Post-Faustian Ethnos: Identity and Race
The materialist focus on race-as-identity damps cultural ethos and heritage
The following article is may piss off some members of the far-right, particularly those who associate racial identity as primary descriptor. The Faustian civilization of Europe developed from the peoples of Europe. The argument is that for Faustian civilization to survive, it remains inherently bound to the peoples that birthed it. Not an unreasonable claim. Faustian civilization took us from dark-age huts to moon-landings. As Spangler states; civilizations are born, grow, mature, fall ill, and eventually die. Resurrecting the dead is not a path to the next civilization. Rather than focus on an idealized past (which I am just as guilty of as the next man) one must look ahead to what we’re creating for our children.
Never one to avoid tricky topics, let’s discuss race [we’ll get there in a minute]
Where We Stand: A Review of Industrial Society
The industrial society is globalized. The architecture of international trade means that your rice is grown in the Philippines, Processed in Chile, Packaged in China, and consumed in Missouri. More importantly, managing these unbelievably complex supply-chains and the international relations associated with them has created a new class. The managerial class.
The managerial class practices managerialism. They exist as bureaucratic tumors within large organizations whose goal is not to facilitate trade profit or regulation, but to facilitate growth of the bureaucracy. Make things more difficult to manage so that they must be promoted. Now manager of two more bureaucrats who do the job that one bureaucrat did last year. Large institutions are particularly susceptible to this type of decay. There are many offices operated by individuals whose goals are not that of the institution. Bullshit workers, working bullshit jobs for bullshit pay. Between 1940 and the 2020s, the managerial class has only grown. In the United Kingdom, the public sector is now nearly half of the entire national GDP… and many of those jobs, I’d argue most, are bullshit jobs.
The managers manage problems, they don’t solve problems. The scholastic system across the West is pumping out people with degrees who have been trained to be managers and making jobs for managers. The economic system is top-heavy because those that manage out number those that produce.
The more problems created, the more those problems must be managed. For a number of cultural reasons, the near-holy project of importing the entire third world has been undertaken by Woke Progressive managerial elites, and those brain-dead enough to listen to them.
Cultureless
For the progressive managerial type, the easiest way to handle people is to group them by caste and least-common-denominator. Great cultural works don’t matter, histories and friendships and literature and ambition don’t matter.
How much do you make? What’s your name? What’s your social security number? Will you swear fealty to your managerial commissar under pain of unemployment?
Under a surveillance culture and a managerial culture what has occurred over the preceding quarter-century is an erasure of the individual in the name of individualism and the erasure of culture in the name of multi-culturalism. All of these horrific acts predicated on the needs of the managerial machine. It is far easier to manage a dozen people in a single beige office than manage those same people each with their own small cottage-business. It’s easier to tax when every one is on HRs’ payroll than it is to tax when people deal in cash and barter with their neighbors.
The destruction of cultural heritage was no accident and it created a reasonable desire in the individual to attach ones self to a larger identity. Simultaneously nearly all traditional community identities have been broken down by the corrosive effects of globalism, multiculturalism, and managerialism.
Trade is easy, why would you be a small-scale craftsman when you can work for Joseph Silverstein as a part of the global work-force? You can make widgets all day every day that’ll then be sold to a company in Singapore that’ll use the widgets to make goods that are shipped over to India? They’ll pay you slightly more than you made in your crafts-shop before and you can buy whatever you want cheap because it’s produced over seas…
There’s no one culture, you don’t really have an identity. You’re all just interchangeable units of production. As long as you’re not one of the sacred identities of the Woke Church, you basically mean nothing with no heritage… and even if you are, your culture is just a side-show. Buy our products and get excited for the next product. Culture is something you buy not something you’re born with.
Why spend all this time getting to know your neighbors when we can just manage your neighborhood for you? We’ll make sure you talk to the right people and make sure to blacklist people who try to start their own crafts shops. That way you’ll be able to have all your interactions with other people managed by the media and AI.
Each of these topics is highly nuanced, but not the thrust of this article. Rather the topic of the article is how these effects have created the modern far-right white identitarians (and every other racial identitarian) in ways that are mostly unprecedented in human history. Race has mattered in the past for eons, but not like it does now.
I posit that the way race is now centralized to identity is unique. One of the most unique visions of race (as purely biological, yet intrinsically tied to philosophical modes of being) ever created. Those steeped in ambitions to resuscitate the Civilization of Faust are the most blind to the ways in which racial identity now means so much more and so much less than it once did.
A Captured Culture
The atomized world of the Industrial age has created an unmoored culture with no future. To those poorly read, no past either. An eternal “now” of consumption. Wake, drive to work, work, drive home, sleep. The wagie existence. A world without kinship or heritage where the past and the future begin running together making it near-impossible to live in the present. An entire global civilization of people that are just waiting… to die? to live? to wake up? no one knows, but waiting.
It’s a prison culture.
Woke progressive bullies aren’t quite like those of the schoolyard (equally mature, but more viscous and less empathetic). They’re prison bullies, and the Woke progressive HR managers and social media Jannies are the guards. Both get off on hurting people they perceive as weaker than themselves.
The lack of agency, perpetual depression, universal surveillance, and reduction of the personal to the professional has created a panopticon in which nearly every individual in society is impounded. The media racketeers politicians while childless pearl-clutchers racketeer every one else. Every one seems to want the same thing… even the prison guards and the Woke useful idiots. Every one wants out.
The ways in which this manifests are complex. The only known exit path is to accrue at least several million dollars of assets at which point one can reasonably check out of society. Pay taxes, own a company, but live life on their own terms for the most part. That’s what figures like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson have accomplished. In the modern era of top-heavy financial systems, however, it’s impossible to accomplish such a feat through honest work. That’s where communists get their dirty claws into society by promising a better world… if they were just the ones managing it.
That irony is not lost on the identarian right.
For most individuals, there is not going to be an out and we all know it. (Even those who have succeeded in achieving their out are perpetually terrified of getting dragged back into the industrial prison that is modern society). Because most people are aware that they will never escape from the prison, they start forming prison gangs for mutual defense and to fight for mutual interests.
The managerial prison-guards have also effectively removed nearly all markers of identity from the individuals. They are a number (income) a location (home) a name (social security number)… and that other thing that’s always on an HR form when you’re applying for a job: a gender and a race.
Metaphysical Biology
As most prison-gangs do, the result of bureaucratically imposed managerial classification systems has been the adoption of those classifications by the people. Prison gangs form around the only identity that each individual has in common, and in the modern world that means gender and that means race and little else. Race according to census. It’s hardly surprising that the primary identities during the fall of Faustian Civilization would be broken down to something so crude.
White. Black. Yellow. Red. Taco. Jew.
If one were to tell Adolf Hitler himself that in less than 100 years, Slavs and Poles and Germans and Danes would all be simply classified into “white” in most of the world… he would have either killed you or become so depressed he’d abandon his mission. What began in the United States as a method for taking a national census has now become one of the most important arbiters of identity. Are you white? How white are you? That’s not an ethnos, those are dodgeball team colors.
The entire principle of modern racial identity is founded on a simplified and materialist world view created by the same managerial class that killed the heritage and culture of the old World and poisoned Faustian civilization. It is a materialistic appeal to biology stating that the primary identity an individual holds is that of a physiological (and poorly defined to the point of superstition) “race.”
That is not to say that biological race doesn’t exist. It most certainly does exist, and those organizations that are heavily predicated on race focusing on “white” can reasonably state that an individual is white, not-white, or in some middle-ground position. Biological may even predicate the types of culture that sprout from fertile ground therein. The fundamental flaw in this thinking lies in the presumption that race is the only thing that exists within a people.
Contrary to the views of Woke progressives, peoples are not identical cogs that can be casually swapped in the global machine of production. They have a spirit, a will, and a voice.
A people, an Ethnos, is not defined solely by purchasing the right t-shirts or solely by the blood you were born to. In a properly spiritual civilization, one is given a heritage guarded by ones parents for passing to ones children. Identity is not flesh or home town, it is a spiritual duty. Identity and heritage are the most valuable things one has, and prisoners of the Globally Managed society have been fully robbed of both.
It is not unreasonable for people to identify along racial lines. That’s something one sees occurring naturally in cultural environments like this all the time. The result of that type of organization is not long-lasting. It is going to either suffer the loosening of bonds over time, or the shedding of members over time. In both cases, the resultant heritage is short-lived. While it is possible to form a prison-gang around only a shared racial identity, it is not possible to build cultural heritage that way. Something that the Native Americans have learned the hard way over the last 200 years or so. Every problem today in the globalized prison-society of modern managerial civilization is visible in microcosm in Native American reservations. Understanding how to improve their living conditions will provide excellent clues in how to improve our own.
A State of Decay
The great pyramids, the Parthenon and the Colosseum. Majestic legions, spirited crusaders and rugged pioneers. When we look through history, most see reflected there the best of a people doing what they do to a degree unmatched by modern man. Few of us are those people, and even if you are one of them, you’re going to find yourself stymied at every turn.
Register your ship, and GPS Track it, and make sure your port-dues are paid.
Can you really afford a van large enough for your wife and kid trekking across the country? What about repairs? Registration costs? What’ll be your legally permanent address?
Sorry, if you want a small farm to live on, that’ll be at least a hundred thousand dollars, and you’d better build that shack to code or the bureaucrats will seize it.
The managerial revolution has killed the heroes of history. It’s killed the sly traveling merchant and replaced him with Amazon.com. The brave pioneer needs a hunting license and thousands of dollars just to remain mobile. The proud home owner can only afford his house by pretending to agree with the hateful rhetoric of the HR lady, hope you enjoy working that soul-sucking job for 30 years.
These are not the times of great men, at least not in the way they’re envisioned through the heights of human history. This is not one of the cultural zeniths. The 21st century is a tomb from which whispers of managerial elites keep imprisoned souls silent by hook or by crook. For all high technology has changed the world, the way in which the spirit has been torn from man and the ethnos torn from our peoples makes us the the most depressed and least socially mobile in human history.
Fascists think that tribal esoteric Darwinism will fix it. Communists think that micro-managed forced-equity will fix it if they just shit hard enough on white men. Liberals think that they’ve won and that there’s no need to fix it because everything is just fine.
Not many people are “liberals” any more. Every one is looking for a solution, few look in the right places.
Ethnos
The Great Peoples of history (Germans, American Anglo-Saxons, Romans, Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, Mongolians) all saw themselves as a specific ethnicity. An Ethnos that represented not only blood, but heritage culture and family. The moral certainty that theirs were the people. Theirs was the ethnos. Theirs was the destiny. Anglo-Saxon Americans expressed that sentiment visibly through Manifest Destiny and the Conquest of the West.
That is not where we are as a people. Those obsessed with the Arc of History see an unfolding of ever more Progressive values and dream of utopianism. Those of us who have actually read history note the dark ages, the bronze age collapse, the waring states of China, and the invasions of the Indo-Aryans. We stand not at the cultural pinnacle of Faustian civilization, that was long ago. The true End beginning when the final myth of the West was written by Tolkein as a re-telling of the earlier Ring Saga in the spirit of Goethe.
Culturally speaking, this is the beginning of the dark-age. The demography of the West is collapsing, invaders have seized most of our cities and shores. We are ruled either by petty schoolyard tyrants or incompetent old fools. The slow march of collapse quickens and most of are too deeply entrenched in our prisoner mentality to recognize that our ancestors stories or achievement are no longer ours.
Those great peoples of history: The Romans, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Mongolians, the Anglo-Saxons and Germans. How did those people come to exist over slow centuries long before imperial light was shown through action? What is it that drove that small city of Rome to achieve when its population was merely ten thousand men?
I would ask the reader to really think about what that means. The original Republic that would one day become The Empire was ten thousand men in a small town on the Italian coast where the great Wars and Heroes written of by Livy… were neighboring farmers feuding over grazing rights. In that tiny village (by modern standards) an ethnos was created that would reshape the course of global history. Not the neighboring village to the south, whose name I doubt a single member of this readership knows by memory, the Roman people came from Rome.
In the modern desire for identity, and in the prison-like atmosphere created by violent Woke progressive bullies, people are seeking an Ethnos. Among the Dissident Right, this is done by rallying around the single “white” mark placed in the census form. While one can acknowledge the wisdom of organizing into groups for mutual defense, doing so will not create a heritage worthy of the children of Europe, the children of Rome… or the Great Khan, or any one else. It’s a census marker.
It’s easy for the managerial elites to attack it too. The whims of the managerial types shift with the wind are not bound to a specific race. They’ll hate men because men are a threat to their system, but in attacking race they’ll attack the most numerous and cultural influential… right up until their entire system collapses because the men won’t hold it up any more.
While one should not entirely eschew the concept of race as being meaningful to heritage and character, one should simultaneously not rely on race as a sole signifier. There is a fundamental mismatch between the goals of the prison-gang and reality. The unmoored people of the multicultural globalized world should be aiming higher.
We must create a new Ethnos. At what point did Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Lombards, Vandals, Franks, Jutes, Angles, and Saxons become Prussians? At what point did Prussians become Germans? When did Germans become White? The whole of modern Germany is a cultural descendent of Prussia and Bavaria at this point. It is tribes of peoples who built clans in antiquity that are the forefathers of Faustian Civilization at its birth, through growth, into its maturity, and that have grown decadent in its illness.
I hope for a resurgence of strong nations that represent the needs of their peoples of course… but realistically, is that in the cards for any western nation at this point?
If it is the will of God that western Faustian Civilization should go on forever, then it would be the first time that God has willed such a thing in human history. It is in the nature of every civilization to believe that it shall last until the end of time, and it is in the nature of every civilization to fail. As they grow decrepit they grow more schizophrenic, less coherent and eventually collapse in on themselves with such thunder that the echoes resound for centuries.
Even as Rome began to decay in the 3rd and 4th centuries, there were new peoples slowly beginning the march towards a world they couldn’t dream of. Our purpose here in this age is not to rebuild White European Civilization. That is a reactionary position of preserving the past, imagining that the previous civilization is an ideal mode of being for the future of all men.
A racial consciousness has already developed across the Dissident Right, primarily because the Woke managerial prison-bullies of the modern age have so consistently and specifically attacked white people. The result is an obvious organization solely around race without any greater thought given to the heritage (or lack there of) created therein. Without a spiritual component and a desire to build a new ethnos, the pro-white right will fail in the long-run as it remains too rigid to sustain the crashing waves of this cultural ravine.
If anything, people need to think smaller. More locally. Organizing as “White” people at the national scale simply changes the color of the flags on the titanic. Even if successful, the sheer quantity of foreigners now embedded in western nations would be near-impossible to root out. That’s if the people even had the moral conviction to do so; they don’t. At the end of the day one would be left with a relatively biologically “pure” people, but with no heritage. The heritage is dead already, and thus the proposed resurgence of Faustian Civilization would be dead-on-arrival. The spirit of Faust is all but spent. The remnant should not be burnt away in attempts to relight cinders.
It is our duty as individuals, unmoored by the last 50 years of decadence and cultural catastrophe to build something new. For political reasons, it is impossible to utilize the political Left for anything (managers, bullies, and small-minded losers). The Right is better and makes a useful ally in cultural reconstruction. A “white” identity can be useful for some demographics/groups, but that is not the end-goal.
The goal is the modern equivalent to those small tribes in Gaul and the Balkans and Denmark that later became the French, Germans, and English. To think in terms of a single generation is to give up the future. The people of the future who conquer continents and stars will be of an Ethnos, a Race with a single powerful spiritual heritage that carries them from hundreds of years in the past. That is what we must start kindling. Some peoples will be more fertile for this future than others, but all who are aware should be striving for it.
The Demographic Collapse Is An Opportunity
The dramatic and sudden population decline first in the West and Far East, and soon in the rest of the world (for obvious reasons) is going to dramatically change the everything. Many modern systems require perpetual-growth in ability, resource-extraction, automation and importantly people. This is a major reason why the managerial class is importing thousands of incompatible foreigners into our homelands. Managerial prison-guards care far more about the prison walls than the prisoners.
With that said, those who do successfully organize into effective clans and produce a next generation will have an outsized effect on the future. When the population of the planet drops by 50%… if you have 3 kids, your family and bloodline will mean something. If you have no children, then there’s no reason to try and build (or preserve a failing) civilization in the first place. The race of the next civilization will be determined entirely by how well we build the sparks of a new Ethnos for our children and their descendants, how well we build homes to raise them in, and how well we protect them from the corrosion of a failing managerial prison-state.
To reference Tolkein once more: the Men of the Dissident Right often imagine themselves as the cavalry or the Rohirrim or the knights of Gondor standing against foreign orc hordes. That may have been the case a century ago, but it is not now. The city has been sacked, Orcs and Traitors man the parapets. We are the dwarves of The Lonely Mountain or the Elves of Rivendell.
The war will continue to be waged beyond our valleys where White Identitarians bash themselves bloody against the iron gates of our prison. By all means let them continue doing it. We should not, however delude ourselves to believe either that they have a chance at proper resurgent victory. Best case scenario they rip the gate down and stand proud in the Wardens office before the foundation gives way.
Instead, look forward: in another century, what will be the problems future generations face? How can we provide them with an Ethnos capable of confronting them? Stressing about race is less important right now, because we haven’t built one yet. We’re doing that now; we’re building the sparks of a new people. The specific biologically defined races between future clans will certainly matter, but that’s an issue for Social Darwinism to figure out. The creation of a holistic ethnos is the future our children will live to see… a golden city of Free Men. Men with a wiser pioneering spirit than that of the Faustian men who came before.
With all that in mind, the tl;dr is that we should embrace a form of focused nativism over a specifically racial identity. Our homeland, our people. Focus on building a new heritage for those collectives at the microscale. Let the macroscale racialized politics play themselves out while we organize something better for the next generation. We’re not going to win by making a prison gang, we’ll win by making a new people.
"If it is the will of God that western Faustian Civilization should go on forever, then it would be the first time that God has willed such a thing in human history. It is in the nature of every civilization to believe that it shall last until the end of time, and it is in the nature of every civilization to fail. As they grow decrepit they grow more schizophrenic, less coherent and eventually collapse in on themselves with such thunder that the echoes resound for centuries."
This is one of your best articles Copernican. (Certainly probably my favorite,) (can I call you kelly?) You've written something really compelling, both in meaning and in how you presented it. I envy your verbal intelligence. The only reason I can possibly think this post didn't get bigger was something like the title or something.
I myself put off reading this because I imagined it would be a "here's why castizo futurism is based" shtick. I was ready the entire time to cite your words and critique them, and I couldn't tell you why I made such a strong guess of what this post was about.
Anyways, great post, good job here.
At the risk of sounding too Leftist and un (Neo) Stoic, let me contend another vital area of lineage awareness - ancestral trauma.
Even between my line where we escaped the Cultural Revolution, and the mother of my children's who was smack in the middle of it, the difference is very obvious. How much greater for those who went through the Black Death and the panic and abandonment of Ethos by many thereby in Europe, and those lines that did not have the latter happen despite being affected by the same disease? Or say the demonisation and disparagement of ancestral ways, instead of a clearer integration and solving problems within, in European pagan compared to Javanese pagan updating to more Axial age paradigms?
Managerialism and Liberalism in general can thereby be seen compassionately as ways to cope with particular lineages unresolved trauma. That's why they in turn never really solve problems. And the more these "solutions" are applied to lines that never needed them even in the short term, the more damage and corruption they spread all over.