The Hesperian Society was founded in the year of Our Lord, 2024, to bring about a restoration – not to return to some point in the past, as some would like to do, nor to embrace the course of destruction that secular modernity has taken the western world down, as most have, but to take up again our inheritance which has been betrayed, and to take up the traditions handed down to us by our dead generations and defend them from the onslaught of this age, that we may hand them down to our children.
Hesperians are young people, from a generation under siege, who have resolved that the hopelessness of modernity must end with us; so help us God. The Society throws itself forward as a wall of defense standing between the innocent and all weapons raised against innocence.
Firstly, we are a cultural organization, committed to teaching the youth the way of life of the Old World, that is, the world as it was before the hegemony of western secularism. We are committed also to giving our members a strong community, a movement to belong to that is active in the real world and united not just by shared ideals but by visible brotherhood and action. The fundamental point of our Society is to give people a way to gain spiritual and economic independence from the state of vanity and corruption of the world around us, what we consider the ‘culture of death’ that is so harmful to the human spirit; and using the existing infrastructure, to build a true, living, beautiful culture out of the one that is dying.
We wish to see extinguished from this land all those things that destroy the human spirit and bring to a halt the natural pattern of life – unchecked capitalism, consumerism, immorality, nihilism…
We will stand in defense even if our immediate chances of victory are none. We don’t weigh and calculate, we trust only in God. We don’t make political guarantees, but this we can ensure; that at the very least our generation’s final act may be an incursion against all those forces that have for so long poisoned and used us and those before us. We don’t know if the victory we envision will be ours or our children’s, but we will fight to the end of our souls’ capability to make sure that the sun will soon set on the culture of death that has been inflicted on us.
We aren’t a political group. Because truly, what is taking place in our nation has no political solution. The culture of death must be fought, disrupted, and replaced by a culture separate from it, a culture of light. The days we live in ask us to tolerate evil and to affirm its privileges; that is something that can’t be asked of those who truly believe in goodness; for good has no communion with evil, and light has no communion with darkness. A right is something that is owed; we owe nothing to evil, to the “father of lies”. But we owe it to the Thrice-Holy God to renounce the devil and all his works.
Our resistance to consumerism isn’t radical in itself; there is practically nobody that speaks positively about it. But we are not only criticizing consumerism – we are giving people a tangible way of bringing it to an end. We don’t deem it enough to simply withdraw ourselves on an individual scale from consumerist society. We don’t want to just free ourselves, but to free all people who crave freedom, and to give the consumerist culture its anticipated execution. This force that has done so much damage to so many souls, that has wrought so much misery on us, does not need to just be fled from; it needs to be made into a ruin, a page in history.
How will we do it?
With extreme ingenuity.
The mercantile pop culture, as we call it, depends on people remaining participants in it. It is not a ‘culture’ in the same sense of the word as a culture that arises naturally from heritage and customs; instead, it is a social and economic phenomenon that tends towards the destruction of authentic, local cultures in favor of an international market culture. It depends not on the spiritual life of a people, as authentic cultures do, but on markets. On money.
The Hesperian Society offers people a way out of this. This isn’t as hard as people imagine; and it doesn’t require moving to the woods or a farm and learning to live without electricity. That’s an option, of course, but we believe that in these times what is really needed is a way to build a culture which is spiritually independent from the mainstream one without having to retreat from it.
To do this takes an organized effort; more organized than one person deciding to leave everything behind, move to the forest and build a cabin, as the oft-repeated aspiration of our times goes. Someone who could actually follow through with this – after getting around the barrier of buying useful land – may come to find that physically separating from society didn’t bring them the peace they were hoping for. After spending years engulfed in the noise of the world, going into the forest didn’t make it go away. The work of restoring the peace of the spirit is a work that must be done in community, by intention, and most of all by a return to the Faith.
The long-term goal of the Hesperian Society is to establish a community, or communities, within existing towns or cities in which people practice a more self-sufficient and communal way of life, similar to that of the early Christians as described in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2:42-47). Even if this were done on a small scale, it would allow people of our generation to escape an almost certain fate of endless debt, loneliness, and unfulfilling labor, and most importantly to show that it is possible to do so. The model we propose would offer our generation a higher quality of life and a higher degree of freedom than what we are currently offered by the normal means, where even those who secure a stable career are still dependent on an economy that because of its reliance on finance capitalism is acting like a rigged slot machine that breaks down every ten years; and if you’re lucky you can spend a little less than half your lifetime paying off your mortgage.
Consumerism can only survive among a people who are losing, or have lost, a sense of cultural and religious identity, of tradition, of having a place within eternity. When an imperial power colonizes a nation, it always strengthens its rule by repressing the conquered nation’s culture; especially their practice of their faith, their language, their customs, and their education. That is because imperialists understand that these things, above all, are the source of a people’s strength, especially for those who do not have many earthly riches. If the people have no sense of unity and identity, then they have no energy to fight, nor do they understand what it is that is being taken away from them. The mercantile pop culture is acting exactly like this type of imperial oppressor in every nation in which it appears, razing the traditional way of life in exchange for profitable modern individualism, and this is perhaps most clearly the case in our poor America.
Are we communists?
Never. Many have rightfully identified capitalism for the unquestionable role it has played in creating the misery of modernity, but have come to a false conclusion that to end the suffering it has brought it should be replaced with yet another faithless, materialist ideology; communism.
This conclusion has been wholeheartedly embraced by vast portions of the population and many of our own generation, the youth.
The problem is, both capitalism and communism see reality as a mere sum of changing material conditions. Capitalism values efficiency and abundance above all, and therefore thrives on ever increasing amounts of production of unnecessary goods, regardless of the consequences. The exploitation required to meet the demands of this vicious system slowly creates a wider disparity between the classes, meanwhile encouraging wealthy nations to move their industry to foreign countries to exploit the people there too.
Communism is a shallow reaction against capitalism that sees all of human history as the history of class warfare. Therefore, says communism, all hierarchy must be destroyed. Religion, for acknowledging the hierarchy of the divine world above the mortal one, must disappear from people’s hearts so that they have hope in nothing but this passing life. The traditional arrangement of marriage and family, Marx argues in the Communist Manifesto, are just more forms of bourgeois exploitation.
Later Marxist thinkers would put forth the idea of totally destroying the existing social norms of family life – they detested the oppression and supposed patriarchy of marriage, monogamy, the raising of children by their parents as opposed to some communal model, the traditional roles of fatherhood and motherhood, and so on. If it isn’t obvious by now, this way of thinking unfortunately became quite influential in the West, and remains so up to this day. Everything that these Marxist intellectuals could wish to see happen to society’s sense of morals has been fully accomplished; and yet, our communist fairytale world never came, and capitalism is as strong as ever.
But as for us, we do not adhere to any of these earthly ideologies, but to the tradition of Οδός (the Way), the Christian Faith. This Faith is not an ideology, because it is simply authentic existence. It is the way of concord, of peace between the body and the soul, between this world and the world to come, between the temporal and the eternal. It is a holistic view of life that cannot be separated from its lived experience.
The ideologies of modernity are not organic progressions of society, and so cannot be called “progress” at all.
“We are too fond of clapping ourselves upon the back because we live in modern times, and we preen ourselves quite ridiculously (and unnecessarily) on our modern progress… Modern speculation is often a mere groping where ancient men saw clearly… There have been States in which the rich did not grind the poor, although there are no such States now; there have been free self-governing democracies, although there are few such democracies now; there have been rich and beautiful social organisations, with an art and a culture and a religion in every man’s house, though for such a thing to-day we have to search out some sequestered people living by a desolate sea-shore or in a high forgotten valley among lonely hills…”
-Padraig Pearse, The Murder Machine
Tradition embraces the romantic, intuitive impression of life that combines idealism with action, the mystical with the mundane. Because it is not dependent on trends and fashions, tradition is ever youthful and always new, while progressivism is always growing old.
Starting from the 1920s you see this pattern take shape, with some breaks in between, where the previous generation’s resistance against established morality becomes dull in the eyes of their children, and so the children resist in an even greater excess against an already weakened morality, and so on until you reach the present day, where it’s hard to say what there is even left for us to resist against, what morals there are left to be destroyed. And of course, one thing has stayed true from generation to generation, which is that these trends against morality, disastrous for the psychological and spiritual health of the people, have opened the doors to making immeasurable amounts of money for those who benefit from exploiting the culture this way.
Our Appeal
The Hesperian Society, as stated in our member’s Club Manual, “is an organization founded for the purpose of bringing about a resurrection of spiritual identity, with its single orientation being the salvation of souls. We desire for the reign of Christ to be acknowledged in this land. For this to happen, the divine law of the apostolic Christian faith must become, as it was in the more dignified and august moments of history, the principle behind social and public life. All the activities of the nation, whether they are economic, educational, political, and so on, must all be directed to one and the same end; not to mere economic efficiency, nor to the enforcement of modernity and internationalism on the people of this world, but to the spiritual health and wellbeing of the nation’s people.”
We are unlike any other current effort at a movement like this in that we have nothing to do with politics. We are concerned only with a spiritual rejuvenation, with the awakening of conscience, with a total reorientation of society towards true peace and holiness and love. While immorality and militant unbelief reigns, there is no true peace and no true freedom, ever.
We respond to the lasting, primeval cry of humanity, the one that has haunted all of history, the unutterable cry for freedom. The communists and modernists shout for freedom, but with a voice that is hollow, empty of the truest longing of the human heart — and which has in it something of the voice of the Deceiver, the Accuser who in Eden lied to make us renounce heaven.
We, too, call for freedom, but with a voice of conviction, a voice in which there is no tone of robbery or betrayal. It is quiet, for it is the sighs of the penitent, and of hearts broken and humbled, of children crying out “Abba, Father!”
Humanity, in its aching for freedom, has ofttimes gone far from the path and reached for what curses and poisons us. We have strayed from the embrace of the Anointed One, the Christ.
Where else, O Lord, is our freedom?
Where else, our God, but in You, will we find our blissful repose?
How long shall we stay in this valley of tears, despising our inheritance and forsaking our forgiveness? How long will this time of hatred endure, while our world becomes rich in its outrages against You? Modernity has tried to take our Faith away from us; look now upon its failure. Never will we submit to the prince of this world, for “you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” (John viii 32)
The apokatastasis, the Restoration, must come before the final darkness which will shroud the end of this age. Peace will reign when people finally return to God who alone is the Lover of Mankind. What justification do we have to say that this generation, facing such a dark hour of history as this is, couldn’t be the one to do something so unexpected, so shocking, sweeping aside all convention and resolving to go against such staggering odds, doing the last thing we are wanted or expected to do according to the doctrine of “eternal progress”?
On our own, as scattered individuals, our potential is crushed under the weight of those combined forces of the world which seek only to hurt us. But coming together in absolute determination, our potential is endless.
There has seldom been moments as decisive as this, and we have fatefully been chosen to live through it all; either to yield to the way of death, or to take up vigilantly our course on the way of life. It is up to you; and I must tell you that it is the inevitable outcome made known to us by the immortal mythos of mankind that the way of life will prevail. That is the drama of existence; that what is innocent and peaceful must be besieged by darkness, that innocence may gloriously triumph over the vainglory of sin.
“We seem to have lost; but we have not lost. To refuse to fight would have been to lose; to fight is to win. We have kept faith with the past, and handed on its tradition to the future.” -Pádraig Pearse