Moldbug isn’t a Neoreactionary in the same way that Christ wasn’t a Christian.

Dreher’s post is seriously interesting. One immediate hook:

Steve Sailer says that the Shallow State is a complement to the Deep State. The Shallow State is, I think, another name for what the Neoreactionaries call “The Cathedral” …

As a State Church, the Cathedral is essentially bound to publicity. Its principal organs — media and education — are directed towards the promulgation of faith. It tends towards an identification with its own propaganda, and therefore — in Mike Lofgren’s words — to the full manifestation of visible government. Perfect coincidence of government with the transparent public sphere approaches a definition of the progressive telos. Since Neoreaction is particularly inclined to emphasize the radical dysfunctionality of this ideal, it naturally presupposes that real government lies elsewhere. In this respect, NRx is inherently destined to formulate a model of hidden or occult government — that which the Cathedral runs upon — which inevitably coincides, in all fundamentals, with the deep state.

What then? Has there been a direct NRx address to the quesion, what do we make of the deep state? Moldbug even declares: “… the United States does not in fact have a ‘deep state.'” In context, this is a complex and suggestive evasion, but it is an evasion nonetheless. There can be no call upon neoreactionaries to articulate their relation to something that does not exist.

In contrast to the Master, I am thoroughly convinced that a US deep state exists, and that the problem of articulation is a very different one. Public articulacy is — at least — not obviously appropriate to the deep state, for transcendental philosophical or occultist reasons (which are the same), since it is the very nature of hidden government not to be a public object. Public representation of the deep state is exposure — an intrinsically political, antagonistic engagement. It’s Wikileaks. This is not to denounce such an operation, reactively, but merely to note that the question has thereby been missed. The righteousness of state sublimation into the public sphere is assumed (and this, to repeat, is progressivism itself).

Under the name of the Cathedral, Nrx depicts the state phenomenon as a degenerative abomination. The deep state (or state-in-itself), in contrast, poses a far more cryptic theoretical and practical problem. It’s worth puzzling over, for at least a while.

(This is among the few topics that puts my reverence for the Moldgod under serious strain.)

More here:

The apparently inverse relation between BTC value and investment level merits further commentary.

On a trivial personal note, I seem to have carelessly lost my Bitcoin wallet somehow, so my perfect detachment on the subject is even more impeccable than you might think.

Note: There’s a exemplary anti-Moldbug prognosis cited over at the other place. “The only extent to which the United States can allow anything at all with respect to Bitcoin is the extent to which it can reform itself to work inside Bitcoin.” OK, it’s perhaps an over-stretch in the opposite direction, but it still ends up far closer to the mark.

(Image source.)

ADDED: Found my Bitcoin account again — which I’m confident everyone will be extremely excited about. Better still, my BTC 0.0005 is still sitting there securely. Phew!

The enlightenment failure has been to begin its analysis of property from the problem of justification. This not only throws it into immediate ideological contention, submitting it to politics, and thus to relentless left-drift, it also places insurmountable obstacles in the path of rigorous understanding. To depart from an axiom of legitimate original property acquisition through work, as Locke does, is already proto-Marxist in implication, resting on philosophically hopeless metaphor, such as that of ‘mixing’ labor with things. It is property that defines work (over against non-productive behavior), not the inverse. As Hurlock notes, Moldbug’s approach is the correct one. ‘Property’ — as a social category — is a legitimation of control. It cascades conceptually from sovereignty, and not from production.

These matters will inevitably become intellectually pressing, due to the current technocommercial restoration of money, exemplified by the innovation of Bitcoin (in its expansive sense, as the blockchain). Control is undergoing cryptographic formalization, from which all consistent apprehension of ‘property’ will follow. Property, in the end, is not sociopolitical recognition of rights, but keys. What you can lock and unlock is yours. The rest is merely more or less serious talk, that only contingently compiles. This is what hacker culture has already long understood in its specific (thedish) usage of ‘owned’. There’s no point crying to the government about having paid good money for your computer, if Nerdgodz or some other irritating 15-year-old is running it as a Bitcoin-mining facility from his mother’s basement. The concreteness of ‘might is right’ once looked like a parade ground, but increasingly it is running functional code.

Formalization isn’t a detached exercise in philosophical reflection, or even a sociopolitical and legal consensus, it’s functional technocommercial cryptography. Defining property outside the terms of this eventuation is an exercise in arbitrary sign-shuffling. Those with the keys can simply smile at the surrounding senseless noise. As Moldbug anticipates, with rigorously coded control, there’s nothing further to argue about.

ADDED: Three recommended links from Bitstein; Locke’s mistake, blockchained title, crypto and contracts (video discussion).

I claim, the sovereign is he who selects the null hypothesis. What is a null hypothesis? Have you ever seen the phrase “no evidence that”? For instance, there is no evidence that voter fraud has a significant impact on American elections.

Since the sovereign also sets the bar for how much evidence it takes to convince you otherwise, he can order you to believe in pretty much anything short of outright arithmetic violations. All he has to do is set the null hypothesis to his desired outcome, then set the burden of proof impossibly high. …

If you voted anything other than raw evil today, your democratic voice was cancelled out by a fictional zombie. Not that it remotely matters. (Radical corruption is the norm.)

ADDED: “One of the biggest voter frauds may be the idea promoted by Attorney General Eric Holder and others that there is no voter fraud …” Meta-fraud is the system.

ADDED: NRx-in-unlikely-places watch:

This election is not a shellacking. It’s a speed bump. The long arc of history bends toward an increasingly progressive electorate.

— Sally Kohn (@sallykohn) November 5, 2014

Believe it or not, even though Moldbug’s definition of the Left is basically the first thing he wrote about, there is a fair amount of debate about this topic in “reactionary” circles. This debate is sometimes referred to as The Puritan Question. (In addition to Puritan, Moldbug also uses the terms: Progressive idealism, ultra-Calvinism, crypto-Christian, Unitarian universalists, etc.)

It is no part of this blog’s brief to facilitate the more somnolent — and at times simply derisive — positionings which Moldbug’s diagnosis can appear to open. While our Catholic friends may consider themselves to be securely located outside the syndrome under consideration, this attitude corresponds, structurally, or systematically, to a minority position (irrespective of the numbers involved). As a dissident schismatic sect, the NRx main-current is cladistically enveloped by the object of its critique. ‘Calvinism’ — in its historical and theoretical extension — is a problematic horizon, within which NRx is embedded, before it can conceivably be construed as a despised object for dismissal.

More directly relevant to this slowly emerging sequence is the question of doom, employed as a Gnon-consistent super-category embracing fate and providence. Trivially, it is maintained here that the fundamental Calvinist challenge to the meaning of history and the final status of human agency has been in no way resolved over the course of its successive cladistic developments, but only evaded, marginalized, and effaced. At the level of philosophical clarity, no significant ‘progress’ has taken place. Certain questions, once found pressing, have merely been dropped, or quasi-randomly reformulated. Typically, a hazy tolerance for implicit cognitive discordance has replaced a prior condition of acute theological anguish. Modernist dissatisfaction with previously proposed religious solutions to certain profound metaphysical quandaries has been mistaken for the dissolution of these quandaries themselves. As invocations of ‘freedom’ become ever more deafening, conceptual purchase has steadily receded. An intoxicating — and more importantly narcotizing — mental cocktail of unconstrained private volition and naturalistic determinism is (absurdly) presumed to have obsoleted the historical dilemma of divine omnipotence and human free-will (or its philosophical proxy, time and temporalization). Discomforting problems that install uncertainty at the core of human self-comprehension are treated as embarrassing cultural relics, inherited from benighted ancestors, on those rare occasions when they impinge at all.

For Outside in, Calvinism remains an unexplored doom. Apprehended within its own terms, it is a providential occurrence whose sense remains sequestered within the secret counsel of God.

As fuel, three passages, taken from Chapters 15 and 16, Book 1, of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), the Henry Beveridge translation:

Book 1. Chapter 15.

8. Therefore, God has provided the soul of man with intellect, by which he might discern good from evil, just from unjust, and might know what to follow or to shun, reason going before with her lamp; whence philosophers, in reference to her directing power, have called her τὸ ἑγεμονικὸν. To this he has joined will, to which choice belongs. Man excelled in these noble endowments in his primitive condition, when reason, intelligence, prudence, and Judgment, not only sufficed for the government of his earthly life, but also enabled him to rise up to God and eternal happiness. Thereafter choice was added to direct the appetites, and temper all the organic motions; the will being thus perfectly submissive to the authority of reason. In this upright state, man possessed freedom of will, by which, if he chose, he was able to obtain eternal life. It were here unseasonable to introduce the question concerning the secret predestination of God, because we are not considering what might or might not happen, but what the nature of man truly was. Adam, therefore, might have stood if he chose, since it was only by his own will that he fell; but it was because his will was pliable in either directions and he had not received constancy to persevere, that he so easily fell. Still he had a free choice of good and evil; and not only so, but in the mind and will there was the highest rectitude, and all the organic parts were duly framed to obedience, until man corrupted its good properties, and destroyed himself. Hence the great darkness of philosophers who have looked for a complete building in a ruin, and fit arrangement in disorder. The principle they set out with was, that man could not be a rational animal unless he had a free choice of good and evil. They also imagined that the distinction between virtue and vice was destroyed, if man did not of his own counsel arrange his life. So far well, had there been no change in man. This being unknown to them, it is not surprising that they throw every thing into confusion. But those who, while they profess to be the disciples of Christ, still seek for free-will in man, notwithstanding of his being lost and drowned in spiritual destruction, labour under manifold delusion, making a heterogeneous mixture of inspired doctrine and philosophical opinions, and so erring as to both. But it will be better to leave these things to their own place (see Book 2 chap. 2) At present it is necessary only to remember, that man, at his first creation, was very different from all his posterity; who, deriving their origin from him after he was corrupted, received a hereditary taint. At first every part of the soul was formed to rectitude. There was soundness of mind and freedom of will to choose the good. If any one objects that it was placed, as it were, in a slippery position, because its power was weak, I answer, that the degree conferred was sufficient to take away every excuse. For surely the Deity could not be tied down to this condition,—to make man such, that he either could not or would not sin. Such a nature might have been more excellent; but to expostulate with God as if he had been bound to confer this nature on man, is more than unjust, seeing he had full right to determine how much or how little He would give. Why He did not sustain him by the virtue of perseverance is hidden in his counsel; it is ours to keep within the bounds of soberness. Man had received the power, if he had the will, but he had not the will which would have given the power; for this will would have been followed by perseverance. Still, after he had received so much, there is no excuse for his having spontaneously brought death upon himself. No necessity was laid upon God to give him more than that intermediate and even transient will, that out of man’s fall he might extract materials for his own glory.

Chapter 16.

2. … the Providence of God, as taught in Scripture, is opposed to fortune and fortuitous causes. By an erroneous opinion prevailing in all ages, an opinion almost universally prevailing in our own day — viz. that all things happen fortuitously, the true doctrine of Providence has not only been obscured, but almost buried. If one falls among robbers, or ravenous beasts; if a sudden gust of wind at sea causes shipwreck; if one is struck down by the fall of a house or a tree; if another, when wandering through desert paths, meets with deliverance; or, after being tossed by the waves, arrives in port, and makes some wondrous hair-breadth escape from death — all these occurrences, prosperous as well as adverse, carnal sense will attribute to fortune. But whose has learned from the mouth of Christ that all the hairs of his head are numbered (Mt. 10:30), will look farther for the cause, and hold that all events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God. With regard to inanimate objects again we must hold that though each is possessed of its peculiar properties, yet all of them exert their force only in so far as directed by the immediate hand of God. Hence they are merely instruments, into which God constantly infuses what energy he sees meet, and turns and converts to any purpose at his pleasure.

8. … we hold that God is the disposer and ruler of all things, — that from the remotest eternity, according to his own wisdom, he decreed what he was to do, and now by his power executes what he decreed. Hence we maintain, that by his providence, not heaven and earth and inanimate creatures only, but also the counsels and wills of men are so governed as to move exactly in the course which he has destined. What, then, you will say, does nothing happen fortuitously, nothing contingently? I answer, it was a true saying of Basil the Great, that Fortune and Chance are heathen terms; the meaning of which ought not to occupy pious minds. For if all success is blessing from God, and calamity and adversity are his curse, there is no place left in human affairs for fortune and chance. We ought also to be moved by the words of Augustine (Retract. lib. 1 cap. 1), “In my writings against the Academics,” says he, “I regret having so often used the term Fortune; although I intended to denote by it not some goddess, but the fortuitous issue of events in external matters, whether good or evil. Hence, too, those words, Perhaps, Perchance, Fortuitously, which no religion forbids us to use, though everything must be referred to Divine Providence. Nor did I omit to observe this when I said, Although, perhaps, that which is vulgarly called Fortune, is also regulated by a hidden order, and what we call Chance is nothing else than that the reason and cause of which is secret. It is true, I so spoke, but I repent of having mentioned Fortune there as I did, when I see the very bad custom which men have of saying, not as they ought to do, ‘So God pleased,’ but, ‘So Fortune pleased.’” In short, Augustine everywhere teaches, that if anything is left to fortune, the world moves at random. And although he elsewhere declares (Quæstionum, lib. 83). that all things are carried on, partly by the free will of man, and partly by the Providence of God, he shortly after shows clearly enough that his meaning was, that men also are ruled by Providence, when he assumes it as a principle, that there cannot be a greater absurdity than to hold that anything is done without the ordination of God; because it would happen at random. For which reason, he also excludes the contingency which depends on human will, maintaining a little further on, in clearer terms, that no cause must be sought for but the will of God. When he uses the term permission, the meaning which he attaches to it will best appear from a single passage (De Trinity. lib. 3 cap. 4), where he proves that the will of God is the supreme and primary cause of all things, because nothing happens without his order or permission. He certainly does not figure God sitting idly in a watch-tower, when he chooses to permit anything. The will which he represents as interposing is, if I may so express it, active (actualis), and but for this could not be regarded as a cause.

ADDED: In connection with some of the discussion taking place in the comment thread (below), this paragraph from Pope Benedict XVI’s (2006) Regensburg Lecture seems worth reproducing here: “Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living historical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics appeared as a premise derived from another source, from which faith had to be liberated in order to become once more fully itself. When Kant stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this programme forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality as a whole.”

In case anyone is somehow unclear about the quality of the neighborhood White Nationalism finds itself in, or adjacent to, it’s worth a brief composite citation from the Andrew Anglin post cited above:

You [Colin Liddell] agree with Jewish agendas, which is why you would wish to obfuscate the fact that Jews are responsible for everything by claiming we shouldn’t blame the Jews for our problems. … The reason these two [CL plus Greg Johnson] are on the same side against me is that they share the quality that they have no interest in a popular movement, and despise anyone who would attempt to take that route. … I am, unashamedly, a populist. Every successful revolutionary movement in history has been populist in nature … Hitler was a populist.

While I have to confess to finding Anglin entertaining, I hope it goes without saying that this kind of thinking has nothing at all to do with NRx. In fact, revolutionary populism almost perfectly captures what Neoreaction is not. NRx is notoriously fissiparous, but on the gulf dividing all its variants from racial Jacobinism there can surely be no controversy. So the barking you can hear in the background serves as necessary context. (This does not count as an objection to the Neo-Nazis acquiring their own state, since that would make it even easier not to live among them than it is already. Unfortunately, it is not easy to imagine the separatist negotiations going smoothly.)

Because everything further to be said on this topic is complicated, I’m restricting my ambitions here to a series of discussion points, roughly sketched:

(1) NRx diversity conflicts are considerably less heated than those presently gripping the WNs, in part — no doubt — because the immediate political stakes are even smaller. It nevertheless introduces a massively complicating factor. For those (not exclusively found in the Tech-Comm camp, but I suspect concentrated there) who consider Moldbug‘s work canonical, the distinction between NRx and White Nationalism (as also antisemitism) is already quite clearly defined. Among those of a predominantly Eth-Nat. inclination, on the other hand, far more border-blurriness exists.

(2) The relationship between White Nationalism and HBD is also complex. From outside, the two are regularly conflated, but this is a crude error. The zone of intersection — exemplified by Frank Salter (and perhaps Kevin MacDonald) — is characterized by a concern with ethnic genetic interests, but this is by no means an axiomatic theoretical or practical commitment among HBD bloggers. More typically, HBD-orientation is associated with cosmopolitan spirit of scientific neutrality, meritocratic elitism, and a suspicion of the deleterious consequences of inbreeding, often accompanied by a tendency to philosemitism and sinophilia. Racial solidarity does not follow necessarily from biorealism, but requires an extraneous political impulse. Whatever connection is forged between WN and HBD owes more to their common opposition to the West’s dominant Lysenkoism and Leftist (blank-slate, victimological) race politics than to any firm internal bond.

(3) The triangular linkages between NRX, WN, and libertarianism are also intricate. Consider this (fascinating) talk by Richard Spencer, to a libertarian audience, for a quick sense of the territory being navigated. The moment of dark enlightenment for libertarians tends to accompany the recognition that the cultural foundations of laissez-faire social arrangements have an extreme ‘ethnic’ specificity. This accommodation of right libertarians to neoreactionary ideas is not associated with a comparable approximation to White Nationalism, however, since the very ethnic characteristics being accentuated — the high-trust cosmopolitan openness of strongly outbred populations — are exactly those provoking WN despair as the roots of pathological altruism and ethnomasochism. (This is a ruinous paradox basic to the relevant ruminations here.)

(4) A closely-connected problem is that of cutting ethnies at the joints. (Within NRx, this is the thede topic.) While there are no doubt some neoreactionaries comfortable with the category of ‘whites’ as a positive thede, for others it seems far too broad — whether due to its inconsistency within any historical nation, its amalgamation of populations culturally divided by the Hajnal line, its aggregation across relatively hard regional, class, and ideological divisions, or generally because — almost without exception — the most bitter and ruthless enemy of any given group of white people has been another group of white people. When WNs speak of a ‘World Brotherhood of Europeans’ it strikes most neoreactionaries (I suspect) as scarcely less comical than an appeal for universal human brotherhood, since it blithely encompasses the most vicious and ineliminable antagonisms in the world.

(5) Finally (for now) there’s the relation of NRx to the ENR — already a grating concern, and (since the ENR is also already highly diverse) beyond the scope of anything but the most glancing treatment. From the perspective of this blog, the most aggravating figure is undoubtedly Alain de Benoist — whose brilliance is directed towards the most radical articulation of anti-capitalism to be found anywhere outside the Marxist tradition (and even within it). NRx Tech-Comms have the same level of sympathy for such ideas as they do for the legacy of Saloth Sar or Hugo Chavez, and insofar as they are proposed as an element of a potential coalition, the enterprise is immediately collapsed to a farce. This touches upon the wider concern that WN thinking often appears to skirt, and on occasions to overtly embrace, a simple racial socialism and thus by some definitions reduce to a leftist — even extreme leftist — ideology. Seen from Outside in, there are far superior prospects to be found in the realist darkening of right libertarians than in coalition-building with clear-eyed collectivists.

(6) Things we can agree upon without much difficulty: The dominant power structure is racially obsessed and (schizophrenically) committed to the effacement of all racial reality; racial differences have substantial social consequences; the native populations of historically white societies are being subjected to an ideological (and criminal) onslaught of deranged intensity; the legal concept of ‘disparate impact’ is fundamentally corrupt; universal prescriptions for the social, political, cultural, and economic arrangements of diverse groups are doomed to failure; ethnic separatism (of any kind) is a legitimate political aspiration; free association and freedom of conscience are principles to be unconditionally defended; science is not answerable to ideology; … this list could no doubt be extended. (I am more uncertain about whether there is anything here that either NRxers or WNs would want to deduct.)

Clearly, and in general, there is much more to be said about all of this, with every reason for confidence that it will be said.

ADDED: Gregory Hood on the First Identitarian Congress.

ADDED: Fred Reed on monstrous über-racist Jared Taylor.

ADDED: Only tangentially connected, but too eloquent to miss out on, Charles Murray on the 20th anniversary of The Bell Curve: “… the roof is about to crash in on those who insist on a purely environmental explanation of all sorts of ethnic differences, not just intelligence. Since the decoding of the genome, it has been securely established that race is not a social construct, evolution continued long after humans left Africa along different paths in different parts of the world, and recent evolution involves cognitive as well as physiological functioning. […] The best summary of the evidence is found in the early chapters of Nicholas Wade’s recent book, ‘A Troublesome Inheritance.’ We’re not talking about another 20 years before the purely environmental position is discredited, but probably less than a decade. What happens when a linchpin of political correctness becomes scientifically untenable? It should be interesting to watch. I confess to a problem with schadenfreude.”

We do not talk very much about Leo Strauss. Once again, there are some obvious reasons for this, but also others.

Steve Sailer’s recent Takimag article on Strauss makes for a convenient introduction, because — despite its light touch — it moves a number of issues into place. The constellation of voices is complex from the start. There is the (now notorious) ‘Neo-Conservatism’ of Strauss and his disciples, or manipulators, and the other conservatism of Sailer, each working to manage, openly and in secret, its own peculiar mix of public statement and discretion. Out beyond them — because even the shadowiest figures have further shadows — are more alien, scarcely perceptible shapes.

Sailer’s article is typically smart, but also deliberately crude. It glosses the Straussian idea of esoteric writing as “talking out of both sides of your mouth” — as if hermetic traditionalism were reducible to a lucid political strategy, or simple conspiracy — to ‘Illuminism’, politically conceived. In the wake of its Neo-Con trauma, conservatism has little patience for “secret decoder rings”. Yet, despite his aversion to the recent workings of inner-circle ‘conservative’ sophisticates, Sailer does not let his distaste lure him into stupidity:

We haven’t heard much about Straussianism lately due to the unfortunate series of events in Iraq that befell the best-laid plans of the sages. But that doesn’t mean that Strauss was necessarily wrong about the ancients. And that has interesting implications for how we should read current works.

As the approaching 20th anniversary of the publication of The Bell Curve reminds us, the best minds of our age have reasons for being less than wholly frank.

Sailer is not, of course, a neoreactionary. Not even secretly. (That is what his article is primarily about.) He believes in the public sphere, and seeks to heal it with honesty. Any pessimism he might harbor in regards to this ambition falls far short of the dark scission that would hurl him over the line. His differences with the Straussians are, in the end, merely tactical. Both retain confidence in the Outer Party as a vehicle for policy promotion, with the potential to master the public sphere. The question is only about the degree of deviousness this will require (minimal for Sailer, substantial for the Straussians).

When adopted into Neoreaction, the HBD current has an altogether more corrosive influence upon attitudes to the public sphere, which is understood as a teleologically cohesive (or self-organizing), inherently directional, and (from ‘our’ perspective) radically hostile social agency. To baptize the public sphere as ‘the Cathedral’ is to depart from conservatism. It is no longer possible to imagine it as a space that could be conquered — even surreptitiously — by forces differing significantly from those it already incarnates. It is what it is, and that is something historically singular, ideologically specific, and highly determined in its social orientation. It swims left, essentially. The public sphere is not the battlefield, but the enemy.

As NRx seeks to navigate this hostile territory, it is tempted ambiguously, by a strategic Scylla and Charybdis. A populist lure drags it towards a reconciliation with the public sphere, as something it could potentially dominate, while a contrary hermetic politics guides it towards the formation of closed groups (whose parodic symbol is the locked twitter account). Both options — ‘clearly’ — are a flight from the complexity of the integral open secret. They both promise a relaxation of semiotic stress, through collapse of multi-level communication into a simplified frank discourse, whether implanted within a redeemed public culture, or circulated cautiously within restricted circles. The problem of hierarchy would be extracted from the signs of Neoreaction, through conversion into a public or private object, rather than working them incessantly from within. What is underway would become (simply) clear.

Such clarity cannot happen. The alternative is not an (equally simple) obscurity. NRx, insofar as it continues to propagate, advances by becoming clear and also unclear. Double writing scarcely scratches the surface. It realizes hierarchy through signs, continuously, in accordance with Providence, or the Occult Order of nature (the OOon). To assume that the author is fully initiated into this spectrum of meanings is a grave error. It is the process that speaks, multiplicitously, and predominantly in secret, as it spreads across an open, publicly-policed space.

This post is now determined to slip the leash, and leap into the raggedness of thematic notes. The Open Secret intersects:

(1) Cathedral censure, in the case of HBD most prominently, but also everywhere that fired-up SJWs make a fight. War is deception, which makes frankness a tactic. Deontological honesty is inept. Anonymity is often crucial to survival. (Demands that all enemies of the Cathedral boldly ‘come out’ are ludicrously misconceived.) Camouflage is to be treasured.

(2) Crypto-technologies are central to any NRx concerns emphasizing practicality. (The idea that classic Moldbug attention to the prospects of ‘crypto-locking’ is a joke, it itself thoughtless.) Urbit — an Open Secret — could quite easily be more NRx than NRx, just as Bitcoin is more An-Cap than Anarcho-Capitalism.

(3) The intelligence services have been under-theorized, and perhaps even under-solicited, by NRx to date. At the lowest, i.e. most publicly accessible — level of discussion, this is quite possibly a virtue. At more cryptic levels of micro-social and analytical endeavor, it is almost certainly an inadequacy. People trained to keep secrets have to be interesting to us. Subtle questions of subversion arise.

(4) “Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Saviour.” — Let’s try not to be simple-minded.

pic.twitter.com/aSnoz9Om20

— Greg (@FoolishReporter) August 23, 2014

Perhaps all significant ideological distinctions — at the level of philosophical abstraction — can be derived from this proposition. For the progressive, it represents the purest expression of history’s “moral arc“. For the Conservative (or, more desperately, the Reactionary), it describes an unfolding historical catastrophe. For the Neoreactionary, it indicates a problem in need of theorization. Moldbug lays out the problem in this (now classic) formulation:

Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left. Isn’t that interesting?

Where is the John Birch Society, now? What about the NAACP? Cthulhu swims left, and left, and left. There are a few brief periods of true reaction in American history — the post-Reconstruction era or Redemption, the Return to Normalcy of Harding, and a couple of others. But they are unusual and feeble compared to the great leftward shift.

The specific Moldbuggian solution to this problem, whether approached historically through the Ultra-Calvinism Thesis, or systemically through the analysis of the Cathedral, invokes a dynamic model of Occidental religious modernization. The irreversible bifurcations, symmetry breaks, or schisms that lock Western modernity into its “great leftward shift” correspond to successive episodes of cladistic fission within Protestant Christianity (abstractly understood). The religious history of modernity is constituted by a degenerative ratchet (as touched upon here, 1, 2, 3).

Discussing a recent critique of the Euro by Keith Humphreys, Megan McArdle converges upon the same insight. She writes:

As a longtime euroskeptic, who has frequently flirted with the idea that the euro must eventually destroy itself, I am sympathetic to Humphreys’ point. But let me attempt to offer a partial defense of the hapless eurocrats: However stupid the creation of the euro was, undoing it will not be easy. […] Yes, we’re back to our old friend path dependence. As I noted the other day, the fact that you can avoid some sort of terrible fate by stopping something before it starts does not mean that you can later achieve the same salutary effects by ceasing whatever stupid thing you have done. It would have been painless just to not have the euro. But it will be painful indeed to get rid of it.

She encounters the signature nonlinearities of such lock-in phenomena in noting: “No wonder that no one wants even to discuss it. Especially since even discussing a dissolution of the euro area makes a crisis more likely …”

Progressivism as a process, rather than a mere attitude, is always and everywhere a matter of degenerative ratchets. Consider, very briefly, some of the most prominent examples:

(1) Democratization. Every extension of the franchise is effectively irreversible. This is why the promotion of democratic reform in Hong Kong, in a complete rupture from its local traditions, is so breathtakingly irresponsible. (No link, because I have yet to encounter an article on the subject worthy of recommendation.)

(2) Welfare systems (and positive rights in general). The irreversibility of these socio-economic innovations is widely recognized. Once implemented, they cannot be rolled back without the infliction of massive suffering. Obamacare is a more-or-less cynical attempt to exploit this lock-in dynamic.

(3) Immigration. Welcoming newcomers is effortless, removing them all-but impossible (or at least entirely unprecedented in the modern West). Immigration policy, by its nature, can only “swim left”. It consists of freezes and floods (but never reversals) — epitomizing the ratchet pattern.

(4) Macroeconomic politicized money (central banking, fiat currency, inflationary normalization, and debt financing). Easing is easy, tightening is terrifying, roll back unattempted (since Jackson in the mid-19th century).

My contention: There is no substantial topic of Neoreactionary concern that does not conform to this basic pattern. The degenerative ratchet is the problem, abstractly conceived.

This is why NRx is dark. The only way out of a degenerative ratchet is catastrophe. Such processes are essentially unreformable, and this conclusion captures the critique of political conservatism from which NRx has been born. The only non-disastrous solution to a DR, or progressive lock-in dynamic, is to avoid entering into it. Once it has begun, normal politics can only modulate the speed of deterioration, and then only to a relatively limited degree. It will reach its end, which will be seriously horrible. NRx forecasting begins and ends with this thesis.

Our doomsterism is not a psychological tic, but a rigorous theoretical obligation. It follows, ineluctably, from iron historical law. Looking on the dark side is the only way to see.

Government is complicated. If this thesis seems implausible to you, it is probable that you will have great difficulties with everything to follow. It would take another (and quite different) post to address objections to this entire topic of discussion which take the approximate form “Government is easy, you just find the best man and put him in charge!” All social problems are easy if you can ‘just’ do the right thing. Infantile recommendations will always be with us.

There are two general lines of democratic apologetics. The first, and politically by far the strongest, is essentially religious. It too is best addressed by a post of its own, themed by Moldbug’s ‘Ultra-Calvinist Hypothesis’. For our purposes here we need only suggest that it is quite satisfactorily represented by Jacques Rousseau, and that it’s fundamental principal is popular sovereignty. From the NRx perspective, it is merely depraved. Only civilizational calamities can come from it.

The second line of apology is far more serious, theoretically engaging, and politically irrelevant. It understands democracy as a mechanism, tasked with the solemn responsibility of controlling government. Any effective control mechanism works by governing behavior under the influence of feedback from actual performance. In biology, this is achieved by natural selection upon phenotypes. In science, it is achieved by the experimental testing of theory, supported by a culture of open criticism. In capitalist economics, it is achieved by market evaluation of products and services, providing feedback on business performance. According to systems-theoretical defenses of democracy, it works by sensitizing government to feedback from voters, who act as conductors of information from actual administrative performance. This is the sophisticated liberal theory of democracy. It explains why science, markets, and democracy are often grouped together within liberal ideologies. (Bio-Darwinism, naturally, is more safely neglected).

How could this beautiful political design possibly go wrong? Merely by asking this question, you have set out on the Neoreactionary path.

Moldbug’s answer, and ours, begins by agreeing with the sophisticated liberal theory in its most abstract outlines. Democracy is indeed a system for the functional tuning of government, operating through electoral feedback, and predictably enhancing its specialized competence, as all reiterating experimentation-selection mechanisms do. Democratic political machines become increasingly good at what they do. The problem, however, is that their functional specialism is not at all identical with administrative capability. Rather, as they progressively learn, the feedback they receive trains them in mastery of public opinion.

The long-circuit, assumed by liberal political theory, models the electorate as a reality-sensor, aggregating information about the effects of government policy, and relaying it back through opinion polls and elections, to select substitutable political regimes (organized as parties) that have demonstrated their effectiveness at optimizing social outcomes. The short-circuit, proposed by Moldbug, models the electorate as an object of indoctrination, subjected to an ever-more advanced process of opinion-formation through a self-organized, message-disciplined educational and media apparatus. The political party best adapted to this apparatus — called the ‘inner party’ by Moldbug — will dominate the democratic process. The outer party serves the formal cybernetic function demanded by liberal theory, by providing an electoral option, but it will achieve practical success only by accommodating itself to the apparatus of opinion-formation — perhaps modifying its recommendations in minor, and ultimately inconsequential ways. It is the system of opinion-formation (the ‘Cathedral’) that represents true sovereign authority within the democratic system, since it is the ‘reality principle’ which decides success or failure. The monotonic trend to short-circuit dominance is the degenerative process inherent to democracy.

If you want the government to listen to you, then you have to expect it to tell you what to say. That is the principal lesson of ‘progressive’ political history. The assertion of popular voice has led, by retrospective inevitability, to a specialized, super-competent political devotion to ventriloquism. The disaster, therefore, is two-fold. On the one hand, government competence in its primary responsibility — efficient governance — is systematically eroded, to be replaced by a facility at propaganda (in a process akin to the accumulation of junk DNA). As government is swallowed by messaging, residual administrative competences are maintained by a bureaucratic machine or ‘permanent government’, largely insulated from the increasingly senseless signals of democratic opinion, but still assimilated to the opinion-formation establishment by direct (extra-democratic) processes of cultivation. Lacking feedback from anything but its own experiments in mind-control, quality of government collapses.

Secondly, and even more calamitously from certain perspectives, culture is devastated by the politicization of opinion. Under a political dispensation in which opinion has no formal power, it is broadly free to develop in accordance with its own experiences, concerns, and curiosities. In a significant minority of cases, cultural achievements of enduring value result. Only in cases of extreme, provocative dissent will the government have any interest in what the people think. Once politicized, however, correct public opinion is a matter of central — indeed all-consuming — government attention. Ideologically installed as the foundation of political legitimacy, it becomes the supreme object of political manipulation. Any thought is now dissent if it is not positively aligned with society’s leading political direction. To think outside the Cathedral is to attack the government. Culture is destroyed.

To be a Neoreactionary is to see these twin eventualities starkly manifested in contemporary Western civilization. What democracy has not yet ruined, it is ruining. It is essentially destructive of both government and culture. It cannot indefinitely last.

The subsequent question: What could conceivably provide a solution? That is where Neocameralism is introduced.

ADDED: Absolutely not to be missed, from Nydwracu.