J.R. Nyquist Blog

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Sick are they always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper.

• Nietzsche

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Richard Weaver called the mass media “The Great Stereopticon.” It consists of television, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet. It is a vehicle for reaching millions of people. It fills their heads with journalistic ephemera, anchoring them to the present with a parade of passing trivialities. “No one is prepared to understand the influence of journalism on the public mind until he appreciates the fact that the newspaper is a spawn of the machine,” wrote Weaver. “A mechanism itself, it has ever been closely linked with the kind of exploitation, financial and political, which accompanies industrialism.”[i] The press was the “great scribe,” noted Weaver, but today’s social media is even better at multiplying stereotypes and spreading intellectual rot than the pundits of yesteryear. The Great Stereopticon, wrote Weaver, “thrives on an endlessness of dissemination. Its progeny, like the frogs of Egypt, come up into our very kneading troughs.”[ii] And what are these frogs that swarm over us? Shabby concepts.

Journalism charms the public as it mesmerizes the popular mind. Talk descends into formula, into stock phrases and knee-jerk reactions. Weaver thought the mass media was designed to minimize discussion. “Despite many artful pretensions to the contrary,” noted Weaver, “it does not want an exchange of views, save perhaps on academic matters. Instead, it encourages men to read in the hope they will absorb.”[iii] And what will they absorb? What messages predominate? What shabby concepts recur? They are, (1) “progress,” (2) “democracy,” and (3) “equality.” These concepts, as noted above, are best absorbed through ephemera because they are ephemeral.

Let us take these “modern” concepts in order, starting with “progress.” According to Weaver, progress “makes a virtue of desecration.”[iv] It exalts “becoming” over “being.”[v] In fact, infinite progress for the sake of progress is destructive.[vi] Belief in it even discourages sanity, because sanity knows how to stop and progress does not. The mass media is the ideal servant of progress. “The touchstone of progress,” wrote Weaver, “simply schools the millions in shallow evaluation.” The unstated goal of progress is “happiness through comfort.”[vii] To make matters worse, we have come to believe that progress is “automatic,” that the “Laws of History” guarantee that life will get better and better. The dogma of progress pictures physical sufficiency as the all-in-all, insulating “the mind against immanent reality.”[viii] In doing this, the Great Stereopticon keeps the ordinary citizen from recognizing the vanity of his materialist pursuits. Emptying our discourse of serious ideas, progress “makes father and child live in different worlds, and speech fails to provide a means to bridge them.”[ix] Weaver wrote, “What more soundly rebukes the theory of automatic progress than the measured tread of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall?”[x] What shall we say, in this context, of the decline of America? Compare our first three presidents (Washington, Adams, and Jefferson) to our last three presidents (Obama, Trump, and Biden). The latter are a grotesque parody of statesmanship when compared to the former. In what sense do these latter names represent any kind of progress? As progress in fraud, crudity, and senility? And who would describe as “progress” our passage from the integrity and uncommon valor of Washington to a creature like Kamala Harris?  

And what of that false god, democracy? Robert Michels explained that “democracy” is just another way of organizing oligarchy. Here we have what Michels called “the Iron Law of Oligarchy.”[xi] We are no longer organized under small city states, so that direct democracy is no longer practicable. All democracies are, therefore, “representative.” As such they involve the organization of political parties. The key word here is “organization,” which requires oligarchy. He wrote, “Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy.” It is, he explained, “organization which gives dominion of the elected over the electors…. Who[ever] says organization, says oligarchy.”[xii] All political systems, excepting direct democracy, are oligarchical. The question today is not whether the few or the many will rule the state. The question, said Max Weber, is what kind of oligarchy will it be? The favored answer, since time immemorial, has been “aristocracy,” or “rule by the best.” But who are the “best”? The warriors? The priests? The rich? The intellectuals? Monarchists hold that the best person is ordained by God or the Church, especially on account of his lineage. Given the circumstances of the American Revolution, America’s Founding Fathers were opposed to monarchy and aristocracy; therefore, presidents would be elected every four years, congressmen every two years, and senators would be appointed. The election mechanism, the independent power of the states, and the courts, were conceived as checks on executive and congressional power. Under the Constitution, America is only a democracy one day in every two years; that is, in November, on a Tuesday that follows the first Monday, of every even numbered year. What the Framers of the Constitution feared, above all, was ochlocracy (i.e., mob rule) where the majority might pass a bill of expropriation against the propertied classes. This, they knew from ancient history, would end in a leveling despotism. Therefore, the U.S. Constitution does not allow the people to vote for mass expropriations, as would be possible under a true democracy (where “the people” have the power to plunder whomever they please). In this context, Vice President Kamala Harris, born the daughter of a communist resident alien, might be classified as true believer in the plundering power of democracy. Indeed, she describes herself as a “woke defender of democracy” against the “despotic” and “racist” ambitions of Donald Trump and his “deplorables.” But is she really a champion of the people? Her rhetoric obscures the fact that she is an aspiring oligarch of the socialist camp, who wants to do away with the checks and balances of America’s “undemocratic” and “racist” Constitution. Although Harris took an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, we should not believe she intends to keep that oath. What she intends, rather transparently, is to fill the country with an alien rabble who will, at some future date, vote for the expropriation of America’s native-born white racists. (Of course, this expropriation is occuring by other means, through the “welfare state”). In promoting social democracy, Harris is one of those revolutionaries who would use democracy to “push past” the Constitution, as called for by The Program of the Communist Party.[xiii] From Harris’s lips we hear the word “democracy,” erroneously supposing that democracy signifies individual rights. But Harris is a woman of the left, a so-called “feminist” whose hatred of motherhood is seen in her advocacy for infanticide. In all this, she is a true democrat who believes that voting can make murder into a right. This shows that the Framers of the Constitution did not trust democracy for good reason. It was, after all, the system that put Socrates to death and ordered the Melian genocide.[xiv]   

The third god of liberalism’s unholy trinity is “equality” or “equity.” Here is a deadly poison, laced with envy. The economist Thomas Sowell wrote that nobody knows what “equality” means. Is it equality of opportunity or equality of outcome? If government intervention is used to correct inequalities, which inequalities will government address? Inequalities of wealth, beauty, intellect? The state, being a machine of violence and coercion, has no means to make men equal “besides blood and the misery of mankind,” noted the political philosopher Eric Voegelin. “The gigantic structure of the system and its strict order is woven over an abyss of human nihilism and torn by the desire for fulfillment in reality through a collective body.”[xv] Given an egalitarian trajectory, the gigantic structure of the system is bound to collapse into the abyss over which it stands. Think of a collective body exposed to egalitarian dogmas and slogans. According to Voegelin, a generation so exposed “will be warped in its decisive center.” It will fall prey to the Big Lie.[xvi] For Voegelin, the false salvific “knowledge” of “gnostic mass movements” arouses the bloodlust of egocentric politicians seeking to gain “a pseudo-identity … by killing somebody.”[xvii] This psychology was explored by Albert Camus in his book, The Rebel. Voegelin summarized Camus’s work as explaining “the equanimity of the intellectuals who have lost their self and try to regain it by becoming pimps for this or that murderous totalitarian power….”[xviii] Power is all that matters to them.[xix] Here we find the story of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where a pig named Napoleon gets control of the Farm, promising equality to all the animals; yet affirming, in the end, that “some animals are more equal than others.” When power is in prospect, the warped individual is not a champion of the people. His is a swindler. Falsification, however, is not the essential tendency of these political ideologists. The essential tendency is murder.[xx]

Why is murder the essential tendency of modern ideologies like communism and Nazism? Because political lying for the sake of power leads to massive distortions of reality, which leads to the trampling down of people, to oppression and the murdering of opposition leaders. Whenever the soul lives within a false construction, inner disintegration colors the whole. There is no integration. The corollary of this inner disintegration is the collapse of order (political and economic). One of the requirements of human life is order. Given ideology’s tendency to replace religious concepts with political concepts, making salvation secular rather than spiritual, the impetus is to replace the “truth of the soul” from which authentic civil order derives with a doctrine of political salvation through untruth (i.e., ideology). Such doctrines must lead to the disintegration of order and ultimate destruction.[xxi]

According to Voegelin, our civilization was built out of Greek philosophy and Christian theology. To reject this heritage in favor of “ideology” signifies a “theoretical retrogression” which must result in “types of derailment which Plato characterized as doxa [i.e., misguided popular opinion]. Whenever in modern intellectual history a revolt against the maximum of differentiation [i.e., intellectual precision] was undertaken systematically, the result was the fall into anti-Christian nihilism, into the idea of the superman in one or the other of its variants….”[xxii] Here we see that egalitarianism is not about equality. Like all political endeavors invested with ego, it is about power as murder – power without a proper conception of order.

In terms of grand strategy, the generals and statesman forced to cope with an ongoing breakdown of order, need to realize that ideologically inspired wars are likely to become wars of destruction for the sake of destruction; that is, for the sake of destroying certain races or classes or nations. Typically, the ideologist projects evil onto a race or class of persons. If only these evil people are eradicated a magical transformation of the universe will occur. Suddenly, out of this, a wondrous new order will form. Everyone will be equal and wars will be at an end. At least, this is what socialist ideology teaches (however obliquely). For normal people a dilemma arises. What do normal people do with these crazy ideologists whose objective is to eradicate the Jews, or to eliminate Great Britain by importing Muslims, or to eliminate America as well? Are normal people then obliged to eradicate these ideologists? The whole situation seems to place a great burden on normal people, who are not ideologists, and who do not want war. But the danger from “gnostic mass movements” (as Voegelin called them) is real. And something must be done before society is entirely consumed and destroyed. Of course, much of “normal” society is infected with liberal ideology which has been a stepping stone to socialism. Liberalism, like socialism, tends to favor concepts like “progress, democracy, and equality.” Liberalism is therefore ill-equipped to confront totalitarian socialism.  According to Voegelin,

If an incipient disturbance of the balance is not met by appropriate political action in the world of reality, if instead it is met with magic incantations, it may grow to such proportions that war becomes inevitable. The model case is that of National Socialist Germany … with the gnostic chorus wailing its moral indignation at such barbarian and reactionary doings in a progressive world – without however raising a finger to repress the rising force by a minor political effort in proper time. The prehistory of the Second World War raises the serious question whether the gnostic dream has not corroded Western society so deeply that rational politics has become impossible, and war is the only instrument left for adjusting disturbances in the balance of existential forces. [xxiii]

According to Voegelin, Western military objectives typically involve “gnostic presumption.”[xxiv] Pointing to the aftermath of World War II, in which the “liberal” leaders of the United States followed a policy of unilateral disarmament, Voegelin wrote, “never before in the history of mankind has a world power used a victory deliberately for the purpose of creating a power vacuum to its own disadvantage.”[xxv] The Soviets maintained their occupation of Eastern Europe and successfully filled the vacuum left by the Japanese Empire in China. America was caught flatfooted, then, when the communists invaded South Korea in 1950. This was a hard lesson for America, but America learned nothing from it. After 1991 America disarmed again, leaving a vacuum in Afghanistan that led to the calamity of 9/11. America also left a vacuum in Africa and Latin America where several communist gangs came to power. Attending this was the explanation of Sovietologist Francis Fukuyama, who wrote of the “end of history.” Above all, Fukuyama was an exemplar of “gnostic presumption” in the liberal sense. The gnostic does not “take into account the structure of reality,” wrote Voegelin. “There can be no peace, because the dream cannot be translated into reality and reality has not yet broken the dream. No one, of course, can predict what nightmares of violence it will take to break the dream….”[xxvi]

In opposition to liberalism, on the communist side, we have the Machiavellian realism of Chairman Mao’s Yenan Way, best explained by Mao himself in a conversation with the Peruvian Marxist, Eudocio Ravines:

Oh dear friend [said Mao] how deluded you are with respect to the political thinking of common people. You have a romantic idea of the revolution and of its politics. You think that workers and peasants and petit bourgeois are full of noble intentions and faithfully respect mores and principles. What an error! It’s not like that, my friend. The immense mass of our friends and enemies is made up of opportunists. You must get that through your head – complete opportunists. [xxvii]

Mao told Revines that “there are countries which have real party politics, a democratic life, real civil liberties.” These, said Mao, require the communists to use “the Popular Front, to attract leftwingers and the leftist groups, good and bad, sincere or not. Tempt them, each through his particular weakness, as the devil tempts.” Mao then explained, “Help them get what they want; put pressure, first with offers, later with threats. Compromise them if you can, so that they can’t get away. And [do] this every day, without respite, one after the other with as deep a psychological study of each as possible.”[xxviii]

About his encounter with China’s communist leader, Ravines wrote, “In all this explanation, so severely free from any doctrinaire principle or moral evaluation, in this shameless exposure, I felt a disheartening basis of realism.”

To believe in a silly dream built on silly concepts is to find oneself outplayed by communists and the many opportunists who are ready to work with them. These people know that progress, democracy, and equality are nonsense slogans. What is not nonsense, however, is the moral firmness of a truthful person to stand up against murderers and thieves. Many liberals imagine that they hold beliefs in common with socialism; beliefs like “progress, democracy, and equality.” But as noted above, such concepts are equivocal if they have any meaning at all. When socialist leaders turn out to be thieves and murderers the liberals are baffled. Philosophy and Christianity are beyond the true liberal’s range of experience, said Voegelin. The liberal believes in science, which makes him too sophisticated to believe in God. “Heaven will be built on earth,” mocked Voegelin, who added, “if liberalism is understood as the immanent salvation of man and society, communism certainly is its most radical expression; it is an evolution that was already anticipated by John Stuart Mill’s faith in the ultimate advent of communism for mankind.”[xxix]

This is why the West is in such trouble today. Liberals will always find themselves exploited by socialists.

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Discussion With Victor and Thomas

Viewer discretion advised. (This video includes profanity and reference to the use of drugs.)

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Links and Notes

[i] Richard Weaver, Ideas have Consequences (Kindle Edition), p. 94. (Note: The Kindle Edition page numbers are identical to my 1962 Phoenix Books paperback.)

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid, p.p. 96.

[iv] Ibid, p. 28.

[v] Ibid, p. 67.

[vi] Ibid, p. 51.

[vii] Ibid, p. 105.

[viii] Ibid, p. 106.

[ix] Ibid, p. 164.

[x] Ibid, p. 177.

[xi] Robert Michels, Political Parties (Kindle Edition). The book was first published in 1911.

[xii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy#:~:text=The%20iron%20law%20of%20oligarchy%20is%20a%20political,%22tactical%20and%20technical%20necessities%22%20of%20the%20organization.%20

[xiii] https://www.cpusa.org/materials/cpusa-party-program/

[xiv] See, especially, the Melian dialogue of Thucydides, in The Peloponnesian War. Also consider, Why America’s Founders Didn’t Want a Democracy (fee.org) where Gary M. Galles cites Randall Halcombe’s book, Liberty in Peril: Democracy and Power in American History. He then quotes Halcomb as follows: “The role of government as [America’s founders] saw it, was to protect the rights of individuals, and the biggest threat to individual liberty was the government itself. So they designed a government with constitutionally limited powers, constrained to carry out only those activities specifically allowed by the Constitution.” From this we may detect the subtle treason of any president who insists on “defending democracy” when such would entail a violation of the Presidential Oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. To conceive the United States federal government as a democracy would be the first step in overthrowing the Constitution.

[xv] Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 5: Modernity Without Restraint (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), p. 30.

[xvi] Ibid, p. 143.

[xvii] Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, p. 47.

[xviii] Ibid.

[xix] Modernity Without Restraint, p. 203.

[xx] Ibid, p. 211.

[xxi] Ibid, p. 221.

[xxii] Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, p.78-80.

[xxiii] Modernity Without Restraint, pp. 227-228. Please note, some critics may find Voegelin’s use of the term “gnostic movement” objectionable. My first suggestion is that Voegelin’s usage is metaphorical rather than literal. Voegelin is not saying that Nazis and Communists follow the teachings of Valentinus or other Gnostics. He is saying that modern ideologies are a secular kind of Gnosticism in which the given order of the universe is rejected. It may be that modern ideologies involve an unconscious desire to divinize the political sphere by divinizing a self-appointed political vanguard. However that may be, the terminology has value for those attempting to understand modern ideologies with an open mind.

[xxiv] Ibid, p. 228.

[xxv] Ibid.

[xxvi] Ibid, p. 229.

[xxvii] Eudocio Ravines, The Yenan Way (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951), p. 156.

[xxviii] Ibid.

[xxix] Modernity Without Restraint, pp. 230-31.

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