The Natural Man Is Always Suspicious And Bloody-Minded
Nature based thinking tends to optimism, rather than to appeals to the past. Its essence is to be ‘forward-looking’, because of its inherent rejection of the old, the traditional. It emphasizes youth, the young, the new, and this fits in with the demographics pattern of Nazi support in the late 1920s. When one agronomist exhorted his farmers to go ‘Forward, onward, avoiding the old errors’, this was an archetypal National Socialist formulation: its similarity to the progressivist ‘onward ever upward’ slogans of 20th century Britain is not accidental, because both were the product of a radical rejection of existing structures.
The word ‘radical’ is not used lightly here. The naturist thinker is always Antigone, not Creon. Nature is seen as a path which leads somewhere; it is a teacher. One goes to the natural world to learn from it, and returns with a series of lessons. Nature teaches that there is a truthful, real world, which can, though with difficulty, be seized, grasped and verified. It exists objectively. Why is this apparently obvious attitude a radical one? Because conservative thought is either indifferent to this sort of realism—preferring criteria of social usefulness—or else translates reality to a metaphysical plane where it poses no threat to social stability. Socialists and communists believe in structures and, once in power, in stability. At heart, they do not want to rock the boat, they want to get in it.
But the man who goes to nature for his beliefs is rejecting these compromises. He may be of an unanalytical cast of mind, but he knows how to say no. He is inherently suspicious and bloody-minded. He suspects tradition, ruling classes, and lies, even holy lies. He prefers kin to caste. He cannot, I think, be described as Utopian or mystical, just because he does not conform. If one defines Utopianism as the attempt to escape from ‘the Wheel’, then nature-inspired reformers are not Utopian. They go to nature to learn, and return with the recommendation that one clings to the Wheel, because it is the most sensible path of action.
-“Blood and Soil: Richard Walter Darre and Hitler’s Green Party” by Anna Bramwell