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John Dunn
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Archive
Awakening from the nightmare of liberal democracy
Wednesday, 20 Nov 2013
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Louis-Gabriel-Amboise de Bonald
Those awakening to even half a political consciousness are discovering that the Western Enlightenment, liberal and democratic tradition has been founded on a chimera. No part of this tradition, particularly since the so-called Enlightenment, has any legitimate religious, moral or philosophical foundation.
The emergence of the ‘free individual’,within a cultural context of equal rights, has been a retrogressive development rather than progressive.
Once emerged fully with the Enlightenment, the individualist ego felt the need to:
- communicate directly with God - leading to Luther and Protestantism.
- be free to inhabit a secular economic sphere - leading to the practice of usury and financial gain free of any moral constraint.
- be satisfied and fulfilled - leading to hedonism and nihilism
- assert its individuality and identity - leading to political, civil and cultural human rights
- assert its equality before the law - leading to equal rights
- rule - leading to democracy.
But the individual as understood in the west is a chimera, starting with the wrong turn taken by Plato and developed in subsequent centuries by Plotinus, Augustine, Descartes, individualistic artistic perspective, science, the Enlightenment, humanism and, finally by democratic liberalism.
Should not our notion of progress, therefore, founded as it is on individualism, Protestantism, usury, nihilism, human rights, equality and democracy, be reassessed?
Have not progress and the concept of evolution that emerged with it been falsified?
Is Evola’s concept of involution the most appropriate descriptor of history after all?
Perhaps it is now time to look back, at least to the pre-Enlightenment era, for alternatives to the liberal democracy that could be said to have stolen the very being from what it is to be human.
We have certainly arrived at a point, described prophetically by Louis-Gabriel-Amboise de Bonald nearly 200 years ago, at which “every passion that is not for money, honour, or pleasure is called unreasonable and fanatical”.
Is it not time, therefore, to be unreasonable and fanatical?
John Dunn.
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