(Weekly open thread.)

Alexander Dugin has an unmatched ability to throw me into a thede-spasm. When he talks about the Atlantean enemies of his people, it’s absolutely impossible for me not to recognize them as my folks. He’s like the Hyperborean double of Walter Russell Mead in that way.

In that vein, I was musing about a death-bed thede-moment competition. Which three books do you have at your bedside to provide ideal thede-coloration to your final moments? (In the old English radio program Desert Island Discs, The Bible and Complete Shakespeare were thrown in for free. Make that the KJV bible, and it seems to me an obvious part of the Anglo-thede core — so the Outside in show will provide them too.) My selection: Paradise Lost; The Wealth of Nations; and An Essay on the Principle of Population. Those are the works to take a nuke from Dugin for.

More enemies.

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The word ‘neoreaction’ is a split, productively paradoxical formula, simultaneously referencing two incompatible cultural formations, each corresponding to an abstract model of time. On one side, it is a gateway opening onto techno-libertarian hyper-progressivism, and an order of time structured by irreversible accumulation, self-envelopment, and catastrophe horizon (Singularity). On the other, it opens onto the temporality of reaction and the cycle, where all progress is illusion, and all innovation anticipated. Within NRx, the time of escape and the time of return seek an obscure synthesis, at once unprecedented and primordial, whose cryptic figure is the spiral. (This is the time of the Old Ones and the Outside, from which the shoggoth come.) If NRx thinks itself already lodged articulately in this synthesis, it deludes itself.

From a strictly philosophical perspective, the time of reaction finds no defender more able than Archdruid John Michael Greer. while his specific form of religious traditionalism, his social attitudes, and his eco-political commitments are all profoundly questionable from the standpoint of throne-and altar reaction, his model of time cannot be surpassed in an Old Right direction. Those who would install a prejudice of relentless degeneration in its place, anchored by a revealed religion of recent creation and subsequent continuous fall, only position themselves to the ‘right’ of Greer by making God a revolutionary. If deep time is to be preserved, there can be no archaic authority beyond the cycle.

Why call Greer a reactionary? It is not, after all, a label he would accept for himself. The answer lies in cyclical time, and everything that follows from it: the supremacy of wisdom among human things, the enduring authority of history, the dismissal of modernist pretension as a mere mask for deep historical repetition, an absolute disillusionment with progress, and an adamantine prognosis that — from the peak of fake ‘improvement’ where we find ourselves — a grinding course of decline over coming centuries is an inevitability. The cultural and political decoration can be faulted, but in the fundamental structure of Greer’s thinking, reaction is perfected.

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There’s been a lot of this kind of thing around recently. It’s mainly been arriving in a link storm from Wagner Clemente Soto, who’s too unambiguously Throne-and-Altar in orientation to identify as NRx or 333, so it’s probably an exercise in internal discipline taking place in another camp. Still, it’s difficult not to ask: Could this be the next fission pile building up?

Here‘s a link to Jörg Guido Hülsman’s (excellent) Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism, which seems to have provided the background citations for the recent round of attacks. (This agitation always takes me back to Der Zauberberg.)

ADDED: Or is it “Moses to Mises”?

ADDED: NBS provides a useful ‘Capitalism Week’ round-up.

ADDED: A (loosely) connected argument from Brett Stevens.

Among the very many reasons to revere Jim is that he doesn’t mess about.

There’s a sizable constituency on the ‘alt right’ whose self-understood differentiation from the Marxist left is entirely reducible to its own heightened appreciation for authoritarian hierarchy and racial solidarity. Since actually existing Marxist-Leninist regimes have been, uniformly, authoritarian-hierarchical ethno-nationalists, this isn’t in fact the basis for any real difference at all.

ADDED: What I’m seeing —

Rx: "Capitalism has to be crushed beneath the boots of the state." NRx: "That sounds like communism." Rx: "HAVE YOU EVEN READ EVOLA!?"

— Outsideness (@Outsideness) June 28, 2014

Nick B. Steves defines ‘Neoreactionary‘ for the Urban Dictionary, with concision, clarity, and accuracy. Altogether, a valuable and well-executed piece of work. The format comes in two parts, with an initial definition, followed by an example of usage. This one begins:

Neoreactionary. A new reactionary; typically one coming to reactionary ideas and conclusions by way of post-libertarian and/or post-anarchist paths; like traditional reactionaries one who is profoundly anti-progressive and suspicious of all egalitarian ideologies, but often more focused on free market capitalism as a solution to, or escape from, social ills than his ethnic or religious identitarian forebears; often, but not exclusively, one influenced by the writings of several well-known reactionary bloggers in the 2007-present timeframe.

With some breakfast-table usage exemplified:

As a natural conservative Bill sympathized with part of the agenda of the Center Right party, but as a neoreactionary he knew that it was merely an ineffectual brake on the progress of the left. He advocated for a new yet very ancient politics in which traditional give and take politics no longer was a factor.

Congratulations to NBS. This kind of practical workmanship does a lot to hold things together. It’s sanity glue.

… there’s something happening that might even be bigger than Project Idaho.

With two weeks left to go before electoral results are in, the world’s largest democracy seems set to veer hard right, to an extent unprecedented in its modern history. There’s a leftish but informative briefing on the ideological stakes at Quartz.

NRx has nothing to teach me about hats.

NRx tends to be quite insular, often out of semi-articulate principle, so nobody (other than enemies) seems to have paid much attention to this yet. That’s odd, upon reflection, because the Modi BJP seems to be juggling Trichotomy issues of a familiar kind within its Hindutva platform, which glues together a quasi-stable raft of religious, ethno-nationalist, and capitalistic elements into an explicitly reactionary-modernizing coalition. When the 21st century is allotted to Asia, it’s for a reason. The West’s vague premonitions are urgent practicalities there.

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With all coherent productivity sucked into a knotty accelerationism essay at the moment, some fragments:

Fission update — apparently the geniuses in the NRx peanut gallery are now convinced that Justine Tunney has usurped Michael Anissimov in his universally-acknowledged holy office as God-Emperor of the New Reaction. Anissimov, to his great credit, is bemused. Is this stuff going to burn out in its own radiant insanity, or amplify to some yet unimagined level of crazy? The responsible option would be to abandon the ship of fools now, but it’s way too entertaining for that. Signalling some distance is becoming absolutely imperative, however.

One point that has to be emphasized with renewed fervor is the absolute priority of territorial fragmentation to any line of NRx discussion which begins to imagine itself ‘political’. Universalist models of the good society are entirely inconsistent with NRx at its foundations, and to turn such differences into political argument is to have wandered hopelessly off script. The whole point of neoreactionary social arrangements is to eliminate political argument, replacing it with practical problems of micro-migration. Facilitating homelands for one’s antagonists is even more important than designing them for one’s friends. (Even the old Republic of South Africa knew that — although it botched the execution.) Geographical sorting dispels dialectics.

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Brett Stevens (of the Amerika blog, @amerika_blog)  has gone super-nova on Twitter in a way that screams impending burn-out, but for the moment he’s a source of superb commentary and linkage. Among very recent gems, these two pieces, raising questions about the restoration of sophisticated teleological ideas within natural science.

Why does life resist disorder? #entropy http://t.co/GGMrjqv4bq

— Brett Stevens (@amerika_blog) May 1, 2014

Also, another two on the Cathedralization of SF literary institutions, unfolding in public.

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It follows from the analysis of socio-political modernity as a degenerative ratchet that identification of deterioration does not in itself amount to a program for reversing it. The vividness of this problem is directly proportional to the seriousness with which the nature of time, as a practical consideration, is addressed. The essential difference between reaction and neoreaction is adequately articulated as soon as this point is made.

‘Past orientation’ is an impressively defensible value (even by techno-commercial criteria). Retro-directed action, in contrast, is sheer error. This is too obvious an idea to labor over. Those who do not get it have chosen not to.

Unlike the many unsettled controversies of neoreaction, the temptation to simply return, however well-intentioned, merits no more than condescension. In this case — as in so many others — an image is worth a thousand words:

(click on image to enlarge)

The commentator going by the tag Saddam Hussein’s Whirling Aluminium Tubes has produced some of the most brilliant criticism this blog has been subjected to. Arguing against the techno-commercial strain of NRx from a hardline paleoreactionary standpoint, his contribution to this thread is the high-water mark of his engagement here. That, even at the climax of the assault, Outside in is unable to decline the diagnosis offered, with the exception of only the very slightest, marginal reservations, is a fact that attests to the lucidity of his vision. (Some minute editorial adjustments have been made for consistency — the original can be checked at the link provided.) SHWAT writes:

Admin’s analogy of Techno-Commercialism to the colonial government structures in the time of the East India company is absolutely correct and it provides a decisive clarification. This is like that time when one group stayed in Europe while the other group went and made their fortune in the New World.

Reaction: Stable order (as a value, if not a practical effect), hereditary position
Techno-commercialism: Disintegrative competition, dynamism

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This is going to continue happening, and to get more intense. The superficial cause is obvious, both Michael Anissimov and myself are extreme, twitchy ideologues, massively invested in NRx, with utterly divergent understandings of its implications. We both know this fight has to come, and that tactical timing is everything. (It’s really not personal, and I hope it doesn’t become so, but when monarchical ideas are involved it’s very easy for “the personal is political” to take a right-wing form.)

It’s worth remembering this diagram, before going further. It suggests that divergence is essential to the far right, which yawns open across an anarcho-autocratic spectrum. Since a disinclination to moderation has already been indicated by anyone arriving at the far right fringe, it should scarcely be surprising when this same tendency rifts the far right itself. Then consider this:

@Outsideness @_Hurlock_ Identitarianism, belonging, and community is what the Far Right is all about.

— Michael Anissimov (@MikeAnissimov) March 22, 2014

The strict Outside in complement to this would be something like: disintegrative Social Darwinism through ruthless competition is what the Far Right is all about. A formula of roughly this kind will inevitably come into play as the conflict evolves. Momentarily, though, I’m more interested in situating the clashes to come than initiating them. Whatever the contrary assertions — and they will come (doubtless from both sides) — the entire arena is located on the ultra-right, oriented vertically on the ideological space diagram, rather than horizontally (between positions whose primary differentiation is between the more-and-less right).

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