There is no doubt that the social world can not only kill and revive myth; it can also, from the sociological residue left by the death of myth, produce new ideas built from what remains of the myth's ruins — namely blood, language, land and people.
Moreover, once it has made myths of these, the social idea, by taking the element of criticism and turning it against itself (Kantianism, postmodernism, post-structuralism), is able to dismantle even what has been erected on the ruins of what has already been dismantled. Thus creating the division between true believers, and functionaries.
Moreover, I think the genius of Russian politics — of Russian political thought, rooted largely in the tradition of the Muscovite court — lies in identifying these fragments of the secular moment as it matured in the socialist framework and in idealism, and the discrepancy between the ideas' own futility, the paradoxes they produce, and those who hold them, and using them against what remains of the West after having experimented in them.
If so, I believe that much of the support for Russia stems, necessarily, from a desperate attempt to point to the sins and lacunae of the West — something only Russia's cynical method, is able to look with sober eyes, for it caters to true believers and non. As if from an endpoint, looking at every ideal as a tool, and at tools as possible ideals, once fully self-imposed upon themselves, with their mentality, can they offer it as a mirror and a counter-perspective, for all secular experiments — tainted by the Social.
Russia is the laboratory report of the social moment after being achieved in the only way possible — Machiavellianism, exporting itself.
The absolute other of what idealism can become, after surviving socialist nation building, being imported from Germany, financed from the US, and politically manufactured in Russia itself.
Russian brilliance is further expressed in the fact that many of the deconstructive ideas that began in France and Germany were intensified, politicized and racialized precisely with the help of post-revolutionary Moscow, in reaction to the Nazi moment, which was itself a reaction both to German philosophy and to the Bolshevik Revolution.
That is, Russia does not merely produce a counter-perspective. It acts in history as the one that sets clear boundaries to morality, through its contribution to the limits of historical action experiences and representation in the eyes of liberal-American world that follows the great social moment of the twentieth century — a moment revived in the postcolonial world of the twenty-first, in part by Russia itself.
Russia always sold fantastic tales that hardly worked to friends, and schizoid paranoia that can only hurt its foes.
In that sense, trying to replace Liberal Brits and Jews as storytellers and interpreters.
This does not mean there is justice in Russia's war in Ukraine, nor that Dugin's strange mythologies are true. But their truth lies in reflecting the deep vulnerability of the social idea, and the deep nihilism within the moment of criticism of the fallen ideals, and the religion which came before them (of which no one knows more than Russia).
And these multi-critiques can themselves become mystical and propaganda.
And once this Russian attempt at reflection also takes up arms, there is something seductive, almost just, in what was born out of the extreme point of the social, offering a redemption from the non-redeemable loop of secularism as denial of transcendence, which reappears as a nation under God and Race.
The problem is that Russia itself is not immune. Russia may be fighting collapse, but in doing so brings another collapse upon itself. How? Because it still plays by the identitarian master–slave rules that the Russian left itself created. And which limits the only religious moment in socialism — to sin, struggle, purification, confession.
It can claim that because the war is a national, religious and cultural war, there is justice in it, and that Russia is the good force within it — but the very phenomena it is against in this war exists within it as well.
For the Russian has known how to use idealism and cynicism not only in exporting ideas but also in preserving power. And in that sense he is almost meta-secular. And as an ability to manufacture trust and distrust without a need for a focal religious point. Or by using ideas that he himself might not be fully committed to.
And so it, too, is a tragic victim of the totality of the godless social idea's pendulum, which knows neither redemption nor rest — an idea that is always, at bottom, pure violence on behalf of something one cannot believe in without depending on the other to confirm or reenact: that exhausting dialogical deadlock that in order to exist must hold power or give someone an idea of power.
It is unclear whether any war can release it. Only nationalism, seemingly, tries to raise it to a mythic place — though nationalism itself knows that without sacred blood or myth, it too lives on borrowed time
