Linking this on Twitter catalyzed a far more animated discussion than I had anticipated. Fundamental question: Is Bane NRx?

Outside in has no settled position on this (yet), and hadn’t expected to need one. A tentative proposal though: The League of Shadows is so radically neoreactionary it doesn’t relate to the Left as a political option, but solely as a mindless pathogen — as germ warfare to be guided against a decaying social order. That militant leftist activism will produce nothing but ruin is an assumption held so firmly it doesn’t require explicit acknowledgement — and the movie audience has to tacitly identify with this analysis for Bane’s strategy to make any sense. The Left is a disease, and therefore a potential bioweapon.

To try to work something like that outside a movie, it would really be necessary to be the functional equivalent of the League of Shadows (manipulating mainstream politics dexterously, from above, or beyond). It’s probably agreed that NRx isn’t there yet … unless what we see hides something else.

ADDED: In the Twitter chat, it has pointed out that my understanding of the background story is profoundly confused (especially regarding Bane’s troubled relationship with the League of Shadows). Hopefully, by the time people have finished with me in the ensuing comments thread, I’ll have been properly schooled. This (suggested by @CineRobert) might help.

Patri Friedman is both extremely smart and, for this blog among others in the ‘sphere, highly influential. So when he promises us “a more politically correct dark enligh[t]enment” (“adding anti-racism and anti-sexism to my controversial new pro-monogamy stance”), that’s a thing. It accentuates concerns about ‘entryism’ and ideological entropy, leading to some thoughtful responses such as this (from Avenging Red Hand).

Michael Anissimov anticipated this in a post at More Right on the ‘Premises of Reactionary Thought’, which begins: “To make progress in any area of intellectual endeavor requires discourse among those who agree with basic premises and the exclusion of those who do not.” (The commentary by Cathedral Whatever is also well worth a look.) Anissimov’s original five premises, subsequently updated to six (with a new #1 added) are:

1. People are not equal. They never will be. We reject equality in all its forms.
2. Right is right and left is wrong.
3. Hierarchy is basically a good idea. 
4. Traditional sex roles are basically a good idea.
5. Libertarianism is retarded.
6. Democracy is irredeemably flawed and we need to do away with it.

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Since predictions solicit feedback from reality they constrain dishonesty, and indicate where correction is needed. This is an outline of what Outside in anticipates from the year.

World

Punctual catastrophes resist remotely confident prediction, unless negative ones. Neither Artificial Intelligence explosion nor Drexlerian nanotechnology will impact in 2014. Nuclear fusion will not be (de-)cracked. A super-volcano will not destroy what remains of human civilization. Global influenza epidemic? Mega-meteorite strike? A malign black swan of cataclysmic scale? — nobody knows.

The three potential catastrophes of greatest prominence heading into 2014 are Asia Pacific war; Sunni-Shia nuclear confrontation; and US dollar (or Japanese Yen) collapse. The probability that any one of these crosses the crisis threshold this year is substantially less than 50% (but possibly greater than 10%). If any does, the chance of a cascading disaster involving one or both of the others spikes dramatically. The probability of a secondary, but still major crisis, is of course far larger (i.e. likely).

The doctrinal neoreactionary prediction for the year is continued, steadily accelerating, general collapse, with an intensity broadly correlated to democratic progress. There will be no economic recovery, or significant resolution of international security issues. All the fixes on offer are fake. In the developed world, underlying human capital deterioration will subvert every proposed remedy, dragged downwards by morbid cultural variations on a remorseless dysgenic theme. The default fascist solution will be undermined by Internet-enabled exit options, exacerbated by inter-state non-cooperation. The Cathedral will fray, but not snap.

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“The economists are right about economics but there’s more to life than economics” Nydwracu tweets, with quote marks already attached. Whether economists are right about economics very much depends upon the economists, and those that are most right are those who make least claim to comprehension, but that is another topic than the one to be pursued in this post. It’s the second part of the sentence that matters here and now. The guiding question: Can the economic sphere be rigorously delimited, and thus superseded, by moral-political reason (and associated social institutions)?

It is already to court misunderstanding to pursue this question in terms of ‘economics’, which is (for profound historical reasons) dominated by macroeconomics — i.e. an intellectual project oriented to the facilitation of political control over the economy.  In this regard, the techno-commercial thread of Neoreaction is distinctively characterized by a radical aversion to economics, as the predictable complement of its attachment to the uncontrolled (or laissez-faire) economy. It is not economics that is the primary object of controversy, but capitalism — the free, autonomous, or non-transcended economy.

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A comment by Stirner, responding to this spirited Aurini post, speculates insightfully about the media environment ahead:

… the insights of the DE are clear and obvious, so targeting and spotlighting is only going to bring the DE to new eyeballs. It’s one thing for them to say “racist” or “sexist”, but it is quite another thing for the DE to answer: “I believe that competitive selection worked on humans over the last 50,000 years – isn’t that what you believe too? Aren’t the only people who disagree with that the Creationist types?” To attack the DE is only to publicize it further.

Second point. They are not going to be able to resist attacking. God help us, but Buzzfeed is the future, not Newspapers. People want their controversy of the day, and websites need their clicks and traffic. For internet media, the DE is a giant source of potential click bait. Even if they would be smart to ignore the DE, they are not going to resist the temptation.

Third point. The mainstream media is withering on the vine, and turning into the vanity press operations of plutocrats. Academia is about to be disintermediated by MOOCs, online learning, and low-cost alternatives to credentials. Major organs of the Cathedral will be growing weaker, and weaker, while the DE adapts to the new environment seamlessly. The DE was birthed on the internet and in the blogosphere: you can’t starve it of money, or attack it’s institutions, and the control of media channels for outreach and influence is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

As confirmation, note this story, or this oxyacetalene-torch-to-the-eyeballs media site.

Matt K. Lewis, in The Week, shows that a critical appraisal of Neoreaction really doesn’t require hysteria. (The second half of the article is especially impressive.) If the custodians of Cathedral orthodoxy don’t find a way to punish him for his sobriety, this piece could set a new standard for public discussion of the anti-democratic right.

… these movements tacitly accept that conservatism as a political force is utterly incapable of slowing the leftward march of liberalism. By definition, conservatives, who want to conserve the good things about the past, are always playing defense. When you consider that many of my conservative views aren’t terribly different from John F. Kennedy’s views in 1960, this becomes self-evident.

Can this degree of honesty be allowable?

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To mark the dawn of the new Aeon, the Reactionary Koans of Master Samo Burja have been scrupulously collected by Nick B. Steves. The path to Dark Enlightenment has never been more exactly (or obscurely) illuminated.

My own favorite:

I walked to Master Moldbug but the road was too long. I visited master Jim and he hit me with a stick.

As has been said innumerable times before, any prophecy concerning outcomes that involve the ‘prophet’ as an agent are seriously suspect. For the (apparent) moment, such concerns are being pushed up the road into the future.

There they have already made themselves ‘at home’ — along with much else related to the general phenomenon of prediction (which is strictly indistinguishable from time travel, when incisively understood). Present knowledge of the future is an action of the future upon the present, but all that can wait, since — of course — it doesn’t need to.

For now, the Prophecy: 2014 is the year in which Neoreaction tears itself apart. This is not at all to say, the year in which it dies. On the contrary, it will end the year strengthened in ways it has not to this point envisaged, having carved out vast tracts of clarity, hardened itself through close intellectual combat, refined its methods of de-synthesis (or catabolism), and — most importantly of all — made schism an internal dynamic principle. What integrates Neoreaction by the end of the year will no longer be elective tenets (reflecting the more-or-less precarious ideological preferences of individuals) but conflict-toughened structures of objective micro-cultural cohesion, selected and sculpted by many months of ferocious storms.

The approximate contours of these impending ruptures will provide the content for the first 2014 Prognoses post (which is already overdue). In anticipation, it need only be noted: the Dark Enlightenment finds nothing external to itself that is hard enough to sharpen its claws. It has feasted on soft, fat, bleating lambs long enough. Thus the introverted ripping begins …

ADDED: Rigorous evidence for time travel still thin.

With my nervous-system still too disintegrated by turn-of-the-year excess to begin a set of 2014 prognoses convincingly, I’ve simply stripped this argument from my twitter stream (quoting myself):

Neoreaction cannot understand itself without directing far more sustained attention to its own cladistic identity. As a natural cultural species, it is a fragment of dissident ultra-protestantism, and this is quite certain to guide its fate. The forces of internal fragmentation working through it will make fratricidal Trotskyism look like unperturbed mind-meld. It will be thriving this time next year, but the tides of dissolution it will have overcome to do so will be truly colossal. Those thinking Neoreaction is a platform from which to complacently deride Neo-Puritanism have a highly-educational 2014 ahead.

Neoreaction is not a series of premises (or articles of faith) but a cultural species. I don’t think that we have begun to seriously digest the consequences of that yet.

Nobody familiar with contemporary Western societies can be intellectually challenged by the idea of a great dialectical resolution to the problem of liberalism. Coercion and liberty are fused in a political order that directs authority towards the maximization of choice without consequence. Stupidity is sacred, and neither tradition nor natural necessity has the right to inhibit it. Preserving the freedom to fathom the limits of dysfunction in every direction is the primary social obligation, with the full resources of Leviathan behind it. If that’s not exactly where we are, it will be soon.

Against this backdrop, Neoreaction emerges as a de-synthesizing impulse, splintering along multiple paths, but especially two. In reacting against authoritarian irresponsibility (or ‘anarcho-tyranny’) it tends to a restoration of the Old Antithesis: either hierarchical solidarity, or a ruthless dis-solidarity (and as it undoes the progressive dialectic, ‘either’ fragments into ‘both’ — separately). Only the state protected irresponsibility of resolved Left-liberalism is strictly intolerable, because that has been historically demonstrated to be an engine of degeneration. Neoreaction, initially conceived, is anything else.

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