‘Pantagruel  with his father Gargantua and mother Gargamelle” (watercolor); by Gustave Doré (1832–1883)

Translated from the French by Tom Sunic.

Below is the interview Alain de Benoist gave recently to Boulevard Voltaire.

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Q: “Eat your five servings of fruit and vegetables every day!”; “Do some sport!”; “Quit Smoking!”; “Drink one glass, but not two!”; “Buckle up when driving!”;  “Do not eat too much fat!”; “Do the proper garbage recycling!” After Big Brother, have we now arrived at Big Mother?

A: Starting with the nineteenth century the welfare state has been progressively put in place in order to compensate for the disappearance of organic and community solidarities which, with the rise of individualist ideology, have become dissolved.  Today the welfare state it is morphing into a sort of “therapeutic state”— if we were to borrow an expression by Christopher Lasch. This therapeutic state can be defined as an unholy alliance of the medication process and the state, setting up all sorts of unjustified obstructions to our freedom. The authority is becoming more and more maternal, albeit maternal in a way of a possessive mother eager to maintain its subjects in total dependency. The unilateral relationship with the state replaces the ancient social bonds. This hygienic control augurs social control. Medicine itself, when taking part in the control of populations, becomes totalitarian.

The dominant human type of today is the immature narcissist, ignoring all realties other than his own, and who, above all, wishes to satisfy all his cravings. This infantile type of a human being, predictably of liberal-libertarian orientation, is perfectly in line with a system which, as Marx wrote, drowns everything “in the icy waters of egoistic calculation.” What follows is a therapeutic civilization centered on the “Me” only. Pierre Manent  rightly stresses that liberalism means primarily renouncing to apprehend human life in terms of its own good and its own finality. In a society ruled by the entertainment industry in which nobody asks himself about the meaning and significance of his presence in the world, body-care of the Self becomes the alpha and omega of human life.  Not only does it signify being of good health, but also “feeling good about oneself,” and thus forgetting one’s own finitude. While expecting immortality in this world, the dream of eternal youth grips all those who have never become adults, and who conceive now of their life as a maternal fusion defying any symbolic order, while thriving  in a culture of the present tense that has expelled any meaning of historical continuity. Henceforth society functions according to the principles of mimetic rivalry, as a form of “ego rivalry” (in Freudian terms), i.e., with  the Self  being stripped off of its “id” and its  “superego,”  convinced now it is the center of the universe. This only facilitates the war of all against all. Read more

The article below is based on the speech given at the “London Forum,” London UK, May 16, 2015).

The nouns ‘hero’ and ‘heretic’ are used as frequent figures of speech in daily communication. Every day, almost every minute of our time, either consciously or subconsciously, we refer to the notion of hero and heretic, albeit by using often different words and expressions. The highly generic nouns ‘hero’ and ‘heretic’ lack a precise common denominator. What may be considered a heretical behavior today may be viewed as heroic behavior tomorrow. The meaning of the noun ‘hero’ is further complicated by its semantic shifts and its awkward equivalents in other languages and cultures. Thus the German word for hero is ‘Held’, although this word conveys a wider meaning in Germanic languages than the English word ‘hero’ or the French ‘héros’, deriving from the ancient Greek, and largely associated with political and military prowess only.

One must also refer to some well-known authors who dealt with the study of heros, such as Joseph Campbell and his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a book still serving as a primer in religious science courses at universities in the USA, but also a book which influenced many Hollywood moguls.  Although Campbell never addressed the notion of the hero from a racial perspective, the fact that he sat on the editorial board of the Mankind Quarterly  and that he had once upon a distant time allegedly cracked a small joke in front of his colleagues about the Jews earned him the title of “anti-Semite,” , a label not usually associated with heroism. Read more