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Low intensity training on Aland Islands:

I will let you in on a secret, although it is not really a secret, since I have revealed it before. The big non-secret is that I am quite a poor sportsman, pretty much lacking the two most relevant qualities making a good long distance runner and/or cross-country skier. The qualities in question are mental and physical endurance. I really do not enjoy pushing myself that hard for that a long time (sad to say I am not a true masochist). So why do I keep aiming at running or skiing long distances at quite high levels of intensity? Obviously, the answer relates to the fact that I have a highly addictive personality. I am addicted to physical exercise and I have used training to free myself of other addictions (as well as to work against general anxiety, of course). Competitions are means, then, by which I justify my excessive training. Here, there is a crux, however. The crux is that if training has been successful, competing for a long time at a high level of intensity becomes less of a pain as well.

Moreover, successful training does not necessarily presuppose compensation in form of prolonged suffering under the yoke of highly intensive training during practice. The “great” lesson I have learned as an athlete is that although suffering is unavoidable, more of it never automatically transfer into better results. In the end, it is all a matter of placing right amounts of suffering into their proper slots (although this requires constant estimation and sensitivity, at which I more often fail than succeed). More is not more, but neither must less be. Sometimes the right choice may be to have as little as possible, that is, to train only with low levels of intensity. At the very least you will feel refreshed afterwards (and perchance you can help up the self-confidence of some fellow managing to overtake you on his daily 4 k run, before parking himself in front of American Ninja Warrior).

This is how my recent 5 days of low intensity training on Aland Islands looked like:

Wednesday: Running, 30 k: 2h 45 min

Thursday: Tarmac skiing (double poling), 15 k + 15 k (skin dipping in between): 2 h

Friday: Running, 17 k: 1h 45 min

Saturday: Tarmac skiing (double poling), 55 k: 3h    

Sunday: Running, 11 k + 11 k (cleaning a boat in between): 2h

This all was training, of course, I sweated (a lot, like I always do, although somewhat less thanks to wearing only speedos (and a junior tank top during skiing)), but I kept my pulse at between 130 and 150 beats a minute all the time. Pain, for me, arrives at 170 beats a minute. This is where high intensity training begins. I kept clear of that zone, and I take pride in not having touched the “black hole” either. If you stay at 160 for too long, in the end you will become, I believe, living dead.

 

The Fourth Political Theory:

After having finished the latest draft for my thesis on the origins of political philosophy in Ancient Greece, my supervisor kindly advised me to cut down the passages where I turn to contemporary history and to dark prognoses of the future of Western civilization. This led to me reacting in my trademark contrarian way, so by now I have spent most of the summer reading as much contemporary history as humanly possible, devoting special care to dark prognoses of the worst kind. Here, the work of the Russian sociologist and “geopolitician” Alexander Dugin takes first place. Dugin’s take on the decline of the West does not follow the usual route of a predicted downfall, conceived of as the soon to be realized outcome of an inevitable inner process (represented by, for instance, by the conservative reaction of claimed detections of extremely severe corruption of traditional values, or by the left-wing (or post-left) idea of a penultimate capitalistic system failure). In Dugin’s comprehension, the West remains the most prominent representative of an ideological outlook having become globally all-powerful, namely of liberalism. It is just that this liberalism, in the eyes of Dugin, is very much akin to the Devil unveiled. In other words, Dugin perceives liberalism as a force to be fought and beaten to the ground before anything else may be undertaken.        

Building on Samuel Huntington’s (The Clash of Civilizations) notion of the history of the 20^th century world as boiling down to a “fight between ideologies” represented by three main antagonists, namely fascism, communism and liberalism (where fascism is understood to have been wiped out with the end of WWII and the fight having been continued during the ensuing Cold War between communism and liberalism) Dugin believes that the final victory of liberalism (realized with the collapse of the USSR) has resulted in a world order where liberalism has ceased to be one ideology among others. Instead, we are supposed to have entered a state of worldwide “post-liberalism”. On this account, the core values of liberalism (for instance: heightened respect for individuals, private property made sacred, equality of opportunity, abolishment of all social authorities aiming to set down common truths, separation of political powers and dominance of market relations) are presented as having transformed into a “panorama of post-liberal grotesques” (meaning: “dividuals” (“post-individuals”, “ironic combinations of parts of people”) replacing individuals, private property moving from being sacred to becoming “idolised”, a state of post-truth or a crisis of common rationality, constant “like-based” electronic referenda beginning to replace the separation of powers and a next to total virtualization of the market).     

Although Dugin thus joins that school of thought, with its beginning in the “theories of civilizations” of the early 20^th century (such as Oswald Spengler’s Untergang des Abendlandes (Eng.: The Decline of the West), which hold out modern Western culture as a perfect example of a civilization on the verge of collapse, Dugin himself certainly conceives of this decline as something more than an object of detached study and/or of lament. In the mind of Dugin, it is exactly the West in its state of downfall, which must be “crusaded” against (with the “core of evil” represented, of course, by the United States). To fight off the “pure evil” of American liberalism (or “post-liberalism”), Dugin maps out the outlines of his Fourth Political Theory (4PT). According to Dugin, this is a theory characterized by the “three main principles” of social justice, national sovereignty and traditional values. It is a theory, which brings in the “greatest value” of the Ethnos (Greek for ethnic group or nation) against the harmful individualism (or “dividualism”) of (post-)liberalism.    

There are some gross historical inaccuracies in Dugin’s book. At one point, he accuses liberalism of being “responsible for slavery”, although slavery as a social institution was in fact abolished for the first time on the initiative of western thinkers inspired by liberal ideas (thinkers such as the “father of conservatism” Edmund Burke). (That being said, there is something particularly abominable about the fact that the origins of the era of Western world dominion was based on cross-continental slave trade). The most important thing to realize, however, is that the “geopolitics” of Dugin’s The Fourth Political Theory,along with his other works, may be the last thing the world needs. Instead of post-liberalism, I think we should realize that we live in an age of post-solidarism. If the world is to stand a chance, I believe that the borders between different nations, cultures and people (different ethnoi) are just one example of divides, which really need to be overbridged, rather than cherished, as Dugin would have it. Within the Ethnos there are more serious and more unbridgeable separating factors, and these divides are constantly widening. These are the breaches, which are yawning the Earth asunder. The Fifth Political Theory (5PT) should bring forth new forms of inclusiveness as its greatest value.