, labour unions are inseparable from industrialisation itself, and industrialisation meant capitalism, and more specifically liberalism. The labour union was, in this sense, a response to liberalism, but one that remained embedded within a liberal framework. What is often missed is that labour unions possess a distinctly liberal metaphysics: despite their collectivist rhetoric, they focus on workers’ rights, and rights presuppose the liberal idea of the individual as a rights-bearing subject. In practice, therefore, the union does not transcend individualism so much as it aggregates individuals, organising labour through claims and rights made on behalf of the individual worker.

Thus, labour unions are focused primarily on a defensive posture: they are concerned with what one must not - or in some cases must - do to the worker. This is not in itself a failing. Few would wish to work in conditions lacking basic dignity, or to be treated as an expendable resource rather than as a human being. For this reason, one should not dismiss the importance of labour unions in the manner the political Right sometimes does, as they have performed an important role in preventing abuses against fellow citizens that might otherwise have taken place.

Having said that, rights and claims protect individuals from abuse and poverty and provide a measure of safety, but they do not concern themselves with the formation of the worker’s character, responsibility, skill, or moral and technical excellence in and of themselves. The worker’s actual competence, whether he is an experienced craftsman who has honed his skills over time, and his mastery of a craft become secondary, or even irrelevant. Moreover, responsibility is externalised to the state through regulation and law, as workplace disputes are resolved through legal mechanisms, courts, and regulators. This both expands state bureaucracy and produces an ever-growing legal apparatus, as the state becomes the final arbiter of workplace order. Under such conditions, accountability becomes procedural rather than moral.

This metaphysics of proceduralism may have its roots in industrialisation itself, insofar as labour unions assume that labour is interchangeable — much as liberalism assumes people to be, regardless of the culture from which they stem. This assumption emerged from the fact that industrialisation largely dismantled older forms of specialisation. Where once master carpenters produced end-to-end, small-scale works meant to last a lifetime, industrial production replaced this with segmented labour, in which multiple workers performed repetitive tasks. The worker no longer needed to understand carpentry as a whole, but only the narrow, specialised function he mechanically repeated. Mastery and skill were thus displaced by efficiency. Ironically, for a liberalism that prides itself on the individual, value came to be produced collectively, procedurally, and repetitively rather than through individual excellence. Labour unions, shaped by these conditions, therefore organise around job categories and tend to privilege seniority over mastery.

What is understood as mastery is, under these conditions, increasingly displaced to universities. Universities, however, have gradually lost much of their original institutional character, even prior to more recent ideological developments. Historically, universities were neither diploma mills nor primarily intended to serve the employability needs of future workers in multinational corporations. Industrialisation instead gave rise to a managerial class that came to rely on formal credentials, such as MBAs or similar degrees, as markers of advancement, sidelining the original purpose of the university in the process.

Technical fields, which historically had little or no place within the university, often lag behind industry practice, and the material taught to students is frequently out of step with the tools and technologies used by most firms. As a result, many students graduate believing themselves prepared for professional life, only to encounter job requirements they do not meaningfully understand. Universities thus come to distribute credentials that substitute for demonstrated mastery of skill. In doing so, the university as an institution is diminished: education shifts from the pursuit of truth and deep inquiry, once centred on disciplines such as philosophy, medicine, literature, history, and theology among others, toward a system that primarily signals the ability to complete a prescribed sequence of tasks over several years, rather than fostering genuine formation and intellectual inquiry.

In response to labour unions and their spillover effects into other institutions, conservatives should not position themselves simply in opposition to labour organisation as such. Instead, they should articulate and build labour institutions grounded in their own values, capable of being offered as a credible alternative. As noted earlier, labour unions, despite their collectivist language, are oriented toward individual entitlements and rights, reflecting their underlying liberal metaphysics. Prior to the industrial revolution, however, an alternative institutional form existed—one that centred not on rights but on skill, competence, and merit: the guild.

Where unions tend to treat work as a set of tasks performed within a defined job category and understand workers primarily as a class in conflict with capital, guilds organised around crafts and understood work as a vocation and as part of personal identity. They accepted hierarchies of competence acquired through sustained practice over many years. Entry, formation, character, culture, skill, and standards were central to the guild, traditionally structured through three stages: apprentice for those entering the craft, journeyman for those with established competence, and master for those who had attained full mastery. Authority within the guild was therefore peer-based and organic rather than procedural, exercised by practitioners who had themselves demonstrated excellence. Guilds were self-regulating institutions, relying on reputation, certification, and exclusion to maintain standards, rather than on external courts or regulatory bodies.

Those who attained mastery of a craft were themselves active practitioners, continuously familiar with the latest tools, techniques, and developments within their field, and they transmitted this knowledge through peer evaluation and the instruction of apprentices. Within a guild system, responsibility came first and rights followed; reputation and respect were earned through demonstrated competence rather than claimed by entitlement. Guilds therefore did not merely protect work, but actively shaped durable skills, professional identities, and confidence, while reducing the need for external arbitration and enforcement by the state.

Labour unions emerged and developed in a period characterised by interchangeable workers and highly centralised employers, in which skill, while still relevant, was secondary to the repetitive nature of most tasks. As technology now advances rapidly, most notably through artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, many of the tasks historically performed by unionised workers are increasingly subject to automation. Execution thus becomes cheap, while judgment, particularly the judgment of quality, error, and consequence, becomes scarce. Under these conditions, taste, restraint, and responsibility assume renewed importance.

This shift implies that automated systems will ultimately be directed and supervised by practitioners who understand the work itself, and who have demonstrated mastery of a craft. Peer recognition and reputation therefore regain centrality as markers of competence and trust. In this context, labour structures such as guilds become relevant once again, not as nostalgic restorations but as institutions suited to organising judgment-intensive work.

A contemporary neo-guild, however, would need to accommodate both older technical crafts and newer technological domains: alongside plumbers, masons, stoneworkers, and metalworkers, guilds could plausibly emerge in fields such as cybersecurity, robotics integration, smart contract auditing, and advanced systems engineering, areas in which execution can be partially automated, but responsibility cannot. Modern neo-guilds could use technological tools such as videos for apprentices to learn what does not require physical presence through recorded videos and have in-person meetings at the guild for personal mentorship and in-depth teaching of things that require physical presence.

Recreating guilds in such a way would also echo Guillaume Faye’s idea of Archeofuturism, combining an ancient idea or value with today’s technologies.

Moreover, since technical formation would move to guilds, this would mean that universities could focus again on their original purposes such as theory, philosophy research, and civilisational memory, thus shifting the funding from technical occupations taught at the university towards research and development instead.

Beyond skill and character formation, guilds historically also incorporated systems of mutual aid, and a contemporary or neo-guild framework could plausibly do the same as an extension of professional responsibility. Rather than relying on state-administered unemployment entitlements, guilds pooled resources through member fees and other revenues into internal insurance funds. These funds provided support in cases of illness, injury, temporary unemployment, periods of transition between engagements, and even death, with payments often extended to the widows of craftsmen to ensure basic security.

Support was typically temporary and conditional, aimed at reintegrating the member into productive work rather than sustaining indefinite dependency. Because assistance was administered within a community of practitioners, members were subject to indirect but real social pressure to remain active: prolonged withdrawal from work risked reputational damage among peers. This arrangement introduced a moral dimension to welfare, in which eligibility depended not only on need, but on continued commitment to the craft and its vocation. Unemployment solidarity thus became embedded within institutions that formed skills, cultivated discipline and character, and incentivised members to remain competent and engaged. Were a similar system implemented within a modern neo-guild framework, the role of the state would shift accordingly, from primary provider of unemployment benefits to guarantor of last resort, intervening only where professional institutions proved insufficient.

If neo-guilds were to become a normalised feature of labour organisation, this would imply a significant reduction in the scope of the state, particularly by removing large portions of bureaucracy associated with labour administration, retraining programmes, regulatory oversight, and arbitration. Under such conditions, the state would be recast less as a manager or caretaker and more as a guarantor, intervening where necessary rather than administering labour relations directly. This would not, however, eliminate the state’s responsibilities toward its citizens. Provision would still be required in cases of severe disability, old age, and systemic shocks that exceed the capacity of professional or communal institutions.

This implies not the abolition of welfare, but its reorientation. The role of the state would be to support a welfare framework that encourages responsibility within one’s own community, through the transmission of culture and knowledge, intergenerational continuity, and family formation, rather than substituting for these functions. In such a model, social protection is preserved, but it is anchored in institutions that form responsibility, rather than eroding it.

Neo-guilds could also become one of the institutional pillars of a broader remigration strategy through several complementary functions. First, they could help develop skills among the native population through apprenticeships in fields such as elder care, construction, and the skilled trades, with younger or less experienced members receiving practical instruction from experienced practitioners within their professional communities.

Second, technological development could reduce the amount of labour required for some routine and repetitive forms of work. Consider, purely as an illustration, a warehouse employing 100 workers in highly repetitive tasks: if advances in artificial intelligence, robotics and automated logistics allowed the same volume of work to be performed with 70 workers, labour demand would fall by 30%, while supervision, troubleshooting, and judgment would become relatively more important than the manual execution of the tasks themselves. This figure is hypothetical, since automation affects occupations unevenly and does not eliminate every task within an occupation. Nevertheless, structured warehouse activities such as picking, sorting, moving, and tracking goods are among the kinds of repetitive work particularly exposed to further automation. Administrative processes surrounding such work could also increasingly be automated through software and, where appropriate, technologies such as smart contracts.

At the same time, neo-guilds operating across Europe could help connect workers with opportunities beyond their immediate locality. Because members of the same professional community would remain in contact across borders, a guild could offer retraining, apprenticeships or employment opportunities elsewhere in Europe to, for example, an Italian in southern Italy or a Greek living in an isolated village. Labour mobility could therefore emerge organically through networks of practitioners who know where particular skills are needed, rather than depending primarily upon governments to coordinate employment and movement across Europe.

The scale of Europe’s existing labour potential makes this question particularly relevant. The European Commission estimated that approximately 51 million EU residents aged 20–64 were outside the labour market in 2024. This figure should not be mistaken for 51 million immediately available native European workers: it includes migrants, older people, people with disabilities, those with caring responsibilities and others facing barriers to employment, while only around 10 million reported that they would like to work. Nevertheless, it points to a substantial pool of labour-market capacity that exists alongside Europe’s reliance on imported labour and raises the question of how much more effectively Europe’s existing population could be trained, connected and mobilised before external recruitment becomes the default response to labour shortages.

For all of these possibilities, neo-guilds should not be treated as a panacea. They could become an important institutional pillar within a broader long-term remigration strategy, particularly by developing domestic skills, improving labour mobility and reducing the amount of labour required for some repetitive occupations, but they could not by themselves eliminate Europe’s immediate dependence on migrant labour. Guilds provide part of a labour, vocational, and technological policy; they do not constitute a demographic or family policy capable of sustaining the native population over generations and ensuring a sufficiently large future workforce.

This is where such institutions would have to be situated within a wider social framework, including the kind of conservative welfare state I have proposed elsewhere. From a Traditionalist perspective, but also even from a horizontal and purely economic one, policies that make family formation and child-rearing more viable could be understood partly as a long-term investment in demographic continuity and future productive capacity.

The argument is not simply that a larger population automatically produces greater prosperity, but that a sufficiently large, well-formed, and economically active future generation could expand the domestic labour supply, sustain public institutions and potentially enlarge the pool from which future entrepreneurs, craftsmen, and professionals emerge. Over one or two generations, such demographic renewal could therefore reduce Europe’s structural dependence on external labour.

The difficulty, however, is temporal. Demographic change operates over decades, while labour shortages exist in the present, and automation is unlikely to replace every repetitive or labour-intensive occupation at the same pace. Some continued reliance on foreign labour could therefore remain necessary during the transition. Rather than treating temporary labour migration and permanent settlement as the same phenomenon, one possible policy model would distinguish more sharply between them. Naturalisation rules currently differ substantially between EU member states and are determined principally under national law; there is no single EU rule under which every foreign worker automatically acquires citizenship after a fixed number of years. A more explicitly temporary labour framework could instead admit workers for defined periods in sectors experiencing shortages, while making clear that the labour permit itself does not constitute an automatic route to permanent residence or citizenship. Versions of temporary migration already exist in European law: the EU Seasonal Workers Directive, for example, provides for limited stays of between five and nine months within a twelve-month period, after which the worker normally leaves unless another lawful residence status has been granted.

Such a system could be used during the period in which automation, vocational reconstruction and demographic renewal have not yet reduced labour shortages sufficiently. If, over time, Europe’s domestic labour supply became capable of meeting a greater share of those needs, the scale of temporary recruitment could then be reduced or the system reconsidered altogether.

A durable civilisation cannot rest on individual rights alone. A society that focuses exclusively on rights lacks the institutions necessary to form people of skill, character, and responsibility; over time, this deficit is compensated for through bureaucracy, procedural control, and an expansive welfare state. Neo-guilds, understood as new institutional forms inspired by their predecessors but adapted to modern conditions, point toward a technological labour order that prioritises responsibility and mastery over entitlement, and continuity over fragmentation, through shared standards and vocation.

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Two men hold the field on what technology is for, and they cannot both be right.

On 25 May, Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, published his first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, signed on the 135th anniversary of his namesake’s Rerum novarum. Technology, he insists, is neither hostile nor inherently evil, but it is ‘never neutral’ because it takes on the character of whoever devises, funds, regulates and uses it. The opening image is a fork in the road: a new Tower of Babel or St Augustine’s city where God and man dwell together.

Just this week, that tension has escalated: At the Élysée on Friday, the Pope reiterated that we avoid ‘losing our humanity amid a “paradise of machines”’; this comes the day after Peter Thiel called the Pope a useful idiot for the Chinese Communist Party.

Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, early patron of J. D. Vance, student of René Girard and not a Catholic, has spent the past year telling rooms of very rich people that the men who want guardrails on AI are the unwitting infantry of the Antichrist, that is, his particular view of the Antichrist.

For me, this recalls Zoltan Istvan’s cringeworthy 2013 fantasy, The Transhumanist Wager, whose Randian entrepreneur triumphs over a villainous Reverend’s anti-tech, Christian coalition. One is tempted to imagine Thiel larping as the protagonist, but the impasse is very real, and I want to say where Thiel has gone wrong (and what most critics miss).

Thiel’s Growing Animus

The escalation is well-documented. Four off-the-record lectures at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club in the autumn of 2025; leaked audio published by the Washington Post that October, seven hours of it reviewed by Reason; then a First Things essay with Sam Wolfe, a researcher at Thiel Capital, “Voyages to the End of the World”.

In the leaked lectures, Thiel called Leo XIV ‘the woke American pope’, named Greta Thunberg among the ‘legionnaires of the Antichrist’, said of his friend Vice President Vance ‘I don’t like his popeism’, and warned of a ‘Caesaro-Papist fusion’ of temporal and spiritual power welded into one.

He repeated the series in Rome in mid-March, invitation-only, venues shifting, no recordings. The Angelicum, where a young Robert Prevost wrote his canon law doctorate, publicly denied hosting it; Fr Paolo Benanti called the teaching a sustained act of heresy.

As a point of fact, Thiel’s July essay, “The Pope and the Antichrist”, is not actually about Leo. The pope of the title is Benedict XVI, whom Thiel admires warmly. Rather, the Antichrist candidate he floats is Hans Küng, dead since 2021, whose pan-religious Weltethos he sets beside Solovyov’s Antichrist and his slogan of ‘peace and safety’ (1 Thess. 5:3). Leo is not named once, suggesting Thiel is, oddly, a better reader of Ratzinger than most Catholics.

For a time, one could say that the insult was for the room and the theology for the record; however, that time has passed. At the Aspen Ideas Festival on 30 June, on an unrecorded panel, but before note-taking reporters, Thiel called Leo an inadvertent ‘Chinese communist agent...working for the Chinese Communists’. The audience laughed, but, on 24 September, collecting the Axel Springer Award in Berlin, Thiel sharpened it for Mathias Döpfner: Leo’s encyclical ‘was working for the Communist Party’ and ‘he was at least acting as a useful idiot for the CCP.’ He admitted that ‘maybe it was too harsh’, but then he said it anyway.

The Restrainer Inverted

Thiel’s own Rome invitation listed Carl Schmitt among the thinkers he would draw upon, which is where the scheme comes apart.

Schmitt is the modern theorist of the katechon, the restrainer of 2 Thessalonians 2:6–7, ‘he who now holds back’ the arrival of the Antichrist and the end times, which tradition read as the Roman Imperium and then Christendom itself, the order delaying the ‘man of lawlessness’. Take up Schmitt’s apparatus and you inherit his polarity: the restrainer is what stands between us and the collapse of Western civilisation.

Thiel inverts the doctrine. In his telling, the restraining institutions, whether treaties, regulators, the Church’s teaching office, any body that says not that, not yet, are not what holds the Antichrist back but, rather, his heralds. Stagnation becomes the eschatological threat, acceleration the deliverance. Catholic teaching says the opposite of course: the Antichrist is a man who rules in defiance of God while promising to resolve every global problem, establishing an order, artificial and mammonistic. He is not the brake but the accelerator who comes with a smile.

Notice what this does to the argument at hand. If the people drafting the EU’s AI Act are the Antichrist’s legionnaires, no version of AI regulation can be discussed in good faith. A dispute over model weights becomes a dispute over your soul; disagree about compliance thresholds and you are no longer mistaken, you are complicit. That is not theology, it is a moat running around Palantir, so named after Tolkien’s seeing-stones which showed their users true things yet ruined them all the same. Perhaps Thiel named it better than he realised.

The Man in the Middle

Thiel’s warning about a Caesaro-Papist fusion should not slide under the radar; after all, it appears he has spent a decade assembling his very own.

Current US Vice President Vance is not merely an ally; he heard Thiel lecture at Yale Law School, took a partnership at Thiel’s Mithril Capital, and credits him with an introduction to René Girard and with the discovery that Christians could be thinking people. (Note, however, Girard’s mimetic theory has done real damage to Catholic theology, recasting the Cross as an unmasking of scapegoating, rather than a true sacrifice, and supplying, incidentally, the victim-centred moralism Thiel elsewhere denounces as woke). Vance was received into the Church in August 2019, at a Dominican priory in Cincinnati, and wrote it up the following Easter in The Lamp. Thiel then spent some $15 million, the largest sum ever given to a single Senate candidate, putting him in the Senate.

So, the man who led Vance to Rome and now tells audiences, ‘I don’t like his popeism’, frets that his protégé may grow ‘too close to the pope’ and says of reported frictions between the two, ‘I hope there are a lot more.’ Vance, for his part, told the Paris AI summit that excessive regulation could kill the industry, just a couple of weeks after he conveniently attacked the USCCB over their excessive funding for the resettlement of migrants. If one were cynical, one could speculate that Vance is framed as Thiel’s foil to buff his bona fides but is, in fact, intended to shield the presidential office from papal counsel. It wouldn’t be the first time this administration and Thiel have tag teamed the Pope (wittingly or unwittingly).

Note the timing of the attacks against Leo, on the heels of Thiel’s closed-door meetings in Rome. Eastertide, in his first Urbi et Orbi on 5 April, Leo asked that ‘those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace’. On Easter Tuesday, Trump warned that ‘a whole civilization will die tonight’ if Iran missed the deadline over the Strait of Hormuz. Leo called the threat against an entire people ‘truly unacceptable’, observed that attacks on civilian infrastructure violate international law and asked Americans to tell their representatives to reject war; hours later, Trump announced a two-week delay. Then, on Divine Mercy Sunday, when the Pope spent the morning praying the Regina Coeli in St. Peter’s Square, Trump pronounced him ‘weak on Nuclear Weapons’, adding ‘I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.’ PolitiFact rated it “Pants on Fire,” Leo having called for disarmament throughout.

So, Thiel supplies the theological “woke pope, useful idiot for commies” frame and Trump comes in with the political smear. Between them, a pope who opposed a war becomes soft on Iran, neutralising Catholic moral authority at precisely the moment it might have carried weight. Neither needed to coordinate with the other. Both drew on the same deep reservoir of Protestant and TradCath suspicion of Rome for which there is precedent; for example, Justice Department files released in February show Bannon telling Jeffrey Epstein in June 2019 that he would ‘take down’ Pope Francis, Epstein sharing an article titled “Pope Francis or Steve Bannon? Catholics must choose’”. So clear was the politicised anti-Francis drive that Cardinal Burke cut ties with Bannon’s Italian academy rather than join the project.

Most inconspicuously, however, J.D. stands between the Pope and Thiel, just trying to be a Catholic whilst also protecting America and her allies. What a convenient setup for 2028.

I do not allege a plot. I observe an arrangement, precisely the one Thiel says he dreads, which is a spiritual disposition married to a temporal office. He fears the very fusion he is attempting, blinded by pride, pride in the supposed superiority of his own foresight and doctrine.

In Pope Leo’s Defence

The woke and leftie charges rest mostly on migration, where TradCaths and right-wing figures like Keith Woods have led the fire. It does not survive reading him for oneself. Leo has plainly reaffirmed the Catholic social teaching that ‘a state has a right to set rules at its borders’ and has rejected the charge of open borders; what he adds is the doctrine’s other half, the right to remain, which is the now-standard papal position of placing the burden primarily on countries of origin for not creating the conditions for migrants to remain (the international community having duties also).

Catholics can criticise liberalised Catholic bodies that profit from mass immigration; they can also criticise the wars we underwrite as manufacturing the migrants we then complain about; they can discern the potentially ulterior motives of many migrants and the legitimacy of their refugee status; they might also be genuinely ignorant of such things in boomerish bliss. Catholic social teaching remains.

All in all, Pope Leo XIV is to the right of both Trump and Thiel, opposing abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty and gender ideology in schools. Thiel is a married gay man who funds life-extension ventures and, asked by Ross Douthat whether the human race should survive, produced what Douthat had to call ‘a long hesitation’. Trump declines a federal abortion limit and campaigns on expanding IVF. The charge of leftism is not a finding but a tactic, intended to make moral opposition to an ongoing war look like partisanship. The same goes for Catholic opposition to libertarian accelerationism for Big and Little Tech.

A People or a Mass

Which brings me to the elite question, on which I would rather quote Pius XII than argue. In his 1944 Christmas message, Pius drew the distinction our age has forgotten. A people lives by its own energy, each man in it conscious of his responsibility and his own mind. A mass is inert, moved only from outside, an easy plaything for whoever knows how to work its instincts, and is therefore, he says, the capital enemy of true liberty. The difference is not numbers but whether men are persons or economic units, subjects or inputs.

A people, Pius went on, requires an elite: select men, ‘spiritually eminent and of strong character’, who take themselves for representatives of the whole and not the mandatories of a mob. His warning to us is, where such men are lacking, others arrive to take their place, making politics serve their ambition and a quick road to profit for themselves, their transnational caste and their class. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira later extended this to countries without formal nobility, analogous elites who we must nevertheless hold to the same standard.

We have such elites, men like Thiel. The most powerful in history, but not apparently spiritually eminent; they are, on their own account, betting on stagnation as the only real sin. But, an order that treats men as interchangeable units to be optimised, displaced and eventually surpassed does not produce a people; it produces exactly the mass Pius described, complaining that the mass is decadent yet profiting from that decadence just the same.

Which is what makes the Berlin insult so revealing. It is the people degenerated into a manipulable mass who are the useful idiots; the mass is inert of itself but plastic for anyone who exploits its whims. Thiel reached for that vocabulary to describe the one man here acting from his own conscience against an administration that has spent the past year attacking him for it. At UNESCO, Leo named the spiritual disease of the Western masses: lives are now ‘judged according to the criterion of efficiency and, when deemed no longer productive, are rejected and discarded.’ Ask instead who is moved by outside forces and the honest answer is the room that laughed in Aspen.

The City of God and the City of Man

Several years ago, I argued we had reached an axial hour. Two systems are on offer and we will be consumed by one: the soulless beast system, Ellul’s technique run to its conclusion, where technocratic forces feed souls to an endless growth until catabolic collapse; or the truly corporate Body of Christ, where elite incentives and technological purposes are harmonised toward the common good.

Peter Thiel and Pope Leo XIV are just the visible elites representing, not just rival visions of the Antichrist, but these two politically ambitious systems. I predict this flashpoint is only going to intensify.

Solovyov’s story, which Thiel quotes at length, ends with Elder John asking the Antichrist one question: What do you believe about Christ? He cannot answer and so the silence unmasks him. Ask the accelerationists the equivalent, not will you succeed, but what is success or even what is a man for, and listen for the pause.

With the fork in the road before us, we must choose our leaders wisely; their language could not be clearer that the choice we make could spell the very end.

The deciding factor is this: in pursuing survival, elites like Thiel act under a spirit of fear, whereas Catholics are filled with a spirit of hope. Believing Christ rose, and that God intends to redeem the whole world, does not stop us seeking a better future; it is the only thing that makes the project intelligible. Far from apathy, the task of building God’s kingdom is as daily as our daily bread and, yes, that involves putting excellence before efficiency.

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The Decline of the West (Oswald Spengler), Civilisation and Its Discontents (Sigmund Freud), In the Shadow of Tomorrow (Johan Huizinga), The Crisis of the Modern World (René Guénon), The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Edmund Husserl)…

The “literature of crisis” from the early 20th century — along with its extensive “history of effects” (Wirkungsgeschichte) — calls for detailed examination, to which numerous scholars have already devoted themselves, body and soul, recognising the urgent need for such reflection. Indeed, this reflection is no mere matter of philology, but of destiny.

It is plain for all to see that we have not yet emerged from this transitional phase. We are still in the interregnum, in that Zwischenreich which the authors of the Conservative Revolution skilfully identified and brought to light in their convergent dissonance.

Without delving into the conceptual and metaphorical debate surrounding the imagery of “sunset” (“decline”) and “crisis”, with all its similarities and differences, it is clear that the notion of a “great” and “tragic” transformation in the way we humans inhabit and interpret the world prevails. As early as Ecce Homo, Nietzsche proclaimed the advent of

“a crisis the like of which has never been known on earth, the memory of the most profound clash of consciences, and the passing of a sentence upon all that which theretofore had been believed, exacted, and hallowed.”

His words have proven prophetic.

On this journey towards nothingness, blind faith in progress accompanied the development of our Zivilisation for a considerable period of time, until it plummeted to the level of its ultimate outcomes: the “culture of narcissism” (Christopher Lasch) and the “culture of complaint” (Robert Hughes).

This utopian cult is rooted in a naïve Rousseauian anthropology and is driven by technocratic politics, which is the political theology of New Age techno-spirituality. This led to the famous concept of the “end of history”, which was developed by Francis Fukuyama in his celebrated and much-debated 1992 essay, The End of History and the Last Man. In this essay, Fukuyama asserts that liberal-capitalist modernisation and the teleology of historical development are one and the same.

In this context, the end of history does not represent the death, disappearance, or erasure of the historical dimension, but rather its fulfilment. However, the realisation that historical development can no longer be perfected logically leads to its cessation. Humankind is cast out of the flow of historical time, having tragically lost the means to access the ritualised time of myth. Demythologisation rises from the depths of theology (Rudolf Bultmann) to the plane of common sense. The “disenchantment of the world” (Max Weber) nihilistically crushes any system of values. Alexander Dugin says in The Fourth Political Theory:

“At this stage, liberalism ceases to be the first political theory and becomes the only post-political practice. Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ arrives, economics in the form of the global capitalist market replaces politics, and states and nations are dissolved in the melting pot of world globalisation. Having triumphed, liberalism disappears and turns into a different entity — into postliberalism […] This is the source of the thesis about post-industrial society: ‘economics as destiny.’”

Once its dynamic, processual, and metamorphic nature has been stripped away, what is history if not the immanentisation of the eschatological moment and the realisation of the end of time? Here, all is silent and motionless. The polemical essence of living organisms, in the sense of the Heraclitean polemos, is reduced to the stillness of the inorganic. Once stripped of its metaphysical dimension, Kairos becomes the postmodern eternal present, establishing an experience of nonsense and temporal deprivation — “the absolute present” theorised by François Hartog. A similar process occurs in relation to space, resulting in the experience of non-places, to use Marc Augé’s term, or “hyper-places”, to use Michel Lussault’s term.

While classical liberalism has long been identified, since Max Weber’s seminal writings, as the political ideology of modernity, the rise of neo-capitalism in its various forms — ranging from neoliberalism to ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Shoshana Zuboff) and ‘ordoliberalism’ — appears to be an inevitable consequence of Western postmodernity.

Yet, in his book The Clash of Civilisations (1997), Samuel Huntington effectively demonstrated that liberal democracy — the political institution that has survived in the West through the transition from the modern to the postmodern era, despite reforms, crises, and re-evaluations — is neither necessary nor eternal. Political and economic paradigms are historically determined and always depend on the cultures to which they refer. Fortunately, even in the age of “planetarisation” (Heidegger), these cultures remain diverse. As Huntington explains, there are multiple forms of modernity. And, by extension, there will be multiple forms of postmodernity.

Recent years have offered us nothing but an illusion of harmony, one that has historically recurred on several occasions and has always faded away: in Europe, we saw such during the Belle Époque, after the First World War, after the Second World War, and finally, as Fukuyama noted, after the end of the Cold War. The empirical evidence, which each time undoes this “perpetual peace” (to use Immanuel Kant’s phrase) and restores the polemos, nevertheless resolutely denies the ‘end of history’. For polemos, as Massimo Cacciari has explored in his extensive philosophical work, The Geo-Philosophy of Europe, is the very mode in which unity comes about; that is to say, it is the inevitable structure of differentiation which alone affords heterogeneous parts the possibility of recognising their own original harmony “in accordance with the necessity of strife.”

In defence of the plural, labyrinthine, and, above all, organic dimension of history, and of its radical, ceaseless, and eternally renewing developments, the ideas of Oswald Spengler and his The Decline of the West are more relevant than ever.

While Spengler’s work does indeed observe a decline and an end, in a sense it refers only to a particular type of civilisation: Western Zivilisation (no longer Kultur). History, the bedrock in which human existence flows, remains the indisputable backdrop. It is within this history that the decline of the West will take place. Perhaps a hundred years on, we will be able to imagine that it has already happened. The death of a history — that of a paradigm now drained of life and devoid of vital force whose cultural power has faded — is the death of a branch, not the tree itself. In this metaphor, the tree is the indivisible organism of historical totality. Stefano Zecchi made this very clear in his valuable essay The Armed Artist: Against the Crimes of Modernity (L’artista armato. Contro i crimini della modernità):

“To be within history means becoming aware that the actions and forces of the history that has unfolded over the centuries lie within ourselves, and that our destiny is to become a symbolic truth for the future.”

The West’s decline certainly signals the end of an era, contrary to Fukuyama’s prediction: tragedy replaces the vision of prosperity and modernisation. However, even Spengler, whose judgement of values is the opposite of Fukuyama’s, suggests that the West is at risk of entering a post-historical phase characterised by a purely biological realm. Here, “many things happen, but ultimately, in a higher sense, nothing happens.” This is history stripped of its meaning. Nature becomes the realm of the inert and the already-become, a blind and anonymous causal necessity. The crisis of modern Western politics — the crisis of the Political (Carl Schmitt) — appears to be heading in this direction. Neoliberalism resists the onslaught of history, but this model’s crisis is evident in numerous and substantial geopolitical, cultural, social, and anthropological setbacks.

Perhaps this outcome could open up new avenues for experimentation with freedom. The fortunes of the liberal tradition have hinged precisely on this concept; despite its numerous variations, which political science has rightly studied with great interest, a common thread can be found in the anthropological principle of the individual. This provides every liberal doctrine with a genuine metaphysical foundation. According to Schmitt, this foundation is linked to radical indecision. Liberalism would thus exist, in the words of the German jurist, “in the short interim period in which it was possible to answer the question ‘Christ or Barabbas?’ with a proposal to adjourn or appoint a commission of investigation” (Political Theology). Thus, for liberals, freedom is constitutionally apolitical or pre-political in that it is not shaped by the historical struggle (agon), but is instead considered an abstract, universal existential value.

Today, liberalism — both as a philosophical doctrine and as the core of the Western imaginary — remains fixated on unlimited individual freedom, a materialist and immanent perspective, a free-market capitalist economic system and a sober, Protestant-rooted petty-bourgeois hedonism. All of these perspectives have been worn thin by time and have now reached their setting sun, their point of decline. Neoliberalism is the mainstream’s superficial doctrine, yet its foundations are in stark contrast to the Zeitgeist.

Indeed, liberalism is no longer capable of serving as a narrative or leading image for younger generations. In the era of the “post-human”, how can liberalism exist other than by betraying its original principles and moving towards a technocratic and accelerationist direction that is neither “free” nor “libertarian”? As Fabrice Hadjadj put it in his scathing essay, The Depth of the Sexes: For a Mysticism of the Flesh (La profondeur des sexes: Pour une mystique de la chair):

“We believed in liberation. All we got was liberalism.”

And yet, European tradition offers a variety of different forms of freedom, as evidenced by the work of Ernst Jünger, among others. Among his many incisive quotations, we present one of the most evocative:

“Freedom appears to us as a primal element that we can only foresee, but which surrounds Europe with better and more solid boundaries than the seas, mountains, and fortifications. In Europe, we have the capacity to respect something beyond humanity that determines our dignity. When one no longer perceives these boundaries and no longer feels their absence, despotism begins.” (The Gordian Knot).

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The freedom of which Jünger speaks is an elemental and primordial force. It is an impersonal axis of integration that links the individual to both the horizontal plane of the historical community of destiny and the vertical vector of transcendent continuity, connecting earth and sky.

“If the struggle against nihilism is to succeed, it must be fought out in the heart of each one of us. Everyone shared in the guilt, and there is no one who did not stand in need of the healing powers which are to be found in the realms of suffering.”

Jünger wrote this in Peace, distinguishing himself as the solitary Contemplator of that “short century” — one which nevertheless carried a heavy burden of ideologies and narratives that our contemporary world struggles to shake off, and instead merely reworks in postmodern forms in the likes of pastiche and collage.

Jünger sets the substance of the individual against this: the differentiated man who is capable of overcoming nihilism by shaping and subjecting it to his own inner disposition. However, this project is only possible “if men strengthen themselves from a metaphysical point of view.” This is why Jünger’s merciless critique of “red” and “black” totalitarianisms does not leave the liberal perspective unscathed:

“In the polemics which the old Liberals sustain against the nihilists, they behave like fathers bewailing their misguided children without seeing that the real fault lies in their inadequate upbringing.”

In short, no political form of modernity is immune to nihilism. Similarly, the French sociologist Michel Maffesoli refers to the liberal ideology of progress as a form of “soft totalitarianism”: the mechanism of subjugation to political power operates through a renunciation of independent thought.

This bears similarities — albeit less brutal ones — to 20th-century totalitarianisms. Hannah Arendt had already noted that the defining feature of totalitarianism is not the tyrant, but rather the ideology in power. This is all the more pervasive when the rulers are complicit pawns who “let things happen” without any particular conviction. In the era of post-ideologies, this mechanism can only function more effectively. All the forms of the sclerotisation of the Enlightenment ideology of reason have been criticised by thinkers such as Adorno and Horkheimer in their famous Dialectic of Enlightenment.

According to Jünger, the defeat of Europe’s “disturbing guest” will therefore come about only through harmony between the sovereign decision of the individual and the emergence of a “New Theology”, capable of organically resymbolising reality. Only in the “spirits that dwell in the totality of creation” can there be peace. Peace imposed by law, coercion, or threats is merely superficial; authentic peace is an “inner” effort requiring more courage than war. Jünger prophesies that it will be achieved only if “we are able to free ourselves from hatred and its divisions. The individual is like light, which forces the darkness to recede as it blazes forth.”

In Jünger’s Weltanschauung, the supra-personal flame at the heart of the individual’s personality burns away the solipsism of the liberal self. In the Worker, this flame emanates from the titanic landscapes laid bare by the nihilistic interregnum. The Rebel intuits it as he enters the “forest” of his inner self, and the Anarch discovers it in the “great encounter” with the Ineffable — the irruption of the Absolute into time, a veritable initiatory death.

Without the elemental force that flows metamorphically through history and mirrors the radiations of that which transcends history, there is no subject — certainly not a free and autonomous one in the likes of the protagonist of the “spiritualisation of the earth” advocated by Jünger. Thus, Jünger is able to allude:

“At the same time the figure of the Worker, losing its titanic cast, will reveal new aspects of itself — then it will be seen what relation it bears to tradition, creation, happiness, and religion.” (The Peace)

Here, the tragic understanding of the decline of the West, and of the necessity of history, may reach a turning point: a dynamic movement towards suprasensible dimension that could perhaps overturn the status quo of our time.

***

READ MORE:

Luca Siniscalco contributed the epilogue “A Mythical-Symbolic Hermeneutics of Film: Some Notes on Kineuropa” to the volume Kineuropa: Cinema as a Reflection of European Identity, brought to you by Arktos:

Kineuropa — from the German Kino, “cinema”, and the ancient Greek kinesis, “motion” — reflects the profound, dynamic relationship between film and the European spirit.

In this unique collection of essays by authors from diverse backgrounds and six different countries, the Seventh Art of film is explored beyond the planes of entertainment and propaganda, rediscovered as a civilisational force for identity and creativity.

From the mythic roots of storytelling to the philosophical and symbolic dimensions of modern film, Kineuropa revisits how European cinema has emerged from an ancient continuum of theatre, literature, religion, and visual art, shaping collective imagination over the centuries and ever endeavouring to seize the Zeitgeist.

In the “Netflix era” of globalised media’s dissolution of culture and banalisation of film, Kineuropa calls for reviving cinema to foster authentic European visions of the past, present, and future.

(Available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook from Arktos and on Amazon)

Continued from Part 1:

Arktos Journal

Liberal Universalism, Post-Fordist Capitalism, and the Great Replacement - Part 1

“Society is the result of its own operations and not of operations that take place elsewhere…

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23 days ago · 54 likes · 4 comments · Arktos Journal

3. Why Post-Fordist Capitalism Prefers Flexible Asian Labor and Immigrant Consumers

Capitalism will strive to optimize in whatever political setting it is allowed to operate. It is not morally committed to diversity. This may lead some to assume that it has no inherent ethnic preference. There is no question, however, that in the post-Fordist era, liberal capitalism has shown a preference both for a diverse workforce and for certain cognitive and personality traits that are statistically more common among East Asians (particularly ethnic Chinese) and Indians. Of course, post-Fordist capitalism has not always found liberal progressivism to be a congenial partner. Initiatives such as DEI have undoubtedly imposed some hiring quotas and bureaucratic regulations that conflict with its optimization tendencies. Nevertheless, generally speaking, the two forces have formed a powerful partnership. Liberalism supplies the moral and legal framework that legitimizes non-Western immigration, while capitalism selects for the labor inputs and consumer behaviors that best serve its drive for maximum efficiency in a post-Fordist age.

I am not thinking only of the obvious preference of post-Fordist businesses for cheaper immigrant labor. Indians, and immigrants generally, tend to accept longer hours, lower relative pay, and jobs that local workers (accustomed to a greater comforts) increasingly avoid (particularly in retail, food service, and agriculture). Research shows that in the case of “temporary foreign workers,” they put in more hours and have lower absenteeism than domestic workers. The “the average nominal wage gap between temporary and Canadian-born workers has more than doubled, widening from -9.5% to -22.6%”. Business organizations consistently support higher immigration for this reason, not because they are subservient to woke mandates. More workers also mean more consumers.

In so-called large settler nations—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and America— post-Fordist businesses have also shown a preference for high-tech workers who are “more goal-oriented” in their motives — more focused on pure careerism, uncreative technical tasks, strong compliance, as well as having lower intellectual interests beyond one’s specialization and work requirements. It views East Asians and Indians as “low-friction inputs” for technical tasks such as coding, algorithm design, lab work, and jobs requiring repetitive movements. White populations, I would say, tend to be viewed as less efficient in this narrow respect because they exhibit greater personality differentiation, broader interests, higher openness to experience, and a stronger tendency toward political, philosophical, and societal engagement. While these White traits were historically crucial in driving revolutionary scientific breakthroughs, major innovations, and grand societal projects, they are less optimal for the narrow, hyperspecialized post-Fordist AI economy.

But some may rightfully ask: how could a nation as chaotic and dirty as India produce high-tech migrants? Aren’t Indians being imported as a “bio-weapon” to destroy the genetic makeup of Western nations? No. The importation of skilled Indians is driven not only by the multicultural logic of liberalism, but by capitalism’s drive for optimization of economic returns. Markets tend to gravitate toward the highest returns and the lowest cost inputs. There is significant research on the benefits of skilled Indian workers. India’s enormous population, to start with, generates a vast supply of technically trained workers suited to the needs of our contemporary economy. The country produces approximately 2.5–2.6 million STEM graduates annually. In contrast, Canada’s total STEM graduates at the bachelor’s level or higher number only around 60,000–120,000 per year. Because workers in Indian with similar skills are paid salaries ranging between 30% to 20% of Canadian or American levels, firms view them as an excellent reservoir of cheap yet skilled labor. Indians actually dominate high-skill visa pathways, accounting for about 70–72% of H-1B visas in the United States. They also hold a disproportionate share (30–50%) of engineering and technical occupations at major tech firms such as Amazon, Meta, and Google. In Canada, immigrants (with Indians particularly prominent) comprise 35% of computer programmers, 43% of engineers, and 55% of software engineers and designers.

Secondly, Indian migrants are particularly attractive because they are more compliant and geographically mobile than native Whites with a comparable level of education. They accept irregular and intense schedules more willingly. When they arrive, they are not tied to mortgages, local communities, or old Western ways. The savings are substantial when the work remains offshore; firms can easily hire a senior Indian developer working from India for roughly $30,000–$50,000 per year, in contrast to $150,000–$200,000 for a similarly qualified American worker. Of course, when the same senior worker is brought to the United States or Canada on a work visa, employers must abide by the domestic wage requirements. The primary cost advantage of the H-1B system consists in having a larger labor supply available globally. This is a pillar of “flexible accumulation”. Moreover, their narrow education, total focus on STEM degrees, compliance, and one-dimensional desire for money have made Indians quite useful as employees in limbic capitalist sectors such as social media, e-commerce, gaming, streaming, and AI-driven engagement.

The socioeconomic success of Chinese and Indians reflects this selection. In the United States, according to data collected by the Pew Research Center (2025), the median income of household headed by Indians is about $145,000–$156,000, which is significantly higher than the U.S. national median of $75,000–$83,000. The median income of Taiwanese Americans is $133,000–$145,000, while that of Chinese Americans is $98,400–$108,600. Chinese and Indian immigrants also show higher STEM educational levels. This should not surprise us. Indian and Chinese immigrants to the U.S. are filtered through H-1B visas, leading to employment. They don’t “waste their time” with Liberal Arts, but focus on high-paying fields like computer science, medicine, engineering, and finance. Similarly, in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, second-generation Chinese and South Asians have higher household median incomes due to their relatively large presence in high-tech occupations.

But we can’t forget that the optimizing logic also requires cheap labor for services, retail, delivery driving, and hospitality, to keep consumer prices low and profits high. Western countries have an aging population, low native birth rates, and increasing rates of retirements in many sectors. In small towns and rural areas in Canada, and other Western nations, the younger generation of locals tend to migrate out to the cities seeking better opportunities. A survey of more than 900 employers across Canada states that 71% of employers have difficulty finding locals willing to do some entry-level or physically demanding work. This is why the Canadian government, in response to such reports (and there are other reports), directs immigrants into these sectors through programs designed to fill these “labor gaps”.

Working in tandem with this optimization, the liberal universalistic logic frames restrictions on low-skilled brown immigration as racist, while celebrating diversity in the public sphere. In Canada (especially from 2021 to 2024), low-skilled workers formed a very large part of Justin Trudeau’s post-COVID massive immigration surge. These immigrants constitute a reliable labor force for irregular shifts and jobs that are demanding in terms of working schedules and location. These are the Indians we see everywhere, fueling the complaints about driving habits, public littering, noise levels, large families in small apartments, etc. Once a few settle and take jobs or buy convenience stores, restaurants, gas stations, or motels, they mostly hire relatives or Indian friends.

It is also the case, moreover, that many post-Fordist businesses structurally prefer large concentrations of rootless immigrants living in cities (and suburbs), because it meets their optimization criteria under conditions of increasingly aging White markets, declining fertility, and the growth of a libidinal economy. Immigrant concentrations create the customer density that makes multinational chains, fast-food franchises, delivery platforms (Deliveroo, Just Eat, Gophr, Pedivan), and 24-hour entertainment profitable. Stable White communities oriented toward nature and local life generate fewer transactions per square kilometer.

Under limbic capitalism, profit margins depend on continuously activating the appetitive instincts of the masses via novelty, status signaling, sexual exhibition, 24 hour day convenience, and cheap availability of dopamine boosts. Individuals with weaker impulse control are better customers for this model than thrifty households that save and defer gratification. Research shows that the marginal propensity to consume of the relatively older (White) population is lower, and, I would add, more inclined toward local stores, with a lower preference for limbic products.

Under post-Fordist limbic conditions, Whites are, therefore, less efficient than an immigrant population that is culturally deracinated and oriented toward global brands. Immigrants are more inclined to shop in big global retailers like Costco, Walmart, BestBuy, not in quaint local stores.

The impending plan is indeed to transform countless medium-sized Western cities into “smart” megacities that resemble cities such as Shanghai, Los Angeles, Jakarta, Tokyo, Mumbai, or Guangzhou. The difference is that Western cities will be thoroughly multiracial, since immigration is the only currently available means in the West for rapid population growth. Such cities would contain masses of consumers stacked together in small apartments, with their “leisure” time dedicated to limbic consumption, concentrated in high-rises and thoroughly commercialized spaces, with spots of greenery here and there, designed for the satisfaction of every conceivable human appetite. The social system has already decided that this is the most efficient way to ensure the highest velocity and highest density of commercial interactions. The old Fordist vision of White families living in well-manicured homes with green yards and multiple rooms, surrounded by public spaces free from commercialism, will be a privilege of the few.

The Western world will have no center and no meaning, only endless expenditure and permanent orgies of bodies, images, and spectacles.

The preference for Indian and other Asian workers in private firms, to be clear, should not be confused with government race quotas. Governments across the West have long practiced preferential hiring for designated groups such as Aboriginal peoples, visible minorities, persons with disabilities, and women. In Canada, for example, an Aristotle Foundation review of 301 federal job openings from February to July 2026 found that 42 percent explicitly or potentially prioritized applicants by group identity. In Fisheries and Oceans, Agriculture and Agri-Food, and the National Research Council, every posting in the sample stated that candidates might be preferred if they belonged to an “equity-deserving” category. The post-Fordist economic code of labor optimization analyzed above should not be confounded with this government practice, which reflects the progressive meta-code operating inside the state. The two logics reinforce each other.

4. The Dual Drivers: Capitalist Optimization and Liberal Universalism in Action

The main drivers of Europe’s immigration policy are not sinister figures like Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi or some woman in a video named Barbara Lerner Spectre bragging about her accomplishments. It is the open, structural imperatives of the post-Fordist liberal-capitalist system itself. Although these two forces have their own rationale, they operate in tandem and reinforce one another.

(A) Pro-Immigration Business Groups

Let’s start with the capitalist side: we have Europe’s largest and most influential employer organization, BusinessEurope, representing 42 national business federations, explicitly stating that “worker mobility and skilled migration are essential for economic growth” and that businesses require “favourable conditions for talent from outside the EU” to address labour shortages and sustain competitiveness. They openly argue that migration should be shaped by what companies need. They have a full policy page on “Diversity and equal opportunities”, where they state: “Embracing diversity and equal opportunities strengthens workplaces and boosts economic performance”. Contrary to common claims by those who blame woke ideas, BusinessEurope frames migration almost entirely in economic terms: filling vacancies, boosting competitiveness, sustaining growth, and addressing the consequences of low native birth rates and an aging population.

Similar positions are taken by many other business groups in Europe: Italy’s Confindustria (led by Emanuele Orsini), Germany’s BDI (led by figures such as Siegfried Russwurm and Peter Leibinger), France’s MEDEF, and Ireland’s IBEC. These organizations, headed by Europeans, are all strongly in favour of expanded legal migration. They represent tens of thousands of European companies in manufacturing, construction, agriculture, hospitality, tourism, and elderly care, that is, the sectors that face chronic vacancies because there are either not enough native workers or they are unwilling to accept the low wages, conditions, and seasonal nature of the jobs. BDI (Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie) is very pro-migration for skilled (and some semi-skilled) workers. BDI has repeatedly warned of “severe labour shortages” and strongly supports the “Skilled Immigration Act”, which advocates for faster visa procedures, easier recognition of foreign qualifications, and more pathways for non-EU workers.

Likewise, France’s MEDEF (Mouvement des Entreprises de France) is explicitly pro-immigration. In 2023, MEDEF president Patrick Martin stated that France will need 3.9 million foreign workers by 2050 to address labour shortages in construction, healthcare, hospitality, and industry overall. Ireland’s largest and most influential employer organisation, Irish Business and Employers Confederation, or IBEC, consistently makes the same argument. The American Chamber of Commerce Ireland, in a publication entitled, “Ireland’s Immigration Pathways - Driving Competitiveness and Economic Growth”, categorically argues that “it is vital for Ireland’s continued growth and competitiveness that companies based in Ireland have access to the best international talent”. In 2024–2025, Confindustria, in Meloni’s Italy, welcomed increases in legal work visas for 500,000 migrants for over three years.

This pattern is also evident in the United States, where major business associations strongly support high immigration. The powerful U.S. Chamber of Commerce aggressively backs expanded legal immigration, H-1B visas, guest worker programs, and amnesty-style reforms. The Business Roundtable, representing CEOs of America’s largest corporations, has long lobbied for more immigration. Other key players include the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), tech groups like FWD.us (founded by Mark Zuckerberg and other tech billionaires, which pushes high-skilled immigration and DACA-style protections), the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition (representing agriculture, hospitality, construction, and service industries), and lobbies such as the American Hotel & Lodging Association and National Restaurant Association. These groups are not “woke communists.” They are mainstream capitalist organizations seeking cheaper labor, weaker bargaining power for workers, and a growing consumer base.

(B) Pro-Immigration Leftist Groups

The progressive logic of liberalism, for its part, supplies the universalistic and moral principles calling for a diverse West in which the ethnic divisions and xenophobia of the past will be transcended. Through a well-organized “humanitarian-industrial complex” of NGOs, churches, human-rights groups, and progressive foundations, liberalism legitimises and accelerates immigration replacement. SOS Méditerranée, Sea-Watch, Proactiva Open Arms, and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) operate large rescue vessels (Ocean Viking, Sea-Watch 3/4, Open Arms). They have conducted thousands of operations since 2014–2015, bringing hundreds of thousands of migrants to Europe (mainly Italy, Spain, Greece). They regularly issue public statements and open letters accusing the EU of “inaction” and “criminalizing solidarity.”

Other large humanitarian and religious NGOs like Caritas (Catholic), Jesuit Refugee Service, and Oxfam provide legal aid, reception services, and advocacy inside Europe, and they consistently lobby for expanded legal pathways, family reunification, and against what they call “externalisation deals” with Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt to stop keep the immigrants in their homelands. In 2025, for instance, over 40 NGOs (including SOS Méditerranée and Sea-Watch) signed open letters demanding the EU reverse cooperation with Libya and expand legal migration routes. The Immigrant Council of Ireland, one of many similar groups in Ireland, actively pushes for broader legal rights for immigrants. The theme of this Council’s 7th annual National Integration Conference held on June 2026 was “Vision for the Future: Building a Shared Home in Ireland,” on the “challenges and opportunities for migrant integration in Ireland”. Open Society Foundations (George Soros) have been one of the largest private funders of pro-migration civil society in Europe for decades. They support NGOs, think tanks, and advocacy groups that promote open borders and frame migration as a human-rights imperative. Many other smaller progressive groups are coordinated through platforms such as the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (PICUM), EuroMed Rights, and Amnesty International. Since these groups operate in a European world where liberalism prevails, they have close relationships with mainstream media, academia, churches, and a variety of educational and legal institutions.

This universalist logic was on full display when French President Emmanuel Macron declared (May 10, 20126) that the epicenter of the French language is no longer on the banks of the Seine but in the Congo River basin, while noting that approximately 21% of Paris residents are now immigrants. In the liberal mind, French identity and language are detachable from the historic French people, and can thus be carried forward by African migrants as long as liberal values are formally adopted. This state of mind is inscribed in Article 1 of the 1958 French Constitution, which clearly states that “France shall [...] ensure the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion.” America is not the only “propositional nation.” All Western governments now claim that their nations are founded on civic values. They can’t claim that their nations are rooted in blood or ethnicity. At most, as in the case of Poland, they may still emphasize a Christian heritage.

5. Who Profits? The Short-to-Medium Term Gains of Post-Fordist Immigration

Many critics of mass immigration rightly point to welfare costs, the lower average IQ of many migrant groups, declining real per capita income for natives, disproportionate migrant crime, longer hospital wait times, school overcrowding, and rising house prices as evidence that large-scale immigration harms the economic well-being of Western nations overall. They are thus inclined to conclude that since immigration brings no real benefits, capitalists are misguided or politically controlled by progressives, or that only a narrow segment of businesses could possibly profit.

It is crucial, however, to distinguish between types of immigration. High-skilled immigration from certain groups (particularly East Asians and Indians in STEM fields) can generate real gains in specific sectors and contribute to aggregate GDP. In contrast, large-scale low-skilled immigration from African and Muslim countries, as Jonatan Pallesen and others have emphasized, has indeed produced high net fiscal costs for natives. Still, from a narrow capitalist optimization viewpoint, immigration has generally been a policy decision rationally calculated as beneficial by major businesses from a short-to-medium-term perspective, in partnership with politicians.

We should not dismiss economic studies showing aggregate gains. Given the reality of low fertility rates across the West, immigration has kept labor costs lower across key sectors such as tech, healthcare, construction, services, and delivery. It has expanded the consumer base for housing, retail, transportation, education, and financial services. Immigration also expands the labor force, incentivizes investments through more workers and consumers, and encourages creation of new businesses by higher-skilled immigrants. It has additionally driven up real estate values, benefiting banks, developers, and homeowners, and it has sustained for decades a huge diversity infrastructure of lawyers, university and school administrators, social workers, government employees, and multicultural organizations looking for new members.

Recent economic research by Giovanni Peri and his colleagues came up with the following calculations, based on statistical associations, of the effects of immigration between 1990 and 2024: In Canada, where immigrants rose by 17 percentage points of the adult population, the estimate says that this inflow could account for about 20% higher growth in GDP per worker. Canada’s actual growth over this period was 33%, so more than half of that growth might be linked to immigration. In the United Kingdom, where immigrants rose by 11 percentage points, the estimate links this to about 13% of the 51% total growth. In Italy, where Immigrants rose by 8.4 percentage points, the estimate links this to almost 10% of the 40% total growth. In France, where immigrants rose by 6.1 percentage points, the estimate links this to about 7% of the 41% total growth.

It is undeniable that major retailers and chains have been substantial beneficiaries of both low-wage labor and new immigrant consumers: Walmart, Target, Costco, Home Depot, Best Buy, Dollarama. So have been fast food restaurants, convenience stores, and countless businesses: Burger King, Subway, KFC, Pizza Hut, Tim Hortons, Starbucks, Popeyes, Taco Bell, Shoppers Drug Mart, Pharma Prix, Walgreens, CVS, Loblaws, Metro, Amazon, IKEA, Winners, Uber, DoorDash. These companies are happy to promote diversity in their ads because it fits with the economic logic of optimization in the post-Fordist age, not because they are “controlled by woke communists”. Nothing appeals more to them than converting towns into strip malls, vast parking lots surrounded by big-box stores packed tightly. Formerly small towns in Canada like Brampton, Mississauga and Scarborough now have these characteristics. Relatively small cities in Canada also illustrate a similar pattern. Take the metro area of Moncton, in the rural province of New Brunswick, it experienced the “second-highest population growth rate of all metro areas across Canada” in 2023-24 driven by mainly by immigration inflows (even as deaths exceeded births). Between 2011 and 2021, immigrant workers increased by 130%, filling primarily “labor shortages” in sectors such as health care, social assistance, retail, and public administration in the wake of high retirements.

Immigration, moreover, has been a major factor in overall GDP growth in Western nations over the last few decades. Canada’s nominal GDP grew more than eightfold from $275 billion in 1980 to over $2.2 trillion in recent years (in current US dollars). Similar patterns appear across the West. In the United States, just as immigration was intensified, nominal GDP expanded dramatically from about $2.8 trillion in 1980 to roughly $29–31 trillion by the mid-2020s. In a capitalist optimizing economy, GDP growth, returns to investors, and increasing wealth of the big owners of capital are the decisive metrics of success. In the U.S., the share of wealth of the top 1% rose substantially from around 23% in 1989 to nearly 31.6% by 2026. The top 10% now holds roughly 67–70% of total wealth, while the bottom 50% holds only about 2.5%. In Canada, the share of market income enjoyed by the top 1% rose considerably from around 8% in the early 1980s to 13–14% in the mid-2000s (and about 10–12% in recent years). The top 10% saw a five percent increase of market income share between the 1970s and 2021. In the United Kingdom, nominal GDP grew from approximately $565 billion in 1980 to over $3.3 trillion in recent years, accompanied by a notable rise in the top 1% income share since the early 1980s.

6. Who Loses? A Structural Flaw in the Post-Fordist Liberal Capitalist Order

This is not to deny that major costs, such as the ones listed in the previous section, including traffic congestion and loss of green farmlands, have been incurred primarily by large segments of the native White population. In Norway, for example, immigrants accounted for 56% of all social assistance recipients in 2024, despite comprising about 17–21% of the population. Similar numbers hold in other Western nations. Moreover, there is now substantial empirical research consistently showing a negative association between higher ethnic diversity and key indicators of social cohesion such as social trust, civic participation, and community cooperation.

Ultimately, I would say that the real cost of capitalism’s fusion with progressive liberalism is the creation of a system that is putting individualist Whites at a critical disadvantage vis-à-vis non-Western immigrants who assimilate liberal values only insofar as they can be beneficial to their ingroup ethnic interests, and that is thus biologically and culturally incompatible with the long-term survival of European peoples in their homelands.

There is indeed a deep structural contradiction embedded in the logics of liberalism and capitalism in their current post-Fordist phase. This regime rests on a historically unique psychological profile: the disposition of Western, primarily White, populations to prioritize universal ethical principles over kin loyalty or ethnic tribalism. All human societies throughout history, until the rise of the modern West, relied on intensive kinship structures (clans, lineages, and cousin marriage) that fostered norms such as loyalty to kin and ingroup, social control through social shame, and favoritism in dealings.

In contrast, for complex historical reasons we don’t need to bring up here, Western peoples abolished their kinship networks in favor of civic or voluntary associations, creating urban communes, guilds, diocese of bishops, monasteries, universities, and corporations relatively open to everyone regardless of kinship lineage. Whites came to prefer societies and institutions in which the same rules are applied to all regardless of status or personal ties. They came to favor impartial analytic thinking, guilt over shame, and recognition of intentionality in moral judgment.

This is the orientation that sustains Western individual rights, value pluralism, and the logic of progressive liberalism itself. But there is an inherent weakness in this orientation: these principles have been framed as applying to humans as such, as rights that belong to humans everywhere, even though this “Weird” psychology is a culturally evolved and historically peculiar attainment of Whites. Only White people are psychologically wired to view nepotism as morally corrupt, to trust strangers more readily, to rely on impartial rules in their judgements of the merits of others, and to treat the public sphere as a setting where everyone regardless of ethnic identity or country of origin should have equal rights. This is why the liberal-capitalist fusion worked extremely well among native Europeans during the Fordist phase, because everyone could behave under the assumption that everyone else would reciprocate their individualism and their impartiality.

The non-Western immigrants continuously arriving in the West in the millions overwhelmingly do not share this psychology. Most originate from cultures in which ethnic ingroup bias is the norm and the way to achieve success. Nepotism is seen as a natural obligation. The exploitation of birthright citizenship, chain migration, creation of ethnic enclaves and parallel economies for their ingroup members, including preferential hiring from within their ethnic groups, are accepted as appropriate behaviors.

Contrary to the expectations of liberal multicultural theory, immigrants (even from the second and third generations) are not inclined to assimilate to the universalism of native Whites or to “neutralize” their own ethnic particularism. Instead, they exploit the neutralized public space precisely because the host society has been socialized to treat any assertion of its own ethnic interests as racist and morally unacceptable. They treat the multicultural liberal order as a resource to be exploited for the advancement of their kin networks. Game theory describes this as “strategic free-riding.” In Pierre van den Berghe’s terms (The Ethnic Phenomenon, 1981), what we are witnessing is “adaptive kin selection,” that is, ethnic groups behaving as extended kin networks that favor co-ethnics in resource competition. This millennial human behavior is now operating inside societies where Whites have unilaterally disarmed themselves of any adaptive kin behaviors to fight back. We thus have a situation in which Whites prohibit themselves from pursuing their in-group interests while arming others to advance their particular in-group interests under the banner of “redistributive justice”.

This manipulation of White fairness and trust persists among so-called “assimilated” immigrants, non-Whites born in the West, and even elected officials operating inside the liberal democratic system. A clear illustration is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Racial Equity Plan, released in April 2026. Mamdani, a self-described “democratic socialist,” works within the progressive liberal order. His plan interprets persistent disparities in housing, education, and income as the result of “decades of discrimination” and “systemic racism.” It requires dozens of city agencies to prioritize resources and outcomes for “Black and brown” communities. I disagree, however, with the categorization of Mamdani’s approach as “race communism.” He is not calling for the expropriation of White capitalists, the abolition of private property, the elimination of markets, or for state planning of the economy by non-Whites. He is, admittedly, going beyond equality of opportunity by addressing, as he sees it, the “underlying factors” that affect the ability of “underprivileged” people to succeed; and in calling for the provision of extra supports and opportunities for “minorities”. While this goes against the classical liberalism principle of race-blind meritocracy, it is nevertheless a position that is now consistent with the actual legal character of liberalism across the West.

The post-Fordist model, moreover, is making a profound mistake in judging native White workers as less efficient than imported Asian laborers. By rewarding “Asian” traits such as compliant focus on repetitive tasks, and lack of interests outside one’s hyper-specialized role, it is optimizing for short-to-medium-term returns. Whites, with their higher variance in personality, greater openness to new ideas, experimentation, and adventurism, are better suited for “frontier innovation” and disruptive thinking, which are the very qualities that built and sustained Western civilization. In devaluing these broader creative and civilizational strengths of Whites, the regime prioritizes immediate accumulation over long-term goals such as cultural continuity and grand technological vision.

To Be Continued in Part 3

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Supreme Being: The Spiritual Foundation of Multipolarity salvages metaphysical truth from political stain.

The trilogy of books concluded here is the resolution of Germanic philosophy, which has always been spiritual.

The New Colossus presented the problem: Man is the decisionless executor of an alien will (the will-to-machine, the unconscious consciousness of pure beyng).

The Electric Will poetically, if not exactingly, defined the problem: Man’s will is neither “to live” (Schopenhauer) nor “to power” (Nietzsche); rather, will is a metaphysical urge bent on tyrannical homogeneity and man’s purpose is to set the conditions for the manifestation of purebeyng — metaphysicality — in the physical realm.

Finally, Supreme Being sketches the outline of a solution meant to be filled in by thoughtful study. Each of these studies of will is meant to stand alone, though each serves as a companion to the others.

In the end, liberation is not communion with despotic pure beyng, but the solitary assertion of the hidden self. Liberation is one’s will being simultaneously discovered and summoned to thoughtfully contravene the propensity for a crippling sameness that gives rise to a ruinous unconscious consciousness.

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Poland’s Pagan Face

When one speaks of the Polish political tradition, it is almost always Catholicism that first comes to mind, and with good reason. A nation many times invaded, dismembered, and subjected to the domination of neighboring Protestant and Orthodox powers, Poland has largely forged its historical identity in a powerful and at times intransigent Catholicism, to the point that one would almost take the words “Polish” and “Catholic” for synonyms.

It would nonetheless be a mistake to believe that this vision has always commanded unanimity, for there existed, in the 20th century, a contestation of rare virulence against this bond held to be self-evident, in the person of Jan Stachniuk.

Jan Stachniuk belongs to those subterranean figures of European intellectual history whose radicalism long condemned their work to the margins. Born on January 13, 1905 in Kowel, in Volhynia (Polish: Wołyń), into a family of railway workers, he belonged to that Polish generation which reached adulthood at the moment Poland recovered its independence. He pursued his studies in Poznań between 1927 and 1930, took an active part in student life, and very early on established himself as a mind of rare intransigence.

But what would secure Stachniuk a singular place in the history of Polish ideas is the founding of an original neo-pagan current, Zadruga, of which he was at once the doctrinal inspiration, the animating spirit, and the principal theoretician.

For a Historico-Creative Myth

Stachniuk is sometimes likened, not without pertinence, to what Armin Mohler called the Conservative Revolution. Like the German thinkers of that family, Stachniuk was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche and situated himself resolutely beyond the cleavage between routine conservatism and modern progressivism.

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He wanted neither simply to restore the old order, nor docilely to accompany the march of the modern world, but to refound from top to bottom the spiritual conditions of a historical renaissance for his country and, more broadly, for the whole Slavic world.

And it is from this ambition that Stachniuk would come to develop a devastating critique of Christianity. Among his books, the most important are undoubtedly Dzieje bez dziejów (“History Without History” or “History Without Events”) in 1939, Mit słowiański (“The Slavic Myth”) in 1941, and Człowieczeństwo i kultura (“Humanity and Culture”) in 1946.

Stachniuk’s central thesis, as befits a good Nietzschean, is that man is not first of all a being destined for comfort, for rest, for passive salvation, or for the mere conservation of self; he is a being of creative power, called to transform the world and to transform himself. This creative movement is what Stachniuk calls, in a particular sense, humanism (humanizm). Man is distinguished from the rest of creation by a “creative genius.” Man does not content himself with living in nature: he reconstructs it, reorganizes it, and subjects it to new forms. His essence is therefore not mere biological life, but the capacity to bring forth a human world.

True “humanism” here is thus not gentleness, philanthropy, or the abstract dignity of the person; it is the creative élan of the human race straining toward the reconstruction of the natural given. In other words, man is truly man only to the extent that he creates, organizes, invents, and surpasses the raw state of the world. But this creative vocation collides with what Stachniuk calls the “dualism of man.” In man there coexist two contrary directions: on one side, the creative, heroic, expansive drive; on the other, the aspiration to mere organic security, to “physiological happiness,” to the repetition of a life closed in on itself. It is from this tension that the drama of human history is born.

Hence, for Stachniuk, culture is not refinement, the fine arts, or erudition. It is the organization of the world’s energies. This is why he speaks of kulturowytwory, which one might render as “objectivized cultural formations”: everything that creative activity has fixed in works, institutions, techniques, symbolic forms, or collective habits. These formations objectivize human energy and permit its transmission. The real human world is therefore not raw nature, but the accumulated ensemble of these cultural objectivations.

From then on, the question is how to intensify culture. For Stachniuk, it is not enough to have scattered talents or isolated inventions. What is needed is a synthesis capable of ordering the available forces. It is here that his capital notion of the historico-creative myth (mit dziejotwórczy) intervenes. Myth is for him not an archaic fable or an irrational illusion; it is an organizing vision that inflames human energies, unifies values, indicates a historical direction, and transforms a latent power into collective action. The myth is at once affective ferment, plan of action, principle of organization, and system of setting-into-motion. Without myth, the creative forces remain scattered; with it, they become history.

From this derives Stachniuk’s very strong conception of heroism. Heroism is not, first of all, any spectacular military exploit; it is the act of converting the substance of one’s individual life into an enduring work, of letting one’s existence be absorbed and transfigured by a higher design. The contrary of heroism is a life consumed in the “eternal return” of the biological: to be born, to enjoy, to suffer, to endure, to die, without carrying anything beyond oneself. The hero is he who breaks this circle by making himself the material of a higher creation. True creative culture is therefore that which increases heroism in society.

But at the opposite pole of culture stands what Stachniuk calls wspakultura, which one may imperfectly translate as “inverted culture,” “anti-culture,” or, more exactly, “culture turned against its vocation.” Wspakultura is not the absence of culture; it is the degeneration of culture, its diseased survival, its reversal. It takes up the products of culture, but detaches them from the creative élan that had engendered them. It absolutizes remnants, ruins, side effects, and erects them into supreme values.

Now, for Stachniuk, universal history must be reread as a battle between culture and wspakultura. He says explicitly that the axis of the centuries is neither the struggle of classes, nor the struggle of races, nor the war of God and the Devil, but the struggle of these two currents for the possession of man. Every individual is traversed by this war, and every civilization as well. Culture increases the power of life, the density of existence, and creative objectivation; wspakultura produces arrest, regression, self-destruction, and the valorization of the lie.

It is precisely as wspakultura that Stachniuk interprets Christianity and especially Polish Catholicism. The latter is not, in his eyes, the supreme form of national identity, but the spiritual matrix of historical abdication. It is therefore in Polish Catholicism that Stachniuk would ultimately recognize the principal adversary. Not because he had rejected his Polishness, but on the contrary because he wanted to restore to Poland what he held to be its lost vocation, namely the élan of a creative power to become historical once again.

Poland has certainly not lacked courage, intelligence, or moral virtues, but Christianity, and still more the victory of the Counter-Reformation, he judges, little by little broke the very organ of historical life in her. The Church is said to have shaped what Stachniuk elsewhere calls the “good Pole”: a pious, moral, at times sentimental being, but one fundamentally ahistorical, incapable of converting his forces into creative power. Poland certainly does not cease to exist — on the contrary, she continues to endure, to pray, and to suffer — but she ceases to produce history. She enters into what Stachniuk calls bezdzieje, the “history-less” or “non-history,” that is, a paralyzed duration in which the nation no longer surpasses itself and in which tradition transmits nothing more than a sanctified impotence. It is in this precise sense that Catholicism appears to him not as a bastion of Polishness, but as the profound cause of its historical withering.

Poland before Rome

Hence, as counterpoint, the importance of Slavic myth. In Stachniuk, it is not a question of a mere romantic taste for pagan folklore, nor of a collector’s archaism. Rather, in his eyes, Slavic myth designates the buried point of departure of another Polish possibility: that of a community still attuned to the forces of life, of nature, of growth, and of collective destiny, before Christianity diverted these energies toward the beyond.

In this sense, Slavic paganism counts not so much as a religion of the past, but rather as a symbolic reserve for the future. Stachniuk was therefore not seeking servilely to restore the ancient cults; he wanted rather to forge, out of this old pre-Christian stock, a new historico-creative myth capable of restoring to the Poles a terrestrial, heroic, and collective horizon. And it is perhaps here, at the foundation, that Stachniuk’s ultimate ambition resides: to wrest Poland from the Catholic identity it has given itself, in order to lead it back toward a myth of power older than itself and newer than the modern world.

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Originally published in Éléments no. 220, June-July 2026

Translated by Alexander Raynor

For an alternative perspective on the Catholic legacy and Polish national thought, check out Jan Mosdorf’s Yesterday and Tomorrow, brought to you in English for the first time by Arktos (available on Amazon):

Published just before the outbreak of the Second World War that spelled the tragic death of its author, Yesterday and Tomorrow is one of the forgotten gems of twentieth-century Polish thought. Now recognized as the foremost Polish nationalist treatise of the 1930s, Jan Mosdorf’s Yesterday and Tomorrow presents a vivid picture of the interwar drive to reread the past, reshape the present, and reimagine the future.

Part study and part manifesto, this immense tour de force, authored by one of the leaders of the new generation of Polish nationalist youth following Poland’s regaining of independence, takes the reader on an ambitious trek to understand the character and fate of the Polish nation in the broader context of the crisis of European civilization and the challenges of technological modernity.

Artfully integrating history and psychology, socio-economics and philosophy, politics and theology, Yesterday and Tomorrow remains an enduringly relevant exposition of the drama of nations in the modern world and the bold thinking that seeks to rekindle the European spirit and civilizational creativity through national renaissance.

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“The Forbidden Investigation”

This book is an investigation in two parts. First, it uncovers the unspoken truths and lies behind the official discourse about “systemic racism.” Second, it plunges into the dirty underbelly of the everyday reality of anti-White racism.

Beyond an ideological critique, this book gives a voice to the victims — those who are silenced because acknowledging their suffering would shatter the dominant narrative. Through in-depth interviews, case studies, and an exploration of cultural context, Anti-White Racism reveals how insults, discrimination, humiliation, and violence experienced in everyday life form part of a larger normalization of racial hostility that official policy and the media seek to deny, but whose effects they can no longer hide.

In this courageous, unsettling, and richly documented investigation, François Bousquet exposes the rising reality of anti-White racism — and asks how long the silence can last.

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Introduction

The aim of this paper is to explain why the complete diversification of White-created nations is now on a path-dependent course, and why rational arguments or a change of government, taken by themselves, will not reverse it. Reversing this path would entail a cascading sequence of crises (in combination with extreme polarization) in which the institutions that reproduce replacement begin to break down.

There are two questions at hand. First, what ultimately lies behind the “great replacement”? Second, what would have to happen for Western nations to leave a path that has already produced, or will soon produce, non-White majorities in most of their major cities?

No other subject in our time carries greater historical and political implications. Historians and social scientists still argue over the origins of agriculture, the fall of Rome, the causes of the First and Second World Wars, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of modern science in Europe. The scholarly world, however, thinks it is morally inappropriate to discuss what it identifies as either a “conspiracy” or a “racist” subject unbecoming of “serious” academics.

The result is a lack of scholarly studies on this subject. The arena of debate is occupied primarily by half-baked notions of a secret “Kalergi Plan,” a deliberate plot by elites to destroy the West through “bio-Leninism,” an attempt to import a new electorate, a psychological “malfunctioning” called “suicidal empathy,” or an unwillingness by conservative elites to accept race realism or the critique of the “equality thesis”.

While some of these explanations bring out important secondary or proximate factors, they remain undeveloped theoretically. The one explanation with substantial scholarly qualities is Kevin MacDonald’s thesis on the disproportionate influence of American Jews in the promotion of multiculturalism and of the idea that ethnic nationalism by people of European ancestry is a form of “neo-Nazism”. But, as I will explain later, even though MacDonald goes deep into the evolutionary selection of individualist (liberal) behavioral traits among prehistoric Europeans, he tends to reduce economic, political, and ideological structures to the choices of individual actors and groups. Like almost every theorist in Western academia, he treats society as persons making decisions, with Jews pursuing in-group interests and promoting Leftist ideas, without examining the institutional conditions that reproduce and validate decisions and actions.

My thesis is that the ultimate reason for the demographic replacement of White people lies in the structural, self-reinforcing fusion of two logics: (i) liberal universalism, which delegitimizes ethnic particularism and prohibits state preference for any one culture in favor of pluralism; and (ii) post-Fordist (including limbic) capitalist optimization, which demands flexible, low-cost, compliant non-Western labor and consumers, expanding global markets and short or medium term economic gains. It is my view that these two logics have merged into a path-dependent trap that is quite effective at achieving GDP growth, opportunities for businesses, and careers for politicians and intellectuals, including feelings of moral validation, at the same time as it systematically undermines the ethnic and cultural foundations of European societies.

In formulating this thesis, I draw on the work of Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998), recognized by many as “Germany’s most prominent and controversial social theorist” of the post-WWII era. Luhmann developed a comprehensive model of modern society as composed of “autopoietic” (meaning self-reproducing and operationally closed) institutional systems organized through functional differentiation. For him, the defining characteristic of modernity is not science or liberal democratic values, but the differentiation of society into function subsystems (politics, economy, education, art, law, and so on). No one system holds the key to the nature and dynamics of the other systems. Rather, each subsystem is relatively autonomous, operating according to its own “binary code” in terms of what it deems to be positive and negative for its functioning. For example, the economy operates on the code of “payment/non-payment,” science operates on the code of “true/false,” politics on “power/no power” (or “government/opposition”), law on “legal/illegal,” and the mass media on “information/non-information”.

Although Luhmann treated these subsystems in neutral, or strictly functional terms, without focusing on either the role of political values or the dynamics of capitalism, his framework has clarified for me how contemporary Western liberal capitalism functions as a meta-code infusing or imbuing the multiple subsystems. Liberalism and capitalism permeate, with their own dominant moral binaries (racist/anti-racist, tolerant/intolerant, profitable/unprofitable, optimizing/suboptimizing, progressive/reactionary, fact/conspiracy, inclusion/exclusion) across these systems, filtering and ordering their operations. My point is not that liberal capitalism nullifies Luhmann’s original codes, but that it acts as a meta-code.

This essay accepts Luhmann’s core insight that societies are not constituted by individuals acting on the basis of their personal motivations, interests, and choices; rather, societies consist of subsystems, each of which constructs reality, and self-reproduces itself, according to its own cognitive structure. I rely on this insight to explain how liberal capitalism acts as a tacitly accepted background reality, ensuring that the subsystems produce and reproduce themselves not only according to their own codes, but according to the meta-codes of liberalism and capitalism. While these systems (the economy, law, politics, science, education) are cognitively open (and do take into account external events, what other subsystems are doing, as well as the totality of society, including events that counter their cognitive structures, such as disproportionate black or immigrant criminality, mounting populist opposition, or reports that diversity weakens community cohesion), they interpret those “irritations” through their internal codes, and through the liberal-capitalist meta-code, in such a way that these irritations are securely incorporated without undermining the functioning of society.

As Luhmann explains, systems operate “autopoietically” or through their own internal codes and cannot therefore be directly controlled from the outside. Populist proposals may cause “perturbations” in the economy, the law, or the political system, but they are processed according to the respective codes of these systems; and, or so I will add to Luhmann’s theory, the overarching liberal meta-code. It is not that liberal elites act as unthinking automatons. On the contrary, progressive liberalism involves a self-aware, ideological commitment to the elimination of traditional “prejudices” and the expansion of personal choice and diversity. Many elites genuinely believe in this project.

What Luhmann’s systems theory explains is that the dynamics of the subsystems are already operationally structured by their own codes and discourses. Events that are perceived as a challenge are therefore processed in ways that either reproduce the existing order or do not threaten it. Similarly, each new cohort of judges, managers, journalists, and professors is socialized into the respective discourses of the systems. That is, they take up predefined roles and views within the systems. While variation in personal tone, style, and emphasis is allowed in this “individualist” order, the recoding of the system, and the meta-code, is prohibited. Using this theoretical approach, I will explain why the “great replacement” is path-dependent.

I add, then, to Luhmann’s theory that modern society is functionally differentiated the idea that the modern West is also a liberal and a capitalist civilization. This economic system and this ideology developed together and are now fused into a single, self-reinforcing system. In the Fordist phase (1945–1975), this fusion largely benefited native White populations, delivering affluence, rising real wages, high homeownership, and stable families and communities within relatively homogeneous nations still anchored by pre-liberal norms. The crisis of Fordism in the 1970s activated a transition to a post-Fordist multicultural and limbic capitalist regime. In this new order, liberal progressivism and capitalist optimization continue to reinforce each other and to act as a meta-code for the subsystems, but with the key difference that in this new order the liberal meta-code acts to delegitimize ethnic and cultural particularism, while the capitalist meta-code demands flexible, cheaper immigrant labor to deal with high-wage unionized labor and White low fertility rates. The Western social system as a whole is now operationally structured to favor both diversity as a moral good consistent with liberal pluralism, and high supplies of immigrant labor that optimize post-Fordist production.

This post-Fordist regime, I will explain, contains a deep structural contradiction. It rests upon the historically peculiar “WEIRD” psychology of European peoples characterized by low ethnocentrism, high impersonal trust, and impartiality, while systematically empowering non-Western groups that operate according to particularistic kin-selection and ethnic nepotism. The result is a system that delivers optimization through GDP growth, rising incomes for the elites, as well as opportunities for those well connected and incentivized by the regime, but that is nevertheless incompatible with the biological and cultural civilizational survival of European peoples.

I will articulate this thesis in several sections. I will first explain the nature of the two logics of liberal progressivism and capitalist optimization, and then trace their fusion through the crisis of Fordism and the rise of the post-Fordist multicultural regime. I will then offer reasons why immigrant labor meets certain key optimizing criteria of post-Fordist capitalism. I will show that the main promoters of immigration in the West are both progressives and business organizations. I will examine Luhmann’s impressive systems theory and how the liberal meta-code operates across law, media, education, and politics. This will set the groundwork for why I think that popular alternative explanations for demographic replacement are flawed or preoccupied with short-term factors.

Finally, I will explain the nature of the path-dependent trap the West is facing, how it absorbs and reframes populist irritations (and whatever failures the order exhibits in terms of welfare costs and grooming gangs) within its own codes, making reversal extremely difficult. I will show why Luhmann’s theory affords us with an excellent perspective of the nature of this path-dependency. In the conclusion, I will consider the possibility of escape through major economic or geopolitical crises, a deep legitimation crisis, and an “overdetermined” rupture in which multiple subsystems fail simultaneously.

1. The Two Logics: Liberal Progressivism and Capitalist Optimization

(A) Liberalism

Liberal ideology seeks a political and public sphere grounded in universal principles that apply equally to all humans, irrespective of ethnic ancestry, sexual identity, and cultural background. It is committed to the extension and maintenance of equal individual rights grounded on the moral principle that every person possesses the inalienable freedom to choose their own values, religious convictions, and personal self-expression. The role of government should be to protect and expand these rights, rather than to impose any substantive vision of the good life or what the preferred lifestyle should be. Liberalism enables diverse individuals to pursue conflicting doctrines and modes of living within a public political framework of mutual tolerance and respect.

A key dimension of liberalism, which its foremost theorists either miss or neglect to emphasize, is that although this ideology advocates universal principles for humanity as such (rule of law, equal rights regardless of race, sex, and religion), the underlying psychology of liberalism is itself culturally evolved and historically peculiar to European peoples. This ideology is not rooted in human nature. All human societies, including pre-liberal Western societies, were based on particularistic, kin-based norms (in which kin members are treated differently from outsiders). Only Western peoples developed a “WEIRD” psychology, as Joseph Henrich puts it, with population oriented toward impersonal trust and cooperation with strangers, abstract analytical thinking rather than ingroup “prejudicial” thinking, voluntary or civic associations based on contract and merit, rather than restricted to kin members or individuals born with a privileged status. In this sense, liberal societies presuppose, for their proper functioning, people who are well socialized with this WEIRD psychology.

Contrary to the common perception that liberalism is strictly a “relativist” or “neutral” ideology that does not seek to impose a particular way of life, this ideology is morally committed to remaking society and the world in its own image. It is an ideology with a moral dynamic that necessarily conflicts with traditionalist ways rooted in ethnic identities, kinship obligations, or any worldview that restricts “the right to choose”.

Liberalism, in other words, contains a progressive dynamic in its striving to “emancipate” the public sphere from “backward” beliefs, discriminatory policies, or inherited hierarchies. It even seeks to “emancipate” individuals from whatever personal (xenophobic, sexist, homophobic) prejudices they may have. It actively socializes children to become open-minded and respectful of diverse lifestyle choices, while marginalizing or confining to the private sphere those perspectives, such as ethnic nationalism or cultural traditionalism, judged to be incompatible with equal rights. This means that liberal societies have an inherent inclination to dissolve ethnic preferences, ingroup cultural attachments, and “sexist stereotypes” in favor of racial and sexual diversity.

The constant debate between those who insist liberalism is pure relativism and those who increasingly see it as totalitarian misses the dual character of this ideology. Liberalism is simultaneously relativist and absolutist in (i) its advocacy or allowance of multiple religions, philosophies, hobbies, and identities in personal relations and private associations—including illiberal ones—and (ii) its determination to create a strictly liberal political sphere which excludes illiberal politics. In many ways, dissidents have largely accepted this state of affairs in their every day lives: “I will not submit to liberalism! I will be a Nietzschean in my thinking and style of living!” or “Let me live traditionally!” Liberalism is not threatened by such private acts of defiance; it encourages it, while continuing to dominate the public sphere.

Liberalism has not been superseded by some new ideology called “cultural Marxism,” “wokeness,” “postmodernism,” or “race communism”. It remains the reigning ideology of the West, with intellectual roots that are deeper and richer—in terms of major thinkers and institutional history—than those of conservatism, fascism, or communism. Its lineage stretches back to foundational figures such as John Locke, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill, articulated by generations of political theorists, legal philosophers, economists, social scientists, artists, and European nationalities.

The commitment to universal values, pluralism, equal rights, and diversity has been mainstream across Western academia and elite circles for decades, articulated by the most institutionally established philosophers and scholars of the 20th and 21st centuries. Academics who accept the central tenets of progressive liberalism, including the celebration of diversity and the repudiation of White identity politics, now control virtually all universities in the West, along with thousands of journals, magazines, and academic societies.

Karl Popper’s book, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) played an important role delegitimizing ethnic nationalism and “closed societies” based on fascist and communist values. Isaiah Berlin’s popularization of the argument that there are multiple, incommensurable values and ways of life, and that liberal societies should encourage diverse forms of self-expression, rather than impose a single moral vision, persuaded many that multiculturalism was a natural ally of liberalism.

John Rawls (1921-2002) provided the most sophisticated post-WWII justification for the claim that the public sphere should remain open to multiple cultural viewpoints. His argument that freedom and justice are possible only if citizens accept that the state itself must remain liberal, and that children must be socialized in schools to be “open-minded” and to reject “intolerant” ideas, is widely accepted as the best defence of Western liberal societies.

We could name many other prominent thinkers—Joseph Raz, Will Kymlicka, Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, and Steven Pinker—who, despite differences in emphasis, with some defending the “absolute truth” of Enlightenment rationality and others celebrating its relativist openness, have all argued in favor of the “moral superiority” of cosmopolitanism, diversity, and equality of rights. We could name as well prominent post-modernists like Jacques Derrida. While Derrida rejected the universalist pretensions of Enlightenment liberalism, his later works on “hospitality,” cosmopolitanism, and his overall deconstruction of hierarchical binaries have been interpreted as calls for the inclusion of the immigrant “stranger” and the displacement of “rigid” national or ethnic identities — in the name of a more progressive form of liberal pluralism.

For all the intense debates we have witnessed over the past decades between “conservative” Enlightenment liberals, deconstructionists, post-colonialists, communitarians, and individuals from numerous philosophical schools, they are all on board with ethnic pluralism.

Now, while it is true that classical liberals and many libertarians continue to insist that liberalism attaches rights and moral worth only to individuals and not to racial or ethnic groups, and therefore reject progressive identity politics, calling it “race communism,” the fact remains that contemporary classical liberals have no principles by which to oppose immigrant diversity. They actually endorse high levels of immigration and diversity on individualist and optimizing grounds; and remain in principle (with their abstraction of individuals from nationality, culture, and race) indifferent to the replacement of White majorities. Moreover, my key point stands that the historical evolution of liberalism has generated an institutionalized meta-code that is progressive, and which treats diversity itself as a moral imperative.

Suffice it to say a few extra words about Jurgen Habermas (1929-2026), judged by many, including conservatives, as the most sophisticated philosophical defender of liberal universalism, and foremost critic of postmodernism and traditionalism. In his last book, Also a History of Philosophy (a massive three-volume work, published in German in 2019-2021), he attempts to reconstruct the entire history of Western philosophy from a post-national, post-metaphysical, cosmopolitan point of view. He insists that the core achievement of the West is the progressive “uncoupling” of reason from particular traditions, religions, and ethnic identities. He sees the “Enlightenment project” as unfinished and argues that the West should strive for greater universality, inclusion, and transcendence of parochial national identities toward the creation of a “post-national” and “post-metaphysical” form of solidarity based on “communicative rationality” (open “democratic” dialogue and reason-based consensus). Western nations, if they are to live up to liberal universalism, must overcome ethnic attachments for a new “constitutional patriotism”. As a recent article in The European Conservative magazine happily expressed it, Habermas developed the most “ambitious post-national argument for political allegiance rooted in constitutional principles rather than ethnic mythology.”

In short, it is progressive liberalism – and not postmodernism, existentialism, communism, wokeism, atheism, Protestantism, or any other school of thought – that dominates the Western world, the very psychology of its citizens, its intellectual history, institutions, governments, educational and legal systems.

(B) Capitalism

Capitalism, despite its variety of national forms, its mixture with higher or lower degrees of Keynesian government spending, still remains the dominant economic system across the West. The key to understand about this system is that it has undergone a profound evolution in the last century. The capitalism that Max Weber (1864-1920) famously described in terms of the Protestant ethic of frugality, savings, deferred gratification, and stable family formation has been largely superseded.

In the post-Fordist, limbic age, capitalism has morphed into what Jean-Joseph Goux called a “general economy of unlimited circulation.” Utility, scarcity, and rational calculation have given way to excess, waste, instant gratification in global megacities. Capitalism no longer primarily relies on the disciplined “bourgeois” subject who saves and invests; it actively encourages, rather, deracinated global citizens with a high marginal propensity to spend their earnings on pleasure and excitement.

This alteration, however, should be interpreted as a transformation of capitalist optimization rather than as a negation of it. From the standpoint of current businesses, the cultivation of excess and immediate gratification is rational in that hedonistic consumers have a higher marginal propensity to consume, which amounts to higher consumption of fast food, dating apps, pharmaceuticals, streaming, gambling, cannabis, and what businesses dedicated to spectacles offer.

In post-Fordist times, as we will see in Section 2, profits are indeed increasingly derived from financial speculation, debt, asset trading, real estate, and from businesses dedicated to entertainment, rather than “useful” material goods alone. This is not to deny that post-Fordist capitalism continues to depend on entrepreneurship, scientific knowhow, high-tech education, and continuous innovation.

To be clear, capitalism, as such, does not aim to realize the ideals of progressivism. It merely requires the social and psychological conditions that allow calculative rationality to flourish. Yet, in both its meritocratic and consumerist forms, capitalism does exhibit a powerful “elective affinity” (to use a Weberian term) with liberal institutions. It reliably produces progressive outcomes even though its motives remain purely calculative rather than ethical.

By favoring individual talent over ethnic loyalties, by applying universal rules over ingroup favoritism, and by doing away with customs and institutions that curtail the mobility of resources and labor, capitalism actively selects for the universalistic personality that liberalism celebrates. Likewise, by rewarding consumers who are reckless in their spending and crave immediate pleasures and dopamine hits, capitalism favors diverse and rootless urban populations over stable, frugal communities in traditional White towns. In this sense, the two logics—liberal progressivism and capitalist optimization—are distinct yet mutually sustaining.

This optimizing logic finds strong support among leading libertarian and free-market economists. Bryan Caplan, Alex Nowrasteh, Tyler Cowen, Walter Block, Michael Clemens, Gary Becker, and Julian Simon have long argued for high or open immigration on grounds of economic efficiency and individual liberty. These libertarians are, in Antonio Gramsci’s lexicon, the “organic intellectuals” who have given coherence, self-awareness, and rationale to the benefits of the capitalist logic in the post-Fordist age. Caplan advocates for full open borders, arguing that it would dramatically increase global wealth. Nowrasteh, Senior economist at Cato Institute, dedicates much of his research trying to show that large-scale immigration brings greater prosperity. Cowen argues for more immigration (particularly high-skilled) on both economic and humanitarian grounds. Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize winner, is well known for his thesis that labor mobility across the world is economically beneficial.

For all their insistence on individual merit and their opposition to progressive “race communism,” these thinkers welcome demographic diversity and vehemently reject White identity as “fascist” precisely because they evaluate people only as individuals rather than as members of a collective cultural heritage. These names, and many others working for organizations like the Cato Institute, Reason Foundation, or at the IMF, the World Bank, and numerous university departments, identify open borders with freedom of movement and individual rights. Major business associations in the United States, and across Europe, as we will see in Section 4, eagerly lobby for higher legal immigration and “guest-worker” programs.

2. The Crisis of Fordism and the Shift to Post-Fordist Multicultural Capitalism

The replacement of Whites can’t be understood without an adequate grasp of the transition from a Fordist to a post-Fordist liberal capitalist regime. During the Fordist phase of capitalist accumulation (roughly the 1940s–1970s), the two logics operated in a way that was greatly beneficial to the native White populations of the West. Fordism was a regime of mass production of standardized goods for national markets, supported by high unionized wages, strong labor unions, government investment, and Keynesian management policies designed to balance supply and demand. Within this regime of accumulation, the progressive logic of liberalism delivered general prosperity for Whites, including the expansion of social safety nets, greater access to cheap university education, high rates of homeownership, and stable family communities.

This Fordist order did not require large-scale immigrant labor. The postwar Baby Boomer generation, with their large families and good incomes, supplied a sufficient working class and consumer population within relatively homogeneous nations. This order fostered national cohesion, cultural identity, and widespread social mobility while supporting major public infrastructure projects such as highways, schools, and universities. During this phase, in the unfolding of the progressive logic of liberalism, Western societies were still regulated by certain “pre-liberal” norms: the belief that a family consists of a father and mother with children, that premarital sex should be avoided, that marriage is sacrosanct and divorce is selfish, that the man is primarily responsible for family provision, that Western societies are Christian or founded on Christian values and of European ancestry, and that they show some deference and attachment to established hierarchies, institutions, and governments.

By the early 1970s, however, the Fordist model began to break down. Fertility rates had started to decline considerably, domestic markets were becoming saturated, and Western economies faced stagflation, declining profitability, and intensifying global competition from newly industrializing Asian nations. Excessive union activism, significant wage increases, and rigid labor structures further undermined the competitiveness of Western businesses. The liberal capitalist West adapted by transitioning to both a post-Fordist neo-liberal order and a more progressive multicultural order.

Neoliberalism began to attain hegemonic status from the mid-1970s onward, influencing political decision making across the West. Its core claim was:

“human well-being can be best advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedom and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong property rights, free markets, and free trade.”

In the United States, for example, think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, and the American Enterprise Institute actively propagated this project and helped create a strong consensus in favor of post-Fordist policies.

These policies entailed, in the main, the pursue of cheaper inputs by businesses, greater flexibility, and access to new markets by building global supply chains, outsourcing production overseas, and shifting toward “flexible accumulation.” They entailed, moreover, moving away from “rigid,” unionized 9:00-5:00 labor toward part-time, temporary, and contract work, including decentralized production using “just-in-time” techniques and subcontracting.

During the 1990s there was a major economic modification across the West from manufacturing to services, finance, and high-tech industries, leading to the dominance of transnational finance capital, where profits derived from asset trading, debt, hedge funds, and speculation, rather than just industrial capital, assumed increasing significance. This transition was eventually accompanied by heavy reliance on information technology, automation, microelectronics, and digital tools.

Multiculturalism began to take hold together with the consolidation of neoliberalism — though this has not been a subject of study by any theorist of post-Fordism. The adoption of multiculturalism was not a product of “cultural Marxists” taking control of the public sphere, but the direct institutional expression of liberalism’s pluralist logic. Liberal communitarians like Will Kymlicka, recognized as the most important theorist of multiculturalism, successfully persuaded politicians from all persuasions that, just as the liberal state should not impose any religious beliefs upon its citizens, it should not mandate any dominant culture; instead, it should guarantee a public sphere in which individuals of diverse religious and nationalities enjoy equal rights to express their preferred customs and beliefs in a state of mutual respect. The intended aim of this multicultural liberalism, as it came to be institutionalized in a variety of ways across the West from the 1980s on, is not to promote group-oriented non-Western cultures as such, but to overcome “past discrimination” against non-Western or non-White populations by “leveling the playing field” and creating greater equalizing opportunities for minorities.

This consolidation of liberal multiculturalism, together with the intense obsession with overcoming “past racism” and “xenophobia,” provided the perfect ideological justification for the requirements of post-Fordist accumulation. As native fertility rates fell and European populations came to be viewed as increasingly costly and inflexible laborers, businesses embraced mass immigration from high-fertility Third World nations. Immigration was thus framed as both an economic solution to the crisis of Fordism and a new phase in the march toward fulfilling progressivist ideals.

This transition marked a profound evolution in the nature of capitalism itself. The economic theory of capitalism (from Adam Smith through David Ricardo and marginalist economists) emphasized supply, savings, frugality, and deferred gratification — what Jean-Joseph Goux called “the cramped and grayish world of petty calculation, quantifiable profit and industrious activity.” In sociology, this is commonly known as the Weberian Protestant ethic. Keynesian economic thinking during Fordism had already emphasised demand stimulation and mass consumption to sustain growth. Post-Fordism radicalized this further, pushing beyond the limits of a utilitarian or calculating rationality in order to replace it with what Goux, drawing on Georges Bataille, termed a “general economics” that makes of unproductive expenditure (pleasure, games, spectacle) the most determinant phenomenon of social life. As Goux observed in a 1990 article:

“It is in this intentionally unproductive use, in this unlimited expenditure, and not in utilitarian consumption that a secret lies hidden, the ‘general law of the economy.’”

Henceforth, capitalism would no longer be as heavily tied to the Protestant ethic, stable families, and ethno-religious customs: “The values of thrift, sobriety and asceticism no longer have the place that they held.” In this new regime, capitalism cultivates deracinated, high-consumption individuals who respond impulsively to the latest thrills markets offer.

What Jean-François Lyotard started to notice in the 1970s, termed a “libidinal economy” to illuminate a new form capitalism (beyond the Marxist emphasis on “immiseration”) that increasingly operates through the circulation of images that intensify our desires, and what Goux identified as “Post-Modern Capitalism” in 1990, is what David Courtwright identifies as “limbic capitalism” in his 2019 book The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business.

Courtwright describes industries that target the brain’s limbic system, the seat of pleasure, craving, and immediate emotional response, rather than rational deliberation. The aim is to “encourage excessive consumption and addiction” by marketing novel pleasures, vices, and “hyperstimulating environments”, inducing binge eating, compulsive gaming, nonmedical drug use, “pathological gambling,” and “taboo sexual behavior”. Part of this limbic model of accumulation includes instant access via the internet to gambling, pornography, and shopping, and to platforms specialized in delivering quick dopamine hits through likes, retweets, personalized feeds, and autoplay.

Limbic internet businesses thrive in today’s world. A Forbes article, using OnlyFans as an example, explains how AI software can talk, flirt, persuade, or keep someone engaged, creating the feeling of a relationship. It can do this at very low cost for each extra user. “AI does not get tired. It does not go offline. It responds instantly, adapts continuously”. TikTok and Instagram Reels, similarly, deliver dopamine through a rapid succession of sensationalist videos and sexualized images. DraftKings and FanDuel have turned sports (even for people who are not fans) into mass gambling. Live Nation, NFL spectacles, fashion platforms such as Shein, and delivery apps such as DoorDash and Uber Eats all thrive on immediate craving, entertainment, and easy comfort. Pornhub may well be the quintessential limbic progressive enterprise: its algorithm maximizes retention through an endless choice of fetishes, while its 2025 Year in Review celebrated the rise of “Lesbian” and “Transgender” as the most popular categories of “sexual authenticity” and of “breaking old ideas about gender and sexuality.”

It is critically important to understand that the progressive logic of liberalism, particularly from the 1960s on, has been operating in amicable symbiosis with this transition to post-Fordist limbic capitalism, by eroding the last remaining or residual pre-liberal norms still prevailing in the Fordist age. In the libidinal economy, the persisting attachments to traditional family structures, Christian morality, ethnic cohesion, and deference to traditional hierarchies came to be viewed as barriers to individual autonomy, labor mobility, and cultural openness. Liberalism progressed from its older preoccupation with fair wages, secure jobs, and affordable housing for the working classes, toward DEI cultural politics. This new emphasis manifested itself as political correctness in the 1980s and 1990s, and in recent years as woke ideology.

What theorists have missed is that this cultural change supplied a moral justification for “flexible accumulation” by nurturing a population detached from any solid identity and therefore amenable to large inflows of diverse immigrants.

To Be Continued in Part 2

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Since its origins, black metal has embraced an aesthetic and rhetoric strongly influenced by war and warrior imagery. Far from being merely stylistic exercise, this trend reflects profound aspects of the ideology and philosophy of this music genre, offering rich ground for cultural and musicological analysis.

Manifestations of the Warrior Aesthetic

The warrior aesthetic in black metal manifests itself in various ways, such as the creation of a coherent and pervasive symbolic ecosystem.

Iconography: the use of weapons (often medieval or ancient), armor, and military symbols is common on album covers, band logos, and musicians’ clothing. Recurring elements include swords, axes, horned helmets, shields with runes, and Celtic or Norse symbols that evoke the imagery of Northern European warriors.

Pseudonyms: Many artists adopt battle names or pseudonyms that evoke historical or mythological warrior figures. From Varg Vikernes (wolf) to Samoth (death), from Fenriz (Fenrir, the giant wolf of Norse mythology) to Ihsahn (son of ice). These names create an artistic identity detached from the civilian persona, transforming the musician into a warrior avatar.

Lyrics: The lyrics often depict battles, both historical and metaphorical, and celebrate warrior virtues such as strength, courage and resilience. The narratives range from Viking sagas and apocalyptic battles to mythological wars and inner conflicts of the soul.

Performances: Black metal concerts are often described as a kind of “sonic assault,” with the musicians adopting aggressive, martial poses on stage and often wielding instruments with aggressive shapes or adorned with war symbols.

The war metaphor in black metal operates on several interconnected levels, creating an intricate semantic architecture.

Spiritual Battle

War is often seen as a metaphor for an inner or spiritual battle, representing an individual’s struggle against the forces of conformity and mediocrity. This dimension has its roots in the medieval tradition of Miles Christi, is presented in the opposite way: the black metal warrior fights against Christianity and the established moral order.

This inner battle is fought on several fronts: the struggle against one’s own weaknesses; the overcoming of human limitations; and the conquest of a form of enlightenment through darkness. Significantly, many lyrics describe this process using the language of war: siege; conquest; victory and defeat becoming metaphors for states of mind and processes of personal transformation.

Cultural Resistance

Imagery of war is used to symbolise resistance against perceived corrupting or alienating cultural influences. Here, the reactionary nature of the movement is evident: war becomes a symbol of resistance against modernity, urbanisation, globalisation and the Americanisation of European culture.

This cultural war is fought through music, which is seen as a means of preserving and transmitting traditional values that are under threat from global standardisation. It is no coincidence that many bands use local languages or archaic dialects in their lyrics, transforming language itself into a weapon of cultural resistance.

Cosmic Conflict

In many cases, war is presented as a manifestation of cosmic forces in conflict, reflecting dualistic views of the universe. This dimension draws on both Norse mythology (Ragnarök) and Gnostic and Manichean traditions, portraying reality as a stage for an eternal battle between opposing forces.

Manifestations of cosmic conflict include the opposition between order and chaos, light and darkness, and creation and destruction.

Purification through Destruction

The idea of war as a means of purification and renewal is a recurring theme, often linked to concepts of apocalypse and rebirth. This conception has its roots in the tradition of furor teutonicus and in Nietzsche’s notion of creative destruction.

War becomes an instrument of collective catharsis, offering the possibility of spiritual and cultural rebirth by destroying the corrupt order. Many bands explore apocalyptic scenarios not as an end in themselves, but as a necessary prelude to a new era. The burning of Norwegian churches in the 1990s can be viewed as such: not as gratuitous vandalism, but as a symbolic act of purification through destruction.

The adoption of this warrior aesthetic has complex roots intertwined with European history, philosophy and anthropology.

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Battle, Victory & Death in the World of Tradition

“War is father of all and king of all; some he has revealed as gods, some as men; some he has made slaves, some free.”

This proverb from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus is re-energised for the modern day in Julius Evola’s Metaphysics of War. Revolting against the modern world’s reduction of war to geopolitics, economic interests, and humanitarian ideology, Evola summons ancient and medieval sources from both East and West to reveal how war can be seen as a unique arena of heroism and spiritual transformation at the origins of civilisation.

Written during the explosive years around the Second World War, the essays gathered in this volume explore the existential situation of war and the heights of the warrior ethos. Drawing on Nordic, Roman, Vedic, and other sacred texts and rituals, Evola points to the opportunity for men of the degraded, materialistic, nihilistic modern age to achieve a higher state of consciousness, rediscover the meaning of life and the human condition, and reconnect with metaphysical reality through a bond of mind and action.

Unlike today’s armies, which demand mere soldiers in the mercenary employ of a decadent ruling class, the authentic warrior tradition is a path toward transcendence which extends beyond the battlefield to transform all spheres of life and culture.

This revised and expanded edition of Metaphysics of War features additional essays as well as a new foreword and introduction connecting Evola’s ideas to both his era and our own.

Historical Influences

References to periods such as the Viking Age or the Middle Ages are not accidental: these periods are seen as times when warrior culture was at the heart of social organisation and the collective imagination. Black metal idealises these periods as moments of cultural authenticity, contrasting them with the perceived decadence of modernity.

In particular, the Viking era is seen as a model of a pre-Christian warrior society where values such as courage, honour and strength were paramount.

On the other hand, the Middle Ages offer the model of the inverted Christian warrior: the black knight, the anti-paladin who fights against the Church and the established order. This figure frequently appears in the genre’s iconography, from corpse paint that transforms the face into a death mask to band names that evoke medieval warlords.

Reaction to Modernity

The glorification of warrior virtues represents a reaction to the perception of a “weak” and “feminized” modern society. This criticism is articulated on several levels: the rejection of consumerism, alienating technology, and liberal democracy which is seen as a system that favours the weak at the expense of the strong.

Modernity is perceived as a degenerative process that has led to the loss of fundamental values such as honor, courage, and connection with nature. Thus, the metaphor of war is employed as a means for recovering a heroic dimension of existence, as opposed to the banality of contemporary bourgeois existence.

Extreme Individualism

The image of the lone warrior who is self-sufficient and fighting against the whole world reflects the extreme individualism that characterises much of black metal. Drawing as much on Nietzsche’s Übermensch as on the Norse berserker archetype, this figure combines modern philosophy and ancient mythology in an original synthesis.

The black metal warrior is often presented as a tragic and heroic figure at the same time: condemned to loneliness, he fights a battle that he knows is lost from the outset, but which is necessary to affirm his existential authenticity.

Interdisciplinary Comparisons

The war metaphor in black metal is not used in isolation; it is part of a broader cultural tradition spanning literature, philosophy and other art forms.

Genres such as death metal and thrash metal also use war imagery in extreme metal, but with different nuances. Death metal tends to focus on the brutal and physical aspects of war, whereas thrash metal often uses it as a form of social criticism. Black metal stands out for its emphasis on the spiritual and metaphysical dimensions of conflict.

In literature, parallels can be drawn with authors such as Ernst Jünger (Der Arbeiter, In Stahlgewittern), whose philosophy conceives war as a transformative experience, and with the tradition of dark romanticism that idealises warrior figures of the past.

Philosophical influences range from Nietzsche’s view of war as a means of overcoming to Carl Schmitt’s conception of conflict as a fundamental category of politics and Heidegger’s modern interpretations of technology and authenticity.

Interpretations and Meanings

Many artists view the warrior aesthetic as a metaphor for personal and artistic struggles, and as a battle against mediocrity.

Black metal artists present themselves as warriors engaged in a battle to create authentic and meaningful art against the forces of commercialisation and aesthetic homogenisation. Thus, the war metaphor becomes an expression of the “art for art’s sake” ethos taken to its extreme.

The warrior aesthetic provides a way to express and process aggressive emotions within an artistic context. Music becomes a vehicle for catharsis, allowing the controlled expression of impulses that might otherwise manifest themselves in socially destructive ways.

Evolution and Prospects

In more recent productions, the war metaphor of black metal has shown signs of evolution and sophistication. Bands such as Blut Aus Nord, Deathspell Omega and The Ruins of Beverast have adopted more abstract and philosophically complex approaches, employing war imagery to examine topics like modern alienation and the contradictions of technological progress.

The war metaphor retains its artistic vitality in black metal, adapting to cultural and social changes while maintaining its transgressive power and ability to offer radical criticism of contemporary society.

The warrior aesthetic and war metaphor in black metal represent a complex framework of historical, philosophical, and psychological influences. They reflect the combative and often antagonistic nature of the genre, they provide a means of expressing themes of struggle, resistance, and transformation.

Far from being a mere aesthetic ornament, this metaphor constitutes one of the central semantic nuclei of the genre, allowing for the articulation of a radical critique of modernity through the reactivation of archetypes and symbols from pre-modern European tradition.

However, as with other aspects of the movement, the warrior aesthetic has undergone a process of progressive commercialisation, emptying it of its original symbolic content. What began as an authentic expression of existential and cultural rebellion has, in many cases, become a mere marketing tool.

War iconography has become a replicable formula for gaining underground credibility: T-shirts with runic symbols, graphics that mechanically reproduce Viking or medieval elements, “warrior” poses designed for promotional photos. The metaphor of spiritual battle has been reduced to theatrical costume, losing its transformative dimension to become a mere aesthetic accessory.

Many contemporary artists use these symbols without understanding their cultural or philosophical meaning, reducing millennial archetypes to commercial clichés. The black metal “warrior” has become a character to be played rather than an existential ideal to be embodied.

Despite this commercial drift, the persistence of these elements in the genre’s imagery nevertheless testifies to black metal’s ability to function as a space for the cultural and artistic elaboration of the tensions and contradictions of the contemporary world. Even in its most superficial form, the warrior aesthetic continues to respond to deep needs for identity and belonging, albeit in contradictory ways.

The above is an excerpt from From Nihilism to Transcendence: Black Metal as a Spiritual Phenomenon, brought to you by Arktos and available on Amazon:

For those who know how to go beyond the surface, beyond the noise and provocation, black metal will remain what it has always been: not a destination, but a powerful and dangerous means of embarking on that inner journey that every human being, sooner or later, is called upon to undertake.

In the panorama of 20th-century music and subcultures, few phenomena have been so misunderstood and embodied such striking contradictions as black metal. From Nihilism to Transcendence: Black Metal as a Spiritual Phenomenon explores how this movement of rebellion, rejection, and darkness came to represent a spiritual and artistic laboratory for generations.

Tracing the genre’s origins, evolution, and main themes through a rich synthesis of musicology, sociology, and philosophy, From Nihilism to Transcendence moves beyond sensationalism and moral panic to uncover black metal’s paradoxical paths to rediscovering the sacred. Black metal’s soundscapes, symbolisms, and controversies are revealed in new light as creatively reflecting the fundamental, existential issues of our disenchanted and superficial age.

The Glacial Period

It is not definitely known how long Sweden has been inhabited, but it is fairly well known how long it has been habitable. There was a time when a thick covering of ice spread over all northern and central Europe, such as we still find in Greenland. This time is known in geology as the Ice Age or the Glacial Period.

Sweden’s First Inhabitants

This ice covering gradually melted away so that today only a few remains of this perpetual ice may be seen on the highest mountain tops in Sweden. Some 15,000 years ago, this ice covering had disappeared from the southern part of the Scandinavian peninsula, making it fit for human habitation, and sometime after this we find the first traces of human life there. As evidence of this, roughly wrought flint implements have been found in the soil of Skåne. Earlier remains of hoes of reindeer’s horns have been found in certain parts of Denmark. The layers of earth in which these remains were embedded were formed shortly after the passing of the Ice Age as proved by geological research.

These finds indicate that the earliest inhabitants of Sweden came by way of Denmark. For a long time after the end of the Ice Age the Scandinavian peninsula and the Danish islands formed a continuous land mass with the peninsula of Jutland, making the Baltic Sea a fresh water lake. The earliest inhabitants of Sweden were most likely of a race different from that of the Swedes of today, whose earliest ancestors seem to have arrived at a later date. Thanks to archaeological research we know tolerably well how these ancient ancestors lived. Let us take a look at the country as it appeared four thousand or more years ago. Nearly its whole surface was then covered with dense forests, teeming with wild animals of the chase. Lakes and rivers were then larger and more numerous than now.

This is an excerpt from Carl Grimberg’s classic A History of Sweden — brought to you in English by Arktos, also available on Amazon:

Inlets of the sea extended farther into the land. Large stretches of its present fertile lands were then sea bottoms or sandy wastes. The cultivated spots were small, and it required many days to go from one village to another. The Dwellings of the Stone-Age People. The best known village site from the early stone-age days lies in a field near Alvastra, which at that time was a shallow arm of a lake. Here have been found remains of a large raft of logs, and brushwood, which people more than four thousand years ago pushed out some three hundred feet into the marsh. On this artificial island they found protection against enemies and wild beasts. For whoever attempted to approach the place would sink helplessly into the mire, and the water was too shallow for the use of boats. Only on footbridges could anyone reach the huts. Such bridges could readily be taken up at night, or upon the approach of an enemy. Remains of such bridges have actually been found near Alvastra. In the same layers, archaeologists have also found remains of utensils, tools, and weapons of stone as well as offal or remains of meals. From the latter, one may learn what sort of animals, tame and wild, the stone-age people lived on and hunted. Thus have been found the bones of four kinds of wild animals, now extinct in Sweden: the wild boar, the aurochs, the wild cat, and the beaver.

From the hard and tough bones of the wild cat, excellent bodkins were formed, and the long and sharp tusks of the beaver furnished splendid chisels. On this artificial island, then, the people erected their huts, made of a framework of poles intertwined with twigs or reeds and plastered with mud or covered with sod. Near the shores of many of the lakes in central Europe remains of similar villages have been found. The huts have, however, been built, not on rafts, but on piles driven into the bottom of the shallow waters. Generally, however, the stone-age people erected their dwellings on solid ground. For protection against attack, they constructed as an entrance a long, low, covered passageway, through which one had to crawl to get in. Such an entrance to the hut was a valuable invention. It served as a protection against wintry winds as well as against attack. Should an enemy come crawling through the dark passage he would not be in position to use his weapons to advantage and would be met by fierce dogs, the faithful family guards.

Let us make an imaginary visit to these huts. The most important piece of furniture in the hut is a stone used for a seat and which may also serve for a table. Bundles of fine twigs also serve for seats and at night for beds. The glowing fire on the stone hearth gives the place a cheerful, homelike appearance. At the one end of the hearth is a deep depression to rake the ashes and coals into. Fire was kindled by the stone-age people in various ways: by striking flint and iron pyrites together and collecting the sparks in tinder or dry leaves and blowing them into a flame, or by rubbing rapidly and patiently two dry pieces of wood against each other, or by using a stick as a drill against a dry piece of wood and whirling it rapidly between the hands or by means of a cord.

Karl-Olov Arnstberg’s The Sweden Syndrome: How Elites Commit National Self-Destruction — available from Arktos and on Amazon:

Food, Clothing, and Occupation

The village huts are now empty. It is the time of late summer. Most of the men are out on a hunt. Others have just returned with some fine fish, caught in the lake with bone hooks. Near the shore we see a few cows of stunted growth grazing, and near by a flock of sheep and goats feeding. In the adjoining woods a herd of grunting swine are feasting on a rich supply of fallen acorns. A few small, shaggy horses also add to the wealth of the village. On the small cultivated clearings we see the ripening barley waving in the breeze. On other clearings the wheat has been harvested. A woman is busy grinding meal by crushing the grain in a stone mortar. As evidence that the early stone-age people in Sweden practiced agriculture, there have been found on their village sites charred grains of the small variety of barley still cultivated in the most northern parts of Lapland. Remarkable, too, are the charred pieces of crab apples that have been found in various places. The apples were gathered in the fall, cut in sections, dried, and kept for winter use. Another of their means of sustenance during the long winters was hazelnuts. Large masses of shells found bear testimony to this fact. There has also been found a stone with a hollow in it in which the people evidently cracked the nuts with smaller stones, which have likewise been found in the same place.

In another part of the village we see a group of women making garments of skins, or pelts. With bodkins made of the tough bones of the wild cat, they pierce holes near the edges of the skins and bind them together with fine threads or thongs of sinews, or tendons. This is their way of sewing. There is also another workshop in the village where an elderly man is engaged in making flint tools and weapons for war and the chase. Other kinds of stone he has shaped into axes. Some tools are sharpened and polished by rubbing them against other stones and applying sand and water. So excellent are these stone implements that men today have used them to fell trees and build a cabin with considerable ease. Most of the flint used by the people of these villages came from Skåne and Halland, where it was quite plentiful.

In Skåne many people were engaged in hacking loose with picks of deer-horn clear lumps of flint from the large chalk beds found there. From these two provinces large quantities of flint were carried to the northernmost part of the peninsula by a system of traffic known as barter, or the exchange of goods, for money had not yet come into use.

Suddenly there is a stir in the village. Some hunters have returned with a valuable catch. The object of the chase had not now, as ordinarily, been the deer or the wild boar of the neighborhood. The quest had been the powerful and stately aurochs. In the meantime, however, the hunters had encountered a pair of bears, and a life-and-death struggle ensued. To sustain life they were compelled to risk life. The hunters triumphed and brought home two fine bearskins and a large supply of meat. The women now bestir themselves to kindle fire in the huts and prepare the feast. The meat is cooked in a large earthen kettle suspended over the fire. The kettle appears to us coarse and clumsy, but not so to the village people, who have even tried to ornament it by engraving and various zigzag lines. Members of the family sit around in an expectant mood. When cooked, the meat is cut up into smaller pieces with flint knives. For forks, fingers are used.

Race Connections

The people thus described were the ancestors of the modern Swedes. They belonged to the great Teutonic race, which in the course of time has differentiated and developed into the German, Dutch, English, Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish nations. By way of Denmark they entered Sweden and settled along the coast and along rivers and lakes; for there travel was easier than over the trackless land stretches, besides the fishing along the water routes furnished an abundant supply of food. Such travel was done by means of canoes, or boats, made of logs hollowed out by burning and hewing with stone axes.

READ MORE from Arktos:

“Our world will not be saved by blind scholars or jaded erudites. It will be saved by poets and warriors, by those who will have forged the ‘magic sword’ of which Ernst Jünger spoke — the spiritual sword that makes monsters and tyrants turn pale.”

30,000 Years of Identity lays out the reflections of a historian who witnessed the defining events of Europe’s new dark age. Through an exploration of thirty millennia of history, it poses the questions Europeans are now compelled to ask themselves: What is Europe? Who are we, and where are we headed?

For Dominique Venner, Europe did not begin with markets, treaties, or ideologies. It arose from a cultural community whose roots stretch back into the depths of prehistory. It is an ancient civilization, enriched by its many peoples, a common spiritual heritage, and a noble ethos that has often had to be defended.

Returning to these roots and restoring long European memory is the purpose of this book, which presents nothing less than a metaphysics of history. Here, readers rediscover what is uniquely our own: from the cave art of the Stone Age, the Homeric epics, Celtic and Norse legends, and the Greek and Roman legacy to the medieval imagination and the ideals of courtly love.

Venner masterfully uncovers the depths and continuity of European identity, encouraging us to rediscover authentic European tradition’s distinctive way of confronting life, death, love, and destiny.

Arktos Journal

Making Anti-Globalism Global Since 2009.

Réfléchir & Agir: David Engels, you are an historian, and yet your discourse is also strongly political. How did this concern for the political come to you?

David Engels: My interest in the political follows naturally from my work as a historian, marked as it is by a fascination with civilizational cycles. Born in 1979 in Verviers, in Belgium, within a German-speaking community, I grew up with a hybrid identity, halfway between the Francophone and Germanophone worlds, which led me to adopt a resolutely European perspective: instead of an attachment to a nation, I feel a deep and visceral love for European civilization.

My studies in history, philosophy, and economics at Aachen then forged my comparatist vision of history, notably through the discovery of the work of Oswald Spengler — a vision I tried to integrate even into my university teaching once I had been appointed professor of Roman history at the Université libre de Bruxelles in 2008.

The publication of my book Le Déclin (The Decline) in 2013, which compared the crisis of the European Union to that of the Roman Republic, then marked a real turning point in my biography, for I was increasingly solicited by the media to speak about current politics and about my view of identitarian questions. My emigration to Poland in 2018, where I worked as a political analyst at the Instytut Zachodni, multiplied the occasions to intervene in public debate, because the European identitarian crisis, which I have long observed with disquiet, made itself felt above all in the stormy debate between the conservatism of the Visegrád states and Brussels’ attempts to impose a woke ideology throughout the European Union; and it is in this context that I developed the idea of hespérialisme1 — Hesperialism — in order to defend what remains of our civilization.

R&A: You rightly speak of the globalist project of métissage2 of our Western societies, an obligatory stage in the coming establishment of a world state. Your assessment is harsh but lucid: “Yes, we are heading straight into the wall — and afterwards will come the beginning of the civil wars.” Like us, do you think the electoral path is hopeless, and that only a civil war can pull us out of this long process of decadence?

DE: First, I confess I do not much believe in the imminent advent of a genuine world state, since great powers such as India, Russia, or China will always resist it fiercely. In the Western world, however, the globalist project, borne along by a materialist universalism, does indeed accelerate the disintegration of identities and leads to the rise of opaque supranational institutions weaving an inextricable web among all the states integrated into this system.

From this point of view, my comparison with the Roman Republic in Le Déclin reveals striking parallels with the past: mass migrations, asymmetrical wars, social polarization, the collapse of tradition, the transformation of political systems into oligarchies, and so on. These dynamics led Rome into civil wars, followed by a conservative authoritarian regime. Will we follow the same destiny? It is probable.

That said, I do not see this civil war as a deliberate choice or a desirable option, but as a regrettable fatality — inevitable though it be — flowing from present tendencies. To be sure, the electoral path, rigged though it is by elites largely disconnected from civilizational realities, is not entirely without hope, but it would demand an ideological awakening and a mobilization around European identity (in its true sense, of course, and not in its globalized Brussels version).

Hesperialism, the European civilizational patriotism that I defend in numerous books, seeks to encourage such an awakening by restoring a genuine identitarian pride — but time is pressing.

R&A: Precisely: what is this Hesperialism you propose in your book Défendre l’Europe civilisationnelle (Defending Civilizational Europe)?

DE: Hesperialism means a third way between globalist Euro-federalism and nationalist sovereigntism. It proposes a civilizational patriotism, unifying Europe around its cultural and spiritual identity without denying the nations. Faced with the “great confusion” — the erosion of traditions, wokeism, multiculturalism — Hesperialism advocates a rational return to transcendence, embodied in Christianity, and to European pride. Concretely, it is a matter of strengthening European cooperation in strategic domains (defense, borders, research) while restoring the subsidiarity of the nations.

Inspired by the thousand-year ideal of the Sacrum Imperium, the “Holy Roman Empire,” which allied unity and diversity, Hesperialism seeks to make European identity an enviable ideal, like the Romanitas under Augustus, which transformed an ethnic identity into a civilizational one.

Hic et nunc, this demands above all a genuine cultural revolution, without which a political transition will be impossible: reviving the faith, reappropriating our culture, uniting patriots in all the European countries, creating exemplary “parallel societies” such as I describe them in my book Que faire? (What Is To Be Done?), and above all by forming a true elite for the future before it is too late.

R&A: Will it not take a still greater crisis — empty refrigerators — for the white European peoples to rise up? But are they still capable of it?

DE: Indeed, the current political system excels at pushing back collapse from year to year by accumulating colossal debts — financial, migratory, demographic — and deferring them onto future generations, all while maintaining a surprising docility among the citizenry. This inertia is explained not only by propaganda, but also by European civilization’s slow entry into “post-history,” where the individual, deprived of the civilizational life force (élan), concentrates on his daily comfort, without higher ideals. This phenomenon, observable in all great civilizations in their final phase, singularly limits the capacity of Europeans to rise up. As in Rome, a few awakenings will always be possible, but they risk being confined to a mere change of elites rather than a collective remaking.

Certainly, a major crisis — “empty refrigerators,” for instance — could trigger reactions of that kind, but spiritual and identitarian disintegration renders European peoples’ capacity to unite behind a positive common project uncertain. Moreover, in order to give a framework to such an awakening, a patriotic elite would have to be formed, a bearer of a vision such as Hesperialism, so as to guarantee that a future upheaval might lead to that “rational return to tradition” which I defend in my new book Défendre l’Europe civilisationnelle.

R&A: This decadence has been recounted in minute detail alongside that of the Roman Empire… Juvenal has not aged a day, and neither have historians like Gibbon or MacMullen. Your book Le Déclin showed this very well, comparing the end of the Roman Republic (first century BC) with our own era…

DE: The Republic, like present-day Europe, was marked by mass migrations, demographic collapse, a decline of traditional religiosity, unprecedented social polarization, a crisis of the family, a first form of globalization, and, of course, the transformation of a participatory political system into an oligarchy, thereby provoking the rise of populism. These parallels, which were moreover already rather well intuited by Spengler, rest upon a progressive loss of transcendence and tradition in favor of a destructive materialism and individualism.

And if we widen our field of vision, similar parallelisms can be found with the late phases of most of the other great civilizations — for example the Warring States in China, or the Mazdakite disturbances in Iran. Each time, civilizations emptied of their true essence and identity see the ideals of a materialist pseudo-humanism driven to absurdity, undergo the advent of Caesarism, and tip over into civil disturbances that systematically usher in an authoritarian and conservative regime — that of Augustus, for instance, or of Han Gaozu, or of Khosrow.

R&A: You point to the attacks suffered by every traditional model. It is a veritable enterprise of generalized demolition… Scipio Africanus did no better at Carthage…

DE: Indeed, in my book Défendre l’Europe civilisationnelle, the chapter “The Great Confusion” describes in detail a profound identitarian crisis touching every aspect of our existence. This “confusion” is not unique, but Europe, borne along by its Faustian spirit — an unbridled quest for the infinite, once toward God, today toward matter — pushes self-destruction to an unprecedented degree. The deep cause is the abandonment of transcendence, replaced by a glorification of human omnipotence.

This reversal engenders multiple symptoms: the deconstruction of national and European identities, the erosion of traditional values (family, religion, community), and the rise of a materialist universalism embodied in wokeism. This ideology, far from being an accident, is the logical result of a rationalism pushed to absurdity, one that denies civilizational specificities. Only a reconstruction founded upon transcendence and civilizational patriotism can counter this dynamic and thus inaugurate the final phase of our civilization.

R&A: Concerning the family, one often speaks of LGBT propaganda, of abortion, and so on, but you rightly point out that the increasingly frequent separation of adults accustoms children to an affective relativism and to the absence of a father figure…

DE: Precisely. Frequent separations, encouraged by an individualistic and hedonistic culture, shatter the emotional stability of children, exposing them to a dangerous emotional relativism. The absence of a father figure, often bound up with these ruptures, deprives the young of a model of authority and responsibility, which is essential to social cohesion, as well as deprives children of the experience of a lasting polarity — or rather complementarity — between a masculine and a feminine familial pole.

To this are added ideological pressures, such as LGBT propaganda or the trivialization of abortion, which further relativize traditional family structures. These tendencies, unthinkable without the abandonment of transcendence and the desacralization of marriage, weaken the family cell, that true pillar of European civilization. That said, we find similar crises in just about all the other great civilizations, as well as the political will to “restore” the family once the crisis has been surmounted. Alas, this would require a return to values of duty and permanence impossible to impose politically and in the short term…

R&A: What will your next book be?

DE: My next book will be a novel exploring a future Europe in full decomposition. The narrator, wrongly accused and hunted, crosses the continent from Poland to France, by way of Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Belgium, meeting idealists, activists, traditionalist influencers, and cynical politicians. A blend of travel narrative, satire, and introspective meditation, it offers a critical — though not unsympathetic — autopsy of the European right, overwhelmed by the identitarian crisis…

Originally published in Réfléchir & Agir no. 88, Winter 2025

Interview conducted by Pierre Gillieth

Translated by Alexander Raynor

David Engels’ What Is To Be Done? Living with the Decline of Europe is coming soon from Arktos.

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For a European Awakening is a selection of well-argued essays from the French New Right, where identitarian authors wrestle with ideas about ecology, history, and beauty. However, it is not simply an exposé of important themes and responses to key issues of our day but a call to action.

These essays explore questions about man’s relationship to his land, and how that territory shapes and defines him; questions about man’s role in nature as one of her children ‘shaped by thousands of years of long patience’.

In these pages, the authors point out the necessity for beauty in our world, to ‘re-enchant the world’ instead of slumbering in the dull muck of utilitarianism. As we rise to this task, should we grow discouraged by the naysayers and ‘deconstructors’ of European culture and tradition, we are called to remember Hölderlin’s words that ‘where danger lies, salvation grows’.

Essays by Philippe Conrad, Rémy Soulié, Henri Levavasseur, Jean-Philippe Antoni, Jean-François Gautier, Thibaud Cassel, Alix Marmin, Jean-Yves Le Gallou, Guillaume Travers, Olivier Eichenlaub, Anne-Laure Blanc, Paul Éparvier, Grégoire Gambier, and Alain de Benoist.

I had named the idea of a continental union between all peoples of European origin, from France to Russia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, “Eurosiberia”. And my friend Pavel Tulaev discreetly pointed out to me that it would be better to speak of Euro-Russia, because Siberia is fundamentally a geographical term and Russia an ethnic and historical term. I think he was right. It’s better to speak of Euro-Russia for this project.

The Euro-Russian imperial confederation: a mobilizing project for the 21st century.

Such an idea is obviously not intended to be pragmatically applied within the next 10 years! It is a matter of a “positive utopia” or the construction of an “acting myth.” In the 19th century, the idea of the Union of Western Europe took shape and was finally realized (with formidable imperfections); in the 20th century, the founders of the Zionist idea succeeded in achieving the creation of the State of Israel. The Founding Fathers of the United States of America in the 18th century succeeded in their gamble. Similarly today, the idea of an imperial and federal Union of Western Europe, Central Europe and Russia must be envisaged, to serve as a model for future generations who will have to realize it.

This project both extends and transcends the European Union, which, in my opinion, was an important dialectical moment in history but has reached its limits and proves to be, in my view, a failure today. Why a failure? Because the European Union has not been capable of asserting Europe’s sovereignty as a great power vis-à-vis the US, because it has been incapable of preventing the invasion of Europe by populations from the third world and Islam. Worse still, the European Union today is coming to deny and destroy the very idea of Europe through the project of including Turkey in it, or even for other irresponsible politicians, the countries of the Maghreb. Nevertheless, I repeat, the European Union was dialectically important (in the Hegelian sense), but it must now be transcended, overcome and extended, both negatively and positively, by the Euro-Russian Union.

The idea according to which European peoples are extremely different from one another and that Russians are even more different from the others must be subjected to a sort of critical relativism. The idea of divergence between peoples of European stock will be less and less true during the 21st century. This century will see an increasingly great opposition emerge between peoples of European origin and all the others. And we are all going to progressively become aware, from the shores of the Atlantic to Siberia, that the Euro-Russian ensemble forms a relative homogeneous unity of civilization, culture, history, mentality and genetic potential. A native Breton or Catalan, a Bavarian, and a Russian from Karelia are much closer to each other on the genetic, mental and behavioral level than they are to a Chinese person. The cultural, artistic, historical roots of France or Italy are much closer to those of Russia than they are to francophone Africa.

If one reasons in terms of ethnopolitics as much as geopolitics, the Euro-Russian ensemble appears as a vital necessity in this 21st century world which will see both the clash of civilizations and the necessity of regrouping into large blocs.

Minds, one will say, are not ready for such a revolutionary project. But with the upheavals of the 21st century, things could evolve much faster than we think. The great concrete principles are as follows:

What political and constitutional organization? Imperial confederalism.

It is impossible here to imagine in detail the internal political and constitutional form of a Euro-Russian union, but one can nevertheless establish its fundamental principles. They are extremely far from those of the current European Union which is nothing but an impotent and vague technocratic aggregate, which combines all the disadvantages of bureaucratic centralism and anarchy.

1. A strong and lean central State is needed, a decision-making center, like a brain, which possesses the monopoly of foreign policy and diplomacy, general economic policy, monetary policy, armed forces and control of common external borders; and which is the guarantor of the great principles.

2. The different peoples and nations must possess the greatest internal autonomy. The “States” composing the Euro-Russian Union may be the current States or result from the dismemberment of some of them into regions, which will thus be new States. Any State must be able to leave the Union when it wishes and recover its sovereignty. It is free to possess the institutions it wants, free in its constitutional, judicial and educational system, in its fiscal and internal economic policy. But it must, unless expelled from the Union, respect the great fundamental principles which will be discussed later and not harm the other member States.

3. Solidarity between States must be ensured by financial compensations organized by the central State.

This model is partially inspired by the constitution of the United States of America, which is the oldest in the world and which functions quite well.

But it must be immediately specified here that, initially, this Euro-Russian Union will not necessarily take the form of a confederal State, but rather a sort of consultation, understanding between European States and Russia, a “union of nations”. Things must be built progressively and pragmatically. And why this word “imperial”? Because the idea of Empire, if properly understood, is the free association of peoples related by culture, civilization, racial proximity and geographical continuity. Heterogeneous ensembles always end up collapsing. The common House must be built step by step, progressively, but nevertheless urgently.

What foreign policy? Power neutralism.

The Euro-Russian confederal alliance will confront three main threats: one is the third world under the banner of Islam, through its will to conquest via mass immigration. The other is the Washington government, which sees any Euro-Russian alliance as a nightmare and which tries by all means to weaken us, to divide us, to encircle us. The third is China, which nurtures a global hegemonic will and which moreover, is currently working to surreptitiously populate Russian Siberia.

We must put an end to NATO, which is nothing other than a structure of the subjugation of Europeans by the US, and build, initially, an integrated military alliance of all European countries and Russia.

On the level of nuclear deterrence, it will be necessary to couple French forces and Russian forces. Great Britain will only be able to participate if it frees itself from its enslavement to the United States, which is not currently the case.

The foreign policy of Euro-Russia must be that of a “giant hedgehog,” with this double imperative: no imperialism vis-à-vis the outside, no interference from foreign powers in our vital space. This neutralism is justified by economic self-sufficiency. We have all the resources, all the raw materials, and we don’t need the others. We don’t need to go wage war on others and imitate irresponsible American imperialism, but we cannot tolerate others coming to impose their law in our vital space. Unlike what the United States practices, it is not a question of threatening others but of ensuring the rigorous defense of our integrity, our security and our interests.

Vis-à-vis the United States, it is not a matter of manifesting hostility, but mistrust. The objective is to convince Americans that their current foreign policy is erratic and stupid. Our conviction must be that Americans will only be our friends if they admit that they are not the masters of the world. American arrogance is immature, infantile, because it only leads to failures. But, from the moment a Euro-Russian confederal ensemble exists, we would be quite willing to cooperate with Americans if the latter renounce their imperialist tradition.

This is an excerpt from Guillaume Faye’s Against Russophobia, brought to you by Arktos:

In a world dominated by headlines portraying Putin’s Russia as the clear and present danger to Europe, Guillaume Faye championed an altogether different vision: a “Eurosiberian” or “Euro-Russian” civilizational bloc stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, united by blood, culture, and unmatched geopolitical and economic potential.

In the final years of his long-running career as a dissident intellectual and metapolitical activist, Faye increasingly turned his scope towards the crisis of Russian-European relations, stressing the need for a tactful synthesis of sober analysis and visionary daring.

Against Russophobia, the first and definitive collection of Guillaume Faye’s writings on Russia, stands out as a critical guide for a new kind of European diplomat: the diplomat of a Europe that thinks in terms of continental longevity and the global chessboard instead of ideological hysteria and divisive stereotypes.

For Faye, only together can Europe and Russia balance their strengths and weaknesses, face down the onslaught of the Global South, restrain globalist warmongering, and meet the economic and technological challenges of the 21st century. At once historic and timely, Against Russophobia is a bold shattering of one of the most daunting Overton window-frames of our days.

We must also put an end to this inconsistent “religion of human rights” which serves the current European Union as foreign policy. Similarly, “aid to the third world”, useless and unproductive, must be called into question. The presence of Islam on the territory of the Euro-Russian Union must initially be curbed and secondly drastically restricted. Vis-à-vis the Israeli-Arab conflict, the position must be one of neutrality. No military participation in any UN intervention outside our borders can be admitted.

What economic organization? The autarky of large spaces.

We should not be inspired by state socialism, in its internal organization — ineffective — nor by current globalist speculative capitalism. A new economic model could be built, founded on principles that I have developed for a long time by drawing inspiration from the French Nobel Prize in economics Maurice Allais and the late Prof. François Perroux, of the Collège de France, under the general theme of organic economy which is a third way between socialism and globalized capitalism.

1. Rejection of the principle of global free trade (which is catastrophic for all humanity) with the establishment of customs barriers and economic quotas protecting the Euro-Russian space, self-sufficient in all areas, the first economic space on the planet.

2. On the other hand, we need a single market, a common currency, internal free trade in the Euro-Russian space, a rejection of assisted, socialized, rigid economy, as practiced in France. An internal free capitalism, which will form a powerful dynamic, given the gigantic size of the Euro-Russian ensemble, such is the choice that must be made.

3. The central State can only intervene in the economy in a political, legislative, planning manner, and no longer financial. The sovereign function must not substitute for enterprises, but define major axes of economic policy. We must draw inspiration here from the very effective model of the US where the State supports firms without entering their capital.

4. No majority stake in the capital of large companies of the Union can be possible on the part of investors foreign to the Union. On the other hand, financial transfers and equity stakes within the Euro-Russian space are free.

5. Rigorous respect for the environment, development of nuclear energy, active policy of research and high technology, particularly on renewable energies, integrated space policy, construction of large strictly Euro-Russian aeronautical and military centers, systematic preference for firms of the Euro-Russian space in all major industrial markets (calls for tenders, but also in terms of trade in agricultural products; prohibition for States to go into debt for operating expenses, but only for investment: these are some of the economic principles that the central State and member States must imperatively respect.

What axes of domestic policy? Ethnocentrism and natalism, social justice and collective discipline.

General principles of domestic policy must be contractually defined for all member States, failing which they cannot enter the Union or must leave it.

1. Euro-Russia, cradle of White peoples, today severely threatened in their demography, must be founded on the ethnocentric principle of ethnic homogeneity. There is nothing immoral in this, since this principle is applied by the majority of non-White countries in the world: China, India, Japan, Africa, etc. This presupposes the following constitutional principles imposed on all member States: refusal of any immigration of workers from outside the Euro-Russian space (except, by quotas, senior executives and highly qualified personnel); prohibition of family reunification and the right of asylum; effective and administrative expulsion without appeal of all illegal immigrants; impossibility for foreigners outside the Union to receive the slightest social or health benefit (end of “suction pumps”); exclusion of any foreign national outside the Union from elections; immediate and definitive expulsion of any foreigner to the Union guilty of the slightest offense; abandonment of birthright citizenship in favor of blood right (end of naturalizations); progressive return to their country for all third world immigrants; possibility of free immigration and naturalizations only within the Euro-Russian space, for its citizens, according to the legislation of each State. The ethnic criterion must be at the center of the constitutional project of internal organization. White ethnic homogeneity is the foundation of the Euro-Russian project, just as black ethnic homogeneity is the foundation of Africans who want, rightly, to unify their continent. Ethnic homogeneity is the very bedrock of social peace and public freedoms, a common sense truth that Aristotle perfectly understood.

2. Given the dramatic demographic decline of the peoples of the Euro-Russian space, each State will be required to implement a natalist policy, which will only benefit nationals of the Union.

3. Other constitutional principles that all States of the Union must respect and that they will implement according to their own legislation and traditions: social justice, meritocracy, disciplined and selective education, equality before the law, eradication of poverty, merciless repression of criminality, family policy, prohibition of unions and adoptions between homosexuals, etc.

It is simply a matter of uniting to confront the increasingly threatening outside world.

And above all, it must be recognized that what divides, in mentalities, cultural habits, historical memory, the Russians from Western Europeans is much less important than what unites us all. And this will be increasingly true during the 21st century. Crucial question: can Russian nationalism feel wounded and dispossessed by such an imperial project of Euro-Russian union? No, insofar as this Union would not be constraining, but voluntary and associative, and where the benefits for Russia would be considerable.

I was told that the “Russian soul” felt divided, even torn between Europe and Asia and that Russia was therefore not truly European. Which is what the symbol of the double-headed Eagle would signify, looking both toward the Orient and the Occident. But I think that this is a geographical sophism. Russians have nothing of a “semi-Asian” people in them; they are a European people who conquered a part of geographical Asia and appropriated it. The opposition between Russians and Eastern Slavs on one hand, and other Western Europeans on the other hand, is much stronger than one believes. We all belong to the same genetic, ethnic and civilizational stock, to a great family, whose differences are less important than the similarities.

I will be reproached for not having spoken of “democracy.” This is intentional, because we no longer know at all what this term, employed by all political regimes worldwide, means. In the European Union, where the people are totally dispossessed of the major decisions concerning them (notably in matters of immigration, uncontrolled opening of borders, economic policy, etc.), leaders boast of representing the superior world model of democracy and worship of “human rights”. However, freedom of opinion is not respected there, since, for example, one cannot denounce the invasion by Islam and the third world without being criminalized as “racist” by a legislative arsenal and a neo-totalitarian judicial system. The concept of democracy, as it is used in the West, is quite similar, in simulacrum and semantic lie (but more subtle and “advertising”), to Soviet communist propaganda. The European Union, as it currently functions, with a powerless Parliament and a non-elected but omnipotent technocracy, cannot claim to respect the will of the peoples. It has invented the practice of soft tyranny. Similarly, it is in the name of its crusade for the famous “democracy” that the Washington government has sown indescribable disorder in the Middle East and is currently trying to encircle and weaken Russia and practice interference in its internal affairs.

This is the reason why, in this Euro-Russian Union project, it is out of the question to unify under the same model the institutional practices and internal law of member States. Simply, the latter, and the central State, if it exists one day, must respect the following three principles: rule of law, free elections by universal suffrage, referendums and absolute respect for the decisions of the people. By people, we obviously mean the “native people”. In reference to the only true democracy, which is neither Western-American, nor socialist or communist, but of Greek and Athenian origin. Let us draw inspiration from Pericles and the spirit of Athena.

I am well aware that such a Euro-Russian Union project is very complex. All this presupposes a reversal of mentalities, the Umwertung of which Nietzsche spoke, who was also an adept of “grand politics.” But this reversal, this mental storm will come with the catastrophes that are looming. These catastrophes are dialectically positive — and here, I invoke Hegel and his “pursuit of Reason in History”. Except that Hegel understood an implacable mechanism without seeing its meaning. This “reason” is not a transcendence, but the possible union of a great implacable historical tendency and an exceptional political will that uses and overturns the chaos created to metamorphose it into a new order. The fatalists, the materialists (whether they are Marxists or liberals, they are exactly the same philosophically), the traitors, the narrow nationalists, the false sages, the depressed and disappointed of History, the progressives clinging to their false prophecies, the hallucinated optimists, the nostalgic conservatives, the calculating decadent politicians, the intellectuals in their ivory tower have never understood that the destiny of men and peoples was never written in advance, that nothing is ever necessarily lost or won.

Two difficult questions to resolve arise now: first of all, what federal capital for the Euro-Russian Union? It could not be Paris, Berlin or Moscow, because then one would suspect materialist calculations. I propose — as Brazil or the US have done — to create from scratch a new capital, which would be as much a political as an architectural work, in the image of Saint Petersburg; but it obviously remains to determine in which country.

The second question that arises is: what dominant working language? What will be the language of the central and federal State? The current multilingual system of the European Union is very costly, anarchic, and results in fact in a domination of English, which is not a good thing. We must not create an artificial language, like Esperanto, that never works. It cannot be a major language, like Russian, German, or French, at the risk of offending other peoples. I am going to make a surprising proposal: why not Breton? It is a living, spoken, modern, very structured language, which the political elites of the Continent could easily learn. Another suggestion that is intended to make its way…

For the moment, minds, whether in Western Europe or in Russia, are not yet ready for such an upheaval of perspective. I have always been reproached for my utopian mentality. French intellectuals think that I lack wisdom, but I think they lack courage. But also lucidity. We must have confidence, because we observe that today history resembles a horse running at a gallop. We must teach the next generation the following reality: from Brest, at the tip of Brittany, to Provideniya, on the Bering Strait, exists the vital space of the same people: ours. Marx said: “proletarians of all countries, unite!”. Let us rather whisper: “Whites of all countries, unite!” Around the Euro-Russian imperial confederation. And let us reflect from today on its future organization, because ideas make their way in History like worms in ripe fruits.

READ MORE:

Guillaume Faye’s Against Russophobia is available from Arktos and on Amazon

Nearly thirty-five years after its first French translation — long since impossible to find — Armin Mohler’s La Révolution conservatrice en Allemagne (1918–1932) (German original: Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932)1 has at last been reissued by Éditions Ars Magna, in a new edition enriched with a previously unpublished preface and afterword by Alain de Benoist.

Far more than a historical summa on the German right under Weimar, this major work offers nothing less than a morphology of worldviews. Behind the diversity of authors and schools, Mohler brings to light a single way of thinking about time, history, and action. This is essential reading for understanding one of the most fertile intellectual matrices of the twentieth century.

There are books that time surrounds with an almost legendary aura, especially when their rarity turns them into objects of quest for the most curious readers. Such was long the fate of Armin Mohler’s study devoted to the Conservative Revolution in Germany. Defended in 1949 as a doctoral thesis under the supervision of Karl Jaspers and published the following year, the book quickly became one of the major references for anyone seeking to understand the intellectual ferment of the German right under the Weimar Republic.

Reissued a first time in 1972 and expanded with an imposing bibliography, then again in 1989, it was translated into French in 1993 from that third edition, but in a print run so limited that it soon became unobtainable. If the name of Mohler and that of his book left their mark, few were those who could actually read it. Its reappearance from Éditions Ars Magna, enriched with a previously unpublished preface and afterword by Alain de Benoist, thus fills a long-standing gap.

A Worldview

The very phrase “Conservative Revolution” is enough to surprise. It seems to unite two terms we have grown accustomed to contrasting. Yet it is precisely in this apparent contradiction that the whole fertility of the formula resides. By it Mohler designates neither a conservatism eager to restore a vanished world nor a progressive revolution carrying the promises of 1789 still further, but a revolt against the modern order, waged in the name of forces older and deeper than the ones that order had claimed to surpass.

In his book, Mohler draws up the inventory of the currents, journals, circles, and figures that make up this conservative-revolutionary nebula. For the francophone reader, this abundance of names and references has at first something vertiginous about it, so much does it refer to authors and historical realities that are often unfamiliar. Mohler distinguishes, as is well known, five great families within the Conservative Revolution: the Völkischen, the Young Conservatives, the National Revolutionaries, the Bündischen, and the peasant movement.

Yet, however fascinating the study of these different currents may be, this is perhaps not where the book’s principal interest lies today. These tendencies belong, in effect, to a German context very remote from our own, marked by the defeat of 1918 and the critique of the Weimar regime. What remains truly fertile is the common worldview that Mohler manages to bring out behind this apparent dispersion.

For Wilhelm Dilthey,2 the Weltanschauung (worldview) designates something vaster than philosophy. Philosophy is only the late, conceptual form of it. Before becoming a philosophical system, a worldview is a way of seeing, feeling, and willing; it engages the whole of man, and not speculative intelligence alone. It is the Leitbilder (”guiding images”) of the conservative-revolutionary worldview that Mohler foregrounds in his essay. He does not seek to extract from them a common program, still less to reduce this constellation to a unified doctrine — which would be a fool’s errand. He attempts rather to bring out the fundamental images around which very different thoughts, styles, and commitments are ordered. As he notes:

“When one wishes to describe a movement of ideas, nothing is more sterile than to line up isolated opinions, which must, by addition, subtraction, and division, produce the final result. The only fruitful thing is the study of behavior toward the few fundamental questions whose urgency is such that it excludes the arbitrariness of mere opinion. One of these questions is that of the relation to time — and it is in accordance with this that we have constructed our inquiry.”3

Toward a Heroic Realism

The Conservative Revolution has this decisive feature: it opposes to the linear conception of history — inherited from Christianity and then secularized by modern progressive thought — a spherical conception of becoming. The distinction — the sphere against the line — may at first seem idle, even byzantine. Yet it touches the very heart of any worldview. To cite Dilthey again, a Weltanschauung is always composed of an image of the world, an evaluation of life, and an orientation of the will. In the case of the Christian vision — which profoundly shaped two millennia of Western history — the image of the world is that of a history oriented toward an end: Creation, Fall, Incarnation, Redemption, and Judgment. Earthly life is then evaluated on the basis of a beyond, or a final term, that gives it its meaning, while the human will orients itself toward salvation and the exit from history. Modern progressive thought, moreover, did not abolish this structure; it simply transferred it into immanence.

Now, if we try to understand the Leitbilder that Mohler brings to light using the same Diltheyan schema, we can say that the German Conservative Revolution inverts each of these terms. Its image of the world is no longer that of the line, but that of the sphere: past, present, and future do not succeed one another there like the stages of a march toward redemption, but answer, reactivate, and reconfigure one another at every historical moment. Its evaluation of life is not that of consolation, happiness, or final equality, but that of heroic realism. Life is worth only what it is capable of producing in the way of greatness and of confronting its destiny. Its orientation of the will, finally, is neither nostalgic restoration nor progressive flight forward, but regeneration:

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck’s classic of the German Conservative Revolution, brought to you by Arktos:

Written in 1923, when Germany was in the throes of revolutionary demands from both the Left and the Right, Moeller van den Bruck envisioned a Germany that was radical, traditional and nationalistic. Angered by the harsh conditions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles which ended the First World War, and frustrated by the types of reforms being called for in the Weimar Republic, he examines all of the major political doctrines of his day and finds them wanting.

Instead, he calls for a return to empire — not the empire of the Kaiser or the Holy Roman Empire, but an empire of all German-speaking peoples, with a social hierarchy based upon strong communal values and German traditions which nurture, rather than belittle, strong individuals. Although van den Bruck was not a supporter of the National Socialists, they ended up adopting his term das dritte Reich for the state they intended to build.

With an original Foreword and Bibliography compiled by French New Right founder Alain de Benoist, who explains the book’s continuing relevance, this edition makes one of the most important works of Germany’s Conservative Revolution available again for the English-speaking world. This edition is a revised version of the condensed edition first published in 1934.

It is in this sense that the Conservative Revolution is indeed revolutionary because conservative. It is not a matter of bringing the past back to life, but of bringing back, against the world of dissolution, the powers capable of founding a new future.

For Mohler, this new worldview was neither the exclusive preserve of Germany — even if it expressed itself in that country with particular vigor for quite specific historical reasons — nor a phenomenon definitively confined to the interwar period. What the phrase “Conservative Revolution” designates is not a doctrine of the past, but a new way of apprehending the world, man, and time after the exhaustion of what Giorgio Locchi would call the “egalitarian tendency.”4

The Eternal Return

At a time when the idea of progress and emancipation no longer promises anything but the undifferentiation and dissolution of forms, Mohler’s book reminds us that there exists another path, another beginning. The line of progress may perhaps be exhausted, but we can still repeat these words of Zarathustra:

“All goes, all returns; eternally rolls the Wheel of Being. [...] Around every Here coils the Sphere of There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of Eternity.”

Further reading:

Mohler, Armin. The Conservative Revolution in Germany, 1918–1932. Radix, 2018.

Locchi, Giorgio. Wagner, Nietzsche et le mythe surhumaniste [Wagner, Nietzsche, and the Suprahumanist Myth]. La Nouvelle Librairie / Institut Iliade, 2022. (COMING SOON IN ENGLISH FROM ARKTOS)

Originally published in Éléments, no. 221, August-September

Translated by Alexander Raynor

READ MORE from Antoine Dresse, brought to you by the Institut Iliade and Arktos:

Alain de Benoist traces the concept of "authoritarian liberalism" from Hermann Heller's 1930s coinage to its present-day resurgence, arguing that when liberal democracy feels threatened, it sheds its own principles and resorts to banning parties, criminalizing dissent, and policing not just acts but motives and thoughts.

The notion of “authoritarian liberalism” was born in the early 1930s, notably from the pen of the jurist Hermann Heller, a great adversary of Carl Schmitt. It resurfaces today in a different context, one in which liberticidal measures are proliferating at the very heart of liberal democracies. The covidist episode of lockdown and vaccinism marked a high point in the establishment of this authoritarian liberalism. The brutal repression of the Gilets jaunes [Yellow Vests] was another.

When liberalism feels threatened, it reacts like any other form of power — that is, like a dog afraid of having its bone taken away. When the dyke overflows and the “cordons sanitaires”1 begin to fray, all that remains is to ban the parties that win, to bar their candidates from standing for election, even to have them killed.

Of this we can be sure: cornered, the oligarchs of the System will stop at nothing. They have already multiplied bans and dissolutions, closed bank accounts, and decreed prohibitions of movement.

In Germany, a bill now proposes that municipalities exercise a right of pre-emption over real estate in order to prevent its acquisition by persons suspected of being “enemies of the Constitution.” This past February, Chancellor Friedrich Merz said so plainly: “In our country, freedom of expression ends where it undermines the Constitution.”

Now that the rejection of the dominant ideology is perceived as a scandal, any means will do to govern not merely without the people, but against them.

Surveillance Capitalism

The hunt for nonconformist ideas — which grants license to search the innermost conscience — goes back at least as far as the Inquisition. In a climate ruled at once by moral puritanism, racial prudishness, and sexual denialism, freedom of expression disappears the moment one begins to legislate on feelings (love and hate), to ban dissident remarks even when uttered in private or within the family circle, and to ask the courts to punish not merely acts but motives, intentions, and thoughts.

Ever since freedom of expression was made conditional, an Orwellian principle has been adopted: one may say anything except what one may not say. To which a second is added: whatever is not forbidden is merely (provisionally) tolerated. Everyone today lives under a regime of conditional liberty — that is, of liberty under surveillance.

The emergence of authoritarian liberalism shows not only that these two words, so often set in opposition, can become synonyms, but that it would be immensely naïve to expect any genuine protection of liberties from liberals. All the more so since the hardening of repression against dissidents goes hand in hand — and this is graver still — with an acceleration in the rollout of control and surveillance procedures throughout every Western country.

Alexandre Kojève, in his Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (g), had already foretold the gradual dissolution of political antagonisms into an administrative and police regime in which every contradiction would be absorbed into the technical management of things. In the age of “surveillance capitalism” (Shoshana Zuboff), the globalization of capital advances in lockstep with social control. In the name of the demand for “transparency,” technological surveillance, hygienic and biomedical surveillance, commercial surveillance, ideological surveillance, and sexual surveillance all claim to pass judgment on private conduct, to manage bodies, and to shape even the most intimate aspects of daily life.

In this way, the whole of society is progressively subjected to a global, reticular form of control that gathers an ever-increasing quantity of data to weigh on choices, steer tastes, influence opinions, and alter behaviors. It is no longer merely a matter of penalizing violations of the law but, as Giuseppe Gagliano has described, of building, by means of algorithms, “a world in which each individual can potentially be analyzed even before having done anything at all.”

Social control makes it possible to anticipate, to delegitimize, or to incapacitate — not on the basis of what one has done, but of what one might do. Thus, the door is thrown open to the worst.

And that worst is “voluntary servitude.” When tyranny speaks the language of technology, algorithms produce self-disciplined subjects. The Korean sociologist Byung-Chul Han has shown that, in liberal societies, we are witnessing a new form of violence directed no longer against others but against oneself: in a world shaped by the capitalist diktats of performance and all-out mimetic rivalry, the self-imposed constraints born of the internalization of dominant norms are now added to old-style prohibitions.

Since social death has become the present-day form of the death penalty, censorship begins with self-censorship. The superego merges with the ego. The result is that it has become pointless to set liberty against constraint, for they are now one and the same. Byung-Chul Han sums this up in a Bernanosian formula: “The new violence always strikes the bearer of an interiority.”

The engine of self-constraint and self-policing is fear. The exploitation of fear, whatever its nature (crime, narco-trafficking, hybrid wars, cyberattacks, immigration, natural disasters, pandemics, terrorism, violence of every kind), makes it possible — under the pretext of better ensuring security — to abolish all liberties, to transform the state of exception into a permanent regime, and to present every new form of control as a new protection.

Where, then, does hope lie? To paraphrase Péguy, let us say that there are two kinds of men: those for whom today is merely the day after yesterday, and those for whom today is the eve of tomorrow. Good luck to the latter.

Originally published in Éléments, no. 221, August-September 2026

Translated by Alexander Raynor

READ MORE from Alain de Benoist, brought to you by Arktos:

From a ‘post-modern’ liberal perspective, sovereign individuals must be able to construct themselves in complete autonomy. Social order thus no longer serves any other purpose but to guarantee the exercise of such free will. This doxa applies to the domain of sexual identity, where it becomes possible to postulate the existence of ‘gender’ categories completely independent of any biological realities. It also extends to the domain of the very identity of peoples and nations, both of which are thus reduced to an arbitrary construct whose nature is purely contractual, one in which the feeling of belonging to a single ethno-cultural community no longer has any place.

This ideology represents the ultimate stage of the individualistic and contractual conception of society developed by certain Enlightenment thinkers. Such an evolution could undoubtedly not have been imagined in the 18th century by the ‘founding fathers’ of philosophical liberalism, convinced as they were of allowing themselves to be wisely guided by Reason alone. The fact remains, however, that the fracture caused by their ‘rationalist’ system of thought enabled the subsequent emergence of political and social upheavals whose scope and violence have been considerable. Indeed, even in its early days, liberal thought, which now asserts itself as intrinsically ‘moderate’ in contrast with all kinds of ‘extremism’, all of which it rejects with equal good conscience, embodied a profound break with earlier conceptions of human nature—although Chesterton did define these new ideas as ‘Christian virtues gone mad’, and certain concepts of modern state theory do transpose secularised theological concepts into the non-religious sphere, as clearly demonstrated by Carl Schmitt.

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This article is an excerpt from Henri Levavasseur’s Identity: The Foundation of the City, brought to you in English by Arktos.

According to the liberal way of thinking, which Alain de Benoist flawlessly analysed in one of his recent works, man is not defined primarily as a member of a community anchored in a specific historical reality (family, ‘order’, fatherland), but mainly as an abstract, autonomous individual detached from the contingent identity inherited from his predecessors, and as someone who enters into a contract with society with the intention of guaranteeing the exercise of his own ‘natural’ rights. In the 8th chapter of his Second Treatise of Government, published in 1690, John Locke states that a child ‘is not born a subject of any government or country’.

The ideological construct on which the idea of a social contract is based takes of course little account of the historical existence of organic communities. Here, one encounters the old contrast between the notions of community (Gemeinschaft) and society (Gesellschaft), a contrast well highlighted by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies in a famous work published in 1887. Having reached the ‘post-modern’ stage of its evolution, the extension of the liberal model sanctifies the disunion between polis and ethnos, that is, between sovereignty and identity. This model represents the culmination of the system of the ‘republican homeland’, one that is based on a purely contractual and ideological conception of the fatherland: it thus constitutes both its apogee and its final phase.

Although the republican homeland has never completely merged with the actual and physical fatherland, content instead with using the latter as ‘its support and instrument’ over a period of two centuries, as stated by Jean de Viguerie, the republic is now in grave danger of collapsing upon the ruins of France, akin to a parasite that would not long survive the organism whose substance it has drained.

Once all ties between sovereignty and identity have been severed, sovereignty inevitably escapes the body of the nation and ends up becoming the expression of a mosaic of individual demands . At the same time, since nature abhors a vacuum, the weakening of the nation logically ends up paving the way for the emergence of various forms of supra-national sovereignty, forms which, as predicted by Ernest Renan, would not necessarily be inclined to respect our genuine freedoms, which had hitherto been guaranteed through the exercise of national sovereignty In this domain, a systematic recourse to the universal morality of ‘human rights’ ultimately serves to undermine the very foundations of traditional political order, with the latter linked to the sovereignty of a people over its own territory.

This critical situation is obviously complicated by the massive presence of populations of non-European origin: by gradually imposing their customs, traditions and unique identity, these people are logically occupying the civilisational space left vacant by Europeans. And who could blame them? It is hardly possible, in fact, to identify, whether individually or collectively, with a homeland whose identity is reduced to abstract and universal principles. Brandishing ‘values’ whose expression appears increasingly outdated and using them as the sole instrument of their convictions, the republican authorities have nothing solid in the face of those who reject their model, nor anything to offer, especially to those who would like to assimilate into what remains of the French nation.

Through long-term and sometimes painful efforts, it is undoubtedly possible, over the generations, for an expatriate community to blend into the melting pot of the host nation, provided that this community does not constitute a mass large enough to suddenly upset the demographic balance of the host country and that the cultures of the two populations in question share certain affinities from the very outset. History provides us with numerous examples of successful assimilation processes, most often involving human groups and peoples from the same civilisational space, as was the case during the settlement of French Huguenots in Prussia after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

Economic considerations also play a role in the process of assimilation of a foreign population. The Huguenots were an industrious and learned elite group, whose arrival contributed to strengthening the dynamism of the Prussian society into which they integrated; a situation that is, of course, different from that of most contemporary waves of migration.

Is collapse therefore inevitable? Well, it is likely that we have now entered a ‘long civilisational winter’, a process that will display all the aspects of gradual and slow death throes, as our country is shaken by some rather violent convulsive spasms. It is not impossible that the political entity called the ‘French Republic’ will continue to exist throughout this time, and that it will still be worth devoting some energy to in order to keep it as functional as possible, while ensuring above all else that we avoid relinquishing control to elements that are completely foreign to our desire to guarantee the sustainability of our ethno-cultural identity.

However, it would be futile to continue placing our hopes in the ability of this entity to embody ‘what we are’ . Our duty dictates that we do not give in to such blameworthy blindness through intellectual laziness, conformism or cowardice. Our generation must now accept a decisive historical responsibility, without losing sight of the fact that it is faced with the necessity to defend, one inch at a time, the ramparts of an already occupied citadel whose command no longer belongs to us, while simultaneously preparing other positions from which future generations can reclaim our civilisational space and grant it a new form once kairos (or the ‘right moment’) arrives; a moment that none of us can predict or situate. In the meantime, we must form a vanguard, without ceasing to wage a rearguard battle.

The same requirement is already imposed on the youth of other European nations, with whom unprecedented solidarity must be forged, thus allowing us all to preserve the identities of our peoples in full awareness of what unites us through each of them . It is impossible to engage in such a struggle without first reverting to a clear vision of the world, which, along with courage, constitutes the primary condition for our freedom of action. This approach is necessarily based on a mental return to one’s perennial sources, in harmony with a realistic anthropology that is free of all biases imposed upon us by two centuries of liberal ‘humanism’.

Henri Levavasseur’s Identity: The Foundation of the City — a call to the peoples of Europe to rebuild the City — is available from Arktos and on Amazon

More from Henri Levavasseur:

Five thousand years ago, communities of herders, warriors, and poets hailing from the Pontic Steppes set in motion one of the most consequential expansions in human history. These people, known as the Indo-Europeans, spread the languages, myths, and institutions that would define many of the ethnocultural groups of ancient and modern Europe and parts of Asia. Despite their distinct histories, European peoples continue to bear the imprints of this shared inheritance.

Drawing upon the latest discoveries in linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, and genetics, Henri Levavasseur introduces readers to the reconstruction of the Indo-Europeans’ origins, language, culture, and worldview. At a time of cultural amnesia and the erasure of identities, Indo-European Echoes invites readers to reconnect with the shared “long memory” that anchors the identity of European peoples in their awareness of a common origin and ancient traditions.