Satiric Discourses

Menippus Redivivus

Menippus Redivivus is a displaced aristocrat and an occasional man of letters.

Au bord du précipice — il y a l'amour

My favorite Frenchman is Stendhal, one of the most refined spirits to ever walk the earth. He gifted all aesthetes the sublime madness of Stendhal Syndrome and wrote the two novels, Le Rouge et le Noir and Le Chartreuse de Parme, that make me go berserk with nostalgia for an aristocratic world I can never know. Once you understand what we truly are, that there lives within our bodies of matter a beast of entropic appetites, and you have only graciousness, tact and joie de vivre for the inevitabilities of our natures, you are truly an aristocratic spirit. Julien Sorel, the scathing hero of The Red and the Black, is a superb aristocratic beast of prey, and can only be hated from afar. Up close (which is to say at uncanniest distance), every woman would fall in love with him. When you have to nonlethally shoot a woman in a beautiful church (honorably responding to her extortion) and she withers away from love-grief after your execution because you have resurrected death-love for her even though a beautiful marquise is so infatuated with you that she’s jealous you didn’t shoot her instead — you have made it as a man in the erotic arts.

The Charterhouse of Parma is the manual of erotic love forever. The starry bishop Fabrizio succumbs to the glorious Clélia through the prison bars, and his ardor finally wins him a painful triumph. She’ll only cheat on her clottish husband with Fabrizio in the dark and he’ll never sculpt her naked architecture to the memory. The uncertainty principle in erotic love! Either you see me but you do not have me, or you have me but you do not see me. There is no true and sustainable eroticism but this for the high. You should also read Stendhal if you want to learn how to do middle-aged marriage properly. The gregarious Count Mosca graciously accepts that Gina Pietranera will never love him like she loves her nephew Fabrizio, and they have as wondrous a union as can be expected in the twilight of the sex blood. Of course, Contessa must die of love-grief when Fabrizio dies, and the Count graciously accepts this, too. You find in Stendhal no moralizing, no suggestion that we have to be better by repression, only a sense of wonder at the intricacies of human personality and the exaltation of the distance-in-reverence that is required for the fragile fire of high romance. You’ll come to know the pinching and exquisite truth that the best of man and woman are only in love when they are at war. You only touch the heart by wounding it. Maybe it’s all very sad in the end that we just cannot make it work but what a glory is in our angst! The erotic yearning that we all share and can never solve for each other is fuel for the anomalous dance of sexual creation and the beautification of the species.

And reading Stendhal really puts into perspective what wretched erotic decay we are in today. All our glorious crop of Fabrizios are extinct, and our poor beauties dare not express the sweetly savage coquetries of their Clélia nature since too many men today are social-erotic dunces. We have neither free warriors nor court-cultivated lovers among our men anymore (we’re all squares), and so most of our women are jejune as molded pastries. The triumph of bourgeois culture has been causing the best of our unwieldy women to go neurotic from the jump. It’s impossible to jam Hedda Gabler into cramped bourgeois domesticity. Really, Hedda should have lived in some Tuscan mountain palisade overlooking a gorge where she could shoot the revolver to her good heart’s ease, keep a servant girl for hair pulling and host passerby warrior lovers to pine for and discard. The bourgeois Emma Bovary wanted to behave like an aristocratic spirit but didn’t have the mind (and couldn’t find the lovers) for it and so had to kill herself in despair. Many of our modern middle-class women (and men) are Emma Bovarys and that is why they waste. They cannot rid themselves of the middle nature instinct to possess and claim. Certainly, the feminists detected these cracks in the humdrum bourgeois life but could never overcome their fierce sexual resentment. So, they helped impose an even worse world of erotic constriction and psychological devastation on many of the best women by forcing them into “administration” and “marketing.” They tire their youth in ache for the tactful admiration of grand spirits in sumptuously decorated halls.

The wipeout of aristocratic culture and the loss of a psychologically astute leisure caste in the West have crushed the delicate arts of erotic poise in us. What remains is the ever-augmenting disaster of bourgeois marriage and chronic erotic deprivation among the tech-bloated generations of the West, even for the very beautiful. Our degenerated world has smothered the possibilities for the grand collision of eyes in the old ballrooms and opera house boxes in favor of ghastly autonomous “courtship” between two status-grubbing corporate cogs. Almost no one today is truly in love in the old high Rococo sense of tripartite oscillation of outraged vanity, rapturous withers, and playfully sadistic withholds. Even most of the old money and royal lineages have lost those arts, and now up and down the social scale it’s all “placeholding” and “status” and “checklists” and “married my best friend” and “my rock” and “relationship goals” and God knows what ugliness besides. Our gamesomeness is gone, man and woman know too keenly the transactional barbarism of the other, and the passion-curtained roots of our biological prerogatives are unearthed to fester. To pluck a flower is to kill it — and so with us.

The Politics of the Middle Nature

All ideological politics are manifestations of what I call the middle nature, a term I use in conjunction with that sinuous appellative “bourgeois.” The middle nature is stuffed with idealisms, prone to guilt and envy, moralistic, mechanical, and managerial, awed by technology, science and dogma, resentful of natural hierarchy and haunted by the chasm of social breakdown. Since the time of the Enlightenment, the nations of the West have slowly succumbed ever more to ideological and value systems of middle supremacy. The natural peasant is too dense to think in clear terms of universal “ideology” and the natural aristocrat’s only “ideology” is the aesthetic and charismatic hierarchy of Nature. All of the major modern socio-economic movements are sibling emanations of the politics of middle supremacy. Anarchism is a revolt against the conforming smudgery of the bourgeois world allied to an absurd rejection of natural hierarchy. Fascism is the middle nature getting uppity and showing aristocratic pretensions. It inevitably turns to kitsch aesthetics and genocides the “outsider bourgeois” because the middle nature doesn’t have the detachment to comprehend real beauty or lift itself from the spitefulness of crowds. Marxism is the middle nature on a guilty downer and showing abusive “sympathy” to the urban and rural peasantry. The Marxist tinkerers try to “raise” the peasants by meddling and coercion and always end up killing millions of them. The extremes of middle-nature politics are always genocidal to some elements of society because the adherents don’t have the refinement, honesty and amor fati to tolerate the disparate psychologies of human castes. The aristocratic perspective on the peoples of the world retains the severities, dispassions, and licenses of Nature itself. Nature is “totalitarian,” but it is hardly “genocidal” because it cannot hate. The ability to govern people as they are, with no unnecessary imposition or oppression, and to understand what they can’t control or understand — this is the mark of the leader sanctioned from on high.

“Liberalism” and “conservatism” are the moderate tentpoles of middle nature politics — they stand for idealistic and abstract hierarchies based on fidelity to social order (conservatism) or fidelity to tabula rasa (liberalism). Truthfully, these monikers are so slippery as to now be meaningless. Burke hoped the aristocratic prerogative could persist so long as egalitarianism remained a toe-dipped phenomenon, but Bismarck was too deep into egalitarian decay and knew better. In a very real sense, conservatism and liberalism died in the 19th century. All the self-proclaimed “conservatives” and “liberals” from the 20th century to the present are moldy salads, and their true worship is for mass consumption and technology. They hope these distractions can forestall the multitudes from the more extreme and uncontrollable outbursts of middle passion politics. They are very prickly about what paths cannot be followed. You see this in the primacy given in the egalitarian world to “economics” and “physics.” These are the “comfy” sciences for a liberal order, and their disproportionate focus contrasts with the shafting given to biology (its truths are too politically unacceptable for the necessary delusions of egalitarianism). Conservative and liberal ideologies still fuel themselves by propaganda and resentment (though less frenzied) because these are necessary for sustained legitimacy in egalitarian systems. The dense, mechanical impulse of ideology always attempts to solve political problems by bureaucratic layering, moral cudgeling, and social tinkering. The idiocy of all middle-nature politics is that its systems don’t retain the concentrated intelligence (or public relations capacity) to deal with problems tactfully and indirectly. The lower natures need to see directly that something is getting done for feel-good consumptive satisfaction. This means that politicians of an ideological middle system can only solve political problems by dramatic, exaggerated, intrusive (and mostly wasteful and unproductive) action.

The historical triumph of the middle nature has many causes, but foremost among them is the discovery of new forms of charismatic authority. The middle nature has invented crucial personality types that can upend the biological hierarchy generated by aristocratic charisma. Middle charisma draws its power from resentment and inhibition. It replaces tactfulness, distance, beauty and grandeur with capacity for sustained incitement and repressed outrage. The greatest bioweapon of the middle nature against the high nature has been the dogmatic, frequently vulgar, intellectual or spiritual charismatic. This type of public genius dissolves the effect of natural aristocratic charisma on the lower orders, and replaces it with the resentful, passion politics of the outraged middle. We can cite among this personality type Luther, Danton, Garibaldi, Makhno, Stalin and about a hundred failed revolutionaries of the European 19th century. The charisma of this type is bound to the earth and incubates tremendous explosive potential. Had Luther sanctioned the German peasant revolt and put on the cap of the conqueror, he might’ve become the true European Muhammad, unified Germany 350 years early and overrun the Mediterranean countries (and destroyed scores of “profane” and “pagan” Renaissance art). But Luther had enough trappings of refinement to dread an opening of primordial chaos and couldn’t bear to be the usherer of a year zero for the frenzied masses. His religious movement stunted and fractured (and saved aristocratic Europe for another quarter millennum) because he sided with the old aristocrats against the German peasants and dared not conjure further the resurrected, unholy chthonic powers not seen since the Goths and Huns in Europe.

The bourgeoisie itself is very susceptible to the persuasive powers of the austere, puritanical charismatic (Calvin, Cromwell, Robespierre, Lenin and Hitler). This charismatic type seems to represent the ideal of correct, smug moral behavior and emphasis. On the personal level, all these people were sparing and morally unimpeachable in conduct (unless Hitler killed his niece). But this type has limited appeal to the low nature. You notice the French counter-revolutionary peasant outbreaks really got going only when the Jacobin “peasant-whisperer” Danton went to the guillotine. The urbane Parisians went mad for the stiff and incorruptible Robespierre, but the peasants never took to him. Similarly, collectivization of the peasants in the USSR could only get underway with the earthy and coarse Stalin at the helm (if Trotsky tried to do it, the peasants would have slung him up on a meat hook — his character is the most repulsive to the low nature: The bourgeois who thinks he’s an aristocrat). Napoleon might’ve been the only Western personality of the post-Enlightenment to fulfill the three-nature trifecta of charismatic appeal, but this was only true for the French (the European aristocrats thought he was a Corsican peasant).

A state founded on middle-nature ideology is always precarious, and more rapidly falls to revolutionary oscillation than an aristocratic state, even a grossly decadent one. The only type of state in accordance with Nature is the military art-state, and this ought to be the aspiration for anyone concerned with quality of life, biological ascension, cultural inheritance and sustained hegemonic influence. The 20th-century fascist state, whatever its genius for pageantry, was crude because it relied on resentful populist adrenaline — still a kind of surrogate for “votes.” The egalitarian preoccupation with “voting” (always riggable) obscures the fact that the fascist strongmen and Bolshevik commissars were true democrats because they were always concerned with the sell. And what must be sold is always ugly. Franco walked this tightrope as well as could be expected, but typically Spain fell to globalist liberalism after he died. There was still in Mussolini (and not D’Annunzio), beneath the pomp and ceremony, the quiet voice to the masses: Please approve of what I do. All the political oscillations of Western history, from the Bastille to now, testify to the simmering sorrow in the hearts of the democratic hordes, that he who is greater needs my most sweet voice. The mob is a child, forever at odds between mischief and dependence. The man of authentic power must digest well the delight of the people in the murder of idols — for the people can only return to innocence as crucifiers. Let him come down from the cross, let us hurl him from the Tarpeian rock and we’ll know by splat or miracle he doesn’t need us. This is the truest gospel of the people, and the only “political philosophy” that endures: The great man who walks with the multitudes to Emmaus must be masked or ascended, for they approve him by the meat hook and the anvil.     *