There’s been a virtual post on the worse, the better* simmering in the kitchen here for a while, without reaching the stage of being ready for the table. ‘Max’ exuberantly pre-empts the topic in this comment thread. How deeply is this speculative position insinuated into the DNA of neoreaction? (The provisional Outside in response: very deeply.) There’s no longer any keeping it off the ‘to do’ list.

Also (on the same thread): don’t miss the trial application of the Lesser Bull / Gnon terminological creation Ruin Voting. It has a dazzling future, because it so exactly captures a devastating empirical reality. (If successfully slogan-synthesized with one or two additional words, it will be despatched immediately to the T-shirt  factory. Perhaps antagonistic ghetto punks would be prepared to pay for a ‘Ruin Voter’ shirt already?)

*Wikipedia attributes the origin of the phrase to Nikolay Chernyshevsky, who seems to have been systematically lexo-pillaged by Lenin. (Chernyshevsky was also author of the novel What is to be done?)

… isn’t an insulting name for Obama, or even for what he has ‘wrought’. It’s a name for America, and thus for the leading spirit (or Zeitgeist) of the world. A country where support for a Harvard Law presidency ‘bottoms out’ (repeatedly) at something above 40% knows what it wants — and is getting it (good and hard). Blaming Obama for any of this is like blaming pustules for the bubonic plague.

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

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Within the Western tradition, the expedition to find Kurtz at the end of the river has a single overwhelming connotation. It is a voyage to Hell. Hence its absolute importance, utterly exceeding narrow ‘mission specifications’. The  assigned  objectives are no more than a pretext, arranging the terms of approach to an ultimate destination. The narrative drive, as it gathers momentum, is truly infernal. Dark Enlightenment is the commanding attraction.

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

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Bryan Caplan has had two epiphanies, which sum to the conclusion that — bad as tribalism is — misanthropy is the real problem. His ineradicable universalism betrays him once again.

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

The central argument of Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals is clarifying in this regard, not least because it explains how radical mystification came to dominate the topic. How could there ever come to be a moral quandary about the value of discrimination? Considered superficially, it is extremely puzzling.

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

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The easiest place to start is with what neoreactionary realism isn’t, which is this:

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

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Kaplan goes full Moldbug:

Unless some force can, against considerable odds, reinstitute hierarchy … we will have more fluidity, more equality and therefore more anarchy to look forward to. This is profoundly disturbing, because civilization abjures anarchy. … without order — without hierarchy — there is nothing.

Perhaps, in the field of international relations, Kaplan is more Moldbug than Moldbug, presenting an uncompromisingly hardline reactionary model of world order, completely undisturbed by domestic considerations or even the slightest hint of libertarian descent. If sovereignty is conserved globally, as well as nationally, a worldwide Patchwork order looks as improbable as a stable constitutional republic, and exit options evaporate. Scale-free Moldbuggian analysis could prove more than a little blood-chilling.

Kill the hyphen, Anomaly UK advised (somewhere) – it lets Google Search dissolve and avoid the subject. Writing ‘neo-reaction’ as ‘neoreaction’ nudges it towards becoming a thing.

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

Expressed with abstruse verbosity, therefore, neoreaction is a time-crisis, manifested through paradox, whose further elaboration can wait (if not for long). Disordering our most basic intuitions, it is, by its very nature, difficult to grasp. Could anything easily be said about it?

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If it were never necessary to adapt fundamentally to reality, then fascism would be the truth. There could be no limit to the sovereignty of political will.

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

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

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Moldbug’s insistence that ‘Sovereignty is conserved’ surely counts as one of the most significant assertions in the history of political thought. It is arguably the fundamental axiom of his ‘system’, and its implications are almost inestimably profound.

Sovereignty is conserved says that anything that appears to bind sovereignty is itself in reality true sovereignty, binding something else, and something less. It is therefore a negative answer to the Odysseus Problem: Can Sovereignty bind itself? If Moldbug’s assertion is accepted, constitutional government is impossible, except as a futile aspiration, a ‘noble lie’, or a cynical joke.

In addition to Moldbug’s powerful arguments, we know from the work of Kurt Gödel that the Odysseus Problem is at least partially insoluble, since it is logically impossible for there to be a perfect knot. However well constructed a constitution might be, it cannot, in principle, seal itself reliably against the possibility of a surreptitious undoing. In a sufficiently complex (self-referential) constitutional order, there will always be permissible procedures whose consequences have not been completely anticipated, and whose consistency with the continuation of the system cannot be ensured in advance.

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

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

Does this ruin refute the constitutional conjecture? Is there really nothing further to be said in defense of imperfect (but perhaps improvable) knots? This one came horribly undone. Might there be other, better ones? Outside in remains obstinately interested in the problem …

ADDED: Many relevant speculations and insights are to be found in this article on the practicalities of secession (especially section XI J, XII, XIII, and XIV). “Since it is important that the AFR [or proposed American Federal Republic] function as a constitutional republic, one of the first things it should do is to hold a constitutional convention. We anticipate that the resulting document will be similar to the present American constitution, but not identical.” It includes some (very modest) recommendations to curtail democracy.

This is an argument I’m really not grasping:

Libertarians are unrealistic because the world was once vastly freer than it is today, and then progressively rolled down the populist hill into the present social democratic latrine trench, so “Why would we expect different results on the second go?” [OK, still following so far] … thus we need Kings back, because … [we need to catch the rising tide, after all, the world hasn’t ever been more monarchist than now? Prussian Neocameralism outlasted Manchester Liberalism? Royalist institutions have demonstrated their inherent immunity to the forces of decay? …]

How can reactionaries criticize free republics for falling apart? Everything reactionaries have ever respected fell apart. Nobody would be a reactionary if their favored configuration of the world hadn’t fallen apart.

Republics are extremely fragile. All the more reason to take devoted care of them (first of all, by protecting them from democracy).

ADDED: Fag-end of a ludicrous institution. (via AoS)

ADDED: Epic response from Nydwracu .