Europe has a fascinating tradition to its philosophy, namely the rise and collapse of empires. From Athens, to Rome, to Russia. Our greatest vices produce our greatest virtues, this is the great tribulations which produce radical change. A cycle wherein we find philosophy, religion, spirituality and universality. Each time the tyrant is toppled, it is at the hands of modesty and sacrifice.
It is no coincidence that Christians found their roots in the classics, and that the Marxists found their roots in the Christians. That Plato begets Hegel, that Hegel begets Marx. The cycle of rise and fall continue, each time with its own profound addition.
There is no mystery as to why this is how Europe develops, because Europe was once the poorest of the continents. With cold winters, clement springtime, pine woods and boreal ecosystems. This produced a demand for shelters, fires, cultivated lands, and expansion. This is why the steppes sired Genghis Khan, and why the meadows sired Napoleon Bonaparte. This is what made Europe into the pirates of the world.
But even this imperialism must eventually fall, as the contradictions of exploitation grow more evident each passing day. Just as it did in the Suburas of Rome, and just as it did in the imperial cantons of China. Humanity is anchored to its own intuition, and as dialectical materialism produces a narrative to us, we can study such an intuition.
We can see how there are interesting relationships between people and time, and how such relationships become religion. All religion is typified by a reflective state. It does not occur in scarcity, but rather in surplus. Wherein our labour grows advanced enough to produce a surplus of time. From the Yoga of the Vedics, to the chantries of the Coptics. Religion begins with a kind of Hegelian acuteness, in which we are conscious by our prolonged idleness.
And this produces the spirit, which is the sublime object of the Assagiolian super consciousness, in which we are not only conscious of ourselves, and the world around us, but also the complete lack of distinction between the two. Wherein we develop a new property: Determination.
This spiritual consciousness, when produced in the human psyche, produces a most profound thought: Freedom is restraint. Each day we are driven by impulses, wants and needs. At first glance we cannot tell them apart. To blindly follow these whims is to live arbitrarily, and without realisation. Rather, we grow determined in our capacity of self-denial, in being able to choose who we want to become.
Choice is not about a range of options, but rather to negate those options. If you want to be a sailor, then you must sail. If you want to be a farmer, then you must farm. All other things are things you cannot do. And so it is not by freedom, but rather by restraint, that we find spiritual happiness.
And this consciousness is to be found in most major faiths in some way or other. In Christianity there is sin, which is all the things to avoid. In Buddhism there is Nirvana, which is the only thing to pursue. The same idea, but in inverse principles.
Dialectical materialism thereby is almost like a scientific understanding of this determination, of this spiritual realism. That determination is a two step process. How we are the products of our material conditions, but how we are also given a remarkable capacity: To make the material conditions products of us. A feedback loop which permits our species to grow determined.
This is the dialectic of the spirit, of this superconsciousness. When the conscious animal is cold, it seeks heat. When the superconscious animal is cold, it invents heat.
The labours of cutting wood, and mining flint, and insulating shelter becomes arbitrary to a conscious animal, but to us it is a process of change; A process in which we are both the author and the subject.
And so we naturally begin to examine the world anew, in creator and created. As each human being upon discovering the powers of labour, begins to ask, who was the first worker? Who produced the mountains, and the fields, and the tress and the sun? Where does it all begin?
Each religion has its unique or uncommon aspects, and one very interesting to Christianity is how Christians have a God which has faith in them. A God that says “I shall become mortal and die for you, so that you can have free will. You are not bound to my rules, I simply believe you will follow them.”
And then if you look at the scriptures, more often than not the nature of sin lies in the sin of nature. As Rome was full of orphans, God says to be chaste until marriage. As Rome was full of drunkards, God says to drink in moderation. As Rome was full of nobles, God speaks the parable of the shrewd manager.
As Rome becomes an empire, God delivers revelations, and warns us of how the lamb shall inherit paradise, and how the beast shall inherit ruin. These messages are only as supernatural as you want them to be. Peace and war is as materially grounded as brick and mortar.
And they would have to be. Why else would it resonate with people for so many thousands of years? The greatest religions always speak to two things at the same time, one which you can see, and one which you cannot.
More often than not we see the roots of dialectics more clearly as we examine this, and just why Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and many other Marxists started out with theosophy prior to philosophy. Sin is always built on prediction, and always anticipates consequence. Sometimes it is distorted by prose and esoterics, sometimes it is as plain as day to the modern scholar, but this pattern keeps happening.
Even the afterlife is ambiguous this way, to inherit the kingdom of God. You do not travel there, you do not ascend there, you do not teleport there, but you inherit it. It somehow comes to you.
And I believe this is because individualism needed to invent the cartoonish afterlife of the feudal churches. In a collective sense you would indeed inherit paradise if you ended all wars, ended poverty and pursued compassion. It is a very idealistic notion, but it’s not hard for us to understand.
And it did have some degree of effect, as the Christians did in fact topple Rome. And the most fascinating thing of all is how they did it precisely in the same way as the Bolsheviks toppled Russia. Namely, through community.
Literacy programmes, social programmes, community work, organising, the early Christian churches was full of the radicals, and they saw precisely the same observation each generation makes: Might does not make right; Right makes right.
You do not fight cruelty with more cruelty, nor do you fight reaction with more reaction. You do not fight hunger with hunger, nor war with war. What made the revolutionaries of Russia successful was not hate, but the opposite; How for the first time in their lives, many of them had experienced profound compassion.
For the first time someone had paid attention to their needs, repeated their voices, published their writing. They were shown a life so profoundly radical that they would sooner die than to return to the bitter destitution of monarchism. It wasn’t about killing the enemy, it was about living among friends. To, for the first time, experience this great determination. To pursue one’s potential and vision, and to find emancipation on such grounds.
Wealth, in the Stoic sense of the word, which is to say wealth of culture, philosophy, knowledge and honour, is not very different from economic poverty. What separates the two is rather masterhood, and who determines. Poverty shapes you precisely into what is desired by the master, whether such a master is a capitalist or a landlord. Inversely, wealth shapes you precisely into what is desired by the master, but the master is you.
But the freedom of being an inert wastrel, of blind hedonism, of cannibal greed and verdant instincts has never been a freedom we desire. If it was, then history would never have been written. Rather, it is this higher freedom, this higher determination, this death and rebirth of the proletariat under the tyranny of empires, that become a universal thing, and a vision which may be pursued by all.
This is the unseen force behind class struggle.
