Finally, we will look at the politics of the right. The realm of Woman corresponds to the National, in which the great man merely serves the people which the Mother birthed him into; the realm of Man corresponds to the Spiritual, where the great man seeks the eternal and only the eternal; and the double movement which lets man retake Woman and connect her to the eternal will of Being corresponds to the Imperial, where the great man retakes the people, and takes it upon himself to be the one who brings the order and values founded in Being down to live in the flesh of the temporary world. By going from the National to the Imperial in this dialectic, nothing of value is lost, but everything is gained.
All that has been said previously about Woman and Man can be analogously said about the National and the Spiritual, and I will not repeat myself unnecessarily, but suppose that the reader has read the previous parts. It will then suffice only to show that the National truly and fully corresponds to the realm of Woman and matter, in order to make the analogy complete. The quickest way to do that is to take a look at Mein Kampf, not because all Nationals are National Socialists, but because Hitler is the one who has pushed the National conception of the world furthest, and thus makes its fundamental essence the clearest.
Firstly, the National conception of the world is that man is solely birthed by and into the community of his blood, (or ethnicity or country in the softer versions of nationalism) hence by the great Mother of Nature. Secondly, he has everything he need by this birth, and to fulfil his existence, he only needs to act ethically, that is to sacrifice himself for the community born by the Mother and return to her.
That the first claim is true – that is that the Mother is the sole source of the National man – is clear enough in Mein Kampf, as Hitler says that National Socialism is an ideology of life, as man is given life by Nature, and Nazism struggled for man’s place in Nature – that is, to earn the favour of the great Woman. He does not ascribe life to the Father, the eternal and undying Being which is at the core of every single being in the cosmos, but only to the Mother.
Thus he fails to see that Woman does not give life, but death, and the National conception of the world will not reach higher than death. He claims that the weak man is worthless, as he only fades into the oblivion of death when Nature rejects him. But this is of course also the fate of the strong man sooner or later, and the fact that the strong man survives another day, that he has large lands and many children – that is, that he has won the temporary favour of Nature – does not give him life and value; for the essence of Nature and Woman is not life, but death. As said earlier, if the strong man does not know Being he cannot create any real value or order, he cannot live a really true life, and his ideology is only waiting for the inevitable day when Nature drags it down again into the chaos whence it sprung.
That the second claim is true is clear from Hitler’s view of the state, as he sets man’s duty to carry out the will of the state, while the sole purpose of the state is to make the people prosper, hence man shall serve and return to the community born by the Mother. The National man is merely ethical, and only works for the good of the common; this is all man needs according to Hitler, as he sees the sacrifice for one’s birth to be the greatest deed a man can accomplish.
But as we discussed earlier, mere sacrifice, to deny oneself for a larger material category, is not in and of itself complete, for it lacks a spiritual movement. And if one believes oneself to be complete by one’s material birth, this upward movement towards the true essence of the world, towards Being, is impossible, as it requires a second birth or awakening in the sign of the Father. Hence the National conception can never leave the realm of Woman, can never take the spiritual step to the realm of Man that is needed in order to bring the eternal into the temporary world of Woman. Thus the sacrifice remains as a mere servitude to Woman and oblivion, even if it as an act is heroic and admirable. The state will not become the connection between the eternal and the temporary, but a mere provider of food, which must feed the swollen womb of Woman. And man will not be more than a drone, who in great pain and pleasure dies while fertilizing the great broodmother and the hive.
Stuck in the realm of Woman and matter, Hitler can only understand spirit by one of its material components, that is thought; and thus he equates the spiritual with the mere idea. Not only does this make what is eternal into a mere ghost of matter, ensuring it will be lost, but it also makes him confuse his mere ideals built upon Nature with eternity itself. But any such ideal is only a ghost or a fixed idea. He sees National Socialism as a spiritual movement, when it in reality is only a set of ideals, empty without eternity, meant to form man into a good servant of the great Mother – a servant willing to sacrifice himself for her.
The difference between the mere fixed ideas of the National and true spirit is very clear when one compares Nazi art with the ancient art, which the Nazis tried to emulate but never could, as they lacked the sublime movement towards the eternal which was the basis of the ancient art – indeed, of all true art. The countless sentimental paintings of nature, women and children are not real art, but rather pictures of the bared breast of Woman, which the National must serve, and the heroic sculptures are only a presentation of ideals and racial characteristics, showing the National the servant which Woman is thought to desire.
It is all a mere picture-making, a representation of that community which the Mother has birthed, while the ancient art depicted the real Olympian hero, that paradoxical individual greater than the common, who walked eternal in a short moment on the earth. The Nazi art is stereotypical, repetitive and stiff, while the ancients managed to show eternity in a variety of lifelike shapes; both in the old and bulky Herakles, as in the slender, almost feminine young man; both in the triumphal and unmovable power of a man who has achieved victory, as in the tragic and meaningless powerlessness of a man who cannot escape fate; and so on. For the ancient art had the ability to move upwards to the eternal, at the same time as it landed in the deeply personal fate of one hero; the art repeated the double leap of faith (or will) that the individual man must make himself, and that is why it was so great. It is also worth noting that by this authenticity, the ancient sculpture was not only able to strike eternity into those European features the Nazis yearned to depict, but also depict them with far greater life and beauty. Nothing of value is lost in the double movement of the Imperial, but everything is won.
One might object that the National Socialist art was short-lived and could not reach its true potential, but the quantity of time itself does not change the quality of an idea, and if a set of fixed ideas, falsely based on Nature rather than the eternal, is the sole source of art, then it can never reach the greatness of the ancient art. Were National Socialism to produce true art, it would no longer be National Socialism, as it would have left the National realm behind. Christian Europe (which was Imperial, but under Christ as king of kings, and not an actual emperor), when they rediscovered the ancient art, could create their own art which almost reached to be equal to the ancients’ art, as they knew eternity and the Sky Father in their own God, just as the ancients knew them in Zeus and Jupiter, but such a reclaiming would be impossible in the mere National realm, as it cannot know eternity other than as a mere word.
The National conception of the world cannot create true order or value, as it itself is only founded on the realm of Woman, and as such, it must sooner or later face the moment when death resurfaces, and annihilates all ideology and struggle. This happened to National Socialism when it lost the war, and Hitler, when faced with that moment Kierkegaard calls man’s greatest – when man has reached the limit and can only collapse on himself – could not take a leap of faith, but only commit suicide. For when the pseudo-order of Nazism returned to the chaos of Nature that had birthed it, only death remained, and Hitler could only step into this oblivion as well. Death was all, and it was only a question of reaching it gracefully by one self, or as a spectacle.
The moment of collapse became a moment of resignation for Hitler, and not a moment of affirmation, and this is what makes him differ from the martyr, who transforms the collapse into the ultimate dual leap of faith. The world and fate overcome the martyr as he enters his garden of Gethsemane, but as a great lightning bolt eternity treads before him, and when his enemies arrive, he stands there silent before them, completely powerless yet completely powerful in his faith and will, as if to say: Nothing can hurt me! The moment of the martyr’s death, his horrible spectacle, reaches eternity, and strikes the world below him as an undying and Imperial sign of Truth. But Hitler could not walk the Way of Grief towards a Golgotha of Germany, not because he was weak or a coward, for he absolutely was not, but because he had nothing left to walk for, because he did not know Being. He had gladly and bravely sacrificed himself in the trenches and on the streets for the great Mother Germany, but Nature changed its fancy, and all the values and order his movement had built on her was swept away. That Hitler did not become a martyr, that he with his ideology had to sink into the death and dust of Nature, shows the inevitable futility of the National conception and its inability to create value; and the Nationals of today will not succeed either, regardless of whether they try to resurrect National Socialism, or create a new movement.
It is only the Imperial conception of life that can create value, that can repeat the paradoxical movement of Being itself when it chose to love Becoming and create the world, and thus let man reach the life he was meant to live.
By Imperial we of course do not mean a state which simply rules over many peoples, instead of one people as the National state does, but a state which makes a dual movement, which faithfully throws itself against the eternal, while landing in the temporary as a concrete power, thus creating that true order which makes life into the image of God himself. Even a state only consisting of one people can, and should, be Imperial, and so can a chiefdom, a family, and even a single individual. Yes, family – as an order and not merely a useful union or a sentimentality based on closeness – only exists as far as it is created by the Imperial will of the Patriarch, and so a true chiefdom is born from the Imperial will of the Chief, and not the tribe, and a Nation only exists as the Imperial will of a Leader or King, and not that of the people. Any order which is not based on this will is based on mere matter, and as such is only a spook or a fixed idea. To be Imperial means to reach for the eternal, and makes it a living manifestation in the part of the world that is one’s own; and when a man does this, his domain is Imperial, no matter how large or small.
As a man must make that double leap which reaches for eternity and lands in the concrete love of a woman, re-creating that unity of Being and Becoming which is the metaphysical truth of the world, so any politics which does not want to be a crippled and incomplete servant of matter must be Imperial. The Imperial rule shines as the greatest possible movement of mankind; it is like the will of the great artist, which strikes into the slumbering bronze of the earth, and makes it a vessel for his great genius and a shape of eternity. The National man claims that the state is subordinated to the people, as the state rises from the people, as a mere subset of it, and the people outlive the state. But so does the statue rise from the bronze, and the bronze will outlive the statue for ages to come, when it inevitably returns to the dark earth where it came from, melted, broken and forgotten. Yet it is easy to see that the time it was a statue is greater than its entire existence as mere bronze: for a short time it was more than bronze. And so the Imperial is the great artist of the state, and his short rule over the people is greater than the whole existence of the people as mere blood.
Being has chosen to be born in the world of Becoming, again and again taking the incomplete form of a man, into an unending, eternal recurrence of absurd and paradoxical existence. And so every new man and every new generation, find themselves in this paradox of existence, and must again embrace and overcome that absurdity, and repeat the giant leap of faith and will which reaches both the eternal and the temporary, fulfilling the love of Being to Becoming.
The great freedom and responsibility to make this leap of faith falls upon us to repeat, in our own time, as it has fallen upon every generation to do before us, and until there are men who can do this, there will never be a true Imperial spirit, never a true order, true values or true Tradition again. For this is what Tradition truly is, an Imperial spirit, the act which reaches for the eternal, and at the same time lands in the temporal as a power.
The Imperial man both wholly loves the people he rules, and wholly sacrifices them to the eternal for himself, like Abraham loved and sacrificed Isaac, thus winning them again, but as eternal Truth, and not as mere Nature.
The Imperial takes the long and frightful journey to return to his people and his homeland, like Odysseus sailed back to Ithaka from the glorious shores of Troy, and there he will trade his eternal life for a death at his home, so he can be an eternal order at the side of his woman. Not because he, like the National man, knows nothing other than woman, but because he loves her like God loved the world, when he chose to be born as a man, and gave the world his eternal order.
And the Imperial man embraces the great paradox, that the individual becomes greater than the common weal of which he is a part, when he has accomplished that fabled movement which both reaches the eternal and wins the temporary again. He embraces the fact that any Imperial movement can only be founded upon those greater than the common, and must perish with them. But unlike National Socialism, which could only return to the dust and death of Nature with Hitler when he lost the war, an Imperial movement is eternal: not in the sense that it will live on forever afterwards, as a ghost in paradise, as an undead abstraction and idea, but in the sense that in the short time it lived – in the short time the Imperial man chose to give his life to the lands and people he loved, the short time he loved like God did when God chose to die as a man – in that short time it was infinite, paradoxically greater than the whole history of the world altogether.
Reaching to the essence of the true Right. Much food for thought; thanks