Fourth Pjlitical Theory as alternative (speech in conference on 4PT)

Conceptually, the 4th Political Theory is absolutely unique. There is no question about that. You've formulated it better than anybody else. 

For instance, if we are Westerners, we can learn a lot from the pre-Socratics, who have been totally sidelined not only after Plato and Aristotle (who are now being cancelled by the woke generation), but in the history of philosophy in the West as well. Only people who studied deep philosophy in the West are familiar with the pre-Socratics. 

We can learn a lot from how Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism intermingle in China. It's fantastic how they have absorbed each other across the Chinese history. And nowadays what we see essentially is a mix of all three. 

We can learn a lot from how cross-cultural procedures work in the Balinese culture, which is an extremely sophisticated form of Hinduism and shamanism, where you have essentially the visible world — Sekala — and what really matters, the invisible world — Niskala. 

So, as you said, Aleksandr, we have a palette of philosophical currents, ways of thought, cosmologies — like the Hopi cosmology in northeastern Arizona, in the United States, which is one of the most sophisticated cosmologies in history, but is completely sidelined (even in the United States nobody knows about it).

So, I think we all agree on how we are going to organize this cross-cultural dialogue. But I am sorry to bring this back to earth in the realpolitik sense. I'm not going to get into geopolitics, but, essentially, what we have nowadays is the 0.001% against the rest. There is no more left, there is no more right, there is no more fixed ideological position. This is completely dissolved. In fact, this is the end of postmodernism — which was to dissolve everything.

During the 1980s, I was deep into postmodernism. I was deep into Deleuze, Guattari, but I was also deep into Baudrillard. And Baudrillard in the 80s was anticipating that soon we would be living in a room full of mirrors of simulacra. And that's where we are today. Remember that fantastic shoot out in a room full of mirrors in The Lady from Shanghai by Orson Welles? This is where we are nowadays. And we cannot identify anything — a real image, the real human being, or the mirror.... or all of them melded into something else. 

That's the problem. We can be as good as we can in terms of formalizing a real There is an Alternative (the real TINA, this is what we are talking about here), but what's happening with COVID-19 is that this 0.001% are already operating their reset and the reboot of the system for their own purposes. I describe it with a few concepts like digital neofascism — which is what we are getting basically from Big Data and Silicon Valley — and a hybrid form of neofascism (including restored neoliberalism, or neoliberalism 3.0 or 4.0) which they want to impose to the rest of the world with even more austerity, concentration of wealth, and concentration for their own purposes. 

So, my question for all of you is: How can we organize a political response to make these people start being extremely scared of a real alternative emerging? And this means we're going to have to engage into an economic criticism of ultra-neoliberalism or neoliberalism 3.0. 

The question is there, everybody. Let's start working on it. Thank you very much. 

Dugin commentaries: 

The power of this absolute minority to reinstall their rule and continuously steal resides in the idea — not in the money, not in technology, but in the thought. For us, in our orthodox Christian tradition, the devil is the thought, the wrong evil thought. So, the evil thought is the power. And we cannot win evil thought with a sword, with the economy, with a political body. Thought can only be won with the thought. 

My short answer is: We should start by rethinking and revising the modern way of thought. We need to deconstruct the intellectual history of political modernity, the history of ideas. We need to find the moment when something went wrong — and for myself that is the beginning of the Western modernity —, and we need to restore the just proportions between the ideas, bodies, politics, economics. So, we need to start with the paradigm. 

We cannot be organized politically, economically or structurally without the thought. And that's what we lack. Putin lacks ideas, modern China somehow lacks ideas, Modi lacks ideas, Trump lacks ideas, Orbán lacks ideas, Erdogan lacks ideas. So, we are badly in need of ideas.   

If we only resist to globalization with brutal power, we will be crushed. And we will lose before this small minority, because this minority is riding on their idea — they are mastering their wrong idea. In our orthodox thinking this is a kind of antichrist. But what is antichrist? It is the idea. 

So, we should start to rethink many things, revise and deconstruct western political modernity, and decolonize our minds, first of all. Decolonize. Not only Africa, Asia, Russia or Latin America need decolonization — the West needs decolonization from modernity. Because modern West is colonized by the modernity. We need to liberate ourselves from this epistemological prison where we are. 

That's my short answer. I think that somehow all our speakers will take that in consideration. I invite all of you to answer Pepe's question, because that is the main question for starting from the East.