There is a bit of the Bhagavad Gita that is rather famous even outside of India. Arjuna is faced with killing his own brothers and cousins who fight for the opposite side in a great battle. Krishna leads him to understand that this conflict is inevitable, and just. Battle is joined, and the fight is not only righteous, but a moral necessity for both sides. Each man on either side has a duty which flows from his allegiances and oaths, and it would be a sin to back down from these. The fight is righteous, because it is in defence of divinely ordained property rights and must be joined, though it will be painful – the opponents are family. Vishnu offers help to both sides – troops for the acquisitionist Kauravas and divine council for the Pandava. But while hatred was discouraged, they were still bound by duty to kill one another.
A recurring feature of soldiers’ stories is a feeling of mutual respect. Men who spent their best years trying to kill each other often feel a desire to meet and break bread with their old enemies. I have seen this in old South African veterans of the Border War with Angola, too. White vs black? Not in the eyes of the soldiers. To them, it was Christianity vs communism. The war is over – why bear ill will, when we can all grow in admiration of each other’s bravery? In an anecdote which is often told as a means of illustrating the absurdity of war, in the Christmas of 1914, German and English soldiers shared a Christmas celebration, calling ceasefire to light candles and sing songs of praise, breaking bread one last time before tearing each other to shreds with hot flying lead after breakfast. Live and let live, until the shrapnel takes us.
In this, I am reminded of the Vietnamese. The marks of their determination to destroy the American forces lives on in the remains of the Củ Chi tunnels, spanning thousands of kilometers, were begun in 1940, and continued to be excavated and used as living quarters, barracks, bomb shelters and transport routes right up until the American retreat in 1975. An entire generation passed in those tunnels. People were born, lived and died in the darkness, sacrificing an unbelievable quantity and quality of life for the defence of their cause. The tunnels were begun against the French, and legend has it that some soldiers had no idea the enemy had changed, fighting the outsiders as if engaged in an eternal battle from which there was no alternative but to fight. Naturally, the tactics were tyrannical, and soldiering is hardly what can be called a matter of choice. But that is sort of the point. A recurring feature of Vietnam war stories is that American and Vietnamese soldiers often bear no ill will for each other. By most accounts from tourists (admittedly not the most reliable source), the ordinary Vietnamese bear little ill will to Americans either. It is generally understood that war has a certain character, and that a duty to fight fearlessly is fully compatible with respect for the enemy as a human being.
Whatever you may think this story illustrates, it is a universal source of fascination today. One can hardly imagine such a phenomenon manifesting its presence between two modern partisan forces. Carl Schmitt, and many others, particularly Lenin and Mao, have put something of a coffin lid on the idea of a soldier’s honour. Partisan warfare penetrates every dimension of life, and makes one an enemy to the other party in every element of existence, a spy, a general, a kamikaze and an infantryman all in one. There can be no neutral ground, no no-man’s-land, no truce, until the enemy is defeated, and his allies chased into holes in the ground, his ideological bedfellows persecuted into the end of the long night.
Today’s partisans see no quarter for their enemies. No measures are too extreme, and no net is too wide or too finely meshed to satisfy their need for eliminationist certainty. This might even live on together with a spiritual agon, but in practice it seems not to. Ironic when one considers how small the stakes are on an individual level. As Winston Churchill said of his formal declaration of war on the Japanese, “Some people did not like this ceremonial style. But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.” And why not? If the Vietnamese, the apogee of total partisan warfare, can take a philosophical approach to the agonistic nature of war, why can’t right and left in the West?
The Greeks believed that human life, indeed all life, was shot through with agon. We speak of agony in English, to refer to internal turmoil, the sundering of the mind or the body. But the Greeks saw it as the innate nature of life at all scales – struggle and contest. A virtuous man embraced the universality of agon, and competed against his rivals, and fought his enemies with no regret or ill feeling. Out of struggle comes greatness and human growth, but also great suffering. While a modern popular instinct might be tempted to interpret the Greek agon, this struggle ethic, as some sort of crude social Darwinism, the Greeks were under no illusion that chance and fate played a great part in the outcome of struggles, which often overshadows merit. They praised competition for its own sake. The Iliad is filled with elegies for fallen heroes, cut down in their prime, sometimes by lesser men. To accept that good may not win, that the best may not get their due, and still feel the righteous duty to contest, these are instincts which have been lost.
I suspect that part of it derives from our modern philosophy of competition. Meritocracy is a dirty word. You can now find dozens of bestsellers on the shelves lambasting the crumbling establishment for its belief in merit as a legitimate criterion. The prevailing attitude across the sunlit ruins of the British Empire is that any inequality is due to undeserved advantages handed to people from birth by the instruments of class and race domination, and any failure to achieve is the result of the system holding you down. This is the thesis of Kwame Anthony Appiah, the great philosopher of cosmopolitanism who, like many Anglos, has inherited the skills of the upper class two-level game, wherein a powerfully philosophically embellished advertisement of modesty conceals a wealth of vanity, and serves to advertise magnanimity and noblesse oblige by making a pantomime of shrugging off class privilege.
But unlike most Anglos, he is dark-skinned, and gay, and thus has the added advantage of suggesting that unlike the rest of the elites, his successes are in spite of, not because of his life history, which no sensible person observing his biographical details could possibly believe. This is not to say he is not a talented and studious man, nor that he does not possess any of that special talent we recognise as the quintessence of human spirit. But he cannot seriously believe that operating society in the absence of measures of merit is a good thing at all – bridges must stand, surgeons must cut straight. Nor does he – what he wishes to justify, just like all the other myriad transatlantic intellectuals lazily barking out their wheezy egalitarianism, is the abolition of inequality, and of the institutions of family. Much like Pierre de Vos, our local utopian hero, he wishes to abolish the parent’s right to pass on advantage to their child, and edge society ever closer to Kallipolis.
It is plain to every university-educated person that this is part of the grand campaign of anticapitalism and left-wing egalitarianism on the basis of which the universal system of race- and gender-based discrimination has been drip-fed into our institutional culture until it has now reached saturation. There is now no place remaining in the West where whites or men are not discriminated against in the name of diversity and levelling the playing field. We rail against billionaires for their potential capacity for undue influence over politics (Musk, Bezos), and yet protect with an almost religious reverence the reputation of those who actively intervene to the greatest extent (Soros, Gates). Of course, most of this is driven by the structures of media and authority who favour their interventions and ideologies, or don’t as the case may be.
These men have welcome contributions because, according to the prevailing moral framework and favoured global political programme, their efforts are legitimate efforts to change the world for the better, not just an exercise in petty self interest (though that is a matter of dispute). That is entirely because the internationalist interests of the global post-war project called the United Nations, and the academic (and consequently managerial, aesthetic and pedagogic) consensus which follows downstream of its prestigious research and social engineering programmes seeks primarily to construct a world in which there is no war or political competition, under a grand ecumenical government facilitating and guiding a grand ecumenical holding company. Thus, all wars will become a thing of the past, as we interlink all economies, and erode and deconstruct identity, tradition and class, until our open society becomes the abstract society – no more binding myths can hold any two people together for longer than a summer fling or a five-year contract.
But The UN has never been particularly good at quelling conflict. If anything, their involvement in conflicts like Somalia seems to guarantee the persistent convulsions of civil war and terrorism instead of allowing natural military competition to produce new functional states. They are dogmatic in their insistence on preserving their static model of national sovereignty, even if there is no state occupying the territory it claims. Somaliland persists quietly and desperately against global isolation, while the fictional republic of Centrafrique sputters in and out of existence while international community pats itself on the back for bringing liberal democracy to the peasants. Conflict goes on.
What so many of us want, is for the ocean of politics to still, and all the cacophony of dangerous crashing competition to resolve into a single great, ecstatic wave to end all waves, and bring about an ocean we no longer need fear, where all the glassy blue vastness assents to our vision like a mirror of common desire, and the ship we careen about on will gently arrive at the sunlit shores of the promised land. For all his sins, Carl Schmitt understood that this was impossible. There is no destination, the sea never calms, and the crew will always fight for the till, all holding different notions of the dangers and opportunities awaiting over the horizon.
“The history of the world is like a ship careening aimlessly through the sea, manned by a bunch of drunken sailors who scream and dance until God thrusts the ship under the waves so there will be silence.”
Hans Herman Hoppe would tell you that this is all part of a grand cycle of history. A primitive feudal aristocracy composed of natural leaders, who draw support from their wisdom and capability to resolve legal disputes, become instruments of security as population density increases. As their fiefdoms expand, their mutual competition seeks resolution, and elects a king, who becomes a conquering monarchy, which acquires greater powers through constitutional law, which elevates the monarch above the realm by promising equality to the people against the aristocracy. The bureaucrats and the gentry leverage these rights to depose the monarchy for a democracy. In the name of democracy, anybody can rule, for a while. And as the fluid exchange of temporary administrators flow in and out, they appropriate ever greater portions of the wealth of the nation to their private projects, at the service of venal plutocrats who assure their ascendency in the rank of parliaments.
Relying on the powers of resentment to justify every stage of this process of transformation and degeneracy, the empowerment of the masses at the expense of principle, eventually democracy’s norms consume it, and the logic is easy to follow. In a democracy, all voices are equal. But through inequalities of power, some voices count more. Those must be levelled – their powers to leverage their position for greater gain suppress the advancement of the poor. We all deserve our fair share, and you wouldn’t be in favour of people being poor, now would you? Besides, it’s not like the property really belongs to them – its stolen by their ancestors, ill-gotten inheritance, exploitation. We can share it all, take from those who hoard it, and share it all amongst ourselves. And before long, you are stacking corpses and staring and stripped railroads, lead-strewn landscapes of human horror and chaos, where from the chaotic ashes, society arises again to assert the green shoots of a new cycle.
The violent resentment of the later stages of democratic society works ever-so-much better when there is a racial Schelling point to sort the haves and have-nots into, because then a great many haves can keep their havings, and point the blades of the mob at other hapless fellows. This is why the Khmer went after Vietnamese, Chinese and Cham first, why the Germans and Hungarians butchered the Jews, why Idi Amin chased out the Indians, why the Hutus carved up the Tutsis. These people imagine that he competition for power and resources ends once you cut open that fat golden goose, forgetting that a dead bird lays no eggs.
Much of the wealth of nations is born from competition – the Marshall plan which resurrected Western Europe was born out of rivalry with communism. Japan became great under the Meiji drive to modernism – and China became wealthy by opening their agricultural markets to competitive means of pricing. The richness and extravagance of our cultures has been born from the desire to compete for the attentions of the gods, the opposite sex, the respect of foreign dignitaries, the esteem of society. To desire the competition to end is to desire life to end – even mastery of nature will bring us to barrenness eventually.
The Capetonian philosopher David Benatar believes that this is in fact a good thing – the pain of life is a harm to be avoided, and that none of us should ever procreate. We are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of our actions, and our procreation produces pain for our offspring. Therefore we are the cause of this pain, and responsible for avoiding it. But the whole philosophy of utilitarian antinatalism rests on a single thought experiment – since the main objection is that on balance, life is worth it, would you trade one minute of excruciating agony for five minutes of bliss? You are asking the wrong question.
How much pain would you be willing to endure for its own sake?
I look at the life of David Goggins, and I see a man who has embraced agony because it makes him feel something far greater than opiate bliss – it makes him feel alive. To fight that constant battle against oneself, not in the manner of a suicidal wretch or a hedonic escapist chasing the silence, but in the manner of a boxer dancing with an eternal beloved enemy, to overcome for the sake of gaining another, more beautiful moment of greater overcoming, in an endless war between two magnificent and prideful elements of nature.
This is the elemental distinction between pain and suffering. Pain is unavoidable, but suffering is chosen, chosen from the desire to escape consequences, the learned helplessness of one who believes they are entitled to live life without pain – the child of a mother who shielded them from responsibility, told them their failures were someone else’s fault. And that suffering can always be exploited, by those whose vanity, avarice or bloodlust drives them to recruitment for power. Those who take part in the collective consciousness, drawn from the resentment and perverted compassion they, lemminglike, drag their peers into an effort to eliminate the adversary for ever.
Earlier this year, the former president of South Africa, FW de Klerk, the man who, as virtually his first act in office, abolished apartheid, was publically excoriated for appearing in parliament for the State of the Nation Address, as if the promises made by the state granting the right of former presidents to appear in the House was for nothing (of course, no promise by a revolutionary means anything, but the expiry date has not yet come). The national-socialist opposition party, the EFF, shouted for his expulsion. In a television interview following this circus, de Klerk was caught refusing to call apartheid a crime against humanity. Certainly maintaining the system required a lot of cruelty, and a lot of humiliation, without a shadow of a doubt, some heinous crimes were committed by the state in the name of security, or in the name of white supremacy and “Christian Civilisation”. He was an enemy, yes, and he did refuse to supplicate himself entirely to the new order, but that is the nature of politics. de Klerk was not a special tyrant, just an ordinary man of the political machine. Failing to respect the terms you sign is…well it’s bad form.
But the notion that the man deserves to be treated as a political enemy is in its way emblematic of our latest moral transformation. While the political settlement promised equal rights, blacks now quite objectively have more legal entitlements than whites. Whites have more wealth than most blacks, but equally there is now far more wealth held by the black population than by whites, however unevenly it is distributed. It is exhausting to utter such an obvious truth, but everybody knows that poverty would not be an issue were the country run well – we had, by anyone’s estimate, a guaranteed 6% year-on-year growth in our future beginning from 1994. That was all suffocated, almost entirely by a desire to “redress inequality”, to satisfy a desire for cosmic justice, to renegotiate the outcome of a fight that had already been won, and terms that had already been settled. And almost as if to make a cosmic joke out of the symbolism of the event, Ramaphosa told the voters that Dingane, the man who betrayed his word and slaughtered the whites who did his bidding to survive on his land, was a struggle hero.
The National Democratic Revolution was a dream that should long ago been shelved – equality is unachievable, and heaven is never brought to earth. As the Good Book tells us, there is an angel with a flaming sword guarding the gates of Eden, and any mortal who attempts to enter there, will bring destruction upon himself. Unlike the radical black national-socialists, or the Naumannite whites, most Afrikaners are reluctant to embrace any form of new utopia, or trust in the advertisements of beneficence from their opponents. Many even insist, despite their pessimistic theodicy, to struggle against the black current and win self-determination despite the state and its selectively enabled anarchy.
Why? Well, Afrikaners have long memories. They know what it means to be on the receiving end of a campaign of extermination, under Lord Kitchener’s scorched earth tactics. They saw the chaotic aftermath of the mfecane, in which over a million people died, either at the end of a spear, or of a long hunger, as withered corpses, pursued by bandits and hyenas through the bosveld. They witnessed betrayal at the hands of the Zulu king, taking these as foundational memories as they carved out a space in the sun. They learned the results of the attempts to build Jerusalem before God’s manifestation, and watched their promised Eden wither in the hot summer winds of change. Theirs was a philosophy of antagonism, where the nation was born out of compromise with one’s enemies, and a pugilistic embrace of the elements. Peace was made with the Anglos, and life went on, despite the bitterness. Much of the same could be said of the narrative upon which the current dispensation is based.
But nobody buys it anymore. Everybody is looking to settle scores. If it must be, so be it, but let us not get lost in motivated reasoning. Fighting must only happen if it is inevitable. This is part of the message of the Bhagavad Gita – the fights we fight are cruel, but we have a duty to fight them anyway. Once we find ourselves on one side of a conflict, we must go to the end, and many sacrifices will be made. You do your duty, you fight your enemy. Do not hope for closure either.
You fight as much as you need to, and no more. True evil lies in attempting to end the game by rewriting the rules – any failure to conform with one’s very narrow plan is anathema to the spirit of the game. An authoritarian project is all fine and good as long as there is opportunity for exit, but those who seek to give their enemy no egress will be forced to fight, not like a man of honour, or a competing brother citizen, but like a cornered animal, to the last drop of blood.
The understanding of the political future of minorities in the emerging black nationalist syncretism is that they have no right to speak in contradiction of black nationalism, they have no right to stand up for themselves, they have no capacity to recognise reality, and they have no place if they are to be different in any way at all. One language, one culture, one race, one leader, no laws or institutions or minorities anywhere. The brutal spirit of Dingane and Mzilikazi over the crafty nature of Tau and Moshoeshoe. The latter parties tolerated minorities, honoured treaties, made coalitions and limited their ambitions with considerations of humanity. The former saw no limit to their potential conquests, nor to the cruelty that could be justified against transgressors or the disobedient. In this fashion, the absence of tolerance for competition destroys the possibility of mutual respect, and requires any competition or difference to be seen as an intolerable evil, the successful are tall tees that must be cut down. As the country edges ever closer to economic catastrophe as the ANC hollows out the last of the state coffers, moving on to pensions and private wealth funds, land and moveable property, life becomes aver more claustrophobic. And like working men in a packed elevator, elbow room is taken by force.
In South Africa today, we are on a knife edge. The fourth dispensation looms, either as the garden of Mzansi, or as an Azanian wasteland with little Zulu and Cape lifeboats bobbing on its shores. The wind is blowing heavily, but only in one direction. Like every new nation that wakes from the ashes of anarchy, the dreamers of KwaZulu and the Cape must remember, that their futures will be political too, and if they can find no ecstacy in the agony of adversity, they will find only suffering in the unsatisfactoriness of success.
The Eccentric Flock 