For almost all of recorded history, Axial theologies have staged themselves as defenders of authority and tradition, much as modern-day conservatives do. But beneath the surface, a deeper foundation lies concealed. There was something that these theologies once replaced—they were once the revolutionaries, the assailants against all authority and tradition, and they bear the ineradicable mark of their revolutionary past. A leopard never changes its spots, and anti-authoritarianism does not become authority with the “silent lapse of time.”1

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This is the frame of folkish apologetics in the 21st century: Axial theologies are the real anti-authoritarians, the real anti-traditionalists. To displace the originary traditions, these theologies had to posit something beyond them—what modern Axialists2 call “transcendence.” But after the revolution, in order to maintain order, these theologies had to convert themselves into a real tradition; and in order to do that, they had to manufacture a schizoid history which actually places themselves at the beginning. But this cannot quell the revolutionary impulse that lives in their heart, which brings forth perennial attempts to “transcend” themselves, one of which eventually triumphs, and the cycle begins anew.

This folkish framing has forced Axial theologies to reveal that they are anti-authoritarian and anti-tradition—in other words, that they are forerunners to liberalism. Axial theologians thus occupy an unstable position: to their right is folkishness, the consistent defender of authority and tradition; to their left is liberalism, the avowed enemy of these. Caught between these consistent poles are Buddhists, Platonists, Christians, perennialists, and other “middling” Axialists.

The rhetorical move for the middling Axialist is to claim that they really defend both: they are allies of tradition and authority just as they are of freedom and conscience. The structural move is to make tradition and authority answer to something outside themselves, and the form of their argument is the performative contradiction. The Axialist will demand that tradition ground itself in truth, and then argue along the lines of “well, you have to appeal to shared, objective standards of truth just to have a discussion at all, so the fact that we’re talking proves my point.” Sometimes the Axialist will even extend this beyond discourse to language or even communication itself, as though a lion roaring to ward off hyenas from their kill is simply a Christian or Platonist who hasn’t realized it yet. This so offends common sense that even if they could offer a valid logical demonstration, it would only show that logic must bow before common sense.

The goal of Axial apologetics is to move authority and tradition into the realm of discourse, where truth governs authority, not the other way around. This is what is meant by the term logos, taken from the Greek word for “word,” “idea,” or “account.” Folkishness reverses the performative contradiction by pointing out that questioning authority at its foundations both collapses morality into incoherence and renders discourse impossible. The folkish apologist observes that commands presuppose authority and that naming resolves into command, meaning that the predicate relation—the basis of the proposition, thus discourse—depends on authority. This is to say that the command comes before the proposition, and therefore authority is upstream of truth. This is anti-logos, or the idea that discursivity is not at the bottom of right.

Axialists have tried to defend logos by mounting objections to this folkish apologetic. In this article, we will examine these objections to show that they fail to address the framework just laid out. This folkish framework involves several concepts, including Thrownness, Heteronomy, Imperative Ethics, Factualism, and the Ancestral Principle. Far and away, the concept that has received the most attention is the ancestral principle, but it is not the most fundamental. To his credit, Greg Johnson has attempted to challenge imperative ethics, though in the final analysis his objection is that imperative ethics is Jewish, which concedes that the validity of an idea is bound up with the identity of the holder of that idea—in other words, that there are different moralities (or in this case, even different truth claims) for different peoples. This already cannot defend the point that the Axialist wants to make.

But I appreciate the responses because they have forced folkish pagans to clarify our positions. There have been no few responses, specifically to the ancestral principle, which seems to have touched a nerve among Christians, and especially among Orthodox Christians.3 In this series, we will address three articles, all from Christians, which represent some of the more common and/or interesting critiques of our folkish framework.

Summary and Disagreements

The critiques in these articles measure folkish theologies by logocentric (i.e., discursive) standards that the folkish worldview does not grant as ultimate. The first and most philosophically serious article, Folkish Heathen Apologetics, Part I, Section I by Enas Mathetes, argues that paganism is self-defeating—that the ancestral principle and pagan reconstruction depend upon shared standards of truth. The second article, No, Burke Must Not Die by Radical Monarchist, a response to our article Edmund Burke Must Die, argues that paganism is debased—that folkish traditionalism mistakes inherited form for transcendent truth. The third article, The Best Argument Against Paganism by Gene Botkin, argues that paganism is retarded—that a backward-facing ancestral metaphysic will become technologically stagnant and therefore geopolitically weak. These three critiques—that “paganism is self-defeating,” “paganism is debased,” and “paganism is retarded”—effectively exhaust the canon of Axial counter-apologetics, so we will use these articles to show the weakness of the canon as a whole.

All three critics grant, to varying degrees, that tradition, inheritance, and authority have some value; the deeper disagreement is over what finally grounds them. Is religion fundamentally a description of the world, or a set of prescriptions? It is obviously both, so the question becomes: which determines which? Is morality a kind of knowledge, or a domain of imperatives? Is tradition a vehicle of truth, or itself a binding authority? And is binding force measured by uninterrupted transmission, or by upstream authorship? Must civilizational competence arise from Axial universalism, or can it arise from particularist forms?

The folkish worldview says that authority is prior to reason, that morality is imperative rather than discursive, that authorship grounds obligation, and that folkhood is the operative horizon within which commands become apt. The critics reject this. All three argue from some version of a universal tribunal—this is the major fault line. The folkish worldview rejects an ultimate tribunal. This is why these debates feel circular: each camp rejects the first principle of the others. The aim of our series will not be to argue first principles—because this is impossible. The aim will be to show how Axialist first principles fail by their own criteria, and how the critics fail even to grasp, much less address, the first principles of the folkish worldview.

There are minor fault lines as well. First, the question of morality vs. technics. The third article explicitly fuses the two, whereas the folkish worldview distinguishes them, showing that the latter need not look backward even if the former does—indeed, one of the major errors of modernity is to infer moral from technological progress. Second, the question of living continuity vs. revived obligation. The first article claims that a broken tradition cannot claim ancestral authority, whereas the folkish worldview answers that uninterrupted observance cannot be a precondition of legitimacy; otherwise, authority would be annulled the first time one neglects an obligation. Rather, revival is simply the renewed obedience to commands that were never abrogated.

First Principles

All the main objections in the three critical articles have already been addressed in some form in earlier Imperium Press articles. However, each of the critical articles focuses primarily on the ancestral principle, so to show how they fail to address folkish apologetics as a whole, we must lay some theoretical groundwork beyond that focus. We will outline five concepts crucial to the folkish worldview, though there are others.

The Imperium Press Substack currently represents a theoretical reserve of some 400,000 words, so we will sketch only outlines here. For those who want to go deeper, many of the core articles have been catalogued by topic at the Guide to the Imperium Press Substack.

Thrownness

Martin Heidegger’s concept of thrownness refers to our condition of being always delivered over to a world we did not create. It is characterized entirely by its unchosenness—we are “thrown” into a particular family, language, and tradition without our consent. The raw facts of our birth are simply given as an arbitrary, but nonetheless inescapable baseline of reality that can ask for no ultimate explanation or justification for the way it is.

Thrownness emphasizes heritage over freedom because our freedom is bounded by our unchosen and inherited legacy. This underscores its historical character, since we are always situated in a particular time and place. This also underscores its immanence; our thrownness is not a transcendent reality but an event in the world. We cannot step outside of it to gain the detached, neutral standpoint from which transcendence claims to speak. Heidegger argued that an authentic existence requires “resoluteness”: that we accept the arbitrariness of our starting point and own this unchosen inheritance in order to transform the hand of cards we are dealt into a path that is authentically our own.

Heteronomy

Heteronomy is the condition of ethics whereby the moral law is defined by and received from an external authority rather than the moral agent’s own autonomous reason. Morality cannot depend on the agent’s will; if moral obligation required the assent of the agent—i.e., conscience—the concept of duty would fall apart. This is because if one can bind oneself, one can just as easily unbind oneself, reducing morality to personal preference and resulting in antinomianism: the rejection of all moral laws.

For this reason, heteronomy shifts the locus of moral life away from the individual, which highlights the fundamentally public nature of morality. There is a close match here with shame culture—a social order in which the locus of moral authority is external to the individual, making shame, rather than guilt, the primary means of enforcing moral order.

Heteronomy also manifests as strict formalism. Since interiority is irrelevant to moral standing, the letter of the law takes precedence over the spirit of the law. Heteronomy prescribes strict adherence to civic rituals, outward legal codes, and established cultural traditions, with internal motives relevant only insofar as they lead the moral agent to obey these formalities. The moral status of an act is judged by conformity to a rule, not by the intentions of the actor.

Imperative Ethics

Imperative ethics is a metaethical framework that holds that moral utterances properly belong in the imperative rather than the indicative mood. Put another way, imperative ethics holds that commands such as “do not steal” are first-order moral utterances, whereas moral propositions such as “stealing is wrong” or “you ought not to steal” are derivative or second-order moral utterances which cloak a direct command in the guise of a statement about reality: “stealing is wrong” is more properly phrased, “God said thou shalt not steal,” or worse, “I said thou shalt not steal.”

That morality reduces to imperatives means that first-order moral statements are not facts, thereby marking out imperative ethics as a form of non-cognitivism, since imperatives lack truth-aptitude. The command “wash the car” cannot grammatically be true nor false, so morality is fundamentally non-discursive, i.e., not a matter of truth or falsity. Statements about morality can be true or false, such as “Dad said wash the car,” but morality at its foundations operates entirely outside the realm of rational debate or logical truth-valuation.

Imperatives are inherently agent-relative, so their validity depends on the identity of the speaker and audience. For example, when the father says to the son, “go to your room and think about what you did,” this is valid, whereas when the son says to the father, “go to your room and think about what you did,” this is not valid. This agent-relativity stems from the indexicality of imperatives. The foundational imperative is always in the second person (“I” address it to “you”)4—who “I” refers to varies with the speaker, and who “you” refers to varies with the audience. This agent-relativity is also known as particularism—so morality is fundamentally a set of particularized, situational commands rather than a set of universal, freestanding truths.

Some ethical frameworks, sensing the incoherence of propositional ethics (i.e., moral cognitivism), attempt to salvage it by introducing teleology—the belief that natural entities have a telos (an innate purpose or goal)—into ethics. However, this does not avoid imperative ethics, because a purpose or a goal implies an intention, thus a will, thus a command. A natural purpose or end goal is unintelligible without an aiming intellect, which automatically smuggles a commanding will back into the system.

Imperative ethics has deep historical consequences. Because morality is non-discursive (i.e., not a set of truth-apt propositions), it is not a form of knowledge, and because it is not a form of knowledge, it is not cumulative nor capable of being advanced through discovery—thus imperative ethics forecloses on moral progress. In fact, it has just the opposite consequence: morality is inherently retrogressive, with later imperatives depending on earlier, more foundational commands for their legitimacy.

Ultimately, this entire system presupposes a foundational authority that commands but lies outside the realm of discourse, thereby making this authority axiomatic. It cannot be cross-examined or morally justified, because not only does it lie outside all moral discourse, but any moral justifications reduce to its own commands, thus rendering its justification circular. Foundational authority must simply be accepted as the unarguable, non-discursive starting point of all obligation.

Factualism

Factualism is a meta-epistemological framework that holds that, owing to the nature of reason—that something is always in place before reason—our reason is never disembodied but always depends upon an agent and is bounded by a culture.

Factualism does not reject reason, but recognizes that discourse cannot rest on an abstract, self-justifying foundation; thus, factualism subordinates reason to the very foundations that make reasoning possible in the first place. Every rational chain must begin with a brute fact or axiom that cannot itself be derived from reason. When we ask where these foundational axioms originate, factualism answers that authority is primordial. This authority serves as an absolute, non-debatable presupposition and source of axioms.

In attempting to determine the identity of this primordial authority, we are bound by a strict conservation law of authority. We can only evaluate anything on the basis of axioms, which themselves inevitably reduce to some authority; consequently, one can never decide between competing authorities without some authority already being securely in place. To close this loop and begin at all, one must start from where one is, operating entirely within the assumptions one has inherited, which we call tradition, with the result that tradition is total. This total reliance on inherited forms means that our ethical grammar, political instincts, communal structures, and cognitive frameworks are given to us from the outset, strictly forbidding “reason” from ever standing over tradition as if it were an independent, objective tribunal. There is no “view from nowhere”—any supra-traditional perspective from which to evaluate different cultures or histories is explicitly denied by the preconditions of reason itself.

This does not mean that tradition physically creates the world, but rather that it furnishes the names, concepts, and imperatives by which the world becomes intelligible, meaning that all contact with reality—including our very concepts of “the world” and “reality”—reduces to tradition. As a result, metaphysics, epistemology, and our entire architecture of the world’s basic structure are downstream of tradition. Ultimately, it is not that one tradition truly sees reality while another sees it falsely—the idea of a supra-traditional perspective already collapses the conditions that make reasoning possible. Rather, different traditions stand as radically incommensurable conceptual worlds, functioning as the exhaustive preconditions for experience itself.

The Ancestral Principle

The ancestral principle is a heuristic that operationalizes the mechanics of imperative ethics, giving us a rule for adjudicating between commands that disagree with each other. The principle is: authorship is authority—the structural reality of authority is that obligations naturally arise from origin. A command binds because it issues from that which made, constituted, founded, or transmitted the form of life within which one stands.

This logic is essentially a practical application of factualism: an authority is decisive because it is your ontological source, standing in relation to you as begetter to begotten. Paternity is the clearest expression of this reality: the child stands under the father because the child exists entirely by the father’s prior act. This structure also scales upward to the level of a society—peoples speak in the voices of their founders and their divine creators.

When applied to conflicting commands, this logic yields a clear rule: the oldest legible command is decisive. This rule operates as a kind of transcendental argument—the principle that a thing derives its authority from authorship is not only a justification, but the very structure of all justification. To argue anything at all is inevitably to invoke a tradition, which is implicitly to invoke the ancestral principle; without it, you simply would not be here.

The ancestral principle often, but not always, functions algorithmically. The goal is to minimize the invocation of conscience, because without an external anchor like the ancestral principle, the alternative is invariably to make oneself the judge of authority, while denying that this self-legislation is even happening, even denying it to oneself. Rather than permitting endless philosophical debate, this principle is offered as a procedural rule for bringing debate to a close; it is a way of minimizing private, subjective, post hoc rationalization in the selection of authorities. This motivation—the reduction of private conscience to avoid subjectivism—underlies all of the previously discussed concepts. The core worry driving this system is that reason and conscience are far more likely to lead to unconstrained caprice than is obedience to authority.

Conclusion

Let us return to the beginning of this article. The Axialist postures as the defender of tradition and authority by claiming that true authority must submit to an external, transcendent standard. This strategy subordinates the command to discourse, which in turn subordinates the particular to the universal. Consequently, this shift reduces the public relation of authority, subordinating it to a private metaphysics of identity, ultimately replacing hierarchy with equality.

Put plainly, private conscience is repurposed from moral scaffolding to moral cornerstone. The Axialist shifts the role of conscience from a necessity invoked when tradition underspecifies duties to the foundation that holds up the whole structure of right. There is a reason why rampant subjectivism never emerged in the ancient world but only in Axial modernity. The consistent application of logos has brought us to the point where every man is his own king, where he dares to judge that which sits on the throne. The civilizational result has been to enshrine subjectivism in the name of objectivity.

It has been necessary to lay this groundwork due to the persistent misunderstanding of the folkish position, as though it consists merely of the ancestral principle. Next week, we will address the first of the three articles and show how it fails to counter folkishness.