The Universal Man Problem (Answering Hunky Haggis)

A long overdue response to a super chat

Long-time supporter and fan ‘‘Hunky Haggis’’ sent me a super chat months ago for the Classic Movies stream, and since then, I’ve consistently forgotten to read it out, to my shame. This is because streaming presents me with all manner of technological points of failure to worry about, and I tend to be distracted and overly eager to bring the stream to a close without seeing ‘‘F’’ floating up the chat.

Nevertheless, I’d never want supporters to think I take them for granted, so I decided to write a brief response here for Mr Haggis.

The question was:

In scientific discovery, one is observing a field of data, and isolating the important natural law which explains all the secondary effects found below it, thus knowledge can be thought of as a pyramid, which the natural law at the top and the unimportant data at the bottom. European man excels at science as it requires the ability to think in universals and abstracts. However, geo-politically having a "universal man" is insane. How do we get back to thinking just about us?

It’s a perennial question for right-wingers and traditionalists, the answers to which vary greatly. One of the reasons I became so enamoured with Oswald Spengler’s thought is that he grapples with this ‘‘Faustian Spirit’’ at great length. Conversely, the Elite Theorists would argue that we merely need to change our rulers, dissolve Globalist institutions, and, in grain, top-down on the masses, a more localized mode of thinking.

It just so happens that I’m reading HG Wells's War of the Worlds at the moment, and the evening before writing this article, I came across this passage in Wells's classic.

And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation, creeps upon them.

And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

Wells was, of course, a prominent Fabian, and he literally wrote the book New World Order. My video is here, now algorithmically crippled and slapped with a warning about Conspiracy Theories. HG Wells is the epitome of the highly intelligent European Man who dreams and ponders a world of universal laws and technocratic institutions spanning the world for the common good of all. Yet, writing half a century before Marcusian Marxism would enter the American university system, we can see clearly that Wells is imbued with what today might be called ‘‘white guilt’’ over the manner in which Europeans destroyed Tasmanians. So much so that Wells asks whether the Martians who invaded the world were any different from the Europeans who colonized it.

Wells is not incorrect about the Tasmanians either. Between 1800 and 1830, the native population of Tasmania was utterly decimated by the British Empire. Yet, the fact that Europeans could set foot on Tasmania at all required all manner of technical ingenuity and abstract thinking, but any universal moral code would have appeared to have been wholly absent. Hence Wells’ suggestion that we were to the Tasmanians as the Martians were to us.

Today, Wells’ successors would call this ‘‘white supremacy’’. From the perspective of Scottish colonists heading to Tasmania, they were indeed thinking about their own interests, though probably more on a personal or family level. When they eagerly began farming the land of Tasmania they were indifferent to the fact the land was already occupied.

There’s a contradiction here. A question: are we actually inherently universalist?

HG Wells went on to draft the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted after his death. One grand constitution to rule them all, one vision of Man as inherently interchangeable and of equal worth. Politically, this is the equivalent of the iPhone or one of Elon Musk’s spaceships in relation to the common man in that it’s not something he would construct or conceive of his own accord.

The core European population finds itself beset by adjuncts and offshoots of their own nature, often with a great deal of out-group interference and cynical exploitation. However, the universalist impulse is largely an external imposition rather than emergent within Europeans themselves; it is an impulse, not the impulse. Most people care more about the puppy down the street than whatever horrors Africans are facing.

It is almost as if some grotesque bargain afflicts our souls and destiny wherein we gained all of the world’s knowledge and created unfathomably intricate and complex societies, only to lose ourselves within the morass and struggle to find our way out. To be oppressed and brutalized by our own creations as out-groups succeed in hacking the system and rewiring it.

It is no surprise that the more the universalists demand of us, the more totalitarian they become and the more paranoid and intrusive their methods. Decade after decade of overt social engineering and education systems dripping with white-guilt indoctrination, and the best they can manage is hate speech laws and closed bank accounts because, as an old friend was fond of saying, ‘‘They’re working against nature’s grain, we work with it!’’.

We can think of it as the ‘‘World-city’’ complete with its devotion to purely abstract modes of thought imposing itself on the man of the land, disrupting his Being. Populism across the West, as incoherent and toothless as it is, still represents the manifesting of a spirit in opposition to the cosmopolitanism of the city. In essence, it says, ‘‘Leave us alone!’’ which is the antithesis of universalism.

To return to Hunky Haggis’s question, then, how do we just care about ourselves again? The answer is to remove the current leaders and institutions with the aim of allowing us to breathe again. To tear out the calipers wired into our brains, with their incessant buzzing babbling, and to be whole and complete on our land once again.

I cannot help but note the bitter irony of HG Wells citing the Martians in their technologically advanced tripods as representing European Man; in the end, they represented people like himself.