Alexander Dugan is a Russian-American philosopher, political philosopher, and writer. He is the author of The Fourth Political Theory and The Rise of the Fourth Theory. In this episode, I talk with Michael Millerman, a YouTuber and professor of philosophy, about his research on the theories and theories of Alexander Dugan.
00:01:25.340Excellent. So he's a great source for this.
00:01:27.960And we're going to be diving deep into a number of different things.
00:01:30.980As I was talking to Michael at the beginning of this, I started taking notes about what I wanted to talk about.
00:01:36.600And I think I made it to chapter three and realized I already had an hour's worth of notes.
00:01:40.340So we're going to focus on just a few topics.
00:01:42.500We're not going to be able to cover everything today.
00:01:44.460But if we're very lucky, we might get Mr. Millerman back and be able to kind of expand on this in more depth.
00:01:50.400But before we do all that, guys, I want to talk to you really quick about today's sponsor.
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00:03:01.460because letting the left win is a pathetic way to watch civilization die.
00:04:03.500I'm not sure if there's a natural break in there or is there a further expansion?
00:04:07.880You know, there are chapters that were in the original Russian that weren't included in the first volume that was put together for a conference in July 2012.
00:04:16.460So I think the publisher wanted to use what they had available.
00:04:19.360And then the chapters that were in the Russian but not in the first volume that came out in English were released as The Rise of the Fourth Political Theory.
00:04:26.920But I'll tell you one thing, which is that in some sense, all of Dugan's books connect to one another.
00:04:32.800So there are passages even in the Fourth Political Theory that refer to ethno-sociology or to his books on the sociology of the imagination.
00:04:49.500So hopefully we can get enough here to have a good discussion, even though I don't have a broader understanding of some of the other particulars that he'd be referencing throughout there.
00:04:58.580But to go ahead and get started, for those who just might not be familiar, could you explain a little bit about Dugan's background and also how you first came to kind of interact and become interested in his work?
00:05:10.960So I'll start with how I became interested in him.
00:05:14.600I was an undergraduate student at the University of British Columbia studying philosophy and studying political philosophy as well, in part.
00:05:22.280I have a background in the Russian language because my family is from the former Soviet Union.
00:05:27.260So that's how I got into the world of Russian thinkers.
00:05:31.020But I also had an interest in mysticism, religious studies, and political philosophy.
00:05:36.060And so I was sort of looking for Russian political theological type figures to be reading and to be studying.
00:05:43.100And I came across an article about Dugan, this was probably 2010 or 2011, and the article basically argued that he's Russia's philosopher king, he's a kind of philosopher mystic, and you can't understand Russia today and Russia's place on the world stage better than you could do if you did it through Dugan.
00:06:02.940And so that just met, that ticked all the boxes for me, you know, there's the mystical dimension, the philosopher king, the Russia side, and the key to understanding something important about this massive civilizational state and country and important player in world affairs.
00:06:17.640So that's when I went out and started digging more.
00:06:20.380And the first book of his that I found was the fourth political theory in Russian, obviously.
00:06:25.700And then I undertook a process of translating that, and that was the first of several books I ended up translating.
00:06:31.260As for Dugan, who he is, I like to say that he's a Russian philosopher, ideologue, and activist, because he combines these several functions in himself that are often parceled out among different people.
00:06:43.860You know, sometimes you have a philosopher whose books get read by an ideologue, whose ideological tracts get put into practice by political parties or political agents or activists.
00:06:56.400Dugan somehow does all of that himself.
00:06:58.460He's built, over 30-odd years, a universe of books that articulate the meaning of Russia's place in the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
00:07:12.140But the one that I think is more interesting for people outside of Russia is a general theory of international and political life, one that spans from the foundational metaphysics, ontology, or first philosophy, all the way to organizing institutions and having strategic partnerships and tactical alliances geopolitically.
00:07:33.080So he's one of these figures whose intention is to have a comprehensive and, as it were, epic, in the sense of broad-ranging with great heights and depths, an epic theory of global affairs and of man's place in the world.
00:07:49.820And so he's been doing that book after book.
00:08:27.000So, in other words, one of his ideas of what it is to think is that it's not just a disembodied abstract practice removed from the existential concerns of human and political life.
00:08:37.540But he's also just had to single-handedly put together a project.
00:08:42.500Now, as you, I think, posted about on Twitter when you were commenting on the book, and as I'm sure you saw in the first part of the book, he's pitched it as an open project.
00:08:50.860So he has other collaborators and contributors and thinkers.
00:08:54.820But somehow, you know, it has rotated around his efforts for all that time, and it's an accomplishment.
00:09:00.980So, like I said, we're not going to get to everything today, but I'm hoping that we can maybe just work through a few of the key points early on.
00:09:07.400In the book, I kind of expound on those, and they're very interesting.
00:09:11.760They cross over some of the philosophy I'm more familiar with when it comes to the neo-reactionary sphere, when I kind of touch on some of those points and maybe examine some of that.
00:09:21.140But to start out with, he kind of lays out, of course, the three political theories of modernity, right?
00:09:28.080The three liberal theory or the three theories he talks about, of course, are liberalism.
00:09:33.940That would be the first one, communism in reaction to liberalism, and then fascism in reaction to communism and liberalism.
00:09:41.700And he kind of explains that, obviously, fascism kind of exploded itself through a couple different problems, including, of course, obviously, Nazism and everything else that followed with that.
00:09:55.400Communism kind of died of old age, and liberalism kind of reigns supreme at the end of this thing.
00:10:00.940But that's put us into a different state, which is post-liberalism, in which liberalism is kind of assumed.
00:10:06.740And that puts us in a very different situation.
00:10:09.720Could you talk a little bit about what he means by kind of that post-liberal situation?
00:10:15.060Yeah, so Dugan has an argument that liberalism, when it's contesting other ideologies, it's in the field of political combat that hasn't yet been resolved.
00:10:26.640So when liberalism, communism, and fascism are fighting, they're fighting for who gets to dominate and become, as it were, the status quo operating in the background.
00:10:36.740So before one of them has won, the background isn't established, it's not settled yet, it's contested.
00:10:42.800When liberalism wins, it goes from being a player in the field to constituting the field itself.
00:10:50.600So that suddenly, after the victory of liberalism, everything that shows up as a political phenomenon does so in the hue of, or against the backdrop of, liberalism's dominance.
00:11:02.460And when that happens, when it goes from being one among the fighters in the arena to the arena itself, everything changes.
00:11:10.720Everything changes about itself, and everything changes about that field of contestation.
00:11:15.880Because in the era of the three political theories, you could oppose liberalism by getting into the ring, by getting into the arena.
00:11:23.700The era of post-liberalism, suddenly the only thing that shows up as an opponent to it, Dugan analyzes this at various points throughout the text, is it's not so clear what can oppose liberalism after it becomes the last ideology standing.
00:11:38.100So another part of his argument, for example, is that in the classical phase of the combat between the three ideologies, liberalism was dedicated to the individual and to no external authorities over and above the individual, kind of liberation from collective identities that are externally opposed, like church identity, for example, and things like that.
00:12:00.040But he has an argument that when liberalism wins, it takes all of the energy and all of the attack that it had previously directed outside of itself against external forms of hierarchy and so on, and redirects it into the individual himself.
00:12:14.480So that the post-modern individual, the post-liberal, post-liberal, post-modern individual, now attacks not only external authorities, but internal authorities, like the authority of reason itself.
00:12:26.080So that the post-liberal individual culminates no longer in the primacy of reason, but in an attack on that, the liberation of our schizophrenic urges, irony, and all of these other uniquely post-modern characteristics.
00:12:38.980So it's a nice analysis, you know, it's one thing when there's a fight, because the fight somehow constitutes the field of the political.
00:12:45.480When he says at the beginning of Fourth Political Theory that it seems like politics has come to an end, that's what he means is that at the ideological level, there's no longer viable contestation with liberal dominance.
00:12:57.680Yeah, and the end of politics is really important there.
00:13:00.920I think he leans very into that end of history from Francis Fukuyama, that language, and saying that, you know, now that liberalism has emerged the victor, everything moves out of the realm of the political and is re-territalized into the realm of the marketplace, right?
00:13:16.020And so all questions really become questions of economic efficiency, that we move out of the ability to really think of things as a specifically economic term and really only have the ability to think of them in this kind of marketplace scenario.
00:13:33.240It really does feel like that explanation, of course, of Schmidt, and he references Schmidt regularly, so I'm sure that that's part of it, of kind of liberalism, putting all the existential questions in the broom closet so that you could just kind of create, you know, a minimum viable morality that allows the marketplace to function.
00:13:53.240But we don't actually ever remove those existential questions, but it feels like he's saying, like, there's just people no longer know how to even engage with those politically anymore.
00:14:05.220They've kind of even just lost the vocabulary for that, which I think is very interesting because, again, it also kind of overlaps with someone who I also like quite a bit, Alistair McIntyre, kind of losing the ability to have even moral conversations or political conversations because the language of the marketplace is now just dominant.
00:14:53.240And if you just consider that as settled, then maybe you can have a world of tolerance, peace, and compromise, as the liberals pretend to be interested in, whereas obviously their logic betrays the fact that they're in a full-out war against any alternative to liberalism.
00:15:09.620We've lost the vocabulary, and Dugan is definitely interested in analyzing that situation, giving us the vocabulary.
00:15:14.720One thing that I think is nice about his approach, I have benefited from it personally, and I think it stands out in some sense as unique or as distinct, I would put it like this.
00:15:25.600Some people who are searching for a vocabulary in the context of liberal dominance to talk about meaningful and good life, some of them go to ancient political philosophy.
00:15:34.240Aristotle, in particular, Stoics in some cases, Plato for sure.
00:15:39.360So you have the return to classical political philosophy, the ancients, in some cases religious thought, Aquinas, you know, a kind of Christian common good vocabulary.
00:15:48.280But as a rule, those people tend not to go all the way in the direction as well of German philosophers like Heidegger.
00:15:58.880You know, we're going to go in the direction of antiquity, we're not going to go in the direction of German postmodernity, let's say.
00:16:04.880Another group of thinkers in trying to criticize liberalism goes in the direction of German postmodernity, but it does so from the left.
00:16:11.480So you have leftist thinkers who are well-versed in Husserl, Heidegger, Kant, Nietzsche, and all of these other thinkers.
00:16:18.320But one of the things that Dugin thinks is important is that we can't actually understand our situation if we don't see the whole picture.
00:16:26.340And part of the whole picture is the postmodern element.
00:16:30.060Therefore, we need the language to understand, and we get that language not just by returning to Christian thought, not just by returning to classical thought,
00:16:36.980but by incorporating all of the theoretical insights of other schools of thought and other disciplines.
00:16:43.960Partially the postmodern theorists I just mentioned, but also, for example, he thinks there are other disciplines we need to draw on.
00:16:50.500Geopolitics being one of them, sociology being another one of them, structural linguistics, and so on.
00:16:55.780So he wants the full arsenal of intellectual disciplines to help us to grasp the unique character of postmodernity.
00:17:03.380I don't think that's always the case on the right, because sometimes, again, it's hard to stand fully for the defense of the Western tradition
00:17:13.940and to take seriously on their own terms, to the extent that they deserve it, the critics of the Western tradition culminating in people,
00:17:24.080you know, in some sense the critics of the Western tradition among those German thinkers.
00:17:28.400So you have to have, in my view, Dugan represents the alternative that says,
00:17:33.620let's try to grasp modernity on the basis of both premodernity and postmodernity.
00:17:39.680We're going to hit it from two flanks and really try to get the big picture that way, which I think is a worthwhile enterprise.
00:17:45.900Yeah, I unfortunately am not familiar with Heidegger.
00:17:49.180I've got being in time on the bookshelf, but I haven't tackled it yet.
00:17:53.440I'm looking forward to eventually getting in there.
00:17:58.120So very useful to have someone to kind of fill in those parts.
00:18:02.280But I think it's very interesting that the, and I talked about this too with my friend Gio Pinchetti,
00:18:09.640who's very well versed in a lot of postmodern theory.
00:18:13.060But a lot of conservatives have been, a lot of people on the right have been told that they have to be very worried about postmodernity.
00:18:19.760It's the boogeyman in the closet that will come and destroy all truth and all knowledge and all value and everything will just disassemble itself into relativism.
00:18:30.860Very interestingly for, I think for a lot of people who might not be familiar with some of this thought is Dugan, from what I can tell, really looks at this as the opportunity, kind of this collapse of logic in on itself.
00:18:45.700The absurdity and contradictions reaching levels that can no longer be borne by kind of the logical load.
00:18:53.780The collapse of this creates a situation where mysticism, religion, things from beyond this very stifled realm of logic can reemerge into the discussion.
00:19:08.000They're freed once again to kind of come back and be a part of this because they're no longer completely locked out by this rigid commitment to pure reason.
00:19:21.280And he had one quote that I really liked where I wrote it down here.
00:19:40.600It's the death of who, right, is what he explains it as, you know, the people would not understand the death of God.
00:19:46.540And so that allows then a return to discussions about God in kind of a whole new context, a whole new way that is not burdened by all these modern discourses surrounding the subject.
00:19:58.020And it kind of opens people up to understanding a different way of being, a different way of understanding value.
00:20:05.180It's a point well made by him, I think.
00:20:07.600Because he's the section there is called the return of myths and archaics.
00:20:11.100So everything that modernity had displaced as as premodern, as a prejudice, as a relic of the past, as antique or ancient or outdated in principle is in play again with the end of modernity.
00:20:25.240We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
00:20:55.340So when the conservative critics look at post-modernity and criticize it, Dugan does too.
00:21:01.160But he, like they, shines his light on the freaks and the monsters and the chimeras and the cyborgs, you know, the post-humanism and the sort of degenerate, degraded insanity.
00:21:14.860But together with the freak show, you also have the possibility of the return of genuine religious faith and of the re-articulation and re-assertion of forms of life that modern dogmatism had discarded or had tried to dispose of.
00:21:33.940So that, again, just as an intellectual operation.
00:21:36.700So a simple way in which I think that's relevant is you say, okay, the modern interpretation of the human being, it showed us something, you know, it had some, let's say, some upside, some benefit to it.
00:21:47.040It taught us something relevant about science and technology.
00:21:50.080Let's say, you know, it accomplished something.
00:21:53.500And one of the things that it came at the expense of was an understanding of the full potentials of a human being.
00:21:59.980The modern human being is a very narrow, small interpretation of the human being proper.
00:22:04.120Individual is a very small, narrow interpretation of human being proper.
00:22:07.700So Dugan has this view, what was left out of the picture?
00:22:10.800And part of what was left out of the picture that got suppressed in modernity, what he calls, and he's got various presentations of this in other texts and in other places.
00:22:18.860But you can say, for example, all right, you had the rationalist history of theology and a rationalist kind of dogmatics.
00:22:27.900But what about the undercurrent of mysticism, like you mentioned, of the Dionysian, of the dark logos, dark not in the sense of evil, but dark in the sense of, you know, mystics often speak in terms of the darkness that is even higher than the light and things like that.
00:22:44.220So there's a whole realm of texts and ideas and perspectives that fell out of the picture in modernity, including, as I say, the classical teachings.
00:22:57.000Like that's why Dugan has several essays on Plato, for example, on the possibility of a return to Plato.
00:23:01.080But not only that, of other figures and of other teachings.
00:23:07.760Because in part, I think his work appeals to those of us or those readers who believe that the deep experiences of the human being are that basically there's a war on the human being right now.
00:23:23.960We see it at a surface level, which is like the war on gender identity, the war on traditional faith, the war on certain other, you know, normal and natural roles.
00:23:33.560And somehow the human being himself is under the gun.
00:23:36.380But there's, you know, there's more to the human being than we even think about when it's not just that, you know, what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman.
00:24:07.860His idea is that that'll help with the construction of new models of understanding that have some political relevance.
00:24:13.520Yeah, I think it's really interesting, too, because his language sounds, again, very much like many near reactionary thinkers that I have read.
00:24:25.420He himself seems to be an accelerationist.
00:24:28.500He regularly encourages accelerating the collapse of kind of this postmodern structure to move on to the next thing.
00:24:38.700Most of the guys like Nick Land saw this as the opportunity to kind of achieve escape velocity from politics at all, as where he sees it as the ability to kind of have reemergent tradition and reemergent mysticism and moral particulars and so many things that have been locked out.
00:25:02.000Which I just I just I just thought was very fascinating because I've seen this argument before I've seen this line of reasoning before, but I've only seen it with the kind of the goal of accelerating and escaping the human as where his is the is accelerating and escaping the prison that is locked.
00:25:19.880Kind of kind of the individual inside of this system and can reconnect to something far more ancient and as emerges kind of outside of these constraints.
00:25:40.060But the accelerationism that allows for the reassertion or for the reinception of what's uniquely human, he regards as a good thing.
00:25:49.280So I know you mentioned you are I won't take any Heidegger for granted in what I'm about to say, but I think it's a nice way of mentioning this.
00:25:57.200So Heidegger had an idea that Dugin does discuss in the fourth political theory that we live at the end of philosophy, that nihilism, alienation, technological interpretation of the world.
00:26:10.040All of these things are characteristic of the fact that we live at the end of the process that began with the first philosophers in Greece.
00:26:19.280But Heidegger had another idea, which is that properly understood the history of philosophy, if we really grasp it and its significance, doing so will prepare the ground for what he called another beginning of philosophy.
00:26:34.840And Dugin, for whom Heidegger is such an important figure, his first book on Heidegger is called Martin Heidegger, The Philosophy of Another Beginning.
00:26:42.940So the idea is that you want to accelerate the end because you want the end to end, as it were, for the sake of what?
00:26:51.260For the sake of another beginning, another beginning of philosophy, another spark, as it were, in the human soul or spirit, where we once again become connected and rooted to the grounds of our existence.
00:27:03.100So in that sense, the exact opposite of the idea of reaching escape velocity, because escape velocity would be becoming unrooted, uprooted or ungrounded from what, for Dugin, is the soil of our existence.
00:27:17.460And that, for him, is ultimately his main, the main interpretations of his that I'm interested in and where I think he puts his emphasis is that that soil is philosophy for him.
00:27:27.100You know, and Heidegger is the key to all of that.
00:27:28.880But yeah, the postmodern world should come to an end.
00:27:33.000That doesn't mean that the world should be destroyed.
00:27:36.280It means that the coordinates of interpretation about the nature of man, the nature of time, the nature of politics, the reigning screen through which we see the world, that has to play itself out so that it can be replaced.
00:27:50.180And we can actively have a role in that process through the free construction of something like the fourth political theory.
00:27:57.960It's not, just to be clear for anybody who's listening, Dugin is very adamant about the fact that it's not inevitable.
00:29:38.980Heidegger, from whom the term, from whom Dugin uses the term Dasein in the specifically Heideggerian sense.
00:29:45.080Heidegger basically had said, look, if you look at all of those different kinds of answer, there's a layer below them.
00:29:52.660There's something about ourselves, namely our openness to being, the fact that we are beings open to being, is somehow this ground that's taken for granted by all these other answers.
00:30:08.580So whether it's a Christian or an atheist or evolutionary or some other kind of answer, Heidegger said, there's this unexplored prior dimension underlying that.
00:30:21.140And that dimension primarily concerns the question, what does it mean to be?
00:30:25.580So we are, as I said at the beginning, if we interpret ourselves as an entity.
00:30:29.860But what kind of entity or being are we?
00:30:32.380Am I the same kind of being as the things that are on my table?
00:30:36.800Like here's a cup, a book, a phone, paper, pencil, camera, TV screen, and me in the chair.
00:30:41.940Are those all the equivalent kind of entity?
00:30:44.200What is it that's uniquely the case about the human being?
00:30:48.880Heidegger gave all of his attention over his whole life and several thousands of pages and many tens of books to that question.
00:30:55.100And the realm that he believes himself to have discovered and, you know, I guess you'll have to decide for yourself when you read Being in Time whether he did or didn't.
00:31:03.860But that realm he denotes with the term da sign, which basically for our purposes means the da is like the location there and the sign is being, being there.
00:31:13.460So he reoriented all of our tools of analysis to the question of our being, which not everybody had done.
00:31:23.080And that's why Heidegger was a revolution somehow in the history of philosophy.
00:31:26.980And Dugin says, look, as he took what he learned from Heidegger and he looked at the field of political theory and political ideology, he said,
00:31:35.140the liberal interpretation of the human being as an individual, the communist focus on class, the Nazi focus on race, the fascist focus on state.
00:31:45.040All of these things, Dugin observed, they also are on the second floor of the building, so to speak, not on the ground floor of the building.
00:31:54.780They also are not linked in an understanding of the question of being.
00:31:59.580And so somehow you can take your axe, as it were, to all of the modern ideologies, digging underneath them by following Heidegger into the question of being.
00:32:10.120And when you do that, Dugin believes, you come out the other side of it with a different set of concepts and a different way of understanding political phenomena,
00:32:19.880which can provide an alternative to all three of liberalism, communism and fascism.
00:32:27.480This is not a very easy notion to grasp.
00:32:31.440I've said it, I've tried to simplify it and state it quickly, but for a lot of people, it's difficult to understand that opposition to a political theory doesn't just have to move horizontally from, you know, from liberalism to communism or to fascism or to some other horizontal alternative.
00:32:47.280The idea of the fourth political theory isn't like you have room 501, 502, 503, 504.
00:32:52.120It's literally going down a level, down to the fundamental level, and then back up with a new set of concepts.
00:32:59.380So that's partly the significance of Heidegger and of the notion of Dasein for Dugin.
00:33:05.080He wants, even as you may have seen, like, I'll give you another quick example.
00:33:08.660People know that in liberalism, in progressivism, and in other forms of ideology as well, there's always some implicit notion of time.
00:33:23.720Like, I think it was Justin Trudeau at one point who said, of course, we're going to have 50% women in our cabinet because, you know, it's 2022 or 2023.
00:33:31.300Like, in other words, as time goes forward, equality should also grow, equity should also grow, and any outdated idea is also ascribed to the past as being outdated or antiquated.
00:33:43.720So one of the things, too, that Heidegger had raised as an issue that Dugin takes as a theoretical tool for all of his analysis is what's the relationship between being and time?
00:33:55.140We can't even take something as apparently simple as time for granted.
00:33:58.640Certainly not its homogeneity, its unidirectionality, its progressivism.
00:34:05.080So the whole question of the nature of time comes into question as well with Heidegger,
00:34:08.980and that's just another tool for criticizing the existing political theories and for articulating a new one.
00:34:16.060So moving on to the criticizing and synthesizing of a new theory, he breaks down these, you know, obviously his, he just says, we need to discard liberalism.
00:34:26.760But he also looks at fascism and communism and says, these are incomplete, these don't work.
00:34:33.240A lot of people will just say, oh, well, it's just, you know, his fourth political theory is just warmed over fascism or warmed over communism.
00:34:41.020I think that's a really lazy way to look at this because he specifically decries both.
00:34:46.800But I want to look at the way he decries both of these because I think one of these is sloppy.
00:34:52.160And I'm not sure if this is something that is in the translation, but you translated this.
00:34:55.600So I feel like you'll know you can, you can give me a very direct kind of a clarification.
00:35:02.020But when he looks at fascism, right, he looks at fascism and he says, a big problem of this is racism and we need to reject racism and kind of all of its forms.
00:35:10.500And of course, he explains, you know, the, what would be the general understanding of racism, I think, for most people.
00:35:16.920But he also says we need to reject things like basically economic racism, that, you know, glamour, fashion, even progress itself.
00:35:58.260He explicitly rejects the biological racism of the Nazi party.
00:36:04.480And he does so incidentally in other works as well.
00:36:07.580So in his book, Ethnosociology, where he explains the relevance of the category of the ethnos to our social understanding,
00:36:13.780he has a section on racism where he says why, in his view, it's an illegitimate category.
00:36:18.200And there he doesn't apply it to all of the various forms.
00:36:21.860Like you mentioned, fashion, glamour, civilizational racism, technological racism.
00:36:26.580He focuses more on the field of race studies and says why, in his view, race is not basically a legitimate social category from the perspective of ethnosociology.
00:36:35.060In the fourth political theory book, what he, yeah, he extends the concept for sure.
00:36:41.020You know, you can have like a temporal racism.
00:36:43.120Temporal racism is the idea that everything new is better than everything at all.
00:36:46.280Civilizational racism, everything Western is better than everything non-Western.
00:36:49.700Technological racism, same thing, right?
00:36:51.120If you have, if you have yesterday's Apple phone, then, you know, you're already outdated.
00:36:55.860You're like a second class citizen or, you know, third world slum dog or something like that.
00:36:59.880And I think that the key thing he's pointing out there is not that, well, you know, there's a slight ambiguity.
00:37:07.260So on one hand, he's not saying fashion is racist in the sense that, you know, in a narrowly biological racist sense.
00:37:16.160But the idea is that some group elevates itself above all other groups on the basis of a small set of criteria.
00:37:21.800And on that basis, excludes the others as subhuman or, you know, of less worth of comparatively subhuman and second and third class citizens.
00:37:31.760I think he's right about the phenomenon, even if you don't necessarily like the extension of the term racism to categorize it.
00:37:40.260The reason I said it's ambiguous is because built into all of those processes, he does mention in passing, is the universalization of Western standards.
00:37:52.140And there is an ethnic core to Western civilization for him.
00:37:58.000In other words, there is an ethnic dimension, not racial, but there's an ethnic core to what gets universalized.
00:38:06.560And so somehow still, in all of those cases, you have a group or a sector projecting its preferences as universal and delegitimizing everybody else along the way.
00:38:21.200So, yes, strictly speaking, it's not in those cases, he's just extended the concept.
00:38:25.000But he wants to make the point, I think, that one of the points he wants to make is that the liberal Western globalist anti-racists who act as though they are, you know, there's no blood on their hands, they don't offend anybody, they're pure tolerance.
00:38:42.540In fact, when they send their LGBT armies to orthodox countries and when they try to put all of these attacks on, they're, in effect, doing the same thing.
00:38:55.120They're effectively delegitimizing anything other than their own preferences, anything other than their own standards.
00:39:00.640And it's such a big part of Dugan's model, whether people like this or not is a separate question, but it is.
00:39:06.000It's such a big part of Dugan's model that you have to take seriously, philosophically, sociologically, anthropologically, theologically, human difference.
00:39:17.160And in particular, the difference among peoples and civilizations, that any universalization like that is illegitimate.
00:39:25.480So he uses the strongest term available, you know, somehow in showing that, but it's true that he extends it further than its normal reach.
00:39:34.560Now, I think the part that he says that you do want to take from fascism, because, again, he breaks down and repudiates large parts of both of these theories, but he says there are valuable things to be taken from each one of them.
00:39:49.680And I think that will put a lot of people off.
00:39:52.020But he's very careful to say, I'm trying to remember what the exact wording was, break the circle of something.
00:40:04.120It's kind of like if the ideology is an organism, the whole thing hangs together, but you rip its heart out, let's say, then it's just a corpse.
00:40:11.740There's no longer an organism, you know, or it's like the pieces have, they no longer hang together in a coherent way when you've deprived them of the thing that gave them their unity.
00:40:21.060And when they no longer hang together in a coherent way, then you can pick and choose the elements.
00:40:25.560First, you have to diffuse the bomb or, you know, rip out the heart or whatever metaphor is best, break the hermeneutic circle.
00:40:32.120So, yeah, once he does that, then he's free to recombine the elements.
00:40:36.400So now that this monster is no longer roaming the countryside, we can kind of figure out what what made it tick and what things are valuable and what things were terrible.
00:40:43.620And so the one that he focuses on for fascism is is ethnos and is, you know, he uses the term ethnocentrism, which I think a lot of people, again, you know, will get a lot of warning flags on this.
00:40:56.080Now, obviously, he wrote a whole book kind of explaining what he probably meant by that.
00:41:00.240So I might be asking you to explain a whole book again.
00:41:02.760But could you get for people who are trying to understand him here?
00:41:05.840What is he saying about taking the idea of ethnos or ethnocentrism from fascism as something valuable that could be carried forward?
00:41:13.320So I'll I'll try to say it like this, the what he's rejecting is the idea of a racial supremacy, you know, like if you're not if you're not Aryan life, you know, you're going to be destroyed or you're going to be deprived.
00:41:25.980You're going to be, you know, annihilated, all of those things.
00:41:31.960OK, that's a complete rejection to all of that for many reasons that he is explicit about here and elsewhere.
00:41:37.560But the category of ethnos is a little bit different because the category of ethnos, first of all, as he uses it, it doesn't presuppose superiority or inferiority.
00:41:46.040This is a model for understanding social phenomena.
00:41:49.700So he has in the book, Ethnosociology, what he does is he goes over several schools, many different schools of cultural anthropology, social anthropology and so on.
00:41:58.840And then he also, after reviewing them, develops his own theory.
00:42:01.440But one thing you can say is, OK, ethnos is the simplest social group.
00:42:08.020It lies at the basis of more complex social groups.
00:43:29.040Then civil society, global society, and post-society.
00:43:32.240So, that's a spectrum from the simplest social form to the most complex.
00:43:37.080Global society is very complex, large, all-encompassing.
00:43:40.740Ethnos is a small, simple, relatively homogenous, and closed in on itself.
00:43:45.780But as you move from one to the other, you don't erase the ethnic dimension.
00:43:51.200You just, as you mentioned earlier, you know how we put the existential questions in the closet or put them under the floorboards or whatever.
00:43:57.400Here, too, the ethnic component gets pushed down.
00:44:10.720So, you have, you know, in the third world, where the capitalists, where, you know, where you have labor, basically, the laboring part of the world, ethnic identity may be more in the forefront.
00:44:20.360And in the capitalist core of the developed world, the ethnic identity is subsumed but present.
00:44:28.300But the key idea here is that the ethnos and its derivatives, folk, nation, civil society, global society, and post-society, are sociological category.
00:44:37.720And understanding them in that way helps us to remove, in his view, the dominant view of civil society and global society.
00:44:47.520So, the analysis, basically, is we live under globalist circumstances.
00:44:50.940And these other parts of our sociological self-understanding have been lost.
00:44:57.600We can recover them and start to get a sense of traditions, ways of life, ways of being, ways of relating, ways of forming families, ways of speaking.
00:45:08.140All of these various phenomena that focus on civil society has cut off.
00:45:14.000So, we're amputated souls if we only take the globalist perspective as the full sociology.
00:45:21.180So, in his view, the globalist perspective is derived from ethno-sociology as a sort of modification or, as I say, amputation of the big picture.
00:45:29.800It's a nice argument and a nice model.
00:45:31.700But the key thing, it's not a supremacist view.
00:45:35.400There's no, in his view, there's no ethnos that's better than another.
00:45:38.960What you have is the tools for analyzing human plurality and diversity.
00:45:44.480When we say diversity in DEI language, we tend to mean, like, you know, all of the ways that you can be a gay, liberal, or leftist.
00:45:53.640The contemporary diversity doesn't take into account Orthodox Christian Russians or, you know, the varieties of Islamic eschatological faiths.
00:46:05.320For us, diversity is very narrow and constrained.
00:46:08.560It's diversity within the paradigm of liberal, of post-liberalism.
00:46:13.540Dugin wants a broader understanding of human diversity, one that includes those who say no to post-liberalism,
00:46:21.540those who say no to liberal democracy, those who assert some other way of being in the world.
00:46:26.320And so ethno-sociology is one of the ways that he's able to describe that.
00:46:30.120Yeah, funny enough that you should end with that example because we just had someone from the White House explaining that our foreign policy is,
00:46:38.880you know, LGBTQ rights are a key aspect of our foreign policy, which is a big part that he talks about here in this sector as well.
00:46:47.480It talks about multipolarity versus unipolarity.
00:46:52.080And one of the things that I think a lot of people, you know, should go eyes wide in with this is that Dugin is very interested in Russia and Russia's future.
00:47:00.860He's centric on this, as he would tell you he has to be, as there's no other way to be.
00:47:05.200And he repeatedly talks about the importance of he calls for a global crusade against America and the West and how important it is to end the unipolarity and domination of America and return to a multipolar structure.
00:47:24.300For a lot of people, that sounds like he's trying to start World War III.
00:47:27.980I don't think he likes America, but I understand his point.
00:47:32.260As someone who would prefer the United States to care more about its own people than the empire of elites that don't care at all about those in the United States,
00:47:43.780I also wish that they would pull away from this strategy.
00:47:47.980His seems far more aggressive, maybe because he sees this as a direct threat to his geopolitical existence.
00:47:52.680But he's very clear that, like, collapsing this unipolar system is a key part of this.
00:48:00.560There's a lot there, and some of it I feel I have to comment on as a sort of priority, which is this.
00:48:07.700It would be weird, I think, for Americans who love America to find themselves attracted to an author who sometimes has these anti-American or anti-Western formulations.
00:48:19.240Like, if you read that somebody says American empire should be destroyed, and you're an American patriot, you love America and what it stands for and its traditions and its possibilities,
00:48:28.420and you want to restore American greatness and sound common sense and all of that,
00:48:33.600it would be natural to categorize Dugan, you know, as a hostile player, as somebody who hates America and wants to destroy it.
00:48:41.020So my view is that, on the basis of the textual evidence, he is pretty explicit, for example, in The Great Awakening versus The Great Reset and elsewhere,
00:48:51.900that the West itself has been occupied by post-liberalism, post-modernity, and anti-Western sentiments.
00:49:01.100And that he wants to, he doesn't hate the West.
00:49:04.240This is, I can tell you very explicitly, I wrote about this in my Dugan book, because the passages are super stark and unambiguous in my view.
00:49:11.840He says he doesn't hate the West, he loves the West, he loves its authors, which is absolutely true.
00:49:15.820He's written many, many volumes about the countries of the West, which is true.
00:49:19.340What he hates is what the West has become under the dominance of people who hate the West.
00:49:24.320And the task is to liberate, among other things, the global task of the fourth political theory would be to liberate the West for its own traditions.
00:49:32.880Nobody could say right now that the modern Western world is true to the best elements of what made it the West.
00:49:41.100Somehow it's at war with the best elements of what made it the West.
00:49:44.360It's censoring and punishing and attacking the best things that made it the West.
00:49:48.600Philosophy, faith, beauty, and all the rest of it.
00:49:51.280So he says at various times in various books that the war is not against the West.
00:49:55.700The war is against the liberalism that has hijacked the West.
00:50:00.560Again, maybe not everybody will see it in those terms.
00:50:02.960Another thing he said is, look, you have to recognize that the United States is the center of the world as it stands.
00:50:10.020And you can reject America's international liberal hegemony.
00:50:16.180In other words, like you said, the fact that it must export LGBTQIA plus values everywhere around the world as a key element of its foreign policy, its destruction of other peoples and civilizations.
00:50:27.060You can reject that perfectly well in full consistency with believing that America should remain a pole in the world, should assert its rights and interests in the world, should defend itself and be strong and be flourishing in the world.
00:50:40.400What he doesn't like is the universalization and destruction of other civilizations and peoples that comes as a function of that.
00:50:48.680Now, nobody likes to have their side of the battle squashed and destroyed.
00:50:53.560He's all in as a Russian patriot on the defense of Russian civilization, Russian existence.
00:50:59.780And he's very cautious about the forces that are trying to destroy it.
00:51:02.880When he reaches out to American audiences and when he writes about America these days, it's definitely with an eye to the fact that something similar is happening in America.
00:51:13.540That the forces of the Great Reset, as he characterizes it in the Great Awakening versus the Great Reset, are as much at war in and against America as they are at war against other peoples and civilizations.
00:51:26.160So for what it's worth, people may find that to be slippery.
00:51:31.360They may find that to be just merely political rhetoric.
00:51:34.200But I think we have some evidence that Dugan is making points that resonate, namely that there are a lot of people, freedom-loving American patriots, who find his criticisms of the Great Reset and his criticisms of global liberalism, his criticisms of the postmodern left, powerful.
00:51:51.900And the fact that he's able to articulate them and give us a new way of thinking about them doesn't mean we have to accept everything he's ever written anywhere, but they do mean that we should make the most of and take the best of what we find in the critics of modern liberalism.
00:52:08.580Yeah, I think it's really important for people to understand that pointing out that Dugan has powerful ideas or criticisms in certain areas doesn't mean a wholesale embrace of his positions or his worldview, his outlook.
00:52:22.900There are many really important thinkers that if you totally embrace every part of their philosophy, you'd be horrified.
00:52:29.840And so it's really important to be able to take these things, think about them, see how they interact with other ideas that you're exploring without assuming that someone who's talking about them is just on board for every geopolitical objective or every part of someone's writings.
00:52:48.140I think that's something people need to keep central in their mind.
00:52:51.360But that said, I also want to make sure we touch just real briefly on his criticism of Marxism because he doesn't leave that alone either.
00:52:58.500He says that the problem with Marxism is it's wholly materialistic, it's wholly atheistic economic determinism.
00:53:08.240He says this too is he agrees with many of its critiques of liberalism and capitalism, but he has a serious problem with kind of the resulting system that replaces those things and thinks that in general fails as a reaction to the first political theory.
00:53:27.800So he says exactly it's unidirectional progressivism, it's historical materialism, it's atheism, it's idea that you can exhaust your account of social and human life on the basis of class analysis.
00:53:40.860All of that is narrow and much of it is false.
00:53:44.260He explicitly rejects the pretty much everything we mentioned there, the historical materialism, the progressivism, the unidirectionalism and the focus on class.
00:53:52.000On the other hand, yes, there are aspects of its criticism of capitalism that he thinks are valuable and that can be combined with other perspectives.
00:54:00.600So just the fact that you're an anti-Marxist doesn't mean you have to have no interest in labor rights, no interest in elements of social justice.
00:54:08.740Again, if they're combined with other sound observations and somehow merged with other basic core principles.
00:54:15.740So he's anti-Marxist in that sense, but he does think that the criticism of capitalism has something to offer.
00:54:22.400Emphasis on justice does have something to offer.
00:54:24.040And one of the things, too, that people may find surprising or exciting or whatever the case is, depending on who's reading it, that I like at any rate, is this experimental spirit where he says, look, you can read Marxism from the right in a way that is deriving useful insights for your political project on the basis.
00:54:45.160When you put him in a different context, you can derive new insights from him or a figure like Julius Evola, traditionalists typically consider on the right or on the far right, Dugan says, read him from the left.
00:54:55.900In other words, the key idea in the especially the first few chapters here of the fourth political theory is we're so used to automatic ideological analysis instantly, like we're running chat GPT, the liberal interpretations on the table or the Marxist interpretation or the fascist interpretation.
00:55:14.940And somehow that's all recycled, well-known and unthinking.
00:55:20.360And you can interrupt that process of automatic, quote-unquote, reasoning by doing some experimental juxtapositions, by doing operations like the one we said, where reject the thing that makes the theory a coherent theory and then see what remains.
00:55:37.000So even when he discusses, for example, the idea that having rejected the individual from liberalism, the class from communism, the race from Nazism and the state from fascism, and he says, well, so what's going to be the key actor of the fourth political theory?
00:55:52.180At first, he says, we can imagine a compound subject, some combination of these.
00:55:56.760And very important, he says, we'll treat this as a preliminary exercise, a preliminary methodological exercise.
00:56:03.400In other words, when it comes to political concepts, ideas and ideologies, we have to learn again how to think, not just how to automatically spew and regurgitate previously processed, hundred-year-old ideological phrases.
00:56:19.580So one of the nice things about this book is I think that it does that.
00:56:22.380It invites us to play around a little bit as a warm-up exercise for the serious work of constructing an alternative.
00:56:29.660And again, this idea that we have to construct an ideological alternative, he says, one of the presuppositions, this goes without saying, but it's worth saying anyways, one of the presuppositions is you're interested in this project only if you have some opposition, some revulsion, to put it strongly, some opposition, to put it neutrally, towards the reigning ideological status quo.
00:56:52.160If it strikes you as odd or as strange or as undesirable that America should have as a key component of its foreign policy, the promotion of what that statement was, or if you find the marksification of higher academia and lower academia, K-12, not to mention undergraduate and graduate studies.
00:57:13.160If you have any sense that that's wrong, then the task is really to understand how we got here, what's going on, how has the situation changed, and on what grounds could we possibly advance a meaningful alternative?
00:57:26.260So that's just another nice thing here.
00:57:29.880And rereading Marxism from the right, or let me say one other, not to go on about this, but just to give the listeners another taste or flavor for it.
00:57:36.960It's like when liberalism was fighting communism and fascism, it was to see who inherits the right to claim themselves as most modern.
00:57:46.460Liberalism won, that means liberalism proved that it was most modern.
00:57:49.780But in losing, that showed you that there was something non-modern about communism and fascism.
00:57:55.720And the fact that there's some non-modern trace or residue, which explains in part why they lost, also can pique our interest.
00:58:04.400Because suddenly, if we reject what's most modern about communism and fascism, we may still be curious about what's not modern in them that can be recovered.
00:58:14.620And when he talks about communism, he says the eschatological, mythological structure of the communist faith and the communist story about the development of society.
00:58:25.420So that's part and parcel of the return of myths and archaics.
00:58:28.500What about treating communism not as a scientific account of society, but as an eschatological myth?
00:58:53.560Now, I found this one particularly interesting because, again, it touches on something that neoreactionary theory, Nick Land specifically, and accelerationism hits on a lot, which is cybernetics and the closed feedback loop, the closed positive feedback loop.
00:59:10.380And he seems to be saying in this that it's really important that we basically be able – he gives the idea of a governor on an engine.
00:59:20.520You know, you need to – once the reaction has started, you really need something that's able to, you know, stop the feeding of fuel into the engine or you end up with a very serious, you know, consequence.
00:59:31.600And he says, basically, we've lost this or we've engineered this out of a lot of what we do.
00:59:38.740And so he talks about the need to kind of reintroduce the ability to apply negative feedback and control kind of this reaction of deterritorialization.
00:59:48.160And I think that's really interesting because I would like that to be true, but I'm not sure that it's possible.
00:59:55.800And this is what so many people in the neuroreactionary sphere mean when they say the only way out is through.
01:00:03.080That basically there is no way to escape the self-exciting feedback loop.
01:00:08.140There is no escape from cybernetics as it is now.
01:00:12.240And we don't have a way to control the, you know, this self-accelerating process.
01:00:19.240But what do you think Dugan is kind of – what would he use to apply kind of the brakes to this runaway train, if there even is a chance for that?
01:00:32.780First of all, he's analyzed in the ethno-sociology books what he also mentions in that chapter in passing, which is kinds of ritual like the sacrifice or the gift and other forms of organization that are designed, you know, social rituals, let's say, that are designed to have this effect.
01:00:50.380So he may think that you could reinstitute some version of that or you could support that type of thing.
01:00:58.960But even just learning about how to oppose, even just learning that monotonic processes are destructive of life and then putting our attention not on growth but on life, what can you do to support the cycles and rhythms of life and what kinds of practices have done well in doing that before and what can be recovered.
01:01:15.920So a lot of his teaching is, like in The Return of Myths and Archaics, what used to work that we left behind that we could recover.
01:01:23.820So the possibility of recovery, you have to clear the playing field to be able to do that.
01:01:27.020The critique of monotonic processes is part of that, I would say.
01:01:33.140Besides the ethno-sociological dimension, like I say, these various ritual forms, theological forms, religious forms, things you could do in –
01:01:44.980I mean, you have to get off the one-way technological train, that's for sure.
01:01:50.720And I think for him – I mean, he mentions that you can use technology against technology.
01:01:55.200That's – he said even opponents of the Internet Society can still use the Internet to accomplish, like, some –
01:02:00.880they can stop using the tools themselves.