Neema Parvini > Quotes

“Left-wing progressivism” and “managerialism” are synonymous since the solutions of the former always involve the expansion of the latter. To stay with the example of LGBT causes, these may seem remote from something as technical as “managerialism” but consider the armies of HR officer, diversity tsars, equality ministers, and so on that are supported today under the banner of “LGBT” and used to police and control enterprises. The “philanthropic” endeavours of the Ford Foundation in this regard laid the infrastructure and groundwork to setup new power centres for managerialism under the guise of this ostensibly unrelated cause. Similar case studies can be found in issues as diverse as racial equality, gender equality, Islamist terrorism, climate change, mental health, and the management of the COVID-19 pandemic. The LOGIC of managerialism is to create invisible “problems” which can, in effect, never truly be solved, but rather can permanently support managerial jobs that force some arbitrary compliance standard such as “unconscious bias training”, “net zero carbon”, the ratio of men and women on executive boards or whatever else.”
― Neema Parvini, The Populist Delusion

“Myth of the stateless society: that state and society were or could ever be separate. Myth of the neutral state: that state and politics were or could ever be separate. Myth of the free market: that state and economy were or could ever be separate. Myth of the separation of powers: that competing power centres can realistically endure without converging.”
― Neema Parvini, The Populist Delusion

“The heroic is a genuinely terrifying idea to the liberal mind which must seek to make everything petty and small.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“Egalitarianism—that is, the belief that the differential outcomes pro​duced by these various attributes might somehow be equalised—can be ​explained in one of three ways.
First, at the most basic emotional level, it ​is the misapplication of compassion. Second, at the level of critical analy​sis, it is a simple confusion about cause and effect. Third, at the more ​sinister ideological level, it is an attempt to impose a fundamentally ​unachievable utopian vision onto reality.”
― Neema Parvini, The Defenders of Liberty: Human Nature, Individualism, and Property Rights

“Power does not rest nor will ever rest in ‘the will of the people’, but rather in the organised efforts of the ruling minority.”
― Neema Parvini, The Populist Delusion

“First, Mosca’s central thesis, for which he is most famous, is the fact that human societies are always governed by minorities. He says: Among the constant facts and tendencies that are to be found in all political organisms, one is so obvious that it is apparent to the most casual eye. In all societies—from all societies that are very meagrely developed and have barely attained the dawnings of civilization, down to the most advanced and powerful societies—two classes of people appear—a class that rules and a class that is ruled.1”
― Neema Parvini, The Populist Delusion

“A simpler way of putting it might be to say that ‘civilisation is incommunicable’ across both time and space, historically and, in the present, geographically. ‘No value can survive beyond the civilisation that produced it. Values are perishable, there are no absolute truths; every truth is relative to the context of the civilisation that posits it, and when the latter is exhausted, the concept of truth also crumbles, shatters.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“The Spark, the animating spirit of the early warrior caste, is distinct from the religion that comes to predominate and maintain the later multiethnic empire, which I will call The Imperial Altar. Civilisational successes—such as conquest, wealth, and education—generate their own loss conditions. The Barbarism of Reflection destroys the foundations of the Imperial Altar and successfully kills any last remnants of The Spark. The castes of the lion archetype (warriors and peasants) have mutual antagonisms with the castes of the fox archetype (priests or intellectuals and merchants). Where the lion archetype predominates either as monarchism (warriors) or as Caesarism (peasants) ‘civilisational successes’ can be held in check for a period. They tend to create strong regimes through ruthlessness but such strength, ironically, leads to the managerial need for administration generated by growth and complexity, which in turn leads to the rise of elites of the fox archetype taking over. When the fox archetype predominates, either as theocracy (priests/intellectuals) or plutarchy (merchants), ‘civilisational success’ may accelerate but, in the process, the very foundations that facilitated such success in the first place (i.e. the strong regime maintained by the lion’s ruthlessness) are eroded, eventually leading to collapse. Quantity has a quality all of its own, which manifests as all that is ‘mass’: democracy, utilitarianism, standardisation, and the destruction of quality and distinction. This is a feature of the late, pre-collapse cycle. Individuals of one civilisational season cannot embody the spirit of another: the Children of Winter, for example, cannot embody the Spring. Civilisation is incommunicable. The ‘world-feeling’ of a people as Spengler says is ‘not transferable’. ‘What one people takes over from another—in “conversion” or in admiring feeling—is a name, dress, and mask for its own feeling, never the feeling of that other.’[1] Ethnicity is a constant reality which promotes ingroup solidarity in the early cycle and becomes a problem for the ruling class to manage in the late cycle.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“it does not matter whether the actual leader is called King or Minister or party-leader, or even (as in the case of Cecil Rhodes) that he has no defined relation to the State. The nobility which managed Roman politics in the period of the three Punic Wars had, from the point of view of constitutional law, no existence whatever. The leader’s responsibility is always to a minority that possesses the instincts of statesmanship and represents the rest of the nation in the struggle of history.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“The brilliance of Vico lies in his anticipation of many currents of thought that would follow him, including the Romantics, Friedrich Nietzsche (whose idea that ‘God is dead’ in many ways fulfils Vico’s prophesy), the cultural relativism of Oswald Spengler, and various postmodern critics of the second half of the twentieth century who shared his scepticism about the Enlightenment.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“However, once safety produces enough prosperity, or as he puts it ‘stored energy’,[26] the civilisational process centralises and gives way to a different type of spirit marked by money-making, usury, and, above all, greed. This increased centralisation exhausts energy rather than accumulates it, and once that energy is all used up, the husk that is left can no longer sustain the civilisation and so collapse and a return to barbarism beckons.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“The abstractions of the remote city have replaced the rootedness in the soil of the familial castle.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“Below the highest stratum in the ruling class there is always, even in autocratic systems, another that is much more numerous and comprises all the capacities for leadership in the country. Without such a class any sort of social organization would be impossible. The higher stratum would not in itself be sufficient or leading and directing the activities of the masses. In the last analysis, therefore, the stability of any political organism depends on the level of morality, intelligence and activity that this second stratum has attained […] Any intellectual or moral deficiencies in this second stratum, accordingly, represent a graver danger to the political structure, and one that is harder to repair, than the presence of similar deficiencies in the few dozen persons who control the workings of the state machine.21”
― Neema Parvini, The Populist Delusion

“A new energy subsidy is necessary if a declining standard of living and a future global collapse are to be averted.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“The most important though was logico-meaningful integration. Sorokin argued that cultural systems are organized around a central value or principle that gives them order and unity. The sociologist discovers it with the logico-meaningful method.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“The sequence is monarchy, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy and ochlocracy,”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“In the Works and Days, Hesiod relates the degeneration of man’s history down from the distant Golden Age of Cronos to his own pernicious Age of Iron. It is a synchronic paradigm of human history, a ‘steady declension of nature’, in which men decline in moral character and fortune from the first to the final period. His story links the ‘good old days’ of Cronos to the golden period of Eastern lore which like it, also is followed by succeeding periods of silver, bronze and iron, into which he inserts, however, an anomalous Heroic Aeon in an attempt … ‘to idealize [sic] the life depicted in Homeric times’.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“I do not ask for overcentralization; but I do ask that we work in a spirit of broad and far-reaching nationalism when we work for what concerns our people as a whole. We are all Americans. Our common interests are as broad as the continent. I speak to you here in Kansas exactly as I would speak in New York or Georgia, for the most vital problems are those which affect us all alike.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“His methodology differs radically from most historians in two fundamental ways: first, in his perrenialist or universalist conception of Tradition, and second, in his treatment of myth as ‘truer’ than historical fact.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“In the creative minority, it manifests itself in two ways: the first is homo economicus, a worship of utilitarianism—and here we are on very familiar territory in the mould of Carlyle—and the second is in a withdrawal of artistic types into snobbishness, obscure high-brow tastes, art for art’s sake, and other such affected attitudes that cut them off from the plebs.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“Spengler foresaw the rise of Caesarism as an antidote to the dominance of the merchants who use liberal democracy to mask their dominance.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“Cyclical Models The pattern of rise and fall: this is the general shape of history outlined by both Herodotus and Thucydides that is generically common to practically all the other cyclical models. The degenerative cycle of the four ages: this is the Gold–Silver–Bronze–Iron model of Hesiod, the Zoroastrians, and the Hindu Yuga cycles in which a state of initial perfection degenerates by ages to a final barbarism before the cycle starts again. The Anacyclosis: this is the political pattern of constitutional cycles outlined by Polybius which follows the sequence monarchy, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and ochlocracy before a period of barbarianism resets the cycle. The providential cycle (judgement–retribution–restoration): this follows the pattern of the Book of Jeremiah and the ‘alternative’ Christian tradition of the Venerable Bede and Geoffrey of Monmouth. The Phoenix cycle (birth–death–rebirth): this is Petrarch’s model which posits a Dark Age between two better periods and in which the New Age will look to Antiquity for inspiration.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“If the ruling class keep political prisoners and act in an arbitrary manner, do not give the ruled the right to a fair trial, do not persecute serious crimes and let criminals loose on the streets, and so on, then it is evidence of a lack of juridical defence. Samuel T. Francis coined the phrase ‘anarcho-tyranny’ in 2004 to describe the situation in which a highly bureaucratic and modern system such as the USA or the UK today could fail in meeting the basic standards of juridical defence.35”
― Neema Parvini, The Populist Delusion

“All things considered, it is difficult to see Julius Evola as any kind of fascist at all. … Evola never was any kind of fascist. He was neither a ‘cryptofascist,’ a ‘parafascist,’ a ‘superfascist,’ nor a ‘neofascist.’ He was and always remained an occultist, a pagan ‘magus’. … The fact is that because fascism is considered so reprehensible, Anglo-American academics do not feel themselves obliged to treat the subject with any professional detachment. Cavalier and irresponsible claims can and have been made. … Since Fascism is almost universally held to be an unmitigated evil, no one really expects to be held accountable for their treatment of its ideas. The results are apparent. Very few academics would tolerate similar treatment of Marxist, or Marxist-Leninist, ideas. The consequence is that, more often than not, we are treated to a caricature of Fascist thought. Few academics bother to read the primary literature. That is held to be an unconscionable waste of time, since everyone knows, intuitively, that Fascists never entertained any real ideas. It is a common judgment among many that Marx, Lenin, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro had real ideas, but Fascists never did. As a result, we have no idea what to expect of the thought of ‘neofascists.’ As we have suggested, some see ‘neofascism’ in the political thought of Reagan Republicans, tax protesters, soccer thugs, skinheads, graveyard vandals, militia members, antisocialists, anti-egalitarians, and anyone who refuses to conform to the strictures of ‘political correctness.’ The results have been intellectually embarrassing. The nonfascist thought of an occultist such as Evola is conceived fascist, while ideas having unmistakable fascist properties often fail to be so considered. This is nowhere more evident than in the treatment of patterns of thought that are somehow insulated from criticism. In the United States, an abundance of revolutionary political thought is just so insulated. Black protest thought is hardly ever considered in a comparative context. More often than not, it is treated as though it were sui generis, a unique product reflecting incomparable experience. Actually, more fascism is to be found in black protest literature than in all the works of Julius Evola —and yet, one is at a loss to find any of it, or any mention of it, in the anthologies of neofascist reflection”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“representative democracy is simply ‘elected oligarchy”
― Neema Parvini, The Populist Delusion

“While he was a kind of perennial traditionalist, he was not afraid of drastic change or even revolution if a ruling class had become too corrupt or decadent to serve.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“Civilisation begins with a set of particularisms (such as ethnicity, a local god, local customs and rituals) and only later does the complexity of society enable and call for universalism and the ‘Big Gods’ follow; they do not create complex societies.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“For Turchin, the crucial factor that precipitates this will is group unity among the elites, or asabiya.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“Spengler’s theory of the state is rooted in an analysis of the four estates. The first estate is the nobility, the second estate is the priesthood, the third estate is the burgher class or bourgeoisie, and the fourth estate is the mass. Note that the ‘mass’ is not the peasant.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“Glubb nonetheless in the final analysis agrees with the Gobineau-Spengler thesis that ‘civilisation is incommunicable’.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom