Muslim nations also aren't outraged by how Palestinians are treated in Jordan or Syria. The whole anti-israel propaganda thing is mostly about driving internal unity against a designated outgroup than anything else (or at least it started off that way, now a lot of it is generational propaganda collecting its own momentum). This wouldn't really work against China, which is too big (and is too good an oil customer) to be useful as a designated enemy.
Other things that apply are that Uyghurs aren't Arabs, so they're a weird non-central example of Muslims that most (Arab) Muslims don't especially relate to (conversely, this is also why Malaysians are somewhat less anti-israel than, say, syrians). And a lot of anti-israel sentiment is generated by Iran using it as a proxy for anti-american sentiment, which obviously wouldn't work with China.
I think Shaked K.'s point about the Uyghurs not being Arabs is an excellent one. Beyond that, I wonder if, in understanding phenomena like this, asking why the greatest rage isn't simply directed against the numerically greatest victimization doesn't miss the point. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, these are irrational, social/psychological phenomena rooted in what people perceive (again, irrationally) as memorable in history (or maybe your point is simply to confirm that). Of course, one could say the whole rationalist project is aimed at weakening the power of All That--which would be all to the good, although I'm skeptical that using rationalism to redirect rage (rather than weaken rage as a principle) would be much to the good. Why so much of the human cognitive (if I'm not using that term in too uninstructed a manner) function of historical memory seems to be about cherishing and compiling grievances seems an important, perhaps in these matters THE important, question.
I'm not sure how that answers my post, but I'm guessing your point is more polemical than intellectual. Perhaps we are moving in parallel lines, which don't intersect.
but that's popularity since the move to substack. you need *some* popularity to have a robust comments section, and the quality of the comments section around the time of that post was pretty good.
I'm extremely grouchy and think that the comments section was terrific near the start of the blog's style and hasn't been anywhere near as good since. I don't know where the cutover is, but at some point comments went from having well reasoned and researched claims with links, to just bald assertions all the time.
Scott doesn't put much time into looking for & banning bad commenters. I understand. Doing that would be very time consuming, and not interesting. I suggested a couple years ago that he just make a little list of guidelines and hire a grad student to prune the comments and commenters.
Interestingly, my impression is the opposite. I can't think of any commentors for whom the decision to ban could be defended, who have not been banned. I honestly feel like Scott errs on the side of too much banning rather than not enough (this is not a criticism).
I do think that there was a ban wave where most of the really egregiously bad regulars were removed. There's only one commentator who I think should be warned not to make a certain genre of comments, but it's sufficiently murky that I'm fine with the status quo.
>Interestingly, my impression is the opposite. I can't think of any commentors for whom the decision to ban could be defended
Are you aware that a ban is generally not a permanent banishment, but one lasting a week or a month? So the way Scott's been using bans since I arrived a coupla years ago is to administer a punishment, not to get rid of people forever.
I'm not saying there are lots of horrible commenters, but there certainly are some godawful comments. I generally only report really awful one. II have reported at least 5 pretty vile ones in the last couple months. Not only was the writer not making any kind of substantive case for their point, they were also being extremely rude, sometimes actually cruel, to somebody else on the thread. Last time I checked, all of them were still sitting there on the threads.
This might be arrogant, but I think of myself as able to generate more popularity than I currently have, on demand, just by wading into more popular topics. So the question is at what rate I want to trade off popularity for becoming a hack and having people hate me. The neoreaction post was right at the border of acceptable exchange rates and I'm not sure it was a good idea.
And yes, I agree that NRx is moribund. It contributed to the conversation and as Scott says most of the good it contributed has been adopted piecemeal elsewhere.
I woudn't have ever heard of SSC if not for being linked via that post (from a devout leftist who thought it'd convince me to taboo rightism in all its forms, which I'm sure he regrets). Maybe that's been bad overall for the development of the blag and/or Scott personally, that's for him to decide. But it was definitely a fortuitous gain for me, as a reader. Really doubtful I would have been exposed to any such ideas otherwise, or the broader range of so-called "heterodox" thinkers I read today. That's really a valuable (and vanishing) public service, of locating gems of wisdom in otherwise-untenable-to-broach topics, so I think taken on its own merits it was a Good Thing, no matter how it played out in hindsight.
I'd like to see you talk about more popular topics. Your writing is really well put-together, and that seems downstream of your ability to think clearly and critically about (what seem to me) to be complex issues. I understand that you have good reasons not to wade into subjects that are currently flaming with controversy, but these are the times where reading a sensible, calm, well-reasoned and supported opinion can impact readers the most.
I'm not sure that you strive to have a big effect with your writing, versus mostly making yourself better off and being content to do "good" in a fair ratio (10%?) to compensate, but you're really doing a public service when you weigh in on topical subjects.
+7 And - As for Eremolalos: -5 Between Taylor's body and ol' Ludwig there is room enough. Though you might be defended with this: In den Tälern der Dummheit wächst für einen Philosophen immer noch mehr Gras als auf den kahlen Hügeln der Gescheitheit.
-5, huh. I guess I'm in no danger of becoming popular. I think I brought up Taylor Swift's butt because I was kind of disturbed by the way things were sounding -- both Scott's possible interest in becoming more popular and other people speaking up encouraging him to write about more popular topics. I had a little sort of flashback to all the articles I see headlines for in various places online: "Nearly Everyone Gets A’s at Yale. Does That Cheapen the Grade?" "A Lot of Things Are Getting Cheaper. Here’s Why You Probably Haven’t Noticed." "Deep-Sea Tourism Is on the Rise. But Is It Safe?" "Freeing Ourselves From The Clutches Of Big Tech" "Norman Lear Brought Big Issues to the Small Screen"
There's nothing terrible or dumb about this topics. It's just that each headline gives me the feeling that the writer was infected with some kind of timeliness virus, that their nostrils were quivering as they sniffed around for a subject that's got just the right proportions of familiarity and novelty. And I don't get that feeling here, and would hate it if I did.
That may all be true, but the question of whether it was ex post a good idea is not very interesting. Ex ante you probably didn't know how much popularity you could generate. There is a lot of value of information from pushing your limits.
I don't think that sounds arrogant; I think it's entirely supported by the history of the blogs and I deeply respect the decision to leave on the table what might well be an order of magnitude more traffic. (In the short term, at the very least.)
But the funny thing is, I think that same decision made over and over again is inseparable from the credibility you wouldn't easily sell. What's the good inverse of a catch 22?
You know what I'd like to see you write about? Some piece by Wittgenstein. From time to time you have picked something weird to read and write about -- for instance that book by the alcoholic psychiatrist, and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. In my opinion, those books are weird but not extraordinarily good. I want you to read somebody weird but brilliant and give us your thoughts. Wittgenstein is sort like an autistic savant, except that he can *almost* put into words what he sees about mind and language and subjectivity. (IMO Yudkowsky is the same. I think whatever he has figured out about AI is sort of like what those savants are doing who can recognize a 6-digit prime number at a glance. *Except* that Yudkowsky is normal enough that he can *almost* explain how he foresees what will happen.)
Anyhow, Wittgenstein had a huge, gorgeous strange mind. I wish you'd take him on. Guaranteed to make your blog less popular.
Might be useful, but not what you'd call a good read. I was thinking Scott could read a section of Philosophical Investigations or Lectures and Conversations, and review it -- give his understanding of what LW's getting at, and his reactions and opinions.
Um, is suggesting a line-by-line reading of the Tractatus your way of saying you think a Scott meets Wittgenstein episode is a bad idea?
Well seriously what do you think of the idea of Scott reading and reviewing something less formal and daunting than the Tractatus? LW wrote lots of stuff that
can be broken into article -sized chunks. And LW actually does remind me of Yudkowsky, whom Scott respects. It’s a very different kind of mind than Scott’s. You get the feeling that Scott rarely has ideas that he cannot find a way to put into words — whereas with LW it feels like he’s struggling to find a way to say something, and sometimes he succeeds and other times the best he can do is point, and say “don't look at the finger, look at what it’s pointing at.”
Why this one is 'pay-walled, obviously. I wished I had good advice; I just feel, you know better and it is YOUR blog. We are privileged to follow. - Personally, I am glad you did not post much on Gaza (outside of Mantics - there are some ok-posts about it, at https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/ ). And not more on woke or "race-realism". There are places for that. - But if you do: that is okay, too.
I think that's an insightful way of thinking about having an online following in general. Growing a audience/engagement seems like it can be very seductive, and a lot of people lose their way chasing those goals. I don't think popular topics necessarily make one a hack, but more so engaging in those topics because they are popular rather than because one has conviction for a specific point of view. It seems like you do a great job writing based on your own taste.
As the one true king of America,* born on the Fourth of July when a bolt of lightning struck the Statue of Liberty and caused her to become pregnant all while thirteen bald eagles circled overhead each holding the state flower of one of the original thirteen colonies in their beaks, I never really got Yarvin. I didn’t understand what the practical solution was supposed to be and to be honest I also don’t understand it for a lot of things like Metaculus which just kind of sits there being interesting but doesn’t get into anyone’s face to change minds which is what I ultimately think you have to do in a Democracy. I blame myself for being lazy.
*blinder of justice, Presumer of innocence, supreme lord of freedom, shield of speech, William of Rights, two-armed bearer of arms, purpler of the mountains majesty, Fruiter of the plains, ruler of the republic, etc
You reminded me of the opening to Journey to the West:
> There was on the top of that very mountain an immortal stone, which measured thirty-six feet and five inches in height and twenty-four feet in circumference. The height of thirty-six feet and five inches corresponded to the three hundred and sixty-five cyclical degrees, while the circumference of twenty-four feet corresponded to the twenty-four solar terms of the calendar. On the stone were also nine perforations and eight holes, which corresponded to the Palaces of the Nine Constellations and the Eight Trigrams.
> Since the creation of the world, it had been nourished for a long period by the seeds of Heaven and Earth and by the essences of the sun and the moon, until, quickened by divine inspiration, it became pregnant with a divine embryo. One day, it split open, giving birth to a stone egg about the size of a playing ball. Exposed to the wind, it was transformed into a stone monkey endowed with fully developed features and limbs.
(This is one of China's greatest heroes, the Monkey King Sun Wukong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QPVeSVan7A is a fun video if you want to see how the Chinese think about him today.)
(Text from the revised edition of Anthony Yu's translation.)
(I assume that the symbolic distance of 36 feet and 5 inches is actually a distance of 36 尺 and 5 寸, or exactly 365 寸. I haven't checked this though.)
> blinder of justice, Presumer of innocence, supreme lord of freedom, shield of speech, William of Rights, two-armed bearer of arms, purpler of the mountains majesty, Fruiter of the plains, ruler of the republic, etc
Wikipedia tells us that in the contract in which Alexander II sold Alaska to the United States, the first page is dedicated to the Czar's many titles.
The first two of those movies are really good, even the shift in tone between the first and second is done well and the change in lead actors from Donnie Yen to Aaron Kwok.
The third one was a real disappointment; they adapted the episode of the Land of Women but very poorly - they didn't seem to know what to do with it, and it got bogged down in a badly-done romance main plot (the two actors had *no* chemistry). It seems to have derailed the series since no more were made, which is a pity; I like the actors in general and would have watched a fourth one if made with a better choice of episode.
We really need high effort style to make a comeback and even though I think that’s going to backfire into a future of anime cosplay, as the King of America I can no longer condone the public wearing of sweatpants and t-shirts.
There's a group of people who love to have Yarvin on their podcasts, and credit him with being an early proponent of their ideas. They seem to get a lot of views, and the algorithms know to lump them all together (if you interact with one on Twitter or YouTube, they'll recommend others). I'd maybe locate Auron MacIntyre as the standard-bearer? The people behind The Passage Prize? Bronze Age Pervert?
I don't find them very interesting, so I guess I don't understand them well and maybe I'm drawing the boundaries wrong. But, are these not neoreactionaries?
A lot of these people are Christians and big into restricting abortion, surrogacy, etc, and even stupider stuff like pedophile hysteria, which Yarvin was never into. They also never talk about having a king or anything like that. So yes they all hang out and talk but it’s hard to think of what they all have in common besides race realism.
I think Yarvin has rebranded so that he sounds like he's pushing something like modern conservatism (even though the rebrand is more cosmetic than real, and he's taking it in his own direction).
I think what you're pointing at is frogtwitter and its diaspora and hangers-on; the latter of which got frankly mid once the anti-woke/anti-DEI stuff really got mainstream.
There's a wiki page for frogtwitter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frogtwitter) and while it's not _bad_ it doesn't really get the vibe of it, it feels a bit like it was written by concerned academics who study "radicalization" and get grants to LARP being glowies.
Yes! That's who I'm trying to talk about. And so the right way to word my comment would be: Shouldn't neoreaction get some credit for frogtwitter? Maybe a corollary to #4 could be "Much that neoreaction captured that was repulsive/bad has been successfully offloaded into worse movements" and frogtwitter could go under that heading?
Directionally correct; though I wouldn't classify frogtwitter as repulsive/bad. What comes to mind as one of the biggest gems in the frogtwitter realms is having a far far better understanding of human flourishing, in comparison the neighboring intellectual movements (NRx, E/acc, Progress Studies, Yimby, Charter Cities, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, utilitarianism, anti-woke/anti-DEI, etc) seem blind to such considerations -- and some seem grievously opposed to them, in rhetoric and in practice. Postrationalism/TPOT doesn't do as bad (but then again there was/is significant frogtwitter influence on postrationalism) as the rest; but in a bit of a navel-gazey way.
Ehh, not really. I follow this scene...reasonably closely and I don't think they would describe themselves as neoreactionary, although they take a lot from it. The buzz word I hear these days is "Italian Elite Theory" but as far as I can tell, a lot of people got inspired by Yarvin, started reading more and discovered that Yarvin was less of an original thinker and more of a repackager of previous thinkers. Burnham by far gets brought up the most but you'll see references to Hoppe and Mosca among others.
Honestly, I think they draw a lot more from Drehrer's Benedict Option and Yarvin is there mostly as an intellectual framework for explaining their disillusionment with democracy. And if there's a key commonality between the different groups its an abandonment of democracy and liberalism in general. Not in a "we should abandon democracy" but more that it's a lie, potentially only possible in "homogenous" societies.
But classifying them as a Twitter phenomenon is...misleading. Like, yes, as far as I can tell they all post extensively on Twitter but they're extremely invested in trying to jump start local meetups and parallel institutions. There was a conference in Austin recently along these lines and should be meetups in Oregon and Washington over the holidays. I wouldn't want to say that they've transitioned offline yet but that's definitely their primary focus since Covid restrictions were lifted.
I was sort of there at the creation, and my view is that elitism just became too hard to maintain in the era of social media. You have to keep the proles happy, flatter their prejudices, etc. Everyone is too connected, and there are many more stupid people than smart people. So most people either give in to the mob or soft pedal wherever they disagree with them.
Yarvin himself is pro-vaxx and pro-choice. He wrote an article criticizing Dobbs, which was sort of brave, and it angered a lot of people online but he doesn’t talk about the issue anymore. I can’t remember him talking about the vaccine, as anti-vaxx has become the standard conservative position.
Based on knowing a lot of smart right wingers that have been in these movements or adjacent to them, I don’t think people are consciously lying. They need to have an audience and are so taken in by tribalism that they adjust their positions to make them as consistent as possible with that of the mob. But even those who aren’t trying to build an audience or whatever have had their brains rotted by social media.
So we moved from obscure blogs and forums to twitter as the center of politics on the internet, and the collective IQ of every movement dropped by 15 points or so. Everyone naturally became less elitist and more populist. You can see that on the left too with the decline of neoliberalism and the rise of socialism and woke in its place.
There's been a decline of neoliberalism on both left and right of late, but on the left it would have to fall a lot further to get us back to pre-Carter levels (which the progressives want). On the right, I think we're in unprecedented territory for the modern era. Not sure what it would take for the ~libertarian/econ-pilled/business folks to reestablish power.
The word "elitist" needs to be disambiguated here. Yarvin clearly was anti-"elitist" in the colloquial sense, because he was one of the first to popularly-identify the "cathedral"-caste of policy analysts, journalists, politicos, lawyers, and other white-collar knowledge-economy PMC-types who, without any clearly lines of responsibility or accountability, collectively extrude the zeitgeist. He clearly did not like these people or think they're doing a good job (though his attitude changed a bit when he started getting invited to the cool kids' literary parties and getting to hook up with hot SF domme(s)).
However, Yarvin *was* "elitist" in the ancient greek sense - he wanted "the best" people to be the ones with actual power, and cared not a whit for the viewpoints of the rest. But even that position has two components - (1) who are "the best" people, and (2) what would it mean for them to have power? In answer to the first question, Yarvin flirted with race realism and the JQ, but didn't like that so much because those questions really were quite radioactive at the time. Instead, Yarvin spent most of his time thinking about (2) - what would it mean for someone to actually have power in a contemporary society? What generates power these days, who currently exercises it, and how?
It's that work which sets Yarvin apart, and which has become ubiquitous in new-right spaces. Yarvin wasn't the first person to think about these issues, but he popularized a particular analysis of contemporary media, educational, and policy-making institutions which had been absent before. This analysis works either with an elitist (we should capture the Cathedral via our own conservative long march through the institutions) or a populist (we should fire half the federal bureaucracy, journalists should learn to code, and we need to tax the university endowments) approach.
>I do think it’s funny that of “Asians might have IQs 5 points higher than whites” and “I want robots to kill all humans”, the accelerationists had to jettison the former belief in order to make the latter palatable.
The irony is Lovecraftian, quite literally (in that it involves both racism and also men of science irresistibly, nay, _religiously_ drawn to summoning/creating grievously powerful entities with tragically predictable results).
I’m curious about your thoughts on the „pro-masculine/pro-male” aspect of NRx that seems to be missing on this list. I think it continues to be a lost cause, perceived as low-status or even extremist, even if based solely on objective statistics and neutral concern about the male wellbeing.
I’m also not sure that what some refer to as „woke drift” can be substantially reversed or corrected, and recent wins might be just a step back before two steps forward; there are numerous domains and circles (including EA, unless you have a high status and a high degree of independence) where even selective and data-driven opposition to the narrative means irreversible reputational risk and loss of career opportunities.
Concern for male well-being seems to be alive, if not exactly mainstream. A journalist called Richard V Reeves has a book out (about a year ago) called "Of Boys and Men - Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It". Pretty balanced and well done too, from a quick skim.
I recall Scott writing about many issues that are simultaneously widely known and endorsed, yet suppressed. It seems particularly applicable to the struggles of disadvantaged men - even such thoughtful attempts are unlikely to succeed in the light of the historical track record.
Thanks for that. Taking a quick skim through those, I see what you mean. I did a forecasting project on some issues that men are facing and it got more attention than anything else I've written. Scott was nice enough to link to one of them. There’s very much popular interest in the topic, but it’s simultaneously silenced by media, or talked about in a way that is not productive. In case you’re curious it’s here: taboo.substack.com/p/forecasting-college-enrollment. I have some more forecasts on related issues I’ll be coming out with in the spring around these things. When it's gets so severe that it impacts GDP then these issues will start getting mainstream attention.
Looking forward to following your work! I wonder what kind of interventions - and their social/ideological/partisan framing - we might expect in case of a major negative impact of these issues on GDP.
This too was absorbed by a much more successful movement. Possibly the most remarked on person of 2023 rose to prominence through spreading pro-masculine rhetoric to the exclusion of almost everything else. (Andrew Tate, if it wasn't obvious.)
I think the association with similar figures counts as a loss - it's successful awareness-raising with a loss of quality and credibility of the message, so the issue becomes even more "recognized and endorsed, but suppressed".
I think this *is* anti-monarchist by Yarvin's definition. He has an entire post about a king ruling at the choice of the people is crappy watered-down monarchy that isn't worth the name. The very idea that you have to agitate for a second Trump term at a rally (and then follow the Constitution when it says he can't have a third term) makes this democracy and therefore boring and bad.
I assume new rebranded Yarvin would say it's good, but picture_of_crying_wojak_in_happy_mask.jpg
The Norwegian monarchy is probably the closest thing in actual practice to a "king ruling at the choice of the people."
- The current royal family was elected through plebiscite in 1905
- There's low-level constant pressure from the left wing parties to abolish the monarchy, which constantly fails, which has the practical effect of the Storting (the parliament, e.g. the people's elected representatives) continuously re-affirming popular support for the present monarch
Not quite the same thing as a "regularly elected king" but probably the closest thing in actual practice
I think that's mocking the T-shirts around Hillary's campaign, which joked about 2 terms for the Empress, followed by 2 terms for Michelle Obama, 2 terms for Chelsea (Empress in waiting), 2 terms each for Malia and Sasha.
Demographics were going to be destiny, you see, and Democrats would be in power in saecula saeculorum because they were the reality-based community and on the right side of history.
I don't think they were serious, but some canny(?) entrepreneur picked up on the It's Her Turn Now The Empress Ascends momentum and the giddy talk about this time for sure First Female Ever, and that the Dems should (and indeed now would have to) run female candidates for the presidency in future (after all, it would be retrogressive to go back to voting in an, ugh, Pale Stale Male after having the First Female Ever) and hence talk about who would run next - Michelle?
Hence the Unending Generations of Female Dynasty t-shirt. And as we have seen, when you set up a target like that to tempt the Fates, they cannot resist whacking it like Bullroarer Took taking on Golfimbul 😀
“I do think it’s funny that of “Asians might have IQs 5 points higher than whites” and “I want robots to kill all humans”, the accelerationists had to jettison the former belief in order to make the latter palatable.”
Okay, I looked it up and it is really very stupid. (This being the site of the True Caliph, I have to bridle my tongue a little and not use a colourful range of descriptive language).
That's not Tolkien, that's DnD rip-off version of elves. Guy has pretensions beyond his understanding of the works in question. Then he gets into the domestic violence analogy and it *really* goes to Angband.
I pity the fool that provokes me to start quoting from the Selected Letters:
"I dislike the use of 'political' in such a context; it seems to me false. It seems clear to me that Frodo's duty was 'humane' not political. He naturally thought first of the Shire, since his roots were there, but the quest had as its object not the preserving of this or that polity, such as the half republic half aristocracy of the Shire, but the liberation from an evil tyranny of all the 'humane' – including those, such as 'easterlings' and Haradrim, that were still servants of the tyranny.
Denethor *was* tainted with mere politics: hence his failure, and his mistrust of Faramir. It had become for him a prime motive to preserve the polity of Gondor, as it was, against another potentate, who had made himself stronger and was to be feared and opposed for that reason rather than because he was ruthless and wicked. Denethor despised lesser men, and one may be sure did not distinguish between orcs and the allies of Mordor. If he had survived as victor, even without use of the Ring, he would have taken a long stride towards becoming himself a tyrant, and the terms and treatment he accorded to the deluded peoples of east and south would have been cruel and vengeful. He had become a 'political' leader: sc. Gondor against the rest."
"My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to 'King George's council, Winston and his gang', it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy. Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The mediævals were only too right in taking nolo episcopari as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that – after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world – is that it works and has worked only when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way. The quarrelsome, conceited Greeks managed to pull it off against Xerxes; but the abominable chemists and engineers have put such a power into Xerxes' hands, and all ant-communities, that decent folk don't seem to have a chance. We are all trying to do the Alexander-touch – and, as history teaches, that orientalized Alexander and all his generals. The poor boob fancied (or liked people to fancy) he was the son of Dionysus, and died of drink. The Greece that was worth saving from Persia perished anyway; and became a kind of Vichy-Hellas, or Fighting-Hellas (which did not fight), talking about Hellenic honour and culture and thriving on the sale of the early equivalent of dirty postcards. But the special horror of the present world is that the whole damned thing is in one bag. There is nowhere to fly to. Even the unlucky little Samoyedes, I suspect, have tinned food and the village loudspeaker telling Stalin's bed-time stories about Democracy and the wicked Fascists who eat babies and steal sledge-dogs. There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as 'patriotism', may remain a habit! But it won't do any good, if it is not universal."
It's worth noting that for every Park Chung-hee there is a Vladimir Putin, a Bashir al-Assad, and a Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov. The strongmen of history that prove effective are not as numerous as the idiots and sociopaths that achieve supreme power. I have a feeling I'm preaching to the choir here, more or less, but I feel it bears well to keep that in mind.
I'm likely just putting an inside panic to voice. 2024 looms large.
Yeah no, you addressed the concern that had me animated. Sorry for jumping ahead.
I think this is one of those things that's generally known but that people like to forget when it's their strongman. There's a reason they say power corrupts, not that it makes you more competent. That's what makes the Park Chung-hee's of the world so fascinating, in my opinion. They're such outliers. If you could produce super-competent autocrats on demand, maybe autocracy would give democracy a run for its money, but of course you can't. As it is, silly, infuriating, bumbling democracy still wins out.
“I do think it’s funny that of “Asians might have IQs 5 points higher than whites” and “I want robots to kill all humans”, the accelerationists had to jettison the former belief in order to make the latter palatable.”
The idea that an East Asian ethnic group was genetically superior to the rest of the world ended up causing the deaths of 3-10 million people over an eight year period. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes)
In contrast, Artificial Intelligence has yet to kill a single person, unless you count accidents with self-driving cars, in which case the death toll goes all the way up to... 18.
It's really not all that illogical for people to fear the former vastly more than the latter.
You could try to argue that the VHEMT guys are worse, because Hussein only wanted to kill some people (e.g. anyone who opposed or defied him, or belonged to an ethnic/religious group he disliked, or lived in a country he wanted to invade), while the VHEMT guys want all of humanity to die out. But no one really feels that way. Hussein killed hundreds of thousands of people, whereas VHEMT is just a super-obscure fringe group filled with weird kooks and never accomplished anything of note.
Similarly, most people view the AI cultists as weird but ultimately harmless kooks. The whole idea of robots exterminating humanity is just a goofy sci-fi trope to them. They would give it a <0.0001% chance of actually happening. You can argue that they're horribly mistaken, but that's irrelevant here; I'm making an argument about people's perceptions, not about the actual probability that AI will cause human extinction.
In contrast, what's the probability that yet another genocide might be caused by beliefs of racial superiority? The odds seem pretty damn high, considering how many times it's happened before throughout human history.
Especially because of how much weasel room someone has between definitions of “race” and “ethnicity”. “Race” isn’t real anyway; it’s “population” on the treadmill right now.
There are definitely certain strains and justifications of racism that exist post-Scientific Revolution, sure, and they were a very big problem in the 20th century.
Call me crazy, but I think Saddam and the VHEM people are/were wrong and bad, and I'm glad the latter did not have the abilities of the former. Saddam was worse given what he was able to accomplish, but if I had to choose whether to live under the rule of Saddam or the VHEM loonies I'd take the despotic dictator.
Further, IQ measurements broken down by various demographics are:
1. Widely available
2. Empirical fact
So disavowing some well-measured facet of empirical reality that is loosely connected to past atrocity while maintaining a goal of human extinction is just a bizarre combo. It's common in humans, sure, but it is bizarre nonetheless. (I suppose a major East Asian vs. East Asian war is still on the table at present, but in both the case of China vs. China and Korea vs. Korea it has nothing to do with ethnic conflict; quite the opposite.)
This is in the same family of bad judgment re: intent and power differentials as the whole idea of "Israel is worse than Hamas because Israel has killed more innocent civilians." The trick is ignoring what Hamas would do if it could, vs. what Israel doesn't do, though it could.
On a somewhat parenthetical point, my impression is that genocides are driven by rhetoric and ideas (notice I did not say *caused by* which is a much more difficult and, after decades of innumerable studies, still basically unanswered question) that are much more complex and ambivalent than superiority. A feeling of victimhood, threat, and even inferiority is often just as, or even more, prominent. To take one example, Mein Kampf is, yes, full of imagery of Jews as verminous animals and "parasites"; but it also attributes to the Jews the ability to create and direct virtually everything in world history that Hitler dislikes, including *both* Marxism and international capitalism, the media writ large, modern art and culture, the coalition of great powers directed against Germany during the First World War, and Germany's internal politics, including (of course) German surrender in 1918. If there are feelings of superiority, then it's given urgency and (crucially) popular appeal by being, above all, a wounded and threatened superiority. See also the radio propaganda that drove the Rwandan genocide (where a rhetoric of compiled grievances and future threat is especially prominent).
All I see there is a tweet where Beff says that we should strive to preserve sentient life regardless of the species. How does that support the claim that he or his movement have an AI killing everyone as a positive goal?
I just did a quick search through Beff's twitter for tweets discussing what he wants to do with humans. From what I can gather (see https://twitter.com/BasedBeffJezos/status/1666930036547497987 and https://twitter.com/BasedBeffJezos/status/1726752978697170999), it seems like his goal is a state where humans continue to exist and grow in population, but have to co-exist and cooperate with a variety of other, more powerful sapient species rather than being the sole dominant species. You could argue that that's also bad, but it's not the same as "AIs should kill everyone".
I'm gonna channel Freddie deBoer here for a second and insist that sliding from "IQs 5 points higher" to "genetically superior" is no small thing, and *definitely* doesn't imply "...and therefore morally superior". Lots of bad consequences from that third one, but there plenty of off-ramps along the way.
Both groups seem quite bad! But only one of those groups is actively trolling us on social media.
If Emperor Hirohito created a social media account and started posting catchy slogans advocating mass genocide, I expect you'd start seeing more discussion about why he's wrong. He's not doing that, so you're seeing more about the other guys.
But I would add a different point which is that often the superficial clothing of first version of an idea is mistaken for the essence of the idea.
In the case of neoreaction, I'd say that the followup, or adjacent, ideas are things like the support for Jordan Peterson, or the interest in Bronze Age Mindset. The commonality in all these ideas is a sense that there is no grandeur and meaning in modern life, or more precisely that the life that is offered to most young men is devoid of much interest and value. You could see this as then having a variety of penumbras, from concern about the hikikomorization of America (aka incels) to concerns about lack of interest in having children across much of the developed world, to women complaining that there are few young men worth marrying to deaths of despair.
If you so wish, you can insist that these are all different problems, all driven by very specific details, and all solvable (should you wish to solve them – many of the same people bemoaning eg too few men worth marrying are happy to cackle gleefully about incels). However, IMHO, there is a commonality behind them, and Neoreaction/Jordan Peterson/Bronze Age Pervert have captured different aspects of the most important elements.
The last time large segments of society felt that a safe and secure life was boring and meaningless, it began with Italian Futurists, morphed into weirdos like Marinetti (look into his theories of food), then into confused twits like D'Annunzio, culminating in Mussolini and Hitler.
The point is not to choose heroes and villains, it is to admit that people (and specifically young men) crave some sort of grandeur and meaning in their lives, and if society refuses to give them this (eg by mocking these desires, or insisting that they correspond to taboo concepts and demonizing their holders), at some point this will probably rebound to the detriment of society. Jan 6th was not exactly Fiume. But it wasn't exactly UNRELATED to the sentiments behind Fiume.
So, IMHO, criticizing neoreaction as in this article is like reading Nietzsche literally and saying "it's nonsense, how can God be dead? God can't die"; it's missing the underlying point, the way the movement captured something important about the Zeitgeist, something much larger than a few phrases like "god is dead" or "the blonde beast" or "slave morality".
And, just like most people preferred to engage with Nietzsche's literal words, and either to mock them or to use them as political weapons, anything but *understand* just how different, and why, Europe in say 1890 was from Europe in 1790; so likewise it feels like people would rather mock or condemn people like Jordan Peterson or BAP than engage with their ideas and what they are trying to say about how say 2015 is different from 1915.
And yes, you too can go down that path of (like Scott's experience) reading all this and leaping to condemn me as a closet supporter of Peterson, BAP, Moldbug, and hell, why not also throw in Trump. Or you can ask yourself if you correctly predicted Brexit, Trump's victory, or Jan 6? And if not, then maybe it's time to do a little less categorizing of other people into enemy vs friend boxes, and a little more trying to *understand* what they these people are saying, and trying to resolve the grievances they are describing?
Is Ukraine-Russia a weird one-off driven by a leader and culture you are happy to call "crazy" and leave it at that?
Or is it a counterpart to the Second Italo-Senussi War, an apparently idiotic adventure between two silly combatants, but ultimately stage one of the capture of Europe by a set of ideas already visible 20 years earlier – if you were willing to take them seriously?
“Neoreaction” is silly, few want a King, clearly what’s needed are many Queens (or Empresses, Duchess’s, Princess’s, et cetera).
Instead of 50 States have 500+ each with a young lady monarch who will do the important hat wearing, horse riding, ribbon cutting, and waving that needs to be done!
Maybe have her have the power to call for new elections when the elected representatives (“her loyal ministers”) get annoying.
Her picture will be on the local currency and displayed at post offices, public libraries, and taverns.
Young men shall pledge service and allegiance to her, stuff will be named “Royal” or “Imperial” (“the Royal laudromat”, “Imperial Ale”, “Princess’s Gasoline”, et cetera).
The benefits are so obvious that I wonder why we’re not doing this already?
> Maybe have her have the power to call for new elections when the elected representatives (“her loyal ministers”) get annoying.
That is a lot of power; she'd mostly be getting her way as to government policies. (I don't see a huge problem with that, but it doesn't seem like it's what you have in mind.)
> each with a young lady monarch who will do the important hat wearing [...] that needs to be done!
This reminded me of a YouTube comment on a video of the Ascot Opening Race song from My Fair Lady, which said "my school picked this musical last year, and I was so excited to wear a HUGE hat in this scene... and then they cast me as a boy!"
Is Bronze Age pervert considered part of the neoreactionary movement? I feel like a big reason why radical movements on the right and left fail is because the more radical you get, the more small differences become amplified. A big schism in this movement and the broader far right is between the Christian nationalists and the nitezshean vitalists. I follow a lot of these people on Twitter and they spend far more time attacking one another than they do leftists. You see the same thing on the left with the most radical wokes.
For this reason, good old normie liberal democracy appears to be the most stable system, even with its downsides.
However, I do enjoy reading these guys, if anything because it’s nice to hear some new, outside the box ideas about the world. I just got Bronze Age Mindset, and really enjoyed it as a piece of entertainment. I also did find some value in what he was saying, there were some smart observations in the book that helped close the loop on some thoughts I’ve had about the world lately. On top of that it’s fucking hilarious. It’s nice to hear some new ideas, bc it feeels like so much political writing is just rehashing the same talking points over and over.
BAP is a definite notable omission from this article. He's the modern-day Moldbug, the product of some kind of breeding program that crossed Moldbug with Frog Twitter. He combines Moldbug's opponent-intimidating erudition with a sopping dose of 4chan-style irony and some much-needed twitter-style brevity.
Overall I think it's admirable that the far right has had so much intellectual development over the past decade, leaning into the bits that made sense and abandoning the bits that didn't. This stands in stark contrast to the far left, who still believe the same dumb things they believed in 1848.
“try to live according to a Bronze Age Mindset. You must not misunderstand this …Above all you must reach for the great aim, physical and military independence. Only the warrior is a free man. The only right government is military government, and every other form is both hypocritical and destructive of true freedom. You must aim high! Band with your friends on the way of power and know that nothing has the right to stop you, and nothing can stop you!” - BAP’s core definition of Bronze Age Mindset is a military dictatorship. I think this is different from Yarvin’s idea of an accountable monarch, but in the same genre of thinking. They’re both anti-democracy at least.
I’m only 28 so I really wasn’t paying much attention at the peak of neoreactionary blogs a decade ago. I discovered Yarvin 3 or 4 years ago, and my brain tends to lump all of the alt-right and neoreactionary figures together as basically part of the same movement. My brain defined neoreactionary as just being alt right with intellectual depth.
He's not a neoreactionary in the sense that "neoreactionary" was a short-lived political label that described, like, one guy and never really took off. BAP is definitely a more modern manifestation of basically the same thing though.
Moldbug and BAP, I think, agree on what the problems with modern society are. They may disagree slightly on the solutions to these problems, but (and this is key) I don't think either of them really takes their own solutions seriously; they propose clearly unworkable solutions as an ironic commentary on the insolubility of the problems. A total monarchy in the US clearly isn't going to work, and nor is a revolution of nudist bodybuilders. But this is fine, being far-right is a mood, not a set of specific policy proposals.
BAP focuses on the personal rather than the political. Maybe you can't cause a revolution of erudite nudist bodybuilders, but you can become an erudite nudist bodybuilder. And if there are enough people out there with the right mindset then maybe together they can do some good.
I was only 17-18 when neoreactionary blogosphere peaked, so I wasn’t paying attention until a couple of years ago. So in my mind BAP and Moldbug are contemporaries. They both have ideas that are new and original, and they have good arguments. Even if liberal democracy still wins out, it’s fun to have original thoughts out there to read.
I disagree with BAP’s core ideas, but I think Bronze Age Mindset is the funniest book I’ve read in my entire life. If you thought the book was funny I recommend listening to his interview on the Red Scare podcast.
It’s the only book I can remember reading that made me laugh out load several times from start to finish. He’s fucking hilarious and a very clever writer, at times it’s very hard to tell when the joke ends and the “serious” insight begins, it’s ambiguous.
Because of that, I feel like I don’t actually know the specifics of what be believes from reading the book, but on some level I agree with much of his diagnosis. I’ve had thoughts like this for a while and it was refreshing to see someone articulate them. He gives the example of something like the gay community, which used to be full of characters and was a portal to the depraved underbelly of society. Now JP Morgan sponsors the pride parade, there’s sex worker activists giving speeches at corporate events. The parts of society that used to offer danger and excitement have now been absorbed into the safety of the longhouse.
I’m a huge fan of visiting new cities, and visiting a shitty dive bar and mingling with the characters that exist on the fringes. It seems like increasingly, these types of establishments are harder to find, and the “dive bar” has just become another brand aesthetic. It’s just a costume that a regular bar puts on, carefully curated to not offend the white collar sensibilities of the 9-5ers who show up for happy hour. Seems like there and everywhere, we’ve made the trade off between safety and adventure in favor of more safety. I think this is a lot of what’s behind male depression.
> I feel like I don’t actually know the specifics of what be believes from reading the book, but on some level I agree with much of his diagnosis
Yeah, I feel exactly the same way. I also can’t figure out what he’s serious about and what’s a joke. I disagree with him on a lot of things, but he pinpoints some real problems, like with lack of adventure in our lives and the way that everything seems fake. I don’t think a military dictatorship is the right solution though.
In regards to your original question about whether he’s neoreactionary or not. I’d say he’s just sort of unclassifiable. He’s regarded as the philosopher of the alt-right, but I’m not even sure if that broader label is accurate or not.
BAP purposefully doesn't elaborate on what he believes the regime should look like.
Agreed that it was absolutely hilarious. By far the most interesting "political " book I've read in years. Also perhaps the most motivating book I've ever read. It filled me with energy and desire to go out and do big things.
At least from my perspective, you writing the original article was a strong positive - it exposed me to the interesting ideas part in an clear way, with the alternative being that I would have had to either wade into nrx writing to get them myself (bad both in that their writing is unreadable and in that reading it would make it harder to separate out the ontereirs ideas), or never learning them at all (and I do think there's some important ideas there that people need to think more about but are verboten in ordinary society).
Also, ij the end you list some dictator failures, but I think it's wrong to mix things that are failures in their own terms (like economic mismanagement or the failed Ukraine invasion) with things that western liberals are ideologically against but are successful at achieving their stated goals and might not actually bother most NRXs that much (Uyghur stuff/poorly treated indian laborers).
Finally, a post spicy enough to justify the subscriber-only label! Thanks for writing this.
I think you're making a common mistake when you talk about elitism vs anti-elitism though. When anti-elitism occurs on the right it isn't motivated by egalitarianism, but by a sense that the quote-unquote elites are not true elites. When right-wingers decry the "elites" there's massive ironic air quotes around the word; right-wingers are happy to believe that some people are better than others and deserve more, but they believe (with good justification) that the current quote-unquote elites are largely just a bunch of well-connected dullards chosen by nepotism, favouritism and maybe the occasional child-sex ritual rather than actual eliteness.
Not all right-of-centre folks are equally elitist. Maybe someone like Mike Huckabee is on one end of the spectrum (all men are equal in the eyes of god) and someone like Bronze Age Pevert is on the other end of the spectrum (a revolution of nudist bodybuilders will one day seize control of the country by pure masculine energy). But Trumpism is definitely towards the pro-elitism end of the spectrum (the country has been ruined by dolts like low-energy Jeb and sleepy Joe and tiny Ron and crooked Hillary, and needs to be rescued by someone who is actually smart and a winner, like Trump!)
Well Scott does say that the first time he wrote about it, it was "one of the more fateful decisions in my life. All the movement’s supporters decided that if I was engaging with neoreaction at all, I must like it, and commented on my blog for the next few years. And all the movement’s enemies made the same inference, and harassed me and tried to get me cancelled for the next few years. Honestly a bad time, 0/5, do not recommend"
"I do think it’s funny that of “Asians might have IQs 5 points higher than whites” and “I want robots to kill all humans”, the accelerationists had to jettison the former belief in order to make the latter palatable."
The problem (which I think nrx was aware of, but never came up with a good solution for) is that most plausible elites (smart people, rich people, beautiful people, etc) are currently mostly liberal. It's really hard to build a pro-elite movement when the elites are opposing you.
Trump is a weird mix of elite and anti-elite, but you can't have a pro-elite movement based on one guy.
> It's really hard to build a pro-elite movement when the elites are opposing you.
Essentially all movements are led by elites. Where two sides come into conflict, it's not necessary for elites to be present in equal numbers on both sides.
I don't buy the idea that actual elites are mostly "liberal" (in the US sense where it means left-of-centre for some reason). Right wing views are positively correlated with wealth and education, and if my observations of college Republican vs college Democrat groups are any indication then positively correlated with good looks as well.
Right-wing views are positively correlated with wealth and education among the 99% of Americans who are not elite. It isn't clear that this correlation holds into the elite ranks (mostly because there aren't enough true elites answering the surveys), and there are reasons to believe the trend might reverse at that level.
He was never cool. He was wealthy and connected enough to have power and influence, but his coin wasn't elitism, it was money. The exchange rate isn't that great. He traded a lot of money for a little elitism.
"But YIMBYs have proven that there can be a constituency for building things even in a democratic system, and won enough victories to demonstrate that methods can work."
Is this... true? my impression so far has been that YIMBYIsm is extremely popular and has become a modern shibboleth while somehow accomplishing exactly nothing. I don't interact with the movement very much (I live in a place where housing prices are low and rents are low), but I feel like every time I see something about it, it's about how the san fransisco zoning board found some new way of foiling the latest popular referendum or state legislation.
Like, most recently, I think I saw an essay about how Seattle had been ordered, or legally obligated, or something, to create some kind of standard design for multi-occupant housing which would be The Building that they'd copy-paste everywhere, and they ended up designing a building that requires a 102' x 84' minimum lot footprint when something like 90% of seattle's lots are 100' x 80', or something like that, and then the essay went into evidence showing how this was clearly a deliberate choice on the part of the designers to subvert the push for more housing
Is it that I only ever hear about YIMBYIsm's failures? or is my general impression correct, that YIMBYism as political movement has become extremely popular and yet housing still stubbornly and mysteriously fails to get built?
I think there is a real bias in what you hear about yimbyism, yes - it's had a bunch of recent wins (including big ones in places you wouldn't expect, like Montana). It's true that the SF board of supervisors is doing increasingly silly countermeasures, but there has been real movement in California too (including SF).
(In New York, otoh, it's still been pretty consistently stymied).
Whether you consider the overall picture a net win or not depends on your standards - there's been a bunch of midsized wins (some cities removing parking requirements or allowing adus or triplexes by-right) but nothing close to "an entire state adopted japanese zoning". I think compared to most political movements in recent years it's been fairly successful.
"The past was able to build things, and provided its citizens with cheap housing and beautiful cities. The present doesn’t. Why not? It’s easy and not entirely wrong to blame liberal democracy for this - if you ask the current citizens of a city to vote on new construction, they’ll usually say no, and the grandest construction was implemented by authoritarian central planners like Robert Moses who ignored them."
Not really accurate. What Robert Moses did absolutely had the support of the people — or at least the people who mattered. That's why he drove his urban highways into poor and black neighberhoods whose residents didn't have the clout to oppose him, and this type of "urban renewal" was absolutely popular among those whom democracy cared about at the time.
Also, putting Robert Moses and "cheap housing and beautiful cities" in the same paragraph is rather peculiar. He didn't want or try to make cities beautiful, he spearheaded the movement to move people out of cities (those who could afford it) and into new-model suburbs, destroyed swathes of low-income housing (deliberately) and extended the highway system, which had been meant to bridge the gaps between cities, into urban cores themselves to facilitate a lifestyle where you live outside the city and commute into it for work. I think even an advocate of car-centric development would be hard pressed to call the resulting urban landscape "beautiful". For an example compare what Amsterdam looks like now to the Robert Moses inspired Plan Jokinen (named after the American urban planner who created it). You might think it's better (although I'd disagree with you), but "beautiful"?
Neo-reaction seems to me to be bog-standard technocracy (and did anyone, even on the Republican side, think Mitt Romney was a competent elite? Gavin Newsom seems the most like him of the current crop of politicians, mostly based on "I look clean and tidy, am young as politicians go, and I have a nice hairstyle").
If I'm going for a monarchy, it'll have to be the Stuarts, and given that the last guy was James II whom even his allies have to admit was not that great, I'll pass. Charles II, though - I could live with him. Any king that is disparaged for not fighting enough Continental wars to expand our glorious reign is fine with me. Prior to reading Cephas Goldsworthy's biographical study of Lord Rochester, I didn't have a high opinion of Charles, but after that I liked him because he seems to have had a sense of humour and to be able to distinguish self-importance between himself as a person and his role as monarch.
For the technocrat bit, he was also a patron of science:
"Charles II and the founding of the Royal Observatory
Improving navigation at sea was a major challenge for 17th century merchants and their sailors. Thanks to Charles II’s French mistress, Louise de Kéroualle, rumours started to circulate at court that French astronomer, Sieur de St. Pierre, had devised a means of determining longitude at sea by using observations of the Moon’s position in relation to the background stars.
On 4 March 1675, the King signed a Royal Warrant appointing John Flamsteed as 'astronomical observator..[..]..so as to find out the so much-desired longitude of places for the perfecting the art of navigation'. It was the founding of Britain’s first state-funded scientific research institution."
> [...] and did anyone, even on the Republican side, think Mitt Romney was a competent elite?
I strongly think so - he had a lot of stuff on his resumé:
- JD and MBA from Harvard
- Successful career at Bain Capital
- President/CEO of the organizing committee for 2002 winter Olympics
- Governor of Massachusetts, who oversaw a move from a budget deficit to surplus and also signed into law a state healthcare system that pretty much achieved universal coverage
You could definitely dig in on how much credit Romney deserves for some of those things vs. how much was just deliberate cultivation of his image, but on paper he has a great case for being a competent technocrat.
On paper, sure, but I don't recall any great enthusiasm for him.
And certainly on the other side, there was a ton of media coverage about every little slip - remember the binders full of women? Remember Cruel Callous Mitt the Animal Cruelty Guy because of the dog on the roof-rack? Remember Ruthless Capitalist Mitt because of Bain Capital? And can it ever be forgotten Ayatollah Mitt And The Threat Of Mormon Theocracy?
Which made all the purring approval about him being The Only Decent Republican years later, when it came to Trump, so very ironic.
This fits my recollection, yes; I think this says very little about Romney and a lot more about failure modes in politics. Presidential candidates are always portrayed by their detractors in overwrought bad ways.
Although I will say "lack of enthusiasm from one's own side" is really the expected mood for a competent technocrat - sure we'd LIKE a hardcore party warrior but maybe we'll accept this bland middle-of-the-road figure who seems to really like Excel spreadsheets.
Also I think the Trump years have made a lot of left-of-center people (myself included) really re-evaluate our rating scales. I think you see this in the newfound sympathy for George W. Bush - most (D) voters aren't saying they actually approve of him, they're saying they didn't realize at the time how much worse he could have been.
The problem is, at the time Romney was portrayed as going to be Literally Hitler. Then Trump. Then DeSantis, though he seems to have dropped out of the limelight a little.
After a while, it stops being effective and is just "oh, yet another Republican politician is being called Literally Hitler, yawn". A little re-evaluation *before* the hysteria (from both sides) would be more to the point, but that's probably asking for too much. If Tweedledee can't portray Tweedledum as the Worst Menace Ever, and Tweedledum can't portray Tweedledee as No You're Worser, what are they expected to do - fight it out on their policies?
I strongly agree - I hope (but don't expect) that the current moment will impress this to some degree on left-wing commentators, and I also think this is a significant part to the general question many left-wing people wrestle with, of, "How can people support Trump?" - well, you used up all your superlatives on Boring Mormon Accountant Guy Who Was Actually Fine, so they have no more value.
The Mormon Theocracy stuff brought me straight back to JFK and 'if you vote for him the Vatican will run the White House'.
Which, you know, way to piss off your older voters who remember that stuff 😀 Of course, the current Democratic Party may be pinning its hopes on the young'uns (Pokemon go to the polls!) but it's the old farts who regularly turn out to vote.
There wasn't any great enthusiasm for Romney, not because he wasn't seen as elite, but because at that time there wasn't any great enthusiasm for the prospect of being ruled by the elite. Particularly on the conservative side, as see who the GOP nominated the next time around.
I don't think neoreaction is much like technocracy. Maybe it's a very specific flavour of technocracy.
An ideal neoreactionary leader would be technocratic to some extent, but this technocracy would be in service to very different values to the milquetoast centrism of a Mitt Romney.
Romney might ask "How can we ensure that everyone can get health care as cost-efficiently as possible?" A neoreactionary monarch would ask "How can we ensure the strongest and best people are able to buy whatever health care they can afford?"
That's probably not a great characterisation of the neoreactionary position on health care, but I think my point remains that a standard technocrat tries to optimise things to appeal to the moronic desires of the great unwashed, while an idealised neoreactionary king will optimise to serve values which may not be shared by lesser beings.
Take an intelligent, polished, professional-seeming, successful, religious family-man guy like that, and give him an agenda that people actually want...I don't know, even without Turnip as a foil, that seems pretty appealing. Some amount of the popularity of populist politics has to stem from path dependency, after all - no one wants to copy losing like Romney (or McCain or Bush Sr. or Hillary, different sorts of "elites"), so the new model is Obama. Orange Man definitely follows more in those footsteps, even though he could have theoretically gone the blueblood route with his background. And I guess that's been successful? So we'll probably see more of it, whether this really reflects an on-the-ground distaste for elitism qua elitism or not.
I recall someone (Steve Sailer?) describing Obama as a "protester-in-chief," which I thought was a useful phrase because of how well it fits Trump as well. Biden isn't capable of pulling it off, so it's too early to tell if the concept has legs.
I think the monarchist aspects of nrx are more of a meta-technocracy. Technocrats focus on solving problems. The communications issue faced by technocrats is that there are about as many important technocrats as there are issues. For every issue, a generic technocrat needs to find the one person who knows exactly which three agency rules are missing things up, and which one of them is law and which of them are actually just interpretive guidance written by a lawyer after a court struck down a vaguely similar policy in another department. Technocracy is great in individual cases, but almost impossible to turn into a coherent ideology.
Most technocratic solutions involve taking bold action that others were afraid to take (like using processes that were legal, but might get held up if anyone happened to sue).
Yarvin seems to want to never let bureaucrats have any actual power at all. He insists that only a monarchy can prevent its bureaucrats from becoming the true center of power.
The technocrat wants to be a great doctor, the monarchist wants to be immortal.
Why do people constantly call Lee Kuan Yew a dictator?
He won fair elections against opposition parties where observers saw the count as fair. Singapore under him had a free press, trade unions, independent courts etc all the trappings of democracy.
He unfairly used the courts to sue his opponents but that is well within the norms of democracy, opposition politicians faced high legal bills but were free to campaign amd stand against his party and were represented in parliament.
A few better arguments against him are that (a) he set up the election system with its GRCs to give the PAP more parliamentary seats than their proportion of the popular vote, and (b) that time they promised to give more funding/nicer apartments in the state-run housing sector to districts that voted for the PAP by larger margins (this one genuinely really bugs me, I really like Lee overall but this one's just straightforwardly pretty bad).
That said I agree that Lee and the PAP base their legitimacy on popular approval and work hard to keep themselves representative of the popular sentiment, so calling him a dictator is mostly unfair. Otoh many dictators (including Putin) also have widespread popularity (Putin manipulates election results, but he'd probably cruise to reelection even without that).
Also, liberal western democracies pretty much never have a single party maintaining a parliamentary supermajority for 60 years, so it feels shady to westerners. Given the details I suspect this difference is caused by cultural differences, not anything underhanded, but it does raise the question - if the next generation of PAP leaders became corrupt and incompetent and lost the faith of the people, would they be peacefully replaced by an opposition party? I don't see any reason why they wouldn't, but the fact that this has never happened in Singapore would make me worry a bit about resilience.
(Again, agreed that this is not the same thing as dictatorship and describing it as such is unfair)
> opposition politicians faced high legal bills but were free to campaign amd stand against his party and were represented in parliament.
Incorrect. In Singapore, you can’t stand for political office after having been declared bankrupt. Which means that if you are bankrupted by a libel judgment you are disqualified from serving in parliament.
Hey, *I'm* glad you wrote that article, as it caused me to read (well, listen to) *Romance of the Three Kingdoms,* as well as the rest of John Zhu's excellent podcasts (check them out at https://chineselore.com/), which led to listening to the [China History Podcast](https://teacup.media/chinahistorypodcast), which led to trying to learn Chinese (and creating some [Siri Shortcuts](https://routinehub.co/user/Calion) to help in the process)!
Well maybe Hanson will make neo-reaction great again with his suggestion we need to raise the status of groups like the Amish because they are going to dominate while we will die out because of low reproduction.
It's an incredibly bad argument imo but movements about bringing back traditional values don't necessarily need compelling arguments.
It's a bad argument because there are huge leaps at every point.
1) Yes we are seeing birth rates fall in the modern world but there is still substantial variation in the number of children people have and if this starts to be a problem then people who grew up in bigger families make up larger and larger fractions of the population so it's not clear the issue isn't self-correcting.
2) Even if it was true you can't derive the fact that we should raise the status of groups like the Amish from the fact we often do respect groups that win more.
3) It conflates the group and the meme. Just because one aspect of Amish (or whatever group) is desierable or likely to win out doesn't mean all are.
I'm inclined to agree with most of this, but I partially disagree with the first point.
Specifically, while Moldbug's "Unqualified Reservations" stuff was deeply elitist at its core, one of the core arguments was essentially that our currently-dominant elites (i.e. the "Cathedral") have become unworthy of power and should be replaced by better elites. He didn't seem to have any fixed principle as to who the better elites should be, at various points arguing for restoring his preferred Jacobite pretender (Prince Alois of Lichtenstein, IIRC), crowing Steve Jobs or another celebrity CEO, restricting the franchise to licensed pilots and their heirs, etc. Moreover, he repeatedly talked about something similar to Nixon's Silent Majority (Moldbug's term was "Vaisya", which he took from the Hindu caste system) as a class with coherent political interests that were being treated as a hostile subject population by current elite culture (Moldbug's "Brahmin") and whose interests, he argued at great lengths, would be well-served by turning out the Brahmins and replacing them with new elites.
This part of his philosophy seems to me to be remarkably consistent with the world-view of Trump's core supporters. Trump's main appeal among his supporters (who map decently well to Moldbug's Vaisya) is that he's seen as being on their side in an existential struggle against the unwholesome cultural domination and incompetent administration of what they see as the woke progressive establishment (who map pretty well to Moldbug's Brahmin). You and I may see Trump as a self-aggrandizing buffoon whose success comes mostly from inherited wealth, abuse of the rules, and a talent for self-promotion, but his supporters largely see him as a legitimately successful businessman and a viable candidate for the vanguard of a new, more competent elite whose policies will be better aligned with their interests than the current elites.
> I looked into it, decided it was bad, and wrote a 30,000 word rebuttal. [...]All the movement’s supporters decided that if I was engaging with neoreaction at all, I must like it, and commented on my blog for the next few years. And all the movement’s enemies made the same inference, and harassed me and tried to get me cancelled for the next few years.
That feels a bit faux naive. If you regularly write about how much you sympathize with neoreactionaries and how much you hate their opponents (which is something Younger Scott did at length), while also saying that neoreactionaries are wrong on the substance, of course most people will pick up on the former and ignore the latter. Maybe not how the internet should work an ideal world, but it really shouldn't be surprising that the actual world works like that.
I don't think it was entirely about people reacting to sentiments over substance, either. It's just that out of all the idea clusters in neoreaction, it's the anti-wokism one people cared the most about, and that's the one thing Younger Scott seemed to agree on. (In an abstract sense, being pro dictatorship should be much more morally objectionable but nobody considered the US political system to be up for grabs then, so I think that part was seen as a weird but nonthreatening eccentricity, while the woke/antiwoke fight was very much on - this was about the same time as GamerGate.)
I think my point is that a democratic government can switch to a less-democratic war footing when the need arises, so you don't have to be an autocracy all the time to be prepared for war.
I'm persuaded by Brett Devereaux's argument that the office of Dictator before c. 200 BC was fundamentally different than the office as reestablished by Sulla in 83 BC. The former seems to have worked pretty well as a mechanism to briefly suspend the normal operation of the Republic, while the latter was a fig leaf over the degradation and eventual failure of Republican institutions.
Possibly. Or they could take advantage of a war and their control of the only significant income streams to eliminate other oligarchical power blocs and consolidate their rule while stuffing their offshore bank accounts. This is one of the most corrupt countries on earth, after all. Or a bit of both. I'm sure their motives are pure.
Note that the United States, an actual, functioning democracy at the time, conducted both presidential and congressional elections and maintained a perfectly free press (to the great annoyance of Union generals) all throughout the Civil War, a far bloodier and disruptive conflict. The Confederacy, on the other hand, did not do either of these things.
Ironically, based on the way the war is trending, and the recent articles confirming the outcome of the March 2022 negotiations, it looks like the "hard choices" Zelensky made to continue the war with BoJo's encouragement are likely to result in a far worse deal for Ukraine than they could have gotten at the time, plus an additional 500K or so dead soldiers. Sometimes the hard choice is also the bad choice.
If your point is, Ukraine is the Casablanca of the Cold War world, I agree with you. There are a lot of interests in play. I would say your narrative has shone a narrow beam of light on part of one of them.
Sure, either all of the above, or maybe you simply personally destroyed the counterfactual neoreactionary movement with facts & logic so thoroughly that there isn't even a good feud to flaunt to prove that you did, but this is unthinkable to say openly so you can only write this post as a Straussian brag. I'm onto you.
More seriously, at the time I thought the FAQ was very informative and a great read even if I didn't particularly care for reaction nor did it end up possessing great facts-and-logic ballistic capability. I stayed out of the comment section back then so I can'tment on how it degraded the discourse but please consider this a strong vote for "you did good regardless".
This could plausibly be a useful public post, as a semi-summary of what happened. (Would probably be better for that to be its own separate post, though. But showing people the "big picture", which they may not be familiar with, is generally helpful.)
Most folks indeed figured out pretty quickly that this neoreaction thing was going absolutely nowhere and thus refrained from commenting on it. There's little room for *either* witches or witch-hunters to congregate on any community if the community's position is "Uhh, who cares about "witches"?"
The big story behind all of these movements was always, essentially, the quest to (rebuild) the right wing on a secular basis. For a long time, both in America and Europe, conservative thought was based on religion, explicitly Christian religion; christian democracy (and godly monarchism before it) in Europe, various Evangelical movements in the US.
The problem with this is, of course, what to do when the society secularizes. It has turned out there are essentially two basis for post-secular right-wing development; classical liberalism (possibly veering into libertarianism) and nationalism (possibly veering into racism). Both of these are perfectly possible to support without being religious; indeed religiousness often has presented a hindrance to them, at least universalist religions like Christianity.
Once religion is out, the right-wing impulse remains, and it will inevitably veer into one of these directions, or the most usually a combination of them; several European governments now existing or in formation seem to be set to prove this quite literally, the Finnish government (which technically includes a small religious party, which is fairly powerless to do anything beyond doling a bit of money to its supporting religious movements) included.
The problem with neoreaction is that it tried to return to something that was traditionally supported for explicitly religious reasons - monarchy; often seen literally as an institution set by God, and with republicanism strongly opposed chiefly due to its historically-strong association with secularism - with secular reasoning. Of course that's bound to fail as anything more than an intellectual exercise, it's a house built against itself and cannot stand.
Of course, Yarvin used the monarchy idea as a figleaf for other ideas, but as said, it turned out those other ideas can probably better be presented without the figleaf.
I know I'm a bit late but I saw this mentioned on Arnold Kling's blog and I wanted to comment.
I'm also GrayMirror subscriber and at this point I've read most of his more recent stuff. So my bias is that I like Yarvin. I'm making my comments in no particular order.
1. This is specifically about Yarvin's blog ideas rather than reaction itself, which has a bunch of different connotations.
2. I heard about 'Moldbug' in 2011 in college and really didn't understand what argument he was trying to make. I also found his style of writing annoying, arrogant, and obtuse. I didn't revisit it until a few years later.
3. Related to something Scott said, Yarvin is open about the fact that he's synthesizing other thinkers ideas, and to the extent you're agreeing with him you're often agreeing with an ensemble of much older thinkers "I am not Vizzini. I am just some dude who buys a lot of obscure used books, and is not afraid to grind them down, add flavor, and rebrand the result as a kind of political surimi. Most everything I have to say is available, with better writing, more detail and much more erudition, in Jouvenel, Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leoni, Burnham, Nock, etc., etc."
4. I gained more appreciation for his blog leading up to and after the 2020 election. I think the idea of a state outside of the state is easier to understand when you can see in real time an outgoing president who is clearly despised and sometimes even disregarded by the permanent civil service (Trump) or lacks the mental faculties at his age to govern independently (Biden).
I was also able to go back and re-read (re-listen via audiobook) his older UR stuff and was able to understand and appreciate it better.
5. What does Yarvin mean by democracy and did he change his opinion on it:
I think a TLDR for Yarvin would be something like: Democracy isn't in charge, cannot be in charge, and we shouldn't attempt to put it in charge **or even pretend to put it in charge**.
But here's the longer version:
Yarvin doesn't really change his opinion on democracy. He uses the word democracy to mean multiple things. When a journalist talks about democracy being under threat they are talking about what Yarvin would sometimes call "Democracy without politics" or something that is supposed to be the alleged opposite of Populism. In the extreme case of this version of democracy, the public elects mascots whilst the day to day operations of government are decided by a permanent civil service and informed by prestigious academic institutions.
Yarvin is open about the fact that academics are sometimes right and populists are sometimes wrong.
Democracy can also mean the more conventional "public policy of government driven by voters and public opinion" -- which is often labeled by democracy supporters as populism or fascism when said voters want things that the highly educated disagree with.
> Public Opinion is not a cause but an effect (and there isn't really any way to change this even if it were desirable)
> People who talk about the characteristics and effects of democracies are usually guilty of oversampling WIERD-ness. And so are usually confusing cause and effect. High trust and publicly spirited societies tend to be prosperous and rich and also lend themselves to 'democratic looking' governments.
> The American electorate doesn't have the temperament to rule, so whether they like it or not, power is going to end up being taken from them (a bit like a child king that never grows up). Mobs can wield power only temporarily and they can't govern as a going concern.
6. Oligarchy vs. Monarchy
Yarvin makes two sets of distinctions, which he sometimes uses interchangeably but I think they're different enough to highlight: Mission vs. Process and Monarchy vs. Oligarchy.
Mission vs. process is a spectrum where on the one extreme (mission) you have a goal subject to certain material constraints and have broad freedom to act. Success and failure is judged by whether the mission was accomplished. Process is when your actions are decided by rules and the only criteria for success is whether said rules were followed.
Monarchy/Oligarchy: Most systems have someone who is formally at the top of the command structure. When the person at the top has actual control over an organization's strategy, tactics, and personnel, Yarvin calls that an absolute monarchy. Aside from not having a head of an organization at all, the other extreme this person is a figure head with no control over the organization. Yarvin sometimes calls this a "Chief Oracle" or a "Costume Monarchy". Yarvin argues that FDR and Biden are at different ends of this spectrum despite holding the same office.
Yarvin argues that most functional large organizations are absolute monarchies organized primarily on the mission principle. He acknowledges the importance of being able to replace the monarch and occasionally comes up with ideas for how a "board of directors" could do such a thing at the sovereign level without letting said board potentially manage the organization directly.
7. Yarvin is a populist in the sense that he sympathizes with red state Americans on issues like immigration, school curriculum, affirmative action, etc. But he's an elitist in the sense that he doesn't think that red state americans are *capable* of running the government or getting politicians to operate effectively on their behalf. He spends a lot of time urging them to avoid attempting to fix these problems "head-on".
Politically agitating in a way that gets people who are far more invested in politics than you are to lock their shields together in order to defeat you is bad.
He believes that even in a government that takes red state American's concerns seriously, the lions share of people who staff the leadership rungs of the new regime will be people who aren't politically progressive but culturally progressive. (Think "Yellowstone" but in reverse). Using hobbits/elves/dark-elves as fill-ins for this when blue tribe, red tribe, and grey tribe are already a thing was a bit odd, but I still think it's an accurate assessment.
8. Yarvin on Technocracy
I think Yarvin acknowledges a distinction between the idea of rule by experts and rule with experts. Government is an art rather than a science, but the person in charge is both capable of thinking independently and making aesthetic judgements about strategy. The government needs to be capable of doing it's own thinking in-house and shouldn't perpetually outsource it's policy making to outside institutions (universities/NGOs)
(I don't recall if it was on ACX or somewhere else that someone was talking about how Jeff Bezos wasn't the smartest person at his company but he knew enough to understand what the more technical people at his company were doing)
(He doesn't say this explicitly but it seems to me that, except maybe for Elon Musk, the people who fit his archetype of an effective monarch are really not popular with republican voters)
(IIRC Matt Yglesias and Sammuel Hammond have made similar complaints about government overreliance on NGOs/Contractor consultants)
9. Lastly I'll say that success of any ideology should be judged less by whether people call themselves the thing you call yourself but whether people take for granted the things you put forward. If an ideology succeeds or fails completely then in either case people won't need or use the label.
I don't know how coincidental this is, but when I saw interviews of Dominic Cummings by Steve Hsu and Dwarkesh Patel and then started reading DC's substack, I was struck by how remarkably similar a lot of DC's complaints of western governments are with Yarvin's (except DC doesn't try to be esoteric).
Muslim nations also aren't outraged by how Palestinians are treated in Jordan or Syria. The whole anti-israel propaganda thing is mostly about driving internal unity against a designated outgroup than anything else (or at least it started off that way, now a lot of it is generational propaganda collecting its own momentum). This wouldn't really work against China, which is too big (and is too good an oil customer) to be useful as a designated enemy.
Other things that apply are that Uyghurs aren't Arabs, so they're a weird non-central example of Muslims that most (Arab) Muslims don't especially relate to (conversely, this is also why Malaysians are somewhat less anti-israel than, say, syrians). And a lot of anti-israel sentiment is generated by Iran using it as a proxy for anti-american sentiment, which obviously wouldn't work with China.
I think Shaked K.'s point about the Uyghurs not being Arabs is an excellent one. Beyond that, I wonder if, in understanding phenomena like this, asking why the greatest rage isn't simply directed against the numerically greatest victimization doesn't miss the point. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, these are irrational, social/psychological phenomena rooted in what people perceive (again, irrationally) as memorable in history (or maybe your point is simply to confirm that). Of course, one could say the whole rationalist project is aimed at weakening the power of All That--which would be all to the good, although I'm skeptical that using rationalism to redirect rage (rather than weaken rage as a principle) would be much to the good. Why so much of the human cognitive (if I'm not using that term in too uninstructed a manner) function of historical memory seems to be about cherishing and compiling grievances seems an important, perhaps in these matters THE important, question.
I'm not sure how that answers my post, but I'm guessing your point is more polemical than intellectual. Perhaps we are moving in parallel lines, which don't intersect.
<quote>Now it’s ten years later, I look back and decide if it was worth it, and I tentatively conclude no.</quote>
Did it not at least have a positive impact on the sites popularity? It seemed like a large amount of the early growth was from that post.
For me, the consequences of increased SSC popularity has been a disaster for its comments section and its average quality.
but that's popularity since the move to substack. you need *some* popularity to have a robust comments section, and the quality of the comments section around the time of that post was pretty good.
I'm extremely grouchy and think that the comments section was terrific near the start of the blog's style and hasn't been anywhere near as good since. I don't know where the cutover is, but at some point comments went from having well reasoned and researched claims with links, to just bald assertions all the time.
the cutover is less than 10 years ago
Case in point: reference comments
September of '93, if I remember my history right
Scott doesn't put much time into looking for & banning bad commenters. I understand. Doing that would be very time consuming, and not interesting. I suggested a couple years ago that he just make a little list of guidelines and hire a grad student to prune the comments and commenters.
Interestingly, my impression is the opposite. I can't think of any commentors for whom the decision to ban could be defended, who have not been banned. I honestly feel like Scott errs on the side of too much banning rather than not enough (this is not a criticism).
I do think that there was a ban wave where most of the really egregiously bad regulars were removed. There's only one commentator who I think should be warned not to make a certain genre of comments, but it's sufficiently murky that I'm fine with the status quo.
>Interestingly, my impression is the opposite. I can't think of any commentors for whom the decision to ban could be defended
Are you aware that a ban is generally not a permanent banishment, but one lasting a week or a month? So the way Scott's been using bans since I arrived a coupla years ago is to administer a punishment, not to get rid of people forever.
I'm not saying there are lots of horrible commenters, but there certainly are some godawful comments. I generally only report really awful one. II have reported at least 5 pretty vile ones in the last couple months. Not only was the writer not making any kind of substantive case for their point, they were also being extremely rude, sometimes actually cruel, to somebody else on the thread. Last time I checked, all of them were still sitting there on the threads.
Well, we do need new blood. Fresh blood. Youthful blood...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6764071/
Must have been me, I guess. I apologize.
This might be arrogant, but I think of myself as able to generate more popularity than I currently have, on demand, just by wading into more popular topics. So the question is at what rate I want to trade off popularity for becoming a hack and having people hate me. The neoreaction post was right at the border of acceptable exchange rates and I'm not sure it was a good idea.
I thinks that's true with your current reach... IMO, pre that post the blogs clout was in a lower weight class.
I'm pretty sure it's what brought me.
And yes, I agree that NRx is moribund. It contributed to the conversation and as Scott says most of the good it contributed has been adopted piecemeal elsewhere.
Same! Via (i think) a Cracked.com article/Voxplainer i believe
I got here by googling “we need two Stalins” (to find out what someone on EA forums was referencing), so that post seems to have brought me here too!
I woudn't have ever heard of SSC if not for being linked via that post (from a devout leftist who thought it'd convince me to taboo rightism in all its forms, which I'm sure he regrets). Maybe that's been bad overall for the development of the blag and/or Scott personally, that's for him to decide. But it was definitely a fortuitous gain for me, as a reader. Really doubtful I would have been exposed to any such ideas otherwise, or the broader range of so-called "heterodox" thinkers I read today. That's really a valuable (and vanishing) public service, of locating gems of wisdom in otherwise-untenable-to-broach topics, so I think taken on its own merits it was a Good Thing, no matter how it played out in hindsight.
I'd like to see you talk about more popular topics. Your writing is really well put-together, and that seems downstream of your ability to think clearly and critically about (what seem to me) to be complex issues. I understand that you have good reasons not to wade into subjects that are currently flaming with controversy, but these are the times where reading a sensible, calm, well-reasoned and supported opinion can impact readers the most.
I'm not sure that you strive to have a big effect with your writing, versus mostly making yourself better off and being content to do "good" in a fair ratio (10%?) to compensate, but you're really doing a public service when you weigh in on topical subjects.
He could weigh in on Taylor Swift's butt, for instance.
https://i.imgur.com/eipnFjj.jpg
Scott, what you think of that bootie?
+7 And - As for Eremolalos: -5 Between Taylor's body and ol' Ludwig there is room enough. Though you might be defended with this: In den Tälern der Dummheit wächst für einen Philosophen immer noch mehr Gras als auf den kahlen Hügeln der Gescheitheit.
-5, huh. I guess I'm in no danger of becoming popular. I think I brought up Taylor Swift's butt because I was kind of disturbed by the way things were sounding -- both Scott's possible interest in becoming more popular and other people speaking up encouraging him to write about more popular topics. I had a little sort of flashback to all the articles I see headlines for in various places online: "Nearly Everyone Gets A’s at Yale. Does That Cheapen the Grade?" "A Lot of Things Are Getting Cheaper. Here’s Why You Probably Haven’t Noticed." "Deep-Sea Tourism Is on the Rise. But Is It Safe?" "Freeing Ourselves From The Clutches Of Big Tech" "Norman Lear Brought Big Issues to the Small Screen"
There's nothing terrible or dumb about this topics. It's just that each headline gives me the feeling that the writer was infected with some kind of timeliness virus, that their nostrils were quivering as they sniffed around for a subject that's got just the right proportions of familiarity and novelty. And I don't get that feeling here, and would hate it if I did.
That may all be true, but the question of whether it was ex post a good idea is not very interesting. Ex ante you probably didn't know how much popularity you could generate. There is a lot of value of information from pushing your limits.
I don't think that sounds arrogant; I think it's entirely supported by the history of the blogs and I deeply respect the decision to leave on the table what might well be an order of magnitude more traffic. (In the short term, at the very least.)
But the funny thing is, I think that same decision made over and over again is inseparable from the credibility you wouldn't easily sell. What's the good inverse of a catch 22?
But why become more fucking popular, Scott?
You know what I'd like to see you write about? Some piece by Wittgenstein. From time to time you have picked something weird to read and write about -- for instance that book by the alcoholic psychiatrist, and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. In my opinion, those books are weird but not extraordinarily good. I want you to read somebody weird but brilliant and give us your thoughts. Wittgenstein is sort like an autistic savant, except that he can *almost* put into words what he sees about mind and language and subjectivity. (IMO Yudkowsky is the same. I think whatever he has figured out about AI is sort of like what those savants are doing who can recognize a 6-digit prime number at a glance. *Except* that Yudkowsky is normal enough that he can *almost* explain how he foresees what will happen.)
Anyhow, Wittgenstein had a huge, gorgeous strange mind. I wish you'd take him on. Guaranteed to make your blog less popular.
Might be useful, but not what you'd call a good read. I was thinking Scott could read a section of Philosophical Investigations or Lectures and Conversations, and review it -- give his understanding of what LW's getting at, and his reactions and opinions.
Um, is suggesting a line-by-line reading of the Tractatus your way of saying you think a Scott meets Wittgenstein episode is a bad idea?
Well seriously what do you think of the idea of Scott reading and reviewing something less formal and daunting than the Tractatus? LW wrote lots of stuff that
can be broken into article -sized chunks. And LW actually does remind me of Yudkowsky, whom Scott respects. It’s a very different kind of mind than Scott’s. You get the feeling that Scott rarely has ideas that he cannot find a way to put into words — whereas with LW it feels like he’s struggling to find a way to say something, and sometimes he succeeds and other times the best he can do is point, and say “don't look at the finger, look at what it’s pointing at.”
What an excellent idea. I'd read it too.
It has always frustrated me that the man who wrote "all that can be said, can be said clearly" never wrote according to his own dictum.
Why this one is 'pay-walled, obviously. I wished I had good advice; I just feel, you know better and it is YOUR blog. We are privileged to follow. - Personally, I am glad you did not post much on Gaza (outside of Mantics - there are some ok-posts about it, at https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/ ). And not more on woke or "race-realism". There are places for that. - But if you do: that is okay, too.
Do you think that essay had any effect on possibly leading NRx people out of the woods, or sewing the seeds that helped that ideology die?
I think that's an insightful way of thinking about having an online following in general. Growing a audience/engagement seems like it can be very seductive, and a lot of people lose their way chasing those goals. I don't think popular topics necessarily make one a hack, but more so engaging in those topics because they are popular rather than because one has conviction for a specific point of view. It seems like you do a great job writing based on your own taste.
As the one true king of America,* born on the Fourth of July when a bolt of lightning struck the Statue of Liberty and caused her to become pregnant all while thirteen bald eagles circled overhead each holding the state flower of one of the original thirteen colonies in their beaks, I never really got Yarvin. I didn’t understand what the practical solution was supposed to be and to be honest I also don’t understand it for a lot of things like Metaculus which just kind of sits there being interesting but doesn’t get into anyone’s face to change minds which is what I ultimately think you have to do in a Democracy. I blame myself for being lazy.
*blinder of justice, Presumer of innocence, supreme lord of freedom, shield of speech, William of Rights, two-armed bearer of arms, purpler of the mountains majesty, Fruiter of the plains, ruler of the republic, etc
I like your self-introduction!
You reminded me of the opening to Journey to the West:
> There was on the top of that very mountain an immortal stone, which measured thirty-six feet and five inches in height and twenty-four feet in circumference. The height of thirty-six feet and five inches corresponded to the three hundred and sixty-five cyclical degrees, while the circumference of twenty-four feet corresponded to the twenty-four solar terms of the calendar. On the stone were also nine perforations and eight holes, which corresponded to the Palaces of the Nine Constellations and the Eight Trigrams.
> Since the creation of the world, it had been nourished for a long period by the seeds of Heaven and Earth and by the essences of the sun and the moon, until, quickened by divine inspiration, it became pregnant with a divine embryo. One day, it split open, giving birth to a stone egg about the size of a playing ball. Exposed to the wind, it was transformed into a stone monkey endowed with fully developed features and limbs.
(This is one of China's greatest heroes, the Monkey King Sun Wukong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QPVeSVan7A is a fun video if you want to see how the Chinese think about him today.)
(Text from the revised edition of Anthony Yu's translation.)
(I assume that the symbolic distance of 36 feet and 5 inches is actually a distance of 36 尺 and 5 寸, or exactly 365 寸. I haven't checked this though.)
> blinder of justice, Presumer of innocence, supreme lord of freedom, shield of speech, William of Rights, two-armed bearer of arms, purpler of the mountains majesty, Fruiter of the plains, ruler of the republic, etc
Wikipedia tells us that in the contract in which Alexander II sold Alaska to the United States, the first page is dedicated to the Czar's many titles.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Czar%27s_Ratification_of_the_Alaska_Purchase_Treaty_-_NARA_-_299810.pdf
Sadly, within the text of the treaty itself he seems to be limited to just "His Majesty the Emperor of all the Russias".
The first two of those movies are really good, even the shift in tone between the first and second is done well and the change in lead actors from Donnie Yen to Aaron Kwok.
The third one was a real disappointment; they adapted the episode of the Land of Women but very poorly - they didn't seem to know what to do with it, and it got bogged down in a badly-done romance main plot (the two actors had *no* chemistry). It seems to have derailed the series since no more were made, which is a pity; I like the actors in general and would have watched a fourth one if made with a better choice of episode.
We really need high effort style to make a comeback and even though I think that’s going to backfire into a future of anime cosplay, as the King of America I can no longer condone the public wearing of sweatpants and t-shirts.
There's a group of people who love to have Yarvin on their podcasts, and credit him with being an early proponent of their ideas. They seem to get a lot of views, and the algorithms know to lump them all together (if you interact with one on Twitter or YouTube, they'll recommend others). I'd maybe locate Auron MacIntyre as the standard-bearer? The people behind The Passage Prize? Bronze Age Pervert?
I don't find them very interesting, so I guess I don't understand them well and maybe I'm drawing the boundaries wrong. But, are these not neoreactionaries?
A lot of these people are Christians and big into restricting abortion, surrogacy, etc, and even stupider stuff like pedophile hysteria, which Yarvin was never into. They also never talk about having a king or anything like that. So yes they all hang out and talk but it’s hard to think of what they all have in common besides race realism.
"A lot of these people are Christians and big into restricting abortion, surrogacy, etc, and even stupider stuff like pedophile hysteria"
Thank you for classifying the doctrines of my church as "stupid stuff" 😁
http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s2c2a6.htm
Though I don't think the Catholic Church has an official position on neo-reaction. I could be wrong!
I think Yarvin has rebranded so that he sounds like he's pushing something like modern conservatism (even though the rebrand is more cosmetic than real, and he's taking it in his own direction).
He's still pretty loud about absolute monarchy being the one true solution?
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/three-questions-for-richard-hanania
>But, are these not neoreactionaries?
I think what you're pointing at is frogtwitter and its diaspora and hangers-on; the latter of which got frankly mid once the anti-woke/anti-DEI stuff really got mainstream.
There's a wiki page for frogtwitter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frogtwitter) and while it's not _bad_ it doesn't really get the vibe of it, it feels a bit like it was written by concerned academics who study "radicalization" and get grants to LARP being glowies.
This medium piece gets the vibe a bit better: https://medium.com/vandal-press/raining-frogs-372315b3cd2d . Also here's some classic Hakan tweets for your enjoyment: https://zyg.edith.reisen/k/detritus/hakon.html
Yes! That's who I'm trying to talk about. And so the right way to word my comment would be: Shouldn't neoreaction get some credit for frogtwitter? Maybe a corollary to #4 could be "Much that neoreaction captured that was repulsive/bad has been successfully offloaded into worse movements" and frogtwitter could go under that heading?
Directionally correct; though I wouldn't classify frogtwitter as repulsive/bad. What comes to mind as one of the biggest gems in the frogtwitter realms is having a far far better understanding of human flourishing, in comparison the neighboring intellectual movements (NRx, E/acc, Progress Studies, Yimby, Charter Cities, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, utilitarianism, anti-woke/anti-DEI, etc) seem blind to such considerations -- and some seem grievously opposed to them, in rhetoric and in practice. Postrationalism/TPOT doesn't do as bad (but then again there was/is significant frogtwitter influence on postrationalism) as the rest; but in a bit of a navel-gazey way.
Ehh, not really. I follow this scene...reasonably closely and I don't think they would describe themselves as neoreactionary, although they take a lot from it. The buzz word I hear these days is "Italian Elite Theory" but as far as I can tell, a lot of people got inspired by Yarvin, started reading more and discovered that Yarvin was less of an original thinker and more of a repackager of previous thinkers. Burnham by far gets brought up the most but you'll see references to Hoppe and Mosca among others.
Honestly, I think they draw a lot more from Drehrer's Benedict Option and Yarvin is there mostly as an intellectual framework for explaining their disillusionment with democracy. And if there's a key commonality between the different groups its an abandonment of democracy and liberalism in general. Not in a "we should abandon democracy" but more that it's a lie, potentially only possible in "homogenous" societies.
But classifying them as a Twitter phenomenon is...misleading. Like, yes, as far as I can tell they all post extensively on Twitter but they're extremely invested in trying to jump start local meetups and parallel institutions. There was a conference in Austin recently along these lines and should be meetups in Oregon and Washington over the holidays. I wouldn't want to say that they've transitioned offline yet but that's definitely their primary focus since Covid restrictions were lifted.
I was sort of there at the creation, and my view is that elitism just became too hard to maintain in the era of social media. You have to keep the proles happy, flatter their prejudices, etc. Everyone is too connected, and there are many more stupid people than smart people. So most people either give in to the mob or soft pedal wherever they disagree with them.
Yarvin himself is pro-vaxx and pro-choice. He wrote an article criticizing Dobbs, which was sort of brave, and it angered a lot of people online but he doesn’t talk about the issue anymore. I can’t remember him talking about the vaccine, as anti-vaxx has become the standard conservative position.
Based on knowing a lot of smart right wingers that have been in these movements or adjacent to them, I don’t think people are consciously lying. They need to have an audience and are so taken in by tribalism that they adjust their positions to make them as consistent as possible with that of the mob. But even those who aren’t trying to build an audience or whatever have had their brains rotted by social media.
So we moved from obscure blogs and forums to twitter as the center of politics on the internet, and the collective IQ of every movement dropped by 15 points or so. Everyone naturally became less elitist and more populist. You can see that on the left too with the decline of neoliberalism and the rise of socialism and woke in its place.
Trump also pro-vax and pro-choice, ironically.
There's been a decline of neoliberalism on both left and right of late, but on the left it would have to fall a lot further to get us back to pre-Carter levels (which the progressives want). On the right, I think we're in unprecedented territory for the modern era. Not sure what it would take for the ~libertarian/econ-pilled/business folks to reestablish power.
The word "elitist" needs to be disambiguated here. Yarvin clearly was anti-"elitist" in the colloquial sense, because he was one of the first to popularly-identify the "cathedral"-caste of policy analysts, journalists, politicos, lawyers, and other white-collar knowledge-economy PMC-types who, without any clearly lines of responsibility or accountability, collectively extrude the zeitgeist. He clearly did not like these people or think they're doing a good job (though his attitude changed a bit when he started getting invited to the cool kids' literary parties and getting to hook up with hot SF domme(s)).
However, Yarvin *was* "elitist" in the ancient greek sense - he wanted "the best" people to be the ones with actual power, and cared not a whit for the viewpoints of the rest. But even that position has two components - (1) who are "the best" people, and (2) what would it mean for them to have power? In answer to the first question, Yarvin flirted with race realism and the JQ, but didn't like that so much because those questions really were quite radioactive at the time. Instead, Yarvin spent most of his time thinking about (2) - what would it mean for someone to actually have power in a contemporary society? What generates power these days, who currently exercises it, and how?
It's that work which sets Yarvin apart, and which has become ubiquitous in new-right spaces. Yarvin wasn't the first person to think about these issues, but he popularized a particular analysis of contemporary media, educational, and policy-making institutions which had been absent before. This analysis works either with an elitist (we should capture the Cathedral via our own conservative long march through the institutions) or a populist (we should fire half the federal bureaucracy, journalists should learn to code, and we need to tax the university endowments) approach.
>I do think it’s funny that of “Asians might have IQs 5 points higher than whites” and “I want robots to kill all humans”, the accelerationists had to jettison the former belief in order to make the latter palatable.
The irony is Lovecraftian, quite literally (in that it involves both racism and also men of science irresistibly, nay, _religiously_ drawn to summoning/creating grievously powerful entities with tragically predictable results).
I’m curious about your thoughts on the „pro-masculine/pro-male” aspect of NRx that seems to be missing on this list. I think it continues to be a lost cause, perceived as low-status or even extremist, even if based solely on objective statistics and neutral concern about the male wellbeing.
I’m also not sure that what some refer to as „woke drift” can be substantially reversed or corrected, and recent wins might be just a step back before two steps forward; there are numerous domains and circles (including EA, unless you have a high status and a high degree of independence) where even selective and data-driven opposition to the narrative means irreversible reputational risk and loss of career opportunities.
Concern for male well-being seems to be alive, if not exactly mainstream. A journalist called Richard V Reeves has a book out (about a year ago) called "Of Boys and Men - Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It". Pretty balanced and well done too, from a quick skim.
I recall Scott writing about many issues that are simultaneously widely known and endorsed, yet suppressed. It seems particularly applicable to the struggles of disadvantaged men - even such thoughtful attempts are unlikely to succeed in the light of the historical track record.
> I recall Scott writing about many issues that are simultaneously widely known and endorsed, yet suppressed
What are some examples?
Many bring up the case of noncoercive interventions concerning human reproduction being labeled as eugenics:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/02/social-censorship-the-first-offender-model/
This gives a great overview of the dynamics:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-popular-and-silenced/
Thanks for that. Taking a quick skim through those, I see what you mean. I did a forecasting project on some issues that men are facing and it got more attention than anything else I've written. Scott was nice enough to link to one of them. There’s very much popular interest in the topic, but it’s simultaneously silenced by media, or talked about in a way that is not productive. In case you’re curious it’s here: taboo.substack.com/p/forecasting-college-enrollment. I have some more forecasts on related issues I’ll be coming out with in the spring around these things. When it's gets so severe that it impacts GDP then these issues will start getting mainstream attention.
Looking forward to following your work! I wonder what kind of interventions - and their social/ideological/partisan framing - we might expect in case of a major negative impact of these issues on GDP.
This too was absorbed by a much more successful movement. Possibly the most remarked on person of 2023 rose to prominence through spreading pro-masculine rhetoric to the exclusion of almost everything else. (Andrew Tate, if it wasn't obvious.)
I think the association with similar figures counts as a loss - it's successful awareness-raising with a loss of quality and credibility of the message, so the issue becomes even more "recognized and endorsed, but suppressed".
I've seen shirts at Trump rallies calling for a 2nd Trump term, followed by 2 terms for Trump jr., then 2 terms for Ivanka, etc.
Not exactly an anti-monarchy sentiment.
I think this *is* anti-monarchist by Yarvin's definition. He has an entire post about a king ruling at the choice of the people is crappy watered-down monarchy that isn't worth the name. The very idea that you have to agitate for a second Trump term at a rally (and then follow the Constitution when it says he can't have a third term) makes this democracy and therefore boring and bad.
I assume new rebranded Yarvin would say it's good, but picture_of_crying_wojak_in_happy_mask.jpg
The Norwegian monarchy is probably the closest thing in actual practice to a "king ruling at the choice of the people."
- The current royal family was elected through plebiscite in 1905
- There's low-level constant pressure from the left wing parties to abolish the monarchy, which constantly fails, which has the practical effect of the Storting (the parliament, e.g. the people's elected representatives) continuously re-affirming popular support for the present monarch
Not quite the same thing as a "regularly elected king" but probably the closest thing in actual practice
I think that's mocking the T-shirts around Hillary's campaign, which joked about 2 terms for the Empress, followed by 2 terms for Michelle Obama, 2 terms for Chelsea (Empress in waiting), 2 terms each for Malia and Sasha.
https://mockup-api.teespring.com/v3/image/gv_NbewZ61kYKZFPBPsKqSZgDU0/480/560.jpg
https://rlv.zcache.com/hillary_michelle_chelsea_sasha_malia_t_shirt-r3b56ba0d10484be5bd01b3b2376874c3_k2gmy_630.jpg?view_padding=%5B285%2C0%2C285%2C0%5D
Demographics were going to be destiny, you see, and Democrats would be in power in saecula saeculorum because they were the reality-based community and on the right side of history.
I see, had not seen those. Well then I guess everybody wants a (pseudo) monarchy.
I don't think they were serious, but some canny(?) entrepreneur picked up on the It's Her Turn Now The Empress Ascends momentum and the giddy talk about this time for sure First Female Ever, and that the Dems should (and indeed now would have to) run female candidates for the presidency in future (after all, it would be retrogressive to go back to voting in an, ugh, Pale Stale Male after having the First Female Ever) and hence talk about who would run next - Michelle?
Hence the Unending Generations of Female Dynasty t-shirt. And as we have seen, when you set up a target like that to tempt the Fates, they cannot resist whacking it like Bullroarer Took taking on Golfimbul 😀
“I do think it’s funny that of “Asians might have IQs 5 points higher than whites” and “I want robots to kill all humans”, the accelerationists had to jettison the former belief in order to make the latter palatable.”
So true, and so frustrating.
"There’s also the dark elves stuff (if you haven’t gone down this rabbit hole, I don’t recommend it)."
This is cruel. I want to know things but am recommended to not know them.
It's not forbidden knowledge or an info hazard, it's just really dumb political analogy.
Okay, I looked it up and it is really very stupid. (This being the site of the True Caliph, I have to bridle my tongue a little and not use a colourful range of descriptive language).
That's not Tolkien, that's DnD rip-off version of elves. Guy has pretensions beyond his understanding of the works in question. Then he gets into the domestic violence analogy and it *really* goes to Angband.
I pity the fool that provokes me to start quoting from the Selected Letters:
"I dislike the use of 'political' in such a context; it seems to me false. It seems clear to me that Frodo's duty was 'humane' not political. He naturally thought first of the Shire, since his roots were there, but the quest had as its object not the preserving of this or that polity, such as the half republic half aristocracy of the Shire, but the liberation from an evil tyranny of all the 'humane' – including those, such as 'easterlings' and Haradrim, that were still servants of the tyranny.
Denethor *was* tainted with mere politics: hence his failure, and his mistrust of Faramir. It had become for him a prime motive to preserve the polity of Gondor, as it was, against another potentate, who had made himself stronger and was to be feared and opposed for that reason rather than because he was ruthless and wicked. Denethor despised lesser men, and one may be sure did not distinguish between orcs and the allies of Mordor. If he had survived as victor, even without use of the Ring, he would have taken a long stride towards becoming himself a tyrant, and the terms and treatment he accorded to the deluded peoples of east and south would have been cruel and vengeful. He had become a 'political' leader: sc. Gondor against the rest."
"My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to 'King George's council, Winston and his gang', it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy. Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The mediævals were only too right in taking nolo episcopari as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that – after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world – is that it works and has worked only when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way. The quarrelsome, conceited Greeks managed to pull it off against Xerxes; but the abominable chemists and engineers have put such a power into Xerxes' hands, and all ant-communities, that decent folk don't seem to have a chance. We are all trying to do the Alexander-touch – and, as history teaches, that orientalized Alexander and all his generals. The poor boob fancied (or liked people to fancy) he was the son of Dionysus, and died of drink. The Greece that was worth saving from Persia perished anyway; and became a kind of Vichy-Hellas, or Fighting-Hellas (which did not fight), talking about Hellenic honour and culture and thriving on the sale of the early equivalent of dirty postcards. But the special horror of the present world is that the whole damned thing is in one bag. There is nowhere to fly to. Even the unlucky little Samoyedes, I suspect, have tinned food and the village loudspeaker telling Stalin's bed-time stories about Democracy and the wicked Fascists who eat babies and steal sledge-dogs. There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as 'patriotism', may remain a habit! But it won't do any good, if it is not universal."
>...and it really goes to Angband.
I am going to steal this metaphor faster than you can say "Gollum". Bravo.
You're welcome!
The general political theory, but especially the bit about going back to personal names, brings to mind Seeing Like A State, by James C Scott.
It's worth noting that for every Park Chung-hee there is a Vladimir Putin, a Bashir al-Assad, and a Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov. The strongmen of history that prove effective are not as numerous as the idiots and sociopaths that achieve supreme power. I have a feeling I'm preaching to the choir here, more or less, but I feel it bears well to keep that in mind.
I'm likely just putting an inside panic to voice. 2024 looms large.
Yeah no, you addressed the concern that had me animated. Sorry for jumping ahead.
I think this is one of those things that's generally known but that people like to forget when it's their strongman. There's a reason they say power corrupts, not that it makes you more competent. That's what makes the Park Chung-hee's of the world so fascinating, in my opinion. They're such outliers. If you could produce super-competent autocrats on demand, maybe autocracy would give democracy a run for its money, but of course you can't. As it is, silly, infuriating, bumbling democracy still wins out.
“I do think it’s funny that of “Asians might have IQs 5 points higher than whites” and “I want robots to kill all humans”, the accelerationists had to jettison the former belief in order to make the latter palatable.”
The idea that an East Asian ethnic group was genetically superior to the rest of the world ended up causing the deaths of 3-10 million people over an eight year period. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes)
In contrast, Artificial Intelligence has yet to kill a single person, unless you count accidents with self-driving cars, in which case the death toll goes all the way up to... 18.
It's really not all that illogical for people to fear the former vastly more than the latter.
It's not about fear in the present, it's about the absolute insanity of the desire to have the robots kill the humans as a fun goal to achieve.
Who do you think was worse: Saddam Hussein, or the guys who started the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Movement)
You could try to argue that the VHEMT guys are worse, because Hussein only wanted to kill some people (e.g. anyone who opposed or defied him, or belonged to an ethnic/religious group he disliked, or lived in a country he wanted to invade), while the VHEMT guys want all of humanity to die out. But no one really feels that way. Hussein killed hundreds of thousands of people, whereas VHEMT is just a super-obscure fringe group filled with weird kooks and never accomplished anything of note.
Similarly, most people view the AI cultists as weird but ultimately harmless kooks. The whole idea of robots exterminating humanity is just a goofy sci-fi trope to them. They would give it a <0.0001% chance of actually happening. You can argue that they're horribly mistaken, but that's irrelevant here; I'm making an argument about people's perceptions, not about the actual probability that AI will cause human extinction.
In contrast, what's the probability that yet another genocide might be caused by beliefs of racial superiority? The odds seem pretty damn high, considering how many times it's happened before throughout human history.
I have a very hard time believing this is true.
India’s caste system comes to mind.
Especially because of how much weasel room someone has between definitions of “race” and “ethnicity”. “Race” isn’t real anyway; it’s “population” on the treadmill right now.
There are definitely certain strains and justifications of racism that exist post-Scientific Revolution, sure, and they were a very big problem in the 20th century.
Here’s a book on the issue:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691125985/the-invention-of-racism-in-classical-antiquity
Call me crazy, but I think Saddam and the VHEM people are/were wrong and bad, and I'm glad the latter did not have the abilities of the former. Saddam was worse given what he was able to accomplish, but if I had to choose whether to live under the rule of Saddam or the VHEM loonies I'd take the despotic dictator.
Further, IQ measurements broken down by various demographics are:
1. Widely available
2. Empirical fact
So disavowing some well-measured facet of empirical reality that is loosely connected to past atrocity while maintaining a goal of human extinction is just a bizarre combo. It's common in humans, sure, but it is bizarre nonetheless. (I suppose a major East Asian vs. East Asian war is still on the table at present, but in both the case of China vs. China and Korea vs. Korea it has nothing to do with ethnic conflict; quite the opposite.)
This is in the same family of bad judgment re: intent and power differentials as the whole idea of "Israel is worse than Hamas because Israel has killed more innocent civilians." The trick is ignoring what Hamas would do if it could, vs. what Israel doesn't do, though it could.
Is there room for arguing the simple point that Saddam was worse because his killing campaigns were not voluntary?
On a somewhat parenthetical point, my impression is that genocides are driven by rhetoric and ideas (notice I did not say *caused by* which is a much more difficult and, after decades of innumerable studies, still basically unanswered question) that are much more complex and ambivalent than superiority. A feeling of victimhood, threat, and even inferiority is often just as, or even more, prominent. To take one example, Mein Kampf is, yes, full of imagery of Jews as verminous animals and "parasites"; but it also attributes to the Jews the ability to create and direct virtually everything in world history that Hitler dislikes, including *both* Marxism and international capitalism, the media writ large, modern art and culture, the coalition of great powers directed against Germany during the First World War, and Germany's internal politics, including (of course) German surrender in 1918. If there are feelings of superiority, then it's given urgency and (crucially) popular appeal by being, above all, a wounded and threatened superiority. See also the radio propaganda that drove the Rwandan genocide (where a rhetoric of compiled grievances and future threat is especially prominent).
Never ceases to amaze me that if Hitler was actually good at eugenics he would have been running breeding camps for intermarrying with the Jews.
Who is saying that robots killing us would be a "fun goal to achieve"?
Nick Land
Sorry, I should've specified, I meant who *in the current e/acc movement* is saying this?
I try to avoid spending many cycles on this stuff, but it seems like Beff Jezos and those folks would be fine with machines supplanting humans. https://thezvi.substack.com/p/based-beff-jezos-and-the-accelerationists
All I see there is a tweet where Beff says that we should strive to preserve sentient life regardless of the species. How does that support the claim that he or his movement have an AI killing everyone as a positive goal?
I just did a quick search through Beff's twitter for tweets discussing what he wants to do with humans. From what I can gather (see https://twitter.com/BasedBeffJezos/status/1666930036547497987 and https://twitter.com/BasedBeffJezos/status/1726752978697170999), it seems like his goal is a state where humans continue to exist and grow in population, but have to co-exist and cooperate with a variety of other, more powerful sapient species rather than being the sole dominant species. You could argue that that's also bad, but it's not the same as "AIs should kill everyone".
I'm gonna channel Freddie deBoer here for a second and insist that sliding from "IQs 5 points higher" to "genetically superior" is no small thing, and *definitely* doesn't imply "...and therefore morally superior". Lots of bad consequences from that third one, but there plenty of off-ramps along the way.
Both groups seem quite bad! But only one of those groups is actively trolling us on social media.
If Emperor Hirohito created a social media account and started posting catchy slogans advocating mass genocide, I expect you'd start seeing more discussion about why he's wrong. He's not doing that, so you're seeing more about the other guys.
"Neoreaction was about elitism"
I would agree with this.
But I would add a different point which is that often the superficial clothing of first version of an idea is mistaken for the essence of the idea.
In the case of neoreaction, I'd say that the followup, or adjacent, ideas are things like the support for Jordan Peterson, or the interest in Bronze Age Mindset. The commonality in all these ideas is a sense that there is no grandeur and meaning in modern life, or more precisely that the life that is offered to most young men is devoid of much interest and value. You could see this as then having a variety of penumbras, from concern about the hikikomorization of America (aka incels) to concerns about lack of interest in having children across much of the developed world, to women complaining that there are few young men worth marrying to deaths of despair.
If you so wish, you can insist that these are all different problems, all driven by very specific details, and all solvable (should you wish to solve them – many of the same people bemoaning eg too few men worth marrying are happy to cackle gleefully about incels). However, IMHO, there is a commonality behind them, and Neoreaction/Jordan Peterson/Bronze Age Pervert have captured different aspects of the most important elements.
The last time large segments of society felt that a safe and secure life was boring and meaningless, it began with Italian Futurists, morphed into weirdos like Marinetti (look into his theories of food), then into confused twits like D'Annunzio, culminating in Mussolini and Hitler.
The point is not to choose heroes and villains, it is to admit that people (and specifically young men) crave some sort of grandeur and meaning in their lives, and if society refuses to give them this (eg by mocking these desires, or insisting that they correspond to taboo concepts and demonizing their holders), at some point this will probably rebound to the detriment of society. Jan 6th was not exactly Fiume. But it wasn't exactly UNRELATED to the sentiments behind Fiume.
So, IMHO, criticizing neoreaction as in this article is like reading Nietzsche literally and saying "it's nonsense, how can God be dead? God can't die"; it's missing the underlying point, the way the movement captured something important about the Zeitgeist, something much larger than a few phrases like "god is dead" or "the blonde beast" or "slave morality".
And, just like most people preferred to engage with Nietzsche's literal words, and either to mock them or to use them as political weapons, anything but *understand* just how different, and why, Europe in say 1890 was from Europe in 1790; so likewise it feels like people would rather mock or condemn people like Jordan Peterson or BAP than engage with their ideas and what they are trying to say about how say 2015 is different from 1915.
And yes, you too can go down that path of (like Scott's experience) reading all this and leaping to condemn me as a closet supporter of Peterson, BAP, Moldbug, and hell, why not also throw in Trump. Or you can ask yourself if you correctly predicted Brexit, Trump's victory, or Jan 6? And if not, then maybe it's time to do a little less categorizing of other people into enemy vs friend boxes, and a little more trying to *understand* what they these people are saying, and trying to resolve the grievances they are describing?
Is Ukraine-Russia a weird one-off driven by a leader and culture you are happy to call "crazy" and leave it at that?
Or is it a counterpart to the Second Italo-Senussi War, an apparently idiotic adventure between two silly combatants, but ultimately stage one of the capture of Europe by a set of ideas already visible 20 years earlier – if you were willing to take them seriously?
“Neoreaction” is silly, few want a King, clearly what’s needed are many Queens (or Empresses, Duchess’s, Princess’s, et cetera).
Instead of 50 States have 500+ each with a young lady monarch who will do the important hat wearing, horse riding, ribbon cutting, and waving that needs to be done!
Maybe have her have the power to call for new elections when the elected representatives (“her loyal ministers”) get annoying.
Her picture will be on the local currency and displayed at post offices, public libraries, and taverns.
Young men shall pledge service and allegiance to her, stuff will be named “Royal” or “Imperial” (“the Royal laudromat”, “Imperial Ale”, “Princess’s Gasoline”, et cetera).
The benefits are so obvious that I wonder why we’re not doing this already?
As you were saying...
https://meaningness.com/virtue-court
Taylor Swift! Taylor Swift!
> Maybe have her have the power to call for new elections when the elected representatives (“her loyal ministers”) get annoying.
That is a lot of power; she'd mostly be getting her way as to government policies. (I don't see a huge problem with that, but it doesn't seem like it's what you have in mind.)
> each with a young lady monarch who will do the important hat wearing [...] that needs to be done!
This reminded me of a YouTube comment on a video of the Ascot Opening Race song from My Fair Lady, which said "my school picked this musical last year, and I was so excited to wear a HUGE hat in this scene... and then they cast me as a boy!"
Is Bronze Age pervert considered part of the neoreactionary movement? I feel like a big reason why radical movements on the right and left fail is because the more radical you get, the more small differences become amplified. A big schism in this movement and the broader far right is between the Christian nationalists and the nitezshean vitalists. I follow a lot of these people on Twitter and they spend far more time attacking one another than they do leftists. You see the same thing on the left with the most radical wokes.
For this reason, good old normie liberal democracy appears to be the most stable system, even with its downsides.
However, I do enjoy reading these guys, if anything because it’s nice to hear some new, outside the box ideas about the world. I just got Bronze Age Mindset, and really enjoyed it as a piece of entertainment. I also did find some value in what he was saying, there were some smart observations in the book that helped close the loop on some thoughts I’ve had about the world lately. On top of that it’s fucking hilarious. It’s nice to hear some new ideas, bc it feeels like so much political writing is just rehashing the same talking points over and over.
BAP is a definite notable omission from this article. He's the modern-day Moldbug, the product of some kind of breeding program that crossed Moldbug with Frog Twitter. He combines Moldbug's opponent-intimidating erudition with a sopping dose of 4chan-style irony and some much-needed twitter-style brevity.
Overall I think it's admirable that the far right has had so much intellectual development over the past decade, leaning into the bits that made sense and abandoning the bits that didn't. This stands in stark contrast to the far left, who still believe the same dumb things they believed in 1848.
Whatever BAP is, I think he's not at all neoreactionary. I haven't read enough of his stuff to know more.
“try to live according to a Bronze Age Mindset. You must not misunderstand this …Above all you must reach for the great aim, physical and military independence. Only the warrior is a free man. The only right government is military government, and every other form is both hypocritical and destructive of true freedom. You must aim high! Band with your friends on the way of power and know that nothing has the right to stop you, and nothing can stop you!” - BAP’s core definition of Bronze Age Mindset is a military dictatorship. I think this is different from Yarvin’s idea of an accountable monarch, but in the same genre of thinking. They’re both anti-democracy at least.
I’m only 28 so I really wasn’t paying much attention at the peak of neoreactionary blogs a decade ago. I discovered Yarvin 3 or 4 years ago, and my brain tends to lump all of the alt-right and neoreactionary figures together as basically part of the same movement. My brain defined neoreactionary as just being alt right with intellectual depth.
He's not a neoreactionary in the sense that "neoreactionary" was a short-lived political label that described, like, one guy and never really took off. BAP is definitely a more modern manifestation of basically the same thing though.
Moldbug and BAP, I think, agree on what the problems with modern society are. They may disagree slightly on the solutions to these problems, but (and this is key) I don't think either of them really takes their own solutions seriously; they propose clearly unworkable solutions as an ironic commentary on the insolubility of the problems. A total monarchy in the US clearly isn't going to work, and nor is a revolution of nudist bodybuilders. But this is fine, being far-right is a mood, not a set of specific policy proposals.
BAP focuses on the personal rather than the political. Maybe you can't cause a revolution of erudite nudist bodybuilders, but you can become an erudite nudist bodybuilder. And if there are enough people out there with the right mindset then maybe together they can do some good.
I was only 17-18 when neoreactionary blogosphere peaked, so I wasn’t paying attention until a couple of years ago. So in my mind BAP and Moldbug are contemporaries. They both have ideas that are new and original, and they have good arguments. Even if liberal democracy still wins out, it’s fun to have original thoughts out there to read.
I disagree with BAP’s core ideas, but I think Bronze Age Mindset is the funniest book I’ve read in my entire life. If you thought the book was funny I recommend listening to his interview on the Red Scare podcast.
It’s the only book I can remember reading that made me laugh out load several times from start to finish. He’s fucking hilarious and a very clever writer, at times it’s very hard to tell when the joke ends and the “serious” insight begins, it’s ambiguous.
Because of that, I feel like I don’t actually know the specifics of what be believes from reading the book, but on some level I agree with much of his diagnosis. I’ve had thoughts like this for a while and it was refreshing to see someone articulate them. He gives the example of something like the gay community, which used to be full of characters and was a portal to the depraved underbelly of society. Now JP Morgan sponsors the pride parade, there’s sex worker activists giving speeches at corporate events. The parts of society that used to offer danger and excitement have now been absorbed into the safety of the longhouse.
I’m a huge fan of visiting new cities, and visiting a shitty dive bar and mingling with the characters that exist on the fringes. It seems like increasingly, these types of establishments are harder to find, and the “dive bar” has just become another brand aesthetic. It’s just a costume that a regular bar puts on, carefully curated to not offend the white collar sensibilities of the 9-5ers who show up for happy hour. Seems like there and everywhere, we’ve made the trade off between safety and adventure in favor of more safety. I think this is a lot of what’s behind male depression.
> I feel like I don’t actually know the specifics of what be believes from reading the book, but on some level I agree with much of his diagnosis
Yeah, I feel exactly the same way. I also can’t figure out what he’s serious about and what’s a joke. I disagree with him on a lot of things, but he pinpoints some real problems, like with lack of adventure in our lives and the way that everything seems fake. I don’t think a military dictatorship is the right solution though.
In regards to your original question about whether he’s neoreactionary or not. I’d say he’s just sort of unclassifiable. He’s regarded as the philosopher of the alt-right, but I’m not even sure if that broader label is accurate or not.
BAP purposefully doesn't elaborate on what he believes the regime should look like.
Agreed that it was absolutely hilarious. By far the most interesting "political " book I've read in years. Also perhaps the most motivating book I've ever read. It filled me with energy and desire to go out and do big things.
At least from my perspective, you writing the original article was a strong positive - it exposed me to the interesting ideas part in an clear way, with the alternative being that I would have had to either wade into nrx writing to get them myself (bad both in that their writing is unreadable and in that reading it would make it harder to separate out the ontereirs ideas), or never learning them at all (and I do think there's some important ideas there that people need to think more about but are verboten in ordinary society).
Also, ij the end you list some dictator failures, but I think it's wrong to mix things that are failures in their own terms (like economic mismanagement or the failed Ukraine invasion) with things that western liberals are ideologically against but are successful at achieving their stated goals and might not actually bother most NRXs that much (Uyghur stuff/poorly treated indian laborers).
Finally, a post spicy enough to justify the subscriber-only label! Thanks for writing this.
I think you're making a common mistake when you talk about elitism vs anti-elitism though. When anti-elitism occurs on the right it isn't motivated by egalitarianism, but by a sense that the quote-unquote elites are not true elites. When right-wingers decry the "elites" there's massive ironic air quotes around the word; right-wingers are happy to believe that some people are better than others and deserve more, but they believe (with good justification) that the current quote-unquote elites are largely just a bunch of well-connected dullards chosen by nepotism, favouritism and maybe the occasional child-sex ritual rather than actual eliteness.
Not all right-of-centre folks are equally elitist. Maybe someone like Mike Huckabee is on one end of the spectrum (all men are equal in the eyes of god) and someone like Bronze Age Pevert is on the other end of the spectrum (a revolution of nudist bodybuilders will one day seize control of the country by pure masculine energy). But Trumpism is definitely towards the pro-elitism end of the spectrum (the country has been ruined by dolts like low-energy Jeb and sleepy Joe and tiny Ron and crooked Hillary, and needs to be rescued by someone who is actually smart and a winner, like Trump!)
Why is this spicy?
Well Scott does say that the first time he wrote about it, it was "one of the more fateful decisions in my life. All the movement’s supporters decided that if I was engaging with neoreaction at all, I must like it, and commented on my blog for the next few years. And all the movement’s enemies made the same inference, and harassed me and tried to get me cancelled for the next few years. Honestly a bad time, 0/5, do not recommend"
Maybe he's worried it could happen again.
Oh. I think I gave up on being popular or respectable so long ago that I'm just not very alert to "spiciness."
"I do think it’s funny that of “Asians might have IQs 5 points higher than whites” and “I want robots to kill all humans”, the accelerationists had to jettison the former belief in order to make the latter palatable."
This is enough to cancel anyone today.
The problem (which I think nrx was aware of, but never came up with a good solution for) is that most plausible elites (smart people, rich people, beautiful people, etc) are currently mostly liberal. It's really hard to build a pro-elite movement when the elites are opposing you.
Trump is a weird mix of elite and anti-elite, but you can't have a pro-elite movement based on one guy.
> It's really hard to build a pro-elite movement when the elites are opposing you.
Essentially all movements are led by elites. Where two sides come into conflict, it's not necessary for elites to be present in equal numbers on both sides.
I would say Trump gives the sense that he wants to belong to the elite and is angry that it hasn't worked out that way, e.g. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/11/01/donald-trump-elite-trumpology-221953/
I don't buy the idea that actual elites are mostly "liberal" (in the US sense where it means left-of-centre for some reason). Right wing views are positively correlated with wealth and education, and if my observations of college Republican vs college Democrat groups are any indication then positively correlated with good looks as well.
Right-wing views are positively correlated with wealth and education among the 99% of Americans who are not elite. It isn't clear that this correlation holds into the elite ranks (mostly because there aren't enough true elites answering the surveys), and there are reasons to believe the trend might reverse at that level.
/hesitantly/
I wouldn't say he's both elite and anti-elite, I'd say he's neither. I think his position relative to the elite is best explained by the metaphor of this SNL sketch: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LBjGD5VGVg0&pp=ygUYVHJ1bXAgbmF0byBjYWZldGVyaWEgc25s
He was rich enough that he got to sit with the cool kids, but only as the butt of their jokes. Right-wingers might like to complain that elites only started hating him when he ran for president, but here's a 1990 SNL sketch making fun of him: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G1gC912LUq0&pp=ygUbU25sIHRydW1wIGRpdm9yY2UgY29sZCBvcGVu
He was never cool. He was wealthy and connected enough to have power and influence, but his coin wasn't elitism, it was money. The exchange rate isn't that great. He traded a lot of money for a little elitism.
"But YIMBYs have proven that there can be a constituency for building things even in a democratic system, and won enough victories to demonstrate that methods can work."
Is this... true? my impression so far has been that YIMBYIsm is extremely popular and has become a modern shibboleth while somehow accomplishing exactly nothing. I don't interact with the movement very much (I live in a place where housing prices are low and rents are low), but I feel like every time I see something about it, it's about how the san fransisco zoning board found some new way of foiling the latest popular referendum or state legislation.
Like, most recently, I think I saw an essay about how Seattle had been ordered, or legally obligated, or something, to create some kind of standard design for multi-occupant housing which would be The Building that they'd copy-paste everywhere, and they ended up designing a building that requires a 102' x 84' minimum lot footprint when something like 90% of seattle's lots are 100' x 80', or something like that, and then the essay went into evidence showing how this was clearly a deliberate choice on the part of the designers to subvert the push for more housing
Is it that I only ever hear about YIMBYIsm's failures? or is my general impression correct, that YIMBYism as political movement has become extremely popular and yet housing still stubbornly and mysteriously fails to get built?
I think there is a real bias in what you hear about yimbyism, yes - it's had a bunch of recent wins (including big ones in places you wouldn't expect, like Montana). It's true that the SF board of supervisors is doing increasingly silly countermeasures, but there has been real movement in California too (including SF).
(In New York, otoh, it's still been pretty consistently stymied).
Whether you consider the overall picture a net win or not depends on your standards - there's been a bunch of midsized wins (some cities removing parking requirements or allowing adus or triplexes by-right) but nothing close to "an entire state adopted japanese zoning". I think compared to most political movements in recent years it's been fairly successful.
"The past was able to build things, and provided its citizens with cheap housing and beautiful cities. The present doesn’t. Why not? It’s easy and not entirely wrong to blame liberal democracy for this - if you ask the current citizens of a city to vote on new construction, they’ll usually say no, and the grandest construction was implemented by authoritarian central planners like Robert Moses who ignored them."
Not really accurate. What Robert Moses did absolutely had the support of the people — or at least the people who mattered. That's why he drove his urban highways into poor and black neighberhoods whose residents didn't have the clout to oppose him, and this type of "urban renewal" was absolutely popular among those whom democracy cared about at the time.
Also, putting Robert Moses and "cheap housing and beautiful cities" in the same paragraph is rather peculiar. He didn't want or try to make cities beautiful, he spearheaded the movement to move people out of cities (those who could afford it) and into new-model suburbs, destroyed swathes of low-income housing (deliberately) and extended the highway system, which had been meant to bridge the gaps between cities, into urban cores themselves to facilitate a lifestyle where you live outside the city and commute into it for work. I think even an advocate of car-centric development would be hard pressed to call the resulting urban landscape "beautiful". For an example compare what Amsterdam looks like now to the Robert Moses inspired Plan Jokinen (named after the American urban planner who created it). You might think it's better (although I'd disagree with you), but "beautiful"?
Those were great texts, the FAQ and even better 'the nutshell', afaik best passing of ITT ever: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/
Thanks for this update on sth. I do not want to spend too much of my time. Emil Kierkegaard suffices https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/my-conversion-story-or-a-brief
Neo-reaction seems to me to be bog-standard technocracy (and did anyone, even on the Republican side, think Mitt Romney was a competent elite? Gavin Newsom seems the most like him of the current crop of politicians, mostly based on "I look clean and tidy, am young as politicians go, and I have a nice hairstyle").
If I'm going for a monarchy, it'll have to be the Stuarts, and given that the last guy was James II whom even his allies have to admit was not that great, I'll pass. Charles II, though - I could live with him. Any king that is disparaged for not fighting enough Continental wars to expand our glorious reign is fine with me. Prior to reading Cephas Goldsworthy's biographical study of Lord Rochester, I didn't have a high opinion of Charles, but after that I liked him because he seems to have had a sense of humour and to be able to distinguish self-importance between himself as a person and his role as monarch.
https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/king-charles-ii-public-personal-life-british-monarch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZhOjMMIaA4
For the technocrat bit, he was also a patron of science:
"Charles II and the founding of the Royal Observatory
Improving navigation at sea was a major challenge for 17th century merchants and their sailors. Thanks to Charles II’s French mistress, Louise de Kéroualle, rumours started to circulate at court that French astronomer, Sieur de St. Pierre, had devised a means of determining longitude at sea by using observations of the Moon’s position in relation to the background stars.
On 4 March 1675, the King signed a Royal Warrant appointing John Flamsteed as 'astronomical observator..[..]..so as to find out the so much-desired longitude of places for the perfecting the art of navigation'. It was the founding of Britain’s first state-funded scientific research institution."
> [...] and did anyone, even on the Republican side, think Mitt Romney was a competent elite?
I strongly think so - he had a lot of stuff on his resumé:
- JD and MBA from Harvard
- Successful career at Bain Capital
- President/CEO of the organizing committee for 2002 winter Olympics
- Governor of Massachusetts, who oversaw a move from a budget deficit to surplus and also signed into law a state healthcare system that pretty much achieved universal coverage
You could definitely dig in on how much credit Romney deserves for some of those things vs. how much was just deliberate cultivation of his image, but on paper he has a great case for being a competent technocrat.
On paper, sure, but I don't recall any great enthusiasm for him.
And certainly on the other side, there was a ton of media coverage about every little slip - remember the binders full of women? Remember Cruel Callous Mitt the Animal Cruelty Guy because of the dog on the roof-rack? Remember Ruthless Capitalist Mitt because of Bain Capital? And can it ever be forgotten Ayatollah Mitt And The Threat Of Mormon Theocracy?
Which made all the purring approval about him being The Only Decent Republican years later, when it came to Trump, so very ironic.
This fits my recollection, yes; I think this says very little about Romney and a lot more about failure modes in politics. Presidential candidates are always portrayed by their detractors in overwrought bad ways.
Although I will say "lack of enthusiasm from one's own side" is really the expected mood for a competent technocrat - sure we'd LIKE a hardcore party warrior but maybe we'll accept this bland middle-of-the-road figure who seems to really like Excel spreadsheets.
Also I think the Trump years have made a lot of left-of-center people (myself included) really re-evaluate our rating scales. I think you see this in the newfound sympathy for George W. Bush - most (D) voters aren't saying they actually approve of him, they're saying they didn't realize at the time how much worse he could have been.
The problem is, at the time Romney was portrayed as going to be Literally Hitler. Then Trump. Then DeSantis, though he seems to have dropped out of the limelight a little.
After a while, it stops being effective and is just "oh, yet another Republican politician is being called Literally Hitler, yawn". A little re-evaluation *before* the hysteria (from both sides) would be more to the point, but that's probably asking for too much. If Tweedledee can't portray Tweedledum as the Worst Menace Ever, and Tweedledum can't portray Tweedledee as No You're Worser, what are they expected to do - fight it out on their policies?
I strongly agree - I hope (but don't expect) that the current moment will impress this to some degree on left-wing commentators, and I also think this is a significant part to the general question many left-wing people wrestle with, of, "How can people support Trump?" - well, you used up all your superlatives on Boring Mormon Accountant Guy Who Was Actually Fine, so they have no more value.
The Mormon Theocracy stuff brought me straight back to JFK and 'if you vote for him the Vatican will run the White House'.
Which, you know, way to piss off your older voters who remember that stuff 😀 Of course, the current Democratic Party may be pinning its hopes on the young'uns (Pokemon go to the polls!) but it's the old farts who regularly turn out to vote.
There wasn't any great enthusiasm for Romney, not because he wasn't seen as elite, but because at that time there wasn't any great enthusiasm for the prospect of being ruled by the elite. Particularly on the conservative side, as see who the GOP nominated the next time around.
I don't think neoreaction is much like technocracy. Maybe it's a very specific flavour of technocracy.
An ideal neoreactionary leader would be technocratic to some extent, but this technocracy would be in service to very different values to the milquetoast centrism of a Mitt Romney.
Romney might ask "How can we ensure that everyone can get health care as cost-efficiently as possible?" A neoreactionary monarch would ask "How can we ensure the strongest and best people are able to buy whatever health care they can afford?"
That's probably not a great characterisation of the neoreactionary position on health care, but I think my point remains that a standard technocrat tries to optimise things to appeal to the moronic desires of the great unwashed, while an idealised neoreactionary king will optimise to serve values which may not be shared by lesser beings.
I think there's a decent case to be made that Romney's unpopularity stemmed mainly from his platform than from the man himself, eliteness notwithstanding. Matt Yglesias argued this last year: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-mythical-martyrdom-of-mitt-romney
Take an intelligent, polished, professional-seeming, successful, religious family-man guy like that, and give him an agenda that people actually want...I don't know, even without Turnip as a foil, that seems pretty appealing. Some amount of the popularity of populist politics has to stem from path dependency, after all - no one wants to copy losing like Romney (or McCain or Bush Sr. or Hillary, different sorts of "elites"), so the new model is Obama. Orange Man definitely follows more in those footsteps, even though he could have theoretically gone the blueblood route with his background. And I guess that's been successful? So we'll probably see more of it, whether this really reflects an on-the-ground distaste for elitism qua elitism or not.
I recall someone (Steve Sailer?) describing Obama as a "protester-in-chief," which I thought was a useful phrase because of how well it fits Trump as well. Biden isn't capable of pulling it off, so it's too early to tell if the concept has legs.
I think the monarchist aspects of nrx are more of a meta-technocracy. Technocrats focus on solving problems. The communications issue faced by technocrats is that there are about as many important technocrats as there are issues. For every issue, a generic technocrat needs to find the one person who knows exactly which three agency rules are missing things up, and which one of them is law and which of them are actually just interpretive guidance written by a lawyer after a court struck down a vaguely similar policy in another department. Technocracy is great in individual cases, but almost impossible to turn into a coherent ideology.
Most technocratic solutions involve taking bold action that others were afraid to take (like using processes that were legal, but might get held up if anyone happened to sue).
Yarvin seems to want to never let bureaucrats have any actual power at all. He insists that only a monarchy can prevent its bureaucrats from becoming the true center of power.
The technocrat wants to be a great doctor, the monarchist wants to be immortal.
Why do people constantly call Lee Kuan Yew a dictator?
He won fair elections against opposition parties where observers saw the count as fair. Singapore under him had a free press, trade unions, independent courts etc all the trappings of democracy.
He unfairly used the courts to sue his opponents but that is well within the norms of democracy, opposition politicians faced high legal bills but were free to campaign amd stand against his party and were represented in parliament.
A few better arguments against him are that (a) he set up the election system with its GRCs to give the PAP more parliamentary seats than their proportion of the popular vote, and (b) that time they promised to give more funding/nicer apartments in the state-run housing sector to districts that voted for the PAP by larger margins (this one genuinely really bugs me, I really like Lee overall but this one's just straightforwardly pretty bad).
That said I agree that Lee and the PAP base their legitimacy on popular approval and work hard to keep themselves representative of the popular sentiment, so calling him a dictator is mostly unfair. Otoh many dictators (including Putin) also have widespread popularity (Putin manipulates election results, but he'd probably cruise to reelection even without that).
Both if those things are quite bad but well within the bounds of what happens in liberal democracies
I think they push them a bit
Also, liberal western democracies pretty much never have a single party maintaining a parliamentary supermajority for 60 years, so it feels shady to westerners. Given the details I suspect this difference is caused by cultural differences, not anything underhanded, but it does raise the question - if the next generation of PAP leaders became corrupt and incompetent and lost the faith of the people, would they be peacefully replaced by an opposition party? I don't see any reason why they wouldn't, but the fact that this has never happened in Singapore would make me worry a bit about resilience.
(Again, agreed that this is not the same thing as dictatorship and describing it as such is unfair)
> opposition politicians faced high legal bills but were free to campaign amd stand against his party and were represented in parliament.
Incorrect. In Singapore, you can’t stand for political office after having been declared bankrupt. Which means that if you are bankrupted by a libel judgment you are disqualified from serving in parliament.
See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chee_Soon_Juan?wprov=sfti1#2002%E2%80%932008,_defamation_suit_and_bankruptcy
Hey, *I'm* glad you wrote that article, as it caused me to read (well, listen to) *Romance of the Three Kingdoms,* as well as the rest of John Zhu's excellent podcasts (check them out at https://chineselore.com/), which led to listening to the [China History Podcast](https://teacup.media/chinahistorypodcast), which led to trying to learn Chinese (and creating some [Siri Shortcuts](https://routinehub.co/user/Calion) to help in the process)!
I would love to know the answer here.
TBH, parts of your answer feel just wrong, like I highly doubt that YIMB had much to do with the collapse of neoreaction.
The rise of the alt-right feels important as I’m not surprised that many folks would want to jump to a movement that seemed to be winning.
The rise of anti-wokeness has probably played a role too; as a much more palatable philosophy that doesn’t require you to call for monarchy.
I wonder if Substack has played a role as well: nudging intellectuals to play more to their audiences for subscriptions.
Well maybe Hanson will make neo-reaction great again with his suggestion we need to raise the status of groups like the Amish because they are going to dominate while we will die out because of low reproduction.
It's an incredibly bad argument imo but movements about bringing back traditional values don't necessarily need compelling arguments.
It's a bad argument because there are huge leaps at every point.
1) Yes we are seeing birth rates fall in the modern world but there is still substantial variation in the number of children people have and if this starts to be a problem then people who grew up in bigger families make up larger and larger fractions of the population so it's not clear the issue isn't self-correcting.
2) Even if it was true you can't derive the fact that we should raise the status of groups like the Amish from the fact we often do respect groups that win more.
3) It conflates the group and the meme. Just because one aspect of Amish (or whatever group) is desierable or likely to win out doesn't mean all are.
I'm inclined to agree with most of this, but I partially disagree with the first point.
Specifically, while Moldbug's "Unqualified Reservations" stuff was deeply elitist at its core, one of the core arguments was essentially that our currently-dominant elites (i.e. the "Cathedral") have become unworthy of power and should be replaced by better elites. He didn't seem to have any fixed principle as to who the better elites should be, at various points arguing for restoring his preferred Jacobite pretender (Prince Alois of Lichtenstein, IIRC), crowing Steve Jobs or another celebrity CEO, restricting the franchise to licensed pilots and their heirs, etc. Moreover, he repeatedly talked about something similar to Nixon's Silent Majority (Moldbug's term was "Vaisya", which he took from the Hindu caste system) as a class with coherent political interests that were being treated as a hostile subject population by current elite culture (Moldbug's "Brahmin") and whose interests, he argued at great lengths, would be well-served by turning out the Brahmins and replacing them with new elites.
This part of his philosophy seems to me to be remarkably consistent with the world-view of Trump's core supporters. Trump's main appeal among his supporters (who map decently well to Moldbug's Vaisya) is that he's seen as being on their side in an existential struggle against the unwholesome cultural domination and incompetent administration of what they see as the woke progressive establishment (who map pretty well to Moldbug's Brahmin). You and I may see Trump as a self-aggrandizing buffoon whose success comes mostly from inherited wealth, abuse of the rules, and a talent for self-promotion, but his supporters largely see him as a legitimately successful businessman and a viable candidate for the vanguard of a new, more competent elite whose policies will be better aligned with their interests than the current elites.
> I looked into it, decided it was bad, and wrote a 30,000 word rebuttal. [...]All the movement’s supporters decided that if I was engaging with neoreaction at all, I must like it, and commented on my blog for the next few years. And all the movement’s enemies made the same inference, and harassed me and tried to get me cancelled for the next few years.
That feels a bit faux naive. If you regularly write about how much you sympathize with neoreactionaries and how much you hate their opponents (which is something Younger Scott did at length), while also saying that neoreactionaries are wrong on the substance, of course most people will pick up on the former and ignore the latter. Maybe not how the internet should work an ideal world, but it really shouldn't be surprising that the actual world works like that.
I don't think it was entirely about people reacting to sentiments over substance, either. It's just that out of all the idea clusters in neoreaction, it's the anti-wokism one people cared the most about, and that's the one thing Younger Scott seemed to agree on. (In an abstract sense, being pro dictatorship should be much more morally objectionable but nobody considered the US political system to be up for grabs then, so I think that part was seen as a weird but nonthreatening eccentricity, while the woke/antiwoke fight was very much on - this was about the same time as GamerGate.)
"western democratic countries can make hard choices and stand up for themselves when they have to"
Which one was that? If you're referring to Ukraine, it's quite a stretch to refer to it as a democracy:
1. Has canceled elections
2. Has banned all opposition parties
3. Has shut down all opposition media, government directly controls the rest
4. Arrests anyone who criticizes the government or just shoots them in the back of the head.
But please do tell me more about their brave struggle against <checks notes> "autocracy" lol . . .
I think my point is that a democratic government can switch to a less-democratic war footing when the need arises, so you don't have to be an autocracy all the time to be prepared for war.
I'm persuaded by Brett Devereaux's argument that the office of Dictator before c. 200 BC was fundamentally different than the office as reestablished by Sulla in 83 BC. The former seems to have worked pretty well as a mechanism to briefly suspend the normal operation of the Republic, while the latter was a fig leaf over the degradation and eventual failure of Republican institutions.
Possibly. Or they could take advantage of a war and their control of the only significant income streams to eliminate other oligarchical power blocs and consolidate their rule while stuffing their offshore bank accounts. This is one of the most corrupt countries on earth, after all. Or a bit of both. I'm sure their motives are pure.
Note that the United States, an actual, functioning democracy at the time, conducted both presidential and congressional elections and maintained a perfectly free press (to the great annoyance of Union generals) all throughout the Civil War, a far bloodier and disruptive conflict. The Confederacy, on the other hand, did not do either of these things.
Ironically, based on the way the war is trending, and the recent articles confirming the outcome of the March 2022 negotiations, it looks like the "hard choices" Zelensky made to continue the war with BoJo's encouragement are likely to result in a far worse deal for Ukraine than they could have gotten at the time, plus an additional 500K or so dead soldiers. Sometimes the hard choice is also the bad choice.
If your point is, Ukraine is the Casablanca of the Cold War world, I agree with you. There are a lot of interests in play. I would say your narrative has shone a narrow beam of light on part of one of them.
Sure, either all of the above, or maybe you simply personally destroyed the counterfactual neoreactionary movement with facts & logic so thoroughly that there isn't even a good feud to flaunt to prove that you did, but this is unthinkable to say openly so you can only write this post as a Straussian brag. I'm onto you.
More seriously, at the time I thought the FAQ was very informative and a great read even if I didn't particularly care for reaction nor did it end up possessing great facts-and-logic ballistic capability. I stayed out of the comment section back then so I can'tment on how it degraded the discourse but please consider this a strong vote for "you did good regardless".
This could plausibly be a useful public post, as a semi-summary of what happened. (Would probably be better for that to be its own separate post, though. But showing people the "big picture", which they may not be familiar with, is generally helpful.)
Most folks indeed figured out pretty quickly that this neoreaction thing was going absolutely nowhere and thus refrained from commenting on it. There's little room for *either* witches or witch-hunters to congregate on any community if the community's position is "Uhh, who cares about "witches"?"
The big story behind all of these movements was always, essentially, the quest to (rebuild) the right wing on a secular basis. For a long time, both in America and Europe, conservative thought was based on religion, explicitly Christian religion; christian democracy (and godly monarchism before it) in Europe, various Evangelical movements in the US.
The problem with this is, of course, what to do when the society secularizes. It has turned out there are essentially two basis for post-secular right-wing development; classical liberalism (possibly veering into libertarianism) and nationalism (possibly veering into racism). Both of these are perfectly possible to support without being religious; indeed religiousness often has presented a hindrance to them, at least universalist religions like Christianity.
Once religion is out, the right-wing impulse remains, and it will inevitably veer into one of these directions, or the most usually a combination of them; several European governments now existing or in formation seem to be set to prove this quite literally, the Finnish government (which technically includes a small religious party, which is fairly powerless to do anything beyond doling a bit of money to its supporting religious movements) included.
The problem with neoreaction is that it tried to return to something that was traditionally supported for explicitly religious reasons - monarchy; often seen literally as an institution set by God, and with republicanism strongly opposed chiefly due to its historically-strong association with secularism - with secular reasoning. Of course that's bound to fail as anything more than an intellectual exercise, it's a house built against itself and cannot stand.
Of course, Yarvin used the monarchy idea as a figleaf for other ideas, but as said, it turned out those other ideas can probably better be presented without the figleaf.
I know I'm a bit late but I saw this mentioned on Arnold Kling's blog and I wanted to comment.
I'm also GrayMirror subscriber and at this point I've read most of his more recent stuff. So my bias is that I like Yarvin. I'm making my comments in no particular order.
1. This is specifically about Yarvin's blog ideas rather than reaction itself, which has a bunch of different connotations.
2. I heard about 'Moldbug' in 2011 in college and really didn't understand what argument he was trying to make. I also found his style of writing annoying, arrogant, and obtuse. I didn't revisit it until a few years later.
3. Related to something Scott said, Yarvin is open about the fact that he's synthesizing other thinkers ideas, and to the extent you're agreeing with him you're often agreeing with an ensemble of much older thinkers "I am not Vizzini. I am just some dude who buys a lot of obscure used books, and is not afraid to grind them down, add flavor, and rebrand the result as a kind of political surimi. Most everything I have to say is available, with better writing, more detail and much more erudition, in Jouvenel, Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leoni, Burnham, Nock, etc., etc."
4. I gained more appreciation for his blog leading up to and after the 2020 election. I think the idea of a state outside of the state is easier to understand when you can see in real time an outgoing president who is clearly despised and sometimes even disregarded by the permanent civil service (Trump) or lacks the mental faculties at his age to govern independently (Biden).
I was also able to go back and re-read (re-listen via audiobook) his older UR stuff and was able to understand and appreciate it better.
5. What does Yarvin mean by democracy and did he change his opinion on it:
I think a TLDR for Yarvin would be something like: Democracy isn't in charge, cannot be in charge, and we shouldn't attempt to put it in charge **or even pretend to put it in charge**.
But here's the longer version:
Yarvin doesn't really change his opinion on democracy. He uses the word democracy to mean multiple things. When a journalist talks about democracy being under threat they are talking about what Yarvin would sometimes call "Democracy without politics" or something that is supposed to be the alleged opposite of Populism. In the extreme case of this version of democracy, the public elects mascots whilst the day to day operations of government are decided by a permanent civil service and informed by prestigious academic institutions.
Yarvin is open about the fact that academics are sometimes right and populists are sometimes wrong.
Democracy can also mean the more conventional "public policy of government driven by voters and public opinion" -- which is often labeled by democracy supporters as populism or fascism when said voters want things that the highly educated disagree with.
> Public Opinion is not a cause but an effect (and there isn't really any way to change this even if it were desirable)
> People who talk about the characteristics and effects of democracies are usually guilty of oversampling WIERD-ness. And so are usually confusing cause and effect. High trust and publicly spirited societies tend to be prosperous and rich and also lend themselves to 'democratic looking' governments.
> The American electorate doesn't have the temperament to rule, so whether they like it or not, power is going to end up being taken from them (a bit like a child king that never grows up). Mobs can wield power only temporarily and they can't govern as a going concern.
6. Oligarchy vs. Monarchy
Yarvin makes two sets of distinctions, which he sometimes uses interchangeably but I think they're different enough to highlight: Mission vs. Process and Monarchy vs. Oligarchy.
Mission vs. process is a spectrum where on the one extreme (mission) you have a goal subject to certain material constraints and have broad freedom to act. Success and failure is judged by whether the mission was accomplished. Process is when your actions are decided by rules and the only criteria for success is whether said rules were followed.
Monarchy/Oligarchy: Most systems have someone who is formally at the top of the command structure. When the person at the top has actual control over an organization's strategy, tactics, and personnel, Yarvin calls that an absolute monarchy. Aside from not having a head of an organization at all, the other extreme this person is a figure head with no control over the organization. Yarvin sometimes calls this a "Chief Oracle" or a "Costume Monarchy". Yarvin argues that FDR and Biden are at different ends of this spectrum despite holding the same office.
Yarvin argues that most functional large organizations are absolute monarchies organized primarily on the mission principle. He acknowledges the importance of being able to replace the monarch and occasionally comes up with ideas for how a "board of directors" could do such a thing at the sovereign level without letting said board potentially manage the organization directly.
7. Yarvin is a populist in the sense that he sympathizes with red state Americans on issues like immigration, school curriculum, affirmative action, etc. But he's an elitist in the sense that he doesn't think that red state americans are *capable* of running the government or getting politicians to operate effectively on their behalf. He spends a lot of time urging them to avoid attempting to fix these problems "head-on".
Politically agitating in a way that gets people who are far more invested in politics than you are to lock their shields together in order to defeat you is bad.
He believes that even in a government that takes red state American's concerns seriously, the lions share of people who staff the leadership rungs of the new regime will be people who aren't politically progressive but culturally progressive. (Think "Yellowstone" but in reverse). Using hobbits/elves/dark-elves as fill-ins for this when blue tribe, red tribe, and grey tribe are already a thing was a bit odd, but I still think it's an accurate assessment.
8. Yarvin on Technocracy
I think Yarvin acknowledges a distinction between the idea of rule by experts and rule with experts. Government is an art rather than a science, but the person in charge is both capable of thinking independently and making aesthetic judgements about strategy. The government needs to be capable of doing it's own thinking in-house and shouldn't perpetually outsource it's policy making to outside institutions (universities/NGOs)
(I don't recall if it was on ACX or somewhere else that someone was talking about how Jeff Bezos wasn't the smartest person at his company but he knew enough to understand what the more technical people at his company were doing)
(He doesn't say this explicitly but it seems to me that, except maybe for Elon Musk, the people who fit his archetype of an effective monarch are really not popular with republican voters)
(IIRC Matt Yglesias and Sammuel Hammond have made similar complaints about government overreliance on NGOs/Contractor consultants)
9. Lastly I'll say that success of any ideology should be judged less by whether people call themselves the thing you call yourself but whether people take for granted the things you put forward. If an ideology succeeds or fails completely then in either case people won't need or use the label.
I don't know how coincidental this is, but when I saw interviews of Dominic Cummings by Steve Hsu and Dwarkesh Patel and then started reading DC's substack, I was struck by how remarkably similar a lot of DC's complaints of western governments are with Yarvin's (except DC doesn't try to be esoteric).
omg I made a similar joke/observation about e/acc
https://twitter.com/warty_dog/status/1729213581517107372
> advocating omnicide is more socially accepted than genocide, despite it killing a superset of the people
typo: everyone can choice