Faith As Political Instinct

I would be inclined to entertain a conspiracy that many so-called "right-wing pagans" are probably undercover communists. not saying all of them, just a good amount. Upon assumption it possibly has to do with the parroting of pantheist doctrines that were formalized under Spinoza only with certain attributes of an aesthetic polytheism. I don't think genuine polytheists could fall under this category but those are rare and most modern pagans are recovering atheists, if only recovering enough to give an appearance of religiosity in light of a crisis of meaning. Of course man's underlying psychological passions that drive him to act against authority are present on both sides of the left versus right argument, and even those who attempt to state they exist beyond it, even if post-French revolution there is no such thing. Its just that the left has the added weapon of demonizing its opponents on the right with psychoanalysis, which is their chief replacement of divine order and organized religion, never mind the fact that both are simply the reflections of each other's anima and are guilty of the same passions that motivate the two sides from attacking each other through disingenuous rhetoric and 'othering' each other into categories.

One of the chief opponents of the psychologizing tendency of the Frankfurt School of Critical theory came from Michel Foucault in his attempts to dislodge the proverbial patient from categorization. Its no wonder that later on he abandoned Marxism in favor of the German "Ordoliberal" tendency as Marxism in its practical application rather than theoretical has always tended to treat people as a condition needing to be fixed or corrected. And it was Marxism and certain strains of anarchism, ironically enough that made attempts to abolish religion not classical liberals and obviously not proponents of divine right. Of course the roots of atheism (and Marxist socialism) came from pantheist doctrines, which opened dialogue with the East, through Arthur Schopenhauer (Schopenhauer was a prime instigator of championing Eastern religions in the west). Philosophers such as Antonio Negri have deep Spinozist roots, and Baruch Spinoza was in turn reacting to Rene Descartes, who, despite his modernizing tendencies, was still a Catholic.

Thinkers (or even those who do not dare to think) on both the right and left call for evidence when its just a matter of choice on what facts to ignore and which to emphasize. Its almost as if there is no care given to truth, but comfort. The root of modern moral thought, which emphasizes the passions, on which Spinoza and Hume warned about but more about establishing a convenient narrative. Johnathan Haidt recognizes this as being the default human condition. That's not to say Spinoza wasn't wrong in flattening the hierarchy of knowledge or that emotion was the center of moral being as Hume supposed, but both assumed man (correctly) was a creature of passion. The problem lies in both assuming that man has no ability to transcend his limitations (as Spinoza assumed otherwise) or that that our universe has no ordained order outside psychological presuppositions (as Hume claimed). Eastern faiths assumed this harmony was immanent, and there is no order from above dictating right reason, which obviously concerning the primacy of Confucianism (emphasizing clan-enforced shame culture), Legalism (assuming there is no divine law, just legal law, which is independent of natural law) and the influence of Taoism and Buddhism (which assumed man should just align himself with the universe independent of a creator-being). This paved the way for the communist takeover of the Eastern world which emphasized all three traditions into one body.

So I would wager that modern Neo-Paganism has roots in the moral psychology of emotivist thinking, a sort of underlying animalistic tendency that underlines all human motivation, with the rationalizing of instinct (as opposed to the consecration of instinct). But this was not necessarily developed in a vacuum but rather through an Eastern dialogue with the West, by way of people such as Max Muller and Arthur Schopenhauer via his argument with George Wilhelm Hegel (not to mention his other rivalry with mystic philosopher Frederich Schelling). Leading to Karl Marx, who presumed that, in opposition to Hegel, that material processes were not subordinate to ideas but rather ideas were subordinate to material processes. this mirrors Spinoza’s critique in which man is a creature of passion who must subordinate his desire to reason, which led to “all ideas”, including faith, become subordinated to reason. Then, the closing of the gap between God and the processes of the natural world, leading to the “scientific” socialists revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries. No God or freedom, just brute nature and an unyielding “kill or be killed” society, of which Darwin and Nietzsche proclaimed the primacy. In Alasdair McIntyre’s After Virtue when communists move forward with their attempts to seize power, they essentially are Machiavellian, they mask their true motives against the people who they believe are masking their motives as well. Their aims and their actions are diametrically opposed, but once they seize power, and begin their domination of the classes they deposed, they end up calcifying into what Max Weber calls the “Iron cage of bureaucracy”, essentially adopting a Kantian framework in which their aims and actions are much the same. So there’s no concealment of motivations, and if a group of people are getting deposed, its because its what they intend to do and there’s no “masking” of real intentions or motivations, bringing about the inevitable “disenchantment” of society, as per (Max) Weber. This squares even with the Spinozist notion of incompatibilist metaphysics where there is no place for existential notions of private sentiment, just the ordering of pure reason, the kind that Kant aimed to critique, Max Weber saw as inevitable, and tyrants seek to impose.

- J./Adolf Stalin