“The superstitious cult of ‘thought’ belongs typically to the same bourgeois civilisation which we combat; it invented this cult and it diffused it for specific polemical reasons. In order to rid itself of the last remnants of the aristocracy of blood and of spirit, the bourgeois civilisation, after having consolidated itself with the advent of the third estate, invented the right of the ‘true’ aristocracy, the aristocracy of ‘thought’, a great many of whose members were the ‘noble’ princes prepared necromantically by Masonic Enlightenment. The return to a true aristocratic civilisation presupposes the overcoming of this bourgeois myth.”
—Julius Evola, The Metaphysics of Power
Your average human doesn’t care about, nor can they process, the concept of “objective reality”. In fact, being exposed to a ray of “objective reality” would vaporize the personality of most individuals. No one “believes in” an objective universe. The mind itself is a virtual environment that only functions as a vessel for spirit when it is sovereign, thusly becoming Evola’s “νοῦς.” Organizing your thought in the direction of the superordinate realm is the rightful, aristocratic function of mentation. Otherwise, the mind and its contents are merely an appendage of the social environment. Anyone proposing an “objective” narrative to you is trying to insert himself into your domain and cultivate an amenable prolapse of sentiment. What most people call ‘thought’ is a form of psychic sodomy.
Besides, “objectivity” has long been abandoned, no one even pretends to believe in it, the “reality-based community” is extinct. But, the striver, the hollow middle, really does superstitiously worship status and regards it as governor of earth, orchestrator of heavenly spheres. Status defeats perception, ‘you will never be found out’, it whispers soto voce. The modern mutant adores the aura of high status, and “trusting the experts” has (until recently) been universally considered a desirable status-supply— mostly due to the marketing campaigns of said “experts”. Only morons (low status) disbelieve the pronouncements of enormously powerful, self-replicating institutions.
Expertise is a daily consumable. The compression of cadaverous wisdom into a streaming service through radio, print or internet was inevitable. Expert power is highly intertwined with corporate or state power, a transcendent substance that has the capacity to convert a great portion of the population into animals or objects. The public perception of an expert—individuals who analyze objectively, think systematically, compile data, and, judiciously study reality with specially honed pattern recognition skills—is mostly a myth and would be anathema to social control. Such a class of experts would be in constant tension with the state; disappearing, exploding and shooting themselves twice in the back of the head with predictable regularity. In order for intellectual elites to exist, they require patrons who can provide an elite level of protection. Members of a real ‘intellectual dark web’ would require an equally dark network of security. This is as all the world reveals: expert prestige is enhanced or protected by state violence and experts are the primary agents of social control.
Modern reliance on expert power has been caused by manufactured distrust. Experts are a kind of “cognitive cabal”. Ideally, for the expert, ortrēowe, a state of distrust synonymous with despair, must become endogenous among the entire population. You must distrust your own family, you must distrust your own folkways, you must distrust your own senses. Only through ortrēowe will technocracy, the total rule by experts, become achievable. If there is too much ambient, organic trust in the relational economy, distrust must be injected, squid-like, in the shape of black propaganda, gossip, character assassination and scandal. In this sense, a sort of relational aggression becomes the default architecture of expert power. In other words, the peer review system exists as a kind of “mean girl mafia”.
As we have demonstrated in previous articles, the real expertise of Smithsonian goons was in discrediting competing academics more so than abrading every trace of giants from public surfaces. This is one reason so much evidence of giants still persists in the public domain. During the first enfilade of the Smithsonian, the newspapers began to feature parodies mocking any who attested to the existence of giants. All the honorable gentlemen who had discovered gigantic remains on their lands in Ohio Mississippi and Tennessee were now to be maligned. Here appears an embryo of contempt for “fly-over states”.
The Oxford History of the French Revolution tells us, at Louis XVI's coronation, "The son of St Louis, the Most Christian King of France and Navarre, had sworn that day to uphold the peace of the Church, prevent disorder, impose justice, exterminate heretics, maintain forever the prerogatives of the Order of the Holy Spirit, and pardon no duelist." Though he met with failure, Louis XVI was an ambitious financial reformer and emancipator of the Jews. This attack on honor culture and dueling was a manifestation of the ascendancy of financial and media elites.
"[H]onor" was not a meaningless term or catch-all but rather a reference to reputation for fair dealing, honoring contracts, and paying debts. Financial responsibility, in other words, if not quite synonymous with honor was at least an important component of the concept. Gentlemen did not shoot each other over trivial matters but rather over accusations that they had lied. Seemingly bizarre behavior, like gently tugging on a rival's nose, was a major offense because it symbolized the unmasking of a liar. The credit implications of such an accusation were certainly negative. Seen in this light, duels take on a more rational cast… In fact, dueling thrived when and where credit markets were opaque and highly personal in nature, as in early modern Europe, colonial America, [and] the antebellum South…”
— The Deadliest of Games: The Institution of Dueling, Christopher G. Kingston and Robert E. Wright
With the rise of “progressivism” and “marxist-communism”, which are essentially progressions towards therapeutic dictatorship, or ‘technological messianism’, there appears a concomitant demolition of honor culture. In order for the tyranny of experts to establish its “protection racket” on the production of knowledge, and for Big Usury to keep its hold on the financial system, honor-based trust had to be razed to the ground. Indeed, one of the very first targets of “social justice” campaigns was the duel.
For example, Abraham Lincoln would engage in epistolary drag to attack his enemies, under the name ‘Rebecca’. Mocking his opponent as a womanizer he writes, “His very features, in the ecstatic agony of his soul, spoke audibly and distinctly — ‘Dear girls, it is distressing, but I cannot marry you all. Too well I know how much you suffer; but do, do remember, it is not my fault that I am so handsome and so interesting”, also calling him a fool and a liar. His victim discovers Lincoln is leader of an entire harassment campaign and challenges him to a duel. Lincoln accepts, only to dishonorably finagle his way out of danger with absurd stipulations and the duel is never completed.
The ascendancy of creature-types such as Lincoln was coeval with the suppression of dueling culture. Lincoln was not excoriated in the press for his cowardice, but for even entertaining a duel, which was called “the calmest, most deliberate and malicious species of murder — a relic of the most cruel barbarism that ever disgraced the darkest periods of the world — and one which every principle of religion, virtue and good order loudly demands should be put a stop to.”
In reality, the duel is merely a way to verify honor. A man’s honor can be thought of as a measure of his integrity, or lack of dissolution, as an entity. In other words, a duel tests the condition of one’s soul. The human psyche consists of a series of images, whether these images project from the divine order or from dead celluloid determines the vitality and integrity of the psyche. Furthermore, these images directly influence how we move through the world, thus extending a field of probability. Accordingly, a certain metaphysical fitness is reflected and manifested in the physical, as ritual combat reveals one to be worthy of exaltation or a fallen mutation, a breeder of mites. Probabilities can become so rarefied that one may seem immune to saber stroke or gunfire, evincing a glorious immortality, if only for a moment. It is self-evident why ‘aristocrats of thought’, with their dead souls, would be terrified of such sacraments.
Most antiquarians or collectors were ‘gentlemen of science’, possessing an elite education but self-educated in their field of interest, active in a number of scientific societies, yet their claims were guaranteed as much, or more, by social status and reputation as membership of any academic institution. This goes back to the earliest evidence of excavation: an inscribed sculpture of Khaemois (1290–1224 bc), son of pharaoh Ramses II, who unearthed a statue and identified it as that of Kaouab
son of pharaoh Kheops. From Pliny the Elder to Comte de Caylus, credibility is automatically awarded to such princes of the antiquities.
In nearly every US county history, the social standing of the discoverer of giant skeletons is referenced. This mode of the patrician-antiquarius existed in Rome, Mesopotamia and China, and was known to persist through the European Renaissance. The ‘cult of the past’ was presided over by a voluntary ‘scribe class’ recruited from men of standing. Trust was established based on their honor or position in a hierarchy underwritten by divine guarantor. This tradition was disrupted with the establishment of the Smithsonian and centralized science, allowing a handful of hatchet men to slander generations of American antiquarians, injecting distrust into a system that had existed since the 2nd millennium BC.