My Dark Enlightenment / horrorist T-shirt suggestion:

You don’t want to see this

(Prompted by Alrenous)

ADDED: Alrenous suggests (in the thread below) — Dark Enlightenment. You just don’t want to know.
‘Know’ is definitely superior from a technical point of view, but I’m still caught up in the quasi-cinematic drama of media sensationalism.

(… and tinkering with the initial offering, I’m wondering whether it’s worth the extra word to go to: You really don’t want to see this.)

Konkvistador (@SamoBurja): “I am in favor of persuading certain kinds of high IQ people. I am against doing dialectics with Progressives.”

We are not looking for agreement. We’re working to raise the level of explicit disagreement to a pitch we can split over.

Dialectics is the alternative to Dynamic Geography. Debating escape is not to escape.

Samo Burja initiates a structured discussion on the subject.

If the Neoreaction is not a popular movement, a political party, a church, an organization, or even in any strong sense one thing, what is it? I’m assuming that if it is more than a fight over a name, it is at least a coalition, integrated by a shared enemy, and some common references.

The only canonical scripture I am able to identify is the Unqualified Reservations corpus. This is certainly not ‘gospel’ for anyone, but it constitutes the distinctive intellectual heritage of those who identify positively with the neoreactionary current. Neoreaction has to be at least tenuously ‘Moldbuggian’ if it is not to dissipate entirely into noise. There are, however, already many Moldbugs, and there will be still more.

Burja writes: “Splitting will happen. People will disagree. And they will leave.”

Leave what? (That, I think, is his question.)

And if splitting is intrinsic to what the Neoreaction is? (That is mine.)

“The thing is, now that I have been made aware of the phenomenon, I see it everywhere …”

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A protracted to-and-fro on Twitter with Michael Anissimov has exposed some deliciously ragged and bleeding faultlines in the Neoreaction on the question of capitalism. There were a number of parties involved, but I’m focusing on Anissimov because his position and mine are so strongly polarized on key issues, and especially this one (the status of market-oriented economism). If we were isolated as a dyad, it’s not easy to see anybody finding a strong common root (pity @klintron). It’s only the linkages of ‘family resemblance’ through Moldbug that binds us together, and we each depart from Unqualified Reservations with comparable infidelity, but in exactly opposite directions. (As a fragmentationist, this fissional syndrome is something I strongly appreciate.)

Moldbug’s Neocameralism is a Janus-faced construction. In one direction, it represents a return to monarchical government, whilst in the other it consummates libertarianism by subsuming government into an economic mechanism. A ‘Moldbuggian’ inspiration, therefore, is not an unambiguous thing. Insofar as ‘Neoreaction’ designates this inspiration, it flees Cathedral teleology in (at least) two very different directions — which quite quickly seem profoundly incompatible. In the absence of a secessionist meta-context, in which such differences can be absorbed as geographically-fragmented socio-political variation, their raw inconsistency is almost certainly insurmountable.

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I’m under a sacred obligation to review Bryce Laliberte’s ebook What is Neoreaction? Ideology, Social-Historical Evolution, and the Phenomena of Civilization. Thankfully, this solemn duty was not specifically scheduled. Working towards its accomplishment is a thought-provoking process, which is a good thing.

As a trivial matter, I’m forced to ask: Is that supposed to be ‘phenomena’? ‘Phenomenon’ would be more stylistically persuasive, even if the plural is defensible on conceptual grounds. That kind of side-issue, however, is symptomatic self-distraction. There are serious questions at stake here, and elusive ones.

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Radish has earned a lot of appreciation for his Basic Guide to the Political Spectrum graphic. It is indeed superb.

(In fact, it’s so good I’ll put off quibbling for another occasion, and just steal the damn thing.)

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Is anyone else beginning to get a little … I think the technical term is ‘weirded out’ by what is happening in the media?

Given that the central convergence point of neoreaction is an analysis of media power as the consummation of the (Anglophone) mainstream trend in global political history, it’s impossible to find this sort of thing simply amusing. Cathedral theory predicts a quasi-stable closed loop in which left-progressive academic self-organization obtains ever more comprehensive social dominion through a conductive media system. When the media strays off message, by allowing things to be noticed that — entirely lacking academic endorsement — cannot legitimately exist, something of profound social significance is taking place.

There might be any number of intriguing opportunities in these (still deeply cryptic) developments. For Mencius Moldbug, however, I suspect life could soon become uncomfortably interesting. The attack dogs of the left have left him alone, in the hope that he would remain unknown and ignored. Once that hope dies, the leashes are sure to come off.

[I haven’t forgotten that I owe Bryce a What is Neoreaction? review — but I hadn’t expected I’d be in a race to complete it before the New York Times gets to the finishing post.]

Whilst dazzlingly ignorant about Julius Evola, I can at least partially understand the attraction his work generates for the ultra-traditionalist wing of the Outer Right. Thomas F. Bertonneau, whose essays are always worth digesting carefully, produces a typically masterful overview here.

Evola represents a significant thread of early 20th century reactionary thinking, rooted in the discoveries of historical linguistics, and the intellectual formation of an ‘Indo-European’ people corresponding to its deep cultural cladistics. The core phenomenon that supports the mystical-reactionary interpretation of history is the unambiguous process of crudification that afflicts the Indo-European languages, evident through the line of grammatical degeneration from Sanskrit, through Attic Greek, to Latin, and then into the vulgar — even structurally collapsed — tongues of the modern European vernacular. Reactionary, hierarchical, and racially-inflected ideas comparable to Evola’s are easily identified in the writings of Martin Heidegger, among many others. Historical linguistics appears to apprehend a large-scale ethnic totality undergoing prolonged cultural deterioration at the fundamental (grammatical) level. Once this is noted, progressivism appears as pure irony — and as a comic confirmation of decline.

Outside in, comparatively comfortable with chewed-up techno-commercial jargons and stripped-down communication protocols, is only minimally attentive to this particular ‘problem of tradition’ (which it registers from a position of detachment). Insofar as ‘tradition’ is invoked, however, it seems to be a highly significant reference — and its tendency to relapse the problem back to a Sanskritic (Vedic) origin is surely worthy of disciplined commentary. Kali Yuga makes a lot of sense.

As anticipated, the organization of the Outside in blogroll is transforming itself from a mechanical task into an engaging cultural-political and philosophical problem. My sense is that people generally resolve this type of quandary on a fairly hasty, ad hoc basis, but it already seems too late to do that. There are legacy considerations, and intricacies of coalitional variety at stake. Ultimately, there is a question about the core significance of the term ‘neoreaction’ — Is it a mere rallying point, flung into prominence by arbitrary historical opportunity, or is it a dense concept, whose semantic components are to be scrupulously respected?

My temptation would be to tactically elude the word, in order to access a more flexible, differentiated terminology. What prevents me from doing so is the arrogant sense that I respect the word more than anyone else it is applied to. ‘Neoreaction’ is an inherently paradoxical, fissional term, splitting in-itself on a temporal axis. It follows that I am extremely reluctant to see it relegated to a mere categorical marker, employed to designate ideological tendencies whose substantial content is better — or more fully — explicated in other terms. The word Neoreaction declares, intrinsically, that it belongs to fissionalist time-junkies exploring historical dissociation. That’s what it says, irrespective of how it is used.

The problem of categorization, therefore, remains, indissolubly. Any suggestions?