The regulation and positive adaptation of behaviour through sanction, reward and exercise.
Discipline is the basis of all education and every civilisation. Permissive “pedagogical” theories cannot but lead to the failure to transmit knowledge, as is so evident today. The belief that “self-discipline” is possible for all is a tragic perversion of aristocratic individualism. Only superior beings are capable of self-discipline, not common man. But, against common sense and overwhelming evidence, egalitarian ideology refuses to acknowledge that there are differences between those capable of self-discipline and those who aren’t.
The refusal to accept legally-established disciplines leads to the most savage oppression, to the law of the jungle. Egalitarian ideology associates discipline and order with their excesses, that is, with arbitrary dictatorship. But just the contrary is the case, for freedom and justice are founded on rigorous social discipline. The anthropologist Arnold Gehlen, like the ethologist Konrad Lorenz, has shown that man, by his very biological nature, is “a being of culture” (Kulturwesen), that is, “a being of discipline” (Zuchtwesen). It’s patently obvious that so-called defenders of freedom (actually licensed) challenged social disciplines in the name of freedom and the rule of law, but the social and political model they advocate has the effect of destroying all freedom, all law, all social justice: as seen in the spread of delinquency and insecurity, the collapse of public education and equal opportunity, the toleration of delinquents and gangsters, privileges for influential or violent pressure groups, etc. – all this comes at the expense of the citizen’s security. We shouldn’t be afraid to say that every society refusing to uphold law and order, that is, collective discipline, is ripe for tyranny and the loss of public freedoms.
The judicial imposture of the dominant ideology endeavours to make us believe the absence of social discipline is a guarantee public freedom, insofar as it wards off the spectre of a “police state”. But just the opposite is true. The ideology of license is the foundation of contemporary despotism. The greatest of liberalism’s impostures has been to confuse indiscipline with freedom and freedom with anarchy.
The anti-disciplinary societies of today are hardly exempt from repression and other, more cloaked, forms of totalitarianism. Repression has merely changed its object and nature. The rigors of the law, fiscally and punitively, now fall on the “transparent citizen”, but the number of no-go zones keeps expanding, just as delinquency and other criminal activities are increasingly tolerated. Indeed, all of kinds of violent delinquencies have grown. “Hate speech” (i.e, Identitarian speech) or “homophobia” is strictly repressed, as the thought police demand, but drugs are decriminalized, the threshold for urban delinquency is raised, secularism is violated in favour of Islam, terrorists and urban rioters are appeased, etc.
These are the signs of a society whose fundamental values have become suicidal – a society which represses and censors everything that is vital and encourages everything that is culturally and biologically pathological.
- Excerpt from: Why We Fight, by Guillaume Faye
