And if we need to do something (and somebody probably does) then a significant amount of the wisdom we’ve received from Moldbug needs to be re-thought.

And humanity will not rebuild “from scratch”; they cannot. The “low-hanging fruit” has already been plucked; the energy and mineral resources accessable with 1800’s technology have already been tapped out. Whether fast or slow, the collapse of the Cathedral will push humanity past the point of no return with regards to the industrial age; the future resembles John Michael Greer’s “deindustrial age”… forever.

Humanity had its one shot at expanding beyond Earth, or creating the Singularity, and has already blown it. The future is only decay.

And here’s where most neoreactionaries seem over-optimistic to me. They all seem to assume (based on nothing but wishful thinking IMO), that they, their descendants, and/or their ideas will triumph in the collapse, when it is highly unlikely that any of these will even survive the chaos, which shall prove so destructive that any sort of recovery afterwards will be utterly impossible.

1. The natural world (“reality”), is best harnessed for human prosperity by conservative principles which understand the limitations and peculiarities of human nature.

2. The Cathedral is a willful, deliberate rebellion from the natural order, and can only be maintained at increasing cost, as the percentage of the society that remains productively grounded in reality continues to shrink.

3. The Cathedral will collapse due to its unsustainability, leading to a chaotic, anarchist mess. During this time, competing systems of sovereignty and power will arise, and those most aligned with the natural order, namely, those that are the most authentically conservative, are likely to achieve dominance.

4. As they achieve dominance and prosperity, they must remain vigilant against the leftward-ratchet. Numerous schemes have been proposed to combat this, and some have hypothesized that it is systemic and unavoidable. If the former is successful, we have reached the end of history as a reactionary stasis. If the latter is true, the cycle begins again.

This aligns very well with the horrorist approach, which could also be considered Taoist. We consider ourselves essentially in harmony with the natural order, and consider the Cathedral as a monstrous rebellion against this order, which must inevitably fail. The primary difference is that while Taoism is essentially practical, intuitionist, situational, neoreaction, born of the Western tradition, believes in an objective natural order whose principles are universal and immutable.