Rehashing the well-hashed hash. But I’m in the mood for some more hash.
Spandrell:
The feasibility of neoreactionary outreach has been discussed a lot, and I stand firmly in the sceptic camp. HBD is toxic to a vast majority of people. Even white nationalism has a better chance of attracting the masses than “your genes define who you are, and there’s a 80% chance you suck.”
Candide:
As I see it, there are two polar kinds of outreach — personal (basically what our gracious host does) and media outreach. It is media outreach that many neoreactionaries, including myself, are justifiably skeptical about, as it has many undesirable properties, one of them being adverse selection.
Handle:
It’s also my opinion that all the remaining Conservatives and Libertarians in America (and the cultural West at large) are operating under a kind of trance of false nostalgia, and if they’d only ‘snap out of it’ or have the equivalent of the ‘mugged by reality’ epiphany experience, they’d realize that there’s no other place where they more properly belong. We should focus on helping them to awaken from their slumber.
…
I’m not worried about exposure or engagement at all. In my personal life, I come across a lot of people who think they are conservatives or libertarians or republicans or tea partiers, or what-have-you, yet express nothing but reactionary views and deep frustration with the establishment of their ‘movements’. It has only even taken a tiny push to make all of them start reading the reactosphere, realize the folly of remaining with their old team, and so de-associate slowly from their previous affiliations.
I call these people ‘pre-reactionaries’, and I think there are a lot of them of there. They will enrich the discourse of our social network. It’s just that there are only tiny and infrequent paths of discovery from their social network into ours.
The discussion frames itself. Answer the Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How of reactionary outreach. Sooner or later we’re going to have to consider the challenge of doing it as well as possible, so we might as well discuss it now.
Handle's Haus 
As I mentioned in the other thread, the problem is one of incentives, corruption, and philosophy. Not one of ignorance. There is no reason to tell the truth and every reason to deny it (within most peoples moral framework). Necessary applications of the truth can be applied as needed in ones personal life and then denied, even to ones own consciousness.
Everyone knows, deep down, HBD and all that other stuff is true. The idea this is a problem of ignorance or lack of exposure is false.
“Everyone knows, deep down, HBD and all that other stuff is true.”
I don’t think this is generally known. People have glimpses, such as the demographics of crime. But a proper picture? Certainly not.
The right pushes hard against abortion and the left pushes hard for immigration lawlessness. Neither stance suggests proper understanding to me.
If they truly knew, I don’t understand how elites could be pushing hard for 3rd world immigration. If they truly understood, then they would realize that America would never be America again. The Western liberalism that they have come to love loses too. The welfare state beloved by the left does not sustain itself.
Even among those who know more than most, there are things (Flynn effect, comparative advantage theory) to attach to you if want to believe things will be fine.
People are incredibly optimistic all the way up to the top. With quantitative easing — the risk of a bond crisis seem enormous. Obamacare has adverse selection problems that are completely unaccounted for. The folks we arm in Syria are openly terrorist.
Simple facts are happily ignored unless there are forceful voices shouting the truth over and over from the rooftops.
There is only one thing in this reply that matters and its this, “want to believe.”
If one wants to believe something, it doesn’t matter what’s true. The lies being put out by the Cathedral are really easy to see through. People believe the mainstream because it benefits them personally to believe the mainstream (with hypocritical actions when necessary). Some benefit a lot (paid toadies) some benefit little (social signaling, not having the argue, not getting punished). If you start going through the incentive structures of all the individual actors from top to bottom I’m sure you’ll think of good selfish reasons to do what they do.
In the absence of a moral framework that says you should do the right thing regardless of how it affects you doing the right thing becomes contingent and controllable by the authority in power, and if its an evil power your screwed.. Telling the truth is one of the first good things to go.
The purpose of Cathedral propaganda isn’t to make us truly believe it deep down, but to accustom us to dishonesty, passivity, and corruption in most spheres of our lives, especially the public sphere.
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
― Theodore Dalrymple
I actually came across The Bell Curve and IQ and The Wealth of Nations as a younger man. Before that, I honestly didn’t connect the dots. People have a vague sense of some differences, but unless you’ve seen the bald data, you don’t understand.
I think we take things for granted that make sense in retrospect. Germs and viruses cause disease and this is almost innately known even by children. But in the not-very-distant past, this was known by virtually nobody. Most people would be unable to even read if they are not first taught.
This doesn’t explain though why the “dumbest” in our society are closer to the truth then the “smartest”. Your average prole gets that blacks are pretty dumb in general, maybe that isn’t The Bell Curve accurate, but its 99.99% more accurate then what a “smart: progressive believes.
If the problem was ignorance, rather then someone actively decided not to believe the truth, then we would expect to see the smartest being more accurate then the dumbest. However, we don’t see that. There is a negative correlation between intelligence and the truth.
The peasants may not understand germs, but it takes the leaned man to think leeches are the cure.
“This doesn’t explain though why the “dumbest” in our society are closer to the truth then the “smartest”. Your average prole gets that blacks are pretty dumb in general, maybe that isn’t The Bell Curve accurate, but its 99.99% more accurate then what a “smart: progressive believes.”
It makes sense if you think about how the human mind works.
Humans are born conformists. If you teach human children a behavior like opening a puzzle box, but add in some unnecessary / silly steps, humans will repeat the silly steps, even once it is made apparent that those steps are silly. Meanwhile, chimps and autistic/aspergian humans will delete the unnecessary, silly steps.
http://www.livescience.com/28533-autism-copy-silly-behaviors.html?cmpid=514645
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/science/13essa.html
High IQ people are better at learning and they are thus more capable of internalizing complex propaganda systems / rituals, even when the propaganda is contradicts the facts on the ground or the ritual is “silly”. This enhances their ability to function socially and pays off with higher social status. Think of it like a Brahmin memorizing the vedas.He’s screwed if he can’t keep the whole thing straight.
On the other hand, low IQ proles aren’t so good at learning. They struggle to fully internalize the complex propaganda / rituals that would enable them to function better in society. Sometimes they forget some steps and revert back to simple, non-ritualized default behaviors, like throwing their trash on the ground or believing their lying eyes.
Your average prole gets that blacks are pretty dumb in general, maybe that isn’t The Bell Curve accurate, but its 99.99% more accurate then what a “smart: progressive believes.
The “smart” progressive doesn’t have any contact at all with blacks in general. I would guess that the question of whether blacks in general are pretty dumb doesn’t even occur to them, except in the negative abstract (ie- racists, the worst people ever, believe all blacks are dumb).
I politely request that you add the next sentence from my original comment. That’s the punch.
Of course. Done.
I think there is the possibility that HBD reaches enough of the inner power structure to make a difference in policy when America’s back is truly to the wall, as it may be in the years or decades to come. This is not absurd. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are both clearly HBD-aware, although too smart to say things about it directly. How do I know? The latter focuses on Planned Parenthood, of all charities. The former focuses on a version for Africa. They are not politicians, but wisdom of those types will be sought if/when treasuries fail at auction while QE XXVII has caused inflation to jump the rails making QE XXVIII unusable.
The ugly truth is that outreach has already killed “neoreaction” as a viable intellectual movement. And in retrospect, I have to say that this failure is deserved, because it shows that all these people who take pride in their supposedly superior understanding of modernity have in fact failed to learn some basic lessons necessary to grapple with its realities. It also shows that for all their alleged insight gathered from the forgotten past, they have failed to learn any lessons from the defeats of all those people who had challenged progressivism in past times.
One sort of self-destructive outreach is courting the attention of progressives and attempting to engage them in public forums. Contrary to some people’s wishful thinking, this will not get their message out and prompt masses of people to “see the light.” Instead, it will strengthen the memetic immune system of progressivism, thereby just reducing the number of people who might in principle be receptive to their ideas. You may have a chance to get people to listen if you don’t pattern-match any of the established “hate” categories, and if progressives can’t readily produce a standard boilerplate quasi-refutation of your position. However, once these memetic antibodies have developed in the bloodstream of progressivism, it’s game over. If the recent loud exposure of “neoreaction” has any lasting effect, it will be to inoculate progressivism against any of the truly original and powerful ideas that originated in this milieu, and diminish the chance of getting high-quality minds to take these ideas seriously in the future.
Another kind of bad outreach has been the movement-building. This means proudly sporting an ideological label and its associated buzzwords, attempting to build symbolism and propaganda around it, and welcoming anyone who will drop a few of these buzzwords and feel self-important about his new-found ideological identity. This is a sure way to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio to near zero, making further interesting discourse impossible — a process that has already advanced very far with “neoreaction.” It will also make the label associated with the kinds of unremarkable and dysfunctional people and immature youngsters who are usually attracted to contrarian movements. (Of course, this also gets us back to the previous point: lowbrow and juvenile versions of “reactionary” ideas circulating around are the perfect vaccination for progressivism to develop the memetic antibodies that will also be effective against the real thing.)
There are even more fundamental problems with outreach. It requires ideas to be systematized and finalized — however, we’re still far from having a comprehensive, coherent, and well thought-out answer to progressivism. Anything like that would require a lot more high-quality discourse to produce. Yet, rather than seeking out opportunities for such discourse and pursuing the fundamental open questions, the “neoreaction” seems to have collectively decided to split its time between increasingly lowbrow bickering, rehashing of half-baked and half-digested ideas from Moldbug, and self-referential posturing — all of which is mainly due to the pretense that it presents a coherent worldview with ready answers. This really marks it as a dead end: can anyone, in all honesty, point to anything of unusual originality and insight that came out of the vast explosion of “neoreactionary” writing and self-idenfitication since last spring?
Overall, outreach in the name of “neoreaction” is at this point certainly doing more damage than good to the cause of getting smart, insightful, and accomplished people to question the fundamental assumptions of the reigning ideological orthodoxy. It’s really time to start thinking of alternative ways.
Great post.
People put up a graph of neoreactionary groups and act like we’re all on a cloud together, without realizing all of those groups disagree at fundamental levels that make us almost incompatible.
I can’t for the life of me think of exactly what neoreactionaries agree on. At best it seems to be the following:
1) A group of people that are willing, in private on the internet, to state obvious empirical facts like HBD. We can’t even state these facts lead to the same analysis and suggestions because those differ from reactionary to reactionary.
2) A rough idea of “The Cathedral” which is basically a stand in for brahmin caste liberal institutions and government entities that are run by or on progressive lines. What is to be done about this nobody knows.
3) The general idea that a lot of our prosperity is based on technological progress and its entirely possible that could have occurred in different political systems (example: less democratic). If you get more specific though there is disagreement.
So basically we say some stuff that a lot of people vaguely believe in but are afraid to talk/think about. So we bravely talk about it anonymously on the internet. Beyond that its all hazy and disagreed on. Maybe each of those little branches thinks they have answers beyond that, but certainly “neoreaction” doesn’t.
And your right too about the “self-referential posturing”. I feel like a need an acronym list to read some of this stuff anymore. Nobody just talks in plain English.
You talk of antibodies as if a careful buildup followed by a massive surprise assault is even possible. Not sure I get your point.
And while I agree that too many half baked ideas have been coming in of late, nobody actively prepared for this. It just happened as it’s typical of the internet.
Building a marketable ideology on HBD is almost by definition impossible, see my point above. and we aren’t attracting upwardly mobile people without it. Nobody wants to be Watsoned.
Of course that getting smart people to accept unorthodox ideas openly is impossible. What’s possible, however, at least in principle, is to attract a small number of them to productive anonymous discussion. (“Productive,” at least for now, only in terms of coming up with further insight and providing a forum for free and sane discussion of unorthodox ideas.)
My point is that even this very modest goal is impossible for a group of people identifiable under some moniker for which progressives have already developed memetic antibodies. A smart and basically honest person who is an unthinking follower of the dominant ideology may react with genuine open-minded interest if he sees a discussion of unorthodox ideas that doesn’t trigger any particular crimestop pattern. However, once your group and label matches some such pattern, this becomes impossible. In order to prevent this memetic immune buildup, the prudent course is to avoid any active outreach, engagement, and self-referential ideological labeling.
From this perspective, “neoreaction” is likely already doomed. The two-pronged immune response is appearing as we speak: “neoreactionary” has already become a somewhat recognizable “hate” label, and we’re already seeing “good cop” progressives writing long-winded, smarmy, mealy-mouthed “refutations” that can be dropped in the future as a boilerplate response for instant-crimestop. At the same time, increasing numbers of mediocre (or worse) “neoreactionary” intellects are running around and happily doing the legwork in stoking up this immune response.
To make my position more concrete, I predict that the existing internet “neoreaction” will fail to attract a single extraordinary intellect in the future. In fact, it will likely fail to attract even someone as interesting as the currently active top 5-6 bloggers and commenters in these blogs — and definitely nobody with a chance of becoming another Moldbug. Which means that it’s doomed to become, at best, a stale and uninteresting intellectual swamp, incapable of advancing beyond the basic ideas developed years ago.
Whether this failure has been an inevitable spontaneous process, or a consequence of particular bad decisions by some people, it looks like the remaining worthwhile individuals in the “neoreactionary” camp should seriously consider ditching this entire movement. (When James G. came to this conclusion a few months ago, I thought this was an overreaction, but now I see that he was quite right.)
So all we have to do is change our nicknames and open new blogs? Well I’m glad again that I’m not using my real name.
Any intellectual idea that makes any amount of sense is going to attract people, increasingly more people, some of them juvenile, who will make noise, and attract mainstream attention. If that’s all it takes for progressivism to acquire ‘memetic immunity’ and create a new crimestop trigger, well the bitch is indestructible.
How is “your genes define who you are and 80% of you suck, oh and by the way make that 95% for blacks” not going to trigger crimestop eventually? “Allowing women in higher education and the workforce breaks all incentives for excellence in men”? How do you sell that? Because that’s what we’re saying.
I sometimes think that what we need is to attract elites like Charles Murray who (very dishonestly) try to uphold the truth on HBD while ostensibly keeping a progressive demeanor. I have no idea how he pulls it off.
And knock it off with the square quotes. Neoreaction might be lame as a name but we gotta call us something or another. Neocons is even lamer and it hasn’t done them any harm.
If that’s all it takes for progressivism to acquire ‘memetic immunity’ and create a new crimestop trigger, well the bitch is indestructible.
Well, yes, that is in fact the problem, isn’t it? This is why it’s imperative not to get into wishful thinking about what is currently possible, and not to do things that are guaranteed to fail in well-known ways. (Note that I never proposed doing something that’s supposed to have a high chance of success, by any standard of success. I’m merely arguing against doing things whose outcome is guaranteed to be a failure by any reasonable standard.)
However, do you actually disagree with my view that the present course of events is unlikely to attract any interesting people, even just for anonymous discussion? If we don’t disagree on this, then maybe there isn’t really much substance to our disagreement overall.
(By the way, my urge to use the quotes is not because the name is lame — I think it’s in fact quite good, or at least it was before it was overdone. It’s because presently the substance behind this term is so lacking, and its vainglorious aspect so jarring, that I just can’t bring myself to use it in full seriousness.)
I know what you’re saying and you know what I think, what I don’t quite get is what alternative model you had for this.
Smart people came to Moldbug because he was writing good stuff. Then he stopped writing good stuff, so they stopped coming. Sure, by then the comment threads had became a manic asylum, but the quality of the posts had declined before that.
The appearance of a hundred bad neoreactionary blogs doesn’t stop people from coming to, say, my blog, does it? It’s not like I have a neoreactionary badge of membership, or I have been featured in Slate as being a hateful evil servant of hell. I have I believe a fair amount of smart commenters, but of course I’d love to have thousands of them. Besides better writing I don’t know what I should do. Surely a change of branding a la James G. won’t do. His rebranding didn’t motivate him much as he hasn’t been writing in months.
What you want sounds a lot like the HBD newsletter that Steve Sailer used to run, with dozens of top academics in it. IIRC it was closed years ago. Problem is “acomplished” people might agree with one aspect of neoreaction that falls into his area of expertise, say a neuroscientists will agree on the nature assumption, but he won’t agree on any of the rest; he won’t agree race is real, or that women should stay in the kitchen. Look at Ron Unz.
As far as non-mainstream communities go, I am a big admirer of Less Wrong. A reddit-like site like LW allows for the enforcement of community standards and the growth of self-identity better than blogs and blog comments. I don’t agree with many LW ideas, but I have to admit their social impact. I run into pods of people that met at LW meetups regularly. They even have a camp at Burning Man. There are real social benefits to joining in.
It was seeded by a large amount of material written by a charismatic personality, and that seems to have kept them on course so far.
‘I predict that the existing internet “neoreaction” will fail to attract a single extraordinary intellect in the future.’
That is silliness, unless you think the Internet is going away or the idiocracy advances so fast that intellectualism ends.
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. ” – Philip K. Dick
The neoreaction could dwindle to zero followers and still succeed in time as since it has the minor advantage of being the truest description of many things.
Here are some realities:
* Many major Democratic experiments in the last 25 years have been a failure as judged against its own goals. From Iraq to Libya to Egypt liberty and modernism suffered by the advance of Democracy. The rising great power China is not Democratic and they are whipping us. Most of the developed Democracies have enormous debt and entitlement messes. The bloom is off democracy’s rose and Syria was an aging democracy getting all dressed up for a date only to be stood up by the public as her market value plummets.
* Democracy is headed for failure in its native home here in the United States. The interests of large swathes will go unrepresented resulting in tyranny because of diversity and tribal voting, same as the failures of Democracy in the nations listed above.
When many people suddenly have no voice and no place to go and no representation, things that they would not otherwise say they will say freely. “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose ” – Janis Joplin
Reaction is enormous in the UK and France and Greece right now.
* The debt crisis will come to a head. On day tomorrow or a decade from now a treasury auction will just fail.
There is no telling how long it will be until America’s stresses hit a breaking point, but until then I go to the alt-right as therapy. To remind myself that I’m not crazy, the world is, and here are some sane people who think the same thing.
Heartiste has a large following and he went whole hog reactionary this year.
On cnn this year, a post on a white tourist killed by a black mo in Oklahoma got 30,000 mostly realist comments in one hour before comments were shut down.
Historical reality is noise. Anything that assumes neat execution of a strategy is absurd. It’s way too early to know what is going to happen yet, but if nothing interesting does, it won’t be because of some counter-factually rectifiable mistake. Nudging, incrementalism, learning from mistakes, even some retreating and licking wounds — it’s all OK — that’s the way things happen in reality, rather than in absurd Platonic dreams.
I’m surprised to hear this kind of thing from you, Vladimir. Your market sensitivity had led me to categorize you as a serious realist, but this is perfectionist idealism of the most implausible kind. Smart people will navigate around the noise. If they can’t do that, they can’t do anything real at all.
You may disagree with the substance of my conclusions, but the comment about “perfectionist idealism” makes no sense. I am in fact motivated by utterly practical concerns. If I believe that certain things should be absolutely avoided because they make bad consequences inevitable, this is no more “perfectionist idealism” than claiming that one should absolutely avoid bumping into other cars while driving on a highway. You may of course disagree that the social forces I mentioned work the way I described, but not dismiss the concern out of hand on the grounds of unrealistic idealism.
Apologies if that sounded antagonistic (and especially for the repetition of ‘absurd’). The idealism point is directed at the extremely high standards for hermetic insulation you seem to be setting — such that only a secret society could meet them, and then only with difficulty. I actually think NR is relatively hermetic, and that those ‘outreach’ inclinations it has could easily be scaled-back by a tap on the tiller. They probably will be after a few educational media experiences burn off false expectations of good faith. I agree with you that this retreat into introversion would be a ‘good thing’ — raising the quality of discussion, and lengthening time-horizons. I’m less convinced that ‘immunization’ is a real problem, as that can only apply to the most superficial aspects of the threat. The core of the threat is the unsustainable Cathedral dynamic itself, which isn’t soluble in improved PR. The most important task for neoreactionaries is to prepare to disrupt the Left explanatory narrative for system failure — “Capitalism is to blame”. It was an analogous story-telling event in the 1930s, more than any other single thing, that brought us to where we are today.
The methods and collaboration platforms of volunteer open source projects could be used. The most promising topics are those that hint at an alternative to libertarianism: less antinomian, and not easily degraded into a mass ideology or mantra. Viz., jurisdiction as property, countervailing legal systems, and scrutiny of ‘democratic’ apparatus in various guises. Unlike neoreaction, this project ought to have explicit aims and a code of conduct. Yudkowskian ethics, without the utopian overtones, are a way to minimise the effect of Conquest’s second law, as is an enduring small size.
I may be competent and inclined to initiate this in a few years–but I will have to see. I don’t find it unlikely that someone else outside this milieu has a similar idea.
Willkommen James. Nice to see you around these parts again. Don’t be a stranger.
If neoreaction is to get off the reservation it must learn to package itself nicely.
For example, I think there would be a lot of support for vocational training and/or apprenticeships aimed at people in the lower 50% of the curve…..just don’t spend too much time dwelling on the bell curve but instead emphasise the benefits such schemes might bring to well-intentioned, but not necessarily gifted, young people.
We also need to go to market with a label other than “neoreactionary”, That’s an 8 (or is it 7?) syllable turnoff for much of our potential audience.
There are two ways for this to go. Firstly, after losing (badly) in the next two presidential elections, plus having the maps redrawn to punish them after the 2020 census, the outer party’s non-elite realizes that the game is rigged and comes en mass to neoreaction. This option branches out to either a) the inner party/cathedral saying “fuck it” and letting neoreaction/the outer party secede (see: all those articles about the northeast seceding), or b) the cathedral saying “oh no you don’t” and attempting to impose by force (banning home-schooling, imposing harsher penalties on sprawl, etc.), which could end in open rebellion and secession. Secondly, neoreaction realizes that the childrens are the future and takes over the schools eventually rewriting the curriculum with actual historical facts leading to a resurgence of family and a rebound for the TFR.
If neither of these things happen it’s all moot. The TFR for Western European ethnics is well below replacement, and barring a technological singularity, we’ll have a great regression and neoreaction might spring up in the pockets that thrive (if the natural order is natural, it will reassert itself eventually). Demographics are destiny, so in the long run outreach only matters to the folks who will show up in the future (also why outreach should avoid HBD/race/ethnicity issues, since there are apt to be a lot more blacks and mestizos, so they’re the ones we want to outreach to).
” Demographics are destiny, so in the long run outreach only matters to the folks who will show up in the future (also why outreach should avoid HBD/race/ethnicity issues, since there are apt to be a lot more blacks and mestizos, so they’re the ones we want to outreach to).”
If history is any guide blacks and mestizos won’t necessarily become the rulers just because they become the majority. See Latin America.
On the other hand, spreading the message of neo-reaction to parasitic elites who rule over a black / mestizo underclass isn’t really a “feel good” activity. At that point it might be best if any existing moral qualms held by the elites were left in place, although you could probably make some money as a part of a toady class, feeding neo-reactionary propaganda to the elites to justify their rule. “Yes, you should rule as a King, not as the President, because there is a natural heirarchy of talents. And make all your cousins nobles…” Ick..
What’s your proposed end game, following a successful neo-reactionary outreach to blacks and mestizos? I can’t see one. They’re already following a pretty correct strategy, although they should have less abortions.
Seems like you’ve already lost if you are trying to achieve broad acceptance of neo-reaction among blacks and Hispanics, better to emigrate.
The end-game is to avoid having a full-scale revolution by the blacks and mestizos vs. the “parasitic elites” while having the rulers rule with enlightened absolutism instead of the sort of populist pandering that we see in South America. Where are you going to emigrate to otherwise?
Wiat for the crash, pick up the pieces. That’s the only viable strategy.
I see Reaction, and by extension Neoreaction, primarily as a defense of particularity. How many kinds of Reactionaries are there? Well, how many particularities ya got? Therefore, I think most of the “outreach” that may be done will likely be intra-particularity… convincing those who already pretty much share your fundamental philosophies of Life And How Things Oughta Be™ that the Progressive Zeitgeist really is out to “get us”, … oh and by the way look at all these other particularities that are getting screwed. And now let us pull back the curtain and see the little grey men at work inside this beast.
Isn’t the primary rift in neoreaction/dark enlightment between those who think the elite need to have their minds changed and those who believe the elite need to hang from lampposts? One of the big takeaways I got from Moldbug is that overthrow and revolution tend to end poorly, no matter how well they end (their destructive energy outweighs any benefits). Outreach is therefore not only important, it is the only thing that matters. It should be done as subtly as possible, and should only be done by those who are capable of articulating the message so that it is heard. Conversely, none of it matters, the elites are incapable of changing their minds (or being overthrown), and we should all be seasteading and/or colonizing Mars if we care about the future of the species. At the very least we should be stockpiling guns and ammunition.
Lots of interest to review and comment upon here. Definitely keep it up; I’m learning a lot, just as I hoped. Alas, Handle will be (mostly) off the grid until the weekend, so I’ll be unable to respond until then. But please do continue.
I think many neoreactionaries are approaching this question under the assumption that material conditions will never substantially change. I don’t think this is true; there are many proto-reactionaries in the making as we speak, young (white) males just getting through the university system who are beginning to realize that the social contract isn’t fulfilling its promises and they will look to renege on the system as but one response. I would look to the young. This also means we shouldn’t expect very great changes in public opinion, at least none that will be noticeable early on.
I have never had any problem getting people to appreciate reactionary thinking in any territory administered by Chinese people.
As the Chinese buy more land in the USA and Canada and seek more administrative control over what they own, the economic climate should wake lots of people up.
I’ve not been to China, but South Korea and Japan, and I think the situation is similar for those parts of East Asia.
Outreached that actually worked. Notice the stunned silence of the Cathedral Functionary facing the Mob. He has never strove before, he is a criminal at heart who thought he’d never be caught. Essence of the Criminal is they will always get away with it because they always have…
Human Nature Wins. Passivity of the Victims ended before apprehension dawned. Retribution is certain. Human Nature.
1. End Passivity.
2. Apprehension of the criminal nature prior to hands on apprehend…
3. Retribution.
Vladimir will make you the stunned superbrain speechless before challenge.
Outreach will not strengthen the Cathedral’s memetic immunity, it will strenghten Dark Enlightenment.
For instance the Army may have trained me, but the Arabs taught me War.
Your model of Reaction should be that of the Anti-Body destroying the pathogens of the Cathedral, as an antibody your existence is to attack. The Antibody doesn’t have discussions or meetings, it attacks.
outreach? build it and they will come
seasteading (lol)
private cities
secession?
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An old college acquaintance, from NY, lifelong Catholic/conservative recently posted on facebook that he’s done with the Republicans. I’m not sure if he reads the neoreactionary stuff I post or not, but I know that he – and a lot of other friends and acquaintances who support the outer party – are getting tired of being whipped. The thrashings have been bigger and more obvious since the internet, and I suspect that a large population is ready/close to ready for outreach. The race-realism stuff needs to not be part of that outreach, for both the obvious reasons, but also because I think that the part of Black society that has its together is a great ally in neoreaction. They’re the ones who suffer the most, by far, from progressivism, and always have.
How we got here, on a personal level, colors our ideas about outreach. I think a lot of people here (in neoreaction) either got here from nearby, or were raised here. Some of us have come a long way, and each stop along the way brought us closer. I have never been as at peace as I have since I came to understand many of the ideas that are promoted here.
The Cathedral needs our anger and discontentment to maintain itself; the thing that it is best at, above all, is identifying the flaws in its “opponents” and evincing rage at those flaws amongst its adherents. When I was a socialist (4th generation!), I was furious at the outer party for preventing socialist utopia. When I realized that this was absurd, I took the half-step to neoconservativism (who helpfully pointed out that Socialists were not *true* Scotsmen). Being an Arabic linguist during the Iraq war dissuaded me of the power of democracy. The incompetence of the bureaucracy taught me that good government was impossible, so we should just try to limit government power, and so libertarianism. The 2012 election cycle made it obvious that democracy is incompatible with libertarianism, and so I found neoreaction. Neoreaction does a *terrible* job of dealing with outliers, though, and I think that is where outreach becomes a problem (HBD in particular, has a ton of outlier shaped holes). People like to point out that Moldbug is much stronger in identifying and articulating the flaws in progressivism than in coming up with remedies, but there are no perfect solutions. Our outreach needs to address the various stages of intellectual evolution that a person can take to reach where we all are now, and also needs to be honest about what we can offer from here. In general, if neoreaction wants to be taken seriously it needs to do a better job of addressing HBD outliers, explaining the parts of history that don’t fit our narrative, and tempering expectations.
Why would anyone ever become an Arabic linguist? I’ve always wondered. Modern Arab culture must be the most unattractive one on earth. Or maybe it’s just me.
No offense, I’m genuinely curious.
Sign up for the military as a linguist, get assigned Arabic. That said, a sizable minority of lingos go native. Not all parts of Arabic culture are terrible (they do a much better job with family and friendship than I’ve experienced with Americans), and there isn’t really a monoculture.
Oh well. The Arab friendship thing always gives me homoerotic creeps, but I guess warmth is nice coming from the military.