Paternalism vs Fraternalism as Basic Forces in Civilizational History

Contextual Quote

"The factual accuracy and separate identity of paternalism and fraternalism thus give the superficial impression that they are essentially different, when nothing could be further from the truth. They both arise from the same selfish impotence and fear, and they both lead to the same disembodied reasoning, fake potency and reactive violence to achieve their self-serving ends. This is evident in the glad-handing bonhomie of the ruling classes ‘on both sides of the house’, in the extreme mediocrity (with a few obvious exceptions) of both left-wing and right-wing intellectuals, and in the fate of the powerless under both paternalistic and fraternalistic systems. Partly this is because both paternalism and fraternalism are subject to the same basic contradiction; dependency on inhuman technology, on self-serving ideology, on mass complicity and on a class of slaves."

- Expressive Egg [1]

Discussion

ExpressiveEgg:

"Sometime towards the end of the Palaeolithic era man fell into a state of impotence and fear of death. This event, which we can reasonably call a ‘fall,’ saw the appearance of warfare (which was not a feature of the palaeolithic world until its final stages), violent exploitation of man and nature, grievous poverty, the misery of work, psychological alienation, extreme sexual oppression and almost all of the illnesses, both physical and ‘mental,’ that we are familiar with today. True, primal folk were not immune to fear and violence, and, true, they were bound by a form of superstitious groupthink that history was to painfully shake the individual free from, but the later caricature of primal life as ‘nasty, brutish and short’ was far from the reality of pre-civilised life, and it was only after the fall that man found himself sick, alone and alienated; a fragile little glass doll in a universe of bowling balls, estranged from his own soul, anxious about his existence and compelled to acquire outer potency in lieu of inner power and control of life as compensation for his loss of self-control.

Those who were lonely, anxious and, crucially, ruthless enough to achieve such worldly power then formed a class of ‘winners’1 that stood over a much larger mass of ‘losers’. The winners—the kings and priests of the new world—then set about creating ideological justifications for this power, while the losers—the slaves and workers—set about creating excuses and consolations for their own reduced position in society. The former exalted individuality, power and control, the latter, collectivity, powerlessness and surrender. In times past we see this split in the passivity of Osiris and the violating dominator principle of Set, in the authoritarian Christ of Revelation and the meek democratic lamb of the Gospels and in the conflicting ideals of Hobbes’ Leviathan and Rousseau’s noble savage. Today, its most salient expression is in the split between the socialist left and the capitalist right. To put this another way, the foundational self-made existential rift between subject and object that occurred with the fall expressed itself socially as a fundamental self-made ideological rift, reflected everywhere in human culture, between paternalism and fraternalism.

Paternalism is the idea that reality is so constituted that one almighty father, God or king rules over the world, which is then subdivided in various sub-kingdoms (empire, state, tribe, family), each governed in an analogous manner. Fraternalism, by contrast, is the idea that there is no father, God or king, that human beings are born equal, brothers and sisters before a neutral law, and each has an equal say in what that law should be and how society is run. Belief in God is popular among patriarchs in power because it justifies never having to lift a finger to improve life, particularly for the poor who were born in the gutter because God predestined them to suffer and, just to be sure, made it a sin to oppose the established order. Atheism, on the other hand, is a very attractive attitude for the fraternalist middle-class attempting to wrest power away from the establishment because it justifies the idea that power is not set by tradition but, like morality, meaning, and destiny, is a construction, to be revised at will.

The religion proper to paternalism therefore is theism, specifically monotheism of the Abrahamic sort, particularly Islam and Judaism, but also old-fashioned ‘Christ the lion’ forms of Christianity. The religious ideologies proper to fraternalism are atheism, Buddhism, moderate ‘Christ the lamb’ varieties of Christianity and wishy-washy forms of ‘spiritualism’. The politics of paternalism are absolute monarchism, feudalism, authoritarianism and totalitarianism; those of fraternalism, are representative monarchism, democracy, liberalism and professional institutionalism. The economics of Paternalism are capitalist modes of production and exchange, while fraternalism prefers socialist models.

Today we live, very broadly, in a fraternalist world. Paternal power exists, of course, but it must accede to fraternalist priorities, and not just to the bizarre, ‘woke’ demands of fraternalism’s most corrupt postmodern form—the power of which is now waning—but to the four pillars of fraternalist society; rational democracy, technological progress, moral relativism and abstract reasoning. This is why ultra-paternalist states, such as Saudi Arabia, must present a liberal, democratic, highly-educated façade, why so-called ‘conservatives’ and ‘traditionalists’ must embrace technology even though technological progress obliterates everything they profess to hold dear, why the gravest professional sin one can commit is to suggest that a [favoured] ethnic group is immoral and why the ability to memorise and manipulate a vast quantity of abstract facts (an ability commonly, but mistakenly, referred to as ‘intelligence’) possesses an almost sacred status in the modern world, because, along with a fundamentally submissive attitude to the system, mere cognitive ability determines success. Thus, to be anti-democratic is to be associated with the worst kind of extremism; thus, to oppose technology is to be associated with retrograde luddism; thus, to question open borders is to be associated with fanatical Nazism; thus, to critique rationalism is to be associated with retrograde ‘anti-intellectualism’.

So ours is a fratriarchal world, at least for the time being. In reality however, as we shall see in part two, the matter is not so clear-cut. Self and selfish society being what they are, ever-changing and ever-ready to adapt to the needs of the moment, an array of divisions and sub-divisions appear within ideological frameworks. There are a thousand forms of locally and individually-inflected theism, atheism, monarchism, capitalism, democracy and socialism, each taking on ideas, values and procedures from the other. Judaism, for example, admits of and frequently promotes fraternalist principles just as readily as Buddhism allows for and encourages hierarchies. But we shouldn’t be fooled by this parade of beliefs, by the fact that they take different forms and employ different rituals, nor by the various compromises they are forced to make with each other, into dismissing the basic dichotomy and tension between the ideology of the dominating paternal brain and that of the egalitarian fraternal cell, which appear everywhere and at all times in civilised society and culture.

To speak of societies and cultures as having an essential character is not, therefore, to build a straw caricature, but to identify a foundational, gravitational pull, a central—and largely unconscious—metaphysical commitment that gives belief systems their coherence and direction. A map does not describe the terrain, it reveals the position and orientation of the traveller. So it is with this map of ideological orientation. That any given paternalist system contains fraternalist elements, or vice versa, does not disprove the primal fraternalist-paternalist model; it reveals the tension inherent in a self that is at once both an individual and part of a collective, a self which, alienated from consciousness, intellectually ossifies into the violently defended egoic positions we are interested in here. This is why it is so difficult to perceive the illusory, representational nature of such self-oriented beliefs, because, separated from context, both poles of the dichotomy are, from their own perspective, factually correct. It is an abstract fact that the social self, like the personal self, is a paternal hierarchy, and it is also a fact that it is a fraternal anarchy. Likewise, it is a fact that reality is formed in the mind, and it is also a fact that it is independent of mind; it is a fact that man is free, and it is also a fact that he is conditioned; it is a fact that one should maximise one’s own comfort at the expense of others, and it is also a fact that one should sacrifice one’s own needs for those of one’s fellows. And so on and so forth. Each dichotomous belief can not only call on all the facts it needs to justify itself, it forms itself from those facts, and so, when it looks upon the world, that is all it can see; itself.

This is how both paternalists and fraternalists can call on ‘nature’ as a justifying foundation. Nature is both a hierarchically violent competition and a cooperatively peaceful collaboration, and so the paternalist aristocrat can invoke ‘nature’ (or ‘human nature’) as a mandate for holding down the weak, while the fraternalist democrat can use it as a warrant for holding down the strong. Consequently, the objection, by writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx and Peter Kropotkin that paternalism is a form of unnatural domination practised by heartless demons is correct, as is the opposite objection, by thinkers such as William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche and D.H. Lawrence, that fraternalism is an unnatural expression of witless ‘herd-mentality’ that suppresses intensity, greatness and genius. Critics of Rousseau, Marx, Kropotkin, Blake, Nietzsche, and Lawrence betray their class allegiances as much as their lack of intelligence when they accuse these thinkers of being flatly wrong in their critiques of modern society.

Because facts are not the truth. The truth is the unique, specific context, or situation—its wholeness, its actuality and its quality—which no partial, general, abstract fact can ever fully—or consistently—encompass. This is why man is always (and more often than not painfully) forced to abandon his beliefs in order to aptly respond to the situation. If he constructs his whole life, perhaps his whole world, around a belief, he can live for many years, centuries even, without having to do this. But sooner or later he is forced to accept that reality is demanding something else from him, something that conflicts with his ideological position. The usual response in such cases is hypocrisy, to do what needs to be done while adopting the appearance of what needs to be said. Rare is the man or woman who can descend beyond effable belief to its ineffable source and let go of his ideological attachments—even trivial beliefs, such as how his day will go—in order to respond to what the moment demands. This is why so many men are so angry and frustrated; because nothing is going to plan.

The paternalist-fraternalist split, such as it manifests in Western society, can be traced back to the tension between paternalistic Israel and fraternalistic Greece,6 the two ‘pillars of representation’ upon which the West was founded. Today, society has largely dispensed with the hypocritical compromise that official Christianity represented—between Christ the paternal lion, the king who commands us to obey, and Christ the fraternal lamb, the institution which enfolds us within its loving arms—and has split down every imaginable fault-line, either side of which we find some version of paternalism or fraternalism; gender disputes, generational conflicts, political antagonisms, cultural tensions, and that thorny field of contention which touches on them all, the split which we will focus on here, ethnicity or, to take the more straightforward word, folk."

(https://expressiveegg.substack.com/p/folk-and-the-culture-war-1)