The Fourth Political Theory

beyond left and right but against the center

Many aspects of Herman Wirth’s unjustly forgotten works deserve attention in the study of plural anthropology. First of all, his extremely fertile hypothesis of the cultural circle of Thule, which is usually discarded from the outset without any careful analysis of his argumentation, is so rich that it deserves serious attention in itself. If such an hypothesis allows for the resolution of such numerous historical and archaeological problems associated with the history of symbols, signs, myths, rituals, hieroglyphs, the calendar, writing, and the most ancient views of the structure of space and time, then this alone is enough to warrant thorough inquiry. Even though Wirth’s works contain many claims which seem either unequivocally wrong or highly controversial, we can set them aside and try to understand the essence of his theory which, in our opinion, is an extraordinarily constructive version that expands our understanding of the archaic epochs of the ancient history of mankind. The theory of the cultural circle of Thule need not be unconditionally accepted, but an assessment of its interpretive potential is necessary.

Chaos strategy does not suggest creation or a new political system or order instead of the destroyed political systems. It is manipulated, moderated chaos - a new way of strategic thinking. If we carefully read Brzezinski’s book, The Grand Chessboard, it is written that they need a balkanized Eurasia, to transform it into a zone of permanent conflict between different groups - between Muslims, between ethnic groups, between Russians and Ukrainians, for example. This was Brzezinski’s idea. Chaos is already sown in Africa, so they don’t have to bother too much about that, while now the Russians and Chinese are coming here to bring another order, maybe not the best, but not bloody chaos as is the current situation. There are different points - smaller proxies, partly India, partly some pro-Western little states, and Israel for aggravating and make the chaos bigger. Smaller proxies, like Ukraine for example, are not allies in this concept, but just points in order to make chaos bigger. That is more or less how they understand the situation.

International Relations deals with the State as such. This is very important. In the very name of this science, this discipline, there is the concept of “nation.” In the Western understanding, the nation is a political value. The West thinks of politics in terms of the “national State” that is normative since the Westphalian peace, and is the normative attitude. The Nation is the national State (Etat-Nation), it is not the people or an ethnic group. International Relations are relations between these States. What kind of State? Modern, Western States. This is the first, very important principle. When we are dealing with the concept of the State, we are dealing with historically Western concepts about how political reality should be organized and studied.

This is a modern paradigm. “Modern paradigm” means Western, but not in all the history of the “West”, but only in modernity. Modernity has transformed the Western mentality and has taken only part of the traditional Western mentality of the middle ages or antiquity and transformed it into a new kind, a new version. International Relations was born as a discipline in the beginning of the 20th century. It is Western and modern. Western modernity is different from Western pre-modernity. This is very important from an historical point of view.

B.N.:You're working on your own, in my opinion, capital work, under the heading "Noomahiа". In it you paid attention to Slavic and Serbian Logos? Can you say something more about this?

A.D.:I have already published two volumes on East European civilization and the part is dedicated to Serbian Logos. I have discovered that Serbs are essentially warriors. That is the heritage of White Serbia and the ancient history – it seems that Sarmatian factor played here important role. But Serbs have settled in the Balkan region where long before first indo-europeans prevailed ancient matriarchy – the civilization of the Great Mother – its rests we see in Lepenski Vir, Vincia and so on. So there is hidden influence of Logos of Cybele in Serbian tradition as well.
I think that Kosovo battle and the epic choice of king Lazar is key to Serbian identity: Serb is that who prefers the glorious death for Orthodox faith and Serbian motherland to any richness and gifts from the enemy. So I think Serbs are not only people… You Serbs are a kind of mystical community, a Church of king Lazar devoted to the Kosovo as eternal example of loyalty, will, dignity and special kind of purely Serbian sanctity… All that I tried to explore in Noomakhia dedicated to Slavs and to Balkan civilization as such.
By the way I have discover that it is wrong to represent Balkans as periphery of Europe. In some sense it is cradle of European peasantry and it is European peasantry that is responsible for many crucial elements of European identity… So I would be happy if my new books would be translated in Serbian as the other that are already translated and published in my beloved country.

First of all, the fact that populist movements are directed against the political elite as a whole, without making a distinction, whether it is right or left-wing, is striking. This is the 'uprise of the periphery of society against its center'. In his famous work, the American sociologist Christopher Lasch (1932–1994) designated the form of government that prevails in modern Western society as the “elite revolution”.

At the beginning of the XXth century, it was customary to follow José Ortega y Gasset's discourse about the “revolt of the masses”, whose increasing influence on politics threatened, it seemed, to destroy Western culture - the European Logos.

But Christopher Lasch noted a new political trend: it is the elites that are destroying culture and European Logos today. These new western elites, who have reached the pinnacle of power only by their resourcefulness and immense will to power, are much worse and more destructive than the masses.

Every thing is what it is thanks to its borders. After all, it is they that separate it from another thing. This distinction carries the most important meaning of the concept of the border not just for international law, defense doctrine, or the structuring of a country’s armed forces, but also for philosophy as such. The border is not just an instrument of philosophy, but its essence, seeing as the highest philosophical concept – transcendence -in Latin literally means “that what lies on the far side of the border”.

The border externally reflects that which lies inside it, while simultaneously confining the essence of the thing in its confrontation with other things. The border is something sacred. The ancient Greeks knew a special god, Terminus, whose name meant ‘limit’, ‘border’. This was not just the guardian-deity of borders, but a “border-deity”, a kind of special, sacred concept that played a central role in the worldviews of the ancient Indo-European peoples.

In magic, there also exists the important concept of the “Guardian of the Threshold”, a special being that is located at the intersection of two worlds: the beyond and the present, the vulgar and subtle, that of life and that of death, the waking world and the dreaming world. This is the very same ancient Terminus, with only slight modifications.

Where right-wing liberals and conservatives preach “you can’t do anything against the progression of modernity, it’s only possible to gradually influence the process”, Alexander Dugins Ethnos and Society tells you the exact opposite: When one realizes the fact, that there are still ethnic societies around this planet in the Amazon, that the Muslim communities of the Middle East still live in the community of their narod, that in Russia and India the modern nation state is just a thin layer, then it’s obvious that the decay of modernity is just a possibility and not our destiny. If we want to continue the suicide of Europe and follow modernity to its conclusion and change nothing. But if we want to restore our tradition and ensure the existence of our people, we have to radically change our habits, morals and our way of life.

Whereas The Fourth Political Theory tells us to return to pre-modernity in order to protect our Dasein (narod), Ethnos and Society shows us how the preconditions for a return to pre-modernity work. Therefore, Ethnos and Society, is not only important to better understand the work of professor Dugin, but also in order to fight post-modernity to the last blood. If one doesn’t let oneself be scared off by the theoretical depth of this book, it’ll greatly improve one’s understanding of the current processes of globalization, decadence and the Great Replacement. This book is exactly what all the right-wing populist parties in Europe would need in order to change their policies of fake populism and realize what is really necessary to revive European identity.

We are playing the same melody, if we`re not happy, we can`t say `stop` here, it`s impossible. We should go this route to the beginning – to the first note of this symphony. We should ask now: who is the author and began this process of urbanization, who has created trains, liberalism, democracy, progress, missile, computer, nuclear synthesis. Who is the real author? And that is essential: because it was human decision, that wasn`t kind of `natural process`. In one moment of the history we`ve decided to go that way, and now we can just slow it down or accelerate. But why we don`t ask ourselves: are we going the right direction from the beginning? Was this decision right one? We should go back to this moment, to the beginning of this melody – that is my idea. It could be too late, to wake up with robots around, perfect tax-payers, making democratic decisions, sending each other SMS messages from robot to robot... The conversation between robots is already possible, in neuro-network the special language is possible, during the conversation two computer have recently created the language without knowledge of the operator. So, they will replace us easily.

Questions of geography are very tightly linked to psychological archetypes. Every people, every civilization, every culture sees and understands space in its own unique way. There always exists a kind of code that serves as a distinctive trait of the national territorial myth.

Reconstructions made by modern historians of religions, sociologists, and anthropologists allow us to speak of an entire science (sacred geography) that predetermined our ancestors’ perception of the surrounding world in its spatial dimension. The norms of this sacred geography formed the foundations of epics, biographies, legends, traditions, myths, and fairy tales.

As the rational aspects of life developed, this sacred geography became part of the unconscious, thus determining deep psychic archetypes, rudimentary reactions, and the typology of slips and dreams. Having disappeared from the ancient stage, the geography of the myth passed into the sphere of subconscious reactions; however, this does not mean that it lost its hypnotic power.

There are peoples who visualize their homeland, their country, as an island. Others see it as a plain hemmed in by mountains. Still others see it as a space between two or more great rivers, or as an uninterrupted mountain range, or as a coastline, and so on and so forth. It is on the basis of this sacred geography of the homeland that an idea of the entire cosmos is formed.

Heidegger himself later called Sein und Zeit the most old-fashioned book ever written. We believe that in the way our economically driven political speech develops, we experience that in Dutch ‘ de wal het schip keert’ , meaning literally that the shore is the only thing that can stop the ship. We are caught up in a form of management. The thought of an Eurasian continent as a mediator between the Atlantic and the Asian might for a Dutch metaphysician be felt as the relieve of a burden. Heidegger saw his own mission in preparing European thinking for a confrontation with the East.

Bringing the geopolitical question back in the philosophical and political agendas means also the necessity of posing the question of the relation between the two. After all the question of politics is again the Schmittian question of friend or foe. When we would be so bold to identify the foe with the antichrist, Heideggers remark in the black notebooks spring to mind: ‘In relation to liberalism the antichrist is a small boy’ .

To work on a new political theory is a matter of great importance, but also a thing that requires great care. Perhaps this care, Sorge, for Heidegger in Sein und Zeit the unity of Dasein, is the driving force itself.

The title of Noomakhia, which literally means “war of the mind” (Noomachy) [4] – and which can also be conceived of as “war within the mind”, “war of minds”, or even “war against the mind” – is intended to emphasize the conflictual nature of logoi structures as well as the multiplicity of noetic fields in each of which surprises, conflicts, aporias, struggles, contradictions, and opposition lie in wait for us. The field of thinking is the field of warfare [5]: thoughts wage ceaseless wars not only against phenomenality, matter, and their own reorganization into elements (whether existing or not is an open question), natural law, dispersion, non-structurality escaping the “control” of multiplicity, etc., but also against other types of thoughts, other thoughts, and the complex diversity of vertical and horizontal, noetic and noeric chains which permeate the reality of the world on different planes and different geometries. Wars between people, including even the most cruel and bloody, are but pale comparisons to the wars of the gods, titans, giants, elements, demons, and angels. And these, in turn, are but figures illustrating even more formidable and profound wars unfolding in the Mind, in the sphere of the Nous and its limits in which the Mind itself borders the zone of Madness. Thus, everything is Noomachy, even that which is bigger and came first of all – ϋπερπαντα. War, according to Heraclitus, is the father of all (πολεμος πατηρ παντων). Indeed, it is about this, the “father of all”, that Noomakhia is written.

The Romanov period saw a continuous process of Russian Orthodoxy’s silent return to pre-Petrine times; this was not a conservative-revolutionary path (as with the Old Believers), but a conservative-evolutionary one whose existence was due mainly to the archaic nature of the provincial clerics and the multitude of simple parishioners. In a certain sense, the enthronement of the antichrist in the Church did not fully succeed, despite the fact that during the individual intervals of Peter the Great’s rule the impression formed that this was taking place. Still, because of some higher reasons, the final chord was delayed, even though the forces of the antichrist multiplied tenfold.

Although it was at the price of compromise and adaptability, Russian Orthodoxy maintained its unity, the legality of its hierarchy, eucharistic succession, and loyalty to the fundamental norms of patristic tradition. The Saint-Petersburg stage was characterised by a certain split in the official Church. At the lower levels it moved towards the Old Faith, i.e. towards Orthodoxy in its purest form. At the top, it was oriented towards Western adjustments and norms, as official theology repeated the model of Catholic-Protestant teachings, and the general spirit was fully apostate. Nikon’s reforms significantly damaged both rites and liturgical books. The synod became an administrative agency in a bureaucratic, profane government.

I admire Italy, or more precisely the many societies, cultures, peoples, and states comprising the history of Italy from the Etruscans and Roman Empire to the Vatican and Risorgimento. I dedicated a separate book to the “Latin Logos,” where I expressed my love for the Italian spirit and for the beauty of dramatic and elevated Italian thought.