What Is

Neoreaction

Ideology, Social-Historical Evolution,

and the Phenomena of Civilization

Bryce Laliberte

What is Neoreaction?
Ideology, Social-Historical Evolution, and the
Phenomena of Civilization

Bryce Laliberte

Dedicated to my friend who introduced me to neoreaction

At the time of this writing, a number of those whom I must acknowledge for their help in crafting this essay
go by pseudonymous personas. Where this is the case, I have directed my acknowledgement to that persona.
My gratitude first and foremost to Amos & Gromar, with whom I began writing reactionary philosophy.
To Nick B. Steves, for his introducing me to the wider reactionary blogosphere and his patience with my use
of his ideas.
To Buttercup Dew of My Nationalist Pony, for his preliminary explanation of nationalism.
To Donal Graeme, who always seems to ask the questions I wanted to see asked.
And all others I have talked with over email and Twitter. The thoughts you inspired were instrumental in
putting this together.

Contents
Introduction....................................................................................................1
The Notion of Ideology..................................................................................1
Singular Dogma, Pluralistic Speculation.....................................................2
The Longer-Run View of History.................................................................5
The Biopolitical Horizon...............................................................................6
Spiritual Egalitarianism, or Were All Protestants Now.............................9
The Case of Libertarianism.........................................................................11
Society and Natures God............................................................................13
The Wars of Ideology...................................................................................15
The Vagaries of Modernism and Neoreaction..........................................18
The Time-Preference of Patriarchalism.....................................................21
Futurism and the Technologization of Man.............................................24
Racism and Biopolitics................................................................................27
The Values of Capitalism.............................................................................29
Monarchy, Politics, and Economy..............................................................32
Anarcho-Institutionalism............................................................................35
Cosmopolitanism and Ethno-Nationalism...............................................38
Tradition and the Return of Christendom................................................40
Why Reaction? Why Now?.........................................................................43

Introduction
History since Christ is the history of Catholicism.
You may take that as a theological proposition if youd like. In fact, I do, but the sentence may be taken in another way. As a fact of human significance, there is no overarching narrative. All narrative is imposed from
without. If there is any such meta-narrative of human history, it must have God as its author.
To say that history since Christ is the history of Catholicism, it means that I am imposing a narrative. There
is a theme, there are protagonists and antagonists, certain virtues are praised and certain vices excoriated.
This narrative is perceived through a lens. It is an ideologized history, even quasi-conspiratorial. I will show
you how to see through this lens, the lens of ideology, and from within you will see how my account of history is produced by the ideology and intellectual event known as Neoreaction, or in other parlance, the Dark
Enlightenment.
I understand many are tentatively dissuaded by my manner of speaking. My language seems far too concessionary, relativist, postmodern. I see that, and I can inform you it is not. You shall see that there is no worry
to bask in the subjectivity of ideology, for this is only to make a vestment the subject puts on, rather than a
body the subject takes into himself.
In order to explain the Neoreactionary perspective, you shall have to follow on an intellectualodyssey, and
you shall have to be capable of questioning assumptions you didnt even know you had. Not that you didnt
know you believed them; but you didnt know they really are merely assumptions.
The purpose of this text is somewhere between treatise and manifesto. It is not a summarization of neoreaction, though it does summarize a fair amount of the intellectual trends contained therein. It is not a defense
of neoreaction, though it does include a number of arguments in its favor. It is not a mere exposition of
neoreaction, though a number of analytical tools are described with the purpose of expositing in a systematic
manner the ideological composition of neoreaction. I allow myself my own opinion to guide the overall construction of this essay, with the hope that the ideas contained herein shall guide new currents of discussion
and codify some aspects of the reactionary approach to social political issues of society. All manner of forms
of reasoning are utilized, from economical to evolutionary to modal.
I must warn that this text is certainly not introductory. Though it serves as an overview of a number of views
developing within neoreaction, this is not written with the purpose of initiating. It is for the initiated, who
are already familiar with thinkers such as Mencius Moldbug and ideas such as patriarchalism.

The Notion of Ideology

The word ideological is not usually used to describe ones own body of beliefs or social-political attitudes.
However, the explanation and defense I give of Neoreaction hinges on my treatment of it as ideology, for it
is from the perspective of an ideology that the operation of other ideology may be perceived. All are subject
to ideology; those who think they arent are simply unaware of the continuity of their beliefs with the present
assentive tradition. These individuals are, moreover, all the more preferable for they are constrained by the
Noble Lies that make their lifestyle arrangement possible. They overestimate their resistance to propaganda,
which makes them the perfect targets. Who would you rather try to con, the man overconfident of his ability
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to see a con, or a man underconfident of his ability?

Evolution is a shrewd bitch. She selects on the basis of naught but cost-effectiveness, the most calculating of
managers. Species, employees, ideas, these shall all be selected out if another can shift the control of the local
environment in its favor. So shall my analysis of ideology be on the basis of establishing a given idea-species
within its social environment, a vaguely definable form that may never be formally understood by its own
progenitors which may only be discovered through uncovering the morphology of the idea-species over time.
In other words, I shall be applying the principles of evolution to the morphological and cladistics transformation of an ideology over time. My thesis is that an ideological core forms the defining principle or principles
around which the whole body of individual doctrines that are ever adopted by various social environments
(societies, elites, governments) may be explained. We note that progressivists of the 21st century are decidedly distinct from their 20th century forebears, at least if you go down the list examining their respectively
stated ends. This is no original observation. Yet there remains a vaguely definable continuity between the
two, such that we yet understand them to stand on the Left side of the political spectrum; even if that is an
inadequate description of political perspectives, it captures a true sentiment. These outwardly appearing
purposes cover up an almost subconscious value that conditions what policies at a given time may be understood as progressive and which may not. The particular set of positions do not seem essential; some plank x
might be replaced and entail no need to change plank y. Indeed, some positions held by the members of that
movement, though they may differentiate between themselves, remain together by mutual dedication to that
same evaluative core. They may disagree on means, but theyre agreed on the end, even if they couldnt tell
you what that end is. If we knew what that underlying belief were, that would explain the tendency of certain
theoretically distinct groups to subsist within the same political organizations.
It is like their ideologies are members of the same species. Though there may be distinct sub-populations
within the species that can be traced, theyre all still able to procreate with each other. How to explain this
observation? A specific ideology may be identified with an occult motivation.
The occult are powers of beings which are hidden, unseen; a phenomena without some explanatory mechanism, a black box technology. You press the button, your drink is dispensed. You dont know the specifics
of the mechanism, and you dont need to, for it still gets you where youre going. The only person liable to
know the mechanism is the repair man, who has the specific task of knowing the specific machine as well
as the general end meant to be accomplished. There is an analogy here for what Im doing. The set of views
which might be contrastingly labeled modern liberalism, modern conservatism, libertarianism, socialism, communism, feminism and the like are all distinct vehicles of thought, some for which the subjects and ends are
completely different, even opposed, yet they all subsist under the general body of modernist political philosophies. I will show how they are all members of the same species, even if some of those members wish they
werent. You see their subsistence by perceiving the occult motivation, the ideology, which powers them all in
the present age.

Singular Dogma, Pluralistic Speculation

How may otherwise contradictory political philosophies manage to subsist together? I will borrow from my
own Catholic religion to give an explanation. It is worth holding on to, for it will also explain what is Neoreaction.
Catholicism is a dogmatic religion. This means there are certain tenets within the Christian tradition which
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are non-negotiable. They are required for belief in order to be a member of the Church. Failure to believe
makes one a heretic; failure to reform makes one an apostate.
An instance of this dogma is the explanation given in the Catechism of the Catholic Church which states
that Mans faculties make him capable of coming to a knowledge of the existence of a personal God.1 What
it declares in no uncertain terms is that in theory there must be a successful argument for Gods existence.
What it does not tell us is how that argument goes. Indeed, it does not even promise that such a successful
argument has yet been crafted.
There is a formal separation between dogma and speculation. Dogma commands assent to a given proposition: speculation provides reason in favor of that proposition. What does not command assent in this equation is the particular speculation. Required Catholics are to believe that a successful argument for Gods
existence there must be, Catholics are not required to believe in the success of some particular or even any
expressible argument meant to establish such. The unity of dogma does not require speculative unity. Indeed, I and Thomas Aquinas are both Catholic, but he believes in Gods existence on the account of cosmological arguments, while I believe on the account of ontological arguments. This difference between us makes
neither of us any less Catholic, for we are unified in dogmatic belief.
With respect to the occult motivation of an ideology, the particular manifestations that ideology concretely
takes on are likewise speculatively pluralistic.
There is, however, a key way in which the analogy breaks down. Unlike Catholicism, the ideology of modernism, having no soteriological aim for its adherents, can make cost-benefit expenditures of its members
provided such an expenditure helps it to gain or at least retain a larger number of members. This may seem
nonsense, but if you see that there is a competition going on between ideologies, the ideology that can plan
for itself longer down the road will outlast the other that is predisposed to short-term victories at the cost of
long-run extinction.
Such a sacrifice serves as an inoculation. How so? Ultimately, the core of an ideology is aesthetic. It is impossible to net all members of a society within the grips of an ideology, so the optimal strategy is to raze what
cannot be taken. A polar aesthetic to a given ideology should go to pains to integrate that aesthetic, so that
individuals who are innately attracted to that aesthetic will go to that and be satisfied, never seeking beyond
the whitewashed, ultimately obedient political manifestation to something deeper, something that gets beyond the predefined area of dissent.
The ideology can open dialogue with dissenters of orthodoxy, because while the dissenters may be heretics,
the end goal is not the salvation of individual souls but the long-term survival of the idea-species. The dialogue may invite dispute, but it is dispute over an issue that is ultimately inessential. Whoever wins or loses,
the ideology wins because both sides have already agreed to its fundamental premise, which prevents the
ideology from coming under inspection.
As such, though there is an identifiable body of dogma, adherence to those dogmas is not required in order
to be a member of that ideology. All that is required is an immutable faith in the occult motivation. We may
say that, in respect to the given occult motivation, the heretics are logically out of bounds. In such a way, we
might say that, supposing for an instant Catholicism were true, that Protestants are logically at a tension
with their given belief in the Resurrection of Christ, since they do not follow through to what else is necessarily entailed by such a fact. Modern conservatives stand as such in respect to modern liberals: modern liberals are, with respect to the occult motivation of modernist ideology, logically orthodox, whilst the modern
1

Catechism of the Catholic Church. Paragraph 35.

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conservatives are logically heretical.

What cannot be tolerated is ideological apostasy. Members who leave and take up a new ideology threaten
the long-term survival of that ideology. Indeed, contrasting ideologies seem incapable of existing within the
same social sphere. As the ideology itself gives it a certain tendency of response that is evolutionarily advantageous, we can be sure that the response it chooses to give is optimally strategic; sub-optimal responses that
other ideologies tended to give were selected out.
In a certain sense, the logic of evolutionary competitive pressures on ideologies necessitates a limited variety of potentially successful idea-species, due to certain innate, unchanging (or at least permanent enough)
conditions the social environment exists under. Likewise, the social environment is also subject to some level
of determination by innate biological, ecological, economical, and political factors. Influence runs both ways
in varying degrees.
There are many roads that lead to Rome. Many routes up the mountain. As the ideology is defined by its
essential core, the occult motivation, there is no sociological contradiction for a variety of mutually exclusive
perspectives to be gathered under the same penumbra. The better adaptive ideology would allow a wide degree of approaches to be successful; too few successful approaches is discouraging for the long-term survival
of the ideology, while too many may discourage the short-term survival with a flood of disjointed political
philosophies.
This gives a perspective on ideology as well as a way of understanding what we ought to be doing with ideology.
Ideology coordinates the actions of those who hold to it. While it does not choose individual winners and
losers, which is a merely political matter, that the politics shall be of one flavor is guaranteed by the unquestioned agreement of both sides to undertake their political feuding under the conditions guaranteed by that
ideology, whether this occurs in the halls of academia or the global stage of nuclear superpowers.
An ideology is manifest in a superstructure. This superstructure is a coalescence of key social institutions in
society. The present superstructure is a coordination between the university system, the civil service, and
technically non-governmental organizations which receive the bulk of their support from the government
and their political direction from the former two institutions. This diagnosis has been gone over at length in
many other places, so I wont make any further arguments to establish this.
How does the ideology coordinate its manifestation? It may be compared to social institutions, for it works
in much the same way, as a superstructure is to social institutions as social institutions are to the individuals
of society. A social institution involves the coordination under a common cause of a number of people. This
coordination does not require the signaling of all involved individuals between each other, for social institutions are not a cabal. Rather, the organizations arise because of mutual advantage pressed at the fringe of the
institution, where you see a greater amount of turnover in newly joining individuals. To make your way to
the top of an institution in many instances is to make ones way to the center so that ones own movement
has much more of an influence over that institution than those individuals at the fringe. You might compare
the minimum wage employees of a business to the owners of that business in this way. However, the business
is also a facet of society, and so perpetuates itself apart from the actions of any of the individuals. Describing
the movement of the institution might be compared to ideal gas laws. Such laws do not describe the movement of any individual gas particle within a given volume of gas, but they are adequate to describe the average of all those individual gas particles taken together. And of course, in order to have a given volume of gas,
it must have a container. The rules of organization a particular institution has are just that container.
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Stronger rules lend themselves to a stronger institution, and likewise weaker rules lend themselves to a weaker institution. The ideal strength of an institution depends on how the good of that institution is achieved.
A business should be a relatively weak institution, subject to market forces, for the good of the business is
achieved by nothing but its serving the market. A marriage, on the other hand, should be a relatively strong
institution, for its good is served by nothing less than lifelong commitment. Society allowed to organize itself
according to the individuals therein (e.g. analogous to the free markets of economists) tends to make those
institutions as strong or weak as they should be, but interventions by an extra-social force, i.e. violence or the
threat thereof, may make those institutions stronger or weaker than they should be. Corporatist socialism
makes select businesses too strong by providing political backing, which is nothing but the promise of extorting capital from society in the case of a businesss market failure, misdirects capital to business ventures which
do not ultimately serve the desire of the market. No fault divorce and the legal presumption in favor of wives
makes marriage too weak and threatens the possibility of individuals coordinating within that institution for
lifelong commitment.
The modernist ideology coordinates society to fall ever leftward. There is a logic to this movement. First,
anything more to the right than the status quo is anathema, untenable by the principles allowed in polite
society. So there is no opportunity to be in the game of politics and hope to move rightward. At best, the
political right can bargain to hold to the present status quo a little longer, though with the rights defeat in
the democratic process, moving leftward is allowed. And so the process begins again. The political right may
do nothing but drag its feet. To actually move to the right, it would have to give up the ideology, but this is
to give up the system which has been coordinated under the present leftward ideology; it is to give up power.
The only answer to the ideologically leftward system is to root it out and replace it with an ideologically rightward system. Anything less, such as a political right, only plays into the house odds. And the house always
wins, in the long run.

The Longer-Run View of History

Let us suppose we are taking an extremely long-run approach. Say, millions of years.
The human race has scarcely been civilized within its own lifetime. Isnt this a bit ambitious? Rather overreaching? It is actually the only way to win. A staring contest is won by the one who can wait the longest. If
were in a staring contest, well win if our ideology provides for the longer-run sustainability of human civilizations. We dont need to win in the next 10, 100, or even 1000 years. If we win even only a million years
down the road, well have won for millions afterward. The logic of social-historical evolution dictates it with
certainty. As in war, what is determined is who is left. But as the only end of ideology is to plan for human
flourishing, the securing of human flourishing in eternity is the end of ideology. As such, the ideology that
lives the longest may perpetuate itself ad infinitum without fear of extinction from a competing ideology.
Is it a manifest destiny, a material dialecticism, a Whiggish history? Not precisely. Where Hegel postulated
an immanentized Absolute that was present in the concrete institution of the social will, another way of
understanding the future arc of history is by seeing that there is a Nash equilibrium to which all players will
eventually settle themselves to. Given the conditions of innate human biology and environmental conditions
(e.g. not only our planet, but wherever we might get to in the physical universe; this is very long run speculation), there is one, and only one, ultimate equilibrium that society may settle itself to.
There are multiple intermediate equilibria. But given an infinite amount of time, human society must settle
itself on one of two endgame potentials. Total extinction, or permanent transcendence. The idea is to plan
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on reaching permanent, cosmic transcendence. That is why were in a staring game, albeit with a lunatic
whose finger is resting on the doomsday button.
Total extinction is not hard to explain. What will be harder to explain is cosmic transcendence.
Cosmic transcendence: to transcend the state of cosmic indeterminacy. Shall humans flourish? Shall they
overcome the possibility of extinction? Maybe, maybe not. The question is, what are the prerequisites for
humans reaching that equilibrium which, upon being obtained, no further deviation from the equilibrium is
possible? As a matter of theory, that is the ideal an ideology teaches for society. It is the ethically normative
content.
That point may be called the Omega Point. We should commit ourselves to describing the properties of that
given society, at least in terms of how they would operate in conjunction with the given conditions it faces.
As such, we cannot describe for a given society, since we do not know the material limitations such a society
faces and, by extension, the social limitations. We do know innate, biological limitations, and that is a start,
but the longer-run shall eventually have to coordinate for that.
It is not reached out of any necessity, and there is nothing behind History, no invisible hands or zeitgeists
in this view. What happens is accidental; all that is being revealed is how society may reach its end of cosmic
transcendence. The longer it takes to get there, the less likely it will ever be reached, though it is a certainty
that given infinite time, if humanity could last that long, it would eventually be reached. But there is no guarantee of reaching that point, so there is no guarantee of infinite time. Hence the importance of discerning
and negotiating now, in the present, so that the longer-run future may happen sooner.

The Biopolitical Horizon

The thing about permanence: it is impossible in this world. All this talk about cosmic transcendence is potentially all in vain. What we may secure for is the most human flourishing, to live the longest. But there is
always the potential for change: the environment will change, politics will change, it could be anything. Ideas
change.
But they are, compared to innate human biology, less permanent. If the intent is to win on the longer-run
view, then we must invest not so much in societys ideas, but in the more permanent features of innate biology. Biology holds a level of social determinativeness; ideas that gain traction which are contrary to the
actual survival of the species will be selected out, and hopefully it is selected out on a local, rather than global,
level. The determination is imperfect, of a statistically correlative fashion, but it is a better avenue for social
engineering than trying to produce arguments that will satisfy each individual student who comes through
the door. Why not an ideology for which youve already won before any argument has been made? But this
is to seek to place the seeds of our victory not in rational persuasion, but through brute out-economizing of
the enemy.
Brute it may seem, but the reality is that this is war. The point is to be left standing, which is to say, that
someone is standing. The critique of modernism I make comes down to this: it isnt shrewd enough. It
should be more utilitarian, it should give up all pretenses of deontological spirit. But we havent stopped asking why this ideology rather than another, because the why is in the how. This ideology will out-compete the
other, and this because it better secures human flourishing. As a matter of means, its occult motivation is at
an odds with this, and so it would sacrifice human flourishing on the altar of egalitarianism.
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That is at least one sympathetic defense of modernism which might be rendered without being over-generous. The claim of some on the right or within neoreaction is that modernism is nihilistic, which explains
the perpetual aim of its policies to destroy all that is good and holy and lift up all that is bad and anti-social.
Hence the motivation to subsidize poverty, to penalize success. This is not a sound critique of modernism.
Modernism is only accidentally nihilist; it is even a kind of noble nihilism.
The spirit, the occult motivation, of modernism, is this: egalitarianism. Some have seen this, and have varyingly embraced or rejected it on that account.
The modernist wishes that all instances of hierarchy may be, at least in the theoretical sense, potentially disposable. Any use of hierarchy is justified only because it does more to increase equality. This has the ironic
effect of enabling ostensibly anti-elitist political structures from within which the logic of egalitarianism really builds into a froth. The ultimate effect, in the sense of a Nash equilibrium in respect of its given political
environment, is the seeking after absolute power. The purpose of this is not for its power, but because, where
clearly something less than the ability to enforce with totalitarian discretion is unable to achieve the ends of
modernism, more power is needed. What in other situations might be the more realistic conclusion, that the
increased application of force will fail to achieve the intended ends, is impossible, since it contradicts the very
essence of modernism.
The philosopher Willard van Orman Quine described beliefs as inhering within a web. The model of the web
of belief is meant to illustrate how just about any given belief can come to occupy a central place. It denies
the implicit supposition of many that every individuals beliefs are as important as the topic warrants: ideally,
people reason out from more general principles to more specific situations. Beliefs which are more central
are harder to budge, since budging them requires budging all the other beliefs which they support. Likewise,
beliefs nearer the periphery may be easier to replace, since they dont pose such an overwhelming threat to
the web. But the point of the web is that it likes its own survival, and as that core, defining center of the web
is hardest to budge, it can only be budged in a process that we may as well consider conversion.
But arent some beliefs more central just by nature? Certain beliefs, it seems, it would be absurd for them
occupy the center. However, that it appears as such is only because you are subject to your own web of belief.
This is as much a model of argumentation as it is a model of psychology.
You have to understand that logic and argument is surprisingly weak for establishing conclusions. A neat
maxim used by philosophy is that one mans modus ponens is another mans modus tollens. You can always
reverse a conditional argument. You might say something like If God exists, there would be no gratuitous
evil; there is gratuitous evil; therefore God doesnt exist. To that it could be replied I agree that, if God exists,
there would be no gratuitous evil; but I argue that God does exist, therefore gratuitous evil doesnt exist. The
focus is not the problem of evil, its just an example. Whenever you have two states of affairs that are mutually incompatible, such as Gods existence and gratuitous evil, you can always demonstrate in a logically valid
fashion that the other isnt the case by assuming the reality of the other. The inconsistency of two or more
propositions does not, from those propositions themselves, tell you which must be rejected to find reality.
In other words, what you might have as a belief that does more to motivate other beliefs might for another be
a belief that is motivated more than it motivates. This is possible because of the transient up-or-down nature
of reasoning. Your argument against the good of egalitarianism might just be used, for the modernist, to
prove the incompatibility of one of your premises.
This is the way in which the modernist is an accidental nihilist. What they would prefer is that the egalitarian
utopia be achievable and, if that isnt possible, then so much the worse for reality. The occult motivation is at
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the very core of the modernist web of belief, and that is why modernism is incredibly recalcitrant to certain
common sense arguments that seem to pose unsolvable problems for modernism.
So we look back on history and the order of civilization tending all in one direction. This has one of two
competing explanations. We know the progressive story. Society is ascending to a higher level of arrangement. But is it called progress because they are progressives, or are they progressives because it is called
progress? When did progress become more than mere progression, mere movement, and became a one way
process in favor of justice?
Neoreaction takes on the competing explanation. We are seeing history tend in one direction because the
center cannot hold. A system that is in disrepair will work itself to even greater disrepair the longer it runs.
It tends in one direction because disorder causes disorder. As social stability is clearly not increasing, as the
hierarchy which would tend to arise is constantly frustrated and social coordination is ceaselessly disrupted,
the progressive explanation seems at odds.

The Ideological Conditions of Civilization

Imagine a gnostic ethic that preached the essential immorality of sexual fraternization. Such a tradition is
suicidal, at least with respect to the longevity of its given society. Unless such a society culled its members
from a larger, sexually involved society, it would not persist and before long nobody would any longer question essential morality of sexual intercourse.
So we may say there are ideological conditions of civilization. Civilization did not happen by accident. Some
tribe members did not just one day decide to settle down, learn to farm, and erect a city. The citys occurrence depended on a vital condition being met; that of a broad enough ideological sentiment which increased
the possibility of peaceful coexistence between members of the human race larger than the Dunbar number.
Small towns they may have been, but there would be strangers. Humans are to some degree psychologically
predisposed to disfavor strangers. As such, there must be some rationalization for an ostensibly individualistic aesthetic that individual takes on in order to make himself feel comfortable in his environment. The
operation of ideology on the micro-social scale like this is but an illustration of a more general phenomenon.
Ideologies are important because they allow civilizational progress, so that more elaborate socioeconomic arrangements may perpetuate themselves, to the benefit of the whole population.
Even if that rationalization is but a Noble Lie, it is sufficient to the ideology to make the city-state level of civilization work. That the arrangement benefits the population in the overall sense proves its benefit to human
flourishing, and so the ideology is an improvement over the previous, tribalistic ideologies that may have
previously been taken on. However, note that ideology is not identical to its concrete manifestations: human
flourishing is a mark in favor of the occult motivation of the ideology, not necessarily its particular doctrines.
The doctrines may be Noble Lies: the occult motivation is neither true nor false. It may only be most advantageous. That is the name of the game.
It may not need to be the evolutionary innovation of opposable thumbs that allow civilization to occur, but it
would be hard to imagine that unless evolution were to supply a species with the material ability to make and
use tools, no matter its intelligence, the species would be unable to achieve civilization. And perhaps this is
a needless worry: it may be that evolutionary descent that selects for intelligence can only occur in the case
there is already some preliminary tool-building ability. I dont care to analyze the particular case here. The
point is relevant, however, if we suppose that ideas are but an extension of physiological capabilities. There
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are ideological conditions of society that must be obtained before civilization, in higher or lower stages, may
ever be achieved. If the Sumerians had held to an essentially tribal ideology, the hierarchical organization of
the city-state wouldve never been achievable.
If I may develop a thesis here better developed elsewhere, an example of this is the hypothesis that it was the
exogamous discipline of Medieval Catholicism in prohibiting, at most times, first cousin marriage (and at
times, up to sixth cousin marriage) that allowed the cosmopolitan economic structure of Europe to become
the case. The uniquely exogamous discipline, which also forms a kind of eugenic practice, had the effect of
limiting the benefits of nepotism while also raising the overall IQ of the society through selective descent.2
As such, this may be evidence that an ideology which implies a high level of exogamy is necessary to the kind
of economic development which we saw take off in the Middle Ages.
This is biopolitics; the social consequences of eugenic effects and demographic trends. It is a live question
as to whether society would have ever developed past the point of rude imperialism (i.e. the Roman Empire)
had not the practice of exogamy taken root. Understand that the thesis does not require that any society
which achieves a post-Middle Ages level of civilization need have the same exogamous practices: catching up
is always easier than original development. The point is that, in order for it to happen in the first place, such
a condition must be met, though once having been met, the benefits gained by that practice may be spread to
other societies which might not have that ideological condition.
It is also an indication of the kind of open-minded examination that must take place if we are to plan on the
devising of a longer-run ideology, an ideology that has the most adaptive advantage for our species, our society, our civilization. Likewise, this may also indicate the openness to abandonment of present civilizational
configurations. Civilization is not a static marker between barbarism and polite society. There are a vast
plurality of levels of civilization which may be achieved, and there may be many more ahead than there are
behind us.
It is largely impossible for the next stages of civilization to be planned for. It usually requires a shift in ideology before the mechanisms start working that launch the given society to its next position. Indeed, the variables that affect the overall success of an ideology are so vast that it may really only be possible to distinguish
them many years on: only a rare genius might see them earlier, as did Kant in his What is Enlightenment? or
Marx in Das Kapital.
I will still make an attempt at this task. But in order to see the future, we shall have to see two other things:
where we came from, and where were going.

Spiritual Egalitarianism, or Were All Protestants Now

My thesis here is not unheard of within Neoreactionary circles. Indeed, the proto-neoreactionary ideologue
himself, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, forwards precisely that argument himself, and so does Mencius Moldbug in his own style. However, the same ground must be tread over, and indeed the tools I have been building for ideological analysis will provide crucial insights. This will provide an ideological context in which
Neoreaction is initially discovered, developed, and finally embraced. But before the discovery, the context.
The Protestant Formation began in 1517 when Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. I call it a Formation specifically because it was an entirely unique body that arose in response to the
2
This is the hypothesis of the one and only hbd*chick.
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Catholic Church; it has no material continuity, no matter if it may pretend to, and is ideologically discontinuous with the Church as begun by the Apostles.
These I consider plain facts. I may be able to reconcile myself to them because I am a Catholic, not a Protestant, and naturally Protestants will protest, as is their nature. That isnt my focus, so let it go for now.
The rise of Protestantism stands in need of an ideological explanation. For 1500 years, no matter what heresy,
schism, or moral scandal arose, the mass of the public sided with the Catholic Church. There was something
unique that Luther was caught up in, and though it may not be his own original development, yet was he put
at the helm of this movement. The essence of Protestantism, and the source of its protest, is spiritual egalitarianism. The 95 Theses may be read as a protest against there being spiritual privilege available to some and
not available to others. Granted, it may be that to whom much is given much shall be expected, so spiritual
privilege has a concomitant spiritual responsibility; but if that is the case, then it should be that a person may
volunteer himself to a higher spiritual calling, rather than it being dependent on Gods plan for the individual
within the spiritual hierarchy. It is a kind of saintly role envy. They do not take it on with humility, but wear
it as praise. The same phenomenon occurs with women and feminism, though that will be discussed later on.
In the way that I have diagnosed the particular dogmas of modernism as rationalizations of the occult motivation that forms its essential core, so might this spiritual egalitarianism be understood as the core of Protestantism? The issue is not so much the doctrines; those are only focused upon because it is intellectually
incumbent upon the Protestant to have some reason for abandoning the Church structure from which it
received the entirety of its revealed corpus, e.g. the Bible, the Christian Tradition. It would be a mistake to
think that sola fide or sola Scriptura were the reasons for Protestantism: these were just latter rationalizations
of the decision to leave the Church, ad hoc justifications that justified, at the least, not coming back even if
the entirety of the received corpus cannot be traced outside of the material structure of the Catholic Church.
That ideological core is egalitarianism. Catholicism is, if youre already acquainted with Neoreaction, the
perfectly neoreactionary religion, save that of course its already been around for 2000 years. It is implicitly
and essentially tied to its hierarchy, for that hierarchy is the very means by which the Tradition of Christianity
has been received and maintained. At the absolute furthest of its anti-modern speculations, it even postulates
that there may be different levels of Heaven, in which the most Saintly gain the greatest reward, while others
lose out on that greater reward. Such a religiously soteriological speculation is quite apparent given certain
sayings of Jesus that obviously imply as much (to whom much is given), but such a notion is clearly
anathema to Protestantism, especially in its equilibrium state of Evangelicalism as we find it here in America.
Evangelicalism is a veritable anarchy. Whatever hierarchy exists occurs only within the church. Interchurch
modes of organization, such as conferences, are actively shunned. This might seem to tend to a lively bounty
of competing doctrines, and indeed it does, save when it comes to the ideological core. No matter an Evangelicals take on the morality of drinking, communion, birth control, or dating, you can be assured that they
shall tend towards the spirit of their age. As an outmoded expression of the modernist ideology, it will assuredly lag behind in assent to the newly defined dogmas of modernism as they are handed down, and in that
very being slow to assent it defines its Christianness. Evangelical Christianity is modernist, but not that modernist. This is because the fundamental developments which took place during the Enlightenment which saw
the abandonment of Protestant Christianity as a vehicle for propagating modernist doctrines are still the case,
and so the tension between modernism and more-Protestant forms of Christianity is always apparent from
the outside, at times the only way of perceiving the logic of a given development of Christian theology, such
as Wolfhart Pannenberg, Paul Tillich, and Karl Barth hoisted upon the world.
If you know your 20th century Christian theological developments, it may seem odd of me to include Barth.
After all, Pannenberg and Tillich might be defined as the leading progressive developments of Protestant
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Christianity in the 20th century, but Barth forwarded a thoroughly anti-modern, pro-Scriptural, neo-orthodoxical movement.
But Barth isnt neoreactionary. If youve been following along, you know that modernism requires its ostensibly anti-modernist stooges, someone who will take the rap. Indeed, Barth is just such a useful idiot.
All the while presenting himself (or at least so he has been presented by his advocates) as a response to the
materialism and the over-rationalism of modernity, he in fact poses no centrally ambivalent theses against
modernism. In fact, he does far more to attack the tendency of Catholicism towards natural theology, and so
insidiously supports the implicit egalitarianism of Protestantism far more than the overt support of Pannenberg, Tillich, and other Christian liberals of since the 19th century. Why? Because, if you have anti-modern
aesthetics, Barths anti-reason preference for Scriptural exegesis over natural theology seems the most sensible option.
Yet, why the preference for Scriptural exegesis? What explains that? There is nothing inherent of Scripture
that commands such a central place for itself within the Christian tradition (interpreted broadly), so such a
move must be motivated by some extra-Scriptural rationalization. That rationale is obvious: egalitarianism.
Why else should Barth resist the notion that some within the Christian Tradition have a privileged place in
the definition of doctrine? Theoretically, he may accord himself a higher place due to his greater intelligence and learning, but in principle, and this is the important part, anyone should be able to apply the same
background knowledge and reasoning to the same Scripture and come to the same religious conclusions as
they ought to. And if they dont, then the explanation is Calvinistic predestination. It is not that reason is
incapable, but that as Fallen creatures we are incapable of such a perfect reason. Ergo, the worship of a God
established by our own reason is a worship of our own reason. Idolatry. It is the room modern conservatism
might make for itself in full while still being appropriated by modernism for its own use.
That is the sentiment which defines Protestantism. There can be no privileged places of theological development and definition, save that reserved for God and Jesus Himself. In principle, all that is good and true
ought to be able to be understood on its own merits by the honest inquirer of Scripture. Granted, a university
education and a background knowledge in the original languages and a level of anthropology of the culture
in which Scripture was written are all helpful for getting at that, but in a fundamental sense anyone who seeks
out the true meaning of Scripture ought to be supplied that just by being a human being. There cannot be
anyone who just is better at interpreting Scripture or is invested with authority to do so.
The egalitarianism of modernism, as it appears in its dogmatic definitions, is this same sentiment writ large.
It is the in principle denial of privileged places in society, an anti-hierarchical prejudice which inevitably
crops up when discussing individuals and their relative fitness or un-fitness to take a place within an hierarchical organization. It is always important for the modernist to stress that not of that individuals essence, but
of his accidental qualities, that he plays the role he does.

The Case of Libertarianism

There is another group that will be bred within an adaptive idea-species. The losers. They are a focal point of
self-selection, i.e. social suicide by political autism. Inevitably, it shall be asked what place the ugly step-sister
of modernism has, so an explanation must be given to this seemingly unique case.
The failure of modernist libertarianism is as this: rejecting the essentiality of hierarchy and believing in the
essentiality of equality, their hopelessly optimistic picture shall not be achieved simply because the people it
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would be populated by dont exist. However, this is where my thesis of the ideological conditions of civilization may play a positive role. I must offer an explanation and defense of my anarchism, so I shall. Not all
societies may achieve an anarchistic socioeconomic arrangement. Some may be doomed to having their best
be achieved through colonial effort, some might enjoy monarchist traditions. Certainly, no society should
favor democracy, but it is still fair to say that societies formed through a process that distills a very uniform
ideological commitment and which integrates a democratic mechanism in a fashion that is least open to
economically perverse incentives (e.g. the rich, white, male landowners who colonized North America or are,
most preferably, direct descendants thereof) can hold over well without a monarchical arrangement.
Anarchism may not be preferable for the simple reason that society is not up to it. This reflects a kind of
reasoning demonstrated above, with the exogamous practices of Christendom Europe. The people may not
be smart enough, they may not properly value purely economic exchanges, they may overfavor nepotism and
other forms of tribalism, and so on. If they were at least smart enough to undertake the hypothetical game
theoretical negotiating Hans-Hermann Hoppe postulates security agencies as doing, anarchy would be possible. But thats the thing. If they were smart enough. And as only an overwhelmingly small portion of the
population understands the benefits of a competitive market in governance, it is fair to say the requisite level
of intelligence and innate sentiments is not the case.
Statists have no morally successful argument for statism, but they are yet right, in the present moment, about
how an authoritarian state may achieve the common good through economically coercive means of resource
coordination that a lack of such a state might not. It is a practical kind of accuracy, in the sense that, since we
dont at present have the ideological conditions in place to achieve a fairer, more just system of governance,
we shall have to cynically give the people something, at least until they wont. My fear is that such a burden,
as it inhibits the growth of society, may endanger the potential growth of those ideological conditions that
would found the possibility of an anarchist society. The patient may expire if he does not get another dose
of heroin, but that is no argument in the drugs favor. Wreak havoc very carefully. That is why I might in the
present give my support to monarchy, though the process of social-historical evolution will eventually prove
me right on this point.
What exactly is this essentiality of hierarchy? The essentiality is a matter of social coordination. Conflict is
costly, so a structure which reduces conflict, as a chain of command would for organizing large-scale coordination with high numbers of individual actors, has a benefit over those organizations which would attempt to
achieve the same coordination while also not invoking a chain of command to supersede any individual actors separate will. Some such hierarchy inevitably occurs, then, as it out-competes those other organizations
that either try to use a de-incentivized hierarchical structure or fails to have a structure at all.
For a given society under the same social conditions, different hierarchies may have different advantages.
Which proves the most advantageous is unable to be known ahead of time, as it involves the process of coordinating a vast number of actors in real time; in other words, a market mechanism is required in order to see
what the ideal hierarchies are.
Apart from that market mechanism, and insofar as its operation is disrupted, distortions hold, so different
hierarchies arise. The libertarian is on to something when he points out that, in a perfect market, modern
governments would not exist, since they tend to hold their place in society due to the creation of distortions
which at once is its job and gives it a job to do. A perfect market is unable to be achieved, at least under
present social conditions. So a government will tend to eke out its own existence, being a theoretically suboptimal arrangement for a practically sub-optimal people.
In a sense, then, the caliber of society must be greater if it is to achieve greater social knowledge, at least
where that knowledge is concerned with optimal means of the distribution of all forms of capital. Ironic
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or not, but a more stable social structure tends to allow the coordination of structures which increase and
reinforce that stability. In a structure which is less stable, there may be no freedom to increase or reinforce
its stability. That is a problem for the libertarian anarchist, since he is effectively calling for a sentimentally
non-market oriented people to become market oriented. The libertarians reflex to let the market solve the
problem is only gained through the maturity of relaxing the authoritarian reflex to take control for oneself,
to abide by sovereignty and reduce uncertainty for oneself at the expense of everyone elses certainty. A more
mature society, at a higher level of civilization, has fewer prisoners dilemmas.

Society and Natures God

My critique of libertarianism never requires the concept of nature, for the concept is a poor one within society. As a matter of material possibility, any number of possible socioeconomic arrangements is possible. The
question we are seeking to answer is to only a certain degree how society works. What is more important is
which society do we want? To that it is answered, the society with the greatest level of stability.
This is not economic or market stability. The stability I speak of is compatible with market movements,
changing actuated preferences, and so on. Stability is not economic stagnation. Rather, this sort of stability is
a precondition to increasing economic coordination, for every instability upsets actual or potential economic
coordination. Higher degrees of potential economic coordination allow for the formation of more complex
socioeconomic arrangements. More complex socioeconomic arrangements are incentivized because they
lead to a greater degree of preferences being met. However, complexity is delicate, as it involves a greater
number of intermediate goals that must be met. As we know from engineering, simplicity is preferred because fewer moving parts means less possibility of breaking down. Some goals require a great complexity of
intermediate goals. As those intermediate goals involve in the most significant sense the exchange of social
capital, where even using time to negotiate that exchange is a cost, a highly assimilated culture with strong
social roles and institutions has an advantage over a less assimilated culture with weak social roles and institutions because it reduces transaction costs, allowing the greater possibility of an individual exchange, and by
extension a greater number of just such coordinated exchanges.
Kydland and Prescott, two economists with gleaming modernist credentials, penned an argument to the effect that discretionary policies by the Federal Reserve increased economic uncertainty.3 By extension, this
meant that fewer successful economic exchanges took place, which entails fewer actuated preferences. The
logic is very simple. If a bank manager is looking to make loans, an interest rate which might be changed
suddenly poses a risk. All risks are cost. Therefore, the Federal Reserve ought to have as static a monetary
policy as possible, since this imposes smaller risks on the market.
But the very existence of the Federal Reserve is in order to make such discretionary, destabilizing operations.
If the ideal purpose was to do nothing, it could just be done with. Keeping it around would be the equivalent
of aiming a loaded gun at you, all the while insisting that I have no intentions of shooting you with it. The
only logical conclusion is that the politicians keep it around with the intent of distorting the markets when it
is politically convenient, and that could very well disadvantage the hypothetical bank manager.
Monetary policy, I note, is only one of many other forms of policy modern states engage in.
A discretionary government is an essentially destabilizing force. You cannot pass new legislation without
3
Kydland, Finn E. and Prescott, Edward C. Rules Rather than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal
Plans. The Journal of Political Economy, Volume 85, Issue 3 (June 1977), p. 473-492.
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changing the means of potential income. Indeed, even the possibility of new legislation is socially destabilizing. The greatest amount of stability would require no government for exactly that reason. Its superfluity
would mean higher costs than any benefit it obtains, though naturally this cant be observed due to its nature
of distorting market pressures for its own benefit. In other words, were the natural state of society to obtain,
the state should have no room to exist. Nature is at least an absence of intervention by what is alien. The
government, defined by its monopoly of coercion, is alien to all other interactions of society which are otherwise void of that coercion, and so the introduction of coercion to a non-coercive exchange undermines the
spirit of the exchange. Yet it is also the nature of the government to intervene. How to understand this state
of affairs?
A distinct sense of nature is in use. We might compare the nature of a thing to what happens (in nature). It
is the nature of a human body to live, yet it is also natural when it is afflicted by disease. These are the two
distinct senses in use. The first sense is normative, in that there is the following of a prescribed order. The
second sense is incidental, in that it occurs irrelevant of order.
What makes a social order natural in the normative sense? We can get at answering that question with another.
What do nature and the internet have to do with each other? A technology such as the internet enables a distinctly different optimal socioeconomic arrangement than if there were no internet. We cant say the difference between those two is that one is natural and the other is not. As such, there is no one and only natural
arrangement of society. Rather, there are a number of natural arrangements, and it depends on what form is
available. It is much like saying there are a plurality of natures, since after are all there are cats and dogs, and
there are cat natures and dog natures.
Then what is about an arrangement of society that makes it natural in the first place?
The natural arrangement of society is that which is conducive to human flourishing. Flourishing is not
strictly identical to only the perpetuation of the species, but also the virtue of the individuals therein. We
should not, in looking at the matter of virtue, concern ourselves with the mass of the public. The mass of the
public is malleable by what social expectations are set for it from above. The virtue we are interested in is the
virtue of the Potent; by this is meant not politically powerful, but those individuals with the greatest potential
for social influence. Freedom entails greater responsibility than servitude, for a servants only responsibility
is to serve his masters will; a free master is responsible not only for his own, but for deciding his own will.
The will of the Potent is virtuous for it is the will of a higher mind, which is beyond the understanding of the
mass. As God was made to reply to Job, so will the Potent be unable to explain their reasons to the mass. It is
not that there is a lack of reason, but that the reason transcends what the vulgar are capable of understanding.
This of course assumes the moral virtue of the potent in society, since it would also be their responsibility to
lead. I explain this not as an ideal, but as a reality. Already it is the case that an ideological superstructure is
in place, which supplies its own reasons for being and are reasons which transcend the grasp of the mass. It
is only those who could perceive the flow of power who could formulate reasons for their being invested with
power, for they see how it acts and what it may achieve in society. What they suppose for themselves is supposed for society as well. Given that this is the reality, the ideal of power would be sustainable, for a power
that sustains itself over the longer-run depends on the sustaining of society over the longer-run. The good of
the Potent is understood in this way. A power which sustains itself by extractive means, viz. the destruction
of society in its own favor, much as a glazier might sustain himself by smashing the windows of a town, is
not sustainable at all, and must eventually end in collapse, if not the annihilation, of the Potent along with the
society.
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Natural society, then, is ideological life. An ideology which tends to supplant itself and otherwise commit suicide is unnatural; it is contrary to the nature of society which is to provide for human flourishing. A healthy
relationship between society and those who guide it would have both be benefited, a mutually advantageous
exchange between the superstructure and the institutions which individuals are embedded in. A healthy
symbiosis, rather than a destructive parasitism. Modernism is unnatural in that it is a parasite on the good of
society, gaining its ground on the broken institutions of society.

The Wars of Ideology

1776 will, many generations from this point, be considered the year that the Wars of Ideology began. Such
an age may be near its end or its beginning, there is no means for us to tell. The American empire is at once
a territory gained through only the most formal conquering and also a global consciousness subject to the
most vicious siege. The American military is occasionally involved as well.
The American war of independence is essentially ideological. Decided by an elite privileged in law and
education, ostensibly started on the basis of human rights claims, it at once chooses and declares the essential
justice of independence.
This independence is, however, for itself. It is a transnational sovereignty, appropriated to itself for the simple
reason that it could. There is no sovereign to fear if you are the sovereign. The global political stage is about
jockeying for position at the top, so that at least whoever has the power to oppose you is ideologically aligned
and whoever isnt can always be summarily done away with. Superstructure is, in other words, the only
sovereign, to which all other institutions are subject. We may say the sovereignty is only presently tenuous; it
must become all the more complete as more institutions which otherwise prevent its domination are eroded,
and the purposes those institutions otherwise filled are taken over by the superstructural sovereign.
In this light, the war of 1776 against Britain has the same ideological motivation as the civil war of 1865,
though clearly with contrasting political motivations. But such is the nature of ideology, that it may craft
politics as is convenient. Politics is but a rationalization for an ideology determined long beforehand, and
there always multiple rationalizations to choose from. In this case, while the political aim of the American
revolutionaries was ostensibly independence, independence was shunned as politically irrelevant when it
threatened the yet-immature superstructure growing at the heart of American society. A true political disunification would threaten the sovereigns aim at reign, and so the Union had to be held together by whatever
forces necessary. It was simply a convenience that the South could be portrayed as defending slavery, rather
than the political right of independence per se.
This same ideological opportunism presents itself when one looks through the motivations America had for
entering the Second World War. The concentration camps which the Nazis used to exterminate the inferior
were never a reason that FDR intervened, and much like the slavery of the South, such a reason was a convenient narrative that allowed America to portray itself not as an ideological aggressor that sought to remove
ideological competition by a belligerent force.
This is not to overlook the vast crimes of the Nazis. While the Nazis may seem to pose a serious problem
for reactionaries, it need only be pointed out that the ideological aim of Germany was twisted by aggressive
eugenics policies and an inexplicable anti-Semitism (or so it appears to all who are not anti-Semites, including your humble author, and this not to praise or defend the Jews). While reactionaries may need to face the
evils committed by the political movement of National Socialism, modernists must also face the evils commit15

ted by the political movement of Marxism-Leninism. After all, that America sought to destroy Nazi Germany
but not Communist Russia is explained by the formers being ideologically opposed, while the latter was
not; it was merely politically opposed. Such is not a very great crime. It even excuses the eradication of a far
greater number of innocents than Hitler ever managed, for at least such mass slaughters were undertaken in
the name of modernism, of which communism is but a political variant alongside democratic socialism, as
we have here in America.
This has nothing to do with nationalism. Yet the notion of political sovereignty, political independence, is
hand in hand with it. Independence is not for the individual, but for a society. The kind of society capable of
and requiring independence is a national society. What binds a nation together? One might point to a population tied together by ethnicity or, lacking that, a shared historical accident. But this is only merest words.
Give a little push, and all these accidental associations fall by the wayside. What binds a people together is
ideology. The actual political structure is a formality past that point. Convince the people they need a government, and they are less opposed to the government they are stuck with. After all, its better than anarchy.
And it may well be. There must be an openness to the possibility, like detailed above, that higher levels of
civilization may not be obtainable with just any given set of the prospective members of a society.
It may be hard to illustrate how increasing the IQ of everyone in a society by 20 points could open up new
economic possibilities, since that would involve not only trying to understand a level of intelligence beyond
my own ken but an entire society in which individuals like that exist. But suppose for a moment that everyone in society was 20 points lower in IQ. You might wonder about those who are already retarded, and worry
at their exceptional retardedness which would result: just assume for the sake of argument an IQ of 50 is the
lowest possible intelligence anyone may fall to. It should be clear that the possible institutions of society, especially where they require heightened complexity of social arrangement and a lower time preference (I think
we may assume that intelligence correlates negatively with time preference) become impossible to coordinate
for.
This may be taken as a hint of an answer as to the necessity of biopolitics and the means of embracing a human population which will inevitably emerge from an ideological population which, adopting some rule of
organization, allows it to initiate the next highest level of civilization. And so doing, it may be in a position
with respect to other societies which have not joined it that it might initiate that next level of civilization for
the other societies, or the other societies might be so seriously disadvantaged in respect to the enlightened
society/ies that it cannot be cultivated.
Ideology is an idea that supersedes nationalism. A Korean does not fight a Korean over nationalism. But
a Korean will fight a Korean over ideology. Sometimes it is with a gun, sometimes with a vote. The political effect is the same. The ideology remains in a feedback loop. All history propels it forward, forward, ever
forward until it falls off a cliff. All imperfections of an ideology in respect to what can be accomplished by
that society tend to social destabilization. But of course, that very social destabilization it has caused is fuel
for the fire, urging the spin down and down until the structure is just materially unable to coordinate at the
economic level, the most basic of all conditions of civilization, no matter its level. That is, literally, the point
when the people of Rome can no longer be given free bread.
Democracy, insofar as it is practically achieved in emphasizing the voice of the people, drenches the people
in ideology. We think of Americans who lived through the Cold War who seriously feared Soviet conspiracies as being over-frightened. But then, we live in an age in which the worst offenses the militant ideological
opposition can muster are the murder of some civilians. It is the responsibility of the people to Decide What
Happens. This is an adaptive mechanism of modernism, for while it means the effectuation of the progression of society towards its egalitarian ideal is slower (contrast the American to the French Revolution), it
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is surer, since the very idea of the egalitarian ideal is that everyone looks to each other to see whether to go
forward. A slippery slope it is, but no one notices because everyone is looking at each other, not the ground.
The society that slips together, sticks together. At least until it gets to the cliff.
This even to some extent has a built-in mechanism for getting some others to go further ahead. After all, if x
is the current issue, and y is obviously attached, then my means of deciding about x will imply what I think of
y. As there tends to be an early adopter reward in society when it looks back on its achievements (e.g. being
an abolitionist in the mid-19th century is thought virtuous than thinking blacks are the equivalents of whites
in the late 20th century), this incentivizes the issues to keep moving forward. There are always those who insist that This, and not one step further, but then they say that every time the issue moves forward. A modern conservative is merely one who is one step behind everybody. After all, it is at least that, or anathematization. And if you want power (you can even convince yourself it is better you be in this position than the next
guy, which is probably true), youll go along with it. This is the same reasoning for politicians as well.
That is the place of the people within the social-historical evolution of ideology. The ideology must endorse
forms of socioeconomic and political arrangement that are both congruent to the occult motivation as well
as able to propagate itself materially in that social structure. A model which is not ultimately sustainable may
still reign for a period, until it has exhausted all social capital and societal collapse follows. It would be ideal
to prevent this before it occurs, but it is the fear of many that it cannot be avoided. We are committed to the
course, and no one is at the helm.
The difference between a politician and an academic is merely one of time preference. The academic is
content to disseminate his ideas through the university system, knowing the reward shall be a hundredfold
decades down the road, when his ostensibly controversial propositions have become nearly everyones common sense. The politician hopes to ride that wave; even if he did nothing to generate it, having the politician
officially pass it in the halls of Correctness is the sign to the modern conservatives that the issue is settled, it is
time for them to take a step leftward or to step off. The professor plays the tune and the politician dances.
Wrapped up in the idea of hierarchy is the idea of institution. What, precisely, is an institution?
To compose it etymologically, the root is a verb, to institute from the Latin prefix in- meaning in, towards
and statuere meaning to set up. So we can say that to institute means something like to set up together,
a coming-together of individuals due to common cause. Individuals with that common cause form the basis
of the organization, with a kind of hierarchy that relates the individuals to each other in the means of coordinating the actions of individuals under the common cause that the institution is put together for.
In order for it to truly be a common cause, it must be that the individual holds such an end on their own
grounds, rather than it being an end enforced by violence or the threat thereof, which we may define as coercion. Coerced ends cannot constitute institutions, as institutions are formed on the basis of agreed-upon
and mutually willing agreements of coordination between individuals. While coercion can establish organizations, these are not institutions per se, as they are not formed on the basis of common cause and the intrinsic ends of the individuals are opposed to the end of the organization.
The range of preferences individuals hold only vary so much, and within shared ends is the possibility of institutions established. This provides the basis for a set of terms to be agreed upon which, though likely to be
asymmetric in duty and privilege within the institution, bring both individuals a greater product in bringing
about the end that the institution is founded for.
The unity of action under common cause also provides a principle for describing institutions of themselves,
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without any necessary reference to the particular actions of the individuals therein. So we may speak of families and corporate bodies, without having to describe their actions in terms of the cumulative action of all its
constituent individuals. The qualities of these descriptions are akin to the way in which ideal gas laws describe the properties of given volumes of gas. Without describing the actions of particular particles, they still
suffice to give context to the notion of pressure and temperature as an average of the particles together. In
this way may the institution be described apart from the constitution, and we see that the institution takes on
a life of its own.
This means of organization scales up, so that institutions are under the same pressures to form relations to
other institutions in the way that individuals have the incentive to form institutions. Under common cause,
identified as an ideological occult motivation, this produces a superstructural arrangement of society, so that
an individuals context is defined not only by those institutions he has the right or privilege of entering, but
also the limits on institutions. Ideology is the common cause of institutions that band together; where this
prevents mutual exchange, the institutions are in a state of warfare with each other, as there remains no external means of resolving inter-institutional dispute. Only one ideology may operate within a society at a time,
with adherents of the contrary ideology being persecuted in what ways are available to the institutions that
manifest the ideologys social power.

The Vagaries of Modernism and Neoreaction

As modernism and neoreaction are ideologically opposed, it isnt surprising to find a number of contrasts in
political philosophy as well. What is anathema to modernism neoreaction embraces, such as the justice of
discrimination on the basis of race, the freedom of association, the rights of parents to raise their children,
monarchism, limited or eliminated immigration, among a number of other issues. The arguments made in
response to modernism, coming from a different ideological perspective, likewise dispense with what can
only be called deontological stipulations. As Ive said before, the problem with modernism is that it isnt
utilitarian enough.
The essay up to this point has made very few references to any politically manifest issues, subsisting in the
abstract and assuming application of concepts to the present situation. I will now point to the political concerns of neoreaction, which are patriarchalism, biopolitics, monarchism, anarchism, Christian traditionalism,
ethno-nationalism, futurism, and capitalism. I note that a neoreactionary does not necessarily embrace all of
these, nor does embracing these make one a neoreactionary. Indeed, a number of these have their modernist
equivalents, such as libertarianism is the (failed) modernist embrace of capitalism. Where there are counterpoints, the arguments neoreaction is capable of wielding are superior to the modernist arguments, though
of course what is a sound argument within the modernist frame may also be adopted to the neoreactionary
frame.
A vagary in the ideological sense is the manifestation of the occult motivation. While the occult motivation
may be treated as an ambiguous aesthetic that stands without intrinsic justification (though I see others may
differ on this point with justice), the vagaries which result of the ideology are the measure of its success. A
vagary is likewise not a political policy, but an attitude in regards to the formulation of policies which determines what policies shall be given support on the condition of ones evaluation of the mechanical operations
of those policies. Occult intent ought to be measured, for what one explains of their own motivation, as the
very notion of occult motivation is meant to overcome, is vague and unhelpful. How to measure these vagaries?

18

Time preference is the notion of the willingness of an individual or group to put off present consumption in
favor of future greater consumption. Higher time preference favors the present more over the future, while
lower time preference favors the future over the present. It is impossible for a person to have absolutely null
time preference, as it is impossible to put off a modicum of present consumption in order merely to stay alive.
Given equal opportunity to indulge, an individual with higher time preference may at first enjoy greater consumption, but because the individual with lower time preference puts off present consumption in order to invest that capital in structures that enable greater production (e.g. skills, technology), he shall eventually pass
up the former in consumption. The most significant difference between poverty and prosperity comes down
to time preference. Prosperity helps to enable lower time preference, while poverty may make it difficult to
exhibit a lower time preference simply due to the lack of available capital that might be accumulated in the
first place. Hence, there may be cycles of poverty, and thus the importance of avoiding societal stagnation.
Vagaries which increase consumption in the present are less preferable to vagaries that lower consumption in
favor of investment. However, the putting off of present consumption can only be afforded by a more-thanbaseline level of prosperity, so the overall lowering of time preference is itself the abstract principle by which
higher levels of civilization can be reached, and explains why one cannot skip certain stages except by the
intervention of civilizations that have already achieved those levels of themselves.
Ultimately neoreaction may be justified contra modernism due to its facilitation of lower civilizational time
preferences. Abstractly, the neoreactionary aesthetic entails a preference for perpetuity, while modernism
entails a preference for immediate gratification. As we shall see below, not only does modernism lead to suboptimal arrangements, it endorses unsustainable models that sees the decline of civilization into barbaristic
decadence and the dampening of the Wests light.
The aim of each of the vagaries of neoreaction is to place the respective components of society into their
right place within hierarchy. The conservative virtue of order is not for its own sake, but so that society may
get along in itself and with others, giving to each group the amount of liberty it is capable of maintaining
responsibility for. It is a mistake to give too much liberty to a group ill-disposed to make use of it, in the way
that it is irresponsible of a parent to give a child too much freedom in what he shall do each day, how he shall
dress and feed himself, and so on. The same reasoning as a parent applies to his children follows for distinct
groups in society, and makes plain the necessity of the Potent to perceive this order so that it may consciously
defend against its eradication. It is when the Potent are not aware of the responsibility that comes with their
power that society becomes corrupted, unnatural hierarchies taking place and subverting the respective virtues each group brings to society.
How then to assign place within the hierarchy? First, the property which defines the privileges and responsibilities of the hierarchy in a continuum is liberty. The higher in the hierarchy and the more influence one
exerts over others, the greater the privilege, as one is then subject to fewer restrictions on the basis of group
and is afforded greater freedom to determine ones own values and life path. This likewise brings with it
greater responsibilities, as ones decisions affect not only themselves, but many more people. The privilege of
the least is that their decisions affect very few, and so the punishments that need be laid on them for disobedience can be much less strict. To whom much is given, much shall be expected.
To assign places within the superstructural hierarchy of society, liberty ought to be accorded to those groups
capable of maintaining it responsibly. This means evaluating the competence of respective groups by a theory
concerned less with pleasant platitudes but unflinching realism. The hierarchy is not for itself, but for the
problem it solves, which is that of social coordination to peaceable, productive activities rather than coercive,
destructive policies.
We call the ability to accept the maintenance required for liberty moral agency. It is only commonsense to
not accord someone liberty who does not possess sufficient moral agency to meet the burdens it imposes. We
19

do not give a child the same liberties as an adult due to this; were they to have the same level of freedom, they
would put it to poor and destructive use. If we are to take seriously the question of where distinct groups
ought to be placed within the hierarchy, then we must take seriously the matter of the distinct moral agencies
each group actually possesses. In other words, not all groups are equal in administering their own agency,
and should have their liberty restricted up to that point they are capable of administering that which is left for
themselves.
This gives us two questions; how do we measure moral agency, and how shall liberty be restricted? Neither of
these questions are easy to answer, and I can only produce an initial speculation, though I am certain it is on
the right track.
Moral agency of populations can be measured by tendency of success and stability brought about by that
groups own efforts. Without being established by the group itself, then the group does not prove its merits
sufficient for the order it may otherwise possess. For instance, children as a group tend to be very stable, but
this not due to their own designs but the order imposed from without, such as parents, the community, and
schooling. Insofar as children fail, much of the blame could be laid with parents and their insufficient imposition of structure in the childs life. However, at the same time some space for the exercise of that agency
must be allowed, so that the child may develop his own agency in the contexts of the structure he shall grow
into (ideally). So much as a group requires the imposition of order by another, that group yet requires freedom of space for self-determination. The purpose of order is to direct activity so that the majority of the
individuals within that group act beneficially for society. Some amount of failure will and must be allowed
to take place; saving those incapable of caring for themselves only increases their representation in society,
heightening overall civilizational time preference and hindering the process of evolution from accomplishing
what we need it to accomplish. Time preference must fall over time for civilization; as prosperity increases,
low time preference is enabled. It is an aberration for time preference to increase as prosperity increases.
From this perspective, greater moral agency must be correlated to lower time preference. The lesser ability
to put off present consumption in favor of later, greater production is the de facto circumscription of moral
agency. The highest moral agency would be able to put off all comforts of the present, undertaking the maximal investment in the best future. In the Christian worldview where ethical action has a Heavenly reward, it
is clear to see the essential link between the capability for moral jurisprudence and the capability for beneficial activity. They are, under a natural law theory of ethics, on a continuum.
The contribution of a group to overall social stability is the groups possession of moral agency. The more
responsible a group is for social stability, the higher that groups moral agency and thus the higher in the hierarchy such a group should be.
Given that moral agency may be measured by the groups effects on social stability, it follows that the means
of obtaining or restricting liberty are coincident. In other words, the process of measuring and the process
of hierarchical distribution are identical. The ability of a group to rise in the hierarchy proves the justice of
that group rising in the hierarchy, and likewise the inability of a group to rise proves the justice of that group
remaining lower in the hierarchy.
This analysis assumes society to be free of forcible redistribution, i.e. the coercive distribution of opportunities offered to one group to another group against the wishes of those who offer the opportunities. The distribution of opportunity determines the hierarchy, and as such what disrupts the distribution of opportunities
disrupts the cohering of hierarchy. As such, all redistribution in the name of any ideological vision, be that
egalitarianism or order, can only disrupt stability and push society away from social equilibrium. The order
we desire will make itself work and any attempts to re-equalize from a previously disrupted order will only
prevent the equitable order from occurring.
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Allowed to arrange itself, civilization over time should tend to incentivize ever-lower time preferences, and
this due to its being the aim of natural institutions within a natural hierarchy.
As we explore the vagaries of neoreaction, keep in mind that ultimate coherency is not the point. A consistent political philosophy under a neoreactionary ideology will have something to say about these issues, and
will likely tend to give prescriptions in keeping with the spirit of the following analyses, but I can guarantee
that an individuals own views will draw differently on each of these issues. Necessarily so, as it should be
obvious that the sections on nationalism, anarchism, monarchism, and capitalism all have some amount of
contradiction, assuming one wished to embrace one in its entirety.
The lack of consistency is not an embrace of postmodernism or relativism. It is only that this is a work of
ideological analysis, rather than political treatise. Were I to give a political treatise, I would do my best to
preserve logic. But this isnt; it is a charting of a diverse array of views that share an occult motivation, which
is that of order.

The Time-Preference of Patriarchalism

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. They even passed on their own wisdom, and now the
women of my generation are poisoned by a fleeting desire not to take their place in the proud tradition of a
familial posterity, but who seek after their own material comforts.
Patriarchalism is a response to the extremely high time-preference set into women, which upsets the natural
order that sees men providing for material production and women household production. Such a division
of labor allowed for the low time-preference manifest in estate planning. Instead, feminism has engendered
roles in which the majority of women put off having children or ever forming a family and has taught them to
selfishly pursue the benefits of male roles while also dumping the burdens of female roles on men.
There is no such thing as the Patriarchy, a conspiratorial cabal of men who seek to keep women down.
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. Furthermore,
feminism does not merely have high time-preference, it has a time-preference above the level of sustainability, which must lead to social degeneration, decay, and destabilization. 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. They are no longer in the role of building civilization, but eating it out without planning for
a future beyond their own materialistic lives. Woman is the womb of civilization, but if she will not fill this
role, and men by nature cannot, then civilization shall fail to be borne.
Our approach is overtly anti-modern, at least insofar as modern methodology tends towards flair for the
arbitrary over the principled. The feminist methodology may be succinctly described as the assumption
that women are better than men, and so where men succeed over women, it must be due to some unfair bias
21

which systematically favors men. The arguments offered by feminist may take the line of reasoning that Men
and women are equal, equal things shouldnt have these differences, there are these differences, these differences must be explained by something external, but in reality that is only a rationalization. Feminism has
been described as a male role envy, but it would be more apt to call it male privilege envy. Feminists have no
envy of men who work the jobs that are unpleasant and dangerous, they only have an envy for the privileges
men have bought at the cost of taking on the roles women would prefer not to. What burdens men face are
not yearned after by women, and frequently what burdens that come with being a woman are redistributed to
men.
The incentivizing of women to take on male roles, and the likewise dis-incentivizing of men to pursue those
roles (at least if it would disfavor women were they to), must produce disastrous consequences for civilization. As this particular area of neoreaction is a concentration of mine, I will attempt to be brief in outlining
how feminism is a failure mode.
The ideological issue of civilization comes to this: certain ideas allow society to thrive, and some ideas do
not. If we continue with a social-ideological analysis, in terms of evolutionary selection for memeplexes
that condition the distribution of resources in society, we are left with a very keen social-historical argument
against feminism. Whereas feminism explains the virtual entirety of all civilizations being patriarchal as
simple conspiratorial accident, the patriarchalist suggests that patriarchy is a key ingredient apart from which
civilization fails. Such is a much more satisfying explanation for this element of history than the feminist as
it does not depend upon a statistically improbable distribution of ideology. Civilization and patriarchy have
an almost identical beginning in time, so far as we can tell by history, and no feminist societies have left their
mark on history. Is that a coincidence?
Patriarchy, even certain elements of misogyny, may have an as-yet unrecognized wisdom. The subordination
of women under men, if it is good for society, is good for both men and women. It is a structure which optimizes for the perpetuation of society. Feminism, with its penchant for instilling into more intelligent women
the notion that they must pursue higher education and professional careers, and that children are optional,
tends to have lower rates of reproduction amongst these intellectually advantaged women. This produces
a negative correlation of IQ and procreation, with the result that high intelligence in women is selected out
by the evolutionary pressures of feminism. Rather than leave a lasting genetic legacy, the pursuit of a crude
nihilism is preached to women. This with the high inheritance of intelligence, and future generations are left
with a lower average IQ than their parents. It is dehumanizing and removes the individual from history and,
by extension, the society. A woman should not be praised for material success, for her calling is much more
noble and important.
This may be why no feminist societies have been found until now. Nearer to equilibrium with nature, and
thus more under pressure to remain strict to optimal social structures, what societies abandoned or strayed
from the patriarchal arrangement would have been swiftly overtaken by other societies. The literal enslavement of a people by another nation may have been the result of women refusing to submit or men refusing to
dominate.
Civilization requires a sufficiently low time preference. Tribalism, which involves a mean existence of hand
to mouth has an inordinately high time preference. If not enough people are willing to put off present consumption in order to seek after greater future gains, then capital accumulation dwindles; if not enough capital
is available, greater amounts of production are impossible. Higher levels of civilization can only be reached
by the lowering of time preference. The key question for whether an ideological vagary is beneficial and natural is whether it operates to establish institutions that lower time preference. Those vagaries which dissolve
institutions heighten time preference, diminishing the accumulation of capital and by extension the ability of
a society to sustain its present level of material production.
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Patriarchy may be described not only as the rule of men over women, and their dominating certain spheres
such that female entrance is precluded, but also the rule of fathers. A father by nature is intent on seeing to
it that his children are well-off, and as such he has a low time preference by necessity in order not primarily for his own gain, but for his own childrens gain. This sees the coalescence not only of strong familial
institutions, but the lowering of time preferences as the patriarchal father, in his rule over the distribution of
the familys own material property but its cohering traditions, sees to it that a lasting legacy is prepared for.
Where feminism obviates any focus on the future, patriarchy throws the present far into the future. Such a
lowering of time preferences may be required considering the incredible changes that will be wrought by new
technologies, as will be more extensively detailed below.
Why man rule over woman, and not the other way around? This has to do with the evolutionary advantages
which are individually distributed to men and women on the basis of their procreative contribution. From
the perspective of evolutionary descent, women are far more valuable than men due to the relative expense of
the womb and the relative cheapness of sperm. A man who dies is more easily replaced than a woman would
be. One woman may produce one child every 9 months, while a man could potentially produce multiple
children a day. In the tribal environment where social equilibrium is only just above material sustenance, it is
a much better strategy to risk your men in those situations where someone must be risked, and keep women
relatively safe at home. Evolutionarily, this results in distinct biologies and psychologies between men and
women, as those which align with the strategy of risking men comparatively more than women will outcompete those that do not.
Men should rule because of this. The same reasons which make it advantageous for men to have innately
lower risk-aversion than women make it advantageous to arrange society such that women are safe under
subordination and men are exposed to the dangers of the world. Studies show that women are far more successful than men at reproducing. Taken as distributions, the distribution of success for men is much flatter
than women. Men rule society because there are more of them at the heights of success, but this comes at the
cost of many more men who fail. Women, though they are less likely to be found at the heights of success, are
also much less likely to fail. Women are the average sex, men the exceptional sex.
A return to traditional family models is only obvious in light of this. The claim is not that women are unable
to compete in the workplace, but that the opportunity cost is too great. A woman in the workplace is giving
up far more to be there than a man, and indeed much is also lost for men as a result. Fewer women who are
interested in marrying and having children means that many men, of whom the majority are innately interested in finding a wife and starting a family, must go without. Already it is natural for a minority of men to
succeed in reproducing, to limit the supply of women and degrade the quality of that product by subjecting
these women to the unregulated pursuit of their hypergamic imperative is to push society towards a dangerous disequilibrium. If men are not to be rewarded by their material virtue with social benefits, why should
they strive? In a society such as ours, it is all too easy to get by without producing any great amount. Production and innovation shall fall precipitously when the majority of men realize that women have abandoned
them.
The feminizing of society cannot be recommended. It is simply an unsustainable socioeconomic arrangement. The virtues of both sexes are tapped into by patriarchy, while feminism pits them against each other.
It disrupts the natural complementarity afforded by this natural division of the species which evolution has
otherwise co-opted to take advantage of the economic division of labor. Men and women are innately specialized to different roles, and their respective gender roles and social expectations should reflect that. To
work against that specialization does not merely return us to a borderline of equality, but pushes social product below the levels of profit necessary to perpetuate civilization. Patriarchy is not merely an advantage for
society, it is an essential part. Lose it, and society dissolves. Feminism cannot afford society a sufficiently low
time preference.
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Futurism and the Technologization of Man

The essence of technology is means. As technology will become ever more crucial to new forms of human
living, the blurring of the line between an individual and the technology which allows that individual his
particular existence leads also to the blurring of human end with technological means. Technology shifts the
benefits and costs of certain actions, and inasmuch as it dampens the consequences of certain actions and
introduces new consequences elsewhere, we shall see the rise of new social behaviors predicated on the emergence of those technologies.
The most apt illustration of this in the 20th century is the Pill. The Pill, an oral contraceptive that prevents the
possibility of conception through sexual intercourse, is an essential technological component of the modern
archetypal woman. Where you find that modern woman, you find the Pill. The modern woman is inseparable from the Pill. Her behavior is not merely influenced by it, her behavior requires it.
The power to prevent conception opens new horizons in intersexual relations, such that women may now
freely copulate with any man they feel attracted to, and men may reasonably expect no burden to arise of
their own sexual pursuits. Given the lustful natures of men and women, the lowering of the risk allows what
is otherwise a prohibitively risky behavior to become commonplace and expected. The beasts of nature are
unleashed, and it seems foolish to suggest, considering what was said above in the section on patriarchy, that
the sexual revolution was a liberation, rather than a great catastrophe which has played itself out over these
decades since the introduction of this new technology. The cost of commitment-free sexual intercourse in
previous eras was a dam which held back a river which now threatens to sweep away much that had been
gained by centuries of careful social coordination. Indeed, Pope Paul VI, in an encyclical concerning the
morality of contraception, warned that:
Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church
on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them
first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general
lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to
understand that human beingsand especially the young, who are so exposed to temptationneed incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect
that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may
forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her
to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner
whom he should surround with care and affection.4
Whether or not one agrees with Catholicism on the morality of contraception, one must agree as to the social
effects we are now witness to, including that prototypically Kantian concern over the person being made an
instrument; technological augmentation of the body must be warned against when it instrumentalizes for
the good of another at the expense of the persons own due. Such threatens the cohesion of civilization as a
whole.
The moral of the story is not that technology is an inevitable threat to the flourishing of mankind. Rather,
the moral is this: technology changes man. Biopolitically, the result of widespread contraceptive use will tend
towards its social abolishment, as those who are born are no longer the products of sex which the parents
wouldve preferred not to result in children. A sheer desire for children shall be selected for, and those in society who find themselves without that desire now have at their hands the tools of their demographic suicide.
Evolution is shrewd. Society after the fallout will be better off without these individuals, since they threaten
its very vitality, its very fount of life.
4
Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae. Paragraph 17.
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Every great technological shift offers the allure of pleasurable genetic cessation. Those who partake fail to
have a familial legacy. The internet is a similar evolutionary trap, decreasing the cost of validation but increasing the cost of actual procreative coordination.
The lesson of technology from these examples is that incorporating technology into ones being makes one
a means, and those who make themselves a means fail to have an end. Those without an end do not pass on
their dispositions, genetic and otherwise. Technology at once culls the socially feeble and offers an increase
of coordination; the spool winds tighter, fewer are able to carry on under its pressure.
Why, then, may it seem as though this future history is so long in the making? Prosperity has a downside,
in that it may cover up failure. An organization with lots of capital to spare may continue its operation long
past the point of profitable sustainability, giving an appearance of health, until it collapses when the last is
spent and no returns are incumbent. Technology increases freedom, and as always freedom requires greater
responsibility.
How then do I mean that technology is prosperity, if that technology is something like the Pill? The Pill itself
has virtually no redeeming qualities, from the moral and social-historical perspective, save to remove from
our midst those who cannot appreciate the possibility of a genetic legacy. However, the Pill is but a species
of a more general power that humans have developed, which is the power to alter the human bodys own
chemistry. Now that we may, for instance, artificially produce and inject insulin, diabetes is no longer a fatal
disease. Psychological defects that were the result of chemical imbalances may now be corrected for.
The same may be said of nuclear fission. With it, we may power cities or destroy cities. Such a path lies open
for all new technologies.
What are the technologies of the future? It may be unwise to make a prediction as to what precisely those
shall be, and what their definite social effects may be. Science fiction already goes over innumerable instances of macro-scale social changes wrought by the introduction of new technologies, be they terrestrial or
not. It is inevitable that more technologies shall be introduced in human history, and some will be used for
devastating or highly coordinating effect. The question is how individuals, in response to these technologies,
choose to select themselves, either for genetic legacy or materialistic nihilism.
May not the same be said of the Roman Empire, if we may consider the high political coordination it enjoyed
at its height as a form of technology? Some chose the path of materialistic nihilism, having few or no children and leaving all of society to that group which proclaimed the good of familial duty, the Church. Following social collapses wrought by technology and any other dark ages, the Church shall by its nature be left to
pick up the pieces and put society back together again. Of course, she wont receive praise for this, and those
who are apt to materialistic nihilism will always see her as standing in the way of the progress they desire,
while those in the world who do not envy the fate of the nihilists, which is of course nothingness, the smiting
from history itself in all lasting forms, shall always at least be allied to her holy mission.
The meek shall inherit the earth, and the familial will inherit the future.
In the face of the great risk that technology poses to the perpetuity of the human species, some might seriously contend that it would be an overall benefit to prohibit and ban the development of new technologies.
While such an advocate could freely confess that technology, properly handled, frees the potential of mankind to yet-unseen horizons, it is too great a risk for us to undertake responsibly. Perhaps certain far-away
colonies of humanity could be allowed to develop new technology, in order that ill effects are insulated from
humanity in general, but a base strain of humanity must be kept safe lest all are made extinct. This is pessi25

mistic futurism, which does not tend to have much representation among the futurist strains.
Such an argument cannot be lightly disposed of. As mentioned above, the focus of neoreaction is on the
longer-run. Over a long enough timeframe, the possibility of humanitys extinction at the hands of his
technology seems almost inevitable. Already, the arsenal of nuclear weapons possessed by nations, especially
when those nations are antagonists, threatens civilization so long as man is stuck on Earth. The stories of
science fiction seem instructive. Doomsday scenarios and technological failure modes cannot be fully catalogued, for it seems as though every new technology offers some grave threat.
The problem with such an approach is that, in the attempt to stave off a multiplicity of failure modes, it initiates its own failure mode. What but a comprehensive government program of forcible ennovation could
accomplish this, and what would prevent such a program from putting man down the road to a dark age? It
is clear that such a program would be harmful.
Might it yet be a lesser risk? Better to live in a dark age than to die in a golden age? This we are also not too
certain of. To give up the attempt at cosmic transcendence due to cowardice is to give up the purpose of humankind in the Omega Point. It denies the Catholic faith that God, not man, shall bring on the apocalypse.
It is not mans place to institute armageddon. Whether this is achieved by natural or supernatural catastrophe
or instrumentally through mans own nature is not for us to decide. Man can only live as he shall, and that
must be a place among the stars.
Contrary to the view that technology is a harbinger of the end, there is also the view common in futurists
that the Singularity shall be a salvation of the species by beneficial god-AIs. This is also view which goes to
the other extreme, and is equally soteriological. Let us call this view soteriological singularitarianism, or
salvific futurism for short.
The reasoning in this case is also easy enough to understand. As the level of technology increases, the most
important forms of material scarcity are essentially solved, so that man need no longer suffer from famine,
disease, or poverty. Between godlike AIs and servant robots, all the problems of material production and distribution will eventually be taken care of without the least human strain. This will free man from the burden
of labor so that he may aspire to ever higher heights of creation and understanding, a society of philosopherkings who accept the material comfort as a means of intellectual cultivation.
Such a picture is comforting and, in a sense, realistic. Of course it may be accepted that some, given freedom from labor, will only pursue nihilistic hedonism as an end. As discussed above, such will rapidly select
themselves out of the population, so we are not concerned with that problem. The problem is, however, that
the creation of new technologies, while it may solve certain material requirements, will not solve the essential
problems of the coordination of society. All social issues that stem from the failure to provide a social structure that optimizes for human virtue in the Potent are not solved by the alleviation of material shortcomings.
In fact, material shortcomings has never been a problem for the Potent, so any Singularity, if such were to occur, would not ultimately eliminate the administration of society (in a broad sense) that must be undertaken
by the elite. Technological advances may change the constitution of the Potent, but it does not eliminate the
Potent. As such, salvific futurism, in regards to the question of social structure, is a complete non-starter. It
doesnt hurt to solve the largest problems of scarcity, but it doesnt solve the problem we are looking to answer
for.

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Racism and Biopolitics

Race is a biological reality. It is as certain as the theory of evolution, for the existence of populations within
a species that may be contrasted along racial lines is just a prediction of the theory. To look at the human
species and fail to find the work of evolution would to some degree falsify the theory and embrace a kind
of creationism. Distinct groups of humans have been historically subject to different environmental conditions, and inasmuch as those environments worked distinct selective pressures over those groups, then those
groups shall have contrasting properties. This ought not to be a controversial thesis, for it is only the elementary application of a theory any student of biology ought to be acquainted with.
Yet the willingness of neoreaction to embrace the reality of race and, by extension, biopolitics, has earned it a
most certain spite by modernity, which is ideologically opposed to such a possibility. Why does it upset modernism so? Accepting that people are innately different is compatible with modernism and does not entail
arbitrary difference in treatment, so applying the same reasoning to groups of people ought not to produce
any troubling notions. Yet there is the strange term applied to the scientific study of race, scientific racism,
as though admitting the reality of race beyond social construct is essentially racist. But ones beliefs about
the differences in race does not require any arbitrary difference in treatment, only that there shall tend to be
different treatment on the basis of those innate differences. That isnt racist, unless grouping together individuals by intelligence such that you have the population which is genius and the other which is retarded
where the difference in treatment of those two distinct populations is somehow intelligentist, which doesnt
make sense because the different treatment of those two groups is justified by that difference in intelligence.
It is that such differences, because they are systematically ascertainable by race, shall become entrenched
into the system, and thus better privileges shall accrue to those races that have more innately pro-social and
useful traits, while those races which lack that distribution of beneficial traits shall be systematically treated
with less preference. The modernist fears this, because he implicitly acknowledges that the real difference in
race would justify that different treatment, and thus the whole project of the Enlightenment which seeks to
bring knowledge to all is shown to be elusive. He wants the best for all, but is unwilling to grapple with the
unsettling reality which such differences portend. If a given race is globally inferior, then those individuals unlucky to be born in to that race will be left behind, as there is no place for them within the competitive
institutions of society, be that the market or the family. Society at best may accord them a status of lower
class, with some few exceptional individuals possessing the ability to join the rest, though what few of these
there are shall have less opportunity to prove themselves compared to those individuals from races in which
the possession of those talents makes them merely typical, for it only makes sense to distribute opportunity
to those populations which are statistically more likely able to excel. It is only a simple exercise of statistics
to see that it will always be economically efficient for races with superiority in socially beneficial traits to be
accorded a privileged place in the distribution of opportunity to prove themselves. In other words, the reality
of race and the inevitability of distinct performance within society given equal opportunity would tend to see
the abolishment of equal opportunity, as it simply would not be profitable enough to dredge an inferior race
when less resources will find a number of equally suitable candidates in another race.
The libertarian, implicitly wedded to the modernist myth of the equality of distributed propensities between
the races as he is, offers the argument against the modern liberal that policies such as affirmative action are
unnecessary. Such policies, which are meant to equalize opportunity for historically underrepresented races
by the redistribution of employment opportunities from those races historically perceived to be superior to
those perceived to be inferior, are superfluous to the market mechanism. Assuming equality of productivity
between different races, it would be profitable to target for employment the underrepresented races.
Such an argument is economically sound, but the problem for the libertarian is that he doesnt countenance
what such an argument suggests. If it is found that races remain unequally represented in certain forms of
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employment, then it follows that, per economic science, those races are not equal in productivity.
These realities shall color our prejudices, and indeed it is only rational to do so. The modernist, in the face
of the verifiable reality that evolution does its work on the human species, is apt to call this racism. Some
proudly bear the moniker, though this seems the wrong means of integrating the reality of race to our behavior. If the prejudice is justified, it cant be immoral. Some subtleties of behavior shall have to be introduced,
rather than letting the caricaturized, derogatory term be applied to a behavior it is morally incumbent on us
to adopt.
Prejudice is short for pre-judgment. It does not imply a lack of follow-up judgment on the basis of new information that becomes available. This means that the prejudice is defeasible, i.e. our behavior changes in the
case that it is possible to retrieve the most directly relevant information about the individual. It is in those
cases when such information is not accessible due to the circumstances of life that prejudice shall have to
suffice least one puts themselves at unwarranted risk in order to overcome that prejudice. I have a prejudice
against going on bridges that appear ready to collapse, and I am under no burden to undertake the overriding
of that prejudice by going out on that bridge. Of course it may be that the bridge only appears rickety, but the
assessed benefit of finding out does not outweigh the cost of risk. Appearances may be deceiving, but they
can only ever deceive if they were ever reliable in the first place.
The only advice that may be warranted to those groups which shall have the least advantage under prejudice
is that they ought to do what they can to dissociate themselves from the negative elements of that group by
appearing as members of a respectable caste. A black person in a neat suit who takes the name of Robert and
speaks in fluent Midwestern English shall face very little prejudice compared to a white person who signals
by his own appearance and behavior affiliation with criminal gangs. Race is something, but it isnt everything.
The potential for an individual to pre-emptively defuse happenstance prejudicial associations as it is, it
remains the case that there will be systematic differences in performance, and thus there will be castes, or
classes, distinguished in part not only by income or vocation, but by race. This undermines the modernist
vision of diverse or colorblind selection into organizations into communities, and foretells of extensive selfsegregation like already occurs despite the best efforts of modern states to incentive and enforce integration.
What the modernist takes to be an unmitigated negative, as the dream of truly equal opportunity without
basis in race is smashed upon the rocks of Natures God, the reactionary racist might praise. It is easy to sympathize with such a position. There is, I believe, another take that can be given.
This is a text on ideology, and as such is not exclusively committed to any particular political philosophy.
Though I do indeed have my own philosophy, and there is a general tendency of conservatism amongst
reactionaries, the ideological take, which embraces a pluralistic political shape, has the resources to turn
reality into a benefit. If the reactionary ideological take may be summarized, to distinct groups of people
distinct forms of governance may be optimal. While some forms of government are just set against themselves theoretically (e.g. comprehensive socialism or communism) and so cannot be recommended for any
group of people, there are structures applied from sound political governance which optimize for that societys potential. Note that what is optimal for a society, working from certain givens of resources, prosperity,
level of education, genetic stock, and so on, will not be equal between societies. Facing the reality of race and
its not-yet fully explored affects, the work of political philosophy has much yet to integrate to itself that has
completely evaded the universalism or egalitarianism of thinkers such as Marx, Rawls, or Nozick.
If an example may be proposed: colonialism is not essentially evil. If this conjures uncomfortable images,
suppose the Earth were to be colonized by a benevolent spacefaring species that possesses far more knowledge and resources than the entire globe. It is easy to see that, given the differences between ourselves and
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these extraterrestrials, they might, to their profit and our own depose all presently reigning human governments and institute new bodies of law which, being similar, are yet different from legislative corps we would
choose for ourselves. Given their superior knowledge and experience in the matter, their form of governance
is probably superior to our own. Yes, this defies the democratic virtue of self-governance, but if giving up selfgovernance yields such great rewards, it seems rational to accept such an offer.
Are there issues to the global colonization of our planet by an extraterrestrial species? Undoubtedly. Yet it
is easy to see that, on the balance, colonial governance may render better returns. After all, if the aliens were
to agree with your own general political philosophy and they instituted that for us, you wouldnt be likely to
disagree. Whatever profits they exact out of the relationship, if it makes us better off, there is no reason to not
go along with it.
Optimal governance, given societies which are either racially homogenous or heterogeneous, shall likewise
take distinct forms. And, between the two, it may be that increasing racial homogenization yields higher
returns for one group or both. Or it may be that a certain admixture is optimal, as it allows fewer resources
to be dedicated to the process of distributing opportunities equitably. This is an issue of further discussion,
and I dont have any hypotheses either way as yet. Again, the difference could come down to the particular
society and its level of technology and access to resources. There is no one size fits all solution to politics.
Democratic imperialism, which is the forcible exportation of ones political philosophy to other cultures and
societies, is doomed to failure, and the particularly American form of imperialism we have been witness to
since World War II has only succeeded on the utter ruin and destruction of the society in question. Short of
nuclear annihilation, the imposition of alternative liberal democratic structures of governance shall always
be rejected.

The Values of Capitalism

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. It is, rather, a
deep and principled conservatism wedded to the principles of a trenchant and thoroughgoing social analysis.
Whereas libertarianism may be practically identified with a branch of economics, be that the Austrian, Chicago, or some other sympathetic school, conservatives have a view on the economy which flows from normative premises and accepts the best economics for getting the preferred outcome. The normative premise of
libertarian economics is the preference for utility and efficiency are above all other potential outcomes. The
strict separation of economy and society under the libertarian view holds that all values are determined in
society, and the economy only maximizes for distributing on the basis of those preferences. There is a lack of
openness to effects on culture, order, and civilization in general, the notion apparently being that if a society
wants to die, the market ought to maximize for that preference just as it might any other preference.
Given this, we might level an attack at the system of capitalism in the sense that efficient market outcomes are
not always equitable. This is especially likely to occur if other elements of society are disrupted from coordination, i.e. social institutions, in which the resultant economic maximization for preferences within such a
limited sphere overlook the loss of civilizational sustainability.
For that, the focus of libertarians on the economy is not misdirected, only insufficient. The economy and
society, inasmuch as one might like to distinguish between the two, have fuzzy boundaries. Corporate culture is a clear example of the overlap. The existence of the economic space engenders social construction of
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a particular kind which wouldnt exist without that particular economic space. Economy influences society,
which libertarians appear reticent to admit, as though market negotiations really did occur in the abstract
axiomatic space of economic though experiments, without reference to the obligations an individual owes
or prefers to institutions or the way in which economic competition may alternately support and sever such
relationships between individuals and institutions.
The critique of capitalism that it is too efficient, in that it allows a social race to the bottom in the production of mass culture for mass man is correct in mechanism. However, given the foregoing in the section
on futurism, this must be admitted as a double effect. There are some who, given the opportunity to annihilate their person in decadent, endless entertainment, will go ahead and do so; enabling excellence brings with
it the danger of enabling sloth. It is pointless to remain frustrated over this. The shadows in the cave will
always remain alluring to some nihilists. We can only be grateful to perceive a higher sphere of human living.
We are able to simultaneously grant the critique of mass culture while cleaving to capitalism, for the good
it achieves is the good of the Potent. The values that allow capitalism to operate and the application of talent and skill therein may manifest mass mans depravity but it equally manifests the excellence of the best. If
anything, we should prefer a more clear and obvious stratification of society, so that those who seek after the
good may filter out those who seek out degradation. Allowing mass man, who was always with us and only
became more clearly observed with capitalistic prosperity, to select himself out allows the best to more easily
select themselves in.
What is capitalism, and what are its values? There tend to be two popular and competing definitions between
scholars. I am not concerning myself with the popular take, or mass mans take, for mass mans take is itself
a commodity marketed and sold as opiates or psychological compensation for unwillingness to succeed.
Economists would define capitalism in terms of pure economic freedom. Capitalism, under this definition,
is just unrestrained trade.
The other definition is more focused on the makeup of the market rather than its condition. This definition
holds capitalism to be the private ownership of the means of production.
Inasmuch as one holds to the first definition, it seems clear that the content of the second definition follow,
for under pure economic freedom there would be no compulsion to fund public means of production. There
may be communes which hold ownership in common, but it would be noted that such a structure remains
technically corporate, for it would be impossible for them to freely rent out the use of the communes own
resources to freeloaders lest the commune immediately have its resources stripped from it by those who do
not share its vision. Given the first definition, the state of affairs named in the second definition follows by
necessity.
What counts as capitalism is extremely broad, and may be hard to express positively. The quickest negative
definition would be that capitalism holds provided intervention into social and economic transactions by the
use or threat of force (coercion) is entirely negated. The positive definition in respect of that is capitalism is
wherever exchange takes place by the free will of all parties.
But this is dubious. Given the existence of the state, capitalism holds only in those spheres of the economy
free of regulation; but as all spheres are technically under the purview of the state (by definition), then the
potential of intervention, inasmuch as it is considered the right or just power of the state to do so, suffices as
the threat of violence. It follows that capitalism could not exist under statism, for all individuals are to some
degrees slaves and their exchanges between each other and their master/s are under coercive restraint.

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Furthermore, the libertarian treatment of coercion as though it does not hold to economic analysis is simply incorrect. Coercion and subordination under its pressure follows everything economics predicts about
all other forms of exchange. The introduction of coercion and the promise to not exact its threat is a kind
of contract the individual takes up, and is binding as well as any other contracts may be bound. There is no
reason to suppose that an individual who would coerce may not also keep promises, making him equally
susceptible to market analysis. How does the coercer not become coerced? By making the deal of allowing
his coercion rather than anothers tasteful in that he prevents the coercion of others on that coerced individual. The better he keeps his word about preventing unexpected and indeterminate coercion by others, the
coercion which is subject to regularity of occurrence would ultimately serve to lower time preferences, if the
coercion does actually prevent more coercion from happening than would otherwise.
Libertarians and moral anarchists are uncomfortable with this, yet such is clearly possible at the micro and
macro scale. If I could at the micro level coerce another into not coercing, my use of coercion is preferable
to society, since my act of coercion only upsets a force which wouldve been more broadly destructive of the
coordination which takes place in the economy. My act of coercion does not intrinsically heighten time preference, except among similar criminals.
However, this salvaging of coercion as a just act in society brings a caveat that statists are also uncomfortable with, or at least seem reticent to admit as a possibility. If the good of the states coercion is that it at least
regularizes the macroscale coercion which occurs, allowing time preferences to lower, then it also follows
that at a sufficiently low time preference, the state becomes unnecessary to regulating macroscale coercion, as
the economic mechanisms which seek to enable the regulation of economic disruptions would supersede the
power of the state. This is, in a sense, to say that the market would eventually internalize the problem regulating for coercion and the enforcing of contracts, since the arrival of institutions which depend intrinsically
on long term regularity (e.g. banks, financial institutions, and other institution-supporting institutions) find it
in their interest to compete in the service of regulating macroscale coercion. Even the state is ultimately dependent on other institutions. Institutions have lower time preferences than individuals by necessity (as they
subsist over generations, i.e. are constituted by individuals who derive higher time preference goals within its
structure), and so institutions which are essential to supporting other institutions must have even lower time
preferences than those institutions, for those institutions derive their (relatively) higher time preference goals
within the structure of that institution. So on up; if the state is dependent for its efficient operation on other
institutions (e.g. banks; central banks are an example of such, albeit in a comprehensively coercive form),
then it becomes worthwhile for the affairs of states as customers of these institutions to have the macroscale
coercion environment it finds itself within, as states are in a state of anarchy with respect to each other, to be
even better regulated than the state is capable of.
Why is there a limit to the states efficiency in regulating macroscale aggression? As a simple matter of economics, the states dependence on coercion handicaps it in more efficiently regulating macroscale aggression.
While a business which is able to effectively extort profit need not have as high quality a product as another
business which is unable to, a business entity such as government which is only able to regulate macroscale
aggression to such a degree will ultimately be undone by the macroscale aggression it is unable to regulate
due to its separation from the strictures of market. A business dependent for its sustenance solely on the free
will exchange of its customers with itself has a direct feed on the efficiency and efficacy of its operation, while
a business not solely dependent on the free will exchange of its customers will not. As such, when society
changes, government is less likely to keep up. Those institutions which will support it, seeing this, will choose
to take on the job of regulation of macroscale aggression for itself, superseding the governments authority
in a sense while also producing more efficient results, making the government obsolete. Governments last,
on average, a frightfully short time. A government lasting longer than a century is the exception rather than
the rule, and the institutions that support government would eventually prefer a more reliable customer that
doesnt tend to fall to pieces following the mis-exercise of its own power. The government, being dependent
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on these institutions, but not being a necessary customer to these institutions, shall wither away and its legacy
likely borne in a common-like body of law over the territory it once ruled.
The effect of this is that it does not make sense so much to be pro-capitalist as not anti-capitalist. The
neoreactionary view of institutions, as has been and will be further expounded upon, is where the focus on
capitalism comes in. Given the right institutions, capitalism is a force which produces much good, because it
produces much good for those institutions. Have corrupted institutions, and capitalism produces much good
for those institutions, which ultimately is to the disadvantage of society. As such, Is capitalism good? depends fundamentally on whether the institutional makeup of society is sustainable, especially in the sense of
whether it incentivizes the lowering of time preferences over time. Capitalism is subsidiary to the functioning of society. It is taken as a given that it is economically efficient and socialism cannot produce sustainable
growth for society, though the real evil occurs in that socialism erodes the natural hierarchy as it is facilitated
by institutions by dis-incentivizing the reliance of individuals on natural institutions. These effects will be
explored further in the section on anarchism.

Monarchy, Politics, and Economy

Slavery is a limited form of statism. Conversely, statism is a distributed form of slavery. The effect of this is
not that statism is evil in itself, nor that slavery is evil in itself. Rather, it fulfills the dictum that master and
slave is not a binary, but a continuum. This is only the upshot of all that has been said previously about hierarchy, and how it binds individuals to obligations to each other and themselves. The sovereign, or master, is
the only individual in society without obligation imposed upon him from above, making him free from any
sense of slavery; likewise, the lowliest individual who rules over none possesses no sovereignty.
This assumes an equal sense of monolithicism to monarchism, which isnt actually the case. Hierarchy is
polycentric; he who rules in one sense may be required to serve in another. All are servants of the king, yet
the king is (ideally) the servant of the people. The kings service to the people lies in regulating macroscale
aggression and preventing society from falling into stagnation by the adoption of modernist policies. He
might not fulfill this calling, in which case others have no obligation to respect him as king.
Why the reactionarys preference for monarchism? It is led by two factors; the displeasure of a democratic
people and the incentives of the noble estate.
Democracy politicizes society and makes all citizens a part of the process, at least theoretically. Inasmuch as
the process is effectively democratic, policies must be populist in reflecting the misguided desires of the mass.
The supposition that the average man knows enough to exercise his right to vote responsibly is laughable.
The legendary remark of Churchill that the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation
with the average voter holds to far greater effect than advocates of democracy are willing to submit. Given
not only the vast ignorance but the incentive to be ignorant about ones voting, it is no wonder voting quickly
becomes split along demographic lines, with those groups which foolishly vote not in their own interest but
the interest of the common good being cannibalized by those more clannish groups willing to express their
self-interest through politics. The relative corporate-mindedness of the average North European settler of
the American colony may have allowed democracy to operate for a far longer time without falling into low
intensity civil warfare between classes and groups, but give the democratic process to societies which exhibit
higher levels of clannishness and you see the split take place almost immediately. This is why the imperialist
project of bringing democracy to the Arabic peoples, who are highly clannish compared to those of European
descent, has the result of groups coercing others through the ballot box.
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In other words, the vote is a means of warfare, as it entails the enforcing of one groups vision for society on
the other who dissented. Failing to utilize it as such, as one may keep a gun without the intent of murder,
does not mean it doesnt have that potential effect. Just because it is given with the intent that is used a certain way does not make it happen that way. Ergo, the liberal belief that giving people the franchise in politics
will make them adopt it with a commitment to voting fairly or in the best interests of society rather than
mean self-interest is a radical failure to recognize the potential for abuse. This with the liberal commitment
that certain groups simply do not abuse privileges they are given, unearned, leads to the tendency of expanding the franchise to those groups which are specifically not corporate minded.
Could democracy work if the liberal commitment could be prevented? Perhaps for a longer time. The problem is that the liberal commitment appears to be the reason to have democracy. If it were true, democracy
would be reliable. But it is false. Inasmuch as it is false, it is proper to limit the franchise. This leads only to
the conclusion that democracy can be effective insofar as it is limited to those groups higher in the hierarchy,
which not only resembles a monarchical system, but so much as it is more effective, proves the greater effectiveness if one stripped even this narrow group of franchise and made political involvement dependent on
heritability. Such would be a de facto monarchical government.
What are the advantages of a monarchical system of governance over a democratic system? The first is that
a monarch must have a lower time preference than democratic representatives of the people. As the representatives are always under the potential to have their power revoked in the next election, it is incumbent on
them to accomplish as much as they will as quickly as possible, without care for whether it is most efficient in
the long run. Furthermore, that they will not be left to inherit the costs of the benefits they amass for themselves and their constituents, at least not inherited to anyone they have a particular care for, it follows that
they stand under even less incentive to promote sustainable models of governance than would an ordinary
household in managing its own affairs. Democracy rewards short-sightedness and punishes advocacy of
socially sustainable policy.
The monarchical system of government, in other words, imposes the incentives that hold for a patriarch of a
household on the ruler and so, what preference men naturally have to plan for their estate beyond the duration of their own lifetime is vested in the king in the act of ruling his people. The government as privately
owned estate is under the incentive to be managed as an estate, lowering the time preference of rulers in the
same way that patriarchy does for estates in general. Not only is the king under the incentive to keep government running efficiently over the course of his rule, which can last for decades, but he has the incentive to
bequeath a sustainable model of governance to his children, as well as raising his children with the vocation
of rule in mind.
The benefits of monarchy being clear to reactionaries, there remains a question of how it should arise again
within modern society. There is actually a very simple means of amassing power to an estate with the effect
of instituting a monarchical form of governance. The only difficulty would be the dissolution of democratic
state power over a territory, but if we may assume such an opportunity to arise, either through the democratic
states mismanagement and resultant need to sell or give up some territory or the outright forcible conquest,
then the incentives in that territory to have an effective king should make such a monarchy arise.
The continuum of slavery to sovereignty makes it that it is mutually advantageous for individuals of disparate
opportunity, due to any accident of birth, to exchange with each other in a servant-master relationship. Lest
any confusion persist due to modernist misinformation, slavery is not an intrinsically oppressive institution, nor is slavery equivalent to the actual ownership of individuals in the sense of property. Slavery is a
kind of employment, albeit one which comes with greater restrictions on an individuals liberty than those
forms of employment (by a master) that allow a greater freedom of movement in society. All forms of employment require some subordination of ones choices to that work, for otherwise the conditions that allow
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the work to be done should not be obtained. I must at least give up my time and the opportunity of living in
another place if I were to continue my employment at some specific businesses. Hence slavery is by degree,
with the lowliest slaves being those who must give up the greatest amount of freedom in order to have sustainable employment.
Under modernist rhetoric, selling oneself into slavery is a great sin, but under the use of the word found here,
slave is the most terminologically apt for, while it circumvents the modernist tradition, it is placed within a
much more comprehensive and pre-modern tradition of thought about the relationship between employees
and their employers. Selling ones labor is a kind of selling of oneself, and so inasmuch as we consider selling
oneself a kind of slavery, we must conclude that whoever sells his labor to another is a slave to some degree.
While there will always be classes, and so some classes will be more obviously slaves than others, that one has
a less burdensome chain does not mean he isnt a slave.
By this, slavery is no evil, but a means of virtue for many individuals. Those who lack the capability of mastery and unrestricted self-determination (i.e. can use their freedom to their and their familys sustainable
benefit) are better off under this kind of slavery, as it allows those decisions to be made by one wiser. Both
the master and the slave profit by the relationship they form. Were it otherwise, no one should agree to be a
master or slave.
Is it better to be a master? Yes, but only if one has the ability. To he who has the ability, he should have it.
Within the framework of continuum between slave and sovereign, the sovereign becomes the one with the
most power to enforce his will over his subjects. His subjects become the distributed corps of individuals and institutions which ultimately owe their fealty to the king, even if not directly but in an indirect form,
much as an employee may be ruled by a manager who is ruled by an executive. This gives two means for the
establishment of monarchism within a free territory, though it is likely both would be in effect.
The first is that de facto wage and debt slaves may sell off the right to quit in making a contract, placing him
at a legally disadvantaged position qua the buyer of the contract. Why should an individual expose himself
to so much risk? Certainly defaulting on the loans would be less costly than making oneself without legal
recourse should the contract buyer choose to extort his legally indentured servants. An individual could
develop a reputation as a just and wise ruler of his subjects, making submission to a king under a quasi- or
outright feudal arrangement potentially preferable to eking out a life of poverty under the crushing cycle of
not being able to save enough. The ruler, in guiding the life of his new subject, provides the service of freeing
the individual in one way at the cost of another liberty, an exchange which is very potentially equitable if it
makes one relatively prosperous.
The second is that of businesses which employ many can choose to be institutions which support a state
institution. Such may come with guild privileges and the like, if the king chooses to grant them, or they
may come in the establishing of legal privileges for business institutions unique from personal individuals. I
imagine the second path more likely, though the first is a time tested, if economically less efficient, means of
vesting market power in a ruler.
Both means would consolidate power which, assuming a number of such individuals within an area prefer
to form a peaceable kind of quasi-oligarchy or aristocratic nobility, could very easily establish a de facto king
with inherited political privilege and the closing of politics to all who are employed within the codified hierarchy.
Given the possibility of a collapse of democratic forms of government and the incentives which society faces
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in such a new power vacuum, it is likely that the change to monarchical governance would be swift, within
only a few generations, with the democratic past looked upon as a bizarre aberration of human history.

Anarcho-Institutionalism
The topic and idea of anarchism is typically unclear in culture and, considering all I have said which is apparently in favor of government or more broadly governance, it is incumbent that I make a number of clarifications about what anarchism is before I can go on to show how it coheres under the neoreactionary ideology.
Foremost among these is that anarchism means nothing more than the lack of a government. Unless otherwise qualified (as the section title is), the advocacy of anarchism does not necessarily entail the advocacy of
social dissolution and chaos. Anarchism is compatible with virtually everything said before and after this
section, though it does require the willingness to see that governance is not equivalent to government within
an hierarchical system. An institution may govern without being a government.
Nor shall this be a thorough defense of anarchism; I leave that to other works already written and being written. Like all other written here in this essay, the purpose of expository more than argumentative, the coalescing of ideas and placing them under an ideological interpretation.
If anarchism is but the absence of government, then we require a good definition of government. I will augment a common definition for the purposes of this paper, giving us that government is the social institution
which is held by society to have a just monopoly on the just use of violence within that society. This definition allows us to see that fulfilling the actions that governments have historically fulfilled does not make an
institution a government. A mail service can exist without making any monopolized pronouncements on
what constitutes the just use of force, and so can those organizations dedicated to enforcing and servicing
laws. Government in this way becomes identified not with its enforcers, but its unchallenged claim to be
the only rightful authority for adjudicating disputes over past or potential future use of force.
All abuses of government in the regulation of macroscale aggression in society come down to a complicit
judicial system, for the judicial system is the ultimate authority in discerning whether a law is just. While under constitutional forms of government the theory is that the judicial branch upholds the constitution which
authorizes it, in reality the constitution is upheld by the judicial branch, rather than the other way around;
what the judicial branch decides as being the canon of meta-laws on which judgment is pronounced for the
justice of laws (of which all laws are effectively about the just use of force applied to specific contexts, means,
and ends) becomes the content-source for making decisions by the judges. If the judges reject a particular
source, that source lacks all effect, and it cannot be imposed on them by a legislative branch, since the workings of the legislative branch ultimately hinge on whether the judicial branch approves of what they do. An
ousting of the judicial branch could be effected as in a coup dtat, but then the military government in this
case simply assumes itself that authority which the previous judicial branch took on.
This use of branches may seem akin to the division of powers accomplished by the US Constitution, and
indeed it is. The Founding Fathers in utilizing explicit branches of government were merely codifying an observation of how power has always effectively worked in governments, with the notion that it was to prevent
a concentration of power an elusive intention. In reality, the US Supreme Court ultimately approved its own
authority and its source in the US Constitution, bootstrapping itself to ultimate rule over the just use of force
within society with the support of a legislative-executive body (I will note that under my description of government, the legislative and executive bodies are distributed on a continuum, sometimes even identical).

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As government must be formally identified with this monopoly over the judicially-approved use of force in
society, then anarchism amounts at least to the dissolution of this monopoly. There may still be judiciallyapproved use of force and the regulation of macroscale aggression without an individual judge or justice
organization arrogating to itself the right to prevent others from providing these services. A polycentric and/
or common body of law may be developed to adjudicate relations between individuals where force is rightly
or wrongly introduced.
This depends crucially on a level of trust between otherwise competing justice organizations. Why should
there be trust and mutually enforced contracts between separate legal entities? Why not go to war in order to
establish monopoly? The problem primarily comes down to the matter of cost. Institutions are incentivized
to form because they provide the possibility to coordinate for group benefits, and this involves the cooperation of individuals who always face the chance to gain at the expense of other individuals, with this only
becoming a greater incentive the greater the trust that is required. In order to signal that one is trustworthy,
generally contracts and arrangements are made so that success and failure are mutually tied together, so
that intra-institutional competition is minimized except where it may be applied to one of its specific goals.
Coming to agreements beforehand with each other about how disputes shall be arraigned within this context
minimizes the cost of conflict in the case that it does arise, and while such agreement to have disputes subjected to an objective process may involve the sacrificing of short term gain, it is to the overall benefit in the
long run as it means even those resources given up in the short run will be recovered in the long run by not
needing to be spent on forcible means of dispute resolution.
This being the case, separate legal, military, and insurance organizations (which may be manifest as separate
or composite institutions) have the incentive to make arrangements with each other that subjects disputes
between each other to an agreed upon process so that the cost of conflict is minimized. To put it very briefly,
when an insurance organization representing a customer handles a dispute with the customer of another
insurance organization, those organizations have the incentive to have agreed upon procedures for resolving
their disputes. As this is the more-likely profitable model in the long run, the opportunity for an individual
to buy conflict is minimized, as all legitimate insurance organizations have the incentive to not offer the
service of defending their customers crimes and to prevent other organizations from operating that refuse
to agree to arrange means of dispute resolution. The crime business, considered as the service of keeping an
individual from suffering for the consequences of their crimes, will still exist much as it does now, though it
will also be considered illegitimate by all legitimate security organizations within society, minimizing their
anti-social effect.
Anarchism must operate, in other words, on the basis of institutions which limit the range of anti-social actions that may be undertaken by individuals and organizations and which require arranged means of dispute
resolution. Without institutions, there is no context for individuals in society to be placed under the incentive to involve themselves with these dispute resolution centers. But as institutions codify hierarchy and limit
what it is possible for an individual to do in terms of anti-social action, society may stabilize under the quasioligarchic, rather than monopolistic, regulation of macroscale aggression.
Oligarchic legal organizations rather than monopolistic legal organizations have lesser incentive to extort
from society the provision of funds, since the attempt to extort such funds can always be met by a cabal of
organizations that have it in their interest to prevent any attempts at grabbing all the power for oneself. What
society faces under government is altogether lessened; power is organized more on the basis of pro-social services rather than anti-social destruction. Assuming that civilization does not fall into or remain in a failure
mode, this is the arrangement of society which will take place, which I give the name anarcho-institutionalism.
The monopoly government holds over the regulation of macroscale aggression allows it to partake in its own
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forms of macroscale aggression, which systematically results in the dissolution of social institutions. It furthermore has the incentive to do this, for in the resultant dissolution of a kind of institution (e.g. the family)
the vacuum of social services previously fulfilled by that institution must be undertaken by the government.
In the very process of triggering the failures of institutions at providing their intended ends, the government
is able to arrogate to itself those powers, with the only limit being that of time and technology for how pervasive may its administrative dissolution of institutions may go.
The government is an essentially anti-social institution, in that its ends are primarily anti-social. The use of
force, or coercion, is by definition anti-social. This is not to argue that anti-social causes are unjustifiable,
for the dissolution of an organization that has negative production for society is overall positive. However,
where there is the incentive to gain power in the destruction of other bastions of power, the subtle shifting of
incentives so that individuals have less opportunity or means or reasons to form non-governmental institutions which administrate particular kinds of governance, such as the raising and educating of children, the
resolution of disputes, the distribution of material goods, and so on, and instead the government becomes
the center of all social activity. This produces what has been variously called the welfare-warfare state, social democratic communism, and statism. I will call this phenomena the State-Society, for the boundaries
between state-political participation in society and mere participation in society becomes fraught. Social
action eventually just is politics, the ultimate democratization of all social structures so that what politics may
intervene on is unlimited and the state enjoys truly absolute power over every facet of society.
An example of the states encroachment and dissolution of non-political spheres of society. The American
policy of social security, which is the public provision of compensation to retirees, works to dissolve the family by incentivizing less investment by parents in their children in the forming of family legacies and traditions. If an individual knows that his welfare past the age of employability is not dependent on his children,
it becomes less important to invest in instilling into his children the good of caring for ones parents and the
virtues that would allow the child to be materially successful to that end. While the clan may have previously
taken on the primary responsibility of caring for its elders, the state in taking on this responsibility dissolves
the binds that tied together the family.
And that is only one example of state policy which leads to the dissolution of institutions in society. What
was previously the primacy of society becomes the primacy of the state, so that individuals are more invested
in the state ultimately. This only serves to increase the power of the state and its ability to further dissolve
other institutions in which power (due to the dependency of individuals on these institutions for their livelihood) is reserved, aggregating it all to itself. Thus the State-Society which, being collectivist politically results
in social atomization. There is lesser opportunity at all to form relations of mutual will and civilization must
cease to develop to further levels. Individuals are set against each other; all relations outside that of statemediated society are constructed to be antagonistic, the proliferation of prisoners dilemmas.
The eventual obsolescence of the state is ideal then because it is required if institutions are to continue. An
aspirational anarchism takes place; while the material of a society may not be advanced enough to achieve a
distributed form of the regulation of macroscale aggression, the handicapping of the state becomes an essential element of political philosophy so that, in the failure of the state in providing for some service, social
institutions form to provide that service and contextualize the benefits for society of these sophisticated
instances of organization. The ultimate hope is not in the right state but the right institutional structure of
society.

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Cosmopolitanism and Ethno-Nationalism

The reactionary take on nationalism is pragmatic rather than deontic. To use popular language, it embraces
nationalism due to practicalities rather than ideology, though of course my use of ideology in this essay is
quite distinct, so I will explain it in terms of pragmatism over deontology.
Nationalism is meant not in the sense of state, so it would be unsound to identify nationalism as a fervor
in favor of a particular government; there are nationalistic governments, and then there are cosmopolitan
governments. Nationalism is defined in terms of ethnicity, and is the favoring of fewer distinct ethnic groups
within a given society. Segregation between distinct ethnicities of differing cultural mores and innate psychologies is more nationalistic as compared with a melting pot which has some or many different ethnic
individuals being integrated, either voluntarily or by force, with the result of social tension or assimilation.
Cosmopolitanism by contrast is the integration of many ethnic groups together.
Favoring nationalism is not supremacist per se. It is only to stipulate that likes ought to be around other
likes; the more that people within a group are like each other, the fewer psychic and social resources must be
dedicated to the development of Schelling points that provide for social coordination between relatively unlike people. The more two individuals are alike in ethnicity, then the more alike in innate psychology those
individuals are; granted there is the distribution of psychological traits along a multidimensional axis, but
within a group there is a more tightly correlated average, rather than having multiple groups, each with its
own average, attempting to cohere along a flatter distribution of psychological traits.
To put it most simply, nationalism has an advantage over cosmopolitanism because it allows for the coordination of institutional ventures between individuals more easily. The more people within a population that are
alike, the easier it is to empathize, which means it is easier to negotiate, to trade, to exchange, to interact, to
resolve disputes. The more a person is an other, the less that is known, the harder it is to empathize, the harder it is to resolve to instances of common cause. Cosmopolitanism requires additional resources, additional
institutions in order to facilitate peaceable cooperation between potentially radically different psychologies
that differ along ethnic lines. Securing in-group empathy is easier to do if youre already ethnically equivalent with the other; if youre not, then other means must be secured to establish in-group empathy which
must be admitted as an additional cost.
Nationalism is identified not so much with ethnocentrism as a preference for ethnic segregation by those
ethnic groups themselves. Given an environment in which integration is not incentivized by various means,
be they statist (in which case they are coercive) or natural (likely the city, for reasons to be explained shortly).
White nationalism and black nationalism do not depend essentially on any claims to supremacy, even if it
would be easy to understand that such forces may be motivated by a misguided notion of supremacy (which I
will not rule out even if I do not know how supremacy could be established). It is taken as a given that people
prefer to be around others more like themselves rather than others more unlike themselves, which leads to
the natural tendency of communities to segregate themselves by race, class, and history, with integration being a cost undertaken for other benefits rather than being sought out for itself.
Cosmopolitanism as a contrast involves integration. Integration is a social phenomenon that is not costless,
which is to say that some things must be given up in order to gain it. Integration, performed successfully, can
have very great benefits, but this integration must be based on mutual ends sought by individuals from both
communities; otherwise, if they want nothing to do with each other, they cannot be made to want to do anything with each other and will resist forcible integration, increasing social tension, racism, and other negative
social phenomena.

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It is the anecdotal experience of many that those who are least racist tend to live in highly segregated communities, e.g. white suburban neighborhoods with low presence of minorities, while those who are most
racist are those who live in communities with higher rates of integration. Why does this occur? It occurs for
a very simple reason. What individuals of an ethnic group are most likely to find preferable and thus understandable behavior isnt equivalent between groups, which leads to behaviors that some groups find acceptable to be odious among other groups. Some groups which have a higher innate preference for antagonism
for out-groups will act in ways that are unpleasant to groups that have a lower innate preference for antagonism of out-groups. Whites, who appear to be more corporate-minded, are less innately racist in the sense
that being a member of another group is not usually taken as grounds for antagonism to obtain social proof
for ones in-group. Blacks, on the other hand, may have a high preference for antagonism as social proof of
in-group sentiment, which leads them to being more innately racist and less pleasant to whites, with higher
rates of anti-white crime and anti-social behavior at the extremes of this tendency. Allowed to segregate from
each other, each group is confronted less with those behaviors the other finds odious. A solution to racism,
in other words, is to stop forcing integration, as if it is being around each other which necessarily leads to empathy rather than mutual antagonism as they disagree with each others use of mutual space. In other words,
racism has more utility in an integrated culture. Allow segregation, a lot of the grounds of racism disappear.
Given that cosmopolitanism faces certain costs which a more nationalistic community, why ever would a
community or population be more cosmopolitan? Cosmopolitanism likewise has its own benefits which
nationalism cannot secure. Given a difference in aptitude to various skills and preferences by distinct ethnic
groups, there is an advantage to trade between the groups as it utilizes the division of labor along the lines of
absolute and comparative advantages. Some of these instances of comparative advantage may be asymmetric,
some may be vocationally equivalent. We might suppose that autists are innately best at programming while
extroverts are best at public relations; it then becomes advantageous for them to overcome the natural level
of antagonism in order to take advantage of a vocationally equivalent comparative advantage. On the other
hand, races of low intelligence may be systematically more likely to take on service vocations, freeing up more
individuals from smarter races to partake in information vocations; rather than one group being subjected by
the other due to forcible integration, integration under the common cause of mutual benefit actually serves
to facilitate empathy. Integration occurs, in other words, due to the common cause certain groups have, with
the result of incentivizing lower innate and behavioral antagonism to out-groups.
This analysis is removed from moralizing, amounting to no more than sociological observation tied to realistic consequences of these facts. There is a bounty of evidence demonstrating innate out-group antagonistic
tendencies. On the other hand, there is no necessary moral good in going beyond ones own innate biases
to integrate oneself with those of other groups. There is a very real danger in comingling with groups one
doesnt know anything about, so the bias to stick to ones own kind, including their own genetic kind, is an
effective and rationally defensible coping mechanism for the uncertainties of life. Likewise, for those who are
able to find profit in mingling with other groups, then that is their profit. There is however no intrinsic good
or evil either way about ones innate nationalistic or cosmopolitan psychological makeup. Some people just
prefer the rural lifestyle and some people just prefer the city lifestyle. It is a preference no more significant
than liking chocolate over vanilla, or vice versa.
What people are worried about, and so emphasize their anti-racist beliefs as compensation, is that some
peoples lack of preference or at least high tolerance for people of other groups leads to racism. Taking people
outside of an environment in which they are perpetually told how other groups are just as good as theirs and
that the experience of others is legitimate, so the worry goes, and allow them to place themselves in environments where there is no pressure to signal anti-racist beliefs will make them actually racist, with attendant
oppression of those groups in that persons action. This overlooks that being forcibly integrated in addition to
being told that your finding the behaviors of other groups odious makes you a bad person is just more likely
to make a person tune out reasonable anti-racist messages. The notion that only white people can be racist,
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or at least that the innate racism of other groups is acceptable and understandable whereas the bland racism
of whites is not, is typically understood as a preposterous notion foisted on integrated whites by self-segregated whites who deny the legitimacy of interaction with the odious behaviors of other groups.
The suggestion is less that racism can be solved by any single means, if there is anything that can be done to
entirely eliminate it, but that it isnt improved by denying the legitimacy of differing opinions about the behaviors of other groups. There will be clashes between cultures, and if you have only as many contact points
between different cultures facilitated by actual common cause (e.g. business as I expect in most cases) rather
than manufactured interaction with the purpose of forcing to appreciate something they have no disposition
towards, and implicitly denying the validity of white identity and culture compared to others, this is no solution to racism, but the identification of the problem of racism with a scapegoat group (i.e. whites) is certainly
only a redirection of that racism.
Some more radical factions with neoreaction may have worries over my unwillingness to defend outright
racism, rather than mere racial realism and rational prejudices. I am perhaps more optimistic that, given a
lack of forcible integration, some level of integration between those who are willing may be allowed. Distinct
cultures and ethnicities possess legitimate experiences and predispositions which may be usefully evaluated,
even potentially adopted. As supposed above, I imagine these will be in the cities, which will be more cosmopolitan, which may be considered a hierarchy between those more disposed to nationalist (in my sense)
communities and those more disposed to cosmopolitan life.
This is not on the basis of a live and let live mentality, as is found in the rightly criticized modern libertarianism, but to draw out alternative and competing goods. Nationalism and cosmopolitanism each possess
various benefits not available to the other, and to those who are able to obtain them, they should be free to do
so. The opposition is to neither self-segregation or self-integration, but forcible segregation and forcible integration. Both are the same kind of mistake. Ethnic identities come in various flavors, with some being more
nationalist and some more cosmopolitan. Assuming the legitimacy of divergent ethnic experiences, there is
nothing that should stop groups mingling together or dispersing as they see fit.
Such a view brings the forcible colonization of other cultures into question. Even if is the case that the
colonized culture is better off for it, a softer form of colonization, predicated on the basis of mutually chosen
exchange, is preferable in that it is less destructive of cultivated traditions in the colonized culture. Given the
traditions being replaced are inferior to the imported cultural manifestations of tradition, the free integration
of a mutually exchanged culture is more likely to produce sustainable traditions, in the establishment of new
institutions and their own traditions and the augmenting of pre-existent traditions to a form more adaptable
to the new cultural context.

Tradition and the Return of Christendom

Religion is a useful vehicle of social engineering. Its cosmology, its prescriptions and proscriptions, its accumulation of power in elitist institutions (e.g. the Vatican), these all tend to make it poised to provide a readymade and persistently defended worldview which results in a greater potential degree of social coordination.
Pro-social morals couched in mythological and religious language led to the rise of civilization, and virtually all comprehensive social movements partake of a religious soteriological posture. Religious institutions
which last over time must provide evolutionary benefits to its adherents, and their focus on eternity instills
the lowest average time preference compared to other institutions. This leads to extremely sophisticated
structures of governance that allows it to ride out centuries-long periods of decline, even allowing it a high
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likelihood of surviving complete social collapse, as witnessed with the Roman Catholic Church in the West
following the decline of the Roman Empire.
Christendom of course refers to the superstructural makeup of Medieval Europe; in other words, it is the
Catholic Middle Ages equivalent to the modern American Cathedral. The proposal by traditionalists to
return a higher degree of moral power to the institution of the Church is an embrace of the means of the
Cathedral. Some are wary of supporting another superstructure, but this occurs under the mistaken assumptions that superstructures are necessarily negative for society and that a highly coordinated level of social
capital can occur without a superstructure. There would be others who prefer a secular, albeit reactionary,
superstructure.
My answer to the latter group is brief: religious institutions such as the Catholic Church lower the overall
time preference of civilization. Not only are the religious institutions themselves remarkably future-oriented,
but they instill values and mores within society that are also beneficial for rewarding greater future-orientedness. A religious superstructure must then have sufficiently low time-preference to foster sustainable socioeconomic arrangements and diminish the likelihood and scale of destructive social movements.
It is furthermore questionable whether a secular superstructure is even formally possible. Without a very
broad all-encompassing common cause, coordinating the actions of powerful institutions is very difficult.
We may only care to distinguish between those ideologies which are materialistic in common cause or spiritual. A secular superstructure must at least take on a religious posturing, with the attendant blind spots and
prejudices in the faithful. The point at which a secular context becomes a totalizing narrative about the
ultimate purpose of the individual and mankind, it may best be called a religion, whether or not it refers to
classical staples of religious worldviews such as God or the supernatural.
There may be the worry over whether religion is (in any way) true, and the desire that people shouldnt be
placed under pressure to be religious. I think the concern with indoctrination is over-stated. Not only are
the vast majority of people susceptible to indoctrination, this vast majority cant even obtain a modicum of
moral agency without being effectively indoctrinated. Whether this indoctrination comes from preachers or
teachers does not matter. The prevalence of near-universal education in post-industrial countries is testament to the fact that with increased material prosperity, a greater degree of socialization is requisite for a
person to keep up with change. One might note the inter-generational gaps in culture brought about by the
lack of socialization into digital media of generations older than 40.
Some may say this is a depressing picture. It is this which makes the long timescale of civilization possible, as
it means a people are generally self-regulating. A civilization of philosopher-kings is not only unrealistic, it
is undesirable. A high ratio of exceptional individuals within a society who obtain some level of sovereignty
from and over the process of socialization would result not in an abundance of pro-social institutions, but the
dissolution of institutions as these individuals resist any process that would serve to socialize them. Thankfully, no society is even remotely near that ratio.
While this natural complicity and complacency of mass man with the reigning superstructure does permit
abuse, it may also be used to societys own benefit. This is the goal of introducing a religious superstructure.
Religious worldviews, unlike secular worldviews, provide cohesive moral injunctions for a people to follow,
founded in static texts and traditions. The secular view provides no basis for the development of a tradition,
as it admits no necessary group charged with ritualizing power relations. Ritual is a Schelling point which
secularism must deny.
It is a modernist to have undue sentiment for the mass man, as though he can or should be raised from his
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state of thorough socialization. However, it must be pointed out that socialization is a requisite to a person
obtaining moral agency. Void authoritative, i.e. non-reasons based, instruction, the individual simply does
not learn how to move in society. To be treated as an independent moral agent as a child would be disastrous
for the child, yet the child does not gain his independence until is taught to him through social stimulus. A
mature individual is a socialized individual.
The socialized individual may be contrasted with the sovereign individual who has been socialized but who,
due to an internal will, embraced his worldview on the basis of independently found reasons. The differences
between the socialized and sovereign individual are most obvious when the socialized individual, in defending the perceived status quo (or perceived counterculture), relies not merely on fallacious reasoning, but on
social and subjective reasons.
Given the socialized individual rarely amounts to more than the sum of his own socially constructed person,
it brings focus from that of bringing about change through more democratic and mass populist movements
to capturing the superstructure and beginning to alter the process of socialization as it concretely occurs.
The democratic people can only be rallied if they already agree to your ideology, so it is a waste of time to try
and convert everyone from the ground up. When neoreaction asks a person to stop embracing comfortable
fictions, will they? The more socialized they are, the less they are sovereign, the less chance they will stick to
neoreaction when it comes to making sacrifices. Only if a person can tell that the reigning process of socialization has harmed them will they become more susceptible to effective conversion, though optimism should
be tempered as to the potential depth of their articulated opinions.
Christendom, and by which I mean specifically a Catholic superstructure, may only be able to rise again
following a collapse. I personally have little sympathy for Protestantism, as it is ideologically opposed to
reaction. Above I equated Protestantism with spiritual egalitarianism, predicated on the rejection of spiritually privileged positions within the Church. Within a reactionary society Protestants would be in the same
position as conservatives within a modernist society; ideologically compromised. I do not mean to extend a
polemic within this text, but it must be understood that a superstructure which includes a monolithic institution can achieve more comprehensive social coordination. The nearest Protestant equivalent of the Catholic
Church might be the Anglican Church, which does take an ideological leadership of mainline denominations, though clearly its tendencies are contrary to what wed hope to see, which establishes the true ideological bent of Protestantism.
Tradition is far more than what has been done before. It is a social-historical context which provides the
means of beneficial perpetuity which ties together the future with the past. By definition, a tradition must
benefit perpetuity, for a tradition is simply that which is passed down through generations, including not
only its means of transmission but the end of transmission. If the notion of anti-tradition makes sense, it
must be identified with materialistic nihilism, the pursuit of an individuals pleasure without planning for
perpetuity. Understood as such, it is easy to see that the modern age is not only untraditional, it is anti-traditional. Fewer individuals than ever before are having children, and those who do remain more focused on
their own materialistic pursuits than the education of their own children and the transmission of a continuity
from their own past to the future. Anti-tradition is equivalent to memetic stillbirth. While judgment may
be passed on anti-tradition for the conceit of nihilism and the destruction of the future of ones own, it is a
mercy that from the evolutionary social-historical perspective nihilism is always maladaptive to the social
environment in the long run. A people that turns its back on its life-giving and life-preserving traditions is
bound for ruin, either at its own hands or the hands of another.
Traditionalism in this context is a description of the kind of memes which are passed down through families
and guarded by them. This is on one hand not a mere defense of tradition for traditions sake, in the style of
Burke, dependent as it is on an anti-rationalism as though governance and society are beyond understanding.
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The sake of traditionalism is for lowering time preference, so that all, not only the patriarch whose incentives
are naturally guided in this way, are incentivized to place themselves into a social context in which the end is
something outside themselves while providing an end to their own lives as well. Whereas anti-tradition is a
nihilistic game of accumulating material and social goods without the intent of it placing the individual in a
larger context, traditionalism is the preference for roles unchosen but assumed which link one together to his
ancestors and progeny.
Catholic traditionalism is only to say that the traditions of a society, passed on in its respective institutions,
are marked by an essentially Catholic character, and unite the traditions under the good of Christian life. It
is my own preference and belief that it is far more sustainable than non-Catholic, even if they are Protestant
Christian, traditions, though I leave it to those unpersuadable to Catholicism to determine their own optimal
arrangements of tradition.
The point of an overarching context of traditions, a kind of super-tradition as it were, is in order to foster
greater overall cohesion in society. The development of traditions outside this super-traditional context may
lead to the production of mutually exclusive traditions, instilling more division between groups and disrupting the potential coordination of society into institutions and superstructure. What would be preferred of a
super-tradition is the grounding of rules that makes traditions mutually compatible, instilling cooperation
even between formally opposed groups.
Ultimately, tradition is the most abstract vagary of neoreaction, yet also the most important, for it alone
could tie together the vagaries into a cohesive social political philosophy. It would do so by introducing
each new individual into contexts of cohesive social cooperation which are greater than the individual and
instill the value of that individuals end in providing their contribution to perpetuity. This is at a contrast to
the present, in which most are instilled into a lifetime pursuit of the accumulation of material goods, placing
economic goods above all others, which has lent itself to the resultant nihilism of those who select themselves
from the honor of reproduction. This is why I am at once skeptical of the feasibility of secular traditions and
must insist on the preferability of religious traditions, even to those who think religion is but an obsolete
misunderstanding of the fundamental nature of the world. A totalizing narrative, which is uniquely a property of religions, can provide a coherent narrative for all groups of people within a society, from slave, master,
man, woman, child, black, white, rich, or poor, facilitating their cooperation and peace with their place in the
hierarchy.

Why Reaction? Why Now?

It is called neoreaction in the sense that this isnt the first instance of reaction. That would be true, but the
previous instances of reaction are not historical, they are ideological. In other words, what makes this a new
form of reaction is that it is truly a new form of reaction. It goes outside the bounds of modernist ideology
and gets at something entirely original, a whole new premise of social organization. This is not a mere conservatism, but a conservatism guided by unique principles that diagnose and transcend the occult motivation
of the Zeitgeist. It is that which allows it to be a true contender, rather than merely a perspective which may
be ultimately re-negotiated in the stoogifying complex a well-adapted idea-species ought, wherein dissent is
allowed and actively developed, provided it does not ever amount to a true challenge against the occult motivation.
In one sense it the refusal to dialogue with modernism that allows neoreaction to develop, for the very idea
of modernism is that dialogue only occurs in the case that one accepts its presuppositions about the good
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of equality and the dissolution of historically fundamental institutions in the name of such a pursuit. Seeing that equality costs so much, the neoreactionary opts instead for the secure foundation of natural society,
Nature and Natures God as it has been called. The willingness to ask certain questions with a view to actually
pursuing their answers without pausing to consider what one was taught to hope and to see opens the mind
to a reality which has otherwise been precluded, so it is no wonder that it should be called a Dark Enlightenment. What has been forgotten has been remembered, recovered, and now it is the wonder of how to reform.
From the reactionary perspective, modernism is not merely a mistake. It poses a fundamental threat to human flourishing. Embraced at the global level, which it has not yet accomplished, it would lead to endless
decline, only being thrown off after the depths of another dark age. If it is the fate of humanity to endlessly
come back to modernist ideology, then humankind is a failure mode, of which only an enlightened few can
ever see mans cyclical fate. Such is a possibility, yet we must labor under the hope that modernism is not
the necessary fate of human civilization, and the misappropriation of power as it currently goes on may be
righted so that human flourishing again becomes the product of civilization.
If this project of social theory may be described from that turn, it is that society must be undertaken anew
each generation. It is contrary to the modernist conceit of progress in that it does not suppose whatever
changes are imposed will never prevent civilization from rising to ever-higher levels. Free of the supposition
that progress must happen as though it were an iron-bound law of the universe, it is able to consider the hypothesis that this superstructure is not the final or ideal superstructure. Where the modernist sees the end of
history, the reactionary only sees an ongoing process for which the ideal form of society is contingent on the
givens of environment, people, and history.
Yet a skepticism remains. Losing the deluded modern optimism about mass man, those who are ruled by
power shall not fundamentally understand the means by which they are ruled. The reasons given here are,
even if syntactically open to understanding by those who are ruled, the mass do not want to understand power for they should only have to understand that they are influenced in ways beyond their own comprehension, negating their own moral agency. Furthermore, to the extent that they understand, it may only instill a
loathing in them of their rulers, for in not understanding the justice of their rule they think the placement of
one group over another in the hierarchy is arbitrary, baseless. What makes the rich, rich? According to an
overwhelming number of the poor, it is due to accident. What makes the poor, poor? According to an overwhelming number of the rich, it is due to lesser capability. Which of these groups is right? What perspective
is most in line with the truth? There is a chance that either group perceives an aspect of reality which the
other doesnt, or maybe aspect the other misses doesnt matter to them. What matters more is whether they
can be provided narratives which contextualize their relations peaceably, in order that social coordination
isnt disrupted.
The individual ends of reactionaries are not all presently unified, and it would be a miracle outside all hope
for splintering political division to never occur. Each will in his own political philosophy take himself to represent the authentic intent of reaction. It does not seem possible to argue over who is the true political heir
of reaction, and I wont take a side on the issue. It seems equally pointless to try and argue that communists
or feminists are the true political heirs of modernity. The heart of the matter is whether the ideological
bent of civilization aims either at flourishing or destruction, and reactionaries are agreed that political philosophies subsisting under the ideology of neoreaction shall better secure the future than the current hegemony
of modernism.
What is the practical future of reaction? The future construction of the ideology seems well-secured already,
and though it would be impossible to predict what specific intellectual developments shall take place (at least
without actually making those developments). The notion to do something has been gaining traction between the like-minded reactionaries, though I must confess the potential to save the system from its decline
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is dubious, at least not without it being a compromise that would only serve to extend the decline and, by
extension, the time at which recovery would occur. A sooner collapse may be preferable on the grounds that
rebuilding with less mis-allocated capital and a less comprehensively indoctrinated population is easier. A
later collapse may be preferable in that it would allow us more comfort within which to perform our reactionary analyses in preparing for taking the future following the decline. Or an entirely unthought of strategy
may be developed; practical politics is not my own specialty and I leave it to others to formulate practical
principles.
My inability to postulate the future of reaction aside, I can still make some estimates about the appeal of
reactionary views to the youth of our modern cultures. My own entry to neoreaction was through the sexual
realism of the androcentric blogosphere, particularly via its efficacy with predicting human behavior in social
settings. This particular route has been undertaken by many, though there are naturally other routes as well,
typically through some given vagary discussed above. The general character of these conversions I take to be
the disillusionment with the promises of modernism. Insofar as modernism may be understood as a kind
of social contract which promises certain rewards for certain behaviors, the process in which it is discovered that the hypotheses modernism engenders about the working of society come to be falsified by actual
lived experience makes reaction a peculiarly anti-modernist ideology. With respect to the desire to actually
repeal the political mistakes of the last decades, it becomes quickly apparent that the entire project of the
Enlightenment was flawed, which itself was born in the radical spiritual egalitarianism of Luther. A justification to repeal modernism must itself utilize ideas and principles which are vehemently un-modern, perhaps
even premodern or postmodern, which leads to the discovery of the alternate ideological system of reaction,
which gives an expression and rational voice to the occult motivation undiagnosed by modern political philosophies.
What precisely explains this jump from only one ideology to another? Why dont we see this disillusionment
resulting in the rediscovery and development of diverse new ideologies?
The all-encompassing nature of ideology is the key to the answer. There are only two ideologies; modernism
and reaction. This also explains the leftward-rightward division. Although political philosophy is multidimensional, ideology describes a more general kind of phenomena, the phenomena of civilization. To augment an oft-used reactionary analogy, ideology is the virus which inhabits the host society and, being better
adapted, perpetuates itself on the host; where this appears to draw a distinction between host (society) and
virus (memeplex), I would say there is no distinction. Civilization just is ideology; ideology not only grounds
the possibility of civilization, it does so by providing the idea of civilization which it becomes. The overall
possibility of civilization is inherent in the question What is justice? the answer to which yields your ideology. A political philosophy is only a rationalization of that ideological impulse. The modernist answers the
question Treating like as like, and all are like while the reactionary answers Treating like as like, and none
are like. Each in taking this answer not only views the others answer as being wrong, but senseless. Both
have equivalent definitions of justice and equality, but the senses are distinct in the evaluative methodology
the ideology uses to analyze the constitution of society.
History only goes in two directions with respect to flourishing; sustainably better or unsustainably worse. By
definition, a system which is unsustainable must be getting worse in the long-run, whether this occurs due to
outright destruction or the accumulation of time preference heightening memes. Whether or not flourishing is increasing or decreasing comes down only to the social political factors of society, for all social action is
constrained by ideology.
Friedrich Nietzsche, though hed certainly object to his being used in this way, speaks prophetically of the
clash between modern thought and the worlds actual nature:
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In all the countries of Europe, and in America, too, there now is something that abuses this name: a very
narrow, imprisoned, chained type of spirits who want just about the opposite of what accords with our
intentions and instincts - not to speak of the fact that regarding the new philosophers who are coming up
they must assuredly be closed windows and bolted doors. They belong, briefly and sadly, among the levelers
- these falsely so-called free spirits - being eloquent and prolifically scribbling slaves of the democratic taste
and its modern ideas; they are all human beings without solitude, without their own solitude, clumsy
good fellows whom one should not deny either courage or respectable decency - only they are unfree and
ridiculously superficial, above all in their basic inclination to find in the forms of the old society as it has
existed so far just about the cause of all human misery and failure - which is a way of standing truth happily upon her head! What they would like to strive for with all their powers is the universal green-pasture
happiness of the herd, with security, lack danger, comfort, and an easier life for everyone; the two songs and
doctrines which they repeat most often equality of rights and sympathy for all that suffers - and suffering itself they take for something that must be abolished. We opposite men, having opened our eyes and
conscience to the question where and how the plant man has so far grown most vigorously to a height - we
think that this has happened every time under the opposite conditions, that to this end the dangerousness
of his situation must first grow to the point of enormity, his power of invention and simulation (his spirit)
had to develop under prolonged pressure and constraint into refinement and audacity, his life - will had to
be enhanced into an unconditional power will. We think that hardness, forcefulness, slavery, danger in the
alley and the heart, life in hiding, stoicism, the art of experiment and devilry of every kind, that everything
evil, terrible, tyrannical in man, everything in him that is kin to beasts of prey and serpents, serves the enhancement of the species man as much as its opposite does. Indeed, we do not even say enough when we
say only that much; and at any rate we are at this point, in what we say and keep silent about, at the other
end from all modem ideology and herd desiderata - as their antipodes perhaps?5
Taking on Nietzsche for ourselves, would not the slave morality, if it must be equated to some group in history, be not the modernists? The notion that the hierarchy which places the slave at bottom and the master
at top under modernism is effectively inverted, where now the natural master works for the benefit of the
natural slaves, the betters for their lesser. This must necessarily lead to the diminishing of flourishing, as the
lesser are no longer directed to production by the social simulacra of power, the message distributed through
all forms of social access and the betters who would are cut down while the system works itself to the point of
exhaustion and beyond, settling into collapse.
Maybe it is the reason for our eventual success, maybe it is a fatal flaw, but this limits the necessity of winning
over the mass of the public. Our reasons do not need to be brought down to the level of mass consumption,
and indeed they couldnt be. Who in the modern day, invested in the false consciousness of self-esteem,
would accept his natural state as a slave of some degree? Reaction is incompatible with cultural democracy in
the same way capitalism is rendered incompatible with cultural Marxism. Neoreaction is an understanding
reserved for a few, though its effects would be felt by all.

5
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Translated by Kaufman, Walter. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy
of the Future. Part 1, paragraph 44.
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