Dystopian League Aligning
Douglas Olds
8 January 2025
A chilling dystopian league is accelerating its preparations for landgrabs. Its multi-polar dream of hegemony that began its modern form with the invasion of Ukraine is allowing Trump to "break the seal on the prohibitions" (cf. Romans 1:32) against expansionary territorial aggression.What Heidegger and Dugin would call its "subterranean" impulses foregrounded in genocide.
Contemporary geopolitical relations are in a state of emergency:
A "dystopian league" has coalesced around state actors extending their reach and domestic position by rejecting established norms of territorial integrity and international law. Their flouting international norms embolden each other to step further out of line (Romans 1:32). Dugin under the influence of Heidegger frames these movements as driven by deep, "subterranean" impulses—primal, existential forces that are now surfacing in the form of aggressive expansionism and ethno-nationalist violence.
The invasion of Ukraine is emblematic of this reversion to expansionary territorial aggression: the contemporary prototype for the broader ambitions of destabilizing global norms in favor of a multipolar order in order to break through the "monotone" of western liberalism. The "dream of hegemons" seeks to dismantle the post-WWII international framework that prioritizes popular sovereignty of territorial integrity and fixed borders, replacing it with spheres of influence defined by might rather than right. Its recrudescent, Grotian diplomatic idea of natural law reaches back to juridical Realism before idealism's projects of the League and Nations and the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact that outlawed aggressive war [2].
The agency behind multipolar spheres of coercive power cannot be expected to stop until the whole earth is under one single realm of domination. But such a fate is ruled out by the metaphysics of sustaining grace, though this object of territorial aggrandizement recurs as if eternal. The ideology of expansion rooted in closure—whether territorial, historical, or ethnic—is a profound metaphysical contradiction. It attempts to fuse degrading forces of entropy with principles of creative vitality—such as liberation and the light of genius—which it cannot sustain, generate, contain, or deny. A stagnating and stultifying militarist, academic or priestly hierarchy, clinging to ancestral retrieval and the values of the dead, inevitably strives to suppress openness to innovation and the energies of creative renewal.[3].
Donald Trump’s rhetoric and actions symbolize a critical turning point in Anglo-American political valencies and norms. Authoritarian and revanchist, Trump contributes to undermining the post-WWII global consensus against state-sponsored territorial conquest. His presence amplifies these dystopian tendencies, particularly by promoting the undermining of democratic institutions and valorizing authoritarian "strength" tied to himself as definer of a natural "state" and extended, Napoleon-like, to his supporters.
Heidegger's existential framework and Dugin's ideological constructs provide a lens on the regressive forces at play. For Heidegger, the "subterranean" refers to the primal, often unconscious drives that shape human existence that he himself worked out in his philosophy to justify his participation in Nazism. Dugin amplifies this philosophy by grounding it in ethno-nationalism, linking identity to the land in a mystical and transcendental sense. When foregrounded in geopolitics, these ideas justify genocide as a means of "cleansing" the land and restoring an ethnic purity of autochthonous security.
The reemergence of territorial aggression signals a broader existential crisis in the global order. It exposes ideologies that exploit fear, resentment, and historical grievances, turning them from addressing systemic failures that benefit the few to incorporating the mass into a shared ethnic movement where its partisans may share in the gains and prestige in an imperialist order that reshuffles the "excluded" while making little change to oligarchies.
This historical moment calls for intensified vigilance and reaffirmation of Christian principles for sustaining peace, international justice, and cooperation of peoples of all language groups as the Church at Pentecost. That negate calls for "ethnic" vengeance. By addressing the ideological roots of "subterranean" impulses of acquisition and false metaphysics of position(ing), the Church is the enduring witnesses to the evils of these movements in our historical moment. The Church must also prepare to address their historical foundations—sins of acquisitiveness, pride, and agonistic violence dressed as "realism."
NOTE:
For expansion and substantiation of the claims of this essay, see my recent work on:
2) historical roots of fascism
3) the Russian project of Aleksandr Dugin
4) the metaphysical contradictions of closed systems seeking expansion
[2] See Olds, Douglas. Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care: Virtue as the Craft of Theology beyond Biblicism 2023, 159, n. 52.
[3] This text is linked by 4) above and includes:
The Second Law of Thermodynamics informs us that entropy degrades every closed system--that the entropy (or disorder) of an isolated [closed] system increases over time, meaning the universe, as a closed whole, is moving towards a state of maximum disorder.
In such a state, only the constancy of renewal—the earth’s essence—from the open system of sun, spirit, rain, new generations of vitality and genius of language and art can keep the church from closing its doors to renewal and providence. For if it does, it becomes at first chaotic, then tepid, then saltless and insipid. What the Shema calls us earth imagers (Trustees) of the divine to: the endless expansion of purpose, empathy, intelligence/logos, and kinesthetic schema (soul). And teleology emerges from the renewing earth and is recognized as its essence that becomes part of the human essence of repair. In this, teleology is attended as a Trinitarian feature, a union of the human trustee and the earth divine imager of grace's heart. Teleology manifests the operation of summed spiritual inputs as the First Law of Thermodynamics. In such a case of the operation of these two laws of thermodynamics, the possibility of either historical recurrence or general--rather than generational cohort--decadence is metaphysically negated.
Teleology can either be denied—and resisted as a force instead to wallow in walled-off, separate, static definitions of “nature" attributed and tied to physicality and position.
It follows that power structures, particularly those in closed 'inner circle' cultures, function as entropy-spreading systems. They strive to maintain their position in a social order by exploiting subordinates, a practice doomed to failure as prophesied in scriptural teachings about ethical downfall. To enclose and sustain power, inner circle culture is an entropy-spreading system that climbs mountains on the backs of subordinates and is thus the palette of the prophetically goat-doomed. As David French notes (NYT 12/7/23), its religious forms are marked by certainty, ad hominem “ferocity, and solidarity (loyalty + confidentiality)” to maintain an elite’s control of narratives, especially those that privilege their “power” at the expense of enemy outsiders, esp. traitors to this culture. Censorship is ever the scandal of new categories of ethnicity, as inner rings try to control debate and separate wheat from chaff, friends from enemies. In this, they close off avenues for grace (Hebrews 13:2): they are doomed by closure. John 3:20.
In the same way, contemporary geopolitical revanchism is certain to fail as its actors propose that ancient civilizations should assert distinct, ethnic sovereignty under authoritarian leadership against the universalism ("monotone") of the liberal and representative democratic West. Assertive ethnocentricism disguised as a multipolar world, where global powers, re-rooted in exclusive traditions and histories, become overtly imperialist are doomed on global stage by reason of their retreat from individual openness. Instead, their attempt cannot succeed to retrieve a collective idea of ethnic closure to ground their territorial expansionist intentions. The Thousand-Year Reich lasted perhaps 1/2 generation, and such experiments may have a similar temporal limit.
The ideology of expansion rooted in closure—whether territorial, historical, or ethnic—is a profound metaphysical contradiction. It attempts to fuse degrading forces of entropy with principles of creative vitality—such as liberation and the light of genius—which it cannot sustain, generate, contain, or deny. A stagnating and stultifying militarist, academic or priestly hierarchy, clinging to ancestral retrieval and the values of the dead, inevitably strives to suppress openness to innovation and the energies of creative renewal. Yet, such vitality, driven by generational change and spiritual insight, will inevitably break through at the Spirit's appointed time, dissolving the constraints of closure attempting to avoid the future and its heralding a future where human potentialities of every citizen is welcomed and actuated.
