Claire Lehmann says that people who talk about “the elites” are the same as Marxists who talk about “the bourgeoisie”. Not so, when we say “the laptop class” that is an idea about the work undertaken and status accrued through it. Marxists never think in this way, it is philosophical idealism. A Marxist thinks about the relation to the means of production—do you own capital or no? That is your class. The idea that the way you work or that your social status changes your relation to reality is idealism; and to say there is a corrupt elite is to suggest there should be a new elite—yet Marxists say History will do away with all elites.
Why does Lehmann make this error? After all, she is not completely stupid. She makes the error because she is lukewarm. This is her act, an act many people live by: I am no extremist, the far left and the far right are the same—I am a sensible person, cautious and clean. It is actually the worst sin, to be uncommitted. In Dante’s Inferno, Canto III, the narrator sees the souls pulled about by the winds—they howl out; yet they are not even in Hell, not even with Charon yet. Who are these souls? Virgil, the guide, tells us: they are those souls who never made a choice, who remained lukewarm, and so are barred from Heaven and Hell for eternity—it is the worst fate, God spits out the lukewarm.
If you want to be a right-wing extremist, you do not need to read any books or adopt any stance. Just say what you see: “I notice there are four Turkish barbers on Broadgate now; they all use this really white fluorescent light, you know. The chap who runs the barbers on Chancery Lane says they deal drugs there—that’s why there are so many clustered together.” “Cor, you’re like some Victorian anthropologist. You can’t go round classifying people like that; are you allowed to say that?” Alternatively: “I went to a roller derby match and the couple in front was this dykey girl with a close-cropped hairdo and she choked her long-haired girlfriend. I mean she really, really choked her hard. I watched. She had her hand right on her neck. Right on her neck all through the game. And, you know, I think the girl with long hair liked it!” “Err, mate, mate…don’t be like that, mate.” “Like what? I went to a roller derby match and that’s what I saw…” “No, yeah, but mate—you sound like Hitler.” Yes, indeed, perhaps you would do better to follow the media so that reasonable centrists can tell you what you saw.
Jesus found himself in trouble for the same reason: he said what he saw—eventually, people crucified him for it. If you refuse to conceal, if you report what you see accurately, you will be called “right wing”—if you are really accurate you become a “right-wing extremist”. There is only reality and the people who deviate from reality, the hypocrites. As soon as you make any commitment to be less hypocritical, in any dimension, you move to the right—to the righteous side. You are no longer a “nice” person, you are a whole person—a controversial person, like Jesus or Hitler, about whom people can never be politely agreeable. “Such a nice chap,” they used to say—now they say, “I never realised, he seemed so nice, but really he was one of those.” What do they mean by such a statement? “One of those”: a whole person, a real person—not just a polite fake.
There are three paths you can choose: the left-hand path, the path of blood and iron; the right-hand path, the path of milk and honey; and the path straight up the middle, the hermaphrodite’s way. The left-hand path will either let you snatch salvation through force of arms—since you will storm Heaven—or else it will damn you to Hell, since you will have unashamedly cheated, lied, and blasphemed your way through life. The right-hand path is for people who pray and keep the laws, even though that seems “boring”—they are kindly and attend church every Sunday and mean it; the highest among them become saints.
The left-hand path usually leads to Hell; yet, as Dante discovers, if you go into Hell, right to the bottom, you can clamber down Lucifer’s fur into Heaven—it all turns the right way up. The suggestion is that those who sweat—perhaps for a long, long time—may eventually work their way out the bottom too. The right-hand path leads to purgatory or paradise, there is not much to say about it: you all know what to do, most do not follow it because it seems too dull and too hard—straight and narrow, you know; it is much easier to be greedy, cheat your fellow man, and wallow in hate. Yet none rejoices more than the angels who see a man turn from that path to the milky path, rare as that is.
The hermaphrodite’s path is the fastest route to salvation, although it is the rarest to take: straight up the middle—yet the path is narrow and sharp like a razor, and if you step off you are destroyed (see, Aleister Crowley and Friedrich Nietzsche). Three prisoners are in their cells: the right-hand path man obeys the rules, writes to his family, and prays for his release—sometimes the guard beats him, the guard has contempt for his milkiness; the left-hand path man smashes his cell and bites the guard—he is thrown into isolation, but he remains proud; and the middle-path man? He walks out—he sees that the cell door was always open, the guard was his own ego.
The door was always open. The other men do not see it because they are lost in illusions about “good” and “bad”—whether they are good, or the world is good. Illusions. The hermaphrodite sees that good and bad interpenetrate, in this operation they achieve non-duality—in fact, if Brouwer is right this may be the fundamental operation that underlies mathematics, reality itself. There is only reality, no good or bad. There are men who say Auschwitz was bad because it caused so much suffering. How can there be God if this happened? Unjustifiable. Other men say it was justified, the Jews are bad—how could Hitler, a man who was so justified, lose? The hermaphrodite says: it is. Other men say the bomb on Hiroshima was justified, it saved Allied lives. And then others say it was cowardice and cruelty, we could have waited them out. Justify. Justify. Justify. This is the prison: men strain and pray for Heaven, for there to be a purpose, for there to be a God—only at the end do they escape their cell; Heaven is at hand, there is no purpose, there is no entity “God”. The hermaphrodite walks straight out: we describe the situation and find it beautiful; it is all beautiful—it is beyond good and evil.
Now, there are people who pervert this path and say: “No good or evil, do what you want—no true or false, do whatever.” What we mean is that there are rules in accountancy, in physics, in religion—yes, yet these are not reality; abide by these rules, yet know you will never see with them—most men try to see with rules, it cannot be done. You will never see with good and evil. Incidentally, women cannot take this path—as the Buddha knew. Women can be nuns or sluts; they cannot be real. You see, women inherently moralise; they cannot see—and the more feminised a society the less it sees; and, indeed, the more it will call the direct route to salvation evil; for women, reality is evil.
Who is not present in this scheme? The people who never make a commitment. Let us list them: lawyers, politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, public intellectuals—Bill Clinton, Obama, Joe Biden. You know who I mean, the unreal people. They are unreal because they follow the letter of the law but not the spirit. You cannot catch them out. They raise their hands and say, “Clean hands! Clean hands!” Technically, perfect—not hateful men, not muggers who push over little old ladies; not saints either, of course (so extreme, all those whips and scourges—irrational). We only talk about “unregulated migration” here, it used to be “undocumented migrants”—immigration has actually gone down, doncha know? If you look at the classification of a migrant in Section 14.8.6.7-1B the chart clearly shows a decrease...
They are beyond Hell these people, they are alive but already dead. They are the uncommitted—the reasonable centrists, the people with a false centre—the genuine Satanists, the concealers. As Dante says, the angels who never picked a side in the war in Heaven are at the gates of Hell—they served the self, not the soul; they served reasonable interest and respectability, as with the Pharisees.
“I couldn’t say that, nobody would take me seriously…I’d lose my job…It would look bad…” Indeed, indeed...no redemption for you though; even the man who rapes and murders little children is redeemable when he has done his time in the pit—Hitler is redeemable, Joe Biden is not; for Hitler was a Luciferian, he made his choice—the choice to storm Heaven—and so will be saved, whereas men like Biden will always be at the gates of Hell; and they will be so because they never put a foot wrong, technically. These people, so “professional”, are irredeemable—less than zero.
E io ch’avea d’error la testa cinta,
dissi: «Maestro, che è quel ch’i’ odo?
e che gent’ è che par nel duol sì vinta?».
Ed elli a me: «Questo misero modo
tegnon l’anime triste di coloro
che visser sanza ’nfamia e sanza lodo.