2. The Fourth Revolution And Tribalism: An Eventuality?
How shall this come to pass? We cannot but wonder if the tribal society dreamed of by today’s structuralist currents provides the answer to this question. Structuralism sees in tribal life an illusory synthesis between the height of individual liberty and of consentaneous collectivism, in which the latter ends up devouring liberty. In this collectivism, the various “I’s” or the individual persons, with their intelligence, will, and sensibility, and consequently with their characteristic and conflictual ways of being, merge and dissolve in the collective personality of the tribe, which generates one thought, one will, and one style of being intensely common to all.
Opening ceremony at Woodstock with Swami Satchidananda giving the opening speech. Swami Satchidananda Saraswati an Indian yoga guru and religious teacher of Hinduism, Interfaith universalism, who gained fame and following in the West.
Of course, the road to this tribal state of things must pass through the extinction of the old standards of individual reflection, volition, and sensibility. These will be gradually replaced by forms of thought, deliberation, and sensibility that are increasingly collective. It is, therefore, principally in this field that the transformation must take place.
The earliest known depiction of a Siberian shaman, by the Dutch Nicolaes Witsen, 17th century. Witsen called him a “priest of the Devil” and drew clawed feet for the demonic qualities.
In what manner? In tribes, the cohesion among the members is assured mainly by a way of thinking and feeling common to all, from which result common habits and a common will. Individual reason is reduced to almost nothing, in other words, to the first and most elementary movements that this atrophied state permits. “Savage thought,”1. the thought that does not think and is turned only to what is concrete — such is the price of the tribal collectivist fusion. It belongs to the witch doctor to maintain, on a mystical level, this collective psychic life by means of totemic cults charged with confused “messages” but rich in the ignes fatui or even fulgurations emanating from the mysterious world of transpsychology or parapsychology. By acquiring these “riches,” man would compensate for the atrophy of reason.
Cartesianism is the philosophical and scientific system of René Descartes.
Reason — formerly hypertrophied by free interpretation of the Scriptures, Cartesianism, and other causes, divinized by the French Revolution, used to the point of the most unabashed abuse in every communist school of thought — would now be atrophied and enslaved by transpsychological and parapsychological totemism.
1. Cf. Claude Levy-Strauss, La pensee sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1969).
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution (York, Penn.: The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, 1993), Part III, Chapter III, pg. 158-159.
