highlight – Page 2

The Trichotomy Explained

Since Spandrell’s
celebrated blog post
of April 2013, neoreaction has been seen as a trinity, or “trichotomy” of three principles: the Ethno-Nationalist principle, the Techno-Commercial principle, and the Religious-Traditionalist
principle.
At a shallow level, neoreaction might appear nothing more than a fragile aggregation of advocates of the three very distinct principles—a coalition of rejectionists of the modern consensus. Most outsiders, and some insiders, have seen it that way, leading to an undercurrent of “fissionism”, of splitting up into three factions.
In spite of that there has always been at the core a dim awareness that the three principles make up one whole, that neoreaction is more than the aggregation of its parts. For all that, it has been unclear whether that is meant as one agenda that embraces the three principles, or rather one movement that encompasses three factions. We talk about three, but in Spandrell’s original statement, the Religious–traditional element is only grudgingly mentioned as a possible third stream, and not examined. He is eloquent in his account of being torn between the two other principles:
“If I had to say where I am, is the nationalist branch. But I used to be more on the capitalist camp. The capitalist argument is quite powerful: ethnic kinship is cool but the necessary corollary of it is National-socialism. Or socialism itself. We used to have more asabiyyah than now, but we also had no economic growth. For all the nostalgia for the Victorian age, who wants to go back there? Who prefers ethnic solidarity and purpose to modern medicine and technology? Reaction is based on a fear of where we are headed, certainly not on a dislike of how life is right now. Yes the proles have become barbarians, but they never were that pleasant anyway. Ethnic solidarity by itself is not necessarily conducing of scientific progress and economic growth. And those I agree are good things.

“But the capitalism argument is to allow the market to do its bidding. But what is its bidding right now? In the last decades it has been towards a re-concentration of wealth. Plutocracy is coming back with force. And yeah the plutocrats have made a lot of good stuff. The argument goes that they might do even better stuff if the government wasn’t messing with their ambitions through socialistic regulations. Imagine all the economic growth they might unleash if they were allowed to employ the proles for peanuts! What’s wrong with slave camps if you get cheap cotton, huh?”

This argument is really the heart of neoreaction. In more recent months we have employed the language of Gnon—the God of Nature or Nature, reality which cannot be defied. In terms of Gnon, Spandrell’s conflict is vivid.

Gnon requires creative destruction. There are more effective ways of manipulating the physical world than those we currently employ. The future belongs to those who find and employ those more effective ways. Anything that ties us to the current ways, that prevents us from trying new ways and using them if they are better, will incur the wrath of Gnon.

The Techno-Commercial principle of Neoreaction is aligment with creative destruction, with bankruptcy and the elimination of the failed and the false.

That political identification with creative destruction—markets, competition, freedom to innovate is where Moldbug came from, where I came from, where, according to the extract above, Spandrell came from. But it is not adequate. Gnon is not satisfied with creative destruction alone. Gnon requires power.

A system can be designed, by libertarians or anarcho-capitalists, to maximise creative destruction. But it cannot live. The society which creates it might eschew power, leaving the forces of competition to find the optimum solutions to problems. Others, however, will defect from this view, and occupy the power vacuum. They might come from outside, or from within, but they will come, and they will either succeed, and reshape the society according to their particular group interests, or the attacked will organise themselves to resist, forming their own power centre, which will itself reshape society according to its particular group interests. The potential of loyalty to a succesful group is in human nature, it is given by Gnon. A society of those who deny it will come to be ruled by those who do not.

If Creative Destruction is made concrete in technology and commerce, group loyalty is made concrete in ethnic solidarity and nationalism. They are not the only group loyalties possible, indeed they are not the dominant ones in today’s West, but they are probably in the long run the most stable and reliable. The neoreactionary study of thedes is the science of this principle of Gnon.

The true neoreactionary, following Spandrell, attempts to balance the creativity of techno-commercialism with the stability of ethno-nationalism. Really, that is the whole problem. It being the whole problem, nobody should expect it to be easy, and it is not. In practical application, embodied in the culture of a society, Techno-commercialism is in deadly conflict with Ethno-nationalism. Markets undermine stable positions of power, blur boundaries between in-group and out-group, invite cosmopolitanism and compete away loyalty. National loyalties obstruct trade, splinter markets, paralyse innovation, preserve the unfit in defiance of Gnon. There is no equilibrium to be reached between the two, no dividing line between where each one can act. In a thousand decisions, the choice must be made again and again between the right techno-commercial answer and the right ethno-nationalist answer. This unstable mix can, when the proportions are right, survive and prosper. But the long-run danger is always that one will overpower the other completely, collapsing the society into unproductive socialist nationalism or into hostile memetic capture by an acquisitive thede. It could even be argued, that in today’s West, the principle of balance has survived, but we have the worst of both worlds: a society ruled by a minority thede, in which the point of compromise is to suppress creative destruction. The ruling thede is not a nation or an ethnicity, but a fluid ideologically-based club whose members must endlessly and destructively compete against each other to retain their membership. Competition in the ruling thede, stagnation in the market.

What then is the neoreactionary solution to the hard problem of getting the benefit of both techno-commercialism and thede loyalty at the same time in the same society? There must be an active management of the competing needs. That management cannot be built on either principle, or there can be no balance. It must come from outside both. But, since both have the force of Gnon between them, it must have some power of its own, some authority independent of both commerce and thede, which can impose on either or both as the situation required.

What can fill this role is, frankly, still an open question for me. The most promising possibilities so far suggested are the authority of tradition and the authority of religion. Either one can, in the right cultural setting, empower a judge to rule for competition or for loyalty as necessary for the long-term good of the society. This is the role of the third principle of the neoreactionary trichotomy: to be the respected arbiter between the first two. The trichotomy therefore in its most general form consists of creative destruction, thede loyalty, and authority, but makes most immediate sense as techno-commercialism, ethno-nationalism and religio-traditionalism.

On this framework, a huge amount of very productive earth becomes available for working. What have the effects been of thede alignments divorced from ethnicity? (I only touched on that above in the barest sense). How, and how effectively, have present and past societies achieved balance between the competitive and stabilising forces? Has such success as they have achieved been accidental, or is it repeatable? How have conflicts within each of the three elements affected the overall balance: church and state, nation and region, corporation and entrepreneur? The value in my analysis lies in the degree to which these questions can be answered usefully.

Cathedrals and Cultural Dominance

I got in a conversation on twitter yesterday about the choice of the term “Cathedral” to describe the information organs of the modern state: academia and the media.

To those of us that have been around and around this debate for years, it is a bit tedious, and sure enough there were some groans, but I do not apologise. For one thing, nobody who is still paying any attention to Anissimov’s bullshit is in any position to complain about tedious. The problem with the word Cathedral is that it implies something good, beautiful, admirable. For some Christians, it is an insult to their religion that we compare our enemy to buildings built by their predecessors. They would rather we emphasised the Jewish contribution to the ideology and membership of the Cathedral, by referring to it as a synagogue.

I can understand their discomfort, but the comparison is so instructive that it is worth working through. To retreat from the question by compromising on the terminology is to lose the opportunity to explain some of the most vital points of the neoreactionary theory, points that are easily missed by those approaching Moldbug from a traditionalist starting-point, as opposed to that of the “open-minded progressive” he was primarily addressing.

It can be jarring to those who have emerged from a Christian enclave to learn that in the wider society, “religion” does not mean their religion, “morality” is not their morality, and “conservatives” are not engaged in conserving their culture. It must be tempting to think that their culture is still here, and can be rallied and strengthened and brought back. But the physical cathedrals that medieval Christians built are now museums, and any status that their occupants have in society is earned by conforming to progressivism rather than opposing it.

To a member of the mainstream culture, a cathedral is a large, rich institution from which, historically, the dominant morality and beliefs of society were pronounced. Maybe it was also a centre of true religion and the worship of God, but that is not so widely accepted, and in any case not the primary set of associations.

In that sense, anyone can build a cathedral, provided they have a sufficiently high status in society. There is a new religion now, one which coincidentally developed out of Christianity, but has since separated from it. (The exact historical relationship of puritanism with modern progressivism is much debated, but isn’t at all the point here. Even if progressivism were entirely the creation of The Jews And Their Father The Devil, the arguments I’m making here would be the same.)

So, we have this new religion, Universalism, and it is dominant in our culture. It has built institutions which, like the cathedrals of old, tell us what is good, how we should behave, who we should obey. It operates completely openly, with one exception—it does not admit that it is a religion. It maintains that it is just the recognition of the self-evident, and that its priests are just good and intelligent people.

The prevailing impression of our political system is that it is not a theocracy, that liberalism and conservatism are just tendencies that compete within the system on equal terms, that “religion” means stuff like Christianity and Islam which was a bit iffy in the past but can be OK and pretty today provided they steer clear of things that are really bad like getting obsessed with obsolete sexual morality. We need a constant reminder that the reality is completely different, that liberalism is not a political faction but a dominant religion, that what is preached to us by Harvard and Hollywood is the doctrine of that religion. If that’s jarring, then it is all the more important. The relevant stereotypical associations if we denote the information establishment as a Synagogue, in contrast, would be of something closed, obscure, maybe people conspiring in secret. That is so far from the true situation, of Universalist devotees being recruited and trained openly in every university and on every television channel, as to produce a crippling misunderstanding of the problem.

And finally, it should not be too hard to eventually accept. It is no contradiction of Christian teaching (as I understand it) to put forward that it is not the dominant belief system in this world; that the Enemy is in power and that it is necessary to resist the dominant culture of the world. If assimilating this is a shock, it is surely not one that the Christian should be spared for the sake of being diplomatic.

There will be other difficulties reconciling Christianity and a Neoreactionary theory which has its origin in secularism, but the evidence so far is that they can be resolved.

Neocameralism and the Corporate-Governance Problem

The previous post was to say that I see the real division within the Dark Enlightenment as being between a strategy of converting the elite (neoreaction) and a strategy of replacing the elite (paleoreaction). In America, that might line up somewhat as neocameralism vs monarchy, but that isn’t really the dividing line. There are those supporting monarchism because they can accept nothing else, but there are also neoreactionary monarchists, such as myself, who choose monarchism as strategically preferable to other neoreactionary options.I concentrate on Britain, and I see monarchist rule as entirely feasible for Britain given any kind of large-scale visible failure of the existing regime. That doesn’t put me on the paleo side of the divide I described earlier. I could easily see myself being persuaded by the neocameralists if they can solve the corporate-governance problem more convincingly than Moldbug managed to do.

Moldbug’s method of guaranteeing shareholders’ rights is to have a computer system which can sabotage the management’s control if authorised to do so by a majority of shareholders voting via a secure automated cryptographic protocol. I never considered that practically workable. If you change the software, or even cause some change in the way the software operates, then you can modify who has rights over the state. I do not envision a system made so reliable and secure that that could not happen.

There may be other mechanisms that would work. Bitcoin is a promising example: as in Moldbuggian Neocameralism, the software says who has what rights under the system. However, the software is not running in a sealed untamperable box; it runs on my PC and yours, and it can be and has been changed. However, it is in the interests of everyone who uses the system that rights be protected and maintained according to the common understanding of the users of the system.

There’s a big gap from that principle to a working neocameralism, but I am able to hope it might be bridged.

In the meantime, I am looking at a different gap, between a situation in which British democracy has failed and the King has taken temporary control, and a situation where his authority is accepted as permanent. I think that is bridgeable, in certain plausible circumstances. I certainly don’t think that working on this puts me on the opposite side of any fission to Nick Land.

What makes my proposed monarchy neoreactionary is that the political formula supporting it is not primarily tradition or religion, but pragmatic and rational. The former democrats who will be part of the system will have have changed their view on a lot of practical, empirical questions, but not on the way they see the world

Shutdown

It’s not the role of the neoreaction to get too occupied by current affairs. The day-to-day obsessions of domestic and foreign policy are mostly irrelevant to our concerns; we must set our sights on a larger scale and a longer term.

The US Government shutdown, however, is a somewhat larger event, in which the actual forces shaping events ought to show themselves, and which we must be able to account for as a test and a demonstration of our theories.

I have not seen such an account, except for James Donald’s tightly constructed argument that, on the part of the Republican Congressional leaders at least, the conflict is a sham.

Even accepting Jim’s thesis, the wider story still needs explaining and putting into context.

There is a kind of dynamic equilibrium of politics under the Modern Structure. The Cathedral moves left at a controlled pace. It drags the political establishment behind it. The parties and the media drag the backward mass of the people behind them.

The last 15 years, under the Bush and Obama administrations, have seen an increase in the rate of expansion of the economic activity of the Federal Government beyond the previous rate. We can think of the old rate of leftward drift as the equilibrium rate, though of course that’s oversimplifying a complex situation.

That departure from the equilibrium rate of advance produced the Tea Party, by damaging the illusion that flyover country could oppose what was happening simply by supporting the Republican side of the political class.

The belief of the political classes in Washington today, received from the Cathedral, is that the White House is the government, and the House of Representatives is somewhere between a historical curiosity and a large lobbying firm. The motive for this is that the Presidency is easier for the Cathedral to control (particularly when it is in the hands of a leftist of weak character).

Leading Republicans, accepting the Cathedral position that the President is allowed to make domestic policy, but with their lucrative jobs threatened by the Tea Party, are adopting the fake-aggressive position described by James Donald.

Once they lose, the right of the Presidency to rule alone will be established. Congress will be a dead letter. It is still just possible that the Cathedral could attempt to revive Congress at some later time if they need to restrain an uncooperative president. But I would consider that unlikely — for a start, there’s no indication where an uncooperative president would come from.

The change in the constitutional roles of Congress and the Presidency that we are looking at the middle of is a prime illustration of the way the Modern Structure achieves major advances. There is plenty of noise, but no meaningful debate: the case for the new constitution consists primarily of shocked outrage that anyone could consider retaining the old one.

From a European perspective, it looks most like the situation when a new Treaty extends the powers of the European Union. In those cases at least there is a debate at the time, but once it is accepted, it is done for ever, and can no longer be considered negotiable. If a country like Denmark or Ireland votes down a change, then there is a much-resented delay while a new vote is arranged, and then finally the new consititution can be considered finished. It is then beyond any challenge. To suggest in France at any time since 1993 that the Maastricht treaty be rolled back would be utterly extremist, though it passed in a referendum by a vote of 51% to 49%, and Denmark needed two attempts to get the right answer.

From the American standpoint, it more concretely resembles the McCarthy period. McCarthy believed that the permanent US government was following a foreign policy at odds with that publicy avowed by the elected government, and that that was a crime. The facts and the law were on his side, but the Cathedral wasn’t, and his defeat meant that the question was settled: elected bodies no longer had any claim to control the State Department. The current conflict is about taking the power to control the Federal Government’s spending policy out of the hands of the elected body.

(Correction: according to Congressman Devin Nunes, the president does not have the power to spend as much as he wants on whatever he wants — he can be stopped if a supermajority in both houses of Congress opposes him. So that’s all right then.) None of this makes much difference in the long run. It is not as if Congress was ever a serious constraint on the steady march towards communism. I just think that it’s a big enough change in the system’s own terms to require an explanation.

The Boden Professor of Sanskrit election, 1860

It’s normal to label Wikipedia as part of the liberal propaganda system, which of course it is, but its sheer breadth of scope makes it impossible to turn it into a coherent lie, so a lot of information comes through it that right-thinking people would prefer was kept quiet. Further, I get the faint impression that someone in influence is pushing in a faintly reactionary direction — something that comes through most strongly in the choice of historical “featured articles” that are selected daily.
I was particularly fascinated by the featured article of the 7th of August, The Boden Professor of Sanskrit Election, 1860. That drew comment in some quarters as an amazingly minor and trivial piece of history to be unexpectedly well-documented, but to me, involved as I was in the long and difficult debate within the reactionary movement about the origins of cultural relativism, anti-racism and multiculturalism, it was a bombshell.
That it is not a minor or trivial piece of history is clearly evident from reading the Wikipedia article itself. The merits of the candidates were hotly disputed, the campaigns carried on in national newspapers, recognised on both sides as part of the “culture war” that is today so often denied. When the forces of conservatism won, the law was changed to prevent another such embarrassment occuring in future.
In this story, Max Müller represents the progressive establishment. He was a German Lutheran. His father was a poet, his grandfather a prime minister of Anhalt-Dessau. He wrote a dissertation on the Ethics of the Jewish philosopher Spinoza.
The Wikipedia story presents him as the downtrodden outsider, facing the great entrenched power of tradition and conservatism with nothing but his superior scholarship. The details make clear that everyone important was on his side: senior academics, The Times, the East India Company, and even senior Anglican clergymen, while his opponent Monier Williams relied for his victory on the old rural landowning class, out of power except in a few anachronistic areas such as the Convocation of Oxford University, to which they had shown up as part of the routine of their upbringing. They were due — overdue, in the view of the powers of the time — to be disenfranchised, and in due course were. As Müller himself wrote to his mother, “all the best people voted for me, the Professors almost unanimously, but the vulgus profanum made the majority”.
The social bases of conservatism and progressivism were also represented by the two men: Williams, son of an officer in the East India Company’s army, Müller, grandson of a European Prime Minister.
What’s remarkable about the election is not simply that it was an episode in the culture war between advancing universalism and retreating traditionalism, but that it was openly so, and that it was debated in terms of which side should win the culture war. It was universally understood that the line taken by Oxford University in this matter was of crucial importance for the future. There is no suggestion of academia being remote or isolated from the key cultural and political battlefields:

The Professorship is not for Oxford alone.
It is not for ‘The Continent and America’.
It is for India.
It is for Christianity.
Let us then Vote for the man who is well-known and loved in India, and who, even by the voice of his opponents, is declared to be a trustworthy depositary of the Christian interests of a Christian Foundation.

Today, Müller’s Wikipedia article is three times the length of Williams’, and includes this gem:

The designer Mary Fraser Tytler stated that Müller’s book Chips from a German Workshop (a collection of his essays) was her “Bible”, which helped her to create a multi-cultural sacred imagery.

Christopher Minkowski is the current Boden professor of Sanskrit (under the 1882 rules that removed control of the chair from the Convocation of Oxford graduates and brought it under the control of the University authorities). In his inaugral lecture in 2006, he made reference to the history of the professorship, contrasting the intent behind its original endowment — promotion of missionary Christianity in India — with the contrary attitude represented by Sir William Jones, founder of the Asiatick Society in Calcutta in 1784. Minkowski describes Jones as “the most prominent articulator in his day of a universalizing Enlightenment ideal, believing that the study of the cultural artefacts of ancient civilizations, and especially of India’s ancient civilzation, could provide instruction and edification for modern people. At the same time, he argued that it would be in the interests of good government in India for British rulers to understand the culture of those whom they ruled, and to govern as much as possible through pre-existent cultural forms.”
As to what Wikipedia says about Jones, well, I have to stop somewhere, and he looks well worth an article in his own right. Tutor to the future Earl Spencer (later Home Secretary), friend of Benjamin Franklin and supporter of American independence are minor asides in his biography
Back to Müller and Williams, I don’t want to oversimplify; a claim that Williams represents tradition and Müller the nascent Cathedral is more than supportable, but is subject to interesting qualifications. The mid-nineteenth century in England was the period where the progressive elite was privately shrugging off Christianity as a source of truth for their own use, while not yet abandoning it as the basis of the social order. Williams’ faction is therefore not simply the Tory opposition to progressivism, but also elements of the Whig side whose ideology still centred on the Christian religion rather than the new progressive morality that was beginning to separate itself from it. There was still a large overlap between puritan morality and progressive ideology, but differences were appearing, and the new multiculturalism was one of them. Thus, the bishops were for Müller, while the missionaries were for Williams.
The contradiction survives today in the Church of England and other protestant denominations — pockets of socially conservative Christians sending missionaries to convert the heathens to the True Faith, in spite of a hierarchy over them dedicated to social justice, respect for other religions, and the political debates of the day

The Modern Structure

Moldbug’s coining “The Cathedral” has caught on and been the subject of much debate, but his other term “The Modern Structure” less so, which is a shame.
The Modern Structure is the constitution of the United States of America, in the sense that that term was originally used — a description of how the government of that country operates. Other Western Democracies have very similar constitutions.
The centre of the Modern Structure is the Civil Service. They actually carry out the business of government.
In theory, they are under the control of Politicians, but in reality the politicians are at most peers of the civil service, and in many cases completely subservient.
In theory again, the Politicians are controlled by the Electorate. However, the influence of the Electorate is slight: enough to tip the balance occasionally when the issue is close, but not to dictate anything. Further, on any issue, the majority of the electorate are completely ignorant, and depend on the media for information about the issue and how they should vote.
Meanwhile, business has at least as much influence on the politicians, and additionally has direct influence on the civil service (through lobbying and other forms of corruption).
In terms of power over government policy, then, the map of influences look something like this:

That is less than half the story, however. In the long run, what matters is not how the noisy controversies of the moment get resolved, but rather what is or is not controversial in the first place. That is the matter of the dominant ideology — what all the people in this network believe about what is and what should be.
The ideology is not fixed: it has changed enormously over mere decades. Who has influence over ideology?
The high status of the organs of the modern structure make them significant, but there are other important influences, and other directions of influence within the network.
This diagram shows the flows of ideological influence. For this purpose I have broken out of “Education” the most crucial organ of ideological influence — “Elite Academia”. This is where ideology comes from.

It is true that, in a sense, everything influences everything else. However, a fully-connected undirected graph has little information content, so the diagram only shows what I think are the biggest influences on what people believe.
I have left out business from the ideology diagram. My view is that while business and lobbyists are able to significantly affect policy, they has very little influence on what people believe. They perhaps have the capability of causing such influence, but in practice businesses are primarily in competition with each other, and it is much more profitable for each player to spend his influence on favouring his own narrow interests rather than on promoting a general business-oriented ideology. To the extent that a business-oriented ideology exists, it is developed by enthusiasts, and funded more by a few eccentrics such as the Kochs rather than by moneyed interests as a whole.
However, this is a disputed point, so here’s the diagram with them added back in, and with the Conservative media broken out from the respectable media.

With or without business interests, it is in the network of ideological influence that we see “The Cathedral” — Elite Academia and Respectable Media — at the core. Ideology flows out from them.
It should go without saying, that this is not intended to be the last word: it is my interpretation of what is mostly general knowledge, and there is a lot of room for refinement, correction and expansion.

The War of Ideas

In previous articles I’ve looked at several possible paths to a failure of the progressive hegemony, but which either are not feasible by themselves, or are not sufficient by themselves to destroy the existing governing structures.

The vital missing piece, which I believe is the key step after which the old order is finished and the new order must be built, is the loss of faith of the ruling class themselves.

That is what actually finished the USSR, it finished the Commonwealth of England, and for that matter it is what sadly finished off European Monarchism in the 19th Century. The secessions,
the final hollowing-out, did happen, but were consequences of the collapse of belief in the political formula of the state by the rulers themselves.

Do not be fooled into thinking that the dogmas of liberalism are merely convenient fictions to the priests and practitioners of the democratic state. We are ruled by True Believers. If they were cynically parotting the mantras of democracy and equality we would probably be better governed than we are.

Some of the contradictions of the progressive faith are indeed visible to these people, but they live with them as best they can: after all, every faith has its mysteries. The faithful either study them and attempt to rationalise them, or else brush them aside as a problem for other people to solve. The faith holds.

But there could come a time when it does not. A few dissenters here and there are of no consequence: they can be driven out and replaced. However, it can come to pass that it becomes general knowledge that the axioms of the faith are false. Then the true believers will be diluted and finally swamped by the cynical opportunists. They will, for a time, retain the doctrines as empty justifications, but while they rely on them for their legitimacy, without genuine belief they will have no reason to defend them into the future. They become subject to erosion by the normal exigencies of political competition; abandoned bit by bit as tactics demand. The final stage arrives when nobody important genuinely believes them, and also, vitally, everybody knows that nobody important genuinely believes them.
(That last condition is why, though the loss of belief
is gradual, the final collapse is sudden).

At that point, the regime retains the instruments of power, but has lost its legitimacy. But, as Chesterton observed, when faith goes it is not replaced with nothing. It will be replaced with something. The state will be reconfigured, either gradually or abruptly, to reflect some alternative political formula.

If the state is efficient at dealing with internal apostasy, then it will switch its beliefs after the ideas of the broader society. It will absorb the new reality socially, from the community that its members engage with at an intellectual level. That is why I say that spreading our ideas matters, but simple numerical majority is not the goal. The elite don’t care now what the ordinary man believes, and they aren’t going to start. But they care what their peers think — they care what their doctor thinks, what writers think, and what their staff think, and maybe even what television comedians think. That is why it is necessary to project the ideas beyond the obsessives, to integrate theory and practice.

Ordinary educated people have to mention to their ordinary friends and colleagues, over coffee or a pint, that they don’t believe that democracy is worth preserving. That’s the most powerful propaganda there is. The ideas have to be developed further and spread more widely through the obsessives before they can start to enter the culture that way, but I think the start of that phase is not far off, no more than a few years.

When the opinions of what the rulers are forced to think of as “sensible people” become overwhelming, their own beliefs will follow. Then we get the period of total hypocrisy, and after that the final discrediting of the old formula.

All the failures I looked at before — economic, administrative, military — can contribute to the discrediting of the formula, but that belief is the ultimate indicator of whether the structure will hold or fall.

From an activist point of view, once it does fall, it is too late to do anything. The intelligentsia by that stage have long since stopped believing in the old formula, and they almost certainly already believe in another one. Whatever happens on the ground, that new formula will dictate what the new order looks like. It might not be clear-cut, there might be conflict and disagreement, but any conflict will be between people who already have power and already know what they believe.

The best case, for Britain, is that the heresy that quietly spreads through the elite until it has gone far enough to come into the open, is that the Royal Family will do a better job than the democratic system. The best case for the USA, as far as I can see from here, is that there should be some kind of breakup, with regions perhaps adopting different formulae.

Neither looks very likely right now, but the collective loss of faith does not look very close, either. There is still time. Our work is to build a theory that is good enough to win over the desperate, ten or twenty or fifty years from now, when belief in democracy and equality becomes unsupportable. It doesn’t need to be popular today, but it needs to be solid, thorough, adaptable, tested in intellectual debate.

By preparing such a theory, we are not just “waiting for a collapse”. We are both bringing about the end of the present regime (since the old political formula will be discarded more quickly if there is a practical alternative), and winning the battle to succeed it. Once the collapse becomes visible, the die is already cast. The real battle of ideas has already been fought, already won or lost. Attempting to force out the rulers, either by violence or by election, while the bulk of them still believe in their ideals, might conceivably succeed, but it can only be a revolution, not a restoration. The new regime would lack legitimacy except as the representative of the revolutionary movement which created it. If reactionaries were to attempt this, the best they could create would be a kind of revolutionary-reactionary hybrid — in short, fascism.

On the other hand, if the holders of official and unofficial power under the Modern Structure themselves recognise reactionary ideas, then the restoration is the legitimate successor to the present regime. It can demand loyalty from everyone on the basis of defending peace, stability, order and unity in a way that a party-based fascist regime cannot.

That does not mean there will be no violence required to secure the regime, but the holdouts will be self-evidently rebels — not just against the new order but against the old. That will be the time for action and glory — not as guerillas or revolutionaries, but as soldiers of honour: loyal knights of the rightful Sovereign. (I will have an urgent dental appointment that day, unfortunately, but I will wish you fame and victory).

It is also conceivable that the elite could hold out, clinging to the old beliefs after the rest of the culture has rejected them. I do not expect that — none of them have the moral courage it would require. If I am wrong, then a more activist penultimate phase would be called for — the formation of a shadow government or government-in-exile, leading to a final popular uprising. The culture must be won over first, in any case.

There are two things that make it possible now to break the centuries-long trend of more and more extreme liberalism. One is the over-extension of liberalism — its destructiveness is getting more obvious. The other is communication technology. In the past the Cathedral really could swamp out intellectual dissent, and make it invisible. Twenty-five years ago, our important thinkers simply would not have been able to reach an audience. The strength of the Cathedral in the battle of ideas is its obvious dominance: the impression it can give that there are no alternatives. The only way to publicise dissent was through activism — forming parties, pressure groups. That works as outreach, but it is self-defeating, because it crushes the movement between humiliation, caused by playing the enemy at their own game and losing, and compromise, which is necessary to the strategy, but destroys the intellectual integrity of the ideas being advanced.

Bringing the arguments into the political arena automatically discredits them. They can only hold the status of an alternative belief system if they are kept out of party politics, where all arguments are required to be judged by their immediate consequences, never by their merits. If, say, HBD is advanced as a reason for opposing a particular immigration bill, then it is automatically false, and cannot be considered further. If it is not associated with one political faction or another, then it remains an “academic” question, which seekers after truth can consider on its merits. Heritage’s cowardice in the Richwine affair is a good thing: as politicians, they are just as damaging to reason as their opponents. It is better that reactionary views are completely driven out of mainstream politics, as that preserves the distance between reactionaries and politicians. There can be no victory through gradual change: adoption of any reactionary ideas must be accompanied by total rejection of the old formula. If reactionary views are banned, that is better still, since it draws that clear line between the present body of thought and the next.

Introduction to the Neoreaction

Generally, when I’m asked to explain “What is a neoreactionary?” (perhaps using alternative terms such as nu-reaction or the Dark Enlightenment), my response is to point elsewhere, at Moldbug or at Nick Land, or even at Scott Alexander’s outsider’s view.

However, good sources though they are, they’re not always appropriate. They’re all extremely verbose. Moldbug and Alexander are really writing for very politically aware progressives, and Land is even more abstruse. Moldbug is the Jeremy Clarkson of political philosophy: while I find his style of presentation highly enjoyable, there’s no doubt that many others find it unbearable.

So maybe we need a more concise introduction.

The Concise Introduction

For five hundred years, there have been attempt to reorder human society on the basis that hereditary privilege, and many other kinds of inequality between humans, are unjust. Reformers have attempted to alter systems of government and other institutions of society with the goal of reducing or eliminating these injustices.

These reformers have consistently underestimated the difficulty of getting people to cooperate in a society. The intellectual techniques of science and engineering that produced miracles in terms of manipulating the natural world, have, time after time, failed catastrophically to improve the lives of humans through changing government and society.

There are a number of reasons for this: For one thing, humans are much more complex than any of the parts and tools with which engineers have made machines. They will not fit in where they are put. Attempts to persuade or compel them to fit into the machine have to be built into the machine themselves, and end up changing the functioning of the machine so much that it no longer achieves its intended goal.

Most importantly, humans have evolved to compete for influence and power, by violence and by deceit. Any reform which attempts to limit or remove the power of the holders of power creates a competition for that power, which will lead to spectacular efforts by everybody else to win it. The innovations that will be produced by such high-stakes competition are impossible to predict or plan for.

Meanwhile, developments in technology have improved people’s lives so much that the calamitous decline in quality of government has been disguised. All mainstream political factions are intellectual descendants of the original reformers, and none have any interest in fairly comparing present-day government with traditional government. Those that are called “conservatives” are only reformers who oppose the most recently enacted or proposed reforms: none of them question the principle or the intellectual basis of progressivism.

Most neoreactionary writing consists of detailed criticism of particular progressive reforms, with particular emphasis on the flaws in one specific idea — democracy.

Ultimately, however, if after all these centuries of trying to improve society based on abstract ideas of justice have only made life worse than it would have been under pre-Enlightenment social systems, the time has come to simply give up the whole project and revert to traditional forms whose basis we might not be able to establish rationally, but which have the evidence of history to support them.

Neoreaction for Reactionaries

Some of the inquiries I spoke of at the beginning have come from old-fashioned reactionaries. The short answer for them is that it doesn’t matter. Neoreaction is not a new, better form of reaction that you should be upgrading to — rather, you’ve found a short-cut past what for us has generally been a long and laborious journey, one that has mostly passed through libertarianism or other forms of liberalism. A lot of our discussion will seem wrong-headed to you, and your theology is mostly irrelevant to us, but when the subject is more immediately practical, we are likely to be closer together.

Aristocracy

Further to my previous post on how I can call myself a reactionary while supporting the dangerous new-fangled innovation of absolute monarchy, let’s look at feudalism.

There have been various forms of aristocracy. When I started to advocate monarchy as a practical from of formalism, “Degenerate Formalism”, I saw no reason to include aristocracy. The monarch should have complete sovereignty, so there is no reason to privilege some subjects over others.

I was setting myself primarily against the feudalist position of Nick Szabo, who makes a case for the medieval structure of “interlocking property rights”

Once I tried to describe a future monarchical regime in detail, I found myself edging back towards an aristocracy, though not in a full-blown medieval form.

Unsurprisingly, given the emphasis of my blog over the last year, the key issue is loyalty.

The medieval noble vassal was supposed to be loyal to his lord. However, the practical implications of this loyalty were limited by transport and communication capabilities. From year to year, he had full authority over his demesne. The major requirements on him were to provide resources to the King when he turned up, to provide armed force when required, and to withold support from the King’s enemies. Beyond that, he wasn’t required to follow the King’s policies, because the King didn’t have any policies for him to follow — he was too far away.

Once the King could be in regular contact by mail or by regular visitors, the situation changed. With regular and reliable information from provinces, the King would inevitably form a view of how they should be managed in detail. This caused conflict with local nobles who had had virtually complete autonomy for centuries. Even if the King recognised a noble’s claim to that autonomy as an established right, the fact of his defying the King’s wishes weakened the relationship betwen them.

If we were to return to a medieval technology level, feudalism could work well. Otherwise, we are forced to this contradiction of the baron professing loyalty to his sovereign while claiming the right to obstruct his policy. That is what I see no point in.

However, I do see a need for the monarch to have a class of subjects from whom he expects positive loyalty, but who do not have independent partial sovereignty. Their position represents not a right to any political power, but rather an eligibility for political power. This is the arrangement I put forward in “Kingdom 2037”. Born aristocrats would be expected (but not required) to move in the direction of royal service, and their behaviour and associations from an early age would be judged with that in mind. If you spend your first twenty years cultivating an image of being loyal and conscientious, you are likely to end up somewhat loyal and conscientious. If you grow up in an elite community, and are stupid, reckless, or crooked, the elite community is going to know. As in elitist societies like today’s Hollywood, noble birth wouldn’t get you into the government, but it would get you looked at.

Such a system might also produce pressure towards mediocrity and excessive conformism. That is why a wise king will build a court mainly from the aristocracy, but including some others. The vital point is that the values of the ruling institutions will be maintained, and the outsiders coming in will acculturate to them, rather than replacing the culture with their own.

What are the drawbacks of this arrangement? There chief danger seems to be that the aristocratic class forms a power block in its own right. If set in competition with the King himself, it would inevitably become rapacious, in the way that a secure ruler is not, because resources plundered from the population would enable it to strengthen its position versus the crown. There is considerable precedent for aristocracies behaving in that way.

My feeling is that the problem is fundamentally one of feudal aristocracies, and there is no reason why a post-feudal monarch would want to tolerate it. That possibly means that, while having something like an aristocracy is useful, it should be symbolically distinct from the old aristocracy which continues to exist in present-day constitutional monarchies. Possibly it should not exist formally at first. The useful features are that the King appoints those he knows and trusts, and that senior Royal appointees are given some kind of permanent status that ties their long-term interest to the regime.

One-line summary: Aristocrats are not better than everybody else, but we can have a better idea of how good they are than we can of everybody else.

Recap of the fall of Monarchism

Hertzlinger points out, accurately, that absolute monarchy is a recent innovation. He also calls it “regrettable”. In a comment, I put forward the “history of liberalism in a nutshell”. It’s nothing I haven’t put here before, but it’s been spread over posts on a lot of different subjects, so I’m pasting my comment here (with minor editing) as a post:

Absolute monarchy was an innovation made possible by new technologies of transport and communication. When subordinates could not be supervised because of the difficulty of travel, it made sense to give them a large degree of independence, and ensure that they, like the Monarch himself, had permanent power and therefore a long-term view. When the Monarch became able to supervise subordinates closely, it made more sense for him to delegate to temporary appointees instead.

Monarchy died out because the enlightenment political philosophy, along with the propaganda pumped out by the English Whigs, became so intellectually dominant that even the monarchs believed it. By the end of the 18th Century, European monarchs were deliberately acting like democratic leaders, which hastened their end.

As Moldbug put it the other day, while technological competence is certainly an indicator of a successful civilization, it is also a lagging indicator. The story of the growth of demotism as I see it goes like this:

As above, technology (roads, literacy) improves, very gradually over hundreds of years, to the point where a King can actually control his realm and his armed forces without delegating permanent power to feudal vassals.
This creates a stable economic basis which produces an enormous boom of technological development and prosperity.
1. Scientific discoveries undermine the religious world-view which is the traditional justification of the political regime.
2. At the same time, many small landowners obtain, as a result of the economic boom, a degree of wealth previously associated with actual political power in the form of major feudal rights. They saw political power as a necessary accompaniment to their wealth.
Those two developments led to the overthrow of the absolute monarchy that had triggered them, and to the first liberal regimes.
The intellectual, technological and economic boom continued. It was erroneously seen as the result of the liberal political order, rather than of the absolutist political order that had initially caused it.