What is Neoreaction?

Ideology, Social-Historical Evolution,

and the

Phenomena of Civilization

Bryce Laliberte

Dedicated to my friend who introduced me to neoreaction

At the time of this writing, a number of those whom I must
acknowledge for their help in crafting this essay go by pseudonymous
personas. Where this is the case, I have directed my acknowledgement
to that persona.

My gratitude first and foremost to Amos & Gromar, with whom I began
writing reactionary philosophy.

To Nick B. Steves, for his introducing me to the wider reactionary
blogosphere and his patience with my use of his ideas.

To Buttercup Dew of My Nationalist Pony, for his preliminary
explanation of nationalism.

To Donal Graeme, who always seems to ask the questions I wanted to
see asked.

And all others I have talked with over email and Twitter. The thoughts

you inspired were instrumental in putting this together.

ONTENTS

Introduction 1

The Notion of Ideology 1

Singular Dogma, Pluralistic Speculation 2

The Longer-Run View of History 5

The Biopolitical Horizon 6

Spiritual Egalitarianism, or We’re All Protestants Now 9

The Case of Libertarianism 11

Society and Nature’s God 13

The Wars of Ideology 15

The Vagaries of Modernism and Neoreaction 18

The Time-Preference of Patriarchalism 21

Futurism and the Technologization of Man 24

Racism and Biopolitics 27

The Values of Capitalism 29

Monarchy, Politics, and Economy 32

Anarcho-Institutionalism 35

Cosmopolitanism and Ethno-Nationalism 38

Tradition and the Return of Christendom 40

Why Reaction? Why Now? 43

NTRODUCTION

History since Christ is the history of Catholicism.

You may take that as a theological proposition if you’d like. In fact, I
do, but the sentence may be taken in another way. As a fact of human
significance, there is no overarching narrative. All narrative is imposed
from without. If there is any such meta-narrative of human history, it
must have God as its author.

To say that history since Christ is the history of Catholicism, it means
that I am imposing a narrative. There is a theme, there are protagonists
and antagonists, certain virtues are praised and certain vices excoriated.
This narrative is perceived through a lens. It is an ideologized history,
even quasi-conspiratorial. I will show you how to see through this lens,
the lens of ideology, and from within you will see how my account of
history is produced by the ideology and intellectual event known as
Neoreaction, or in other parlance, the Dark Enlightenment.

I understand many are tentatively dissuaded by my manner of speaking.
My language seems far too concessionary, relativist, postmodern. I see
that, and I can inform you it is not. You shall see that there is no worry
to bask in the subjectivity of ideology, for this is only to make a
vestment the subject puts on, rather than a body the subject takes into
himself.

In order to explain the Neoreactionary perspective, you shall have to
follow on an intellectualodyssey, and you shall have to be capable of
questioning assumptions you didn’t even know you had. Not that you
didn’t know you believed them; but you didn’t know they really are
merely assumptions.

The purpose of this text is somewhere between treatise and manifesto.
It is not a summarization of neoreaction, though it does summarize a
fair amount of the intellectual trends contained therein. It is not a

defense of neoreaction, though it does include a number of arguments
in its favor. It is not a mere exposition of neoreaction, though a number
of analytical tools are described with the purpose of expositing in a
systematic manner the ideological composition of neoreaction. I allow
myself my own opinion to guide the overall construction of this essay,
with the hope that the ideas contained herein shall guide new currents
of discussion and codify some aspects of the reactionary approach to
social political issues of society. All manner of forms of reasoning are
utilized, from economical to evolutionary to modal.

I must warn that this text is certainly not introductory. Though it serves
as an overview of a number of views developing within neoreaction,
this is not written with the purpose of initiating. It is for the initiated,
who are already familiar with thinkers such as Mencius Moldbug and
ideas such as patriarchalism.

—

OTION OF

DEOLOGY

The word ‘ideological’ is not usually used to describe one’s own body
of beliefs or social-political attitudes. However, the explanation and
defense I give of Neoreaction hinges on my treatment of it as ideology,
for it is from the perspective of an ideology that the operation of other
ideology may be perceived. All are subject to ideology; those who think
they aren’t are simply unaware of the continuity of their beliefs with
the present assentive tradition. These individuals are, moreover, all the
more preferable for they are constrained by the Noble Lies that make
their lifestyle arrangement possible. They overestimate their resistance
to propaganda, which makes them the perfect targets. Who would you
rather try to con, the man overconfident of his ability to see a con, or a
man underconfident of his ability?

Evolution is a shrewd bitch. She selects on the basis of naught but cost-
effectiveness, the most calculating of managers. Species, employees,

ideas, these shall all be selected out if another can shift the control of
the local environment in its favor. So shall my analysis of ideology be
on the basis of establishing a given idea-species within its social
environment, a vaguely definable form that may never be formally
understood by its own progenitors which may only be discovered
through uncovering the morphology of the idea-species over time.

In other words, I shall be applying the principles of evolution to the
morphological and cladistics transformation of an ideology over time.
My thesis is that an ideological core forms the defining principle or
principles around which the whole body of individual doctrines that are
ever adopted by various social environments (societies, elites,
governments) may be explained. We note that progressivists of the 21st
century are decidedly distinct from their 20th century forebears, at least
if you go down the list examining their respectively stated ends. This is
no original observation. Yet there remains a vaguely definable
continuity between the two, such that we yet understand them to stand
on the Left side of the political spectrum; even if that is an inadequate
description of political perspectives, it captures a true sentiment. These
outwardly appearing purposes cover up an almost subconscious value
that conditions what policies at a given time may be understood as
‘progressive’ and which may not. The particular set of positions do not
seem essential; some plank x might be replaced and entail no need to
change plank y. Indeed, some positions held by the members of that
movement, though they may differentiate between themselves, remain
together by mutual dedication to that same evaluative core. They may
disagree on means, but they’re agreed on the end, even if they couldn’t
tell you what that end is. If we knew what that underlying belief were,
that would explain the tendency of certain theoretically distinct groups
to subsist within the same political organizations.

It is like their ideologies are members of the same species. Though
there may be distinct sub-populations within the species that can be

traced, they’re all still able to procreate with each other. How to
explain this observation? A specific ideology may be identified with an
occult motivation.

The occult are powers of beings which are hidden, unseen; a
phenomena without some explanatory mechanism, a black box
technology. You press the button, your drink is dispensed. You don’t
know the specifics of the mechanism, and you don’t need to, for it still
gets you where you’re going. The only person liable to know the
mechanism is the repair man, who has the specific task of knowing the
specific machine as well as the general end meant to be accomplished.
There is an analogy here for what I’m doing. The set of views which
might be contrastingly labeled modern liberalism, modern
conservatism, libertarianism, socialism, communism, feminism and the
like are all distinct vehicles of thought, some for which the subjects and
ends are completely different, even opposed, yet they all subsist under
the general body of modernist political philosophies. I will show how
they are all members of the same species, even if some of those
members wish they weren’t. You see their subsistence by perceiving
the occult motivation, the ideology, which powers them all in the
present age.

—

INGULAR

OGMA,

LURALISTIC

PECULATION

How may otherwise contradictory political philosophies manage to
subsist together? I will borrow from my own Catholic religion to give
an explanation. It is worth holding on to, for it will also explain what is
Neoreaction.

Catholicism is a dogmatic religion. This means there are certain tenets
within the Christian tradition which are non-negotiable. They are
required for belief in order to be a member of the Church. Failure to
believe makes one a heretic; failure to reform makes one an apostate.

An instance of this dogma is the explanation given in the Catechism of
the Catholic Church which states that “Man’s faculties make him
capable of coming to a knowledge of the existence of a personal God.”

What it declares in no uncertain terms is that in theory there must be a
successful argument for God’s existence. What it does not tell us is
how that argument goes. Indeed, it does not even promise that such a
successful argument has yet been crafted.

There is a formal separation between dogma and speculation. Dogma
commands assent to a given proposition: speculation provides reason in
favor of that proposition. What does not command assent in this
equation is the particular speculation. Required Catholics are to believe
that a successful argument for God’s existence there must be, Catholics
are not required to believe in the success of some particular or even any
expressible argument meant to establish such. The unity of dogma does
not require speculative unity. Indeed, I and Thomas Aquinas are both
Catholic, but he believes in God’s existence on the account of
cosmological arguments, while I believe on the account of ontological
arguments. This difference between us makes neither of us any less
Catholic, for we are unified in dogmatic belief.

With respect to the occult motivation of an ideology, the particular
manifestations that ideology concretely takes on are likewise
speculatively pluralistic.

There is, however, a key way in which the analogy breaks down. Unlike
Catholicism, the ideology of modernism, having no soteriological aim
for its adherents, can make cost-benefit expenditures of its members
provided such an expenditure helps it to gain or at least retain a larger
number of members. This may seem nonsense, but if you see that there
is a competition going on between ideologies, the ideology that can
plan for itself longer down the road will outlast the other that is
predisposed to short-term victories at the cost of long-run extinction.

Such a sacrifice serves as an inoculation. How so? Ultimately, the core
of an ideology is aesthetic. It is impossible to net all members of a
society within the grips of an ideology, so the optimal strategy is to
raze what cannot be taken. A polar aesthetic to a given ideology should
go to pains to integrate that aesthetic, so that individuals who are
innately attracted to that aesthetic will go to that and be satisfied, never
seeking beyond the whitewashed, ultimately obedient political
manifestation to something deeper, something that gets beyond the
predefined area of dissent.

The ideology can open dialogue with dissenters of orthodoxy, because
while the dissenters may be heretics, the end goal is not the salvation of
individual souls but the long-term survival of the idea-species. The
dialogue may invite dispute, but it is dispute over an issue that is
ultimately inessential. Whoever wins or loses, the ideology wins
because both sides have already agreed to its fundamental premise,
which prevents the ideology from coming under inspection.

As such, though there is an identifiable body of dogma, adherence to
those dogmas is not required in order to be a member of that ideology.
All that is required is an immutable faith in the occult motivation. We
may say that, in respect to the given occult motivation, the heretics are
logically out of bounds. In such a way, we might say that, supposing for
an instant Catholicism were true, that Protestants are “logically” at a
tension with their given belief in the Resurrection of Christ, since they
do not follow through to what else is necessarily entailed by such a
fact. Modern conservatives stand as such in respect to modern liberals:
modern liberals are, with respect to the occult motivation of modernist
ideology, logically orthodox, whilst the modern conservatives are
logically heretical.

What cannot be tolerated is ideological apostasy. Members who leave
and take up a new ideology threaten the long-term survival of that
ideology. Indeed, contrasting ideologies seem incapable of existing

within the same social sphere. As the ideology itself gives it a certain
tendency of response that is evolutionarily advantageous, we can be
sure that the response it chooses to give is optimally strategic; sub-
optimal responses that other ideologies tended to give were selected
out.

In a certain sense, the logic of evolutionary competitive pressures on
ideologies necessitates a limited variety of potentially successful idea-
species, due to certain innate, unchanging (or at least permanent
enough) conditions the social environment exists under. Likewise, the
social environment is also subject to some level of determination by
innate biological, ecological, economical, and political factors.
Influence runs both ways in varying degrees.

There are many roads that lead to Rome. Many routes up the mountain.
As the ideology is defined by its essential core, the occult motivation,
there is no sociological contradiction for a variety of mutually
exclusive perspectives to be gathered under the same penumbra. The
better adaptive ideology would allow a wide degree of approaches to be
successful; too few successful approaches is discouraging for the long-
term survival of the ideology, while too many may discourage the
short-term survival with a flood of disjointed political philosophies.

This gives a perspective on ideology as well as a way of understanding
what we ought to be doing with ideology.

Ideology coordinates the actions of those who hold to it. While it does
not choose individual winners and losers, which is a merely political
matter, that the politics shall be of one flavor is guaranteed by the
unquestioned agreement of both sides to undertake their political
feuding under the conditions guaranteed by that ideology, whether this
occurs in the halls of academia or the global stage of nuclear
superpowers.

An ideology is manifest in a superstructure. This superstructure is a

coalescence of key social institutions in society. The present
superstructure is a coordination between the university system, the civil
service, and technically “non-governmental organizations” which
receive the bulk of their support from the government and their
political direction from the former two institutions. This diagnosis has
been gone over at length in many other places, so I won’t make any
further arguments to establish this.

How does the ideology coordinate its manifestation? It may be
compared to social institutions, for it works in much the same way, as a
superstructure is to social institutions as social institutions are to the
individuals of society. A social institution involves the coordination
under a common cause of a number of people. This coordination does
not require the signaling of all involved individuals between each other,
for social institutions are not a cabal. Rather, the organizations arise
because of mutual advantage pressed at the fringe of the institution,
where you see a greater amount of turnover in newly joining
individuals. To “make your way to the top” of an institution in many
instances is to make one’s way to the center so that one’s own
movement has much more of an influence over that institution than
those individuals at the fringe. You might compare the minimum wage
employees of a business to the owners of that business in this way.
However, the business is also a facet of society, and so perpetuates
itself apart from the actions of any of the individuals. Describing the
movement of the institution might be compared to ideal gas laws. Such
laws do not describe the movement of any individual gas particle
within a given volume of gas, but they are adequate to describe the
average of all those individual gas particles taken together. And of
course, in order to have a given volume of gas, it must have a container.
The “rules of organization” a particular institution has are just that
container.

Stronger rules lend themselves to a stronger institution, and likewise

weaker rules lend themselves to a weaker institution. The ideal strength
of an institution depends on how the good of that institution is
achieved. A business should be a relatively weak institution, subject to
market forces, for the good of the business is achieved by nothing but
its serving the market. A marriage, on the other hand, should be a
relatively strong institution, for its good is served by nothing less than
lifelong commitment. Society allowed to organize itself according to
the individuals therein (e.g. analogous to the “free markets” of
economists) tends to make those institutions as strong or weak as they
should be, but interventions by an extra-social force, i.e. violence or the
threat thereof, may make those institutions stronger or weaker than
they should be. Corporatist socialism makes select businesses too
strong by providing political backing, which is nothing but the promise
of extorting capital from society in the case of a business’s market
failure, misdirects capital to business ventures which do not ultimately
serve the desire of the market. No fault divorce and the legal
presumption in favor of wives makes marriage too weak and threatens
the possibility of individuals coordinating within that institution for
lifelong commitment.

The modernist ideology coordinates society to fall ever leftward. There
is a logic to this movement. First, anything more to the right than the
status quo is anathema, untenable by the principles allowed in polite
society. So there is no opportunity to be in the game of politics and
hope to move rightward. At best, “the political right” can bargain to
hold to the present status quo a little longer, though with the right’s
defeat in the democratic process, moving leftward is allowed. And so
the process begins again. The political right may do nothing but drag its
feet. To actually move to the right, it would have to give up the
ideology, but this is to give up the system which has been coordinated
under the present leftward ideology; it is to give up power. The only
answer to the ideologically leftward system is to root it out and replace
it with an ideologically rightward system. Anything less, such as a

political right, only plays into the house odds. And the house always
wins, in the long run.

—

ONGER-

IEW OF

ISTORY

Let us suppose we are taking an extremely long-run approach. Say,
millions of years.

The human race has scarcely been civilized within its own lifetime.
Isn’t this a bit ambitious? Rather overreaching? It is actually the only
way to win. A staring contest is won by the one who can wait the
longest. If we’re in a staring contest, we’ll win if our ideology provides
for the longer-run sustainability of human civilizations. We don’t need
to win in the next 10, 100, or even 1000 years. If we win even only a
million years down the road, we’ll have won for millions afterward.
The logic of social-historical evolution dictates it with certainty. As in
war, what is determined is who is left. But as the only end of ideology
is to plan for human flourishing, the securing of human flourishing in
eternity is the end of ideology. As such, the ideology that lives the
longest may perpetuate itself ad infinitum without fear of extinction
from a competing ideology.

Is it a manifest destiny, a material dialecticism, a Whiggish history?
Not precisely. Where Hegel postulated an immanentized Absolute that
was present in the concrete institution of the social will, another way of
understanding the future arc of history is by seeing that there is a Nash
equilibrium to which all players will eventually settle themselves to.
Given the conditions of innate human biology and environmental
conditions (e.g. not only our planet, but wherever we might get to in the
physical universe; this is very long run speculation), there is one, and
only one, ultimate equilibrium that society may settle itself to.

There are multiple intermediate equilibria. But given an infinite

amount of time, human society must settle itself on one of two
endgame potentials. Total extinction, or permanent transcendence. The
idea is to plan on reaching permanent, cosmic transcendence. That is
why we’re in a staring game, albeit with a lunatic whose finger is
resting on the doomsday button.

Total extinction is not hard to explain. What will be harder to explain is
cosmic transcendence.

Cosmic transcendence: to transcend the state of cosmic indeterminacy.
Shall humans flourish? Shall they overcome the possibility of
extinction? Maybe, maybe not. The question is, what are the
prerequisites for humans reaching that equilibrium which, upon being
obtained, no further deviation from the equilibrium is possible? As a
matter of theory, that is the ideal an ideology teaches for society. It is
the ethically normative content.

That point may be called the Omega Point. We should commit
ourselves to describing the properties of that given society, at least in
terms of how they would operate in conjunction with the given
conditions it faces. As such, we cannot describe for a given society,
since we do not know the material limitations such a society faces and,
by extension, the social limitations. We do know innate, biological
limitations, and that is a start, but the longer-run shall eventually have
to coordinate for that.

It is not reached out of any necessity, and there is nothing “behind
History,” no invisible hands or zeitgeists in this view. What happens is
accidental; all that is being revealed is how society may reach its end of
cosmic transcendence. The longer it takes to get there, the less likely it
will ever be reached, though it is a certainty that given infinite time, if
humanity could last that long, it would eventually be reached. But there
is no guarantee of reaching that point, so there is no guarantee of
infinite time. Hence the importance of discerning and negotiating now,

in the present, so that the longer-run future may happen sooner.

—

IOPOLITICAL

ORIZON

The thing about permanence: it is impossible in this world. All this talk
about cosmic transcendence is potentially all in vain. What we may
secure for is the most human flourishing, to live the longest. But there
is always the potential for change: the environment will change,
politics will change, it could be anything. Ideas change.

But they are, compared to innate human biology, less permanent. If the
intent is to win on the longer-run view, then we must invest not so
much in society’s ideas, but in the more permanent features of innate
biology. Biology holds a level of social determinativeness; ideas that
gain traction which are contrary to the actual survival of the species
will be selected out, and hopefully it is selected out on a local, rather
than global, level. The determination is imperfect, of a statistically
correlative fashion, but it is a better avenue for social engineering than
trying to produce arguments that will satisfy each individual student
who comes through the door. Why not an ideology for which you’ve
already won before any argument has been made? But this is to seek to
place the seeds of our victory not in rational persuasion, but through
“brute” out-economizing of the enemy.

“Brute” it may seem, but the reality is that this is war. The point is to
be left standing, which is to say, that someone is standing. The critique
of modernism I make comes down to this: it isn’t shrewd enough. It
should be more utilitarian, it should give up all pretenses of
deontological spirit. But we haven’t stopped asking why this ideology
rather than another, because the why is in the how. This ideology will
out-compete the other, and this because it better secures human
flourishing. As a matter of means, its occult motivation is at an odds
with this, and so it would sacrifice human flourishing on the altar of

egalitarianism.

That is at least one sympathetic defense of modernism which might be
rendered without being over-generous. The claim of some on the right
or within neoreaction is that modernism is nihilistic, which explains the
perpetual aim of its policies to destroy all that is good and holy and lift
up all that is bad and anti-social. Hence the motivation to subsidize
poverty, to penalize success. This is not a sound critique of modernism.
Modernism is only accidentally nihilist; it is even a kind of noble
nihilism.

The spirit, the occult motivation, of modernism, is this: egalitarianism.
Some have seen this, and have varyingly embraced or rejected it on that
account.

The modernist wishes that all instances of hierarchy may be, at least in
the theoretical sense, potentially disposable. Any use of hierarchy is
justified only because it does more to increase equality. This has the
ironic effect of enabling ostensibly anti-elitist political structures from
within which the logic of egalitarianism really builds into a froth. The
ultimate effect, in the sense of a Nash equilibrium in respect of its
given political environment, is the seeking after absolute power. The
purpose of this is not for its power, but because, where clearly
something less than the ability to enforce with totalitarian discretion is
unable to achieve the ends of modernism, more power is needed. What
in other situations might be the more realistic conclusion, that the
increased application of force will fail to achieve the intended ends, is
impossible, since it contradicts the very essence of modernism.

The philosopher Willard van Orman Quine described beliefs as
inhering within a web. The model of the web of belief is meant to
illustrate how just about any given belief can come to occupy a central
place. It denies the implicit supposition of many that every individual’s
beliefs are as important as the topic warrants: ideally, people reason out

from more general principles to more specific situations. Beliefs which
are more central are harder to budge, since budging them requires
budging all the other beliefs which they support. Likewise, beliefs
nearer the periphery may be easier to replace, since they don’t pose
such an overwhelming threat to the web. But the point of the web is that
it likes its own survival, and as that core, defining center of the web is
hardest to budge, it can only be budged in a process that we may as well
consider conversion.

But aren’t some beliefs more central just by nature? Certain beliefs, it
seems, it would be absurd for them occupy the center. However, that it
appears as such is only because you are subject to your own web of
belief. This is as much a model of argumentation as it is a model of
psychology.

You have to understand that logic and argument is surprisingly weak
for establishing conclusions. A neat maxim used by philosophy is that
one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens. You can
always reverse a conditional argument. You might say something like
‘If God exists, there would be no gratuitous evil; there is gratuitous
evil; therefore God doesn’t exist.’ To that it could be replied ‘I agree
that, if God exists, there would be no gratuitous evil; but I argue that
God does exist, therefore gratuitous evil doesn’t exist.’ The focus is not
the problem of evil, it’s just an example. Whenever you have two states
of affairs that are mutually incompatible, such as God’s existence and
gratuitous evil, you can always demonstrate in a logically valid fashion
that the other isn’t the case by assuming the reality of the other. The
inconsistency of two or more propositions does not, from those
propositions themselves, tell you which must be rejected to find reality.

In other words, what you might have as a belief that does more to
motivate other beliefs might for another be a belief that is motivated
more than it motivates. This is possible because of the transient up-or-
down nature of reasoning. Your argument against the good of

egalitarianism might just be used, for the modernist, to “prove” the
incompatibility of one of your premises.

This is the way in which the modernist is an accidental nihilist. What
they would prefer is that the egalitarian utopia be achievable and, if
that isn’t possible, then so much the worse for reality. The occult
motivation is at the very core of the modernist web of belief, and that is
why modernism is incredibly recalcitrant to certain common sense
arguments that seem to pose unsolvable problems for modernism.

So we look back on history and the order of civilization tending all in
one direction. This has one of two competing explanations. We know
the progressive story. Society is ascending to a higher level of
arrangement. But is it called progress because they are progressives, or
are they progressives because it is called progress? When did progress
become more than mere progression, mere movement, and became a
one way process in favor of justice?

Neoreaction takes on the competing explanation. We are seeing history
tend in one direction because the center cannot hold. A system that is in
disrepair will work itself to even greater disrepair the longer it runs. It
tends in one direction because disorder causes disorder. As social
stability is clearly not increasing, as the hierarchy which would tend to
arise is constantly frustrated and social coordination is ceaselessly
disrupted, the progressive explanation seems at odds.

—

DEOLOGICAL

ONDITIONS OF

IVILIZATION

Imagine a gnostic ethic that preached the essential immorality of
sexual fraternization. Such a tradition is suicidal, at least with respect
to the longevity of its given society. Unless such a society culled its
members from a larger, sexually involved society, it would not persist
and before long nobody would any longer question essential morality of

sexual intercourse.

So we may say there are ideological conditions of civilization.
Civilization did not happen by accident. Some tribe members did not
just one day decide to settle down, learn to farm, and erect a city. The
city’s occurrence depended on a vital condition being met; that of a
broad enough ideological sentiment which increased the possibility of
peaceful coexistence between members of the human race larger than
the Dunbar number. Small towns they may have been, but there would
be strangers. Humans are to some degree psychologically predisposed
to disfavor strangers. As such, there must be some rationalization for
an ostensibly individualistic aesthetic that individual takes on in order
to make himself feel comfortable in his environment. The operation of
ideology on the micro-social scale like this is but an illustration of a
more general phenomenon. Ideologies are important because they allow
civilizational progress, so that more elaborate socioeconomic
arrangements may perpetuate themselves, to the benefit of the whole
population.

Even if that rationalization is but a Noble Lie, it is sufficient to the
ideology to make the city-state level of civilization work. That the
arrangement benefits the population in the overall sense proves its
benefit to human flourishing, and so the ideology is an improvement
over the previous, tribalistic ideologies that may have previously been
taken on. However, note that ideology is not identical to its concrete
manifestations: human flourishing is a mark in favor of the occult
motivation of the ideology, not necessarily its particular doctrines. The
doctrines may be Noble Lies: the occult motivation is neither true nor
false. It may only be most advantageous. That is the name of the game.

It may not need to be the evolutionary innovation of opposable thumbs
that allow civilization to occur, but it would be hard to imagine that
unless evolution were to supply a species with the material ability to
make and use tools, no matter its intelligence, the species would be

unable to achieve civilization. And perhaps this is a needless worry: it
may be that evolutionary descent that selects for intelligence can only
occur in the case there is already some preliminary tool-building
ability. I don’t care to analyze the particular case here. The point is
relevant, however, if we suppose that ideas are but an extension of
physiological capabilities. There are ideological conditions of society
that must be obtained before civilization, in higher or lower stages,
may ever be achieved. If the Sumerians had held to an essentially tribal
ideology, the hierarchical organization of the city-state would’ve never
been achievable.

If I may develop a thesis here better developed elsewhere, an example
of this is the hypothesis that it was the exogamous discipline of
Medieval Catholicism in prohibiting, at most times, first cousin
marriage (and at times, up to sixth cousin marriage) that allowed the
cosmopolitan economic structure of Europe to become the case. The
uniquely exogamous discipline, which also forms a kind of eugenic
practice, had the effect of limiting the benefits of nepotism while also
raising the overall IQ of the society through selective descent.

As such,

this may be evidence that an ideology which implies a high level of
exogamy is necessary to the kind of economic development which we
saw take off in the Middle Ages.

This is biopolitics; the social consequences of eugenic effects and
demographic trends. It is a live question as to whether society would
have ever developed past the point of rude imperialism (i.e. the Roman
Empire) had not the practice of exogamy taken root. Understand that
the thesis does not require that any society which achieves a post-
Middle Ages level of civilization need have the same exogamous
practices: catching up is always easier than original development. The
point is that, in order for it to happen in the first place, such a condition
must be met, though once having been met, the benefits gained by that
practice may be spread to other societies which might not have that

ideological condition.

It is also an indication of the kind of open-minded examination that
must take place if we are to plan on the devising of a longer-run
ideology, an ideology that has the most adaptive advantage for our
species, our society, our civilization. Likewise, this may also indicate
the openness to abandonment of present civilizational configurations.
Civilization is not a static marker between barbarism and polite society.
There are a vast plurality of levels of civilization which may be
achieved, and there may be many more ahead than there are behind us.

It is largely impossible for the next stages of civilization to be planned
for. It usually requires a shift in ideology before the mechanisms start
working that launch the given society to its next position. Indeed, the
variables that affect the overall success of an ideology are so vast that
it may really only be possible to distinguish them many years on: only
a rare genius might see them earlier, as did Kant in his What is
Enlightenment? or Marx in Das Kapital.

I will still make an attempt at this task. But in order to see the future,
we shall have to see two other things: where we came from, and where
we’re going.

—

PIRITUAL

GALITARIANISM, OR

E’RE

ROTESTANTS

My thesis here is not unheard of within Neoreactionary circles. Indeed,
the proto-neoreactionary ideologue himself, Erik von Kuehnelt-
Leddihn, forwards precisely that argument himself, and so does
Mencius Moldbug in his own style. However, the same ground must be
tread over, and indeed the tools I have been building for ideological
analysis will provide crucial insights. This will provide an ideological
context in which Neoreaction is initially discovered, developed, and
finally embraced. But before the discovery, the context.

The Protestant Formation began in 1517 when Luther nailed the 95
Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. I call it a Formation
specifically because it was an entirely unique body that arose in
response to the Catholic Church; it has no material continuity, no
matter if it may pretend to, and is ideologically discontinuous with the
Church as begun by the Apostles.

These I consider plain facts. I may be able to reconcile myself to them
because I am a Catholic, not a Protestant, and naturally Protestants will
protest, as is their nature. That isn’t my focus, so let it go for now.

The rise of Protestantism stands in need of an ideological explanation.
For 1500 years, no matter what heresy, schism, or moral scandal arose,
the mass of the public sided with the Catholic Church. There was
something unique that Luther was caught up in, and though it may not
be his own original development, yet was he put at the helm of this
movement. The essence of Protestantism, and the source of its protest,
is spiritual egalitarianism. The 95 Theses may be read as a protest
against there being spiritual privilege available to some and not
available to others. Granted, it may be that “to whom much is given
much shall be expected,” so spiritual privilege has a concomitant
spiritual responsibility; but if that is the case, then it should be that a
person may volunteer himself to a higher spiritual calling, rather than it
being dependent on God’s plan for the individual within the spiritual
hierarchy. It is a kind of saintly role envy. They do not take it on with
humility, but wear it as praise. The same phenomenon occurs with
women and feminism, though that will be discussed later on.

In the way that I have diagnosed the particular dogmas of modernism
as rationalizations of the occult motivation that forms its essential core,
so might this spiritual egalitarianism be understood as the core of
Protestantism? The issue is not so much the doctrines; those are only
focused upon because it is intellectually incumbent upon the Protestant
to have some reason for abandoning the Church structure from which it

received the entirety of its revealed corpus, e.g. the Bible, the Christian
Tradition. It would be a mistake to think that sola fide or sola Scriptura
were the reasons for Protestantism: these were just latter
rationalizations of the decision to leave the Church, ad hoc
justifications that justified, at the least, not coming back even if the
entirety of the received corpus cannot be traced outside of the material
structure of the Catholic Church.

That ideological core is egalitarianism. Catholicism is, if you’re
already acquainted with Neoreaction, the perfectly neoreactionary
religion, save that of course it’s already been around for 2000 years. It
is implicitly and essentially tied to its hierarchy, for that hierarchy is
the very means by which the Tradition of Christianity has been
received and maintained. At the absolute furthest of its anti-modern
speculations, it even postulates that there may be different levels of
Heaven, in which the most Saintly gain the greatest reward, while
others lose out on that greater reward. Such a religiously soteriological
speculation is quite apparent given certain sayings of Jesus that
obviously imply as much (“to whom much is given…”), but such a
notion is clearly anathema to Protestantism, especially in its
equilibrium state of Evangelicalism as we find it here in America.

Evangelicalism is a veritable anarchy. Whatever hierarchy exists
occurs only within the church. Interchurch modes of organization, such
as conferences, are actively shunned. This might seem to tend to a
lively bounty of competing doctrines, and indeed it does, save when it
comes to the ideological core. No matter an Evangelical’s take on the
morality of drinking, communion, birth control, or dating, you can be
assured that they shall tend towards the spirit of their age. As an
outmoded expression of the modernist ideology, it will assuredly lag
behind in assent to the newly defined dogmas of modernism as they are
handed down, and in that very being slow to assent it defines its
Christianness. Evangelical Christianity is modernist, but not that

modernist. This is because the fundamental developments which took
place during the Enlightenment which saw the abandonment of
Protestant Christianity as a vehicle for propagating modernist doctrines
are still the case, and so the tension between modernism and more-
Protestant forms of Christianity is always apparent from the outside, at
times the only way of perceiving the logic of a given ‘development’ of
Christian theology, such as Wolfhart Pannenberg, Paul Tillich, and Karl
Barth hoisted upon the world.

If you know your 20th century Christian theological developments, it
may seem odd of me to include Barth. After all, Pannenberg and Tillich
might be defined as the leading progressive developments of Protestant
Christianity in the 20th century, but Barth forwarded a thoroughly anti-
modern, pro-Scriptural, neo-orthodoxical movement.

But Barth isn’t neoreactionary. If you’ve been following along, you
know that modernism requires its ostensibly anti-modernist stooges,
someone who will take the rap. Indeed, Barth is just such a useful idiot.
All the while presenting himself (or at least so he has been presented by
his advocates) as a response to the materialism and the over-
rationalism of modernity, he in fact poses no centrally ambivalent
theses against modernism. In fact, he does far more to attack the
tendency of Catholicism towards natural theology, and so insidiously
supports the implicit egalitarianism of Protestantism far more than the
overt support of Pannenberg, Tillich, and other Christian liberals of
since the 19th century. Why? Because, if you have “anti-modern
aesthetics,” Barth’s anti-reason preference for Scriptural exegesis over
natural theology seems the most sensible option.

Yet, why the preference for Scriptural exegesis? What explains that?
There is nothing inherent of Scripture that commands such a central
place for itself within the Christian tradition (interpreted broadly), so
such a move must be motivated by some extra-Scriptural
rationalization. That rationale is obvious: egalitarianism. Why else

should Barth resist the notion that some within the Christian Tradition
have a privileged place in the definition of doctrine? Theoretically, he
may accord himself a higher place due to his greater intelligence and
learning, but in principle, and this is the important part, anyone should
be able to apply the same background knowledge and reasoning to the
same Scripture and come to the same religious conclusions as they
ought to. And if they don’t, then the explanation is Calvinistic
predestination. It is not that reason is incapable, but that as Fallen
creatures we are incapable of such a perfect reason. Ergo, the worship
of a God established by our own reason is a worship of our own reason.
Idolatry. It is the room modern conservatism might make for itself in
full while still being appropriated by modernism for its own use.

That is the sentiment which defines Protestantism. There can be no
privileged places of theological development and definition, save that
reserved for God and Jesus Himself. In principle, all that is good and
true ought to be able to be understood on its own merits by the honest
inquirer of Scripture. Granted, a university education and a background
knowledge in the original languages and a level of anthropology of the
culture in which Scripture was written are all helpful for getting at that,
but in a fundamental sense anyone who seeks out the true meaning of
Scripture ought to be supplied that just by being a human being. There
cannot be anyone who just is better at interpreting Scripture or is
invested with authority to do so.

The egalitarianism of modernism, as it appears in its dogmatic
definitions, is this same sentiment writ large. It is the in principle
denial of privileged places in society, an anti-hierarchical prejudice
which inevitably crops up when discussing individuals and their
relative fitness or un-fitness to take a place within an hierarchical
organization. It is always important for the modernist to stress that not
of that individual’s essence, but of his accidental qualities, that he
plays the role he does.

—

ASE OF

IBERTARIANISM

There is another group that will be bred within an adaptive idea-
species. The losers. They are a focal point of self-selection, i.e. social
suicide by political autism. Inevitably, it shall be asked what place the
ugly step-sister of modernism has, so an explanation must be given to
this seemingly unique case.

The failure of modernist libertarianism is as this: rejecting the
essentiality of hierarchy and believing in the essentiality of equality,
their hopelessly optimistic picture shall not be achieved simply because
the people it would be populated by don’t exist. However, this is where
my thesis of the ideological conditions of civilization may play a
positive role. I must offer an explanation and defense of my anarchism,
so I shall. Not all societies may achieve an anarchistic socioeconomic
arrangement. Some may be doomed to having their best be achieved
through colonial effort, some might enjoy monarchist traditions.
Certainly, no society should favor democracy, but it is still fair to say
that societies formed through a process that distills a very uniform
ideological commitment and which integrates a democratic mechanism
in a fashion that is least open to economically perverse incentives (e.g.
the rich, white, male landowners who colonized North America or are,
most preferably, direct descendants thereof) can hold over well without
a monarchical arrangement.

Anarchism may not be preferable for the simple reason that society is
not up to it. This reflects a kind of reasoning demonstrated above, with
the exogamous practices of Christendom Europe. The people may not
be smart enough, they may not properly value purely economic
exchanges, they may overfavor nepotism and other forms of tribalism,
and so on. If they were at least smart enough to undertake the
hypothetical game theoretical negotiating Hans-Hermann Hoppe

postulates security agencies as doing, anarchy would be possible. But
that’s the thing. If they were smart enough. And as only an
overwhelmingly small portion of the population understands the
benefits of a competitive market in governance, it is fair to say the
requisite level of intelligence and innate sentiments is not the case.

Statists have no morally successful argument for statism, but they are
yet right, in the present moment, about how an authoritarian state may
achieve the common good through economically coercive means of
resource coordination that a lack of such a state might not. It is a
practical kind of accuracy, in the sense that, since we don’t at present
have the ideological conditions in place to achieve a fairer, more just
system of governance, we shall have to cynically give the people
something, at least until they won’t. My fear is that such a burden, as it
inhibits the growth of society, may endanger the potential growth of
those ideological conditions that would found the possibility of an
anarchist society. The patient may expire if he does not get another
dose of heroin, but that is no argument in the drug’s favor. Wreak
havoc very carefully. That is why I might in the present give my
support to monarchy, though the process of social-historical evolution
will eventually prove me right on this point.

What exactly is this “essentiality of hierarchy?” The essentiality is a
matter of social coordination. Conflict is costly, so a structure which
reduces conflict, as a chain of command would for organizing large-
scale coordination with high numbers of individual actors, has a benefit
over those organizations which would attempt to achieve the same
coordination while also not invoking a chain of command to supersede
any individual actor’s separate will. Some such hierarchy inevitably
occurs, then, as it out-competes those other organizations that either try
to use a de-incentivized hierarchical structure or fails to have a
structure at all.

For a given society under the same social conditions, different

hierarchies may have different advantages. Which proves the most
advantageous is unable to be known ahead of time, as it involves the
process of coordinating a vast number of actors in real time; in other
words, a market mechanism is required in order to see what the ideal
hierarchies are.

Apart from that market mechanism, and insofar as its operation is
disrupted, distortions hold, so different hierarchies arise. The
libertarian is on to something when he points out that, in a perfect
market, modern governments would not exist, since they tend to hold
their place in society due to the creation of distortions which at once is
its job and gives it a job to do. A perfect market is unable to be
achieved, at least under present social conditions. So a government will
tend to eke out its own existence, being a theoretically sub-optimal
arrangement for a practically sub-optimal people.

In a sense, then, the caliber of society must be greater if it is to achieve
greater social knowledge, at least where that knowledge is concerned
with optimal means of the distribution of all forms of capital. Ironic or
not, but a more stable social structure tends to allow the coordination of
structures which increase and reinforce that stability. In a structure
which is less stable, there may be no freedom to increase or reinforce
its stability. That is a problem for the libertarian anarchist, since he is
effectively calling for a sentimentally non-market oriented people to
become market oriented. The libertarian’s reflex to let the market solve
the problem is only gained through the maturity of relaxing the
authoritarian reflex to take control for oneself, to abide by sovereignty
and reduce uncertainty for oneself at the expense of everyone else’s
certainty. A more mature society, at a higher level of civilization, has
fewer prisoner’s dilemmas.

—

OCIETY AND

ATURE’S

My critique of libertarianism never requires the concept of nature, for
the concept is a poor one within society. As a matter of material
possibility, any number of possible socioeconomic arrangements is
possible. The question we are seeking to answer is to only a certain
degree how society works. What is more important is which society do
we want? To that it is answered, the society with the greatest level of
stability.

This is not economic or market stability. The stability I speak of is
compatible with market movements, changing actuated preferences,
and so on. Stability is not economic stagnation. Rather, this sort of
stability is a precondition to increasing economic coordination, for
every instability upsets actual or potential economic coordination.
Higher degrees of potential economic coordination allow for the
formation of more complex socioeconomic arrangements. More
complex socioeconomic arrangements are incentivized because they
lead to a greater degree of preferences being met. However, complexity
is delicate, as it involves a greater number of intermediate goals that
must be met. As we know from engineering, simplicity is preferred
because fewer moving parts means less possibility of breaking down.
Some goals require a great complexity of intermediate goals. As those
intermediate goals involve in the most significant sense the exchange
of social capital, where even using time to negotiate that exchange is a
cost, a highly assimilated culture with strong social roles and
institutions has an advantage over a less assimilated culture with weak
social roles and institutions because it reduces transaction costs,
allowing the greater possibility of an individual exchange, and by
extension a greater number of just such coordinated exchanges.

Kydland and Prescott, two economists with gleaming modernist
credentials, penned an argument to the effect that discretionary policies
by the Federal Reserve increased economic uncertainty.

By extension,

this meant that fewer successful economic exchanges took place, which

entails fewer actuated preferences. The logic is very simple. If a bank
manager is looking to make loans, an interest rate which might be
changed suddenly poses a risk. All risks are cost. Therefore, the Federal
Reserve ought to have as static a monetary policy as possible, since this
imposes smaller risks on the market.

But the very existence of the Federal Reserve is in order to make such
discretionary, destabilizing operations. If the ideal purpose was to do
nothing, it could just be done with. Keeping it around would be the
equivalent of aiming a loaded gun at you, all the while insisting that I
have no intentions of shooting you with it. The only logical conclusion
is that the politicians keep it around with the intent of distorting the
markets when it is politically convenient, and that could very well
disadvantage the hypothetical bank manager.

Monetary policy, I note, is only one of many other forms of policy
modern states engage in.

A discretionary government is an essentially destabilizing force. You
cannot pass new legislation without changing the means of potential
income. Indeed, even the possibility of new legislation is socially
destabilizing. The greatest amount of stability would require no
government for exactly that reason. Its superfluity would mean higher
costs than any benefit it obtains, though naturally this can’t be observed
due to its nature of distorting market pressures for its own benefit. In
other words, were the natural state of society to obtain, the state should
have no room to exist. Nature is at least an absence of intervention by
what is alien. The government, defined by its monopoly of coercion, is
alien to all other interactions of society which are otherwise void of
that coercion, and so the introduction of coercion to a non-coercive
exchange undermines the spirit of the exchange. Yet it is also the
nature of the government to intervene. How to understand this state of
affairs?

A distinct sense of nature is in use. We might compare the nature of a
thing to what happens (in nature). It is the nature of a human body to
live, yet it is also natural when it is afflicted by disease. These are the
two distinct senses in use. The first sense is normative, in that there is
the following of a prescribed order. The second sense is incidental, in
that it occurs irrelevant of order.

What makes a social order natural in the normative sense? We can get
at answering that question with another.

What do nature and the internet have to do with each other? A
technology such as the internet enables a distinctly different optimal
socioeconomic arrangement than if there were no internet. We can’t
say the difference between those two is that one is “natural” and the
other is not. As such, there is no one and only natural arrangement of
society. Rather, there are a number of natural arrangements, and it
depends on what form is available. It is much like saying there are a
plurality of natures, since after are all there are cats and dogs, and there
are cat natures and dog natures.

Then what is about an arrangement of society that makes it “natural” in
the first place?

The natural arrangement of society is that which is conducive to human
flourishing. Flourishing is not strictly identical to only the perpetuation
of the species, but also the virtue of the individuals therein. We should
not, in looking at the matter of virtue, concern ourselves with the mass
of the public. The mass of the public is malleable by what social
expectations are set for it from above. The virtue we are interested in is
the virtue of the Potent; by this is meant not politically powerful, but
those individuals with the greatest potential for social influence.
Freedom entails greater responsibility than servitude, for a servant’s
only responsibility is to serve his master’s will; a free master is
responsible not only for his own, but for deciding his own will. The will

of the Potent is virtuous for it is the will of a higher mind, which is
beyond the understanding of the mass. As God was made to reply to
Job, so will the Potent be unable to explain their reasons to the mass. It
is not that there is a lack of reason, but that the reason transcends what
the vulgar are capable of understanding.

This of course assumes the moral virtue of the potent in society, since
it would also be their responsibility to lead. I explain this not as an
ideal, but as a reality. Already it is the case that an ideological
superstructure is in place, which supplies its own reasons for being and
are reasons which transcend the grasp of the mass. It is only those who
could perceive the flow of power who could formulate reasons for their
being invested with power, for they see how it acts and what it may
achieve in society. What they suppose for themselves is supposed for
society as well. Given that this is the reality, the ideal of power would
be sustainable, for a power that sustains itself over the longer-run
depends on the sustaining of society over the longer-run. The good of
the Potent is understood in this way. A power which “sustains” itself by
extractive means, viz. the destruction of society in its own favor, much
as a glazier might “sustain” himself by smashing the windows of a
town, is not sustainable at all, and must eventually end in collapse, if
not the annihilation, of the Potent along with the society.

Natural society, then, is ideological life. An ideology which tends to
supplant itself and otherwise commit suicide is unnatural; it is contrary
to the nature of society which is to provide for human flourishing. A
healthy relationship between society and those who guide it would have
both be benefited, a mutually advantageous exchange between the
superstructure and the institutions which individuals are embedded in.
A healthy symbiosis, rather than a destructive parasitism. Modernism
is unnatural in that it is a parasite on the good of society, gaining its
ground on the broken institutions of society.

—

ARS OF

DEOLOGY

1776 will, many generations from this point, be considered the year
that the Wars of Ideology began. Such an age may be near its end or its
beginning, there is no means for us to tell. The American empire is at
once a territory gained through only the most formal conquering and
also a global consciousness subject to the most vicious siege. The
American military is occasionally involved as well.

The American war of independence is essentially ideological. Decided
by an elite privileged in law and education, ostensibly started on the
basis of human rights claims, it at once chooses and declares the
essential justice of independence.

This independence is, however, for itself. It is a transnational
sovereignty, appropriated to itself for the simple reason that it could.
There is no sovereign to fear if you are the sovereign. The global
political stage is about jockeying for position at the top, so that at least
whoever has the power to oppose you is ideologically aligned and
whoever isn’t can always be summarily done away with. Superstructure
is, in other words, the only sovereign, to which all other institutions are
subject. We may say the sovereignty is only presently tenuous; it must
become all the more complete as more institutions which otherwise
prevent its domination are eroded, and the purposes those institutions
otherwise filled are taken over by the superstructural sovereign.

In this light, the war of 1776 against Britain has the same ideological
motivation as the civil war of 1865, though clearly with contrasting
political motivations. But such is the nature of ideology, that it may
craft politics as is convenient. Politics is but a rationalization for an
ideology determined long beforehand, and there always multiple
rationalizations to choose from. In this case, while the political aim of
the American revolutionaries was ostensibly independence,
independence was shunned as politically irrelevant when it threatened

the yet-immature superstructure growing at the heart of American
society. A true political disunification would threaten the sovereign’s
aim at reign, and so the Union had to be held together by whatever
forces necessary. It was simply a convenience that the South could be
portrayed as defending slavery, rather than the political right of
independence per se.

This same ideological opportunism presents itself when one looks
through the motivations America had for entering the Second World
War. The concentration camps which the Nazis used to exterminate the
“inferior” were never a reason that FDR intervened, and much like the
slavery of the South, such a reason was a convenient narrative that
allowed America to portray itself not as an ideological aggressor that
sought to remove ideological competition by a belligerent force.

This is not to overlook the vast crimes of the Nazis. While the Nazis
may seem to pose a serious problem for reactionaries, it need only be
pointed out that the ideological aim of Germany was twisted by
aggressive eugenics policies and an inexplicable anti-Semitism (or so it
appears to all who are not anti-Semites, including your humble author,
and this not to praise or defend the Jews). While reactionaries may
need to face the evils committed by the political movement of National
Socialism, modernists must also face the evils committed by the
political movement of Marxism-Leninism. After all, that America
sought to destroy Nazi Germany but not Communist Russia is
explained by the former’s being ideologically opposed, while the latter
was not; it was merely politically opposed. Such is not a very great
crime. It even excuses the eradication of a far greater number of
innocents than Hitler ever managed, for at least such mass slaughters
were undertaken in the name of modernism, of which communism is
but a political variant alongside democratic socialism, as we have here
in America.

This has nothing to do with nationalism. Yet the notion of political

sovereignty, political independence, is hand in hand with it.
Independence is not for the individual, but for a society. The kind of
society capable of and requiring independence is a national society.
What binds a nation together? One might point to a population tied
together by ethnicity or, lacking that, a shared historical accident. But
this is only merest words. Give a little push, and all these accidental
associations fall by the wayside. What binds a people together is
ideology. The actual political structure is a formality past that point.
Convince the people they need a government, and they are less opposed
to the government they are stuck with. After all, it’s better than
anarchy.

And it may well be. There must be an openness to the possibility, like
detailed above, that higher levels of civilization may not be obtainable
with just any given set of the prospective members of a society.

It may be hard to illustrate how increasing the IQ of everyone in a
society by 20 points could open up new economic possibilities, since
that would involve not only trying to understand a level of intelligence
beyond my own ken but an entire society in which individuals like that
exist. But suppose for a moment that everyone in society was 20 points
lower in IQ. You might wonder about those who are already retarded,
and worry at their exceptional retardedness which would result: just
assume for the sake of argument an IQ of 50 is the lowest possible
intelligence anyone may fall to. It should be clear that the possible
institutions of society, especially where they require heightened
complexity of social arrangement and a lower time preference (I think
we may assume that intelligence correlates negatively with time
preference) become impossible to coordinate for.

This may be taken as a hint of an answer as to the necessity of
biopolitics and the means of embracing a human population which will
inevitably emerge from an ideological population which, adopting
some rule of organization, allows it to initiate the next highest level of

civilization. And so doing, it may be in a position with respect to other
societies which have not joined it that it might initiate that next level of
civilization for the other societies, or the other societies might be so
seriously disadvantaged in respect to the enlightened society/ies that it
cannot be cultivated.

Ideology is an idea that supersedes nationalism. A Korean does not
fight a Korean over nationalism. But a Korean will fight a Korean over
ideology. Sometimes it is with a gun, sometimes with a vote. The
political effect is the same. The ideology remains in a feedback loop.
All history propels it forward, forward, ever forward until it falls off a
cliff. All imperfections of an ideology in respect to what can be
accomplished by that society tend to social destabilization. But of
course, that very social destabilization it has caused is fuel for the fire,
urging the spin down and down until the structure is just materially
unable to coordinate at the economic level, the most basic of all
conditions of civilization, no matter its level. That is, literally, the
point when the people of Rome can no longer be given free bread.

Democracy, insofar as it is practically achieved in emphasizing the
voice of the people, drenches the people in ideology. We think of
Americans who lived through the Cold War who seriously feared
Soviet conspiracies as being over-frightened. But then, we live in an
age in which the worst offenses the militant ideological opposition can
muster are the murder of some civilians. It is the responsibility of the
people to Decide What Happens. This is an adaptive mechanism of
modernism, for while it means the effectuation of the progression of
society towards its egalitarian ideal is slower (contrast the American to
the French Revolution), it is surer, since the very idea of the egalitarian
ideal is that everyone looks to each other to see whether to go forward.
A slippery slope it is, but no one notices because everyone is looking at
each other, not the ground. The society that slips together, sticks
together. At least until it gets to the cliff.

This even to some extent has a built-in mechanism for getting some
others to go further ahead. After all, if x is the current issue, and y is
obviously attached, then my means of deciding about x will imply what
I think of y. As there tends to be an early adopter reward in society
when it looks back on its achievements (e.g. being an abolitionist in the
mid-19th century is thought virtuous than thinking blacks are the
equivalents of whites in the late 20th century), this incentivizes the
issues to keep moving forward. There are always those who insist that
“This, and not one step further,” but then they say that every time the
issue moves forward. A modern conservative is merely one who is one
step behind everybody. After all, it is at least that, or anathematization.
And if you want power (you can even convince yourself it is better you
be in this position than the next guy, which is probably true), you’ll go
along with it. This is the same reasoning for politicians as well.

That is the place of the people within the social-historical evolution of
ideology. The ideology must endorse forms of socioeconomic and
political arrangement that are both congruent to the occult motivation
as well as able to propagate itself materially in that social structure. A
model which is not ultimately sustainable may still reign for a period,
until it has exhausted all social capital and societal collapse follows. It
would be ideal to prevent this before it occurs, but it is the fear of many
that it cannot be avoided. We are committed to the course, and no one
is at the helm.

The difference between a politician and an academic is merely one of
time preference. The academic is content to disseminate his ideas
through the university system, knowing the reward shall be a
hundredfold decades down the road, when his ostensibly controversial
propositions have become “nearly everyone’s common sense.” The
politician hopes to ride that wave; even if he did nothing to generate it,
having the politician officially pass it in the halls of Correctness is the
sign to the modern conservatives that the issue is settled, it is time for

them to take a step leftward or to step off. The professor plays the tune
and the politician dances.

Wrapped up in the idea of hierarchy is the idea of institution. What,
precisely, is an institution?

To compose it etymologically, the root is a verb, “to institute” from the
Latin prefix in- meaning “in, towards” and “statuere” meaning “to set
up.” So we can say that “to institute” means something like “to set up
together,” a coming-together of individuals due to common cause.
Individuals with that common cause form the basis of the organization,
with a kind of hierarchy that relates the individuals to each other in the
means of coordinating the actions of individuals under the common
cause that the institution is put together for.

In order for it to truly be a “common cause,” it must be that the
individual holds such an end on their own grounds, rather than it being
an end enforced by violence or the threat thereof, which we may define
as “coercion.” Coerced ends cannot constitute institutions, as
institutions are formed on the basis of agreed-upon and mutually
willing agreements of coordination between individuals. While
coercion can establish organizations, these are not institutions per se, as
they are not formed on the basis of common cause and the intrinsic
ends of the individuals are opposed to the end of the organization.

The range of preferences individuals hold only vary so much, and
within shared ends is the possibility of institutions established. This
provides the basis for a set of terms to be agreed upon which, though
likely to be asymmetric in duty and privilege within the institution,
bring both individuals a greater product in bringing about the end that
the institution is founded for.

The unity of action under common cause also provides a principle for
describing institutions of themselves, without any necessary reference
to the particular actions of the individuals therein. So we may speak of

families and corporate bodies, without having to describe their actions
in terms of the cumulative action of all its constituent individuals. The
qualities of these descriptions are akin to the way in which ideal gas
laws describe the properties of given volumes of gas. Without
describing the actions of particular particles, they still suffice to give
context to the notion of “pressure” and “temperature” as an average of
the particles together. In this way may the institution be described apart
from the constitution, and we see that the institution takes on a life of
its own.

This means of organization scales up, so that institutions are under the
same pressures to form relations to other institutions in the way that
individuals have the incentive to form institutions. Under common
cause, identified as an ideological occult motivation, this produces a
superstructural arrangement of society, so that an individual’s context
is defined not only by those institutions he has the right or privilege of
entering, but also the limits on institutions. Ideology is the common
cause of institutions that band together; where this prevents mutual
exchange, the institutions are in a state of warfare with each other, as
there remains no external means of resolving inter-institutional dispute.
Only one ideology may operate within a society at a time, with
adherents of the contrary ideology being persecuted in what ways are
available to the institutions that manifest the ideology’s social power.

—

AGARIES OF

ODERNISM AND

EOREACTION

As modernism and neoreaction are ideologically opposed, it isn’t
surprising to find a number of contrasts in political philosophy as well.
What is anathema to modernism neoreaction embraces, such as the
justice of discrimination on the basis of race, the freedom of
association, the rights of parents to raise their children, monarchism,
limited or eliminated immigration, among a number of other issues.

The arguments made in response to modernism, coming from a
different ideological perspective, likewise dispense with what can only
be called deontological stipulations. As I’ve said before, the problem
with modernism is that it isn’t utilitarian enough.

The essay up to this point has made very few references to any
politically manifest issues, subsisting in the abstract and assuming
application of concepts to the present situation. I will now point to the
political concerns of neoreaction, which are patriarchalism, biopolitics,
monarchism, anarchism, Christian traditionalism, ethno-nationalism,
futurism, and capitalism. I note that a neoreactionary does not
necessarily embrace all of these, nor does embracing these make one a
neoreactionary. Indeed, a number of these have their modernist
equivalents, such as libertarianism is the (failed) modernist embrace of
capitalism. Where there are counterpoints, the arguments neoreaction is
capable of wielding are superior to the modernist arguments, though of
course what is a sound argument within the modernist frame may also
be adopted to the neoreactionary frame.

A ‘vagary’ in the ideological sense is the manifestation of the occult
motivation. While the occult motivation may be treated as an
ambiguous aesthetic that stands without intrinsic justification (though I
see others may differ on this point with justice), the vagaries which
result of the ideology are the measure of its success. A vagary is
likewise not a political policy, but an attitude in regards to the
formulation of policies which determines what policies shall be given
support on the condition of one’s evaluation of the mechanical
operations of those policies. Occult intent ought to be measured, for
what one explains of their own motivation, as the very notion of occult
motivation is meant to overcome, is vague and unhelpful. How to
measure these vagaries?

Time preference is the notion of the willingness of an individual or
group to put off present consumption in favor of future greater

consumption. Higher time preference favors the present more over the
future, while lower time preference favors the future over the present.
It is impossible for a person to have absolutely null time preference, as
it is impossible to put off a modicum of present consumption in order
merely to stay alive. Given equal opportunity to indulge, an individual
with higher time preference may at first enjoy greater consumption, but
because the individual with lower time preference puts off present
consumption in order to invest that capital in structures that enable
greater production (e.g. skills, technology), he shall eventually pass up
the former in consumption. The most significant difference between
poverty and prosperity comes down to time preference. Prosperity
helps to enable lower time preference, while poverty may make it
difficult to exhibit a lower time preference simply due to the lack of
available capital that might be accumulated in the first place. Hence,
there may be “cycles of poverty,” and thus the importance of avoiding
societal stagnation. Vagaries which increase consumption in the present
are less preferable to vagaries that lower consumption in favor of
investment. However, the putting off of present consumption can only
be afforded by a more-than-baseline level of prosperity, so the overall
lowering of time preference is itself the abstract principle by which
higher levels of civilization can be reached, and explains why one
cannot skip certain stages except by the intervention of civilizations
that have already achieved those levels of themselves.

Ultimately neoreaction may be justified contra modernism due to its
facilitation of lower civilizational time preferences. Abstractly, the
neoreactionary aesthetic entails a preference for perpetuity, while
modernism entails a preference for immediate gratification. As we
shall see below, not only does modernism lead to sub-optimal
arrangements, it endorses unsustainable models that sees the decline of
civilization into barbaristic decadence and the dampening of the West’s
light.

The aim of each of the vagaries of neoreaction is to place the respective
components of society into their right place within hierarchy. The
conservative virtue of order is not for its own sake, but so that society
may get along in itself and with others, giving to each group the
amount of liberty it is capable of maintaining responsibility for. It is a
mistake to give too much liberty to a group ill-disposed to make use of
it, in the way that it is irresponsible of a parent to give a child too much
freedom in what he shall do each day, how he shall dress and feed
himself, and so on. The same reasoning as a parent applies to his
children follows for distinct groups in society, and makes plain the
necessity of the Potent to perceive this order so that it may consciously
defend against its eradication. It is when the Potent are not aware of the
responsibility that comes with their power that society becomes
corrupted, unnatural hierarchies taking place and subverting the
respective virtues each group brings to society.

How then to assign place within the hierarchy? First, the property
which defines the privileges and responsibilities of the hierarchy in a
continuum is liberty. The higher in the hierarchy and the more
influence one exerts over others, the greater the privilege, as one is then
subject to fewer restrictions on the basis of group and is afforded
greater freedom to determine one’s own values and life path. This
likewise brings with it greater responsibilities, as one’s decisions affect
not only themselves, but many more people. The privilege of the least
is that their decisions affect very few, and so the punishments that need
be laid on them for disobedience can be much less strict. To whom
much is given, much shall be expected.

To assign places within the superstructural hierarchy of society, liberty
ought to be accorded to those groups capable of maintaining it
responsibly. This means evaluating the competence of respective
groups by a theory concerned less with pleasant platitudes but
unflinching realism. The hierarchy is not for itself, but for the problem

it solves, which is that of social coordination to peaceable, productive
activities rather than coercive, destructive policies.

We call the ability to accept the maintenance required for liberty moral
agency. It is only commonsense to not accord someone liberty who
does not possess sufficient moral agency to meet the burdens it
imposes. We do not give a child the same liberties as an adult due to
this; were they to have the same level of freedom, they would put it to
poor and destructive use. If we are to take seriously the question of
where distinct groups ought to be placed within the hierarchy, then we
must take seriously the matter of the distinct moral agencies each
group actually possesses. In other words, not all groups are equal in
administering their own agency, and should have their liberty restricted
up to that point they are capable of administering that which is left for
themselves.

This gives us two questions; how do we measure moral agency, and
how shall liberty be restricted? Neither of these questions are easy to
answer, and I can only produce an initial speculation, though I am
certain it is on the right track.

Moral agency of populations can be measured by tendency of success
and stability brought about by that group’s own efforts. Without being
established by the group itself, then the group does not prove its merits
sufficient for the order it may otherwise possess. For instance, children
as a group tend to be very stable, but this not due to their own designs
but the order imposed from without, such as parents, the community,
and schooling. Insofar as children fail, much of the blame could be laid
with parents and their insufficient imposition of structure in the child’s
life. However, at the same time some space for the exercise of that
agency must be allowed, so that the child may develop his own agency
in the contexts of the structure he shall grow into (ideally). So much as
a group requires the imposition of order by another, that group yet
requires freedom of space for self-determination. The purpose of order

is to direct activity so that the majority of the individuals within that
group act beneficially for society. Some amount of failure will and
must be allowed to take place; saving those incapable of caring for
themselves only increases their representation in society, heightening
overall civilizational time preference and hindering the process of
evolution from accomplishing what we need it to accomplish. Time
preference must fall over time for civilization; as prosperity increases,
low time preference is enabled. It is an aberration for time preference
to increase as prosperity increases.

From this perspective, greater moral agency must be correlated to
lower time preference. The lesser ability to put off present consumption
in favor of later, greater production is the de facto circumscription of
moral agency. The highest moral agency would be able to put off all
comforts of the present, undertaking the maximal investment in the
best future. In the Christian worldview where ethical action has a
Heavenly reward, it is clear to see the essential link between the
capability for moral jurisprudence and the capability for beneficial
activity. They are, under a natural law theory of ethics, on a continuum.

The contribution of a group to overall social stability is the group’s
possession of moral agency. The more responsible a group is for social
stability, the higher that group’s moral agency and thus the higher in
the hierarchy such a group should be.

Given that moral agency may be measured by the group’s effects on
social stability, it follows that the means of obtaining or restricting
liberty are coincident. In other words, the process of measuring and the
process of hierarchical distribution are identical. The ability of a group
to rise in the hierarchy proves the justice of that group rising in the
hierarchy, and likewise the inability of a group to rise proves the justice
of that group remaining lower in the hierarchy.

This analysis assumes society to be free of forcible redistribution, i.e.

the coercive distribution of opportunities offered to one group to
another group against the wishes of those who offer the opportunities.
The distribution of opportunity determines the hierarchy, and as such
what disrupts the distribution of opportunities disrupts the cohering of
hierarchy. As such, all redistribution in the name of any ideological
vision, be that egalitarianism or order, can only disrupt stability and
push society away from social equilibrium. The order we desire will
make itself work and any attempts to “re-equalize” from a previously
disrupted order will only prevent the equitable order from occurring.

Allowed to arrange itself, civilization over time should tend to
incentivize ever-lower time preferences, and this due to its being the
aim of natural institutions within a natural hierarchy.

As we explore the vagaries of neoreaction, keep in mind that ultimate
coherency is not the point. A consistent political philosophy under a
neoreactionary ideology will have something to say about these issues,
and will likely tend to give prescriptions in keeping with the spirit of
the following analyses, but I can guarantee that an individual’s own
views will draw differently on each of these issues. Necessarily so, as it
should be obvious that the sections on nationalism, anarchism,
monarchism, and capitalism all have some amount of contradiction,
assuming one wished to embrace one in its entirety.

The lack of consistency is not an embrace of postmodernism or
relativism. It is only that this is a work of ideological analysis, rather
than political treatise. Were I to give a political treatise, I would do my
best to preserve logic. But this isn’t; it is a charting of a diverse array
of views that share an occult motivation, which is that of order.

—

IME-

REFERENCE OF

ATRIARCHALISM

The willingness and ability to put off present consumption in order to

invest in higher future production is a necessary component of
civilization. What is consumed now cannot be available in the future. It
is impossible to set more aside for present consumption and to have
more set aside for the future. Worse, a society which consumes the
stock of capital necessary to maintain the present levels of production
must have lower levels of production in the future. Such is a toxic
nihilism that dooms future generations, and many in my generation are
seeing now how our parents and grandparents ate out our own future.
“Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die!” was their morality.
They were nihilists who treated their own genetic legacies as
expendable in pursuit of their own pleasures. They even passed on their
own “wisdom,” and now the women of my generation are poisoned by a
fleeting desire not to take their place in the proud tradition of a familial
posterity, but who seek after their own material comforts.

Patriarchalism is a response to the extremely high time-preference set
into women, which upsets the natural order that sees men providing for
material production and women household production. Such a division
of labor allowed for the low time-preference manifest in estate
planning. Instead, feminism has engendered roles in which the majority
of women put off having children or ever forming a family and has
taught them to selfishly pursue the benefits of male roles while also
dumping the burdens of female roles on men.

There is no such thing as “the Patriarchy,” a conspiratorial cabal of
men who seek to “keep women down.” Support of a patriarchy is
merely the contention that fathers ought to rule, and this because they
would plan for the longer-run of society. Patriarchalism compared to
feminism has low time-preference. Furthermore, feminism does not
merely have high time-preference, it has a time-preference above the
level of sustainability, which must lead to social degeneration, decay,
and destabilization. Such a conclusion is the inescapable result of
women trying to take on male roles and not taking on the noble female

roles of wifely duties and motherhood. They are no longer in the role of
building civilization, but eating it out without planning for a future
beyond their own materialistic lives. Woman is the womb of
civilization, but if she will not fill this role, and men by nature cannot,
then civilization shall fail to be borne.

Our approach is overtly anti-modern, at least insofar as modern
methodology tends towards flair for the arbitrary over the principled.
The feminist methodology may be succinctly described as the
assumption that women are better than men, and so where men succeed
over women, it must be due to some unfair bias which systematically
favors men. The arguments offered by feminist may take the line of
reasoning that “Men and women are equal, equal things shouldn’t have
these differences, there are these differences, these differences must be
explained by something external,” but in reality that is only a
rationalization. Feminism has been described as a male role envy, but it
would be more apt to call it male privilege envy. Feminists have no
envy of men who work the jobs that are unpleasant and dangerous, they
only have an envy for the privileges men have bought at the cost of
taking on the roles women would prefer not to. What burdens men face
are not yearned after by women, and frequently what burdens that come
with being a woman are redistributed to men.

The incentivizing of women to take on male roles, and the likewise dis-
incentivizing of men to pursue those roles (at least if it would disfavor
women were they to), must produce disastrous consequences for
civilization. As this particular area of neoreaction is a concentration of
mine, I will attempt to be brief in outlining how feminism is a failure
mode.

The ideological issue of civilization comes to this: certain ideas allow
society to thrive, and some ideas do not. If we continue with a social-
ideological analysis, in terms of evolutionary selection for memeplexes
that condition the distribution of resources in society, we are left with a

very keen social-historical argument against feminism. Whereas
feminism explains the virtual entirety of all civilizations being
patriarchal as simple conspiratorial accident, the patriarchalist suggests
that patriarchy is a key ingredient apart from which civilization fails.
Such is a much more satisfying explanation for this element of history
than the feminist as it does not depend upon a statistically improbable
distribution of ideology. Civilization and patriarchy have an almost
identical beginning in time, so far as we can tell by history, and no
feminist societies have left their mark on history. Is that a coincidence?

Patriarchy, even certain elements of misogyny, may have an as-yet
unrecognized wisdom. The subordination of women under men, if it is
good for society, is good for both men and women. It is a structure
which optimizes for the perpetuation of society. Feminism, with its
penchant for instilling into more intelligent women the notion that they
must pursue higher education and professional careers, and that
children are optional, tends to have lower rates of reproduction
amongst these intellectually advantaged women. This produces a
negative correlation of IQ and procreation, with the result that high
intelligence in women is selected out by the evolutionary pressures of
feminism. Rather than leave a lasting genetic legacy, the pursuit of a
crude nihilism is preached to women. This with the high inheritance of
intelligence, and future generations are left with a lower average IQ
than their parents. It is dehumanizing and removes the individual from
history and, by extension, the society. A woman should not be praised
for material success, for her calling is much more noble and important.

This may be why no “feminist” societies have been found until now.
Nearer to equilibrium with nature, and thus more under pressure to
remain strict to optimal social structures, what societies abandoned or
strayed from the patriarchal arrangement would have been swiftly
overtaken by other societies. The literal enslavement of a people by
another nation may have been the result of women refusing to submit

or men refusing to dominate.

Civilization requires a sufficiently low time preference. Tribalism,
which involves a mean existence of hand to mouth has an inordinately
high time preference. If not enough people are willing to put off present
consumption in order to seek after greater future gains, then capital
accumulation dwindles; if not enough capital is available, greater
amounts of production are impossible. Higher levels of civilization can
only be reached by the lowering of time preference. The key question
for whether an ideological vagary is beneficial and natural is whether it
operates to establish institutions that lower time preference. Those
vagaries which dissolve institutions heighten time preference,
diminishing the accumulation of capital and by extension the ability of
a society to sustain its present level of material production.

Patriarchy may be described not only as the rule of men over women,
and their dominating certain spheres such that female entrance is
precluded, but also the rule of fathers. A father by nature is intent on
seeing to it that his children are well-off, and as such he has a low time
preference by necessity in order not primarily for his own gain, but for
his own children’s gain. This sees the coalescence not only of strong
familial institutions, but the lowering of time preferences as the
patriarchal father, in his rule over the distribution of the family’s own
material property but its cohering traditions, sees to it that a lasting
legacy is prepared for. Where feminism obviates any focus on the
future, patriarchy throws the present far into the future. Such a
lowering of time preferences may be required considering the
incredible changes that will be wrought by new technologies, as will be
more extensively detailed below.

Why man rule over woman, and not the other way around? This has to
do with the evolutionary advantages which are individually distributed
to men and women on the basis of their procreative contribution. From
the perspective of evolutionary descent, women are far more valuable

than men due to the relative expense of the womb and the relative
cheapness of sperm. A man who dies is more easily replaced than a
woman would be. One woman may produce one child every 9 months,
while a man could potentially produce multiple children a day. In the
tribal environment where social equilibrium is only just above material
sustenance, it is a much better strategy to risk your men in those
situations where someone must be risked, and keep women relatively
safe at home. Evolutionarily, this results in distinct biologies and
psychologies between men and women, as those which align with the
strategy of risking men comparatively more than women will
outcompete those that do not.

Men should rule because of this. The same reasons which make it
advantageous for men to have innately lower risk-aversion than women
make it advantageous to arrange society such that women are safe
under subordination and men are exposed to the dangers of the world.
Studies show that women are far more successful than men at
reproducing. Taken as distributions, the distribution of success for men
is much flatter than women. Men rule society because there are more of
them at the heights of success, but this comes at the cost of many more
men who fail. Women, though they are less likely to be found at the
heights of success, are also much less likely to fail. Women are the
average sex, men the exceptional sex.

A return to traditional family models is only obvious in light of this.
The claim is not that women are unable to compete in the workplace,
but that the opportunity cost is too great. A woman in the workplace is
giving up far more to be there than a man, and indeed much is also lost
for men as a result. Fewer women who are interested in marrying and
having children means that many men, of whom the majority are
innately interested in finding a wife and starting a family, must go
without. Already it is natural for a minority of men to succeed in
reproducing, to limit the supply of women and degrade the quality of

that product by subjecting these women to the unregulated pursuit of
their hypergamic imperative is to push society towards a dangerous
disequilibrium. If men are not to be rewarded by their material virtue
with social benefits, why should they strive? In a society such as ours,
it is all too easy to get by without producing any great amount.
Production and innovation shall fall precipitously when the majority of
men realize that women have abandoned them.

The feminizing of society cannot be recommended. It is simply an
unsustainable socioeconomic arrangement. The virtues of both sexes
are tapped into by patriarchy, while feminism pits them against each
other. It disrupts the natural complementarity afforded by this natural
division of the species which evolution has otherwise co-opted to take
advantage of the economic division of labor. Men and women are
innately specialized to different roles, and their respective gender roles
and social expectations should reflect that. To work against that
specialization does not merely return us to a borderline of equality, but
pushes social product below the levels of profit necessary to perpetuate
civilization. Patriarchy is not merely an advantage for society, it is an
essential part. Lose it, and society dissolves. Feminism cannot afford
society a sufficiently low time preference.

UTURISM AND THE

ECHNOLOGIZATION OF

The essence of technology is means. As technology will become ever
more crucial to new forms of human living, the blurring of the line
between an individual and the technology which allows that individual
his particular existence leads also to the blurring of human end with
technological means. Technology shifts the benefits and costs of certain
actions, and inasmuch as it dampens the consequences of certain
actions and introduces new consequences elsewhere, we shall see the
rise of new social behaviors predicated on the emergence of those
technologies.

The most apt illustration of this in the 20

century is the Pill. The Pill,

an oral contraceptive that prevents the possibility of conception
through sexual intercourse, is an essential technological component of
the modern archetypal woman. Where you find that modern woman,
you find the Pill. The modern woman is inseparable from the Pill. Her
behavior is not merely influenced by it, her behavior requires it.

The power to prevent conception opens new horizons in intersexual
relations, such that women may now freely copulate with any man they
feel attracted to, and men may reasonably expect no burden to arise of
their own sexual pursuits. Given the lustful natures of men and women,
the lowering of the risk allows what is otherwise a prohibitively risky
behavior to become commonplace and expected. The beasts of nature
are unleashed, and it seems foolish to suggest, considering what was
said above in the section on patriarchy, that the sexual revolution was a
liberation, rather than a great catastrophe which has played itself out
over these decades since the introduction of this new technology. The
cost of commitment-free sexual intercourse in previous eras was a dam
which held back a river which now threatens to sweep away much that
had been gained by centuries of careful social coordination. Indeed,
Pope Paul VI, in an encyclical concerning the morality of
contraception, warned that:

Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of
the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect
on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth
control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action
could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general
lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be
fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human
beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to
temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an
evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect

that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to
the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a
woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium,
reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his
own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he
should surround with care and affection.

Whether or not one agrees with Catholicism on the morality of
contraception, one must agree as to the social effects we are now
witness to, including that prototypically Kantian concern over the
person being made an instrument; technological augmentation of the
body must be warned against when it instrumentalizes for the good of
another at the expense of the person’s own due. Such threatens the
cohesion of civilization as a whole.

The moral of the story is not that technology is an inevitable threat to
the flourishing of mankind. Rather, the moral is this: technology
changes man. Biopolitically, the result of widespread contraceptive use
will tend towards its social abolishment, as those who are born are no
longer the products of sex which the parents would’ve preferred not to
result in children. A sheer desire for children shall be selected for, and
those in society who find themselves without that desire now have at
their hands the tools of their demographic suicide. Evolution is shrewd.
Society after the fallout will be better off without these individuals,
since they threaten its very vitality, its very fount of life.

Every great technological shift offers the allure of pleasurable genetic
cessation. Those who partake fail to have a familial legacy. The
internet is a similar evolutionary trap, decreasing the cost of validation
but increasing the cost of actual procreative coordination.

The lesson of technology from these examples is that incorporating
technology into one’s being makes one a means, and those who make
themselves a means fail to have an end. Those without an end do not

pass on their dispositions, genetic and otherwise. Technology at once
culls the socially feeble and offers an increase of coordination; the
spool winds tighter, fewer are able to carry on under its pressure.

Why, then, may it seem as though this future history is so long in the
making? Prosperity has a downside, in that it may cover up failure. An
organization with lots of capital to spare may continue its operation
long past the point of profitable sustainability, giving an appearance of
health, until it collapses when the last is spent and no returns are
incumbent. Technology increases freedom, and as always freedom
requires greater responsibility.

How then do I mean that technology is prosperity, if that technology is
something like the Pill? The Pill itself has virtually no redeeming
qualities, from the moral and social-historical perspective, save to
remove from our midst those who cannot appreciate the possibility of a
genetic legacy. However, the Pill is but a species of a more general
power that humans have developed, which is the power to alter the
human body’s own chemistry. Now that we may, for instance,
artificially produce and inject insulin, diabetes is no longer a fatal
disease. Psychological defects that were the result of chemical
imbalances may now be corrected for.

The same may be said of nuclear fission. With it, we may power cities
or destroy cities. Such a path lies open for all new technologies.

What are the technologies of the future? It may be unwise to make a
prediction as to what precisely those shall be, and what their definite
social effects may be. Science fiction already goes over innumerable
instances of macro-scale social changes wrought by the introduction of
new technologies, be they terrestrial or not. It is inevitable that more
technologies shall be introduced in human history, and some will be
used for devastating or highly coordinating effect. The question is how
individuals, in response to these technologies, choose to select

themselves, either for genetic legacy or materialistic nihilism.

May not the same be said of the Roman Empire, if we may consider the
high political coordination it enjoyed at its height as a form of
technology? Some chose the path of materialistic nihilism, having few
or no children and leaving all of society to that group which proclaimed
the good of familial duty, the Church. Following social collapses
wrought by technology and any other dark ages, the Church shall by its
nature be left to pick up the pieces and put society back together again.
Of course, she won’t receive praise for this, and those who are apt to
materialistic nihilism will always see her as standing in the way of the
progress they desire, while those in the world who do not envy the fate
of the nihilists, which is of course nothingness, the smiting from
history itself in all lasting forms, shall always at least be allied to her
holy mission.

The meek shall inherit the earth, and the familial will inherit the future.

In the face of the great risk that technology poses to the perpetuity of
the human species, some might seriously contend that it would be an
overall benefit to prohibit and ban the development of new
technologies. While such an advocate could freely confess that
technology, properly handled, frees the potential of mankind to yet-
unseen horizons, it is too great a risk for us to undertake responsibly.
Perhaps certain far-away colonies of humanity could be allowed to
develop new technology, in order that ill effects are insulated from
humanity in general, but a base strain of humanity must be kept safe
lest all are made extinct. This is “pessimistic futurism,” which does not
tend to have much representation among the futurist strains.

Such an argument cannot be lightly disposed of. As mentioned above,
the focus of neoreaction is on the longer-run. Over a long enough
timeframe, the possibility of humanity’s extinction at the hands of his
technology seems almost inevitable. Already, the arsenal of nuclear

weapons possessed by nations, especially when those nations are
antagonists, threatens civilization so long as man is stuck on Earth. The
stories of science fiction seem instructive. Doomsday scenarios and
technological failure modes cannot be fully catalogued, for it seems as
though every new technology offers some grave threat.

The problem with such an approach is that, in the attempt to stave off a
multiplicity of failure modes, it initiates its own failure mode. What
but a comprehensive government program of forcible ennovation could
accomplish this, and what would prevent such a program from putting
man down the road to a dark age? It is clear that such a program would
be harmful.

Might it yet be a lesser risk? Better to live in a dark age than to die in a
golden age? This we are also not too certain of. To give up the attempt
at cosmic transcendence due to cowardice is to give up the purpose of
humankind in the Omega Point. It denies the Catholic faith that God,
not man, shall bring on the apocalypse. It is not man’s place to institute
armageddon. Whether this is achieved by natural or supernatural
catastrophe or instrumentally through man’s own nature is not for us to
decide. Man can only live as he shall, and that must be a place among
the stars.

Contrary to the view that technology is a harbinger of the end, there is
also the view common in futurists that ‘the Singularity’ shall be a
salvation of the species by beneficial god-AIs. This is also view which
goes to the other extreme, and is equally soteriological. Let us call this
view “soteriological singularitarianism,” or “salvific futurism” for
short.

The reasoning in this case is also easy enough to understand. As the
level of technology increases, the most important forms of material
scarcity are essentially solved, so that man need no longer suffer from
famine, disease, or poverty. Between godlike AIs and servant robots, all

the problems of material production and distribution will eventually be
taken care of without the least human strain. This will free man from
the burden of labor so that he may aspire to ever higher heights of
creation and understanding, a society of philosopher-kings who accept
the material comfort as a means of intellectual cultivation.

Such a picture is comforting and, in a sense, realistic. Of course it may
be accepted that some, given freedom from labor, will only pursue
nihilistic hedonism as an end. As discussed above, such will rapidly
select themselves out of the population, so we are not concerned with
that problem. The problem is, however, that the creation of new
technologies, while it may solve certain material requirements, will not
solve the essential problems of the coordination of society. All social
issues that stem from the failure to provide a social structure that
optimizes for human virtue in the Potent are not solved by the
alleviation of material shortcomings. In fact, material shortcomings has
never been a problem for the Potent, so any Singularity, if such were to
occur, would not ultimately eliminate the administration of society (in
a broad sense) that must be undertaken by the elite. Technological
advances may change the constitution of the Potent, but it does not
eliminate the Potent. As such, salvific futurism, in regards to the
question of social structure, is a complete non-starter. It doesn’t hurt to
solve the largest problems of scarcity, but it doesn’t solve the problem
we are looking to answer for.

ACISM AND

IOPOLITICS

Race is a biological reality. It is as certain as the theory of evolution,
for the existence of populations within a species that may be contrasted
along racial lines is just a prediction of the theory. To look at the
human species and fail to find the work of evolution would to some
degree falsify the theory and embrace a kind of creationism. Distinct

groups of humans have been historically subject to different
environmental conditions, and inasmuch as those environments worked
distinct selective pressures over those groups, then those groups shall
have contrasting properties. This ought not to be a controversial thesis,
for it is only the elementary application of a theory any student of
biology ought to be acquainted with.

Yet the willingness of neoreaction to embrace the reality of race and,
by extension, biopolitics, has earned it a most certain spite by
modernity, which is ideologically opposed to such a possibility. Why
does it upset modernism so? Accepting that people are innately
different is compatible with modernism and does not entail arbitrary
difference in treatment, so applying the same reasoning to groups of
people ought not to produce any troubling notions. Yet there is the
strange term applied to the scientific study of race, ‘scientific racism,’
as though admitting the reality of race beyond social construct is
essentially racist. But one’s beliefs about the differences in race does
not require any arbitrary difference in treatment, only that there shall
tend to be different treatment on the basis of those innate differences.
That isn’t racist, unless grouping together individuals by intelligence
such that you have the population which is “genius” and the other
which is “retarded” where the difference in treatment of those two
distinct populations is somehow intelligentist, which doesn’t make
sense because the different treatment of those two groups is justified by
that difference in intelligence.

It is that such differences, because they are systematically ascertainable
by race, shall become entrenched into the system, and thus better
privileges shall accrue to those races that have more innately pro-social
and useful traits, while those races which lack that distribution of
beneficial traits shall be systematically treated with less preference.
The modernist fears this, because he implicitly acknowledges that the
real difference in race would justify that different treatment, and thus

the whole project of the Enlightenment which seeks to bring knowledge
to all is shown to be elusive. He wants the best for all, but is unwilling
to grapple with the unsettling reality which such differences portend. If
a given race is globally inferior, then those individuals unlucky to be
born in to that race will be left behind, as there is no place for them
within the competitive institutions of society, be that the market or the
family. Society at best may accord them a status of lower class, with
some few exceptional individuals possessing the ability to join the rest,
though what few of these there are shall have less opportunity to prove
themselves compared to those individuals from races in which the
possession of those talents makes them merely typical, for it only
makes sense to distribute opportunity to those populations which are
statistically more likely able to excel. It is only a simple exercise of
statistics to see that it will always be economically efficient for races
with superiority in socially beneficial traits to be accorded a privileged
place in the distribution of opportunity to prove themselves. In other
words, the reality of race and the inevitability of distinct performance
within society given equal opportunity would tend to see the
abolishment of equal opportunity, as it simply would not be profitable
enough to dredge an inferior race when less resources will find a
number of equally suitable candidates in another race.

The libertarian, implicitly wedded to the modernist myth of the
equality of distributed propensities between the races as he is, offers
the argument against the modern liberal that policies such as
affirmative action are unnecessary. Such policies, which are meant to
equalize opportunity for historically underrepresented races by the
redistribution of employment opportunities from those races
historically perceived to be superior to those perceived to be inferior,
are superfluous to the market mechanism. Assuming equality of
productivity between different races, it would be profitable to target for
employment the underrepresented races.

Such an argument is economically sound, but the problem for the
libertarian is that he doesn’t countenance what such an argument
suggests. If it is found that races remain unequally represented in
certain forms of employment, then it follows that, per economic
science, those races are not equal in productivity.

These realities shall color our prejudices, and indeed it is only rational
to do so. The modernist, in the face of the verifiable reality that
evolution does its work on the human species, is apt to call this racism.
Some proudly bear the moniker, though this seems the wrong means of
integrating the reality of race to our behavior. If the prejudice is
justified, it can’t be immoral. Some subtleties of behavior shall have to
be introduced, rather than letting the caricaturized, derogatory term be
applied to a behavior it is morally incumbent on us to adopt.

Prejudice is short for “pre-judgment.” It does not imply a lack of
follow-up judgment on the basis of new information that becomes
available. This means that the prejudice is defeasible, i.e. our behavior
changes in the case that it is possible to retrieve the most directly
relevant information about the individual. It is in those cases when such
information is not accessible due to the circumstances of life that
prejudice shall have to suffice least one puts themselves at unwarranted
risk in order to overcome that prejudice. I have a prejudice against
going on bridges that appear ready to collapse, and I am under no
burden to undertake the overriding of that prejudice by going out on
that bridge. Of course it may be that the bridge only appears rickety,
but the assessed benefit of finding out does not outweigh the cost of
risk. Appearances may be deceiving, but they can only ever deceive if
they were ever reliable in the first place.

The only advice that may be warranted to those groups which shall
have the least advantage under prejudice is that they ought to do what
they can to dissociate themselves from the negative elements of that
group by appearing as members of a respectable caste. A black person

in a neat suit who takes the name of Robert and speaks in fluent
Midwestern English shall face very little prejudice compared to a white
person who signals by his own appearance and behavior affiliation with
criminal gangs. Race is something, but it isn’t everything.

The potential for an individual to pre-emptively defuse happenstance
prejudicial associations as it is, it remains the case that there will be
systematic differences in performance, and thus there will be castes, or
classes, distinguished in part not only by income or vocation, but by
race. This undermines the modernist vision of “diverse” or colorblind
selection into organizations into communities, and foretells of
extensive self-segregation like already occurs despite the best efforts of
modern states to incentive and enforce integration. What the modernist
takes to be an unmitigated negative, as the dream of truly equal
opportunity without basis in race is smashed upon the rocks of Nature’s
God, the reactionary racist might praise. It is easy to sympathize with
such a position. There is, I believe, another take that can be given.

This is a text on ideology, and as such is not exclusively committed to
any particular political philosophy. Though I do indeed have my own
philosophy, and there is a general tendency of conservatism amongst
reactionaries, the ideological take, which embraces a pluralistic
political shape, has the resources to turn reality into a benefit. If the
reactionary ideological take may be summarized, to distinct groups of
people distinct forms of governance may be optimal. While some
forms of government are just set against themselves theoretically (e.g.
comprehensive socialism or communism) and so cannot be
recommended for any group of people, there are structures applied
from sound political governance which optimize for that society’s
potential. Note that what is “optimal” for a society, working from
certain givens of resources, prosperity, level of education, genetic
stock, and so on, will not be equal between societies. Facing the reality
of race and its not-yet fully explored affects, the work of political

philosophy has much yet to integrate to itself that has completely
evaded the universalism or egalitarianism of thinkers such as Marx,
Rawls, or Nozick.

If an example may be proposed: colonialism is not essentially evil. If
this conjures uncomfortable images, suppose the Earth were to be
colonized by a benevolent spacefaring species that possesses far more
knowledge and resources than the entire globe. It is easy to see that,
given the differences between ourselves and these extraterrestrials, they
might, to their profit and our own depose all presently reigning human
governments and institute new bodies of law which, being similar, are
yet different from legislative corps we would choose for ourselves.
Given their superior knowledge and experience in the matter, their
form of governance is probably superior to our own. Yes, this defies the
democratic virtue of self-governance, but if giving up self-governance
yields such great rewards, it seems rational to accept such an offer.

Are there issues to the global colonization of our planet by an
extraterrestrial species? Undoubtedly. Yet it is easy to see that, on the
balance, colonial governance may render better returns. After all, if the
aliens were to agree with your own general political philosophy and
they instituted that for us, you wouldn’t be likely to disagree. Whatever
profits they exact out of the relationship, if it makes us better off, there
is no reason to not go along with it.

Optimal governance, given societies which are either racially
homogenous or heterogeneous, shall likewise take distinct forms. And,
between the two, it may be that increasing racial homogenization yields
higher returns for one group or both. Or it may be that a certain
admixture is optimal, as it allows fewer resources to be dedicated to the
process of distributing opportunities equitably. This is an issue of
further discussion, and I don’t have any hypotheses either way as yet.
Again, the difference could come down to the particular society and its
level of technology and access to resources. There is no “one size fits

all” solution to politics. Democratic imperialism, which is the forcible
exportation of one’s political philosophy to other cultures and societies,
is doomed to failure, and the particularly American form of
imperialism we have been witness to since World War II has only
succeeded on the utter ruin and destruction of the society in question.
Short of nuclear annihilation, the imposition of alternative “liberal
democratic” structures of governance shall always be rejected.

—

ALUES OF

APITALISM

Neoreaction has been called a libertarian heresy. The distinction is
cladistic rather than morphological; that is to say, it is a heresy in the
sense that it was begun from a libertarian attitude in response to the
inadequacies of libertarianism, as explored above, though now it no
longer possesses libertarian tenets. It is, rather, a deep and principled
conservatism wedded to the principles of a trenchant and
thoroughgoing social analysis. Whereas libertarianism may be
practically identified with a branch of economics, be that the Austrian,
Chicago, or some other sympathetic school, conservatives have a view
on the economy which flows from normative premises and accepts the
best economics for getting the preferred outcome. The “normative”
premise of libertarian economics is the preference for utility and
efficiency are above all other potential outcomes. The strict separation
of economy and society under the libertarian view holds that all values
are determined in society, and the economy only maximizes for
distributing on the basis of those preferences. There is a lack of
openness to effects on culture, order, and civilization in general, the
notion apparently being that if a society wants to die, the market ought
to maximize for that preference just as it might any other preference.

Given this, we might level an attack at the system of capitalism in the
sense that efficient market outcomes are not always equitable. This is

especially likely to occur if other elements of society are disrupted
from coordination, i.e. social institutions, in which the resultant
“economic maximization” for preferences within such a limited sphere
overlook the loss of civilizational sustainability.

For that, the focus of libertarians on the economy is not misdirected,
only insufficient. The “economy” and “society,” inasmuch as one might
like to distinguish between the two, have fuzzy boundaries. “Corporate
culture” is a clear example of the overlap. The existence of the
economic space engenders social construction of a particular kind
which wouldn’t exist without that particular economic space. Economy
influences society, which libertarians appear reticent to admit, as
though market negotiations really did occur in the abstract axiomatic
space of economic though experiments, without reference to the
obligations an individual owes or prefers to institutions or the way in
which economic competition may alternately support and sever such
relationships between individuals and institutions.

The critique of capitalism that it is too efficient, in that it allows a
social “race to the bottom” in the production of “mass culture” for
“mass man” is correct in mechanism. However, given the foregoing in
the section on futurism, this must be admitted as a double effect. There
are some who, given the opportunity to annihilate their person in
decadent, endless entertainment, will go ahead and do so; enabling
excellence brings with it the danger of enabling sloth. It is pointless to
remain frustrated over this. The shadows in the cave will always remain
alluring to some nihilists. We can only be grateful to perceive a higher
sphere of human living.

We are able to simultaneously grant the critique of mass culture while
cleaving to capitalism, for the good it achieves is the good of the
Potent. The values that allow capitalism to operate and the application
of talent and skill therein may manifest mass man’s depravity but it
equally manifests the excellence of the best. If anything, we should

prefer a more clear and obvious stratification of society, so that those
who seek after the good may filter out those who seek out degradation.
Allowing mass man, who was always with us and only became more
clearly observed with capitalistic prosperity, to select himself out
allows the best to more easily select themselves in.

What is capitalism, and what are its values? There tend to be two
popular and competing definitions between scholars. I am not
concerning myself with the popular take, or mass man’s take, for mass
man’s take is itself a commodity marketed and sold as opiates or
psychological compensation for unwillingness to succeed. Economists
would define capitalism in terms of “pure economic freedom.”
Capitalism, under this definition, is just unrestrained trade.

The other definition is more focused on the makeup of the market
rather than its condition. This definition holds capitalism to be “the
private ownership of the means of production.”

Inasmuch as one holds to the first definition, it seems clear that the
content of the second definition follow, for under pure economic
freedom there would be no compulsion to fund public means of
production. There may be “communes” which hold ownership in
common, but it would be noted that such a structure remains
technically corporate, for it would be impossible for them to freely rent
out the use of the commune’s own resources to freeloaders lest the
commune immediately have its resources stripped from it by those who
do not share its vision. Given the first definition, the state of affairs
named in the second definition follows by necessity.

What counts as “capitalism” is extremely broad, and may be hard to
express positively. The quickest negative definition would be that
capitalism holds provided intervention into social and economic
transactions by the use or threat of force (coercion) is entirely negated.
The positive definition in respect of that is capitalism is wherever

exchange takes place by the free will of all parties.

But this is dubious. Given the existence of the state, “capitalism” holds
only in those spheres of the economy free of regulation; but as all
spheres are technically under the purview of the state (by definition),
then the potential of intervention, inasmuch as it is considered the right
or just power of the state to do so, suffices as the threat of violence. It
follows that capitalism could not exist under statism, for all individuals
are to some degrees slaves and their exchanges between each other and
their master/s are under coercive restraint.

Furthermore, the libertarian treatment of coercion as though it does not
hold to economic analysis is simply incorrect. Coercion and
subordination under its pressure follows everything economics predicts
about all other forms of exchange. The introduction of coercion and the
promise to not exact its threat is a kind of contract the individual takes
up, and is binding as well as any other contracts may be bound. There is
no reason to suppose that an individual who would coerce may not also
keep promises, making him equally susceptible to market analysis.
How does the coercer not become coerced? By making the deal of
allowing his coercion rather than another’s tasteful in that he prevents
the coercion of others on that coerced individual. The better he keeps
his word about preventing unexpected and indeterminate coercion by
others, the coercion which is subject to regularity of occurrence would
ultimately serve to lower time preferences, if the coercion does actually
prevent more coercion from happening than would otherwise.

Libertarians and moral anarchists are uncomfortable with this, yet such
is clearly possible at the micro and macro scale. If I could at the micro
level coerce another into not coercing, my use of coercion is preferable
to society, since my act of coercion only upsets a force which would’ve
been more broadly destructive of the coordination which takes place in
the economy. My act of coercion does not intrinsically heighten time
preference, except among similar criminals.

However, this “salvaging” of coercion as a just act in society brings a
caveat that statists are also uncomfortable with, or at least seem
reticent to admit as a possibility. If the good of the state’s coercion is
that it at least regularizes the macroscale coercion which occurs,
allowing time preferences to lower, then it also follows that at a
sufficiently low time preference, the state becomes unnecessary to
regulating macroscale coercion, as the economic mechanisms which
seek to enable the regulation of economic disruptions would supersede
the power of the state. This is, in a sense, to say that the market would
eventually internalize the problem regulating for coercion and the
enforcing of contracts, since the arrival of institutions which depend
intrinsically on long term regularity (e.g. banks, financial institutions,
and other institution-supporting institutions) find it in their interest to
compete in the service of regulating macroscale coercion. Even the
state is ultimately dependent on other institutions. Institutions have
lower time preferences than individuals by necessity (as they subsist
over generations, i.e. are constituted by individuals who derive higher
time preference goals within its structure), and so institutions which are
essential to supporting other institutions must have even lower time
preferences than those institutions, for those institutions derive their
(relatively) higher time preference goals within the structure of that
institution. So on up; if the state is dependent for its efficient operation
on other institutions (e.g. banks; central banks are an example of such,
albeit in a comprehensively coercive form), then it becomes
worthwhile for the affairs of states as customers of these institutions to
have the macroscale coercion environment it finds itself within, as
states are in a state of anarchy with respect to each other, to be even
better regulated than the state is capable of.

Why is there a limit to the state’s efficiency in regulating macroscale
aggression? As a simple matter of economics, the state’s dependence
on coercion handicaps it in more efficiently regulating macroscale
aggression. While a business which is able to effectively extort profit

need not have as high quality a product as another business which is
unable to, a business entity such as government which is only able to
regulate macroscale aggression to such a degree will ultimately be
undone by the macroscale aggression it is unable to regulate due to its
separation from the strictures of market. A business dependent for its
sustenance solely on the free will exchange of its customers with itself
has a direct feed on the efficiency and efficacy of its operation, while a
business not solely dependent on the free will exchange of its
customers will not. As such, when society changes, government is less
likely to keep up. Those institutions which will support it, seeing this,
will choose to take on the job of regulation of macroscale aggression
for itself, superseding the government’s authority in a sense while also
producing more efficient results, making the government obsolete.
Governments last, on average, a frightfully short time. A government
lasting longer than a century is the exception rather than the rule, and
the institutions that support government would eventually prefer a
more reliable customer that doesn’t tend to fall to pieces following the
mis-exercise of its own power. The government, being dependent on
these institutions, but not being a necessary customer to these
institutions, shall wither away and its legacy likely borne in a common-
like body of law over the territory it once ruled.

The effect of this is that it does not make sense so much to be “pro-
capitalist” as not “anti-capitalist.” The neoreactionary view of
institutions, as has been and will be further expounded upon, is where
the focus on capitalism comes in. Given the right institutions,
capitalism is a force which produces much good, because it produces
much good for those institutions. Have corrupted institutions, and
capitalism produces much good for those institutions, which ultimately
is to the disadvantage of society. As such, “Is capitalism good?”
depends fundamentally on whether the institutional makeup of society
is sustainable, especially in the sense of whether it incentivizes the
lowering of time preferences over time. Capitalism is subsidiary to the

functioning of society. It is taken as a given that it is economically
efficient and socialism cannot produce sustainable growth for society,
though the real evil occurs in that socialism erodes the natural
hierarchy as it is facilitated by institutions by dis-incentivizing the
reliance of individuals on natural institutions. These effects will be
explored further in the section on anarchism.

—

ONARCHY,

OLITICS, AND

CONOMY

Slavery is a limited form of statism. Conversely, statism is a
distributed form of slavery. The effect of this is not that statism is evil
in itself, nor that slavery is evil in itself. Rather, it fulfills the dictum
that master and slave is not a binary, but a continuum. This is only the
upshot of all that has been said previously about hierarchy, and how it
binds individuals to obligations to each other and themselves. The
sovereign, or master, is the only individual in society without
obligation imposed upon him from above, making him free from any
sense of slavery; likewise, the lowliest individual who rules over none
possesses no sovereignty.

This assumes an equal sense of monolithicism to monarchism, which
isn’t actually the case. Hierarchy is polycentric; he who rules in one
sense may be required to serve in another. All are servants of the king,
yet the king is (ideally) the servant of the people. The king’s service to
the people lies in regulating macroscale aggression and preventing
society from falling into stagnation by the adoption of modernist
policies. He might not fulfill this calling, in which case others have no
obligation to respect him as king.

Why the reactionary’s preference for monarchism? It is led by two
factors; the displeasure of a democratic people and the incentives of the
noble estate.

Democracy politicizes society and makes all citizens a part of the
process, at least theoretically. Inasmuch as the process is effectively
democratic, policies must be populist in reflecting the misguided
desires of the mass. The supposition that the average man “knows
enough” to exercise his right to vote responsibly is laughable. The
legendary remark of Churchill that “the best argument against
democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter” holds
to far greater effect than advocates of democracy are willing to submit.
Given not only the vast ignorance but the incentive to be ignorant about
one’s voting, it is no wonder voting quickly becomes split along
demographic lines, with those groups which foolishly vote not in their
own interest but the interest of the common good being cannibalized by
those more clannish groups willing to express their self-interest
through politics. The relative corporate-mindedness of the average
North European settler of the American colony may have allowed
democracy to operate for a far longer time without falling into low
intensity civil warfare between classes and groups, but give the
democratic process to societies which exhibit higher levels of
clannishness and you see the split take place almost immediately. This
is why the imperialist project of bringing democracy to the Arabic
peoples, who are highly clannish compared to those of European
descent, has the result of groups coercing others through the ballot box.

In other words, the vote is a means of warfare, as it entails the
enforcing of one group’s vision for society on the other who dissented.
Failing to utilize it as such, as one may keep a gun without the intent of
murder, does not mean it doesn’t have that potential effect. Just
because it is given with the intent that is used a certain way does not
make it happen that way. Ergo, the liberal belief that giving people the
franchise in politics will make them adopt it with a commitment to
voting fairly or “in the best interests of society” rather than mean self-
interest is a radical failure to recognize the potential for abuse. This
with the liberal commitment that certain groups simply do not abuse

privileges they are given, unearned, leads to the tendency of expanding
the franchise to those groups which are specifically not corporate
minded.

Could democracy work if the liberal commitment could be prevented?
Perhaps for a longer time. The problem is that the liberal commitment
appears to be the reason to have democracy. If it were true, democracy
would be reliable. But it is false. Inasmuch as it is false, it is proper to
limit the franchise. This leads only to the conclusion that democracy
can be effective insofar as it is limited to those groups higher in the
hierarchy, which not only resembles a monarchical system, but so
much as it is more effective, proves the greater effectiveness if one
stripped even this narrow group of franchise and made political
involvement dependent on heritability. Such would be a de facto
monarchical government.

What are the advantages of a monarchical system of governance over a
democratic system? The first is that a monarch must have a lower time
preference than democratic representatives of the people. As the
representatives are always under the potential to have their power
revoked in the next election, it is incumbent on them to accomplish as
much as they will as quickly as possible, without care for whether it is
most efficient in the long run. Furthermore, that they will not be left to
inherit the costs of the benefits they amass for themselves and their
constituents, at least not inherited to anyone they have a particular care
for, it follows that they stand under even less incentive to promote
sustainable models of governance than would an ordinary household in
managing its own affairs. Democracy rewards short-sightedness and
punishes advocacy of socially sustainable policy.

The monarchical system of government, in other words, imposes the
incentives that hold for a patriarch of a household on the ruler and so,
what preference men naturally have to plan for their estate beyond the
duration of their own lifetime is vested in the king in the act of ruling

his people. The government as privately owned estate is under the
incentive to be managed as an estate, lowering the time preference of
rulers in the same way that patriarchy does for estates in general. Not
only is the king under the incentive to keep government running
efficiently over the course of his rule, which can last for decades, but
he has the incentive to bequeath a sustainable model of governance to
his children, as well as raising his children with the vocation of rule in
mind.

The benefits of monarchy being clear to reactionaries, there remains a
question of how it should arise again within modern society. There is
actually a very simple means of amassing power to an estate with the
effect of instituting a monarchical form of governance. The only
difficulty would be the dissolution of democratic state power over a
territory, but if we may assume such an opportunity to arise, either
through the democratic state’s mismanagement and resultant need to
sell or give up some territory or the outright forcible conquest, then the
incentives in that territory to have an effective king should make such a
monarchy arise.

The continuum of slavery to sovereignty makes it that it is mutually
advantageous for individuals of disparate opportunity, due to any
accident of birth, to exchange with each other in a servant-master
relationship. Lest any confusion persist due to modernist
misinformation, “slavery” is not an intrinsically oppressive institution,
nor is slavery equivalent to the actual ownership of individuals in the
sense of property. Slavery is a kind of employment, albeit one which
comes with greater restrictions on an individual’s liberty than those
forms of employment (by a master) that allow a greater freedom of
movement in society. All forms of employment require some
subordination of one’s choices to that work, for otherwise the
conditions that allow the work to be done should not be obtained. I
must at least give up my time and the opportunity of living in another

place if I were to continue my employment at some specific businesses.
Hence slavery is by degree, with the lowliest slaves being those who
must give up the greatest amount of freedom in order to have
sustainable employment.

Under modernist rhetoric, selling oneself into slavery is a great sin, but
under the use of the word found here, “slave” is the most
terminologically apt for, while it circumvents the modernist tradition,
it is placed within a much more comprehensive and pre-modern
tradition of thought about the relationship between employees and their
employers. Selling one’s labor is a kind of selling of oneself, and so
inasmuch as we consider “selling oneself” a kind of slavery, we must
conclude that whoever sells his labor to another is a slave to some
degree. While there will always be classes, and so some classes will be
more obviously slaves than others, that one has a less burdensome
chain does not mean he isn’t a slave.

By this, slavery is no evil, but a means of virtue for many individuals.
Those who lack the capability of mastery and unrestricted self-
determination (i.e. can use their freedom to their and their family’s
sustainable benefit) are better off under this kind of slavery, as it
allows those decisions to be made by one wiser. Both the master and
the slave profit by the relationship they form. Were it otherwise, no one
should agree to be a master or slave.

Is it better to be a master? Yes, but only if one has the ability. To he
who has the ability, he should have it.

Within the framework of continuum between slave and sovereign, the
sovereign becomes the one with the most power to enforce his will over
his subjects. His “subjects” become the distributed corps of individuals
and institutions which ultimately owe their fealty to the king, even if
not directly but in an indirect form, much as an employee may be ruled
by a manager who is ruled by an executive. This gives two means for

the establishment of monarchism within a free territory, though it is
likely both would be in effect.

The first is that de facto wage and debt slaves may sell off the right to
quit in making a contract, placing him at a legally disadvantaged
position qua the buyer of the contract. Why should an individual expose
himself to so much risk? Certainly defaulting on the loans would be
less costly than making oneself without legal recourse should the
contract buyer choose to extort his legally indentured servants. An
individual could develop a reputation as a just and wise ruler of his
subjects, making submission to a king under a quasi- or outright feudal
arrangement potentially preferable to eking out a life of poverty under
the crushing cycle of not being able to save enough. The ruler, in
guiding the life of his new subject, provides the service of freeing the
individual in one way at the cost of another liberty, an exchange which
is very potentially equitable if it makes one relatively prosperous.

The second is that of businesses which employ many can choose to be
institutions which support a state institution. Such may come with guild
privileges and the like, if the king chooses to grant them, or they may
come in the establishing of legal privileges for business institutions
unique from personal individuals. I imagine the second path more
likely, though the first is a time tested, if economically less efficient,
means of vesting market power in a ruler.

Both means would consolidate power which, assuming a number of
such individuals within an area prefer to form a peaceable kind of
quasi-oligarchy or aristocratic nobility, could very easily establish a de
facto king with inherited political privilege and the closing of politics
to all who are employed within the codified hierarchy.

Given the possibility of a collapse of democratic forms of government
and the incentives which society faces in such a new power vacuum, it
is likely that the change to monarchical governance would be swift,

within only a few generations, with the democratic past looked upon as
a bizarre aberration of human history.

—

NARCHO-

NSTITUTIONALISM

The topic and idea of anarchism is typically unclear in culture and,
considering all I have said which is apparently in favor of government
or more broadly governance, it is incumbent that I make a number of
clarifications about what anarchism is before I can go on to show how
it coheres under the neoreactionary ideology. Foremost among these is
that anarchism means nothing more than the lack of a government.
Unless otherwise qualified (as the section title is), the advocacy of
anarchism does not necessarily entail the advocacy of social dissolution
and chaos. Anarchism is compatible with virtually everything said
before and after this section, though it does require the willingness to
see that governance is not equivalent to government within an
hierarchical system. An institution may govern without being a
government.

Nor shall this be a thorough defense of anarchism; I leave that to other
works already written and being written. Like all other written here in
this essay, the purpose of expository more than argumentative, the
coalescing of ideas and placing them under an ideological
interpretation.

If anarchism is but the absence of government, then we require a good
definition of government. I will augment a common definition for the
purposes of this paper, giving us that government is “the social
institution which is held by society to have a just monopoly on the just
use of violence within that society.” This definition allows us to see
that fulfilling the actions that governments have historically fulfilled
does not make an institution a government. A mail service can exist
without making any monopolized pronouncements on what constitutes

the just use of force, and so can those organizations dedicated to
enforcing and servicing laws. “Government” in this way becomes
identified not with its enforcers, but its unchallenged claim to be the
only rightful authority for adjudicating disputes over past or potential
future use of force.

All abuses of government in the regulation of macroscale aggression in
society come down to a complicit judicial system, for the judicial
system is the ultimate authority in discerning whether a law is just.
While under constitutional forms of government the theory is that the
judicial branch upholds the constitution which authorizes it, in reality
the constitution is upheld by the judicial branch, rather than the other
way around; what the judicial branch decides as being the canon of
meta-laws on which judgment is pronounced for the justice of laws (of
which all laws are effectively about the just use of force applied to
specific contexts, means, and ends) becomes the content-source for
making decisions by the judges. If the judges reject a particular source,
that source lacks all effect, and it cannot be imposed on them by a
legislative branch, since the workings of the legislative branch
ultimately hinge on whether the judicial branch approves of what they
do. An ousting of the judicial branch could be effected as in a coup
d’état, but then the “military government” in this case simply assumes
itself that authority which the previous judicial branch took on.

This use of “branches” may seem akin to the “division of powers”
accomplished by the US Constitution, and indeed it is. The Founding
Fathers in utilizing explicit branches of government were merely
codifying an observation of how power has always effectively worked
in governments, with the notion that it was to prevent a concentration
of power an elusive intention. In reality, the US Supreme Court
ultimately approved its own authority and its source in the US
Constitution, bootstrapping itself to ultimate rule over the just use of
force within society with the support of a legislative-executive body (I

will note that under my description of government, the legislative and
executive bodies are distributed on a continuum, sometimes even
identical).

As government must be formally identified with this monopoly over
the judicially-approved use of force in society, then anarchism amounts
at least to the dissolution of this monopoly. There may still be
judicially-approved use of force and the regulation of macroscale
aggression without an individual judge or justice organization
arrogating to itself the right to prevent others from providing these
services. A polycentric and/or common body of law may be developed
to adjudicate relations between individuals where force is rightly or
wrongly introduced.

This depends crucially on a level of trust between otherwise competing
justice organizations. Why should there be trust and mutually enforced
contracts between separate legal entities? Why not go to war in order to
establish monopoly? The problem primarily comes down to the matter
of cost. Institutions are incentivized to form because they provide the
possibility to coordinate for group benefits, and this involves the
cooperation of individuals who always face the chance to gain at the
expense of other individuals, with this only becoming a greater
incentive the greater the trust that is required. In order to signal that
one is trustworthy, generally contracts and arrangements are made so
that success and failure are mutually tied together, so that intra-
institutional competition is minimized except where it may be applied
to one of its specific goals. Coming to agreements beforehand with
each other about how disputes shall be arraigned within this context
minimizes the cost of conflict in the case that it does arise, and while
such agreement to have disputes subjected to an objective process may
involve the sacrificing of short term gain, it is to the overall benefit in
the long run as it means even those resources given up in the short run
will be recovered in the long run by not needing to be spent on forcible

means of dispute resolution.

This being the case, separate legal, military, and insurance
organizations (which may be manifest as separate or composite
institutions) have the incentive to make arrangements with each other
that subjects disputes between each other to an agreed upon process so
that the cost of conflict is minimized. To put it very briefly, when an
insurance organization representing a customer handles a dispute with
the customer of another insurance organization, those organizations
have the incentive to have agreed upon procedures for resolving their
disputes. As this is the more-likely profitable model in the long run, the
opportunity for an individual to buy conflict is minimized, as all
legitimate insurance organizations have the incentive to not offer the
service of defending their customers’ crimes and to prevent other
organizations from operating that refuse to agree to arrange means of
dispute resolution. The crime business, considered as the service of
keeping an individual from suffering for the consequences of their
crimes, will still exist much as it does now, though it will also be
considered illegitimate by all legitimate security organizations within
society, minimizing their anti-social effect.

Anarchism must operate, in other words, on the basis of institutions
which limit the range of anti-social actions that may be undertaken by
individuals and organizations and which require arranged means of
dispute resolution. Without institutions, there is no context for
individuals in society to be placed under the incentive to involve
themselves with these dispute resolution centers. But as institutions
codify hierarchy and limit what it is possible for an individual to do in
terms of anti-social action, society may stabilize under the quasi-
oligarchic, rather than monopolistic, regulation of macroscale
aggression.

Oligarchic legal organizations rather than monopolistic legal
organizations have lesser incentive to extort from society the provision

of funds, since the attempt to extort such funds can always be met by a
cabal of organizations that have it in their interest to prevent any
attempts at grabbing all the power for oneself. What society faces
under government is altogether lessened; power is organized more on
the basis of pro-social services rather than anti-social destruction.
Assuming that civilization does not fall into or remain in a failure
mode, this is the arrangement of society which will take place, which I
give the name anarcho-institutionalism.

The monopoly government holds over the regulation of macroscale
aggression allows it to partake in its own forms of macroscale
aggression, which systematically results in the dissolution of social
institutions. It furthermore has the incentive to do this, for in the
resultant dissolution of a kind of institution (e.g. the family) the
vacuum of social services previously fulfilled by that institution
“must” be undertaken by the government. In the very process of
triggering the failures of institutions at providing their intended ends,
the government is able to arrogate to itself those powers, with the only
limit being that of time and technology for how pervasive may its
administrative dissolution of institutions may go.

The government is an essentially anti-social institution, in that its ends
are primarily anti-social. The use of force, or coercion, is by definition
anti-social. This is not to argue that anti-social causes are unjustifiable,
for the dissolution of an organization that has negative production for
society is overall positive. However, where there is the incentive to
gain power in the destruction of other bastions of power, the subtle
shifting of incentives so that individuals have less opportunity or
means or reasons to form non-governmental institutions which
administrate particular kinds of governance, such as the raising and
educating of children, the resolution of disputes, the distribution of
material goods, and so on, and instead the government becomes the
center of all social activity. This produces what has been variously

called the welfare-warfare state, social democratic communism, and
statism. I will call this phenomena the State-Society, for the boundaries
between state-political participation in society and mere participation
in society becomes fraught. Social action eventually just is politics, the
ultimate democratization of all social structures so that what politics
may intervene on is unlimited and the state enjoys truly absolute power
over every facet of society.

An example of the state’s encroachment and dissolution of non-
political spheres of society. The American policy of social security,
which is the public provision of compensation to retirees, works to
dissolve the family by incentivizing less investment by parents in their
children in the forming of family legacies and traditions. If an
individual knows that his welfare past the age of employability is not
dependent on his children, it becomes less important to invest in
instilling into his children the good of caring for one’s parents and the
virtues that would allow the child to be materially successful to that
end. While the clan may have previously taken on the primary
responsibility of caring for its elders, the state in taking on this
responsibility dissolves the binds that tied together the family.

And that is only one example of state policy which leads to the
dissolution of institutions in society. What was previously the primacy
of society becomes the primacy of the state, so that individuals are
more invested in the state ultimately. This only serves to increase the
power of the state and its ability to further dissolve other institutions in
which power (due to the dependency of individuals on these institutions
for their livelihood) is reserved, aggregating it all to itself. Thus the
State-Society which, being collectivist politically results in social
atomization. There is lesser opportunity at all to form relations of
mutual will and civilization must cease to develop to further levels.
Individuals are set against each other; all relations outside that of state-
mediated “society” are constructed to be antagonistic, the proliferation

of prisoner’s dilemmas.

The eventual obsolescence of the state is ideal then because it is
required if institutions are to continue. An aspirational anarchism takes
place; while the material of a society may not be advanced enough to
achieve a distributed form of the regulation of macroscale aggression,
the handicapping of the state becomes an essential element of political
philosophy so that, in the “failure” of the state in providing for some
service, social institutions form to provide that service and
contextualize the benefits for society of these sophisticated instances of
organization. The ultimate hope is not in the “right state” but the “right
institutional structure of society.”

OSMOPOLITANISM AND

THNO-

ATIONALISM

The reactionary take on nationalism is pragmatic rather than deontic.
To use popular language, it embraces nationalism due to practicalities
rather than ideology, though of course my use of ideology in this essay
is quite distinct, so I will explain it in terms of pragmatism over
deontology.

Nationalism is meant not in the sense of state, so it would be unsound
to identify nationalism as a fervor in favor of a particular government;
there are nationalistic governments, and then there are cosmopolitan
governments. Nationalism is defined in terms of ethnicity, and is the
favoring of fewer distinct ethnic groups within a given society.
Segregation between distinct ethnicities of differing cultural mores and
innate psychologies is more nationalistic as compared with a “melting
pot” which has some or many different ethnic individuals being
integrated, either voluntarily or by force, with the result of social
tension or assimilation. Cosmopolitanism by contrast is the integration
of many ethnic groups together.

Favoring nationalism is not supremacist per se. It is only to stipulate
that likes ought to be around other likes; the more that people within a
group are like each other, the fewer psychic and social resources must
be dedicated to the development of Schelling points that provide for
social coordination between relatively unlike people. The more two
individuals are alike in ethnicity, then the more alike in innate
psychology those individuals are; granted there is the distribution of
psychological traits along a multidimensional axis, but within a group
there is a more tightly correlated average, rather than having multiple
groups, each with its own average, attempting to cohere along a flatter
distribution of psychological traits.

To put it most simply, nationalism has an advantage over
cosmopolitanism because it allows for the coordination of institutional
ventures between individuals more easily. The more people within a
population that are alike, the easier it is to empathize, which means it is
easier to negotiate, to trade, to exchange, to interact, to resolve
disputes. The more a person is an other, the less that is known, the
harder it is to empathize, the harder it is to resolve to instances of
common cause. Cosmopolitanism requires additional resources,
additional institutions in order to facilitate peaceable cooperation
between potentially radically different psychologies that differ along
ethnic lines. Securing “in-group” empathy is easier to do if you’re
already ethnically equivalent with the other; if you’re not, then other
means must be secured to establish “in-group” empathy which must be
admitted as an additional cost.

Nationalism is identified not so much with ethnocentrism as a
preference for ethnic segregation by those ethnic groups themselves.
Given an environment in which integration is not incentivized by
various means, be they statist (in which case they are coercive) or
natural (likely the city, for reasons to be explained shortly). “White
nationalism” and “black nationalism” do not depend essentially on any

claims to supremacy, even if it would be easy to understand that such
forces may be motivated by a misguided notion of supremacy (which I
will not rule out even if I do not know how supremacy could be
established). It is taken as a given that people prefer to be around others
more like themselves rather than others more unlike themselves, which
leads to the natural tendency of communities to segregate themselves
by race, class, and history, with integration being a cost undertaken for
other benefits rather than being sought out for itself.

Cosmopolitanism as a contrast involves integration. Integration is a
social phenomenon that is not costless, which is to say that some things
must be given up in order to gain it. Integration, performed
successfully, can have very great benefits, but this integration must be
based on mutual ends sought by individuals from both communities;
otherwise, if they want nothing to do with each other, they cannot be
made to want to do anything with each other and will resist forcible
integration, increasing social tension, racism, and other negative social
phenomena.

It is the anecdotal experience of many that those who are “least racist”
tend to live in highly segregated communities, e.g. white suburban
neighborhoods with low presence of minorities, while those who are
“most racist” are those who live in communities with higher rates of
integration. Why does this occur? It occurs for a very simple reason.
What individuals of an ethnic group are most likely to find preferable
and thus understandable behavior isn’t equivalent between groups,
which leads to behaviors that some groups find acceptable to be odious
among other groups. Some groups which have a higher innate
preference for antagonism for out-groups will act in ways that are
unpleasant to groups that have a lower innate preference for
antagonism of out-groups. Whites, who appear to be more corporate-
minded, are less innately racist in the sense that being a member of
another group is not usually taken as grounds for antagonism to obtain

social proof for one’s in-group. Blacks, on the other hand, may have a
high preference for antagonism as social proof of in-group sentiment,
which leads them to being more innately racist and less pleasant to
whites, with higher rates of anti-white crime and anti-social behavior at
the extremes of this tendency. Allowed to segregate from each other,
each group is confronted less with those behaviors the other finds
odious. A solution to racism, in other words, is to stop forcing
integration, as if it is being around each other which necessarily leads
to empathy rather than mutual antagonism as they disagree with each
other’s use of mutual space. In other words, racism has more utility in
an integrated culture. Allow segregation, a lot of the grounds of racism
disappear.

Given that cosmopolitanism faces certain costs which a more
nationalistic community, why ever would a community or population
be more cosmopolitan? Cosmopolitanism likewise has its own benefits
which nationalism cannot secure. Given a difference in aptitude to
various skills and preferences by distinct ethnic groups, there is an
advantage to trade between the groups as it utilizes the division of labor
along the lines of absolute and comparative advantages. Some of these
instances of comparative advantage may be asymmetric, some may be
vocationally equivalent. We might suppose that autists are innately best
at programming while extroverts are best at public relations; it then
becomes advantageous for them to overcome the natural level of
antagonism in order to take advantage of a vocationally equivalent
comparative advantage. On the other hand, races of low intelligence
may be systematically more likely to take on service vocations, freeing
up more individuals from smarter races to partake in information
vocations; rather than one group being subjected by the other due to
forcible integration, integration under the common cause of mutual
benefit actually serves to facilitate empathy. Integration occurs, in
other words, due to the common cause certain groups have, with the
result of incentivizing lower innate and behavioral antagonism to out-

groups.

This analysis is removed from moralizing, amounting to no more than
sociological observation tied to realistic consequences of these facts.
There is a bounty of evidence demonstrating innate out-group
antagonistic tendencies. On the other hand, there is no necessary moral
good in going beyond one’s own innate biases to integrate oneself with
those of other groups. There is a very real danger in comingling with
groups one doesn’t know anything about, so the bias to stick to one’s
own kind, including their own genetic kind, is an effective and
rationally defensible coping mechanism for the uncertainties of life.
Likewise, for those who are able to find profit in mingling with other
groups, then that is their profit. There is however no intrinsic good or
evil either way about one’s innate nationalistic or cosmopolitan
psychological makeup. Some people just prefer the rural lifestyle and
some people just prefer the city lifestyle. It is a preference no more
significant than liking chocolate over vanilla, or vice versa.

What people are worried about, and so emphasize their “anti-racist”
beliefs as compensation, is that some people’s lack of preference or at
least high tolerance for people of other groups leads to racism. Taking
people outside of an environment in which they are perpetually told
how other groups are just as good as theirs and that the experience of
others is legitimate, so the worry goes, and allow them to place
themselves in environments where there is no pressure to signal anti-
racist beliefs will make them actually racist, with attendant oppression
of those groups in that person’s action. This overlooks that being
forcibly integrated in addition to being told that your finding the
behaviors of other groups odious makes you a bad person is just more
likely to make a person tune out reasonable anti-racist messages. The
notion that only white people can be racist, or at least that the innate
racism of other groups is acceptable and understandable whereas the
bland racism of whites is not, is typically understood as a preposterous

notion foisted on integrated whites by self-segregated whites who deny
the legitimacy of interaction with the odious behaviors of other groups.

The suggestion is less that racism can be solved by any single means, if
there is anything that can be done to entirely eliminate it, but that it
isn’t improved by denying the legitimacy of differing opinions about
the behaviors of other groups. There will be clashes between cultures,
and if you have only as many contact points between different cultures
facilitated by actual common cause (e.g. business as I expect in most
cases) rather than manufactured interaction with the purpose of forcing
to appreciate something they have no disposition towards, and
implicitly denying the validity of white identity and culture compared
to others, this is no solution to racism, but the identification of the
problem of racism with a scapegoat group (i.e. whites) is certainly only
a redirection of that racism.

Some more radical factions with neoreaction may have worries over
my unwillingness to defend outright racism, rather than mere racial
realism and rational prejudices. I am perhaps more optimistic that,
given a lack of forcible integration, some level of integration between
those who are willing may be allowed. Distinct cultures and ethnicities
possess legitimate experiences and predispositions which may be
usefully evaluated, even potentially adopted. As supposed above, I
imagine these will be in the cities, which will be more cosmopolitan,
which may be considered a hierarchy between those more disposed to
nationalist (in my sense) communities and those more disposed to
cosmopolitan life.

This is not on the basis of a “live and let live” mentality, as is found in
the rightly criticized modern libertarianism, but to draw out alternative
and competing goods. Nationalism and cosmopolitanism each possess
various benefits not available to the other, and to those who are able to
obtain them, they should be free to do so. The opposition is to neither
self-segregation or self-integration, but forcible segregation and

forcible integration. Both are the same kind of mistake. Ethnic
identities come in various flavors, with some being more nationalist
and some more cosmopolitan. Assuming the legitimacy of divergent
ethnic experiences, there is nothing that should stop groups mingling
together or dispersing as they see fit.

Such a view brings the forcible colonization of other cultures into
question. Even if is the case that the colonized culture is better off for
it, a softer form of colonization, predicated on the basis of mutually
chosen exchange, is preferable in that it is less destructive of cultivated
traditions in the colonized culture. Given the traditions being replaced
are inferior to the imported cultural manifestations of tradition, the free
integration of a mutually exchanged culture is more likely to produce
sustainable traditions, in the establishment of new institutions and their
own traditions and the augmenting of pre-existent traditions to a form
more adaptable to the new cultural context.

—

RADITION AND THE

ETURN OF

HRISTENDOM

Religion is a useful vehicle of social engineering. Its cosmology, its
prescriptions and proscriptions, its accumulation of power in elitist
institutions (e.g. the Vatican), these all tend to make it poised to
provide a readymade and persistently defended worldview which
results in a greater potential degree of social coordination. Pro-social
morals couched in mythological and religious language led to the rise
of civilization, and virtually all comprehensive social movements
partake of a religious soteriological posture. Religious institutions
which last over time must provide evolutionary benefits to its
adherents, and their focus on eternity instills the lowest average time
preference compared to other institutions. This leads to extremely
sophisticated structures of governance that allows it to ride out
centuries-long periods of decline, even allowing it a high likelihood of

surviving complete social collapse, as witnessed with the Roman
Catholic Church in the West following the decline of the Roman
Empire.

Christendom of course refers to the superstructural makeup of
Medieval Europe; in other words, it is the Catholic Middle Ages
equivalent to the modern American Cathedral. The proposal by
traditionalists to return a higher degree of moral power to the
institution of the Church is an embrace of the means of the Cathedral.
Some are wary of supporting another superstructure, but this occurs
under the mistaken assumptions that superstructures are necessarily
negative for society and that a highly coordinated level of social capital
can occur without a superstructure. There would be others who prefer a
secular, albeit reactionary, superstructure.

My answer to the latter group is brief: religious institutions such as the
Catholic Church lower the overall time preference of civilization. Not
only are the religious institutions themselves remarkably future-
oriented, but they instill values and mores within society that are also
beneficial for rewarding greater future-orientedness. A religious
superstructure must then have sufficiently low time-preference to
foster sustainable socioeconomic arrangements and diminish the
likelihood and scale of destructive social movements.

It is furthermore questionable whether a “secular superstructure” is
even formally possible. Without a very broad all-encompassing
common cause, coordinating the actions of powerful institutions is very
difficult. We may only care to distinguish between those ideologies
which are materialistic in common cause or spiritual. A secular
superstructure must at least take on a religious posturing, with the
attendant blind spots and prejudices in the faithful. The point at which a
“secular” context becomes a totalizing narrative about the ultimate
purpose of the individual and mankind, it may best be called a religion,
whether or not it refers to classical staples of religious worldviews such

as God or the supernatural.

There may be the worry over whether religion is (in any way) true, and
the desire that people shouldn’t be placed under pressure to be
religious. I think the concern with indoctrination is over-stated. Not
only are the vast majority of people susceptible to indoctrination, this
vast majority can’t even obtain a modicum of moral agency without
being effectively indoctrinated. Whether this indoctrination comes
from preachers or teachers does not matter. The prevalence of near-
universal education in post-industrial countries is testament to the fact
that with increased material prosperity, a greater degree of
socialization is requisite for a person to keep up with change. One
might note the inter-generational gaps in culture brought about by the
lack of socialization into digital media of generations older than 40.

Some may say this is a depressing picture. It is this which makes the
long timescale of civilization possible, as it means a people are
generally self-regulating. A civilization of philosopher-kings is not
only unrealistic, it is undesirable. A high ratio of exceptional
individuals within a society who obtain some level of sovereignty from
and over the process of socialization would result not in an abundance
of pro-social institutions, but the dissolution of institutions as these
individuals resist any process that would serve to socialize them.
Thankfully, no society is even remotely near that ratio.

While this natural complicity and complacency of mass man with the
reigning superstructure does permit abuse, it may also be used to
society’s own benefit. This is the goal of introducing a religious
superstructure. Religious worldviews, unlike secular worldviews,
provide cohesive moral injunctions for a people to follow, founded in
static texts and traditions. The secular view provides no basis for the
development of a tradition, as it admits no necessary group charged
with ritualizing power relations. Ritual is a Schelling point which
secularism must deny.

It is a modernist to have undue sentiment for the mass man, as though
he can or should be raised from his state of thorough socialization.
However, it must be pointed out that socialization is a requisite to a
person obtaining moral agency. Void authoritative, i.e. non-reasons
based, instruction, the individual simply does not learn how to move in
society. To be treated as an independent moral agent as a child would
be disastrous for the child, yet the child does not gain his independence
until is taught to him through social stimulus. A mature individual is a
socialized individual.

The socialized individual may be contrasted with the sovereign
individual who has been socialized but who, due to an internal will,
embraced his worldview on the basis of independently found reasons.
The differences between the socialized and sovereign individual are
most obvious when the socialized individual, in defending the
perceived status quo (or perceived counterculture), relies not merely on
fallacious reasoning, but on social and subjective reasons.

Given the socialized individual rarely amounts to more than the sum of
his own socially constructed person, it brings focus from that of
bringing about change through more democratic and mass populist
movements to capturing the superstructure and beginning to alter the
process of socialization as it concretely occurs. The democratic people
can only be rallied if they already agree to your ideology, so it is a
waste of time to try and convert everyone from the ground up. When
neoreaction asks a person to stop embracing comfortable fictions, will
they? The more socialized they are, the less they are sovereign, the less
chance they will stick to neoreaction when it comes to making
sacrifices. Only if a person can tell that the reigning process of
socialization has harmed them will they become more susceptible to
effective conversion, though optimism should be tempered as to the
potential depth of their articulated opinions.

Christendom, and by which I mean specifically a Catholic

superstructure, may only be able to rise again following a collapse. I
personally have little sympathy for Protestantism, as it is ideologically
opposed to reaction. Above I equated Protestantism with spiritual
egalitarianism, predicated on the rejection of spiritually privileged
positions within the Church. Within a reactionary society Protestants
would be in the same position as conservatives within a modernist
society; ideologically compromised. I do not mean to extend a polemic
within this text, but it must be understood that a superstructure which
includes a monolithic institution can achieve more comprehensive
social coordination. The nearest Protestant equivalent of the Catholic
Church might be the Anglican Church, which does take an ideological
leadership of mainline denominations, though clearly its tendencies are
contrary to what we’d hope to see, which establishes the true
ideological bent of Protestantism.

Tradition is far more than what has been done before. It is a social-
historical context which provides the means of beneficial perpetuity
which ties together the future with the past. By definition, a tradition
must benefit perpetuity, for a tradition is simply that which is passed
down through generations, including not only its means of transmission
but the end of transmission. If the notion of “anti-tradition” makes
sense, it must be identified with materialistic nihilism, the pursuit of an
individual’s pleasure without planning for perpetuity. Understood as
such, it is easy to see that the modern age is not only untraditional, it is
anti-traditional. Fewer individuals than ever before are having
children, and those who do remain more focused on their own
materialistic pursuits than the education of their own children and the
transmission of a continuity from their own past to the future. Anti-
tradition is equivalent to memetic stillbirth. While judgment may be
passed on anti-tradition for the conceit of nihilism and the destruction
of the future of one’s own, it is a mercy that from the evolutionary
social-historical perspective nihilism is always maladaptive to the
social environment in the long run. A people that turns its back on its

life-giving and life-preserving traditions is bound for ruin, either at its
own hands or the hands of another.

Traditionalism in this context is a description of the kind of memes
which are passed down through families and guarded by them. This is
on one hand not a mere defense of tradition for tradition’s sake, in the
style of Burke, dependent as it is on an anti-rationalism as though
governance and society are beyond understanding. The sake of
traditionalism is for lowering time preference, so that all, not only the
patriarch whose incentives are naturally guided in this way, are
incentivized to place themselves into a social context in which the end
is something outside themselves while providing an end to their own
lives as well. Whereas anti-tradition is a nihilistic game of
accumulating material and social goods without the intent of it placing
the individual in a larger context, traditionalism is the preference for
roles unchosen but assumed which link one together to his ancestors
and progeny.

Catholic traditionalism is only to say that the traditions of a society,
passed on in its respective institutions, are marked by an essentially
Catholic character, and unite the traditions under the good of Christian
life. It is my own preference and belief that it is far more sustainable
than non-Catholic, even if they are Protestant Christian, traditions,
though I leave it to those unpersuadable to Catholicism to determine
their own optimal arrangements of tradition.

The point of an overarching context of traditions, a kind of super-
tradition as it were, is in order to foster greater overall cohesion in
society. The development of traditions outside this super-traditional
context may lead to the production of mutually exclusive traditions,
instilling more division between groups and disrupting the potential
coordination of society into institutions and superstructure. What
would be preferred of a super-tradition is the grounding of rules that
makes traditions mutually compatible, instilling cooperation even

between formally opposed groups.

Ultimately, tradition is the most abstract vagary of neoreaction, yet
also the most important, for it alone could tie together the vagaries into
a cohesive social political philosophy. It would do so by introducing
each new individual into contexts of cohesive social cooperation which
are greater than the individual and instill the value of that individual’s
end in providing their contribution to perpetuity. This is at a contrast to
the present, in which most are instilled into a lifetime pursuit of the
accumulation of material goods, placing economic goods above all
others, which has lent itself to the resultant nihilism of those who select
themselves from the honor of reproduction. This is why I am at once
skeptical of the feasibility of secular traditions and must insist on the
preferability of religious traditions, even to those who think religion is
but an obsolete misunderstanding of the fundamental nature of the
world. A totalizing narrative, which is uniquely a property of religions,
can provide a coherent narrative for all groups of people within a
society, from slave, master, man, woman, child, black, white, rich, or
poor, facilitating their cooperation and peace with their place in the
hierarchy.

—

EACTION?

OW?

It is called ‘neoreaction’ in the sense that this isn’t the first instance of
reaction. That would be true, but the previous instances of reaction are
not historical, they are ideological. In other words, what makes this a
“new form of reaction” is that it is truly a new form of reaction. It goes
outside the bounds of modernist ideology and gets at something
entirely original, a whole new premise of social organization. This is
not a mere conservatism, but a conservatism guided by unique
principles that diagnose and transcend the occult motivation of the
Zeitgeist. It is that which allows it to be a true contender, rather than

merely a perspective which may be ultimately re-negotiated in the
stoogifying complex a well-adapted idea-species ought, wherein dissent
is allowed and actively developed, provided it does not ever amount to
a true challenge against the occult motivation.

In one sense it the refusal to dialogue with modernism that allows
neoreaction to develop, for the very idea of modernism is that dialogue
only occurs in the case that one accepts its presuppositions about the
good of equality and the dissolution of historically fundamental
institutions in the name of such a pursuit. Seeing that equality costs so
much, the neoreactionary opts instead for the secure foundation of
natural society, Nature and Nature’s God as it has been called. The
willingness to ask certain questions with a view to actually pursuing
their answers without pausing to consider what one was taught to hope
and to see opens the mind to a reality which has otherwise been
precluded, so it is no wonder that it should be called a Dark
Enlightenment. What has been forgotten has been remembered,
recovered, and now it is the wonder of how to reform.

From the reactionary perspective, modernism is not merely a mistake.
It poses a fundamental threat to human flourishing. Embraced at the
global level, which it has not yet accomplished, it would lead to endless
decline, only being thrown off after the depths of another dark age. If it
is the fate of humanity to endlessly come back to modernist ideology,
then humankind is a failure mode, of which only an enlightened few
can ever see man’s cyclical fate. Such is a possibility, yet we must
labor under the hope that modernism is not the necessary fate of human
civilization, and the misappropriation of power as it currently goes on
may be righted so that human flourishing again becomes the product of
civilization.

If this project of social theory may be described from that turn, it is
that society must be undertaken anew each generation. It is contrary to
the modernist conceit of progress in that it does not suppose whatever

changes are imposed will never prevent civilization from rising to ever-
higher levels. Free of the supposition that progress must happen as
though it were an iron-bound law of the universe, it is able to consider
the hypothesis that this superstructure is not the final or ideal
superstructure. Where the modernist sees the end of history, the
reactionary only sees an ongoing process for which the ideal form of
society is contingent on the givens of environment, people, and history.

Yet a skepticism remains. Losing the deluded modern optimism about
mass man, those who are ruled by power shall not fundamentally
understand the means by which they are ruled. The reasons given here
are, even if syntactically open to understanding by those who are ruled,
the mass do not want to understand power for they should only have to
understand that they are influenced in ways beyond their own
comprehension, negating their own moral agency. Furthermore, to the
extent that they understand, it may only instill a loathing in them of
their rulers, for in not understanding the justice of their rule they think
the placement of one group over another in the hierarchy is arbitrary,
baseless. What makes the rich, rich? According to an overwhelming
number of the poor, it is due to accident. What makes the poor, poor?
According to an overwhelming number of the rich, it is due to lesser
capability. Which of these groups is right? What perspective is most in
line with the truth? There is a chance that either group perceives an
aspect of reality which the other doesn’t, or maybe aspect the other
misses doesn’t matter to them. What matters more is whether they can
be provided narratives which contextualize their relations peaceably, in
order that social coordination isn’t disrupted.

The individual ends of reactionaries are not all presently unified, and it
would be a miracle outside all hope for splintering political division to
never occur. Each will in his own political philosophy take himself to
represent the authentic intent of reaction. It does not seem possible to
argue over who is the “true political heir” of reaction, and I won’t take

a side on the issue. It seems equally pointless to try and argue that
communists or feminists are the “true political heirs” of modernity.
The heart of the matter is whether the ideological bent of civilization
aims either at flourishing or destruction, and reactionaries are agreed
that political philosophies subsisting under the ideology of neoreaction
shall better secure the future than the current hegemony of modernism.

What is the practical future of reaction? The future construction of the
ideology seems well-secured already, and though it would be
impossible to predict what specific intellectual developments shall take
place (at least without actually making those developments). The
notion to “do something” has been gaining traction between the like-
minded reactionaries, though I must confess the potential to save the
system from its decline is dubious, at least not without it being a
compromise that would only serve to extend the decline and, by
extension, the time at which recovery would occur. A sooner collapse
may be preferable on the grounds that rebuilding with less mis-
allocated capital and a less comprehensively indoctrinated population
is easier. A later collapse may be preferable in that it would allow us
more comfort within which to perform our reactionary analyses in
preparing for taking the future following the decline. Or an entirely
unthought of strategy may be developed; practical politics is not my
own specialty and I leave it to others to formulate practical principles.

My inability to postulate the future of reaction aside, I can still make
some estimates about the appeal of reactionary views to the youth of
our modern cultures. My own entry to neoreaction was through the
sexual realism of the androcentric blogosphere, particularly via its
efficacy with predicting human behavior in social settings. This
particular route has been undertaken by many, though there are
naturally other routes as well, typically through some given vagary
discussed above. The general character of these conversions I take to be
the disillusionment with the promises of modernism. Insofar as

modernism may be understood as a kind of social contract which
promises certain rewards for certain behaviors, the process in which it
is discovered that the hypotheses modernism engenders about the
working of society come to be falsified by actual lived experience
makes reaction a peculiarly anti-modernist ideology. With respect to
the desire to actually repeal the political mistakes of the last decades, it
becomes quickly apparent that the entire project of the Enlightenment
was flawed, which itself was born in the radical spiritual egalitarianism
of Luther. A justification to repeal modernism must itself utilize ideas
and principles which are vehemently un-modern, perhaps even
premodern or postmodern, which leads to the discovery of the alternate
ideological system of reaction, which gives an expression and rational
voice to the occult motivation undiagnosed by modern political
philosophies.

What precisely explains this jump from only one ideology to another?
Why don’t we see this disillusionment resulting in the rediscovery and
development of diverse new ideologies?

The all-encompassing nature of ideology is the key to the answer.
There are only two ideologies; modernism and reaction. This also
explains the leftward-rightward division. Although political philosophy
is multidimensional, ideology describes a more general kind of
phenomena, the phenomena of civilization. To augment an oft-used
reactionary analogy, ideology is the virus which inhabits the host
society and, being better adapted, perpetuates itself on the host; where
this appears to draw a distinction between host (society) and virus
(memeplex), I would say there is no distinction. Civilization just is
ideology; ideology not only grounds the possibility of civilization, it
does so by providing the idea of civilization which it becomes. The
overall possibility of civilization is inherent in the question “What is
justice?” the answer to which yields your ideology. A political
philosophy is only a rationalization of that ideological impulse. The

modernist answers the question “Treating like as like, and all are like”
while the reactionary answers “Treating like as like, and none are like.”
Each in taking this answer not only views the other’s answer as being
wrong, but senseless. Both have equivalent definitions of justice and
equality, but the senses are distinct in the evaluative methodology the
ideology uses to analyze the constitution of society.

History only goes in two directions with respect to flourishing;
sustainably better or unsustainably worse. By definition, a system
which is unsustainable must be getting worse in the long-run, whether
this occurs due to outright destruction or the accumulation of time
preference heightening memes. Whether or not flourishing is
increasing or decreasing comes down only to the social political factors
of society, for all social action is constrained by ideology.

Friedrich Nietzsche, though he’d certainly object to his being used in
this way, speaks prophetically of the clash between modern thought and
the world’s actual nature:

In all the countries of Europe, and in America, too, there now is
something that abuses this name: a very narrow, imprisoned,
chained type of spirits who want just about the opposite of what
accords with our intentions and instincts - not to speak of the fact
that regarding the new philosophers who are coming up they must
assuredly be closed windows and bolted doors. They belong,
briefly and sadly, among the levelers - these falsely so-called
“free spirits” - being eloquent and prolifically scribbling slaves of
the democratic taste and its “modern ideas”; they are all human
beings without solitude, without their own solitude, clumsy good
fellows whom one should not deny either courage or respectable
decency - only they are unfree and ridiculously superficial, above
all in their basic inclination to find in the forms of the old society
as it has existed so far just about the cause of all human misery
and failure - which is a way of standing truth happily upon her

head! What they would like to strive for with all their powers is
the universal green-pasture happiness of the herd, with security,
lack danger, comfort, and an easier life for everyone; the two
songs and doctrines which they repeat most often “equality of
rights” and “sympathy for all that suffers” - and suffering itself
they take for something that must be abolished. We opposite men,
having opened our eyes and conscience to the question where and
how the plant “man” has so far grown most vigorously to a height
- we think that this has happened every time under the opposite
conditions, that to this end the dangerousness of his situation must
first grow to the point of enormity, his power of invention and
simulation (his “spirit”) had to develop under prolonged pressure
and constraint into refinement and audacity, his life - will had to
be enhanced into an unconditional power will. We think that
hardness, forcefulness, slavery, danger in the alley and the heart,
life in hiding, stoicism, the art of experiment and devilry of every
kind, that everything evil, terrible, tyrannical in man, everything
in him that is kin to beasts of prey and serpents, serves the
enhancement of the species “man” as much as its opposite does.
Indeed, we do not even say enough when we say only that much;
and at any rate we are at this point, in what we say and keep silent
about, at the other end from all modem ideology and herd
desiderata - as their antipodes perhaps?

Taking on Nietzsche for ourselves, would not the slave morality, if it
must be equated to some group in history, be not the modernists? The
notion that the hierarchy which places the slave at bottom and the
master at top under modernism is effectively inverted, where now the
natural master works for the benefit of the natural slaves, the betters for
their lesser. This must necessarily lead to the diminishing of
flourishing, as the lesser are no longer directed to production by the
social simulacra of power, the message distributed through all forms of
social access and the betters who would are cut down while the system

works itself to the point of exhaustion and beyond, settling into
collapse.

Maybe it is the reason for our eventual success, maybe it is a fatal flaw,
but this limits the necessity of winning over the mass of the public. Our
reasons do not need to be brought down to the level of mass
consumption, and indeed they couldn’t be. Who in the modern day,
invested in the false consciousness of self-esteem, would accept his
natural state as a slave of some degree? Reaction is incompatible with
cultural democracy in the same way capitalism is rendered
incompatible with cultural Marxism. Neoreaction is an understanding
reserved for a few, though its effects would be felt by all.

Catechism of the Catholic Church. Paragraph 35.

This is the hypothesis of the one and only hbd*chick.

Kydland, Finn E. and Prescott, Edward C. Rules Rather than

Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plans. The Journal of
Political Economy, Volume 85, Issue 3 (June 1977), p. 473-492.

Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae. Paragraph 17.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Translated by Kaufman, Walter. Beyond Good

and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Part 1, paragraph 44.

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