What do the pictures in this post have in common, apart of human esthetics and artistic excellence?

All spring from the genius of Nazi propaganda artist Leni Riefenstahl. But the icons share other characteristics.

Polylogism (here defined, and here seen in postmodern action) is a form of collectivist subjectivism that also produced the National Socialist racial theories. A postmodern term for polylogism is multiculturalism.

A people, racial or cultural group is seen as having to follow its own particular destiny apart from the rest of humanity, a historical path culminating - according to a number of subjectivist philosophers (Kant and Hegel) - in teleological endgames, often a secularized version of the Second Coming.

The irrationality of multiple 'logics' apart, this form of self-determination negates universalism and is in fact racism, with apartheid as a direct consequence.

Universalism endows the human race as a whole with basic rights, as poetically summed up in the American Declaration of Independence: (...) that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

In its result it makes no difference whether these inalienable rights are bestowed by God, are a result of Natural Law, or are seen as inherent in man's nature.

But it makes all the difference if such rights are relative, conditional and temporarily bestowed by society, or worse, by the state or a government - up for suspension at any time when the collective deems its own common causes of primary importance over the individual's as we have witnessed in Nazism, Communism and Fascism. See it succinctly explained in this animated video - the entire P1 series is heartily recommended, also as an educational tool).

Modern forms of collectivism are the inevitable consequences of a fatal mistake made by the thinkers of the so-called Radical Enlightenment, the first relativists of our time, skeptics, deists and atheists, notably Cartesian philosophers as Pierre Bayle and Baruch Spinoza: they 1o1 substituted absolute monarchy with the rule by the state. Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau put the cherry on the evil edifice by fitting it out with an illusionary 'common will' of its own.

Building total states was not their intention, but it was the result of their oversight to safeguard individual rights against the ever expanding bodies of state. Whereas in universalism rights are absolute, either sacred, natural, or inherent and thus inalienable, collectivists derive their temporal, conditional and positive rights directly from the state or the government. These aren't servants and representatives of the people, but ends in themselves.

Universalism produces negative rights and liberty, limiting the powers of the state in favor of its individual citizens; on the racial level the result is 'melting pot' and given time, Dr Martin Luther King's 'color blindness'.

Polylogism or multiculturalism on the other hand produces subjects, drones, apartheid, gang morality, segregation, ghettos, no-go areas, balkanization, tribalism, and the oppression of dissidents of any particular group, whose rules they happened to have violated. These have nowhere to go since the multicultural prime directive - all groups being morally equal - is not to interfere in any other group's affairs.

Contrary to what the proponents tell us, the definition of a multicultural society is not a society comprising multiple cultures, but one consisting of segregated minorities, each following their own 'common will'. History learns that the result is oppression and a perpetual state of tribal warfare.

Given the fact that humanity can now look back on literally centuries of ill experience with collectives - each of course laying claim to its own version of Utopia - it's truly stupefying that we are still in the process of reproducing more of the same.

The analysis was never properly made, nor were the evils in essence ever exposed and addressed. As a result we're not looking ahead to a happy post-racial melting pot, but to the ultimate nightmare of a postmodern version of tribalism.

Eurozine recently published an exchange of polemics between proponents and opponents of multiculturalism. Note that the proponents defend their morally charged views on the basis of their good intentions, not on the logical consequences of their ideas. That particular strain of Kantian ethics is called deontology, or the perpetual get-of-jail-card for the good-intent-bad-result-never-mind brigades.

If anything stands out between the 17th century originals and the postmodern lot, it's that the former were rather keen on the absoluteness of the freedom of expression. But since the onset of the Counter Enlightenment that value has been subject of erosion, now temporarily culminating in the inexplicable wish to return to barbarism and obscurantism.

Need to have the matter explained the hard way? Watch (or listen to) "Tough Absolutes". (I can up that figure of 57 million: it's actually closer to 110 million over the last century alone.)

Related: "'Triumph of the Will', or Defeat of Delusion" (a full length Nazi propaganda film by Leni Riefenstahl)

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