Dugin: The Great Awakening vs The Great Reset (Review)
Alexander Dugin's 2021 book The Great Awakening vs The Great Reset begins with a discussion of what Dugin believes is a globalist agenda embodied in the slogan "The Great Reset." Dugin argues that the five points presented by King Charles at the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos represent the latest iteration of a worldwide conspiracy to advance liberalism to its final inhuman stage of development. This agenda is also allegedly embodied in Biden's "Build Back Better" slogan which uses Covid-19 as an excuse to accelerate the efforts of globalist elites to "liberate" humanity from all collective identity and eventually replace biological life with cyborgs. Despite recent setbacks, the Trump presidency being the most serious, the liberal elites have not given up, and they continue pushing forward into the post-human future.
As insane as his thesis sounds, Dugin defends it well. Throughout the book, he manages to shift between respectable discussions of history, philosophy, current events, and political gossip. It's not hard to understand why Dugin is both influential and controversial, he has a big agenda and he's not afraid to talk about how it applies to nearly every social media trend.
Alexander Dugin is a Russian philosopher who is thought to have influence with Vladimir Putin. His program, which he calls the "Fourth Political Theory," advocates the overthrow of the uni-polar western liberal international order represented by globalism, capitalism, and modern democracy. Dugin wants to see the rise of a multi-polar world in which Russia experiences an imperial Eurasianist revival defined by Orthodox Christianity and a traditionalist worldview that utterly rejects philosophical materialism.
Dugin traces the liberal ideology that now threatens mankind back to the work of the medieval nominalist philosophers. The nominalists repudiated the philosophical tradition of Plato and most other traditional worldviews. "Nominalism" comes from the Latin word for "name," and the basic idea of the nominalists is that there is no ultimate reality in names. Names are just markers invented by humans, and thus all classifications and collective groupings of things are artificial human creations. For example, there's no such thing as the "white race" because "race" is just a name given to describe a category that we think we perceive. Nominalist logic eventually leads to the idea that the category of "race" is just a human construct and people are ultimately just individuals, therefore there is no reason to speak about race. Dugin argues that medieval nominalism eventually metastasized from being a seemingly obscure philosophical topic to shattering Christendom in the Protestant Reformation. If there is no ultimate reality in categories, if categories are just human constructs, then the individual person is really the only thing that's real. So why shouldn't religion be focused on the individual and his private relationship with God rather than his participation in an artificial collective like the Catholic Church? The church is not as real as the individual Christians who make up the church. It's not hard to see how this logic would eventually evolve into individual people having political rights and capitalistic property rights, but it also extends into the reduction of all individual beings into the individual particles they're composed of (a tendency that's only recently begun to be reversed with quantum physics). Only individuals should have political rights, and only individuals should have the right to own property. Philosophically, the nominalist process culminates in postmodernism and every person having the right to define truth in whatever way they choose. There is no collective identity, there is no universal concept that can bridge people together, because all collective identities and names we use to talk about them are just artificial human constructs with no ultimate reality. Liberals fight for liberty, and liberty means freedom from any repressive collective identity that might stifle individual expression. After all, those repressive collective identities are all just fake human constructions anyway.
How does this relate to modern politics? The weirdness of the current debate over homosexuality and transgender rights is the direct philosophical result of nominalism. If collective identities are artificial and contain no ultimate reality, then the collective identities called "male" and "female" are not real. Anyone who defends the concept of "male" and "female" is now regarded as a fascist in the same way that someone who defended the concept of "race" was a fascist thirty years ago. Modern liberals, and Dugin specifically calls out the Democrats, are destroying the categories we use to make sense of humanity by taking nominalism to its final logical absurdity.
How does this relate to future politics? If race and gender are nothing but artificial collective identities that the individual needs to be liberated from in order to enjoy full freedom, then the next category that individuals need to be liberated from is the artificial category of "human." If categories have no ultimate reality, then "human" has no ultimate reality. Individuals are individuals, and they should not be restricted by the collective concept of what "human" means, nor the obligations humans are said to have. The next liberal battleground is to liberate individuals from being human. The elites are preparing for this next push by laying the technological groundwork for transhumanism, gene editing, artificial intelligence, fusing humans with technology, and the replacement of humans with robots. Perhaps the most immediately dangerous field is genetics. Scientists in China have already created a human-monkey hybrid and other monstrosities. What would our ethical response be if such a creature grew into adulthood? The category of "human" would be seriously eroded. Dugin cites Nick Land as being among the most honest of liberals, a thinker willing to take liberalism to its final "Satanic" conclusion: the abolition of the human subject in favor of a technological singularity.
Nominalism began in England with the philosopher William Occam, and it is in the Anglo-Saxon world that nominalism is strongest. England was at the vanguard of the liberal nominalist revolution until it was supplanted by the more extreme liberalism of its American offspring. Dugin defines America as entirely liberal. American civilization has never known anything except liberalism, and its entire political and cultural atmosphere is just a spectrum of various forms of liberalism. America is at the forefront of history; it is the vanguard nation, center of elite globalism, and driving force behind historical development. It is shocking, therefore, that a resistance against the globalist agenda has now emerged within America. Donald Trump's triumph, and his rallying of half the American population against the latest advancements of the nominalist liberal agenda, has been a blow to the heart of the liberal elite project. While liberal elites expected resistance from "backward" places in Russia, the Middle East, and China, they never expected resistance could emerge so strongly within the bastion of liberalism itself, the United States. According to Dugin, the threat of Trump was so extreme that the elites employed tactics against him that have normally been reserved for backwater Third World countries, like rigging elections and censoring social media. After discussing this, Dugin then bizarrely claims that the liberal Democrats are planning to genocide the conservative population with Covid-19 vaccines, and thus Dugin's cycle from reasonable philosophy professor to QAnon conspiracy theorist is completed.
The Trump movement represents a wing of what Dugin calls "The Great Awakening," which is being driven by the growing realization by people around the world that liberalism is leading them into a post-human world. Religion, nation, and gender are being deconstructed and erased, and artificial intelligence is replacing people's old roles as productive workers in their communities and breadwinners for their families. People are more and more asking: where is this going? The accelerated acceptance of homosexual marriage and enforcement of draconian transgender rights laws, in which parents are denied the right to prevent kids from undergoing transgender mutilation, is awakening people every day to the evils of the liberal project. The only problem with this awakening is that it's various wings are poorly coordinated. The Trumpist resistance wing in deeply opposed to Islam and China, while the Chinese wing is deeply opposed to Islam and all religion. Without any united coordinated effort by all these wings, there's no hope of overthrowing the liberal elite. Dugin proposes the Fourth Political Theory as a framework upon which a coordinated network of ideologically based resistance can be mounted against the abolition of humanity by nominalist liberalism.
While I find myself generally agreeing with what Dugin says about the trajectory of the modern world and its origins in nominalism, I find it difficult to accept his conclusions and proposed solutions. The fundamental problem with Dugin's Fourth Political Theory is that is expressly rejects any ultimate truth claims and argues that civilizations cannot judge other civilizations because there are no universal values that apply across civilizational lines. This is a strange claim coming from someone who advocates an Orthodox Christian revival in Russia. What would Dugin say about the Christian claim that Jesus is the universal king of the world? Dugin claims to seek a return to pre-modern worldviews, and explicitly says we should restore Christianity, and yet ancient Christianity was deeply convinced that there was one universal "catholic" truth that should be applied to all nations. Jesus himself told his followers to make disciples of all nations.
Dugin's conclusions are also strange because they seem to undermine his own attack on nominalism. If the problem with nominalism is that it eliminates collective categories (universals), and thus discards collective universally applicable truth, then Dugin's worldview seems to be making the problem worse. How does "truth" correlate to ultimate reality if its status depends on what civilization you're in? Dugin's worldview undermines its own attack against nominalist liberalism. Dugin repeatedly states that he does not believe in universalism and wants everyone everywhere to attack universalism. However, God created every human from Adam and Eve, and it's both biblically and genetically true that humans share the same ancestors. There's something vaguely preposterous about pretending that truth can't be universal, or that humanity, as a category, doesn't exist. Isn't this the very idea that Dugin claims to be fighting against? The nominalists attack universals, and it seems that Dugin has joined them. The only difference between Dugin and the liberals is that Dugin thinks that words/values/truth are artificial constructs of civilizations rather than individual people. Another problem I see with this attack on universalism, however, is that it just seems to ignore the fact that humans are humans who are perfectly able to love each other and communicate across civilizational lines. It seems to me that the only kind of person who could accept Dugin's argument is someone who's never lived in another civilization.
Nominalism does appear to have been a mistake, despite the many successes it seems to have produced in the realms of material accumulation and technological control. The question that both communism and fascism tried to answer was how we might exist in modernity without deconstructing every collective category and truth we've come to rely upon as human beings? Both ideologies failed when confronted with liberalism. For all its faults, liberalism is powerful. It has overcome every challenger, and the nations that embraced it first have become the masters of the earth. I have a feeling that Dugin's philosophy goes wrong because it aims at too much, it makes a kind of category error by conflating the concept of "liberalism" with too much of what is simply the functioning of the world as God designed it. In one of the appendixes, for example, Dugin argues that European colonialism was the result of post-enlightenment liberalism. This is historically indefensible. The Catholic Christian countries that were least influenced by nominalism, Spain and Portugal, were the creators of the first massive colonial empires. When the Catholic Spanish conquered Mexico, they had no concept of philosophical multi-polarity and quickly exterminated and erased traditional Aztec civilization as they enforced their universalist Christianity on the peoples of the New World.
I sometimes question how much of what Dugin says is stuff he actually believes, and how much is just meant to advance a political agenda. I don't think it's a coincidence that Dugin's philosophy encourages the decline of NATO and the rise of a new Russian imperium. His writing sometimes feels less like an honest assessments of truth and more like philosophically strategic tools justifying a narrow nationalist project. How exactly does one begin with a reasonable assessment of thousands of years of philosophy and then, almost directly, jump straight into claiming the Democrats are planning to genocide the population with Covid vaccines? Is Dugin just a sophisticated troll trying to destabilize any political system that opposes his grand new Eurasianist empire?