Against the Theory of Everything

The real problem with totalitarianism that almost no-one talks about

“Your theory has no answer to this question!” Actually, it does, allow me to explain. “Oh yeah, well what about this other question?” That’s outside the scope of my theory, and thus not relevant. “You don’t have an answer, I win!” Sir, I’m an embryologist, and you just asked me a question that only a geologist could answer.

Threw you off there, didn’t I? That was deliberate. One of the problems with ideologues is that they can never take off their ideological lens, and so they adopt a world view that, by necessity, has an answer for everything. Even if the doctrine of that ideology does not explicitly answer a particular question, the over-arching principle is usually vague enough that it can be applied to any circumstance. There are two creeds that all ideologues abide by:

If you abandon your principles when it is convenient, you’re not pragmatic, you’re just unprincipled.

It is not possible to ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer.

The first allows to ideologue to stubbornly hold on to a position even if all of their arguments supporting it are proven wrong. The second allows the ideologue to remain in their intellectual bubble and discover the answer to any query simply through pontification. Ideologues are gnostic, not in the sense that they abide by the religion of Gnosticism (though plenty of them do), but in the sense that they worship knowledge, think they know everything, and any knowledge they don’t already possess may simply “reveal itself” to them because of their anointed status. It should come as no surprise that ideologues are also habitual credential worshippers, and frequently rely on the argument from authority fallacy, which has positive and negative versions: the first is “I know what I’m talking about because I have credentials (or I’m parroting someone who has credentials), and the second is “you don’t know what you’re talking about because you don’t have credentials.” The great irony is that any individual with credentials will be dismissed as a quack if they disagree with the ideologue, and also that ideologues will jump at the chance to point out logical fallacies and even minor mistakes in an argument. Arguing with an ideologue requires a degree of perfection that only the most seasoned debaters have achieved. But enough about why live debates are generally a waste of time.

The abrupt switching of topics in a debate may be bad form, and a good debate moderator won’t allow it, but if one is arguing for a theory of everything, then there is no such thing as a topic change; everything is all one topic. When a particular ideology inevitably reaches the topic of politics, it makes everything political. The totalising philosophy is the religion of the totalitarian state. Every form of totalitarianism is its own state religion, and as much as I hate to say it, it would appear that we now live in a post-totalitarian world. The debate has shifted from “what should the concern of the state be” to “how should the state concern itself with this matter,” and the answer of “it should not” is rarely entertained. Not only that, but all forms of totalitarianism have been defeated save one. If the state is us, then all of our concerns are the state’s concerns, and there is no argument against that. Checkmate, classical liberals! The eschaton has been immanentised, our task now is to see that it is not permanentised. We have reached the End of History, or at least what a certain portion of the population believes to be the end of history, and what that now means is the perceived achievement of a new enlightenment; everything worth learning has been learned, everything that can be invented has been invented. When once we were told to trust those who seek the truth and doubt those who claim to have already found it, now it is the opposite. That which was learned through open-minded inquiry in the first place is now a ruthlessly defended dogma. This applies even to things that are of no political consequence, such as the composition of the surface of the sun.¹ Nothing is neutral, everything that anyone discusses is now a matter of utmost consequential importance whether they want it to be or not; everyone must have an answer for every question, and so it would seem that we must all have our own theory of everything. Now is not the time for uncertainty.

But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear: - 1 Peter 3:15 (KJV)

And we have been here before. As Plato said, the price of apathy is to be ruled by evil men. Historically, this has been used as a statist cudgel to force people to get involved in politics, but I would like to provide you with an alternative perspective: apathy need not refer merely to action, but intellectual and spiritual development. Rejecting base materialism, especially while still acknowledging the realities of the material, is not easy. Few tread that path, and fewer still dare to tread it alone, instead relying on guides of questionable reliability. The totalising philosophers, those least reliable of guides, did not count on one thing: our own Akashic Records. I am being slightly hyperbolic, but the knowledge now available to anyone is so abundant to anyone who has the ability to teach themselves that it is effectively limitless. For now, those who have brought about the End of History may enjoy the material advantage, but those of us who oppose them enjoy a metaphysical advantage, for we need not look too far to find truths such as this:

There are only two possible forms of control: one internal and the other external; religious control and political control. They are of such a nature that when the religious barometer rises, the barometer of political control falls and likewise, when the religious barometer falls, the political barometer, that is political control and tyranny, rises. That is the law of humanity, a law of history. If civilised man falls into disbelief and immorality, the way is prepared for some gigantic and colossal tyrant, universal and immense. - Juan Donoso Cortés

Perhaps the original Gnostics were on to something with their own concept of enlightenment, though they are hardly the only ones to have such a concept. There are, indeed, certain universals throughout human cultures that have endured, whereas the aberrations have seldom lasted. This is a cyclical process, as “rejecting the ways of the world” has usually meant a rejection of all the old ways, all old conventions. The trick to discerning a true enlightenment from a false one is discerning which one demands a rejection not just of materialism, but the material world itself. The promise of a “heaven on Earth” is one such indication, and history has shown us that no religion offering such a promise has lasted very long. Those that profess two distinct and separate realms though, they have all persisted. I am not here to tell you what is true, that is for you to figure out, but there is definite pattern when it comes to stable and lasting cultures: they all discourage degeneracy, though what constitutes degeneracy varies slightly, and they reject the materialist mindset.

Materialism functions as its own theory of everything, flatly rejecting anything immaterial as “not real.” But we do not live in a material reality, we live in an objective reality. Emotions are irrational and immaterial, yet they are objectively real. Any society that ignores those emotions and other irrational incentives cannot endure. The pursuit of a purely rational society is one of those false enlightenments that has not only created a totalitarian state in every thought experiment, but completely fallen flat every time it has been attempted. Even the totalitarian states that exist today are still held together by some metaphysical element out of simple necessity, however tenuous that integrity may be. The chief mistake and the source of all cognitive dissonance inherent to such a state is the conflict between the purely rational materialism of the bureaucracy and the metaphysics of the state’s guiding philosophy.

We can move forward and escape the nihilistic instrumentality being prepared for us, but it requires an open mind, a wider perspective, and a revival of the old ways that the false enlightenment has suppressed. A revolt against the modern world need not mean throwing away everything we’ve learned and built, only throwing away the mindset that the machine requires us to have. Yes, that was an Evangelion reference immediately followed by an Evola reference. Get used to it. Na shledanou!

1. This is a real example. Pierre-Marie Robitaille, the co-inventor of the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine has something of a passion for astronomy, and decided to point the instrument he helped develop at the surface of the sun. His research suggests that the sun does, contrary to the nearly 150-year-old standard model, have a definite surface, and that it is made of liquid metallic hydrogen. Is he right? I don’t know, but the fact that none of his critics have bothered to pick apart his research and demonstrate any flaws in his methods, instead fixating on irrelevant topics such as his apparent subscription to the long-debunked electric universe model, are profoundly telling. If you can stomach that utter rubbish heap of regime propaganda called RationalWiki, check out the article about him for his full list of anti-establishment sins.