Radish has earned a lot of appreciation for his Basic Guide to the Political Spectrum graphic. It is indeed superb.

(In fact, it’s so good I’ll put off quibbling for another occasion, and just steal the damn thing.)

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Is anyone else beginning to get a little … I think the technical term is ‘weirded out’ by what is happening in the media?

Given that the central convergence point of neoreaction is an analysis of media power as the consummation of the (Anglophone) mainstream trend in global political history, it’s impossible to find this sort of thing simply amusing. Cathedral theory predicts a quasi-stable closed loop in which left-progressive academic self-organization obtains ever more comprehensive social dominion through a conductive media system. When the media strays off message, by allowing things to be noticed that — entirely lacking academic endorsement — cannot legitimately exist, something of profound social significance is taking place.

There might be any number of intriguing opportunities in these (still deeply cryptic) developments. For Mencius Moldbug, however, I suspect life could soon become uncomfortably interesting. The attack dogs of the left have left him alone, in the hope that he would remain unknown and ignored. Once that hope dies, the leashes are sure to come off.

[I haven’t forgotten that I owe Bryce a What is Neoreaction? review — but I hadn’t expected I’d be in a race to complete it before the New York Times gets to the finishing post.]

Neoreaction, as it tends to extremity on its Dark Enlightenment vector, frustrates all familiar demands for activism. Even if explicit anti-politics remains a minority posture, the long-dominant demotic calculus of political possibility is consistently subverted — coring out the demographic constituencies from which ‘mobilization’ might be expected. There is no remotely coherent reactionary class, race, or creed — it painstakingly explains — from which a tide-reversing mass politics could be constructed. In this respect, even the mildest versions of neoreactionary analysis are profoundly politically disillusioning.

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

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As anticipated, the organization of the Outside in blogroll is transforming itself from a mechanical task into an engaging cultural-political and philosophical problem. My sense is that people generally resolve this type of quandary on a fairly hasty, ad hoc basis, but it already seems too late to do that. There are legacy considerations, and intricacies of coalitional variety at stake. Ultimately, there is a question about the core significance of the term ‘neoreaction’ — Is it a mere rallying point, flung into prominence by arbitrary historical opportunity, or is it a dense concept, whose semantic components are to be scrupulously respected?

My temptation would be to tactically elude the word, in order to access a more flexible, differentiated terminology. What prevents me from doing so is the arrogant sense that I respect the word more than anyone else it is applied to. ‘Neoreaction’ is an inherently paradoxical, fissional term, splitting in-itself on a temporal axis. It follows that I am extremely reluctant to see it relegated to a mere categorical marker, employed to designate ideological tendencies whose substantial content is better — or more fully — explicated in other terms. The word Neoreaction declares, intrinsically, that it belongs to fissionalist time-junkies exploring historical dissociation. That’s what it says, irrespective of how it is used.

The problem of categorization, therefore, remains, indissolubly. Any suggestions?

This point is important enough to restate well, as Foseti does:

The crux of [Scott Alexander’s] argument is that, “It is a staple of Reactionary thought that everything is getting gradually worse.” He then goes on to show that not everything is getting worse. […] It is not a staple of reactionary thought that everything is getting worse. To the contrary, I’ve never read that argument from any reactionary anywhere. […] Let’s correct his statement: It is a staple of Reactionary thought that massive improvements in technology have been very effective in masking massive declines in virtually all other aspects of society.

The progressive assumption, which neoreaction contests, is that it is natural and good to spend the advances of civilization on causes unrelated to civilizational advance. A more controversial formulation (supported here) is that the Cathedral spends capitalism on something other than capitalism, and ultimately on the destruction of capitalism. It tolerates a functional economy — to the extent that it does — only on the understanding that it will be used for something else.

Elementary cybernetics predicts that if productivity is recycled into productivity, the outcome is an explosive process of increasing returns. Insofar as history is not manifesting accelerating productivity, therefore, it can be assumed that social circuitry is being fed through non-productive, and anti-productive links. Techno-commercial Modernity is being squandered on (Neo-Puritan) Progressivism. In the West, at least, that is what is getting worse.

Nydrwracu wants us to think harder, which has to be a good thing (right?). So what are the basic questions of neoreaction? This is too important to rush, so I’m inclined to go meta (which reliably slows things down).

First meta point: If this is going to work, it has to be far more rigorously honed. That means a maximum of three basic problems each, with the objective of amalgamation into a list of 10, at most. The process of compression should do a lot of the preparatory work. Add Nydrwracu’s original  11 to Bryce Laliberte’s entirely different 10 ( in the comments, same link), and the result is already a sprawling mess that isn’t going anywhere. Neither list is remarkable for its tautness, as I hope both proposers would admit. “The 119 basic problems of neoreaction” isn’t going to sharpen anybody up.

Anyway, here are mine:

(1) The Odysseus Problem (or political knot theory): Can a model of distributed power be rigorously formulated? I am not remotely convinced that this question has yet been answered, and I refuse to get excited about monarchs until it has.

(2) Does a rigorous theory of degenerative ratchets capture the basic practical problem of neoreaction? If it does, a domain of investigation is determined at a high-level of abstraction. If it doesn’t, where do we look for degenerative ratchet counter-engineering (wherever it is, I’ll be spending a lot of time there).

(3) What does the ‘neo-‘ in ‘neoreaction’ signify? This is a timely question, because I’m noticing a lot of people edging into it, and the topics it excavates are huge. My own take on this: Anyone who thinks that Modernity, Capitalism, and Progress are simply bad things to have happened should drop the ‘neo-‘ prefix immediately. After that, anybody who lacks conviction about needing it should think about doing the same. Sheer reaction is OK, isn’t it? Fashion isn’t a good reason for anything.

James Goulding also had an extremely interesting set of basic questions (I’m worried they’re lost somewhere on this blog). Turning them up would also contribute seriously to moving this forward.

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Each of the three main strands of neoreaction, insofar as they are remotely serious, attaches itself to something that no politics could absorb.

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

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

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By 2037 the harsh phases of The Upheaval have finally ended. Western Eurasia is ruined and confused, but the fighting has burnt out amongst the rubble. In the Far East, the Chinese Confucian Republic has largely succeeded in restoring order, and is even enjoying the first wave of renewed prosperity. The Islamic civil war continues, but — now almost entirely introverted — it is easily quarantined. No one wants to think too much about what is happening in Africa.

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

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Even prior to the twitterization catastrophe, and the terminal disintegration of thought into nano-particles, symphonic orchestration wasn’t obviously emerging as an Outside in core competence. One unfortunate consequence of this deficiency is that highly persuasive blogging ideas get endlessly can-kicked, unless they can be easily pulverized.

“Blogging ideas” doesn’t mean anything grandiose (those type of thoughts splinter anything in their path, and bust in), but rather highly medium-adapted discussion packages, which present things in a way that racks up hits. The relevant example right now is — or rather ‘was to be’ — The X Fundamental Disputes of Neoreaction (‘X’ being an as-yet undetermined number — optimally of surreptitious qabbalistic significance). That puppy would have been clocking up views like Old Faithful, but confusion reigns, and patience has run out. Into the shredding machine it goes.

The principal provocations for this spasm of impatience are two posts on the topic of monarchism, at Anomaly UK, and More Right. The Great AUK post is structured as a science fiction scenario, modeling a future monarchist regime, whilst Michael Anissimov’s MR defense of “traditionalism and monarchism” is organized dialectically. Both serve to consolidate an affinity between neoreaction and monarchist  ideals that was already solidly established by Moldbug’s Jacobitism. It would not be unreasonable to propose that this affinity is strong enough to approach an identity (which is quite possibly what both of these writers do envisage). So the time to frame the monarchist case within a question, as a Fundamental Dispute of Neoreaction, is now.

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Matt Sigl of Vocativ is writing an article on the Dark Enlightenment, both the ‘thing’ and the ‘manifesto’ (I’ve already told him why this description is misleadingly over-generous). His questions suggest a sincere attempt to understand what is going on.

Among the lines of inquiry he is pursuing (my compressions): Why Now? What’s the ‘Cathedral’ business? How does the Dark Enlightenment relate to transhumanism/futurism, libertarianism, fascism, white supremacism, anti-semitism, social Darwinism? Where is the Dark Enlightenment going? How does it respond to criticisms that (a) capitalism is to blame, (b) everything’s basically OK?

I have tried to respond as objectively as possible, whilst attempting to be clear about those answers which express my own idiosyncratic decisions regarding unsettled/disputed matters. Predictably, I have emphasized the Moldbuggian origins of the Dark Enlightenment / Neoreaction as a definite cultural phenomenon (distinct from pre-existing right-libertarian, traditionalist, and paleo-reactionary streams of thought).

Readers who think they can help Matt get this portrait right are encouraged to make relevant points here.

ADDED: Foseti on ‘Why Now?’

ADDED: Handle on progress.

ADDED: Mike Anissimov (via Twitter): “Nothing good will come of a neoreactionary dialogue with Matt Sigl. … I predict we’ll regret this in the end.”