Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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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

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The Cult of the Virgin Mary and Romance

Romantic love began to appear in Europe at around the same time or after the Virgin Mary came to be more commonly depicted in art and prayed to throughout the West. It sort of makes sense from a logical and aesthetic perspective if people who were praying for the intercession of a sacred virgin all the time would come to value virginity highly.

But that would be a bit of a mistaken conclusion — virginity tends to be (and tended to be) highly valued almost everywhere, both civilized and non-civilized, throughout history. The particular character of romantic love, on the other hand, is close to unique, with all of its overbearing displays of devotion, exchanges of letters, singing of songs, and occasional self-mutilations.

When people in previous times venerated virginity, they did it in the service of other virtues — namely those of chastity, diligence, patience, prudence, temperance, self-control, and loyalty. It was also connected to religion, as it is today within more pious communities. That’s not to say that in the past there were no people who didn’t live up to those virtues. That’s why they’re virtues and not character aspects which we simply expect from everyone.

It’s common to say that romance is dead — in the real world — at the same time as romance explodes in popularity in the world of fantasy.

In fantasy worlds which are popular today, men are tough knights, space marines, grizzled cops, and Italian plumbers with incredible vertical leaps. In the fantasies of women, they’re virgins in the firm hands of a respectable billionaire pervert. While the stories might be a little odd, stories are always odd.

So, while Romance the genre remains the most popular Western genre of fantasy, romance the concept has come to be widely denigrated, almost universally so. I have trouble even thinking of a contemporary figure who’s not also ridiculous who argues for romantic behavior as it was once understood.

There is a veneration of romantic passion — passion has come to be seen the moral justification for sex — but romantic gestures have come to be seen as outmoded and ridiculous. Mostly, it’s men who are especially slow on the cultural uptake still make them, and they tend to earn mockery for it.

Romance simply makes no sense at all outside of the framework of virtue in which it was conceived, because a moral framework in which absolutely everything is permitted is one in which it loses all of its coherence.

Today, we tend to make fun of people who mistake the vestigial expectations formed by romantic fantasy tales for what should be expected in ‘reality.’ But still, people return to the stories, because they stir their hearts, only to have those same hearts bashed against a wall of indifference to virtue and worship of vice.

Part of the trouble that people have with romance — despite its enduring appeal — is that it tends not to get along with anyone‘s idea of what ought to be good and legitimate. Many romances which aren’t fantasies are tragedies, because they’re more true to life. Romeo and Juliet really can’t be together, and the conclusion of the play depicts the consequences of star-crossed love in a way that encourages pity more than it does imitation. Abelard and Heloise did not go to a good end, but the impression drawn from the story of what happened to them was not really supposed to be that the passions ought to be unleashed to run over every fixed institution.

Today, we tend to emphasize romance and romantic love far more than we do virtue. Some have attempted to tie the experience of romantic passions to the perception of virtue in another person, to limited success — after all, there are plenty of examples of people being overwhelmed by passionate affection for someone who is bad.

Anyway, the point of this wandering post is to say that because the cult of the virgin — and respect for virginity itself — has diminished, so has romance. Fantasy fiction takes on a more urgent role as people fumble at the hole that’s left behind. Their lives become dulled, with only pop fiction to make any sense of it at all.

Women and men alike also tend to want the rewards of virtue without really needing to be virtuous. Chivalrous gestures are inane when there’s no chastity or modesty. The left expends enormous amounts of effort on denigrating both of those things, and making them especially impractical for young people. Conservatives tend to demand extraordinary self-control from young people crammed together in co-educational institutions, and then became enraged when nature proceeds to take its course.

Social Pathologist wrote well on this the other year:

The continual conflation of physiological sexual attraction with moral parameters (either positive of negative) seems to be a problem of Christianity when it comes to an analysis of sexuality. Good Christian men can’t understand why they are not sexually attractive, despite living according to God’s law. Living in the hope that God will send them a good woman who will not be like the “others”. This deficiency in the understanding of the biological dimension of sexuality means that no practical advice is given on how to improve the success rate with the ladies, apart from pray. Most of the other advice is next to useless. On the other hand, due to this hostility to the “flesh” men and women who are sexually attractive are deemed to be morally bad. Amongst weaker minds there almost appears to be an associative incompatibility between being “hot” and being “Christian”. Drab women and grey men.

The Trads seem to be unable to recognise that he attraction a woman feels for a man is involuntary, i.e. it is morally neutral. How she chooses to act on the attraction gives her actions a moral dimension. But they continually conflate the two. The fact that Jessica is attracted to Bill, the bad boy, does not mean she will be attracted to dweeby Ben, who is also morally bad but lacks erotic capital. Morals have nothing to do with the issue, attraction is decided by the flesh.

This tradition of conflation in my opinion stems of Christianity’s aversion to “flesh”. The overtly erotic was simply seen as the express route the Hell and Christianity did all it could to suppress it. As a result, Christianity developed a good tradition of fighting the flesh and neglected to develop an understanding of it or accord it any legitimacy. The result has been that Christianity can’t evaluate sexuality on the biomechanical level and insists to continually evaluate it on the moral one. The resistance to this common sense understanding is perplexing. It’s as if the Trads do not want to acknowledge a carnal nature to our sexual desires and instead continue with their understanding of human sexuality as if the mechanics of sexual attraction did not matter, only its moral evaluation; still, which they nearly always view in the negative.

This historical position has had practical real world sequelae. Admittedly, Christianity is not responsible for the excesses but it provided for a a cultural fault line which was waiting to be exploited.

  1. For good or ill, the Church was the dominant cultural force in the West till about the end of the 19th Century, it’s suppression of the erotic, not procreative, component of sexuality, meant that as the Church lost power, the pendulum swung the other way. Nature abhors a vacuum and in the absence of any theology of desire the world developed it’s own. Predictably it was stupid. Today’s sluttery is due to yesterdays prudery.
  2. It has made a meaningful discussion on sexual polarity difficult since the spirit was more important that the flesh. Yet our sexual polarity is intrinsically tied to our carnal bodies. Gender equality/interchangeability is easy when the flesh is irrelevant. Cue feminism.
  3. It has conditioned people towards evil by making sexual evil fun and virtue boring.
  4. It has encouraged physical ugliness by neglecting or erotic complementarity. Desire is supercharged in bodily perfection and diminished in dysmorphia. The Fat acceptance movement is based on the idea that we shouldn’t be so “superficial” and judge people on appearances.

I get a lot of heat for taking this position, but here is an interesting question I’ll wish you to ponder: Why has “bad boy” become synonymous with sexual attraction and “good boy” with sexual repulsion? Perhaps it’s because contemporary Christianity lacks the capability to be sexy and good. The flipside to this is the notion that the erotic and good are incompatible. See what I’m getting at?

This tendency hasn’t really gone away. The differences between most contemporary conservatives and liberals in these matters is slight. We see similar tendencies in how they handle ‘supercharged desire’ and dysmorphia.

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The Dark Enlightenment Doubles

The Dark Enlightenment subreddit has roughly doubled in traffic over the last year, although if you go by the numbers from April, it actually doubled from April-August 2014, and has nearly leveled off at another doubling as of this month from August 2014 to March 2015.

As a mostly backseat moderator, I have access to the numbers. The rest of the moderators gave me permission to share them with you:

dark enlightenment subreddit stats 2015

This jives with unique user numbers that I see on my site. The majority of the engagement probably happens with a minority of users, most likely a core group of 4,000. Of those, maybe 2% are active writers, which would be a typical ratio. Users also don’t match precisely with actual individuals — so these numbers are really only good for showing the shapes of trends, and are a lot less precise than they seem.

Nemester, the most active moderator, had this to say about the growth and the general state of the subreddit:

I know that the NRXN generally isn’t very happy with the sub. For some reason. I am guessing it is because my personality is almost entirely unknown. I can see why it is hard to trust /u/nemester since it appears like I don’t contribute anything to the theory of the community…

That aside, however, I don’t think anything better could have been put together given the platform, honestly. Every other far right sub on reddit is pretty much just another version of /pol/ and has lots of shitty quality posts and comments. Policing the community to remain intellectual requires a lot of work, and that work has borne fruit here. It also pisses off a lot people who have to be dealt with firmly and sometimes harshly. The hardest part is having to ban someone who otherwise could contribute productive ideas, but they are such an acrimonious shitbag that they can’t be tolerated. Anyway, when I compare the quality of the submissions here to the quality of the comments of acknowledged neoreactionaries on twitter, there is a world of difference and it does not favor twatter. (I have an account which I don’t participate, I just look for links) That said, sometimes reasonable conversations are had there occasionally.

He also credited the creation of /r/DebateDE as being effective at sapping some of the energy away from trolls who would otherwise be disruptive. Nemester also credits these two posts (1, 2) on post-modern discourse for being good effective guidelines for channeling discussion.

Vakerr, the second-most active mod, added (to explain his lack of contributions outside the subreddit):

Speaking for myself, while I have 1/4 English genetic heritage I grew up in central Europe and English is a 2nd language to me (3rd or 4th actually but that’s beside the point). So I’m not practiced in writing lengthy essays in English. Keeping up with the output of the NRx community is using up my available time anyway. In fact, considering the volume of the output, curating and shepherding the discussion is becoming increasingly valuable.

Yup.

Scale and reddit mix poorly

Reddit was designed on democratic principles. Popular links rise whether or not they actually have other qualities other than mere popularity. The design of reddit also makes it easy for people from hop from sub to sub. This is good for raw growth numbers, but raw numbers are completely useless for most intellectual or community-building goals shared by most of you.

Reddit actually has a relatively small user base of maybe 3.2 million users of which maybe half are active. It just has some outsized influence because journalists and other people in publishing use it as a test bed to predict what will be popular. In this way it has a bit of a self-reinforcing effect — the clique of redditors is influential because publishers assume that they’re influential, which reinforces itself.

By comparison, Twitter has maybe 75 million active US users (of whom not all are individual human beings), Facebook has about 200 million, and Pinterest has roughly 50 million, all reported by the companies themselves. Someone should really audit all those numbers.

Links and posts that become popular can, if the subreddit is so configured, wind up in the feeds of users who have no idea hat the subreddit is. Niche subreddits with small user bases can generate some high quality discussion (much like old newsgroups dedicated to specific topics), but once they grow past a certain point, the discussion quality tends to degenerate quickly as the members stop being able to recognize most of one another.

Rather than grow one large subreddit to as enormous a size as possible, it’d be better to try to redirect as much traffic as can be to more specific areas of discussion. Reddit’s design makes this a little tougher.

Size in a subreddit can also be mitigated by imposing more rules on who’s allowed to submit links, but that doesn’t solve comment quality issues.

I think that in general people should not expect too much of Reddit as a platform. Private discussion on more specific topics is easier to manage and to control quality on. People who use Reddit tend to be of wildly varying quality, and it’s impossible to pre-assess that on the site itself.

Pageviews are next to worthless

Something to keep in mind is that pageviews and new warm bodies are next to worthless. They tend to be a cost. There are billions of people connected to the internet, and most of them are poor, ugly, and stupid.

Pageviews are only worth something when it’s a proxy for the attention of a valuable person, or a person with high potential value in the future.

There are plenty of places where you can buy pageviews for anything ranging from a few pennies to many dollars depending on what you’re looking for and who the people are. The majority of people in the world are useless or worse than useless, and getting their attention costs resources without returning anything positive.

As a general rule, effective human beings are harder to get a hold of, and far more useful. On the internet, because of the way that it’s structured, the tendency is to pander to people who are heavy users of low value. That’s because their attention and time comes cheap. Speculators also tend to overvalue the attention of worthless people, so executives respond to that irrational behavior by spending more time and resources manipulating the short term attention of said mostly-worthless people on the internet.

If the only numbers you pay attention to are web server activity, you will pander to the people who make those numbers go up more than the rest. You can write a bot or network of bots to make those numbers go up in arbitrary ways — and many do.

Display ad driven platforms like most social networks also will tend to try to condition you using notifications to feel a surge of pleasure when engaging in mostly worthless interactions. This is also a usual internet use pratfall that’s easy to fall in to.

Earnings are a slightly better metric, but that’s also tricky — you can spike short term earnings by scamming people, which involves the building-up of good will followed by the rape of that same goodwill. There are no perfect metrics.

But here are some guidelines:

  • Numbers aren’t everything
    • When valuing numbers, value valuable things more than numbers which are tough to value
  • Aim to attract people of the highest quality possible
    • Disqualify low quality people whenever possible or shunt them somewhere else
    • There are many measures of quality and virtue — they can be piety, wealth, intelligence, industriousness, cleverness, courage, good humor, chastity, etc.
      • Quality attracts quality. Low quality attracts low quality
  • If a crowd forms, chop up the crowd until it returns to order, then chop up the crowd some more
  • Put people to productive ends whenever possible

This is also how I’d also make an economics writ small argument against populism and participating in the election process. Directing people to vote is a high cost activity. It requires a big initial investment. The only economically rational reason to do it is to get repaid by the politician after he’s elected. If your primary goal is to reduce corruption in society, it makes no sense to pursue that goal in a way that can only be sustained by using corrupt means.

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