Conservatives, in the broadest sense of that word, will occasionally protest that they are the “real progressives”, by which they mean that any real advance in science or technology—even in social affairs—comes about through an engagement with reality, and this engagement is inherently rightist; even the Soviet KGB was rightist in nature—hierarchical, disciplined, elitist—it was just that it was put to perverted ends; it persecuted the productive, responsible, and honest sectors of Soviet society instead of the society’s external enemies—yet, being one of the few functional Soviet institutions, it fell to the KGB, to Putin, to take over when Russia was in collapse; the Communists could not govern without a rightist element, and in the end it was—with the military—the only functional element of society.
This approach does not work for conservatives, because it is an attempt at rhetoric and the right is almost entirely anti-rhetorical; by “progress” the left always means social progress, by which it means the flattening of hierarchies—it claims that this is synonymous with technical and scientific advance, but this is obviously not so. Socialist countries have not been more technically innovative—the USSR was first into space thanks to its Germans, not its Marxists. The idea of progress, particularly in the technical and scientific sense, is intrinsic to Indo-Aryan identity and the left-hand path of esotericism. As I noted yesterday, the left-hand path is associated with war and violence—with the Gnostic desire to become as gods, to snatch the golden apples of Hesperides and be a modern Prometheus, to snatch the knowledge of the gods. War is often synonymous with the left-hand path because it grants unrestricted advance in technology—existential competition promotes advance in technology—and so moves the Promethean towards tech-gnosis.
I noted that National Socialism contained a Promethean element; the relay organised for the Berlin Olympiad was an act of Promethean symbolism, with the flame run from Greece to Germany—a symbolic demonstration of the Greek legacy transferred to Germany. Yet this Olympian aspiration is not only “Nazi”. The British Conservative Party, for example, used the torch as its logo during the Thatcher years; a moment when it was at its most “progressive”, engaged in financial and technological experiment. The torch also represents tradition—the relay torch, the torch passed between the generations. Further, the Statue of Liberty also carries the torch of Prometheus. In short, the Promethean ideal—the left-hand path of war and god-like gnosis—is wider than just “the Nazis” and is also characteristic of the Indo-Aryans as a people.
On another level, the film director Ridley Scott understands this very well. His prequels to the Alien film series start with Prometheus and the entire series plays with the recursive tension between the creator and the created, with the created on a search for the creator and, eventually, surpassing the creator. Hence the Indo-Aryan race is created by “the Engineers” a race of grey giants that represent the war-like giants of the Book of Enoch, to whom the Indo-Aryans are supposed to be related—the Nephilim. This interrelation is reflected by the name of the main corporation in Alien, Weyland-Yutani Corp; Weyland is the smith of the gods, his forge makes weapons and the Weyland Corporation seeks the original Xenomorph (“the Alien”) to use as a weapon: war as progress. A tension exists between the Engineers and their creation, the Indo-Aryans, and the creation-child of the Indo-Aryans, the androids “David” and “Ash”. Hence Scott’s films speak to the Indo-Aryan psyche at a deep level and reflect the Luciferian and Faustian desire to achieve parity with the gods through the technology of war.
It should further be noted that Ridley Scott’s brother made the original Top Gun, another elitist and militaristic film—and both brothers started work in advertising, representing a symbiosis between aesthetic commercial competition and militaristic rivalry that is characteristic of conservatism more generally and the Indo-Aryan tradition in particular, the tradition of merciless beauty.