The sad truth is that we live in a society of false choices. Mainstream "conservatives" are almost indistinguishable from actual liberals. Christian religionists may view themselves as genuine conservatives, but apart from medieval superstitions and an emphasis on "traditional values" – an utterly meaningless phrase in the feminist matriarchal wasteland of post-Western society – they’re really just SJWs, of the pro-life variety.
Even those conservatives who claim to be "radical traditionalist" by rejecting the modern West fall short. This is because they conflate misgivings about technology with being radical traditionalist – like the celebrated paleoconservative and neo-Luddite Russell Kirk, who tossed his television set out the window and lived to the age of 75 without ever having learned to drive a car. This is superficial and against the spirit of what true radical traditionalism involves.
In my understanding, there are three closely related elements to radical traditionalism. In fact, because they all balance and reinforce one another, it is impossible to discard even one of them or to substitute anything else. The argument I am making therefore is one of completeness and compresence.
The three elements are as follows:
Western man’s overcoming of his own physical limitations through rational contemplation of nature is at the heart of radical traditionalism. It is the scientific method that provides us with the only effective means of acquiring certain knowledge of the external world. In fact, rejecting the Scientific Enlightenment is tantamount to rejecting radical traditionalism itself.
The true radical traditionalist values reason. His starting point begins with the ancient Greeks – specifically the Attic and pre-Hellenistic Greeks. Why the ancient Greeks, you ask? The reason is twofold:
(a) They were the first to inaugurate centuries of Western achievement. Since they were the first, they were confronted with the hardest task of all, intellectual creatio ex nihilo, conjuring something from nothing. The mental activity that produced the Greek Miracle was colossal. The Elements of Euclid or the Method of Archimedes were the fruit of more intellectual exertion than Newton’s Principia Mathematica, notwithstanding the latter’s greater complexity. The Greeks did not have the benefit of "standing on the shoulders of giants" when they made their discoveries, as Newton did. They were the giants!
(b) The Greeks were the inventors of the science of correct reasoning or logic. Without this formal science, Western civilization as we know it would not exist. Since the ancient Greeks laid the foundations of Western accomplishment, it makes sense that radical traditionalism would begin and (mostly) end with pre-Christian Greek culture, the ultimate source of all things Western. The radical traditionalist is radical because he wishes to go back to this root, this primordial source, to start again where the ancient Greeks left off, before the civilizational decline of the Hellenistic age.
The radical traditionalist's devotion to Greek rationality means that he rejects theology and metaphysics. Faith and revelation have contributed more negatives than positives to Western civilization because they elevate sterile dogma over objective truth, whereas Greek rationality provides us with the tools of scientific and rational inquiry to aid us in the search for objective truth. This is why Westerners were able to build on the ancient Greek heritage during the Renaissance, bringing us the discoveries of the Scientific Enlightenment.
Greek rationality actually works, but faith does not.
Likewise, the radical traditionalist understands that the traditional Western hierarchical order worked because it was the outgrowth of centuries of human experience. For this reason, even the greatest traditionalist conservative of the modern age, Edmund Burke, found himself dependent on reason as the means of conserving the ancien regime through sensible change. His writings show his clear attachment to Humean empiricism – not faith, revelation, and intuition.
This is simply a modern distortion. In the ancient world, the philosophers defined progress as the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake by an intellectual elite. This was not connected to so-called "benefits" for this class or that, especially as the true philosopher sees further than the politician and realises that the unfortunate use of Greek rationality for the social and material uplift of humanity can also lead to its dysgenic collapse. Such a misuse of reason and "progress" in post-Western society is not Greek, but essentially Judeo-Christian.
While the Scientific Enlightenment is a force for good, the Liberal Political Enlightenment that hijacked it, is a malignant cancerous growth.
From this movement, comes the idea of "rights," which liberal elites have politicized by calling "human" rights. They have replaced the traditional Western hierarchical order with a regime that sanctions moral degeneracy and calls it "freedom."
Rights are wildly popular because they can be used to justify anything. For example, feminism, a modern-day vagina-worshiping cult, teaches us that women have a right to act and dress like whores in public. The women's fashion industry guarantees this right to public whoredom by designing clothing that accentuates female secondary sex characteristics for the purpose of attracting dominant alpha males, i.e. yoga pants and other tight-fitting garments.
Locke, the prime theoretician of this co-option, was wrong. There is no state of nature where man is everywhere born free and equal. In reality, man is everywhere born unequal and in chains. This is not only true of individuals, but of entire races and nations. Few men attain real freedom, whereas the masses are born to serve through endless toil. The truth is that there are no "rights," just the will to survive and flourish against all odds.
The solution to rights and liberties is the re-establishment of the traditional hierarchies of the past. Only these had the power to satisfy man’s fundamental biological and psychological needs, such as ethnic homogeneity, social trust, moral reciprocity, female companionship, and sex. This would entail replacing inefficient democracy, based on the impulsive whims of the mob, with an efficient androcentric, family-oriented, and property-owning elite sworn to uphold centuries of tradition through the aid of empirical rationality.
Warriors, whether Greek hoplites, Viking raiders, Mongol horsemen, or samurai, have far more meaningful and fulfilling lives than the soy-guzzling, effeminate, sex-starved male consumers who inhabit the post-apocalyptic urban hellholes of the decaying West.
The warrior is at least allowed the freedom to be true to himself and express his own masculine energies, without fear of state censorship and persecution. Compared to the warrior, the consumer, a psychologically emasculated drone tyrannized over by feminists and Third World immigrants, is at an extreme disadvantage.
The radical traditionalist, like the ancient Greeks before him, views peace with deep ambivalence, because it ultimately tethers him and corrodes the human spirit. Too much peace destroys masculine vigor, replacing it with effeminacy and weakness; it undermines the societal order by breaking a man’s will to defend what he has, increasing his susceptibility to social maladies like women’s suffrage and cosmopolitanism.
The Pax Romana and the Pax Britannia, despite their impressiveness and immediate economic benefits, were also harbingers of decay and decline.
The organization of society around the Männerbund is the antidote to pacifist inertia. Times must always have a hard edge to ensure that men are ever ready to defend what they have, otherwise they will cease to appreciate this heritage and give it away for the proverbial "mess of pottage." The radical traditionalist believes that struggle and the Männerbund are essential ingredients of a nation’s health.
History is a record that men live to the fullest in traditional social orders defined by reason, hierarchical order, and meaningful struggle. Ancient Greek societies, whether oligarchies, tribal democracies, or tyrannies, were a synthesis of these three elements, creating the most stable social and political organizations ever known.
We would do well to jettison feminism, multiculturalism, and other leftist ideologies to reincorporate these elements into our societies. But instead of following this path, the post-Western elites have chosen a different course. In their hatred of the beautiful and the good, they have, through feminist matriarchy and mass immigration, reduced non-alpha males to disposable commodities in a ruthless quest for a peace and an equality that never existed and never can.
Become a Patron!
Even those conservatives who claim to be "radical traditionalist" by rejecting the modern West fall short. This is because they conflate misgivings about technology with being radical traditionalist – like the celebrated paleoconservative and neo-Luddite Russell Kirk, who tossed his television set out the window and lived to the age of 75 without ever having learned to drive a car. This is superficial and against the spirit of what true radical traditionalism involves.
In my understanding, there are three closely related elements to radical traditionalism. In fact, because they all balance and reinforce one another, it is impossible to discard even one of them or to substitute anything else. The argument I am making therefore is one of completeness and compresence.
The three elements are as follows:
- Love of reason
- Love of hierarchy and order
- Love (or acceptance) of war
Love of Reason
Western man’s overcoming of his own physical limitations through rational contemplation of nature is at the heart of radical traditionalism. It is the scientific method that provides us with the only effective means of acquiring certain knowledge of the external world. In fact, rejecting the Scientific Enlightenment is tantamount to rejecting radical traditionalism itself.
The true radical traditionalist values reason. His starting point begins with the ancient Greeks – specifically the Attic and pre-Hellenistic Greeks. Why the ancient Greeks, you ask? The reason is twofold:
(a) They were the first to inaugurate centuries of Western achievement. Since they were the first, they were confronted with the hardest task of all, intellectual creatio ex nihilo, conjuring something from nothing. The mental activity that produced the Greek Miracle was colossal. The Elements of Euclid or the Method of Archimedes were the fruit of more intellectual exertion than Newton’s Principia Mathematica, notwithstanding the latter’s greater complexity. The Greeks did not have the benefit of "standing on the shoulders of giants" when they made their discoveries, as Newton did. They were the giants!
(b) The Greeks were the inventors of the science of correct reasoning or logic. Without this formal science, Western civilization as we know it would not exist. Since the ancient Greeks laid the foundations of Western accomplishment, it makes sense that radical traditionalism would begin and (mostly) end with pre-Christian Greek culture, the ultimate source of all things Western. The radical traditionalist is radical because he wishes to go back to this root, this primordial source, to start again where the ancient Greeks left off, before the civilizational decline of the Hellenistic age.
The radical traditionalist's devotion to Greek rationality means that he rejects theology and metaphysics. Faith and revelation have contributed more negatives than positives to Western civilization because they elevate sterile dogma over objective truth, whereas Greek rationality provides us with the tools of scientific and rational inquiry to aid us in the search for objective truth. This is why Westerners were able to build on the ancient Greek heritage during the Renaissance, bringing us the discoveries of the Scientific Enlightenment.
Greek rationality actually works, but faith does not.
 |
| Hellenistic Period: Reason displaced by spectacle, emotions, and superstition. |
Love of hierarchy and order
Likewise, the radical traditionalist understands that the traditional Western hierarchical order worked because it was the outgrowth of centuries of human experience. For this reason, even the greatest traditionalist conservative of the modern age, Edmund Burke, found himself dependent on reason as the means of conserving the ancien regime through sensible change. His writings show his clear attachment to Humean empiricism – not faith, revelation, and intuition.
"What is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor of metaphysics. The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught à priori."But what of the idea of "progress" and constant social change that we have been taught to associate with reason?
This is simply a modern distortion. In the ancient world, the philosophers defined progress as the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake by an intellectual elite. This was not connected to so-called "benefits" for this class or that, especially as the true philosopher sees further than the politician and realises that the unfortunate use of Greek rationality for the social and material uplift of humanity can also lead to its dysgenic collapse. Such a misuse of reason and "progress" in post-Western society is not Greek, but essentially Judeo-Christian.
 |
| Enlightenment perverted for political ends. |
From this movement, comes the idea of "rights," which liberal elites have politicized by calling "human" rights. They have replaced the traditional Western hierarchical order with a regime that sanctions moral degeneracy and calls it "freedom."
Rights are wildly popular because they can be used to justify anything. For example, feminism, a modern-day vagina-worshiping cult, teaches us that women have a right to act and dress like whores in public. The women's fashion industry guarantees this right to public whoredom by designing clothing that accentuates female secondary sex characteristics for the purpose of attracting dominant alpha males, i.e. yoga pants and other tight-fitting garments.
Locke, the prime theoretician of this co-option, was wrong. There is no state of nature where man is everywhere born free and equal. In reality, man is everywhere born unequal and in chains. This is not only true of individuals, but of entire races and nations. Few men attain real freedom, whereas the masses are born to serve through endless toil. The truth is that there are no "rights," just the will to survive and flourish against all odds.
The solution to rights and liberties is the re-establishment of the traditional hierarchies of the past. Only these had the power to satisfy man’s fundamental biological and psychological needs, such as ethnic homogeneity, social trust, moral reciprocity, female companionship, and sex. This would entail replacing inefficient democracy, based on the impulsive whims of the mob, with an efficient androcentric, family-oriented, and property-owning elite sworn to uphold centuries of tradition through the aid of empirical rationality.
Love (or acceptance) of war
"War its thousands slays, Peace its ten thousands"War is the final and inescapable element of this triad. The radical traditionalist recognizes the Männerbund as the supreme interpersonal ideal. This is the brotherhood of warriors sworn to die for each other. His role models are the heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Man achieves sense of purpose when he has something noble to die for.
Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London
Warriors, whether Greek hoplites, Viking raiders, Mongol horsemen, or samurai, have far more meaningful and fulfilling lives than the soy-guzzling, effeminate, sex-starved male consumers who inhabit the post-apocalyptic urban hellholes of the decaying West.
 |
| All out of soy. |
The radical traditionalist, like the ancient Greeks before him, views peace with deep ambivalence, because it ultimately tethers him and corrodes the human spirit. Too much peace destroys masculine vigor, replacing it with effeminacy and weakness; it undermines the societal order by breaking a man’s will to defend what he has, increasing his susceptibility to social maladies like women’s suffrage and cosmopolitanism.
The Pax Romana and the Pax Britannia, despite their impressiveness and immediate economic benefits, were also harbingers of decay and decline.
The organization of society around the Männerbund is the antidote to pacifist inertia. Times must always have a hard edge to ensure that men are ever ready to defend what they have, otherwise they will cease to appreciate this heritage and give it away for the proverbial "mess of pottage." The radical traditionalist believes that struggle and the Männerbund are essential ingredients of a nation’s health.
History is a record that men live to the fullest in traditional social orders defined by reason, hierarchical order, and meaningful struggle. Ancient Greek societies, whether oligarchies, tribal democracies, or tyrannies, were a synthesis of these three elements, creating the most stable social and political organizations ever known.
We would do well to jettison feminism, multiculturalism, and other leftist ideologies to reincorporate these elements into our societies. But instead of following this path, the post-Western elites have chosen a different course. In their hatred of the beautiful and the good, they have, through feminist matriarchy and mass immigration, reduced non-alpha males to disposable commodities in a ruthless quest for a peace and an equality that never existed and never can.
Become a Patron!
