The Symbolic World vs. Fluid Ontology

As many have pointed out, today’s right wing movements are far from unified or ideologically coherent. The only thing that unites them is their unrelenting opposition to the Social Justice Progressive movement, who despite its internal inconsistencies, seems to have formed a stable structure, claiming numerous victories over the past century. When seeking to define the right or separate it into distinct movements, one is faced with the constant gaslighting coming from Progressives: ‘the right is simply proto-fascism, they say. Progressivism isn’t even a thing. We are simply concerned modern citizens.’ To increase the confusion, some of them will criticise PC culture and label it ‘rightwing’ from a more classical marxian position. Horseshoe theory remains one of the most useful gaslighting tools.

In this article I will offer two useful tools in defining the left-right divide: the left vs right brain dichotomy and the fluid vs hierarchical ontology.

The Master and his His Emissary – Left / Right Hemispheres

Iain McGillchrist, Jonathan Haidt and Michael Gazzaniga have all introduced the idea that each hemisphere of the brain has a distinct way of computing information and sensemaking.

The left hemisphere thinks in deterministic causal chains, kantian categories and jargon. It computes information sequentially, moving from A to B and from B to C. It orders disparate information under unifying common factors. It creates a Minecraft approximation of reality and quite often confuses the map with the actual reality. It likes positive emotions, happiness, motivation, perfectionism. It is fuelled by dopamine, which makes it motivated and aggressive. It is bored with familiar patterns and demands novelty and invention. It obfuscates its own cognitive limits and rejects whatever does not fit into its Minecraft universe.

The right hemisphere is the quiet, wise observer. It perceives entire patterns of information at once rather than sequentially; it relishes the uniqueness of these patterns, attempting to align itself to them, to ‘get in tune’ rather than abstract laws and use them for some goal. It accepts complex emotions like melancholic bliss, spleen or even sadness. It is fascinated with archetypal and seeing what is really there, making the everyday appear anew, discovering rather than inventing. It accepts limitation, although it has access to deeper unconscious information than the left hemisphere.

Stef Fox observed that SocJus Progressivism literally represents the left hemisphere’s characteristics abstracted into a world vision.

“It is the same archetype as the Christian “kingdom of god”. Society of equality, where the limitations of biology are finally overcome and death is conqeured by transhumanism. Through tech you can become whatever your spirit decides and then share this energy comfrotably in a social space that has firmly eradicated all judgement. Literally the left brain’s characteristics abstracted into a “world vision”. This is also why they have so much animus, the left brain is the DOPAMINE brain, so they’re really motivated and aggressive. Map paradise lost to the above idea, i.e. Lucifer as the “progressive will to a utopia” that actually ends up being “pandemonium” and you have a cool story” – Stef Fox.

The political right, on the other hand, is in touch with the abyssal psyche, the archetipal, the more complex states of being-there, refusing to destroy fences just because they appear to be in the way; admitting limitation, both cognitive and societal, cherishing it through ‘amor fati’ and overall living a more authentic life beyond the chattering left-brain interpreter.

This is certainly an unusual way to describe the political left-right divide. The main obstacle we encounter at this point is, shockingly, the gaslighting coming from the woke left. While an old school Marxian or a New Atheist would proudly admit his reliance on the left hemisphere and autistically dismiss Jung and Peterson as snake oil salesmen or simply madmen, the woke leftist worships primitive, non-industrial cultures and their authentic way of living. Take any phenomenology course and you will immediately notice an overwhelming SocJus bias – the embodied experiences of the BAME are sacred; the male objectifying gaze taints everything; the performative acts of the marginalised are weaponised against what they term as ‘essentialism’ of the cis hetero white man. While the woke left was busy doing yoga, taking psychedelics and getting in touch with their body, the virgin Evangelical right was building its autistic Minecraft city of Creationist Puritanical Ancapistan.

Left-brain autism is first of all a state of the mind, not an ideology. Virtually everyone can become stuck in categories and abstract laws, even senile anarchists, hippies and revolutionaries. The left vs right brain divide may be useful in providing a methodology for the right, but it will never be enough to accurately portray the political divide.

Jargonites – Priests of Fluid Ontology

To make things worse, the SocJus left already declared itself to be on the side of ‘juiciness’, while labeling the right as ossified, stuck-up grifters, curmudgeons and ideologues.

While studying a Master’s degree in Architecture in a London university, I attended the Global Mobilities Seminar Series, which promised to provide ‘a platform for cross-disciplinary and trans-national conversations about architecture as an expanded territory.’ You can already smell the woke bs from its description. I quote:

“This paper expands on recent attempts to destabilise the static, bordered, and linear framings that typify human geographical studies of place, territory, and time and that provide geopolitical underpinning for attempts to order space through legal ‘fixions’ (the fixing of space), ‘fissions’ (the division of space) and ‘fictions’ (the attribution of ‘properties’ to discrete spaces). In a world conceptualised as open, immanent, and ever-becoming, scholars have turned away from these notions of fixity towards concepts of fluidity and flow. Recent attempts have gone further, challenging the horizontalism inherent in such approaches by opening up a vertical world of volume. This paper proposes a ‘wet ontology’ wherein the voluminous, haptic, dynamic, and mobile nature of space is promoted as a ‘foundation’ for the political organisation of space, rather than being denigrated as its nemesis.” – Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces, Legal Fi(x/ss)ions, Cold Facts – Philip Steinberg

While repulsive and jargon-filled, the paper offers the key to understanding the sacred cow of Progressivism: FLUID ONTOLOGY. Count all verbs that indicate subversion: ‘to destabilise’, ‘to turn away from’, ‘to challenge’, ‘to open up’. The methodology offered here is nothing but a Promethean attempt to build an academic edifice while exclusively using tools of destruction – sledgehammers, bulldozers and dynamites. The jargonite-in-chief is not only destroying all prior categorisations of anthropic space; he promises to build something filled with goodness (open, ever-becoming, haptic, dynamic, fluid), arousing his audience at the mere thought.

Edifice vs. River

According to Karl Popper, there are two radically different ways of conceptualising the Cosmos – the Edifice and the River. These go back as far as Plato vs. Heraclitus. While Plato believed that the ultimate nature of the Cosmos is stable, like an edifice whose ultimate laws are eternal, Heraclitus imagined the Cosmos as an ever-changing river in which you can never step twice, because the water particles are never the same. Stability vs. Change as ultimate principles of the world.

As you are reading this, you might have already thought of a few scientific facts that side with the professor. Isn’t the Universe always changing? Stars exploding, galaxies colliding, life on earth evolving? Of course! Everywhere we look we encounter change and endless flux; nobody is denying that. This is not a debate between Bill Nye and a stuck-up science denier. It is a question about the ultimate nature of Reality. Are there great patterns and archetypes at work in the Cosmos, or just contingencies? Do the particles that flow with the river form greater structures, or are they just that – flowing particles? Is there a Logos at work in the Cosmos, or are we looking at a Universe of plain dirt, ever decaying and re-composing?

Modernity tends to reject every hierarchical notion. It therefore had no trouble in rejecting the symbolic view. And what is the symbolic view? The intellectual intuition (as Guenon calls it) that behind the ever-flowing phenomena of the river we are noticing lie greater patterns. Yes, we are all unique individuals and no two lives are the same. But from the ever-flowing river of life we can notice patterns of being-there. Let’s call them jungian archetypes. Everyone’s psyche is unique, but can be understood by referring to ‘the ego’, ‘the subconscious’, ‘the anima/animus’, ‘the shadow’ etc. Our minds are not just collections of neurons; greater things emerge.

We can then look at human typologies among our acquintances; we notice romance, motherhood, fatherhood; the harmonious or abusive relationship. The coming together of multiple individuals around the sacred maypole of a guild of traders (if nothing else), a fortified citadel; a parish. We maybe notice the fundamental ways of being described in the Bhagavad Gita: goodness, passion, ignorance. If we climb one level higher we notice the transcendent and the demonic at work. That which centers me versus that which destabilises. We notice deeper patterns of belonging that unify the experiences, so that in the end the contingencies of any particular life can find a predetermined role in a Greek tragedy. ‘Are we then completely predetermined’? asks the autistic left hemisphere. No one cares.

The traditional or symbolic worldview can be summed up as this ‘intellectual intuition’ of the initiate to perceive the deeper levels of reality. And as we go higher and higher, to the upper levels of the edifice or the summit of the mountain if you will, we notice a coming together of patterns, until we have arrived at the absolute unity of Being in God. From this apex, the Cosmos appears to be static; we see the lower levels from great height, as particular manifestations of higher patterns. This is the symbolic view of Jonathan Pageau, Renee Guenon or even Carl Jung.

The rejection of this worldview by modernity and Progressivism inevitably leads to the so-called ‘fluid ontology’ – the belief that only the low level of the river exists, that contingency and unpredictable change is all there is to reality. That we never advance upwards on the symbolic ladder, because that is somehow fascistic and dangerous. So we MUST sacralize DIRT; the atom, the river particle; the occurence without any nesting in any higher meaning; we must celebrate pride (think of how it sounds); we must embrace fluidity and change for the sake of it. Demolish the shite out of our edifices and pretend we are building. Or that somehow something magical will ’emerge’ from this destructive process, without the help of any human hand.

What’s with this talk of ’emergence’ anyway? It is the attempt of the contemporary scientist to escape the autistic cage of determinism; to admit that reality is structured HIERARCHICALLY (hold my beer), and that higher levels of organisation appear to coagulate (emerge) from lower ones. If one can admit to themselves that this process is possible, is it inconceivable to consider the complementary top-down model, in which order at a higher level shapes the lower levels of complexity forming it?

This, again, is the realm of the left hemisphere; of human attempts to categorise things and abstract laws from dissociated occurences. This can be done in an infinity of ways based on which criteria you choose as the cornerstones of categorisation. You can talk about scientific laws; you can talk about jungian archetypes; conscious vs unconscious; freudian ‘libido’; Frankl’s splitting of meaning into 3 components: love, creativity, suffering with dignity. Peterson’s order vs. chaos. We can even philosophise about the entire edifice of the Cosmos; ask whether it is completely rigid and unmovable at its peak, or if the grand symbols themselves undergo a process of slow becoming, like Jung attempted to describe in ‘Aion’.

THIS particular activity of categorising can offer tyrannical regimes tools to oppress and control their subjects. This happens, however, regardless of which specific paradigm you choose to Minecraft. As we are seeing, the priests of Fluid Ontology have created their own ossified jargon in which they are forcefully fitting people and cancelling whoever opposes their paradigm. This is what a lot of people don’t get; the Progressive’s intellectual masterpiece attempted to categorise CHANGE itself; to make a system so great, so all-encompassing and self-updating, that even the slightest change is immediately REGISTERED, DOCUMENTED, COMPUTED by the Deep State Cathedral, which automatically updates its categories and keeps us weaklings content and pacified without having to lift a finger.

This is madness. Not only is the attempt to glorify dirt and contingence Luciferian; but it is by far the most tyrannical attempt of the left hemisphere to take over and butcher mythopoetic experiences. If the symbolic world is real and the world is moved by Logos, aren’t we supposed to reject this fluid ontology in favour of the spiritual quest for the heights? Are we not to seek at least individuation, the coming-together of our conscious and unconscious sides? Aren’t we supposed to aim for passion over ignorance? For goodness over passion? For transcendence over goodness? For God’s love over autistic accumulation and transitory control?

“In the dark night of all beings awakes to Light the tranquil man. But what is day to other beings is night for the sage who sees.”
― Bhagavad Gita