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.

CONTENTS

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 Were All Protestants Now 9

The Case of Libertarianism 11

Society and Natures 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 youd 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 didnt even know
you had. Not that you didnt know you believed them; but you
didnt 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.

 THE NOTION OF IDEOLOGY

The word ideological is not usually used to describe ones

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
arent 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
theyre agreed on the end, even if they couldnt 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, theyre 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 dont know the specifics of the mechanism,
and you dont need to, for it still gets you where youre 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 Im 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 werent. You see their
subsistence by perceiving the occult motivation, the ideology,
which powers them all in the present age.

SINGULAR DOGMA, PLURALISTIC SPECULATION

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 Mans
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 Gods 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 Gods 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 Gods 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 wont 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 ones way to the
center so that ones 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
businesss 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 rights
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.

THE LONGER-RUN VIEW OF HISTORY

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. Isnt 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 were in a staring contest,
well win if our ideology provides for the longer-run
sustainability of human civilizations. We dont need to win in
the next 10, 100, or even 1000 years. If we win even only a
million years down the road, well 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 were 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.

 THE BIOPOLITICAL HORIZON

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 societys 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 youve 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 isnt shrewd enough. It should be more utilitarian, it
should give up all pretenses of deontological spirit. But we
havent 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 individuals 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 dont 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 arent 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 mans modus ponens is another
mans 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 doesnt 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 doesnt exist. The
focus is not the problem of evil, its just an example.
Whenever you have two states of affairs that are mutually
incompatible, such as Gods existence and gratuitous evil, you
can always demonstrate in a logically valid fashion that the
other isnt 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 isnt 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.

THE IDEOLOGICAL CONDITIONS OF CIVILIZATION

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 citys 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 dont 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 wouldve 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 were going.

SPIRITUAL EGALITARIANISM, OR WERE ALL

PROTESTANTS NOW

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 isnt
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 Gods 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 youre

already acquainted with Neoreaction, the perfectly
neoreactionary religion, save that of course its 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 Evangelicals 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 isnt neoreactionary. If youve 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, Barths 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 dont, 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
individuals essence, but of his accidental qualities, that he
plays the role he does.

THE CASE OF LIBERTARIANISM

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
dont 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 thats 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 dont 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 wont. 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 drugs 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 actors 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 libertarians 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 elses certainty. A more mature society,
at a higher level of civilization, has fewer prisoners dilemmas.

SOCIETY AND NATURES GOD

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 cant 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 cant 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 servants only responsibility is to serve his
masters 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.

THE WARS OF IDEOLOGY

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 isnt 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 sovereigns 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 formers 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, its 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), youll 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 everyones 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 individuals 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 ideologys social power.

THE VAGARIES OF MODERNISM AND NEOREACTION

As modernism and neoreaction are ideologically opposed, it

isnt 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 Ive said
before, the problem with modernism is that it isnt 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 ones 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 Wests 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 ones own values and life path. This
likewise brings with it greater responsibilities, as ones
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 groups 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 childs 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

groups possession of moral agency. The more responsible a
group is for social stability, the higher that groups moral
agency and thus the higher in the hierarchy such a group
should be.

Given that moral agency may be measured by the groups

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 individuals 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
isnt; it is a charting of a diverse array of views that share an
occult motivation, which is that of order.

THE TIME-PREFERENCE OF PATRIARCHALISM

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
shouldnt 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 childrens 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 familys 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.

FUTURISM AND THE TECHNOLOGIZATION OF MAN

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
temptationneed 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 persons 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 wouldve 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 ones 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 bodys 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 wont 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
humanitys 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 mans place to institute
armageddon. Whether this is achieved by natural or
supernatural catastrophe or instrumentally through mans
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 doesnt hurt to
solve the largest problems of scarcity, but it doesnt solve the
problem we are looking to answer for.

RACISM AND BIOPOLITICS

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 ones 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 isnt 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 doesnt 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 doesnt 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 cant 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 isnt 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 Natures 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 societys 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 wouldnt 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 dont 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 ones 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.

THE VALUES OF CAPITALISM

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
wouldnt 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 mans 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
mans take, for mass mans 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
communes 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 anothers 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 wouldve 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
states 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 states efficiency in regulating

macroscale aggression? As a simple matter of economics, the
states 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
governments 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 doesnt 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.

MONARCHY, POLITICS, AND ECONOMY

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 isnt 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 kings 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 reactionarys 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 ones 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 groups 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 doesnt 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 states 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 individuals 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 ones 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 ones 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 isnt 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 familys 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.

ANARCHO-INSTITUTIONALISM

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 dtat, 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 states 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 ones 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 prisoners
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.

COSMOPOLITANISM AND ETHNO-NATIONALISM

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 youre already ethnically
equivalent with the other; if youre 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 isnt 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 ones 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 others 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 ones own innate biases to integrate oneself with
those of other groups. There is a very real danger in
comingling with groups one doesnt know anything about, so
the bias to stick to ones 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 ones 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 peoples 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 persons 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 isnt 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.

TRADITION AND THE RETURN OF CHRISTENDOM

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 shouldnt 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 cant
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 societys 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 wed 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 individuals 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 ones 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 traditions 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
individuals 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.

WHY REACTION? WHY NOW?

It is called neoreaction in the sense that this isnt 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 Natures 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 mans 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 doesnt, or maybe aspect the
other misses doesnt matter to them. What matters more is
whether they can be provided narratives which contextualize
their relations peaceably, in order that social coordination
isnt 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
wont 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 dont 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 others 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 hed certainly object to his being

used in this way, speaks prophetically of the clash between
modern thought and the worlds 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
couldnt 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.
 Table of Contents

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