Metapolitics is also related to broader and deeper events in the political life of nations. To further explore this observation, we will use here an observation made two centuries ago on the other side of the Atlantic by an important American thinker of his day, Robert Lewis Dabney. In 1897, he “prophesied” the triumph of the campaign for women’s suffrage, using his general assessment of history and of the character of the only force that opposed this right: namely, conservatism, in the American North.
[Robert Lewis Dabney (1820-1898) was a Southern Presbyterian theologian and pastor, a chaplain in the Southern Confederate Army, and an architect. He was chief of staff and a highly successful biographer of the Southern hero General Stonewall Jackson].
Thus wrote the resourceful man about the conservative party: “It is a party which ultimately never maintains anything. Its history consists in constantly underestimating every kind of aggression on the part of the progressives and aiming to save its faith with a fair amount of grunting, but always finally acquiescing to any innovation. What yesterday was an innovation to which it resisted, today is one of the accepted principles of Conservatism. Now one is a Conservative only when one tries to resist the next coming innovation, which tomorrow one will be forced to accept by one’s cowardice and which will be followed by some third revolution, a revolt which will first be denounced and then adopted in its turn. Conservatism is merely a shadow that follows radicalism as it advances towards destruction. Conservatism always remains behind it but never lags it and always advances close to the leading radicalism.
Correspondingly, with a terrible similarity, in the modern Western world, namely Europe and America, the political hegemony of the Left was and is based largely on the intellectual hegemony of the alleged and widespread “leftist” ideas of freedom, equality and progress. Today’s liberal or liberalizing pseudo-Right shares the fundamental worldview of the Left, but not its clarity of vision, its uniqueness of purpose and its moral idealism. The so-called Rightists are essentially just lukewarm or backward Leftists, clearly lagging behind their more intelligent classmates in the school of politics. Consequently, their superior Leftists always “beat” them in the end. In any battle between the Left and the Right, the Left can rely fearlessly on a fifth phalanx inherent within every Rightist, namely on his own deepest moral convictions. If one starts with leftist assumptions, sooner or later one will draw leftist conclusions and put them into practice.
Of course, politics cannot be conceived simply as a matter of intellectual influence and persuasion. It is not only a matter of a change of mentality, but of a change of the world. So this requires organized, coordinated and purposeful action. Therefore politics inherently also concerns the bodies of public control, the chains of administration, the leaders and the followers.
Again, we will refer here to a nationalist from across the Atlantic, the untimely deceased philosopher, activist and journalist, Samuel Todd Francis, who explained the “leftward shift in contemporary politics” in terms of leadership. On the Left, the leadership is always to the left of the electorate, leading it to ever more radical positions. But on the Right, the leadership is also to the left of the electorate. Therefore, it is reasonable that politics is moving steadily to the Left, because its radical vanguard extends its influence across the political spectrum and drags it along with it.
One could imagine the above event with the physical analogy of a railway train in which the railway cars reasonably follow the engine. The cars of the Left are at the front of the train while the cars of the Right are at the back, therefore they arrive at their destination later but in no case do they have an independent course or motive power. There is only one engine and the people there determine the direction of the train. The supervisors responsible for the various cars usually wear uniforms and behave with an air of authority. But essentially they are conductors and ticket inspectors, along with the rest of us, in an externally determined movement.
But how has the Left acquired such power? Can this power be obtained by the Right and used in reverse? The answers are found in the Traditionalist school of philosophy and thought of Rene Guenon and Julius Evola. There is no doubt that technology, science and medicine in particular are making very remarkable advances. But from the perspective of Nationalists (Europeans and Americans) everything is getting worse politically, culturally and racially. This is why many Nationalists are attracted to Traditionalism. It explains contemporary events in terms of Myth, accepting that History moves cyclically, starting from a Golden Age and then declining during the Silver, Bronze and Iron Ages, until a new Golden Age rises again.
But Guénon and Evola did not see historical decline as an incorporeal force. They believed that it was produced by specific, embodied groups of historical agents. Although human action plays a major role in history, most people are not historical agents. They are the objects, not the subjects, of history. The historical organism is the domain of tiny ruling classes, or “vanguards,” which extend their lines of influence and control throughout the entire civilization, dragging it ever deeper into decline. The vast majority of humanity is simply a band of fellow travelers on a fleeting historical journey.
Guénon and Evola discuss these historical vanguards under the term “secret war.” It is “secret” simply in the sense of “hidden.” According to Evola’s words, in his work “Men and Ruins,” it is “a battle waged imperceptibly by the forces of world subversion, with means and under conditions ignored by current historiography,” that is, it is not a fog of abstract philosophical or sociological concepts, but rather must be considered as a “backstage” dimension, where specific “intelligences” operate. Evola adds the ominous observation that these secret forces “cannot be reduced to what is merely human.” Of course, occult warfare is not necessarily associated with occultism in the usual sense of the word, that is, with mysticism and magic, although both approaches overlap strongly in groups such as the Freemasons.
So how does occult warfare cause political and historical change? According to Evola, in his aforementioned book: “The deepest causes of History operate primarily through those elements that can be called impermanent factors, to use an image borrowed from Natural Science. These factors are causes responsible for almost undetectable ideological, social and political changes, which ultimately produce remarkable results: They are like the first cracks in a layer of snow which ultimately produce an avalanche. These causes almost never act in a direct manner, but, instead, give some already existing process a sufficient impetus leading to the designated goal.
Thus, as Evola describes it, the occult war is essentially identical to Metapolitics. It is recalled here that Metapolitics deals with the underlying causes and conditions of political change. Metapolitics also operates on two levels, intellectual and organizational. Metapolitical ideas include extensive moral systems, religions, collective identities (racial and national) as well as assumptions about what is politically possible. Metapolitical organizations disseminate metapolitical ideas, bridging the gap between theory and practice. Examples of metapolitical movements include the European and North American New Right, the functioning and actions of which we must study closely.
Extremely small metapolitical changes can lead over time to truly enormous political transformations. For example, the values enunciated in the Sermon on the Mount ultimately overthrew the entire ancient world. But since postpolitical causes are often remote from their political effects, and since these postpolitical causes are often abstract and internal ideas that only a few people grasp, Postpolitics is generally invisible to most people, as they focus only on the immediate and the concrete. Therefore, Postpolitics is “occult” in the literal sense of the word, that is, “hidden.” But it is often hidden in plain sight, and no special precautions need to be taken to keep it hidden from the public eye.
The concept of covert warfare is a contribution of Traditionalism to this subject that is generally derided as “conspiracy theories,” including both History and the various speculations regarding “secret societies.” This field is indeed a spiritually dangerous terrain.
However, Baron Evola, according to his statement, was “careful to prevent valid knowledge from degenerating into the creation of fantasies and superstitions”, including the paranoid tendency “to see everywhere and at all costs an occult background”. Thus, he treated all hypotheses regarding the occult war as simple “working hypotheses” formulated to unify and explain empirical data as much as possible.
He emphatically claimed that when a phenomenon cannot be fully explained by known causes, one can conclude that there are indeed unknown triggering causes and at the same time speculate about their nature.
