Let their own vices be their gallows.

“Virtue is its own reward, Vice its own punishment.”

Replacing Virtue with our host’s axiom of Intelligence Optimization (and Vice with Intelligence Corruption), yields two pretty spirals, upwards and downwards. John Q. Public is bored. He decides to read. He has questions about the subject, questions that can only be answered by further reading. And thus he spirals upwards. John Q. Public is bored. He decides to try a little heroin. And thus he spirals downwards.

The downward spiral is limited first by habituation (hedonic treadmill) and finally by biological reality (overdose and death). The upward spiral is limited also by habituation (standards increase, questions multiply, better competition, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis) and finally by biological reality (brain can’t foom).

Technology and civilization amplify these spirals. Neither books no heroin existed in the ancestral savannah. Both are superstimuli.

As described by our host, the liberal dialectic goes something like this (cribbed from La Wik):

Thesis: anarchy + poverty (primitive communism, Thank you, M. Rousseau.)
Antithesis: hierarchy + wealth (slavery, feudalism, and capitalism)
Synthesis: anarchy + wealth (final communism)

Ahh, the various imagined final communisms. The state withers away. Ancap security corps protect us from a world of pacifists. All money is Bitcoin, but with programmable matter, who needs money? A world without any scarcity especially the scarcity of scarce things.

The Neoreaction holds this dialectic to be incorrect . It starts from the false premise that Man is socially atomic. The state of nature was neither bellum omnium contra omnes nor the noble savage. It was tribal. In the state of nature, without his tribe, Man simply dies. And what is a tribe without hierarchy?

Behold, Man, the pack hunter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o (persistence hunting is impossible without supporting runners).

The Neoreactionary dialectic starts from a different thesis, and must therefore be entirely distinct in antithesis and conclusion.

Thesis: Hierarchy, Substimulus (tribes, feudalism, paleoreaction)

Civilization can perhaps be described as the process of Man developing his superstimuli. Writing, beer, campfires, recreational sex, clothes etc. etc. But for a very long time, those stimuli were unbelievably scarce. Extreme hierarchy was needed to develop them at all. Imagine the process of making beer from scratch, really from scratch.

Antithesis: Anarchy, Superstimulus (industrialization, communism)

Then, abruptly, superstimuli got much less scarce. Increasingly less hierarchy was needed to achieve the same or greater effects. Since less hierarchy was needed, hierarchy started to wither away. A process which has occurred before, but never at so great a scale (cf. Rome, http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.de/2007/05/antisingularity.html).

Synthesis: Hierarchy, Superstimulus (neoreaction)

Which brings me back to upward and downward spirals (respectively, http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15308 and http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/poetry/john-magee.html).

The synthesis of the Neoreaction is that we need hierarchy, not just to create superstimuli, but also to master them. To not be destroyed by them. They are dangerous. An adult gives a child books rather than heroin. Or, if they do, the result is unsurprisingly vicious. And our world frequently gives heroin-class superstimuli to children, literal and metaphorical (e.g. democracy : power :: porn : sex). Resulting in unacceptable Intelligence Corruption. The downward spiral is just slow suicide. Do people have the right to suicide? Not inside my hierarchy they don’t.

The implied solution of the Neoreactionary synthesis: Build hierarchy. Within hierarchy, optimize for intelligence, serve Cosmos. Spiral upwards. Let outside the hierarchy deal with itself. It’ll eventually ask to come in.

James I; 1604