This point is important enough to restate well, as Foseti does:

The crux of [Scott Alexander’s] argument is that, “It is a staple of Reactionary thought that everything is getting gradually worse.” He then goes on to show that not everything is getting worse. […] It is not a staple of reactionary thought that everything is getting worse. To the contrary, I’ve never read that argument from any reactionary anywhere. […] Let’s correct his statement: It is a staple of Reactionary thought that massive improvements in technology have been very effective in masking massive declines in virtually all other aspects of society.

The progressive assumption, which neoreaction contests, is that it is natural and good to spend the advances of civilization on causes unrelated to civilizational advance. A more controversial formulation (supported here) is that the Cathedral spends capitalism on something other than capitalism, and ultimately on the destruction of capitalism. It tolerates a functional economy — to the extent that it does — only on the understanding that it will be used for something else.

Elementary cybernetics predicts that if productivity is recycled into productivity, the outcome is an explosive process of increasing returns. Insofar as history is not manifesting accelerating productivity, therefore, it can be assumed that social circuitry is being fed through non-productive, and anti-productive links. Techno-commercial Modernity is being squandered on (Neo-Puritan) Progressivism. In the West, at least, that is what is getting worse.

Nydrwracu wants us to think harder, which has to be a good thing (right?). So what are the basic questions of neoreaction? This is too important to rush, so I’m inclined to go meta (which reliably slows things down).

First meta point: If this is going to work, it has to be far more rigorously honed. That means a maximum of three basic problems each, with the objective of amalgamation into a list of 10, at most. The process of compression should do a lot of the preparatory work. Add Nydrwracu’s original  11 to Bryce Laliberte’s entirely different 10 ( in the comments, same link), and the result is already a sprawling mess that isn’t going anywhere. Neither list is remarkable for its tautness, as I hope both proposers would admit. “The 119 basic problems of neoreaction” isn’t going to sharpen anybody up.

Anyway, here are mine:

(1) The Odysseus Problem (or political knot theory): Can a model of distributed power be rigorously formulated? I am not remotely convinced that this question has yet been answered, and I refuse to get excited about monarchs until it has.

(2) Does a rigorous theory of degenerative ratchets capture the basic practical problem of neoreaction? If it does, a domain of investigation is determined at a high-level of abstraction. If it doesn’t, where do we look for degenerative ratchet counter-engineering (wherever it is, I’ll be spending a lot of time there).

(3) What does the ‘neo-‘ in ‘neoreaction’ signify? This is a timely question, because I’m noticing a lot of people edging into it, and the topics it excavates are huge. My own take on this: Anyone who thinks that Modernity, Capitalism, and Progress are simply bad things to have happened should drop the ‘neo-‘ prefix immediately. After that, anybody who lacks conviction about needing it should think about doing the same. Sheer reaction is OK, isn’t it? Fashion isn’t a good reason for anything.

James Goulding also had an extremely interesting set of basic questions (I’m worried they’re lost somewhere on this blog). Turning them up would also contribute seriously to moving this forward.

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By 2037 the harsh phases of The Upheaval have finally ended. Western Eurasia is ruined and confused, but the fighting has burnt out amongst the rubble. In the Far East, the Chinese Confucian Republic has largely succeeded in restoring order, and is even enjoying the first wave of renewed prosperity. The Islamic civil war continues, but — now almost entirely introverted — it is easily quarantined. No one wants to think too much about what is happening in Africa.

The territory of the extinct USA is firmly controlled by the Neoreactionary Coalition, whose purchase is strengthened by the flight of 20 million Cathedral Loyalists to Canada and Europe (incidentally toppling both into terminal chaos). The Provisional Trichotomous Council, selected primarily by a process of military promotion and delegation from within the major Neoreactionary  guerrilla groups, now confronts the task of establishing a restored political order.

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Even prior to the twitterization catastrophe, and the terminal disintegration of thought into nano-particles, symphonic orchestration wasn’t obviously emerging as an Outside in core competence. One unfortunate consequence of this deficiency is that highly persuasive blogging ideas get endlessly can-kicked, unless they can be easily pulverized.

“Blogging ideas” doesn’t mean anything grandiose (those type of thoughts splinter anything in their path, and bust in), but rather highly medium-adapted discussion packages, which present things in a way that racks up hits. The relevant example right now is — or rather ‘was to be’ — The X Fundamental Disputes of Neoreaction (‘X’ being an as-yet undetermined number — optimally of surreptitious qabbalistic significance). That puppy would have been clocking up views like Old Faithful, but confusion reigns, and patience has run out. Into the shredding machine it goes.

The principal provocations for this spasm of impatience are two posts on the topic of monarchism, at Anomaly UK, and More Right. The Great AUK post is structured as a science fiction scenario, modeling a future monarchist regime, whilst Michael Anissimov’s MR defense of “traditionalism and monarchism” is organized dialectically. Both serve to consolidate an affinity between neoreaction and monarchist  ideals that was already solidly established by Moldbug’s Jacobitism. It would not be unreasonable to propose that this affinity is strong enough to approach an identity (which is quite possibly what both of these writers do envisage). So the time to frame the monarchist case within a question, as a Fundamental Dispute of Neoreaction, is now.

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Having finally got around to Elysium,  one point in particular bears emphasis: There’s only one interesting character in the movie, and she’s a neoreactionary heroine. That’s not a matter of ideological preference. Among the tiny number of characters who might imaginably be thought to know what they’re doing, Secretary of Defense Jessica Delacourt (Jodie Foster) is the only one to be treated with the slightest seriousness.

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Matt Sigl of Vocativ is writing an article on the Dark Enlightenment, both the ‘thing’ and the ‘manifesto’ (I’ve already told him why this description is misleadingly over-generous). His questions suggest a sincere attempt to understand what is going on.

Among the lines of inquiry he is pursuing (my compressions): Why Now? What’s the ‘Cathedral’ business? How does the Dark Enlightenment relate to transhumanism/futurism, libertarianism, fascism, white supremacism, anti-semitism, social Darwinism? Where is the Dark Enlightenment going? How does it respond to criticisms that (a) capitalism is to blame, (b) everything’s basically OK?

I have tried to respond as objectively as possible, whilst attempting to be clear about those answers which express my own idiosyncratic decisions regarding unsettled/disputed matters. Predictably, I have emphasized the Moldbuggian origins of the Dark Enlightenment / Neoreaction as a definite cultural phenomenon (distinct from pre-existing right-libertarian, traditionalist, and paleo-reactionary streams of thought).

Readers who think they can help Matt get this portrait right are encouraged to make relevant points here.

ADDED: Foseti on ‘Why Now?’

ADDED: Handle on progress.

ADDED: Mike Anissimov (via Twitter): “Nothing good will come of a neoreactionary dialogue with Matt Sigl. … I predict we’ll regret this in the end.”

Handle has an excellent post up on this, referencing Nydwracu, who has made a momentous project out of it. It’s huge, and old, and quite impossible to summarize persuasively. It’s also impossible to avoid, especially for the Outer Right.

Steve Sailer told a joke that I’m going to mangle. A monstrous alien invasion assails the earth, and people have to decide how to respond. The conservatives say, “What’s there to think about? We have to get together to defeat this thing.” Liberals respond: “Wait! They probably have good reasons to hate us. It must be something we’ve done. Until we work out what that is, we should prostrate ourselves before their grievances.” Finally the libertarians pipe up: “Do they believe in free markets?”

An obvious quibble arises with the libertarian punch-line: if only.  Libertarians have predominantly demonstrated an enthusiasm for alien invasion that is totally detached from any market-oriented qualification. As their argument goes — the alien invasion is the free market.  (We’ll need to return to this, indirectly.)

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Jason Clower has edited an indispensable volume of Mou Zongsan’s writings (Late Works of Mou Zongsan: Selected Essays in Chinese Philosophy, forthcoming). In the first words of his introduction, he says: “If twentieth-century China produced a philosopher of the first rank, it was Mou Zongsan.” This judgment strikes me as near-irresistible. A taste (from two of the first three essays):

From Objective Understanding and the Remaking of Chinese Culture

…to adapt to the times you have to understand the times. For that you need right knowledge of the present age (xiandai 現代) … Compared to political and social activities, the influence of scholarly culture is an influence on a virtual level (xuceng 虛層), but “the virtual governs the solid” (xu yi kong shi 虛以控實) and its influence is wide and far-reaching, which is why I call it a “decisive influence.” We should not take it lightly and think that it is not an urgent matter. 

***

… to have objective understanding. The first step is to understand ourselves; the second step is to understand the West. Then we can look for the way out for Chinese culture, and we hope that our young friends will take on this responsibility. In its simple essentials, this responsibility is to revive the ancient meaning of Greek philosophy. Its original meaning was what Kant defined as a “doctrine of practical wisdom” (shijian de zhihuixue 實踐的智慧學). And what is wisdom? Only “yearning after the highest good” is wisdom. As most people know, philosophy is the “love of wisdom,” and the “love” in question is the kind of love that is “heartfelt yearning for that highest good in human life and constantly wanting to put it into practice.” That is why Kant called “philosophy” in its ancient Greek sense a “doctrine of practical wisdom.” The term is very apt. But this ancient meaning of philosophy has already been lost in the West. Nowadays all that is left is linguistic analysis under the conditions of advanced civilization, with logic having been reduced to applied computing. This does not actually count as philosophy, only the degeneration of philosophy into a technology. To enter into the depths of philosophy, it has to be that “love of wisdom,” the “yearning after the highest good.” But though the West has forgotten it, this sense of philosophy has been preserved in the Chinese tradition, as what the Chinese ancients called “teachings” (jiao 教). Buddhism exemplifies the meaning of “teachings” most clearly, but Confucianism has it too, as the “teaching” referred to in the Doctrine of the Mean when it says, “The understanding that arises from authenticity is called our nature, and the authenticity that arises from understanding is called teaching,” and when it says, “What heaven decrees is called our nature; following our nature is called the Way; cultivating the Way is called teaching.”  The meaning of “teaching” here is not institutional education as currently practiced, which takes knowledge as its standard. Rather, it is “philosophy,” the “yearning after the highest good” of a doctrine of practical wisdom.

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Well-engineered, formidable, yet also lumbering constructions are directed into battle against horrific monsters, with the fate of the world at stake. Guillermo del Toro’s movie Pacific Rim is one of these entities, and the ethno-political review by ‘white advocacy’ writer Gregory Hood is another.

Within this cascade of monstrous signs, a convulsive re-ordering of the world from out of the Pacific is a constant reference. With the shocking scale of a tsunami, and the insidiousness of an obscure intelligence, it inundates the Old Order, starting from the ocean’s coastal ramparts. “When alien life entered the earth it was from deep within the Pacific Ocean. … the Breach.” City after city falls prey to the Kaiju. “This was not going to stop.”

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‘Liberaltarian’ isn’t a word that’s been heard much recently. Whilst aesthetics is surely part of the explanation, there’s probably more to it than that. Most obviously, recent political developments in the United States have shown, beyond the slightest possibility of doubt, that modern ‘liberalism’ and the project of maximal state expansion are so completely indistinguishable that liberal-libertarian fusionism can only perform a comedy act. Garin K Hovannisian had already predicted this outcome down to its minute details before the 2008 Presidential Election. Ed Kilgore later conducted a complementary dismissal from the left. From Reason came the question “Is Liberaltarianism Dead? Or Was it Ever Alive in The First Place?” which sets us out on a zombie hunt.

Anybody here who has poked into this stuff, even just a little bit, is probably approaching shriek-point already: In the name of everything holy please just let it remain in its grave. It’s too late for that. Liberaltarianism has been freshly exhumed specially for Outside in readers, and the zombie serum injected through its left eye, directly into the amygdala. It might seem rather ghoulish, but let us harden ourselves — for science. This absurd shambling specimen will help us to refine an elegant formula, of both ideological and historical interest.

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