Against The False Materialist Dichotomy

Zeus has His own politics

If you actually take spirituality seriously enough for it to affect how you live and think, then it becomes clear that the spiritual order of the universe is opposed to both capitalism and communism. First we will treat with capitalism. In a capitalist system Authority, the power to coordinate and organize, becomes tied to material wealth to an excessive degree. Wealth and power have always gone together for the simple reason that warriors must be fed and armed and doing so requires acreage and ores. The wealth-power, however, is traditionally tempered by networks of social bonds. Among these bonds is the religious law which binds entire societies, or at least sectors of society, together.

We must remind ourselves that once material wealth is sufficient to feed and clothe us then its actual existence is only as a tool for incentivizing behaviors in other people. The potential of wealth to incentivize antisocial behaviors can only be countered by alternate or conflicting incentives. These incentives are almost always social because the human mind is overwhelmingly socially oriented. We are currently actually seeing in our society the insidious cooption of social authority by money authority via media; Money power sponsors favorable media which then creates the conception in the wider public that everyone else has adopted a position, even though everyone else has only adopted that position because they think others have. Social authority and social incentives work by defining a range of behaviors and then making it clear that anyone who breaches the defined norm will suffer social consequences in the form of ostracization, humiliation, etc. This will almost always work because the human mind is not actually particularly individual and in fact does its processing on a distributed network that literally includes its environment and the minds of adjacent humans. Taken in all, it becomes clear that unrestrained money-power is actually jury rigging itself into the position of social power and law power and thereby removing the only obstacles to its tendency to incentivize antisocial behavior. A society that values tradition could soften this blow by allowing the trial and error process of our forebears to influence how we decide what the range of normalized behaviors and opinions should be; It’s not perfect but it’s at least not outright exploitative - what do the dead have to gain from misleading us? But we in the west are already without our tradition, and so begins the work of scavenging from it. Very quickly one juicy morsel from the religious world of the ancients reveals itself to be relevant.

When I as a polytheist examine this state of affairs I in fact see a mythical reenactment of the Gigantomachy, the struggle between the Gods and the Gigantes (Giants) for control of the earth. The Gigantes are understood as supremely physical creatures, children of Gaia, whereas the Gods are of course the supremely transcendent wardens of the ascending ladder of spiritual causes, souls, and intellects. In Gigantomachy mythology the Earth, the field upon which the struggle plays out, should be seen as a macrocosm of the human being in whom the war is actually waged. In this light it should be remembered that the war is over the fate of the land and mankind, not that of the Divine itself which is immortal and unconquerable. This is a struggle which it is actually possible for us to lose, especially if we do not embrace the Divine’s help.

But what will victory in our current situation look like? In my view it will involve the reestablishment of relationships and oaths that are powerful enough to significantly alter material conditions on the scale of an entire community, and historically such oaths and bonds had to be founded on a shared religious conception of the world. Do not be thrown off by that. Material conditions are actually supremely important, it is only the unharmonious arrangement of incentives and priorities that material sometimes engenders that is dangerous. I will remind you all that matter is literally just condensed and bound energy. Nuclear science attests to this. Metaphysically, Platonist theology considers matter to be formed by the interaction of Being with Nothingness in a particular ratio, where Nothingness performs the role of what the Norse called “Isa,” Ice, solidifying and condensing the free and light essence of divinity. Matter is good. Matter is necessary. But to turn your eyes towards it at the expense of the divine is to look towards nothingness even if matter is not actually wholly empty.

And this brings me to the refutation of communism. Given our critique of capital it may be less apparent why the ideal of an egalitarian commune is also undesirable. In short, human natures are hierarchical. Firstly I will clarify that Hierarchy is not synonymous with exploitation. Hierarchy as a phenomenon can be as simple and benign as members of a friend group looking up to one or two members more than others. Nobody in that equation is losing or being marginalized. Likewise we exist in a spiritual continuum that is highly hierarchical, ascending from the inanimate to the animate and the incarnate to the pre-incarnate, from rocks to plants to animals to spirits to angels to Gods, and at no point in this hierarchy is anyone positioned unjustly.

It is undeniable, though, that capitalism - via the processes I described above - has created a network of worldly hierarchies that are in fact unjust. Most egregiously it places the merchant at the pinnacle of society despite the fact that merchants do not produce military protection nor do they produce raw goods, they only produce financial liquidity and amass their fortunes by siphoning off of the streams of money they direct. This is a necessary function which provides flexibility to a society, but it does not belong in senate chambers. A merchant can accomplish his goal without actually bettering or perfecting anything; a craftsman or farmer must create a good which is useful to others and a military regime must produce well-ordered human types for its soldiery, but merchants can benefit even if their own society loses.

It is in this mercantile environment that the Marxist critique of class develops. It is indeed true that in the industrial or post-industrial society it is unjust that the labor of the middle and lower classes is mobilized towards the discursive, gigantian goal of Make Big Line Go Zoom despite the fact that such classes will not be compensated proportionally for their work. Workers should be compensated correctly for the fruits of their labor and should do so in an environment that is human-scaled and prosocial, But this would not necessarily mean an abolition of class itself.

The fact of the matter is that class is a necessary aspect of any civilization advanced enough to have division of labor. Class appeared with the first grain crop. Society can codify classes as more or less rigid and socially impactful, but as long as different jobs exist they are going to attract and create different human types. Certain necessary work is really demanding and shapes its practitioners drastically. The lighthouse warden, the lifelong soldier, the parish priest - all of these people are shaped by their position and were perhaps even called to that position because they fit a certain profile that suited it. Wherever there is diversity, difference must be mediated, and diversity is necessary for a complex civilization. Sometimes a fair mediation of differences requires having a hierarchy, such as a relationship between mentor and mentee, and sometimes it does not. There is no need to assign a special moralistic miasma to relationships that involve hierarchy, and no reason to dogmatically forbid hierarchical relationships from emerging at a large scale such as in military or ecclesiastical organizations.

If you are going to create a society without class, which can function without navigation of its diversity being codified into a varied corpus of customs and relations, you would have to change the human animal on a fundamental level because for millennia our brains have been honed to navigate a hierarchical social world. We are capable of being envious, aggressive, selfish, and generally antisocial, even, maybe especially, when our material needs are totally met. The postmodern west attests to this - how rampant is drug abuse and mental illness among affluent people? Eradicating hierarchical social relations involves eradicating either our differences or our ability to perceive and assign value to differences. That sounds like one hell of a eugenics program to me, if not outright lobotomization.

If you, like our ancestors did, consider that humans can be different even in their very souls, then the suggestion that humans should be leveled and equalized as much as possible should be offensive to you. But this is not a uniquely anti-communist critique. In fact the modern capitalist west may be the closest humanity is capable of coming to a classless society, because capital is incentivized to make sure that its labor pool is as undifferentiated as possible, as devoid of non-monetary bonds as possible, and as vulnerable to advertising as possible. Capital wants you to consult a NYT article with 5 ads in it instead of your aunt about relationship troubles. Huge portions of the previously discussed social power and law power it has acquired are devoted to furthering this end and reducing the three or four tier class structure down to just two, with the upper caste growing so small that it hardly has any existence beyond its duties operating the system. In fact this levelling is so central to the capitalist project that I would personally go as far as to accuse online communists who concern themselves with media broadcasted injustices of being useful tools for capital.

Their concern and their partisanship are understandable. Desiring to correct injustice is the proper response to witnessing injustice. But at some point, shouldn’t it become clear that you’re being baited? That someone is dangling a procession of horrific tragedies in front of your face because they’re deriving some benefit from your anxiety and outrage? Do you think that maybe capital wins when its consumers are nervous messes vulnerable to comfort marketing? How do you think ice cream sales have been doing? There are 8 billion people on earth and 300 million in the United States. There is always going to be something bad happening. Our media seizes upon smatterings of individual events and suggests narrative links between them even without statistical backing and in so doing shifts the window of acceptable beliefs and behaviors. What’s more, once a narrative is established it doesn’t even need any legacy media input to run wild. People who believe that narrative will connect events to it all by themselves and proliferate it via social media.

If you actually want to improve the world then at some point you have to move beyond the negative and look at what you actually want to affirm and build. The communist, if she is developed enough, wants to build a classless physical utopia. Ultimately as inheritors of the classical spiritual tradition, we deny that the ideal society is as the communist describes because we disagree as to what the role of society should be. For the communist, the state and the society is seen as a tool for guaranteeing the material wellbeing of its members to the point that they may be as free as possible without infringing upon each other. This is agreeable to us, except for the problem that contemporary marxists by and large adhere to a modern rather than Platonist understanding of freedom. For them, “freedom” means simple autonomy from any authority that would, for example, enforce sexual morality. For us on the other hand, freedom is understood as divine and therefore adhering to the divine hierarchy. Material autonomy without a well-ordered and virtuous soul is not freedom because the appetite will trick the soul to further enslave itself by looking towards nothingness, just as we saw while discussing the Giants earlier.

For us, the role of society is first and foremost to provide an environment where virtue and therefore freedom may be cultivated. The ancients, and really anyone from more than 100 years ago, make it absolutely clear that to do so entails limiting raw autonomy. Ideally all citizens are also at least materially safe and not precarious - this was not so difficult for past societies and shouldn’t be for ours. But under no circumstances should the society that organizes itself around the attainment of virtue sacrifice itself and its structure in the pursuit of eradicating material suffering. The entire “sublunar”, incarnate world contains pain and hardship as a fundamental part of its structure because its purpose is to strengthen and purify our souls. Divinity, having compassion for us because it does indeed “experience” suffering through us, has given us the proper way to surpass this suffering & attain virtue, but there is no shortcut.

Divinity has also done this in a way that cannot be reconciled with the egalitarian and autonomous communist ideal: The procession of Gods begins with Zeus the Father and Mother Hera and descends through their siblings and children all the way down into this world so that ultimately we are participating in their family, their household, their kingdom. We reenact this structure in our own families as a reflection of their own relationships: the Mother and Father embedded in an extended clan and ruling over a diverse set of children of different ages and abilities. We are virtuous when we uphold the order of the family and its extensions because to be virtuous is to be as much like the Gods as is possible for us. Likewise we eschew virtue and endanger our own freedom and the freedom of those around us when we abandon or demean these bonds.

Communism, at its base, is a rejection of parenthood. Just like individual daddy issues, it's actually a misguided reaction to the distorted, malformed "parenthood" of the capitalist system that usurped the medieval liege contract which was itself a distorted reflection of the spiritually parental relationship in an ancient Polis between its patron God, its ancestors, and its contemporary elders. The communist, living in the modern west, has only ever experienced authority in the degraded form of the exploitative profit-motivated money-state. His scope is so limited by this that he even retrofits this model of exploitative authority onto the past in the immature pastiche of "The Dark Ages.” Just like an individual with shitty parents develops an antipathy towards the entire concept of parenthood, the communist witnesses authority misused by its current wielders and concludes that it is bad in itself. We as successors to the spiritual world of our forebears can sympathize with their diagnosis and acknowledge its basis in current reality, but we must be firm in differentiating our goals: Only the resurrection of sacred oaths, un-coopted social-power, and the robust extended family can lift us from this gigantic mess.