Reconstructivist Fiction, Rebuilding Truth

What happens when deconstructing reality goes too far: the author builds back better.

Every now and then post-modernists go too far in their attempts to deconstruct their society, our hierarchies and traditions and other pillars of our social system. The last century and a half has generated numerous humanist ideologies vying for dominance and each seeking new industrial and post-industrial social models.

Much of post-modern liberalism is dedicated to destroying, critiquing, and deconstructing all traditional models of society and thought. Post modernists doesn’t actually stand for anything themselves, from some vague (and verifiably false) notions of human exceptionalism. Humanist ideas they’ve built their world view on like tabula rasa are objectively incorrect. Yet those ideas persist on sheer momentum.

An odd thing happens when these abhorrent creatures go too far in the deconstruction of society: they can accidentally rebuild old cultural traditions. Much like meta-irony and post-meta-irony, reconstructivist fiction is a point where the line between hyperbole and honesty becomes blurred by the context of the society it inhabits.

Deconstructivist fiction will critique and deconstruct a society by emphasizing flaws and minimizing strengths. Reconstructivist fiction takes deconstruction to such a hyperbolic extreme that, in the context of the twenty first century, the fiction is in some ways preferable to the society we now inhabit. I’ll provide a few examples.

Warhammer 40k

A quintessential piece of reconstructivist fiction in the 21st century is Warhammer 40k. “in the grim darkness of the future there is only war.” Warhammer depicts a stagnant humanity in constant war with hostile forces where the Emperors chosen Angels, heroic superhuman space marines defend humanity in grotesque and bloody battles. Warhammer depicts galactic turmoil, a society where the Cult of the Emperor violently suppresses heretics due to very real risks as chaos demons can easily infiltrate unguarded minds. Warhammer describes an entire society geared for constant war with regimented lives.

It’s dystopian. To a neoliberal humanist, Warhammer 40k is a fiction designed to highlight the flaws in totalitarianism and zealous extremism. Beyond the set dressing of humanism, however it changes. The neoliberal mind sees no point to life beyond hedonism, materialism, and the pursuit of pleasure. Values like sacrifice, honor, valor, or loyalty are not considered. As an ideology, neoliberalism despises those things as a core tenant is “there is nothing beyond my immediate experience of physical reality.”

Warhammer 40k gives to its fictional characters something that a humanist society does not: meaning.

Sure an inquisitor had to destroy an entire planets worth of civilians to root out hostile heretical influence. But he didn’t do it because he wanted to, he did it because he needed to. Because that sacrifice was necessary, because it meant something. In a universe at war, every sacrifice means something. Billions die in trenches, but the Imperium survives, humanity survives against all those who would destroy it. It takes the masculine ideal of sacrifice for family, for friends, for homeland, and for a people, and turns it up to a galactic scale. Warhammer is a dystopian fiction I would not want to live in, but I recognize the power inherent in the uncompromising words:

There is wisdom in tradition, there is meaning in violence, there is hope in suffering. What happens in Warhammer happens for a reason; the idea that the suffering of individuals, no matter how small, is part of a greater mission. The suffering of the individual is justified by the greater mission. For the humanist progressive, there can be no such thing as tolerable suffering or justified suffering. Warhammer 40k is reconstructivist in that it rebuilds a mythology that imbues meaning into loyalty, valor, sacrifice, hope, righteousness, tradition, and pain. It makes that dystopian galactic war of 40k more meaningful than our lives here at the dawn of the 21st century.

Starship Troopers

Starship troopers is another example. The setting occurs in a hyperbolic semi-fascist society and once again imbues that society with meaning for the individual through righteousness of action. There aren’t moral shades of grey in the society, there is right and there is wrong, and a clear delineation between the two. The characters of this setting benefit from moral certainty, something that even the dissident Right struggles to maintain. It is a breath of fresh air in the face of constant legalistic obfuscations to justify state-violence.

The state acts because it can. That the state maintains its strength through violence. That those who would challenge the state must meet it on the field of battle. Compared to progressive harpies droning on about “taxes” or “police” or “moral culpability” it’s far more meaningful to see honesty on behalf of authority and force.

Both the film, and the book show this reconstructivism in different ways, but they do so clearly. The fiction shows that, despite the totalitarian nature of the state, individuals within it are a part of something greater. Rather than reliance on some nebulous concept of the ‘soul’ or the ‘divine spark of the individual’ (a belief humanists will happily declare to be secular). People within the fiction all participate in the same monoculture with the same ultimate purpose. The camaraderie of a platoon of soldiers but at a grand scale. Regardless of individual suffering, these peoples lives participate something far greater than themselves. They may have little choice, but they have a drive that neoliberal hedonists will never have.