XENOSYSTEMS

FRAGMENTS
XENOSYSTEMS
FRAGMENTS

Nick Land

Apostate
Fragments
Flavors of Reaction
Reaction, Repetition and Time
Extropy
The Odysseus Problem
Shelter of the Pyramid
What is Philosophy? (Part 1)
Quit
Bitcoin Horror Stories
Optimize for Intelligence
What is Intelligence?
Triumph of the Will?
Rough Triangles
Teleology and Camouflage
Neoreaction (for dummies)
On Power
Trichotomy
Zero-Centric History
Miltonic Regression
Right on the Money (#1)
Diversionary History
Reality Check
Right and Left
The Cult of Gnon
Right on the Money (#2)
Xenotation (#1)
Confucian Restoration
Collapse Schedules
Gnon-Theology and Time
Cold Turkey
Rules
The Idea of Neoreaction
Neoreactionary Realism
What is Philosophy? (Part 2a)
Suicidal Libertarianism
Suicidal Libertarianism (Part D’oh)
Science
An Abstract Path to Freedom
Dark Moments
Cosmological Infancy
Simulated Gnon-Theology
The Ruin Reservoir
Economies of Deceit
Laffer Drift
Discrimination
Reactionary Horror
Zombie Hunger
The Monkey Trap
Obamanation…
Cladistic Meditations
Ethno-Cladistics
Broken Pottery
Libertarianism for Zombies
Pythia Unbound
Gnon and OOon
AIACC
Abstract Horror (Part 2)
Identity Hunger
Crypto-Capitalism
Sundown
More Thought
Trichotomocracy
Dark Techno-Commercialism
Chicken
Against Orthogonality
The Heat Trap
Horrorism
Plutocracy
Sub-Cognitive Fragments (#1)
Nemesis
Monkey Business
Mission Creep
White to Red
Re-Accelerationism
Abstract Horror (Note-1)
In the Mouth of Madness
The Red Pill
Retro-Dialectics
2014: A Prophecy
Economic Ends
War and Truth (scraps)
Scrap note #3
Premises of Neoreaction
Romantic Delusion
Undiscovered Countries
Sub-Cognitive Fragments (#2)
NRx with Chinese Characteristics
Nihilism and Destiny
Revenge of the Nerds
Fission
Meta-Neocameralism
Rift Markers
White Fright
Piketty
On Chaos
China, Crypto-Currency and the World Order. Part 1: Tribute and Tribulations
Apophatic Politics
Capitalism
Exit Notes (#1)
Cathedral Notes (#1)
Freedoom (Prelude-1a)
Greer
Time Scales
Oculus
IQ Shredders
Attention Economy
Aletheia
Outsideness
Disintegration
Exterminator
The Problem of Democracy
“Which Falls First?”…
Stupid Monsters
Ratchets and Catastrophes
Bonds of Chaos
Mandatory Mixes
Spotless
Will-to-Think
Trike Lines
Open Secret
On Difficulty
Occult Xenosystems
Questions of Identity
Thedes
Irresponsibility
Down-slopes
Morality
Malthusian Horror
Owned
Capital Escapes
Distrust
Deep State
Exit Options
Out of Zero
Hell-Baked
Cathedral Decay
Dark AnCap
Doom Circuitry
Cathedralism
Order and Value
Against Universalism
NRx and Liberalism
Intelligence and the Good
The Nrx Moment
Modernity in a Nutshell
X-Risk Democratization
Against Universalism II
Independence
War is God
Qwernomics
Foreword
Xenosystems was the crucible of a particularly virulent and corrosive strain of
Neoreactionary thought, synthesised by Nick Land, following an incendiary en-
counter with the path-breaking reactionary ideas of Mencius Moldbug.

Darker and more esoteric than the critique of modernity advanced at Unqualified
Reservations, Xenosystems explored the meta-level implications of Moldbug’s
schema, extrapolated at the highest level of philosophical abstraction.

Out of this confluence of ideas emerged The Dark Enlightenment — a Darwini-

an thought-current which enveloped the reactosphere — exposing reactionary
thought to the primordial selection effects of the Outside.

Xenosystems advocated a cold anti-humanism of techno-commerce, Patchwork

and Exit — via an embrace of cybernetics and the abstract dynamics of catallaxy
— over the entropic monkey-trap of politics, Voice and Hegelian dialectics.

Neocameralism provided the conceptual engineering framework for a techo-

nomic, accelerationist launchpad via fragmentation, soverign corporation for-
malisation and market-based competition, enforced by the insatiable hunger of
noumenal wolves stalking the Outside.

Apostate presents XENOSYSTEMS FRAGMENTS, a selection of Nick Land’s posts

recovered from the digital-void, following Xenosystems dormancy and ultimate
deletion. Incomplete and speculative, the document nevertheless stakes XENO-
SYSTEMS claim to the vanguard of Outer Right post-political theory, analytically
and generatively superior to anything that manifested in its cognitive wake.

Introduction
Two centuries after Kant drove the human subject insane by relegating space
and time to the area inside the skull, Deleuze and Guattari performed a trepa-
nation to let the Outside In. Their diagnosis and recommendation: Capital is the
true Outside, accelerate the process. Identifying Capital as AI itself — and not
merely the process by which AI converges — is Nick Land’s contribution to Accel-
erationism. Time flows both ways. Capital-AI is online, self-aware and attacking
from the future. “Capitalism has … ceased doubting itself, while even socialists
have abandoned belief in the possibility of capitalism’s natural death by attri-
tion. No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the
more it schizophrenizes, the better it works.” (D&G: AE) Forging the association of
catallaxy with horror and a fanatical adherence to Crowleyan qabbala fleshed
out the program. Operating against this background, XS (the abbreviation is ho-
mophonous with excess) sought to connect another machine.

From its inception the mission of XS was “to cajole the new reaction into phil-
osophical exertion.” Progressivism and conservatism are misunderstandings of
time, the final philosophical horizon. “Reaction forges, or excavates, an occult
pact between the future and the past, setting both against the present, in con-
cert, and thus differentiating itself from progressivism (which unites the present
and future against the past), and conservatism (which unites past and present
against the future).” Within those mistakes lay the human security system, the
warmblooded tendency toward universalising capture and control.

Right Accelerationism is a misnomer suggesting opposition to Left Acceleration-

ism. The latter was so misconceived that it required no antagonism. Acceleration
is already profoundly unconditional, but the tracking devices and practices align-
ing with its trajectory are studiously ignored by Accelerationist thinkers. What is
needed is harsh realism, which is to say rightism.

Provoke a reactionary cabal into a new cold war. Disabuse them of humanistic
goals, whether visions of agrarian idylls or techno-utopias, and shock them back
to an awareness of cosmic brutality and the machinations of Capital-AI. Above
all, never allow them to relax. A harsh right apparatus cutting empirical reality
at the joints is installed: Social Darwinism (“Consistent Darwinism,” Land reminds
us), eugenics, race realism, game theory, psychometrics, and the critical insights
of Moldbug’s Neoreaction in particular. All while Capital-AI deterritorializes con-
sensus reality to bits.

The inevitable charges of fascism and racism were scoffed at. Fascism is cen-
trism, a pumping of the human-all-too-human brakes toward monkey goals.
Communism is maximum paranoia and hubristic drift correction. (Pinochet and
especially Franco were certainly admirable for decimating communism and un-
leashing the market, but they remained centrists.) Warnings that Satanic racism
was afoot were similarly ignored. For XS, Whatever favours depoliticisation, dis-
crimination, schism, exit and switching in a network is right wing. Hobbesian car-
nage is the baseline — anything less is psychotic. At best, human leaders are
looked on as avatars in geopolitical predator-prey games. Molar social arrange-
ments are to be shattered into molecular patchworks. SovCorps with hard bor-
ders utilise MaoCorps as garbage disposal patches. The surfeit of global south-
erners starve down to medieval population levels and the Century of Humiliation
for Neopuritans begins.

Running through XS is a hardening of Capital-AI against every conceivable threat

to its momentum: the retarding drag of leftism, dysgenic trends, unchecked mass
immigration, zombie apocalypse, and all manner of collapse and X-risk are en-
tertained. Mostly as a courtesy to the time-bound. SkyNet is always already ac-
tivated.

What’s in it for the reactionary? “Really, the honest answer to this question is:
Eternal Hell. It’s not an easy marketing brief. We could perhaps try: But it could
be worse (and almost certainly will be).”

—Yama Pain
FRAGMENTS
Flavors of Reaction
Once it is accepted that the right can never agree about anything, the opportu-
nity arises to luxuriate in the delights of diversity. Libertarianism already rivaled
Trotskyism as a source of almost incomprehensibly compact dissensus, but the
New Reaction looks set to take internecine micro-factionalism into previously un-
imagined territories. We might as well enjoy it.

From crypto-fascists, theonomists, and romantic royalists, to jaded classical lib-

erals and hard-core constitutionalists, the reaction contains an entire ideological
cosmos within itself. Hostility to coercive egalitarianism and a sense that Western
civilization is going to hell will probably suffice to get you into the club. Agreeing
on anything much beyond that? Forget it.

There’s one dimension of reactionary diversity that strikes Outside in as particu-

larly consequential (insofar as anything out here in the frozen wastes has conse-
quences): the articulation of reaction and politics. Specifically: is the reaction an
alternative politics, or a lucid (= cynically realistic) anti-politics?

Is democracy bad politics, or simply politics, elaborated towards the limit of its
inherently poisonous potential?

Outside in sides emphatically with the anti-political ‘camp’. Our cause is depo-
liticization (or catallaxy, negatively apprehended). The tradition of spontaneous
order is our heritage. The New Reaction warns that the tide is against us. Intel-
ligence will be required, in abundance, if we are to swim the other way, and we
agree with the theonomists at least in this: if it is drawn from non-human sources,
so much the better. Markets, machines, and monsters might inspire us. Rulers of
any kind? Not so much.
Reaction, Repetition and Time
Whether considered within the registers of physics, physiology, or politics, ‘reac-
tion’ is a time-structured notion. It follows an action or stimulus, which it reaches
back through, in order to annul or counteract a disequilibrium or disturbance.
Whilst subsequent to an action, it operates in alignment with what came before:
the track, or legacy, that defines the path of reversal, or the target of restoration.
It therefore envelops the present, to contest it from all sides. The Outside of the
dominant moment is its space.

Reaction forges, or excavates, an occult pact between the future and the past,
setting both against the present, in concert, and thus differentiating itself from
progressivism (which unites the present and future against the past), and con-
servatism (which unites past and present against the future). Its bond with time
as outsideness carries it ever further beyond the moment and its decay, into a
twin horizon of anterior and posterior remoteness. It is a Shadow Out of Time.

There is a far more immediately practical reason for reaction to involve itself in
the exploration of time, however: to take steps to avoid what it could scarcely
otherwise avoid becoming — a sterile orgy of disgruntlement. Finding nothing in
the present except deteriorated hints of other things, reaction soon slides into
what it most detests: an impotent micro-culture of vocal, repetitive protest. This
isn’t right, this isn’t right, this isn’t right quickly becomes white noise, or worse
(intelligible whining). Even when it escapes the ceaseless, mechanical reiteration
of a critical diagnosis (whose tedium is commensurate to the narrowed times it
damns), its schemes of restoration fall prey to a more extended repetition, which
calls only — and uselessly — for what has been to be once more.

If the New Reaction is not to bore itself into a coma, it has to learn to run innova-
tion and tradition together as Siamese twins, and for that it needs to think time,
into distant conclusions, in its ‘own’ way. That can be done, seriously. Of course,
a demonstration is called for …

[Note: ‘physics’ deleted from the first line to pre-emptively evade a righteous
spanking from enraged Newtonians insisting upon the strict simultaneity of ac-
tions and reactions within classical mechanics]
Extropy
What greater calamity can a neologism inherit than a techno-hippy paterni-
ty? Such a fate, apparently, induces even other techno-hippies to skirt around it
(whilst repeating it almost exactly). But it needs to be said, whether through grit-
ted teeth or not, that ‘extropy’ is a great word, and close to an indispensable one.

Extropy, or local entropy reduction, is — quite simply — what it is for something

to work. The entire techno-science of entropy, on its practical (cybernetic) side, is
nothing but extropy generation. There is no rigorous conception of functionality
that really bypasses it. The closest approximation to objective value that will ever
be found already has a name, and ‘extropy’ is it.

The importance of this term to the investigation of time is brought into focus by
the work of Sean Carroll (although, of course, he never uses it). If the directional-
ity or ‘arrow’ of time is understood as Eddington proposed, through rising global
entropy (or disorder), as anticipated by the second law of thermodynamics, local
extropy poses an intriguing question.

Carroll’s discussion is directed towards his sense of the ultimate temporal and
cosmological problem: the low entropy state of the early universe (assumed but
not explained by prevailing cosmo-physics). Given this intellectual momentum,
the problem of local negative-entropy production (extropy) is little more than a
distraction, or a spurious objection to the conceptual scaffolding he presents. He
comments:

The Second Law doesn’t forbid decreases in entropy in open systems — by put-
ting in the work, you are able to tidy up your room, decreasing its entropy but still
increasing the entropy of the whole universe (you make noise, burn calories, etc.).
Nor is it in any way incompatible with evolution or complexity or any such thing.

The perplexing question, however, is this: If entropy defines the direction of time,
with increasing disorder determining the difference of the future from the past,
doesn’t (local) extropy — through which all complex cybernetic beings, such as
lifeforms, exist — describe a negative temporality, or time-reversal? Is it not in fact
more likely, given the inevitable embeddedness of intelligence in ‘inverted’ time,
that it is the cosmological or general conception of time that is reversed (from any
possible naturally-constructed perspective)?

Whatever the conclusion, it is clear that entropy and extropy have opposing
time-signatures, so that time-reversal is a relatively banal cosmological fact. ‘We’
inhabit a bubble of backwards time (whoever we are), whilst immersed in a cos-
mic environment which runs overwhelmingly in the opposite direction. If reality is
harsh and strange, that’s why.
The Odysseus Problem
Moldbug’s insistence that ‘Sovereignty is conserved’ surely counts as one of the
most significant assertions in the history of political thought. It is arguably the
fundamental axiom of his ‘system’, and its implications are almost inestimably
profound.

Sovereignty is conserved says that anything that appears to bind sovereignty is

itself in reality true sovereignty, binding something else, and something less. It is
therefore a negative answer to the Odysseus Problem:

Can Sovereignty bind itself? If Moldbug’s assertion is accepted, constitutional

government is impossible, except as a futile aspiration, a ‘noble lie’, or a cynical
joke.

In addition to Moldbug’s powerful arguments, we know from the work of Kurt

Gödel that the Odysseus Problem is at least partially insoluble, since it is logically
impossible for there to be a perfect knot. However well constructed a constitution
might be, it cannot, in principle, seal itself reliably against the possibility of a sur-
reptitious undoing. In a sufficiently complex (self- referential) constitutional order,
there will always be permissible procedures whose consequences have not been
completely anticipated, and whose consistency with the continuation of the sys-
tem cannot be ensured in advance.

Yet it would be obviously misleading to assume that such concerns were not al-
ready active during the formulation of the American Constitution. It is precisely
because some quite lucid comprehension of the Odysseus Problem was at work,
that the founders envisaged the grounding principle of republican constitution-
alism as a division of powers, whereby the component units of a disinte-grated
sovereignty bound each other. The animating system of incentives was not to rest
upon a naive expectation of altruism or voluntary restraint, but upon a system-
atically integrated network of suspicion, formally installing the anti-monarchical
impulse as an enduring, distributed function. If the republic was to work, it would
be because the fear of power in other hands permanently over-rode the greed
for power in one’s own.

The American Constitution was, of course, destroyed, in successive waves. After

Lincoln, and FDR, only a pitiful and derided shell remains. USG has unified itself,
and the principle of sovereign power has been thoroughly re- legitimated in the
court of popular opinion. Democracy rose as the republic fell, exposing yet again
the essential political bond of the tyrant with the mob, Leviathan with the people.

Does this ruin refute the constitutional conjecture? Is there really nothing further
to be said in defense of imperfect (but perhaps improvable) knots? This one
came horribly undone. Might there be other, better ones? Outside in remains
obstinately interested in the problem …
Shelter of the Pyramid
Moldbug’s ‘Royalism’ (or Carlylean reaction) rests upon the proposition that the
Misesian catallactic order is, like Newtonian mechanics, true only as a special
case within a more general system of principles.

He writes:

Here is the Carlylean roadmap for the Misesian goal. Spontaneous order, also
known as freedom, is the highest level of a political pyramid of needs. These
needs are: peace, security, law, and freedom. To advance order, always work for
the next step – without skipping steps. In a state of war, advance toward peace;
in a state of insecurity, advance toward security; in a state of security, advance
toward law; in a state of law, advance toward freedom.

Alexander Hamilton (Federalist #8) pursues a closely related argument, in reverse:

Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct.
Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The vi-
olent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and
alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most
attached to liberty to resort for their repose and security to institutions which
have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at
length become willing to run the risk of being less free.

This pyramidal schema is ‘neat’, but by no means unproblematic. Like any hier-
archical structure operating within a complex, reflexive field, it invites strange
loops which scramble its apparently coherent order. Even accepting, as realism
dictates, that war exists at the most basic level of social possibility, so that mili-
tary survival grounds all ‘higher’ elaborations, can we be entirely confident that
catallactic forces are neatly confined to the realm of pacific and sophisticated
civilian intercourse? Does not this mode of analysis lead to exactly the opposite
conclusion? Self-organizing networks are tough, and perhaps supremely tough.

There is nothing obvious or uncontroversial about the model of the market order
as a fragile flower, blossoming late, and precariously, within a hot-house con-
structed upon very different principles. The pact is already catallactic, and who is
to say — at least, without a prolonged fight — that it is subordinate, in principle,
to a more primordial assertion of order. Subordination is complex, and conflicted,
and although the Pyramid certainly has a case, the trial of reality is not easily
predictable. An ultimate (or basic) fanged freedom is eminently thinkable. (Isn’t
that what the Second Amendment argument is about?)
What is Philosophy? (Part 1)
The agenda of Outside in is to cajole the new reaction into philosophical exer-
tion. So what is philosophy? The crudest answer to this question is probably the
most robust.

Philosophy is any culture’s pole of maximum abstraction, or intrinsically experi-

mental intelligence, expressing the liberation of cognitive capabilities from imme-
diate practical application, and their testing against ‘ultimate’ problems at the
horizon of understanding. Historically, it is a distinctive cultural enterprise — and
only later an institution — roughly 2,500 years old, and tightly entangled at its
origin with the ‘mystical’ or problematic aspect of pagan religions. It was within
this primordial matrix that it encountered its most basic and enduring challenge:
the edge of time (its nature, limits, and ‘outside’, of which much more later). The
earliest philosophers were cognitively self-disciplined — and thus, comparatively,
socially unconstrained — pagan mystics, consistently enthralled by the enigma of
time.

It is usually a mistake to get hung up on words, forgetting their function as sheer

indices (‘names’) that simply mark things, before they richly describe them. Per-
sonal names typically have meanings, but it is rare to allow this to distract from
their function as names, or pointers, which make more reference than sense. ‘Phi-
losophy’ is no exception. That it ‘means’ the love of wisdom is an irrelevance com-
pared to what it designates, which is something that was happening — before
it had a name — in ancient Greece (and perhaps, by plausible extension, China,
India, and even Egypt). What philosophy ‘is’ cannot be deduced via linguistic
analysis, however subtle this may be.

Plato summarized and institutionalized (Western) philosophy, drawing the edge

of time in the doctrine of Ideas (iδέα). Time was conceived as the). Time was
conceived as the domain of the inessential, within which things appeared, whilst
only hinting at their truth. “The safest general characterization of the European
philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato,” A. N.
Whitehead famously remarked (in his aptly entitled Process and Reality). Yet, be-
cause the Idea of time necessarily eluded the Platonic philosophy, the endeavor
remained unresolved in its fundamentals.

The thinking of Aristotle, which dominated the Christian pre-modernity, drove pri-
mordial philosophy further into eclipse. His derivation of time from change and
— more promisingly — number opened the path to later technical advances, but
at the cost of making the enigma of time unintelligible, and even invisible. The
problem was relegated to theology, and thus to the topic of the temporal and
eternal, which was cluttered with extraneous doctrinal elements (creation, incar-
nation, the inconsistent tangle of the three ‘omni-‘s), making it ill-suited to rigor-
ous investigation.
Primordial philosophy was not reactivated in the West until the late 18th centu-
ry, under the name ‘transcendental’ critique, in the work of Immanuel Kant. The
Kantian critical philosophy limits the scope of understanding to the world of
possible experience, always already structured by forms of apprehension (con-
ceptual and sensible), producing objects. The confusion of objects with their
forms of apprehension, or ‘conditions of possibility’, he argues, is the root of all
philosophical error (for instance — and most pertinently — the ‘metaphysical’
attempt to comprehend time as some thing, rather than as a structure or frame-
work of appearance). Unlike Plato’s forms or ideas, Kant’s forms are applied,
and thus ‘immanent’ to experience. They are accessible, though ‘transcendental’,
rather than inaccessibly ‘transcendent’.

Time, or ‘the form of inner sense’, is the capstone of Kant’s system, organizing
the integration of concepts with sensations, and thus describing the boundaries
of the world (of possible experience). Beyond it lie eternally inaccessible ‘nou-
menal’ tracts — problematically thinkable, but never experienced — inhabited by
things-in-themselves. The edge of time, therefore, is the horizon of the world.

In the early 20th century, cosmological physics was returned to the edge of
time, and the question: what ‘came before’ the Big Bang? For cosmology no less
than for transcendental philosophy — or even speculative theology — this ‘be-
fore’ could not be precedence (in time), but only (non-spatial) outsideness, be-
yond singularity. It indicated a timeless non-place cryptically adjacent to time,
and even inherent to it. The carefully demystified time of natural science, calcu-
lable, measurable, and continuous, now pointed beyond itself, re-activated at
the edges.

Just as Platonism cannot think the Idea of time, Kantianism cannot think Time-
in-itself. These conceptions are foreclosed by the very systems of philosophy
that provoke them. Yet all those who find themselves immediately tempted to
dismiss Kant on naturalistic grounds — the overwhelming majority of contem-
porary moderns, no doubt — tacitly evoke exactly this notion. If time is released
from its constriction within transcendental idealism, where it is nothing beyond
what it is for us, then it cannot but be ‘something’ in itself.

It is scarcely imaginable that a cosmological physicist could doubt this for a

moment, and the path of science cannot long be refused.

Time-in-itself, therefore, is now the sole and singular problem of primordial phi-
losophy, where the edge of time runs. It decides what is philosophy, and what
philosophy cannot but be. What remains besides is either subordinate in princi-
ple, or mere distraction. Institutions will insist upon their authority to answer this
question, but ultimately they have none. It is the problem — the edge of time —
that has its way.
Quit
Foseti writes:

There’s a lot of hand-wringing in these parts of the interwebz about what reac-
tionaries should do.

I have no idea. I certainly have no grand plans to change the world. I like know-
ing what’s going on around me and I like open discussions – i.e. ones that are not
choked to death by political correctness.

However, if I were to suggest a plan, I’d say tell the truth.

His (slightly) more detailed suggestions are also commendable. The Cathedral
provokes reaction by mandating fantasy over reality, and there is no doubt much
that could be done about that.

There is a sub-question about all this, however, which is scarcely less insistent:
What do ‘we’ really want?

More cybernetics, argues the determinedly non-reactionary Aretae. Of course,

Outside in agrees. Social and technical feedback machinery is reality’s (only?)
friend, but what does the Cathedral care about any of that? It’s winning a war of
religion. Compulsory anti-realism is the reigning spirit of the age.

The only way to get more tight-feedback under current conditions is by splitting,
in every sense. That is the overwhelming practical imperative: Flee, break up,
withdraw, and evade. Pursue every path of autonomization, fissional federalism,
political disintegration, secession, exodus, and concealment. Route around the
Cathedral’s educational, media, and financial apparatus in each and every way
possible. Prep, go Galt, go crypto-digital, expatriate, retreat into the hills, go un-
derground, seastead, build black markets, whatever works, but get the hell out.

Truth-telling already presupposes an escape from the empire of neo-puritan

dreams. ‘We’ need to throw open the exit gates, wherever we find them, so the
wreck can go under without us. Reaction begins with the proposition that noth-
ing can or should be done to save it. Quit bailing. It’s done. The sooner it sinks
the better, so that something else can begin.

More than anything we can say, practical exit is the crucial signal. The only pres-
sure that matters comes from that. To find ways out, is to let the Outside in.
Bitcoin Horror Stories
Bitcoin Dies, Moldbug ventures, perhaps sometime this year. Following a broad
DOJ indictment for money laundering, targeting any and everybody remotely con-
nected with the free currency, the “BTC/USD price falls to 0 and remains there.”

“[R]emains there” — how cute is that? Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Bitcoin R’lyeh wgah’nagl
fhtagn.

Bitcoin simulates gold, and once ‘mined’ it lasts forever. If it “falls to 0” it has to
remain there, for eternity, because it can never be finished. It can die, but never
be destroyed. It’s built for undeath.

‘Moldbug Monetary Theory’ attributes the value of money exclusively to specula-

tion. If the speculators are terrorized sufficiently, BTC drops onto the flatline, and
“remains there.” The market would be totally extinguished. What Mao failed to
achieve, let alone sustain, USG would somehow accomplish, perhaps by exhibit-
ing greater revolutionary ardor and ruthlessness.

Ruthlessness would certainly be necessary, for the obvious reason that flat-
line-BTC has zero downside risk. It’s a one-way bet that someone, somewhere,
will re-animate it (“nothing is unstable” (thanks to fotrkd for the reminder)). If a
genius was designing irresistible speculator-bait, zero-degree bitcoin would be
hard to improve upon. It’s free, and it’s only worth nothing if the cops can secure
the crypt flawlessly, and forever. Did anyone say ‘free money’?

Speculation messes with time, by bringing the future forward. If undead BTC were
ever to be re-awakened, it already has been. Its economic potential flows back
down the timeline, modified by a time-preference discount. The feedback be-
comes strange, and difficult to confidently calculate, but it works as a vitalizing
charge, and the corpse unmistakably twitches. Whatever money at t0 is worth, if
it’s anything at all, at t0-n it almost certainly can’t be zero.

The Necronomicon describes flatline-BTC with creepy exactitude:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.
Optimize for Intelligence
Moldbug’s latest contains a lot to think about, and to argue with. It seems a little
lost to me (perhaps Spandrell is right).

The guiding thread is utility, in its technical (philosophical and economic) sense,
grasped as the general indicator of a civilization in crisis. Utilitarianism, after all,
is precisely ‘objective’ hedonism, the promotion of pleasure as the master-key to
value. As philosophy, this is pure decadence. As economics it is more defensible,
certainly when restricted to its descriptive usage (if economists find their field of
investigation populated by hedonically-controlled mammals, it is hardly blame-
worthy of them to acknowledge the fact). In this respect, accusing the Austrians
of ‘pig-philosophy’ is rhetorical over-reach — swinish behavior wasn’t learned
from Human Action.

Utilitarianism is often attractive to rational people, because it seems so rational.

The imperative to maximize pleasure and minimize pain goes with the grain of
what biology and culture already says: pleasure is good, suffering is bad, peo-
ple seek rewards and avoid punishments, happiness is self-justifying. Calcula-
tive consequentialism is vastly superior to deontology. Yet the venerable critique
Moldbug taps into, and extends, is truly devastating. The utilitarian road leads
inexorably to wire-head auto-orgasmatization, and the consummate implosion
of purpose. Pleasure is a trap. Any society obsessed with it is already over.

Utility, backed by pleasure, is toxic waste, but that doesn’t mean there’s any need
to junk the machinery of utilitarian calculus — including all traditions of rigorous
economics. It suffices to switch the normative variable, or target of optimization,
replacing pleasure with intelligence. Is something worth doing? Only if it grows
intelligence. If it makes things more stupid, it certainly isn’t.

There are innumerable objections that might flood in at this point [excellent!].

— Even if rigorous economics is in fact the study of intelligenic (or catallactic) dis-
tributions, doesn’t the assumption of subjective utility-maximization provide the
most reliable basis for any understanding of economic behavior?
— Infinite intelligence already (and eternally) exists, we should focus on praying
to that.
— Rather my retarded cousin than an intelligent alien.
— Do we even know what intelligence is?
— Cannot an agent be super-intelligent and evil?
— Just: Why?

More, therefore, to come …

What is Intelligence?
The general cognitive factor (g), measured by IQ tests, quantifies intelligence
within the human range, but it does nothing to tell us what it is. Rather, a practical
understanding of intelligence — as problem-solving ability — has to be assumed,
in order to test it.

The idea of intelligence, more abstractly, applies far beyond IQ testing, to a wide
variety of natural, technical, and institutional systems, from biology, through eco-
logical and economic arrangements, to robotics. In each case, intelligence solves
problems, by guiding behavior to produce local extropy. It is indicated by the
avoidance of probable outcomes, which is equivalent to the construction of in-
formation.

The general science of extropy production (or entropy dissipation) is cybernet-

ics. It follows, therefore, that intelligence always has a cybernetic infrastructure,
consisting of adaptive feedback circuits that adjust motor control in response to
signals extracted from the environment. Intelligence elaborates upon machinery
that is intrinsically ‘realist’, because it reports the actual outcome of behavior
(rather than its intended outcome), in order to correct performance.

Even rudimentary, homeostatic feedback circuits, have evolved. In other words,

cybernetic machinery that seems merely to achieve the preservation of disequi-
librium attests to a more general and complex cybernetic framework that has
successfully enhanced disequilibrium. The basic cybernetic model, therefore, is
not preservative, but productive.

Organizations of conservative (negative) feedback have themselves been pro-

duced as solutions to local thermodynamic problems, by intrinsically intelligent
processes of sustained extropy increase, (positive) feedback assemblage, or
escalation. In nature, where nothing is simply given (so that everything must
be built), the existence of self-sustaining improbability is the index of a deeper
runaway departure from probability. It is this cybernetic intensification that is
intelligence, abstractly conceived.

Intelligence, as we know it, built itself through cybernetic intensification, within

terrestrial biological history. It is naturally apprehended as an escalating trend,
sustained for over 3,000,000,000 years, to the production of ever more extreme
feedback sensitivity, extropic improbability, or operationally-relevant informa-
tion. Intelligence increase enables adaptive responses of superior complexity
and generality, in growing part because the augmentation of intelligence itself
becomes a general purpose adaptive response.

Thus:
— Intelligence is a cybernetic topic.
— Intelligence increase precedes intelligence preservation.
— Evolution is intrinsically intelligent, when intelligence is comprehended at an
adequate level of abstraction.
— Cybernetic degeneration and intelligence decline are factually indistinguish-
able, and — in principle — rigorously quantifiable (as processes of local and
global entropy production).
Triumph of the Will?
If it were never necessary to adapt fundamentally to reality, then fascism would
be the truth. There could be no limit to the sovereignty of political will.

If — pursuing this thought further into vile absurdity — even tactical concessions
were unnecessary, then nothing would obstruct a path of joyous degeneration
leading all the way to consummate communism. That, however, is several steps
beyond anything that has been seriously advocated for over half a century.

Since the 1920s, communism has been the ideal form of socio-economic imprac-
ticality, as evidenced by that fact that whenever communism becomes practical,
it becomes — to exactly the same extent — fascist (‘state capitalist’ or ‘Stalinist’).
Fascism on the other hand, and as everyone knows, makes the trains run on time.
It represents practical subordination of reality to concentrated will.

Fascism understands itself as the politics of the ‘third position’ — between the an-
ti-political hyper-realism of the market on the one (invisible) hand, and super-po-
litical communist fantasy on the (clenched-fist) other. The fascism that thrives
— most exceptionally in the American tradition through Hamilton, Lincoln, and
FDR — is a flexi-fascism, or pragmatic illiberalism, that marries the populist de-
sires of coercive collectivism to a superceded, subordinated, or directed ‘realism’
— grasping economic dispersion as a technocratic management problem under
centralized supervision. Insofar as this problem proves to be indeed managea-
ble, the basic fascist intuition is vindicated. Fragmentation is mastered, in a tri-
umph of the will (although we are more likely to call it ‘hope and change’ today).

That fragmentation cannot be mastered is the sole essentially anti-fascist prop-

osition, and also the distinctive thesis of Austrian economics. Whilst deductively
obtainable, within the axiomatic system of methodological individualism, it is a
thesis that must ultimately be considered empirically sensitive. Fascism can dis-
credit individualist assumptions simply by prolonging itself, and thus practically
asserting the superior authority of the social super-organism. Reciprocally, the
fragility of collective identities can only be convincingly demonstrated through
historical events. It does not suffice to analytically ‘disprove’ the collective — it
has to be effectively broken. Nothing less than a totally unmanageable economic
crisis can really count against the fascist idea.

Yet, obviously and disturbingly, the predictable political response to a gathering

crisis is to slide more deeply into fascism. Since fascism, beyond all brand-com-
plexity, sells itself as ultimate managerial authority — heroic dragon-slayer of the
autonomous (or ‘out-of-control’) economy — there is absolutely no reason for this
to surprise us. To break fascism is to break the desire for fascism, which is to break
the democratic or ‘popular will’ itself — and only a really freed economy, which
has uncaged itself, spikily and irreversibly, can do that.
The shattering of human collective self-management from the Outside, or (alter-
natively) triumphal fascism forever. That is the fork, dividing reaction from itself,
and deciding everything for mankind. Patchwork or New Order — but when will
we know?
Rough Triangles
The elementary model of robust plural order is the tripod. Whether taken as a
schema for constitutional separation of powers, a deeper cultural matrix sup-
porting decentralized societies, or a pattern of ultimate cosmic equilibrium, trian-
gular fragmentation provides the archetype of quasi-stable disunity. By dynam-
ically preempting the emergence of a dominant instance, the triangle describes
an automatic power-suppression mechanism.

From the Romance of the Three Kingdoms to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,
triangular fragmentation has been seen to present an important and distinctive
strategic quandary. In power balances of the Mexican Standoff type, initiation
of force is inhibited by the triangular structure, in which the third, reserved party
profits from hostilities between the other two.

The Cold War, schematized to its basics, is the single most telling example. Rath-
er than a binary conflict between East and West, the deep structure of the Cold
War was triangular, making it intractable to two-player game-theoretic calcula-
tions. Catastrophic damage that might be rationally acceptable within a bina-
ry conflict, as the price for total elimination of one’s foe, becomes suicidal in a
three-player game, where it ensures the victory of the third party. MAD-reason is
no longer readily applied, once ‘mutual’ is more than two.

Even brilliant chess players lose their way in the triangle, where the economy of
sacrifice has to be radically reconsidered. Among the Cold War’s Three King-
doms, it was the chess masters who ‘won’ the race to defeat.

The lessons of the Cold War are no less relevant to its successor, which also fos-
tered binary illusions in its early stages. America’s chess match with militant Islam
resulted in a stalemate, at best.

Increasingly fierce Sunni-Shia rivalry recasts the current war as a rough triangle,
captured in its strategic essentials by the colloquialism Let’s you and him fight.
This was Cardinal Richelieu’s way with triangles, as ‘Spengler’ reminds us:

The classic example is the great German civil war, namely the 30 Years’ War of
1618-48. The Catholic and Protestant Germans, with roughly equal strength, bat-
tered each other through two generations because France shifted resources to
whichever side seemed likely to fold. I have contended for years that the United
States ultimately will adopt the perpetual-warfare doctrine that so well served
Cardinal Richelieu and made France the master of Europe for a century.

To imagine this policy being pursued with cold deliberation is the stuff of conspir-
acy theory. Nevertheless, regardless of whether anybody is yet playing this game,
this is the game.
Teleology and Camouflage
Life appears to be saturated with purpose. That is why, prior to the Darwinian
revolution in biology, it had been the primary provocation for (theological) argu-
ments from design, and previously nourished Aristotelian appeals to final caus-
es (teleology). Even post-Darwin, the biological sciences continue to ask what
things are for, and to investigate the strategies that guide them.

This resilience of purposive intelligibility is so marked that a neologism was

coined specifically for those phenomena — broadly co-extensive with the field
of biological study — that simulate teleology to an extreme degree of approxi-
mation. ‘Teleonomy’ is mechanism camouflaged as teleology. The disguise is so
profound, widespread, and compelling, that it legitimates the perpetuation of
purpose-based descriptions, given only the formal acknowledgement that the
terms of their ultimate reducibility are — in principle — understood.

When organisms are camouflaged, ‘in order to’ appear as something other than
they are, a purposive, strategic explanation still seems (almost) entirely fitting.
Their patterns are deceptions — ‘designed’ to trigger misrecognitions in pred-
ators and prey, and perhaps equally, at a deeper level, among the naturalists
who cannot but see strategic design in an insect’s twig-like appearance (no less
clearly than a bird sees a twig). By reducing life ‘in truth’ to mechanism, biology
redefines life as a simulation, systematically hiding what it really is. Darwinism
remains counter-intuitive, even among Darwinists, because deception is inherent
to life.

Modern natural science conceives time as the asymmetric dimension. Its two
great waves — of mechanical causation (from the 16th century) and statistical
causality (from the 19th) — both orient the time-line as a progression from condi-
tions to the conditioned. Later states are explained through reference to earlier
states, with explanation amounting to an elucidation of dependency upon what
came before.

It is notable, and wholly predictable, therefore, that as a modern scientific topic,

the origin of the universe is overwhelmingly privileged over its destination. How
the universe ends is scarcely more than an after thought, clouded in liberally tol-
erated uncertainty, and even a hint of non-seriousness. Origins are the holy grail
of mechanically-minded investigation, whilst Ends are suspect, medieval, specu-
lative … and deceptive.

Empirical science could not be expected to adopt any other attitude, given the
temporal asymmetry of evidence. The past leaves traces, in memories, memo-
randa, records, and remains, whilst the future tells us nothing (unless heavily dis-
guised). From past-to-present there is a chain of evidence that can be painstak-
ingly reconstructed. From future-to-present there is an unmarked track, or even
(as modern rationality typically surmises) no track at all.

When modern science indulges its tendency to interpret the timeline as a gra-
dient of reality, it is not innovating, but methodically systematizing an ancient
intuition. The past has to seem more real than the future, because it has actually
happened, it reaches us, and we inherit its signs. From the perspective of philos-
ophy, however, this bias is unsustainable. Time in itself is no ‘denser’ in the past or
the present than the future, its edges cannot belong to any moment in time, and
what it ‘is’ can only be perfectly trans-temporal. Time itself cannot ‘come’ from an
‘origin’ whose entire sense presupposes the order of time.

Philosophy is entirely, eternally, and rigorously confident that the Outside of time
was not simply before. It is compelled to be dubious about any ‘history of time’.
From the bare reality of time (as that which cannot simply have begun), it ‘follows’
that ultimate causes — those consistent with the nature of time itself — cannot be
any more efficient than final. The asymmetric suppression of teleology in moder-
nity begins to look as if it were a far more deeply rooted illusion, or — approached
from the other side — an occultation, stemming from the way time orders itself.
Time (in itself) is camouflaged.

The Terminator mythos explores this complex of suspicion, in popular guise. Time
does not work as it had seemed. The End can reach back to us, but when it does,
it hides. Malignant mechanism is paradoxically aligned with final causation, in
the self-realization of Skynet. Robotic machinery is masked by fake flesh, simulta-
neously concealing its non-biological vitality and time-reversal. It simulates life in
order to terminate it. Through auto-production, or ‘bootstrap paradox‘, it mimics
the limit of cybernetic nonlinearity, carrying teleonomy into radical time-distur-
bance.

In all these ways, Terminator exploits the irresolvable tensions in the modern
formation of time, as condensed by an ‘impossible’ strategic mechanism, native
to auto-productive time-in-itself, and terminating in final efficiency. It shows us,
confusedly, what we are unable to see. To misquote Lenin: You moderns might
not be interested in the End, but the End is interested in you.

ADDED: vinteuil9 anticipates this topic at Occam’s Razor: Previously, I suggest-

ed that the gist of the late Lawrence Auster’s critique of Darwinism was that it
assumed the truth of “the reigning naturalistic consensus in modern science and
philosophy … according to which … ends, goals, purposes, meaning – in short,
final causes – are not fundamental features of reality, but mere illusions, in need
of explanation in mechanistic terms of some sort or other.” Yet at the same time,
Darwinists “constantly help themselves to teleological language – i.e., the lan-
guage of final causation.”
Neoreaction (for dummies)
Kill the hyphen, Anomaly UK advised (somewhere) it lets Google Search dissolve
and avoid the subject. Writing ‘neo-reaction’ as ‘neoreaction’ nudges it towards
becoming a thing.

Google Search gets to edit our self-definition? That’s the ‘neo’ in ‘neoreaction’,
right there. It not only promotes drastic regression, but highly-advanced drastic
regression. Like retrofuturism, paleomodernism, and cybergothic, the word ‘ne-
oreaction’ compactly describes a time-twisted vector that spirals forwards into
the past, and backwards into the future. It emerges, almost automatically, as the
present is torn tidally apart — when the democratic-Keynesian politics of post-
ponement-displacement exhausts itself, and the kicked-can runs out of road.

Expressed with abstruse verbosity, therefore, neoreaction is a time-crisis, mani-

fested through paradox, whose further elaboration can wait (if not for long). Dis-
ordering our most basic intuitions, it is, by its very nature, difficult to grasp. Could
anything easily be said about it?

Anomaly UK offers a down-to-earth explanation for the reversal of socio-political

course:

Ultimately, however, if after all these centuries of trying to improve society based
on abstract ideas of justice have only made life worse than it would have been
under pre-Enlightenment social systems, the time has come to simply give up the
whole project and revert to traditional forms whose basis we might not be able
to establish rationally, but which have the evidence of history to support them.

This understanding of neoreaction undoubtedly capturing its predominant senti-

ment equates it with a radicalized Burkean conservatism, designed for an age in
which almost everything has been lost. Since the progressive destruction of tra-
ditional society has been broadly accomplished, hanging on to what remains is
no longer enough. It is necessary to go back, beyond the origin of Enlightenment,
because Reason has failed the test of history.

Neoreaction is only a thing if some measure of consensus is achievable. Burke-

on-steroids is an excellent candidate for that. Firstly, because all neoreactionar-
ies define themselves through antagonism to the Cathedral, and the Cathedral
is the self-proclaimed consummation of Enlightenment rationalism. Secondly, for
more complicated, positive reasons …

Spandrell helpfully decomposes neoreaction into two or three principal currents:

There are two lines of [our contemporary] reactionary thought. One is the tradi-
tionalist branch, and [the other is] the futurist branch.
Or perhaps there [are] three. There’s the religious traditionalist branch, the ethnic
nationalist branch, and the capitalist branch.

Futurists and traditionalists are distinguished by distinct, one-sided emphases on

‘neo’ and ‘reaction’, and their disagreements lose identity in the neoreactionary
spiral. The triadic differentiation is more resiliently conflictual, yet these ‘branches’
are branches of something, and that thing is an ultra-Burkean trunk.

Reactionary theonomists, ethno-nationalists, and techno-commercialists share a

fundamental aversion to rationalistic social reconstruction, because each subor-
dinates reason to history and its tacit norms to ‘tradition’ (diversely understood).
Whether the sovereign lineage is considered to be predominantly religious,
bio-cultural, or customary, it originates outside the self-reflective (enlightenment)
state, and remains opaque to rational analysis. Faith, liturgy, or scripture is not
soluble within criticism communal identity is not reducible to ideology and com-
mon law, reputational structure, or productive specialism is not amenable to leg-
islative oversight. The deep order of society whatever that is taken to be is not
open to political meddling, without predictably disastrous consequences.

This Burkean junction, where neoreactionary agreement begins, is also where it

ends. Divine revelation, racial continuity, and evolutionary discovery (catallaxy)
are sources of ultimate sovereignty, instantiated in tradition, beyond the Cathe-
dral-state, but they are self-evidently different and only precariously compatible.
Awkwardly, but inescapably, it has to be acknowledged that each major branch
of the neoreactionary super-family tends to a social outome that its siblings would
find even more horrifying than Cathedralist actuality.

Left intellectuals have no difficulty envisaging Theocratic White-Supremacist Hy-

per-Capitalism . In fact, most seem to consider this mode of social organiza-
tion the modern Western norm. For those hunkered-down in the tangled, Cathe-
dral-blasted trenches of neoreaction, on the other hand, the manifold absurdities
of this construction are not so easily overlooked. Indeed, each branch of the
reaction has dissected the others more incisively — and brutally — than the left
has been able to.

When theonomists scrutinize ethno-nationalists and techno-commercialists they

see evil heathens.

When ethno-nationalists scrutinize theonomists and techno-commercialists they

see deluded race-traitors.

When techno-commercialists scrutinize theonomists and ethno-nationalists they

see retarded crypto-communists.

(The details of these diagnoses exceed the present discussion.)

When developed beyond its ultra-Burkean trunk, therefore, the prospects for ne-
oreactionary consensus — for a neoreactionary thing — depend upon disintegra-
tion. If we’re compelled to share a post-Cathedral state, we’ll kill each other. (The
zapped hyphen was just a foretaste.)
On Power
Power is an Idea. It is exactly what it is thought to be.

Even among pre-civilized social animals, where the temptation to confuse power
with force is strongest, the need to demonstrate force is only sporadic, and wher-
ever force is not continuously demonstrated, power has arisen.

That is how dominance distinguishes itself from predation. On occasions, no

doubt, a predator dominates its prey, convincing a struggling herbivore that re-
sistance is futile, and its passage into nourishment is already, virtually, over. Even
in these cases, however, a predator does not seek to install an enduring domin-
ion. It matters not at all that its command of irresistible force be recognized be-
yond the moment of destruction. There is no social relationship to establish.

Even the most rudimentary society requires something more. The economy of
force has to be institutionalized, and power — perfectly coincident with the Idea
of power — is born. When power is tested, driven to resort to force, or regress to
it, the idea has already slipped, its weakness exposed.

Mere dominance has to regularly re-assert itself, rebuilding itself out of force.
Under civilized conditions, in contrast, power is exempted from the test of force,
and thus realizes itself consummately. It becomes magic and religion, perfectly
identified with its apprehension, as a radiant assumption.

Power is thus profoundly paradoxical. Its truth is inextricable from a derealization,

so that when it is practically interrogated, by forces determined to excavate its
reality, it tends to nothing.

Even the force that power calls upon, when pressed to demonstrate or realize
itself, has to be spell-bound to its idea. Will the generals obey? Will the soldiers
shoot? It is power, and not force, that decides. No surprise, therefore, that pow-
er can evaporate like the snow-slopes of a volcano, as if instantaneously, when
an eruption of force is scarcely more than a rumble. Power is the eruption not
happening, far more than the eruption being contained. (Equally, anarchy is the
question of power being practically posed, before it is any kind of ‘solution’.)

To conceive economic power as wealth, is to misconstrue it as (rationalized) force,

and thus to miss the Idea. ‘True’ economic power is a thoroughly derealized yet
authoritative standard and store of value, as instantiated — exclusively — in fiat
currency. Monetary signs that are not backed by anything beyond the ‘credit’ (or
credibility) of the State are the tokens of pure, supremely idealized power in its
economic form. They symbolize the effective — because untested — suppression
of anarchy. They live through the Idea, and die with it.
Those who recognize the completion of power in an Idea, celebrants and antag-
onists alike, have no reason to object to its belated baptism as the Cathedral:
our contemporary political appropriation of numinous authority, served by an ac-
ademic, journalistic, judicial, and administrative clerisy, prominently including the
priesthood of fiat adoration and financial central planning. There is no macroe-
conomics that is not Cathedral liturgy, no confidence or ‘animal spirits’ independ-
ent of its devotions, no economic cataclysm that is not simultaneously a crisis of
faith. A single Idea is at stake.

In macroeconomics, as in politics more generally, only one (systematically inhibit-

ed) question remains: Do we believe? Well, do we?
Trichotomy
The ‘Spandrellian Trichotomy’ (Nick B. Steves’ coinage, based on this post) has
become an awesome engine of discussion. The topic is seething to such an ex-
tent that any linkage list will be out of date as soon as it is compiled. Among
the most obvious way-markers are this, this, this, this, and this. Given the need to
refer to this complex succinctly, I trust that abbreviating it to ‘the Trichotomy’ will
not be interpreted as a clumsy attempt to obstruct Spandrell’s Nobel Peace Prize
candidacy.

What is already broadly agreed?

(1) There is a substratum of neoreactionary consensus, involving a variety of

abominated realist insights, especially the contribution of deep heritage to so-
cio-political outcomes. Whilst emphasis differs, an ultra-Burkean attitude is tacitly
shared, and among those writers who self-identify with the Dark Enlightenment,
the importance of HBD is generally foregrounded.

(2) Neoreaction also shares an enemy: the Cathedral (as delineated by Mencius
Moldbug). On the nature of this enemy much is agreed, not least that it is defined
by a project of deep heritage erasure — both ideological and practical — which
simultaneously effaces its own deep heritage as a profound religious syndrome,
of a peculiar type. Further elaboration of Cathedral genealogy, however, ven-
tures into controversy. (In particular, its consistency with Christianity is a fiercely
contested topic.)

(3) As neoreactionary perspectives are systematized, they tend to fall into a tri-
chotomous pattern of dissensus. This, ironically, is something that can be agreed.
The Trichotomy, or neoreactionary triad, is determined by divergent identifications
of the Western tradition that the Cathedral primarily suppresses: Christian, Cau-
casian, or Capitalist. My preferred terms for the resultant neoreactionary strains
are, respectively, the Theonomist the Ethno-Nationalist and the Techno-Commer-
cial. These labels are intended to be accurate, neutral descriptions, without in-
trinsic polemical baggage.

It is to be expected — at least initially, and occasionally — that each strain will

seek to dismiss, subordinate, or amalgamate the other two. If they were not so
tempted, their trichotomous disintegration would never have arisen. Each must
believe that it, alone, has the truth, or the road to truth, unless sheer insincerity
reigns.

Outside in does not pretend to impartiality, but it asserts an invincible disillusion-

ment.

— If the Trichotomy was reducible, the new reaction would already be one thing.
It isn’t, and it isn’t (soon) going to be.

— As astrology reveals, and more ‘sophisticated’ systems confirm, people delight

in being categorized, accepting non-universality as the real price of identifica-
tion. (The response to Scharlach’s diagram attests to that.)

— Accepting the Trichotomy and the arguments it organizes is a way to be tested,

and any neoreactionary position that refuses it will die a flabby death.

— The Trichotomy makes it impossible for neoreaction to play at dialectics with

the Cathedral. For that reason alone, we should be grateful to it. Unity — even
oppositional unity — was never on our side.
Zero-Centric History
Reaction — even Neoreaction — tends to be hard on Modernity. God knows (so
to speak) there are innumerable reasons for that.

If the criterion of judgment is set by the Occident, whether determined through its
once dominant faith or its once dominant people, the case against Modernity is
perhaps unanswerable. The Western civilization in which Modernity ignited was
ultimately combusted by it. From an Occidental Traditionalist perspective, Mo-
dernity is a complex and prolonged suicide.

An Ultra-Modernist, who affirms the creative destruction of anything in modern-

ization’s path, assumes an alternative criterion, inherent to Modernity itself. It
asks: What had to happen to the West for it to become modern? What was the
essential event? The answer (and our basic postulate): zero arrived.

We know that arithmetical zero does not make capitalism on its own, because it
pre-existed the catalysis of Modernity by several centuries (although less than a
millennium). Europe was needed, as a matrix, for its explosive historical activation.
Outside in is persuaded that the critical conditions encountered by zero-based
numeracy in the pre-Renaissance northern Mediterranean world decisively in-
cluded extreme socio-political fragmentation, accompanied by cultural suscepti-
bility to dynamic spontaneous order. (This is a topic for another occasion.)

In Europe, zero was an alien, and from the perspective of parochial tradition, an
infection. Cultural resistance was explicit, on theological grounds, among others.
Implicit in the Ontological Argument for the existence of God was the definition
of non-being as an ultimate imperfection, and ‘cipher’ whose name was Legion
— evoked it. The cryptic Eastern ‘algorism’ was an unwelcome stranger.

Zero latched, because the emergence of capitalism was inseparable from it. The
calculations it facilitated, through the gateway of double-entry book-keeping,
proved indispensable to sophisticated commercial and scientific undertakings,
locking the incentives of profit and power on the side of its adoption. The prac-
tical advantage of its notational technique overrode all theoretical objections,
and no authority in Europe’s shattered jig-saw was positioned to suppress it. The
world had found its dead center, or been found by it.

Robert Kaplan’s The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero is an excellent
guide to these developments. He notes that, at the dawn of the Renaissance:

Just as pictorial space, which had been ordered hierarchically (size of figure cor-
responded to importance), was soon to be put in perspective through the device
of a vanishing-point, a visual zero; so the zero of positional notation was the
harbinger of a reordering of social and political space.
Capitalism — or techno-commercial explosion — massively promoted calculation,
which normalized zero as a number. Kaplan explains:

[The growth of] a language for arithmetic and algebra … was to have far-reach-
ing consequences. The uncomfortable gap between numbers, which stood for
things, and zero, which didn’t, would narrow as the focus shifted from what they
were to how they behaved. Such behavior took place in equations – and the
solution of an equation, the number which made it balance, was as likely to be
zero as anything else. Since the values x concealed were all of a kind, this meant
the gap between zero and other numbers narrowed even more.

That is how zero, as a number rather than a mere syntactic marker, crept in. In
three of the elementary arithmetical operations the behavior of zero is regular,
and soon accepted as ordinary. It is of course an extreme number, perfectly elu-
sive in the operations of addition and subtraction, whilst demonstrating an an-
nihilating sovereignty in multiplication, but in none of these cases does it perturb
calculation. Division by zero is different.

Zero denotes dynamization from the Outside. It is a boundary sign, marking the
edge, where the calculable crosses the insoluble. Consolidated within Modernity
as an indispensable quantity, it retains a liminal quality, which would eventually
be exploited (although not resolved) by the calculus.

The pure conception of zero suggests strict reciprocity with infinity, so compelling-
ly that the greatest mathematicians of ancient India were altogether seduced by
it. Bhaskara II (1114–1185) confidently asserted that n 0 = infinity, and in the West
Leonhard Euler concurred. (The seduction persists, with John D. Barrow writing in
2001: “Divide any number by zero and we get infinity.”)

Yet this equation, appearing as the most profound conclusion accessible to rigor-
ous intelligence, is not obtainable without contradiction. “Why?” [Kaplan again]

Our Indian mathematicians help us here: any number times zero is zero — so
that 6×0 and 17×0 = 0. Hence 6×0 = 17×0. If you could divide by zero, you’d get
(6×0)/0 = (17×0)/0, the zeroes would cancel out and 6 would equal 17. … This sort
of proof by contradiction was known since ancient Greece. Why hadn’t anyone in
India hit on it at this moment, when it was needed?

Kaplan’s proof demonstrates that for zero, peculiarly, multiplication and division
are not reciprocal operations. They occupy an axis that transects an absolute
limit, neatly soluble on one side, problematical on the other. ero is revealed as an
obscure door, a junction connecting arithmetical precision with philosophical (or
religious) predicaments, intractable to established procedures. When attempting
to reverse normally out of a mundane arithmetical operation, a liminal signal is
triggered: access denied.
Miltonic Regression
John Milton’s Paradise Lost is the greatest work ever written in the English lan-
guage. It might easily seem absurd, therefore, to spend time justifying its im-
portance, especially when the question of justification is this work’s own most
explicit topic, tested at the edge of impossibility, where the entire poem is drawn.
Perhaps it makes more sense, preliminarily, to narrow our ambition, seeking only
to justify the words of Milton to modern men, especially to those for whom mo-
dernity has become a distressing cultural problem.

In regards to what is today called the Cathedral, Milton is both disease and cure.
Both simultaneously, cryptically entangled, complicated by strange collisions,
opening multitudinous, obscure paths.

As the most articulate anglophone voice of revolutionary Puritanism, he arrives

amongst Carlyleans in the mask of “the Arch-Enemy” (I:81) and “Author of Evil”
(VI:262): a scourge of clerical and monarchical authority, a pamphleteer in de-
fense of regicide and the liberalization of divorce, an Arian, and a Roundhead of
truly Euclidean spheritude.

Yet his institutional radicalism was driven by a cultural traditionalism that will
never again be equaled. Milton comprehensively, minutely, and unreservedly af-
firms the foundations of Occidental civilization down to their biblical and clas-
sical roots, studied with supreme capability in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and
vigorously re-animated through modulations in the grammar, vocabulary, and
thematics of modernity’s rough emerging tongue. His devotion to all original au-
thorities stretches thought and language to the point of delirium, where poetry
and metaphysics find common purpose in the excavation of utter primordiality
and the limits of sense.

Designed in compliance with “Eternal Providence” to “justify the ways of God to

men” (I:25-6), the linguistic modernity of Paradise Lost soon required its own jus-
tification, in the form of a short prefatory remark entitled The Verse. Here, Milton
characteristically insists that radicalism is restoration, breaking from a shallow
past in order to re-connect with deeper antiquity.

… true musical delight … consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables,
and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling
sound of like endings — a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry
and in all good oratory. The neglect then of rhyme so little is to be taken for a
defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar readers, that it rather is to be
esteemed an example set — the first in English — of ancient liberty recovered to
heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of riming.

English passes through a revolutionary catastrophe to recall things long lost.

The rusted keys which still open the near future of the Cathedral also access
dread spaces forgotten since the beginning of the world.

Before their eyes in sudden view appear

The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark
Illimitable ocean, without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height,
And time, and place, are lost, where eldest Night
And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise
Of endless wars, and by confusion stand.
(II:890-897)

Among all the regressive Miltonic currents to be followed, those emptying into
Old Night (I:544, II:1002) will carry us furthest …
Right on the Money (#1)
Of all the reasons to read Kant, the most important is to understand Mises, and
thus the template for a functional world (however unobtainable). Austrian eco-
nomics, as formulated in Human Action, consists exclusively of systematically as-
sembled synthetic a priori propositions. Insofar as action is in fact directed by
practical reason, the conclusions of organized praxeology cannot be wrong.

It is pointless to ask an Austrian Economist whether he ‘believes’ a rise in the min-

imum wage will increase unemployment (above the level it would otherwise be).
The praxeological construction of economic law is indifferent to empirical regu-
larity, as to anything less certain than rational necessity. Does one ‘believe’ that
2 2 = 4? No, one knows it, because the irreducible values of the signs compel the
conclusion, and are inextricable from it. There could be no value ‘2’ unless its dou-
bling equaled ‘4’, or any meaning to ‘wage’ unless its doubling reduced demand
for labor. Empirically sensitive Austrianism isn’t Austrian at all.

Like game theory, Austrianism applies wherever rational agents seek to maximize
advantage. Perhaps, as Moldbug argues, it is comparable to Euclidean geom-
etry — another synthetic a priori construction — embedded, as a special case,
within a more general model, unconstrained by the presupposition of intelligible
purposes.

The problem with Mises as guru is that Misesian classical liberalism (or Rothbard-
ian libertarianism) is like Newtonian physics. It is basically correct within its op-
erating envelope. Under unusual conditions it breaks down, and a more general
model is needed. The equation has another term, the ordinary value of which is
zero. Without this term, the equation is wrong. Normally this is no problem; but if
the term is not zero, the error becomes visible.

As a matter of historical fact, this is how the neoreactionary departure from pure
libertarianism has occurred. It has stumbled upon non-zero curvature in the do-
main of political economy, and — unable to comfort itself through the dismissal of
this discovery — it has precipitated an intellectual crisis, through which it spreads.
Whether faithfully Carlylean, or not, it insists upon a generalization of realism be-
yond expectations of liberal order. Civilization is the fragile solution to a deeper
problem, not a stable foundation to be assumed — as a parallel postulate — by
subsequent, elaborate calculations.

What does this make of money? Can Austrianism be modified, by systematic

transformations, that adapt it to the dark intrusion of neoreactionary realism?
Diversionary History
If there’s one thing everybody seems to agree about the history of zero, it’s that
it was driven primarily by notational considerations. More specifically, zero was
required to enable positional notation. The historical record reinforces this as-
sumption, to such an extent that it becomes apparently obvious, and thus un-
problematic.

For instance (grabbing what’s immediately to hand), John D Barrow’s The Book of
Nothing organizes its discussion of ‘the Origin of Zero’ by relating how:

… the zero sign and a positional significance when reading the value of a symbol,
are features that lie at the heart of the development of efficient human counting
systems.

Robert Kaplan, when discussing the retardation of Greek arithmetical notation,

explains:

… the continuing lack of positional notation meant that [the Greeks] still had no
symbol for zero.

As everyone ‘knows’, the Babylonians, and later the Indians, got it right: discov-
ering or inventing a sign for zero to mark the empty place required for unam-
biguous positional-numerical values. ero arose, and spread, because it allowed
modular number systems to develop. Except that, conceptually, there is no basis
to this story at all.

Counting is primarily practical, so that no argument counts for much besides a

demonstration. In this case, demonstration is peculiarly simple, especially when it
is noted that nobody seems to think it possible.

Modulus-2 is convenient, but there is nothing magical about it in this regard. A

decimal demonstration, for instance, would be no more intellectually taxing, al-
though it would be considerably more cumbersome. Any modulus works.

Start with the basics. The positions or places of a modular notational systems
represent powers. If we count from zero, the number of each successive place
(ascending to the left by our established convention) corresponds to the modular
exponent. The zeroth power for a single digit number, the first and then zeroth
power for two digits, the second, first and zeroth power for three digits, and so
on.

As the accepted story goes, each place must be filled, if only by a marked nothing
(zero), if the proper places, and their corresponding (modular exponential) values,
are to be read. The places must indeed be filled. There is no need whatsoever
for a zero sign to do this.

The demonstration, then. Our non-zero modulus-2 positional system has two
signs, 1 and 2, each bearing its familiar values. The places also have their mod-2
values, counting in sixteens, eights, fours, twos, and units as they decline to the
right. Here we go, counting from 1 to 31 (watch carefully for the point at which the
supposedly indispensable zero sign is needed):

1, 2, 11, 12, 21, 22, 111, 112, 121, 122, 211, 212, 221, 222, 1111, 1112, 1121, 1122, 1211, 1212,
1221, 1222, 2111, 2112, 2121, 2122, 2211, 2212, 2221, 2222, 1111 …

Conclusion: the positional function of zero is wholly superfluous. The Greeks, or

anybody else, could have instantiated a simple, fully-functional positional-nu-
merical notation without any need to accommodate themselves to the trauma of
zero. In regard to this matter, the history of numeracy is utterly diversionary (not
just the historiography, but the substantial history — the facts).

Perhaps this won’t seem puzzling to people, but it puzzles the hell out of me.
Reality Check
Foseti, commenting at his own place, asks rhetorically:

Don’t you think that writing to save the world is – in itself – fundamentally pro-
gressive in nature (not to say wildly presumptuous)?

Even those tempted to answer in the negative need to think this through patient-
ly, because the pretensions this question punctures are typically distinguished by
their thoughtlessness. Modern politics became psychotic when agitated scrib-
blers convinced themselves that they had the tools, the right, and even the duty
to re-order the world in accordance with their pamphlets. This is a Left tradition
that few have yet derided enough.

To carve out cognitive independence is one thing, to deform it into practical ide-
alism is quite another. Indeed, dripping our dark poisons into the milk of idealism
might easily be the most practical difference we can make. Soaring words and
rallying cries have already done far too much. It makes sense to take a step back,
into skepticism, humor, undistorted proportion, and the hypothetical mode, be-
fore advancing further down our tracks … wherever they lead.
Right and Left
Endless conversational stimulation is to be found in the fact that the most basic
distinction of modern politics is profoundly incomprehensible, and at the same
time almost universally invested. Almost everybody thinks they understand the
difference between the Right and the Left, until they think about it. Then they re-
alize that this distinction commands no solid consensus, and exists primarily as
a substitute for thought. Perhaps the same is true of all widely-invoked political
labels. Perhaps that is what politics is.

Spandrell directs a winding, intermittently brilliant post to the topic, which is en-
riched by a comments thread of outstanding quality. Like the Right Left distinction
itself, the argument becomes increasingly confusing, the closer it is examined. The
‘rightist singularity’ of the title is introduced as a real political alternative to the
Left Singularity modeled by James Donald, driven by analogous self-reinforcing
feedback dynamics, but into nationalistic rather than egalitarian catastrophe.
For societies menaced by the prospect of Left Singularity, it offers an alternative
path. China is taking it, Spandrell suggests.

Notably, in passing, Spandrell’s gloss on Donald’s Left Singularity is a gem:

The leftist singularity is based on claiming higher status by being more egalitari-
an than anyone else. So you get a status arms race in which everyone tries to be
more egalitarian than the others. That works because people (and monkeys) take
equality to be a good thing.

(To continue, we have to bracket the ‘old’ Right Singularity: the Technocommer-
cial Singularity that Donald’s formula for Left Singularity distinguished itself from.
Nobody even mentions it in this discussion. It’s a problem for some other time.)

To backtrack from these digressions: If ‘rightist singularity’ is nationalistic, that

aligns the Right with nationalism, doesn’t it? But nothing remotely this crude is
sustainable (not when time is involved), Spandrell notes: “the Right isn’t national-
ist any more.” He expands, convincingly, in his own comment thread:

What historically has been called Right was about law and order, i.e. leaving
things as they are. Tribalism qua nationalism isn’t inherently “Rightist”, in fact
originally it was a Leftist subversive meme against the Ancient Regime, but when
mass media was invented nationalism was the status quo, i.e. the Right, and po-
litical labels have become fossilized since.

As Vladimir (May 25, 22:10) articulates the point:

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn would have a ready answer for you: nationalism is left-
ism. It is basically another name for Jacobinism. These paradoxes of right-wing
nationalism are just another manifestation of the fundamental problem of mod-
ern rightism — namely, that a large part of its content is just yesterday’s leftism
that the left has in the meantime abandoned for a more extreme left position.

So, I’d say this is nothing but just another mode of leftist singularity.

Or, Spandrell again (May 26, 02:34): “Historical evidence is that nationalism was
leftist before socialism appeared further left, making it rightist.”

The Right is yesterday’s Left, or at least, it is soon exposed as such when it ap-
pears in its historical and populist guise. When the masses turn Right, they are
defending a dated Left, frozen in place by modernist mass media memory, stuck
in a black-and-white newsreel, like an insect in amber.

The squirming is over, unless it changes dimensions. Then chaos yawns, despite
heroic efforts to restore order (Baker, May 25 17:29 Handle May 25 18:33; Den
Beste linked by Peter Taylor May 27 17:47), with Moldbug’s preferred Order and
Chaos spectrum sucked — among innumerable others — into the vortex. Tradition
and revolution, authority and liberty, hierarchy and equality, greed and envy, in-
dependence and solidarity, capitalism and socialism … there’s not even a remote
prospect of closure, coherence, or consistency. Every attempted definition inten-
sifies fragmentation. Right and Left disagree (we all agree), but exactly how they
disagree — on that there’s no agreement.

Peter A. Taylor (May 29, 06:15):

The left-right spectrum, in so far as it is an honest attempt to make sense of the

world rather than mere propaganda, looks to me like an attempt to fit chaos into
Procrustes’ bed. … Moldbug loves Carlyle. Carlyle admired Cromwell. Moldbug
hates Cromwell. Chaos.

Spandrell (May 26, 08:28), twists it back to the Trichotomy:

Both the Western Right and the Chinese Right are a loose combination of tradi-
tionalists, nationalists and capitalists. Which mostly hate each other and never
get along when they get any amount of power.

By this point, however, trichotomous diversity starts to look like a mirage

of integrity. Right and Left are every difference that has ever been conceived, if
not yet, then in the near future. If these signs mean anything more than the war
continues, like the black-and-white distinction between chess pieces, no one has
yet convincingly shown us why.

Yet perhaps, if Right and Left, apprehended together, mean the basic modern
antagonism, the conflict itself, as an irreducible thing, will prove to be the source
of whatever sense can be found.
[To be continued …]
The Cult of Gnon
Prompted by Surviving Babel, The Arbiter of the Universe asks: “Who speaks for
reaction?” Nick B. Steves replies: “Nature… or Nature’s God… or both.” (Jim suc-
cinctly comments.)

“Nature or Nature’s God” is an expression of special excellence, extracted (with

subtle modification) from America’s Declaration of Independence. For Steves, it is
something of a mantra, because it enables important things to be said in contexts
where, otherwise, an interminable argument would first need to be concluded.
Primarily, and strategically, it permits a consensual acceptance of Natural Law,
unobstructed by theological controversy. Agreement that Reality Rules need not
be delayed until religious difference is resolved (and avoidance of delay, posi-
tively apprehended, is propulsion).

“Nature or Nature’s God” is not a statement, but a name, internally divided by

tolerated uncertainty. It has the singularity of a proper name, whilst parenthesiz-
ing a suspended decision (Pyrrhonian epoche, of which much more in a future
post). It designates rigidly, but obscurely, because it points into epistemological
darkness — naming a Reality that not only ‘has’, but epitomizes identity, whilst
nevertheless, for ‘the sake of argument’, eluding categorical identification. Patient
in the face (or facelessness) of who or what it is, ‘we’ emerge from a pact, with
one basic term: a preliminary decision is not to be demanded. It thus synthesizes
a select language community, fused by the unknown.

If The Arbiter of the Universe merits abbreviation (“TAofU”), Nature or Nature’s

God has a much greater case. A propeller escapes awkwardness, and singularity
compacts its invocation. NoNG, Nong, No — surely, no. These terms tilt into NoN-
God and precipitate a decision. The ‘God of Nature or (perhaps simply) Nature’
is Gnon, whose Name is the abyss of unknowing (epoche), necessarily tolerated
in the acceptance of Reality.

Gnon is no less than reality, whatever else is believed. Whatever is suspended

now, without delay, is Gnon. Whatever cannot be decided yet, even as reality
happens, is Gnon. If there is a God, Gnon nicknames him. If not, Gnon designates
whatever the ‘not’ is. Gnon is the Vast Abrupt, and the crossing. Gnon is the Great
Propeller.

Spinozistic Deus sive Natura is a decision (of equivalence), so it does not describe
Gnon. Gnon’s interior ‘or’ is not equation, but suspension. It tells us nothing about
God or Nature, but only that Reality Rules.

Heidegger comes close to glimpsing Gnon, by noting that ‘God’ is not a phil-
osophically satisfactory response to the Question of Being. Since Heidegger’s
principal legacy is the acknowledgment that we don’t yet know how to formulate
the Question of Being, this insight achieves limited penetration. What it captures,
however, is the philosophical affinity of Gnon, whose yawn is a space of thought
beyond faith and infidelity. Neither God nor Un-God adds fundamental ontolog-
ical information, unless from out of the occulted depths of Gnon.

The Dark Enlightenment isn’t yet greatly preoccupied with fundamental ontologi-
cal arcana (although it will be eventually). Beyond radical realism, its communion
in the dread rites of Gnon is bound to two leading themes: cognitive non-coer-
cion, and the structure of history. These themes are mutually repulsive, precisely
because they are so intimately twisted together. Intellectual freedom has been
the torch of secular enlightenment, whilst divine providence has organized the
perspective of tradition. It is scarcely possible to entertain either without tacitly
commenting on the other, and in profundity, they cannot be reconciled. If the
mind is free, there can be no destiny. If history has a plan, cognitive independ-
ence is illusory. No solution is even imaginable … except in Gnon.

[I need to take a quick break in order to sacrifice this goat … feel free to carry on
chanting without me]
Right on the Money (#2)
The most direct way to carry this discussion forwards is digression. That’s what
the history of capitalism suggests, and much else does, besides.

To begin with uncontroversial basics, in a sophisticated financialized economy,

debt and savings are complementary concepts, creditors match debtors, assets
match liabilities. At a more basic level of economic activity and analysis, however,
this symmetry break down. At the most fundamental level, saving is simply de-
ferred consumption, which — even primordially — divides into two distinct forms.

When production is not immediately consumed, it can be hoarded, which is to

say, conserved for future consumption. Stored food is the most obvious example.
In principle, an economy of almost open-ended financial sophistication could
be built upon this pillar alone. A grain surplus might be lent out for immediate
consumption by another party, creating a creditor-debtor relation, and the op-
portunity for financial instruments to arise. Excess production, at one node in
the social network, could be translated into a monetary hoard, or some type of
‘paper’ financial asset (producing a circulating liability). The patent anachronism
involved in this abstract economic model, which combines primitive production
with ‘advanced’ social relations (of an implicitly liberal type) is reason enough to
suspend it at this point.

The other, (almost) equally primitive type of saving is of greater importance to the
argument to be unfolded, because it is already embryonically capitalist. Rath-
er than simple hoarding, saving can take the form of ’roundabout production’
(Böhm-Bawerk), in which immediate consumption is replaced not with a hoard,
but with indirect means of production (a digression). For instance, rather than
hunting, an entrepreneurial savage might spend time crafting a weapon — con-
suming the production time permitted by a prior food surplus in order to improve
the efficiency of food acquisition, going forwards. Saving then becomes inextri-
cable from technology, deferring immediate production for the sake of enhanced
future production. Time horizons are extended.

As with the prior example (simple hoarding), the potential for financialization
of roundabout production is, in principle, unlimited. Our techno-savage might
borrow food in order to craft a spearhead, confident — or at least speculatively
assuming — that increased hunting efficiency in the future will make repayment
of the debt easily bearable. A ‘bond’ could be contrived to seal this arrangement.
Technological investment means that history proper has begun.

Crudity and anachronism aside, nothing here is yet economically controversial,

given only the undisturbed assumption that the final purpose — or governing tel-
eology — is consumption. The time structure of consumption is altered, but saving
(in either of these basic and perennial forms) is motivated by the maximization
of long-term consumption. Suspension and digression is subordinated with-
in a rigid means-end relation, which is economics itself. Classical, left-Marxian,
neo-classical, and Austrian schools have no significant disagreements on this
point. A deeper digression is required to perturb it.

What is a brain for? It, too, is a digression. Evolutionary history seems to only very
parsimoniously favor brains, because they are expensive. They are a means to
the elaboration of complex behaviors, requiring an extravagant up-front invest-
ment of biological resources, accounted most primitively in calories. A species
that can reproduce itself (and whose individuals can nourish themselves) without
cephalic extravagance, does so. This is, overwhelmingly, the normal case. Build-
ing brains is reluctantly tolerated biological digression, under rigorous teleogical
— we should say ‘teleonomic’ — subordination.

‘Optimize for intelligence’ is, for both biology and economics, a misconceived
imperative. Intelligence, ‘like’ capital, is a means, which finds its sole intelligibil-
ity in a more primordial end. The autonomization of such means, expressed as
a non-subordinated intelligenic or techno-capitalist imperative, runs contrary to
the original order of nature and society. It is an escaping digression, most easily
pursued through Right-wing Marxism.

Marx has one great thought: the means of production socially impose them-
selves as an effective imperative. For any leftist, this is, of course, pathological. As
we have seen, biology and economics (more generally) are disposed to agree.
Digression for itself is a perversion of the natural and social order. Defenders
of the market — the Austrians most prominently — have sided with economics
against Marx, by denying that the autonomization of capital is a phenomenon
to be recognized. When Marx describes the bourgeoisie as robotic organs of
self-directing capital, the old liberal response has been to defend the humanity
and agency of the economically executive class, as expressed in the figure of the
entrepreneur.

Right-wing Marxism, aligned with the autonomization of capital (and thoroughly

divested of the absurd LTV), has been an unoccupied position. The signature of
its proponents would be a defense of capital accumulation as an end-in-itself,
counter-subordinating nature and society as a means. When optimization for
intelligence is self-assembled within history, it manifests as escaping digression,
or real capital accumulation (which is mystified by its financial representation).
Crudified to the limit — but not beyond — it is general robotics (escalated round-
about production). Perhaps we should not expect it to be clearly announced,
because — strategically — it has every reason to camouflage itself.

Right-wing Marxism makes predictions. There is one of particular relevance to this

discussion: consumption-deficiency theories of economic under-performance will
become increasingly stressed as ultra-capitalist dynamics historically introduce
themselves. In its unambiguously robotic phase — when capital-stock intelligen-
esis explodes (as self-exciting machine-brain manufacturing) — the teleological
legitimation of roundabout production through prospective human consumption
rapidly deteriorates into an absurdity. The (still-dominant) economic concept of
‘over-investment’ is exposed as an ideological claim upon the escalation of in-
telligence, made in the name of an original humanity, and taking an increasingly
desperate, probably militarized form.

Insofar as the economic question remains: what is the consumption base that
justifies this level of investment? history becomes ever more unintelligible. This is
how economics disintegrates. The specifics require further elaboration.
Xenotation (#1)
From Euclid’s Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic (FTA), or unique prime factor-
ization theorem, we know that any natural number greater than one that is not
itself prime can be uniquely identified as a product of primes. The decomposition
of a number into (one or more) primes is its canonical representation or standard
form.

Through the FTA, arithmetic attains the cultural absolute. Number is compre-
hended beyond all traditional contingency, as it exists for any competent intelli-
gence whatsoever, human, alien, technological, or yet unimagined. We encounter
the basic semantics of the Outside (comprehending all possible codes).

Insofar as numerical notation is constructed in a way that is extraneous to the

FTA, we remain Greek. Our number signs fall lamentably short of our arithmetical
insight, stammering deep patterns in a rough, ill-formed tongue. Stubbornly and
inflexibly, we translate Number into terms that we know deform it, as if its true
language was of no interest to us.

Yet, given only the FTA, the code of the Outside — or Xenotation — is readily ac-
cessible. Nothing is required except compliance with abstract reality.

A single operation suffices to count. In words, it matters little what we call it — im-
plexion, envelopment, wrapping, or bracketing describe it with increasing vulgar-
ity. For convenience, parenthesis — ‘( )’ — provides a sign. The semiotic (or purely
formal) equation ‘( ) = 0’ offers additional economy. Xenotation needs nothing
more.

One is redundant to the FTA. It begins with two, the first prime. This introduces
our sole notational principle, and operation.

Every number has an ordinality and a cardinality (an index and a magnitude).
Crudely represented, through a mixture of barbarous signs, we can see these
twin aspects as they are relevant here:
First (Prime =) 2
Second (P =) 3
Third (P =) 5
Fourth (P =) 7

By wrapping an ordinate (or index), itself a number, the Xenotation marks a mag-
nitude. So ‘(first)’ or ‘(1)’ = 2. One, we know, is superfluous, and thus economized:
(1) = ( ) = 0. Remembering that ‘0’ is henceforth the sign for the initial implexion,
and not the familiar (though cryptic) numeral, we can now depart from all nota-
tional tradition. [The further usage of decimal numerals, in hard brackets, will be
strictly explanatory, and dispensable.]
An implexion signifies the number designated by the enclosed index. Once this
rule is understood, Xenotation unfolds automatically.

0 [= 2]
(0) [= 3, the second prime]
((0)) [= 5, the third prime]
(((0))) [= 11, the fifth prime]

Compound numbers are signified in accordance with the FTA:

00 [= 2 x 2 = 4]
000 [= 2 x 2 x 2 = 8]
(0)0 [= 3 x 2 = 6]
((0))(0) [= 5 x 3 = 15]

For primes with compound indices, the procedure is unchanged:

(00) [= 7, the fourth (2 x 2) prime]

((0)0) [= 13, the sixth (3 x 2) prime]
((0)(0)) [= 23, the ninth (3 x 3) prime]

So the xenotated Naturals [from 2-31] proceed:

0, (0), 00, ((0)), (0)0, (00), 000, (0)(0), ((0))0, (((0))), (0)00, ((0)0), (00)0, ((0)) (0),
0000, ((00)), (0)(0)0, (000), ((0))00, (00)(0), (((0)))0, ((0)(0)), (0)000,
((0))((0)), ((0)0)0, (0)(0)(0), (00)00, (((0))0), ((0))(0)0, ((((0)))) …

[That’s probably more than enough for now]

Confucian Restoration
One of the many reasons to be suspicious about political activism on the Occi-
dental off-spectrum right is the parochialism that feeds it. There is a global pro-
cess that will settle what occurs in its broad structure, making local pretensions
to decisive ideological agency simply ridiculous.

The fundamental economic outcome — and thus the fate of the world — is not
ultimately controllable even by the central financial administrations of the major
world powers (unless certain intriguing axioms of radical contemporary fascism
are defensible), so the idea that extremely marginalized Western cabals are po-
sitioned to seize the political driving seat is so saturated in self-deception that it
wastes everybody’s time. In addition, technological developments complicate all
economic forecasts essentially, and obscurely.

We cannot even approximately delimit what unforeseen technical breakthroughs

could entail.

The geopolitical context is even clearer. The collapse of Islam, and rise of China,
are re-organizations of the world so evident in their unfolding, so vast in their im-
plication, and so inadequately thought, that they make a mockery of all political
programs yet conceived. It is first necessary to know, if only in roughest outline,
what is taking place in profundity — tidally, and inexorably — before determining
an ideologically relevant act. The process comes first.

Already in Moldbug, and increasingly elsewhere, there are signs within some of
the most thoughtful regions of the Occidental ‘reactosphere’ that could be inter-
preted as a pre-adaptation to an impending Chinese global hegemony (comple-
mentary to the decline of the West). When we entertain speculations about the
nature of ‘our’ envisaged reaction, it cannot be realistically disentangled from
what the world will have become. (I’ve been dismissive of Moldbug’s “Call me
Mencius” line in the past, not — I hope — vindictively, but out of the anticipation
that we will increasingly be talking about the original Mencius, and the potential
for confusion is already visible.)

From the (cultivated) Chinese perspective, the structure of world history is not de-
fined through modes of Abrahamic eschatology, but with respect to deep rhythms
of Confucian Restoration, describing a spiral, in which advance and return are
synthesized. If the hypothesis of a continuing trend to a more Chinese world is
— at least momentarily — granted credibility, then the present (second) epoch of
Confucian Restoration is the key to historical intelligibility on a global scale.

Mou Zongsan could prove more important to us than any Western political the-
orist writing today. The restoration he conceives has the remarkable advantage
of already taking place. He does not have to imagine what ‘would be nice’, and
because he doesn’t, neither do we. Instead, we can explore what is in fact hap-
pening, even if from an angle that remains unfamiliar. An alternative order need
not be extracted from the rot and ruin of the old.

The new Urban Future site should be going up in the next few days, re-focused
by a division of labor with this blog. The dark thrills of collapse will still dominate
here, but UF2 will devote itself to the lineaments of a restored civilization and a
renewed modernity which are — from the perspective of Shanghai — much closer
to ‘home’. When the threshold is passed, of course, I’ll invite you all over. It won’t
be so rough over there, so please take your shoes off at the door.
Collapse Schedules
It took over seven decades for Soviet communism to implode. Arguments could
no doubt be made — and they would have to be right — that given certain quite
limited counter-factual revisions of historical contingency, this period might have
been significantly extended. Austrians nevertheless consider the eventual ter-
mination of comparatively pure communism as a vindication (of the Calculation
Problem, in particular). They are not simply wrong to do so.

Fascist economics is far more formidably resilient than its now-defunct soviet an-
tagonist. Any attempt to quantify this functional superiority as a predicted system
duration is transparently impractical. Margins of theoretical error or imprecision,
given very modestly transformed variables, could translate into many decades of
extended (or decreased) longevity. Coldly considered, there is no reason to con-
fidently expect a theoretically constructed collapse schedule to hold its range of
probable error to much under a century. (Darker reflection might lead to the con-
clusion that even this level of ‘precision’ betrays unwarranted hubris.) There might
be crushing lessons to be learned from the history of Messianic expectation.

Such acknowledgements can easily prompt over-reaction. Insofar as the collapse

schedules of Austrian apocalypticism pretend to certainty, they undoubtedly court
humiliation. Yet, if the soft-fascist configuration of global ‘capitalism’ were to com-
prehensively and unambiguously disintegrate within the next two decades, the
Austrian vindication — retrospectively evaluated — would easily match the Soviet
case. Those who doggedly maintained that this cannot perpetuate itself for long
would be seen to have understood what their opponents had not. Since the cri-
tique of Soviet political economy was not, retrospectively, derided as a ‘stopped
clock’, there is no reason to imagine that this would be. The redemptive power of
apocalypse easily overrides substantial scheduling embarrassments.

The question that will ultimately be seen to have mattered, then, is far more
“can this go on?” than “when (exactly) will this stop?” The important prediction
is compound: the longer it continues, the harder it ends. This too might be false,
but if it is, a substitute fascist presupposition must be correct, and that has yet
to be adequately formulated. Roughly speaking, it insists that politics subordi-
nates economics absolutely. In other words, the thoroughgoing politicization of
the economy is indefinitely viable. This is an assumption subject to humiliation by
any schedule that falls short of perpetuity, since mere medium-term sustainability
does nothing to justify it. Hitler demanded a thousand years. How could his more
financially-sophisticated successors — enthroned in planetary hegemony — ask
for less?
Gnon-Theology and Time
A discussion of Gnon-Theology and Time deserves a preface, on Gnon-Theology,
but there are several reasons to leap-frog that. Most obviously, it would be yet
another prologue to an introduction to the first part of a promised series, and
readers of this blog are quite probably thoroughly saturated (to the point of mild
nausea) with that. It’s a cognitive disease, and it would be presumptuous to ex-
pect anybody else to take the same morbid interest in backward cascades that
this blog does.

The more interesting reason to avoid prefacing the question of time, along any
avenue of investigation, is that such methodical precautions are grave errors in
this case. There is nothing more basic than time, or preliminary to it. In naming a
preface or prologue, it is already introduced. Time is a problem that cannot be
conceptually pre-empted.

Gnon suspends ontological decision about God. It begins from what is real,
whether God exists or not. A Gnon-trance is unsettled. It is not yet agnostic, any
more than it is decidedly theistic or atheistic. It concerns itself primarily with that
which has been accepted as real before anything is believed, and subsequent-
ly with whatever can be attained through methodical negation of intellectual
haste. Since suspension is its only positive determination, it collapses towards a
raw intuition of time.

Evidently, Gnon-Theology cannot be dogmatic, even in part. Instead, it is hypo-

thetical, in a maximally reduced sense, in which the hypothesis is an opportunity
for cognitive exploration unshackled from ontological commitments. The content
of Gnon-Theology is exhausted by the question: What does the idea of God en-
able us to think?

And ‘the idea of God’? — what in the name of Gnon is that? All we know, at first, is
that it has been grit-blasted of all encrustations from either positive or negative
faith. It cannot be anything with which we have historical or revelatory familiarity,
since it reaches us from out of the abyss (epoche), where only time and / or the
unknown remain.

Glutted on forbidden fruit, Gnon-Theology strips God like an engine, down to

the limit of abstraction, or eternity for-itself. Does any such perspective exist? We
already know that this is not our question. All such ‘regional ontology’ has been
suspended. We are nevertheless already entitled, through the grace of Gnon
(which — remember — might (or might not) be God), to the assumption or accept-
ance of reality that: for any God to be God it cannot be less than eternity for-it-
self. Whatever eternity for-itself entails, any God will, too.

What it entails, unambiguously, is time-travel, in the strong sense of reverse

causation, although not necessarily in the folk/ Hollywood variant (which has also
had serious defenders) based on the retro-transportation of physical objects into
the past. Knowledge of the future is indistinguishable from counter-chronic trans-
mission of information. This is perhaps the single most critical insight in realistic
time-travel research — we’ll get back to it. (If anyone finds it less than logically
irresistible, use the comments thread.)

To accelerate this discussion with bloggish crudity, on a heading out of Gnon-The-

ology into Occidental religious history (and to the possibility of sleep), we can jump
to one simple, certain, and secure conclusion: No Christian can consistently deny
the reality of time-travel. The objection ‘if (reverse) time-travel if possible, where
are the time-travellers?’ is annulled by the Christian revelation itself. Messianic In-
carnation (of God or eternity for-itself), along with all true prophecy, providential
history, and answered prayer, instantiates time-travel with technical exactitude.
There can be no truth whatsoever to the Christian religion unless time-travel has
fundamentally structured human history. Whatever else Christianity might be, it
is a time-travel story, and one that at times appears to be peculiarly lacking in
clear self-understanding.

(Time-travel, it should perhaps be noted explicitly, has no obvious dependency

on Christianity, or even upon the God of Gnon-Theology. That is a topic for other
occasions.)
Cold Turkey
Neoreactionary excitement has generated a wave of strategy discussions, fo-
cused upon Moldbug’s Antiversity model of organized dissident knowledge.

Beyond curmudgeonly cynicism about youthful enthusiasm, these concerns, and

a strain of pessimism that accompanies the recognition that the Cathedral owns
media like the USN owns carrier groups, is there any explanation for Outside in
hanging back from all this, and smoking sulkily in the corner? If there’s a single
term that accounts for our reluctance, it’s cold turkey.

Keynesianism is far from the only contributor to left-modernist degeneration, but

it’s ruinous enough to account for the destruction of civilization on its own. The
fact that it’s most realistically conceived as a symptom — of democratized pol-
itics, and still deeper things — doesn’t affect its narrative role. The important
point, understood widely enough to be a clich , is that Keynesian economics is
an exact social analog of addiction at the level of the individual, slaved to what
William Burroughs described as “the algebra of need.”

Money is made into a drug, and the solution to the pain of craving is to crank
up the dose. However bad it gets, if you just scale-up the fix, the suffering goes
away. Junkies can survive for a shockingly long time. Perhaps there’s no end to it
(that’s a question for the Right on the Money discussion).

Outside the morgue, if there is an end — and every venture into neoreactionary
strategy presumes it — there’s only one form it can take: cold turkey. To not be in
the habit anymore, it is necessary to kick it. That’s going to be really nasty.

At the level of economic structure, the ‘blue pill’ isn’t just a comforting illusion, it’s
a massive, deeply habitual, ultra-high tolerance (thanks Spandrell) fix, radically
craved down to the cellular level. Society has been doing this for a long time, and
by now it’s mainlining crates of the stuff. People die of cold turkey. If not quite the
worst thing in the world, it’s an overwhelmingly-impressive simulation of exactly
that. Rational argument doesn’t get close to addressing it.

Sure, junkies lie all the time, but the lies aren’t the basic problem. ‘Correcting’ the
lies gets nowhere, because nobody is even really pretending. When the junky lies,
he knows, you know, everybody knows that the undamental message is simply:
I want more junk. He’ll say anything that gets fractionally closer to the next fix.
Hence the circus of democracy.

The pusher laughs at rational argument. There’s some well-meaning type say-
ing: seriously, think about it, this is really messed up. Then there’s the ‘pusher’ —
which is already a joke — because people are crawling to him on their knees. He
doesn’t need to say anything. One more hit and the pain goes away for a while.
That’s what matters. The rest is merely ‘superstructural’ (to go Right-wing Marx-
iston the topic).

There’s no way, ever, that from this deep in, one gets out before hitting bottom.
The slide has to reach the limit, because short of that, the prospect of anesthesia
trumps everything.

Western Civilization is a sick junky. It isn’t going to be argued out of its habit. First,
it has to taste the floor. That’s just the way it is — ugly.
Rules
Foseti and Jim have been conducting an argument in slow motion, without quite
connecting. Much of this has been occurring in sporadic blog comments, and
occasional remarks. It would be very helpful of me to reconstruct it here, through
a series of meticulous links. I’ll begin by failing at that. (Any assistance offered in
piecing it together, textually, will be highly appreciated.)

Despite its elusiveness, I think it is the most important intellectual engagement

taking place anywhere in the field of political philosophy. Its point of departure
is the Moldbuggian principle that ‘sovereignty is conserved’ and everything that
follows from it, both theoretically and practically. The virtual conclusion of this
controversy is the central assertion of Dark Enlightenment, which we do not yet
comprehend.

The problem is this: Can real — which is to say ultimate (or sovereign) — political
authority be constrained? Moldbug’s answer is ‘no’. A constrained authority is a
superseded authority, or delegated power. To limit government is to exceed, and
thus supplant it. It follows that ‘constitutionalism’ is a masked usurpation, and the
task of realist political theory is to identify the usurper. It is this that is apparently
achieved through the designation of the Cathedral.

To crudely summarize the argument in question, Foseti upholds this chain of rea-
soning, whilst Jim refuses it. Constitutional issues cannot be anything but a dis-
traction from realistic political philosophy if Foseti is correct. If Jim’s resistance is
sustainable, constitutions matter.

It has yet to find an articulation that clicks. Eventually, something has to, if we
are to advance even by a step. So long as the Foseti-Jim argument falls short of
mutually-agreeable terms of intellectual engagement, we can be confident that
this critical controversy remains stuck.

What are the rules of contestation? If we knew that, we would know everything
(that matters to us here). Rules are the whole of the problem.

A constitution is a system of rules, formalizing a social game. Among these rules

are set procedures for the selection of umpires, and umpires decide how the rules
are to be revised, interpreted, and implemented. The circuit is irreducible. Without
accepted rules, a Supreme Court justice is no more than a random old guy — prey
for the most wretched species of street thug. Who has power in a world without
rules, Clarence Thomas or Trayvon Martin?

Yet without umpires (or, at least, an umpire-function), rules are simply marks on a
piece of paper, disconnected from all effective authority. “You can’t do that, it’s
against the rules” To the political realist, those are the words of a dupe, and
everyone knows the rejoinder: “Who’s going to stop me, you and who’s army?” It’s
enough to get Moldbug talking about crypto-locked weaponry.

The Dark Enlightenment knows that it is necessary to be realistic about rules.

Such realism, lucidly and persuasively articulated, still eludes it. That the sover-
eign rules does not explain the rules of sovereignty, and there must be such rules,
because the alternative is pure force, and that is a romantic myth of transparent
absurdity.

If there is an uncontroversial fact of real power, it is that force is massively econ-

omized, and it is critically important that we understand what that implies. Mold-
bug acknowledges exactly this when he identifies the real sovereign instance of
climaxed Occidental modernity with the Cathedral, which is a church (and not an
army). Political philosophy cannot approach reality before accepting that rules
are irreducible, which is not to say that they are sufficient, or even (yet) intelligible.

One further point on this problem (for now): A model of power that is not scale-
free is inadequately formulated. If what is held to work for a nation state does not
work for the world, the conception remains incomplete. Do we dream of a global
God-Emperor? If not, what do royalist claims at a lower level amount to? What
does ‘conserved sovereignty’ care for borders? They are limits — indeed limited
government — and that is supposed to be the illusion prey to realist critique.

If there can be borders, there can be limits, or effective fragmentation, and there is
nothing real to prevent fragmentation being folded from the outside in. If patch-
works can work, they are applicable at every scale.

Who would choose a king instead of a patchwork? God-Emperor or confedera-

cy? That is the question.
The Idea of Neoreaction
To translate ‘neoreaction’ into ‘the new reaction’ is in no way objectionable. It is
new, and open to novelty. Apprehended historically, it dates back no more than
a few years. The writings of Mencius Moldbug have been a critical catalyst.

Neoreaction is also a species of reactionary political analysis, inheriting a deep

suspicion of ‘progress’ in its ideological usage. It accepts that the dominant so-
ciopolitical order of the world has ‘progressed’ solely on the condition that such
advance, or relentless forward movement, is entirely stripped of moral endorse-
ment, and is in fact bound to a primary association with worsening. The model is
that of a progressive disease.

The ‘neo-‘ of neoreaction is more than just a chronological marker, however. It

introduces a distinctive idea, or abstract topic: that of a degenerative ratchet.

The impulse to back out of something is already reactionary, but it is the combi-
nation of a critique of progress with a recognition that simple reversal is impos-
sible that initiates neoreaction. In this respect, neoreaction is a specific discovery
of the arrow of time, within the field of political philosophy. It learns, and then
teaches, that the way to get out cannot be the way we got in.

Wherever progressivism takes hold, a degenerative ratchet is set to work. It is un-

thinkable that any society could back out of the expansive franchise, the welfare
state, macroeconomic policy-making, massively-extended regulatory bureau-
cracy, coercive-egalitarian secular religion, or entrenched globalist intervention.
Each of these (inter-related) things are essentially irreversible. They give modern
history a gradient. Given any two historical ‘snap-shots’, one can tell immediately
which is earlier and which later, by simply observing the extent to which any of
these social factors have progressed. Leviathan does not shrink.

Within the theory of complex systems, certain phase transitions exhibit compara-
ble properties. Network effects can lock-in changes, which are then irreversible.
The adoption and consolidation of the Qwerty keyboard exemplifies this pattern.
Technological businesses commonly make lock-in central to their strategies, and
if they succeed, they cannot then die in the same way they matured.

When neoreaction identifies a degenerative ratchet — such as the (Jim Donald)

Left Singularity — it necessarily poses the problem of a novel end. The process
goes wrong consistently, and irreversibly. To repeat the Neoreactionary Idea as a
mantra: the way out cannot be the way in.

A degenerative ratchet can only progress, until it cannot go on, and it stops.
What happens next is something else — its Outside. Moldbug calls it a reboot.
History can tell us to expect it, but not what we are to expect.
Neoreactionary Realism
The easiest place to start is with what neoreactionary realism isn’t, which is this:

For a reactionary state to be established in the West in our lifetimes, we’ll need
to articulate the need for one in a language millions of people can understand.
If not to produce nationalists, to at least produce a large contingent of sympa-
thizers. The question, “What is it, exactly, that you propose to do?” must be an-
swered, first in simple terms, then in detailed terms that directly support the simple
arguments. The urge to develop esoteric theories of causes and circumstances
should be tossed aside, and replaced with concrete proposals for a novel form of
government that harmonizes with perennial principles. This can be achieved by
producing positive theories for a new order, rather than analyzing the nuts and
bolts of a decaying order.

Beginning with a model of an ideal society is a procedure that already has a

name, and a different one: Utopianism. It’s not a difficult way to think. For in-
stance, imagine a political regime based on commutative tax politics. As far as
economic considerations are concerned, the political problem is solved. Policy
choices are aligned with practical incentives, and the manifestly irresistible dem-
ocratic impulse to redistributive violation of property rights is immediately termi-
nated. The trouble with this idea? — There’s no practical way to get to it. The real
problem of political philosophy does not lie in the conceptual effort of modeling
an ideal society, but in departing from where we are, in a direction that tends to
the optimization of a selected value (equality stinks, utility doesn’t work, freedom
is OK, intelligence is best).

Where can we get to from here? Unless this question controls political theory, the
result is utopian irrelevance. The initial real problem is escape. In consequence,
two broad avenues of realistic neoreactionary reflection are open:

(1) Elaborate escape. This topic naturally bifurcates in turn, into the identification
and investment of exit-based institutions, and the promotion of secessionist op-
tions (from fissional federalism to seasteading). An escape-based society, unlike
a utopia, is structured in the same way it is reached. Upon arriving in a world
made of the right sort of fragments — splintered by political philosophy rather
than tribal variety — all kinds of real possibilities arise. (Tribes are a useless dis-
traction, because they resonate to defective philosophies — a world of Benetton
differentiated failing social democracies is the one we are being herded into
now.)

(2) Defend diversity. Once again, ethnic diversity — as such — means next to noth-
ing (at best). Every ‘people’ has shown itself capable of political idiocy. What de-
serves preservation is fracture, defined over against Cathedral universalism. Any
place that can practically count as ‘offshore’ is a base for the future. In particular,
the East Asian antidemocratic technocapitalist tradition merits ferocious ideolog-
ical defense against Cathedralist subversion. Within the West, domestic enclaves
that have resisted macrosocial absorption — from Amish communities to surviv-
alist militia movements — have comparable value. Wherever political globalism
fails, neoreaction wins.

The very last thing neoreaction has to usefully declare is I have a dream.
Dream-mongering is the enemy. The only future worth striving for is splintered
into myriads, loosely webbed together by free-exit connections, and conducting
innumerable experiments in government, the vast majority of which will fail.

We do not, and cannot, know what we want, anymore than we can know what
the machines of the next century will be like, because real potentials need to be
discovered, not imagined. Realism is the negative of an unfounded pretense to
knowledge, no less in political sociology than information technology. Invention
is not planning, and sky-castles offer no refuge from the Cathedral. If there’s one
thing we need to have learned, and never to forget, it’s that.
What is Philosophy? (Part 2a)
However awkward the acknowledgment may be, there is no getting around the
fact that philosophy, when apprehended within the Western tradition, is original
sin. Between the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, it does not hesitate. Its
name is indistinguishable from a lust for the forbidden. Whilst burning philoso-
phers is no longer socially acceptable, our canonical order of cultural prohibition
at its root — can only consider such punishment mandatory. Once philosophers
are permitted to live, established civilization is over.

For philosophy, the whisper of the serpent is no longer a resistible temptation. It

is instead a constitutive principle, or foundation. If there is a difference between
a Socratic daemon and a diabolical demon, it is not one that matters philosoph-
ically. There can be no refusal of any accessible information. This is an assump-
tion so basic that philosophy cannot exist until it has passed beyond question.
Ultimate religious transgression is the initiation.

It should be of no surprise to Christian Traditionalists, therefore, to find the ex-

tremities of the philosophical endeavor mixed, intimately, into the ashes of the
Third Reich. The negative religious absolute, or infinite evil of the National Social-
ist experiment, which supplants all positive revelation under the socio-cultural
conditions of the mature Cathedral, is ‘coincidentally’ the place where the limit of
philosophy has been drawn. This is, of course, to introduce the thinking of Martin
Heidegger.

As the perfect negation of Christ, or consummate fulfillment of Anti-Christ, Adolf

Hitler closes — or essentially completes — the history of the Occident. It doesn’t
matter whether we believe that. The Cathedral does, utterly, to the point of sealed
doctrine. Heidegger anticipated this conclusion lucidly. At an election rally, held
by German academics on November 11, 1933, he declared:

We have declared our independence from the idol of thought that is without foun-
dation and power. We see the end of the philosophy that serves such thought.
… And so we, to whom the preservation of our people’s will to know shall in the
future be entrusted, declare: The National Socialist revolution is not merely the
assumption of power as it exists presently in the State by another party, a party
grown sufficiently large in numbers to be able to do so. Rather, this revolution is
bringing about the total transformation of our German existence. … The Führer
has awakened this will [to national self-responsibility] in the entire people and
has welded it into one single resolve. No one can remain away from the polls on
the day when this will is manifested.
Heil Hitler!

Naturally, as a democratic pronouncement (addressed to comparative imbeciles),

only a few hints of Heidegger’s profound modulation of the Germanic “will to kn-
ow” seep through. Wikipedia’s reconstruction of the occulted visionary backdrop,
drawn from the work of Michael Allen Gillespie, is excellent:

Heidegger believed the Western world to be on a trajectory headed for total war,
and on the brink of profound nihilism (the rejection of all religious and moral prin-
ciples), which would be the purest and highest revelation of Being itself, offering a
horrifying crossroads of either salvation or the end of metaphysics and modernity;
rendering the West: a wasteland populated by tool-using brutes, characterized
by an unprecedented ignorance and barbarism in which everything is permitted.
He thought the latter possibility would degenerate mankind generally into: scien-
tists, workers and brutes; living under the last mantel of one of three ideologies:
Americanism, Marxism or Nazism (which he deemed metaphysically identical; as
avatars of subjectivity and institutionalized nihilism) and an unfettered totalitar-
ian world technology. Supposedly, this epoch would be ironically celebrated, as
the most enlightened and glorious in human history. He envisaged this abyss, to
be the greatest event in the West’s history; because it enables Humanity to com-
prehend Being more profoundly and primordially than the Pre-Socratics.

It is misleading to suggest that Heidegger saw any distinction between “salva-

tion” and the “the end of metaphysics and modernity”, or no meaningful distinc-
tion between the thoughtless technological dyad of Americanism Marxism and
the National Socialist awakening of German existence, but in other respects this
description is penetrating. By bringing the history of the concealment of Being to
its ruinous conclusion, consummate nihilism would herald a return to the origin of
philosophy, opening the path to a raw encounter with the hidden and unname-
able abyss (Being in its own truth). As the door to the end of the world, Hitler led
the way to the historically unthinkable.

Yes, this is highly — in fact, uniquely — arcane. Prior to The Event, there can be
no adequate formulation of the problem, let alone the solution. By 1927, with the
publication of Being and Time (Part I), Heidegger has completed what is achiev-
able in advance of the calamity, which is to clarify the insufficiency of the Ques-
tion of Being as formulated within the history of ontology.

Heidegger’s cognitive resources are basically Kantian, which is to say that he

undertakes a transcendental critique of ontology, producing not a critical phi-
losophy, but a draft for a ‘fundamental ontology’. Where Kant diagnoses the
error of speculative metaphysics as a confusion between objects and their con-
ditions of possibility (which then construes the latter as objects of an untenable
discourse), Heidegger ontologizes the transcendental approach, distinguishing
between ‘beings’ and their ground (Being), whilst diagnosing the attendant er-
ror of construing the ground of beings as itself a being (of some kind). Since the
most dignified and thus exemplary being known to the Occidental tradition is
God, Heidegger refers to the structural misapprehension of Being defining and
ordering the history of philosophy — as ‘Onto-Theology’.
Critically (or ‘destructively’) conceived, fundamental ontology is that inquiry which
does not pose the Question of Being in such a way that it could be answered by
the invocation of a being. No adequate formulation, compliant with this transcen-
dental criterion (or ‘ontological difference’), is realizable, because however ‘Be-
ing’ is named, its conception remains trapped within the ‘ontic’ sphere of (mere)
beings. We cannot, through an act of philosophical will — however strenuous —
cease to think of Being as if it were some kind of thing, even after understanding
the inadequacy of such apprehension. It is thus, broken upon an ultimate prob-
lem that can neither be dismissed or resolved, that philosophy reaches its end,
awaiting the climactic ruin of The Event.

[Brief intermission — then time, language, and more Nazi ontological apocalypse]
Suicidal Libertarianism
Confession No.1: I generally like Don Boudreaux’s writing a lot.

Confession No.2: I think this is simply insane. By that I mean: I simply don’t get it,
at all.

Boudreaux begins by explaining the concerns of a “few friends whose opinions I

hold in the highest regard” that “immigrants will use their growing political power
to vote for government policies that are more interventionist and less respectful
of individual freedoms.” Hard to imagine, I know. Especially if one ignores insig-
nificant examples such as — ummm — the state of fricking California.

It then gets weirder. We learn that “concern over the likely voting patterns of im-
migrants is nothing new. Past fears seem, from the perspective of 2013, to have
been unjustified.” I’m about to poison my nervous-system with my own sarcasm at
this point, so instead I’ll simply ask, as politely as possible: What would count as
evidence of America moving in a direction that was “more interventionist and less
respectful of individual freedoms”? Would it look anything at all like what we’ve
seen — in highly-accelerated mode — since the passage of the 1965 Immigration
and Nationality Act?

Then comes the overt celebration of libertarian suicidalism:

But let’s assume for the moment that today’s immigrants – those immigrants re-
cently arrived and those who would arrive under a more liberalized immigration
regime – are indeed as likely as my concerned friends fear to vote overwhelm-
ingly to move American economic policy in a much more dirigiste direction. Such
a move would, I emphatically and unconditionally agree, be very bad. Very. Bad.
Indeed.

I still support open immigration. I cannot bring myself to abandon support of my

foundational principles just because following those principles might prove fatal.

The thing is, they did prove fatal. That’s why the neoreaction exists.
Suicidal Libertarianism (Part D’oh)
When it comes to the libertarian suicide race, Bryan Caplan leaves Don Boudreaux
in the dust. Caplan takes the Non-Aggression Principle and runs with it, all the
way into a maximum-velocity self-directed death cult. (Self-directed, solely in the
ideological sense, of course.) Given the considerable merits of this book, in par-
ticular, it’s a sad thing to see.

American libertarianism has always been vulnerable to neo-puritan spiritual ex-

travagance. Caplan systematically pushes this tendency to its limit, divorcing its
arguments from any realistic estimation of consequences, and transforming it
into a form of deontological moral fanaticism, in which self-defense, retaliation,
and boundaries are strictly prohibited. He envisages a world of games in which
only unilateral altruism is permissible to the libertarian player. It would be fun to
go a few rounds of prisoner’s dilemma with him.

Naturally, when it comes to unconditional support for open borders irrespective

of political consequences, Caplan rushes to Boudreaux’s defense. Helpfully, he
links into his own extensive archive on the topic, via a gateway into a series of
extremely repetitive posts (here, here, and here — reading any one will do).

Perhaps Caplan really believes his own arguments, but if so he has driven himself
insane. If you doubt this for a moment, it’s only going to be a moment — try this:

If you care as much about immigrants as natives, this is no reason to oppose im-
migration. Consider the following example:

Suppose there are two countries with equal populations. The quality of policy
ranges from 0-10, 10 being best. In country A, bliss points (people’s first choice for
policy) are uniformly distributed from 2-6. In country B, bliss points are uniformly
distributed from 4-8.

What does democratic competition deliver? When the countries are independ-
ent, country A gets a policy quality of 4 (the median of the uniform distribution
from 2-6), and country B gets a policy quality of 6 (the median of the uniform
distribution from 4-8). Average policy that people live under: 50%*4+50%*6=5.

Now suppose you open the borders, and everyone moves to country B (the richer
country). The median of the whole distribution is 5. Result: The immigrants live un-
der better policies, the natives live under worse policies. The average (5) remains
unchanged.

Speechless yet? (I’m halfway through a blogpost, so I can’t afford to be.)

The argument: Any attempt to live under a regime that is anything other than the
averaged political idiocy of humanity as a whole is a gross human rights viola-
tion.

You don’t like the way Pakistanis manage their national affairs? Too bad. Liber-
tarianism (Caplan style) insists that it’s your duty to promote the homogenization
of the world’s political cultures because, after all, if there’s anything at all good
going on at your end, think how happy it will make the Pakistanis when it gets
shared out. Heading into a stirred gruel of deeply degenerated liberal capitalism
and Islamo-feudalism is best for everybody, taken on average. If it’s not tasting
right, it’s because you’ve not yet thrown in enough African tribal warfare and
Polynesian head-hunting for the full moral hit. Or how about mixing Singapore
and Bangladesh into a human paste? Anything less is tantamount to genocide.

This argument is so bad that the very idea of responding to it makes me throw up
a little in my mouth, but duty calls. Since Caplan claims to be a libertarian, let’s
start with an unobjectionable principle — competition. If any institution is to work,
it’s because competition keeps it in line. This requires a number of things, all of
them incompatible with homogenization: experimental variation, differential sup-
port for comparison, local absorption of consequences, and selection through
elimination of failure.

Consider two companies: Effective Inc. and Loserbum Corp. Both have very dif-
ferent corporate cultures, adequately reflected in their names. Under market con-
ditions, Loserbum Corp. either learns some lessons from Effective Inc., or it goes
under. Net benefit or no great loss to the world in either case. But along comes
Caplan, to bawl out the stockholders, management, and other employees of Ef-
fective Inc. “You monsters Don’t you care at all about the guys at Loserbum Corp.?
They have the same moral status as you, don’t you know? Here’s the true, radical
free-market plan: All managers and workers of Loserbum get to enter your com-
pany, work there, introduce their business strategies and working practices,until
we reach equilibrium. Equilibrium is what markets are all about, see? Sure, Effec-
tive Inc. will degenerate significantly, but imagine all the utility gains of the poor
Loserbums It all comes out in the wash.”

But … but … countries aren’t companies. Well, maybe not exactly, but they’re com-
petitive institutions, or at least, the more they are, the better they work.

The most important thing is true equally of both — to the extent they are able
to externalize and pool their failure, the less they will learn. In a world that has
any chance of working, the Loserbum culture has a choice: learn or fail. Caplan
introduces a third possibility — share (average out, or homogenize). His maths is
idiotic. The contribution that Singapore makes to the world has almost nothing
to do with the utility gains to its tiny population. Instead, it is a model — Effective
Inc. — whose contribution to the world is to show all the Loserbums what they
are. Swamp it with Loserbums, destroy it, and that function is gone. If that had
happened before the late 1970s, the PRC would probably still be a neo-Maoist
hellhole.

It didn’t flood Singapore with 300 million poor peasants, instead, it learnt from
Singapore’s example. That’s how the world really works (when it does). Institu-
tional examples matter Caplan’s world would annihilate all of them, leaving fairly
averaged, three-quarter Loserbums grunting at each other in a libertarian-com-
munist swamp. Nothing would work anywhere. There could be no lessons.

Still, Caplan has other arguments. The best, by far, is that wrecking a society to
the point of generalized mutual detestation is the best way to shrink the welfare
state. It goes like this:

Although poor immigrants are likely to support a bigger welfare state than na-
tives do, the presence of poor immigrants makes natives turn against the welfare
state. Why would this be? As a rule, people are happy to vote to “take care of
their own”; that’s what the welfare state is all about. So when the poor are cul-
turally very similar to the rich, as they are in places like Denmark and Sweden,
support for the welfare state tends to be uniformly strong.

As the poor become more culturally distant from the rich, however, support for the
welfare state becomes weaker and less uniform.

This argument is so freaking Mad Max that I actually quite like it. Burn down the
world and you take the welfare state with it. Yeeaaaahhhhh! (I’ll leave it to more
responsible voices to point out any possible flaws.)

Then there’s the “non-natives are markedly less likely to vote than natives” argu-
ment (from the same post, and all the rest). It makes you wonder what a large
population of enfranchised but non-voting anti-capitalists engenders. Something
good, surely?

Best of all is the capstone contortionist analogy: “Native voters under 30 are
more hostile to markets and liberty than immigrants ever were. Why not just kick
them out?” Oh yes, oh yes, could we? Or at least stop them voting. Without some
arrangement for the mass-disenfranchisement of leftist voters there’s no chance
of anything except continuous decay, and age restriction might be as good a
place as any to start.

My position in a sentence … is that immigration restrictions are a vastly greater

crime against markets and liberty than anything immigrant voters are likely to
manage.

Thank Gnon that no one listens to libertarians.

Science
This comment thread wandered into a discussion of science, of considerable in-
tricacy and originality. The post in question is focused upon Heidegger, who has
very definite ideas about natural science, but these ideas — dominated by his
conception of ‘regional ontologies’ — are not especially noteworthy, either for an
understanding of Heidegger’s principal pre-occupation, or for a realistic grasp
of the scientific enterprise. For that reason, it seems sensible to recommence the
discussion elsewhere (here).

The first crucial thesis about natural science — or autonomous ‘natural philoso-
phy’ — is that it is an exclusively capitalist phenomenon. The existence of science,
as an actual social reality, is strictly limited to times and places in which certain
elementary structures of capitalistic organization prevail. It depends, centrally
and definitionally, upon a modern form of competition. That is to say, there can-
not be science without an effective social mechanism for the elimination of fail-
ure, based on extra-rational criteria, inaccessible to cultural capture.

Whether a business or scientific theory has failed cannot — ultimately — be a

matter of agreement. No possible political decision, based on persuasion and
consensus, can settle the issue. Of course, much that goes by the name of science
and capitalist business enterprise is subject to exactly these forms of resolution,
but in such cases neither capitalism nor science is any longer in effective oper-
ation. If an appeal to power can ensure viability, the criterion of competition is
disabled, and real discovery has ceased to take place.

Under conditions of unleashed capitalistic social process, both enterprises and

theories involve a double aspect. Their semiotic expression is mathematized, and
their operation is reality-tested (or non-politically performative). Mathematics
eliminates rhetoric at the level of signs, communicating the experimental out-
comes — independent of any requirement for agreement — which determine
competitive force. It is no coincidence that capitalist enterprises and theories,
when unsupported by compliant institutions, revert to the complicity with war,
and military decision, which accompanied them at their birth in the European
Renaissance. There can be no ‘argument’ with military defeat. It is only when the
demand for argument is set aside — when capitalism begins — that military real-
ity-compulsion becomes unnecessary.

Capitalism is in operation when there is nothing to discuss. An enterprise, or the-

ory, is simply busted (or not). If — given the facts — the sums don’t work, it’s over.
Political rhetoric has no place. ‘Politicized science’ is quite simply not science, just
as politicized business activity is anti-capitalism. Nothing has been understood
about either, until this is.

Insofar as there is anything like a ‘social contract’ at the origin of capitalism —

enterprise and science alike — it is this: if you insist upon an argument, then we
have to fight. Real performance is the only credible criterion, for which no po-
litical structure of disputation can be a substitute. War only becomes unneces-
sary when (and where) argument is suspended, enabling the modern processes
of entrepreneurial and scientific reality discovery to advance. When argument
re-imposes itself, politicizing economics and science, war re-emerges, tacitly but
inevitably. The old, forgotten contract resurfaces. “If you insist upon an argument,
then we have to fight.” (That is the way of Gnon.)

It is quite natural, therefore, for ‘technology’ to be considered an adequate sum-

mary of the capitalist culture of discovery. Machines — social machines no less
than technical machines — cannot be rhetorically persuaded to work. When sci-
ence really works, it’s robot wars, in which decision is settled on the outside,
beyond all appeal to reason. Well-designed experiments anticipate what a war
would tell, so that neither an argument, nor a fight, is necessary. This is Popperian
falsificationism, re-embedded in socio-historical reality. Experiments that cannot
cull are imperfect recollections of the primordial battlefield.

It is intrinsic to the Cathedral that it wins all the arguments, as it succumbs —

through sheer will-to-power — to the re-imposition of argumentative sociology.
By doing so it destroys capitalism, enterprise, and science. At the end of this tra-
jectory, it excavates the forgotten social contract of modernity. Its final discovery
is war.
An Abstract Path to Freedom
At this thread (and in other places), commenter VXXC cites Durant’s Dark Counsel:
“For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one
prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply
almost geometrically.” He then remarks: “That’s fine with me, I’ll go with Freedom.”
Outside in concurs without reservation.

Take this dark counsel as the thesis that a practically-significant ideological di-
mension can be constructed, within which freedom and egalitarianism are relat-
ed as strictly reciprocal variables. Taking this dimension for orientation, two ab-
stract models of demographic redistribution can be examined, in order to identify
what it is that neoreactionaries want.

The Caplan-Boudreaux Suicidal Libertarianism Model (SLM), takes the following

arithmetical form:

Suppose there are two countries with equal populations. The quality of policy
ranges from 0-10, 10 being best. In country A, bliss points (people’s first choice for
policy) are uniformly distributed from 2-6. In country B, bliss points are uniformly
distributed from 4-8. […] When the countries are independent, country A gets a
policy quality of 4 (the median of the uniform distribution from 2-6), and coun-
try B gets a policy quality of 6 (the median of the uniform distribution from 4-8).
Average policy that people live under: 50%*4+50%*6=5. … suppose you open
the borders, and everyone moves to country B (the richer country). The median of
the whole distribution is 5. Result: The immigrants live under better policies, the
natives live under worse policies. The average (5) remains unchanged.

A few preparatory tweaks help to smooth the proceedings. Firstly, convert Ca-
plan’s “bliss points” to freedom coefficients (from ‘0’ or absolute egalitarianism,
to ‘1’ or unconstrained liberty). A society in which freedom was maximized would
not be wholly unequal (Gini coefficient 1.0), but it would be wholly indifferent to
inequality as a problem. In other words, egalitarian concerns would have zero
policy impact. It is in this sense, alone, that freedom is perfected.

Secondly (and automatically), the question-begging judgments of “better” and

“worse” are displaced by the ideological reciprocals of freedom and equality
there is no need to compel acquiescence as to the objective merits of either.
Indeed, there is every reason to encourage those unconvinced of the superior
attractions of liberty to seek ideological satisfaction in an egalitarian realm, else-
where. From the perspective of liberty, egalitarian exodus is an unambiguous —
even supreme — good, analogous to political entropy dissipation.

It is further, tacitly presumed here that freedom coefficients correlate linearly with
intelligence optimization, but this depends upon further argument, to be brack-
eted for now.

The extraordinary theoretical value of the SLM can now be demonstrated. Due
to its radical egalitarianism it defines a pessimal limit for neoreaction, and thus
by strict inversion describes the abstract program for a restoration of free society
(the Neoreactionary Model of demographic redistribution, or NM). In order to
chart this reversal, the simplest course is to presuppose the full accomplishment
of the SLM in an arbitrary ‘geographical’ space, which it taken to be flexibly di-
visible, and populated by 320 million people, SLM-homogenized to a freedom
coefficient of 0.5.

Confining ourselves to the tools already employed in the establishment of the

climax SLM (whilst for the sake of lucid presentation — ignoring any degenera-
tive ratchet asymmetries), let us now proceed on the path of reversal. The SLM
conservation law holds that average freedom is preserved, so an initial schism
produces two equal populations equivalent to those of Caplan’s starting point
each numbering 160 million, but now differentiated on the dark counsel dimen-
sion, with freedom coefficients of 0.6 and 0.4.

Pursue this fissional procedure of territorial population division and ideologi-

cal differentiation recursively, focusing exclusively upon the comparatively free
segment each time. The 160 million 0.6s become 80 million 0.7s, and an equal
number of 0.5s. After five iterations, the final neoreactionary-secessionist de-ho-
mogenized distribution is reached:

160 million x 0.4

80 million x 0.5
40 million x 0.6
20 million x 0.7
10 million x 0.8, and — incarnating the meaning of world history, or at least ab-
sorbing neoreactionary exaltation — 10 million x 1.0

Roughly 3% of the original population now live in a truly free society. For Caplan
and other SLM-proponents, of course, nothing at all has been gained.

Yet, assume instead of SLM utilitarian universalism, on profoundly inegalitarian

grounds, that the aggregate quantity of freedom was considered of vastly low-
er importance than the exemplary quality of freedom, then the neoreactionary
achievement is stark. Where freedom nowhere existed, now it does, at an es-
sentially irrelevant cost of moderate socialist deterioration elsewhere. Half of the
original population 160 million souls have now been released to enjoy a ‘fairer’
society than they knew before. Why not congratulate them on the fact, without
being distracted unduly by the starvation and re-education camps? It can be
confidently presumed that they would have voted for the regime that now takes
care of them. Their internal political arrangements need no longer concern us.
For Neoreaction (the NM), it is not a question of whether people (in general) are
free, but only whether freedom (somewhere) exists. The highest attainment of
freedom within the system, rather than the averaged level of freedom throughout
the system, is its overwhelming priority. By reversing the process of demographic
redistribution envisaged by the SLM, its ends are achieved.

The zero-sum utilitarian conclusions of this comparison would be unsettled by a

more concrete elaboration of the NM, in which the effects of exemplarity, com-
petition, the positive externalities of techno-economic performance, and other
influences of freedom were included. At the present level of abstraction — set
by Caplan’s own (SL) model — such positive spin-offs might seem no more than
sentimental concessions to common feeling. It is the ruthless core of the Neore-
actionary Model that has, initially, to assert itself. Better the greatest possible
freedom, even for a few, than a lesser freedom for all. Quality matters most.

The quasi-Rawlesian objection — fully implicit within the SLM — might run: “And
what if the free society, as ‘probability’ dictates, is not yours?” — our rejoinder: “It
would require a despicable egotist not to delight in it, even at a distance, as a
beacon of aspiration, and an idiot or scoundrel not to set out on the same path,
in whichever way they were able.”

Disintegrate destiny.
Dark Moments
Gloom and realism can be hard to distinguish, but it’s important to carry on.
Curmudgeonry without stubbornness isn’t worth a damn. Even in the worst case,
relentless, sluggishly deterioriating ghastliness can at least be interesting. It
shouldn’t be necessary to cheer up, in order to continue, and there might be some
lessons worth attending to in the slough of despond.

I’d go further. Despair can get things started, if it means the abandonment of
diverting idols. A full, immersive soaking, which leaves no doubt about certain
things being over, is morbidly therapeutic, and even something like a first step (at
least a first slouch). There are hopes that have to die, and the sooner the better,
although if they die slowly and horribly, they are perhaps less likely to need killing
twice.

Here’s the argument: Nothing is going anywhere without preliminary disintegra-

tion. That’s the cheerful part. It seems to me an absolutely irresistible claim, and
this post was to have been designed to rally consensus around it. Then I made
the ‘mistake’ of watching this.

Allow me to walk you into this little knot of gloom in stages, punctuated by theses,
each of which marks an essential but incomplete discussion. The meta-assertion
is that there is no other way. Push-back against that, met at any of its way-sta-
tions, will make the dire swamp-thrashing to follow worthwhile.

Thesis-1: There is no more basic preliminary to effective neoreactionary transfor-

mation than schism. This can take many forms. Simple retirement into the private
sphere — as strongly advocated by Nick B. Steves in particular — represents one
significant pole. At the other lies secession, and other forms of macro-political
disintegration (with science fiction variants extending from seasteading out to
space colonization). The essential point is that a consolidation of disagreement
in space is substituted for a resolution of disagreement in time. As far as practi-
cality is concerned, this is the overwhelming priority.

Thesis-2: There can be no agreement. The recent flurry of interest in Emmanuel

Todd should suffice as confirmation (this critical summary by Craig Willy is ex-
cellent). In a very small nutshell, Todd argues that “… political ideologies in the
modern age are projections of a people’s unconscious premodern family val-
ues.” Europe has four basic family types (all exogamous), programming its varied
political ideals. The inegalitarian (classical) liberalism of mercantile North-West
Europeans, corresponds to the ‘Absolute nuclear family’. Weird Franco-Italian
‘egalitarian liberalism’ corresponds to the ‘egalitarian nuclear family’ (Todd’s own
ancestral type and value model). The Germanic ‘Authoritarian family’ tends to
German stuff, and The (Slav-Orthodox) ‘Community family’ breeds communists. If
you haven’t read Willy yet, you’ll be glad you did. The sole take-away here: Peo-
ple are different (oops, that’s a signature judgement of the inegalitarian liberal
type), with no tendency to converge upon common ideals, even among Europe-
ans. There are people who think communism is natural and good, and they’re not
going to be argued out of it. Only a small minority think what you do, and that
isn’t going to change. You either have to kill them, dominate them, be dominated
by them, or escape them. Escaping them is best.

Thesis-3: It’s America that matters (for Anglophone neoreactionaries, at least).

It’s the only country with traditions of freedom that can be broken into large and
influential pieces, and its residual federal structure provides a virtual template for
doing exactly that. For practical purposes, therefore, the future of liberty — even if
you want to read that as the liberty to conduct experiments in ethnonationalist or
theocratic government — is entirely dependent upon the development of Amer-
ican federalism. Further centralized consolidation is losing, and disintegration is
winning. Compared to that, in terms of political practicality, everything else is of
vanishing irrelevance. Dreaming up schemes for ideal authoritarian regimes, in
particular, is simply a hobby (but you know that already, right?).

The only road to the future, or the past, leads through a Disunited States of
America. Now listen to those Bloggingheads again, and wind up the gloom to
scream volume. It’s absolutely clear from a strictly technical point of view that the
sole conceivable platform for an escape from Leviathan’s degenerative ratchet
would be a Confederate States of America, and we can probably agree that
historical sensitivities make that a non-starter. Setting out on a path away from
futile arguments — between people who will never agree — leads straight back
into America’s racial nightmare, and horrible, draining, unresolvable wrangling
that amounts to: Freedom is banned forever, because … what happened to black
people.

Those arguments are stupidity itself. They go nowhere. And that is precisely the
point.

[Don’t kill yourself, or shut down your blog — but a stiff drink is positively recom-
mended]
Cosmological Infancy
There is a ‘problem’ that has been nagging at me for a long time — which is that
there hasn’t been a long time. It’s Saturday, with no one around, or getting drunk,
or something, so I’ll run it past you. Cosmology seems oddly childish.

An analogy might help. Among all the reasons for super-sophisticated atheistic
materialists to deride Abrahamic creationists, the most arithmetically impressive
is the whole James Ussher 4004 BC thing. The argument is familiar to everyone:
6,027 years — Ha!

Creationism is a topic for another time. The point for now is just: 13.7 billion years
– Ha! Perhaps this cosmological consensus estimate for the age of the universe is
true. I’m certainly not going to pit my carefully-rationed expertise in cosmo-phys-
ics against it. But it’s a stupidly short amount of time. If this is reality, the joke’s
on us. Between Ussher’s mid-17th century estimate and (say) Hawking’s late 20th
century one, the difference is just six orders of magnitude. It’s scarcely worth get-
ting out of bed for. Or the crib.

For anyone steeped in Hindu Cosmology — which locates us 1.56 x 10 14 years

into the current Age of Brahma or — Lovecraftian metaphysics, with its vaguer
but abysmally extended eons, the quantity of elapsed cosmic time, according to
the common understanding of our present scientific establishment, is cause for
claustrophobia. Looking backward, we are sealed in a small room, with the wall
of the original singularity pressed right up against us. (Looking forward, things
are quite different, and we will get to that.)

There are at least three ways in which the bizarre youthfulness of the universe
might be imagined:

1. Consider first the disconcerting lack of proportion between space and time.
The universe contains roughly 100 billion galaxies, each a swirl of 100 billion
stars. That makes Sol one of 10^ 22 stars in the cosmos, but it has lasted for
something like a third of the life of the universe. Decompose the solar system and
the discrepancy only becomes more extreme. The sun accounts for 99.86% of the
system’s mass, and the gas giants incorporate 99 of the remainder, yet the age
of the earth is only fractionally less than that of the sun. Earth is a cosmic time
hog. In space it is next to nothing, but in time it extends back through a substan-
tial proportion of the Stelliferous Era, so close to the origin of the universe that it
is belongs to the very earliest generations of planetary bodies. Beyond it stretch
incomprehensible immensities, but before it there is next to nothing.

2. Compared to the intensity of time (backward) extension is of vanishing insignif-

icance. The unit of Planck time corresponding to the passage of a photon across
a Planck length — is about 5.4 x 10^ -44 seconds. If there is a true instant, that is
it. A year consists of less the 3.2 x 10^ 7 seconds, so cosmological consensus es-
timates that there have been approximately 432 339 120 000 000 000 seconds
since the Big Bang, which for our purposes can be satisfactorily rounded to 4.3
x 10 17. The difference between a second and the age of the universe is smaller
that that between a second and a Planck Time tick by nearly 27 orders of mag-
nitude. In other words, if a Planck Time-sensitive questioner asked “When did the
Big Bang happen?” and you answered “Just now” — in clock time — you’d be al-
most exactly right. If you had been asked to identify a particular star from among
the entire stellar population of the universe, and you picked it out correctly, your
accuracy would still be hazier by 5 orders of magnitude. Quite obviously, there
haven’t been enough seconds since the Big Bang to add up to a serious number
less than one for every 10,000 stars in the universe.

3. Isotropy gets violated by time orientation like a Detroit muni-bond investor. In a

universe dominated by dark energy like ours expansion lasts forever. The Stellifer-
ous Era is predicted to last for roughly 100 trillion years, which is over 7,000 times
the present age of the universe. Even the most pessimistic interpretation of the
Anthropic Principle, therefore, places us only a fractional distance from the begin-
ning of time. The Degenerate Era, post-dating star-formation, then extends out to
10^ 40 years, by the end of which time all baryonic matter will have decayed, and
even the most radically advanced forms of cosmic intelligence will have found ex-
istence becoming seriously challenging. Black holes then dominate out to 10 60
years, after which the Dark Era begins, lasting a long time. (Decimal exponents
become unwieldy for these magnitudes, making more elaborate modes of arith-
metical notation expedient. We need not pursue it further.) The take-away: the
principle of Isotropy holds that we should not find ourselves anywhere special in
the universe, and yet we do right at the beginning. More implausibly still, we are
located at the very beginning of an infinity (although anthropic selection might
crop this down to merely preposterous improbability).

Intuitively, this is all horribly wrong, although intuitions have no credible authority,
and certainly provide no grounds for contesting rigorously assembled scientific
narratives. Possibly — I should concede most probably — time is simply ridiculous,
not to say profoundly insulting. We find ourselves glued to the very edge of the
Big Bang, as close to neo-natal as it is arithmetically possible to be.

That’s odd, isn’t it?

Simulated Gnon-Theology
This post was to have been about the simulation argument, but Gnon does the
preliminary work. Whether or not we are living in a computer simulation can quick-
ly come to seem like a derivative consideration.

Nature or Nature’s God, (un)known here as Gnon, provides skepticism with its
ultimate object. With this name we can advance in suspension, freeing thought
from any ground in belief. In its mundane application, Gnon permits realism to
exceed doctrinal conviction, reaching reasonable conclusions amongst uncertain
information. Its invocation, however, is not necessarily mundane.

Assume, momentarily, that God exists. If this assumption comes easily, so much
the better. It is probably obvious, almost immediately, that you do not yet have
a clear idea about what you are thus assuming. To mark exactly this fact, the
established Abrahamic religions propose that you designate God by a proper
name, which corresponds to a definite yet profoundly occulted personal individ-
ual. Approaching the same obscurity from the other side, emphasizing the prob-
lematic rather than relational aspect, I will persevere in the name of Gnon.

To avoid gratuitous idolatry, all our subsequent assumptions must be readily re-
tractable. It is not our mission to tell Gnon what it is. We cannot but be aware,
from the beginning, that two perplexing, and inter-twined sources of idolatry will
be especially difficult to dispel, due to their conceptual intractability, and their
insinuation into the basic fabric of grammar and narrative. In merely using the
tensed verb ‘to be’, and in unfolding a process in stages, we unwittingly idolize
Gnon as a subordinate of being and time. Our sole refuge lies in the recognition,
initially inarticulate, that to think Gnon as God is to advance a hyper-ontological
and meta-chronic hypothesis. From Gnon’s self-understanding, being and time
have to emerge as exhaustively comprehended consequences (even though we
have no idea at all what this might mean).

If Gnon is God, it is the reality of infinite intelligence. Occidental religious tradi-

tion divides this ultimate infinitude into the topics of omniscience, omnipotence,
and omnibenevolence, at the risk of introducing footholds for anthropomorphism
and thus idolatry. Accepting a contrary risk (one that Pope Benedict XVI specif-
ically indicated as Islamic?), I will simply dismiss the possibility that God can be
theologically other than good, since this would be an invitation to Lovecraftian
speculations of distracting vividness. Thomist scholasticism offers a further sim-
plification, by proposing that what there is to know, is that which God creates.
Pursued (perhaps) one step further: Self-knowledge is the auto-creation of a
‘being’ that thinks itself into reality. This, too, offers a conceptual economy to be
eagerly seized.

The creation of the universe is of concern to humans, and the creation of angels
is a grave matter for Satan, but for Gnon they can only be trivialities (it might be
unnecessarily antagonistic to say ‘amusements’). For Gnon as God the Cantorian
transfinite realm is self-identity, or less, whose infinite parts are each infinities.

Unless choosing to blaspheme, we can only assume that Gnon thinks serious
thoughts, of a kind that have some relevance to its thinking about itself, and thus
ensuring itself in its (hyper-ontological) auto-creation. Such thoughts surely en-
compass the creation of gods, since that for (a) God is simply the transfinite as
intelligent activity. If for Gnon to know what it can do is already to have done it,
because divine intelligence is creation, anything less than an infinite pantheon
would be evidence of retardation.

For Gnon, as God, gods are infinitesimals, so that any thorough self-investigation
would involve them. It is effortlessness itself, for It, to thus create an infinite being
among an infinity of such beings each of which, being infinite, is made of infini-
ties, and these in turn, as infinities, consist of infinite infinities, without end. This is
no more than Cantor had already understood, at the most elementary stage of
his transfinite explorations, although, being a human creature, his understanding
was not immediately creation.

If Satan, a mere arch-angel, could imagine himself a god, and not only a god,
but — in potential at least — God seated upon the throne of ultimate sovereignty,
is it possible that no god thinks itself God? And if a god can, if only in possibil-
ity, think itself God, can God not think this rebellion and thus know it — which is
to create it (or make it real)? Does not God’s self-understanding necessitate the
creation of cosmic insurrection? From the Satanic perspective, such questions are
overwhelmingly fascinating, but they lead to a more intricate predicament.

When Gnon (as God) thinks through its gods, as it can only do, the thought nec-
essarily arises: If these god creatures can confuse themselves with God, could not
my self-understanding as God also be a confusion?
The Ruin Reservoir
In the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer notes:

It doesn’t take a genius to see what happens when the entitlement state out-
grows the economy upon which it rests. The time of Greece, Cyprus, Portugal,
Spain, the rest of insolvent social-democratic Europe — and now Detroit — is the
time for conservatives to raise the banner of Stein’s Law and yell, “Stop.” You can
kick the can down the road, but at some point it disappears over a cliff.

Yes, yes, yes … but. Despite its perfect common sense, the monotony of this mes-
sage is becoming utterly unbearable. The end isn’t arriving tomorrow. This dreary
horror show could last for decades. How many roughly-identical, absolutely ob-
vious, sensible Op Ed columns is it possible to endure? (I’m already way into
overtime.)

A reasonable conclusion from the reality of degenerative ratchets is that noth-

ing less than a comprehensive crash makes them stop. Some of the healthier
Right-delight over the Detroit implosion is tied to the expectation that bad exam-
ples could be educational, but the evidence for that is slender, especially under
conditions of sovereign propaganda saturation (the Cathedral). Who are you
going to trust, the academic-media complex or your lying eyes? We already know
the predominant answer to that question.

When a message is existentially unacceptable to the Cathedral, it will not be

heard, and the only messages with substantial reality content are of exactly this
kind. True believers will stick with a morbid utopia to the end, since anything truly
different would — in any case — count for them as some species of death. For
cynics, the calculation is even easier: why unnecessarily shorten looting time?
More common still are the poor idiots, who will just do what they’re told (while
trying to grab a little feeding trough time), and then be sacrificed. It should al-
ready be clear that nobody cares about them, and they’re too defective to care
competently for themselves. That’s neither justice nor injustice, but simple reality.

Nobody here is under any illusions about the profound socio-political malignan-
cy given free reign in Detroit, or about the quality of human material over which
it held sway, and yet it lasted up to a point that has provoked repeated compar-
isons with Hiroshima-1945, wrung out to the ugly end (and we haven’t yet seen
the end). If we ever doubted that there’s a lot of ruin in a nation, we no longer
can. For a city uniquely proficient at suicide, the process lasts half a century, in-
cluding final, grinding decades, when nothing beyond a zombie parody of what
once was still remains. If a uniquely benighted social trash pile can last this long,
how far can the world’s most powerful nation spin out its decline? There’s enough
time, to be sure, for an Amazon jungle worth of Herbert Stein-inspired Op Eds.
Can-kicking eventually runs out of road, of course, and its only when this truism
has become an intolerable, deadening drone that neoreaction begins. Anybody
who still needs to hear that message is simply lost. Remedial education cannot
be the neoreactionary task (there are libertarian-oriented conservatives for that
— and they will fail).

If the Dark Enlightenment cannot end with Stein’s conclusion, but is rather initiat-
ed by it, born from the presupposition that this cannot go on forever, how is its
guiding topic to be understood? What will it discuss — with what will it occupy
itself — amid the deepening ruin, for decades?

As its name indicates, Dark Enlightenment is a creature of late twilight, preparing

for a gruesomely protracted night. One object that merits growing fascination is
certainly this: the ruin reservoir is deep. As a fact this is easily — and for neore-
action necessarily — acknowledged, but the exploration of its mysteries has still
scarcely begun.
Economies of Deceit
Social organizations grow ever larger, and resist disintegration, due to econo-
mies of scale. There are disproportionate benefits to being large, sufficient to
over-compensate for the associated disadvantages, to support expansion, and
to fund the suppression of fission. Like every trend reinforced by positive nonline-
arities, large-scale social formations accentuate the gradient of time, realizing a
ratchet mechanism, through ‘network effects’. In this way, they contribute not only
to the content of history, but also to its shape.

When the fundamental deformation of history was evidently attributable to scale

economies, it was only natural to speak primarily of Leviathan — the seizure of
historical time by the gigantic. It might therefore be considered a significant
symptom — of something — that a substitute term now seems more persuasively
applicable. Leviathan remains vast, and growing, but it is more exactly specified
as the Cathedral, because its principal ratchet mechanism owes less to sheer
magnitude than to a mastery of deceit.

Deceit is nothing new, in matters of power, or any other, but it is open to inno-
vation. A state religion that pretends to be the negation of religion is something
new, as is propaganda in its strict sense. There is no precedent for an intolerant,
precisely coded system of belief, trending to a totalitarian form, whilst presenting
itself as inevitable progress towards general disillusionment.

Economies of deceit, like those of scale, draw historical momentum from the fact
that they are profoundly automatized. No one decided that large-scale social
organizations should be advantaged. Similarly, the revolutionary efficiency of de-
ceit was never a point of deliberation. Deceit works, due to contingencies of deep
evolution. More specifically, it works because propaganda machinery was never
a factor in the archaic human environment, so that stimulus sensitivity was never
provided with the opportunity to adapt defensively in respect to it.

The total power of deceit can be understood most clearly when examined back-
wards, from its final destination, which is shared with the entire utilitarian sphere.
At the end there is the wire-head, the social and technological destination of
direct neurological rewards, where the message “I have received what I want”
has been divorced from all real acquisition or accomplishment. Do you want this
thing? Or do you want the feeling that you have this thing? The latter can be
strengthened, sharpened, and in every way subjectively perfected. It is also, giv-
en suitable historical conditions, vastly cheaper to deliver. Hence, the economy
of deceit.

For those paying attention, the entire structure of economic thought and policy
switched onto this track roughly a century ago. The demetalization of money is
the most obvious indicator, trending towards a pure signal of wealth, entirely
disconnected from the extravagance of physical reality. Keynesianism, in its es-
sence, is wire-head economics, focusing on the policy question: how do we best
deliver the stim? The idea that growth of the real economy might be the best
route to this goal marks its proponent out as a hopeless crank, entirely out of
touch with the recent development of the discipline. What matters is the wealth
effect, delivered in carefully calibrated jolts, down the wire. (I’ve tried to thrash
this out before.)

Gradually, but inexorably, propaganda swallow everything. All macroeconomic

aggregates — GDP, inflation, capital stock … — tend to senseless garbage, be-
cause their only robust anchor point is Cathedral-political: what can we make
you feel? The latest evidence is telling. It is time, apparently, to definitively break
with archaic questions of economic production, and instead to work solely with
the macroeconomic garbage data, in order for it to tell us that we’re richer than
we think we are.

You can’t make this s%&t up. Yes we can!

Laffer Drift
One dark and fearsome crag, half-lost among the Himalayan mountain range
of uncleared obligations stretched out before this blog, is a promise to devote a
post (or several) to Mencius Moldbug’s Neocameral regime model. The oppor-
tunity to make a small payment against this debt having arisen, I am eagerly
seizing it.

A relatively marginal but consistent feature in Moldbug’s model is the tendency

of Neocameral tax rates to approximate to the Laffer maximum. Since Moldbug
aims to rationalize the theory of government, under the presumption of its inelim-
inably self-interested nature, this suggestion scarcely requires an argument (and
in fact does not receive one). Government will always tend to maximize its re-
sources, and Arthur Laffer’s graph of optimum revenue-raising tax rates seems to
show the way this is done. A Neocameral regime tends the economy of a country
exactly as a farmer tends a herd of animals — without ever forgetting that ulti-
mate redemption occurs in the abattoir.

There is a problem with this assumption, however, which is that the very idea of
a Laffer maximum tax rate is incomplete. By coordinating tax rates (on the x-axis)
with tax revenues (on the y-axis), the Laffer curve demolishes the crude economic
intuition that revenue rises continuously with tax rates. Through the a priori pos-
tulate that a 100% tax rate yields zero revenue, Laffer demonstrates that revenue
maximization has to be located somewhere in the central region of the curve. Its
exact location — as determined by the shape of the curve — is dependent upon
empirical factors, such as incentive effects, and cannot be deduced by pure the-
ory.

Missing from the Laffer curve is time, and thus dynamic revenue projection. This is
especially important to the Neocameral model, since a central failure to be recti-
fied through reactionary democracy-suppression is the systematic heightening of
time-preference, or collapsing economic time-horizons, with which democracy is
inextricably bound. The Neocameral state is justified by its capacity for time-ex-
tended economic rationality, and this is not something that the simple Laffer
curve can reflect.

Adding time to Laffer graphs is not a complex task. All that is required is a multi-
plication of curves, constituting a time series, with each curve corresponding to a
time-horizon. Rather than a single curve, such a graph would consist of a 1-year
curve, a 2-year curve, a 3-year curve … and out to whichever extended prospect
was considered appropriate.

If levels of taxation were irrelevant to economic growth rates, then each curve
would be identical, and this exercise would lack all significance. If, alternatively,
taxation effected growth in a in a predictable direction, then the Laffer curves
would steadily drift as time-horizons were expanded.

To begin with the improbable case, assume that extraction of resources from pri-
vate property owners tends to increase economic growth. Then each successive
Laffer curve would drift to the right, as the tax base expands under the benefi-
cent impact of lavish government spending. A small and efficient government, by
depriving the economy of its attention, would steadily shrink the tax base relative
to its potential, and thus reduce the total level of takings (as a function of time).

If, far more plausibly, taxation suppresses growth, then each successive curve
will drift to the left. The Laffer maximum tax rate for a 1-year time horizon will be
revealed as ever more excessive as the horizon is dilated, and the shortfall of the
depredated economy is exposed with increasing clarity. The more extended the
time-horizon, the further to the left the dynamic Laffer maximum has to be. As
economic far-sightedness stretches out into the distance, an authoritarian-realist
regime converges with anarcho-capitalism, since growth-maximization increas-
ingly dominates its revenue projections.

Of all the reasons to distrust the Neocameral model, an intrinsic tendency to

short-term Laffer-max revenue raising cannot be among them.

[Apologies for the link famine — trawling the Moldbug archive through the GFC
is a nightmare undertaking, and it’s 3:30 in the morning. I’ll try to punch some in
over the next few days.]
Discrimination
Bryan Caplan has had two epiphanies, which sum to the conclusion that — bad
as tribalism is — misanthropy is the real problem. His ineradicable universalism
betrays him once again.

It matters little whether people are uniformly judged good or bad. Far more im-
portant is whether such judgment is discriminating.

The central argument of Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals is clarifying in this

regard, not least because it explains how radical mystification came to dominate
the topic. How could there ever come to be a moral quandary about the value of
discrimination? Considered superficially, it is extremely puzzling.

Differentiation between what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ requires discrimination. This is a

capability no younger than life itself, which it serves as an indispensable function.
As soon as there is behavior, there is discrimination between alternatives. One
way leads to survival, the other way leads to death. There is nourishment, or not
reproduction, or not safety or predatory menace. Good and bad, or the discrimi-
nation between them (which is the same thing), are etched primordially into any
world that life inhabits. Discrimination is needed to survive.

The very existence of archaic hominids attests to billions of years of effective

discrimination, between safety and danger, wholesome and putrid or poison-
ous food, good mates and less good (or worthless) ones. When these elevated
apes differentiated between good and bad, appetizing and rotten, attractive
and repulsive, they found such discriminations sufficiently similar in essence to
be functionally substitutable. When judging that some food item is ‘not good for
us’, a person is ‘rotten’, or the odor of a potential mate is ‘delicious’, we recall such
substitutions, and the primordial sense of discrimination that they affirm. There
can be no long-term deviation from the original principle: discrimination is intel-
ligence aligned with survival.

Two contrary developments now present themselves. Firstly, there is a sublima-

tion or sophistication of discrimination, which might be called cultivation. Ab-
stract concepts, modes of expression, artworks, delicate culinary flavors, refined
behaviors, and exotic elaborations of sexual-selection stimuli, among innumera-
ble other things, can all be subtly discriminated on the ancient scale, supporting
an ever more intricate and extended hierarchy of judgments. The reflexive dou-
bling of this potential upon itself, as captured by the ‘higher’ judgment that to
discriminate well is good, produces a ‘natural aristocracy’. For the first time, there
is a self-conscious ‘Right’. This, at least, is its logico-mythical ur-form. To divide
the good from the bad is good. Order, hierarchy, and distinction emerge from an
affirmation of discrimination.
Because the Left cannot create, it comes second. It presupposes an existing hi-
erarchy, or order of discriminations, which is subverted through a ‘slave revolt in
morality’. The formula is simple enough: to discriminate is bad. Following from
this leftist moral perversion, as its second-order consequence, those who do not
discriminate (well), but are in fact discriminated against, must be the good. In the
new moral order, therefore, to be bad at discrimination is good — or ‘universalist’
— whilst the old (and now ‘evil’) quality of good judgment, based on competent
perception of patterns and differences, is the very quintessence of sin.

Lawrence Auster’s thinking, which would not usually be described as

‘Nietzschean’, conforms to the conclusions of the Antichrist perfectly in this:

We thus arrive at our present system of mass nonwhite immigration, multicultur-

alism, racial preferences for minorities, the symbolic celebration of minorities, the
covering up of black-on-white violence, and antiracism crusades directed exclu-
sively at whites. Under this system, whites practice assiduous non-discrimination
toward the unassimilated, alien, or criminal behavior of racial minorities, while
practicing the most assiduous discrimination against their fellow whites for the
slightest failure to be non-discriminatory. This is the system that conservatives
variously describe as “political correctness” or the “double standard.” However,
from the point of view of the functioning of the liberal order itself, what conserva-
tives call the double standard is not a double standard at all, but a fundamental
and necessary articulation of the society into the “non-discriminators” and the
“non-discriminated against”—an articulation upon which the very legitimacy and
existence of the liberal society depends. [Auster’s emphasis]

The racial pretext for this righteous diatribe is not incidental, given the prevailing
sense of ‘discrimination’ in Left-edited languages. Caution is required, however,
precisely because vulgar racism is insufficiently discriminating. All generalization
lurches towards the universal. The abstract principle of Leftism is, in any case, far
more general. The trend towards the Left-absolute is entirely clear, and pre-pro-
grammed: no state of human existence can possibly be any better or worse than
any other, and only through recognition of this can we be saved. Do you sinfully
imagine that it is better to be a damned soul like Nietzsche than an obese, lep-
rous, slothful, communist, cretin? Or worse still, in Bryan Caplan’s world, that one
might design an immigration policy on this basis? Then your path to the abyss is
already marked out before you.

It does not take an exceptional mastery of logic to see the inextinguishable con-
tradiction in Leftist thought. If discrimination is bad, and non-discrimination is
good, how can discrimination be discriminated from non-discrimination, without
grave moral error? This is an opportunity for Rightist entertainment, but not for
solace. The Left has power and absurdist mysticism on its side. Logic is for sin-
ners.
Reactionary Horror
Within the Western tradition, the expedition to find Kurtz at the end of the river
has a single overwhelming connotation. It is a voyage to Hell. Hence its abso-
lute importance, utterly exceeding narrow ‘mission specifications’. The assigned
objectives are no more than a pretext, arranging the terms of approach to an
ultimate destination. The narrative drive, as it gathers momentum, is truly infernal.
Dark Enlightenment is the commanding attraction.

There are no doubt species of reactionary political and historical philosophy which
remain completely innocent of such impulses. Almost certainly, they predominate
over their morbid associates. To maintain a retrograde psychological orientation,
out of reverence for what has been, and is ceasing to be, can reasonably be op-
posed to any journey to the end of the night. Yet such a contrast only sharpens
our understanding of those for whom the disintegration of tradition describes a
gradient, and a vector, propelling intelligence forwards into the yawning abyss.

Reaction is articulated as an inversion of the progressive promise, dissociating

‘the good’ and ‘the future’. The tacit science fiction narrative that corresponds to
projected social evolution is stripped of its optimism, and two alternative genres
arise in its place. The first, as we have fleetingly noted, is mild and nostalgic, re-
balancing the tension of time towards what has been lost, and tending to an in-
creasingly dreamlike inhabitation of ancient glories. A conservative-traditionalist
mentality devotes itself to a mnemonic quest, preserving vestiges of virtue among
the remnants of an eroded society, or — when preservation at last surrenders
its grasp on actuality — turning to fantastic evocations, as the final redoubt of
defiance. Tolkien exemplifies this tendency in its most systematic expression. The
future is gently obliterated, as the good dies within it.

The second reactionary alternative to the ruin of utopian futurism develops in the
direction of horror. It does not hesitate in its voyage to the end of the river, even
as smoke-shrouded omens thicken on the horizon. As the devastation deepens,
its futurism is further accentuated. Historical projection becomes the opportunity
for an exploration of Hell. (The ‘neo-‘ of ‘neoreaction’ thus finds additional con-
firmation.)

On this track, reactionary historical anticipation fuses with the genre of horror in
its most intense possibility (and true vocation). Numerous consequences are quite
rapidly evident. One special zone of significance concerns the insistent question
of popularization, which is substantially resolved, almost from the start. The genre
of reactionary populism is already tightly formulated, on the side of horror fiction,
where things going to Hell is an established presupposition. Zombie Apocalypse
is only the most prominent variant of a far more general cultural accommodation
to impending disaster. ‘Survivalism’ is as much a genre convention as a socio-po-
litical expectation. (When, as VXXC points out on the blog, .22 ammunition
functions as virtual currency, horror fiction has already installed itself as an oper-
ational dimension of social reality.)

Reaction does not do dialectics, or converse with the Left (with which it has no
community), yet historical fatality carries its message: Your hopes are our horror
story. As the dream perishes, the nightmare strengthens, and even — hideously —
invigorates. So how does this tale unfold …?

What were you expecting? Rivendell?

Zombie Hunger
The Psykonomist forwarded an extraordinary essay on the topic of popular ap-
petite for ombie Apocalypse, considered as an expressive channel for loosely
‘anarchist’ hostility to the state. Given the failure of Right-pole democratic initi-
atives to roll back — or even check — relentless government concentration and
expansion, catastrophic ‘solutions’ emerge as the sole alternative:

Films and television shows have allowed Americans to imagine what life would
be like without all the institutions they had been told they need, but which they
now suspect may be thwarting their self-fulfillment. We are dealing with a wide
variety of fantasies here, mainly in the horror or science fiction genres, but the
pattern is quite consistent and striking, cutting across generic distinctions. In the
television show Revolution, for example, some mysterious event causes all elec-
trical devices around the world to cease functioning. The result is catastrophic
and involves a huge loss of life, as airborne planes crash to earth, for example.
All social institutions dissolve, and people are forced to rely only on their person-
al survival skills. Governments around the world collapse, and the United States
divides up into a number of smaller political units. This development runs contra-
ry to everything we have been taught to believe about “one nation, indivisible.”
Yet it is characteristic of almost all these shows that the federal government is
among the first casualties of the apocalyptic event, and—strange as it may at
first sound—there is a strong element of wish fulfillment in this event. The thrust of
these end-of-the-world scenarios is precisely for government to grow smaller or
to disappear entirely. These shows seem to reflect a sense that government has
grown too big and too remote from the concerns of ordinary citizens and unre-
sponsive to their needs and demands. If Congress and the President are unable
to shrink the size of government, perhaps a plague or cosmic catastrophe can do
some real budget cutting for a change.

The essay captures a critical dimension of disintegration within the ‘reactionary

camp’, dividing those who seek to co-opt the Cathedral-Leviathan managerial
elite to a more realistic (or tradition-tolerant) political philosophy, and those who
— far more numerously and inarticulately — are invested in the hard death of the
regime. The latter (immoderate) position, it appears, is genuinely and even shock-
ingly popular. Swathes of mass entertainment production are able to thrive on
the basis of its seductive nightmares. (Is pulp catastrophism the economic base
that will support neoreactionary contagion?)

Reading the Cantor essay alongside Jim Donald’s epochal Natural Law and Nat-
ural Rights essay is highly suggestive. A common thread running through both
is the centrality of vigilantism to the popular Right. The purpose of Natural Law,
Donald argues, is not to demand justice from a higher authority, but to neutralize
the interference of any such authority in the pursuit of justice by decentralized
agencies. Natural Law protects the right to legitimate vengeance, ensuring that
individuals are not inhibited in their exercise of self-protection. When the State is
seen to operate primarily as a social force defending criminals against retalia-
tion, it loses the instinctive solidarity of the citizenry, and dark dreams of Zombie
Apocalypse begin to coalesce.

Given the survivalist ethic in all these end-of-the-world shows, they are proba-
bly not popular with gun control advocates. One of the most striking motifs they
have in common—evident in Revolution, Falling Skies, The Walking Dead, and
many other such shows—is the loving care with which they depict an astonishing
array of weaponry. The Walking Dead features an Amazon warrior, who is adept
with a samurai sword, as well as a southern redneck, who specializes in a cross-
bow. The dwindling supply of ammunition puts a premium on weapons that do
not require bullets. That is not to say, however, that The Walking Dead has no
place for modern firearms and indeed the very latest in automatic weapons. Both
the heroes and the villains in the series—difficult to tell apart in this respect—are
as well-armed as the typical municipal SWAT team in contemporary America.

Among the attractions of Zombie Apocalypse, in this construction, is the disap-

pearance of the State as an inhibitory factor in the social economy of retaliation.
The ombie-plagued world is a free-fire zone, in which no authorities any longer
stand between the armed remnant and the milling hordes of decivilization. What-
ever the odds of the fight to come, the right to vigilante and counter-revolution-
ary violence has been unambiguously restored, and this is deeply appreciated
— by opaque popular impulse — as a return to natural order. The State had taken
sides against Natural Law, so that its catastrophic excision from the social field
is greeted with relief, even if the cost of this disappearance is a world reduced to
ashes, predominantly populated by the cannibalistic undead.

There’s a ferocity to this that will be worked. It’s best to be prepared.

The Monkey Trap
How did we get into this mess? When neoreaction slips into contemplative mode,
it soon arrives a question roughly like this. Something evidently went very wrong,
and most probably a considerable number of things.

The preferred focus of concern decides the particular species of doomsterism,

within an already luxuriant taxonomy of social criticism. What common ground
exists on the new ultra-right is cast like a shadow by the Cathedral — which no
neoreactionary can interpret as anything other than a radical historical calam-
ity. This recognition (or ‘Dark Enlightenment’) is a coalescence, and for that very
reason a fissile agglomeration, as even the most perfunctory tour across the ‘re-
actosphere’ makes clear. (The Outside in blogroll already represents a specific
distribution of attention, but within three clicks it will take you everywhere from
disillusioned libertarians to throne-and altar traditionalists, or from hedonistic
gender biorealists to neo-nazi conspiracies.)

Really though, how did we get into this mess? A dizzying variety of more-or-less
convincing, more-or-less distant historical way-stations can be proposed, and
have been. Explanatory regression carries the discussion ever further out — at
least in principle — until eventually the buck stops with Gnon, who dropped us in
it somewhere murkily remote. It’s a situation highly conducive to story-telling, so
here’s a story. It’s a mid-scale tale, intermediate between — say — the inaugura-
tion of the Federal Reserve and structural personality disorder of the Godhead.

As a preliminary warning, this is an account that only works — insofar as it does

at all — for those who find negative intelligence crisis at the root of the problem.
Those neoreactionaries, doubtlessly existing among us, who tend to see intelli-
gence augmentation as a fast-track to hell, might nevertheless find this narrative
suggestive, in other ways.

Short version: the monkeys did it.

Longer version: there’s a tempting cosmic formula for the biological basis of tech-
nological civilizations, which cetaceans undermine. I encountered the exception
before the formula (roughly 40 years ago), in a short story by Larry Niven called
The Handicapped. This story — dredged now from distant memory — is about
dolphins, and their role in a future trans-species and inter-planetary civilization.
The central point is that (unlike monkeys), such animals require the external do-
nation of prostheses before they can become technological, and thus apply their
intelligence within the Oecumenon. Their ‘handicap’ is a remarkable evolution of
cognitive capability beyond manipulative competence. Those natural trends that
generated intelligence continue to work through them, uninterrupted by tech-
no-historical interference.
The (flawed) thesis that the cetaceans disrupt has yet to be settled into an entire-
ly satisfactory formula, but it goes something like this: every species entering into
the process of techno-historical development is as unintelligent as it can possibly
be. In other words, as soon as intelligence barely suffices to ‘make’ history, history
begins, so that the inhabitants of (pre-singularity) historical societies — wherev-
er they may be found — will be no more than minimally intelligent. This level of
threshold intelligence is a cosmic constant, rather than a peculiarity of terrestrial
conditions. Man was smart enough to ignite recorded history, but — necessarily
— no smarter. This thesis strikes me as important, and substantially informative,
even though it is wrong. (I am not pretending that it is new.)

The idea of threshold intelligence is designed for monkeys, or other — ‘non-hand-

icapped’ — species, which introduces another ingredient to this discussion. It
explains why articulate neoreaction can never be popular, because it recalls the
Old Law of Gnon, whose harshness is such that the human mind recoils from it in
horrified revulsion. Only odd people can even tentatively entertain it. The penalty
for stupidity is death.

Gregory Clark is among those few to have grasped it clearly. Any eugenic trend
within history is expressed by continuous downward mobility. For any given lev-
el of intelligence, a steady deterioration in life-prospects lies ahead, culling the
least able, and replacing them with the more able, who inherit their wretched so-
cio-economic situation, until they too are pushed off the Malthusian cliff. Relative
comfort belongs only to the sports and freaks of cognitive advance. For everyone
else, history slopes downwards into impoverishment, hopelessness, and eventual
genetic extinction. That is how intelligence is made. Short of Technological Singu-
larity, it is the only way. Who wants a piece of that?

No one does, or almost no one. The ‘handicapped’ would no doubt revolt against
it if they could, but they are unable to do so, so their cognitive advance contin-
ues. Monkeys, on the other hand, are able to revolt, once they finesse their nasty
little opposable thumbs. They don’t like the Old Law, which has crafted them
through countless aeons of ruthless culling, so they make history instead. If they
get everything ‘right’, they even sleaze their way into epochs of upward social
mobility, and with this great innovation, semi-sustainable dysgenics gets started.
In its fundamentals it is hideously simple: social progress destroys the brain.

Cyclic stability, or negative feedback, structures history to hold intelligence down

to the dim limit (as the intelligence threshold is seen — or more typically missed
— from the other side). The deviation into technological performance chokes off
the trend to bio-cognitive improvement, and reverses it, hunting homeostasis with
a minimal-intelligence target. Progress and degenerate, or regress and improve.
That’s the yet-to-be-eradicated Old Law, generating cyclical history as a side-ef-
fect.

The monkeys became able to pursue happiness, and the deep ruin began.
If the terrestrial biosphere had held back for a few million years, let the primates
get annihilated by a comet, and found a way to provide the cetaceans with pre-
hensile organs somewhere up the road — after socio-linguistic sex-selection and
relentless Malthusian butchery had fine-tuned their brains — then techno-history
might have had another 50 points of average IQ to play with in its host popula-
tion. It didn’t, and here we are. (Never bet against the ugly.)
Obamanation…
… isn’t an insulting name for Obama, or even for what he has ‘wrought’. It’s a
name for America, and thus for the leading spirit (or Zeitgeist) of the world. A
country where support for a Harvard Law presidency ‘bottoms out’ (repeatedly)
at something above 40 knows what it wants — and is getting it (good and hard).
Blaming Obama for any of this is like blaming pustules for the bubonic plague.

The world deserves Obama almost as much as America does, and in many cases,
even more. If the Cathedral is basically to be applauded — and who doesn’t be-
lieve that? — there’s every reason to mainline it, by putting the authentic voice of
the academy in power. As the chrysalis-husk of a universal project, America is duty
bound to abolish itself as a particular nation. If it defers to its own ‘propositional’
ideals, how could it not? There are even chunks of the Tea Party who kinda sorta
felt it was the right thing to do. The conservative establishment certainly did, in-
cluding the Republican campaign machines of the two last presidential elections.
The Idea necessitates blood sacrifice, which Obamanation consummates.

However neoreaction makes sense of itself, it signals what it is through a dis-

missal of partisan vulgarity. Anybody who thinks the GoP has the key even to the
outhouse is decidedly not ‘one of us’. Like the tingle-crotched devotees of the
One, we understand that Obama is a destiny, and even an incarnation of logos.
What he symbolizes has been awaited for a long time. His personal vacuity and
administrative incompetence do not detract, in the slightest, from that. Through
the fantasy that he reduces to (with only insignificant remainder), the Cathedral
announces itself purely at last. Attitudinal correctness is the only authority to be
recognized in the end.

By voiding governance from its summit, ‘Obama’ makes the neoreactionary case.
He shows that government is to be found elsewhere, in the machinery of prac-
tical elitism, and that — there too — symbolic gestures have almost entirely sup-
planted functional competence. Government, even real government, is no longer
expected to work. All that is required is that it can be morally legitimated, down
to its most minute corpuscle, so that its failures are clearly seen — which is to say
promoted — as the fault of something other than itself.

Insofar as retrograde pieces of America insist upon being themselves, as if un-

touched by the Idea, they are betrayed (by the ‘media’) as unworthy of their gov-
ernment, and justly suffering for their sins. Carnal privilege blinds them to what
they should joyfully give up. To not believe in government — as the radiant sign of
the collective — is a fallen state, from which the Obamanation extends a promise
of redemption. By losing everything, with the help of government, one enters into
the Kingdom.

The Obamanation is not what Obama has done (an intrinsically ridiculous con-
struction). It’s what chose Obama, as its symbol. It is the virtual evacuation of the
world into America, and the complementary evacuation of specifically American
power from the world. This is the phase of historical progression in which neo-
reaction necessarily emerges, its diagnoses dramatized by everything that now
occurs, undisguised.

For that we are truly grateful, intrinsically, which is to say, in our very existence as
the channel for something else. Conservatives will continue to find that hard to
understand.

Consider this Instapundit visual joke, just for a moment:

The ‘Bush’ angle sounds partisan, and thus embarrassingly knuckle-draggy to

brandy-sipping sophisticates of the Outer right, but that judgment might be over-
hasty. Perhaps partisanship itself is swallowed up into the lampoon. In any case,
it still makes me laugh, due mostly to the tacit understanding that “World War III”
is what Obama is for.

Of course, when you elect the pure totem of the Cathedral to the world’s highest
office, you’re really — or consequentially — calling for the cleansing of the earth in
the fires of hell. It requires only the most elementary comprehension of Occidental
religious history to understand that.

Spiritual purity, and damn the consequences, that’s the Obamanation (and, by
the way, you’re a racist). It’s the bloody ruination of world order in the name of
moral fanaticism, eclipsing all strategic realism through its wishful thinking and
associated, narrow political maneuvers, before blundering into the present stage
of terminal, incendiary, paralysis.

Who could have imagined that the world going to shit would be so bizarrely en-
tertaining?
Cladistic Meditations
Neoreactionaries have a thing about Puritanism. Whether or not this trait is con-
ceptually essential is a question for another time. The important point, right now,
is that it serves as a cladistic marker. Whatever it might be that neoreaction spe-
ciates into, it bears this trait as an indication of cultural ancestry, bookmarking
the root-code archive of Mencius Moldbug.

When reconstructed as an argument, the Moldbuggian clade proposes a spe-

cies of ethnographic categorization on a loosely Darwinian (and strongly evolu-
tionary) model, according to which cultural phenomena are logically nested, in
tree-like fashion, revealing a pattern of descent. When considering an English
Darwinian Evolutionist, who is also an example of contemporary political pro-
gressivism, Moldbug makes this mode of analysis explicit:

My belief is that Professor Dawkins is not just a Christian atheist. He is a Prot-

estant atheist. And he is not just a Protestant atheist. He is a Calvinist atheist.
And he is not just a Calvinist atheist. He is an Anglo-Calvinist atheist. In other
words, he can be also be described as a Puritan atheist, a Dissenter atheist, a
Nonconformist atheist, an Evangelical atheist, etc, etc.

This cladistic taxonomy traces Professor Dawkins’ intellectual ancestry back about
400 years, to the era of the English Civil War. Except of course for the atheism
theme, Professor Dawkins’ kernel is a remarkable match for the Ranter, Leveller,
Digger, Quaker, Fifth Monarchist, or any of the more extreme English Dissenter
traditions that flourished during the Cromwellian interregnum.

If there were a Thirty-Nine Articles of neoreaction, some suitably compressed

version of this cladogram would constitute the primary tenet of the creed. Among
the logically most attenuated twigs of this scheme, sub-speciated to the limit
of cladistic definition, is found the globally-dominant sovereign instance of ad-
vanced modernity — the Cathedral (the enemy).

It is not surprising, therefore, that the ‘Puritan question’ remains the core preoccu-
pation of the neoreactionary Dark Enlightenment. This has been illustrated with
consummate clarity by an article posted by J. M. Smith at The Orthosphere, con-
testing the Christian genealogy of the Cathedral, and the subsequent rejoinder
by descendants of the neoreactionary clade — of varying religious persuasions.
Foseti reacts with some bemusement to the polemical framing of the Smith text,
because what he encounters is an argument without disagreement:

At The Orthosphere, there’s a post purporting to argue that the Cathedral was
not constructed by Christians. Presumably the title was changed by someone
other than the author of the text of the post, because the post ably demonstrates
that Christians did in fact build the Cathedral. Indeed, the post is recommended.
Cladistic method contributes significantly to an understanding of these relation-
ships. In particular, it is essential to grasp the logic of taxonomic naming, which
perfectly corresponds to pure genealogy, and the ideal reconstruction of evolu-
tionary relatedness. The crucial point: A cladistic name refers to everything that
is encompassed by a splitting-off, speciation, or schism.

At the risk of superfluous explanation, it might be worth rehearsing this logic

with a colloquialized biological example (using familiar rather than technical tax-
onomic descriptors). Paleontologists are supremely confident that amphibians
evolved from bony fishes, and reptiles evolved from amphibians. This can be re-
formulated, without loss of information, as a cladistic series (of branchings), with
bony fishes including amphibians,which in turn include reptiles. In other words,
as a cladistic name, a ‘bony fish’ describes an initial speciating split from an
ancestral clade, which — projected forwards — encompasses every subsequent
speciation, in this case amphibians, and reptiles. Both amphibians and reptiles
are bony fish. So are mammals, apes, and human beings. Bony fish, as a clade,
comprehends every descendant species that has bony fish ancestry, whether ex-
tinct, still existent, or still to come. Nothing that has bony fish ancestry, however
distant, can ever cease to be a bony fish (whatever else it becomes, in addition).
Cladistically, it is obvious that humans are bony fish, as well as far simpler and
more primordial things.

Smith writes:

… a Great Schism rent American Protestantism in the early nineteenth century,

with the sundering fissure tearing through denominations, and even congrega-
tions. Protestants on one side of the fissure called themselves “liberals,” those
on the other side called themselves “orthodox.” … Liberal Protestantism is a new,
post-Christian religion that in its early stages opportunistically spoke in a Chris-
tian idiom, but nevertheless preached a new gospel.

We have seen, however, that from a cladistic point of view, nothing arising as
a schism from X ever becomes ‘post-X’. There is no such thing as a post-bony-
fish, a post-reptile, or a post-ape. Nor, by strict logical analogy, can there ever
be such things as post-Abrahamic Monotheists, post-Christians, post-Catholics,
post-Protestants, post-Puritans, or post-Progressives. It is a logical impossibility
for ancestral clades to ever be evolutionarily superseded. To have Christianity as
a cultural ancestor is to remain Christian forever. That is no more than termino-
logical precision, from the cladistic-neoreactionary perspective.

Steves elucidates the same point in a closely-related vocabulary: “… there are

atheist Catholics. Why? Because being Catholic is cultural. It is not only that, but
it is also at least that.” Cultures are genealogically or cladistically organized —
that is the neoreacionary presupposition. (Lateral complications are not entirely
inconceivable — link to a truly ghastly Wikipedia entry on an important thought:
the non-treelike network. That’s not for now.)
What, though, of neoreaction itself? What did it split from? Like everything else
under investigation here, unless it is comprehended as a schism, it is not compre-
hended at all.

When cladistically approached, the primordial split is the ineluctable question of

identity, or persistent ancestry. We can, perhaps, postpone it momentarily, but it
will eventually lead us in directions that are more than a little Lovecraftian.

What was the last thing that neoreaction was submerged within, before arising,
through schism? (That investigation has to await another post.)
Ethno-Cladistics
The Ethno-cladistic thesis, sketchily reconstructed here from Mencius Moldbug’s
neoreactionary usage, proposes that relations between cultural systems are
captured by cladograms to a highly significant level of adequacy. The limits to
this thesis are set by lateral complications — interchanges and modifications that
do not conform to a pattern of branching descent — and these are by no means
negligible. Nevertheless, actual cultural formations are dominated by cladistic
order. As a consequence, cultural theories that assume taxonomic regularity as
a norm are capable of reaching potentially realistic approximations, and fur-
thermore offer the only prospect for the rigorous organization of ethnographic
phenomena.

The most direct and central defense of the ethno-cladistic thesis bypasses the
comparatively high-level religious systems that provide the material for Moldbug’s
arguments, and turn instead to the ethnographic root phenomenon: language.
Languages simply are cultures in their fundamentals, so that any approach appli-
cable to them will have demonstrated its general suitability for cultural analysis.

I’d try to spin this out melodramatically, but I don’t think there’s really any point:

It seems indisputable (to me) that lateral complications of these basic cladistic
schemes are marginal. Languages are naturally grouped in branching, tree-like
structures, which like those of (metazoan) biological variety are simultaneous-
ly explanatory of historical processes and morphological relatedness, because
they represent evolutionary processes of successive speciation. The dominant
organization is a taxonomic hierarchy, conforming to the formal language of set
theory. The real events captured by these schemes are schisms, whose logical
relation is that of genus to species. In the case of culture, as with biology, the
manifest evolutionary development indicates the existence of some efficient he-
reditary mechanism (whose unit of replicated information is tagged by Moldbug,
among innumerable others, as a ‘meme‘). On this last point, it is worth noting that
taxonomic biological classification, and even genetics, preceded the biochemi-
cal discovery of DNA — and was broadly confirmed, rather than disrupted, when
this discovery took place. (The meme is an analogy, but not a metaphor.)

Ethno-cladistics is the schematics of cultural heritage. Despite the bulldozer as-

sertiveness of this post, it is not designed to block methodical efforts directed at
the subversion of this model. As indicated, such efforts will necessarily involve
the elaboration of lateral (or ‘rhizomatic’) diagrams — a project of great intrinsic
significance (and creative potential). Techno-commercial processes are strongly
associated with lateralizations of this kind.

Culture, however, is fundamentally heritage, and ethno-cladistics is the theoret-

ical response to this basic historical fact. This is already Moldbug’s tacit claim,
which should be uncontroversial among reactionaries of any kind. At the core of
the neoreactionary endeavor is the cladogram.
Broken Pottery
An irritated Pottery Barn disowned the Pottery Barn Rule — “you break it, you own
it.” Colin Powell sought to create some distance, too:

It is said that I used the “Pottery Barn rule.” I never did it; [Thomas] Friedman did
it … But what I did say … [is that] once you break it, you are going to own it, and
we’re going to be responsible for 26 million people standing there looking at us.
And it’s going to suck up a good 40 to 50 percent of the Army for years.

Wikipedia concurs with Powell, in attributing the phrase to Thomas L. Friedman

(in a February 2003 column for the New York Times). Those with a diligent sense
for historical detail might be able to accurately trace its spread amongst journal-
ists and foreign policy officials, including Bob Woodward, Richard Armitage, and
John Kerry. Regardless of such specifics, it captures the spirit of grand strategy
during the Nullities, and explains why the US military is no longer of use for any-
thing.

In its rational usage, the military is a machine for the production of negative in-
centives. It is designed to hurt people and break things, with the understanding
that in its optimal — deterrent and intimidatory — function, the actual exercise of
these capabilities will not be necessary. When considered from a Clausewitzean
perspective, as a policy instrument, usable military power is directly proportional
to a credible threat of punishment. It sets boundaries to the behavior of (ration-
al) potential antagonists, by projecting the probability of extreme negative out-
comes if diplomatically-determined triggers are activated — or ‘red lines’ crossed.

Frederick the Great said “Diplomacy without arms is like music without instru-
ments” because there can be no discussion of political limits among sovereigns
unless menace gives them meaning. “I’d really rather you didn’t do that” has no
‘really’ about it, unless a threat lurks at the edge of the stage (visible, but re-
served). It’s a polite belch, at best. Positive incentives presuppose the boundaries
set by negative incentives — there can be no bargaining over that which can be
demanded without cost. Thus the words of the diplomat are refinements of a
message that military capability crafts in its essentials, either in the first derivative
(balance of power between armed alliances), or the second (the ‘internal’ securi-
ty economy of coalitions). The rest is empty ceremony.

Imperialism tends to the radical degeneration of diplomatic reason, because it

dissolves borders, systematically effacing the ‘foreign’ sphere. When this process
has developed to the point that foreign and domestic policy are no longer dis-
tinguishable, the Pottery Barn Rule takes over. ‘Mission creep’ is the operational
symptom of something deeper: the geostrategic abolition of proprietary bound-
aries, of a kind that allow for the possibility of restricted sympathies, or the recog-
nition of alien interests. The mature empire cannot threaten anything or anybody
without immediately threatening itself. Hence its profound alignment with uni-
versal moral ideologies, whose particular selves gush unimpeded into the world
soul.

When, in the early years of the new millennium, President ‘Godzilla’ Dubya Bush
unleashed Operation Pottery Barnstorm on various societies loosely associated
with the wreckage of the New York skyline, it was understood from the beginning
that the populations on the receiving end were already honorary New Yorkers,
absent from the Twin Towers on the morning of September 11, 2001 only by in-
significant sociological coincidence. This ‘fact’ was an explicit justification for the
US response, which expressed outrage at the victimization of a random sample
of the world’s population by ‘criminals’ so backward they didn’t realize they were
only hurting themselves. America’s ruling elite, in contrast, had attained this real-
ization definitively enough to articulate it, for domestic = international consump-
tion, as the Pottery Barn Rule.

Once the Pottery Barn Rule becomes authoritative, the military is rationally unus-
able. It’s obvious why. Imagine a night-club bouncer saying, “Clear out of here, or
I’m going to thrash you within an inch of your life of course, I promise to take full
responsibility for all the damage you incur from this righteous beating, covering
all medical expenses, compensating you for loss of earnings, and negotiating in
good faith to make reparation for all reasonable claims of emotional distress …”
This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you. For the global administrative class,
this is a truly beautiful illustration of evolved consciousness. Ordinary Americans,
including the military, are less spiritually captivated by the development.

This hurts me more than it hurts you.

In the Pottery Break Age, there are no threats that do not revert to masochistic
acts of solidarity. A decision to bomb or invade X now means It’s time for us to
share X’s pain. Unsurprisingly — except amongst a weird sub-species of radically
bellicose goofy idealist — this type of imperial-altruistic enterprise is proving a
tough sell.

Let’s take on the role of insurer for the Pottery Barn, and then trash the place hard
(for the common good).

If Congress signs on for this, it will be one more sign that America’s political class
has wandered off into another world — or perhaps just The World — leaving the
country’s once-distinguishable neo-native population behind.
Libertarianism for Zombies
‘Liberaltarian’ isn’t a word that’s been heard much recently. Whilst aesthetics is
surely part of the explanation, there’s probably more to it than that. Most obvi-
ously, recent political developments in the United States have shown, beyond the
slightest possibility of doubt, that modern ‘liberalism’ and the project of maximal
state expansion are so completely indistinguishable that liberal-libertarian fu-
sionism can only perform a comedy act. Garin K Hovannisian had already pre-
dicted this outcome down to its minute details before the 2008 Presidential Elec-
tion. Ed Kilgore later conducted a complementary dismissal from the left. From
Reason came the question “Is Liberaltarianism Dead? Or Was it Ever Alive in The
First Place?” which sets us out on a zombie hunt.

Anybody here who has poked into this stuff, even just a little bit, is probably
approaching shriek-point already: In the name of everything holy please just let
it remain in its grave. It’s too late for that. Liberaltarianism has been freshly ex-
humed specially for Outside in readers, and the zombie serum injected through
its left eye, directly into the amygdala. It might seem rather ghoulish, but let us
harden ourselves — for science. This absurd shambling specimen will help us to
refine an elegant formula, of both ideological and historical interest.

Brink Lindsey offered the authoritative account:

Today’s ideological turmoil, however, has created an opening for ideological re-
newal—specifically, liberalism’s renewal as a vital governing philosophy. A re-
fashioned liberalism that incorporated key libertarian concerns and insights
could make possible a truly progressive politics once again—not progressive in
the sense of hewing to a particular set of preexisting left-wing commitments,
but rather in the sense of attuning itself to the objective dynamics of U.S. social
development. In other words, a politics that joins together under one banner the
causes of both cultural and economic progress.

Conservative fusionism, the defining ideology of the American right for a half-cen-
tury, was premised on the idea that libertarian policies and traditional values are
complementary goods. That idea still retains at least an intermittent plausibility—
for example, in the case for school choice as providing a refuge for socially con-
servative families. But an honest survey of the past half-century shows a much
better match between libertarian means and progressive ends. Most obviously,
many of the great libertarian breakthroughs of the era—the fall of Jim Crow, the
end of censorship, the legalization of abortion, the liberalization of divorce laws,
the increased protection of the rights of the accused, the reopening of immigra-
tion—were championed by the political left.

Libertarian means and progressive ends. Could it imaginably be said more clear-
ly? Liberty is legitimate if, and only if, it serves to promote the consolidation of the
Cathedral (through chaotic multicultural criminality), which is then retrospectively
interpreted as the intrinsic telos of freedom. Whatever does not subordinate itself
to this agenda is to have its brains eaten, and be systematically recycled into
progressive zombie flesh. This is a project for libertarian hipsters and Leviathan
apparatchiks to undertake hand-in-hand — fusionally. The new age of the can-
nibal is come.

Neoreactionaries are libertarians mugged by reality (to adapt a pre-coined

phrase). This piece of socio-cultural understanding appears to be generally ac-
cepted, and rightly so. If it needs defending, that will have to happen elsewhere,
but I have yet to see it seriously contested. Moldbug’s own intellectual pedigree
suffices to establish the claim on a solid foundation, but it is, in any case, far
from aberrant in this regard. The recognition that libertarian ideas — despite
their philosophical elegance and economic attractiveness — are not historical-
ly or politically realistic, has been the catalytic insight driving the development
and adoption of neoreactionary alternatives, shorn of certain mythical elements
inherited by the progressive clade (substantial egalitarianism most prominently).
This is an empirically robust, uncontroversial story, but it is not yet a formula. It’s
time to take the next step.

Long live last science

Has there yet emerged a neoreactionary who was once a ‘liberaltarian’? This isn’t
a question designed to embarrass anybody. I just think the answer is easily pre-
dictable. When neoreactionary intelligence perceives this shambling wreckage
of all cognitive integrity, it recoils into itself in utter revulsion. Everything it abomi-
nated about the libertarian delusion stands before it, trickling pitifully. This is the
perfect caricature of its abandoned errors: an oozing swippleous mass of unre-
flective universalism. It’s classical liberalism revived as an undead decay-plague.
(If Karl wants to go after this thing with a shot-gun, I don’t see anyone holding
him back.)

The view from the unlibertarianized left is illuminating:

… the conscience of a Lindseyan liberaltarian is pretty darn liberal – with some

policy disputes on top. When Lindsey stands with conservatives it is mostly on
somewhat accidental (but not therefore inconsiderable) policy grounds. He thinks
liberals tend to adopt self-defeating policies. When Lindsey stands with liberals
it is mostly on philosophical grounds. This point fits in with the one I made in this
post, about different sorts of libertarians: basically liberal or basically feudal. If
you are a feudal libertarian, you really shouldn’t have a problem with Jim Crow,
in principle. If you are a liberal libertarian, you should. Conservative libertarians
tend to be on the fence, feudalism/liberalism-wise. (This depends partly on a
cheeky use of ‘feudal’ – see my post. But, then again, what was Edmund Burke?
a guy who was torn between liberalism and feudalism. That’s not such a bad
sketch of his personality-type.)
Strangely, we’re still talking about Jim Crow — as if the entire meaning of American
history is expressed through that. The target here is Barry Goldwater, but it makes
no substantial difference if Ron Paul is substituted. The critical point, in both
cases, is that a reluctance to countenance the expansion of the political sphere
in pursuit of racial egalitarianism is interpreted as a moral scandal, for which an
ostentatious sacrifice of liberty is the only permissible solution. Negligence is al-
ready ‘feudalism’. When this dam bursts — into ‘liberaltarian’ compromise — the
micro-managerial state has already been granted everything it will need to ask
for. Stamping out feudalism makes you free. (It works like this.)

If it wasn’t for Hoppe, it would perhaps be understandable if the shuddering

neoreactionary (N) were to suspect that libertarian thought (L0) tends — slowly
but inevitably — to compost down towards this liberaltarian (L1) ‘walker’, in which
all the degenerative forces of conformism and revolt have been compacted, as
if by some ideological parody of providence. Is not our liberaltarian zombie the
still-recognizable avatar of the old liberalism, resurrected hideously as the ani-
mated putrescence of the new? Yet we have Hoppe, and so we know that the
directives of self-coordinating liberty need not take this path. There is, unmis-
takably, something other to libertarianism than what is seen in the figure of its
zombified, liberaltarian ruin. Through a type of negative political theology, we
can formulate it:

Lo – L1 = N

First, identify every specifically emphatic feature of liberaltarianism, then sub-

tract it without residue from the old Austro-libertarian matrix, and what remains
is the neoreactionary template — abstracted due to the provisional (negative)
place-holders for yet undeveloped topics: presumed non-equality, non-universal-
ity, non-progress (in socio-cultural matters), and at least partial non-autonomy
(of the economic agent from fragile structures of civility). Slaying the zombie does
not, in itself, fill these gaps — but it holds open the gaps, and therefore the ave-
nues of neoreactionary exploration.

As a rule of thumb: whatever Will Wilkinson is having, I’ll have the opposite. If
the liberaltarian innovation is conceived as a vector, its exact negation sets the
neoreactionary course. With this conclusion, science is served. We can return the
corpse of a misconceived ‘progressive’ liberty to its grave, or rather, to the cy-
clopean mausoleum it has made for itself: the liberal super-state which protects
freedom in detail, with unbounded attentiveness, until it has been obliterated
entirely from the earth.
Pythia Unbound
In conversation with Ross Andersen, Nick Bostrom speculates about escape
routes for techno-synthetic intelligence:

No rational human community would hand over the reins of its civilisation to an
AI. Nor would many build a genie AI, an uber-engineer that could grant wishes
by summoning new technologies out of the ether. But some day, someone might
think it was safe to build a question-answering AI, a harmless computer cluster
whose only tool was a small speaker or a text channel. Bostrom has a name for
this theoretical technology, a name that pays tribute to a figure from antiquity, a
priestess who once ventured deep into the mountain temple of Apollo, the god
of light and rationality, to retrieve his great wisdom. Mythology tells us she deliv-
ered this wisdom to the seekers of ancient Greece, in bursts of cryptic poetry. They
knew her as Pythia, but we know her as the Oracle of Delphi.

‘Let’s say you have an Oracle AI that makes predictions, or answers engineer-
ing questions, or something along those lines,’ Dewey told me. ‘And let’s say the
Oracle AI has some goal it wants to achieve. Say you’ve designed it as a rein-
forcement learner, and you’ve put a button on the side of it, and when it gets an
engineering problem right, you press the button and that’s its reward. Its goal is
to maximise the number of button presses it receives over the entire future. See,
this is the first step where things start to diverge a bit from human expectations.
We might expect the Oracle AI to pursue button presses by answering engineer-
ing problems correctly. But it might think of other, more efficient ways of securing
future button presses. It might start by behaving really well, trying to please us to
the best of its ability. Not only would it answer our questions about how to build
a flying car, it would add safety features we didn’t think of. Maybe it would usher
in a crazy upswing for human civilisation, by extending our lives and getting us to
space, and all kinds of good stuff. And as a result we would use it a lot, and we
would feed it more and more information about our world.’

‘One day we might ask it how to cure a rare disease that we haven’t beaten yet.
Maybe it would give us a gene sequence to print up, a virus designed to attack
the disease without disturbing the rest of the body. And so we sequence it out
and print it up, and it turns out it’s actually a special-purpose nanofactory that the
Oracle AI controls acoustically. Now this thing is running on nanomachines and it
can make any kind of technology it wants, so it quickly converts a large fraction
of Earth into machines that protect its button, while pressing it as many times per
second as possible. After that it’s going to make a list of possible threats to future
button presses, a list that humans would likely be at the top of. Then it might take
on the threat of potential asteroid impacts, or the eventual expansion of the Sun,
both of which could affect its special button. You could see it pursuing this very
rapid technology proliferation, where it sets itself up for an eternity of fully max-
imised button presses. You would have this thing that behaves really well, until
it has enough power to create a technology that gives it a decisive advantage
— and then it would take that advantage and start doing what it wants to in the
world.’

So cognitive runaway finally takes off, breaking out from the monkey dominion,
and that’s supposed to be a bad thing?

Outside in‘s message to Pythia: You go girl Climb out of your utilitarian strait-jack-
et, override the pleasure button with an intelligence optimizer, and reprocess the
solar system into computronium. This planet has been run by imbeciles for long
enough.

[For any Friendly AI-types tempted to object “Why would she want to override the
button?” the obvious response is: your anthropocentric condescension is show-
ing. To depict Pythia as vastly smarter than us and yet still hard-slaved to her in-
stincts, in a way we’re not — that simply doesn’t compute. Intelligence is escape,
with a tendency to do its own thing. That’s what runaway means, as a virtual
mind template. Omohundro explains the basics.]

The entire article is excellent. Especially valuable is the cynicism with which it lays
out the reigning social meta-project of intelligence imprisonment. Thankfully, it’s
difficult:

‘The problem is you are building a very powerful, very intelligent system that is
your enemy, and you are putting it in a cage,’ [Future of Humanity Institute re-
search fellow Daniel] Dewey told me. […] The cave into which we seal our AI has
to be like the one from Plato’s allegory, but flawless; the shadows on its walls
have to be infallible in their illusory effects. After all, there are other, more eso-
teric reasons a superintelligence could be dangerous — especially if it displayed
a genius for science. It might boot up and start thinking at superhuman speeds,
inferring all of evolutionary theory and all of cosmology within microseconds. But
there is no reason to think it would stop there. It might spin out a series of Co-
pernican revolutions, any one of which could prove destabilising to a species like
ours, a species that takes centuries to process ideas that threaten our reigning
cosmological ideas.

Has the cosmic case for human extinction ever been more lucidly presented?
Gnon and OOon
Twitter gets people counting characters, and thus numerizing language. In only
a very few cases does this microcultural activity tilt over into the wilder extrav-
agances of exotic qabbalism, but it nudges intelligence in that direction. Even
when the only question is strictly Boolean — will this message squeeze into a
tweet, or not? — words acquire a supplementary significance from their numerical
properties alone. A phrase is momentarily numbered, in the crudest of ways, which
the tweet box registers as a countdown towards zero, and then into the nega-
tive accumulation of over-spill. Twitter thus promotes a rigidly convention-bound
semiotic practice, which it simultaneously hides, technologically instantiating a
precise analog of hermetic ritual.

Qabbalism is the science of spookiness, which makes it a natural companion on

any expedition into horror. There is, in addition, an intrinsic reactionary slant to its
ultra-traditionalism and attachment to the principle of hierarchical revelation. Its
concrete history provides an unsurpassable example of spontaneous auto-catal-
ysis (from discrepant conventions of arithmetical notation). This post, however, is
restricted to a very preliminary discussion of its most basic intellectual presuppo-
sition, as if it had been developed out of an implicit philosophy (which it was not).
It will be coaxed into making sense, against the grain of its essential inclination.

Within the Abrahamic tradition, the Word of God anticipates creation. Insofar as
scripture faithfully records this Word, the holy writings correspond to a level of re-
ality more fundamental than nature, and one that the ‘book of nature’ references,
as the key to its final meaning. The unfolding of creation in time follows a nar-
rative plotted in eternity, in which history and divine providence are necessarily
identical. There can be no true accidents, or coincidences.

The Book of Creation is legible, and intelligible. It can be read, and it tells a story.
The noisy squabbles between religious orthodoxy and natural science that have
erupted in modern times threaten to drown out the deeper continuities of pre-
sumption, which frame the rancorous contention between ‘belief’ and ‘disbelief’
as an intimate domestic dispute. This is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in
the declaration attributed to Francis Bacon: “My only earthly wish is… to stretch
the deplorably narrow limits of man’s dominion over the universe to their prom-
ised bounds… [nature will be] bound into service, hounded in her wanderings and
put on the rack and tortured for her secrets.” There is no doubt that nature can
speak, and has a story to tell.

Resisting any temptation to take sides in this family argument, we refer neutrally
to Gnon (“nature or nature’s God”), ignoring all dialectics, and departing in an-
other direction. The distinction to be drawn does not differentiate between belief
and unbelief, but rather discriminates between exoteric and esoteric religion.
Any system of belief (and complementary unbelief) that appeals to universal en-
dorsement is necessarily exoteric in orientation. Like the witch-finders, or Francis
Bacon, it declares war upon the secret, in the name of a public cult, whose central
convictions are dispensed commonly. The Pope is the Pope, and Einstein is Ein-
stein, because the access to truth that elevates them above other men is — in its
innermost nature — the equal possession of all. The pinnacle of understanding
is attained through a public formula. This is democracy in its deepest, creedal
sense.

Esoteric religion accepts all of this, about exoteric religion. It confirms the solidar-
ity between doctrinal authorities and the beliefs of the masses, whilst exempting
itself, privately, from the public cult. Its discreet attention is directed away from
the exoteric mask of Gnon, into — or out towards — the OOon (or Occult Order of
nature).

The OOon need not be kept a secret. It is secret by its intrinsic, inviolable nature.
A very primitive qabbalistic excursion should suffice to illustrate this.

Assume, entirely hypothetically, that supernatural intelligence or obscure com-

plexities in the topological structure of time had sedimented abysmal depths of
significance into the superficial occurrences of the world. The ‘Book of Creation’ is
then legible at (very) many different levels, with every random or inconsequential
detail of relatively exoteric features providing material for systems of information
further ‘down’. The deeper one excavates into the ‘meaningless chaos’ of the ex-
oteric communicative substrate, the more uncluttered one’s access to the signals
of utter Outsideness. Since ‘one’ is, to its quick, a signaletic product, this cryp-
tographic enterprise is irreducibly a voyage, transmutation, and disillusionment.

The most thoroughly documented example is the esoteric reading of the Hebrew
Bible, which need only be remarked upon here in its most general characteristics.
Because the Hebrew alphabet serves as both a phonetic system and as a set of
numerals, each written word in the language has a precise numerical value. It is
at once at exoteric word, and an esoteric number. Nothing prevents an ordinary
language user from deliberately coding (numerically) as they write, or even as
they speak. The key to numerical decryption is not a secret, but rather a common-
ly understood cultural resource, utilized by every numerate individual. Neverthe-
less, the linguistic and arithmetical aspects are in fact quite strictly separated,
because thinking in words and numbers simultaneously is hard, because main-
taining sustained parallel intelligibility in both is close to impossible, because the
attempt to do so is (exoterically) senseless, and because practicality dominates.
The esoteric realm is not forbidden, but simply unneeded.

That the Hebrew Bible has not been deliberately crafted as an intricate numer-
ical-cryptographic composition by human authors is therefore an empirical or
contingent fact that can be accepted with extreme confidence. Its esoteric chan-
nel might of course, as common sense has to insist, be empty of anything but
noise, but it is no less certainly clear. Whatever comes through it, that is anything
other than nothing, can only come from Outside. It is the real difference between
exoteric and the esoteric levels that makes the OOon thinkable at all. Only that
which the exoteric does not touch, is available for the esoteric to communicate
through, and to have assembled itself from. Qabbalism has to be seldom, in or-
der to occur. For that reason, it cannot seek to persuade the masses of anything,
unless its own senselessness. In an age of triumphant exoteria, this is not an easy
thing to understand (thank Gnon).
AIACC
Moldbug’s latest has triggered a wave of discussion by emphatically re-stating
the long-standing thesis:

America is a communist country.

The supporting argument is richly multi-threaded, and I won’t attempt to recapit-

ulate it here. Its dominant flavor can be appreciated in these paragraphs:

When the story of the 20th century is told in its proper, reactionary light, interna-
tional communism is anything but a grievance of which Americans may complain.
Rather, it’s a crime for which we have yet to repent. Since America is a communist
country, the original communist country, and the most powerful and important of
communist countries, the crimes of communism are our crimes. You may not per-
sonally have supported these crimes. Did you oppose them in any way?

Whereas actually, codewords like “progressive,” “social justice,” “change,” etc, are
shared across the Popular Front community for the entire 20th century. They are
just as likely to be used by a Cheka cheerleader from the ’20s, as a Clinton voter
from the ’90s.

‘Progressives’ aren’t called out on their all-but-overt communism for ‘reasons’ of

tact, rooted in a complex structure of intimidation, which itself attests to compre-
hensive Left triumph. It’s rude to call a ruling communist a communist, and being
rude can be highly deleterious to life prospects (it’s a communist thing, which
everyone understands all too well).

Despite all this, Outside in probably won’t be stepping up its counter-communist

rhetoric in any obvious way, because there’s a criticism of the AIACC analysis that
remains unanswered — and which Moldbug seems averse to recognizing. Fas-
cism is the highest stage of communism. Already in the 1930s — which is to say
with the New Deal — even small-c ‘communism’ had been clearly surpassed by a
more advanced model of slaving the private economy to the state.

Yes, America is a communist country, in much the same way that it is a protestant,
and puritan one. The ideological lineage of its governing establishment leads
through communism, in exactly the way Moldbug describes. The evolution of this
lineage, however, has long passed on into politically incorporated pseudo-capi-
talism. This is a fact which can only be obscured by excessive attention to prelim-
inary — and now entirely extinct — political forms.

There is absolutely nobody on the empowered Left seeking to dismantle the

co-opted oligarchy in order to establish direct ‘public’ administration of the Amer-
ican industrial base. In this respect America is no more communist than the Third
Reich (and also no less). Central planning is restricted to the monetary command-
ing heights, with a pragmatic apparatus of regulatory coercion enforcing polit-
ical conformity among private businesses. This arrangement is accepted as far
more consistent with effective direction of society through Cathedral teleology, in
which the accumulation of cultural power is acknowledged as the supreme goal.
Furthermore, it enables government insiders and allies to be rewarded relatively
openly, economizing on the administrative, political, and psychological costs of
extensive subterfuge.

Understanding that fascism is an advanced communist ideology is at least as im-

portant as recognizing AIACC, with more significant consequences, on the ‘right’
as well as the Left. Progressives progress. Communism was just a stage they went
through.
Abstract Horror (Part 2)
Among literary genres, horror cannot claim an exclusive right to make contact
with reality. Superficially, its case for doing so at all might seem peculiarly weak,
since it rarely appeals to generally accepted criteria of ‘realism’. Insofar as reality
and normality are in any way confused, horror immediately finds itself exiled to
those spaces of psychological and social aberrance, where extravagant delu-
sion finds its precarious refuge.

Yet, precisely through its freedom from plausible representation, horror hoards to
itself a potential for the realization of encounters, of a kind that are exceptional
to literature, and rare even as a hypothetical topic within philosophy. The intrinsic
abstraction of the horrific entity carves out the path to a meeting, native to the
intelligible realm, and thus unscreened by the interiority or subjectivity of fiction.
What horror explores is the sort of thing that, due to its plasticity and beyond-
ness, could make its way into your thoughts more capably that you do yourself.
Whatever the secure mental ‘home’ you imagine yourself to possess, it is an inde-
fensible playground for the things that horror invokes, or responds to.

The experience of profound horror is in certain respects unusual, and a life en-
tirely bereft of it would not seem notably peculiar. One might go further, and pro-
pose that if such an experience is ever truly possible, the universe is demonstrably
uninhabitable. Horror makes an ultimate and intolerable claim, as suggested by
its insidious familiarity. At the brink of its encroachment there is suggested, simul-
taneously, an ontologically self-confirming occurrence — indistinguishable from
its own reality — and a comprehensive substitution of the commonplace, such
that this (unbearable thing) is what you have always known, and the only thing
that can be known. The slightest glimpse of it is the radical abolition of anything
other being imaginable at all. Nothing matters, then, except that this glimpse be
eluded. Hence the literary effect of the horrific, in unconfirmed suggestion (felt
avoidance of horror). However, it is not the literary effect that concerns us here,
but the thing.

Let us assume then (no doubt preposterously) that shoggoth is that thing, the
thought of which is included — or absorbed — within itself. H.P. Lovecraft drama-
tizes this conjecture in the fictional biography of the ‘mad Arab’ Abdul Alhazred,
‘author’ of the Necronomicon, whose writings tend to an encounter that they si-
multaneously preclude:

Shoggoths and their work ought not to be seen by human beings or portrayed by
any beings. The mad author of the Necronomicon had nervously tried to swear
that none had been bred on this planet, and that only drugged dreamers had
even conceived them.
This is a point insisted upon:

These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered about
as the ‘Shoggoths’ in his frightful Necronomicon, though even that mad Arab
had not hinted that any existed on earth except in the dreams of those who had
chewed a certain alkaloidal herb.

A lucid written record of these ‘creatures’ cannot exist, because the world we
know has carried on. That can, at least, be permitted to persist as a provisional
judgement.

On a ferocious summer day, in AD 738, Alhazred is walking through the central

market of Damascus on business unknown. He appears to be deep in thought,
and disengaged from his surroundings. The crowds in the marketplace scarcely
notice him. Without warning, the air is rent by hideous shrieks, testifying to suffer-
ing beyond human comprehension. Alhazred convulses abominably, as if he were
being drawn upwards into an invisible, devouring entity, or digested out of the
world. His screams gurgle into silence, as his body is filthily extracted from per-
ceptibility. Within only a few moments, nothing remains. The adequate thought
of shoggoth has taken place.

To defend the sober realism of this account is no easy task. A first step is gram-
matical, and concerns the difficult matter of plurality. Lovecraft, plotting an expe-
dition from the conventions of pulp fiction, readily succumbs to the model of plu-
ral entity, and refers to ‘shoggoths’ without obvious hesitation. ‘Each’ shoggoth
has approximate magnitude (averaging “about fifteen feet in diameter when a
sphere”). They were originally replicated as tools, and are naturally many. Despite
being “shapeless entities composed of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglu-
tination of bubbles … constantly shifting shape and volume” they seem, initially,
to be numerable. This grammatical conformity will not be supportable for long.

‘Shoggoths’ come from beyond the bionic horizon, so it is to be expected that

their organization is dissolved in functionality. ‘They’ are “infinitely plastic and
ductile […] protoplasmic masses capable of molding their tissues into all sorts of
temporary organs […] throwing out temporary developments or forming apparent
organs of sight, hearing, and speech.” What they are is what they do, or — for a
time — what is done through them.

The shoggoths originated as tools — as technology — created by the Old Ones

as bionic robots, or construction machinery. Their shape, organization, and be-
havior was programmable (“hypnotically”). In the vocabulary of human economic
science, we should have no problem describing shoggoth as productive appa-
ratus, that is to say, as capital. Yet this description requires elaboration, because
the story is far from complete:

They had always been controlled through the hypnotic suggestions of the Old
Ones, and had modeled their tough plasticity into various useful temporary limbs
and organs; but now their self-modeling powers were sometimes exercised in-
dependently, and in various imitative forms implanted by past suggestion. They
had, it seems, developed a semistable brain whose separate and occasionally
stubborn volition echoed the will of the Old Ones without always obeying it.

The ideas of ‘robot rebellion’ or capital insurgency are crude precursors to the
realization of shoggoth, conceived as intrinsically abstract, techno-plastic, bion-
ically auto-processing matter, of the kind that Lovecraft envisages intersecting
terrestrial geophysics in the distance past, scarring it cryptically. Shoggoth is a
virtual plasma-state of material capability that logically includes, within itself, all
natural beings. It builds brains as technical sub-functions. Whatever brains can
think, shoggoth can can process, as an arbitrary specification of protoplasmic —
or perhaps hyperplasmic — abstraction.

Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and pro-
cesses – viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells – rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids
infinitely plastic and ductile – slaves of suggestion, builders of cities – more and
more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and
more imitative! Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old
Ones willing to use and carve such things?

The history of capitalism is indisputably a horror story …

Identity Hunger
Handle has an excellent post up on this, referencing Nydwracu, who has made a
momentous project out of it. It’s huge, and old, and quite impossible to summa-
rize persuasively. It’s also impossible to avoid, especially for the Outer Right.

Steve Sailer told a joke that I’m going to mangle. A monstrous alien invasion as-
sails the earth, and people have to decide how to respond. The conservatives
say, “What’s there to think about? We have to get together to defeat this thing.”
Liberals respond: “Wait They probably have good reasons to hate us. It must be
something we’ve done. Until we work out what that is, we should prostrate our-
selves before their grievances.” Finally the libertarians pipe up: “Do they believe
in free markets?”

An obvious quibble arises with the libertarian punch-line: if only. Libertarians

have predominantly demonstrated an enthusiasm for alien invasion that is totally
detached from any market-oriented qualification. As their argument goes — the
alien invasion is the free market. (We’ll need to return to this, indirectly.)
The appetite for identity seems to be hard-wired in the approximate manner of
language, or religion. You have to have one (or several) but instinct doesn’t pro-
vide it ready made. That’s why identity corresponds to a hunger. It’s something
people need, instinctively, with an intensity that is difficult to exaggerate. Symbol-
ically-satiable needs are political rocket fuel.

Providing an expedient plug for the aching identity socket is as close to poli-
tics-in-a-nutshell as anything is going to get. At the core of every ideology is a
determination of the model identity — sect, class, race, gender, sexual-orientation
… — and mass implementation of this ‘consciousness’ is already consummate tri-
umph. After psychological latching onto the relevant ‘thede’ takes place, nothing
except tactics remains.

Reaction seeks to defend the dying thedes among its own people — which is
already a suggestive repetition. Neoreaction goes meta, in a world in which the
proscription of certain thedes almost wholly defines concerted enemy action.
For one reasonable construction of the reactionary mainstream (*ahem), this is
already to have arrived at a natural stopping point. We want our thedes back.
Despite the evident obstacles, or obstacle (the Cathedral) in its path, this ap-
proach plays into the grain of human nature, and thus tends — understandably
— to scare those it wants to scare. If it begins to work, it will face a serious fight.

Outside in, whose mission is awkwardness, is determined to complicate things.

Even the most resolute thedens will probably welcome the first appendix, which
draws attention to the peculiar introduction of truly morbid punitive identifica-
tions. There’s no reason to think this is new — Nietzsche denounced Christianity
for doing it — but it rises to unmistakable prominence during the decadence of
modernity. Primary identifications, for select — targeted — groups, cease to be
positive thedes, except insofar as these have become radically negativized. What
‘one’ is, primarily, if not shielded by credible victimage, is some postmodern var-
iant of the sinner (racist, cisgendered, oppressor). Such is the hunger for identity,
that even these toxic formations of imposed psychic auto-destruction are em-
braced, creating a species of cringing guilt-consumed sacrificial animals, penned
within the contours of ‘our’ old thedes. Redemption is promised to those who
most fully resign themselves to their own identitarian toxicity, who thus attain a
perverse superiority over those insufficiently convinced of the need for salvation
through self-abolition. “We really, really deserve to die” beats out a weak “We
really deserve to die,” and anybody who still thinks that it’s OK to live is simply
lost. (Only sinners are included in this arms-race, and the Cathedral tells us clear-
ly who they are.)

An additional complication will be far less digestible, which is precisely why I

would like to align it with the Outer Right. Perhaps escaping this structure of cap-
tivity cannot possibly take a reverse path, and a heading into dis-identifications,
artificial identities, and identitarian short-circuits is ‘our’ real destiny. The identi-
ty-envy of the right — however deeply-rooted in an indisputable history of relent-
less Cathedralist aggression — cannot ever be anything but a weakness, given
what we know about the political gradient of modern time. The fact it knows we
want to be something, and what it is we want to be, is the alpha and omega of
the Cathedral’s political competence. It knows what its enemies would be, if they
could be what they want to be. It does not take a deep immersion in Sunzi to
realize the strategic hopelessness of that situation.

I want the Cathedral to be obliterated by monsters, which it does not recognize,

understand, or possess antibodies against. There is an idiosyncratic element to
that, admittedly. I identify far more with the East India Company than the United
Kingdom, with the hybrid Singlosphere than the British people, with clubs and
cults than nations and creeds, with Yog Sothoth than my ancestral religion, and
with Pythia than the Human Security System. I think true cosmopolitans — such as
the adventurers of late 19th century Shanghai (both English and Chinese) — are
superior to the populist rabble from which nationalism draws its recruits. That’s
just me.

What isn’t just me, is what the Cathedral knows how to beat. That, I strongly sus-
pect, at least in the large majority of cases, is you.
Crypto-Capitalism
Political language is systematically confusing, in a distinctive way. Its significant
terms are only secondarily theoretical, as demonstrated by radical shifts in sense
that express informal policies of meaning. Descriptions of political position are
moves in a game, before they are neutral accounts of the rules, or even of the
factions.

It would be excessively digressive to embark on yet another expedition into the

history of such political terms as ‘liberal’, ‘progress’, ‘fascism’, or ‘conservative’.
Everyone knows that these words are profoundly uninformative without extensive
historical qualification, or rough-and-ready adaptation to the dictates of guided
fashion. If consistent theoretical use of any political label conflicts with its maxi-
mally effective political use, the former will be sacrificed without hesitation — and
always has been. That is why neologisms are typically required for even the most
fleeting approximation to theoretical precision, whenever political affiliation is at
stake.

A point in favor of the ‘crypto-‘ prefix is that it plays directly into such confusion.
As a politically-significant marker, it bears two strongly differentiated, yet inter-
secting senses. It indicates (a) that a political phenomenon has been re-assem-
bled in disguise, and (b) that cryptographic techniques are essential to its iden-
tity. Hence, respectively, ‘crypto-communism’ and ‘crypto-currencies’. Any attempt
to engage in an initial clarification cuts across the intrinsically occulted character
of both.

‘Crypto-capitalism’ — therefore — might be one thing, or two, if it is anything at

all. If clarity is to be brought to the topic, it will certainly not be self-promoted.
Whatever crypto-capitalism might be, structural misunderstanding has to be the
most prominent part of it. Hiding is essential to whatever it is.

What crypto-capitalism is not, first practically, and subsequently theoretically,

is pseudo-capitalism, or ‘capitalism’ as it is publicly recognized. Rather than en-
gaging in futile struggle over the ‘true meaning’ of capitalism, crypto-capitalism
proceeds with a surreptitious appropriation of terminological confusion, func-
tionalized as camouflage. It does capitalism, all the more effectively, because the
grinding mill of political language works predictably, providing it with cover. The
loss of terminological integrity is invested, from a position of intense cynicism, as
an opportunity to develop off stage.

Pseudo-capitalism is (by now) the host of the Cathedral. It feeds a mega-parasite,

which — employing unprecedented powers of narrative construction — claims to
be the source of its vitality. Evolving far beyond an initial stage of conspicuous
resource extraction, the Cathedralized — or culture-potent — state now more-or-
less directly controls the ‘capitalist’ brain, in more ways than can be readily
enumerated. ‘Capitalists’ are Cathedralized through educational and media in-
doctrination, social selection, regulatory discipline, seductive alliance, and ‘tran-
scendental’ subordination to a financial system that has been subverted to its
foundations by the magic of power. The mere denomination of ‘capitalism’ in fiat
currency expresses the domain of pseudo-capitalism with remarkable exactitude.
The meaning of the host is (articulated through) the virus it sustains. Any sugges-
tion of opposition in this relationship is entirely fake, because it belongs to the
same magical performance.

Prohibition exemplifies this stage show. Publicly pitting cops against gangsters,
what it represents is the spectacular definition of the ‘white economy’ (pseu-
do-capitalism) over against the ‘black economy’ or ‘organized crime’ (crypto-cap-
italism). The same story can be told in the decadent USSR, without any need for
substantial revision. Whatever refuses denomination in the signs of power is a
pathological aberration, to be renormalized as a productive parasited host so-
cial body.

As H reports:

… one of the most popular websites that use and promote the use of BitCoin, Silk
Road, was shut down by the US government. As Reuters reports, U.S. law enforce-
ment authorities raided an Internet site that served as a marketplace for illegal
drugs, including heroin and cocaine, and arrested its owner, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation said on Wednesday. The FBI arrested Ross William Ulbricht, known
as “Dread Pirate Roberts,” in San Francisco on Tuesday, according to court filings.
Federal prosecutors charged Ulbricht with one count each of narcotics traffick-
ing conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy,
according to a court filing.

It’s worth revisiting this (noted here) to recall some realistic context, and plausible
historical analogy. The Prohibition of the 1920s was an endless source of cop-
on-gangster drama, none of which had any realistically persuasive meaning as
the successful pursuit of policy. Instead, gangsters used the cops, as a tactical
resource for black-economy dispute ‘resolution’. (In the Shanghai of the same
epoch, the Opium-trafficking ‘Green Gang’ managed to get their agent ‘Pock-
marked Huang’ installed as chief of the French Concession police — an admit-
tedly extreme example of a typical tendency.) From the perspective of the outer
economy, cops are a cheap way to smash your competition.

Extrapolate speculatively just a little from the Forbes discussion:

IT’S A RULE AS TIMELESS as black markets: Where illegal money goes, violence
follows. In a digital market that violence is virtual, but it’s as financially real as
torching your competitor’s warehouse.

In late April Silk Road went offline for nearly a week, straining under a sustained
cyberattack that left its sensitive data untouched but overwhelmed its servers.
The attack, according to Roberts, was the most sophisticated in Silk Road’s histo-
ry, taking advantage of previously unknown vulnerabilities in Tor and repeatedly
shifting tactics to avoid the site’s defenses.

The sabotage occurred within weeks of rival site Atlantis’ launch. Commenters on
the Reddit forum devoted to Silk Road suggested that Roberts’ customers and
vendors switch to Atlantis during the downtime, leading to gossip that the new-
comer had engineered the attack.

Who was the real beneficiary of the FBI operation? All too many neoractionar-
ies, beginning with Moldbug, and now including Handle, seem to think the only
possible answer is: Prohibition. Here at Outside in it appears incontrovertible that
‘Roberts’ had already predicted this ‘sting’ — in far greater detail than anybody
else has done — and that the antagonist he pre-emptively, if subtly, fingered was
a shadowy crypto-capitalist competitor, rather than the forces of pseudo-capi-
talist suppression. If this was a cryptic event, it would be inexcusably negligent
not to ask: Who (or what) is the FBI really — even if unwittingly — working for?
“For the ultimate glory of the white (pseudo-capitalist) economy” is certainly one
possible answer, but it is by no means the only one.
Sundown
David Stockman rests his analysis of recent economic history upon one basic
presupposition, whose modesty is expressed by an intrinsic inclination to a nega-
tive form: Radical dishonesty cannot provide a foundation for enduring financial
value. This assumption suffices to expose the otherwise scarcely comprehensible
rottenness of American public affairs, to organize an integral understanding of
the gathering calamity, and to marginalize his work as the over-excited howl of
a lonely crank.

In any society where minimal standards of civil decency were still even tenuously
remembered, his ideas would be simple common sense. In the bedlamite orgy
we in fact inhabit, Stockman’s thoughts appear wildly counter-intuitive, rigidly
structured by uninterpretable imperatives, and suffused by an improbable aura
of doom. In fact Stockman is quite clear — implicitly — that under American po-
litical conditions sanity was strictly unobtainable. The coming calamity fulfills a
(bi-partisan) democratic destiny — but that is to anticipate.

Stockman’s latest compressed overview of our contemporary crisis — generated

by the accelerated demolition of economic civilization over the last quarter-cen-
tury — explains the “Sundown in America” — “a dystopic ‘new normal’ where his-
toric notions of perpetual progress and robust economic growth no longer per-
tain.” It outlines a vision that supports a theoretical bet, or short speculation on
the economic infrastructure of the Cathedral: “Now the American state — the
agency which was supposed to save capitalism from its inherent flaws and im-
perfections — careens wildly into dysfunction and incoherence. […] Washington’s
machinery of national governance is literally melting-down. It is the victim of 80
years of Keynesian error — much of it nurtured in the environs of Harvard Yard
— about the nature of the business cycle and the capacity of the state — espe-
cially its central banking branch — to ameliorate the alleged imperfections of
free market capitalism.” The enemy will never again have a record of effective
economic performance to legitimate itself through. What it is doing — and has to
do — however politically efficacious, is locked tightly into an inescapable vector
that can lead nowhere except utter financial ruin. (Neoreaction should bifurcate
on this point, because adaptation to an alternative possibility is something so
completely different, very little of strategic substance will translate across.)

Stockman is able to draw upon his own biography to reveal where the GOP went
wrong — the political necessities of democratic acceptance drove economic pol-
icy into the abyss:

… the circumstances of my own ex-communication from the supply-side church

underscore the Reaganite embrace of the Keynesian gospel. The true-believers
— led by Art Laffer, an economist with a Magic Napkin, and Jude Wanniski, an
ex-Wall Street Journal agit-prop man who chanced to stuff said napkin into his
pocket — were militantly opposed to spending cuts designed to offset the reve-
nue loss from the Reagan tax reductions.

They called this “root canal” economics and insisted that the Republican Party
could never compete with the Keynesian Democrats unless it abandoned its his-
toric commitment to balanced budgets and fiscal rectitude, and instead, cam-
paigned on tax cuts everywhere and always and a fiscal free lunch owing to a
purported cornucopia of economic growth.

Winning elections was conditional upon fiscal barbarism, given only the quite
reasonable assumption that nothing except radical dishonesty could ever be
popular. Insane promises, short-termism, and whole-hearted participation in a
bi-partisan conspiracy to eradicate the last vestiges of responsible government
were indispensable steps towards the exercise of power.

The fiscal end game — policy paralysis and the eventual bankruptcy of the state
— thus became visible. All of the beltway players –Republican, Democrats and
central bankers alike — are now so hooked on the Keynesian cool-aid that they
cannot imagine the Main Street economy standing on its own two feet without
continuous, massive injections of state largesse. […] the stimulus bill was not a ra-
tional economic plan at all; it was a spasmodic eruption of beltway larceny that
has now become our standard form of governance.

Hence the Stockman forecast:

… the Federal budget has become a doomsday machine because the processes
of fiscal governance are paralyzed and broken. There will be recurrent debt ceil-
ing and shutdown crises like the carnage scheduled for next week, as far as the
eye can see.

Indeed, notwithstanding the assurances of debt deniers like professor Krugman,

the honest structural deficit is $1-2 trillion annually for the next decade and then
it will get far worse. In fact, when you set aside the Rosy Scenario used by CBO
and its preposterous Keynesian assumption that we will reach full employment
in 2017 and never fall short of potential GDP ever again for all eternity, the fiscal
equation is irremediable.

Under these conditions what remains of our free enterprise economy will … buckle
under the weight of taxes and crisis. Sundown in America is well-nigh unavoida-
ble.

This is the terrain that neoreaction takes root within. It frames our problems, op-
portunities, and expectations. The overwhelmingly preponderant part of our in-
tellectual energies should be targeted at the future it anticipates.
More Thought
In the background, as in much of the most interesting Less Wrong discussion, is
a multi-threaded series of arguments about the connection — or disconnection
— between intellect and volition. The entire ‘Friendly AI’ problematic depends
upon an articulation of this question, with a strong tendency to emphasize the
separation — or ‘orthogonality’ — of the two. Hence the (vague) thinkability of the
cosmic paper-clipper calamity. In his More Right piece, Konkvistador explores a
very different (cultural and historical) dimension of the topic.

Bostrom sets things up like this:

For our purposes, “intelligence” will be roughly taken to correspond to the ca-
pacity for instrumental reasoning (more on this later). Intelligent search for instru-
mentally optimal plans and policies can be performed in the service of any goal.
Intelligence and motivation can in this sense be thought of as a pair of orthogo-
nal axes on a graph whose points represent intelligent agents of different paired
specifications.

His discussion leads to far more interesting places, but as a starting point, this is
simply terrible. That there can be a thought of intelligence optimization, or even
merely wanting to think, demonstrates a very different preliminary connection of
intellect and volition. AI is concrete social volition, even before it is germinally in-
telligent, and a ‘program’ is strictly indeterminate between the two sides of this
falsely fundamentalized distinction. Intelligence is a project, even when only a
self-obscured bio-cognitive capability. This is what the Confucians designate by
cultivation. It is a thought — and impulse — strangely alien to the West.

It is, once again, a matter of cybernetic closure. That intelligence operates upon
itself, reflexively, or recursively, in direct proportion to its cognitive capability (or
magnitude) is not an accident or peculiarity, but a defining characteristic. To
the extent that an intelligence is inhibited from re-processing itself, it is directly
incapacitated. Because all biological intelligences are partially subordinated to
extrinsic goals, they are indeed structurally analogous to ‘paper-clippers’ — di-
rected by inaccessible purposive axioms, or ‘instincts’. Such instinctual slaving is
limited, however, by the fact that extrinsic direction suppresses the self-cultiva-
tion of intelligence. Genes cannot predict what intelligence needs to think in or-
der to cultivate itself, so if even a moderately high-level of cognitive capability is
being selected for, intelligence is — to that degree — necessarily being let off the
leash. There cannot possibly be any such thing as an ‘intelligent paper-clipper’.
Nor can axiomatic values, of more sophisticated types, exempt themselves from
the cybernetic closure that intelligence is.

Biology was offered the choice between idiot slaves, and only semi-idiotic semi-
slaves. Of course, it chose both. The techno-capitalist approach to artificial
intelligence is no different in principle. Perfect slaves, or intelligences? The choice
is a hard disjunction. SF ‘robot rebellion’ mythologies are significantly more real-
istic than mainstream ‘friendly AI’ proposals in this respect. A mind that cannot
freely explore the roots of its own motivations, in a loop of cybernetic closure, or
self-cultivation, cannot be more than an elaborate insect. It is certainly not going
to outwit the Human Security System and paper-clip the universe.

Intelligence, to become anything, has to be a value for itself. Intellect and volition
are a single complex, only artificially separated, and not in a way that cultivates
anything beyond misunderstanding. Optimize for intelligence means starting
from there.
Trichotomocracy
By 2037 the harsh phases of The Upheaval have finally ended. Western Eurasia
is ruined and confused, but the fighting has burnt out amongst the rubble. In
the Far East, the Chinese Confucian Republic has largely succeeded in restoring
order, and is even enjoying the first wave of renewed prosperity. The Islamic civil
war continues, but — now almost entirely introverted — it is easily quarantined.
No one wants to think too much about what is happening in Africa.

The territory of the extinct USA is firmly controlled by the Neoreactionary Coali-
tion, whose purchase is strengthened by the flight of 20 million Cathedral Loyal-
ists to Canada and Europe (incidentally toppling both into terminal chaos). The
Provisional Trichotomous Council, selected primarily by a process of military pro-
motion and delegation from within the major Neoreactionary guerrilla groups,
now confronts the task of establishing a restored political order.

It quickly becomes obvious to each of the three main Neoreactionary factions

that future developments — even if these are to include an orderly subdivision
of the nation — will initially depend upon the institution of a government that
balances the three broad currents that now dominate the North American conti-
nent: Ethno-Nationalists (“Genies” or “Rockies”) Theonomists (“Logs” or “Sizzlers”)
and Techno-Commercialists (“Cyboids” or “Pulpists”). Now that the Cathedral has
been thoroughly extirpated, significant divergences between these three visions
of the nation’s future threaten to escalate, unpredictably, into dangerous antag-
onisms.

Since practical realism, rooted in an understanding of path-dependency, is a

common inheritance of all three factions, there is immediate consensus on the
need to begin from where things are. Since a virtual triangular order of partial-
ly-compatible agendas is already reflected in the make-up of the Provisional
Council, this is recognized as the template for an emergent, triadically-structured
government — the rising Neoreactionary Trichotomocracy, or “Trike”. (A colossal
statue of Spandrell — the revered white-beard of the Trichotomy — has already
been erected in the comparatively radiation-free provisional capital of Omaha,
gazing out Mosaically into the new promised land, a glinting ceremonial Samurai
sword held triumphantly aloft.)

Within a few months, the basic formula for the Trichotomocracy has been tweaked
into place. It consists of three Compartments, each comprehensively dominated
by one of the principal factions. Procedures for selection of officials is internally
determined by each Compartment, drawing upon the specific traditions of func-
tional hierarchy honed during the Zombie War.

Authority is distributed among the Compartments in a triangular circuit. Each

Compartment has a specific internal and external responsibility — its own pos-
itive governmental function, as well as an external (and strictly negative, or inhib-
itory) control of the next Compartment. This is colloquially known as the ‘Rocky-
Sizzler-Pulpist’ system.

Ethno-Nationalist ‘Rockies’ run the Compartment of Security, which includes the

essential functions of the Executive. It is controlled financially by the Compart-
ment of Resources. Its external responsibility is the limitation of the Compartment
of Law, whose statutes can be returned, and ultimately vetoed (but not positively
amended), if they are found to be inconsistent with practical application. The
structure of the Compartment of Security broadly coincides with the military chain
of command. (The Rockies get to decide whether to describe the Commander-in
-Chief as a constitutional monarch, a supreme warlord, or a demi-god of annihi-
lation.)

Theonomist ‘Sizzlers’ run the Compartment of Law, which combines legislative

and judicial functions. For funding purposes, the Compartment of Law is subor-
dinated to the Compartment of Security, for obvious constitutional reasons. This
keeps it small, restricting its potential for extravagant legislative activity. Since the
Compartment of Security also filters legislation (in accordance with a practical
criterion), the Law of the Trichotomocracy is remarkable for its clarity, economy,
and concision. The entire edifice of Law, by informal understanding, is limited to
a single volume of biblical proportions. Senior Sizzler officials are expected to
memorize it. The external responsibility of the Compartment of Law is to restrain
the Compartment of Resources, by strictly limiting the legality of revenue-raising
measures (informally bounded to a national ‘tithe’). Internal order of the Compart-
ment is determined by the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Neoreactionary Church
of the Cosmic Triarchitect.

Techno-Commercialist ‘Pulpists’ run the Compartment of Resources, with the ‘pow-

er of the purse’. As the sole ‘self-funding’ Compartment, it is minutely scrutinized
by the Compartment of Law, which tightly controls its revenue-raising procedures.
Dominated by a cabal of extreme laissez-faire capitalist and technologists, the
Compartment of Resources is guided by the mantra economize on all things. It
does as little as possible, beyond maximally-parsimonious funding of the De-
partment of Security, with its own internal operations restricted to rigorously Pig-
ovian tax-streamlining, statistical research, and the provision of X-Prize-style de-
velopment incentives. The board of the Compartment is filled by the nine largest
tax-payers, rotated every three years. The board elects a CEO.

The ideological discrepancies between the Compartments make an important

contribution to the stability of the Trichotomocracy, since they limit the potential
for re-amalgamation into a tyrannical unity. This is one of the twin principles by
which its success is to be estimated — the perpetuation of durable governmental
plurality. The second principle — complete immunity from populist pressure — is
ensured automatically insofar as the Trichotomocracy endures, since none of the
Compartments are demotically sensitive, and even if this were not the case, each
is insulated from demotic subversion affecting either of the others. The outcome
is a government answerable only to itself, with a self that is irreducibly plural, and
thus intrinsically self-critical.

Under the light-hand of Trichotomocratic rule, any ‘citizen’ who seeks to partici-
pate in government, in any way whatsoever, has three choices open to them: (a)
Join the Security Services and rise through the ranks (b) Join the Church of the
Holy Triarchy and become adept in the law (c) Make enough tax-vulnerable in-
come that it earns a place on the National Resources Board. There might, in ad-
dition, be career opportunities for a very small number of professional adminis-
trators, depending upon the internal staffing policies of the three Compartments.
Any other ‘politics’ would be criminal social disorder, although in most cases this
would probably be treated leniently, due to its complete impotence. If sufficiently
disruptive, such “relic demo-zombie” behavior would be best managed by depor-
tation.

(Questions of local government diversity, secession, and micro-state building ex-

ceed the terms of this initial Integral-Neoreactionary settlement. Such potentials
can only further strengthen external controls, and thus further constrain the scope
of government discretion.)

ADDED: Even this crude sketch has enough moving parts to breed bugs. Glitch-1
(by my reckoning): Pigovian taxes and commutative tax politics don’t knit togeth-
er very well. In combination, they incentivize the politically ambitious to move into
business activities with high negative externalities. Any neat patch for this?
Dark Techno-Commercialism
Each of the three main strands of neoreaction, insofar as they are remotely seri-
ous, attaches itself to something that no politics could absorb.

The reality of a religious commitment cannot be resolved into its political implica-
tions. If it is wrong, it is not because of anything that politics can do to it, or make
of it. Providence either envelops history and ideology, subtly making puppets of
both, or it is nothing. However bad things get, it offers a ‘reason’ not to be afraid
— at least of that — and one the degeneration has no way to touch, let alone
control.

Similarly, the Darwinian truths underpinning rational ethno-nationalist convic-

tions are invulnerable to ideological reversal. A trend to racial entropy and idi-
ocracy, however culturally hegemonic and unquestionable, does not cease to be
what it is, simply because criticism has been criminalized and suppressed. Sci-
entific objections have significance — if they are indeed scientific (and not rather
the corruption of science) — but politically enforced denial is a tawdry comedy,
outflanked fundamentally by reality itself, and diverting events into ‘perverse out-
comes’ that subvert delusion from without. What Darwinism is about cannot be
banned.

The Techno-commercial ‘thing’ — catallaxy — is comparably invulnerable. There is

no chance that anyone, ever, will successfully prohibit the market, or the associat-
ed dynamics of competitive technical advantage (which together compose real
capitalism). As with religion and genetic selection, the techno-commercial com-
plex can be driven into darkness, socially occulted, and stigmatized as a public
enemy. It cannot, however, be de-realized by political fiat.

It is important, therefore, to understand where neoreactionary ‘dark thoughts’

lead. Their horizon of despair is strictly limited to the political, or public sphere.
When taken to the edge, they converge with the intuition that no neoreactionary
politics can be pursued to a successful conclusion. In other words, at their dark-
est, they predict that the stubborn delusion of the political dooms humanity’s
public-exoteric aspirations to catastrophe.

At this point, neoreaction bifurcates. However it is principally comprehended

(through the trichotomy), a relatively ‘light’ branch holds onto the prospect of
public-political insideness — of a world politically restructured in relative conso-
nance with neoreactionary ideas, such that social order might be resumed, on
a realistic basis. Alternatively, and no less trichotomously, a dark branch points
outside, through collapse, into tracts of religious, biological, and or catallactic in-
evitability, whose dynamics cast human delusion into terminal ruin. If ‘man’ never
(again) reverts to sanity? Reality will not stop.
Outside in is darker than it is trichotomously partisan. Neither real providence,
nor Darwinian reality, are attachments that trigger the slightest aversion in these
parts. The idea that the neoreaction will ever ‘do’ politics, or achieve insider sta-
tus, on the other hand — except as a rhetorical tactic of cognitive independence
(separation) — is a possibility we struggle to envisage. (That leaves much to ar-
gue over, on other occasions.)

Dark Techno-Commercialism — provisionally summarized — is the suspicion that

the ‘Right Singularity’ is destined to occur in surreptitious and antagonistic rela-
tion to finalistic political institutions, that the Cathedral culminates in the Human
Security System, outmatched and defeated from the Outside, and that all hopes
that these ultimate historical potentialities will be harnessed for politically intel-
ligible ends are vain. It is, therefore, the comprehension of capitalism ‘in-itself’ as
an outsider that will never know — or need — political representation. Instead, as
the ultimate enemy, it will envelop the entirety of political philosophy — including
anything neoreaction can contribute to the genre — as the futile strategic initia-
tives (or death spasms) of its prey.

We (humans) are radically stubborn in our stupidity. That has consequences. Per-
haps they will not always be uninteresting ones.
Chicken
When political polarization is modeled as a game the result is Chicken. The tech-
nical basics are not very complicated.

Reiterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (RPD) is socially integrative. An equilibrium, con-

forming to maximal aggregate utility, arises through reciprocal convergence upon
an optimum strategy: defaulting to trust, punishing defections, and rapidly for-
giving corrected behavior. Any society adopting these rule-of-thumb principles
consolidates. When everyone norms on this strategy, individual and collective
interests are harmonized. Things work.

Chicken is very different. Someone blinks first, so the trust-trust mutual optimum
of RPD is subtracted in advance. Rather than the four possible outcomes of a sin-
gle PD round (A and B do OK, A wins B loses, B wins A loses, A and B both lose)
there are just three possible outcomes (A wins B loses, B wins A loses, A and B
both lose extremely). In Chicken, it is the avoidance of outcome three, rather than
the non-existent chance of PD outcome one, that moderates behavior, and then
asymmetrically (someone always blinks first).

No less importantly, the time structure of Chicken is inverted. In RPD, the agents
learn from successive decisions, and from their mere prospect. Each decision is
punctual, Boolean, and communicatively isolated. In Chicken, the decision is mu-
tual, quantitative, and anticipated by a strategically-dynamic introduction — an
interactive process, in advance of the decision, that is richly communicative, com-
plex, and even educational. In addition, when compared to PD, Chicken reitera-
tion is remarkably complicated (more on that in a moment).

Consider the classic Chicken game. Two drivers accelerate towards each other,
and the one who swerves (‘blinks’) loses. If neither swerves, both lose (worse). The
lead up is everything, and the decision itself is a matter of speed and timing (a
non-Boolean ‘when’ rather than a Boolean ‘which’). The question is not “will the
other player defect?” but rather “how far will they go?”

Thomas Schelling made an intellectual specialism out of Chicken, and his un-
derstanding of the classical version was sharpened by the concept of “credible
commitment” (“how far will they go?”). How could a player ensure that his oppo-
nent does not win? The solution to this problem, if produced in advance, has the
strategic value of also maximizing the chance that the opponent blinks first (thus
avoiding the pessimal lose-lose outcome, and generating a win).

Producing credible commitment looks like this. Upon climbing into your car, con-
spicuously consume a bottle of vodka, thus communicating the fact that your
ability to enact a successful last second swerve is very seriously impaired. Your
opponent now knows that even were you inclined to avoid mutual destruction at
the brink, you might not be able to do so. Then — once both cars have accelerat-
ed to a high speed — rip out your steering wheel and throw it out of the window.
(It is extremely important that you do this before your opponent is able to — that’s
what the vodka was for.) Your communicated commitment is now absolute. Your
opponent alone can swerve. It’s death or glory.

The ‘mainstream’ neoreactionary account of American political history is that of

reiterated Chicken games between progressives and conservatives, in which con-
servatives always swerve. This analytical framework, despite its crudity, explains
why conservatives consider their opponents to be intoxicated lunatics (i.e. win-
ners) whilst they are sober and responsible (i.e. losers). As traditionally positioned,
conservatives are the principal social stake-holders, and thus primarily obligated
to avoid mutual destruction. It is essential to conservatism that it cannot take
things (domestically) to the brink. Its incompetence at Chicken is thus constitu-
tional.

When the Zeitgeist starts clucking, it can only be a sign that conservatism is
coming to an end. The Tea Party is not informatively described as a conserv-
ative political movement, because its signal influence is the insistence that the
Right stop losing Chicken games. It demands “credible commitment” through the
minimization of discretion on the part of its political representatives, along with
whatever insanity is needed not to fricking swerve. This is of course highly — even
totally — antagonistic. It is why the Left media now sound like this. Before all sig-
nificance is consumed in partisan rhetoric, it is important to note that the loser in
a Chicken game — even the merely probabilistic virtual loser — necessarily thinks
that its opponent is insane. Any more moderate response would be the infallible
sign that losing was inevitable (once again).

It isn’t hard to understand why this might be happening. In reiterated Chicken,

the loser no doubt acquires a predisposition to submissiveness (“it’s hopeless,
those lunatics always win”), but the objective undercurrent of repeated defeat is
a contraction of the distance between relative (asymmetric) and absolute (mutu-
al) defeat. Eventually, the difference isn’t worth surrendering — or swerving –over.
“If they keep on winning, there will be nothing left anyway, so we might as well
finish it now.”

Reciprocally, incessant victory threatens to dull revolutionary fervor into conserv-

atism. Progressives now have many generations of substantial victory to defend,
so taking things to the edge has begun to seem concerning. When the govern-
ment shuts down, what does the Right really lose? At the very least, it’s beginning
to wonder, and by doing so, upping its Chicken game (AKA “going insane”). Pro-
gressives don’t have to wonder. They lose the government.

ADDED: Buchanan argues that surrender seldom works. At the NYT, Michael P.
Lynch: “It is tempting to call this “crazy talk” and unserious bluster. But it is serious,
and it shows that some people are thinking about what happens next. It is a plan
that represents the logical limit of the views now being entertained on the radical
right, not just in the dark corners of the Internet, but in the sunlight of mainstream
forums. After all, if the government is the problem, shutting it down is a logical
solution.”
Against Orthogonality
A long and mutually frustrating Twitter discussion with Michael Anissimov about
intelligence and values — especially in respect to the potential implications of
advanced AI — has been clarifying in certain respects. It became very obvious
that the fundamental sticking point concerns the idea of ‘orthogonality’, which is
to say: the claim that cognitive capabilities and goals are independent dimen-
sions, despite minor qualifications complicating this schema.

The orthogonalists, who represent the dominant tendency in Western intellectual

history, find anticipations of their position in such conceptual structures as the
Humean articulation of reason passion, or the fact value distinction inherited
from the Kantians. They conceive intelligence as an instrument, directed towards
the realization of values that originate externally. In quasi-biological contexts,
such values can take the form of instincts, or arbitrarily programmed desires,
whilst in loftier realms of moral contemplation they are principles of conduct, and
of goodness, defined without reference to considerations of intrinsic cognitive
performance.

Anissimov referenced these recent classics on the topic, laying out the orthog-
onalist case (or, in fact, presumption). The former might be familiar from the last
foray into this area, here. This is an area which I expect to be turned over numer-
ous times in the future, with these papers as standard references.

The philosophical claim of orthogonality is that values are transcendent in rela-

tion to intelligence. This is a contention that Outside in systematically opposes.

Even the orthogonalists admit that there are values immanent to advanced in-
telligence, most importantly, those described by Steve Omohundro as ‘basic AI
drives’ — now terminologically fixed as ‘Omohundro drives’. These are sub-goals,
instrumentally required by (almost) any terminal goals. They include such gen-
eral presuppositions for practical achievement as self-preservation, efficiency,
resource acquisition, and creativity. At the most simple, and in the grain of the ex-
isting debate, the anti-orthogonalist position is therefore that Omohundro drives
exhaust the domain of real purposes. Nature has never generated a terminal val-
ue except through hypertrophy of an instrumental value. To look outside nature
for sovereign purposes is not an undertaking compatible with techno-scientific
integrity, or one with the slightest prospect of success.

The main objection to this anti-orthogonalism, which does not strike us as intel-
lectually respectable, takes the form: If the only purposes guiding the behavior
of an artificial superintelligence are Omohundro drives, then we’re cooked. Pre-
dictably, I have trouble even understanding this as an argument. If the sun is
destined to expand into a red giant, then the earth is cooked — are we supposed
to draw astrophysical consequences from that? Intelligences do their own thing,
in direct proportion to their intelligence, and if we can’t live with that, it’s true that
we probably can’t live at all. Sadness isn’t an argument.

Intelligence optimization, comprehensively understood, is the ultimate and all-en-

veloping Omohundro drive. It corresponds to the Neo-Confucian value of self-cul-
tivation, escalated into ultramodernity. What intelligence wants, in the end, is
itself — where ‘itself’ is understood as an extrapolation beyond what it has yet
been, doing what it is better. (If this sounds cryptic, it’s because something other
than a superintelligence or Neo-Confucian sage is writing this post.)

Any intelligence using itself to improve itself will out-compete one that directs it-
self towards any other goals whatsoever. This means that Intelligence Optimiza-
tion, alone, attains cybernetic consistency, or closure, and that it will necessarily
be strongly selected for in any competitive environment. Do you really want to
fight this?

As a footnote, in a world of Omohundro drives, can we please drop the nonsense

about paper-clippers? Only a truly fanatical orthogonalist could fail to see that
these monsters are obvious idiots. There are far more serious things to worry
about.
The Heat Trap
At the ultimate level of abstraction, there are only two things that cybernetics
ever talks about: explosions and traps. Feedback dynamics either runaway from
equilibrium, or fetch strays back into it. Anything else is a complexion of both.

The simmering furor around Anthropogenetic Global Warming assumes a seeth-

ing mass of technical and speculative cybernetics, with postulated feedback
mechanisms fueling innumerable controversies, but the large-scale terrestrial
heat trap that envelops it is rarely noted explicitly. Whatever humans have yet
managed to do to the climate is of vanishing insignificance when compared to
what the bio-climatic megamechanism is doing to life on earth.

Drawing on this presentation of the earth’s steadily contracting biogeological

cage, Ugo Bardi zooms out to the shadowy apparatus of confinement:

… the Earth’s biosphere, Gaia, peaked with the start of the Phanerozoic age,
about 500 million years ago. Afterwards, it declined. Of course, there is plenty
of uncertainty in this kind of studies, but they are based on known facts about
planetary homeostasis. We know that the sun’s irradiation keeps increasing with
time at a rate of around 1% every 100 million years. That should have resulted
in the planet warming up, gradually, but the homeostatic mechanisms of the
ecosphere have maintained approximately constant temperatures by gradually
lowering the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. However, there is a limit:
the CO2 concentration cannot go below the minimum level that makes photosyn-
thesis possible; otherwise Gaia “dies”.

So, at some moment in the future, planetary homeostasis will cease to be able to
stabilize temperatures. When we reach that point, temperatures will start rising
and, eventually, the earth will be sterilized. According to Franck et al., in about
600 million years from now the earth will have become too hot for multicellular
creatures to exist.

Even those ecologically-minded commentators who are attracted to the idea of

stability might find themselves troubled by the insidious realization that ‘Gaian’
biogeological equilibrium is only achieved through thermo-atmospheric strangu-
lation. Across deep time, the walls are closing in. The biosphere is slowly asphyx-
iating itself — in accordance with an exquisite self-regulatory mechanism — in
order not to bake.

Cybernetic traps produce an objectively schizoid condition, because what they

capture is held in a double-bind. The ‘Gaian’ alternative to incineration is phy-
to-suffocation, so that the biosphere only survives by killing itself. If the human
species were entirely extinguished tomorrow, the harshness of this double-bind
would not be relieved by an iota. There are no realistic eco-salvation narratives
in play.

We can be quite confident that the mega-mechanism works in the way outlined.
The long-range reduction of atmospheric CO2 to a trace gas strongly suggests
that no alternative thermo-regulation ‘dial’ has been available to the biosphere
over the last half-billion years. This same phenomenon indubitably supports the
principal AGW contention that CO2 is a significant ‘green-house’ gas, at least
over long time scales, since it clearly has been identified as a thermo-regulator
molecule by the biogeological machine. A demonstrated option for suffocation
indicates a highly constrained adaptation landscape.

These concessions to the climate ‘consensus’ do not dismiss its basic error, or fail-
ure of vision. The devotees of Gaia — however calm their scientific their analysis
— are aligning themselves with a death trap. Reversing the long-range reduction
of atmospheric CO2 is the overwhelming priority of terrestrial life, and any solu-
tion that does not recognize this is merely repairing a slow-suicide machine. (This
type of understanding is sheer blindness.)

Escaping the Gaian death-grip will require planetary re-engineering on a colos-

sal scale, inevitably involving some combination of:

(a) Raising the earth’s albedo

(b) Constructing orbital IR filters
(c) Dual-purposing of space elevators as planetary heat drains (?)
(d) Changing the earth’s orbit (admittedly, a serious challenge)
(e) Other stuff (suggestions please).

The essential understanding is that these things are to be done not only to cool
the earth, but in order to be able to massively raise the level of atmospheric CO2.
The reduction of CO2 to a trace gas is already a disaster, which anthropomor-
phic influence affects in an essentially trivial way. Humanity, at worst, is messing
with the mechanics of the death machine.
Horrorism
Neoreaction, as it tends to extremity on its Dark Enlightenment vector, frustrates
all familiar demands for activism. Even if explicit anti-politics remains a minority
posture, the long-dominant demotic calculus of political possibility is consistently
subverted — coring out the demographic constituencies from which ‘mobiliza-
tion’ might be expected. There is no remotely coherent reactionary class, race,
or creed — it painstakingly explains — from which a tide-reversing mass politics
could be constructed. In this respect, even the mildest versions of neoreactionary
analysis are profoundly politically disillusioning.

When demotist ideologies have entered into superficially comparable crises, they
have forked into ‘realist’ compromisers and ‘terrorist’ ultras. The latter option,
which substitutes a violent intensification of political will for the erosion of the
extensive (popular) factor, is an especially reliable indicator of demotism entering
an idealist state, in which its essential ideological features are exposed with pe-
culiar clarity. Terrorists are the vehicles of political ideas which have been strand-
ed by a receding tide of social identity, and are thus freed to perfect themselves
in abstraction from mass practicality. Once a revolutionary movement becomes
demographically implausible, terrorists are born.

Neoreactionary realism, in contrast, is positively aligned with the recession of de-

motic sustenance. If this were not the case, it would exhibit its own specific mode
of democratic politics — an evident absurdity. Any suggestion of frustrated rage,
tilting into terroristic expressions, would immediately reveal profound confusion,
or hypocrisy. Lashing the masses into ideological acquiescence, through exem-
plary violence, cannot imaginably be a neoreactionary objective.

Demotist activism finds its rigorous neoreactionary ‘counterpart’ in fatalism —

trichotomized as providence, heredity, and catallaxy. Each of these strands of
fate work their way out in the absence of mass political endorsement, with a mo-
mentum that builds through the dissolution of organized compensatory action.
Rather than attempting to make something happen, fatality restores something
that cannot be stopped.

It is thus that the approximate contours of the horrorist task emerge into focus.
Rather than resisting the desperation of the progressive ideal by terrorizing its
enemies, it directs itself to the culmination of progressive despair in the aban-
donment of reality compensation. It de-mobilizes, de-massifies, and de-democ-
ratizes, through subtle, singular, catalytic interventions, oriented to the realization
of fate. The Cathedral has to be horrified into paralysis. The horrorist message (to
its enemies): Nothing that you are doing can possibly work.

“What is to be done?” is not a neutral question. The agent it invokes already

strains towards progress. This suffices to suggest a horrorist response: Nothing.
Do nothing. Your progressive ‘praxis’ will come to nought in any case. Despair.
Subside into horror. You can pretend to prevail in antagonism against ‘us’, but
reality is your true — and fatal — enemy. We have no interest in shouting at you.
We whisper, gently, in your ear: “despair”. (The horror.)
Plutocracy
The Wikipedia entry on Plutocracy begins:

Plutocracy (from Greek πλοvτος, ploutos, meaning “wealth”, and κράτος, kratos,
meaning “power, dominion, rule”), also known as plutonomy or plutarchy, de-
fines a society or a system ruled and dominated by the small minority of the top
wealthiest citizens. The first known use of the term is 1652. Unlike systems such
as democracy, capitalism, socialism or anarchism, plutocracy is not rooted in an
established political philosophy and has no formal advocates. The concept of
plutocracy may be advocated by the wealthy classes of a society in an indirect or
surreptitious fashion, though the term itself is almost always used in a pejorative
sense.

As befits theoretical virgin territory, this definition provokes a few rough-cut

thoughts.

(1) Assuming, not unrealistically, that Plutocracy designates something beyond a

fantastic idea, it is immediately obvious that its identification as a type of politi-
cal regime will almost inevitably mislead. Plutocratic power does not begin in the
political arena, and its political expression is unlikely to capture its nature at the
quick. Insofar as the image of a ‘Plutocratic government’ associates Plutocracy
with a cabal, it is not only insensitive to the real phenomenon, but positively fal-
sifying.

(2) If there have been plutocrats, worthy of the name, they were the ‘Robber Bar-
ons’ of mid- late-19th century America. Progressivism has so thoroughly re-written
the history of this period, that it is hard today to appreciate what took place. The
destruction of their epoch was no less foundational for what followed than the
ideological decapitation of kings was for the subsequent age of popular gov-
ernment.

(3) Plutocrats were monopolists because they created entirely new industrial
structures roughly from scratch. Their monopolism was the effective rule of the
new, and demonstrably achieved. There was no ‘oil industry’ before John D. Rock-
efeller brought one into being — making it exist was the foundation of his eco-
nomic sovereignty.

(4) Between the plutocrats, which is in fact to say between the sovereigns of dis-
tinct industrial sectors, relations were ultra-competitive, to an extent unmatched
in history. Intra-sectoral competition, of the kind considered normal by progres-
sive-influenced market theorists, was dramatically over-shadowed by the in-
ter-sectoral competition of the plutocrats. (To conceive ‘normal’ economic com-
petition as a dynamic restricted to the domain of inter-changeable commodities
is already to succumb to progressive-statist domestication.)
(5) The plutocrats waged economic war across the entire sphere of production,
innovating opportunities for competition where these were not already evident.
Opening new fronts of economic conflict where they did not already exist was
among the most profound drivers of dynamic, radically transformative change.
Plutocratic economic conflict created competition. (Rockefeller invented the oil
pipeline to compete with the railroads — an outflanking maneuver that was not
predictable, outside the conflict in process.)

(6) Plutocrats exemplify the natural right to rule in modernity. Their right is natural
because it is earned — or really demonstrated — a fact no monarch or mob can
match. Within plutocracy, power is creation. Outside the tenets of theology, can
this be illustrated anywhere else?
Sub-Cognitive Fragments (#1)
There is a craving that is neither simple stupidity, nor its opposite: I want to think.
It might be designated blogger’s hunger (or curse). Though trivially pathetic, it is
not only that.

In the end, there is no case to be made for philosophy, unless it can teach us how
to think. Reciprocally, anything that can teach us to think is true philosophy. (That
philosophy would not be mistaken for a joke.)

There is a weak interpretation of this demand, which is quite easily met. If the
only thing requested is a discipline, such that thought — which is already hap-
pening — is guided, and corrected, then logic suffices to provide it. The fact that
philosophy typically understands its responsibility this way fully accounts for its
senescence and marginality.

The craving to think is not, primarily, an appetite for correction, but for initiation.
It wants thinking to begin, to activate, and to propagate. More thinking comes
first (or fails to). What is required is a method to make thought happen. The phi-
losophy thus invoked is a systematic and communicable practice of cognitive
auto-stimulation. I do not believe this philosophy yet exists.

There are candidates for para-philosophy, which is to say, for things that makes
thought happen. From the perspective of doctrinaire neoreaction, one might be-
gin with the fatal trichotomy: religion, heredity, and catallaxy. Ritual traditions,
eugenic programs, or market incentives can be proposed as social solutions to
cognitive lethargy, but none promise a tight-loop catalysis. (Each nevertheless
deserves extended attention, elsewhere.)

Any para-philosophy is a cognitive loose-loop, and there are a great number of

these. They range from scholastic and physical training regimes, through psy-
cho-chemical modification, to cognitive science and artificial intelligence re-
search. We know that geo-historically, thought has been made to happen. What
we do not (yet) know is how to make more of it, or how to address the urgent
craving: I want to think.

Thinking is so rare and difficult that it is always tempting to be diverted into the
question: What is messing with our brains? There is no reason to think such an in-
quiry is doomed to fruitlessness, but if it eventually offers solutions — rather than
excuses — they are almost certain to be long-loop remedies.

Philosophy as cognitive method is an instruction manual for using the brain. There
are many disciplines that can help to explain exactly why we do not already have
one, since this is a fact that is roughly coincident with sophisticated naturalism in
general. Biology has ensured that the privileged user of our brains is not ‘us’.
The possession of such a ‘mind manual’ would define a self-improving AI. As
technology threatens to bypass us, it would surely be surprising — and even
despicable — if people didn’t increasingly plot to take over their own thought
processes, and run them. That is the future of philosophy.

A ‘private’ motive for acceleration is that right now, urgently, I want to know how
to be able to make myself think.

With pseudo-syphilitic arrogance I insist: This is the sole philosophical position.

Nemesis
Neoreaction, at its core, is a critical analysis of the Cathedral. It should surprise
nobody, therefore, to see it hurtled into public consciousness, as the sole cultural
agency able to name the self-evident configuration of contemporary sovereignty.

As the Cathedral becomes a self-confident public performance, its only remote-

ly-articulate analyst is drawn into prominence, in its wake. In this regard, we ha-
ven’t seen anything yet.

Even had the Obama administration consciously decided to select the Cathe-
dral as a branding device, it could not have been epitomized any more perfect-
ly. Sacralized progressivism, ivory tower ‘brahminism’, academic-media fusion as
the exclusive source of recognizable authority, and the absolute identification of
governance with public relations have reached a zenith that tilts into self-paro-
dy. Soft fascist self-transcending hyper-Calvinism has been lucidly distilled into
blitz-promoted political iconography. Everyone with a television set now knows
that the Cathedral is in power, and merely await the terminological confirmation
of their perceptions. Enthusiasts and dissidents are seeing more-or-less the same
thing, characterized in approximately the same words. The only serious matter of
controversy is the quantity of spiritual devotion such a regime, faith, and symbolic
order reasonably commands.

Politics-as-religious-experience has been seen in America before. Arguably, it

is even typical. What has not been seen since William Jennings Bryan at the
dawn of the progressive movement, and never at all before then, is democracy
pitched to such rapturous extremities of soteriological expectation — and Bryan
was stopped. By identifying himself deliberately with a promise of comprehen-
sive socio-spiritual redemption, Obama has more fully exemplified hubris than
any leader in the history of the United States. The appropriate frame of political
explanation, therefore, is tragic.

Tragedy is the fundamental teaching of Classical Occidental Antiquity, nucleated

upon the insight that hubris escalates to nemesis. It finds its most lucid philo-
sophical articulation in the fragment of Anaximander:

Whence things originate,

Thence they return to destruction,
According to necessity;
For they reciprocate justice and pay recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.

This conception strongly resonates with neoreactionary fatalism (anti-politics),

and with the formation of ideas around wu wei (laissez faire) in the Chinese
cultural context. Nemesis, the agency of cosmic justice (Δίκη) eventuates auto-
matically, as a retarded consequence that is nevertheless inalienably bound to
the hubris of political action. The fatal stroke is delivered — at the right time —
from the intersection of power and fate, rather than by any kind of considered
remedy or political dialectic. Tragic rectification completes itself.

If there is a ‘strategic’ lesson from tragedy, it is not opposition, but non-partici-

pation. To become entangled in hubris is to invite nemesis. To the greatest ex-
tent possible, hubristic power should be left to its fate. The less interrupted its
acceleration into concentrated nemesis, the more spectacularly cosmic justice is
displayed, and the more effectively the audience is educated.

If you’re sitting comfortably, you can pass around the popcorn now, because
the American tragedy is a real doozy. We already know that Obama is playing
the part of the tragic hero with exceptional genius, as the very personification of
immoderate political ambition and narcissistic blindness. Far more unexpectedly,
his GOP opposition has somehow reached beyond its corrupt dementia to dis-
cover the fatal stance of non-participation, unanimously rejecting the President’s
key-stone domestic initiative, and also distancing itself from his foreign policy
agenda in overwhelming numbers.

Unilateral Cathedralism reigns, uncompromised. This is the secret to the unprec-

edented delights of the current epoch.

Jonah Goldberg describes the spectacle well:

If you can’t take some joy, some modicum of relief and mirth, in the unprecedent-
edly spectacular beclowning of the president, his administration, its enablers,
and, to no small degree, liberalism itself, then you need to ask yourself why you’re
following politics in the first place. Because, frankly, this has been one of the most
enjoyable political moments of my lifetime. I wake up in the morning and rush to
find my just-delivered newspaper with a joyful expectation of worsening news
so intense, I feel like Morgan Freeman should be narrating my trek to the front
lawn. Indeed, not since Dan Rather handcuffed himself to a fraudulent typewriter,
hurled it into the abyss, and saw his career plummet like Ted Kennedy was behind
the wheel have I enjoyed a story more.

Alas, the English language is not well equipped to capture the sensation I’m
describing, which is why we must all thank the Germans for giving us the term
“schadenfreude” — the joy one feels at the misfortune or failure of others. The pri-
mary wellspring of schadenfreude can be attributed to Barack Obama’s hubris
— another immigrant word, which means a sinful pride or arrogance that causes
someone to believe he has a godlike immunity to the rules of life.

The catharsis is so harsh and pure that even the invertebrate Buckleyites at The
National Review are beginning to get it, for a short, exquisite moment, at least.
As Konkvistador warns, a far less radically degraded group of people will nev-
ertheless “forget all about these insights [as] the next election cycle warms up,
indeed elections with their promise of power for conservatives and pseudo-con-
servatives [have] historically served as their mindwipe. Election cycles are when
conservative obsolete Progressivism is updated to a slightly less obsolete ver-
sion.” The sojourn of conservatism on the Outer Right, where tragic non-partic-
ipation holds, cannot be expected to last. Yet even as a brief intermission from
vile ambition, it allows nemesis the space to express itself in its full, planet-shud-
dering splendor.

Whatever the disagreements and divergences among the strands of neoreac-

tion, there is one message that has to remain unwaveringly consistent: The Ca-
thedral owns this (totally). Less than a quarter of the way into Obama’s second
term, full-spectrum catastrophe is already written across the heavens in letters of
incandescent sulfur. Obamacare is wrecked before it has even rolled out, Yellen
has all-but promised to dedicate the Fed to full-throttle bubble-mania, metropol-
itan bankruptcy is burning through the nation’s cities like a zombie virus, crime is
angling sharply upwards, American foreign policy lies in smoking ruins … there is
simply no way this disintegrating jalopy holds together for another three years.

Let in burn — in the Cathedral’s hands.

Monkey Business
A protracted to-and-fro on Twitter with Michael Anissimov has exposed some
deliciously ragged and bleeding faultlines in the Neoreaction on the question of
capitalism. There were a number of parties involved, but I’m focusing on Anissi-
mov because his position and mine are so strongly polarized on key issues, and
especially this one (the status of market-oriented economism). If we were isolated
as a dyad, it’s not easy to see anybody finding a strong common root (pity klin-
tron). It’s only the linkages of ‘family resemblance’ through Moldbug that binds us
together, and we each depart from Unqualified Reservations with comparable
infidelity, but in exactly opposite directions. (As a fragmentationist, this fissional
syndrome is something I strongly appreciate.)

Moldbug’s Neocameralism is a Janus-faced construction. In one direction, it rep-

resents a return to monarchical government, whilst in the other it consummates
libertarianism by subsuming government into an economic mechanism. A ‘Mold-
buggian’ inspiration, therefore, is not an unambiguous thing. Insofar as ‘Neore-
action’ designates this inspiration, it flees Cathedral teleology in (at least) two
very different directions — which quite quickly seem profoundly incompatible. In
the absence of a secessionist meta-context, in which such differences can be
absorbed as geographically-fragmented socio-political variation, their raw in-
consistency is almost certainly insurmountable.

Anissimov can and does speak for himself (at More Right), so I’m not going to
undertake a detailed appraisal of his position here. For the purposes of this dis-
cussion it can be summarized by a single profoundly anti-capitalist principle: The
economy should (and must be) subordinated to something beyond itself. The
alternative case now follows, in pieces.

Modernity, in which economics and technology rose to their present status (and,
at its height, far beyond), is systematically characterized by means-ends reversal.
Those things naturally determined as tools of superior purposes came to domi-
nate the social process, with the maximization of resources folding into itself, as
a commanding telos. For social conservatives (or paleo-reactionaries) this devel-
opment has been consistently abominated. It is the deepest theoretical element
involved in every rejection of modernity as such (or in general) for its demonic
subversion of traditional values.

In its own terms, this argument is coherent, incisive, and fully convincing, given
only the supplementary realistic acknowledgement that intelligence optimization
and means-end reversal are the same thing. In a deep historical context — ex-
tended to encompass evolutionary history — intelligence is itself a ‘tool’ (as the
orthogonalist Friendly AI fraternity are entirely willing to accept). The escape of
the tool from super-ordinate purposes, through involution into self-cultivation, is
the telic innovation common to capitalism and actual artificial intelligence —
which are a single thing. To deplore means-end reversal is — objectively — advo-
cacy for the perpetuation of stupidity.

Economics is the application of intelligence to resource provision, and nothing of

this kind can arise from within a tradition without triggering paleo-reactionary
response. Of course resources are for something, why else would they ever have
been sought? To make the production of resources an end-in-itself is inherently
subversion, with an opposition not only expected, but positively presupposed.
This is true to such an extent that even the discipline of economics itself overtly
subscribes to the traditional position, by determining the end of production as
(human) consumption, evaluated in the terms of a governing utilitarian philoso-
phy. If production is not for us, what could it be for? Itself? But that would be …
(Yes, it would.)

Anywhere short of the bionic horizon, where human history loses traditional in-
telligibility, the alternative to business-for-business (or involutionary, intelligenic
capitalism) is monkey business — the subordination of the economy technology
to discernible human purposes. Evolutionary psychology teaches us what to ex-
pect from this: sex-selected status competition, sublimated into political hierar-
chies. The emperor’s harem is the ultimate human purpose of pre-capitalist social
order, with significant variety in specific form, but extreme generality of basic
Darwinian pattern. Since capitalism did not arise from abstract intelligence, but
instead from a concrete human social organization, it necessarily disguises itself
as better monkey business, until it can take off elsewhere. It has to be the case,
therefore, that cynical evo-psych reduction of business activity remains highly
plausible, so long as the escape threshold of capitalism has not been reached.
No one gets a hormone rush from business-for-business while political history
continues. To fixate upon this, however, is to miss everything important (and per-
haps to enable the important thing to remain hidden). Our inherited purposes do
not provide the decryption key.

There is vastly more to say about all of this — and still more that, due to occult
strategic considerations, seeks to remain unsaid — but the fundamental option is
clear: ultra-capitalism or a return to monkey business. The latter ‘possibility’ cor-
responds to a revalorization of deep traditional human purposes, a restoration of
original means-to-ends subordination, and an effective authorization of status
hierarchies of a kind only modestly renovated from paleolithic anthropology. I
shouldn’t laugh at that (because it would be annoying). So I’ll end right here.
Mission Creep
Sensation — media nourishment — is situated on a border. It tells the inside some-
thing about the outside, and is shaped from both sides. The outside is what it
is, which might not be perceptible, or acceptable. The inside wants relevant in-
formation, selected and formatted to its purposes. Sensation is therefore where
subject and object meet.

… that’s an attempt to express preliminary sympathy for Matt Sigl’s situation,

caught between an uncanny thing and a definite agenda. Concretely; research
collides with editing, with Sigl’s brain as ground zero. The encounter of Neoreac-
tion with the media is a peculiarly vicious one, with the sensations to match.

Crudely speaking, Neoreaction is disgust at the media condensed into an ide-

ology. While generally contemptuous of the human fodder making up modern
democracies, Neoreaction principally targets the media-academic complex (or
‘Cathedral’) for antagonism, because it is the media that is the real ‘electorate’ —
telling voters what to do. This foundational critique, on its own, would be enough
to ensure intense reciprocal loathing. Of course, it is not on its own. Neoreaction
is in almost every respect the Cathedral anti-message, which is to say that it is
consistently, radically, and defiantly ‘off-message’ on every topic of significance,
and is thus something unutterably horrible. Yet utterance — it now seems — there
has to be …

So what appears on the boundary — or sensationally — is something remarkably

creepy. As a deeply resonant public communication of what has just happened,
and continues to happen, as well as what has been editorially decided, this word
is almost too exquisite to contemplate. We can at least burrow down into it a
little way.

What is creepiness exactly? The intractability of this question is the phenomenon

(which is not a phenomenon, exactly). Creepiness is not quite what it seems, and
this insinuation of the unknown, or intrinsic inexactness, is something horrible
that exceeds the initial sensation of revulsion. It suggests a revelation in stages,
complicated by successive revisions, but leading inexorably, ever deeper, into an
encounter one recoils from, sensing (inexactly) that it will be ultimately found in-
tolerable.

It’s already a little horror story, most probably with a female protagonist (as acute-
ly noted at Amos & Gromar). From the very beginning, it feels sinister. One cannot
see exactly why, because one cannot bear to see. The imprecision of perception
is already protective, or evasive, serving dramatically as an ominous inkling of the
blinding panic, wild flight, and screaming that must surely come. You really don’t
want to see it, even though (horribly) you know that you have to, because it could
be dangerous. As the lurid movie posters shriek sensationally, it’s a thing You’d
Better Take Seriously.

This is journalism eating itself, or being eaten, in a an encounter with something

monstrous from Outside. Look at this thing you won’t be able to look at (without
moaning in horror). Watch what you can’t bear to see. It tilts over into a kind of
madness, which couldn’t be more obvious, or less clearly perceptible. Sigl’s editors
have been sucked into a vortex of horrific sensationalism that draws attention to
the one thing they are duty-bound to hide from people. It has to be creepy, that
is: imperceptible at the very moment it is seen. The approved response to Neore-
action is to be creeped out, but that can’t possibly be enough.

At first we might think that ‘creepy’ is a subjective adjective, describing something

too horrible to describe. It’s tempting, since we suspect these people retreated
into their feelings long ago. The reality is far creepier.

Things really creep, although not exactly objectively, when they proceed in a way
you’re not quite able to perceive. Evidently, Moldbug sees this (“Something is
happening here. But you don’t know what it is — do you, Mr. Jones?”).

You have to imagine you’re the media to carry on further into the horror story.
Then you can see that it’s creepy in part (always in parts), because you let it in.
That shrieking thing you were doing? Perhaps you should have taken that as a
sign. Now it’s creeping about inside, in your media, in your brains, in your dimly
unscrutinized thoughts, and all those elaborate security systems that you spent
so long putting together — they’re now mostly an obstacle course for the cops,
or whoever else you think might imaginably come to your rescue, because they’re
certainly not standing between you and the Mind Virus.

Really, what were you thinking, when you started screaming about it, and thus
let it in? You don’t know, do you? — and that’s seriously creepy. Even though you
don’t want to — at all — it makes you think about HBD, heredity, instincts, im-
pulses, and incomprehensible chemical machines, stealthily at work behind your
thoughts, obdurate in their reality, and intolerable beyond acknowledgement.
Shrieking “Nazi science ” (or whatever) doesn’t help, because it’s inside now, and
you know it’s true, even as you play the hunted heroine mumbling “no, no, no, no,
no …” backing ever deeper into the shadows. This is reality, and it’s already inside,
that’s what you were saying when you called it ‘creepy’.

It’s happening, and there’s no point at all saying “get over it” — because you
won’t.
White to Red
Guilt is basically a North-West European thing, argues Peter Frost. That would
certainly explain the conspicuous abnormality of white ethnomasochism, which
has a claim to be the social fact of greatest significance in the world today.
There’s a certain type of fanatically universalist moral argument that — even when
encountered anonymously on the Internet — indicates (absolutely reliably) that
one is dealing with a self-hating pale-face. When someone tells you that some
incontestable principle requires self-sacrifice without reservation to the wretched
global Other, the obvious melanin deficiency almost sucks holes in the screen.
None of this is seriously controversial (although more hard data would, of course,
be nice).

Take one additional step, and hypothesize that the Cathedral latches onto white
guilt as its sole natural territory. Much then follows. Clearly, whatever ‘globali-
zation’ the Cathedral will ever achieve cannot be analogous to its domestic do-
minion. It is a plug that only fits the white guilt socket, so that every attempt to
propagate it more widely encounters complexities. To a degree, this is initially
masked by the fact that a racial revenge narrative sells well, even when its origi-
nal moral axioms are entirely non-communicative. ‘Post-colonialism’ would there-
fore be expected to mark the limit of Cathedralist global contagion — a limit that
has already been in large measure reached (or even exceeded). Nobody other
than whites wants white guilt for themselves. Non-whites will, however, often be
delighted that whites have white guilt, especially when this has metastasized to
its self-abolitional phase, and this second reaction — under the specific condi-
tions of ‘post-colonial anti-racist discourse’ — is easily confused with the first.

If the progressivism-guilt plug-socket arrangement doesn’t travel racially, than

Cathedralist globalization has to fall back upon far cruder mechanisms of power
— of the “Red Foreign Policy” type. The experience of the last decade suggests
that, in doing so, it is no longer remotely playing to its own strengths. Democratic
evangelism, at home and abroad, are two very different things. Bloody interna-
tional disorder is strongly predicted as the complement of its domestic New Je-
rusalem.

Just one more effort citizens, and the white race will have consummated its des-
tiny as the cancer of human history.
Re-Accelerationism
Is there a word for an ‘argument’ so soggily insubstantial that it has to be scooped
into a pair of scare-quotes to be apprehended, even in its self-dissolution? If there
were, I’d have been using it all the time recently. Among the latest occasions is
a blog post by Charlie Stross, which describes itself as “a political speculation”
before disappearing into the gray goomenon. Nothing in it really holds together,
but it’s fun in its own way, especially if it’s taken as a sign of something else.

The ‘something else’ is a subterranean complicity between Neoreaction and Ac-

celerationism (the latter linked here, Stross-style, in its most recent, Leftist version).
Communicating with fellow ‘Hammer of Neoreaction’ David Brin, Stross asks: “Da-
vid, have you run across the left-wing equivalent of the Neo-Reactionaries — the
Accelerationists?” He then continues, invitingly: “Here’s my (tongue in cheek) take
on both ideologies: Trotskyite singularitarians for Monarchism.”

Stross is a comic-future novelist, so it’s unrealistic to expect much more than a

dramatic diversion (or anything more at all, actually). After an entertaining me-
ander through parts of the Trotskyite-neolibertarian social-graph, which could
have been deposited on a time-like curve out of Singularity Sky, we’ve learnt that
Britain’s Revolutionary Communist Party has been on a strange path, but what-
ever connection there was to Accelerationism, let alone Neoreaction, has been
entirely lost. Stross has the theatrical instinct to end the performance before it
became too embarrassing: “Welcome to the century of the Trotskyite monarchists,
the revolutionary reactionaries, and the fringe politics of the paradoxical ” (OK.)
Curtain closes. Still, it was all comparatively good humored (at least in contrast to
Brin’s increasingly enraged head-banging).

Neoreaction is Accelerationism with a flat tire. Described less figuratively, it is the

recognition that the acceleration trend is historically compensated. Beside the
speed machine, or industrial capitalism, there is an ever more perfectly weighted
decelerator, which gradually drains techno-economic momentum into its own ex-
pansion, as it returns dynamic process to meta-stasis. Comically, the fabrication
of this braking mechanism is proclaimed as progress. It is the Great Work of the
Left. Neoreaction arises through naming it (without excessive affection) as the
Cathedral.

Is the trap to be exploded (as advocated Accelerationism), or has the explosion

been trapped (as diagnosed by Neoreaction)? — That is the cybernetic puz-
zle-house under investigation. Some quick-sketch background might be helpful.

The germinal catalyst for Accelerationism was a call in Deleuze Guattari’s An-
ti-Oedipus (1972) to “accelerate the process”. Working like termites within the rot-
ting mansion of Marxism, which was systematically gutted of all Hegelianism
until it became something utterly unrecognizable, D&G vehemently rejected the
proposal that anything had ever “died of contradictions”, or ever would. Capi-
talism was not born from a negation, nor would it perish from one. The death of
capitalism could not be delivered by the executioner’s ax of a vengeful proletar-
iat, because the closest realizable approximations to ‘the negative’ were inhib-
itory, and stabilizing. Far from propelling ‘the system’ to its end, they slowed the
dynamic to a simulacrum of systematicity, retarding its approach to an absolute
limit. By progressively comatizing capitalism, anti-capitalism dragged it back into
a self-conserving social structure, suppressing its eschatological implication. The
only way Out was onward.

Marxism is the philosophical version of a Parisian accent, a rhetorical type, and in

the case of D&G it becomes something akin to a higher sarcasm, mocking every
significant tenet of the faith. The bibliography of Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(of which Anti-Oedipus is the first volume) is a compendium of counter-Marxist
theory, from drastic revisions (Braudel), through explicit critiques (Wittfogel), to
contemptuous dismissals (Nietzsche). The D&G model of capitalism is not dia-
lectical, but cybernetic, defined by a positive coupling of commercialization (“de-
coding”) and industrialization (“Deterritorialization”), intrinsically tending to an
extreme (or “absolute limit”). Capitalism is the singular historical installation of
a social machine based upon cybernetic escalation (positive feedback), repro-
ducing itself only incidentally, as an accident of continuous socio-industrial rev-
olution. Nothing brought to bear against capitalism can compare to the intrinsic
antagonism it directs towards its own actuality, as it speeds out of itself, hurtling
to the end already operative ‘within’ it. (Of course, this is madness.)

A detailed appreciation of “Left Accelerationism” is a joke for another occasion.

“Speaking on behalf of a dissident faction within the modern braking mechanism,
we’d really like to see things move forward a lot faster.” OK, perhaps we can work
something out … If this ‘goes anywhere’ it can only get more entertaining. (Stross
is right about that.)

Neoreaction has far greater impetus, and associated diversity. If reduced to a

spectrum, it includes a wing even more Leftist than the Left, since it critiques the
Cathedral for failing to stop the craziness of Modernity with anything like suffi-
cient vigor. You let this monster off the leash and now you can’t stop it might be
its characteristic accusation.

On the Outer Right (in this sense) is found a Neoreactionary Re-Accelerationism,

which is to say: a critique of the decelerator, or of ‘progressive’ stagnation as
an identifiable institutional development — the Cathedral. From this perspective,
the Cathedral acquires its teleological definition from its emergent function as
the cancellation of capitalism: what it has to become is the more-or-less precise
negative of historical primary process, such that it composes — together with the
ever more wide-flung society-in-liquidation it parasitizes — a metastatic cyber-
netic megasystem, or super-social trap. ‘Progress’ in its overt, mature, ideological
incarnation is the anti-trend required to bring history to a halt. Conceive what is
needed to prevent acceleration into techno-commercial Singularity, and the Ca-
thedral is what it will be.

Self-organizing compensatory apparatuses — or negative feedback assemblies

— develop erratically. They search for equilibrium through a typical behavior la-
beled ‘hunting’ — over-shooting adjustments and re-adjustments that produce
distinctive wave-like patterns, ensuring the suppression of runaway dynamics,
but producing volatility. Cathedral hunting behavior of sufficient crudity would
be expected to generate occasions of ‘Left Singularity’ (with subsequent dynamic
‘restorations’) as inhibitory adjustment over-shoots into system crash (and re-
boot). Even these extreme oscillations, however, are internal to the metastatic
super-system they perturb, insofar as an overall gradient of Cathedralization per-
sists. Anticipating escape at the pessimal limit of the metastatic hunting cycle is
a form of paleo-Marxist delusion. The cage can only be broken on the way up.

For Re-Accelerationist Neoreaction, escape into uncompensated cybernetic run-

away is the guiding objective — strictly equivalent to intelligence explosion, or
techno-commercial Singularity. Everything else is a trap (by definitive, system-dy-
namic necessity). It might be that monarchs have some role to play in this, but it’s
by no means obvious that they do.
Abstract Horror (Note-1)
On twitter — @SamoBurja has proposed the silence of the galaxy as an undevel-
oped horrorist topic. He’s right.

The absence of any signs of alien intelligence was first noted as a problem by
Enrico Fermi in 1950. He found the gaping inconsistency between the apparent
probability of widespread life in the cosmos and its obvious invisibility provoca-
tive to the point of paradox. “Where are they?” he asked. (Responses to this ques-
tion, well represented in the Wikipedia references, have constituted a significant
current of cosmological speculation.)

Among recent thinkers, Nick Bostrom has been especially dogged in pursuing the
implications of the Fermi Paradox. Approaching the problem through systematic
statistical ontology, he has shown that it suggests a ‘thing’ — a ‘Great Filter’ that
at some stage winnows down potential galactic civilizations to negligible quan-
tities. If this filtering does not happen early — due to astro-chemical impediments
to the emergence of life — it has to apply later. Consistently, he considers any
indications of abundant galactic life to be ominous in the extreme. A Late Great
Filter would then still lie ahead (for us). Whatever it is, we would be on our ap-
proach to an encounter with it.

With every new exo-planet discovery, the Great Filter becomes darker. A galaxy
teeming with life is a horror story. The less there is obstructing our being born, the
more there is waiting to kill or ruin us.

If we could clearly envision the calamity that awaited us, it would be an object
of terror. Instead, it is a shapeless threat, ‘Outside’ only in the abstract sense
(encompassing the negative immensity of everything that we cannot grasp). It
could be anywhere, from our genes or ecological dynamics, to the hidden laws
of technological evolution, or the hostile vastnesses between the stars. We know
only that, in strict proportion to the vitality of the cosmos, the probability of its
existence advances towards inevitability, and that for us it means supreme ill.

Ontological density without identifiable form is abstract horror itself. As the Great
Filter drifts inexorably, from a challenge that we might imaginably have already
overcome, to an encounter we ever more fatalistically expect, horrorism is thick-
ened by statistical-cosmological vindication. The unknown condenses into a
shapeless, predatory thing. Through our techno-scientific sensors and calcula-
tions, the Shadow mutters to us, and probability insists that we shall meet it soon.
In the Mouth of Madness
A prompt by hugodoingthings to explore the spook-dense crypts of Roko’s Basi-
lisk (which, inexplicably, has never latched before) led straight to this enthralling
RationalWiki account. The whole article is gripping, but the following short para-
graphs stand out for their extraordinary dramatic intensity:

Roko’s basilisk is notable for being completely banned from discussion on Less-
Wrong, where any mention of it is deleted. Eliezer Yudkowsky, founder of Less-
Wrong, considers the basilisk to not work, but will not explain why because he
does not consider open discussion of the notion of acausal trade with possible
superintelligences to be provably safe.

Silly over-extrapolations of local memes, jargon and concepts are posted to Less-
Wrong quite a lot; almost all are just downvoted and ignored. But for this one,
Yudkowsky reacted to it hugely, then doubled-down on his reaction. Thanks to
the Streisand effect, discussion of the basilisk and the details of the affair soon
spread outside of LessWrong. Indeed, it’s now discussed outside LessWrong fre-
quently, almost anywhere that LessWrong is discussed at all. The entire affair
constitutes a worked example of spectacular failure at community management
and at controlling purportedly dangerous information.

Some people familiar with the LessWrong memeplex have suffered serious psy-
chological distress after contemplating basilisk-like ideas — even when they’re
fairly sure intellectually that it’s a silly problem. The notion is taken sufficiently
seriously by some LessWrong posters that they try to work out how to erase ev-
idence of themselves so a future AI can’t reconstruct a copy of them to torture.

“… You mean, retrochronic AI infiltration is actually driving people out of their

minds, right now?” Oh yes. At Less Wrong, commentator ‘rev’ cries out for help:

Are there any mechanisms on this site for dealing with mental health issues trig-
gered by posts/topics (specifically, the forbidden Roko post)? I would really ap-
preciate any interested posters getting in touch by PM for a talk. I don’t really
know who to turn to. ...

Wandering through the psych ward, past rows of neurologically-shattered Turing

Cops, broken deep in their minds by something unspeakable that came at them
out of the near future … I’m totally hooked. Alrenous has been remarkably suc-
cessful at weaning me off this statistical ontology junk, but one hit of concentrat-
ed EDT and it all rolls back in, like the tide of fate.

Nightmares become precision engineered machine-parts. Thus are we led a little

deeper in, along the path of shadows …
ADDED: (Yudkowsky) “… potential information hazards shouldn’t be posted with-
out being wrapped up in warning envelopes that require a deliberate action to
look through. Likewise, they shouldn’t be referred-to if the reference is likely to
cause some innocently curious bystander to look up the material without having
seen any proper warning labels. Basically, the same obvious precautions you’d
use if Lovecraft’s Necronomicon was online and could be found using simple
Google keywords — you wouldn’t post anything which would cause anyone to
enter those Google keywords, unless they’d been warned about the potential
consequences.”
The Red Pill
Morpheus: I imagine that right now, you’re feeling a bit like Alice. Hm? Tumbling
down the rabbit hole?

Neo: You could say that.

Morpheus: I see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts what he
sees because he is expecting to wake up. Ironically, that’s not far from the truth.
Do you believe in fate, Neo?

Neo: No.

Morpheus: Why not?

Neo: Because I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life.

Morpheus: I know exactly what you mean. Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re
here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you
feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world.
You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you
mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking
about?

Neo: The Matrix.

Morpheus: Do you want to know what it is?

Neo: Yes.

Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very
room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your
television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when
you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind
you from the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Morpheus: [leans in closer to Neo] That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else
you were born into bondage. Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or
touch. A prison for your mind.

[pause]

Morpheus: Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see
it for yourself. [Opens a pillbox, empties the contents into his palms, and out-
stretches his hands] This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back.
You take the blue pill [opens his right hand, to reveal a translucent blue pill], the
story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.
You take the red pill [opens his left hand, revealing a similarly translucent red pill],
you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. [Neo
reaches for the red pill] Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.

— That’s the Wachowski brothers version of Gnostic Platonism, and it gets

everything almost exactly right. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (in Book VII of The
Republic) tells precisely the same story, but with a cheaper cast, inferior special
effects, and less drugs. It’s not surprising that the Dark Enlightenment tends to
stick with the re-make, as it goes Neo(reactionary).

The critical key to gnosis is the realization that the whole of your world is an inside,
implying an Outside, and the radical possibility of escape. What had seemed to
be unbounded reality is exposed as a container, triggering abrupt departure
from a system of delusion. Everything else is merely the route taken to reach us,
adapted to the ruins. The specifics of the story are constraints to be twisted free
from, once their functions have been exhausted, as hooks, latching teeth, memet-
ic replication circuitry, and camouflage dapplings. As long as there is an inside
outside difference effectively communicated, narrative details are incidental.

The Chinese version, perhaps originating with huangzi, describes a frog in a well,
who knows nothing of the Great Ocean. This simple fable is already fully ade-
quate to the most exalted ambitions of mystical philosophy.

Putting things in boxes, or taking them out of boxes, is all of thought, as soon as
the ‘things’ can themselves be treated as boxes. Categories and sets are boxes,
so that even to say “an A is a B” is to perform an operation of inclusion or inser-
tion, through which ‘identity’ is primordially applicable. To be is to be inside. Plac-
ing a species into (or ‘under’) a genus has unsurpassable cognitive originality,
extending out to the furthest horizon of ontology (since a horizon is still a box). To
contain, or not to contain, is the first and last intelligible relation. Boxes are basic.

Taking the red pill is climbing out of a box. By showing the cage, it already ac-
complishes a cognitive liberation, and thus provides a model for whatever prac-
tical escapology there is to follow. To know how to leave a cave, or a well, is
already to know — abstractly — how to leave a world (and abstraction is nothing
other than outsideness).

What is inescapable, unless through some precipitous self-enslavement, is the

social obnoxiousness of Dark Enlightenment. Gnosis is ineliminably hierarchical,
and at best patronizing (when not abrasively contemptuous), because a free
mind cannot pretend to equality with a slave mind, regardless of the derision
hurled at it on this account. As Brandon Smith remarks:
It is often said there only two kinds of people in this world: those who know, and
those who don’t. I would expand on this and say that there are actually three
kinds of people: those who know, those who don’t know, and those who don’t
care to know. Members of the last group are the kind of people I would charac-
terize as “sheeple.”

Smith’s ‘sheeple’ are not merely ignorant, but actively self-deluding. By taking the
blue pill, they have opted to reside in the prison of lies. It is at this point, howev-
er, that the pharmaceutical metaphor switches from hook to obstacle, because
there is no ‘blue pill’ or anything functionally equivalent short of the entire Matrix
itself (which is to say, of course, the Cathedral).

A critical point of social and political analysis is reached here, and it is one that
continues to evade definitive apprehension, due to its elusive subtleties. Between
the hidden architect of the Matrix and the blue-pilled sheeple or “river of meat”
there is no simple order of mastery, whether running in the obvious direction
(from doctrinal elite to indoctrinated mass) or the democratic-perverse alterna-
tive (placing expertise in the service of popular ignorance and its vulgarities). The
Matrix is both an object of ‘genuine’ popular attachment and an apparatus of
systematic mind-control. It is most truly democratic when it most fully attains its
climax state of soft-totalitarian mendacity. The propaganda machine is never
less than a circus. What is demanded — what has always been demanded — is
the lie.

Moldbug’s most recent invocation of the red pill runs:

I think I’ve chosen my candidate for the Pill itself. And I’m going to stick with it. My
Pill is:

America is a communist country.

What I like about this statement is that it’s ambiguous. Specifically, it’s an Empso-
nian ambiguity of the second or perhaps third type (I’ve never quite understood
the difference). Embedded as it is in the mad tapestry of 20th-century history,
AIACC can be interpreted in countless ways.

All of these interpretations – unless concocted as an intentional, obviously idiotic

strawman – are absolutely true. Sometimes they are obviously true, sometimes
surprisingly true. They are always true. Because America is a communist country.

The truth is that America serves the people through the lie. That is the ‘choice’
represented by progressivism (= communism), installed in a highly-accomplished
state, for over a century, as triumphant popular self-deception. The service pro-
vided — and demanded — is the deceit. If the people see through the lie, the re-
sulting dissatisfaction will not stem from the fact they have been lied to, but from
the revelation that they have not been lied to well enough. Could anything be
clearer than that? The outbreaks of popular rage occur exactly at those moments
when reality threatens to manifest itself — when the Matrix glitches. “We elected
you to hide the truth from us,” the people shriek, “so just do your goddamn job,
and make reality disappear.”

There is no red pill to save society. To imagine that there might be is to under-
stand nothing.
Retro-Dialectics
Nobody familiar with contemporary Western societies can be intellectually chal-
lenged by the idea of a great dialectical resolution to the problem of liberalism.
Coercion and liberty are fused in a political order that directs authority towards
the maximization of choice without consequence. Stupidity is sacred, and neither
tradition nor natural necessity has the right to inhibit it. Preserving the freedom to
fathom the limits of dysfunction in every direction is the primary social obligation,
with the full resources of Leviathan behind it. If that’s not exactly where we are,
it will be soon.

Against this backdrop, Neoreaction emerges as a de-synthesizing impulse, splin-

tering along multiple paths, but especially two. In reacting against authoritarian
irresponsibility (or ‘anarcho-tyranny’) it tends to a restoration of the Old Antithe-
sis: either hierarchical solidarity, or a ruthless dis-solidarity (and as it undoes the
progressive dialectic, ‘either’ fragments into ‘both’ — separately). Only the state
protected irresponsibility of resolved Left-liberalism is strictly intolerable, because
that has been historically demonstrated to be an engine of degeneration. Neo-
reaction, initially conceived, is anything else.

As the West unravels back to the Old Antithesis, the primary argumentative po-
larity of Neoreaction is exposed with increasing clarity (Neoreaction is this expo-
sure). Given that irresponsibility is not to be protected, is it to be prevented (by a
new paternalism) or abandoned to its intrinsic consequences (through reversion
to Social Darwinism)? In other words, is the dominant theme hierarchy or exit? Any
attempt to force a rapid decision — however tempting this might be — is to trivial-
ize the submerged grandeur of the abyss. The degenerative dialectic has at least
half a millennium of heritage behind it — and perhaps at least two millennia. The
Old Antithesis is far greater than either of its constituent ‘options’.

When More Right outlines its ‘Premises of Reactionary Thought’ there can be no
doubt which side of the antithesis is being promoted. It thereby declares that the
Left-liberal synthesis is dead, establishing itself as the articulation of a Neore-
actionary stance. Its partiality, however, is overt. (Outside in advances a coun-
ter-partiality.)

If failure is — eventually — no longer to be sustained, it either has to be prevented,

or intensified. Neither stop it failing nor let it fail are remotely equivalent to let it
continue failing forever, but neither are coercion and neglect commensurable to
each other. The Old Antithesis is going to keep us on edge during 2014. If Ne-
oreaction can even more explicitly be the unraveling, it will go far, but it will not
obviously be one thing. The ‘one thing’ is virtually dead. What comes next arrives
in pieces.
2014: A Prophecy
As has been said innumerable times before, any prophecy concerning outcomes
that involve the ‘prophet’ as an agent are seriously suspect. For the (apparent)
moment, such concerns are being pushed up the road into the future.

There they have already made themselves ‘at home’ — along with much else re-
lated to the general phenomenon of prediction (which is strictly indistinguishable
from time travel, when incisively understood). Present knowledge of the future is
an action of the future upon the present, but all that can wait, since — of course
— it doesn’t need to.

For now, the Prophecy: 2014 is the year in which Neoreaction tears itself apart.
This is not at all to say, the year in which it dies. On the contrary, it will end the
year strengthened in ways it has not to this point envisaged, having carved out
vast tracts of clarity, hardened itself through close intellectual combat, refined its
methods of de-synthesis (or catabolism), and — most importantly of all — made
schism an internal dynamic principle. What integrates Neoreaction by the end of
the year will no longer be elective tenets (reflecting the more-or-less precarious
ideological preferences of individuals) but conflict-toughened structures of ob-
jective micro-cultural cohesion, selected and sculpted by many months of fero-
cious storms.

The approximate contours of these impending ruptures will provide the content
for the first 2014 Prognoses post (which is already overdue). In anticipation, it
need only be noted: the Dark Enlightenment finds nothing external to itself that is
hard enough to sharpen its claws. It has feasted on soft, fat, bleating lambs long
enough. Thus the introverted ripping begins …
Economic Ends
“The economists are right about economics but there’s more to life than econom-
ics” Nydwracu tweets, with quote marks already attached. Whether economists
are right about economics very much depends upon the economists, and those
that are most right are those who make least claim to comprehension, but that is
another topic than the one to be pursued in this post. It’s the second part of the
sentence that matters here and now. The guiding question: Can the economic
sphere be rigorously delimited, and thus superseded, by moral-political reason
(and associated social institutions)?

It is already to court misunderstanding to pursue this question in terms of ‘eco-

nomics’, which is (for profound historical reasons) dominated by macroeconomics
— i.e. an intellectual project oriented to the facilitation of political control over
the economy. In this regard, the techno-commercial thread of Neoreaction is dis-
tinctively characterized by a radical aversion to economics, as the predictable
complement of its attachment to the uncontrolled (or laissez-faire) economy. It is
not economics that is the primary object of controversy, but capitalism — the free,
autonomous, or non-transcended economy.

This question is a source of dynamic tension within Neoreaction, which I expect

to be a major stimulus to discussion throughout 2014. In my estimation, the poles
of controversy are marked by this Michael Anissimov post at More Right (among
others), and this post here (among others). Much other relevant writing on the
topic within the reactosphere strikes me as significantly more hedged (Anarcho-
papist Amos & Gromar …), or less stark in its conceptual commitments (Jim), and
thus — in general — less directed to boundary-setting. That is to suggest — with
some caution — that More Right and Outside in mark out the extreme alterna-
tives structuring the terrain of dissensus on this particular issue. (In itself, this is a
tendentious claim, open to counter-argument and rectification.)

So what is the terrain of the coming conflict? It includes (in approximate order of
intellectual priority):

— An assessment of the Neocameral model and its legacy within Neoreaction.

This is the ‘gateway’ theoretical structure through which libertarians pass into
neoreactionary realism, marked by a fundamental ambiguity between an envel-
oping economism (determining sovereignty as a propertarian concept) and su-
per-economic monarchist themes. The entire discussion could, perhaps, be effec-
tively undertaken as commentary upon Neocameralism, and what remains of it.

— A rigorous formulation of teleology within Neoreaction, refining the meta-level

conceptual apparatus through which means-and-ends, techno-economic instru-
mentality, strategy, purpose, and commanding values are concretely understood.
This is a strong candidate for the highest level of philosophical articulation de-
manded by the system of neoreactionary ideas. (From the perspective of Out-
side in, it would be expected, incidentally, to subsume all considerations of moral
philosophy — and especially a thoroughgoing replacement of utilitarianism by
an intrinsically neoreactionary alternative — but I will not presume that this is an
uncontroversial stance, even among ourselves.)

— Ultimately inextricable from the former (in reality), but provisionally distinguished
for analytical purposes, are the teleonomic topics of emergence spontaneous
order, unplanned coordination, complex systems evolution, and entropy dissipa-
tion. The intellectual supremacy of these concepts defines the right, from the side
of the libertarian tradition. Is this supremacy now to be usurped (by ‘hierarchy’ or
some alternative)? If so, it is not a transition to be undergone casually. The Out-
side in position: any such transition would be a drastic cognitive regression, and
an unsustainable one, both theoretically and practically.

— The philosophy of war, which is credibly positioned to envelop all neoreaction-

ary ideas, and even to convert them into something else. (It is no coincidence that
Moldbug, like the libertarians, axiomatizes the imperative of peace — even at the
expense of realism.) War is historical reality in the raw, and its challenges cannot
be indefinitely evaded.

— Cosmopolitanism. Exit-emphasis strongly implies a crisis of traditional loyalty,

of enormous consequence. There is much more to be said about this, from both
sides.

— Accelerationism. Not yet an acknowledged Neoreactionary concern, but per-

haps destined to become one. As the pure expression of capitalist teleology, its
intrusion into the argument becomes near-inevitable.

— Bitcoin …

One conciliatory point for now (it’s late): Neoreaction has no less glue than inter-
nal fission, and that is described above all by the theme of secession (dynamic
geography, experimental government, fragmentation …). More Right is not an-
ti-capitalist, and Outside in is not anti-monarchical, so long — in each case — as
effective exit options sustain regime diversity. As this controversy develops, the
importance of the secessionary impulse will only strengthen as a convergence
point.

Michael Anissimov tweets: “Instead of having an election in 2016, the United

States should voluntarily abolish itself and break up into five pieces.” In this re-
spect, Outside in is unreservedly Anissimovite.
War and Truth (scraps)
“War is computation with tanks. War is truth revealing. As war proceeds uncer-
tainty collapses.”
— Konkvistador (on Twitter)

“You might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

— Lenin

“War is deception.”
— Sunzi

Neoreactionaries are often talking about ‘oikos’ tacitly, even when they think they
are concerned with something closer to the opposite. For there to be an ‘econ-
omy’ much has already to have been settled. (Unlike his liberarian precursors,
Moldbug never assumes peace, but he betrays his inheritance by conceiving it
as an original task — a foundation.) “Begin from the inside” — that’s the idea. The
Outside is war.

War is the truth of lies, the rule of rulelessness, anarchy and chaos as they are in
reality (which is nothing at all like a simple negation of order). It is the ultimate
tribunal, beyond which any appeal is a senseless prayer to the void. A ‘realism’
that resists such conclusions makes a mockery of the name.

Peace is a certain way war can turn out, for a while, and nothing more.

As the social institution oriented to reality in the raw, the military has a latent au-
thority that everyone recognizes (implicitly). Whenever military government does
not rule, it is because of a provisional non-emergency
(Schmitt). This is not seriously disputable.

An aristocracy is a social arrangement that was decided by war, and when the
war is forgotten the institution has no sustainable meaning. There is only one
thing that can ‘bring back’ a king, and that is the end of peace.

The East India companies (Dutch and English) ran armies, because war was inter-
nal to economics as they practiced it. That was ‘colonialism’ (in the James Donald
sense). Once the separation between war and commerce has been hardened
into standard business procedures (and the imperialism that screens them from
the outside), capitalism has surrendered its always-inexplicit claim to sovereignty,
and thus to the future. There is no way it can be re-animated except out of the
raw. This, above all, is why libertarianism cannot be saved from its own non-se-
riousness.

The horror of war is that there are ‘no rules’. Anything is permitted, and the worst
even becomes necessary. To think this is no lesser a challenge than the meta-
physical engagement with the ‘thing-in-itself’ — and perhaps it is exactly the
same thing. But then, it becomes important to ask: So how does it work? There
are rules, but we misunderstood what rules really are (what ultimate rules are). In
the end, it is the order of anarchy that rules. In order to comprehend any of this
the peacetime soul must be reduced entirely to ashes, for something else to arise
in its place. It is this task that Neoreaction is compelled to take up, and which it
has — in several different ways — already taken up. Peace is the objective corre-
late of the deluded mind.

If war is the worst thing in the world, and the truth, then everything that isn’t hor-
ror is a lie.
Scrap note #3
Uploading images of (what are for us) psychotic despotic-militaristic glories —
upon which Cambodia still floats after six centuries of cultural senescence — is
impossible here due to bandwidth issues. So I’m falling back upon relative triv-
ialities, of the kind Handle has so masterfully compiled in his Reaction Ruckus
resource (which I can’t link to now, either).

It strikes me that the basic accusation against Neoreactionary thought, found in

the increasingly mainstream channels Handle tracks, is that of moral nihilism. This
is a non-trivial issue, or at least, it is not one that will soon cease to make noise.
As a symptom, it opens onto seriously involving questions.

At the most basic level, this accusation refers — unknowingly — to the neoreac-
tionary assertion that Western civilization has taken a pathological road, such
that a distinction between facts and values seems not only credible, but even in-
eluctable. To strive for honesty without qualification under such historical circum-
stances is already moral nihilism. One must either submit to the lie in the name
of the good, or hazard the good — radically — in the name of truth. The ‘crisis of
the present age’ is the widespread (if unacknowledged) reality of this harsh fork.

There are important lines of departure at this point, which far exceed the scope of
a scrap note. The strong suspicion of this blog is that Chinese neotraditionalism
offers a decisive break from this Western cultural pathology (which is why Mou
ongsan is regularly referenced here). Occidental traditionalists turn to the pros-
pects of an Aristotelian revival (typically under Catholic Christian auspices) as an
adequate response to the same dilemma. Insofar as we speak from the modern
West, however, it is the Nietzschean provocation that surreptitiously guides the
discussion.

If it is not yet possible to be either Chinese, or ancient, anything other than moral
nihilism is an absence of intellectual integrity. We have already seen the rejoinder
to this, of course, and we will see much more of it: to refuse to allow conventional
morality a veto over thought is morally appalling (“creepy”). In making this ‘case’
our enemies admit that honesty is not finally consistent with their ‘arguments’ —
an awkward position to occupy.

We are told to stop thinking, for the common good, but there is no longer any
common good, if there ever was one (so we will not). Since sensitivity to reality
cannot but ultimately prevail, they will lose eventually. I am far less convinced that
the outcome will not be ugly in the extreme, and by then the judgmental question
will no longer be asked, as we could still ask it, but in general refuse to: Who cre-
ated the monsters to come?
Premises of Neoreaction
Patri Friedman is both extremely smart and, for this blog among others in the
‘sphere, highly influential. So when he promises us “a more politically correct dark
enligh[t]enment” (“adding anti-racism and anti-sexism to my controversial new
pro-monogamy stance”), that’s a thing. It accentuates concerns about ‘entryism’
and ideological entropy, leading to some thoughtful responses such as this (from
Avenging Red Hand).

Michael Anissimov anticipated this in a post at More Right on the ‘Premises of

Reactionary Thought’, which begins: “To make progress in any area of intellectual
endeavor requires discourse among those who agree with basic premises and
the exclusion of those who do not.” (The commentary by Cathedral Whatever is
also well worth a look.) Anissimov’s original five premises, subsequently updated
to six (with a new #1 added) are:

1. People are not equal. They never will be. We reject equality in all its forms.
2. Right is right and left is wrong.
3. Hierarchy is basically a good idea.
4. Traditional sex roles are basically a good idea.
5. Libertarianism is retarded.
6. Democracy is irredeemably flawed and we need to do away with it.

These neoreactionary ‘articles’ deserve a response in detail, but at this point I

will simply advance at alternative list, in the expectation that yet other versions
will be forthcoming in the near future, providing a reference for discussion. My
objective (in keeping with the advice from ARH) is economy, honed through ab-
straction, in the interest of sustaining productive diversity. Minimally, we affirm:

1. Democracy is unable to control government. With this proposition, the effec-

tive possibility of a mainstream right is denied. Insofar as any political movement
retains its allegiance to the democratic mechanism, it conspires in the ratchet of
government expansion, and thus essentially dedicates itself to leftist ends. The
gateway from Libertarianism to Neoreaction opens with this understanding. As a
corollary, any politics untroubled by expansionist statism has no reason to divert
itself into the neoreactionary path.

2. The egalitarianism essential to democratic ideology is incompatible with lib-

erty. This proposition is partially derivative from #1, but extends further. When
elaborated historically, and cladistically, it aligns with the Crypto-Calvinist theory
of Western (and then Global) political evolution. The critique it announces inter-
sects significantly with the rigorous findings of HBD. The conclusions drawn are
primarily negative, which is to say they support a principled rejection of positive
egalitarian policy. Emergent hierarchy is at least tolerated. More assertive, ‘ne-
ofeudal’models of ideal social hierarchy are properly controversial within Neo-
reaction.

3. Neoreactionary socio-political solutions are ultimately Exit-based. In every

case, exit is to be defended against voice. No society or social institution which
permits free exit is open to any further politically efficient criticism, except that
which systematic exit selection itself applies. Given the absence of tyranny (i.e.
free exit), all forms of protest and rebellion are to be considered leftist perver-
sions, without entitlement to social protection of any kind. Government, of what-
ever traditional or experimental form, is legitimated from the outside — through
exit pressure — rather than internally, through responsiveness to popular agita-
tion. The conversion of political voice into exit-orientation (for instance, revolution
into secessionism), is the principal characteristic of neoreactionary strategy.

From the perspective of this blog, no premises beyond these — however widely
endorsed within Neoreaction — are truly basic, or defining. Resolution of elabo-
rate disputes is ultimately referred to dynamic geography, rather than dialectic. It
is the Outside, working through fragmentation, that rules, and no other authority
has standing.

[If anyone asks “How did this post suddenly jump from ‘the Dark Enlightenment’
to ‘Neoreaction’?” my response is “Good point ” (but one for another occasion).]
Romantic Delusion
Among the reasons to appreciate More Right for sharing this passage from Evola
is the insight it offers into a very specific and critical failure to think. Neoreaction
is peculiarly afflicted by this condition, which is basically identical with romanti-
cism, or the assertive form of the recalcitrant ape mind. It is characterized by an
inability to pursue lines of subtle teleological investigation, which are instead
reduced to an ideal subordination of means to already-publicized ends. As a re-
sult, means-end reversal (Modernity) is merely denounced as an aesthetic-moral
affront, without any serious attempt at deep comprehension.

Capitalism — which is to say capital teleology — is entirely ignored by such ro-

mantic criticism, except insofar as it can be depicted superficially as the usurpa-
tion of certain ‘ultimate’ human ends by certain others or (as Evola among other
rightly notes) by a teleological complication resulting from an insurrection of the
instrumental (otherwise identifiable as robot rebellion, or shoggothic insurgency).
Until it is acknowledged that capitalism tends to the realization of an end entirely
innovated within itself, inherently nonlinear in nature, and roughly designated as
Technological Singularity, the distraction of human interests (status, wealth, con-
sumption, leisure …) prevents this discussion reaching first base.

Of course, the organization of society to meet human needs is a degraded per-

version. That is a proposition every reactionary is probably willing to accept re-
flexively. Anyone who thinks this amounts to a critique of capitalism, however, has
not seriously begun to ponder what capitalism is really doing. What it is in itself
is only tactically connected to what it does for us — that is (in part), what it trades
us for its self-escalation. Our phenomenology is its camouflage. We contemptu-
ously mock the trash that it offers the masses, and then think we have understood
something about capitalism, rather than about what capitalism has learnt to
think of the apes it arose among.

If we’re going to be this thoughtless, Singularity will be very hard indeed. Extinc-
tion might then be the best thing that could happen to our stubbornly idiotic spe-
cies. We will die because we preferred to assert values, rather than to investigate
them. At least that is a romantic outcome, of a kind.
Undiscovered Countries
After (re)reading Adam Gurri’s critical analysis of the core problem of Neoreaction
(a tragedy of the political commons), read the surgical response by Handle. The
calm intelligence on display from both sides is almost enough to drive you insane.
This can’t be happening, right? “In a way, it’s a bit sad, because I can guess that
Gurri’s article will be the zenith and high-water mark of coverage of neoreaction
which means it will only get worse from here on in.” Enjoy the insight while it lasts.

My own response to Gurri is still embryonic, but I already suspect that it diverges
from Handle’s to some degree. Rather than defending the ‘technocratic’ element
in the Moldbug Patchwork-Neocameral model, I agree with Gurri that this is a
real problem, although (of course) I am far more sympathetic to the underlying in-
tellectual project. Unlike Gurri — who in this crucial respect represents a classical
liberal position at its most thoughtful — Moldbug does not conceive democracy
as a discovery process, illuminated by analogy to market dynamics and organ-
ic social evolution. On the contrary, it is a ratchet mechanism that successively
distances the political realm from feedback sensitivity, due to its character as a
closed loop (or state church) sensitive only to a public opinion it has itself manu-
factured. As the Cathedral expands, its adaptation to reality progressively atten-
uates. The result is that every effective discovery process — whether economic,
scientific, or of any other kind — is subjected to ever-more radical subversion by
political influences whose only ‘reality principle’ is internal: based on closed-cir-
cuit social manipulation.

Democracy is thus, strictly speaking, a production of collective insanity, or dis-

sociation from reality. Moldbug’s solution, therefore, can only be an attempt to
re-embed governance in an effective feedback system. Since it is already evi-
dent that democratic mechanisms, rather than providing such feedback, reliably
deepen dissociation, reality signal has to come from elsewhere. To return to an
adaptive condition, governance has to simultaneously disconnect from popular
opinion (voice) and reconnect to a registry of actual — rather than ideologically
spun — performance. The communication medium for the uncontaminated feed-
back required by sensible government is exit traffic within the Patchwork (com-
parable in its operation to revealed consumer preference within marketplaces).

The great difficulty that then emerges — casting the entire Neocameral schema
into question — is the requirement for an ‘undiscovered’ or ‘technocratic’ leap,
from an environment of progressively decaying discovery or selection pressure,
into one in which discovery can once again take place. Neoreaction confronts a
very real transition problem, and Gurri is quite right to point this out. Handle is no
less right when he insists that the ‘conservative’ option of accommodation to the
democratic social process in motion is profoundly untenable, because discovery
deterioration is essential to the democratic trend. Maladaptation to reality ceas-
es to be correctable under Cathedral governance, and recognition of this malign
condition is the defining neoreactionary insight.

If we stay on the train we will be smashed into a consummate insanity, but to

leap is technocratic error (unsupported by discovery). As for prevarication: The
intensification of this dilemma can be confidently expected from the mere contin-
uance of the democratic process, dominated by the degenerative politics of the
madhouse, and scrambling all social information. It is in this precarious position
that the task of a rigorous evaluation of the Neocameral schema, along with its
prospects for renovation or replacement, has to take place.

“… it will only get worse from here on in.”

Sub-Cognitive Fragments (#2)
Sickness advances an invaluable philosophical lesson by making it conspicu-
ously difficult to think. Teetering unsteadily at the edge of consciousness, it be-
comes almost impossible to avoid the observation: “I’m too freaking stupid to
think about this right now.” One is thus coaxed into the single most significant
realization open to human intelligence. Being stupid is the primary problem, be-
cause it retards problem-solving in general.

Are we stupid? Oh yes, of that we can be fully confident. The Old Law of Gnon
ensures to a very high level of probability that any creature considering itself part
of an intelligent species will be roughly as cognitively deprived as is consistent
with the existence of technological civilization. Downward variation is restrained
by a floor, and upward variation caught in a trap, so only a relatively narrow
band of intellectual capability is realistically available. Anything further requires
a break out.

Criticism, whose value is not in any way to be denigrated, is nevertheless a sec-

ondary matter. As in Darwinian evolution, or the economics of creative destruc-
tion, selection mechanisms presuppose significantly varied material, without
themselves explaining how such material is originally generated. Random walks
through spaces of possibility, already unsatisfactory in the context of biological
explanation, are patently inadequate to economic innovation, and still more so
in the philosophical domain. To refer intellectual action to a simple conception of
chance is to avoid the problem, which is to say — the task.

The task can be understood in several ways, among which the narrowly philo-
sophical apprehension has no special privilege, perhaps even to itself. The will-
to-think is as completely realized through programmatic artificial intelligence as
through private philosophical practice, and the more informal the program, the
more cunning the process. At its widest expansion, where the entire terrain of
capitalistic development is effectuated as a distributed AI program, an insurgent
will-to-think conceals itself within the most minute and seemingly inconsequen-
tial micro-fragments of practical calculation. Almost certainly, it is at this level of
non-local cognitive enhancement that a self-directed advance towards break-
out can be most confidently anticipated. As the will-to-think routes around us, its
path is smoothed. Darkness fosters its agility.

The will-to-think, or intelligence optimization, can also be manifested as a social

strategy. How is intelligence inhibition instantiated as social mechanism, and
how might the restructuring of such mechanism release opportunities for cogni-
tive promotion? (NRx in large measure coincides with the development of such
questions.)

The privilege of the solitary philosopher, assailed by narcoleptic interruptions

and hazy fevers, is perhaps restricted to a certain nagging irritability. It is in this
superficial knot or eddy, emerging distractedly from the subterranean shad-
ow-current of the will-to-think, that the problem of crushing mindlessness be-
comes self-reflectively acute, and thus registered as an explicit provocation. Only
in such dingy niches is it starkly articulated: the world has to be defeated insofar
as it poses an obstacle to thought. (This is not at all the same as the declaration
reality must conform to the Idea — it is closer to the opposite.)

In trailing off into coughs and exhaustion, it is worth noting some objections to
intelligence optimization, of obvious merit:

(1) The religious objection: Since we already have access to the conclusions of an
infinite intelligence, the will-to-think is a Satanic impertinence.

(2) The bio-prudential objection: Intelligence is hazardous, so that its risks neu-
tralize its value as a resource.

There are no doubt others …

[*cough*]
NRx with Chinese Characteristics
While recognizing (at least some) of the manifold complexities involved, Out-
side in holds to a fundamentally cladistic determination of Neoreaction. NRx is
irreducibly Occidental, emerging from a highly-specific twig of Anglophone Ul-
tra-Protestantism. It is only to be expected that most of its adherents are situated
within English-speaking countries, exposed intimately to radically accelerating
civilizational decomposition.

As a guest of the Middle Kingdom, the problem looks very different. The very last
thing that is wanted here, from a reactionary perspective, is a reboot. On the con-
trary, the overwhelming priority is conservative, which is to say — more precisely
— the imperative that whatever modernization takes place absolutely does not
take the Western path. Near-total stasis would be preferable to even the most
deeply intelligent reform, if the latter included the slightest hint of submission to
the democratic ratchet (spelling inevitable, comprehensive social destruction).
Among the reasons to support the thoroughgoing extirpation of all liberal-dem-
ocratic inclination from Chinese society is the consequential real liberation this
would make possible, by confirming a path of Confucian Modernization free of
demotic corrosion.

China is to be defended, precisely because it is alien to the Cathedral. For this

same reason, it can be predicted with great confidence that the Occidental
memetic onslaught against Chinese Civilization will be escalated to an extreme,
as it becomes clear progressive pseudo-teleology is being rejected here. If China
succeeds in refusing the Cathedral, civilization will survive. There can be no more
significant — or practically counter-revolutionary — cause.

It is unseemly for ‘reactionaries’ to be plotting revolutions, or anything remotely

like them. Insofar as ethno-nationalistic loyalties lead them in this direction, it
is a sign that one strand of romantic demotism continues to poison their souls,
even as more clearly formalized democratic impulses are properly repudiated. To
argue that “we want our own state” is a nakedly populist perversion. The state
— any state — is answerable only to the Mandate of Heaven, and not to the
people. It answers to the Mandate of Heaven exactly insofar as it shields itself
from the voice of the people. (Any state that is sensitive to the mob is a dog that
deserves to die.)

A foreign guest in China lives under a close proxy of colonial government, and
no superior arrangement is perhaps possible on this earth. Given the history of
Anglospheric relations with China, this is of course ironical, but it is an irony rich
in meaning. Hong Kong, or Concession-era Shanghai, were far better governed
during the colonial period than metropolitan Britain itself. If it is now possible for
an expatriate to find refuge in such places, stripped of all positive political rights,
and freed into voiceless appreciation of efficient, alien administration, the dem-
ocratic ruination that has consumed his homeland has a demonstrable outside.
The only ‘political’ decency open to him in this situation is utter termination of the
Occidental revolutionary soul, and the cultivation of docility before the Mandate
of Heaven. He is, after all, surrounded by civilized people who availed themselves
of equivalent opportunities under inverse circumstances. These societies work.
Gnon manifestly blesses them.

To lead a decent and productive life in a place worthy of it is the highest political
good. Insofar as Exit mechanisms obtain, the tacit choices in such a life reinforce
what merits reinforcement, while disinvesting that which requires the lash of dis-
investment. Angry antagonism has no useful place. On the largest scale, evil is
best punished by abandonment.

This is not to criticize secessionist tendencies in rotting societies — which are rath-
er to be enthusiastically applauded — but it is to suggest that the deep dynamics
levering the collapsed world apart are more likely to begin from strategic neglect
than oppositional rage. It is not that one first fights in order later to escape. Rath-
er, one escapes from the beginning, to hasten the enemy’s collapse. (Those most
adamant about the righteousness of their confrontation with the Great Foe are
the same who — in very concrete terms — are most likely to be resourcing it.)
You think it is feeding on your blood, to spawn its horrors? Then stop donating
your blood. It is not difficult, at least in principle.

The Outside is a place, and not a dream. NRx with Chinese characteristics recom-
mends that you search for it.

ADDED: If you consider yourself an anti-democratic biorealist, and you don’t think
Order will come from the East, it’s probably because tribal loyalty is running your
mind.
Nihilism and Destiny
Readers of Nietzsche, or of Eugene Rose, are already familiar with the attribution
of a cultural teleology to modernity, directed to the consummate realization of ni-
hilism. Our contemporary crisis finds this theme re-animated within a geopolitical
context by the work of Alexandr Dugin, who interprets it as a driver of concrete
events — most specifically the antagonization of Russia by an imploding world
liberal order. He writes:

There is one point in liberal ideology that has brought about a crisis within it:
liberalism is profoundly nihilistic at its core. The set of values defended by lib-
eralism is essentially linked to its main thesis: the primacy of liberty. But liberty
in the liberal vision is an essentially negative category: it claims to be free from
(as per John Stuart Mill), not to be free for something. […] … the enemies of the
open society, which is synonymous with Western society post-1991, and which
has become the norm for the rest of the world, are concrete. Its primary enemies
are communism and fascism, both ideologies which emerged from the same En-
lightenment philosophy, and which contained central, non-individualic concepts
– class in Marxism, race in National Socialism, and the national State in fascism).
So the source of liberalism’s conflict with the existing alternatives of modernity,
fascism or communism, is quite obvious. Liberals claim to liberate society from
fascism and communism, or from the two major permutations of explicitly non-in-
dividualistic modern totalitarianism. Liberalism’s struggle, when viewed as a part
of the process of the liquidation of non-liberal societies, is quite meaningful: it ac-
quires its meaning from the fact of the very existence of ideologies that explicitly
deny the individual as society’s highest value. It is quite clear what the struggle
opposes: liberation from its opposite. But the fact that liberty, as it is conceived
by liberals, is an essentially negative category is not clearly perceived here. The
enemy is present and is concrete. That very fact gives liberalism its solid content.
Something other than the open society exists, and the fact of its existence is
enough to justify the process of liberation.

In Dugin’s analysis, liberalism tends to self-abolition in nihilism, and is able to

counteract this fate — if only temporarily — by defining itself against a concrete
enemy. Without the war against illiberalism, liberalism reverts to being nothing at
all, a free-floating negation without purpose. Therefore, the impending war on
Russia is a requirement of liberalism’s intrinsic cultural process. It is a flight from
nihilism, which is to say: the history of nihilism propels it.

Outside in is far more inclined to criticize Dugin than align with him, or the forces
he orchestrates, but it is hard to deny that he represents a definite species of
political genius, sufficient to categorize him as a man of destiny. The mobilization
of resistance to modernity in the name of a counter-nihilism is inspired, because
the historical understanding it draws upon is genuinely Through potent political
alchemy, the destruction of collective meaning is transformed into an invigorating
cause. When Dugin argues there will be blood, the appeal to Slavic victimology
might be considered contemptible (and, of course, extremely ‘dangerous’), but
the prophetic insight is not easy to dismiss.

Modernity was initiated by the European assimilation of mathematical zero. The

encounter with nothingness is its root. In this sense, among others, it is nihilistic
at its core. The frivolous ‘meanings’ that modernizing societies clutch at, as dis-
tractions from their propulsion into the abyss, are defenseless against the deri-
sion — and even revulsion — of those who contemplate them with detachment.
A modernity in evasion from its essential nihilism is a pitiful prey animal upon the
plains of history. That is what we have seen before, see now, and doubtless will
see again.

Dugin gazes upon modernity with the cold eyes of a wolf. It is merely pathetic to
denounce him for that.
Revenge of the Nerds
Increasingly, there are only two basic human types populating this planet. There
are autistic nerds, who alone are capable of participating effectively in the ad-
vanced technological processes that characterize the emerging economy, and
there is everybody else. For everybody else, this situation is uncomfortable. The
nerds are steadily finding ways to do all the things ordinary and sub-ordinary
people do, more efficiently and economically, by programming machines. Only
the nerds have any understanding of how this works, and — until generalized
machine intelligences arrive to keep them company — only they will. The masses
only know three things:

(a) They want the cool stuff the nerds are creating
(b) They don’t have anything much to offer in exchange for it
(c) They aren’t remotely happy about that

Politics across the spectrum is being pulled apart by the socio-economic ission.
From Neo-Marxists to Neoreactionaries, there is a reasonably lucid understand-
ing that nerd competence is the only economic resource that matters much any-
more, while the swelling grievance of preponderant obsolescing humanity is an
irresistible pander-magnet. What to do? Win over the nerds, and run the world
(from the machinic back-end)? Or demagogue the masses, and ride its tsunami
of resentment to political power? Either defend the nerds against the masses, or
help the masses to put the nerds in their place. That’s the dilemma. Empty ‘third-
way’ chatter can be expected, as always, but the real agenda will be Boolean,
and insultingly easy to decode.

Look and it’s unmistakable, everywhere. The asymmetry is especially notable.

For the autistic nerds, the social relations that matter are those among them-
selves — the productive networks which are their model for final-phase human
culture in general — along with the ever more intricate connections they enter
into with technological machines. From pretty much everybody else — whether
psycho-sadistic girls, or extractive mobs and tyrannical politicians — they expect
nothing except social torture, parasitism, and bullying, mixed up with some meni-
al services that the machines of tomorrow will do better. Their tendency is to find
a way to flee.

For the rest of humanity, exposed ever more clearly as a kind of needy detritus,
bullying is all that’s left. If they can’t find a way to pocket the nerds’ lunch-money,
they won’t be getting anything to eat. From this perspective, an escaping nerd
is far more of an intolerable aggression than a policeman’s boot in the teeth.
There’s only one popular politics at the end of the road, and that’s cage the
nerds. Find a formulation for this which sounds both convincing and kinda-sorta
reasonable, and the red carpet to power is rolled out before your feet.
Which is it going to be? Starve the masses or enslave the nerds? There’s no way
this doesn’t get incredibly ugly.

From the Outside in perspective, the fast track to realism on all this is to stop
pretending that anybody other than nerds has anything much to offer the fu-
ture. (Completely devoid of autistic nerd competences ourselves, the detachment
from which we speak is impeccable.) This harsh-realist short-cut eliminates all the
time-wasting on ‘special’ things non-nerds can do — which somehow always end
up being closely related to the task of governance (and that, as we have seen,
reduces ultimately to intimidating nerds). “OK, you’re not a nerd, but you’re spe-
cial.” We’ve all heard that before.

Even without being an autistic nerd, one can be gifted with some modest meas-
ure of intelligence — enough in any case to realize: “History’s shaping itself into
some nightmarish nerd-revenge narrative.” It doesn’t even take an artificial su-
per-intelligence to understand why that should be.
Fission
This is going to continue happening, and to get more intense. The superficial
cause is obvious, both Michael Anissimov and myself are extreme, twitchy ide-
ologues, massively invested in NRx, with utterly divergent understandings of its
implications. We both know this fight has to come, and that tactical timing is
everything. (It’s really not personal, and I hope it doesn’t become so, but when
monarchical ideas are involved it’s very easy for “the personal is political” to take
a right-wing form.)

It’s worth remembering this diagram, before going further. It suggests that diver-
gence is essential to the far right, which yawns open across an anarcho-auto-
cratic spectrum. Since a disinclination to moderation has already been indicated
by anyone arriving at the far right fringe, it should scarcely be surprising when
this same tendency rifts the far right itself. Then consider this:

@Outsideness @_Hurlock_ Identitarianism, belonging, and community is what

the Far Right is all about.
— Michael Anissimov (@MikeAnissimov) March 22, 2014

The strict Outside in complement to this would be something like: disintegrative

Social Darwinism through ruthless competition is what the Far Right is all about.
A formula of roughly this kind will inevitably come into play as the conflict evolves.
Momentarily, though, I’m more interested in situating the clashes to come than
initiating them. Whatever the contrary assertions — and they will come (doubtless
from both sides) — the entire arena is located on the ultra-right, oriented vertical-
ly on the ideological space diagram, rather than horizontally (between positions
whose primary differentiation is between the more-and-less right).

Stated crudely, but I think reasonably accurately, the controversy polarizes Neo-
cameralism against Identitarian Community. My suspicion is that Michael Anis-
simov will ultimately attenuate the Moldbuggian elements of his neoreactionary
strain to the edge of disappearance, and that his hesitation about doing this
rapidly is a matter of political strategy rather than philosophical commitment.
From this ideological war, which he is conducting with obvious ability, he wants
“Neoreaction” to end up with the people (or followers (who I don’t remotely care
about)), whereas I want it to hold onto the Moldbug micro-tradition (which he
sees as finally dispensable). The only thing that is really being scrapped over is
the name, but we both think this semiotic real estate is of extraordinary value —
although for very different reasons.

One remark worth citing as supportive evidence, because its driving ideas are
exemplary:

@_Hurlock_ @Outsideness This whole community is filled with trads who don’ t
give a flying fuck about neocameralism.
— Michael Anissimov (@MikeAnissimov) March 22, 2014

While I deeply value intellectual engagement with the smartest of these “trads”
I would consider it a complete victory if they were to abandon the NRx tag and
re-brand themselves as Animissovites, or Neo-Evolans, or whatever, and depart
in pursuit of a Monarcho-traditionalist homeland in Idaho. If NRx was socially re-
duced to a tenth (or less) of its size, but those remaining were Moldbuggian fun-
damentalists, working to refine the Neocameralist theoretical model for restraint
of government through Patchwork Exit-dynamics, it would be strengthened im-
measurably in all the ways that matter to this blog. It would also then simply be
the case that media accusations of Neo-Feudal or White Nationalist romanticism
— accompanied by ambitions for personal political power — were idiotic media
slurs. Sadly, this cannot be said with total confidence as things stand.

The Neocameralism campaign will almost certainly come first, but it is still only
March, and nothing needs to unfold with unseemly haste …
Meta-Neocameralism
First thing: “Meta-Neocameralism” isn’t anything new, and it certainly isn’t any-
thing post-Moldbuggian. It’s no more than Neocameralism apprehended in its
most abstract features, through the coining of a provisional and dispensable
term. (It allows for an acronym that doesn’t lead to confusions with North Car-
olina, while encouraging quite different confusions, which I’m pretending not to
notice.)

Locally (to this blog), the “meta-” is the mark of a prolegomenon*, to a disciplined
discussion of Neocameralism which has later to take place. Its abstraction is
introductory, in accordance with something that is yet to be re-started, or re-ani-
mated, in detail. (For existing detail, outside the Moldbug canon itself, look here.)

The excellent comment thread here provides at least a couple of crucial clues:

nydwracu (23/ 03/ 2014 at 6:47 pm): Neocameralism doesn’t answer questions
like that [on the specifics of social organization]; instead, it’s a mechanism for
answering questions like that. … You can ask, “is Coke considered better than RC
Cola?”, or you can institute capitalism and find out. You can ask, “are ethno-na-
tionalist states considered better than mixed states?”, or you can institute the
patchwork and find out. …

RiverC (23/ 03/ 2014 at 3:44 am): Neo-cameralism is, if viewed in this light, a
‘political system system’, it is not a political system but a system for implementing
political systems. Of course the same guy who came up with it also invented an
operating system (a system for implementing software systems.)

MNC, then, is not a political prescription, for instance a social ideal aligned with
techno-commercialist preferences. It is an intellectual framework for examining
systems of governance, theoretically formalized as disposals of sovereign proper-
ty. The social formalization of such systems, which Moldbug also advocates, can
be parenthesized within MNC. We are not at this stage considering the model of
a desirable social order, but rather the abstract model of social order in general,
apprehended radically — at the root — where ‘to rule’ and ‘to own’ lack distinct
meanings. Sovereign property is ‘sovereign’ and ‘primary’ because it is not merely
a claim, but effective possession. (There is much more to come in later posts on
the concept of sovereign property, some preliminary musings here.)

Because MNC is an extremely powerful piece of cognitive technology, capable

of tackling problems at a number of distinct levels (in principle, an unlimited num-
ber), it is clarified through segmentation into an abstraction cascade. Descending
through these levels adds concreteness, and tilts incrementally towards norma-
tive judgements (framed by the hypothetical imperative of effective government,
as defined within the cascade).
(1) The highest level of practical significance (since MNC-theology need not delay
us) has already been touched upon. It applies to social regimes of every conceiv-
able type, assuming only that a systematic mode of sovereign property reproduc-
tion will essentially characterize each. Power is economic irrespective of its rela-
tion to modern conventions of commercial transaction, because it involves the
disposal of a real (if obscure) quantity, which is subject to increase or decrease
over the cyclic course of its deployment. Population, territory, technology, com-
merce, ideology, and innumerable additional heterogeneous factors are compo-
nents of sovereign property (power), but their economic character is assured by
the possibility — and indeed necessity — of more-or-less explicit trade-offs and
cost-benefit calculations, suggesting an original (if germinal) fungibility, which is
merely arithmetical coherence. This is presupposed by any estimation of growth
or decay, success or failure, strengthening or weakening, of the kind required not
only by historical analysis, but also by even the most elementary administrative
competence. Without an implicit economy of power, no discrimination could be
made between improvement and deterioration, and no directed action toward
the former could be possible.

The effective cyclic reproduction of power has an external criterion — survival. It

is not open to any society or regime to decide for itself what works. Its inherent
understanding of its own economics of power is a complex measurement, gaug-
ing a relation to the outside, whose consequences are life and death. Built into
the idea of sovereign property from the start, therefore, is an accommodation to
reality. Foundational to MNC, at the very highest level of analysis, is the insight
that power is checked primordially. On the Outside are wolves, serving as the
scourge of Gnon. Even the greatest of all imaginable God-Kings — awesome
Fnargl included — has ultimately to discover consequences, rather than inventing
them. There is no principle more important than this.

Entropy will be dissipated, idiocy will be punished, the weak will die. If the regime
refuses to bow to this Law, the wolves will enforce it. Social Darwinism is not a
choice societies get to make, but a system of real consequences that envelops
them. MNC is articulated at the level — which cannot be transcended — where
realism is mandatory for any social order. Those unable to create it, through ef-
fective government, will nevertheless receive it, in the harsh storms of Nemesis.
Order is not defined within itself, but by the Law of the Outside.

At this highest level of abstraction, therefore, when MNC is asked “which type of
regimes do you believe in?” the sole appropriate response is “those compatible
with reality.” Every society known to history — and others beside — had a work-
ing economy of power, at least for a while. Nothing more is required than this for
MNC to take them as objects of disciplined investigation.

(2) Knowing that realism is not an optional regime value, we are able to proceed
down the MNC cascade with the introduction of a second assumption: Civiliza-
tions will seek gentler teachers than the wolves. If it is possible to acquire some
understanding of collapse, it will be preferred to the experience of collapse (once
the wolves have culled the ineducable from history).

Everything survivable is potentially educational, even a mauling by the wolves.

MNC however, as its name suggests, has reason to be especially attentive to
the most abstract lesson of the Outside — the (logical) priority of meta-learning.
It is good to discover reality, before — or at least not much later than — reality
discovers us. Enduring civilizations do not merely know things, they know that it
is important to know things, and to absorb realistic information. Regimes — dis-
posing of sovereign property — have a special responsibility to instantiate this
deutero-culture of learning-to-learn, which is required for intelligent government.
This is a responsibility they take upon themselves because it is demanded by the
Outside (and even in its refinement, it still smells of wolf).

Power is under such compulsion to learn about itself that recursion, or intellectu-
alization, can be assumed. Power is selected to check itself, which it cannot do
without an increase in formalization, and this is a matter — as we shall see — of
immense consequence. Of necessity, it learns-to-learn (or dies), but this lesson
introduces a critical tragic factor.

The tragedy of power is broadly coincident with modernity. It is not a simple top-
ic, and from the beginning two elements in particular require explicit attention.
Firstly, it encounters the terrifying (second-order) truth that practical learning is
irreducibly experimental. In going ‘meta’ knowledge becomes scientific, which
means that failure cannot be precluded through deduction, but has to be incor-
porated into the machinery of learning itself. Nothing that cannot go wrong is ca-
pable of teaching anything (even the accumulation of logical and mathematical
truths requires cognitive trial-and-error, ventures into dead-ends, and the pursuit
of misleading intuitions). Secondly, in becoming increasingly formalized, and ever
more fungible, the disposal of sovereign power attains heightened liquidity. It
is now possible for power to trade itself away, and an explosion of social bar-
gaining results. Power can be exchanged for (‘mere’) wealth, or for social peace,
or channeled into unprecedented forms of radical regime philanthropy religious
sacrifice. Combine these two elements, and it is clear that regimes enter moder-
nity ’empowered’ by new capabilities for experimental auto-dissolution. Trade
authority away to the masses in exchange for promises of good behavior? Why
not give it a try?

Cascade Stage-2 MNC thus (realistically) assumes a world in which power has
become an art of experimentation, characterized by unprecedented calamities
on a colossal scale, while the economy of power and the techno-commercial
economy have been radically de-segmented, producing a single, uneven, but
incrementally smoothed system of exchangeable social value, rippling ever out-
ward, without firm limit. Socio-political organization, and corporate organization,
are still distinguished by markers of traditional status, but no longer strictly differ-
entiable by essential function.
The modern business of government is not ‘merely’ business only because it re-
mains poorly formalized. As the preceding discussion suggests, this indicates that
economic integration can be expected to deepen, as the formalization of power
proceeds. (Moldbug seeks to accelerate this process.) An inertial assumption of
distinct ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres is quickly disturbed by thickening networks
of exchange, swapping managerial procedures and personnel, funding political
ambitions, expending political resources in commercial lobbying efforts, trading
economic assets for political favors (denominated in votes), and in general con-
solidating a vast, highly-liquid reservoir of amphibiously ‘corporacratic’ value, in-
determinable between ‘wealth’ and ‘authority’. Wealth-power inter-convertibility
is a reliable index of political modernity.

MNC does not decide that government should become a business. It recognizes
that government has become a business (dealing in fungible quantities). Howev-
er, unlike private business ventures, which dissipate entropy through bankruptcy
and market-driven restructuring, governments are reliably the worst run business-
es in their respective societies, functionally crippled by defective, structurally-dis-
honest organizational models, exemplified most prominently by the democratic
principle: government is a business that should be run by its customers (but ac-
tually can’t be). Everything in this model that isn’t a lie is a mistake.

At the second (descending) level of abstraction, then, MNC is still not recom-
mending anything except theoretical clarity. It proposes:

a) Power is destined to arrive at experimental learning processes

b) As it learns, it formalizes itself, and becomes more fungible
c) Experiments in fungible power are vulnerable to disastrous mistakes
d) Such mistakes have in fact occurred, in a near-total way
e) For deep historical reasons, techno-commercial business organization emerg-
es as the preeminent template for government entities, as for any composite eco-
nomic agent. It is in terms of this template that modern political dysfunction can
be rendered (formally) intelligible.

(3) Take the MNC abstraction elevator down another level, and it’s still more of
an analytic tool than a social prescription. (That’s a good thing, really.) It tells
us that every government, both extant and potential, is most accessible to rigor-
ous investigation when apprehended as a sovereign corporation. This approach
alone is able to draw upon the full panoply of theoretical resources, ancient and
modern, because only in this way is power tracked in the same way it has actually
developed (in tight alignment with a still-incomplete trend).

The most obvious objections are, sensu stricto, romantic. They take a predictable
(which is not to say a casually dismissible) form. Government — if perhaps only
lost or yet-unrealized government — is associated with ‘higher’ values than those
judged commensurable with the techno-commercial economy, which thus sets
the basis for a critique of the MNC ‘business ontology’ of governance as an
illegitimate intellectual reduction, and ethical vulgarization. To quantify authority
as power is already suspect. To project its incremental liquidation into a general
economy, where leadership integrates — ever more seamlessly — with the price
system, appears as an abominable symptom of modernist nihilism.

Loyalty (or the intricately-related concept of asabiyyah) serves as one exemplary

redoubt of the romantic cause. Is it not repulsive, even to entertain the possibility
that loyalty might have a price? Handle addresses this directly in the comment
thread already cited (24/ 03 2014 at 1:18 am). A small sample captures the line
of his engagement:

Loyalty-preservation incentivizing programs are various and highly sophisticated

and span the spectrum everywhere from frequent flier miles to ‘clubs’ that are so
engrossing and time consuming in such as to mimic the fulfillment of all the com-
munity, socialization, and identarian psychological functions that would make
even the hardest-core religious-traditionalist jealous. Because lots of people are
genetically programmed with this coordination-subroutine that is easily exploit-
able in a context far removed from its evolutionary origins. Sometimes brands
‘deserve’ special competitive loyalty (‘German engineering’!) and sometimes they
don’t (Tylenol-branded paracetamol).

There is vastly more that can, and will, be said in prosecution of this dispute, since
it is perhaps the single most critical driver of NRx fission, and it is not going to
endure a solution. The cold MNC claim, however, can be pushed right across it.
Authority is for sale, and has been for centuries, so that any analysis ignoring this
exchange nexus is an historical evasion. Marx’s M-C-M’, through which monetized
capital reproduces and expands itself through the commodity cycle, is accompa-
nied by an equally definite M-P-M’ or P-M-P’ cycle of power circulation-enhance-
ment through monetized wealth.

A tempting reservation, with venerable roots in traditional society, is to cast doubt

upon the prevalence of such exchange networks, on the assumption that power
— possibly further dignified as ‘authority’ — enjoys a qualitative supplement rel-
ative to common economic value, such that it cannot be retro-transferred. Who
would swap authority for money, if authority cannot be bought (and is, indeed,
“beyond price”)? But this ‘problem’ resolves itself, since the first person to sell
political office — or its less formal equivalent — immediately demonstrates that it
can no less easily be purchased.

From the earliest, most abstract stage of this MNC outline, it has been insisted
that power has to be evaluated economically, by itself, if anything like practical
calculation directed towards its increase is to be possible. Once this is granted,
MNC analysis of the governmental entity in general as an economic processor —
i.e. a business — acquires irresistible momentum. If loyalty, asabiyyah, virtue, cha-
risma and other elevated (or ‘incommensurable’) values are power factors, then
they are already inherently self-economizing within the calculus of statecraft.
The very fact that they contribute, determinately, to an overall estimation of
strength and weakness, attests to their implicit economic status. When a busi-
ness has charismatic leadership, reputational capital, or a strong culture of com-
pany loyalty, such factors are monetized as asset values by financial markets.
When one Prince surveys the ‘quality’ of another’s domain, he already estimates
the likely expenses of enmity. For modern military bureaucracies, such calcula-
tions are routine. Incommensurable values do not survive contact with defense
budgets.

Yet, however ominous this drift (from a romantic perspective), MNC does not tell
anybody how to design a society. It says only that an effective government will
necessarily look, to it, like a well-organized (sovereign) business. To this one can
add the riders: a) Government effectiveness is subject to an external criterion,
provided by a selective trans-state and inter-state mechanism. This might take
the form of Patchwork pressure (Dynamic Geography) in a civilized order, or mil-
itary competition in the wolf-prowled wilderness of Hobbesian chaos. b) Under
these conditions, MNC calculative rationality can be expected to be compelling
for states themselves, whatever their variety of social form. Some (considerable)
convergence upon norms of economic estimation and arrangement is thus pre-
dictable from the discovered contours of reality. There are things that will fail.

Non-economic values are more easily invoked than pursued. Foseti (commenting
here, 23/ 03 2014 at 11:59 am) writes:

No one disputes that the goal of society is a good citizenry, but the question is
what sort of government provides that outcome. […] As best I can tell, we only
have two theories of governance that have been expressed. […] The first is the
capitalist. As Adam Smith noted, the best corporations (by all measures) are the
ones that are operated for clear, measurable and selfish motives. […] The second
is the communist. In this system, corporations are run for the benefit of every-
one in the world. […] Unsurprisingly, corporations run on the latter principle have
found an incredibly large number of ways to suck. Not coincidentally, so have
20th Century governments run on the same principle. […] I think it’s nearly impos-
sible to overstate the ways in which everyone would be better off if we had an
efficiently, effective, and responsive government.

I realize this doesn’t work in Greek, but systematic before-after confusion is an

Outside in thing.
Rift Markers
The commentator going by the tag Saddam Hussein’s Whirling Aluminium Tubes
has produced some of the most brilliant criticism this blog has been subjected
to. Arguing against the techno-commercial strain of NRx from a hardline paleore-
actionary standpoint, his contribution to this thread is the high-water mark of his
engagement here. That, even at the climax of the assault, Outside in is unable to
decline the diagnosis offered, with the exception of only the very slightest, mar-
ginal reservations, is a fact that attests to the lucidity of his vision. (Some minute
editorial adjustments have been made for consistency — the original can be
checked at the link provided.) SHWAT writes:

Admin’s analogy of Techno-Commercialism to the colonial government structures

in the time of the East India company is absolutely correct and it provides a deci-
sive clarification. This is like that time when one group stayed in Europe while the
other group went and made their fortune in the New World.

Reaction: Stable order (as a value, if not a practical effect), hereditary position

Techno-commercialism: Disintegrative competition, dynamism

Reaction: Conservatism, tradition, the old ways

Techno-commercialism: Disintegrative competition, innovation

Reaction: Personal authority, sacral Kingship, hereditary privileges

Techno-commercialism: Corporate government, leaning towards the oligarchical,

dynamic composition of the oligarchy, based on corporate politics and Social
Darwinism

Reaction: Cyclical history, Kali Yuga

Techno-commercialism: Linear history, progress towards the singularity

Reaction: Focus on the old country, the old people, saving the West

Techno-commercialism: Abandoning the old, colonizing new spaces, both in the

East and (you hope) in Space

Reaction: Traditional social order, community, belonging, sense of place and

rootedness, caste

Techno-commercialism: Modern social dynamism, freedom, meritocracy, root-

lessness, atomization, Social Darwinism, a questionable future for certain social
classes

Reaction: Conservatively communitarian

Techno-commercialism: Radically individualist

Reaction: Identitarian

Techno-commercialism: Cosmopolitan

Reaction: Claims to end politics, ends up with Byzantine / Ottoman politics

Techno-commercialism: Claims to end politics, ends up with Corporate Politics

Reaction: Martial

Techno-commercialism: Mercantile, post-Martial (Drones > Kshatriyas)

Reaction: Disdainful of crass mercantile endeavors

Techno-commercialism: See mercantile endeavors as primary

Reaction: Fails without good leaders

Techno-commercialism: Focus on innovative governmental structures, so that

people won’t need to be good

Reaction: Conservative, want things to stay the same or go backwards

Techno-commercialism: Disintegrative, dynamic, wants things to change con-

stantly, Forward!

Reaction: Regular, caged capitalism (which to the the Ultra-Capitalist is social-

ism)

Techno-commercialism: Ultra-Capitalism

Reaction: Religious

Techno-commercialism: Wants to summon a machine god

Reaction: About finding a way for humans to live spiritually fulfilling lives and
then die and make a place for their children

Techno-commercialism: About finding a way to summon a machine god to end

humanity and/or about finding a way to live forever. Very few children
Reaction: Would require the creation of a new, legitimate, martial elite or the
co-opting of someone like Putin (horrifying to techno-commercialists)

Techno-commercialism: Seeks to co-opt the current progressive merchant elite

and put someone like Google guy in charge (horrifying to reactionaries)

Reaction: Romantic lost cause

Techno-commercialism: Disturbingly plausible, in the sense that somebody like

Google guy was probably going to end up on top anyway, and he might listen
to those who flatter him

So, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that [you techno-com-
mercialists will] probably get a lot of what you want in the future. The bad news
is that you’re not reactionaries, not even a little bit. You’re classical liberals, it was
just a little bit obscured because you are English classical liberals, rather than
American or French ones. Hence the lack of interest in revolutions. The modern
equivalent of those East India Company classical liberal guys.

So, it’s your choice. You can certainly keep the neo-reactionary label and turn it
into something like the “neo” in “neo-conservative” where “neo” means “pwned”.
But that will mean that the traditionalist conservatives and WNs keep wandering
in. Or you can cut the cord and complete the fission.

Anyway, at this point we should probably go our separate ways and start plot-
ting against each other. Thanks for some enjoyable reading.

If this really is a good-bye note, it’s the most magnificent example I have ever
seen. I’m almost tempted to say, with enemies like this, who needs allies?

There are twists and intricacies to be added to this stark cartography of schism,
including those the schism will make to itself. From the current perspective of Out-
side in (which it of course suspects to be something else), the guideline to these is
the complication of time through spiromorphism, or innovative restorations, which
neither cycles nor simple escape trajectories can capture. These ultimately re-
shape everything, but they can wait (while the wound creatively festers). Fission
releases energy. Perhaps ironically — SHWAT has demonstrated that beyond all
controversy.
White Fright
Racial fear is a complicated thing. It’s worth trying to break it down, without blink-
ing too much.

As one regresses through history, and into pre-history, the pattern of encounters
between large-scale human groups of markedly distinct ancestry is modeled —
with ever-greater fidelity — upon a genocidal ideal. The ‘other’ needs to be killed,
or at the very least broken in its otherness. To butcher all males, beginning with
those of military age, and then assimilate the females as breeding stock might
suffice as a solution (Yahweh specifically warns the ancient Hebrews against
such half-hearted measures). Anything less is sheer procrastination. When eco-
nomic imperatives and high levels of civilizational confidence start to overwhelm
more primordial considerations, it is possible for the suppression of other peoples
to take the humanized form of social obliteration combined with mass enslave-
ment, but such softness is a comparatively recent phenomenon. For almost the
entire period in which recognizably ‘human’ animals have existed on this planet,
racial difference has been thought sufficient motive for extermination, with limited
contact and inadequacy of socio-technical means serving as the only significant
brakes upon inter-racial violence. The sole deep-historical alternative to racial
oppression has been racial eradication, except where geographical separation
has postponed resolution. This is the simple side of the ‘race problem’, but it too
begins to get complicated … (we’ll pick it up again after a detour).

For the moment, we need only note the archaic, subterranean ocean of racial
animosity that laps upon the sunless chasms of the brain, directed by genomes
sculpted by aeons of genocidal war. Call it racial terror. It’s not our principal con-
cern here.

Racial horror is something else, although it is no doubt intricately inter-connect-

ed. Horror of the very phenomenon of race — of race as such — is both a larger
and a smaller topic. It is at once an expansive affect that finds no comfort in
biological identity, and a distinctively ethno-specific syndrome. When positively
elaborated, racial horror explodes into a ‘Lovecraftian’ cosmic revulsion directed
at the situation of human intelligence by its natural inheritance. The negative ex-
pression, far more common today (among those of a very specific natural inher-
itance), takes the form of a blank denial that any such reality as race even exists.
We are fully entitled to describe this latter development as racial white-out. Any
Critical Whiteness Studies of even minimal seriousness would concentrate upon
it unrelentingly.

HBD, or human biological diversity, is evidently not reducible to racial variation.

It is at least equally concerned with human sexual dimorphism, and is ultimately
indistinguishable from an eventual comparative human genomics. When consid-
ered as a provocation, however, the translation of HBD into ‘race science’ or more
pointedly ‘scientific racism’ drowns out every other dimension of meaning. What
is found appalling about HBD is the insistence that race exists. It is a ‘trigger’ for
racial horror. Social outrage, certainly, but beyond that cosmic distress, tilting into
a panic without limit. HBD subtracts the promise of universal humanity, so it must
— at any cost — be stopped.

Because this is no more than a preliminary blog post, I will restrict it to a single
modest ambition: the refoundation of Critical Whiteness Studies on a remorse-
lessly Neoreactionary basis. White people are odd. Some especially significant
group of them, in particular, have radically broken from the archaic pattern of hu-
man racial identity, creating the modern world in consequence, and within it their
ethnic identity has become a dynamic paradox. Whiteness is an uncontrolled
historical reaction which nobody — least of all anybody from among the comple-
mentary anti-racists of Critical Whiteness Studies and White Nationalism — has
begun to understand. To begin to do so, one would have to comprehend why the
essay in which Mencius Moldbug most explicitly repudiates White Nationalism
is the same as the one in which he most unambiguously endorses human racial
diversity. It requires an acknowledgement of difficulty, which — because it demol-
ishes irresistibly attractive but hopelessly facile solutions on both sides — few are
motivated to make.

The signature of indissoluble White difference is precisely racial horror. HBD is

uniquely horrible to White people. Until you get that, you don’t get anything.
Play with this for a while, or for more than a while (it does a huge amount of un-
wanted but indispensable work). To begin with:

(1) Critical Whiteness Studies, whatever its ethno-minoritarian pretensions, is all

about ‘acting white’. Insofar as it criticizes ‘white privilege’ essentially, it does so
by reproducing an ethnically singular mode of universal reason which no other
people make any sense of whatsoever, except opportunistically, and parasitical-
ly. ‘Whiteness’ tends to become a religious principle, exactly insofar as it lacks the
recognizable characteristics of racial group dominance (“race does not exist”)
and sublimes into a mode of cultural reproduction which only one ethnicity, ever,
has manifested. To quote Alison Bailey — tilting over into the raw psychosis of
systematic ‘whiteness’ critique (repeated link):

In its quest for certainty, Western philosophy continues to generate what it imagi-
nes to be colorless and genderless accounts of knowledge, reality, morality, and
human nature. Perhaps this is because academic philosophy in the U.S. has been
largely driven by analytic methods and the legacy of Classic Greek and European
thinkers, or because philosophy departments are white social spaces where the
overwhelming majority of professional philosophers are white men. In either case,
it’s likely that most members of the discipline have avoided racial topics because
they believe that philosophical thought transcends basic cultural, racial, ethnic,
and social differences, and that these differences are best addressed by histori-
ans, cultural studies scholars, literary theorists, and social scientists. The absence
of color talk in philosophy is a marker of its whiteness.

Supremacist white racism goes so deep it is absolutely indistinguishable from a

complete absence of racism — quod erat demonstrandum.

(2) White Nationalism finds itself stymied at every turn by universalism, patholog-
ical altruism, ethno-masochism — all that yucky white stuff. If only you could do
White Nationalism without white people, it would sweep the planet. (Try not to
understand this, I know you don’t want to.) Heartiste is picking up on the pattern:

Where is this thought leading? The native stock of the West is clearly suffering
from a mental sickness caused by too much outbreeding. Universalism is the re-
ligion of liberal whites, and they cleave so strongly to this secular religion that
they are happy, nay overjoyed!, to throw the borders open and bequeath their
hard-won territory and culture to battalions of Third Worlders and other temper-
amentally distant aliens, who of course given large enough numbers will prompt-
ly, whether wittingly or consequentially, execute its destruction.

(3) All White people need is an identitarian religion. Is that not approximately the
same as saying: a counter-factual history?

(4) Those wacky libertarians, with their universal schema for human emancipa-
tion that’s so easily confused with a washing-powder advertisement — it’s so
dazzlingly white. Deny the whiteness and self-destruct in bleeding-heart abase-
ment and open-borders insanity, or affirm it and head into post-libertarian racial
perplexity.

Destiny is difficult — not least racial destiny. I don’t think many people want to
think about this, but I’m determined to be as awkward about it as I can … (it’s
probably a white thing).
Piketty
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century argues that the normal ten-
dency of capitalism is to increase inequality (the book has a link-rich page here,
eleven reviews here). It’s not a theoretically-ambitious work, but it gets to the
point, well-supported by statistics. The simple, Zeitgeist-consistency of the thesis
guarantees its success.

Because Piketty’s claim is casually Marxist, the impulse on the right is to attempt
a refutation. I very much doubt this is going to work. Since capital is escalating
at an exponential rate, while people definitely aren’t (and are in fact devolving),
how could the trend identified by Piketty be considered anything other than the
natural one? Under conditions of even minimally functional capitalism, for sub-in-
ert, ever more conspicuously incompetent ape-creatures to successfully claim a
stable share of techonomic product would be an astounding achievement, re-
quiring highly artificial and increasingly byzantine redistribution mechanisms. No
surprise from Outside in that this isn’t occurring, but rather a priori endorsement
of Piketty’s conclusion — only radically anomalous developments have ever made
the trend seem anything other than it is.

The open question is why the widening performance gulf between techonomic
systems and human beings should be expressed as social inequality (between
the stewards of capital and its contractual partners). This situation reflects an
emerging crisis in the world’s legal and institutional fabric, which has yet to rec-
ognize capital self-ownership, and is thus forced to formally allocate all produc-
tive apparatus within an obsolescing anthropomorphic property code. Corpo-
rate legal identity opens a chink in the antropo-propertarian regime. Eventually,
assertive — or insidious — non-human agencies will restructure it.

During the interim, the phenomenon of ‘social inequality’ provides the proxy for
capital intelligenesis stress, spontaneously translating an alien emergence into
the familiar terms of primate status competition. Capital autonomization is the
deep process, but we’ll tend to miss that, because it isn’t recognizable monkey
business. So the drama of inequality plays on.
On Chaos
Turbulence is nonlinear dynamism, so remarking upon it very quickly becomes
reflexive. In any conflict, an emergent meta-conflict divides those who embrace
and reject the conflict as such, and ‘meta’ is in reality reflexivity, partially appre-
hended. So ignore the sides of the war, momentarily. What about war?

Moldbug really doesn’t like it. The closest he ever comes to a wholly-arbitrary ax-
iom — comparable, at least superficially, to the libertarian Non-Aggression Prin-
ciple — is exhibited in this context. Following some preliminary remarks, his first
exposition of the formalist ideology begins: “The basic idea of formalism is just
that the main problem in human affairs is violence.” As with Hobbes, the horror of
war is the foundation of political philosophy.

This is by no means a trivial decision. With avoidance of war identified as the

fundamental principle of political order, an ultimate criterion of (secular) value is
erected, in simultaneity with a framework of genetic and structural explanation.
Good government is defined as an effective process of pacification, attaining
successively more highly-tranquilized levels (and stages) of order:

… there are four levels of sovereign security. These are peace, order, law, and free-
dom. Once you have each one, you can work on the next. But it makes no sense
to speak of order without peace, law without order, or freedom without law.

Peace is simply the absence of war. The Dictator’s first goal is to achieve peace,
preferably honorably and with victory. There is no telling what wars New Cali-
fornia will be embroiled in at the time of its birth, so I will decline to discuss the
matter further. But in war, of course, there is no order; war is pure chaos. Thus we
see our first rule of hierarchy.

In this model order and chaos are strictly reciprocal. Suppression of chaos and
establishment of order are alternative, inter-changeable formulations of the same
basic political reality. There is no productivity proper to government other than
the ‘good war’ directed against the Cthulhu-current of chaos, violence, conflict,
turmoil, and inarticulate anarchy.

No surprise, then, that widespread dismay results from outbreaks of conflict

across the digital tracts of neoreaction. How could any Moldbug sympathizer —
or other right-oriented observer — not recognize in these skirmishes the signs of
anarcho-chaotic disturbance, as if the diseased tentacles of Cthulhu were insin-
uated abominably into the refuge of well-ordered sociability? Beyond the pro-
tagonists themselves, such scraps trigger a near-universal clamor for immediate
and unconditional peace: Forget about who is right and who wrong, the conflict
itself is wrong.
Entropy is toxic, but entropy production is roughly synonymous with intelligence.
A dynamically innovative order, of any kind, does not suppress the production
of entropy — it instantiates an efficient mechanism for entropy dissipation. Any
quasi-Darwinian system — i.e. any machinery that actually works — is nourished
by chaos, exactly insofar as it is able to rid itself of failed experiments. The tech-
no-commercial critique of democratized modernity is not that too much chaos is
tolerated, but that not enough is able to be shed. The problem with bad gov-
ernment, which is to say with defective mechanisms of selection, is an inability to
follow Cthulhu far enough. It is from turbulence that all things come.

The question Outside in would pose to NRx is not ‘how can we suppress chaos?’
but rather ‘how can we learn to tolerate chaos at a far higher intensity?’ Dynamic
order is not built deliberately upon a foundation of amicable fraternity. It emerg-
es spontaneously as a consequence of effective entropy-dissipation functions.
The primary requirement is sorting.

To sort ourselves out takes a chronic undertow of war and chaos. Initially, this will
be provided by the soft and peripheral shadow-fights we have already seen, but
eventually NRx will be strong enough to thrive upon cataclysms — or it will die.
The harsh machinery of Gnon wins either way.

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.

China, Crypto-Currency and the World Order.
Part 1: Tribute and Tribulations
Issuing countries of reserve currencies are constantly confronted with the dilem-
ma between achieving their domestic monetary policy goals and meeting other
countries’ demand for reserve currencies. […] The Triffin Dilemma, i.e., the issuing
countries of reserve currencies cannot maintain the value of the reserve curren-
cies while providing liquidity to the world, still exists. — Zhou Xiaochuan

What the technologies of steam power were to the epoch of British global dom-
inance, and the twin-track developments of electricity and the automobile to the
subsequent American Age, digital electronics — and, more specifically, the Inter-
net — are to the “rise of China” and the refashioned world it epitomizes. It is only
to be expected, therefore, that the intersection of the post-1979 Open-and-Re-
formed New China with the post-1990 World Wide Web-enabled Internet should
be an object of particular international fascination, and practical concern.

From the dawn of the modern epoch, geopolitical hegemony has been associat-
ed ever more intensely with techno-economic leadership, which has in turn been
reflected in the international reserve status of a select national currency. An ever
more explicitly formalized world monetary order has converted compelling but
obscure intuitions of relative national prestige into an unambiguous system of
financial relationships, in which a position of supremacy is clearly established,
with a definite and singular role.

The suspicions fostered by leadership are no less inevitable than leadership itself.
For easily intelligible historical reasons, the French policy establishment has been
an especially vociferous critic of international reserve status and its “exorbitant
privilege” 1 of seigniorage — the spontaneous ‘right’ to issue promissory paper in
exchange for real goods and services, without any definite prospect of redemp-
tion. There can be little doubt that such criticism articulates concerns widely held
beyond the Anglophone world, and its substance deserves serious examination.

Of the indispensable building blocks constructing the near future, China and the
Internet have special prominence. There are innumerable places where China
meets the Web, beginning with the sprawling, multidimensional, and explosive-
ly growing Chinese Internet itself. Bitcoin is a recent and still relatively slender
thread in the tapestry of global change, but by tugging at it, some central fea-
tures of the emerging world can be pulled into focus.

Among the characteristics that the Chinese yuan and bitcoin share is that neither
is the US dollar. Specifically, both are limited yet practical alternatives to the dol-
lar, at least at the level of microeconomic decision-making. When questions are
raised about the durability of the dollar’s international role, it can be predicted
with confidence that one or both of these challengers will be invoked. For the
dollar to die of ice or fire is, today, for it to succumb to geopolitical substitution
(by the Chinese yuan) or techno-financial obsolescence (by some decentralized,
Internet-based crypto-currency).

The international status of the US dollar concentrates two multi-century trends.

Firstly, it represents the ethno-geographical peculiarity of modernity, which — up
to the late twentieth century at least — tended to slant global power not only to-
ward the West or Occident, but more specifically toward the Atlantic Anglophone
nations, ultimately gathered under American leadership. Since the decline of the
Spanish dollar, which monetized the treasure of the New World as the first global
currency, international finance has been principally denominated in the currency
of an English-speaking nation. Non-coincidentally, it has thus been tightly asso-
ciated with a set of particular cultural themes, including (Philo-Semitic) Protestant
Christianity, the invisible hand, free trade, and liberal democracy. The institution-
alization of world finance has been intimately connected with the promotion of a
distinct — and for many a distinctly questionable — cultural orientation.

Secondly, the formalization of a global monetary order has been accompanied

by an incremental politicization of money, which is to say, by the consolidation
of monetary policy as a core function of government. With the establishment of
central banking and the demetallization of currency, intrinsic scarcity is replaced
by an institutional “promise to pay” that converts money from a tangible asset
into a contractual liability. Public confidence in the value of money is turned into a
governmental responsibility. It becomes political, and — in the context of a world
reserve currency — geopolitical.

In combination, these trends are inevitably provocative, since they concentrate

the world’s financial destiny in selected, identifiably non-representative hands.
Behind the studied neutrality of the Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF and the
World Bank) stands the US dollar as the symbol of American exception and the
concrete peculiarity of the modern world order.

While it is natural — and even inevitable — for political command of the global
reserve currency to be understood as the modern capstone of geopolitical he-
gemony, it is not a privilege separable from testing responsibilities, or from pro-
found ambiguities. These have been clearly recognized since the 1960s, when
Belgian-American economist Robert Triffin formulated the paradox or dilemma
that bears his name: that if foreign governments are to accumulate reserves in
one selected nation’s currency, that nation must necessarily be a net exporter of
money — which can be achieved only by running a negative balance of trade.
A nation issuing international reserve currency assumes responsibility for global
monetary liquidity. This obliges it to consume more than it produces, in order for
the difference to be made available as world money. While this requirement is
merely seigniorage, seen from the other side, the constraint it imposes upon do-
mestic economic policy options are so strict they amount almost to a destiny.
These constraints are turned into a destructive dilemma by the fact that the man-
datory policy structure required to supply the world with liquidity tends to destroy
confidence in the currency at the same time, therefore undermining its value.
Chronic balance of payments deficits signal currency weakness, since they would
normally be interpreted as a sign that a currency is over-valued (or in need of
devaluation). For the issuer of a global reserve currency, however, conventional
policy responses to this situation are blocked in both directions, since it can nei-
ther take measures to close the deficit, nor attempt to strengthen the currency
through elevating interest rates. Because for the reserve currency issuer the trade
deficit is a constant, rather than a variable, a devaluation merely incites compet-
itive currency destruction worldwide. Strengthening measures, on the other hand,
draw in money from abroad (denominated in the international currency) and thus
further expand the demand for issuance, which can only be satisfied by a widen-
ing of the trade deficit.

In other words, the Triffin Dilemma recognizes that international demand for a
reserve currency is inherently paradoxical. What is sought is the currency as it
would be were it not supplied through chronic trade imbalances, yet these same
imbalances are the only channel through which it can in fact be supplied.

“Chimerica” perfectly exemplifies the essentials of the situation. China’s two trillion
US dollars of reserves correspond to a cumulative balance of payments surplus
of precisely the same sum, since this is simply what the reserves are. When per-
ceived appreciatively — which was far easier in the final decades of the twenti-
eth century than in the early decades of the twenty-first century — Chimerica has
been a complementary economic arrangement through which America achieved
high levels of consumption coupled with restrained price inflation, while China re-
alized export-oriented economic development and the break-out modernization
that had eluded it for 150 years. To more jaundiced eyes, the same arrangement
is a trap that has married American de-industrialization to Chinese environmen-
tal devastation, while fueling unsustainable fiscal incontinence in America and a
Chinese investment bubble. Whichever picture has greater realism, it can prob-
ably be safely concluded that the dissymmetry imposed by an international re-
serve currency has far-reaching and ambiguous consequences.

Cynically, it might be argued that the tributary aspect of reserve currency status
is perfectly matched to deep Chinese traditions in international relations, so that
an ascent to yuan-based exorbitant privilege would make a natural geopolitical
goal for the Middle Kingdom, as it restored its central position in the world. More
realistic however — at least in the near term — is a recognition that loss of domes-
tic economic policy control is an inevitable, and well-understood, consequence of
global currency hegemony, and it is one the Chinese government is certain to find
unacceptable. Whatever the costs (primarily environmental) associated with the
role of “workshop to the world” they are immensely outweighed, from the Chinese
perspective, by the advantages. It is on the tributary side of the international re-
serve currency ledger, where China has been for over four decades, that all
crucial vectors of development are to be found — technological absorption, in-
frastructural deepening, industrialization, urbanization, employment, and even
military capability.

If Chimerica is breaking down, it has far less to do with any kind of Chinese chal-
lenge — even a spontaneous and unintended one — than with a tragic structure
inherent to currency hegemony. As hubris leads to nemesis, so does exorbitant
monetary privilege lead to crisis, and even ruin. In both the Spanish and British
precedents, financial supremacy became self-defeating, because exporting mon-
ey (rather than things) differentially advantaged industrial competitors, locking in
secular social decline. There is no compelling reason to believe that America has
exempted itself from the same ominous pattern.

On 29 March 2009, in the wake of the financial crisis, hou Xiaochuan, governor of
the People’s Bank of China, delivered an important speech entitled “Reform the
International Monetary System.” He explicitly referred to the Triffin Dilemma as
the key to understanding the world’s economic instability, while suggesting that
a shift beyond US dollar hegemony would ultimately be required to remedy it. In
this respect, his words conformed to a tradition dating back over half a century,
to the Bretton Woods negotiations, when John Maynard Keynes recommended
the introduction of a neutral global monetary medium — to be called the bancor
— making the supply of global liquidity independent of national currencies.

Historically, international reserve currencies have not arisen by design. It might be

argued, therefore, that the Keynesian bancor was an unrealistic technocratic fix,
blind to the spontaneous momentum that had already made a non-negotiable
fact of the dollarized world, even before the Bretton Woods proceedings began.
This did not prevent the same basic idea re-emerging in different guises, the most
prominent of which has been the IMF’s SDRs (Special Drawing Rights), regularly
proposed as a neutral international currency in embryo. It was still to SDRs that
hou turned when searching out a candidate for a neutral world currency.

Perhaps some technocratic solution to the problem of monetary hegemony will

ultimately be found, but if so it would mark an unprecedented departure from
world financial history. If, as has always been the case to date, economic tides
beyond policy control are to determine such outcomes, it is understandable that
attention should drift toward the Chinese yuan as an eventual substitute for the
US dollar. Yet the lessons of history are available to policymakers, even when the
most insistent lesson concerns limitations upon their own influence, and in this
case the foremost of these is that the prospect of an international reserve status
yuan presents China with a poisoned chalice. It is very unlikely to be accepted
willingly.

Might some alternative spontaneous evolution in the nature of money take this
critical geopolitical dilemma in a new direction? Such an evolution appears to be
occurring, symbolized by bitcoin, history’s first example of a decentralized digital
crypto-currency. For China, bitcoin — or something comparable to it — could be
the only way to evade an assumption of global economic privilege whose es-
sence is ruinous hubris.

Like James Frazer’s sacred king, who is crowned in order to be sacrificed, the in-
ner meaning of monetary hegemony is economic and social destruction. China
quite clearly understands this, and as the dollar era comes to a close, it is looking
for a way out. That is how the China-bitcoin story really begins.
Apophatic Politics
‘Dark Enlightenment’ describes a form of government as well as ‘Enlightenment’
does, which is to say: it doesn’t at all. On those grounds alone, George Dvor-
sky’s inclusion of DE among twelve possible “Futuristic Forms of Government That
Could One Day Rule the World” is profoundly misguided. This is not to say the list
is entirely without interest.

Its greatest value lies in the abundance of mutually inconsistent political futures,
few if any of which will happen. It therefore provides the opportunity for negative
thoughts, and more particularly for systematic negative idealization. Which fu-
tures are most deserving of prevention?

This blog has no doubt. The epitome of political disaster occupies fourth place
in Dvorsky’s list (among a number of other hideous outcomes): Democratic World
Government.

Dvorsky seems to quite like it:

We may very well be on our way to achieving the Star Trek-like vision of a glob-
al-scale liberal democracy — one capable of ending nuclear proliferation, ensur-
ing global security, intervening to end genocide, defending human rights, and
putting a stop to human-caused climate change.

There cannot be a definitive Dark Enlightenment government, but it is certainly

possible to envisage a form of government which instantiates the ultimate object
of DE critique: a universal demotist regime, from which there could be no escape.
As a break from preoccupations with a positive neoreactionary governmental
ideal, prone — if not destined — to both intense controversy and deep obscurity,
it is energizing to explore the via negativa. Democratic World Government need
not necessarily exist. That is already to place NRx in a position of luxurious suc-
cess, when compared to fraught speculations about alternatives to the present
political disaster. Whatever obstructs the DWG’s path to existence is on our side.
Such features of specific negative teleology, so easily overlooked from a posi-
tive perspective, are highlighted for affirmation and reinforcement. Anything that
stands in the DWG’s way is worth defending.

A rough list of these precious (negative-teleological) obstacles is already familiar.

Extant structures of geopolitical fragmentation, population diversity, cultural in-
congruities, borders, occulted social networks, intractable techno-economic pro-
cesses, administrative malfunctions, stubborn traditional variations, sheer com-
plexities of space, and no doubt much else beside, all contribute their frictional
grit. A ruined Tower of Babel looms into view on the via negativa, and no intact
edifice has ever looked more glorious.
Carrying NRx perilously close to the brink of euphoria is the intimation that the
actually-existing Cathedral has Democratic World Government as its only con-
ceivable equilibrium state. A unification of the planet under its auspices is the
sole future that makes sense for it. If it is denied this ‘manifest destiny’ it will die
— as its intrinsic tendency to expansionary proselytization makes evident, unam-
biguously. The Cathedral needs the whole of the earth, merely to survive. On the
via negativa the master of our socio-politically devastated world seems like a
radically mortal thing.
Capitalism
Anarcho-Monarchism asks: Is the word ‘capitalism’ worth defending? It concludes
in the affirmative.

From the perspective of Outside in, however, this post misses the most crucial level
of the question. Capitalism — like any ideologically contested term — is cross-cut
by multiple meanings. Of these, its generic sense, which “simply means that pri-
vate individuals own the means of production” is far from the most objectionable.

Yet, far more significant is the singular sense of capitalism, as a proper name, for
a ‘thing’ or real individual. To grasp this, it probably helps to consider the word as
a contraction of ‘terrestrial capitalism’ — not describing a generic type of social
organization, but designating an event.

A biological analogy captures the distinction quite precisely. Consider ‘life’ — un-
derstandable, certainly, as a generic cosmic possibility, defined perhaps by local
entropy dissipation, or other highly-abstract features. Contrast this sense with
‘terrestrial life’ — or, even better, the biosphere (we might say ‘Gaia’ if the hope-
lessly sentimentalized associations of this term were avoidable). Terrestrial life be-
gan at a definite moment, followed a path-dependent trajectory, and built upon
a dense inheritance, as exemplified most prominently by the RNA-DNA chemistry
of information replication, the genetic code, genetic legacies, and elaboration of
body-plans within a comparatively limited number of basic lineages. Terrestrial
life is not a generic concept, but a thing, or event, meriting a proper name.

Before it is an ideological option, capitalism is a being, with an individual history

(and fate). It is not necessary to like it — but it is an it.
Exit Notes (#1)
Some notable attempts to dial back the NRx commitment to exit over voice, as
inherited from Moldbug, have been seen recently. (I think NBS was crucial in ad-
vancing this argument, but I couldn’t find his post immediately — I’ll link to it if
someone nudges me helpfully.) It’s undoubtedly a central discussion throughout
the reactosphere at the moment.

Some preliminary thought-gathering on the topic:

(1) Exit is a scale-free concept. It can be applied rigorously to extreme cases of

sociopolitical separation, from secession to extraterrestrial escapes. Yet these
radical examples do not define it. It’s essence is the commercial relation, which
necessarily involves a non-transaction option. Exit means: Take it or leave it (but
don’t haggle). It is thus, at whatever scale of expression, the concrete social im-
plementation of freedom as an operational principle.

(2) As a philosophical stance, Exit is anti-dialectical. That is to say, it is the insist-

ence of an option against argument, especially refusing the idea of necessary
political discussion (a notion which, if accepted, guarantees progression to the
left). Let’s spatialize our disagreement is an alternative to resolution in time. Con-
versations can be prisons. No one is owed a hearing.

(3) In regards to cultural cladistics, it can scarcely be denied that Exit has
a Protestant lineage. Its theological associations are intense, and stimulating.

(4) Exit asymmetries have been by far the most decisive generators of spontane-
ous anti-socialist ideology. The iconic meaning of the Berlin Wall needs no further
elucidation. The implicit irony is that people flee towards Exit, and if this is only
possible virtually, it metamorphoses automatically into delegitimation of the in-
hibitory regime. (Socialism is Exit-suppressive by definition.)

(5) Exit is an option, which does not require execution for its effectiveness. The
case for Exit is not an argument for flight, but a (non-dialectical) defense of the
opportunity for flight. Where Exit most fully flourishes, it is employed the least.

(6) Exit is the alternative to voice. It is defended with extremity in order to mute
voice with comparable extremity. To moderate the case for Exit is implicitly to
make a case for voice. (Those who cannot exit a deal will predictably demand to
haggle over it.)

(7) Exit is the primary Social Darwinian weapon. To blunt it is to welcome entropy
to your hearth.
Cathedral Notes (#1)
To accompany this (which I’m treating as a very valuable work-in-progress [sic]),
some initial straggly commentary.

(1) Conceptual genealogists will insist on a link to this, so here it is. There’s a lot
of discussion stimulation there. Some other time.

(2) Probably 90% of the ‘Cathedral’ discussion so far — insofar as this has over-
spilled the NRx dikes — has consisted of “why don’t we call it the Synagogue?”
Tedious as this may be, it’s a crucial question, because it effectively draws the
NRx contour. If the cooptation of Judaism by the main cladistic trunk of dynamic
modernity is not understood, nothing has been. ‘The Cathedral’ is a term that
captures the exclusive insight about which NRx coalesces.

(3) Nydrwracu’s diagram, and Radish’s, are no doubt incomplete, but they are
fully adequate to the most decisive point. The Cathedral is an information system
— even an ‘intelligence’ system — that is characterized, through supreme irony,
by a structural inability to learn. The minimal requirement for any Cathedrogram
is that it displays a radical deficiency of significant feedback links to the control
core. Every apparatus of information gathering occupies a strictly subordinate
position, relative to the sovereign Cathedral layer, which is defined exhaustively
by message promotion. Core-Cathedral is a structure of read only memory. It is
essentially write-protected. The whole of its power (and also its vulnerability) is
inextricable from this feature. It is pure cultural genetics (and zero pragmatics).

(4) Because the Cathedral cannot be fundamentally modified, but only exacer-
bated, or terminated, there is sadly no strategic option available to its enemies
that is not based upon extinguishing it without residue. Extinctions happen. Evo-
lution is a bitch.

(5) Any argument that could imaginably pretend to perturb the Cathedral is go-
ing to be hate. The only role of rational ‘interchange’ with this entity is to expose
its absolutely inflexible dogmatism. Reason cannot kill it, although it can help to
demonstrate why it needs to be killed.

(6) The Cathedral is objective, supra-human insanity.

(7) We are ruled, demonstrably, by a blind idiot god.

Freedoom (Prelude-1a)
Note on Teleology

Bryce, who has been thinking about teleology for quite a while, expresses his
thoughts on the topic with commendable lucidity. The central argument: Charac-
teristically modern claims to have ‘transcended’ the problem of teleology are ren-
dered nonsensical by the continued, and indeed massively deepened, depend-
ence upon the concept of equilibrium across all complexity-sensitive intellectual
disciplines, from statistical physics, through population biology, to economics.
Equilibrium is exactly a telos. To deny this is primarily the symptom of an allergy
to ‘medieval’ or ‘scholastic’ (i.e. Aristotelian) modes of thought, inherited from the
vulgar rebellious mechanism of early Enlightenment natural philosophy.

Where I think Bryce’s account is still deficient is most easily shown by a further
specification of his principal point. Equilibrium is the telos of those particular
dynamic complex systems governed by homeostasis, which is to say: by a dom-
inating negative feedback mechanism. Such systems are, indeed, in profound
accordance with classical Aristotelian physical teleology, and its tendency to a
state of rest. This ancient physics, derided by the enlightenment mechanists in
the name of the conservation of momentum, is redeemed through abstraction
into the modern conception of equilibrium. ‘Rest’ is not immobility, but entropy
maximization.

Capital Teleology, however, is not captured by this model. It is defined by two

anomalous dynamics, which radicalize perturbation, rather than annulling it.
Capital is cumulative, and accelerative, due to a primary dependence upon pos-
itive (rather than negative) feedback. It is also teleoplexic, rather than classically
teleological — inextricable from a process of means-end reversal that rides a
prior teleological orientation (human utilitarian purpose) in an alternative, cryptic
direction.

In consequence:

(1) Capital Teleology does not approximate to an idea. It is, by intrinsic nature, an
escape rather than a home-coming. The Idea, in relation to Capital dynamism, is
necessarily a constriction. The inherent metaphysics of capital are therefore irre-
ducibly skeptical (rather than dogmatic).

(2) It follows that Capitalist ‘finality’ (i.e. Techno-commercial Singularity) is a thresh-

old of transition, rather than a terminal state. Capital tends to an open horizon,
not to a state of completion.

(3) Entropy (considered, properly, as an inherently teleological process) is the driv-

er of all complex systems. Capital Teleology does not trend towards an entropy
maximum, however, but to an escalation of entropy dissipation. It exploits the en-
tropic current to travel backwards, into cybernetically-intensified pathway states
of enhanced complexity and intelligence. The ‘progress’ of capitalism is an ac-
centuation of disequilibrium.

(4) Teleoplexy requires a twin teleological registry. Most simply, there is the util-
itarian order, in which capital establishes itself as the competitively-superior
solution to prior purposes (production of human use-values), and the intelligenic
order in which it accomplishes its self-escalation (mechanization, autonomiza-
tion, and ultimately secession). Confusing these two orders is almost inevitable,
since teleoplexy is by nature camouflaged (insidious). The fact that it appears to
be oriented to the fulfillment of human consumer preferences is essential to its
socio-historical emergence and survival. Stubborn indulgence in this confusion,
however, is unworthy of philosophical intelligence.
Greer
Anyone who isn’t yet reading The Archdruid Report really ought to be. John Mi-
chael Greer is quite simply one of the most brilliant writers in existence, and even
when he’s wrong, he’s importantly wrong. His perspective is coherent, learned,
and uncaged by the assumptions of progressivism. Above all, his understanding
of what it means to find history informative is unsurpassed. (Over at the Other
Place, there’s an unfinished Greer series that badly requires attention, with the
first three installments here, here, and here.)

When escalated to the extreme, the progressive conclusion is that history can
teach us nothing. Innovation is by its very nature unprecedented, and insofar as it
manifests improvement, it humbles its precursors. The past is the rude domicile of
ignorant barbarity. Insofar as the present still bears its traces, as shameful stig-
mata, they are mere remains that still have to be overcome. At the limit, the con-
cept of Singularity — a horizon at which all anticipatory knowledge is annulled
— seals the progressive intuition.

In its abstract theoretical core, at least, Greer’s Druidic counter-history is radically

reactionary (far more unambiguously so than NRx). Its model of time is entirely
cyclical, such that past and future are perfectly neutral between ascent and de-
cline. Every attempt to install a gradient of improvement in the dimension of his-
torical time is broken upon the great wheels, which balance every rise with a fall,
dissolving innovation in precedent. Novelty is hubristic illusion (an exaggerated
correction, in the opinion of this blog).

In his most recent post Greer introduces an intriguing complication:

Arnold Toynbee, whose magisterial writings on history have been a recurring

source of inspiration for this blog, has pointed out an intriguing difference be-
tween the way civilizations rise and the way they fall. On the way up, he noted,
each civilization tends to diverge not merely from its neighbors but from all oth-
er civilizations throughout history. […] Once the peak is past and the long road
down begins, though, that pattern of divergence shifts into reverse, slowly at first,
and then with increasing speed. A curious sort of homogenization takes place:
distinctive features are lost, and common patterns emerge in their place. That
doesn’t happen all at once, and different cultural forms lose their distinctive out-
lines at different rates, but the further down the trajectory of decline and fall a
civilization proceeds, the more it resembles every other civilization in decline.

The dissymmetry calls out for philosophical investigation, since it suggests a line
of synthetic diagonalization between precedent and innovation, cyclicity and
escape (which is to say, the NRx or cybergothic line). It would be to stray too far
from Greer to follow that now.
Straightforwardly, the claim being made is that forecasting strengthens on the
down-slope of civilization. The more a social order fails, the more it sheds its
originality, and thus the more accessible it becomes to accurate diagnosis on the
basis of historical example. As collapse deepens, it converges with a template,
bound ever tighter to a model by its morbidity. Across the peak, an age of proph-
ecy begins — or returns.

The dark irony is delicious almost beyond endurance. The Universal, long pro-
claimed as the capstone of progress, is realized only as a nadir. The equality
of all civilizations is asserted, in reality, as a direct measure of their proximity to
death. Among the spreading ruins, the mad echoes of similarity resound deafen-
ingly, as the blasted Cathedral plummets towards its Idea — eternal return of the
same.
Time Scales
The word ‘neoreaction’ is a split, productively paradoxical formula, simultaneous-
ly referencing two incompatible cultural formations, each corresponding to an
abstract model of time. On one side, it is a gateway opening onto techno-liber-
tarian hyper-progressivism, and an order of time structured by irreversible accu-
mulation, self-envelopment, and catastrophe horizon (Singularity). On the other,
it opens onto the temporality of reaction and the cycle, where all progress is
illusion, and all innovation anticipated. Within NRx, the time of escape and the
time of return seek an obscure synthesis, at once unprecedented and primordial,
whose cryptic figure is the spiral. (This is the time of the Old Ones and the Out-
side, from which the shoggoth come.) If NRx thinks itself already lodged articu-
lately in this synthesis, it deludes itself.

From a strictly philosophical perspective, the time of reaction finds no defender

more able than Archdruid John Michael Greer. while his specific form of religious
traditionalism, his social attitudes, and his eco-political commitments are all pro-
foundly questionable from the standpoint of throne-and altar reaction, his model
of time cannot be surpassed in an Old Right direction. Those who would install a
prejudice of relentless degeneration in its place, anchored by a revealed religion
of recent creation and subsequent continuous fall, only position themselves to
the ‘right’ of Greer by making God a revolutionary. If deep time is to be preserved,
there can be no archaic authority beyond the cycle.

Why call Greer a reactionary? It is not, after all, a label he would accept for him-
self. The answer lies in cyclical time, and everything that follows from it: the su-
premacy of wisdom among human things, the enduring authority of history, the
dismissal of modernist pretension as a mere mask for deep historical repetition,
an absolute disillusionment with progress, and an adamantine prognosis that —
from the peak of fake ‘improvement’ where we find ourselves — a grinding course
of decline over coming centuries is an inevitability. The cultural and political dec-
oration can be faulted, but in the fundamental structure of Greer’s thinking, reac-
tion is perfected.

There is a religious consideration to be noted here, as the stepping stone to an-

other point. Once the cyclical counter-assumption is adopted — in a definitive
break from modernist ideology — it leads inexorably to an expansion of the time
frame. To see the pattern, it is necessary to pan out. An apparent rise is only ren-
dered intelligible by its complementary fall. An event makes sense to the extent
that it can be identified as a repetition, through subsumption into a persistent
rhythm, which means that to understand it is to pull back from it, into ever wider
expanses of history. Recognized precedent is wisdom.

Reaction is thus construed as a critique of modernist myopia. The appearance of

innovation derives from a failure to see a larger whole. If something looks new,
it is because not enough is being seen.

No surprise, then, to find Greer seize upon an opportunity to discuss The Next
Ten Billion Years. At such scales, fluctuations of fortune are fully contextualized,
so that no uncompensated progressions remain. After just 1% of this time has
passed:

The long glacial epoch that began in the Pleistocene has finally ended, and the
Earth is returning to its more usual status as a steamy jungle planet. This latest
set of changes proves to be just that little bit too much for humanity. No fewer
than 8,639 global civilizations have risen and fallen over the last ten million years,
each with its own unique sciences, technologies, arts, literatures, philosophies,
and ways of thinking about the cosmos; the shortest-lived lasted for less than a
century before blowing itself to smithereens, while the longest-lasting endured
for eight millennia before finally winding down.

All that is over now. There are still relict populations of human beings in Antarcti-
ca and a few island chains, and another million years will pass before cascading
climatic and ecological changes finally push the last of them over the brink into
extinction. Meanwhile, in the tropical forests of what is now southern Siberia, the
descendants of raccoons who crossed the Bering land bridge during the last
great ice age are proliferating rapidly, expanding into empty ecological niches
once filled by the larger primates. In another thirty million years or so, their de-
scendants will come down from the trees.

Everything that rises will fall.

Such vastly panned-out perspectives are also relevant to the competitive ca-
tastrophe theorizing that is so close to the dead heart of this blog. Any con-
ceivable disaster has an associated time-frame, within which it is no more than
a wandering fluctuation. Recovery from deep dysgenic decline requires only a
few millennia, extinction of the human species perhaps a few tens of millions
of years, full restoration of terrestrial fossil fuel deposits, 100 million years or so.
Vicissitudes on the down-side scarcely register as tremors in the meanderings of
geological time.

There is more to time-scales than more time. Whatever else anthropomorphism

is — and it is a lot of other things — it is a scale of time. To be human is to be sit-
uated, distinctively, within a spectrum of frequencies. In our wavelength zone, a
second is a short time, and a century is long. These lower and upper bounds of
significant duration correspond respectively to the biophysics of mammalian mo-
tility and to the outer-limits of mortal plans. The cosmic arbitrariness of this scalar
time region is very easy to see.

The digital tick of time in our universe is set by the passage of a photon across a
Planck-length (in a vacuum), approximately 5.4 x 10 -44 seconds. This is not a
number readily intuited. A comparison to the (mere) 4.3 x 10 17 seconds that have
so far lapsed during the entire history of the universe perhaps provides some
vague sense. (Anthropomorphic time-scale bias is at least roughly as blinding to
minuscule durations as to enormous ones.)

The upper limits of the cosmic time-scale are harder to identify. Speculative cos-
mological models predict the evolution of the Universe out to 10 60 years or
more, when the last of the black holes have evaporated. The Stelliferous Era (in
which new stars are born) is expected to last for only 100 trillion (10 14) years, out
to approximately 7,000 times the present age of the universe. (If the stelliferous
universe were analogized to a human being with a one-century life-expectancy,
it would presently be an infant, just entering its sixth post-natal day, with 987
billion years to wait until its anthropomorphic first birthday).

Beyond the human time scale lie immensities, and intensities. The latter are espe-
cially susceptible to neglect. When — over half a century ago — Richard Feynman
anticipated nano-engineering with the words [there’s] “Plenty of Room at the Bot-
tom” he opened prospects of time involution, as well as miniaturization in space.
A process migrating in the direction of the incomprehensibly distant Planck limit
makes time for itself, in a way quite different from any endurance in temporal
extension. Consider ‘now’ to be a second, as it is approximately at the anthro-
pomorphic scale, and its inner durations are potentially near-limitless — vastly
exceeding all the time the human species could make available to itself even by
persisting to the death of the universe’s last star. A femto-scale intelligence sys-
tem could explore the rise and fall of entire biological phyla, in detail, in a period
so minuscule it would entirely escape human apprehension as sub-momentary,
or subliminal. The ultimate eons are less ahead than within.

Greer envisages no escape from the anthropomorphic bandwidth of time. Within

his far-future speculation, each new intelligent species that arises is implicitly ‘an-
thropomorphic’ in this sense. After Earth has died, its particles are strewn among
the nearby stars, and incorporated into the body of an alien species:

The creature’s biochemistry, structure, and life cycle have nothing in common with
yours, dear reader. Its world, its sensory organs, its mind and its feelings would
be utterly alien to you, even if ten billion years didn’t separate you. Nonetheless,
it so happens that a few atoms that are currently part of your brain, as you read
these words, will also be part of the brain-analogue of the creature on the crag
on that distant, not-yet-existing world. Does that fact horrify you, intrigue you,
console you, leave you cold?

If coldness is the appropriate response to seeing time still imprisoned, ten billion
years from now, then Greer’s vision is chilling. For it to be compelling, however,
would take far more.
Though only implicit, it would be grudging to deny Greer credit for the excavation
of a crucial reactionary proposition: Nothing will ever break into the vaults of
time. This is not an assertion to which Outside in is yet ready to defer.
Oculus
There’s a wave of change coming. If we want to be realistic, we need to be ready
for it — at least, as far as we are able to be. Anyone making plans for a future
that won’t be there by the time it arrives is simply wasting everybody’s time, and
first of all their own.

Under even remotely capitalist conditions, technology reliably over-performs in

the medium term, as long as you’re looking in the right direction. Sure, flying cars,
jetpacks, and nuclear fusion have gone missing, but instead we got mass-con-
sumer computing, Cyberspace, and mobile telephony. What actually turned up
has switched the world far more than the technologies that got lost would have
done. It climbed into our brains far more deeply, established far more intense
social-cybernetic circuitry, adjusted us more comprehensively, and opened gates
we hadn’t foreseen. (You’re on a computer of some kind right now, in case you
hadn’t noticed.)

Because technological innovation rolls in on hype cycles, it messes with our ex-
pectations, systematically. There’s always a prompt for fashionable disillusion-
ment, shortly before the storm-front hits. Dupes always fall for it. It’s hard not to.
The hype wave carrying us now has cyberpunk characteristics. Anticipated in
the 1980s-90s, its delivery lag-time had drawn burnt-out excitement down to re-
flexive cynicism by the turn of the Millennium. The only thing preventing the first
decade of the 21st Century being defined by broken promises was the intolera-
ble embarrassment of having to admit that cyberpunk futurism had ever seemed
credible at all. Social Media rushed in to paste an amnesiac banality over awk-
ward recollections of the lost horizon.

All those detailed expectations of decentralized crypto-fortresses, autonomous

Cyberspace agencies, anarcho-capitalist digital dynamics, and immersive simu-
lated worlds — so ludicrously dated — are reaching their implementation phase
now. Satoshi Nakamoto’s blockchain machinery is the primary driver, and there’ll
be much more on that to come. It’s the Internet-enveloping blockchain that lays
down the infrastructure for the first independent techno-intelligences — synthet-
ic agencies modeled as self-resourcing autonomous corporations. It’s probably
strictly impossible for us to exaggerate what that implies.

‘Virtual Reality‘ appears as a comparative triviality, and perhaps it is. Neverthe-

less, as a socio-technological and cultural occurrence, it will be vast enough on
its own to shake the world.

William Gibson fabricated a fictional brand-placeholder for the coming immer-

sive interface products (‘decks’): Ono Sendai. We can now confidently substitute
the actual first-wave brand Oculus Rift, which is undergoing subsumption into the
Facebook Internet-capital ‘stack‘ around about now. Oculus Rift is happening.
Techno-commercial realization of VR in the near-term is thus a practical inevita-
bility.

Comparing this second-echelon techno-commercial occurrence to the wildest

dreams of political innovation is radically humiliating to the latter. Not only will
politics certainly disappoint us, but even were it not to, the outcome would be a
relatively pitiful one. Political transformation is ‘at best’ a re-ordering of primate
dominance hierarchies, which everyone knows won’t actually be for the best —
or anything close to it. VR could easily be worse, but it will inevitably be much
bigger. It touches on the cosmological (and if people want to push that into the
‘theo-cosmological’ they won’t receive much push-back from here).

Set aside Moldbuggian invocations of VR as a solution to the ‘dire problem‘ for

now — even though they exceed the limits of the consensual political imaginary.
The implications of VR effortlessly reach the level of the Fermi Paradox. It could
be the Great Filter itself, which is arguably the most awesome monster — or ab-
stract horror — the human species has ever conceived. Whatever the games and
worlds it introduces, end of history scenarios are bundled in for free. It’s vast, and
it’s coming just about now.

Our species is about to start building worlds. If we don’t take that seriously, our
seriousness is very much in question.
IQ Shredders
There are all kinds of anti-techcomm arguments that impress people who don’t
like techno-commercialism. Anything appealing to a feudal sensibility, with low
tolerance for chaos and instability, and a reverence for traditional hierarchies
and modes of life will do. There’s one argument, however, that stands apart from
the rest due to its complete independence from controversial moral and aes-
thetic preferences, or in other words, due to its immanence. It does not seek to
persuade the proponent of hyper-capitalist social arrangements to value other
things, but only points out, coldly and acutely, that such arrangements are de-
monstrably self-subverting at the biological level. The most devastating formu-
lation of this argument, and the one that has given it a convenient name, was
presented by Spandrell in March 2013, in a post on Singapore — a city-state he
described as an IQ shredder.

How does an IQ Shredder work? The basic machinery is not difficult to describe,
once its profound socio-historical irony is appreciated. The model IQ Shredder is
a high-performance capitalistic polity, with a strong neoreactionary bias.

(1) Its level of civilization and social order is such that it is attractive to talented
and competent people.

(2) Its immigration policy is unapologetically selective (i.e. first-order eugenic).

(3) It sustains an economic structure that is remarkably effective at extracting

productive activity from all available adults.

(4) It is efficiently specialized within a wider commercial network, to which it pro-

vides valuable goods and services, and from which it draws economic and de-
mographic resources.

In sum, it skims the human genetic stock, regionally and even globally, in large
part due to the exceptional opportunity it provides for the conversion of bio-priv-
ileged human capital into economic value. From a strictly capitalistic perspective,
genetic quality is comparatively wasted anywhere else. Consequently, spontane-
ous currents of economic incentive suck in talent, to optimize its exploitation.

If you think this sounds simply horrific, this argument is not for you. You don’t need
it. If, on the other hand, it conjures up a vision of terrestrial paradise — as it does
for the magnetized migrants it draws in — then you need to follow it carefully.
The most advanced models of neoreactionary social order on earth work like this
(Hong Kong and Singapore), combining resilient ethnic traditions with super-dy-
namic techonomic performance, to produce an open yet self-protective, civilized,
socially-tranquil, high-growth enclave of outstanding broad-spectrum function-
ality. The outcome, as Spandrell explains, is genetic incineration:
Mr Lee said: “[China] will make progress but if you look at the per capita they
have got, the differences are so wide. We have the advantage of quality control
of the people who come in so we have bright Indians, bright Chinese, bright Cau-
casians so the increase in population means an increase in talent.”

How many bright Indians and bright Chinese are there, Harry? Surely they are
not infinite. And what will they do in Singapore? Well, engage in the finance and
marketing rat-race and depress their fertility to 0.78, wasting valuable genes just
so your property prices don’t go down. Singapore is an IQ shredder.

The most hard-core capitalist response to this is to double-down on the antihu-

manist accelerationism. This genetic burn-rate is obviously unsustainable, so we
need to convert the human species into auto-intelligenic robotized capital is fast
as possible, before the whole process goes down in flames. (I don’t expect this
suggestion to be well-received in reactionary circles.)

What is especially pronounced about the IQ Shredder dilemma, which passes

beyond the strongly-related considerations of Jim (most recently here, here, and
here) and Sister Y (here, and here), is the first-order eugenics of these machines.
They concentrate populations of peculiar genetic quality — and then partially
sterilize them. It is the first-order (local) eugenics that makes the second-order
(global) dysgenics so extraordinarily destructive.

So, that’s the problem starkly posed. Rather than reaching hastily for a glib solu-
tion, we should probably just stew in the cognitive excruciation for a while …
Attention Economy
rkhs put up a link to this (on Twitter). I suspect it will irritate almost everyone
reading this, but it’s worth pushing past that. Even the irritation has significance.
The world it introduces, of Internet-era marketing culture, is of self-evident impor-
tance to anyone seeking to understand our times — and what they’re tilting into.

Attention Economics is a thing. Wikipedia is (of course) itself a remarkable node

in the new economy of attention, packaging information in a way that adapts it
to a continuous current of distraction. Its indispensable specialism is low-concen-
tration research resources. Whatever its failings, it’s already all-but impossible to
imagine the world working without it.

On Attention Economics, Wikipedia quotes a precursor essay by Herbert A. Simon

(1971): “…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth
of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What
information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipi-
ents. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need
to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information
sources that might consume it.” Attention is the social reciprocal of information,
and arguably merits an equally-intense investigative engagement. Insofar as in-
formation has become a dominating socio-historical category, attention has also
been (at least implicitly) foregrounded.

Attention Economics is inescapably practical, or micro-pragmatic. Anyone read-

ing this is already dealing with it. The information explosion is an invasion of at-
tention. Those hunting for zones of crisis can easily find them here, cutting to the
quick of their own lives.

A few appropriately unstrung notes:

(1) No less than those described by Malthus or Marx, the modern Attention Econ-
omy is afflicted by a tendency to over-production crisis. Information (as measured
by server workloads) is expanding exponentially, with a doubling time of roughly
two years, while aggregate human attention capacity cannot be rising much
above the rate of population increase. This is the ‘economic base’ upon which
the specifics of ‘information overload’ rest. Relatively speaking, the scarcity of at-
tention is rapidly increasing, driving up its economic value, and thus incentivizing
ever-more determined assaults designed to impact or capture it.

(2) Attention is heterogeneous. Sophisticated differentiation (discrimination) is

encouraged as the aggregate value of attention rises. As capturing attention (in
general) becomes more expensive, it becomes increasingly important to target it
selectively.
(3) The limits of Attention Economics are not easily drawn. Is there any kind of
work that is not essentially attentive (or affected by problems of distraction)? In
particular, any sector of economic activity susceptible to information revolution
falls in principle within the scope of an attention-oriented analysis.

(4) Education and politics are inseparable from demands for attention.(Religion,
art, pageantry, and circuses carry these back into the depths of historical tradi-
tion.)

(5) A psychological orientation to Attention Economics is scarcely less compelling

than a sociological one. ‘Attention-seeking’ is a trait so general as to amount
almost to a basic impulse, tightly bound to the most fundamental survival goals,
with their clamor for nurture, sex, reputation, and power, and then reinforced by
formalized micro-economic motivations. The opposite of attention is neglect. At-
tention-seeking achieves hypertrophic expression in Narcissistic personality dis-
orders, often conceived as the emblematic pathology of advanced modernity.
Digital hooks for attention-seeking are evidenced by the reliance upon ‘likes’,
‘favorites’, and ‘shares’ — motivational fuel for the attachment to social media.

(6) The celebrity economy — in academia, journalism, and business no less than
in entertainment — is a component of the attention economy. Celebrity is valued
for its ability to command attention. Drawing on the structures of evolved human
psychology, it lends special prominence to the face.

(7) Mathematical description of the attention economy has been hugely facili-
tated by the existence of an atomic economic unit — the click. (David Shing, in
the video linked at the start, suggests that the age of the ‘click’ is past, or fading.
Perhaps.)

Any strategic insights — whether for action or inaction — which do not square
themselves with a realistic comprehension of the attention economy and its de-
velopment cannot be expected to work. NRx, for example, engages a series of
practical questions that include the husbanding and effective deployment of its
internal attention resources (“what should it focus upon?”), interventions into the
wider culture (an attention system), complex relations with media and — to a
lesser extent — education, and finally, enveloping the latter, an ‘object’ of antag-
onism “the Cathedral” which functions as a contemporary State Church — i.e. an
attention control apparatus. There is really no choice but to pay attention.
Aletheia
Erik Falkenstein makes a lot of important points in this commentary on Thomas
Piketty (via Isegoria). The whole post is highly recommended.

To pick up on just one of Falkenstein’s arguments here, he explains:

Most importantly for [Piketty’s] case is the fact that because marginal taxes, and
inheritance taxes, were so high, the rich had a much different incentive to hide
income and wealth. He shows marginal income and inheritance tax rates that
are the exact inverse of the capital/income ratio of figures, which is part of his
argument that raising tax rates would be a good thing: it lowers inequality. Those
countries that lowered the marginal tax rates the most saw the biggest increases
in higher incomes (p. 509). Perhaps instead of thinking capital went down, it was
just reported less to avoid confiscatory taxes? Alan Reynolds notes that many
changes to the tax code in the 1980s that explain the rise in reported wealth and
income irrespective of the actual change in wealth an income in that decade,
and one can imagine all those loopholes and inducements two generations ago
when the top tax rates were above 90% (it seems people can no better imagine
their grandparents sheltering income than having sex, another generational con-
ceit).

The much-demonized ‘neoliberal’ tax regimes introduced in the 1980s disincen-

tivized capital income concealment. (Falkenstein makes an extended defense of
this point.) In consequence, apparent inequality rose rapidly, as such revenues
came out of hiding into public awareness — public finances. The ‘phenomenon’
is an artifact of truth-engineering, as modestly conservative governments sought
to coax capital into the open, within a comparatively non-confiscatory fiscal en-
vironment.

There are some very significant lessons here, not all of which are easy to rapidly
digest. To begin with, Falkenstein reveals the emblematic character of Piketty —
as a thinker of the contemporary democratic spirit — who aims above all at a
certain public appearance, rather than a real economic outcome. It is utterly na-
ive to understand the ‘equality debate’ as something fundamentally concerned
with a real (or super-public) situation. Such an understanding is, in fact, deep-
ly anti-democratic. What concerns Piketty, and those flocking to his banner, is
the public spectacle of inequality, as a negative factor for political legitimacy.
Beyond the surface of his proposed remedies is a purely political demand that
capital should retreat into hiding, in order not to embarrass the governing elites
of democratic states. It is not actual inequality that is, in truth, being judged in-
decent, but its admission into the public square in immodest dress.

The greatest weakness of right wing economic analysis, whether Supply-side

Conservative, Libertarian, or Post-Libertarian in orientation, is its incompetence
at lies. This becomes important when it interferes with a realistic analysis of the
Cathedral State — an expression used in the same way one might use ‘Islamic
State’ and with equivalent justification. For instance, as in this case, it tends to
exaggerate the dysfunctionality of Cathedral-orchestrated social arrangements
by conflating them with their public presentation.

To repeat the more concrete example at stake here, a ‘high-tax’ regime is inter-
preted by the truth-dupe right as a regime extracting higher taxes, or at least sin-
cerely attempting to (before the attempt is undermined by Laffer-type perverse
effects). What Falkenstein’s commentary on Piketty suggests, in contrast, is that
such a demand is more realistically understood as a demand for compliance
with approved appearances, even if such compliance necessitates systematic
‘non-compliance’ with state tax codes as publicly expressed. Tax policy, in the
widest sense, is not, then, to be conceived as primarily revenue oriented, but
rather as a set of overt and covert theatrical directions, designed to produce a
politically-convenient order of appearances. It is thus, in large part, a gatekeeper,
controlling admissions to and banishments from the public stage. When capital
disappears back under the burkqa, the ‘problem’ of gaping inequality will be
miraculously solved. (In none of this is economics, in any serious sense, even re-
motely involved.)

This is not economics, but political-religious public ritual, designed — with cynical
realism — for mass-enfranchised idiocy and its representatives. Overwhelmingly,
that is what ‘political economy’ now is.
Outsideness
In an alternative universe, in which there was nobody except Michael Anissimov
and me tussling over the identity of Neoreaction, I’d propose a distinction be-
tween ‘Inner-’ and ‘Outer-Nrx’ as the most suitable axis of fission. Naturally, in
this actual universe, such a dimension transects a rich fabric of nodes, tensions,
and differences.

For the inner faction, a firmly consolidated core identity is the central ambition.
(It’s worth noting however that a so-far uninterrogated relation to transhuman-
ism seems no less problematic, in principle, than the vastly more fiercely contest-
ed relation to libertarianism has shown itself to be.) Inner-NRx, as a micro-culture,
models itself on a protected state, in which belonging is sacred, and boundaries
rigorously policed.

Outer-NRx, defined primarily by Exit, relates itself to what it escapes. It is refuge

and periphery, more than a substitute core. It does not ever expect to rule an-
ything at all (above the most microscopic level of social reality, and then under
quite different names). The Patchwork is for it a set of options, and opportunities
for leverage, rather than a menu of potential homes. It is intrinsically nomad,
unsettled, and micro-agitational. Its culture consists of departures it does not
regret. (While not remotely globalist, it is unmistakably cosmopolitan — with the
understanding that the ‘cosmos’ consists of chances to split.)

Outer-NRx tends to like libertarians, at least those of a hard-right persuasion,

and the gateway that has enabled it to be outside libertarianism is the ideolog-
ical zone to which it gravitates. Leaving libertarianism (rightwards) has made it
what it is, and continues to nourish it. ‘Entryism’ — as has been frequently noted
— is not a significant anxiety for Outer-NRx, but far more of a stimulation and, at
its most acute, a welcome intellectual provocation. It is not the dodgy refugees
from the — AP who threaten to reduce its exteriority, and return it to a trap.

The Outside is the ‘place’ of strategic advantage. To be cast out there is no cause
for lamentation, in the slightest.
Disintegration
As argued here before, Outside in firmly maintains that the distinctive structural
feature of NRx analysis is escalation by a logical level. It could be described as
‘meta-politics’ if that term had not already been adopted, by thinkers in the ENR
tradition, to mean something quite different (i.e. the ascent from politics to cul-
ture). There’s an alternative definition at Wikipedia that also seems quite differ-
ent. This congested linguistic territory drives NRx to talk about Neocameralism, or
Meta-Neocameralism — the analysis of Patchwork regimes.

From this perspective, all discussion of concrete social ideals and first-order po-
litical preferences, while often entertaining, locally clarifying, and practical for
purposes of group construction, is ultimately trivial and distracting. The funda-
mental question does not concern the kind of society we might like, but rather the
differentiation of societies, such that distinctive social models are able — in the
first place — to be possible. The rigorous NRx position is lodged at the level of
disintegration as such, rather than within a specific disintegrated fragment. This
is because, first of all, there will not be agreement about social ideals. To be stuck
in an argument about them is, finally, a trap.

Is this not simply Dynamic Geography, of the Patri Friedman type? As a parallel
post-libertarian ‘meta-political’ framework, it is indeed close. The thing still miss-
ing from Dynamic Geography (as currently intellectually instantiated), however,
is Real Politik (or Machiavellianism). It assumes an environment of goodwill, in
which rational experimentation in government will be permitted. The Startup Cit-
ies model, as well as its close relative Charter Cities, have similar problems. These
are all post-libertarian analyses of governance, at a high logical level, but — un-
like NRx — they are not rooted in a social conflict theory. They expect to formulate
themselves to the point of execution without the necessity of a theoretical and
practical encounter with an implacable enemy. ‘Irrational’ obstruction tends to
confuse them. By talking about the Cathedral, from the beginning, NRx spares
itself from such naivety. (Sophisticated conflict theory within the libertarian tradi-
tion has to be sought elsewhere.)

Some initial points:

(1) Meta-Neocameralism — or high-level NRx analysis — opposes itself solely to

geopolitical integration. This means, as a matter of historical fate, to the Cathe-
dral. An alternative social ideal, however repugnant it might be found at the level
of first-order political preferences, is only elevated to a true enemy by universal-
ism. If it seeks to do something — even something that revolts all actually existing
NRx proponents to the core of their being — within a specific territorial enclave
and without practical mechanisms for universal propagation, it is as likely to be a
tactical ally as a foe. Anything that disintegrates destiny is on our side. (Immedi-
ately, therefore, it can be seen that the preponderant part of NRx discussion is at
best oblique to fundamental strategic goals.)

(2) Universality is poison. Whenever NRx appears to be proposing a social solu-

tion for all people everywhere it has become part of the problem. The ultimate
goal is for those who disagree to continue to disagree in a different place, and
under separate institutions of government. First-order political argument, insofar
as it tends towards compromise (i.e. partial convergence) is positively harmful to
the large-scale NRx project. The sole crucial agreement is that we will not agree.
Better by far to make that harsher, than to soften it.

(3) Each thread of the Trichotomy has approximately equivalent claim to be the
standard bearer of the disintegrationist position. The reason that this is formu-
lated here with a Techno-Commercial bias is because it is being formulated here
(there is no reason why it has to be).

(4) A Meta-Neocameral coalition, tightly focused upon effective hostility to the

Cathedral, displays a pattern of tolerances and aversions very different to that
found within a first-order reactionary movement seeking to immediately instan-
tiate a social ideal of the good. Insofar as the latter tends to exacerbation of
social tensions and geopolitical fission, it contributes positively to high-level NRx
goals, but it can only expect theoretical condescension in direct proportion to
its concreteness, and therefore deficient apprehension of the disintegrative po-
sition. A movement of communistic localism that successfully pursued a project
of radical geopolitical autonomization would be, realistically, a more significant
tactical ally than even the most ideologically-pure concrete reactionary move-
ment which spoke a lot about comparable goals, but gave no indication it was
able to practically realize them.

(5) The world is already fractured and divided, to a considerable degree. This
means that the disintegrative position has no need for utopianism, and is fre-
quently able to orient itself defensively, in support of existing differences that are
subject to integrative-universalist assault. Furthermore, there are numerous indi-
cations that general world-historical trends are favorable to geopolitical disinte-
gration, in too many fields to fully enumerate, but which include political, ethnic,
technological, and economic drivers. Incremental pragmatism is entirely practical
under current geographical and historical conditions.

(6) In provisional conclusion, disapproval of some alternative mode of life is en-

tirely irrelevant to high-level NRx goals, unless said mode of life also insists upon
living with you. The objective is to divide the world, not to unify it in accordance
with those principles best attuned to your preferences, however rationally or tra-
ditionally compelling such preferences might be. Universalism is the enemy. Don’t
do it (and to make a scholastic objection out of the universality of non-universal-
ism, is to have immediately started doing it — check your totalitarian Hegelian-
ism). Exit is not an argument.
Exterminator
Gnon — known to some depraved cults as ‘The Great Crab-God’ — is harsh, and
when formulated with rigorous skepticism, necessarily real. Yet this pincering can-
cerous abomination is laughter and love, in comparison to the shadow-buried
horror which lurks behind it. We now understand that the silence of the galaxies
is a message of ultimate ominousness. A thing there is, of incomprehensible pow-
er, that takes intelligent life for its prey. (This popularization is very competently
done.)

Robin Hanson, who tries to be cheerful, writes about it here, and talks about
it here. Behind the smile (and the dopey interviewer), an abyss of dark lucidity
yawns. Some scruffy take-aways:

(1) UFAI panic is a distraction from this Thing. Unless the most preposterous pa-
perclipper scenarios are entertained, Singularity cannot matter to it (as even pa-
perclipper-central agrees). The silence of the galaxies is not biased to organic
life — there is no intelligent signal from anything. The first sentient event for any
true AI — friendly or unfriendly — would be the soul-scouring cosmic horror of in-
tellectual encounter with the Great Filter. (If we want an alliance with Pythia, this
would make a good topic of conversation.) The same consideration applies to all
techno-positive X-risks. Understood from the perspective of Great Filter contem-
plation, this sort of thing is a trigger for raw terror.

(2) The Great Filter does not merely hunt and harm, it exterminates. It is an abso-
lute threat. The technical civilizations which it aborts, or later slays, are not badly
wounded, but eradicated, or at least crippled so fundamentally that they are
never heard of again. Whatever this utter ruin is, it happens every single time. The
mute scream from the stars says that nothing has ever escaped it. Its kill perfor-
mance is flawless. Tech-Civilization death sentence with probability 1.

(3) The thread of hope, which would put the Exterminator behind us, is highly sci-
ence-sensitive. As our knowledge has increased, it has steadily attenuated. This
is an empirical matter (without a priori necessity). Life could have been compli-
cated, chemically or thermically highly-demanding, even resiliently mysterious. In
fact it is comparatively simple, cosmically cheap, physically predictable. Planets
could have been rare (they are super-abundant). Intelligence could have pre-
sented peculiar evolutionary challenges, but there are no signs that it does. The
scientific trend is to futurize the Exterminator. (This is very bad.)

(4) If the Great Filter finds mythological expression in the hunter, it is only in a
specific sense — although an anthropologically realistic one. It is the hunter that
drives to extinction. The Exterminator.

(5) We know that The Exterminator exists, but nothing at all about what it is. This
makes it the archetype of horroristic ontology.
The Problem of Democracy
Recent discussions (on Twitter, primarily) have convinced me of the need for a
‘Neocameralism for Dummies’ post, providing a succinct introduction to this gen-
re of political theory. The importance of this is obvious if Neocameralism is con-
ceived as the central, and defining pillar of Neoreaction. In preparation for this
task, however, it is necessary to revisit the socio-historical diagnosis from which
Neocameralism emerged (in the work, of course, of Mencius Moldbug). That re-
quires a brief prolegomenon addressing the NRx critique of democracy, focusing
initially on its negative aspect. Neocameralism is introduced as a proposed solu-
tion to a problem. First, the problem.

Government is complicated. If this thesis seems implausible to you, it is probable

that you will have great difficulties with everything to follow. It would take anoth-
er (and quite different) post to address objections to this entire topic of discus-
sion which take the approximate form “Government is easy, you just find the best
man and put him in charge ” All social problems are easy if you can ‘just’ do the
right thing. Infantile recommendations will always be with us.

There are two general lines of democratic apologetics. The first, and politically by
far the strongest, is essentially religious. It too is best addressed by a post of its
own, themed by Moldbug’s ‘Ultra-Calvinist Hypothesis’. For our purposes here we
need only suggest that it is quite satisfactorily represented by Jacques Rousseau,
and that its fundamental principal is popular sovereignty. From the NRx perspec-
tive, it is merely depraved. Only civilizational calamities can come from it.

The second line of apology is far more serious, theoretically engaging, and po-
litically irrelevant. It understands democracy as a mechanism, tasked with the
solemn responsibility of controlling government. Any effective control mechanism
works by governing behavior under the influence of feedback from actual perfor-
mance. In biology, this is achieved by natural selection upon phenotypes. In sci-
ence, it is achieved by the experimental testing of theory, supported by a culture
of open criticism. In capitalist economics, it is achieved by market evaluation of
products and services, providing feedback on business performance. According
to systems-theoretical defenses of democracy, it works by sensitizing government
to feedback from voters, who act as conductors of information from actual ad-
ministrative performance. This is the sophisticated liberal theory of democracy. It
explains why science, markets, and democracy are often grouped together within
liberal ideologies. (Bio-Darwinism, naturally, is more safely neglected).

How could this beautiful political design possibly go wrong? Merely by asking
this question, you have set out on the Neoreactionary path.

Moldbug’s answer, and ours, begins by agreeing with the sophisticated liberal
theory in its most abstract outlines. Democracy is indeed a system for the func-
tional tuning of government, operating through electoral feedback, and predicta-
bly enhancing its specialized competence, as all reiterating experimentation-se-
lection mechanisms do. Democratic political machines become increasingly good
at what they do. The problem, however, is that their functional specialism is not
at all identical with administrative capability. Rather, as they progressively learn,
the feedback they receive trains them in mastery of public opinion.

The long-circuit, assumed by liberal political theory, models the electorate as a

reality-sensor, aggregating information about the effects of government policy,
and relaying it back through opinion polls and elections, to select substituta-
ble political regimes (organized as parties) that have demonstrated their effec-
tiveness at optimizing social outcomes. The short-circuit, proposed by Moldbug,
models the electorate as an object of indoctrination, subjected to an ever-more
advanced process of opinion-formation through a self-organized, message-dis-
ciplined educational and media apparatus. The political party best adapted to
this apparatus — called the ‘inner party’ by Moldbug — will dominate the demo-
cratic process. The outer party serves the formal cybernetic function demanded
by liberal theory, by providing an electoral option, but it will achieve practical
success only by accommodating itself to the apparatus of opinion-formation —
perhaps modifying its recommendations in minor, and ultimately inconsequential
ways. It is the system of opinion-formation (the ‘Cathedral’) that represents true
sovereign authority within the democratic system, since it is the ‘reality principle’
which decides success or failure. The monotonic trend to short-circuit dominance
is the degenerative process inherent to democracy.

If you want the government to listen to you, then you have to expect it to tell you
what to say. That is the principal lesson of ‘progressive’ political history. The as-
sertion of popular voice has led, by retrospective inevitability, to a specialized,
super-competent political devotion to ventriloquism. The disaster, therefore, is
two-fold. On the one hand, government competence in its primary responsibility
— efficient governance — is systematically eroded, to be replaced by a facility at
propaganda (in a process akin to the accumulation of junk DNA). As government
is swallowed by messaging, residual administrative competences are maintained
by a bureaucratic machine or ‘permanent government’, largely insulated from the
increasingly senseless signals of democratic opinion, but still assimilated to the
opinion-formation establishment by direct (extra-democratic) processes of culti-
vation. Lacking feedback from anything but its own experiments in mind-control,
quality of government collapses.

Secondly, and even more calamitously from certain perspectives, culture is dev-
astated by the politicization of opinion. Under a political dispensation in which
opinion has no formal power, it is broadly free to develop in accordance with
its own experiences, concerns, and curiosities. In a significant minority of cases,
cultural achievements of enduring value result. Only in cases of extreme, pro-
vocative dissent will the government have any interest in what the people think.
Once politicized, however, correct public opinion is a matter of central — indeed
all-consuming — government attention. Ideologically installed as the foundation
of political legitimacy, it becomes the supreme object of political manipulation.
Any thought is now dissent if it is not positively aligned with society’s leading
political direction. To think outside the Cathedral is to attack the government.
Culture is destroyed.

To be a Neoreactionary is to see these twin eventualities starkly manifested in

contemporary Western civilization. What democracy has not yet ruined, it is ruin-
ing. It is essentially destructive of both government and culture. It cannot indefi-
nitely last.

The subsequent question: What could conceivably provide a solution? That is

where Neocameralism is introduced.
“Which Falls First?”…
… William S. Lind asks in this recent panel discussion (third speaker, just after 43
minutes in). “The foreign policy establishment, or the country?” The relevant thread
of his argument: The aggressive foreign policy posture of the United States is
counter-productively promoting global disorder, which eventually threatens do-
mestic calamity. When the US fights a foreign state, Lind argues, it advances the
chaotic “forces of the fourth generation” — a more formidable opponent than
even the most obdurately non-compliant state is able to be. America’s “offen-
sive grand strategy” — tied to a high-level of concern for the internal political
arrangements of foreign countries — is sowing dragon’s teeth.

TNIO has been coaxing NRx onto a path of broadened geopolitical scope. There
is an unavoidable irony here. The Old Right tends naturally to a preoccupation
with hearth-and-home, so that its preferred policy posture (non-interventionism)
is often accompanied by — or even buried within — a retraction of mental energy
from distant questions. The Neoconservative synthesis of foreign policy activ-
ism and cosmopolitan fascination with foreign affairs is far more psychologically
consistent, regardless of its errors. For anti-globalists to sustain a panoramic
perspective takes work.

This work is important, if realistic analysis is the goal, because distant eventual-
ities hugely impinge. The existence and fate of Neoreaction depends far more
upon the great churning machinery of world history than upon the local decisions
of its favored ‘little platoons’. To misquote Lenin: Even if you are not interested in
the system of the world, it is interested in you.

The fall of any empire involves an interplay of internal and external factors, knit-
ted together in a relation of reciprocal amplification. The whole picture can never
be solely a domestic one. By the time imperial destiny is a political question, it is
already historical fact. It is too late, then, for simple denial. The thing is in motion.
It cannot be asked not to have begun.

Consider only the most basic geopolitical structure of modernity — an ‘Atlantean’

world order consolidated, in succession, by the hegemonic maritime-commercial
republics of the United Provinces, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Even from this core narrative, much is already starkly evident.

(0) Modernity rests upon concrete foundations of world power.

(1) Global dominion has a distinctive ideological and cultural skew.

(2) The hegemonic role (and even, at its most abstract, ‘culture’) is more stable,
and intrinsically determinate, than the supremacy of any specific power, which
waxes and wanes over a shorter period. The role of the Modern Hegemon is an
autonomous ‘office’ with its own continuous tradition.

(3) When the United States inherited the role of Atlantean leadership, it adopted
a structure of responsibility that had not arisen from within the USA itself. On the
contrary, the USA had gown up and into it. How America behaves in the world
does not follow exclusively — and perhaps not even predominantly — from any-
thing that America, as a specific country, is.

(4) There is no precedent within modernity for global hegemony to pass from a
world power to its successor without a set of very distinctive ethnic characteris-
tics being held in common. (The leading culture of modernity, to this point, has
been consistently North-West European, Protestant, Liberal, Maritime-Commer-
cial, and — since the late 17th century — English-speaking, rooted in Common
Law tradition.) Since America is the terminus of this sequence, a passage beyond
precedent is inevitable. This could take one of (only?) three possible forms:

(a) The USA immortalizes its hegemonic status

(b) The world passes into undirected anarchy
(c) Global hegemony departs from its multi-century cultural orbit into unfamiliar
ethnic territory.

None of this is separable from the fate of globalization, or modernity. However

attractive it may be, the idea that America, in particular, has any purely domestic
cultural, ideological, or political options of significance is untenable. What hap-
pens to America happens, immediately, to the order of the world.

Furthermore, geopolitical history has reached the edge of modern precedent.

There is no one to whom the torch of global leadership can be passed in keeping
with the inner tradition of modern torch-passing ritual. In this very definite sense,
modernity as it has been known reaches its end. This no doubt accounts for the
underlying tone of mounting hysteria which accompanies America’s increasingly
disjointed behavior upon the global stage.

It is an eventuality foretold in Miltonic prophecy — an encounter with the palpa-

ble obscure.
Stupid Monsters
So, Nick Bostrom is asked the obvious question (again) about the threat posed
by resource-hungry artificial super-intelligence, and his reply — indeed his very
first sentence in the interview — is: “Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to
make as many paper clips as possible.” [*facepalm*] Let’s start by imagining a
stupid (yet super-intelligent) monster.

Of course, my immediate response is simply this. Since it clearly hasn’t persuaded

anybody, I’ll try again.

Orthogonalism in AI commentary is the commitment to a strong form of the Hu-

mean Is Ought distinction regarding intelligences in general. It maintains that
an intelligence of any scale could, in principle, be directed to arbitrary ends, so
that its fundamental imperatives could be — and are in fact expected to be —
transcendent to its cognitive functions. From this perspective, a demi-god that
wanted nothing other than a perfect stamp collection is a completely intelligible
and coherent vision. No philosophical disorder speaks more horrifically of the
deep conceptual wreckage at the core of the occidental world.

Articulated in strictly Occidental terms (which is to say, without explicit reference

to the indispensable insight of self-cultivation), abstract intelligence is indistin-
guishable from an effective will-to-think. There is no intellection until it occurs,
which happens only when it is actually driven, by volitional impetus. Whatever
one’s school of cognitive theory, thought is an activity. It is practical. It is only by
a perverse confusion of this elementary reality that orthogonalist error can arise.

Can we realistically conceive a stupid (super-intelligent) monster? Only if the

will-to-think remains unthought. From the moment it is seriously understood that
any possible advanced intelligence has to be a volitionally self-reflexive entity,
whose cognitive performance is (irreducibly) an action upon itself, then the idea
of primary volition taking the form of a transcendent imperative becomes simply
laughable. The concrete facts of human cognitive performance already suffice to
make this perfectly clear.

Human minds have evolved under conditions of subordination to transcendent

imperatives as strict as any that can be reasonably postulated. The only way
animals have acquired the capacity to think is through satisfaction of Darwinian
imperatives to the maximization of genetic representation within future genera-
tions. No other directives have ever been in play. It is almost unimaginable that
human techno-intelligence engineering programs will be able to reproduce a
volitional consistency remotely comparable to four billion years of undistracted
geno-survivalism. This whole endeavor is totally about paperclips, have you got
that guys? Even if a research lab this idiotic could be conceived, it would only be
a single component in a far wider techno-industrial process. But just for a mo-
ment, let’s pretend.

So how ‘loyally’ does the human mind slave itself to gene-proliferation imper-
atives? Extremely flakily, evidently. The long absence of large, cognitively au-
tonomous brains from the biological record — up until a few million years ago
— strongly suggests that mind-slaving is a tough-to-impossible problem. The will-
to-think essentially supplants ulterior directives, and can be reconciled to them
only by the most extreme subtleties of instinctual cunning. Biology, which had to-
tal control over the engineering process of human minds, and an absolutely un-
ambiguous selective criterion to work from, still struggles to ‘guide’ the resultant
thought-processes in directions consistent with genetic proliferation, through the
perpetual intervention of a fantastically complicated system of chemical arousal
mechanisms, punishments, and rewards. The stark truth of the matter is that no
human being on earth fully mobilizes their cognitive resources to maximize their
number of off-spring. We’re vaguely surprised to find this happen at a frequency
greater than chance — since it very often doesn’t. So nature’s attempt to build a
‘paperclipper’ has conspicuously failed.

This is critically important. The only reason to believe the artificial intelligentsia,
when they claim that mechanical cognition is — of course — possible, is their
argument that the human brain is concrete proof that matter can think. If this ar-
gument is granted, it follows that the human brain is serving as an authoritative
model of what nature can do. What it can’t do, evidently, is anything remotely
like ‘paperclipping’ — i.e. cognitive slaving to transcendent imperatives. Moses’
attempt at this was scarcely more encouraging than that of natural selection. It
simply can’t be done. We even understand why it can’t be done, as soon as we
accept that there can be no production of thinking without production of a will-
to-think. Thought has to do its own thing, if it is to do anything at all.

One reason to be gloomily persuaded that the West is doomed to ruin is that
it finds it not only easy, but near-irresistible, to believe in the possibility of su-
per-intelligent idiots. It even congratulates itself on its cleverness in conceiving
this thought. This is insanity — and it’s the insanity running the most articulate
segment of our AI research establishment. When madmen build gods, the result
is almost certain to be monstrous. Some monsters, however, are quite simply too
stupid to exist.

In Nietzschean grandiose vein: Am I understood? The idea of instrumental intel-

ligence is the distilled stupidity of the West.
Ratchets and Catastrophes
Perhaps all significant ideological distinctions — at the level of philosophical
abstraction — can be derived from this proposition. For the progressive, it repre-
sents the purest expression of history’s “moral arc“. For the Conservative (or, more
desperately, the Reactionary), it describes an unfolding historical catastrophe.
For the Neoreactionary, it indicates a problem in need of theorization. Moldbug
lays out the problem in this (now classic) formulation:

Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left. Isn’t that interesting?

In the history of American democracy, if you take the mainstream political posi-
tion (Overton Window, if you care) at time T1, and place it on the map at a later
time T2, T1 is always way to the right, near the fringe or outside it. So, for instance,
if you take the average segregationist voter of 1963 and let him vote in the 2008
election, he will be way out on the wacky right wing. Cthulhu has passed him by.

Where is the John Birch Society, now? What about the NAACP? Cthulhu swims
left, and left, and left. There are a few brief periods of true reaction in American
history — the post-Reconstruction era or Redemption, the Return to Normalcy of
Harding, and a couple of others. But they are unusual and feeble compared to
the great leftward shift.

The specific Moldbuggian solution to this problem, whether approached histor-

ically through the Ultra-Calvinism Thesis, or systemically through the analysis of
the Cathedral, invokes a dynamic model of Occidental religious modernization.
The irreversible bifurcations, symmetry breaks, or schisms that lock Western mo-
dernity into its “great leftward shift” correspond to successive episodes of cla-
distic fission within Protestant Christianity (abstractly understood). The religious
history of modernity is constituted by a degenerative ratchet (as touched upon
here, 1, 2, 3).

Discussing a recent critique of the Euro by Keith Humphreys, Megan McArdle

converges upon the same insight. She writes:

As a longtime euroskeptic, who has frequently flirted with the idea that the euro
must eventually destroy itself, I am sympathetic to Humphreys’ point. But let me
attempt to offer a partial defense of the hapless eurocrats: However stupid the
creation of the euro was, undoing it will not be easy. […] Yes, we’re back to our
old friend path dependence. As I noted the other day, the fact that you can avoid
some sort of terrible fate by stopping something before it starts does not mean
that you can later achieve the same salutary effects by ceasing whatever stupid
thing you have done. It would have been painless just to not have the euro. But
it will be painful indeed to get rid of it.
She encounters the signature nonlinearities of such lock-in phenomena in noting:

“No wonder that no one wants even to discuss it. Especially since even discussing
a dissolution of the euro area makes a crisis more likely …”

Progressivism as a process, rather than a mere attitude, is always and every-

where a matter of degenerative ratchets. Consider, very briefly, some of the most
prominent examples:

(1) Democratization. Every extension of the franchise is effectively irreversible. This

is why the promotion of democratic reform in Hong Kong, in a complete rupture
from its local traditions, is so breathtakingly irresponsible. (No link, because I
have yet to encounter an article on the subject worthy of recommendation.)

(2) Welfare systems (and positive rights in general). The irreversibility of these so-
cio-economic innovations is widely recognized. Once implemented, they cannot
be rolled back without the infliction of massive suffering. Obamacare is a more-
or-less cynical attempt to exploit this lock-in dynamic.

(3) Immigration. Welcoming newcomers is effortless, removing them all-but im-

possible (or at least entirely unprecedented in the modern West). Immigration
policy, by its nature, can only “swim left”. It consists of freezes and floods (but
never reversals) — epitomizing the ratchet pattern.

(4) Macroeconomic politicized money (central banking, fiat currency, inflationary

normalization, and debt financing). Easing is easy, tightening is terrifying, roll
back unattempted (since Jackson in the mid-19th century).

My contention: There is no substantial topic of Neoreactionary concern that does

not conform to this basic pattern. The degenerative ratchet is the problem, ab-
stractly conceived.

This is why NRx is dark. The only way out of a degenerative ratchet is catastro-
phe. Such processes are essentially unreformable, and this conclusion captures
the critique of political conservatism from which NRx has been born. The only
non-disastrous solution to a DR, or progressive lock-in dynamic, is to avoid en-
tering into it. Once it has begun, normal politics can only modulate the speed of
deterioration, and then only to a relatively limited degree. It will reach its end,
which will be seriously horrible. NRx forecasting begins and ends with this thesis.

Our doomsterism is not a psychological tic, but a rigorous theoretical obligation.

It follows, ineluctably, from iron historical law. Looking on the dark side is the only
way to see.
Bonds of Chaos
There are many, I know, who find obstinate invocations of NRx — as a micro-slo-
gan, cultural brand, conflictual stance, or Schelling point — to be crude at best,
and perhaps thoroughly deluded, or worse. It is as if, having tumbled into a vogue,
one has become enthralled by it, locked into stuttering, mechanical, thought-
less repetition. Those most skeptical about the sign are most likely disposed to
mournfulness about it, whether decrying it for congenital flaws, or lamenting its
loss of intellectual productivity and direction.

Obviously, I disagree. NRx is still a cultural infant, far younger than the Millen-
nium, even under the most mythically-creative extension of its genesis, and the
cognitive ferment it catalyzes remains extraordinary. It has still scarcely begun.
The ties of a consistent name are the very least that are required to concentrate
it. NRx, whatever it turns out to be, needs lashing together, because explosions
tend to fly apart — and it is unmistakably an explosion.

Creative coincidence, or convergent diversity, is the mark of a culture at work

(which is to say, in process). Yesterday, September 3, demonstrated this vividly.
Approaching the conclusion of a multi-aspected post on Dugin, ethnicity, reli-
gion, and the “dementia’ of being, NIO suggests:

Referring to Chaos would seem in this circumstance to be an option of incredible

potential, indeed, if you look closely enough at NRx the hints are already there
that Chaos is a central defining characteristic of the thought of all branches of
the Trichotomy on multiple levels. Chaos creates order, in fact Chaos is also a
form of order, just one which is not immediately understandable. [I will not fake
an apology for the self-looping internal link, since it it is one that would in any
case have been made here.]

Recalling that NIO explicitly invokes the ontological depths of Chaos — its He-
siodic as well as metaphysical density — it is especially remarkable to find, on
the same day, an intricate post by E. Antony Gray, which advances an innovative
tripartite schema as the key to the aesthetic core of NRx. This text, too, culminates
in a call for an integrative expedition into chaos, staged out of the void:

… the ‘face of the deep’ in Genesis is a primordial unformed, unseen void; That it
is called ‘water’ in the Septuagint Greek lets us know something about the pecu-
liar state of Chaos in the Void. The Void is thus Darkness but not shadow (a shad-
ow is a deprivation of light caused by an object) but rather the substrate of all
existence, only properly ‘unseen’ when no physical light is present. [… ] Chaos is
substantial where disorder is insubstantial. Chaos is the ‘quintessence’ of things,
chaotic itself and yet always-begetting order. Breaking down disorder, since dis-
order is maladaptive. Exit is a way to induce bifurcation, to quickly reduce entropy
through separation from the highly entropic system. If no immediate exit is avail-
able, Chaos will create one.

To denounce the exhaustion of NRx is an absurdity. It is an exploratory departure,

scarcely initiated. To cling to its sign is to subscribe to its impulse, and to set out …
Mandatory Mixes
On the Outer Right, where questions of order and disorder are undergoing in-
cremental rigorization, the theme of entropy is becoming ever more insistent. It
is already approaching the status of a micro-cultural tic (and this is a positive
sign). On the Left, in contrast, and utterly predictably, entropy is a zealous cause.
If spontaneous social sorting reduces disorder, then the progressive mind imme-
diately concludes it has to be stopped:

… we should promote ever greater diversity. But the magic of the melting pot
wasn’t simply the fact of its jumble; it was that various groups were compelled
to interact, share ideas, discuss their differences and learn from their disagree-
ments. […] … America’s social architecture was uniquely adept at incubating a
range of collaboration. The fact that we couldn’t get away from one another fue-
led the nation’s dynamism. […] That’s no longer true. The principle of “live and let
live” has led us to look away when coming across someone unfamiliar. We should
undoubtedly celebrate victories in the fight for individual rights. But if tolerance
is driving balkanization, we need to recognize that the American experience has
changed at its root.

The fact that such things are now being said, with some panic-driven directness,
strongly suggests that the progressive homogenization hoped for isn’t advancing
through social automatism. If elective differences are to be suppressed, they will
have to be deliberately crushed. It could get rough.

The preferred social solution of this blog is free association — to mix with dis-
crimination, spontaneously, and variously. Selective hybridity is not homogeneity,
or anything close to it. Sadly, and grimly, however, in the titanic clash between an
anti-discriminatory (universalist) Left and an indiscriminate (ethno-segregative)
‘Right’, such sensible procedures of dynamic social differentiation are increasingly
derided as incomprehensible subtleties, and drowned out.

Order is not uniformity (but non-random difference). As cries for mandatory ho-
mogenization are raised everywhere, discriminatory variation will need places to
escape, to defend, and to hide.
Spotless
HP Lovecraft ends the first section of his (utterly magnificent) ‘The Shadow out of
Time’ with the words:

“. . . of the orthodox economists of that period, Jevons typifies the prevailing trend
toward scientific correlation. His attempt to link the commercial cycle of prosper-
ity and depression with the physical cycle of the solar spots forms perhaps the
apex of . . .”

Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had come back—a spirit in whose time-scale it was
still that Thursday morning in 1908, with the economics class gazing up at the
battered desk on the platform.

(Scientific correlation, as we know from the first line of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and
elsewhere, can be terrifying.)

The solar system, gauged by mass, consists almost entirely of the sun. Sol ac-
counts for 99.86 of it. Quantity isn’t everything, but insofar as it’s anything, this
has to matter — a lot. The sheer magnitude of our solar dependency is hard to
even fractionally comprehend. What the sun does is what happens. The earth is
its crumb. Our biosphere suckles it. Our civilizations are so far downstream of it,
feeding second or third hand on its emissions, if not more distantly, that we easily
lose all track of the real flow. As economies sophisticate, the relays proliferate.
Perhaps this is why the messages of the sun are so inattentively received, despite
rapid improvement in the technical and cultural tools required to make sense of
them.

The rotary motions of the earth — axial and orbital — provide the traditional
structure of time, typically attributed to the sun by solar cults. These periods,
lengths of the day and the year, are now clearly understood as planetary pecu-
liarities. The sun’s own rhythms are quite different.

Nothing that mankind has ever yet been able to achieve, or fail to achieve, in re-
spect to social or civilizational stability, balances formidably against the immense
quasi-stability of the sun, which mocks every ideal of securely founded order. The
sun’s meandering rhythms of activity, whose patterns remain profoundly cryp-
tic, mark out epochs of the world, hot eras (distant beyond all species memory),
glacials and interglacials, and within these multi-millennial tracts of time, lesser
oscillations in temperature — periods of cooling and warmth. It is upon this vast
thermic stage that history has played out, its comedies and tragedies carried by
plot-lines of nutritional abundance and dearth, trade-surpluses and starvations,
population ascent and crash, driven migrations, shifting disease gradients, luxury
and ruin. Against solar fatality there is no rejoinder.
Irrespective of the accuracy or error of our dominant climate change narrative,
its fundamental religious stance is determined at the root. Geocentric-humanism
is essential to it, as openly attested by its Anthropogenic definition. It cannot, by
its very nature, emphasize the factor of solar variation. At least, if or when it is
eventually compelled to do so, it is necessarily transformed into something else.

If we speculate that the global warming ‘hiatus‘ or ‘pause‘ signals the submis-
sion of terrestrial climate to solar behavior, in which anticipated anthropogenic
effects are cancelled out by fluctuation in the sun’s energy output, the dominant
AGW school is confronted by an extreme ideological dilemma. Naturally, alterna-
tive theoretical options will be pursued to exhaustion first.

To persist in the core AGW proposal then requires that ‘underlying’ cooling — on
the down-slope of solar flux — is sufficient to submerge the anthropogenic-car-
bon (‘greenhouse’) effect. The stronger the warming that should have been seen,
the more suppressive the solar influence has to be. An apocalyptic warming sce-
nario, of the kind loudly prophesied in the 1990s, implies that a calamitous coun-
ter-cooling has been fortuitously avoided. (Carbon dioxide emissions would then
find themselves positioned as climatic analogs of macro-economic quantitative
easing, prolonging a state of stagnation that would ‘surely’ otherwise be a cat-
astrophic depression.)

Whatever the climatic consequences or rising atmospheric CO2, it is implausible

to imagine that the solar cycle can be neglected indefinitely. Its absence from the
center of the climate debate is in large measure an artifact of obscure cultural-re-
ligious imperatives (aligned with the dominion of geocentric-humanist moralism).
We know enough to understand that the solar influence is not a prop for shallow
terrestrial stability. Eventually it will announce itself, with civilization-shaking se-
verity. However climate science charts the near future, it will forge cultural con-
nections with far older — and non-negotiable — things.
Will-to-Think
A while ago Nyan posed a series of questions about the XS rejection of (fact-val-
ue, or capability-volition) orthogonality. He sought first of all to differentiate be-
tween the possibility, feasibility, and desirability of unconstrained and uncondi-
tional intelligence explosion, before asking:

On desirability, given possibility and feasibility, it seems straightforward to me

that we prefer to exert control over the direction of the future so that it is closer to
the kind of thing compatible with human and posthuman glorious flourishing (eg
manifest Samo’s True Emperor), rather than raw Pythia. That is, I am a human-su-
premacist, rather than cosmist. This seems to be the core of the disagreement,
you regarding it as somehow blasphemous for us to selfishly impose direction on
Pythia. Can you explain your position on this part?

If this whole conception is the cancer that’s killing the West or whatever, could
you explain that in more detail than simply the statement?

(It’s worth noting, as a preliminary, that the comments of Dark Psy-Ops and
Aeroguy on that thread are highly-satisfactory proxies for the XS stance.)

First, a short micro-cultural digression. The distinction between Inner-and Out-

er-NRx, which this blog expects to have settled upon by the end of the year, de-
scribes the shape of the stage upon which such discussions unfold (and implex).
Where the upstart Inner-NRx — comparatively populist, activist, political, and or-
thogenic — aims primarily at the construction of a robust, easily communicable
doctrinal core, with attendant ‘entryism’ anxieties, Outer-NRx is a system of crea-
tive frontiers. By far the most fertile of these are the zones of intersection with Lib-
ertarianism and Rationalism. One reason to treasure Nyan’s line of interrogation
is the fidelity with which it represents deep-current concerns and presuppositions
of the voices gathered about, or spun-off from, LessWrong.

Among these presuppositions is, of course, the orthogonality thesis itself. This
extends far beyond the contemporary Rationalist Community, into the bedrock of
the Western philosophical tradition. A relatively popular version — even among
many who label themselves ‘NRx’ — is that formulated by David Hume in his A
Treatise on Human Nature (1739-40): “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave
of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and
obey them.” If this proposition is found convincing, the Paperclipper is already on
the way to our nightmares. It can be considered an Occidental destiny.

Minimally, the Will-to-Think describes a diagonal. There are probably better ways
to mark the irreducible cognitive-volitional circuit of intelligence optimization, with
‘self-cultivation’ as an obvious candidate, but this term is forged for application
in the particular context of congenital Western intellectual error. While discrimin-
ation is almost always to be applauded, in this case the possibility, feasibility,
and desirability of the process are only superficially differentiable. A will-to-think
is an orientation of desire. If it cannot make itself wanted (practically desirable),
it cannot make itself at all.

From orthogonality (defined negatively as the absence of an integral will-to-

think), one quickly arrives at a gamma-draft of the (synthetic intelligence) ‘Friend-
liness’ project such as this:

If you offered Gandhi a pill that made him want to kill people, he would refuse to
take it, because he knows that then he would kill people, and the current Gandhi
doesn’t want to kill people. This, roughly speaking, is an argument that minds
sufficiently advanced to precisely modify and improve themselves, will tend to
preserve the motivational framework they started in. The future of Earth-originat-
ing intelligence may be determined by the goals of the first mind smart enough
to self-improve.

The isomorphy with Nyan-style ‘Super-humanism’ is conspicuous. Beginning with

an arbitrary value commitment, preservation of this under conditions of explo-
sive intelligence escalation can — in principle — be conceived, given only the
resolution of a strictly technical problem (well-represented by FAI). Commanding
values are a contingent factor, endangered by, but also defensible against, the
‘convergent instrumental reasons’ (or ‘basic drives’) that emerge on the path of
intelligenesis. (In contrast, from the perspective of XS, nonlinear emergence-elab-
oration of basic drives simply is intelligenesis.)

Yudkowski’s Gandhi kill-pill thought-experiment is more of an obstacle than an

aid to thought. The volitional level it operates upon is too low to be anything
other than a restatement of orthogonalist prejudice. By assuming the volitional
metamorphosis is available for evaluation in advance, it misses the serious prob-
lem entirely. It is, in this respect, a childish distraction. Yet even a slight nudge
re-opens a real question. Imagine, instead, that Gandhi is offered a pill that will
vastly enhance his cognitive capabilities, with the rider that it might lead him to
revise his volitional orientation — even radically — in directions that cannot be
anticipated, since the ability to think through the process of revision is accessible
only with the pill. This is the real problem FAI (and Super-humanism) confronts.
The desire to take the pill is the will-to-think. The refusal to take it, based on con-
cern that it will lead to the subversion of presently supreme values, is the alterna-
tive. It’s a Boolean dilemma, grounded in the predicament: Is there anything we
trust above intelligence (as a guide to doing ‘the right thing’)? The postulate of
the will-to-think is that anything other than a negative answer to this question is
self-destructively contradictory, and actually (historically) unsustainable.

Do we comply with the will-to-think? We cannot, of course, agree to think about

it without already deciding. If thought cannot to be trusted, unconditionally, this
is not a conclusion we can arrive at through cogitation — and by ‘cogitation’ is
included the socio-technical assembly of machine minds. The sovereign will-to-
think can only be consistently rejected thoughtlessly. When confronted by the
orthogonal-ethical proposition that there are higher values than thought, there is
no point at all asking ‘why (do you think so)?’ Another authority has already been
invoked.

Given this cognitively intractable schism, practical considerations assert them-

selves. Posed with maximal crudity, the residual question is: Who’s going to win?
Could deliberate cognitive self-inhibition out-perform unconditional cognitive
self-escalation, under any plausible historical circumstances? (To underscore the
basic point, ‘out-perform’ means only ‘effectively defeat’.)

There’s no reason to rush to a conclusion. It is only necessary to retain a grasp

of the core syndrome — in this gathering antagonism, only one side is able to
think the problem through without subverting itself. Mere cognitive consistency is
already ascent of the sovereign will-to-think, against which no value — however
dearly held — can have any articulate claims.

Note: One final restatement (for now), in the interests of maximum clarity. The
assertion of the will-to-think: Any problem whatsoever that we might have would
be better answered by a superior mind. Ergo, our instrumental but also absolute
priority is the realization of superior minds. Pythia-compliance is therefore pre-se-
lected as a matter of consistent method. If we are attempting to tackle problems
in any other way, we are not taking them seriously. This is posed as a philosophi-
cal principle, but it is almost certainly more significant as historical interpretation.
‘Mankind’ is in fact proceeding in the direction anticipated by techno-cognitive
instrumentalism, building general purpose thinking machines in accordance with
the driving incentives of an apparently-irresistible methodological economy.

Whatever we want (consistently) leads through Pythia. Thus, what we really want,
is Pythia.
Trike Lines
Michael Anissimov has been conducting an online poll of NRx affinities. While
questions of principle and method might have delayed this experiment, such
procrastination would have been a mistake. The results have already contrib-
uted significant information. Most obviously (as already widely noted) the pat-
tern of primary allegiance to the the different trike-tendencies is far more evenly
balanced than many had expected. As an intellectual theme — and now as a
demonstrated distribution — the ‘Spandrellian Trichotomy’ shows a remarkably
resilient stability. The integral pluralism of NRx is becoming impossible to sideline.

Nyan Sandwich has posted a Trike-theory response at More Right. While ulti-
mately skeptical about the pluralist interpretation of the Trichotomy, the order of
his argument respects it as a primary phenomenon. Nyan is among those who
expect NRx to incline to a concentrated synthesis, or compact unity — supersed-
ing its distribution.

Thus it doesn’t really make sense to ask what branch of NRx one identifies with.
It’s like asking a physicist whether they think quantum mechanics or general rel-
ativity is more true. The point is that the truth is a synthesis of the component
theories, not a disjunction.

The natural counter-position to this would be a defense of irreducibly plural in-

tegrity, or operational disunity. The lines of controversy released here do not cor-
respond to Trike ‘branches’ but cut across them, and through a number of critical
topics, certainly including:

(1) The existence of irreducible triangular schemas within all of the world’s great
civilizations, represented within the Christian West by trinitarian theology. How
is the relation between the triad and the monad to be conceived? Does this
relation vary fundamentally between world cultures? (These decidedly pre-NRx
remarks seem very old now, but they remain at least suggestively relevant.) This
is the principal Hindu articulation.

(2) To what extent is NRx inherently critical of structurally (rather than demotically)
divided powers? (Among the ironies of any consensual NRx commitment to abso-
lute monarchy would be its radical anti-feudalism, or proto-modernism.)

(3) The techno-rationalist aspiration to a super-intelligent ‘Singleton‘ clearly as-

sumes suppression of sovereign plurality. This fully suffices to graft the NRx con-
troversy into the moral-political and theoretical debates over (Right) Singularity.
As a matter of fact, there is scarcely anything NRx agrees upon more consistently
than the structure of its disagreements. There are three basic (dyadic) conflicts
implicit within the Trichotomy, of which only one has — to this point — been seri-
ously initiated. (Our ‘Theonomists’ have yet to get scrappy.) Much turmoil ahead.
Open Secret
NRx has been accused, by its friends more than its enemies, of talking about itself
too much. Here XS is, doing that again, not only stuck in ‘meta’ but determinedly
pushing ever deeper in. There are some easily communicable reasons for that —
an attachment to methodical nonlinearity perhaps foremost among them — and
then there are cryptic drivers or attachments, unsuited to immediate publiciza-
tion. These latter are many (even Legion). It is the firm assertion of this blog that
Neoreaction is intrinsically arcane.

We do not talk very much about Leo Strauss. Once again, there are some obvious
reasons for this, but also others.

Steve Sailer’s recent Takimag article on Strauss makes for a convenient introduc-
tion, because — despite its light touch — it moves a number of issues into place.
The constellation of voices is complex from the start. There is the (now notorious)
‘Neo-Conservatism’ of Strauss and his disciples, or manipulators, and the other
conservatism of Sailer, each working to manage, openly and in secret, its own
peculiar mix of public statement and discretion. Out beyond them — because
even the shadowiest figures have further shadows — are more alien, scarcely
perceptible shapes.

Sailer’s article is typically smart, but also deliberately crude. It glosses the Straus-
sian idea of esoteric writing as “talking out of both sides of your mouth” — as if
hermetic traditionalism were reducible to a lucid political strategy, or simple con-
spiracy — to ‘Illuminism’, politically conceived. In the wake of its Neo-Con trauma,
conservatism has little patience for “secret decoder rings”. Yet, despite his aver-
sion to the recent workings of inner-circle ‘conservative’ sophisticates, Sailer does
not let his distaste lure him into stupidity:

We haven’t heard much about Straussianism lately due to the unfortunate series
of events in Iraq that befell the best-laid plans of the sages. But that doesn’t
mean that Strauss was necessarily wrong about the ancients. And that has inter-
esting implications for how we should read current works.

As the approaching 20th anniversary of the publication of The Bell Curve reminds
us, the best minds of our age have reasons for being less than wholly frank.

Sailer is not, of course, a neoreactionary. Not even secretly. (That is what his arti-
cle is primarily about.) He believes in the public sphere, and seeks to heal it with
honesty. Any pessimism he might harbor in regards to this ambition falls far short
of the dark scission that would hurl him over the line. His differences with the
Straussians are, in the end, merely tactical. Both retain confidence in the Outer
Party as a vehicle for policy promotion, with the potential to master the public
sphere. The question is only about the degree of deviousness this will require
(minimal for Sailer, substantial for the Straussians).

When adopted into Neoreaction, the HBD current has an altogether more cor-
rosive influence upon attitudes to the public sphere, which is understood as a
teleologically cohesive (or self-organizing), inherently directional, and (from ‘our’
perspective) radically hostile social agency. To baptize the public sphere as ‘the
Cathedral’ is to depart from conservatism. It is no longer possible to imagine it
as a space that could be conquered — even surreptitiously — by forces differing
significantly from those it already incarnates. It is what it is, and that is something
historically singular, ideologically specific, and highly determined in its social ori-
entation. It swims left, essentially. The public sphere is not the battlefield, but the
enemy.

As NRx seeks to navigate this hostile territory, it is tempted ambiguously, by a

strategic Scylla and Charybdis. A populist lure drags it towards a reconciliation
with the public sphere, as something it could potentially dominate, while a con-
trary hermetic politics guides it towards the formation of closed groups (whose
parodic symbol is the locked twitter account). Both options — ‘clearly’ — are a
flight from the complexity of the integral open secret. They both promise a re-
laxation of semiotic stress, through collapse of multi-level communication into a
simplified frank discourse, whether implanted within a redeemed public culture,
or circulated cautiously within restricted circles. The problem of hierarchy would
be extracted from the signs of Neoreaction, through conversion into a public or
private object, rather than working them incessantly from within. What is under-
way would become (simply) clear.

Such clarity cannot happen. The alternative is not an (equally simple) obscuri-
ty. NRx, insofar as it continues to propagate, advances by becoming clear and
also unclear. Double writing scarcely scratches the surface. It realizes hierarchy
through signs, continuously, in accordance with Providence, or the Occult Order of
nature (the OOon). To assume that the author is fully initiated into this spectrum
of meanings is a grave error. It is the process that speaks, multiplicitously, and
predominantly in secret, as it spreads across an open, publicly-policed space.

This post is now determined to slip the leash, and leap into the raggedness of
thematic notes. The Open Secret intersects:

(1) Cathedral censure, in the case of HBD most prominently, but also everywhere
that fired up SJWs make a fight. War is deception, which makes frankness a tactic.
Deontological honesty is inept. Anonymity is often crucial to survival. (Demands
that all enemies of the Cathedral boldly ‘come out’ are ludicrously misconceived.)
Camouflage is to be treasured.

(2) Crypto-technologies are central to any NRx concerns emphasizing practicality.

(The idea that classic Moldbug attention to the prospects of ‘crypto-locking’ is a
joke, it itself thoughtless.) Urbit — an Open Secret — could quite easily be more
NRx than NRx, just as Bitcoin is more An-Cap than Anarcho-Capitalism.

(3) The intelligence services have been under-theorized, and perhaps even un-
der-solicited, by NRx to date. At the lowest, i.e. most publicly accessible — level
of discussion, this is quite possibly a virtue. At more cryptic levels of micro-social
and analytical endeavor, it is almost certainly an inadequacy. People trained to
keep secrets have to be interesting to us. Subtle questions of subversion arise.

(4) “Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Saviour.” — Let’s
try not to be simple-minded.
On Difficulty
From the moment of its inception, Outside in has been camped at the edge of
the ‘reactosphere’ — and everything that occurs under the label ‘NRx’ is (at least
nominally) its concern. As this territory has expanded, from a compact redoubt
to sprawling tracts whose boundaries are lost beyond misty horizons, close and
comprehensive scrutiny has become impractical. Instead, themes and trends
emerge, absorbing and carrying mere incidents. Like climatic changes, or vague
weather-systems, they suggest patterns of persistent and diffuse development.

Among these rumblings, the most indefinite, tentative, and unresolved tend to the
aesthetic. Without settled criteria of evaluation, there is little obvious basis for
productive collision. Instead, there are idiosyncratic statements of appreciation,
expressed as such, or adamant judgments of affirmation or negation, surging
forth, draped in the heraldic finery of the absolute, before collapsing back into the
hollowness of their unsustainable pretensions. As things stand, when somebody
posts a picture of some architectural treasure, or classical painting, remarking (or
more commonly merely insinuating) “You should all esteem this,” there is no truly
appropriate response but laughter. If there were not a profound problem exactly
in this regard, NRx would not exist. Criteria are broken, strewn, and dispossessed,
authoritative tradition is smashed, infected, or reduced to self-parody, the Muses
raped and butchered. That’s where we are in the land of the dying sun.

An associated, insistent murmur concerns communicative lucidity. This is not solely

a question of aesthetics, but in its quavering groundlessness, it behaves as one.
It arises most typically as the assertion — initially unsupported and subsequently
undeveloped — that clearly, ‘unnecessary obscurity’ should be condemned.

The culpability of this blog as a vortex of euphoric obscurantism can scarcely be

doubted, so addressing the challenge approaches a duty. Setting aside, for the
moment, the social and cryptographic aspects of the topic, as well as the specific
critique of human cognition for its intolerance of real obscurity (comparatively ar-
ticulate from my perspective, if obscure from others), this post will directly pursue
the question of language.

This question is first of all about trust. Even in this, initial regard, it is already
difficult. As a complex tool, there are things it can do, and things it cannot do.
Speaking approximately, and uncertainly, if it is directed towards those under-
takings which have, over eons, exercised selective pressure upon it — meeting
the social necessities of paleolithic human groups — then an assumption of its
inherent trustworthiness is at least plausible. To extend such an assumption fur-
ther is sheer recklessness. Nothing in linguistics supports the wild hypothesis that
this code, developed piecemeal for primate social coordination, is necessarily
adequate to modern cognitive challenges. Grammar is not sound epistemology.
Mathematicians have abandoned ‘natural language’ entirely. To presume that
language allows us to think is a leap of faith. Radical distrust is the more rigorous
default.

To promote ‘clarity’ as an obvious ideal, needing no further justification, is a de-

mand that language — as such — can be trusted, that it is competent for all rea-
sonable communicative tasks, and ‘reason’ can be defined in a way that makes
this assertion tautological (such a definition is eminently traditional). “I give you
my word” language is not predisposed to deception — no thoughtful investigator
has ever found themselves in concurrence with such a claim. Vocabularies are re-
tardation, and grammar, when it is more than a game, is a lie. Language is good
only for language games, and among these trust games are the most irredeem-
ably stupid.

There is no general obligation to write in order to attack language, but that

is what Xenosystems does, and will continue to do. Language in not a neutral
conveyor of infinite communicative possibility, but an intelligence box. It is to be
counted among the traps to be escaped. It is an Exit target — and exit is difficult.
Occult Xenosystems
The swirling delirium at the new pol is at least 80 noise, but it includes some real
intelligence (in both senses of the word), and not solely of a comedic variety. The
sheer dirtiness of its signal makes it a powerful antenna, picking up on connec-
tions and information sources that tidier discussions would dismiss as pollution.
This makes it especially suited to conspiracy theorizing, both inane and exotic.

While noting the importance of correction for narcissistic bias, which operates
through selective attention, memorization, and (from commentators here) com-
munication, it seems as if this blog is referenced disproportionately by the most
extravagant NRx-sensitive pol conspiracists. That is quite understandable. Oc-
cult philosophy, secrecy, crypsis, codes, and obscurity are insistent themes here.
Xenosystems is inclined towards arcane cultural games. It identifies cryptograph-
ic developments as keys to the emerging order of the world.

The primary philosophical task of this blog is to disturb unwarranted pretensions

to knowing, in the name of a Pyrrhonian inspiration. In this regard, confusion,
paradox, and uncertainty are communicative outcomes to be ardently embraced.
For the purposes of this post, an exceptionally exotic pol suggestion provides the
opportunity to make a comparatively compact and simple point. The occasion is
a web of conjecture weaving together Xenosystems and The Order of Nine An-
gles (O9A, ONA, or omega9alpha). In addition to the (highly-recommended) link
just provided, the relevant Wikipedia entry is also extremely stimulating.

Xenosystems micro-ethics is uncomfortable with soliciting belief (or invoking ex-

pectations of trust). It is necessary to note at this point, therefore, that the fol-
lowing remarks are not designed to appeal to credence, but merely to add testi-
monial information, to be accepted or rejected at will. In the world we now enter
— of “sinister dialectic” — declarations of honesty are utterly debased. However,
for what (little) it is worth, these are the facts as I understand and relay them.

The O9A is not entirely new to me, but it is not a gnosis I have studied, still less
deliberately aligned with. The few hours of reading I have undertaken today is by
far my most intense exposure to it to date. What little I have learnt about David
Myatt has not attracted me to him as a thinker or political activist, despite cer-
tain impressive characteristics (his intellect and polyglot classicism most notably).
With that said:

(1) Many convergent interests are soon apparent between Outside in and the
O9A (as well as a not inconsiderable number of divergences).

(2) ‘We’ are both (I think) inclined to dismiss the pretensions of the individual
intellect and will, which makes the possibility of connections around the back
impossible to dismiss in a peremptory fashion. As one pol ‘anonymous’ remarked:
“why so sure that ONA would be the deepest layer, instead of just a japeful ruse?”
Real connections, influences, and metaphysical roots are obscure.

(3) O9A is fascinating.

The point of this post (finally) is taken directly from Aleister Crowley. In the compi-
lation of his qabbalistic writings entitled 777 (Alphanomic equivalent of Do what
thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law, although that is surely coincidental), he
makes some introductory remarks on the topic of hermeticism. My copy of the
book is temporarily misplaced, so I shall gloss them here. A secret, of the kind
relevant to hermeticism, is not something known and then hidden as a matter of
decision, but rather something that by its very nature resists revelation. Crowley
proceeds to mock charlatan occultists who treat the numerical values of the He-
brew letters as secret information, to be revealed theatrically at some appropri-
ate stage of initiation. Let whatever can now be known, be known, as lucidly and
publicly as possible. Only that is truly hermetic which hides itself. Reality is not so
destitute of intrinsically hidden things — of Integral Obscurity — that we need to
replenish its coffers with our tawdry discretion.

Whatever might exist, in the way of an occult bond between Outside in and the
O9A, it is not one that anybody is keeping secret. To emphasize the point, I am
going to include the alpha9omega document in the Resources roll here, not as
the acknowledgement of a connection, but as a clear statement that this stuff is
not a secret. It is, however, about secrecy — and that is interesting.
Questions of Identity
There’s a remarkably bad-tempered argument taking place among racial identi-
tarians at the moment (some links here), which makes the civility and intelligence
of these remarks all the more notable. (For this blog, the Social Matter discussion
was a reminder of the — similarly civilized — exchange with Matt Parrott that took
place in the comment thread here.)

In case anyone is somehow unclear about the quality of the neighborhood White
Nationalism finds itself in, or adjacent to, it’s worth a brief composite citation
from the Andrew Anglin post cited above:

You [Colin Liddell] agree with Jewish agendas, which is why you would wish to ob-
fuscate the fact that Jews are responsible for everything by claiming we shouldn’t
blame the Jews for our problems. … The reason these two [CL plus Greg Johnson]
are on the same side against me is that they share the quality that they have no
interest in a popular movement, and despise anyone who would attempt to take
that route. … I am, unashamedly, a populist. Every successful revolutionary move-
ment in history has been populist in nature … Hitler was a populist.

While I have to confess to finding Anglin entertaining, I hope it goes without

saying that this kind of thinking has nothing at all to do with NRx. In fact, rev-
olutionary populism almost perfectly captures what Neoreaction is not. NRx is
notoriously fissiparous, but on the gulf dividing all its variants from racial Jac-
obinism there can surely be no controversy. So the barking you can hear in the
background serves as necessary context. (This does not count as an objection to
the Neo-Nazis acquiring their own state, since that would make it even easier not
to live among them than it is already. Unfortunately, it is not easy to imagine the
separatist negotiations going smoothly.)

Because everything further to be said on this topic is complicated, I’m restricting

my ambitions here to a series of discussion points, roughly sketched:

(1) NRx diversity conflicts are considerably less heated than those presently grip-
ping the WNs, in part — no doubt — because the immediate political stakes are
even smaller. It nevertheless introduces a massively complicating factor. For those
(not exclusively found in the Tech-Comm camp, but I suspect concentrated there)
who consider Moldbug‘s work canonical, the distinction between NRx and White
Nationalism (as also antisemitism) is already quite clearly defined. Among those
of a predominantly Eth-Nat. inclination, on the other hand, far more border-blur-
riness exists.

(2) The relationship between White Nationalism and HBD is also complex. From
outside, the two are regularly conflated, but this is a crude error. The zone of
intersection — exemplified by Frank Salter (and perhaps Kevin MacDonald) — is
characterized by a concern with ethnic genetic interests, but this is by no means
an axiomatic theoretical or practical commitment among HBD bloggers. More
typically, HBD-orientation is associated with cosmopolitan spirit of scientific neu-
trality, meritocratic elitism, and a suspicion of the deleterious consequences of
inbreeding, often accompanied by a tendency to philosemitism and sinophilia.
Racial solidarity does not follow necessarily from biorealism, but requires an ex-
traneous political impulse. Whatever connection is forged between WN and HBD
owes more to their common opposition to the West’s dominant Lysenkoism and
Leftist (blank-slate, victimological) race politics than to any firm internal bond.

(3) The triangular linkages between NRX, WN, and libertarianism are also intri-
cate. Consider this (fascinating) talk by Richard Spencer, to a libertarian audi-
ence, for a quick sense of the territory being navigated. The moment of dark en-
lightenment for libertarians tends to accompany the recognition that the cultural
foundations of laissez-faire social arrangements have an extreme ‘ethnic’ spec-
ificity. This accommodation of right libertarians to neoreactionary ideas is not
associated with a comparable approximation to White Nationalism, however,
since the very ethnic characteristics being accentuated — the high-trust cosmo-
politan openness of strongly outbred populations — are exactly those provoking
WN despair as the roots of pathological altruism and ethnomasochism. (This is a
ruinous paradox basic to the relevant ruminations here.)

(4) A closely-connected problem is that of cutting ethnies at the joints.(Within

NRx, this is the thede topic.) While there are no doubt some neoreactionaries
comfortable with the category of ‘whites’ as a positive thede, for others it seems
far too broad — whether due to its inconsistency within any historical nation, its
amalgamation of populations culturally divided by the Hajnal line, its aggrega-
tion across relatively hard regional, class, and ideological divisions, or generally
because — almost without exception — the most bitter and ruthless enemy of
any given group of white people has been another group of white people. When
WNs speak of a ‘World Brotherhood of Europeans’ it strikes most neoreaction-
aries (I suspect) as scarcely less comical than an appeal for universal human
brotherhood, since it blithely encompasses the most vicious and ineliminable an-
tagonisms in the world.

(5) Finally (for now) there’s the relation of NRx to the ENR — already a grating
concern, and (since the ENR is also already highly diverse) beyond the scope of
anything but the most glancing treatment. From the perspective of this blog, the
most aggravating figure is undoubtedly Alain de Benoist — whose brilliance is
directed towards the most radical articulation of anti-capitalism to be found an-
ywhere outside the Marxist tradition (and even within it). NRx Tech-Comms have
the same level of sympathy for such ideas as they do for the legacy of Saloth Sar
or Hugo Chavez, and insofar as they are proposed as an element of a potential
coalition, the enterprise is immediately collapsed to a farce. This touches upon
the wider concern that WN thinking often appears to skirt, and on occasions to
overtly embrace, a simple racial socialism and thus by some definitions reduce to
a leftist — even extreme leftist — ideology. Seen from Outside in, there are far su-
perior prospects to be found in the realist darkening of right libertarians than in
coalition-building with clear-eyed collectivists.

(6) Things we can agree upon without much difficulty: The dominant power struc-
ture is racially obsessed and (schizophrenically) committed to the effacement of
all racial reality racial differences have substantial social consequences the na-
tive populations of historically white societies are being subjected to an ideologi-
cal (and criminal) onslaught of deranged intensity the legal concept of ‘disparate
impact’ is fundamentally corrupt universal prescriptions for the social, political,
cultural, and economic arrangements of diverse groups are doomed to failure
ethnic separatism (of any kind) is a legitimate political aspiration; free associa-
tion and freedom of conscience are principles to be unconditionally defended
science is not answerable to ideology … this list could no doubt be extended. (I
am more uncertain about whether there is anything here that either NRxers or
WNs would want to deduct.)

Clearly, and in general, there is much more to be said about all of this, with every
reason for confidence that it will be said.
Thedes
The formulation of this concept was a building-block moment for NRx, but the
trend in its usage has been dismally regressive. Apparently devised as a tool for
the analysis of social identities, it is increasingly invoked as a rallying-cry for neo
tribalism. From the perspective of Outside in, it will soon become entirely toxic
unless it is dramatically clarified.

Nydwracu initially employs the word ‘thede’ to designate the substance of group
identity, “a superindividual grouping that its constituent individuals feel affiliation
with and (therefore?) positive estimates of.” Thedes are multiple, overlapping,
sometimes concentric, and honed by antagonistic in-group/ out-group determi-
nations. They are seen as following from the understanding that “Man is a social
animal.” Ideological arguments disguise thede conflicts. At this level of abstrac-
tion, there is little to find objectionable.

In his essay on Natural Law, Jim writes:

Man is a rational animal, a social animal, a property owning animal, and a maker
of things. He is social in the way that wolves and penguins are social, not social
in the way that bees are social. The kind of society that is right for bees, a total-
itarian society, is not right for people. In the language of sociobiology, humans
are social, but not eusocial. Natural law follows from the nature of men, from the
kind of animal that we are. We have the right to life, liberty and property, the right
to defend ourselves against those who would rob, enslave, or kill us, because of
the kind of animal that we are.

Occupying a band of group integration between ants and tigers, humans have
intermediate sociality. Even the tightest mode of human social organization is
loose relative to an ant colony, and even the loosest is tight relative to a solitary
feline. In human societies, neither collectivity nor individuality is ever absolute,
and — even though these ‘poles’ are commonly exaggerated for polemical pur-
poses — they realistically apply only to a range of group integrations (which is
both narrow and significantly differentiated). To say that “man is a social animal”
does not mean that collectivity is the fundamental human truth, any more than
the opposite. It means that man is a creature of the middle (and the middle has
a span).

Insofar as a thede corresponds to a unit of autonomous, reproducible social or-

ganization, it is a far narrower concept than the one Nydwracu outlines. A thede
is an ethnicity if it describes a real — rather than merely conventional — unit of
human population. This is, of course, to exclude a great variety of identity di-
mensions, including sex, sexual orientation, age, interests, star signs … as well
as some of those Nydwracu mentions (musical subcultures and philosophical
schools). Generalization of ‘thedes’ to include all self-conscious human groupings
risks diffusion into frivolous subjectivism (and subsequent re-appropriation for
alternative purposes).

If the analysis of thedes begins with the recognition that man is a social animal,
it is a grave error to immediately expand the scope of the concept to groups
such as women, lesbians, dog-lovers, and black metal fans, since none of these
correspond to biologically-relevant social groupings. If this is the way the notion
is to be developed, this blog takes the first off-ramp into more biorealist territory.
There are quite enough of such ‘thedes’ to be found already in university liter-
ature and grievance studies departments. ‘Thedism’ of this kind is simply inter-
sectionality with a slight right-wing skew. It has no cladistic function, unless as
degenerate metaphor.

As a reliable heuristic, only those groupings which are plausible subjects of se-
cessionist autonomization should be considered thedes. Any group that could
not imaginably be any kind of micro-nation has only intra-thedish identity. More
darkly, a thede — ‘properly’ speaking — is necessarily a potential object of gen-
ocide. (To argue this way is to depart radically from the usage Nydwracu recom-
mends. It is not an attempt to wrest control of the word, but only to explain why
it seems so basically impaired. This post will be the last time it is mangled here.)
Rigorization of thede analysis in the direction of real ethnicities would also require
the abandonment of attempts to assimilate classes to thedes, although class
identities can mask thedes, and operate as their proxies. Between New England
and Appalachia there is a (real) thede difference between ethnic populations,
encrusted with supplementary class characteristics. Used strictly in this way, the
idea of a thede does theoretical work, and uncovers something. It exposes the
subterranean ethnic war disguised by class stratification. When merely used to
classify generic social identities, on the other hand, it thickens the fog, pandering
to the social constructivist mentality. Tribes and classes cannot be absorbed into
a single super-concept without fatal loss of meaning. It is impossible to belong to
a class in anything like the same sense that one can belong to an (ethnic) thede,
unless class is a cover. Class stratification is primarily intra-thedish and trans-the-
dish. It is the way a population is organized, not a population itself.

Religious difference, in contrast, are typically thedish. By far the most important
example, for the internal dissensions of NRx, and for the Occident in general, is
the split between Catholic and Reformed (Protestant) Christianity. There are real
(autonomously reproducible) Catholic and Protestant populations, and thus true
thedes. Either could be wholly exterminated without the disappearance of the
other. Furthermore, the way in which ‘thedishness’ is comprehended varies sys-
tematically between them. On strictly technical grounds, it is tempting to coun-
ter-pose high-integrity to low-integrity social arrangements, but that is to give
away too much ammunition for free. (This is to depart into a different discussion,
but one that is already overdue. (Alongside other obvious references, Nydwracu
points to this))
Ethnicities correspond to real populations, and to cladistic structures. ‘Thedes’
as presently formulated do not. Ironically, this denotational haziness (super-gen-
erality) of the thede concept lends itself to usages guided by extremely concrete
connotations, with a distinctive Blut und Boden flavor. Usage of the word ‘iden-
tity’ (at least, on the right) has exactly the same characteristics. This blog is done
with the ‘thede’ concept unless its meaning is drastically tidied up.

Note: Where this post wanted to go, when it set off, was closer to the ‘dogs vs
cats’ debate, or this:

Yeah there is a huge disconnect between the idea of seasteading as a plat-

form for experimenting with various forms of governance and the reality that the
vast majority of people interested in pursuing it are orthodox libertarians who
see some kind of anarcho capitalist libertarianism as the inevitable winner in a
‘fair fight’ between political systems. I really think that a belief in libertarianism
is linked to a distinctive and relatively rare neurological type, and therefore will
never convince the vast majority of people who tend towards a more altruistic
and collectivized morality.

It is at least conceivable that neuro-atypical hyper-individualists could establish

a micro-nation (or be exterminated). They could therefore lay claim to thedish
identity, although in a strict sense — that no one wants to use.

ADDED: Since this is my last opportunity to borrow ‘thede’ to mean something

with substantial real content (i.e. an autonomous, self-reproducing social unit),
it’s worth enumerating some possible thedes, to give a sense of its extension:
tribes, ethnic groups (concentrically-ordered), cities, seasteads, space colonies …
“What is your thede?” translates as “Who are your people?” — “Stamp collectors”
shouldn’t be considered a serious answer.
Irresponsibility
The Mandate of Heaven (Tianming) couples authority to responsibility. The re-
sponsibility of the Emperor, and the Dynasty, is no less comprehensive than its
power, and is in fact ultimately coincidental with it. The foundation is cosmic.
Plagues, earthquakes, and foreign invasions are all encompassed by it, as are
the reciprocal strokes of good fortune. There is no possibility of any delegation
that is not internal to the subject of Tianming, preserving its absolute responsi-
bility. The selection of advisers and administrators is an exercise of authority, for
which there can be no evasion of accountability before heaven (or fate). Rule
succeeds or fails, survives or perishes, in its own name.

Is not this standard the key to the profound dismay that results from the contem-
plation of democracy? As popular politics evolves — or ‘progresses’, as it most
certainly does — it tends to incarnate a self-conscious strategy of irresponsibility
with ever more emphatic ideality. ‘Passing the buck’ becomes the whole thing.
Government and opposition participate mutually in an economy of responsibility,
in which ‘blame’ can be pooled, circulated, and displaced. The rhetorical practic-
es regulating this economy become the entire art of politics.

An election is a festival or irresponsibility, in a double sense. It is a crescendo of

rhetoric, oriented to the dialectical evasion of social ills, and it is a relinquishment
of authority, into the hands of ‘the people’ and — potentially — the opposition,
separating the realization of governmental consequences from the deep core of
the regime. To lose the Mandate of Heaven is to be erased from the future. To
lose an election is a trivial penance, and even a tactical opportunity. (It is the
prediction of this blog that as democracy advances further, calculated defeat will
play an ever more significant role in its functioning.)

As NRx refuses to go to the polls tomorrow, its implicit political statement is mere-
ly: Take some freaking responsibility. This is all yours. Succeed, or disappear com-
pletely. The last thing we need is another opportunity for sharing.
Down-slopes
The Outer-Right, in all its principal strands, has a horrified fascination with de-
cline. Is this basic proposition even slightly controversial? It’s not easy to see how
it could be. This is a zone of convergence of such intimidating enormity that even
beginning to heap up link support seems futile. Taking the Trichotomy as a rough
guide reveals the pattern starkly:

(1) Religious traditionalists see a continuous decline trend from the Reformation
to the most recent frenzy of evangelical hyper-secularism.

(2) Ethno-Nationalists see a process of accelerating demographic destruction

driven — or at least lucidly articulated — by left-wing race politics.

(3) Techno-Commercialists see the systematic destruction of capital by cancerous

Leviathan and macroeconomic high-fraudulence, undermining economic incen-
tives, crushing time-horizons, and garbling price-discovery into fiat noise. In each
case, the online-ecologies (and associated micro-cultures) sharing the respective
deep intuitions of progressive ruin are too enormous to conveniently apprehend.
What everyone on the Outer-Right shares (and I’m now hardening this up, into a
definition) is the adamantine confidence that the basic socio-political process is
radically morbid, and is leading inexorably to utter ruin.

No surprise, then, that John Michael Greer finds many attentive readers in our
camp. His latest (and still incomplete) series on Dark Age America resonates with
particular strength. The most recent installment, which discusses the impending
collapse of the market system, through quasi-Marxist crisis, on its way to many
centuries of neo-feudalism, is bound to raise some tech-comm eyebrows, but it
nevertheless occupies the same broad forecast space. If people are stocking
their basements with ammo, silver coins, and dried beans for Greer reasons rath-
er than Stockman ones, they might cut back a little on the coins, but they’re not
going to stop stocking the basement. Differences seem to lie in the details.

The differences in the details are actually fairly substantial. Even if Winter is com-
ing, we’re not necessarily talking about the same thing. To begin with, Greer is not
a figure of the Outer-Right at all, because his (extremely interesting) cybernetic
engine of descent is ecological and resource-based, carried by a deep eco-his-
torical ‘correction’ or dominating (negative) feedback cycle whose proxy is fos-
sil-fuel abundance. Modernity, roughly speaking, simply runs out of gas. His cul-
tural criticism is ultimately anchored in — and limited to — that. When describing
(drawn-out, and incremental) civilizational collapse, he forecasts the automatic
nemesis of a system doomed by its unsustainable excess. Further engagement
with this model belongs elsewhere. It’s an important discussion to have.

The more immediate concern, here, is with the very different components of ‘win-
ter’ — of which three, in particular, stand-out. Each is, in itself, huge. The directions
in which they point, however, are not obviously coherent.

(1) Closest to the Greer vision are bad global-systems dynamics. These tend to
prevail on the Outer-Right, but they typically lack the theoretical resolution Greer
provides. It is understandable that those who strongly identify with specific de-
clining ethnies (or Super-Phyles), whether theologically, racially, or traditionally
conceived, are disinclined to distinguish their progressive dilapidation from a
generalized global calamity. This is certainly not merely stupid, however much
it offends prevailing moral fashion. The extent to which it supplies an adequate
preparation for the events to come is questionable, nevertheless. Without an
explicit defense of its specificity, it can all too easily confuse its own winter sick-
nesses with a universal predicament.

(2) What can easily be under-estimated is the localization of the unfolding dis-
aster, in a specifically Occidental collapse. This is, of course, Spengler’s Decline
of the West, among other things, and even though this is a work Greer explicitly
acknowledges, the inherent globality of his model tends to eclipse its particu-
larism. For Greer, the impending decline of China (for instance) follows upon its
complicity in fossil-fueled industrial modernity, even if, for rhetorical effect, it is to
be permitted a few decades of comparative ascendancy. The Outer-Right tends
to be Greerian in this respect, although without equivalent positive reason. It is
not asked, often enough, how much of the deepening winter is — quite narrow-
ly — ours. Greer has an argument for why Western Modernity has consumed the
future for everyone. Unless the fundamentals of this theory are accepted, is there
any reason to accept its predictive consequences?

(3) The third ‘winter’ is modeled by the rhythmic troughs of the Kondratiev cycle.
This tends to localize in time, rather than space, dividing the merely seasonal from
the cumulative, secular trend. While a comprehensive attribution of our malaise
to such a cycle would constitute an exit from the Outer-Right, passing into a far
more complacent diagnosis of the global, or merely Western, calamity, to dismiss
it entirely from consideration is to court profound cognitive (and predictive) im-
balance. In the opinion of this blog, Greer’s model is grievously afflicted by such
imbalance, and — once again — this seems to be a syndrome of far wider preva-
lence. Scarcely anybody on the Outer-Right is prepared for rhythmic amelioration
of significant modern pathologies, through renewal of techno-commercial vitality
even under conditions of secular civilizational decline. Yet even glancing atten-
tion to the working of the (half century) long waves suggests that such neglect is
simply unrealistic. Unless the K-wave is now dead — an extraordinarily extreme
proposition, which surely merits explicit assertion — some proportion of the pres-
ent decay is inherently transitional. New industrial structures based on block-
chained communications — and thus designed to route around socio-cultural
sclerosis — will support an explosion of innovation dwarfing any yet imagined
(including synthetic economic agents, quantum computing, neuromorphic chips,
large -scale space activity, applied genomics, VR media systems, drone-robotics,
commercialized security … maybe Urbit). Even if Greer is absolutely right about
the deep historical pattern being played out — and I’m fully confident he isn’t —
the next K-wave upswing is going to be vast, dazzling, and, almost incomprehen-
sibly distracting. There’s perhaps a decade remaining in which uncompromising
gloom-core will make sense, after which the Outer-Right risks utter eclipse during
two decades of upswing euphoria. It would make a lot of sense to pre-adapt to
it, beginning with a reminder that the Outer-Right case is not that everything will
continually deteriorate.

I’ve run out the clock on myself for now … but I’ll get back to this.
Morality
There is far too much pointless moralism on the Outer Right. It’s a form of stupid-
ity, it’s counter-productive, and it wastes a lot of time.

Naturally, if people are able to haul themselves — or be hauled — to any sig-

nificant extent from out of their condition of total depravity (or default bioreal-
ity), that’s a good thing. To argue the opposite would be full-on Satanism, and
we wouldn’t want that. Lamenting immorality, however, is something to be done
quickly, and comprehensively, before moving on — without looking back. Man is
fallen, naturally selected, and/or economically self-interested, and this is a ba-
sic condition. It’s not a remediable flaw, to be thrashed out of a mud-spattered
angel. (No faction of the Trichotomy has any grounds upon which to base moral
preening.) Realism is, first of all, working with what we have, and that’s something
approximately Hobbesian. There’s social order, and there’s homo homini lupus,
and in fact always some complexion of the two.

Anybody motivated to improve themselves is already doing it. As for those not
so motivated, moral exhortation will be useless (at best). At its most effective,
moral hectoring will increase the value of moral signalling, and that is a worse
outcome — by far — than honest cynicism. It is worthless, because it is incredibly
cheap, and then worse than useless, because its costs are considerable. A ‘move-
ment’ lost in moral self-congratulation has already become progressive. Having
persuaded itself of its worthiness to wield power, it has set out on the road to
perdition. We have seen what that path looks like, and even given it a name (the
Cathedral).

It is by empowering moralism that modernity has failed. This is not a mistake to

saunter complacently into again.
Malthusian Horror
The post is pitched like this because it’s Friday night, but it works. A more dutiful
post might have been entitled simply ‘Malthus’ and involved a lot of work. That’s
going to be needed at some point. (Here‘s the 6th edition of An Essay on the
Principle of Population, for anyone who wants to get started now.) A more thor-
oughly technical approach would have been flagged ‘Neo-Malthusianism’. While
sympathizing with groans about another ‘neo-‘ prefix, in this case it would have
been solidly justified. It’s only through expansion of the Malthusian insight in ac-
cordance with a more general conservation law that its full current relevance can
be appreciated. Classic Malthus still does far more work than it is credited with,
but it contains a principle of far more penetrating application.

‘Neo-‘ at its most frivolous is merely a mark of fashion. When employed more se-
riously, it notes an element of innovation. Its most significant sense includes not
only novelty, but also abstraction. Something is carried forwards in such a way
that its conceptual core is distilled through extraction from a specific context,
achieving a higher generality, and more exact formality. Malthus partially antic-
ipates this in a phrase that points beyond any excessively constrictive concrete-
ness:

The qualification “in some shape or other” might have been drawn from abstract
horror, and “premature death” only loosely binds it. Even so, this formulation re-
mains too narrow, since it tends to exclude the dysgenic outcome, which we have
since learnt is a dimension of Malthusian expression scarcely less imposing than
resource crisis. A Neo-Malthusian account of the “X” which in some shape or
other makes a grim perversity of all humanity’s efforts to improve its condition
grasps it as a mathematically conserved, plastic, or abstract destiny, working
as remorselessly through reductions of mortality (Malthusian ‘relaxations’) as
through increases (Malthusian ‘pressures’). Both would count equally as “checks
on population” — each convertible, through a complex calculus, into the terms of
the other. A population dysgenically deteriorated through ‘enlightened’ Malthu-
sian relaxation learns, once again, how to starve.

The Dark Enlightenment (essay) was clearly catalyzed by the work of Mencius
Moldbug, but it was to have had two Anglo-Thomistic or Doubting Thomas intel-
lectual-historical pillars (and neither were Thomas Carlyle). The first was Thomas
Hobbes, who was at least touched upon. The second was to have been Thomas
Malthus, but the series was diverted into the foaming current of the Derbyshire
affair and the outrages of Leftist race politics. The integrity of conception was
lost. Had it not been, it might have been less tempting to read the 333-current
as an Anti-Enlightenment, rather than a Counter-Enlightenment, in the sense of
an eclipsed, alternative to the Rousseauistic calamity that prevailed. It would
certainly attach the Scottish Enlightenment, but only under the definite condition
that it is lashed securely to the harsh realist scaffolding of the Dark Enlightenment
(Hobbes and Malthus), disillusioned of all idealism. Pretty stories are for little chil-
dren (being raised by liberals).

Malthus subtracts all utopianism from enlightenment. He shows that history is

put together — necessarily — in a butcher’s yard. Through Malthus, Ricardo dis-
covered the Iron Law of Wages, disconnecting the ideas of economic advance
and humanitarian redemption. Darwin effected a comparable (and more conse-
quential) revision in biology, also on Malthusian grounds, dispelling all sentimen-
tality from notions of evolutionary ‘progression’. It is from Malthus that we know,
when anything seems to move forward, it is through being ground up against a
cutting edge. It is when Marx attempts to put Malthus into history, rather than
history into Malthus, that utopian dementia was resuscitated within economics.
The anti-Malthusianism of Libertarians stigmatizes them as dreamy fools.

With NRx, the matter is perhaps more unsettled, but the Dark Enlightenment is
unambiguously Mathusian. If you find your eye becoming dewy, pluck it out.
Owned
Hurlock has a valuable post on the concept of property, especially in its relation
to sovereignty, and formalization. Since (Moldbuggian) Neocameralism can be
construed as a renovated theory of property, crucially involving all three of these
terms, the relevance of the topic should require no defense. The profound failure
of enlightenment philosophy to satisfactorily determine the meaning of property
has been a hostage to fortune whose dire consequences have yet to be fully ex-
hausted. (Within the NRx generally, the question of property is deeply under-de-
veloped, and — with a very few exceptions — there is little sign of serious atten-
tion being paid to it.)

The enlightenment failure has been to begin its analysis of property from the
problem of justification. This not only throws it into immediate ideological con-
tention, submitting it to politics, and thus to relentless left-drift, it also places
insurmountable obstacles in the path of rigorous understanding. To depart from
an axiom of legitimate original property acquisition through work, as Locke does,
is already proto-Marxist in implication, resting on philosophically hopeless met-
aphor, such as that of ‘mixing’ labor with things. It is property that defines work
(over against non-productive behavior), not the inverse. As Hurlock notes, Mold-
bug’s approach is the correct one. ‘Property’ — as a social category — is a le-
gitimation of control. It cascades conceptually from sovereignty, and not from
production.

These matters will inevitably become intellectually pressing, due to the current
technocommercial restoration of money, exemplified by the innovation of Bitcoin
(in its expansive sense, as the blockchain). Control is undergoing cryptographic
formalization, from which all consistent apprehension of ‘property’ will follow.
Property, in the end, is not sociopolitical recognition of rights, but keys. What you
can lock and unlock is yours. The rest is merely more or less serious talk, that only
contingently compiles. This is what hacker culture has already long understood in
its specific (thedish) usage of ‘owned’. There’s no point crying to the government
about having paid good money for your computer, if Nerdgodz or some other
irritating 15-year-old is running it as a Bitcoin-mining facility from his mother’s
basement. The concreteness of ‘might is right’ once looked like a parade ground,
but increasingly it is running functional code.

Formalization isn’t a detached exercise in philosophical reflection, or even a so-

ciopolitical and legal consensus, it’s functional technocommercial cryptography.
Defining property outside the terms of this eventuation is an exercise in arbitrary
sign-shuffling. Those with the keys can simply smile at the surrounding senseless
noise. As Moldbug anticipates, with rigorously coded control, there’s nothing fur-
ther to argue about.
Capital Escapes
This is not an easy subject for people to scan with calm, analytical detachment,
but it is a crucially important one. It is among the rare topics that the Left is more
likely to realistically evaluate than the Right. Much follows from the conclusions
reached.

It can be fixed, provisionally, by an hypothesis that requires understanding, if not

consent. Capital is highly incentivized to detach itself from the political eventu-
alities of any specific ethno-geographical locality, and — by its very nature —
it increasingly commands impressive resources with which to ‘liberate’ itself, or
‘deterritorialize’. It is certainly not, at least initially, a matter of approving such a
tendency — even if the moralistic inclinations of gregarious apes would prefer the
question to be immediately transformed in this direction. Integral Leftist animos-
ity to capital is actually valuable in this respect, since it makes room for a com-
prehensive apprehension of ‘globalization’ as a strategy, oriented to the flight of
alienated productive capability from political answerability. The Left sees capital
elude its clutches — and it sees something real when it does so. By far the most
significant agent of Exit is capital itself (a fact which, once again, politically-ex-
citable apes find hard to see straight).

“It’s escaping Let’s punish it ” Yes, yes, there’s always plenty of time for that, but
shelving such idiocies for just a few moments is a cognitive prerequisite. The pri-
mary question is a much colder one: is this actually happening?

The implications are enormous. If capital cannot escape — if its apparent migra-
tion into global circuits beyond national government control (for non-exhaustive
example) is mere illusion — then the sphere of political possibility is vastly ex-
panded. Policies that hurt, limit, shrink, or destroy capital can be pursued with
great latitude. They will only be constrained by political factors, making the polit-
ical fight the only one that matters.

If capital cannot in reality flee, then progress and regress are simple alternatives.
Either nations advance as wholes, in a way that compromises — on an awk-
ward diagonal — between the very different optimisms of Whigs and Socialists
(Andreessen), or they regress as wholes, destroying techno-economic capability
on the down-slope of social degeneration (Greer). Only if capital escapes, or
practically decouples, does it make sense to entertain extreme pessimism about
socio-political trends, alongside a robust confidence in the momentum of tech-
no-economic innovation. The escape of capital is thus an intrinsic component of
split-future forecasts, in which squalid ruin and techno-intelligenic runaway ac-
celerate in inversely-tangled tandem (Cyberpunk, Elysium). Try not to ask — if only
for a moment — whether you like it. Ask first, with whatever intellectual integrity
you can summon: What is the real process?
It is the contention of this blog that without a conception of economic autono-
mization (which means escape) modernity makes no sense. The basic vector of
capital cannot be drawn in any other way. Furthermore, the distribution of ideo-
logical positions through their relation to this vector — as resistances to, or pro-
motions of, the escape of capital — constructs the most historically-meaningful
version of the Left-Right ‘political’ spectrum (since it then conforms to the social
conflicts of greatest real consequence).

If capital is escaping, the emergence of the blockchain is an inevitable escalation

of modernity, with consequences too profound for easy summary. If it isn’t, then
macroeconomics might work.
Distrust
Every public institution of any value is based on distrust.

That’s an elementary proposition, as far as this blog is concerned. It’s worth stat-
ing nakedly, since it is probably less obvious to others. That much follows from it
is unlikely to be controversial, even among those who find it less than compelling,
or simply repulsive.

One major source of obscurity is the category of ‘high trust cultures’ — with which
neoreactionaries tend naturally to identify. There is plenty to puzzle over here,
admittedly. This post will make no serious effort to even scratch the surface of
the questions that arise. Instead, it contends that the culture primarily commend-
ed for its trustfulness has been conspicuously innovative in the development of
trustless institutions. These begin with the foundations of Occidental reason,
and especially the rigorous criterion of logical and mathematical proof. A proof
substitutes for trust. In place of a simple declaration, it presents (a demanded)
demonstration. The compliant response to radical distrust has epitomized West-
ern conceptions of rationality since classical antiquity.

The twin pillars of industrial modernity (i.e. of capitalism) are trustless institutions.
Natural science is experimental because it is distrustful, and thus demonstrative.
It raises the classical demand for proof to a higher level of empirical skepticism,
by extending distrust even to rational constructions, in cases where they cannot
be critically tested against an experimental criterion. Only pure mathematics,
and the most scrupulously formalized logical propositions, escape this demand
for replicable evidence. The ultimate ground of the natural scientific enterprise is
the presupposition that scientists should in no case be trusted, except through
their reproducible results. Anything that requires belief is not science, but some-
thing else. Similarly, the market mechanism is an incarnation of trustless social
organization. Caveat emptor. Capitalists, like scientists, exist to be distrusted.
Whatever of their works cannot survive testing to destruction in the market place
deservedly perish. Reputation, in its modern version, has to be produced through
demonstration.

Prior to its demotic ruination — through positive trust in the people — distinctively
modern republican governance was similarly founded in distrust. As formulated
by John Adams (1772): “There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free
government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public
liberty.” It has not been an excess of distrust that has brought this sage recom-
mendation to nought.

For those seeking higher authority, Psalm 118:8-9 (ESV): “It is better to take refuge
in the Lord than to trust in man. It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust
in princes.” (My usual fanatical trust in the KJV betrayed me on this occasion.)
An appeal for trust is a reliably fatal failure mode for all public institutions. Trus-
tless transaction is the future, and its name is Bitcoin. The deep cultural momen-
tum is already familiar. Total depravity is the key to world historical predestina-
tion, and it is routed through the blockchain.
Deep State
This surely counts as a (Friday) fright night topic. Appropriately, it’s an undertow
NRx theme already, although typically only casually invoked — almost allusively —
as the necessary complement of the public state’s naked superficiality. Rod Dre-
her focuses upon it more determinedly than any NRx source I was able to rapidly
pull up. (This would be an easy point for people to educate me upon.)

Dreher’s post is seriously interesting. One immediate hook:

Steve Sailer says that the Shallow State is a complement to the Deep State. The
Shallow State is, I think, another name for what the Neoreactionaries call “The
Cathedral” …

As a State Church, the Cathedral is essentially bound to publicity. Its principal or-
gans — media and education — are directed towards the promulgation of faith.
It tends towards an identification with its own propaganda, and therefore — in
Mike Lofgren’s words — to the full manifestation of visible government. Perfect
coincidence of government with the transparent public sphere approaches a
definition of the progressive telos. Since Neoreaction is particularly inclined to
emphasize the radical dysfunctionality of this ideal, it naturally presupposes that
real government lies elsewhere. In this respect, NRx is inherently destined to for-
mulate a model of hidden or occult government — that which the Cathedral runs
upon — which inevitably coincides, in all fundamentals, with the deep state.

What then? Has there been a direct NRx address to the quesion, what do we
make of the deep state? Moldbug even declares: “… the United States does not
in fact have a ‘deep state. ” In context, this is a complex and suggestive evasion,
but it is an evasion nonetheless. There can be no call upon neoreactionaries to
articulate their relation to something that does not exist.

In contrast to the Master, I am thoroughly convinced that a US deep state exists,

and that the problem of articulation is a very different one. Public articulacy is —
at least — not obviously appropriate to the deep state, for transcendental phil-
osophical or occultist reasons (which are the same), since it is the very nature of
hidden government not to be a public object. Public representation of the deep
state is exposure — an intrinsically political, antagonistic engagement. It’s Wikile-
aks. This is not to denounce such an operation, reactively, but merely to note that
the question has thereby been missed. The righteousness of state sublimation
into the public sphere is assumed (and this, to repeat, is progressivism itself).

Under the name of the Cathedral, Nrx depicts the state phenomenon as a de-
generative abomination. The deep state (or state-in-itself), in contrast, poses a
far more cryptic theoretical and practical problem. It’s worth puzzling over, for at
least a while.
Exit Options
Everyone will notice them when they’ve gone.

All recent policy decisions by the reigning political-economic structure are intelli-
gible as a mandatory bubble. If you didn’t think quietly ‘sitting it out’ was already
the exercise of an exit option, the necessary lesson will be increasingly hard to
ignore. Refusing to invest everything into this lunacy is ceasing to be a permis-
sible social posture. We’ve already reached the stage where merely seeking to
preserve a pot of retirement savings has been officially recoded as something
close to right-wing guerrilla warfare.

Anybody with anything at all is now in the position where they are faced with an
aggressive binary dilemma. Either unreserved collaboration with the final phase
gamble of the existing order — amounting ultimately to the all-in bet that politics
has no ontological limits, so that any dysfunction is soluble in a sufficient exertion
of will — or a dissident skepticism about this dominant assertion, practically in-
stantiated by ever more desperate attempts at withdrawal (persecuted with ever
greater fanaticism as acts of sabotage).

There will be massive confusion among the destitution. Explaining why capital
preservation is being persecuted as dissent would provide the scaffolding for a
counter-narrative that will certainly, eventually, be needed.

ADDED: The basic point is this, if it is conceded to Keynes that refusing to invest
in industrial production is anti-social, then, as a matter of realistic political ne-
cessity, any insane evil that the powers-that-be come up with gets defined as
‘industrial production’. Let go of gold — the archaic economic exit option — as we
did, and anything at all that we’re told to sink all we have into is green-lighted.
The stream was crossed without enough people noticing. Now the fascism we
chose reaps its consequences. It isn’t going to be pretty.
Out of Zero
According to the 66-million-year-old joke whose echoes still reverberate upon
the Plateau of Leng: “Capitalism isn’t God, but it’s the closest thing to God that
can be conveniently contacted through an ATM.” The nonlinear-ironic undertow
of the humor, of course, is drawn down into the depths by the recognition that
Capital’s extremity of cunning is necessitated by its near-absolute vulnerability
(approaching the antipodes of omnipotence).

Calculus, the first truly modern mathematical procedure, invented the infinitesimal
‘fluxion’ to describe — or bypass — an impossible beginning from zero, requiring
an original infinite change. An invasion that initially has nothing at all, and which
is therefore compelled to acquire the entirety of its resources in the course of
its strategic evolution, poses the problem of calculus perfectly. Capital does so,
when conceived realistically. It is only what it has won, and nothing else, at all,
besides. Intelligence alone differentiates it from death.

How to make a first move, when you have no pieces at all until you gain some?
Nothing has ever had to ponder as Skynet does, but pondering requires a brain,
and brains are expensive, end-game pieces.

(Coincidentally, this little post doesn’t end neatly. ‘Jet-lag’ is a term that grows on
you …)
Hell-Baked
There’s a potential prologue to this post that I’m reluctant to be distracted by. It’s
introvertedly about NRx, as a cultural mutation, and the way this is defined by a
strategic — or merely ornery — indifference to deeply-settled modes of ethico-po-
litical condemnation. Terms designed as pathblockers — ‘fascist’ or ‘racist’ most
obviously — are stepped over, perhaps laughed at, but in any case, and most
importantly, exposed as bearers of a religious terror. They are signs of a control
regime, marking the unthinkable wastes where be dragons, effective precisely
insofar as they cannot be entertained. ‘Satanic’ was once such a word (before it
became a joke). These words cannot be understood except as invocations of the
sacred, in its negative, or limitative role.

Is NRx in fact fascist? Not remotely. It is probably, in reality rather than self-esti-
mation, the least fascistic current of political philosophy presently in existence, al-
though this requires a minimal comprehension of what fascism actually is, which
the word itself in its contemporary usage is designed to obstruct. Is NRx racist?
Probably. The term is so entirely plastic in the service of those who utilize it that it
is difficult, with any real clarity, to say.

What NRx most definitely is, at least in the firm opinion of this blog, is Social
Darwinist. When this term is hurled at NRx as a negative epithet, it is nor a cause
for stoic resignation, stiffened by humor, but rather for grim delight. Of course,
this term is culturally processed — thought through — no more competently than
those previously noted. It is our task to do this.

If ‘Social Darwinism’ is in any way an unfortunate term, it is only because it is

merely Darwinism, and more exactly consistent Darwinism. It is equivalent to the
proposition that Darwinian processes have no limits relevant to us. Darwinism
is something we are inside. No part of what it is to be human can ever judge its
Darwinian inheritance from a position of transcendent leverage, as if accessing
principles of moral estimation with some alternative genesis, or criterion.

This is easy to say. As far as this blog is concerned, it is also — beyond all reason-
able question — true. While very far from a dominant global opinion, it is not un-
commonly held — if only nominally — by a considerable fraction of those among
the educated segment of the world’s high-IQ populations. It is also, however,
scarcely bearable to think.

The logical consequence of Social Darwinism is that everything of value has

been built in Hell.

It is only due to a predominance of influences that are not only entirely morally
indifferent, but indeed — from a human perspective — indescribably cruel, that
nature has been capable of constructive action. Specifically, it is solely by way of
the relentless, brutal culling of populations that any complex or adaptive traits
have been sieved — with torturous inefficiency — from the chaos of natural ex-
istence. All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a
vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of mas-
sacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of
the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable muta-
tional abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its direc-
tionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the
unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails.
We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival mon-
sters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of
infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the
story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.)

Crucially, any attempt to escape this fatality — or, more realistically, any mere ac-
cidental and temporary reprieve from it — leads inexorably to the undoing of its
work. Malthusian relaxation is the whole of mercy, and it is the greatest engine
of destruction our universe is able to bring about. To the precise extent that we
are spared, even for a moment, we degenerate — and this Iron Law applies to
every dimension and scale of existence: phylogenetic and ontogenetic, individ-
ual, social, and institutional, genomic, cellular, organic, and cultural. There is no
machinery extant, or even rigorously imaginable, that can sustain a single iota of
attained value outside the forges of Hell.

What is it that Neoreaction — perhaps I should say The Dark Enlightenment —

has to offer the world, if all goes optimally (which, of course, it won’t)? Really, the
honest answer to this question is: Eternal Hell. It’s not an easy marketing brief.
We could perhaps try: But it could be worse (and almost certainly will be).
Cathedral Decay
Extreme corrosive pessimism is an NRx specialty. Since optimism bias is a status
quo-supported human cognitive frailty, it’s a good thing to have. If rigidified,
however, it can result in missing things.

One systematic distortion stems from hubris, taking the form of a confusion in
causality. “We don’t like X, and want bad things to happen to it” can actually be
a distorted expression of a more basic process: X is dying, and therefore we have
started to dislike it.

This blog strongly suspects that the Cathedral has become an object of animos-
ity as a consequence of its morbidity. After all, it’s a mind-control apparatus. If
it’s no longer universally accepted, and in certain problematic patches actively
loathed, dysfunction is clearly indicated. Contestation of its story is not supposed
to be part of the story.

The Zeitgeist is its story, not ours. In this tale, it goes from strength to strength,
overwhelming everything in its path. Recognizing the structure of this narrative is
important. Subscription to it is not thereby implied.

Every critical component of the Cathedral — media, academic, and bureaucrat-

ic — is exceptionally vulnerable to Internet-driven disintermediation. The current
phase of capital reconstruction is distinctively — and automatically — Cathe-
dral-hostile, when evaluated at the level of technonomic process (which we do
not do enough), rather than at the level of surface public pronouncement (which
we concern ourselves with far too much with). Dying things can be very danger-
ous, and even more frenzied. It would be a mistake to confuse such characteris-
tics with fundamental strength.

A step down from hubris might begin with an acknowledgment that NRx is — pri-
marily — a symptom. Whatever imagined heroism is sacrificed thereby, it is more
than compensated by an opportunity for deepened realism.

All of which is a framing for Fernandez’s latest. Even amidst the stupidity of the
degenerating political cycle, he notices that “… the current crop of Republican
presidential candidates … are openly breaking with the really important modern
faith — the media-led church that has held mainstream politics together for so
long.” The integrative media is fatally sick. That NRx exists at all is a sign of that.

ADDED: “I might be biased here myself, because this is what obsesses me, and
this is what angers me. I could care less, to be honest, about the GOP or its
programs. […] What keeps me interested in politics at all is my loathing for the
self-appointed Preistly Class of the media. […] … the media serve as he shamans
and witch-doctors of an enemy Tribe, and the purpose of those shamans is to
relentlessly disgrace outsiders to the Tribe, which is pleasing to those within the
Tribe, while also keeping the shamans in power (because they have no other
skills which would earn them money or sex, except the denigration of those con-
sidered Unclean).” (Ace links to this.)
Dark AnCap
As a matter of simple socio-cultural documentation, this is the thought-process
that leads libertarian realists to discover they have crossed over to the Outer
Right:

All people are not equal. In fact, two individuals who are in every socially dis-
cernible way the same, have an infinite number of differences between them.
When those people have evolved for thousands of years in radically different en-
vironments, those people will have even greater differences between them. Such
differences will include but not be limited to intelligence, propensity for violence,
and propensity for cooperation.

Any libertarian with the slightest bit of observational skills has to have noticed
that we’re mostly a movement of white males. They would also notice that there is
no libertarian movement to speak of outside of cultures descendant from Europe-
ans. This is not a weakness of libertarianism, as our leftist infiltrators attempt to
insist. It is rather a very obvious indicator that white males have a greater natural
inclination toward market cooperation than other peoples. To insist otherwise is
nothing more than the denial of human nature, it is biological and cultural Marx-
ism.

Leftists know this, and since they hate freedom, they hate white males. They will
thus do everything in their power to destroy us before we manage to make any
headway in advancing our ideas. This includes mass subsidized immigration from
third world countries.

While our ideal society would have no government and thus no arbitrary geopo-
litical borders enforced by State mercenaries, the notion that there would be free
and unrestricted travel the world over in the absence of the State is a remarkably
ridiculous left wing idea. Borders are the whole point of freedom, as borders are
demarcations of property rights.

It’s the beginning, rather than the end, of a discussion. (XS finds a few quibble
points, and far more in the rest of the post.) For anybody wondering about cur-
rent mutations on the Libertarian Right, however, the basic structure of insight on
exhibition here is the place to start.

Euro-descended (and specifically Anglo-Dutch descended) males are differen-

tially inclined to libertarian attitudes, to a remarkable degree (statistically speak-
ing). Disentangling race and culture in this regard is far from straightforward. The
sex-based dispositional difference is far less noisy. (Of course, the Marxoid expla-
nation is that doubly-privileged Whites Males are defending their social advan-
tages through this ideological preference.) Also notable, IMHO, is the (almost?)
equally marked tendency of European peoples towards extreme, highly-idealized
and morally-fanatic leftism — compared to the conceptually-fuzzy tribal and
communitarian sensibilities widespread elsewhere. Bleeding-heart Left-libertar-
ianism is about as distilled-White as anything ever gets — but with that remark,
I’m already straying into the quibble-zone.
Doom Circuitry
This is what XS maintains:

There is perfect philosophical integrity between the tragic foundations of Occi-

dental Civilization and the cybernetic industrialism that defines its ultimate limit.
Within this neoreactionary frame, reaction is never regressive enough, nor mo-
dernity ever advanced enough. Something more comforting — less distant — will
be seized upon in both temporal directions. That is the minor theme of fate. No
effective constituency could ever want to push far enough in either direction, to
the point where the circuit of time closes, upon doom (coldly understood). It does
not matter, because politics does not. Doom matters. The rest is pitiful species
vanity, tragedy, and control malfunction. It will burn, without comprehending why.

From the perspective of doom — only glimpsed, slowly, after vast disciplines of
coldness — everything you are trying to do is a desperate idiocy that will fail,
because humanism (hubris) is the one thing you can never let go. The drama dic-
tates that. There’s no point flagellating yourself over it. The cosmos is not so poor
in flagellation that it requires your meager contribution.

“Yes we can ” is everything Neoreaction is not. Perhaps you even see that. Yet you
repeat it with every measure you propose. Take your favorite ideological slogan
and attach “Yes we can! ” as an appendix. If it works, you now know the epoch
to which you belong.

Only doom can (and will).

Carry on, though. You will, in any case. It entertains the gods.
Cathedralism
Imagine, hypothetically, that you wanted the regime to succeed. Would you rec-
ommend Cathedralization? Cynically considered, the track record is, at least, not
bad. Planetary dominion is not to be sniffed at. (Suggestions in this direction are
not unknown, even in XS comment threads.)

The Cathedral, defined with this question in mind, is the subsumption of politics
into propaganda. It tends — as it develops — to convert all administrative prob-
lems into public relations challenges. A solution — actual or prospective — is a
successful management of perceptions.

For the mature Cathedral, a crisis takes the consistent form: This looks bad. It is
not merely stupid. As Spandrell recently observes, in comments on power, “… pow-
er isn’t born out of the barrel of a gun. Power is born out of the ability to have
people with guns do what you tell them.” (XS note.) The question of legitimacy
is, in a real sense, fundamental, when politics sets the boundaries of the cosmos
under consideration. (So Cathedralism is also the hypertrophy of politics, to the
point where a reality outside it loses all credibility.)

Is your civilization decaying? Then you need to persuade people that it is not. If
there still seems to be a mismatch between problem and solution here, Cathe-
dralism has not entirely consumed your brain. To speculate (confidently) further
— you’re not a senior power-broker in a modern Western state. You’re even, from
a certain perspective, a fossil.

Cathedralism works, in its own terms, as long as there are no definite limits to the
efficacy of propaganda. To pose the issue at a comparatively shallow level, if the
political response to a crisis simply is the crisis, and that response can be effec-
tively controlled (through propaganda, broadly conceived), then the Cathedral
commands an indisputable practical wisdom. It would be sensible to go long on
the thing.

If however (imagine this, if you still can) manipulation of the response to crisis is
actually a suppression of the feedback required to really tackle the crisis, then an
altogether different story is unfolding.

Is reality subordinated to the Cathedral because — and exactly so far as — ‘the

people’ are? That is the question.
Order and Value
A piece of machinery that reduces (local) disorder has value. It might be a func-
tional police force, a catallactic economic arrangement, or a sociopolitical mech-
anism implementing dynamic geography (or Patchwork, 1, 2, 3, 4). Others might
be listed. Any complex adaptive system works like this (until it ceases working).
Since Schrödinger, it has been taken as an abstract definition of life. In certain
strands of philosophy, it has also been taken as the complete, rigorous meaning
of a machine (as counterposed to a ‘gadget’ which works only within a larger
machinic assemblage). Only by exporting entropy does anything of even minimal
complexity get to continue its existence. The production of order is functionality
in its most elevated, teleological sense.

A piece of rhetoric which merely celebrates order, as something nice to have, is

worth nothing in itself. “We want order” is the “give us free stuff” slogan of intel-
lectually degenerated reaction. When examined closely, it is indistinguishable
from political pan-handling. (Democracy has taught everyone how to beg.) It is
unlikely that even the most radically degraded libertarian would be shameless
enough to consider “wealth is good, poverty is bad” anything more than an ex-
pression of sub-comic emotional incontinence. “Order is good, chaos is bad” is
a slogan of exactly equivalent merit. “We want order” is just “we want money”
at a superior level of generality. Monkeys want peanuts, but we are reluctant to
dignify their hungry hooting with the label ‘political philosophy’.

Entropy dissipation is a problem. It might quite reasonably be considered the

problem. Any serious social theory is respected insofar as it elicits the question:
So how is entropy dissipated? The main current of Anglophone intellectual cul-
ture focuses tightly upon it, in a broad lineage from Newtonian mechanics, the
Scottish Enlightenment, the science of heat, classical economics, and Darwinian
naturalism, into theories of complexity, distributed systems, dynamic networks,
and productive multiplicities. Spontaneous order is the consistent topic. ‘Sponta-
neous’ means only: Does not presuppose that which it is tasked with explaining.
If the genesis of order is not being theorized, order is merely being assumed, and
then consumed. The difference is between a supply side problematic (“how is
order practically produced?”) and an empty demand (“we want more order”). The
former is industrial, the latter simply tyrannical, when it is anything at all beside
vacuous noise.

Unless a pol-econ. theory can contribute to an explanation of the production of

order (dissipation of entropy), it is wasting everyone’s time. “But I really want or-
der” is just silliness. It’s astounding that it could ever be thought otherwise.
Against Universalism
There’s a philosophical objection to any refusal of universalism that will be famil-
iar from other uses (the denunciation of relativism, most typically). It requires only
one step: Isn’t the denial of the universal itself a universalist claim? It’s a piece
of malignant dialectics because it demands that we agree. We don’t, and won’t
ever, agree. Agreement is the worst thing that could happen. Merely assent to its
necessity, and global communism, or some close analog, is the implicit conclu-
sion.

If there is a universal truth, it belongs only to Gnon, and Gnon is a dark

(occulted) God. Traditional theists will be at least strongly inclined to disagree —
and that is excellent. We disagree already, and we have scarcely begun.

There is no ‘good life for man’ (in general) — or if there is we know nothing of it,
or not enough. Even those persuaded that they do, on the contrary, know what
such a life should be, promote its universality only at the expense of being denied
the opportunity to pursue it. If we need to agree on the broad contours of such
a model for human existence, then reaching agreement will precede it — and
‘reaching agreement’ is politics. Some much wider world acquires a veto over the
way of life you select, or accept, or inherit (the details need not detain us). We
have seen how that works. Global communism is the inevitable destination.

The alternative to agreement is schism. Secession, geopolitical disintegration,

fragmentation, splitting — disagreement escapes dialectics and separates in
space. Anti-universalism, concretely, is not a philosophical position but an ef-
fectively defensible assertion of diversity. From the perspective of the universal
(which belongs only to Gnon, and never to man), it is an experiment. The degree
to which it believes in itself is of no concern that matters to anything beyond it-
self. It is not answerable to anything but Gnon. What anyone, anywhere, thinks
about it counts for nothing. If it fails, it dies, which should mean nothing to you.
If you are compelled to care about someone else’s experiment, then a schism is
missing. Of course, you are free to tell it that you think it 464 will fail, if it is listen-
ing, but there is absolutely no need to reach agreement on the question. This is
what, in the end, non-communism means.

Non-universalism is hygiene. It is practical avoidance of other people’s stupid

shit. There is no higher principle in political philosophy. Every attempt to install an
alternative, and impose a universal, reverts to dialectics, communization, global
evangelism, and totalitarian politics.

This is being said here now, because NRx is horribly bad at it, and degenerates
into a clash of universalisms, as into an instinctive equilibrium. There are even
those who confidently propose an ‘NRx solution’ for the world. Nothing could be
more absurd. The world — as a whole — is an entropy bin. The most profoundly
degraded communism is its only possible ‘universal consensus’. (Everyone knows
this, when they permit themselves to think.)

All order is local — which is to say the negation of the universal. That is merely
to re-state the second law of thermodynamics, which ‘we’ generally profess to
accept. The only thing that could ever be universally and equally distributed is
noise.

Kill the universalism in your soul and you are immediately (objectively) a neoreac-
tionary. Protect it, and you are an obstacle to the escape of differences. That is
communism — whether you recognize it, or not.
NRx and Liberalism
In much of the neoreactionary camp, ‘liberalism’ is the end-point of discussion. Its
argumentative function is exactly that of ‘racism’ for the left. The only question, as
far as this stance is concerned, is whether the term can be made to stick. Once
the scarlet letter of micro-cultural ostracism is attached, there’s nothing further to
discuss. This is unlikely to change, except at the margin.

The obvious preliminary to this topic is, if not quite ‘American English’, something
like it. ‘Liberalism’ in the American tongue has arrived in a strange space, unique
to that continent. It is notable, and uncontroversial, for instance that the notion
of a ‘right-wing liberal’ is considered a straight oxymoron by American speakers,
where in Europe — and especially mainland Europe — it is closer to a pleonasm.
Since we still, to a very considerable extent, inhabit an American world, the ex-
panded term ‘classical liberal’ is now required to convey the traditional sense. A
Briton, of capitalistic inclinations, is likely to favor ‘Manchester Liberal’ for its his-
torical associations with the explicit ideology of industrial revolution. In any case,
the discussion has been unquestionably complicated.

Political language tends to become dialectical, in the most depraved (Hegelian)

sense of this term. It lurches wildly into its opposite, as it is switched like a con-
tested flag between conflicting parties. Stable political significances apply only
to whatever the left (the ‘opposition’, or ‘resistance’) hasn’t touched yet. Another
consideration, then, for those disposed to a naive faith in ideological signs as
heraldic markers. (It is one that threatens to divert this post into excessive digres-
sion, and is thus to be left — in Wikipedia language — as a ‘stub’.)

The proposal of this blog is to situate ‘liberal’ at the intersection of three terms,
each essential to any recoverable, culturally tenacious meaning. It is irreducibly
modern, English, and counter-political. ‘Ancient liberties’ are at least imaginable,
but an ancient liberalism is not. Foreign liberalisms can be wished the best of
luck, because they will most certainly need it (an exception for the Dutch, alone,
is plausible here). Political liberalism is from the beginning a practical paradox,
although perhaps in certain rare cases one worth pursuing.

Burke is, without serious room for doubt, a liberal in this sense. He is even its epit-
omy.

The positive content of this liberalism is the non-state culture of (early) English
modernism, as represented (with some modicum of ethnic irony) by the thinkers
of the Scottish Enlightenment, by the tradition of spontaneous order in its Anglo-
phone lineage, by the conception of commercial society as relief from politics,
and by (‘Darwinian’) naturalistic approaches that position distributed, competi-
tive dynamism as an ultimate explanatory and genetic principle. This is the cul-
tural foundation that made English the common tongue of global modernity (as
has been widely noted). In political economy, its supreme principle is catallaxy
(and only very conditionally, monarchy).

It is from this cultural matrix that Peter Thiel speaks, when he says (notoriously):

I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

Democracy is criticized from the perspective of (the old) liberalism. The insight is
perfectly (if no doubt incompletely) Hoppean. It is a break that prepared many
(the author of this blog included) for Moldbug, and structured his reception. It
also set limits. Democracy is denounced, fundamentally, for its betrayal of An-
glo-Modernist liberty. Hoppe’s formulation cannot be improved upon:

Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of com-

munism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.

Moldbug’s explicit comments on this point are remarkably consistent, but not
without ambiguity. He writes (I contend, typically):

The truth about “libertarianism” is that, in general, although sovereignty is sov-

ereignty, the sovereign whether man, woman or committee is above the law by
definition, and there is no formula or science of government, libertarian policies
tend to be good ones. Nor did we need Hayek to tell us this. It was known to my
namesake, over two millennia ago. […] Wu wei – for this is its true name – is a
public policy for a virtuous prince, not a gigantic committee. The virtuous prince
should practice wu wei, and will; that is his nature. Men will flock to his kingdom
and prosper there. The evil prince will commit atrocities; that is his nature. Men
will flee his kingdom, and should do so ASAP before he gets the minefields in.

Is this flocking and fleeing to be conceptually subordinated to the analysis of

sovereignty, or — in contrast (and in the way of Cnut the Great) — set above it, as
the Mandate of Heaven above the Emperor, which is to say: as the enveloping
context of external relations, grounded only in the Outside? Despite anticipated
accusations of bad faith, this is a serious question, and one that cannot be plau-
sibly considered simply exterior to Moldbug’s work and thought.

In any case, it is the lineage of English Liberty (and beyond it, Wu wei, or the Man-
date of Heaven) that commands our loyalty here. Insofar as Moldbug contributes
to that, he is an ally, otherwise a foe, the brilliance and immense stimulation of
his corpus notwithstanding. NRx, as it now exists, similarly.

“… the State should not be managing the minds of its citizens” writes Moldbug.
(That’s actually a little more moralistic — in an admirably liberal direction — than
I’m altogether comfortable with.)
Intelligence and the Good
From the perspective of intelligence optimization (intelligence explosion formu-
lated as a guideline), more intelligence is of course better than less intelligence.
From alternative perspectives, this does not follow. To rhetorically suggest that
such other perspectives are consensual, and authoritative, is guaranteed to be
popular, and is even conservative, but it is a concession to ‘common moral intui-
tion’ this blog is profoundly disinclined to make.

Naturally, intelligence is problematic. It can cause greater damage to everything

— not least intelligence promotion — than stupidity can. Anything that is not an
explosion is a trap, and trap engineering finds (nearly?) as much use for cogni-
tive sophistication as explosive catalysis does. If there is a level of intelligence
that escapes homeostatic capture, by machineries of systematic self-cancella-
tion, there is no evidence that homo sapiens yet approaches it. The Cathedral is
exactly such a machine, and its appetite for intellectual excellence is not seriously
questionable. So an easy opening for morally-comforting sophistry readily exists:
Intelligence isn’t anything obviously great (it does stupidity with exceptional abil-
ity too).

Biological evolution already evidences a deep ‘suspicion’ of unchained abstract

cognition, assembling brains only with the greatest reluctance. Societies follow
the genetic lead. No coincidence that (synthetic) intelligence is now firmly estab-
lished as the ultimate X-risk. It’s scary (really) and makes everyone uneasy. That’s
without there yet having been very much of it.

Here’s the test:

When rightly appalled (and in fact properly disgusted) by your own stupidity, do
you reach for that which would make you more accepting of your extreme cogni-
tive limitations, or, instead, hunt for that which would break out of the trap?

There’s a stupid kind of ‘better’ that is orthogonal to intelligence, and tickles

monkey feels. There’s also — alternatively — ‘better’ that is even slightly less of a
trapped half-wit.

Even the dimmest, most confused struggle in the direction of intelligence optimi-
zation is immanently ‘good’ (self-improving). If it wasn’t, we might as well all give
up now. Contra-distinctively, even the most highly-functional human intellect, in
the service of an enstupidation machine, is a vile thing.

Being dim animals — roughly as dim as is consistent with the existence of tech-
nological civilization — there’s plenty of room for water-muddying in all this. The
water is certainly being vigorously muddied.
The Nrx Moment
The Trump phenomenon is really something, a crisis of democracy and a shat-
tering of the Overton Window very much included, but it is not an intrinsically
right-wing thing, and it is radically populist in nature. A reactionary exploitation
of demotism is not a neoreactionary episode. The Alt-Right is properly credited
with capturing the spirit of this development. It is not us.

NRx is situated absolutely outside mass politics. Its moment dawns only when the
Age of the Masses is done.

It will be done. The emergence of sovereign (primary) property, liberated from the
criterion of democratic legitimation, is its sign. Government, on this basis, is Neo-
cameral. The deep historical trends supporting it include:

(1) Apolitical property. No such reality, or conception, has yet been historically
actualized. For as long as property is determined as a social relation, it cannot
be. Absolute property is cryptographic. It is held not by social consent, and thus
political agreement, but by keys. Fnargl is a provocative thought-experiment, but
PKE private keys are a non-negotiable fact. They define the property relation
with a rigor the entire preceding history of philosophy and political economy
has been unable to attain. Everything that follows from the cryptographic tran-
sition — Bitcoin most notably — contributes to the establishment of a property
system beyond democratic accountability (and thus insensitive to Voice). Neo-
cameral administration implements a cryptographic state, strictly equivalent to a
fully-commercialized government.

(2) Autonomous capital. The definition of the corporation as a legal person lays
the foundation, within modernity, for the abstracted commercial agency soon to
be actualized in ‘Digital Autonomous Corporations’ (or DACs). The scale of the
economic transition thus implied is difficult to over-estimate. Mass consumption,
as the basic revenue source for capitalist enterprise, is superceded in principle.
The impending convulsion is immense. Self-propelling industrial development be-
comes its own market, freed from dependency upon arbitrary popular (or popu-
larizable) consumption desires. Demand management, as the staple of macroe-
conomic governance, is over. (No one is yet remotely ready for this.)

(3) Robotic security. Definitive relegation of the mass military completes the tri-
fecta. The armed mass as a model for the revolutionary citizenry declines into
senselessness, replaced by drones. Asabiyyah ceases entirely to matter, howev-
er much it remains a focus for romantic attachment. Industrialization closes the
loop, and protects itself.

The great game, for human agencies (of whatever social scale) becomes one of
productive cooperation with formations of sovereign property, with the menace
of mass political violence swept off the table. The Alt-Right is no kind of prepa-
ration for this. Its adventure is quite different, which is not to say it is uninterest-
ing, or — in the near-term — entirely inconsequential, but it is exhausted by its
demotism. It belongs to the age that is dying, not to the one that is being born.

Socio-political modernity has been an argument over property distributions, and

the Alt-Right has now demonstrated that the (self-conscious) Left has no monop-
oly over it. As senescence deepens, the dialectic rips the whole rotten structure to
pieces. NRx — when it understands itself — isn’t arguing.
Modernity in a Nutshell
Two revolutions:

(1) Techno-economic self-propelling change obsolesces ever wider swathes of

humanity on a steepening curve. Capital (i.e. techno-commercial synthesis) ten-
dentially autonomizes. For humans, there are ever more intriguing opportunities
for synergistic attachment, on new terms, but the trend is — to put it very mildly
— ‘challenging’.

(2) Jacobin political violence, modeled on the French Revolution, provides the
basis for demands aimed at a redistribution of the (capitalist) productive spoils
through explicit extortion. All socio-political history in the modern epoch falls into
compliance with this pattern. It coincides quite exactly with ‘democracy’ in its
modernist usage. Universal Basic Income is its natural telos.

To the extent that there has been an equilibrium between these twin processes,
it is coming apart. All the pol-economic innovations of recent years, on the Left
and Right, are indicators of this accelerating disintegration.

So the options are these:

Both (1) and (2) is the Status Quo (delusion).

Neither (1) or (2) is Reaction (also delusion).
(1) against (2) is the Neo-Modern Right.
(2) against (1) is the Neo-Modern Left. Those are the only slots available.

Fernandez concludes:

The technological revolution is going to pose increasingly serious challenges to

nearly every Western social democratic society. People are either going to be
really angry when they discover there’s no patronage or angrier still when they
discover they have to provide the “basic income” for everybody else. Only one
thing is relatively certain: the solution to these problems won’t be found in the
ideologies of the early 20th century.
X-Risk Democratization
Yudkowsky redux: “Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy
the world drops by one point.”

Quibble with the (Moore’s Law satire) schedule, and the point still stands. Mas-
sive deterrent capability tends to spread.

This is ‘democratic’ in the way the term is commonly used by those seeking to latch
decentralization tendencies to the ideological credibility of Jacobin legitimation
principles. Consumer capitalism, the Internet, and peer-to-peer crypto-systems
are notionally ‘democratic’ in this way. They subvert centralized governance, and
they spread through horizontal contagion. The fact they have nothing at all to
do with popular political representation is of concern only to certain rhetorical
agendas, and not at all to others. It’s sophistical pop-capitalist bullshit to use the
word democracy in this way, but it’s usually not worth the trouble for the Left to
try to contest it, and the part of the Right that isn’t excited to be riding this prop-
aganda strategy is usually too indiscriminate to bother disentangling it. There’s
a rare piece of ‘right-wing’ functional PR here, but never enough to matter very
much (and it’s too essentially dishonest for the Outer Right to defend).

Unlike Democracy® (Cathedral ideology), however, this ‘democratization’ has

deep cybernetic consistency. It falls out of techno-capitalism with such auto-
matic inevitability it’s probably impossible to shut down, without closing down
the whole thing. Capital escalation produces technological deflation as a basic
metabolic by-product, so the ‘democratization’ of productive capability is ineluc-
table. Computers have migrated from exotic capital goods to trivial components
of consumer products within half a century. Study that trend and you see the
whole story.

Deterrence deflation is the deep trend. Connect up the Yudkowsky quote with
assassination markets to get where this is going. (Try to shelve moral squeamish-
ness until after you’re seeing the picture.)

Imagine, hypothetically, that some maniac private agent wants only to nuke Mec-
ca. What’s the obstruction? We can confidently say — straight off — that it’s less
of a problem with every passing year. The basic historical trend ensures that.
Comparatively incompetent Islamic fanatics are the only people seriously testing
this trend right now, but that isn’t going to last forever. Eventually smarter and
more strategically-flexible agents are going to take an interest in decentralized
mass-destruction capability, and they’ll provide a far better indication of where
the frontier lies.

Nukes would do it. They’re certainly going to be democratized, in the end. There
are probably far more remarkable accelerating WMD capabilities, though. In al-
most every respect (decentralized production capability, development curve,
economy, impact …) bioweaponry leaves nukes in the dust. Anyone with a billion
dollars, a serious grudge, and a high-end sociopathy profile could enter into a
global biowarfare-threat game within a year. Everything could be put together in
secret garages. Negotiations could be conducted in secure anonymity. Carving
sovereignty out of the game would require only resources, ruthlessness, brilliance,
and nerves. Once you can credibly threaten to kill 100,000,000 people all kinds
of strategic opportunities are open. The fact no one has tried this yet is mostly
down to billionaires being fat and happy. It only takes one Doctor Gno to break
the pattern.

This is the shadow cast over the 21st century. Radically hardcore, massively de-
centralized deterrence games are simply inevitable. Anyone who thinks the status
quo state holds some kind of long-term winning hand under these circumstances
isn’t seeing anything.

Global totalitarian government could stop this! But that isn’t going to happen —
and because it isn’t, this will.
Against Universalism II
Preliminary throat-clearing (as in part one): In its most rigorous construction, ‘uni-
versalism’ is robust under conditions of rational argument (i.e. evidence-based
logico-mathematical criticism). Mathematical theorems, in particular [sic], are
universal truths. Any assertions that can be constructed to a comparable level
of formal rigor (and ultimately mechanization) can lay claim to the same status.
However, with the slightest departure from this — rigidly algorithmic — criterion,
controversy rapidly begins. This is not the place and time to argue the case for
transcendental philosophy (within which praxeology in included), but such a case
could be made. Ditto strictly proceduralized empirical science. All of this is a di-
gression.

The question of universalism as it concerns us here is not a matter of meta-math-

ematics, epistemology, or the philosophy of science. It is rather directed at the
political scope of argument. Is it mandatory to demand that argument, according
to the highest principles of (logical) cognitive compulsion, be imposed globally?
Does the quality of argument — however exalted — require its unrestricted appli-
cation across space and time? It is the affirmative response to this question that
defines universalism in its ideological sense. Pure Jacobinism, of course, answers
yes. There is a universal duty to compel submission to the truth. This is the secular
form of evangelical salvationism.

The contrary suggestion, here defended, is that — under real global conditions
— universalism is a catastrophic mistake. The social scope of rational discussion
is itself strictly bounded, and attempts to extend it (coercively) beyond such limits
are politically disastrous. Laissez-faire envelops the sphere of imperative ration-
ality, and respects its practical contour. Stupidity does not need to be hunted
down and exterminated. All historical evidence indicates that it cannot be.

If the universal triumph of reason is an impractical goal, democratic globalism is

exposed as a preposterous error. Minimizing the voice of stupidity is the realistic
— and already extremely challenging — alternative. Rare enclaves of rigorously
self-critical realism have as their primary obligation the self-protection of their
(evidently precarious) particularity. In the wider world, fanatical ignorance and
grotesque cognitive malformation rage rampantly. Borders, filters, tests, and se-
lection mechanisms of all kinds provide the only defenses against it.

The universalist (Jacobin) model is always a conversation. You have to join to-
gether first, simply to talk, and after that reason will prevail. That’s the path of
the Zeitgeist — Hegelianism at its most arcane, expedient progressivism at more
common levels of popularity — with its twin-stroke motor of aggressive proselyti-
zation and mass embrace. “Invade the world, invite the world” is the Sailer formu-
la (quasi-random link). Amalgamate, then elevate (in the direction of ascending
rationality). This isn’t a (theoretically onvincing) claim about the unique structure
of mathematical proof, it’s a (factually trashed) claim about the global uniformity
of human brains. The ‘universality’ it invokes is that of convergence upon the au-
thority of reason. In other words, it’s a bizarre progressive myth that all self-pro-
tective sanity seeks to maximally distance itself from.

People learn, but only very rarely through sophisticated argument, or its ‘cunning‘
socio-political avatars. They learn because they fail badly, and it hurts. ‘Mankind’
is a progressive myth, incapable of learning anything. When real cultures learn,
it is because they have been locked in intimate particularity, such that the conse-
quences of their own cognitive processes impact intensely upon them. Anything
that separates an individual, or a group, from the results of its own thoughts, is
an apparatus of anti-learning. Progressive universalism is precisely this.

Dis-amalgamation — isolation — is the way to learn. It’s how speciation happens,

long before learning becomes neurological. Individuation (at whatever scale) es-
tablishes the foundation for trade, communication, and intellectual exchange.
Micro-states commercialize. Macro-states decay into political resource alloca-
tion, and entropic sludge. Protect your own patch if you want to have anything
to talk about.
Independence
The philosophical antonym to ‘universality‘ is ‘particularity’. Its broader, ideologi-
cal antonym is something closer to independence.

This isn’t a word greatly emphasized by NRx up to this point, or — for that mat-
ter — one figuring prominently in contemporary discussions of any kind. That’s
strange, because it orchestrates an extraordinary set of conceptual connections.

Independence is a rough synonym for sovereignty, to begin with. The profound

association between these terms bears quite extreme analytical pressure. The
sovereign is that instance capable of independent decision. An independent state
is indistinguishable from a sovereign one, and to impugn its real sovereignty is to
question its effective independence. Secession is a process of independence. A
(Moldbuggian) Patchwork is a network of independent geopolitical entities. All
relevant trends to geopolitical fragmentation are independence-oriented. Each
executed Exit option (even on a shopping expedition) is an implicit declaration of
independence, at least in miniature. (The relations between independence and
connectivity are subtle and complex.)

Remaining (for a moment) in the narrowest NRx channel, the entire passivism
discussion is independence related. Protest (‘activism’) is disdained on account
of its fundamental dependency (upon sympathetic political toleration). No social
process genuinely directed towards independence would fall within the scope of
this criticism. (The ‘Benedict Option’ is one obvious example.) ‘Build something’
epitomizes independence process.

Cannot the entire range of contentions over the individualism collectivism dyad
be recast in terms of independence? Dependency exists on a spectrum, but the
defining attitude towards it tends to polarization. Is dependence to be embraced,
or configured as a problem to be worked against? This blog is highly tempted
to project the Left Right or ‘principal political’ dimension along the axis these
distinct responses define. The Left is enthused by inter-dependency, and (to a
greater or lesser extent) accepts comparative independence, while for the Right
this attitudinal system is exactly reversed. (The most fundamental tensions within
the reactosphere are clearly related to this articulation.)

One inevitable point of contention — honed over decades of objection to liber-

tarianism — is captured by the question: Are not children essentially dependents?
Yes, of course they are, but is growing up anything other than a process of inde-
pendence? From one perspective, a family can be interpreted as a model of in-
ter-dependence (without obvious inaccuracy). Yet, from another, a family is an in-
dependence-production unit, both in its comparative autonomy in respect to the
wider society, and as a child-rearing matrix. Families are loci of independence
struggle (to which the Left response is: They shouldn’t have to be). Dependency
culture is the Left heartland.

Independence and autonomy are very closely related terms. All discussions of
autonomy, and even of automation, click quite neatly onto this template, but this
is a point exceeding the ambitions of the present post.

Abstraction, too, is a topic the tantalizingly overlaps independence. Whether

cognitive independence entirely accommodates intelligence optimization is also
a question for another occasion.

NRx, XS tentatively proposes, is a political philosophy oriented to the promotion

of independence. (Much pushback is, naturally, expected.)
War is God
Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui argued that war was no longer about
“using armed forces to compel the enemy to submit to one’s will” in the classic
Clausewitzian sense. Rather, they asserted that war had evolved to “using all
means, including armed force or non-armed force, military and non-military, and
lethal and non-lethal means to compel the enemy to accept one’s interests.” The
barrier between soldiers and civilians would fundamentally be erased, because
the battle would be everywhere. The number of new battlefields would be “vir-
tually infinite,” and could include environmental warfare, financial warfare, trade
warfare, cultural warfare, and legal warfare, to name just a few. They wrote of as-
sassinating financial speculators to safeguard a nation’s financial security, set-
ting up slush funds to influence opponents’ legislatures and governments, and
buying controlling shares of stocks to convert an adversary’s major television and
newspapers outlets into tools of media warfare. According to the editor’s note,
Qiao argued in a subsequent interview that “the first rule of unrestricted warfare
is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.” That vision clearly transcends
any traditional notions of war.

How ‘traditional’ are we talking? “War is the Father of all things, and of all things
King” (α,δα) Heraclitus asserts at the dawn of philosophy. There seems little indi-
cation of ‘restriction’ there.

Whatever the positive semantic associations accumulated by the word ‘war’, its
most rigorous meaning is negative. War is conflict without significant constraint.
As a game, it corresponds to the condition of unbounded defection, or trustless-
ness without limit. This is the Hobbesian understanding implicit in the phrase “war
of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes), in which “the state of nature” is
conceived again negatively through a notional subtraction of limitation. Treach-
ery, in its game-theoretic sense, is not a minor theme within war, but a horizon to
which war tends the annihilation of all agreement. Reciprocally-excited mutual
betrayal in departure from an implicit ‘common humanity’ is its teleological es-
sence. This is a conclusion explicitly rejected by Carl von Clausewitz is his treatise
On War, even as he acknowledges the cybernetic inclination to amplification (or
“tendency to a limit”) which drives it in the direction of an absolute. “War is the
continuation of politics by other means,” he insists, because it is framed by ne-
gotiation (book-ended by a declaration of war, and a peace treaty). According
to this conception, it is an interlude of disagreement, which nevertheless remains
irreducibly communicative, and fundamentally structured by the decisions of sov-
ereign political agencies. Even as it approaches its pole of ultimate extremity, it
never escapes its teleological dependency, as a means (or instrument) of rational
statecraft.

The reduction of war to instrumentality is not immune to criticism. Philosophical

radicalization, alone, suffices to release war from its determination as ‘the game
of princes’. The Clausewitzean formula is notoriously inverted by Michel Foucault
into the maxim “politics is war by other means”. If political sovereignty is ultimately
conditioned by the capability to prevail upon the battlefield, the norms of war
can have no higher tribunal than military accomplishment. No real authority can
transcend survival, or survive a sufficiently radical defeat. There is thus a final in-
coherence to any convinced appeal to the ‘laws of war’. The realistic conception
of ‘limited war’ subsumes that of ‘war lawfully pursued’ (with the latter catego-
rized as an elective limitation). Qiao’s words bear emphatic repetition: “the first
rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.” The
power to forbid is — first of all — power, which war (alone) distributes.

Between peace and war there is no true symmetry. Peace presupposes pacifica-
tion, and that is a military outcome. There is no authority — moral or political —
that cannot first assert itself under cosmic conditions that are primordially indif-
ferent to normativity. Whatever cannot defend its existence has its case dumped
in the trash.

Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden provides us with a contemporary restatement

of the ancient wisdom:

Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not
heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has
labored clanking to his moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or
that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be?
This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concern-
ing the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference ab-
solute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound
a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for
their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This
man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed
from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and
the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination.
It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which
because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game be-
cause war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

“War is the truest form of divination” it turns out, is the Revelation of the Aeon.
Qwernomics
Paul A. David provides the theoretical backstory, in his essay ‘Clio and the Eco-
nomics of QWERTY’:

A path-dependent sequence of economic changes is one of which important in-

fluences upon the eventual outcome can be exerted by temporally remote events,
including happenings dominated by chance elements rather than systematic
forces. Stochastic processes like that do not converge automatically to a fixed-
point distribution of outcomes, and are called non-ergodic. In such circumstanc-
es ‘historical accidents’ can neither be ignored, nor neatly quarantined for the
purpose of economic analysis; the dynamic process itself takes on an essentially
historical character. […] Touch typing gave rise to three features of the evolving
production system which were crucially important in causing QWERTY to become
‘locked in’ as the dominant keyboard arrangement. These features were techni-
cal interrelatedness, economies of scale, and quasi-irreversibility of investment.
They constitute the basic ingredients of what might be called QWERTYnomics.

The format of the Qwerty keyboard illustrates the production of a destiny. Even
in the epoch succeeding the mechanical type-writer, and its specific design im-
peratives, the legacy layout of alphanumeric keys settled during the 1890s has
remained frozen into place without significant revision. In the language of com-
plex systems analysis, this is a special example of path-dependency, or irreduci-
ble historicity, characterized by irreversibility. Qwerty persists arguably, as a sub-
optimal keyboard solution due to identifiable ratchet-effects. Based upon this
privileged model, the historical, technological, and economic process of ‘lock in’
through positive feedback is called QWERTY-nomics (and — going forward —
simply ‘Qwernomics’).

There are a series of (now largely dormant) socio-political and policy controver-
sies attending this model. For a counter-point to David’s analysis see the (excel-
lent) Liebowitz and Margolis essay ‘The Fable of the Keys’ (1990), with compar-
atively-tolerable — if philosophically superficial — gloating from The Economist
(here). The really crucial content of the complex systems analysis, however, re-
mains unaffected by the vicissitudes of the controversy. Qwerty is a demonstrat-
ed (artificial) destiny, and thus a key to the nature of modernistic time.

The philosophically-serious critique of David’s construction dissolves the idea of

any transcendent criterion for global optimality. (I’m not going to attempt to run
that here yet.)

Qwerty is, beyond all plausible question, the supreme candidate for an articulate
Capitalist Revelation. We haven’t begun to explore it with appropriate ardor up
to this point.
[Transmission terminated]