The Outer-Right, in all its principal strands, has a horrified fascination with decline. Is this basic proposition even slightly controversial? It’s not easy to see how it could be. This is a zone of convergence of such intimidating enormity that even beginning to heap up link support seems futile. Taking the Trichotomy as a rough guide reveals the pattern starkly:
(1) Religious traditionalists see a continuous decline trend from the Reformation to the most recent frenzy of evangelical hyper-secularism.
(2) Ethno-Nationalists see a process of accelerating demographic destruction driven — or at least lucidly articulated — by left-wing race politics.
(3) Techno-Commercialists see the systematic destruction of capital by cancerous Leviathan and macroeconomic high-fraudulence, undermining economic incentives, crushing time-horizons, and garbling price-discovery into fiat noise.
In each case, the online-ecologies (and associated micro-cultures) sharing the respective deep intuitions of progressive ruin are too enormous to conveniently apprehend. What everyone on the Outer-Right shares (and I’m now hardening this up, into a definition) is the adamantine confidence that the basic socio-political process is radically morbid, and is leading inexorably to utter ruin.

No surprise, then, that John Michael Greer finds many attentive readers in our camp. His latest (and still incomplete) series on Dark Age America resonates with particular strength. The most recent installment, which discusses the impending collapse of the market system, through quasi-Marxist crisis, on its way to many centuries of neo-feudalism, is bound to raise some tech-comm eyebrows, but it nevertheless occupies the same broad forecast space. If people are stocking their basements with ammo, silver coins, and dried beans for Greer reasons rather than Stockman ones, they might cut back a little on the coins, but they’re not going to stop stocking the basement. Differences seem to lie in the details.

Continue Reading

Spandrell (here) reproduced in response to overwhelming demand:

I find interesting that when one sees Erasmus or Servetus, it’s clear that the growth of classical knowledge and the advancement of science had created a situation in which large parts of the intelligentsia in Europe had realized that Christianity was bogus.

Fast forward to the early 21st century, and a small group of aspiring intellectuals are starting to notice that Progressivism is bogus. They probably thought …

Even in the absence of its energetic Catholic constituency, it could be tempting to identify NRx as an anti-Calvinist ideology, given the centrality of the occulted Calvinist inheritance to Moldbug’s critique of modernity. As Foseti remarks (in what remains a high-water mark of Neoreactionary exegesis):

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.

Continue Reading

(Open thread, and links.)

Ebola! Stories from Nigeria (good) and Europe (not so good). Contagion math (and from Taleb). “The End of the World: it’s sooner than you think.” Ebola as a morbid cultural indicator. Oddness and lunacy.

Fertility transitions and dysgenics. (Related.)

Some (old) background to Singularity and time preference. There’s a lot more to discuss about technology, reaction, and time horizons at some point (given time).

Secrets.

Taking trolls seriously.

Dampier on van Creveld on sexual privilege. Mangan on masculinity and politics. Goddesses and man at Harvard. Phalanx: “… we envision a group of men meeting regularly to do things like the following: Go to church …”

Continue Reading

On the persistence of Lovecraft’s influence:

Lovecraft, who died five months before his 47th birthday, also “shrewdly created an American pantheon of horror,” [Leslie S.] Klinger said of the hardcore New Englander. “He was the first writer of supernatural literature to understand the psychological consequences of the generations of Puritanism and the warping of the human psyche that resulted.”

Lovecraft’s influence on [Alan] Moore lay in how the author was able to link the cosmic to the familiar. “Lovecraft’s most enduring influence on my own work is the way in which, consciously or otherwise, he managed to imbue the familiar New England landscape that was so dear and immediate to him with a sense of the universe’s dispiriting vastness and the blind, random nature of the forces governing it, a perspective drawn from his keen interest in contemporary science and astronomy,” Moore wrote to Speakeasy. “As the familiar worlds around us are increasingly invaded by alien ideas, today’s writers could do worse than look to the strategies of antiquarian-modernist H.P. Lovecraft.”

(If Neoreaction was still looking for a name, ‘antiquarian-modernism’ would be a definite candidate.)

The American Interest discusses the Chinese crackdown on Church of the Almighty God (also known as Eastern Lightning) after a recruiting operation turned murderous. The general background is most probably familiar, but it’s important enough to run through again:

The strong Chinese reaction against splinter groups — in this case, five death sentences—sometimes surprises Western observers, but we only need to look to China’s history to see why such groups give Beijing officials the willies. In the 19th-century, the catastrophic Taiping Rebellion involved a group not wholly unlike the Church of the Almighty God. In that rebellion a millenarian sect lead by Hong Xiuquan claiming to be the younger brother of Jesus, rose up against the Qing dynasty. At least twenty million people died in the ensuing conflict.

There’s another reason that the rise of an apocalyptic cult would be of such concern. China’s long history of rising and falling dynasties has given rise to a school of historical analysis that looks for patterns in Chinese history. This approach, shared by many ordinary people and many distinguished Chinese intellectuals down through the ages, seeks to identify recurring features of the decline and fall phase of a dynasty’s cycle. The rise of apocalyptic religious cults is one of the classic signs of dynastic decadence, as is the rise of a pervasive culture of corruption among officials and the spread of local unrest.

Since the 18th century, the divorce of theological innovation from social revolution in Occidental public consciousness has pushed the religious question — originally identical with tolerance — into ever deeper eclipse. Until very recently, within the West, any attribution of genuine political consequence to such matters had seemed no more than eccentric anachronism, although this situation is quite rapidly changing. Elsewhere in the world, religious issues retained far greater socio-political pertinence, largely because the common millenarian root of enthusiasm and rebellion had not been effaced.

It is possible that the Chinese approach to dissident religion remains ‘strange’ to many in the West. There can surely be little doubt, however, that whatever convergence takes place will tend to a traditional Chinese understanding far more than a contemporary Western one. The gravity of the stakes ensures it.

It’s going to be a challenge cranking-up the chaos level this week, but away you go. First, in accordance with the emerging ritual, a few miscellaneous links.

Moldbug mainstreaming watch. Also (quickly) from in and around the reactosphere: Triune critique. This post captures the quintessence of Anissimovite new reaction. An almost-equally characteristic overview from Nydwracu. Another IQ shredder? An 8chan podcast on NRx. “They woke up confused from fractured dreams, then groggily dug through memories to remember only a strange hooded figure, a brief pinch near the neck and then blackness …”

Over in the more traditional New Right, there’s some spectacular internecine conflict taking place. This is the best guide. Sample commentary from Counter-Currents and Alternative Right, who are both fully pitched in (on approximately the same side — here‘s the other). It seems to have been ignited by this preposterously entertaining series of events, embarrassments, apologies, and discombobulations. Simply noticing this has your brain curving back towards /pol/. … then there was the whole Budapest brouhaha, which seems to have driven the usually level-headed Jared Taylor into WN Utopian race nuttiness. (If you managed to save a little of that popcorn, you’ll be glad you did.)

As Ebola gets increasingly terrifying (*ahem*), it has begun to provoke an ever wider range of political commentary. (I like Gary North’s prediction: “An Ebola pandemic will create a ‘distrust in government’ pandemic.”)

Brevity.

On Jaynes and ancient mythology (from 2010)

IQ and autism (some facts).

Boltzmann Brains.

Galton’s awkward legacy. Also, Byron Roth on Immigration and Dysgenics.

Some critical guidance for qabbalists on the mind-traps of small numbers.

Towards an analysis of the Social Justice Industrial Complex:

To perceive the group dynamics at work which is the Complex is first to distinguish between those forms of cooperation which are and are not taking place. Is there some evil mastermind pulling the strings from the shadows? No. The impetus in this case is nothing but the aggregation of personal interests aligned to a collective interest. The actions taken by these individuals are spontaneous, in the sense that the actions taken by soldiers on the battlefield are spontaneous, but behind this spontaneity the order is derived of the motivation which we variously call ideology, purpose, or religion. There is less agency at work in the camp of the Social Justice Industrial Complex than might be presumed from a precursory glance, reflecting that human tendency towards over-attribution of agency. No less, though, are we able to dismiss the notion of an agenda taking place; it is no grand conspiracy, but rather, very small conspiracies united by a vision of utopia which sees all present social structures as oppressions to be destroyed, the far side of which shall inevitably emerge their egalitarian eschaton.

(The focus upon the “tendency in human nature to over-attribute agency” is an excellent starting point, building immunity against some of the most toxic inclinations to radical ideological error into its foundations. If this is aspiring to the status of an authoritative position, it certainly deserves to be nodded through so far.)

ADDED: A brief vacation into the conspiratorial mind.

ADDED: Xenosystems is tempted to propose a (non-exclusive) definition of NRx as the systematic dismantling of conspiracy theorizing — in all its richness — into the tradition of spontaneous order.

(Open thread, and stuff.)

Too much Ebola news and commentary to process, from speculative nightmares of various kinds, to historical reminiscences, neo-Puritan panic attacks, border disputes, alarm calls, and conspiracy theory.

Ron Paul, John Glanton, and Keith Preston walk into a bar. The bartender says: “OK, break it up gentlemen.” (Jordan Bloom should get it.) Related.

Eugenics around the back.

The game has changed.

Crabby thoughts.

An unfortunate invention.

Continue Reading

Don’t be alarmed: “Ebola now has its first diagnosis in the U.S., and while concerning, it’s not entirely surprising. Given how interconnected our world is, the CDC has long said that it’s possible Ebola could make it here, though it’s unlikely it would spread widely. Here’s what you need to know …” (Well, maybe just a little alarmed. (Or …))

Ezra Klein is on my unbelievably annoying people list, but he was only a kid when he got there, and this (interview) is really good work. Some additional recent articles, in escalating order of panic, plus some geopolitical complication.

Continue Reading