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The more diversity a nation has the less likely voluntary associations are going to arise since people, in the context of diversity, tend to withdraw from Culture (see Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone.”) The more people refuse to build the voluntary associations that make for culture the more the State will centralize as it has no competition for authority from the social order matrix that is inclusive of the now reduced cultural infrastructure that once was built by voluntary associations that are no longer voluntarily associating (See Robert Nisbet’s “Twilight of Authority”). Hence it is in the interest of the Managerial State to foster as much diversity as it can.

Now combine this with the reality that diversity in religion, race, and culture ensures conflict between the competing religions, races, and cultures that are living cheek by jowl so that the only resolution of such conflict comes from the State and its enforcement apparatus and we see again the interest that the tyrant state as in embracing diversity.

Finally, the tyrant state also has an interest in continuing with the cheap labor that comes from the pursuit of ongoing diversity. Cheap labor favors the Mega-Corporation class and as the Mega-Corporation class is one and the same with the tyrant state (a revolving door existing as between them) the tyrant state pursues the interests of the tyrant Corporation class.

4. Familialism and the Counter-Enlightenment’s social ontology

Edmund Burke, widely considered to be the father of modern conservatism, laid the foundations of the main principles of the Counter-Enlightenment’s social ontology in his most famous work, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Herein he counters the Enlightenment’s rationalist notion of a society based upon abstractions by means of an emphasis on the epistemic value of tradition, which ties individuals not only to their community but also their ancestors and progeny (Burke 1790:107). Utilizing this historic and traditionalist principle was key to the Counter Enlightenment view of the nature and structure of society, one of the earliest representatives of this traditionalist Counter-Enlightenment school, the German philosopher-historian Johan Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) wrote the following concerning the character of the family as foundational to human society:

The most natural state is, therefore, one nation, an extended family, with
one national character. This it retains for ages and develops most naturally
if the leaders come from the people … Nothing, therefore, is more manifestly contrary to the purposes of political government than the unnatural enlargement of states, the wild mixing of various races and nationalities under one scepter (Herder,1820:298).6

The family then, for Herder, was foundational to the nation, with the nation in the ethnic sense, that is, as an extension of the family and clan, being the unit around which the state is to be built. That states, therefore, should be considered as organic historically-developed extensions of the family as basic unit, as opposed to an aggregate of individuals, was particularly evident in the social ontology of the influential French Counter-Enlightenment philosopher Louis de Bonald (1754-1840). His work entitled Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux dans la société civile démontrée par le raisonnement et par l’histoire is primarily concerned with the relations between God, man and society by way of response to the ideas of the Enlightenment as embodied by Montesquieu and of Rousseau (Sarah, 2018:69). In it he writes, with reference to the social order that “Man only exists through society, and society shapes him for herself” (De Bonald, 1796:103).7

Per De Bonald’s traditionalism, therefore, the individual never exists in the
abstract but only as a member of society. The nuclear family is the logical and historical precedent for the larger family, i.e., the nation as political society. As a matter of fact, in the opinion of de Bonald, “any system which does not base the constitution of political society on the domestic society … is false and unnatural. This is the standard by which to measure all constitutions” (De Bonald, 1817:413).8

Having set the family, therefore, as the basic unit of society, de Bonald
(1830:441) applied its very constitution to political society as well: he argued that just as the nuclear family is constituted by a father, mother, and infant, so the state is constituted by the state’s power as the cause, the ministers as the means and the citizens as subjects. In other words, just as the father embodies the will of the family, the king embodies the will of the nation as political family.

Across the Atlantic, the Counter-Revolutionary Southern Presbyterian pastor and moral philosopher Robert Lewis Dabney (1820-1898) advocated a similar ontological social paradigm:

The theistic scheme, then traces civil government and the civic obligation to
the will and act of God, our sovereign, moral ruler and proprietor, in that He from the first made social principles a constitutive part of our souls, and placed us under social relations that are as original and natural as our own persons. These relations were: first, the family, then of the clan, and, as men multiplied, of the commonwealth. It follows thence that social government in some form is as natural as man (Dabney, 1892:305).

He also intrinsically connects his familialist conception of the social order
with his opposition to the social contract theory proposed by Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, which per Dabney, stands in direct opposition to it (Ibid., p. 308-309):

The claim of a social contract is [a] theory [that] is atheistic and unchristian. Such were Hobbes and the Jacobins. It is true that Locke tried to hold it in a Christian sense, but it is none the less obstinately atheistic in that it wholly discards God, man’s relation to Him, his right to determine our condition and moral existence, and the great fact of moral philosophy, that God has formed and ordained us to live under civil government … [In terms of the social contract] civil society is herself a grand robber of my natural rights, which I only tolerate to save myself from other more numerous robbers. How then can any of the rules of government be an expression of essential morality? … Commonwealths have not historically begun in such an optional compact of lordly savages. Such absolute savages, could we find any considerable number of them, would not usually possess the good sense and the self-control which would be sufficient for any permanent good. The only real historical instances of such compacts have been the agreements of outlaws forming companies of banditti, or crews of pirate ships. Those combinations realize precisely the ideals pictured by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Did ever one of them result in the creation of a permanent and well-ordered commonwealth? The well-known answer to this question hopelessly refutes the scheme. Commonwealths have usually arisen, in fact, from the expansion of clans, which were at first but larger families.

Evident from both the likes of Dabney and De Bonald is their proposition that the family as foundational to society falsifies any individualistic notions of liberty which fundamentally underlies the social contract theory. With both these theorists society is fundamentally the organic and historical outgrowth of primarily the nuclear and secondarily the extended family as basic unit of the divinely ordained human social order. Dabney’s comment that the implications of the social contract theory is functionally atheistic in that it denies the reality of human relationship to God as sovereign Creator, is particularly telling in terms of how central the opposition to the Enlightenment’s social ontology in particular was in the thought of the leading representatives of the Counter-Enlightenment.

This also holds true for the most well-known Dutch representative of the
Counter-Enlightenment, Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (1801-1876). He
wrote concerning the Enlightenment’s political theory that “[t]he proponents of this sociable order ordained by the state, of this society not of clans and families, but companies and pelotons are, in terms of the implementation of their system, content with the peace and liberty of the government—with the liberty and omnipotence of those who take care for the discipline of society and are the heads of the herd who provide us with this new grazing. They have sadly convinced so many of the greatness and superiority of their ideas” (Groen van Prinsterer, 1847:67).9

For Groen van Prinsterer, the individualizing implications of the social
contract inevitably leads to government tyranny since a society made up of
individuals, isolated from their natural and familial blood relations, is an ideal subject for government despotism. In this way, Groen argued, the social ontology of the Enlightenment inevitably led to isolation from those natural familial relationships in which humans were designed to flourish as well as a consequent loss of true liberty (Groen van Prinsterer, 1867:1). In other words, by virtue of its attempt to liberate the individual from the natural bonds established by blood and birth, it takes away the divinely-ordained creational structure in which humanity was designed to prosper and thrive, thereby enslaving it to the only authoritative social structure that remains, the state.

6 “Die Natur erzieht Familien; der natürlichste Staat ist also auch ein Volk, mit einem Nationalcharakter. Jahrtausende lang erhält sich dieser in ihm und kann, wenn seinem mitgebor: nen Fürsten daran liegt, am Natürlichsten ausgebildet werden … Nichts scheint also dem Zweck der Regierungen so offenbar entgegen als die unnatürliche Vergrößerung
der Staaten , die wilde Vermischung der Menschengattungen und Nationen unter Einem Scepter.”

7 “L’homme n’existe que pour la societe et la societe ne le forme que pour elle.”

8 “Tout systeme de constitution pour la societe politique, qu’on ne peut pas appliquer a la societe domestique … est faux et contre nature. C’est la pierre de touche des constitutions.”

9 “De voorstanders van dit gezellig verkeer, van staatswege verordend, van deze samenleving, niet in huisgezinnen, niet in familiën meer, maar in compagniën en pelotons zijn, bij de ten uitvoer leggen van hun stelsel, te vrede met de vrijheid van den Staat, van het bewind, met de vrijheid of het alvermogen dergenen die zorg dragen voor de discipline, die aan het hoofd der kudde staan, die met deze nieuwe soort van vetweiderij belast zijn.
Velen hebben zij van de uitnemendheid hunner ontwerpen overreed.”

3. The Enlightenment and its Impact on social ontology

Enlightenment social contract theorists presupposed the sovereignty and independence of the individual as being in their natural state free from all social and political structures, but who, in order to make human society at all possible, unconsciously enter into a what they called the social contract by which, as Locke describes it:

men, when they enter into society, give up the equality, liberty and executive power they had in the state of nature, into the hands of the society, to be far disposed of by the Legislative as the good of the Society shall require; yet it being only with an intention in everyone the better to preserve himself, his Liberty and Property (Locke, 1690:93).

Rousseau himself argued that the state of nature, the only state in which
humans are truly free, uncorrupted and sovereign, is the very foundation for the “equality of rights and the idea of justice which such equality creates [and which] originate in the preference each man gives to himself, and accordingly in the very nature of man” (Rousseau, 1762:69).3 To him individual liberty and sovereignty, therefore, entailed egocentric self-servitude free from all external constraints.

The ontological implications of the social contract theory are profound: society is accordingly viewed as fundamentally made up of naturally sovereign individuals. Each individual as a basic constitutive unit of human society share a natural equality with all others, with civil society or the state then being the result of an implicit contract signed by free and equal individuals who sacrifice some of that natural autonomy for the sake of establishing a functional human society (Spahn, 2018:2). This individualist ontological framework has remained the prevailing philosophical foundation underlying the notion of universal human rights throughout the post-World War II world as it is understood and promoted by the United Nations today (Spahn, 2018:2-3).

In Western Christendom prior to the Age of Enlightenment, family and
lineage were understood to have played a central role in shaping society as
well as in determining the individual’s place within and relationship to society. The influential thirteenth-century philosopher-theologian, Thomas Aquinas (2006:4), for example, wrote that

God holds the first place, for He is supremely excellent, and is for us the first principle of being and government. In the second place, the principles of our being and government are our parents and our country, that have given us birth and nourishment. Consequently, man is debtor chiefly to his parents and his country, after God. Wherefore just as it belongs to religion to give worship to God, so does it belong to piety, in the second place, to give worship to one’s parents and one’s people. The worship due to our parents includes the worship given to all our kindred since our kinfolk are those who descend from the same parents.4

Even right up until the dawn of the Enlightenment, this medieval family and kinship-centered notion of society remained prevalent, as evidenced in
the work of one of the most prominent political philosophers of the early
seventeenth century, Johannes Althusius (1610:715), who, in his magnum
opus, Politica Methodice Digesta, Atque Exemplis Sacris et Profanis Illustrata, emphasized the decisive role of the family—both nuclear and extended—as the constitutive unit of human society:

It cannot be denied that provinces are constituted from villages and cities, and commonwealths and realms from provinces. Therefore, just as the cause by its nature precedes the effect and is more perceptible, and just as the simple or primary precedes in order what has been composed or derived from it, so also villages, cities and provinces precede realms and are prior to them. For this is the order and progression of nature, that the conjugal relationship, or the domestic association of man and wife, is called the beginning and foundation of human society. From it are then produced the associations of various blood relations and in-laws. From them, in turn, come the sodalities and assemblies, out of the union of which arises the composite body that we call a village, town or city … It is necessary, therefore, that the doctrine of the symbiotic life of families, kinship associations, assemblies, cities, and provinces precede the doctrine of the realm or universal symbiotic association that arises from the former associations and is composed of them.5

This understanding of social ontology fundamentally relates the individual to the family and to broader blood or ancestral relationships in which he finds his social place and identity. This, of course, stands in stark contrast to the atomizing tendencies of the social ontology that would later characterize the thought of Enlightenment social contract theorists. The influential eighteenth-century French Philosophe, Jacques-Pierre Brissot (1783:157-158), for example, advocated embracing the ideal of cosmopolitan multiculturalism as an alternative to what he considered the prejudice based on familial relations, nationhood, religion and race that had characterized European society until that time.

When the Counter-Enlightenment, a movement that sought to establish
a viable antithesis then emerged as conservative reaction to the Enlightenment’s revolutionary notions of the nature of society based in the
social contract (McMahon 2001:8-9), it proceeded to counter what it regarded to be as an inversion of true social ontology with a more traditionalist social ontology.

3 “Ce qui prouve que l’egalite de droit et la notion de justice qu’elle produit derive de la preferance que chacin se donne et par consequent de la nature de l’homme.”

4 “Deus summum obtinet locum, qui et excellentissimus est, et est nobis essendi et gubernationis primum principium. Secundario vero nostri esse et gubernationis principium sunt parentes et patria, a quibus et in qua et nati et nutriti sumus. Et ideo post Deum, maxime est homo debitor parentibus et patriae. Unde sicut ad religionem pertinet cultum Deo exhibere, ita secundo gradu ad pietatem pertinet exhibere cultum parentibus et patriae. In cultu autem parentum includitur cultus omnium consanguineorum, quia etiam
consanguinei ex hoc dicuntur quod ex eisdem parentibus processerunt”.

5 “Nam negari non petest ex pagis et urbibus, provincias, ex bisce vicro Respublicae et rega constituta. Sicut igitur cansa sua natura praecedit effectum, eoque, notior est et simplex, seu primum id quod compositum seu ortum a primo est, antecedit ordinare, ita quoque, pagi, civitates et provincia, regna antecedunt et prius quam ea suerunt. Hic enim naturae
ordo et processus, ut conjungium, seu consocatio domestica viriet uxoris fundamentum et principium humane societatis dicatur, et ex hac Porro producantur consociationes consanguineorum et adsinium diversorum, ex bis vero sodalitates, collegia, ex quorum conjunctiove corpus compositum, quod pagum, oppidum, vel civitatem dicimus … Necessario igitur doctrina de vita symbiotica coniugum prpinquorum, collegiorum, ci vit atum et provincae antecedit eam, qua est de regno, vel universali consociatone symboitica priore orta est et exea composita.