What if I’m done conversing?

I’ve been reading James Burnham’s work Suicide of the West, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. He concisely states what I’ve been feeling for at least a year. I'm fascinated by his explanation of the Liberal obsession with “dialogue." According to Burnham, this is the Liberal’s modus operandi; this is how they believe they will achieve liberty from tyranny for all Mankind. Since the beginning of the contemporary Liberal order, which started after the end of WWII, the Right has been guided into conversations that have ensured their loss time and again. When the Right didn’t lose, they just postponed the Left’s forward progress. Burnham effectively lays out how the Left continues to achieve this through dialogue.

The goal of dialogue, for the Left, is to get its interlocutor to see the reasonability of its position. Yet, what’s reasonable for the left is defined by its ideological standards. Epistemic seems to be the main tactic by which the left asserts its ideological standard. The Left doesn’t purport to know “the truth” (it’s absolutely relativistic), but it does purport to be searching for the truth. This means the Left cannot ultimately define the truth. Instead, the Left can reach a consensus about what’s true. With some confidence, each member of the dialogue can come to see the soundness of the majority party’s opinion. That, or they’ll be considered unreasonable and reactionary.

Fascinatingly, because the Left emphasizes the power of the masses, and purports to be the liberators of the downtrodden, ignorant, and materially dispossessed, what they mean by consensus is plebiscitary agreement. Without fail, this seems to always manifest as tyranny by the majority through the state. If you disagree with the majority, you become subject to the majority’s will. In addition, because they’ve realized that institutional capture is the best way to liberate the downtrodden from their ignorance and material dispossession, they use the institutions that they do capture to enforce their will on any dissenters by generating cultural consensus. Do you find public education to be a waste of time? You’re unreasonable and not allowed a position amongst reasonable people. Do you think criminals make life choices that are not necessarily caused by their material circumstances? You’re a reactionary and not allowed a position amongst reasonable people. Do you think there might be essential differences between groups of people? You’re completely unreasonable, not allowed a position amongst reasonable people, and you should be removed from polite society.

In this way, the Left becomes the tyrant. They force their moral norms on all the people of a nation and demand conformity, You will be liberated whether you like it or not, and if you resist, you will be re-educated so you can see the error of your ways; and if you are unwilling to see the error of your ways…

Well, what if I’m done conversing with people whose conception of fundamental truth, and truth generally, is predicated on what the majority consents to in a particular time and place? Contemporarily, I’ll be met with the mindless, proceeding statement: Silence is violence. From this, we may conclude two things. First, you must engage in dialogue if you’re reasonable, and by dialoguing with the majority, they will decide whether your opinion is truly liberal. They're both the arbiters and definers of what's acceptable, true, and reasonable speech; and, thus, who's a reasonable, honest, and acceptable person. Secondly, if you recognize the game's unbalanced or unreasonable, i.e., the marketplace of ideas is simply a way for the majority to demand conformity, then you are de facto unreasonable. The majority will demand that you conform to their will, or you’re unreasonable. How liberating! 

Tyranny by the state isn’t the only problem. The Liberals tend to see the actions of people deemed ignorant and materially dispossessed by the liberals to be caused by their material limitations and ignorance, Therefore, they do not consider them responsible for their circumstances. On the other hand, the people who make up Western nations, people who are/were Christians, Europeans, materially enriched people, and people with families, are responsible for their circumstances and choices. They do not have the benefit of claiming ignorance or material dispossession. Under a Liberal paradigm, these people have a duty to educate the ignorant, to equalize the material conditions of the downtrodden, and to be merciful towards those whose actions allegedly stem from their poverty. If they recognize that this game is designed to take advantage of them, they will be regarded as unreasonable. Their reach in the marketplace of ideas will be significantly limited if not outright suppressed. They will be removed from polite society or compelled to or coerced into subsidizing the education and enrichment of the poverty-stricken.

If you acknowledge that the "downtrodden" might take advantage of these circumstances, you are an unreasonable reactionary that’s also probably some jingoistic nationalist and thus racist, like Hitler. If you recognize that this is the game and refuse to take part in any “discussion” on these matters, you're signaling you’re not a liberal and thus probably an unreasonable reactionary that’s some jingoistic nationalist and racist. There’s no winning.

If stepping to the side were all that was necessary, perhaps living parallel lives to the Liberals or Progressives wouldn’t be so bad. However, the Liberals or Progressives cannot permit this. It wasn’t that long ago that the Liberals recognized that the acquisition of government institutions and the application of the Liberal-Progressive framework through those institutions were the most effective ways to shape society in their image. They apparently learned it from Andrew Jackson. As a result, the more you step aside and create parallel communities, the more the Progs will use their institutional control to destroy you. Any hopes you have of peacefully capturing these institutions for yourself may as well be considered delusional. If you cannot be inclusive and do not tow the Progs’ line, you cannot be included, anywhere. Because their philosophy is universalist, you cannot just be excluded from their society; you eventually must be removed from all societies. The Progs' puritanical obsession with their conception of an inclusive, egalitarian society necessitates the extermination of the reactionary if he doesn't comply. However, the ‘reactionary’ doesn’t have a way to gain any significant power through dialogue with the progressive because the prog will not acknowledge the weltanschauung of the ‘reactionary.’ How could he? At best, after obsequiously submitting to the will of the Liberals, the ‘reactionary’ must wait and watch as the liberals hollow out his nation, culture, values, and institutions so that progressives can try to manifest their ideal, utopian society.

Between the puritanical utopians and the ‘reactionaries,’ who are more aptly described as sensible Right-wingers, dialogue is not about discovering the truth. Disputes about facts, logic, and statistics are not the core of their conversations. In many ways, they’re not trying to convince the other that their side is right. Convincing their audience is the aim of both the sensible Right-winger and the puritanical utopian if they know what's happening. Such a conversation cannot be considered a dialogue in any real sense; it is verbal combat. Once the conversation commences, synthesis is out the door. One side has its worldview and the other has theirs, they are mutually exclusive to each other. It is their mutual exclusivity that prevents them from synthesizing. They are like oil and water; they will not mix.

The fact that these two worldviews do not engage in dialogue, but adversarial discussions because they are mutually exclusive, means that most people on both sides will inevitably accept that there can be no conversation. If one side wants to chase you to the ends of the earth and destroy you but the other side wants to have a good-faith conversation, the latter will lose. The progs want to destroy you, your culture, and your traditions, they want to capture and infest your institutions, and they want to see your people "universalized." There can be no good-faith dialogue with them. They know what they’re doing, as well; they are not unaware of their desire to homogenize the people of the world, to capture and utilize your traditional institutions towards their ends (if they haven’t already), to dismantle or deconstruct the traditions that preserved your forefathers, the culture they entrusted you with, or your identity vis-à-vis that culture and those traditions. They consciously do this, and they see it as a good thing. You cannot have a fair, evenhanded discussion with them. They are enemies of sensible people and should be classified as such. Most people will inevitably recognize that having conversations with the Left is fruitless; either you accept the Left’s weltanschauung or you get ostracized, at best. In such circumstances, many people will choose the path of silence and drop out of the conversation to establish a parallel structure. Inevitably, capturing these parallel institutions will become the next aim of the Left. Until the Left's worldview is captured and dismantled, there can be no peace for the Right. 

Essentially, the Left uses the Right’s desire to engage in good-faith dialogue against it. One of the better examples of this is the Right’s obsession with the Constitution. They act as if the Constitution has some magical ability to get the Left to see its overreach as Un-American and antithetical to the foundational values of these United States. First, when the Right does this, they are quickly reminded by the Left that some of the Founding Fathers were slaveholders and so, therefore, the Left argues that we cannot hold the same values that they held when they wrote the Constitution because we do not defend or uphold slavery as an institution. Secondly, we are reminded by the Left that the Constitution is a “living document,” which essentially means that it can mean whatever the Left wants the Constitution to mean in any particular circumstance. Their epistemic skepticism is both a knowledge claim and an astoundingly efficacious tactic against an opponent who purports to know the truth, especially when they can outnumber him and achieve “consensus.” When these two events occur, or anything like them occurs, the Right’s tradition, culture, cultural habits, and values are put on the chopping block. So much for dialogue.

I do not feel I’m in the position to make any definitive statements on what dismantling and deconstructing the Left’s worldview will look like, but I do think it will be useful to put progressives and the Left into a position where they must confront their worldview’s irreconcilable and fundamental contradictions. This, I think, should force them into a state of aporia. Once this is achieved, one may move forward and lay claim to new grounds; this keeps the Left on its heels. On the defensive, the Left cannot assert itself. If this is impossible because they utterly refuse to engage with the sensible Right (a very real possibility) or because institutional conditions simply prohibit the Right from speaking, unfortunately, silence is probably the only way.

I’m looking forward to reading Burnham further, and other writers such as Guenon, Yockey, and Carlisle, for example. Many of the writers I’m delving into are controversial, but controversiality shouldn’t prohibit one from understanding what another thinks. For now, I think I will use this space to wrestle with their ideas and get feedback. If you have any thoughts you’d like to share on these matters, you’re welcome to comment. Thanks.