My mind has been a bit scattered as of late, and for someone who suffers from overambition and overextension, this fracture leads to very little creative output. I have decided to allow the ferment that has been recently brewing within my skull to slowly seep out onto the page and pray that it crystallizes into something half-coherent.

James Lindsay is a con artist. A worm. A perpetual loser whose political antidote is graphing his own flatulence. James Lindsay believes in a bogeyman called “woke.” Now, “wokeness” is a catchy little term that was traditionally used as shorthand for a certain kind of racial neurosis prominent among the left. But Mr Lindsay, with his lofty intellectual prowess and encyclopedic knowledge of both 19th-century anarchists and theosophical offshoots, has decided that wokeness is really any kind of political consciousness founded on group identity. Lindsay sees wokeness as a virus, a virus that has infected the right, and so he has coined the term “woke right,” and offered up this cudgel to be wielded by his supposed enemies.

But what is really annoying about Lindsay is his obsession with intellectual genealogies to chart wokeness. This tweet just about sums up the entirety of his creative output:

Lindsay considers the obscure pamphlets of 19th and 20th-century socialists to be grimoires, demonic tomes capable of unleashing ideological devils upon the face of the earth. It is this fear of red obdicuts that throws light on his other obsession, theosophical infiltration of American Christianity. How many fiends haunt ol’ James? Hoppedance surely cries in his belly, and from the size of his paunch, that is one groyperous prince of hell. Schmittians are right wing leninists! Michaelmas is no Catholic tradition, but a theosophical enzyme inserted by the Fetzer institute! I guess James never read the first page of Dicken’s Bleak House, but more likely he deems the ol’ Anglo to be part of the proto woke cabal.

But I am not here today to waste time giggling over Lindsay. The man’s a fool, and if I thought anyone of substance took him seriously, then I would spend the time to dismantle him. I bring him up only to contextualize a comment I posted earlier today with Lindsay half in mind. Forgive the run-on prose, as it was posted on xitter:

The point has been made a million times, but there really is no use in studying 'intellectual genealogies' to understand the modern left. In the latter half of the 19th century, many revolutionary "leftists" believed their mission was to rekindle the ancient fires of heroism in a stagnant world drained by a moribund bourgeoisie. The impulse was one of reinvigoration; the proletariat was seen as the remnant of a moral and vital humanity capable of electrifying the world once more. The march of industry was a great project to be completed, an epic of Homeric proportions. The old aristocracy was sterile and the bourgeoisie was degenerate from the get go. All the best of 19th century revolutionary socialism was filtered into the fascist movements, and with the end of WWII, all the fire became verboten. By the 60s onward, all that remained of the left was a mindless worship of foreigners, fags, and jazz. James Lindsay is such a joke that its an indictment upon mankind that he had any following to begin with. The only revolutionary impulse that remains of the modern left is the desire to eliminate borders and enlarge the welfare state. Reading Marx or Proudhon to understand the left today is like an FBI agent in the 70s reading the Quran to understand the motivations of the Nation of Islam

The Left of today is not Marxist. Nobody, either in power or burning cars in Los Angeles, seriously believes in the science of Historical Materialism, nor could they articulate what that even means. Materialist readings of Hegel are a hobby for bored E Girls and bearded community college professors. Karl Marx was against tariffs and welcomed free trade as the mechanism to strengthen the collective identity of the international proletariat and hasten the inevitable revolution. The rallying cry behind the Occupy Wall Street movement was “We are the 99%!” and yet they never articulated what the 99% wanted. The Chapo Trap House DemSoc push of the Bernie Sanders years was for Free Health Care. And now it has been proclaimed that the impotence of Occupy was actually a hijacking by the insidious conspirators of Capital. The Leftism of the 2010’s was a confused populist squeal, not a rediscovery of Gramsci. And hell, by the time of Gramsci, Orthodox Marxism was already dead.

The modern international political cartel and their legion of lumpenproletariat agitators have nothing in common with the socialist movements of yesteryear. There is no genealogy for Linsday to track. There is no straight line to elucidate the shapes of today. In fact, if the modern Left actually revisited the works of the thinkers that Lindsay is so sure they descend from, the modern Left would transmute into a metal far nobler (or more sinister, but certainly more coherent and effective). That is because there is no Left today in the way that there was a century before.

The idea of heroism, vitality, or anti-decadence is completely anathema to the modern “leftist”. And for this reason, some of you are probably mighty confused by the statement I made in my quoted post. To repeat,

In the latter half of the 19th century, many revolutionary "leftists" believed their mission was to rekindle the ancient fires of heroism in a stagnant world drained by a moribund bourgeoisie. The impulse was one of reinvigoration; the proletariat was seen as the remnant of a moral and vital humanity capable of electrifying the world once more. The march of industry was a great project to be completed, an epic of Homeric proportions. The old aristocracy was sterile and the bourgeoisie was degenerate from the get go. All the best of 19th century revolutionary socialism was filtered into the fascist movements, and with the end of WWII, all the fire became verboten.

A leftist would recoil at such language, such prose is the dogwhistle of the fascist! Socialism is about radical egalitarianism and embracing the broken! Whether that fracture is physical, mental, or racial. The very notion of a vital spark in society, of metaphysical fire, of vanquishing inertia, all of this is very much against the leftist grain. But it was not always so.

The majority of leftists today would not dream of reading the works of the socialists that Lindsay claims they descend from. Good. Then why don’t we? The key to a renaissance, to palingenesis, is the discovery and synthesis of forgotten ideas that glitter in the nooks of the charnel-house of time.

Mussolini was originally a socialist. Fascism evolved out of the revolutionary “leftist” ferment of the early 20th century. One thinker in particular had a tremendous impact upon him and his sharp new idea.

I owe most to Georges Sorel. This master of syndicalism by his rough theories of revolutionary tactics has contributed most to form the discipline, energy and power of the fascist cohorts.

-Mussolini

Who was Sorel? Go look him up, I do not summarize, I drop truth nukes. This passage of his is sufficient for our purposes:

Much more am I prevented from becoming the founder of a school; but is that really a great misfortune? Disciples have nearly always exercised a pernicious influence upon the thought of him they call their master, and he in turn has often believed himself obliged to follow them. There is no doubt that for Marx it was a real disaster to have been transformed into the leader of a sect by his young enthusiasts; he would have produced much more useful work had he not become the slave of the Marxists.

People have often laughed at Hegel’s belief that humanity, since its origins, had worked to give birth to the Hegelian philosophy and that with it the Spirit had at last completed its development. Similar illusions are found to a greater or lesser extent in all founders of schools: disciples expect their masters to close the era of doubt by providing definitive solutions. I have no aptitude for a role of that kind: every time that I have approached a question I have found that my enquiries have ended up by giving rise to new problems, the further I push my investigations the more disquieting the results. But perhaps, after all, philosophy is only a recognition of the abysses which lie on each side of the path that the vulgar follow with the serenity of sleepwalkers.

It is my ambition to be able occasionally to awaken a personal vocation. There is probably within every man a metaphysical fire which lies hidden beneath the ashes, and the greater the number of ready-made doctrines it has blindly received the more likely it is to be extinguished; the awakener is he who stirs the ashes and who thus makes the flames fly up. I do not think that I am unduly praising myself when I say that I have sometimes succeeded in liberating the spirit of invention in my readers; and it is this spirit of invention which it is, above all, necessary to arouse in the world. To achieve this result is far better than gaining the banal approval of people who repeat formulas and who subjugate their own thought to the disputes of schools.

Today, a modern leftist is considered “orthodox” if they still profess a commitment to material redistribution of wealth and aggressive egalitarian interventions, as opposed to the now more ubiquitous ferment of anti-imperialism and anti-whiteness. And so, one would be forgiven for assuming the revolutionary leftist movements of a century before had wealth distribution at their very core. One would also be forgiven for assuming that these leftist intellectuals were all unanimous in their support for the ascent of the proletariat. This was certainly not the case with Sorel, and not the case with many others who fell under the “leftist” umbrella. Sorel believed that revolutionary proletarian violence against the bourgeoisie would lead to societal palengenesis, a new order, a moral rejuvenation. There was no resentment here. And this is what is so important to understand. The leftist of today is fueled by resentment or a masochistic acceptance of the underclasses’ resentment. The victory of the broken against the old masters! The death of heteronormativity and European social mores! But Sorel envisioned the proletariat as a moral force battling the decadence of the bourgeoisie. He likened the proletariat to the Germanic conquerors who would one day take a degenerate Rome. Going so far as to warn the Proletariat not to make the mistake of their Gothic forefathers, not to allow their soon to be vanquished foes to latinize them! Do not indulge in their decadence! You are the remnant of moral mankind, of the vital conquerors!

The following passage from Neither Right nor Left gives a fragrant taste of Sorel’s alien flavor.

I worry that if I continue in this fashion that this ferment I’m inking will ossify into synopsis. Bah! We are after truth nukes and not a lecture.

Let us broach an aspect of Sorel’s thought that I find truly magnetic. An idea capable of producing a current. It is Sorel’s heroic pessimism. An anti-utopian thunderbolt that reverberates throughout his prose.

Franco Freda, one of the most maligned thinkers of the post-war period, is slandered as a man of ideological contradiction, just as Sorel is labeled. And yet he was perfectly consistent as long as one was properly immersed in history and the history of ideas. As recently as 2015, Franco Freda quoted Sorel to cite the importance of his heroic pessimism. I translate below:

Philosophers of optimism are those convinced types who speak of man’s natural tendency towards good. Those men whom Georges Sorel, the great inspirer of 20th century anti-decadence, laughed in the faces of. Listen to his words: “Despite what those philosophers of optimism ruminate and affirm, the human race by its very nature is absolutely uninclined to that which is noble and majestic. Indeed, it could be claimed that our authentic nature experiences a kind of repugnance in the face of a masterpiece, against which it unleashes its most infernal instincts of dissolution. History teaches us: the legacy of the great masters cannot be preserved without the tension of a heroic will. That which is called decadence is nothing other than the eruption of dark and primordial powers, whose ordinary and vulgar manifestations had been temporarily contained, repressed and suffocated by an artificial order imposed by the light of Genius. In the universe of Man, the True is frighteningly bound by vascillation and uncertainty, while our malignant core perpetually projects the False.” Todays philosphers of optimism simply cannot bear certain arguments. They flutter between festivals and literary prizes, and do everything for one purpose: to conceal every “painful sightbut true” element of knowledge. For them, one must not even allow oneself to suspect an inclination towards wickedness in the human race. They break down man into a thousand variables and complications, those grifting chemists, until one has completely lost siht of the point of origin. And that dark look that mars them, why? But because of these circumstances, the school of thought that fails the ignorant masses by surrendering the fight to extract gold from turnips, the fight against descrimination, intolerance, homophobia, femicide (in addition to being chemists they are also alchemists and will concoct unbelievable neologisms for you, sophisticated and empty like their makers), Berlusconi and his amusing stories. The more the merrier, a million little alibis. Because for these optimists, primordial man was something protean and pure. Man, in the minds of these optimists, before Berlusconi, before Mussolini, before the first tyrants, Mankind was supposedly but a paste, happy to be educated and anxious to understand.

Have you ever read anything so incisive and beautiful? That so penetrates the heart of our present condition, of the illusions that plate us as a fairy castle?

Today’s amorphous mass of leftists are the hyena-faced optimists. Cackling in vacuous self satisfaction. They believe that they will win. What that victory will look like, nobody knows, and they certainly cannot articulate their goals. But they are aflame with optimism. They invoke the providential deities of history, mocking and chastizing their enemies in His name. “You are on the wrong side of history.” The effortless implication is that they are on the right side of Providence, and their victory is assured. But they no longer have a justification for this optimism. They can no longer articulate a semi-scientific theory for why they will win, or what they will win. We must wear heroic pessimism as a panoply of sober starlight. It is now our birthright.

Please carefully read this section from Sorel: