Throne, Altar and a Gothic Futurist Politics

The official liberal ideological discourse is that we live in a society that upholds the values ​​of science, progress, enlightenment and tolerance. All of this as the result of the achievements of the European Enlightenment. However, we only need to look at the state of Western liberal democracies to realize that this discourse is nothing more than a set of vague terms and notions with no corresponding real content. Elementary knowledge of biology is relegated to the category of “prejudice” when it affirms the biological reality of the sexes; objective differences and hierarchies between human groups and cultures, when affirmed, are treated as a police case; the possibility of a broad debate of ideas based on common rational principles is non-existent and replaced by ideological clichés typical of automaton minds incapable of reflection, etc.

None of this reflects what Kant understood as the core of the Enlightenment: the ability to think for oneself. Contemporary society is a space where old and archaic forms of tribalism return, while the ideological core of liberal societies is a hollow rationalist formalism. But there is no denying that the return of tribal identities has a profound truth: the inability of a liberal rationalist formalism to serve as a basis for structuring a culture and society.

The very idea of ​​a “multicultural” society is a cognitive aberration, since culture implies the notion of unity, or it would not be possible to speak of “cultures” in a world where none of them were different from the other. The very idea of ​​cultural diversity implies the idea of ​​cultural unity, since each particular culture that represents a unique anthropological aspect of human cultural diversity can only be understood in its singularity through the radical contrast that differentiates it from all other cultures.

What happens with the multiculturalist idea of ​​a soup of fragmented cultures living within Western liberal democracies is that such a project is simply an attempt to neutralize and annihilate the same culture that defends a formalist and rationalist universalism open to all other cultures: the Western one. It is not possible to create a universalist and rationalist umbrella that would embrace all cultures, simply because such rationalist and formalist universalism is the fruit of a specific culture, the culture of the West. Liberal rationalism is the fruit of an intellectual and spiritual journey that begins with the Greeks, passes through the Romans, reaches the medieval world and ends in modernity. Outside of this cultural and cognitive framework, liberal rationalism is merely prey for alien tribes to rob the West economically, culturally, politically and spiritually.

Which brings us to the relationship between individualism, tribalism and the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is the fruit of the aristocratic individualism of the West, where freedom is the capacity of an individual to determine his life in a sovereign way, without needing to justify his actions in light of the values ​​of his tribe. But wouldn’t this be a way of making any tradition impossible for the West? No, because this is the very tradition of the West – the aristocratic pride of sovereign and despotic souls. Even the negative freedom of liberalism has an aristocratic core of a subject who does not accept being limited in an authoritarian way by his surroundings; such negative freedom only degenerates into arbitrariness from the moment one loses sight of the fact that true freedom occurs in the performance of an action oriented towards a greater and sublime end, in the creation of something that elevates the human condition to the heights of excellence, glory and spiritual recognition.

Such notions of freedom, individuality, and tradition are incompatible with ways of life that are alien to the Western form of life. This is not because non-Western cultures are inferior, but simply because they are distinct and have a different historical and cultural genesis than the Western one. The symbolism of the stars can teach us the true measure of the Western spirit. If the East is the place on Earth where the Sun rises, the West is the space where the Sun retreats to sleep. It is undeniable that celestial patterns imprint on the human mind specific qualities and characteristics that intertwine with cultures, manifesting specific desires, virtues, and characteristics. The Eastern mind is formed in the certainty that the Sun will rise once again above its latitude. The West, on the other hand, is the land of twilight, since the Sun always sets above our heads. This progression of the Sun towards its disappearance has imprinted on the Western spirit the yearning for freedom to seek one's own destiny beyond the limits determined by culture, tradition, family, and community. But paradoxically, this is our tradition – a mixture of liberal traditionalism and aristocratic individuality. Something that will never be assimilated by alien cultural elements.

All this brings us to the point where we have to recognize that the multicultural societies that the West has been trying to build since the end of World War II are cultural impossibilities; and whose only possible result will be the cultural suicide of the Western form of life, thus leading to the very denial of science, of human progress, of the aristocratic legacy of Enlightenment freedom in the name of a slum where different cultures and tribes face each other in a permanent civil war administered by a Multiculturalist Leviathan.

But what can we oppose to such totalitarian disorder that is the true reality of today’s liberal democracies? Well, what remains is the political form that was abandoned with the French Revolution, the spiritual alliance between warriors and priests represented by the symbols of the Throne and the Altar. Of course, this is not about reestablishing the pre-revolutionary political order. Past historical experiences never return in the same way in human history. What is at stake here is understanding what was true and timeless in the political form of the Gothic world – a politics oriented towards spiritual verticality and infinity. Spengler was right when he said that the West began with the historical emergence of the Gothic world, where the passion for the vertical infinity of the spiritual absolute and the infinity of geographical spaces open to domination appeared as the most characteristic manifestation of the Faustian spirit.

But the liberal dogma would have us believe that the Gothic world and its political form are expressions of backwardness and obscurantism. The problem with such a view is that it is a denial of reality, since it is our current liberal democracies, based on a secular and materialist vision of progress, that really deny any greatness and progress in the field of science and culture. Where can we find scientists of the stature of Heisenberg and Bohr, philosophers like Kant and Nietzsche, writers like Goethe and Stendhal, musicians like Mozart and Beethoven today? If they exist out there, they have been medicalized and subjected to the most brutal therapeutic pressure imaginable as a way of breaking their spirits in the search for greatness and excellence. Such individuals can only triumph when the political and social order in which they live also reflects superior spiritual values ​​embodied in a vertical and aristocratic political form: the Throne and the Altar.

Therefore, it is not a question of recreating past institutions, but of updating two political principles that give form to concrete institutions, animating them with the spiritual content that elevates them to higher spheres, elevating the mind, culture and spirit of a people as a consequence. It is no coincidence that the entire heritage of the High Culture of the West was the work of aristocratic and monarchical societies. Thus, the content of institutions will always vary historically, but the spirit of such institutions is expressed in their political form, just as a Gothic cathedral manifests in its visible form the entire content of the spiritual and theological vision of the West.

It is often said that the year 2025 is unlike anything we have ever imagined for the future: flying cars, robots doing household chores and heavy labor, economic development combined with a less stressful life, cultural grandeur combined with the comforts of technology. But perhaps the answer to why the future (now our present) looks more like a slum than Star Wars is that our current political form does not allow our higher spiritual and cultural aspirations to be realized with the current technical potential available. It is not a problem of technical development, but of stunted political will and neutered cultural imagination. Perhaps true progress and Enlightenment were being championed by figures like Joseph de Maistre rather than Robespierre.

My deepest conviction is that the potential for progress, science, and enlightenment contained in the modern project can only be unleashed by a radical aristocratic political form. We have rushed in and annihilated those classes who were the true repositories of the human capacity for cultural and scientific greatness: the priests and warriors. The modern world handed over to the bourgeoisie and the workers is the cause of the spiritual misery of the present. And until these classes are put in their proper place, we will sink ever deeper into the slumification of the West.