Negative Conservatism

What Is, Is

The Mandate of Heaven is the same function as forest fires - the brush builds up, its detritus beginning to hypertrophy across the entire living body of the biome, until its cleansed away by the brushfire. This prevents the catastrophic action of the crownfire, which, though still non-destructive for the living being of the forest, is incredibly destructive to the life trapped within in a fashion the brushfire isn’t. The legitimacy of the Mandate is through these same means, the individuals given power by are legitimate for the very reason of their being in power. Concepts of legitimacy often rely upon the same instinct that leads many forest managers to withhold the brushfires long enough for the crownfire to take place, with the “conservative” faction of politics being those who fetishize the existing order as somehow destined by eternity to rule in their specific character. This is, as the old phrase goes, a worship of ashes. If the old order becomes sclerotic, it deserves to be ousted. In doing this, the individual people in which positions change, and their position is no less legitimate, for the very reason than the conference of legitimacy is the existence of their legitimacy at all, ie, they are because they are.

No One Is

Following from this, the instinct of concepts of status legitimacy in regards to individuals is one which confers them some form of soul, even if not explicated as such. The liberal idea of the “individual” recreates this in cryptic form, where the individual is blessed with the same internal objecthood that the spiritual soul gives. This is rejected for the same reason as the latter - the very fact of an individual is given by nothing greater than what there is. People don’t exist until they’re born, with their context entirely informing who they are to all experience except their immediate internality. As Lacan was so commonly pointing out, to all except the very individual experiencing things, the ego’s own experience, the individual is nothing except who they are to other people, they are solely their masks, in other words. Concepts of cryptic souls cause an inherent tension in all ways of examining the world, which should not be present. Rather, people are recognized for what they are, masks (beings) emerging from the performances done by the internal ego.

Against Revolutionary Platonism

The Christio-Platonic concept of the world is one of a particular form of dualism where the world is always an imperfect attempt to live up to the perfect world of Being. The family tree of these forms of thought carries down a pattern of the left through history. Christianity, the original left against the Pagan elite of Rome, carries its Platonism into Liberalism, the left against the Monarchy, carries its Platonism into Socialism, the left against Capitalism, and etc. The Revolutionary Pagan instinct is here always one of destruction for this reason. The world of becoming-against-being, as is imagined, where all movement and life is an imperfect seeking of the perfect, causes their praxis to be a praxis of endless destruction. The Christians of Rome sacked and burned countless libraries and temples, enraged at the discrepancy, hoping to be saved through the very performance of actions which will bring the world one step closer to God. This is explicated by no better than Codreanu and its consequences can be seen all throughout the history and action of these ideologies, the intense ideological schisms of fringe protestants and academic leftists, the endless purges of various rationalist-revolutionary states, the endless seething of their commentaries on the world, outraged at every little news item of so-called degeneracy or capitalist greed or whatever else fulfills the role.

Counterrevolutionary Inaction

It’s not to say that there is inherent virtue in doing nothing, but that there is inherent virtue in avoiding the sorts of attempts at overcoding the ideal onto the real that is so characteristic of revolutionary action. The opposite of this form of imposition of the known-perfect onto the perceived-imperfect is an embracing of the perceived-imperfect. The masturbatory actions of the revolutionary are not only ultimately destructive outwards, but inwards as well. Whatever goals of praxis of politics should follow, they should those which go along with the current ways of the world, navigating and utilizing it in order to pursue the truly traditional, the mechanics and systems underlying which remain changed only in their practical beings. To take inaction in this way is to both radically embrace the true nature of things and to, in a practical sense, take far more action than the revolutionary ever dreams of. To see the world through its mechanics and becomings, and not be blinded by the spectral fantasies of revolution.