Foseti is back, doing something of great importance. This titanic contribution to Moldbug digestion from Peter Taylor comes immediately to mind (it wins the ultimate Outside in accolade of a place in the ‘Resources’ list, under ‘Meta-Moldbug’).

Walter Russell Mead’s list of 2013 losers consists entirely of democratic countries and movements, with the exception of ‘The Syrians’ (#9). ‘Democracy’ as such, and in general, is given a category of its own, and takes fifth place.

People have been seeing something of an informal Neoreactionary ‘zeitgeist’ in this piece on Frank Luntz.

Neoreaction receives some more mainstream media attention. Is this going to be a 2014 up-curve? Lewis’ piece quotes Jordan Bloom: “For the last 500 years or so, history has mostly been a matter of polities consolidating. Fewer, bigger countries and empires. We’re on the cusp of things starting to move in the opposite direction, to the point that it’s reasonable to predict that secession will be the most important political idea of the 21st century.”

Criticism from the traditionalist right. (Useful boundary-setting, I think.)

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Mark Warburton passed this masterpiece along (Revolutionary Apocalypse, by Luciano Pellicani). A couple of tiny morsels from its consistently brilliant — and eerily familiar — analysis:

With Puritanism, an absolutely new element was introduced into Western civilisation: (revolutionary) politics as fulfillment of God’s will, with the objective of consciously building “a new human community, that could substitute the lost Eden” and produce a prodigious “change in human nature.” For centuries, politics had been conceived as a “cybernetic art” (Plato) or as a technique for the accumulation of power (Machiavelli). From the Puritan cultural revolution on, politics was conceived as a soteriological practice, dominated by an eschatological tension toward the Kingdom of God on earth, therefore as a calling, whose methodical objective was to overturn the world in order to purify it. The slogan originally used by the Taborites and the Anabaptists was revived: “Permanent warfare against the existing, in the name of the New World.”

And:

An all-powerful state is essential for communism, since the total destruction of civil society is the only way to destroy capitalism. By civil society we mean the “society of industry, of general competition, of freely pursued private interest, of anarchy, of natural and spiritual individuality alienated from self.” But since capitalism — Lenin’s definition is correct — is a phenomenon that is generated spontaneously, whenever the ideological power relaxes its watch, the effort to prevent mammon from raising its head must be permanent. It is a matter of annihilation that requires mass terror, since the main enemy of communism is “widespread petit bourgeois spontaneity.” Thus, the “revolutionary project challenges the normal course of history.” It is a huge effort to prevent humanity from moving spontaneously toward a bourgeois society. This is only achieved through permanent terror.

If Pellicani is already being widely discussed in the reactosphere, I’ve missed it. My guess: he’ll be considered an indispensable reference by this time next year.

Multiply the world population by 365 and it comes out as something significantly north of two trillion human days in which to make things happen. It has impressed me, then, to note that roughly 20% of the last year’s Gross Global Occurrence Volume has taken place in the comments threads of this blog. (I received an activity report from WordPress this evening that suggested I thank VXXC, fotrkd, Spandrell, and Thales in particular for being cranked-up comment monkeys.) Tack on the rest of the reactosphere, and what remains of the planet has been fighting over scraps (which we’ll get to later).

The first — tentative and unconvinced — post here went up in mid-February, so Outside in is a creature of 2013. There’s nothing remotely unusual about that. Other 2013 reactionary monster babies include Radish, Anarchopapist and Occam’s Razor (January); Habitable Worlds, The Reactivity Place, and Amos & Gromar (April); More Right (May); Theden (July); Handleshaus and The Legionnaire (August) … which is just to scoop from my regular reading list. The sheer quantity of explicitly reactionary writing has to have surged by at least an order of magnitude this year. This timeline (by Handle) sharpens the contours of the phenomenon (expanded to encompass the burgeoning new genre of excited anti-reactionary push-back). Even if many of the greatest Outer Right blogs preexisted this wave of dark energy, 2013 was surely the year in which Neoreaction really established itself as a thing.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne knew his Puritans (from The House of the Seven Gables):

“It appears to me,” said the daguerreotypist, smiling, “that Uncle Venner has the principles of Fourier at the bottom of his wisdom; only they have not quite so much distinctness, in his mind, as in that of the systematizing Frenchman.”

I’m under a sacred obligation to review Bryce Laliberte’s ebook What is Neoreaction? Ideology, Social-Historical Evolution, and the Phenomena of Civilization. Thankfully, this solemn duty was not specifically scheduled. Working towards its accomplishment is a thought-provoking process, which is a good thing.

As a trivial matter, I’m forced to ask: Is that supposed to be ‘phenomena’? ‘Phenomenon’ would be more stylistically persuasive, even if the plural is defensible on conceptual grounds. That kind of side-issue, however, is symptomatic self-distraction. There are serious questions at stake here, and elusive ones.

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Having finally got around to Elysium,  one point in particular bears emphasis: There’s only one interesting character in the movie, and she’s a neoreactionary heroine. That’s not a matter of ideological preference. Among the tiny number of characters who might imaginably be thought to know what they’re doing, Secretary of Defense Jessica Delacourt (Jodie Foster) is the only one to be treated with the slightest seriousness.

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