Aleksandr Dugin’s Stone-Destining Metaphysics: Weaponizing History against Spirit For Territory
Douglas Olds6 December 2024
ABSTRACT
Aleksandr Dugin's Fourth Political Theory (Arktos, 2018) articulates the Putin/Kirill alliance’s will to Russian-ify post-soviet authoritarianism as a pseudo-theoethnic project. Positioned as an alternative to liberalism, communism, and fascism, it situates humanity’s purpose in a metaphysics of Tradition justified by enduring territorial dominance and static social hierarchies over relational accountability and sustainable human flourishing.Dugin weaponizes Tradition, transforming it into a deterministic force—an unchanging harness of ancestors—to justify imperialism dressed as anti-imperialism. By asserting that spiritual values are confined to the past, his theory suppresses the liberating potential of history: its capacity for renewal, adaptation, and moral progress. In this framework, humanity’s telic purpose, expressed through the harmonious logoi of the soul—kinesthetic, ethical, aesthetic, and discursive—is fragmented and subordinated to authoritarian control of past experience to bring about and serve future stasis of order.
Central to Dugin’s misuse of tradition is his Gnostic approach, which divorces ontology from theology, reducing spiritual values to esoteric and elitist, "subterranean" constructs. This ideology, rooted in Heideggerian philosophy and Schmittian political theology, reduces spirit to a mechanistic tool for territorial dominance. Such revanchist reduction tries to escape the future by replacing universal justice with binaries of friend (of an order) and enemies portrayed as agents of moral chaos. It aligns with the Putin/Kirill alliance of an authoritarian Russia embodied by a state church, which mobilizes religious symbols to sanctify an orthodoxy of territorial aggression while denying the Gospel’s call to relational justice and love.
In contrast, liberalism contextualizes the necessary, real, authentic telos of human spiritual progress rooted in virtue, accountability, creativity, and cooperation with the dynamic interplay of grace and justice. It recognizes that hope lies not in ossified political traditions but in the ever-maturing project of human immanence and Trinitarian participation. This is the Christic path: a call to charitable love, relational justice, and universal liberation.
Aleksandr Dugin's Fourth Political Theory is the expression of Russkiy Mir, a "special[ly] purpose[d]" Russian World [10] being carried forth by the Putin Rasputinate of KGB (ibid, chap. 10) church dog Kirill. This alliance between state authoritarianism and a church’s ethnocentric orthodoxy uses spiritual rhetoric and appeals to a mysticism's primordial tradition to justify authoritarian rule and territorial expansion. By framing these policies as manifestations of perennial wisdom and preordained destiny, Dugin's politics positions itself as a transcendent mission to challenge the “decadence” of the liberal West and is held out as a model for other nations seeking to escape the tightening grips of capitalism. The latter is caricatured as the inevitable result of liberal modernism. In its export and dissemination, Dugin's theory seeks an audience and adherents themselves searching for values of non-ambiguous, earnest post-modernism going by the undefinable and empty term post-liberalism.
Masquerading as a spiritual alternative to liberalism, communism, and fascism, Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory is a territorial retrieval project of distortion that valorizes a pre-modern, medievalist, orthodox hierarchy. It incoherently asserts that spiritual values are rooted exclusively in and to the past—perpetually forgotten and ever subject to forgetting—as if the living God is confined to parochially memorialized and ethnicized forms. This perspective reduces the dynamic processes of seeking and reflecting on transcendence across generations to a rigid fixation on what has already been. Dugin weaponizes Tradition as a static, deterministic force--an unchanging harness of ancestors and preordained system--to justify an ethnicized imperialism ruddered by coercion's false rendering of power . By framing the recovery of the past as the ultimate foundation of metaphysics, Dugin's theory subordinates spiritual values to territorial ambitions and suppresses the future: its (re-)generational creative and progressive potential in every new present moment, the implications of demographic and generational change, and the arriving potentials of genius.
I. Critique of Metaphysics of Tradition
Notably, Dugin equates efforts to reinterpret or update Tradition—particularly those aimed at liberating it from oppressive structures—with the "satanic," as suggested by his text accompanying footnotes 30-31. This ironic deployment of the Satan figure draws from the Abrahamic religious tradition, even as Dugin elsewhere (e.g., at text accompanying footnote 34) claims that Christian theology, as a proxy for the Abrahamic, is unnecessary for the societal model envisioned by the Fourth Political Theory. Such an unallowable rejection or syncretism reveals a deeper issue: the metaphysical core of Dugin’s ideology appears to fixate on Satan, not Christ, as the constant of a perennial philosophy of Being. Satan, not Christ, emerges as the metaphysical referent in Dugin’s ideology of “in-depth readdressing of ancient archaic values” in anticipation of an “event” of Being tied to a terrestrial place. Such a spectacle will jar recollection of what typically came before and is ever destined to return. Such metaphysics derives from a Heideggerian construct in a Schellingian vein.
By contrast, Liberalism and its commitment to teleology--progressive betterment--is cast by Dugin in terms of its racism. Such racism is
discriminations against the past and the present, as well as the humiliation of all those who lived in the past, an insult to the honour and dignity of our ancestors and those of others, and a violation of the rights of the dead. In many cultures, the dead play an important sociological role. They are considered to still be alive in a certain sense, present in this world, and participating in its life. This is true of all ancient cultures and civilizations...The ideology of progress represents the moral genocide of past generations--in other words, real racism (text preceding footnote 82, emph. original).
Whatever this mystagogy of the dead is--and the claim that is universal--it is not Christian (Matt. 22.32) [4]!
II. Territoriality and the State-"Church"
Rather than engaging with vetted metaphysics rooted in ethnic as linguistically-mediated archives—where ethnos, as seen in Acts 2:1-11 with prior, terrestrially bound referents in the Hebrew Bible (e.g. Exod. 12:38) signifies a language group expressed through spiritual ideals rather than kinship relations—Dugin’s ideological politics manifests as a recrudescent and mystical chauvinism. His is a gnostic epistemology that severs ontology—the study of existence as such—from theology, which considers the source of existence and its ultimate concern, function, and purpose.
Instead of bringing wisdom, as gnosticism grounded in blood and soil has often promised, this separation brings alienation. It creates dualities of esoterism and elitism that embed Manichaean binaries into politics, following the pattern of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt's political anti-theology of friends and enemies of the state [12].
Dugin’s gnosticism excludes the central Christian events of Jesus' life—creation, incarnation, atonement, and resurrection—that have historically animated spiritual progress. Instead, he seeks to derive a political framework from a sterile mysticism of space--of position--tying Being to place—a purifying ethno-territorial milieu of chained relations—rather than to universal time and the eternal and materially unbound potentiality of the moment. By this yoke, the political state steps into the role of the source of Being by its assignments of its chain(s). The reins of state order its hierarchies and forces for social dominance established by how it favors space and proximity rather than Spirit.
This fixation on place anchors ontology in divisive and corrosive, Satanic particularity rather than its manifold potential to universalize. The Gospel of God's grace calls for an aligning ontology of concern that serves other creatures and contexts. As the parable of the mustard seed (Matt. 13:31-32) suggests, such concern activated, while imperceptible to so-called realists, ramifies by Spirit-guided time through space rather than vice versa. Through perfecting alignment with the metaphysics of grace--a worldview rooted in divine generosity and call to justice--humanity takes on the essence of its created purpose to participate in the emerging, repairing, and expanding of shalom. In this, God through Christ is becoming all-in-all from grassroots, bottom up (immanence), offering an alternative to exclusion operating by the dramatized spectacles of the human top-down (its idolatrous conceits of transcendence). Immanence redeems all creation to flourish free of formal (form stabilizing, security-seeking statics) but vain (hebel: Ecclesiastes 1) dictates and hegemonies. No matter how dressed as "realistic."
Dugin’s metaphysics, by offering the illusion of certainty through fixed forms, appeals to politically alienated audiences seeking relief from the perceived instability and decadence of modernity-- those for whom God and/or the universal church is or appears deadening[12]. The resulting postmodern condition of neoliberalism's anxieties offers little but commercial and careerist outlets and posed ironies for addressing human purpose and meaning. But structuring ontology on promises of becoming wise to hidden and particular fate to address such an audience cannot provide the political guidance and relief hungered for. Dugin's politics of hierarchical authority and fixed and defended forms--a political ideology dressed in metaphysics confected by expedient fallacy to extend "Being" in space--may only stifle energies of creativity and innovation as generations process.
Instead of linking Being to Time—a moment of insight or kairetic spark that demystifies—Dugin, like Heidegger, ties it to Place in an organic chain anticipating dying. This fixation celebrates form, cultivating nostalgia that produces ash rather than a spark of peace. Dugin frames this as an ethically particularized celebration of ethnic solidarity disguised as ontological renewal. Yet his adoption of Heidegger's Dasein’s gives it over to a static metaphysics of position to establish a closed system, vulnerable to entropy as it rejects the future, denies grace, thereby excluding the possibilities of insight and genius. It thus inevitably decays in the just disruption of its chain of favored order. This decay is framed by reactionary political philosophy as cultural forgetting where time is its friend--or the action of fifth column betrayal.
Where progress is cynically portrayed, political decadence is perceived by the leader or a state poet as moving away from ethnically ordained primal wisdom. Reactionaries like Dugin suggest that historical decadence may only be punctuated by a strong leadership force—Plato’s guardians and philosopher king. These move to reawaken and particularize ethnic consciousness en masse, a pretext for authoritarian leadership which claims to restore ethnic glory by suppressing individualism and "rootless" diversity. Such rhetoric demonizes ethnic "outgroups" and impure individuals--even individualism itself-- as modernity's contribution to cosmopolitan awareness carried by the vectors of moral permissiveness. Such impurities are contagious and thus pervade the "true" nation and certain to bring shame and defeat. Yet such challenge and impurity is rhetorically framed as an opportunity to recover, by any means necessary, the Preordained Primordium. Such may be recognized by a gnostic inner circle as the "eventuated wisdom" of hidden cycles of historical “glory.” The enemy to the Primordium is ethical extension, outreach, and care that seeks to break free of these cycles. The prophetic individual is the enemy progressive who calls these guardians and kings back to their accountability to the whole of existing society and their future, not some favored order that sacrifices individuals and their prospects for a faulty and tragic understanding of glorying death.
Such an ideological project of recovering the understanding and thus authenticity of Being is promised to re-eventuate through a kind of Shivaic, cathartic dance of regimenting will that recovers the ordained national glory in a completely unanticipated manner of victorious strife, channeling as by another spirit than Christ's immanence and teleology of peacebuilding another territorial, terrestrial reality, another meaning that puts to flame and sword what is incomprehensible in order to resurrect the forgotten.
To bring about such occult incorporation with dead ancestors, Dugin proposes to elevate what Heidegger terms subterranean values to an abstract consciousness, centering the Absolute in formalist, epistemicist Tradition rather than grounding it in lived, embodied, relational spirituality and Golden Rule virtue which is the realm where immanent human purpose is continually validated and realized, individually at first and then from the ground up in community healing [14]. Dugin's top down Absolutism stands in opposition to integrated, heart-centered spirituality—one that humbly acknowledges the finite capacity of the human mind while accompanying the infinite purposes of the divine.
Dugin’s reactionary valorization of intellect channeled through tradition of ethnic territorial assertion, detached from its proper spiritual context of ethical extension and repair, neglects the balancing and self-emptying (kenotic) influence of the developing soul and its cultivation of the Holy Spirit. The processing and eternalizing metaphysics of relational immanence versus the metaphysics of spatial fixation as Tradition. A repairing soul, guided by the strengthening accompaniment of the Holy Spirit, derives from the Shema’s call to love God with all one’s heart, soul, and strength, to which Jesus adds the dimension of “noesis” (mind or understanding) in Matthew 22:37. It is after the soul is rightly sequenced in the Shema's call that the messianic intellect is developed by repentence to correct epistemology at last. And then the transcendent will of God becomes understood by the human mind, the realm of human immanence, allowing the mind to shape history and individual lives through grace and a crown of understanding. No longer may one appeal to ignorance as the prophet (Jer. 31:34) speaks of humanity's essence joined by the new covenant of the heart to bring forth a world—where ignorance is replaced by a Spirit-led understanding that fosters justice, peace, and creative responsibility. Then we will know as God knows. Then the human project of salvific maturation takes on responsibility and becomes perfected as it perfects.
Only when the soul is rightly aligned and guided by the Spirit may the intellect be trusted to operate properly, as evidenced by adherence to the deontological virtues of the Golden Rule. By neglecting the soul’s proper development and its harmonious relationship with the Spirit, Dugin’s Traditioned cognitive framework from the dead ancestor unleashes the speculative and unhinged strategic design to restore ontology and redeem the shame of ancestors.
By prioritizing the “highest supra-mental (supra even the Logos! [5]) symbols of faith,” Dugin buries participatory dimensions of spirituality under performative rites--their mounds of pillaged baubles, superficial forms devoid of loving and serving life, rites authenticating position and rank. The participatory dimensions of restoring shalom are crucial for nurturing the human essence and emerging from the flawed, static ontologies of “fallen human nature” that his framework explicitly tries to rein but implicitly reinforces.
By particularizing ontology, Dugin's political project eliminates human accountability to the creation's wholeness and its Creator, instead leaving human potential stillborn in a parochial nature of homeland and stuck from attaining its moral and spiritual essence--to act as the bridge between eternity and the renewing, generative earth.
Aligning with Heidegger’s cyclical model of Being in human consciousness—an itinerancy of Being, forgetting, and eventual re-awakened awareness of the glories of pure being—in Heidegger’s case at least, absent any necessity of ethical awareness or obligation—Dugin also accepts Heidegger’s antipathy to technology. But by proposing a cyclicity to human awareness—Being, forgetting, event—Dugin’s theory is conducive to the machine, especially the determinist structure of AI which draws from historical data patterns for meaning-making ensconced by the Past and cycling through time. This framework of recurrent patterns of material structures grounded in the past jams the needs and opportunities of the present through a rigid lens of silicon, a sickling cyclical inevitability in the human project of history--by undermining the progressive values of the Enlightenment and democracy. Dugin’s ideology threatens the foundations of a society that values individual accountability, creativity, and freedom. His political theory valorizes authoritarian control at the expense of human individuation and self-assertion. Instead, it seeks to resurrect a romanticized “golden age,” a vision of Russia as the “fourth Rome” and the hierarchies attendant thereto.
In Dugin’s framework that cannot read history or discern the implications of divine justice inside generational change, liberalism's project for progressive reform is portrayed as hypertrophied by libertarianism and libertinism--portrayed as the descent into excessive individualism and moral permissiveness, which he equates with the very chaos and spiritual instability that liberalism claims to address. The implications of this explicit, reactionary rejection of Western individualism and modernity--is it by paradox or cultural oxymoron?--in his Fourth Political Theory are dire: they threaten to replace deliberative, relational virtue with authoritarian stricture to become guided by technological manipulation--a machine-driven awareness of sin's deterministic and recurrent patterns (see Olds 2023, 155). Thus machined authoritarianism will allow monetization of its coerced social routines, exerting a strong capitalist direction, and requiring ever more surveillant calibration of authority and control. The submission to the Tradition and its Changelessness can be expected to evolve by any means necessary--machined organicism [11]--because putatively ontologically ordained but realized by its opposite. Within Dugin’s framework, attempts to destabilize the established order will be framed by authorities as metaphysical threats, demonized as chaotic and likely Satanic. This projection reveals his reliance on a rigid metaphysical binary between order and chaos that is the Tradition's conceptual dichotomy of holy homeland in the past and the future's peripheries. These latter are ever loosed by liberalism.
On the cover of Dugin Against Dugin: A Traditionalist
Critique of the Fourth Political Theory (2018), Charles Upton states:
“Dugin has made a valiant attempt to ground his politics in metaphysics.
Unfortunately, his metaphysics are inverted, his view of Orthodox Christianity
heretical, and his flirtation with Satanism all too obvious.” These indictments
reveal that Dugin’s ideology distorts not only the telic dimension of immanence
noted in this essay but also the traditional spirituality of transcendence into a tool
for deception and control. His framework abandons humanist values in favor of
political validation tied to territorial dominance and endurance.
Dugin’s presentation of his fourth political theory emphatically argues against liberalism’s understanding of human purpose, thereby distorting it. Where Dugin’s ideology imposes static forms and territorial fixations, liberalism offers a dynamic and accountable vision for human progress, rooted in relational justice and creativity. Instead of an anti-modernists caricature of individualism amok, the Enlightenment's suspicion of traditions was reconditioned by the necessity of accountability of the liberated political agent to take a stand for the goal-oriented purpose of human life. Liberal humanism emphasizes humanity’s telic dimension—human essence realized by relational justice--its alignment with universal, not particularized, grace that bridges eternal providence with the cycles of the earth. This purpose is expressed through the harmonious logoi of the soul: kinesthetic, ethical, aesthetic, and discursive. Dugin’s framework subordinates these expressive dimensions to political objectives dressed as Tradition. State-religion rigidity of such type fragments the soul’s relational purpose, replacing its growth toward Trinitarian immanence and union with Christ with imperatives of control-- immanence of another order.
Simultaneously, such rigidity of Traditioned form reduces the transcendent, the source of liberation and spiritual ripening, into an idolatrous mechanism for control and deception. In harming both the pursuit of immanence under the guidance of the transcendent, his theory vitiates humanist values, anchoring them in territorial fixation and justifying authoritarian power through territorial dominance. Only in ethnically (Traditioned) institutionalized endurance of form is the human measured and purposed as its end. This project reimagines human nature as a product of the Tradition's qua State’s territorial sovereignty. In this way, Dugin, as a mouthpiece of the Putin/Kirill alliance that continues the ideological trajectory of atheistic Leninism. A totalitarian alliance may ever seek renewal by the control of narratives. Dugin reframes liberal modernity as an ontological enemy to Tradition, portraying its emphasis on individual autonomy and progress as existential threats to the divine order embodied and ritualized in the state church. By framing liberal modernity as the ultimate enemy of chaos-pacifying Tradition, Dugin adopts Schmitt’s framework to position the state as the defender of divine (ontologized) order, thereby sanctifying authoritarian control. When religious symbols are given over to a Schmittian pseudo-theological framework of ontological friends and moral enemies of the state's order, the Gospel is denied.
The territorial spirit, rather than the Christic, is the focus of Dugin’s political program for control embedded by this revanchist ideology. Yet true spirituality cannot be bound in static forms or unchangeable territories--by a strategic mapping of territorial control and demonological opponents [6]. This wrong focus on demons and hating enemies directly contradicts the Gospel, which emphasizes humility, service, and the bottom-up cultivation of spiritual growth that loves enemies. By reducing the transcendent to a mechanism of control, Dugin reorients spiritual values away from ideals of liberation and shared, universal progress instead toward ethnic religious narratives to assemble acquiescence and justify exclusivity and authoritarian power. True shalom—the peace and wholeness rooted in divine virtue—emerges from relational practices that engender liberation and unity of a spiritual entirety (Matt. 22: 37: the Golden Imperative of Law and Prophet), not an institutionalized dominance or territorial control by hierarchs walled from criticism and resistance by Tradition.
The Holy Spirit is cultivated on the ground, from the bottom up in the moment, by the energies of virtue that bring forth shalom that ramifies by the same energies. It does not sanctify institutional statuaries or endorse an “ethics of continuance” that equates utility with moral worth—a reductionist error akin to the naturalist fallacy.
This fallacy extends to history when treats the recurrence and endurance of authoritarian systems as evidence of their moral legitimacy. Ignoring its fallacy allows Dugin’s political theory to distort history and progress by making an idol of what recurs, which is generational enmeshment with sin. Instead of developing the conditions for growth, creative genius, and human accountability, recurrent tradition weaponizes those aspects of the past that have brought decline. The rhetorical suppositions of "national" shame to mobilize hegemonic tendencies in the present to (re)gain control of a future shape. It seeks to sanctify static, stone-bound powers in contrast to the human-focused, liberating Absolutes initiated by the Logos. Political theory, therefore, must begin with the Logos of creation's vitality and scale itself within its liberating scope.
Dugin’s ideology rejects the metaphysics of the dynamic interplay of history and spirituality, where injustice is mirrored. At the same time, through repentance and grace, human creativity escapes the cycles of sin, enabling Spirit-led genius to progress toward justice and liberation. Instead, Dugin reduces spirit and history to unchanging symbols of authoritarianism. In contrast to the biblical story of Abel’s blood crying out from the earth (Genesis 4) that brought forth God’s mercy on Cain to suspend the cycle of vengeance, Dugin aligns with Kirill and Putin’s pursuit of territorial dominance and rigid hierarchies. Their revanchist ideology is burdened by contradictions such as its rejection of individual creativity while relying on spiritual renewal narratives tied to territory. These are but strategies to rend a favored state covered in the cloth of religion.
Dugin’s authoritarian “stone,” cast at emerging history, is bound to rebound, carrying the consequences of its violence. Such consequences should convince his followers that a metaphysics of Tradition is false, holding no stabilizing force. Rather, consequences and accountability are part of a telic metaphysics rooted in grace structured by justice! Dugin's ideology, rooted in the ritual revival of orthodox symbols and narratives--tropes--to justify territorial recoveries like Crimea and greater Ukraine (and rumblings about Romania), sows the seeds of its own collapse. The coercive throw of authoritarianism into history will inevitably return with cycles of resistance, chaos, and vengeance.
III. Tradition's Promise to Assuage Alienation
Double Mirroring and Sin's Fragmentation
Double mirroring's phenomenology of recursive cognitive feedback images the contradictions of distorted metaphysics that centers the personality not in the heart's other-intentiality, but in the pretense of the ethically untethered mind. This inner state, likened to a Dantean recursive loop (Olds 2023, 100-102), traps consciousness within a kind of Möbius strip process of doubling recursion—a tragic hall of mirrors where the self encounters distorted reflections of memory, objectives, teachings, idolatries, and resentment, amplifying confusion and alienation. In this state, individuals are drawn into the depths of subterranean consciousness and epistemological inquiry, seeking hidden knowledge to stabilize their fragmented cognition and personality. This pursuit of clarity often results in a fixation on cyclically “eventuated” structures, where awareness becomes not of Providence or transcendent, gentle guidance but to the agonistic forces of a presumed "human nature." These forces exacerbate the psychological dissonance, locking individuals in a struggle with internal contradictions that authoritarian systems exploit to consolidate control.
The psychological implications have led many philosophers and artists to plunge deeper into subterranean consciousness without Dantean Virgil as guide and prophet--for example, Hölderlin for Heidegger (Wolin 2023, 119-27; 20, 75, 93, 166)--to uncover hidden knowledge and thus stabilize cognition and personality. By what seems cyclically "eventuated," where these deep veiled structures of awareness are tied not to Providence but to agonistic forces of "human nature"[9]. In Heidegger's proposal of an historic event, what is experienced individually of this atomizing madness may be collectivize and thus binding to an ethnic guide (poet or statesman): where inner dissonance finds its "ethnic" meaning in external projection onto enemies. Projection fragments moral and cognitive integrity by pursuing syncretism of religious symbols supplementing individualized aesthetic conceits that advances an isolated ego's favored prospects and order, and subject to vectors of order and force derived therefrom. The projection of syncretists abandoning metaphysical clarity is the dog angel barking out existential enemies (scapegoats) and lapping at hands of masters--eating what falls from their table (cf. Matt. 15:27 [13]). This cycle of projection and internalized cognitive disarray enrages at the presence of the outsider who brings "rootless" impurities. Poet-leaders carve out an outlet and grant rhetorical permission for thymic outbursts and regimented cultic performance that allow mirror readings of who is being called out in tribal assemblies. These organize around promises of security enacted by institutional, politized leadership through increasingly rabid partisanship.
Double Mirroring reflects the psychological toll of abandoning moral clarity, as individuals facing inner confusion project their anxieties outward while internalizing societal dysfunctions as personal failures. Abandoning the promise of peace for the sake an ego's isolating wants. By rejecting the Book of Proverbs' dichotomy of shalom and agon, individuals are drawn into cycles of cognitive and emotional fragmentation that authoritarian systems exploit. Breaking free may become impossible. Only by the soul reintegrating power of the Shema's moral and spiritual progress, supplemented by the mind of Christ--dianoia (Matt. 22:37) and rooted in metanoia (repentance)-- may one be set on the course of grace, accountability, and relational justice. It is deeply unsettling if not damning to abandon course into the dank gloom of compulsion while continuing to name Christ as one's leader.
When Christ's moral anchor in the Sermon on the Mount is ignored, and one's relationship exists in name and invocation only, individuals become trapped in "Brownian motions of thoughts"—a state of mental buffeting between dissonant paths and fragmented ideals that leave them vulnerable to manipulation. To compensate and find relief to their buffeting, they seek a predictive buffer mirrored in kinship (or lust) but in reality are ever let down--"betrayed"--by others' doubled mirroring and escalating contention.
The Illusion of Being
In states of fragmentation, individuals often mistake their recurring psychological and emotional turmoil for a deeper metaphysical truth—a supposed condition of Being rooted in dissonance and confusion that can be resolved by an act of will. However, this perceived regularity is an illusion. Double Mirroring is not an authentic metaphysical condition but a self-perpetuating feedback circuit. Individuals project their inner turmoil outward onto perceived enemies or societal dissidents while internalizing systemic dysfunctions, creating a reinforcing cycle of distortion.
Authoritarian movements and tribalized religion exploit this cycle by offering institutional answers and hierarchical leadership that promise stability and belonging. This dynamic is amplified by modern phenomena such as "blue lies" (lies that reinforce in-group identity, as Steven Pinker describes) and "inner rings" (C.S. Lewis’s critique of exclusive tribal structures)[8]. These mechanisms deepen the fragmentation by framing moral failures and societal complexities as external threats while consolidating group identity around antagonism and exclusion.
Double Mirroring's projection and internalization is a phenomenology of syncretism's inverted anthropology, practicing coercive antagonism while naming Christ as Absolute. Psychological distortion and fragmented inner states, when allowing for reflection, seem as recurrent or regular or typic--as if these inner states (and the seeking of a deeper, "subterranean" unconscious) cognitively impart a metaphysical condition of Being in which signals:
- Metaphysical Justice: A mirroring of consequences of one's abandoning the path to Christ that exposes moral complicity with that other path, agon.
- Anthropological Failure: A failed attainment of Christological union which is the essence of human, the promise and potentiality into which were born, becomes evident in psychological distortions escalating from moral collapse.
The phenomenology of such a soul fragmented swims in a chaos of indecision and contradiction, what the Bible calls “shifting in all manner of teachings” (James 1:7-8) which is the linguistic result of fractal jumps between neural pathways absent the heart’s centralizing hermeneutic of outward-intending servant love exerting its soul- and body-guiding discernment that recognizes the evils of strategic intent. The choice to exert coercive control by stratagems of a machined "brain" leads to this interior mind's chaos of double mirroring ever doubting: the detached and isolated mind's neuro-linguistic circling around the ego alone, considering between pathways of memories and prior teachings of philosophies devoid of care but focused on shaping the ego's security. Such a soul becomes trapped in the whirlpools of unstable teachings and memories, unable to achieve the wholeness that only the heart aligned with grace can start.
Distorted psychologies scope external outlets for resolving fragmenting resentments, leading some partisan entrepreneurs to the advertising of arenas where grief and shame may be shared and transformed. A consumerist politics stoked by partisan spectacles may channel this leaderless energy into tribal rage.
They most evidence in recrudescent fascism occasioned by the hijacking of Enlightenment modernity's liberalism as tolerance and human liberation from oppressive structures by hypertrophying market financialization into more and more aspects of human existence. Dugin's critique of enlightenment liberalism ties it insufficiently to its "neoliberal" globalizing idolatries by its mammonic force. I addressed this elsewhere [see this essay's footnote 7]:
As neoliberalism [7]--its programs and ideology--diminishes social discourse as it strips resources from public goods of critical humanities and education and of ideals of justice save a "meritocracy" of market performance. Such has created a vacuum in meaning making of purpose outside wealth while opportunities for family-supporting living wage earning shrinks. In this vacuum tendencies toward rage take root, guiding partisans to abandon moral character and political virtues of deliberation for emotionalism and spectacle.
Partisans in the runup to fascism have become engulfed by the metaphysical cross-currents and whirlpools of cognitive 'double mirroring' to give up the project of developing the character, the potentials into which they were born, to participate in the metaphysics of peace as bridges of historical processing of generations, linking the human essence with the earth's essence of renewal, bringing eternity to elapsing time.
Once they abandon this potential of developing an eternal moral character, they enter the doubled mirror hall of consciousness in which they find comrades in the assuaging, performative, and aesthetic spectacles of raw emotionalism—adoration of a symbol or leader, and rage at an opponent—dehumanizing their enemies and their own autonomy in the process.
Distorted psychologies scope external outlets for resolving fragmenting resentments, leading some entrepreneurs to the advertising of arenas where grief may be shared and transformed. A consumerist politics stoked by partisan spectacles may channel this leaderless energy into tribal rage and avenues for marketing and sales.
In lieu of the absent heart buried in double mirroring's concrete silo, partisan spectacles are offered to frustrated and resentful carriers of double mirroring to channel into tribal rage, activating them into a mob by emotional manipulation that perverts language and moral ideals in favor of primal instincts rebranded as determinist 'human nature.' Back when the old gods gave us both meaning and a prosperous hearth. Double mirroring supplants the ideals of language group, shaping instead the resentment by projecting (the summa of malign mirroring) its own degradation onto scapegoats, in the process becoming demonic: cryptic, evasive, and taking refuge in fool's gold philosophies of freedom absent obligation and accountability.
Spectacles and Schismogenic Festivals: Spectacle of emotional sensationalism wrench a double-mirroring soul into an emotional/political program that grants permission, by assembly, to abandon the ideals of a language group, to support a status quo by regressing into the exaltation of animal instincts now presented as determinist 'human nature.' Only the regimentation of such instincts, these spectacles model and their platformed lead symbolize, can provide stability, solidarity, and security, soothing anxieties that remain inchoate yet ever-seeking scapegoats and strong-man leaders.
"Spectacle" is Guy Debord's term for establishment capitalist elites, for the purpose of political economic aggrandizement and control, to frame human experience by mass media representation of images and symbols to move citizens into acceptance of another--inverted- order of reality or reduced sovereignty: consumer materialism and status-sorting in lieu of opening access to and assertion of political rights of deliberation. Spectacles, in these terms, homogenize the spiritual into the acquistive society. They flatten spiritual differences and the pursuit of life goals outside the market, where social distinctions are manifest by fashion and accumulations of prestige, while fascist movements invert these into schismogenic festivals that escalate divisions and channel insecurities into tribal hatred.
Partisan festivals manifest a set of perversions of double mirroring, supplanting reflection and deliberative virtue with performative rituals to gin partisan energy defined by the search for enemies. These lay the ground for eroding social peace instead to shape and model volcanic rage and appetites necessary to occasion a flagship. In the anomie of digital-age spectacle, disenfranchised individuals increasingly seek influence through symbolic performance of ritual agon (conscripted as True Religion) rather than deliberative participation with a Constituted diversity to better communal life and opportunity.
As social conditions turn--as by the diversion of all human-meaning making into market metrics and commercialized merit, capitalist spectacle turns toward the radically schismogenic [2]. They warp into festivals of fascist division, biasing friends or perceived enemies to a breaking point. Fascist movements, exploiting these dynamics of "dis-ease," redirect collective insecurities toward identifying scapegoats: "traitors within" and "invading hordes without." Schismogenic festivals undermine Constitutional democracy, instead to entrenching alienation and enemy seeking.
Dugin’s insight is to reverse the power of capitalist and globalizing spectacle by the parochial return of a festivated orthodoxy as a warrant for reversing a supposed deviant chain of Being in the human social order.
Dugin’s Festivated Orthodoxy: To reverse globalization's media of exoteric spectacles that celebrate consumerism and idiosycracy, Dugan celebrates esoteric orthodoxy, invoking ethnically situated religious rituals to sanctify a particular territorial order. The social order intended to result is solidarity of form--a chain of being of comrades in new dress--rather than the ethical extension of a civilization of care devoid of signal and rank.
Graeber and Wengrow describe how certain pre-political, tribalizing spectacles serve a ‘schismogenetic’ function—using exaggerated rituals, symbols, and performative rage, absolution, and acceptance to sharply differentiate in-groups from out-groups. This process is central to Duginist protofascism, which employs orthodox Festivals and aesthetics to foment a structure of tribal, territorial unity against perceived external and moral threats. Dugin’s political theory is an attempt at entrepreneurial and transacted sublimations of religion to meet individual alienation by reviving and repackaging symbols and rituals from the past.
Tribal rituals (blowing of shofarim), propaganda, and symbols (e.g., 'Appeal to Heaven' flags) pave over language-spread faculties and virtues intended to tame these inner appetites and instinctual rage at frustration. Resentment and rage supplants moral ideals to become demonic: cryptic, evasive, and projecting--a second mirroring by the reflection of their own degradation of human essence and attendant dysfunction. Viscerally activated participants often hide behind anonymous bots and avatars—noms de guerre on social media—to project their dysfunctions onto others, labeling them as pornography-obsessed 'Jezebels,' bullet-intending opposition, or worse, all the while unable to engaging in the critical analysis of the demon of mammon that is their puppet master. Their dysfunction is what pulls their strings. They cycle from the inert anomie of spectacle to the catharsis of festival, moving from accountable agency into unaccountable anonymity.In the digital age, anonymity enables these mirroring dysfunctions of spectacle to metastasize. Hidden behind avatars and bots, participants project their moral failures onto others, labeling them as “Jezebels” or “traitors,” all while evading critical analysis of the true master they serve—the demon of mammon.
IV. Theological Rebuttal in Immanence to the Metaphysics of Tradition and Territory
Religious spectacle presents a particularly insidious and potent form of mammon's manipulation, co-opting faith to justify worldly power and territorial control under the guise of divine mandate. These spectacles often glorify Christ as a personal savior while enabling the "saved" to claim a share of worldly power, as if Christ’s sovereignty over all powers (Eph. 1:20-22; 1 Peter 3:22; Col. 2:10) automatically extends to their earthly ambitions by every means. This dynamic reveals a theological distortion rooted in "double mirroring," where faith is hedged (James 1:7-8): Christ is brandished as savior, yet trust is placed elsewhere for bodily security and power.
Religious double mirroring is revealed by conative (intentional) hedging (James 1:7-8). Brandishing Christ as personal savior while looking elsewhere for bodily security. The attempts to "hedge" the gospel, to wield "both Cross and a gun," makes entrepreneurial pastors tragically the most effective and corrupting actors in partisan networks. "Cross and a gun"-- a Biblically forbidden blending of grace and coercion is the platform for entrepreneurial pastors to embed themselves partisan network where they discover both wealth and political power. Theirs is tragically the most amplifying of distortions from double mirroring:. Their rhetoric selectively sorts through the Sermon on the Mount and the apocalyptic symbolism of Revelation to justify violent means, reinforcing a narrative that equates faith with power over others. Associated partisans--the dogs--look to them for the call for the gun. [2]
While Dugin’s philosophy reaches out to a receptive Western
audience increasingly sickened by or resentful of the spectacle of inverted if
not perverted traditions of family, identity, and dignity and of consumerism’s
anomie, it must be primarily understood as serving a geopolitical wedge in
which Kirill and Putin are driving into the heart of western modernity, making
specious claims regarding the Enlightenment as the assassin of the Tradition.
Rather, modernity has served humanity’s maturation by liberating individuals
from oppressive and coercive hierarchies, allowing them to adapt their own projects
for human flourishing. This Enlightenment, rather than releasing the libertine and alienating clown show
Dugin laments, actually demands individuals maturely take on accountability for
their choices that previously they could defer to a proxy responsible authority or institution. In this,
modernity serves the necessary telos of immanence as progress instead of the claimants to “transcendence” by finite minds of strategic hegemonic planners. The project of human immanence
cultivates the Holy Spirit for progress and processing amidst generational
change. Once Enlightened, only the irresponsible revanches to a hidebound
absolutism dressed in the regal, decaying dead skins of stitched state-religion, its "symphony" some hear and some smell wafted ever from sulfurous regions of coercive, unwarranted powers.
Dugin’s proposal of a finalizing political theory intended for his catastrophic vision for the fallen man who can’t get up--irredeemably fallen in his account under the putative corrupting licentiousness of modernity. His politics of revanchism vitiates accountable individual autonomy by sublimating it to an unaccountable state-religion of apocalyptic determinism structured by authoritarian traditionalism to maintain an order, that so long it endures proves by utility its truth. This fallacy is both addressed and appealing to those 'left behind' in despair of Enlightenment-driven, heart-centering progress.
Liberalism's ethical, aesthetic, and telic vision for humanity and its politics resists authoritarian narratives like Dugin's. Its enduring enlightenment and commitment to responsible alignnment with civilizing care are essential for challenging regressive ideologies. While authoritarianism revives ossified traditions with promises of stability to soothe the anxieties of double mirroring, liberalism embraces the difficult yet hopeful project of maturing human accountability as contexts evolve and ripen.
In critiquing Dugin’s authoritarian metaphysics, this analysis affirms the lasting relevance of a liberal vision—one rooted in the dynamic interplay of grace, justice, and creativity. Such a vision reaches its fulfillment in divine immanence, as begun by sequencing through the anthropology of the Shema (ear, heart, voiced soul, and deed, then back to the heart) then made understandable in the incarnational experience of Christ’s call. This one Way through active charitable love, accountability, and relational justice transcends ritualized traditions and ethnicized consciousness. Instead, the Way morally transforms egoism and its ethics of strategic instrumentalism into the outward focus of other-directed care and obligations, embodying the Golden Imperative and its virtues.
By taking on the Trinitarian will to sustain creation, humanity discovers its only path to a future of security and solidarity. This praxis of grace and justice, rather than static metaphysics of position or rigid traditions, energizes true human flourishing and development—rooted in the ear’s openness to the metaphysics of hope and fulfilled in the heart’s glorifying embrace of the metaphysics of eternity.
Notes:
[1] On the last page of Chapter 1. I only had access to the unpaginated electronic edition of Dugin's book.
[2] This passage is derived from the essay cited and linked in footnote 3.
See the extended discussion of "festivals" underlying tribalism--their cohesive and purpose-driving intent--in Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, esp. 116-1; 311-12. See also their discussion of the "schismogenetic" function of a certain ritual political style of spectacle--the function to radically distinguish an ingroup from outgroup by performative rage and totemic symbolisms (Ibid. esp. 56-7; 174).
[3] For proposals that reject authoritarianism within a broader philosophical vision for societal renewal, grounded in Christology, immanent humanism, and deontological virtue ethics; and concrete, practical steps, both at the individual and societal levels, for countering the appeal of ideologies of recrudescent protofascism, see the section "Conclusive Applications" in my analysis of pagan political economic theology, "Mammon's Dogs."
[4] This text is notable for its discursive connection to v. 37, where dianoia is added to the Mosaic anthropology of the Shema (Deut. 6:4-9). Thus, Matt. 22:32 is the historical context of the expansion of the human anthropological essence to now include discernment--dianoia of the living God! Such living God's guidance of history is not some zombified, Duginesque "participation" by dead ancestors in the present and certainly not shaping of a future. It is the teleology of the living God in Christ becoming all-in-all (Colossians 3:11) by which God is becoming all-in-all (1 Corinthians 15:28, including and especially of the crowning moment for humanity, understanding). Matt. 22:32 as it grounds v. 37 is thus foundationally opposed to Dugin's foundations of a metaphysics of a summoning back of Tradition. Moreover, the summoning in death of the prophetic tradent of David's anointing, Samuel (1 Sam 28: 7-20) by the first monarch, Saul, as the incipient identity for Israel as nation-state, is revealed as a transgressive act. It has tragic consequences for the presumptive embodiment of that state tradition's launch (1 Chronicles 10:13–14). Such summoning of the past--its attempt to use its personalities to recalibrate the exercise of autocratic power--by means of awakening its dead is taboo in both Judaism and Christianity!
Such taboo sets in relief the profound messianic expansion of anthropological essence seen in Matthew 22:32, where the reference to dianoia (discernment or understanding) enriches the Mosaic anthropology of the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-9). Here, the human capacity for discernment of the living God becomes its crowning essence, marking the necessity to abandon reductionist or fatalistic readings of history, such as Dugin's metaphysical notions of guided "participation" by dead ancestors in shaping the present and future. Instead, the living God's active guidance of history (Matt 22:32)—culminating in the eschatological vision of Christ as all-in-all (Colossians 3:11; 1 Corinthians 15:28)—grounds human existence in an unfolding teleology of understanding and its aligning purpose with grace as generations renew.
Matthew 22:32, linked to verse 37, directly opposes Dugin’s retrogressive Metaphysics of Tradition that summons the dead by past experience and parochial, exclusionary archives. It fails to account for the dynamic, living nature of God's guidance, which is ever oriented toward teleological progress and community renewal rather than mere repetition or nostalgic recurrence.
The narrative of the Witch of Endor (1 Samuel 28:7-20) exposes the most dire dangers of summoning the past to recalibrate present power and reassert its provenance. Saul's invocation of the dead Samuel—a desperate and taboo act—aims to add justification to his failed autocratic authority by leveraging the symbols and personalities of a past prophetic era. However, this act ultimately seals a tragic fate (1 Chronicles 10:13–14), exposing the futility and transgression of attempting to machine the "data" of corpses to impose its patterns onto the project of controlling the present to determine the future.
This sequence thus becomes a parable warning against mechanistic qua idolatrous engagements with tradition, particularly when the past is modeled to be the tool to control or manipulate the present. Necromancy's prohibition by both Judaism and Christianity underscores that summoning the dead by technologies of witchcraft or algorithmic logic to dictate to the living how to live betrays the dynamic essence of human participation in God's guidance, to bring through living faith a relational understanding of the present and a welcoming attitude to whatever comes next as the Spirit's work in history. The Witch of Endor episode illustrates that God's covenantal history is not to be subjected to human attempts at control nor reduced to static symbols for strategic, self-serving ends. It resists any ideology—Duginist or otherwise—that seeks to weaponize the past at the expense of living faith and discernment.
[5] Dugin recognizes the way western civilization has developed and degraded the concept of ethnos from that of Spiritually-assembled language group (Acts 2:1-11), which Dugin terms a "community of language...and sharing of goals." Thus, at Pentecost, the ethnos expresses the ideals of Judaism's historical archives, becoming by the time of Charlemagne changed into the ideology of "nation" embodied in the ruler (Napolean: "L'etat c'est moi"). Later, the ethnos became the object of an administrative state, and in the latest lapse into Darwinist biologicalism and genetic anatomical collectives. However, Dugin only handwaves at the idea of an ethnos as a language group, instead moving to assess it in terms of a language "game" and "organic...landscape." This moiety of nation as both blood-and-soil referencing that serve a Wittgensteinian concern with personal advantage is in no way a divinely intended essence for humanity--certainly not the Pentecostal spirit's Golden Rule.
The miracle of Pentecost unifies diverse linguistic groups through the Holy Spirit, making an absolute of mutual understanding and solidarity and grounding ethnos in relational faithfulness to God's new covenant of the heart (Jeremiah 31-33) revealed in and through Christ.
But Dugin radically departs from Christian liberation and unity by making the unallowed move to essentialize ethnos in organicism rather than Spirit. Here, 'organicism' refers to the belief that a society or group is like an organism, with each part contributing to the whole. Dugin's view is that 'Liberalism as an idealogy, calling for the liberation from all forms of collective identity in general, is entirely incompatible with the ethnos and ethnocentrism, and is an expression of a systemic theoretical and technological genocide' (text accompanying footnote 88). Seeking such an anthropology of union of Christ makes a grave, gnostic error when it organicizes the Spirit by transcendentalizing the Logos in Tradition aligned with blood and soil! Dugin’s reduction of ethnos to an organicist and territorial construct directly opposes the liberating and universal trajectory of Christian theology, substituting the Spirit’s eschatological promise with a regressive and exclusionary ideology. This alignment with blood-and-soil mysticism not only misconstrues the Logos but imposes Tradition and territory as idolatrous objects of worship over the living God.
[6] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnOH9vjfqeI (6'15" f).
[7] For an analysis of how neoliberalism creates conditions that make Dugin’s ideology appealing as a reactionary alternative to liberal democracy, see my essay "Mammon's Dogs: A Public Thimble Sermon and Analysis of the Political Theology of Fascism."
[8] See the discussion and citations in chap. 5 of t.ly/PvMl of how "blue lies" (Pinker) and "inner rings"(CS Lewis) function in tribalizing contemporary religion and politics.
[9] So that even if not most influentially Kant, who sought the liberating entry into radical epistemological freedom to counter the human appetite for war that shaped historicism.
Kantian ontological investigation into the nature of categorization centers on determination and liberation rather than a teleology of expression, particularly when applied to the human sciences of history. While Kant’s focus was on establishing epistemology from a prioris, he excludes teleological dimensions of social purpose except as speculative and outside rational method. Although Kant acknowledges belief in God, he excludes from his epistemologyv divine initiative and grace other than from human initiative (see esp. Insole, Christopher J. Kant and the Divine, 2020, chaps. 14-15).
Kant deems divine intervention unknowable and therefore theoretically inaccessible. This exclusion aligns his system with historicism's commitment to historical narratives guided by natural reason rather than divine providence and justice, thereby excluding these from phenomenological investigation.
Lloyd, Genevieve. Enlightenment Shadows. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 142, 145) notes:
From these ideas, Kant constructs a view, revisited by Ernst Jünger after WWI, in which war’s degenerative forces are contingently but naturally ennobling, shaping human history. Yet this view risks binding individuals to a mechanistic system that undermines autonomy by involving them in war’s proliferative logic. Kant's disconnection from grace--especially grace foreshadowed in the Mosaic Shema and later Judaism's tikkun olam as divinely realized in Christ--vitiates his ability to address real-world conflicts like war.
But Kant's is faulty historicism influenced by his aesthetics of power and a prioris if it proposes that war and generals define borders. Such historicism is counter to his student then rival Herder, whose great historical insight is that geopolitical changed realities have been shaped by those who stop the wars.
[10] Ash, Lucy. The Baton and the Cross: Russia's Church from Pagans to Putin. OUP, 2024, 105.
[11]A machined organicism is threatening to become the human context in nature. Where the impersonal dictates of mechanistic efficiency serve a state of humanity modeled on mechanistic nature, such a state's definition of human nature—chained to the past both as aspiration and pattern—suborns human agency. In such, humanity risks becoming subservient to a new type of totalitarian state where even spirit is put in its service, as Dugin's politics in the context of AI will lure. This inversion of Spirit by mechanistic extension, foreseen by Ernst Jünger in his vision of Arbeit, lacks the poetic and cultural sensitivity to technology’s impact articulated by his brother, Friedrich Georg Jünger.
Technology, when structured solely by the efficiencies of means, remolds human action in its image rather than God's. It reduces humanity to a means for consequential design and strategic forecast, governed by the impersonal mathematical logic that coerces thought and muscle. Such logic is unable to conceive or operationalize ethical participation or the virtues that pacify and unify. As Simone Weil warns: “It is inevitable that evil should dominate wherever the technical side of things is either completely or almost completely sovereign” (The Need for Roots, Routledge, 2002, 200-201). Weil’s insight warns that the sovereignty of technical systems eclipses moral discernment and goodness, erasing empathetic and relational discourse and Golden Rule obligations that ground ethical action.
[12] "The fundamental theological dogma of the evilness of the world and man leads, just as does the distinction of friend and enemy, to a categorization of men and makes impossible the undifferentiated optimism of a universal conception of man."
~ Carl Schmitt, Concept of the Political (Pt. 3).
Alienation exacerbates when human potential is reduced to the spent, and where, per Schmitt, we have been born into Hell. Categories determined by the past are shaped to numerically represent the recurrent—data shadows operationalized as living patterns as if to climb back out of the pit: body counts, demographic figures, and scores of impact and credit. Numerical abstractions erase individuality and relational potential, reducing people to commodified fragments and dichotomous alternatives sold or politically mobilized and rearranged as 'wholes.'" Kierkegaard’s "levelling" describes this process: a "silent and mathematical age without passion," where totalizing abstraction supplants embodied character and spiritual depth.
The devil is in the numbers. Categorization flattens potential while investing invidious distinctions through algorithmic logic, assigning the unquantifiable into a “null set” of the qualitative, analogue, non-dichotomous, and protean. Human individuals are defined not by inherent worth to be served and enabled but by the favored ends of software designers serving market forces. Their metrics create “selfied anatomies”—shallow, fragmented identities severed from deeper meaning, aspiration, or contribution, as human lives are kidnapped by the logic of mammon.
Mathematical logic manifests in repeated patterns—series, reenactments, and broadcasts—that reduce life to abstract typologies favoring anatomy: logic’s first abstraction is the ego and next its wants. That leads to selected other external valuations becoming "necessary," and thus reductionist to mechanize ersatz organic value. In this framework, there is only the Number—the metric for which we occasion merit and by which we define merit, but for which opposite we lack any foundation for rendering: the merit to accord its metric, to allocate and assign it. Net worth, IQ, careerist credentials, and social media likes become the sole arbiters and fetish. Portfolio, followers, the “book,” the rating act to erase the essence of human personality because impossible to quantify.
Dugin’s 'Fourth Political Theory' exploits alienation by replacing market abstractions with a mythic collectivism rooted in race and ancestral tradition, perpetuating alienation through another dehumanizing ideology. This vision substitutes the dynamic potential of civilization and creative craft with a ritualized bond to imagined pasts, shaped by a rigid orthodoxy of recurring cycles of forgetting instead to forge the tragedy of retrieving a buried archaeology of the shadow, the grave, and the errant.
[13] Plato in the Republic sets forth the philosopher's program for political stability: a philospher-king whose vision for the people is ensured by physically and militarily trained "guardians" with the aptitude and "moral" qualities for such. These are the "dogs" to which Jesus refers. He is not making an ethnic slur in the modern sense of national race, but a point about a recurrent class of cultural and religious enemy seekers mobilized by the glass makers of the double mirror (see above)--those who construct material precarity, the silicon forge of educational stratefication and social exclusion that, in another tale of syncretism, produce Praetorian orcs, Tokien's thrice turned nobility sold to Sauron's dark power.
Wolin (2023, 116-17) adds further context for Jesus' reference to his Syro-Phoenician female petitioner, where dog and a stratefied fascist society are synonymous:
Although the guardians were an invaluable source of order and authority in Plato’s Kalliopolis, or “best city,” at one point, Plato-Socrates, owing to their servility, mockingly likened them to a pack of “well-bred dogs”: creatures who are “swift to overtake the enemy when they see him and strong too, if, when they see him, they have to fight with him” ([Republic] 375e). In Plato’s portrayal, the guardians might be accurately described as “proto-Schmittians,” insofar as their outstanding attribute was their capacity to distinguish “friend” from “enemy.”
As Plato, in keeping with the humorous “well-bred dog” analogy, explained, “a dog, whenever he sees a stranger, is angry; conversely, when he sees an acquaintance, he welcomes him, although the one has never done him any harm, nor the other any good.” Plato regarded the guardians’ innate ability to distinguish Freund from Feind as indispensable, since it prevented these vicious “attack dogs” from redirecting their ferocity toward the Kalliopolis itself.
[14] The sanctification of peace begins phylogenetically with the Shema, guiding ontogenies toward shalom. In contrast, the sanctification of war initiates a phylogeny’s aesthetic conditioning of its young, training them, in times of moral challenge to assign enemies, to recapitulate what Freud terms the Todestrieb—the death drive—thereby risking their progeny devolving into antogenies. The distinction lies in internalizing the summons, "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. You shall love the Lord with all your heart, soul, and strength," versus the jingo piety of bromides extending "boo-yas!" and "Thanks for your service" to valorize careers dedicated to giving life to objects of flag and uniform. Though by these "patriots" hollow out their favors in armed violence and machined strategems over the hopes of a heart oriented toward divine love and communal wholeness.
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