Matthew Opitz has put up an insightful post at Less Wrong, attempting to make sense of Neoreaction through contrast with Progressivism. Given the great internal diversity of NRx, combined with its embryonic stage of self-formulation (in many respects), the lucidity Opitz brings to the topic is no slight achievement. His post is among the most impressive Ideological Turing Test performances I have yet seen.

The core paragraph (among much else of great interest):

Neoreaction says, “There is objective value in the principle of “perpetuating biological and/or civilizational complexity” itself*; the best way to perpetuate biological and/or civilizational complexity is to “serve Gnon” (i.e. devote our efforts to fulfilling nature’s pre-requisites for perpetuating our biologial and/or civilizational complexity); our subjective values are spandrels manufactured by natural selection/Gnon; insofar as our subjective values motivate us to serve Gnon and thereby ensure the perpetuation of biological and/or civilizational complexity, our subjective values are useful. (For example, natural selection makes sex a subjective value by making it pleasurable, which then motivates us to perpetuate our biological complexity). But, insofar as our subjective values mislead us from serving Gnon (such as by making non-procreative sex still feel good) and jeopardize our biological/civilizational perpetuation, we must sacrifice our subjective values for the objective good of perpetuating our biological/civilizational complexity” (such as by buckling down and having procreative sex even if one would personally rather not enjoy raising kids).

Most LessWrongers probably agree with neoreactionaries on this fundamental normative assumption, with the typical objective good of LessWrongers being “human complexity/Godshatter,” and thus the “techno-commercialist” wing of neoreaction being the one that typically finds the most interest among LessWrongers.

Opitz’s ‘Godshatter’ reference link.

XoS will do its best to follow this discussion as it goes forward.

This attractively odd thing might be found at least vaguely relevant.

There are many, I know, who find obstinate invocations of NRx — as a micro-slogan, cultural brand, conflictual stance, or Schelling point — to be crude at best, and perhaps thoroughly deluded, or worse. It is as if, having tumbled into a vogue, one has become enthralled by it, locked into stuttering, mechanical, thoughtless repetition. Those most skeptical about the sign are most likely disposed to mournfulness about it, whether decrying it for congenital flaws, or lamenting its loss of intellectual productivity and direction.

Obviously, I disagree. NRx is still a cultural infant, far younger than the Millennium, even under the most mythically-creative extension of its genesis, and the cognitive ferment it catalyzes remains extraordinary. It has still scarcely begun. The ties of a consistent name are the very least that are required to concentrate it. NRx, whatever it turns out to be, needs lashing together, because explosions tend to fly apart — and it is unmistakably an explosion.

Creative coincidence, or convergent diversity, is the mark of a culture at work (which is to say, in process). Yesterday, September 3, demonstrated this vividly. Approaching the conclusion of a multi-aspected post on Dugin, ethnicity, religion, and the “dementia’ of being, NIO suggests:

Referring to Chaos would seem in this circumstance to be an option of incredible potential, indeed, if you look closely enough at NRx the hints are already there that Chaos is a central defining characteristic of the thought of all branches of the Trichotomy on multiple levels. Chaos creates order, in fact Chaos is also a form of order, just one which is not immediately understandable. [I will not fake an apology for the self-looping internal link, since it it is one that would in any case have been made here.]

Recalling that NIO explicitly invokes the ontological depths of Chaos — its Hesiodic as well as metaphysical density — it is especially remarkable to find, on the same day, an intricate post by E. Antony Gray, which advances an innovative tripartite schema as the key to the aesthetic core of NRx. This text, too, culminates in a call for an integrative expedition into chaos, staged out of the void:

… the ‘face of the deep’ in Genesis is a primordial unformed, unseen void; That it is called ‘water’ in the Septuagint Greek lets us know something about the peculiar state of Chaos in the Void. The Void is thus Darkness but not shadow (a shadow is a deprivation of light caused by an object) but rather the substrate of all existence, only properly ‘unseen’ when no physical light is present. [… ] Chaos is substantial where disorder is insubstantial. Chaos is the ‘quintessence’ of things, chaotic itself and yet always-begetting order. Breaking down disorder, since disorder is maladaptive. Exit is a way to induce bifurcation, to quickly reduce entropy through separation from the highly entropic system. If no immediate exit is available, Chaos will create one.

To denounce the exhaustion of NRx is an absurdity. It is an exploratory departure, scarcely initiated. To cling to its sign is to subscribe to its impulse, and to set out …

This insisted on being stolen. It made itself irresistible by its sheer Amishlessness:

(via Derek Hopper)

Rather than cathedrals, the East Asian cities that enthrall this blog tend to nurture temples to self-cultivation and ultimate cosmic nullity among their LED-skinned hypermodern edifices of capitalist darkness. Yet, despite the difference in religious heritage, the split-time signature is precisely the same. Neoreaction diverges from Paleoreaction insofar as it coincides with the understanding: Tradition is not something one can ever simply hold on to, or to which one can truly return. The Neoreactionary city is a standing time-spiral in process.

Eli Dourado’s piece at The Umlaut on ‘What the Neoreaction Doesn’t Understand about Democracy’ has already accumulated a mass of (to this blog) telling criticism in its comment thread, plus a full-length critique by Henry Dampier. The tone of the discussion has been encouraging, and the grounds proposed by Dourado upon which democracy is asked to defend itself (government incontinence and rampant redistributionism) is doubly so. Based on this (rather odd) research paper, the conclusion is that ‘non-democracies’ are at least as messed up as democracies on the indicators that matter to the economic right.

From the perspective of Outside in, the central problem with this line of argument is the assumption that ‘Neoreaction’ can be aligned with the grotesquely aggregated category of ‘non-democracy’. (Although, this is of course how things will look from a default commitment to democratic normality.) The Neoreactionary critique is in fact directed at demotic government, a regime class that includes democracy, authoritarian populism, and socialist ‘people’s republics’. The reliable signature of this class is that its members legitimate themselves through democracy, however their various levels of democracy are gauged by social scientific analysis. North Korea self-identifies as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (and to a formalist, this is of ineliminable significance). Since it is the principle of democratic legitimation that NRx denounces, its models are restricted to a far more compact class than ‘non-democracies’ — namely, to non-demotic states: with absolute monarchies and colonial regimes as the purest historical examples, supplemented by restricted-franchise commercial republics (17-18th century United Provinces and United Kingdom*), (still virtual) Joint-Stock Republics, and demotically-compromised Confucian Autocracies, plus rightist military juntas (since Pinochet cannot reasonably be excluded). As soon as regimes of such types are statistically amalgamated with socialist / populist dictatorships, the theoretical chaos is irredeemable.

Furthermore, and even more crucially, main-current Neoreaction does not argue for ‘non-democracy’ over democracy, but for Exit over Voice. It does not expect some governmental magic from ‘non-democracies’ (except on its — admittedly wide — theoretically incoherent fringes). Effective government requires non-demotic control, resulting from (apolitical) selection pressure. The identification of the state with the corporate institution is directed to the fact that businesses work when they can be bankrupted. The attraction of the ‘dictatorial’ CEO is a twin-product of demotic desensitization and competitive hyper-sensitization. The reason to free the ‘monarch’ from the voice of the people is to lock him into undistracted compliance with the Outside.

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… William S. Lind asks in this recent panel discussion (third speaker, just after 43 minutes in). “The foreign policy establishment, or the country?” The relevant thread of his argument: The aggressive foreign policy posture of the United States is counter-productively promoting global disorder, which eventually threatens domestic calamity. When the US fights a foreign state, Lind argues, it advances the chaotic “forces of the fourth generation” — a more formidable opponent than even the most obdurately non-compliant state is able to be. America’s “offensive grand strategy” — tied to a high-level of concern for the internal political arrangements of foreign countries — is sowing dragon’s teeth.

TNIO has been coaxing NRx onto a path of broadened geopolitical scope. There is an unavoidable irony here. The Old Right tends naturally to a preoccupation with hearth-and-home, so that its preferred policy posture (non-interventionism) is often accompanied by — or even buried within — a retraction of mental energy from distant questions. The Neoconservative synthesis of foreign policy activism and cosmopolitan fascination with foreign affairs is far more psychologically consistent, regardless of its errors. For anti-globalists to sustain a panoramic perspective takes work.

This work is important, if realistic analysis is the goal, because distant eventualities hugely impinge. The existence and fate of Neoreaction depends far more upon the great churning machinery of world history than upon the local decisions of its favored ‘little platoons’. To misquote Lenin: Even if you are not interested in the system of the world, it is interested in you.

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Recent discussions (on Twitter, primarily) have convinced me of the need for a ‘Neocameralism for Dummies’ post, providing a succinct introduction to this genre of political theory. The importance of this is obvious if Neocameralism is conceived as the central, and defining pillar of Neoreaction. In preparation for this task, however, it is necessary to revisit the socio-historical diagnosis from which Neocameralism emerged (in the work, of course, of Mencius Moldbug). That requires a brief prolegomenon addressing the NRx critique of democracy, focusing initially on its negative aspect. Neocameralism is introduced as a proposed solution to a problem. First, the problem.

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).

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The Umlaut has long been doing an embarrassing amount of our thinking for us, and perhaps even more of our controversy. The latest installment, by Dalibor Rohac, is here. The connections it makes are frankly disturbing to this blog, whose pro-capitalist, post-libertarian, and general Atlantean sympathies have been pushed as hard as realistically possible, along with an explicit attempt at differentiation from those tendencies with an opposite — I would argue self-evidently anti-Moldbuggian — valency. It is going to be difficult to condemn conflations of NRx with the ENR for so long as the ‘voice’ of Neoreaction includes remarks of this kind:

.@DaliborRohac is scared by nationalist stirrings. https://t.co/OhzEVKTBsR

— Michael Anissimov (@MikeAnissimov) August 6, 2014

NRx, across its whole spectrum, is neither libertarian nor fascist. There is, however, a remarkable polarity — our axis of fission — which is based upon which of these associations is found most disreputable. From my perspective, this distinction lines up extremely neatly with Alexander Dugin’s Hyperborean / Atlantean continental forever war. It seems to me beyond any serious question that the inheritance from Mencius Moldbug lies unproblematically on the Atlantean side of this divide. The standing Outside in prophecy is that, by the end of this year, a definitive break along these lines will have taken place. There’s no reason I can see to back-track on that expectation.

ADDED: “One could see a situation in which libertarian inattentiveness to political concerns, in the face of masses of people that are growing frustrated with democracy, abets extremism. If freedom and democracy are incompatible, like Peter Thiel thinks, it is important to articulate ways to preserve freedom.”

I’ll assume everyone has read and digested Scott Alexander’s description of Motte and Bailey arguments. It’s extremely useful. (So much so, it’s probably fated to undergo compression to ‘M&B positions’ at some stage.)

The NRx versions of these are extremely trying. Most grating, from the perspective of this blog, are the Feudalism (Monarchism) examples. These have a strong motte, roughly of the form “by ‘feudalism’ we mean structures of decentralized hierarchical tradition, antedating state bureaucratization (and by ‘monarchism’ we mean a CEO with undivided powers)”. In predictable M&B style, these then dilate into a ramshackle set of formless nostalgias, bizarre dreams for a universal return to rural life, with ‘the Olde Kinges will return’ fantasies substituted for a realistic engagement with modernity, plus much arm-wrestling and ale. My strong temptation is to burn out the motte and forget the whole thing. There’s certainly far more to be lost from the latter associations, than to be gained from the former.

Listen to this interview with Marc Andreessen if you get a chance. There’s a lot of fascinating material there. Perhaps most crucial to this ‘point’ — he understands that the combination of peripheral economic development, advanced mobile telephony, and precipitously falling prices, is basically putting the equivalent of a 1970s supercomputer into everyone‘s hands in the very near future. You can already buy a smartphone for $35, and denizens of developing countries express a preference for these gizmos over indoor plumbing. It’s not so much a prediction then, more an acknowledgement of final-phase installed fact. This is the world that realistic socio-political analysis has to address.

However NRx gets sub-divided, can I please not be in the part that foregrounds the return of jousting as a pressing cultural issue. The challenges and opportunities of planetary-saturation Cyberspace is the topic that matters.

As argued here before, Outside in firmly maintains that the distinctive structural feature of NRx analysis is escalation by a logical level. It could be described as ‘meta-politics’ if that term had not already been adopted, by thinkers in the ENR tradition, to mean something quite different (i.e. the ascent from politics to culture). There’s an alternative definition at Wikipedia that also seems quite different. This congested linguistic territory drives NRx to talk about Neocameralism, or Meta-Neocameralism — the analysis of Patchwork regimes.

From this perspective, all discussion of concrete social ideals and first-order political preferences, while often entertaining, locally clarifying, and practical for purposes of group construction, is ultimately trivial and distracting. The fundamental question does not concern the kind of society we might like, but rather the differentiation of societies, such that distinctive social models are able — in the first place — to be possible. The rigorous NRx position is lodged at the level of disintegration as such, rather than within a specific disintegrated fragment. This is because, first of all, there will not be agreement about social ideals. To be stuck in an argument about them is, finally, a trap.

Is this not simply Dynamic Geography, of the Patri Friedman type? As a parallel post-libertarian ‘meta-political’ framework, it is indeed close. The thing still missing from Dynamic Geography (as currently intellectually instantiated), however, is Real Politik (or Machiavellianism). It assumes an environment of goodwill, in which rational experimentation in government will be permitted. The Startup Cities model, as well as its close relative Charter Cities, have similar problems. These are all post-libertarian analyses of governance, at a high logical level, but — unlike NRx — they are not rooted in a social conflict theory. They expect to formulate themselves to the point of execution without the necessity of a theoretical and practical encounter with an implacable enemy. ‘Irrational’ obstruction tends to confuse them. By talking about the Cathedral, from the beginning, NRx spares itself from such naivety. (Sophisticated conflict theory within the libertarian tradition has to be sought elsewhere.)

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Arthur Chu wasn’t prepared to put in the work to write the worst NRx-denunciation screed yet, but he’s done his best. Too many absurd errors to enumerate, and AC proudly declared on twitter that life’s too short to bother with right-wing garbage like facts. Still, the spreading menace has reached The Daily Beast now. (They just can’t stop themselves.)

@j_arthur_bloom Yes, I have only abt 50 yrs left to live on this earth if I'm lucky, not going to spend it nodding thoughtfully at racists

— Arthur Chu (@arthur_affect) August 1, 2014

(In context it’s easier to recognize that “nodding thoughtfully at racists” is a cute way of saying ‘reading stuff’.)

ADDED: This (from the article) is morbidly intriguing:

I’ve known who Moldbug was since he was just starting his career of intellectual trolling … […] I’ve known about the “neoreactionaries” a lot longer, before they were given that name—back when they were just teenagers on the Internet, like me, furious that there were people less intelligent than us who dared tell us what to do. […] I never bought into the ideology fully, but I understand its appeal.

A smidgen of identification? Careful Arthur, that could be very dangerous.

ADDED: More on JT at The Daily Dot. (Still more, at Twitchy.)