The Mithridates Strategy

Liberalism’s Bid for Survival

In our last article we discussed how the West has entered into its ascetic phase. It has become the victim of its own success—there is always an enemy, and in default of external enemies it has turned to the enemy within. This internal friend-enemy distinction has steadily expanded into a kind of self-flagellation, where the West’s categorical imperative is now the literal mortification of the flesh (of the ethnic stock).

We left off saying that this self-mortification could well be adaptive, could eat like a tapeworm through the rest of the world, leaving only the liberalized West standing. How awful if so? Pop a few Xanax and read on if you must.

This self-mortification is of course just liberalism, formulated in a specific way. In its specifically political form, liberalism is the conceit that there is only soft power, that things get done mostly by magic, without hard power. There is no state religion, only “secular” humanism; there is no Cathedral, only the separate spheres of public and private; there is no official priesthood, only peer review—the list goes on. Long-time readers of Imperium Press will recognize in this what Chris Bond calls anarchist social ontology, and what Neema Parvini calls the populist delusion. By imposing the fever dream of bottom-up social change on everyone, the state contaminates the ability of anyone to do things effectively except itself. It’s national security exception for me, spontaneous change for thee. This poisoning of everyone and everything while inoculating itself is unbelievably shrewd, and unbelievably destructive. The inoculation at the heart of this strategy is the unprincipled exception: we break the rules only to preserve them.

Of course, the liberal idea of bottom-up change is, in the end, maladaptive. It just takes a while for this muddled thinking to push your society over, to where you go from subduing the whole world to being unable to wage effective proxy war against a country with a GDP the size of South Korea.

Isn’t this the opposite of what we said though? That liberalism could ultimately win? Terrifyingly, the fact that it’s maladaptive may not be enough to stop it from winning. To understand how, we must understand how ideas propagate themselves.