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My interpretation of what you're saying here is "look, I can tell you in plain English exactly what I want. It's a very short and simple list of requests. And after I get what I want, I'll be out of your hair, you won't be hearing from me anymore. But these other guys, the communists, all they can say is that there will always be 'problems'. They can't tell me exactly what problems they intend to solve, or how they intend on solving them. So you never know what they're gonna do. Today everything could be fine, but tomorrow they could want something else, and then it's something else, and then something else, all because they found a new 'problem'. That makes them dangerous, because you don't know what they're gonna do from one minute to the next."
Do I have that right?
I will acknowledge that, yes, this is a feature of basically all the non-utopian Marxists. They think the future is fundamentally open. They don't know what's possible, what's impossible, or what will need to be done in the future. They don't claim to be capable of this kind of knowledge. (The utopian Marxists do claim to have this sort of knowledge, but we've already established that they have other problems).
I think however you can easily be a white nationalist while operating on a model that's basically like what you describe, with a more concrete list of demands. Mainly they just want to live in a country with other white people; it's really quite simple. There are many historical examples of 99% white countries. Just copy one of those, add on some extra immigration laws, and you're basically good, besides the continual ongoing maintenance that every state requires. You don't have to be Bismark with infinite will to power in order to be a white nationalist.
I'm curious what you would think of Keith Woods.
Yes! Dear God, yes!
For Lacan (one of the foundational reference points for Zizek and McGowan), the human subject is "constitutively lacking". There's a gaping hole that can never be filled, condemning us to the eternal samsara of desire. Unlike in Buddhism, he offers no escape from the wheel of desire, and unlike in Christianity, you can't fill the hole with God. The "primordial lost object which can never be found" was such an important concept for him that he invented a special name for it ("objet a") and called it "his one true contribution". This is not a mere footnote or aside. It's foundational to everything he thought.
Of course this position does not have universal assent among philosophers/leftists/Marxists/whatever. Deleuze & co. have a position that I think is much closer to the one you're criticizing. Deleuze thought that all desire was "positive" and "productive", and that we weren't fundamentally lacking anything. He thought that suicide was incoherent; "no organism kills itself of its own accord". The organism simply has a "bad encounter" with the bullet, or the ground, etc. This is a major point of disagreement between the Lacanians and Deleuzians.
It's funny that you used the word "loss" specifically, because this specific question has come up before in the canon of leftist philosophy. Derrida said that Hegel's (another one of the foundational reference points for Zizek and McGowan) dialectical system was incapable of conceiving of loss without recompense. McGowan pushed back and said Derrida was wrong, and that Hegel could conceive of loss without recompense. Any interpretation of an author or text can be challenged of course. There was a woman whose name completely escapes me now who wrote a critique of Hegel that went something like, yeah he can conceive of loss, I guess, but he can't conceive of super ultimate absolute loss, and in order to be able to accept super ultimate absolute loss we have to ditch Hegel entirely and go back to Kant. And so it goes, back and forth.
The point, regardless of who's correct in any of this, is that your enemies are already aware of all the points you raise. All of your concerns have been thought about, discussed, and debated in philosophical circles for almost a century now, and some of your enemies have even taken your concerns to heart. I mean, when Adorno and Horkheimer wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment, they had basically the same criticism of the Enlightenment that you have! It was the entire project of the book!
They too recognized that something had gone horribly wrong with the Enlightenment, but they still wanted to see what could be salvaged of Marxism.
If you've already decided that your opponents are lying, and your only job is to ferret out the lie, why even have a discussion at all?
Perhaps this is another candidate for a formulation of the actual fundamental disagreement between us.
I don't look at political ideologies as "predatory". I look at them as social and historical realities. I look at them as concrete social organizations that different people may or may not be attracted to for different reasons. And yes, I look at them as abstract intellectual systems as well, whose study gives me a certain amount of pleasure. But I don't look at them as "predators". Not even wokeism, as much as I despise it.
Why bother looking for concealed predators when you already know that there are predators surrounding you on all sides? I am acutely aware of how many people from all quadrants of the political compass despise me, for various different reasons. When everyone's a predator, no one's a predator; or at least, when everyone's a predator, there's not much point in trying to distinguish predators from non-predators. I have no tribe, I'm an outcast everywhere. I am accustomed to the notion that my allies could betray me at any time. And this affords me a certain amount of flexibility in my outlook. I'll listen to what anyone has to say, but I'll also always keep one eye open as well, even with those who are ostensibly closest to me.
If you do have a tribe, whether it is called Red or some other name, whose support you can be relatively assured of, and from whom predators can be meaningfully and consistently distinguished, then it's unsurprising that this would lead to a fundamental difference in our outlooks.
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