I throw my hand out to feel something. Like a fisherman hopes the bend of his line is not an old boot.

I look at someone one, like she isn’t the post-modern banality of a west-end art group.

I feel myself, onside. I wake up – mouth dry. I – I – I. Everything else is abstraction and reaction and feigned sincerity. There is a quiet narcissism. One that syncs in – and without – amongst the other animals of this world.

Spittle is the only thing that lasts. It thickens around the mouth when ranting makes sense to the speaker. He cries because the christmas tree was taken down.

(a) Progressivism is a non-theistic Christian sect.

(b) The Cathedral is the takeover by the like-minded elite of all institutions that dominate the public influence environment.

(c) Democracy is divided authority, diverting attention and energy to popularity and mind-control, hyper-inflating time preference.

They culminate in the Left Singularity aka Hell on Earth.

What else would you add to this stripped-to-the-bone framework?

Something like this with more information might be what’s needed to create some flow charts indicating the user journey taken from progressivism / libertarianism to Neoreaction.

Clear concise diagrams / user journeys might really help expedite conversion of susceptible people who’s parasite is already coming a bit loose…

The internal struggle for self-definition is one of the most exciting aspects of the Neoreaction at the moment, and clearly also one of the most necessary. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly wouldn’t want NR to ossify into some kind of static-doctrine, built around a personality cult, and lose its sense of flux and momentum. But as the different gospels are being written, it is fascinating to probe them from the sidelines and see what sticks.

If you’re going to play the ‘convert the elites’ strategy, then civil argumentation – logic and evidence – is never enough. It’s not enough to say it works ‘better’ – they’re elite, so by definition what they already have is working pretty well for them.

You have to offer them something that they want, that even their eliteness cannot easily achieve for them if their society complies with the current Blue Orthodoxy.

I should clarify that by ‘elite’ I don’t mean Charles Murray’s ‘narrow’ elite (the top 0.1% influential / powerful / wealthy working adults, maybe 100,000 people in the US), but something more like Tyler Cowen’s thrivers in his Average is Over scenario – more like the top 10% or top million households. In the US income distribution, this starts at $191K per year for a married couple.

I won’t get into the whole argument now of the Calculus of Variations to discover the Path of Least Resistance for elite conversion, but my guess is that while you can’t budge the 1%, there is indeed something you can offer to the 2-10%.

They want the SWPL version of Sailer’s affordable family formation, but without having to flee to the suburbs. They want hip cities which are also safe and high quality for child-rearing, with pleasant mass transit full of well-behaved people just like them, and with real estate costs that aren’t bid up to levels that suck away every last dime of consumer surplus.

Progressive government cannot offer this to them without contradicting some of its core principles. Sometimes it tries to resolve the tension sub silentio, as with disparate-impact stop-and-frisk for NYC, but not for thee. Sometimes they are willing to look the other way if it seems that neighborhoods are gradually gentrifying.

But there is always that tension, and in the end most SWPL top 10%’ers won’t be able to afford to get what they want. So, like Marx suggested, it’s probably worthwhile to ‘heighten the contradictions’ of conflicting ideological and material desires, and to offer a kind of Faustian Bargain of SWPL paradise in exchange for a little ideological flexibility.

Says Mephistopheles (Hebrew for ‘destroyer by means of false propaganda’),

Well, yes, according to what you think now, maybe my proposal is a little evil. Ok. But, surely you can see it is the lesser evil when compared to the prospect of the profound wickedness of all you good people never being able to get what you need, what you deserve, and are entitled to have? And once you have that, we can always try to mitigate and remedy the things that give you qualms about it. And wouldn’t that be the best the best of all possible worlds? So, really, it’s ‘good’, when you see it from the proper subtle perspective of nuanced enlightenment. While only very intelligent and noble people like yourselves truly can. So try it, you’ll like it.

Of course, after the Deal With The Devil has been in place for a long time to everyone’s satisfaction, the residents of the new order will think the new normal is perfectly enlightened instead of merely a lesser evil. And once that idea flows through the influence and indoctrination institutions long enough, it might as well become the new official state religion.

If you buy my elite-youthful-indoctrination and then deployment-as-societal-leaders mechanism-of-propagation theory, then you will also observe that the content of an ideology is orthogonal to its success in the short term. This is because the ideology gets to piggyback on actually competitive mechanisms and processes.

If the best and brightest, most powerful, influential and wealthy, keep recycling themselves and their progeny through your central indoctrination institutions, it’s almost impossible to loose status to competitors. You may gradually be killing to Golden Goose for the whole nation, but on a relative basis, your folks are always going to be in every institution’s 1%.

The only thing you really have to fear is competition from the outside, so the race is on to multi-nationalize every organization and capture elites and spread influence globally so that there is no outside.

Land says, “Exit, Escape, Outside, Secede, Bypass, Let It Burn”. Foseti and Moldbug tend to say, “Given the robustness of the current modern structure, your only hope is to gradually convert the elites, and that’s perhaps not impossible, but it is a long shot, not to mention risky because they’re hypersensitive to efforts to do so”. VXXC says, “Rise Up, Unite, and Revolt, ye remnant middle-class masses!”

I pick the Foseti / Moldbug option as a first choice, with the Land option as a insurance hedge.

I emailed Adam Gurri – who is writing yer another article about NR – about it, and said that all idea-communities experience this struggle and infighting in their early stages, and some never lose it. Thing about trying to define early Christianty, or ‘Feminism’ (which wave), or ‘Communism’ (Stanilist? Trotskyite?)

Adam replied wisely:

… I’ll make a clear disclaimer: neoreaction, as with any movement, isn’t a set of principles enumerated on stone tablets. Instead, it’s a community of individuals who signal their affiliation with the group label, and have a rather diverse, semi-overlapping set of ideas about what it means to be a member of that group.

Just so. One of those overlaps is a preference for truth, accuracy, and integrity, and I’d hate to think I’d be excommunicated as not a True Scotsman for hedging a bit in my adherence to certain common claims if I think they are debatable. I think progressivism as cryptocalvinism is a 50/50 story – like Sailer says, there comes a point when you say, ‘there’s been too much water under the bridge’ – and if we define NR as ‘belief in cryptocalvinism with p=0.9′, then maybe I’m more of a distant cousin than an equally inheriting sibling.

So, I would submit that we ought to allow a distinction between ‘Neoreaction’ and ‘Moldbugism’. I admire the guy, and think he’s brilliant and his work is seminal and inspiring, but it’s not a personality cult.

Nevertheless, I would like to point out that what you call progressivism (a ‘religion’ or ‘mere sociopolitical ideology’), or how you speculate as to its historical origins and development, is very distinct from what it actually is, how it operates, its errors and strengths, the psychology and sociology of its adherents, and the danger it poses to our preferences for society and civilization.

Let’s say all that History was irretrievably destroyed. (We were ‘alienated from that Truth’, in Gnostic jargon). Well, so what? All we would know if that there are these people that call themselves progressives, they have these strong beliefs, many of which are false and dangerous, and they seem to have come to dominate all the major institutions of the influence environment – which are able to penetrate every minute of our modern lives – largely in a conscious effort to propagate their beliefs.

What would be the useful lessons of that Lost True History when it comes to actually contending with progressivism? Perhaps you could develop the adaptive-meme-model of the evolutionary / viral spread of ideas via selection. Maybe you could try your hand at prediction and forecasting where the trend will inevitably lead us if not effectively resisted. Maybe you could observe a pattern of vulnerabilities of ‘Christian-type’ dominant / official belief systems. Putting those lessons together, maybe you could develop a strategy for gradually bringing progressivism down, or just letting it collapse and being prepared and ready with a better replacement.

I think ‘The Cathedral’ – the takeover by the like-minded elite of all institutions that dominate the public influence environment – is a compatible and complementary key tenet to the one Foseti has proposed. The facts that those elite beliefs are quasi-religious in nature, and, to the extent they resemble any other religion, that they are closet to secularized Protestantism, and that this makes sense Historically, are all consistent with that approach.

The question remains how does the philosophical / political / ideological homogenization of elites occur? And I think the simple answer is ‘elite (selective admissions) higher education in a meritocratic system’. Consider this Sailer post on the Gulenists.

So, you get all the kids in your country. You test them for intelligence, conscientiousness, determination, ambitious, and conformity. You collect up all those best and brightest, send them to the same school, and indoctrinate them all the same way. Then, naturally, they are hot commodities for every important institution in your society, because everyone wants top talent. And of course, they are talented and hard working, and eventually go on to top leadership positions in those organizations, because everybody wants top talented leaders (and if you don’t, you won’t survive long anyway).

And those leaders go on to both enforce the belief system and values of the indoctrination they picked up in school – the same way in every institution – and they also pick the next generation of key-institution workers and leaders, usually coming from the same elite academies.

If you control the prime indoctrination institution, your students will, soon enough, becomes like a fifth-column deep-state at the head of every organization – especially public influence organizations and your doctrine eventually takes over the whole country.

And that’s why what only Harvard thinks in 1945, everyone else thinks by 2014.

I enjoyed reading (most of) Peter A. Taylor’s recent long-form critique of ‘A Gentle Introduction’ but was rather left wondering if it was necessary for him to identify as a Neoreactionary, even on a P/T basis, given the extent of what he seemed to be questioning / rejecting.

One point: in terms of the genetic evolution metaphor, my understanding of adaptive evolution is that while slow-mo change happens, the introduction of new genus – the branching out of one ‘species’ to become form a new one – is itself revolutionary ie occurring over a relatively condensed time period from mutations within outliers of the original genus. And the whole thing could be understood on a more generative evolutionary basis, as you suggest, progressively jettisoning the more ‘supernatural’ elements of religion but maintaining its moral meta-structure, which was highly adaptive when in the business of “fishing for souls”.

Anyway, I am not sure exactly where I am going with this, but Foseti’s claim:

“If I was forced to pick the one key tenet of the neoreaction, I’d pick this understanding of Progressivism. To the reactionary, Progressivism is a nontheistic Christian sect. If you don’t understand Progressivism in this way, you simply don’t understand Progressivism.”

is certainly under attack here, and, if you are right, I think that this challenge points towards a significantly watered down version of Neoreactionary doctrine going forward.

Mostly, those of us that know particularly fanatical progressive zealots recognize the kind of Psychology of the religious true believer who stubbornly holds to a doctrine he absorbed by indoctrination and social osmosis despite it making clearly false claims about reality, and unfalsifiable claims about morality. The rabid emotionalism of social offensive and defensive techniques against rival ideologies is also relevant to the charge.

My own provisional historical theory is that two things happened at the same time which confounds the analysis. On the one hand, late 19th century progressives has abandoned religion – and even the possibility of valid normativity – but were living off the still potent cultural inheritance of Christian society with its beneficial societal norms and traditional ideas of ‘the good’ remaining extant and self-propagating by a kind of cultural inertia. They inherited a kind of cultural consensus that was taken for granted and which took time to break down once severed from its root.

The public intellectuals at the time attributed their preferred aspects of this consensus to Christianity, and felt warmly towards the role Christianity had played in establishing it, but thought they could keep it and simultaneously drop all the superstitious nonsense and build upon that foundation a new society based on rational principles.

Later on, as Christian norms and bourgeois virtues gradually faded, they came under attack, the norms became open for debate, and the Deutungshoheit was definitely up for grabs by the 60’s. The progressives were ‘re-moralized’ because of homogenous indoctrination in elite academic institutions, because most humans feel a strong need to fill the moral void, and because it’s adaptive in terms of public influence when competing with religion when you are ‘fishing for souls’.

Also, consider this question, “This Christianity thing claims to be pretty critical of Judaism. And yet we can see from Historical analysis there is a direct descent of Christianity from Judaism. Wasn’t Jesus a Jew, who was called ‘Rabbi’ and who chastised the Jews when they weren’t being sufficiently pious and respectful of Jewish holy sites? In fact, Christianity turns out to be a particularly virulent form of post-messianic Judaism!”

And you could play the same game with Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, and Protestantism. The danger with all ‘evolutionary’ arguments is the Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. You can never prove ‘genuine, rupturing innovation’ to someone who wants to emphasize in ‘direct descent with national selection’.

And a Christian could reply, “Um, no. There was a definite and critical rupture there, not some slight mutation or gradual selection of phenotypes that tend to be part of the typical population variation. When doctrinal changes are sufficiently rapid and stark, it’s more than just a mild schism or adaptation in evolutionary descent. That’s the difference between qualitative changes in kind, and quantitative changes in degree.” It’s comparable to the introduction of Quantum mechanics into Physics. You can say, “Well, you know, Boltzman and Statistical Mechanics, and ..” No. The new theory was something revolutionary.

Of course, no revolution is total. You can always trace a lineage of some commonalities before and after. The French didn’t stop speaking French or drinking wine or making fantastic cheese after they had guillotined their aristocracy. The question is whether, in the contextual matter that you are considering, the revolution is more relevant than the continuous tradition.

Consider also the Confederacy. A continuous cultural tradition was severed irreversibly by the Civil War and Reconstruction era punitive measures. There is such a thing as genuinely new and radical ideas, and they can play the same role in their native environments as foreign conquest can. If the local crops have recently been cut down or plowed under the still-rich soil without the use of herbicide, you should expect weeds to take over, which could just as probably originate locally as be invasive imports from elsewhere.

So, personally, I view the ‘de-theologized Protestantism vs. secular rupture’ debate as akin to the ‘Nature or Nurture’ debate. And in both cases my view is that it’s a false choice and that the truth is probably about 50/50.

This claim really interested me, in particular when juxtapoised against Foseti’s recent thoughts on Moldbug:

“Moldbug argues that Richard Dawkins – instead of being an atheistic critic of Christianity – is a hardcore adherent of the world’s most successful sect of Christianity. Instead of arguing against Christianity, Dawkins is arguing for one sect of Christianity over all others. How’s that for a red pill? If that’s correct – and I think it is – almost everyone is wrong about everything.

If pressed, I’d go further. If I was forced to pick the one key tenet of the neoreaction, I’d pick this understanding of Progressivism. To the reactionary, Progressivism is a nontheistic Christain sect. If you don’t understand Progressivism in this way, you simply don’t understand Progressivism.

From this understanding of Progressivism, all other reactionary ideas flow. For example, here’s reactionary history in one sentence is: “Massachusetts, of course, later went on [i.e. after conquering the US in the Civil War] to conquer first Europe and then the entire planet, the views of whose elites in 2007 bear a surprisingly coincidental resemblance to those held at Harvard in 1945.” Similarly, political correctness and diversity-worship really can’t be understood unless they’re viewed as religious beliefs – at which point their operation becomes startlingly clear…

…It is many of these ideas – Moldbug’s alternate histories and his criticism of both Progressivism and mainstream varieties of conservatives – that have attracted many other “reactionaries.” For our purposes, we can close by noting that these ideas are included in the series on Dawkins precisely because one can only reasonably reach these (apparently at least somewhat attractive) results from the initial idea that Progressivism is a nontheistic Christian sect.”

Have you undertaken a post about this already? Or debated the issue elsewhere?