Orwell’s 1984 Revisited: Postmodernity and the Demise of Self-Made Man

Mihai Marinescu revisits Orwell’s “1984” and provides us with the exposition of still darker undertones present in this work, popular perhaps for all the wrong reasons. Orwell proposed no antidotes – but could it be that he never detected the essence of the poison itself? As Mihai demonstrates, the real horror of “1984” does not lay in the depiction of totalitarian monstrosity, as is customary understood. It is in the soul of its hero doomed to encounter his own reflection in the eye of executioner.  

In the article concerning That  Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis I made a passing remark to the two best-sellers of dystopian literature: Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World.

These two books are most certainly the most widely cited and referred-to fictional books in today’s conspiracy culture as well as in many “alternative narratives” of today’s world. There is also a theory proposed that these works should not be treated at face-value as some dire-warnings against a future world-tyranny but as a psychological tool designed to demoralize and pave the way for such an order, by presenting it as an inevitable and implacable future. The links of the two authors to the establishment are often cited as proof for this theory and, admittedly, in Huxley’s case at least it might not be so far-fetched. As for Orwell, I will withhold any judgment.

Having recently re-read 1984 (the first time since the high-school years) was a quite an eye-opener from many points of view. It occurred to me that some of the more subtle and sinister and truly hair-raising sub-tones of the novel are easily lost amid discussions about mass-surveillance, police state, thought police, political conspiracy, fake propaganda, fictional perpetual-wars and all the plethora of deep politics featured in this book.

It is for this reason that we will focus on the third part of this novel only: that is on the revelations that are brought to light in the “Ministry of love”; we will take these as the starting point for a more extended discussion of knowledge, truth and objectivity.

The attempt here is to try to extract some conclusions about:

1. The fact that such an ideology (as the of The Party) can only be the apex of post-modernity, which is itself only a logical development facilitated by and not in spite of the rationalism and naturalism found at the advent of modernity

2. That attempts at fighting these terminal nihilistic tendencies from the stand point of individualism and so-called “natural right” (understanding this as separate from Divine Revelation) are doomed to inevitable failure.

Attached to this second point we will make just a few remarks on alternative media, hence contributing a little to the talks which recently took place on KT: about the deviant directions taken by alternative media (which, let’s face it, shouldn’t have been viewed with great optimism to begin with) and the failure by most opponents of the “New World Order” (as a generic term for all that represents post-modernity) to understand what they are truly up against, and to understand that evil and the hunger for power are metaphysical phenomena which manifest through but do not have their origin in the world of politics.

It is therefore a revisiting of the commentary on C.S. Lewis, but from a slightly different angle.

 

The will to power

It is both a theory of the philosophers as well as a clear and repeated lesson of history that democracy is quite an appropriate doorway to tyranny. It is so not only because of the cosmic pendulum which, when pushed to one extreme will soon rebound to the opposite one; and not only because of practical concerns caused by the social chaos.

There is also a deeper, metaphysical cause.

Man is not an individual atom free to choose and decide his own future and identity. This pseudo-anthropology based upon a formless and empty notion of “freedom” promoted since the time of the Enlightenment is only a fiction. Beyond and beneath the mask of empty petty bourgeois existence there is a precipice which extends both upward and downward.

A human person carries not only a horizontal, genetically-inherited history within himself that shapes his psyche and outer habits and immediate ways of interacting with the world but also a vertical, metaphysical “history”. He not only has the possibility of knowing the deeper, unseen, aspects of the world around him but, being endowed with the image of the Creator within himself, he also has the possibility to know the higher, intelligible realms, his higher noetic faculty opening in the upper part to the ultimate possibility of seeing God face to face as far as it is possible for a created being to see Him.

In short, man has within himself a natural thirst for infinity, one can say an infinite thirst that cannot be satisfied by any created being or thing.

To many people living in the giant mall which is the globalist world all this may sound like abstract speculation on the part of a few disgruntled individuals who shun the “real world” because of their failure to adapt and succeed in it. Yet, even the daily life in our consumerist societies offers proof of this. For what is this unquenchable thirst and obsession to shop like a madman if not a false direction in which the true metaphysical thirst manifests? It is the desiring and going from one created object to another in an attempt to find a a fulfillment which on this level can never be.

And though a great many people these days never get passed this level – for one reason or another- yet there are other examples who quickly reach saturation and even nausea from this indefinite wandering through a finite and one dimensional existence and start to realize the existence of this deeper calling.

Since man is created in the image of God on the one hand but as a created being he is also created out of non-being on the other hand, he is suspended between two opposite states: the fullness of being and the nothingness of non-being. Matter – the final echo at the edge of existence – as an indefinite well of energy through which the worlds are brought forth, is also a great cosmic mirror in which Narcissus can all too easily lose himself thinking that his reflected image is the principle of all existence. He may all too well mistake the indefinite potentiality of matter with Him who is infinite and all powerful; his ability to act upon matter and co-work in the divine plan may be abused in the opposite sense: of returning all created forms to primordial chaos (the tohu-bohu in Genesis 1:2) in order to re-fashion them anew according to his own distorted will.

Prior to the earthly Narcissus, his heavenly counterpart did the same. Since then the destruction of creation and the establishment of a counter-kingdom on earth has been his stated goal. He (the “heavenly Narcissus” that is- currently a basement dweller) is also a primary inspiration for revolutionaries, anarchists, occultists, transhumanists and sometimes geopolitical ideologues plus he appeared on the cover of the first issue of the Diderot’s Encyclopedia.

So, when the democratic man is becoming fed up with his empty existence, yet he will not let go of his self-love and pursuit of amorphous freedom and the dream of absolute independence from everything- then he takes the opposite root which leads to the ultimate abyss of existence. It is here that the will to power manifests itself.

And hence we reach that which O’Brian tells Winston in the windowless basements of the Ministry of Love: the ultimate goal of The Party is power.

Not power as a tool towards a desired “better” state of affairs, but power for its own sake: “the goal of power is power, that of persecution is persecution etc” and later on O’Brian adds “and power always means power over other people” to which he adds the image of the boot crushing a human face as statement of intent of the Party’s desired ultimate paradise.

Amorphous power manifested as a diabolical impulse to crush and destroy is an intoxication which for a short span of time creates the illusion in the one intoxicated with it that it can satisfy the infinite thirst we talked about; this is because, unlike the multitude of limited objects in the world who are nonetheless definite, that is their boundaries are visible, amorphous power is precisely that: indefinite, its boundaries are forever expanding in an endless void, the ultimate frontier seemingly ever closer but never actually reachable.

It is precisely and inverted image of God’s infinity. It is being “limitless” within the limits of the world.
Now in the Lewis piece we alluded to the complete absence of the vertical dimension in Orwell’s novel. Though the the Party exhibits no interest in the occult whatsoever, yet there are certain aspects of its methods and ideology which can be easily assimilated and understood from such a perspective.

The tyranny of post-modernism

The reason we have gone through all the above is to delineate the metaphysical aspect of the problem at hand. Although, as previously said, the vertical dimension is completely lacking in Orwell, there is nonetheless something in the Party’s methods of “crimestop”, “doublethink” or “black-white” that can easily be interpreted as some sort of dark and perverted askesis.

All this is perfectly intelligible from a metaphysical perspective. And it cannot be otherwise, since – by O’Brian’s admission – they are interested not in doing but in being; and when we talk of being, we cannot help but enter the metaphysical domain one way or another and hence, on a different level, even if unconsciously, we are dealing with forces and presences that are beyond the strictly secular domain – be it either above or below it.

What’s more, the fundamental presuppositions of the Party are almost entirely similar to the ones of the N.I.C.E., once again leaving aside the occult element. Both are the products of the tyrannical man, that is the luciferian, power craving individual (or collective) who have doubly severed the ties with the Divine and with Truth implicitly – firstly by directly rejecting that which is above, secondly be rejecting even the natural order – which being a creation of God participates in truth and objectivity.

Hence, the tyrannical man is necessarily an extreme subjectivist, reaching the extreme of solipsism.

But here we have reached a defining factor of post-modernism. And what does the Party in 1984 hold as the central aspect of its ideology? That there is no reality outside the human mind. Who controls his mind controls his personal reality; and who controls all the minds controls all of reality.

It is as simple as that. To constantly change the content of documents and to perpetually produce forgeries is nothing if the mind of the individual is still aware of the fact that there exists an objective reality beyond the forgeries of a self-appointed power elite and that he, as Winston puts it, “knows the secret doctrine that 2+2=4”.

The sense of objective reality must be taken away completely in order for the zero point of destruction to be reached and from the ruins to erect “the new aeon”, an expression which – from the time Alistair Crowley received his “revelations” in Cairo in 1904 – has become a kind of “holy grail” for revolutionary groups linked to occultism.

The question for those who still think that such are only the products of fringe manifestations and dystopian fiction, with no threat to society as we know it, is this: what exactly is contained in the world-view of the Party which is not the part and parcel of every ideology and world-view originating or at least partially influenced by post-modernism? What exactly is so fringe nowadays in the expression “everything is subjective” or “everything is relative”?

These are expressions you hear on the street in conversations of otherwise normal, everyday people. Few even fathom the implications of these words they utter, few would dare to even entertain for a moment the thought of the outside reality being entirely subjected to their will, but that makes matters even worse: by not being conscious of what one is doing or believing simply means that these subversive viruses of the soul pass beneath the conscious level unnoticed and from below this level they gain a far greater power to in-form and thus deform the soul.

 

The demise of the self-made man

 

The most interesting, and at the same time the most sad, part of this novel is Winston’s complete defenselessness: not physical, but rather mental and also spiritual.

Of course, Orwell himself admitted – when criticizing Lewis – that for him “The whole drama of the struggle against evil lies in the fact that one does not have supernatural aid.” It is indeed the most central trait of “the self made man” – the atomized individual of Enlightenment mythology – to believe that the responsibility for the outcome of history and for the correction of real or perceived injustices rests entirely in his hands. That it is up to him to make the right decision by “thinking for himself” (of course with the power of reason) without the need of any dogma or guidance beyond him.

The first question in this case is: what actually constitutes evil? If evil is to be viewed from the strictly societal point of view then there are certain elements that quite simply are disproportionate. O’Brian himself laughed at Winston’s opinion that the Party thinks like the “illuminated despots” of the past, that they are doing it for the greater good of the people: on the contrary, power is a goal in itself and is always power over other people.

Also, from the social point of view the simple elimination of “undesirable elements” is enough to keep the status quo going. The extremity of the methods to destroy one’s personality in order to “possess” one with the spirit of the Party before killing him, which are employed in the novel, are simply unintelligible from the merely social point of view.

It is indeed a great enigma for Winston because he does not realize the spiritual aspect behind all of it. Winston is thus a perfect symbol for an entire world-view – that of the atomized individualism described above. If we look at this world-view from the standpoint of classical philosophy, we will immediately see that it is extremely wanting.

So there are three questions: who am I? What is the world around me? What is the correct relation between me and the world around me? What does the self-made man answer to these questions consciously and what are the unseen, but ever present- and deadly, presuppositions on which he bases his view of life, the world and himself?

 

The collapse of the objective world

One of the most striking aspects of the dystopian society in 1984 is the collapse of the scientistic world-view, characterized within the novel as a stagnation of science. But it is not stagnation but merely a final and complete fulfillment of the baconian maxim “knowledge is power”.

At the outset of the modern scientific endeavor the belief was presented that natural (empirical) science is the only objective means of knowing the world and that all metaphysics, traditional philosophy and, of course, theology are mere empty speculations that cannot be proven in any way because they are not empirical and which have nothing to do with the real world. The empirical approach is the only exact science, because the world and the laws of nature can only be discovered through the five senses.

God, spirituality, transcendence were cast aside as irrational superstitions from the childhood of our race (an expression frequently used) which must be kept at bay if science is to advance and make progress. Since the time of Enlightenment this view remains a constant in the arsenal of the “enlightened” individual who-thinks-for-himself-and-cannot-be-fooled-by-bronze-age-superstitions. It is, of course, parroted by that silly type of “new atheism”.

Yet, those most closely associated with the lodges of power, yesterday the same as today – like the author of the New Atlantis alluded to above – know very well that this is simple rhetoric. They know that science divorced from metaphysics is by no means an endeavor for real knowledge with the goal of knowing the truth, but a tool for gaining power and creating the truth.

Note that this does certainly not mean that honest men throughout the centuries did not make real scientific discoveries and did not bring real knowledge about the world. But as we shall see in what follows this real knowledge of the natural world itself, without attaching it to higher principles, is doomed to be appropriated and co-opted in various power-schemes and be made subservient to various ideologies. What cannot be co-opted or what is not useful for the above named schemes is cast aside and the general public never finds out about it.

If we now look back to the world of 1984 we see that science has become a simple weapon in the hands of the Party. Science is useful insofar as it provides new weapons, new means of torture, new means of accessing the deepest recesses of the individual’s mind or new ways to deceive and to spread mass propaganda. Otherwise, clinging to notions such as “the objective, outside world” is rejected by O’Brian as simply clinging to “outdated views of 19th century natural science”.

The party is the supreme and ultimate ruler of the universe, it controls everything, it is the center of the world. The stars are feeble lights in the sky which The party can extinguish if it ever sees the need to do it. The Earth- as the dwelling place of the Party is the unmovable point around which the whole cosmos revolves.

For the individualistic self-made man this is a definite proof that post-modernity betrayed modernity, deviated from its stated objectives and hijacked the world of science in its own selfish interest.

On the contrary, the Party in this novel as well as the whole post-modernist academic establishment is quite consequent in following the lead of empirical science.

Far from being the “superstitious enemy against the light of science”, Christianity on the contrary was the stable ground on which the edifice of scientific investigation of the natural world could be erected. Christianity claims that man is created in the image of God and that he is also a microcosm of the macrocosm. That is: the principles and forces which exist in the outer world have their analogous or corresponding faculty within man.

Since both man and the cosmos are created by the Divine Logos – which also means Reason and Purpose – it means that the cosmos is a rational creation, endowed with purpose and so is man. Besides the fact that in this world-view both the world and man have their objectivity or reality rooted in a principle beyond themselves – so they can never be collapsed into the mere subjectivity of individual perception – it also means that man has within himself adequate “tools” to understand the world around him. He has his five senses to interact with the world of senses, he has reason to make sense of what he perceives, he has the inner sense or nous to comprehend the intelligible essences of things etc. If the cosmos is a multi-leveled structure with a door at each level, man has the right key for each one (although he has for a long time misplaced his keys to the upper floors).

Such is not the case in the world-view of materialism and empiricism. To say that man is rational so he can know the world through his reason means absolutely nothing on its own.

First of all the multiple levels of the cosmos are here collapsed into a single one – the empirical – with a corresponding collapse in man himself. Then the cosmos cannot be considered to be rational in this scheme since everything is regarded as the product of impersonal physical laws and a completely random and chaotic starting point. Man himself is just an accident in a remote corner of the universe, a product of an equally impersonal and accidentally started process of evolution.

It is obvious that in this “scenario” there is absolutely no necessity for man to possess the necessary faculties to understand the world. There is no analogy of microcosm-macrocosm, there is no purpose and no higher plane on which to base our knowledge. What we call “reason” is itself a product of purposeless and impersonal processes for which there is no guarantee that they provides any true and objective knowledge. The universe is not rational and there is no guarantee that it can be understood at all by what we call “reason” or even that our sensual perceptions correspond to any objective reality whatsoever. All our so-called knowledge might very well be merely a product of a collective illusion or even less than that.

The Party in this novel sees through this faulty logic and draws the obvious conclusion: we don’t know if knowledge is true and don’t care. There is no objective truth. We just know that applying some rules and methods we obtain certain results that inside this illusion (perhaps) of ours grants us power on an enormous scale. If science is true or not is irrelevant – we just use it when it is useful.

It is the final outcome of “knowledge is power” and German writer Ernst Jünger has said it the best in his novel Heliopolis when describing the cabinet of an eugenicist doctor:

Das <Wissen ist macht> des alten Francis Bacon hatte sich hier vereinfacht zum <Wissen ist mord>
(The “knowledge is power” has been simplified here to “knowledge is murder”)

 

The dissolution of personal identity

 

During one of the torture sessions Winston is baffled to have the self-contradictory phrase “you do not exist” thrown in his face, as an answer to one of his objections. Besides the process of “vaporizing” and also the gruesome destruction of the personality through evil methods of physical and psychical torture, there is also the claim that an outside entity – such as the Party – is the sole means to ascertain what is real and what is not in everyone’s personal identity and experience.

In fact, there is no longer a personal identity, it is only the collective (“I am legion”) identity of The party. No party member should say “I” except as through the “collective hypostasis” which is the Party.

Is this a betrayal of individualism, of the ideal of the self-made man or is it perhaps, once again, its fulfillment?

Of course it is its fulfillment.

The gradual elimination of all “chains” of higher meaning which stand in the way of the “free expression” of the will (the amorphous freedom from- in the excellent words of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra) essentially means the collapsing of all higher faculties and inner life of the person into its empirical manifestation and then further on below it.

If individual “choice” and individual consensus are regarded as the only authorities of meaning and purpose and any fixed metaphysical identity is regarded as a tyrannical oppression from outside that impeaches one’s freedom and hence must be overthrown and discarded, then the conclusion becomes obvious: the personality is nothing more than an extension and product of the individual will.

Of course, just as in the case of natural science, this illuminist world-view attempted, at first, to tacitly keep all the presuppositions of the very metaphysical outlook it fought against. Vague notions such as “natural right” and “secular morality”, common sense and even a sort of purely intellectual abstraction of “deity” found in “Deism” were only disguises under which traditional Christian notions – now emptied of all essence – were recycled.

As also stated in the commentary on Lewis’ Abolition of Man, the first prophets of post-modernity – the first and the most important of them all being Nietzsche – essentially demolished this castle constructed on thin air and opened the gate towards the coming to complete fruition of the poisonous seeds planted at the dawn of modernity.

“Natural right” is as much something subjected to the perception of the individual as anything else. Everything is then absorbed by the individual will before it itself very well ends up absorbing himself before becoming something else.

If individual will has no relation to anything transcendent to it is all too obvious that there is not one individual will to speak of and, ultimately, no individual will at all. That is because there is absolutely nothing here, on the immanent plane, to act as a stable principle of personal identity – especially nothing to account for the retaining of one fixed identity in the face of permanent and inevitable alteration brought about by the flow of time. Memory, which some think it is the source and condition of identity is just as unreliable and subjected to the distortions of imagination as any fleeting passion or desire.

Since he’s becoming somewhat popular lately, we’ll take as an example The Apophenion, by chaos-magick guru Peter Carroll, where he sums-up the next stage in the process of dissolution of personal identity. In this typical post-modernistic book, Carroll first presents a mutilated and vulgarized version of both Oriental and Western philosophy and metaphysics, after which he presents his conclusion that all is flux and there is no being, only doing. The “I” is defined only by his action at any give time. In fact, there is no “I”, there are only different and multiple “I’s” that act at different times. The Self is just an ever-shifting, transitory fata morgana, an empty container that fulfills the passive role of support for innumerable fractal “selves” that fight for center stage at every given moment. You are nothing but a collection of circumstances (as one postmodernist told me once).

In this intermediary stage we move one step closer towards complete chaos. But even this is just a half-hearted attempt. This post-modernist “philosophy” (which post-modernists like to regard as “profound” and “ground breaking”) was analyzed and refuted a long time ago in Plato’s dialogue Parmenid.

Towards the end of this work, Plato analyses a world (better said an un-world) from which The One is absent- we would say God, but let’s call it, for the sake of the argument, “a transcendent principle of unity”. Since everything on the empirical plane is, in itself, a composition of disparate parts and the stability we think we witness is constantly changing and moving before our very eyes (although we do not immediately see this) and also there is no transcendent source of unity and stability to keep these disparate and shape-shifting parts together and to retain a stable identity for more than one fleeting moment before it shifts again into something different, it follows that absolutely nothing can be said to be “one” and everything is a cluster of indefinite multiplicity. The sub-particles of which an apparently single thing is said to be made are also broken down into an endless multiplicity of other sub-particles.

This goes for Carroll’s multiple “selves” as well. The “primary self” so to speak is made up of a great number of “selves”. But there is no reason to stop half-way and to regard these “selves “ other than just another series of empty containers through which a third category of “sub-selves” manifest and these third category is just a composition of fourth category of sub-sub-selves and this of a fifth and so on, indefinitely. The world, starting from such presuppositions, is nothing other than a collection of mirages that dissolve the moment one takes to inspecting them closer.

Once God was rejected, the final stop can only be the world of the “acausal”- the self, the world and every single existing being is just a fleeting manifestation of an amorphous chaos, devoid of quality and quantity, a boundless void forever dissolving into nothingness. In other words, all existence is just an illusory manifestation of nothing.

The ultimate contradiction has been reached, but entirely in accordance with the starting point we have previously articulated. And this is the final destination which, today, is embodied in a plethora of ideologies- from transhumanism to left-hand path satanism, to political nihilism, to “environmentalist” misanthropic groups. The vocabulary, the definitions, the concepts used by any one of these groups differ in a larger or a lesser degree from that of the others, but their presuppositions and end-goals are the manifestation of one and the same thing.

So, we see in 1984 that although Winston knows full well, through the “organic logic” of everyday existence accessible to any sane person, that all of the Party’s ideology is based on sophisms and insane lucubrations, yet he is quite unable to actually contradict them, he finds no firm ground from which to repel O’Brian’s lunatic ravings, because his own materialist and naturalist mentality is constructed on thin air. Winston’s defeat is not only verbal or intellectual, but spiritual, as he ends up losing all personal identity and being absorbed in the virtual construction of the Party.

So, self-made man begins his evening bragging about his emancipated mentality, his victory over superstition and the obscurantism of past ages, he scoffs at religion and rambles about progress and science and all that. Later on, close to midnight, he participates in some chaos-magick sort of ritual invoking deities he invented five minutes ago…and in the witching hours of the morning he finds himself firmly tied to the altar of the acausal, ready to be sacrificed as an “undesirable element”.

If I am free to be whatever I want to be, then so can other and more stronger wills convince me to be whatever they want me to be or, better still, just brake down my sense of identity by force. O’Brian’s statement “you do not exist” is here to be taken quite literally.
 
The breakdown of ethics
 

Until now we have seen how the external world and the self have been dissolved right under the helpless nose of the self-made man. What about his relation to the world? Well, perhaps we should have started with this part, because now we are in the awkward position of analyzing the relation between an illusory non-entity and a collection of ever-fleeting mirages.

But let’s just forget the first two sections and just put this question from a realistic framework: how does the self-made man relate to the world around him? (including other people)

There can be no doubt that the main character of Orwell’s book is a complete stranger to about all principles and practices of ethics.

In his private statement to Julia, he desires “corruption” – “I detest purity. I hate goodness, I want virtue to stop existing anywhere. I want the whole world to be corrupt .”

Of course we must take into account the context – Winston lives in a world where what is upheld as purity is just a sinister parody of the actual virtue that goes by that name – as seen in the so-called “Anti-sex league” in the book. He’s in the position of the one being bombarded with political correctness from his early youth to the point that his inner sense is affected and can no longer tell the difference between the genuine love for one’s neighbor and the technocrat parody of it.

Still, his hatred of virtue and goodness cannot be accounted for in the same way, since these words – as well as corruption – have a more definite, unambiguous meaning. More damnable to his cause is the moment when he swears allegiance to what he thinks is The Brotherhood in O’Brian’s apartment where he agrees that, if need be, he is ready to do acts of sabotage that leave thousands of innocent dead as collateral damage, spread sexual diseases, even murder children or corrupt their minds, spread false news and spread drugs that annihilate the will if need be. Back in the torture chamber, when he confronts O’Brian for the cruelty and shameless lies that the Party perpetrates stating that he is a superior being, with a superior morality, O’Brian simply plays the tape with the recording from his apartment.

The only truly original ethical notion produced by the self-made world-view is the “your liberty ends where mine begins and vice-versa”. This may sound common-sense on a superficial level, but the reality is that it is so vague and ambiguous that it may be taken to mean everything and nothing. “Liberty” is just as ambiguous a word as are the boundaries between “my” liberty and “yours”- and as proof of this one can point to precisely the dogma of political correctness, where a casual word or even a not-so-careful glance at a member of a “protected group” can be interpreted to be a “micro-aggression”, an impeaching upon the liberty of said member to walk around without being micro-agressed.

But the real problem with self-made ethics is that, once again, it is only a house of cards. The ideal it upholds is in itself contradictory. On the one hand it wants absolute liberty of individual in his own private sphere (whatever that may be) as long as it does not involve affecting anyone else without his consent. On the other hand it demands that the boundaries of this “private sphere” be strictly observed as if they were absolute. This is the same as saying that the individual can engage his passions uninhibited while at the same time he is to keep his passions within strict boundaries. But this is contradictory because the passions are exactly that part of us which are in themselves without boundaries, they are amorphous, prime mater in need of being defined and shaped by superior principles. Traditional morality serves exactly this purpose: to direct the passions towards an objective need and keep them within natural necessity. Once this natural necessity is trespassed there is no other real, objective boundary to keep them in check. Vague conventional or psychological notions will simply not do.

So if all hard morality is denied in “private” and “consensual” matters the pretense to observe social or public norms (especially in the political struggle for power) in spite of this is unfounded. It is like wanting to be free to roll the bolder over the edge and at the same time to be convinced that it will simply stop in midair and not crush the village below.

The outbreak of the passions will make more and more demands for absolute “freedom”, while the lack of any foundation for the consensual social morality will be in time realized. Also, when acting for the “common good” all limits will be suspended, pretexting that extreme problems require extreme solutions – like Winston’s we described above (and in the absence of absolute norms, this is all too obviously acceptable).

In time, even the “common good” excuse becomes abandoned, the tyrannical measures that were once used to solve “an extreme problem” will be left in place long after the problem was “solved”. In the end, as argued in The Abolition of Man only the subjective will remains the only criteria for what is good and what is not.

And here we come full circle. The self-made man’s utilitarian and secular notion of morality cannot stand the dissolution process he unleashes by renouncing God and all absolute Truth. It is at this point where there are only two choices- either be swept away by the tidal wave one has himself unleashed or ride this wave become the “new man”- the creator of new values and of a new morality, the member of the future elite which Nietzsche foresaw throughout his work. The recognition that, in the world where “God is dead” any notions of good and evil that are simply residues of the old world are simply obsolete and need to be completely eliminated.

Regardless of the choice he takes, one thing is certain: the self-made man, the individual living between two worlds, the rebel who ditches tradition but tacitly and with docility holds on to some of its fundamental principles without understanding them, this individual will be dead.

Of course, what was said above about there being only two choices should be understood in the context of the Nietzschean type of mentality that actively burns all bridges behind him, essentially closing the path that can lead back to the light through repentance. Otherwise, the idea that you only have the choice of dying by drowning or being burned alive is an extremely naive reductionism and a serious mental deviation.

 

The alternative media

 

If we now take a look at the whole “alternative culture” we can clearly observe both of the tendencies which have been the focus of this article.

From the very beginning alternative media relied on the anthropological fiction of the self-made man. It is quite ironic to hear so much about the “illuminati” these days when the starting premises of many “alternative” researches are exactly grounded in the world-view of Illuminism.

The fiction that the individual gathering information from scratch by himself, spreading his findings as wide as possible so that in the end you will get an entire mass of well-informed individuals who will become conscious of their power to cause change and overthrow the power elite is purely and simply a delusion. Furthermore being individualistic it affirms the unconditional “freedom” of the individual over and against all forms of “manipulation” and “oppression” – from religion (of course) to ethnicity and even family, thus promoting the same kind of rootlessness as the globalism it says to be against.

The idea that “the power is in our hands” and we “just need to wake up and the decline of the global power elite will be inevitable” is quite simply the proof of a complete lack of knowledge in regards to both history and human nature.

A common idea in alternative circles – annoying libertarianism being quite a fad today among many of them – is that the “good and noble ideals” brought by the Enlightenment under their many guises- the most obvious being the American Revolution- were hijacked by subversive elements and turned into something completely opposite of what they were in the beginning. We have seen in the previous sections that all this is false and that what we have today is the logical consequence of those precise premises.

There should be no surprise if science is hijacked and made subservient to devious ideologies like “global warming” or something as degenerate as “gender theory”, or become weaponised by being used in poisoning our food and creating GMO monstrosities. Nor should there be any offense taken if national economies are systematically dismantled for the profit of transnational corporations as if that is not a quite logical outcome of the demand of having a completely “free market” with no limits imposed from a superior point of view. Once the sin of usury was made legal and became “the driving force behind economical progress” it is useless to spit venom against international banksters. And if Darwinism is the starting point, what is really so obnoxious about transhumanism, manipulation of genes, birth control or eugenics?

Besides all of this it is the inherently contradictory premise from which empiricist mentality starts that renders the whole endeavor of alternative media fruitless – because the empiricist epistemology is inherently lacking purpose and coherence.

The quantitative gathering of as much information as possible from as many sources as possible does not lead to the truth and even less to correct action in accordance with the truth, because the truth does not reside in the empirical. Information is equivalent to building blocks. Unless you have the knowledge, the science of how a building is constructed, you are better of selling them for a price to someone who can make some use of them. The same, if you have a distorted notion (if at all) of the world, of human nature, of yourself and of how all this comes together and interacts all the information in the world will mean nothing.

This is why few “alternative channels” today are not being co-opted by other power players or by this or that ideology. Those that maintain integrity – and among them we can mention James Corbett of Corbett Report at the top of the list – cannot unfortunately provide any meaningful direction. For all their noble efforts to expose the lies and subversions of today’s politics and society, they cannot lead to any positive conclusion.

Those who have become, consciously or not, co-opted into some movements with a definite ideology behind them or even became supporters of non-Western propaganda – like that of Russia or China or North Korea -have completely abandoned the notion of “truth” and replaced it with that of “narrative”.

A narrative is – as we have seen- an essential element of the world of 1984. With the information overload brought by the internet age coupled with the impotence of the purely empirical approach many have abandoned the hope for truth completely. So it is no longer knowing as many facts as possible in order to try to understand what truly is happening, but of finding a few facts which can then be combined into a narrative that validates some personal hope or prejudice.

Attaching oneself to the state propaganda of other powers and placing one’s hopes in this other power provides of there being a reliable solution, an alternative.

At the same time, dabbling into occultism and an inverted type of metaphysics finally provides that third dimension which the self-made man missed so much. It also allows what some think to be a vantage point from which alternative versions of history and reality can be produced. It also helps further the breakdown of ethics through promotion of anti-social behavior which is deemed acceptable since it is directed against the NWO and its “brain dead slaves”, those who promote such ideas being, of course, “above this world”, even though there is almost no point on which they can be said to truly differ with it.

In the end actual research becomes unnecessary – in the world of post-modernism the truth is not that which is, but that which will be. The truth is being built every moment, the will to power is the builder.

So if I am to end this, I would use a phrase which I all too often read and heard in alternative media: “1984 has arrived. We must act before it is too late!!!” Yes, indeed! 1984 IS a reality but IT IS NOT because of CCTVs at every street corner or laws that impeach privacy.

 

Mihai Marinescu
 
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