What follows is argument for Folkishness as opposed to Universalism and is taken from the works of Imperium Press and Tristan Powers. The readers will answer for themselves what seems most correct in their own understanding.
Factualism points out that if you want to reason, you have to start with a brute fact, and that this brute fact is neither analyzable by nor derived from reason. In other words, an axiom. But where do we get axioms? Most people don’t think about this at all, but when we scratch below the surface, we find something highly disturbing. In fact, the simple idea behind factualism upends all metaphysics, epistemology, and morality—it reorders the traditional priority of those disciplines. It also entails folkishness in a way that fully rules out liberalism.
Where do you get your brute facts, that “something” at the very beginning? Not from reason, by definition. The short answer is that you get it from some authority.
So, you have to start from assumptions you were handed. We call that tradition. Tradition is simply the accumulated authoritative commands of a people. To evaluate the question “which authority” you need to lean on authority anyway—the authority of your tradition.
So, to boil it down to its basic elements:
- Authority is unquestionable
- The question “which authority?” is identical to the question “which folk?”
At the end of the day, reason is governed by custom, which is just to say, reason is subordinate to folkishness, the particularity of a people.
Commands come from authority. The proper authority belongs to one’s father. His authority is passed down from his father and his from his father. The particularity of a people (folk) includes the authority of the fathers; ultimately the oldest father. This can be summed up with the fundamental maxim as follows: “The most authoritative command is the eldest legible command.” The Ancestral Principle (the authoritative commands of a people/tradition) places ultimate authority in the eldest ancestor.
The fact that we’ve been off-track for a long time hardly matters. Ancient error is still error. Ancient anti-authoritarianism is still anti-authoritarianism. The ancestral principle is simply the recognition that you don’t get to choose your own authority. Your forefathers didn’t get to choose their own authority either. All morality and even all knowledge rests on this principle. If the principle seems new, that’s because your tradition has been anti-authoritarianism for a long time. The ancestral principle is not new, but simply the articulation of something that was once so obvious that it never needed articulation.
All Indo-European peoples and religions share a common paternal origin and ultimate source such that we may think of it as a single overarching family structure of mutually related religious expressions, but this is a system both exclusive and particular to our people. It is explicitly not a universalist belief system intended for “humanity.”
The call to obey the Fathers is demonstrably itself, the oldest commanding authority …
“Our ancestors established laws and customs which we must follow as if they were divine commands, for nothing new should be introduced that departs from their wisdom.”
— Cicero, “De Legibus”
“All new things done contrary to the custom of our ancestors are not considered right.”
— Censorial edict of Suetonius, 92BC
“We must preserve the rites and customs of our fathers, for in them lies the strength of our state; to adopt foreign novelties is to invite ruin.”
— Livy, “Ab Urbe Condita”
“The greatness of Rome stems from adhering to the ways of our ancestors, not from embracing every new fashion.”
— Pliny the Elder, “Naturalis Historia”
“A state ought not to be considered happy or stable if it departs from the institutions of its fathers.”
— Aristotle
“We are the ancient ones, and our anger is just; let no new law overturn the old.”
— Aeschylus, “Eumenides”
“We must act kata ta patria (according to our forefathers) and the laws of our ancestors, not follow the whims of the moment.”
—Demosthenes, “De Corona”
“He acted not kata ta patria but according to his own will, thus profaning the customs of our fathers.”
— Lysias, “Against Nicomachus”
“Our city has grown great because it follows ta patria established by our ancestors, not the fleeting fashions of others.”
— Isocrates, “Panegyricus”
“We should judge by kata ta patria, for the customs of our fathers are our strength.”
— Thucydides, “History of the Peloponnesian War”
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