What is the Right?

An attempt at a definition

The terms “Left” and “Right” are ubiquitous in political discourse, but the latter more so. While being “Left-wing” is often equated with simply being “normal”, “democratic”, “within the bounds of acceptable discourse” by leftists who use these terms as euphemisms for “somebody who does not disagree with us”, the Left’s usage of “Right-wing” is, of course, of a derogatory character. The enemy is on the Right, dangerous Right-wingers (not “extremists” - right-wingers!) are seen everywhere, somebody who does not support the newest gender trend while staying sympathetic to progressivism as a whole finds himself “to the right of the mainstream”.

It has now become fashionable for self-proclaimed “centrists” and “conservatives” declare war on the Right. Similar emotional definitions of the Left have, in turn, become fashionable among people describing themselves as Right-wing.

Of course, definitions of “Left” and “Right” coming from such individuals (if they ever manage to form a coherent one) have little to do with logical, scientific conclusions. They reduce “Left” and “Right” to buzzwords with very flexible uses. On this low level of political discourse, the same belief can be easily claimed both by the Left and the (self-proclaimed) Right whenever it is convenient. This pliability of what should be a clear term makes it possible for people to declare themselves right-wing while at the same campaigning for a secular, liberal society, as if this very recent “achievement” of the revolutionary left is a traditional foundation of human civilisation worth conserving.

The desire to create simplified, clearer terms, lists of criteria, can have a variety of reasons. Some are attracted by taxonomy, the academic discipline of classifying things for the sake of it. There is something in all of us that makes us like putting everything into boxes. Specifically when classifying people and their beliefs, the politically interested want objective ways to check is somebody is “already there” or still believes in some of the Other Side’s dogma. And finally, a clear definition can help turn a gut feeling into real argumentation: sometimes, even with broad and unclear terms, some things will clearly be considered examples while others won’t, and to clarify the meaning of the term in question is to ask why.

Certainly, all of these motivations play a role in my decision to accept the same challenge that countless philosophers and historians have accepted before me, to create a simple definition for something as complex as the political dichotomy between the supporters and the opponents of the Dogma of 1789. Of course, I also want to do myself and fellow rightists a favour, by adding yet another way in which we can differentiate ourselves not as much from the outspoken Left as from those who claim to be Right but are not.

I do not claim that my definition will be unbiased. It will be as biased as it gets, coming from a Dissident Right perspective, and it will certainly disappoint those whose Right-ness I will deny.

So, what is the Right?

The Great Chain of Being, as depicted in 1579 by Spanish artist Diego Valades

The starting point of any political definition is our relationship with power.

Politics begins with power, with hierarchy.

Humans live in groups, interacting and having influence over each other. The natural differential in the capacities between any two people, however minuscule it is, results in the more capable of the two having power over the other one. This creates a hierarchy. Any human is a member of various hierarchies at a given time, and any measurable ability or quality that multiple humans have results in the formation of a hierarchy between them.

Hierarchy is the mother of all organisation.

Even in a democratic environment, where decisions are made, seemingly, by consensus, said consensus will be reached by one of the sides in a conflict demonstrating rhetorical, argumentative superiority over the other. In democratic organisations, those who are better at speaking will form a hierarchy in which they exert control over those who are worse at it, without necessarily being better at ruling. This is the problem with democracy and egalitarianism. Hierarchies cannot be “flattened” or “eroded”, they will always exist, and if you destroy one hierarchy three new ones will arise to replace it. Hierarchies combine into a general hierarchy, which determines who has the factual power in a given organisation or society.

All attempts to create a “classless” society, inevitably starting in the destruction of one elite, even more inevitably end in the creation of a new one. Hierarchy, one can say, is a natural feature of all social organisms.

The Left’s approach to hierarchy is twofold and not only wrong but also illogical in itself. The Left simultaneously claims that inequalities between humans must (and can) be done away with, and denies that they exist. The leftist is perfectly able to deny that any traits or abilities pertaining to whatever new “discrimination” metric is “in” today exist, while demanding that the “disadvantaged” group receives compensation for its inferiority therein, the same inferiority that to mention on other occasions is strictly forbidden.

This Orwellian doublespeak, as we will see later, permeates leftist ideology and reappears in surprising places. Its source is the leftist’s discomfort with the thought of his own inferiority.

Every human is inferior to other humans in some of the many existing hierarchies, and the ruler who stands at the top of the general hierarchy of his society is still inferior to God. The Right accepts this as a fact of life. Individual rightists either accept their place in the existing (general) hierarchy, or try to advance their personal position in the general hierarchy by acting within it, by improving themselves, or attempt to replace it with a new hierarchy without the delusion of removing hierarchy altogether, if they believe that the current hierarchy does not put the fittest in power.

The Left’s view of hierarchies is pessimistic. The Left thinks that power over others corrupts, that any person given power over others will use it at their detriment. This is of course, more often than not, a projection of the individual leftist’s moral turpitude onto others, and also an expression of what Nietzsche described as the slave morality. Egalitarianism is no more than a very dishonest way of coping with one’s inferiority. Of course, this is not surprising given the origins of the Left as the ideology of the plebeian, the unintelligent, the incapable.

The Right knows that elites exist and will always exist, it is concerned with the choice of elites, not with their existence. It has a much more optimistic outlook. It knows that it is, indeed, possible for a powerful person to be, at the same time, a good person, to use his power over others with restraint and in a way that benefits them. The right-wing justification of monarchy and aristocracy is that hereditary succession improves the quality of elites, because those who are prepared for leadership (just like for any other job) from birth are better at it, and because certain qualities associated with leadership are inheritable. Monarchy and all other models of governance proposed by the Right aim not as much to redistribute power between individual positions as to occupy these positions in the optimal way - and clearly mark them as such to ensure accountability, in what Yarvin terms as Formalism.

To reject the existence of elites means to forfeit control over their selection. If the elite that will arise does not understand itself, and is not understood, as an elite, then any attempts to control the quality of the elite, at least in a honest way like proposed by the Right, are impossible. While right-wingers seek the best among themselves to become leaders, the left is stuck with an irredeemable, kakistocratic managerial elite that is both origin and product of the dysfunctional, sick, degenerate society it leads. Any attempt by the Left to change its elites, any attempt by the Left’s elites themselves at bettering themselves requires the realisation that there is and must be an elite, which is impossible.

Yet again we see a pathological impasse. The Left’s entire worldview revolves around the Urkatastrophe of inequality, and its ideology can, in its various expressions, be mapped against the stages of grief. The Left grieves over the fact that humans are not all the same in their capacity, and most of its members are stuck in the denial stage. To become Right-wing therefore must mean to complete the process of grief, to come to terms with this realisation, and to make the best out of it.

Perhaps it is not a surprise that mental illness is so prevalent on the Left: it is indicative of unprocessed trauma.

But, as already suggested above, it is not only power dynamics between individuals and groups that us and the Left approach in radically different ways.

Leftist thought is subject to severe cognitive dissonance. Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

Leftists have a fundamentally pessimistic and negative view of power when exerted on other people. At the same time, they are very optimistic and idealist about the capacity of humans to govern themselves personally, i.e. to exert power on themselves.

The Left’s notion of breaking down boundaries and principles finds its expression not only in its rage against any kinds of hierarchy, but also in its desire for apotheosis in the form of a personal “liberation”. Obtaining power and influencing others is not a desirable and acceptable ambition in a society governed by the Left (individual leftists will, of course, pursue power, in part to forcibly establish this “freedom” of theirs, but will never admit that they want to do this), and neither is, for those who have no such calling, subordination to one’s betters. The leftist’s energies are turned completely inward, and the externally destructive behaviour of the Left is driven by nothing but the selfish urge for “freedom”.

These energies find their expression in the eccentricities, perversions and outright abominations characterising leftists’ personal existences. This is their only valid expression, from a dogmatically leftist perspective. The Leftist accepts no kind of constraints or values not imposed by himself. He even, despite modern Reddit-grade leftists’ happy reliance on “Science”, rejects the laws of nature. The Left’s militant atheism is not a rejection of divinity, it is the rejection of God in particular, driven by envy towards Him.

The leftist wants to be his own God. Leftism is Satanic not because of the particular nature of the Left’s aesthetics or morals, it is Satanic because Satan was the first leftist. Satanism is the essence of all leftism, and to some extent we could make these two terms congruent. Instructions for personal behaviour which potentially could have come from non-leftists are automatically considered hierarchical and thus trigger the leftist.

Tradition, for the leftist, is not a set of experiences from the past to be relied upon, but the dictatorship of the past, the answer to which is the temporal chauvinism calling itself Progress. The leftist envies and rejects his forefathers precisely because they came before him and have already left a mark on history. The old must be replaced, no matter how good it is, because it is old. The very existence of the past as the ultimate objective truth, the sum of events that are factual because they happened, offends the Left. Leftists will claim that organised religion oppresses, manipulates the people, or competes with science, but in reality what makes it subject to their hate is the fact that all religions rely on tradition and history, on prophets who lived and preached in the past, who are not them.

Leftists will, of course, happily create secular religions to achieve their goals and to provide a reassuring worldview, even though they will deny this purpose. The worship of progress, equality, human rights, climate change and perceived racism is a prophecy that leftists find acceptable because it was created by them, not by wise men of the past who might not have been leftists, and who have committed the crime of having lived in the past!

But even here, the new must supplant the old: the number of recognised genders, intersectional groups, buzzwords is exploding, what was “progressive” 20 years ago is outdated and “discriminatory” now. No, the reason why more and more letters are being added to the Left’s identity-political acronyms, why more and more stripes and symbols are being added to its flags every year, is not an actual scientific process that discovers more and more allegedly disadvantaged groups, it is the insatiable lust for change, a change that is not positive but destructive, a change that serves to accelerate entropy.

The Left’s utopia is like a carrot on the stick. When the Left achieves one of its “goals”, the goalposts move. The individual leftist is like a shark that will suffocate if it stops moving even if it is in a good place: he will suffocate if he stops rejecting and destroying the nature, the heritage that surrounds him, and ultimately, himself. The shark, a natural predator, lusts for the flesh of other beings, providing a popular sujet to horror. The leftist lusts for truth, not to learn or to experience it, but to destroy it.

The Left’s masochistic behaviours, briefly explored in Theodore Kaczynski’s manifesto, are one of the many ways in which it secularises the practices of the religions it aims to destroy. Its glorification of weakness and victimhood, embarrassing and repulsive protest tactics are nothing but the mortification of flesh in the name of Progress. Self-mutilation, invariably resulting in the loss of one’s capacity to reproduce, is one of its ultimate forms. Transgenderism is the Left’s warped, perverted form of monasticism. And while Christian, Buddhist or Hindu monks go into the desert to seek wisdom and to live a consecrated and virtuous life, the left’s “monks” sacrifice their nature and humanity in the name of their own desires, they sacrifice it on the altar of progress.

Self-destruction is the easiest way in which a man can exert power over himself and thus be free, and this makes it so attractive to the Left.

The Left is like an insatiable shark, forced to always move, lusting for destruction

Of course, the Right’s conception of freedom is, perhaps, the complete antithesis of that of the Left. Instead of believing in freedom as an absolute, abstract good that must be pursued at all costs, we recognise that, being unequal, men are unequally capable of exerting power not only over others but also over themselves, thus having an unequal capacity of enjoying freedom. The same personal abilities that influence one’s capacity to wield power against others also influence one’s capacity to influence oneself. Indeed, the two types of power are interrelated closely, external power being a product of internal power, for how to exert power even on others is an internal, personal decision. And the very act of exerting power on others, the essence of hierarchy, is, of course, a limitation of others’ ability to exert power on themselves.

Similarly to hierarchy itself, the capacity to field power thus finds an absolute constraint in God.

Both progress and freedom are, under the Right’s conception of them, limited by certain immutable principles which are not of human origin, which can only be discovered but not created or altered.

I am speaking of natural law, which, all nature being the creation of God, is the Law of God, famously expressed in the Ten Commandments. God as the supreme lawgiver, standing above all men, is the one who makes laws for those who know no other laws above them. Rulers, even those given absolute power, are still judged by God according to His laws, and must, in all of their actions, anticipate this judgement. This makes the Christian monarch, God’s viceroy for one of Earth’s nations, distinct from the tyrant who wants to play God and can thus see nothing and nobody above himself.

Just as the ruler surrenders to God, his subjects surrender both to God and to the ruler, to the human laws made by the Ruler and the traditions formed by intergenerational experience, which, to be just, may only concretise the pure law of God, not alter or contradict it. The Platonic, intangible concepts of natural law are made applicable to human experience by being put in words by human lawmakers. The Ten Commandments, by being put on the tablets by God Himself and not by a human king or parliament, enjoy the highest precedence among such depictions. Just lawmaking is the pursuit of natural laws. It is the pursuit of concrete knowledge of God’s will. When wielded by the Left, power serves to deny and destroy such constraints, but power wielded by the Right serves to seek out more just, more precise, stricter constraints to bring human law into greater concordance with natural law.

This process of perfection is progress. Of course, full perfection, available only to God Himself, can never be obtained. But while the Left’s pursuit of imperfection and entropy has no direction (for to have a direction would be incompatible with its values), God provides a clear and constant direction to the Right’s pursuit.

In its pure form, natural law contains norms on all aspects of human life, for nothing created by God is without purpose. Natural law is absolute, and it is total! Therefore, freedom in its leftist sense, as a sum of positive and negative rights, can have no application in a right-wing context.

Instead, freedom in our sense is enjoyed by acting in accordance with the obligations, by laying a path between the obligations set by God who expresses His will for all of us through them. To act in accordance with natural law means to choose, whenever no prescription or proscription is made by human laws, the option which is nevertheless closest to the will of God, whether deduced by the combination of other, already written, laws, or by intuition. Humans are imperfect beings, nothing but God Himself is perfect, and therefore material desires, low feelings, at times even physical pain will tempt to make a decision incompatible with natural law.

The Right bravely accepts this fight, which is the purpose of just human existence. The rightist seeks to come as close as possible to perfection by defeating his desires, and realising a mode of life guided, as precisely as possible, to the will of his Lord.

The Left, once again unwittingly admitting its own inferiority, gives up even before starting the fight. It does so by surrendering to hedonism, which is nothing but the pursuit of freedom and progress in their destructive forms. Incapable of feeling the joy of living under the just guidance of God, the leftist rejects Him and salvation, buries his head into the sand at the prospect of an afterlife which depends on one’s actions in this world, and finds his only solace in animalism and destruction.

The overbearing principles of the Left and the Right are similar because they both oppose the status quo of human nature. But while the impulse of the Right aims at completing and perfecting it in accordance with a plan set out by the one who first created it, the impulse of the Left is to reject it altogether, to attempt the creation of a new nature for the sake of realising the greatest possible autonomy and satisfaction. It is futile, of course, because only God can create new nature, and no matter how much he wishes it, the leftist will never be God.

Human laws must serve to interpret the laws of God. Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

So, once again, what is the Right?

As I reach the conclusion of this essay, it is time to fulfill its original purpose, namely to create a simple definition that we on the Right, particularly on the Dissident Right, can use to present ourselves and to firmly determine access to our circles.

The above thoughts can all be summed up into what I call the three Is: Inequality, Imperfection, and Inferiority.

Inequality means that human beings are distinct in their capacity of enjoying their natural gifts, particularly in the power they possess over themselves and others. The consequence of this is the inevitability of hierarchies.

Imperfection means that human nature is fundamentally flawed and incomplete, and that a just life involves the pursuit of perfection, which however, is unattainable in this world.

Inferiority brings these concepts together, it means that perfection cannot be sought in humanity itself, and that no human hierarchy can be self-contained. Humans must seek out the constraints limiting their existence and directing their life and accept them as benevolent guidance from God, the Creator of all.

Even further summarising what has been said, let us verbalise a working definition:

The Right is the direction in politics and philosophy that accepts, seeks knowledge on, and is driven to act in accordance with human inequality, human imperfection, and human inferiority towards God.

An ideology is right-wing if it seeks to interpret and complete human nature, and left-wing if it rejects or seeks to alter it. It is right-wing if it acknowledges a higher power and left-wing if it sees humanity as a higher power in itself. An ideology is only unequivocally right-wing if it uncompromisingly acknowledges all three precepts set out above, all three Is, and accepts them as a positive, not as an oppressive force.

Having formulated our definition, we find the political spectrum reordered in a way that might look unfamiliar at first but actually seems much more logical than the one imposed by the mainstream, which clearly denies Right-ness to the ideologies that we all intuitively and colloquially considered to be lacking in true Right orientation.

Conservatism is not right-wing, because it does not believe in immutable values and merely seeks to limit the pace at which values change.

Libertarianism is not right-wing, because it believes in human freedom as an absolute good and tolerates, if not encourages, destructive self-expression, similarly denying the existence of immutable values.

Democracy is not right-wing, because it puts values at the disposition of voting processes, claiming that humans are equal, perfect and superior to whatever might want to impose constraints from outside.

To be right-wing is to acknowledge that some things, no matter what, simply cannot be changed, and that precisely this makes them unique.

To be right-wing is to declare war not on them, but on whatever in oneself is offended by them.

To be right-wing is to realise that these things, together, form not a cage, but a path, a perfect plan set out by our Creator for us, and to joyfully set out on it in pursuit of true freedom, true progress, and true perfection.