The Post-Nihilist Manifesto — Dismantling the Liberal Consensus

Chapter Twenty Four: Liberalism and the Noble Lie

Burton Sankeralli
Sep 4, 2018 · 2 min read

As one attempts to here describe the contemporary liberal scene it is revealed that we are engaging an incoherent field constituted as it were in philosophical contradictions.

So we note the “culture wars” conflict between conservatism and social liberalism. Both constituting the liberal architecture.

But even within each of these factions we note fundamental incoherence. So on what Americans amusingly refer to as the social liberal left there is the contradiction of the supposed rights of the individual, its cultural pluralism, and the very capitalist system that makes it all possible.

And on the conservative right there are the contradictions inherent in its “fusionism”. Capitalism’s rugged individualism and its corporations. Neo-conservative foreign interventionism and American isolationism. The capitalist ethos of primordial greed that is individual self-interest and Christian fundamentalism.

Such ontological contradiction is generated out of and inherent to the very irrationality that is the fractured isolated individual. It indeed constitutes the ontological foundation of the Modern West itself. The intellectual probity of the liberated enlightened rational individual that is metaphysically law-unto- itself — autonomous — reveals that there is no rational moral order in the universe. Thus does Enlightenment lead inexorably to nihilism.

But there is a system to run. Natives to conquer. Money to be made. Moreover the masses caught up in all this cannot be expected to accept the deadly truth. The ever encroaching abyss must be constantly pushed away and fended off. Enter the Noble Lie. The fiction that endows with truth, meaning, value, purpose even beauty an otherwise pitiless Void. Or rather one is provided with an incoherent string of invented liberal fictions — Protestant orthodoxy, American exceptionalism and manifest destiny, human rights and democracy, progress, scientific technological Utopia etc.

If the Noble Lie were exposed we would be left with a stark choice. Either the embrace of fascist nihilism. Or return to the terrible ancestral Darkness.

The Post-Nihilist Manifesto

Dismantling the Liberal Consensus

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