From Shariati:
But the realist philosophers – e.g., the materialists and naturalists who depend solely upon philosophical and scientific notions of sociology, psychology, and anthropology – do not hesitate to deny the existence of values, dismissing them as superstitions, vain suppositions, inherited habits, or social mores resulting from material forms, or as emotional states originating in the physiology of this “talking animal”! With their merciless and unfeeling pseudo-scientific analysis, the realists corrupt the essential sanctity and virtue of values and vivisect them as one cuts apart a living, delicate system into dead substance and elementary material components. Thus, when confronted with a person who forgets himself in the pursuit of scientific discovery, or who dedicated his life to his country, or chooses ideals over self-interest, or who ascribes greater value to beauty and goodness than to personal pleasure and advantage, the realists explain his feelings just as they would explain participation in a rite of circumcision.
Protestantism, capitalism, Marxism and Fascism?
These four are brothers born of the same materialism and raised in the same household, the West.
All four favor:
1) The dismissal or categorical denial of any immaterial, spiritual dimension in man; banishment of the notion of man as a being having a supra-material essence, as a inherently idealistic being.
2) The confinement of human needs and ideals to the narrow limits of material consumption and power, and the triumph of economic needs over all others.
3) The gravitation of philosophy, or at any rate morals and psychology, toward materialism.
4) Reliance upon the machine as the sole guarantee of economic power and
consumption. Worship of production and in consequence, assumption by the machine of the role of idol of the new civilization.
5) Inevitably, a confrontation with religious faith, or the spiritual dimension of religion, which is considered the most powerful obstacle and source of resistance to these movements.
From Dugin:
In order to adequately understand the essence of liberalism, we must
recognise that it is not accidental, that its appearance in the history of political and economic ideologies is based on fundamental processes, proceeding in all of Western civilisation. Liberalism is not only a part of that history, but its purest and most refined expression, its result. This principal observation demands from us a stricter definition of liberalism.
Liberalism is a political and economic philosophy and ideology,
embodying in itself the most important force-lines of the modern age and of the epoch of modernity:
• The understanding of the individual as the measure of all things;
• Belief in the sacred character of private property;
• The assertion of the equality of opportunity as the moral law of society;
• Belief in the ‘contractual’ basis of all sociopolitical institutions, including
governmental;
• The abolition of any governmental, religious and social authorities who
lay claim to ‘the common truth’;
• The separation of powers and the making of social systems of control
over any government institution whatsoever;
• The creation of a civil society without races, peoples and religions in
place of traditional governments;
• The dominance of market relations over other forms of politics (the
thesis: ‘economics is fate’);
• Certainty that the historical path of Western peoples and countries is a
universal model of development and progress for the entire world,
which must, in an imperative order, be taken as the standard and pattern.
The principles of the philosophy of liberalism and the very name ‘liberalism’
are based on the thesis of ‘freedom equals liberty’. At the same time, the
liberal philosophers, in particular Mill, underscore that the freedom they stand for is a strictly negative freedom. Moreover, they separate freedom from and freedom to and suggest using for these things two different English words: ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’. Liberty implies freedom from something. It is from here that the name liberalism is derived. Liberals fight for this freedom and insist on it. As for ‘freedom to’ -that is, the meaning and goal of freedom — here liberals fall silent, reckoning that each individual can himself find a way to apply his freedom, or that he can neglect altogether to search for a way to use it. This is a question of private choice, which is not discussed and which has no political or ideological value.
On the other hand, ‘freedom from’ is defined precisely and has a dogmatic
character. Liberals propose to be free from:
• Government and its control over the economy, politics and civil society;
• Churches and their dogmas;
• Class systems;
• Any form of common areas of responsibility for the economy;
• Any attempt to redistribute, with one or another government or social
institutions, the results of material and non-material labour (the formula
of the liberal philosopher Philip Nemo, a follower of Hayek: ‘Social
justice is deeply immoral’);
• Ethnic attachments;
• Any collective identity whatsoever.
In postmodernity, liberalism, preserving and even increasing its influence, ever more rarely projects an intelligent and freely adopted political philosophy; it becomes unconscious, self-understood and instinctive. This instinctive liberalism, having pretensions to transform itself into the generally non-conscious ‘matrix’ of contemporariness, gradually acquires grotesque characteristics. From the classical principles of liberalism, which have become unconscious (‘the world reserve unconscious’ could be used as an analogy alongside the dollar as the ‘world reserve currency’), the grotesque ways of postmodern culture are born. This is already a sui generis postliberalism, following from the total victory of classical liberalism, but leading it to extreme conclusions.
Thus there arises the panorama of postliberal grotesques:
- The measure of things becomes not the individual, but the postindividual, ‘the dividual’, accidentally playing an ironic combination of parts of people (his organs, his clones, his simulacra — all the way up to cyborgs and mutants);
- Private property is idolised, ‘transcendentalised’, and transforms from that which a man owns to that which owns the man;
- Equality of opportunity turns into equality of the contemplation of opportunities (the society of the spectacle — Guy Debord);
- Belief in the contractual character of all political and social institutions grows into an equalisation of the real and the virtual, and the world becomes a technical model;
- All forms of non-individual authorities disappear altogether, and any individual is free to think about the world howsoever he sees fit (the crisis of common rationality);
- The principle of the separation of powers transforms into the idea of a constant electronic referendum (a sort of electronic parliament), where each Internet user continually ‘votes’ on any decision by giving his opinion in any number of forums, which in turn cedes power to each individual citizen (each becoming, in effect, his own branch of government);
- ‘Civil society’ completely displaces government and converts into a global, cosmopolitan melting pot;
- From the thesis ‘economy is destiny’ it takes up the thesis ‘the numerical code — that is destiny’, so far as work, money, the market, production, consumption — everything becomes virtual.
From Spengler:
This revolution does not commence with the materialistic Socialism of the nineteenth century, still less with the Bolshevism of 1917. It has been “in permanence” (to borrow one of its current phrases) since the middle of the eighteenth century. It was then that Rational criticism, proudly named the philosophy of Enlightenment, began to turn its attention from the theological systems of Christianity and the traditional world-philosophy of the scholars – which was nothing more than theology without the will to system – to the facts of actuality, the State, society, and finally the evolved forms of economics. It commenced by depriving the concepts of nation, right, government, of their historical content, and interpreting the difference of rich and poor quite materialistically as a moral contrast, which was insisted upon by the agitators rather than honestly believed. At this point “Political Economy” came in, a materialistic science – founded about 1770 by Adam Smith in association with Hartley, Priestley, Mandeville, and Bentham – that had the presumption to regard men as appurtenances of the economic situation and to “explain” history in the light of prices, markets, and goods. To it we owe the conception of work, not as the content of life and calling, but as the commodity in which the worker trades. The whole history of the formative passions and the creative characters of strong personalities and races is ignored – the will, focused on commanding and ruling, on power and booty; the inventive urge, hatred, revenge, pride in personal strength and its successes; and equally, on the other side, jealousy, laziness, the poisonous emotions of the inferior. And there remain nothing but the “laws” of money and prices, which find expression in statistics and graphs.
And now at last it is possible to record the “successes” which the World Revolution has achieved. For the Revolution has reached its goal. It no longer menaces, it triumphs. It has won. And if its supporters argue the contrary to others or to their own horrified consciences, this is but one more case of the fate that eternally in human history pursues the fighter – the realization, with cruel distinctness, that the goal reached is quite different from that aimed at, and, in most cases, that it was not worth the trouble.