American Dissident Voices broadcast of March 17, 2018

by Kevin Alfred Strom

TODAY WE continue with part 9 of our series, “A New Religion for Us” — as we study the foundations of religion in the prehistory, history, and psychology of our race — from the beginnings of language — to the creation of myths — to imaginative artistic works, like Tolkien’s, that conjure fantastic worlds of the imagination that our race seems to crave as an escape from our day-to-day reality — to the basic psychological characteristics that make our race such easy prey for supposedly “spiritual” confidence rackets — a field of endeavor in which the Jews certainly excel.

I give you the words of classicist and scholar Revilo P. Oliver, from his book The Origins of Christianity, read by Miss Vanessa Neubauer. Listen:

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Belief

by Revilo P. Oliver

IT MAY BE that, as Carl Jung claims, religiosity is an inherent and inherited tendency of our nature, determined by the archetypal symbols that are latent in our subconscious minds as our inheritance from the collective unconscious of the race to which we belong – a psychic substratum that was formed by our race’s collective experience during all the millennia since it became a human species. But although Jung’s arguments are plausible, his theory is, at the limit, no more demonstrable than the many that are more superficial.

There are, however, two indubitable factors that we may mention, since they are sometimes so obvious they are overlooked, being simply taken for granted.

Although all of the higher mammals have certain rudimentary powers of reason and communication, the several species that are distinguished as human possess, in varying degrees, the ability to form a language, by which certain arbitrary sounds are given specific meanings and may be assembled into the sentences of a statement that becomes a substitute for visual, auditory, or tactile perception. The word ‘spear’ causes the hearer’s imagination to form a picture of a specific instrument, and the statement ‘I hurled a spear at the tiger’ makes the hearer visualize in his consciousness not only the weapon, the tiger, and me, but also the act in which I am said to have engaged. There is nothing in the statement or in the hearer’s imaginative reaction to it that indicates the truth or the falsity of the statement. Language, in other words, confers the power to lie. . . . If I tell you that I was in London this morning, you will know that I lie, because I could not conceivably have returned thence in the elapsed time. If I tell you that I thought of London this morning, you will never be able to determine whether or not I have told the truth.

If we read Sir Walter Scott’s Life of Swift and his Waverley, there is nothing in either narrative that permits us to distinguish between biography and fiction. We know, however, from our basic education that there was a distinguished writer named Swift who lived at the time mentioned in the first of these books, and what we know of his writings and the circumstances of his life agrees with what Scott tells us; we therefore accept the Life of Swift as a statement of facts, truthful and accurate, except insofar as Scott may have overlooked or misunderstood data that we can ascertain from other and reliable sources. When we read the second of these books, however, we have no means of knowing offhand whether a man named Edward Waverley lived at the time indicated and we could not find out, except by a prolonged and laborious search through the vast mass of relevant records that might contain mention of him and confirm at least some of the acts attributed to him; but Sir Walter has informed us in his preface that Waverley is merely a creation of his own imagination.

If we read Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse, we know that it is a novel, for so the author has told us. If it were labelled a biography, we might wonder how some of the incidents and personal sentiments recorded became known to the writer, and we might be sceptical about parts of the narrative, but an enormous amount of research would be necessary before we would dare affirm that the protagonist never lived. Kenneth Roberts’ 0liver Wiswell would present an even more difficult problem, since almost all of the leading characters except the protagonist are historical figures who did participate in the events that are described in the book with historical accuracy, as can be determined from some or many authentic sources, and the protagonist is essentially an observer, so that we should have to prove that he could not have witnessed those events.

If now we turn to the famous works of J. R. R. Tolkien, we find a narrative that is, per se, as circumstantial and seemingly realistic, as convincing, as any of the books mentioned above. We know at once, however, that we are reading fiction – and we should know it, no matter how positively the author asseverated that it was a veracious account of actual happenings – because we know, from our basic education, that no such beings as hobbits, elves, and wizards ever existed and that many of the incidents described violate the ascertained and indubitable laws of Nature. We know, beyond possible doubt, that Tolkien’s books are grandiose tissues of falsehood, of what would be impudent falsehood, if the author pretended otherwise. They are, however, works of brilliant and almost poetic fantasy and so serve a spiritual need that is an essential part of our nature and cannot be denied with impunity.

For our aesthetic satisfaction, therefore, we practice what is called the “poetic suspension of doubt,” that is to say, we, by an act of will, assume that the narrative is a factual and veracious account while we are reading it and in our minds, so to speak, we temporarily suspend the laws of Nature and our own rationality, so that we may enjoy a delightful illusion and satisfy our emotional need to escape for a time from the grim limitations of reality. [As Horace said,] Dulce et decorum est desipere in loco. [“It is sweet and fitting to relax the mind at times.”] At the end of the reading, as though at the end of a symphony, having experienced the spiritual and emotional release that our psyche needed, we return to reality and the dire world from which we escaped for a time in imagination. We return to painful sanity in a world in which, alas, there is no magic.

If we were propense to superstition and could not bear to surrender the dulcet illusion, if we were willing to believe what is manifestly impossible, only the author’s explicit statement that he wrote fiction would save us from taking Tolkien’s books as the veracious gospels of a religion more plausible and internally consistent than any other. Tolkien’s books are the work of a single and singularly lucid mind, not a mere congeries of myths elaborated at widely different times for widely different purposes by many obscure authors and never given competent editorial revision, which would have eliminated internal inconsistencies in each tale and gross contradictions between tales, such as have to be explained away by the theologians of all religions that have sacred scriptures. When Tolkien wrote his trilogy, he revised The Hobbit to make it agree with what he said in the later work; his Silmarillion was published posthumously from many shorter narratives, written at various times, mere, tentative drafts that the author would have revised and harmonized with the published volumes, had he lived to combine them into a continuous narrative.

There are some inconsistencies, therefore, but far fewer and far less troublesome than the flagrant self-contradictions found in the holy books of every revealed religion. It is possible, indeed, to predict a collapse of our civilization and a new Dark Ages, and to imagine that the text of the Silmarillion and perhaps the other books will survive the destruction of most of our culture and come into the hands of ignorant survivors of our race or barbarians of a race to which our modalities of thought and feeling are congenial, with the result that Tolkien’s fantasies will be taken as the Sacred Bible of a new religion.

Tolkien’s world has both coherence and a noble morality, but neither is requisite for sacred writings. The late Clark Ashton Smith wrote a series of short stories about a continent named Zothique that will appear in the far distant future, and the late Robert E Howard published a large number of short stories about a continent that vanished in the remote past; neither author aimed at more than a superficial similarity between the various short stories’ imaginary setting, and each story was composed for its own dramatic and romantic effectiveness in exciting horror and wonder in the readers of the popular periodicals in which the various stories were published over a period of many years. Nevertheless, the admirers of each writer have drawn maps of the imaginary continents, arranged the tales in a chronological order, and compiled biographies of the principal characters, explaining away inconsistencies with only a modicum of the ingenuity that theologians have to put into concealing the irremediable conflicts within their chosen body of myths. And the same admirers could, if they wished, read into the stories a religious significance. We may be quite certain that any moderately competent theologian could take the diverse tales thrown together in some one of Andrew Lang’s varicolored Fairy Books and, with the usual techniques of sophistry and mendacity, make of them an apparently coherent doctrine and a religion that many of our contemporaries would be prone to accept.

Language, in other words, can be used to portray what never happened and never could have happened in terms so vivid that they will induce belief subject only to the vigilance of the reader’s common sense and knowledge of reality, his critical faculties, which will enable hin to test the story’s consistency, and, if necessary, his knowledge of the relevant facts of history and science. We know that no man can walk on water, that an omniscient god could not be surprised by an unforeseen event, and that the sun cannot be stopped above a town on earth. If such events were narrated in fiction written with a very high degree of literary skill and imaginative art, we could, for a brief time, feign belief in them for the sake of aesthetic satisfaction, but if we pemit emotional cravings to put our rational faculties permanently into cold storage, there is absolutely no limit whatsoever to what we can believe, and even the crudest tale will induce chronic delusions. Oddly enough, however, the paralysis of the intellect can be limited somehow to certain idées fixes , thus pemitting the mind to reason from its own delusions, as in the well-known story about Dr Abernethy’s insane patient: The man was convinced that he was dead, and when the physician lanced his arm, the patient congratulated him on having made an epochal medical discovery, to-wit, that dead men can bleed.

Obviously, an individual’s credulity is relative to two quite different factors, first, the quality and vigor of his intellect, which is genetically detemined, and second, the amount of factual knowledge at his disposal, which depends on his education and, above all, on the extent of the accurate information that has been accumulated by his society in the time at which he lives. He cannot avoid erroneous suppositions about phenomena that have not yet been explained or correctly observed, and it is only natural that whenever an increase in knowledge destroys a false belief that is emotionally comforting to human weakness, many individuals will suffer a psychic perturbation that is strictly comparable to the “withdrawal symptoms” experienced by addicts who have been deprived of their drugs. What concerns us here is the persistence of belief in what is known to be impossible.

We must first of all remark that such an irrational belief satisfies a craving of our subliminal psyche, which is certainly shaped by our genetic inheritance and, most probably, by the collective unconscious of our race as formed by the evolution of our species for a hundred thousand years or more. It is a craving only a little less imperative than sexual desire, which is partly physical, and which, as Hippolytus discovered, men cannot deny with impunity. A yearning to transcend the cruel reality of a world in which we are ephemerae is born in us and is today made only the more imperative by our knowledge that our twenty thousand days under the sun are but a moment, no more than the dance of a midge that is born in the morning to die at evening, in the infinite time of a universe in which we, and our race, and all mammals, and our peculiar planet itself are infinitesimally unimportant epiphenomena in a universe that is vast beyond our comprehension and actuated by the blind forces of an inexorable and insentient Nature from which there is no appeal. Cultured men and women can satisfy this yearning with great literature, both poetry and highly imaginative prose, and, less directly, by music and the aesthetic satisfactions afforded by mimetic arts that correspond to our racial conceptions of beauty. Such rational indulgence of a psychic need is not available to the unfortunate individuals who have been denied participation in our cultural heritage by their schools, their private circumstances, or their own abilities, and it is not remarkable that the sabotage of our civilization by “educators” is currently producing a frightening increment of voluntary belief in the impossible, thus more and more levelling our population to a peniplane on which it will be impossible for our race to retain the intelligence requisite for survival.

The fact that religiosity does correspond to a psychic need accounts, of course, for its persistence in otherwise intelligent individuals who were in their early years subjected by clever teachers to a process of conditioning that implanted a habit before the development of rational faculties in the child’s mind. A maxim frequently repeated in the schools of several religious corporations states the principle quite bluntly: “If we have them until they are seven, we’ve got them for life.” This, of course, is an exaggeration: The technique often fails, either because the pedagogues who apply it are inefficient or because they encounter a firm resistance in the minds of precocious children. The method is not infallible, but it is often successful. We have all encountered from time to time men who have attained distinction in historical scholarship or technology (including the methodology of the genuine sciences), but have never been able to break the religious habits formed by the mold in which their infantile minds were forced to grow. This is the psychic equivalent of the physical deformation of the skull practiced by many savage and barbarous tribes, possibly for the subconscious purpose of concealing some racial diversity in the components of the tribe, at least at the time that it came together. Our children are born with the psychic need for transcending reality and instinctively take pleasure in fairy stories, tales of the marvellous and impossible, but naturally outgrow serious belief in such things as they grow up; but if childish belief in a given set of fairy tales is enforced by an imposed routine of acts of worship, thus implanting a habit that is both physical and mental, the sapling thus bent may become a tree that retains the inclination thus forced upon it. The efficacy of this psychological device was first discovered by religious organizations, but, as we all know, it is now intensively used by the revolutionaries who have made of the public schools in the United States a monstrous tool for the sabotage of our civilization and liquidation of our race. Their deformation of children’s minds and characters does not concern us here, since it does not at present induce religiosity, except insofar as the stunting of native intelligence so debilitates the mind that it becomes susceptible to uncontrolled emotions and induced hallucinations.

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You have been listening to the words of Professor Revilo Pendleton Oliver on the origins and true nature of religion — in this, the ninth program in our series “A New Religion for Us,” as read by Vanessa Neubauer.

Are there among my listeners one hundred — or one hundred thousand — White men and women who comprehend the need for a religion based on the ascertained facts of Nature? — who understand that only religion, and only true religion, can give the best minds of our race the purpose and focus that can lead us to our true destiny? — who understand that, at this moment of peril for our race, nothing short of a total commitment to that purpose will suffice if we are to avoid extinction? — who understand that our race’s spiritual childhood is now at an end? — who can see that we must now face squarely the dangers and responsibilities of adulthood? — and who know deep in their race-souls that we who do comprehend these truths must now separate ourselves from those who will be left behind, and bring into being a new people on this planet?

In future programs in this series we will continue exploring a new spiritual path for our race — the revolutionary Nature-based religion of Cosmotheism, coming up right here on American Dissident Voices.

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You’ve been listening to American Dissident Voices, the radio program of the National Alliance. The National Alliance is working to educate White men and women around the world as to the nature of the reality we must face — and organizing our people to ensure our survival and advancement. We need your help to continue. Please send the largest contribution you can afford to National Alliance, Box 172, Laurel Bloomery, TN 37680 USA. Make your life count. You can also help us by visiting natall.com/donate. Once again, our postal address is Box 172, Laurel Bloomery, TN 37680 USA. Until next week, this is Kevin Alfred Strom reminding you of the words of Richard Berkeley Cotten: Freedom is not free; free men are not equal; and equal men are not free.