/lit/ - Literature

I’ve been reading Del Noce, and his ability to get into the guts of the failures and contradictions in modern spiritual, philosophical, and political movements is absolutely captivating.
The most important of Del Noce’s ideas is the Heterogenesis of Ends, which he believes is present in all modern philosophies. He most famously applied it to Marxism, demonstrating well in advance of the collapse of Communism that the negations and relativism inherent in historical materialism would eventually overrun the dialectical revolutionary faith. Having done the dirty work of dismantling all competing lifeways, Del Noce thought Marxism would give way to an even more ghastly, materialistic, hyper-bourgeois variant of State Capitalism. This is, of course, exactly what happened — the Marxist periodization of history was wrong — Capitalism is what comes after Communism in the actually existing world.
Del Noce intentionally avoided systematizing his thought, so it’s hard to know what he’s think about any particular development in today’s world, but I’ve been thinking about the hererogenesis of ends as it relates to the current wave of populism. Essentially, the so-called traditional values being defended, particularly in the Anglophone countries, are the very values of modernity that have been undermining the lifeways if their inhabitants for centuries: secularism, the sovereign State, the revolutionary demotic spirit, industrialism, consumerism, material comfort and ease of life, etc. I wonder that it too doesn’t contain within it the seeds of its own destruction.