Realism or Idealism?

A Practical Application of the Odinic-Tyrrhic Framework

There’s been a debate raging (as ever) on nationalist Telegram over whether ideals govern action, or action governs ideals. One side is painted as being hopelessly out of touch with reality, the other as being in the thrall of power. This is no academic exercise considering that the populist right in the UK has just been crushed by the Tory party. Even supposedly reactionary Jacob Rees Mogg has had to walk back his position that a leadership change requires a general election—obviously loyalty to the party trumps loyalty to the nation, to say nothing of loyalty to ideals.

So, what is the engine of history—ideas, or men? The answer must be, in a trivial sense, both. But this doesn’t really get us anywhere. It would be like asking the metaphysician what really exists, only for him to reply “all of it”, then to produce a list of things, like rocks and trees and agreements and marriages and constitutions and justice. Not very helpful. Questions of metaphysics are questions of priority—is the forest ontologically upstream of the trees, or vice versa? The question of realism vs. idealism is one of priority too.

Vilfredo Pareto had something to say on this, and his case is laid out ably in The Populist Delusion. According to Pareto, human action is essentially non-rational, animated not by conscious belief but by pre-rational sentiment, which he calls residues. However, the first class of residues impels man toward elaborating, systematizing, and rationalizing his sentiments after the fact—these rationalizations are called derivations. Pareto’s residues are the source of his derivations, and while this doesn’t perhaps address our realism vs. idealism question head-on, the implied answer is quite clear: particular men dictate ideas because ideas are the post hoc rationalization of the sentiments that dwell within those particular men.

Examples of this are many and famous. Lenin espoused Marxist principles, but when faced with the reality of governing, his “vanguardism” threw off the thin veil of Marxism and was revealed as what amounts to a kind of aristocracy. The French Revolution was couched in the slogans of idealism, but when power was won it was exposed as little more than a kind of revenge fantasy of the third estate. In fact, Gobineau was convinced that the French Revolution boiled down to nothing but an ethnic conflict between the Gallic ethnic stock and the Germanic stock who had conquered them a millennium before, which had resolved themselves into the third and first two estates respectively. Early Christianity originally had no real objections to things like cousin marriage, contraception, or concubinage, but as the new faith became a serious political force, objections had to be found in order to short-circuit the heirship strategies relied upon by its theological rivals.

So, when we look at these world-historical events, it seems that ideology follows the needs of power. However, this doesn’t really explain all history very neatly. Is a medieval crusader, driven to fight thousands of miles from his homeland by faith, really a slave to power? His action is much easier to explain in terms of sincere belief. So, unless we want to answer the question of realism vs. idealism with “both”, which is the equivalent of a physicist putting forth his law that “shit happens”, we need to rethink the question. Never do we think to qualify it by asking when? But this makes all the difference.