Post-Revolutionary Man & The Conquering of Self, Pt. I
September 2025
THE IMPERATIVE TO MASTER THE SEDATED SPIRIT
The issue at hand is the formation of the post-revolutionary conscience. Overturning status quo, quietly or loudly, does not require that the new status quo remains for long. Historically, it is not uncommon that the individuals funding both sides of a conflict were one and the same. How, then, should the post-revolutionary man expect his newfound society exacted from prior hands to be cleansed when those same hands have influenced the outcome of his efforts?
The man who wades his way into political theory now finds himself as a fish in the ocean. Does he notice the water? Liberalism, in its proper sense, has won out. Any political party of any Western state is liberal. Further, any competing theory, namely Marxism and fascism, were still downstream from liberalism and yet resoundingly defeated. Having prevailed, society is post-political for now. There can be no true politics in an environment so quarantined that the ends of any choice amount to the same direction. The entirety of the Western world turns on this axis.
Yet, seemingly, liberalism has run its course. No empire is immortal, and the boards of this ship have begun to rot. This waning of imperium has put the ship in irons and the stagnation is stirring the occupants’ minds. This, we see in the revival of Third Positionist thought. The deckhands are figuring what to do with their ailing captain. “Conservatives”, simply one wing of liberalism, attempt to look to the past to construct a new theory of the future and right the ship, much like the Third Positionists. However, any one moment in time is a matrix of several points, all of which influenced by the preceding decade’s matrix. It is impossible to hold the ship and still let time fill its sails.
What can be done but to create a new “fourth” political theory? Dugin is perhaps correct here, but, worryingly, can an authentically new theory be made if the influence of liberalism is so pervasive? Questioning the tenets of the Enlightenment is almost a litmus test of sanity to common ears. Even the likes of Marxism and fascism were infected by liberalism. Unless the shadow of the Enlightenment could be eliminated from the common man’s mind, then creating anything but a perversion of any of the former seems impossible.
Regardless of being a perversion or not, what must be addressed to right the ship and maintain its new course?
From Comte to Durant, historians have conceptualized the evolution of civilizations boiling to three stages. Firstly, animism and guidance by passions, which is then overcome by organized religion. The mastery of the passions allows the pursuit of higher goals, which culminates in the reign of reason.
Having reached mastery of the passions and technological heights, we have backslid into a degenerate culture which does not foster the soul. The common man runs in circles to sedate his passions like Alexander’s rat park. The wanton attack on the souls of common men has been handed down at the delight of international finance. What better a slave than man too preoccupied with his ills and his passions to raise his fist? What better a slave than an ant?
Lucre calls to the hearts of many. How easy it is for a man to not act by conscience when reeded coins fall at his desk. The same game is played by the same hands at both sides of the aisle, an aisle which might as well not exist. Lucre destroys the spirit twofold: avarice and compulsion. Either when overcome by avarice, he will act against his fellow man, or by compulsion, he will. So few does it even matter to be enticed by lucre, only those of meaningful station. The rest run the rat race. They are no longer men, but numbers, whose purpose is to move lines on graphs.
So long as the common man has been transformed into the ouroboros, he will continue to sink his teeth into his own tail rather than those who reign over him and his mind.
Yet, if a man could raise his snout to bite back, what incentive should he have when also so disconnected from his past? The incessant attack on history and its rewriting leaves a hole in the common man’s mind which would otherwise inform him of his place in the world. Why should he bite back when he is the vilified one? If it were true, he would only damage the common cause and reinforce the critique of history. He is left with a broken social conscience that cannot act but to atomize him further, internally and socially.
What is a man to do but accept his station and struggle?
The man who does not struggle does not grow, any reading of the Fathers and of history would tell us so. It is only when faced with an adversary, internally or externally, that man is given the inspiration to grow. One man may mount a hill, now seeing the horizon in all its glory, while another sits unmoved at the foot of the hill, surrounded by hills that blind him to the horizon. One wields dynamism; one is sedated. One has mastered himself. He can see his future in the horizon, and, with his self-mastery, his virile soul can take him there. The other is pacified by animalistic joys, never to get up from his chair but to find his next fix.
Further difficulty comes in realizing the virile soul could only be formed from internal change. The degenerated culture surrounds them both, willing to pacify any man at a whim. Only in realizing his station, his degenerated self, does something become alight within a man to master his world. The abyss will beckon him. He will fall to it repeatedly in learning to master himself. When he can finally say “no” to whatever calls to him from below, he will have mounted the hill. Masses of men still sit at its foot. Some may be inspired, but he will look back aghast at all those who jeer at him for not partaking in what keeps them there. Locked, fixated, they bite their tails, only unconsciously devouring themselves with each relent to their passions and the joys of the culture. They will never understand the virile spirit.
It is possible the necessary and inevitable struggle will generate the required conditions to form the soul. The waning of any hegemon will only lead to strife. Whatever difficulties will result from the interim between our degenerated culture and what comes next could be enough to mold the virile souls which will mount the hill. Should we expect any strife without a man having first mounted the hill? Insofar as a waning power will grip the scepter harder as it loses its grasp, yes. The sheep will be herded with more vigor and not understand why. When the hand which feeds becomes the one which strikes, perhaps a few will look to the beams of sunlight just over the hill. In some sense, then, some struggling their way up the hill is inevitable. Yet, those few will wait lonesome at the top until the time comes that the shepherd will fumble his crook.
He who overcomes the world’s imprint upon his mind is the one that will change it. The few that do are the vanguard of change and the keepers of whatever they will create. The vanguard does not need the sheep at the bottom of the hill, as they will follow whichever crook is held highest. Those at the top of the hill will raise their crook only to attract a handful. Who would choose the difficult road? The masses will sneer at those who leave them for the hill, never drawn to what they cannot see.
Until the shepherd inevitably fumbles his crook, there will be no opportunity to break it. Perhaps more importantly, he wields the power. His influence will naturally affect what comes after. Unless the virile souls which mounted the hill are thoroughly fortified against his influence, whatever they create will have his hands in it. The marks of the degenerate culture are almost indelible.
The popular, and very Spenglerian, saying rings true throughout history: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.” The time is fast approaching that the impotent grasp the scepter to little avail, when the virile spirit will be fomented. The virile soul must have eviscerated the lingering and dormant influences he overcame, detached from the culture he sought to leave, before any assurances can be made the culture he paves will not wind its way back down the hill almost immediately.
The dissident voices have become strong in their critique, but only in laying a foundation, a sort of party program of the soul, will any meaningful change be made.
I leave you with chapter 21 (“Reconquest”) of the book “The Burning Souls”:
“The turmoil that agitates public opinion, the wars that shake up nations, are just episodes.
Partial reforms will do away with such periodic chaos.
To attempt to change people would be a very disappointing work if it were only not accompanied by the essential work of changing that which lies deep in the soul by a transformation of the very foundations of our time.
All the scandals, the decline of honesty and honor, shamelessness in the certainty of impunity, the passion for money which sweeps away conventions, dignity, self-respect, amorality which has become unconscious, indicate the existence of a deep-seated evil, which calls for remedies of equal magnitude. It is not suddenly that we lie, that we break all moral laws, supernatural or natural, and, more simply, the laws of the public code. It is not overnight that you work yourself up to bold hypocrisy, to speak truth only with reticence, to lie with virtuous words.
This deformation of consciousness which amazes, which frightens, today, or which puts on an air of sarcastic superiority, is only the conclusion of a long decline in human virtues.
It is the passion for wealth, the will to be powerful no matter what, it is the frenzy to be honored, it is materialism, it is the unscrupulous gratification of instincts, which have corrupted men and, through men, institutions.
The world is more and more preoccupied with banal, material, or simply animal joys. It maintains itself only by the principle of maximizing material wealth. Each man lives only for himself and allows the domination of life both within his home and within the country by a constant egoism, which has converted men into hateful, embittered, greedy wolves, or corrupt and soulless half-men.
We will come out of this downfall only through an immense moral recovery, by re-teaching men to love, to sacrifice themselves, to live, to struggle and die for a higher ideal.
In a century when we only live for ourselves, it will take hundreds, thousands of men to live no longer for themselves, but for a collective ideal, accepting in advance all the sacrifices, all the humiliations, all necessary heroism.
All that matters is faith, brilliant confidence, the complete absence of selfishness and individualism, the pulling of the whole being towards service, without promise of reward, in any place, by any means, towards a cause that goes beyond man, asking him everything, promising him nothing.
The only things that count are the quality of the soul, the pulse, the total gift, the will to hoist an ideal above all else in the most absolute selflessness.
The time is coming when saving the world will require this handful of heroes and saints to make the great reconquest.”
Degrelle, The Burning Souls, XXXI. Reconquest