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CHAPTER IX

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS STATE!

When German Zerefs and Zeremids turned to their authority figures – evolutionary examples of how no one became someone: a doctor, a teacher, a lawyer – what were they told? Although they never communicated, I will assume here, for discussion, that they did – and that the doctors, teachers, and lawyers did have something to tell those following in their footsteps. How did this German solidarity come about?

All those doctors, teachers, and lawyers (not to mention the small merchants and street vendors defined in Marxism) were the bourgeoisie (also defined in Marxism). Or the middle class, as we call it today. So, who approached them, and why?

Recessions affect people regardless of their social class. But it is manual and office workers, peasants, and the poor who take the brunt. Bourgeois classes are different. As we can see, and as has been portrayed to us in the past, the uncontrollable greed of the upper bourgeoisie caused the market to overheat (as far as goods, capital, and speculation go). That adversely affects the market and agents and then the state itself. Mass layoffs result in unemployment. Small profiteers stand as good a chance of going bankrupt as major factory owners. The state cannot help them (except maybe by giving out soup). Prices first soar such high public servants cannot afford to buy things they can’t do without and then plummet as the market begins to lure buyers. Still, the public servants are essentially broke.

Times like these see everyone pointing their finger at the prime minister, not the largest exchange speculator. The prime minister is the one to blame! He has failed to prevent speculation. Ordinary people blame the recession on the government and, by extension, the state. Land-poor peasants and tenant farmers go bankrupt; they have to flock to cities, either because they don’t earn enough to pay the rent or because no one buys their produce. These Zerefs, heirs of tradition, join the army of unemployed urban Zeremids. The Zeremids know for certain the blame lies with the state. But the rural Zerefs go even further in searching for an answer to the question, “Who hung the government out to dry?” Those on your side could have never done such a thing. Only an enemy could. An enemy of the people and of the state.

To Zerefs, all the harm comes from the enemy of the people, of the ethnos; to Zeremids, the prime minister is the enemy. Doctors and teachers, however, have no enemies. With that said, they might have some enemy. After all, Remids are former Zeremids and Zerefs. They, too, may know what office the enemy holds and what ethnic group they belong to. But Remids are statists. They are the ones who weigh the public on their shoulders. That’s why they agree that public officials are to blame, but they don’t think the state shares that blame. The state is sacrosanct. The state – the land of the fathers, Alemania, Fatherland – is paramount.

Remids’ self-reflection is highly developed. They may disown the specific. But they save the state and declare it innocent. The confluence of the low notes coming from Zerefs and the high tones from middle-class clusters brings German statism to life in the form of Nazism. Silent appeals are then heard by Zeremid leaders – who also come as a rule from provincial regions and families of the rural intelligentsia – and the leaders turn those appeals into a choir, a cacophony of yelling throats.

German Nazism resulted from a combination of Zerefs’ grievances and Zeremids’ complexes on the one hand and the romantic haze of the German state (brought about by Remids) on the other. German doctors, teachers, and public officials were saving their state while Zerefs and Zeremids were inflating the enemy’s guilt. Each reflection group contributed to German Nazism. The concentration of the middle layer or the high urbanization rate blocked another way to outclass struggle. Tradition led the people, though they were unaware of it.

Everyone, not only Germans, wants to start a family, which requires taking your status up a notch. Some societies and peoples consider it to be the wellbeing of their families and ethnos; others, as the prosperity of their state. Thanks to Remids, the state can guarantee prosperity for the people and the ethnos, even though the initial groups of tradition (and reflection) do not concur.

In Russia, the middle class was insignificant. During a crisis, armed workers and sailors (peasants disguised) entered into a fateful dialogue not with doctors and teachers but with the nobility. Did they have no one to tell about the Russian state? And about what state, one of the tsars and the priests? The discussion revolved around the public, not the state. There was no state anymore. It had all been self-deception.

CHAPTER X

ARE THERE LEVELS TO TOTALITARIANISM

How many industrial generations was Germany ahead of Russia?

From the so-called average, we can infer the population’s self-reflection level. Which level was it – Zeref, Zeremid, or Remid?

The Remid level, as we have found out, gives the informal elite of civilization a chance to stay alive.

After all, Germany still was a country of tradition, something that all nations feels like a phantom pining for the past. This manifested itself most clearly in Italian fascism. But the Italian fascists didn’t annihilate the local socialists until 1920. Russia was close in all ways to agrarian Italy. For that reason, in 1919—1920, the Italian socialists seized factories in the industrially developed central and northern Italy, following the example of Russia’s proletariat. Italy was a country of active anarchism, meaning it didn’t need the state.

With that said, Italians had spent 300 years fighting to free their homeland and unify it into a single state. The state meant ownership, the state scale, and that there are Remids. Italy’s statism took the form of fascism. In two years, all socialists, advocates of a socialist community, were killed off (with some help from the residents). That left the upper bourgeoisie, factory owners, and latifundistas pleased. The local administration sided with the fascists. In Russia, the proletariat and the peasantry followed Lenin, not Savinkov. Italy followed the former socialist Mussolini precisely because of the Risorgimento. The Italians wanted to order: they had suffered for centuries because of the lack of a single state.

The Witch-Hunt

Someone must be called to account for epidemics, disasters, crop failures: the practice of declaring the innocent guilty has existed since ancient times. In the Middle Ages, the Inquisition hunted down witches. This kind of hunting – searching for scapegoats – is something typical of all times.

The Inquisition chose not to reinvent the wheel. Catholic priests could not have a family. So, what reason was there for the Inquisition to love women, even the most beautiful of them? After all, when some kind of misfortune happened in a village or even across a whole city, it was all because some woman had evoked evil spirits. In female witchcraft, the dark people saw the cause of their troubles. This is the Zeref level. It doesn’t rely on facts or needs evidence. The Zeref level is one of the conjectures and black thoughts of loathing and envy.

The Zeremid level is one of wider practice. This kind of hunting involves someone specific and even logical, going from the specific to the general. Even though the specific here borrows a lot from the subconscious. But the Zeremids name the perpetrator’s name. They even have the temerity to call the ruler the culprit, even though they do so at the instigation of liberal Refags and, often, other revolutionaries. The thing is that traditional practice has several idols – ideals it lives with as people grow old and die. When saints’ names are secularized, people, it seems, no longer have a reason to live. But if people – soldiers, for example – don’t want to die for their king or fatherland – this level is that of Zeremids. Zeremids have primitive designs. They invariably want to stay alive. That was precisely why the Bolsheviks blamed their troubles on soldiers going to their deaths and on the tsar and his henchmen. The tsar wasn’t a witch – he was the people’s saint, God’s Anointed.

But they laid the blame on him all the same. This qualifies as the Zeremid level, with the entire ethnos declared guilty. This fits right in the middle of the dark tribal subconscious, which looks for the enemy without, as in primitive times, while the enemy is actually within. Is this cunning? Yes, it is cunning. Antisemitism can attain a Remid scale. But it is second-generation Zeremids and Remids that bring it to that level.

GLOSSARY

Zeref- a traditional person with rigidly set social actions, low reflection almost zero, hence the word Zeref reflection zero (Zeref)). Has no semitones, serves the idols of the genus, communicates in the circle of native blood. Zeref has no semitones of perception, is categorical, irreconcilable, hostile to others and to another opinion in the development of rejection of “not your own”

Zeref’s loop – the baby boom, overheating of the population.

Zerot- the traditional feudal elite

Zerot’s loop creates a solid cast, an impenetrable social barrier. None of the lower castes can enter the feudal elite – the lack of social mobility pre-revolutionary situation.

Remid – a New traditional elite, rulers, officials, authorities, teachers; Remid put actions for Zerefs, determine morality, laws, politics, reflection average-middle (remiddle).

Remid’s loop – the elite’s struggle with the brightest personality, the cooperation of second and third parties against the hero and the prophet.

Refag- the person of a trading civilization in several generations, reflection is high, selfish, utilitarian Refag (re + high).

Zeremid is a first-generation city person, has a half-rigid social reflex of custom and new skills of city life, half-urban, half-rural. The traditional people in the first generation have undergone industrialization and cultural modernization.

Zeremid’s loop – the Zeremids are approximate imitators. They imitate the elite, any idea, any direction just to be good for their families. By imitation, hypocrisy, and even fanaticism, they harm any cause, state, or idea.

Zefa are men from the city’s first generation with a tendency towards the market and speculation, and to trade, at least something, he was forced by circumstances. People from the socialist camp were faced with market relations and market values.

Revcon – revolution conservatism

CHAPTER XI

THE OUROBOROS

You might have heard of the ancient symbol depicting a serpent eating its tail. It’s called the ouroboros. It is held to symbolize eternity, the cyclic renewal of life. The rapid change of the state elite leads to the demise of the people.

“Between 1933 and 1935 most of the czarist engineers were rounded up. In Soviet Russia, large-scale transfers of people were to different provinces, so they could not communicate with each other. Many innocents were executed immediately; others were banished to Siberia”.

“By the spring of 1936, almost all the young people who had received secondary or higher technical education between 1927 and 1932 had been arrested. Before getting rid of the qualified technical elite, the party and the government prepared successors to take that elite’s place. Thus, the regime first created a whole class of specialists and then, seeing in it a threat to its power, destroyed it.

If they hadn’t, industrial development would have faced a dead end.”

“On graduating from the academy after two years of studies, the wunderkinds (as the old workers at our factory called them) were appointed to managerial positions as soon as the specialists who had occupied them disappeared. This clearly planned and thought-out policy was carried out openly and rigorously for several years. That solved the problem – creating a class of ‘devotees to the party, truly Soviet specialists’ (in the parlance of the slogans of that time). But the young managers lacked both experiences operating machinery and theoretical knowledge, which two years at the academy could not provide. These wunderkinds had an adverse effect on factory workers, secretly despising them.”

“As soon as new – truly socialist, from the party’s standpoint – workers came into the industry and thousands of others filled the rooms with industrial academies, a large-scale purge of experienced specialists began. First, it hit those who the government had sent to study abroad to replace the old engineers, who had been educated before the Revolution, and foreign specialists.

Now they were considered hopelessly tainted, especially condemned by the bourgeois influence of their association with foreign specialists. The foundation upon which the country’s technical development developed began to disappear rapidly.”

These are excerpts from a book by a Jamaican-American, a black engineer hired by the Soviet government during industrialization, about his life in Stalin’s USSR.

Someone neither white nor red took stock of the situation as an impartial observer uninterested in politics and drew his conclusions about the regime.

As we know, such purges happened among engineers and in all sectors of the government machine. Purges reached the highest establishment of the ruling party and the military, bringing the most tragic results of all. I have long included in those tragic results the number of people the USSR lost to the German attack. But who needed to purge the country of its “enemies”?

Even Stalin – the USSR leader – did not want to live in fear when Wehrmacht troops were near Moscow. He wasn’t that stupid to eliminate his military leaders to bring his collapse closer.

A reason will be given here that was big enough to pull the rug out from under the omnipotent dictator, whom some former soviet ordinary people still hold in esteem until now.

But what he did or had planned to do to leave people with no memory of the past – a crowd of devoted fanatics – is an indicator of common self-reflection. We must understand why today the state’s body, while it seems to be where it’s not supposed to be, has a hydra of ever-hungry heads that fail to understand the sense of state. Where do those heads come from?

CHAPTER XII

THERE CAN BE NO TOTALITARIANISM WITHOUT REMIDS

All totalitarian regimes share a problem no less totalitarian in its essence than they are. The conclusions about their totality are just the final point, like an ocean that opens up before everyone instead of the rivers – events – that run together in streams to form that ocean. Still, the drops making up those rivers are people – their thoughts. At the very beginning, when they start thinking similar thoughts, no one knows yet where that might take them. And after a while, this results in a regime, a manifestation of the totality of myriads of thoughts. But who are these people? And why does responsibility for that totality rest with the leaders, not the people?

Answers should be sought in the people’s similarity, of course. With time, people will gather to form an order – first a group, then a political party that brings everyone together in one place or directs them to that place. Before people assemble in a square, their thoughts will get together. And before the similarity of indignation, vexation, and negation materializes (elsewhere in the world), one needs to find the origin of this similarity. The origin of their reaction and the source of their indignation lies in tradition.

Tradition. Tradition-minded people take care to first observe their rituals. And then they respond to crises, all similarly. That’s what the cause of totalitarianism is. Don’t look for similarities in city residents who have lost touch with the place that, while not their birthplace, still holds their roots and is home to their relatives. Refags remember no one, making it difficult to bring them together. Their thoughts are like cockroaches scurrying on the kitchen floor. Everyone thinks they are someone. Everyone is on their own. The totality of Rrefags is yet to merge into their ocean, their own world order. But we are still concerned here with tradition and tradition-minded people. We are investigating why they have their totality.

Crises don’t turn everyone into a Nazi. Many Zerefs don’t really know what the essence of fascism is. What they do and think doesn’t depend on them: Remids do all their thinking. Just to make things clear, traditional Zerefs are like little kids imitating adults. They are provided with ready-made social reflexes, as they would be with food products that someone else grows or makes for them.

Their ancestors are another influence. That’s why Zerefs, just like all traditionalists, are raised by their ancestors and rely on their precepts so often. And their parents, in turn, inherited behavioral models from the parents of their parents. And so on. That’s not to say Zerefs are born conservatives. No one is born somebody. Rather, life itself turns, when it’s born, into a routine, monotonous ritual.

But, among all the reflection groups, the most self-aware conservatives are, of course, the Zerots, or the traditional feudal elite (see my book entitled Hierarchical Man). All the groups – Zerots, Zerefs, Remids, and the Remids are the new elite. Teachers, lawyers, distinguished, honored artists, writers, and, needless to say, public officials. They put in a lot of their energy to appear as the new elite. They sacrificed their lives for their careers. We chose them as the new elite or new teachers, and they didn’t put in so much effort to have someone take away all the fruits of their hard work. A career, including reflection, means work – very energy-consuming work. Some want to grow materially; others, spiritually. Ultimately, they get what they deserve: honor and respect from the public. And then a crisis comes up…

A host of inherited ghosts.

Earnestness came to be a responsibility for everyone. The Eldest sons are much like their fathers, perhaps because they don’t want their fathers to deprive them of their inheritance. At any rate, all eldest sons are earnest and businesslike. When the father is not at home, every tot knows who’s holding the fort.

If you think of Remids as sons of the regime, they are the eldest sons everywhere. Remids are the face of society and the state. Society is only as good as its elite. In the traditional world, even if it takes the form of a state, thoughtlessness can put everyone under attack. No traditional community will jeopardize its fate. Hostile tribes are always around, taking the form of the same state. Only those families can stay alive and well that will entrust rite observance to the earnest sons of the people. Those sons who would rather play and have fun are quite unreliable heirs, putting society and the state at risk.

Hence, every elite is the product of extensive upbringing and control, and Remids are all the eldest sons. Many of them, those who have started a family, are fathers themselves.

During a recession, you might have noticed that all tradespeople are either silent or turn into conditional eldest sons of society. They take on the functions of sacrificers, as it were. But the Refags, the tradespeople, cannot be sacrificers – they only need money and income. During a recession, Refags’ income plummets. They begin to speak in other people’s voices, insolently taking on the functions of the elite (Remids). No one authorizes them to, of course. But if townspeople are eighty percent former migrants, those migrants will not ask permission for rallies. All Refags, even those who are forced by the regime to engage in trade, quickly turn into so-called all-too-common people. If society is really eighty percent boutique, shop, and stall owners, then, of course, they are the people – who else could it be? But they’re not the ones who come up with strategic initiatives. Strategies, as we have found out, are created by Remids from the second-generation intelligentsia; that is, by children of the same migrant Zeremids who choose not to be forced to trade in a market but to learn in any way they can – not to peddle their wares but to write laws. These same second-generation Remids ahead the Refags men and new Zeremids by an entire generation. That means that they have had time to concentrate and think not only of what to do with their lives but also of what they could do for society and the state. At this point, instead of keeping silent and unquestioningly obeying the Remids, the Refags begin to yell out their strategy, something similar to, “Liberty! Democracy!” That is, this is nothing but the second advent of the phenomenon well known in the past as the bourgeoisie. Back in their day, the founders of the strategy, Marx and Engels, participated in similar uprisings of the bourgeoisie and were disappointed in their fellow rioters.

Why did they? Why was the strategy put together by someone other than Remids, the sacrificers? Why did the lower class, those younger city sons, become the archons of the post-industrial world?