Traditional Quotes and Symbols
The lower is always aligned with the one above it, and the one above is aligned with the one above that, all the way up to the Most High, which ultimately determines everything.
The third point that receives highlighted significance in the perspective of László András, and therefore must be addressed, is right-wing attitude. Traditionality is a complex perspective that encompasses all aspects and levels of human existence – yet it can be said that tradition, as the worldview of ancient man, and traditionality, as a contemporary human perspective in opposition to modernity, have two pillars: spirituality, which refers to the set of tools, procedures, and paths that enable a person to transcend themselves toward their ultimate divine totality; and politics in the broadest sense, which refers to the hierarchical structuring of human society and the state. While the former is marked by Freedom, its ultimate goal being the transcendence of all conditionality, so that man may recognize himself as an unconditional totality of being, the Absolute, the latter is marked by Order, which is the earthly reflection and manifestation of the celestial world, and whose task is to provide a framework, both collectively and individually, that allows for a life in harmony with divine principles. For the earthly Order must harmoniously fit into the heavenly Order in every respect; in other words, because the normative goal of society must always coincide with the normative goal of the individual; the normative goal of the collective must always serve what the normative goal of the individual is. And this always happens: because as everything is enveloped by sacrality in the ideal traditional society, in the "ideal" modern society, everything is enveloped by consumption.
The archaic age, or generally the age of the traditional man, lived almost unconsciously and without any form of objectification what can be called right-wing attitude in the original sense of the word. In contrast, left-wing orientation in the modern sense is hardly older than a few hundred years: it only appeared in the late period of the dissolution of Tradition, and from its appearance onward it gained increasing dominance in the form of the gradual leftward shift of the relative and current political center (the absolute center, of course, never changes). This leftward shift is still ongoing—even though today every significant party is almost entirely left-wing. What is considered right-wing today, or the party that defines itself as right-wing, from a traditional perspective can only be considered right-wing in a very relative sense. This applies equally to today’s parliamentary right and far-right, as well as to the far-right movements of the first half of the 20th century: these, although not to the same extent, were and are so contaminated by left-wing ideas that if we were to designate their place between absolute right-wingness and absolute left-wingness, they would all fall closer to the left-wing endpoint than to the midpoint between the two endpoints, that is, the absolute center.
As for right-wing attitude in the traditional sense, it is not at all identifiable with what is today understood as “right-wing” – and not because it is less, but because it is much more right-wing: a maximal right-wing attitude untainted by leftist ideas. Right-wing attitude does not belong among those qualities and values that are optimally ideal, but among those that are maximally ideal. The expression “far-right” is therefore actually a contradictio in adiecto: right-wingness has no extreme variant and cannot have one, because only that which has an optimum point can have an extreme variant, by exceeding that optimum point. What is today nevertheless called “far-right,” if it is extreme in any sense at all, is not extreme because of its right-wing attitude—that is, not because it exaggerates the representation of right-wing values—but for other reasons (aggressive anti-leftism, violence, populism, demagogy, etc.).
What are the criteria of maximal right-attitude?
In the negative sense, the rejection of the ideological components of left-wing attitude,
– whether it is democratism, which manifests the reign of quantity in the social sphere, that is, the principle of popular sovereignty, which can be expressed as civil democracy (“mob rule,” as Plato says) or as communist dictatorship (the latter having to disappear from the political stage due to its low efficiency and its almost conservative nature compared to the former);
– whether it is socialism, which is nothing other than humanism on a social level, that is, society’s orientation toward itself, a kind of “social narcissism”;
– whether it is nationalism and internationalism, which are successive stages of the dissolution of the old order and the realization of a new counter-order;
–whether it is egalitarianism, which disqualifies individuals, or liberalism, the theory and practice of universal value deprivation, which does the same with ideas, and while proclaiming the free competition of ideas, reserves the position of external organizer for itself;
– whether it is revolutionary ideology, whose basic principle is that if two factors are hierarchically arranged above and below each other, then the higher one inevitably oppresses, exploits, and abuses the lower one, and therefore the latter must resort to “revolutionary violence” to shake off the yoke of the former;
– whether it is relativism, which appears in countless levels and variations,, this par excellence samsaric worldview, which seeks to relativize every truth except its own;
– whether it is rationalism, which arises when the purely instrumental reason (ratio), which knows only the question of “how?” and is essentially executive, shakes off the “chains” of the suprarational intellect (the intellectus, which always sees the part in the whole and is solely competent in the questions of “what?” and “why?”), and either becomes autonomous or directly enters the service of subrational forces;
– whether it be the secularized messianism inseparable from both basic forms of left-wingness, that is, utopianism, which, the more systematically it works toward the “Holy Goal,” the more it seeks to conceal the true nature of the “end of history” and the dismal role it assigns to the “last man”;
– whether it is self-service religiosity, which signifies not the elevation of man but the continuous degradation of the level of religion;
– whether it be the only cycle known to modern man: the increasingly frantic pace of the hamster wheel of production and consumption;
– finally, let us not forget that both basic forms of left-wing attitude go hand in hand with materialism as a doctrinal system (social democracy), and with materiality as a mentality (liberalism).
But leftism manifests on a »psychological« level as well: for when today everything is directed toward the instincts being liberated and reaching a ruling position, the inhibitions ceasing, the desires continuing to grow and seeking further satisfactions, then in reality nothing else happens than that what has its place below and in bondage is allowed to break forth and rule (one of the most dreaded words for the modern leftist post-Freudian man is »repression«). This psychological principle, which became the foundation of twentieth‑century psychology, is nothing other than the penetration of leftism into the psychological sphere.
Leftism is in every case a political exploitation of the conjuncture determined by kali-yuga – that is, leftism does not give direction to the changes, as some of its theorists believe (for example, Friedrich A. Hayek), but merely serves a blind mechanism.
Generally speaking, leftism – at least in its liberal, now solely progressive variant – likes to have things arranged by themselves, that is, to let them run free within certain loose frameworks (self-regulating systems, laissez faire), which naturally results in a continuous inflation, leveling, and loss of value in every area – whether it be economy, culture, religion, etc. However, if this process is not at the desired speed, or if the given category has already reached its natural level and further sinking is no longer expected by itself, it often tries to "arrange" – disorganize! – them based on principles that are beneath them and result in further descent.
Positively formulated, pure right-wing attitude starts from a worldview that has God at its pinnacle, and tries to arrange every area of life in an analogical way, or through representations, so that it is in harmony with this Principium Principiorum (cf. "as in heaven, so also on earth"). The lower is always aligned with the one above it, and the one above is aligned with the one above that, all the way up to the Most High, which ultimately determines everything.
In this way, the right is principally theocratic, and this divine rule is realized through monarchic and aristocratic (class-based) transitions. At the intersection of heaven and earth stands the king, the par excellence man, in whom humanity – interpreted not as a given but as a possibility – has been fulfilled, and who is the embodiment of that central principle which permeates the whole "under heaven" and manifests itself in a specific manner according to the given domain.
The State and the Church, or in other words, the profane and the sacred spheres, are not separated by right wing attitude, since essentially both point towards the same ultimate Point from which they originate.
The basic word of the right-wing arrangement of traditional society has therefore always been Order – and Order is always a structure based on a higher principle, a higher organizing principle (Sanskrit dharma). Tradition was and is conscious that for the people or the masses it is not freedom that is fitting, but Order. José Ortega y Gasset excellently pointed out that the mass is not made a mass by its numerical superiority, but by its inertia. The mass is that which can be "mobilized." This is something that Tradition has always been fundamentally aware of: it was conscious that the people and the mass, powerless and by their powerlessness always inclined to sinking, must be held from above; and it goes without saying that if the sustaining force of Order weakens or ceases, the mass begins to sink due to the inertial force of its own weight (this is the "strength" of the people: its own inertial momentum). That is why traditional peoples, when encountering secular culture and civilization, almost immediately begin to degenerate and perish: because the bonds that held them relatively high are severed. However, this mere "abandonment," which was characteristic of the transitional period between traditionality and modernity, is aggravated in the modern, and even more so in the postmodern age, by the activation of distinct descending forces.
Naturally this does not mean that the traditional world rejected Freedom. On the contrary: it was only in the traditional world that it received its true dignity and appropriate rank. Freedom as a capacity and virtue was the privilege of the few – the exceptional – while Order was everyone’s task. The “ancient man” was conscious that Freedom cannot be democratized, because a virtue tied to high qualities (in the original sense of the word virtus, that is, manly vigor/virtue) cannot simply be distributed. Freedom is not a given that can be secured for people, but a capacity to be won. Neither the trade union, nor the parliament, nor the women’s movement can fight out freedom for anyone – because the freedom they secure is never real freedom. The one who needs to be liberated is the servant, and even when freed, the servant remains a servant: a freed servant. Only the victor is free; only he who is capable to rule – and above all he who is able to rule over himself! For just as the basis of all knowledge is self-knowledge, so too the basis and culmination of all rule is self-rule. And rule is connected not only with Freedom, but also closely with Order: the choice of Order already points toward Freedom, that is, a serious step taken in the direction of Freedom – because Freedom can only be attained through Order, only through the surpassing of fulfilled, maximized Order. It would be foolish to think that freedom could be realized without strength and power – specifically without personal strength and personal power. And likewise it would be foolish to think that anyone other than the high-ranking could be free; the low-ranking, precisely because essentially they are always – even at the peak of political power – below, can never be free. For only he can be free who is above, and rule can only be exercised from above downward.
What the modern leftist/liberal masses know is in reality not freedom, but liberation and unleashing: emancipatio. Liberation and unleashing are not the result of personal strength and victory, but of being deprived of constraints – which, however, can indeed be carried out by an external institution. Freedom requires strength; on the contrary, unleashing requires weakness and relinquishment. The mass has no stability — this always requires an internal regulating force; the mass never holds itself up, but is held up from above: by its nature it always lets itself go. Therefore, when the force of Order that holds and sustains ceases, the mass enters a state of relinquishment. This is liberation and unleashing. The masses always feel free when they are released from above and can finally yield to their own weight’s pulling force, the ontological mass attraction that always acts upward from below but pulls downward from above. The freedom of the masses is therefore not the freedom of the man who overcomes his own inertial force in free ascent, but the freedom of the man in free fall. And in this way, what today is glorified as freedom is the diametrical – and at the same time parodistic – counterpart of true freedom.
www.amazon.com/Solum-Ipsum-Metaphysical-Andr%C3%A1s-L%C3%...
The lower is always aligned with the one above it, and the one above is aligned with the one above that, all the way up to the Most High, which ultimately determines everything.
The third point that receives highlighted significance in the perspective of László András, and therefore must be addressed, is right-wing attitude. Traditionality is a complex perspective that encompasses all aspects and levels of human existence – yet it can be said that tradition, as the worldview of ancient man, and traditionality, as a contemporary human perspective in opposition to modernity, have two pillars: spirituality, which refers to the set of tools, procedures, and paths that enable a person to transcend themselves toward their ultimate divine totality; and politics in the broadest sense, which refers to the hierarchical structuring of human society and the state. While the former is marked by Freedom, its ultimate goal being the transcendence of all conditionality, so that man may recognize himself as an unconditional totality of being, the Absolute, the latter is marked by Order, which is the earthly reflection and manifestation of the celestial world, and whose task is to provide a framework, both collectively and individually, that allows for a life in harmony with divine principles. For the earthly Order must harmoniously fit into the heavenly Order in every respect; in other words, because the normative goal of society must always coincide with the normative goal of the individual; the normative goal of the collective must always serve what the normative goal of the individual is. And this always happens: because as everything is enveloped by sacrality in the ideal traditional society, in the "ideal" modern society, everything is enveloped by consumption.
The archaic age, or generally the age of the traditional man, lived almost unconsciously and without any form of objectification what can be called right-wing attitude in the original sense of the word. In contrast, left-wing orientation in the modern sense is hardly older than a few hundred years: it only appeared in the late period of the dissolution of Tradition, and from its appearance onward it gained increasing dominance in the form of the gradual leftward shift of the relative and current political center (the absolute center, of course, never changes). This leftward shift is still ongoing—even though today every significant party is almost entirely left-wing. What is considered right-wing today, or the party that defines itself as right-wing, from a traditional perspective can only be considered right-wing in a very relative sense. This applies equally to today’s parliamentary right and far-right, as well as to the far-right movements of the first half of the 20th century: these, although not to the same extent, were and are so contaminated by left-wing ideas that if we were to designate their place between absolute right-wingness and absolute left-wingness, they would all fall closer to the left-wing endpoint than to the midpoint between the two endpoints, that is, the absolute center.
As for right-wing attitude in the traditional sense, it is not at all identifiable with what is today understood as “right-wing” – and not because it is less, but because it is much more right-wing: a maximal right-wing attitude untainted by leftist ideas. Right-wing attitude does not belong among those qualities and values that are optimally ideal, but among those that are maximally ideal. The expression “far-right” is therefore actually a contradictio in adiecto: right-wingness has no extreme variant and cannot have one, because only that which has an optimum point can have an extreme variant, by exceeding that optimum point. What is today nevertheless called “far-right,” if it is extreme in any sense at all, is not extreme because of its right-wing attitude—that is, not because it exaggerates the representation of right-wing values—but for other reasons (aggressive anti-leftism, violence, populism, demagogy, etc.).
What are the criteria of maximal right-attitude?
In the negative sense, the rejection of the ideological components of left-wing attitude,
– whether it is democratism, which manifests the reign of quantity in the social sphere, that is, the principle of popular sovereignty, which can be expressed as civil democracy (“mob rule,” as Plato says) or as communist dictatorship (the latter having to disappear from the political stage due to its low efficiency and its almost conservative nature compared to the former);
– whether it is socialism, which is nothing other than humanism on a social level, that is, society’s orientation toward itself, a kind of “social narcissism”;
– whether it is nationalism and internationalism, which are successive stages of the dissolution of the old order and the realization of a new counter-order;
–whether it is egalitarianism, which disqualifies individuals, or liberalism, the theory and practice of universal value deprivation, which does the same with ideas, and while proclaiming the free competition of ideas, reserves the position of external organizer for itself;
– whether it is revolutionary ideology, whose basic principle is that if two factors are hierarchically arranged above and below each other, then the higher one inevitably oppresses, exploits, and abuses the lower one, and therefore the latter must resort to “revolutionary violence” to shake off the yoke of the former;
– whether it is relativism, which appears in countless levels and variations,, this par excellence samsaric worldview, which seeks to relativize every truth except its own;
– whether it is rationalism, which arises when the purely instrumental reason (ratio), which knows only the question of “how?” and is essentially executive, shakes off the “chains” of the suprarational intellect (the intellectus, which always sees the part in the whole and is solely competent in the questions of “what?” and “why?”), and either becomes autonomous or directly enters the service of subrational forces;
– whether it be the secularized messianism inseparable from both basic forms of left-wingness, that is, utopianism, which, the more systematically it works toward the “Holy Goal,” the more it seeks to conceal the true nature of the “end of history” and the dismal role it assigns to the “last man”;
– whether it is self-service religiosity, which signifies not the elevation of man but the continuous degradation of the level of religion;
– whether it be the only cycle known to modern man: the increasingly frantic pace of the hamster wheel of production and consumption;
– finally, let us not forget that both basic forms of left-wing attitude go hand in hand with materialism as a doctrinal system (social democracy), and with materiality as a mentality (liberalism).
But leftism manifests on a »psychological« level as well: for when today everything is directed toward the instincts being liberated and reaching a ruling position, the inhibitions ceasing, the desires continuing to grow and seeking further satisfactions, then in reality nothing else happens than that what has its place below and in bondage is allowed to break forth and rule (one of the most dreaded words for the modern leftist post-Freudian man is »repression«). This psychological principle, which became the foundation of twentieth‑century psychology, is nothing other than the penetration of leftism into the psychological sphere.
Leftism is in every case a political exploitation of the conjuncture determined by kali-yuga – that is, leftism does not give direction to the changes, as some of its theorists believe (for example, Friedrich A. Hayek), but merely serves a blind mechanism.
Generally speaking, leftism – at least in its liberal, now solely progressive variant – likes to have things arranged by themselves, that is, to let them run free within certain loose frameworks (self-regulating systems, laissez faire), which naturally results in a continuous inflation, leveling, and loss of value in every area – whether it be economy, culture, religion, etc. However, if this process is not at the desired speed, or if the given category has already reached its natural level and further sinking is no longer expected by itself, it often tries to "arrange" – disorganize! – them based on principles that are beneath them and result in further descent.
Positively formulated, pure right-wing attitude starts from a worldview that has God at its pinnacle, and tries to arrange every area of life in an analogical way, or through representations, so that it is in harmony with this Principium Principiorum (cf. "as in heaven, so also on earth"). The lower is always aligned with the one above it, and the one above is aligned with the one above that, all the way up to the Most High, which ultimately determines everything.
In this way, the right is principally theocratic, and this divine rule is realized through monarchic and aristocratic (class-based) transitions. At the intersection of heaven and earth stands the king, the par excellence man, in whom humanity – interpreted not as a given but as a possibility – has been fulfilled, and who is the embodiment of that central principle which permeates the whole "under heaven" and manifests itself in a specific manner according to the given domain.
The State and the Church, or in other words, the profane and the sacred spheres, are not separated by right wing attitude, since essentially both point towards the same ultimate Point from which they originate.
The basic word of the right-wing arrangement of traditional society has therefore always been Order – and Order is always a structure based on a higher principle, a higher organizing principle (Sanskrit dharma). Tradition was and is conscious that for the people or the masses it is not freedom that is fitting, but Order. José Ortega y Gasset excellently pointed out that the mass is not made a mass by its numerical superiority, but by its inertia. The mass is that which can be "mobilized." This is something that Tradition has always been fundamentally aware of: it was conscious that the people and the mass, powerless and by their powerlessness always inclined to sinking, must be held from above; and it goes without saying that if the sustaining force of Order weakens or ceases, the mass begins to sink due to the inertial force of its own weight (this is the "strength" of the people: its own inertial momentum). That is why traditional peoples, when encountering secular culture and civilization, almost immediately begin to degenerate and perish: because the bonds that held them relatively high are severed. However, this mere "abandonment," which was characteristic of the transitional period between traditionality and modernity, is aggravated in the modern, and even more so in the postmodern age, by the activation of distinct descending forces.
Naturally this does not mean that the traditional world rejected Freedom. On the contrary: it was only in the traditional world that it received its true dignity and appropriate rank. Freedom as a capacity and virtue was the privilege of the few – the exceptional – while Order was everyone’s task. The “ancient man” was conscious that Freedom cannot be democratized, because a virtue tied to high qualities (in the original sense of the word virtus, that is, manly vigor/virtue) cannot simply be distributed. Freedom is not a given that can be secured for people, but a capacity to be won. Neither the trade union, nor the parliament, nor the women’s movement can fight out freedom for anyone – because the freedom they secure is never real freedom. The one who needs to be liberated is the servant, and even when freed, the servant remains a servant: a freed servant. Only the victor is free; only he who is capable to rule – and above all he who is able to rule over himself! For just as the basis of all knowledge is self-knowledge, so too the basis and culmination of all rule is self-rule. And rule is connected not only with Freedom, but also closely with Order: the choice of Order already points toward Freedom, that is, a serious step taken in the direction of Freedom – because Freedom can only be attained through Order, only through the surpassing of fulfilled, maximized Order. It would be foolish to think that freedom could be realized without strength and power – specifically without personal strength and personal power. And likewise it would be foolish to think that anyone other than the high-ranking could be free; the low-ranking, precisely because essentially they are always – even at the peak of political power – below, can never be free. For only he can be free who is above, and rule can only be exercised from above downward.
What the modern leftist/liberal masses know is in reality not freedom, but liberation and unleashing: emancipatio. Liberation and unleashing are not the result of personal strength and victory, but of being deprived of constraints – which, however, can indeed be carried out by an external institution. Freedom requires strength; on the contrary, unleashing requires weakness and relinquishment. The mass has no stability — this always requires an internal regulating force; the mass never holds itself up, but is held up from above: by its nature it always lets itself go. Therefore, when the force of Order that holds and sustains ceases, the mass enters a state of relinquishment. This is liberation and unleashing. The masses always feel free when they are released from above and can finally yield to their own weight’s pulling force, the ontological mass attraction that always acts upward from below but pulls downward from above. The freedom of the masses is therefore not the freedom of the man who overcomes his own inertial force in free ascent, but the freedom of the man in free fall. And in this way, what today is glorified as freedom is the diametrical – and at the same time parodistic – counterpart of true freedom.
www.amazon.com/Solum-Ipsum-Metaphysical-Andr%C3%A1s-L%C3%...