Against the Machine

[wilpuri]

Here is a short piece by Finnish esoteric writer Ensio Kataja from his weblog Pyhä, a blog well worth checking out.

Against the Machine

When the Berlin Wall came crumbling down, the Italian Catholic philosopher Augusto Del Noce remarked that “Marxism died in the East because it was realized in the West”. Today this argument is more true than ever. I share Del Noce’s belief that Marxism was never a radical alternative to, but only a variant of, liberal capitalism. According to Del Noce, the West has incorporated all the basic Marxist principles in its global system: atheism and materialism, cosmopolitanism and universalism, the primacy of practice over philosophy, economism, technological Prometheanism, and egalitarian homogenization.

If the late Soviet Union represented “hard” totalitarianism, the West, with its cool technologies, is currently an example of “soft” totalitarianism. The new despotism of anti-traditionalist liberal secularism, attractively packaged, has become desired, even demanded by many. It is questionable, whether today’s West can be rightfully called a “civilization”. It reminds more of a gigantic Machine formed by banks, multinationals and myriad transnational institutions. Something that might sound like out of science fiction, but is far too real. When the West today fights, it doesn’t fight for any real freedom or for the sake of culture, but only to make sure that the Machine itself prospers and can extend its influence to every corner of the globe.

The Machine of the West favours acultural, artificial “universal nation”. In this on-going effort to remake the whole world into a giant marketing environment the Machine continues to dismantle local and national distinctions, replacing every authentic tradition and spirituality with a crass consumer “culture” pandering to the lowest common denominator. It devitalizes everything it touches, spreading like a virus. It is becoming more and more irrelevant, who really is in power, for all the major “alternatives” are part of the Machine, working for the same goals. They might differ in their language and in minor details, but on all issues that really matter, they are in agreement. I don’t know about you, but my ideal world is not a soulless Disney World where “good life” is reduced to a question of goods. Neither do I put much value to these neo-Marxist ideals, which are sold to us in the guise of “unlimited growth”. Is our future, especially in Europe, a mixture of banal McDonaldisation and silent Islamization or can something be done about all this?

There are many people and institutions who are conscious of this situation. Thousands of books are being published, meetings and seminars held, voices of protest filling also the hallways of cyberspace. The problem remains to figure out what can be really done about it, when public discussion is carried out under the auspices of political correctness and so many people have become desirous of their own servitude.

For anyone, who puts his trust to mainstream, “respectable” politics and cannot see beyond the usual left/right dichotomy, rants like these are simply examples of crackpottery. Solution? Better to ignore these dualists and stay, as one American associate put it, “outside the box” for good. However, despite of everything, I do have some faith left that winds of change might blow again, maybe even in my own lifetime. Hopefully I am not too optimistic.

While the overall situation may seem all too hopeless and bleak right now, anyone can, in the context of his own life, defiantly rebel against these etinnic and thursic forces of non-consciousness. There are as many ways for this as there are individuals, and those who share the ideal and vision of the Northern Renaissance, don’t have to wonder what they must do.