RV dropouts demonstrate working universal basic income








Darwin on genetic entropy


What process kills every civilization? Degeneration, or the genetic adaptation to lower conditions by its population, precipitating a collapse into third world status. Too much inclusivity normally causes this, which leads a civilization to value its least productive and moral citizens along with others, and that quickly leads to disastrous policy including unnecessary wars and diversity.

Every effect has a singular cause, however, and the cause of too much inclusivity is a lack of direction. Without purpose, societies become subsidy engines through easy work, producing hordes of parasites who think that by showing up to a job and reaping the benefits, they have participated in society. The “bourgeois” attitude of more than laissez faire but “out of sight, out of mind” applies there.

Lack of purposes emerges from an unwillingness to strive for more than the material. In turn, that originates in a lack of belief in the physical world and withdrawal into mental worlds, including personal religion. When people reject the goodness of our world, they reject a purpose to life itself by passing off their human judgment as absolute truth, which then creates a ghetto where only human desires, judgments and feelings are accepted as real, which creates a very real neurotic hell.

Darwin rightly points out that degeneration occurs naturally to any population without the strength to resist it:


Evola shows, in turn, that degeneration arises from lack of purpose toward the transcendent:

If we look at the secret of degeneration from the exclusively traditional point of view, it becomes even harder to solve it completely. It is then a matter of the division of all cultures into two main types. On the one hand there are the traditional cultures, whose principle is identical and unchangeable, despite all the differences evident on the surface. The axis of these cultures and the summit of their hierarchical order consists of metaphysical, supra-individual powers and actions, which serve to inform and justify everything that is merely human, temporal, subject to becoming and to “history.” On the other hand there is “modern culture,” which is actually the anti-tradition and which exhausts itself in a construction of purely human and earthly conditions and in the total development of these, in pursuit of a life entirely detached from the “higher world.” — Julius Evola, “On the Secret of Degeneration”

Conservatism is what conserves. What is conserved? That which is excellent. Conservatism has two prongs. The first is consequentialism or measurement of all things by their effect in reality in full scope, meaning for all time and in all contexts. The second is transcendental purpose to life itself, based in — if nothing else — our ability to establish an order above the default, and achieve “the good, the beautiful and the true” and “the perennial things” (Huxley) or “Tradition” (Evola).

We define ourselves by that toward which we strive. With a physical goal, we become more physical things; this includes physical goals like equality and pacifism. With a transcendental goal, we push ourselves toward what is not just reacting to life, but what is enhancing it, and in that power we see the reason to ascend to greater clarity of consciousness and through that see the wisdom of nature and any gods in which we believe.

Until that point is achieved, all discipline is “outward in” meaning manipulating manifestations in appearance of inward tendencies, not the tendencies themselves. Very few humans achieve this point, and only later in their lives, and even then they see in varying degrees. This is why the ancients put their best people into aristocracies and kept them in sheltered, introverted, and meditative states of contemplation and surrounded them with other wise people, to produce leaders who were fully aware and capable.

Without leaders of this nature, we succumb to degeneration because of the inevitable compromise and eroding of standards and through that purpose over the years, and so we end up degenerating within and having that manifest itself in declining genetics. At that point, our civilization becomes moronland, the outright stupid and thoughtless becomes the approved norm, and anyone with a brain flees to the hills, leaving behind a third world level of disorganization and venality.

The Great Filter that dooms non-leftist movements


Recapping history in brief: The EnlightenmentTM legitimized egalitarianism — lack of social standards to hold back the individual — as a viewpoint, then the French Revolution in 1789 made it a political force. The French went on from there to rage across Europe in the first of the ideological wars, and the Americans tried to invent a form of liberalism that would not consume itself.

We all know the problem of liberalism: it destroys civilizations and leaves third world remnants. It does this by dividing the people against one another and substituting the quest for civilizational and personal health with an ideological jihad for ever-greater equality. Its policies are unrealistic, its advocates insane, and it constitutes a power grab that then fails to rule because it is mob rule.

Why, you may ask, with every intellectual who was not awash in personal problems knowing this since 1500 AD approximately, has nothing been done?

The first is democracy itself. Crowds reward emotionally-pleasing ideas that are easy to understand, which cuts out any long-term plans (longer than the next year at most) and any complex ideas that cannot be explained in one sentence at a bar. Crowds also like to receive things from society, and to not be accountable, so radical changes are bad but entitlements are good.

The further problem is the compromise problem which is that in a group of people, each person will differentiate himself by having a unique opinion or need; the process of differentiation is important for that person to succeed socially. This will force a norming onto the many divergent ideas which involves taking their lowest common denominator. (See LCD, r/k, Dunning-Kruger.)

Between these effects, you have a political system that is hostile toward leadership. Leadership sees what others do not, acts toward it, and worries later about getting all the special interests into line. Politics works the exact opposite way: it is “pragmatic,” and involves currying favor among special interests and flattering voters and accepting lobbyists and the interests of foreign powers, a process that politicians hide behind altruism because if you can justify your plan with helping pity objects — the poor, women, LGTBBQ, minorities, orphans and cripples — then the credulous wide-eyed voters will go for it and completely fail to observe its actual goal.

This is analogous to advertising. If you want to make good beer, you create a painstakingly crafted product that is more expensive than the average and has low margins. If you want to make money making beer, find a way to do it at low cost so that you can both sell it cheaply and have a high margin. This requires making bad beer, but you can offset that with a relatively minor cost — compared to that of making actually good beer — of advertising. When you advertise, do not sell them cheap beer. Sell them an image of how this is sexually successful person beer, and being essentially monkeys with the facility of language, they will buzz warmly to that image and buy the product. Politics is no different.

In addition to the problem of politics, there is the problem of internal politics on the right:

On the other hand, it has happened several times already in the history of the Right that intellectual movements have gotten to this level. Then they dissipated. For whatever ultimate cause, they became corrupted and oversimplified; they lost the enthusiasm of their followers and the attention of everyone else. These schools of thought all failed to impede the advance of liberalism. Between its initial awakening and world historical influence there seems to be a Filter (perhaps several, but let’s keep things simple), and no antiliberal movement has yet survived it. And this challenge is before the neoreactionaries, not behind them. – Bonald via Outside In

What, indeed, is this Great Filter?

I submit it is two things: First, people interested in normal life do not have a concentrated demand that is deconstructive like the ideological people do. Second, people on the right are easily seduced by the ego, which demands social success over accuracy, and so they modify their philosophies to include what people want to hear and special interests demand, and get rich and popular and so everyone follows them.

Truth is a lonely path that can only be appreciated by at best the top fifth of the population in terms of intelligence. Then the question of their honesty arises. Have they disciplined their emotions? Are they mature enough to view a world in which they and their personal success are not the most important things? Can they think on a long term basis? And the biggest: can they think of situations with more than one actor, such as market forces, culture and leadership working together, instead of the standard modern solution of making a law to create an institution to address a problem with a strict rule?

Most right-wingers know they are not-liberal by their gut feelings and their intimation that liberalism is sheerly insane.

There are some who are not right-wing per se, but also recognize that the liberal/leftist plans will end in disaster.

These two find it very hard to unify in any way because to do so requires unpopular thoughts, violation of trends and fashion, and even more, personal sacrifice by not profiting from selling people what they already want to hear, and personal negation by recognizing the world outside of the narcissistic ego.

Any right-wing movement is easy to split up. Wait for it to get going, then re-state liberalism with a conservative surface. The crowd will flock to you! You have given them a path of least resistance, and the ability to be popular for upholding it. This is why conservatives always try to be like liberals, even though it hands them defeats over the long term.

It is easier for conservatives to be the “party of NO” because it enables them to hide their own ideas and focus solely on why liberal ideas are insane, dysfunctional and destructive. While this is less popular than the “and it’s all free!” style of politics, it gains support from those who want lower taxes and to avoid following the ideological train into the graveyard of empires along with the Soviets.

But can Neoreaction survive entryism by populism through self-promotion?

Understanding the extremism of modernity


Ideology makes itself tempting by providing a single set of symbols and categories to explain civilization and its problems. What if, on the other hand, politics were not a cause but an effect? Including possibly the type of mistaken effect that occurs when something is used as a justification, or an explanation after the fact to make an event seem favorable.

Biology explains much of our society and its behavior better than politics does. Imagine that society were a single animal, or a herd of animals. Knowing that it was in trouble, perhaps with a disease or famine or threat of invasion, that herd might go a bit wild. It would accelerate normal behaviors of life to extremes in order to save what it could of itself before the end.

Using the herd analogy, a herd under stress tends to produce more offspring so they will outlast its losses. It becomes more violent, both to fend off attackers and possibly subjugate other herds and occupy their environmental niches. As part of this, it forces its animals to demonstrate greater loyalty.

What does this translate into for humanity?

  1. Hypersexuality. Like crazed animals, we repeat the sex act frequently as if it were a talisman against our downfall.
  2. Obesity. Cornered animals will often eat impulsively to give themselves something to do, and to try to boost health.
  3. Zealotry. When the herd is threatened, its members obsessively come together and exile discontents.
  4. Competition. Members of the herd assert position and test others to firm up the command and control hierarchy.
  5. Paranoia. Feeling constantly alert, and wary also of instability within, members become hyper-alert and suspicious.
  6. Superstitious. Confronting an ill it does not understand, the herd becomes neurotic and superstitious looking for causes.

Our past 200 years could be viewed as the spasms of a dying animal or a dying herd. Aware of its short time, it is manically trying to conduct the patterns of life in compressed form so that there is a chance of survival.

This creates pathology where the method is repeated without the purpose, and as the method does not produce the right results, it is repeated even more obsessively. Like instinct in the domesticated animal, it arises out of place and is repeated creepily and fanatically.

For the West, the writing has been on the wall for centuries. A peak of culture, massive internal conflict, massive political instability, lack of good leaders, incursion of commerce into all areas, and lower echelon revolt that seems more destructive than constructive. We can argue about causes later, but it is clear that we are in decline.

That has — like all crises — created a division in our society. At the highest level, there are two groupings of humans: those who recognize the problem, and those who do not. The denialists invent excuses for how our collapse is a good thing, which explains the beady-eyed fixation of the left on the Third World, and/or come up with other “problems” that are not real but will distract us, like the war on drugs or the quest for social justice.

As the doom still approaches despite our efforts, and no real consensus exists about it, people become more frenetic and unstable. Very few of them can articulate what is going on because it requires someone who has the equivalent of a PhD in philosophy and history who also has lived as an outsider, and thus not been tainted by denialism, his or her whole life.

Some exist. The herd takes revenge on them as it always does, by ignoring what they say and then pretending to not notice the steady increase of doom, because this gives the herd power with what it has left. Yet the only real power consists in recognizing the problem and counteracting it, because otherwise all of what we have exists on borrowed time.

The law of unexperienced idealism


Our society is an echo chamber by design. The herd, knowing in their hearts that their ideas are nonsense, seek others who will affirm the delusion as fact. This allows the group to use its numerical weight to protect its members from criticism with the threat of retaliation. In the time-honored methods of human interpersonal relations, lie will then be treated as fact and resentment will spread.

Most of us can list at least a half-dozen taboo ideas. For example, that most homeless people want to be that way because they are alcoholics, which is why previous generations called them winos and bums instead of the PC appellation “homeless.” Or that your average woman craves nothing more than a strong man, if she can be honest long enough to form the thought. Or that all of our environmental and green programs are worthless, bandaids on spearwounds.

Perhaps the greatest taboo of our times comes from diversity, mainly because it is the final weapon in the quest by our society to self-immolate. When the genetic basis of the population is gone, nothing is left and the laws and institutions will quickly fade. This was the Baby Boomer dream, after all: I hate you so much, Mom and Dad, that I will burn everything you hold dear, including myself.

You can on occasion actually discuss diversity. People will bring it up, and not just to affirm The Narrative. This triggers its defenders to swarm and wherever they are, if they get wind of it, they will drop what they are doing and rush toward you. Their strategy is the shotgun blitzkrieg: throw as many reasons out there as possible not to land a solid punch but to overwhelm you so you trip up in addressing any one of them. Then they say, “See, this guy is a fringe element who is probably cracked and should be ignored.” Back to business as usual.

If you respond with “This issue is not relevant to me” or “I am self-interest, and I do not care,” they will take that as a talking point to wax eloquent about how they care and you are, by implication, the opposite of the good and selfless profound educated altruists that they are. Their goal is to bully you and make you back down and then to humiliate you. It has no truth quotient; it is all appearances.

In such discussions, a rule that I call the “law of unexperienced idealism” comes into play. If you turn the discussion toward questioning the benefits of diversity (as opposed to attacking its disadvantages), they will start the tape reciting the usual platitudes. During this discussion, the possibility of “restaurants” being mentioned approaches one.

Many a time a brave warrior has ventured forth with classic Socratic verve and debunked every one of the pellets of the shotgun blitzkrieg attack. This leaves the opposition retreating into the area that Socrates did not have to explore, which was a simple refusal to pay attention to anything but personal preference. Your average modern person will believe a lie because it flatters them, and when they act on it and create a disaster, will simply go into oblivion and either ignore or deny the chaos they have created.

When all their other gambits have failed, they always start talking about restaurants. The wide variety of foods, how good they are, how they help make you an intellectual, and how food was boring before they had a dozen ethnic restaurants. Never mind that every one of these restaurants is owned by white people and staffed by Mexicans or African-Americans; they will keep banging that tin drum until your eardrums rupture.

The inability of advocates of diversity to come up with solid arguments says a lot about the intellectual bankruptcy of diversity as a position. They say it is a strength; how? It was not needed before. They claim it is educational; how is it more so than a book or film on the topic? They claim it is morally good, but it seems dubious that it is a higher moral good than each group having its own lands. But restaurants? That is pure subjectivity. They choose it, you see, because they like it. They will say this many times over.

When people like me tell you that the root of diversity is in egalitarianism, and cannot be fought without debunking egalitarianism, this is it. When people are equal, it is a valid and presumably true opinion to prefer restaurants to social order. The individual is empowered not only to seek truth, but to deny it or brush past it in blithe oblivion. This is their last refuge and their trump card for all of your arguments.

Diversity implodes in South Africa


The behaviors that evolved alongside us — complementary gender roles, xenophobia/nationalism, chastity, self-sacrifice — did not emerge because they were the default ways of nature, but because they enabled us to rise above the norm for species, which is to approximate a mean. Instead, humanity pushed further. It was only with The EnlightenmentTM that we abandoned this eternal knowledge.

We are all accustomed to diversity failure stories from South Africa. Long story short, people became outraged in the 1980s that South Africa maintained a system of racial segregation called “apartheid,” and assumed it and not inherent differences between peoples was responsible for black poverty in contrast to white wealth. The international community raged, South Africa caved, and now rapes and violence are through the roof and the thoroughly diverse government is totally dysfunctional.

At this blog, we take a different view of diversity: that no matter what groups are involved, it fails because it gives groups a choice between submission to a mass-culture through assimilation or being perpetual impoverished outsiders. The choice itself is offensive enough to launch revolutions, and it makes both whites and blacks in South Africa miserable.

This week our bumbling drunken media discovered another South Africa story: diversity failing within a race. Notice how carefully The Wall Street Journal reports it:

Attacks on immigrants, many of them from other African countries, in and around the coastal city of Durban have subsided after the deaths of six people there, police said. Some 112 people were arrested in KwaZulu-Natal province, which includes Durban, during the riots there, according to authorities.

Some South Africans have accused immigrants of taking jobs and opportunities away from them in a country with high unemployment. The government has said it is addressing complaints about undocumented migrants, while noting that many foreign nationals are living legally in South Africa and contributing to economic development.

Newsweek portrays the story in much the same way:


“The attacks in Durban happened because the government failed to deal with the root cause of xenophobia,” which is South Africa’s dire economic situation and high crime rates, said Dewa Mavhinga, a senior researcher for the Human Rights Watch Africa division. He is Zimbabwean and decided to return home from Johannesburg this week after witnessing threats of violence against foreigners.

As you know, with media you must read between the lines. They are going to tell you a story that leaves out key details and rely on your imagination to fill in the blanks.

Who are these entrepreneurial foreigners? Saudis? Mexicans? Germans?

No: other Africans. This is black-on-black violence.

The people resisting them are the ones we are told we impoverished because of apartheid. Apartheid being gone, they continue to be totally dysfunctional, probably because they themselves were immigrants into South Africa’s coastal areas from further inland who came to South Africa to take advantage of its newfound wealth. Now they are finding that the loss of apartheid created a form of affirmative action that was a de facto subsidy, and it has weakened them.

Diversity works in no form. It is a paradoxical idea. Based in an emotional desire for peace and equality, it ignores the differences between peoples and more importantly, the need for each group to have its own identity. Having lived in minority-majority cities for most of my life, I have seen black-on-Hispanic, Asian-on-Indian, Hispanic-on-Asian, Indian-on-Arab and other forms of minority-on-minority violence. Diversity fails on its own, not because it is obstructed by white people or because of historical grievances.

Think of it this way: what kind of person do you want stopping you as a cop? Someone who is like you, or not? Who do you want in office, and as your doctor or lawyer, someone like you or not like you? In our human arrogance, we assume we can re-define who is like us through politics and take any random person, teach them to love democracy and consumerism, and have an instant ally.

It is not so. Real diversity — which is nationalism, meaning that each discernible group gets self-rule and self-determination by excluding all others — came about through the wisdom of nature. It is what allows us to evolve and survive while keeping social standards through culture, and it is better than all that governments can do.

As South Africa winds down into chaos yet again, we are reminded of the narcissism of humanity that has us ignore obvious rules of nature. We think that we can conquer all that is out there with guns, laws and internal combustion engines. But the beast is within, and it as the product of billions of years of evolution is far smarter than we are.

The Jackal Hour broadcasts outside-modern round-table discussion


Neoreactionaries are gathering on Google Hangouts to riff on the ideas of those who oppose modernity. These round-table discussions occur over several hours of whisky and cigars, through voice and video remotely, and produce detailed analysis of Neoreactionary positions. To join one, visit the join the Google hangout.

Robert Sapolsky and the urge to neuter in Stress: Portrait of a Killer (2008)


Liberalism wants to remove power. It has two views on power, a public view and a private view. In private, liberals fear power because it requires competence, and competence entails oversight because it allows the powerful to point out where others are acting in illogical or venal ways. The private goal of liberalism is to abolish oversight of the individual, which requires the justification of egalitarianism/altruism to whip groups into a hive-frenzy to implement it. In public, liberals fear power because it results in “oppression,” and their response is to diffuse power through democracy and de-masculinization, replacing it with the Society of Endless Compromise which always defaults to inclusivity, removing oversight and allowing venal and illogical behaviors to be “equal” to intelligent ones.

As part of this myth, liberals enjoy the concept of pacifism. In this mental state, they assume that life would turn out just fine or even better without warfare and conflict. This ignores the fact that most people are unreasonable and that the stronger, by virtue of being more competent, tend to improve conditions by imposing violence on the lesser. In nature, we call this “Natural Selection” and newspapers run the kindly picture of grandfather Darwin. But our human pretense disallows us from realizing the same rule applies to us: evolution occurs when the more competent beat down the less-competent and take their place.

One form of this pacifism myth appears in the interview with primatologist Robert Sapolsky in the National Geographic Society documentary Stress: Portrait of a Killer. Sapolsky talks about his experience with the Keekorok Troop of baboons, and he relates his conclusions as if they were experience, fully aware than an audience of credulous useful idiots will adore him for his precious and passive stand against masculinity, power, violence and anything else that affirms reality over individual human desires, judgments and feelings.

Here is his statement in the documentary:

Sapolsky: The Keekorok Troop is the one I started with 30 years ago.

Narrator: The Keekorok Troop took to foraging for food in the garbage dump of a popular tourist lodge. The trash included meat tainted with tuberculosis. The result was that nearly half the males in the troop died.

Sapolsky: It wasn’t random who died.

Narrator: Every alpha male was gone.

Sapolsky: And what you were left with was twice as many females as males, and the males who were remaining were, you know, just to use scientific jargon they were good guys. It completely transformed the atmosphere in the troop. And this particular troop has a culture of very low levels of aggression and they’re doing that 20 years later. If they’re able to, in one generation, transform what are supposed to be textbook social systems sort of engraved in stone, we don’t have an excuse when we say there’s certain inevitabilities about human social systems.

Let us translate: in this group the alpha males died, and peace reigned. And it has kept going! Why can’t we humans be as enlightened as the baboons?

He does not mention that 20 years is to evolution the blink of an eye, or elaborate whether this troop continues surviving because it is living off the refuse of humans. Then again, that would be a socialist experiment that would make liberals and especially the armchair women pampered with easy jobs or dysfunctional modern family subsidies squeal and shout out in delight how “adorable” it all is.

Pacifism wins the day, and all that scary stuff in life — death, conflict, personal inferiority — is banished. The feeling is religious.

Not surprisingly, the Red The New York Times covered this in pure ecstasy of a passivity-superiority complex:

Remarkably, the Forest Troop has maintained its genial style over two decades, even though the male survivors of the epidemic have since died or disappeared and been replaced by males from the outside. (As is the case for most primates, baboon females spend their lives in their natal home, while the males leave at puberty to seek their fortunes elsewhere.) The persistence of communal comity suggests that the resident baboons must somehow be instructing the immigrants in the unusual customs of the tribe.

That is the Great Liberal Dream in a nutshell: remove the powerful, replace them with foreigners, and have them take care of us in subsidy and happiness forever. The article even states this explicitly:

The new work vividly demonstrates that, Putumayo records notwithstanding, humans hold no patent on multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism = peace, pacifism, love and happiness. Get rid of those blonde meanies who rule over us and we will finally be free!

Like the liberal love affair with the Bonobos, the tribe of monkeys who pacify each other with sex instead of fighting, the Keekorok Troop is a myth elevated to fantasy because it conforms to the liberal agenda.

”We don’t yet understand the mechanism of transmittal,” said Dr. Robert M. Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford, ”but the jerky new guys are obviously learning, ‘We don’t do things like that around here.’ ”

Jerky guys versus good guys, in the rhetoric of a scientist. How is this science? It is as if ideology went looking for meaning, picked it out of a more complex situation and ignored the rest of it, and now is using it to hammer home its zombie viewpoint without regard for the truth of the situation.

What happens to the Keekorok Troop when the human garbage goes away, or a stronger troop moves into the neighborhood? Probably the conditions of whatever is “third world status” in simian troops.












What could be the driving source behind such a scientist? Again, from nu-Pravda:

Dr. Sapolsky, 43, grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, a place he describes as ”a true tribal enclave.” His career blossomed during boyhood visits to the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, where he spent hours fantasizing about living in the African dioramas.

By age 12, he was ”your basic misanthropic egghead,” as he put it, and writing fan letters to primatologists (later on, at John Dewey High School in Coney Island, he taught himself Swahili). He dreamed of escaping Brooklyn.

”Bensonhurst was not the place to be a short scholarly Jewish kid with no proclivity toward athletics or gang violence,” he explained.

He was a short nerdy kid who did not like sports and he was of course, oppressed, by the strong. Or at least the violent. Or maybe not the strong or violent, but the criminal. It is unclear what he is saying here, but also clear that if he is reciting this 31 years later, he harbors a life-long resentment of people stronger than him.

Liberal pathology at work is an amazing thing. They wish to neuter the strong and embrace the foreign, if not the outright enemy, and have it take care of them. In my day, we had a simpler term for this: giving up.

Neoreaction in reverse


The ongoing Neoreaction drama is bound to take some time to clarify because afflictions do not reveal themselves. Much like only the stupidest evil would appear in an evil-looking form, we inherit our worst confusions from the world around us in a form that is invisible because it is both abstract and broad. This thinking then underscores everything that we do.

Mr. Henry Dampier wrote a quick piece in response to “What is Neoreaction?”. In his piece, he addresses an important point, but not the point I made. His thesis reads as follows:

The part that I do mind is the bit about fame, which is an unavoidable byproduct of actually organizing people to achieve certain goals. Jesus had his apostles, followers, and divine powers, but the rest of us who are less holy than Jesus must use time, money, material, power, and energy to achieve our political ends.

Popularity and admiration are natural byproducts of success. It’s generally good to downplay them and shed the byproducts when it’s feasible, but such behaviors can’t be eliminated entirely.

…some of Brett’s criticism to me seems to be that we ought to have divine powers, like Jesus, which would prevent us from having to get our hands dirty with the whole money and manipulation business, because sheer purity and disinterested practicality would carry the day. This may be my resentful misinterpretation of his criticism, but it’s my instinctive reaction nonetheless.

I think too highly of Mr. Dampier to assume this is resentful, but what makes this situation difficult is that it involves breaking out of the assumptions that are inherent to our time, which makes the truth doubly hard to find. It is both obscure, in that we do not know when we start where to look for it, and hidden, in that the precepts applied to any modern argument will confuse us. This is not an easy task.

The target is not popularity, admiration, or wealth here. “What is Neoreaction?” is not an anti-capitalist screed, although it notes the limits of capitalism.






I further disagree with Mr. Dampier here:

It’s also a little odd for ‘traditionalists’ of a certain tradition which claims to be an ur-tradition to speak as if their tradition is universal, and then to berate rival traditions as being false rather than particular to a certain culture and geography.

Evolans see tradition as absolute and the differences between geographical locations as a failure to fully interpret. There is a correct answer, as with all questions, to the question of human civilization. Saying that it varies with continent is a sensible political strategy, but one that ultimate affirms relativism and the kind of “truth is optional” attitude that makes democracy abhorrent. The European and American strains, which we might describe as socialist and libertarian respectively, will resolve themselves for the very failures of socialism that I document in “What is Neoreaction?” and of libertarianism that Mr. Dampier describes in his response.

However, he does conclude the piece in a hopeful and useful way:

For that matter, it’s a good jumping off point for me to reiterate the goal that I made up for this website for this year: to investigate the passing of the grand tradition of higher education and to make some progress towards restoring it in a practical way for the people who read this. It’s also always been my approach to focus on the natural elites, and to disdain the others.

That means that I’m mostly looking to appeal to professionals, doctors, lawyers, and the occasional disaffected right-wing academic, small business person, engineer, and investor. I also especially want to get to know and appeal to parents of large families who are right-wing.

Mr. Dampier says above that he is not writing about Neoreaction; he is writing about academia as a tradition. This is an excellent goal and can be influenced by Neoreaction but would not properly be part of Neoreaction. He is clearly taking his blog in another direction than Neoreaction as theory and focusing instead on a specific task, with Neoreaction as an influence.

The point made by the article still stands, which is that when a message gets bent to please its audience, truth suffers — and so does any hope of winning over the actual audience. Neoreaction has filtered its audience by demanding realism and truth at the same time, which replaces the narrow pragmatism of appeasement. Those who will understand it, like the audience for Nietzsche and Plato, want hard answers to a problem that humanity has never been able to solve: the creation and maintenance of stable but notable civilizations.

Neoreaction stands out from most modern suggestions along these lines because it rejects the liberal assumptions that underly everything we see, hear and read in public. It does so broadly enough that differentiating what areas it attacks becomes impossible. It rejects egalitarianism and the notion that we are obligated to others, which is where it overlaps with anarcho-capitalism/libertarianism.

The path however runs deeper and further into the forest than that. As detailed in “What is Neoreaction?” those who hope to escape the thinking of the dying West must look to the roots of the psychology that created it, and expunge that. Many philosophers have achieved partial answers without distorting their message to sell AdWords. The rest of us can do the same.