“Nation” and “State”
There is a complete discontinuity in most people’s comprehension of what “nation” is; more than that, what culture even is. Because of the broad strokes that every philosopher, sociologist, and geopolitical thinker paints their understanding of what they see as a nationstate, and the culture therein, their subsequent predictions and evaluations are quite intellectually indictable. In the last article, we viewed this through the lens of some basic misconceptions that rightists have when it comes to the nature of the world reserve currency and how they see economic constructs as solely instituted by power and power alone, rather than epiphenomena of policy taking on effects not understood by its enactors. They see the dollar as something controlled by the central bank, and therefore understood and grasped, rather than what it really is - an international currency loaned and used to create other derivatives that has led to an economy of dollar-denominated debt that brings organic, undestroyable demand for dollars.
The world reserve currency isn’t enforced by contracts, it’s enforced by the demand of its own hostages for it to continue existing. In this same way culture takes on its own life, and is not something solely allowed or disallowed by the state.
This is what brings us to such a distracting dilemma of interpreting “nation” and “nationstate.” Nationstates are defined by political territory enforced by the memetic power of economic, social, and cultural forces that recognize where borders lie, how strong they are, and what exactly defines their borders. A nationstate’s legitimacy is defined by its state, and thus the enforcement of its law. A nationstate’s borders can lose continuity as it loses its ability to enforce its legitimacy, or said borders become irrelevant to whomever or whatever they border. Ultimately, a nationstate, beyond the spiritual forces of culture and social construct, they are defined by the state, and that’s what where we can all agree on what United States or United Kingdom or Russia mean. They are nationstates with defined borders whose legitimacy is enforced by the government; said government having a monopoly on force.
A “nation” or “country” or perhaps “patria” is not a nationstate. It is a defined people who, regardless of the recognition of a government, exist in their own undefinably-recognized political entities. Much of the time, their attention to the authority of their culture is not relevant to their station within that culture within a nationstate. For example, Texans do not recognize some president-in-exile even though they have a definable culture. Within Texas, there are at least five or six subcultures, and those subcultures do not have defined leaders or political movements to enact their own authority. For many reasons, this is not always the case, and in fact, seems to be unhelpful when operating in larger conglomerate nationstates like the United States.
That being the case, this is where the broad strokes of the armchair league becomes frustrating. They gauge nationstate and culture as one. They paint cultures with a broad brush, include them in one nation, when they are clearly not apart of one nation. There is no benefit in misunderstanding what culture is, which is why the broad strokes of sociological and geopolitical commentators becomes dangerous. Yet again, their midwit view that somehow contracts and treatises being tantamount to the Word of God misguide their ability to make sound judgement and commentary on the sum total parts of nationstates.
In addition, as we are reaching this point of no return, where cultures bud, new nations or cultures form, dialogue and war are had, legitimacy waxes or wanes, the only partially understood effects of a totalizing state mistaking its immense power for omnipotence, the citizenry treating every action by said government as more than the gestalt that it is, et cetera. Culture is not simple, and I am not claiming a universal explanation in my just criticism here. What I do see is a persistent and growing cancerous mindset that we can somehow apply the paradigms of yesterday to today with almost total accuracy. What I do see is incorrectly treating corporate media and the degeneracy of a small group of gay bourgeoisie as somehow the entire culture of the many cultures within the nationstate of the US.
America, United States, Ecophilosophy
This is where the mindset of totality becomes completely pretentious and shortsighted. Viewing American cultures as one big culture of the United States of America is doing little justice to the millions of people in the Midwest, Southwest, South, North, and elsewhere that aren’t under the spell of degeneracy. And simply looking down on them as lesser than you is not giving you any more legitimacy as a decent critic or commentator. You just look even more pompous and detached from reality. Just because you conflate the United States Government with the cultures of America doesn’t mean I have to play into your language game. You are either acting dishonest or stupid when you do that, and it muddies the waters. So stop it.
Which brings me to an even more interesting point. The conflation with this giant blob of bureaucracies of apparatchiks, and psyopping corporate media is a reminder of how a mindset of the inevitability of totalitarianism and the totalizing society forgets the entire reality of ecology. If you do not recognize your natural milieu, you will not realize the incorrect and broad judgements that will be made by you that build until your bullshit becomes to palpable for anyone to handle.
If you are a fat atheist from the city, especially suburbia, your understanding and relation to either innercity hoodrats or rural rednecks is going to be extremely surface-level and influenced by corporate media. This is where social and geopolitical commentary becomes moot because you yourself are detached from what it actually means to be the result of a cultural phenomenon. Well, not entirely - there isn’t a death of culture, but a hermeneutical death (as Chad Haag has coined), as the interpretation of being and telos has been lost in industrial society. This is why academics seem to be more and more demotivating, and idle and ineffective in their approach to consistent interpretations of culture, nation, and people. It is because their dialectic has become a positive feedback loop of the same routine intake of suburbanite or cosmopolitan media and talking points and most importantly interpretation. They are choked out by their own lack of connection to an ecological milieu that isn’t McMansions, coffee shops, highways, and quirky gift shops.
This same criticism applies to environmentalists who want the same destructive lifestyle of being a self-indulgent cosmopolitan degenerate, but with the ego-gratifying ghost dance to the myth of progress by throwing mashed potatoes at priceless art. Anyone engaging in this behavior has lost a sense of what it means to be, and likewise, misinterpretation of an “us” and a “them” that is strictly cultural, is where you go to die. No, serious. You are dead when you can no longer interpret what it means to be in an identity sense. It means you no longer have a conception of “me” and “you.” You resolve this issue through the political, but that is not cutting to the core of “why” because it is not explaining anything past surface level intent of supposed rulers. It is childish to take the face value of central bankers, CEOs, and congressmen, and likewise to see their edicts as totalizing; likewise to see Hollywood as a cultural apparatus that is totalizing; likewise to see the consumer society as the end of man; likewise to treat technology or war as some easy predictive “out” for the right to become relevant once again.
Life is stranger than fiction, and treating it as anything more one-dimensional and easy is lazy, and in the long run, extraordinarily dangerous, as the misguider leads people astray. When the misguided, cynical rightist sees a foolish environmentalist, their immediate reaction is to say some prepackaged line; something to the tune of, “Green energy is DUMB!” or “Climate change is FAKE!” or whatever flavor of contrarianism they’re enjoying that week. This is the improper reaction. There is no bones about the issues of the myth of progress and technological society, so why are you acting like environmentalists need to be utterly disagreed with? There is a kernel of truth in what they say, and the most powerful antithesis to them isn’t to be in favor of the same technological society that they wish to have. What they want is inevitably what you want if you are after the same ends of a society built upon the assumption that energy can always be attained regardless of the inherent limitations to life itself. That is why those who are for oil, and those who are for green energy, all are ultimately woven from the same cloth of industrialism. Just different aesthetics and different types of cancer.
Nonetheless, this misunderstanding of the origin of misconceptions and the actual nature of man’s power and its extent has become extremely detrimental to the right in the long run. It is shooting itself in the foot by essentially becoming the mirror image of the left by misinterpreting all of reality and treating all of history as a tale of Machiavellian power struggles and in-group preferences; viewing reality as nothing more than Hobbesian philosophic materialism. This worldview is quite dimwitted and loses sight of the real problem at hand - secular, industrial society; not muh libs, not the blacks or the jews. Hermeneutics are important, and without seeing the importance of our ecological milieus and therefore the source of our cultures and interaction with limitations, the more we will become misguided mirror images of the left. In my opinion, the atheists and pagans on the right are a step away from being there. They will make themselves irrelevant from being imbued within their own ideological-hermeneutical heat death.
The real answer is in a connection back to where you are from in the real world, your rituals and practices, your spirituality, what you do to excercise your engagement with “being.” Hopeless reminiscences of realpolitik and the surface-level (and deeper) evaluations of policy and the instruments and their use therein, the antispiritual engagement with systematizing all aspects of life, and imbuing powerful sources of governance all miss the ultimate point to what such nebulous dialectical engagements are wishing to achieve. It is founded in disengagement from what is fake and simulated, and reengagement with what is real and wholesome. This is why I stress - ludditism is not a philosophy, but rather having security in your culture’s legitimacy and its social claims is. This is why ecophilosophy, and not elite theory (nor environmentalism lol) is more of a legitimate answer to the question of power, its effects; the nature of actual culture, and interpretation of nation.
“No Limitation is simply a euphemism for No Being.”
Chad Haag