Grundsatze der Hallerismus II

Philosophy of Power. Personalism.

1.0) Biological prolegomena. Vital principle. The life-force of anything that lives by nature strives to find full expression in active mastery of the world around it- contra Liberal pseudo-biology (Darwinian evolution), which sees life as nothing more than that which conserves itself as best it can in the face of external pressure by passive adjustment and conformity to that pressure ("adaptation").

1.1) It is therefore a man's want, and natural right, to attain to as much mastery as his personal forces, talents, faculties, and luck allow.

1.2) These personal forces, talents, faculties, and luck are gifts of fortune. They are not equally distributed between men and cannot be, and that's a good thing. The Liberal cult of "equality" proposes an impossibility founded on the cardinal lie that the cause of any natural inequality of fortune must always lie in man-made injustice- as though, if Lady Luck should favour some men over others, it must be that those men have unjustly stolen the fair share of her attentions or something else from the "oppressed".

1.3) Man being a social animal who by nature can't subsist without the company and assistance of others and wouldn't want to, mastery isn't just about dominion over the physical environment, but lordship over other men as well, perhaps above all. This obtains in a spontaneous and voluntary process whereby the strongest among them, those with the lion's share of personal forces, talents, and faculties of whatever kind, and who have distinguished themselves by parlaying their superior innate abilities into the acquisition and possession of various scarce resources and means (above all, wealth or the ability to provide; physical-military force or the ability to protect; possession of rare knowledge or ability to instruct), win the admiration, recognition, and respect of other men, who freely enter the service of the great in order to get what they need to meet the needs of life. The social ties of lordship and dependence which form on that reciprocal basis, in turn, are the stuff of all human society; were men perfectly equal and self-sufficient, as Liberalism would like, they would have no use for one another, and would all live as perpetual isolates.

1.4) This service is freely-rendered, with the weaker parties attaching themselves to the stronger with no compulsion on the part of the latter, sometimes even against their will; it can thus, in no way be conflated with involuntary servitude or slavery. The terms of service are solemnized in some sort of tacit or formal contract or agreement negotiated between the parties, variegated into infinity, and in any case require nobody to forfeit any of their existing freedom beyond the obligations positively specified in the contract. We will return to this later on.

2.0) Power is the name given to that force by which the weak and strong find each other and bond together such that the one obeys while the other commands; that charisma or personal magnetism by which the great and illustrious attract and win for themselves followers ready to do their bidding.

2.1) Power is inextricably and irreducibly personal, the public sign and hard-won fruit of superlative personal qualities and distinguished personal accomplishment; neither in right or fact can it be separated from the person or property of the great man who has won it by disposition of his person or property. As such, it can never be said to belong to those over whom it is exercised, and who thus lack it by definition; any claim to the contrary (e.g. "government by and for the people", "workplace democracy", etc.) is spurious, absurd, and moreover, a pretext for the usurpation and theft of what rightly belongs to another.  

2.2) Power cannot be identified with violence and coercion, still less with deceit and dissimulation, which if anything comprise the antitheses of power. Although power can, and in some cases must, resort to violence in order to e.g. fend off incursions against person, property, and dependants under one's protection, avenge insults and injuries, punish wrong-doers, or enforce contractual obligations against welshers and deadbeats, violence isn't of its essence. As we have seen, power is an emanation of personal strength, superiority, and charisma that elicits willing deference. But any man no matter how personally weak, ineffectual, or unremarkable can kill. Likewise, a democratic majority or other mob, mass, or herd, to be sure, can exact compliance with sheer overwhelming force of numbers, but does so where a great man wouldn't have to- even though he, as but one lone man, could himself easily be overwhelmed by his legions of followers. It follows that the rabble or mob can't be said to wield power in any meaningfully rigorous and scientific sense of the term; it is capable only of murder, theft, and despotism.  

As to deceit and dissimulation: these are precisely the first and final resort of the weak and the powerless, of women and others who, altogether lacking in personal forces, unable to make anything happen by and for themselves, must resort to wiles in order to trick and manipulate the strong and powerful into doing their bidding for them; or alternately, of fakes, phonies, and other weak men who must conceal their impotence and cowardice as best they can behind a mask of braggadocio and bluster.

Finally, power, when not abused, is by nature a benevolent force. Power brings men together and unites them in ties of reciprocal benefit and mutual affection in which the strong help the weak meet their needs to be paid and housed, protected and defended, instructed and guided; but we think it uncontroversial to say nobody wants or needs to be shot at or lied to.

3.0) We can now define Liberalism as that which historically supplanted benevolent personal rule based on the personal power of individual great men, acting either alone as Princes, or in association as Republics, with an anonymous, impersonal, and bureaucratized tyranny that rests exclusively on twin pillars of organized violence (Leviathan, with its omnipotent, omniscient, and irresistible machinery of State-monopolized physical coercion: standing armies and police forces, surveillance and investigative bureaus, court and penal system, regulatory agencies and compliance officers, etc.) on the one side, and organized deceit on the other (complex of mass media and entertainment, journalism, K-12 and post-secondary education-indoctrination, medicine and psychotherapy, purported "expertise" of all kinds, party-political messaging, commercial advertising, etc. that saturates the entirety of the country with the propaganda that relentlessly torments the citizen everywhere he goes or stays, every waking hour of every day and night). For five centuries now Liberalism has waged a relentless perpetual war against personal power of any sort and any degree of magnitude, and the corresponding relative personal greatness, strength, and superiority upon which it rests and from which it emanates. Its propaganda relies on a panoply of fictions that teach men:

-to fear and despise personal power and the will to acquire and project it as singularly dangerous, that which corrupts absolutely, and radically incompatible with the existence of civilized society, which came into being only once men forfeited all of their natural or personal power to the impersonal artificial Leviathan, with its faceless bureaucratic machinery that is the nemesis of all individual charisma- first in the fictive act of "social contract" supposed to have founded the artificial State, subsequently on a presumptive basis by mere fact of residence on the national territory.

-that power rightfully belongs to those over whom it is exercised, to those who purport to "speak truth to power" on behalf of the powerless, "the people", "the oppressed", and so arrogate to themselves the right to steer its exercise from the back-seat. The natural social order of things is inverted to absurdity: inferiors are held out as the rightful superiors of their superiors and better than their betters, while the right of sovereignty, we are told, really belongs to a faceless and nameless democratic mass of nobodies ("We the People"), not just in spite of the fact that its members have no power, but because of it. (!)

 -that the reciprocal relations of personal lordship and dependence that naturally and freely form between strong and weak, great and small, superior and inferior, in whatever form they may assume (Princes and subjects, employers and employees, husbands and wives, parents and children, seniors and juniors, pastors and flocks, the races of Man and one another, etc.) are nothing but unreason, corruption, abuse, despotism, and slavery; that it is inherently unjust for a man to exercise power over another, and contemptibly servile and degrading for a man to subject himself to the power of another.

-that power may legitimately be exercised only in the name and on behalf of a wholly impersonal and fictive corporation of the people ("the rule of law not men") that exists only on paper. All of the aforesaid natural social relations and many more, hitherto thought to comprise the very stuff of which society is made, are to be extirpated, dissolved, and abolished. "Freedom" and "equality" are the names given to the process through which individuals are released from the ostensible tyranny of all their solidary and intimate face-to-face relationships so as to comprise a mass of isolate urban atoms whose sole unity is their common subjection to the artificial Leviathan, before which they are stood at parity, all with the same legal standing, the same rights, and the same obligations, and above all, equal in their complete and unconditional submission to its all-embracing power. As Hobbes, founder of the Liberal feast, who named the Leviathan and wrote its source code, had it: "the power and honour of subjects vanish in the presence of the power sovereign".

3.1) "As in the presence of the Master", Hobbes continues, "the servants are equal, and without any honour at all; so are the Subjects, in the presence of the Sovereign. And though they shine some more, some less, when they are out of his sight; yet in his presence, they shine no more than the stars in presence of the sun". It thus come as no surprise that the war on personal power is extended to personality itself . Every singular and superlative personal quality that makes a man stand out from the pack, all personal charisma and apparent grace, all individual virtuosity and excellence, along with the ambition and thirst for glory that spurs on their cultivation, and for that matter anything that makes a man a unique, inasmuch as it might someday conceivably translate into some measure of personal power for him, is to be censured and effaced. Liberalism so to speak seeks to grind the human face off of the individual person and force-fit him into a Procrustean bed of standardized mediocrity- first by reducing him, at public law, to a hollowed-out and generic juridical abstraction that takes absolutely no cognizance of individual particularities (in stark contrast to the natural, person-to-person relation cemented by private law, which by definition must take cognizance of who the participants are and what they can do for each other); second, by means of a set of sophisticated social technologies, above all mandatory mass education and psychotherapy, which entice and/or force individual behaviour into conformity with the statistical average or group norm; third, by that peculiar culture-mentality Nietzsche aptly termed "herd morality", which fears, resents, and despises all manifestations of personal excellence and greatness and strives to suppress them whilst elevating dull mediocrity and faceless conformity to the status of supreme moral virtue.                

4.0) In opposition to the Liberal cult of individualism, with its ideal of a mass of isolate, homogenized, and faceless individual atoms enjoying homogenized and faceless "individual rights" while their affairs are administered by the faceless bureaucratic functionaries and technocrats of a faceless machine-State, Haller proposes a personalism that seeks to put a human face back on power, and on Man in general.  

4.1) We frankly and unabashedly preach a cult of personality, vaunting the strongmen and larger-than-life figures of this world; we seek to exalt the prowess and great deeds of great men of all kinds in song, story, and sculpture; we celebrate that special rare charisma and force of character that can never be bound and swaddled in bureaucratic red-tape or restrained by man-made rules and regulations; and we intend to do everything in our power to clear the way and prepare the world for the advent of  great men soon to come, who will raise our civilization from the mire into which it has sunk, and in the course of doing so win supreme power for themselves as their unalienable private property and personal patrimony.

4.2) We think it apodictic truth that true individuality can never be realized in the anonymity of crowd and committee, but always as singular distinction. Individuality is what is exceptional in a man, what makes him stand out from the crowd and far surpass the average; what makes him stronger, smarter, or wealthier than other men. It is these things that earn him a name all his own and public recognition as a unique individual different from the rest, not banal private quirks and idiosyncracies nobody cares about; and personal power freely acknowledged by other men is at once the primordial and highest form of this public recognition and distinction.

4.3) Hence, in place of the Liberal individual-private right of the nameless and generic subject to indulge, in the privacy (that is to say, invisibility) of his own home, various hobbies and consumer preferences deemed too trivial and too insignificant for the State to bother itself about, as long as he does so without drawing too much attention to himself, personalism recognizes the natural right of any man to cultivate, enlarge, and exercise his natural and acquired forces in the pursuit of personal achievement, accomplishment, and excellence, and his right to exclusive possession and enjoyment of their hard-won visible fruits, including such personal power as they may bring. Given that personal power is Nature's medal or award of distinguished personal achievement and proven personal greatness and excellence, we see its attainment as the height of human fortune- we dare say, the telos of human striving in this life, nothing less than the realization of the essential being of a man in the plenitude of its completion.

4.4) It should go without saying that personalism is radically "meritocratic", recognizing no caste or class privileges or any other a priori claim to exclusive right to the legitimate acquisition and exercise of power. Of the three types of legitimation distinguished by Max Weber, personalism recognizes only the charismatic; what counts are (natural or acquired) personal qualities and above all, their tangible fruits. The inheritance of a crown, a great fortune, or an illustrious surname, to be sure, can confer power to, or facilitate its acquisition by, a successor; but ancestry or bloodline alone do not entitle anybody to power if the wherewithal from which it emanates and is inextricably tied to is lacking. An aristocrat who loses the family fortune at cards and loses the means of influencing and retaining the services of others is no longer an aristocrat, a man of distinction, but one degenerate gambler among others; and should he become dependent upon a low-born bourgeois for his livelihood, then the latter is the patron, the true aristocrat, in the relationship, and justly so. Likewise, and contra a certain species of intellectual who seems to think that the right to rule should be allocated according to IQ scores, educational attainment, or purported expertise, personal facilities of whatever sort are, as far as power is concerned, so many mere dormant unrealized potentialities until actualized in real-world results, namely winning followers and dependants. In other words, only those who have actually acquired power can be said to be entitled to it.

4.5) It follows that those intellectuals of the Right who fancy themselves "aristocrats of the spirit" or somesuch are the spiritual twins of those of the Left who style themselves "oppressed" in that both of them lay claim to something they don't have, and don't have because they haven't gone out and earned it. Both posit an ideal order of how things ought to be, which however is so much mere empty metaphysical speculation with no real-world substance. For power is an emanation of the material wherewithal of its exercise, outside of which it has no existence, and not the mystic nebulae of some cosmic order imagined in the idle reveries of metaphysicians. Power resides in what you can do, and actually do, down here on Earth; you don't get it by saying you should have it, but by doing what it takes to win it. Political rights, then, are never natural, but always acquired rights; and they are proprietary, the personal property of those who have acquired them, since after all they stem from other personal property physical or intellectual.

5.0) Objection: "Personalism is all well and good for the Great Men of this world, those who wear the Crown and have grabbed the brass ring for themselves- but what about the rest of us, the regular guys, the working stiffs, those of us without fame and fortune or any realistic hope of getting any, and just trying to raise families and get through our daily grind as best we can? Are we to surrender all our freedom to them and be reduced to servitude, to a life of groveling and abjection before various big shots, subject to their arbitrary will at all times, with no redress against their abuses? I saw on Reddit where it was explained that in Our Democracy™, all men are created equal, subject only to the law and not the will of other men, from whom I don't have to take any crap"     

In no particular order:

5.1) The Liberal boast of an impartial and impersonal "rule of law not men" is absurd on the face of it. For the positive laws of the Liberal order are not self-executing, as though living beings with intelligence and a will of their own; and the same is true of the artificial State from  which they issue, itself a pure juridical fiction, a paper construct that can't do anything on its own. Its "acts" are always the acts of men, public functionaries who act in its name and on its behalf; likewise its general laws are wholly empty and without substance absent the particular judgments, rulings, and other official determinations pronounced in their name by judicial officers.

Whether power is held by personal right, or in trust on behalf of the so-called "people" or somebody or something else, then, it is always exercised by natural persons, human beings of flesh and bone; the question isn't whether or not the man in the street will end up taking orders from somebody, but from who exactly. And we think it far more consonant with the proper dignity of a free and grown man to take orders from men who have earned his respect, perhaps even admiration, through their proven superiority of personal forces, men who can inspire freely-willed loyalty and moreover have the ability to make it worth one's while through the benefits they are uniquely positioned to provide in return, than from an equal who is no better than him in any particular respect and can neither help nor hurt him, or, worst of all, from his inferiors: the weak, the ugly, the stunted and stupid, in a word, the "oppressed" and their representatives in the form of legions of noodle-armed technocrats, girlbosses, eunuchs in dresses, sexual perverts, shrill blue-haired girl "activists" yet to complete their studies, spinster schoolmams and HR officers, grifters and crooked politicians, corporate bozos, and the dregs and beasts of urban populations; those who arouse the contempt and not respect of any re-blooded male, useless parasites wholly lacking in means and forces of their own, unable to do anything for  anybody, on the contrary dependent on the means of the very tax-payers they presume to boss around for their upkeep and protection. We think it safe to say that nobody in their right mind would take an order from these wretches were the agents of the Leviathan not figuratively and literally training guns at their heads, though they would not only freely and with eager willingness follow the man they acknowledge as great, but jockey and compete for the privilege of taking up his cause and participating in his glories.

5.2) It isn't personal power, but delegated power ("Our Democracy™" or the artificial Leviathan premised on the fiction of popular sovereignty and the "social contract") that requires a man to forfeit all his power, freedom, and will to the Sovereign.

First, personal power, since it derives from personal property, cannot possibly be omnipotent or omniscient, since the personal power of any man can reach no further than the extent of his personal means, and moreover finds natural boundaries in the means and property of others. The patrimonial ruler is the most powerful actor in the land, but never the only one. For the lowliest grunt with a home and family of his own, and a source of income to pay for their upkeep, enjoys a measure of personal power in his own right, and in fact exercises the same proprietary rights and privileges as the mightiest of Kings, only on a much smaller scale and in a much smaller sphere of influence. This is the true meaning of the ancient common-law doctrine that "the house of everyone is to him as his Castle and Fortress as well for defense against injury and violence, as for his repose". No patrimonial ruler could bring the rights of his free subjects into question without simultaneously and seriously undermining the legitimacy of his own, which are likewise grounded in the sanctity of personal property, and hence any despotic ambitions on his part are contained by a circular dilemma that thwarts their expression before it happens.

It is precisely Liberalism that, starting from the premise that the personal possession and exercise of power by any man great or small is immoral and extremely dangerous, insists that the "public" power of Leviathan must be a monopoly power, not merely the highest, but the sole, unique, and moreover omnipotent authority. It follows that the "social contract" supposed to have created the artificial State demands as exhaustively total a level of submission on the part of its participants as the creepiest of death cults. In the blunt words of Rousseau, doyen of modern Liberalism, and who coined the term, "social contract", the clauses of this putative contract "properly understood, may be reduced to one- the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community"; "each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will". The reality behind the popular misconception of the absolutist ruler as a despot wielding total, life-or-death personal power over millions of people is the modern one-party State (Communist, Fascist, National Socialist, etc.) in which a single political party under the leadership of a charismatic figure takes over, on an indefinite basis, an existing, Liberal State, an artificial public power that, just like any such State, already enjoyed unlimited right over its citizens prior to the takeover. The only real modification here is that high public office passes to a dictator who claims to immediately embody the general will, and on those grounds abolishes procedural elections as superfluous, but without him ever ruling by his own personal means, making the State his personal property, or ever styling himself anything other than a public functionary and chief executive officer of a public corporation of "the people" (by whatever name: "race", "nation", "proletariat", etc.) exercising power delegated in trust on its behalf (see esp. the National Socialist "leadership principle" and corresponding conception of the State as explicated by Hitler in Mein Kampf).

It is clear, then, that the totalitarian regime or dictatorship is no form of personal power rigorously so-called, but rather an exceptional form of public or delegated power, an off-brand Our Democracy™, in any case nothing to do with personalism. The personal or patrimonial power of the Great Man is "absolute" only in that it is indivisible (it is his private property, after all); the term does not imply totalitarianism of reach and scope. On the contrary: patrimonial power isn't founded on a "social contract" that establishes a public power, and which, as we have seen, requires each citizen to forfeit his power and his will in their entirety without reservation at the outset, rests on a multitude of highly-variegated individual contracts between the patron and his various clients- in other words, contracts at private law of a kind with the ordinary employment contracts and rental agreements we know today, and which likewise set out only a narrowly-delimited and agreed-upon set of duties, terms of use, payments, and so on as applicable, without touching on any of the extra-contractual personal affairs and rights of the contracting parties.

5.3) Personalism, while it affirms that the strong rule the weak in right and fact categorically rejects the idea that "might makes right", or that the powerful are "creators of values" à la Nietzsche. Perhaps more precisely, might does make right- and that's why God, whose might is absolutely invincible and irresistible, alone can legislate moral values by fiat. Men, for their part, no matter how much stronger and more powerful than their fellows, are strictly bound by natural laws authored by the All-Powerful in the exercise of power and everything else they do. And the natural laws that regulate the exercise of power are no mere speculative and empty deontological oughts, but causally efficacious in the material realm of fact, just like the natural laws studied by the physical sciences (albeit less proactive in their workings). Sovereigns ignore them at their own peril, courting a plague of unintended consequences and natural punishments visited in this life should they abuse their power and violate the legitimate natural and acquired rights of subjects.

5.4) The last thing we shall mention here is that, among the several natural preventatives and correctives against the abuse of personal power, there figures a natural right of resistance encompassing the right of any man to keep and bear such arms as he has the means to acquire, and to do justice for himself in his own case as he deems necessary or prudent, with no obligation to call on authorities for help if he doesn't want or need it- where the Liberal State, jealously monopolizing the legitimate use of force, demands that the citizen entirely forfeit the right to do justice for himself at the outset and stand disarmed and vulnerable before Leviathan, perhaps to subsequently be thrown some scraps in the form of a nominal right to immediate self-defense when he is unable to call upon agents of the State for help (although he is nonetheless subject to criminal prosecution if he exercises it), or perhaps a nominal right to keep and bear such small arms as deemed suitable for "civilian" use (although over time more and more such small arms inevitably end up on the official schedule of prohibited weapons, and the "right" is progressively whittled down to a mere empty fiction).

(To be cont'd).