Strolling with my girl through one of the once-great American metropolises, the truth glares at me from all sides: We are living in the Fall. The name of the actual city doesn’t matter. It could be any of them: Detroit, Atlanta, New York, Baltimore, even (or rather especially) D.C.. They’re all the same now. By day the whirl of helicopters, like the wings of valkyries carrying some lost soul to the general hospital, by night the drug-stupor shrieks of the walking dead punctuated by the crackle of gunfire. And always the sound of sirens. But before I come off as too doomer, I have to admit it isn’t all bad. My girl and I scavenge treasures of another age in little café-book-stores and thrift shops. We celebrate rare finds in hole-in-the-wall vinyl shops and pass the time on the walk home by pointing out the glimpses of ruined glory. Imagine what this used to look like. They say they used to wash the marble steps every week. The weekends are spent quietly. Romantic nights filled with the music from forgotten rock stars, quiet Sundays filled with the smell of basilica incense, coffee and yellowing paperbacks. This particular weekend I found myself sitting out on the small back patio looking at a small nugget of metal.

9mm. Blondie walks outside.

Been wondering was that was. Found it when I came back last week.

Yeah it’s a bullet.

I make an effort to see where it struck the brick siding, but give up. It doesn’t really matter. A couple coffees later I’m sperging to her about how the government should dictate the mission of the corporations not vice versa. If Ford wants to build cars in Mexico the government should be able to force them to stay. If Starbucks wants to be gay the government should rule “Nah.” I leave out that second example. Blondie calls it a beautiful idea—too bad it’s never been done. I don’t give her my list of examples. She wouldn’t get it.

When the Fall gets to me extra bad I tend to sperg about the economy. I often hear my girl telling me that for someone who rants about Marxism so much I sound like I’m advocating for socialism. No. Sometimes I try to explain. Sometimes I don’t. She doesn’t get it. Women recognize the Fall but fewer understand why.

Back with boys we’re Zyning and wrestling with that very Leviathan: the incomprehensible, horrific why. The search takes various courses: Why did the German panzer aces pass the physiognomy check but not the Nazi hierarchy? Why did Franco and Salizar always draw a line between themselves and facism? Why did the allies betray Wrangel and the White Russians? Why did everyone collectively reject monarchy after 1000s of years? All of these queries leading in their own way to the one true Why of the 21st century: Why are we falling?

So let me learn you some of the explanation that I’ve pieced together over sleepless nights of rabbit holes and schizo conversations. Because if I know one thing, it’s that if you’ve found yourself reading MAN’s WORLD you’re seeking that great why too. I can’t even pretend to be some kind of expert in anything—just a random guy like the rest of you—but doesn’t that speak to my credit? We all know the kind of people the “experts” really are. So just for the fun of it follow me through this train of thought.

The question of why is of an almost incomprehensible magnitude. It could conceivably encompass everything from jet fuel melting steel beams to soy subsidies to the sinking of the HMS Hampshire with Field Marshal Kitchener on board. The magnitude of the why question is somewhat comparable to great theological study of yore into the nature of God. So why don’t we follow the methodology of those ancient scholars and define the why not by what it is but rather what it isn’t?

To do this we’ll establish two assumptions. 1.) Society is broken. 2.) It is possible for society (for our purposes Western society) to be less broken. Making these assumptions allows us to recognize that our horribly broken system has a hypothetical foil: the ideal ordered society. If society is broken and there exists the possibility for it to be fixed (at least in theory), then we can discover the nature of our why by asking ourselves what. Wjhat is the ideal? That’s the moneyball question. The tough part about the answer is that Western civilization has been in a fallen state for so long that our collective memory has nothing but legends and wisps of memories of ages past to pull answers out of. But I think by ignoring the eclectic magnitude of political discourse and focusing on something we are all acutely familiar with we will find a more direct path to the truth. And what is it that we are all so well acquainted with? No, it’s not Twitter. It’s not Kate Upton. It’s not even the incredible edible egg. It is the human body.

The anatomy of the human body provides a uniquely valuable blueprint for the ideal structure of human society (after all, it is technically what society is made of). Firstly, its enormous complexity mirrors the level of complexity of a civilization itself. Secondly, it is easily one of, if not the most, successful operating system known to the world. Thirdly, it is something we all know as well as anything which will allow the individual to search himself (perhaps literally) for the truth of some of the conclusions we will be drawing here shortly.

Delving into the human-body analogy, a surface look at anatomy and physiology already presents us with a rather curious aspect of our theoretical blueprint. The structure of our physiology happens to be everything a leftist detests: totalitarian (executive nervous function), xenophobic (indiscriminate immune response to foreign bodies), and ethnocentric (autonomically programmed survival responses). And above all it is ordered. There was a time in the not-so-distant past when it was order, not freedom, that was the supreme virtue of the state. The modern value placed on liberty was largely a product of the Enlightenment and resulting French revolution, and let’s be real—those guys were literally executing nuns. Where is liberty in physiology? Pretty much nowhere. Molecular gradients, fluid pressure, temperature are all strictly regulated down to minute changes. Nothing is left to chance. A lapse of control, A.K.A. your beloved “liberty,” presents as something like diarrhea-filled undies (or worse) on an anatomical model. The simple truth is nothing that is prioritized in a liberal society (and that includes a neo-conservative waste land) would foster life on an individual level.

Before I go any further, I can already hear the whiney response against this point: something along the lines of “humans aren’t animals so the structure of our internal physiology has no relevance to our macro relations” (i.e. human-human interactions). To this I would first say YES. Then I would add NO. Yes humans are not animals, being endowed with a soul (if that’s going to be a sticking point just think of it in some kind of broad Petersonian sense) allows man to operate on playing fields that are not strictly earthly (i.e. morality, community-building).

This does not invalidate the relevancy of the comparison to the micro-scale, because it is the individual exceptionalism of man that allows man to have exceptional macro-relations. Let me explain that more clearly. The human ability to form relationships within the various degrees of his “tribe group” (family, friends, community, society) is dependent on man having the highest degree of consciousness found among all fauna and flora. This supreme consciousness, which is the basis of all higher bonds he forms, is at its heart a spiritual characteristic. If man as an individual were not structured this way, his macro-relations (most notably the ability to create civilization) would cease to differ significantly from any other type of animal. One can make an argument that man’s higher consciousness is just a perfection of the survival instinct (the larger your tribe, the better your survival odds) but my on-the-fly rebuttal would simply be the instances when physical survival instinct is suppressed for the survival of a spiritual ethos. Man will forfeit his physical life in order to remain true to what he believes is his spiritual “self,” (ie. martyrdom or dying for your country). I’ll leave the rest of that discussion for a discord thread, the real takeaway from this is that the micro-scale of humanity has everything to do with the macro-scale of humanity.

Ok, whiners aside, let’s continue to look at society as a body. If we used a successful blueprint (ie. the actual human body) how would Western civilization be structured?

The first and, for some, possibly most uncomfortable fact about an “anatomically correct” society is that it would most certainly be totalitarian. The totalitarianism of our nervous system is something only found in the darkest nightmares of a WaPo editor. There is absolutely no voting on anything. Pluralism be damned, it’s all just pure executive authority. So much in fact that most of your most vital functions are controlled independently of even your conscious thoughts. Heartbeat, digestion, blood filtration: all meticulously regulated by one supreme power without any bureaucratic red tape. Nightmare? Maybe wet dream is more fitting. In fact the only real input that influences the authority of the nervous system is that elusive concept of the psyche or soul. Call it our Jiminy cricket- or conscience: the spiritual aspect of man that exerts a kind of soft control on the voluntary actions of the body. Is pushing the old lady crossing the street keeping in line with the moral code I know in my heart of hearts to be true? What about helping her? This is the crux upon which the whole system rests. It is why a society governed by an absolute executive can so easily become an Orwellian dystopia. The traditional application of this brain/soul relationship is church and state. In the days of yore, the epochs of kings, rulers (most notably that of Christendom) operated under the authority of Divine Right of Kings.

Now before we go further, flush out that enlightenment revisionism shoved down your throat by your pencil-necked schoolmaster. Divine right of kings best understood was not a principle of complete impunity for a monarch’s actions, since only God could judge the ruler. No, rather it’s the idea that all rulers are put in power by God’s will simply because it is God’s grace that allowed for the circumstances they rose to power (i.e. the fact they were born, the innate gifts they were born with, the fact there is even an earth to rule over). The Bible mentions this in Jesus’s reply to Pilate, “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above.” Or as the saint/philosopher Thomas Aquinas discussed, emanationem ex deo: All sourced from God. No one rules without God: the principle of divine right of kings, is still applicable in theory to the leaders today. Assuming that all power ultimately comes from God, divine right of kings creates the stipulation that only by recognizing this fact, demonstrated by following biblical moral teaching, can a monarch rule legitimately. Once the king strays from the straight and narrow so to say, he will have hell to pay (both in a literal and figurative sense). The genius of the idea comes from the fact that by establishing this relationship between religious morality and legitimate authoritarian rule, the medieval church (and other societies to a lesser extent: think the high priest-kings of Hebrews, Egyptians and Aztecs) created the only real system of regulation on an absolute monarch (a role inherently impossible to regulate). If the “supreme leader” is the nervous system of our anatomically correct society, the church exists as the conscious/soul. Without a morally sound soul to check the actions of a totalitarian state, there is no safeguard against its inevitable fall into immoral behavior. This is precisely the reason we see such different results between the largely similar governments of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy compared to Nationalist Spain and Salvizar’s Portugal. Let’s hear it from the man himself, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, who described national socialism and fascism as a kind of amoral “pagan Caesarism.” Salazar and Franco understood the importance of establishing a strong moral bedrock for their authoritarian societies with Salazar calling Christianity “the formative element of the soul of the nation and the dominant trait of character of the Portuguese people.” It was Franco who said, in a direct recognition of the true meaning of divine right of kings: “I am responsible only to God and history.” Let me make one thing clear. Neither Spain nor Portugal were theocracies where the Catholic church controlled civic rule. Both men understood the role of religion was social not political, just like the hundreds of christian monarchs before them (an inquisitive scholar is hard pressed to find any real example of direct clergy rule in the entire history of Christendom). By allowing the church to form the “spiritual psyche” of the state, the two societies avoided most of the degenerate trends of Germany and Italy. So having established our anatomically correct government (an absolute ruler) with its anatomically correct conscience (the Christian Church), on to the fun stuff: the economy.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Just kidding! It’s such a boring idea anyway. No, let’s delve into something much more interesting: fascism! More specifically, let’s investigate the economic structure that Il Duce himself titled “corporatism.” Hopefully you guys will understand this better than my girl, Blondie. Corporatism has an unfortunate name because everyone just starts thinking of a society where corporate interests universally dominate (wow who could imagine that dystopia?). In fact it’s essentially the opposite: private business exists but exists to serve the state. Maybe a name change is due before we blow up twitter with this. The government (authoritarian) operates as a kind of supreme CEO who has total authority to regulate individual industrial sectors. The beauty of this setup is that the government doesn’t actually need to worry about the nitty-gritty of business dealings, which never ends well, but is able to ensure that private business works for the society rather than subverts it.

We see this in Fascist Italy where all the classic manufacturers—Fiat, Beretta, Alfa Romeo, even early Ferrari (Auto Avi Costruzioni)—existed and operated much as they always have under their respective ownership. The main difference was that when patriotic duty called,“Si” was the only option. And this is only logical. Would it have made sense for Enzo Ferrari to use his factories for race cars while Rome was being bombed? The same was true for Germany: think Volkwagen or Porsche (lest we forget Ferdinand Porsche was actually an SS officer whose company helped produce Tiger tanks). Now some of you may think this arrangement isn’t much different from the way the U.S. negotiated military contracts from the likes of Jeep, General Motors (those guys were even making artillery), or Remington. And that’s where you’re wrong. But you’re actually not completely wrong. Where you’re right is in the fact that for all practical purposes America actually became a corporatist state on the road to military industrialization. Anno Domini 1943, Congress passed the “War Labor Disputes Act,” which gave F.D.R. authority to take over any plants crucial for the war effort where production had stalled. However this was really only ever soft corporatism. The advantage of true corporatism lies in the ability of the government to exert full fiscal as well as social control over corporations. Fiscally, a corporatist government does not have to rely on a laissez-faire system of contracts and bids for its industrial needs. That doesn’t mean that the government doesn’t pay its producers, it’s common sense that if you tank your economy in the process of securing tanks, air planes, safety pins, etc. you’re worse off than you started. At the same time, the government is free to set a realistic price instead of being forced to fish for bidders with obscenely lucrative offers (yes we’ve all seen War Dogs). Socially, and this is the sweetest feature, the government can actually regulate the ideology of corporations.

No corporation has any real guiding ideology, but it doesn’t stop them from word vomiting a bunch of rubbish mission statements all over their websites. Just listen to Meta’s self-stated mission, “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” Or what about Disney’s? “To entertain, inform and inspire people around the globe.” American companies one and all yet their attention seems to be everywhere but America. And that’s not even getting into the more specific social-justice ideation these conglomerates champion. Everything from trans children to black lives. Why are all the big ones such suckers to these progressive trends? Simply because at the end of the day their only master is the mob of their shareholders. They have no Duce reigning over them to denounce their actions as unpatriotic and threaten liquidation. Just a congressional gathering of crooks on their payroll and a bloated bureaucracy who could care less what they post on social media. The economy is a function of the state, rather than the state being a function of the economy like some Ronald Reagan chud would tell you. That’s how it works under corporatism and how it works in the human body. Yes! Did you think corporatism wouldn’t be anatomically correct? Where did you think I was going with this? At first it seems ridiculous to look for anything resembling an economy in flesh and bone, but it’s actually a fairly easy concept to translate. Human anatomy obviously doesn’t use currency as we know it but there is a complex exchange of molecules (Na, K+, Calcium, ATP, GTP, glucose, among many). We could think of the industrial output as being anything produced: neurotransmitters, new tissue, leukocytes, proteins, DNA. With this foundation let’s explore the actual economic structure. What do we know already? Well, as established previously the government structure is completely totalitarian.

With this said, a dive into physiology shows that while the nervous system controls all organs, each individual system has its own organization of specialized receptors, types of cells, and membranes (the heart even has its own system of electrical impulses), that give them a certain amount of autonomous function. This autonomy is not enough to constitute a free market. Organs do not compete for nutrients at the expense of others, in times of crisis the body will be specific about the systems it prioritizes over other less vital ones. Laissez-faire does not exist. A specific example of this can be found in the kidneys. Reabsorption in the nephron is highly regulated and is not dependent purely on abundance of supply vs amount of internal demand. What is reabsorbed or excreted plays an important role in broader functions like circulation and osmotic homeostasis just as what goods are consumed in a society impact more than just Wall Street. The body recognizes this and uses a number of mechanisms to artificially regulate the “economic exchange,” of the kidneys. This ensures that the body gets what it needs and not solely what it wants. It also ensures it doesn’t kill itself from the “corporate interests,” of its renal sector. So clearly no free market within us. So what exactly is going on here? That level of individual “enterprise” which we touched upon earlier is too complex for us to write off our physiological system as a completely nationalized “economy.” This leaves us with a non-laissez faire organization featuring private industries under the supervision of an absolute authority. Sounds like corporatism to me.

If we wanted to, there is almost an infinite depth we could take this analogy to. We didn’t even get to explore the beautifully xenophobic immune system or some of the analogies pertaining to autoimmune disorders. But for everyone’s sake let’s wrap this thing up nicer and neater than the trad girls in midwinter. The totalitarian state, its Christian church moral compass, the corporatist economy—how do we tie these all together? The origins of corporatism give us a clue. Interestingly, it is a theory that long predates Mussolini. In fact its embryonic origins might be accurately traced to the organization of society found in Aristotle’s Politics, while its full maturity can be attributed to everyone’s favorite boogeyman: the Catholic Church. It was Pope Leo XIII of the late 1800’s who commissioned church theologians for a working definition of the idea. It’s worth noting that by that time the concept was anything but new, historians sometimes identifying pre-revolutionary France or Medieval orders like the Knights Templar as corporatist in nature. The Catholic Church’s take on corporatism (which differs slightly from the later Musulini version with regards to details beyond the scope of this article) is interesting because it is incorporated into a broader social theory known as integralism. A basic summation of this idea is the unification of all institutions within a society under a common guiding principle. For the Catholic Church, this is defined as all institutions: political, economic, social, as being obligated to operate within the teachings of Christianity. This same concept can be broadened to include other principles like nationalism (ie. unification of purpose for the good of the nation-state or culture). It’s this concept of integralism that seems to best encompass the unique blend of systems we’ve at this point established as anatomically correct. All parts united by one authority, working for one purpose: it’s a simple idea and exactly like the human body! Outside of the political and economic areas already touched upon, the broader implications of an integralist system are extremely alluring. Industry and government are not just working together towards a unified vision of society but also entertainment, the arts, education, and healthcare as well. No more foreign interests, subversive movies, critical racism textbooks, pedophilic modern art. Nothing that goes against the true collective soul of the nation.

All of this is of course dependent on what our hypothetical authoritarian government deems that national soul to be. This is why the church-state relationship discussed earlier is so crucial. Without a guiding traditional Christian worldview, the government would be able to make all those social elements conform to its wildest globohomo fever dream.

Even if we’re living in the Fall, there is no reason why the West can’t be made great again. The sick body can be cured. Forget your chud slogan E pluribus Unum. There is but Unum. One West. One body. The organs are nothing outside the whole. 100% efficiency and wellness is the goal, not a pluralism of “mostly functioning.” Integralism is what describes the structure of our anatomy. Integralism is what we should do.

Integralism is what we want. Integralism is the key. Remember it. Shout it aloud. Write it down.

Whisper is softly in your girl’s ear. Integralism is what’s true.