In the final part of his study, Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin draws disappointing conclusions about the state of modern society in the West and Russia's chances of salvation based on a substantive analysis of human nature.

Modernity through the eyes of tradition

Let us now turn to an absolutely different part of anthropology: the way in which the philosophy and science of the modern West present man, his essence, his nature. We almost always start with modern notions, which we take for granted ('progress is compulsory'), and through their prism we turn to other, e.g. pre-modernist, notions. With a certain degree of indulgence.

If this were the case, any religious anthropology, and particularly its eschatological section, would appear as a naive and arbitrary generalisation. But here is the interesting thing. If we look the other way and try to evaluate the anthropological theories of modernity through the eyes of a man of Tradition, a shocking picture will open up before us.

If history is the process of dividing mankind into sheep and goats, i.e. the actualisation through a sequence of steps proceeding from the freedom of choice of men in favour of the children of light or the children of darkness, then the last centuries of Western European civilisation, increasingly in retreat from God, religion, faith, Christianity and eternity, will appear as a continuous and growing process of sliding towards the abyss, a massive shift towards the Denitsa side, a conscious and structurally verified vector of direct struggle against God.

European modernity is the way of the goats, that is, the compulsive invitation to societies and peoples to become scapegoats at the Last Judgment. Western European civilisation of modernity has been built from the beginning on the rejection of religion: first through the relativisation of its teachings (deism) and then through outright dogmatic atheism.

Man is henceforth thought of as an independent material-psychic phenomenon, the bearer of rationality. God appears as an abstract hypothesis. In New Age culture, it is not God who creates man, but man invents 'God' for himself, in the naive quest to explain the origin of the world. With this approach, neither spiritual worlds nor angels have any place in existence, all spirituality is reduced to the human mind.

At the same time, the very act of creation and created eternity are rejected; consequently, the idea of the structure of time and history changes: Paradise and the Last Judgement are presented as 'naive myths' not worthy of any serious consideration. The appearance of man is described as a stage in the evolution of animal species and human history as a gradual social progress leading to ever more perfect forms of social organisation, with ever greater levels of comfort and technological development.

This image of the world and of man is so familiar to us that we seldom think about its origins or the assumptions on which it is based, but if we turn to them anyway, we see that it is a radical rejection of the ontology of salvation, a desire to categorically forbid man to create his being in the realm of eschatological sheep. The New Age paradigm turns its back on God and heaven and, consequently, moves inwards.

In religious topology, it is an unequivocal choice of hell, a slide into the abyss of Avaddon. Under the formally atheistic and secular world order, the image of the fallen angel is becoming increasingly clear. The devil has drawn mankind to himself throughout all phases of sacred history, starting from the earthly paradise. But it is only in modern times that he is able to take power over mankind and become the true 'prince of this world' and the 'god of this age'.

Postmodernity: the return of the devil

The transformation of anthropology in an overtly satanic sense is particularly evident in its later stages, in what is commonly referred to as the Postmodern. Here, New Age optimism is replaced by pessimism and humanism is discarded altogether.

If the New Age (Modern) rebelled against God, religion and sacredness, Postmodernism goes further and calls for the elimination of man (anthropocentrism), scientific rationality and the ultimate destruction of social institutions - states, families - through to the rejection of gender (gender politics) and the move towards transhumanism (transferring the initiative to artificial intelligence, creating chimeras and cyborgs through genetic engineering, etc.).

If in Modernity the movement towards the civilisation of the devil was planned and expressed in the dismantling of traditional society, Postmodernity takes this trend to its logical conclusion by directly implementing a programme for the final abolition of humanity.

This programme, as the triumph of materialism, is presented particularly vividly in the modern direction of Western philosophy - critical realism, or object-oriented ontology (OO).

It openly proclaims the dismantling of subjectivity and the appeal to the Outer Absolute (C. Meillas) as the ultimate foundation of reality. Moreover, many philosophers of this tendency directly identify the figure of the Outer Absolute with Satan or his counterparts in other religions - in particular, with the Zoroastrian Ahriman (see Reza Negarestani in this regard).

Thus, together, Modern and Postmodern represent a single tendency that aims to put humanity on the path of the rejected victim, of the scapegoat, and at the moment of the Last Judgement, which is denied, to plunge it into the abyss of irreversible damnation.

The denial of religious anthropology and its eschatological apotheosis already contain a programme of scapegoating, and as secular culture takes root, develops and becomes explicit, especially in postmodernism and transhumanism, this programme becomes explicit and transparent. We can say, simplifying, that first the New Age mocks the existence of God and the devil, rejecting the existence of the vertical as the axis of creation, and then, in Postmodernity, the devil and the lower half of the vertical return and make themselves fully known.

However, there is no longer a God (God is dead, Nietzsche exclaimed, we killed him) who can help humanity. Discarded at an earlier stage, this remains an indisputable argument in Postmodernism. There is only the devil leading humanity down the broad path of damnation, cynically (Satan likes to joke) called 'progress’.

The Armageddon of our hearts

If we now combine these two perspectives, eschatological anthropology and the conceptions of man in modernity and especially in postmodernity, we obtain a rather voluminous picture. It will become clear that we are in the final phase of the end times, in the immediate vicinity of the moment of the Last Judgement. There is nothing arbitrary or speculative in this statement. On the vertical plane of the world, humanity is in this position at every point in its history: the Last Judgement and the resurrection of the dead are always close to God and are present at every moment and in every place of life.

In the big picture, however, as far as mankind is concerned, this event occurs once and for all: when the two dimensions, the vertical and the horizontal, meet in the most complete and unadulterated way. If at the great judgement there will be many people who are not at all prepared for this, who have even been brought up with the idea that nothing like this can happen, because only matter and its derivatives exist, they may find themselves among those who will be sent to the abyss.

Especially those who, by succumbing to the hypnosis of progress, will go so far down the road of dehumanisation that they will completely lose touch with their own human nature, and thus with the possibility of choosing the good side, which is always possible when dealing with humans - however difficult this choice may be in certain circumstances. But when the transhumanist project is fully realised and humanity has irreversibly migrated into the zone of post-humanity (what modern futurologists call the moment of the singularity), severing ties with its nature, peace and history will come to an end, as a witness will be removed from the centre of reality.

It will not be a vacuum, but the display of the eternal creation and the angelic vertical in its entirety: it will be the time of the Second Coming, the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgement. Until this time has arrived, the division of humanity into sheep and goats takes on a particularly intense dramatic expression. More and more people become "children of darkness" and turn away from faith in the true light of God. Opposed to them are the 'children of light' who, despite everything, remain faithful to God, to the Saviour, to the vertical.

Both of them, consciously or unconsciously, although the figure of the angel has long since disappeared from the holistic picture of the world, find themselves very close to the angelic poles, separated from eternity and the end of the world as far from each other as possible. For goats, this means that they literally become possessed by the devil, turning into his helpless tool and losing all autonomy.

This is what it means to become 'children of darkness', scapegoats, a sacrifice rejected by God. But it is also extremely difficult to remain faithful to heaven and light in such an extreme situation, and this desperate position of the 'little flock' needs the special support and protection of God and the dedicated angels. At a certain point, the battle of the eternally righteous angels coincides with the last war of mankind, in which the 'children of light' clash directly with the 'children of darkness' in the imminence of the Last Judgement. This is exactly what the Bible describes as the battle of Armageddon. It is impossible to describe it in purely earthly rational terms, because it includes the ultimate volumes of theological, metaphysical and ontological content.

VO (in English should be TO, true ontology, truth-oriented ontology) has the most direct relationship with eschatological anthropology. No one knows its exact moment, not least because it is not an event located in time, but that hard-to-imagine state of the world in which time collides directly with eternity and, as a result, eternity ceases to be the time it was before. Here begins a 'future age' that faces the vertical of existence. All this has already happened and is happening now, but will be fully revealed in the course of Revelation, which in Greek means "revelation", "discovery".

The hidden becomes manifest. This is how the mystery of man's duality is resolved, and every man becomes a direct and direct participant in it - because the front line does not only run through earthly geography, but strictly through our hearts.

Part I -  Dugin's guideline: The Anthropological Problem in Eschatology

Part II - Dugin's guideline: The Dualism of the Spiritual World

Part III - Dugin's guideline: The final division between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness

Alexander Dugin

Translation by Lorenzo Maria Pacini