Introduction
Multipolarity is a hot topic right now, and for good reason; it has been a sword wielded with great efficiency to begin slaying the leviathan that is Liberal Globalism. Some of todays notable multipolarity proponents are thinkers such as
and ; the former of which authored the book “MULTIPOLARITY!” which is a great introductory text to the topic. For a more detailed exposition of multipolarity, Dugin’s three volume work on the "Fourth Political Theory" is excellent.Because there is so much work already done on the topic, I will be reserved in my overview of the idea: Essentially, multipolarity is the idea that there are ideally multiple large spaces1 across the earth, each being its own power pole unimpeded by the others, thus allowing them to live authentically by developing according to their own inner logic.2 Each Large Space or “Empire” is thought of as “A Big Man”3 with a trichotomous anthropology —an idea we should be familiar with if we are familiar with the Classical Political Philosophers. One implication if you accept this idea is that you must view all races as being equal in the sense that one race or people is not objectively better than another; in other words, the standard by which a peoples (or Empires) value is measured cannot be another people (Large Space can also be thought of as race). For Dugin, racism is bad, and multipolarity solves the racism issue without opening borders and making each individual equal in all places (we can call this a kind of subjective racism).4
As it stands, I see one major issue, and one speculative issue which I will address here with the idea of Multipolarity:
Multipolarity is a rejection of the Natural Hierarchy at the level of the State-Man
Multipolarity could be conceived of as a guilt-response to the racism of the West
The following will be a short introduction to my thoughts on the topic; I hope to do more work on it in the near future.
The Rejection of Natural Hierarchy
Natural hierarchy for Plato starts with the divisions of the soul, and the soul/body distinction:
“And a state was thought by us to be just when the three classes in the State severally did their own business; and also thought to be temperate and valiant and wise by reason of certain other affections and qualities of these same classes?
And so of the individual; we may assume that he has the same three principles in his own soul which are found in the State; and he may be rightly described in the same terms, because he is affected in the same manner.”
~ “Republic” (Book 4)5
This principle of justice, or natural hierarchy is then extended; first to the home in the form of patriarchy, then into society in the forms of the various classes, and finally at the peak of the hierarchy stands the Philosopher-King. The Philosopher-King is the best and highest principle of the State, the principle which shapes the chaotic masses into the image of the heavenly forms. The same idea was applied to races and peoples as well; historically, the Greeks and Romans for example, recognized themselves at the top of the natural hierarchy —when we extend the principle to the global scale— and viewed all other peoples as barbarians or savages which they would impose form onto. In other words, they viewed themselves as a “Big Man” which stood as the Philosopher-King of the world.
This is the first issue I see with multipolarity; while the movement is full of Traditionalists who affirm the natural hierarchy within the self, gender relations, and society, they seem to fail to consistently apply the principle at the global scale. Here, Dugin expounds on the trichotomous nature of Empire:
“Territorial space, ground, zones of control and influence —this is the corporeal substance of Empire, and it corresponds to the body in man.”
“The narod corresponds to the soul: it lives and moves, love and hates, falls and lifts itself anew, takes flight and suffers… It is alive, the sacred narod, the narod of soul.”
“Religion pertains to the spirit. It reveals celestial perspectives, secures contact with eternity, and directs the gaze to Heaven.”
“As man necessarily has a body, soul, and spirit, according to Christianity, so Empire has a territorial space, narod, and religion.”6
The picture we have painted for us now is a globe with a man standing at each pole of the multipolar world. If we zoomed in on one of those Empires, we would want to see a natural hierarchy; in other words, a properly ordered society of properly ordered people. But when multipolarity advocates zoom out and look at the global level, they want radical equality, no natural hierarchy between the big men, each people being perfectly equal and free to live how they see fit. This is an inconsistent application of the principle of the natural hierarchy.
quite powerfully says:“Moreover, a "multipolar" world is impossible, as power does not tolerate a vacuum or share its sovereignty. There will always be a dominant pole. And I will always defend that such a pole rightfully belongs to Western man.”
A truly multipolar world is in fact, impossible. The same way that we have seen the push for “equality” backfire by way of the feminist movement becoming feminine supremacy, or the “equality” of races becoming a power struggle between them in the lands where they are supposed to be “equal”; so too will we see the power struggle play out on the global scale between the big men as nature seeks to correct the lies of equality there too.
Dugin does however make it clear that this power struggle will occur:
“Why, in fact, must we stop waging war, if enemies live around us, who encroach on our space, on our narod, on our religion?”7
But what are we supposed to do when a victor emerges from the dust, covered in the blood of his enemies? Are the inferior Empires supposed to form a new League of Nations (Empires) to combat the victor and restore equality? There is no real way to deal with this issue; nature demands a hierarch, and so it will be, equality be damned at all levels.
A unipolar world is the only possible solution to this dilemma. However, the response of multipolarity is justified insofar as the undisputed world leading empire of the last hundred years has been a wicked tyrant. On the topic of wanting and needing unipolarity in the form of Traditional Western supremacy rather than the modernist machine we have now,
again says:“Not so he can spread the cult of anal sex, "rights" of sexual minorities, feminism, egalitarianism, or democracy to the world, but so he can lead the world toward cultural, technical, and spiritual superiority centered on the values of hierarchy, sacrality, and cultural elitism.”
This does of course beg the question of how we hash out what Empire the world leader should be. We simply just have to follow in the footsteps of the giants that came before us; we know what makes the soul the higher principle than the body (reason, dispassion, rationality, closer contact with the Divine), those same criteria apply at every level of society. In other words, the Philosopher-King is the highest principle of the State for the same reasons the soul is the higher principle than the body; and in like manner, the global Philosopher-King will be known.
How to enforce this rule of the superior is a discussion for another time, but as Dugin says: “He [man] wages war for the truth, for love, for right, for good… As long as man lives, he wages war.”8 This waging of war will be had in the struggle for global unipolar power; the last victor was America, and unfortunately, we waged war for all the wrong reasons. When the time for the crowning of the next victor comes, he must devote his scepter and sword to the service of the Good.
Multipolarity as a Guilt-Response
The decades after World War Two have been devastating; the great myth of our time has changed our Western culture in every way. But no more so than in our view of race, equality, and immigration. The force behind the myth of the “Good War” and the post-WW2 Consensus is guilt; the White man is guilted into oblivion for the way Jews were mistreated, and then for the way all non-whites were mistreated in our history. Hitler is commonly conceived of as Satan, and this is true. But more than Hitler being Satan, he became the entire evil history of the West incarnate; every act of racism or any form of Western supremacy is made incarnate in the person of Hitler. He was vilified, made into the great Satan, and as a result, the West was made into the great Satan; we all became vilified, and then we fell with Hitler. And the guilt was so powerful that we decided to self-destruct ourselves, and still today our self-destruction continues until Western civilization is no more.
Multipolarity of course wants to save Western civilization, but as a purely speculative thesis, I would like to briefly propose that Multipolarity is the right-wing response to guilt, which stands in opposition to global liberalism, but is motivated by the same forces. Multipolarity says “no race is objectively better than any other,” but in opposition to liberalism it also says, “no people can force anything on another.” This is important because Multipolarity fundamentally changes the way the Western man historically conceived of himself as the supreme man of the world, while also claiming to defend Western Civilization. However, if Western Civilization continues without the exceptionalism, then it will be a different civilization entirely. It seems entirely possible that the same guilt of racism that motivated liberalism is also motivating multipolarity, albeit, to different ends.
America is the most Multipolarity opposed Nation currently, and for good reason, we have the most to lose from a multipolar world. But I think the opposition runs deeper than that; American exceptionalism is deeply ingrained in all Americans, from the Founding Fathers to radical left-wingers to Donald Trump, regardless of the end goal, America views itself as having a right to impose its will on the rest of the world. This is a good self-conception to have, it is thoroughly Western in the most traditional sense, and the abuse of Western/American Exceptionalism and Supremacy does not justify its complete eradication. Rather Western Exceptionalism ought to be glorified and used for good once again.
I think it is safe to say that Multipolarity could be a continuation of Western self-destruction which is more palatable that what we have now but is not a permanent solution. There is no way around the fact that Multipolarity seeks to equalize the Western poles with all other peoples; to make Europeans equal with sub-Saharan Africans and Indians is a nauseating thought, and one which must be opposed by Westerners at all costs. Dugin says while condemning Western Supremacy of racism:
“The idea arose that the West is the obligatory model of the historical development of all mankind, and world history —as in the past, so in the present and future— was and is conceived of as a repetition of those stages that the West, in its development, already passed through or is presently approaching, in advance of all others. In all places where Europeans encountered ‘non-Western’ cultures, which preserved ‘traditional society’ and its way, Europeans made an unequivocal diagnosis: ‘barbarism,’ savagery,’ ‘backwardness,’ ‘absence of civilization,’ sub-normality.’… The further they were from the West (in its newest historical phase), the more ‘defective’ and ‘inferior’ they were thought to be.”9
While Multipolarity does not condemn the Western man for defending his land against foreign invaders, it joins hands with liberalism to condemn Western man of racism in the name of defending foreign peoples (Africa, China, India, etc.). The answer is to cast away our guilt completely, to repent of our liberalism and globalism, but also to recognize that no other people is capable of such global superiority and to channel that supremacy —which was used for evil in recent years— towards the Good. And when we do so, we can draw the peoples of the world up with us. Their authentic existence be damned.
The West cannot allow either liberalism or Multipolarity to guilt us for our “racism.” It matters not that the two choose different places to dig up racist history to bury us with, what does matter is that both are attempting to bury us in the shame of our “racist” history.
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Sincerely,
John, Son of Dick
“The large space’ proceeds from an anti-colonial strategy and proposes (purely theoretically) a voluntary alliance of all countries of the continent, collectively striving to defend their independence.”
Dugin, A., & Millerman, M. (2017). The fourth political theory. vol. II, the rise of the fourth political theory. Arktos Media Ltd.
There are two principles which may cause “development,” “endogenous” and “exogenous.” The former is an internal principle by which a society develops according to their own logic, “will and mood of the majority of” the people. Dugin gives the example of modernization:
“The modernization of the countries and peoples of Europe emerges according to internal laws. Developing from the preconditions and corresponding to the will and mood of the majority of the European people.”
This is contrasted by exogenous development:
“It is a completely different matter with those countries and peoples that are pulled into the process of modernization despite their will, becoming victims of colonization or else being reluctant to oppose European expansion.”
For Dugin, ideally “Non-Western peoples and cultures remain in the conditions of traditional society, developing in accord with their own cycles and their own inner logic.”
Endogenous development is authentic, exogenous is inauthentic and is imposed on a people (primarily by the forces of Liberal Globalism from the West).
ibid.
“This trichotomy is also fully applicable to the structure of the ideal Empire.”
ibid.
Chapter 3 of “The Rise of the Fourth Political Theory” has a subsection titled “The Idea of ‘Progress’ as the Basis for Political Colonization and Cultural Racism.” In that section he says the following:
“The idea arose that the West is the obligatory model of the historical development of all mankind, and world history —as in the past, so in the present and future— was and is conceived of as a repetition of those stages that the West, in its development, already passed through or is presently approaching, in advance of all others. In all places where Europeans encountered ‘non-Western’ cultures, which preserved ‘traditional society’ and its way, Europeans made an unequivocal diagnosis: ‘barbarism,’ savagery,’ ‘backwardness,’ ‘absence of civilization,’ sub-normality.’… The further they were from the West (in its newest historical phase), the more ‘defective’ and ‘inferior’ they were thought to be.”
ibid.
Plato, Bloom, A., & Kirsch, A. (2016). The Republic of Plato. Basic Books.
Dugin, A., & Millerman, M. (2017). The fourth political theory. vol. II, the rise of the fourth political theory. Arktos Media Ltd.
ibid.
ibid.
ibid. (see footnote 4).
Thank you for inviting me to read this piece.
Together with Platon Body Builder’s critique, this is one of the most rigorous recent analyses of multipolarity, from both the fascist and National Socialist perspectives. I myself stand as a Prussian Socialist, very close to Nazbolism (I admit it) pand my critique of Dugin proceeds from the Prussian Socialist tradition or from the original Nazi-Bolshevism of Ernst Niekisch and his circle.
The theme of racism in Dugin’s work is deeply ambiguous. I agree with him that modern biological racism is a colonial and universalist phenomenon; it is in the colonies that the European becomes racist, out of a raw struggle for survival. In Europe proper, biological racism erupts as a mass ideology only in the 1920s and 30s.
Fascism believes in a racism of the soul and of the spirit: a kind of Platonic aristocracy of types. National Socialism, by contrast, insists on biological racism, but sees biology as the outward expression of a very exclusive spiritual form that only certain Germans and Nordics can embody. Nazism reached such a level of supremacism that the war against the Soviet Union was justified almost in Platonic terms: Hitler called the Slavs inferior, natural slaves to the German Aryan, and from this the entire Lebensraum mythology was born. Regarding this, Dugin assumes a type of anti-nazi position.
And here we must pause because paradoxically Dugin absorbed the Lebensraum idea, and thus this imperialist logic mirrors Russian expansionism, the idea of a “civilizational pole” in Eurasia that absorbs and subordinates weaker neighbors. But such expansionism is not "multipolarity" but a simply a new unipolarity, a Muscovite empire replacing Washington’s. Multipolarity, if it is to be a true order, must rest on the recognition of limits and spheres, not on their erasure through conquest. But since we aren't the same there will be always civilizational struggle.
It is precisely this contradiction that will lead to the great clash of this century: when China inevitably expands northward and begins to reclaim the territories seized by Russia in the 19th century (Outer Manchuria, Vladivostok, the Amur region). Multipolarity without restraint leads to collision, not harmony.
Coming back to Dugin’s racism: in the Russia and the Mystery of Eurasia the mytho-historical currents that shaped the SS are assumed as valid. One of these was the Oera Linda Book, an "historical" Frisian chronicle allegedly dating back to 2193 BC. Dugin Adapter the Oera Linda to the Russian spirit.
The Oera Linda describes a lost Aryan matriarchal civilization, its wars, migrations, and eventual fall. Although dismissed by mainstream historians as a 19th-century fabrication, it was embraced by certain SS circles as evidence of a primordial, Nordic-Atlantic origin of Europe. It was reportedly part of the material studied at Wewelsburg Castle, where Himmler sought to create an SS “order castle” and an alternative mythic history for the Germanic peoples. Read nothing if you have the time.
I myself own a copy of this book. These books served as doctrinal material for officers (although my grandfather was not SS, his brothers were). Dugin takes the Oera Linda seriously, treating its vision of history as compatible with his Eurasianist narrative and Russian racial supremacy.
Dugin defends an aristocratic racism, and here I agree with him: biological racism is plebeian and mass-oriented. Only someone who understands aristocratic racism, racism of the spirit, can grasp the mystery of race and the mystery of the people.
In The Fourth Political Theory, Dugin claims that the political subject of the coming age is Heidegger’s Dasein, being-there, the historical existence of a people rooted in its destiny. This is a powerful insight, but it is not neutral. Dasein is not merely “multipolar,” not merely an abstract actor among civilizational poles. Dasein is racial. It carries the seal of a concrete historical people, its blood, its mythos, its soil. If multipolarity ignores this, it dissolves Dasein into a planetary neutrality, reducing it to a mere statistical variable in the chaos of civilizations.
From my Prussian and kinda "Nazbol" perspective, the problem with multipolarity is that it is defined too vaguely, as if the Asian, Indic, and Islamic worlds could simply declare themselves “poles” and thereby create order. Every summit between Beijing and Delhi is hailed as proof of the “death of the West”; an overreaction bordering on the grotesque.
But Eurasia is not order: it is chaos, quite well defined by Niekish. And what we currently see is not a multipolar order but a multipolar chaos. Only if one power assumes the role of sentinel of the balance of power, a kind of Eurasian arbiter, could we speak of order. But if you want to expand... you cannot be a civilizational sentinel, like Bismarck' Prussia was, but an hegemon. In this sense I believe in the balance of power instead of hegemony.
For me, the Unipolar order ended on September 11, 2001. That was the moment when the United States began its decline, China began to rise, Russia began to win wars and ceased to fear NATO. Even Europe launched the euro, which collided with the dollar. But this multipolar chaos ultimately benefits the West: China and India are not sovereign nations, but defeated postcolonial states, dependent on the very West they claim to oppose. None of the multipolarists seem to remember when China was closer to Biden than to Putin, or how China indirectly sponsors the war against Russia in Europe through its economic leverage.
Calling Islam a “civilization” when its tribes and clans are still killing each other is a daring move. Dugin even elevates Iran, the only major Shi’a power, hated by nearly everyone else, as the “pole” of Islamic civilization. This is a profound misreading: which Sunni country would accept that? None! In truth, none of these powers have openly challenged Anglo-Saxon supremacy through formal war except Russia. The rest remain silent, Westernized, perfect subalterns, or attempt to infiltrate the West through other means, whether China’s economic power or Islamic demographic growth.