Hegelian Daughter or Reactionary Son
We tried to mobilize people with beatnik philosophy and they replaced Tolkien with cringe versions of Mary Shelley.
Remember Aaron Cummings, the YouTuber into heavy metal and classic rock? His recent piece at The Cultural Futurist was about how 90s culture spoke to those of us who remembered how films like Heathers and television shows like 90210 set the foundation for the culture we have today. Now, Aaron is back to share some very offline thoughts with us on a very online thing. I did some editing and now it’s time to do some reading. What follows is his latest polemic.
The only thing we have to lose is our minds.
The most startling thesis for any academic has been the way the fringes are back in style. It’s Dugin’s dream of salvaging concerns of communism, leftovers of fascism, and postmodernism itself. This was everything undergrad students were supposed to avoid. Has the Russian madman reduced his Eastern education, free from the clutches of American excesses, into the same tired agenda that professors warned us about?
Has Dugin, like Nietzsche, started with humble dreams of romanticism only to witness the optimism of his joy division get reduced to the sharks of edgy nihilism? Did the dreams of Dugin amount to the same political goals as Nietzsche’s without the taste of a true aristocrat?
The academy is not a safe haven for the 21st century aristocrats. Their education waited for them at any venue. When the Chicago mob built the Sunset Strip, they created an intelligentsia bigger than Pennsylvania Avenue. Like the Hollywood studios next door, the Strip allowed busloads of talent to fight in the gladiator arena of aesthetics for each generation. Most of these artists fizzled out after a only a few records that embodied each decade’s Overton Window.
However, there were plenty of peaks as each vitalist rock band rivaled the heights of the 40s and 50s. Apollo didn’t dominate the three most aesthetic American decades of the 20th century. Music triumphed, even if the politics were pozzed and the tech was lacking. By the turn of the century the dreams of Jim Morrison, Andy Warhol, and David Bowie became a legacy.
Weimar nightclubs were rebuilt. Madison Grant was back on the syllabus. Right Hegelian philosophy was back. We found ourselves asking questions that many were afraid to ponder. What choice did we have but to take a deep dive into the reality of the situation simulation?
Could the romance outlast the honeymoon?
For years, the Dissident Right tried to monopolize the airtime when it came to politics and philosophy. The Zoomers weren’t good enough for those cliqued up in adjacent ivory towers. Ah, we’re all banned, but at least we’re smart.
Right?
What caused the Dissident Right to have its struggle session, despite having more experience under its belt, was the echo chamber of the millennials. Did this make the culture eligible to wield its pre-woke education and years of adulthood against low impulse control Zoomers who were obsessed with finding their own clique?
Maybe.
Millennials need to share the spotlight, or else they’ll find their cliques turning against them. Or even worse, they’ll lose their audience to a more transgressive type. This brings me to the emergence of the Hegelian E-Girl, a litmus test for curious minds. What has yet to be determined is how the Dissident Right and their counterparts on the left will determine the theories behind the aristocrats who were abandoned by their class allies.
The Hegalian E-Girl finds that the thesis and antithesis belong together. Their values may not be in sync, but their principles must be unified in order to complete the system of German Idealism. This leaves racist anons with a new group of friends.
The fan fiction writes itself.
The opposites attract thesis has increased in a time where social capital is abundant. Digital children have embraced a life where hippie utopian thought could find a home. Race scientists have returned to academia as their Tumblr fantasies have come to life.
As Jello Biafra notes, the punk scene emerged when all the Stooges/Velvet Underground fans in their small towns migrated to cosmopolitan areas where their synthesis could be complete. It all came down to the music and would-be band members. Prior to this, they were on a small island without anyone else around. Their shared loneliness would need to be addressed.
The punks shared this isolation and filled it with the same politics that would drive them further away from their would-be allies. Chomsky and Marcuse filled the lyrics of an aesthetic movement that was quickly being replaced by the late 70s. Neocons denazified their enemies with precision, leaving the revolutionary left as outdated as their ideological predecessors.
We tried to mobilize people with beatnik philosophy and they replaced Tolkien with cringe versions of Mary Shelley. This misuse of Nietzsche explained our marginalization from academia. Now, we have manufactured figures that were supposed to make the Soviet Union resemble a place where no rock bands dared to tour.
With or without communism, the left never used their beatnik smarts to make neoliberalism or its antithesis cool. Maybe they didn’t know how to. Maybe they couldn’t hack it due to ideological reasons. After the dawn of the internet there was no excuse. Their isolation may have brought them down, yet they still had enough power to make their own movement out of whatever era or audience they wanted. Despite this opportunity, it was the Hegelian E-Girls who found out how how to capture their minds with their philosophical performance art.
Which Way Western Man?
This new social experiment placed the Dissident Right in an awkward spot. Could other factions find the books they pretended to read? Could independent writers and curious-minded academics engage in a Marshall McLuhan-style interpretation of the dialogue?
The Hegelian E-Girls and Reactionary Bad Boys have different goals. Their movements separate from each other and allow us to understand whose philosophy has salience in the 21st century. The fringes did not represent Dugin’s thesis accurately. Can we fix this or are we doomed?
Can the Hegelian E-Girls and Reactionary Bad Boys find romance as children of the winter? I’m not sure. In the end, these are the questions that the Philosopher Queens must address.
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The Greater 2010s… The Obama Era… is finally, FINALLY, in the rear view mirror. As an elder millennial, I had the fortune to be exposed as a child to just how nice the United States could be in the 1990s. How well things functioned. That great cultural production could be taken for granted… We survived Y2K… but no one was looking out for what could come next.
9/11. Neocons purging anyone right leaning who dared to disagree with the latest, pointless war. Making real estate sales politically correct to the point it crashed the economy, cutting the legs out of a generational cohort just as they were entering their early career years. And then, finally, Obama. Hope! Change! Let’s make the country safe for woke neoliberalism, and while we’re at it, let’s neutralize the populist left by corralling them into a circular firing squad over never satiable identity politics and grievance. The Overton Window suddenly narrowed, bordered by razor wire quick to cut the heads off of anyone straying too close to the edge.
A cultural neutron bomb went off. Admittedly, some Millennials thrived. The kinds that could grift for Vox or BuzzFeed, have their woke agitprop indirectly funded by USAID or Soros, or be a diversity hire to write or direct an MCU film. Everyone just had to take or ignore the cultural slop from spent franchises or musical styles that shouldn’t have made it past Y2K.
Many Millennials have been sidelined or confined outside the Overton Window for the better part of a decade. Gen Z has no lack of creative energy. The best thing Millennials can do is try and help Gen Z where we can. Creativity done right is never a zero sum game, but one where everyone gains and is able to accomplish far more in the right collaborative environment. We really need to appreciate that Gen Z went through an ideologically programmed adolescence we can only begin to fathom. Just because someone is a default leftist doesn’t mean they organically came to those beliefs. Given a choice, they just may surprise us.
A new dawn really is here.
Hegelian thought, "the rational alone is real", works only if you always look forward ignoring the irrational that's always nibbling at your ass.
Perhaps the Philosopher Queens can bring such into thesis, antithesis, and hence, in to synthesis. If so, such ain't Hegelian, praise Whoever.