A National Project vs A National Ideology
At this point, I think that most people who read this blog understand that I’m very against political ideologies and think that people who promote them ought to be publicly stoned to death.
I believe that a commitment to core principles and truth-seeking ought to suffice.
I’m particularly partial to the principle of Strength and its pursuit on an individual and societal level as opposed to, say, Freedom or Equality.
But what about a national project as opposed to a national ideology?
Ah, now we’re talking.
A national project manifests when a society makes a decision (a society’s elites, really) to commit its resources to achieving something. By resources I mean yes, raw resources, but also manpower, money, energy and the brightest minds that the society can produce.
Many ancient Greek city-states devoted a large portion of their resources to thinking about stuff. They created academies and sent their brightest minds to these places of learning to figure out philosophy and other big-brained things. The cultural product of ancient Greece was so high-quality and awe-inspiring that it remains the foundation for our understanding of the world today. These people literally invented the language with which we conceptualize and think about things. Quite the legacy, no?
Other Greeks, however, pursued different national projects.
The Spartans, most famously, devoted themselves to war. Everything that they built and dedicated resources to was related to the military craft. Their brightest minds were sent to become officers. The national project of Sparta was the creation of a military machine. They too have served as an inspiration for many subsequent national projects. In Leningrad, after the revolution, they outlawed kitchens and forced people to eat at collective communal cantinas (stolovayas). They probably got the inspiration for that idea from Sparta as well.
There are many national projects that could be worth pursuing going forward.
The Chinese appear to be committed to building a casino empire in every single country that they colonize and yearn to reach new heights of commercial amusement by investing into cutting-edge pachinko technology. A worthy goal, no doubt.
America, based on the amount of money and minds that it has devoted to this sector, appears to be committed to the project of automizing literally every single job out of existence and then creating an AI virtual cyber control-grid that every single jobless person on earth will then be plugged into and forced to watch nonstop Holocaust documentaries while being intravenously fed corn syrup and bug burgers.
But what about Russia?
Well, if Russia decides to create a national ideology, the following will happen:
Dogmas need to be enforced. That means the secret police/faith militant will be sic’d on anyone who doubts the new faith. By creating a national ideology, they will automatically make a certain swath of the population their enemy, because no people is so homogenous in their beliefs that they can all, to a man, accept a new dogma unquestioningly. The more ridiculous the dogma, the more heretics that will have to be sent to re-education camps, eventually. We have seen this before.
Russia will be hobbled. Everything will have to be run through a council of self-styled priests who will decide whether or not any course of action is in accordance with the accepted dogma of the state. In exchange for ideological rigidity, Russia will lose her ability to simply do what is in the nation’s and the people’s best interests. We also have seen this before.
Colossal amounts of resources will be wasted on trying to bend reality to the constraints of the new ideology. A new dark age will descend on the country. We see this happening all over the West right now.
But a national project is quite different.
Ideally, it will lean into Russia’s natural strengths and not work against the national and cultural grain of society.
Me, I’m quite fond of the military. I believe that martial values impart a positive influence on the peasantry and work to raise the general morals of society. I say Russia ought to devote all of her resources, that is, her raw resources and her greatest minds, into creating the most powerful military that the world has seen yet. Then, and this is the crucial point, Russia needs to actually use her accumulated power against everyone and anyone that stands in her way.
The Soviet Union, in contrast, spent decades stockpiling the world’s greatest arsenal only to not use it when push came to shove because the Party Nomenklatura, like in Orwell’s famous book Animal Farm, realized that they had more in common with the Western Elites than their own people.
No doubt, the fact that many of them hailed from the same shtetl in Poland played a significant role in this realization.
Actually, Comrade Andropov outlined this armistice in his musings on “Convergence”. Despite being seen as a hard-liner, Andropov was the first (to my knowledge) who spoke of the need for the Western and Eastern elite to find common ground and eventually merge. He was either a prophet or privy to information that the general public was not.
But hey, I’m not wedded to the total war of all against all idea.
Maybe a better national project is to commit to a plan to colonize Europa and Titan.
Europa off Jupiter
Titan off Saturn
Russia better move fast with that plan because the Mormons might colonize space first in their search for the planet Kolob.
Frankly, a plan to colonize Siberia might be more realistic though. Both Stolypin and Solzhenitsyn believed that Russia’s future lay in the vast eastern hinterlands and thought that the Jeffersonian ideal of a vast, continental agrarian nation of land-owning peasants suited Russia well.
Urbanites refuse to reproduce at a replacement rate and housing in Russia’s big cities is sub-par and unaffordable anyways.
So yeah, colonizing Siberia with homestead family units isn’t a bad idea.
Putin is a big fan of Stolypin, by the way. He created the Medal/Order of Stolypin and quotes him often. Solzhenitsyn considered Stolypin to be Russia’s best hope of staying off the revolution and the other disasters that beset Russia in the 20th century. Stolypin was murdered by an ethnic banker terrorist in Ukraine. This assassination was carried out with the knowledge of the secret police.
These facts are all related, no doubt.
Another very interesting and intriguing article. Thank you for posting. Colonising and populating Siberia while developing a strong military to defend it from the Chinese, the West and the Africans (the 21st century demographic time bomb) sounds like an excellent national project for Russia and the Russians. I hope Putin reads your blog... ;-)
The lack of a national project is what's killing the West. Through the early 70s, we had one - exploring and colonizing space. Then the boomers lost their nerve, we spent the next five decades paddling around in the shallow end in Low Earth Orbit, and have yet to emerge from those doldrums. Space is dangerous you know. Safety first, children!
Key thing for a national project is that it has to be inspiring and exciting. "We're gonna automate everything" doesn't cut it - there's no glory there. But I don't think that's exactly the West's ersatz national project; it seems that globalists are trying to use DIE/ESG to fill that hole (solar panels everywhere! built by gay mulattoes!) But there's nothing in that of the heroic, therefore no ability to unify; as you pointed out, it's really more of an ideology than a project.