What is Neoreaction?

Ideology, Social-Historical Evolution,

and the
Phenomena of Civilization

Bryce Laliberte
Dedicated to my friend who introduced me to neoreaction
At the time of this writing, a number of those whom I must acknowledge
for their help in crafting this essay go by pseudonymous personas. Where
this is the case, I have directed my acknowledgement to that persona.
My gratitude first and foremost to Amos & Gromar, with whom I began
writing reactionary philosophy.
To Nick B. Steves, for his introducing me to the wider reactionary
blogosphere and his patience with my use of his ideas.
To Buttercup Dew of My Nationalist Pony, for his preliminary explanation
of nationalism.
To Donal Graeme, who always seems to ask the questions I wanted to see
asked.
And all others I have talked with over email and Twitter. The thoughts you
inspired were instrumental in putting this together.
C ONTENTS

Introduction 1
The Notion of Ideology 1
Singular Dogma, Pluralistic Speculation 2
The Longer-Run View of History 5
 The Biopolitical Horizon 6
Spiritual Egalitarianism, or We’re All Protestants Now 9
The Case of Libertarianism 11
Society and Nature’s God 13
The Wars of Ideology 15
The Vagaries of Modernism and Neoreaction 18
The Time-Preference of Patriarchalism 21
Futurism and the Technologization of Man 24
Racism and Biopolitics 27
The Values of Capitalism 29
Monarchy, Politics, and Economy 32
Anarcho-Institutionalism 35
Cosmopolitanism and Ethno-Nationalism 38
Tradition and the Return of Christendom 40
Why Reaction? Why Now? 43

INTRODUCTION

History since Christ is the history of Catholicism.

You may take that as a theological proposition if you’d like. In fact, I do,
but the sentence may be taken in another way. As a fact of human
significance, there is no overarching narrative. All narrative is imposed
from without. If there is any such meta-narrative of human history, it must
have God as its author.
To say that history since Christ is the history of Catholicism, it means that I
am imposing a narrative. There is a theme, there are protagonists and
antagonists, certain virtues are praised and certain vices excoriated. This
narrative is perceived through a lens. It is an ideologized history, even
quasi-conspiratorial. I will show you how to see through this lens, the lens
of ideology, and from within you will see how my account of history is
produced by the ideology and intellectual event known as Neoreaction, or
in other parlance, the Dark Enlightenment.
I understand many are tentatively dissuaded by my manner of speaking. My
language seems far too concessionary, relativist, postmodern. I see that, and
I can inform you it is not. You shall see that there is no worry to bask in the
subjectivity of ideology, for this is only to make a vestment the subject puts
on, rather than a body the subject takes into himself.
In order to explain the Neoreactionary perspective, you shall have to follow
on an intellectualodyssey, and you shall have to be capable of questioning
assumptions you didn’t even know you had. Not that you didn’t know you
believed them; but you didn’t know they really are merely assumptions.
The purpose of this text is somewhere between treatise and manifesto. It is
not a summarization of neoreaction, though it does summarize a fair
amount of the intellectual trends contained therein. It is not a defense of
neoreaction, though it does include a number of arguments in its favor. It is
not a mere exposition of neoreaction, though a number of analytical tools
are described with the purpose of expositing in a systematic manner the
ideological composition of neoreaction. I allow myself my own opinion to
guide the overall construction of this essay, with the hope that the ideas
contained herein shall guide new currents of discussion and codify some
aspects of the reactionary approach to social political issues of society. All
manner of forms of reasoning are utilized, from economical to evolutionary
to modal.
I must warn that this text is certainly not introductory. Though it serves as
an overview of a number of views developing within neoreaction, this is not
written with the purpose of initiating. It is for the initiated, who are already
familiar with thinkers such as Mencius Moldbug and ideas such as
patriarchalism.
—
T N
HE OTION OF I
DEOLOGY

The word ‘ideological’ is not usually used to describe one’s own body of
beliefs or social-political attitudes. However, the explanation and defense I
give of Neoreaction hinges on my treatment of it as ideology, for it is from
the perspective of an ideology that the operation of other ideology may be
perceived. All are subject to ideology; those who think they aren’t are
simply unaware of the continuity of their beliefs with the present assentive
tradition. These individuals are, moreover, all the more preferable for they
are constrained by the Noble Lies that make their lifestyle arrangement
possible. They overestimate their resistance to propaganda, which makes
them the perfect targets. Who would you rather try to con, the man
overconfident of his ability to see a con, or a man underconfident of his
ability?
Evolution is a shrewd bitch. She selects on the basis of naught but cost-
effectiveness, the most calculating of managers. Species, employees, ideas,
these shall all be selected out if another can shift the control of the local
environment in its favor. So shall my analysis of ideology be on the basis of
establishing a given idea-species within its social environment, a vaguely
definable form that may never be formally understood by its own
progenitors which may only be discovered through uncovering the
morphology of the idea-species over time.
In other words, I shall be applying the principles of evolution to the
morphological and cladistics transformation of an ideology over time. My
thesis is that an ideological core forms the defining principle or principles
around which the whole body of individual doctrines that are ever adopted
by various social environments (societies, elites, governments) may be
explained. We note that progressivists of the 21st century are decidedly
distinct from their 20th century forebears, at least if you go down the list
examining their respectively stated ends. This is no original observation.
Yet there remains a vaguely definable continuity between the two, such that
we yet understand them to stand on the Left side of the political spectrum;
even if that is an inadequate description of political perspectives, it captures
a true sentiment. These outwardly appearing purposes cover up an almost
subconscious value that conditions what policies at a given time may be
understood as ‘progressive’ and which may not. The particular set of
positions do not seem essential; some plank x might be replaced and entail
no need to change plank y. Indeed, some positions held by the members of
that movement, though they may differentiate between themselves, remain
together by mutual dedication to that same evaluative core. They may
disagree on means, but they’re agreed on the end, even if they couldn’t tell
you what that end is. If we knew what that underlying belief were, that
would explain the tendency of certain theoretically distinct groups to subsist
within the same political organizations.
It is like their ideologies are members of the same species. Though there
may be distinct sub-populations within the species that can be traced,
they’re all still able to procreate with each other. How to explain this
observation? A specific ideology may be identified with an occult
motivation.
The occult are powers of beings which are hidden, unseen; a phenomena
without some explanatory mechanism, a black box technology. You press
the button, your drink is dispensed. You don’t know the specifics of the
mechanism, and you don’t need to, for it still gets you where you’re going.
The only person liable to know the mechanism is the repair man, who has
the specific task of knowing the specific machine as well as the general end
meant to be accomplished. There is an analogy here for what I’m doing.
The set of views which might be contrastingly labeled modern liberalism,
modern conservatism, libertarianism, socialism, communism, feminism and
the like are all distinct vehicles of thought, some for which the subjects and
ends are completely different, even opposed, yet they all subsist under the
general body of modernist political philosophies. I will show how they are
all members of the same species, even if some of those members wish they
weren’t. You see their subsistence by perceiving the occult motivation, the
ideology, which powers them all in the present age.
—
SINGULAR D
OGMA, P
LURALISTIC S
PECULATION

How may otherwise contradictory political philosophies manage to subsist

together? I will borrow from my own Catholic religion to give an
explanation. It is worth holding on to, for it will also explain what is
Neoreaction.
Catholicism is a dogmatic religion. This means there are certain tenets
within the Christian tradition which are non-negotiable. They are required
for belief in order to be a member of the Church. Failure to believe makes
one a heretic; failure to reform makes one an apostate.
An instance of this dogma is the explanation given in the Catechism of the
Catholic Church which states that “Man’s faculties make him capable of
coming to a knowledge of the existence of a personal God.”1 What it
declares in no uncertain terms is that in theory there must be a successful
argument for God’s existence. What it does not tell us is how that argument
goes. Indeed, it does not even promise that such a successful argument has
yet been crafted.
There is a formal separation between dogma and speculation. Dogma
commands assent to a given proposition: speculation provides reason in
favor of that proposition. What does not command assent in this equation is
the particular speculation. Required Catholics are to believe that a
successful argument for God’s existence there must be, Catholics are not
required to believe in the success of some particular or even any expressible
argument meant to establish such. The unity of dogma does not require
speculative unity. Indeed, I and Thomas Aquinas are both Catholic, but he
believes in God’s existence on the account of cosmological arguments,
while I believe on the account of ontological arguments. This difference
between us makes neither of us any less Catholic, for we are unified in
dogmatic belief.
With respect to the occult motivation of an ideology, the particular
manifestations that ideology concretely takes on are likewise speculatively
pluralistic.
There is, however, a key way in which the analogy breaks down. Unlike
Catholicism, the ideology of modernism, having no soteriological aim for
its adherents, can make cost-benefit expenditures of its members provided
such an expenditure helps it to gain or at least retain a larger number of
members. This may seem nonsense, but if you see that there is a
competition going on between ideologies, the ideology that can plan for
itself longer down the road will outlast the other that is predisposed to
short-term victories at the cost of long-run extinction.
Such a sacrifice serves as an inoculation. How so? Ultimately, the core of
an ideology is aesthetic. It is impossible to net all members of a society
within the grips of an ideology, so the optimal strategy is to raze what
cannot be taken. A polar aesthetic to a given ideology should go to pains to
integrate that aesthetic, so that individuals who are innately attracted to that
aesthetic will go to that and be satisfied, never seeking beyond the
whitewashed, ultimately obedient political manifestation to something
deeper, something that gets beyond the predefined area of dissent.
The ideology can open dialogue with dissenters of orthodoxy, because
while the dissenters may be heretics, the end goal is not the salvation of
individual souls but the long-term survival of the idea-species. The dialogue
may invite dispute, but it is dispute over an issue that is ultimately
inessential. Whoever wins or loses, the ideology wins because both sides
have already agreed to its fundamental premise, which prevents the
ideology from coming under inspection.
As such, though there is an identifiable body of dogma, adherence to those
dogmas is not required in order to be a member of that ideology. All that is
required is an immutable faith in the occult motivation. We may say that, in
respect to the given occult motivation, the heretics are logically out of
bounds. In such a way, we might say that, supposing for an instant
Catholicism were true, that Protestants are “logically” at a tension with their
given belief in the Resurrection of Christ, since they do not follow through
to what else is necessarily entailed by such a fact. Modern conservatives
stand as such in respect to modern liberals: modern liberals are, with respect
to the occult motivation of modernist ideology, logically orthodox, whilst
the modern conservatives are logically heretical.
What cannot be tolerated is ideological apostasy. Members who leave and
take up a new ideology threaten the long-term survival of that ideology.
Indeed, contrasting ideologies seem incapable of existing within the same
social sphere. As the ideology itself gives it a certain tendency of response
that is evolutionarily advantageous, we can be sure that the response it
chooses to give is optimally strategic; sub-optimal responses that other
ideologies tended to give were selected out.
In a certain sense, the logic of evolutionary competitive pressures on
ideologies necessitates a limited variety of potentially successful idea-
species, due to certain innate, unchanging (or at least permanent enough)
conditions the social environment exists under. Likewise, the social
environment is also subject to some level of determination by innate
biological, ecological, economical, and political factors. Influence runs both
ways in varying degrees.
There are many roads that lead to Rome. Many routes up the mountain. As
the ideology is defined by its essential core, the occult motivation, there is
no sociological contradiction for a variety of mutually exclusive
perspectives to be gathered under the same penumbra. The better adaptive
ideology would allow a wide degree of approaches to be successful; too few
successful approaches is discouraging for the long-term survival of the
ideology, while too many may discourage the short-term survival with a
flood of disjointed political philosophies.
This gives a perspective on ideology as well as a way of understanding
what we ought to be doing with ideology.
Ideology coordinates the actions of those who hold to it. While it does not
choose individual winners and losers, which is a merely political matter,
that the politics shall be of one flavor is guaranteed by the unquestioned
agreement of both sides to undertake their political feuding under the
conditions guaranteed by that ideology, whether this occurs in the halls of
academia or the global stage of nuclear superpowers.
An ideology is manifest in a superstructure. This superstructure is a
coalescence of key social institutions in society. The present superstructure
is a coordination between the university system, the civil service, and
technically “non-governmental organizations” which receive the bulk of
their support from the government and their political direction from the
former two institutions. This diagnosis has been gone over at length in
many other places, so I won’t make any further arguments to establish this.
How does the ideology coordinate its manifestation? It may be compared to
social institutions, for it works in much the same way, as a superstructure is
to social institutions as social institutions are to the individuals of society. A
social institution involves the coordination under a common cause of a
number of people. This coordination does not require the signaling of all
involved individuals between each other, for social institutions are not a
cabal. Rather, the organizations arise because of mutual advantage pressed
at the fringe of the institution, where you see a greater amount of turnover
in newly joining individuals. To “make your way to the top” of an
institution in many instances is to make one’s way to the center so that
one’s own movement has much more of an influence over that institution
than those individuals at the fringe. You might compare the minimum wage
employees of a business to the owners of that business in this way.
However, the business is also a facet of society, and so perpetuates itself
apart from the actions of any of the individuals. Describing the movement
of the institution might be compared to ideal gas laws. Such laws do not
describe the movement of any individual gas particle within a given volume
of gas, but they are adequate to describe the average of all those individual
gas particles taken together. And of course, in order to have a given volume
of gas, it must have a container. The “rules of organization” a particular
institution has are just that container.
Stronger rules lend themselves to a stronger institution, and likewise weaker
rules lend themselves to a weaker institution. The ideal strength of an
institution depends on how the good of that institution is achieved. A
business should be a relatively weak institution, subject to market forces,
for the good of the business is achieved by nothing but its serving the
market. A marriage, on the other hand, should be a relatively strong
institution, for its good is served by nothing less than lifelong commitment.
Society allowed to organize itself according to the individuals therein (e.g.
analogous to the “free markets” of economists) tends to make those
institutions as strong or weak as they should be, but interventions by an
extra-social force, i.e. violence or the threat thereof, may make those
institutions stronger or weaker than they should be. Corporatist socialism
makes select businesses too strong by providing political backing, which is
nothing but the promise of extorting capital from society in the case of a
business’s market failure, misdirects capital to business ventures which do
not ultimately serve the desire of the market. No fault divorce and the legal
presumption in favor of wives makes marriage too weak and threatens the
possibility of individuals coordinating within that institution for lifelong
commitment.
The modernist ideology coordinates society to fall ever leftward. There is a
logic to this movement. First, anything more to the right than the status quo
is anathema, untenable by the principles allowed in polite society. So there
is no opportunity to be in the game of politics and hope to move rightward.
At best, “the political right” can bargain to hold to the present status quo a
little longer, though with the right’s defeat in the democratic process,
moving leftward is allowed. And so the process begins again. The political
right may do nothing but drag its feet. To actually move to the right, it
would have to give up the ideology, but this is to give up the system which
has been coordinated under the present leftward ideology; it is to give up
power. The only answer to the ideologically leftward system is to root it out
and replace it with an ideologically rightward system. Anything less, such
as a political right, only plays into the house odds. And the house always
wins, in the long run.
—
T L
HE R V
ONGER- UN IEW OF H
ISTORY

Let us suppose we are taking an extremely long-run approach. Say, millions

of years.
The human race has scarcely been civilized within its own lifetime. Isn’t
this a bit ambitious? Rather overreaching? It is actually the only way to
win. A staring contest is won by the one who can wait the longest. If we’re
in a staring contest, we’ll win if our ideology provides for the longer-run
sustainability of human civilizations. We don’t need to win in the next 10,
100, or even 1000 years. If we win even only a million years down the road,
we’ll have won for millions afterward. The logic of social-historical
evolution dictates it with certainty. As in war, what is determined is who is
left. But as the only end of ideology is to plan for human flourishing, the
securing of human flourishing in eternity is the end of ideology. As such,
the ideology that lives the longest may perpetuate itself ad infinitum
without fear of extinction from a competing ideology.
Is it a manifest destiny, a material dialecticism, a Whiggish history? Not
precisely. Where Hegel postulated an immanentized Absolute that was
present in the concrete institution of the social will, another way of
understanding the future arc of history is by seeing that there is a Nash
equilibrium to which all players will eventually settle themselves to. Given
the conditions of innate human biology and environmental conditions (e.g.
not only our planet, but wherever we might get to in the physical universe;
this is very long run speculation), there is one, and only one, ultimate
equilibrium that society may settle itself to.
There are multiple intermediate equilibria. But given an infinite amount of
time, human society must settle itself on one of two endgame potentials.
Total extinction, or permanent transcendence. The idea is to plan on
reaching permanent, cosmic transcendence. That is why we’re in a staring
game, albeit with a lunatic whose finger is resting on the doomsday button.
Total extinction is not hard to explain. What will be harder to explain is
cosmic transcendence.
Cosmic transcendence: to transcend the state of cosmic indeterminacy.
Shall humans flourish? Shall they overcome the possibility of extinction?
Maybe, maybe not. The question is, what are the prerequisites for humans
reaching that equilibrium which, upon being obtained, no further deviation
from the equilibrium is possible? As a matter of theory, that is the ideal an
ideology teaches for society. It is the ethically normative content.
That point may be called the Omega Point. We should commit ourselves to
describing the properties of that given society, at least in terms of how they
would operate in conjunction with the given conditions it faces. As such,
we cannot describe for a given society, since we do not know the material
limitations such a society faces and, by extension, the social limitations. We
do know innate, biological limitations, and that is a start, but the longer-run
shall eventually have to coordinate for that.
It is not reached out of any necessity, and there is nothing “behind History,”
no invisible hands or zeitgeists in this view. What happens is accidental; all
that is being revealed is how society may reach its end of cosmic
transcendence. The longer it takes to get there, the less likely it will ever be
reached, though it is a certainty that given infinite time, if humanity could
last that long, it would eventually be reached. But there is no guarantee of
reaching that point, so there is no guarantee of infinite time. Hence the
importance of discerning and negotiating now, in the present, so that the
longer-run future may happen sooner.
—
T B
HE IOPOLITICAL H
ORIZON

The thing about permanence: it is impossible in this world. All this talk
about cosmic transcendence is potentially all in vain. What we may secure
for is the most human flourishing, to live the longest. But there is always
the potential for change: the environment will change, politics will change,
it could be anything. Ideas change.
But they are, compared to innate human biology, less permanent. If the
intent is to win on the longer-run view, then we must invest not so much in
society’s ideas, but in the more permanent features of innate biology.
Biology holds a level of social determinativeness; ideas that gain traction
which are contrary to the actual survival of the species will be selected out,
and hopefully it is selected out on a local, rather than global, level. The
determination is imperfect, of a statistically correlative fashion, but it is a
better avenue for social engineering than trying to produce arguments that
will satisfy each individual student who comes through the door. Why not
an ideology for which you’ve already won before any argument has been
made? But this is to seek to place the seeds of our victory not in rational
persuasion, but through “brute” out-economizing of the enemy.
“Brute” it may seem, but the reality is that this is war. The point is to be left
standing, which is to say, that someone is standing. The critique of
modernism I make comes down to this: it isn’t shrewd enough. It should be
more utilitarian, it should give up all pretenses of deontological spirit. But
we haven’t stopped asking why this ideology rather than another, because
the why is in the how. This ideology will out-compete the other, and this
because it better secures human flourishing. As a matter of means, its occult
motivation is at an odds with this, and so it would sacrifice human
flourishing on the altar of egalitarianism.
That is at least one sympathetic defense of modernism which might be
rendered without being over-generous. The claim of some on the right or
within neoreaction is that modernism is nihilistic, which explains the
perpetual aim of its policies to destroy all that is good and holy and lift up
all that is bad and anti-social. Hence the motivation to subsidize poverty, to
penalize success. This is not a sound critique of modernism. Modernism is
only accidentally nihilist; it is even a kind of noble nihilism.
The spirit, the occult motivation, of modernism, is this: egalitarianism.
Some have seen this, and have varyingly embraced or rejected it on that
account.
The modernist wishes that all instances of hierarchy may be, at least in the
theoretical sense, potentially disposable. Any use of hierarchy is justified
only because it does more to increase equality. This has the ironic effect of
enabling ostensibly anti-elitist political structures from within which the
logic of egalitarianism really builds into a froth. The ultimate effect, in the
sense of a Nash equilibrium in respect of its given political environment, is
the seeking after absolute power. The purpose of this is not for its power,
but because, where clearly something less than the ability to enforce with
totalitarian discretion is unable to achieve the ends of modernism, more
power is needed. What in other situations might be the more realistic
conclusion, that the increased application of force will fail to achieve the
intended ends, is impossible, since it contradicts the very essence of
modernism.
The philosopher Willard van Orman Quine described beliefs as inhering
within a web. The model of the web of belief is meant to illustrate how just
about any given belief can come to occupy a central place. It denies the
implicit supposition of many that every individual’s beliefs are as important
as the topic warrants: ideally, people reason out from more general
principles to more specific situations. Beliefs which are more central are
harder to budge, since budging them requires budging all the other beliefs
which they support. Likewise, beliefs nearer the periphery may be easier to
replace, since they don’t pose such an overwhelming threat to the web. But
the point of the web is that it likes its own survival, and as that core,
defining center of the web is hardest to budge, it can only be budged in a
process that we may as well consider conversion.
But aren’t some beliefs more central just by nature? Certain beliefs, it
seems, it would be absurd for them occupy the center. However, that it
appears as such is only because you are subject to your own web of belief.
This is as much a model of argumentation as it is a model of psychology.
You have to understand that logic and argument is surprisingly weak for
establishing conclusions. A neat maxim used by philosophy is that one
man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens. You can always
reverse a conditional argument. You might say something like ‘If God
exists, there would be no gratuitous evil; there is gratuitous evil; therefore
God doesn’t exist.’ To that it could be replied ‘I agree that, if God exists,
there would be no gratuitous evil; but I argue that God does exist, therefore
gratuitous evil doesn’t exist.’ The focus is not the problem of evil, it’s just
an example. Whenever you have two states of affairs that are mutually
incompatible, such as God’s existence and gratuitous evil, you can always
demonstrate in a logically valid fashion that the other isn’t the case by
assuming the reality of the other. The inconsistency of two or more
propositions does not, from those propositions themselves, tell you which
must be rejected to find reality.
In other words, what you might have as a belief that does more to motivate
other beliefs might for another be a belief that is motivated more than it
motivates. This is possible because of the transient up-or-down nature of
reasoning. Your argument against the good of egalitarianism might just be
used, for the modernist, to “prove” the incompatibility of one of your
premises.
This is the way in which the modernist is an accidental nihilist. What they
would prefer is that the egalitarian utopia be achievable and, if that isn’t
possible, then so much the worse for reality. The occult motivation is at the
very core of the modernist web of belief, and that is why modernism is
incredibly recalcitrant to certain common sense arguments that seem to pose
unsolvable problems for modernism.
So we look back on history and the order of civilization tending all in one
direction. This has one of two competing explanations. We know the
progressive story. Society is ascending to a higher level of arrangement. But
is it called progress because they are progressives, or are they progressives
because it is called progress? When did progress become more than mere
progression, mere movement, and became a one way process in favor of
justice?
Neoreaction takes on the competing explanation. We are seeing history tend
in one direction because the center cannot hold. A system that is in disrepair
will work itself to even greater disrepair the longer it runs. It tends in one
direction because disorder causes disorder. As social stability is clearly not
increasing, as the hierarchy which would tend to arise is constantly
frustrated and social coordination is ceaselessly disrupted, the progressive
explanation seems at odds.
—
T I
HE DEOLOGICAL C
ONDITIONS OF C
IVILIZATION

Imagine a gnostic ethic that preached the essential immorality of sexual

fraternization. Such a tradition is suicidal, at least with respect to the
longevity of its given society. Unless such a society culled its members
from a larger, sexually involved society, it would not persist and before long
nobody would any longer question essential morality of sexual intercourse.
So we may say there are ideological conditions of civilization. Civilization
did not happen by accident. Some tribe members did not just one day
decide to settle down, learn to farm, and erect a city. The city’s occurrence
depended on a vital condition being met; that of a broad enough ideological
sentiment which increased the possibility of peaceful coexistence between
members of the human race larger than the Dunbar number. Small towns
they may have been, but there would be strangers. Humans are to some
degree psychologically predisposed to disfavor strangers. As such, there
must be some rationalization for an ostensibly individualistic aesthetic that
individual takes on in order to make himself feel comfortable in his
environment. The operation of ideology on the micro-social scale like this
is but an illustration of a more general phenomenon. Ideologies are
important because they allow civilizational progress, so that more elaborate
socioeconomic arrangements may perpetuate themselves, to the benefit of
the whole population.
Even if that rationalization is but a Noble Lie, it is sufficient to the ideology
to make the city-state level of civilization work. That the arrangement
benefits the population in the overall sense proves its benefit to human
flourishing, and so the ideology is an improvement over the previous,
tribalistic ideologies that may have previously been taken on. However,
note that ideology is not identical to its concrete manifestations: human
flourishing is a mark in favor of the occult motivation of the ideology, not
necessarily its particular doctrines. The doctrines may be Noble Lies: the
occult motivation is neither true nor false. It may only be most
advantageous. That is the name of the game.
It may not need to be the evolutionary innovation of opposable thumbs that
allow civilization to occur, but it would be hard to imagine that unless
evolution were to supply a species with the material ability to make and use
tools, no matter its intelligence, the species would be unable to achieve
civilization. And perhaps this is a needless worry: it may be that
evolutionary descent that selects for intelligence can only occur in the case
there is already some preliminary tool-building ability. I don’t care to
analyze the particular case here. The point is relevant, however, if we
suppose that ideas are but an extension of physiological capabilities. There
are ideological conditions of society that must be obtained before
civilization, in higher or lower stages, may ever be achieved. If the
Sumerians had held to an essentially tribal ideology, the hierarchical
organization of the city-state would’ve never been achievable.
If I may develop a thesis here better developed elsewhere, an example of
this is the hypothesis that it was the exogamous discipline of Medieval
Catholicism in prohibiting, at most times, first cousin marriage (and at
times, up to sixth cousin marriage) that allowed the cosmopolitan economic
structure of Europe to become the case. The uniquely exogamous
discipline, which also forms a kind of eugenic practice, had the effect of
limiting the benefits of nepotism while also raising the overall IQ of the
society through selective descent.2 As such, this may be evidence that an
ideology which implies a high level of exogamy is necessary to the kind of
economic development which we saw take off in the Middle Ages.
This is biopolitics; the social consequences of eugenic effects and
demographic trends. It is a live question as to whether society would have
ever developed past the point of rude imperialism (i.e. the Roman Empire)
had not the practice of exogamy taken root. Understand that the thesis does
not require that any society which achieves a post-Middle Ages level of
civilization need have the same exogamous practices: catching up is always
easier than original development. The point is that, in order for it to happen
in the first place, such a condition must be met, though once having been
met, the benefits gained by that practice may be spread to other societies
which might not have that ideological condition.
It is also an indication of the kind of open-minded examination that must
take place if we are to plan on the devising of a longer-run ideology, an
ideology that has the most adaptive advantage for our species, our society,
our civilization. Likewise, this may also indicate the openness to
abandonment of present civilizational configurations. Civilization is not a
static marker between barbarism and polite society. There are a vast
plurality of levels of civilization which may be achieved, and there may be
many more ahead than there are behind us.
It is largely impossible for the next stages of civilization to be planned for.
It usually requires a shift in ideology before the mechanisms start working
that launch the given society to its next position. Indeed, the variables that
affect the overall success of an ideology are so vast that it may really only
be possible to distinguish them many years on: only a rare genius might see
them earlier, as did Kant in his What is Enlightenment? or Marx in Das
Kapital.
I will still make an attempt at this task. But in order to see the future, we
shall have to see two other things: where we came from, and where we’re
going.
—
SPIRITUAL E
GALITARIANISM, OR W A P
E’RE LL ROTESTANTS N
OW

My thesis here is not unheard of within Neoreactionary circles. Indeed, the

proto-neoreactionary ideologue himself, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn,
forwards precisely that argument himself, and so does Mencius Moldbug in
his own style. However, the same ground must be tread over, and indeed the
tools I have been building for ideological analysis will provide crucial
insights. This will provide an ideological context in which Neoreaction is
initially discovered, developed, and finally embraced. But before the
discovery, the context.
The Protestant Formation began in 1517 when Luther nailed the 95 Theses
to the door of the church in Wittenberg. I call it a Formation specifically
because it was an entirely unique body that arose in response to the Catholic
Church; it has no material continuity, no matter if it may pretend to, and is
ideologically discontinuous with the Church as begun by the Apostles.
These I consider plain facts. I may be able to reconcile myself to them
because I am a Catholic, not a Protestant, and naturally Protestants will
protest, as is their nature. That isn’t my focus, so let it go for now.
The rise of Protestantism stands in need of an ideological explanation. For
1500 years, no matter what heresy, schism, or moral scandal arose, the mass
of the public sided with the Catholic Church. There was something unique
that Luther was caught up in, and though it may not be his own original
development, yet was he put at the helm of this movement. The essence of
Protestantism, and the source of its protest, is spiritual egalitarianism. The
95 Theses may be read as a protest against there being spiritual privilege
available to some and not available to others. Granted, it may be that “to
whom much is given much shall be expected,” so spiritual privilege has a
concomitant spiritual responsibility; but if that is the case, then it should be
that a person may volunteer himself to a higher spiritual calling, rather than
it being dependent on God’s plan for the individual within the spiritual
hierarchy. It is a kind of saintly role envy. They do not take it on with
humility, but wear it as praise. The same phenomenon occurs with women
and feminism, though that will be discussed later on.
In the way that I have diagnosed the particular dogmas of modernism as
rationalizations of the occult motivation that forms its essential core, so
might this spiritual egalitarianism be understood as the core of
Protestantism? The issue is not so much the doctrines; those are only
focused upon because it is intellectually incumbent upon the Protestant to
have some reason for abandoning the Church structure from which it
received the entirety of its revealed corpus, e.g. the Bible, the Christian
Tradition. It would be a mistake to think that sola fide or sola Scriptura
were the reasons for Protestantism: these were just latter rationalizations of
the decision to leave the Church, ad hoc justifications that justified, at the
least, not coming back even if the entirety of the received corpus cannot be
traced outside of the material structure of the Catholic Church.
That ideological core is egalitarianism. Catholicism is, if you’re already
acquainted with Neoreaction, the perfectly neoreactionary religion, save
that of course it’s already been around for 2000 years. It is implicitly and
essentially tied to its hierarchy, for that hierarchy is the very means by
which the Tradition of Christianity has been received and maintained. At
the absolute furthest of its anti-modern speculations, it even postulates that
there may be different levels of Heaven, in which the most Saintly gain the
greatest reward, while others lose out on that greater reward. Such a
religiously soteriological speculation is quite apparent given certain sayings
of Jesus that obviously imply as much (“to whom much is given…”), but
such a notion is clearly anathema to Protestantism, especially in its
equilibrium state of Evangelicalism as we find it here in America.
Evangelicalism is a veritable anarchy. Whatever hierarchy exists occurs
only within the church. Interchurch modes of organization, such as
conferences, are actively shunned. This might seem to tend to a lively
bounty of competing doctrines, and indeed it does, save when it comes to
the ideological core. No matter an Evangelical’s take on the morality of
drinking, communion, birth control, or dating, you can be assured that they
shall tend towards the spirit of their age. As an outmoded expression of the
modernist ideology, it will assuredly lag behind in assent to the newly
defined dogmas of modernism as they are handed down, and in that very
being slow to assent it defines its Christianness. Evangelical Christianity is
modernist, but not that modernist. This is because the fundamental
developments which took place during the Enlightenment which saw the
abandonment of Protestant Christianity as a vehicle for propagating
modernist doctrines are still the case, and so the tension between
modernism and more-Protestant forms of Christianity is always apparent
from the outside, at times the only way of perceiving the logic of a given
‘development’ of Christian theology, such as Wolfhart Pannenberg, Paul
Tillich, and Karl Barth hoisted upon the world.
If you know your 20th century Christian theological developments, it may
seem odd of me to include Barth. After all, Pannenberg and Tillich might be
defined as the leading progressive developments of Protestant Christianity
in the 20th century, but Barth forwarded a thoroughly anti-modern, pro-
Scriptural, neo-orthodoxical movement.
But Barth isn’t neoreactionary. If you’ve been following along, you know
that modernism requires its ostensibly anti-modernist stooges, someone
who will take the rap. Indeed, Barth is just such a useful idiot. All the while
presenting himself (or at least so he has been presented by his advocates) as
a response to the materialism and the over-rationalism of modernity, he in
fact poses no centrally ambivalent theses against modernism. In fact, he
does far more to attack the tendency of Catholicism towards natural
theology, and so insidiously supports the implicit egalitarianism of
Protestantism far more than the overt support of Pannenberg, Tillich, and
other Christian liberals of since the 19th century. Why? Because, if you
have “anti-modern aesthetics,” Barth’s anti-reason preference for Scriptural
exegesis over natural theology seems the most sensible option.
Yet, why the preference for Scriptural exegesis? What explains that? There
is nothing inherent of Scripture that commands such a central place for
itself within the Christian tradition (interpreted broadly), so such a move
must be motivated by some extra-Scriptural rationalization. That rationale
is obvious: egalitarianism. Why else should Barth resist the notion that
some within the Christian Tradition have a privileged place in the definition
of doctrine? Theoretically, he may accord himself a higher place due to his
greater intelligence and learning, but in principle, and this is the important
part, anyone should be able to apply the same background knowledge and
reasoning to the same Scripture and come to the same religious conclusions
as they ought to. And if they don’t, then the explanation is Calvinistic
predestination. It is not that reason is incapable, but that as Fallen creatures
we are incapable of such a perfect reason. Ergo, the worship of a God
established by our own reason is a worship of our own reason. Idolatry. It is
the room modern conservatism might make for itself in full while still being
appropriated by modernism for its own use.
That is the sentiment which defines Protestantism. There can be no
privileged places of theological development and definition, save that
reserved for God and Jesus Himself. In principle, all that is good and true
ought to be able to be understood on its own merits by the honest inquirer
of Scripture. Granted, a university education and a background knowledge
in the original languages and a level of anthropology of the culture in which
Scripture was written are all helpful for getting at that, but in a fundamental
sense anyone who seeks out the true meaning of Scripture ought to be
supplied that just by being a human being. There cannot be anyone who just
is better at interpreting Scripture or is invested with authority to do so.
The egalitarianism of modernism, as it appears in its dogmatic definitions,
is this same sentiment writ large. It is the in principle denial of privileged
places in society, an anti-hierarchical prejudice which inevitably crops up
when discussing individuals and their relative fitness or un-fitness to take a
place within an hierarchical organization. It is always important for the
modernist to stress that not of that individual’s essence, but of his accidental
qualities, that he plays the role he does.
—
T C
HE ASE OF L
IBERTARIANISM

There is another group that will be bred within an adaptive idea-species.

The losers. They are a focal point of self-selection, i.e. social suicide by
political autism. Inevitably, it shall be asked what place the ugly step-sister
of modernism has, so an explanation must be given to this seemingly
unique case.
The failure of modernist libertarianism is as this: rejecting the essentiality
of hierarchy and believing in the essentiality of equality, their hopelessly
optimistic picture shall not be achieved simply because the people it would
be populated by don’t exist. However, this is where my thesis of the
ideological conditions of civilization may play a positive role. I must offer
an explanation and defense of my anarchism, so I shall. Not all societies
may achieve an anarchistic socioeconomic arrangement. Some may be
doomed to having their best be achieved through colonial effort, some
might enjoy monarchist traditions. Certainly, no society should favor
democracy, but it is still fair to say that societies formed through a process
that distills a very uniform ideological commitment and which integrates a
democratic mechanism in a fashion that is least open to economically
perverse incentives (e.g. the rich, white, male landowners who colonized
North America or are, most preferably, direct descendants thereof) can hold
over well without a monarchical arrangement.
Anarchism may not be preferable for the simple reason that society is not
up to it. This reflects a kind of reasoning demonstrated above, with the
exogamous practices of Christendom Europe. The people may not be smart
enough, they may not properly value purely economic exchanges, they may
overfavor nepotism and other forms of tribalism, and so on. If they were at
least smart enough to undertake the hypothetical game theoretical
negotiating Hans-Hermann Hoppe postulates security agencies as doing,
anarchy would be possible. But that’s the thing. If they were smart enough.
And as only an overwhelmingly small portion of the population understands
the benefits of a competitive market in governance, it is fair to say the
requisite level of intelligence and innate sentiments is not the case.
Statists have no morally successful argument for statism, but they are yet
right, in the present moment, about how an authoritarian state may achieve
the common good through economically coercive means of resource
coordination that a lack of such a state might not. It is a practical kind of
accuracy, in the sense that, since we don’t at present have the ideological
conditions in place to achieve a fairer, more just system of governance, we
shall have to cynically give the people something, at least until they won’t.
My fear is that such a burden, as it inhibits the growth of society, may
endanger the potential growth of those ideological conditions that would
found the possibility of an anarchist society. The patient may expire if he
does not get another dose of heroin, but that is no argument in the drug’s
favor. Wreak havoc very carefully. That is why I might in the present give
my support to monarchy, though the process of social-historical evolution
will eventually prove me right on this point.
What exactly is this “essentiality of hierarchy?” The essentiality is a matter
of social coordination. Conflict is costly, so a structure which reduces
conflict, as a chain of command would for organizing large-scale
coordination with high numbers of individual actors, has a benefit over
those organizations which would attempt to achieve the same coordination
while also not invoking a chain of command to supersede any individual
actor’s separate will. Some such hierarchy inevitably occurs, then, as it out-
competes those other organizations that either try to use a de-incentivized
hierarchical structure or fails to have a structure at all.
For a given society under the same social conditions, different hierarchies
may have different advantages. Which proves the most advantageous is
unable to be known ahead of time, as it involves the process of coordinating
a vast number of actors in real time; in other words, a market mechanism is
required in order to see what the ideal hierarchies are.
Apart from that market mechanism, and insofar as its operation is disrupted,
distortions hold, so different hierarchies arise. The libertarian is on to
something when he points out that, in a perfect market, modern
governments would not exist, since they tend to hold their place in society
due to the creation of distortions which at once is its job and gives it a job to
do. A perfect market is unable to be achieved, at least under present social
conditions. So a government will tend to eke out its own existence, being a
theoretically sub-optimal arrangement for a practically sub-optimal people.
In a sense, then, the caliber of society must be greater if it is to achieve
greater social knowledge, at least where that knowledge is concerned with
optimal means of the distribution of all forms of capital. Ironic or not, but a
more stable social structure tends to allow the coordination of structures
which increase and reinforce that stability. In a structure which is less
stable, there may be no freedom to increase or reinforce its stability. That is
a problem for the libertarian anarchist, since he is effectively calling for a
sentimentally non-market oriented people to become market oriented. The
libertarian’s reflex to let the market solve the problem is only gained
through the maturity of relaxing the authoritarian reflex to take control for
oneself, to abide by sovereignty and reduce uncertainty for oneself at the
expense of everyone else’s certainty. A more mature society, at a higher
level of civilization, has fewer prisoner’s dilemmas.
—
S OCIETY AND N
ATURE’S G
OD

My critique of libertarianism never requires the concept of nature, for the

concept is a poor one within society. As a matter of material possibility, any
number of possible socioeconomic arrangements is possible. The question
we are seeking to answer is to only a certain degree how society works.
What is more important is which society do we want? To that it is answered,
the society with the greatest level of stability.
This is not economic or market stability. The stability I speak of is
compatible with market movements, changing actuated preferences, and so
on. Stability is not economic stagnation. Rather, this sort of stability is a
precondition to increasing economic coordination, for every instability
upsets actual or potential economic coordination. Higher degrees of
potential economic coordination allow for the formation of more complex
socioeconomic arrangements. More complex socioeconomic arrangements
are incentivized because they lead to a greater degree of preferences being
met. However, complexity is delicate, as it involves a greater number of
intermediate goals that must be met. As we know from engineering,
simplicity is preferred because fewer moving parts means less possibility of
breaking down. Some goals require a great complexity of intermediate
goals. As those intermediate goals involve in the most significant sense the
exchange of social capital, where even using time to negotiate that
exchange is a cost, a highly assimilated culture with strong social roles and
institutions has an advantage over a less assimilated culture with weak
social roles and institutions because it reduces transaction costs, allowing
the greater possibility of an individual exchange, and by extension a greater
number of just such coordinated exchanges.
Kydland and Prescott, two economists with gleaming modernist credentials,
penned an argument to the effect that discretionary policies by the Federal
Reserve increased economic uncertainty.3 By extension, this meant that
fewer successful economic exchanges took place, which entails fewer
actuated preferences. The logic is very simple. If a bank manager is looking
to make loans, an interest rate which might be changed suddenly poses a
risk. All risks are cost. Therefore, the Federal Reserve ought to have as
static a monetary policy as possible, since this imposes smaller risks on the
market.
But the very existence of the Federal Reserve is in order to make such
discretionary, destabilizing operations. If the ideal purpose was to do
nothing, it could just be done with. Keeping it around would be the
equivalent of aiming a loaded gun at you, all the while insisting that I have
no intentions of shooting you with it. The only logical conclusion is that the
politicians keep it around with the intent of distorting the markets when it is
politically convenient, and that could very well disadvantage the
hypothetical bank manager.
Monetary policy, I note, is only one of many other forms of policy modern
states engage in.
A discretionary government is an essentially destabilizing force. You cannot
pass new legislation without changing the means of potential income.
Indeed, even the possibility of new legislation is socially destabilizing. The
greatest amount of stability would require no government for exactly that
reason. Its superfluity would mean higher costs than any benefit it obtains,
though naturally this can’t be observed due to its nature of distorting market
pressures for its own benefit. In other words, were the natural state of
society to obtain, the state should have no room to exist. Nature is at least
an absence of intervention by what is alien. The government, defined by its
monopoly of coercion, is alien to all other interactions of society which are
otherwise void of that coercion, and so the introduction of coercion to a
non-coercive exchange undermines the spirit of the exchange. Yet it is also
the nature of the government to intervene. How to understand this state of
affairs?
A distinct sense of nature is in use. We might compare the nature of a thing
to what happens (in nature). It is the nature of a human body to live, yet it
is also natural when it is afflicted by disease. These are the two distinct
senses in use. The first sense is normative, in that there is the following of a
prescribed order. The second sense is incidental, in that it occurs irrelevant
of order.
What makes a social order natural in the normative sense? We can get at
answering that question with another.
What do nature and the internet have to do with each other? A technology
such as the internet enables a distinctly different optimal socioeconomic
arrangement than if there were no internet. We can’t say the difference
between those two is that one is “natural” and the other is not. As such,
there is no one and only natural arrangement of society. Rather, there are a
number of natural arrangements, and it depends on what form is available.
It is much like saying there are a plurality of natures, since after are all
there are cats and dogs, and there are cat natures and dog natures.
Then what is about an arrangement of society that makes it “natural” in the
first place?
The natural arrangement of society is that which is conducive to human
flourishing. Flourishing is not strictly identical to only the perpetuation of
the species, but also the virtue of the individuals therein. We should not, in
looking at the matter of virtue, concern ourselves with the mass of the
public. The mass of the public is malleable by what social expectations are
set for it from above. The virtue we are interested in is the virtue of the
Potent; by this is meant not politically powerful, but those individuals with
the greatest potential for social influence. Freedom entails greater
responsibility than servitude, for a servant’s only responsibility is to serve
his master’s will; a free master is responsible not only for his own, but for
deciding his own will. The will of the Potent is virtuous for it is the will of a
higher mind, which is beyond the understanding of the mass. As God was
made to reply to Job, so will the Potent be unable to explain their reasons to
the mass. It is not that there is a lack of reason, but that the reason
transcends what the vulgar are capable of understanding.
This of course assumes the moral virtue of the potent in society, since it
would also be their responsibility to lead. I explain this not as an ideal, but
as a reality. Already it is the case that an ideological superstructure is in
place, which supplies its own reasons for being and are reasons which
transcend the grasp of the mass. It is only those who could perceive the
flow of power who could formulate reasons for their being invested with
power, for they see how it acts and what it may achieve in society. What
they suppose for themselves is supposed for society as well. Given that this
is the reality, the ideal of power would be sustainable, for a power that
sustains itself over the longer-run depends on the sustaining of society over
the longer-run. The good of the Potent is understood in this way. A power
which “sustains” itself by extractive means, viz. the destruction of society
in its own favor, much as a glazier might “sustain” himself by smashing the
windows of a town, is not sustainable at all, and must eventually end in
collapse, if not the annihilation, of the Potent along with the society.
Natural society, then, is ideological life. An ideology which tends to
supplant itself and otherwise commit suicide is unnatural; it is contrary to
the nature of society which is to provide for human flourishing. A healthy
relationship between society and those who guide it would have both be
benefited, a mutually advantageous exchange between the superstructure
and the institutions which individuals are embedded in. A healthy
symbiosis, rather than a destructive parasitism. Modernism is unnatural in
that it is a parasite on the good of society, gaining its ground on the broken
institutions of society.
—
T W
HE ARS OF I
DEOLOGY

1776 will, many generations from this point, be considered the year that the
Wars of Ideology began. Such an age may be near its end or its beginning,
there is no means for us to tell. The American empire is at once a territory
gained through only the most formal conquering and also a global
consciousness subject to the most vicious siege. The American military is
occasionally involved as well.
The American war of independence is essentially ideological. Decided by
an elite privileged in law and education, ostensibly started on the basis of
human rights claims, it at once chooses and declares the essential justice of
independence.
This independence is, however, for itself. It is a transnational sovereignty,
appropriated to itself for the simple reason that it could. There is no
sovereign to fear if you are the sovereign. The global political stage is about
jockeying for position at the top, so that at least whoever has the power to
oppose you is ideologically aligned and whoever isn’t can always be
summarily done away with. Superstructure is, in other words, the only
sovereign, to which all other institutions are subject. We may say the
sovereignty is only presently tenuous; it must become all the more complete
as more institutions which otherwise prevent its domination are eroded, and
the purposes those institutions otherwise filled are taken over by the
superstructural sovereign.
In this light, the war of 1776 against Britain has the same ideological
motivation as the civil war of 1865, though clearly with contrasting political
motivations. But such is the nature of ideology, that it may craft politics as
is convenient. Politics is but a rationalization for an ideology determined
long beforehand, and there always multiple rationalizations to choose from.
In this case, while the political aim of the American revolutionaries was
ostensibly independence, independence was shunned as politically
irrelevant when it threatened the yet-immature superstructure growing at the
heart of American society. A true political disunification would threaten the
sovereign’s aim at reign, and so the Union had to be held together by
whatever forces necessary. It was simply a convenience that the South could
be portrayed as defending slavery, rather than the political right of
independence per se.
This same ideological opportunism presents itself when one looks through
the motivations America had for entering the Second World War. The
concentration camps which the Nazis used to exterminate the “inferior”
were never a reason that FDR intervened, and much like the slavery of the
South, such a reason was a convenient narrative that allowed America to
portray itself not as an ideological aggressor that sought to remove
ideological competition by a belligerent force.
This is not to overlook the vast crimes of the Nazis. While the Nazis may
seem to pose a serious problem for reactionaries, it need only be pointed out
that the ideological aim of Germany was twisted by aggressive eugenics
policies and an inexplicable anti-Semitism (or so it appears to all who are
not anti-Semites, including your humble author, and this not to praise or
defend the Jews). While reactionaries may need to face the evils committed
by the political movement of National Socialism, modernists must also face
the evils committed by the political movement of Marxism-Leninism. After
all, that America sought to destroy Nazi Germany but not Communist
Russia is explained by the former’s being ideologically opposed, while the
latter was not; it was merely politically opposed. Such is not a very great
crime. It even excuses the eradication of a far greater number of innocents
than Hitler ever managed, for at least such mass slaughters were undertaken
in the name of modernism, of which communism is but a political variant
alongside democratic socialism, as we have here in America.
This has nothing to do with nationalism. Yet the notion of political
sovereignty, political independence, is hand in hand with it. Independence is
not for the individual, but for a society. The kind of society capable of and
requiring independence is a national society. What binds a nation together?
One might point to a population tied together by ethnicity or, lacking that, a
shared historical accident. But this is only merest words. Give a little push,
and all these accidental associations fall by the wayside. What binds a
people together is ideology. The actual political structure is a formality past
that point. Convince the people they need a government, and they are less
opposed to the government they are stuck with. After all, it’s better than
anarchy.
And it may well be. There must be an openness to the possibility, like
detailed above, that higher levels of civilization may not be obtainable with
just any given set of the prospective members of a society.
It may be hard to illustrate how increasing the IQ of everyone in a society
by 20 points could open up new economic possibilities, since that would
involve not only trying to understand a level of intelligence beyond my own
ken but an entire society in which individuals like that exist. But suppose
for a moment that everyone in society was 20 points lower in IQ. You might
wonder about those who are already retarded, and worry at their exceptional
retardedness which would result: just assume for the sake of argument an
IQ of 50 is the lowest possible intelligence anyone may fall to. It should be
clear that the possible institutions of society, especially where they require
heightened complexity of social arrangement and a lower time preference (I
think we may assume that intelligence correlates negatively with time
preference) become impossible to coordinate for.
This may be taken as a hint of an answer as to the necessity of biopolitics
and the means of embracing a human population which will inevitably
emerge from an ideological population which, adopting some rule of
organization, allows it to initiate the next highest level of civilization. And
so doing, it may be in a position with respect to other societies which have
not joined it that it might initiate that next level of civilization for the other
societies, or the other societies might be so seriously disadvantaged in
respect to the enlightened society/ies that it cannot be cultivated.
Ideology is an idea that supersedes nationalism. A Korean does not fight a
Korean over nationalism. But a Korean will fight a Korean over ideology.
Sometimes it is with a gun, sometimes with a vote. The political effect is
the same. The ideology remains in a feedback loop. All history propels it
forward, forward, ever forward until it falls off a cliff. All imperfections of
an ideology in respect to what can be accomplished by that society tend to
social destabilization. But of course, that very social destabilization it has
caused is fuel for the fire, urging the spin down and down until the structure
is just materially unable to coordinate at the economic level, the most basic
of all conditions of civilization, no matter its level. That is, literally, the
point when the people of Rome can no longer be given free bread.
Democracy, insofar as it is practically achieved in emphasizing the voice of
the people, drenches the people in ideology. We think of Americans who
lived through the Cold War who seriously feared Soviet conspiracies as
being over-frightened. But then, we live in an age in which the worst
offenses the militant ideological opposition can muster are the murder of
some civilians. It is the responsibility of the people to Decide What
Happens. This is an adaptive mechanism of modernism, for while it means
the effectuation of the progression of society towards its egalitarian ideal is
slower (contrast the American to the French Revolution), it is surer, since
the very idea of the egalitarian ideal is that everyone looks to each other to
see whether to go forward. A slippery slope it is, but no one notices because
everyone is looking at each other, not the ground. The society that slips
together, sticks together. At least until it gets to the cliff.
This even to some extent has a built-in mechanism for getting some others
to go further ahead. After all, if x is the current issue, and y is obviously
attached, then my means of deciding about x will imply what I think of y.
As there tends to be an early adopter reward in society when it looks back
on its achievements (e.g. being an abolitionist in the mid-19th century is
thought virtuous than thinking blacks are the equivalents of whites in the
late 20th century), this incentivizes the issues to keep moving forward.
There are always those who insist that “This, and not one step further,” but
then they say that every time the issue moves forward. A modern
conservative is merely one who is one step behind everybody. After all, it is
at least that, or anathematization. And if you want power (you can even
convince yourself it is better you be in this position than the next guy,
which is probably true), you’ll go along with it. This is the same reasoning
for politicians as well.
That is the place of the people within the social-historical evolution of
ideology. The ideology must endorse forms of socioeconomic and political
arrangement that are both congruent to the occult motivation as well as able
to propagate itself materially in that social structure. A model which is not
ultimately sustainable may still reign for a period, until it has exhausted all
social capital and societal collapse follows. It would be ideal to prevent this
before it occurs, but it is the fear of many that it cannot be avoided. We are
committed to the course, and no one is at the helm.
The difference between a politician and an academic is merely one of time
preference. The academic is content to disseminate his ideas through the
university system, knowing the reward shall be a hundredfold decades
down the road, when his ostensibly controversial propositions have become
“nearly everyone’s common sense.” The politician hopes to ride that wave;
even if he did nothing to generate it, having the politician officially pass it
in the halls of Correctness is the sign to the modern conservatives that the
issue is settled, it is time for them to take a step leftward or to step off. The
professor plays the tune and the politician dances.
Wrapped up in the idea of hierarchy is the idea of institution. What,
precisely, is an institution?
To compose it etymologically, the root is a verb, “to institute” from the
Latin prefix in- meaning “in, towards” and “statuere” meaning “to set up.”
So we can say that “to institute” means something like “to set up together,”
a coming-together of individuals due to common cause. Individuals with
that common cause form the basis of the organization, with a kind of
hierarchy that relates the individuals to each other in the means of
coordinating the actions of individuals under the common cause that the
institution is put together for.
In order for it to truly be a “common cause,” it must be that the individual
holds such an end on their own grounds, rather than it being an end
enforced by violence or the threat thereof, which we may define as
“coercion.” Coerced ends cannot constitute institutions, as institutions are
formed on the basis of agreed-upon and mutually willing agreements of
coordination between individuals. While coercion can establish
organizations, these are not institutions per se, as they are not formed on the
basis of common cause and the intrinsic ends of the individuals are opposed
to the end of the organization.
The range of preferences individuals hold only vary so much, and within
shared ends is the possibility of institutions established. This provides the
basis for a set of terms to be agreed upon which, though likely to be
asymmetric in duty and privilege within the institution, bring both
individuals a greater product in bringing about the end that the institution is
founded for.
The unity of action under common cause also provides a principle for
describing institutions of themselves, without any necessary reference to the
particular actions of the individuals therein. So we may speak of families
and corporate bodies, without having to describe their actions in terms of
the cumulative action of all its constituent individuals. The qualities of
these descriptions are akin to the way in which ideal gas laws describe the
properties of given volumes of gas. Without describing the actions of
particular particles, they still suffice to give context to the notion of
“pressure” and “temperature” as an average of the particles together. In this
way may the institution be described apart from the constitution, and we see
that the institution takes on a life of its own.
This means of organization scales up, so that institutions are under the same
pressures to form relations to other institutions in the way that individuals
have the incentive to form institutions. Under common cause, identified as
an ideological occult motivation, this produces a superstructural
arrangement of society, so that an individual’s context is defined not only
by those institutions he has the right or privilege of entering, but also the
limits on institutions. Ideology is the common cause of institutions that
band together; where this prevents mutual exchange, the institutions are in a
state of warfare with each other, as there remains no external means of
resolving inter-institutional dispute. Only one ideology may operate within
a society at a time, with adherents of the contrary ideology being persecuted
in what ways are available to the institutions that manifest the ideology’s
social power.
 —
T V
HE AGARIES OF M
ODERNISM AND N
EOREACTION

As modernism and neoreaction are ideologically opposed, it isn’t surprising

to find a number of contrasts in political philosophy as well. What is
anathema to modernism neoreaction embraces, such as the justice of
discrimination on the basis of race, the freedom of association, the rights of
parents to raise their children, monarchism, limited or eliminated
immigration, among a number of other issues. The arguments made in
response to modernism, coming from a different ideological perspective,
likewise dispense with what can only be called deontological stipulations.
As I’ve said before, the problem with modernism is that it isn’t utilitarian
enough.
The essay up to this point has made very few references to any politically
manifest issues, subsisting in the abstract and assuming application of
concepts to the present situation. I will now point to the political concerns
of neoreaction, which are patriarchalism, biopolitics, monarchism,
anarchism, Christian traditionalism, ethno-nationalism, futurism, and
capitalism. I note that a neoreactionary does not necessarily embrace all of
these, nor does embracing these make one a neoreactionary. Indeed, a
number of these have their modernist equivalents, such as libertarianism is
the (failed) modernist embrace of capitalism. Where there are
counterpoints, the arguments neoreaction is capable of wielding are superior
to the modernist arguments, though of course what is a sound argument
within the modernist frame may also be adopted to the neoreactionary
frame.
A ‘vagary’ in the ideological sense is the manifestation of the occult
motivation. While the occult motivation may be treated as an ambiguous
aesthetic that stands without intrinsic justification (though I see others may
differ on this point with justice), the vagaries which result of the ideology
are the measure of its success. A vagary is likewise not a political policy,
but an attitude in regards to the formulation of policies which determines
what policies shall be given support on the condition of one’s evaluation of
the mechanical operations of those policies. Occult intent ought to be
measured, for what one explains of their own motivation, as the very notion
of occult motivation is meant to overcome, is vague and unhelpful. How to
measure these vagaries?
Time preference is the notion of the willingness of an individual or group to
put off present consumption in favor of future greater consumption. Higher
time preference favors the present more over the future, while lower time
preference favors the future over the present. It is impossible for a person to
have absolutely null time preference, as it is impossible to put off a
modicum of present consumption in order merely to stay alive. Given equal
opportunity to indulge, an individual with higher time preference may at
first enjoy greater consumption, but because the individual with lower time
preference puts off present consumption in order to invest that capital in
structures that enable greater production (e.g. skills, technology), he shall
eventually pass up the former in consumption. The most significant
difference between poverty and prosperity comes down to time preference.
Prosperity helps to enable lower time preference, while poverty may make
it difficult to exhibit a lower time preference simply due to the lack of
available capital that might be accumulated in the first place. Hence, there
may be “cycles of poverty,” and thus the importance of avoiding societal
stagnation. Vagaries which increase consumption in the present are less
preferable to vagaries that lower consumption in favor of investment.
However, the putting off of present consumption can only be afforded by a
more-than-baseline level of prosperity, so the overall lowering of time
preference is itself the abstract principle by which higher levels of
civilization can be reached, and explains why one cannot skip certain stages
except by the intervention of civilizations that have already achieved those
levels of themselves.
Ultimately neoreaction may be justified contra modernism due to its
facilitation of lower civilizational time preferences. Abstractly, the
neoreactionary aesthetic entails a preference for perpetuity, while
modernism entails a preference for immediate gratification. As we shall see
below, not only does modernism lead to sub-optimal arrangements, it
endorses unsustainable models that sees the decline of civilization into
barbaristic decadence and the dampening of the West’s light.
The aim of each of the vagaries of neoreaction is to place the respective
components of society into their right place within hierarchy. The
conservative virtue of order is not for its own sake, but so that society may
get along in itself and with others, giving to each group the amount of
liberty it is capable of maintaining responsibility for. It is a mistake to give
too much liberty to a group ill-disposed to make use of it, in the way that it
is irresponsible of a parent to give a child too much freedom in what he
shall do each day, how he shall dress and feed himself, and so on. The same
reasoning as a parent applies to his children follows for distinct groups in
society, and makes plain the necessity of the Potent to perceive this order so
that it may consciously defend against its eradication. It is when the Potent
are not aware of the responsibility that comes with their power that society
becomes corrupted, unnatural hierarchies taking place and subverting the
respective virtues each group brings to society.
How then to assign place within the hierarchy? First, the property which
defines the privileges and responsibilities of the hierarchy in a continuum is
liberty. The higher in the hierarchy and the more influence one exerts over
others, the greater the privilege, as one is then subject to fewer restrictions
on the basis of group and is afforded greater freedom to determine one’s
own values and life path. This likewise brings with it greater
responsibilities, as one’s decisions affect not only themselves, but many
more people. The privilege of the least is that their decisions affect very
few, and so the punishments that need be laid on them for disobedience can
be much less strict. To whom much is given, much shall be expected.
To assign places within the superstructural hierarchy of society, liberty
ought to be accorded to those groups capable of maintaining it responsibly.
This means evaluating the competence of respective groups by a theory
concerned less with pleasant platitudes but unflinching realism. The
hierarchy is not for itself, but for the problem it solves, which is that of
social coordination to peaceable, productive activities rather than coercive,
destructive policies.
We call the ability to accept the maintenance required for liberty moral
agency. It is only commonsense to not accord someone liberty who does not
possess sufficient moral agency to meet the burdens it imposes. We do not
give a child the same liberties as an adult due to this; were they to have the
same level of freedom, they would put it to poor and destructive use. If we
are to take seriously the question of where distinct groups ought to be
placed within the hierarchy, then we must take seriously the matter of the
distinct moral agencies each group actually possesses. In other words, not
all groups are equal in administering their own agency, and should have
their liberty restricted up to that point they are capable of administering that
which is left for themselves.
This gives us two questions; how do we measure moral agency, and how
shall liberty be restricted? Neither of these questions are easy to answer, and
I can only produce an initial speculation, though I am certain it is on the
right track.
Moral agency of populations can be measured by tendency of success and
stability brought about by that group’s own efforts. Without being
established by the group itself, then the group does not prove its merits
sufficient for the order it may otherwise possess. For instance, children as a
group tend to be very stable, but this not due to their own designs but the
order imposed from without, such as parents, the community, and
schooling. Insofar as children fail, much of the blame could be laid with
parents and their insufficient imposition of structure in the child’s life.
However, at the same time some space for the exercise of that agency must
be allowed, so that the child may develop his own agency in the contexts of
the structure he shall grow into (ideally). So much as a group requires the
imposition of order by another, that group yet requires freedom of space for
self-determination. The purpose of order is to direct activity so that the
majority of the individuals within that group act beneficially for society.
Some amount of failure will and must be allowed to take place; saving
those incapable of caring for themselves only increases their representation
in society, heightening overall civilizational time preference and hindering
the process of evolution from accomplishing what we need it to accomplish.
Time preference must fall over time for civilization; as prosperity increases,
low time preference is enabled. It is an aberration for time preference to
increase as prosperity increases.
From this perspective, greater moral agency must be correlated to lower
time preference. The lesser ability to put off present consumption in favor
of later, greater production is the de facto circumscription of moral agency.
The highest moral agency would be able to put off all comforts of the
present, undertaking the maximal investment in the best future. In the
Christian worldview where ethical action has a Heavenly reward, it is clear
to see the essential link between the capability for moral jurisprudence and
the capability for beneficial activity. They are, under a natural law theory of
ethics, on a continuum.
The contribution of a group to overall social stability is the group’s
possession of moral agency. The more responsible a group is for social
stability, the higher that group’s moral agency and thus the higher in the
hierarchy such a group should be.
Given that moral agency may be measured by the group’s effects on social
stability, it follows that the means of obtaining or restricting liberty are
coincident. In other words, the process of measuring and the process of
hierarchical distribution are identical. The ability of a group to rise in the
hierarchy proves the justice of that group rising in the hierarchy, and
likewise the inability of a group to rise proves the justice of that group
remaining lower in the hierarchy.
This analysis assumes society to be free of forcible redistribution, i.e. the
coercive distribution of opportunities offered to one group to another group
against the wishes of those who offer the opportunities. The distribution of
opportunity determines the hierarchy, and as such what disrupts the
distribution of opportunities disrupts the cohering of hierarchy. As such, all
redistribution in the name of any ideological vision, be that egalitarianism
or order, can only disrupt stability and push society away from social
equilibrium. The order we desire will make itself work and any attempts to
“re-equalize” from a previously disrupted order will only prevent the
equitable order from occurring.
Allowed to arrange itself, civilization over time should tend to incentivize
ever-lower time preferences, and this due to its being the aim of natural
institutions within a natural hierarchy.
As we explore the vagaries of neoreaction, keep in mind that ultimate
coherency is not the point. A consistent political philosophy under a
neoreactionary ideology will have something to say about these issues, and
will likely tend to give prescriptions in keeping with the spirit of the
following analyses, but I can guarantee that an individual’s own views will
draw differently on each of these issues. Necessarily so, as it should be
obvious that the sections on nationalism, anarchism, monarchism, and
capitalism all have some amount of contradiction, assuming one wished to
embrace one in its entirety.
The lack of consistency is not an embrace of postmodernism or relativism.
It is only that this is a work of ideological analysis, rather than political
treatise. Were I to give a political treatise, I would do my best to preserve
logic. But this isn’t; it is a charting of a diverse array of views that share an
occult motivation, which is that of order.
—
T T P
HE IME- REFERENCE OF P
ATRIARCHALISM

The willingness and ability to put off present consumption in order to invest
in higher future production is a necessary component of civilization. What
is consumed now cannot be available in the future. It is impossible to set
more aside for present consumption and to have more set aside for the
future. Worse, a society which consumes the stock of capital necessary to
maintain the present levels of production must have lower levels of
production in the future. Such is a toxic nihilism that dooms future
generations, and many in my generation are seeing now how our parents
and grandparents ate out our own future. “Eat drink and be merry, for
tomorrow we die!” was their morality. They were nihilists who treated their
own genetic legacies as expendable in pursuit of their own pleasures. They
even passed on their own “wisdom,” and now the women of my generation
are poisoned by a fleeting desire not to take their place in the proud
tradition of a familial posterity, but who seek after their own material
comforts.
Patriarchalism is a response to the extremely high time-preference set into
women, which upsets the natural order that sees men providing for material
production and women household production. Such a division of labor
allowed for the low time-preference manifest in estate planning. Instead,
feminism has engendered roles in which the majority of women put off
having children or ever forming a family and has taught them to selfishly
pursue the benefits of male roles while also dumping the burdens of female
roles on men.
There is no such thing as “the Patriarchy,” a conspiratorial cabal of men
who seek to “keep women down.” Support of a patriarchy is merely the
contention that fathers ought to rule, and this because they would plan for
the longer-run of society. Patriarchalism compared to feminism has low
time-preference. Furthermore, feminism does not merely have high time-
preference, it has a time-preference above the level of sustainability, which
must lead to social degeneration, decay, and destabilization. Such a
conclusion is the inescapable result of women trying to take on male roles
and not taking on the noble female roles of wifely duties and motherhood.
They are no longer in the role of building civilization, but eating it out
without planning for a future beyond their own materialistic lives. Woman
is the womb of civilization, but if she will not fill this role, and men by
nature cannot, then civilization shall fail to be borne.
Our approach is overtly anti-modern, at least insofar as modern
methodology tends towards flair for the arbitrary over the principled. The
feminist methodology may be succinctly described as the assumption that
women are better than men, and so where men succeed over women, it must
be due to some unfair bias which systematically favors men. The arguments
offered by feminist may take the line of reasoning that “Men and women
are equal, equal things shouldn’t have these differences, there are these
differences, these differences must be explained by something external,” but
in reality that is only a rationalization. Feminism has been described as a
male role envy, but it would be more apt to call it male privilege envy.
Feminists have no envy of men who work the jobs that are unpleasant and
dangerous, they only have an envy for the privileges men have bought at
the cost of taking on the roles women would prefer not to. What burdens
men face are not yearned after by women, and frequently what burdens that
come with being a woman are redistributed to men.
The incentivizing of women to take on male roles, and the likewise dis-
incentivizing of men to pursue those roles (at least if it would disfavor
women were they to), must produce disastrous consequences for
civilization. As this particular area of neoreaction is a concentration of
mine, I will attempt to be brief in outlining how feminism is a failure mode.
The ideological issue of civilization comes to this: certain ideas allow
society to thrive, and some ideas do not. If we continue with a social-
ideological analysis, in terms of evolutionary selection for memeplexes that
condition the distribution of resources in society, we are left with a very
keen social-historical argument against feminism. Whereas feminism
explains the virtual entirety of all civilizations being patriarchal as simple
conspiratorial accident, the patriarchalist suggests that patriarchy is a key
ingredient apart from which civilization fails. Such is a much more
satisfying explanation for this element of history than the feminist as it does
not depend upon a statistically improbable distribution of ideology.
Civilization and patriarchy have an almost identical beginning in time, so
far as we can tell by history, and no feminist societies have left their mark
on history. Is that a coincidence?
Patriarchy, even certain elements of misogyny, may have an as-yet
unrecognized wisdom. The subordination of women under men, if it is good
for society, is good for both men and women. It is a structure which
optimizes for the perpetuation of society. Feminism, with its penchant for
instilling into more intelligent women the notion that they must pursue
higher education and professional careers, and that children are optional,
tends to have lower rates of reproduction amongst these intellectually
advantaged women. This produces a negative correlation of IQ and
procreation, with the result that high intelligence in women is selected out
by the evolutionary pressures of feminism. Rather than leave a lasting
genetic legacy, the pursuit of a crude nihilism is preached to women. This
with the high inheritance of intelligence, and future generations are left with
a lower average IQ than their parents. It is dehumanizing and removes the
individual from history and, by extension, the society. A woman should not
be praised for material success, for her calling is much more noble and
important.
This may be why no “feminist” societies have been found until now. Nearer
to equilibrium with nature, and thus more under pressure to remain strict to
optimal social structures, what societies abandoned or strayed from the
patriarchal arrangement would have been swiftly overtaken by other
societies. The literal enslavement of a people by another nation may have
been the result of women refusing to submit or men refusing to dominate.
Civilization requires a sufficiently low time preference. Tribalism, which
involves a mean existence of hand to mouth has an inordinately high time
preference. If not enough people are willing to put off present consumption
in order to seek after greater future gains, then capital accumulation
dwindles; if not enough capital is available, greater amounts of production
are impossible. Higher levels of civilization can only be reached by the
lowering of time preference. The key question for whether an ideological
vagary is beneficial and natural is whether it operates to establish
institutions that lower time preference. Those vagaries which dissolve
institutions heighten time preference, diminishing the accumulation of
capital and by extension the ability of a society to sustain its present level of
material production.
Patriarchy may be described not only as the rule of men over women, and
their dominating certain spheres such that female entrance is precluded, but
also the rule of fathers. A father by nature is intent on seeing to it that his
children are well-off, and as such he has a low time preference by necessity
in order not primarily for his own gain, but for his own children’s gain. This
sees the coalescence not only of strong familial institutions, but the
lowering of time preferences as the patriarchal father, in his rule over the
distribution of the family’s own material property but its cohering
traditions, sees to it that a lasting legacy is prepared for. Where feminism
obviates any focus on the future, patriarchy throws the present far into the
future. Such a lowering of time preferences may be required considering the
incredible changes that will be wrought by new technologies, as will be
more extensively detailed below.
Why man rule over woman, and not the other way around? This has to do
with the evolutionary advantages which are individually distributed to men
and women on the basis of their procreative contribution. From the
perspective of evolutionary descent, women are far more valuable than men
due to the relative expense of the womb and the relative cheapness of
sperm. A man who dies is more easily replaced than a woman would be.
One woman may produce one child every 9 months, while a man could
potentially produce multiple children a day. In the tribal environment where
social equilibrium is only just above material sustenance, it is a much better
strategy to risk your men in those situations where someone must be risked,
and keep women relatively safe at home. Evolutionarily, this results in
distinct biologies and psychologies between men and women, as those
which align with the strategy of risking men comparatively more than
women will outcompete those that do not.
Men should rule because of this. The same reasons which make it
advantageous for men to have innately lower risk-aversion than women
make it advantageous to arrange society such that women are safe under
subordination and men are exposed to the dangers of the world. Studies
show that women are far more successful than men at reproducing. Taken
as distributions, the distribution of success for men is much flatter than
women. Men rule society because there are more of them at the heights of
success, but this comes at the cost of many more men who fail. Women,
though they are less likely to be found at the heights of success, are also
much less likely to fail. Women are the average sex, men the exceptional
sex.
A return to traditional family models is only obvious in light of this. The
claim is not that women are unable to compete in the workplace, but that
the opportunity cost is too great. A woman in the workplace is giving up far
more to be there than a man, and indeed much is also lost for men as a
result. Fewer women who are interested in marrying and having children
means that many men, of whom the majority are innately interested in
finding a wife and starting a family, must go without. Already it is natural
for a minority of men to succeed in reproducing, to limit the supply of
women and degrade the quality of that product by subjecting these women
to the unregulated pursuit of their hypergamic imperative is to push society
towards a dangerous disequilibrium. If men are not to be rewarded by their
material virtue with social benefits, why should they strive? In a society
such as ours, it is all too easy to get by without producing any great amount.
Production and innovation shall fall precipitously when the majority of men
realize that women have abandoned them.
The feminizing of society cannot be recommended. It is simply an
unsustainable socioeconomic arrangement. The virtues of both sexes are
tapped into by patriarchy, while feminism pits them against each other. It
disrupts the natural complementarity afforded by this natural division of the
species which evolution has otherwise co-opted to take advantage of the
economic division of labor. Men and women are innately specialized to
different roles, and their respective gender roles and social expectations
should reflect that. To work against that specialization does not merely
return us to a borderline of equality, but pushes social product below the
levels of profit necessary to perpetuate civilization. Patriarchy is not merely
an advantage for society, it is an essential part. Lose it, and society
dissolves. Feminism cannot afford society a sufficiently low time
preference.
F UTURISM AND THE T
ECHNOLOGIZATION OF M
AN
The essence of technology is means. As technology will become ever more
crucial to new forms of human living, the blurring of the line between an
individual and the technology which allows that individual his particular
existence leads also to the blurring of human end with technological means.
Technology shifts the benefits and costs of certain actions, and inasmuch as
it dampens the consequences of certain actions and introduces new
consequences elsewhere, we shall see the rise of new social behaviors
predicated on the emergence of those technologies.
The most apt illustration of this in the 20th century is the Pill. The Pill, an
oral contraceptive that prevents the possibility of conception through sexual
intercourse, is an essential technological component of the modern
archetypal woman. Where you find that modern woman, you find the Pill.
The modern woman is inseparable from the Pill. Her behavior is not merely
influenced by it, her behavior requires it.
The power to prevent conception opens new horizons in intersexual
relations, such that women may now freely copulate with any man they feel
attracted to, and men may reasonably expect no burden to arise of their own
sexual pursuits. Given the lustful natures of men and women, the lowering
of the risk allows what is otherwise a prohibitively risky behavior to
become commonplace and expected. The beasts of nature are unleashed,
and it seems foolish to suggest, considering what was said above in the
section on patriarchy, that the sexual revolution was a liberation, rather than
a great catastrophe which has played itself out over these decades since the
introduction of this new technology. The cost of commitment-free sexual
intercourse in previous eras was a dam which held back a river which now
threatens to sweep away much that had been gained by centuries of careful
social coordination. Indeed, Pope Paul VI, in an encyclical concerning the
morality of contraception, warned that:
Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the
doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the
consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let
them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide
the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral
standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human
weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the
young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the
 moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that
law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows
accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the
reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and
emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the
satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his
partner whom he should surround with care and affection.4
Whether or not one agrees with Catholicism on the morality of
contraception, one must agree as to the social effects we are now witness to,
including that prototypically Kantian concern over the person being made
an instrument; technological augmentation of the body must be warned
against when it instrumentalizes for the good of another at the expense of
the person’s own due. Such threatens the cohesion of civilization as a
whole.
The moral of the story is not that technology is an inevitable threat to the
flourishing of mankind. Rather, the moral is this: technology changes man.
Biopolitically, the result of widespread contraceptive use will tend towards
its social abolishment, as those who are born are no longer the products of
sex which the parents would’ve preferred not to result in children. A sheer
desire for children shall be selected for, and those in society who find
themselves without that desire now have at their hands the tools of their
demographic suicide. Evolution is shrewd. Society after the fallout will be
better off without these individuals, since they threaten its very vitality, its
very fount of life.
Every great technological shift offers the allure of pleasurable genetic
cessation. Those who partake fail to have a familial legacy. The internet is a
similar evolutionary trap, decreasing the cost of validation but increasing
the cost of actual procreative coordination.
The lesson of technology from these examples is that incorporating
technology into one’s being makes one a means, and those who make
themselves a means fail to have an end. Those without an end do not pass
on their dispositions, genetic and otherwise. Technology at once culls the
socially feeble and offers an increase of coordination; the spool winds
tighter, fewer are able to carry on under its pressure.
Why, then, may it seem as though this future history is so long in the
making? Prosperity has a downside, in that it may cover up failure. An
organization with lots of capital to spare may continue its operation long
past the point of profitable sustainability, giving an appearance of health,
until it collapses when the last is spent and no returns are incumbent.
Technology increases freedom, and as always freedom requires greater
responsibility.
How then do I mean that technology is prosperity, if that technology is
something like the Pill? The Pill itself has virtually no redeeming qualities,
from the moral and social-historical perspective, save to remove from our
midst those who cannot appreciate the possibility of a genetic legacy.
However, the Pill is but a species of a more general power that humans have
developed, which is the power to alter the human body’s own chemistry.
Now that we may, for instance, artificially produce and inject insulin,
diabetes is no longer a fatal disease. Psychological defects that were the
result of chemical imbalances may now be corrected for.
The same may be said of nuclear fission. With it, we may power cities or
destroy cities. Such a path lies open for all new technologies.
What are the technologies of the future? It may be unwise to make a
prediction as to what precisely those shall be, and what their definite social
effects may be. Science fiction already goes over innumerable instances of
macro-scale social changes wrought by the introduction of new
technologies, be they terrestrial or not. It is inevitable that more
technologies shall be introduced in human history, and some will be used
for devastating or highly coordinating effect. The question is how
individuals, in response to these technologies, choose to select themselves,
either for genetic legacy or materialistic nihilism.
May not the same be said of the Roman Empire, if we may consider the
high political coordination it enjoyed at its height as a form of technology?
Some chose the path of materialistic nihilism, having few or no children
and leaving all of society to that group which proclaimed the good of
familial duty, the Church. Following social collapses wrought by
technology and any other dark ages, the Church shall by its nature be left to
pick up the pieces and put society back together again. Of course, she won’t
receive praise for this, and those who are apt to materialistic nihilism will
always see her as standing in the way of the progress they desire, while
those in the world who do not envy the fate of the nihilists, which is of
course nothingness, the smiting from history itself in all lasting forms, shall
always at least be allied to her holy mission.
The meek shall inherit the earth, and the familial will inherit the future.
In the face of the great risk that technology poses to the perpetuity of the
human species, some might seriously contend that it would be an overall
benefit to prohibit and ban the development of new technologies. While
such an advocate could freely confess that technology, properly handled,
frees the potential of mankind to yet-unseen horizons, it is too great a risk
for us to undertake responsibly. Perhaps certain far-away colonies of
humanity could be allowed to develop new technology, in order that ill
effects are insulated from humanity in general, but a base strain of humanity
must be kept safe lest all are made extinct. This is “pessimistic futurism,”
which does not tend to have much representation among the futurist strains.
Such an argument cannot be lightly disposed of. As mentioned above, the
focus of neoreaction is on the longer-run. Over a long enough timeframe,
the possibility of humanity’s extinction at the hands of his technology
seems almost inevitable. Already, the arsenal of nuclear weapons possessed
by nations, especially when those nations are antagonists, threatens
civilization so long as man is stuck on Earth. The stories of science fiction
seem instructive. Doomsday scenarios and technological failure modes
cannot be fully catalogued, for it seems as though every new technology
offers some grave threat.
The problem with such an approach is that, in the attempt to stave off a
multiplicity of failure modes, it initiates its own failure mode. What but a
comprehensive government program of forcible ennovation could
accomplish this, and what would prevent such a program from putting man
down the road to a dark age? It is clear that such a program would be
harmful.
Might it yet be a lesser risk? Better to live in a dark age than to die in a
golden age? This we are also not too certain of. To give up the attempt at
cosmic transcendence due to cowardice is to give up the purpose of
humankind in the Omega Point. It denies the Catholic faith that God, not
man, shall bring on the apocalypse. It is not man’s place to institute
armageddon. Whether this is achieved by natural or supernatural
catastrophe or instrumentally through man’s own nature is not for us to
decide. Man can only live as he shall, and that must be a place among the
stars.
Contrary to the view that technology is a harbinger of the end, there is also
the view common in futurists that ‘the Singularity’ shall be a salvation of
the species by beneficial god-AIs. This is also view which goes to the other
extreme, and is equally soteriological. Let us call this view “soteriological
singularitarianism,” or “salvific futurism” for short.
The reasoning in this case is also easy enough to understand. As the level of
technology increases, the most important forms of material scarcity are
essentially solved, so that man need no longer suffer from famine, disease,
or poverty. Between godlike AIs and servant robots, all the problems of
material production and distribution will eventually be taken care of
without the least human strain. This will free man from the burden of labor
so that he may aspire to ever higher heights of creation and understanding, a
society of philosopher-kings who accept the material comfort as a means of
intellectual cultivation.
Such a picture is comforting and, in a sense, realistic. Of course it may be
accepted that some, given freedom from labor, will only pursue nihilistic
hedonism as an end. As discussed above, such will rapidly select
themselves out of the population, so we are not concerned with that
problem. The problem is, however, that the creation of new technologies,
while it may solve certain material requirements, will not solve the essential
problems of the coordination of society. All social issues that stem from the
failure to provide a social structure that optimizes for human virtue in the
Potent are not solved by the alleviation of material shortcomings. In fact,
material shortcomings has never been a problem for the Potent, so any
Singularity, if such were to occur, would not ultimately eliminate the
administration of society (in a broad sense) that must be undertaken by the
elite. Technological advances may change the constitution of the Potent, but
it does not eliminate the Potent. As such, salvific futurism, in regards to the
question of social structure, is a complete non-starter. It doesn’t hurt to
solve the largest problems of scarcity, but it doesn’t solve the problem we
are looking to answer for.
 R ACISM AND B
IOPOLITICS

Race is a biological reality. It is as certain as the theory of evolution, for the

existence of populations within a species that may be contrasted along
racial lines is just a prediction of the theory. To look at the human species
and fail to find the work of evolution would to some degree falsify the
theory and embrace a kind of creationism. Distinct groups of humans have
been historically subject to different environmental conditions, and
inasmuch as those environments worked distinct selective pressures over
those groups, then those groups shall have contrasting properties. This
ought not to be a controversial thesis, for it is only the elementary
application of a theory any student of biology ought to be acquainted with.
Yet the willingness of neoreaction to embrace the reality of race and, by
extension, biopolitics, has earned it a most certain spite by modernity,
which is ideologically opposed to such a possibility. Why does it upset
modernism so? Accepting that people are innately different is compatible
with modernism and does not entail arbitrary difference in treatment, so
applying the same reasoning to groups of people ought not to produce any
troubling notions. Yet there is the strange term applied to the scientific
study of race, ‘scientific racism,’ as though admitting the reality of race
beyond social construct is essentially racist. But one’s beliefs about the
differences in race does not require any arbitrary difference in treatment,
only that there shall tend to be different treatment on the basis of those
innate differences. That isn’t racist, unless grouping together individuals by
intelligence such that you have the population which is “genius” and the
other which is “retarded” where the difference in treatment of those two
distinct populations is somehow intelligentist, which doesn’t make sense
because the different treatment of those two groups is justified by that
difference in intelligence.
It is that such differences, because they are systematically ascertainable by
race, shall become entrenched into the system, and thus better privileges
shall accrue to those races that have more innately pro-social and useful
traits, while those races which lack that distribution of beneficial traits shall
be systematically treated with less preference. The modernist fears this,
because he implicitly acknowledges that the real difference in race would
justify that different treatment, and thus the whole project of the
Enlightenment which seeks to bring knowledge to all is shown to be
elusive. He wants the best for all, but is unwilling to grapple with the
unsettling reality which such differences portend. If a given race is globally
inferior, then those individuals unlucky to be born in to that race will be left
behind, as there is no place for them within the competitive institutions of
society, be that the market or the family. Society at best may accord them a
status of lower class, with some few exceptional individuals possessing the
ability to join the rest, though what few of these there are shall have less
opportunity to prove themselves compared to those individuals from races
in which the possession of those talents makes them merely typical, for it
only makes sense to distribute opportunity to those populations which are
statistically more likely able to excel. It is only a simple exercise of
statistics to see that it will always be economically efficient for races with
superiority in socially beneficial traits to be accorded a privileged place in
the distribution of opportunity to prove themselves. In other words, the
reality of race and the inevitability of distinct performance within society
given equal opportunity would tend to see the abolishment of equal
opportunity, as it simply would not be profitable enough to dredge an
inferior race when less resources will find a number of equally suitable
candidates in another race.
The libertarian, implicitly wedded to the modernist myth of the equality of
distributed propensities between the races as he is, offers the argument
against the modern liberal that policies such as affirmative action are
unnecessary. Such policies, which are meant to equalize opportunity for
historically underrepresented races by the redistribution of employment
opportunities from those races historically perceived to be superior to those
perceived to be inferior, are superfluous to the market mechanism.
Assuming equality of productivity between different races, it would be
profitable to target for employment the underrepresented races.
Such an argument is economically sound, but the problem for the libertarian
is that he doesn’t countenance what such an argument suggests. If it is
found that races remain unequally represented in certain forms of
employment, then it follows that, per economic science, those races are not
equal in productivity.
These realities shall color our prejudices, and indeed it is only rational to do
so. The modernist, in the face of the verifiable reality that evolution does its
work on the human species, is apt to call this racism. Some proudly bear the
moniker, though this seems the wrong means of integrating the reality of
race to our behavior. If the prejudice is justified, it can’t be immoral. Some
subtleties of behavior shall have to be introduced, rather than letting the
caricaturized, derogatory term be applied to a behavior it is morally
incumbent on us to adopt.
Prejudice is short for “pre-judgment.” It does not imply a lack of follow-up
judgment on the basis of new information that becomes available. This
means that the prejudice is defeasible, i.e. our behavior changes in the case
that it is possible to retrieve the most directly relevant information about the
individual. It is in those cases when such information is not accessible due
to the circumstances of life that prejudice shall have to suffice least one puts
themselves at unwarranted risk in order to overcome that prejudice. I have a
prejudice against going on bridges that appear ready to collapse, and I am
under no burden to undertake the overriding of that prejudice by going out
on that bridge. Of course it may be that the bridge only appears rickety, but
the assessed benefit of finding out does not outweigh the cost of risk.
Appearances may be deceiving, but they can only ever deceive if they were
ever reliable in the first place.
The only advice that may be warranted to those groups which shall have the
least advantage under prejudice is that they ought to do what they can to
dissociate themselves from the negative elements of that group by
appearing as members of a respectable caste. A black person in a neat suit
who takes the name of Robert and speaks in fluent Midwestern English
shall face very little prejudice compared to a white person who signals by
his own appearance and behavior affiliation with criminal gangs. Race is
something, but it isn’t everything.
The potential for an individual to pre-emptively defuse happenstance
prejudicial associations as it is, it remains the case that there will be
systematic differences in performance, and thus there will be castes, or
classes, distinguished in part not only by income or vocation, but by race.
This undermines the modernist vision of “diverse” or colorblind selection
into organizations into communities, and foretells of extensive self-
segregation like already occurs despite the best efforts of modern states to
incentive and enforce integration. What the modernist takes to be an
unmitigated negative, as the dream of truly equal opportunity without basis
in race is smashed upon the rocks of Nature’s God, the reactionary racist
might praise. It is easy to sympathize with such a position. There is, I
believe, another take that can be given.
This is a text on ideology, and as such is not exclusively committed to any
particular political philosophy. Though I do indeed have my own
philosophy, and there is a general tendency of conservatism amongst
reactionaries, the ideological take, which embraces a pluralistic political
shape, has the resources to turn reality into a benefit. If the reactionary
ideological take may be summarized, to distinct groups of people distinct
forms of governance may be optimal. While some forms of government are
just set against themselves theoretically (e.g. comprehensive socialism or
communism) and so cannot be recommended for any group of people, there
are structures applied from sound political governance which optimize for
that society’s potential. Note that what is “optimal” for a society, working
from certain givens of resources, prosperity, level of education, genetic
stock, and so on, will not be equal between societies. Facing the reality of
race and its not-yet fully explored affects, the work of political philosophy
has much yet to integrate to itself that has completely evaded the
universalism or egalitarianism of thinkers such as Marx, Rawls, or Nozick.
If an example may be proposed: colonialism is not essentially evil. If this
conjures uncomfortable images, suppose the Earth were to be colonized by
a benevolent spacefaring species that possesses far more knowledge and
resources than the entire globe. It is easy to see that, given the differences
between ourselves and these extraterrestrials, they might, to their profit and
our own depose all presently reigning human governments and institute
new bodies of law which, being similar, are yet different from legislative
corps we would choose for ourselves. Given their superior knowledge and
experience in the matter, their form of governance is probably superior to
our own. Yes, this defies the democratic virtue of self-governance, but if
giving up self-governance yields such great rewards, it seems rational to
accept such an offer.
Are there issues to the global colonization of our planet by an
extraterrestrial species? Undoubtedly. Yet it is easy to see that, on the
balance, colonial governance may render better returns. After all, if the
aliens were to agree with your own general political philosophy and they
instituted that for us, you wouldn’t be likely to disagree. Whatever profits
they exact out of the relationship, if it makes us better off, there is no reason
to not go along with it.
Optimal governance, given societies which are either racially homogenous
or heterogeneous, shall likewise take distinct forms. And, between the two,
it may be that increasing racial homogenization yields higher returns for
one group or both. Or it may be that a certain admixture is optimal, as it
allows fewer resources to be dedicated to the process of distributing
opportunities equitably. This is an issue of further discussion, and I don’t
have any hypotheses either way as yet. Again, the difference could come
down to the particular society and its level of technology and access to
resources. There is no “one size fits all” solution to politics. Democratic
imperialism, which is the forcible exportation of one’s political philosophy
to other cultures and societies, is doomed to failure, and the particularly
American form of imperialism we have been witness to since World War II
has only succeeded on the utter ruin and destruction of the society in
question. Short of nuclear annihilation, the imposition of alternative “liberal
democratic” structures of governance shall always be rejected.
—
T V
HE ALUES OF C
APITALISM

Neoreaction has been called a libertarian heresy. The distinction is cladistic

rather than morphological; that is to say, it is a heresy in the sense that it
was begun from a libertarian attitude in response to the inadequacies of
libertarianism, as explored above, though now it no longer possesses
libertarian tenets. It is, rather, a deep and principled conservatism wedded to
the principles of a trenchant and thoroughgoing social analysis. Whereas
libertarianism may be practically identified with a branch of economics, be
that the Austrian, Chicago, or some other sympathetic school, conservatives
have a view on the economy which flows from normative premises and
accepts the best economics for getting the preferred outcome. The
“normative” premise of libertarian economics is the preference for utility
and efficiency are above all other potential outcomes. The strict separation
of economy and society under the libertarian view holds that all values are
determined in society, and the economy only maximizes for distributing on
the basis of those preferences. There is a lack of openness to effects on
culture, order, and civilization in general, the notion apparently being that if
a society wants to die, the market ought to maximize for that preference just
as it might any other preference.
Given this, we might level an attack at the system of capitalism in the sense
that efficient market outcomes are not always equitable. This is especially
likely to occur if other elements of society are disrupted from coordination,
i.e. social institutions, in which the resultant “economic maximization” for
preferences within such a limited sphere overlook the loss of civilizational
sustainability.
For that, the focus of libertarians on the economy is not misdirected, only
insufficient. The “economy” and “society,” inasmuch as one might like to
distinguish between the two, have fuzzy boundaries. “Corporate culture” is
a clear example of the overlap. The existence of the economic space
engenders social construction of a particular kind which wouldn’t exist
without that particular economic space. Economy influences society, which
libertarians appear reticent to admit, as though market negotiations really
did occur in the abstract axiomatic space of economic though experiments,
without reference to the obligations an individual owes or prefers to
institutions or the way in which economic competition may alternately
support and sever such relationships between individuals and institutions.
The critique of capitalism that it is too efficient, in that it allows a social
“race to the bottom” in the production of “mass culture” for “mass man” is
correct in mechanism. However, given the foregoing in the section on
futurism, this must be admitted as a double effect. There are some who,
given the opportunity to annihilate their person in decadent, endless
entertainment, will go ahead and do so; enabling excellence brings with it
the danger of enabling sloth. It is pointless to remain frustrated over this.
The shadows in the cave will always remain alluring to some nihilists. We
can only be grateful to perceive a higher sphere of human living.
We are able to simultaneously grant the critique of mass culture while
cleaving to capitalism, for the good it achieves is the good of the Potent.
The values that allow capitalism to operate and the application of talent and
skill therein may manifest mass man’s depravity but it equally manifests the
excellence of the best. If anything, we should prefer a more clear and
obvious stratification of society, so that those who seek after the good may
filter out those who seek out degradation. Allowing mass man, who was
always with us and only became more clearly observed with capitalistic
prosperity, to select himself out allows the best to more easily select
themselves in.
What is capitalism, and what are its values? There tend to be two popular
and competing definitions between scholars. I am not concerning myself
with the popular take, or mass man’s take, for mass man’s take is itself a
commodity marketed and sold as opiates or psychological compensation for
unwillingness to succeed. Economists would define capitalism in terms of
“pure economic freedom.” Capitalism, under this definition, is just
unrestrained trade.
The other definition is more focused on the makeup of the market rather
than its condition. This definition holds capitalism to be “the private
ownership of the means of production.”
Inasmuch as one holds to the first definition, it seems clear that the content
of the second definition follow, for under pure economic freedom there
would be no compulsion to fund public means of production. There may be
“communes” which hold ownership in common, but it would be noted that
such a structure remains technically corporate, for it would be impossible
for them to freely rent out the use of the commune’s own resources to
freeloaders lest the commune immediately have its resources stripped from
it by those who do not share its vision. Given the first definition, the state of
affairs named in the second definition follows by necessity.
What counts as “capitalism” is extremely broad, and may be hard to express
positively. The quickest negative definition would be that capitalism holds
provided intervention into social and economic transactions by the use or
threat of force (coercion) is entirely negated. The positive definition in
respect of that is capitalism is wherever exchange takes place by the free
will of all parties.
But this is dubious. Given the existence of the state, “capitalism” holds only
in those spheres of the economy free of regulation; but as all spheres are
technically under the purview of the state (by definition), then the potential
of intervention, inasmuch as it is considered the right or just power of the
state to do so, suffices as the threat of violence. It follows that capitalism
could not exist under statism, for all individuals are to some degrees slaves
and their exchanges between each other and their master/s are under
coercive restraint.
Furthermore, the libertarian treatment of coercion as though it does not hold
to economic analysis is simply incorrect. Coercion and subordination under
its pressure follows everything economics predicts about all other forms of
exchange. The introduction of coercion and the promise to not exact its
threat is a kind of contract the individual takes up, and is binding as well as
any other contracts may be bound. There is no reason to suppose that an
individual who would coerce may not also keep promises, making him
equally susceptible to market analysis. How does the coercer not become
coerced? By making the deal of allowing his coercion rather than another’s
tasteful in that he prevents the coercion of others on that coerced individual.
The better he keeps his word about preventing unexpected and
indeterminate coercion by others, the coercion which is subject to regularity
of occurrence would ultimately serve to lower time preferences, if the
coercion does actually prevent more coercion from happening than would
otherwise.
Libertarians and moral anarchists are uncomfortable with this, yet such is
clearly possible at the micro and macro scale. If I could at the micro level
coerce another into not coercing, my use of coercion is preferable to society,
since my act of coercion only upsets a force which would’ve been more
broadly destructive of the coordination which takes place in the economy.
My act of coercion does not intrinsically heighten time preference, except
among similar criminals.
However, this “salvaging” of coercion as a just act in society brings a
caveat that statists are also uncomfortable with, or at least seem reticent to
admit as a possibility. If the good of the state’s coercion is that it at least
regularizes the macroscale coercion which occurs, allowing time
preferences to lower, then it also follows that at a sufficiently low time
preference, the state becomes unnecessary to regulating macroscale
coercion, as the economic mechanisms which seek to enable the regulation
of economic disruptions would supersede the power of the state. This is, in
a sense, to say that the market would eventually internalize the problem
regulating for coercion and the enforcing of contracts, since the arrival of
institutions which depend intrinsically on long term regularity (e.g. banks,
financial institutions, and other institution-supporting institutions) find it in
their interest to compete in the service of regulating macroscale coercion.
Even the state is ultimately dependent on other institutions. Institutions
have lower time preferences than individuals by necessity (as they subsist
over generations, i.e. are constituted by individuals who derive higher time
preference goals within its structure), and so institutions which are essential
to supporting other institutions must have even lower time preferences than
those institutions, for those institutions derive their (relatively) higher time
preference goals within the structure of that institution. So on up; if the state
is dependent for its efficient operation on other institutions (e.g. banks;
central banks are an example of such, albeit in a comprehensively coercive
form), then it becomes worthwhile for the affairs of states as customers of
these institutions to have the macroscale coercion environment it finds itself
within, as states are in a state of anarchy with respect to each other, to be
even better regulated than the state is capable of.
Why is there a limit to the state’s efficiency in regulating macroscale
aggression? As a simple matter of economics, the state’s dependence on
coercion handicaps it in more efficiently regulating macroscale aggression.
While a business which is able to effectively extort profit need not have as
high quality a product as another business which is unable to, a business
entity such as government which is only able to regulate macroscale
aggression to such a degree will ultimately be undone by the macroscale
aggression it is unable to regulate due to its separation from the strictures of
market. A business dependent for its sustenance solely on the free will
exchange of its customers with itself has a direct feed on the efficiency and
efficacy of its operation, while a business not solely dependent on the free
will exchange of its customers will not. As such, when society changes,
government is less likely to keep up. Those institutions which will support
it, seeing this, will choose to take on the job of regulation of macroscale
aggression for itself, superseding the government’s authority in a sense
while also producing more efficient results, making the government
obsolete. Governments last, on average, a frightfully short time. A
government lasting longer than a century is the exception rather than the
rule, and the institutions that support government would eventually prefer a
more reliable customer that doesn’t tend to fall to pieces following the mis-
exercise of its own power. The government, being dependent on these
institutions, but not being a necessary customer to these institutions, shall
wither away and its legacy likely borne in a common-like body of law over
the territory it once ruled.
The effect of this is that it does not make sense so much to be “pro-
capitalist” as not “anti-capitalist.” The neoreactionary view of institutions,
as has been and will be further expounded upon, is where the focus on
capitalism comes in. Given the right institutions, capitalism is a force which
produces much good, because it produces much good for those institutions.
Have corrupted institutions, and capitalism produces much good for those
institutions, which ultimately is to the disadvantage of society. As such, “Is
capitalism good?” depends fundamentally on whether the institutional
makeup of society is sustainable, especially in the sense of whether it
incentivizes the lowering of time preferences over time. Capitalism is
subsidiary to the functioning of society. It is taken as a given that it is
economically efficient and socialism cannot produce sustainable growth for
society, though the real evil occurs in that socialism erodes the natural
hierarchy as it is facilitated by institutions by dis-incentivizing the reliance
of individuals on natural institutions. These effects will be explored further
in the section on anarchism.
—
M ONARCHY, P
OLITICS, AND E
CONOMY

Slavery is a limited form of statism. Conversely, statism is a distributed

form of slavery. The effect of this is not that statism is evil in itself, nor that
slavery is evil in itself. Rather, it fulfills the dictum that master and slave is
not a binary, but a continuum. This is only the upshot of all that has been
said previously about hierarchy, and how it binds individuals to obligations
to each other and themselves. The sovereign, or master, is the only
individual in society without obligation imposed upon him from above,
making him free from any sense of slavery; likewise, the lowliest individual
who rules over none possesses no sovereignty.
This assumes an equal sense of monolithicism to monarchism, which isn’t
actually the case. Hierarchy is polycentric; he who rules in one sense may
be required to serve in another. All are servants of the king, yet the king is
(ideally) the servant of the people. The king’s service to the people lies in
regulating macroscale aggression and preventing society from falling into
stagnation by the adoption of modernist policies. He might not fulfill this
calling, in which case others have no obligation to respect him as king.
Why the reactionary’s preference for monarchism? It is led by two factors;
the displeasure of a democratic people and the incentives of the noble
estate.
Democracy politicizes society and makes all citizens a part of the process,
at least theoretically. Inasmuch as the process is effectively democratic,
policies must be populist in reflecting the misguided desires of the mass.
The supposition that the average man “knows enough” to exercise his right
to vote responsibly is laughable. The legendary remark of Churchill that
“the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with
the average voter” holds to far greater effect than advocates of democracy
are willing to submit. Given not only the vast ignorance but the incentive to
be ignorant about one’s voting, it is no wonder voting quickly becomes split
along demographic lines, with those groups which foolishly vote not in
their own interest but the interest of the common good being cannibalized
by those more clannish groups willing to express their self-interest through
politics. The relative corporate-mindedness of the average North European
settler of the American colony may have allowed democracy to operate for
a far longer time without falling into low intensity civil warfare between
classes and groups, but give the democratic process to societies which
exhibit higher levels of clannishness and you see the split take place almost
immediately. This is why the imperialist project of bringing democracy to
the Arabic peoples, who are highly clannish compared to those of European
descent, has the result of groups coercing others through the ballot box.
In other words, the vote is a means of warfare, as it entails the enforcing of
one group’s vision for society on the other who dissented. Failing to utilize
it as such, as one may keep a gun without the intent of murder, does not
mean it doesn’t have that potential effect. Just because it is given with the
intent that is used a certain way does not make it happen that way. Ergo, the
liberal belief that giving people the franchise in politics will make them
adopt it with a commitment to voting fairly or “in the best interests of
society” rather than mean self-interest is a radical failure to recognize the
potential for abuse. This with the liberal commitment that certain groups
simply do not abuse privileges they are given, unearned, leads to the
tendency of expanding the franchise to those groups which are specifically
not corporate minded.
Could democracy work if the liberal commitment could be prevented?
Perhaps for a longer time. The problem is that the liberal commitment
appears to be the reason to have democracy. If it were true, democracy
would be reliable. But it is false. Inasmuch as it is false, it is proper to limit
the franchise. This leads only to the conclusion that democracy can be
effective insofar as it is limited to those groups higher in the hierarchy,
which not only resembles a monarchical system, but so much as it is more
effective, proves the greater effectiveness if one stripped even this narrow
group of franchise and made political involvement dependent on
heritability. Such would be a de facto monarchical government.
What are the advantages of a monarchical system of governance over a
democratic system? The first is that a monarch must have a lower time
preference than democratic representatives of the people. As the
representatives are always under the potential to have their power revoked
in the next election, it is incumbent on them to accomplish as much as they
will as quickly as possible, without care for whether it is most efficient in
the long run. Furthermore, that they will not be left to inherit the costs of
the benefits they amass for themselves and their constituents, at least not
inherited to anyone they have a particular care for, it follows that they stand
under even less incentive to promote sustainable models of governance than
would an ordinary household in managing its own affairs. Democracy
rewards short-sightedness and punishes advocacy of socially sustainable
policy.
The monarchical system of government, in other words, imposes the
incentives that hold for a patriarch of a household on the ruler and so, what
preference men naturally have to plan for their estate beyond the duration of
their own lifetime is vested in the king in the act of ruling his people. The
government as privately owned estate is under the incentive to be managed
as an estate, lowering the time preference of rulers in the same way that
patriarchy does for estates in general. Not only is the king under the
incentive to keep government running efficiently over the course of his rule,
which can last for decades, but he has the incentive to bequeath a
sustainable model of governance to his children, as well as raising his
children with the vocation of rule in mind.
The benefits of monarchy being clear to reactionaries, there remains a
question of how it should arise again within modern society. There is
actually a very simple means of amassing power to an estate with the effect
of instituting a monarchical form of governance. The only difficulty would
be the dissolution of democratic state power over a territory, but if we may
assume such an opportunity to arise, either through the democratic state’s
mismanagement and resultant need to sell or give up some territory or the
outright forcible conquest, then the incentives in that territory to have an
effective king should make such a monarchy arise.
The continuum of slavery to sovereignty makes it that it is mutually
advantageous for individuals of disparate opportunity, due to any accident
of birth, to exchange with each other in a servant-master relationship. Lest
any confusion persist due to modernist misinformation, “slavery” is not an
intrinsically oppressive institution, nor is slavery equivalent to the actual
ownership of individuals in the sense of property. Slavery is a kind of
employment, albeit one which comes with greater restrictions on an
individual’s liberty than those forms of employment (by a master) that
allow a greater freedom of movement in society. All forms of employment
require some subordination of one’s choices to that work, for otherwise the
conditions that allow the work to be done should not be obtained. I must at
least give up my time and the opportunity of living in another place if I
were to continue my employment at some specific businesses. Hence
slavery is by degree, with the lowliest slaves being those who must give up
the greatest amount of freedom in order to have sustainable employment.
Under modernist rhetoric, selling oneself into slavery is a great sin, but
under the use of the word found here, “slave” is the most terminologically
apt for, while it circumvents the modernist tradition, it is placed within a
much more comprehensive and pre-modern tradition of thought about the
relationship between employees and their employers. Selling one’s labor is
a kind of selling of oneself, and so inasmuch as we consider “selling
oneself” a kind of slavery, we must conclude that whoever sells his labor to
another is a slave to some degree. While there will always be classes, and
so some classes will be more obviously slaves than others, that one has a
less burdensome chain does not mean he isn’t a slave.
By this, slavery is no evil, but a means of virtue for many individuals.
Those who lack the capability of mastery and unrestricted self-
determination (i.e. can use their freedom to their and their family’s
sustainable benefit) are better off under this kind of slavery, as it allows
those decisions to be made by one wiser. Both the master and the slave
profit by the relationship they form. Were it otherwise, no one should agree
to be a master or slave.
Is it better to be a master? Yes, but only if one has the ability. To he who has
the ability, he should have it.
Within the framework of continuum between slave and sovereign, the
sovereign becomes the one with the most power to enforce his will over his
subjects. His “subjects” become the distributed corps of individuals and
institutions which ultimately owe their fealty to the king, even if not
directly but in an indirect form, much as an employee may be ruled by a
manager who is ruled by an executive. This gives two means for the
establishment of monarchism within a free territory, though it is likely both
would be in effect.
The first is that de facto wage and debt slaves may sell off the right to quit
in making a contract, placing him at a legally disadvantaged position qua
the buyer of the contract. Why should an individual expose himself to so
much risk? Certainly defaulting on the loans would be less costly than
making oneself without legal recourse should the contract buyer choose to
extort his legally indentured servants. An individual could develop a
reputation as a just and wise ruler of his subjects, making submission to a
king under a quasi- or outright feudal arrangement potentially preferable to
eking out a life of poverty under the crushing cycle of not being able to save
enough. The ruler, in guiding the life of his new subject, provides the
service of freeing the individual in one way at the cost of another liberty, an
exchange which is very potentially equitable if it makes one relatively
prosperous.
The second is that of businesses which employ many can choose to be
institutions which support a state institution. Such may come with guild
privileges and the like, if the king chooses to grant them, or they may come
in the establishing of legal privileges for business institutions unique from
personal individuals. I imagine the second path more likely, though the first
is a time tested, if economically less efficient, means of vesting market
power in a ruler.
Both means would consolidate power which, assuming a number of such
individuals within an area prefer to form a peaceable kind of quasi-
oligarchy or aristocratic nobility, could very easily establish a de facto king
with inherited political privilege and the closing of politics to all who are
employed within the codified hierarchy.
Given the possibility of a collapse of democratic forms of government and
the incentives which society faces in such a new power vacuum, it is likely
that the change to monarchical governance would be swift, within only a
few generations, with the democratic past looked upon as a bizarre
aberration of human history.
—
A I
NARCHO- NSTITUTIONALISM

The topic and idea of anarchism is typically unclear in culture and,

considering all I have said which is apparently in favor of government or
more broadly governance, it is incumbent that I make a number of
clarifications about what anarchism is before I can go on to show how it
coheres under the neoreactionary ideology. Foremost among these is that
anarchism means nothing more than the lack of a government. Unless
otherwise qualified (as the section title is), the advocacy of anarchism does
not necessarily entail the advocacy of social dissolution and chaos.
Anarchism is compatible with virtually everything said before and after this
section, though it does require the willingness to see that governance is not
equivalent to government within an hierarchical system. An institution may
govern without being a government.
Nor shall this be a thorough defense of anarchism; I leave that to other
works already written and being written. Like all other written here in this
essay, the purpose of expository more than argumentative, the coalescing of
ideas and placing them under an ideological interpretation.
If anarchism is but the absence of government, then we require a good
definition of government. I will augment a common definition for the
purposes of this paper, giving us that government is “the social institution
which is held by society to have a just monopoly on the just use of violence
within that society.” This definition allows us to see that fulfilling the
actions that governments have historically fulfilled does not make an
institution a government. A mail service can exist without making any
monopolized pronouncements on what constitutes the just use of force, and
so can those organizations dedicated to enforcing and servicing laws.
“Government” in this way becomes identified not with its enforcers, but its
unchallenged claim to be the only rightful authority for adjudicating
disputes over past or potential future use of force.
All abuses of government in the regulation of macroscale aggression in
society come down to a complicit judicial system, for the judicial system is
the ultimate authority in discerning whether a law is just. While under
constitutional forms of government the theory is that the judicial branch
upholds the constitution which authorizes it, in reality the constitution is
upheld by the judicial branch, rather than the other way around; what the
judicial branch decides as being the canon of meta-laws on which judgment
is pronounced for the justice of laws (of which all laws are effectively about
the just use of force applied to specific contexts, means, and ends) becomes
the content-source for making decisions by the judges. If the judges reject a
particular source, that source lacks all effect, and it cannot be imposed on
them by a legislative branch, since the workings of the legislative branch
ultimately hinge on whether the judicial branch approves of what they do.
An ousting of the judicial branch could be effected as in a coup d’état, but
then the “military government” in this case simply assumes itself that
authority which the previous judicial branch took on.
This use of “branches” may seem akin to the “division of powers”
accomplished by the US Constitution, and indeed it is. The Founding
Fathers in utilizing explicit branches of government were merely codifying
an observation of how power has always effectively worked in
governments, with the notion that it was to prevent a concentration of
power an elusive intention. In reality, the US Supreme Court ultimately
approved its own authority and its source in the US Constitution,
bootstrapping itself to ultimate rule over the just use of force within society
with the support of a legislative-executive body (I will note that under my
description of government, the legislative and executive bodies are
distributed on a continuum, sometimes even identical).
As government must be formally identified with this monopoly over the
judicially-approved use of force in society, then anarchism amounts at least
to the dissolution of this monopoly. There may still be judicially-approved
use of force and the regulation of macroscale aggression without an
individual judge or justice organization arrogating to itself the right to
prevent others from providing these services. A polycentric and/or common
body of law may be developed to adjudicate relations between individuals
where force is rightly or wrongly introduced.
This depends crucially on a level of trust between otherwise competing
justice organizations. Why should there be trust and mutually enforced
contracts between separate legal entities? Why not go to war in order to
establish monopoly? The problem primarily comes down to the matter of
cost. Institutions are incentivized to form because they provide the
possibility to coordinate for group benefits, and this involves the
cooperation of individuals who always face the chance to gain at the
expense of other individuals, with this only becoming a greater incentive
the greater the trust that is required. In order to signal that one is
trustworthy, generally contracts and arrangements are made so that success
and failure are mutually tied together, so that intra-institutional competition
is minimized except where it may be applied to one of its specific goals.
Coming to agreements beforehand with each other about how disputes shall
be arraigned within this context minimizes the cost of conflict in the case
that it does arise, and while such agreement to have disputes subjected to an
objective process may involve the sacrificing of short term gain, it is to the
overall benefit in the long run as it means even those resources given up in
the short run will be recovered in the long run by not needing to be spent on
forcible means of dispute resolution.
This being the case, separate legal, military, and insurance organizations
(which may be manifest as separate or composite institutions) have the
incentive to make arrangements with each other that subjects disputes
between each other to an agreed upon process so that the cost of conflict is
minimized. To put it very briefly, when an insurance organization
representing a customer handles a dispute with the customer of another
insurance organization, those organizations have the incentive to have
agreed upon procedures for resolving their disputes. As this is the more-
likely profitable model in the long run, the opportunity for an individual to
buy conflict is minimized, as all legitimate insurance organizations have the
incentive to not offer the service of defending their customers’ crimes and
to prevent other organizations from operating that refuse to agree to arrange
means of dispute resolution. The crime business, considered as the service
of keeping an individual from suffering for the consequences of their
crimes, will still exist much as it does now, though it will also be considered
illegitimate by all legitimate security organizations within society,
minimizing their anti-social effect.
Anarchism must operate, in other words, on the basis of institutions which
limit the range of anti-social actions that may be undertaken by individuals
and organizations and which require arranged means of dispute resolution.
Without institutions, there is no context for individuals in society to be
placed under the incentive to involve themselves with these dispute
resolution centers. But as institutions codify hierarchy and limit what it is
possible for an individual to do in terms of anti-social action, society may
stabilize under the quasi-oligarchic, rather than monopolistic, regulation of
macroscale aggression.
Oligarchic legal organizations rather than monopolistic legal organizations
have lesser incentive to extort from society the provision of funds, since the
attempt to extort such funds can always be met by a cabal of organizations
that have it in their interest to prevent any attempts at grabbing all the
power for oneself. What society faces under government is altogether
lessened; power is organized more on the basis of pro-social services rather
than anti-social destruction. Assuming that civilization does not fall into or
remain in a failure mode, this is the arrangement of society which will take
place, which I give the name anarcho-institutionalism.
The monopoly government holds over the regulation of macroscale
aggression allows it to partake in its own forms of macroscale aggression,
which systematically results in the dissolution of social institutions. It
furthermore has the incentive to do this, for in the resultant dissolution of a
kind of institution (e.g. the family) the vacuum of social services previously
fulfilled by that institution “must” be undertaken by the government. In the
very process of triggering the failures of institutions at providing their
intended ends, the government is able to arrogate to itself those powers,
with the only limit being that of time and technology for how pervasive
may its administrative dissolution of institutions may go.
The government is an essentially anti-social institution, in that its ends are
primarily anti-social. The use of force, or coercion, is by definition anti-
social. This is not to argue that anti-social causes are unjustifiable, for the
dissolution of an organization that has negative production for society is
overall positive. However, where there is the incentive to gain power in the
destruction of other bastions of power, the subtle shifting of incentives so
that individuals have less opportunity or means or reasons to form non-
governmental institutions which administrate particular kinds of
governance, such as the raising and educating of children, the resolution of
disputes, the distribution of material goods, and so on, and instead the
government becomes the center of all social activity. This produces what
has been variously called the welfare-warfare state, social democratic
communism, and statism. I will call this phenomena the State-Society, for
the boundaries between state-political participation in society and mere
participation in society becomes fraught. Social action eventually just is
politics, the ultimate democratization of all social structures so that what
politics may intervene on is unlimited and the state enjoys truly absolute
power over every facet of society.
An example of the state’s encroachment and dissolution of non-political
spheres of society. The American policy of social security, which is the
public provision of compensation to retirees, works to dissolve the family
by incentivizing less investment by parents in their children in the forming
of family legacies and traditions. If an individual knows that his welfare
past the age of employability is not dependent on his children, it becomes
less important to invest in instilling into his children the good of caring for
one’s parents and the virtues that would allow the child to be materially
successful to that end. While the clan may have previously taken on the
primary responsibility of caring for its elders, the state in taking on this
responsibility dissolves the binds that tied together the family.
And that is only one example of state policy which leads to the dissolution
of institutions in society. What was previously the primacy of society
becomes the primacy of the state, so that individuals are more invested in
the state ultimately. This only serves to increase the power of the state and
its ability to further dissolve other institutions in which power (due to the
dependency of individuals on these institutions for their livelihood) is
reserved, aggregating it all to itself. Thus the State-Society which, being
collectivist politically results in social atomization. There is lesser
opportunity at all to form relations of mutual will and civilization must
cease to develop to further levels. Individuals are set against each other; all
relations outside that of state-mediated “society” are constructed to be
antagonistic, the proliferation of prisoner’s dilemmas.
The eventual obsolescence of the state is ideal then because it is required if
institutions are to continue. An aspirational anarchism takes place; while the
material of a society may not be advanced enough to achieve a distributed
form of the regulation of macroscale aggression, the handicapping of the
state becomes an essential element of political philosophy so that, in the
“failure” of the state in providing for some service, social institutions form
to provide that service and contextualize the benefits for society of these
sophisticated instances of organization. The ultimate hope is not in the
“right state” but the “right institutional structure of society.”

C OSMOPOLITANISM AND E N
THNO- ATIONALISM

The reactionary take on nationalism is pragmatic rather than deontic. To use

popular language, it embraces nationalism due to practicalities rather than
ideology, though of course my use of ideology in this essay is quite distinct,
so I will explain it in terms of pragmatism over deontology.
Nationalism is meant not in the sense of state, so it would be unsound to
identify nationalism as a fervor in favor of a particular government; there
are nationalistic governments, and then there are cosmopolitan
governments. Nationalism is defined in terms of ethnicity, and is the
favoring of fewer distinct ethnic groups within a given society. Segregation
between distinct ethnicities of differing cultural mores and innate
psychologies is more nationalistic as compared with a “melting pot” which
has some or many different ethnic individuals being integrated, either
voluntarily or by force, with the result of social tension or assimilation.
Cosmopolitanism by contrast is the integration of many ethnic groups
together.
Favoring nationalism is not supremacist per se. It is only to stipulate that
likes ought to be around other likes; the more that people within a group are
like each other, the fewer psychic and social resources must be dedicated to
the development of Schelling points that provide for social coordination
between relatively unlike people. The more two individuals are alike in
ethnicity, then the more alike in innate psychology those individuals are;
granted there is the distribution of psychological traits along a
multidimensional axis, but within a group there is a more tightly correlated
average, rather than having multiple groups, each with its own average,
attempting to cohere along a flatter distribution of psychological traits.
To put it most simply, nationalism has an advantage over cosmopolitanism
because it allows for the coordination of institutional ventures between
individuals more easily. The more people within a population that are alike,
the easier it is to empathize, which means it is easier to negotiate, to trade,
to exchange, to interact, to resolve disputes. The more a person is an other,
the less that is known, the harder it is to empathize, the harder it is to
resolve to instances of common cause. Cosmopolitanism requires additional
resources, additional institutions in order to facilitate peaceable cooperation
between potentially radically different psychologies that differ along ethnic
lines. Securing “in-group” empathy is easier to do if you’re already
ethnically equivalent with the other; if you’re not, then other means must be
secured to establish “in-group” empathy which must be admitted as an
additional cost.
Nationalism is identified not so much with ethnocentrism as a preference
for ethnic segregation by those ethnic groups themselves. Given an
environment in which integration is not incentivized by various means, be
they statist (in which case they are coercive) or natural (likely the city, for
reasons to be explained shortly). “White nationalism” and “black
nationalism” do not depend essentially on any claims to supremacy, even if
it would be easy to understand that such forces may be motivated by a
misguided notion of supremacy (which I will not rule out even if I do not
know how supremacy could be established). It is taken as a given that
people prefer to be around others more like themselves rather than others
more unlike themselves, which leads to the natural tendency of
communities to segregate themselves by race, class, and history, with
integration being a cost undertaken for other benefits rather than being
sought out for itself.
Cosmopolitanism as a contrast involves integration. Integration is a social
phenomenon that is not costless, which is to say that some things must be
given up in order to gain it. Integration, performed successfully, can have
very great benefits, but this integration must be based on mutual ends
sought by individuals from both communities; otherwise, if they want
nothing to do with each other, they cannot be made to want to do anything
with each other and will resist forcible integration, increasing social
tension, racism, and other negative social phenomena.
It is the anecdotal experience of many that those who are “least racist” tend
to live in highly segregated communities, e.g. white suburban
neighborhoods with low presence of minorities, while those who are “most
racist” are those who live in communities with higher rates of integration.
Why does this occur? It occurs for a very simple reason. What individuals
of an ethnic group are most likely to find preferable and thus
understandable behavior isn’t equivalent between groups, which leads to
behaviors that some groups find acceptable to be odious among other
groups. Some groups which have a higher innate preference for antagonism
for out-groups will act in ways that are unpleasant to groups that have a
lower innate preference for antagonism of out-groups. Whites, who appear
to be more corporate-minded, are less innately racist in the sense that being
a member of another group is not usually taken as grounds for antagonism
to obtain social proof for one’s in-group. Blacks, on the other hand, may
have a high preference for antagonism as social proof of in-group
sentiment, which leads them to being more innately racist and less pleasant
to whites, with higher rates of anti-white crime and anti-social behavior at
the extremes of this tendency. Allowed to segregate from each other, each
group is confronted less with those behaviors the other finds odious. A
solution to racism, in other words, is to stop forcing integration, as if it is
being around each other which necessarily leads to empathy rather than
mutual antagonism as they disagree with each other’s use of mutual space.
In other words, racism has more utility in an integrated culture. Allow
segregation, a lot of the grounds of racism disappear.
Given that cosmopolitanism faces certain costs which a more nationalistic
community, why ever would a community or population be more
cosmopolitan? Cosmopolitanism likewise has its own benefits which
nationalism cannot secure. Given a difference in aptitude to various skills
and preferences by distinct ethnic groups, there is an advantage to trade
between the groups as it utilizes the division of labor along the lines of
absolute and comparative advantages. Some of these instances of
comparative advantage may be asymmetric, some may be vocationally
equivalent. We might suppose that autists are innately best at programming
while extroverts are best at public relations; it then becomes advantageous
for them to overcome the natural level of antagonism in order to take
advantage of a vocationally equivalent comparative advantage. On the other
hand, races of low intelligence may be systematically more likely to take on
service vocations, freeing up more individuals from smarter races to partake
in information vocations; rather than one group being subjected by the other
due to forcible integration, integration under the common cause of mutual
benefit actually serves to facilitate empathy. Integration occurs, in other
words, due to the common cause certain groups have, with the result of
incentivizing lower innate and behavioral antagonism to out-groups.
This analysis is removed from moralizing, amounting to no more than
sociological observation tied to realistic consequences of these facts. There
is a bounty of evidence demonstrating innate out-group antagonistic
tendencies. On the other hand, there is no necessary moral good in going
beyond one’s own innate biases to integrate oneself with those of other
groups. There is a very real danger in comingling with groups one doesn’t
know anything about, so the bias to stick to one’s own kind, including their
own genetic kind, is an effective and rationally defensible coping
mechanism for the uncertainties of life. Likewise, for those who are able to
find profit in mingling with other groups, then that is their profit. There is
however no intrinsic good or evil either way about one’s innate nationalistic
or cosmopolitan psychological makeup. Some people just prefer the rural
lifestyle and some people just prefer the city lifestyle. It is a preference no
more significant than liking chocolate over vanilla, or vice versa.
What people are worried about, and so emphasize their “anti-racist” beliefs
as compensation, is that some people’s lack of preference or at least high
tolerance for people of other groups leads to racism. Taking people outside
of an environment in which they are perpetually told how other groups are
just as good as theirs and that the experience of others is legitimate, so the
worry goes, and allow them to place themselves in environments where
there is no pressure to signal anti-racist beliefs will make them actually
racist, with attendant oppression of those groups in that person’s action.
This overlooks that being forcibly integrated in addition to being told that
your finding the behaviors of other groups odious makes you a bad person
is just more likely to make a person tune out reasonable anti-racist
messages. The notion that only white people can be racist, or at least that
the innate racism of other groups is acceptable and understandable whereas
the bland racism of whites is not, is typically understood as a preposterous
notion foisted on integrated whites by self-segregated whites who deny the
legitimacy of interaction with the odious behaviors of other groups.
The suggestion is less that racism can be solved by any single means, if
there is anything that can be done to entirely eliminate it, but that it isn’t
improved by denying the legitimacy of differing opinions about the
behaviors of other groups. There will be clashes between cultures, and if
you have only as many contact points between different cultures facilitated
by actual common cause (e.g. business as I expect in most cases) rather than
manufactured interaction with the purpose of forcing to appreciate
something they have no disposition towards, and implicitly denying the
validity of white identity and culture compared to others, this is no solution
to racism, but the identification of the problem of racism with a scapegoat
group (i.e. whites) is certainly only a redirection of that racism.
Some more radical factions with neoreaction may have worries over my
unwillingness to defend outright racism, rather than mere racial realism and
rational prejudices. I am perhaps more optimistic that, given a lack of
forcible integration, some level of integration between those who are
willing may be allowed. Distinct cultures and ethnicities possess legitimate
experiences and predispositions which may be usefully evaluated, even
potentially adopted. As supposed above, I imagine these will be in the
cities, which will be more cosmopolitan, which may be considered a
hierarchy between those more disposed to nationalist (in my sense)
communities and those more disposed to cosmopolitan life.
This is not on the basis of a “live and let live” mentality, as is found in the
rightly criticized modern libertarianism, but to draw out alternative and
competing goods. Nationalism and cosmopolitanism each possess various
benefits not available to the other, and to those who are able to obtain them,
they should be free to do so. The opposition is to neither self-segregation or
self-integration, but forcible segregation and forcible integration. Both are
the same kind of mistake. Ethnic identities come in various flavors, with
some being more nationalist and some more cosmopolitan. Assuming the
legitimacy of divergent ethnic experiences, there is nothing that should stop
groups mingling together or dispersing as they see fit.
Such a view brings the forcible colonization of other cultures into question.
Even if is the case that the colonized culture is better off for it, a softer form
of colonization, predicated on the basis of mutually chosen exchange, is
preferable in that it is less destructive of cultivated traditions in the
colonized culture. Given the traditions being replaced are inferior to the
imported cultural manifestations of tradition, the free integration of a
mutually exchanged culture is more likely to produce sustainable traditions,
in the establishment of new institutions and their own traditions and the
augmenting of pre-existent traditions to a form more adaptable to the new
cultural context.
—
T RADITION AND THE R
ETURN OF C
HRISTENDOM

Religion is a useful vehicle of social engineering. Its cosmology, its

prescriptions and proscriptions, its accumulation of power in elitist
institutions (e.g. the Vatican), these all tend to make it poised to provide a
readymade and persistently defended worldview which results in a greater
potential degree of social coordination. Pro-social morals couched in
mythological and religious language led to the rise of civilization, and
virtually all comprehensive social movements partake of a religious
soteriological posture. Religious institutions which last over time must
provide evolutionary benefits to its adherents, and their focus on eternity
instills the lowest average time preference compared to other institutions.
This leads to extremely sophisticated structures of governance that allows it
to ride out centuries-long periods of decline, even allowing it a high
likelihood of surviving complete social collapse, as witnessed with the
Roman Catholic Church in the West following the decline of the Roman
Empire.
Christendom of course refers to the superstructural makeup of Medieval
Europe; in other words, it is the Catholic Middle Ages equivalent to the
modern American Cathedral. The proposal by traditionalists to return a
higher degree of moral power to the institution of the Church is an embrace
of the means of the Cathedral. Some are wary of supporting another
superstructure, but this occurs under the mistaken assumptions that
superstructures are necessarily negative for society and that a highly
coordinated level of social capital can occur without a superstructure. There
would be others who prefer a secular, albeit reactionary, superstructure.
My answer to the latter group is brief: religious institutions such as the
Catholic Church lower the overall time preference of civilization. Not only
are the religious institutions themselves remarkably future-oriented, but
they instill values and mores within society that are also beneficial for
rewarding greater future-orientedness. A religious superstructure must then
have sufficiently low time-preference to foster sustainable socioeconomic
arrangements and diminish the likelihood and scale of destructive social
movements.
It is furthermore questionable whether a “secular superstructure” is even
formally possible. Without a very broad all-encompassing common cause,
coordinating the actions of powerful institutions is very difficult. We may
only care to distinguish between those ideologies which are materialistic in
common cause or spiritual. A secular superstructure must at least take on a
religious posturing, with the attendant blind spots and prejudices in the
faithful. The point at which a “secular” context becomes a totalizing
narrative about the ultimate purpose of the individual and mankind, it may
best be called a religion, whether or not it refers to classical staples of
religious worldviews such as God or the supernatural.
There may be the worry over whether religion is (in any way) true, and the
desire that people shouldn’t be placed under pressure to be religious. I think
the concern with indoctrination is over-stated. Not only are the vast
majority of people susceptible to indoctrination, this vast majority can’t
even obtain a modicum of moral agency without being effectively
indoctrinated. Whether this indoctrination comes from preachers or teachers
does not matter. The prevalence of near-universal education in post-
industrial countries is testament to the fact that with increased material
prosperity, a greater degree of socialization is requisite for a person to keep
up with change. One might note the inter-generational gaps in culture
brought about by the lack of socialization into digital media of generations
older than 40.
Some may say this is a depressing picture. It is this which makes the long
timescale of civilization possible, as it means a people are generally self-
regulating. A civilization of philosopher-kings is not only unrealistic, it is
undesirable. A high ratio of exceptional individuals within a society who
obtain some level of sovereignty from and over the process of socialization
would result not in an abundance of pro-social institutions, but the
dissolution of institutions as these individuals resist any process that would
serve to socialize them. Thankfully, no society is even remotely near that
ratio.
While this natural complicity and complacency of mass man with the
reigning superstructure does permit abuse, it may also be used to society’s
own benefit. This is the goal of introducing a religious superstructure.
Religious worldviews, unlike secular worldviews, provide cohesive moral
injunctions for a people to follow, founded in static texts and traditions. The
secular view provides no basis for the development of a tradition, as it
admits no necessary group charged with ritualizing power relations. Ritual
is a Schelling point which secularism must deny.
It is a modernist to have undue sentiment for the mass man, as though he
can or should be raised from his state of thorough socialization. However, it
must be pointed out that socialization is a requisite to a person obtaining
moral agency. Void authoritative, i.e. non-reasons based, instruction, the
individual simply does not learn how to move in society. To be treated as an
independent moral agent as a child would be disastrous for the child, yet the
child does not gain his independence until is taught to him through social
stimulus. A mature individual is a socialized individual.
The socialized individual may be contrasted with the sovereign individual
who has been socialized but who, due to an internal will, embraced his
worldview on the basis of independently found reasons. The differences
between the socialized and sovereign individual are most obvious when the
socialized individual, in defending the perceived status quo (or perceived
counterculture), relies not merely on fallacious reasoning, but on social and
subjective reasons.
Given the socialized individual rarely amounts to more than the sum of his
own socially constructed person, it brings focus from that of bringing about
change through more democratic and mass populist movements to capturing
the superstructure and beginning to alter the process of socialization as it
concretely occurs. The democratic people can only be rallied if they already
agree to your ideology, so it is a waste of time to try and convert everyone
from the ground up. When neoreaction asks a person to stop embracing
comfortable fictions, will they? The more socialized they are, the less they
are sovereign, the less chance they will stick to neoreaction when it comes
to making sacrifices. Only if a person can tell that the reigning process of
socialization has harmed them will they become more susceptible to
effective conversion, though optimism should be tempered as to the
potential depth of their articulated opinions.
Christendom, and by which I mean specifically a Catholic superstructure,
may only be able to rise again following a collapse. I personally have little
sympathy for Protestantism, as it is ideologically opposed to reaction.
Above I equated Protestantism with spiritual egalitarianism, predicated on
the rejection of spiritually privileged positions within the Church. Within a
reactionary society Protestants would be in the same position as
conservatives within a modernist society; ideologically compromised. I do
not mean to extend a polemic within this text, but it must be understood that
a superstructure which includes a monolithic institution can achieve more
comprehensive social coordination. The nearest Protestant equivalent of the
Catholic Church might be the Anglican Church, which does take an
ideological leadership of mainline denominations, though clearly its
tendencies are contrary to what we’d hope to see, which establishes the true
ideological bent of Protestantism.
Tradition is far more than what has been done before. It is a social-historical
context which provides the means of beneficial perpetuity which ties
together the future with the past. By definition, a tradition must benefit
perpetuity, for a tradition is simply that which is passed down through
generations, including not only its means of transmission but the end of
transmission. If the notion of “anti-tradition” makes sense, it must be
identified with materialistic nihilism, the pursuit of an individual’s pleasure
without planning for perpetuity. Understood as such, it is easy to see that
the modern age is not only untraditional, it is anti-traditional. Fewer
individuals than ever before are having children, and those who do remain
more focused on their own materialistic pursuits than the education of their
own children and the transmission of a continuity from their own past to the
future. Anti-tradition is equivalent to memetic stillbirth. While judgment
may be passed on anti-tradition for the conceit of nihilism and the
destruction of the future of one’s own, it is a mercy that from the
evolutionary social-historical perspective nihilism is always maladaptive to
the social environment in the long run. A people that turns its back on its
life-giving and life-preserving traditions is bound for ruin, either at its own
hands or the hands of another.
Traditionalism in this context is a description of the kind of memes which
are passed down through families and guarded by them. This is on one hand
not a mere defense of tradition for tradition’s sake, in the style of Burke,
dependent as it is on an anti-rationalism as though governance and society
are beyond understanding. The sake of traditionalism is for lowering time
preference, so that all, not only the patriarch whose incentives are naturally
guided in this way, are incentivized to place themselves into a social context
in which the end is something outside themselves while providing an end to
their own lives as well. Whereas anti-tradition is a nihilistic game of
accumulating material and social goods without the intent of it placing the
individual in a larger context, traditionalism is the preference for roles
unchosen but assumed which link one together to his ancestors and
progeny.
Catholic traditionalism is only to say that the traditions of a society, passed
on in its respective institutions, are marked by an essentially Catholic
character, and unite the traditions under the good of Christian life. It is my
own preference and belief that it is far more sustainable than non-Catholic,
even if they are Protestant Christian, traditions, though I leave it to those
unpersuadable to Catholicism to determine their own optimal arrangements
of tradition.
The point of an overarching context of traditions, a kind of super-tradition
as it were, is in order to foster greater overall cohesion in society. The
development of traditions outside this super-traditional context may lead to
the production of mutually exclusive traditions, instilling more division
between groups and disrupting the potential coordination of society into
institutions and superstructure. What would be preferred of a super-tradition
is the grounding of rules that makes traditions mutually compatible,
instilling cooperation even between formally opposed groups.
Ultimately, tradition is the most abstract vagary of neoreaction, yet also the
most important, for it alone could tie together the vagaries into a cohesive
social political philosophy. It would do so by introducing each new
individual into contexts of cohesive social cooperation which are greater
than the individual and instill the value of that individual’s end in providing
their contribution to perpetuity. This is at a contrast to the present, in which
most are instilled into a lifetime pursuit of the accumulation of material
goods, placing economic goods above all others, which has lent itself to the
resultant nihilism of those who select themselves from the honor of
reproduction. This is why I am at once skeptical of the feasibility of secular
traditions and must insist on the preferability of religious traditions, even to
those who think religion is but an obsolete misunderstanding of the
fundamental nature of the world. A totalizing narrative, which is uniquely a
property of religions, can provide a coherent narrative for all groups of
people within a society, from slave, master, man, woman, child, black,
white, rich, or poor, facilitating their cooperation and peace with their place
in the hierarchy.
—
W RHY EACTION? W N
HY OW?

It is called ‘neoreaction’ in the sense that this isn’t the first instance of
reaction. That would be true, but the previous instances of reaction are not
historical, they are ideological. In other words, what makes this a “new
form of reaction” is that it is truly a new form of reaction. It goes outside
the bounds of modernist ideology and gets at something entirely original, a
whole new premise of social organization. This is not a mere conservatism,
but a conservatism guided by unique principles that diagnose and transcend
the occult motivation of the Zeitgeist. It is that which allows it to be a true
contender, rather than merely a perspective which may be ultimately re-
negotiated in the stoogifying complex a well-adapted idea-species ought,
wherein dissent is allowed and actively developed, provided it does not ever
amount to a true challenge against the occult motivation.
In one sense it the refusal to dialogue with modernism that allows
neoreaction to develop, for the very idea of modernism is that dialogue only
occurs in the case that one accepts its presuppositions about the good of
equality and the dissolution of historically fundamental institutions in the
name of such a pursuit. Seeing that equality costs so much, the
neoreactionary opts instead for the secure foundation of natural society,
Nature and Nature’s God as it has been called. The willingness to ask
certain questions with a view to actually pursuing their answers without
pausing to consider what one was taught to hope and to see opens the mind
to a reality which has otherwise been precluded, so it is no wonder that it
should be called a Dark Enlightenment. What has been forgotten has been
remembered, recovered, and now it is the wonder of how to reform.
From the reactionary perspective, modernism is not merely a mistake. It
poses a fundamental threat to human flourishing. Embraced at the global
level, which it has not yet accomplished, it would lead to endless decline,
only being thrown off after the depths of another dark age. If it is the fate of
humanity to endlessly come back to modernist ideology, then humankind is
a failure mode, of which only an enlightened few can ever see man’s
cyclical fate. Such is a possibility, yet we must labor under the hope that
modernism is not the necessary fate of human civilization, and the
misappropriation of power as it currently goes on may be righted so that
human flourishing again becomes the product of civilization.
If this project of social theory may be described from that turn, it is that
society must be undertaken anew each generation. It is contrary to the
modernist conceit of progress in that it does not suppose whatever changes
are imposed will never prevent civilization from rising to ever-higher
levels. Free of the supposition that progress must happen as though it were
an iron-bound law of the universe, it is able to consider the hypothesis that
this superstructure is not the final or ideal superstructure. Where the
modernist sees the end of history, the reactionary only sees an ongoing
process for which the ideal form of society is contingent on the givens of
environment, people, and history.
Yet a skepticism remains. Losing the deluded modern optimism about mass
man, those who are ruled by power shall not fundamentally understand the
means by which they are ruled. The reasons given here are, even if
syntactically open to understanding by those who are ruled, the mass do not
want to understand power for they should only have to understand that they
are influenced in ways beyond their own comprehension, negating their
own moral agency. Furthermore, to the extent that they understand, it may
only instill a loathing in them of their rulers, for in not understanding the
justice of their rule they think the placement of one group over another in
the hierarchy is arbitrary, baseless. What makes the rich, rich? According to
an overwhelming number of the poor, it is due to accident. What makes the
poor, poor? According to an overwhelming number of the rich, it is due to
lesser capability. Which of these groups is right? What perspective is most
in line with the truth? There is a chance that either group perceives an
aspect of reality which the other doesn’t, or maybe aspect the other misses
doesn’t matter to them. What matters more is whether they can be provided
narratives which contextualize their relations peaceably, in order that social
coordination isn’t disrupted.
The individual ends of reactionaries are not all presently unified, and it
would be a miracle outside all hope for splintering political division to
never occur. Each will in his own political philosophy take himself to
represent the authentic intent of reaction. It does not seem possible to argue
over who is the “true political heir” of reaction, and I won’t take a side on
the issue. It seems equally pointless to try and argue that communists or
feminists are the “true political heirs” of modernity. The heart of the matter
is whether the ideological bent of civilization aims either at flourishing or
destruction, and reactionaries are agreed that political philosophies
subsisting under the ideology of neoreaction shall better secure the future
than the current hegemony of modernism.
What is the practical future of reaction? The future construction of the
ideology seems well-secured already, and though it would be impossible to
predict what specific intellectual developments shall take place (at least
without actually making those developments). The notion to “do
something” has been gaining traction between the like-minded
reactionaries, though I must confess the potential to save the system from
its decline is dubious, at least not without it being a compromise that would
only serve to extend the decline and, by extension, the time at which
recovery would occur. A sooner collapse may be preferable on the grounds
that rebuilding with less mis-allocated capital and a less comprehensively
indoctrinated population is easier. A later collapse may be preferable in that
it would allow us more comfort within which to perform our reactionary
analyses in preparing for taking the future following the decline. Or an
entirely unthought of strategy may be developed; practical politics is not my
own specialty and I leave it to others to formulate practical principles.
My inability to postulate the future of reaction aside, I can still make some
estimates about the appeal of reactionary views to the youth of our modern
cultures. My own entry to neoreaction was through the sexual realism of the
androcentric blogosphere, particularly via its efficacy with predicting
human behavior in social settings. This particular route has been undertaken
by many, though there are naturally other routes as well, typically through
some given vagary discussed above. The general character of these
conversions I take to be the disillusionment with the promises of
modernism. Insofar as modernism may be understood as a kind of social
contract which promises certain rewards for certain behaviors, the process
in which it is discovered that the hypotheses modernism engenders about
the working of society come to be falsified by actual lived experience
makes reaction a peculiarly anti-modernist ideology. With respect to the
desire to actually repeal the political mistakes of the last decades, it
becomes quickly apparent that the entire project of the Enlightenment was
flawed, which itself was born in the radical spiritual egalitarianism of
Luther. A justification to repeal modernism must itself utilize ideas and
principles which are vehemently un-modern, perhaps even premodern or
postmodern, which leads to the discovery of the alternate ideological
system of reaction, which gives an expression and rational voice to the
occult motivation undiagnosed by modern political philosophies.
What precisely explains this jump from only one ideology to another? Why
don’t we see this disillusionment resulting in the rediscovery and
development of diverse new ideologies?
The all-encompassing nature of ideology is the key to the answer. There are
only two ideologies; modernism and reaction. This also explains the
leftward-rightward division. Although political philosophy is
multidimensional, ideology describes a more general kind of phenomena,
the phenomena of civilization. To augment an oft-used reactionary analogy,
ideology is the virus which inhabits the host society and, being better
adapted, perpetuates itself on the host; where this appears to draw a
distinction between host (society) and virus (memeplex), I would say there
is no distinction. Civilization just is ideology; ideology not only grounds the
possibility of civilization, it does so by providing the idea of civilization
which it becomes. The overall possibility of civilization is inherent in the
question “What is justice?” the answer to which yields your ideology. A
political philosophy is only a rationalization of that ideological impulse.
The modernist answers the question “Treating like as like, and all are like”
while the reactionary answers “Treating like as like, and none are like.”
Each in taking this answer not only views the other’s answer as being
wrong, but senseless. Both have equivalent definitions of justice and
equality, but the senses are distinct in the evaluative methodology the
ideology uses to analyze the constitution of society.
History only goes in two directions with respect to flourishing; sustainably
better or unsustainably worse. By definition, a system which is
unsustainable must be getting worse in the long-run, whether this occurs
due to outright destruction or the accumulation of time preference
heightening memes. Whether or not flourishing is increasing or decreasing
comes down only to the social political factors of society, for all social
action is constrained by ideology.
Friedrich Nietzsche, though he’d certainly object to his being used in this
way, speaks prophetically of the clash between modern thought and the
world’s actual nature:
In all the countries of Europe, and in America, too, there now is
something that abuses this name: a very narrow, imprisoned, chained
type of spirits who want just about the opposite of what accords with
our intentions and instincts - not to speak of the fact that regarding the
new philosophers who are coming up they must assuredly be closed
windows and bolted doors. They belong, briefly and sadly, among the
levelers - these falsely so-called “free spirits” - being eloquent and
prolifically scribbling slaves of the democratic taste and its “modern
ideas”; they are all human beings without solitude, without their own
solitude, clumsy good fellows whom one should not deny either
courage or respectable decency - only they are unfree and ridiculously
superficial, above all in their basic inclination to find in the forms of
the old society as it has existed so far just about the cause of all human
misery and failure - which is a way of standing truth happily upon her
head! What they would like to strive for with all their powers is the
universal green-pasture happiness of the herd, with security, lack
danger, comfort, and an easier life for everyone; the two songs and
doctrines which they repeat most often “equality of rights” and
“sympathy for all that suffers” - and suffering itself they take for
something that must be abolished. We opposite men, having opened
our eyes and conscience to the question where and how the plant
“man” has so far grown most vigorously to a height - we think that
 this has happened every time under the opposite conditions, that to this
end the dangerousness of his situation must first grow to the point of
enormity, his power of invention and simulation (his “spirit”) had to
develop under prolonged pressure and constraint into refinement and
audacity, his life - will had to be enhanced into an unconditional
power will. We think that hardness, forcefulness, slavery, danger in the
alley and the heart, life in hiding, stoicism, the art of experiment and
devilry of every kind, that everything evil, terrible, tyrannical in man,
everything in him that is kin to beasts of prey and serpents, serves the
enhancement of the species “man” as much as its opposite does.
Indeed, we do not even say enough when we say only that much; and
at any rate we are at this point, in what we say and keep silent about,
at the other end from all modem ideology and herd desiderata - as
their antipodes perhaps?5
Taking on Nietzsche for ourselves, would not the slave morality, if it must
be equated to some group in history, be not the modernists? The notion that
the hierarchy which places the slave at bottom and the master at top under
modernism is effectively inverted, where now the natural master works for
the benefit of the natural slaves, the betters for their lesser. This must
necessarily lead to the diminishing of flourishing, as the lesser are no longer
directed to production by the social simulacra of power, the message
distributed through all forms of social access and the betters who would are
cut down while the system works itself to the point of exhaustion and
beyond, settling into collapse.
Maybe it is the reason for our eventual success, maybe it is a fatal flaw, but
this limits the necessity of winning over the mass of the public. Our reasons
do not need to be brought down to the level of mass consumption, and
indeed they couldn’t be. Who in the modern day, invested in the false
consciousness of self-esteem, would accept his natural state as a slave of
some degree? Reaction is incompatible with cultural democracy in the same
way capitalism is rendered incompatible with cultural Marxism.
Neoreaction is an understanding reserved for a few, though its effects would
be felt by all.
1 Catechism of the Catholic Church. Paragraph 35.
2 This is the hypothesis of the one and only hbd*chick.
3 Kydland, Finn E. and Prescott, Edward C. Rules Rather than Discretion:
The Inconsistency of Optimal Plans. The Journal of Political Economy,
Volume 85, Issue 3 (June 1977), p. 473-492.
4 Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae. Paragraph 17.
5 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Translated by Kaufman, Walter. Beyond Good and
Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Part 1, paragraph 44.
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