Navigating Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction in an uncertain environment

How does one build community in this digitized prison?

Many years ago I had a jarring aha moment regarding the friend-enemy distinction in a trivial interaction with someone who was at the time a close liberal friend.

The friend-enemy distinction is a concept created by German political theorist Carl Schmitt, elaborated on in his famous 1932 book “The Concept of the Political.” According to Schmitt, the political is simply the distinguishing between one’s friends and one’s enemies. Groups of like-minded people naturally form and coalesce over time, and given this world is a world of opposites, groups of people who share antithetical views to such group tends to form as well. Viewing the solidification over time of an enemy collective into an identifiable, solid mass, an individual sees a force that is diametrically opposed to him regarding an issue, dogma, or affiliation. Only by the destruction of the enemy collective is an individual guaranteed the enactment of his collective’s will and/or the preemption of the enemy’s will, and this guarantee along with the intensity of division enables the extreme possibility of physical conflict.

N.S. Lyons

has an illuminating post on Schmitt’s conception of the friend/enemy distinction. With respect to the modern era, Lyons discusses how white middle America has been defined as the “enemy” of society, and how this in turn is slowly mirroring and shaping a reaction toward viewing the modern liberal technocratic state as their enemy in turn. He states:

If portions of the American right have today turned to Schmitt as a guide, it may be because they now have plenty of reason to believe the purported procedural neutrality of the liberal technocratic state is nothing but the thinnest of veils covering an existential antagonism; that in truth the crucial political distinction has now already been made for them: they have been identified, in concrete clarity, as the enemies of the state.

It happens that Schmitt in fact voiced particular unease about how he expected liberalism would tend to define its enemies. By insisting on having transcended the political through its commitment to pluralism and enlightened universal values, and therefore incapable of ever acknowledging the possibility of sinking to the level of identifying a human enemy, liberalism would, he predicted, “confiscate the word humanity,” thus “denying the enemy the quality of being human.” In such a case, for the liberal, any resulting war “is then considered to constitute the absolute last war of humanity.” And, ultimately, “Such a war is necessarily unusually intense and inhuman because, by transcending the limits of the political framework, it simultaneously degrades the enemy into moral and other categories and is forced to make him a monster that must not only be defeated but also utterly annihilated.”

In a similar vein, Substack author

Sanfedisti

had an interesting post recently about his limits on his willingness to debate with liberals, who he believes wants to murder and destroy him. He writes:

I have never been interested in speaking to people who do not already agree with me, or at least who do not share a similar perspective. What I do not do, ever, is speak to leftists.

The left exists as an anti-civilizational force whose goal is no less than the total obliteration of your life, family, nation, history, religion, ethnos, people, and the permanent erasure of all that ever came from any of it. And you want me to talk?…

The answer cannot be to give these diabolical plots the legitimacy of civil discourse. The answer is to reject entirely the premise and the person whole-cloth.

Sanfedisti is correct in the sense that the liberal point of view, the way they see the world, is fundamentally different from the outlook of those on the right. Anonymous Conservative likens these differences to evolutionary r/k selection theory, which posits two opposing procreation strategies reflecting environmental extremes: one is better adapted to environments where resources are freely available (having lots of kids with little investment in each child) and the other better adapted to environments where resources are scarce (having fewer children with more investments in each child). These differences are hardwired biologically for most and not changeable regardless of environmental changes. For example, wonderful Lee Kuan Yew stated no matter how much richer and more successful Singapore became through his methods, about 30% of the population stubbornly remained diehard communists or communist supporters. If they aren’t even convinced by their own dramatically improving quality of life, what hope would you have to convince them of anything?

Now, I would caution

Sanfedisti

that liberals control every institution of power (including the military and police forces), and that pushing this talk too far could eventually lead to violent conflict — conflict I am convinced the right has very little chance of winning at this time, because success requires either institutional or foreign support, which the right has none of. When you’re around an aggressive and spiteful bully who can beat you up, tread carefully. I will delve into the potential odds of success for a “redneck rebellion” in a future post.

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The “aha” moment

There was a small, inconsequential moment where I realized liberals had a completely alien perspective from my own. I didn’t really appreciate the impact of the moment at the time - I noted it with a kind of “huh” - but it increasingly reverberated with me as time went on.

The moment occurred in 2015 and was over an insignificant political matter. An unknown figure, Corey Lewandowski, was running Trump’s upstart campaign in the Republican primaries and doing a surprisingly great job, keeping the campaign focused, limber, and with limited overhead. In a crowded room at one of Trump’s press conferences Lewandowski brushed through the crowd to keep up with his boss. Michelle Fields, a reporter for Breitbart at the time, claimed that Lewandowski viciously grabbed her as he passed by. She decided to press charges. Ben Shapiro jumped in and demanded Lewandowski be fired:

“Corey Lewandowski is a thug, and Donald Trump is a thug for backing him,” Shapiro said Thursday night during an appearance on Fox News’s The Kelly File. 

Unlike Breitbart management, which today shifted blame for the attack from the Trump campaign manager to the Secret Service, Shapiro is vocally backing Fields’ account. 

“The fact that the Trump campaign continues to play this game, where they put out not just violent rhetoric but in this case a campaign manager engaging in violent action — and they won’t step down to apologize — is beyond disgusting, it really is,” Shapiro said. ”It’s gross.”

This was a big deal in the moment because if Lewandowski was fired it could have had a material impact on Trump’s burgeoning campaign. It felt like an attempt from some on the right (who worked for Breitbart of all places, which was the champion of Trump!) to undermine and hurt his movement. Now, nothing ultimately happened from this minor incident and Lewandowski continued in his role through the primaries. Later Trump replaced him with Paul Manafort and then Steve Bannon to navigate the Republican convention and the general election, respectively.

So why was this minor incident so clarifying? Well, the whole thing was caught on video and released to the public by the police. Let’s see what the stop-motion video shows with how it comports to Field’s and Shapiro’s takes, which took place over maybe a second:

You can see Trump starting in the center and walking toward the bottom right. Lewandowski is right behind him. Michelle Fields approaches Trump to ask a question, and Lewandowski brushes past her to keep up with Trump. It was a half second interaction, maybe a frame or two of the stop-motion video, and it looks like he didn’t even see her. You may have to watch it a couple of times to see it fully.

How was this a national incident? Why did this get blown up? Am I in crazy land here? What the hell did I just watch compared to media reports on it?

Now, at the time I was a relative political neophyte. I had always followed politics and news, but this was at the end of an era when the personal and the political were sort of distinct entities, and I didn’t really understand the process by which they were increasingly blending. During the Trump era and especially the COVID era the personal and the political blended, and now they cannot be separated. Julian Assange relates this process in 2016 to the changing nature of the internet itself:

“I see that there is now a militarization of cyberspace, in the sense of a military occupation. When you communicate over the internet, when you communicate using mobile phones, which are now meshed to the internet, your communications are being intercepted by military intelligence organizations. It’s like having a tank in your bedroom. It’s a soldier between you and your wife as you’re SMSing. We’re all living under martial law as far as our communications are concerned, we just can’t see the tanks - but they are there. To that degree, the internet, which was supposed to be a civilian space, has become a militarized space. But the internet is our space, because we all use it to communicate with each other and with the members of our family. The communications at the inner core of our private lives now move over the internet. So in fact our private lives have entered into a militarized zone. It is like having a soldier under the bed. This is a militarization of civilian life.”

The personal has become the political.

Anyway, I had a number of liberal friends at the time, which have since dwindled in number (not to zero, though), and one of them was really into politics, a very smart guy and one who had some idiosyncratic views that did not match lockstep with the liberal establishment. He was also more willing than most liberals to consider alternative views, even if he didn’t agree. I showed him this video at the time (as he had heard of the story and was enjoying the right-on-right squabble), expecting him to fully agree that the story was blown up out of nothing, but after watching the video, he said he agreed with Shapiro and Fields that Lewandowski should be fired! What!!!

I was flabbergasted. Here was a video showing frame-by-frame the interaction, and it was as one-sided and obvious as can be, and yet there was a fundamental disagreement over interpretation. If two people of different political persuasions cannot agree on the interpretation of frame-by-frame video evidence, what hope is there of achieving consensus on any matter of which there is not such evidence?

There is a fundamental difference of perception, rooted in underlying differing value and judgment systems that are irreconcilable.

Sanfedisti

shares the same sentiment in this post, where he argues interpretations of direct video evidence can be narratively spun by our elites to mean anything, and that this is unnerving. The elite sentiment seems to be, not entirely without merit, “Who are you going to believe, you peasant, you plebian, you prole, you worm, the always objective media or your own lying eyes? We are the masters of all reality, we decide what is real and what is false, and who are you? A gnat, meaningless, who we grind beneath our feet, forgotten by historical records, swept away by the sands of time. We are Gods and you are nothing.”

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How does one differentiate friend from foe?

Schmitt argued that the friend-enemy distinction is the most important political distinction one can make. Liberals are much better at identifying friends and enemies than conservatives are, who are much more independently minded than liberals and easily distracted/blinded by appeals to ideals and equality. In the example above, my friend correctly identified that Lewandowski represented Trump, he represented competence (given he was doing a good job), therefore he was a threat who should be destroyed. Who cares what the video evidence showed? Say whatever it takes, get rid of him. And it’s not like he thought this consciously — he was an NPC liberal, not a sociopathic liberal — but still, it was an unconscious process where he identified who his enemy was and then consciously sought to justify his underlying unconscious beliefs.

Telling friend from enemy can be difficult, though, without a proper framework (and sometimes even with one). Are anti-abortion Christians allies or enemies of the eugenic racialist right? Are corporatist leftists friends or enemies of the environmentalist left? Is the establishment right exemplified by Rupert Murdoch, Fox News, the Club for Growth, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan friends or enemies of those further to their right? What about alt-light gatekeepers like Ben Shapiro, Mike Cernovich, Ben Chowder, Charlie Kirk, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, Candace Owens - are they all in the same category and should be treated the same? Where does Jeff Sessions fall, who was one of the earliest and most vocal Trump supporters yet viciously betrayed him and helped institute the Russiagate fraud?

Or what about the concepts of doomerism and demoralization generally, where those on the right who are black-pilled without offering actionable solutions may be considered just as bad as liberals?

Kulak

makes the argument for this here.

What, ultimately, separates friend from enemy?

Ultimately I think the distinction is a relative one and context dependent, depending on the objectives of the person making the distinction. Is the objective of the person making the determination to win an election? Then the goal should be to create as big a political tent as possible. Is the objective to monetize one’s follower base and not run afoul of the authorities, like much of the alt-light gatekeepers above? Then one should figure out an angle that will maximize that revenue stream from existing followers and generate new ones while staying away from no-go topics.

If the goal, though, is to broaden human knowledge, to push back against the egalitarian ratchet effect that is destroying western civilization and perhaps all of humanity, then the only people worth discussing things with are other dissidents, and only from a perspective of the pursuit of truth.

I offered a comment in Kulak’s post above about demoralization which is as follows:

“Where or how do you draw the line between demoralization and truth? For example, if you told Trump supporters in 2017: "Hey guys, by 2023 Trump will have re-election stolen from him with permanently instituted vote-by-mail fraud, he will have accomplished nothing meaningful, over a thousand of his most dedicated followers will be in prison, and Trump will be facing over 90 criminal charges that could easily put him away for life" everyone would have looked at you as an insane demoralization agent -- yet all of this is true. How do you separate the two?”

Now, Kulak didn’t respond to this question, but I’ll give my answer to it here. It depends on the objectives being pursued. If one is trying to build a political coalition, then this truthful statement would be harmful to the objective. Therefore ignore or squash truth, build political coalition. But if one is pursuing truth for its own sake, wherever it leads, which is a layer much deeper and with much more potential for radical long-term change than merely pursuing political solutions, then this truthful statement would be helpful to the objective. This is why there is tension between the so-called doomer camp (such as

Rurik Skywalker

and Igor Strelkov) with that of the so-called patriotic or populist camp; the latter see the former as undermining them, while the former believe the latter cannot succeed without deeper and more fundamental spiritual and philosophical changes. (There’s also a separate type of doomerism which is essentially generalized nihilistic pessimistic passivity which I think is rightly condemned, as seen here by Asha Logos and here by

Kenaz Filan

). Identify the objective you are pursuing and build your community on that basis.

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If pursuing truth, only engage with ideological dissidents

I previously offered a taxonomy of personality types: these classifications are based on ones physiognomy and are mostly immutable. The taxonomy offered was as follows:

• Liberals, comprised of non-playable characters (the vast majority) and sociopathic types (few in number but many of the leaders). Sociopathic liberals are immutably ideologically opposed to dissidents and cannot change. NPCs unquestioningly imbibe establishment propaganda and do what they are told as herd-creatures, but if dissidents ever came to power then they would follow them just as easily;

• Corporatists, who focus on making money as their top priority but who always bend to liberal pressure tactics in the hope of going back to making money;

• Dissidents, comprised of non-ideological and ideological types. Non-ideological dissidents are emotionally opposed to egalitarianism, but they are not intellectual enough to eloquently verbalize their objections — they feel their opposition instead of thinking it. They are basically Fox News watchers. Ideological types are opposed to globohomo on philosophical grounds (such as opposing central bank usury), and/or religious or race based. Ideological dissidents are drawn exclusively from the Loser clique.

• There are also the lumpenproletariat who are apolitical, low IQ and just focus on their job, paying bills, entertainment and sex.

If the hope is to build a new system based on a partial transvaluation of values, only ideological dissidents are worth spending one’s energies on. If such dissidents build an energetic and self-sustaining parallel system or an integrated community with a compelling, competing vision of the future, then non-ideological dissidents and system NPCs will eventually join, but they will be hanger-ons to the movement instead of forming the backbone of it. This is why globohomo crushed the alt-right movement in 2017, because they were starting to have a significant impact on the wider public’s thought processes. For those who are currently trying to build a parallel, physical economy in the real world, I am skeptical it can work given globohomo’s control over the money supply and the taxation of bartering by the IRS, which requires bartering be treated as taxable and payable in dollars, but the attempt is interesting regardless.

If one panders to non-ideological dissidents or to corporatists for popularity, then one will have to compromise one’s values. Those who are popular are the ones who tell others what they want to hear. Pandering in turn dilutes the message being conveyed and serves as a corrupting influence. Nietzsche, for example, who legitimately spoke truth to the power of the whole society in which he lived, was not popular during the active part of his writing career. Trailblazers often end up with arrows in their backs, paving the way for others to follow. Popularity will slowly and inevitably come if the conveyed message is true and solves a major problem plaguing society, but truth should be pursued for its own sake; let others if they want take up the mantle of using that truth for convincing others and for the power process.

In my opinion, it is preferable to bask in the sun like Diogenes and tell Alexander to get out of the way.

Alexander und Diogenes by Lovis Corinth, 1894, at the Graphische Sammlung Albertina, representing the pursuit of truth versus the pursuit of power

This sense of community is what Substack currently provides given it allows free speech, for now, during their growth stage, at least.

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The discernment of values

What are the values that ideological dissidents should look for in each other? Here are a couple of heuristics:

• Transparency and accountability. Q-anon was the worst kind of movement because it was built on peddling trust without accountability or verification. The result of such misplaced trust was to encourage (mostly non-ideological) dissidents to sit passively as the “good guys” behind the scenes were “fighting” for them. This was Operation Trust 2.0. A well-intentioned author should give his step-by-step process in the chain of reasoning behind his argument, linking to evidence at every step, and leave it up to the reader to make up their own determination. This is what I attempted to do in my long-form Neoliberal Feudalism essay with well over 1,000 cites documenting my chain of reasoning regarding the structure of modern society. Appeals to authority are weak in an era of decentralized knowledge; state your reasoning, give the underlying information being relied upon to reach those conclusions, and let people make up their own minds. Julian Assange has and had a similar philosophy; provide the underlying primary source materials and let the reader decide.¹

• An acknowledgment of subjectivity. Ben Shapiro has an infamous quote, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” In this quote he claims to be a unique possessor of “facts” that give him the “insight” to tell you what do think and how to act. It reminds me of the famous Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”

  Compare Shapiro’s position with that of Nietzsche: “There are no facts, only interpretations”. Also "Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler." Under Nietzsche’s formulation, what matters is who is offering the interpretation and from what motivation? What are the speaker’s underlying moral beliefs motivating their statements and conduct?

  You are aware of my demand upon philosophers, that they should take up a stand Beyond Good and Evil … This demand is the result of a point of view which I was the first to formulate: that there are no such things as moral facts. Moral judgment has this in common with the religious one, that it believes in realities which are not real. Morality is only an interpretation of certain phenomena: or, more strictly speaking, a misinterpretation of them.… [M]oral judgment must never be taken quite literally: as such is sheer nonsense. As a sign code, however, it is invaluable: to him at least who knows, it reveals the most valuable facts concerning cultures…

  This is such a more honest and direct approach than Shapiro’s, whose unstated objective is simply to support Israel. And his sneering “I’m the decider of the facts, listen to me” has led to him being duplicitously pro-COVID vaccine, a vocal never-Trumper, pro-censorship, and more.

  Always ask, cui bono? If you don’t know what your own interests are and how to advance them, how can you expect not to be fooled when someone underhandedly pushes their own interests to sucker you?

Nietzsche and Shapiro have opposite understandings of what “facts” constitute. Compare their physiognomies; intensity, directness at the seriousness of life on the left, smug arrogance and dissembly on the right.

• Character of both others and yourself revealed during times of stress. The height of COVID hysteria was a great way to see the true values of people, for it revealed character during times of stress. Did someone get an untested mRNA vaccine because society pressured them to? (i.e. Jordan Peterson, who then pathetically tried to backtrack about the booster, compromising himself by agreeing to contract terms with Shapiro’s Daily Wire that muzzle the voices of their contributors, and later cried while calling Israel a moral city on a hill). What about Arnold Schwarzenegger, who famously said “screw your freedoms” when calling for you to be force-jabbed? Was someone silent about election fraud due to employer pressure? (Tucker Carlson). So many false idols were smashed under the pressures of COVID…

  Or how about on the other side — if you want to see a real hero, look at Ian Smith who heroically fought against COVID tyranny in New Jersey and suffered over a million dollars in fines, in addition to many other punitive measures:

  

  Ian Smith, COVID hero

  

  Jordan Peterson, COVID failure

  If you want to see others acting heroically under pressure and paying a large price for it, see Louis Uridel, Shelley Luther, Greg Anderson, Danny Presti, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

  Seeing someone’s behavior under pressure isn’t a perfect heuristic - there are no guarantees heroic action on one issue translates to similar heroism on another - but it’s as close as one can get.

• Building cooperatively instead of instigating right-on-right drama. It’s a good idea to be weary of those characters who spend an inordinate amount of time infighting in petty squabbles, regardless of their other qualities. Milo Yiannopoulos comes to mind.

• The corrupting influences of money, power and influence. Writing for money serves as a potentially corrupting influence. This is because money starts bending one’s incentive structure; are you writing for yourself, or are you writing to please your audience to tell them what they want to hear so they maintain their subscription? Then you also have to become worried about how often you write. Without knowing it you may slowly become a slave instead of the master of your writing. If you are worried about the extent of your influence, are you willing to write hard truths or does the pull of pretty lies become more important? Small bloggers writing for free and documenting the full chain of their reasoning are, I think, the best spot to be in. (Of course, psychologically speaking people assign more value for what they pay for and the more they pay the more they value it (i.e. setting a higher price point for an item can often result in more demand), and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with wanting or needing to be paid for one’s work, but still, the corrupting danger of chasing money is ever-present…)

Anyway, these are some hopefully useful heuristics, but there are no guarantees. As mentioned above, Jeff Sessions was Trump’s earliest Senate supporter, he brought on Stephen Miller who loyally served Trump, but then Sessions displayed extreme moral weakness against a globohomo coup attempt against Trump which led directly to the two year fake Mueller investigation nightmare. There was no signs of this character defect in Sessions ahead of time, and even though many of Trump’s personnel decisions were quite poor, the results of this key appointment was something that no one could have seen coming. One may use their best discernment and judgment on assessing others, but ultimately the soul of others (and to a large extent, our own) remain a mystery, and the results are known only to God.

The Benedict Arnold of modern America

1. Julian Assange, When Google Met WikiLeaks, p. 126: “I have been pushing this idea of scientific journalism - that things must be precisely cited with the original source, and as much of the information as possible should be put in the public domain so that people can look at it, just like in science so that you can test to see whether the conclusion follows from the experimental data. Otherwise the journalist probably just made it up. In fact, that is what happens all the time: people just make it up. They make it up to such a degree that we are led to war.”