The New Right in the 25th Century

Some minor archeofuturistic musings…

Look, modern civilization pretty well sucks—I don’t have to tell you that.

It has some good points, of course; but then again, so do even the vilest of civilizations. Most will point to all the whiz-bang technology that’s followed in the wake of modernity, but I suspect many are coming to the conclusion that that’s been a mixed blessing, at best.

The luster of modern liberal-democratic civilization is decidedly beginning to wear off. In exchange for dubious technological goodies, and a postwar peace that seems to grow more precarious by the day, we must endure the ritual humiliations, the fake elections, the looting of our national treasures by a hostile overclass, the woke and intersectional nonsense, and the endless nagging, censoring, moralizing, virtue signaling, tut-tutting, and sanctimonious shaming of the insufferable Left.

It’s like having to live under the stifling guardianship of a dowdy, frowzy, childless aunt…only forever, and with absolutely zero prospects for a more hopeful future over the horizon.

I remember the way it was long ago in the before times—in the ’90s that is, in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, when anything seemed possible. Back then, the dream of a brighter future, spearheaded by a West that was less nakedly totalitarian in those days (especially in contrast to its recently vanquished foe), didn’t seem altogether implausible. That was when numerous Star Trek spinoffs presented a kind of futuristic “ultra-Americanism”—but which in reality was nothing more than a Leftist confection, a globalist and liberal-democratic utopia among the stars.

I’ve noticed in recent years that even our overlords don’t believe in these utopian visions anymore…not really. The insatiable desire to censor, stifle, and smother dissident thought, to shame and denounce and accuse and dox and vilify and discountenance anything that bears even the slightest whiff of unorthodoxy doesn’t exactly scream confidence and optimism about the future. It’s so obviously a fear response, and the left-leaning, liberal-democratic techno-state is so obviously dystopian—anyone who lived through the past several years and hasn’t imbibed the Kool-Aid can clearly see it—that even its most ardent defenders seem to have given up on portraying it in a positive light.

I think the last attempt was Ida Auken’s infamous “You’ll Own Nothing and Be Happy” tripe for the World Economic Forum; that went over like a lead balloon. Still, I encourage you to read it if you haven’t already…despite the blowback, I’d say things seem to be pretty much right on schedule. Of course, we can’t overlook the WEF’s own Klaus Schwab—who looks and talks like an old Saturday morning cartoon villain (even down to concocting elaborate and buffoonish schemes for world domination). He co-authored that jargon-filled bible beloved of globalists and would-be world controllers, COVID-19: The Great Reset, a book that has probably spawned more conspiracy theories involving lizard people, the Antichrist, and plots to enslave and exterminate mankind than David Icke’s entire considerable oeuvre.

Actually, the tome is packed with the sort of nebulous, vaguely scientific and technology-worshipping happy-talk that these people love. But the point is this: these futuristic, leftist utopias aren’t convincing anyone anymore, and even those who dream them up seem to be phoning it in nowadays. In fact, they’re usually just a shallow retread of the sort of visionary left-wing futures that were penned nearly a century ago—something like Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930), which pretty much covers all the Marxist utopian tropes, but in a rather more inspiring way.

The problem is that the leftist visions of the future haven’t changed all that much, or at all, and they’re essentially just an indefinite continuation of the current dystopia into the centuries to come, ad nauseam. This is one of the reasons I find the right-wing visions of the future—such as French Nouvelle Droite writer Guillaume Faye’s concept of “Archeofuturism,” which I discussed in an earlier article—so intensely fascinating. Perhaps they’re just as ridiculous, unwieldy, and implausible as left-wing futures, but they’re refreshing and new at least, and they present a hell of a lot more diversity and innovation.

They’re also much less easily found in fictional representations, although sometimes—if you’re lucky—you can come across a few when you least expect it.

When I read Faye’s Archeofuturism, I found his ideas intriguing, even if not necessarily entirely to my tastes; but I also wondered how such a future could be represented fictionally. Of course, Faye does this himself in a later book, Archeofuturism 2.0, which I suppose is sort of a right-wing Last and First Men, encompassing vast panoramas of future time.

But it struck me that there was another archeofuturistic setting that I could think of, and this actually preceded Faye’s concept and coinage by several years. It was called Buck Rogers in the 25th Century…and, no, I’m not talking about the cheesy TV series from the late ’70s starring Gil Gerard, Erin Gray, and Twiki.

Actually, I think it was styled “Buck Rogers XXVc” or something like that, and it was a role-playing game developed by TSR—of “Dungeons & Dragons” fame—in the late ’80s. Aside from a few concessions to the usual Buck Rogers mythos—the eponymous hero himself frozen in stasis and awakened five hundred years in the future, and a few character names like Wilma Deering and Doctor Huer—the setting has virtually nothing to do with the older incarnations of the story.

The game was not a success, or so I’m told. Maybe it was too ahead of its time; maybe people were actually expecting Gil Gerard, Erin Gray, and Twiki…who knows? In any case, I’m more interested here in its fictional backstory.

The game’s designers seem to have outdone themselves with imagining a fairly original futuristic universe, and the whole “Buck Rogers” aspect seems like an afterthought that was grafted on later for marketing purposes. In any case, in the twenty-fifth century of the game, human civilization is almost unrecognizable, and seems to have developed on largely archeofuturistic grounds.

For one thing, the inner planets have been colonized, with inroads being made into the outer planets. None of the countries or states of the twentieth century have survived. The US and the Soviet Union (remember, this was in the late ’80s) engaged in some sort of limited nuclear exchange in the late ’90s, and the devastation forced a kind of geopolitical “great reset.” By 2050, the world was divided into three power blocs, including the “Russo-American Mercantile” (RAM) combine, the Euro-Bloc, and the Indo-Asian Consortium. So, in some ways, a lot like Faye’s concept of separate civilizational blocs—although the Russian-American combination is a puzzler. Perhaps this was a subconscious recognition of Julius Evola’s insight that the United States and the Soviet Union were really two sides of the same coin?

Anyhow, these three power blocs parcel out the Solar System between themselves, with RAM grabbing Mars, the Europeans taking the Moon, and the Far Eastern bloc taking Venus. RAM turns Mars into a fascist-socialist utopia, building giant arcologies in Mariner Valley or at the foot of Olympus Mons, and redirecting comets to crash on its surface to produce shallow seas and thicken its atmosphere. The Asians begin the arduous task of terraforming Venus, living at first in aerostat-cities that float above the acidic clouds and migrating downward through the centuries; they become masters of genetic engineering, developing all sorts of strange organisms to help them transform the planet into something more hospitable to human life.

The Europeans, meanwhile, turn the Moon into something like a cross between Switzerland and Israel—a pathologically neutral banking-state with a powerful military.

All of them are ruled for several centuries by an increasingly hostile, out-of-touch, and supercilious terrestrial government (sounds familiar), which finally provokes a revolt on Mars. RAM, which is now virtually synonymous with Mars, attacks Earth and levels it, sending it back to the Stone Age. Mars now becomes the top dog in the Solar System, intriguing against the other planets and turning the devastated Earth into a dependency, looting its abandoned cities for the treasures of the past and turning its people into corporate slaves.

Now it’s obvious this setting was created as a dystopia, and its political and cultural disposition was developed with an eye toward creating maximal opportunities for adventure. That makes sense for a role-playing game. Still, inadvertently or otherwise, its designers seemed to hit all the hallmarks of Archeofuturism years before Faye dreamed up the idea.

For one thing, there are no human rights organizations in this future. There’s no talk of abortion, women’s rights, transgender stuff, and perpetual left-wing moralizing, shaming, and virtue signaling. Feminism is a dead letter, although there are powerful females; but they’re just as likely as men to be slippery and deceitful customers, and neither they, nor any other “minority,” is accorded special treatment.

Meanwhile, the political structure of this future is basically in the form of giant ethnopolitical power blocs centered on the inner planets; thanks to widespread and effortless genetic manipulation, each planet has essentially produced a sort of divergent subspecies of humanity. Even wilder is the creation of genetic chimeras and human-animal hybrids, called “gennies,” which have been designed to act as everything from slaves and foot-soldiers to lizard-like husbandmen tending the terraforming organisms on the hostile surface of Venus.

And no one bothers about the thorny moral implications of all of this because…well, who cares? They’re all too busy doing stuff.

In many ways, it’s a lot like the Middle Ages or premodern period—just with rocketships, genetic engineering, and sophisticated computers. The fascinating thing about this futuristic setting is that it depicts none of the handwringing, moralizing, and ideological squabbles and spats that characterize our own exhausted and dying civilization. Everything is vigorous and expansionistic, with wildly different civilizations busy with the work of conquering hostile planets and a hostile Solar System.

There are no social justice warriors, no HR departments, no “DEI” squads, no racial hucksters, no tyranny by the perpetually offended, no FBI and IRS and Department of Homeland Security, no Congressional investigatory subcommittees and political action committees and whatever.

Just a good-old fashioned tyranny, of the fascistic-corporatocratic kind (Mars), complete with an ossified hierarchy that brutally and exploitatively rules a conquered dependency (Earth). What’s not to love?

In many ways, the villainous Martians are the heirs of the Faustian West, and they seem to have recovered that domineering, innovative spirit of conquest and expansion and discovery. It’s as if Spengler’s ineluctable civilizational cycle has been broken…for a time, at least. There’s excitement in the air and a sense of boundless opportunity, with grandiose projects of terraformation, space exploration, and the manipulation of life itself.

The Russo-American Mercantile has transformed Mars into a small paradise, with shallow seas, immense pyramidal arcologies, forests of genetically engineered pine trees, and even a gigantic space elevator rising from one of the colossal Tharsis volcanoes to ease the business of space travel. Meanwhile, scientific labs on the Red Planet churn out strange new creatures to assist in the terraforming of Mars, Venus, and even in creating new human variants to live on Jupiter or Saturn, or in airless space itself.

And for those misfits who don’t fit within this political disposition? Well, they flee to the asteroids, or to Mercury, to live in caves beneath its surface or in rail-mounted “track cities” that follow its shadow terminator, and pay homage to its self-proclaimed “Sun Kings” who live in extravagant opulence off the money made by harvesting and selling abundant solar energy.

I don’t know.

I suppose the game’s designers probably had no wish to associate themselves with a French right-wing thinker’s notions of combining futuristic technology with a premodern political system. But you tend to see a lot of that in science fiction—just look at Star Wars, or Dune, for some more notable examples, with their kings and emperors and feudal lords. George Lucas tried to flirt with republican government in his fictional universe…but, let’s face it, everyone prefers the Empire. They were snazzier dressers and their ships were loads cooler.

I don’t know if Archeofuturism—or something like it—is the answer, or is even feasible. Most likely it isn’t. But I’ve found that the people who design the settings for role-playing games often tend to come up with the kind of worlds that people actually want to live in. And that’s got to tell you something.

So it’s no wonder not one of these looks a whit like the modern world, and I guess it’s no surprise TSR’s old “Buck Rogers” setting envisions the kind of future I could get down with—a future of adventure and discovery, without the endless nagging, hectoring, and censoring of today.

Maybe crazy Elon Musk isn’t so crazy after all, and his dream of colonizing Mars is a worthwhile one. I wish him all the best, as I think we all should; if his dream bears fruit, maybe some fine day in the twenty-fifth century, we might just find ourselves in a brand-new Faustian civilization, armed with the best that the West has to offer and accepting none of the worst, and poised at the beginning of a thrilling new adventure.

Hopefully that won’t have to entail pummeling the Earth back into the Stone Age. Honestly, though, it probably will…