I would like to note again out of necessity: this account has nothing to do with the real Benoist, as it is not curated or run by him at all. This is just an account that was made by one of his many readers. Benoist's only official account is this:
@alaindebenoist
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--Editor.
Please note that most of Benoist' excerpts which are shared here with you are almost entirely taken out of context. Some of them might be taken from, say, an essay Benoist wrote 15–30 years go. The man wrote more than 5000 articles and 75 books, and gave more than 380 interviews.
Modernity has given birth to the most empty civilisation mankind has ever known: the language of advertising has become the paradigm of all social discourse; the primacy of money has imposed the omnipresence of commodities; man has been transformed into an object of exchange in
Thus modernity has given birth to the most empty civilization mankind has ever known. The language of advertising has become the paradigm of social discourse; the primacy of money has imposed the omnipresence of commodities; man has been transformed into an object of exchange
This overvaluation of intelligence is quite typical of modern societies. It was foreign to the European mentality throughout most of our history. The Homeric hero, the medieval knight, the French gentilhomme, the English gentleman, or the Spanish caballero,
Europe seems to be now in decline at all levels. The very construction of Europe is melting away before our eyes. Not only is Europe the “sick man on the economic planet” (Marcel Gauchet); it is also facing an unprecedented crisis of intelligence and political will.
The Right has lost its main enemy: communism. The Left has chosen to collaborate with its own: capitalism. As a result, the Right can no longer mobilise its voters by denouncing the “red menace,” while the Left can no longer rally its own by proposing “to change society.”
Today, everyone looks at the same films, listens to the same music, lives in the same kind of houses. This is something that greatly concerns me. I have traveled a great deal, and every year I see the world becoming more similar. I call this the ideology of sameness.
The French population has lost the sense of belonging to a community. The rioters have one, or think they have one. The French identity crisis has ancient roots. It is the result of the influence of an ideology that is both individualistic and universalist
Every language is a code, and this code determines categories of thought. George Orwell had shown it well in 1984: that he who controls the power to define the words also controls the minds.
The coup d'état of February 22, 2014, also known as "Euro-Maidan," was prepared, organized, and financed by the United States – the American political scientist Georg Friedman called this the "least veiled coup d'état in history" – and its aim was not to help Ukraine achieve
Every language is a code, and this code determines categories of thought. George Orwell had shown it well in 1984: that he who controls the power to define the words also controls the minds.
We are in a society which thinks that nothing is worse than death, especially not slavery. The disadvantage is that this type of society always ends up dying. After having been enslaved.
#Benoist
Historically, the philosophy of the Enlightenment first of all attacked organic communities, whose way of life they denounced as ridden with irrational “superstitions” and “prejudices,” in order to replace them with a society of individuals.
courage, a sense of honor, disinterestedness, generosity, fidelity to one’s word, will, decisiveness, sensitivity, creativity, etc., all qualities that have nothing to do with intelligence per se.
#Benoist
How has the Right, naturally attached to conservation, been able so consistently to support a capitalist system so destructive of what it means to conserve?
The stupidity of people on the left who believe that you can fight capitalism in the name of ‘progress’ is matched by the stupidity of people on the right who want to defend both ‘traditional values’ and the market that undermines them.
#Benoist
The responsibility for current immigration lies primarily, not with the immigrants, but with the industrialised nations which have reduced man to the level of merchandise that can be relocated anywhere.
#Benoist
I am one of those who have had the sad privilege of having seen the disappearance of a (French) civilization and a (Christian) religion in the space of a generation. To this can be added the end of the rural world, the en-framing of the world,
The societies that emphasise the importance of security and comfort and are averse to risk-taking are societies in which masculine values are on the decline. ‘Make love, not war’ is a feminine slogan that can be explained as follows: ‘Make love to us, not war upon one another’.
We have a choice between left and right liberalism, which is the same as the choice between Pepsi and Coca Cola . . . Living in an Orwellian society, we must realize that today's promotion of "diversity" is actually leading to its decline.
The Right talks a great deal about defending its “identity,” but it generally has a hard time defining it. Most of the time, its identity is about not being what it condemns. It is the existence of its enemies that defines the R's own existence, a negative existence, a contrario.
In the age of globalisation, liberalism no longer presents itself as an ideology, but as a global system of production and reproduction of men and commodities, supplemented by the hypermodernism of human rights.
Liberalism considers men interchangeable because it only conceives of them in an abstract, generic manner, as beings unattached to the Earth, free of all community, and detached from all belonging, this break being in liberalism’s eyes the very condition of their “emancipation.”
The issue of identity does not return; it simply emerges. In traditional societies, the question of identity does not even arise. It begins to arise in modern times because the landmarks are fading, and more and more people are questioning who they are and what they belong to.
The biggest victory of the system is to have persuaded everybody not of its qualities, but of its fatal character. The system doesn't claim to be perfect; it claims that there're no other alternatives. If one cannot dream of a better world, then there is nothing that can be done.
Universities are increasingly isolating their students from the realities of existence. They act as the extension of the familial cocoon with false impressions of ‘life’. This is why, despite having reduced the illiteracy rate, compulsory education has done very little
1/ Modernity has not liberated man from his original familial belonging or from local, tribal, corporative or religious attachments. It has only submitted him to other constraints, which are harsher, because they are further away, more impersonal, & more demanding: a mechanistic,
The Americans, who of course never bombed civilians (Hiroshima), never attacked a sovereign country (Iraq), never illegally invaded a country (Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia) & did not recently bomb a European capital (Belgrade), reacted [to Putin] with the usual tactics of
In 1973, shortly before his death, French President Georges Pompidou confessed to opening the gates to immigration at the request of many leading businessmen, such as Francis Bouygues, who was eager to take advantage of an obedient and cheap labor,
"Liberalism has undermined civilization; it has destroyed religions, it has ruined homelands. Primitive peoples didn't know liberalism. For them, the world was a unique experience that a man shared with another man.
You understand absolutely nothing about modern civilization unless you first admit that it is a universal conspiracy against all interior life.
#Bernanos
which the countryside is abandoned for unliveable suburbs & monstrous megalopolises, & where the solitary individual merges into an anonymous & hostile crowd, while traditional social, political, cultural or religious mediations become increasingly uncertain & undifferentiated.
The right has abandoned the nation so as not to displease the multinationals, the left has abandoned the people by rallying for the market society. All are supporters of human rights & the liberalization of capital, all of them pursue convergent policies when they come to power.
The ideology of progress is a rationalist ideology that gives excessive importance to technology and science, since both help the production of new things. The result of all this is the disappearance of the sacred, together with the impoverishment of traditions and customs.
The New Right has never preached a “return” to paganism or a “return” to roots, or a return to anything for that matter. Instead, we wish to go beyond current society, but we wish to envision the future through the lens of a clear consciousness of the past.
The authority is becoming more and more maternal, albeit maternal in a way of a possessive mother eager to maintain its subjects in total dependency. The unilateral relationship with the state replaces the ancient social bonds. This hygienic control augurs social control.
The great intellectual and ideological revolutions, which are formed first in the mind, are silent revolutions. They are unleashed without noise, without violence, and their effects are permanently observed. Ideas walk "on dove's wings."
a context of mean hedonism; technology has ensnared the life-world in a network of rationalism—a world replete with delinquency, violence, & incivility, in which man is at war with himself & against all, i.e., an unreal world of drugs, virtual reality & media-hyped sports, in
Each egalitarian and universalist ideology is necessarily totalitarian, because it aims at reducing all social and spiritual reality to a single model. Thus, monotheism implies the idea that there is only one truth, one God, one type of man who could please God.
Conservative revolutionaries are thinkers or political actors (Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Othmar Spann, Albrecht Erich Günther, Ernst Jünger, Artur Mahraun, etc.) who consider, contrary to nineteenth-century conservatism,
The Pope presents unified humanity as a goal to be reached ("let us dream as one and the same humanity"), the cosmopolitan city as a redemption, as if the division of the world into nations, cultures and peoples were a historical accident that it would be possible to erase.
1/ Stripped of its traditional mediation, society is becoming more fluid and more fragmented, which only makes it easier to objectify it. You live in it suddenly and quickly. With the real disappearance of the main collective ideas that were once carriers of various worldviews,
Modern man has abandoned myth and it has abandoned him, and he is orienting himself toward a modality of life that will never reflect anything but his own finitude and leave him no other possibility but meeting his own «reflection»—in other words, meeting himself.
Former Czech President Václav Klaus has spoken the unvarnished truth: "As a hostage of NATO, Ukraine has been from the beginning only a pawn on a much larger chessboard."
Actually, for Western culture, the time of rebirths is over. It's no longer time for “betterers of the world” (Weltbesserer), for plebeian demagogues, but for cold, impersonal, “Prussian” Caesars. It's the time for “heroic realism,” for the desperate defense of conquered posts.
Totalitarian regimes forbade any protest (this was called dictatorship); liberal democracies are content to make it impossible (this is called governance).
#Benoist
Liberalism undoes nations and systematically destroys their sense of history, tradition, loyalty and value. Instead of helping man to elevate himself to the sphere of the superhuman, it divorces him from all ‘grand projects’ by declaring these projects ‘dangerous’ from the view
I personally do not expect anything from politics in general, nor from an election (even if it is presidential) in particular. I think the system is too rotten, too necrotic to the bone, to be transformed in depth by the game of ballot boxes.
The international law issued by the Peace of Westphalia 1648 is today equally turned upside down by the ideology of human rights, which justifies the right (or the duty) of ‘humanitarian interference’, i.e. preventive war, formerly seen as nearly identical to a war of aggression.
The U.S. praises the advantages of competition, but hates having competitors. They also hate the idea of a multipolar world. Having emerged victorious from World War II as great victors, their foreign policy is to thwart the rise of rival powers
Modernity will not be transcended by returning to the past, but by means of certain pre-modern values in a decisively postmodern dimension. It is only at the price of such a radical restructuring that anomie and contemporary nihilism will be exorcised.
#Benoist
When Nietzsche says that “The future belongs to those with the longest memory,” what he means is that Modernity will be so overburdened by memory that it will become impotent. That’s why he calls for the “innocence” of a new beginning, which partly entails oblivion.
The clean slate (tabula rasa) today has two names: "cancel culture" and "transhumanism." Jean-Claude Michéa is right when he says that Cancel Culture is the "indispensable complement to the roller of the liberal market economy."
1/ Sometimes [the Right] claims to be opposed to modernity, but it continues to support the most modernizing system that has ever existed. Wanting to be spiritual, it finds nothing to criticize in the materialist logic of interest and profit.
I was at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, where I saw a quotation from President Reagan that went something like this: “There are no limits to growth or human happiness if people can freely choose their dreams.” What does that mean? Nothing.
Why does liberal theory deny the existence of peoples? Because it is based on an anthropological base that is both “economist” and individualist. Historically speaking, liberal modernity corresponds to the moment when society is no longer posited as first,
Wherever the "American way of life" has taken root, in Europe, Asia or Africa, nations have lost their identity, peoples have been "decultured"; the subtlest, but also the safest, form of genocide.
#Benoist
1/ Globalization is not what Ernst Jünger called the “universal state,” constituted by the progressive fusion of the “red star” and the “white star,” i.e., the East and the West. Globalisation is the result of a modernisation which takes the form of a structural adjustment
We will say that a society and a people are in good shape when: 1) they remain aware of their cultural and historical origins; 2) they can come together around a mediator, individual or symbolic, capable of bringing together energies and catalysing the will of destiny;
Certainly in the society of individualism the dominant opinion is that there is nothing worse than death (especially because for most of our contemporaries there is nothing after).
1/ God is dead, but the modern world continues to claim him as its authority, precisely because it cannot and does not want to rid itself of his carcass. All Western "humanism," according to Levinas' phrase, is passing through a "secularization of Judeo-Christianity"—
The American nation was born in the era of modernity, in a contractual form that evokes the primitive scene imagined by Freud: the children unite to kill the father, then conclude a contract between them sanctioning their mutual equality.
Liberal society is both a society of individuals and a market society where economic reason subordinates all social relations and which it makes the site of generalized competition, of the war of all against all, where everyone wants to maximize his own interest at the expense
In the compassionate climate of the empire of the Good, everyone wants to be a victim: the era of victims has replaced that of heroes. The status of victim authorizes anything, as soon as one can instrumentalize political correctness and the ideology of “human” rights.
#Benoist
that in the present conditions, only a revolution can preserve what deserves to be preserved. Their basic idea is that conservatism should not seek to preserve the past, but what is eternal. We could say: maintain the flame and not keep the ashes.
#Benoist
greater democracy, but to westernize it & turn it against Russia. It had succeeded in deposing President Yanukovych, who had been democratically elected in 2010, & in bringing power to a pro-Western group whose first legislative act was to abolish Russian as an official language.
The true wealth of the world is first and foremost the diversity of its cultures and peoples.
The West’s conversion to universalism has been the main cause of its subsequent attempt to convert the rest of the world: in the past, to its religion (the Crusades);
The essence of capitalism is the limitless, the "always more," the negation of limits and borders, the negation of measure, and first of all of human measure. Its fundamental characteristic is its orientation towards endless accumulation in the double sense of the term:
in which the countryside is abandoned for unliveable suburbs and monstrous megalopolises, and where the solitary individual merges into an hostile crowd, while traditional social, political, cultural or religious mediations become increasingly uncertain and undifferentiated.
The degree of homogeneity of today's Western societies [in thought and behaviour] far exceeds that of the totalitarian societies of the last century.
#Benoist
“Capitalism,” Liberalism,” Marxism,” “Communism,” etc., are stages on one and the same path to the mechanization of all human associations, a path that leads—as only the blind would fail to see—to a collectivist destination. Ludwig
#Klages
Jean Baudrillard recently [1996] remarked that “all cultures worthy of this name lose themselves in the universal. All cultures which universalise themselves lose their singularity and die.
My position is simple: like the majority of French people, I am resolutely hostile to immigration. To immigration but not to immigrants. I have no moral hostility towards them, any more than I have towards their cultures of origin or the countries from which they come.
1/ The rioters don't care about the French state; they are indifferent. When they attack police officers with pyrotechnic mortars, set fire to town halls or fire stations, it is not because they are seen as representatives of authority, but rather as intruders.
in a context of mean hedonism; technology has ensnared the lifeworld in a network of rationalism--a world replete with delinquency, violence, and incivility, in which man is at war with himself against all, a world of drugs, virtual reality and media hyped sports,
We are in a society which thinks that nothing is worse than death, especially not slavery. The disadvantage is that this type of society always ends up dying. After having been enslaved.
#Benoist
There are two forms of totalitarianism, whose nature and effects are very different. The one, in the East, jails, persecutes, hurts the body, but, at least, leaves hope intact. The other, in the West, results in creating happy robots. It air-conditions hell. It kills the souls.
This was followed in 2019 by a puppet government that was corrupt to the core, largely controlled by mafia-like structures and led by Volodymyr Zelenskyi, an ex-king of show business. In all this time, the Americans did nothing but threaten, ignore and humiliate Russia.
#Benoist
It wishes to bail out of history, driven by the idea that the present state of things—the boundless capital and techno-science—are expected to continue their course forever and that there is nothing else possible, and especially that there is nothing better.
America is the only Western country never to have had as little as a semblance of aristocracy—with ‘aristocratism’ consisting particularly in knowing how to bestow value upon things that have no price
Many ‘liberals’ acknowledge each person’s right to express his opinions . . . provided these do not challenge the ideological assumptions to which they are accustomed.
Today's society combines all sexual perversions in a non-sexual form. Commodity fetishism, generalized prostitution under the effect of corruption, masochism of voluntary conditioning and self-alienation,
Tall stature, aristocratic bearing, paralytic of both legs after a bombing during the war, the philosopher Julius Evola wrote for a small number of men, for those who still remain “standing, among the ruins.”
#Benoist
Max Weber called this phenomenon "the disenchantment of the world." That is, the triumph of calculation and the reign of quantity. And since such a way of thinking conceives of humanity as something essentially uniform, then it seeks to impose a total homogenization of the world.
The superhero is not an exponential hero, but the very opposite of the hero. The hero is a tragic figure. He is a man who has chosen to have a glorious but brief life, rather than a comfortable life of any kind.