In dialectical tension with society as culminated consciousness, the white seeks a means by which they can subvert the status quo which they feel has slighted them. They feel as though society fails to give them the proper recognition of their consciousness and their alienation that they deserve. They also feel, importantly, that society scorns them for noting this; that, in feeling indignant, society turns against them and rejects their self-consciousness.

Here is where the crucial moment happens. An essay in Breivik’s manifesto refers to sociology as an academic topic being a propaganda-machine. My intent isn’t to contend with this take that’s self-defeating in its own right; saying that sociology is “anti-Christendom” just after a sentence invoking Weber’s influence on the field is laughable at best. My intent rather is to point to the closing part, where the author suggests alternatives, pointing to a curriculum based on “ideological fundaments” from “The Bible[,] Machiavelli[,] George Orwell[,] Thomas Hobbes[,] John Stuart Mill[,] John Locke[,] Adam Smith[,] Edmund Burke[,] Ayn Rand[, and] William James.”

Again, never minding that Orwell was a socialist vehemently opposed to fascism and that the white nationalist once more foolishly opposes their own purpose in their examples, we should zero in on the invocation of Enlightenment philosophers. To these philosophers, the legitimacy of government is based on the consent of the governed. A parallel is drawn here.

In the modern neoliberal national identity, the embryonic white nationalist seeks recognition and doesn’t find it. This unresolved negation leads necessarily to the illegitimacy of the liberal order in the eyes of the embryonic white nationalist. In response, the white nationalist seeks recognition elsewhere, and establishes legitimacy there. Likewise, the sociofactual chains which formed the foundation of contextual reality under the liberal worldview falls aside and becomes ethereal and ungrounded; in their place enters an alternative skeleton of meaning, built around notions of Jewish media control, cultural Marxist invasion and subversion and suppression of traditional world systems, Islamic barbarism and pillaging, and so forth. These become facts supported by unfacts seen as facts. Liberalism, for the record, is often just as guilty of this sort of cultural mythologizing, and weaves unsustainable notions of unfacts into the social fabric. The uncovering of some of these unfacts, for instance, such as the posturing of the inevitability of man-made climate change as an opinion or argument, are intuited by the embryonic white nationalist and subverted, albeit in a very strange direction. The eco-fascist leanings of both Tarrant and the shooter in El Paso, who opened his document with “In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto” and later said “the environment is getting hotter by the year,” reflect a synthesis of the subversion of status quo liberalism and liberal discussion with the indignation of perceived social slighting. And, as perceptual reality becomes more distant from reality-per-consensus, the actual necessity of the perceived truth to correlate to empirical or logical reality subsides so long as it manages to fit within the skeleton of constructed truths.

This perhaps explains the pseudo-psychoanalytical appeal of introspectives like those posted by Stefan Molyneux regarding pop culture, where “The Truth about Frozen” becomes a diatribe on tribe mentalities and a pseudo-scientific anthropology.

This subversion of the common mythos is an element in all radical ideology. The difference is that left radical ideology tends to progress the notions of social integration for the purposes of advancing given ends, like academic research and science (even if there is contention about the meaning of “science” and its need for elaboration within social contexts), in essence attempting to surround and saturate the notion of the “fact” with perceptual context. right radical ideology tends instead to form a connection with immediate identity and mitigate all context which is external or perceived as extraneous to the immediate identity’s most proximate perceived “need”. That is, contextually-based facts which are inconvenient to the identitarian cause are discarded, and those which are useful are morphed into a certain form. For instance, IQ testing results are used as a foundation for race science; never mind that these results are susceptible to critique in terms of environmental factors and psychosocial conditions. The peer-reviewed nature of liberal science is accepted only insofar as it reinforces the goals of the movement. Global warming is accepted, but only because it gives a means of solidarity-building and a feeling of immanent danger for one’s people.

And when recognition isn’t found in the social and economic sphere of the liberal nation-state, and slights are perceived, this is instead displaced and replaced with the discovery of immediate identity, in shifting definitions of whiteness, a faux form of nebulous solidarity. Again, my goal here isn’t to poke holes in white nationalist talking points, and it is meaningless to point out the futility of “whiteness” as a unifying factor.

At any rate, once the illegitimacy of the status quo and the common mode of thought is determined, legitimacy is sought, and legitimacy all too often is found not in the critical reflection of society by analysis of social structures as a whole, but through adherence of strange race- or ethnicity-based pseudonationalism. These things present themselves as legitimate because of their emotional appeal; they hearken to a point where things were different. Hold that thought.

Identities are as much a social construction as the individual self-consciousness. Identity can only not be tautological, self-explanatory, or extraneous in a series of contrasts and oppositions. The term “I am white” becomes tautological and meaningless if one removes it from the social context defining whiteness; the history of the idea of “whiteness”, the history of white colonialism, the history of the subjugation of other races and the creation of their racial identities which indeed were formed themselves as an locative opposition to, ultimately, what one most certainly is not. And so people are white as much as they are told they are white, not just by society as it is but by society as it was, and especially and particularly how the individual perceives society to be and how the individual perceives society to have been. This is why race is so tricky. It’s not a stagnant standalone social categorization based off of individual phenotypes and physical characteristics. It’s a historically written role.

So in recognition of this, the embryonic white nationalist forms in themselves the kernel of the idea of whiteness from the social dialogues they’ve heard, both those intended to be constructive and those which were very much not so. In seeing themselves, the white nationalist comes to see themselves as white, but also sees a statement and symbolism in whiteness, and begins to fawn for this lost state. This is why fascism is so endlessly traditionalist. What appears is that not only is this state lost, but the vestiges of this state — in this case, white identity — are also disappearing, and soon, the identity in and of itself will completely dissolve. Because paradoxically, white nationalists believe they have an incredible story of an ideal society, but also that the identity this created is a self-contained entity which can evaporate into thin air.

When the dialectic between a social identity as one entity and society, capitalism, and liberal democracy as the cohesive other fails to resolve neatly — and remember, crucially, that the resolution is dependent upon subjective perception — the result is the crumbling of the dialectic, and the creation of a feeling of illegitimacy among those who carry that social identity. In turn, the traditional and self-contained identity gains legitimacy, and all facts which support the notion that this traditional and self-contained identity is under attack gain precedence over more conventional social “facts”. This is why white supremacist manifestos are not detailed excursions on how and why white people are superior beyond vague allusions to European accomplishment or inherent greatness, or gestures to vaguely-defined and ill-supported periods in the history of such “identity”. Rather, they are full of anecdotes and fake news articles about the white identity being under attack. “Islam rapes our women.” “The Jews wish to replace us.” “The migrants are sponging up our social benefits.” So on and so forth. The reason for the embrace of ecofascism is that it fits neatly into this narrative of an identity under attack, and this identity, to the white nationalist, is the only perceived legitimate source of social structure and hierarchy.