In this episode, I discuss the concept of organic government, which is a concept that is central to the notion of a socialist or social nationalist regime, or whatever you want to call it. In order to understand this concept, we have to go back to the roots of the concept, which are the family and the institution of patriarchy.
00:03:40.000Good afternoon. Welcome back to another Mysterium Monologue. I'm your host, Florian Geyer.
00:03:46.840It's a pleasure, dear listeners, to be joining you once again to have a little sit down and discuss another important topic in the realms of political and theological thought.
00:03:58.120So, this week I thought that we would take a break from maybe all of the theology that we seem to have been focusing on, although I suppose it's more on social issues.
00:04:09.200And we can go back into a little bit of discussion about political organization. But before we get into that, I wanted to wish all of my listeners a very happy Pentecost.
00:04:20.280And I hope that your 50 days of the concept of organic government is one that is central to the notion of a national socialist or social nationalist regime or whatever you want to call it.
00:04:39.440And it's a concept and it's a concept and it's a concept and it's a concept and idea that is focused on very heavily by a lot of the theorists that we see coming out of Germany, but also the other movements.
00:04:49.320Because there was a reaction to the rise in the 19th century of the bureaucratic leviathan type state, which may seem very ironic to some people.
00:05:08.160And this was a subject that really fascinated me when I first got into it because the major stereotype that's portrayed about the ideology of social nationalism or whatever, you know, and that's so on, is that it's totalitarian and that in all instances, it seeks to absorb all functions and faculties of society into the state, into just this corporation with a monopoly on the use of force.
00:05:33.800Because, you know, because, you know, they're just fascists and Nazis, they're just so evil that they just want everybody to be oppressed and they worship the state as a god.
00:05:42.600And so, so this is not actually true in its essence.
00:05:49.160What, and before we get into addressing the substance of what an ideal organic state or organic government is, we have to kind of go through some of the presuppositions behind such a theory.
00:06:00.080So first we have to start off with the core and the foundation of the national theory of government is that government and regulation state arises ultimately from family and from familial bonds.
00:06:11.920That it's that it's in the family and in the institution of patriarchy, more generally speaking, that we see the origin of natural hierarchy.
00:06:21.960And of not only natural hierarchy, but a natural hierarchy that's united in its ideal form around self-giving and love, that the father and the mother don't use their regulations to oppress or to destroy a child, but rather to build them up and to protect them and to love them and to integrate them ever more into the flowers of life, so to speak.
00:06:44.620And so the rules and regulations and all of this comes from a place of genuine authority that the father and the mother also are empowered with authority over the children and the family, generally speaking, and they use this authority to regulate them, to impose rules.
00:07:03.380Right now in the ancient world, we think of the term like canon or rule and so on.
00:07:11.520Well, they didn't have the same sense of being like some sort of penal code.
00:07:18.600So, you know, you can't drink juice at a certain hour.
00:07:21.320And if you break this law, you're just going to have your hands cut off or something like that.
00:07:25.780But in the ancient world, a rule or a canon, it referred, I mean, even if you think about what we call a ruler, I mean, it's a measuring stick, or it's an example.
00:07:38.100It is an ideal personification, as close as that can come, that is expressed through words of human behavior and sanctions on the particularly vicious aberrations of such behavior.
00:07:51.820And so the law is not meant to be just this mechanical, you know, Talmudic labyrinth of, you know, documentary codes, but rather it's meant to just be an expression of the people's own sense of their moral frame and of communication, of harmony and so on, of the regulation of their lives in common, which is the essence of community, obviously.
00:08:22.820And so for us, what we see is we seek, as in the family, in a good family, an equilibrium between the needs of the children and the needs of the context of the family and of the power of the law.
00:08:38.600And so ideally, in a national socialist state, we wouldn't have very much government at all, you know, almost it's, I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't say minarchist, because it doesn't have that kind of connotations.
00:08:52.840But in an absolutely ideal sense, we would have a very, very, very limited state, because people would be able to regulate their own behavior, and that there would be social discipline from within.
00:09:05.980There wouldn't need to be the imposition of some, you know, code or mode of living or this kind of thing.
00:09:12.760I mean, in the ancient world, if we look at like old, you know, Anglo-Saxon, and generally speaking, Germanic systems of law, when somebody committed a capital crime, they would be made an outlaw.
00:09:28.920There was not even a coercive force, in the sense that the people could be liable to the death penalty.
00:09:33.800But what would happen is that when somebody's behavior was so far outside of the norms of regulation of your tribe and of your ethnos, you would be expelled from the protection that the regularity of the law gives, and people could do whatever they want to, and they could exact revenge of their own accord.
00:09:51.680So concepts of law and justice and order and so on, very, very, very different in ancient times.
00:09:59.420And we ourselves, as Western Europeans, as kind of Celto-Germanics that have inherited this hybrid Roman legal tradition, have our own very particular means of social organization and administration of justice.
00:10:17.000And we see this expressed most clearly in English traditions of common law and the liberties of an arms-bearing free man and so on.
00:10:30.540And so, returning to our initial issue, ideally, we want the government to be, the state apparatus to be, as small as is necessary.
00:10:40.760We're not a fetishist of either a small or a large government, but what we want is we want the government to be effective.
00:10:47.940And so, we will identify the areas in which it needs to be able to have effective regulation and empower it to achieve those ends and nothing more.
00:10:56.600And what would be best is if the state didn't actually have to fulfill any of the mechanisms of social regulation and that it was just all done between us in an informal social manner.
00:11:07.620But, unfortunately, modern civilization being the way it is, it's simply something that is impossible.
00:11:15.640I think that one of the very best examples that we can use to identify this is that the rise of mass media and the rate of exchange of information, I think, necessitates some species of censorship.
00:11:27.940Especially when it comes to things like vulgarity and obscenity, you know, because there's no way that, this is the, there's a very excellent series of articles written by Benjamin Garland called The Jew as the Adversary of the Battle Over Obscenity in Pornography.
00:11:46.380And this basically, very eloquently, traces the history of how Jews were able to twist the concept of free speech in the American legal system, coming from this older concept of common law.
00:12:03.360And they were able to subvert it in such a way that obscenity and pornography, which never before were protected under such a system, could be freely expressed under the protection of the law.
00:12:15.020And so, my contention is that even if this was, this system or this reality had occurred in a pre-modern society, it wouldn't be such a huge issue because there isn't kind of mass communication that can allow the proliferation of Hollywood-produced, you know, pornography to every end of the earth.
00:12:38.240And so, the necessity of, the reality of such communication, especially with the rise of the internet, means that there is, in fact, an absolute imperative to protect the polity from just wholesale, like, rot and degeneration, which comes from enslavement to the passions, to things like pornography and, you know,
00:12:59.860So, let's, what's the best word to describe this, foreign propaganda.
00:13:08.680So, all of this is trying to get at the idea that within a properly regulated, healthy society, many of the functions that we associate with the government are actually fulfilled by the society themselves.
00:13:28.340I mean, the father traditionally is expected to control the kind of things that come in and out of his household.
00:13:33.720So, you know, if a father doesn't want, let's say, pornography or liquor or, you know, literature he considers inappropriate, then that's up to him.
00:13:47.440And this is something that is a matter of internal communal familial regulation.
00:13:55.340And so, when we get to the larger scale and we think about, you know, clan structures, extended families, and then we think about, you know, groups of households that come together to form language groups, ethnicities, and so on.
00:14:09.700The very conception is that of an extended family, where the leaders and governors and so on take the roles of the patriarch, of the father.
00:14:18.780And so, their role is on a larger scale to, in fact, exercise this patriarchal authority to control these things which come in and out of the household.
00:14:29.600Now, again, I almost hesitate to say these things, because many times when we speak of these issues, we have such a modern view of the state within our minds,
00:14:45.780where we see the empowered sort of patriarchal leader as one who uses his authority to micromanage and to oppress and to moralize the daily lives of the citizens,
00:14:59.420sort of for his own capricious enjoyment and the prideful high he gets from seeing his idea of morality,
00:15:06.860which our leftist adversaries would claim as little more than the aggrandization of his own ego and of, you know, romantic chauvinism and so on,
00:15:15.620implemented into society as a whole, dripping with laughter that he gets to force his enemies to engage in inconvenient things which they don't want to do.
00:15:24.680I mean, like, this is the image that we're presented.
00:15:26.900And that totalitarianism is just a manifestation of men who are uncomfortable with their masculinity and feel the need to assert absolute supreme domination over all aspects of society,
00:15:39.000you know, lest young men and women, you know, kiss each other or make a rude joke or something.
00:15:49.780I, before I was podcast, wrote a very famous speech by Joseph Goebbels on morality and moralizing, which is extremely effective in this exposition.
00:16:04.780I mean, and this is why it comes back to that the whole idea behind organic government and the organic state, it's not something that can be manufactured.
00:16:14.900And so if we conceive the nation as a corporate identity, as like a body that's composed of many individual cells,
00:16:23.400which they themselves are composed of constituent units,
00:16:26.480the idea is that the organism, because it is interconnected, has its own means of internal regulation that works for its own betterment.
00:16:37.660Just as our body has means of excreting waste and ingesting nourishment and arresting when injured and weary and so on,
00:16:49.800development of its own faculties and infrastructure by training in a thesis,
00:16:55.060so too ought the state exercise such functions in a manner which befits the overall welfare of the nation and pursues the common good and so on.
00:17:06.360And so all of these ideas are totally, radically separate from what we see in the world around us.
00:17:21.000The idea of law as the manifestation of some transcendent regular ideal is not in any sense what we see today.
00:17:33.000So one of the things that is also necessary to understand before we can continue our conversation is when we think about the state,
00:17:46.360we think about the state classically, as the sociologist Max Weber defines it,
00:17:51.000as a corporation with a monopoly and the legitimate use of force.
00:17:54.220And there is a tendency from the kind of faux, pseudo, right-wing, Hobbesian, you know,
00:18:01.660enlightenment ideals to view the binding force of society and of the state in general as raw and naked power and violence.
00:18:10.040Now, you are a listener to Mysterium Fashies, you will know that I am not a wilting violet when it comes to these issues,
00:18:18.480and I have a lot of contempt for people who are, but the state is not based on force or violence.
00:18:27.220Politics is based on violence, but the state and social organization is actually fundamentally based on love,
00:18:33.820and it's based on the ability to communicate and to commune with one another as a collective entity.
00:18:41.660That you can live in harmony with another person and understand them by language
00:18:46.360and regulate yourselves according to a common economy and purpose.
00:18:52.200And so that system of affairs, that's what Plato called love.
00:18:56.260The thing which enables a city to function in peacefulness.
00:19:03.820So what happens when that whole, that capital, that love, whatever you mean, social capital,
00:19:09.880that is predicated upon a unity of moral frame and worldview,
00:19:18.500whereby each can appropriate and understand and live this common law in their own lives.
00:19:26.840And they recognize that law as being instantiated in the world around them,
00:19:31.020and they strive to live towards fulfillment of the law.
00:19:35.160And so from this common recognition of correct action and of, you know, regulation of interpersonal human interaction,
00:19:48.280excuse me, this is where we have the origins of like a coherent state or city,
00:19:55.920which, when it becomes large enough, empowers certain groups of people to fulfill certain faculties,
00:20:04.260to address certain needs, mostly common defense, the exercise of violence.