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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   37010 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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To be clear: Russian Cosmism is no more nationally Russian than a roulette can be. To wit, it may be a particularly telling expression of an archetype in the national soul, which is how the label got earned from third parties, but that's it – unlike Tseghakronism or Kızıl Elma or German National Socialism or «White Man's Burden» or any other particularist doctrine. Fedorov did derive his ideas from the Eastern Orthodoxy (and devoted a fraction of his writing to criticism of other faiths), pointificated on Heartland peoples vs Atlanticists and even saw value in Romanovs' Autocracy; but in principle – he cared more about Russia for two explicit reasons. First was his belief that problems he wanted humanity as a whole to address are especially urgent in his homeland. Second was the impression that it's easier to make Russians aware of it. Consider some excerpts from «The question of Brothership, or Kinship, The reasons for non-brotherlike, non-familial, i.e. non-peaceful state of the world, and the means to reconstruction of the kinship: a note from non-scientists to scholars, spiritual and secular, to believers and unbelievers» (he was very verbose):

[…] These two types of social system (organism-like and Trinity-like), one in full bloom, the other in its infancy, are represented at present by England or the West in general, and by Russia (if only Russia has not yet been finally Europeanized) and all the agricultural peoples, respectively. The second type, an embryo for now, belongs to all without exception, because it is truly human and truly divine (in God lies its full reality); but this type was preserved mostly with the backward peoples, among the savages, in the provinces.

The West, with England at its head, considers the doctrine of the Trinity to be the most anti-philosophical doctrine, and for some reason even mystical. Had Christ said «I am not in You and You are not in Me, and those in eternal discord, outside of us, let them be» or «I versus you and you versus me,» etc. – then this doctrine would not be mystical and anti-philosophical, because no other unity, except economic and legal, is now accepted, and the struggle in all forms is considered the condition of progress. Russia wants (if only it wants?) to be that which the West has rejected and cast off; and if it accepts this model (turns to it consciously), it will assume only a duty, an obligation, and, while in this case it must serve as a frame for unification in the image of the Triune God (i.e. for the revelation of the kinship of all mankind), it cannot already be a party, a side, it must avoid war and direct its activity to the removal of the causes of enmity, and above all, in itself, of course.

If Russia is compelled to wage war, it cannot consider itself righteous either, for to become the belligerent party means to lose brotherhood, although this may be mitigated by generosity and unselfishness. The fault of Russia lies in the fact that the social type, which the inheritance of the tribal contains, is not completely expressed in the structure of the society or the state, and is not even properly formulated; on the contrary, we imitate the Western example, which is not peculiar to us. According to the western view, which has lost consciousness of the true aim, the aim of uniting people is to achieve material and moral well-being; but this is impossible for a society organized like an organism, for this system is essentially immoral; in this system the majority is made a mechanical tool, with the reward for unilateralism in beautiful clothes and similar goods, and the right at leisure, if there is a desire, to give opinions about anything; a small minority is given to cognitive work. […]

Our task is quite different; it is not invented, not contrived, it cannot be for us an object of pride […]; the whole of our advantage lies only in the fact that we have preserved the most primitive form of life, with which a truly human existence began, i.e. the tribal life. It is based on the fifth commandment, and yet we have survived the death of the ancestors! The only sin we have not committed is that the whole nation has not yet renounced the paternal covenant. Christianity, we might say, has given final form to the fifth commandment; and in this final form the fifth commandment is the very essence of Christianity. The revelation of the eternal birth of the Son is that the Son, being born as the Spirit proceeds, and being both separate persons, are not, however, separated from the Father, but remain with Him in inseparable unity; This is the opposite of the Universe, which has not yet attained self-consciousness through man, Universe in which every succeeding part absorbs the preceding part in order to be absorbed in turn, and where life, because of the isolation of the worlds, cannot be expressed except by the succession of generations; the individual sentient and conscious person dies, and only the race lives, it alone does not die, does not vanish, is preserved. With the fifth commandment comes a new era in the universe, new relationship between subsequent and previous, between fathers and children, and in Christianity this commandment changes into the commandment about the resurrection, the duty to parents is not limited only to piety, whether European or Chinese; and the consequence of this commandment will be not longevity, but immortality.

[...] This is why the duty to parents cannot be limited to reverence alone. Christianity eliminates this flaw in the Old Testament commandment, turning the matter of desperation into a matter of hope, a matter of resurrection, and from the duty of resurrection derives the very duty to children. Children are the hope of the future and of the past, for the future, i.e. the resurrection, is the turning of the past into the present, into the actual. And brotherly love can only get a firm basis in the resurrection, because only this will unite every generation in working for a common goal, and the closer this work will come to it, the more brotherhood will strengthen, because the resurrection is the restoration of all the intermediary degrees, which make us, brothers, one clan, likening our kind to that inseparable unity in which the Father, Son and Holy Spirit dwell. If our kin has disintegrated and we have turned into kinsmanlike peoples and estates, and if the same process of disintegration continues within peoples, estates and individual societies themselves, the reason for this phenomenon must be sought in the absence, in the lack of a firm basis, i.e. of a common goal and common work; and there is and can be no other high goal, natural, unfashioned, unartificial, except the resurrection of fathers, or in other words the restoration of universal love.

It's not just transhumanism. It addressed directly some problems of futurism we are seeing now, and demanded an ethical system that would put humans first. Not «utility», not «hypothetical conscious beings», not «civilization» or «nation» but humans who live now and have ever lived. Compare this to William MacAskill, this British Socrates of our times, the champion of Western Transhumanism, who implores of us to think of the world where not only our fathers but all of us are dust and the Race lives on, collecting utility points; who sees no value even in cryonics. Then, compare it to SecureSignals, who is a white nationalist and very much not an Effective Altruist, here – and you may have an idea as to why Cosmism is specified as «Russian».

Karlin himself advocated for reinventing it as the basic firmware for the state ideology, but it's in line with our perpetual search for the national idea, which is to say, attempts to insert stuff you personally like or consider advantageous, like some cartridge, into the top-down indoctrination machine. In the same way we have «Russian libertarianism», «Russian national liberal democracy» (no, that's not LDPR) and whatever. Consider his glib buzzwordization of the topic, which reeks of his Californian background:

From RNS [Russian National State] [...] to RSI (Russian Space Empire):

Second, we need to build a truly inspiring national myth, instead of today's #CrimeaOurs (which automatically reminds us that even Novorossiya is not ours) and the Cult of the Great Victory (which began during the Brezhnev stagnation and reached its apogee under Putin; rapidly transforming into a multinational festival that interests only Soviet dinosaurs and nobody else).

It is necessary to look not only into the past, but into the future: it is necessary to revive Russian Cosmism as a state ideology.

Cosmism is in fact transhumanism – but more authentic, older, and without transgender connotations.

Cosmism, it is: Explosion propelled craft, Martian colonies, radical life extension, cryonics, robots, automation, universal income, bionics, Internet of Things, cryptocurrency, deep web and the Great Silk Road, Robin Hanson's age of ems, technological singularity.

Cosmism is also AI and genetic augmentation of intelligence – the two most important components.

I note that there is no contradiction between the implicit Reactionary nature of the RNS and the bright future of the RSI.

We are not the same, as the meme goes.

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