Succession I: Individualism & Ambition

Over the past three hundred years, we have gradually increased our personal freedom at the expense of tradition and a strong community. This exchange is known as individualism and it is the implicit ideology of all modern democracies. But despite its many upsides (human rights, personal choice, etc.), individualism has atomised us, not only from each other, but also in time. Individualism is preoccupied with the present, at the expense of posterity. Our ambitions have shrunk to the size of one human life, where they were once attuned to the possible accomplishments of an entire dynasty.

The philosopher and economist Edmund Burke saw a similar issue with the democratic notion of a social contract, which is generally conceived as a deal among living people. According to Burke, however, society does not contain only the living; ‘it is an association between the dead, the living and the unborn. Its binding principle is not contract but something more akin to trusteeship’ (Scruton).

When we remove this principle, our concern for the future shrinks. For the neoreactionary, Nick Land, this is the primary difference between monopolies in a monarchy and in a democracy:

As a hereditary monopolist, a king regards the territory and the people under his rule as his personal property and engages in the monopolistic exploitation of this…