With Googling so ubiquitous today, it’s tempting to find shallow, slogan-level knowledge of every new thing before diving into it for the first time. This is especially true for uncanny politics–‘did you hear about Marxism-Nixonism?’–and it is certainly true for a den of irreverent tricksters like the contemporary alt-right. Otherwise, who knows what a fool they might make of you?

If a curious and intrepid visitor from far afield were coming to Social Matter today, I would guess that their slogan for what to expect might be one of two things. First, an edgier libertarianism–in which case, they’re in for something much more interesting. Second, intemperate and fervent hatred–but a picture of a woman alone in the fog on a skyscraper? It’s the wrong aesthetic. This is a site from which one can quietly look out and over the world. There’s no such thing as Batmanism-Libertarianism, right?

Ideally, a new visitor would come with the idea the right is somehow about ‘order.’ Whether it’s the military, the police, high-finance plutocrats, old church morality, fathers as heads of households, or walls to keep out immigrants, the right is on the side of order, while the left is on the side of license.

But this idea that ‘the right is for order’ is unintelligible unless order is carefully defined and fleshed out. Vocabulary shifts, especially during times of cultural upheaval.

Uncharitable observers say our order is regimentation. They imagine the right organizing battalions of citizens to salute as one, all individuality subsumed into faceless, even ranks. All families forced to be nuclear families constituted in identical, cookie-cutter forms, all homes identical ‘little boxes made of ticky tacky.’ This is not the case; totalitarian order is degenerate order. It is chaos. In the false order of regimentation, all men are given identical places, rather than being given the places that properly fit them. Wherever men can be assigned to duty randomly and interchangeably, that is disorder and chaos.

Uncharitable progressives say our order is stasis. They imagine us trying to freeze society into an atemporal traditionalist culture, with all families eternally revering the same God in the same way with the same mores and the same aesthetics. This is also not what we desire. Static order is also degenerate order. The healthy, organic growth of societal development is never opposed; rather, the continuities of tradition are the foundations of artistic and moral progress. The right seeks to ensure orderly development–and, most importantly, development that is not simply the fluctuation of wild animal populations, but that which brings man closer to perfection, God, or Truth. All true artists work in this way, from Gilgamesh to Homer to Michelangelo to Malick. The alternative would be a society that is continually hacked and cut to prevent growth, stunted like India under the Brahmin. Wherever outcomes are static and divorced from natural possibility, that is also chaos. The link between man and time is broken, splitting men from the world and from consequence.

Whether it is the decrees of God or Nature or inscrutable Power, the philosophy of the right is a philosophy of thriving under conditions set from outside oneself. Without these, reaction properly appears to be a caricature of stasis and regimentation–but the left recoiling here is simply a 5-year-old grossed out by sex, seeing only the possibility of cooties and none of the depth of love.

A virtuous society repudiates order without outside influences, like virtuous men repudiate sex without love. A closed system lives on its own excrement, and perfect autonomy and complete madness are indistinguishable. However, like sex without love is tempting and all too common and callous, closed autonomy is also tempting and also all too common. How much easier it is to be a shut-in with whisky and opinions rather than to raise a family. How much easier, even as a husband, to renounce one’s headship rather than to lead. But lazy sex is no argument against good sex, and lazy order is no argument against good order.

Multiculturalists disingenuously claim that “if order is a matter of fit to the world, then like us, you should respect every way people have found to fit to the world.” Or, “I am the true traditionalist because I respect all traditions.” This self-serving mischaracterization of the right ignores the most final, inarguable, and seemingly obvious way what is outside us orders our lives: through death. The longest tradition of life, long preceding man, is deadly struggle for supremacy. As any gardener or evolutionary biologist knows, pruning is no enemy of growth or antonym to order. Multiculturalism can find a place in reactionary thought as a base for otherwise differentiated cosmopolitan cultures, but universal toleration could never be an essential principle of order. Et in Arcadia ego.

Next, the cynical, nihilist determinists claim that “if order means moving in concert with the world, well, there is only one way for the world to move and we must accept it whatever it is.” Perhaps all human decision-making is supervenient on the unthinking propagation of particles through spacetime. Perhaps there is no free will. In that case, what is the argument? That one is deluded if one seeks any particular goal? But this has no power to persuade–in this case my belief is part of the way that the world is, and so is my resolution to fight for the goal. Is it supposed to change my mind to discover that, to paraphrase the determinist, my choice is the work of Nature or God rather than my own private judgment? Far from it.

I’d be delighted to serve these true sovereigns and delighted to be guided by them deeply. Even granting the unlikely premise of determinism, accepting the world as it is would also mean accepting the apparent conflict between oneself and the rest of the world. Otherwise one finds oneself resisting one’s own obvious convictions–simply a new and different conflict in place of the original.

In both cases, the non-reactionary has incorrectly taken ‘conflict’ or ‘frustration’ to be an antonym of order, which could not be further from the truth. A building ‘rests’ on its foundation the same way that the Berlin Wall could be safer than the Bronx: order is a matter of the balance of forces rather than their absence.

A virtuous reactionary society does not suppress forceful conflict and self-assertion. Limp openness is a funhouse image of the closed autonomy described earlier and no better. Openness means one succumbs to any passing madness, and limpness means one is merely more of the excrement the world recycles endlessly. A society without conflict is sterile, and a society without force is flimsy. Of course, it is often tempting to forgo conflict when it is costly and to be weak when that is easy, but this is no argument: the vices remains vices. One should protect oneself and one’s fellows; the prices of unprincipled appeasement and atrophy are higher in the long run.

Could a preference for order be rephrased as a form of utilitarianism? “Order is matching everyone to what makes them happiest.” One might say, “Disorder is mismatch between duties, abilities, and rewards.”

It has quite a bit to recommend it from a narrow rationalist perspective. First, it turns questions of order into more familiar questions of game theoretic equilibria: for instance order is however we can cooperate most and maximize our complementarities, or order is the way we cooperate least, while still ensuring the greatest liberty, or order is a way to reduce transactional costs and uncertainties. Relatedly, it seems to make the desire for order a nonthreatening problem of calculation: it becomes an optimization with a flexible objective function, and if the objective is up for discussion, then the definition of order is also implicitly up for discussion, as well. The ideological baggage of this order then appears to be defused. The associated worldview seems safe to model as a sterile optimization process without fear of memetic contagion.

However, even if some utility function could envelop the reactionary conception of order, there is little reason to think that that would do any good.

At its heart, the reactionary conception of morality contains a conviction that individuals do not and cannot know what is best.

It requires a game theory in which players never precisely learn the payoffs for actions and do not even know the actions available to them. At best, they eventually learn variable estimates for the payoff of an action someday, and at worst they die unexpectedly years later with no idea of the causal connection–but in fact I spoke too soon–at the truly worst, all of their distant offspring die together unexpectedly, centuries later, with no idea that the action was ever performed and even less idea that it caused their deaths. For better or worse this is the ‘game’ we play.

Likely too late, a rationalist will also find that the optimization problem is not memetically sterile. Thinking about these problems leads down a road to understanding embodied cognition, which leads to intelligence nonorthogonality, evolutionary game theory, which leads to human biodiversity, and rational bias, which leads to virtue ethics and even functional ritual. Grappling with the difficulty of this civilizational calculation problem leads away from individualistic rationalism, just as certainly as grappling with the economic calculation problem leads away from socialism.

So enough. We are not merely utilitarians trying on a more frightening costume.

But is it possible we might still remain progressives behind the reactionary mask? Is our ‘order’ a species of Progress? It’s certainly true that we’re no enemies of less meretricious forms of progress. Order makes room for improvisation, creativity, technological innovation, and moral development. For people who want to make their lives genuinely better, we consider the reactionary lifestyle ideal. But it is better not to compare ourselves on the the basis of this present name ‘progressivism’ at all. It is better to summon forth the left by a string of names that it has worn before: Dissent, Puritanism, Whiggery, Quakerism, Jacobinism, Unitarianism, Universalism, Progressivism, Communism, Multiculturalism.

In every case, it appeals to individual consciences for solidarity as individuals, even across current group lines. It asks new followers to give up their memberships in small inner groups for stronger individual identities in a larger group, and it always moves on by forming the larger group from a inner group vanguard plus whatever outsiders can be converted. The movement progresses by appealing to naive consciences seeking equality in the inner group and avaricious conscience in the outer group; the former uses the latter’s desire for inner group resources as the drive for purges and internal reorganization. Then the process repeats with a new vanguard and new outsiders. The right gloats that ‘the left devours its own,’ but this is a stable part of the lifecycle. It has rarely been a hindrance–certainly never since the American First Great Awakening turned Puritan sons against their fathers.

In the core of contemporary reaction, there is no hint of a centrality for oppressed and spoiled conscience. There is no hint of a call for equality of individuals and universal respect inside the group. The order we call for is not an ordering of morals by inborn conscience, but an ordering of conscience by morals. The goal is not vainglorious, absolute Progress, but humble, tangible development. The existence of progressives mistaking themselves for reactionary is no argument against the reality of this truer core; heresies are always plentiful at the conception of new orthodoxies.

So we are not progressives, then, but one might still find something disquietingly modern about contemporary reaction.

To begin with, however much we read old greats like Carlyle, Froude, and Maine, we cannot help  having also read Darwin, Boltzmann, Schumpeter, Feynman, and Schelling. Whatever the mendacity of liberal ideology, it should be inarguable to an honest man that the last two liberal centuries have provided vast intellectual and scientific knowledge. Given the scale of the changes, it is almost impossible to imagine what a genuinely reactionary society for today’s world would look like. This is why the ‘neo’-reactionary label is used. As stated in the first section of this piece, a true order must fit the nature of a time and its material facts.

It has been 100 years since WWI destroyed the last technologically advanced, yet plausibly reactionary European societies, Austria-Hungary and Russia. Therefore, we are in the uncomfortable position of having to build and experiment. One of the things we experiment with most dangerously is materialism.

The body is physical and physical manipulations have effects on character. This is inarguable and traditional; it was known by older societies, and traditions sprang up to say what foods were good for the soul and for growing strong children. However, the scale of the changes and the rapidity with which cycle in today’s society make traditions learned over generations an unwieldy adaptation. Imagine keeping a traditional diet of milk, eggs, plentiful wheat and vegetables, and occasional meat, but always buying cheaply and from local stores. The animal products would likely come from animals fed antibiotics and unnatural feed. Much of the wheat and vegetables would likely be transgenic or grown with fertilizers and pesticides. These have unknown, often deleterious effects on nutritional content and hormonal influence, and worse, the technologies change so rapidly that even before one understands what their effects on health and character are, they have changed again.

Comparable effects are active in almost every corner of life. The styles of advertising and journalism change so rapidly that a tradition of reading news each morning means something quite different from decade to decade. The march of liberal influence through Christianity can make sticking with just one church for a lifetime a wild ride. Skills such as driving manual transmission briefly seem to be essentially masculine, then quickly become foibles of old men. If we do not appreciate this, then our hopes of restoring order are empty vanity. So, we spend more time than ancient reactionaries may have in terms of thinking about the changes wrought by these things: diet, profession, media, material. We can be confused, wrongly, with material determinists.

However, the challenge of designing environments to support virtue is not solely a determinist’s challenge, as any monk or priest could tell you. Our goal is neither to shape man alone, nor to shape nature alone, but to ensure that the reciprocal influences between man and nature are maximally harmonious and lead to ever greater and deeper harmonies. In the media Cathedral, men’s loud voices encourage others to raise their voices until all is shouting chaos. In a true cathedral, the ceilings absorb the noise from the pews and amplify the voice from the pulpit; the long echoes off the walls keep every man mindful of his disturbances of the peace. Our determinism goes only so far as desiring the latter over the former.

We could now appear to be relativists to the coarser eye, given our confession that we must experiment and try multiple new ways of life. We also have a suspicious interest in patchwork civilizations, in which many societal subgroups coexist despite contrasting laws and traditions. However, there is a deep and firm dividing line between believing that what is best for a people depends on who they are and believing that what is best for that people depends only on what they believe. The former is common sense, while the latter is nonsense.

The particular ways different peoples might require different ways of life are undoubtedly what cause us the most trouble with impolite society, but they also prove beyond doubt that we are not relativists. Sexism is often a proper order. What’s referred to as racism is often a proper order. Slavery can be a proper order. These orders can be subtle enough that outliers from each group would not contradict them, and they can be lenient to encourage outliers in the rare cases they do pop up. The essential problem is to achieve a stable order that reinforces and deepens the best aspects of the group. This discrimination is nothing unusual. For instance, current racist laws keep down Asian college admissions to ensure apparent equality of opportunity among all races. Whether or not this equality is a goal of injustice and disorder, the point is simple: what is normally labeled as racism is in actuality a ubiquitous, unavoidable adaptation to objective differences between human subpopulations.

Individualists may be howling at this point, questioning my focus on societal virtues rather than personal virtues. But man is a social animal. Man’s highest perfections are expressed in friendship, comradeship, citizenship, and discipleship. Without others to serve and to lead, man leads a stunted, poor life, and no amount of individual strength or intelligence will make up for it. Even a solitary writer has his references and his audience, and even Mowgli had his wolves.

It is simply impossible for individuals inside and outside of society, or in different societies, to be ordered in the same way. Feral children do not learn language. Teenagers typically change their characters dramatically in front of different audiences. An adult’s profession will often shape him deeply by middle-age. And after death, a man’s success or failure will be judged solely by his effect on what remains. The individual, without responsibilities, is something only half real; the truth of a man is revealed in his relationships and his duties.

Order must be emergent and collective to reflect the way all admirable people actually live and judge. And what constitutes order in this sense? That conflicts should be minimal and stable, while harmonies are maximal and ever-growing. A clear negative example is the feminist project, which undermines the harmony between men and women while destabilizing the conflicts among men, among women, and between men and women. A clear positive example is the early Christian monasteries, which acted as nuclei for towns, repositories for knowledge, and supports to resettling the countryside after the fall of Rome.

In less obvious cases, there can be disagreement about what is order and what is chaos. There may be a right answer from an objective position, but no human is objective. In practice, good men follow the judgment of those they trust most. In practice, morality is personal choice within the context of a greater system of partially shared trust, partially shared property, and partially shared interests.

The name for this system of shared information, shared property, and shared goals is civilization.

Your earliest virtues come from your parents; your later virtues are developed in school and play; as you learn to read, the sources of guidance become overwhelming in number; as you become an adult, you learn to filter that guidance and rely on wisdom from the few you trust. Throughout it all, you are embedded in a system of reciprocal actions and relationships that you may never trust or feel fully loyal to, but you cannot escape as the frame and ground for all of your choices and values. It contains your parents, your school, your playmates, your books and internet, and your adult friends. Civilization is that system.

This is not the relativist’s metaphysical ‘what is true for one civilization is not for another’ but the concrete fact that what is good in one civilization may not be in another. The truth is often contingent but never relative.

This is enough to have made the most important points. Our order is not totalitarian, multiculturalist, Progressive, determinist, relativist, or individualist.

We are civilizationists. Our order is civilization.

Our reaction is not a matter of fixed, rigid patterns. Nor is it limp-wristed surrender to whatever comes. It is reinforcement and elaboration of whatever good comes from God and Nature along with avoidance and containment of whatever chaos comes. It is not a matter of forcing God and Nature to conform to conscience or intellect, but rather training the conscience and intellect to follow God and Nature. It is morality, not in the sense of a tyrannical law, but in the sense of the virtues identical with human flourishing.

And because human flourishing is a collective, social activity and the best virtues for a people depend on who those people are, we go further.

Reactionary order is a people’s elaboration of itself, their continued hallowing of their traditions, their conquering of new spaces, and their advancement to new heights of wisdom. These are the virtues that constitute order.

Order is morality, and morality is civilization.

The post That Word Called ‘Order’ appeared first on Social Matter.

We are told we now live in the Information Age, which to the educated ear is merely a sly name for an Entropic Age. We also live in the Atomic Age, a strange appellation that never quite fit. This age nonetheless haunts. It is an age in which nuclear weapons reshape all international contention, though they are almost never used or lately even tested, an age in which major innovations in nuclear power that could make fossil fuels appear laughably scarce are unused for fear of liability, and an age in which particle beams and high-energy radiation undergird all our modern chemical and biological sciences. Society, however, is far most interested in the pictures and hardly knows anything of the cameras.

There appear to be few better examples of technological stagnation in the present age than the half-aborted promise of nuclear technology. That promise looms around us whenever we allow ourselves to think for a moment about how our world could end, or what could await us among the stars.

This name ‘Atomic Age’ also haunts us in terms of reflecting on the way our society has been atomized in undesired ways and failed to become atomized in desired ways.

The nuclear family has proven to be quite fissile, with the self-pity and entitlement of each new divorceé spinning through society like a swarm of neutrons to destabilize more marriages. Now single motherhood and bastardy are common, but far from being liberated atoms in their own right, we find that the offspring are divided against themselves with poor self-regulation and high rates of mental illness.

Evidently, like chemical atoms, individuals do not fit the abstract conception of the atom, either. They can be split against themselves, and they cannot be extracted cleanly from their environments. In physics, this was discovered through the phenomenon of radiation: emission of electrons when light shone on metals and the emission of alpha particles from the atomic nucleus. Society is not so simple, but modern society’s radioactivity is clear enough to any honest eye. So this metaphor of atomization is worth reconsidering.

The base of the metaphor is the concept of an atom, shared contentiously between philosophy and physics. In the philosophical version, all material would be made up of atoms. In the physical conception, atoms and the radiation fields surrounding them are inseparable partners. ‘Atoms’ are familiar, but ‘radiation’ may seem more threatening and more obscure, and it is therefore a perfect lever to pry apart this concept of atomization.

Radiations mediate interactions. The most common, obvious societal interactions that humans make are linguistic, so language is our first candidate for a radiation of social atomism. A human communicates a pattern, another absorbs it, both are changed. When we understand each other’s patterns and are changed most by them, the communication is said to resonate with us, like light is best absorbed by an atom when it resonates with the atom. The light emitted from an atom fits the resonances of the atom, and so it is with communication we initiate. We talk and discover each others’ vibes, in an earlier parlance of the Atomic Age.

One can tell that atoms are inextricably part of their environment by the fact that many of their resonances depend as much on their environment as on their own properties. The same is true of people–how often do you find a message that resonates with you only when with the right crowd? A joke that’s funny with the guys may be abhorrent with a daughter. “Sure,” the atomists say, “the part of you that responds to jokes and talk may look a great deal different depending on who you’re with, and your own ideas might change, too, but your core, your nucleus, remains unchanged.”

Dostoevsky is one of the great reactionary psychologists and is notable in this context for his deep feel for the influence of company on character. To see it starkly in one of his best works, read the words of Dmitri Karamazov after conversations with his brother Ivan and compare to his words after a conversation with brother Alyosha.

Dostoevsky is a keen witness to the falsehood of shallow individualism, and in particular, the way that people who try to define themselves as atomic individuals fall into nihilism. As Ivan’s example shows, even when one fiercely maintains separation from all other men’s moral influence, without God, one may simply fall to talking with oneself as the Devil–and split, with bitter effects on friends and family, who were not so inclined to keep themselves clear of influence.

Mankind also interacts without language, often more consequentially. There are few more final ways to end a disagreement than by killing or enslaving. Less intentional, less direct means than whips and bullets also affect others without words–overflowing trashcans, unkempt appearances, long-unwashed urine and feces in alleys–and these, too, belie our individual natures.

When a human creature is incapable of politeness and acts like a barbaric savage, wise and ancient men considered it fit only to be a trained animal, a slave. To these men, slaves were hardly individuals. Their character was considered a product of their masters’ training, their natures often said to be two-faced and divided, and their motivations always said to come from outside: whether they are ruled by their passions or their masters, a Greek like Aristotle would never say they rule themselves. The master is held responsible for shielding society from the radioactivity of their charges. Where polite, educated slaves were found, the reckoning was different, but this does not contradict the point. In Rome, Greek slaves could be moral educators, but they carried themselves as old Greek citizens might have.

Training and education are essential for individualism in the modernist, Anglo conception descended from the classical view. The individuality of a person is guaranteed by their self-control; this individuality is a matter of having a personal will guided by personal interests. Out of this and against this, grew the postmodern conception, in which individuality is less dependent on training and more inclusive, but appropriately lacks atomicity as well. The postmodern individual is divisible, schizophrenic, colonized. They are theorized to have the potential for responsibility, but also to fall short of actually achieving it. Pynchon’s V. is explicitly concerned with the self-modification and antihumanism of its titular mystery woman, and his characters in Gravity’s Rainbow explicitly concern themselves with the divisibility and mutability of the soul. Their mad tortures and capers are natural emissions of unstable minds, unable to remain the atoms their societies expected, seeking change.

Our current societal mess of souls desperately seeking identity and validation, while destabilizing the lives around them, explicitly contradicts the purported feasibility of atomic individualism. The shifting of fashion and cultural resonance indicate that however important individuals are for creativity, it is always humans in context who have that creativity. Neither of these failures of atomism is truly doubted by the Marxist left or the reactionary right, though both are still denied by libertarians and Anglo-centrists currently losing grip on the masses.

When one talks about Weimerica, then, one talks about a society that is almost past believing humans can live well as atoms, but is still resigned to atomized life, nonetheless. Our society is filled with the radiation spewed by hundreds of millions of unwise loudmouths, so that each child is pulled in thousands of directions before they can form stable relationships–and then, if they did manage a deep connection despite the odds, they are geographically dispersed to yet more radioactive universities, where they are asked to absorb the voices of generations of disaffected, unstable, unwise, but clever thinkers of the historical left.

It is almost impossible that something dangerous will not resonate in such a radiation bath, and as in chemistry those chance resonances will break bonds, whether the bond of a boy to his childhood church or scout group, the bond between high school sweethearts, or the bond between parents and child–assuming the parents have not already been seduced to see the child as a burden and break that bond themselves. And, since there is so much literal and ideological space to move through in modern society, entropic drift will ensure that bonds, once broken, rarely re-form as strongly. It is easy to stop calling, and it is easy to check Facebook without saying hello.

With every bond a person breaks inadvisedly, they become more likely to release more radiation. Whether it is callous words to a wife or child, the cat lady’s unmistakable ammoniac smell, insane lists of protest demands, mass molestation, or disastrous war, the desperate and misguided breed more displeasure, distrust, and alienation. Broken work relationships become pretext for dismantling men’s friendships; abused children provide pretexts for dismantling families; bitter loneliness becomes antisocial cruelty.

New bonds form, but rarely as strongly. Divorceés divorce again. Friendships become increasingly hard to form from scratch. Those who do not prioritize family when young do not get to relive their children’s first years. And without these bonds, mental health suffers; the individual splits apart. If all goes well, they decline quietly, but too often they make bizarre, harmful choices, or choose not to live at all.

In the end, our atomization is not separate from its radioactivity. The two are coupled faces of a single process. You are all alone, but, having been alone so long, who would want to be with you? If you claim to drink male tears, if you think all women are whores without agency, if you are wrapped up in demanding rights and concessions and justice, what do you have to offer others but your own wild radiation? What can you promise but to strain their other relationships?

The single best solution for this life in a sea of dangerous talk and action is passivism: maintain few, robust bonds at the deepest levels and react with circumspection to everything else. Never stoop to activism, never seek notoriety directly, never open mouth or ambitions to the masses.

Build quiet, stable, private community, even in the midst of the public conflagration.

Nonetheless, reactionary values make the public uneasy and reactionary social technologies are banned where it has been possible. The unease is unfounded; far from being the sources of radiation in society, passivists are simply ones who resist it well and therefore need fear it less. However, like in the panic of the Black Death, immunity suggests guilt. Reflecting or transmitting the radiation impinging on us since we do not absorb it, we are mistaken for sources of radiation by those it next passes on to.

Most unforgivably, we reflect men’s self-hatred back to them. We remember the Gods of the Copybook Headings. We make men feel their effect on the world and how those effects return to them. For the unfree, battered around by the emissions of thousands of others, with no strong, stabilizing bonds left, this is a reminder of their unfreedom and, most being unimaginative moderns, they imagine unfreedom as confinement. They cannot properly understand the unfreedom of chaotic but unreflective license: they have spurned this inheritance from the ancients.

So these utopians keep imagining that life is a confinement, wishing that someday, if we were open enough with each other, if the radiation pressure were built high enough, we atoms could burst our prison open and finally escape our own offal.

But of course it will not happen. There is no prison. The atomization of society is merely the combustion of society; people are not even potentially true atoms. We must order our lives and quiet this activist chain reaction lunacy that tempts us all from time to time. We are simply as we are: imperfectly atomic, occasionally radioactive, occasionally benign, and always living in the light of past actions.

The post The Radioactivity Of Atomic Individualism appeared first on Social Matter.

Neoreaction grows out of soil prepared by perhaps the most powerful combinations of power-based and want-based organization so far, capitalist markets, in which monies stand for both powers and desires in one instrument.

The novel techno-commercial focus of neoreaction is essential to its reinvigoration of ethno-nationalist and theonomist elements.

Of course, capitalism is not always regarded as a particularly moral institution. A great deal of ink has been spilled over how, exactly, capitalism is just or unjust, moral or amoral. However, going back to the roots of trade in the ideas of fairness, power, and desire should show clearly how, far from being amoral mechanisms, prices and capital are as inextricably moral as authority and community are.

To be sure, this is not the fuzzy, humane morality of a Spock-influenced parent, and neither is it the fiery, divine morality of the Old Testament. However, it is mortal justice par excellence. Markets are an engine for aggregating choices and exposing consequences. The justice of capitalism is the justice of the storm that drowns the careless sailor: the hapless are consumed and the skillful prosper.

Still, this is not at all a blind spot of economics in its contemporary Beckerian analytical formulations that take difficult to trade capital, such as intellectual training and genetics, to be just as fundamental as more liquid capital, such as land and equipment. It may sound discomforting or sophistical that in contemporary economics, ghetto community organization could be understood as part of an economy just as much as trading shares of a public company. It is, however, true.

We live in a world where concepts like ‘political market,’ ‘marriage market,’ and ‘religious market‘ are used to plan and analyze real actions unironically and effectively.

This is not the free market fundamentalist, anarcho-capitalist’s idea of capitalism. NRx has grown past its ancap roots, though it retains a strong affinity for economic analysis.

If you want to wirehead yourself, no other era can offer more ways to do it or leave you as brutally alone with the aftermath. If you want to live by wireheading others, no other era will match you as effectively to the people you can best help to their destruction. Unfettered contemporary markets, like post-Beckerian capital, threaten to be all-encompassing; the old paternalist superstructure around them is dissolving just as accelerationists have long hoped.

However, a curious thing has happened that not enough accelerationists saw coming: paternalist and maternalist moral superstructure, rather than merely disappearing like a vestigial tail, has instead been exposed as a valuable resource worth cultivating. It is dissolving through assimilation, not annihilation.

Morality itself has become capital to be managed and invested.

Employee reliability and social fluency are valued as intellectual capital in corporate finance. It is a cliché to say that character is your greatest asset. Intangible good will can be a dominant line item in accounting. Leadership training is a booming consulting market. Not only academically, but factually and practically, moral behavior is capital for sale—whatever its higher significance.

And just like for any other capital, which morality is most valuable rarely appears uniform across a society. The apparent value differs across classes and regions. Market allocation is a sophisticated mixture of desire-based and power-based social allocation, and the composition of that mixture varies throughout society.

At different rungs of the social ladder, different powers and desires are privileged, and so with their attendant moralities. At the lowest rung, perhaps physical clout and passionate desire appear key. At this rung, then, thug ethics appear adaptive and the young who intend to thrive in it seek instruction by joining gangs. Among the mid-level gentry, social clout and temperate desire may seem more important. At this rung, therefore, bourgeois ethics appear adaptive and the youth who intend to thrive in it seek instruction by attending colleges.

Specialization in skills generalizes to specialization in all forms of capital, including moral capital. In each case, market pressures promote elaborating both desire-based and power-based morality, though unevenly and along different dimensions.

So welfare checks and social security grow, but so do the privileges of wealth. Mass media may have to print flagrant untruth to serve their audience’s desires, but they can do so without much worry of being seriously accountable for misrepresentation. Sexual liberation proceeds like a ratchet, yet it seems to remain the same beautiful and powerful people who are having the most and best sex, only more so.

Mass culture drifts left with desire even as elite might makes ever more right.

Yet however powerful it seems, we must always remember that while market capitalism may currently be among our best, most comprehensive processes for organizing the human judgments necessary to design and carry out social resource allocation, it remains an institution of only mortal justice.

Used well, markets link distant inhuman consequences to contextual human judgment more effectively than any other system yet devised. In doing so, they empower human choice to incredible heights. However, the highest heights can be the sites of greatest folly. Desire all too often exceeds power no matter how great. And Nemesis always follows hubris.

Capital is just as capable of empowering the negligent to commit greater follies as of empowering the wise to accomplish greater deeds, like sailing will drown the negligent in deeper waters even as it propels the prudent to more distant shores. As we learn to live with capital, we are learning its peculiar laws, but whether we are learning correctly enough or quickly enough is up for debate.

It is unclear whether any of our lives on Earth could survive a particularly poor choice of investments, given how frightfully powerful our investments have become. A slogan from Stewart Brand describes it well: “We are as gods and have to get good at it.”

Existential threat is not new of course. Our world could always end completely and without warning, and given doomsday arguments, we should not overestimate the stability of older civilizations when measured against inhuman chance. We know we have been lucky enough to develop on our planet so far, but we do not know what this luck consists of. Nonetheless, the power of modern technology is an all-too-foreseeable source of threat.

Negligence appears to thrive everywhere in our systems, from the raising of children to the securitization of debt, and it seems truly doubtful that we are currently wise enough to avoid systemic disaster.

In fact, we see everywhere that the contemporary man expects punishment, though he often despairs of receiving it soon enough to reform his life. We see it in the author of Infinite Jest, who could not escape his privileged loneliness and addictions short of death; we see it in the director of the 2008-2009 bailouts, who laments that the wicked could not be punished without hurting the innocent more; we see it in the father of the American Cold War containment strategy, who was no more certain that the Soviet system would collapse out of its own illegitimacy than he was that consumer capitalism would do the same soon after.

In many cases, we respond to this state of affairs by limiting ourselves. We restrict the power of nuclear and medical technologies through treaties and regulation. We declare certain desires like ‘perfection of the race’ out of bounds. We even limit the forms of discourse that seem capable of leading to dangerous powers and desires. This is, in one sense, prudent.

However, our self-limitation is performed haphazardly and ineffectively. Our restrictions are like those of the obese trucker who will fastidiously avoid cholesterol ‘for his heart’, but still drinks 64 oz. sodas every day. It is not uncommon to see an environmentalist feminist call for restrictions on GMO foods, citing possible hormonal disruption, while wholeheartedly encouraging women to use hormonal birth control. It is not uncommon to see a pacifist multiculturalist decry violent genocide while advocating population replacement.

Evidently our morals leave something to be desired, as any reactionary could tell you. One of the key innovations that the techno-commercialist neoreaction growing out of libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism offers is its account of these moral failures as a market failure in moral capital, i.e., a market failure for truth and justice.

This diagnosis begins with the fact that current media and education markets lack any strong guarantees that the forms of mortal judgment they offer match any more objective concept of judgment, a classic information asymmetry. In fact, the incentives of moral instructors, such as journalists and university professors, seem more aligned towards giving audiences the illusion of understanding and the pleasure of a good conscience rather than any real thing, adding principal agent problems on top of the information asymmetry. Our academic, media, and political cartels, thus incessantly produce glittering insights, but rarely glowing wisdom.

And as judgment worsens, the information asymmetry and principal agent problems only grow.

The current market for judgment and moral influence is therefore a farce. Parents pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to send children to universities that do not instill even basic professionalism, much less improve their other character. Self-help books overwhelmingly preach empty self-esteem and merely instrumental habit while antidepressant, antipsychotic, and antidisobedience drug prescriptions soar because self-regulation is becoming a rarer and rarer skill. The social sciences are transparently biased, and geneticists are employed not to state basic facts.

The market perspective is not the only one worth taking on this moral problem, and it is unlikely to reveal all solutions. However, it does offer advantages. First, it can be formalized well using methods of contemporary microeconomics, enabling tests by computer simulations and experiments. This may prove essential as discussions of reactionary institution design mature into genuine engineering of social technology. As importantly, it relies little on shared cultural heritage that is all-too-rare among the cosmopolitan elite, making neoreaction more accessible to intelligent and analytically-minded individuals with elite backgrounds. Market failure is a neutral way for shallowly rooted intellectuals to debate the moral bases of their problems—and thereby earn respect for reactionary analysis—without first assenting to a reactionary moral perspective.

Indeed, whatever one’s opinion of reactionary mores this moral market rot must be taken seriously. It hollows out the rest of the capitalist consequence engine. In the 2008-2009 subprime crisis, an inability to properly appreciate the risks of contagion among unreliable mortgage applicants led to a dramatic system failure. Hiring based on signals of competence is at times prohibited outright as unjust oppression, even before one broaches the tender subject of compensation for competence. The health care market has been utterly sick both before and after Obamacare’s passage, from the regulation-driven pricing of pharmaceuticals to judicial system avoidant defensive medicine. Volumes have been and continue to be written about moral hazard, the blind spots of regulators, and the apparent stagnation of developed economies.

These problems are all too apparent and have clear roots in judgment. Yet however farcical and structurally perilous, this moral market failure is an opportunity for market makers.

The task of techno-commercialist reactionaries is to identify and invest in the morality and judgment that will survive a market reset (especially the wisest ethno-nationalism and theonomy), short what will be exposed as dross, and be ready to thrive in the recovery.

In less commercial language, if they choose to appreciate it: hew to admirable men; resist sirens of modern moralism like narrow individualism and narrow rationalism; put trust in the faiths of one’s forefathers. Be ready to depart from Troy to seed a new Rome; be ready to depart Sodom without a backward look.

Because make no mistake, inhuman judgment never stops no matter how slow it can seem to an internet junkie or an algorithmic trader. Nemesis comes for the proud.

The post Techno-Commercialism And Markets In Morality appeared first on Social Matter.

Our time is beset by resignation on one hundred fronts. Politically, the far-left is resigned to class struggle and oppression; though they fight, they rarely anticipate any final victory. The moderate left is resigned to corporate influence and to disappointing the zealots they wish they had the idealism to believe in. The conservative right is resigned to change, however hard they fight their enemies to left and right. The far-right has become resigned to the collapse of society as we know it and the necessity of finding another way.

Sub-politically, things may be even more dire. We hear widespread resignation to our words being lost and misinterpreted in the maelstrom of modern media. We hear resignation to changing neighborhoods and communities, whether gentrification or ghettoization, or just Bowling Alone. We hear resignation to divorce and to poor parenting, to the absurd amount of time spent on shallow entertainment, and to the general uglification of men, women, buildings, books, and art.

But this resignation is rarely the clean amor fati resignation of a Stoic. Most often, when we say we hear resignation we mean that we hear despair and bitter frustration. To use a technical term introduced by Friedrich Nietzsche and elaborated well by Max Scheler, we hear ressentiment.

This despair is unbecoming. It’s an excellent sign that this person, whose life is a curse and a hole to be filled, is not worthy to be followed.

For better and worse, however, it is especially common among newcomers to fringe political movements. If not for our sourness, few of us would have traveled so far from mainstream politics. With the culture wars boiling over around Trump, the rhetoric is more overheated than ever. It can be hard not to react by burning with impotent activist rage. Therefore, it’s important that we address the issue, especially now, and circulate remedies against it. I feel a particular responsibility to do so after writing The Radioactivity of Atomic Individualism, which portrayed many negative features of this ubiquitous, desperate unhappiness without describing how to adapt to it in any detail.

Why, in an age of such plenty, would men be so frustrated? There are many threads to follow.

I plan to pick just one with particularly broad relevance and special technical interest for aspiring passivists: incoherent agency.

This concept is that we are often deeply confused about what to feel responsible for and what is out of our control. Do we have the responsibility to regulate our desires, or are our desires inborn and inherently natural? Are our decisions determined by circumstance, or do we choose them freely? Should we be judging one another by our intentions, or by the results we achieve?

Anyone who would be worthy to govern must be proficient in recognizing and assigning such responsibility. Understanding and taming issues of agency in one’s own life and the lives of loved ones is therefore an ideal early step down the passivist path.

One of the causes of our incoherence about agency is our loss of a living concept of virtue, and three virtues are essential to answer these questions and pull up the roots of the bitterest frustration: temperance, justice, and courage, corresponding for my narrow purposes to proper organization of agency across present, past, and future. Let me begin with the first.

One most easily recognized way that incoherent agency leads to despair and frustration is that we formulate our desires using one agency, but then live according to another.

This is especially common in modern life. As a perfect example, consider sexual desire.

Pornography allows viewers to scan through hundreds of body types or fetishes in a single hour. The level of diversity and ease of acquisition has become incredible. On the other hand, though polyamory and fetishes have become relatively normalized, it is still rare to find an actual partner who is up for anything, still less a healthy and desirable partner like that. Desires can be formulated in an environment of abundance with desire almost entirely sovereign, but life must still be lived according to stricter compromises. A mirror occurs with romantic films and books, where convincing fictions portray perfections of emotion that the consumer has never earned nor has any idea how to earn.

One’s frustration occurs because the desires are unrealistic, and they are unrealistic because of a mismatch between where desires are formed and where they are later expressed. In the first context, one’s agency is almost free and complete, but in the second, one’s agency is conditional and limited.

This observation suggests a first essential rule for living a happy and well-ordered life in modern culture: keep learning and doing close together. For mutable desires, never accept low-effort surrogates that imitate rewards better than you can earn. Carefully ensuring that one’s thirst for pleasures does not outstrip one’s rights to them has an old name, of course: this is temperance, as mentioned at the outset.

In our times, temperance especially includes being wary of porn and romance as substitutes for sex and love, of snark for superiority, of flattery for friendship, and of official rights for actual powers. But it is not simply a rule about fiction rather than nonfiction. It is exactly as important to be wary of learning to desire fictions as of learning desires from true stories one cannot personally relive—that way lies envy, just as bitter.

Yet though fiction and nonfiction can be dangerous, this is not to say stop consuming fictions or stop comparing oneself to great men. Only be careful to learn to do what makes them great rather than learn to desire what they earn from their greatness. This is the difference between a young Raskolnikov, eager for the old Napoleon’s privileges, and the young Napoleon, eager for Caesar’s virtues. Become the young hero before an old one.

To judge the present well and to enjoy ourselves in the moment, we must match our desires to our circumstances. Otherwise, we are eternally irritated and disappointed. Otherwise, we can find no good to cultivate in the world around us. Otherwise, we mistake order for chaos and do violence to it.

A second frustrating incoherence, more related to past than present, arises especially among adherents to modern socialist and materialist ideologies, in which agency is ascribed to inchoate groups, or is denied to individuals because of their social conditioning, or is reduced to acting out pre-programmed responses after environmental stimulus.

Taken alone, one can often make good cases for these theories. It may be true that responses to stimuli are predictable, that an individual’s values behind choices might themselves have been chosen by others, or that a group’s desires are together far more causally efficacious than individual desires. Agency is a rich phenomenon that should not be underestimated or oversimplified. However, what happens all too often is that we mix the theories poorly, forgetting the premises that make each conception viable as we clumsily squash one together with another.

We learn that most decisions are made by habit, but think that simple intention will be enough to change habits. We think for a moment that our moods are chemical, yet fail to appreciate how complex that implies the chemistry must be. We exculpate ourselves for being manipulated by others, yet hold them responsible as if they were not also manipulated. There is a temptation to hold oneself responsible for every decision, as in the most radical existentialism, and a simultaneous temptation to hold oneself responsible for nothing, as in the most radical determinism.

What is the intelligent young man to do? Believe that he is structurally part of the patriarchy and thus responsible for all the unhappiness of women? Believe that he’s responsible for nothing more than just kicking it poolside and watching the world burn? Most likely he muddles through, going from one side to the other based on context and the luck of the draw. He follows whichever influence seems higher status or truer (it is rare that those appearances do not coincide). Mostly, he feels guilt and frustration, manipulated but also guilty for being manipulable.

Further, it makes him an ineffective manager and leader. If he is an individualist and somewhat-relativist, he manages each employee according to their own conception of responsibility, sure to cause dissension in the ranks. He cannot enforce or even insist on a consistent standard of responsibility because he does not have one.

To live and lead well, one must maintain consistent standards for agency across contexts, and the last paragraph suggests a proper name for the standard one should aspire to: justice. Whether one is a determinist or an existentialist (and one may be both), justice requires consistency with oneself and with others.

This can especially be a problem for new reactionaries and radicals. Often one will just have been ‘red-pilled‘ from an ideology in which people’s ideals seemed more intentionally honest and rational. Now on the fringes, the norm seems more mendacious—systematically and obligately bad—so he often makes vicious accusations and impractical demands of the normal. He still thinks honesty and rationality are easier than they really are, despite learning that they’re less common. With time, luck, and wisdom, he may learn a just and consistent standard for agency, but in the interim he makes a distinctly poor impression.

The only way to cease this torturous confusion is to understand how to include the past as part of oneself, as consistent with one’s own agency. One must make peace with one’s origins, and that means equally both those origins in the most fleeting chances and those in the deepest natural laws. It is doubtful that the importance of fleeting chance is not one of the deepest laws.

But even if one can maintain temperate desire in the presence and a just feeling of responsibility for past events, despair can still set in when we face the future.

Among the young and the working class, especially, there is a distinct anger that “even doing everything right, we can’t get ahead” in the hollowed-out economies prepared for the Millenials by their Boomer elders and by U.S. coast dwellers for Middle Americans. Students graduate college, but with incredible debt loads. ‘Nice guys’ try to date respectfully, but find women prefer others. Workingmen try to provide for a family, but between divorce and outsourcing find themselves unemployable, on the hook, and alone. The formulas do not work, and men feel betrayed.

On the other hand, genuine sources of happiness are widely distrusted. “Sure you’re saved,” some will say, “but how stupid do you have to be to take church seriously in this day and age?” Or “sure she seems happy but she’s so boring, I could never just be a mother.” A common refrain for the ambitious young man is that “I think meaning is more important than happiness,” but the false opposition reveals a lack of both.

It seems to happen again and again that we misjudge what we expect to make us happy at the same time we discount what we observe making others happy. In one sense, this is simply an image of intemperance as described above: these awful entitled Millenials, for instance, have set their desires above their means. However, there is a deeper mistake at work concerning the relationship of means and ends. Specifically, we ascribe too much direct control to our intention, when intention is only a small part of agency.

The fact is that we do not understand what we do even when we’re successful in doing it. Even the neuroscientists among us do not yet know how, specifically, a good food produces a pleasing sensation of taste. Often the most profound artist will have no articulate explanation for the effect of his work, or will even have one that is demonstrably incorrect. Our actions produce consequences with some regularity, but we rarely know exactly what this regularity consists in.

A fascinating historical case study of this is the prevention of scurvy, and it is particularly interesting for reactionaries because it clearly shows how advances in one technology can mask declines in another. Today, it is well known that scurvy is a vitamin C deficiency and that supplements of any food containing vitamin C are sufficient to prevent or cure it. However, scurvy was cured with citrus well before the vitamin theory was known.

The particular British cure of lemon juice worked for decades, but then changes in technology (1) made ocean travel faster, so fresh food high in vitamin C was more common and (2) eliminated the vitamin C in the most common citrus supplements. The first change masked the other, so that scurvy re-emerged as a problem in long ocean voyages and arctic expeditions despite the presence of citrus (now lime juice) supplements. In fact, with the advent of boiling and canning destroying natural vitamin C in many other foods, scurvy became a particular epidemic among the rich. All the while, various doctors and nutritionists advanced vain theories of what to eat and why, and all the while people believed that they were taking the most reasonable actions to ensure their health.

Some will read this story and think the lesson is to be suspicious. Many beliefs have turned out to be false in this story. However, it should be equally incredible how well the lemon juice cure worked before the vitamin theory was known. Even without the vitamin theory, citrus solidified British domination of the seas for generations. As much as one should be humble about the limits of one’s knowledge, one should also be courageous in acting despite one’s ignorance.

Our ignorance is unlimited. For every theory, there is an unknown assumption, and for every policy there is an unknown failure mode. Coherent agency requires a coherent practice of giving reasons for acting and communicating expectations. Agency cannot consist in following guaranteed formulas absent judgment, and trusting judgment requires courage. There is no alternative or substitute. Even complete inaction is a risk, and even letting another decide requires the courage to trust that other.

For the young and the working class, the difficulty and likelihood of failure in particular endeavors will often be made no less by courage, but the fact of failure will become more bearable—even strengthening. The difficulty of trying again for the next, more likely success will lessen. And in the most important cases, courage will reveal paths forward that no generic expert or outsider could recommend: paths like starting a unique business or learning skills that hardly exist yet; paths that require the ability to judge risks for oneself.

Courage could also be called the ability to make a choice for the future and accept the unknown consequences; in this sense it is clear it is also an aspect of coherent agency. And with courage, even if despair may persist for a time, it will become something more before long—the example of a Job still faithful to God, or of an outmatched warrior fighting to the death just to spite the enemy, or of a mad experimental philosopher going to the limits of sanity for the sake of finding something deeper.

Alone, each of these three incoherencies can cause unbecoming frustration, despair, and ressentiment. Without temperance, the present is irritating or dull; without justice, the past is empty or cruel; without courage, it is impossible to anticipate good outcomes or endure the expectation of bad ones. Together they do not account for every root of ressentiment, but these virtues form a strong protection against the most common types. They also have other, richer and more rewarding aspects that I have not discussed. Yet before you begin this three-part remedy or recommend it, take care.

None of these virtues is independent of wisdom, and not one will be independent of the passion that likely drives any current ressentiment. In a choice between giving up both ressentiment and all the passions that lead one to it, or continuing to feel the frustration and the anger and the thirst for what is better, prefer the latter.

Nature does not look kindly on mere self-satisfaction and self-consistency; nothing is surer to invite predators and parasites. Nor does her God, He who spits out the lukewarm and sooner blesses those Jacobs who wrestle against Him.

Instead, as you burn, keep these in mind and use them to harness your fire rather than to cool it. Learn to concentrate its heat with temperance, to fuel it cleanly with justice, and to vent its warmth into the world with courage. Before long, done well, the fire will burn clean and bright, without spittling smoke and poison vapors. You will find it a trusted friend rather than an unaccountable torturer.

Make your soul the hearth of a roaring flame, and around you, others will see it in your eyes—and begin to think you worthy.

The post A Remedy For Ressentiment appeared first on Social Matter.

I recently had the pleasure of diving deep into the thought and life of Albert O. Hirschman, an anti-communist anti-libertarian, wary of economism and scientism and steeped in old books, yet nevertheless resolutely liberal. I engaged with him as one of the most admirable modern intellectual opponents I could find for my less-liberal beliefs. Moreover, given the centrality of Exit and Voice to contemporary neoreactionary theory, he is an important precursor to that nascent tradition. He introduced these terms, and though words can be repurposed, they keep the stamp of their coiner.

Hirschman’s writing is elegant, focused, and interesting. He is also rare for having explicitly engaged with reaction 25 years ago with more subtlety than knee-jerk rejection in his mistitled book The Rhetoric of Reaction, which also criticizes progressive rhetoric equally incisively, if not at equal length. Hirschman states he preferred the book to be called The Rhetoric of Intransigence, that is, the rhetoric of refusing to consider alternatives, subtleties, and compromises.

The book had its merits, but missed its mark. The book did not live up to the high expectations set by his earlier work: it did not have the reception or effect that Hirschman wished. Reading it as a reactionary, I felt sympathy. The book’s weaknesses are apparent but seem inevitable given the lack of a healthy, living reactionary tradition to engage with. His targets, the neoconservatives, were no such thing.

Therefore, out of respect for the man and the others who rightfully respect him as one of the most creative and independent social scientists of the postwar era (or one of the few?—some readers will think this), my words will attempt to provide that missing reactionary engagement, however sadly posthumously. It will outline a response to The Rhetoric of Reaction that addresses his claims constructively, towards syntheses, without falling into the intransigent rhetoric he rightly or wrongly identifies as the heart of the reactionary analytical style.

First, I will skim the book’s critique of intransigent reactionary and progressive rhetoric, which is correct in the main. The rhetoric is typical of reaction and does conflict with subtle problem-solving discourse. However, my response will not aim at improving this discourse for democracy—at least as it is usually understood. I am no democratic idealist.

Hirschman’s mistaken idealization of democracy guaranteed the book would not have the effect he desired. He misjudged the role of intransigence in democracy and neglected its possibilities for organizing democratic cooperation. This undercut his call to abandon intransigence as a foe of reform. An approach that acknowledged the possibilities of synthesis via mixed or alternating strategies (so typical of Hirschman elsewhere) could have been more effective, though it departs from idealism.

Hirschman’s book centers around three theses attributed to reactionary rhetoric against reform. First, the perversity thesis: that attempts at reform will have the opposite of the intended, as when Burke argues the French revolution in the name of liberty merely established Robespierre’s tyranny. Second, the futility thesis: that attempts at reform will have no effect, as when Tocqueville demonstrates that what reform did follow the revolution was already present before the revolution regardless. Third, the jeopardy thesis: that attempts at reform will undercut other goods, as when Maine claims that universal suffrage will undermine technological innovation and scientifically grounded legislation.

In each case Hirschman acknowledges that the reactionaries may in fact be correct. Rather than claiming the theses are simply wrong because of their form, he criticizes over-reliance on the forms to the exclusion of nuance and compromise.

The progressive mirrors to these theses are said to be, respectively: desperation, the thesis that without reform everything will fall apart; inevitability, the thesis that resistance to reform is futile; and mutuality, the thesis that reforms must inherently support one another, never compete.

I trust my readers either already see how these are overused by the left to stifle creative compromise or are uninterested in hearing that critique, so I won’t spend more time discussing them.

The book illustrates the reactionary theses with a significant bibliography of sound and unsound reactionary arguments of the past two and a half centuries that any neoreactionary could do well to study. It is also worth checking our current rhetoric alongside these examples to confirm that we ourselves are not over reliant on these tropes to the point of blindness.

Of all the theses, neoreaction and the broader alt-right overuse the perversity thesis least. Some will certainly say that increases in minimum wage could lead to unemployment and socialist distribution to shortage, for instance, but these are attested by observation. What they do not do—and rather mock—is absurdities like “Democrats are the real racists.” We’ve learned to be wary of such sloppy inversions.

As Hirschman correctly points out, the perversity thesis too often concedes the opponent’s frame of reference and only reinforces their sense of power to achieve reform. Perversely, the perversity thesis encourages the opponent. So this, at least, has been transcended in large part—however funny it is to think of alt-right Twitter as evidence of transcending anything.

Neoreaction is also proving resistant to overuse of the futility thesis, and the alt-right may not be far behind with its recent furor over ‘the black pill.’ Factually, many things in life are futile. There is no general algebraic solution to all quintic polynomial equations. Nevertheless, while neoreaction may overemphasize the perceived futility of activism, for instance, this never blinds it to more humble avenues for reform: establishing healthy group norms, raising virtuous children, and founding strong institutions.

Our public speech is more prone to this futility trope than our private action. Because we are persecuted and private, we do not make our most compelling hopes public. I ask a charitable reader to have patience.

The jeopardy thesis, on the other hand, is one I would admit as a particular weakness. Reactionary ideology does not minimize the differences between distinct ends, or their conflicts, which leads our movement to have a certain fragmentary character.

However, this vice is not so vicious, and in a move Hirschman might respect we laud this fragmentation and formalize it as patchwork. These conflicts strengthen our intellectual ferment, a mechanism reminiscent of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (or Heraclitus, to be less presentist—and yes, citing 300-year-old writing can be presentism in this milieu: one of its charms). This counters jeopardy theses with the theory of mutual support, exactly Hirschman’s suggested cure.

Therefore, though we maintain a predilection for many of these rhetorical forms, they do not seem so crippling as Hirschman alleges. We use them contingently and are frequently conscious of their drawbacks. It is certainly true that we still use this rhetoric even when it does not convince our interlocutors, but before I recommend changing that rhetoric to be more convincing rather than simply intransigent, let me change tacks.

If the book had been more successful in its author’s eyes, the argument would appear more compelling. Nothing Hirschman says about intransigent reactionary and progressive rhetoric is necessarily incorrect, and it’s often good advice for us to avoid using these tropes too often. Yet evidently something about the book missed the point for its intended audience; the book is mistargeted from the beginning.

Hirschman’s beginnings lie in his conclusions:

[M]y purpose is not to cast “a plague on both your houses.” Rather, it is to move public discourse beyond extreme, intransigent postures of either kind, with the hope that in the process our debates will become more “democracy friendly.” (Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction, p. 168)

This is where a lively reactionary correspondent might have contributed to his thinking. In fact, I am surprised that his supporter Thomas Schelling’s influence was not sufficient.

Democracy is friendly to intransigence.

Democracy is exactly a way for intransigent mass factions to pursue “civil war with other means,” as Hirschman paraphrases Clausewitz (The Rhetoric of Reaction, p. 169), as has been a conscious obsession of European political philosophy since at least the English Civil Wars of 1642-1651, Hobbes, and Locke. Hirschman claims that democratic legitimacy arises “to the extent that its decisions result from full and open deliberation among it principal groups, bodies, and representatives,” but it seems more likely that the legitimacy of democratic cooperation arises from full and open contention among those principal groups, bodies, and representatives—deliberation is often beside the point.

The problem of effective cooperation is not simply a matter of good will and open deliberation, a point few have made as well as Schelling in his The Strategy of Conflict:

What is there about pure collaboration that relates it to game theory or to bargaining? A partial answer, just to establish that this game is not trivial, is that it may contain problems of perception and communication of a kind that quite generally occur in nonzero-sum games. Whenever the communication structure does not permit players to divide the task ahead of time according to an explicit plan, it may not be easy to coordinate behavior in the course of the game. Players have to understand each other, to discover patterns of individual behavior that make each player’s actions predictable to each other; they have to test each other for a shared sense of pattern or regularity and to exploit cliches, conventions, and impromptu codes for signaling their intentions and responding to each other’s signals. They must communicate by hint and by suggestive behavior. Two vehicles trying to avoid collision, two people dancing together to unfamiliar music, or members of a guerrilla force that have become separated in combat have to concert their intentions in this fashion… (Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, p. 85)

Are most citizens expected to be elegant waltzers of opinion, subtly anticipating one another’s responses to complex political melodies without stepping on one another’s toes? Being honest about their education and motivation, we might be grateful they choose intransigent martial tunes instead–a march is a better fit; it flatters their virtues where a more subtle dance would mock them.

And in these situations, intransigence and seeming weaknesses can even become strengths:

When a person—or a country—has lost the power to help himself, or the power to avert mutual damage, the other interested party has no choice but to assume the cost or responsibility. “Coercive deficiency” is the term Arthur Smithies uses to describe the tactic of deliberately exhausting one’s annual budgetary allowance so early in the year that the need for more funds is irresistibly urgent. (Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, p. 37)

Or, best read in context but striking regardless:

[I]f one player can make an offer and destroy communication, he may thereby win the ensuing tacit game by having provided the only extant offer that both players can converge on when they badly need to concert their choices later during the final tacit stage. (Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, p. 277)

Hirschman speaks as if the reactionaries he indicts were speaking dialectically in deliberation rather than rhetorically in contention, as if propositional truth and technocratic reform were the name of the democratic game rather than posture and maintaining Schelling points. As explained by de Maistre:

One can even note an affectation (may I be permitted to use this expression) of Providence: the efforts people make to attain a certain objective are precisely the means employed by Providence to keep it out of reach…

All those who have written or meditated about history have admired this secret force which mocks human intentions. (Joseph de Maistre, trans. Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction, p. 18)

He is speaking passionately to passionate men who decide by radical conversion and personal experience because they are rightly wary of slippery slope sophistry. Recall Schelling on threats and promises again, and is it any wonder that rhetoric in a democracy does not look particularly subtle? Subtlety is too often a liability if the other side will not reciprocate. De Maistre writes to signal intransigent opposition to an intransigent mob.

Both progressives and reactionaries are drawn into intransigence by democratic politics, not in spite of it. It would be foolish to recommend those speaking to general audiences to soften their rhetoric in order to find better solutions in many cases; that would mean unilateral concession to the other.

In order to make reform possible, it is more important to provide face-saving ways to make changes while respecting intransigence. An American solution is to delegate legislation to an elite Congress and judgment to an even more rarefied Supreme Court.

In elite institutions, the structure of bargaining processes is different. When communication is more reliable among the educated and sophisticated, cooperation is more practical. Collusion and logrolling, while often derided, are effective coordination mechanisms. An old boys network in which reputation is everything provides an excellent framework for making credible threats and promises and also for ensuring that false threats and promises rarely confuse matters. Strict but nuanced ownership rights provide a multitude of enforceable contracts, lessening concerns about slippery slopes and the need for intransigence to establish bright lines. Elite discourse is where subtlety functions.

Separation between governor and governed is often castigated as invitation to abuse, but the mismatch also makes for rich bargaining opportunities. If a leader makes one deal while his people fulminate against it, the precedent does not oblige him to make a similar deal again. The subjects’ credible irrationality grounds the sovereign’s bargaining position: “you know I’m a reasonable man, but my army wants blood…” This is evident in analyses of diplomacy from the Cold War to barbarian siege. The threat of provoking obdurate reactionary, progressive, or simply bloodthirsty anger in followers can ensure that elite negotiations are more sophisticatedly cooperative. Such threats even ensure more mutually beneficial outcomes in the right cases, which do not seem unusual enough to be called merely special cases. In Hobbes, the threat of unrestricted war is the basis of all government.

In his essay Political Economics and Possibilism, Hirschman advocates identifying even the most unexpected ways to accomplish desired development. To take this seriously, one must seek to understand even how intransigence can enable mutually beneficial cooperation despite its more apparent role in preventing it. Sometimes, democratic idealism is blinding when mixed high/low strategy should not be overlooked.

Hirschman, however, persisted in his calls for a new rhetoric after the book’s disappointing reception. He did not look for ways to use the current state of rhetoric as a frame in which to seek levers; he looked to achieve an ideal inspired by a problem rather than a possibility. Despite his effort, it would be hard to argue that contemporary society is not still shot through with intransigence at every level, from the Tea Party’s government shutdowns to Black Lives Matter’s burning neighborhoods to Chinese posturing in the South China Sea to Salafist extremism worldwide.

So in the end, I’m left with a too-neat little slogan: one should not inveigh too intransigently against intransigence. Perhaps it’s inevitable that I’d end up playing a joke like that in memory of Hirschman’s own playfulness. But seriously, one must respect intransigence’s place in negotiation no matter how frustrating. Your frustration is the point: that is the feeling of the other side extracting concessions.

Hirschman was not an ally of ours, but he was a brave man worth respecting. He fought in the streets of Weimar Berlin and the Spanish Civil War. He worked as a fixer and human trafficker to save his allies’ lives. He advised heads of state and captains of industry. He was always a proponent of civilization in his own eyes, and was far more open than most to creative ways to encourage development that did not reduce to dry paradigms, prediction-based positivism, or universal theories of human good.

If there are budding Hirschmans out in the world now, I hope we can earn their respect and convince them we’re worth a conversation or two. Lord knows there’s a lot of dross written on both the left and the right, but let’s not take it as an excuse to ignore one another’s better thinking. Gentlemanly discourse among a diversely opinionated elite is one of the most precious traditions of Western civilization, and it would be a shame to lose.

The alternative may be universal intransigence, with none of the redeeming features of our current mixture.

The post Possibilities Of Intransigence appeared first on Social Matter.

One of Mencius Moldbug’s more famous and infamous slogans is the audacious “America is a communist country.” As rhetoric and provocation it has much to recommend it. It is hard not to look at the United States government differently after realizing how much of the 1928 platform of the Communist Party of the USA has been adopted and feels modern, whereas major goals of the other political parties, such as bimetallism and racial segregation, appear scandalously dated. The prominence of so many communists in high places throughout the last century of American politics, from Alger Hiss to Bill Ayers, also seems telling. Yet the living, breathing Marxist communists in this country are dissatisfied as ever, and in some cases declaring that they are worse off than they have ever been.

Is this just because these Marxists are naturally catankerous and fiery people? In the most endearing ways, yes. They have ideals, and they’ll accept nothing less. Still, our living, breathing communists also have a point beyond merely expressing fervent idiosyncrasies. Even if much of their former platforms has been adopted, the spirit does seem missing.

Look around and ask if your world is communist in spirit. The answer for a communist is no. Formally, the workers have been granted ownership of a surprising amount of the means of production through retirement funds, pensions, and the like, but be honest–the pensions are hollow, underfunded: looted. A test of genuine ownership in the Marxist sense is absence of alienation–do Americans report alienation? Of course. Next, let’s examine that root “commune.”

Where is the solidarity in our lives? Where is community? We have a society, but communists find it fragmented and status-obsessed with alarming financial inequality. Though we do have social safety nets and social redistribution, many among us seem glorified sharecroppers essentially in slavery to private purchasers of collection rights on publicly subsidized debt. Perhaps what we have is a weak form of socialism and not communism?

No, neoreaction’s critics from the left will say that what we have is “neoliberalism.” Semi-liberal market democracy. They have a point.

Perhaps the most derided expression of neoliberalism’s present perceived hegemony is Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” essay, infamous for declaring in the early 90s that the victory of capitalist liberal democracy is the end of history. Denigrators say Fukuyama jumped the gun in announcing supremacy of liberal democracy over all competing forms of government in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. They point to continued war for power’s sake alone, environmental catastrophes, and Clashes of Civilizations between cultures that refuse to assimilate peacefully into a global multicultural superstate. I have to confess I felt it absurd, too, until I read it. Clearly, history is not over, and liberal democracy still faces threats.

However, they miss the point and Fukuyama appears happy to let them. He is an admirer of Leo Strauss. In his interviews, he speaks carefully. Watch him in the BBC discussion on the 25th anniversary of the essay—look at minute 11. Is he really concerned about defending his thesis? He disputes facts that his opponents assert, but a deeper mirth in his eyes seems to say he’s more entertained than threatened.

This could be arrogance, and if we aren’t feeling charitable, that’s enough to damn him. But first go back to the book following up the essay, which is not titled The End of History? but rather The End of History and the Last Man.

The last man? You hear Nietzsche. This is not election cycle time horizon, goldfish punditry. Something old—and something suspiciously German—is at play; the essay’s thesis is more subtle than a paean to the neoliberal/neoconservative American form of government. The initial essay’s stimulus was a then very recent historical event, the end of the Cold War, but the true mark was a 200-year-old theory of history grounding Marxism from the beginning: Hegelian absolute idealism. Far from being early to his conclusions, Fukuyama might also be considered a century late. Possibly two.

Listen again to Fukuyama’s first speech in the video linked above.

Well, you have to understand the term end properly. End meant not termination, the question was, in the grand philosophical sense of the evolution of human societies, in what direction was history pointing. And for a hundred years, progressive intellectuals believed it was pointing towards a communist utopia, and I made the simple observation in 1989 that it didn’t look like were were gonna to get there, that if we were going to end up at any place it was going to be something like liberal democracy and a market economy, and I think that that still is the most likely termination point of the whole modernization process 25 years later. (vide supra)

The End of History is an end more in the sense of telos than termination. Furthermore, it is not our telos, but the telos of a process called ‘history’. It is the telos specifically of the progressive, modernizing, Hegelian conception of history: history-as-progress.

Fukuyama’s thesis is not that history has finished, but that the end target of history-as-progress is liberal market democracy rather than communism. When he disputes his opponents’ facts in the video, he can feel secure because they hardly touch his true thesis, let alone rebut it.

In his book, he argues that the apparent universality and terminality of liberal democracy as opposed to communism arises from the weaving of two political threads.

The first thread is the progress of the natural sciences, which privileges particular liberal socioeconomic arrangements for their ability to accumulate and exert power. He argues that this natural power imbalance allows socially and economically liberal societies to dominate others and tempts other societies to mimic them. This is a commonly asserted, often contested point; I will not rely on its validity here but only report that Fukuyama correctly anticipates many of the most familiar criticisms, so his discussion remains interesting despite relying on this often-weak foundational premise.

The second thread is the human ambition to receive validating moral recognition from others, which arguably causes inevitable conflict in all societies with structural political inequalities. This latter is more rarely described than the first, so allow me to quote Fukuyama’s introduction of his crucial term for this ambition, thymos.

The desire for recognition may at first appear to be an unfamiliar concept, but it is as old as the tradition of Western philosophy, and constitutes a thoroughly familiar part of the human personality. It was first described by Plato in the Republic, when he noted that there were three parts to the soul, a desiring part, a reasoning part, and a part that he called thymos, or “spiritedness.” Much of human behavior can be explained as a combination of the first two parts, desire and reason: desire induces men to seek things outside themselves, while reason or calculation shows them the best way to get them. But in addition, human beings seek recognition of their own worth, or of the people, things, or principles that they invest with worth… The desire for recognition, and the accompanying emotions of anger, shame, and pride, are parts of the human personality critical to the political life. According to Hegel, they are what drive the whole historical process. (Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 2006, p. xvi-xvii)

Fukuyama goes on to paraphrase Hegel to the effect that in authoritarian societies, the relationships between masters and slaves can never satisfy the desire for recognition. The slave does not receive validating recognition at all and the masters are only recognized as masters by slaves, not other masters, which is unsatisfying. On the other hand, in a democratic state all citizens recognize the dignity and humanity of every other citizen. Thus democracy satisfies thymos uniquely elegantly.

Obviously this is an oversimplification, and Fukuyama does not defend the clumsiest elaborations of this view. The essential idea he explores in depth is this: democratic universal dignity appears capable of satisfying thymos in a uniquely symmetric way, so it does not inevitably give rise to interpersonal political conflicts that destabilize the democratic order. Thus, it serves as a rational stable state, or teleological end point, for political history understood as rational progress.

This is not the Scottish Enlightenment argument that everyone should subordinate their personal, conflicting prides and bigotries to cooperation via enlightened self-interest, but an alternative Continental argument that the best way to satisfy the political will for recognition of one’s particular chauvinisms is universal and reciprocal recognition for others’ bigotries, as formalized in rights-granting democracies. It is not the sleep of politics underneath philistinism, but rather unlimited but tame activism for ever, for all.

The book outlines this case briefly, but spends the majority of its words exploring objections to it, actively seeking other possibilities past this End of History-as-Progress. Fukuyama’s most critical objections rely on the last man of his book’s title, an image Nietzsche used to illustrate a shared folly of capitalism, liberalism, and communism over 125 years ago. Here is his introductory summary:

But is the recognition available to citizens of contemporary liberal democracies “completely satisfying”? The long term future of liberal democracy, and the alternatives to it that might one day arise, depend above all on the answer to this question. In Part V we sketch two broad responses, from the Left and Right, respectively. The Left would say that universal recognition in a liberal democracy is necessarily incomplete because capitalism creates economic inequality and requires a division of labor that ipso facto implies unequal recognition. In this respect, a nation’s absolute level of prosperity provides no solution, because there will continue to be those who are relatively poor and therefore invisible as human beings to their fellow citizens. Liberal democracy, in other words, continues to recognize people unequally.

The second, and in my view more powerful, criticism of universal recognition comes from the Right that was profoundly concerned with the leveling effects of the French Revolution’s commitment to human equality. This Right found its most brilliant spokesman in the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose views were in some respects anticipated by that great observer of democratic societies, Alexis de Tocqueville. Nietzsche believed that modern democracy represented not the self-mastery of former slaves, but the unconditional victory of the slave and a kind of slavish morality. This typical citizen of a liberal democracy was a “last man” who, schooled by the founders of modern liberalism, gave up prideful belief in his or her own superior worth in favor of comfortable self-preservation. Liberal democracy produced “men without chests,” composed of desire and reason but lacking thymos, clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of petty wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest. The last man had no desire to be recognized as greater than others, and without such desire no excellence or achievement was possible. Content with his happiness and unable to feel any sense of shame for being unable to rise above those wants, the last man ceased to be human. (Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 2006, p. xxi-xxii)

The alt-right insult “cuckservative” is directed precisely at these men without chests. Trump, on the other hand, is a perfect example of a man of thymos, a man with a broad chest and “high energy,” who again and again confounds the expectations of this era’s best approximations of last men.

True to form, these are too busy fiddling with statistical and economic estimates of long-term ”enlightened self-interest” to even understand the hunger so many feel to “make America great again,” a succinct expression of frustrated thymos. The few explanations that the left offers blame inequality, even as the right insists again and again that no, we don’t want equality, we want to be great—to build great buildings, to revive or found whole industries anew, to escape this planet’s flyspeck of a gravity well.

This concept should therefore be familiar to my readers. From another perspective, these chest-less last men are the wreckers who will not work themselves to Stakhanovite extremes for the good of the Motherland. These are the men who use feminism as an excuse to shirk responsibility. These are the liberal Zionists who will back every civil rights movement, unless it contradicts their own Israel-chauvinism.

Last men are the ones who give lip service to universal equality but are satisfied to work little further once they achieve their own minimal dignity and material security.

Fukuyama claims that the reason neoliberal democracy is a satisfactory End of History, so Marxist Communism is unnecessary, is that men without chests on the way to becoming last men are not so offended by economic inequality that they really want further revolution. So long as their basic needs for food and flattery are taken care of. Add to that the apparent superiority of market economies over command economies for actually putting food on the table and entertainment on the eyeballs, and neoliberalism makes a fine end point for history.

Needless to say, this is not the stuff of manifestos. It lacks ambition—that’s the point.

This is a persistent observation and frustration of Marxist intellectuals from Marx through the present day, not only an idiosyncratic thesis of Fukuyama’s. The idealistic vanguard is often frustrated by the more complacent rank and file. Luxemburg’s fiery pamphlets against Bernstein’s reformism famously exemplify this struggle. Trotsky’s conflicts against Stalin’s socialism in one country do also. And where shall we place Slaughter’s writing on revolutionary leadership?

If I am lucky enough to have wavering Marxists reading this article today, I urge them to take this issue seriously. In the early twentieth century, it was easy to believe this was only a matter of education and that the intellectuals would soon convert the working class to proper revolutionary fervor, but these days it appears that in fact the intellectuals were fated to the reverse. All too many have instead dulled their own ambitions and been tamed nearly into last men themselves.

The CIA bet large on this by sponsoring pet literary publications and modern art projects in the wake of Word War II. The gamble is vindicated. The American state maintained its power through every decade of the Cold War, and when an occasional outbreak of revolutionary thymos occurs today, it seems easy enough to discharge into whatever identity politics purity spiral du jour is convenient. The struggle to achieve prominence in these will rarely interfere with the deepest power structures in our society. Though many on the right assume that foundation funding of the left shows support, perhaps just as often it indicates an effort to tame.

This strategy of manipulation belies the essential tragedy of thymos in neoliberal society: for a man with the greatest desire for glory, the best way to achieve it is often to help others be satisfied in complacency.

Consumer goods manufacturers prove their genius by improving processes to lower prices, making modest life more satisfying for the less driven. Politicians drum up support by seeding resentment or entitlement when they already have a role in mind to focus and channel the public’s new desires towards their own advancement. Our most famous artists are our greatest crowd entertainers; our most famous comedians are masters of snark and self-satisfaction.

Though ever fewer remain ambitious, these few still amass power. If fewer try to consciously order their own lives, more control of their lives will come from elsewhere. Perhaps it will be a paternalistic mayor forbidding smoking and large sodas, perhaps it will be EU regulation of what had been traditional cheesemaking. Vain thymos will interfere anywhere it finds no resistance.

Therefore, far from being a path to a truly equal society, “one herd and no shepherd,” the progressive path leads again and again to oligarchy. The sheep do not mind the shepherd, really, so long as he does not herd them too clumsily. They are content to forget he exists. At worst, a red cape will suffice.

And so what is the need for full, Marxist Communism over and above neoliberal democracy?

The last men don’t need it; their complacency makes economic inequality bearable. The men with chests don’t want it; they would be dissatisfied with equality. The remainder are those who actually dream of equality for the world for its own sake… and self-deceivers actually thirsting for recognition as holier-than-thou. Historically, the latter appear to be the majority by far.

I’m convinced by Fukuyama’s thesis. This, I think he’s right about: the dream and specter of Marxist Communism is done. Though it lives on in attenuated forms, as a revolutionary social vision it has succumbed to the last men. The sex appeal is gone; the movement has grayed.

So we might agree, America is not really a communist country, it’s merely neoliberal. We might agree, Moldbug is insisting that what is clearly a gray, lumpy manatee is actually an exquisite mermaid. We all know mermaids have never been seen on earth and neither has true communism. Whether either ever will, we leave up to posthuman genetic engineering.

However, if you imagine yourself as a desperate, sex-starved sailor looking too far out over a glaring sea too long, you might see how a manatee would be mistaken for a beautiful mermaid. This is how many legends formed. Similarly, if you imagine yourself as Marx, an obsessive Hegelian looking too far into the future of industrial ecology too long, you might start taking the neoliberalism we have today for communism. You might mistake the possibility of retirement and pension-owned stock markets, universal suffrage democracy, and substantial redistributive taxes for the possibility of a beautiful new form of government.

In fact, manatees are ungainly and blubbery sea-cows, and in fact, our wonderful redistributive government with universal suffrage amounts to a sclerotic and uninspiring oligarchy for all its democratic trappings. Yet in an important sense, mermaids never were anything more than manatees. And in the same sense, communism never has been anything but hypocritical, redistributive rule by the few. This was Moldbug’s definition: “democracy without authentic political opposition.”

This point has been made again and again since Marx’s polemical-historical futurology first sparked a fire among the intellectuals of his day. Schumpeter put this criticism especially well in writing, as did Kolakowski. Stalin, Mao, and Chavez made the point in practice.

And in this sense, even committed Marxists should now understand why we call America a communist country. If they continue to insist on seeing True Communist mermaids out on the horizon, we’ll keep pointing to the neoliberal manatees by the boat. Manatees who often self-identify as mermaids, in fact…

Does that contradict America’s being a plutocratic country, too? The point is this: whether we’re talking about capitalism or communism as they exist today, either one, and we still talk about the same uninspiring masses primarily seeking contentment and freedom from responsibility. The persistence of cynical, redistributive, oligarchic bureaucracy politics in practice. The same hollow surface-democratic materialism without the power to cultivate virtue and hope among its people. The End of American History, as it stands, is White Noise.

Expecting to improve a people merely by satisfying their needs for material pleasure and flattery is a fundamental error. It does not lead to greater things. Satisfying such needs in our society does not often make time for philosophy or invention, it makes time for TV.

Contra the usual assumptions of our contemporary culture, the needs for food, shelter, and self-esteem are not the most basic needs. This can be seen in any story of actual privation, from POWs to shipwrecks, or of excess, from Buddha to Des Esseintes. Virtue—courage, resourcefulness, and will—is as important as and often more sustaining than external goods. Without moderation no amount of food will be enough and without daring no amount of security will calm the mind for greater things.

This presents a challenge to seek other hopes than merely different patterns of resource allocation and self-satisfaction.

Fukuyama himself recognizes how the liberal last man might be overcome. Deep within his book, we read an explicit suggestion:

Thus, despite the apparent absence of systematic alternatives to liberal democracy at present, some new authoritarian alternatives, perhaps never before seen in history, may assert themselves in the future. These alternatives, if they come about, will be created by two distinct groups of people: those who for cultural reasons experience persistent economic failure, despite an effort to make economic liberalism work, and those who are inordinately successful at the capitalist game. (Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 2006, p. 235)

Neoreaction aims at the second of these paths. Fukuyama is not blind to our hopes; few of today’s observant intellectuals are.

So, we look beyond history as a universal progression from low needs to higher morals. We look beyond the End of History-as-Progress because in so many ways it is already here; we admit that the redistributive oligarchy we have in America today is as materially satisfying a communism as has ever been achieved. The Marxist ideal shows no signs of being approached closer in any more formally communist government, and what grounds remain at this point for thinking that the quest for this so-called True Communism is any more realistic than the hunt for a mythical mermaid?

We envision something other. A new End of American History. The seemingly endless brawl between capitalism and communism is, to us, a diversion from the more important struggle between greatness and nihilism. If we neoreactionaries were to succeed according to our enemies’ most absurd fears and literally restore the Stuarts, yet merely gorge ourselves complacently in the new monarchy like the last men—we would have won nothing at all.

The post You Say America Is Not A Communist Country appeared first on Social Matter.

One of the most obvious ways men and women differ must be our affinities for destruction. No matter how hard progressive parents try to stop them, little boys find a way to play with swords and guns. Girls find their own ways to make messes and wreck each other’s plans, but little boys are a league apart when it comes to straightforward smashing, burning, and making bleed.

The difference doesn’t disappear in adulthood. Men commit more crime, especially violent crime, and men are overwhelmingly more military in disposition. But among the best of us, our violence matures. We’ll keep up a boxing hobby, we’ll rip the life out of an old tree to make room for a new shed, we’ll go to the firing range every couple of weeks, or we’ll play dirty games of rugby to smash a few faces. We find a way without overstepping the bounds of civilized living—too much.

Even the philosophers have been little different since Plato, whose name means broad-shouldered and who was famous as a wrestler in his day. In fact, the Socratic dialogue likely become popular exactly because it was a new twist on ancient masculine traditions of verbal and athletic competition. The Greeks could not resist agon, as they called struggles and contests; it was one of their highest arts and joys.

No man should expect to avoid struggle in his life, and taking joy in what is given honors life and its sources. Avoiding struggle unconditionally marks a soul unworthy of respect and incapable of love. Moreover, it’s boring.

Several times in my articles here I have advocated for passivism, the opposite of activism, which may sound strange, given what I have just written. But activism is no synonym for struggle and passivism is no antonym to it. Activism could be caricatured as a process with three steps: Declare authority. Attempt power. Pretend worthiness. Passivism is the reverse: Become worthy. Accept power. Wield authority.

To some, the shallow pretensions of current leaders show that activism fits better to the way of the world. But instead it’s just a gross inversion. Even the worst hypocrisies of our leaders rest on a bedrock of astonishing real power as judged by the impartial revelation of fact after fact along the progress of history. Preparation, placement, and real, relevant skill—whether or not those are also mixed with abominable vice and pretension—are the sources of victory, power, and authority. We may not like the way the world works, but there is an undeniable pattern to what functions and what doesn’t.

Yet, the word activism carries an appeal. It is designed to seduce our vanity: we like to think of ourselves as active and in control, rather than patient and following natural law. And there would be something paradoxical in following natural law too smoothly, since conflict is written into nature’s heart.

In particular, part of what is called activism feels like defending one’s people, one’s home, and one’s culture, and those instincts are too good and too deeply ingrained to resist or to recommend denying.

So let me propose an alternative name for this, for the reactionary right: one that should satisfy the best instincts that the concept ‘activism’ appeals to without pulling us into Alinskyite vanity and movement for movement’s sake.

Territorialism.

The word might be most commonly associated with dogs marking trees and barking like mad, but dogs aren’t so stupid or unlike us we can’t recognize ourselves in them. Specifically, think of the big dogs who can merely growl and make a room go silent. Then think of the yapping lapdogs who can’t shut up in the face of a wolfhound ten times their size. The yapper is a mere activist, high-pitched and bouncing and acting a fool. The growler is something more, strong and poised and legitimately intimidating. The little dog keeps yapping and may never show he’s intimidated, and perhaps other little dogs take courage from that. But the instant the big one wants it, the little guy is toast.

This is the story of right-wing activists’ repeated failure over the past century of US history, a line of defeats essentially unbroken since the WASP Know-Nothings preferred to prioritize banning slavery in the South rather than restricting immigration to protect their own culture in the North.

Activism may seem like defending territory at times, but by itself it is only disrespecting the territory of another. A good offense is sometimes the best defense, but only if, like Sir Francis Drake, the Crusaders, or Scipio Africanus, you are the offense in service to a bigger power that can back you up. Otherwise, you are at best a new Hannibal.

No matter your tactical brilliance, your fate is sealed. Your successes merely leave you running out of resources surrounded by enemies. The victors might remember you and honor your skill, someday, but you will not be among them. Hardly recommended unless you care about your enemies’ opinions more than your own people’s welfare.

Truly claiming and defending territory looks different. The big dog doesn’t yap too eagerly or move too quickly, but the signs of his dominion are clear enough when he wants them to be. He barks at intruders, he gets in the occasional fight when they persist, he marks his trees, he sniffs around and meets the neighbors as an equal. But he doesn’t roam, mark, bark, and fight far beyond his borders. He keeps himself focused on his piece of earth.

We are much more than dogs, but each of us likewise have our own piece of earth. Territory is an indispensable good for men. It’s at the heart of Männerbund and the heart of civilization, and it doesn’t have to be a literal plot of land. It rarely is. For a city-dweller, it is more likely to be a social position and for a tradesman, it is more likely to be a particular expertise. For a rare few, it will be some innermost depth of the soul. For most of us, it will be a mix of these, tightly bound up with our ideas of our rights, identities, and reputations.

Status and territory are inseparable.

Each of us also has his own way of defending his territory. Whether it’s literally wrestling to protect our reputations, crushing a fellow nerd in a math competition, or making a knock-down argument in court for all to see, we fight to protect what we own—and often win. Often, as men who sublimate our violent streaks, this is what we live for.

No passivist would oppose territorialism defined as fighting to hold one’s own domain and winning. Indeed, it’s among the surest ways to show worthiness when the territory is genuinely held. However, the passivist’s territorialism is not the activist’s, because he always traces these steps: become worthy; accept power; rule. Pin your opponent, let them tap out, then take the prize. He never reverses the steps: first trash talk, then wrestle, then claim superiority even after a loss. (This was often even Alinsky’s fate, however much he has a reputation as a modern Machiavelli.) But I don’t expect this to be fully convincing. This essay isn’t written as a defense of passivism.

The Internet, unfortunately, is a bad place to separate claims of winning from facts of winning. And history is too often written by people with no sense for the real stakes in action. It’s too often written by the people who are so busy admiring the tactical brilliance of a Hannibal that they ignore his larger strategic failures. The Internet is fertile soil for activists and armchair tacticians, and I doubt I have yet convinced you I’m not either.

Still, think slowly and you’ll see that there’s a difference between the territorialism of the growing European Right and the mere activism of, say, the Tea Party. At its best, the former focuses on actual borders of real territory they factually control, whether that’s protecting young women on the streets at night or simply building real-world networks of like-minded people with shared goals, standing sober testament to the fact one can oppose immigration without being an evil caricature. The latter, on the other hand, is most famous for futile symbolic gestures like electing politicians who sell out their interests immediately after reaching Washington.

The key, which is not easy, is to keep a realistic idea of what one can truly defend as one’s territory and what claims will just make the bigger dogs angry and activate a potent immune response.

One’s kingdom starts with the square meter around one’s feet. Master yourself, master your immediate surroundings, and then work on impressing others enough that they’ll surrender you territory of their own volition (for which you may need a low growl). However, cede what can’t be held. Don’t overreach, and especially don’t antagonize true powers ineffectually, or you are merely playing at power—and not for long.

Holding territory honestly is not simple. It is tempting to instead assert claims by false bravado. However, there is nothing more satisfying, or more basically worthy, than justly and securely claiming and maintaining a domain of one’s own.

Be a territorialist in any case, but don’t be an activist without power behind you—regardless of your opinion of passivism. And dig in deep, because any restoration is going to take a while.

The post Activism Versus Territorialism appeared first on Social Matter.

The new right-wing reactionaries differentiate themselves from conservatives in part by their time horizon. They don’t long to preserve just yesterday, last year, or last half-century. They long to preserve the wisdom of past centuries, even past millennia. A favorite reactionary quote of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn‘s goes:

For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.

Social linchpin Nick B. Steves recommends to think past the year 1789 to 1688, the year of the Glorious Revolution, or even to 1517, the Protestant Reformation. But let’s be honest; by 1517, humanism was already rampant in Italy’s fading Renaissance. What sort of Golden Age could that have been? Clearly, we must go further back.

Finding a firm root for all of this degeneracy is timely with Mark Lilla’s new book on political reaction, The Shipwrecked Mind, making the rounds. He asserts that half of us ignore the ills of previous eras in favor of remembering them nostalgically as Golden Ages. Let’s prove ourselves different by being rigorous enough and going back far enough to truly find a real golden age—

This is a fun game, though not one to take too seriously. Let’s play “history of degeneration,” and let’s start with today. The rules: list instances of degeneration in as many sequential time periods as you can, on a timescale starting with half-centuries but growing as you go back. Provide just enough color to say why each was degenerate; end by proposing a solution. Farthest back wins.

Assume today is a time of imminent collapse of Western civilization. Blame it on immigration, the end of free speech, rampant consumerism, globalization, whatever you’d like. Whatever it was, the seeds of our current collapse were clear in the 1960s countercultural revolutions, from sexual revolution to civil rights legislation and immigration liberalization. This cultural collapse started in the 50s with Playboy, the Beats, massive tranquilizer abuse, popularization of Frankfurt School Marxism, and so on, though the seeds of degeneration sprouting then could be ignored by popular media, giving us a false impression of a Golden age.

And these values of the 60s left, germinated in the 50s, were a natural evolution of Wilsonian Puritanism. The 1910s and 20s were a famous era of feminist liberation and bureaucratic excess, as America naturally took a chief place in the world in the wake of Europe’s grand self-destruction in World Wars I and II.

This fall of Europe, of course, had been a long time coming by the 1910s. The mass-led, nihilistic modern industrial society of that time had been mismanaging itself disastrously since the liberal revolutions of 1848 confirmed a bloody end would not be long in coming to the Age of Metternich; one need only read fin de siecle French writing to understand how degenerate the intervening years were and how much nihilism, anarchism, and communism had begun to rear their ugly heads. 1848, of course, was the natural consequence of the series of liberalizations that swept over Europe behind Napoleon’s artillery, thundering out from the chaos of the 1789 Revolution that toppled a French monarchy that had been the light of civilized Europe for centuries.

Yet, the chaos of 1789 was natural for a French monarchy that had been desperately selling titles and restructuring its tax base around unpriveleged class power even before the financially devastating Seven Years War and War of the Austrian succession. The Spanish, French, and Habsburgs were already in decline by 1789; civilizational decay precedes mere Jacobinism. It was clear that these states possessed mere sham-kings after the War of the Spanish Succession collapsed the glorious Spanish empire and the Great Northern War ended the Swedish empire—and those both so soon on the heels of the mendaciously-named Glorious Revolution in England—the following, excessively parliamentary “Age of Enlightenment” was as odious and doomed as you’d expect; the French Revolution was no surprise. So, let’s go back to 1688.

1688 was in a way only a continuation of English parliamentarian rebellion in the 1640s, when Independent Protestants) beheaded their king, only too natural given the weakness of the Stuart dynasty founded after Queen Elizabeth’s disastrous choice not to provide an heir—in fact to suppress and execute perhaps the closest thing she had to one—and to mismanage her kingdom’s finances and religious controversies to the point popular anti-tax and anti-episcopal revolution was arguably inevitable.

But focusing on England alone would be a mistake, for how could we neglect that unparalleled European bloodbath, the Thirty Years War? (I’ll skip the War of Devolution for the sake of brevity.) Yes, we seem to have a half-century not just between collapse, but an entire half-century of collapse. One of the bloodiest wars, per capita, Europe has ever seen—and should we include it as only part of a larger combination with the 80 Years War?

Regardless, we can clearly see that the 1555 Peace of Augsburg was no final solution to the Protestant Question. No, Augsburg was a clear failure to contain dissent: “an exhausted Charles [V] finally gave up his hopes of a world Christian empire,” says Wikipedia. The Lutherans were officially recognized: given time to develop their power and lay foundations for all the religious wars and bourgeois revolutions to come.

So, perhaps we need to go back to the Protestant Reformation launched by Luther in 1517? At 500 years back, let me start marking time in centuries rather than half-centuries. Because surely, it is impossible to consider the Protestant Reformation without reference to the degeneracy of papacy in Renaissance Italy. The Reformation obviously recalled the Western Schism that had just ended in 1417, marking the collapse of the attempts of France to pull the papacy to Avignon. The Avignon papacy was famously political and temporally-focused; its degeneracy inspired the Franciscans, especially William of Ockham, to invent disastrously effective theories of natural human rights in the mid-1300s. Contemporaneously the Golden Bull‘s expanded constitutionalism laid the ground for ever more ‘rule of law,’ that mendacious phrase which only ever conceals actual rule by judgment.

Just a century before this mid-1300s degeneration, de Jouvenel’s Minotaur was already busy in the guise of Frederick II’s Imperial Landfrieden of 1235, a coddling insulation of men from rightful vendetta by their peers. Claiming a government monopoly on violence, it was masterful use of high/low vs middle, relying crucially on the support of the governed beneath the level of princes and aristocracy, who Frederick contested with for power. The law survived, though Frederick’s dynasty didn’t; the House of Hohenstaufen brought to greatness by Barbarossa soon collapsed under opposition from the popes—opposition between the popes and the emperors soon to come to a head with the Avignon papacy, mentioned above, and all the future degeneration and liberalization that implies.

Barbarossa himself came to power at the expense of Italian and Byzantine decay. His rise was nearly contemporaneous with the overextension of the Byzantines against the Sicilians in Italy; 1158 was the end of a brief period of Byzantine power in Italy and soon enough the Latins would sack Constantinople, permanently ending Byzantine greatness. Of course, the sack was just insult to injury on the heels of the Angelid dynasty, formed in an 1182 revolution, which predictably decayed, as revolutions do, into a reign of terror complete with mass slaughter of the aristocracy. The Fourth Crusade was late. The Byzantine renaissance under the Komnenian dynasty, started in the 1080s, had already ended. So finished the glory of the second Rome.

The 1150s wars in Italy and the subsequent century and a half of papal venality so vividly indicted in Dante’s Commedia were for their part the heirs of the Norman invasions across Europe begun a century before. The conquest of England by 1072, in particular, was a classic case of an invading criminal elite governing through foreign institutions and intentionally suppressing native traditions. This was the end of Old English, and the end of the English monarchy and nobility. More importantly for my broader arc, the Norman invasions of Italy and the Byzantine empire were crucial political forces behind the Great Schism of 1054, since which the Orthodox and Catholic churches have never reconciled. The Normans played a key role in destroying any hope for the unity of Christian worship, one millennium after its founding by Christ. At the same time, the first of the Landfriede, prototypes for rule by law rather than judgment across continental Europe, was decreed in Mains.

Evidently, the year 1000 is not far enough back to reach a golden age where incipient liberalism is not already sprouted and degeneracy is not running rampant.

At this point we could shift to the oft-disputed translatio imperii of the Ottonians, then the decline of the Carolingians, then to the Popes who only invited Charlemagne to rule to solidify growing freedom from declining Byzantine influence, and then we would find ourselves in the shadow of the long Roman decline and fall chronicled so famously by Gibbon. The rise of Rome had in turn relied on degeneracy of Hellas and Carthage, which had in turn grown only in the vacuums left by the degeneration of yet older precursor civilizations. Each new civilization brought forth more complex and artificial legal and social organization, bringing us closer to detestable modern forms. In each, unsecure powers made use of de Jouvenel’s high and low vs middle to enrich themselves. In each, powers popularized whatever philosophy and religion profited them best. Even Christ and Aristotle were used in this way.

But why stop so recently as Aristotle? Certainly the invention of writing was a powerful contributor to all future bureaucracy and false rationalization, and the invention of zero, a dangerous metaphysical innovation with repercussions still unknown but essential to modern nihilism. Certainly, also, early Indo-European evolution and radiation was a usurpation and genocide of more traditional, more natural men that did not degenerately suck the teats of other animals, and the associated linguistic changes were a victory for a false new modernity in grammar against richer, more traditional grammars of the further past.

Then again, why stop there? The lineage of mammals is essentially a lineage of neonates become so weak they must live in the womb longer than most animals live at all, and even after birth, they still must suckle from their mothers’ teats: the millennials of the animal kingdom, if you will. But then, aren’t all animalia just variants of super-predators evolved to take advantage of a more trusting microbial mat ecology, the Cambrian Explosion equally being the fall of the Ediacarian? The ‘burrowing revolution’ of the Cambrian was the end of a more trusting age in which living things could honestly count on the seabed not to harbor sudden devourers. Should we be asking the Animal Question, given that all animals are heterotrophs: parasites and predators? Aren’t the only real producers plants and algae?

We might even recognize the eukaryotic nucleus as a clear case of proto-liberal tyranny, an insulated elite of DNA dictating commands to the rest of the cell according to a noisy and often lazily interpreted foreign language of codons and amino acids, subverting the more traditional RNA into merely a class of middlemen and informers instead of the central place they initially held. And if social atomization is an easily recognized ill, perhaps we should also doubt whether primordial atomization, following quark-gluon condensation, was also the end of a superior more homogenous state, when mass and energy were more clearly one and the degenerate frustration of ‘molecules’ was only a nightmare of a future epoch.

If we have any comfort, it is the light of the stars fusing atoms back together. Occasionally they even approximate that lost halcyon era of 3 minutes after the Big Bang by collapsing into neutron stars in which, like that bygone age, there is no more cruel separation of quarks into cold, isolated atoms. Our last, best hope for redeeming ourselves of our wretched Fall is to launch ourselves into a pulsar.

I’ve clearly gone wrong somewhere. I hope you’ll try to outdo me with more plausible, yet even more absurd “history of degeneration” in the comments. Whatever you do, please don’t take the above seriously. I hope I’ve made my point: there’s no true requirement to stop when playing this game, and the resulting reverse Whig history is as silly as Whig history.

Unless, perhaps, existence really is fundamentally degenerate through and through? The second law of thermodynamics—entropy always increases—is our best argument to confirm this. However, this would be absurdly far from our real values: it classes all growth as degeneration, all reproduction as failed copying, and all partial ordering as net corruption. It indicts God on every count.

The poor history above, far from being ‘more rigorously’ reactionary, is a parody of progressives’ frequent inability to recognize that reaction is not simply a belief in contemporary degeneration and a hatred of everything too new.

Reactionaries must be, rather, good judges of both past and present: we know that most mutations are deleterious and that innovation is not an unalloyed good, but also that mutation is the engine of evolution and that even our oldest, fondest traditions were once innovations far back in forgotten time.

As I’ve written before, reaction is also not a celebration of stasis; reactionary order is organic harmony, adaptation, and civilization. Stasis is in conflict with the God or Nature of the world and therefore disordered, just as surely as pessimism is. So we do not long for fixed, historical, perfect Golden Age societies, only aspirational, mythical ones or ones that we’re willing to acknowledge had foundations destined to crumble. If we model the myths after our ancestors—well, we remember how to love what is best in our fathers without denying their faults.

In the meantime, we have no illusions that history is either endless progress, endless decay, or an endless cycle. It is not just a long rise followed by a recent fall. And God forbid we satisfy ourselves, instead, with a sophomoric spiral! The histories of civilizations and institutions show progress, decay, stagnation, and cycles, but also branching, collision, annihilation, hybridization, and much more. There are more dimensions, edges, and twists to history than there are grains of sand on the beaches of Normandy, Hispaniola, and Lake Kinneret.

We study history, we learn from it, we judge the good and bad. And when there is degeneration, we condemn it, but when there is glory, we praise that also.

Sometimes, on dour days when we mistakenly recognize Quixote in our mirrors, we even play games with it and laugh at ourselves.

The post Where Did It All Go Wrong? appeared first on Social Matter.

A central tragedy of the Homeric tradition sprouts from the bitter contention between Ajax and Odysseus over the armor of Achilles. Rageful Achilles was a consummate symbol of brave, thymotic masculinity to the Greeks. His divinely forged armor, a coveted reward. Both Ajax and Odysseus claimed the armor as just deserts for their own feats of war, and their king Agamemnon decreed that the claims should be decided by a contest of speeches.

Ajax was the stronger, more loyal, and more trusted man. Odysseus was the cleverer and more inventive. In the rhetorical contest, Odysseus prevailed. Ajax’s bravery and devotion had been vital to the Greek victory, but clever Odysseus’s strategem, the daring theft of Athena’s palladium, had been decisive. Ajax was driven to murderous rage by this slight, and then, after waking from rage, fell on his sword in despair at his dishonor. The justice of this outcome has been doubted ever since.

The Right today often emphasizes its Ajaxes. For an Ajax faced with the struggle to be recognized in our over-clever, endlessly speechifying world, it is difficult not to go mad with resentment and so his needs are urgent.

However, I myself am no Ajax. I’m a clever enough speaker with a few good strategems and resentment is not my challenge. For the right wing Odysseus-type, the problem is not finding opportunity but finding home.

Many of us today feel the present to be foreign. We are more comfortable among old books and future speculation. More than better representation in present political conflicts or resource payoffs from an elite, our politics seeks different ways of life: exits from contemporary societies and entries into others that would feel more like home.

One of the inspiring images of exit for neoreactionaries, especially Odysseus-types, is Nick Land’s Doctor Gno: the mad technologist who acquires enough power to destroy, so that he can successfully win autonomy from the International Community.

The image is striking, but it’s not clear how to get there from here. For young men, it’s a long way from college or a first job to gathering enough deterrent firepower to stay the hand of international government. Putting it mildly.

Still, this dream of unilateral exit can be begun another, quieter way: by becoming invisible. Private. A No One, a Nemo, a Mr. Nobody. And this makes an excellent precursor to all further plans for a young Odysseus type, whether they lead to Doctor Gno, a Mannerbund cabal, or life as the humble patriarch of a Benedict Option family.

This mission, should one choose to accept it, is to become Bond before Bond villain: to first learn to camouflage yourself to the Cathedral without compromising morally or intellectually. Then, to grow in wrongly forbidden wisdom and virtue, while hiding in plain sight—and make a more complete exit when the opportunity arises.

To escape control, one needn’t change laws or minds. That’s not how drug users act with impunity, not how Muslims establish their enclaves in Europe, and not how financiers get away with creative accounting practices. The key is to find blind spots: closed doors; impenetrable ghettos; limited expert attention. Becoming a reactionary man is discouraged and dangerous, but given most people’s general inattention and poor insight into character, it’s something that can be risked with confidence.

Visibility is key to enforcement power. On the Right, one often sees how the Left’s refusal to see the differences between different ethnic groups prevents it from effectively addressing terrorist threats and crime. In the other direction, one learns that gun registration is often the first step towards further gun control. What the government cannot see, it has difficulty controlling. If it wants to control, it will introduce new monitoring; if it wants to prevent control, it will ban monitoring.

The theoretical term for this visibility is legibility, defined in the excellent Seeing Like a State. This concept describes the limits on an organization’s ability to process information and how limits on what can be communicated through an organization in turn limit what it can effectively accomplish. A phenomenon that an organization can recognize, process, and respond to is legible to the organization. A phenomenon that always gets overlooked, that never gets reported all the way up the chain of command, or that doesn’t mean anything to the men with decision-making power when it does reach them, is illegible. Organizations do not act on illegible signals. Illegible actions can be performed unilaterally.

The path of Mr. Gnobody is to make one’s inner life illegible to progressivism while in its territory. This requires compromise. This is not a route for the bold and loud who want to always speak their minds without hesitation in defense of the good; this is a route for a man who can discreetly bide his time though vice and evil preen around him.

With Trump elected, some of our readers have new hope for free self-expression and open victory. For another group of us, however, his election does nothing to separate us from the virulent zombism that still pervades our places of employment. It inspires newer, hungrier mutations. This is for the latter group: my own group.

Many of us have already implemented this plan. It’s not hard to do alone, and the principles are simple. However, every time our movement grows there are those who encounter the need for illegibility as something new, and for these I’ll outline the basics. For those of us who have already achieved it, consider this an invitation to rethink one’s compromises and perhaps how to frame them best for newcomers or those who choose to live differently.

The first order before implementing illegibility exit is to determine the alternatives well. Without a plan, the most likely outcome for attempting social independence is merely social leprosy.

Begin by reckoning one’s requirements to maintain mental and moral stability over a period of 5-10 years. Make no room for liberal fantasies of autonomy. Plan to maintain family relationships, friendships, professional connections, and moral mentorships. Aim for more than strictly needed, since natural tragedy and social fragmentation easily upset too-optimistic plans.

Above all, when imagining potential exit paths think through 1) what good and bad influences can be brought close or avoided 2) what good and bad influences can be followed or resisted and 3) whether or not this more private life will be rich and warm enough to sustain long circumspection and emotional disconnection from the public.

1) and 2) are most complex and personal, but should also be most familiar. Everyone must consider these. The addition of 3) complicates the calculus for an aspiring Mr. Gnobody. Invisibility with integrity requires discipline. One bad day, and the arrangement may fail. With practice it becomes effortless as standing straight, but acquiring the habits is initially taxing.

What sorts of discretion will be most necessary? First, emotional continence: a reactionary’s feelings will not match those of most others and the deepest ones should be shown only to a few. Second, intellectual patience: one must get used to allowing others their follies. Third, stylistic conformity: never wear red in a Crip neighborhood and be careful using Heidegger’s vocabulary in the Ivy League. These are a minimum and provide a base for further refinement.

For 3), then, pay particular attention to the following. Will you need new emotional outlets for the things you no longer share with just anyone who will listen? Will you need new intellectual hobbies or clubs to satisfy a need for debate that until now you’ve been inflicting on whoever happens to be around? Can you keep your aesthetics illegible to all others comfortably, or will you need a few fellows with common artistic taste for community? None should be neglected.

Be especially careful of expecting too much of the women you’ll meet along the path as Gnobody. Relationships founded on the misunderstandings intrinsic to camouflage will present difficult challenges. Circes and Calypsos might offer aid, but they cannot substitute for home.

With 3) in mind, I’ll now say more on the subject of maintaining illegibility through discretion.

The most urgent emotions to contain are disgust and contempt. Among unrepentant sinners, there is little more offensive than being reminded of their sin.

One effective way to contain these emotions is proverbial: remember the plank in one’s own eye reflexively when irritated by the mote in another’s. This provides a true, inoffensive cover story for the disgust and contempt: one’s own failure. Further, it provides internal motivation for maintaining the polite sympathy good society requires.

An inferior but popular method is to universalize one’s contempt: to appear irritable through and through, the misanthrope who “hates everyone equally.” If misanthropy is just a pretense at first, the tongue leads the heart and the pretense can solidify into fact more easily than one expects. Even if it stays a pretense, think on Odysseus’s transparent attempt to avoid the call to Troy: feigning incoherence to cover up disloyalty only works while left untested, yet it invites testing by its extremity.

More tactics exist, and there are other emotions to consider. Open joy at Trump’s election, for instance, might easily cost us work and social goodwill. Obvious fear in ghetto neighborhoods could likewise.

The general rule to follow is always: do not allow one’s feelings to be tyrants, only proper subjects of the self that have every right to counsel the reason but no rights to take control of the face or tongue. Remember Odysseus and the Sirens: do not close the reason’s, the captain’s, ears to the Sirens, but do seal those of the body, the crew.

Like anything else, this can be practiced. Watch oneself in a mirror reading or watching things at the edge of tolerability; practice maintaining an even expression. Have good friends provoke you to try to break your cool. Taking small deliberate steps, soon enough one earns the privilege to feel anything one likes freely, forevermore, in any company.

And in case it needed to be spelled out for any single reader here, don’t drink past the point you can hold your liquor except with trusted fellows. The more any of this sounds constraining, the more friends you’ll need to pull it off.

Intellectual patience builds on emotional continence. First, one learns to avoid getting visibly annoyed when others say something one finds foolish. After, one learns the intellectual patience to resist correcting mistakes until the time is right. Flipping the two makes for the always-annoyed arrogant archetype.

This is often harder than it initially looks from outside. The further we go into learning true history and true philosophy, the more mistakes we recognize in conversation. And since people often reason by coherence, the smallest corrections may have far-ranging consequences. Too often, risky arguments about race and gender politics start from small corrections to matters of historical record. Save careful thinking and fact-checking for those you trust.

The best way to learn this patience is to pay close attention to your treatment by wise men who do not quite trust you to be reasonable. Watch their words carefully and pick up the patterns they use to probe for your readinesses or unreadinesses, your open-mindednesses or deep-set stubbornnesses.

A thoughtful priest is often the best candidate for this: someone used to explaining multiple interpretations of parables to multiple audiences as the situation requires. If no wise men are available, one can read about them. Read the Gospels, read Maimonides’s Guide, read Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima.

Mastering the art of speaking carefully does not isolate, it becomes the basis for community with others of the same skill. Nor does it entail cowardice. This patience is not fear of acting at the wrong time, but confidence that the right time is worth waiting for.

And if you ever feel the need to let loose, there’s always someone wrong on the internet. Use VPN and a pseudonym and don’t overshare.

However, all effort to make the content of our beliefs illegible to contemporary antagonists will be wasted if we cannot also pass more superficial tests of belonging. If one insists on being a reactionary in unfriendly territory, have the good manners to respect the sovereign morass at least as far as hanging their slogans at your window and pronouncing their shibboleths properly. We’re not punks; we respect authority.

The first thing to establish: how to put strangers at ease. When our goal is illegibility, the most urgent question is which status conflicts are bitterest and how each side recognizes an enemy. What types show up as TV villains again and again? What mannerisms characterize heretics in novels? Most importantly, when mysteries and political thrillers depict people ‘everyone knows’ will turn out to be a betrayer, what signs make them suspicious? Whatever those things are, they attract unwanted attention and speculations of evil character.

Chances are, the villains today will be creepy or cold white men. Don’t play the part. Once again, practice as necessary. The most graceful styles are second nature integrated so smoothly that they can be mistaken for first nature.

None of this, opaque emotion, patient intellect, or camouflaged style, is truly required for good character. There are emotionally transparent, intellectually combative, and intentionally provocative reactionaries no less admirable for all that. These are not universal virtues.

However, as situational virtues, they are vital servants of prudence in hostile social environments. They allow silent, no-motion exit from demotic society’s relentless self-policing in opinion, allowing free feeling and free thought even in the midst of intense pressure to conform.

An exit into moral illegibility is not complete. It hardly makes room for children. It does not allow exit from material anarcho-tyranny, only the spiritual portion. It does not allow exit from conformance to ugly norms that corrupt the soul in the long term.

This is just a first step onto the path to Ithaca for those of us who wake to political sanity in Polyphemus’s cave. For us, the legendary way out is to declare ourselves intellectually Gnobody and then lash ourselves to the bellies of sheep (stylistically) so that the giant cannot feel us out with its monstrous fingers. Only after this first escape do we orient and choose a next move.

As an Odysseus of the contemporary world, one may wander through many strange lands with foreign customs and unknown dangers after this first step. One must continue to mind provisions, travel carefully, and keep strong. The home one seeks, when reached, may require retaking before it will welcome its proper owner.

Be prepared to keep your name secret even when you first arrive.

The post Mr. Gnobody: Exit Through Illegibility appeared first on Social Matter.

Tyler Cowen is not outwardly neoreactionary. His sympathy to neoreaction has been strictly limited the few times he has written about it; in fact, he prefers to ignore it in favor of a broader “neo-reaction” of his own definition. It is a puzzle, then, how he has written such a precise, inspiring manifesto for it in his recently published book, The Complacent Class.

On a first read, the book may not seem to offer so much. It initially reads like a series of Vox articles about the lazy foibles of several particular sorts of white American that it’s currently fashionable to hector. There are plenty of questionably designed statistics and politically correct thinkpiece citations scattered throughout like so much gauche op-ed bling. However, the end grows more and more daring until we hit a triplet of stunning lines in the final six pages, the sole bolded sentences in the book of 200 pages:

When it comes to ordinary, everyday American life, how quickly will matters turn chaotic or disorderly again, and what forms will the implosion take? (p. 199)

The biggest story of the last fifteen years, both nationally and globally, is the growing likelihood that a cyclical model of history will be a better predictor than a model of ongoing progress. (p. 200)

All of this can happen even if you think the majority response will be a greater and greater love of peace. (p. 202)

The specific thinkers cited for ‘cyclical models of history’ are Vico, Spengler, and Toynbee, in that order.

With that triple-burst trigger pull, the race to a second, Straussian reading begins.

Taking a cue from those statements, consider that the book itself might be a cycle. Read forwards, it is a series of slightly overcooked thinkpieces that ends on a surprisingly bold note. Read backwards, one finds it hides a thrilling call to arms.

This is a contrarian reading; one I make no claim should actually be attributed to Cowen himself. Nonetheless, the coherences pile up too neatly to simply be ignored once seen.

We begin with Chapter 1: The Return of Chaos. Though our lives have become unprecedentedly stable, continued Progress is not assured. Cyclical history is becoming more predictive. We are not meeting our expectations and our systems are fragile. Civilizations rise and fall. Ours appears to be falling by several measures. And Dark Enlightenment is coming whether you wish it or not:

There is the distinct possiblity that, in the next twenty years, we are going to find out far more about how the world really works than we ever wanted to know. As the mentality of the complacent class loses its grip, the subsequent changes in attitude will be part of an unavoidable and perhaps ultimately beneficial process of social, economic, and legal transformation. But many Americans will wish, ever so desperately, to have that complacency back. (p. 204)

Domestic order is unraveling, says Cowen, looking at spreading unrest on campuses like Mizzou and on the streets like in Ferguson, unstable crime rates (especially given how partially cybercrime is reported), and electoral upsets such as Brexit and Trump’s election on a wave of populist resentment. “Let’s not be shocked if the next set of significant innovations among the American professions comes… in the profession of crime,” he writes (p. 189), predicting that “the next crime wave is going to break the internet, or at least significant parts of it” (p. 187). Global order, too, appears fragile to him. Our plans for the Middle East are a shambles, the reset with Russia went sour, and Hillary’s pivot to Asia flopped.

The chapter-in-reverse concludes:

And as the years pass, it seems increasingly obvious that the social and economic stagnation of our times is more than just a temporary blip; instead, that stagnation reflects deeply rooted structural forces that will not be easy to undo by mere marginal reforms. (p. 177)

A call for an alternative to mere marginal reform… a call for revolution? For Restoration? For now this is only foreshadowing, but the next chapter will clear the ambiguity.

Chapter 2: Political Stagnation and the Dwindling of True Democracy indicts the democratic spirit as the source of the coming chaos. First, we are reminded that our infatuation with democracy is rather parochial:

One simple way to get a good read on “democracy in America,” circa 2017, is to ask what America’s main rival on the global stage, China, thinks of American government. I have found that many Chinese admire and indeed envy America greatly, pointing to its much higher standard of living, freedom of speech, and relatively clean environment, among other positive features. Still, even those Chinese who admire America find it hard to praise our government. (p. 176)

The chapter’s thesis is only partly that democratic government itself is dwindling. Even more, its thesis is that True Democracy dwindles man. Rather than paraphrases of Cowen’s words that let you wonder how far I’ve interpreted them, take this series of verbatim excerpts:

Through a deep study of the classics and the long arc of human historical development, Tocqueville understood that current historical trends were by no means guaranteed to be permanent, and American restlessness might contain the seeds of its own demise.

For Tocqueville, the philosophy of “pantheism” helps drive this fall from grace. Tocqueville uses the word pantheism in a special way, so don’t associate it with the theological doctrine that God is represented by the material universe as a whole. For Tocqueville, pantheism is as much a social construct as a religious perspective. It promotes the merging of man and nature and thereby attempts to remove the transcendent from human discourse. The transcendent is no longer something man ought to strive for, and that surrender is for Tocqueville the essence of pantheistic philosophy. The creator is no longer distant from man, giving people something to look up to, and so there is a lost source of inspiration and therefore a death of enthusiasm. There is instead a search for unity, resulting in a lazy pride and contentment and a forgetting of the striving and heroism that can make men great.

To be sure, pantheism no longer sounds like the right word for what Tocqueville was describing. Few Americans subscribe to explicit pantheism.

Still, the identification of pantheism with a kind of social stasis nonetheless captures a significant insight. Think of Tocqueville’s invocation of pantheism, and the disappearance of the transcendent, as a general stand-in for the phenomenon of self-contained contentment and complacency. (p. 169-168)

This could be at home on an Orthosphere blog. And concluding the chapter:

Anti-establishment insurgent campaigns were the talk of the 2016 presidential campaign, and both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were legitimate anti-establishment candidates. But a peek beneath the surface reveals that much of the fear and anger that drove their campaigns was based not on a hope for change in Washington but on a hope for a return to the past. (p. 159)

No, not mere marginal reform in Washington, not more democracy, and not revolution—the people’s hearts cry out for Restoration!

We may want it, but given that democratic theology has apparently been rendering us into drudges without a sense of the transcendent, we should take a hard look at ourselves as we begin to consider the possibilities for an American Restoration. What is our potential today? How are we living today? The reversed Chapter 3: How a Dynamic Society Looks and Feels begins by describing how in today’s America, people feel they must hide their wealth and privilege (p. 157-152). We feel it is better to countersignal power than to signal it. We feel signaling will out us as strivers—and vulnerable to humiliation or extortion.

However, this only applies to Americans, we learn. Immigrants to the U.S. have a freer and more hopeful mindset than natives, evidenced by their greater social mobility. Foreigners in more ethnically homogeneous, authoritarian countries such as China are freer to enjoy their wealth and their power.

Since the 1960s, the cultures that have produced the most upward economic mobility include Japan, South Korea, and China, due to their supercharged rates of economic growth. It is no accident that these are the same cultures obsessed with business cards, stereotypical blue suits, submission to hierarchical authority, and bringing the perfect gift. (p. 157)

Cowen shows us that if we had the courage of immigrants and foreigners to ignore contemporary mores and treat our strengths as something to take pride in rather than something to hide, we might restore our culture to a dynamic greatness. Such honest pride in ourselves and our abilities was ours only a half-century ago, before the 60s, he implies. It is not so long gone.

However, a proper neoreactionary, he doesn’t pretend we can simply wish ourselves there. Americans’ current complacency is not pure timidity. The transcendent is not something we’ve simply lost. It was crushed, stolen, and turned against us.

Bombings, riots, theft, and vandalism that terrorist resentment politics unleashed in the 60s provoked the change to our current stifling, complacent safety. “Overall,” reminds Cowen, “whether it was on campus or not, the 1968 to 1975 period saw more instances of antigovernment violence than any time since the American Civil War” (p. 129).

Our fears are practical, grounded, and real. Our safety comes at the cost of ambitious bureaucratic, penal, and custodial innovations.

The story of these innovations, the subject of Chapter 4, serves as both a caution and a paradoxical source of hope. The neoreactionary reading this section of the manifesto should be impressed by the scale of the problem he is facing, but also heartened that American society has been addressing its problems, surreptitiously, even when it has not always had the political courage to admit just what it was doing.

The chapter contains a long list of attempted protests that ended up rather tame, for all the attention they received in the press from day to day. On Occupy Wall Street:

the on-the ground reality is that Brookfield Properties and the City of New York ended up getting their way. Eventually the weather became colder, and Occupy Wall Street is now a kind of misty nostalgic footnote to history. (p. 136)

Why has this happened? It’s the powers behind the protests, of course.

It’s not just the law that has changed; the incentives of the organizers are now fundamentally different. When a major public event is orchestrated, such as the Million Man March of 1995, it tends to be backed by a lot of organization and capital investment. That in turn requires a lot of mainstream support. Unlike the days of the Black Panthers, today’s social protest can no longer be a shoestring operation based on cheap labor, a lot of walking, and some guns. For today’s events, you need planners, operatives, and “nudgers”—on the side of the marchers—to ensure that the images on television are positive. (p. 140)

In other words, now that the protests are no longer tendrils of international Soviet subversion with a goal of revolution, but agents of foundations with more insidiously progressive political goals, the protests are no longer so violent or so spontaneous. The 1970s were the end of an era of proxy war that our American communists won.

Recent innovations in bureacratic control, as oppressive as they have become to some of us over the last two decades, are mechanisms to keep our sovereigns at least somewhat able to maintain property rights and similar freedoms despite our democracy. They keep the American cold civil war on ice. They keep the transcendent alive, if only in the dark.

Chapter 5, The Well-Ordered Match, continues this theme, eventually declaring the work of the last chapter “the grand project of our time” (p. 98). “Matching,” one of Cowen’s key terms in this book, is the process of using innovation to ensure personal safety, satisfaction, and lifestyle continuity. Instead of trying to overcome past highs via innovation, matchers use innovation to maintain current satisfaction levels with lower risk, especially lower risk via decreased dependencies on other individuals or communities. In the words of one of my earlier articles here, they are Exiting in place, or in the words of another, they focus on building better radiation shields against an atomized culture rather than finding new ways to use actual atoms.

Cowen is suggesting that most contemporary innovation is centered on achieving escape from envious levellers and mediocre universal culture. Who cares if you can make money or invent new technologies if you won’t enjoy the benefits? What are the benefits of striving in a society of countersignalers with no shared sense of the transcendent? When any random idiot’s Voice can be so loud as in today’s society, the only hope is to find Exits.

However, the book is not over. Cowen has more in store for us. Matching is only a stage or a tactic to acquire the independence to do greater things. This halfway point of the book is where the night seems darkest. Dawn emerges in the next chapter.

It is no longer time just to seek and preserve safety, directs Cowen. The time has come to create. Chapter 6, Why Americans Stopped Creating, sketches the primary barriers to constructive innovations as opposed to protective innovations. In doing so, it also indicates that the tide is set to turn.

The chapter begins by dismissing internet technology as a source of economic productivity. Next, despite its relative failure, Cowen identifies it as the closest thing to a successful overt, constructive grand project that the US has had in two and a half decades. The other candidates would be peace in the Middle East and the Affordable Care Act (p. 93). He echoes Thiel that the era of grand projects is over. The chapter is well-summarized by its section headings: “Living Standards Have Been Stagnating,” “Measures of Productivity Indicate Pessimism,” “Fewer Americans Involved in Innovation,” “Monopoly Power on the Rise.”

In other words, your competition is made up of paper tigers. Unless they are Amazon, Google, Apple, or some other of a small number of companies that are actually improving and growing, their success is the success of an incumbent bully that has lost its ability to improve the lives of its workers, the efficiency with which they work, and even the know-how to reinvent the same products and processes again if they were lost. These companies are not huge out of strength, but out of weakness:

Corporate cash holdings have shown a steady trend upward for decades, as companies are holding more funds in safe securities rather than investing them in new opportunities.

However, one investment that this quite popular is dealmaking, and 2015 was a record year in this regard. When it comes to mergers and acquisitions, times have never been better.

So the cash piles of corporations are going somewhere, just not always into creating new ideas. Companies would rather buy up other, already established companies than try to succeed with new ideas or their own new product lines. (p. 81-80)

Businesses just aren’t investing as much as they used to. Net capital investment, as a share of gross domestic product, has been declining ever since the 1980s. An alternative measure of the value of capital services, a ten-year moving average which avoids the “noise” in the data for any single year, has been declining since the start of the millenium. (p. 80)

In other words, these enormous monopolies are treading water internally and searching far and wide for outsiders to provide the scarce innovation they judge themselves to be incapable of. It’s a fine time to be an innovative outsider, provided you can avoid stepping on the bullies’ turf while establishing your own.

And proceeding naturally to the topic of acquiring and protecting turf, Chapter 7: The Return of Segregation tells the story of how we are already defending and even reconquering some communities thought lost to the right. Don’t lose hope listening to progressive talking points about their own successes, don’t even listen to Moldbug’s “Cthulhu swims left”: segregation is up, rebellious subcultures are tamer, and America is not lost. We begin on this note:

It is often a puzzle for foreigners why the United States has such a dismal performance when it comes to murder, guns, and mental illness, all features of American life that, when compared to most of the other wealthy countries, are so awful that they do not require further documentation. You might wonder how those bad results square with America’s relatively strong performances on most capital indices, such as trust, cooperation, and charitable philanthropy; on philanthropy, we even rate as the global number one. The truth is that those positive and negative facets are two sides of the same coin: Cooperation is very often furthered by segregating those who do not fit in. That creates some superclusters of cooperation among the quality cooperators and a fair amount of chaos and dysfunctionality elsewhere. (p. 70)

—Steve Sailer could hardly have said it better himself. The remainder of the chapter describes how these superclusters successfully stay that way.

The reversed Cowen commends pricing the unwanted out of good neighborhoods, raising the cost of employing undesirables by giving them rights to sue for almost anything, and adopting hipster cultures that keep competitors out by refusing them to offer the foods they like, the entertainments they prefer, or any other comforts, like the freedom to catcall beautiful women, that they would otherwise take for granted. He does not only focus on racial segregation in the text; the same points become even stronger when applied to class and culture.

These are the mechanisms that successful cooperative superclusters use to preserve themselves today, and they are not the exclusive preserve of the left. Half our battle, therefore, is just to convince modern elites that it’s OK to do what they’re already doing, defending their own small incipient patchworks from outside invasion, and thus free them to do it more purposefully and elegantly. And in the meantime, doing it consciously, we’ll also do it better.

Next, Chapter 8 tells us that the time is ripe to go beyond consolidating these superclusters and also create new ones. Geographic mobility is sharply down in America, and why? There is nowhere affordable for potentially mobile people to move to, or, dually, no established communities want to risk welcoming mobile troublemakers.

Cowen paints a convincing picture of how government malinvestment into mobility in the 50s and 60s lead to widespread civil strife in the 60s and 70s, leading many formerly productive and attractive cities and neighborhoods to become stagnant and unattractive. The places that remained attractive learned to close themselves to influx of population lest they go the same way as Detroit, New York, or Chicago’s South Side, so that now rents have grown enormous and mobility is much lower. Even when these cities recover, as New York and Chicago have at least in part, they do so via pricing undesirables out as described in the previous chapter, keeping mobility low for those who would benefit most from it.

In other words, the limit to mobility today is that communities cannot vet potential newcomers before they make plans to invite them in. Looking at New York’s thriving co-ops and the business success of President Trump, Cowen could be making a recommendation here: creating exclusive community is among the most compelling political and business opportunities of our time.

In fact Cowen gives an explicit estimate for the economic loss due to lack of such services over the past 12 years alone: 1.7 trillion dollars of GDP (p. 44). Enough to fit 1.7 thousand unicorn startup valuations per year.

This is the spoils awaiting the founders of a national organization capable of helping its members make new homes in new places while also guaranteeing they will be such good tenants and neighbors that current residents would welcome new building to accomodate them. Inspiring stuff for a national organization whose logo is the Roman goddess of the hearth.

The conclusion, reversed Chapter 9, summarizes and reiterates the material of the previous eight chapters. “We have created the complacent class. We own the concept and indeed we are the concept. It is in fact our greatest but also our most dangerous innovation. Someday we make break it, too,” it begins, a warning to all who have been counting on conservative complacency and a battle cry to the resigned who can now rise up.

The further playing out of this Great Reset will, as I explain[ed] in more detail in the [first] chapter of this book, involve a major fiscal and budgetary crisis; the inability of our government to adjust to the next global emergency that comes along; impossibly expensive apartment rentals in the most attractive cities; the legacy of inadequate mobility and residential segregation; a rebellion of many less-skilled men; a resurgence of crime; and a decline in economic dynamism, among other social and economic problems. Eventually stasis will prove insufficient and big changes will have to come, whether we like it or not. (p. 22)

The “less-skilled men,” here, especially means more “brutish,” (p. 20) less “socially skilled” men, i.e., the men who lack the superior social skills of women that have been so crucial to America’s massive productivity gains in education, healthcare, and administration since the 1970s. Manifestos have to be spared such bitter jokes; manifesto writers rarely take up the profession out of an excess of good will.

But with that my conceit is reaching its end. I find myself testing a model of a neoreactionary Tyler Cowen who must still “harbor some resentment towards women” after hearing about the Dark Enlightenment through mens’ rights activism.

Still, examine just how much has fallen into place so far: chaos is returning to American life due to neglect of essential virtue. The root cause is democratic politics, which has led state power to develop unprecedentedly invasive bureacratic control mechanisms. Most innovation today is focused on Exit from the society of the masses, whether the innovators like to admit it or not; corporate exploitation of the masses has matured and now stagnates. Segregation is the key to functional community and can still be achieved clandestinely. The task for an innovator of the next twenty years is to construct a quasi-governmental organization capable of maintaining segregated, high-trust, eucivic networks and use it to escape democratic pathology for good in a Great Reset.

Cowen is probably not hiding any secret sympathy for our projects, though in today’s paranoid intellectual environment, the Left does again and again stretch perfectly anodyne books like Cowen’s into absurd boogeymen like the ‘hidden manifesto’ sketched above. And perhaps it’s fair, since were I writing under a true name, I might write much the same way Cowen has here.

The puzzle of how he could inadvertently provide me the material to pull such a manifesto from his book is solved easily: any observant intellectual today can see the same patterns that ground the neoreactionary project and also cannot say the same things openly about those patterns.

We are born of these intellectuals ourselves. We come from the same social classes, we attended the same institutions for education, and we have many of the same shared cultural touchstones. We’re not so far away; we fit in well to progressive society. Hence the crippling progressive paranoia currently cutting free speech out of our culture: make truth your enemy and you never sleep soundly again.

Cowen is a sharp competitor, one of very few I believe might truly convince me to take another political path than neoreaction. If he reads this piece, I’d hope he takes it as the well-intentioned contrarianism that it is. He is honest as one can be in his milieu, encyclopedically informed, consistently interesting, and he’s admitting in this book that certain aspects of neoreactionary worldviews are deeper, truer, and more accessible than the complacent classes would like to allow. To my mind that makes him a fellow competitor rather than an existential opponent. He does not appear sympathetic to all of our values, but then who are we to impose our values, at this point?

Our task is not to vainly assert superiority but to prove by deeds to Cowen and all like him that, yes, the time for complacency has ended. It is the time to create and to transcend. The time has come for humane, admirable, inspiring alternatives to both democratic leveller-activism and resigned, complacent matching as an end in itself.

We can do without the idols of Progress. We don’t need permission and we don’t need popular support. We can do it in our own backyards.

The post Tyler Cowen’s Unexpected Neoreactionary Manifesto appeared first on Social Matter.

With Googling so ubiquitous today, it’s tempting to find shallow, slogan-level knowledge of every new thing before diving into it for the first time. This is especially true for uncanny politics–‘did you hear about Marxism-Nixonism?’–and it is certainly true for a den of irreverent tricksters like the contemporary alt-right. Otherwise, who knows what a fool they might make of you?

If a curious and intrepid visitor from far afield were coming to Social Matter today, I would guess that their slogan for what to expect might be one of two things. First, an edgier libertarianism–in which case, they’re in for something much more interesting. Second, intemperate and fervent hatred–but a picture of a woman alone in the fog on a skyscraper? It’s the wrong aesthetic. This is a site from which one can quietly look out and over the world. There’s no such thing as Batmanism-Libertarianism, right?

Ideally, a new visitor would come with the idea the right is somehow about ‘order.’ Whether it’s the military, the police, high-finance plutocrats, old church morality, fathers as heads of households, or walls to keep out immigrants, the right is on the side of order, while the left is on the side of license.

But this idea that ‘the right is for order’ is unintelligible unless order is carefully defined and fleshed out. Vocabulary shifts, especially during times of cultural upheaval.

Uncharitable observers say our order is regimentation. They imagine the right organizing battalions of citizens to salute as one, all individuality subsumed into faceless, even ranks. All families forced to be nuclear families constituted in identical, cookie-cutter forms, all homes identical ‘little boxes made of ticky tacky.’ This is not the case; totalitarian order is degenerate order. It is chaos. In the false order of regimentation, all men are given identical places, rather than being given the places that properly fit them. Wherever men can be assigned to duty randomly and interchangeably, that is disorder and chaos.

Uncharitable progressives say our order is stasis. They imagine us trying to freeze society into an atemporal traditionalist culture, with all families eternally revering the same God in the same way with the same mores and the same aesthetics. This is also not what we desire. Static order is also degenerate order. The healthy, organic growth of societal development is never opposed; rather, the continuities of tradition are the foundations of artistic and moral progress. The right seeks to ensure orderly development–and, most importantly, development that is not simply the fluctuation of wild animal populations, but that which brings man closer to perfection, God, or Truth. All true artists work in this way, from Gilgamesh to Homer to Michelangelo to Malick. The alternative would be a society that is continually hacked and cut to prevent growth, stunted like India under the Brahmin. Wherever outcomes are static and divorced from natural possibility, that is also chaos. The link between man and time is broken, splitting men from the world and from consequence.

Whether it is the decrees of God or Nature or inscrutable Power, the philosophy of the right is a philosophy of thriving under conditions set from outside oneself. Without these, reaction properly appears to be a caricature of stasis and regimentation–but the left recoiling here is simply a 5-year-old grossed out by sex, seeing only the possibility of cooties and none of the depth of love.

A virtuous society repudiates order without outside influences, like virtuous men repudiate sex without love. A closed system lives on its own excrement, and perfect autonomy and complete madness are indistinguishable. However, like sex without love is tempting and all too common and callous, closed autonomy is also tempting and also all too common. How much easier it is to be a shut-in with whisky and opinions rather than to raise a family. How much easier, even as a husband, to renounce one’s headship rather than to lead. But lazy sex is no argument against good sex, and lazy order is no argument against good order.

Multiculturalists disingenuously claim that “if order is a matter of fit to the world, then like us, you should respect every way people have found to fit to the world.” Or, “I am the true traditionalist because I respect all traditions.” This self-serving mischaracterization of the right ignores the most final, inarguable, and seemingly obvious way what is outside us orders our lives: through death. The longest tradition of life, long preceding man, is deadly struggle for supremacy. As any gardener or evolutionary biologist knows, pruning is no enemy of growth or antonym to order. Multiculturalism can find a place in reactionary thought as a base for otherwise differentiated cosmopolitan cultures, but universal toleration could never be an essential principle of order. Et in Arcadia ego.

Next, the cynical, nihilist determinists claim that “if order means moving in concert with the world, well, there is only one way for the world to move and we must accept it whatever it is.” Perhaps all human decision-making is supervenient on the unthinking propagation of particles through spacetime. Perhaps there is no free will. In that case, what is the argument? That one is deluded if one seeks any particular goal? But this has no power to persuade–in this case my belief is part of the way that the world is, and so is my resolution to fight for the goal. Is it supposed to change my mind to discover that, to paraphrase the determinist, my choice is the work of Nature or God rather than my own private judgment? Far from it.

I’d be delighted to serve these true sovereigns and delighted to be guided by them deeply. Even granting the unlikely premise of determinism, accepting the world as it is would also mean accepting the apparent conflict between oneself and the rest of the world. Otherwise one finds oneself resisting one’s own obvious convictions–simply a new and different conflict in place of the original.

In both cases, the non-reactionary has incorrectly taken ‘conflict’ or ‘frustration’ to be an antonym of order, which could not be further from the truth. A building ‘rests’ on its foundation the same way that the Berlin Wall could be safer than the Bronx: order is a matter of the balance of forces rather than their absence.

A virtuous reactionary society does not suppress forceful conflict and self-assertion. Limp openness is a funhouse image of the closed autonomy described earlier and no better. Openness means one succumbs to any passing madness, and limpness means one is merely more of the excrement the world recycles endlessly. A society without conflict is sterile, and a society without force is flimsy. Of course, it is often tempting to forgo conflict when it is costly and to be weak when that is easy, but this is no argument: the vices remains vices. One should protect oneself and one’s fellows; the prices of unprincipled appeasement and atrophy are higher in the long run.

Could a preference for order be rephrased as a form of utilitarianism? “Order is matching everyone to what makes them happiest.” One might say, “Disorder is mismatch between duties, abilities, and rewards.”

It has quite a bit to recommend it from a narrow rationalist perspective. First, it turns questions of order into more familiar questions of game theoretic equilibria: for instance order is however we can cooperate most and maximize our complementarities, or order is the way we cooperate least, while still ensuring the greatest liberty, or order is a way to reduce transactional costs and uncertainties. Relatedly, it seems to make the desire for order a nonthreatening problem of calculation: it becomes an optimization with a flexible objective function, and if the objective is up for discussion, then the definition of order is also implicitly up for discussion, as well. The ideological baggage of this order then appears to be defused. The associated worldview seems safe to model as a sterile optimization process without fear of memetic contagion.

However, even if some utility function could envelop the reactionary conception of order, there is little reason to think that that would do any good.

At its heart, the reactionary conception of morality contains a conviction that individuals do not and cannot know what is best.

It requires a game theory in which players never precisely learn the payoffs for actions and do not even know the actions available to them. At best, they eventually learn variable estimates for the payoff of an action someday, and at worst they die unexpectedly years later with no idea of the causal connection–but in fact I spoke too soon–at the truly worst, all of their distant offspring die together unexpectedly, centuries later, with no idea that the action was ever performed and even less idea that it caused their deaths. For better or worse this is the ‘game’ we play.

Likely too late, a rationalist will also find that the optimization problem is not memetically sterile. Thinking about these problems leads down a road to understanding embodied cognition, which leads to intelligence nonorthogonality, evolutionary game theory, which leads to human biodiversity, and rational bias, which leads to virtue ethics and even functional ritual. Grappling with the difficulty of this civilizational calculation problem leads away from individualistic rationalism, just as certainly as grappling with the economic calculation problem leads away from socialism.

So enough. We are not merely utilitarians trying on a more frightening costume.

But is it possible we might still remain progressives behind the reactionary mask? Is our ‘order’ a species of Progress? It’s certainly true that we’re no enemies of less meretricious forms of progress. Order makes room for improvisation, creativity, technological innovation, and moral development. For people who want to make their lives genuinely better, we consider the reactionary lifestyle ideal. But it is better not to compare ourselves on the the basis of this present name ‘progressivism’ at all. It is better to summon forth the left by a string of names that it has worn before: Dissent, Puritanism, Whiggery, Quakerism, Jacobinism, Unitarianism, Universalism, Progressivism, Communism, Multiculturalism.

In every case, it appeals to individual consciences for solidarity as individuals, even across current group lines. It asks new followers to give up their memberships in small inner groups for stronger individual identities in a larger group, and it always moves on by forming the larger group from a inner group vanguard plus whatever outsiders can be converted. The movement progresses by appealing to naive consciences seeking equality in the inner group and avaricious conscience in the outer group; the former uses the latter’s desire for inner group resources as the drive for purges and internal reorganization. Then the process repeats with a new vanguard and new outsiders. The right gloats that ‘the left devours its own,’ but this is a stable part of the lifecycle. It has rarely been a hindrance–certainly never since the American First Great Awakening turned Puritan sons against their fathers.

In the core of contemporary reaction, there is no hint of a centrality for oppressed and spoiled conscience. There is no hint of a call for equality of individuals and universal respect inside the group. The order we call for is not an ordering of morals by inborn conscience, but an ordering of conscience by morals. The goal is not vainglorious, absolute Progress, but humble, tangible development. The existence of progressives mistaking themselves for reactionary is no argument against the reality of this truer core; heresies are always plentiful at the conception of new orthodoxies.

So we are not progressives, then, but one might still find something disquietingly modern about contemporary reaction.

To begin with, however much we read old greats like Carlyle, Froude, and Maine, we cannot help  having also read Darwin, Boltzmann, Schumpeter, Feynman, and Schelling. Whatever the mendacity of liberal ideology, it should be inarguable to an honest man that the last two liberal centuries have provided vast intellectual and scientific knowledge. Given the scale of the changes, it is almost impossible to imagine what a genuinely reactionary society for today’s world would look like. This is why the ‘neo’-reactionary label is used. As stated in the first section of this piece, a true order must fit the nature of a time and its material facts.

It has been 100 years since WWI destroyed the last technologically advanced, yet plausibly reactionary European societies, Austria-Hungary and Russia. Therefore, we are in the uncomfortable position of having to build and experiment. One of the things we experiment with most dangerously is materialism.

The body is physical and physical manipulations have effects on character. This is inarguable and traditional; it was known by older societies, and traditions sprang up to say what foods were good for the soul and for growing strong children. However, the scale of the changes and the rapidity with which cycle in today’s society make traditions learned over generations an unwieldy adaptation. Imagine keeping a traditional diet of milk, eggs, plentiful wheat and vegetables, and occasional meat, but always buying cheaply and from local stores. The animal products would likely come from animals fed antibiotics and unnatural feed. Much of the wheat and vegetables would likely be transgenic or grown with fertilizers and pesticides. These have unknown, often deleterious effects on nutritional content and hormonal influence, and worse, the technologies change so rapidly that even before one understands what their effects on health and character are, they have changed again.

Comparable effects are active in almost every corner of life. The styles of advertising and journalism change so rapidly that a tradition of reading news each morning means something quite different from decade to decade. The march of liberal influence through Christianity can make sticking with just one church for a lifetime a wild ride. Skills such as driving manual transmission briefly seem to be essentially masculine, then quickly become foibles of old men. If we do not appreciate this, then our hopes of restoring order are empty vanity. So, we spend more time than ancient reactionaries may have in terms of thinking about the changes wrought by these things: diet, profession, media, material. We can be confused, wrongly, with material determinists.

However, the challenge of designing environments to support virtue is not solely a determinist’s challenge, as any monk or priest could tell you. Our goal is neither to shape man alone, nor to shape nature alone, but to ensure that the reciprocal influences between man and nature are maximally harmonious and lead to ever greater and deeper harmonies. In the media Cathedral, men’s loud voices encourage others to raise their voices until all is shouting chaos. In a true cathedral, the ceilings absorb the noise from the pews and amplify the voice from the pulpit; the long echoes off the walls keep every man mindful of his disturbances of the peace. Our determinism goes only so far as desiring the latter over the former.

We could now appear to be relativists to the coarser eye, given our confession that we must experiment and try multiple new ways of life. We also have a suspicious interest in patchwork civilizations, in which many societal subgroups coexist despite contrasting laws and traditions. However, there is a deep and firm dividing line between believing that what is best for a people depends on who they are and believing that what is best for that people depends only on what they believe. The former is common sense, while the latter is nonsense.

The particular ways different peoples might require different ways of life are undoubtedly what cause us the most trouble with impolite society, but they also prove beyond doubt that we are not relativists. Sexism is often a proper order. What’s referred to as racism is often a proper order. Slavery can be a proper order. These orders can be subtle enough that outliers from each group would not contradict them, and they can be lenient to encourage outliers in the rare cases they do pop up. The essential problem is to achieve a stable order that reinforces and deepens the best aspects of the group. This discrimination is nothing unusual. For instance, current racist laws keep down Asian college admissions to ensure apparent equality of opportunity among all races. Whether or not this equality is a goal of injustice and disorder, the point is simple: what is normally labeled as racism is in actuality a ubiquitous, unavoidable adaptation to objective differences between human subpopulations.

Individualists may be howling at this point, questioning my focus on societal virtues rather than personal virtues. But man is a social animal. Man’s highest perfections are expressed in friendship, comradeship, citizenship, and discipleship. Without others to serve and to lead, man leads a stunted, poor life, and no amount of individual strength or intelligence will make up for it. Even a solitary writer has his references and his audience, and even Mowgli had his wolves.

It is simply impossible for individuals inside and outside of society, or in different societies, to be ordered in the same way. Feral children do not learn language. Teenagers typically change their characters dramatically in front of different audiences. An adult’s profession will often shape him deeply by middle-age. And after death, a man’s success or failure will be judged solely by his effect on what remains. The individual, without responsibilities, is something only half real; the truth of a man is revealed in his relationships and his duties.

Order must be emergent and collective to reflect the way all admirable people actually live and judge. And what constitutes order in this sense? That conflicts should be minimal and stable, while harmonies are maximal and ever-growing. A clear negative example is the feminist project, which undermines the harmony between men and women while destabilizing the conflicts among men, among women, and between men and women. A clear positive example is the early Christian monasteries, which acted as nuclei for towns, repositories for knowledge, and supports to resettling the countryside after the fall of Rome.

In less obvious cases, there can be disagreement about what is order and what is chaos. There may be a right answer from an objective position, but no human is objective. In practice, good men follow the judgment of those they trust most. In practice, morality is personal choice within the context of a greater system of partially shared trust, partially shared property, and partially shared interests.

The name for this system of shared information, shared property, and shared goals is civilization.

Your earliest virtues come from your parents; your later virtues are developed in school and play; as you learn to read, the sources of guidance become overwhelming in number; as you become an adult, you learn to filter that guidance and rely on wisdom from the few you trust. Throughout it all, you are embedded in a system of reciprocal actions and relationships that you may never trust or feel fully loyal to, but you cannot escape as the frame and ground for all of your choices and values. It contains your parents, your school, your playmates, your books and internet, and your adult friends. Civilization is that system.

This is not the relativist’s metaphysical ‘what is true for one civilization is not for another’ but the concrete fact that what is good in one civilization may not be in another. The truth is often contingent but never relative.

This is enough to have made the most important points. Our order is not totalitarian, multiculturalist, Progressive, determinist, relativist, or individualist.

We are civilizationists. Our order is civilization.

Our reaction is not a matter of fixed, rigid patterns. Nor is it limp-wristed surrender to whatever comes. It is reinforcement and elaboration of whatever good comes from God and Nature along with avoidance and containment of whatever chaos comes. It is not a matter of forcing God and Nature to conform to conscience or intellect, but rather training the conscience and intellect to follow God and Nature. It is morality, not in the sense of a tyrannical law, but in the sense of the virtues identical with human flourishing.

And because human flourishing is a collective, social activity and the best virtues for a people depend on who those people are, we go further.

Reactionary order is a people’s elaboration of itself, their continued hallowing of their traditions, their conquering of new spaces, and their advancement to new heights of wisdom. These are the virtues that constitute order.

Order is morality, and morality is civilization.

The post That Word Called ‘Order’ appeared first on Social Matter.

We are told we now live in the Information Age, which to the educated ear is merely a sly name for an Entropic Age. We also live in the Atomic Age, a strange appellation that never quite fit, yet nonetheless haunts us. It is an age in which nuclear weapons reshape all international contention, though they are almost never used or lately even tested, an age in which major innovations in nuclear power that could make fossil fuels appear laughably scarce are unused for fear of liability, and an age in which particle beams and high-energy radiation undergird all our modern chemical and biological sciences. Society, however, is far most interested in the pictures and hardly knows anything of the cameras.

There appear to be few better examples of technological stagnation in the present age than the half-aborted promise of nuclear technology. That promise looms around us whenever we allow ourselves to think for a moment about how our world could end, or what could await us among the stars.

This name ‘Atomic Age’ also haunts us in terms of reflecting on the way our society has been atomized in undesired ways and failed to become atomized in desired ways.

The nuclear family has proven to be quite fissile, with the self-pity and entitlement of each new divorceé spinning through society like a swarm of neutrons to destabilize more marriages. Now single motherhood and bastardy are common, but far from being liberated atoms in their own right, we find that the offspring are divided against themselves with poor self-regulation and high rates of mental illness.

Evidently, like chemical atoms, individuals do not fit the abstract conception of the atom, either. They can be split against themselves, and they cannot be extracted cleanly from their environments. In physics, this was discovered through the phenomenon of radiation: emission of electrons when light shone on metals and the emission of alpha particles from the atomic nucleus. Society is not so simple, but modern society’s radioactivity is clear enough to any honest eye. So this metaphor of atomization is worth reconsidering.

The base of the metaphor is the concept of an atom, shared contentiously between philosophy and physics. In the philosophical version, all material would be made up of atoms. In the physical conception, atoms and the radiation fields surrounding them are inseparable partners. ‘Atoms’ are familiar, but ‘radiation’ may seem more threatening and more obscure, and it is therefore a perfect lever to pry apart this concept of atomization.

Radiations mediate interactions. The most common, obvious societal interactions that humans make are linguistic, so language is our first candidate for a radiation of social atomism. A human communicates a pattern, another absorbs it, both are changed. When we understand each other’s patterns and are changed most by them, the communication is said to resonate with us, like light is best absorbed by an atom when it resonates with the atom. The light emitted from an atom fits the resonances of the atom, and so it is with communication we initiate. We talk and discover each others’ vibes, in an earlier parlance of the Atomic Age.

One can tell that atoms are inextricably part of their environment by the fact that many of their resonances depend as much on their environment as on their own properties. The same is true of people–how often do you find a message that resonates with you only when with the right crowd? A joke that’s funny with the guys may be abhorrent with a daughter. “Sure,” the atomists say, “the part of you that responds to jokes and talk may look a great deal different depending on who you’re with, and your own ideas might change, too, but your core, your nucleus, remains unchanged.”

Dostoevsky is one of the great reactionary psychologists and is notable in this context for his deep feel for the influence of company on character. To see it starkly in one of his best works, read the words of Dmitri Karamazov after conversations with his brother Ivan and compare to his words after a conversation with brother Alyosha.

Dostoevsky is a keen witness to the falsehood of shallow individualism, and in particular, the way that people who try to define themselves as atomic individuals fall into nihilism. As Ivan’s example shows, even when one fiercely maintains separation from all other men’s moral influence, without God, one may simply fall to talking with oneself as the Devil–and split, with bitter effects on friends and family, who were not so inclined to keep themselves clear of influence.

Mankind also interacts without language, often more consequentially. There are few more final ways to end a disagreement than by killing or enslaving. Less intentional, less direct means than whips and bullets also affect others without words–overflowing trashcans, unkempt appearances, long-unwashed urine and feces in alleys–and these, too, belie our individual natures.

When a human creature is incapable of politeness and acts like a barbaric savage, wise and ancient men considered it fit only to be a trained animal, a slave. To these men, slaves were hardly individuals. Their character was considered a product of their masters’ training, their natures often said to be two-faced and divided, and their motivations always said to come from outside: whether they are ruled by their passions or their masters, a Greek like Aristotle would never say they rule themselves. The master is held responsible for shielding society from the radioactivity of their charges. Where polite, educated slaves were found, the reckoning was different, but this does not contradict the point. In Rome, Greek slaves could be moral educators, but they carried themselves as old Greek citizens might have.

Training and education are essential for individualism in the modernist, Anglo conception descended from the classical view. The individuality of a person is guaranteed by their self-control; this individuality is a matter of having a personal will guided by personal interests. Out of this and against this, grew the postmodern conception, in which individuality is less dependent on training and more inclusive, but appropriately lacks atomicity as well. The postmodern individual is divisible, schizophrenic, colonized. They are theorized to have the potential for responsibility, but also to fall short of actually achieving it. Pynchon’s V. is explicitly concerned with the self-modification and antihumanism of its titular mystery woman, and his characters in Gravity’s Rainbow explicitly concern themselves with the divisibility and mutability of the soul. Their mad tortures and capers are natural emissions of unstable minds, unable to remain the atoms their societies expected, seeking change.

Our current societal mess of souls desperately seeking identity and validation, while destabilizing the lives around them, explicitly contradicts the purported feasibility of atomic individualism. The shifting of fashion and cultural resonance indicate that however important individuals are for creativity, it is always humans in context who have that creativity. Neither of these failures of atomism is truly doubted by the Marxist left or the reactionary right, though both are still denied by libertarians and Anglo-centrists currently losing grip on the masses.

When one talks about Weimerica, then, one talks about a society that is almost past believing humans can live well as atoms, but is still resigned to atomized life, nonetheless. Our society is filled with the radiation spewed by hundreds of millions of unwise loudmouths, so that each child is pulled in thousands of directions before they can form stable relationships–and then, if they did manage a deep connection despite the odds, they are geographically dispersed to yet more radioactive universities, where they are asked to absorb the voices of generations of disaffected, unstable, unwise, but clever thinkers of the historical left.

It is almost impossible that something dangerous will not resonate in such a radiation bath, and as in chemistry those chance resonances will break bonds, whether the bond of a boy to his childhood church or scout group, the bond between high school sweethearts, or the bond between parents and child–assuming the parents have not already been seduced to see the child as a burden and break that bond themselves. And, since there is so much literal and ideological space to move through in modern society, entropic drift will ensure that bonds, once broken, rarely re-form as strongly. It is easy to stop calling, and it is easy to check Facebook without saying hello.

With every bond a person breaks inadvisedly, they become more likely to release more radiation. Whether it is callous words to a wife or child, the cat lady’s unmistakable ammoniac smell, insane lists of protest demands, mass molestation, or disastrous war, the desperate and misguided breed more displeasure, distrust, and alienation. Broken work relationships become pretext for dismantling men’s friendships; abused children provide pretexts for dismantling families; bitter loneliness becomes antisocial cruelty.

New bonds form, but rarely as strongly. Divorceés divorce again. Friendships become increasingly hard to form from scratch. Those who do not prioritize family when young do not get to relive their children’s first years. And without these bonds, mental health suffers; the individual splits apart. If all goes well, they decline quietly, but too often they make bizarre, harmful choices, or choose not to live at all.

In the end, our atomization is not separate from its radioactivity. The two are coupled faces of a single process. You are all alone, but, having been alone so long, who would want to be with you? If you claim to drink male tears, if you think all women are whores without agency, if you are wrapped up in demanding rights and concessions and justice, what do you have to offer others but your own wild radiation? What can you promise but to strain their other relationships?

The single best solution for this life in a sea of dangerous talk and action is passivism: maintain few, robust bonds at the deepest levels and react with circumspection to everything else. Never stoop to activism, never seek notoriety directly, never open mouth or ambitions to the masses.

Build quiet, stable, private community, even in the midst of the public conflagration.

Nonetheless, reactionary values make the public uneasy and reactionary social technologies are banned where it has been possible. The unease is unfounded; far from being the sources of radiation in society, passivists are simply ones who resist it well and therefore need fear it less. However, like in the panic of the Black Death, immunity suggests guilt. Reflecting or transmitting the radiation impinging on us since we do not absorb it, we are mistaken for sources of radiation by those it next passes on to.

Most unforgivably, we reflect men’s self-hatred back to them. We remember the Gods of the Copybook Headings. We make men feel their effect on the world and how those effects return to them. For the unfree, battered around by the emissions of thousands of others, with no strong, stabilizing bonds left, this is a reminder of their unfreedom and, most being unimaginative moderns, they imagine unfreedom as confinement. They cannot properly understand the unfreedom of chaotic but unreflective license: they have spurned this inheritance from the ancients.

So these utopians keep imagining that life is a confinement, wishing that someday, if we were open enough with each other, if the radiation pressure were built high enough, we atoms could burst our prison open and finally escape our own offal.

But of course it will not happen. There is no prison. The atomization of society is merely the combustion of society; people are not even potentially true atoms. We must order our lives and quiet this activist chain reaction lunacy that tempts us all from time to time. We are simply as we are: imperfectly atomic, occasionally radioactive, occasionally benign, and always living in the light of past actions.

The post The Radioactivity Of Atomic Individualism appeared first on Social Matter.

Neoreaction grows out of soil prepared by perhaps the most powerful combinations of power-based and want-based organization so far, capitalist markets, in which monies stand for both powers and desires in one instrument.

The novel techno-commercial focus of neoreaction is essential to its reinvigoration of ethno-nationalist and theonomist elements.

Of course, capitalism is not always regarded as a particularly moral institution. A great deal of ink has been spilled over how, exactly, capitalism is just or unjust, moral or amoral. However, going back to the roots of trade in the ideas of fairness, power, and desire should show clearly how, far from being amoral mechanisms, prices and capital are as inextricably moral as authority and community are.

To be sure, this is not the fuzzy, humane morality of a Spock-influenced parent, and neither is it the fiery, divine morality of the Old Testament. However, it is mortal justice par excellence. Markets are an engine for aggregating choices and exposing consequences. The justice of capitalism is the justice of the storm that drowns the careless sailor: the hapless are consumed and the skillful prosper.

Still, this is not at all a blind spot of economics in its contemporary Beckerian analytical formulations that take difficult to trade capital, such as intellectual training and genetics, to be just as fundamental as more liquid capital, such as land and equipment. It may sound discomforting or sophistical that in contemporary economics, ghetto community organization could be understood as part of an economy just as much as trading shares of a public company. It is, however, true.

We live in a world where concepts like ‘political market,’ ‘marriage market,’ and ‘religious market‘ are used to plan and analyze real actions unironically and effectively.

This is not the free market fundamentalist, anarcho-capitalist’s idea of capitalism. NRx has grown past its ancap roots, though it retains a strong affinity for economic analysis.

If you want to wirehead yourself, no other era can offer more ways to do it or leave you as brutally alone with the aftermath. If you want to live by wireheading others, no other era will match you as effectively to the people you can best help to their destruction. Unfettered contemporary markets, like post-Beckerian capital, threaten to be all-encompassing; the old paternalist superstructure around them is dissolving just as accelerationists have long hoped.

However, a curious thing has happened that not enough accelerationists saw coming: paternalist and maternalist moral superstructure, rather than merely disappearing like a vestigial tail, has instead been exposed as a valuable resource worth cultivating. It is dissolving through assimilation, not annihilation.

Morality itself has become capital to be managed and invested.

Employee reliability and social fluency are valued as intellectual capital in corporate finance. It is a cliché to say that character is your greatest asset. Intangible good will can be a dominant line item in accounting. Leadership training is a booming consulting market. Not only academically, but factually and practically, moral behavior is capital for sale—whatever its higher significance.

And just like for any other capital, which morality is most valuable rarely appears uniform across a society. The apparent value differs across classes and regions. Market allocation is a sophisticated mixture of desire-based and power-based social allocation, and the composition of that mixture varies throughout society.

At different rungs of the social ladder, different powers and desires are privileged, and so with their attendant moralities. At the lowest rung, perhaps physical clout and passionate desire appear key. At this rung, then, thug ethics appear adaptive and the young who intend to thrive in it seek instruction by joining gangs. Among the mid-level gentry, social clout and temperate desire may seem more important. At this rung, therefore, bourgeois ethics appear adaptive and the youth who intend to thrive in it seek instruction by attending colleges.

Specialization in skills generalizes to specialization in all forms of capital, including moral capital. In each case, market pressures promote elaborating both desire-based and power-based morality, though unevenly and along different dimensions.

So welfare checks and social security grow, but so do the privileges of wealth. Mass media may have to print flagrant untruth to serve their audience’s desires, but they can do so without much worry of being seriously accountable for misrepresentation. Sexual liberation proceeds like a ratchet, yet it seems to remain the same beautiful and powerful people who are having the most and best sex, only more so.

Mass culture drifts left with desire even as elite might makes ever more right.

Yet however powerful it seems, we must always remember that while market capitalism may currently be among our best, most comprehensive processes for organizing the human judgments necessary to design and carry out social resource allocation, it remains an institution of only mortal justice.

Used well, markets link distant inhuman consequences to contextual human judgment more effectively than any other system yet devised. In doing so, they empower human choice to incredible heights. However, the highest heights can be the sites of greatest folly. Desire all too often exceeds power no matter how great. And Nemesis always follows hubris.

Capital is just as capable of empowering the negligent to commit greater follies as of empowering the wise to accomplish greater deeds, like sailing will drown the negligent in deeper waters even as it propels the prudent to more distant shores. As we learn to live with capital, we are learning its peculiar laws, but whether we are learning correctly enough or quickly enough is up for debate.

It is unclear whether any of our lives on Earth could survive a particularly poor choice of investments, given how frightfully powerful our investments have become. A slogan from Stewart Brand describes it well: “We are as gods and have to get good at it.”

Existential threat is not new of course. Our world could always end completely and without warning, and given doomsday arguments, we should not overestimate the stability of older civilizations when measured against inhuman chance. We know we have been lucky enough to develop on our planet so far, but we do not know what this luck consists of. Nonetheless, the power of modern technology is an all-too-foreseeable source of threat.

Negligence appears to thrive everywhere in our systems, from the raising of children to the securitization of debt, and it seems truly doubtful that we are currently wise enough to avoid systemic disaster.

In fact, we see everywhere that the contemporary man expects punishment, though he often despairs of receiving it soon enough to reform his life. We see it in the author of Infinite Jest, who could not escape his privileged loneliness and addictions short of death; we see it in the director of the 2008-2009 bailouts, who laments that the wicked could not be punished without hurting the innocent more; we see it in the father of the American Cold War containment strategy, who was no more certain that the Soviet system would collapse out of its own illegitimacy than he was that consumer capitalism would do the same soon after.

In many cases, we respond to this state of affairs by limiting ourselves. We restrict the power of nuclear and medical technologies through treaties and regulation. We declare certain desires like ‘perfection of the race’ out of bounds. We even limit the forms of discourse that seem capable of leading to dangerous powers and desires. This is, in one sense, prudent.

However, our self-limitation is performed haphazardly and ineffectively. Our restrictions are like those of the obese trucker who will fastidiously avoid cholesterol ‘for his heart’, but still drinks 64 oz. sodas every day. It is not uncommon to see an environmentalist feminist call for restrictions on GMO foods, citing possible hormonal disruption, while wholeheartedly encouraging women to use hormonal birth control. It is not uncommon to see a pacifist multiculturalist decry violent genocide while advocating population replacement.

Evidently our morals leave something to be desired, as any reactionary could tell you. One of the key innovations that the techno-commercialist neoreaction growing out of libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism offers is its account of these moral failures as a market failure in moral capital, i.e., a market failure for truth and justice.

This diagnosis begins with the fact that current media and education markets lack any strong guarantees that the forms of mortal judgment they offer match any more objective concept of judgment, a classic information asymmetry. In fact, the incentives of moral instructors, such as journalists and university professors, seem more aligned towards giving audiences the illusion of understanding and the pleasure of a good conscience rather than any real thing, adding principal agent problems on top of the information asymmetry. Our academic, media, and political cartels, thus incessantly produce glittering insights, but rarely glowing wisdom.

And as judgment worsens, the information asymmetry and principal agent problems only grow.

The current market for judgment and moral influence is therefore a farce. Parents pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to send children to universities that do not instill even basic professionalism, much less improve their other character. Self-help books overwhelmingly preach empty self-esteem and merely instrumental habit while antidepressant, antipsychotic, and antidisobedience drug prescriptions soar because self-regulation is becoming a rarer and rarer skill. The social sciences are transparently biased, and geneticists are employed not to state basic facts.

The market perspective is not the only one worth taking on this moral problem, and it is unlikely to reveal all solutions. However, it does offer advantages. First, it can be formalized well using methods of contemporary microeconomics, enabling tests by computer simulations and experiments. This may prove essential as discussions of reactionary institution design mature into genuine engineering of social technology. As importantly, it relies little on shared cultural heritage that is all-too-rare among the cosmopolitan elite, making neoreaction more accessible to intelligent and analytically-minded individuals with elite backgrounds. Market failure is a neutral way for shallowly rooted intellectuals to debate the moral bases of their problems—and thereby earn respect for reactionary analysis—without first assenting to a reactionary moral perspective.

Indeed, whatever one’s opinion of reactionary mores this moral market rot must be taken seriously. It hollows out the rest of the capitalist consequence engine. In the 2008-2009 subprime crisis, an inability to properly appreciate the risks of contagion among unreliable mortgage applicants led to a dramatic system failure. Hiring based on signals of competence is at times prohibited outright as unjust oppression, even before one broaches the tender subject of compensation for competence. The health care market has been utterly sick both before and after Obamacare’s passage, from the regulation-driven pricing of pharmaceuticals to judicial system avoidant defensive medicine. Volumes have been and continue to be written about moral hazard, the blind spots of regulators, and the apparent stagnation of developed economies.

These problems are all too apparent and have clear roots in judgment. Yet however farcical and structurally perilous, this moral market failure is an opportunity for market makers.

The task of techno-commercialist reactionaries is to identify and invest in the morality and judgment that will survive a market reset (especially the wisest ethno-nationalism and theonomy), short what will be exposed as dross, and be ready to thrive in the recovery.

In less commercial language, if they choose to appreciate it: hew to admirable men; resist sirens of modern moralism like narrow individualism and narrow rationalism; put trust in the faiths of one’s forefathers. Be ready to depart from Troy to seed a new Rome; be ready to depart Sodom without a backward look.

Because make no mistake, inhuman judgment never stops no matter how slow it can seem to an internet junkie or an algorithmic trader. Nemesis comes for the proud.

The post Techno-Commercialism And Markets In Morality appeared first on Social Matter.

Our time is beset by resignation on one hundred fronts. Politically, the far-left is resigned to class struggle and oppression; though they fight, they rarely anticipate any final victory. The moderate left is resigned to corporate influence and to disappointing the zealots they wish they had the idealism to believe in. The conservative right is resigned to change, however hard they fight their enemies to left and right. The far-right has become resigned to the collapse of society as we know it and the necessity of finding another way.

Sub-politically, things may be even more dire. We hear widespread resignation to our words being lost and misinterpreted in the maelstrom of modern media. We hear resignation to changing neighborhoods and communities, whether gentrification or ghettoization, or just Bowling Alone. We hear resignation to divorce and to poor parenting, to the absurd amount of time spent on shallow entertainment, and to the general uglification of men, women, buildings, books, and art.

But this resignation is rarely the clean amor fati resignation of a Stoic. Most often, when we say we hear resignation we mean that we hear despair and bitter frustration. To use a technical term introduced by Friedrich Nietzsche and elaborated well by Max Scheler, we hear ressentiment.

This despair is unbecoming. It’s an excellent sign that this person, whose life is a curse and a hole to be filled, is not worthy to be followed.

For better and worse, however, it is especially common among newcomers to fringe political movements. If not for our sourness, few of us would have traveled so far from mainstream politics. With the culture wars boiling over around Trump, the rhetoric is more overheated than ever. It can be hard not to react by burning with impotent activist rage. Therefore, it’s important that we address the issue, especially now, and circulate remedies against it. I feel a particular responsibility to do so after writing The Radioactivity of Atomic Individualism, which portrayed many negative features of this ubiquitous, desperate unhappiness without describing how to adapt to it in any detail.

Why, in an age of such plenty, would men be so frustrated? There are many threads to follow.

I plan to pick just one with particularly broad relevance and special technical interest for aspiring passivists: incoherent agency.

This concept is that we are often deeply confused about what to feel responsible for and what is out of our control. Do we have the responsibility to regulate our desires, or are our desires inborn and inherently natural? Are our decisions determined by circumstance, or do we choose them freely? Should we be judging one another by our intentions, or by the results we achieve?

Anyone who would be worthy to govern must be proficient in recognizing and assigning such responsibility. Understanding and taming issues of agency in one’s own life and the lives of loved ones is therefore an ideal early step down the passivist path.

One of the causes of our incoherence about agency is our loss of a living concept of virtue, and three virtues are essential to answer these questions and pull up the roots of the bitterest frustration: temperance, justice, and courage, corresponding for my narrow purposes to proper organization of agency across present, past, and future. Let me begin with the first.

One most easily recognized way that incoherent agency leads to despair and frustration is that we formulate our desires using one agency, but then live according to another.

This is especially common in modern life. As a perfect example, consider sexual desire.

Pornography allows viewers to scan through hundreds of body types or fetishes in a single hour. The level of diversity and ease of acquisition has become incredible. On the other hand, though polyamory and fetishes have become relatively normalized, it is still rare to find an actual partner who is up for anything, still less a healthy and desirable partner like that. Desires can be formulated in an environment of abundance with desire almost entirely sovereign, but life must still be lived according to stricter compromises. A mirror occurs with romantic films and books, where convincing fictions portray perfections of emotion that the consumer has never earned nor has any idea how to earn.

One’s frustration occurs because the desires are unrealistic, and they are unrealistic because of a mismatch between where desires are formed and where they are later expressed. In the first context, one’s agency is almost free and complete, but in the second, one’s agency is conditional and limited.

This observation suggests a first essential rule for living a happy and well-ordered life in modern culture: keep learning and doing close together. For mutable desires, never accept low-effort surrogates that imitate rewards better than you can earn. Carefully ensuring that one’s thirst for pleasures does not outstrip one’s rights to them has an old name, of course: this is temperance, as mentioned at the outset.

In our times, temperance especially includes being wary of porn and romance as substitutes for sex and love, of snark for superiority, of flattery for friendship, and of official rights for actual powers. But it is not simply a rule about fiction rather than nonfiction. It is exactly as important to be wary of learning to desire fictions as of learning desires from true stories one cannot personally relive—that way lies envy, just as bitter.

Yet though fiction and nonfiction can be dangerous, this is not to say stop consuming fictions or stop comparing oneself to great men. Only be careful to learn to do what makes them great rather than learn to desire what they earn from their greatness. This is the difference between a young Raskolnikov, eager for the old Napoleon’s privileges, and the young Napoleon, eager for Caesar’s virtues. Become the young hero before an old one.

To judge the present well and to enjoy ourselves in the moment, we must match our desires to our circumstances. Otherwise, we are eternally irritated and disappointed. Otherwise, we can find no good to cultivate in the world around us. Otherwise, we mistake order for chaos and do violence to it.

A second frustrating incoherence, more related to past than present, arises especially among adherents to modern socialist and materialist ideologies, in which agency is ascribed to inchoate groups, or is denied to individuals because of their social conditioning, or is reduced to acting out pre-programmed responses after environmental stimulus.

Taken alone, one can often make good cases for these theories. It may be true that responses to stimuli are predictable, that an individual’s values behind choices might themselves have been chosen by others, or that a group’s desires are together far more causally efficacious than individual desires. Agency is a rich phenomenon that should not be underestimated or oversimplified. However, what happens all too often is that we mix the theories poorly, forgetting the premises that make each conception viable as we clumsily squash one together with another.

We learn that most decisions are made by habit, but think that simple intention will be enough to change habits. We think for a moment that our moods are chemical, yet fail to appreciate how complex that implies the chemistry must be. We exculpate ourselves for being manipulated by others, yet hold them responsible as if they were not also manipulated. There is a temptation to hold oneself responsible for every decision, as in the most radical existentialism, and a simultaneous temptation to hold oneself responsible for nothing, as in the most radical determinism.

What is the intelligent young man to do? Believe that he is structurally part of the patriarchy and thus responsible for all the unhappiness of women? Believe that he’s responsible for nothing more than just kicking it poolside and watching the world burn? Most likely he muddles through, going from one side to the other based on context and the luck of the draw. He follows whichever influence seems higher status or truer (it is rare that those appearances do not coincide). Mostly, he feels guilt and frustration, manipulated but also guilty for being manipulable.

Further, it makes him an ineffective manager and leader. If he is an individualist and somewhat-relativist, he manages each employee according to their own conception of responsibility, sure to cause dissension in the ranks. He cannot enforce or even insist on a consistent standard of responsibility because he does not have one.

To live and lead well, one must maintain consistent standards for agency across contexts, and the last paragraph suggests a proper name for the standard one should aspire to: justice. Whether one is a determinist or an existentialist (and one may be both), justice requires consistency with oneself and with others.

This can especially be a problem for new reactionaries and radicals. Often one will just have been ‘red-pilled‘ from an ideology in which people’s ideals seemed more intentionally honest and rational. Now on the fringes, the norm seems more mendacious—systematically and obligately bad—so he often makes vicious accusations and impractical demands of the normal. He still thinks honesty and rationality are easier than they really are, despite learning that they’re less common. With time, luck, and wisdom, he may learn a just and consistent standard for agency, but in the interim he makes a distinctly poor impression.

The only way to cease this torturous confusion is to understand how to include the past as part of oneself, as consistent with one’s own agency. One must make peace with one’s origins, and that means equally both those origins in the most fleeting chances and those in the deepest natural laws. It is doubtful that the importance of fleeting chance is not one of the deepest laws.

But even if one can maintain temperate desire in the presence and a just feeling of responsibility for past events, despair can still set in when we face the future.

Among the young and the working class, especially, there is a distinct anger that “even doing everything right, we can’t get ahead” in the hollowed-out economies prepared for the Millenials by their Boomer elders and by U.S. coast dwellers for Middle Americans. Students graduate college, but with incredible debt loads. ‘Nice guys’ try to date respectfully, but find women prefer others. Workingmen try to provide for a family, but between divorce and outsourcing find themselves unemployable, on the hook, and alone. The formulas do not work, and men feel betrayed.

On the other hand, genuine sources of happiness are widely distrusted. “Sure you’re saved,” some will say, “but how stupid do you have to be to take church seriously in this day and age?” Or “sure she seems happy but she’s so boring, I could never just be a mother.” A common refrain for the ambitious young man is that “I think meaning is more important than happiness,” but the false opposition reveals a lack of both.

It seems to happen again and again that we misjudge what we expect to make us happy at the same time we discount what we observe making others happy. In one sense, this is simply an image of intemperance as described above: these awful entitled Millenials, for instance, have set their desires above their means. However, there is a deeper mistake at work concerning the relationship of means and ends. Specifically, we ascribe too much direct control to our intention, when intention is only a small part of agency.

The fact is that we do not understand what we do even when we’re successful in doing it. Even the neuroscientists among us do not yet know how, specifically, a good food produces a pleasing sensation of taste. Often the most profound artist will have no articulate explanation for the effect of his work, or will even have one that is demonstrably incorrect. Our actions produce consequences with some regularity, but we rarely know exactly what this regularity consists in.

A fascinating historical case study of this is the prevention of scurvy, and it is particularly interesting for reactionaries because it clearly shows how advances in one technology can mask declines in another. Today, it is well known that scurvy is a vitamin C deficiency and that supplements of any food containing vitamin C are sufficient to prevent or cure it. However, scurvy was cured with citrus well before the vitamin theory was known.

The particular British cure of lemon juice worked for decades, but then changes in technology (1) made ocean travel faster, so fresh food high in vitamin C was more common and (2) eliminated the vitamin C in the most common citrus supplements. The first change masked the other, so that scurvy re-emerged as a problem in long ocean voyages and arctic expeditions despite the presence of citrus (now lime juice) supplements. In fact, with the advent of boiling and canning destroying natural vitamin C in many other foods, scurvy became a particular epidemic among the rich. All the while, various doctors and nutritionists advanced vain theories of what to eat and why, and all the while people believed that they were taking the most reasonable actions to ensure their health.

Some will read this story and think the lesson is to be suspicious. Many beliefs have turned out to be false in this story. However, it should be equally incredible how well the lemon juice cure worked before the vitamin theory was known. Even without the vitamin theory, citrus solidified British domination of the seas for generations. As much as one should be humble about the limits of one’s knowledge, one should also be courageous in acting despite one’s ignorance.

Our ignorance is unlimited. For every theory, there is an unknown assumption, and for every policy there is an unknown failure mode. Coherent agency requires a coherent practice of giving reasons for acting and communicating expectations. Agency cannot consist in following guaranteed formulas absent judgment, and trusting judgment requires courage. There is no alternative or substitute. Even complete inaction is a risk, and even letting another decide requires the courage to trust that other.

For the young and the working class, the difficulty and likelihood of failure in particular endeavors will often be made no less by courage, but the fact of failure will become more bearable—even strengthening. The difficulty of trying again for the next, more likely success will lessen. And in the most important cases, courage will reveal paths forward that no generic expert or outsider could recommend: paths like starting a unique business or learning skills that hardly exist yet; paths that require the ability to judge risks for oneself.

Courage could also be called the ability to make a choice for the future and accept the unknown consequences; in this sense it is clear it is also an aspect of coherent agency. And with courage, even if despair may persist for a time, it will become something more before long—the example of a Job still faithful to God, or of an outmatched warrior fighting to the death just to spite the enemy, or of a mad experimental philosopher going to the limits of sanity for the sake of finding something deeper.

Alone, each of these three incoherencies can cause unbecoming frustration, despair, and ressentiment. Without temperance, the present is irritating or dull; without justice, the past is empty or cruel; without courage, it is impossible to anticipate good outcomes or endure the expectation of bad ones. Together they do not account for every root of ressentiment, but these virtues form a strong protection against the most common types. They also have other, richer and more rewarding aspects that I have not discussed. Yet before you begin this three-part remedy or recommend it, take care.

None of these virtues is independent of wisdom, and not one will be independent of the passion that likely drives any current ressentiment. In a choice between giving up both ressentiment and all the passions that lead one to it, or continuing to feel the frustration and the anger and the thirst for what is better, prefer the latter.

Nature does not look kindly on mere self-satisfaction and self-consistency; nothing is surer to invite predators and parasites. Nor does her God, He who spits out the lukewarm and sooner blesses those Jacobs who wrestle against Him.

Instead, as you burn, keep these in mind and use them to harness your fire rather than to cool it. Learn to concentrate its heat with temperance, to fuel it cleanly with justice, and to vent its warmth into the world with courage. Before long, done well, the fire will burn clean and bright, without spittling smoke and poison vapors. You will find it a trusted friend rather than an unaccountable torturer.

Make your soul the hearth of a roaring flame, and around you, others will see it in your eyes—and begin to think you worthy.

The post A Remedy For Ressentiment appeared first on Social Matter.

I recently had the pleasure of diving deep into the thought and life of Albert O. Hirschman, an anti-communist anti-libertarian, wary of economism and scientism and steeped in old books, yet nevertheless resolutely liberal. I engaged with him as one of the most admirable modern intellectual opponents I could find for my less-liberal beliefs. Moreover, given the centrality of Exit and Voice to contemporary neoreactionary theory, he is an important precursor to that nascent tradition. He introduced these terms, and though words can be repurposed, they keep the stamp of their coiner.

Hirschman’s writing is elegant, focused, and interesting. He is also rare for having explicitly engaged with reaction 25 years ago with more subtlety than knee-jerk rejection in his mistitled book The Rhetoric of Reaction, which also criticizes progressive rhetoric equally incisively, if not at equal length. Hirschman states he preferred the book to be called The Rhetoric of Intransigence, that is, the rhetoric of refusing to consider alternatives, subtleties, and compromises.

The book had its merits, but missed its mark. The book did not live up to the high expectations set by his earlier work: it did not have the reception or effect that Hirschman wished. Reading it as a reactionary, I felt sympathy. The book’s weaknesses are apparent but seem inevitable given the lack of a healthy, living reactionary tradition to engage with. His targets, the neoconservatives, were no such thing.

Therefore, out of respect for the man and the others who rightfully respect him as one of the most creative and independent social scientists of the postwar era (or one of the few?—some readers will think this), my words will attempt to provide that missing reactionary engagement, however sadly posthumously. It will outline a response to The Rhetoric of Reaction that addresses his claims constructively, towards syntheses, without falling into the intransigent rhetoric he rightly or wrongly identifies as the heart of the reactionary analytical style.

First, I will skim the book’s critique of intransigent reactionary and progressive rhetoric, which is correct in the main. The rhetoric is typical of reaction and does conflict with subtle problem-solving discourse. However, my response will not aim at improving this discourse for democracy—at least as it is usually understood. I am no democratic idealist.

Hirschman’s mistaken idealization of democracy guaranteed the book would not have the effect he desired. He misjudged the role of intransigence in democracy and neglected its possibilities for organizing democratic cooperation. This undercut his call to abandon intransigence as a foe of reform. An approach that acknowledged the possibilities of synthesis via mixed or alternating strategies (so typical of Hirschman elsewhere) could have been more effective, though it departs from idealism.

Hirschman’s book centers around three theses attributed to reactionary rhetoric against reform. First, the perversity thesis: that attempts at reform will have the opposite of the intended, as when Burke argues the French revolution in the name of liberty merely established Robespierre’s tyranny. Second, the futility thesis: that attempts at reform will have no effect, as when Tocqueville demonstrates that what reform did follow the revolution was already present before the revolution regardless. Third, the jeopardy thesis: that attempts at reform will undercut other goods, as when Maine claims that universal suffrage will undermine technological innovation and scientifically grounded legislation.

In each case Hirschman acknowledges that the reactionaries may in fact be correct. Rather than claiming the theses are simply wrong because of their form, he criticizes over-reliance on the forms to the exclusion of nuance and compromise.

The progressive mirrors to these theses are said to be, respectively: desperation, the thesis that without reform everything will fall apart; inevitability, the thesis that resistance to reform is futile; and mutuality, the thesis that reforms must inherently support one another, never compete.

I trust my readers either already see how these are overused by the left to stifle creative compromise or are uninterested in hearing that critique, so I won’t spend more time discussing them.

The book illustrates the reactionary theses with a significant bibliography of sound and unsound reactionary arguments of the past two and a half centuries that any neoreactionary could do well to study. It is also worth checking our current rhetoric alongside these examples to confirm that we ourselves are not over reliant on these tropes to the point of blindness.

Of all the theses, neoreaction and the broader alt-right overuse the perversity thesis least. Some will certainly say that increases in minimum wage could lead to unemployment and socialist distribution to shortage, for instance, but these are attested by observation. What they do not do—and rather mock—is absurdities like “Democrats are the real racists.” We’ve learned to be wary of such sloppy inversions.

As Hirschman correctly points out, the perversity thesis too often concedes the opponent’s frame of reference and only reinforces their sense of power to achieve reform. Perversely, the perversity thesis encourages the opponent. So this, at least, has been transcended in large part—however funny it is to think of alt-right Twitter as evidence of transcending anything.

Neoreaction is also proving resistant to overuse of the futility thesis, and the alt-right may not be far behind with its recent furor over ‘the black pill.’ Factually, many things in life are futile. There is no general algebraic solution to all quintic polynomial equations. Nevertheless, while neoreaction may overemphasize the perceived futility of activism, for instance, this never blinds it to more humble avenues for reform: establishing healthy group norms, raising virtuous children, and founding strong institutions.

Our public speech is more prone to this futility trope than our private action. Because we are persecuted and private, we do not make our most compelling hopes public. I ask a charitable reader to have patience.

The jeopardy thesis, on the other hand, is one I would admit as a particular weakness. Reactionary ideology does not minimize the differences between distinct ends, or their conflicts, which leads our movement to have a certain fragmentary character.

However, this vice is not so vicious, and in a move Hirschman might respect we laud this fragmentation and formalize it as patchwork. These conflicts strengthen our intellectual ferment, a mechanism reminiscent of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (or Heraclitus, to be less presentist—and yes, citing 300-year-old writing can be presentism in this milieu: one of its charms). This counters jeopardy theses with the theory of mutual support, exactly Hirschman’s suggested cure.

Therefore, though we maintain a predilection for many of these rhetorical forms, they do not seem so crippling as Hirschman alleges. We use them contingently and are frequently conscious of their drawbacks. It is certainly true that we still use this rhetoric even when it does not convince our interlocutors, but before I recommend changing that rhetoric to be more convincing rather than simply intransigent, let me change tacks.

If the book had been more successful in its author’s eyes, the argument would appear more compelling. Nothing Hirschman says about intransigent reactionary and progressive rhetoric is necessarily incorrect, and it’s often good advice for us to avoid using these tropes too often. Yet evidently something about the book missed the point for its intended audience; the book is mistargeted from the beginning.

Hirschman’s beginnings lie in his conclusions:

[M]y purpose is not to cast “a plague on both your houses.” Rather, it is to move public discourse beyond extreme, intransigent postures of either kind, with the hope that in the process our debates will become more “democracy friendly.” (Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction, p. 168)

This is where a lively reactionary correspondent might have contributed to his thinking. In fact, I am surprised that his supporter Thomas Schelling’s influence was not sufficient.

Democracy is friendly to intransigence.

Democracy is exactly a way for intransigent mass factions to pursue “civil war with other means,” as Hirschman paraphrases Clausewitz (The Rhetoric of Reaction, p. 169), as has been a conscious obsession of European political philosophy since at least the English Civil Wars of 1642-1651, Hobbes, and Locke. Hirschman claims that democratic legitimacy arises “to the extent that its decisions result from full and open deliberation among it principal groups, bodies, and representatives,” but it seems more likely that the legitimacy of democratic cooperation arises from full and open contention among those principal groups, bodies, and representatives—deliberation is often beside the point.

The problem of effective cooperation is not simply a matter of good will and open deliberation, a point few have made as well as Schelling in his The Strategy of Conflict:

What is there about pure collaboration that relates it to game theory or to bargaining? A partial answer, just to establish that this game is not trivial, is that it may contain problems of perception and communication of a kind that quite generally occur in nonzero-sum games. Whenever the communication structure does not permit players to divide the task ahead of time according to an explicit plan, it may not be easy to coordinate behavior in the course of the game. Players have to understand each other, to discover patterns of individual behavior that make each player’s actions predictable to each other; they have to test each other for a shared sense of pattern or regularity and to exploit cliches, conventions, and impromptu codes for signaling their intentions and responding to each other’s signals. They must communicate by hint and by suggestive behavior. Two vehicles trying to avoid collision, two people dancing together to unfamiliar music, or members of a guerrilla force that have become separated in combat have to concert their intentions in this fashion… (Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, p. 85)

Are most citizens expected to be elegant waltzers of opinion, subtly anticipating one another’s responses to complex political melodies without stepping on one another’s toes? Being honest about their education and motivation, we might be grateful they choose intransigent martial tunes instead–a march is a better fit; it flatters their virtues where a more subtle dance would mock them.

And in these situations, intransigence and seeming weaknesses can even become strengths:

When a person—or a country—has lost the power to help himself, or the power to avert mutual damage, the other interested party has no choice but to assume the cost or responsibility. “Coercive deficiency” is the term Arthur Smithies uses to describe the tactic of deliberately exhausting one’s annual budgetary allowance so early in the year that the need for more funds is irresistibly urgent. (Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, p. 37)

Or, best read in context but striking regardless:

[I]f one player can make an offer and destroy communication, he may thereby win the ensuing tacit game by having provided the only extant offer that both players can converge on when they badly need to concert their choices later during the final tacit stage. (Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, p. 277)

Hirschman speaks as if the reactionaries he indicts were speaking dialectically in deliberation rather than rhetorically in contention, as if propositional truth and technocratic reform were the name of the democratic game rather than posture and maintaining Schelling points. As explained by de Maistre:

One can even note an affectation (may I be permitted to use this expression) of Providence: the efforts people make to attain a certain objective are precisely the means employed by Providence to keep it out of reach…

All those who have written or meditated about history have admired this secret force which mocks human intentions. (Joseph de Maistre, trans. Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction, p. 18)

He is speaking passionately to passionate men who decide by radical conversion and personal experience because they are rightly wary of slippery slope sophistry. Recall Schelling on threats and promises again, and is it any wonder that rhetoric in a democracy does not look particularly subtle? Subtlety is too often a liability if the other side will not reciprocate. De Maistre writes to signal intransigent opposition to an intransigent mob.

Both progressives and reactionaries are drawn into intransigence by democratic politics, not in spite of it. It would be foolish to recommend those speaking to general audiences to soften their rhetoric in order to find better solutions in many cases; that would mean unilateral concession to the other.

In order to make reform possible, it is more important to provide face-saving ways to make changes while respecting intransigence. An American solution is to delegate legislation to an elite Congress and judgment to an even more rarefied Supreme Court.

In elite institutions, the structure of bargaining processes is different. When communication is more reliable among the educated and sophisticated, cooperation is more practical. Collusion and logrolling, while often derided, are effective coordination mechanisms. An old boys network in which reputation is everything provides an excellent framework for making credible threats and promises and also for ensuring that false threats and promises rarely confuse matters. Strict but nuanced ownership rights provide a multitude of enforceable contracts, lessening concerns about slippery slopes and the need for intransigence to establish bright lines. Elite discourse is where subtlety functions.

Separation between governor and governed is often castigated as invitation to abuse, but the mismatch also makes for rich bargaining opportunities. If a leader makes one deal while his people fulminate against it, the precedent does not oblige him to make a similar deal again. The subjects’ credible irrationality grounds the sovereign’s bargaining position: “you know I’m a reasonable man, but my army wants blood…” This is evident in analyses of diplomacy from the Cold War to barbarian siege. The threat of provoking obdurate reactionary, progressive, or simply bloodthirsty anger in followers can ensure that elite negotiations are more sophisticatedly cooperative. Such threats even ensure more mutually beneficial outcomes in the right cases, which do not seem unusual enough to be called merely special cases. In Hobbes, the threat of unrestricted war is the basis of all government.

In his essay Political Economics and Possibilism, Hirschman advocates identifying even the most unexpected ways to accomplish desired development. To take this seriously, one must seek to understand even how intransigence can enable mutually beneficial cooperation despite its more apparent role in preventing it. Sometimes, democratic idealism is blinding when mixed high/low strategy should not be overlooked.

Hirschman, however, persisted in his calls for a new rhetoric after the book’s disappointing reception. He did not look for ways to use the current state of rhetoric as a frame in which to seek levers; he looked to achieve an ideal inspired by a problem rather than a possibility. Despite his effort, it would be hard to argue that contemporary society is not still shot through with intransigence at every level, from the Tea Party’s government shutdowns to Black Lives Matter’s burning neighborhoods to Chinese posturing in the South China Sea to Salafist extremism worldwide.

So in the end, I’m left with a too-neat little slogan: one should not inveigh too intransigently against intransigence. Perhaps it’s inevitable that I’d end up playing a joke like that in memory of Hirschman’s own playfulness. But seriously, one must respect intransigence’s place in negotiation no matter how frustrating. Your frustration is the point: that is the feeling of the other side extracting concessions.

Hirschman was not an ally of ours, but he was a brave man worth respecting. He fought in the streets of Weimar Berlin and the Spanish Civil War. He worked as a fixer and human trafficker to save his allies’ lives. He advised heads of state and captains of industry. He was always a proponent of civilization in his own eyes, and was far more open than most to creative ways to encourage development that did not reduce to dry paradigms, prediction-based positivism, or universal theories of human good.

If there are budding Hirschmans out in the world now, I hope we can earn their respect and convince them we’re worth a conversation or two. Lord knows there’s a lot of dross written on both the left and the right, but let’s not take it as an excuse to ignore one another’s better thinking. Gentlemanly discourse among a diversely opinionated elite is one of the most precious traditions of Western civilization, and it would be a shame to lose.

The alternative may be universal intransigence, with none of the redeeming features of our current mixture.

The post Possibilities Of Intransigence appeared first on Social Matter.

One of Mencius Moldbug’s more famous and infamous slogans is the audacious “America is a communist country.” As rhetoric and provocation it has much to recommend it. It is hard not to look at the United States government differently after realizing how much of the 1928 platform of the Communist Party of the USA has been adopted and feels modern, whereas major goals of the other political parties, such as bimetallism and racial segregation, appear scandalously dated. The prominence of so many communists in high places throughout the last century of American politics, from Alger Hiss to Bill Ayers, also seems telling. Yet the living, breathing Marxist communists in this country are dissatisfied as ever, and in some cases declaring that they are worse off than they have ever been.

Is this just because these Marxists are naturally catankerous and fiery people? In the most endearing ways, yes. They have ideals, and they’ll accept nothing less. Still, our living, breathing communists also have a point beyond merely expressing fervent idiosyncrasies. Even if much of their former platforms has been adopted, the spirit does seem missing.

Look around and ask if your world is communist in spirit. The answer for a communist is no. Formally, the workers have been granted ownership of a surprising amount of the means of production through retirement funds, pensions, and the like, but be honest–the pensions are hollow, underfunded: looted. A test of genuine ownership in the Marxist sense is absence of alienation–do Americans report alienation? Of course. Next, let’s examine that root “commune.”

Where is the solidarity in our lives? Where is community? We have a society, but communists find it fragmented and status-obsessed with alarming financial inequality. Though we do have social safety nets and social redistribution, many among us seem glorified sharecroppers essentially in slavery to private purchasers of collection rights on publicly subsidized debt. Perhaps what we have is a weak form of socialism and not communism?

No, neoreaction’s critics from the left will say that what we have is “neoliberalism.” Semi-liberal market democracy. They have a point.

Perhaps the most derided expression of neoliberalism’s present perceived hegemony is Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” essay, infamous for declaring in the early 90s that the victory of capitalist liberal democracy is the end of history. Denigrators say Fukuyama jumped the gun in announcing supremacy of liberal democracy over all competing forms of government in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. They point to continued war for power’s sake alone, environmental catastrophes, and Clashes of Civilizations between cultures that refuse to assimilate peacefully into a global multicultural superstate. I have to confess I felt it absurd, too, until I read it. Clearly, history is not over, and liberal democracy still faces threats.

However, they miss the point and Fukuyama appears happy to let them. He is an admirer of Leo Strauss. In his interviews, he speaks carefully. Watch him in the BBC discussion on the 25th anniversary of the essay—look at minute 11. Is he really concerned about defending his thesis? He disputes facts that his opponents assert, but a deeper mirth in his eyes seems to say he’s more entertained than threatened.

This could be arrogance, and if we aren’t feeling charitable, that’s enough to damn him. But first go back to the book following up the essay, which is not titled The End of History? but rather The End of History and the Last Man.

The last man? You hear Nietzsche. This is not election cycle time horizon, goldfish punditry. Something old—and something suspiciously German—is at play; the essay’s thesis is more subtle than a paean to the neoliberal/neoconservative American form of government. The initial essay’s stimulus was a then very recent historical event, the end of the Cold War, but the true mark was a 200-year-old theory of history grounding Marxism from the beginning: Hegelian absolute idealism. Far from being early to his conclusions, Fukuyama might also be considered a century late. Possibly two.

Listen again to Fukuyama’s first speech in the video linked above.

Well, you have to understand the term end properly. End meant not termination, the question was, in the grand philosophical sense of the evolution of human societies, in what direction was history pointing. And for a hundred years, progressive intellectuals believed it was pointing towards a communist utopia, and I made the simple observation in 1989 that it didn’t look like were were gonna to get there, that if we were going to end up at any place it was going to be something like liberal democracy and a market economy, and I think that that still is the most likely termination point of the whole modernization process 25 years later. (vide supra)

The End of History is an end more in the sense of telos than termination. Furthermore, it is not our telos, but the telos of a process called ‘history’. It is the telos specifically of the progressive, modernizing, Hegelian conception of history: history-as-progress.

Fukuyama’s thesis is not that history has finished, but that the end target of history-as-progress is liberal market democracy rather than communism. When he disputes his opponents’ facts in the video, he can feel secure because they hardly touch his true thesis, let alone rebut it.

In his book, he argues that the apparent universality and terminality of liberal democracy as opposed to communism arises from the weaving of two political threads.

The first thread is the progress of the natural sciences, which privileges particular liberal socioeconomic arrangements for their ability to accumulate and exert power. He argues that this natural power imbalance allows socially and economically liberal societies to dominate others and tempts other societies to mimic them. This is a commonly asserted, often contested point; I will not rely on its validity here but only report that Fukuyama correctly anticipates many of the most familiar criticisms, so his discussion remains interesting despite relying on this often-weak foundational premise.

The second thread is the human ambition to receive validating moral recognition from others, which arguably causes inevitable conflict in all societies with structural political inequalities. This latter is more rarely described than the first, so allow me to quote Fukuyama’s introduction of his crucial term for this ambition, thymos.

The desire for recognition may at first appear to be an unfamiliar concept, but it is as old as the tradition of Western philosophy, and constitutes a thoroughly familiar part of the human personality. It was first described by Plato in the Republic, when he noted that there were three parts to the soul, a desiring part, a reasoning part, and a part that he called thymos, or “spiritedness.” Much of human behavior can be explained as a combination of the first two parts, desire and reason: desire induces men to seek things outside themselves, while reason or calculation shows them the best way to get them. But in addition, human beings seek recognition of their own worth, or of the people, things, or principles that they invest with worth… The desire for recognition, and the accompanying emotions of anger, shame, and pride, are parts of the human personality critical to the political life. According to Hegel, they are what drive the whole historical process. (Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 2006, p. xvi-xvii)

Fukuyama goes on to paraphrase Hegel to the effect that in authoritarian societies, the relationships between masters and slaves can never satisfy the desire for recognition. The slave does not receive validating recognition at all and the masters are only recognized as masters by slaves, not other masters, which is unsatisfying. On the other hand, in a democratic state all citizens recognize the dignity and humanity of every other citizen. Thus democracy satisfies thymos uniquely elegantly.

Obviously this is an oversimplification, and Fukuyama does not defend the clumsiest elaborations of this view. The essential idea he explores in depth is this: democratic universal dignity appears capable of satisfying thymos in a uniquely symmetric way, so it does not inevitably give rise to interpersonal political conflicts that destabilize the democratic order. Thus, it serves as a rational stable state, or teleological end point, for political history understood as rational progress.

This is not the Scottish Enlightenment argument that everyone should subordinate their personal, conflicting prides and bigotries to cooperation via enlightened self-interest, but an alternative Continental argument that the best way to satisfy the political will for recognition of one’s particular chauvinisms is universal and reciprocal recognition for others’ bigotries, as formalized in rights-granting democracies. It is not the sleep of politics underneath philistinism, but rather unlimited but tame activism for ever, for all.

The book outlines this case briefly, but spends the majority of its words exploring objections to it, actively seeking other possibilities past this End of History-as-Progress. Fukuyama’s most critical objections rely on the last man of his book’s title, an image Nietzsche used to illustrate a shared folly of capitalism, liberalism, and communism over 125 years ago. Here is his introductory summary:

But is the recognition available to citizens of contemporary liberal democracies “completely satisfying”? The long term future of liberal democracy, and the alternatives to it that might one day arise, depend above all on the answer to this question. In Part V we sketch two broad responses, from the Left and Right, respectively. The Left would say that universal recognition in a liberal democracy is necessarily incomplete because capitalism creates economic inequality and requires a division of labor that ipso facto implies unequal recognition. In this respect, a nation’s absolute level of prosperity provides no solution, because there will continue to be those who are relatively poor and therefore invisible as human beings to their fellow citizens. Liberal democracy, in other words, continues to recognize people unequally.

The second, and in my view more powerful, criticism of universal recognition comes from the Right that was profoundly concerned with the leveling effects of the French Revolution’s commitment to human equality. This Right found its most brilliant spokesman in the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose views were in some respects anticipated by that great observer of democratic societies, Alexis de Tocqueville. Nietzsche believed that modern democracy represented not the self-mastery of former slaves, but the unconditional victory of the slave and a kind of slavish morality. This typical citizen of a liberal democracy was a “last man” who, schooled by the founders of modern liberalism, gave up prideful belief in his or her own superior worth in favor of comfortable self-preservation. Liberal democracy produced “men without chests,” composed of desire and reason but lacking thymos, clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of petty wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest. The last man had no desire to be recognized as greater than others, and without such desire no excellence or achievement was possible. Content with his happiness and unable to feel any sense of shame for being unable to rise above those wants, the last man ceased to be human. (Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 2006, p. xxi-xxii)

The alt-right insult “cuckservative” is directed precisely at these men without chests. Trump, on the other hand, is a perfect example of a man of thymos, a man with a broad chest and “high energy,” who again and again confounds the expectations of this era’s best approximations of last men.

True to form, these are too busy fiddling with statistical and economic estimates of long-term ”enlightened self-interest” to even understand the hunger so many feel to “make America great again,” a succinct expression of frustrated thymos. The few explanations that the left offers blame inequality, even as the right insists again and again that no, we don’t want equality, we want to be great—to build great buildings, to revive or found whole industries anew, to escape this planet’s flyspeck of a gravity well.

This concept should therefore be familiar to my readers. From another perspective, these chest-less last men are the wreckers who will not work themselves to Stakhanovite extremes for the good of the Motherland. These are the men who use feminism as an excuse to shirk responsibility. These are the liberal Zionists who will back every civil rights movement, unless it contradicts their own Israel-chauvinism.

Last men are the ones who give lip service to universal equality but are satisfied to work little further once they achieve their own minimal dignity and material security.

Fukuyama claims that the reason neoliberal democracy is a satisfactory End of History, so Marxist Communism is unnecessary, is that men without chests on the way to becoming last men are not so offended by economic inequality that they really want further revolution. So long as their basic needs for food and flattery are taken care of. Add to that the apparent superiority of market economies over command economies for actually putting food on the table and entertainment on the eyeballs, and neoliberalism makes a fine end point for history.

Needless to say, this is not the stuff of manifestos. It lacks ambition—that’s the point.

This is a persistent observation and frustration of Marxist intellectuals from Marx through the present day, not only an idiosyncratic thesis of Fukuyama’s. The idealistic vanguard is often frustrated by the more complacent rank and file. Luxemburg’s fiery pamphlets against Bernstein’s reformism famously exemplify this struggle. Trotsky’s conflicts against Stalin’s socialism in one country do also. And where shall we place Slaughter’s writing on revolutionary leadership?

If I am lucky enough to have wavering Marxists reading this article today, I urge them to take this issue seriously. In the early twentieth century, it was easy to believe this was only a matter of education and that the intellectuals would soon convert the working class to proper revolutionary fervor, but these days it appears that in fact the intellectuals were fated to the reverse. All too many have instead dulled their own ambitions and been tamed nearly into last men themselves.

The CIA bet large on this by sponsoring pet literary publications and modern art projects in the wake of Word War II. The gamble is vindicated. The American state maintained its power through every decade of the Cold War, and when an occasional outbreak of revolutionary thymos occurs today, it seems easy enough to discharge into whatever identity politics purity spiral du jour is convenient. The struggle to achieve prominence in these will rarely interfere with the deepest power structures in our society. Though many on the right assume that foundation funding of the left shows support, perhaps just as often it indicates an effort to tame.

This strategy of manipulation belies the essential tragedy of thymos in neoliberal society: for a man with the greatest desire for glory, the best way to achieve it is often to help others be satisfied in complacency.

Consumer goods manufacturers prove their genius by improving processes to lower prices, making modest life more satisfying for the less driven. Politicians drum up support by seeding resentment or entitlement when they already have a role in mind to focus and channel the public’s new desires towards their own advancement. Our most famous artists are our greatest crowd entertainers; our most famous comedians are masters of snark and self-satisfaction.

Though ever fewer remain ambitious, these few still amass power. If fewer try to consciously order their own lives, more control of their lives will come from elsewhere. Perhaps it will be a paternalistic mayor forbidding smoking and large sodas, perhaps it will be EU regulation of what had been traditional cheesemaking. Vain thymos will interfere anywhere it finds no resistance.

Therefore, far from being a path to a truly equal society, “one herd and no shepherd,” the progressive path leads again and again to oligarchy. The sheep do not mind the shepherd, really, so long as he does not herd them too clumsily. They are content to forget he exists. At worst, a red cape will suffice.

And so what is the need for full, Marxist Communism over and above neoliberal democracy?

The last men don’t need it; their complacency makes economic inequality bearable. The men with chests don’t want it; they would be dissatisfied with equality. The remainder are those who actually dream of equality for the world for its own sake… and self-deceivers actually thirsting for recognition as holier-than-thou. Historically, the latter appear to be the majority by far.

I’m convinced by Fukuyama’s thesis. This, I think he’s right about: the dream and specter of Marxist Communism is done. Though it lives on in attenuated forms, as a revolutionary social vision it has succumbed to the last men. The sex appeal is gone; the movement has grayed.

So we might agree, America is not really a communist country, it’s merely neoliberal. We might agree, Moldbug is insisting that what is clearly a gray, lumpy manatee is actually an exquisite mermaid. We all know mermaids have never been seen on earth and neither has true communism. Whether either ever will, we leave up to posthuman genetic engineering.

However, if you imagine yourself as a desperate, sex-starved sailor looking too far out over a glaring sea too long, you might see how a manatee would be mistaken for a beautiful mermaid. This is how many legends formed. Similarly, if you imagine yourself as Marx, an obsessive Hegelian looking too far into the future of industrial ecology too long, you might start taking the neoliberalism we have today for communism. You might mistake the possibility of retirement and pension-owned stock markets, universal suffrage democracy, and substantial redistributive taxes for the possibility of a beautiful new form of government.

In fact, manatees are ungainly and blubbery sea-cows, and in fact, our wonderful redistributive government with universal suffrage amounts to a sclerotic and uninspiring oligarchy for all its democratic trappings. Yet in an important sense, mermaids never were anything more than manatees. And in the same sense, communism never has been anything but hypocritical, redistributive rule by the few. This was Moldbug’s definition: “democracy without authentic political opposition.”

This point has been made again and again since Marx’s polemical-historical futurology first sparked a fire among the intellectuals of his day. Schumpeter put this criticism especially well in writing, as did Kolakowski. Stalin, Mao, and Chavez made the point in practice.

And in this sense, even committed Marxists should now understand why we call America a communist country. If they continue to insist on seeing True Communist mermaids out on the horizon, we’ll keep pointing to the neoliberal manatees by the boat. Manatees who often self-identify as mermaids, in fact…

Does that contradict America’s being a plutocratic country, too? The point is this: whether we’re talking about capitalism or communism as they exist today, either one, and we still talk about the same uninspiring masses primarily seeking contentment and freedom from responsibility. The persistence of cynical, redistributive, oligarchic bureaucracy politics in practice. The same hollow surface-democratic materialism without the power to cultivate virtue and hope among its people. The End of American History, as it stands, is White Noise.

Expecting to improve a people merely by satisfying their needs for material pleasure and flattery is a fundamental error. It does not lead to greater things. Satisfying such needs in our society does not often make time for philosophy or invention, it makes time for TV.

Contra the usual assumptions of our contemporary culture, the needs for food, shelter, and self-esteem are not the most basic needs. This can be seen in any story of actual privation, from POWs to shipwrecks, or of excess, from Buddha to Des Esseintes. Virtue—courage, resourcefulness, and will—is as important as and often more sustaining than external goods. Without moderation no amount of food will be enough and without daring no amount of security will calm the mind for greater things.

This presents a challenge to seek other hopes than merely different patterns of resource allocation and self-satisfaction.

Fukuyama himself recognizes how the liberal last man might be overcome. Deep within his book, we read an explicit suggestion:

Thus, despite the apparent absence of systematic alternatives to liberal democracy at present, some new authoritarian alternatives, perhaps never before seen in history, may assert themselves in the future. These alternatives, if they come about, will be created by two distinct groups of people: those who for cultural reasons experience persistent economic failure, despite an effort to make economic liberalism work, and those who are inordinately successful at the capitalist game. (Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 2006, p. 235)

Neoreaction aims at the second of these paths. Fukuyama is not blind to our hopes; few of today’s observant intellectuals are.

So, we look beyond history as a universal progression from low needs to higher morals. We look beyond the End of History-as-Progress because in so many ways it is already here; we admit that the redistributive oligarchy we have in America today is as materially satisfying a communism as has ever been achieved. The Marxist ideal shows no signs of being approached closer in any more formally communist government, and what grounds remain at this point for thinking that the quest for this so-called True Communism is any more realistic than the hunt for a mythical mermaid?

We envision something other. A new End of American History. The seemingly endless brawl between capitalism and communism is, to us, a diversion from the more important struggle between greatness and nihilism. If we neoreactionaries were to succeed according to our enemies’ most absurd fears and literally restore the Stuarts, yet merely gorge ourselves complacently in the new monarchy like the last men—we would have won nothing at all.

The post You Say America Is Not A Communist Country appeared first on Social Matter.

One of the most obvious ways men and women differ must be our affinities for destruction. No matter how hard progressive parents try to stop them, little boys find a way to play with swords and guns. Girls find their own ways to make messes and wreck each other’s plans, but little boys are a league apart when it comes to straightforward smashing, burning, and making bleed.

The difference doesn’t disappear in adulthood. Men commit more crime, especially violent crime, and men are overwhelmingly more military in disposition. But among the best of us, our violence matures. We’ll keep up a boxing hobby, we’ll rip the life out of an old tree to make room for a new shed, we’ll go to the firing range every couple of weeks, or we’ll play dirty games of rugby to smash a few faces. We find a way without overstepping the bounds of civilized living—too much.

Even the philosophers have been little different since Plato, whose name means broad-shouldered and who was famous as a wrestler in his day. In fact, the Socratic dialogue likely become popular exactly because it was a new twist on ancient masculine traditions of verbal and athletic competition. The Greeks could not resist agon, as they called struggles and contests; it was one of their highest arts and joys.

No man should expect to avoid struggle in his life, and taking joy in what is given honors life and its sources. Avoiding struggle unconditionally marks a soul unworthy of respect and incapable of love. Moreover, it’s boring.

Several times in my articles here I have advocated for passivism, the opposite of activism, which may sound strange, given what I have just written. But activism is no synonym for struggle and passivism is no antonym to it. Activism could be caricatured as a process with three steps: Declare authority. Attempt power. Pretend worthiness. Passivism is the reverse: Become worthy. Accept power. Wield authority.

To some, the shallow pretensions of current leaders show that activism fits better to the way of the world. But instead it’s just a gross inversion. Even the worst hypocrisies of our leaders rest on a bedrock of astonishing real power as judged by the impartial revelation of fact after fact along the progress of history. Preparation, placement, and real, relevant skill—whether or not those are also mixed with abominable vice and pretension—are the sources of victory, power, and authority. We may not like the way the world works, but there is an undeniable pattern to what functions and what doesn’t.

Yet, the word activism carries an appeal. It is designed to seduce our vanity: we like to think of ourselves as active and in control, rather than patient and following natural law. And there would be something paradoxical in following natural law too smoothly, since conflict is written into nature’s heart.

In particular, part of what is called activism feels like defending one’s people, one’s home, and one’s culture, and those instincts are too good and too deeply ingrained to resist or to recommend denying.

So let me propose an alternative name for this, for the reactionary right: one that should satisfy the best instincts that the concept ‘activism’ appeals to without pulling us into Alinskyite vanity and movement for movement’s sake.

Territorialism.

The word might be most commonly associated with dogs marking trees and barking like mad, but dogs aren’t so stupid or unlike us we can’t recognize ourselves in them. Specifically, think of the big dogs who can merely growl and make a room go silent. Then think of the yapping lapdogs who can’t shut up in the face of a wolfhound ten times their size. The yapper is a mere activist, high-pitched and bouncing and acting a fool. The growler is something more, strong and poised and legitimately intimidating. The little dog keeps yapping and may never show he’s intimidated, and perhaps other little dogs take courage from that. But the instant the big one wants it, the little guy is toast.

This is the story of right-wing activists’ repeated failure over the past century of US history, a line of defeats essentially unbroken since the WASP Know-Nothings preferred to prioritize banning slavery in the South rather than restricting immigration to protect their own culture in the North.

Activism may seem like defending territory at times, but by itself it is only disrespecting the territory of another. A good offense is sometimes the best defense, but only if, like Sir Francis Drake, the Crusaders, or Scipio Africanus, you are the offense in service to a bigger power that can back you up. Otherwise, you are at best a new Hannibal.

No matter your tactical brilliance, your fate is sealed. Your successes merely leave you running out of resources surrounded by enemies. The victors might remember you and honor your skill, someday, but you will not be among them. Hardly recommended unless you care about your enemies’ opinions more than your own people’s welfare.

Truly claiming and defending territory looks different. The big dog doesn’t yap too eagerly or move too quickly, but the signs of his dominion are clear enough when he wants them to be. He barks at intruders, he gets in the occasional fight when they persist, he marks his trees, he sniffs around and meets the neighbors as an equal. But he doesn’t roam, mark, bark, and fight far beyond his borders. He keeps himself focused on his piece of earth.

We are much more than dogs, but each of us likewise have our own piece of earth. Territory is an indispensable good for men. It’s at the heart of Männerbund and the heart of civilization, and it doesn’t have to be a literal plot of land. It rarely is. For a city-dweller, it is more likely to be a social position and for a tradesman, it is more likely to be a particular expertise. For a rare few, it will be some innermost depth of the soul. For most of us, it will be a mix of these, tightly bound up with our ideas of our rights, identities, and reputations.

Status and territory are inseparable.

Each of us also has his own way of defending his territory. Whether it’s literally wrestling to protect our reputations, crushing a fellow nerd in a math competition, or making a knock-down argument in court for all to see, we fight to protect what we own—and often win. Often, as men who sublimate our violent streaks, this is what we live for.

No passivist would oppose territorialism defined as fighting to hold one’s own domain and winning. Indeed, it’s among the surest ways to show worthiness when the territory is genuinely held. However, the passivist’s territorialism is not the activist’s, because he always traces these steps: become worthy; accept power; rule. Pin your opponent, let them tap out, then take the prize. He never reverses the steps: first trash talk, then wrestle, then claim superiority even after a loss. (This was often even Alinsky’s fate, however much he has a reputation as a modern Machiavelli.) But I don’t expect this to be fully convincing. This essay isn’t written as a defense of passivism.

The Internet, unfortunately, is a bad place to separate claims of winning from facts of winning. And history is too often written by people with no sense for the real stakes in action. It’s too often written by the people who are so busy admiring the tactical brilliance of a Hannibal that they ignore his larger strategic failures. The Internet is fertile soil for activists and armchair tacticians, and I doubt I have yet convinced you I’m not either.

Still, think slowly and you’ll see that there’s a difference between the territorialism of the growing European Right and the mere activism of, say, the Tea Party. At its best, the former focuses on actual borders of real territory they factually control, whether that’s protecting young women on the streets at night or simply building real-world networks of like-minded people with shared goals, standing sober testament to the fact one can oppose immigration without being an evil caricature. The latter, on the other hand, is most famous for futile symbolic gestures like electing politicians who sell out their interests immediately after reaching Washington.

The key, which is not easy, is to keep a realistic idea of what one can truly defend as one’s territory and what claims will just make the bigger dogs angry and activate a potent immune response.

One’s kingdom starts with the square meter around one’s feet. Master yourself, master your immediate surroundings, and then work on impressing others enough that they’ll surrender you territory of their own volition (for which you may need a low growl). However, cede what can’t be held. Don’t overreach, and especially don’t antagonize true powers ineffectually, or you are merely playing at power—and not for long.

Holding territory honestly is not simple. It is tempting to instead assert claims by false bravado. However, there is nothing more satisfying, or more basically worthy, than justly and securely claiming and maintaining a domain of one’s own.

Be a territorialist in any case, but don’t be an activist without power behind you—regardless of your opinion of passivism. And dig in deep, because any restoration is going to take a while.

The post Activism Versus Territorialism appeared first on Social Matter.

The new right-wing reactionaries differentiate themselves from conservatives in part by their time horizon. They don’t long to preserve just yesterday, last year, or last half-century. They long to preserve the wisdom of past centuries, even past millennia. A favorite reactionary quote of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn‘s goes:

For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.

Social linchpin Nick B. Steves recommends to think past the year 1789 to 1688, the year of the Glorious Revolution, or even to 1517, the Protestant Reformation. But let’s be honest; by 1517, humanism was already rampant in Italy’s fading Renaissance. What sort of Golden Age could that have been? Clearly, we must go further back.

Finding a firm root for all of this degeneracy is timely with Mark Lilla’s new book on political reaction, The Shipwrecked Mind, making the rounds. He asserts that half of us ignore the ills of previous eras in favor of remembering them nostalgically as Golden Ages. Let’s prove ourselves different by being rigorous enough and going back far enough to truly find a real golden age—

This is a fun game, though not one to take too seriously. Let’s play “history of degeneration,” and let’s start with today. The rules: list instances of degeneration in as many sequential time periods as you can, on a timescale starting with half-centuries but growing as you go back. Provide just enough color to say why each was degenerate; end by proposing a solution. Farthest back wins.

Assume today is a time of imminent collapse of Western civilization. Blame it on immigration, the end of free speech, rampant consumerism, globalization, whatever you’d like. Whatever it was, the seeds of our current collapse were clear in the 1960s countercultural revolutions, from sexual revolution to civil rights legislation and immigration liberalization. This cultural collapse started in the 50s with Playboy, the Beats, massive tranquilizer abuse, popularization of Frankfurt School Marxism, and so on, though the seeds of degeneration sprouting then could be ignored by popular media, giving us a false impression of a Golden age.

And these values of the 60s left, germinated in the 50s, were a natural evolution of Wilsonian Puritanism. The 1910s and 20s were a famous era of feminist liberation and bureaucratic excess, as America naturally took a chief place in the world in the wake of Europe’s grand self-destruction in World Wars I and II.

This fall of Europe, of course, had been a long time coming by the 1910s. The mass-led, nihilistic modern industrial society of that time had been mismanaging itself disastrously since the liberal revolutions of 1848 confirmed a bloody end would not be long in coming to the Age of Metternich; one need only read fin de siecle French writing to understand how degenerate the intervening years were and how much nihilism, anarchism, and communism had begun to rear their ugly heads. 1848, of course, was the natural consequence of the series of liberalizations that swept over Europe behind Napoleon’s artillery, thundering out from the chaos of the 1789 Revolution that toppled a French monarchy that had been the light of civilized Europe for centuries.

Yet, the chaos of 1789 was natural for a French monarchy that had been desperately selling titles and restructuring its tax base around unpriveleged class power even before the financially devastating Seven Years War and War of the Austrian succession. The Spanish, French, and Habsburgs were already in decline by 1789; civilizational decay precedes mere Jacobinism. It was clear that these states possessed mere sham-kings after the War of the Spanish Succession collapsed the glorious Spanish empire and the Great Northern War ended the Swedish empire—and those both so soon on the heels of the mendaciously-named Glorious Revolution in England—the following, excessively parliamentary “Age of Enlightenment” was as odious and doomed as you’d expect; the French Revolution was no surprise. So, let’s go back to 1688.

1688 was in a way only a continuation of English parliamentarian rebellion in the 1640s, when Independent Protestants) beheaded their king, only too natural given the weakness of the Stuart dynasty founded after Queen Elizabeth’s disastrous choice not to provide an heir—in fact to suppress and execute perhaps the closest thing she had to one—and to mismanage her kingdom’s finances and religious controversies to the point popular anti-tax and anti-episcopal revolution was arguably inevitable.

But focusing on England alone would be a mistake, for how could we neglect that unparalleled European bloodbath, the Thirty Years War? (I’ll skip the War of Devolution for the sake of brevity.) Yes, we seem to have a half-century not just between collapse, but an entire half-century of collapse. One of the bloodiest wars, per capita, Europe has ever seen—and should we include it as only part of a larger combination with the 80 Years War?

Regardless, we can clearly see that the 1555 Peace of Augsburg was no final solution to the Protestant Question. No, Augsburg was a clear failure to contain dissent: “an exhausted Charles [V] finally gave up his hopes of a world Christian empire,” says Wikipedia. The Lutherans were officially recognized: given time to develop their power and lay foundations for all the religious wars and bourgeois revolutions to come.

So, perhaps we need to go back to the Protestant Reformation launched by Luther in 1517? At 500 years back, let me start marking time in centuries rather than half-centuries. Because surely, it is impossible to consider the Protestant Reformation without reference to the degeneracy of papacy in Renaissance Italy. The Reformation obviously recalled the Western Schism that had just ended in 1417, marking the collapse of the attempts of France to pull the papacy to Avignon. The Avignon papacy was famously political and temporally-focused; its degeneracy inspired the Franciscans, especially William of Ockham, to invent disastrously effective theories of natural human rights in the mid-1300s. Contemporaneously the Golden Bull‘s expanded constitutionalism laid the ground for ever more ‘rule of law,’ that mendacious phrase which only ever conceals actual rule by judgment.

Just a century before this mid-1300s degeneration, de Jouvenel’s Minotaur was already busy in the guise of Frederick II’s Imperial Landfrieden of 1235, a coddling insulation of men from rightful vendetta by their peers. Claiming a government monopoly on violence, it was masterful use of high/low vs middle, relying crucially on the support of the governed beneath the level of princes and aristocracy, who Frederick contested with for power. The law survived, though Frederick’s dynasty didn’t; the House of Hohenstaufen brought to greatness by Barbarossa soon collapsed under opposition from the popes—opposition between the popes and the emperors soon to come to a head with the Avignon papacy, mentioned above, and all the future degeneration and liberalization that implies.

Barbarossa himself came to power at the expense of Italian and Byzantine decay. His rise was nearly contemporaneous with the overextension of the Byzantines against the Sicilians in Italy; 1158 was the end of a brief period of Byzantine power in Italy and soon enough the Latins would sack Constantinople, permanently ending Byzantine greatness. Of course, the sack was just insult to injury on the heels of the Angelid dynasty, formed in an 1182 revolution, which predictably decayed, as revolutions do, into a reign of terror complete with mass slaughter of the aristocracy. The Fourth Crusade was late. The Byzantine renaissance under the Komnenian dynasty, started in the 1080s, had already ended. So finished the glory of the second Rome.

The 1150s wars in Italy and the subsequent century and a half of papal venality so vividly indicted in Dante’s Commedia were for their part the heirs of the Norman invasions across Europe begun a century before. The conquest of England by 1072, in particular, was a classic case of an invading criminal elite governing through foreign institutions and intentionally suppressing native traditions. This was the end of Old English, and the end of the English monarchy and nobility. More importantly for my broader arc, the Norman invasions of Italy and the Byzantine empire were crucial political forces behind the Great Schism of 1054, since which the Orthodox and Catholic churches have never reconciled. The Normans played a key role in destroying any hope for the unity of Christian worship, one millennium after its founding by Christ. At the same time, the first of the Landfriede, prototypes for rule by law rather than judgment across continental Europe, was decreed in Mains.

Evidently, the year 1000 is not far enough back to reach a golden age where incipient liberalism is not already sprouted and degeneracy is not running rampant.

At this point we could shift to the oft-disputed translatio imperii of the Ottonians, then the decline of the Carolingians, then to the Popes who only invited Charlemagne to rule to solidify growing freedom from declining Byzantine influence, and then we would find ourselves in the shadow of the long Roman decline and fall chronicled so famously by Gibbon. The rise of Rome had in turn relied on degeneracy of Hellas and Carthage, which had in turn grown only in the vacuums left by the degeneration of yet older precursor civilizations. Each new civilization brought forth more complex and artificial legal and social organization, bringing us closer to detestable modern forms. In each, unsecure powers made use of de Jouvenel’s high and low vs middle to enrich themselves. In each, powers popularized whatever philosophy and religion profited them best. Even Christ and Aristotle were used in this way.

But why stop so recently as Aristotle? Certainly the invention of writing was a powerful contributor to all future bureaucracy and false rationalization, and the invention of zero, a dangerous metaphysical innovation with repercussions still unknown but essential to modern nihilism. Certainly, also, early Indo-European evolution and radiation was a usurpation and genocide of more traditional, more natural men that did not degenerately suck the teats of other animals, and the associated linguistic changes were a victory for a false new modernity in grammar against richer, more traditional grammars of the further past.

Then again, why stop there? The lineage of mammals is essentially a lineage of neonates become so weak they must live in the womb longer than most animals live at all, and even after birth, they still must suckle from their mothers’ teats: the millennials of the animal kingdom, if you will. But then, aren’t all animalia just variants of super-predators evolved to take advantage of a more trusting microbial mat ecology, the Cambrian Explosion equally being the fall of the Ediacarian? The ‘burrowing revolution’ of the Cambrian was the end of a more trusting age in which living things could honestly count on the seabed not to harbor sudden devourers. Should we be asking the Animal Question, given that all animals are heterotrophs: parasites and predators? Aren’t the only real producers plants and algae?

We might even recognize the eukaryotic nucleus as a clear case of proto-liberal tyranny, an insulated elite of DNA dictating commands to the rest of the cell according to a noisy and often lazily interpreted foreign language of codons and amino acids, subverting the more traditional RNA into merely a class of middlemen and informers instead of the central place they initially held. And if social atomization is an easily recognized ill, perhaps we should also doubt whether primordial atomization, following quark-gluon condensation, was also the end of a superior more homogenous state, when mass and energy were more clearly one and the degenerate frustration of ‘molecules’ was only a nightmare of a future epoch.

If we have any comfort, it is the light of the stars fusing atoms back together. Occasionally they even approximate that lost halcyon era of 3 minutes after the Big Bang by collapsing into neutron stars in which, like that bygone age, there is no more cruel separation of quarks into cold, isolated atoms. Our last, best hope for redeeming ourselves of our wretched Fall is to launch ourselves into a pulsar.

I’ve clearly gone wrong somewhere. I hope you’ll try to outdo me with more plausible, yet even more absurd “history of degeneration” in the comments. Whatever you do, please don’t take the above seriously. I hope I’ve made my point: there’s no true requirement to stop when playing this game, and the resulting reverse Whig history is as silly as Whig history.

Unless, perhaps, existence really is fundamentally degenerate through and through? The second law of thermodynamics—entropy always increases—is our best argument to confirm this. However, this would be absurdly far from our real values: it classes all growth as degeneration, all reproduction as failed copying, and all partial ordering as net corruption. It indicts God on every count.

The poor history above, far from being ‘more rigorously’ reactionary, is a parody of progressives’ frequent inability to recognize that reaction is not simply a belief in contemporary degeneration and a hatred of everything too new.

Reactionaries must be, rather, good judges of both past and present: we know that most mutations are deleterious and that innovation is not an unalloyed good, but also that mutation is the engine of evolution and that even our oldest, fondest traditions were once innovations far back in forgotten time.

As I’ve written before, reaction is also not a celebration of stasis; reactionary order is organic harmony, adaptation, and civilization. Stasis is in conflict with the God or Nature of the world and therefore disordered, just as surely as pessimism is. So we do not long for fixed, historical, perfect Golden Age societies, only aspirational, mythical ones or ones that we’re willing to acknowledge had foundations destined to crumble. If we model the myths after our ancestors—well, we remember how to love what is best in our fathers without denying their faults.

In the meantime, we have no illusions that history is either endless progress, endless decay, or an endless cycle. It is not just a long rise followed by a recent fall. And God forbid we satisfy ourselves, instead, with a sophomoric spiral! The histories of civilizations and institutions show progress, decay, stagnation, and cycles, but also branching, collision, annihilation, hybridization, and much more. There are more dimensions, edges, and twists to history than there are grains of sand on the beaches of Normandy, Hispaniola, and Lake Kinneret.

We study history, we learn from it, we judge the good and bad. And when there is degeneration, we condemn it, but when there is glory, we praise that also.

Sometimes, on dour days when we mistakenly recognize Quixote in our mirrors, we even play games with it and laugh at ourselves.

The post Where Did It All Go Wrong? appeared first on Social Matter.

A central tragedy of the Homeric tradition sprouts from the bitter contention between Ajax and Odysseus over the armor of Achilles. Rageful Achilles was a consummate symbol of brave, thymotic masculinity to the Greeks. His divinely forged armor, a coveted reward. Both Ajax and Odysseus claimed the armor as just deserts for their own feats of war, and their king Agamemnon decreed that the claims should be decided by a contest of speeches.

Ajax was the stronger, more loyal, and more trusted man. Odysseus was the cleverer and more inventive. In the rhetorical contest, Odysseus prevailed. Ajax’s bravery and devotion had been vital to the Greek victory, but clever Odysseus’s strategem, the daring theft of Athena’s palladium, had been decisive. Ajax was driven to murderous rage by this slight, and then, after waking from rage, fell on his sword in despair at his dishonor. The justice of this outcome has been doubted ever since.

The Right today often emphasizes its Ajaxes. For an Ajax faced with the struggle to be recognized in our over-clever, endlessly speechifying world, it is difficult not to go mad with resentment and so his needs are urgent.

However, I myself am no Ajax. I’m a clever enough speaker with a few good strategems and resentment is not my challenge. For the right wing Odysseus-type, the problem is not finding opportunity but finding home.

Many of us today feel the present to be foreign. We are more comfortable among old books and future speculation. More than better representation in present political conflicts or resource payoffs from an elite, our politics seeks different ways of life: exits from contemporary societies and entries into others that would feel more like home.

One of the inspiring images of exit for neoreactionaries, especially Odysseus-types, is Nick Land’s Doctor Gno: the mad technologist who acquires enough power to destroy, so that he can successfully win autonomy from the International Community.

The image is striking, but it’s not clear how to get there from here. For young men, it’s a long way from college or a first job to gathering enough deterrent firepower to stay the hand of international government. Putting it mildly.

Still, this dream of unilateral exit can be begun another, quieter way: by becoming invisible. Private. A No One, a Nemo, a Mr. Nobody. And this makes an excellent precursor to all further plans for a young Odysseus type, whether they lead to Doctor Gno, a Mannerbund cabal, or life as the humble patriarch of a Benedict Option family.

This mission, should one choose to accept it, is to become Bond before Bond villain: to first learn to camouflage yourself to the Cathedral without compromising morally or intellectually. Then, to grow in wrongly forbidden wisdom and virtue, while hiding in plain sight—and make a more complete exit when the opportunity arises.

To escape control, one needn’t change laws or minds. That’s not how drug users act with impunity, not how Muslims establish their enclaves in Europe, and not how financiers get away with creative accounting practices. The key is to find blind spots: closed doors; impenetrable ghettos; limited expert attention. Becoming a reactionary man is discouraged and dangerous, but given most people’s general inattention and poor insight into character, it’s something that can be risked with confidence.

Visibility is key to enforcement power. On the Right, one often sees how the Left’s refusal to see the differences between different ethnic groups prevents it from effectively addressing terrorist threats and crime. In the other direction, one learns that gun registration is often the first step towards further gun control. What the government cannot see, it has difficulty controlling. If it wants to control, it will introduce new monitoring; if it wants to prevent control, it will ban monitoring.

The theoretical term for this visibility is legibility, defined in the excellent Seeing Like a State. This concept describes the limits on an organization’s ability to process information and how limits on what can be communicated through an organization in turn limit what it can effectively accomplish. A phenomenon that an organization can recognize, process, and respond to is legible to the organization. A phenomenon that always gets overlooked, that never gets reported all the way up the chain of command, or that doesn’t mean anything to the men with decision-making power when it does reach them, is illegible. Organizations do not act on illegible signals. Illegible actions can be performed unilaterally.

The path of Mr. Gnobody is to make one’s inner life illegible to progressivism while in its territory. This requires compromise. This is not a route for the bold and loud who want to always speak their minds without hesitation in defense of the good; this is a route for a man who can discreetly bide his time though vice and evil preen around him.

With Trump elected, some of our readers have new hope for free self-expression and open victory. For another group of us, however, his election does nothing to separate us from the virulent zombism that still pervades our places of employment. It inspires newer, hungrier mutations. This is for the latter group: my own group.

Many of us have already implemented this plan. It’s not hard to do alone, and the principles are simple. However, every time our movement grows there are those who encounter the need for illegibility as something new, and for these I’ll outline the basics. For those of us who have already achieved it, consider this an invitation to rethink one’s compromises and perhaps how to frame them best for newcomers or those who choose to live differently.

The first order before implementing illegibility exit is to determine the alternatives well. Without a plan, the most likely outcome for attempting social independence is merely social leprosy.

Begin by reckoning one’s requirements to maintain mental and moral stability over a period of 5-10 years. Make no room for liberal fantasies of autonomy. Plan to maintain family relationships, friendships, professional connections, and moral mentorships. Aim for more than strictly needed, since natural tragedy and social fragmentation easily upset too-optimistic plans.

Above all, when imagining potential exit paths think through 1) what good and bad influences can be brought close or avoided 2) what good and bad influences can be followed or resisted and 3) whether or not this more private life will be rich and warm enough to sustain long circumspection and emotional disconnection from the public.

1) and 2) are most complex and personal, but should also be most familiar. Everyone must consider these. The addition of 3) complicates the calculus for an aspiring Mr. Gnobody. Invisibility with integrity requires discipline. One bad day, and the arrangement may fail. With practice it becomes effortless as standing straight, but acquiring the habits is initially taxing.

What sorts of discretion will be most necessary? First, emotional continence: a reactionary’s feelings will not match those of most others and the deepest ones should be shown only to a few. Second, intellectual patience: one must get used to allowing others their follies. Third, stylistic conformity: never wear red in a Crip neighborhood and be careful using Heidegger’s vocabulary in the Ivy League. These are a minimum and provide a base for further refinement.

For 3), then, pay particular attention to the following. Will you need new emotional outlets for the things you no longer share with just anyone who will listen? Will you need new intellectual hobbies or clubs to satisfy a need for debate that until now you’ve been inflicting on whoever happens to be around? Can you keep your aesthetics illegible to all others comfortably, or will you need a few fellows with common artistic taste for community? None should be neglected.

Be especially careful of expecting too much of the women you’ll meet along the path as Gnobody. Relationships founded on the misunderstandings intrinsic to camouflage will present difficult challenges. Circes and Calypsos might offer aid, but they cannot substitute for home.

With 3) in mind, I’ll now say more on the subject of maintaining illegibility through discretion.

The most urgent emotions to contain are disgust and contempt. Among unrepentant sinners, there is little more offensive than being reminded of their sin.

One effective way to contain these emotions is proverbial: remember the plank in one’s own eye reflexively when irritated by the mote in another’s. This provides a true, inoffensive cover story for the disgust and contempt: one’s own failure. Further, it provides internal motivation for maintaining the polite sympathy good society requires.

An inferior but popular method is to universalize one’s contempt: to appear irritable through and through, the misanthrope who “hates everyone equally.” If misanthropy is just a pretense at first, the tongue leads the heart and the pretense can solidify into fact more easily than one expects. Even if it stays a pretense, think on Odysseus’s transparent attempt to avoid the call to Troy: feigning incoherence to cover up disloyalty only works while left untested, yet it invites testing by its extremity.

More tactics exist, and there are other emotions to consider. Open joy at Trump’s election, for instance, might easily cost us work and social goodwill. Obvious fear in ghetto neighborhoods could likewise.

The general rule to follow is always: do not allow one’s feelings to be tyrants, only proper subjects of the self that have every right to counsel the reason but no rights to take control of the face or tongue. Remember Odysseus and the Sirens: do not close the reason’s, the captain’s, ears to the Sirens, but do seal those of the body, the crew.

Like anything else, this can be practiced. Watch oneself in a mirror reading or watching things at the edge of tolerability; practice maintaining an even expression. Have good friends provoke you to try to break your cool. Taking small deliberate steps, soon enough one earns the privilege to feel anything one likes freely, forevermore, in any company.

And in case it needed to be spelled out for any single reader here, don’t drink past the point you can hold your liquor except with trusted fellows. The more any of this sounds constraining, the more friends you’ll need to pull it off.

Intellectual patience builds on emotional continence. First, one learns to avoid getting visibly annoyed when others say something one finds foolish. After, one learns the intellectual patience to resist correcting mistakes until the time is right. Flipping the two makes for the always-annoyed arrogant archetype.

This is often harder than it initially looks from outside. The further we go into learning true history and true philosophy, the more mistakes we recognize in conversation. And since people often reason by coherence, the smallest corrections may have far-ranging consequences. Too often, risky arguments about race and gender politics start from small corrections to matters of historical record. Save careful thinking and fact-checking for those you trust.

The best way to learn this patience is to pay close attention to your treatment by wise men who do not quite trust you to be reasonable. Watch their words carefully and pick up the patterns they use to probe for your readinesses or unreadinesses, your open-mindednesses or deep-set stubbornnesses.

A thoughtful priest is often the best candidate for this: someone used to explaining multiple interpretations of parables to multiple audiences as the situation requires. If no wise men are available, one can read about them. Read the Gospels, read Maimonides’s Guide, read Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima.

Mastering the art of speaking carefully does not isolate, it becomes the basis for community with others of the same skill. Nor does it entail cowardice. This patience is not fear of acting at the wrong time, but confidence that the right time is worth waiting for.

And if you ever feel the need to let loose, there’s always someone wrong on the internet. Use VPN and a pseudonym and don’t overshare.

However, all effort to make the content of our beliefs illegible to contemporary antagonists will be wasted if we cannot also pass more superficial tests of belonging. If one insists on being a reactionary in unfriendly territory, have the good manners to respect the sovereign morass at least as far as hanging their slogans at your window and pronouncing their shibboleths properly. We’re not punks; we respect authority.

The first thing to establish: how to put strangers at ease. When our goal is illegibility, the most urgent question is which status conflicts are bitterest and how each side recognizes an enemy. What types show up as TV villains again and again? What mannerisms characterize heretics in novels? Most importantly, when mysteries and political thrillers depict people ‘everyone knows’ will turn out to be a betrayer, what signs make them suspicious? Whatever those things are, they attract unwanted attention and speculations of evil character.

Chances are, the villains today will be creepy or cold white men. Don’t play the part. Once again, practice as necessary. The most graceful styles are second nature integrated so smoothly that they can be mistaken for first nature.

None of this, opaque emotion, patient intellect, or camouflaged style, is truly required for good character. There are emotionally transparent, intellectually combative, and intentionally provocative reactionaries no less admirable for all that. These are not universal virtues.

However, as situational virtues, they are vital servants of prudence in hostile social environments. They allow silent, no-motion exit from demotic society’s relentless self-policing in opinion, allowing free feeling and free thought even in the midst of intense pressure to conform.

An exit into moral illegibility is not complete. It hardly makes room for children. It does not allow exit from material anarcho-tyranny, only the spiritual portion. It does not allow exit from conformance to ugly norms that corrupt the soul in the long term.

This is just a first step onto the path to Ithaca for those of us who wake to political sanity in Polyphemus’s cave. For us, the legendary way out is to declare ourselves intellectually Gnobody and then lash ourselves to the bellies of sheep (stylistically) so that the giant cannot feel us out with its monstrous fingers. Only after this first escape do we orient and choose a next move.

As an Odysseus of the contemporary world, one may wander through many strange lands with foreign customs and unknown dangers after this first step. One must continue to mind provisions, travel carefully, and keep strong. The home one seeks, when reached, may require retaking before it will welcome its proper owner.

Be prepared to keep your name secret even when you first arrive.

The post Mr. Gnobody: Exit Through Illegibility appeared first on Social Matter.

Tyler Cowen is not outwardly neoreactionary. His sympathy to neoreaction has been strictly limited the few times he has written about it; in fact, he prefers to ignore it in favor of a broader “neo-reaction” of his own definition. It is a puzzle, then, how he has written such a precise, inspiring manifesto for it in his recently published book, The Complacent Class.

On a first read, the book may not seem to offer so much. It initially reads like a series of Vox articles about the lazy foibles of several particular sorts of white American that it’s currently fashionable to hector. There are plenty of questionably designed statistics and politically correct thinkpiece citations scattered throughout like so much gauche op-ed bling. However, the end grows more and more daring until we hit a triplet of stunning lines in the final six pages, the sole bolded sentences in the book of 200 pages:

When it comes to ordinary, everyday American life, how quickly will matters turn chaotic or disorderly again, and what forms will the implosion take? (p. 199)

The biggest story of the last fifteen years, both nationally and globally, is the growing likelihood that a cyclical model of history will be a better predictor than a model of ongoing progress. (p. 200)

All of this can happen even if you think the majority response will be a greater and greater love of peace. (p. 202)

The specific thinkers cited for ‘cyclical models of history’ are Vico, Spengler, and Toynbee, in that order.

With that triple-burst trigger pull, the race to a second, Straussian reading begins.

Taking a cue from those statements, consider that the book itself might be a cycle. Read forwards, it is a series of slightly overcooked thinkpieces that ends on a surprisingly bold note. Read backwards, one finds it hides a thrilling call to arms.

This is a contrarian reading; one I make no claim should actually be attributed to Cowen himself. Nonetheless, the coherences pile up too neatly to simply be ignored once seen.

We begin with Chapter 1: The Return of Chaos. Though our lives have become unprecedentedly stable, continued Progress is not assured. Cyclical history is becoming more predictive. We are not meeting our expectations and our systems are fragile. Civilizations rise and fall. Ours appears to be falling by several measures. And Dark Enlightenment is coming whether you wish it or not:

There is the distinct possiblity that, in the next twenty years, we are going to find out far more about how the world really works than we ever wanted to know. As the mentality of the complacent class loses its grip, the subsequent changes in attitude will be part of an unavoidable and perhaps ultimately beneficial process of social, economic, and legal transformation. But many Americans will wish, ever so desperately, to have that complacency back. (p. 204)

Domestic order is unraveling, says Cowen, looking at spreading unrest on campuses like Mizzou and on the streets like in Ferguson, unstable crime rates (especially given how partially cybercrime is reported), and electoral upsets such as Brexit and Trump’s election on a wave of populist resentment. “Let’s not be shocked if the next set of significant innovations among the American professions comes… in the profession of crime,” he writes (p. 189), predicting that “the next crime wave is going to break the internet, or at least significant parts of it” (p. 187). Global order, too, appears fragile to him. Our plans for the Middle East are a shambles, the reset with Russia went sour, and Hillary’s pivot to Asia flopped.

The chapter-in-reverse concludes:

And as the years pass, it seems increasingly obvious that the social and economic stagnation of our times is more than just a temporary blip; instead, that stagnation reflects deeply rooted structural forces that will not be easy to undo by mere marginal reforms. (p. 177)

A call for an alternative to mere marginal reform… a call for revolution? For Restoration? For now this is only foreshadowing, but the next chapter will clear the ambiguity.

Chapter 2: Political Stagnation and the Dwindling of True Democracy indicts the democratic spirit as the source of the coming chaos. First, we are reminded that our infatuation with democracy is rather parochial:

One simple way to get a good read on “democracy in America,” circa 2017, is to ask what America’s main rival on the global stage, China, thinks of American government. I have found that many Chinese admire and indeed envy America greatly, pointing to its much higher standard of living, freedom of speech, and relatively clean environment, among other positive features. Still, even those Chinese who admire America find it hard to praise our government. (p. 176)

The chapter’s thesis is only partly that democratic government itself is dwindling. Even more, its thesis is that True Democracy dwindles man. Rather than paraphrases of Cowen’s words that let you wonder how far I’ve interpreted them, take this series of verbatim excerpts:

Through a deep study of the classics and the long arc of human historical development, Tocqueville understood that current historical trends were by no means guaranteed to be permanent, and American restlessness might contain the seeds of its own demise.

For Tocqueville, the philosophy of “pantheism” helps drive this fall from grace. Tocqueville uses the word pantheism in a special way, so don’t associate it with the theological doctrine that God is represented by the material universe as a whole. For Tocqueville, pantheism is as much a social construct as a religious perspective. It promotes the merging of man and nature and thereby attempts to remove the transcendent from human discourse. The transcendent is no longer something man ought to strive for, and that surrender is for Tocqueville the essence of pantheistic philosophy. The creator is no longer distant from man, giving people something to look up to, and so there is a lost source of inspiration and therefore a death of enthusiasm. There is instead a search for unity, resulting in a lazy pride and contentment and a forgetting of the striving and heroism that can make men great.

To be sure, pantheism no longer sounds like the right word for what Tocqueville was describing. Few Americans subscribe to explicit pantheism.

Still, the identification of pantheism with a kind of social stasis nonetheless captures a significant insight. Think of Tocqueville’s invocation of pantheism, and the disappearance of the transcendent, as a general stand-in for the phenomenon of self-contained contentment and complacency. (p. 169-168)

This could be at home on an Orthosphere blog. And concluding the chapter:

Anti-establishment insurgent campaigns were the talk of the 2016 presidential campaign, and both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were legitimate anti-establishment candidates. But a peek beneath the surface reveals that much of the fear and anger that drove their campaigns was based not on a hope for change in Washington but on a hope for a return to the past. (p. 159)

No, not mere marginal reform in Washington, not more democracy, and not revolution—the people’s hearts cry out for Restoration!

We may want it, but given that democratic theology has apparently been rendering us into drudges without a sense of the transcendent, we should take a hard look at ourselves as we begin to consider the possibilities for an American Restoration. What is our potential today? How are we living today? The reversed Chapter 3: How a Dynamic Society Looks and Feels begins by describing how in today’s America, people feel they must hide their wealth and privilege (p. 157-152). We feel it is better to countersignal power than to signal it. We feel signaling will out us as strivers—and vulnerable to humiliation or extortion.

However, this only applies to Americans, we learn. Immigrants to the U.S. have a freer and more hopeful mindset than natives, evidenced by their greater social mobility. Foreigners in more ethnically homogeneous, authoritarian countries such as China are freer to enjoy their wealth and their power.

Since the 1960s, the cultures that have produced the most upward economic mobility include Japan, South Korea, and China, due to their supercharged rates of economic growth. It is no accident that these are the same cultures obsessed with business cards, stereotypical blue suits, submission to hierarchical authority, and bringing the perfect gift. (p. 157)

Cowen shows us that if we had the courage of immigrants and foreigners to ignore contemporary mores and treat our strengths as something to take pride in rather than something to hide, we might restore our culture to a dynamic greatness. Such honest pride in ourselves and our abilities was ours only a half-century ago, before the 60s, he implies. It is not so long gone.

However, a proper neoreactionary, he doesn’t pretend we can simply wish ourselves there. Americans’ current complacency is not pure timidity. The transcendent is not something we’ve simply lost. It was crushed, stolen, and turned against us.

Bombings, riots, theft, and vandalism that terrorist resentment politics unleashed in the 60s provoked the change to our current stifling, complacent safety. “Overall,” reminds Cowen, “whether it was on campus or not, the 1968 to 1975 period saw more instances of antigovernment violence than any time since the American Civil War” (p. 129).

Our fears are practical, grounded, and real. Our safety comes at the cost of ambitious bureaucratic, penal, and custodial innovations.

The story of these innovations, the subject of Chapter 4, serves as both a caution and a paradoxical source of hope. The neoreactionary reading this section of the manifesto should be impressed by the scale of the problem he is facing, but also heartened that American society has been addressing its problems, surreptitiously, even when it has not always had the political courage to admit just what it was doing.

The chapter contains a long list of attempted protests that ended up rather tame, for all the attention they received in the press from day to day. On Occupy Wall Street:

the on-the ground reality is that Brookfield Properties and the City of New York ended up getting their way. Eventually the weather became colder, and Occupy Wall Street is now a kind of misty nostalgic footnote to history. (p. 136)

Why has this happened? It’s the powers behind the protests, of course.

It’s not just the law that has changed; the incentives of the organizers are now fundamentally different. When a major public event is orchestrated, such as the Million Man March of 1995, it tends to be backed by a lot of organization and capital investment. That in turn requires a lot of mainstream support. Unlike the days of the Black Panthers, today’s social protest can no longer be a shoestring operation based on cheap labor, a lot of walking, and some guns. For today’s events, you need planners, operatives, and “nudgers”—on the side of the marchers—to ensure that the images on television are positive. (p. 140)

In other words, now that the protests are no longer tendrils of international Soviet subversion with a goal of revolution, but agents of foundations with more insidiously progressive political goals, the protests are no longer so violent or so spontaneous. The 1970s were the end of an era of proxy war that our American communists won.

Recent innovations in bureacratic control, as oppressive as they have become to some of us over the last two decades, are mechanisms to keep our sovereigns at least somewhat able to maintain property rights and similar freedoms despite our democracy. They keep the American cold civil war on ice. They keep the transcendent alive, if only in the dark.

Chapter 5, The Well-Ordered Match, continues this theme, eventually declaring the work of the last chapter “the grand project of our time” (p. 98). “Matching,” one of Cowen’s key terms in this book, is the process of using innovation to ensure personal safety, satisfaction, and lifestyle continuity. Instead of trying to overcome past highs via innovation, matchers use innovation to maintain current satisfaction levels with lower risk, especially lower risk via decreased dependencies on other individuals or communities. In the words of one of my earlier articles here, they are Exiting in place, or in the words of another, they focus on building better radiation shields against an atomized culture rather than finding new ways to use actual atoms.

Cowen is suggesting that most contemporary innovation is centered on achieving escape from envious levellers and mediocre universal culture. Who cares if you can make money or invent new technologies if you won’t enjoy the benefits? What are the benefits of striving in a society of countersignalers with no shared sense of the transcendent? When any random idiot’s Voice can be so loud as in today’s society, the only hope is to find Exits.

However, the book is not over. Cowen has more in store for us. Matching is only a stage or a tactic to acquire the independence to do greater things. This halfway point of the book is where the night seems darkest. Dawn emerges in the next chapter.

It is no longer time just to seek and preserve safety, directs Cowen. The time has come to create. Chapter 6, Why Americans Stopped Creating, sketches the primary barriers to constructive innovations as opposed to protective innovations. In doing so, it also indicates that the tide is set to turn.

The chapter begins by dismissing internet technology as a source of economic productivity. Next, despite its relative failure, Cowen identifies it as the closest thing to a successful overt, constructive grand project that the US has had in two and a half decades. The other candidates would be peace in the Middle East and the Affordable Care Act (p. 93). He echoes Thiel that the era of grand projects is over. The chapter is well-summarized by its section headings: “Living Standards Have Been Stagnating,” “Measures of Productivity Indicate Pessimism,” “Fewer Americans Involved in Innovation,” “Monopoly Power on the Rise.”

In other words, your competition is made up of paper tigers. Unless they are Amazon, Google, Apple, or some other of a small number of companies that are actually improving and growing, their success is the success of an incumbent bully that has lost its ability to improve the lives of its workers, the efficiency with which they work, and even the know-how to reinvent the same products and processes again if they were lost. These companies are not huge out of strength, but out of weakness:

Corporate cash holdings have shown a steady trend upward for decades, as companies are holding more funds in safe securities rather than investing them in new opportunities.

However, one investment that this quite popular is dealmaking, and 2015 was a record year in this regard. When it comes to mergers and acquisitions, times have never been better.

So the cash piles of corporations are going somewhere, just not always into creating new ideas. Companies would rather buy up other, already established companies than try to succeed with new ideas or their own new product lines. (p. 81-80)

Businesses just aren’t investing as much as they used to. Net capital investment, as a share of gross domestic product, has been declining ever since the 1980s. An alternative measure of the value of capital services, a ten-year moving average which avoids the “noise” in the data for any single year, has been declining since the start of the millenium. (p. 80)

In other words, these enormous monopolies are treading water internally and searching far and wide for outsiders to provide the scarce innovation they judge themselves to be incapable of. It’s a fine time to be an innovative outsider, provided you can avoid stepping on the bullies’ turf while establishing your own.

And proceeding naturally to the topic of acquiring and protecting turf, Chapter 7: The Return of Segregation tells the story of how we are already defending and even reconquering some communities thought lost to the right. Don’t lose hope listening to progressive talking points about their own successes, don’t even listen to Moldbug’s “Cthulhu swims left”: segregation is up, rebellious subcultures are tamer, and America is not lost. We begin on this note:

It is often a puzzle for foreigners why the United States has such a dismal performance when it comes to murder, guns, and mental illness, all features of American life that, when compared to most of the other wealthy countries, are so awful that they do not require further documentation. You might wonder how those bad results square with America’s relatively strong performances on most capital indices, such as trust, cooperation, and charitable philanthropy; on philanthropy, we even rate as the global number one. The truth is that those positive and negative facets are two sides of the same coin: Cooperation is very often furthered by segregating those who do not fit in. That creates some superclusters of cooperation among the quality cooperators and a fair amount of chaos and dysfunctionality elsewhere. (p. 70)

—Steve Sailer could hardly have said it better himself. The remainder of the chapter describes how these superclusters successfully stay that way.

The reversed Cowen commends pricing the unwanted out of good neighborhoods, raising the cost of employing undesirables by giving them rights to sue for almost anything, and adopting hipster cultures that keep competitors out by refusing them to offer the foods they like, the entertainments they prefer, or any other comforts, like the freedom to catcall beautiful women, that they would otherwise take for granted. He does not only focus on racial segregation in the text; the same points become even stronger when applied to class and culture.

These are the mechanisms that successful cooperative superclusters use to preserve themselves today, and they are not the exclusive preserve of the left. Half our battle, therefore, is just to convince modern elites that it’s OK to do what they’re already doing, defending their own small incipient patchworks from outside invasion, and thus free them to do it more purposefully and elegantly. And in the meantime, doing it consciously, we’ll also do it better.

Next, Chapter 8 tells us that the time is ripe to go beyond consolidating these superclusters and also create new ones. Geographic mobility is sharply down in America, and why? There is nowhere affordable for potentially mobile people to move to, or, dually, no established communities want to risk welcoming mobile troublemakers.

Cowen paints a convincing picture of how government malinvestment into mobility in the 50s and 60s lead to widespread civil strife in the 60s and 70s, leading many formerly productive and attractive cities and neighborhoods to become stagnant and unattractive. The places that remained attractive learned to close themselves to influx of population lest they go the same way as Detroit, New York, or Chicago’s South Side, so that now rents have grown enormous and mobility is much lower. Even when these cities recover, as New York and Chicago have at least in part, they do so via pricing undesirables out as described in the previous chapter, keeping mobility low for those who would benefit most from it.

In other words, the limit to mobility today is that communities cannot vet potential newcomers before they make plans to invite them in. Looking at New York’s thriving co-ops and the business success of President Trump, Cowen could be making a recommendation here: creating exclusive community is among the most compelling political and business opportunities of our time.

In fact Cowen gives an explicit estimate for the economic loss due to lack of such services over the past 12 years alone: 1.7 trillion dollars of GDP (p. 44). Enough to fit 1.7 thousand unicorn startup valuations per year.

This is the spoils awaiting the founders of a national organization capable of helping its members make new homes in new places while also guaranteeing they will be such good tenants and neighbors that current residents would welcome new building to accomodate them. Inspiring stuff for a national organization whose logo is the Roman goddess of the hearth.

The conclusion, reversed Chapter 9, summarizes and reiterates the material of the previous eight chapters. “We have created the complacent class. We own the concept and indeed we are the concept. It is in fact our greatest but also our most dangerous innovation. Someday we make break it, too,” it begins, a warning to all who have been counting on conservative complacency and a battle cry to the resigned who can now rise up.

The further playing out of this Great Reset will, as I explain[ed] in more detail in the [first] chapter of this book, involve a major fiscal and budgetary crisis; the inability of our government to adjust to the next global emergency that comes along; impossibly expensive apartment rentals in the most attractive cities; the legacy of inadequate mobility and residential segregation; a rebellion of many less-skilled men; a resurgence of crime; and a decline in economic dynamism, among other social and economic problems. Eventually stasis will prove insufficient and big changes will have to come, whether we like it or not. (p. 22)

The “less-skilled men,” here, especially means more “brutish,” (p. 20) less “socially skilled” men, i.e., the men who lack the superior social skills of women that have been so crucial to America’s massive productivity gains in education, healthcare, and administration since the 1970s. Manifestos have to be spared such bitter jokes; manifesto writers rarely take up the profession out of an excess of good will.

But with that my conceit is reaching its end. I find myself testing a model of a neoreactionary Tyler Cowen who must still “harbor some resentment towards women” after hearing about the Dark Enlightenment through mens’ rights activism.

Still, examine just how much has fallen into place so far: chaos is returning to American life due to neglect of essential virtue. The root cause is democratic politics, which has led state power to develop unprecedentedly invasive bureacratic control mechanisms. Most innovation today is focused on Exit from the society of the masses, whether the innovators like to admit it or not; corporate exploitation of the masses has matured and now stagnates. Segregation is the key to functional community and can still be achieved clandestinely. The task for an innovator of the next twenty years is to construct a quasi-governmental organization capable of maintaining segregated, high-trust, eucivic networks and use it to escape democratic pathology for good in a Great Reset.

Cowen is probably not hiding any secret sympathy for our projects, though in today’s paranoid intellectual environment, the Left does again and again stretch perfectly anodyne books like Cowen’s into absurd boogeymen like the ‘hidden manifesto’ sketched above. And perhaps it’s fair, since were I writing under a true name, I might write much the same way Cowen has here.

The puzzle of how he could inadvertently provide me the material to pull such a manifesto from his book is solved easily: any observant intellectual today can see the same patterns that ground the neoreactionary project and also cannot say the same things openly about those patterns.

We are born of these intellectuals ourselves. We come from the same social classes, we attended the same institutions for education, and we have many of the same shared cultural touchstones. We’re not so far away; we fit in well to progressive society. Hence the crippling progressive paranoia currently cutting free speech out of our culture: make truth your enemy and you never sleep soundly again.

Cowen is a sharp competitor, one of very few I believe might truly convince me to take another political path than neoreaction. If he reads this piece, I’d hope he takes it as the well-intentioned contrarianism that it is. He is honest as one can be in his milieu, encyclopedically informed, consistently interesting, and he’s admitting in this book that certain aspects of neoreactionary worldviews are deeper, truer, and more accessible than the complacent classes would like to allow. To my mind that makes him a fellow competitor rather than an existential opponent. He does not appear sympathetic to all of our values, but then who are we to impose our values, at this point?

Our task is not to vainly assert superiority but to prove by deeds to Cowen and all like him that, yes, the time for complacency has ended. It is the time to create and to transcend. The time has come for humane, admirable, inspiring alternatives to both democratic leveller-activism and resigned, complacent matching as an end in itself.

We can do without the idols of Progress. We don’t need permission and we don’t need popular support. We can do it in our own backyards.

The post Tyler Cowen’s Unexpected Neoreactionary Manifesto appeared first on Social Matter.