Book Review: What Is Neoreaction?

I’ve been remiss in not covering this short book sooner. “Review Bryce Book” sat on a to-do list, un-administered to, for some months, even though I bought it and read it the day that it came out. This extended essay is certainly worth your time, if only for the extended argument that he makes for a patriarchal social structure, in a more thorough, direct, and concise way than most people are willing to.

Here’s Bryce:

The willingness and ability to put off present consumption in order to invest in higher future production is a necessary component of civilization. What is consumed now cannot be available in the future. It is impossible to set more aside for present consumption and to have more set aside for the future. Worse, a society which consumes the stock of capital necessary to maintain the present levels of production must have lower levels of production in the future. Such is a toxic nihilism that dooms future generations, and many in my generation are seeing now how our parents and grandparents ate out our own future. “Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die! ‘was their morality. They were nihilists who treated their own genetic legacies as expendable in pursuit of their own pleasures.

And Laliberte later:

Support of a patriarchy is merely the contention that fathers ought to rule, and this because they would plan for the longer-run of society. Patriarchalism compared to feminism has low time-preference

…

Such a conclusion is the inescapable result of women trying to take on male roles and not taking on the noble female roles of wifely duties and motherhood.

And still later (on the conspiracy version of patriarchy vs. the observed history of it):

Whereas feminism explains the virtual entirety of all civilizations as being patriarchal as simple conspiratorial accident, the patriarchalist suggests that patriarchy is a key ingredient apart from which civilization fails.

This leads into the ‘feminist IQ shredder’ argument which you may or may not be familiar with already. To those of you not already familiar with it: feminism tends to discourage the smartest women from having large families, which leads to long term dysgenic impacts on populations. Because intelligence, beauty, and countless other factors have large genetic components, encouraging the childbearing half of the species to form their characters around high-strain education & labor in their most fertile years results in a rapid decrease in the quality of each ensuing generation of children.

Although some more bearing to the left might find this to be another instance of the he-man-woman-haters-club striking again, it’s really more of a call for encouragement  to a more “noble and important” calling.

The work also weaves in a number of Catholic arguments which may or may not be persuasive to you depending on whether or not you’re Catholic and what opinion of the church you happen to hold.

He also takes the time to address libertarianism:

Neoreaction has been called a libertarian heresy. The distinction is cladistic rather than morphological; that is to say, it is a heresy in the sense that it was begun from a libertarian attitude in response to the inadequacies of libertarianism, as explored above, though now it no longer possesses libertarian tenets [ED: Like the NAP.] It is, rather, a deep and principled conservatism wedded to the principles of trenchant and thoroughgoing social analysis.

The prime distinction that Bryce draws here (which I think is correct) is that, unlike libertarians, neoreactionaries don’t see the value in creating a dichotomy between the economy and the rest of society, or the values which lead to good economics and the values which lead to a sound social structure. So, while many libertarians will be happy to say live-and-let-live with regard to social issues, even though in reality that attitude tends to result in distinctly non-libertarian economic and political orders, we aim to think about things from a more cohesive perspective.

There’s more in this than I can cover here without block quoting everything. If you’re worried about a lot of technical language or density, there’s not much of that here. It’s fairly straightforward from what you can see from the table of contents — it covers a lot of ground over the course of its short length.

WHAT IS NEOREACTION?
By Bryce Laliberte
90 pp. Kindle Direct Publishing. $3