The Fourth Political Theory

beyond left and right but against the center

The escalation of tension in Russian-Ukrainian relations after the conflict in the Sea of Azov demands analysis.

The formal side of the conflict is obvious: Poroshenko is not capable of winning the upcoming elections, so he arranged a provocation to impose state of emergency and disrupt them. That`s how Russian experts have commented on the situation, with a smile. This analysis is correct to a certain degree, but the decision is not spontaneous: Poroshenko has a plan, and it is more serious than some momentary trick.

If the current escalation gradually calms down, then martial law will eventually be repealed, and elections will be held. Poroshenko will look like an idiot because the “Russian threat” will not be enough to improve his popularity. He must have another plan in mind. The only thing that would make Poroshenko's action logical, is a deeper orientation toward war with Russia. If such a war does not occur, Poroshenko will only have worsened his situation. Poroshenko needs more than escalation, he needs war.

First of all, the fact that populist movements are directed against the political elite as a whole, without making a distinction, whether it is right or left-wing, is striking. This is the 'uprise of the periphery of society against its center'. In his famous work, the American sociologist Christopher Lasch (1932–1994) designated the form of government that prevails in modern Western society as the “elite revolution”.

At the beginning of the XXth century, it was customary to follow José Ortega y Gasset's discourse about the “revolt of the masses”, whose increasing influence on politics threatened, it seemed, to destroy Western culture - the European Logos.

But Christopher Lasch noted a new political trend: it is the elites that are destroying culture and European Logos today. These new western elites, who have reached the pinnacle of power only by their resourcefulness and immense will to power, are much worse and more destructive than the masses.

The task of describing Turanian civilization in the recent volume of Noomakhia was inseparable from the fact that Turan is gone. The book was therefore a reconstruction of a past society, an archaeological volume, in which Turanian civilization had to be restored bit by bit on the basis of archaeological research, linguistic analysis, what we know about ethnology and ethnography, and essentially artificial methods.

A few Turanian peoples can be named. For example, the Ossetians are the last heirs of the Sarmatians, there are the various Pashtun tribes, and the direct descendants of the Indo-European nomads in the Great Steppe. There are also descendants in Nuristan, the Kalash in Pakistan and Afghanistan, enclaves of direct Turanian cultures and Indo-Europeans nomadic tribes. But, of course, this is largely a conditional reconstruction.

Every thing is what it is thanks to its borders. After all, it is they that separate it from another thing. This distinction carries the most important meaning of the concept of the border not just for international law, defense doctrine, or the structuring of a country’s armed forces, but also for philosophy as such. The border is not just an instrument of philosophy, but its essence, seeing as the highest philosophical concept – transcendence -in Latin literally means “that what lies on the far side of the border”.

The border externally reflects that which lies inside it, while simultaneously confining the essence of the thing in its confrontation with other things. The border is something sacred. The ancient Greeks knew a special god, Terminus, whose name meant ‘limit’, ‘border’. This was not just the guardian-deity of borders, but a “border-deity”, a kind of special, sacred concept that played a central role in the worldviews of the ancient Indo-European peoples.

In magic, there also exists the important concept of the “Guardian of the Threshold”, a special being that is located at the intersection of two worlds: the beyond and the present, the vulgar and subtle, that of life and that of death, the waking world and the dreaming world. This is the very same ancient Terminus, with only slight modifications.

This is also where some of his most useful observations are found—his discussion of potlatch, for example, the ethnic destruction of property to demonstrate power, can be very useful in understanding the tendency of certain demographics to riot as a means of demonstrating or celebrating power. Civilized societies, of course, consider such riots as counter-productive because when a fully realised narod riots, it is usually an expression of frustrated powerlessness, not a demonstration of social power. Dugin enables us to draw qualitative distinctions having nothing to do with environment or circumstance between the bread riots preceding the French Revolution and the Ferguson and Baltimore riots following the death of Black criminals in the United States or the more recent riots in places like Johannesburg. Another interesting observation is his understanding of slavery as a function that only higher civilization, the narod, is truly capable, since slavery creates irreconcilable contradictions within the structure of the ethnos. The primitive ethnos has no category for a slave, since the balance of the ethnos requires the “other” to be an absolute evil to be destroyed, while a slave is allowed to exist and remain “other” to the ethnos (he observes that the Egyptians referred to slaves as “living dead” for this reason – those who by all right should have been deprived of life but instead were kept alive to become tools for ethnic labour). The necessary connexion of slavery with complex societies and higher thought is rich fodder for Reactionary thought in particular.

Where right-wing liberals and conservatives preach “you can’t do anything against the progression of modernity, it’s only possible to gradually influence the process”, Alexander Dugins Ethnos and Society tells you the exact opposite: When one realizes the fact, that there are still ethnic societies around this planet in the Amazon, that the Muslim communities of the Middle East still live in the community of their narod, that in Russia and India the modern nation state is just a thin layer, then it’s obvious that the decay of modernity is just a possibility and not our destiny. If we want to continue the suicide of Europe and follow modernity to its conclusion and change nothing. But if we want to restore our tradition and ensure the existence of our people, we have to radically change our habits, morals and our way of life.

Whereas The Fourth Political Theory tells us to return to pre-modernity in order to protect our Dasein (narod), Ethnos and Society shows us how the preconditions for a return to pre-modernity work. Therefore, Ethnos and Society, is not only important to better understand the work of professor Dugin, but also in order to fight post-modernity to the last blood. If one doesn’t let oneself be scared off by the theoretical depth of this book, it’ll greatly improve one’s understanding of the current processes of globalization, decadence and the Great Replacement. This book is exactly what all the right-wing populist parties in Europe would need in order to change their policies of fake populism and realize what is really necessary to revive European identity.

We are playing the same melody, if we`re not happy, we can`t say `stop` here, it`s impossible. We should go this route to the beginning – to the first note of this symphony. We should ask now: who is the author and began this process of urbanization, who has created trains, liberalism, democracy, progress, missile, computer, nuclear synthesis. Who is the real author? And that is essential: because it was human decision, that wasn`t kind of `natural process`. In one moment of the history we`ve decided to go that way, and now we can just slow it down or accelerate. But why we don`t ask ourselves: are we going the right direction from the beginning? Was this decision right one? We should go back to this moment, to the beginning of this melody – that is my idea. It could be too late, to wake up with robots around, perfect tax-payers, making democratic decisions, sending each other SMS messages from robot to robot... The conversation between robots is already possible, in neuro-network the special language is possible, during the conversation two computer have recently created the language without knowledge of the operator. So, they will replace us easily.

Cold war was the confrontation between two ideological camps. Now there is no more clear distinction in the field of ideology, rather between two versions of the same liberal-democracy – advanced in the case of USA and EU and delayed in the case of Russia. So we would presume that should reduce considerably the tension. But it is not the case. So we have to search the reason of growing tensions in other field than ideology. The most likely the reasons of the “new cold war” are this time geopolitical. But it is legitimate to ask the question: That it was not in reality an ideological cold war between capitalism and socialism the moment of much more broader historically context the moment of Great War of Continents.

This GWoC is the very basis of geopolitical understanding of history – Sea Power against Land Power, Eurasia against Atlantica. If we can agree on that everything becomes logical and clear. There is the everlasting battle between two types of civilizations – dynamic (progressive, merchant)  Sea civilization and static (conservative, heroic) Land civilization: Carthage against Rome, Athens against Sparta.

The US, UK, and France’s first missile airstrikes were rather improvisational and symbolic in nature.

Iranian, Russian, and Hezbollah forces were not attacked. Assad did not suffer strategically. The Syrian opposition, which expected much more, did not gain any serious advantages. Mass demonstrations in support of Assad are being held in Damascus.

Russian commentators have pointed out that France itself did not launch any missiles - all those launched were by British and American military forces.

Judging by the fact that all the missiles were launched at targets at a careful distance from the location of Russian soldiers, it seems that Mattis’ line won out in the US, as opposed to that of Bolton, who has insisted on directly attacking Iranians and Russians.

Man, as the cosmic mediator, is situated on the border between both worlds, between Tradition (above) and modernity (below). He is always straddling this border, eternally, in both the era of Tradition’s predominance, and in the periods in which modernity temporarily wins. In his eidetic, eternal dimension, man himself is this border, and the movement of his spirit, his thought, his ways and methods of philosophizing, outline the content of that which lies on either side. Through his choice of orientation, spiritual or corporeal, man constitutes the time, the epoch, the age in which he lives.

Thus, residing in the “dark age”, the Kali-Yuga, is neither a fatality, a punishment, nor something arbitrary, but the Night’s testing of the grain of eternity, of the divine center that comprises the essence of man. In other words, no matter how far away the Golden Age might be, a kernel of it remains within man as hope, as opportunity, as a fulcrum, which can always be found in refusing to unconditionally and fatalistically (or unconsciously) accept the conditions of the Iron Age. Time is an illusion. The historial is no more than a sign, a metaphor that can be deciphered in different ways and appealed to freely. We ourselves choose the time in which we live. And if man is born in the modern world and in the West’s zone of influence, this means that he is included in the profound plans of eternity, and this reflects his mission and fate. Modernity is in Tradition, and Tradition is in modernity. But in different sections of the vertical world, their proportions adjust to being polar: in Heaven (Tradition) there is only a drop of hell (the Biblical serpent that first appeared in paradise), and in hell there is a drop of Heaven. But this is enough to stretch a semantic thread of sacred history, or hiérohistoire (in Henry Corbin’s formulation) between these drops.

Questions of geography are very tightly linked to psychological archetypes. Every people, every civilization, every culture sees and understands space in its own unique way. There always exists a kind of code that serves as a distinctive trait of the national territorial myth.

Reconstructions made by modern historians of religions, sociologists, and anthropologists allow us to speak of an entire science (sacred geography) that predetermined our ancestors’ perception of the surrounding world in its spatial dimension. The norms of this sacred geography formed the foundations of epics, biographies, legends, traditions, myths, and fairy tales.

As the rational aspects of life developed, this sacred geography became part of the unconscious, thus determining deep psychic archetypes, rudimentary reactions, and the typology of slips and dreams. Having disappeared from the ancient stage, the geography of the myth passed into the sphere of subconscious reactions; however, this does not mean that it lost its hypnotic power.

There are peoples who visualize their homeland, their country, as an island. Others see it as a plain hemmed in by mountains. Still others see it as a space between two or more great rivers, or as an uninterrupted mountain range, or as a coastline, and so on and so forth. It is on the basis of this sacred geography of the homeland that an idea of the entire cosmos is formed.

Moscow is not just a great city, not just a great capital, not just the symbol of a gigantic Empire. Moscow is a basic concept of theology and geopolitics.

Moscow has been called the “Third Rome” not merely as a metaphor or self-indulgent manifestation of purely national pride. Everything goes much, much deeper. Orthodoxy knows the special teaching of the “three Romes.” The first was imperial Rome before Christ, the same state on whose territory the Son of God set foot on earth. This Rome was a universal reality that united enormous spaces and manifold peoples and cultures in civilizational unity.

The Second Rome, the New Rome, was Constantinople, the capital of the Roman Empire, which had accepted the blessing of holy christening. From that point forward, the Roman Empire acquired a strictly ecclesiastical, deeply Christian meaning. The Orthodox Emperor (Basileus), as head of the Empire, was identified with the mysterious person from the Apostle Paul’s Second Epistle to the Thessalonians: the “withholder”, “katechon”, who in the end times is fated to prevent the “coming of the son of perdition.”

The coming of Christ is a central event in world history. Everything that preceded it was a presage. What followed it was the universalization of the Gospel. And, in the Orthodox conception of the world, the center of history in the Christian era was Rome, the New Rome, Constantinople and its ruler, the Orthodox Basileus.

Heidegger himself later called Sein und Zeit the most old-fashioned book ever written. We believe that in the way our economically driven political speech develops, we experience that in Dutch ‘ de wal het schip keert’ , meaning literally that the shore is the only thing that can stop the ship. We are caught up in a form of management. The thought of an Eurasian continent as a mediator between the Atlantic and the Asian might for a Dutch metaphysician be felt as the relieve of a burden. Heidegger saw his own mission in preparing European thinking for a confrontation with the East.

Bringing the geopolitical question back in the philosophical and political agendas means also the necessity of posing the question of the relation between the two. After all the question of politics is again the Schmittian question of friend or foe. When we would be so bold to identify the foe with the antichrist, Heideggers remark in the black notebooks spring to mind: ‘In relation to liberalism the antichrist is a small boy’ .

To work on a new political theory is a matter of great importance, but also a thing that requires great care. Perhaps this care, Sorge, for Heidegger in Sein und Zeit the unity of Dasein, is the driving force itself.