Tome2 - Nick Land's Writings From 2011

Reignition
NICK LAND'S WRITINGS (2011-)
Tome II - The Dark Enlightenment:

Neoreactionaries Head for the Exit
Reignition
NICK LAND
LAND'S
'S WRITINGS (2011-)
Tome II - The Dark Enlightenment: Neoreactionaries Head for the

Exit
Reignition
NICK LAND
LAND'S
'S WRITINGS (2011-)
Tome II - The Dark Enlightenment: Neoreactionaries Head for the

Exit
Edited b
byy
Uriel Fiori
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Table of Contents .................................................................................................

.................................................................................................vii
vii
BL
BLOCK
OCK 1 - D
DARK
ARK ENLIGHTENMENT ........................................................ 10
BL
BLOCK
OCK 2 - SOCIAL D
DARWINISM
ARWINISM...............................................................
...............................................................147
147
CHAPTER ONE - SELECTION .......................................................170
CHAPTER TWO - DYSGENICS .....................................................176
CHAPTER THREE - EUGENICS AND SPECIATION .............188
CHAPTER FOUR - STEREOTYPES ..............................................198
CHAPTER FIVE - RACES..................................................................212
SECTION A - CLADISTICS........................................................................235
CHAPTER ONE - RELIGIOUS CLADES......................................236
CHAPTER TWO - ETHNO-CULTURAL CLADES...................248
CHAPTER THREE - THE PURITAN QUESTION.....................268
CHAPTER FOUR - ALTERNATE PATHS.....................................281
BL
BLOCK
OCK 3 - POLITICAL THEORY
THEORY.................................................................
.................................................................300
300
vii
CHAPTER ONE - THE BASICS.......................................................301
CHAPTER TWO - DISTRIBUTION, FRAGMENTATION AND
TRUST......................................................................................................315
CHAPTER THREE - IDEOLOGICAL SPACE .............................366
CHAPTER FOUR - LIBERALISM ...................................................394
SECTION A - REPUBLICANISM AND CONSTITUTIONS ...........407
CHAPTER ONE - SOVEREIGNTY ................................................408
CHAPTER TWO - CONSTITUTIONS AND ALGORITHMIC
GOVERNANCE....................................................................................423
SEQUENCE i - NEOCAMERALISM ..................................................463
CHAPTER ONE - PRIMERS ............................................................464
CHAPER TWO - IMPLEMENTATION.........................................494
SECTION B - FASCISM...............................................................................509
CHAPTER ONE - THE BASICS.......................................................510
CHAPTER TWO - NEOLIBERALISM: THE FASCISM THAT
WON ........................................................................................................519
CHAPTER THREE - EURASIANISM, THE ALT-RIGHT AND
CURRENT EVENTS ............................................................................541
SECTION C - STRATEGICS.......................................................................557
CHAPTER ONE - ROUGH TRIANGLES .....................................558
CHAPTER TWO - INCENTIVES....................................................570
CHAPTER THREE - MUTUAL INTENSIFICATION ...............575
CHAPTER FOUR - SUBVERSION AND CAMOUFLAGE....587
CHAPTER FIVE - HEGEMONIC HEADEACHES....................597
viii
Table of Contents
CHAPTER SIX - RECENT EVENTS ...............................................610

SEQUENCE i - WAR................................................................................616
SEQUENCE ii - THE ISLAMIC VORTEX..........................................629
SECTION D - IMMIGRATION .................................................................710
SECTION E - EXIT.........................................................................................726
CHAPTER ONE - GETTING OUT ......................................................727
CHAPTER TWO - WHAT IS GOING ON? ......................................790
CHAPTER THREE - IDENTITY, INDIVIDUALISM AND
INDEPENDENCE.....................................................................................803
ix
Reignition
BL
BLOCK
OCK 1 - D
DARK
ARK
ENLIGHTENMENT
The Dark Enlightenment (P

(Part
art 1)
Neo-reactionaries head for the eexit

xit
Enlightenment is not only a state, but an event, and a process. As

the designation for an historical episode, concentrated in northern
Europe during the 18th century, it is a leading candidate for the ‘true
name’ of modernity, capturing its origin and essence (‘Renaissance’
and ‘Industrial Revolution’ are others). Between ‘enlightenment’ and
‘progressive enlightenment’ there is only an elusive difference,
because illumination takes time – and feeds on itself, because
enlightenment is self-confirming, its revelations ‘self-evident’, and
10
BLOCK 1 - DARK ENLIGHTENMENT
because a retrograde, or reactionary, ‘dark enlightenment’ amounts

almost to intrinsic contradiction. To become enlightened, in this
historical sense, is to recognize, and then to pursue, a guiding light.
There were ages of darkness, and then enlightenment came.
Clearly, advance has demonstrated itself, offering not only
improvement, but also a model. Furthermore, unlike a renaissance,
there is no need for an enlightenment to recall what was lost, or
to emphasize the attractions of return. The elementary
acknowledgement of enlightenment is already Whig history in
miniature.
Once certain enlightened truths have been found self-evident,
there can be no turning back, and conservatism is pre-emptively
condemned – predestined — to paradox. F. A. Hayek, who refused
to describe himself as a conservative, famously settled instead upon
the term ‘Old Whig’, which – like ‘classical liberal’ (or the still more
melancholy ‘remnant’) – accepts that progress isn’t what it used to
be. What could an Old Whig be, if not a reactionary progressive? And
what on earth is that?
Of course, plenty of people already think they know what
reactionary modernism looks like, and amidst the current collapse
back into the 1930s their concerns are only likely to grow. Basically,
it’s what the ‘F’ word is for, at least in its progressive usage. A flight
from democracy under these circumstances conforms so perfectly to
expectations that it eludes specific recognition, appearing merely as
11
Reignition
an atavism, or confirmation of dire repetition.

Still, something is happening, and it is – at least in part –
something else. One milestone was the April 2009 discussion hosted
at Cato Unbound among libertarian thinkers (including Patri
Friedman and Peter Thiel) in which disillusionment with the
direction and possibilities of democratic politics was expressed with
unusual forthrightness. Thiel summarized the trend bluntly: “I no
longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
In August 2011, Michael Lind posted a democratic riposte at
Salon, digging up some impressively malodorous dirt, and
concluding:
The dread of democracy by libertarians and classical liberals

is justified. Libertarianism really is incompatible with
democracy. Most libertarians have made it clear which of the
two they prefer. The only question that remains to be settled
is why anyone should pay attention to libertarians.
Lind and the ‘neo-reactionaries’ seem to be in broad agreement that

democracy is not only (or even) a system, but rather a vector, with an
unmistakable direction. Democracy and ‘progressive democracy’ are
synonymous, and indistinguishable from the expansion of the state.
Whilst ‘extreme right wing’ governments have, on rare occasions,
momentarily arrested this process, its reversal lies beyond the
12
bounds of democratic possibility. Since winning elections is

overwhelmingly a matter of vote buying, and society’s informational
organs (education and media) are no more resistant to bribery than
the electorate, a thrifty politician is simply an incompetent politician,
and the democratic variant of Darwinism quickly eliminates such
misfits from the gene pool. This is a reality that the left applauds, the
establishment right grumpily accepts, and the libertarian right has
ineffectively railed against. Increasingly, however, libertarians have
ceased to care whether anyone is ‘pay[ing them] attention’ – they
have been looking for something else entirely: an exit.
It is a structural inevitability that the libertarian voice is drowned
out in democracy, and according to Lind it should be. Ever more
libertarians are likely to agree. ‘Voice’ is democracy itself, in its
historically dominant, Rousseauistic strain. It models the state as a
representation of popular will, and making oneself heard means
more politics. If voting as the mass self-expression of politically
empowered peoples is a nightmare engulfing the world, adding to the
hubbub doesn’t help. Even more than Equality-vs-Liberty, Voice-vs-
Exit is the rising alternative, and libertarians are opting for voiceless
flight. Patri Friedman remarks: “we think that free exit is so
important that we’ve called it the only Universal Human Right.”
For the hardcore neo-reactionaries, democracy is not merely
doomed, it is doom itself. Fleeing it approaches an ultimate
imperative. The subterranean current that propels such anti-politics
13
Reignition
is recognizably Hobbesian, a coherent dark enlightenment, devoid

from its beginning of any Rousseauistic enthusiasm for popular
expression. Predisposed, in any case, to perceive the politically
awakened masses as a howling irrational mob, it conceives the
dynamics of democratization as fundamentally degenerative:
systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices,
resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective
criminality and comprehensive social corruption. The democratic
politician and the electorate are bound together by a circuit of
reciprocal incitement, in which each side drives the other to ever
more shameless extremities of hooting, prancing cannibalism, until
the only alternative to shouting is being eaten.
Where the progressive enlightenment sees political ideals, the
dark enlightenment sees appetites. It accepts that governments are
made out of people, and that they will eat well. Setting its
expectations as low as reasonably possible, it seeks only to spare
civilization from frenzied, ruinous, gluttonous debauch. From
Thomas Hobbes to Hans-Hermann Hoppe and beyond, it asks: How
can the sovereign power be prevented – or at least dissuaded — from
devouring society? It consistently finds democratic ‘solutions’ to this
problem risible, at best.
Hoppe advocates an anarcho-capitalist ‘private law society’, but
between monarchy and democracy he does not hesitate (and his
argument is strictly Hobbesian):
14
As a hereditary monopolist, a king regards the territory and

the people under his rule as his personal property and
engages in the monopolistic exploitation of this
"property." Under democracy, monopoly and
monopolistic exploitation do not disappear. Rather, what
happens is this: instead of a king and a nobility who regard
the country as their private property, a temporary and
interchangeable caretaker is put in monopolistic charge of
the country. The caretaker does not own the country, but
as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his and
his protégés’ advantage. He owns its current use – usufruct–
but not its capital stock. This does not eliminate exploitation.
To the contrary, it makes exploitation less calculating and
carried out with little or no regard to the capital stock.
Exploitation becomes shortsighted and capital consumption
will be systematically promoted.
Political agents invested with transient authority by multi-party

democratic systems have an overwhelming (and demonstrably
irresistible) incentive to plunder society with the greatest possible
rapidity and comprehensiveness. Anything they neglect to steal – or
‘leave on the table’ – is likely to be inherited by political successors
who are not only unconnected, but actually opposed, and who can
therefore be expected to utilize all available resources to the
15
Reignition
detriment of their foes. Whatever is left behind becomes a weapon

in your enemy’s hand. Best, then, to destroy what cannot be stolen.
From the perspective of a democratic politician, any type of social
good that is neither directly appropriable nor attributable to (their
own) partisan policy is sheer waste, and counts for nothing, whilst
even the most grievous social misfortune – so long as it can be
assigned to a prior administration or postponed until a subsequent
one – figures in rational calculations as an obvious blessing. The long-
range techno-economic improvements and associated accumulation
of cultural capital that constituted social progress in its old (Whig)
sense are in nobody’s political interest. Once democracy flourishes,
they face the immediate threat of extinction.
Civilization, as a process, is indistinguishable from diminishing
time-preference (or declining concern for the present in comparison
to the future). Democracy, which both in theory and evident
historical fact accentuates time-preference to the point of
convulsive feeding-frenzy, is thus as close to a precise negation of
civilization as anything could be, short of instantaneous social
collapse into murderous barbarism or zombie apocalypse (which it
eventually leads to). As the democratic virus burns through society,
painstakingly accumulated habits and attitudes of forward-thinking,
prudential, human and industrial investment, are replaced by a
sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a ‘reality
television’ political circus. Tomorrow might belong to the other team,
16
so it’s best to eat it all now.

Winston Churchill, who remarked in neo-reactionary style that
“the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation
with the average voter“ is better known for suggesting “that
democracy is the worst form of government except all the others
that have been tried.” Whilst never exactly conceding that “OK,
democracy sucks (in fact, it really sucks), but what’s the alternative?”
the implication is obvious. The general tenor of this sensibility is
attractive to modern conservatives, because it resonates with their
wry, disillusioned acceptance of relentless civilizational
deterioration, and with the associated intellectual apprehension of
capitalism as an unappetizing but ineliminable default social
arrangement, which remains after all catastrophic or merely
impractical alternatives have been discarded. The market economy,
on this understanding, is no more than a spontaneous survival
strategy that stitches itself together amidst the ruins of a politically
devastated world. Things will probably just get worse forever. So it
goes.
So, what is the alternative? (There’s certainly no point trawling
through the 1930s for one.) “Can you imagine a 21st-century post-
demotist society? One that saw itself as recovering from democracy,
much as Eastern Europe sees itself as recovering from Communism?”
asks supreme Sith Lord of the neo-reactionaries, Mencius Moldbug.
“Well, I suppose that makes one of us.”
17
Reignition
Moldbug’s formative influences are Austro-libertarian, but that’s

all over. As he explains:
… libertarians cannot present a realistic picture of a world

in which their battle gets won and stays won. They wind up
looking for ways to push a world in which the State’s natural
downhill path is to grow, back up the hill. This prospect is
Sisyphean, and it’s understandable why it attracts so few
supporters.
His awakening into neo-reaction comes with the (Hobbesian)

recognition that sovereignty cannot be eliminated, caged, or
controlled. Anarcho-capitalist utopias can never condense out of
science fiction, divided powers flow back together like a shattered
Terminator, and constitutions have exactly as much real authority as
a sovereign interpretative power allows them to have. The state isn’t
going anywhere because — to those who run it — it’s worth far too
much to give up, and as the concentrated instantiation of sovereignty
in society, nobody can make it do anything. If the state cannot be
eliminated, Moldbug argues, at least it can be cured of democracy
(or systematic and degenerative bad government), and the way to do
that is to formalize it. This is an approach he calls ‘neo-cameralism’.
To a neocameralist, a state is a business which owns a

country. A state should be managed, like any other large
18
business, by dividing logical ownership into negotiable

shares, each of which yields a precise fraction of the state’s
profit. (A well-run state is very profitable.) Each share has
one vote, and the shareholders elect a board, which hires and
fires managers.
This business’s customers are its residents. A profitably-
managed neocameralist state will, like any business, serve its
customers efficiently and effectively. Misgovernment equals
mismanagement.
Firstly, it is essential to squash the democratic myth that a state

‘belongs’ to the citizenry. The point of neo-cameralism is to buy out
the real stakeholders in sovereign power, not to perpetuate
sentimental lies about mass enfranchisement. Unless ownership of
the state is formally transferred into the hands of its actual rulers,
the neo-cameral transition will simply not take place, power will
remain in the shadows, and the democratic farce will continue.
So, secondly, the ruling class must be plausibly identified. It should
be noted immediately, in contradistinction to Marxist principles of
social analysis, that this is not the ‘capitalist bourgeoisie’. Logically,
it cannot be. The power of the business class is already clearly
formalized, in monetary terms, so the identification of capital with
political power is perfectly redundant. It is necessary to ask, rather,
who do capitalists pay for political favors, how much these favors
19
Reignition
are potentially worth, and how the authority to grant them is

distributed. This requires, with a minimum of moral irritation, that
the entire social landscape of political bribery (‘lobbying’) is exactly
mapped, and the administrative, legislative, judicial, media, and
academic privileges accessed by such bribes are converted into
fungible shares. Insofar as voters are worth bribing, there is no need
to entirely exclude them from this calculation, although their portion
of sovereignty will be estimated with appropriate derision. The
conclusion of this exercise is the mapping of a ruling entity that is the
truly dominant instance of the democratic polity. Moldbug calls it the
Cathedral.
The formalization of political powers, thirdly, allows for the
possibility of effective government. Once the universe of democratic
corruption is converted into a (freely transferable) shareholding in
gov-corp. the owners of the state can initiate rational corporate
governance, beginning with the appointment of a CEO. As with any
business, the interests of the state are now precisely formalized as
the maximization of long-term shareholder value. There is no longer
any need for residents (clients) to take any interest in politics
whatsoever. In fact, to do so would be to exhibit semi-criminal
proclivities. If gov-corp doesn’t deliver acceptable value for its taxes
(sovereign rent), they can notify its customer service function, and
if necessary take their custom elsewhere. Gov-corp would
concentrate upon running an efficient, attractive, vital, clean, and
20
secure country, of a kind that is able to draw customers. No voice,

free exit.
… although the full neocameralist approach has never been

tried, its closest historical equivalents to this approach are
the 18th-century tradition of enlightened absolutism as
represented by Frederick the Great, and the 21st-century
nondemocratic tradition as seen in lost fragments of the
British Empire such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai.
These states appear to provide a very high quality of service
to their citizens, with no meaningful democracy at all. They
have minimal crime and high levels of personal and economic
freedom. They tend to be quite prosperous. They are weak
only in political freedom, and political freedom is
unimportant by definition when government is stable and
effective.
In European classical antiquity, democracy was recognized as a

familiar phase of cyclical political development, fundamentally
decadent in nature, and preliminary to a slide into tyranny. Today this
classical understanding is thoroughly lost, and replaced by a global
democratic ideology, entirely lacking in critical self-reflection, that
is asserted not as a credible social-scientific thesis, or even as a
spontaneous popular aspiration, but rather as a religious creed, of a
21
Reignition
specific, historically identifiable kind:
… a received tradition I call Universalism, which is a

nontheistic Christian sect. Some other current labels for this
same tradition, more or less synonymous, are progressivism,
multiculturalism, liberalism, humanism, leftism, political
correctness, and the like. … Universalism is the dominant
modern branch of Christianity on the Calvinist line, evolving
from the English Dissenter or Puritan tradition through the
Unitarian, Transcendentalist, and Progressive movements.
Its ancestral briar patch also includes a few sideways sprigs
that are important enough to name but whose Christian
ancestry is slightly better concealed, such as Rousseauvian
laicism, Benthamite utilitarianism, Reformed Judaism,
Comtean positivism, German Idealism, Marxist scientific
socialism, Sartrean existentialism, Heideggerian
postmodernism, etc, etc, etc. … Universalism, in my opinion,
is best described as a mystery cult of power. … It’s as hard
to imagine Universalism without the State as malaria without
the mosquito. … The point is that this thing, whatever you
care to call it, is at least two hundred years old and probably
more like five. It’s basically the Reformation itself. … And just
walking up to it and denouncing it as evil is about as likely to
work as suing Shub-Niggurath in small-claims court.
22
To comprehend the emergence of our contemporary predicament,

characterized by relentless, totalizing, state expansion, the
proliferation of spurious positive ‘human rights’ (claims on the
resources of others backed by coercive bureaucracies), politicized
money, reckless evangelical ‘wars for democracy’, and
comprehensive thought control arrayed in defense of universalistic
dogma (accompanied by the degradation of science into a
government public relations function), it is necessary to ask how
Massachusetts came to conquer the world, as Moldbug does. With
every year that passes, the international ideal of sound governance
finds itself approximating more closely and rigidly to the standards
set by the Grievance Studies departments of New England
universities. This is the divine providence of the ranters and levelers,
elevated to a planetary teleology, and consolidated as the reign of
the Cathedral.
The Cathedral has substituted its gospel for everything we ever
knew. Consider just the concerns expressed by America’s founding
fathers (compiled by ‘Liberty-clinger’, comment #1, here):
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of

the people may take away the rights of the other 49%. —
Thomas Jefferson
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have
23
Reignition
for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!—

Benjamin Franklin
Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and

murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not
commit suicide. — John Adams
Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and

contention; have ever been found incompatible with
personal security or the rights of property; and have in
general been as short in their lives as they have been violent
in their death. — James Madison
We are a Republican Government, Real liberty is never found

in despotism or in the extremes of democracy…it has been
observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would
be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that
no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies
in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed
one good feature of government. Their very character was
tyranny…— Alexander Hamilton
More on voting with your feet (and the incandescent genius of

Moldbug), next …
Added Note (March 7):
24
Don’t trust the attribution of the ‘Benjamin Franklin’ quote, above.

According to Barry Popik, the saying was probably invented by
James Bovard, in 1992. (Bovard remarks elsewhere: “There are few
more dangerous errors in political thinking than to equate
democracy with liberty.”)
March 2, 2012

(Part
art 2)
The arc of history is long, but it bends towards zombie apocalypse
David Graeber: It strikes me that if one is going to pursue

this to its logical conclusion, the only way to have a genuinely
democratic society would also be to abolish capitalism in this
state.
Marina Sitrin: We can’t have democracy with capitalism…
Democracy and capitalism don’t work together.
(Here, via John J. Miller)
That’s always the trouble with history. It always looks like it’s
over. But it never is.
(Mencius Moldbug)
25
Reignition
Googling ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’ together is highly enlightening, in

a dark way. In cyberspace, at least, it is clear that only a distinct
minority think of these terms as positively coupled. If opinion is to be
judged in terms of the Google spider and its digital prey, by far the
most prevalent association is disjunctive, or antagonistic, drawing
upon the reactionary insight that democracy poses a lethal menace
to liberty, all but ensuring its eventual eradication. Democracy is to
liberty as Gargantua to a pie (“Surely you can see that we love liberty,
to the point of gut-rumbling and salivation …”).
Steve H. Hanke lays out the case authoritatively in his short essay
On Democracy Versus Liberty, focused upon the American
experience:
Most people, including most Americans, would be surprised

to learn that the word “democracy” does not appear in the
Declaration of Independence (1776) or the Constitution of
the United States of America (1789). They would also be
shocked to learn the reason for the absence of the word
democracy in the founding documents of the U.S.A. Contrary
to what propaganda has led the public to believe, America’s
Founding Fathers were skeptical and anxious about
democracy. They were aware of the evils that accompany a
tyranny of the majority. The Framers of the Constitution
went to great lengths to ensure that the federal government
26
was not based on the will of the majority and was not,
therefore, democratic.
If the Framers of the Constitution did not embrace
democracy, what did they adhere to? To a man, the Framers
agreed that the purpose of government was to secure
citizens in John Locke’s trilogy of the rights to life, liberty and
property.
He elaborates:
The Constitution is primarily a structural and procedural

document that itemizes who is to exercise power and how
they are to exercise it. A great deal of stress is placed on
the separation of powers and the checks and balances in the
system. These were not a Cartesian construct or formula
aimed at social engineering, but a shield to protect the people
from the government. In short, the Constitution was
designed to govern the government, not the people.
The Bill of Rights establishes the rights of the people
against infringements by the State. The only thing that the
citizens can demand from the State, under the Bill of Rights,
is for a trial by a jury. The rest of the citizens’ rights are
protections from the State. For roughly a century after the
Constitution was ratified, private property, contracts and
27
Reignition
free internal trade within the United States were sacred. The
scope and scale of the government remained very
constrained. All this was very consistent with what was
understood to be liberty.
As the spirit of reaction digs its Sith-tentacles into the brain, it

becomes difficult to remember how the classical (or non-communist)
progressive narrative could once have made sense. What were
people thinking? What were they expecting from the emerging
super-empowered, populist, cannibalistic state? Wasn’t the eventual
calamity entirely predictable? How was it ever possible to be a Whig?
The ideological credibility of radical democratization is not, of
course, in question. As thinkers ranging from (Christian progressive)
Walter Russell Mead to (atheistic reactionary) Mencius Moldbug
have exhaustively detailed, it conforms so exactly to ultra-protestant
religious enthusiasm that its power to animate the revolutionary
soul should surprise nobody. Within just a few years of Martin
Luther’s challenge to the papal establishment, peasant
insurrectionists were stringing up their class enemies all over
Germany.
The empirical credibility of democratic advancement is far more
perplexing, and also genuinely complex (which is to say controversial,
or more precisely, worthy of a data-based, rigorously-argued
controversy). In part, that is because the modern configuration of
28
democracy emerges within the sweep of a far broader modernistic

trend, whose techno-scientific, economic, social and political strands
are obscurely interrelated, knitted together by misleading
correlations, and subsequent false causalities. If, as Schumpeter
argues, industrial capitalism tends to engender a democratic-
bureaucratic culture that concludes in stagnation, it might
nevertheless seem as though democracy was ‘associated’ with
material progress. It is easy to misconstrue a lagging indicator as a
positive causal factor, especially when ideological zeal lends its bias
to the misapprehension. In similar vein, since cancer only afflicts
living beings, it might – with apparent reason — be associated with
vitality.
Robin Hanson (gently) notes:
Yes many trends have been positive for a century or so, and
yes this suggests they will continue to rise for a century or
so. But no this does not mean that students are empirically or
morally wrong for thinking it “utopian fantasy” that one could
“end poverty, disease, tyranny, and war” by joining a modern-
day Kennedy’s political quest. Why? Because positive recent
trends in these areas were not much caused by such political
movements! They were mostly caused by our getting rich
from the industrial revolution, an event that political
movements tended, if anything, to try to hold back on
29
Reignition
average.
Simple historical chronology suggests that industrialization supports

progressive democratization, rather than being derived from it. This
observation has even given rise to a widely accepted school of pop
social science theorizing, according to which the ‘maturation’ of
societies in a democratic direction is determined by thresholds of
affluence, or middle-class formation. The strict logical correlate of
such ideas, that democracy is fundamentally non-productive in
relation to material progress, is typically under-emphasized.
Democracy consumes progress. When perceived from the
perspective of the dark enlightenment, the appropriate mode of
analysis for studying the democratic phenomenon is general
parasitology.
Quasi-libertarian responses to the outbreak accept this implicitly.
Given a population deeply infected by the zombie virus and
shambling into cannibalistic social collapse, the preferred option is
quarantine. It is not communicative isolation that is essential, but a
functional dis-solidarization of society that tightens feedback loops
and exposes people with maximum intensity to the consequences
of their own actions. Social solidarity, in precise contrast, is the
parasite’s friend. By cropping out all high-frequency feedback
mechanisms (such as market signals), and replacing them with
sluggish, infra-red loops that pass through a centralized forum of
30
‘general will’, a radically democratized society insulates parasitism

from what it does, transforming local, painfully dysfunctional,
intolerable, and thus urgently corrected behavior patterns into
global, numbed, and chronic socio-political pathologies.
Gnaw off other people’s body parts and it might be hard to get
a job– that’s the kind of lesson a tight-feedback, cybernetically
intense, laissez faire order would allow to be learned. It’s also exactly
the kind of insensitive zombiphobic discrimination that any
compassionate democracy would denounce as thought crime, whilst
boosting the public budget for the vitally-challenged, undertaking
consciousness raising campaigns on behalf of those suffering from
involuntary cannibalistic impulse syndrome, affirming the dignity of
the zombie lifestyle in higher-education curriculums, and rigorously
regulating workspaces to ensure that the shuffling undead are not
victimized by profit-obsessed, performance-centric, or even
unreconstructed animationist employers.
As enlightened zombie-tolerance flourishes in the shelter of the
democratic mega-parasite, a small remnant of reactionaries,
attentive to the effects of real incentives, raise the formulaic
question: “You do realize that these policies lead inevitably to a
massive expansion of the zombie population?” The dominant vector
of history presupposes that such nuisance objections are
marginalized, ignored, and — wherever possible – silenced through
social ostracism. The remnant either fortifies the basement, whilst
31
Reignition
stocking up on dried food, ammunition, and silver coins, or

accelerates the application process for a second passport, and starts
packing its bags.
If all of this seems to be coming unmoored from historical
concreteness, there’s a conveniently topical remedy: a little
digressive channel-hopping over to Greece. As a microcosmic model
for the death of the West, playing out in real time, the Greek story
is hypnotic. It describes a 2,500 year arc that is far from neat, but
irresistibly dramatic, from proto-democracy to accomplished zombie
apocalypse. Its pre-eminent virtue is that it perfectly illustrates the
democratic mechanism in extremis, separating individuals and local
populations from the consequences of their decisions by scrambling
their behavior through large-scale, centralized re-distribution
systems. You decide what you do, but then vote on the
consequences. How could anyone say ‘no’ to that?
No surprise that over 30 years of EU membership Greeks have
been eagerly cooperating with a social-engineering mega-project
that strips out all short-wave social signals and re-routes feedback
through the grandiose circuitry of European solidarity, ensuring that
all economically-relevant information is red-shifted through the
heat-death sump of the European Central Bank. Most specifically, it
has conspired with ‘Europe’ to obliterate all information that might
be contained in Greek interest rates, thus effectively disabling all
financial feedback on domestic policy choices.
32
This is democracy in a consummate form that defies further

perfection, since nothing conforms more exactly to the ‘general will’
than the legislative abolition of reality, and nothing delivers the
hemlock to reality more definitively than the coupling of Teutonic
interest rates with East Mediterranean spending decisions. Live like
Hellenes and pay like Germans — any political party that failed to rise
to power on that platform deserves to scrabble for vulture-picked
scraps in the wilderness. It’s the ultimate no-brainer, in just about
every imaginable sense of that expression. What could possibly go
wrong?
More to the point, what did go wrong? Mencius Moldbug begins
his Unqualified Reservations series How Dawkins got pwned (or
taken over through an “exploitable vulnerability”) with the outlining
of design rules for a hypothetical “optimal memetic parasite” that
would be “as virulent as possible. It will be highly contagious, highly
morbid, and highly persistent. A really ugly bug.” In comparison to
this ideological super-plague, the vestigial monotheism derided in
The God Delusion would figure as nothing worse than a moderately
unpleasant head cold. What begins as abstract meme tinkering
concludes as grand-sweep history, in the dark enlightenment mode:
My belief is that Professor Dawkins is not just a Christian

atheist. He is a Protestant atheist. And he is not just a
Protestant atheist. He is a Calvinist atheist. And he is not
33
Reignition
just a Calvinist atheist. He is an Anglo-Calvinist atheist. In

other words, he can be also described as a Puritan atheist,
a Dissenter atheist, a Nonconformist atheist, an Evangelical
atheist, etc, etc.
This cladistic taxonomy traces Professor Dawkins’
intellectual ancestry back about 400 years, to the era of the
English Civil War. Except of course for the atheism theme,
Professor Dawkins’ kernel is a remarkable match for the
Ranter, Leveller, Digger, Quaker, Fifth Monarchist, or any of
the more extreme English Dissenter traditions that
flourished during the Cromwellian interregnum.
Frankly, these dudes were freaks. Maniacal fanatics. Any
mainstream English thinker of the 17th, 18th or 19th century,
informed that this tradition (or its modern descendant) is
now the planet’s dominant Christian denomination, would
regard this as a sign of imminent apocalypse. If you’re sure
they’re wrong, you’re more sure than me.
Fortunately, Cromwell himself was comparatively
moderate. The extreme ultra-Puritan sects never got a solid
lock on power under the Protectorate. Even more
fortunately, Cromwell got old and died, and Cromwellism
died with him. Lawful government was restored to Great
Britain, as was the Church of England, and Dissenters
became a marginal fringe again. And frankly, a damned good
34
riddance it was.
However, you can’t keep a good parasite down. A
community of Puritans fled to America and founded the
theocratic colonies of New England. After its military
victories in the American Rebellion and the War of Secession,
American Puritanism was well on the way to world
domination. Its victories in World War I, World War II, and
the Cold War confirmed its global hegemony. All legitimate
mainstream thought on Earth today is descended from the
American Puritans, and through them the English Dissenters.
Given the rise of this “really ugly bug” to world dominion, it might
seem strange to pick on tangential figure such as Dawkins, but
Moldbug selects his target for exquisitely-judged strategic reasons.
Moldbug identifies with Dawkins’ Darwinism, with his intellectual
repudiation of Abrahamic theism, and with his broad commitment
to scientific rationality. Yet he recognizes, crucially, that Dawkins’
critical faculties shut off – abruptly and often comically – at the point
where they might endanger a still broader commitment to
hegemonic progressivism. In this way, Dawkins is powerfully
indicative. Militant secularism is itself a modernized variant of the
Abrahamic meta-meme, on its Anglo-Protestant, radical democratic
taxonomic branch, whose specific tradition is anti-traditionalism.
The clamorous atheism of The God Delusion represents a protective
35
Reignition
feint, and a consistent upgrade of religious reformation, guided by a

spirit of progressive enthusiasm that trumps empiricism and reason,
whilst exemplifying an irritable dogmatism that rivals anything to be
found in earlier God-themed strains.
Dawkins isn’t merely an enlightened modern progressive and
implicit radical democrat, he’s an impressively credentialed scientist,
more specifically a biologist, and (thus) a Darwinian evolutionist. The
point at which he touches the limit of acceptable thinking as defined
by the memetic super-bug is therefore quite easy to anticipate. His
inherited tradition of low-church ultra-protestantism has replaced
God with Man as the locus of spiritual investment, and ‘Man’ has
been in the process of Darwinian research dissolution for over 150
years. (As the sound, decent person I know you are, having gotten
this far with Moldbug you’re probably already muttering under your
breath, don’t mention race, don’t mention race, don’t mention race,
please, oh please, in the name of the Zeitgeist and the dear sweet
non-god of progress, don’t mention race …) … but Moldbug is already
citing Dawkins, citing Thomas Huxley “…in a contest which is to be
carried out by thoughts and not by bites. The highest places in the
hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of our
dusky cousins.” Which Dawkins frames by remarking: “Had Huxley…
been born and educated in our time, [he] would have been the first
to cringe with us at [his] Victorian sentiments and unctuous tone. I
quote them only to illustrate how the Zeitgeist moves on.”
36
It gets worse. Moldbug seems to be holding Huxley’s hand, and …

(ewww!) doing that palm-stroking thing with his finger. This sure ain’t
vanilla-libertarian reaction anymore — it’s getting seriously dark,
and scary. “In all seriousness, what is the evidence for fraternism?
Why, exactly, does Professor Dawkins believe that all neohominids
are born with identical potential for neurological development? He
doesn’t say. Perhaps he thinks it’s obvious.”
Whatever one’s opinion on the respective scientific merits of
human biological diversity or uniformity, it is surely beyond
contention that the latter assumption, alone, is tolerated. Even if
progressive-universalistic beliefs about human nature are true, they
are not held because they are true, or arrived at through any process
that passes the laugh test for critical scientific rationality. They are
received as religious tenets, with all of the passionate intensity that
characterizes essential items of faith, and to question them is not
a matter of scientific inaccuracy, but of what we now call political
incorrectness, and once knew as heresy.
To sustain this transcendent moral posture in relation to racism
is no more rational than subscription to the doctrine of original sin,
of which it is, in any case, the unmistakable modern substitute. The
difference, of course, is that ‘original sin’ is a traditional doctrine,
subscribed to by an embattled social cohort, significantly under-
represented among public intellectuals and media figures, deeply
unfashionable in the dominant world culture, and widely criticized
37
Reignition
– if not derided – without any immediate assumption that the critic

is advocating murder, theft, or adultery. To question the status of
racism as the supreme and defining social sin, on the other hand, is
to court universal condemnation from social elites, and to arouse
suspicions of thought crimes that range from pro-slavery apologetics
to genocide fantasies. Racism is pure or absolute evil, whose proper
sphere is the infinite and the eternal, or the incendiary sinful depths
of the hyper-protestant soul, rather than the mundane confines of
civil interaction, social scientific realism, or efficient and
proportional legality. The dissymmetry of affect, sanction, and raw
social power attending old heresies and their replacements, once
noticed, is a nagging indicator. A new sect reigns, and it is not even
especially well hidden.
Yet even among the most hardened HBD constituencies,
hysterical sanctification of plus-good race-think hardly suffices to
lend radical democracy the aura of profound morbidity that Moldbug
detects. That requires a devotional relation to the State.
March 9, 2012

(Part
art 3)
The previous installment of this series ended with our hero Mencius
Moldbug, up to his waist (or worse) in the mephitic swamp of political
38
incorrectness, approaching the dark heart of his politico-religious

meditation on How Dawkins Got Pwned. Moldbug has caught
Dawkins in the midst of a symptomatically significant, and
excruciatingly sanctimonious, denunciation of Thomas Huxley’s
racist “Victorian sentiments” – a sermon which concludes with the
strange declaration that he is quoting Huxley’s words, despite their
self-evident and wholly intolerable ghastliness, “only to illustrate
how the Zeitgeist moves on.”
Moldbug pounces, asking pointedly: “What, exactly, is this
Zeitgeist thing?” It is, indisputably, an extraordinary catch. Here is
a thinker (Dawkins), trained as a biologist, and especially fascinated
by the (disjunctively) twinned topics of naturalistic evolution and
Abrahamic religion, stumbling upon what he apprehends as a one-
way trend of world-historical spiritual development, which he then –
emphatically, but without the slightest appeal to disciplined reason
or evidence – denies has any serious connection to the advance of
science, human biology, or religious tradition. The stammering
nonsense that results is a thing of wonder, but for Moldbug it all
makes sense:
In fact, Professor Dawkins’ Zeitgeist is … indistinguishable

from … the old Anglo-Calvinist or Puritan concept of
Providence. Perhaps this is a false match. But it’s quite a close
one.
39
Reignition
Another word for Zeitgeist is Progress. It’s unsurprising

that Universalists tend to believe in Progress– in fact, in a
political context, they often call themselves progressives.
Universalism has indeed made quite a bit of progress since
[the time of Huxley’s embarrassing remark in] 1913. But this
hardly refutes the proposition that Universalism is a parasitic
tradition. Progress for the tick is not progress for the dog.
What, exactly, is this Zeitgeist thing? The question bears repeating.

Is it not astounding, to begin with, that when one English Darwinian
reaches for a weapon to club another, the most convenient cudgel
to hand should be a German word — associated with an abstruse
lineage of state-worshipping idealistic philosophy — explicitly
referencing a conception of historical time that has no discernible
connection to the process of naturalistic evolution? It is as if, scarcely
imaginably, during a comparable contention among physicists (on the
topic of quantum indeterminacy), one should suddenly hear it
shouted that “God does not play dice with the universe.” In fact, the
two examples are intimately entangled, since Dawkins’ faith in the
Zeitgeist is combined with adherence to the dogmatic progressivism
of ‘Einsteinian Religion’ (meticulously dissected, of course, by
Moldbug).
The shamelessness is remarkable, or at least it would be, were it
naively believed that the protocols of scientific rationality occupied
40
sovereign position in such disputation, if only in principle. In fact –

and here irony is amplified to the very brink of howling psychosis
– Einstein’s Old One still reigns. The criteria of judgment owe
everything to neo-puritan spiritual hygiene, and nothing whatsoever
to testable reality. Scientific utterance is screened for conformity to
a progressive social agenda, whose authority seems to be unaffected
by its complete indifference to scientific integrity. It reminds
Moldbug of Lysenko, for understandable reasons.
“If the facts do not agree with the theory, so much worse for the
facts” Hegel asserted. It is the Zeitgeist that is God, historically
incarnated in the state, trampling mere data back into the dirt. By
now, everybody knows where this ends. An egalitarian moral ideal,
hardened into a universal axiom or increasingly incontestable
dogma, completes modernity’s supreme historical irony by making
‘tolerance’ the iron criterion for the limits of (cultural) toleration.
Once it is accepted universally, or, speaking more practically, by all
social forces wielding significant cultural power, that intolerance is
intolerable, political authority has legitimated anything and
everything convenient to itself, without restraint.
That is the magic of the dialectic, or of logical perversity. When
only tolerance is tolerable, and everyone (who matters) accepts this
manifestly nonsensical formula as not only rationally intelligible, but
as the universally-affirmed principle of modern democratic faith,
nothing except politics remains. Perfect tolerance and absolute
41
Reignition
intolerance have become logically indistinguishable, with either

equally interpretable as the other, A = not-A, or the inverse, and in
the nakedly Orwellian world that results, power alone holds the keys
of articulation. Tolerance has progressed to such a degree that it
has become a social police function, providing the existential pretext
for new inquisitional institutions. (“We must remember that those
who tolerate intolerance abuse tolerance itself, and an enemy of
tolerance is an enemy of democracy,” Moldbug ironizes.)
The spontaneous tolerance that characterized classical
liberalism, rooted in a modest set of strictly negative rights that
restricted the domain of politics, or government intolerance,
surrenders during the democratic surge-tide to a positive right to be
tolerated, defined ever more expansively as substantial entitlement,
encompassing public affirmations of dignity, state-enforced
guarantees of equal treatment by all agents (public and private),
government protections against non-physical slights and
humiliations, economic subsidies, and – ultimately – statistically
proportional representation within all fields of employment,
achievement, and recognition. That the eschatological culmination
of this trend is simply impossible matters not at all to the dialectic.
On the contrary, it energizes the political process, combusting any
threat of policy satiation in the fuel of infinite grievance. “I will not
cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand: Till
we have built Jerusalem, In England’s green and pleasant land.”
42
Somewhere before Jerusalem is reached, the inarticulate pluralism

of a free society has been transformed into the assertive
multiculturalism of a soft-totalitarian democracy.
The Jews of 17th century Amsterdam, or the Huguenots of 18th
century London, enjoyed the right to be left alone, and enriched their
host societies in return. The democratically-empowered grievance
groups of later modern times are incited by political leaders to
demand a (fundamentally illiberal) right to be heard, with social
consequences that are predominantly malignant. For politicians,
however, who identify and promote themselves as the voice of the
unheard and the ignored, the self-interest at stake could hardly be
more obvious.
Tolerance, which once presupposed neglect, now decries it, and
in so doing becomes its opposite. Were this a partisan development,
partisan politics of a democratic kind might sustain the possibility of
reversion, but it is nothing of the kind. “When someone is hurting,
government has got to move” declared ‘compassionate conservative’
US President George W. Bush, in a futile effort to channel the
Cathedral. When the ‘right’ sounds like this it is not only dead, but
unmistakably reeking of advanced decomposition. ‘Progress’ has
won, but is that bad? Moldbug approaches the question rigorously:
If a tradition causes its hosts to make miscalculations that

compromise their personal goals, it exhibits Misesian
43
Reignition
morbidity. If it causes its hosts to act in ways that

compromise their genes’ reproductive interests, it exhibits
Darwinian morbidity. If subscribing to the tradition is
individually advantageous or neutral (defectors are
rewarded, or at least unpunished) but collectively harmful,
the tradition is parasitic. If subscribing is individually
disadvantageous but collectively beneficial, the tradition is
altruistic. If it is both individually and collectively benign, it
is symbiotic. If it is both individually and collectively harmful,
it is malignant. Each of these labels can be applied to either
Misesian or Darwinian morbidity. A theme that is arational,
but does not exhibit either Misesian or Darwinian morbidity,
is trivially morbid.
Behaviorally considered, the Misesian and Darwinian systems are

clusters of ‘selfish’ incentives, oriented respectively to property
accumulation and gene propagation. Whilst the Darwinians conceive
the ‘Misesian’ sphere as a special case of genetically self-interested
motivation, the Austrian tradition, rooted in highly rationalized neo-
kantian anti-naturalism, is pre-disposed to resist such reductionism.
Whilst the ultimate implications of this contest are considerable,
under current conditions it is a squabble of minor urgency, since both
formations are united in ‘hate’, which is to say, in their reactionary
tolerance for incentive structures that punish the maladapted.
44
‘Hate’ is a word to pause over. It testifies with special clarity to

the religious orthodoxy of the Cathedral, and its peculiarities merit
careful notice. Perhaps its most remarkable feature is its perfect
redundancy, when evaluated from the perspective of any analysis
of legal and cultural norms that is not enflamed by neo-puritan
evangelical enthusiasm. A ‘hate crime’, if it is anything at all, is just
a crime, plus ‘hate’, and what the ‘hate’ adds is telling. To restrict
ourselves, momentarily, to examples of uncontroversial criminality,
one might ask: what is it exactly that aggravates a murder, or assault,
if the motivation is attributed to ‘hate’? Two factors seem especially
prominent, and neither has any obvious connection to common legal
norms.
Firstly, the crime is augmented by a purely ideational, ideological,
or even ‘spiritual’ element, attesting not only to a violation of
civilized conduct, but also to a heretical intention. This facilitates the
complete abstraction of hate from criminality, whereupon it takes
the form of ‘hate-speech’ or simply ‘hate’ (which is always to be
contrasted with the ‘passion’, ‘outrage’, or righteous ‘anger’
represented by critical, controversial, or merely abusive language
directed against unprotected groups, social categories, or
individuals). ‘Hate’ is an offense against the Cathedral itself, a refusal
of its spiritual guidance, and a mental act of defiance against the
manifest religious destiny of the world.
Secondly, and relatedly, ‘hate’ is deliberately and even
45
Reignition
strategically asymmetrical in respect to the equilibrium political

polarity of advanced democratic societies. Between the relentless
march of progress and the ineffective grouching of conservatism it
does not vacillate. As we have seen, only the right can ‘hate’. As the
doxological immunity system of ‘hate’ suppression is consolidated
within elite educational and media systems, the highly selective
distribution of protections ensures that ‘discourse’ – especially
empowered discourse – is ratcheted consistently to the left, which is
to say, in the direction of an ever more comprehensively radicalized
Universalism. The morbidity of this trend is extreme.
Because grievance status is awarded as political compensation
for economic incompetence, it constructs an automatic cultural
mechanism that advocates for dysfunction. The Universalist creed,
with its reflex identification of inequality with injustice, can conceive
no alternative to the proposition that the lower one’s situation or
status, the more compelling is one’s claim upon society, the purer and
nobler one’s cause. Temporal failure is the sign of spiritual election
(Marxo-Calvinism), and to dispute any of this is clearly ‘hate’.
This does not compel even the most hard-hearted neo-
reactionary to suggest, in a caricature of the high Victorian cultural
style, that social disadvantage, as manifested in political violence,
criminality, homelessness, insolvency, and welfare dependency, is a
simple index of moral culpability. In large part – perhaps
overwhelmingly large part – it reflects sheer misfortune. Dim,
46
impulsive, unhealthy, and unattractive people, reared chaotically in

abusive families, and stranded in broken, crime-wracked
communities, have every reason to curse the gods before
themselves. Besides, disaster can strike anyone.
In regards to effective incentive structures, however, none of this
is of the slightest importance. Behavioral reality knows only one iron
law: Whatever is subsidized is promoted. With a necessity no weaker
than that of entropy itself, insofar as social democracy seeks to
soften bad consequences – for major corporations no less than for
struggling individuals or hapless cultures — things get worse. There
is no way around, or beyond this formula, only wishful thinking, and
complicity with degeneration. Of course, this defining reactionary
insight is doomed to inconsequence, since it amounts to the
supremely unpalatable conclusion that every attempt at
‘progressive’ improvement is fated to reverse itself, ‘perversely’, into
horrible failure. No democracy could accept this, which means that
every democracy will fail.
The excited spiral of Misesian-Darwinian degenerative runaway
is neatly captured in the words of the world’s fluffiest Beltway
libertarian, Megan McArdle, writing in core Cathedral-mouthpiece
The Atlantic:
It is somewhat ironic that the first serious strains caused by

Europe’s changing demographics are showing up in the
47
Reignition
Continent’s welfare budgets, because the pension systems

themselves may well have shaped, and limited, Europe’s
growth. The 20th century saw international adoption of
social-security systems that promised defined benefits paid
out of future tax revenue—known to pension experts as
“paygo” systems, and to critics as Ponzi schemes. These
systems have greatly eased fears of a destitute old age, but
multiple studies show that as social-security systems become
more generous (and old age more secure), people have fewer
children. By one estimate, 50 to 60 percent of the difference
between America’s (above-replacement) birthrate and
Europe’s can be explained by the latter’s more generous
systems. In other words, Europe’s pension system may have
set in motion the very demographic decline that helped make
that system—and some European governments—insolvent.
Despite McArdle’s ridiculous suggestion that the United States of

America has in some way exempted itself from Europe’s mortuary
path, the broad outline of the diagnosis is clear, and increasingly
accepted as commonsensical (although best ignored). According to
the rising creed, welfare attained through progeny and savings is
non-universal, and thus morally-benighted. It should be supplanted,
as widely and rapidly as possible, by universal benefits or ‘positive
rights’ distributed universally to the democratic citizen and thus,
48
inevitably, routed through the altruistic State. If as a result, due to

the irredeemable political incorrectness of reality, economies and
populations should collapse in concert, at least it will not damage our
souls. Oh democracy! You saccharine-sweet dying idiot, what do you
think the zombie hordes will care for your soul?
Moldbug comments:
Universalism, in my opinion, is best described as a mystery

cult of power.
It’s a cult of power because one critical stage in its
replicative lifecycle is a little critter called the State. When
we look at the big U’s surface proteins, we notice that most
of them can be explained by its need to capture, retain, and
maintain the State, and direct its powers toward the creation
of conditions that favor the continued replication of
Universalism. It’s as hard to imagine Universalism without
the State as malaria without the mosquito.
It’s a mystery cult because it displaces theistic traditions
by replacing metaphysical superstitions with philosophical
mysteries, such as humanity, progress, equality, democracy,
justice, environment, community, peace, etc.
None of these concepts, as defined in orthodox
Universalist doctrine, is even slightly coherent. All can absorb
arbitrary mental energy without producing any rational
49
Reignition
thought. In this they are best compared to Plotinian,

Talmudic, or Scholastic nonsense.
As a bonus, here’s the Urban Feature guide to the main sequence of

modern political regimes:
Regime (1) Communist Tyranny
Typical Growth: ~0%
Voice / Exit: Low / Low
Cultur
Culturalal climate: Pyschotic utopianism
Life is … hard but ‘fair’
Transition mechanism: Re-discovers markets at economic degree-
zero
Regime (2) Authoritarian Capitalism
Typical Growth: 5-10%
Voice / Exit: Low / High
Cultur
Culturalal climate: Flinty realism
Life is … hard but productive
Transition mechanism: Pressurized by the Cathedral to democratize
Regime (3) Social Democracy
Typical Growth: 0-3%
Voice / Exit: High / High
Cultur
Culturalal climate: Sanctimonious dishonesty
Life is … soft and unsustainable
Transition mechanism: Can-kicking runs out of road
50
Regime (4) Zombie Apocalypse

Typical Growth: N/A
Voice / Exit: High (mostly useless screaming) / High (with fuel, ammo,
dried food, precious metal coins)
Cultur
Culturalal climate: Survivalism
Life is … hard-to-impossible
Transition mechanism: Unknown
For all regimes, growth expectations assume moderately
competent population, otherwise go straight to (4)
March 19, 2012

(Part
art 4)
Re-running the rrace

ace to ruin
Liberals are baffled and infuriated that poor whites vote

Republican, yet voting on tribal grounds is a feature of all
multi-ethnic democracies, whether [in] Northern Ireland,
Lebanon or Iraq. The more a majority becomes a minority
the more tribal its voting becomes, so that increasingly the
Republicans have become the “white party”; making this
point indelicately got Pat Buchanan the sack, but many
others make it too.
51
Reignition
Will it happen here [in the UK]? The patterns are not
dissimilar. In the 2010 election the Conservatives won only
16 per cent of the ethnic minority vote, while Labour won
the support of 72 per cent of Bangladeshis, 78 per cent of
African-Caribbeans and 87 per cent of Africans. The Tories
are slightly stronger among British Hindus and Sikhs –
mirroring Republican support among Asian-Americans – who
are more likely to be home-owning professionals and feel less
alienated.
The Economist recently asked if the Tories had a “race
problem”, but it may just be that democracy has a race
problem.
— Ed West (here)
Without a taste for irony, Mencius Moldbug is all but unendurable,

and certainly unintelligible. Vast structures of historical irony shape
his writings, at times even engulfing them. How otherwise could a
proponent of traditional configurations of social order – a self-
proclaimed Jacobite – compose a body of work that is stubbornly
dedicated to subversion?
Irony is Moldbug’s method, as well as his milieu. This can be seen,
most tellingly, in his chosen name for the usurped enlightenment, the
dominant faith of the modern world: Universalism. This is a word
that he appropriates (and capitalizes) within a reactionary diagnosis
52
whose entire force lies in its exposure of an exorbitant particularity.

Moldbug turns continually to history (or, more rigorously,
cladistics), to accurately specify that which asserts its own universal
significance whilst ascending to a state of general dominance that
approaches the universal. Under this examination, what counts as
Universal reason, determining the direction and meaning of
modernity, is revealed as the minutely determined branch or sub-
species of a cultic tradition, descended from ‘ranters’, ‘levelers’, and
closely related variants of dissident, ultra-protestant fanaticism, and
owing vanishingly little to the conclusions of logicians.
Ironically, then, the world’s regnant Universalist democratic-
egalitarian faith is a particular or peculiar cult that has broken out,
along identifiable historical and geographical pathways, with an
epidemic virulence that is disguised as progressive global
enlightenment. The route that it has taken, through England and
New England, Reformation and Revolution, is recorded by an
accumulation of traits that provide abundant material for irony, and
for lower varieties of comedy. The unmasking of the modern ‘liberal’
intellectual or ‘open-minded’ media ‘truth-teller’ as a pale, fervent,
narrowly doctrinaire puritan, recognizably descended from the
species of witch-burning zealots, is reliably – and irresistibly –
entertaining.
Yet, as the Cathedral extends and tightens its grip upon
everything, everywhere, in accordance with its divine mandate, the
53
Reignition
response it triggers is only atypically humorous. More commonly,

when unable to exact humble compliance, it encounters inarticulate
rage, or at least uncomprehending, smoldering resentment, as befits
the imposition of parochial cultural dogmas, still wrapped in the
trappings of a specific, alien pedigree, even as they earnestly confess
to universal rationality.
Consider, for instance, the most famous words of America’s
Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-
evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …” Could it be honestly
maintained that to submit, scrupulously and sincerely, to such ‘self-
evident’ truths amounts to anything other than an act of religious re-
confirmation or conversion? Or denied that, in these words, reason
and evidence are explicitly set aside, to make room for principles
of faith? Could anything be less scientific than such a declaration,
or more indifferent to the criteria of genuinely universal reasoning?
How could anybody who was not already a believer be expected to
consent to such assumptions?
That the founding statement of the democratic-republican creed
should be formulated as a statement of pure (and doctrinally
recognizable) faith is information of sorts, but it is not yet irony. The
irony begins with the fact that among the elites of today’s Cathedral,
these words of the Declaration of Independence (as well as many
others) would be found – almost universally – to be quaintly
54
suggestive at best, perhaps vaguely embarrassing, and most

certainly incapable of supporting literal assent. Even amongst
libertarian-slanted conservatives, a firm commitment to ‘natural
rights’ is unlikely to proceed confidently and emphatically to their
divine origination. For modern ‘liberals’, believers in the rights-
bestowing (or entitlement) State, such archaic ideas are not only
absurdly dated, but positively obstructive. For that reason, they are
associated less with revered predecessors than with the retarded,
fundamentalist thinking of political enemies. Sophisticates of the
Cathedral core understand, as Hegel did, that God is no more than
deep government apprehended by infants, and as such a waste of
faith (that bureaucrats could put to better use).
Since the Cathedral has ascended to global supremacy, it no
longer has need for Founding Fathers, who awkwardly recall its
parochial ancestry, and impede its transnational public relations.
Rather, it seeks perpetual re-invigoration through their denigration.
The phenomenon of the ‘New Atheism’, with its transparent
progressive affiliations, attests abundantly to this. Paleo-puritanism
must be derided in order for neo-puritanism to flourish – the meme
is dead, long live the meme!
At the limit of self-parody, neo-puritan parricide takes the form of
the ludicrous ‘War on Christmas’, in which the allies of the Cathedral
sanctify the (radically unthreatened) separation of Church and State
through nuisance agitation against public expressions of traditional
55
Reignition
Christian piety, and their ‘Red State’ dupes respond with dyspeptic
outrage on cable TV shows. Like every other war against fuzzy nouns
(whether ‘poverty’, ‘drugs’, or ‘terror’), the outcome is predictably
perverse. If resistance to the War on Christmas is not yet established
as the solid center of Yuletide festivities, it can be confidently
expected to become so in the future. The purposes of the Cathedral
are served nonetheless, through promotion of a synthetic secularism
that separates the progressive faith from its religious foundations,
whilst directing attention away from the ethnically specific,
dogmatic creedal content at its core.
As reactionaries go, traditional Christians are generally
considered to be quite cuddly. Even the most wild-eyed fanatics of
the neo-puritan orthodoxy have trouble getting genuinely excited
about them (although abortion activists get close). For some real red
meat, with the nerves exposed and writhing to jolts of hard
stimulation, it makes far more sense to turn to another discarded and
ceremonially abominated block on the progressive lineage: White
Identity Politics, or (the term Moldbug opts for) ‘white nationalism’.
Just as the ratchet progress of neo-puritan social democracy is
radically facilitated by the orchestrated pillorying of its embryonic
religious forms, so is its trend to consistently neo-fascist political
economy smoothed by the concerted repudiation of a ‘neo-nazi’ (or
paleo-fascist) threat. It is extremely convenient, when constructing
ever more nakedly corporatist or ‘third position’ structures of state-
56
directed pseudo-capitalism, to be able to divert attention to angry

expressions of white racial paranoia, especially when these are
ornamented by clumsily modified nazi insignia, horned helmets, Leni
Riefenstahl aesthetics, and slogans borrowed freely from Mein
Kampf. In the United States (and thus, with shrinking time-lag,
internationally) the icons of the Ku Klux Klan, from white bed-sheets,
quasi-Masonic titles, and burning crosses, to lynching ropes, have
acquired comparable theatrical value.
Moldbug offers a sanitized white nationalist blog reading list,
consisting of writers who – to varying degrees of success – avoid
immediate reversion to paleo-fascist self-parody. The first step
beyond the boundary of respectable opinion is represented by
Lawrence Auster, a Christian, anti-Darwinist, and ‘Traditionalist
Conservative’ who defends ‘substantial’ (ethno-racial) national
identity and opposes the liberal master-principle of
nondiscrimination. By the time we reach ‘Tanstaafl’, at the ripped
outer edge of Moldbug’s carefully truncated spectrum, we have
entered a decaying orbit, spiraling into the great black hole that is
hidden at the dead center of modern political possibility.
Before following the Tanstaafl-types into the crushing abyss
where light dies, there are some preliminary remarks to make about
the white nationalist perspective, and its implications. Even more
than the Christian traditionalists (who, even in their cultural mid-
winter, can bask in the warmth of supernatural endorsement), white
57
Reignition
identity politics considers itself besieged. Moderate or measured

concern offers no equilibrium for those who cross the line, and begin
to self-identify in these terms. Instead, the path of involvement
demands rapid acceleration to a state of extreme alarm, or racial
panic, conforming to an analysis focused upon malicious population
replacement at the hands of a government which, in the oft-cited
words of Bertolt Brecht, “has decided to dissolve the people, and to
appoint another one.” ‘Whiteness’ (whether conceived biologically,
mystically, or both) is associated with vulnerability, fragility, and
persecution. This theme is so basic, and so multifarious, that it is
difficult to adequately address succinctly. It encompasses everything
from criminal predation (especially racially-charged murders, rapes,
and beatings), economic exactions and inverse discrimination,
cultural aggression by hostile academic and media systems, and
ultimately ‘genocide’ – or definitive racial destruction.
Typically, the prospective annihilation of the white race is
attributed to its own systematic vulnerability, whether due to
characteristic cultural traits (excessive altruism, susceptibility to
moral manipulation, excessive hospitality, trust, universal
reciprocity, guilt, or individualistic disdain for group identity), or
more immediate biological factors (recessive genes supporting
fragile Aryan phenotypes). Whilst it is unlikely that this sense of
unique endangerment is reducible to the chromatic formula ‘White
+ Color = Color’, the fundamental structure is of this kind. In its
58
abstract depiction of non-reciprocal vulnerability, it reflects the ‘one

drop rule’ (and Mendelian recessive / dominant gene combination). It
depicts mixture as essentially anti-white.
Because ‘whiteness’ is a limit (pure absence of color), it slips
smoothly from the biological factuality of the Caucasian sub-species
into metaphysical and mystical ideas. Rather than accumulating
genetic variation, a white race is contaminated or polluted by
admixtures that compromise its defining negativity – to darken it
is to destroy it. The mythological density of these — predominantly
subliminal – associations invests white identity politics with a
resilience that frustrates enlightened efforts at rationalistic
denunciation, whilst contradicting its own paranoid self-
representation. It also undermines recent white nationalist
promotions of a racial threat that is strictly comparable to that facing
indigenous peoples, universally, and depicting whites as ‘natives’
cruelly deprived of equal protection against extinction. There is no
route back to tribal innocence, or flat, biological diversity. Whiteness
has been compacted indissolubly with ideology, whichever the road
taken.
“If Blacks can have it, and Hispanics can have it, and Jews can have
it, why can’t we have it?” – That’s the final building block of white
nationalist grievance, the werewolf curse that means it can only ever
be a monster. There’s exactly one way out for persecuted palefaces,
and it leads straight into a black hole. We promised to get back to
59
Reignition
Tanstaafl, and here we are, in late Summer 2007, shortly after he got
‘the Jew thing’. There isn’t anything very original about his epiphany,
which is exactly the point. He quotes himself:
Isn’t it absurd that anyone would even think to blame

Christianity or WASPs for the rise of PC and its catastrophic
consequences? Isn’t this in fact a reversal of the truth? Hasn’t
the rise and spread of PC eroded the power of Christianity,
WASPs, and whites in general? Blaming them is in effect
blaming the victim.
Yes, there are Christians, WASPs, and whites who have
fallen for the PC brainwashing. Yes, there are some who have
taken it so deeply to heart that they work to expand and
protect it. That’s the nature of PC. That is its purpose. To
control the minds of the people it seeks to destroy. The left,
at its root, is all about destruction.
You don’t have to be an anti-Semite to notice where these
ideas originate from and who benefits. But you do have to
violate PC to say: Jews.
That’s the labyrinth, the trap, with its pitifully constricted,

stereotypical circuit. “Why can’t we be cuddly racial preservationists,
like Amazonian Indians? How come we always turn into Neo-Nazis?
It’s some kind of conspiracy, which means it has to be the Jews.”
60
Since the mid-20th century, the political intensity of the globalized

world has streamed, almost exclusively, out of the cratered ash-pile
of the Third Reich. Until you get the pattern, it seems mysterious
that there’s no getting away from it. After listing some blogs falling
under the relatively genteel category of ‘white nationalism’, Moldbug
cautions:
The Internet is also home to many out-and-out racist blogs.

Most are simply unreadable. But some are hosted by
relatively capable writers … On these racist blogs you’ll find
racial epithets, anti-Semitism (see why I am not an anti-
Semite) and the like. Obviously, I cannot recommend any of
these blogs, and nor will I link to them. However, if you are
interested in the mind of the modern racist, Google will get
you there.
Google is overkill. A little link-trawling will get you there. It’s a ‘six
degrees of separation’ problem (and more like two, or less). Start
digging into the actually existing ‘reactosphere’, and things get quite
astoundingly ugly very quickly. Yes, there really is ‘hate’, panic, and
disgust, as well as a morbidly addictive abundance of very grim,
vitriolic wit, and a disconcertingly impressive weight of credible fact
(these guys just love statistics to death). Most of all, just beyond the
horizon, there’s the black hole. If reaction ever became a popular
61
Reignition
movement, its few slender threads of bourgeois (or perhaps dreamily

‘aristocratic’) civility wouldn’t hold back the beast for long.
As liberal decency has severed itself from intellectual integrity,
and exiled harsh truths, these truths have found new allies, and
become considerably harsher. The outcome is mechanically, and
monotonously, predictable. Every liberal democratic ‘cause war’
strengthens and feralizes what it fights. The war on poverty creates
a chronically dysfunctional underclass. The war on drugs creates
crystallized super-drugs and mega-mafias. Guess what? The war on
political incorrectness creates data-empowered, web-coordinated,
paranoid and poly-conspiratorial werewolves, superbly positioned
to take advantage of liberal democracy’s impending rendezvous with
ruinous reality, and to then play their part in the unleashing of
unpleasantnesses that are scarcely imaginable (except by disturbing
historical analogy). When a sane, pragmatic, and fact-based
negotiation of human differences is forbidden by ideological fiat, the
alternative is not a reign of perpetual peace, but a festering of
increasingly self-conscious and militantantly defiant thoughtcrime,
nourished by publicly unavowable realities, and energized by
powerful, atavistic, and palpably dissident mythologies. That’s
obvious, on the ‘Net.
Moldbug considers the danger of white nationalism to be both
over- and understated. On the one hand, the ‘menace’ is simply
ridiculous, and merely reflects neo-puritan spiritual dogma in its
62
most hysterically oppressive and stubbornly mindless form. “It

should be obvious that, although I am not a white nationalist, I am not
exactly allergic to the stuff,” Moldbug remarks, before describing it
as “the most marginalized and socially excluded belief system in the
history of the world … an obnoxious social irritant in any circle which
does not include tattooed speedfreak bikers.”
Yet the danger remains, or rather, is under construction.
I can imagine one possibility which might make white

nationalism genuinely dangerous. White nationalism would
be dangerous if there was some issue on which white
nationalists were right, and everyone else was wrong. Truth
is always dangerous. Contrary to common belief, it does not
always prevail. But it’s always a bad idea to turn your back
on it. …While the evidence for human cognitive biodiversity is
indeed debatable, what’s not debatable is that it is debatable
…[even though] everyone who is not a white nationalist has
spent the last 50 years informing us that it is not debatable …
There’s far more to Moldbug’s essay, as there always is. Eventually

it explains why he rejects white nationalism, on grounds that owe
nothing to conventional reflexes. But the dark heart of the essay,
lifting it beyond brilliance to the brink of genius, is found early on, at
the edge of a black hole:
63
Reignition
Why does white nationalism strike us as evil? Because Hitler

was a white nationalist, and Hitler was evil. Neither of these
statements is remotely controvertible. There is exactly one
degree of separation between white nationalism and evil.
And that degree is Hitler. Let me repeat: Hitler.
The argument seems watertight. (Hitlertight?) But it holds
no water at all.
Why does socialism strike us as evil? Because Stalin was a
socialist, and Stalin was evil. Anyone who wants to seriously
argue that Stalin was less evil than Hitler has an awful long
row to hoe. Not only did Stalin order more murders, his
murder machine had its heyday in peacetime, whereas
Hitler’s can at least be seen as a war crime against enemy
civilians. Whether this makes a difference can be debated,
but if it does it puts Stalin on top.
And yet I have never had or seen anything like the “red
flags” response to socialism [“the sense of the presence of
evil”]. If I saw a crowd of young, fashionable people lining
up at the box office for a hagiographic biopic on Reinhard
Heydrich, chills would run up and down my neck. For Ernesto
Guevara, I have no emotional response. Perhaps I think it’s
stupid and sad. I do think it’s stupid and sad. But it doesn’t
freak me out.
64
Any attempt to be nuanced, balanced, or proportional in the moral

case against Hitler is to entirely misconstrue the nature of the
phenomenon. This can be noted, quite regularly, in Asian societies,
for instance, because the ghost of the Third Reich does not occupy
central position in their history, or rather, their religion, although – as
the inner sanctum of the Cathedral — it is determined to (and shows
almost every sign of succeeding). A brief digression on cross-cultural
misunderstanding and reciprocal blindness might be merited at this
point. When Westerners pay attention to the ‘God-Emperor’ style
of political devotion that has accompanied modern totalitarianism
in East Asia, the conclusion typically drawn is that this pattern of
political feeling is exotically alien, morbidly amusing, and ultimately
– chillingly — incomprehensible. Contemporary comparisons with
laughably non-numinous Western democratic leaders only deepen
the confusion, as do clumsy quasi-Marxist references to ‘feudal’
sensibilities (as if absolute monarchy was not an alternative to
feudalism, and as if absolute monarchs were worshipped). How could
a historical and political figure ever be invested with the
transcendent dignity of absolute religious meaning? It seems absurd
…
“Look, I’m not saying that Hitler was a particularly nice guy …” –
to imagine such word is already to see many things. It might even
provoke the question: Does anybody within the (Cathedral’s)
globalized world still think that Adolf Hitler was less evil than the
65
Reignition
Prince of Darkness himself? Perhaps only a few scattered paleo-

Christians (who stubbornly insist that Satan is really, really bad), and
an even smaller number of Neo-Nazi ultras (who think Hitler was
kind of cool). For pretty much everybody else, Hitler perfectly
personifies demonic monstrosity, transcending history and politics
to attain the stature of a metaphysical absolute: evil incarnate.
Beyond Hitler it is impossible to go, or think. This is surely
interesting, since it indicates an irruption of the infinite within
history – a religious revelation, of inverted, yet structurally familiar,
Abrahamic type. (‘Holocaust Theology’ already implies as much.)
In this regard, rather than Satan, it might be more helpful to
compare Hitler to the Antichrist, which is to say: to a mirror Messiah,
of reversed moral polarity. There was even an empty tomb. Hitlerism,
neutrally conceived, therefore, is less a pro-Nazi ideology than a
universal faith, speciated within the Abrahamic super-family, and
united in acknowledging the coming of pure evil on earth. Whilst not
exactly worshipped (outside the extraordinarily disreputable circles
already ventured into), Hitler is sacramentally abhorred, in a way
that touches upon theological ‘first things’. If to embrace Hitler as
God is a sign of highly lamentable politico-spiritual confusion (at
best), to recognize his historical singularity and sacred meaning is
near-mandatory, since he is affirmed by all men of sound faith as the
exact complement of the incarnate God (the revealed anti-Messiah,
or Adversary), and this identification has the force of ‘self-evident
66
truth’. (Did anybody ever need to ask why the reductio ad Hitlerum
works?)
Conveniently, like the secularized neo-puritanism that it
swallows, (aversive) Hitlerism can be safely taught in American
schools, at a remarkably high level of religious intensity. Insofar as
progressive or programmatic history continues, this suggests that
the Church of Sacred Hitlerite Abomination will eventually supplant
its Abrahamic predecessors, to become the world’s triumphant
ecumenical faith. How could it not? After all, unlike vanilla deism, this
is a faith that fully reconciles religious enthusiasm with enlightened
opinion, equally adapted, with consummate amphibious capability,
to the convulsive ecstasies of popular ritual and the letter pages of
the New York Times. “Absolute evil once walked amongst us, and
lives still …” How is this not, already, the principal religious message
of our time? All that remains unfinished is the mythological
consolidation, and that has long been underway.
There’s still some bone-fragment picking to do among the ashes
and debris [in Part 5], before turning to healthier things …
April 1, 2012
67
Reignition

(Part
art 4a)
A multi-part sub-digression into rracial

acial terror
My own sense of the thing is that underneath the happy talk,

underneath the dogged adherence to failed ideas and dead
theories, underneath the shrieking and anathematizing at
people like me, there is a deep and cold despair. In our
innermost hearts, we don’t believe racial harmony can be
attained. Hence the trend to separation. We just want to get
on with our lives away from each other. Yet for a moralistic,
optimistic people like Americans, this despair is unbearable.
It’s pushed away somewhere we don’t have to think about it.
When someone forces us to think about it, we react with fury.
That little boy in the Andersen story about the Emperor’s
new clothes? The ending would be more true to life if he had
been lynched by a howling mob of outraged citizens.
— John Derbyshire, interviewed at Gawker
We believe in the equal dignity and presumption of equal

decency toward every person — no matter what race, no
matter what science tells us about comparative intelligence,
and no matter what is to be gleaned from crime statistics. It
is important that research be done, that conclusions not be
rigged, and that we are at liberty to speak frankly about what
68
it tells us. But that is not an argument for a priori conclusions

about how individual persons ought to be treated in various
situations — or for calculating fear or friendship based on
race alone. To hold or teach otherwise is to prescribe the
disintegration of a pluralistic society, to undermine the
aspiration of E Pluribus Unum.
— Andrew McCarthy, defending the expulsion of JD from the
National Review
“The Talk” as black Americans and liberals present it (to wit:

necessitated by white malice), is a comic affront — because
no one is allowed (see Barro above) to notice the context in
which black Americans are having run-ins with the law, each
other, and others. The proper context for understanding this,
and the mania that is the Trayvonicus for that matter, is the
reasonable fear of violence. This is the single most exigent
fact here — yet you decree it must not be spoken.
— Dennis Dale, responding to Josh Barro’s call for JD’s ‘firing’
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to

be a slave.
— Bladerunner
There is no part of Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai, or very

many other East Asian cities where it is impossible to wander, safely,
69
Reignition
late at night. Women, whether young or old, on their own or with

small children, can be comfortably oblivious to the details of space
and time, at least insofar as the threat of assault is concerned. Whilst
this might not be quite sufficient to define a civilized society, it comes
extremely close. It is certainly necessary to any such definition. The
contrary case is barbarism.
These lucky cities of the western Pacific Rim are typified by
geographical locations and demographic profiles that conspicuously
echo the embarrassingly well-behaved ‘model minorities’ of
Occidental countries. They are (non-obnoxiously) dominated by
populations that – due to biological heredity, deep cultural
traditions, or some inextricable entanglement of the two – find
polite, prudent, and pacific social interactions comparatively
effortless, and worthy of continuous reinforcement. They are also,
importantly, open, cosmopolitan societies, remarkably devoid of
chauvinistic boorishness or paranoid ethno-nationalist sentiment.
Their citizens are disinclined to emphasize their own virtues. On the
contrary, they will typically be modest about their individual and
collective attributes and achievements, abnormally sensitive to their
failures and shortcomings, and constantly alert to opportunities for
improvement. Complacency is almost as rare as delinquency. In these
cities an entire — and massively consequential — dimension of social
terror is simply absent.
In much of the Western world, in stark contrast, barbarism has
70
been normalized. It is considered simply obvious that cities have ‘bad

areas’ that are not merely impoverished, but lethally menacing to
outsiders and residents alike. Visitors are warned to stay away,
whilst locals do their best to transform their homes into fortresses,
avoid venturing onto the streets after dark, and – especially if young
and male — turn to criminal gangs for protection, which further
degrades the security of everybody else. Predators control public
space, parks are death traps, aggressive menace is celebrated as
‘attitude’, property acquisition is for mugs (or muggers), educational
aspiration is ridiculed, and non-criminal business activity is despised
as a violation of cultural norms. Every significant mechanism of
socio-cultural pressure, from interpreted heritage and peer
influences to political rhetoric and economic incentives, is aligned to
the deepening of complacent depravity and the ruthless extirpation
of every impulse to self-improvement. Quite clearly, these are places
where civilization has fundamentally collapsed, and a society that
includes them has to some substantial extent failed.
Within the most influential countries of the English-speaking
world, the disintegration of urban civilization has profoundly shaped
the structure and development of cities. In many cases, the ‘natural’
(one might now say ‘Asian’) pattern, in which intensive urbanization
and corresponding real estate values are greatest in the downtown
core, has been shattered, or at least deeply deformed. Social
disintegration of the urban center has driven an exodus of the (even
71
Reignition
moderately) prosperous to suburban and exurban refuges,

producing a grotesque and historically unprecedented pattern of
‘donut’-style development, with cities tolerating – or merely
accommodating themselves to – ruined and rotting interiors, where
sane people fear to tread. ‘Inner city’ has come to mean almost
exactly the opposite of what an undistorted course of urban
development would produce. This is the geographical expression of a
Western – and especially American – social problem that is at once
basically unmentionable and visible from outer space.
Surprisingly, the core-crashed donut syndrome has a notably
insensitive yet commonly accepted name, which captures it in broad
outlines – at least according to its secondary characteristics – and to
a reasonable degree of statistical approximation: White Flight. This
is an arresting term, for a variety of reasons. It is stamped, first of
all, by the racial bi-polarity that – as a vital archaism – resonates
with America’s chronic social crisis at a number of levels. Whilst
superficially outdated in an age of many-hued multicultural and
immigration issues, it reverts to the undead code inherited from
slavery and segregation, perpetually identified with Faulkner’s
words: “The past is not dead. It isn’t even past.” Yet even in this
untypical moment of racial candor, blackness is elided, and implicitly
disconnected from agency. It is denoted only by allusion, as a residue,
concentrated passively and derivatively by the sifting function of a
highly-adrenalized white panic. What cannot be said is indicated
72
even as it is unmentioned. A distinctive silence accompanies the

broken, half-expression of a mute tide of racial separatism, driven by
civilizationally disabling terrors and animosities, whose depths, and
structures of reciprocity, remain unavowable.
What the puritan exodus from Old to New World was to the
foundation of Anglophone global modernity, white flight is to its
fraying and dissolution. As with the pre-founding migration, what
gives white flight ineluctable relevance here is its sub-political
character: all exit and no voice. It is the subtle, non-argumentative,
non-demanding ‘other’ of social democracy and its dreams – the
spontaneous impulse of dark enlightenment, as it is initially
glimpsed, at once disillusioning and implacable.
The core-crashed donut is not the only model of sick city
syndrome (the shanty fringe phenomenon emphasized in Mike
Davis’ Planet of Slums is very different). Nor is donut-disaster
urbanism reducible to racial crisis, at least in its origins.
Technological factors have played a crucial role (most prominently,
automobile geography) as have quite other, long-standing cultural
traditions (such as the construction of suburbia as a bourgeois idyll).
Yet all such lineages have been in very large measure supplanted by,
or at least subordinated to, the inherited, and still emerging, ‘race
problem.’
So what is this ‘problem’? How is it developing? Why should
anybody outside America be concerned about it? Why raise the topic
73
Reignition
now (if ever)? – If your heart is sinking under the gloomy suspicion
this is going to be huge, meandering, nerve-wracking, and torturous,
you’re right. We’ve got weeks in this chamber of horrors to look
forward to.
The two simplest, quite widely held, and basically incompatible
answers to the first question deserve to be considered as important
parts of the problem.
Question: What is America’s race problem?
Answer-1: Black people.
Answer-2: White people.
The combined popularity of these options is significantly
expanded, most probably to encompass a large majority of all
Americans, when is taken to include those who assume that one of
these two answers dominates the thinking of the other side.
Between them, the propositions “The problem would be over if we
could just rid ourselves of black hoodlums / white racists” and / or
“They think we’re all hoodlums / racists and want to get rid of us”
consume an impressive proportion of the political spectrum,
establishing a solid foundation of reciprocal terror and aversion.
When defensive projections are added (“We’re not hoodlums, you’re
racists” or “We’re not racists, you’re hoodlums”), the potential for
super-heated, non-synthesizing dialectics approaches the infinite.
Not that these ‘sides’ are racial (except in black or white tribal-
nationalist fantasy). For crude stereotypes, it is far more useful to
74
turn to the principal political dimension, and its categories of ‘liberal’

and ‘conservative’ in the contemporary, American sense. To identify
America’s race problem with white racism is the stereotypical liberal
position, whilst identifying it with black social dysfunction is the
exact conservative complement. Although these stances are
formally symmetrical, it is their actual political asymmentry that
charges the American race problem with its extraordinary historical
dynamism and universal significance.
That American whites and blacks – considered crudely as
statistical aggregates — co-exist in a relation of reciprocal fear and
perceived victimization, is attested by the manifest patterns of urban
development and navigation, school choice, gun ownership, policing
and incarceration, and just about every other expression of revealed
(as opposed to stated) preference that is related to voluntary social
distribution and security. An objective balance of terror reigns,
erased from visibility by complementary yet incompatible
perspectives of victimological supremacism and denial. Yet between
the liberal and conservative positions on race there is no balance
whatsoever, but something closer to a rout. Conservatives are
utterly terrified of the issue, whilst for liberals it is a garden of earthly
delight, whose pleasures transcend the limits of human
understanding. When any political discussion firmly and clearly
arrives at the topic of race, liberalism wins. That is the fundamental
law of ideological effectiveness in the shadow fragrant shade of the
75
Reignition
Cathedral. In certain respects, this dynamic political imbalance is

even the primary phenomenon under consideration (and much more
needs to be said about it, down the road).
The regular, excruciating, soul-crushing humiliation of
conservatism on the race issue should come as no surprise to
anybody. After all, the principal role of conservatism in modern
politics is to be humiliated. That is what a perpetual loyal opposition,
or court jester, is for. The essential character of liberalism, as
guardian and proponent of neo-puritan spiritual truth, invests it with
supreme mastery over the dialectic, or invulnerability to
contradiction. That which it is impossible to think must necessarily
be embraced, through faith. Consider only the fundamental doctrine
or first article of the liberal creed, as promulgated through every
public discussion, academic articulation, and legislative initiative
relevant to the topic: Race doesn’t exist, except as a social construct
employed by one race to exploit and oppress another. Merely to
entertain it is to shudder before the awesome majesty of the
absolute, where everything is simultaneously its precise opposite,
and reason evaporates ecstatically at the brink of the sublime.
If the world was built out of ideology, this story would already be
over, or at least predictably programmed. Beyond the apparent zig-
zag of the dialectic there is a dominant trend, heading in a single,
unambiguous direction. Yet the liberal-progressive solution to the
race problem – open-endedly escalating, comprehensively
76
systematic, dynamically paradoxical ‘anti-racism’ – confronts a real

obstacle that is only very partially reflected in conservative
attitudes, rhetoric, and ideology. The real enemy, glacial, inchoate,
and non-argumentative, is ‘white flight’.
At this point, explicit reference to the Derbyshire Case becomes
irresistible. There is a very considerable amount of complex, recent
historical context that cries out for introduction – the cultural
convulsion attending the Trayvon Martin incident in particular – but
there’ll be time for that later (oh yes, I’m afraid so). Derbyshire’s
intervention, and the explosion of words it provoked, while to some
extent illuminated by such context, far exceeds it. That is because
the crucial unspoken term, both in Derbyshire’s now-notorious short
article, and also — apparently — in the responses it generated, is
‘white flight’. By publishing paternal advice to his (Eurasian) children
that has been — not entirely unreasonably — summarized as ‘avoid
black people’, he converted white flight from a much-lamented but
seemingly inexorable fact into an explicit imperative, even a cause.
Don’t argue, flee.
The word Derbyshire emphasizes, in his own penumbra of
commentary, and in antecedent writings, is not ‘flight’ or ‘panic’, but
despair. When asked by blogger Vox Day whether he agreed that the
‘race card’ had become less intimidating over the past two decades,
Derbyshire replies:
77
Reignition
One [factor], which I’ve written about more than once, I think,
in the United States, is just despair. I am of a certain age,
and I was around 50 years ago. I was reading the newspapers
and following world events and I remember the civil rights
movement. I was in England, but we followed it. I remember
it, I remember what we felt about it, and what people were
writing about it. It was full of hope. The idea in everyone’s
mind was that if we strike down these unjust laws and we
outlaw all this discrimination, then we’ll be whole. Then
America will be made whole. After an intermediate period of
a few years, who knows, maybe 20 years, with a hand up from
things like affirmative action, black America will just merge
into the general population and the whole thing will just go
away. That’s what everybody believed. Everybody thought
that. And it didn’t happen.
Here we are, we’re 50 years later, and we’ve still got these
tremendous disparities in crime rates, educational
attainment, and so on. And I think, although they’re still
mouthing the platitudes, Americans in their hearts feel a kind
of cold despair about it. They feel that Thomas Jefferson was
probably right and we can’t live together in harmony. I think
that’s why you see this slow ethnic disaggregation. We have a
very segregated school system now. There are schools within
10 miles of where I’m sitting that are 98 percent minority. In
78
residential housing too, it’s the same thing. So I think there

is a cold, dark despair lurking in America’s collective heart
about the whole thing.
This is a version of reality that few want to hear. As Derbyshire

recognizes, Americans are a predominantly Christian, optimistic,
‘can-do’ people, whose ‘collective heart’ is unusually maladapted to
an abandonment of hope. This is a country culturally hard-wired to
interpret despair not merely as error or weakness, but as sin.
Nobody who understands this could be remotely surprised to find
bleak hereditarian fatalism being rejected — typically with vehement
hostility — not only by progressives, but also by the overwhelming
majority of conservatives. At NRO, Andrew C. McCarthy no doubt
spoke for many in remarking:
There is a world of difference, though, between the need to

be able to discuss uncomfortable facts about IQ and
incarceration, on the one hand, and, on the other, to urge race
as a rationale for abandoning basic Christian charity.
Others went much further. At the Examiner, James Gibson seized

upon “John Derbyshire’s vile racist screed” as the opportunity to
teach a wider lesson – “the danger of conservatism divorced from
Christianity”:
79
Reignition
… since Derbyshire does not believe “that Jesus of Nazareth

was divine . . . and that the Resurrection was a real event,”;
he cannot comprehend the great mystery of the Incarnation,
whereby the Divine truly did take on human flesh in the
person of Jesus of Nazareth and suffered death at the hands
of a fallen humanity in order to redeem that humanity out of
its state of fallenness.
Herein lies the danger of a conservative socio-political
philosophy divorced from a robust Christian faith. It becomes
a dead ideology spawning a view of humanity that is toxic,
fatalistic, and (as Derbyshire proves abundantly)
uncharitable.
It was, of course, on the left that the fireworks truly ignited. Elspeth
Reeve at the Atlantic Wire contended that Derbyshire had clung on
to his relation with the National Review because he was offering
the magazine’s “less enlightened readers” what they wanted: “dated
racial stereotypes.” Like Gibson on the right, she was keen for people
to learn a wider lesson: don’t think for a minute this stops with
Derbyshire. (The stunningly uncooperative comments thread to her
article is worth noting.)
At Gawker, Louis Peitzman jumped the shark (in the approved
direction) by describing Derbyshire’s “horrifying diatribe” as the
“most racist article possible,” a judgment that betrays extreme
80
historical ignorance, a sheltered life, unusual innocence, and a lack of

imagination, as well as making the piece sound far more interesting
than it actually is. Peitzman’s commentators are impeccably liberal,
and of course uniformly, utterly, shatteringly appalled (to the point of
orgasm). Beyond the emoting, Peitzman doesn’t offer much content,
excepting only a little extra emoting – this time mild satisfaction
mixed with residual rage – at the news that Derbyshire’s punishment
has at least begun (“a step in the right direction”) with his “canning”
from the National Review.
Joanna Schroeder (writing at something called the Good Feed
Blog) sought to extend the purge beyond Derbyshire, to include
anybody who had not yet erupted into sufficiently melodramatic
paroxysms of indignation, starting with David Weigel at Slate (who
she doesn’t know “in real life, but in reading this piece, it seems you
just might be a racist, pal”). “There are so many … racist,
dehumanizing references to black people in Derbyshire’s article that
I have to just stop myself here before I recount the entire thing point
by point with fuming rage,” she shares. Unlike Peitzman, however,
at least Schroeder has a point – the racial terror dialectic — “…
propagating the idea that we should be afraid of black men, of black
people in general, makes this world dangerous for innocent
Americans.” Your fear makes you scary (although apparently not with
legitimate reciprocity).
As for Weigel, he gets the terror good and hard. Within hours he’s
81
Reignition
back at the keyboard, apologizing for his previous insouciance, and

for the fact he “never ended up saying the obvious: People, the essay
was disgusting.”
So what did Derbyshire actually say, where did it come from, and
what does it mean to American politics (and beyond)? This sub-series
will comb through the spectrum from left to right in search of
suggestions, with socio-geographically manifested ‘white’ panic /
despair as a guiding thread …
Coming next: The Liberal Ecstasy
April 19, 2012

(Part
art 4b
4b))
Obno
Obnoxious
xious observations
Although black families and parents of boys aren’t the only

ones who worry about the safety of adolescents, Tillman,
Brown and other parents say raising black boys is perhaps the
most stressful aspect of parenting because they’re dealing
with a society that is fearful and hostile toward them, simply
because of the color of their skin.
“Don’t believe it? Walk a day in my shoes,” Brown said.
Brown said that at 14, his son is at that critical age when
82
he’s always worried about his safety because of profiling.

“I don’t want to scare him or have him paint people with
a broad brush, but, historically, we black males have been
stigmatized as the purveyors of crime and wherever we are,
we’re suspect,” Brown said.
Black parents who don’t make that fact clear, he and
others said, do it at their sons’ peril.
“Any African-American parent not having that
conversation is being irresponsible,” Brown said. “I see this
whole thing as an opportunity for us to speak frankly, openly
and honestly about race relations.”
— Gracie Bonds Staples (Star-Telegram)
When communities resist an influx of Section 8 housing-

voucher holders from the inner city, say, they are reacting
overwhelmingly to behavior. Skin color is a proxy for that
behavior. If inner-city blacks behaved like Asians — cramming
as much knowledge into their kids as they can possibly fit into
their skulls — the lingering wariness towards lower-income
blacks that many Americans unquestionably harbor would
disappear. Are there irredeemable racists among Americans?
To be sure. They come in all colors, and we should deplore all
of them. But the issue of race in the United States is more
complex than polite company is usually allowed to express.
83
Reignition
— Heather Mac Donald (City Journal)
“Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. I’m black, OK” the
woman said, declining to be identified because she
anticipated backlash due to her race. She leaned in to look a
reporter directly in the eyes. “There were black boys robbing
houses in this neighborhood,” she said. “That’s why George
was suspicious of Trayvon Martin.”
— Chris Francescani (Reuters)
“In brief, dialectics can be defined as the doctrine of the unity of

opposites. This embodies the essence of dialectics,” Lenin notes, “but
it requires explanations and development.” That is to say: further
discussion.
The sublimation (Aufhebung) of Marxism into Leninism is an
eventuality that is best grasped crudely. By forging a revolutionary
communist politics of broad application, almost entirely divorced
from the mature material conditions or advanced social
contradictions that had been previously anticipated, Lenin
demonstrated that dialectical tension coincided, exhaustively, with
its politicization (and that all reference to a ‘dialectics of nature’ is no
more than retrospective subordination of the scientific domain to a
political model). Dialectics are as real as they are made to be.
The dialectic begins with political agitation, and extends no
84
further than its practical, antagonistic, factional and coalitional

‘logic’. It is the ‘superstructure’ for itself, or against natural limitation,
practically appropriating the political sphere in its broadest
graspable extension as a platform for social domination. Everywhere
that there is argument, there is an unresolved opportunity to rule.
The Cathedral incarnates these lessons. It has no need to espouse
Leninism, or operational communist dialectics, because it recognizes
nothing else. There is scarcely a fragment of the social
‘superstructure’ that has escaped dialectical reconstruction, through
articulate antagonism, polarization, binary structuring, and reversal.
Within the academy, the media, even the fine arts, political super-
saturation has prevailed, identifying even the most minuscule
elements of apprehension with conflictual ‘social critique’ and
egalitarian teleology. Communism is the universal implication.
More dialectics is more politics, and more politics means
‘progress’ – or social migration to the left. The production of public
agreement only leads in one direction, and within public
disagreement, such impetus already exists in embryo. It is only in
the absence of agreement and of publicly articulated disagreement,
which is to say, in non-dialectics, non-argument, sub-political
diversity, or politically uncoordinated initiative, that the ‘right-wing’
refuge of ‘the economy’ (and civil society more widely) is to be found.
When no agreement is necessary, or coercively demanded,
negative (or ‘libertarian’) liberty is still possible, and this non-
85
Reignition
argumentative ‘other’ of dialectics is easily formulated (even if, in a

free society, it doesn’t need to be): Do your own thing. Quite clearly,
this irresponsible and negligent imperative is politically intolerable.
It coincides exactly with leftist depression, retrogression, or
depoliticization. Nothing cries out more urgently to be argued
against.
At the opposite extreme lies the dialectical ecstasy of theatrical
justice, in which the argumentative structure of legal proceedings
is coupled with publicization through the media. Dialectical
enthusiasm finds its definitive expression in a courtroom drama that
combines lawyers, journalists, community activists, and other agents
of the revolutionary superstructure in the production of a show trial.
Social contradictions are staged, antagonistic cases articulated, and
resolution institutionally expected. This is Hegel for prime-time
television (and now for the Internet). It is the way that the Cathedral
shares its message with the people.
Sometimes, in its impatient passion for progress, this message can
trip over itself, because even though the agents of the Cathedral
are infinitely reasonable, they are ever less sensible, often strikingly
incompetent, and prone to making mistakes. This is to be expected
on theological grounds. As the state becomes God, it degenerates
into imbecility, on the model of the holy fool. The media-politics of
the Trayvon Martin spectacle provides a pertinent example.
In the United States, as in any other large country, lots of things
86
happen every day, exhibiting innumerable patterns of varying

obscurity. For instance, on an average day, there are roughly 3,400
violent crimes, including 40 murders, 230 rapes, 1,000 robberies,
and 2,100 aggravated assaults, alongside 25,000 non-violent
property crimes (burglaries and thefts). Very few of these will be
widely publicized, or seized upon as educational, exemplary, and
representative. Even were the media not inclined towards a
narrative-based selection of ‘good stories’, the sheer volume of
incidents would compel something of the kind. Given this situation, it
is all but inevitable that people will ask: Why are they telling us this?
Almost everything about the death of Trayvon Martin is
controversial, except for media motivation. On that topic there is
near unanimity. The meaning or intended message of the story of
the case could scarcely have been more transparent: White racist
paranoia makes America dangerous for black people. It would thus
rehearse the dialectic of racial terror (your fear is scary), designed
– as always — to convert America’s reciprocal social nightmare into
a unilateral morality play, allocating legitimate dread exclusively to
one side of the country’s principal racial divide. It seemed perfect.
A malignantly deluded white vigilante guns down an innocent black
child, justifying black fear (‘the talk’) whilst exposing white panic as a
murderous psychosis. This is a story of such archetypal progressive
meaning that it cannot be told too many times. In fact, it was just too
good to be true.
87
Reignition
It soon became evident, however, that media selection – even

when reinforced by the celebrity / ‘community activist’ rage-machine
– hadn’t sufficed to keep the story on script, and both of the main
actors were drifting from their assigned roles. If progressively-
endorsed stereotypes were to be even remotely preserved, vigorous
editing would be required. This was especially necessary because
certain evil, racist, bigoted readers of the Miami Herald were
beginning to forge a narrative-wrecking mental connection between
‘Trayvon Martin’ and ‘burglary tool’.
As for the killer, George Zimmerman, the name said it all. He was
clearly going to be a hulking, pasty-faced, storm-trooper look-alike,
hopefully some kind of Christian gun-nut, and maybe – if they really
hit pay-dirt – a militia movement type with a history of homophobia
and anti-abortion activism. He started off ‘white’ – for no obvious
reason beyond media incompetence and narrative programming –
then found himself transformed into a ‘white Hispanic’ (a category
that seems to have been rapidly innovated on the spot), before
gradually shifted through a series of ever more reality-compliant
ethnic complications, culminating in the discovery of his Afro-
Peruvian great grandfather.
In the heart of the Cathedral it was well into head-scratching time.
Here was the great Amerikkkan defendant being prepped for his
show trial, the President had pitched in emotionally on behalf of the
sacred victim, and the coordinated ground game had been advanced
88
to the simmering brink of race riots, when the message began falling
apart, to such an extent that it now threatened to decay into an
annoyingly irrelevant case of black-on-black violence. It was not only
that George Zimmerman had black ancestry – making him simply
‘black’ by the left’s own social constructivist standards – he had also
grown up amicably among black people, with two African-American
girls as “part of the household for years,” had entered into joint
business venture with a black partner, he was a registered Democrat,
and even some kind of ‘community organizer’ …
So why did Martin die? Was it for carrying iced tea and a bag
of Skittles while black (the media and community activist approved,
‘son Obama might have had’ version), for scoping out burglary
targets (the Kluxer racial profiling version), or for breaking
Zimmerman’s nose, knocking him over, sitting on top of him, and
smashing his head repeatedly against the sidewalk (to be decided in
court)? Was he a martyr to racial injustice, a low-level social predator,
or a human symptom of American urban crisis? The only thing that
was really clear when legal proceedings began, beyond the squalid
sadness of the episode, was that it was not resolving anything.
For a sense of just how disconcertingly the approved lesson had
disintegrated by the time Zimmerman was charged with second
degree murder, it is only necessary to read this post by HBD-blogger
oneSTDV, describing the dialectical derangements of the race-
warrior right:
89
Reignition
Despite the disturbing nature of the “charges” against

Zimmerman, many in the alt-right refuse to grant
Zimmerman any sympathy or to even view this as a seminal
moment in modern leftism’s anarcho-tyrannical reign.
According to these individuals, the Spanish-speaking,
registered Democr
Democratat mestizo got what was coming to him
— the ire of the black mob and the elite left indirectly
buttressed by Zimmerman himself. Due to his voting record,
multicultural background, and mentoring of minority youth,
they see Zimmerman as emblematic of the left’s assault on
white America, a sort of ground soldier in the campaign
against American whiteness. [Bolding in original]
The pop PC police were ready to move on. With the great show trial
collapsing into narrative disorder, it was time to refocus on the
Message, facts be damned (and double damned). ‘Jezebel’ best
exemplifies the hectoring, vaguely hysterical tone:
You know how you can tell that black people are still
oppressed? Because black people are still oppressed. If you
claim that you are not a racist person (or, at least, that you’re
committed to working your ass off not to be one — which is
really the best that any of us can promise), then you must
believe that people are fundamentally born equal. So if that’s
90
true, then in a vacuum, factors like skin color should have

no effect on anyone’s success. Right? And therefore, if you
really believe that all people are created equal, then when
you see that drastic racial inequalities exist in the real world,
the only thing that you could possibly conclude is that some
external force is holding certain people back. Like…racism.
Right? So congratulations! You believe in racism! Unless you
don’t actually think that people are born equal. And if you
don’t believe that people are born equal, then you’re a f*****g
racist.
Does anyone “really believe that people are born equal,” in the way
it is understood here? Believe, that is, not only that a formal
expectation of equal treatment is a prerequisite for civilized
interaction, but that any revealed deviation from substantial equality
of outcome is an obvious, unambiguous indication of oppression?
That’s “the only thing you could possibly conclude”?
At the very least, Jezebel should be congratulated for expressing
the progressive faith in its purest form, entirely uncontaminated by
sensitivity to evidence or uncertainty of any kind, casually
contemptuous of any relevant research – whether existent or merely
conceivable – and supremely confident about its own moral
invincibility. If the facts are morally wrong, so much worse for the
facts – that’s the only position that could possibly be adopted, even
91
Reignition
if it’s based upon a mixture of wishful thinking, deliberate ignorance,

and insultingly childish lies.
To call the belief in substantial human equality a superstition is
to insult superstition. It might be unwarranted to believe in
leprechauns, but at least the person who holds to such a belief isn’t
watching them not exist, for every waking hour of the day. Human
inequality, in contrast, and in all of its abundant multiplicity, is
constantly on display, as people exhibit their variations in gender,
ethnicity, physical attractiveness, size and shape, strength, health,
agility, charm, humor, wit, industriousness, and sociability, among
countless other features, traits, abilities, and aspects of their
personality, some immediately and conspicuously, some only slowly,
over time. To absorb even the slightest fraction of all this and to
conclude, in the only way possible, that it is either nothing at all, or a
‘social construct’ and index of oppression, is sheer Gnostic delirium:
a commitment beyond all evidence to the existence of a true and
good world veiled by appearances. People are not equal, they do
not develop equally, their goals and achievements are not equal, and
nothing can make them equal. Substantial equality has no relation
to reality, except as its systematic negation. Violence on a genocidal
scale is required to even approximate to a practical egalitarian
program, and if anything less ambitious is attempted, people get
around it (some more competently than others).
To take only the most obvious example, anybody with more than
92
one child knows that nobody is born equal (monozygotic twins and
clones perhaps excepted). In fact, everybody is born different, in
innumerable ways. Even when – as is normally the case – the
implications of these differences for life outcomes are difficult to
confidently predict, their existence is undeniable, or at least:
sincerely undeniable. Of course sincerity, or even minimal cognitive
coherence, is not remotely the issue here. Jezebel’s position, whilst
impeccable in its political correctness, is not only factually dubious,
but rather laughably absurd, and actually – strictly speaking —
insane. It dogmatizes a denial of reality so extreme that nobody could
genuinely maintain, or even entertain it, let alone plausible explain
or defend it. It is a tenet of faith that cannot be understood, but only
asserted, or submitted to, as madness made law, or authoritarian
religion.
The political commandment of this religion is transparent: Accept
progressive social policy as the only possible solution to the sin
problem of inequality. This commandment is a ‘categorical
imperative’ – no possible fact could ever undermine, complicate, or
revise it. If progressive social policy actually results in an
exacerbation of the problem, ‘fallen’ reality is to blame, since the
social malady is obviously worse than had been originally envisaged,
and only redoubled efforts in the same direction can hope to remedy
it. There can be nothing to learn in matters of faith. Eventually,
systematic social collapse teaches the lesson that chronic failure and
93
Reignition
incremental deterioration could not communicate. (That’s macro-

scale social Darwinism for dummies, and it’s the way that
civilizations end.)
Due to it’s exceptional correlation with substantial variation in
social outcomes in modern societies, by far the most troublesome
dimension of human bio-diversity is intelligence or general problem
solving ability, quantified as IQ (measuring Spearman’s ‘g’). When
‘statistical common sense’ or profiling is applied to the proponents
of Human Bio-Diversity, however, another significant trait is rapidly
exposed: a remarkably consistent deficit of agreeableness. Indeed, it
is widely accepted within the accursed ‘community’ itself that most
of those stubborn and awkward enough to educate themselves on
the topic of human biological variation are significantly ‘socially
retarded’, with low verbal inhibition, low empathy, and low social
integration, resulting in chronic maladaptation to group
expectations. The typical EQs of this group can be extracted as the
approximate square-root of their IQs. Mild autism is typical,
sufficient to approach their fellow beings in a spirit of detached,
natural-scientific curiosity, but not so advanced as to compel total
cosmic disengagement. These traits, which they themselves consider
– on the basis of copious technical information — to be substantially
heritable, have manifest social consequences, reducing employment
opportunities, incomes, and even reproductive potential. Despite all
the free therapeutic advice available in the progressive environment,
94
this obnoxiousness shows no sign of diminishing, and might even be

intensifying. As Jezebel shows so clearly, this can only possibly be
a sign of structural oppression. Why can’t obnoxious people get a
break?
The history is damning. ‘Sociables’ have always had it in for the
obnoxious, often declining to marry or do business with them,
excluding them from group activities and political office, labeling
them with slurs, ostracizing and avoiding them. ‘Obnoxiousness’ has
been stigmatized and stereotyped in extremely negative terms, to
such an extent that many of the obnoxious have sought out more
sensitive labels, such as ‘socially-challenged’, or ‘differently socially
abled’. Not uncommonly, people have been verbally or even
physically assaulted for no other reason than their radical
obnoxiousness. Most tragically of all, due to their complete inability
to get on with one another, the obnoxious have never been able to
politically mobilize against the structural social oppression they face,
or to enter into coalitions with their natural allies, such as cynics,
debunkers, contrarians, and Tourette Syndrome sufferers.
Obnoxiousness has yet to be liberated, although it’s probable that
the Internet will ‘help’ …
Consider John Derbyshire’s essay in infamy The Talk: Nonblack
Version, focusing initially on its relentless obnoxiousness, and
attentive to the negative correlation between sociability and
objective reason. As Derbyshire notes elsewhere, people are
95
Reignition
generally incapable of differentiating themselves from group

identities, or properly applying statistical generalizations about
groups to individual cases, including their own. A rationally
indefensible, but socially inevitable, reification of group profiles is
psychologically normal – even ‘human’ – with the result that noisy,
non-specific, statistical information is erroneously accepted as a
contribution to self-understanding, even when specific information
is available.
From the perspective of socially autistic, low-EQ, rational
analysis, this is simply mistaken. If an individual has certain
characteristics, the fact of belonging to a group that has similar or
dissimilar average characteristics is of no relevance whatsoever.
Direct and determinate information about the individual is not to
any degree enriched by indirect and indeterminate (probabilistic)
information about the groups to which the individual belongs. If an
individual’s test results are known, for instance, no additional insight
is provided by statistical inferences about the test results that might
have been expected based on group profiling. An Ashkenazi Jewish
moron is no less moronic because he is an Ashkenazi Jew. Elderly
Chinese nuns are unlikely to be murderers, but a murderer who
happens to be an elderly Chinese nun is neither more nor less
murderous than one who is not. This is all extremely obvious, to
obnoxious people.
To normal people, however, it is not obvious at all. In part this is
96
because rational intelligence is scarce and abnormal among humans,

and in part because social ‘intelligence’ works with what everyone
else is thinking, which is to say, with irrational groupish sentiment,
meager information, prejudices, stereotypes, and heuristics. Since
(almost) everybody else is taking short-cuts, or ‘economizing’ on
reason, it is only rational to react defensively to generalizations that
are likely to be reified or inappropriately applied — over-riding or
substituting for specific perceptions. Anybody who anticipates being
pre-defined through a group identity has an expanded ego-
investment in that group and the way it is perceived. A generic
assessment, however objectively arrived at, will immediately
become personal, under (even quite remotely) normal conditions.
Obnoxious reason can stubbornly insist that anything average
cannot be about you, but the message will not be generally received.
Human social ‘intelligence’ is not built that way. Even supposedly
sophisticated commentators blunder repeatedly into the most
jarring exhibitions of basic statistical incomprehension without the
slightest embarrassment, because embarrassment was designed for
something else (and for almost exactly the opposite). The failure to
understand stereotypes in their scientific, or probabilistic
application, is a functional prerequisite of sociability, since the sole
alternative to idiocy in this respect is obnoxiousness.
Derbyshire’s article is noteworthy because it succeeds in being
definitively obnoxious, and has been recognized as such, despite the
97
Reignition
spluttering incoherence of most rejoinders. Among the things that

‘the talk’ and ‘the counter-talk’ share is a theatrical structure of
pseudo-private conversation designed to be overheard. In both
cases, a message that parents are compelled to deliver to their
children is staged as the vehicle for a wider social lesson, aimed at
those who, through action or inaction, have created a world that is
intolerably hazardous to them.
This form is intrinsically manipulative, making even the ‘original’
talk a tempting target of parody. In the original, however, a tone of
anguished sincerity is engineered through a deliberate performance
of innocence (or ignorance). Listen son, I know this will be difficult
to understand … (Oh why, oh why are they doing this to us?). The
counter-talk, in stark contrast, melds its micro-social drama with the
clinically non-sociable discourse of “methodical inquiries in the
human sciences” – treating populations as fuzzy bio-geographical
units with quantifiable characteristics, rather than as legal-political
subjects in communication. It derides innocence, and – by
implication – the criterion of sociability itself. Agreement,
agreeableness, count for nothing. The rigorously and redundantly
compiled statistics say what they say, and if we cannot live with that,
so much the worse for us.
Yet even to a reasonably sympathetic, or scrupulously obnoxious,
reading, Derbyshire’s article provides grounds for criticism. For
instance, and from the beginning, it is notable that the racial
98
reciprocal of “nonblack Americans” is ‘black Americans’, not

“American blacks” (the term Derbyshire selects). This reversal of
word order, switching nouns and adjectives, quickly settles into a
pattern. Does it matter that Derbyshire requests the extension of
civility to any “individual black” (rather than to ‘black individuals’)?
It certainly makes a difference. To say that someone is ‘black’ is to
say something about them, but to say that someone is ‘a black’ is
to say who they are. The effect is subtly, yet distinctly, menacing,
and Derbyshire is too well-trained, algebraically, to be excused from
noticing it. After all, ‘John Derbyshire is a white’ sounds equally off,
as does any analogous formulation, submerging the individual in the
genus, to be retrieved as a mere instance, or example.
The more intellectually substantive aspect of this over-reach into
gratuitous incivility have been examined by William Saletan and
Noah Millman, who make very similar points, from the two sides
of the liberal/conservative divide. Both writers identify a fissure or
methodical incongruity in Derbyshire’s article, stemming from its
commitment to the micro-social application of macro-social
statistical generalizations. Stereotypes, however rigorously
confirmed, are essentially inferior to specific knowledge in any
concrete social situation, because nobody ever encounters a
population.
As a liberal of problematic standing, Saletan has no choice but
to recoil melodramatically from Derbyshire’s “stomach-turning
99
Reignition
conclusions,” but his reasons for doing so are not consumed by his
gastro-emotional crisis. “But what exactly is a statistical truth?” he
asks. “It’s a probability estimate you might fall back on if you know
nothing about [a particular individual]. It’s an ignorant person’s weak
substitute for knowledge.” Derbyshire, with his Aspergery attention
to the absence of black Fields Medal winners, is “…a math nerd who
substitutes statistical intelligence for social intelligence. He
recommends group calculations instead of taking the trouble to
learn about the person standing in front of you.”
Millman emphasizes the ironic reversal that switches (obnoxious)
social scientific knowledge into imperative ignorance:
The “race realists” like to say that they are the ones who are
curious about the world, and the “politically correct” types
are the ones who prefer to ignore ugly reality. But the advice
Derbyshire gives to his children encourages them not to be
too curious about the world around them, for fear of getting
hurt. And, as a general rule, that’s terrible advice for kids –
and not the advice that Derbyshire has followed in his own
life.
Millman’s conclusion is also instructive:
So why am I arguing with Derb at all? Well, because he’s a

friend. And because even lazy, socially-irresponsible talk
100
deserves to be refuted, not merely denounced. Is

Derbyshire’s piece racist? Of course it’s racist. His whole
point is that it is both rational and morally right for his
children to treat black people significantly differently from
white people, and to fear them. But “racist” is a descriptive
term, not a moral one. The “race realist” crowd is strongly
convinced of the accuracy of Derbyshire’s major premises,
and they are not going to be argued out of that conviction
by the assertion such conviction is “racist” – nor, honestly,
should they be. For that reason, I feel it’s important to argue
that Derbyshire’s conclusions do not follow simply from
those premises, and are, in fact, morally incorrect even if
those premises are granted for the sake of argument.
[Brief intermission …]
May 3, 2012

(Part
art 4c)
The Cr
Crack
acker
er Factory
In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent
101
Reignition
words of the Constitution and the Declaration of

Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which
every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that
all men — yes, black men as well as white men — would be
guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this
promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are
concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation,
America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check that
has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.
Conservatism … is a white people’s movement, a scattering of

outliers notwithstanding.
Always has been, always will be. I have attended at least a
hundred conservative gatherings, conferences, cruises, and
jamborees: let me tell you, there ain’t too many raisins in that
bun. I was in and out of the National Review offices for twelve
years, and the only black person I saw there, other than when
Herman Cain came calling, was Alex, the guy who runs the
mail room. (Hey, Alex!)
This isn’t because conservatism is hostile to blacks and
mestizos. Very much the contrary, especially in the case of
102
Conservatism Inc. They fawn over the occasional nonwhite

with a puppyish deference that fairly fogs the air with
embarrassment. (Q: What do you call the one black guy at a
gathering of 1,000 Republicans? A: “Mr. Chairman.”)
It’s just that conservative ideals like self-sufficiency and
minimal dependence on government have no appeal to
underperforming minorities — groups who, in the statistical
generality, are short of the attributes that make for group
success in a modern commercial nation.
Of what use would it be to them to embrace such ideals? They
would end up even more decisively pooled at the bottom of
society than they are currently.
A much better strategy for them is to ally with as many
disaffected white and Asian subgroups as they can
(homosexuals, feminists, dead-end labor unions), attain
electoral majorities, and institute big redistributionist
governments to give them make-work jobs and transfer
wealth to them from successful groups.
Which is what, very rationally and sensibly, they do.
— John Derbyshire
Neo-secessionists are all around us… and free speech gives

them a cozy blanket of protection. Rick Perry insinuating
Texas could secede rather than adhere to the federal
103
Reignition
healthcare law, Todd Palin belonging to a political association

advocating Alaskan secession, and Sharron Angle talking
about ‘second amendment remedies’ to handle disputes with
federal authorities are all examples of dangerous secessionist
rhetoric permeating through modern discourse. The media
focuses our attention at Civil War reenactors and pick-up
trucks with Confederate flags flying on them. But public
figures are influenced as well, by academics who struggle to
perpetuate a most dangerous brand of revisionism.
— Practically Historical
African-Americans are the conscience of our country.

— commenter ‘surfed’ at Walter Russell Mead’s blog (edited
for spelling)
America’s racial ‘original sin’ was foundational, dating back before

the birth of the United States to the clearing of aboriginal peoples
by European settlers, and – still more saliently – to the institution of
chattel slavery. This is the Old Testament history of American black-
white relations, set down in a providential narrative of escape from
bondage, in which factual documentation and moral exhortation are
indissolubly fused. The combination of prolonged and intense social
abuse in a pattern set by the Torah, recapitulating the primordial
moral-political myth of the Western tradition, has installed the story
104
of slavery and emancipation as the unsurpassable frame of the

American historical experience: let my people go.
‘Practically Historical’ (cited above), quotes Lincoln on the Civil
War:
Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by
the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited
toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with
the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as
was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the
judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
The New Testament of race in America was written in the 1960s,

revising and specifying the template. The combination of the Civil
Rights Movement, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, and
the Republican Southern Strategy (appealing to disaffected whites
in the states of the old Confederacy) forged a partisan identification
between Blacks and the Democratic Party that amounted to a
liberal-progressive rebirth, setting the terms for partisan racial
polarization that have endured – and even strengthened – over
subsequent decades. For a progressive movement compromised by
a history of systematic eugenicist racism, and a Democratic Party
traditionally aligned with white southern obduracy and the Ku Klux
Klan, the civil rights era presented an opportunity for atonement,
105
Reignition
ritual purification, and redemption.

Reciprocally, for American conservatism (and its increasingly
directionless Republican Party vehicle), this progression spelt
protracted death, for reasons that continue to elude it. The Idea of
America was now inextricable from a vehement renunciation of the
past, and even of the present, insofar as the past still shaped it. Only
an ‘ever more perfect union’ could conform to it. At the most
superficial level, the broad partisan implications of the new order
were unmistakable in a country that was becoming ever more
democratic, and ever less republican, with effective sovereignty
nationally concentrated in the executive, and the moral urgency of
activist government installed as a principle of faith. For what had
already become the ‘Old Right’ there was no way out, or back,
because the path backwards crossed the event horizon of the civil
rights movement, into tracts of political impossibility whose ultimate
meaning was slavery.
The left thrives on dialectics, the right perishes through them.
Insofar as there is a pure logic of politics, it is that. One immediate
consequence (repeatedly emphasized by Mencius Moldbug) is that
progressivism has no enemies to the left. It recognizes only idealists,
whose time has not yet come. Factional conflicts on the left are
politically dynamic, celebrated for their motive potential.
Conservatism, in contrast, is caught between a rock and a hard place:
bludgeoned from the left by the juggernaut of post-constitutional
106
statism, and agitated from ‘the right’ by inchoate tendencies which

are both unassimilable (to the mainstream) and often mutually
incompatible, ranging from extreme (Austro-libertarian) varieties of
laissez-faire capitalist advocacy to strains of obstinate, theologically-
grounded social traditionalism, ultra-nationalism, or white identity
politics.
‘The right’ has no unity, actual or prospective, and thus has no
definition symmetrical to that of the left. It is for this reason that
political dialectics (a tautology) ratchets only in one direction,
predictably, towards state expansion and an increasingly coercive
substantial-egalitarian ideal. The right moves to the center, and the
center moves to the left.
Regardless of mainstream conservative fantasies, liberal-
progressive mastery of American providence has become
uncontestable, dominated by a racial dialectic that absorbs unlimited
contradiction, whilst positioning the Afro-American underclass as
the incarnate critique of the existing social order, the criterion of
emancipation, and the sole path to collective salvation. No
alternative structure of historical intelligibility is politically tolerable,
or even – strictly speaking – imaginable, since resistance to the
narrative is un-American, anti-social, and (of course) racist, serving
only to confirm the existence of systematic racial oppression through
the symbolic violence manifested in its negation. To argue against it
is already to prove it correct, by concretely demonstrating the same
107
Reignition
benighted forces of social retardation that are being verbally denied.

By resisting the demand for orchestrated social re-education,
knuckle-dragging ‘bitter clingers’ only show how much there still is
to do.
At its most abstract and all-encompassing, the liberal-progressive
racial dialectic abolishes its outside, along with any possibility of
principled consistency. It asserts — at one and the same time — that
race does not exist, and that its socially-constructed pseudo-
existence is an instrument of inter-racial violence. Racial recognition
is both mandatory, and forbidden. Racial identities are meticulously
catalogued for purposes of social remedy, hate crime detection, and
disparate impact studies, targeting groups for ‘positive
discrimination’, ‘affirmative action’, or ‘diversity promotion’ (to list
these terms in their rough order of historical substitution), even as
they are denounced as meaningless (by the United Nations, no less),
and dismissed as malicious stereotypes, corresponding to nothing
real. Extreme racial sensitivity and absolute racial desensitization
are demanded simultaneously. Race is everything and nothing. There
is no way out.
Conservatism is dialectically incompetent by definition, and so
abjectly clueless that it imagines itself being able to exploit these
contradictions, or – in its deluded formulation – liberal cognitive
dissonance. The conservatives who triumphantly point out such
inconsistencies seem never to have skimmed the output of a
108
contemporary humanities program, in which thick rafts of internally

conflicted victimage are lovingly woven out of incompatible
grievances, in order to exult in the radical progressive promise of
their discordant lamentations. Inconsistency is fuel for the
Cathedral, demanding activist argumentation, and ever heightened
realizations of unity. Integrative public debate always moves things
to the left — that might not seem an especially difficult point to grasp,
but to understand it is to expose the fundamental futility of
mainstream conservatism, and that is in almost nobody’s interest, so
it will not be understood.
Conservatism is incapable of working dialectics, or simultaneous
contradiction, but that does not prevent it from serving progress (on
the contrary). Rather than celebrating the power of inconsistency,
it stumbles through contradictions, decompressed, in succession, in
the manner of a fossil exhibition, and a foil. After “standing athwart
history, yelling ‘Stop!’” during the Civil Rights Era, and thus banishing
itself eternally to racial damnation, the conservative (and
Republican) mainstream reversed course, seizing upon Martin
Luther King Jr. as an integral part of its canon, and seeking to
harmonize itself with “a dream deeply rooted in the American
dream.”
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live
out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be
109
Reignition
self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the
sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will
be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi,
a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with
the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of
freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live
in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their
skin but by the content of their character.
Captivated by King’s appeal to constitutional and biblical

traditionalism, by his rejection of political violence, and by his
uninhibited paeans to freedom, American conservatism gradually
came to identify with his dream of racial reconciliation and race
blindness, and to accept it as the true, providential meaning of its
own most sacred documents. At least, this became the mainstream,
public, conservative orthodoxy, even though it was consolidated far
too late to neutralize suspicions of insincerity, failed almost entirely
to convince the black demographic itself, and would remain open to
escalating derision from the left for its empty formalism.
So compelling was King’s restatement of the American Creed
that, retrospectively, its triumph over the political mainstream
110
seems simply inevitable. The further American conservatism

departed from the Masonic rationalism of the founders, in the
direction of biblical religiosity, the more indistinguishable its faith
became from a Black American experience, mythically articulated
through Exodus, in which the basic framework of history was an
escape from bondage, borne towards a future in which “all of God’s
children — black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants
and Catholics — will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the
old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty,
we are free at last!’”
The genius of King’s message lay in its extraordinary power of
integration. The flight of the Hebrews from Egypt, the American War
of Independence, the abolition of chattel slavery in the wake of the
American Civil War, and the aspirations of the civil rights era were
mythically compressed into a single archetypal episode, perfectly
consonant with the American Creed, and driven forwards not only
by irresistible moral force, but even by divine decree. The measure
of this integrative genius, however, is the complexity it masters. A
century after the “joyous daybreak” of emancipation from slavery,
King declares, “the Negro still is not free.”
One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly
crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of
discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on
111
Reignition
a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of

material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is
still languished in the corners of American society and finds
himself an exile in his own land.
The story of Exodus is exit, the War of Independence is exit, and the
emancipation from slavery is exit, especially when this is exemplified
by the Underground Railroad and the model of self-liberation,
escape, or flight. To be ‘manacled’ by segregation, ‘chained’ by
discrimination, trapped on a ‘lonely island of poverty’, or ‘exiled’ in
one’s ‘own land’, in contrast, has no relation to exit whatsoever,
beyond that which spell-binding metaphor can achieve. There is no
exit into social integration and acceptance, equitably distributed
prosperity, public participation, or assimilation, but only an
aspiration, or a dream, hostage to fact and fortune. As the left and
the reactionary right were equally quick to notice, insofar as this
dream ventures significantly beyond a right to formal equality and
into the realm of substantial political remedy, it is one that the right
has no right to.
In the immediate wake of the John Derbyshire affair, Jessica
Valenti at The Nation blog makes the point clearly:
… this isn’t just about who has written what — it’s about the
intensely racist policies that are par for the conservative
112
course. Some people would like to believe that racism is just

the explicit, said-out-loud discrimination and hatred that is
easily identifiable. It’s not — it’s also pushing xenophobic
policies and supporting systemic inequality. After all, what’s
more impactful — a singular racist like Derbyshire or
Arizona’s immigration law? A column or voter suppression?
Getting rid of one racist from one publication doesn’t change
the fact that the conservative agenda is one that
disproportionately punishes and discriminates against
people of color. So, I’m sorry, folks — you don’t get to support
structural inequality and then give yourself a pat on the back
for not being overtly racist.
The ‘conservative agenda’ cannot ever be dreamy (hopeful and

inconsistent) enough to escape accusations of racism – that’s
intrinsic to the way the racial dialectic works. Policies broadly
compatible with capitalistic development, oriented to the rewarding
of low time-preference, and thus punishing impulsivity, will reliably
have a disparate impact upon the least economically functional social
groups. Of course, the dialectic demands that the racial aspect of
this disparate impact can and must be strongly emphasized (for the
purpose of condemning incentives to human capital formation as
racist), and at the same time forcefully denied (in order to denounce
exactly the same observation as racist stereotyping). Anyone who
113
Reignition
expects conservatives to navigate this double-bind with political

agility and grace must somehow have missed the late 20th century.
For instance, the doomed loser idiots conservatives at the
Washington Examiner, noticing with alarm that:
House Democrats received training this week on how to

address the issue of race to defend government programs
… The prepared content of a Tuesday presentation to the
House Democratic Caucus and staff indicates that
Democrats will seek to portray apparently neutral free-
market rhetoric as being charged with racial bias, conscious
or unconscious.
There are no alternative versions of an ever more perfect union,

because union is the alternative to alternatives. Searching for where
the alternatives might once have been found, where liberty still
meant exit, and where dialectics were dissolved in space, leads into
a clown-house of horrors, fabricated as the shadow, or significant
other, of the Cathedral. Since the right never had a unity of its own, it
was given one. Call it the Cracker Factory.
When James C. Bennett, in The Anglosphere Challenge, sought to
identify the principal cultural characteristics of the English-speaking
world, the resulting list was generally familiar. It included, besides
the language itself, common law traditions, individualism,
114
comparatively high-levels of economic and technological openness,

and distinctively emphatic reservations about centralized political
power. Perhaps the most striking feature, however, was a marked
cultural tendency to settle disagreements in space, rather than time,
opting for territorial schism, separatism, independence, and flight, in
place of revolutionary transformation within an integrated territory.
When Anglophones disagree, they have often sought to dissociate in
space. Instead of an integral resolution (regime change), they pursue
a plural irresolution (through regime division), proliferating polities,
localizing power, and diversifying systems of government. Even in
its present, highly attenuated form, this anti-dialectical, de-
synthesizing predisposition to social disaggregation finds expression
in a stubborn, sussurous hostility to globalist political projects, and in
a vestigial attraction to federalism (in its fissional sense).
Splitting, or fleeing, is all exit, and (non-recuperable) anti-
dialectics. It is the basic well-spring of liberty within the Anglophone
tradition. If the function of a Cracker Factory is to block off all the
exits, there’s only one place to build it – right here.
Like Hell, or Auschwitz, the Cracker Factory has a simple slogan
inscribed upon its gate: Escape is racist. That is why the expression
‘white flight’ – which says exactly the same thing – has never been
denounced for its political incorrectness, despite the fact that it
draws upon an ethnic statistical generalization of the kind that
would, in any other case, provoke paroxysms of outrage. ‘White
115
Reignition
flight’ is no more ‘white’ than low time-preference is, but this broad-
brush insensitivity is deemed acceptable, because it structurally
supports the Cracker Factory, and the indispensable confusion of
ancient (or negative) liberty with original (racial) sin.
You absolutely, definitely, mustn’t go there … so, of course, we will
… [next]
May 17, 2012

(Part
art 4d)
Odd Marriages
The origins of the word ‘cracker’ as a term of ethnic derision are

distant and obscure. It seems to have already circulated, as a slur
targeting poor southern whites of predominantly Celtic ancestry, in
the mid-18th century, derived perhaps from ‘corn-cracker’ or the
Scots-Irish ‘crack’ (banter). The rich semantic complexion of the
term, inextricable from the identification of elaborate racial, cultural,
and class characteristics, is comparable to that of its unmentionable
dusky cousin – “the ‘N-‘word” – and draws from the same well of
generally recognized but forbidden truths. In particular, and
emphatically, it testifies to the illicit truism that people are more
excited and animated by their differences than by their
116
commonalities, ‘clinging bitterly’ – or at least tenaciously – to their

non-uniformity, and obstinately resisting the universal categories of
enlightened population management. Crackers are grit in the
clockwork of progress.
The most delectable features of the slur, however, are entirely
fortuitous (or Qabbalistic). ‘Crackers’ break codes, safes, organic
chemicals – sealed or bonded systems of all kinds – with eventual
geopolitical implication. They anticipate a crack-up, schism or
secession, confirming their association with the anathematized
disintegrative undercurrent of Anglophone history. No surprise,
then – despite the linguistic jumps and glitching – that the figure
of the recalcitrant cracker evokes a still-unpacified South,
insubordinate to the manifest destiny of Union. This returns it, by
short-circuit, to the most problematic depths of its meaning.
Contradictions demand resolution, but cracks can continue to
widen, deepen, and spread. According to the cracker ethos, when
things can fall apart – it’s OK. There’s no need to reach agreement,
when it’s possible to split. This cussedness, pursued to its limit, tends
to a hill-billy stereotype set in a shack or rusting trailer at the end
of an Appalachian mountain path, where all economic transactions
are conducted in cash (or moonshine), interactions with government
agents are conducted across the barrel of a loaded shotgun, and
timeless anti-political wisdom is summed in the don’t-tread-on-me
reflex: “Get off my porch.” Naturally, this disdain for integrative
117
Reignition
debate (dialectics) is coded within the mainstream of Anglocentric

global history – which is to say, Yankee evangelical Puritanism – as
a deficiency not only of cultural sophistication, but also of basic
intelligence, and even the most scrupulous adherent of social
constructivist righteousness immediately reverts to hard-
hereditarian psychometrics when confronted by cracker
obstreperousness. To those for whom a broad trend of socio-political
progress seems like a simple, incontestable fact, the refusal to
recognize anything of the kind is perceived as clear evidence of
retardation.
Since stereotypes generally have high statistical truth-value, it’s
more than possible that crackers are clustered heavily on the left
of the white IQ bell-curve, concentrated there by generations of
dysgenic pressure. If, as Charles Murray argues, the efficiency of
meritocratic selection within American society has steadily risen and
conspired with assortative mating to transform class differences into
genetic castes, it would be passing strange if the cracker stratum
were to be characterized by conspicuous cognitive elevation. Yet
some awkwardly intriguing questions intervene at this point, as long
as one diligently pursues the stereotype. Assortative mating? How
can that work, when crackers marry their cousins? Oh yes, there’s
that. Drawing on population groups beyond the north-western
Hajnal Line, traditional cracker kinship patterns are notably atypical
of the exogamous Anglo (WASP) norm.
118
The tireless ‘hbdchick’ is the crucial resource on this topic. Over

the course of a truly monumental series of blog posts, she employs
Hamiltonian conceptual tools to investigate the borderland where
nature and culture intersect, comprising kinship structures, the
differentiations they require in the calculus of inclusive fitness, and
the distinctive ethnic profiles in the evolutionary psychology of
altruism that result. In particular, she directs attention to the
abnormality of (North-West) European history, where obligatory
exogamy – through rigorous proscription of cousin marriage – has
prevailed for 1,600 years. This distinctive orientation towards
outbreeding, she suggests, plausibly accounts for a variety of bio-
cultural peculiarities, the most historically significant of which is a
unique pre-eminence of reciprocal (over familial) altruism, as
indicated by emphatic individualism, nuclear families, an affinity with
‘corporate’ (kinship-free) institutions, highly-developed contractual
relationships among strangers, relatively low levels of nepotism /
corruption, and robust forms of social cohesion independent of tribal
bonds.
Inbreeding, in contrast, creates a selective environment favoring
tribal collectivism, extended systems of family loyalty and honor,
distrust of non-relatives and impersonal institutions, and – in general
– those ‘clannish’ traits which mesh uncomfortably with the leading
values of (Eurocentric) modernity, and are thus denounced for their
primitive ‘xenophobia’ and ‘corruption’. Clannish values, of course,
119
Reignition
are bred in clans, such as those populating Britain’s Celtic fringe and
borderlands, where cousin marriage persisted, along with its
associated socio-economic and cultural forms, especially herding
(rather than farming), and a disposition towards extreme, vendetta-
style violence.
This analysis introduces the central paradox of ‘white identity’,
since the specifically European ethnic traits that have structured the
moral order of modernity, slanting it away from tribalism and
towards reciprocal altruism, are inseparable from a unique heritage
of outbreeding that is intrinsically corrosive of ethnocentric
solidarity. In other words: it is almost exactly weak ethnic
groupishness that makes a group ethnically modernistic, competent
at ‘corporate’ (non-familial) institution building, and thus objectively
privileged / advantaged within the dynamic of modernity.
This paradox is most fully expressed in the radical forms of
European ethnocentric revivalism exemplified by paleo- and neo-
Nazism, confounding its proponents and antagonists alike. When
exceptionally advanced ‘race-treachery’ is your quintessential racial
feature, the opportunity for viable ethno-supremacist politics
disappears into a logical abyss – even if occasions for large-scale
trouble-making no doubt remain. Admittedly, a Nazi, by definition,
is willing (and eager) to sacrifice modernity upon the altar of racial
purity, but this is either not to understand, or to tragically affirm, the
inevitable consequence – which is to be out-modernized (and thus
120
defeated). Identity politics is for losers, inherently and unalterably,

due to an essentially parasitical character that only works from the
left. Because inbreeding systematically contra-indicates for modern
power, racial Übermenschen make no real sense.
In any case, however endlessly fascinating Nazis may be, they are
not any kind of reliable key to the history or direction of cracker
culture, beyond setting a logical limit to the programmatic
construction and usage of white identity politics. Tattooing swastikas
on their foreheads does nothing to change that. (Hatfields vs
McCoys is more Pushtun than Teuton.)
The conjunction taking place in the Cracker Factory is quite
different, and far more perplexing, entangling the urbane,
cosmopolitan advocates of hyper-contractarian marketization with
romantic traditionalists, ethno-particularists, and nostalgics of the
‘Lost Cause’. It is first necessary to understand this entanglement
in its full, mind-melting weirdness, before exploring its lessons. For
that, some semi-random stripped-down data-points might be
helpful:
* The Mises Institute was founded in Auburn, Alabama.
* Ron Paul newsletters from the 1980s contain remarks of a
decidedly Derbyshirean hue.
* Derbyshire hearts Ron Paul.
* Murray Rothbard has written in defense of HBD.
* lewrockwell.com contributors include Thomas J. DiLorenzo and
121
Reignition
Thomas Woods
* Tom Palmer doesn’t heart Lew Rockwell or Hans-Hermann
Hoppe because “Together They Have Opened the Gates of Hell and
Welcomed the Most Extreme Right-Wing Racists, Nationalists, and
Assorted Cranks”
* Libertarians / constitutionalists account for 20% of the SPLC
‘Radical Right’ watch list (Chuck Baldwin, Michael Boldin, Tom
DeWeese, Alex Jones, Cliff Kincaid, and Elmer Stewart Rhodes)
… perhaps that’s enough to be going on with (although there’s
plenty more within easy reach). These points have been selected,
questionably, crudely, and prejudicially, to lend impressionistic
support to a single basic thesis: fundamental socio-historical forces
are crackerizing libertarianism.
If the tentative research conclusions drawn by hbdchick are
accepted as a frame, the oddity of this marriage between libertarian
and neo-confederate themes is immediately apparent. When
positioned on a bio-cultural axis, defined by degrees of outbreeding,
the absence of overlap – or even proximity – is dramatically exposed.
One pole is occupied by a radically individualistic doctrine, focused
near-exclusively upon mutable networks of voluntary interchange of
an economic type (and notoriously insensitive to the very existence
of non-negotiable social bonds). Close to the other pole lies a rich
culture of local attachment, extended family, honor, contempt for
commercial values, and distrust of strangers. The distilled rationality
122
of fluid capitalism is juxtaposed to traditional hierarchy and non-

alienable value. The absolute prioritization of exit is jumbled
amongst folkways from which no exit is even imaginable.
Stapling the two together, however, is a simple, ever more
irresistible conclusion: liberty has no future in the Anglophone world
outside the prospect of secession. The coming crack-up is the only
way out.
June 15, 2012

(Part
art 4e
4e))
Cross-coded history
Democracy is the opposite of freedom, almost inherent to

the democratic process is that it tends towards less liberty
instead of more, and democracy is not something to be fixed.
Democracy is inherently broken, just like socialism. The only
way to fix it is to break it up. — Frank Karsten
Historian (mainly of science) Doug Fosnow called for the

USA’s “red” counties to secede from the “blue” ones, forming
a new federation. This was greeted with much skepticism by
the audience, who noted that the “red” federation would get
123
Reignition
practically no seacoast. Did Doug really think such a

secession was likely to happen? No, he admitted cheerfully,
but anything would be better than the race war he does think
is likely to happen, and it is intellectuals’ duty to come up with
less horrific possibilities.– John Derbyshire
Thus, rather than by means of a top-down reform, under the

current conditions, one’s strategy must be one of a bottom-
up revolution. At first, the realization of this insight would
seem to make the task of a liberal-libertarian social
revolution impossible, for does this not imply that one would
have to persuade a majority of the public to vote for the
abolition of democracy and an end to all taxes and legislation?
And is this not sheer fantasy, given that the masses are
always dull and indolent, and even more so given that
democracy, as explained above, promotes moral and
intellectual degeneration? How in the world can anyone
expect that a majority of an increasingly degenerate people
accustomed to the “right” to vote should ever voluntarily
renounce the opportunity of looting other people’s property?
Put this way, one must admit that the prospect of a social
revolution must indeed be regarded as virtually nil. Rather,
it is only on second thought, upon regarding secession as an
integral part of any bottom-up strategy, that the task of a
124
liberal-libertarian revolution appears less than impossible,

even if it still remains a daunting one. – Hans-Hermann
Hoppe
Conceived generically, modernity is a social condition defined by an

integral trend, summarized as sustained economic growth rates that
exceed population increases, and thus mark an escape from normal
history, caged within the Malthusian trap. When, in the interest of
dispassionate appraisal, analysis is restricted to the terms of this
basic quantitative pattern, it supports sub-division into the (growth)
positive and negative components of the trend: techno-industrial
(scientific and commercial) contributions to accelerating
development on the one hand, and socio-political counter-
tendencies towards the capture of economic product by
democratically empowered rent-seeking special interests on the
other (demosclerosis). What classical liberalism gives (industrial
revolution) mature liberalism takes away (via the cancerous
entitlement state). In abstract geometry, it describes an S-curve of
self-limiting runaway. As a drama of liberation, it is a broken promise.
Conceived particularly, as a singularity, or real thing, modernity
has ethno-geographical characteristics that complicate and qualify
its mathematical purity. It came from somewhere, imposed itself
more widely, and brought the world’s various peoples into an
extraordinary range of novel relations. These relations were
125
Reignition
characteristically ‘modern’ if they involved an overflowing of

previous Malthusian limits, enabling capital accumulation, and
initiating new demographic trends, but they conjoined concrete
groups rather than abstract economic functions. At least in
appearance, therefore, modernity was something done by people of
a certain kind with, and not uncommonly to (or even against), other
people, who were conspicuously unlike them. By the time it was
faltering on the fading slope of the S-curve, in the early 20th century,
resistance to its generic features (‘capitalistic alienation’) had
become almost entirely indistinguishable from opposition to its
particularity (‘European imperialism’ and ‘white supremacy’). As an
inevitable consequence, the modernistic self-consciousness of the
system’s ethno-geographical core slid towards racial panic, in a
process that was only arrested by the rise and immolation of the
Third Reich.
Given modernity’s inherent trend to degeneration or self-
cancellation, three broad prospects open. These are not strictly
exclusive, and are therefore not true alternatives, but for schematic
purposes it is helpful to present them as such.
(1) Modernity 2.0. Global modernization is re-invigorated from
a new ethno-geographical core, liberated from the degenerate
structures of its Eurocentric predecessor, but no doubt confronting
long range trends of an equally mortuary character. This is by far
the most encouraging and plausible scenario (from a pro-modernist
126
perspective), and if China remains even approximately on its current

track it will be assuredly realized. (India, sadly, seems to be too far
gone in its native version of demosclerosis to seriously compete.)
(2) Postmodernity. Amounting essentially to a new dark age, in
which Malthusian limits brutally re-impose themselves, this scenario
assumes that Modernity 1.0 has so radically globalized its own
morbidity that the entire future of the world collapses around it. If
the Cathedral ‘wins’ this is what we have coming.
(3) Western Renaissance. To be reborn it is first necessary to die,
so the harder the ‘hard reboot’ the better. Comprehensive crisis and
disintegration offers the best odds (most realistically as a sub-theme
of option #1).
Because competition is good, a pinch of Western Renaissance
would spice things up, even if – as is overwhelmingly probable —
Modernity 2.0 is the world’s principal highway to the future. That
depends upon the West stopping and reversing pretty much
everything it has been doing for over a century, excepting only
scientific, technological, and business innovation. It is advisable to
maintain rhetorical discipline within a strictly hypothetical mode,
because the possibility of any of these things is deeply colored by
incredibility:
(1) Replacement of representational democracy by constitutional
republicanism (or still more extreme anti-political governmental
mechanisms).
127
Reignition
(2) Massive downsizing of government and its rigorous

confinement to core functions (at most).
(3) Restoration of hard money (precious metal coins and bullion
deposit notes) and abolition of central banking.
(4) Dismantling of state monetary and fiscal discretion, thus
abolishing practical macroeconomics and liberating the autonomous
(or ‘catallactic’) economy. (This point is redundant, since it follows
rigorously from 2 & 3 above, but it’s the real prize, so worth
emphasizing.)
There’s more – which is to say, less politics – but it’s already
absolutely clear that none of this is going to happen short of an
existential civilizational cataclysm. Asking politicians to limit their
own powers is a non-starter, but nothing less heads even remotely
in the right direction. This, however, isn’t even the widest or deepest
problem.
Democracy might begin as a defensible procedural mechanism for
limiting government power, but it quickly and inexorably develops
into something quite different: a culture of systematic thievery. As
soon as politicians have learnt to buy political support from the
‘public purse’, and conditioned electorates to embrace looting and
bribery, the democratic process reduces itself to the formation of
(Mancur Olson’s) ‘distributional coalitions’ – electoral majorities
mortared together by common interest in a collectively
advantageous pattern of theft. Worse still, since people are, on
128
average, not very bright, the scale of depredation available to the

political establishment far exceeds even the demented sacking that
is open to public scrutiny. Looting the future, through currency
debauchment, debt accumulation, growth destruction, and techno-
industrial retardation is especially easy to conceal, and thus reliably
popular. Democracy is essentially tragic because it provides the
populace with a weapon to destroy itself, one that is always eagerly
seized, and used. Nobody ever says ‘no’ to free stuff. Scarcely
anybody even sees that there is no free stuff. Utter cultural ruination
is the necessary conclusion.
Within the final phase of Modernity 1.0, American history
becomes the master narrative of the world. It is there that the great
Abrahamic cultural conveyor culminates in the secularized neo-
puritanism of the Cathedral, as it establishes the New Jerusalem in
Washington DC. The apparatus of Messianic-revolutionary purpose
is consolidated in the evangelical state, which is authorized by any
means necessary to install a new world order of universal fraternity,
in the name of equality, human rights, social justice, and – above
all – democracy. The absolute moral confidence of the Cathedral
underwrites the enthusiastic pursuit of unrestrained centralized
power, optimally unlimited in its intensive penetration and its
extensive scope.
With an irony altogether hidden from the witch-burners’ spawn
themselves, the ascent of this squinting cohort of grim moral fanatics
129
Reignition
to previously unscaled heights of global power coincides with the

descent of mass-democracy to previously unimagined depths of
gluttonous corruption. Every five years America steals itself from
itself again, and fences itself back in exchange for political support.
This democracy thing is easy – you just vote for the guy who
promises you the most stuff. An idiot could do it. Actually, it likes
idiots, treats them with apparent kindness, and does everything it
can to manufacture more of them.
Democracy’s relentless trend to degeneration presents an
implicit case for reaction. Since every major threshold of socio-
political ‘progress’ has ratcheted Western civilization towards
comprehensive ruin, a retracing of its steps suggests a reversion
from the society of pillage to an older order of self-reliance, honest
industry and exchange, pre-propagandistic learning, and civic self-
organization. The attractions of this reactionary vision are evidenced
by the vogue for 18th century attire, symbols, and constitutional
documents among the substantial (Tea Party) minority who clearly
see the disastrous course of American political history.
Has the ‘race’ alarm sounded in your head yet? It would be
amazing if it hadn’t. Stagger back in imagination before 2008, and the
fraught whisper of conscience is already questioning your prejudices
against Kenyan revolutionaries and black Marxist professors.
Remain in reverse until the Great Society / Civil Rights era and the
warnings reach hysterical pitch. It’s perfectly obvious by this point
130
that American political history has progressed along twin,

interlocking tracks, corresponding to the capacity and the
legitimation of the state. To cast doubt upon its scale and scope is
to simultaneously dispute the sanctity of its purpose, and the moral-
spiritual necessity that it command whatever resources, and impose
whatever legal restraints, may be required to effectively fulfill it.
More specifically, to recoil from the magnitude of Leviathan is to
demonstrate insensitivity to the immensity – indeed, near infinity –
of inherited racial guilt, and the sole surviving categorical imperative
of senescent modernity – government needs to do more. The
possibility, indeed near certainty, that the pathological
consequences of chronic government activism have long ago
supplanted the problems they originally targeted, is a contention so
utterly maladapted to the epoch of democratic religion that its
practical insignificance is assured.
Even on the left, it would be extraordinary to find many who
genuinely believe, after sustained reflection, that the primary driver
of government expansion and centralization has been the burning
desire to do good (not that intentions matter). Yet, as the twin tracks
cross, such is the electric jolt of moral drama, leaping the gap from
racial Golgotha to intrusive Leviathan, that skepticism is suspended,
and the great progressive myth installed. The alternative to more
government, doing ever more, was to stand there, negligently, whilst
they lynched another Negro. This proposition contains the entire
131
Reignition
essential content of American progressive education.

The twin historical tracks of state capability and purpose can be
conceived as a translation protocol, enabling any recommended
restraint upon government power to be ‘decoded’ as malign
obstruction of racial justice. This system of substitutions functions so
smoothly that it provides an entire vocabulary of (bipartisan) ‘code-
words’ or ‘dog-whistles’ – ‘welfare’, ‘freedom of association’, ‘states
rights’ – ensuring that any intelligible utterance on the Principal (left-
right) Political Dimension occupies a double registry, semi-saturated
by racial evocations. Reactionary regression smells of strange fruit.
… and that is before backing out of the calamitous 20th century.
It was not the Civil Rights Era, but the ‘American Civil War’ (in the
terms of the victors) or ‘War between the States’ (in those of the
vanquished) that first indissolubly cross-coded the practical
question of Leviathan with (black/white) racial dialectics, laying
down the central junction yard of subsequent political antagonism
and rhetoric. The indispensable primary step in comprehending this
fatality snakes along an awkward diagonal between mainstream
statist and revisionist accounts, because the conflagration that
consumed the American nation in the early 1860s was wholly but
non-exclusively about emancipation from slavery and about states
rights, with neither ‘cause’ reducible to the other, or sufficient to
suppress the war’s enduring ambiguities. Whilst there are any
number of ‘liberals’ happy to celebrate the consolidation of
132
centralized government power in the triumphant Union, and,

symmetrically, a (far smaller) number of neo-confederate apologists
for the institution of chattel slavery in the southern states, neither of
these unconflicted stances capture the dynamic cultural legacy of a
war across the codes.
The war is a knot. By practically dissociating liberty into
emancipation and independence, then hurling each against the other
in a half-decade of carnage, blue against gray, it was settled that
freedom would be broken on the battlefield, whatever the outcome
of the conflict. Union victory determined that the emancipatory
sense of liberty would prevail, not only in America, but throughout
the world, and the eventual reign of the Cathedral was assured.
Nevertheless, the crushing of American’s second war of secession
made a mockery of the first. If the institution of slavery de-
legitimated a war of independence, what survived of 1776? The
moral coherence of the Union cause required that the founders were
reconceived as politically illegitimate white patriarchal slave-
owners, and American history combusted in progressive education
and the culture wars.
If independence is the ideology of slave-holders, emancipation
requires the programmatic destruction of independence. Within a
cross-coded history, the realization of freedom is indistinguishable
from its abolition.
133
Reignition
July 3, 2012

(Part
art 4f(inal))
Approaching the Bionic Horizon
It’s time to bring this long digression to a conclusion, by reaching out

impatiently towards the end. The basic theme has been mind control,
or thought-suppression, as demonstrated by the Media-Academic
complex that dominates contemporary Western societies, and which
Mencius Moldbug names the Cathedral. When things are squashed
they rarely disappear. Instead, they are displaced, fleeing into
sheltering shadows, and sometimes turning into monsters. Today, as
the suppressive orthodoxy of the Cathedral comes unstrung, in
various ways, and numerous senses, a time of monsters is
approaching.
The central dogma of the Cathedral has been formalized as the
Standard Social Scientific Model (SSSM) or ‘blank slate theory’. It is
the belief, completed in its essentials by the anthropology of Franz
Boas, that every legitimate question about mankind is restricted to
the sphere of culture. Nature permits that ‘man’ is, but never
determines what man is. Questions directed towards natural
characteristics and variations between humans are themselves
134
properly understood as cultural peculiarities, or even pathologies.

Failures of ‘nurture’ are the only thing we are allowed to see.
Because the Cathedral has a consistent ideological orientation,
and sifts its enemies accordingly, comparatively detached scientific
appraisal of the SSSM easily veers into raw antagonism. As Simon
Blackburn remarks (in a thoughtful review of Steven Pinker’s The
Blank Slate), “The dichotomy between nature and nurture rapidly
acquires political and emotional implications. To put it crudely, the
right likes genes and the left likes culture …”
At the limit of reciprocal loathing, hereditarian determinism
confronts social constructivism, with each committed to a radically
pared-back model of causality. Either nature expresses itself as
culture, or culture expresses itself in its images (‘constructions’) of
nature. Both of these positions are trapped at opposite sides of an
incomplete circuit, structurally blinded to the culture of practical
naturalism, which is to say: the techno-scientific / industrial
manipulation of the world.
Acquiring knowledge and using tools is a single dynamic circuit,
producing techno-science as an integral system, without real
divisibility into theoretical and practical aspects. Science develops in
loops, through experimental technique and the production of ever
more sophisticated instrumentation, whilst embedded within a
broader industrial process. Its advance is the improvement of a
machine. This intrinsically technological character of (modern)
135
Reignition
science demonstrates the efficiency of culture as a complex natural

force. It neither expresses a pre-existing natural circumstance, nor
does it merely construct social representations. Instead, nature and
culture compose a dynamic circuit, at the edge of nature, where fate
is decided.
According to the self-reinforcing presupposition of
modernization, to be understood is to be modifiable. It is to be
expected, therefore, that biology and medicine co-evolve. The same
historical dynamic that comprehensively subverts the SSSM through
inundating waves of scientific discovery simultaneously volatilizes
human biological identity through biotechnology. There is no
essential difference between learning what we really are and re-
defining ourselves as technological contingencies, or technoplastic
beings, susceptible to precise, scientifically-informed
transformations. ‘Humanity’ becomes intelligible as it is subsumed
into the technosphere, where information processing of the genome
– for instance — brings reading and editing into perfect coincidence.
To describe this circuit, as it consumes the human species, is to
define our bionic horizon: the threshold of conclusive nature-culture
fusion at which a population becomes indistinguishable from its
technology. This is neither hereditarian determinism, nor social
constructivism, but it is what both would have referred to, had they
indicated anything real. It is a syndrome vividly anticipated by
Octavia Butler, whose Xenogenesis trilogy is devoted to the
136
examination of a population beyond the bionic horizon. Her Oankali

‘gene traders’ have no identity separable from the biotechnological
program that they perpetually implement upon themselves, as they
commercially acquire, industrially produce, and sexually reproduce
their population within a single, integral process. Between what the
Oankali are, and the way they live, or behave, there is no firm
difference. Because they make themselves, their nature is their
culture and (of course) reciprocally. What they are is exactly what
they do.
Religious traditionalists of the Western Orthosphere are right to
identify the looming bionic horizon with a (negative) theological
event. Techno-scientific auto-production specifically supplants the
fixed and sacralized essence of man as a created being, amidst the
greatest upheaval in the natural order since the emergence of
eukaryotic life, half a billion years ago. It is not merely an
evolutionary event, but the threshold of a new evolutionary phase.
John H. Campbell heralds the emergence of Homo autocatalyticus,
whilst arguing: “In point of fact, it is hard to imagine how a system of
inheritance could be more ideal for engineering than ours is.”
John H. Campbell? – a prophet of monstrosity, and the perfect
excuse for a monster quote:
“Biologists suspect that new forms evolve rapidly from very

tiny outgroups of individuals (perhaps even a single fertilized
137
Reignition
female, Mayr, 1942) at the fringe of an existing species. There

the stress of an all but uninhabitable environment, forced
inbreeding among isolated family members, “introgression”
of foreign genes from neighboring species, lack of other
members of the species to compete against or whatever,
promotes a major reorganization of the genomic program,
possibly from modest change in gene structure. Nearly all
of these transmogrified fragments of species die out, but an
occasional one is fortunate enough to fit a new viable niche.
It prospers and expands into a new species. Its conversion
into a statistically constrained gene pool then stabilizes the
species from further evolutionary change. Established
species are far more notable for their stasis than change.
Even throwing off a new daughter species does not seem to
change an existing species. No one denies that species can
gradually transform and do so to various extents, but this
so-called “anagenesis” is relatively unimportant compared to
geologically-sudden major saltation in the generation of
novelty.
Three implications are important.
1. Most evolutionary change is associated with the origin
of new species.
2. Several modes of evolution may operate
simultaneously. In this case the most effective dominates the
138
process.
3. Tiny minorities of individuals do most of the evolving
instead of the species as a whole.
A second important characteristic of evolution is self-
reference (Campbell, 1982). The Cartesian cartoon of an
autonomous external “environment” dictating the form of a
species like a cookie cutter cutting stencils from sheets of
dough is dead, dead wrong. The species molds its
environment as profoundly as the environment “evolves” the
species. In particular, the organisms cause the limiting
conditions of the environment over which they compete.
Therefore the genes play two roles in evolution. They are the
targets of natural selection and they also ultimately induce
and determine the selection pressures that act upon them.
This circular causality overwhelms the mechanical character
of evolution. Evolution is dominated by feedback of the
evolved activities of organisms on their evolution.
The third seminal realization is that evolution extends
past the change in organisms as products of evolution to
change in the process itself. Evolution evolves (Jantsch, 1976;
Balsh, 1989; Dawkins, 1989; Campbell, 1993). Evolutionists
know this fact but have never accorded the fact the
importance that it deserves because it is incommensurate
with Darwinism. Darwinists, and especially modern
139
Reignition
neodarwinists, equate evolution to the operation of a simple

logical principle, one that is prior to biology: Evolution is
merely the Darwinian principle of natural selection in action,
and this is what the science of evolution is about. Since
principles cannot change with time or circumstances,
evolution must be fundamentally static.
Of course, biological evolution is not like this at all. It is
an actual complex process, not a principle. The way that it
takes place can, and indisputably does, change with time. This
is of utmost importance because the process of evolution
advances as it proceeds (Campbell, 1986). Preliving matter
in the earth’s primordial soup was able to evolve only by
subdarwinian “chemical” mechanisms. Once these puny
processes created gene molecules with information for their
self-replication then evolution was able to engage natural
selection. Evolution then wrapped the self-replicating
genomes within self-replicating organisms to control the way
that life would respond to the winds of selection from the
environment. Later, by creating multicellular organisms,
evolution gained access to morphological change as an
alternative to slower and less versatile biochemical
evolution. Changes in the instructions in developmental
programs replaced changes in enzyme catalysts. Nervous
systems opened the way for still faster and more potent
140
behavioral, social and cultural evolution. Finally, these higher

modes produced the prerequisite organization for rational,
purposeful evolution, guided and propelled by goal-directed
minds. Each of these steps represented a new emergent level
of evolutionary capability.
Thus, there are two distinct, but interwoven, evolutionary
processes. I call them “adaptive evolution” and “generative
evolution.” The former is familiar Darwinian modification of
organisms to enhance their survival and reproductive
success. Generative evolution is entirely different. It is the
change in a process instead of structure. Moreover, that
process is ontological. Evolution literally means “to unfold”
and what is unfolding is the capacity to evolve. Higher
animals have become increasingly adept at evolving. In
contrast, they are not the least bit fitter than their ancestors
or the lowest form of microbe. Every species today has had
exactly the same track record of survival; on average, every
higher organism alive today still will leave only two offspring,
as was the case a hundred million years ago, and modern
species are as likely to go extinct as were those in the past.
Species cannot become fitter and fitter because reproductive
success is not a cumulative parameter.
For racial nationalists, concerned that their grandchildren should
141
Reignition
look like them, Campbell is the abyss. Miscegenation doesn’t get

close to the issue. Think face tentacles.
Campbell is also a secessionist, although entirely undistracted by
the concerns of identity politics (racial purity) or traditional cognitive
elitism (eugenics). Approaching the bionic horizon, secessionism
takes on an altogether wilder and more monstrous bearing –
towards speciation. The folks at euvolution capture the scenario
well:
Reasoning that the majority of humankind will not

voluntarily accept qualitative population-management
policies, Campbell points out that any attempt to raise the IQ
of the whole human race would be tediously slow. He further
points out that the general thrust of early eugenics was not
so much species improvement as the prevention of decline.
Campbell’s eugenics, therefore, advocates the abandonment
of Homo sapiens as a ‘relic’ or ‘living fossil’ and the
application of genetic technologies to intrude upon the
genome, probably writing novel genes from scratch using a
DNA synthesizer. Such eugenics would be practiced by elite
groups, whose achievements would so quickly and radically
outdistance the usual tempo of evolution that within ten
generation the new groups will have advanced beyond our
current form to the same degree that we transcend apes.
142
When seen from the bionic horizon, whatever emerges from the
dialectics of racial terror remains trapped in trivialities. It’s time to
move on.
July 20, 2012
Malthusian Horror
The post is pitched like this because it’s Friday night, but it works.
A more dutiful post might have been entitled simply ‘Malthus’ and
involved a lot of work. That’s going to be needed at some point.
(Here‘s the 6th edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population, for
anyone who wants to get started now.) A more thoroughly technical
approach would have been flagged ‘Neo-Malthusianism’. While
sympathizing with groans about another ‘neo-‘ prefix, in this case it
would have been solidly justified. It’s only through expansion of the
Malthusian insight in accordance with a more general conservation
law that its full current relevance can be appreciated. Classic
Malthus still does far more work than it is credited with, but it
contains a principle of far more penetrating application.
‘Neo-‘ at its most frivolous is merely a mark of fashion. When
employed more seriously, it notes an element of innovation. Its most
significant sense includes not only novelty, but also abstraction.
Something is carried forwards in such a way that its conceptual core
143
Reignition
is distilled through extraction from a specific context, achieving a

higher generality, and more exact formality. Malthus partially
anticipates this in a phrase that points beyond any excessively
constrictive concreteness:
The qualification “in some shape or other” might have been drawn
from abstract horror, and “premature death” only loosely binds it.
Even so, this formulation remains too narrow, since it tends to
exclude the dysgenic outcome, which we have since learnt is a
dimension of Malthusian expression scarcely less imposing than
resource crisis. A Neo-Malthusian account of the “X” which in some
shape or other makes a grim perversity of all humanity’s efforts to
improve its condition grasps it as a mathematically conserved,
plastic, or abstract destiny, working as remorselessly through
reductions of mortality (Malthusian ‘relaxations’) as through
increases (Malthusian ‘pressures’). Both would count equally as
“checks on population” — each convertible, through a complex
calculus, into the terms of the other. A population dysgenically
144
deteriorated through ‘enlightened’ Malthusian relaxation learns,

once again, how to starve.
The Dark Enlightenment (essay) was clearly catalyzed by the
work of Mencius Moldbug, but it was to have had two Anglo-
Thomistic or Doubting Thomas intellectual-historical pillars (and
neither were Thomas Carlyle). The first was Thomas Hobbes, who
was at least touched upon. The second was to have been Thomas
Malthus, but the series was diverted into the foaming current of the
Derbyshire affair and the outrages of Leftist race politics. The
integrity of conception was lost. Had it not been, it might have been
less tempting to read the 333-current as an Anti-Enlightenment,
rather than a Counter-Enlightenment, in the sense of an eclipsed,
alternative to the Rousseauistic calamity that prevailed. It would
certainly attach the Scottish Enlightenment, but only under the
definite condition that it is lashed securely to the harsh realist
scaffolding of the Dark Enlightenment (Hobbes and Malthus),
disillusioned of all idealism. Pretty stories are for little children
(being raised by liberals).
Malthus subtracts all utopianism from enlightenment. He shows
that history is put together — necessarily — in a butcher’s yard.
Through Malthus, Ricardo discovered the Iron Law of Wages,
disconnecting the ideas of economic advance and humanitarian
redemption. Darwin effected a comparable (and more
consequential) revision in biology, also on Malthusian grounds,
145
Reignition
dispelling all sentimentality from notions of evolutionary

‘progression’. It is from Malthus that we know, when anything seems
to move forward, it is through being ground up against a cutting
edge. It is when Marx attempts to put Malthus into history, rather
than history into Malthus, that utopian dementia was resuscitated
within economics. The anti-Malthusianism of Libertarians
stigmatizes them as dreamy fools.
With NRx, the matter is perhaps more unsettled, but the Dark
Enlightenment is unambiguously Mathusian. If you find your eye
becoming dewy, pluck it out.
November 14, 2014
146
BLOCK 2 - SOCIAL DARWINISM
BL
BLOCK
OCK 2 - SOCIAL
DARWINISM
Reality Rules
Wh
Whyy Social Darwinism isn
isn’t
’t going an
anywhere
ywhere
The name social Darwinism is a modern name given to the

various theories of society that emerged in England and the
United States in the 1870s, which, it is alleged, sought to
apply biological concepts to sociology and politics. The term
social Darwinism gained widespread currency when used in
1944 to oppose these earlier concepts. Today, because of the
negative connotations of the theory of social Darwinism,
especially after the atrocities of the Second World War
147
Reignition
(including the Holocaust), few people would describe

themselves as Social Darwinists and the term is generally
seen as pejorative. — Wikipedia
… no one calls himself a social Darwinist. Not now, not ever.

Not Herbert Spencer. The term is always used to label one’s
opponents. In that sense it’s clearly a more abusive term than
“socialist,” a term that millions of people have proudly
claimed. — David Boaz
Urban Future somehow missed the excited side-track discussion

that bolted to the conclusion: America voted in November 2012 to
spare itself from Social Darwinism. Yet, sadly belated as it may be,
our rejoinder is unchanged: nothing ever gets spared from
Darwinism. That’s what Darwinism is.
The fact that the term Social Darwinism survives only as a slur is
abundantly telling, and suffices on its own to explain the ideological
‘evolution’ of recent times. In a nutshell, the dominant usage of ‘social
Darwinism’ says “markets are a kind of Nazi thing.” Checkmate in one
move.
Markets implement a Darwinian process by eliminating failure.
Schumpeter called it ‘creative destruction’. The principle unit of
selection is the business enterprise, which is able to innovate, adapt,
propagate, and evolve precisely insofar as it is also exposed to the
148
risk of perishing. None of this is especially complicated, or even

controversial. In a sane world it is what ‘social Darwinism’ would
mean. It is certainly what Herbert Spencer was really talking about
(although he never adopted the label).
The fundamental tenet of Social Darwinism would then be
compressible into a couple of words: reality rules. There’s more, of
course, but nothing especially challenging. The further additions are
really subtractions, or reservations – intellectual economies,
negative principles, and non-commitments. That’s because
Darwinism – whether ‘social’ or otherwise – is built from
subtractions. Deducting all supernatural causality and transcendent
agencies leaves Darwinism as the way complex structures get
designed. (Not constructed, but designed, in conformity with a
naturalistic theory of plans, blueprints, recipes, or assembly codes,
of the kind that have naturally invited supernatural explanation.
Darwinism only applies to practical information.)
Subtractions put it together. For instance, remove the
extravagant hypothesis that something big and benevolent is looking
after us, whether God, the State, or some alternative Super-Dad,
and the realistic residue indicates that our mistakes kill us. It follows
that anything still hanging around has a history of avoiding serious
mistakes, which it may or may not be persisting with – and
persistence will tell. If we’re forgetting important lessons, we’ll pay
(in the currency of survival).
149
Reignition
If this is mere tautology, as has not infrequently been alleged, then

there’s not even any need for controversy. But of course, controversy
there is, plentifully, and so deeply entrenched that the most banal
expositions capture it best. Consider this, from the self-assuredly
pedestrian United States History site:
Social Darwinism was the application of Charles Darwin’s

scientific theories of evolution and natural selection to
contemporary social development. In nature, only the fittest
survived — so too in the marketplace. This form of
justification was enthusiastically adopted by many American
businessmen as scientific proof of their superiority.
What is this supremely typical paragraph really saying? That some

American businesses survived, were thus seen as “the fittest” (= they
had survived), ‘justified’ (= they had survived), and ‘proven to be
superior’ (= they had survived), in other words, a string of perfectly
empty identity statements that is in some way supposed to embody
a radically disreputable form of ruthless social extremism. This same
systematic logical error, seen with tedious insistence in all instance
of commentary on ‘social Darwinism’, was baptized by Schopenhauer
‘hypostasis of the concept’. It seizes upon something, repeats it
exactly but in different terms, and then pretends to have added
information. Once this error is corrected for, substantial discussion
150
of the topic is exposed in its full, dazzling vacuity.

A writhing David Boaz cites the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on
Social Darwinism, which describes it as:
… the theory that persons, groups, and races are subject to

the same laws of natural selection as Charles Darwin had
perceived in plants and animals in nature. According to the
theory, which was popular in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, the weak were diminished and their cultures
delimited, while the strong grew in power and in cultural
influence over the weak…. The poor were the “unfit” and
should not be aided; in the struggle for existence, wealth was
a sign of success. At the societal level, social Darwinism was
used as a philosophical rationalization for imperialist,
colonialist, and racist policies, sustaining belief in Anglo-
Saxon or Aryan cultural and biological superiority.
It is immediately clear that this passage, too, follows the already-

familiar pattern, clocking ‘hypostasis of the concept’ to the edge of
spontaneous combustion. Worse still, it tries to put its hypostasized
‘information’ to work through the positive proposition — tacitly
insinuated rather than firmly stated – that “persons, groups, and
races” are something other than “animals in nature.” Nature, it seems,
ceased to apply at some threshold of human social development,
151
Reignition
when people stopped being animals, and became something else.

Man is not only doubled (as a natural being and something else), but
divided between incommensurable kingdoms, whose re-integration
is morally akin to “rationalization for imperialist, colonialist, and
racist policies” and – why not admit it? — fascist genocide.
Define nature in such a way that we’re not part of it, or you’re
engaged in Nazi apologetics says Encyclopedia Britannica. There’s
obviously something about social Darwinism that gets people
excited — several things, actually. Plugging the spontaneous theory
of laissez faire capitalism into traumatic association with the Third
Reich is thrilling enough, especially because that’s the basic platform
for the epoch of actually existing fascism (which we still inhabit), but
there’s more.
The most obvious clue, from which the Encyclopedia Britannica
passage unravels like a piece of incompetent knitting, is the magical
appearance of ‘should’ – “The poor were the ‘unfit’ and should not
be aided.” This is another preposterous hypostasis, naturally (and
unnaturally), but equally typical. At the evolution site talkorigins,
John S. Wilkins tells us: “’Social Darwinism’ … holds that social policy
should allow the weak and unfit to fail and die, and that this is not
only good policy but morally right.” The intellectual perversity here is
truly fascinating.
Any naturalistic social theory subtracts, or at least suspends,
moral evaluation. It says: this is the way things are (however we
152
might want them to be). Yet here, through hypostatic doubling, or

redundancy, such neutral realism is converted into a bizarre, morally-
charged stance: nature should happen. Social Darwinism is not
attempting to explain, but rather siding with reality (those Nazis!).
This is, quite simply and literally, madness. Left dissatisfied by
mere denial of the modest proposition that reality rules, the
denunciation of social Darwinism proceeds smoothly to the
accusation that realists are aiding and abetting the enemy. The
unforgivable crime is to accept that there are consequences, or
results, other than those we have agreed to allow.
The reality is that practical decisions have real consequences. If
those consequences are annulled by, or absorbed into, a more
comprehensive social entity, then that entity inherits them. What
it incentivizes it grows into. The failures it selects for become its
own. When maladaptive decisions are displaced, or aggregated, they
are not dispelled, but reinforced, generalized, and exacerbated.
Whatever the scale of the social being under consideration, it either
finds a way to work, and to reward what works, or it perishes,
whether as a whole, or in pieces. That is the ‘social Darwinism’ that
will return, eventually, because reality rules, and rather than joining
the clamor of denunciation, Boaz would have been prescient to
reclaim it.
November 20, 2012
153
Reignition
Discrimination
Bryan Caplan has had two epiphanies, which sum to the conclusion
that — bad as tribalism is — misanthropy is the real problem. His
ineradicable universalism betrays him once again.
It matters little whether people are uniformly judged good or bad.
Far more important is whether such judgment is discriminating.
The central argument of Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals is
clarifying in this regard, not least because it explains how radical
mystification came to dominate the topic. How could there ever
come to be a moral quandary about the value of discrimination?
Considered superficially, it is extremely puzzling.
Differentiation between what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ requires
discrimination. This is a capability no younger than life itself, which
it serves as an indispensable function. As soon as there is behavior,
there is discrimination between alternatives. One way leads to
survival, the other way leads to death. There is nourishment, or not;
reproduction, or not; safety or predatory menace. Good and bad,
or the discrimination between them (which is the same thing), are
etched primordially into any world that life inhabits. Discrimination
is needed to survive.
The very existence of archaic hominids attests to billions of years
of effective discrimination, between safety and danger, wholesome
and putrid or poisonous food, good mates and less good (or
154
worthless) ones. When these elevated apes differentiated between

good and bad, appetizing and rotten, attractive and repulsive, they
found such discriminations sufficiently similar in essence to be
functionally substitutable. When judging that some food item is ‘not
good for us’, a person is ‘rotten’, or the odor of a potential mate is
‘delicious’, we recall such substitutions, and the primordial sense of
discrimination that they affirm. There can be no long-term deviation
from the original principle: discrimination is intelligence aligned with
survival.
Two contrary developments now present themselves. Firstly,
there is a sublimation or sophistication of discrimination, which
might be called cultivation. Abstract concepts, modes of expression,
artworks, delicate culinary flavors, refined behaviors, and exotic
elaborations of sexual-selection stimuli, among innumerable other
things, can all be subtly discriminated on the ancient scale,
supporting an ever more intricate and extended hierarchy of
judgments. The reflexive doubling of this potential upon itself, as
captured by the ‘higher’ judgment that to discriminate well is good,
produces a ‘natural aristocracy’. For the first time, there is a self-
conscious ‘Right’. This, at least, is its logico-mythical ur-form. To
divide the good from the bad is good. Order, hierarchy, and
distinction emerge from an affirmation of discrimination.
Because the Left cannot create, it comes second. It presupposes
an existing hierarchy, or order of discriminations, which is subverted
155
Reignition
through a ‘slave revolt in morality’. The formula is simple enough: to

discriminate is bad. Following from this leftist moral perversion, as
its second-order consequence, those who do not discriminate (well),
but are in fact discriminated against, must be the good. In the new
moral order, therefore, to be bad at discrimination is good — or
‘universalist’ — whilst the old (and now ‘evil’) quality of good
judgment, based on competent perception of patterns and
differences, is the very quintessence of sin.
Lawrence Auster’s thinking, which would not usually be described
as ‘Nietzschean’, conforms to the conclusions of the Antichrist
perfectly in this:
We thus arrive at our present system of mass nonwhite
immigration, multiculturalism, racial preferences for minorities, the
symbolic celebration of minorities, the covering up of black-on-white
violence, and antiracism crusades directed exclusively at whites.
Under this system, whites pr practice
actice assiduous non-discrimination
toward the unassimilated, alien, or criminal beha behavior
vior of rracial
acial
minorities, while pr practicing
acticing the most assiduous discrimination
against their fellow whites for the slightest failure to be non-
discriminatory
discriminatory.. This is the system that conservatives variously
describe as “political correctness” or the “double standard.”
However, from the point of view of the functioning of the liberal
order itself, what conservatives call the double standard is not a
double standard at all, but a fundamental and necessary articulation
156
of the society into the “non-discriminators” and the “non-

discriminated against”—an articulation upon which the very
legitimacy and existence of the liberal society depends. [Auster’s
emphasis]
The racial pretext for this righteous diatribe is not incidental,
given the prevailing sense of ‘discrimination’ in Left-edited
languages. Caution is required, however, precisely because vulgar
racism is insufficiently discriminating. All generalization lurches
towards the universal. The abstract principle of Leftism is, in any
case, far more general. The trend towards the Left-absolute is
entirely clear, and pre-programmed: no state of human existence can
possibly be any better or worse than any other, and only through
recognition of this can we be saved. Do you sinfully imagine that it
is better to be a damned soul like Nietzsche than an obese, leprous,
slothful, communist, cretin? Or worse still, in Bryan Caplan’s world,
that one might design an immigration policy on this basis? Then your
path to the abyss is already marked out before you.
It does not take an exceptional mastery of logic to see the
inextinguishable contradiction in Leftist thought. If discrimination
is bad, and non-discrimination is good, how can discrimination be
discriminated from non-discrimination, without grave moral error?
This is an opportunity for Rightist entertainment, but not for solace.
The Left has power and absurdist mysticism on its side. Logic is for
sinners.
157
Reignition
Two hanging questions:

Can Left and Right be rigorously distinguished in any other way?
Isn’t Christianity, as Nietzsche insisted, inextricable from this mess?
August 9, 2013
Coldness
‘Coincidentally’ a number of seemingly unrelated social media
stimuli have conspired to recall this today:
158
Note: “Politics closest to me” comes from the original creator of

this diagram (I’m still not sure who that is). The politics closest to
159
Reignition
me are located in the top right corner of the gray box, where it
disappears into the blackness of the Outside.
For the record, these tweets were the principal pincers:
@Outsideness I'm 70% sure I read something by you (or

maybe it was linked by you) about how Darwinism is always
to our right
— Кирилл Каминец (@Fatalist_Rus) February 12, 2015
Outside in – Involvements with reality » Blog Archive »

Fission http://t.co/GTCSoEd89s
— Kalish Jantzen (@KalishJantzen) February 13, 2015
(It took me a while to make the connection.)

There’s a further link — also to Twitter — concerning the
accusation that Anarcho-Capitalism and Neocameralism are
‘Utopian’. I won’t reproduce that here, because it was longer, and
more involved. The relevant point is that both these ‘positions’ can
be construed either as ideals, and therefore indeed vulnerable to
criticism for their Utopianism, or as cold analytical frameworks that
capture what is in a way that enhances its theoretical tractability.
Darwinism is no different, in this respect.
Anybody who is a Cosmic Darwinist is certainly going to be a
Social Darwinist, unless they have a cognitive consistency problem.
160
When a Darwinist observes a maladaption it is not seen as a

theoretical hole, but rather as the basis for a prediction. Whatever
cannot effectively reproduce itself can be reliably expected not to
successfully reproduce itself. If adventures in policy
recommendation then follow, they are strictly secondly. What is
primary is simple. Reality rules.
Outside in is, of course, utterly Social Darwinist in this sense (and
probably also in whatever others are available). Variation-selection
dynamics are unsurpassable. Whatever seeks to depart from them
will fail. Suppression of either variation or selection is intrinsically
maladaptive to the cosmos. Maximization of the interlocked
functions of experimentation and eradication of error is the only
value to which the ultimate nature of things subscribes. Anything
that works picks up on that, and goes with its grain. Anything that
doesn’t is objectively insane. It’s not especially difficult, except for
the fact that it offers us nothing but the (cold) truth.
Does Darwinism define the ultimate (transcendental) Right (in
this sense, and this)? Capitalism as Darwinian socio-economics, HBD
as Darwinian anthropology, the Gods of the Copybook Headings as
Darwinian cultural history …? I cannot even imagine how that might
not be so.
February 13, 2015
161
Reignition
Scales
From a widely cited defense of the Black Lives Matter synthetic
meme at Reddit:
… societally, we don
don’t
’t pay as much attention to certain people’s
deaths as we do to others. So, currently, we don’t treat all lives as
though they matter equally.
Two points:
(1) Some lives (and deaths) do matter far more than others,
ob
obviously
viously. Everyone knows this, when they’re not high, even if they
usually feel compelled to lie about it. (Some lives, indeed,
characterized by criminality and parasitism, are worth less than
nothing — and even considerably less.) Only bizarre religious ideas
could lead anybody to think the opposite.
(2) Western societies are very rapidly losing the ability to make sane
calls on the point, as exceptional productivity loses its capacity to
inspire attention, and the merely piteous usurps its central cultural
position.
In the absence of adaptive sensibilities, life insurance premiums —
or some equivalent expression of undemonstrative, practical value-
processing — will have to serve as a default.
September 3, 2015
162
How Communism W
Works
orks
Really:
Naked mole rats are among the ugliest creatures in the animal
kingdom, and they engage in acts that seem repulsive — such as
eating one another’s, and their own, faeces. … Now researchers have
found one biological motivation for this behaviour. When a queen
mole rat’s subordinates feed on her hormone-filled faeces, the
resulting oestrogen boost causes the beta rats to take care of the
queen’s pups … […] Like bees, naked mole rats live in eusocial
colonies, with only one queen rat and a few males that can
reproduce. The rest of the colony consists of dozens of infertile
subordinates that help with tasks such as foraging and defending
the nest. The subordinate rats also take care of the queen’s pups as
though the babies were their own: they build the nests, lick the pups
and keep them warm with their body heat.
We’re almost there. Hail the New Collectivist Man:
163
Reignition
“Sue Carter, a behavioural neurobiologist at Indiana University in

Bloomington, says that the animals’ method of transferring parental
responsibility through faeces is interesting.”
(Don’t say you weren’t warned.)
October 22, 2015
164
Twin Disco
Discovveries
Twin studies are the foundation of realism in all subjects pertaining
to human beings (although their implications are wider). They reveal
two crucial pieces of information:
(1) Heredity overwhelms environment in the (rigorous, statistical)
explanation of human psychology, and
(2) Humans are massively predisposed to under-emphasize
hereditary factors in the folk explanation of human psychology
(including their own).
Both points emerge lucidly from Brian Boutwell’s article on twin
research in Quillette:
Based on the results of classical twin studies, it just doesn’t
appear that parenting — whether mom and dad are permissive or
not, read to their kid or not, or whatever else — impacts development
as much as we might like to think. Regarding the cross-validation that
I mentioned, studies examining identical twins separated at birth and
reared apart have repeatedly revealed (in shocking ways) the same
thing: these individuals are remarkably similar when in fact they
should be utterly different (they have completely different
environments, but the same genes). Alternatively, non-biologically
related adopted children (who have no genetic commonalities)
raised together are utterly dissimilar to each other — despite in many
cases having decades of exposure to the same parents and home
165
Reignition
environments.
Without wanting to play down the importance of the parenting
angle, it’s worth bearing in mind that this is a rare zone where it
remains politically acceptable to bring hereditarian findings to the
table. Upsetting parents is still OK, and even vaguely commendable,
so it provides a doorway through which to introduce matters of far
broader significance. The truly critical point, from the perspective of
this blog, is that we should expect a systematic cognitive bias against
the influence of heredity and thus — intellectual integrity demands
— we should lean against it.
There’s an important lesson here:
Children who are spanked (not abused, but spanked) often
experience a host of other problems in life, including psychological
maladjustment and behavioral problems. In a study led by my
colleague J.C. Barnes, we probed this issue in more detail and found
some evidence suggesting that spanking increased the occurrence
of overt bad behavior in children. We could have stopped there. Yet,
we went one step further and attempted to inspect the genetic
influences that were rampant across the measures included in our
study. What we found was that much of the association between the
two variables (spanking and behavior) was attributable to genetic
effects that they had in common. The correlation between spanking
and behavior appeared to reflect the presence of shared genetic
influences cutting across both traits.
166
Parents are twin sources of influence. They “pass along two things
to their kids: genes and an environment” — which facilitates the
misattribution of genetic to environmental factors. If you find
yourself regularly spanking your kids, it’s very likely that you’ve
genetically-endowed them with the same spank-worthy
characteristics you have yourself (because you were spanked as a
kid, too, right?). The environmentalist delusion practically leaps out
of this situation, pre-packaged for credulous belief.
See original (of both quotes) for references.
(Don’t just read the whole of Boutwell’s article, read the whole of
Quillette.)
December 2, 2015
Quote note (#266)

It is surely a crucial (and inadequately acknowledged) feature of
Darwin’s The Origin of Species that its point of departure is artificial
selection, which might also be described as primordial technology,
or the foundation of material civilization. Natural selection acquires
definition through comparison with the (predominantly
unconscious) process of domestication, or cultivation. This is the
transitional paragraph (from Chapter IV):
As man can produce, and certainly has produced, a great result
167
Reignition
by his methodical and unconscious means of selection, what may not

natural selection effect? Man can act only on external and visible
characters: Nature, if I many be allowed to personify the natural
preservation or survival of the fittest, cares nothing for appearances,
except in so far as they are useful to any being. She can act on every
internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the
whole machinery of life. Man selects only for his own good: Nature
only for that of the being which she tends. Every selected character
is fully exercised by her, as is implied by the fact of their selection.
Man keeps the natives of many climates in the same country; he
seldom exercises each selected character in some peculiar and fitting
manner; he feeds a long- and short-beaked pigeon on the same food;
he does not exercise a long-backed or long-legged quadruped in any
peculiar manner; he exposes sheep with long and short wool to the
same climate. He does not allow the most vigorous males to struggle
for the females. He does not rigidly destroy all inferior animals, but
protects during each varying season, as far as lies in his power, all
his productions. He often begins his selection from some half-
monstrous form; or at least by some modification prominent enough
to catch the eye or to be plainly useful to him. Under Nature, the
slightest difference of structure or constitution may well turn the
nicely balanced scale in the struggle for life, and so be preserved.
How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time!
and consequently how poor will be his results, compared with those
168
accumulated by Nature during whole geological periods! Can we

wonder, then, that Natures productions should be far “truer” in
character than man’s productions; that they should be infinitely
better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should
plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship?
July 10, 2016
169
Reignition
CHAPTER ONE - SELECTION
Edited Life
Leonard Eisenberg has created a striking new visualization of the
tree of life.
It’s open about the skew: “All the major and many of the minor
living branches of life are shown on this diagram, but only a few of
those that have gone extinct are shown.”
Extinction is overwhelmingly the deep reality, compared to which
the survival of species — the selected phenomenon — is scarcely
more than a rounding error. Through a reflexive, lucid, secondary
selection the culled, blasted, and gnawed tree of terrestrial life is
170
edited into the attractive flowering shrub we see in the diagram. It

shows us what our illusion looks like in detail.
Survivor or selection bias is a hugely important frame. It absorbs
the whole of anthropic reasoning in principle. To produce a display
of life on earth that realistically incorporated it would require
overcoming a range of psychological and epistemological obstacles
so profound they reach the very root of the biological enterprise and
even human intelligence as such, but only then would we truly see
where we come from.
December 16, 2014
Hell-Bak
Hell-Baked
ed
There’s a potential prologue to this post that I’m reluctant to be
distracted by. It’s introvertedly about NRx, as a cultural mutation,
and the way this is defined by a strategic — or merely ornery —
indifference to deeply-settled modes of ethico-political
condemnation. Terms designed as pathblockers — ‘fascist’ or ‘racist’
most obviously — are stepped over, perhaps laughed at, but in any
case, and most importantly, exposed as bearers of a religious terror.
They are signs of a control regime, marking the unthinkable wastes
where be dragons, effective precisely insofar as they cannot be
entertained. ‘Satanic’ was once such a word (before it became a joke).
171
Reignition
These words cannot be understood except as invocations of the

sacred, in its negative, or limitative role.
Is NRx in fact fascist? Not remotely. It is probably, in reality rather
than self-estimation, the least fascistic current of political
philosophy presently in existence, although this requires a minimal
comprehension of what fascism actually is, which the word itself in
its contemporary usage is designed to obstruct. Is NRx racist?
Probably. The term is so entirely plastic in the service of those who
utilize it that it is difficult, with any real clarity, to say.
What NRx most definitely is, at least in the firm opinion of this
blog, is Social Darwinist. When this term is hurled at NRx as a
negative epithet, it is nor a cause for stoic resignation, stiffened by
humor, but rather for grim delight. Of course, this term is culturally
processed — thought through — no more competently than those
previously noted. It is our task to do this.
If ‘Social Darwinism’ is in any way an unfortunate term, it is only
because it is merely Darwinism, and more exactly consistent
Darwinism. It is equivalent to the proposition that Darwinian
processes have no limits relevant to us. Darwinism is something we
are inside. No part of what it is to be human can ever judge its
Darwinian inheritance from a position of transcendent leverage, as
if accessing principles of moral estimation with some alternative
genesis, or criterion.
This is easy to say. As far as this blog is concerned, it is also —
172
beyond all reasonable question — true. While very far from a

dominant global opinion, it is not uncommonly held — if only
nominally — by a considerable fraction of those among the educated
segment of the world’s high-IQ populations. It is also, however,
scarcely bearable to think.
The logical consequence of Social Darwinism is that everything of
value has been built in Hell
Hell.
It is only due to a predominance of influences that are not only
entirely morally indifferent, but indeed — from a human perspective
— indescribably cruel, that nature has been capable of constructive
action. Specifically, it is solely by way of the relentless, brutal culling
of populations that any complex or adaptive traits have been sieved
— with torturous inefficiency — from the chaos of natural existence.
All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from
a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable
eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This
is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either,
but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by
the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some
negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the
unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself
predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized
matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic
ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite.
173
Reignition
(This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the

story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.)
Crucially, any attempt to escape this fatality — or, more
realistically, any mere accidental and temporary reprieve from it —
leads inexorably to the undoing of its work. Malthusian relaxation
is the whole of mercy, and it is the greatest engine of destruction
our universe is able to bring about. To the precise extent that we
are spared, even for a moment, we degenerate — and this Iron Law
applies to every dimension and scale of existence: phylogenetic and
ontogenetic, individual, social, and institutional, genomic, cellular,
organic, and cultural. There is no machinery extant, or even
rigorously imaginable, that can sustain a single iota of attained value
outside the forges of Hell.
What is it that Neoreaction — perhaps I should say The Dark
Enlightenment — has to offer the world, if all goes optimally (which,
of course, it won’t)? Really, the honest answer to this question is:
Eternal Hell. It’s not an easy marketing brief. We could perhaps try:
But it could be worse (and almost certainly will be).
July 17, 2015
Malthus was Right

The global wealth distribution is predictably spiky. That’s mostly
174
because scarcely anyone owns anything:

… it does not take that much to get into the top 1% of wealth
holders. Once debts have been subtracted, a person needs only
$3,650 to be among the wealthiest half of the world’s citizens.
However, about $77,000 is required to be a member of the top 10%
of global wealth holders and $798,000 to belong to the top 1%. So if
you own a home in any major city in the rich North on your own and
without a mortgage, you are part of the top 1%.
This looks like what you’d expect if population — at the global
level — expanded approximately to the resource limit. (There are no
doubt cuddlier interpretations out there.)
November 28, 2016
175
Reignition
CHAPTER TWO - D
DYSGENICS
YSGENICS
Ruin
What does Dark Enlightenment see when it scrutinizes our world?
This. (Exactly
Exactly this.)
December 12, 2013
Charlton is Right …
… on this question, at least. The sole real puzzle is the precise
quantity of dysgenic deterioration that has taken place in Western
societies over the last 150 years, or more. Charlton estimates a one
SD decline over this period in the UK, which seems entirely credible.
Due to the small sample size, his argument from mathematical
excellence has an inevitable anecdotal quality, but it would be hard
to contest its general direction.
A fascinating paper by Michael A. Woodley (via @intelligenceres)
is able to be more comprehensively persuasive. Its second table
describes the innovation rate per capita across a sample of
176
European countries falling by almost three-quarters over the period

1845-2005, and roughly halving from 1945-2005. (Great Stagnation
anyone?)
It shouldn’t need adding that it’s impossible to read this often
enough (it’s always there in my ‘Resources’ roll).
Two more, somewhat more distantly related links.
(We’re so screwed.)
ADDED: More on this topic at Charlton’s place.
ADDED: Gregory Cochran’s ‘outliers’ argument against this thesis
has as its core: “In another application – if the average genetic IQ
potential had decreased by a standard deviation since Victorian
times, the number of individuals with the ability to develop new,
difficult, and interesting results in higher mathematics would have
crashed, bring such developments to a screeching halt. Of course
that has not happened.”
I would have found it profoundly confidence-crushing if Cochran
had simply said: the collapse of a complex trait on this scale, in this
time-span, is inconsistent with everything we know about population
genetics. The argument he relies upon instead, while far more
elegant, is also much less persuasive (see the excellent comment
thread at his site). As Dave Chamberlin notes, the parallel increase in
assortative mating over the period in question means that assuming
a stable standard distribution (variance) might not be safe. An
increasingly heterogeneous population would to some degree shield
177
Reignition
its outliers from averaging effects.

Compared to the evidence mustered in support of the IQ collapse
thesis, it is hard to be impressed by the rather impressionistic claim
“Of course that has not happened.” Up to the mid-20th century —
the era of Gödel, Von Neumann, and Turing — this might indeed have
been irresistible, but today? Charlton’s counter-argument seems by
no means risible. How sure are we that mathematics has not
“collapsed” — at least down to the level of ‘normal’ (rather than
‘revolutionary’) science? What was the last mathematical break-
through that mattered dazzlingly to the world?
ADDED: Mangan adds a significant complication.
March 7, 2014
The W
Worst
orst Question
At news aggregator Real Clear World, Frank Ching’s recent article
comparing the economic performance of the earth’s two
demographic giants was given the tantalizing headline Why India
Keeps Falling Behind China. There’s no sign of the “Why?” at the
original, published in Taiwan’s China Post. No surprise there.
As Ching notes:
While India and China are both being hailed as rapidly developing
emerging markets, the gap between the two countries is widening
178
with India being left behind as China continues to power ahead.

China’s growth in 2013 was 7.7 percent while that of India hit a low
for the decade of 4.5 percent in the 2012-13 fiscal year.
Despite being positioned for catch-up (i.e. being far poorer), India
simply doesn’t grow as fast as China. “The average estimated
productivity growth rate of China (5.9%) is more than double that
of India (2.4%).” India hasn’t matched Chinese growth rates in any
single year since the end of the Mao-era in the late 1970s, even after
launching its own much-heralded market-oriented economic reform
program in the early 1990s. Despite pulling itself from the dismal 3%
“Hindu” growth rate, which was roughly doubled to a 5-6% range,
China’s average 9.8% growth rate, sustained over three decades, has
remained far out of reach.
The two most populous nations on earth — by a huge margin —
accounting between them for over a third of the ‘developing world’
by headcount (and for a far larger proportion of the part that has
been in any serious way developing), would seem, superficially, like
obvious candidates for unrelenting comparison. How could this
titanic development race not be the most important socio-economic
story on the planet?
Adding drama to this competition is the ideological polarity it
represents. Pitting the most substantial and obstreperous
antagonist to liberal-democratic global manifest destiny against a
regime that was forged in Fabian social-democracy, and which
179
Reignition
continues to exult in its status as “the world’s largest democracy®” —

the narrative potential is … oh wait.
For the forces of darkness, it only gets better. If India’s relative
development failure is not to be considered a conspicuous
illustration of democratic incapability, other explanatory factors
have to be invoked. Something like 5% GDP growth is going missing,
chronically, every year (and if alternative development indicators are
preferred, the grim story they tell is much the same). Either India’s
Cathedral-approved political orientation is responsible for this social
morass, or something else has to be.
While wondering about this awkward conundrum, you’re quite
likely to stop being surprised about the paucity of China-India
comparative news coverage. Clearly, the “Why?” isn’t wanted,
because it only goes to bad places. In fact, it’s probably the worst
question in the world.
March 27, 2014
Dysgenic Reactions
Michael A. Woodley, Jan te Nijenhuis, and Raegan Murphy respond
(in detail) to critics of their 2013 paper on the dysgenic implications
of Galton’s reaction time data. Their adjusted evidence indicates an
increase in reaction times among US/UK males over the period
180
1889-2004 from 187.1 ms to 237.1 ms (44.6 ms over 115 years),

equivalent to a decline in g of 13.9 points, or 1.21 points per decade.
They propose that 68% of this decline is due to dysgenic selection,
with the remaining 32% attributed to increasing mutation load.
If these figures are even remotely accurate, they portray a
phenomenon — and indeed a catastrophe — that would have to be
considered a fundamental determinant of recent world history.
Given the scale and rapidity of dysgenic collapse suggested here,
skepticism is natural, and indeed all-but inevitable. (The proposed
rate of decline seems incredible to this, radically inexpert, blog.) It
should nevertheless be reasonable to expect counter-arguments to
exhibit the same intellectual seriousness and respect for evidence
that this paper so impressively demonstrates.
June 12, 2014
Counter-Dysgenics
Heartiste (finally) discovers Weiss.
Of Heartiste’s six proposed policy responses, #2 (introduce
counter-dysgenic incentives) is the only one this blog endorse
without reservation. High-IQ immigration, assortative mating, and
open markets all make a positive contribution to general social
competitiveness, although due theoretical deference to IQ-Shredder
181
Reignition
problems is required. His point #6 is valuable if it is inverted, to make

socio-political fragmentation a primary objective, rather than a
consequence, or subordinate instrumental goal. Point #5 (“Eliminate
all female-friendly public policies”) is unobjectionable because all ‘X-
friendly’ public policies are objectionable, and its specific emphasis is
material for consideration within a disintegrated oecumenon, where
polities could experiment with all kinds of things. Talented people
will tend to flee a heavy-handed authoritarian state, even if it’s social
policies have impressive traditional validation. Consequently, as a
response to local dysgenics, the outcome of any attempt to socially
engineer a restored patriarchy from the top-down is likely to be
counter-productive.
Social Darwinism, seriously understood, is the theoretical default
that every attempt to neutralize spontaneous selection processes
(entropy dissipation) will be subverted by predictable perverse
effects. It’s no more possible to suppress Social Darwinism than it is
to annul the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and social philosophies
which teach that this can be achieved are the strict equivalent of
plans for perpetual motion machines. That’s what Weiss is
explaining, as Outside in understands it. Subsumption into an
effective competitive environment is the only possible response that
could work to reverse dysgenic trends, and this will eventually occur,
whether human politics cooperates or not. Patchwork is the gentlest
way this could be realized, since it enables a multitude of societies to
182
decide on their own levels of entropy-accumulation tolerance. (That

is not, of course, to suggest that a Patchworked-world is gentle in any
sense we have grown accustomed to.)
August 2, 2014
Quote note (#168)

The level of apocalypticism to be found in scientific abstracts rarely
reaches the Dark Enlightenment threshold, but there are always
exceptions. Here’s Olav Albert Christophersen, on ‘Thematic
Cluster: Focus on Autism Spectrum Disorder’, originally published in
Microbial Ecology in Health & Disease (2012). Indicatively, the paper
is subtitled ‘Should autism be considered a canary bird telling that
Homo sapiens may be on its way to extinction?’ The full abstract:
There has been a dramatic enhancement of the reported
incidence of autism in different parts of the world over the last 30
years. This can apparently not be explained only as a result of
improved diagnosis and reporting, but may also reflect a real change.
The causes of this change are unknown, but if we shall follow T.C.
Chamberlin’s principle of multiple working hypotheses, we need to
take into consideration the possibility that it partly may reflect an
enhancement of the average frequency of responsible alleles in large
populations. If this hypothesis is correct, it means that the average
183
Reignition
germline mutation rate must now be much higher in the populations

concerned, compared with the natural mutation rate in hominid
ancestors before the agricultural and industrial revolutions. This is
compatible with the high prevalence of impaired human semen
quality in several countries and also with what is known about high
levels of total exposure to several different unnatural chemical
mutagens, plus some natural ones at unnaturally high levels.
Moreover, dietary deficiency conditions that may lead to
enhancement of mutation rates are also very widespread, affecting
billions of people. However, the natur
natural
al mutation rrate
ate in hominids
has been found to be so high that there is apparently no toler tolerance
ance
for further enhancement of the germline mutation rrate ate before the
Eigen error threshold will be eexxceeded and our species will go eextinct
xtinct
because of mutational meltdown
meltdown. This threat, if real, should be
considered far more serious than any disease causing the death only
of individual patients. It should therefore be considered the first and
highest priority of the best biomedical scientists in the world, of
research-funding agencies and of all medical doctors to try to stop
the eexpress
xpress trtrain
ain carrying all humankind as passengers on board
before it arriv
arrives
es at the end station of our civilization
civilization. [XS emphasis]
(Mutational load is, of course, genomic entropy — and the kind of
‘Social Darwinian’ or eugenicist mechanisms that might dissipate it
are all, today, strictly unthinkable.)
(Via.)
184
June 13, 2015
Crime Think
It doesn’t get much clearer than this. Any policy decisions resulting in
a reduction of mean IQ within a society are implicit choices to raise
the level of criminality. If there’s wriggle room on the point, this blog
isn’t seeing it.
The clearest takeaway from this research is that low intelligence
is a strong and consistent correlate of criminal offending. For
example, the risk of acquiring a felony conviction by age 21 is nearly
four times (3.6) higher among those in the three lowest categories
(1–3) of total intelligence as compared to those scoring in the top
three categories (7–9). We observed differences of similar
magnitude across each indicator of criminal offending and
regardless of the measure of intelligence.
(Via.)
June 25, 2015
No-Br
No-Brainer
ainer
“Getting rid of your brain sounds like a bad idea.”
185
Reignition
It says a lot about the cosmos that evolution seems to disagree.

The oldest known fossil with a complex brain is about 520 million
years old. This was a time when life became much more abundant
and diverse, often referred to as the Cambrian explosion. […]
Discovered in China, the animal looked like a woodlouse with claws.
It seems to have had an elaborate brain-like structure consisting of a
fore-, mid- and hind-brain, all of which had specialised neural circuits.
[…] This suggests that complex brains were in place as early as 520
million years ago. But they may not have stayed.
(Via.)
October 29, 2015
Who needs an argument?

The kind of things 19th century English geniuses believed will set
your teeth chattering:
Galton feared that the English race was degenerating, declining
in both mental and physical ability. (It remains a common fear; the
French thought they were degenerating, too.) Like others of his day,
Galton used the term ‘race’ loosely. He referred alternately to the
English race, the white race, the human race. But overall, English
eugenics was less about race than class. To Galton’s mind, the filthy
working poor were breeding like rabbits while the gentry were
186
chastely dwindling. He became convinced that unless something

were done, the flower of English manhood – not excluding specimens
such as his cousin and, ahem, himself – would soon vanish, swamped
by a massive tide of Oliver Twists and Tiny Tims.
Thank goodness that preposterous conviction has been
rigorously debunked.
November 18, 2015
Going Down
Yes, the United States is undergoing a triple-pronged dysgenic
process.
The only serious questions are about speed.
May 9, 2017
187
Reignition
CHAPTER THREE - EUGENICS AND

SPECIA
SPECIATION
TION
Quote notes (#71)

F. Roger Devlin reviews Gregory Clark’s latest book The Son Also
Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility at American
Renaissance:
China, which saw enormous social upheaval in the 20th century,
provides yet another perspective. Under Mao, much of the country’s
elite was killed or exiled. The rest were subject to discrimination and
excluded from the Communist Party. During the Cultural Revolution,
Mao tried to turn the social scale upside down by shipping prominent
people to the countryside to work in rice paddies. If political
intervention can create higher social mobility, it would have done so
in China.
Yet once discrimination against “class enemies” was abolished
shortly after Mao’s death, those with surnames characteristic of the
pre-communist elite quickly began to rise again. Today, they are
greatly over-represented even in the Communist Party. Those
188
descended from the “workers and peasants” favored under Mao

have quickly seen their status erode. Recent social mobility in China
has been no greater than it was under the Emperors.
Anyone who doesn’t find their presuppositions shaken by Clark’s
work is probably not paying attention. If those out here in the NRx
think it conforms neatly to their expectations that heredity is
strongly determining of social outcomes — are they comfortable
proceeding to evidence-based acknowledgement that socio-
economic regime-type seems entirely irrelevant to the (uniformly
low) level of social mobility? Clark himself draws the curve-ball
conclusion: so why not be a social democrat? It’s not as if rational
incentives make any difference anyway.
(I’ll be looking for the opportunity to dig into this stuff at least a
little, as soon as I catch a moment.)
April 7, 2014
Chinese Eugenics
A Shanghaiist interview with Leta Hong Fincher wanders into
inspiring delicate territory:
… in 2007, China’s State Council came out with a very important
population decision. They announced that China had a severe
problem with the so-called “low quality” of the population, that it’s
189
Reignition
going to cause problems for China in the future, in the global

marketplace, that it’s going to affect China’s ability to compete with
other nations, because the quality of the population is too low. So
they made it an urgent priority to “upgrade population quality” (tigao
tigao
renk
renkou
ou suzhi
suzhi). And then they designated certain agencies to be the
primary implementers of the goal of upgrading population quality.
One of the agencies they named was the Women’s Federation. And
they also named the Public Security Bureau. Shortly after that
population decision, the state media suddenly came out with all
these Leftover Women media reports, news reports cartoons,
commentaries, columns, and it was just ubiquitous.
And then, the Women’s Federation defined the term and the
Ministry of Education adopted the term shengnü [or ‘leftover
woman’] as part of its official lexicon. And it’s just amazing when
you look at these reports and cartoons just how little they vary.
Fundamentally it’s the same message, kind of reworded. It’s the same
theme over and over again, year after year.
The basic message is targeting urban, educated, successful,
professional women. And it shows these women as being too picky.
They’re too focused on their careers. They’re overly ambitious. If
they simply lowered their sights, and made more compromises, then
they would easily find a man to marry. So it’s the woman’s fault that
they are not getting married, that their standards are too high. And
then there are a wide variety of insults hurled at these women: that
190
they don’t like sex, that they’re afraid of commitment.

And I noticed that they are evolving. The propaganda machine is
evolving now to include single, divorced mothers. Just a few months
ago, I noticed Xinhua News came out with something talking about
how single, divorced mothers also have an obligation to go out and
get married again and that they shouldn’t use their children as an
excuse not to get married. They also have a new category of so-called
leftover women which is single female homeowners. They say that
single women lull themselves into a false sense of security by buying
a home of their own. In fact this is going to make it even more difficult
for them to find a husband.
All of this is really tightening its hold on this group of urban,
educated, professional women. And why are they focusing on these
women? It’s because these women have, in the view of the
government, higher quality. The government has a tradition of
eugenics. These educated urban women are seen as having higher
quality, but these are the very women who are choosing to delay
marriage because they want to pursue their educations, because
they want to pursue their careers. It’s a very natural thing to do
and that’s what women around China are doing. In South Korea,
Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, and even Hong Kong, women are delaying
their age of first marriage and some of them are even rejecting
marriage altogether.
And so the Chinese government feels this urgency, I believe, that
191
Reignition
they need to stop this trend. They have to get these educated women
to get married and have a child because they see this as the basic
function of a woman. Her duty to the nation is to have a child. But
they are focusing on educated women. They’re not encouraging the
illiterate rural woman to have children, because those women are
considered to be of “low quality”.
This elementary common sense is supposed to be appalling
beyond comprehension, of course.
ADDED: Bernard Harcourt on Michel Foucault on Gary Becker —
Now, Foucault refers to this … specific danger around page 228 of
the English translation of his lectures when he talks about eugenics,
the problem of eugenics. And he says, “as soon as a society poses
itself the problem of the improvement of its human capital in
general,” that is, once we have a theory of human capital, and once
we view the important issue as being improvement of human capital,
that “it is inevitable that the problem of control, screening, and
improvement of the human capital of individuals … [is] called for.”
May 6, 2014
Reality Bo
Boxxes
Acknowledgement of a conservation law is typically a reliable
indication of realistic analysis. There’s a notable example here
192
(embedded in an important article):

In the past, individuals could suffer death or disability due to small
genetic defects, for example in their immune systems, for which
modern medicine now routinely substitutes and which welfare
cushions. But even modern medicine and welfare have their limits.
W.D. Hamilton stated that when the misery resulting from mutations
grows too great to bear — for medical, economic or humanitarian
reasons — the load will be reduced
reduced, either naturally or artificially —
painfully through elevated rates of mortality, or painlessly through
eugenics.
[My emphasis]
The slogan It’s going to happen one way or the other is engraved
upon the gateway to the Temple of Gnon.
May 13, 2015
Ideological Speciation
It’s happening.
If this sort of assortative mating continues, Civil War II is all

but guaranteed. http://t.co/BsmwZgOSwb
— heartiste (@heartiste) July 22, 2014
193
Reignition
(Bring it on.)
July 22, 2014
Hyper-Racism
While this blog generally seeks to spread dismay whenever the
opportunity arises, it cannot pretend to a huge obsession with what
might be described as ordinary racism. When perusing the thought-
crimes of the mainstream racist community, it is continually afflicted
by a sense of overwhelming unreality. This is not (of course), because
races do not exist, or do not differ significantly, or … whatever. The
most politically incorrect cognitive position on almost every point of
this kind is reliably closer to reality than its more socially-convenient
and comforting alternatives.
The problem with ordinary racism is its utter incomprehension of
the near future. Not only will capabilities for genomic manipulation
dissolve biological identity into techno-commercial processes of yet-
incomprehensible radicality, but also … other things.
First, a sketch of the existing racism-antiracism contention in its
commonplace or dominant form. The antiracist, or universal
humanist position — when extracted from its most idiotic social-
constructivist and hypocritical alt-racist expressions — amounts to a
program for global genetic pooling. Cultural barriers to the Utopian
194
vision of a unitary ‘human’ gene pool, stirred with increasing ardor

into homogeneous intermixture, are deplored as atavistic
obstructions to the realization of a true, common humanity. Races
will not exist once they are reduced, by practical politics and libidinal
indiscriminacy, into relics of contingent historical partition. In
contrast, racial identitarianism envisages a conservation of
(comparative) genetic isolation, generally determined by boundaries
corresponding to conspicuous phenotypic variation. It is race realist,
in that it admits to seeing what everyone does in fact see — which is
to say consistent patterns of striking, correlated, multi-dimensional
variety between human populations (or sub-species). Its unrealism
lies in its projections.
Gregory Cochran suggests that space colonization will inevitably
function as a highly-selective genetic filter, unless extreme political
intervention is taken to prevent this:
One generally assumes that space colonists, assuming that there
ever are any, will be picked individuals, somewhat like existing
astronauts – the best out of hordes of applicants. They’ll be smarter
than average, healthier than average, saner than average – and not
by just a little. […] Since all these traits are significantly heritable,
some highly so, we have to expect that their descendants will be
different – different above the neck. They’d likely be, on average,
smarter than any existing ethnic group. If a Lunar colony really took
off, early colonists might account for a disproportionate fraction of
195
Reignition
the population (just as Puritans do in the US), and the Loonies might
continue to have inordinate amounts of the right stuff indefinitely.
As a scientific sort, Cochran is exploring this scenario as a
potential source of compelling hereditarian evidence (anticipated
through thought experiment). What, however, of the prospect itself,
as the illustration of a mechanism that lends itself to theoretical
generalization? One might discuss it in terms of ordinary racism, as
a zone of disparate impact (which it would almost certainly be). Yet
this is only to scratch at it, hazily and superficially.
The most prominent model of such a filter is found in the theory
of assortative mating. Strictly speaking, the racial-preservationist
culture advocated by ordinary racism is an example of assortative
mating, with a criterion of genetic proximity filtering potential
matches. This is not why the idea has such currency. It is assortative
mating on the basis of SES that has lifted it to prominence, both
because it seems unquestionably to be happening, and because the
implications of its happening are extreme. (Crucially, SES is a strong
proxy for IQ.)
Assortative mating tends to genetic diversification. This is neither
the preserved diversity of ordinary racism, still less the idealized
genetic pooling of the anti-racists, but a class-structured mechanism
for population diremption, on a vector towards neo-speciation. It
implies the disintegration of the human species, along largely
unprecedented lines, with intrinsic hierarchical consequence. The
196
genetically self-filtering elite is not merely different — and becoming

ever more different — it is explicitly superior according to the
established criteria that allocate social status. Analogical fusion with
Cochran’s space colonists is scarcely avoidable. If SES-based
assortative mating is taking place, humanity (and not only society)
is coming apart, on an axis whose inferior pole is refuse. This is not
anything that ordinary racism is remotely able to process. That it is
a consummate nightmare for anti-racism goes without question, but
it is also trans-racial, infra-racial, and hyper-racial in ways that leave
‘race politics’ as a gibbering ruin in its wake.
Neo-eugenic genomic manipulation capabilities, which will also
be unevenly distributed by SES, will certainly intensify the trend to
speciation, rather than ameliorating it. On the sweetness-and-light
side, racists and anti-racists can be expected to eventually bond in
a defensive fraternity, when they recognize that traditionally-
differentiated human populations are being torn asunder on an axis
of variation that dwarfs all of their established concerns.
ADDED: Assortative Mating, Class, and Caste
September 29, 2014
197
Reignition
CHAPTER FOUR - STEREO

STEREOTYPES
TYPES
Stereotypes
The Less-Evil Twin hasn’t been on its best behavior recently.
Discussing the prospects for Accelerationism (following this
negative prognosis), it quite innocently suggested:
@turingcop (A new pulse of darkside electronic music

innovation would help.)
— Urban Future (2.1) (@UF_blog) May 27, 2014
… and it was already over the line.
@UF_blog @turingcop why isn't there any coming out of

neochina?
— Urbanomic (@urbanomicdotcom) May 27, 2014
@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop Actually, my guiding theory

there is hardcore racist, so I bet save it for the darkside space.
198
[‘bet’ should be ‘best’ (not ‘better’)]

That’s where things paused for a while.
@UF_blog @turingcop hoping for some devastating sonic

counterattack to Al Qadiri's neoexoticist chinoiseries
(You’ve heard of her, right? It’s a superbly intelligent play off the
Shanzhai idea.)
@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop The sound of Cyber-

apocalypse is going to come out of the Black Atlantic. That's
just the way it is.
@UF_blog @turingcop footwork needs to turn up the dread, I

guess
@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop Kind of like the Al Qadiri

stuff, it's clever, but it doesn't claw its way into the brainstem
and start ripping.
@UF_blog @turingcop refuse to believe nothing happening in
199
Reignition
China (esp 'because race', o plz) Someone will be workin on

sonic weirdness…
@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop Because the notion of

overwhelming racial patterns in compulsive rhythmo-
memetics is so obviously implausible ..
@UF_blog @turingcop "natural rhythm"? Omg omg omg

@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop … oh come on, you know it's

true. Why the hell shouldn't there be a genetic basis for this
stuff?
@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop … I'll stop talking about it if

you're about to faint on me or something.
@UF_blog @turingcop i think mostly the biological sciences

have abandoned the "why shouldn't there be" approach
200
@UF_blog @turingcop lol its a good job we both know ur too

smart to actually think this shit
@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop I'm having trouble believing

you sincerely don't see the obvious reality of it. Any reason
particularly?
@UF_blog @turingcop i'm reading the stuff, its not convincing

me
@UF_blog @turingcop concept of race thoroughly

discredited?
@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop Oh sure, there's no such

thing as Chinese people. It's a bizarre idea cooked up by
Hitler.
@UF_blog @turingcop wow, so reasoning! Much argument.

201
Reignition
@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop There are no people on

earth I'd want to live among more than the Chinese, but the
idea that they're going …
@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop … to transport the world to

the sonic dark side any moment now is some kind of bizarre
ideological fantasy.
@UF_blog @turingcop not an ideological fantasy just

assumption based on sheer weight of numbers and
electronics
@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop Is "omg omg omg" supposed

to be some kind of exhibition of natural rhythm?
@UF_blog @turingcop its a song from bongo bongo land

@UF_blog @turingcop snark aside, dont u think, in view of

massive prodtvty of hyperdub continuum,that adding
chinese terminal can only +++ ?
202
@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop Comparative advantage.

People should do what they're good at.
@UF_blog @turingcop does that mean we gots to keep on

slavin' massah?
@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop … still, among 1.3 billion

people, there should be some freaky statistical outliers.
Finding them though …
@UF_blog @turingcop i am going to make it one of my

missions now. Gotta go feeding porridge to my caucasian
scion.
@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop You're killing me here.

@UF_blog @turingcop are you going to faint? It's ok I'll stop

203
Reignition
@UF_blog @turingcop dammit why does this baby refuse to

eat anything but fish and chips
@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop Actually, the reason to stop

is to avoid the slightest risk of getting you into trouble.
@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop … I've got the PLA watching

my back — you're stuck out there in insanityville all on your
lonesome.
@UF_blog @turingcop so tuff

@UF_blog @turingcop http://t.co/vv9pbAMCNv

@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop Exactly "minimalist, ghostly

electronic music" — might as well be wearing his DNA on his
T-shirt.
@UF_blog @turingcop hmm. unfortunately, it's not
204
particularly good. the search continues

@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop Science!

@UF_blog @turingcop pwned by dna

@UF_blog @turingcop http://t.co/97HNVVNpz8 lol

@UF_blog @turingcop more "Electronica from Sichuan

province, the band lists Pet Shop Boys among influences +
has early 80s Euro sound." ?
@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop Keep on busting those

stereotypes.
@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop You should stop, really,

before the bad thoughts come.
@UF_blog @turingcop the condescension library is the least
205
Reignition
appealing aspect of your new personality implant

@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop I'm just trying to keep you

out of the ducking stool.
@UF_blog @turingcop tell it to 师涛

@UF_blog @turingcop I realise that from over there Cornwall

must seem futuristic and exotic but rly it's not that dangerous
these days
@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop Is the investigation

continuing, or has it drawn a blank for now?
@UF_blog @turingcop you're seriously treating this as an

experimentum crucis for biological determinism now, right?
@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop No, I'm far to deep into

evidence saturation for that.
206
[‘to’ should be ‘too’, of course]
@UF_blog @turingcop a rabbit hole. int.style generic noisism

is big: http://t.co/MeqEG1Pel0 Alice Hui worth a listen for
freaky voice evac
@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop A lot of that stuff is pretty

interesting — but you wouldn't want to try and get people
dancing to it.
@UF_blog @turingcop if anyone knows it must be @kodenine

@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop @kodenine We already

know what came out of his research expeditions.
@UF_blog @urbanomicdotcom @turingcop coming soon

— 9 (@kodenine) May 28, 2014
@UF_blog @turingcop @kodenine def soundcloud shows 10x

more imaginary shanghai sonic fictions than stuff actually
207
Reignition
coming out of there

@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop @kodenine [Digs into the

condescension library] Why could that possibly be?
@kodenine @UF_blog @turingcop search on 'chinese

footwork' mainly tabletennis tutorials #QED
@UF_blog @urbanomicdotcom > http://t.co/Yvw4ORQkCA

> https://t.co/kHvBRgRxSA
— Promiis mesh (@MXEXSXH) May 28, 2014
(I’ve no idea what secret treasures await extraction from that final
tweet yet.)
May 28, 2014
Stereotypes II
Meta-stereotypes are not to be trusted. This is two years old, but
recently tweet-linked by Justine Tunney, and well-worth recalling.
The meat and potatoes:
208
… stereotypes are not inaccurate. There are many different ways

to test for the accuracy of stereotypes, because there are many
different types or aspects of accuracy. However, one type is quite
simple — the correspondence of stereotype beliefs with criteria. If I
believe 60% of adult women are over 5′ 4″ tall, and 56% voted for the
Democrat in the last Presidential election, and that 35% of all adult
women have college degrees, how well do my beliefs correspond
to the actual probabilities? One can do this sort of thing for many
different types of groups.
And lots of scientists have. And you know what they found? That
stereotype accuracy — the correspondence of stereotype beliefs
with criteria — is one of the largest relationships in all of social
psychology. The correlations of stereotypes with criteria range from
.4 to over .9, and average almost .8 for cultural stereotypes (the
correlation of beliefs that are widely shared with criteria) and.5 for
personal stereotypes (the correlation of one individual’s stereotypes
with criteria, averaged over lots of individuals). The average effect in
social psychology is about .20. Stereotypes are more valid than most
social psychological hypotheses.
It’s not as if this is new, or in general outline even two years old.
It’s roughly as old as human culture, in fact. Generalization is what
pragmatic intelligence is for (which means it’s what intelligence in
general has been kept around for). Regardless of where we find
ourselves culturally right now, this is a point of common sense that
209
Reignition
simply can’t be forgotten forever.
August 27, 2014
Stereotypes III
There’s an exchange in Sam Raimi’s movie Oz the Great and
Powerful, where the fake wizard, speculating on the incentives for
success, says to his monkey(ish) companion and servant Finley:
“We’re going to find this wicked witch. Steal her wand. I’ll get that
big pile of gold. And you can have a nice pile of bananas, alright?”
“Bananas. Oh, I see, because I’m a monkey? I must love bananas,
right? — That is a vicious stereotype.”
“You don’t like bananas?”
“Of course I love bananas. I’m a monkey. Don’t be ridiculous. I just
don’t like you saying it …”
(I seem to remember Sailer citing a similar joke at some point —
probably from a more reputable source.)
September 28, 2015
Stereotypes IV
Folk Wisdom is a thing:
210
Google searches about cats are negatively correlated with

birth rate, across U.S. states https://t.co/p06AJsv5v7 !
pic.twitter.com/HgUmaNTV53
— Neuroskeptic (@Neuro_Skeptic) February 26, 2016
February 29, 2016
211
Reignition
CHAPTER FIVE - RA
RACES
CES
Racism for Beginners

Taken on average:
Caucasians should be ashamed of their sanctimonious moral
hysteria;
(Ashkenazi) Jews should be ashamed of their susceptibility to insane
ideologies;
East Asians should be ashamed of their thoughtless timid
conformism;
South Asians should be ashamed of their Tamas;
Hispanics should be ashamed of their mindless populism;
Arabs should be ashamed of their inbreeding and Islam;
and Africans should be ashamed of their incompetent barbarism.
As for casual racism, there’s far too much shame about that
already.
(I hope that’s sanctimonious enough for everyone)
ADDED: “Whole books could be filled with the unequal behavior
or performances of people, or the unequal geographic settings in
which whole races, nations, and civilizations have developed. Yet the
212
preconceptions of the political Left march on undaunted, loudly

proclaiming sinister reasons why outcomes are not equal within
nations or between nations.”
July 4, 2013
Fiv
Fivee Stages of HBD
Stage-1 (Denial): “What is this naziish-sounding “HBD” of which you
speak? Actually, I’d rather you didn’t answer that.”
Stage-2 (Anger): “RAAAAAAACISSSST!!!”
Stage-3 (Bargaining): “… but even if HBD is real, it doesn’t mean
anything, does it? You know, comparative advantage, or
postmodernism … (or something).”
Stage-4 (Depression): “Who could possibly have imagined that
reality was so evil?”
Stage-5 (Acceptance): “Blank slate liberalism really has been a
mountain of dishonest garbage, hasn’t it? Guess it’s time for it to die
…”
[Thanks to Thales for the prompt]
October 21, 2013
213
Reignition
Quote notes (#46)

Commenter ‘augurae’ at the TC Colloseum:
I believe these people are stupidest and most dangerous people
on the planet. But it would be lying if I said I didn’t share some of their
ideas: for exemple, I think that if prior to, or after the second world
war, we killed all the reactionaries and other fascists-friendly people,
we would’ve prevented the situation we are in today and be way
further in term of technology, medicine, economy, social and global
peace…
People who prone social darwinism are the people who don’t
invent or change shit, except for the worse, and I mean the worse
periods in humanity’s History like the Middle Age or WWII.
Moreover they are dangerous, racist, retrograde people who should
be killed.
Liberal humanists — you have to love them.
There’s a comment from me pending at TC, and I’ve lost patience,
so here it is (one word edited):
There’s absolutely no reason to think that the “HBD OMG!
Auschwitz!” crowd here is receptive to logical argument, but what
the hell — It goes like this:
Under the present Progressive dispensation, wherever group
differences are detected in social outcomes, the dominant
presupposition is that a grave social injustice has been identified.
214
Not many women, blacks, or hispanics to be found as programmers

in Silicon Valley companies? — obvious evil at work. The solution:
new bureaucratic arrangements, indoctrination sessions, intensified
ideological reconstruction of the education system, anti-rightist
campaigns (the beatings will continue until ‘fairness’ arrives). Protest
any of this, and full-spectrum social destruction will be orchestrated.
HBD and its associated ideas propose — on the basis of abundant
empirical evidence and theoretical understanding — that the
existence of deeply ingrained group differences, both biological and
cultural, actually predict disparate social outcomes. Men and
women, on average, are attracted to different professions, in keeping
with their natural competences. The same applies to ethnic and racial
groups. It makes no more sense to see a vicious racist conspiracy in
the domination of sprinting by people of African ancestry than to see
the same in the preponderance of Jews, East Asians, and Caucasians
among mathematics professors. If this seems implausible to you, feel
free to argue about it — there are rigorous research programs
dedicated to researching examining such realities (even under
contemporary Lysenkoist conditions).
The first-order consequence of HBD, therefore, is not to start
organizing the cattle trucks to death camps, but in fact to — relax.
People are different. They thrive at different things. No government
is capable of comprehending optimal outcomes in detail (or even
broad outline). Society’s spontaneous sorting mechanisms do a
215
Reignition
pretty good job at dealing with the situation, when left alone to do so,
and certainly no superior arrangement presents itself. Best of all, you
don’t even need to pull your jackboots on to let things work. So chill
(except that’s increasingly illegal).
ADDED: A link worth noting.
ADDED: Panic! (Some smart comments to the initial froth-post.)
November 25, 2013
216
Bell-Curv
Bell-Curvee of the Apes
Another outrageous study completely overlooks the problem of

stereotype threat.
Hopkins et al conclude (un-shockingly):
Finally, from an evolutionary standpoint, the results reported
here suggest that genetic factors play a significant role in
determining individual variation in cognitive abilities, particularly for
spatial cognition and communication skills. Presumably, these
217
Reignition
attributes would have conferred advantages to some individuals,

perhaps in terms of enhanced foraging skills or increased social skills,
leading to increased opportunities for access to food or mating …
These individuals would have then potentially had increased survival
and fitness, traits that would have become increasingly selected
upon during primate evolution, as has been postulated by a number
of theorists, going all the way back to Darwin …
(Thanks to Greg for the link.)
July 10, 2014
The Prussian
If you’d asked me what I think about The Prussian yesterday, I’d
probably have assumed you were talking about Frederick the Great.
Today I’m seeing his stuff mentioned all over the place (at least, by
Bryce on Twitter, and Scott Alexander at his place). The two pieces
being especially recommended share a tack (interesting) and a tone
(impressive). The Outside in response to both is unsettled, but
already uneven. At the very least, they initiate a conversation in a
way that is unexpected and worthy of respect.
The highlight for me was this (to repeat the second link):
… when differences in African and Caucasian distributions of the
ASPM gene that is involved in brain development, racialists jumped
218
to argue that this was the long looked for basis for white cognitive
supremacy (Derbyshire’s line). Unfortunately for them, it turned out
that the variation does not affect IQ, but does affect the ability to
hear tones, and is associated with a lack of tonal languages.
To be honest, this is a lot more interesting than any IQ mumbo-
jumbo; that Indo-European languages (‘Aryan’ languages to use the
term correctly, and not in the disgraceful way it was used) are non-
tonal is one of the big puzzles, and may be a reason why civilization
got started in these regions. This is a variant of Joseph Needham’s
hypothesis of why China ‘got stuck’ at a certain level of technology.
Needham argued that the Chinese failed to make the break to the
conceptual level of science that the ancient Greeks did, and part
of this is to do with the concrete-level of Chinese vocabulary. By
contrast, the reduced sound range and hence, reduced word range
available to Indo-European languages may have played a crucial role
in making that initial great breakthrough.
Has the case just been made for a clearly identifiable genetic
predisposition to digitization? It sounds that way to me.
ADDED: Theden gets serious on the genetics of tonal language.
ADDED: A critique of the Anti-Racialist Q&A at The Right Stuff.
April 19, 2014
219
Reignition
Escalation
Steve Sailer doesn’t ask whether there are any two human races
further apart than wolves and coyotes, because he’s a nice guy.
August 16, 2014
Demogr
Demograph
aphyy is Destin
Destinyy
For a blast of sudden, icy clarity, this is worth recalling:
After decades of American Ed theorists and politicians grumbling
about our low ranking on international tests, we now know that, as
Steve Sailer summarized in 2010, reviewing the PISA (Program for
International Student Assessment) results from the previous year:
* Asian Americans outscored every Asian country, and lost out only
to the city of Shanghai, China’s financial capital.
* White Americans students outperformed the national average in
every one of the 37 historically white countries tested, except
Finland (which is, perhaps not coincidentally, an immigration
restrictionist nation where whites make up about 99 percent of the
population).
* Hispanic Americans beat all eight Latin American countries.
* African Americans would likely have outscored any sub-Saharan
country, if any had bothered to compete. The closest thing to a black
220
country out of PISA’s 65 participants is the fairly prosperous oil-

refining Caribbean country of Trinidad and Tobago, which is roughly
evenly divided between blacks and South Asians. African Americans
outscored Trinidadians by 25 points.
Racially disaggregate a conundrum that has tortured progressive
education reformers for over a century, and it entirely disappears.
Non-discrimination is mental and cultural chaos.
April 16, 2015
Quote note (#348)

Retrieved from four years ago (by XS’s favorite HBD-blogger), and
still perfect in its outrageous realism:
Daniel Freedman was a professor of anthropology at the
University of Chicago. For his doctoral thesis, he did adoption studies
with dogs. He had noticed that different dog breeds had different
personalities, and thought it would be interesting to see if
personality was inborn, or if it was somehow caused by the way in
which the mother raised her puppies. Totally inborn. Little beagles
were irrepressibly friendly. Shetland sheepdogs were most sensitive
to a loud voice or the slightest punishment. Wire-haired terriers
were so tough and aggressive that Dan had to wear gloves when
playing with puppies that were only three weeks old. Basenjis were
221
Reignition
aloof and independent.

He decided to try the same thing with human infants of different
breeds. Excuse me, different races. …
You’ll never guess what happens next (although, actually, the
readers here are almost certain to).
The dog-breed analogy is used quite often, but probably still not
enough. It’s pitched at the correct cladistic level, obviously. In
addition, since ‘labrador supremacism’ sounds immediately
ridiculous it should contribute to chipping a little stupidity from the
race discussion.
April 4, 2017
White to Red
Guilt is basically a North-West European thing, argues Peter Frost.
That would certainly explain the conspicuous abnormality of white
ethnomasochism, which has a claim to be the social fact of greatest
significance in the world today. There’s a certain type of fanatically
universalist moral argument that — even when encountered
anonymously on the Internet — indicates (absolutely reliably) that
one is dealing with a self-hating pale-face. When someone tells you
that some incontestable principle requires self-sacrifice without
reservation to the wretched global Other, the obvious melanin
222
deficiency almost sucks holes in the screen. None of this is seriously

controversial (although more hard data would, of course, be nice).
Take one additional step, and hypothesize that the Cathedral
latches onto white guilt as its sole natural territory. Much then
follows. Clearly, whatever ‘globalization’ the Cathedral will ever
achieve cannot be analogous to its domestic dominion. It is a plug
that only fits the white guilt socket, so that every attempt to
propagate it more widely encounters complexities. To a degree, this
is initially masked by the fact that a racial revenge narrative sells
well, even when its original moral axioms are entirely non-
communicative. ‘Post-colonialism’ would therefore be expected to
mark the limit of Cathedralist global contagion — a limit that has
already been in large measure reached (or even exceeded). Nobody
other than whites wants white guilt for themselves. Non-whites will,
however, often be delighted that whites have white guilt, especially
when this has metastasized to its self-abolitional phase, and this
second reaction — under the specific conditions of ‘post-colonial /
anti-racist discourse’ — is easily confused with the first.
If the progressivism-guilt plug-socket arrangement doesn’t travel
racially, than Cathedralist globalization has to fall back upon far
cruder mechanisms of power — of the “Red Foreign Policy” type. The
experience of the last decade suggests that, in doing so, it is no longer
remotely playing to its own strengths. Democratic evangelism, at
home and abroad, are two very different things. Bloody international
223
Reignition
disorder is strongly predicted as the complement of its domestic

New Jerusalem.
Just one more effort citizens, and the white race will have
consummated its destiny as the cancer of human history.
December 8, 2013
White F
Fright
right
Racial fear is a complicated thing. It’s worth trying to break it down,
without blinking too much.
As one regresses through history, and into pre-history, the
pattern of encounters between large-scale human groups of
markedly distinct ancestry is modeled — with ever-greater fidelity —
upon a genocidal ideal. The ‘other’ needs to be killed, or at the very
least broken in its otherness. To butcher all males, beginning with
those of military age, and then assimilate the females as breeding
stock might suffice as a solution (Yahweh specifically warns the
ancient Hebrews against such half-hearted measures). Anything less
is sheer procrastination. When economic imperatives and high levels
of civilizational confidence start to overwhelm more primordial
considerations, it is possible for the suppression of other peoples to
take the humanized form of social obliteration combined with mass
enslavement, but such softness is a comparatively recent
224
phenomenon. For almost the entire period in which recognizably

‘human’ animals have existed on this planet, racial difference has
been thought sufficient motive for extermination, with limited
contact and inadequacy of socio-technical means serving as the only
significant brakes upon inter-racial violence. The sole deep-historical
alternative to racial oppression has been racial eradication, except
where geographical separation has postponed resolution. This is the
simple side of the ‘race problem’, but it too begins to get complicated
… (we’ll pick it up again after a detour).
For the moment, we need only note the archaic, subterranean
ocean of racial animosity that laps upon the sunless chasms of the
brain, directed by genomes sculpted by aeons of genocidal war. Call
it racial terror. It’s not our principal concern here.
Racial horror is something else, although it is no doubt intricately
inter-connected. Horror of the very phenomenon of race — of race as
such — is both a larger and a smaller topic. It is at once an expansive
affect that finds no comfort in biological identity, and a distinctively
ethno-specific syndrome. When positively elaborated, racial horror
explodes into a ‘Lovecraftian’ cosmic revulsion directed at the
situation of human intelligence by its natural inheritance. The
negative expression, far more common today (among those of a very
specific natural inheritance), takes the form of a blank denial that
any such reality as race even exists. We are fully entitled to describe
this latter development as racial white-out. Any Critical Whiteness
225
Reignition
Studies of even minimal seriousness would concentrate upon it

unrelentingly.
HBD, or human biological diversity, is evidently not reducible to
racial variation. It is at least equally concerned with human sexual
dimorphism, and is ultimately indistinguishable from an eventual
comparative human genomics. When considered as a provocation,
however, the translation of HBD into ‘race science’ or more pointedly
‘scientific racism’ drowns out every other dimension of meaning.
What is found appalling about HBD is the insistence that race exists.
It is a ‘trigger’ for racial horror. Social outrage, certainly, but beyond
that cosmic distress, tilting into a panic without limit. HBD subtracts
the promise of universal humanity, so it must — at any cost — be
stopped.
Because this is no more than a preliminary blog post, I will restrict
it to a single modest ambition: the refoundation of Critical
Whiteness Studies on a remorselessly Neoreactionary basis. White
people are odd. Some especially significant group of them, in
particular, have radically broken from the archaic pattern of human
racial identity, creating the modern world in consequence, and within
it their ethnic identity has become a dynamic paradox. Whiteness
is an uncontrolled historical reaction which nobody — least of all
anybody from among the complementary anti-racists of Critical
Whiteness Studies and White Nationalism — has begun to
understand. To begin to do so, one would have to comprehend why
226
the essay in which Mencius Moldbug most explicitly repudiates

White Nationalism is the same as the one in which he most
unambiguously endorses human racial diversity. It requires an
acknowledgement of difficulty, which — because it demolishes
irresistibly attractive but hopelessly facile solutions on both sides —
few are motivated to make.
The signature of indissoluble White difference is precisely racial
horror. HBD is uniquely horrible to White people
people. Until you get that,
you don’t get anything.
Play with this for a while, or for more than a while (it does a huge
amount of unwanted but indispensable work). To begin with:
(1) Critical Whiteness Studies, whatever its ethno-minoritarian
pretensions, is all about ‘acting white’. Insofar as it criticizes ‘white
privilege’ essentially, it does so by reproducing an ethnically singular
mode of universal reason which no other people make any sense of
whatsoever, except opportunistically, and parasitically. ‘Whiteness’
tends to become a religious principle, exactly insofar as it lacks the
recognizable characteristics of racial group dominance (“race does
not exist”) and sublimes into a mode of cultural reproduction which
only one ethnicity, ever, has manifested. To quote Alison Bailey —
tilting over into the raw psychosis of systematic ‘whiteness’ critique
(repeated link):
In its quest for certainty, Western philosophy continues to
generate what it imagines to be colorless and genderless accounts
227
Reignition
of knowledge, reality, morality, and human nature. Perhaps this is

because academic philosophy in the U.S. has been largely driven by
analytic methods and the legacy of Classic Greek and European
thinkers, or because philosophy departments are white social spaces
where the overwhelming majority of professional philosophers are
white men. In either case, it’s likely that most members of the
discipline have avoided racial topics because they believe that
philosophical thought transcends basic cultural, racial, ethnic, and
social differences, and that these differences are best addressed by
historians, cultural studies scholars, literary theorists, and social
scientists. The absence of color talk in philosophy is a marker of its
whiteness.
Supremacist white racism goes so deep it is absolutely
indistinguishable from a complete absence of racism — quod erat
demonstrandum.
(2) White Nationalism finds itself stymied at every turn by
universalism, pathological altruism, ethno-masochism — all that
yucky white stuff. If only you could do White Nationalism without
white people, it would sweep the planet. (Try not to understand this,
I know you don’t want to.) Heartiste is picking up on the pattern:
Where is this thought leading? The native stock of the West is
clearly suffering from a mental sickness caused by too much
outbreeding. Universalism is the religion of liberal whites, and they
cleave so strongly to this secular religion that they are happy, nay
228
overjoyed!, to throw the borders open and bequeath their hard-won

territory and culture to battalions of Third Worlders and other
temperamentally distant aliens, who of course given large enough
numbers will promptly, whether wittingly or consequentially,
execute its destruction.
(3) All White people need is an identitarian religion. Is that not
approximately the same as saying: a counter-factual history?
(4) Those wacky libertarians, with their universal schema for
human emancipation that’s so easily confused with a washing-
powder advertisement — it’s so dazzlingly white. Deny the whiteness
and self-destruct in bleeding-heart abasement and open-borders
insanity, or affirm it and head into post-libertarian racial perplexity.
Destiny is difficult — not least racial destiny. I don’t think many
people want to think about this, but I’m determined to be as
awkward about it as I can … (it’s probably a white thing).
ADDED: Notable race sanity from Neovictorian here and here.
March 29, 2014
Mitochondrial Ev
Evee
Without wanting to set off the usual suspects, this research into
Ashkenazi ancestry is fascinating. Based on MtDNA analysis, it is
evident that: “Overall, at least 80 percent of Ashkenazi maternal
229
Reignition
ancestry comes from women indigenous to Europe, and 8 percent

from the Near East, with the rest uncertain, the researchers
estimate.”
Jewish matrilineal cultural descent starts to look extraordinarily
odd. Also, a final goodbye to Koestler’s Khazar hypothesis.
(via)
October 9, 2013
On the JQ
Colin Liddell, amid an impressively cool-headed discussion of John
Engelman and racial neuralgia:
Jared Taylor is trying very, very hard to avoid the Jewish question.
Naturally I disagree with this, but I can understand why Taylor wishes
to do so, as the Jewish Question has become a kind of lightning rod
for a lot of angst and rage in our society that does not have the time,
sophistication, or emotional equilibrium to attain to a more complex
understanding of the challenges of modernity.
Whatever one’s opinion on the JQ, it is important as the marker
for a still intellectually under-developed schism, dividing the
meritocratic and tribalistic strains of HBD. This blog is
surreptitiously sympathetic to WN claims that it is being
systematically evaded on the Right out of evasive cowardice. The
230
main reason for this evasion is that anti-semitic WNs tend to be over-
excitable, inarticulate proles, whose commentary — to quote Liddell
— is characterized by “humourless, droning, brittle outrage” if not
outright splenetic abuse. (In fairness, I have to note that on the rare
occasions when extreme anti-semites have visited this blog, they
have been models of calm lucidity, however lop-sided in their
attention.)
The Outside in line on the JQ is well-represented by Moldbug and
Amy Chua. (They’re both smarts-over-loyalty selections of exactly
the kind to raise WN hackles, of course. This isn’t a bhumiputra blog.)
The slight familiarity I have with the work of Yuri Slezkine has also
left a very positive impression.
It’s worth taking the opportunity to link this recent post.
(Feel free to be evil, but be civil — or else.)
ADDED: Yuri Slezkine interviewed (video).
July 3, 2014
Guilt Projection
“This machine breeds fascists.”
Given Jesse Benn’s repulsive indulgence in self-criticism on other
people’s behalf, the riposte almost writes itself. It’s hard to see
anything in the push-back that seems uncalled for.
231
Reignition
Just to be clear: Speaking as a self-appointed representative for

people you feel free to disassociate from at will is as annoying as hell.
It’s hard for me to believe Benn is too stupid to see that, which leaves
the malignant devious evil option.
If the West sees another mass outbreak of antisemitism, a
plaintive “Why?” is going to look laughable. Benn’s ilk are why.
(You might want the other half of the proxy-masochism cognitive
dissonance machinery. This (entirely non-obnoxious piece) is also
well-worth a read.)
September 2, 2015
Tough Asia
Scott Sumner has a good post on the topic, using low government
spending and unemployment (a proxy for “get a job” social attitudes)
as indicators. East Asian countries — China, Hong Kong, Singapore,
South Korea, and Taiwan — do indeed cluster at the ‘hard’ end.
Europeans, predictably, are softies. The Anglosphere (or
“immigrant”) societies are intermediate.
My favorite part of the post, though, was this:
… the great Simon Leys once suggested that 5000 years of
Chinese history could be divided up into two types of periods.
A. Times when the status of the Chinese masses was little better than
232
slaves.
B. Periods of turmoil, when the Chinese masses yearned for period A.
March 26, 2015
Chinese T
Trumpkins
rumpkins
SoBL has passed on this fascinating piece on Trump-fervor in
Chinese elite opinion. It’s all good. Quasi-random snippet:
The past 30 years of China’s economic growth and social
development began after a period of chaos [i.e., the Cultural
Revolution], and there was no Enlightenment-like intellectual
movement. Government officials, in order to mobilize reform,
exaggerated the evils of the old benefit system as “everyone eating
from one big pot,” which, with the assistance of some scholars, led to
an almost complete social consensus that a market economy means
completely free competition. With no restraint from ethics or rules,
the “law of the jungle” that the weak are prey to the strong became
nearly universal in society. Amid all the worship of the strong and
disdain for the weak, an atmosphere of care and equal treatment
of disadvantaged groups has not formed. Therefore “political
correctness,” which is for the protection of vulnerable groups,
basically does not exist in Chinese society, and the language of
discrimination, objectification of women, and mockery of disabled
233
Reignition
people is everywhere. […] This way of thinking is further reinforced

among some Chinese elites: they succeed because they are better
able to adapt to and dominate this kind of environment. In this
process, they are hurt by others, they hurt others, and gradually they
develop a heart of stone and a feeling of superiority — that their
success is due to their own efforts and natural abilities, and the
losers in competition must be those who don’t work hard because
they are lazy or have some other problems. Therefore, they believe
in free competition and personal striving even more than ordinary
people, and also feel more strongly that poor people deserve their
low position, are more wary of the abuse of welfare by lazy people,
and are more supportive of Trump’s attacks on political correctness.
The result is a shockingly civilized civil society (in which women,
conspicuously, excel), but you wouldn’t get that from reading the
article. Highly recommended, nevertheless.
November 22, 2016
234
SECTION A - CLADISTICS
235
Reignition
CHAPTER ONE - RELIGIOUS CLADES
Cladistic Meditations
Neoreactionaries have a thing about Puritanism. Whether or not this
trait is conceptually essential is a question for another time. The
important point, right now, is that it serves as a cladistic marker.
Whatever it might be that neoreaction speciates into, it bears this
trait as an indication of cultural ancestry, bookmarking the root-code
archive of Mencius Moldbug.
When reconstructed as an argument, the Moldbuggian clade
proposes a species of ethnographic categorization on a loosely
Darwinian (and strongly evolutionary) model, according to which
cultural phenomena are logically nested, in tree-like fashion,
revealing a pattern of descent. When considering an English
Darwinian Evolutionist, who is also an example of contemporary
political progressivism, Moldbug makes this mode of analysis
explicit:
My belief is that Professor Dawkins is not just a Christian atheist.
He is a Protestant atheist
atheist. And he is not just a Protestant atheist. He
is a Calvinist atheist
atheist. And he is not just a Calvinist atheist. He is an
236
Anglo-Calvinist atheist
atheist. In other words, he can be also be described
as a Puritan atheist
atheist, a Dissenter atheist
atheist, a Nonconformist atheist
atheist, an
Evangelical atheist
atheist, etc, etc.
This cladistic taxonomy traces Professor Dawkins’ intellectual
ancestry back about 400 years, to the era of the English Civil War.
Except of course for the atheism theme, Professor Dawkins’ kernel
is a remarkable match for the Ranter, Leveller, Digger, Quaker, Fifth
Monarchist, or any of the more extreme English Dissenter traditions
that flourished during the Cromwellian interregnum.
If there were a Thirty-Nine Articles of neoreaction, some suitably
compressed version of this cladogram would constitute the primary
tenet of the creed. Among the logically most attenuated twigs of this
scheme, sub-speciated to the limit of cladistic definition, is found the
globally-dominant sovereign instance of advanced modernity — the
Cathedral (the enemy).
It is not surprising, therefore, that the ‘Puritan question’ remains
the core preoccupation of the neoreactionary Dark Enlightenment.
This has been illustrated with consummate clarity by an article
posted by J. M. Smith at The Orthosphere, contesting the Christian
genealogy of the Cathedral, and the subsequent rejoinder by
descendants of the neoreactionary clade — of varying religious
persuasions — Jim (here), Foseti (here), and Nick B. Ste Stevves (here,
here, and here). Foseti reacts with some bemusement to the
polemical framing of the Smith text, because what he encounters is
237
Reignition
an argument without disagreement:

At The Orthosphere, there’s a post purporting to argue that the
Cathedral was not constructed by Christians. Presumably the title
was changed by someone other than the author of the text of the
post, because the post ably demonstrates that Christians did in fact
build the Cathedral. Indeed, the post is recommended.
Cladistic method contributes significantly to an understanding of
these relationships. In particular, it is essential to grasp the logic of
taxonomic naming, which perfectly corresponds to pure genealogy,
and the ideal reconstruction of evolutionary relatedness. The crucial
point: A cladistic name refers to everything that is encompassed by a
splitting-off, speciation, or schism.
At the risk of superfluous explanation, it might be worth
rehearsing this logic with a colloquialized biological example (using
familiar rather than technical taxonomic descriptors).
Paleontologists are supremely confident that amphibians evolved
from bony fishes, and reptiles evolved from amphibians. This can
be reformulated, without loss of information, as a cladistic series
(of branchings), with bony fishes including amphibians,which in turn
include reptiles. In other words, as a cladistic name, a ‘bony fish’
describes an initial speciating split from an ancestral clade, which —
projected forwards — encompasses every subsequent speciation, in
this case amphibians, and reptiles. Both amphibians and reptiles are
bony fish. So are mammals, apes, and human beings. Bony fish, as
238
a clade, comprehends every descendant species that has bony fish

ancestry, whether extinct, still existent, or still to come. Nothing that
has bony fish ancestry, however distant, can ever cease to be a bony
fish (whatever else it becomes, in addition). Cladistically, it is obvious
that humans are bony fish, as well as far simpler and more primordial
things.
Smith writes:
… a Great Schism rent American Protestantism in the early
nineteenth century, with the sundering fissure tearing through
denominations, and even congregations. Protestants on one side of
the fissure called themselves “liberals,” those on the other side called
themselves “orthodox.” … Liberal Protestantism is a new, post-
Christian religion that in its early stages opportunistically spoke in a
Christian idiom, but nevertheless preached a new gospel.
We have seen, however, that from a cladistic point of view,
nothing arising as a schism from X ever becomes ‘post-X’. There is
no such thing as a post-bony-fish, a post-reptile, or a post-ape. Nor,
by strict logical analogy, can there ever be such things as post-
Abrahamic Monotheists, post-Christians, post-Catholics, post-
Protestants, post-Puritans, or post-Progressives. It is a logical
impossibility for ancestral clades to ever be evolutionarily
superseded. To have Christianity as a cultural ancestor is to remain
Christian forever. That is no more than terminological precision,
from the cladistic-neoreactionary perspective.
239
Reignition
Steves elucidates the same point in a closely-related vocabulary:

“… there are atheist Catholics. Why? Because being Catholic is
cultural. It is not only that, but it is also at least that.” Cultures are
genealogically or cladistically organized — that is the neoreacionary
presupposition. (Lateral complications are not entirely inconceivable
— link to a truly ghastly Wikipedia entry on an important thought:
the non-treelike network. That’s not for now.)
What, though, of neoreaction itself? What did it split from? Like
everything else under investigation here, unless it is comprehended
as a schism, it is not comprehended at all.
When cladistically approached, the primordial split is the
ineluctable question of identity, or persistent ancestry. We can,
perhaps, postpone it momentarily, but it will eventually lead us in
directions that are more than a little Lovecraftian.
What was the last thing that neoreaction was submerged within,
before arising, through schism? (That investigation has to await
another post.)
September 4, 2013
Religious Clades
Peter A. Taylor relayed this magnificent cladogram of world religions:
240
(Click on image to enlarge.)

If there’s such a thing as a comprehensive cultural map of the
world, it’s woven on to something very like this. No opportunity to
comment on it right now — but I’m confident it will spark some
responses.
April 29, 2014
Religions and Ideologies

Tobin Grant (of the Religious News Service) charts political ideology
by religious affiliation:
241
Reignition
242
The chart is reproduced in this article, which also includes a

complementary graphic (of religions and income distribution). I’m
assuming visitors here are too reality-jaded to need a ThinkProgress
trigger warning (after all, even communists can provide useful links).
(Click on image to expand)

At this stage, there’s no commentary from this blog on the
abundance of graphically-embedded information here (except to say
that the first diagram makes the Congregationalists look highly
attractive, which seems strange). It’s being posted as a contextual
resource for future discussion.
August 30, 2014
Goddamned
That’s roughly Gregory Hood’s title, for an article making the case
for a return to paganism. As his point of departure, Hood examines,
unflinchingly, the indications of an Occidental desire for
enslavement or destruction by Islam. “It’s a kind of ethical exhaustion
243
Reignition
— liberal Whites are weary of the moral responsibility of existence

and survival.” (The diagnosis seems hideously plausible to me.)
Islam is Nature’s solution. Like the Architect from The Matrix
Reloaded
Reloaded, it is Nature’s way of saying that “There are levels of
survival we are prepared to accept.” It is stultifying, depressing, and
tyrannical. It is an enemy of real culture, with the most militant
variations smashing the tombs and shrines not only of other religious
traditions, but of their own. Modern Wahhabism is funded by
Western decadence, enabled by Western weakness, in many ways
a product of Western postmodernism and self-hatred. […] And lest
what I say be misunderstood, it is obviously, laughably, and comically
false. It is sustained by the protective cordon it has created around
criticism. Yet believing that a pedophiliac illiterate transcribed the
literal word of God still makes more sense than believing all men are
created equal. Islam’s refusal to allow critical analysis of itself is a
sign of strength, not weakness.
Islam is the first term in Hood’s tetralemma. It’s the executioners
blade for a civilization that has lost all cosmic purchase upon
existence. A disgusting way to die, begged for by the broken, in the
end (which is already) — because at least it’s a way to die.
The remaining three terms entertained by Hood are the “god of
our grandfathers, the White Christ upon whose image the West was
built” which “is dying”, faithless liberalism (including modern
Christianity), and paganism. Among these options, he declares, “The
244
Old Gods are my own choice.”

Much of this analysis — down to its grimmest conclusions — is
highly compelling, even when abstracted from the flow of Hood’s
vigorous prose. The proposed remedy, however, is by far its weakest
component.
To make a choice among Gods, is that not the final expression
of liberalism, and therefore of degenerated Christianity? If we have
learnt anything from the manifold failures of multiculturalism, it is
that religious freedom is downstream of religion. ‘Freedom of
conscience’ lies at the furthest remove from a genuinely secular
conception, if any such thing is even possible. If it now seems
imaginable to shop for different gods, it is because of the way a
distinctive religious tradition has worked out. If political
considerations seem to occupy a position of meta-religious
authority, the descent has been deeper still. Choice is internal to
religion, even if the decayed image of religion serves to obscure this
fundamental fact. Contemporary Occidental paganism remains
dissident Christianity. There is no decision that could alter that.
As Hood himself states: The very fact that I frame this identity as
a “choice” is itself proof of decadence — a vibrant metaphysics simply
is and has nothing to do with a rational actor listing pros and cons.
Ironically, those who profess the Old Gods are weakened because
what they profess is so obviously new and a product of innovation
and modernity. Few would even call it a real faith that actually
245
Reignition
expresses literal belief in personalized divinities. […] The new pagan

cults that preach fanaticism and virility owe too much to reason and
deconstruction.
A God that is not the very principle of destiny is no God at all.
Are we, then, destined to rediscover the Old North European Gods?
The impossibility of answering such a question with confident
affirmation says everything necessary about it. The Old Gods
manifestly failed against the challenge of the new One. There is no
reason at all to suspect that this outcome has been rescinded by the
subsequent calamities befalling the new faith.
Religions are providential. They are units of fate. The claims they
make far exceed rational controversy or personal decision, in the
abyss of their decadence no less than at the apex of their flourishing.
If Christian Modernity is a process of escalating nihilism, as
Nietzsche conceived it to be, it is nevertheless a road without turn-
offs, that can only be followed to the end.
ADDED: Second long (italicized) quote has been grafted in, thanks
to Irving (in comments below), who pointed out its clearly
indispensable relevance to the topic. Just in case it is not already
obvious, the Hood essay is a superbly crafted masterpiece — its
quality only enhanced by its supple self-ironization. It deserves to
be a landmark reference whenever this question re-arises, as it will
continually do.
246
November 19, 2014
247
Reignition
CHAPTER TWO - ETHNO-CUL

ETHNO-CULTURAL
TURAL
CLADES
Ethno-Cladistics
The Ethno-cladistic thesis, sketchily reconstructed here from
Mencius Moldbug’s neoreactionary usage, proposes that relations
between cultur
cultural
al systems are captured bbyy cladogr
cladograms
ams to a highly
significant le
levvel of adequacy
adequacy. The limits to this thesis are set by
lateral complications — interchanges and modifications that do not
conform to a pattern of branching descent — and these are by no
means negligible. Nevertheless, actual cultural formations are
dominated by cladistic order. As a consequence, cultural theories
that assume taxonomic regularity as a norm are capable of reaching
potentially realistic approximations, and furthermore offer the only
prospect for the rigorous organization of ethnographic phenomena.
The most direct and central defense of the ethno-cladistic thesis
bypasses the comparatively high-level religious systems that provide
the material for Moldbug’s arguments, and turn instead to the
ethnographic root phenomenon: language. Languages simply are
248
cultures in their fundamentals, so that any approach applicable to

them will have demonstrated its general suitability for cultural
analysis.
I’d try to spin this out melodramatically, but I don’t think there’s
really any point:
Click on images for full-size (legible) display.
249
Reignition
It seems indisputable (to me) that lateral complications of these

basic cladistic schemes are marginal. Languages are naturally
grouped in branching, tree-like structures, which like those of
(metazoan) biological variety are simultaneously explanatory of
historical processes and morphological relatedness, because they
represent evolutionary processes of successive speciation. The
dominant organization is a taxonomic hierarchy, conforming to the
formal language of set theory. The real events captured by these
schemes are schisms, whose logical relation is that of genus to
species. In the case of culture, as with biology, the manifest
evolutionary development indicates the existence of some efficient
hereditary mechanism (whose unit of replicated information is
tagged by Moldbug, among innumerable others, as a ‘meme‘). On this
250
last point, it is worth noting that taxonomic biological classification,

and even genetics, preceded the biochemical discovery of DNA —
and was broadly confirmed, rather than disrupted, when this
discovery took place. (The meme is an analogy, but not a metaphor.)
Ethno-cladistics is the schematics of cultural heritage. Despite
the bulldozer assertiveness of this post, it is not designed to block
methodical efforts directed at the subversion of this model. As
indicated, such efforts will necessarily involve the elaboration of
lateral (or ‘rhizomatic’) diagrams — a project of great intrinsic
significance (and creative potential). Techno-commercial processes
are strongly associated with lateralizations of this kind.
Culture, however, is fundamentally heritage, and ethno-cladistics
is the theoretical response to this basic historical fact. This is already
Moldbug’s tacit claim, which should be uncontroversial among
reactionaries of any kind. At the core of the neoreactionary
endeavor is the cladogram.
September 6, 2013
Pictured P
Power
ower
Couldn’t resist sharing this:
251
Reignition
252
My main quibble is with the chromatics — a single color for the

Anglosphere would have been helpful. More generally, a
correspondence of color with language groups would have given a
more intuitive picture of history’s shape.
Also, China looks a little slender, no? (I wonder how ‘power’ is
being calculated?)
July 23, 2014
European V
Vedism
edism
Whilst dazzlingly ignorant about Julius Evola, I can at least partially
understand the attraction his work generates for the ultra-
traditionalist wing of the Outer Right. Thomas F. Bertonneau, whose
essays are always worth digesting carefully, produces a typically
masterful overview here.
Evola represents a significant thread of early 20th century
reactionary thinking, rooted in the discoveries of historical
linguistics, and the intellectual formation of an ‘Indo-European’
people corresponding to its deep cultural cladistics. The core
phenomenon that supports the mystical-reactionary interpretation
of history is the unambiguous process of crudification that afflicts
the Indo-European languages, evident through the line of
grammatical degeneration from Sanskrit, through Attic Greek, to
253
Reignition
Latin, and then into the vulgar — even structurally collapsed —

tongues of the modern European vernacular. Reactionary,
hierarchical, and racially-inflected ideas comparable to Evola’s are
easily identified in the writings of Martin Heidegger, among many
others. Historical linguistics appears to apprehend a large-scale
ethnic totality undergoing prolonged cultural deterioration at the
fundamental (grammatical) level. Once this is noted, progressivism
appears as pure irony — and as a comic confirmation of decline.
Outside in, comparatively comfortable with chewed-up techno-
commercial jargons and stripped-down communication protocols, is
only minimally attentive to this particular ‘problem of tradition’
(which it registers from a position of detachment). Insofar as
‘tradition’ is invoked, however, it seems to be a highly significant
reference — and its tendency to relapse the problem back to a
Sanskritic (Vedic) origin is surely worthy of disciplined commentary.
Kali Yuga makes a lot of sense.
November 2, 2013
Range Finders
A politically-incorrect short history of the Wild West. (Jim at his
rough realist best.)
254
March 10, 2014
Thedes
The formulation of this concept was a building-block moment for
NRx, but the trend in its usage has been dismally regressive.
Apparently devised as a tool for the analysis of social identities, it
is increasingly invoked as a rallying-cry for neo–tribalism. From the
perspective of Outside in, it will soon become entirely toxic unless it
is dramatically clarified.
Nydwracu initially employs the word ‘thede’ to designate the
substance of group identity, “a superindividual grouping that its
constituent individuals feel affiliation with and (therefore?) positive
estimates of.” Thedes are multiple, overlapping, sometimes
concentric, and honed by antagonistic in-group/out-group
determinations. They are seen as following from the understanding
that “Man is a social animal.” Ideological arguments disguise thede
conflicts. At this level of abstraction, there is little to find
objectionable.
In his essay on Natural Law, Jim writes:
Man is a rational animal, a social animal, a property owning
animal, and a maker of things. He is social in the way that wolves
and penguins are social, not social in the way that bees are social.
255
Reignition
The kind of society that is right for bees, a totalitarian society, is not
right for people. In the language of sociobiology, humans are social,
but not eusocial. Natural law follows from the nature of men, from
the kind of animal that we are. We have the right to life, liberty and
property, the right to defend ourselves against those who would rob,
enslave, or kill us, because of the kind of animal that we are.
Occupying a band of group integration between ants and tigers,
humans have intermediate sociality. Even the tightest mode of
human social organization is loose relative to an ant colony, and even
the loosest is tight relative to a solitary feline. In human societies,
neither collectivity nor individuality is ever absolute, and — even
though these ‘poles’ are commonly exaggerated for polemical
purposes — they realistically apply only to a range of group
integrations (which is both narrow and significantly differentiated).
To say that “man is a social animal” does not mean that collectivity is
the fundamental human truth, any more than the opposite. It means
that man is a creature of the middle (and the middle has a span).
Insofar as a thede corresponds to a unit of autonomous,
reproducible social organization, it is a far narrower concept than
the one Nydwracu outlines. A thede is an ethnicity if it describes a
real — rather than merely conventional — unit of human population.
This is, of course, to exclude a great variety of identity dimensions,
including sex, sexual orientation, age, interests, star signs … as well
as some of those Nydwracu mentions (musical subcultures and
256
philosophical schools). Generalization of ‘thedes’ to include all self-

conscious human groupings risks diffusion into frivolous
subjectivism (and subsequent re-appropriation for alternative
purposes).
If the analysis of thedes begins with the recognition that man is a
social animal, it is a grave error to immediately expand the scope of
the concept to groups such as women, lesbians, dog-lovers, and black
metal fans, since none of these correspond to biologically-relevant
social groupings. If this is the way the notion is to be developed,
this blog takes the first off-ramp into more biorealist territory. There
are quite enough of such ‘thedes’ to be found already in university
literature and grievance studies departments. ‘Thedism’ of this kind
is simply intersectionality with a slight right-wing skew. It has no
cladistic function, unless as degenerate metaphor.
As a reliable heuristic, only those groupings which are plausible
subjects of secessionist autonomization should be considered
thedes. Any group that could not imaginably be any kind of micro-
nation has only intra-thedish identity. More darkly, a thede —
‘properly’ speaking — is necessarily a potential object of genocide.
(To argue this way is to depart radically from the usage Nydwracu
recommends. It is not an attempt to wrest control of the word, but
only to explain why it seems so basically impaired. This post will be
the last time it is mangled here.)
Rigorization of thede analysis in the direction of real ethnicities
257
Reignition
would also require the abandonment of attempts to assimilate

classes to thedes, although class identities can mask thedes, and
operate as their proxies. Between New England and Appalachia
there is a (real) thede difference between ethnic populations,
encrusted with supplementary class characteristics. Used strictly in
this way, the idea of a thede does theoretical work, and uncovers
something. It exposes the subterranean ethnic war disguised by class
stratification. When merely used to classify generic social identities,
on the other hand, it thickens the fog, pandering to the social
constructivist mentality. Tribes and classes cannot be absorbed into
a single super-concept without fatal loss of meaning. It is impossible
to belong to a class in anything like the same sense that one can
belong to an (ethnic) thede, unless class is a cover. Class stratification
is primarily intra-thedish and trans-thedish. It is the way a population
is organized, not a population itself.
Religious difference, in contrast, are typically thedish. By far the
most important example, for the internal dissensions of NRx, and for
the Occident in general, is the split between Catholic and Reformed
(Protestant) Christianity. There are real (autonomously
reproducible) Catholic and Protestant populations, and thus true
thedes. Either could be wholly exterminated without the
disappearance of the other. Furthermore, the way in which
‘thedishness’ is comprehended varies systematically between them.
On strictly technical grounds, it is tempting to counter-pose high-
258
integrity to low-integrity social arrangements, but that is to give

away too much ammunition for free. (This is to depart into a different
discussion, but one that is already overdue. (Alongside other obvious
references, Nydwracu points to this))
Ethnicities correspond to real populations, and to cladistic
structures. ‘Thedes’ as presently formulated do not. Ironically, this
denotational haziness (super-generality) of the thede concept lends
itself to usages guided by extremely concrete connotations, with a
distinctive Blut und Boden flavor. Usage of the word ‘identity’ (at
least, on the right) has exactly the same characteristics. This blog is
done with the ‘thede’ concept unless its meaning is drastically tidied
up.
Note
Note: Where this post wanted to go, when it set off, was closer to
the ‘dogs vs cats’ debate, or this:
Yeah there is a huge disconnect between the idea of seasteading
as a platform for experimenting with various forms of governance
and the reality that the vast majority of people interested in pursuing
it are orthodox libertarians who see some kind of anarcho capitalist
libertarianism as the inevitable winner in a ‘fair fight’ between
political systems. I really think that a belief in libertarianism is linked
to a distinctive and relatively rare neurological type, and therefore
will never convince the vast majority of people who tend towards a
more altruistic and collectivized morality.
It is at least conceivable that neuro-atypical hyper-individualists
259
Reignition
could establish a micro-nation (or be exterminated). They could

therefore lay claim to thedish identity, although in a strict sense —
that no one wants to use.
ADDED: Since this is my last opportunity to borrow ‘thede’ to
mean something with substantial real content (i.e. an autonomous,
self-reproducing social unit), it’s worth enumerating some possible
thedes, to give a sense of its extension: tribes, ethnic groups
(concentrically-ordered), cities, seasteads, space colonies … “What
is your thede?” translates as “Who are your people?” — “Stamp
collectors” shouldn’t be considered a serious answer.
ADDED: Terminological tidying from Nydwracu —
I should separate @Outsideness' redefinition of 'thede'

(autonomous, self-reproducing social unit) into a new word.
Ideas?
— Wesley Morganston (@nydwracu) October 26, 2014
I'm using 'phyle' for that second one. @Outsideness

@chitonous
— Wesley Morganston (@nydwracu) October 26, 2014
‘Phyle’ is good.
ADDED: Valuable consolidation (and criticism) at Nydwracu’s
place.
260
October 24, 2014
Genetic Interests
‘n/a’ provided a link to Frank Salter’s On Genetic Interests. (Available
in a variety of formats.)
That gift follows from the latest exchange on the topic, based on
this Jayman post. Some (Salterian) contention from Pumpkin Person
(here) and n/a (here). It’s a fascinating discussion, that has divided
Cochran and Harpending, which is an indication of its seriousness.
Sadly — if understandably — it tends to generate massive rancor
very quickly, as is evident in the tone of some of these posts. That’s
especially unfortunate because, heated race politics aside, there’s a
massive amount of philosophical substance underlying it. (Maximum
coldness would certainly be appreciated here.)
A suggestive remark from Salter (p.28), on the disrupted
equilibrium between ‘ultimate’ and ‘proximate’ interests (a crucial
and thought-provoking distinction):
The equilibrium applying to humans has been upset in recent
generations, so that we can no longer rely on subjectively designated
proximate interests to serve our ultimate interest. We must rely
more on science to perceive the causal links between the things we
value and formulate synthetic goals based on that rational appraisal.
261
Reignition
So (subject to correction as the argument progresses) Salter

proposes an explicit, rational proxy for the ‘ultimate interests’ of
genetic propagation, now inadequately represented by change-
shocked phenotypes (and, most importantly, brains). This is a
Principal-Agent problem, applied to human biology.
Here is Salter laying out his problem at greater length:
Certainly we can no longer rely on our instincts to guide us
through the labyrinths of modern technological society. But there
is one innate capacity we possess that, combined with one or more
motivations, is capable of solving this problem. Humans are uniquely
equipped with analytic intelligence, the ability to tackle novel
challenges. This ‘domain general’ problem-solving capacity evolved
because it allowed our ancestors to find solutions to novel threats
that arose in the environments in which they lived. General
intelligence is distinguished from ‘domain specific capacities, such as
face recognition and speech, specialized mental modules for solving
recurring problems in the environments in which we evolved. We are
flexible strategizers par excellence, able to construct our own micro
environments across a great diversity of climates and ecosystems.
Abstract intelligence is physiologically costly because it requires a
large brain, difficult childbirth and extended childhood. Nevertheless
it has been so adaptive that it distinguishes our species. It allows us
to consciously assess dangers and opportunities and to devise novel
solutions, or to choose a well-rehearsed routine from our extensive
262
repertoire to apply in a given situation. Now changed environments

have effectively blinded us to large stores of our genetic interests, or
to put it more accurately, for the first time situated us where we need
to perceive those interests and be motivated to pursue them. This
blindness is not cured by a people’s economic and political power,
as documented in Chapter 3, regarding the decline of Western
populations. We must rely on our intelligence to adapt, not only
using science to perceive our fundamental interests in the abstract
but devising ways to realize these interests through proximate
interests, the short-term goals of which we are aware and towards
which we are motivated to act.
There’s a far more general topic here than racial antagonism
(without wanting to dismiss the importance of that). Putting it up
here now is a test of whether it can be discussed without throwing
people into a rage. If so, it could become an engaging conversation.
(Googling Moravec’s concept of ‘replicator usurpation’ for a cite,
it seems that I’m the only person who’s being talking about it for
over a decade. That’s disappointing, because its relevance to these
questions seems obvious. I’m going to need to look it up again in
order to come back here with a helpful quote.)
ADDED: Gloss and critical commentary from David B. at Gene
Expression (2005): “It is essential to understand that Salter is not
presenting a biological theory of how people have evolved, how they
will evolve in future, or why they behave in the way they do. [Note 2]
263
Reignition
As Salter puts it himself: ‘the present work is not primarily a theory

of human behavior, but of interests. Rather than being a work of
explanation, this is mainly an exercise in political theory dealing with
what people are able to do if they want to behave adaptively (p.85)…
my main goal in this chapter is not to describe how people actually
behave. Rather, I explore how individuals would behave if they were
attempting to preserve their genetic interests (p.257)’. Some of these
remarks might suggest that Salter is merely setting out an option
that people may wish to follow or not, according to their own values,
but it can hardly be doubted that Salter himself positively advocates
the pursuit of ethnic genetic interests, principally through the
control of immigration. The use of such terms as ‘adaptive’, ‘fitness’,
and ‘ultimate interests’ could in principle have a neutral biological
sense, but in practice Salter uses them with an evaluative force: he
regards the policies he discusses not just as possible but desirable.
Otherwise why say that we ‘need to perceive’ our genetic interests
and ‘be motivated to pursue them’? From time to time he overtly
uses the mode of recommendation rather than mere analysis, for
example, ‘Multiculturalism and other versions of ethnic pluralism…
are types of ethnic regime that majorities should certainly avoid
(p.188)… Since genetic interests are the most fundamental, liberals
[sic] should support social policies that take these vital interests into
account (p.250)’. And some of the language and comparisons Salter
uses are strongly emotive … much of Salter’s book is concerned with
264
immigration, and especially immigration from third-world countries

to the West. In my view there are sound arguments against large-
scale, uncontrolled immigration from the third-world, not least the
danger of civil strife resulting from the presence of large
unassimilated groups holding values and beliefs incompatible with
those of the host society. But it would be unwise for people who
object to uncontrolled immigration on these grounds to latch onto
Salter’s ideas. Whatever Salter’s own motives, his theory is being
taken up enthusiastically by racists (as a Google search will confirm),
and anyone who follows their lead will be tainted by association.
Since even by Salter’s own account his theory is not a scientific
thesis, but more of a political manifesto, there can be no compelling
reason for non-racists to accept it.”
David B.’s final point is especially relevant to some of the issues
hinted at in the post here (targeted for future development): “…
Salter’s doctrine is profoundly anti-eugenic. For Salter, it is in the
interest of an individual to preserve and promote the gene
frequencies of his own ethnic group, whether the existing gene
frequency is good, bad or indifferent, as judged by qualitative
criteria. So, for example, it is in the interest of American blacks to
promote their own gene frequencies against those of American
whites, even if in some respects it would be better for blacks
themselves to change those gene frequencies. The doctrine of
genetic interests is inherently backward-looking and conservative.
265
Reignition
In contrast, the eugenic position is that we are able to make value

judgements about what characteristics are desirable (such as health,
intelligence, and beauty) and undesirable (such as stupidity, mental
illness, and physical disabilities) and then to take reproductive
decisions based on those judgements. Of course eugenics is
controversial, but many of those who might feel vaguely sympathetic
to Salter’s approach would also feel vaguely sympathetic to
eugenics, and they should at least be aware of the conflict between
them.”
August 3, 2015
Fish P
People
eople
Since the opportunities for XS to agree (in advance) with PZ Myers
don’t come along too regularly, it’s worth seizing upon those that do.
For anyone who thinks cladistics are important, this point is worth
strongly defending:
There are multiple meanings of “fish”. We can use it to refer to
specific species or an extant category of animals: salmon are fish,
halibut are fish, herring are fish. No one objects to that, and they
all understand that if I said “humans are still salmon”, that would be
wrong. […] But another way the term is used is as a descriptor for
a clade. A taxonomic clade is a “grouping that includes a common
266
ancestor and all the descendants (living and extinct) of that

ancestor”. […] So, for instance, humans belong to the mammalian
clade, which includes mice and cats and cows. If we have transhuman,
part-cyborg descendants, they will still be mammals, because, note,
by definition a clade must include all the descendants of an ancestor.
We’re trapped! There’s no way our progeny can exit the clade!
In fact, it’s such a sound point, it’s worth generalizing.
July 6, 2016
267
Reignition
CHAPTER THREE - THE PURIT

PURITAN
AN
QUESTION
Luciano P
Pellicani
ellicani
Mark Warburton passed this masterpiece along (Revolutionary
Apocalypse, by Luciano Pellicani). A couple of tiny morsels from its
consistently brilliant — and eerily familiar — analysis:
With Puritanism, an absolutely new element was introduced into
Western civilisation: (re
(revvolutionary) politics as fulfillment of God’s
will
will, with the objective of consciously building “a new human
community, that could substitute the lost Eden” and produce a
prodigious “change in human nature.” For centuries, politics had been
conceived as a “cybernetic art” (Plato) or as a technique for the
accumulation of power (Machiavelli). From the Puritan cultural
revolution on, politics was conceived as a soteriological pr practice
actice,
dominated by an eschatological tension toward the Kingdom of God
on earth
earth, therefore as a calling, whose methodical objective was to
overturn the world in order to purify it. The slogan originally used by
the Taborites and the Anabaptists was revived: “Permanent warfare
268
against the existing, in the name of the New World.”

And:
An all-powerful state is essential for communism, since the total
destruction of civil society is the only way to destroy capitalism. By
civil society we mean the “society of industry, of general competition,
of freely pursued private interest, of anarchy, of natural and spiritual
individuality alienated from self.” But since capitalism — Lenin’s
definition is correct — is a phenomenon that is generated
spontaneously, whenever the ideological power relaxes its watch,
the effort to prevent mammon from raising its head must be
permanent. It is a matter of annihilation that requires mass terror
terror,
since the main enemy of communism is “widespread petit bourgeois
spontaneity.” Thus, the “revolutionary project challenges the normal
course of history.” It is a huge effort to prevent humanity from
moving spontaneously toward a bourgeois society. This is only
achieved through permanent terror.
If Pellicani is already being widely discussed in the reactosphere,
I’ve missed it. My guess: he’ll be considered an indispensable
reference by this time next year.
January 3, 2014
269
Reignition
Ultr
Ultra-Calvinism
a-Calvinism
JayMan chips in (succinctly and lucidly) to a familiar topic (or,
perhaps, two):
A complex story, but today's SWPLs are indeed descendants

of the Puritans http://t.co/EEI7hzVeFx
— JayMan (@JayMan471) March 2, 2015
“New England was not swamped with immigr immigrants

ants because these
people were particularly simpatico with the original Puritan settlers.”
Post Civil War New England, no. But assortative migration has been
powerful (see previous link) and continues on to this day.
You know, your general trope of modern SWPLs not being the
descendents of the Puritans doesn’t actually hold water. A simple
comparison of both genetic and self-reported ancestry (again
aforementioned link, partially supplied by you) shows that
Democratic voting Whites are only found in areas Puritans settled.
British ancestry backs it up. See also The Myth of the Expanding
Circle or You Can’t Learn How to Be an English Vegetarian | Staffan’s
Personality Blog.
Now, in New England, some of that genetic British ancestry is
Scottish, as opposed to English ancestry. I think we can be fairly
certain the Scots aren’t the ones pushing things Left.
270
Sure, today’s SWPLs are heavily admixed with other groups in

addition to their Puritan roots. And sure, small numbers of liberals
are found everywhere. And sure, not all Puritan descendants vote
Left (e.g., Mormons – but they have been specially selected). But
today, the consistent Blue states are found only in areas which have
Puritan (as well as Scandinavian, and possibly Quaker) descendants.
It does limited (some, but limited) good to compare their attitudes
200-400 years ago with current ones – all groups have undergone
considerable change during that time (the moral circle expanded to
fill its genetic potential). You also can’t blame it on the Jews because
A) there’s not that many of them B) their putative influence
resonates with some and not others, putting us back to the original
problem.
March 3, 2015
Ultr
Ultra-Calvinism
a-Calvinism II
The XS Inner Council doesn’t get as much time to study hardcore
Ultra-Calvinist Theonomy as it would like, but Rushdoony’s Politics
of Guilt and Pity (full-text available free online) is looking truly
awesome so far. A couple of early snippets:
The reality of man apart from Christ is guilt and masochism. And
guilt and masochism involve an unshakeable inner slavery which
271
Reignition
governs the total life of the non-Christian. The politics of the anti-
christian will thus inescapably be the politics of guilt
guilt. In the politics
of guilt, man is perpetually drained in his social energy and cultural
activity by his over-riding sense of guilt and his masochistic activity.
He will progressively demand of the state a redemptive role. What
he cannot do personally, i.e., to save himself, he demands that the
state do for him, so that the state, as man enlarged, becomes the
human savior of man. The politics of guilt, therefore, is not directed,
as the Christian politics of liberty, to the creation of godly justice
and order, but to the creation of a redeeming order, a saving state.
Guilt must be projected, therefore, on all those who oppose this new
order and new age. And, because the salvation is mythical, and the
enslavement real, the hatred of life and of innocence grows, and with
it grows the urge to mass destruction.
[…]
In the modern state, in the name of democracy, there is the
increasing pandering to guilt and to the hatred felt by the guilty for
the innocent and for the successful. This then is the full triumph of
the politics of guilt and its open enthronement. For the politics of
guilt, the order of the day is mass destruction. […] Sentimental
humanism asserts that man’s basic need is lo lovve, more specifically, a
passive need to be lo lovved
ed. Thus, man is seen as a passive creature
whose basic problem is not a will to evil but an absence of love, so
that a positive agency must be created to supply man’s needs. The
272
result is the totalitarian caretaker state. Man, being passive, needs

an active agency in his life, and this agency the welfare state
provides.
[…]
In guilt cultures, the individual deals directly and personally with
the inner warfare. Man, burdened with a sense of guilt and unable
to enjoy life, confesses his sin, as does the man in a shame culture,
but he pleads guilty to the lesser crime. With a fine sensitivity, he
dredges up minor offenses to prove the refinement of his conscience
in order to escape his capital offense against God. He may trouble
himself over a stolen pencil while ignoring his open or veiled warfare
against God. In the United States, as the nation has departed
progressively from God, it has indulged progressively in a
“debunking” of its history, in a general confession of many past faults,
some often imagined. The hypocrisy of such confessions is striking:
by confessing the “sins” of past generations, the present scholar or
generation thereby implies its own superior virtues and its
innocence of those sins. By the fact of such “debunking” or
confession, it confesses also, very modestly, that wisdom is now born
to us and is among us, so that confession again becomes a vehicle of
pride.
[…]
What man cannot do, i.e., to cleanse himself of sin or to make
atonement to God for sin, God does for man. Men, being wholly
273
Reignition
God’s creation, cannot be active towards God; his relationship is

derivative and passive. Man’s will is not autonomous, nor is man
creative in relationship to God. Hence, since God is God, the
relationship between man and God is wholly a part of the eternal
decree and wholly determined by the triune God.
[…]
Today, millions of Negroes, joined by millions of slave whites, are
demanding that the federal government become their slave-master
and provide them with security and care. Slavery is a welfare
economy; private ownership is a privately maintained welfare
economy, and it is not economically a sound unit of operation. Under
state ownership, slavery, a social security structure, is a welfare
economy which lacks the necessity for successful operation which
the private owner must maintain. The private owner must make a
profit somewhere; Alexander H. Stephens made it in law and
supported his slaves thereby. The slave-owning state survives
instead by progressive confiscation until the nation is destroyed. […]
… Slavery remains, however, a legitimate way of life, but a lower way
of life. Slavery offers certain penalties as well as certain advantages.
Objectively, the penalty is the surrender of liberty. Subjectively, the
slave does not see the surrender of freedom as a penalty, since he
desires escape from freedom. Even as a timid and fearful child dreads
the dark, so does the slave mind fear liberty: it is full of the terrors
of the unknown. As a result, the slave mind clings to statist or state
274
slavery, cradle-to-grave welfare care, as a fearful child clings to his

mother. The advantage of slavery is precisely this, security in the
master or in the state. Socialism is thus a slave state, created by the
demands of slaves for a master.
[…]
Hell is a witness to the fact that a God of justice is on the throne
of the universe. When people insist that they cannot believe in hell
they are saying that they refuse to believe that justice has any right
to exist. The denial of hell means that justice has been replaced by
the total tolerance of evil, and this tolerance of evil is disguised as
love. This doctrine of love involves a hatred of God and justice and an
overt or covert love of evil.
November 12, 2015
Double Predestination
Cladistic inheritance necessitates that I begin talking about the
Calvinist doctrine of Providence here (soon), despite my total
cognitive depravity on the topic. I’ve been reading the Institutes of
the Christian Religion, and around it, but inevitably as if from Mars
(and as a Confucian). It has to be the case that many of the visitors
here are vastly more intellectually fluent on the subject, so any
anticipatory comments will be hungrily seized upon.
275
Reignition
The fatality, as far as it is initially evident:

(1) Neoreaction, cladistically located, is a Cryptocalvinist splinter.
(2) The doctrines that placed Calvinism in H. L. Mencken’s
“cabinet of horrors” (“next to cannibalism”), have never been
philosophically dissolved, whether by theological or secular
argument.
(3) The moralistic dismissal of Modernity and, through
association, of Protestantism, evidences an almost
incomprehensibly crude conception of Providence — as if the way
things have turned out was not a fatality, and in theological terms
a message (or punishment), but rather an accident, or man-made
contingency. The rigorous theology of Modernity cannot reduce to
mere denunciation.
(4) Calvinism is an instrument with which to explore Catholicism,
especially in respect to its implicit philosophy of history (and
recourse to teleological reasoning). The ‘Neo-‘ in Neoreaction
appears to be a Calvinist mark. There are any number of influential
secular explanations for the way history has tortured the Church
— such that even the religious seem typically to default to them.
Where does one find a radically providential account (excavating the
theological meaning of Modernity)?
(5) Is not the very word ‘Cathedral’ in its Neoreactionary usage a
complex providential sign? (Which suggests that it has far more to
tell than anything either Neoreactionary writers or mere accident
276
put into it.)

(6) The cluster of disputes around ‘predestination’ (or the action
of eternity upon history) is the Occidental key to the problem of time.
I’m sure there’s much more …
[This helps to set the tone.]
November 30, 2013
Join the Dots

Walter Russell Mead muses on identitarian blood-letting.
First the sermon:
The eastern Congo and the African Great Lakes are remote
places, and many people might wonder why Americans or the world
at large should care much about what goes on there. The short
answer is that the people who live there are made in God’s image
as much as anybody else and they are infinitely dear to him, and to
remain indifferent to the suffering of people there is to fail in our
clear duty to our Creator and to some degree to betray our own
humanity.
Then the analysis:
While the world’s intelligentsia today spends an endless amount
of time “celebrating difference” and singing the praises of diversity
(and we join in that chorus), diversity and difference constitute
277
Reignition
potentially catastrophic political challenges. One thing that seems

to happen with modernization is that groups of people start feeling
more need to have the state and the laws reflect the values and
the priorities of their own ethnic or religious communities. Identity
demands to be reflected in politics.
Pre-modern and “primitive” cultures don’t seem to feel this as
strongly as more modern ones do, and democracies are sometimes
even more chauvinistic than other forms of government as these
pressures are felt. It is often populists who lead campaigns for ethnic
cleansing or nationalist war. The history of Europe and the Middle
East has been shaped by 150 years of sometimes genocidal wars of
conquest, revenge, national liberation and religion. Tens of millions
have been killed in these wars, multinational states have broken
down into ethnic nation states, and millions of refugees have been
forced into exile.
[…] One of the biggest questions of the 21st century is whether
this destructive dynamic can be contained, or whether the demand
for ethnic, cultural and/or religious homogeneity will continue to
convulse world politics, drive new generations of conflict, and create
millions more victims. […] … the foundations of our world are
dynamite, and that the potential for new conflicts on the scale of the
horrific wars of the 20th century is very much with us today.
In other words: “If everyone shared my (religious) identity, we
wouldn’t be tilting into a century of blood and horror.” Even if this
278
dubious argument was to be accepted at face value, the theyy don

don’t
’t, and
we are.
ADDED: “… Great State leaders take the erroneous intellectual
short cut of assuming that foreigners are just human beings who
think just like they do and who focus on the same priorities. … This
tendency to a kind of passive, subconscious, egalitarian universalism
is, of course, greatly amplified if you are actually an Egalitarian
Universalist because that is effectively your official state religion …”
December 19, 2013
279
Reignition
Progress (IV)
Facile progressivism is over.
January 12, 2016
280
CHAPTER FOUR - AL
ALTERNA
TERNATE
TE P
PA
ATHS
Salience Preference
Time preference and provincialism are both special cases of

salience preference.
— Gate Of Heavens (@GateOfHeavens) October 31, 2014
On the assumption that most reactionary-types will want to

refuse the idea of an integrated ‘salience preference’ — what is the
counter-argument? (I’m also wondering whether ethico-political
humanism — in its restrictive rather than expansive usage — can be
bound into the same super-syndrome.)
November 1, 2014
Crypto-Br
Crypto-Brahmins
ahmins
Poseidon Awoke has a great post up about the class characteristics
of neoreaction. It’s bound to generate a lot of discussion. Much of it
is irresistibly persuasive. You’ll want to read it.
281
Reignition
I have a few quibbles — Vaisyas aren’t ‘activists’ (because business

isn’t politics), and the Catholic slant of NRx is more complicated than
this essay makes it out to be (because cladistics). These kind of
qualifications aren’t decisive in themselves.
The decisive reservation has to do with the social function of code
specialists. Perhaps this tweet makes the point best:
Prose is just code that doesn't compile. (Ignore if you're not a

tech entrepreneur).
— Naval Ravikant (@naval) May 30, 2014
‘Silicon Valley’ changes the meaning of ‘Brahmin’ — if we’re still

going to use that word. Most simply, the long-established distinction
between literate and industrial elites loses its security in the epoch
of programming, or digitization. NRx washes back from a social
horizon at which the sign and its operationalization have become
de-segmented, necessitating a seismic re-configuration of class
identities.
The Brahmin priest caste, like the digital elite, specializes in signs,
but they are signs of exhortation, rather than of intrinsic efficiency.
Is not the Cathedral precisely a name for that apparatus of signs
— (non-STEM) academia, media, bureaucracy, politics … — which
cannot in principle ever compile? The Cathedral is a secular religion,
which has to preach because it does not work.
282
When NRx insists upon a division within ‘progress’ between

techno-economics (which works) and socio-politics (which decays), it
opens a rift that splits the Brahmins, rather than further separating
them from social inferiors. NRx, at its core, is a ‘Brahmin’ civil war.
June 6, 2014
Quantum Suicide
This stuff is excellent Frightday night material (a relatively old but
appropriately sensationalist link). It’s the Outside in candidate for
a conceivable postmodern religion, channeling video game ontology
into an off-the-cliff practice of the numinous. It has to be a better
place to look than Odinist revival (which it might ultimately eat).
QS fanatics would merit an argument, and better still, they’d be
immunized against it.
NRx would find a lot to talk about with these folks — until they
pulled the trigger. For instance: Exit. Imagine a near-future world
in which political disputes were dominated by QS cults. It would be
remarkably tolerant of electoral processes, whose defects would
have been made a matter of indifference. Divide the social body on
the issue of greatest political rancor, and submit the contest to a
‘resolution’ procedure with significant probabilistic input. Whoever
loses terminates themselves, in ‘this’ sector of the multiverse. The
283
Reignition
outcome, from the perspective of the QS religion, would be that

branching universes acquired increasingly distinctive ideological
flavors. Everyone ends up with the future they selected, in worlds
pre-cleansed of dissent. Elections would be OK, but why not just roll
the dice? The important thing would be the schism, and from the QS
perspective, every true devotee ends up on the right side of it. This is
the future you chose would actually always be true.
Replace elections with the flip of a coin, accompanied by mass
suicidal auto-selection. On the day this becomes an articulate
political program, the Quantum Suicide religion will have arrived.
February 20, 2015
Sore LLosers
osers
Following the recent publication of Our Wound Is Not So Recent,
Alain Badiou’s analysis of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, Nick
Land detects a residue of ‘Frenchness’ in Badiou’s universalism,
reconfigures the battlefield of the future, and plays devil’s advocate
for globalised capitalism
[L]et’s admit it: Globalization does not automatically benefit

France. […] Globalization develops according to principles
that correspond neither to French tradition nor to French
284
culture. These principles include the ultraliberal market

economy, mistrust of the state, individualism removed from
the republican tradition, the inevitable reinforcement of the
universal and ‘indispensable’ role of the United States,
common law, the English language, Anglo-Saxon norms, and
Protestant—more than Catholic—concepts.
—Hubert Védrine, February 9, 20021
To be French is to understand—with peculiar lucidity—what it is to

have been defeated by modernity. The world’s first modern nation,
enthralled beyond all others by the call of the universal, has been
cropped back to a nexus of untaken paths, over the course of two
centuries. If Hubert Védrine says this more clearly than Alain Badiou,
Badiou says it nevertheless. Our Wound is Not So Recent. The title
already says almost everything. To anticipate: ‘…our wound comes
from the historical defeat of communism.’
Compared to this primary, chronic and, by now, essential
misfortune, occasional disasters are mere accidents. The recent
massacre in Paris by soldiers of Jihad provides an unusually dramatic
(or ‘particularly spectacular’) instance. Yet, despite its colorful, richly
affective character, the disturbance of state security represented by
the slaughter of a few score Parisians is a minor affair, when
compared to the conquest of modernity itself—and thus the
world—by a far more ominous adversary. Whatever philosophical
285
Reignition
dignity is to be found in reflection upon the November 13 incident

lies in its cognitive adoption as a relay, leading back to the main story,
‘the triumph of globalised capitalism’.
It is understandable, therefore, that the elegance of Badiou’s
presentation is unable to fully conceal its structural irritability. ‘We’
have been distracted, which is how adults understand ‘terror’. It is
a distraction of ‘thought’ that has occurred here, Badiou insists, and
thus an annoyance, in multiple senses, including that of simple
condescension. As befits a member of the socio-cultural elite,
Badiou’s response takes the form of a thoughtful meta-irritation—an
irritability directed at irritation as such. This is an anti-empirical
reflex and therefore, in some definite way, ‘French’—but we will get
to that soon enough. Those scores of dead youngsters strewn across
Paris demand some affective acknowledgement, which is undignified
(and annoying). Far more significantly, the atrocity upsets people. It
is—precisely as intended by the perpetrators, and also in the most
neutral sense of the word—exciting. The public response it elicits
is not only philosophically useless, but positively deleterious to the
work of the universal. ‘So, to counter these risks, I think that we must
manage to think what has happened.’
We have a duty to philosophy—which is to say, to our only

credible model of nobility—to be cold. Emotional spasms in
response to blood spatter would be unbecoming.
286
I think so, too. We have a duty to philosophy—which is to say, to

our only credible model of nobility—to be cold. Emotional spasms in
response to blood spatter would be unbecoming. It would also be
an integral contribution to the achievement of ‘fascist’ terror. Worst
of all, it distracts. Terror excites identity, by concentrating it, and
packaging it in a false simplicity. Badiou is not concerned to disguise
the fact that, for the European Left, in particular, ‘identity’ is the true
terror.
There are, however, other distractions—for ‘us’. When Badiou
proclaims that ‘Our wound is not so recent’, we are compelled to
ask: How far does this collective pronoun extend? A response to this
question could be prolonged without definite limit. Everything we
might want to say ultimately folds into it, ‘identity’ most obviously.
Whatever meaning ‘communism’ could have belongs here, as ‘we’
reach outwards to the periphery of the universal, and thus
(conceivably) to the end of philosophy. ‘Frenchness’ is, in some
complex way, involved by it, among other social sets of lesser and
greater obscurity. This ‘we’ is the whole, even as it is hidden in the
margin. It is also strategically non-negotiable. (Nobody asks
‘who?’—as Badiou knows they will not.) Smuggled into grammar, it
says everything of ultimate consequence in advance of any possible
rejoinder, framing subsequent controversy in its terms. A sovereign
or transcendental antagonism—settled securely beyond
discussion—thus announces itself, in a whisper.
287
Reignition
In comparable fashion, then, we can only propose another ‘us’

outside it. As already promised, the detail—if only a little—will soon
follow. For the moment, it need only be noted that ‘their’ identity
cannot be assumed to be ‘ours’, any more than we share their
problems, their successes, or their defeats. The pronoun is
scrambled, torn apart. We are not ‘wounded’ by what hurts them,
unless accidentally, and by the failure of their collective project least
of all. Whatever malice might appear in these words strikes us as
sheer retaliation. This is only to say that Badiou’s ‘we’ was already
a project of mobilization and a declaration of war, if only as a
recollection, and a gesture of defiance. The haze that surrounds ‘us’
is the fog of war. No one can be sincerely shocked by that. (We are
not children.) Our conflict is not so recent.
The stakes, on both sides, are absolute. There is—most

probably—nothing we would not do, were it still necessary, in
order to prevail against each other
‘It must be seen that the objective victory of globalized capitalism is a

destructive, aggressive practice,’ Badiou asserts. We can only shrug,
since of course, for you (collectively), that is simply true. Its successes
are your defeats, and reciprocally. No one is being educated by any
of this. We have, not so very long ago, menaced each other with
thermonuclear warheads, and burnt down states still more recently.
288
The stakes, on both sides, are absolute. There is—most

probably—nothing we would not do, were it still necessary, in order
to prevail against each other. ‘Victory’, ‘defeat’—these are Badiou’s
words, even if—for no reason at all—war is not, at first, although it
soon will be.
Let us explicate, then, that which Badiou leaves still partially
implicit. We do not care about Islam. No one does—at least no one we
care about, but only ‘fascists’. For the industrialized world, it is never
more than an annoyance, and more typically a complex opportunity
to be exploited, a weapon to be directed at those whose antagonism
is respected. Having failed at modernity with a comprehensiveness
that approaches the comedic, it has been many centuries since Islam
has had any kind of serious claim upon history to lose—so ‘a whole
section of the global population is counted for nothing’, inevitably.
We can parasitize Badiou’s shallowly-buried contempt without
qualification: ‘it’s fascization that islamizes, not Islam that fascizes’.
We will decide upon the way to categorize their refusal of our
categorizations. Your coldness is tested by this joke.
It is not that religion is quite nothing, of course, even for Badiou,
at his most French. Not originally, in any case. ‘Religion can perfectly
well act as an identitarian sauce for all of this, precisely in so far as
it is a suitably anti-Western referent. But as we have seen, in the
final analysis, the origin of these youths doesn’t matter much, their
spiritual or religious origin, as they say, and so on.’ (It ‘is counted
289
Reignition
for nothing’.) ‘What counts is the choice they have made about their
frustration’ (we decide). ‘And they will rally to the mixture of
corruption and sacrificial and criminal heroism because of the
subjectivity that is theirs, not because of their Islamic conviction.
What is more, we have been able to see that, in most cases,
islamization is terminal rather than inaugural.’ Nihilistic individuals,
seduced into ‘fascism’, articulating their motivations in words that
count for nothing, pathetic existentialist communists with false
consciousness, malicious punks…if there are some further resources
of contempt that might be added to this analysis, they will not be
easy to find. Which is not at all to suggest that we encounter anything
problematic here, or in need of rectification.
It could easily have been some other faith that provided this
‘terminus’, we are expected to accept (unless the concession to ‘a
suitably anti-Western referent’ is the clue to a more persuasive—and
decorously unspoken—claim). All right, we accept. For the sake of
moving forward, we accept it, despite the extraordinary deformation
of historical evidence required to do so. Let us pretend that our
Jihadi ‘fascists’ are only randomly differentiated from Buddhists or
Confucians, in order to proceed to the identities that more
immediately concern us.
Those dead Parisian youngsters cannot be ‘counted for nothing’
quite so easily. They would have certainly done some capitalism,
even despite themselves, and also – being young and French—quite
290
probably some communism, in addition, so they matter to ‘us’, at least

a little. The young Jihadi ‘fascists’ who slaughtered them, in
contrast—with nothing to make but a distraction—are nothing at all,
to either of us. That saddens Badiou, rhetorically, and tactically.
‘Their own life did not count. And since their own lives did not count,
the lives of others meant nothing to them either.’ Look what
globalized capitalism did to them. Perhaps we should turn our
attention to this far more serious, historically-productive
monstrosity, before we upset people—gratuitously—with our
unfathomable and entirely mutual indifference.
Let’s recapitulate. We have a contemporary world structure

dominated by the triumph of globalised capitalism. We have a
strategic weakening of states, and even an ongoing process of
the capitalist withering away of states. And thirdly, we have
new practices of imperialism that tolerate, and even
encourage in certain circumstances, the butchering and the
annihilation of states.
The main story of recent times has been ‘the liberation of

liberalism’—the freeing of capitalism—Badiou insists. (His preferred
identity lies in insisting this.)
To succumb to excitement about the empiricity of ‘Capitalist

globalization’, in its scandalous singularity, is to thrill to its
291
Reignition
vast annoyance, rather than its universal disaster
This Thing—the Great Foe—is not devoid of identity, however

embarrassing it may be to explicitly acknowledge that fact (i.e. its
factuality as such). To succumb to excitement about the empiricity
of ‘Capitalist globalization’, in its scandalous singularity, is to thrill
to its vast annoyance, rather than its universal disaster. Yet it is, as
everyone clearly recognizes, an Anglophone global affliction that
disturbs ‘us’, and an Anglophone ideological negligence that has
‘counted for nothing’ those without any productive part to play in
its expansion. The major enemy is Anglophone, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-
American—‘Anglo-Jewish’, it will inevitably be said, if not by Badiou
then by innumerable others, including especially the Islamic ‘fascists’
whose sensitivities refuse to be dulled on the point. It is, in any case,
the positive ethnic constituency primarily identified with ‘the
liberation of liberalism’ when this is acknowledged with coarse
realism. No one gets to see how peculiar this thing is from nowhere.
Its critics, we can confidently—if indelicately—speculate, have been
concretely offended. They have been ‘wounded’—and not only so
very recently.
Of course, there could be nothing more gauche than to articulate
ideological criticism in the voice of national resentment. From the
perspective of philosophy, to speak in the name of any positive
identity—even one far more fashionable than the nation and its
292
associated ethnic categories—is a simple disgrace. Selected

identities might be exalted from a distance, in approximate
proportion to their transgressive or victimological status, but every
elite intellectual understands profoundly—if often only
implicitly—that ontic definition is dirt.
Badiou is fastidious, therefore, in avoiding all temptation to self-
identification in less than universal terms. His ‘discursive position’
depends upon his identity as a proud communist, who merely
happens to be French. There is a cost to be paid for this, in
honesty—or realism—first of all. A necrotic collectivist utopianism
does not constitute a plausible site of enunciation, and no one
believes that it does. It is perhaps for this reason that Badiou refrains
from quite closing the door onto a certain nuanced ‘patriotism’, even
if his catastrophist narrative demands that it is held ajar only in a
mode of nostalgia (and one that is not wholly devoid of bitterness).
What France was, as a revolutionary power, is still affirmed, in a tone
at once tragic and philosophical, drawing the requisite quantum of
detachment from both:
France, what is singular about France—because if there are

French values, we must ask what is singular about them—is
the revolutionary tradition. Republican first of all, from the
’89 revolution. And then socialist, anarchosyndicalist,
communist, and finally leftist, all of this between 1789 and,
293
Reignition
let’s say, 1976. […] But all that’s over. It’s over. France can
no longer be represented today in any credible way as the
privileged site of a revolutionary tradition. Rather, it is
characterised by a singular collection of identitarian
intellectuals.
The surrender of France to the identitarian vice is but part of the

more comprehensive defeat. Yet the dramatic quality of Badiou’s
stance here should not blind us to what it evades. The French accent
in what he has to say—both before and after this passage—extends
far beyond his lament for the nation’s withered revolutionary
vocation. The ethnic identity that speaks in his words encompasses,
among many other things, a specific mode of universal aspiration, a
secular faith ‘freed’—contemptuously—of religious trappings, and a
firm confidence in the moral dignity of the State. There has only been
one ‘revolution’ of the kind he inherits as a model, and it was French.
It identified reason with revolutionary innovation—to a degree
commonly found amusing beyond the Gallic cultural sphere, despite
its menacing incarnation in an armed re-origination of the state, from
first principles. Naturally, these ‘first principles’ were already a
dismissal of the old religion, through their very originality, and also
an exaltation of philosophy—as smelted in the flames of insurrection.
They were the monsters bred from Descartes’s methodically
exacerbated, artificial nightmare, released by a passage through zero
294
(radical doubt), in which organic tradition was immolated upon the

altar of the universal. They would—for instance—have decimalized
time and geometry, and struggled earnestly to do so, repeatedly,
without even a moment of pious reservation or residual doubt…but
they failed. Modern history, from a particular but illuminating angle
has been this failure, this defeat. Our Wound is Not So Recent.
French identity, radically conceived, corresponds to a failed

national project. Is it not, in fact, the supreme example of
collective defeat in the modern period, and
thus—concretely—of humiliation by capital?
French identity, radically conceived, corresponds to a failed national

project. Is it not, in fact, the supreme example of collective defeat in
the modern period, and thus—concretely—of humiliation by capital?
It is the way the ‘alternative’ dies: locally, and unpersuasively,
without dialectical engagement, dropping—neglected—into
dilapidation. It can be inserted into a limited, yet not inconsiderable,
series of identities making vehement claim to universality without
provision of any effective criterion through which to establish it.
When frustrated by the indifference of the outside, such objective
pretentions tend to turn ‘fascist’ in exactly the sense Badiou
employs. Their claims are shown—demonstrably—to be non-
compelling beyond their own shrinking domain. They are ignored, so
295
Reignition
they ‘act up’. A certain violent madness is easily spawned. Yet it is

rarely more than a distraction.
What we are suffering from is the absence, at the global scale,

of a politics that would be detached entirely from the
interiority of capitalism. It is the absence on the global scale
of this politics that means that a young fascist appears, is
created. It is not the young fascist, banditry, and religion, that
create the absence of a politics of emancipation able to
construct its own vision and to define its own practices. It
is the absence of this politics that creates the possibility of
fascism, of banditry, and of religious hallucinations.
This is Badiou’s analysis. The pin-pricks so far—and the far greater

sufferings to come—result from an ethno-political defeat, in a long
conflict still recalled by its stubborn survivors as a global drama of
the Universal. It is a defeat that they imagine—or at least, still claim
to imagine—might one day be undone. Who would deprive them of
their old songs, and strange flags, and wounded dreams?
The ‘liberation of liberalism’ has scarcely begun
Spite, or triumphalism, are identitarian confusions, extravagances,

and also simply errors that we cannot afford. Our war is far less
comprehensively won than theirs is lost. The adversaries that
296
matter—real fascists—have controlled the commanding heights of

our societies since the New Deal. The techno-economic dispersion of
power remains radically incomplete. Sino-capitalism—momentarily
trembling—has yet to re-make the world. The ‘liberation of
liberalism’ has scarcely begun. None of this is a concern for Badiou,
however, or for the Islamists. It belongs to another story, and—for
this is the ultimate, septically enflamed wound—as it runs forwards,
ever faster, it is not remotely theirs.
1. http://www.theglobalist.com/france-and-globalization/.
2016
Rhizomes
After the counter-revolution, when the most ludicrous Lysenkoists
have been cast down from power, it will be necessary to undertake
a scrupulous examination of horizontal genetic transfer. Among the
stream of data received from Existoon on the topic, this line of
inquiry is definitely notable. The phenomenon in question is
introduced well here:
Within our bodies resides a dynamic population of microbes
forming a symbiotic super-organism with whom we have co-evolved.
297
Reignition
Recent investigations indicate that these microbes majorly impact

on cognitive function and fundamental behavior patterns, such as
social interaction and stress management. The collective
microbiome comprises a myriad of bacteria of approximately 10^14
cells, containing 100 times the number of genes of the human
genome. Despite evolution of this microbiome for 500 million years,
only recent advances in sequencing technology have allowed us to
appreciate the full complexity of the host–microbe interrelationship.
The gut microbiota is a highly developed organ of immense
metabolic complexity and has approximately the same weight as the
human brain. It is now clear that the gut microbiota plays a key role
in the life and health of the host by protecting against pathogens,
metabolizing dietary nutrients and drugs, and influencing the
absorption and distribution of dietary fat. However, the influence of
the microbiota extends beyond the gastrointestinal tract, playing a
major role in the development and functioning of the central nervous
system (CNS). Among the many substances produced by the gut
microbiota are key central neurotransmitters whose influence
extends beyond the enteric nervous system to the brain. [See original
for references.]
Under present cultural conditions, in which the imperatives for
wishful thinking — and even raw, institutionally mandated
dishonesty — are so extraordinary, I doubt that significant cognitive
resources can be spared from the primary task of defending basic
298
Darwinism against the aggressions of Cathedral religious ideology.

That does not mean the rhizomatic (lateral-reticulated) model has
been addressed with any detailed adequacy, but only that, in a ruined
culture, its time has not yet come. Perhaps the Chinese can get on
with it in the interim …
ADDED: Contagious insanity (via).
April 17, 2015
299
Reignition
BL
BLOCK
OCK 3 - POLITICAL
THEORY
300
BLOCK 3 - POLITICAL THEORY
CHAPTER ONE - THE BASICS
On P
Power
ower
Power is an Idea. It is exactly what it is thought to be.
Even among pre-civilized social animals, where the temptation
to confuse power with force is strongest, the need to demonstrate
force is only sporadic, and wherever force is not continuously
demonstrated, power has arisen.
That is how dominance distinguishes itself from predation. On
occasions, no doubt, a predator dominates its prey, convincing a
struggling herbivore that resistance is futile, and its passage into
nourishment is already, virtually, over. Even in these cases, however,
a predator does not seek to install an enduring dominion. It matters
not at all that its command of irresistible force be recognized beyond
the moment of destruction. There is no social relationship to
establish.
Even the most rudimentary society requires something more. The
economy of force has to be institutionalized, and power — perfectly
coincident with the Idea of power — is born. When power is tested,
driven to resort to force, or regress to it, the idea has already slipped,
301
Reignition
its weakness exposed.

Mere dominance has to regularly re-assert itself, rebuilding itself
out of force. Under civilized conditions, in contrast, power is
exempted from the test of force, and thus realizes itself
consummately. It becomes magic and religion, perfectly identified
with its apprehension, as a radiant assumption.
Power is thus profoundly paradoxical. Its truth is inextricable
from a derealization, so that when it is practically interrogated, by
forces determined to excavate its reality, it tends to nothing.
Even the force that power calls upon, when pressed to
demonstrate or realize itself, has to be spell-bound to its idea. Will
the generals obey? Will the soldiers shoot? It is power, and not force,
that decides. No surprise, therefore, that power can evaporate like
the snow-slopes of a volcano, as if instantaneously, when an eruption
of force is scarcely more than a rumble. Power is the eruption not
happening, far more than the eruption being contained. (Equally,
anarchy is the question of power being practically posed, before it is
any kind of ‘solution’.)
To conceive economic power as wealth, is to misconstrue it as
(rationalized) force, and thus to miss the Idea. ‘True’ economic power
is a thoroughly derealized yet authoritative standard and store of
value, as instantiated — exclusively — in fiat currency. Monetary
signs that are not backed by anything beyond the ‘credit’ (or
credibility) of the State are the tokens of pure, supremely idealized
302
power in its economic form. They symbolize the effective — because

untested — suppression of anarchy. They live through the Idea, and
die with it.
Those who recognize the completion of power in an Idea,
celebrants and antagonists alike, have no reason to object to its
belated baptism as the Cathedral: our contemporary political
appropriation of numinous authority, served by an academic,
journalistic, judicial, and administrative clerisy, prominently
including the priesthood of fiat adoration and financial central
planning. There is no macroeconomics that is not Cathedral liturgy,
no confidence or ‘animal spirits’ independent of its devotions, no
economic cataclysm that is not simultaneously a crisis of faith. A
single Idea is at stake.
In macroeconomics, as in politics more generally, only one
(systematically inhibited) question remains: Do we believe? Well, do
we?
ADDED: Belief drain (via)
April 25, 2013
On Chaos
Turbulence is nonlinear dynamism, so remarking upon it very quickly
becomes reflexive. In any conflict, an emergent meta-conflict divides
303
Reignition
those who embrace and reject the conflict as such, and ‘meta’ is in
reality reflexivity, partially apprehended. So ignore the sides of the
war, momentarily. What about war?
Moldbug really doesn’t like it. The closest he ever comes to a
wholly-arbitrary axiom — comparable, at least superficially, to the
libertarian Non-Aggression Principle — is exhibited in this context.
Following some preliminary remarks, his first exposition of the
formalist ideology begins: “The basic idea of formalism is just that
the main problem in human affairs is violence.” As with Hobbes, the
horror of war is the foundation of political philosophy.
This is by no means a trivial decision. With avoidance of war
identified as the fundamental principle of political order, an ultimate
criterion of (secular) value is erected, in simultaneity with a
framework of genetic and structural explanation. Good government
is defined as an effective process of pacification, attaining
successively more highly-tranquilized levels (and stages) of order:
… there are four levels of sovereign security. These are peace,
order, law, and freedom. Once you have each one, you can work on
the next. But it makes no sense to speak of order without peace, law
without order, or freedom without law.
Peace is simply the absence of war. The Dictator’s first goal is to
achieve peace, preferably honorably and with victory. There is no
telling what wars New California will be embroiled in at the time of
its birth, so I will decline to discuss the matter further. But in war, of
304
course, there is no order; war is pure chaos. Thus we see our first rule
of hierarchy.
In this model order and chaos are strictly reciprocal. Suppression
of chaos and establishment of order are alternative, inter-
changeable formulations of the same basic political reality. There
is no productivity proper to government other than the ‘good war’
directed against the Cthulhu-current of chaos, violence, conflict,
turmoil, and inarticulate anarchy.
No surprise, then, that widespread dismay results from outbreaks
of conflict across the digital tracts of neoreaction. How could any
Moldbug sympathizer — or other right-oriented observer — not
recognize in these skirmishes the signs of anarcho-chaotic
disturbance, as if the diseased tentacles of Cthulhu were insinuated
abominably into the refuge of well-ordered sociability? Beyond the
protagonists themselves, such scraps trigger a near-universal clamor
for immediate and unconditional peace: Forget about who is right
and who wrong, the conflict itself is wrong.
I don’t think so.
Entropy is toxic, but entropy production is roughly synonymous
with intelligence. A dynamically innovative order, of any kind, does
not suppress the production of entropy — it instantiates an efficient
mechanism for entropy dissipation. Any quasi-Darwinian system —
i.e. any machinery that actually works — is nourished by chaos,
exactly insofar as it is able to rid itself of failed experiments. The
305
Reignition
techno-commercial critique of democratized modernity is not that

too much chaos is tolerated, but that not enough is able to be shed.
The problem with bad government, which is to say with defective
mechanisms of selection, is an inability to follow Cthulhu far enough.
It is from turbulence that all things come.
The question Outside in would pose to NRx is not ‘how can we
suppress chaos?’ but rather ‘how can we learn to tolerate chaos at
a far higher intensity?’ Dynamic order is not built deliberately upon
a foundation of amicable fraternity. It emerges spontaneously as a
consequence of effective entropy-dissipation functions. The primary
requirement is sorting.
To sort ourselves out takes a chronic undertow of war and chaos.
Initially, this will be provided by the soft and peripheral shadow-
fights we have already seen, but eventually NRx will be strong
enough to thrive upon cataclysms — or it will die. The harsh
machinery of Gnon wins either way.
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
ADDED: Highly on point (with even a smidgen of Hobbes).
April 25, 2014
Politics
Following a typical HBD Bibliography twitter intervention
306
(paraphrased: “educate yourself”), a professor of Global Liberal

Studies turned up to engage in activity that can be technically
described as “hooting”. The pattern of symbolic behavior that then
manifested cannot, of course, be reduced to the expectations of
primatology. If it seems like an entirely predictable assertion of
dominance, as found among all the great apes, something is surely
being missed. That at least is the claim now being made (decorated
by a little immediate status signaling):
@Outsideness @HBDBibliography Author thinks you don't

understand article. Doesn't deny variation (I teach 19th c.
history of science btw).
— Michael Rectenwald (@drrectenwald) September 24,
2014
@Outsideness @HBDBibliography Most likely you're

reducing the political to the biological, a typical kind of
reductionism but also mistaken.
2014
The error of mistaking this expert hooting for the first step in an
argument was too tempting to resist. After all, if a professor of Global
Liberal Studies deigns to teach you about the limits of possible
biological understanding, it is only polite to listen attentively.
307
Reignition
Unfortunately, certain monkey juices were triggered by the chest-

thumping of GLS-prof., and I descended quickly into
obstreperousness:
@drrectenwald @HBDBibliography Politics has emergent

principles (game theory), but it's as reducible to biology as bio
is to chemistry.
— Outsideness (@Outsideness) September 24, 2014
@drrectenwald @HBDBibliography … Whenever a

supervenient level seems 'irreducible' it's because our
substrate theory is too crude.
Uh oh, look what’s happening now — it’s gibbering monkey

business political dialectic. GLS-prof. isn’t being even nominally
respected, there’s nothing remotely like a “please mount my butt
you hairy master” moment taking place, and it’s not hard to see that
GLS-p. isn’t getting enough of those from anywhere, so he’s kind of
desperate for a random dopamine hit. Time to really make it clear
that politics transcends biology, and anybody who thinks the
contrary better bend over quickly for a piece of hierarchically-
clarifying ass-punishment:
@Outsideness @HBDBibliography OK Kurzweil, or is it E.O.
308
Wilson you're mimicking? I suppose there's a "D" gene for

Democrat, and an "R" …
2014
Translation: So which serious alpha monkey like me person owns

you as their bitch? Politics is nothing like primate dominance.
Dumbass.
@drrectenwald @HBDBibliography You're right, what does

an idiot like E.O. Wilson know about Global Liberal Studies?
Translation: [*sarcastic counter-hoot*]
@Outsideness @HBDBibliography Wilson is brilliant. But I

don't need *you* to tell me what he and others like him think.
Presumptuous much?
2014
Translation: My buddy PROFESSOR Wilson wouldn’t even use

you as a doormat — so why am I even talking to you, impertinent
gamma wretch? It’s distracting me from serious politics and stuff.
There has to be some chimpanzee ass-play politics that isn’t quite
309
Reignition
this disgustingly stupid, but I’m guessing — not a lot.

Note: “Michael Rectenwald is professor in Global Liberal Studies
at New York University. He is the author of numerous essays and six
books.” He is widely respected by his peers in the field.
ADDED: After posting this I worried a little that it was too harsh.
The guy was probably just having a bad day. After all, no one “paid
to write and think” by a (somewhat) prestigious university could
possibly engage in these self-parodying dominance chimp-outs on a
regular basis, surely? Ooops:
@AlbertKropp @HBDBibliography @ad_bestias

@Outsideness None of you are worthy to wipe my ass, let
alone sit in my class.
2014
September 24, 2014
Order and V
Value
alue
A piece of machinery that reduces (local) disorder has value. It might
be a functional police force, a catallactic economic arrangement, or
a sociopolitical mechanism implementing dynamic geography (or
310
Patchwork, 1, 2, 3, 4). Others might be listed. Any complex adaptive

system works like this (until it ceases working). Since Schrödinger, it
has been taken as an abstract definition of life. In certain strands of
philosophy, it has also been taken as the complete, rigorous meaning
of a machine (as counterposed to a ‘gadget’ – which works only
within a larger machinic assemblage). Only by exporting entropy
does anything of even minimal complexity get to continue its
existence. The production of order is functionality in its most
elevated, teleological sense.
A piece of rhetoric which merely celebrates order, as something
nice to have, is worth nothing in itself. “We want order” is the “give
us free stuff” slogan of intellectually degenerated reaction. When
examined closely, it is indistinguishable from political pan-handling.
(Democracy has taught everyone how to beg.) It is unlikely that even
the most radically degraded libertarian would be shameless enough
to consider “wealth is good, poverty is bad” anything more than an
expression of sub-comic emotional incontinence. “Order is good,
chaos is bad” is a slogan of exactly equivalent merit. “We want order”
is just “we want money” at a superior level of generality. Monkeys
want peanuts, but we are reluctant to dignify their hungry hooting
with the label ‘political philosophy’.
Entropy dissipation is a problem. It might quite reasonably be
considered the problem. Any serious social theory is respected
insofar as it elicits the question: So how is entropy dissipated? The
311
Reignition
main current of Anglophone intellectual culture focuses tightly upon

it, in a broad lineage from Newtonian mechanics, the Scottish
Enlightenment, the science of heat, classical economics, and
Darwinian naturalism, into theories of complexity, distributed
systems, dynamic networks, and productive multiplicities.
Spontaneous order is the consistent topic. ‘Spontaneous’ means
only: Does not presuppose that which it is tasked with explaining.
If the genesis of order is not being theorized, order is merely being
assumed, and then consumed. The difference is between a supply
side problematic (“how is order practically produced?”) and an empty
demand (“we want more order”). The former is industrial, the latter
simply tyrannical, when it is anything at all beside vacuous noise.
Unless a pol-econ. theory can contribute to an explanation of the
production of order (dissipation of entropy), it is wasting everyone’s
time. “But I really want order” is just silliness. It’s astounding that it
could ever be thought otherwise.
March 7, 2016
Wealth Space
From Szabo’s critically-important exploration of collectibles:
312
At the extreme upper left-hand corner is modern money – used

purely as a medium of exchange and obligation satisfaction, and with
high velocity, typically several transactions per month. The
predominant such media in a culture also usually becomes its of
account. At the opposite (southeast) extreme are pure stores of
value – seldom if ever alienated, they usually change ownership only
at death. At the northeast extreme are pure collectibles – a low-
313
Reignition
velocity (a few to a few dozen transfers per human lifetime) medium

of obligation satisfaction and exchange, but also a store and display
of wealth. At the southwest extremely are immediate consumables,
such as food obtained from foraging in cultures that do not preserve
or store their food.
September 3, 2016
314
CHAPTER TWO - DISTRIBUTION,

FRA
FRAGMENT
GMENTA
ATION AND TR
TRUST
UST
Pattern Recognition
There has been enough productive history to know what functional
social systems look like, and the basic common factor is obvious.
Institutions advance by substituting for trust.
(To the extent we still have any of these things …)
— We have market capitalism because businesspeople can’t be
trusted.
— We have experimental science because neither truth intuitions
nor scientists can be trusted.
— We have constitutional republicanism because neither political
leaders nor the citizenry can be trusted.
— We have freedom of conscience because priests can’t be trusted.
— We have common law because neither legislators nor judges can
be trusted.
— We have the blogosphere because the media can’t be trusted.
— We have gold coins buried in the garden because bankers can’t be
315
Reignition
trusted.
— We have basements packed with semi-automatic rifles because
state law enforcement can’t be trusted.
Siding with intelligence has nothing at all to do with trusting,
liking, or respecting intelligent people. It is intelligent people,
typically, who run the engines of stupidity. ‘Trust, but
verify‘ is politely euphemistic, and — in truth — wholly inadequate.
Distrust, and test, test, test … to destruction wherever possible.
Three theses:
(1) The robust sophistication (or design quality) of any society or
social institution is inversely proportional to the the trust it
demands. This is not, of course, to be confused with the trust it earns.
(2) In any society capable of institution building, distrust is the
principal driver of innovation. Systematization and automation, in
general, incarnate distrust.
(3) Productive distrust reaches its apotheosis in the Internet, which
routes around everything and everybody that has ever been
believed.
March 18, 2013
Quote notes (#68)

Pat Buchanan asks: Is Europe Cracking Up? His tour of disintegration
316
takes in Ukraine, France, Britain, Belgium and Spain, but …

… the most startling news on the nationalist front last week came
in Venice and the Veneto region, where 89 percent of a large turnout
in a non-binding referendum voted to secede from Italy and re-
establish the Venetian republic that vanished in 1866.
Exulted Luca Zaia of the separatist Northern League, “The will for
secession is growing very strong. We are only at the Big Bang of the
movement — but revolutions are born of hunger and we are now
hungry. Venice can now escape.”
The proposed “Repubblica Veneta” would embrace five million
inhabitants of Veneto. Should it succeed in seceding, Lombardy and
Trentino would likely follow, bringing about a partition of Italy.
Sardinia is also reportedly looking for an exit.
Buchanan’s preferred term ‘nationalism’ is ambiguous in this
context, since it can mean either integration or disintegration. After
all, it was Italian ‘nationalism’ that built this self-dismantling monster.
Increasingly, it’s the fissile aspect — nationality as ethnic splintering
and escape from something larger — that’s driving the process. How
many micro-nationalities remain as yet undiscovered?
ADDED: A (libertarian-secessionist) voice from Italy.
March 26, 2014
317
Reignition
Wolfendale vv.. Urban F

Future
uture
Pete Wolfendale has a version here. There were some threading
issues, so this is the Urban Future version:
An appropriately derisive analysis of neoreaction: http://t.co/

77M0JohrMd
— pete wolfendale (@deontologistics) May 24, 2014
As I mentioned at the #accelerationism workshop yesterday:

old school fascism uses capitalism as a means to nostalgic
anti-modernism…
…whereas neoreactionaries propose nostalgic anti-

modernism as a means to defend capitalism. If nothing else
this is sillier than fascism.
@deontologistics I realize the neofeudal types make it easy

for you, but this constant reversion to BDSM political
dialectics …
@deontologistics … is an evasion of the real challenge: Exit

over Voice. https://t.co/PswTiiCXHm
318
Modernity threatening your libertarian fantasies of free-

wheeling capitalist accumulation? Why not try monarchism?
@deontologistics Both poles of the ideological spectrum

have attachments to (distinct) ideals of emancipation.
@deontologistics … Neither will abandon them causally,

however much they are derided as 'silly'.
[Not “causally” but “casually”.]
@deontologistics They've been watching too much Game of

Thrones basically.
— pjebleak (@pjebleak) May 24, 2014
@pjebleak It’s more like they’ve read Neil Stephenson’s Snow

Crash/Diamond Age and thought: “that’s a dystopian
diaspora I can get behind!”
@deontologistics @pjebleak Diamond Age is a dystopia? (It's
319
Reignition
easy to see why no meeting of minds is likely here.)

@UF_blog @pjebleak It does a good job of showing the

difference between advancement in industrial technology
and social technology.
@deontologistics @pjebleak The human organism is highly

write-protected, so 'social technology' is something of a
misleading metaphor.
@UF_blog @pjebleak The organism, yes, but hardly the social

structures that are composed on top of it. Most of the write-
protection there…
@UF_blog @pjebleak …is itself a form of social technology

(e.g., Nietzschean ascetic ideals, etc.).
@deontologistics @pjebleak 'Social structures' are to some

considerable extent hard-coded in organisms — that's what
"social animal" means.
320
@UF_blog @pjebleak No, ‘social animal’ means the capacity

to interface so as to create social structures.
@UF_blog @pjebleak There’s a crucial difference between

saying ‘there is a structure of social structure’ and inferring
from this that…
@UF_blog @pjebleak …particular social structures are hard-

wired.
@deontologistics @pjebleak This is a Levi-Strauss argument

that I don't find particularly convincing.
@deontologistics @pjebleak The left is always going to

maximally emphasize the plasticity of social forms, the right
the opposite.
@deontologistics @pjebleak … It would be deluded to assume
321
Reignition
that such emphases will pass as uncontroversial outside their

own constituency.
@UF_blog @pjebleak It’s a simple logical point. The question

of how much social structure is encoded is empirical, and
well, it doesn’t…
@UF_blog @pjebleak …look to be all that much.

@deontologistics @pjebleak It looks like a lot to me.

@UF_blog @pjebleak To use @benedict’s preferred terms,

you’re confusing generatively entrenched social platforms
with biological codes.
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict Biological codes

determine a highly restrictive landscape of functional social
models.
322
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict … Societies explore

that landscape, at different speeds. Attractor basins usually
capture them.
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict Biological necessity is the

last resort of scoundrels.
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict Your team will no

doubt agree with you.
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict So the tautology goes.

@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict Over-emphasizing

social plasticity is a standard utopian error.
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict Yes, unless it is a call to

experimentally explore a wider space of possible social
technologies.
323
Reignition
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict I'm very supportive

of that. As long as it's based on Dynamic Geography, with exit,
and local failure.
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict Communist social

experimentation (for e.g.), if properly localized, would be an
excellent thing to see.
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict Reciprocal liberation

to try different things out is an attractive deal (but not
holding my breath).
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict You definitions of social

experimentation are pretty archaic though. Fundamentally
about competition…
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict Competition is

'archaic'? I thought you guys believed in primitive
communism.
324
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict See next tweet. Internet

glitch.
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict …between geographically

distinct nation states or analogs thereof. Biology is hardly
that limiting.
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict Are you ruling out

the possibility of competitive and non-competitive options,
side-by-side?
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict … If so, then of

course there's no possible deal to be made.
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict Split up. Use dynamic

geography to radicalize our experiments. Quit universalizing.
Is it that hard?
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict … The whole point is

not having to agree. (Because we won't.)
325
Reignition
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict Quit universalising

sociologically, by universalising biologically?
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict Quit universalizing in

general. Let each society believe what it wants. Do your own
thing.
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict ‘Each society’ is where the

biologically justified archaisms lie.
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict Dynamic geography

would make a society a legacy of revealed preferences. No
biological theory needed.
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict You seem to be justifying

the geopolitical war of all against all as the only legitimate
form of disagreement.
326
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict If there's a master-

narrative being imposed above geo-political fragmentation
itself, this won't work.
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict Indeed, it’s pretty important

to see that struggle between fragmented poleis is not
disagreement at all.
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict This 'struggle'

business is coming entirely from you. Why does dynamic
geography imply struggle?
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict Competition bottoms out in

struggle unless limited by a competitive framework. Is DG
such a framework?
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict It seems to me that we can

develop better (socio-technological) frameworks for
disagreement than fragmentation.
327
Reignition
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict That isn't going to

happen, because the "frameworks" you like will remain
massively controversial.
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict Unlike GEOPOLITICAL

FRAGMENTATION.
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict Sadly, it's going to be

messy. It seems the Left won't ever tolerate anything it can't
control.
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict Because calling for your

own personal nation state to secure your personal freedom
isn’t being a control freak?
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict Freedom is control

freakery? Anyway, at least the left logic is clear.
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict Thinking that freedom is

getting everything your own way is pretty much control
328
freakery, yes.
***
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict A laissez-faire

capitalist Phyle would rather ignore its communist neighbor
than 'struggle' with it.
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict And now we’re back to the

benefits of our preferred phylums.
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict But you don't want

to be there? Why?
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict If the benefits of DG depend

upon the characteristics of the Phyle’s you prefer then you’re
not really…
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict …providing an argument for

DG now, are you?
329
Reignition
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict The argument for

DG is that every Phyle can do what it wants, succeed or fail,
experiment.
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict Including struggle with one

another outside the bounds of any framework for
disagreement?
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict That's as good as it's

going to get. It's hardly likely that every crazed experiment
will work out.
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict Struggle, struggle,

struggle … it's exhausting. Won't your Phyle have anything
better to do?
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict And we’re back to Phyles

rather than DG.
330
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict Use whatever

language you like for a unit of geopolitical fragmentation.
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict If you’re arguing that human

nature necessitates geopolitical fragmentation, but aren’t
willing to discuss…
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict …the worst possible

outcomes of such fragmentation (i.e., struggle over
disagreement) you seem to have a bit…
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict …of a double standard going

on.
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict At least it's clear

what this is about. You guys want to strengthen the
dialectical net. We want out.
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict We both know this

won't be settled by argument. It will be settled by escape
331
Reignition
attempts, succeed or fail.

@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict Perhaps, but this hardly

invalidates the argument, especially given the supposed
importance of ‘disagreement’.
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict What argument? The

argument that arguments have to be settled before anyone is
let out of the room?
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict That IS communism.

I'm seriously OK with people doing that stuff, but only if they
localize it.
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict The argument that anyone

should be allowed to appropriate the resources necessary to
build their personal ark.
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict I’m OK with laissez faire

capitalism on personal arks. Not so much with its use to
332
justify their construction.

@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict I'm truly grateful for

this discussion, because it's explaining all the blood-spatter
down the road.
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict So it goes. Blood-spatter.

First up against the wall. etc. etc.
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict The necessity for

'struggle' is your schtick. We just want Out.
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict … Free Exit from our

side to your communist utopia, so no "up-against-the-wall"
necessary.
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict We would, of course,

replace all domestic political argument with "if you want
communism, go there".
333
Reignition
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict And the dynamic geography

comes with guaranteed open borders, freedom of movement,
and transit costs?
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict "Transit costs"? Oh,

come on! Immigration freedoms, I imagine, would be non-
universal.
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict Whatever can be

done to build Exit security, should be. It's you guys who have
the problem record there
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict This makes Exit a political

framework, not simply a one off event. Overarching, not
parochial.
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict Yes, it's complicated.

Probably inevitable people would need to choose their Phyle
carefully.
334
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict If they screw up, and

get locked into a North Korea, there's not much that could be
done.
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict … If the historical

record is anything to go by, this won't be a problem for
commercial republics.
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict Collectivist

experiments, on the other hand? That will be for those who
go that route to sort out.
***
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict It's the fact that

you're absolutely determined not to allow Exit that makes
the nastiness inevitable.
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict I’m really not absolutely

determined. There are speculative scenarios that could work.
But it distorts…
335
Reignition
@UF_blog @pjebleak @benedict …the discussion of more

realistic political possibilities like a warped ideological lens.
@deontologistics @pjebleak @benedict This is the meta-

politics of the 21st century. The warpage has scarcely begun.
May 24, 2014
Counterfactual Cyberspace
Internet retro-futurism is taken to a whole new level by Andrew L.
Russell:
What happened to the “beautiful dream” [of Open Systems
Interconnection]? While the Internet’s triumphant story has been
well documented by its designers and the historians they have
worked with, OSI has been forgotten by all but a handful of veterans
of the Internet-OSI standards wars. To understand why, we need to
dive into the early history of computer networking, a time when the
vexing problems of digital convergence and global interconnection
were very much on the minds of computer scientists, telecom
336
engineers, policymakers, and industry executives. And to appreciate

that history, you’ll have to set aside for a few minutes what you
already know about the Internet. Try to imagine, if you can, that the
Internet never existed. …
The article is rich enough to support a number of take-away
lessons. The most compelling from the perspective of this blog: the
real benefits of bypassing discussion are huge. We got a TCP/IP
Internet because OSI was discussing the future far too widely and
comprehensively. The route that avoids the talking shop is the one
history tends to take.
December 8, 2014
Distrust
Ev ery public institution of an
Every anyy value is based on distrust
distrust.
That’s an elementary proposition, as far as this blog is concerned.
It’s worth stating nakedly, since it is probably less obvious to others.
That much follows from it is unlikely to be controversial, even among
those who find it less than compelling, or simply repulsive.
One major source of obscurity is the category of ‘high trust
cultures’ — with which neoreactionaries tend naturally to identify.
There is plenty to puzzle over here, admittedly. This post will make
no serious effort to even scratch the surface of the questions that
337
Reignition
arise. Instead, it contends that the culture primarily commended for

its trustfulness has been conspicuously innovative in the
development of trustless institutions. These begin with the
foundations of Occidental reason, and especially the rigorous
criterion of logical and mathematical proof. A proof substitutes for
trust. In place of a simple declaration, it presents (a demanded)
demonstration. The compliant response to radical distrust has
epitomized Western conceptions of rationality since classical
antiquity.
The twin pillars of industrial modernity (i.e. of capitalism) are
trustless institutions. Natural science is experimental because it is
distrustful, and thus demonstrative. It raises the classical demand for
proof to a higher level of empirical skepticism, by extending distrust
even to rational constructions, in cases where they cannot be
critically tested against an experimental criterion. Only pure
mathematics, and the most scrupulously formalized logical
propositions, escape this demand for replicable evidence. The
ultimate ground of the natural scientific enterprise is the
presupposition that scientists should in no case be trusted, except
through their reproducible results. Anything that requires belief is
not science, but something else. Similarly, the market mechanism is
an incarnation of trustless social organization. Caveat emptor.
Capitalists, like scientists, exist to be distrusted. Whatever of their
works cannot survive testing to destruction in the market place
338
deservedly perish. Reputation, in its modern version, has to be

produced through demonstration.
Prior to its demotic ruination — through positive trust in the
people — distinctively modern republican governance was similarly
founded in distrust. As formulated by John Adams (1772): “There is
danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to
be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.”
It has not been an excess of distrust that has brought this sage
recommendation to nought.
For those seeking higher authority, Psalm 118:8-9 (ESV): “It is
better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man. It is better to
take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes.” (My usual fanatical
trust in the KJV betrayed me on this occasion.)
An appeal for trust is a reliably fatal failure mode for all public
institutions. Trustless transaction is the future, and its name is
Bitcoin. The deep cultural momentum is already familiar. Total
depravity is the key to world historical predestination, and it is
routed through the blockchain.
December 10, 2014
Trust W
Webs
ebs
The systems of governance native to the Internet Epoch are going
339
Reignition
to emerge out of this. Anybody who is trying to build institutions

today, of whatever kind*, would be wise to immerse themselves in
the way this stuff works. It will take time to shape the order of the
world, but it isn’t going away. The same can very much not be said for
the nation states of the Gutenberg Era, whose recession is already
unmistakable.
Virtually speaking, there is nothing serious left for the
Westphalian state to do. Of course, anybody expecting these relics
to die tidily is almost certainly deluding themselves. Making the
Westphalian order set the world to the torch. Its unmaking is unlikely
to be much easier.
*[ahem]
ADDED: Related —
Here's why bitcoin will be bigger than the internet http://t.co/

CsxfUMvf3U via @businessinsider @xapo
— Wences Casares (@wences) February 11, 2015
February 11, 2015
Quotable (#67)
Private property has no real legitimacy, argues David Graeber:
340
Basically, we assume that market relations are natural, but you

need a huge institutional structure to make people behave the way
that economists say they are “supposed” to behave. So, for example,
think about the way the consumer market works. The market is
supposed to work on grounds of pure competition. Nobody has
moral ties to each other other than to obey the rules. But, on the
other hand, people are supposed to do anything they can to get as
much as possible off the other guy — but won’t simply steal the stuff
or shoot the person.
Historically, that’s just silly; if you don’t care at all about a guy, you
might as well steal his stuff. In fact, they’re encouraging people to
act essentially how most human societies, historically, treated their
enemies — but to still never resort to violence, trickery or theft.
Obviously that’s not going to happen. You can only do that if you set
up a very strictly enforced police force.
In the absence of a moral bond, who’s going to stick to the rules,
when they could cheat? It’s a consistent viewpoint, in its own way.
Merge with me morally, or I’m just going to steal your stuff. And
people wonder where the impulse to algorithmic governance comes
from.
March 7, 2015
341
Reignition
Con
Convvergence
Haidt: “We argue that the social conditions that promote complaints
of oppression and victimization overlap with those that promote
case-building attempts to attr
attract
act third parties
parties. When such social
conditions are all present in high degrees, the result is a culture of
victimhood in which individuals and groups display high sensitivity
to slight, have a tendency to handle conflicts through complaints to
third parties
parties, and seek to cultivate an image of being victims who
deserve assistance.”
Bitcoin: “What is needed is an electronic payment system based
on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing
parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a
trusted third party
party.”
(XS emphasis in both.)
Insignificant coincidence? Or a key to the crucial conflict nodes of
the 21st century?
This is the thesis I’m tempted by:
… Abject dependence on "third parties" is the general form of

civilizational decay.
September 9, 2015
342
Age of F
Frragmentation
More inflection point material, this time macro-political, and Europe-
focused, beginning:
Perhaps the greatest academic growth area over the past twenty
years or so has been “European integration studies”, a field that has
both analysed and boosted support for the European “project”.
Almost all of its practitioners have proceeded from the assumption
that the process of integration is – must be – “irreversible”. It is the
intellectual equivalent of the principle of the European acquis
communautaire by which powers, once surrendered or pooled,
cannot be retrieved. Or, more unkindly, one might see it as a
“European Brezhnev doctrine”, by which socialism, being inevitable,
could not be allowed to fail in any country in which it was already
established.
But what if this is not so? What if, as the Croatian political scientist
Josip Glaurdic, an expert on the collapse of Yugoslavia, once quipped,
what we really need is a school of “European disintegration studies”?
…
(Don’t be put off by the leftist publication credentials from
reading the whole thing.)
November 10, 2015
343
Reignition
Quote note (#211)

At Nathan Cook‘s new blog:
Bitcoin is not a Marxist reification. Bitcoin reifies in the rare sense
of ‘eex nihilo
nihilo, actually create a physical object’. Bitcoin reifies
property
property. Property before bitcoin is an abstraction, a social relation
treated provisionally as an object, but never attaining that status
(Property
Property is Impossible
Impossible). Bitcoin quite literally makes property into
something physical. Anything that can store a private key and keep
it secret, and can use it to create and emit transactions, can own
Bitcoin. The relation ‘X owns Bitcoin’ is spatially local and temporally
persistent; in other words, it more closely resembles relations like
‘X is made of wood’ or ‘X weighs 20 kilograms’ than it does relations
like ‘X is a dollar billionaire’. Property is possible—when property is
Bitcoin.
Prior to functional, distributed crypto, ‘property’ was nothing but
confused political pleading. Now it’s something else.
ADDED: Still a rocky road ahead. “What was meant to be a new,
decentralised form of money that lacked ‘systemically important
institutions’ and ‘too big to fail’ has become something even worse: a
system completely controlled by just a handful of people. Worse still,
the network is on the brink of technical collapse.”
January 14, 2016
344
Twitter cuts (#112)
What a mysterious people, that have two different words for

Nation and State https://t.co/eifDuanDcI
— Harry Stopes (@HarryStopes) April 29, 2016
The point doesn’t really need decompressing, but just in case —
@RichardHaass @nytimes we English speakers also have one

word for nations and another for states. They are 'nations'
and 'states'.
— G.I. Poe (@Nevidge20) April 30, 2016
When a proposition nation serves as the global model of the state,

such discriminations are easily blurred. The underlying stresses have
become far more visible recently. (Language figures, ironically
doubled, in the irruption of ‘excessive’ national questions.)
The last time such a mismatch was recognized, in the early 20th
century, Wilsonian dreams seemed available, as a fix. After much
subsequent unpleasantness, the problem was eclipsed. We can now
see, however, that it never disappeared.
(If ‘Nation State’ is a pseudo-pleonasm, we can expect diagonal
lines of political philosophy to open as it cracks.)
April 30, 2016
345
Reignition
Proposition Nations
Xenosystems likes proposition nations so much it wants to see a lot
more of them.
America is a problem for the world for two main (and conflicting)
reasons:
1) Its proposition contains enough productive innovation to be
scary. Independence war, foundational liberalism, constitutionally-
restricted government, and laissez-faire capitalism have been a
memetic-cocktail-from-hell for those in thrall to competitively-
inferior ideas. But, undoing all of this, is the legacy of the American
Civil War (in particular) —
2) The suppression of the propositional principle — i.e.
geopolitical ideological sorting — under an idealization of national
unity. Upon this pyre the liberal tradition has been incinerated, until
it exists only as a charred parody of itself. The Proposition is by now
little more than the State of the Union. Mandatory agreement,
within an undivided territory, is policed by the democratic
mechanism. That we remain one is left as the only strictly axiomatic
propositional content (as the Trump and Sanders presidential
candidacies in their different ways illustrate).
Spatial Metapolitics recommends that America do both Trumpist
ethno-nationalism, and Sanderista democratic socialism, and a large
number of other (more interesting) things, even also more stupid
346
ones, if such can be devised. The critical point is the precise inverse
of the late-modern axiom: As long as mandatory unity is dissolved,
ideological tolerance can be extended without definite limit — across
a disintegrated territory.
First-order ideological preferences, elaborated under an
assumption of dominant unity, are a trap entirely irrespective of their
specific content.
Here’s a proposition: Abolish the Union. Only disintegration is
worth doing.
May 17, 2016
Quotable (#177)
The fatal illusion continues:
If every EU member were prepared to make concessions to the
concerns of others, everyone could emerge better off.
Confusing integration with a global optimization process is the
single most calamitous error of modern times.
July 6, 2016
347
Reignition
Quote note (#337)

Hengest on Bill Bishop and Tiebout Sorting among the (in this case
specifically Anglo-Saxon) nations of America:
Rather than [the] borders dissolving between cultures and
populations, the various nations are actually becoming further
differentiated with time. This concept is demonstrated in The Big
Sort by Bill Bishop. Bishop argues that Americans are segregating
themselves into like-minded geographic regions at increasing rates
with the onset and ease of long-distance travel. Basically, the various
Anglo-Saxon regions are more strongly becoming themselves.
If this is actually the trend, the motor of dynamic geography
(running Patchwork-type geopolitical arrangements) should work
fine.
There needs to be much more work done in the field of Entropic
and Negentropic Trends Emerging in Dynamic Social Distributions. It
would tell us who’s going to win this thing.
March 1, 2017
Quote note (#343)

The new great divergence:
Increasing polarization, even fragmentation, of society is
348
becoming apparent in US politics. There is a sense that society is

separating into parts, each of which is listening only to other
members of that group. The separation between groups can enable
them to deviate even further in values and perspectives. …
(Via.)
That’s the process. Nothing else is necessary. The only task
remaining is to accelerate it.
March 17, 2017
Disintegr
Disintegration
ation
According to a certain construction of cultural history, to which the
natural sciences have often seemed attached, religion is essentially
conceived as pre-scientific naturalistic explanation. Seen this way,
religions are comparatively primitive cosmologies. This is what
makes them vulnerable to scientific progress. A Galileo, or a Darwin,
advances into their core territory, mortally wounding them in the
heart. A somewhat sociologically-indistinct notion of “science” is
envisaged as religion’s natural successor.
However plausible (or implausible) this narrative is found to be, it
matters. By way of it, scientific ascendancy acquires its foundational
myth. Crucially, this mythical power does not depend upon any kind
of rigorous scientific validation. No one has ever been under
349
Reignition
compulsion to put it to the test. Everything pre-modern — and even

profoundly archaic — in the modernist enterprise runs through it. It
provides a tacit infrastructure of deep belief.
To refer to “mythic science” is not positively skeptical, still less
polemical. For scientific ideas to acquire the status of myth is a
matter of cultural potency, supplementary to whatever epistemic
validity they retain. Scientific concepts do not become any less
scientific by also becoming mythic. They can, however, on occasions
sustain mythic power disproportionate to their strictly scientific
legitimacy. The dominating apex of a culture is some more-or-less
scientific cosmology.
This is what the word “nature” has primordially conveyed. An
ultimate object of cognitive affirmation is promoted through it. This
is what we believe. Things are this way, and not another way (or only
another way elsewhere).
We ask here, then, as innocent scientific pagans: Which way are
things?
The best current cosmology is accelerationist, and
disintegrationist. To put the matter crudely — and ultimately
untenably — the expansion of the universe is speeding up, and apart.
Rather than being decelerated by gravity, subsequent to an original
explosion, the rate of cosmic inflation has increased. Some yet-
unknown force is overwhelming gravity, and red-shifting all distant
objects. Quite recently baptized “dark energy,” this force is thought
350
to account for seventy percent of physical reality.

Compared to this strongly confirmed discovery of accelerating
fragmentation, the notion of an underlying integral “universe” looks
increasingly like an unsustainable mythological relic.
“Unsustainable,” that is, even in terms of consistent scientific myth,
and also more practically.
The distance from which information can be received, or to which
it can be broadcast, over any period of time has a boundary set by
the speed of light. The space-time horizon of reality for any entity
is determined by this “light-cone.” Beyond it, there is only the
absolutely incommunicable. A light-cone is thus, among other things,
a strict delimitation of power projection, understood as practical
unity. The process leads from general relativity to absolute
disintegration.
In his intellectual history of relativistic physics,[1] Peter Gallison
connects the problem of relativity to that of imperial management.
Synchronization is the precondition for any sophisticated process
of coordination. Even under (compact) terrestrial conditions, the
extreme finitude of the speed of light posed a significant technical
problem for governance at global-imperial scale. Telegraphic
networks, in particular, demanded technical correction for
relativistic effects.
By irresistible extrapolation, we can see that domination is only
ever able to mask processes of escape. There can be no Cosmic
351
Reignition
Imperium. Space does not tolerate it. This is merely a science

fictionesque fact, until it is mythologized.
Dark energy is tearing the cosmos apart. Eventually its pieces
will mutually depart from each others’ light-cones. They will then be
nothing to each other ever again. This is a finding of extraordinary
consequence. At the greatest scale of empirical objectivity, unity has
no future. The “universe” is an unrealistic model. Everything now
known about the cosmos suggests that fragmentation is basic.
Cosmology thus provides a model of disintegration that is
remarkable for its extremity. It characterizes pieces that have
nothing at all except a shared past in common, propelled into
absolute non-communication. No political conception of separation
has ever yet reached this limit.
Some fascinating results quickly fall out of the extrapolation. The
cosmological evidence our scientific tradition has been able to draw
upon will eventually cease to be available. A future intelligent
species could not build any comparable model of the universe upon
empirical foundations. Whatever counted as the whole, for it, would
in fact be only a fragment (we can already see). Distant galactic
clusters would have become matters for sheer speculation. The very
possibility of empirical science would have been demonstrably
bounded in space and time.
Geoff Manaugh calls it “the coming amnesia.” He remarks on a talk
by science fiction writer Alastair Reynolds:
352
As the universe expands over hundreds of billions of years,

Reynolds explained, there will be a point, in the very far
future, at which all galaxies will be so far apart that they will
no longer be visible from one another. […] Upon reaching that
moment, it will no longer be possible to understand the
universe’s history—or perhaps even that it had one—as all
evidence of a broader cosmos outside of one’s own galaxy
will have forever disappeared. Cosmology itself will be
impossible. […] In such a radically expanded future universe,
Reynolds continued, some of the most basic insights offered
by today’s astronomy will be unavailable. After all, he points
out, ‘you can’t measure the redshift of galaxies if you can’t
see galaxies. And if you can’t see galaxies, how do you even
know that the universe is expanding? How would you ever
determine that the universe had had an origin?’
Reynolds was drawing upon an article entitled “The End of

Cosmology?” by Lawrence M. Krauss and Robert J. Scherrer,
published in Scientific American (2008). This article summarized
itself in the sub-head: “An accelerating universe wipes out traces of
its own origins.”
The extrapolation can be pushed further. If a far-future scientific
culture can be seen to be structurally-deprived of evidence essential
for realistic appraisal of cosmic scale, can we be confident our
353
Reignition
situation is fundamentally different? Is it not more probable that the

absolute or unsurpassable locality of scientific perspective is a basic
situation? How likely is it that we can see universally — in principle
— when we can already see how others will in the future be unable
to? On the basis of available evidence, we have to envisage a future
civilization that is utterly deluded about its own structural
parochialism, confident in its ability to finally shrug off perspectival
limitation. The most esteemed scientific minds in such a culture
might be expected to dismiss any suggestion of inaccessible cosmic
regions as groundless metaphysics. It seems merely hubristic to
refrain from turning this scenario back upon ourselves. If universal
cosmology is to become impossible, the default hypothesis should be
that it already has.[2]
Natural science exhibits a tragic structure. Pursuing only its own
essential methods, it finds — through cosmology — a compelling case
for its large-scale unreliability. The acquisition of universal insight
through rigorous empirical investigation appears cosmically
obstructed.
Science is thus eventually bound to be fundamentally localized.
The “locality” at issue here is not merely the weak particularism of
an option taken against the global, or universal. Rather, it is the very
horizon of any possible universalistic ambition that finds itself
rigorously constricted, and dismantled. Localism, thus understood, is
not a choice, but a destiny, and even a fatality already imposed. At its
354
greatest scales, reality is shattered. Unity exists only to be broken.

The principle of isotropy holds that there are no privileged
orientations in space. Together with the presumption of the
homogeneity of space, it composes the Cosmological Principle. We
are surely entitled to an isochronic analog, in which a fate observable
in the order of time can be assumed equally to already be behind us.
We have a cosmos still, and perennially, then, but no longer a
universe. The cosmos we, as moderns, subscribe to under cultural
obligation is in fact the manifest disintegration of the apparent
universe.
Our topic gears down from inflationary cosmology through
thermodynamics. We are talking of diversification, or heterogenesis,
after all – and that is the rigorous negative of entropy increase.
Homogenization is entropy. The two concepts are not strictly
distinguishable. What was discovered under the name of entropy
was the destruction of difference — whether variation in
temperature (Clausius and Carnot) or, later, variation in particle
distribution (Boltzmann and Gibbs). Heterogenesis is local, the
second law of thermodynamics tells us. At the truly global level –
where no inputs or outputs can occur – deterioration necessarily
prevails.
To get ahead of ourselves, we will find that the West has made
of entropy a God, One whose final law is that everything shall be
the same. It is a false god. The ultimate cosmo-physical problem –
355
Reignition
How is negative entropy possible? – attests to that. We know that

heterogenesis is no weaker than its opposite, even if we do not know
how.
Cosmological disintegration is more widely echoed among the
natural sciences. Perhaps most importantly, The Origin of Species
has disintegration as its basic topic, as its name already underscores.
Darwinism — which is to say the whole of scientific biology — has
speciation as its primary object, and speciation is splitting.
Despite recognition of various exotic lateral connections, from
symbioses to retroviral genomic insertions, it is the divergence of
genetic lineages that best defines life at the largest scales. Meldings
are anomalous, and in any case impossible unless diversity has first
been produced. The ingredients of any heterogeneous coalition
presume prior diversification.[3]
Disintegrationism in the biological sciences amounts to a science
in itself, named cladistics.[4] Cladistics formalizes the method of
rigorous Darwinian classification. The identity of any biological type
is determined by the particular series of schismatic events it has
passed through. To be human is to be a primate, a mammal, a reptile,
a bony fish, and a vertebrate, among other, more basic, classes. The
sum of what you have broken from defines what you are.
A “clade” is a shard. It is a group, of any scale, determined by
secession from a lineage. The point of differentiation between clades
corresponds to their most recent (i.e. last) common ancestor.
356
Crucially, therefore, all descendants of a clade belong to that clade,

which encompasses any number of sub-clades. The production of
subclades (origin of species) is called “radiation.” It tends to proceed
through serial bifurcation, since simultaneous complex cladistic
fragmentation events are comparatively exotic. Successive simple
branchings typically capture diversification. The stakes of it not
doing so are not huge.
Cladistics can be identified with a rigorization of taxonomic
nomenclature. A system of names writes a cladogram, which is to
say a model of evolutionary history, and of biological relatedness.
Any cladogram is an evolutionary hypothesis. It proposes a particular
order of splitting. Any such proposed order is empirically revisable.
Cladistics maps the whole of disintegrationism below the
cosmological level, and perhaps even up to it. Naturally, it is
supremely controversial. The full scope of its provocation has yet to
be understood. Insofar as cladistics is explanatory, however, much
follows. Notably, identity is conceived as essentially schismatic, and
being is apprehended fundamentally as a structure of inheritance.
Historical linguistics fell naturally into a cladistic mode. Linguistic
‘families’ shared essential characteristics with their biological
template. They proliferated by sub-division, providing the material
for a classification schema. It was upon this linguistic taxonomy that
racial groupings were first systematically determined. The
“Yamnaya” — still today more widely known as “Aryans” — were
357
Reignition
originally identified through the cladistics of Indo-European

languages. Their pattern of radiation was marked by a tree-like
linguistic diversification.
Differential anthropology was drawn in cladograms. Trees,
phylogenetic order, language families, genealogies, actual (massively
extended) families — it was all extremely coherent. Here, too,
phenomena of fusion, lateral cross-contamination, and convergence
— while by no means absent — were evidently secondary and
derivative.
Linguistic diversification looks like a process of schismatic
ethnogenesis. As peoples branch out, they mutually differentiate.
The origin of peoples is only origin of species at higher resolution —
the abstract pattern is the same.
The concrete mechanism of speciation typically involves the
isolation of populations, and in this way becomes — very recently —
political. There is a politics of “invasive species” and anthropic bio-
dispersal, but this is not especially rancorous, or significantly
polarizing. The case of human population isolation is very different.
During this process of politicization, the exogamic radicalism of
North-West European populations has been sublimed into a
universal ideology.
Since the subject of race tends to produce extreme ideological
and emotional disturbance today, it might be preferable to consider
variegated domestic animals, as the English naturalistic tradition was
358
inclined to do. Not only sound analogy but also balance, or true
moderation is to be found in doing so. Since, in our contemporary
cultural context the influence of country life has notably receded,
and with it the sense of vivid distinction among cultivated species,
dogs serve us as by far the most illustrative examples.
A world without mongrels would be a poorer world. Mongrels are
often advantaged by special and even superior qualities. The Golden
Doodle, for instance, is as exalted as any canine type that exists. Such
crosses add to the diversity of the world. This is fully consistent with
a basic process through which the world is enriched by diverging dog
breeds, in which “dogs in general” is an increasingly uninformative
category. There is not – yet – any ideology directed to global canine
genetic homogenization.
Diversity is good, which is to say robust, and innovative (at least).
The ecological consensus can be trusted in this regard. Invasive
species are detested because they lower diversity, not because they
raise it. Heterogenesis is at all times the superior ambition. Yet
diversification — the production of diversity — is a peculiarly
neglected topic in our contemporary social sciences. The mantra of
diversity is coupled with almost complete indifference, and even
strategic negligence, in this regard. Obligatory public celebration of
diversity accompanies, and covers, its programmatic practical
extirpation. Mankind, it has been authoritatively decided, is one, and
destined only to be ever more so. Genetic partition is today
359
Reignition
considered tantamount to a human-rights violation.[5]

Our supreme orthodoxy is that it would be terrible almost beyond
contemplation not to already be and become yet more One. We
might be tempted to call this faith monohumanism. That mankind
shall be a unity is its fundamental doctrine. It cannot be sufficiently
emphasized that this is far less an empirical observation than a moral
and political project, in which racial entropy has been elevated to a
sacred obligation. The radical — as opposed to merely conservative
— alternative to this vision is found only in science fiction.[6]
Preservation of human diversity is a staple of dissident
ethnopolitics, with “Beige World” increasingly perceived as a
coercive ideal. A typically inchoate resistance to racial entropy is
the central mobilizing factor in such cases, though one regrettably
afflicted by an immoderate fetishization of mandatory racial purity.
At worst – and not uncommonly – this reaction against
monohumanism has come to see all contributions to human genetic
diversity through racial crossing as an avatar of coercive
homogenization. The balanced response, to repeat the lesson of the
dogs, is that a world of tendential speciation or increasing genetic
diversity is by no compelling necessity a world hostile to mutts.
Over the last 60,000 years, human genetic divergence has been
overwhelmingly the dominant process. Conspicuous fragmentation
of modern humans into genetically distinct sub-species has been the
basic pattern. It is a process worthy of ecological celebration, and
360
even techno-industrial acceleration. Despite the fondest hopes of

the present secular church, there is no chance it will be terminally
dispelled.
“Globalism” is a word that, while ideologically contested, is of
uncontested ideological weight. It might be defined, with minimal
tendentiousness, as seeking the direction of policy from a
perspective in accordance with the whole. Stubbornly partial
orientations are its enemies. Yet such has been its triumph that —
even in the face of recent set-backs — hostility is peculiarly drowned
in condescension.
“Parochialism” is among the slurs globalism finds prepared to its
convenience. It might accept an inability to see universally as
understandable, and educable. A refusal of universalistic
perspective, however, can merit no such sympathy. It is, for the
globalist, essentially unethical. Parochialism is less to be argued
against than simply scorned. It is to be despised in the name of the
universal — which is becoming amusing.
Whatever we have seen as the death of God is only a special case
of universality’s more comprehensive demise. While God’s death
was mostly inferred, the death of the universal unfolds as an explicit
scientific spectacle. Astrophysics sees the universe being dismantled
before its artificial eyes.
The globalist camp is especially prone to gesticulations of piety in
respect to the idea of science. It is ironic therefore that — in scientific
361
Reignition
terms — globalism looks increasingly like an untenable religion. Its

intrinsic cosmology is an archaic myth. It could not easily be more
obvious that there is no universe, outside this mythological
structure. The fundamental nature of the cosmos is to go its separate
ways.[7]
Pieces are basic. To conceive them following from wholes is
confusion, produced by unsustainable universalistic frames. Any
perspective that can actually be realized has already been localized
by serial breakages. Nothing begins with the whole, unless as illusion.
Today, we know this both empirically and transcendentally. Anything
not done in pieces is not done in profound accordance with reality.
[1]
Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time, New York,
2003.
[2]
Manaugh quotes Krauss and Scherrer saying: “We may be living
in the only epoch in the history of the universe when scientists can
achieve an accurate understanding of the true nature of the
universe.” The intellectual indolence of this suggestion is remarkable.
[3]
Isolation of genetic lineages is a matter of sound — if
spontaneous and unconscious — experimental technique. Avoid
cross-contamination of test samples. Which is to say do it, if you
insist, but don’t expect optimal epistemic outcomes if you do.
Optimal epistemic outcomes tend to win.
[4]
The arborescent orientation of cladistics could not be more
362
unflinching. The word ‘clade’ is taken from the Greek clados, meaning
branch. A cladogram is an abstract tree. Its articulations are all
branchings. Deleuze & Guattari’s critical engagement with it has
been highly influential. They tell us they are “bored of trees.” The
alternative to arborescence, they propose, is the rhizome — a
network in which every node connects to every other. Appropriately,
the ‘rhizome’ is not itself a taxonomic concept, but a morphological
one. The balanced position is to acknowledge that evolutionary trees
are complemented by ecological webs. Neither is conceivable
without the other. The evolutionary tree is pruned and trained within
ecologies of lateral relations. Phylogeny is overwhelmingly tree-like,
while ontogeny involves far more lateral influence. We will limit
ourselves here, with cryptic brevity, to remarking that
Deleuzoguattarian rhizomatics is rhizomatically connected to Neo-
Darwinism, but it is cladistically Neo-Lamarckian.
[5]
This is a simplification, wormed-through by incoherences and
unprincipled exceptions. Most notably, ad hoc special permissions
are granted to ‘minor’ populations. The notably erratic usage of the
word ‘genocide’ is the most obvious index of this. A closer
construction of the operating formula might be: Population
partitioning is wrong, absolutely and universally, insofar as it secures
the isolation of North-West European populations.
[6]
Bruce Sterling, Alastair Reynolds, and Neal Stephenson among
very many others populate their fictional worlds with radically
363
Reignition
diversified neo-hominid types.

[7]
Robin Hanson devotes a recent blog post to three
(comparatively exotic) varieties of tree like descent. The first is an
odd thought experiment that need not distract us even momentarily
here. The second concerns his mind-clone “ems.” This is of potential
relevance to a range of potential, and even already actual software
lineages. The third is the structure of the quantum multiverse. It
suggests that a tree-like cosmology arises on paths quite different
from that pursued here. He notes: ” … a quantum history is in part a
tree of observers. Each observer in this tree can look backward and
see a chain of branches back to the root, with each branch holding
a version of themselves. More versions of themselves live in other
branches of this tree.”
proposes a Darwinian multiverse, selecting for reproductive
fitness through the production of black holes. It might be described
as a cladistically-structured multiverse, were this label not so much
more widely applicable. Cladistic multiverses belong to the much
larger set of cladistically-structured entities, whose parts are
characterized by:
1.
2.
3.
364
July 15, 2019
365
Reignition
CHAPTER THREE - IDEOL

IDEOLOGICAL
OGICAL SP
SPA
ACE
Ideological Space
Does ideological space make more sense when depicted as a triangle
(rather than a line or quadrant)? It certainly helps to explain the room
for controversy on the ‘extreme right’. Having Darwin out there
beyond the edge of the ideologically-thinkable makes a lot of sense,
too.
Click image to enlarge.

If anyone knows where this diagram originated, please let me
know and I’ll credit it properly.
366
(Accessed via @MikeAnissimov).
February 10, 2014
Right and LLeft

eft
Endless conversational stimulation is to be found in the fact that
the most basic distinction of modern politics is profoundly
incomprehensible, and at the same time almost universally invested.
Almost everybody thinks they understand the difference between
the Right and the Left, until they think about it. Then they realize that
this distinction commands no solid consensus, and exists primarily
as a substitute for thought. Perhaps the same is true of all widely-
invoked political labels. Perhaps that is what politics is.
Spandrell directs a winding, intermittently brilliant post to the
topic, which is enriched by a comments thread of outstanding quality.
Like the Right/Left distinction itself, the argument becomes
increasingly confusing, the closer it is examined. The ‘rightist
singularity’ of the title is introduced as a real political alternative to
the Left Singularity modeled by James Donald, driven by analogous
self-reinforcing feedback dynamics, but into nationalistic rather than
egalitarian catastrophe. For societies menaced by the prospect of
Left Singularity, it offers an alternative path. China is taking it,
Spandrell suggests.
367
Reignition
Notably, in passing, Spandrell’s gloss on Donald’s Left Singularity

is a gem:
The leftist singularity is based on claiming higher status by being
more egalitarian than anyone else. So you get a status arms race in
which everyone tries to be more egalitarian than the others. That
works because people (and monkeys) take equality to be a good
thing.
(To continue, we have to bracket the ‘old’ Right Singularity: the
Technocommercial Singularity that Donald’s formula for Left
Singularity distinguished itself from. Nobody even mentions it in this
discussion. It’s a problem for some other time.)
To backtrack from these digressions: If ‘rightist singularity’ is
nationalistic, that aligns the Right with nationalism, doesn’t it? But
nothing remotely this crude is sustainable (not when time is
involved), Spandrell notes: “the Right isn’t nationalist any more.” He
expands, convincingly, in his own comment thread:
What historically has been called Right was about law and order,
i.e. leaving things as they are. Tribalism qua nationalism isn’t
inherently “Rightist”, in fact originally it was a Leftist subversive
meme against the Ancient Regime, but when mass media was
invented nationalism was the status quo, i.e. the Right, and political
labels have become fossilized since.
As Vladimir (May 25, 22:10) articulates the point:
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn would have a ready answer for you:
368
nationalism is leftism. It is basically another name for Jacobinism.

These paradoxes of right-wing nationalism are just another
manifestation of the fundamental problem of modern rightism —
namely, that a large part of its content is just yesterday’s leftism
that the left has in the meantime abandoned for a more extreme left
position.
So, I’d say this is nothing but just another mode of leftist singularity.
Or, Spandrell again (May 26, 02:34): “Historical evidence is that
nationalism was leftist before socialism appeared further left,
making it rightist.”
The Right is yesterday’s Left, or at least, it is soon exposed as
such when it appears in its historical and populist guise. When the
masses turn Right, they are defending a dated Left, frozen in place by
modernist mass media memory, stuck in a black-and-white newsreel,
like an insect in amber.
The squirming is over, unless it changes dimensions. Then chaos
yawns, despite heroic efforts to restore order (Baker, May 25 17:29;
Handle May 25 18:33; Den Beste linked by Peter Taylor May 27
17:47), with Moldbug’s preferred Order and Chaos spectrum sucked
— among innumerable others — into the vortex. Tradition and
revolution, authority and liberty, hierarchy and equality, greed and
envy, independence and solidarity, capitalism and socialism … there’s
not even a remote prospect of closure, coherence, or consistency.
Every attempted definition intensifies fragmentation. Right and Left
369
Reignition
disagree (we all agree), but exactly how they disagree — on that
there’s no agreement.
Peter A. Taylor (May 29, 06:15):
The left-right spectrum, in so far as it is an honest attempt to make
sense of the world rather than mere propaganda, looks to me like an
attempt to fit chaos into Procrustes’ bed. … Moldbug loves Carlyle.
Carlyle admired Cromwell. Moldbug hates Cromwell. Chaos.
Spandrell (May 26, 08:28), twists it back to the Trichotomy:
Both the Western Right and the Chinese Right are a loose
combination of traditionalists, nationalists and capitalists. Which
mostly hate each other and never get along when they get any
amount of power.
By this point, however, trichotomous diversity starts to look like a
mirage of integrity. Right and Left are every difference that has ever
been conceived, if not yet, then in the near future. If these signs mean
anything more than the war continues, like the black-and-white
distinction between chess pieces, no one has yet convincingly shown
us why.
Yet perhaps, if Right and Left, apprehended together, mean the
basic modern antagonism, the conflict itself, as an irreducible thing,
will prove to be the source of whatever sense can be found.
[To be continued …]
ADDED: Whatever you do, don’t miss Handle’s systematic
analysis of the question (May 31, 10:09pm below).
370
May 29, 2013
Quote notes (#49)

Some foundational wisdom beautifully restated by Handle:
… the long history of progressivism in general is most quickly
summarized by an enthusiasm to reject the old, time-tested social
institutions originating in undesigned traditions as obsolete
anachronisms and replace with them with new, more ‘enlightened’
innovations rationally constructed from first principles.
The Rightist view of human nature is often described as ‘tragic’
or ‘realistically pessimistic’. Whether one on the right sees man as
‘fallen and totally depraved’ or merely a ‘hairless ape’ makes little
difference in regards to the conclusion of what is required to
regulate such a creature’s behaviors. And that prescription,
unfortunately but inescapably for most people, involved a certain
amount of se sevverity of consequence
consequence. There is pain, harshness,
punishment, impoverishment, and so on, or at the very least an
effectively salient terror of the credible threat of these things.
December 12, 2013
371
Reignition
PPD and r/K

Ideological categorization is the astrology of politics, in the sense
that it panders to insatiable identity hunger. This post still holds the
daily traffic record here, which is probably not entirely due to people
looking for their political star signs, but neither is it mostly for other
reasons. New approaches to the Left-Right spectrum — the Prime
Political Dimension — promise master-keys to the secrets of
identity-core opinion.
Given the quite absurdly competitive nature of the terrain, there
is something truly remarkable about the simplicity and
persuasiveness of this PPD-model, based upon the biological
distinction between r/K selection strategies. The application of this
distinction to humans is — I confidently assume — radioactively
controversial. Its usage as a conceptual tool to collapse ideology into
an axis of Human Biological Diversity is therefore undoubtedly
disreputable. (This trigger-warning isn’t likely to act as much of a
deterrent here.)
The ‘Anonymous Conservative’ theory does the most important
things expected of a PPD-model. In particular, it provides an
explanation for the polarized clusters of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’
traits, which have often proved highly resistant to reflective
integration. Why should anti-capitalism, pacifism, and sexual laxity
belong together? When grouped together as expressions of an r-
372
type strategy, this bundle of seemingly unconnected ideological

predispositions tightens into an intuitively coherent whole.
Worth special mention is the mapping of ideological difference
onto environmental conditions. The (‘liberal’) r-type strategy is a
response top conditions of resource abundance, versus
(‘conservative’) K-type adaptation to scarcity. When augmented by
some modest assumptions about the effects of r-type prevalence
upon the persistence of Civilization, the r/K PPD-model
automatically generates a cyclical history of social ascent and decline
(through a biorealist abundance-decadence mechanism). The hope-
crushing tragic structure is sure to appeal to reactionary
sensibilities.
The Outside in prediction: This is a theory (and book) that will go
far. You can read the first chapter here.
August 19, 2014
Right and LLeft

eft II
Bill Whittle and Stefan Molyneux work through the Anonymous
Conservative r/K model of ideological polarity in a compelling video.
XS prediction: This analysis is going nova. It sets the gold standard
for definition of Right / Left difference.
As a darkening vector for the mainstream right, with at least
373
Reignition
significant truth value, it’s hard to beat.

ADDED: Reminded to link this, which I was too lazy to do
yesterday.
November 14, 2015
2014 LLessons
essons (#1)
The world war is Bitcoin versus Dugin. Everything else is just messing
around (or, perhaps, tactics).
December 27, 2014
Populism
Political categories — however plausible they look on paper —
quickly dissolve into senseless noise when applied to modern
historical reality, unless they foreground populism as the critical
discriminating factor. Furthermore, populism is for all practical
purposes already national populism, irrespective of ideological
commitments to the contrary, since super-national popular
constituencies exist only in the feverish brains of Utopian
intellectuals. The Syriza victory in Greece is making all of this
extraordinarily graphic:
374
Ushering in the new era, Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister-

designate, announced that he would not be sworn in, as tradition
dictates, in the presence of Archbishop Iernonymos but would
instead take the oath of office in a civil ceremony. At 40, he becomes
the country’s youngest premier in modern times. […] The leftist, who
surprised Greeks by speedily agreeing to share power with the
populist rightwing Independent Greeks party, Anel, is expected to
be handed a mandate by president Karolos Papoulias to form a
government later on Monday. Earlier, Panos Kammenos, Anel’s
rumbustious leader, emerged from talks with Tsipras lasting an hour
saying the two politicians had successfully formed a coalition. […] “I
want to say, simply, that from this moment, there is a government,”
Kammenos told reporters gathered outside Syriza’s headquarters.
[…] “The Independent Greeks party will give a vote of confidence to
the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras. The prime minister will go to the
president and … the cabinet makeup will be announced by the prime
minister. The aim for all Greeks is to embark on a new day, with full
sovereignty.”
Anyone who thinks it odd that Marine Le Pen and Slavoj Žižek
are both firm supporters is missing the picture entirely. As Žižek
remarks:
This is our position today with regard to Europe: only a new
“heresy” (represented at this moment by Syriza), a split from the
European Union by Greece, can save what is worth saving in the
375
Reignition
European legacy: democracy, trust in people, egalitarian solidarity.

That’s what the Left means. Construct your ideological spectrum
accordingly.
Mainstream, but sane:
Of course, politics is about emotion as much as reality. And here,
socialism has one advantage in its favor: easy populism.
Socialism has one huge advantage: People are idiots.
… and while I’m slumming it at NRO, here‘s Andrew Stuttaford:
Fun fact No. 1: One of the two sons of Syriza’s leader was given
the middle name “Ernesto” in honor of the murderer better known
as Ernesto “Che” Guevara. […] Fun fact No. 2: The neo-Nazi Golden
Dawn probably came in third with 6 percent or so. […] I, for one,
continue to be grateful that the single currency has proved to be
such a bulwark against extremism.
ADDED: Childish incomprehension from the Left (of which we
will be seeing a great deal): “… Last but not least, while Mr.
Kammenos and his sovereigntyist right-wing ANEL party
[Independent Greeks] are certainly a lesser evil compared to
formations like To Potami (whose stated goal was to force Syriza
to stay within the narrow boundaries set by the EU and the
Memorandums), they are nonetheless an evil. Their participation in
the government, even with just one minister, would symbolise the
end of the idea of an ‘anti-austerity government of the Left’.
Moreover, this is a party of the Right, one that is particularly
376
concerned to protect the ‘hard core’ of the state apparatus (it will
be important to keep a watchful eye over whatever cabinet portfolio
it might get). It will be no surprise if its first demands are for the
ministry of defence or public order, though it seems that it will not
get them.” (Relevant predictions from Jim.)
January 26, 2015
Populism II
David Frum does a good job at explaining why the new populist
upsurge isn’t an intrinsically rightist phenomenon:
They aren’t necessarily superconservative. They often don’t think
in ideological terms at all. But they do strongly feel that life in this
country used to be better for people like them—and they want that
older country back.
You hear from people like them in many other democratic
countries too. Across Europe, populist parties are delivering a
message that combines defense of the welfare state with skepticism
about immigration; that denounces the corruption of parliamentary
democracy and also the risks of global capitalism. Some of these
parties have a leftish flavor, like Italy’s Five Star Movement. Some
are rooted to the right of center, like the U.K. Independence Party.
Some descend from neofascists, like France’s National Front. Others
377
Reignition
trace their DNA to Communist parties, like Slovakia’s governing

Direction–Social Democracy.
These populists seek to defend what the French call “acquired
rights”—health care, pensions, and other programs that benefit older
people — against bankers and technocrats who endlessly demand
austerity; against migrants who make new claims and challenge
accustomed ways; against a globalized market that depresses wages
and benefits. In the United States, they lean Republican because they
fear the Democrats want to take from them and redistribute to
Americans who are newer, poorer, and in their view less
deserving—to “spread the wealth around,” in candidate Barack
Obama’s words to “Joe the Plumber” back in 2008. Yet they have
come to fear more and more strongly that their party does not have
their best interests at heart.
It’s built for compromise, delusion, and heart-ache. (Interesting,
of course, nonetheless.)
December 30, 2015
Quotable (#197)
This interesting interview with Michael Glennon on “double
government” concludes with one of the most confused self-
abolishing meanderings ever to see print:
378
The ultimate problem is the pervasive political ignorance on the

part of the American people. And indifference to the threat that is
emerging from these concealed institutions. That is where the
energy for reform has to come from: the American people. Not from
government. Government is very much the problem here. The people
have to take the bull by the horns. And that’s a very difficult thing
to do, because the ignorance is in many ways rational. There is very
little profit to be had in learning about, and being active about,
problems that you can’t affect, policies that you can’t change.
The utter nothingness of that paragraph says something
important in itself. Roughly: Sadly, the kind of things that need to
happen can’t possibly happen, which doesn’t suggest the problem is
being taken very seriously. All that’s needed is for people to wake
up simply doesn’t cut it, when — at the very same time — you know
beyond all serious question that they won’t.
ADDED (for obvious relevance):
“Government is the Entertainment division of the military-

industrial complex.” – Frank Zappa
— Jacob Wren (@EverySongIveEve) October 19, 2016
October 19, 2016
379
Reignition
Through the Mirror

The articulate Left comes close to capturing NRx from the other side,
mapping out a persuasive genealogy (through games theory and
public choice analysis). The final line of this piece gets closest:
It is the logical endgame of a dark political vision crafted in
opposition to democratic advances; the realisation of a strange
freedom which lies at the root of the neoliberal dystopia, from which
the political establishment offers no deliverance.
… except, they think counter-democratic darkness is already in
power, in the guise of ‘neoliberalism’, and that the populist political
charade, with its 40%+ state absorption of economic product,
financial central planning, and publicly-promoted egalitarian
evangelism, is an outcome compatible with the triumph of a
disillusioned right. It seems an absurd sticking point to reach — that
in the end, we can’t even agree about who is ruling the world.
April 25, 2015
Neuro-P
Neuro-Politics
olitics
Woah:
Darren Schreiber, a political neuroscientist at the University of
Exeter in the United Kingdom, first performed brain scans on 82
380
people participating in a risky gambling task, one in which holding

out for more money increases your possible rewards, but also your
possible losses. Later, cross-referencing the findings with the
participants’ publicly available political party registration
information, Schreiber noticed something astonishing: Republicans,
when they took the same gambling risk, were activating a different
part of the brain than Democrats.
Republicans were using the right amygdala, the center of the brain’s
threat response system. Democrats, in contrast, were using the
insula, involved in internal monitoring of one’s feelings. Amazingly,
Schreiber and his colleagues write that this test predicted 82.9
percent of the study subjects’ political party choices — considerably
better, they note, than a simple model that predicts your political
party affiliation based on the affiliation of your parents.
When you consider what hereditarian realism makes of “the
affiliation of your parents” (with its massive confounding effect when
brought into comparison with neurological characteristics) the level
of correlation looks even more preposterous.
(The insula sounds like an intrinsically leftist neurological
structure, I mean — does ‘feels monitoring’ really count as doing
anything? Radical insulectomy in exchange for blockchain credits and
Neocameral residency privileges has to be worth a test.)
(Via.)
381
Reignition
December 4, 2015
Modernity in a Nutshell
Two revolutions:
(1) Techno-economic self-propelling change obsolesces ever
wider swathes of humanity on a steepening curve. Capital (i.e.
techno-commercial synthesis) tendentially autonomizes. For
humans, there are ever more intriguing opportunities for synergistic
attachment, on new terms, but the trend is — to put it very mildly —
‘challenging’.
(2) Jacobin political violence, modeled on the French Revolution,
provides the basis for demands aimed at a redistribution of the
(capitalist) productive spoils through explicit extortion. All socio-
political history in the modern epoch falls into compliance with this
pattern. It coincides quite exactly with ‘democracy’ in its modernist
usage. Universal Basic Income is its natural telos.
To the extent that there has been an equilibrium between these
twin processes, it is coming apart. All the pol-economic innovations
of recent years, on the Left and Right, are indicators of this
accelerating disintegration.
So the options are these:
Both (1) and (2) is the Status Quo (delusion).
382
Neither (1) or (2) is Reaction (also delusion).

(1) against (2) is the Neo-Modern Right.
(2) against (1) is the Neo-Modern Left.
Those are the only slots available.
Fernandez concludes:
The technological revolution is going to pose increasingly serious
challenges to nearly every Western social democratic society. People
are either going to be really angry when they discover there’s no
patronage or angrier still when they discover they have to provide
the “basic income” for everybody else. Only one thing is relatively
certain: the solution to these problems won’t be found in the
ideologies of the early 20th century.
(It’s a theme.)
April 8, 2016
Twitter cuts (#122)
I don't want a future in which politics is primarily a battle

between cosmopolitan finance capitalism and ethno-
nationalist backlash.
— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 24, 2016
This is what the rancorous Brexit controversy — and catabolic
383
Reignition
geopolitics in general — looks like when the option between

integrative connection and disintegrative disconnection is
elaborated, without reference to the diagonal line (of connective
disintegration).
Zizek is worth referencing on the same conundrum.
June 26, 2016
Wagner’s La
Laww
Wagner’s Law is a critical concept for political-philosophy. In the
words of Adolph Wagner (1835–1917, as cited by Wikipedia): “The
advent of modern industrial society will result in increasing political
pressure for social progress and increased allowance for social
consideration by industry.” It thus explains why the right has to be
radical, if it isn’t to be a sad joke, because snowballing socialism is the
‘natural’ trend.
Here‘s Will Wilkinson abasing himself before it abjectly, and
Arnold Kling showing considerably more spine. Also, commentary
from Scott Sumner.
Nothing that falls short of a serious assault upon the real process
formalized by Wagner’s Law merits the label ‘right-wing’.
Conservatism, for instance, is merely decelerated leftism. Wilkinson
is positively enthused by that. The Outer Right is everything that
384
definitely isn’t.
What, then, is required to practically defy Wagner’s Law? NRx
abstractly designates the project. Neocameralism goes into the
details.
If XS expected the Alt-Right to break from the modern demotic
meta-regime whose signature is Wagner’s Law, it would celebrate
the fact. It doesn’t, sadly, expect anything of the kind. That’s why the
Alt-Right isn’t ‘us’ or even — strictly speaking — a right-wing political
phenomenon at all.
November 14, 2016
Trump
rump’s
’s W
Warsa
arsaww Uprising
For supporters and detractors alike, U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s
July 6 speech in Warsaw was immediately recognized as the most
important of his presidency to date. Since so much was crystallized
by it – or perhaps brought to a head – it is impossible to begin making
sense of this event without some preliminary broad-brush outline of
its context.
The new dominant ideological polarity, on both sides of the
Atlantic, exhibits remarkably similar characteristics. Perhaps most
strikingly, it displays the culmination of an ideological-class
inversion, decades in coming, which has aligned the masses – and
385
Reignition
in particular the native working class – with the right, and social
elites with the left. In consequence, populism has been firmly locked
into place as a phenomenon of the right. Even those classical liberal
stances most tightly bound to the advancement of commercial
liberty, and thus most firmly associated with the conservative right,
have not escaped radical scrambling, whether through re-
assessment, marginalization, or complete inversion.
In this new and disconcerting epoch, business interest has ceased
to be any kind of index for right affiliation, and popular opposition to
free-trade no longer defines a substantial bloc on the left. If anything,
the opposite is now true. Those on the left or right (including this
author) who stubbornly maintain that ideological orientation to
capitalism is the fundamental determinant of meaningful political
polarity find themselves cast into a position of unplugged
anachronism. The stunning magnitude of this transition should not
be underestimated.
This is not, of course, a development without alarming precedent.
From at least one perspective – which is by no means necessarily
hysterical – the boundary between right-wing populism and fascism
can be difficult to discern. Insofar as the affective context to Trump’s
speech is concerned, this is without serious question the most
important element.
Many books could be devoted to the new terms of political
controversy, and almost certainly will be. Each of the still-unstable
386
new camps is highly heterogeneous, and cross-cut with a variety of

complex strategic interests regarding the way the great rift between
them is described, so every attempt at articulation will be contested,
often fiercely. Yet even amid the present shock and confusion, some
basic structure is discernible. Beside the political opposition
between left and right – in its present, re-adjusted, sense – it is not
hard to recognize a corresponding globalist and nationalist
emphasis, pitting universalists against particularists: defenders of
the contemporary world’s institutional order against its opponents,
or partisans of cosmopolitan openness against parochial localists,
according to taste. Because, concretely, the insurgency marks a crisis
of international social management, and of confidence in
established, credentialized elites, to describe it as a struggle
between technocrats and populists is roughly as neutral as we can
get. Such terms are employed here as mere labels, rather than as
judgments, or explanations. No extravagant disparagement is
directed at either, relative to the other. The constituencies they
name have substantial depths, exceeding any facile definition. They
are obscure social masses in conflict, rather than competing ideas.
With Trump’s arrival in Warsaw, two pairs of profoundly
antagonistic political constituencies – one American, the other
European – were mapped across each other, resonantly. Populist Red
America had found its local champion in Warsaw, versus that of
technocratic Blue America, in Berlin. These alignments were not
387
Reignition
seriously questioned, from any side. That the open-door policy of

Angela Merkel’s Germany, exemplifying its defense of EU
institutions and traditional policy stances in general, were in
fundamental affinity with the ideological intuitions of Blue America,
were self-evident to all parties. Reciprocally, the identification of
Trumpian Red America with the Polish stance of EU dissidence – on
the immigration issue most pointedly – was taken as self-evident.
Even before the visit, to those paying attention, the Polish regime
had become an icon of ethno-nationalist popular revolt against
technocratic transnational government, evangelical secularism, and
mass migration. Everything clicked.
It is difficult to be confident about how much lucid strategy under-
pinned the event. In all matters Trump, the default assumption tends
to be not very much. Given Trump’s characteristic bluster, and
unusual comfort with low demagoguery, such dismissal is to be
expected. This is not at all to suggest it is acute. If political instincts
tuned almost to perfection played no part, then divine intervention –
or some blessing of fortune functionally indistinguishable from it – is
the next most plausible hypothesis.
The speech itself was rhetorically pedestrian, and even clumsy. It
is hard to imagine any single sentence being remembered from it,
unless for purposes of dry historical illustration. The language was
tailored entirely to its immediate audience – both local and
international – rather than to the delectation of future generations.
388
The speech was, in this respect among others, a thing of the social
media age, tuned to instantaneous feedback. It manifestly
schmoozed, even by the dismal standards of such orations. The
rapport it struck with its local listeners tipped into collective self-
congratulation. Wow, we really are great seems to have been the
consensus, among all directly involved. To those disinclined to
identify with the speaker and throng in question, this can only have
been annoying. Enemy rallies generally are, as conservatives learnt
during the Obama years. The untroubled self-love of one’s foes,
exuberantly manifested, is a truly horrible thing to see. Naturally
enough, Trump has been no more distressed by this fact than his
predecessor.
There is one further, and indispensable contextual element that
needs to be raised before proceeding to the media reaction – which
was, of course, the deepest level of the event – and that is the ‘Jew
Thing.’ Everyone knows, at some level, we have to start talking about
that, in some way, even those who – entirely understandably – really
don’t want to. Ignoring the topic is a disappearing option, because
there’s no reason, at all, to think it’s going away. Perhaps it was mere
coincidence that Trump’s visit took him deep into holocaust territory,
which, again, nobody really seems to want to mention, even though it
was an explicit thread within his speech. It was, however, structurally
essential to everything that followed. Unmistakably, even as it went
unacknowledged, the Jewish dimension added greatly to the
389
Reignition
feverish intensity of the response.

The extreme sensitivity to Jewish socio-political anxieties that
has prevailed in the postwar West is notably losing its edge, in a
way that doesn’t seem plausibly reversible. At least in part, this is a
consequence of the generalization of identity politics, predominantly
under leftist direction, which has the peculiar cultural effect – in its
late stages – that special cases are becoming increasingly difficult
to make. Victimological status bursts its banks, among conditions
of unbounded, and symmetrical, ethnic paranoia. Lurid grievance
anecdotes – tailored to every imaginable social niche – are always
in abundance, fed by Internet supply-lines. Persecution narratives
explode from all sides. Demands to “check one’s privilege” have
proven awkwardly mobile, and reversible, as they have been
increasingly normalized, even to the point – in this particular
example – of overt, caustic antisemitism.
The result is nothing less than a crisis of the diasporic Jewish
left, whose argumentative edge has been blunted by decades of
exceptional immunity to unflinching criticism. Defensive cultural
strategies that have, for half a century, been accepted, unquestioned
as a special ethno-historical privilege have quite suddenly become
subjected to irreverent public inspection. Everyone wants a piece of
ethnic survivalism now.
This is the key to what happened in Warsaw. It is evoked as the
subtext to Peter Beinart’s wail of distress, when exposed to Trump’s
390
line: “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West

has the will to survive.” Beinart was quite correct in recognizing –
horrified – the resonance of this sentence with the most extreme
elements of the present transition, but that was no help to him. He
had been ambushed.
Trump made his speech explicitly about ethnic survival,
disarmingly aligned with WWII Jewish victimage, with heroic Polish
resistance to foreign military occupation, and finally – most
provocatively – with the contemporary situation of the West. It
naturally helped him, overwhelmingly, that the Warsaw Uprising was
an insurrection against actual Nazis. This provided a vaccination
against the normal workings of Godwin’s Law. You know who else
wanted ethnic survival? Adolf Hitler! — We have reached the core
of the event now. There was simply no way this response, which was
the only one that mattered to Trump’s enemies on the left, could
conceivably be made to operate on this occasion. What was being
celebrated was the Poles surviving Nazism, then communism, and
now – infinitely awkwardly – again the Germans, this time cast in
the role of principal executors for a transnational political order
promoting mandatory multiculturalism, secular technocracy, and
the culture of Western historical self-flagellation. The result, almost
inevitably, was a rout.
It took no great flights of oratorical bedazzlement to triumph on
this battlefield. The situation did almost everything. Trump’s
391
Reignition
maddened enemies blundered into the trap, and were shattered. The
left, for whom of course the West has no right to survive, found itself
ideologically isolated to a degree that was unprecedented under the
present administration. Their tactical allies in the ‘Never-Trump’
conservative establishment evaporated. Hardened Trump skeptics,
such as Rod Dreher, David French, and Jonah Goldberg contributed
their talents to hunting down the fleeing leftist remnants. David
Frum only held his ground in opposition by arguing that Trump was
personally unworthy of his own speech.
Beinart came out of the trauma worst. He will forever be haunted
by his own definition of the matter at stake, which was immediately
judged from all sides to be an unforced production of Alt-Right
propaganda: “The West is a racial and religious term. To be
considered Western, a country must be largely Christian (preferably
Protestant or Catholic) and largely white.” Across social media, much
nodding ensued, from constituencies whose approval he would
surely least appreciate.
Jonah Goldberg refused explicitly to follow what was now so
vividly exhibited as the road of obligate European ethnomasochism
and civilizational self-hatred: “What’s ironic is that Peter’s desk-
pounding outrage about Trump’s talk of the West is oh-so Western.
The West’s tolerance for anti-Western philosophies is a fairly unique
feature of the West itself. We love to beat ourselves up.” Defense of
the West, therefore, is taken up as a cause inclusive even of its critics.
392
It is Rod Dreher, however, who best captures what Trump

consolidated in Warsaw, perhaps for the first time. He says,
comparing Trump to his leftist critics:
As is often the case with conservatives and Trump, no matter

how much you may despise him and his pomps and works, in
the end, you know that he doesn’t hate your beliefs, and that
he and his government aren’t going to use the power of the
State to suppress you as a threat to public order and all things
good and holy. […] That’s not nothing.
However much Trump fosters aversion among many conservatives,

he also provokes events that remind conservatives why they hate
liberals (using these terms in their degenerate contemporary
American sense). Plenty of conservatives hate Trump, and will
continue to hate him, probably until the end of his second term in
office, if not longer. But the way liberals hate him poses an obvious
existential threat to all forms of conservative life. As Martin
Niemöller never quite said, first they came for Trump and it was
pretty damn obvious I was next in the queue.
July 12, 2017
393
Reignition
CHAPTER FOUR - LIBERALISM
Language and Liber

Liberalism
alism
The inversion of the meaning of liberalism over the last 150 years
has to be counted among the world’s most remarkable ideological
facts. The coinage of the term ‘classical liberalism’ in recent times,
as an utterly marginalized linguistic act of dissent, attests to the
comprehensiveness and radicality of the change that has occurred. It
has surely been essential to the momentum of the historical tide that
it has usurped the most elementary cultural tools required for its
articulation. What has taken place cannot even be discussed without
obscure struggle in a drifting, semiotic fog.
Daniel B. Klein of the Adam Smith Institute has formulated a lucid
response to this ideological event, in a website entirely devoted to
the re-ordering of the language of liberalism during the crucial
period from 1880-1940. Combining ngrams, historical quotations,
and reflections (from the author), it depicts with unprecedented
clarity the process through which the Old Liberalism lost its tongue.
July 9, 2014
394
Slippage
Watch the whole of modern political confusion expose itself in a
micro-tremor:
Locke’s commitment both to voluntary religion and voluntary,
contractual government are mutually reinforcing. Just as people join
and remain in religious communities by their consent, so they enter
and sustain political communities. “Men being, as has been said, by
Nature all free, equal, and independent,” Locke writes in the Second
Treatise
reatise, “no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the
political power of another without his own consent.” If the members
of a faith community believe their church is failing to uphold its
spiritual responsibilities, the
theyy ha
havve a right to lea
leavve — without fear of
reprisal. Likewise for a political society: If its members believe the
political authority is failing to safeguard their natural rights — their
“lives, liberty, and estates” — it forfeits the right to go
govvern
ern.
(XS emphasis.)
“Likewise”? Yet one leaves a church, but replaces a government.
The fall from liberty into democracy takes only a single false step.
With a little more consistency, the case for Exit-based control of
government would have been solidly made centuries ago
(intrinsically secure against all Rousseauistic perversion). Still, it’s
not too late to do that now.
395
Reignition
February 16, 2017
Quote note (#344)

Cowen:
… Here’s another way to put my concern. The percentage of global
GDP which is held in relatively non-free countries, such as China,
has been rising relative to the share of global GDP held in the freer
countries. I suspect we are underrating the noxious effects of that
development.
If freedom has become disconnected from economic competence,
then classical liberalism is dead.
(The XS suspicion, however, is that Cowen’s sense of “freedom”
has been so corrupted by social democracy that it’s incapable of
doing the work he wants it to here.)
March 22, 2017
Psy
Psycho
cho P
Politics
olitics
Classical liberals are sitting-out the end of the world. Sitting out,
mostly, in the way Norma Bates sat out her son’s exploration of
psychological diversity. Norman would know why she’s not moving, if
396
he could only remember.

Before even starting, we’re deep into the identity problem, and
actually several. ‘Liberalism’ is the most profoundly corrupted word
in political history. Without any exaggeration, rhetorical license, or
metaphorical latitude, it’s the leathery sliced-off face of something
murdered long ago which now serves to disguise a foaming
chainsaw-wielding maniac sharing none of its DNA. That psycho-
killer usage needs to be put to rest before even getting to Bates.
Liberalism, from this point forward, means nothing at all like state-
happy progressivism. It is defined, instead, as the polar opposite of
socialism. Its sole commanding value is liberty. It is individualist, only
ever guardedly traditionalist, commercially and industrially oriented,
strategically neglectful of care, skeptical in respect to all purported
public agencies, and rigorously economical in respect to every
dimension of government. It had a truly terrible 20th century, and
right now things aren’t looking any better.
At no time in recent history have liberal concerns been less
relevant to public policy – even as foils, or ‘neoliberal’ bogeymen.
It might be necessary to return to the 1930s to find a time of
comparable eclipse. They aren’t being listened to, and they certainly
aren’t the object of any animated conversations, unless to slip into
social media banter as the butt of jokes. Their concerns seem
eccentric, and even identifiably dated, to some point between the
end of the 1970s and the Baby Bush quagmire. Where the right once
397
Reignition
nursed a secret ambivalence for Pinochet, out of admiration for the

Chicago Boys, today it’s only interested in the helicopters.
It isn’t – mostly – the gender and generational confusion of the
Norma / Norman sub-personalities that make libertarians so
Batesian. It’s the third alter, who goes missing in the movie but not
in the novel. Norman intermittently mistakes himself for Normal.
Normal is the one who thinks he’s just like everyone else. Liberalism
does exactly the same thing. It goes mad by thinking of itself as
normal, when really it’s WEIRD.
Liberal universalism has aged badly in recent years. More
specifically, it has aged badly in two very different directions. To the
left, liberalism has been consumed by universalism, becoming a
liberty-deriding globalist monster, while to the right it has been
thoroughly demoralized, as recognition has dawned about what its
universalism actually means. To anyone still trembling to some slight
residual death-flutter of the liberal impulse, the discussion quickly
becomes nearly intolerable at this point. Withdrawal, psychic-
shattering, and other manifestations of traumatized craziness ensue.
Everything that the 2016 US Presidential Election was about is
germane. Political correctness and the Overton Window in general,
race, immigration, gender, and social norms in particular, every part
of it caught upon an aspect of the liberal agony. Donald Trump was,
in the strict sense – and not just the depraved one – a drastically
illiberal candidate. In his campaign, public humiliation of
398
universalism amounted almost to a platform. American politics had

become nakedly tribal.
That American dream girl who you were talking to over dinner?
The one who might have been the future? She bled-out from multiple
knife-wounds in the shower. You killed her, Norman. Yes, you did. It’s
hard to believe, obviously, but we’re going to explain how.
To begin with the most heated dimension of identity politics,
liberalism has a race problem. Liberals tend to like immigrants a lot,
while immigrants don’t like liberals very much at all. Some
quantitative evidence for this is provided by Hal Pashler, in a (2013)
paper on U.S. Immigrants’ Attitudes Toward Libertarian Values,
which discovers:
… a marked pattern of lower support for pro-liberty views

among immigrants as compared to US-born residents. These
differences were generally statistically significant and
sizable, with a few scattered exceptions. With increasing
proportions of the US population being foreign-born, low
support for libertarian values by foreign-born residents
means that the political prospects of libertarian values in the
US are likely to diminish over time.
According to a wide range of metrics, foreign-born residents

expressed significantly lower support for limited government than
399
Reignition
the native-born population. Such effects would almost certainly

been strengthened further if the latter category had itself been
broken-down by ethnicity. When Americans were offered a binary
choice between smaller or larger government, an expansion of
government was favored by only 27% of Whites, but by 55% of
Asians, 64% of Blacks, and 73% of Hispanics. More precise ethnic
categories only sharpen the pattern. The Hajnal Line, which divides
Europe’s most committed (north-western) out-breeders from their
more tribalistic neighbors, summarizes a gradient of individualism,
among other distinctive liberal traits. Emmanuel Todd’s ethnography
of family types and their associated ideological tendencies binds
liberalism to the (North-West European) ‘Absolute Nuclear Family.’
Common law traditions are peculiar to Anglo-Saxons. Weber and
Sombart ethnically identify capitalist dispositions with Protestants
and (modern) Jews. It begins to seem extremely unlikely that liberals
would represent a random sample of the world’s peoples.
Liberal gender-skew is scarcely less striking.
Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of
Government? ask John Lott and Lawrence Kenny. It certainly looks
that way:
We find that government continued to grow as female voter

turnout increased over time. Since suffrage was granted to
women in different states over a long period of time
400
extending from 1869 to 1920, it is unlikely that World War

I is the key. These data also allow us to address causality
questions in unusual ways. The central issue is whether giving
women the right to vote caused government to grow or there
was something else that both contributed to women’s getting
the right to vote and also increased government growth. We
find very similar effects of women’s suffrage in states that
voted for suffrage and states that were forced to give women
the right to vote, which suggests that the second effect is
small.
The era of big government and that of female emancipation don’t

seem to be easily distinguishable. In the incautious words of Peter
Thiel:
Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the

extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies
that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered
the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
The hideously compelling but utterly illiberal conclusion seems to be

that women and non-whites have used their rising political influence
to massively expand the scope of government. To which a third factor
can be added, which is marriage. Quite simply, singles are communist
maniacs, comparatively speaking. In regard to US partisan politics,
401
Reignition
Steve Sailer calls it ‘the marriage gap.’ It isn’t small. In the 2012
Presidential Election, married women (in general) broke for Romney
over Obama by 55%, married white women by 63%, and married
white men by 67%. (Romney’s share among black single women was
2%.)
As liberal demographic, political, and social policies have been
entrenched, classical liberals, steering the course of modern social
evolution from a position modestly to the left of the old monarchical
and ecclesiastical establishment, eventually became libertarians,
railing ineffectually against the plunge into socialist tyranny from
the position of a stranded, alienated, and derided outer right.
Throughout the whole of this process, liberalism has consisted –
almost without exception – of white men. These have typically been
white men in denial, admittedly. Across the entire sweep of world
history there has never been a population group more neglectful of
its own privileges. And thus they destroyed themselves.
Anyone who has reached the “Oh, my God, the stereotypes!”
stage with this is onto something. That has been a central part of
the learning process. All the stereotypes are true (basically). That’s
science, too, if it helps, though it rarely does. Unless inflated, or
dogmatized, beyond the range of usefulness as broad
epistemological heuristics, stereotypes have vastly greater
reliability than – for instance – ideologically-motivated cognitive
commitments. What’s more, classical liberals used to know that. It’s
402
a Burkean expectation.
Stereotypes are spontaneous social products, like natural
languages, common law, and metallic money. To say all this explains
why classical liberals are conservatives, characterized by a principled
acceptance of the way things have turned out. What had been,
historically, a reasonably sanguine view of centralized state
government was based on how little of it there had ever been. The
mere existence of the gargantuan social-democratic welfarist state
makes such conservative liberalism (or liberal conservatism)
impossible. Radically frustrated revolutionary libertarianism takes
its place.
It’s easy to see what pushes Bates over the edge. He’d thought he
was Normal, but it turns out he’s a WASP. By a further mad twist,
he recognizes the one thing WASPs will never do is defend their
own culture – that’s an essential ethnic tradition. Libertarianism has
been crazily WASPish that way, when he looks at it, which he can’t
for long. It’s an intractable paradox that leads through incoherence
into fragmentation. To have protected his identity would have been
something only another could have done. Perhaps his mother would
look after him? But she’s dead.
The identification of classical liberalism with WASP culture is a
strong approximation. Few socio-historical correlations are more
robust, but the coincidence can only be statistical. There are socialist
WASPs, and classical liberal non-WASPs, although not enough of
403
Reignition
either to seriously disrupt the pattern. When the French, in

particular, refer to Anglo-Saxons stereotypically, they know what
they are talking about, and so does anybody else who is paying
attention. Hubert Védrine puts it best:
[L]et’s admit it: Globalization does not automatically benefit

France. […] Globalization develops according to principles
that correspond neither to French tradition nor to French
culture. These principles include the ultraliberal market
economy, mistrust of the state, individualism removed from
the republican tradition, the inevitable reinforcement of the
universal and ‘indispensable’ role of the United States,
common law, the English language, Anglo-Saxon norms, and
Protestant — more than Catholic — concepts.
It all makes sense from outside, but for WASP culture itself – which is
to say for liberalism – identity politics is madness. That leaves it with
nowhere to go. The leather-face schizo-Maoism of the contemporary
Anglophone left is not any kind of plausible option, but neither is
anything opening up on the popular right. As the Alt-Right
consolidates its passionate affair with identity, it sounds ever more
like Hubert Védrine. Individualism is derided. Its suspicion of free-
trade owes more to Friedrich List than to the Scottish
Enlightenment. Its criticism of labor arbitrage is often almost
404
indistinguishable from that familiar from socialist traditions, marked

by the same current of moral outrage at the fact that Capital –
despite itself being competitively disciplined by footloose
consumers – is permitted to shop around for its human resources.
Wage competition, and even price competition more generally, is an
increasingly common object of attack. At its dynamic, racial edge
the Alt-Right promotes solidarity among Whites, or Europeans, as
if either could ever be a WASP thing. Europe is what liberalism has
always sought to escape. Populism demands grievance politics,
which means default antipathy to market dominant minorities, and
thus – in the Western context – an irrepressible inclination to anti-
Semitism. None of this describes a place that even maddened liberals
can go.
Because the word ‘fascism’ has been so ruined by incontinent
polemical usage, it is difficult to employ without apparent rhetorical
over-reach. This is unfortunate, because in its cold, technical sense,
the word is not even merely convenient, but even invaluable. It
literally means the politics of bundling. Fasces are sticks bound
together. Liberals are essentially defined by their dissent from that.
If WASP culture has a core, it is loose association. There’s no real
possibility of simply sticking it back together. Pirates and cowboys
don’t do national solidarity. That would be a different culture
altogether.
As for Bates, he knows his mother is dead by now, and even that
405
Reignition
he killed her – kills anyone like her. Bad thoughts flood in. It’s difficult
to move on, but at least he has confidence in his own inviolable non-
aggression principle. There’s no way it could have been as they say,
because he wouldn’t hurt anyone. Not even a fly.
August 11, 2017
406
SECTION A - REPUBLICANISM
AND CONSTITUTIONS
407
Reignition
CHAPTER ONE - SO
SOVEREIGNTY
VEREIGNTY
Quibbles with Moldbug

To be a reactionary, minimally speaking, requires no more than a
recognition that things are going to hell. As the source of decay is
traced ever further back, and attributed to ever more deeply-rooted
– and securely mainstream — sociopolitical assumptions, the
reactionary attitude becomes increasingly extreme. If innovative
elements are introduced into either the diagnosis or the proposed
remedy, a neo-reactionary mentality is born.
As the United States, along with the world that it has built, careers
into calamity, neo-reactionary extremism is embarrassingly close to
becoming a vogue. If evidence is needed, consider the Vacate
Movement, a rapidly growing dissident faction within the
0.0000001%. This is a development that would have been scarcely
imaginable, were it not for the painstakingly crafted, yet rhetorically
effervescent provocations of Mencius Moldbug.
From Moldbug, immoderate neo-reaction has learnt many
essential and startling facts about the genealogy and tendency of
history’s central affliction, newly baptized the Cathedral. It has been
408
liberated from the mesmerism of ‘democratic universalism’ – or

evangelical ultra-puritanism – and trained back towards honest (and
thus forbidden) books. It has re-learnt class analysis, of
unprecedented explanatory power. Much else could have been
added, before arriving at our destination: the schematic outline for
a ‘neocameral’ alternative to the manifestly perishing global political
order. (On a trivial etiquette matter: Moldbug politely asks to be
addressed as ‘Mencius’ — comparable requests by Plato Jiggabug
and Siddhartha Moldbucket have been evaded too.)
Moldbug scrupulously distances his proposals from any hint of
revolutionary agitation, or even the mildest varieties of civil
disobedience. Neocameralism is not designed to antagonize, but
rather to restore order to social bodies that have squandered it, by
drafting a framework compatible with the long-lost art of effective
government. (‘Long-lost’, that is, to the West – the Singapore
example, among those of other city states and special economic
zones, is never far removed.) Neocameralism would not overthrow
anything, but rather arise amongst ruins. It is a solution awaiting the
terminal configuration of a problem.
The neocameral program proceeds roughly as follows:
Phase-1: Constructively disciplined lamentation
Phase-2: Civilization collapses
Phase-3: Re-boot to a modernized form of absolute monarchy,
in which citizens are comprehensively stripped of all historically-
409
Reignition
accumulated political rights

Despite its obvious attractions to partisans of liberty, this
program is not without its dubious features, a few of which can be
touched upon here whilst rehearsing the Moldbug case for
Neocameral government in slightly greater detail. Stated succinctly
and preliminarily, our reservations drift into focus when that guy on
a white horse appears. Where exactly does he come from?
To answer ‘Carlyle’ would be easy, and not exactly inaccurate, but
it would also miss the structural coherence of the issue. Moldbug
refuses to call his neocameral dictator a ‘national CEO’ (which he is),
preferring to describe him as a ‘monarch’ (which – as a non-dynastic
executive appointee — he isn’t), for reasons both stylistic and
substantial. Stylistically, royalism is a provocation, and a
dramatization of reactionary allegiance. Substantially, it foregrounds
the question of sovereignty.
Moldbug’s political philosophy is founded upon a revision to the
conception of property, sufficient to support the assertion that
sovereign power is properly understood as the owner of a country. It
is only at this level of political organization that real property rights
– i.e. protections – are sustained.
Property is any stable structure of monopoly control. You

own something if you alone control it. Your control is stable
if no one else will take it away from you. This control may
410
be assured by your own powers of violence, or it may be

delegated by a higher power. If the former, it is secondary
property. If the latter, it is primary or sovereign property.
The sovereign power (sovereign corporation, or ‘sovcorp’), alone, is

able to ensure its own property rights. Its might and rights are
absolutely identical, and from this primary identity subordinate
rights (to ‘secondary property’) cascade down through the social
hierarchy. Neocameralism is nothing but the systematic, institutional
recognition of this reality. (Whether it is, in fact, a ‘reality’ is a
question we shall soon proceed to.)
Perhaps surprisingly, Moldbug’s conclusions can be presented in
terms that recovering libertarians have found appealing:
Neocameralism is the idea that a sovereign state or primary

corporation is not organizationally distinct from a secondary
or private corporation. Thus we can achieve good
management, and thus libertarian government, by converting
sovcorps to the same management design that works well in
today’s private sector – the joint-stock corporation.
One way to approach neocameralism is to see it as a
refinement of royalism, an ancient system in which the
sovcorp is a sort of family business. Under neocameralism,
the biological quirks of royalism are eliminated and the State
411
Reignition
“goes public,” hiring the best executives regardless of their

bloodline or even nationality.
Or you can just see neocameralism as part of the usual
capitalist pattern in which services are optimized by aligning
the interests of the service provider and the service
consumer. If this works for groceries, why shouldn’t it work
for government? I have a hard time in accepting the
possibility that democratic constitutionalism would generate
either lower prices or better produce at Safeway …
In order to take a step back from this vision, towards its foundations,
it is useful to scrutinize its building blocks. When Moldbug defines
property as “any stable structure of monopoly control” what is really
meant by ‘control’? It might seem simple enough. To control
something is to use, or make use of it — to put it to work, such that
a desired outcome is in fact achieved. ‘Property’ would be glossed
as exclusive right of use, or instrumental utilization, conceived with
sufficient breadth to encompass consumption, and perhaps (we will
come to this), donation or exchange.
Complications quickly arise. ‘Control’ in this case would involve
technical competence, or the ability to make something work. If
control requires that one can use something effectively, then it
demands compliance with natural fact (through techno-scientific
understanding and practical skills). Even consumption is a type of
412
use. Is this historical variable – vastly distant from intuitive notions

of sovereignty – actually suited to a definition of property?
It might be realistic to conceive property through control, and
control through technical competence, but it would be hard to
defend as an advance in formalism. Since this problem thoroughly
infuses the topic of ‘might’, or operational sovereignty, it is also
difficult to isolate, or parenthesize. Moldbug’s frequent, enthusiastic
digressions into the practicalities of crypto-locked military
apparatuses attest strongly to this. The impression begins to emerge
that the very possibility of sovereign property is bound to an
irreducibly fuzzy, historically dynamic, and empirically intricate
investigation into the micro-mechanics of power, dissolving into an
acid fog of Clauswitzean ‘friction’ (or ineliminable unpredictability).
More promising, by far – for the purposes of tractable argument
— is a strictly formal or contractual usage of ‘control’ to designate
the exclusive right to free disposal or commercial alienation. Defined
this way, ownership is a legal category, co-original with the idea of
contract, referring to those things which one has the right to trade
(based on natural law). Property is essentially marketable. It cannot
exist unless it can be alienated through negotiation. A prince who
cannot trade away his territory does not ‘own’ it in any sense that
matters.
Moldbug seems to acknowledge this, in at least three ways.
Firstly, his formalization of sovereign power, through conversion into
413
Reignition
sovereign stock, commercializes it. Within the neocameral regime,

power takes the form of revenue-yielding property, available for free
disposal by those who wield it. That is the sole basis for the corporate
analogy. If sovereign stock were not freely disposable, its ‘owners’
would be mere stewards, subject to obligations, non-alienable
political responsibilities, or administrative duties that demonstrate
with absolute clarity the subordination to a higher sovereignty. (That
is, broadly speaking, the current situation, and inoffensively
conventional political theory.)
Secondly, the neocameral state exists within a patchwork, or
system of interactions, through which they compete for population,
and in which peaceful (or commercial) redistributions — including
takeovers and break-ups — are facilitated. Unless sovereign stock
can be traded within the patchwork, it is not property at all. This
in turn indicates that ‘internal’ positive legislation, as dictated by
the domestic ‘sovereign’, is embedded within a far more expansive
normative system, and the definition of ‘property’ cannot be
exhausted by its local determination within the neocameral micro-
polis. As Moldbug repeatedly notes, an introverted despotism that
violated broader patchwork norms – such as those governing free
exit — could be reliably expected to suffer a collapse of sovereign
stock value (which implies that the substance of sovereign stock is
systemically, rather than locally, determined). If the entire
neocameral state is disciplined through the patchwork, how real can
414
its local sovereignty be? This systemic disciplining or subversion of

local sovereignty, it should be noted, is the sole attraction of the
neocameral schema to supporters of dynamic geography (who want
nothing more than for the national government to become the
patchwork system’s bitch).
Thirdly (and relatedly), neocameralism is floated as a model for
experimental government, driven cybernetically towards
effectiveness by the same types of feedback mechanisms that
control ‘secondary’ corporations. In particular, population traffic
between neocameral states is conceived as a fundamental regulator,
continuously measuring the functionality of government, and
correcting it in the direction of attractiveness. The incentive
structure of the neocameral regime – and thus its claim to practical
rationality — rests entirely upon this. Once again, however, it is
evidently the radical limitation of local sovereignty, rather than its
unconstrained expression, which promises to make such
governments work. Free exit – to take the single most important
instance — is a rule imposed at a higher level than the national
sovereign, operating as a natural law of the entire patchwork.
Without free exit, a neocameral state is no more than a parochial
despotism. The absolute sovereign of the state must choose to
comply with a rule he did not legislate … something is coming unstuck
here (it’s time to send that white horse to the biodiesel tanks).
Neocameralism necessarily commercializes sovereignty, and in
415
Reignition
doing so it accommodates power to natural law. Sovereign stock

(‘primary property’) and ‘secondary property’ become commercially
inter-changeable, dissolving the original distinction, whilst local
sovereignty is rendered compliant with the wider commercial order,
and thus becomes a form of constrained ‘secondary sovereignty’
relative to the primary or absolute sovereignty of the system itself.
Final authority bleeds out into the catallactic ensemble, the agora,
or commercium, where what can really happen is decided by natural
law. It is this to which sovereign stockholders, if they are to be
effective, and to prosper, must defer.
The fundamental point, and the reason why the pretender on the
white horse is so misleading, is that sovereignty cannot, in principle,
inhere in a particular social agent – whether individual, or group.
This is best demonstrated in reference to the concept of natural law
(which James Donald outlines with unsurpassed brilliance). When
properly understood, or articulated, natural law cannot possibly be
violated. Putting your hand into a fire, and being burnt, does not
defy the natural law that temperatures beyond a certain range cause
tissue damage and pain. Similarly, suppressing private property, and
producing economic cataclysm, does not defy the natural law that
human economic behavior is sensitive to incentives.
Positive law, as created by legislators, takes the form: do (or don’t
do) this. Violations will be punished.
Natural law, as discovered by any rational being, takes the form:
416
do what thou wilt and accept the consequences. Rewards and

punishments are intrinsic to it. It cannot be defied, but only
misunderstood. It is therefore absolutely sovereign (Deus sive
Natura). Like any other being, governments, however powerful, can
only comply with it, either through intelligent adaptation and
flourishing, or through ignorance, incompetence, degeneration, and
death. To God-or-Nature it matters not at all. Natural law is
indistinguishable from the true sovereign power which really
decides what can work, and what doesn’t, which can then –
‘secondarily’ — be learnt by rational beings, or not.
Moldbug knows this – really. He demonstrates it – to take just
one highly informative example — through his insistence that a
neocameral state would tend to tax at the Laffer optimum. That is
to say, such a state would prove its effectiveness by maximizing the
return on sovereign property in compliance with reality. It does not
legislate the Laffer curve, or choose for it to exist, but instead
recognizes that it has been discovered, and with it an aspect of
natural law. Anything less, or other, would be inconsistent with its
legitimacy as a competent protector of property. To survive, prosper,
and even pretend to sovereignty, it can do nothing else. Its power is
delegated by commercium.
It is surely no coincidence that Cnut the Great has been described
by Norman Cantor as “the most effective king in Anglo-Saxon
history.” As Wikipedia relates his story:
417
Reignition
His accession to the Danish throne in 1018 brought the

crowns of England and Denmark together. Cnut held this
power-base together by uniting Danes and Englishmen under
cultural bonds of wealth and custom, rather than sheer
brutality.
Most importantly:
Henry of Huntingdon, the 12th-century chronicler, tells how

Cnut set his throne by the sea shore and commanded the
tide to halt and not wet his feet and robes. Yet “continuing to
rise as usual [the tide] dashed over his feet and legs without
respect to his royal person. Then the king leapt backwards,
saying: ‘Let all men know how empty and worthless is the
power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He
whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.'”
January 24, 2013
Cnut the Great

According to legend, at least, Cnut was the wisest of all kings,
precisely because he ironized the attribution of sovereignty.
“Surely, Great King, you are ominipotent Fnargl himself!”
418
“Let us then test the claim, shall we?”

Modern macroeconomics is the systematized refusal to learn
from this story. Sovereignty does not rise above the waves.
March 3, 2016
Twitter cuts (#52)
@Outsideness "The Crown" isn't the same thing as the

monarch, or even as the monarchy.
— Lulach the Simpler (@lulach_cuardach) March 8, 2016
Responding to this (Outsideness) twitter-stream:

The transcendental self is not the empirical person, Kant argues,
though confusion of the two is a reliable anthropological fact. …
‘Sovereignty’ demands disciplined critique on exactly these lines.
Monarchical theater is (exactly) a naive image of ‘the sovereign’. …
Moldbug is clear that the ‘monarch’ (state CEO) is an agent of
sovereignty, and not the sovereign ‘himself’. … The LARPing loved
by romantic reaction, and derided by the Left, dwells entirely within
this rigorously identifiable philosophical error. … Sovereignty is no
less a profound philosophical enigma than the transcendental self,
the prompt for an exploration of vast difficulty. … “We know what a
sovereign looks like.” — It is scarcely possible to imagine a delusion of
419
Reignition
greater absurdity.
Something of greater articulacy is clearly called for, but the kernel
would be unchanged. ‘Sovereignty’ is the translation of the
transcendental into the realm of political philosophy. This is why,
even for atheists, the Idea of Divine Right sovereign legitimacy is a
superior point of departure than mere charismatic leadership.
March 8, 2016
Quotable (#176)
Stockman on the limits of power:
The Deep State can control Congress. It can control the state
bureaucracy, Wall Street and Big Business. It can even – usually –
control the voters. But it can’t control the credit cycle.
Cnut the Great is the ancient hero of the Austrians, and Nemesis
is their goddess.
June 29, 2016
Scale-free Reaction
Kaplan goes full Moldbug:
Unless some force can, against considerable odds, reinstitute
420
hierarchy … we will have more fluidity, more equality and therefore

more anarchy to look forward to. This is profoundly disturbing,
because civilization abjures anarchy. … without order — without
hierarchy — there is nothing.
Perhaps, in the field of international relations, Kaplan is more
Moldbug than Moldbug, presenting an uncompromisingly hardline
reactionary model of world order, completely undisturbed by
domestic considerations or even the slightest hint of libertarian
descent. If sovereignty is conserved globally, as well as nationally,
a worldwide Patchwork order looks as improbable as a stable
constitutional republic, and exit options evaporate. Scale-free
Moldbuggian analysis could prove more than a little blood-chilling.
April 18, 2013
Transcendental Anarch
Anarchyy
This, from NBS, is perfect.
Asked (by Garrett Gray): “What reason is there to think there’s an
irreducible anarchy between sovereigns?” he responds —
Suppose there is no anarchy between sovereigns. This means
there is a law governing sovereigns. Which means there is a
sovereign over the sovereigns. Which means that the sovereigns
weren’t sovereign. Which is a contradiction. Therefore there IS
421
Reignition
anarchy between sovereigns.

This insight is already the solid foundation of IRT, but it’s
surprising how few seem to clearly get it.
September 15, 2016
422
CHAPTER TWO - CONSTITUTIONS AND

AL
ALGORITHMIC
GORITHMIC GO
GOVERNANCE
VERNANCE
A Republic, If Y
You
ou Can K
Keep
eep It
The interlocking achievements of Kurt Gödel, which revolutionized
the rigorous understanding of logic, arithmetic, and time, are not of a
nature that wins ready popular acclamation. There is nevertheless a
broadly factual story about him that has attained some notable level
of popularity, and it is one that connects suggestively with the core
concerns of his work. At the website of the Institute for Advanced
Study (where Gödel was based from 1940 until his death in 1978),
Oskar Morgenstern’s recollection of the episode in question is
recorded:
[Gödel] rather excitedly told me that in looking at the

Constitution, to his distress, he had found some inner
contradictions and that he could show how in a perfectly
legal manner it would be possible for somebody to become a
dictator and set up a Fascist regime never intended by those
who drew up the Constitution. I told him that it was most
423
Reignition
unlikely that such events would ever occur, even assuming

that he was right, which of course I doubted.
But he was persistent and so we had many talks about this
particular point. I tried to persuade him that he should avoid
bringing up such matters at the examination before the court
in Trenton, and I also told Einstein about it: he was horrified
that such an idea had occurred to Gödel, and he also told
him he should not worry about these things nor discuss that
matter.
Many months went by and finally the date for the
examination in Trenton came. On that particular day, I picked
up Gödel in my car. He sat in the back and then we went
to pick up Einstein at his house on Mercer Street, and from
there we drove to Trenton. While we were driving, Einstein
turned around a little and said, “Now Gödel, are you really
well prepared for this examination?” Of course, this remark
upset Gödel tremendously, which was exactly what Einstein
intended and he was greatly amused when he saw the worry
on Gödel’s face.
When we came to Trenton, we were ushered into a big
room, and while normally the witnesses are questioned
separately from the candidate, because of Einstein’s
appearance, an exception was made and all three of us were
invited to sit down together, Gödel, in the center. The
424
examiner first asked Einstein and then me whether we

thought Gödel would make a good citizen. We assured him
that this would certainly be the case, that he was a
distinguished man, etc.
And then he turned to Gödel and said, Now, Mr. Gödel,
where do you come from?
Gödel: Where I come from? Austria.
The examiner: What kind of government did you have in
Austria?
Gödel: It was a republic, but the constitution was such that
it finally was changed into a dictatorship.
The examiner: Oh! This is very bad. This could not happen
in this country.
Gödel: Oh, yes, I can prove it.
To the great advantage of intelligence on earth, Gödel did not in

the end disqualify himself from residence in the USA through this
disastrously over-accurate understanding of its constitution.
Evidently, despite everything that had happened by 1947, detailed
attachment to the constitution had not yet become a thought-crime.
Today, emphatic attachment to the US Constitution is restricted
to the decent i.e. lunatic fringe of the Outer Party, and even crankier
outliers. Hardcore libertarians tend to dismiss it as a distraction, if
not a malign incarnation of statist degeneracy (when compared to
425
Reignition
the less Leviathan-compatible Articles of Confederation).

Reactionary realists of the Moldbug school (in all their vast
multitudes) are at least as dismissive, seeing it as little more than
a fetish object and evasion of the timeless practical question: Quis
custodiet ipsos custodes? If constitutions are realistically
indefensible, both in principle and as a matter of brutally
demonstrated historical fact, what significance could they have to
any cold-eyed analysis of power?
Since the overwhelmingly bulk of present USG activity is
transparently unconstitutional, the skeptical case largely makes
itself. Presidents mobilize congressional support to appoint Supreme
Court justices whose principal qualification for office is willingness
to conspire in the subversion of the constitution, to the deafening
applause of a pork-ravening electorate and their intermediary
lobbies. How could that plausibly be resisted? Perhaps that was
Gödel’s point.
In fact, no one really knows what Gödel’s point was. Jeffrey
Kegler, who has examined the topic carefully, leaves it open.
“Apparently, the ‘inconsistency’ noted by Gödel is simply that the
Constitution provides for its own amendment,” suggests a “gravely
disappointed” Mark Dominus, who “had been hoping for something
brilliant and subtle that only Gödel would have noticed.” Dominus
draws this tentative conclusion from Peter Suber’s Paradox of Self-
Amendment, where it is stated more boldly:
426
Kurt Gödel the Austrian logician understood that an

omnipotent AC contained the risk of tyranny. Gödel studied
the U.S. constitution in preparation for his oral citizenship
examination in 1948. He noticed that the AC had procedural
limitations but no substantive limitations; hence it could be
used to overturn the democratic institutions described in the
rest of the constitution.
Suber adds: “A desire to limit the amending power, or to make it more

difficult — not the same thing — shows a distrust for democracy or
a denial that in general the people deserve what they get.” (We’ll get
back to that later.)
This is conceptually persuasive, because it harmonizes Gödel’s
constitutional concerns with his central intellectual pre-occupation:
the emergence of inconsistencies within self-referential formal
systems. The Amending Clause (Article V, section 1) is the occasion
for the constitution to talk about itself, and thus to encounter
problems rigorously comparable to those familiar from Gödel’s
incompleteness theorems in mathematical logic. Despite the
neatness of this ‘solution’, however, there is no solid evidence to
support it. Furthermore, self-referential structures can be identified
at numerous other points. For instance, is not the authority of the
Supreme Court respecting constitutional interpretation a similar
point of reflexivity, with unlimited potential for circularity and
427
Reignition
paradox? This insight, highly-regarded among the neo-reactionaries,

recognizes that the constitution allows – in principle – for a
sufficiently corrupted Supreme Court to ‘interpret’ its way to
absolute power (in conformity with a constitution that has sublimed
into pure ‘life’). Insofar as a constitution allows for its own
processing, it must – ultimately — allow anything.
Moldbug asks us to accelerate through this formal tangle, cutting
the Gordian knot. “Sovereignty is conserved,” he repeats, insistently,
so the occasions when power undertakes to bind itself are
essentially risible. Of course the final custodian of the constitution
is a constitutionally unrestrained dictator. That’s simple Schmittian
sanity.
With all due contempt for argumentum ad hominem, it can
probably still be agreed that Gödel was not a fool, so that his excited
identification of a localized flaw in the US Constitution merits
consideration as just that (rather than an excuse to bin the entire
problematic). The formal resonances between his topically disparate
arguments provide a further incentive to slow down.
Whether in number theory, or space-time cosmology, Gödel’s
method was to advance the formalization of the system under
consideration and then test it to destruction upon the ‘strange loops’
it generated (paradoxes of self-reference and time-travel). In each
case, the system was shown to permit cases that it could not
consistently absorb, opening it to an interminable process of
428
revision, or technical improvement. It thus defined dynamic

intelligence, or the logic of evolutionary imperfection, with an
adequacy that was both sufficient and necessarily inconclusive.
What it did not do was trash the very possibility of arithmetic,
mathematical logic, or cosmic history — except insofar as these were
falsely identified with idols of finality or closure.
On the slender evidence available, Gödel’s ‘reading’ of the US
Constitution was strictly analogous. Far from excusing the
abandonment of constitutionalism, it identified constitutional design
as the only intellectually serious response to the problem of politics
(i.e. untrammeled power). It is a subtle logical necessity that
constitutions, like any formal systems of comparable complexity,
cannot be perfected or consistently completed. In other words, as
Benjamin Franklyn fully recognized, any republic is precarious.
Nothing necessarily follows from this, but a number of things might.
Most abruptly, one might contemplate the sickly child with
sadness, before abandoning it on the hillside for the wolves. Almost
every interesting voice on the right seems to be heading this way.
Constitutions are a grim joke.
Alternatively, constitutionalism could be elevated to a new level
of cultural dignity, in keeping with its status as the sole model of
republican government, or truly logical politics. This would require,
first of all, that the necessity for constitutional modification was
recognized only when such modification made the constitution
429
Reignition
stronger, in purely formal, or systemic terms. In the US case, the first

indication of such an approach would be an amendment of Article
Five itself, in order to specify that constitutional amendments are
tolerated only when they satisfy criteria of formal improvement,
legitimated in exact, mathematical terms, in accordance with
standards of proof no different than those applicable to absolutely
uncontroversial arguments (theorems). Constitutional design would
be subsumed within applied mathematics as a subsection of
nonlinear control theory.
Under these (unlikely) circumstances, the purpose of the
constitution is to sustain itself, and thus the Republic. As a
mathematical object, the constitution is maximally simple,
consistent, necessarily incomplete, and interpretable as a model of
natural law. Political authority is allocated solely to serve the
constitution. There are no authorities which are not overseen, within
nonlinear structures. Constitutional language is formally
constructed to eliminate all ambiguity and to be processed
algorithmically. Democratic elements, along with official discretion,
and legal judgment, is incorporated reluctantly, minimized in
principle, and gradually eliminated through incremental formal
improvement. Argument defers to mathematical expertise. Politics is
a disease that the constitution is designed to cure.
Extreme skepticism is to be anticipated not only from the
Moldbuggian royalists, but from all of those educated by Public
430
Choice theory to analyze ‘politics without romance’. How could

defending the constitution become an absolute, categorical or
unconditional imperative, when the only feasible defenders are
people, guided by multiple incentives, few of which align neatly with
objective constitutional order? Yet, how is this different from the
question of mathematical or natural scientific progress? Are not
mathematicians equally people, with appetites, egos, sex-driven
status motivations, and deeply defective capabilities for realistic
introspection? How does maths advance? (No one can seriously deny
that it does.) The answer surely lies in its autonomous or impersonal
criteria of excellence, combined with pluralistic institutions that
facilitate Darwinian convergence. The Gödelian equivalence
between mathematical logic and constitutional government
indicates that such principles and mechanisms are absent from the
public domain only due to defective (democratic-bureaucratic)
design.
When it comes to deep realism, and to guns, is there any reason
to think the military is resistant by nature to constitutional
subordination? Between the sublime office of Commander in Chief,
and the mere man, is it not obvious that authority should tend to
gravitate to the former? It might be argued that civilization is nothing
else, that is to say: the tendency of personal authority to decline
towards zero. Ape-men will reject this of course. It’s what they do.
Between democracy, monarchy, anarchy, or republican
431
Reignition
government, the arguments will not end soon. They are truly ancient,
and illustrated in the Odyssey, by the strategy of binding oneself
against the call of the Sirens. Can Odysseus bind himself? Only
republicans defend the attempt, as Gödel did. All of the others let the
Sirens win. Perhaps they will.
February 1, 2013
The Ro
Royalist
yalist Imper
Imperativ
ative
e
This is an argument I’m really not grasping:
Libertarians are unrealistic because the world was once vastly
freer than it is today, and then progressively rolled down the populist
hill into the present social democratic latrine trench, so “Why would
we expect different results on the second go?” [OK, still following so
far] … thus we need Kings back, because … [we need to catch the
rising tide, after all, the world hasn’t ever been more monarchist than
now? Prussian Neocameralism outlasted Manchester Liberalism?
Royalist institutions have demonstrated their inherent immunity to
the forces of decay? …]
How can reactionaries criticize free republics for falling apart?
Everything reactionaries have ever respected fell apart. Nobody
would be a reactionary if their favored configuration of the world
hadn’t fallen apart.
432
Republics are extremely fragile. All the more reason to take

devoted care of them (first of all, by protecting them from
democracy).
ADDED: Fag-end of a ludicrous institution. (via AoS)
ADDED: Epic response from Nydwracu .
February 20, 2013
The Odysseus Problem

Moldbug’s insistence that ‘Sovereignty is conserved’ surely counts
as one of the most significant assertions in the history of political
thought. It is arguably the fundamental axiom of his ‘system’, and its
implications are almost inestimably profound.
Sovereignty is conserved says that anything that appears to bind
sovereignty is itself in reality true sovereignty, binding something
else, and something less. It is therefore a negative answer to the
Odysseus Problem: Can Sovereignty bind itself? If Moldbug’s
assertion is accepted, constitutional government is impossible,
except as a futile aspiration, a ‘noble lie’, or a cynical joke.
In addition to Moldbug’s powerful arguments, we know from the
work of Kurt Gödel that the Odysseus Problem is at least partially
insoluble, since it is logically impossible for there to be a perfect
knot. However well constructed a constitution might be, it cannot, in
433
Reignition
principle, seal itself reliably against the possibility of a surreptitious

undoing. In a sufficiently complex (self-referential) constitutional
order, there will always be permissible procedures whose
consequences have not been completely anticipated, and whose
consistency with the continuation of the system cannot be ensured
in advance.
Yet it would be obviously misleading to assume that such
concerns were not already active during the formulation of the
American Constitution. It is precisely because some quite lucid
comprehension of the Odysseus Problem was at work, that the
founders envisaged the grounding principle of republican
constitutionalism as a division of powers, whereby the component
units of a disintegrated sovereignty bound each other. The animating
system of incentives was not to rest upon a naive expectation of
altruism or voluntary restraint, but upon a systematically integrated
network of suspicion, formally installing the anti-monarchical
impulse as an enduring, distributed function. If the republic was to
work, it would be because the fear of power in other hands
permanently over-rode the greed for power in one’s own.
The American Constitution was, of course, destroyed, in
successive waves. After Lincoln, and FDR, only a pitiful and derided
shell remains. USG has unified itself, and the principle of sovereign
power has been thoroughly re-legitimated in the court of popular
opinion. Democracy rose as the republic fell, exposing yet again the
434
essential political bond of the tyrant with the mob, Leviathan with
the people.
Does this ruin refute the constitutional conjecture? Is there really
nothing further to be said in defense of imperfect (but perhaps
improvable) knots? This one came horribly undone. Might there be
other, better ones? Outside in remains obstinately interested in the
problem …
ADDED: Many relevant speculations and insights are to be found
in this article on the practicalities of secession (especially section XI
J, XII, XIII, and XIV). “Since it is important that the AFR [or proposed
American Federal Republic] function as a constitutional republic, one
of the first things it should do is to hold a constitutional convention.
We anticipate that the resulting document will be similar to the
present American constitution, but not identical.” It includes some
(very modest) recommendations to curtail democracy.
February 21, 2013
Shelter of the Pyr

Pyramid
amid
Moldbug’s ‘Royalism’ (or Carlylean reaction) rests upon the
proposition that the Misesian catallactic order is, like Newtonian
mechanics, true only as a special case within a more general system
of principles.
435
Reignition
He writes:
Here is the Carlylean roadmap for the Misesian goal.
Spontaneous order, also known as freedom
freedom, is the highest level of a
political pyramid of needs. These needs are: peace, security
security,, la
laww, and
freedom
freedom. To advance order, always work for the next step – without
skipping steps. In a state of war, advance toward peace; in a state of
insecurity, advance toward security; in a state of security, advance
toward law; in a state of law, advance toward freedom.
Alexander Hamilton (Federalist #8) pursues a closely related
argument, in reverse:
Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of
national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time,
give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property
incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state
of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty
to resort for their repose and security to institutions which have a
tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe,
they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.
This pyramidal schema is ‘neat’, but by no means unproblematic.
Like any hierarchical structure operating within a complex, reflexive
field, it invites strange loops which scramble its apparently coherent
order. Even accepting, as realism dictates, that war exists at the most
basic level of social possibility, so that military survival grounds all
‘higher’ elaborations, can we be entirely confident that catallactic
436
forces are neatly confined to the realm of pacific and sophisticated

civilian intercourse? Does not this mode of analysis lead to exactly
the opposite conclusion? Self-organizing networks are tough, and
perhaps supremely tough.
There is nothing obvious or uncontroversial about the model of
the market order as a fragile flower, blossoming late, and
precariously, within a hot-house constructed upon very different
principles. The pact is already catallactic, and who is to say — at
least, without a prolonged fight — that it is subordinate, in principle,
to a more primordial assertion of order. Subordination is complex,
and conflicted, and although the Pyramid certainly has a case, the
trial of reality is not easily predictable. An ultimate (or basic) fanged
freedom is eminently thinkable. (Isn’t that what the Second
Amendment argument is about?)
February 24, 2013
Casino Ro
Royale
yale
Even prior to the twitterization catastrophe, and the terminal
disintegration of thought into nano-particles, symphonic
orchestration wasn’t obviously emerging as an Outside in core
competence. One unfortunate consequence of this deficiency is that
highly persuasive blogging ideas get endlessly can-kicked, unless
437
Reignition
they can be easily pulverized.

“Blogging ideas” doesn’t mean anything grandiose (those type of
thoughts splinter anything in their path, and bust in), but rather
highly medium-adapted discussion packages, which present things
in a way that racks up hits. The relevant example right now is — or
rather ‘was to be’ — The X FFundamental
undamental Disputes of Neoreaction (‘X’
being an as-yet undetermined number — optimally of surreptitious
qabbalistic significance). That puppy would have been clocking up
views like Old Faithful, but confusion reigns, and patience has run
out. Into the shredding machine it goes.
The principal provocations for this spasm of impatience are two
posts on the topic of monarchism, at Anomaly UK, and More Right.
The Great AUK post is structured as a science fiction scenario,
modeling a future monarchist regime, whilst Michael Anissimov’s
MR defense of “traditionalism and monarchism” is organized
dialectically. Both serve to consolidate an affinity between
neoreaction and monarchist ideals that was already solidly
established by Moldbug’s Jacobitism. It would not be unreasonable
to propose that this affinity is strong enough to approach an identity
(which is quite possibly what both of these writers do envisage). So
the time to frame the monarchist case within a question, as a
Fundamental Dispute of Neoreaction, is now.
Perhaps the first thing to note is that, even though Outside in
adopts the anti-monarchist position in this dispute, it finds the
438
Anomaly UK description of a future Britain remarkably attractive,

and — without any hesitation — a vast improvement upon the
present dismal state of that country’s political arrangements. In
addition, there is not a single objection to the monarchist idea,
among the ten listed by Anissimov, that we find even slightly
persuasive. If these were the reasons to refuse monarchy
government, any suggestion of republican sentiment would strike us
as an obnoxious perversion. Our dissatisfaction with the monarchist
solution has other grounds.
The primary concern is abstractly constitutional, which is to say, it
arises from considerations of political engineering. For our purposes
here, the concept of ‘constitutional government’ can be quite exactly
specified, to refer to a blueprint for the mechanism of power that
achieves cybernetic closure. An adequate constitution designs a
fragmentation of authority, such that each element is no less
controlled than controlling, with the result that sovereignty emerges
from a distributed system, rather than inhering in concentrated form
within any particular node. The simplest model for such a system is a
dynamic triangle, comparable to the circuit of paper-scissors-stone,
in which power flows nonlinearly, or circulates. Thus conceived, a
constitution is a design for the dissolution of power reservoirs, in
which the optimum administrative function of each node is a check,
or restriction, on the effective authority of nodes downstream
(within a circular arrangement). The achievement of dynamically
439
Reignition
stable governmental self-limitation through strategic fragmentation

(of functions and powers) is the constitutional objective.
Clearly, monarchism represents a definitive abandonment of this
constitutional ambition. It contends that, since sovereignty cannot
be effectively or permanently dismantled, rational attention is better
focused upon its concentrated expression. The monarchist case is
able to draw great sustenance from the manifest degeneration of
republican constitutionalism — most obviously within the United
States of America — where its most radically deteriorated possibility,
mass democracy, betrays a scarcely contestable inferiority to
monarchical government in each day’s news headlines. It needs to be
emphasized at this point that any constitutional republicanism which
is less anti-democratic than absolute monarchy is, in that regard,
contemptible. Neoreaction is essentially anti-democratic, but only
hypothetically monarchist.
Republicanism, like monarchy, has a rich and deep historical
archive of examples to draw upon, dating back to classical antiquity.
The confusion between republican government and democracy is a
recent and unfortunate eventuality. The historical reasons for this
confusion are by no means trivial, but nor do they point inexorably
to the monarchist conclusion. It is especially important to consider
the possibility that the demotic destruction of monarchical regimes,
and of functional republics, has been a parallel process, rather than a
succession (in which republicanism served as an intermediate stage
440
of political disorganization). A detailed historical analysis of the 1848

revolutions would bring out some of the complexity this topic
introduces. In particular, it raises the question why the model of the
Dutch Republic (1581-1795) was unable to offer a template for
constitutional government of effective relevance beyond the
Anglosphere. From the perspective of constitutional republicanism,
the limited influence of the Dutch example marks a fatal historical
bifurcation, exposing the European peoples to a calamitous bi-polar
struggle between monarchical and democratic forces (from which
our present ruin was hatched). It is also immediately evident from
this perspective that the emergence of advanced capitalistic
economic organization is inextricable from the propagation of the
Dutch model (transplanted into the UK by the Glorious Revolution
of 1688, and from there to the Anglophone New World). Since
capitalism epitomizes cybernetic closure — a system without
uncontrolled nodes — these connections should not surprise us.
Because monarchism dismisses the possibility of cybernetic
closure, and thus asks us to accept the inevitability of uncontrolled
nodes, or concentrated sovereignty, it necessarily compromises on
the prospects of meritocratic selection. It argues, soundly enough,
that we can do far worse than kings, and have done so, but in making
this case it falls far short of the selective mechanism for excellence
that capitalism routinely demonstrates. When Moldbug compares
a monarch to a CEO, it is with the understanding that — under
441
Reignition
approximate free-enterprise conditions — business leadership has

been socially sifted for rare talent in a way that dynastic succession
cannot possibly match. The fact that the outcome of democratic-
electoral selection is reliably far worse than the monarchical
alternative does not indicate that ‘royalty’ represents an impressive
solution to the meritocratic problem — it is simply less appalling than
the one presently prevalent among our contemporary political
systems. It is capitalism that has found the solution, from which any
rational politics would seek to learn.
That monarchy is superior to democracy is a point of secure
neoreactionary consensus, but this is a remarkably low benchmark
to set. That there is anything beyond it recommending the return of
kings remains an unsettled matter of dispute.
October 7, 2013
Rules
Foseti and Jim have been conducting an argument in slow motion,
without quite connecting. Much of this has been occurring in
sporadic blog comments, and occasional remarks. It would be very
helpful of me to reconstruct it here, through a series of meticulous
links. I’ll begin by failing at that. (Any assistance offered in piecing it
together, textually, will be highly appreciated.)
442
Despite its elusiveness, I think it is the most important intellectual

engagement taking place anywhere in the field of political
philosophy. Its point of departure is the Moldbuggian principle that
‘sovereignty is conserved’ and everything that follows from it, both
theoretically and practically. The virtual conclusion of this
controversy is the central assertion of Dark Enlightenment, which
we do not yet comprehend.
The problem is this: Can real — which is to say ultimate (or
sovereign) — political authority be constrained? Moldbug’s answer is
‘no’. A constrained authority is a superseded authority, or delegated
power. To limit government is to exceed, and thus supplant it. It
follows that ‘constitutionalism’ is a masked usurpation, and the task
of realist political theory is to identify the usurper. It is this that is
apparently achieved through the designation of the Cathedral.
To crudely summarize the argument in question, Foseti upholds
this chain of reasoning, whilst Jim refuses it. Constitutional issues
cannot be anything but a distraction from realistic political
philosophy if Foseti is correct. If Jim’s resistance is sustainable,
constitutions matter.
Outside in (and its predecessor) has sought purchase on this
problem here, here, here, and here. It has yet to find an articulation
that clicks. Eventually, something has to, if we are to advance even
by a step. So long as the Foseti-Jim argument falls short of mutually-
agreeable terms of intellectual engagement, we can be confident
443
Reignition
that this critical controversy remains stuck.

What are the rules of contestation? If we knew that, we would
know everything (that matters to us here). Rules are the whole of the
problem.
A constitution is a system of rules, formalizing a social game.
Among these rules are set procedures for the selection of umpires,
and umpires decide how the rules are to be revised, interpreted, and
implemented. The circuit is irreducible. Without accepted rules, a
Supreme Court justice is no more than a random old guy — prey for
the most wretched species of street thug. Who has power in a world
without rules, Clarence Thomas or Trayvon Martin?
Yet without umpires (or, at least, an umpire-function), rules are
simply marks on a piece of paper, disconnected from all effective
authority. “You can’t do that, it’s against the rules!” To the political
realist, those are the words of a dupe, and everyone knows the
rejoinder: “Who’s going to stop me, you and who’s army?” It’s enough
to get Moldbug talking about crypto-locked weaponry.
The Dark Enlightenment knows that it is necessary to be realistic
about rules. Such realism, lucidly and persuasively articulated, still
eludes it. That the sovereign rules does not explain the rules of
sovereignty, and there must be such rules, because the alternative is
pure force, and that is a romantic myth of transparent absurdity.
If there is an uncontroversial fact of real power, it is that force
is massively economized, and it is critically important that we
444
understand what that implies. Moldbug acknowledges exactly this

when he identifies the real sovereign instance of climaxed
Occidental modernity with the Cathedral, which is a church (and not
an army). Political philosophy cannot approach reality before
accepting that rules are irreducible, which is not to say that they are
sufficient,or even (yet) intelligible.
One further point on this problem (for now): A model of power
that is not scale-free is inadequately formulated. If what is held to
work for a nation state does not work for the world, the conception
remains incomplete. Do we dream of a global God-Emperor? If not,
what do royalist claims at a lower level amount to? What does
‘conserved sovereignty’ care for borders? They are limits — indeed
limited government — and that is supposed to be the illusion prey to
realist critique.
If there can be borders, there can be limits, or effective
fragmentation, and there is nothing real to prevent fragmentation
being folded from the outside in. If patchworks can work, they are
applicable at every scale.
Who would choose a king instead of a patchwork? God-Emperor
or confederacy? That is the question.
ADDED: First key to the text trail, beginning June 5, 2013 at 6:48
pm (provided by Foseti in the comments below).
ADDED: Thoughts on sovereignty and limits at Anomaly UK. At
Habitable Worlds, Scharlach applies methodical intelligence to the
445
Reignition
problem, with encouraging results.

ADDED: James Goulding explains why “‘sovereignty is conserved’
captures the imagination yet is badly flawed.”
June 24, 2013
Quote notes (#76)

Not a new point in this neck of the woods, but formulated with
exceptional elegance:
There are only two possibilities regarding the Constitution of the
United States. One is that it is working as it was intended, in which
case it is a monstrosity. The other is that it was broken somewhere
along the way – in which case it failed.
The prod back to this topic is appreciated, because it really hasn’t
been properly processed yet. (This blog has yet to do more than stick
a tag on the problem.) Insofar as constitutions are at least partly
functional, they are involved in the production of power. As abstract
engineering diagrams for regimes they should no more be expected
to rule than rocket blueprints are expected to blast into space — but
they matter.
ADDED: An articulate cry from the republican id:
… this fifteen-year journey back to the USSR under the leadership
of a former KGB lieutenant colonel has shown the world the vicious
446
nature and archaic underpinnings of the Russian state’s “vertical

power” structure, more than any “great and terrible” Putin. With a
monarchical structure such as this, the country automatically
becomes hostage to the psychosomatic quirks of its leader. All of
his fears, passions, weaknesses, and complexes become state policy.
If he is paranoid, the whole country must fear enemies and spies;
if he has insomnia, all the ministries must work at night; if he’s a
teetotaler, everyone must stop drinking; if he’s a drunk—everyone
should booze it up; if he doesn’t like America, which his beloved KGB
fought against, the whole population must dislike the United States.
A country such as this cannot have a predictable, stable future;
gradual development is extraordinarily difficult.
April 27, 2014
Ne
Next
xt Stage of the Slide
As a prophet of the unfolding calamity, Angelo Codevilla has always
been handicapped by his touching faith in ‘the people’. The ‘country
class’ was already demonstrably unworthy of Goldwater in 1964.
Things are far worse today.
As a guide to the next step in the crack-up, however, there are
few better guides, and his latest ruminations on the disintegration
of the American party system are highly convincing. The death of
447
Reignition
the Republican Party is a much-deserved necessary way-stage to

pretty much anything, whatever one’s sense of the way. As always,
the insightful commentary of Richard Fernandez on the topic is not
to be missed.
Between even the sharpest conservative analysis, and anything
that would pass muster amongst reactionaries, a daunting gulf
yawns. As Codevilla muses in the new Forbes piece:
Representation is the distinguishing feature of democratic
government. To be represented, to trust that one’s own identity and
interests are secure and advocated in high places, is to be part of
the polity. In practice, any democratic government’s claim to the
obedience of citizens depends on the extent to which voters feel
they are party to the polity. No one doubts that the absence, loss, or
perversion of that function divides the polity sharply between rulers
and ruled.
The confusion between legitimate republican government and
political representation (‘democracy’) has been the disaster of
modern history. Until this error is thoroughly purged from statecraft,
reason will belong with kings.
ADDED: Sickness unto death
February 24, 2013
448
The Unr
Unraaveling
A democracy cannot survive as a permanent form of government. It
can last only until its citizens discover that they can vote themselves
largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority
(who vote) will vote for the candidates promising the greatest
benefits from the public purse, with the result that a democracy will
always collapse from loose fiscal policies, always followed by a
dictatorship. — Macaulay [or the ‘Tytler Calumny‘ (thanks Matt)]
From the Urban Dictionary, Democracy:
1) A common system of government directed by the whims of
mobs and marked by a low tolerance for basic human rights and
common sense; primarily used to incrementally transition a
government ruled by common law (Republic) to a government ruled
by the political law of a few elite (Oligarchy).
As the slide continues, the perennial understanding of anti-
demotic statecraft (and initiatory insight of the new reaction)
appears to be going mainstream. Alex Berezow writes at
Realclearworld‘s The Compass blog:
It’s been a rough few years for democracy. Despite that,
Westerners always seem to assume that the most highly evolved
form of government is democratic. The trouble with that notion is
that, at some point, a majority of voters realize they can vote for
politicians who promise them the most stuff, regardless of whether
449
Reignition
or not it is good policy or financially sustainable. And once that

occurs, the country is (perhaps irreversibly) on a pathway to decline.
Whilst glibly insubstantial by Moldbug standards (of course), the
article never retracts this initial premiss, and concludes with the
suggestion that the whole world could profitably learn arts of
democracy inhibition from China. Interesting times.
[Note: the two articles immediately below Berezow’s at the RCW
site are ‘Is Cameron’s EU Strategy Unraveling?’ (by Benedict Brogan)
and ‘Libya Is Still Unraveling’ (by Max Boot) — just noticed
(consciously). Contemporary news: all unraveling, all the time.]
Will the ‘post-democratic world’ have a clear principle of political
legitimacy? The most elegant, by far, would be the introduction of
commutativity to the slogan of Anglosphere colonial rebellion: ‘No
taxation without representation.’
No representation without taxation restricts legitimacy to those
regimes in which those who fund government determine its
structure, scope, and policy, in direct proportion to their
contribution. The improvements that would result from this
integration of the State’s fiscal and electoral feedback circuits are
too profound and numerous to readily outline, but they can be
summarized in a single expectation: radical, irreversible, and
continuous shift to the right.
Among the most obvious anticipated objections:
(1) It’s impractical (Oh yes, only horrors are practical)
450
(2) It’s unjust (For soldiers and cops, perhaps, but the deleterious
effects of complication outweigh the benefits of moral nuance)
(3) In the West, at least, Brahmin plutocrats would undo it at the first
opportunity (A sadly plausible prediction — perhaps no Abrahamic
culture is capable of supporting a sane social order, and will always
choose to resolve policing problems through expansion of the
franchise.)
Granting all of these objections, and more, the principle of
commutative tax-politics still provides one very valuable service: it
explains what went wrong. Representational hypertrophy destroyed
the modern constitutional order, based on a one-sided
interpretation of the demand that government be made accountable
for its exactions. Balance (commutativity) might well be
unobtainable, but it isn’t difficult to understand what it would be.
April 2, 2013
The Progr
Program
am
According to Mark Waser, the project of replacing human politicians
with algorithms would yield positive results, far in advance of its
nominal accomplishment. As he concludes: “I think that AI leadership
is a tremendous idea, not the least because the path towards it
necessarily improves human leadership (and civic debate).”
451
Reignition
The extent to which the deep Anglo tradition tends in this

direction is easy to under-estimate. Magna Carta was already a beta
version draft of machine governance, as every serious initiative at
constitutionalism has been. The principle of limited government
finds its consummation in the ideal of rigid algorithmic constraint,
and the impracticality of such an objective in no way diminishes the
well-springs of motivation behind it. The programmatic erosion of
political charisma is one obvious spin-off benefit.
In the Anglophone world — at least, until the most recent spasms
of its degeneration — the call to empower the people has always
been an unfortunate derivation from attempts to disempower
government authority, by subjecting it to structural checks, and
subtracting its discretion to the greatest possible extent.
Computerizing a fast food restaurant gets you a cheaper hamburger.
Computerizing government promises something far more deeply
attuned to ancient political-economic impulses.
As Waser suggests: Merely letting politicians know that their
definitive abolition is in prospect sends a valuable signal in its own
right. Perhaps, in the interim, it could even train them to behave
more like machines.
August 4, 2015
452
Protocols
“Protocol governance can come in many forms, these include
bureaucratic rules, literal interpretations of religious texts,
democracy, proposed block chain or P2P governance, statistics
based governance, rule of law, and any other form of governance
which seeks to provide a protocol as being ultimately sovereign as
opposed to ultimate human judgement,” writes NIO.
The meaning of ‘protocol’ here? I’m assuming, until corrected, that
it’s something like: A formalized procedure. If so, it elides a critical
difference, because while “bureaucratic rules, literal interpretations
of religious texts,” and constitutions tell people what to do,
“proposed block chain or P2P governance” doesn’t.
A set of instructions opens itself to derision, if it ‘demands’ human
compliance, without possessing the means to compel it.
Constitutions, laws, and bureaucracies are massively — and
demonstrably — vulnerable to subversion, because they require
what they cannot enforce. It is exactly this problem that has
propelled the development of software protocols that are
intrinsically self-protective. The longest section of Satoshi
Nakamoto’s Bitcoin paper (#11) is devoted to an examination of the
system’s automatic defense capabilities. The problem is a serious and
complicated one, but it is certainly not susceptible to resolution by
armchair philosophizing about the essence of sovereignty, however
453
Reignition
much this latter proclaims its possession of the truth.

Claims to ‘truth’ demand trust, and trust is a social and technical
problem (of ever increasing urgency). Mere assertion is certainly
incapable of generating it. Only a trust engine can, and that has to be
built, if it cannot be simply preserved, which — on this at least we are
surely agreed? — it could not.
Bitcoin is only a stepping stone, and the scale of the step it enables
remains obscure at this point. What is already clear, however, is that
the principle of trustless (or open-source, automatically self-
policing) protocols is concrete, in large part technical, and
invulnerable to a priori dismissal. The theoretical difficulties involved
have been largely solved, based upon a series of radical innovations
in cryptography — public key systems and proof-of-work credentials,
among others — compared to which the recent ‘advances’ of political
philosophy, let alone governmental institutions, have been risible at
best. If Byzantine Agreement is realizable, protocol subversion is
exterminable. What then remains is productive work, in the direction
of automatic or autonomized agoras.
Carlyle is a lament (admittedly, a rhetorically attractive, and
insightful one). Satoshi Nakamoto has built something. The former
is vindicated by progressive socio-political decay, the latter by the
escape of self-protective catallaxy from the ruins.
Within a few decades, most of what still works on this planet will
be on the blockchain.
454
ADDED: This is excellent. (Adam Back, via Twitter, describes it as

the “Best article yet on what Bitcoin *is* & why decentralisation is
necessary”.) The proposal of this post is that the conflict it outlines
is obviously of massive importance. Those who think the entire
problem of decentralized protocols is an irrelevant distraction from
other things, are surely compelled to disagree. The XS position here
is that trustless decentralization is worth defending. Clearly, that
presupposes it’s something real (and consequential). As far as the
NRx discussion is concerned, I’m going to assume that’s the matter at
stake.
September 17, 2015
Trichotomocr
richotomocracy
acy
By 2037 the harsh phases of The Upheaval have finally ended.
Western Eurasia is ruined and confused, but the fighting has burnt
out amongst the rubble. In the Far East, the Chinese Confucian
Republic has largely succeeded in restoring order, and is even
enjoying the first wave of renewed prosperity. The Islamic civil war
continues, but — now almost entirely introverted — it is easily
quarantined. No one wants to think too much about what is
happening in Africa.
The territory of the extinct USA is firmly controlled by the
455
Reignition
Neoreactionary Coalition, whose purchase is strengthened by the

flight of 20 million Cathedral Loyalists to Canada and Europe
(incidentally toppling both into terminal chaos). The Provisional
Trichotomous Council, selected primarily by a process of military
promotion and delegation from within the major Neoreactionary
guerrilla groups, now confronts the task of establishing a restored
political order.
It quickly becomes obvious to each of the three main
Neoreactionary factions that future developments — even if these
are to include an orderly subdivision of the nation — will initially
depend upon the institution of a government that balances the three
broad currents that now dominate the North American continent:
Ethno-Nationalists (“Genies” or “Rockies”); Theonomists (“Logs” or
“Sizzlers”); and Techno-Commercialists (“Cyboids” or “Pulpists”).
Now that the Cathedral has been thoroughly extirpated, significant
divergences between these three visions of the nation’s future
threaten to escalate, unpredictably, into dangerous antagonisms.
Since practical realism, rooted in an understanding of path-
dependency, is a common inheritance of all three factions, there is
immediate consensus on the need to begin from where things are.
Since a virtual triangular order of partially-compatible agendas is
already reflected in the make-up of the Provisional Council, this is
recognized as the template for an emergent, triadically-structured
government — the rising Neoreactionary Trichotomocracy, or “Trike”.
456
(A colossal statue of Spandrell — the revered white-beard of the

Trichotomy — has already been erected in the comparatively
radiation-free provisional capital of Omaha, gazing out Mosaically
into the new promised land, a glinting ceremonial Samurai sword
held triumphantly aloft.)
Within a few months, the basic formula for the Trichotomocracy
has been tweaked into place. It consists of three Compartments,
each comprehensively dominated by one of the principal factions.
Procedures for selection of officials is internally determined by each
Compartment, drawing upon the specific traditions of functional
hierarchy honed during the Zombie War.
Authority is distributed among the Compartments in a triangular
circuit. Each Compartment has a specific internal and external
responsibility — its own positive governmental function, as well as
an external (and strictly negative, or inhibitory) control of the next
Compartment. This is colloquially known as the ‘Rocky-Sizzler-
Pulpist’ system.
Ethno-Nationalist ‘Rockies’ run the Compartment of Security,
which includes the essential functions of the Executive. It is
controlled financially by the Compartment of Resources. Its external
responsibility is the limitation of the Compartment of Law, whose
statutes can be returned, and ultimately vetoed (but not positively
amended), if they are found to be inconsistent with practical
application. The structure of the Compartment of Security broadly
457
Reignition
coincides with the military chain of command. (The Rockies get to

decide whether to describe the Commander-in -Chief as a
constitutional monarch, a supreme warlord, or a demi-god of
annihilation.)
Theonomist ‘Sizzlers’ run the Compartment of Law, which
combines legislative and judicial functions. For funding purposes, the
Compartment of Law is subordinated to the Compartment of
Security, for obvious constitutional reasons. This keeps it small,
restricting its potential for extravagant legislative activity. Since the
Compartment of Security also filters legislation (in accordance with
a practical criterion), the Law of the Trichotomocracy is remarkable
for its clarity, economy, and concision. The entire edifice of Law, by
informal understanding, is limited to a single volume of biblical
proportions. Senior Sizzler officials are expected to memorize it. The
external responsibility of the Compartment of Law is to restrain the
Compartment of Resources, by strictly limiting the legality of
revenue-raising measures (informally bounded to a national ‘tithe’).
Internal order of the Compartment is determined by the
ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Neoreactionary Church of the Cosmic
Triarchitect.
Techno-Commercialist ‘Pulpists’ run the Compartment of
Resources, with the ‘power of the purse’. As the sole ‘self-funding’
Compartment, it is minutely scrutinized by the Compartment of Law,
which tightly controls its revenue-raising procedures. Dominated by
458
a cabal of extreme laissez-faire capitalist and technologists, the

Compartment of Resources is guided by the mantra economize on all
things. It does as little as possible, beyond maximally-parsimonious
funding of the Department of Security, with its own internal
operations restricted to rigorously Pigovian tax-streamlining,
statistical research, and the provision of X-Prize-style development
incentives. The board of the Compartment is filled by the nine largest
tax-payers, rotated every three years. The board elects a CEO.
The ideological discrepancies between the Compartments make
an important contribution to the stability of the Trichotomocracy,
since they limit the potential for re-amalgamation into a tyrannical
unity. This is one of the twin principles by which its success is to
be estimated — the perpetuation of durable governmental plurality.
The second principle — complete immunity from populist pressure
— is ensured automatically insofar as the Trichotomocracy endures,
since none of the Compartments are demotically sensitive, and even
if this were not the case, each is insulated from demotic subversion
affecting either of the others. The outcome is a government
answerable only to itself, with a self that is irreducibly plural, and
thus intrinsically self-critical.
Under the light-hand of Trichotomocratic rule, any ‘citizen’ who
seeks to participate in government, in any way whatsoever, has three
choices open to them: (a) Join the Security Services and rise through
the ranks; (b) Join the Church of the Holy Triarchy and become adept
459
Reignition
in the law; (c) Make enough tax-vulnerable income that it earns a

place on the National Resources Board. There might, in addition, be
career opportunities for a very small number of professional
administrators, depending upon the internal staffing policies of the
three Compartments. Any other ‘politics’ would be criminal social
disorder, although in most cases this would probably be treated
leniently, due to its complete impotence. If sufficiently disruptive,
such “relic demo-zombie” behavior would be best managed by
deportation.
(Questions of local government diversity, secession, and micro-
state building exceed the terms of this initial Integral-
Neoreactionary settlement. Such potentials can only further
strengthen external controls, and thus further constrain the scope of
government discretion.)
ADDED: Even this crude sketch has enough moving parts to
breed bugs. Glitch-1 (by my reckoning): Pigovian taxes and
commutative tax politics don’t knit together very well. In
combination, they incentivize the politically ambitious to move into
business activities with high negative externalities. Any neat patch
for this?
ADDED: Anomaly UK will require some further persuasion.
October 9, 2013
460
Lynch La
Laww
This is insanely great (second only to NeoCam for absolute
attractiveness, and arguably more suitable under predominant
rough-and-ready social conditions). First, a little scene-setting:
There is, to the best of my knowledge, no single right and proper
method to construct a gallows. A few elements are common to just
about every design, but the grim carpenters’ flourishes of the
scaffold reflect the tastes of the community and the eye of the
builders. There is always a raised platform; there are always stairs
leading to the platform, usually thirteen; there is always a crossbeam
around which to string the noose; and there is always a trapdoor to
launch the condemned into the hereafter. Beyond that, the timbers
of the frame are a matter of discretion. Supporting braces and thick
beams are common for permanent installations. Temporary gallows
will often rely on a nock rather than a full cleat to hold the bitter end
of the killing rope. A shoreside hanging can even rely on a high tide
and the scuttling claws of the merciless deep to clean up the turgid
mess left by a dead man dancing. …
Then the carpentry of refined-incentives governance:
Me: “I don’t know if they still do it that way, but that’s how it
used to be. What’s more, even speaking up at a rulemoot can be a
death sentence.” It was clear she thought I was pulling her leg. I wish
I was. Tolerance for two-bit tinpot tyrants was running awfully low,
461
Reignition
so Sacramentarians decided to raise the stakes for would-be petty

autocrats. “Any citizen can propose any rule change at a rulemoot.
To do [so], you ascend the Black Gallows, loop a secured noose of
your own tying around your neck, and take the next five minutes
and five minutes only to deliver your proposal and your plea. Then
there’s some sort of a deliberation process. I think folks can line up to
give brief comments or something, after which the assembled crowd
votes yea or nay. If the motion passes, it is now law. If it fails, the lever
is pulled and you hang by your neck until you are dead, dead dead.”
Anika: “That’s insane! This place must be a madhouse!”
Me: “You might be surprised. Plenty of laws get passed this way. Most
of them are pretty standard things: no murder, no theft, no rape,
that sort of thing. And nobody’s stupid enough to try to pass a new
law if they aren’t very sure they’ll have the support of the crowd.”
I paused to consider something. “I’d reckon they don’t have a lot of
civic participation on windy days.”
Excessive populism, certainly, but turned unambiguously in the
right direction. After a few generations, the genetic selection effects
alone would have justified it. The model, clear in context, is an anti-
California. If something like this isn’t tried somewhere, social
experimentation will have missed out.
December 7, 2015
462
SEQUENCE i - NEOCAMERALISM
463
Reignition
CHAPTER ONE - PRIMERS
Meta-Neocamer
Meta-Neocameralism
alism
First thing: “Meta-Neocameralism” isn’t anything new, and it
certainly isn’t anything post-Moldbuggian. It’s no more than
Neocameralism apprehended in its most abstract features, through
the coining of a provisional and dispensable term. (It allows for an
acronym that doesn’t lead to confusions with North Carolina, while
encouraging quite different confusions, which I’m pretending not to
notice.)
Locally (to this blog), the “meta-” is the mark of a prolegomenon*,
to a disciplined discussion of Neocameralism which has later to take
place. Its abstraction is introductory, in accordance with something
that is yet to be re-started, or re-animated, in detail. (For existing
detail, outside the Moldbug canon itself, look here.)
The excellent comment thread here provides at least a couple of
crucial clues:
nydwr acu (23/03/2014 at 6:47 pm): Neocameralism doesn’t
dwracu
answer questions like that [on the specifics of social organization];
instead, it’s a mechanism for answering questions like that. … You can
464
ask, “is Coke considered better than RC Cola?”, or you can institute
capitalism and find out. You can ask, “are ethno-nationalist states
considered better than mixed states?”, or you can institute the
patchwork and find out. …
Riv erC (23/03/2014 at 3:44 am): Neo-cameralism is, if viewed in
RiverC
this light, a ‘political system system’, it is not a political system but a
system for implementing political systems. Of course the same guy
who came up with it also invented an operating system (a system for
implementing software systems.)
MNC, then, is not a political prescription, for instance a social
ideal aligned with techno-commercialist preferences. It is an
intellectual framework for examining systems of governance,
theoretically formalized as disposals of sovereign property. The
social formalization of such systems, which Moldbug also advocates,
can be parenthesized within MNC. We are not at this stage
considering the model of a desirable social order, but rather the
abstract model of social order in general, apprehended radically —
at the root — where ‘to rule’ and ‘to own’ lack distinct meanings.
Sovereign property is ‘sovereign’ and ‘primary’ because it is not
merely a claim, but effective possession. (There is much more to
come in later posts on the concept of sovereign property, some
preliminary musings here.)
Because MNC is an extremely powerful piece of cognitive
technology, capable of tackling problems at a number of distinct
465
Reignition
levels (in principle, an unlimited number), it is clarified through

segmentation into an abstraction cascade. Descending through
these levels adds concreteness, and tilts incrementally towards
normative judgements (framed by the hypothetical imperative of
effective government, as defined within the cascade).
(1) The highest level of practical significance (since MNC-theology
need not delay us) has already been touched upon. It applies to social
regimes of every conceivable type, assuming only that a systematic
mode of sovereign property reproduction will essentially
characterize each. Power is economic irrespective of its relation to
modern conventions of commercial transaction, because it involves
the disposal of a real (if obscure) quantity, which is subject to
increase or decrease over the cyclic course of its deployment.
Population, territory, technology, commerce, ideology, and
innumerable additional heterogeneous factors are components of
sovereign property (power), but their economic character is assured
by the possibility — and indeed necessity — of more-or-less explicit
trade-offs and cost-benefit calculations, suggesting an original (if
germinal) fungibility, which is merely arithmetical coherence. This
is presupposed by any estimation of growth or decay, success or
failure, strengthening or weakening, of the kind required not only
by historical analysis, but also by even the most elementary
administrative competence. Without an implicit economy of power,
no discrimination could be made between improvement and
466
deterioration, and no directed action toward the former could be

possible.
The effective cyclic reproduction of power has an external
criterion — survival. It is not open to any society or regime to decide
for itself what works. Its inherent understanding of its own
economics of power is a complex measurement, gauging a relation
to the outside, whose consequences are life and death. Built into
the idea of sovereign property from the start, therefore, is an
accommodation to reality. Foundational to MNC, at the very highest
level of analysis, is the insight that power is checked primordially.
On the Outside are wolves, serving as the scourge of Gnon. Even the
greatest of all imaginable God-Kings — awesome Fnargl included —
has ultimately to discover consequences, rather than inventing them.
There is no principle more important than this.
Entropy will be dissipated, idiocy will be punished, the weak will
die. If the regime refuses to bow to this Law, the wolves will enforce
it. Social Darwinism is not a choice societies get to make, but a
system of real consequences that envelops them. MNC is articulated
at the level — which cannot be transcended — where realism is
mandatory for any social order. Those unable to create it, through
effective government, will nevertheless receive it, in the harsh
storms of Nemesis. Order is not defined within itself, but by the Law
of the Outside.
At this highest level of abstraction, therefore, when MNC is asked
467
Reignition
“which type of regimes do you believe in?” the sole appropriate

response is “those compatible with reality.” Every society known to
history — and others beside — had a working economy of power, at
least for a while. Nothing more is required than this for MNC to take
them as objects of disciplined investigation.
(2) Knowing that realism is not an optional regime value, we are
able to proceed down the MNC cascade with the introduction of a
second assumption: Civilizations will seek gentler teachers than the
wolves. If it is possible to acquire some understanding of collapse, it
will be preferred to the experience of collapse (once the wolves have
culled the ineducable from history).
Everything survivable is potentially educational, even a mauling
by the wolves. MNC however, as its name suggests, has reason to
be especially attentive to the most abstract lesson of the Outside —
the (logical) priority of meta-learning. It is good to discover reality,
before — or at least not much later than — reality discovers us.
Enduring civilizations do not merely know things, they know that
it is important to know things, and to absorb realistic information.
Regimes — disposing of sovereign property — have a special
responsibility to instantiate this deutero-culture of learning-to-
learn, which is required for intelligent government. This is a
responsibility they take upon themselves because it is demanded by
the Outside (and even in its refinement, it still smells of wolf).
Power is under such compulsion to learn about itself that
468
recursion, or intellectualization, can be assumed. Power is selected

to check itself, which it cannot do without an increase in
formalization, and this is a matter — as we shall see — of immense
consequence. Of necessity, it learns-to-learn (or dies), but this lesson
introduces a critical tragic factor.
The tragedy of power is broadly coincident with modernity. It is
not a simple topic, and from the beginning two elements in particular
require explicit attention. Firstly, it encounters the terrifying
(second-order) truth that practical learning is irreducibly
experimental. In going ‘meta’ knowledge becomes scientific, which
means that failure cannot be precluded through deduction, but has
to be incorporated into the machinery of learning itself. Nothing that
cannot go wrong is capable of teaching anything (even the
accumulation of logical and mathematical truths requires cognitive
trial-and-error, ventures into dead-ends, and the pursuit of
misleading intuitions). Secondly, in becoming increasingly
formalized, and ever more fungible, the disposal of sovereign power
attains heightened liquidity. It is now possible for power to trade
itself away, and an explosion of social bargaining results. Power can
be exchanged for (‘mere’) wealth, or for social peace, or channeled
into unprecedented forms of radical regime philanthropy / religious
sacrifice. Combine these two elements, and it is clear that regimes
enter modernity ’empowered’ by new capabilities for experimental
auto-dissolution. Trade authority away to the masses in exchange for
469
Reignition
promises of good behavior? Why not give it a try?

Cascade Stage-2 MNC thus (realistically) assumes a world in
which power has become an art of experimentation, characterized
by unprecedented calamities on a colossal scale, while the economy
of power and the techno-commercial economy have been radically
de-segmented, producing a single, uneven, but incrementally
smoothed system of exchangeable social value, rippling ever
outward, without firm limit. Socio-political organization, and
corporate organization, are still distinguished by markers of
traditional status, but no longer strictly differentiable by essential
function.
The modern business of government is not ‘merely’ business only
because it remains poorly formalized. As the preceding discussion
suggests, this indicates that economic integration can be expected
to deepen, as the formalization of power proceeds. (Moldbug seeks
to accelerate this process.) An inertial assumption of distinct ‘public’
and ‘private’ spheres is quickly disturbed by thickening networks of
exchange, swapping managerial procedures and personnel, funding
political ambitions, expending political resources in commercial
lobbying efforts, trading economic assets for political favors
(denominated in votes), and in general consolidating a vast, highly-
liquid reservoir of amphibiously ‘corporacratic’ value,
indeterminable between ‘wealth’ and ‘authority’. Wealth-power
inter-convertibility is a reliable index of political modernity.
470
MNC does not decide that government should become a business.

It recognizes that government has become a business (dealing in
fungible quantities). However, unlike private business ventures,
which dissipate entropy through bankruptcy and market-driven
restructuring, governments are reliably the worst run businesses in
their respective societies, functionally crippled by defective,
structurally-dishonest organizational models, exemplified most
prominently by the democratic principle: government is a business
that should be run by its customers (but actually can’t be). Everything
in this model that isn’t a lie is a mistake.
At the second (descending) level of abstraction, then, MNC is still
not recommending anything except theoretical clarity. It proposes:
a) Power is destined to arrive at experimental learning processes
b) As it learns, it formalizes itself, and becomes more fungible
c) Experiments in fungible power are vulnerable to disastrous
mistakes
d) Such mistakes have in fact occurred, in a near-total way
e) For deep historical reasons, techno-commercial business
organization emerges as the preeminent template for government
entities, as for any composite economic agent. It is in terms of this
template that modern political dysfunction can be rendered
(formally) intelligible.
(3) Take the MNC abstraction elevator down another level, and
it’s still more of an analytic tool than a social prescription. (That’s
471
Reignition
a good thing, really.) It tells us that every government, both extant

and potential, is most accessible to rigorous investigation when
apprehended as a sovereign corporation. This approach alone is able
to draw upon the full panoply of theoretical resources, ancient and
modern, because only in this way is power tracked in the same way
it has actually developed (in tight alignment with a still-incomplete
trend).
The most obvious objections are, sensu stricto, romantic. They
take a predictable (which is not to say a casually dismissible) form.
Government — if perhaps only lost or yet-unrealized government —
is associated with ‘higher’ values than those judged commensurable
with the techno-commercial economy, which thus sets the basis for
a critique of the MNC ‘business ontology’ of governance as an
illegitimate intellectual reduction, and ethical vulgarization. To
quantify authority as power is already suspect. To project its
incremental liquidation into a general economy, where leadership
integrates — ever more seamlessly — with the price system, appears
as an abominable symptom of modernist nihilism.
Loyalty (or the intricately-related concept of asabiyyah) serves
as one exemplary redoubt of the romantic cause. Is it not repulsive,
even to entertain the possibility that loyalty might have a price?
Handle addresses this directly in the comment thread already cited
(24/03/2014 at 1:18 am). A small sample captures the line of his
engagement:
472
Loyalty-preservation incentivizing programs are various and

highly sophisticated and span the spectrum everywhere from
frequent flier miles to ‘clubs’ that are so engrossing and time
consuming in such as to mimic the fulfillment of all the community,
socialization, and identarian psychological functions that would
make even the hardest-core religious-traditionalist jealous. Because
lots of people are genetically programmed with this coordination-
subroutine that is easily exploitable in a context far removed from
its evolutionary origins. Sometimes brands ‘deserve’ special
competitive loyalty (‘German engineering’!) and sometimes they
don’t (Tylenol-branded paracetamol).
There is vastly more that can, and will, be said in prosecution of
this dispute, since it is perhaps the single most critical driver of NRx
fission, and it is not going to endure a solution. The cold MNC claim,
however, can be pushed right across it. Authority is for sale, and has
been for centuries, so that any analysis ignoring this exchange nexus
is an historical evasion. Marx’s M-C-M’, through which monetized
capital reproduces and expands itself through the commodity cycle,
is accompanied by an equally definite M-P-M’ or P-M-P’ cycle of
power circulation-enhancement through monetized wealth.
A tempting reservation, with venerable roots in traditional
society, is to cast doubt upon the prevalence of such exchange
networks, on the assumption that power — possibly further dignified
as ‘authority’ — enjoys a qualitative supplement relative to common
473
Reignition
economic value, such that it cannot be retro-transferred. Who would

swap authority for money, if authority cannot be bought (and is,
indeed, “beyond price”)? But this ‘problem’ resolves itself, since the
first person to sell political office — or its less formal equivalent —
immediately demonstrates that it can no less easily be purchased.
From the earliest, most abstract stage of this MNC outline, it has
been insisted that power has to be evaluated economically, by itself,
if anything like practical calculation directed towards its increase
is to be possible. Once this is granted, MNC analysis of the
governmental entity in general as an economic processor — i.e. a
business — acquires irresistible momentum. If loyalty, asabiyyah,
virtue, charisma and other elevated (or ‘incommensurable’) values
are power factors, then they are already inherently self-economizing
within the calculus of statecraft. The very fact that they contribute,
determinately, to an overall estimation of strength and weakness,
attests to their implicit economic status. When a business has
charismatic leadership, reputational capital, or a strong culture of
company loyalty, such factors are monetized as asset values by
financial markets. When one Prince surveys the ‘quality’ of another’s
domain, he already estimates the likely expenses of enmity. For
modern military bureaucracies, such calculations are routine.
Incommensurable values do not survive contact with defense
budgets.
Yet, however ominous this drift (from a romantic perspective),
474
MNC does not tell anybody how to design a society. It says only
that an effective government will necessarily look, to it, like a well-
organized (sovereign) business. To this one can add the riders:
a) Government effectiveness is subject to an external criterion,
provided by a selective trans-state and inter-state mechanism. This
might take the form of Patchwork pressure (Dynamic Geography)
in a civilized order, or military competition in the wolf-prowled
wilderness of Hobbesian chaos.
b) Under these conditions, MNC calculative rationality can be
expected to be compelling for states themselves, whatever their
variety of social form. Some (considerable) convergence upon norms
of economic estimation and arrangement is thus predictable from
the discovered contours of reality. There are things that will fail.
Non-economic values are more easily invoked than pursued.
Foseti (commenting here, 23/03/2014 at 11:59 am) writes:
No one disputes that the goal of society is a good citizenry, but
the question is what sort of government provides that outcome. […]
As best I can tell, we only have two theories of governance that have
been expressed. […] The first is the capitalist. As Adam Smith noted,
the best corporations (by all measures) are the ones that are
operated for clear, measurable and selfish motives. […] The second is
the communist. In this system, corporations are run for the benefit
of everyone in the world. […] Unsurprisingly, corporations run on the
latter principle have found an incredibly large number of ways to
475
Reignition
suck. Not coincidentally, so have 20th Century governments run on

the same principle. […] I think it’s nearly impossible to overstate the
ways in which everyone would be better off if we had an efficiently,
effective, and responsive government.
* I realize this doesn’t work in Greek, but systematic before-after
confusion is an Outside in thing.
[Yes, I know I have to get my commenting system updated with
comment permalinks — thanks to everybody for the reminder.]
ADDED: Anarcho-Papist is on the synthesizer.
March 24, 2014
Eight-P
Eight-Point
oint Neo-Cam
A reminder of where NRx came from:
Let me quickly explain my reactionary theory of history, which
comes from reading weird old forgotten books such as the above.
Note that this theory is quite simple. Depending on your inclinations,
you may regard this as a good thing or a bad thing.
In order to get to the reactionary theory of history, we need a
reactionary theory of government. History, again, is interpretation,
and interpretation requires theory. I’ve described this theory before
under the name of neocameralism, but on a blog it never hurts to be
a little repetitive.
476
First: government is not a mystical or mysterious institution. A

government is simply a group of people working together for a
common aim, ie, a corporation. Whether a government is good or bad
is not determined by who its employees are or how they are selected.
It is determined by whether the actions of the government are good
or bad.
Second: the only difference between a government and a “private
corporation” is that the former is sovereign: it has no higher
authority to which it can appeal to protect its property. A sovereign
corporation owns its territory, and maintains that ownership by
demonstrating unchallenged control. It is stable if no other party,
internal or external, has any incentive to attack it. Especially in the
nuclear age, it is not difficult to deter prospective attackers.
Third: a good government is a well-managed sovereign
corporation. Good government is efficient management. Efficient
management is profitable management. A profitable government has
no incentive to break its promises, abuse its citizens (who are its
capital), or attack its neighbors.
Fourth: efficient management can be implemented by the same
techniques in sovereign corporations as in nonsovereign ones. The
company’s profit is distributed equally to holders of negotiable
shares. The shareholders elect a board, which selects a CEO.
Fifth: although the full neocameralist approach has never been
tried, its closest historical equivalents to this approach are the 18th-
477
Reignition
century tradition of enlightened absolutism as represented by

Frederick the Great, and the 21st-century nondemocratic tradition
as seen in lost fragments of the British Empire such as Hong Kong,
Singapore and Dubai. These states appear to provide a very high
quality of service to their citizens, with no meaningful democracy
at all. They have minimal crime and high levels of personal and
economic freedom. They tend to be quite prosperous. They are weak
only in political freedom, and political freedom is unimportant by
definition when government is stable and effective.
Sixth: the comparative success of the American and European
postwar systems appears to be due to their abandonment of
democratic politics as a practical mechanism of government, in favor
of a civil-service Beamtenstaat in which democratic politicians are
increasingly symbolic. The post-communist civil-service states,
China and Russia, appear to be converging on the same system,
although their stability is ensured primarily by direct military
authority, rather than by a system of managed public opinion.
Seventh: the post-democratic civil-service state, while not utterly
disastrous, is not the end of history. It has two problems. One, the
size and complexity of its regulatory system tends to increase
without bound, resulting in economic stagnation and general apathy.
Two, more critically, it can neither abolish democratic politics
formally, nor defend itself against changes in information flow that
may destabilize public opinion. Notably, the rise of the Internet
478
disrupts the feedback loop between public education and political

power, allowing noncanonical ideas to flourish. If these ideas are
both rationally compelling and politically delegitimating, the state is
threatened.
Eighth: therefore, productive political efforts should focus on
peacefully terminating, restructuring and decentralizing the 20th-
century civil-service state along neocameralist lines. The ideal result
is a planet of thousands, even tens of thousands, of independent city-
states, each managed for profit by its shareholders.
Note that this perspective has nothing at all in common with the
Universalist theory of government. Note also the simplicity of the
transition that it suggests should have happened, from monarchy
as a family business to a modern corporate structure with separate
board and CEO, eliminating the vagaries of the hereditary principle.
Now let’s look – from this reactionary perspective – at what actually
did happen. …
March 11, 2015
Quote note (#200)

Crypto-core of the XS Moldbug:
Internal security can be defined as the protection of the
shareholders’ property against all internal threats — including both
479
Reignition
residents and employees, up to and certainly including the chief

executive. If the shareholders cannot dismiss the CEO of the realm
by voting according to proper corporate procedures, a total security
failure has occurred.
The standard Patchwork remedy for this problem is the
cryptogr
cryptographic
aphic chain of command
command. Ultimately, power over the realm
truly rests with the shareholders, because they use a secret sharing
or similar cryptographic algorithm to maintain control over its root
keys. Authority is then delegated to the board (if any), the CEO and
other officers, and thence down into the military or other security
forces. At the leaves of the tree are computerized weapons, which
will not fire without cryptographic authorization.
Thus, any fragment of the security force which remains loyal to the
shareholders can use its operational weapons to defeat any coalition
of disloyal, and hence disarmed, employees and/or residents. Ouch!
Taste the pain, traitors. (Needless to say, the dependence of this
design on 21st-century technology is ample explanation of why
history has not bequeathed us anything like the joint-stock realm. It
was simply not implementable — any more than our ancestors could
build a suspension bridge out of limestone blocks.)
(Emphasis in original.)
Crypto-sovereignty is huge (and on the to-do list here).
‘Formalism’ is a place-holder for crypto-architecture. ‘Sovereignty’
means keys.
480
November 17, 2015
Neocamer
Neocameralism
alism #1
Clippings from this, end-2007 Moldbug Neocameralism essay (with
minimal commentary):
It is very hard to show that any new form of government is
superior to that practiced now. It is even harder to show that any
new form of government is superior to any practiced ever. […]
Nonetheless, unless these problems are not just hard but actually
unsolvable, innovation in the form of government is possible. …
Certainly, the very idea of innovation in government should not
frighten you. If it does, there is no point at all in thinking about
government. This is conservatism to the point of mental disorder. I
simply cannot contend with it, and I refuse to try. If you cannot set
yourself outside your own beliefs and prejudices, you are not capable
of normal civilized discourse.
Neocameralism is not (simply) reactionary because it has never
been fully instantiated up to this time. It is a proposed political-
economic innovation.
Let’s start with my ideal world – the world of thousands,
preferably even tens of thousands, of neocameralist city-states and
ministates, or neostates. The organizations which own and operate
481
Reignition
these neostates are for-profit sovereign corporations, or sovcorps.

For the moment, let’s assume a one-to-one mapping between
sovcorp and neostate. […] Let’s pin down the neocameralist dramatis
personae by identifying the people who work for a sovcorp as its
agents
agents, the people or organizations which collectively own it as its
subscribers
subscribers, and the people who live in its neostate as its residents
residents.
A Neocameral ‘neostate’ is not owned by its residents or its
agents. Its ‘monarch’ (or ‘CEO’) is an executive appointment. (90%
of all confusion about Neocameralism, and Neoreaction in general,
stems from a failure to grasp this elementary point.) Note:
‘subscribers’ (plural). More coming on this immediately.
Every patch of land on the planet has a primary owner, which
is its sovcorp. Typically, these owners will be large, impersonal
corporations. We call them sovcorps because they’re so sovvereign
ereign. You
are sovereign if you have the power to render any plausible attack on
your primary property, by any other sovereign power, unprofitable.
In other words, you maintain gener
general
al deterrence
deterrence. […] (Sovereignty
is a flat, peer-to-peer relationship by definition. The concept of
hierarchical sovereignty is a contradiction in terms. …) […] The
business of a sovcorp is to make money by deterring aggression.
Since human aggression is a serious problem, preventing it should
be a good business. Moreover, the existence of unprofitable
governments in your vicinity is serious cause for concern, because
unprofitable governments tend to have strange decision structures
482
and do weird, dangerous things. […] (Nuclear deterrence (mutual

assured destruction) is only one small class of deterrent designs. To
deter is to render predictably unprofitable. Predictably unprofitable
violence is irrational. Irrational violence is certainly not unheard of.
But it is much, much rarer than you may think. Most of the violence
in the world today is quite rational, IMHO.) […] General deterrence
is a complex topic which deserves its own post. For the moment,
assume that every square inch of the planet’s surface is formally
owned by some sovcorp, that no one disagrees on the borders, and
that deterrence between sovcorps is absolute.
Patchwork is a (transcendentally) flat network. No global
sovereign. At the ultimate level of its instantiation, it consists of P2P
connections between independent nodes.
This does not solve the problem of constructing a stable sovcorp.
The central problem of governance is the old Latin riddle: who
guards the guardians? The joint-stock corporate design solves the
central problem by entrusting guardianship in the collective
decisions of the corporation’s owners, voting not by head but by
percentage of profit received. […] The joint-stock model is hundreds
of years old. It is as proven as proven can be. […] … However, in the
sovereign context, the corporate joint-stock ownership and decision
structure faces serious challenges which do not exist for a
conventional secondary corporation. […] In the conventional
secondary corporation, the control of the owners is unchallenged
483
Reignition
and unchallengeable, at least as long as the sovereign’s rule of

corporate law is functioning properly. The corporation is
incorporated under the oversight of a sovereign protector, or
sponsor
sponsor. This is what makes it a secondary corporation. …
The Neocameral organizational problem is here defined.
… classical political thought concurred in considering imperio in
imperium
imperium, ie, internal subauthorities powerful enough to resist or
even control the center, a political solecism. In case you are not too
special to have ever worked in a cube, you are probably aware that
imperio in imperium is a solecism in Powerpointia as well. One small
difficulty, however, is that imperio in imperium means basically the
same thing as separ
separation
ation of powers
powers. Hm. […] Internal management
in modern Western corporations is pretty good. At least by the
standards of modern government, imperio in imperium is
nonexistent. (It should not be confused with the normal practice of
internal accounting, which does not in any way conflict with an
absolute central authority and a single set of books.)
The model for avoidance of imperio in imperium is joint-stock
business organization. It is thus equivalent to the control of
executives, or the preservation of sovereign capital imperatives
(through effective resolution of the principal-agent problem).
Solution of the P-A problem at the level of State governance is the
task of Neocameral administrative design.
Briefly, there are two options for sovcorp governance on a
484
neocameralist patchwork planet. One is cross-listing and the other

is cryptogo
cryptogovvernance
ernance. In cross-listing, sovcorps list on each other’s
secondary exchanges, taking great care to select only the most
reputable sponsors, and demanding a backdoor in which they can
switch sponsors at the slightest hint of weirdness. […] Cross-listing
can probably be made to work. However, it is dangerous as a single
line of defence. For an ideal sovcorp, it should be combined with
some degree of cryptogovernance. […] Cryptogovernance is any
system of corporate government in which all formal decisions are
endorsed and verified cryptographically. A sponsor can still be very
useful for cryptogovernance, but it is not required. Shareholders in
a cryptogoverned corporation – known as subscribers – use private
keys to sign their contributions to its governance. They may or may
not be anonymous, depending on the corporation’s rules. […] If you
are an American, have you ever wondered what the letters SA, or
similar, which you see all the time in the names of European
companies, mean? They mean “anonymous society.” If this strikes you
as weird, it shouldn’t.
Do any #HRx types still think this is their universe?
The neat thing about cryptographic government (which is actually
much easier than it sounds – we’re talking a few thousand lines of
code, max) is that it can be connected directly to the sovcorp’s
second line of defense: a cryptographically-controlled military. […]
Cryptographic weapons control, in the form of permissive action
485
Reignition
links, is already used for the world’s most powerful weapons.

However, there is nothing in principle preventing it from being
extended down to small arms – for example, with a radio activation
code transmitted over a mesh network. Military formations loyal to
the CEO will find that their weapons work. Rebel formations will
find that theirs don’t. The outcome is obvious. Moreover, the
neocameralist state has no incentive to deal kindly with traitors, so
there is no way for an attacker to repeatedly probe the system’s
weaknesses. […] The one difficulty with cryptographic weapons
control is that it fails, and devolves into simple military rule, if the
authorization keys are kept anywhere near the weapons.
Weaponholders can gather unlocked or noncryptographic weapons
secretly, and use them to arrest the keyholders – for example, the
directors of the sovcorp. […] The solution is simple: keep the
sovcorp’s directors, or whoever has ultimate control of the highest
grade of military keys, outside the sovcorp’s neostate. Even if the
CEO himself rebels, along with all of his subordinates, any formation
loyal to the directors can defeat them. The result is internal military
stability.
Agree with where Moldbug is going with this, or not, the line of
thought is profoundly illustrative of the Neocameral problem, as
originally conceived, which lies within the general framework of
cryptographic property protection (and not that of romantic political
attachment).
486
June 29, 2016
Owned
Hurlock has a valuable post on the concept of property, especially
in its relation to sovereignty, and formalization. Since (Moldbuggian)
Neocameralism can be construed as a renovated theory of property,
crucially involving all three of these terms, the relevance of the topic
should require no defense. The profound failure of enlightenment
philosophy to satisfactorily determine the meaning of property has
been a hostage to fortune whose dire consequences have yet to be
fully exhausted. (Within the NRx generally, the question of property
is deeply under-developed, and — with a very few exceptions — there
is little sign of serious attention being paid to it.)
The enlightenment failure has been to begin its analysis of
property from the problem of justification. This not only throws it
into immediate ideological contention, submitting it to politics, and
thus to relentless left-drift, it also places insurmountable obstacles
in the path of rigorous understanding. To depart from an axiom of
legitimate original property acquisition through work, as Locke does,
is already proto-Marxist in implication, resting on philosophically
hopeless metaphor, such as that of ‘mixing’ labor with things. It is
property that defines work (over against non-productive behavior),
487
Reignition
not the inverse. As Hurlock notes, Moldbug’s approach is the correct

one. ‘Property’ — as a social category — is a legitimation of control. It
cascades conceptually from sovereignty, and not from production.
These matters will inevitably become intellectually pressing, due
to the current technocommercial restoration of money, exemplified
by the innovation of Bitcoin (in its expansive sense, as the
blockchain). Control is undergoing cryptographic formalization, from
which all consistent apprehension of ‘property’ will follow. Property,
in the end, is not sociopolitical recognition of rights, but keys. What
you can lock and unlock is yours. The rest is merely more or less
serious talk, that only contingently compiles. This is what hacker
culture has already long understood in its specific (thedish) usage of
‘owned’. There’s no point crying to the government about having paid
good money for your computer, if Nerdgodz or some other irritating
15-year-old is running it as a Bitcoin-mining facility from his
mother’s basement. The concreteness of ‘might is right’ once looked
like a parade ground, but increasingly it is running functional code.
Formalization isn’t a detached exercise in philosophical reflection,
or even a sociopolitical and legal consensus, it’s functional
technocommercial cryptography. Defining property outside the
terms of this eventuation is an exercise in arbitrary sign-shuffling.
Those with the keys can simply smile at the surrounding senseless
noise. As Moldbug anticipates, with rigorously coded control, there’s
nothing further to argue about.
488
ADDED: Three recommended links from Bitstein; Locke’s

mistake, blockchained title, crypto and contracts (video discussion).
November 15, 2014
Legitimacy
As the conclusion to a quality piece of Singapore gloating, Kishore
Mahbubani outlines the crucial principle of regime legitimacy that
liberal-autocratic East Asia is honing for the world:
Singapore has its fair share of detractors. Its political system was
widely viewed as being an “enlightened dictatorship,” even though
free elections have been held every five years. Its media is widely
perceived to be controlled by the government and Singapore is
ranked number 153 out of 180 by Reporters Without Borders in
2015 on the Press Freedom Index. Many human rights organizations
criticize it. Freedom House ranks Singapore as “partially free.” […]
Undoubtedly, some of these criticisms have some validity. Yet, the
Singapore population is one of the best educated populations and,
hence, globally mobile. The
Theyy could vvote
ote with their feet if Singapore
were a stifling “un-free” society. Most choose to stay. Equally
importantly, some of the most talented people in the world, including
Americans and Europeans, are giving up their citizenship to become
Singapore citizens. Maybe they have noticed something that the
489
Reignition
Western media has not noticed: Singapore is one of the best places
to be born in and to live in. [UF emphasis]
Jacobinism is typically too lost in its own evangelical universalism
to recognize its limits in political philosophy and in space, if not yet
quite so demonstrably in time.
August 5, 2015
Laffer Drift
One dark and fearsome crag, half-lost among the Himalayan
mountain range of uncleared obligations stretched out before this
blog, is a promise to devote a post (or several) to Mencius Moldbug’s
Neocameral regime model. The opportunity to make a small payment
against this debt having arisen, I am eagerly seizing it.
A relatively marginal but consistent feature in Moldbug’s model is
the tendency of Neocameral tax rates to approximate to the Laffer
maximum. Since Moldbug aims to rationalize the theory of
government, under the presumption of its ineliminably self-
interested nature, this suggestion scarcely requires an argument
(and in fact does not receive one). Government will always tend to
maximize its resources, and Arthur Laffer’s graph of optimum
revenue-raising tax rates seems to show the way this is done. A
Neocameral regime tends the economy of a country exactly as a
490
farmer tends a herd of animals — without ever forgetting that

ultimate redemption occurs in the abattoir.
There is a problem with this assumption, however, which is that
the very idea of a Laffer maximum tax rate is incomplete. By
coordinating tax rates (on the x-axis) with tax revenues (on the y-
axis), the Laffer curve demolishes the crude economic intuition that
revenue rises continuously with tax rates. Through the a priori
postulate that a 100% tax rate yields zero revenue, Laffer
demonstrates that revenue maximization has to be located
somewhere in the central region of the curve. Its exact location — as
determined by the shape of the curve — is dependent upon empirical
factors, such as incentive effects, and cannot be deduced by pure
theory.
Missing from the Laffer curve is time, and thus dynamic revenue
projection. This is especially important to the Neocameral model,
since a central failure to be rectified through reactionary democracy-
suppression is the systematic heightening of time-preference, or
collapsing economic time-horizons, with which democracy is
inextricably bound. The Neocameral state is justified by its capacity
for time-extended economic rationality, and this is not something
that the simple Laffer curve can reflect.
Adding time to Laffer graphs is not a complex task. All that is
required is a multiplication of curves, constituting a time series, with
each curve corresponding to a time-horizon. Rather than a single
491
Reignition
curve, such a graph would consist of a 1-year curve, a 2-year curve,

a 3-year curve … and out to whichever extended prospect was
considered appropriate.
If levels of taxation were irrelevant to economic growth rates,
then each curve would be identical, and this exercise would lack all
significance. If, alternatively, taxation effected growth in a
predictable direction, then the Laffer curves would steadily drift as
time-horizons were expanded.
To begin with the improbable case, assume that extraction of
resources from private property owners tends to increase economic
growth. Then each successive Laffer curve would drift to the right,
as the tax base expands under the beneficent impact of lavish
government spending. A small and efficient government, by
depriving the economy of its attention, would steadily shrink the
tax base relative to its potential, and thus reduce the total level of
takings (as a function of time).
If, far more plausibly, taxation suppresses growth, then each
successive curve will drift to the left. The Laffer maximum tax rate
for a 1-year time horizon will be revealed as ever more excessive as
the horizon is dilated, and the shortfall of the depredated economy
is exposed with increasing clarity. The more extended the time-
horizon, the further to the left the dynamic Laffer maximum has to
be. As economic far-sightedness stretches out into the distance, an
authoritarian-realist regime converges with anarcho-capitalism,
492
since growth-maximization increasingly dominates its revenue

projections.
Of all the reasons to distrust the Neocameral model, an intrinsic
tendency to short-term Laffer-max revenue raising cannot be among
them.
[Apologies for the link famine — trawling the Moldbug archive
through the GFC is a nightmare undertaking, and it’s 3:30 in the
morning. I’ll try to punch some in over the next few days.]
August 6, 2013
493
Reignition
CHAPER TWO - IMPLEMENT

IMPLEMENTA
ATION
Undisco
Undiscovvered Countries
After (re)reading Adam Gurri’s critical analysis of the core problem
of Neoreaction (a tragedy of the political commons), read the
surgical response by Handle. The calm intelligence on display from
both sides is almost enough to drive you insane. This can’t be
happening, right? “In a way, it’s a bit sad, because I can guess that
Gurri’s article will be the zenith and high-water mark of coverage
of neoreaction which means it will only get worse from here on in.”
Enjoy the insight while it lasts.
My own response to Gurri is still embryonic, but I already suspect
that it diverges from Handle’s to some degree. Rather than
defending the ‘technocratic’ element in the Moldbug Patchwork-
Neocameral model, I agree with Gurri that this is a real problem,
although (of course) I am far more sympathetic to the underlying
intellectual project. Unlike Gurri — who in this crucial respect
represents a classical liberal position at its most thoughtful —
Moldbug does not conceive democracy as a discovery process,
illuminated by analogy to market dynamics and organic social
494
evolution. On the contrary, it is a ratchet mechanism that

successively distances the political realm from feedback sensitivity,
due to its character as a closed loop (or state church) sensitive only to
a public opinion it has itself manufactured. As the Cathedral expands,
its adaptation to reality progressively attenuates. The result is that
every effective discovery process — whether economic, scientific, or
of any other kind — is subjected to ever-more radical subversion by
political influences whose only ‘reality principle’ is internal: based on
closed-circuit social manipulation.
Democracy is thus, strictly speaking, a production of collective
insanity, or dissociation from reality. Moldbug’s solution, therefore,
can only be an attempt to re-embed governance in an effective
feedback system. Since it is already evident that democratic
mechanisms, rather than providing such feedback, reliably deepen
dissociation, reality signal has to come from elsewhere. To return to
an adaptive condition, governance has to simultaneously disconnect
from popular opinion (voice) and reconnect to a registry of actual —
rather than ideologically spun — performance. The communication
medium for the uncontaminated feedback required by sensible
government is exit traffic within the Patchwork (comparable in its
operation to revealed consumer preference within marketplaces).
The great difficulty that then emerges — casting the entire
Neocameral schema into question — is the requirement for an
‘undiscovered’ or ‘technocratic’ leap, from an environment of
495
Reignition
progressively decaying discovery or selection pressure, into one in

which discovery can once again take place. Neoreaction confronts
a very real transition problem, and Gurri is quite right to point this
out. Handle is no less right when he insists that the ‘conservative’
option of accommodation to the democratic social process in motion
is profoundly untenable, because discovery deterioration is essential
to the democratic trend. Maladaptation to reality ceases to be
correctable under Cathedral governance, and recognition of this
malign condition is the defining neoreactionary insight.
If we stay on the train we will be smashed into a consummate
insanity, but to leap is technocratic error (unsupported by discovery).
As for prevarication: The intensification of this dilemma can be
confidently expected from the mere continuance of the democratic
process, dominated by the degenerative politics of the madhouse,
and scrambling all social information. It is in this precarious position
that the task of a rigorous evaluation of the Neocameral schema,
along with its prospects for renovation or replacement, has to take
place.
“… it will only get worse from here on in.”
February 14, 2014
496
The Deal
NRx repudiates public politics. Turn that around, and it’s the thesis:
Politics happens in private.
Specifically — as a political philosophy — NRx advocates the
privatization of government. It makes a public case for that, in the
abstract, but only for purposes of informational and theoretical
optimization. It is not, ever, doing politics in public, but only thinking
about it under conditions of minimal intelligence security. Concrete
execution of political strategy occurs through private deals.
The currency of such deals was formalized by Mencius Moldbug,
as primary (or fungible sovereign) property. It corresponds to the
conversion — whether notional or actual — of hard power into
business assets. This conversion is what ‘formalism’ means. It’s an
important contribution to political philosophy, and political
economy, but it’s also a negotiating position.
Cries for (public) Action! will always be with us, at least until
things are radically sorted out. They should be ignored. No public
action is serious.
The serious thing is the deal, which substitutes for any semblance
of revolution, and also for regime perpetuation. Shadow NRx —
which acts outside the sphere of public visibility — is a political
vulture fund. This blog does not want to know who, or what, it is. Its
deep secrecy is the same as its reality. Our concern is restricted to
497
Reignition
the way it necessarily acts, in compliance with an absolute principle.

We ask only: What does the deal have to be like?
In its essence it is this: Stand down effective capabilities for
regime preservation in exchange for primary property stock. The
form thus indicates the relevant principals — holders of the keys to
hard power. What is on offer for them, as NRx develops in reality (the
shadows), is formalization of their implicit social authority, through
the emergence of a new — ultimate or ‘transcendental’ — commercial
medium. The whole of Neocameral transition is realized through this.
“Turn everything you have into rigorous code, and everything
changes. We can help with the technicalities.”
“Why should I do that?”
“It will be worth it.”
That’s the vulture fund aspect. Hard power capability is
systematically under-valued under conditions of Cathedral-demotic
degeneracy, since it is squandered on the ever-more inefficient
preservation of an insane religious establishment — the Atheo-
Oecumenic Ecclesiocracy — and compensated accordingly, from the
charred scraps of chronic policy disaster. After dysfunctional
domestic social programs, election buying, and Jacobin foreign policy
crusades have been paid for, what remains to reward competent
governance?
Administrative capability is slaved to the Cathedral, which means
to a zealous pursuit of impossible objectives, and thus accelerating
498
waste. As a business opportunity (“We can help with the

technicalities”), the attraction of defection grows, therefore, in strict
proportion to the triumph of progressivism. This is critical, because
the threshold risks of transition are immense, and the deal has to
cover them.
"All that complex governance you're doing under increasingly

ludicrous circumstances? We want to help you turn it into a
business."
— Outsideness (@Outsideness) January 23, 2016
… "You do get that you're basically working as a poorly paid

security goon for Jim Jones at the moment?"
The Cathedral is the Peoples Temple.

ADDED: The Political Omnivore responds (to the twitter
precursor).
January 23, 2016
The Sad LLeft

eft
It’s probably unrealistic right now to think the non-demented Left is
going to be able to cut the hysterical weeping long enough to realize:
499
Reignition
You’re going to have to put your social ideals into Neocameral format
if you want to play in the 21st century.
They really could do that. Sovereign stock distribution could be
wholly egalitarian. If Neo-Maoism seeks a sensible sized patch, they
should clearly be given one. (That would be a Neo-Maoist garbage
disposal program, as far as everyone else is concerned.) At the
highest level, NRx is first-order politics neutral. Do whatever you
want, within precisely formalized bounds.
There’s no audience for this point yet. Eventually there will be.
“But … but .. the whole point of the Left is that we don’t think
government is a business!” — Then call it a ‘co-op’ or some equivalent
bullshit. Jesus, use some imagination.
March 4, 2017
Startup Cities
Michael Anissimov is no friend of Neocameralism, but he’s got a good
sense for the kind of things we like:
Explain to me how this is different than Techno-

Commercialism http://t.co/Vvfb1i3oLS
— Michael Anissimov (@MikeAnissimov) July 31, 2014
500
Here‘s a good introduction.

Here‘s Paul Romer on Charter Cities (video), the more
institutionally-respectable predecessor conception (or perhaps the
same conception, with a more established brand).
The Startup Cities blog promotes China’s Special Economic Zones
as a model of success.
July 31, 2014
Quote note (#111)

SoBL on the next stage for Japan:
The Japanese had their forty-first straight month of trade deficits.
This is the problem when a nation imports raw materials and energy
and exports finished goods in a world of sluggish demand. The
Japanese are one of the export dollar recyclers. They are not reliable
anymore, which might be why tiny Belgium holds hundreds of billions
of US Treasuries now. The Japanese are now moving to invest more
abroad, but curiously, they are not investing in hot spots like China
but instead in America. The Japanese are investing in US insurance
companies as a proxy for investing directly in the US. They want
to use insurance companies as a way to learn about the US market
more before digging in deeper. This is beyond direct purchases of
manufacturing firms and what not. They did this in the ’80s when
501
Reignition
Japanese automakers partnered with US firms to learn the

psychology of the US worker as they then invested in US sitused
plants.
At the core of all of this is finding ways to earn non-yen
denominated revenue. Currency diversification to prepare for a
domestic shock. They are preparing for the devaluing of the yen,
and they expect it to happen to the yen first and the dollar later.
Many have bet against the yen and lost, including recently Kyle Bass,
but if the Japanese themselves are starting to bail, the end must be
approaching. It is an interesting island culture shaping up. Greying
and shrinking population, growing robotics industry, worlds’ largest
creditor nation with trillions in net assets, “xenophobic” immigration
policy, shrinking working population… it is like they are setting up an
island of a homogenous, rentier class.
If this analysis is correct, it suggests that Japanese capital is set to
become a major resource for world-wide trends with an NRx (anti-
demotic propertarian) orientation. Sustaining foreign investment
revenue streams will become an existential necessity for a grayed
Japan, which is enough to establish a definite agenda regarding
governance models in the functional fragments of the world system.
Does a ‘rentier nation’ spontaneously produce a Neocameral
geopolitical entity?
September 22, 2014
502
Clandestine NeoCam
This is huge:
The most intriguing secrets of the “war on terror” have nothing
to do with al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers. They’re about the
mammoth private spying industry that all but runs U.S. intelligence
operations today. […] Surprised? No wonder. In April, Director of
National Intelligence Mike McConnell was poised to publicize a year-
long examination of outsourcing by U.S. intelligence agencies. But
the report was inexplicably delayed — and suddenly classified a
national secret. What McConnell doesn’t want you to know is that
the private spy industry has succeeded where no foreign
government has: It has penetrated the CIA and is running the show.
[…] Over the past five years (some say almost a decade), there has
been a revolution in the intelligence community toward wide-scale
outsourcing. Private companies now perform key intelligence-
agency functions, to the tune, I’m told, of more than $42 billion a
year. Intelligence professionals tell me that more than 50 percent of
the National Clandestine Service (NCS) — the heart, brains and soul
of the CIA — has been outsourced to private firms such as Abraxas,
Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. …
Of course, read it all, but especially:
Outsourcing has provided solutions to personnel-management
problems that have always plagued the CIA’s operations side. Rather
503
Reignition
than tying agents up in the kind of office politics that government

employees have to engage in to advance their careers, outsourcing
permits them to focus on what they do best, which boosts morale and
performance.
Under the conditions of a ruined public sphere, trends to the
commercialization of government are re-routed around the back.
When the time is right for the dismantling of the terminally
deteriorated Cathedral Empire — a.k.a. ‘the International
Community’ — its power structures will default to the Deep State,
which is already undergoing business re-organization. Identify the
private agencies who at that point will own the only chunks of
security apparatus still working, and you know who’s political ideas
will matter. It follows, naturally, that it would be unrealistic to expect
these directors to be voluble about their thinking, or anything else.
They’re not politicians. That’s over.
The public sphere is already dead. It’s time now to shift all serious
attention into the dark.
(Thanks to VXXC for the WaPo link.)
May 12, 2015
NRx Disne
Disneyworld
yworld
Never underestimate the capacity of modern history’s neo-
504
cyberpunk oddity to reach the place you thought you were heading
ahead of time, and in a way that doesn’t seem … quite right. Glenn
Beck has set his heart (and checkbook) on a version of
neoreactionary secessionism, based on a restoration of the House of
Disney. Once you see the plan, it’s immediately obvious that nothing
in the reactosphere will ever be the same again:
While Independence is very much a dream at this point, the
proposed city-theme park hybrid would bring several of Glenn’s
seemingly disconnected projects into one place. Media, live events,
small business stores, educational projects, charity, entertainment,
news, information, and technology R&D – all of these things would
have a home in Independence. With the rest of the country and the
world going away from the values of freedom, responsibility and
truth, Independence would be a place built on the very foundation
of those principles. A retreat from the world where entrepreneurs,
artists, and creators could come to put their ideas to work. A place
for families to bring their children to be inspired. […] The ambitious
project, projected to cost over two billion dollars, has been heavily
influenced by Walt Disney. As Glenn has been explaining throughout
the week, Disneyland was originally intended to be a place where
people would find happiness, inspiration, courage and hope. Over
time, Walt Disney’s original vision has been lost. While hundreds of
thousands still flock to the town, it’s become commercialized and
the big dreams and the heart have been compromised. […] Glenn
505
Reignition
believes that he can bring the heart and the spirit of Walt’s early
Disneyland ideas into reality. Independence, USA wouldn’t be about
rides and merchandise, but would be about community and freedom.
The Marketplace would be a place where craftmen and artisan could
open and run real small businesses and stores. The owners and
tradesmen could hold apprenticeships and teach young people the
skills and entrepreneurial spirit that has been lost in today’s
entitlement state. […] There would also be an Media Center, where
Glenn’s production company would film television, movies,
documentaries, and more. Glenn hoped to include scripted television
that would challenge viewers without resorting to a loss of human
decency. He also said it would be a place where aspiring journalists
would learn how to be great reporters. […] Across the lake, there
would be a church modelled after The Alamo which would act as
a multi-denominational mission center. The town will also have a
working ranch where visitors can learn how to farm and work the
land.
Gnon giveth in overwhelming abundance, and also takes away.
“Neoreaction? Wasn’t that some kind of precursor to the Glenn
Beck thing?”
June 16, 2015
506
Disne
Disneyy NRx
It looks as if this was a lot more flippant than it needed to be.
Via @asilentsky (via), the question: Was Walt Disney practically
exploring a prototypical Neoreaction in the 1960s? Such
anachronism typically merits extreme skepticism, but here are some
videos to hone your doubt upon: Walt Disney’s original plan for
EPCOT (his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow),
parts 1, 2, and 3. Plus some select tweet support:
In a very real sense Walt Disney is #NRx

— Konkvistador (@asilentsky) July 20, 2015
A for profit city that is also an industrial park for cutting edge
industry, with room for future technology, designed to be
updated. #NRx
They called Lee's brilliant Singapore Disneyworld with the

Death Penalty. This is closer to truth than it seems. And a
deep compliment. #NRx
(That last is a Gibson quote, btw.)

From the EPCOT videos: “Whatever worked became the code …
507
Reignition
We’re ready to go right now.”

There has to be a discussion about this.
July 20, 2015
508
SECTION B - F
FASCISM
ASCISM
509
Reignition
CHAPTER ONE - THE BASICS
Triumph of the Will?

If it were never necessary to adapt fundamentally to reality, then
fascism would be the truth. There could be no limit to the
sovereignty of political will.
If — pursuing this thought further into vile absurdity — even
tactical concessions were unnecessary, then nothing would obstruct
a path of joyous degeneration leading all the way to consummate
communism. That, however, is several steps beyond anything that
has been seriously advocated for over half a century.
Since the 1920s, communism has been the ideal form of socio-
economic impracticality, as evidenced by that fact that whenever
communism becomes practical, it becomes — to exactly the same
extent — fascist (‘state capitalist’ or ‘Stalinist’). Fascism on the other
hand, and as everyone knows, makes the trains run on time. It
represents practical subordination of reality to concentrated will.
Fascism understands itself as the politics of the ‘third position’ —

between the anti-political hyper-realism of the market on the one
510
(invisible) hand, and super-political communist fantasy on the

(clenched-fist) other. The fascism that thrives — most exceptionally
in the American tradition through Hamilton, Lincoln, and FDR — is
a flexi-fascism, or pragmatic illiberalism, that marries the populist
desires of coercive collectivism to a superceded, subordinated, or
directed ‘realism’ — grasping economic dispersion as a technocratic
management problem under centralized supervision. Insofar as this
problem proves to be indeed manageable, the basic fascist intuition
is vindicated. Fragmentation is mastered, in a triumph of the will
(although we are more likely to call it ‘hope and change’ today).
That fragmentation cannot be mastered is the sole essentially
anti-fascist proposition, and also the distinctive thesis of Austrian
economics. Whilst deductively obtainable, within the axiomatic
system of methodological individualism, it is a thesis that must
ultimately be considered empirically sensitive. Fascism can discredit
individualist assumptions simply by prolonging itself, and thus
practically asserting the superior authority of the social super-
organism. Reciprocally, the fragility of collective identities can only
be convincingly demonstrated through historical events. It does not
suffice to analytically ‘disprove’ the collective — it has to be
effectively broken. Nothing less than a totally unmanageable
economic crisis can really count against the fascist idea.
Yet, obviously and disturbingly, the predictable political response
to a gathering crisis is to slide more deeply into fascism. Since
511
Reignition
fascism, beyond all brand-complexity, sells itself as ultimate

managerial authority — heroic dragon-slayer of the autonomous (or
‘out-of-control’) economy — there is absolutely no reason for this to
surprise us. To break fascism is to break the desire for fascism, which
is to break the democratic or ‘popular will’ itself — and only a really
freed economy, which has uncaged itself, spikily and irreversibly, can
do that.
The shattering of human collective self-management from the
Outside, or (alternatively) triumphal fascism forever. That is the fork,
dividing reaction from itself, and deciding everything for mankind.
Patchwork or New Order — but when will we know?
NOTE: Among the glories of this comments thread is Vladimir’s
indispensable contribution to the schedule of decision: “Meanwhile,
the Austro-libertarian prophets of doom are necessarily unable to
give any accurate timing for these crashes and panics, even when
they unfold exactly according to their theory. The reason is simple:
the obvious truth of the weak efficient markets hypothesis.”
ADDED: Ex-Army on why Communism ≠ Fascism: “When you’re
given a choice between living under a communist dictator or a fascist
dictator, everything else being equal, take the fascist dictator.
Interestingly, communists in general are safer under a fascist
dictator than they are under a communist dictator.”
March 25, 2013
512
AIA
AIACC
CC
Moldbug’s latest has triggered a wave of discussion by emphatically
re-stating the long-standing thesis:
America is a communist country.
The supporting argument is richly multi-threaded, and I won’t
attempt to recapitulate it here. Its dominant flavor can be
appreciated in these paragraphs:
When the story of the 20th century is told in its proper,
reactionary light, international communism is anything but a
grievance of which Americans may complain. Rather, it’s a crime for
which we have yet to repent. Since America is a communist country,
the original communist country, and the most powerful and
important of communist countries, the crimes of communism are our
crimes. You may not personally have supported these crimes. Did
you oppose them in any way?
Whereas actually, codewords like “progressive,” “social justice,”
“change,” etc, are shared across the Popular Front community for the
entire 20th century. They are just as likely to be used by a Cheka
cheerleader from the ’20s, as a Clinton voter from the ’90s.
‘Progressives’ aren’t called out on their all-but-overt communism
for ‘reasons’ of tact, rooted in a complex structure of intimidation,
which itself attests to comprehensive Left triumph. It’s rude to call
a ruling communist a communist, and being rude can be highly
513
Reignition
deleterious to life prospects (it’s a communist thing, which everyone

understands all too well).
Despite all this, Outside in probably won’t be stepping up its
counter-communist rhetoric in any obvious way, because there’s a
criticism of the AIACC analysis that remains unanswered — and
which Moldbug seems averse to recognizing. Fascism is the highest
stage of communism. Already in the 1930s — which is to say with the
New Deal — even small-c ‘communism’ had been clearly surpassed by
a more advanced model of slaving the private economy to the state.
Yes, America is a communist country, in much the same way that
it is a protestant, and puritan one. The ideological lineage of its
governing establishment leads through communism, in exactly the
way Moldbug describes. The evolution of this lineage, however, has
long passed on into politically incorporated pseudo-capitalism. This
is a fact which can only be obscured by excessive attention to
preliminary — and now entirely extinct — political forms.
There is absolutely nobody on the empowered Left seeking to
dismantle the co-opted oligarchy in order to establish direct ‘public’
administration of the American industrial base. In this respect
America is no more communist than the Third Reich (and also no
less). Central planning is restricted to the monetary commanding
heights, with a pragmatic apparatus of regulatory coercion enforcing
political conformity among private businesses. This arrangement is
accepted as far more consistent with effective direction of society
514
through Cathedral teleology, in which the accumulation of cultural

power is acknowledged as the supreme goal. Furthermore, it enables
government insiders and allies to be rewarded relatively openly,
economizing on the administrative, political, and psychological costs
of extensive subterfuge.
Understanding that fascism is an advanced communist ideology
is at least as important as recognizing AIACC, with more significant
consequences, on the ‘right’ as well as the Left. Progressives
progress. Communism was just a stage they went through.
September 19, 2013
Quote notes (#59)

John Michael Greer on the triumph of fascism (spot on):
National socialist parties argued that business firms should be
made subject to government regulation and coordination in order to
keep them from acting against the interests of society as a whole,
and that the working classes ought to receive a range of government
benefits paid for by taxes on corporate income and the well-to-do.
Those points were central to the program of the National Socialist
German Workers Party from the time it got that name— it was
founded as the German Workers Party, and got the rest of the
moniker at the urging of a little man with a Charlie Chaplin mustache
515
Reignition
who became the party’s leader not long after its founding — and
those were the policies that the same party enacted when it took
power in Germany in 1933.
If those policies sound familiar, dear reader, they should. That’s
the other reason why next to nobody outside of specialist historical
works mentions national socialism by name: the Western nations
that defeated national socialism in Germany promptly adopted its
core economic policies, the main source of its mass appeal, to
forestall any attempt to revive it in the postwar world.
(via @PuzzlePirate)
ADDED: A point of clarification and a question:
Fascism isn’t a problem because it triggers scary feelings about
the Nazis. It’s a problem because it’s running the world.
Question: Is there anybody among the critics of this contention
who seeks to defend fascism against sloppy criticism and ‘spin’ who
doesn’t also want — at least partially — to defend elements of
socialist governance?
The sample size of the commentary so far is too small to tell, but
it’s looking as if the answer is ‘no’. If so, it would suggest that Hayek
and even (*gasp*) Jonah Goldberg are right in suggesting that the
fundamental controversy is about spontaneous social organization,
and not about any unambiguous argument of Left v. Right.
516
February 13, 2014
Fascism
The whole of Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism (2004) is
available here. In the final pages (p.218), following detailed historical
analysis, it cautiously advances a cultural-political definition:
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked
by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or
victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity,
in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants,
working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites,
abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive
violence and without ethical or legal restraint goals of internal
cleansing and external expansion.
Since the topic regularly re-surfaces, it seems worth recording
Paxton’s formulation as a reference point, especially as its emphases
differ significantly from those this blog (and its critics) have tended
to stress. An important conclusion of Paxton’s study is that no purely
ideological account of fascism is able to capture what is an
essentially historical phenomenon, which is to say a process, rooted
in the degeneration of democracy. (Wikipedia offers some
background on his work.)
517
Reignition
June 12, 2014
518
CHAPTER TWO - NEOLIBERALISM: THE

FASCISM THA
THAT
T WON
‘Neoliber
‘Neoliberalism
alism’’
It’s absolutely obvious that any engagement with the most
prominent current version of accelerationist thinking — or indeed
with any left-dominated discussion today — is going to encounter the
term ‘neoliberalism‘ as an omnipresent reference. Sheer irritability
won’t serve as a response for long.
Why irritation at all? Most immediately, because the reference of
this term is a sprawling mess. It is employed ambiguously to describe
an epoch, and an ideology. The evident duplicity of this lies in the
tacit assumption that the ideology defines the epoch — a vast
historical and political claim, as well as an implausible one — which
evades systematic interrogation through terminological sleaziness.
Worse still, the characteristics of the ‘neoliberal’ ideology are
themselves pasted together, primarily by a mish-mash of
theoretically-impoverished anti-capitalist polemics from around the
world, with the consequence that its only consistent feature is the
519
Reignition
mere fact of having a leftist opposition (somewhere). As the

Wikipedia explanation (linked above) makes clear, any economic
policy anywhere that is not positively hostile to the market, and
which finds itself talked about antagonistically by the left, is
‘neoliberal’.
When all of these compounding fuzz factors are taken into
consideration, it is easy to see why the meaning of ‘neoliberal’ can
range — at the very least — from marginally market-reformist
Keynesianism (Clinton), through autocratic capitalism (Pinochet), to
extreme libertarian ‘hyper-capitalism’ (in our dreams). Its global
application, to include — for instance — the ethnic-Chinese
dominated Pacific Rim (and post Reform-and-Opening Mainland
China), is more carelessly gestural still. If Lenin’s 1921 New
Economic Policy wasn’t ‘neoliberal’ it’s hard to see why — unless the
absence of a left opposition suffices as an explanation. A word this
sloppy — traditionally rooted in Latin American anti-market
demagoguery, but since adopted generally as the linguistic
equivalent of a Che Guevara T-shirt — has no serious analytical use.
Fashion is unpredictable, but it seems very unlikely that this word
is going anywhere. Its totemic meaning within tribal leftism is enough
to ensure its persistence — which is to say that SWPL radical chic
signalling would be significantly inconvenienced without it. Might it
then be possible to rigorize it?
That would require delimitation, which is to say: specificity. Given
520
the political utility of the word, there are few grounds for optimism
in this respect. David Harvey, for instance, who has devoted a book
to the ‘topic’ (A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 2005), produces no
clear definition beyond resurgent capitalism, as it occurred with the
partial recession of central planning from the late 1970s.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, the more classically liberal policy
becomes, the more ‘neoliberal’ it is too. The ‘neo-‘, in the end, signifies
no more than an infuriated “you’re supposed to be dead, goddammit.”
Neoliberalism is then a capitalistic orientation that has outlived
expectation, and since the expectation has been sunk into
immovable foundations, it is the outliving that requires explicit
designation.
Whatever slight (and strictly polemical) coherence might be
drawn from Harvey is thrown back into chaos by Benjamin Noys’
paper ‘The Grammar of Neoliberalism’ (2010). Far from describing
the partial reversion to market-oriented economic arrangements in
the wake of hegemonic Social Democratic assumptions, Noys
identifies ‘neoliberalism’ with the state-supervised capitalism
introduced in the 1920s-30s, i.e. exactly that economic order which
Harvey’s ‘neoliberalism’ overthrows.
Taken in its own terms — rather than as a defense of an
intrinsically misleading word — Noys’ argument is highly interesting.
Its general direction is captured in the following passage [citation
marks subtracted]:
521
Reignition
What is the precise nature, then, of neo-liberalism? Of course,

the obvious objection to the ‘anti-state’ vision of neo-liberalism is
that neo-liberalism itself is a continual form of state intervention,
usually summarised in the phrase ‘socialism for the rich, capitalism
for the poor’. Foucault notes that neo-liberalism concedes this: ‘neo-
liberal government intervention is no less dense, frequent, active,
and continuous than in any other system.’ The difference, however, is
the point of application. It intervenes on society ‘so that competitive
mechanisms can play a regulatory role at every moment and every
point in society and by intervening in this way its objective will
become possible, that is to say, a general regulation of society by the
market.’ Therefore, we miss the point if we simply leave a critique of
neo-liberalism at the point of saying ‘neo-liberalism is as statist as
other governmental forms’. Instead, the necessity is to analyse how
neo-liberalism creates a new form of governmentality in which the
state performs a different function: permeating society to subject it
to the economic.
Setting aside the question of this argument’s persuasiveness (for
another time), the essential thing to note is that it represents a
contest over the mindlessly shambling term ‘neoliberalism’ which
Noys has little realistic chance of winning — ‘winning’, that is, with
sufficient comprehensiveness to salvage the word. If ‘neoliberalism’
generally meant a highly statist variant of ‘capitalist’ organization,
first originating in the era of high-modernism, in which — in contrast
522
to the statism of the left — the role of the state was specifically
directed to imposing an administrative simulacrum of catallactic
social order, it would become a valuable, theoretically-functional
word. This would be so even if the theory itself were criticized,
amended, or rejected — and in fact the very possibility of such
engagement presupposes that ‘neoliberalism’ becomes a locally
intelligible concept (local, that is, to Noys’ argument and whatever
halo it has managed to extend beyond itself).
Even here on the Outer Right, almost all terminological irritability
would immediately subside if the expression repeatedly
encountered was — even implicitly — Neoliberalism in the Noysean
sense. It would then be a term with relatively precise limits, clarifying
more than it obscured. Consequently, it would mark a limit on the
right as well as the left, distinguishing anti-statist or laissez-faire
capitalism — with its model in Hong Kong — from the dominant
political-economic formation of our age. For that reason alone, it can
be confidently anticipated that ‘neoliberalism’ will not be permitted
to mean any such thing.
ADDED: Complete PDF of David Harvey’s A Brief History of
Neoliberalism.
February 21, 2014
523
Reignition
‘Neoliber
‘Neoliberalism
alism’’ II
Paul Mason thinks he’s being helpful:
There’s a meme that keeps resurfacing in the genteel world of
rightwing financial thought: that the term “neoliberalism” is in some
way just a term of abuse, or a catch-all phrase invented by the left.
[…] Well, as the UK steel industry faces instant closure—and let’s
be clear that’s what Tata would do if it had to—we about to get
a textbook lesson in what neoliberalism actually means. It means,
when market logic clashes with human logic, the market must prevail
and you must not give a shit about the social consequences.
Ummm … you know that was just straight-up liberalism, before
they wrecked the word. (Socialism is the other thing.)
ADDED: Some precious lucidity here.
April 21, 2016
The Fascism that W

Won
on
Calling somebody a fascist tends to be a great way to end a
conversation. First on the Left, and more recently on the Right, the
abuse value of this term has been eagerly seized upon. Insofar as
such usage merits the attribution of a ‘logic’ it is that of reductio ad
absurdum — an argument or position that can be identified as fascist
524
by implication is thereby immediately dismissed. Fascism is analyzed

only as far as required to stick the label on the other guy.
Among the reasons to regret this situation is the veil it casts over
the triumph of fascism as the decisive historical fact of the 20th
century. While the defeat of the core ‘fascist’ axis in the Second
World War left the ideology bereft of confident defenders, reducing
it to its merely abusive meaning, it also fostered the illusion that
the victorious powers were essentially ‘anti-fascist’ — to the point
of extreme military exertion. The historical reality, in contrast, is
described far more accurately by dramatic convergence upon fascist
ideas, from both Left and Right, as exemplified by the ascendency
of pragmatic nationalism over radical collectivism in the communist
world, and by social-democratic state-managerialism over laissez-
faire ‘classical liberalism’ in the West. With calm discussion of this
‘third-position’ formation rendered next to impossible, the crucial
attempt to understand its socio-historical specificity is diverted into
sterile polemics.
American Arch-Druid John Michael Greer is perhaps sufficiently
distanced from predictable Left-Right controversy to make a
difference with his three part series of blog posts on the historical
reality of fascism. Rather than attack fascism (from the Left) for its
residual capitalism, or (from the Right) for its innovative anti-
capitalism, Greer prioritizes the philosophical task of a rectification
of words:
525
Reignition
When George Orwell wrote his tremendous satire on

totalitarian politics, 1984
1984, one of the core themes he
explored was the debasement of language for political
advantage. That habit found its lasting emblem in Orwell’s
invented language Newspeak, which was deliberately
designed to get in the way of clear thinking. Newspeak
remains fictional—well, more or less—but the entire subject
of fascism, and indeed the word itself, has gotten tangled up
in a net of debased language and incoherent thinking as
extreme as anything Orwell put in his novel.
These days, to be more precise, the word “fascism” mostly
functions as what S.I. Hayakawa used to call a snarl word —
a content-free verbal noise that expresses angry emotions
and nothing else. … To get past such stupidities, it’s going to
be necessary to take the time to rise up out of the swamp
of Newspeak that surrounds the subject of fascism — to
reconnect words with their meanings, and political
movements with their historical contexts.
Greer’s discussion is so eloquent and penetrating that it would be

redundant to repeat it here. It deserves the widest possible careful
reading, and subsequent reflection. (Urban Future endorses the
entire argument, with only the most marginal reservations on
comparatively insignificant points.)
526
Instead of pointless repetition, a question. Given that history has

conspired to make the word ‘fascism’ illegible, and has thus not only
obscured the dominant trend in social organization worldwide, but
also stripped away all effective antibodies to resurgent movements
of classical fascist type, is there any realistic path to a restoration of
political lucidity? Is the world doomed to persistent blindness about
what it is, and what it might still more dismally become? If there are
any grounds for encouragement in this regard, the evidence for them
is thin.
Greer’s conclusion seems no less bleak. Approaching it, he
comments:
The fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s were …

closely attuned to the hopes and fears of the masses, far
more so than either the mainstream parties or the
established radical groups of their respective countries.
Unlike the imagined “fascism” of modern radical rhetoric,
they were an alternative to business as usual, an alternative
that positioned itself squarely in the abandoned center of
the political discourse of their eras. … Antisemitism and overt
militarism were socially acceptable in Germany between the
wars; they aren’t socially acceptable in today’s United States,
and so they won’t play a role in a neofascist movement of
any importance in the American future. What will play such
527
Reignition
roles, of course, are the tropes and buzzwords that appeal to

Americans today, and those may very well include the tropes
and buzzwords that appeal most to you.
ADDED: (For the Fregeans out there) Different Sinn, same

Bedeutung: ‘morning star’ and ‘evening star’; ‘Neoliberalism’ and The
Fascism that Won.
March 3, 2014
The Fascism that’s Winning

John Michael Greer’s grasp of the fascist phenomenon is much
stronger than Samir Amin’s. As might be expected from a voice so
unambiguously aligned with the Left, Amin is entirely indifferent to
the essentially populist nature of fascism and its erosion of property
rights.
Property has no meaning apart from free disposal, equivalent to
an Exit option on a particular instantiation of wealth. Fascism’s
statist subordination of the independent ‘plutocracy’ — realized
through more-or-less severe restrictions on the free disposal of
assets, both formal and informal — is therefore inconsistent with
the protection of private property, which is rather eroded from its
foundations. (Where communism expropriates, fascism — more
528
efficiently — attenuates.)
Amin is therefore writing from a position of structurally-
unobservant Marxist dogma when he remarks of “fascist regimes” in
general:
… they were all willing to manage the government and society in
such a way as not to call the fundamental principles of capitalism
into question, specifically private capitalist property, including that
of modern monopoly capitalism. That is why I call these different
forms of fascism particular ways of managing capitalism and not
political forms that challenge the latter’s legitimacy, even if
“capitalism” or “plutocracies” were subject to long diatribes in the
rhetoric of fascist speeches. The lie that hides the true nature of
these speeches appears as soon as one examines the “alternative”
proposed by these various forms of fascism, which are always silent
concerning the main point — private capitalist property.
On the contrary — every fascist regime qualifies the liberal right
to free disposal of ‘strategic’ economic assets, and thus subverts
“private capitalist property” at the root. Indeed, the forms of
property most radically affected by fascist governance are precisely
those identifiable with a capitalistic (i.e. productive) character. In the
case of large-scale capital assets determined as the ‘commanding
heights’ of a modern industrial economy, especially those of clear
military significance, utilization is directed as stringently under
fascist conditions as communistic ones (although typically with
529
Reignition
considerably greater administrative competence and pragmatic

flexibility). When socialism emphasizes practicality, it tends to adopt
fascistic traits — such as nationalism and state-supervised bourgeois
management — automatically.
Amin’s essay, however, is far from uninteresting. It’s most striking
analysis, which also seems to have been its motivating topic,
concerns political Islam. Amin’s disdain for this rising ideology is
classically Marxist, and entirely untainted by New Left opportunism.
In consequence, he is positioned as a voice in the wilderness,
addressing a sympathetic audience that has been marginalized to the
edge of disappearance.
After formulating a four-fold typology of fascist regimes, Amin
resolutely folds Islamism into it, stating:
… the Western powers (the United States and its subaltern
European allies) … have given preferential support to the Muslim
Brotherhood and/or other “Salafist” organizations of political Islam.
The reason for that is simple and obvious: these reactionary political
forces accept exercising their power within globalized neoliberalism
(and thus abandoning any prospect for social justice and national
independence). That is the sole objective pursued by the imperialist
powers.
Consequently, political Islam’s program belongs to the type of
fascism found in dependent societies. In fact, it shares with all forms
of fascism two fundamental characteristics: (1) the absence of a
530
challenge to the essential aspects of the capitalist order (and in this

context this amounts to not challenging the model of lumpen
development connected to the spread of globalized neoliberal
capitalism); and (2) the choice of anti-democratic, police-state forms
of political management (such as the prohibition of parties and
organizations, and forced Islamization of morals).
The anti-democratic option of the imperialist powers (which gives
the lie to the pro-democratic rhetoric found in the flood of
propaganda to which we are subjected), then, accepts the possible
“excesses” of the Islamic regimes in question. Like other types of
fascism and for the same reasons, these excesses are inscribed in
the “genes” of their modes of thought: unquestioned submission to
leaders, fanatic valorization of adherence to the state religion, and
the formation of shock forces used to impose submission. In fact,
and this can be seen already, the “Islamist” program makes progress
only in the context of a civil war (between, among others, Sunnis
and Shias) and results in nothing other than permanent chaos. This
type of Islamist power is, then, the guarantee that the societies in
question will remain absolutely incapable of asserting themselves on
the world scene. It is clear that a declining United States has given
up on getting something better — a stable and submissive local
government — in favor of this “second best.”
Beyond an appeal for “vigilance”, Amin has little to propose in
practical response to this predicament. Given the near-total
531
Reignition
evaporation of secular-leftist constituencies in the Muslim world,

accompanied by the disappearance of a confident anti-Islamist Left
outside it, this absence of practical direction is scarcely surprising.
September 2, 2014
Capitalism T
Toda
odayy
… the American version, at least, which is probably why it’s going to
die. Apple’s Tim Cook opines:
America’s business community recognized a long time ago that
discrimination, in all its forms, is bad for business.
Charitably, I’m going to assume this isn’t a direct quote from
Stormfront. It’s a mess, but not an unanticipated one.
ADDED: Any connoisseur of tangled irony knots has to
appreciate this:
Can we admit it's KIND OF funny ppl are boycotting Indiana

for the immoral act of allowing people to boycott those they
think act immorally?
— Scott Alexander (@slatestarcodex) March 31, 2015
March 30, 2015
532
Man in the High Castle

The TV series trailer.
Could it be that people are beginning to understand that fascism
won the 20th century? (With no sign of a major reverse so far in the
21st.)
Since ‘fascism’ tweaks people’s Godwin nerves, it might be better
to talk about ‘pragmatic populism’ — so long as it is initially
understood that no substantial semantic revision is thereby taking
place. Whatever we call it, it’s what has ruled the earth for close
to a century, as the culmination of democracy, and the way classical
liberalism is actually destroyed. It plays on basic human traits in a
way that leaves every other ideology in the dust — tribalism,
resentment, vicarious identification with authority, extreme
susceptibility to simple propaganda, and all of the remaining highly-
predictable, easily manipulable, aspects of hominid social emotion.
Ultimately, it’s what humanity deserves, strictly speaking, since it is
nothing other than the cynical exploitation of what people are like.
The fact that the most insultingly trivial redecorations of this mode
of social organization suffice to convince even articulate intellectuals
that something else is taking place serves as an ample demonstration
of its tidal historic momentum. Fascists Pragmatic populists think
that people, as a general political phenomenon, are irredeemably
moronic tools, and they’re right.
533
Reignition
The more politics we get, the deeper pragmatic populism digs in.
ADDED: Background to the Times Square shot. “The more
familiar it is, the more terrifying it is.” (Quite.)
September 25, 2015
Twitter cuts (#124)
So, I have been mulling Marx's prediction of the ultimate

result of capitalist development with increasing confusion.
— Jehu (@Damn_Jehu) July 14, 2016
(Massive tweet-storm follows that is too long to reproduce, but

well worth your time.)
The “national capitalist” is a concept that arises in the Marxian
tradition, but has also (recently) acquired a very different valency
elsewhere. Countries come to appear as estates.
July 14, 2016
The ‘F’ W
Word
ord
Fascism is back, apparently. At the very least, it might be getting
more interesting to talk about.
534
In the period immediately following World War II, both of the

triumphant blocs moved rapidly to define the word ‘fascism’
expediently. The critical objective, on each side, was to emphasize
those features comparatively understated in its own domestic
version of the phenomenon, in order to underscore the impression
that they had unambiguously sided against it. ‘Fascism’ was,
definitively, that thing recently and at an enormous cost defeated.
The immense sacrifices – and, in fact, progressive fascist
reconstruction of society that had been accelerated during the war
years – was justified by the crushing defeat of an absolute evil.
Distinction was imperative. Thus, the Soviets drew particular
attention to the comparatively muted anti-capitalism of the Axis
powers, while the Atlantic allies concentrated upon the exotic
trappings of German anti-semitic Aryanism. It is particularly notable
that the predominant Western definition of fascism is remarkably
maladapted to even the most basic comprehension of the Italian
original, and that both Western and Soviet anti-fascist narratives are
compelled to downplay the revolutionary socialism of its roots, in
both its Italian and its German variants.
This is all understandable enough, but it grotesquely mystifies the
reality of fascism, which was epitomized – universally – by the
20th-century war economy. Every major contestant of WWII –
including the great Asian powers Japan and China – developed
fascist governance to an advanced state. The essential feature was
535
Reignition
state seizure of the economy’s ‘commanding heights’ in the

delegated (and integrated) ‘popular interest’. During war time such
interest is peeled back to sheer survival, and thus publicized with
dramatic intensity, which is also to say with an unusual absence of
skepticism. Fascism is therefore broadly identical with a
normalization of war-powers in a modern state, that is: sustained
social mobilization under central direction. Consequently, it involves,
beside the centralization of political authority in a permanent war
council, a tribal hystericization of social identity, and a considerable
measure of economic pragmatism. Fascism is practical socialism,
distinguished from its dim cousin by its far more sophisticated grasp
of incentives, or of human nature in its motivated individual and
tribal particularity. When compared to universalistic communism,
fascism’s practical advantages are such that ‘actually existing
socialism’ always soon turns into it. National socialism and socialism
in one country are not sanely separable things. Everyone knows that
the literal meaning of ‘fascism’ is bundling.
Like its Continental European and Soviet competitors, American
fascism had been fully consolidated by the beginning of the war. The
New Deal cemented its structural pillars into place. Socialization of
the economy through central banking, the transformation of the
Supreme Court into a facilitator of systematic executive over-reach,
and a transformation of mass-politics through broadcast media
technologies had composed a new, post-constitutional political
536
order. It is this formation that is so flagrantly entering its phase of

terminal dementia today.
Since the fascist state justifies itself through perpetual war, it
naturally likes wars that cannot end. The Cold War looked like one,
but wasn’t quite. The War on Terror is a better bet. In regards to
their interminability, if not their moral intensity, ‘wars’ on poverty,
drugs, and other resilient social conditions are more attractive still.
Waging modern wars, and their metaphorical side-products, is what
the fascist state is for. Winning them on occasion, and by accident, is
only ever a misfortune. That lesson seems to have been thoroughly
learned.
The recent adaptation to television of Philip K. Dick’s prophetic
The Man in the High Castle is one suggestive indication of a general
ideological awakening. In dramatic contrast to the prevailing
historical myth, fascism won WWII so decisively that its opponents
were driven to the political fringes of paleo-conservatism (once
mainstream conservatism), libertarianism (once mainstream
liberalism), and Trotskyism (once simply ‘communism’). The victory
was so complete that even policy objectives as blatantly fascistic as
nationalization could be considered wholly innocent of fascist taint.
It wasn’t even necessary to say: “Nationalization, but, you know, not
in a fascist way.” It would be amusing if it hadn’t ruined everything.
Perhaps it still is amusing. It’squo;s notable that humor has become
quite a lot rougher recently.
537
Reignition
Since fascism had entirely filled the Overton Window, it lost

contour, and became invisible. The word persisted in public
conversation only as an empty slur. Under this cover, and the
absurdly misleading branding associated with it, American fascism
ascended to a state of global hegemonic dominance. Since 1989, it
has been essentially unchallenged, except by the geopolitical
temper-tantrum that is radical Islam. Yet suddenly, from left field, the
Trump candidacy has thrown it into crisis.
The flamboyant fascist features of the Trump campaign – and still
more of his excited Alt-Right supporters – are deniable only by fools.
The prior escalation of overt fascist imagery by the first Obama
campaign and subsequent administration was no less remarkable.
The established convention in polite society that all conservative
presidential candidates are Hitler obscured the trend before this
year, on both sides. Much of this might be reminiscent of the Jonah
Goldberg thesis that we are all fascists now, which was near-
universally dismissed out of hand, for reasons that have been – until
recently – under no socio-political pressure whatsoever to defend
themselves. It’s obvious nonsense, the mind-control class had
decided, and that should have been enough for everyone. Those days
are unmistakably ending.
The general insight that remains incompletely crystallized is this:
Democracy tends to fascism, due to its fundamental affinity with
tribal mobilization (i.e. its essential illiberalism). The multi-century
538
ratchet of Western democratization has led, exactly, and inexorably,

to this. If the worst hasn’t come yet, it will come soon. We are all close
to seeing that now.
An especially obvious catalyst for political radicalization has been
the embrace of demographic engineering as an explicit policy
objective, of deliberate partisan asymmetry, attended by a rolling
thunder of cultural-elite approved rhetoric that has not only been
indiscreet, but blatantly triumphalistic. When dismissing fears of
‘white genocide’ as malignant, and over-wrought, it is not helpful to
laugh in public about the steady progress of population replacement
(in the fashion of John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, most obviously). At
some point, Bertholt Brecht’s most celebrated example of devil’s
advocacy – “Would it not be easier … for the government to dissolve
the people and elect another?” – switched ideological polarity, to
become a bitter Alt-Right joke. The new American demography is
really going to screw you guys over is funny as hell, until – suddenly –
it isn’t.
There’s been a lot of laughter in 2016, but not much smiling.
Perhaps it won’t be so long before people realize what they’ve done.
October 17, 2016
539
Reignition
Horseshoe Quiz
Nazism is the only political form that corresponds to the soul of the
European people.
— Without peeking, see if you can guess which ‘end of the political
spectrum’ this comes from.
ADDED: Relevant —
Anti-Fascist, Trump protesters applaud speech comprised

entirely of Hitler quotes.
This is the best thing on the internet today😂
pic.twitter.com/HD2CPusckI
— Tennessee (@TEN_GOP) July 8, 2017
July 9, 2017
540
CHAPTER THREE - EURASIANISM, THE

AL
ALT
T-RIGHT AND CURRENT EVENTS
The Eur
Eurasian
asian Question
Within the great spans of history, domestic ideological controversy
is something close to a luxury good. Whenever it isn’t to same extent
‘on hold’ the global environment is untypically benign. Under more
normal — which is to say stressed — conditions, it either folds down
into pragmatism, or explodes into cosmic, eschatological drama. In
today’s unmistakably stressed world, Alexander Dugin‘s
‘Eurasianism‘ exemplifies the latter eventuality.
As with Jacobinism and Bolshevism before it, Eurasianism
541
Reignition
matters to you whether you want it to or not. The grandeur of its

scope is undeniable. It is concerned with nothing less than the fate
of the the earth. In this sense, nothing that anyone cares about falls
outside it. (People are beginning to get scared.)
Shelving moral and partisan responses, it is merely realistic to
acknowledge that Dugin is an ideological genius of the first order.
Synthesizing Russia’s native Eurasianist traditions with geopolitcal
theory and deep currents of occult mythology, he has restructured
the political imagination of his homeland, whose leader is paying
obvious attention. When history is integrated with myth, things can
easily begin to get exciting.
The fact that Atlantis is unmistakably sinking makes the rising
wolf-howls of Eurasianism all the more penetrating. Decadence is a
dilemma or a delight for those involved in it. For those looking on, it
is food. Eurasianism has the initiative, while the West reacts.
The Eurasian Question, then, is not whether this ideology will
shake the world. That is already baked into the cake. The open
question concerns China. In a re-ignited Hyperborean / Atlantean
forever war, which way does China tilt?
For China, the ideological and geostrategic landscape opened by
the Eurasian challenge to the present global order offers
extraordinary leverage. A civilization that has long understood
triangular diplomacy as the optimal context for the exercise of
strategic intelligence can scarcely fail to find encouragement in this
542
complex pattern of widening fractures. In comparison to the

cramped and dangerous position of a world geostrategic challenger,
that of a triangular balancer presents advantages that are difficult to
over-estimate.
China cannot plausibly be described as an ‘Atlantean’ power
(despite the great historical importance of its ‘Singlosphere‘). Yet,
neither is it ‘Hyperborean’ in any persuasive sense. These options
both belong to a dirempted Occident — understood according to
an expansive, rather than Eurasian definition, attentive to common
classical and Christian roots. The Eurasian mythos is not inherently
Sino-sensitive. China’s moves will be made upon a still greater
gaming table.
Both a (geographically) Eurasian and a Pacific-maritime power —
already, perhaps, a super-power — China has free options within the
conflicted global space that Dugin’s ideology so convincingly, or at
least compellingly, portrays. The next stage of Chinese geopolitical
evolution will occur within an environment of dynamic, triangular
tensions. The course of the world depends upon how this
opportunity is played.
August 7, 2014
543
Reignition
Mash
Among the very many reasons to revere Jim is that he doesn’t mess
about.
There’s a sizable constituency on the ‘alt right’ whose self-
understood differentiation from the Marxist left is entirely reducible
to its own heightened appreciation for authoritarian hierarchy and
racial solidarity. Since actually existing Marxist-Leninist regimes
have been, uniformly, authoritarian-hierarchical ethno-nationalists,
this isn’t in fact the basis for any real difference at all.
ADDED: What I’m seeing —
Rx: "Capitalism has to be crushed beneath the boots of the

state." NRx: "That sounds like communism." Rx: "HAVE YOU
EVEN READ EVOLA!?"
— Outsideness (@Outsideness) June 28, 2014
June 28, 2014
White Dindus
“Our entire history is something that’s been done to us by tricky
outsiders — especially the bad stuff!”
When anybody else sounds like this, it’s rightfully categorized as
544
pathetic whining.
ADDED: “Can we criticize (the extraordinarily large number of)
Jewish Leftist freaks without going completely insane about it?”
“No! Go completely insane about it!”
October 8, 2015
What is the Alt-Right?

Topic of the week, it seems. XS will carve out a Chaos Patch space for
targeted links on Sunday, but for impatient types, here’s a taster (1,
2, 3, 4).
This blog, I’m guessing predictably, takes a count me out position.
Neoreaction, as I understand it, predicted the emergence of the Alt-
Right as an inevitable outcome of Cathedral over-reach, and didn’t
remotely like what it saw. Kick a dog enough and you end up with
a bad-tempered dog. Acknowledging the fact doesn’t mean you
support kicking dogs — or bad-tempered dogs. Maybe you’d be
happy to see the dog-kicker get bitten (me too). That, however, is as
far as it goes.
A short definition, that seems to me uncontroversial: The Alt-
Right is the populist dissident right. Set theoretically, NRx is
therefore grouped with it, but as a quite different thing. Another
obvious conclusion from the definition: the Alt-Right is almost
545
Reignition
inevitably going to be far larger than NRx is, or should ever aim to
be. If you think people power is basically great, but the Left have
just been doing it wrong, the Alt-Right is most probably what you’re
looking for (and NRx definitely isn’t).
For the Alt-Right, generally speaking, fascism is (1) basically a
great idea, and (2) a meaningless slur concocted by (((Cultural
Marxists))) to be laughed at. For NRx (XS version) fascism is a late-
stage leftist aberration made peculiarly toxic by its comparative
practicality. There’s no real room for a meeting of minds on this point.
As a consequence of its essential populism, the Alt-Right is
inclined to anti-capitalism, ethno-socialism, grievance politics, and
progressive statism. Its interest in geopolitical fragmentation (or
Patchwork production) is somewhere between hopelessly distracted
and positively hostile. Beside its — admittedly highly entertaining
— potential for collapse catalysis, there’s no reason at all for the
techno-commercial wing of NRx to have the slightest sympathy for
it. Space for tactical cooperation, within the strategic framework of
pan-secessionism, certainly exists, but that could equally be said of
full-on Maoists with a willingness to break things up.
None of this should be taken as a competition for recruits. The
Alt-Right will get almost all of them — it’s bound to be huge. From
the NRx perspective, the Alt-Right is to be appreciated for helping
to clean us up. They’re most welcome to take whoever they can,
especially if they shut the door on the way out.
546
ADDED: Preserving this just to thrash myself senseless:
When Gnon is not your friend. — Finish my mandatory "WTF

is the Alt-Right?" post (https://t.co/Q6LQYkg9pH),
housekeeping — "views 1,488"
If you think God coming out as an Anime Nazi is going to stop me

being obstreperous, you’ve no idea what you’re dealing with.
January 22, 2016
What is the Alt-Right? II

There’s a Wikipedia answer to the question now. It doesn’t strike me
as obviously dishonest, or any more inchoate than the phenomenon
itself. Building Trump-adoration into the definition will ensure that it
dates fast — but it’s not hard to see why that seems necessary.
There’s a lot of Wikipedia disdain around, in our neck of the
woods, but I’m usually hard-pressed to find serious cause for
complaint. After taking a look at RationalWIki — which folds the Alt-
Right into its “Neoreactionary movement” rant presently —
returning to Wikipedia is like taking a bath.
547
Reignition
(Alt-Right at XS, for future reference.)
March 5, 2016
Quote note (#286)

The Guardian goes Alt-Right:
Those still in work might be less grumpy about funding a more
generous welfare state if beneficiaries are deemed to be enough like
them: fellow tribesmen, people of similar background and therefore
felt to be deserving of charity.
It’s the Sweden attractor at work. (“Sure, fascism isn’t great, but if
that’s what’s needed to protect the welfare state …”)
September 27, 2016
The Alt-Right is Dead

It might stagger on for a bit longer, but it has nothing left to do.
Annoying the (impending) Trump Regime at this point would be
pointless, so that prospect isn’t any source of leverage. The 1488 nut
cases, due to their marriage of convenience with the legacy media,
have the ability to define it in the public mind, so those supporters
without a Nazi-fetish will gradually drift away. It’s done.
548
Fascism isn’t cool, and Anglosphere cultures will never find it so.
In Continental Europe it’s different, but that’s a whole other topic.
We’re not them, which is one of the crucial things the Alt-Right ultras
won’t ever get. We’re Atlanteans. There’s expanded space for a right-
populist American nationalist movement, but it won’t call itself the
Alt-Right, and if it’s remotely sensible it will be pre-emptively
immunized against ruinous European ideas. It will probably be far
more Tea-Party flavored, though a lot tougher. (This blog will still find
its populism unappetizing.)
That’s the XS prediction. (RamZPaul, who liked the Alt-Right
much more than I did, agrees with the central point.)
Jim has a very different take. (As does Amerika.)
Here‘s someone who’s building something more solid.
November 24, 2016
What is the Alt-Right? III

Late to this, which is what the comparatively honest faction of the
Cathedral is seeing.
Main XS-specific quibbles:
(1) No, I didn’t have anything to do with The Dark Enlightenment
blog. Nor, I’m highly confident, did Curtis Yarvin. I’m especially
confident that the Open Letter was not written as an introduction to
549
Reignition
the DE.
ADDED: See this TDE statement.
(2) I have no social connections at all with the Lesser God-tier of
SV. (If I did, I’d brag about it all the time.)
(3) Anyone who thinks this usage of echoes is non-ironic needs a
Kek-check.
(4) The RamZPaul link is complete black-thread and duct tape
conspiracism. (C’mon, seriously, that’s obvious, isn’t it?) A little
reciprocal linkage isn’t a social relationship. We both merely
acknowledge that the other guy exists.
Induction would suggest there are some other howlers beyond
my epistemological horizon. Frankly, though, I don’t see much
deliberate malevolence here. Cramer seems to be doing his best to
understand what’s going on, and to remain as calm as possible about
it. If he’s primarily interested in the Alt-Right, I’d recommend much
more attention to Richard Spencer, and much less to Neoreaction.
My recommendation to NRx, naturally, is to vindicate that
suggestion.
March 3, 2017
Hoppe on the Alt-Right

Speech delivered at PFS 2017. Consistently sound, naturally.
550
October 16, 2017
551
Reignition
The F
Fear
ear
Ryan Cooper:
I made the case just a couple months back that Republican
552
presidential frontrunner Donald Trump is a sort of fledgling

Mussolini, nurturing an incipient fascist movement. As the first
primaries approach, and Trump’s lead in the polls is actually
widening, his development toward outright fascism is progressing
faster than I feared. […] As of August, Trump had most of the
ingredients for a fascist movement: the victim complex, the fervent
nationalism, the obsession with national purity and cleansing purges,
and the cult of personality. He was missing the organized violence,
a left-wing challenge strong enough to push traditional conservative
elites into his camp, support for wars of aggression, and a full-bore
attack on democracy itself. He’s made much progress on all but the
last one.
The last one is the only point of NRx intersection, but if he takes
The White House, there’s going to be plenty of deranged: “See, this
is what the Dark Enlightenment leads to!” analysis (among the upper
echelons of the leftist commentariat). No, this is what democracy
leads to. It’s called radical populism. (Unfortunately, that’s a message
that isn’t going to be heard.)
The Left would rather hand lurid fascism the keys than stop what
they’re doing (they’re already doing the non-lurid version). That
would count as a perverse moral vindication — cooking up the enemy
they always said they wanted to stop. Eventually, they’ll manage it.
The Ancients already knew that’s how this thing ends.
It goes without saying that NRx should back away as far as
553
Reignition
possible, while scattering signs of protection (not that it will do any

good).
ADDED: Trump speaks.
November 25, 2015
Merk
Merkel’s
el’s Mess
Damon Linker paints the gruesome picture almost perfectly. (Read
the whole thing — it’s not long.)
In the course of a few months, Angela Merkel was transmogrified
from a moderately talented German politician, into one of the most
destructive leaders in world history. If that sounds like an
exaggeration, it’s only because her responsibility for dragging the
European continent back into a new 1930s still awaits the unfolding
of events. Even without complete relapse into a dark age of
authoritarian anti-capitalism, the wave of rape, pillage, and terror
she has unleashed will now — inevitably — devastate millions of lives,
and structurally degrade the quality of life for tens of millions more
as they seek to protect themselves in markedly more adverse social
circumstances. It will all get extremely ugly. As Linker dryly remarks,
“let’s just say it’s unlikely to end well. … And the storm has only just
begun to gather.”
What was she thinking? Assuming — as seems fair — that she
554
doesn’t positively want to usher in Hitler 2.0, her catastrophic policy

decisions have to be misguided. It’s probably no easier for the
readers of this blog than it is for me to cognitively sympathize with
the deranged path she has taken. One can only infer that she
genuinely believed a vast flood of predominantly young, male,
Islamic, tribalistic, and historically-traumatized incomers, with a
hallucinatory sense of (unrealizable) cultural and material
entitlement, would immediately transmute into fungible production
units and contribute to European pensions financing. The Economist
pretends to believe the same thing. I’m forced to accept it’s possible
to believe it, despite finding the flying spaghetti monster significantly
more plausible. If this depth of delusion really has a grip on the minds
of Western elites, any outcome other than utter disaster is most
probably unobtainable. A cynical lie would be far less dangerous.
In a single stroke, Merkel has converted the Raspail and
Houellebecq scenarios into vivid contemporary predicaments.
European collapse has been radically accelerated. For that, a certain
dark gratitude is due.
August 6, 2016
Post-Democr
ost-Democratic
atic P
Politics
olitics
Apparently we’re already in the next phase:
555
Reignition
To call Trumpism fascist is to suggest that it demands from us a

unique response. We can deploy the “fascism” moniker to Trump’s
ascendance by recognizing features like selective populism,
nationalism, racism, traditionalism, the deployment of Newspeak
and disregard for reasoned debate. The reason we should use the
term is because, taken together, these aspects of Trumpism are not
well combated or contained by standard liberal appeals to reason.
It is constitutive of its fascism that it demands a different sort of
opposition.
I doubt whether they’ve thought this through, but don’t let that
get in the way of progress.
January 22, 2017
556
SECTION C - STRA
STRATEGICS
TEGICS
557
Reignition
CHAPTER ONE - R
ROUGH
OUGH TRIANGLES
The Unspeakable
To prepare for an excursion into the real-world workings of strategic
triangles, this harshly illuminating conversation between David P.
Goldman (‘Spengler’) and the ghost of Cardinal Richelieu is worth
recalling:
“We are a bit confused about Syria,” I began. “Its leader, Bashar
al-Assad, is slaughtering his own people to suppress an uprising. And
he is allied to Iran, which wants to acquire nuclear weapons and
dominate the region. If we overthrow Assad, Sunni radicals will
replace him, and take revenge on the Syrian minorities. And a radical
Sunni government in Syria would ally itself with the Sunni minority
next door in Iraq and make civil war more likely.”
“I don’t understand the question,” Richelieu replied.
“Everyone is killing each other in Syria and some other places in
the region, and the conflict might spread. What should we do about
it?”
“How much does this cost you?”
“Nothing at all,” I answered.
558
“Then let them kill each other as long as possible, which is to say
for 30 years or so. Do you know,” the ghastly Cardinal continued,
“why really interesting wars last for 30 years? That has been true
from the Peloponnesian War to my own century. First you kill the
fathers, then you kill their sons. There aren’t usually enough men left
for a third iteration.”
“We can’t go around saying that,” I remonstrated.
ADDED: DrewM at AoS channels Richelieu from the id:
“Personally, I’m happy to let [the Syrians] fight it out amongst
themselves for a good long time. Hell, let’s arm both sides.”
March 21, 2013
Rough T
Triangles
riangles
The elementary model of robust plural order is the tripod. Whether
taken as a schema for constitutional separation of powers, a deeper
cultural matrix supporting decentralized societies, or a pattern of
ultimate cosmic equilibrium, triangular fragmentation provides the
archetype of quasi-stable disunity. By dynamically preempting the
emergence of a dominant instance, the triangle describes an
automatic power-suppression mechanism.
From the Romance of the Three Kingdoms to The Good, the Bad,
and the Ugly, triangular fragmentation has been seen to present an
559
Reignition
important and distinctive strategic quandary. In power balances of

the Mexican Standoff type, initiation of force is inhibited by the
triangular structure, in which the third, reserved party profits from
hostilities between the other two.
The Cold War, schematized to its basics, is the single most telling
example. Rather than a binary conflict between East and West, the
deep structure of the Cold War was triangular, making it intractable
to two-player game-theoretic calculations. Catastrophic damage
that might be rationally acceptable within a binary conflict, as the
price for total elimination of one’s foe, becomes suicidal in a three-
player game, where it ensures the victory of the third party.
MAD-reason is no longer readily applied, once ‘mutual’ is more than
two.
Even brilliant chess players lose their way in the triangle, where
the economy of sacrifice has to be radically reconsidered. Among the
Cold War’s Three Kingdoms, it was the chess masters who ‘won’ the
race to defeat.
The lessons of the Cold War are no less relevant to its successor,
which also fostered binary illusions in its early stages. America’s
chess match with militant Islam resulted in a stalemate, at best.
Increasingly fierce Sunni-Shia rivalry recasts the current war as
a rough triangle, captured in its strategic essentials by the
colloquialism Let’s you and him fight. This was Cardinal Richelieu’s
way with triangles, as ‘Spengler’ reminds us:
560
The classic example is the great German civil war, namely the 30
Years’ War of 1618-48. The Catholic and Protestant Germans, with
roughly equal strength, battered each other through two
generations because France sneakily shifted resources to whichever
side seemed likely to fold. I have contended for years that the United
States ultimately will adopt the perpetual-warfare doctrine that so
well served Cardinal Richelieu and made France the master of
Europe for a century (see How I learned to stop worrying and love
chaos, March 14)
To imagine this policy being pursued with cold deliberation is the
stuff of conspiracy theory. Nevertheless, regardless of whether
anybody is yet playing this game, this is the game.
ADDED: A Couple of rough triangles links; George Kerevan at
The Scotsman; and Clifford May at The National Post (who recalls
Kissingers classic rough triangles comment — on the Iran-Iraq War —
“It’s a shame they can’t both lose.”)
ADDED: Daniel Pipes is totally there: “Western powers should
guide enemies to stalemate by helping whichever side is losing, so as
to prolong the conflict.”
ADDED: “With Western policy being so confused, ineffective, and
ignorant, the divisions among enemies may be the best thing going.”
March 27, 2013
561
Reignition
Rough T
Triangles
riangles II
On learning that Hamas and Hizbollah are now fighting each other in
Syria, Peter Ingemi writes:
This sets up the possibility that the greatest threats to Israel and
the US will be clashing in Syria & Lebanon, in a long and bitter
struggle and moreover as Iran doesn’t want to lose their clients and
the Saudis and others want to bleed Iran this has the potential to
become a mass killing ground for the most vile and despicable
enemies the western world has faced.
And all of it happening without us, or Israel lifting a finger.
For a foe of radical Islam it’s practically a wet dream, we just have to
sit back and let them slaughter each other and if one side starts to
lose, we aid third parties to reenforce [Sic] them enough to keep the
fight going until the cream of the jihadist crop finds themselves, shot,
gassed or blown up.
And at this point where you contemplate the solution to so many
problems that pesky Christian belief comes in. … That’s when you
look at your glee at the death of your enemies and feel ashamed.
The Christianity angle isn’t basic to the Outside in analysis of
rough triangles, but since it’s important to Ingemi, and Ingemi sees
the pattern so clearly, we’ll do our best to remain sub-orgasmic about
the situation (even if it escalates into a regional humanitarian
calamity of apocalyptic scale). Gnon is considerably less demanding
562
than Jesus in this regard, but it still tilts against indecorous

exultation in mass slaughter. The view from the side-lines calls for
detachment, and the side-lines are the center here.
In a rough triangle, the side-lines are decidedly the place to be.
That should be obvious, and if judged by the serial anecdotes of blog
commentary, it is indeed self-evident to the widely-disparaged
‘proles’ of the right — among whom “please let them kill each other”
amounts to common wisdom. Adam Garfinkle, who doesn’t seem to
approve, nevertheless provides a convincing political back-story to
this state of mind. There’s a lack of “affinity”, a loss of media purchase
(i.e. live video), and too many unhealed burns. Less than a quarter of
Americans are buying what John McCain is selling (which shows that
you can get almost a quarter of Americans to buy anything).
The Syrian quagmire models a rough triangle with such
extraordinary exactness that it tempts us into Platonism. It could
have been extracted, essentially unmodified, from the notebooks of
Cardinal Richelieu. It’s not difficult to find these developments, as
they unfold symmetrically in Syria and Iraq, provocatively weird. If a
strategic genius had deliberately steered the ‘war on terror’ to this
eventuality, his world-historic stature would have been guaranteed.
It is worth recalling that when the Bush WoT went pear-shaped,
John Derbyshire coined the phrase “to-hell-with-them hawks” to
describe dissent from the right, in distinction from overseas state-
building neoconservatism. To Hell they now go.
563
Reignition
Improbable conspiracy aside, none of this was planned, and that’s

where the most important lesson lies. The “to-hell-with-them hawks”
had no strategy to send America’s enemies to hell, but only inchoate
grumbles about the progressive welfarization of US military activity.
For the harsh right, the message of the early 21st century was that
American military power was no longer politically usable. It was time
to clamber out of the sandbox, because the Cathedral had filled it
with huggy dolls. Doing nothing was the only option left. (Fernandez,
uncharacteristically, is embarrassingly slow to grasp this point.)
In the field of right-populist international relations thinking,
therefore, there is already broad — if only partially articulate —
support for the neoreactionary stance, explored most lucidly by
Foseti, which might be characterized as de-activism. What we’re not
on board for is the primary consideration.
Under Cathedralized conditions, suspension of the act can be the
only way to let things happen. Just stop, and let ‘providence’ take
over. Perhaps inaction will even simulate strategic genius. We’ve
seen that it can.
ADDED: Jihad (against Shi’ites) … and more Jihad (against Sunnis)
June 2, 2013
564
Rough T
Triangles
riangles III
Déjà vu time at XS, courtesy of the Mesopotamian death spiral, and
Fernandez’s strategic framing. The background is important, and
relates the topic to a wider question of conservation laws.
The collapse in the Middle East feels like Black April, 1975, the
month South Vietnam fell [*]. And it should, because just as the
collapse of Saigon did not happen in Black April, but in a political
American decision to allow South Vietnam to fall after a “decent
interval”, so also is the ongoing collapse rooted, not in the recent
tactical mistakes of the White House, but in the grand strategic
decision president Obama made when he assumed office. […] This is
the plan
plan. It would be crazy not to acknowledge it.
A humanitarian foreign policy is as much a hostage to dark humor
as any other affront to Gnon. Hell doesn’t go away just because you
don’t like it. So instead it slides diagonally in the only direction left
open, from bloody (and incompetent) hegemonism into radically
cynical catastrophe tweaking:
Deep in their hearts the Washington Post and the New York
Times must realize they endorsed Obama precisely because they
knew that when this moment came he would harden his heart and
refuse to re-engage, except for show. Since this is the plan, the only
effective strategy, the only sane thing to do is to accept the liberal
gambit and continue it. […] The obvious continuation is not to
565
Reignition
dampen the sectarian conflict, but to exacerbate it to the greatest

degree possible. America, like Britain in the Napoleonic age, should
adopt the policy of supporting first one side then the other, or
preferably both at once, so that the combatants inflict the maximum
degree of damage on each other. […] … To a cynic, what follows next
is quite simple: to be the winner stand back and watch while the
Arabian peninsula, Levant and North Africa destroys itself. Take
every opportunity to make it worse. Clearly a humanitarian
catastrophe of unprecedented scale will result. Hundreds of
thousands are already dead and millions of displaced persons are
on the road. That will only grow in scale and number to millions of
dead and tens of millions of refugees. Therefore steps like preparing
to sink the people smuggling boats, as the EU is doing, are in order.
[…] If you can stomach it, it can work like a charm. […] The main
problem with this strategy is that Obama may not be able to contain
its effects. …
(For the Rough Triangles XS log, see 1, 2, 3.)
* Cited over-excitedly here, with walk-back here.
May 19, 2015
Natur
Natural
al La
Laww
“Some critics of Morsi argue that the U.S. should let him fail,” reports
566
David Ignatius, as Egypt spirals down the drain.

Let X fail is the cosmic formula for getting policy right.
March 7, 2013
Let It Burn …
… (the Middle East version):
Why can’t America be more like China?
(a) Stay out
(b) If you have to interfere, help whoever’s losing (but not too much)
(c) Recognize there’s an intricate theological argument going on that
we can’t hope to understand:
Let's keep it civil guys. pic.twitter.com/bjqmbY4Sxk

— CB Langille (@CBLangille) June 20, 2014
ADDED:
Good search terms if you want to go down a rabbit hole of

sectarian youtube videos: 'rafidah', 'takfiri'
— CB Langille (@CBLangille) June 20, 2014
June 20, 2014
567
Reignition
Sa
Savagery
vagery Management
The Left-Salafist alliance:
… the cause of Salafist Islam has come to dominate the field of
armed struggle since 2001 and to be the most attractive option for
people inclined to practice insurgency. Salafist Islam also melds well
with the lessons in insurgency and terrorism previously taught by
Marxist theoreticians such as Carlos Marighella, especially when one
factors in the ideas and strategy of modern Islamist theorists such
as Sayyid Qutb and Abu Bakr al Naji, author of The Management of
Savagery. These concepts have also been quite attractive for many
on the radical left in the West, who may go so far as to be motivated
by the melding of a theory of armed revolution with an intact
religious tradition, thereby even converting to Islam. It may also
mean that support for jihad, particularly in Europe, may go well
beyond Muslim enclaves.
This process of amalgamation between the camps of the enemy
is of the very greatest advantage to the Outer Right. The model of
domestic progressive ‘evolution’ is switched to one of stark foreign
aggression. It thus terminates all prospect of political compromise,
and integrates a single military security problem.
If the Right is incapable of recognizing what it is, it can at least
consolidate against what it has to stop. It is in the ashes of this
conflict that the toxic dream of political universality will have died.
568
The shattering of the Overton Window and the elimination of the

Grayzone is the same thing.
April 16, 2016
Sentences (#81)
Harsanyi:
… institutional media and white nationalists ha havve formed a
politically con
convvenient symbiotic relationship.
Is this seriously deniable?
There’s a lot of conspiracy-theorizing underway right now, but it
seems implausible, and superfluous. A spontaneous convergence of
(perceived) interests is capable of explaining everything. In the end,
though, someone is being played. In fact, it’s not only possible, but
probable, that both sides of this particular arrangement are being
played, and not primarily by each other.
November 23, 2016
569
Reignition
CHAPTER TWO - INCENTIVES
Game Theory
Attempting to hold rationality and humanity together is an
unenviable task, if not simply an impossible one:
In a series of interventions, Adil Ahmad Haque and Charlie
Dunlap have debated the Defense Department La Laww of W
Warar Manual
Manual’s
position on human shields (here, here, and here). Claiming that the
manual does not draw a distinction between voluntary and
involuntary human shields, Haque maintains that it ignores the
principle of proportionality, thus permitting the killing of defenseless
civilians who are used as involuntary shields. Dunlap, however,
insists that the manual includes all the necessary precautions for
protecting civilians used as shields by enemy combatants, and argues
that the adoption of Haque’s approach would actually encourage the
enemy to increase the deployment of involuntary human shields. …
Sensitivity to the plight of ‘human shields’ directly increases their
tactical value. That is the ultimate ‘proportionality’ involved in the
discussion. Disciplined attention to incentives under conditions of
unbounded competition reliably heads into dark places.
570
October 26, 2015
Twitter cuts (#41)
Why does government spending grow faster than GDP?

Shouldn't increasing tech and GDP actually make
government cheaper?
— Warg Franklin (@wargfranklin) January 4, 2016
@wargfranklin it's almost like the prices a protection racket

charges have nothing to do with the cost of providing
'protection'
— The Duck (@jokeocracy) January 4, 2016
@jokeocracy A bunch of warlords extracting protection

money from us and spending it on bling would be an
improvement.
— Warg Franklin (@wargfranklin) January 4, 2016
The disastrous incentive-effects would certainly be moderated.
571
Reignition
(That’s why military-industrial pork waste is actually the least

harmful element of government spending — at least, for everything
except defense capability and industrial competence.)
January 5, 2016
Quotable (#134)
In The New Yorker, John Cassidy lucidly rehearses the core game
theoretic model of economic crisis:
… deciding whether to invest in financial assets or any other form
of capital can be viewed as a huge n-person game (one involving
more than two participants), in which there are two options: trust
in a good outcome, which will lead you to make the investment, or
defect from the game and sit on your money. If you don’t have a firm
idea about what is going to happen and the payoffs are extremely
uncertain, the optimal strategy may well be to defect rather than to
trust. And if everybody defects, bad things result.
Does anybody seriously expect honesty from the status quo
within this context? ‘Optimism’ is a fundamental building-block of
regime stability. Expect it to be very carefully nurtured, with
whatever epistemological flexibility is found helpful.
(Stay to the end of the article for the ominous nonlinear dynamics
that correspond to narrative dike-breaking.)
572
January 21, 2016
Quotable (#191)
Nagel on (Gottlieb on) Hobbes, getting the critical point:
What was distinctive about Hobbes’s theory, and what led to his
being attacked as a moral nihilist, was his refusal to appeal to any
concern for the good of others or the collective good as a basis for
moral motivation. He demonstrated that the familiar rules of
morality, which he called the laws of nature, are principles of conduct
such that if everyone follows them, everyone will be better off. But
the fact that everyone will be better off if everyone follows them
gives no individual a reason to follow them himself. He can have a
reason to follow them only if that will make him individually better
off. And there is no natural guarantee that individual self-interest
and the collective interest will coincide in this way. […] Hobbes
concluded that although we all have a reason to want to live in a
community governed by the moral rules, we cannot achieve this
unless we bring it about that it is in each person’s individual interest
to abide by those rules. And the method of doing that is to agree
with one another to support a powerful sovereign with a monopoly
on the use of force, who will use it to punish violators. Only then
can each individual be confident that if he obeys the rules, he will
573
Reignition
not be laying himself open to assault and dispossession by others.

Without the trust engendered by the knowledge that violators will
be punished, civilization is impossible and individual self-interest —
the same rational motive that supports morality — leads to perpetual
conflict and constant insecurity. This is the famous Hobbesian state
of nature, and Hobbes was most notorious for saying that in this
condition, we are almost never obligated to obey the moral rules,
because it is not safe to do so.
The identification of a collective optimum does no realistic
theoretical work. Irrespective of the status of his concrete
conclusion, Hobbes’ methodical principle is impeccable.
September 22, 2016
574
CHAPTER THREE - MUTU

MUTUAL
AL
INTENSIFICA
INTENSIFICATION
TION
Twitter cuts (#8)
Bahrain government unfairly spying on man who has

dedicated his life to overthrowing it. http://t.co/
gKRdZFrOwW
— anomalyuk (@anomalyuk) January 23, 2015
(There’s a perfect sanity to this tweet, sarcasm of course included,

that would be hard to top. That is equally to say there is a perfect
exposure of our reigning moral-political insanity. The “C’est un chien
sauvage …” quote that should accompany it is escaping me for now …
Something like: “It is a fierce beast. When it is attacked, it bites.” No
doubt one of my cultivated readers can help.)
This elusive aphorism is driving me slowly insane. The closest I can
get right now: “A French philosopher once said that a dog is the most
dangerous animal in the world because when it is attacked it bites.”
575
Reignition
(Voltaire?)
ADDED: Thanks to Harold (in the comments) for hunting this
down:
Cet animal est tres méchant;
Quand on l’attaque il se défend.
January 23, 2015
Cui bono?
Terrorism is notoriously resistant to strict definition, and the most
obvious reason for this is generally understood. Unlike (for instance)
guerrilla warfare, ‘terrorism’ is not merely a tactic, but an intrinsically
abominated tactic. Whatever the technical usage of the word, it
adheres to the register of propaganda, as a partisan denunciation. It
is what the other side does.
This partisan skew is reinforced by technical considerations. Even
more than guerrilla warfare, terrorism is a tactic suited to relatively
disorganized non-state actors. When even guerrilla warfare is
impractical, terrorism is the mode of violent ‘resistance’ that
remains. In the sentimental language of the Left, it is the warfare of
the weak.
If these factors are recognized, a realistic definition of terrorism can
576
be constructed that coldly acknowledges both aspects of its

positioning, as an ideologically motivated atrocity without state
legitimation. Terrorism is violent partisan criminality. It is aggressive
violation of the law in the service of a political cause.
In a post written prior to the identification of the Boston
Marathon bombers, Richard Fernandez makes a point that is far from
original, but all the more important for being clearly true, and widely
accepted as being true:
The ascription of guilt in public attacks has become highly
politicized. Each ideological side is rooting for its own set of villains
to be identified as guilty. The Left desperately want the perpetrators
to come [from] the Tea Party, White Supremacist Groups or at least
Christians while the conservatives want the perps to be Muslims or
drug addled lions of the Left.
Acts of terror taint a cause, its supporters, and its demographic
base with violent partisan criminality. Who benefits? In the case of
American domestic terrorism, at least, the answer is almost
insultingly obvious. Those identified with the target of terror are
strengthened by it, those pre-positioned as enemies of the terrorists
even more so. After the atrocity occurs, the cry immediately arises:
please let it not be ours.
This is distinctly odd. An act that is inherently political has a
valency that directly and explicitly contradicts its superficial partisan
motivation. Terrorism is not only something the other side does, it is
577
Reignition
something that — when reptilian partisan considerations are all that

count — one wants the other side to do. How utterly delightful (if
unavowable) to be blessed with spectacular public confirmation that
one’s enemies are violent partisan criminals.
An inevitable consequence of this oddity is the proliferation of
conspiracy theories. If the guiding question is cui bono?, the
inescapable implication is that the target — ultimately, the State —
is the only agent with a rational interest in terror taking place. ‘False
flags’ make much more sense than raw terror ever could. This way
lies madness, and perhaps an ineluctable mass insanity.
The alternative to conspiracy theory can only be common sense,
but it finds itself surprisingly stressed. Is terror rationally explicable
at all? Are its proponents simply deranged? Or do they perceive
subtle advantage in sheer escalation — feeding their enemies, as a
way to feed the war? With the world becoming ever more Black
Swan-compatible, this is a story that has scarcely begun.
ADDED: Driven to kill by brutalist architecture.
ADDED: ‘George Washington’ on False Flag Terror.
April 23, 2013
Assassination Mark
Markets
ets
Just in case there could be any doubt about it, the primary point
578
of this post is to insist that this is a really bad idea. It’s certainly
ingenious, and highly topical, but considered solely from a
perspective of sub-reptilian amorality, it’s still a really bad idea.
For one thing, it’s massively asymmetric, in the wrong way.
Assassinate a McKinley, and it pushes things hard to the left.
Assassinate a Kennedy, and it pushes things hard to the left.
Assassinate pretty much anybody of any public significance, and the
result is the same. Leftists are simply better at fantasy counter-
factuals and martyrology, so the assassination of a leftist produces
an imaginary ultra-leftist of even greater ideological purity (whilst
killing a conservative works, or even turns them into a post-
mortuary leftist). We all know that if JFK hadn’t been murdered by
Texan capitalism we’d be basking in a socialist utopia by now. (There’s
a reason why assassination is the preferred tactic of left-wing
anarchists and communists, beside the fact these people are
demented criminals.)
The reciprocal is even more compelling. Anything that spares
leftists from the consequences of participating in reality aids their
cause. To consider only the most prominent potential target, Barack
Obama alive and in power is the greatest single asset the Outer Right
has ever known. Felled by an assassin, he would become the
capstone of progressive mythology, and everything he’s aiming to
achieve would have turned out absolutely perfectly. If there’s a black
counter-assassination market, surreptitiously protecting key agents
579
Reignition
of the Cathedral from acts of violence, it would be infinitely more

effective to invest in that.
November 20, 2013
Chick
Chicken
en
When political polarization is modeled as a game the result is
Chicken. The technical basics are not very complicated.
Reiterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (RPD) is socially integrative. An
equilibrium, conforming to maximal aggregate utility, arises through
reciprocal convergence upon an optimum strategy: defaulting to
trust, punishing defections, and rapidly forgiving corrected behavior.
Any society adopting these rule-of-thumb principles consolidates.
When everyone norms on this strategy, individual and collective
interests are harmonized. Things work.
Chicken is very different. Someone blinks first, so the trust-trust
mutual optimum of RPD is subtracted in advance. Rather than the
four possible outcomes of a single PD round (A and B do OK, A wins B
loses, B wins A loses, A and B both lose) there are just three possible
outcomes (A wins B loses, B wins A loses, A and B both lose
extremely). In Chicken, it is the avoidance of outcome three, rather
than the non-existent chance of PD outcome one, that moderates
behavior, and then asymmetrically (someone always blinks first).
580
No less importantly, the time structure of Chicken is inverted. In

RPD, the agents learn from successive decisions, and from their mere
prospect. Each decision is punctual, Boolean, and communicatively
isolated. In Chicken, the decision is mutual, quantitative, and
anticipated by a strategically-dynamic introduction — an interactive
process, in advance of the decision, that is richly communicative,
complex, and even educational. In addition, when compared to PD,
Chicken reiteration is remarkably complicated (more on that in a
moment).
Consider the classic Chicken game. Two drivers accelerate
towards each other, and the one who swerves (‘blinks’) loses. If
neither swerves, both lose (worse). The lead up is everything, and the
decision itself is a matter of speed and timing (a non-Boolean ‘when’
rather than a Boolean ‘which’). The question is not “will the other
player defect?” but rather “how far will they go?”
Thomas Schelling made an intellectual specialism out of Chicken,
and his understanding of the classical version was sharpened by the
concept of “credible commitment” (“how far will they go?”). How
could a player ensure that his opponent does not win? The solution to
this problem, if produced in advance, has the strategic value of also
maximizing the chance that the opponent blinks first (thus avoiding
the pessimal lose-lose outcome, and generating a win).
Producing credible commitment looks like this. Upon climbing
into your car, conspicuously consume a bottle of vodka, thus
581
Reignition
communicating the fact that your ability to enact a successful last

second swerve is very seriously impaired. Your opponent now knows
that even were you inclined to avoid mutual destruction at the brink,
you might not be able to do so. Then — once both cars have
accelerated to a high speed — rip out your steering wheel and throw
it out of the window. (It is extremely important that you do this
before your opponent is able to — that’s what the vodka was for.)
Your communicated commitment is now absolute. Your opponent
alone can swerve. It’s death or glory.
The ‘mainstream’ neoreactionary account of American political
history is that of reiterated Chicken games between progressives
and conservatives, in which conservatives always swerve. This
analytical framework, despite its crudity, explains why conservatives
consider their opponents to be intoxicated lunatics (i.e. winners)
whilst they are sober and responsible (i.e. losers). As traditionally
positioned, conservatives are the principal social stake-holders, and
thus primarily obligated to avoid mutual destruction. It is essential to
conservatism that it cannot take things (domestically) to the brink.
Its incompetence at Chicken is thus constitutional.
When the Zeitgeist starts clucking, it can only be a sign that
conservatism is coming to an end. The Tea Party is not informatively
described as a conservative political movement, because its signal
influence is the insistence that the Right stop losing Chicken games.
It demands “credible commitment” through the minimization of
582
discretion on the part of its political representatives, along with

whatever insanity is needed not to fricking swerve. This is of course
highly — even totally — antagonistic. It is why the Left media now
sound like this. Before all significance is consumed in partisan
rhetoric, it is important to note that the loser in a Chicken game —
even the merely probabilistic virtual loser — necessarily thinks that
its opponent is insane. Any more moderate response would be the
infallible sign that losing was inevitable (once again).
It isn’t hard to understand why this might be happening. In
reiterated Chicken, the loser no doubt acquires a predisposition to
submissiveness (“it’s hopeless, those lunatics always win”), but the
objective undercurrent of repeated defeat is a contraction of the
distance between relative (asymmetric) and absolute (mutual)
defeat. Eventually, the difference isn’t worth surrendering — or
swerving –over. “If they keep on winning, there will be nothing left
anyway, so we might as well finish it now.”
Reciprocally, incessant victory threatens to dull revolutionary
fervor into conservatism. Progressives now have many generations
of substantial victory to defend, so taking things to the edge has
begun to seem concerning. When the government shuts down, what
does the Right really lose? At the very least, it’s beginning to wonder,
and by doing so, upping its Chicken game (AKA “going insane”).
Progressives don’t have to wonder. They lose the government.
ADDED: Buchanan argues that surrender seldom works. At the
583
Reignition
NYT, Michael P. Lynch: “It is tempting to call this “crazy talk” and
unserious bluster. But it is serious, and it shows that some people
are thinking about what happens next. It is a plan that represents
the logical limit of the views now being entertained on the radical
right, not just in the dark corners of the Internet, but in the sunlight
of mainstream forums. After all, if the government is the problem,
shutting it down is a logical solution.”
ADDED: Jim expects a swerve.
ADDED: The swerve.
October 15, 2013
Political Chick
Chicken
en
As a preliminary, a little XS background, which I’ll aim not to repeat.
The take on Trump’s advantage that seems under-emphasized: He
credibly signals a refusal to swerve. I’m not arguing here that it’s
realistic to trust that. The point is only, the Trump candidacy looks
to a substantial swathe of the electorate — at least comparatively
— like the strategic choice for not losing at chicken games. As noted
in the linked post, when democratic party politics becomes highly
polarized, that’s the game being played.
Anyone playing chicken through an agent prioritizes certain
definite virtues. Trump’s rhetoric reflects these uncannily. “Winning”
584
— for instance — is a word to watch.

To see what it is to be a chicken game loser, there’s no better
model than recent GOP presidential candidates. John McCain
appeared to positively delight in the honor of being defeated by
Barack Obama in 2008, and Mitt Romney followed quite faithfully
in his footsteps. In both cases, which can be extended to the GOP
establishment generally, respectability is defined by the sentiment:
“Sure, winning would be nice, but we’re not going to be crazy about
it.” If there’s a single key to winning at chicken, however, ‘crazy’ is it.
The greater the media onslaught against Trump, given only that
he doesn’t flinch, the stronger the signal that he’s not a swerve kind
of guy. In this respect, the specific content of the attacks is almost
irrelevant. The nastier the better. Best of all, if the message gets
communicated that this maniac would take us over the cliff, he’s
already won. From the perspective of this analysis, there’s simply
nothing else he has to get across. It translates to: With Trump we
either win, or at least don’t lose. (Objection: “But ‘everyone dies’ is
losing isn’t it?” — Thanks GOPe, but you’re not getting this at all.)
Cruz and (to a parodic extent) Rubio look flexible next to Trump.
It’s not that people think they might swerve — it’s what they firmly
expect. They seem bendy, and specifically prone to compromise,
concessions to media-fabricated realities, back-downs, apologies,
and pre-emptive cringe.
Never, ever, even for a moment back-down, laugh at demands for
585
Reignition
‘disavowal’, double-down on offense, concede nothing, and never

swerve. Regardless of what one thinks about this orientation, it’s
the one hungered for by the Trump constituency right now. Trump’s
instincts, if not perfect in this regard, are impressively sound. We’ll
know within 24-hours or so how it’s working out.
ADDED: It’s chicken all the way down.
ADDED: Trump poker.
March 1, 2016
586
CHAPTER FOUR - SUBVERSION AND

CAMOUFLA
CAMOUFLAGE
GE
Sub
Subvversion
Nyan Sandwich has a cunning plan:
Proposal: a secretly NR-run hatefact-respinning and

overton-window-lefting blog.
— Nyan Sandwich (@WolfTivy) March 13, 2014
Sister Sarah (@sarahdoingthing) suggests the “hard part is to be

somehow different from actual real leftist sites …”
@sarahdoingthing No. Point is to be a perfectly normal leftist

site, but secretly an experimental apparatus for Cthulology
— Nyan Sandwich (@WolfTivy) March 13, 2014
Partly because there can simply never be enough of this, but also
for other reasons, this idea is perfectly delicious. It would be like
a Sokal tar-baby, spreading sticky black paranoid confusion
587
Reignition
throughout the redoubts of the enemy. To make this work, however,

would require a very exceptional type of genius (of exactly the kind
demonstrated in the Shea case). Judging the precise extent and
flavors of absurdity that the left will endorse — or at least find
credibly non-parodic — is a rare and delicate art, especially since they
have to be taken to the very edge, teetering prominently into gulfs of
roaring madness. In addition, since effectiveness would correspond
closely with persistence, the work involved would be immense.
If anyone is embarking on this, I do not (of course) want to know —
Omertà.
(Before anyone else brings it up (here) I should perhaps also
mention this.)
Modeling strategy on espionage and the double-agent, rather
than military confrontation and the hero-warrior, would do much
to burn-off ludicrous romanticism, replacing theatrical attitude with
realist cunning. As with anything that involves demonstrated
performance of a complex feat, rather than grandiose proclamations
of antagonism, it would require actual cognitive achievement. Given
basic facts about numbers and capabilities, infiltration is almost
certainly something that will eventually need to be done.
Such subversion would also be an experiment in practical
metaphysics. How are identities assembled? What are agents? How
do expressed values coordinate with effective activity? These
questions are destined to explosive complication in the ragged,
588
techno-psychological world to come, so it is worth tangling with

them early, and intricately. Making biorealism an excuse to regress
into paleolithic brotherhoods is a temptation to be torched-out
ruthlessly by Internet machinations. Turn social Cyberspace into a
jungle, where camouflage and complexity rule.
March 13, 2014
Poe
oe’s
’s La
Laww
Only a few months ago, I had never heard of Poe’s Law. Now it’s
a rare day in which it doesn’t crop up several times. Invocations of
the Zeitgeist are inherently improbable, but if there were to be a
persuasive illustration of the phenomenon, it would be something
like this.
According to the succinct Wikipedia entry (already linked), Poe’s
Law is less than a decade old. Among it’s precursors, also relatively
recent, a 2001 Usenet comment by Alan Morgan most closely
anticipates it: “Any sufficiently advanced troll is indistinguishable
from a genuine kook.” In other words, between a sincere intellectual
position and its satirization, no secure distinction can be made.
(There is nothing about this thesis that restricts it to ‘extreme’
opinion, although that is how it is usually understood.)
The latest opportunity for raising this topic is, of course,
589
Reignition
@Salondotcom. (There’s an entertaining interview with the

pranksters behind it here.) The offense of this account, which led
to it being suspended by Twitter last week, was clear beyond any
reasonable doubt. Quite simply, it was nearly indistinguishable from
the original, a fact that has itself been explicitly noted (and tweeted
about) innumerable times. Parody Salon slugs, so ludicrously over-
the-top that they had @Salondotcom readers in stitches, were funny
precisely because they were such plausible mimics of Salon‘s own.
Readers were laughing through @Salondotcom, at Salon. This is
almost certainly why the account was suspended.
Without wandering too deeply into the realm of speculation, it’s
worth noting this:
"Twitter's policies require that impersonation reports come

from the individual being impersonated” https://t.co/
wSo7YkwZOo hmm
— J. Arthur Bloom (@j_arthur_bloom) July 17, 2014
Poe’s Law is ultimately indistinguishable from another recent,

rapidly popularized rhetorical concept: the Ideological Turing Test.
An intellectual criticism can be said to understand its foe if it is able
to reproduce it with adequate fidelity. The ITT is therefore a cultural
procedure for winnowing-out straw-man arguments and other
misrepresentations. If you cannot imitate the enemy case, you
590
cannot be considered to have engaged it seriously.

Evidently, Poe’s Law can be construed as a filter of the same kind.
Satire is effective to exactly the extent it can be confused with the
satirized. (This can be taken in comparatively serious directions.)
What Poe’s Law tells us, is that antagonism is irreducible to
argumentation. It is thus inherently anti-dialectical (and thus tacitly
secessionist). There can be perfect understanding of what the enemy
is saying, without even the slightest degree of approach to
consensus. In other words, there are discrepancies entirely
indissoluble in discussion.
Cutting satire does not reconstruct a cognitive position in order
to make it laughable. Instead, it re-states such a position, as faithfully
as possible, within the register of laughter — which is to say: hostility.
It asserts a dissensus that no process of reconciliation can
ameliorate. Our ‘disagreement’ is not the sign of a missing
conversation. It is the call for a coming split.
ADDED: Even Newsweek notices “… there was a problem: Few
could tell the difference between @SalonDotCom and the real thing.”
ADDED: So two Edgar Allan Poe twitterbots started following me
…
ADDED: Agree, Amplify, and Accelerate
July 18, 2014
591
Reignition
AAA …
… stands for agree, amplify, and accelerate. Initiated here, and
escalated here, it opens an unexplored horizon for strategic
discussion within NRx. No analysis of cultural conflict on the Internet
can bypass a reference to trolling, and no understanding of trolling
is any longer complete without reference to AAA. It raises the
discussion of parody to a new level. (If it isn’t already obvious, this
blog is seriously impressed.)
AAA works if strategic complication has favorable consequences.
Whichever cultural faction has the greater capacity for the tolerance
of difficulty, identity confusion, irony, and humor, will tend to find
advantage in it. I think that’s us. It’s inherently toxic to zealotry.
As a sub-theme — but one keenly appreciated here — it marks a
critical evolution in the Cthulhu Wars. (Check out the graphics on the
TNIO post for recognition of that.) Rather than arguing over whether
“Cthulhu swims left” AAA proposes amphetaminizing the monster
regardless. If a “holocaust of freedom” is what you want, let’s go
there. Take this operation to the end of the river … and see what we
find.
ADDED: Slate Star Scratchpad comments.
July 22, 2014
592
#AAA UK
UK-Style
-Style
The profound, utterly cynical contempt for the basic principles,
procedures, and personalities of democracy™ exhibited by this
phenomenon is highly encouraging.
(#AAA)
With added meta-amusement:
Don't be fooled! #ToriesForCorbyn is actually a double bluff

as he is the candidate that they are most scared of.
— Benjamin Barton (@ThisWeekInBen) June 17, 2015
June 17, 2015
AAA … II
There follows an XS-endorsed message from Henry Dampier:
… we can’t make the omelet of perfect, universal justice without
breaking some eggs. […] The presence of White men in any
classroom, owing to their historical record, can be profoundly
triggering to women and people of color. To protect their historic
victims – to give them mental and physical space for them to flourish
– we must keep White men away from the university, and by blocking
them from those institutions, we must keep them far away from
593
Reignition
political power, also. […] We have tried reform. We have tried patient
education. It has not worked. Harsher measures will be required. The
world can’t wait.
(For reference, AAA …)
September 11, 2015
Quote note (#218)

Libertarian in genesis, but strategically sound:
“… those who consider themselves modern American
revolutionaries often envision manning barricades and mass revolt
as the undoing of the government. That attacks the government at
its greatest strength — its capacity to use force and violence. The
US government has at its disposal the most potent military and
surveillance capabilities ever assembled. … […] The idea that some
sort of mass movement will rise and by force of its inferior arms
throw off the yoke of oppression is the stuff of weak novels, not a
real life strategy that has a chance of success. Those who buy into
it and attempt implementation commit the biggest strategic failure:
they have fooled themselves. Consequently, their enemy — the
government — profits. It uses their failure to justify further tyranny
and repression.
There is surprisingly little written about attacking the government
594
at its weakest point: its financial dependence … An offensive would

require a mass movement far less massive than that required for
armed revolt, and its tactics would be legal. A few million
simultaneous phone calls and requests via websites for the
withdrawal of balances from banks, money market funds, and stock
and bond mutual funds would precipitate a financial panic. None of
those institutions keep enough cash on hand to meet a tsunami of
redemption and withdrawal requests. They’d have to sell their assets
to raise cash. The prices of those assets would drop, begetting
further selling; negative crowd psychology and wealth effects would
kick in as markets crash, and debt and economic activity would
contract.
The biggest loser in all this would be the government. As prices
for bonds drop, interest rates rise, increasing its debt service. As
economic activity contracts, tax receipts drop, safety net spending
rise, crony capitalists must be bailed out, and deficits expand. Except
for interest on government debt rising (it was perceived as a safe
haven) all of this happened during the last financial crises. A massive
increase in government debt and central bank debt monetization
forestalled complete disaster last time. Even some of their
proponents admit that those palliatives are now exhausted. During
the next crisis, interest rates will rise on government debt to reflect
its increasing credit risk. […] Which will leave the government
confronting, and being defeated by, one of its biggest whoppers: that
595
Reignition
the pieces of paper and computer notations its Treasury and central
bank generate ultimately have value after decades of determined
efforts to depreciate them. They’re simply pieces of paper and
computer entries, and eventually they’re not going to buy any
groceries for all those warriors and police the government’s counting
on, or for anyone else. Currencies collapse just before governments
do; witness Venezuela, with its Bolivar and its government in
extremis.
This outcome does not require a plan; it’s going to happen. Indeed,
it’s already happening.
When something is falling, push — but push intelligently. The
fetish for popular violence among certain factions of the Alt-Right
is simple idiocy. If a populace is still docile enough to support
government deficit spending, it’s not going to be waging a guerrilla
war anytime soon.
February 9, 2016
596
CHAPTER FIVE - HEGEMONIC

HEADEA
HEADEACHES
CHES
Peace Dividend
Glenn Reynolds notices an emerging interpretation of PRISM as a
phenomenon internally connected to geopolitical pacifism. Making
unilateral peace requires infinite vigilance.
First Steyn:
The same bureaucracy that takes the terror threat so seriously
that it needs the phone and Internet records of hundreds of millions
of law-abiding persons would never dream of doing a little more pre-
screening in its immigration system … Because the formal, visible
state has been neutered by political correctness, the dark, furtive
shadow state has to expand massively to make, in secret, the
judgment calls that can no longer be made in public.
Then WRM:
PRISM and similar programs aren’t a ghastly misstep or an
avoidable accident. They are the essence of Obama’s grand strategy:
public peace and secret war. To cool down the public face of the war,
597
Reignition
he must intensify the secret struggle.

Richard Fernandez comments.
There’s some kind of conservation law at work there, and they
always have the potential to trip people up. Bad outcomes are
conserved might be too harsh, but it gets close to something.
June 8, 2013
Brok
Broken
en P
Pottery
ottery
An irritated Pottery Barn disowned the Pottery Barn Rule — “you
break it, you own it.” Colin Powell sought to create some distance,
too:
It is said that I used the “Pottery Barn rule.” I never did it; [Thomas]
Friedman did it … But what I did say … [is that] once you break it, you
are going to own it, and we’re going to be responsible for 26 million
people standing there looking at us. And it’s going to suck up a good
40 to 50 percent of the Army for years.
Wikipedia concurs with Powell, in attributing the phrase to
Thomas L. Friedman (in a February 2003 column for the New York
Times). Those with a diligent sense for historical detail might be able
to accurately trace its spread amongst journalists and foreign policy
officials, including Bob Woodward, Richard Armitage, and John
Kerry. Regardless of such specifics, it captures the spirit of grand
598
strategy during the Nullities, and explains why the US military is no

longer of use for anything.
In its rational usage, the military is a machine for the production
of negative incentives. It is designed to hurt people and break things,
with the understanding that in its optimal — deterrent and
intimidatory — function, the actual exercise of these capabilities will
not be necessary. When considered from a Clausewitzean
perspective, as a policy instrument, usable military power is directly
proportional to a credible threat of punishment. It sets boundaries
to the behavior of (rational) potential antagonists, by projecting the
probability of extreme negative outcomes if diplomatically-
determined triggers are activated — or ‘red lines’ crossed.
Frederick the Great said “Diplomacy without arms is like music
without instruments” because there can be no discussion of political
limits among sovereigns unless menace gives them meaning. “I’d
really rather you didn’t do that” has no ‘really’ about it, unless a
threat lurks at the edge of the stage (visible, but reserved). It’s a
polite belch, at best. Positive incentives presuppose the boundaries
set by negative incentives — there can be no bargaining over that
which can be demanded without cost. Thus the words of the
diplomat are refinements of a message that military capability crafts
in its essentials, either in the first derivative (balance of power
between armed alliances), or the second (the ‘internal’ security
economy of coalitions). The rest is empty ceremony.
599
Reignition
Imperialism tends to the radical degeneration of diplomatic

reason, because it dissolves borders, systematically effacing the
‘foreign’ sphere. When this process has developed to the point that
foreign and domestic policy are no longer distinguishable, the
Pottery Barn Rule takes over. ‘Mission creep’ is the operational
symptom of something deeper: the geostrategic abolition of
proprietary boundaries, of a kind that allow for the possibility of
restricted sympathies, or the recognition of alien interests. The
mature empire cannot threaten anything or anybody without
immediately threatening itself. Hence its profound alignment with
universal moral ideologies, whose particular selves gush unimpeded
into the world soul.
When, in the early years of the new millennium, President
‘Godzilla’ Dubya Bush unleashed Operation Pottery Barnstorm on
various societies loosely associated with the wreckage of the New
York skyline, it was understood from the beginning that the
populations on the receiving end were already honorary New
Yorkers, absent from the Twin Towers on the morning of September
11, 2001 only by insignificant sociological coincidence. This ‘fact’ was
an explicit justification for the US response, which expressed outrage
at the victimization of a random sample of the world’s population
by ‘criminals’ so backward they didn’t realize they were only hurting
themselves. America’s ruling elite, in contrast, had attained this
realization definitively enough to articulate it, for domestic =
600
international consumption, as the Pottery Barn Rule.

Once the Pottery Barn Rule becomes authoritative, the military
is rationally unusable. It’s obvious why. Imagine a night-club bouncer
saying, “Clear out of here, or I’m going to thrash you within an inch
of your life – of course, I promise to take full responsibility for all the
damage you incur from this righteous beating, covering all medical
expenses, compensating you for loss of earnings, and negotiating in
good faith to make reparation for all reasonable claims of emotional
distress …” This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you. For the
global administrative class, this is a truly beautiful illustration of
evolved consciousness. Ordinary Americans, including the military,
are less spiritually captivated by the development.
This hurts me more

than it hurts you.
In the Pottery Break Age, there are no threats that do not revert
to masochistic acts of solidarity. A decision to bomb or invade X now
means It’s time for us to share X’s pain. Unsurprisingly — except
601
Reignition
amongst a weird sub-species of radically bellicose goofy idealist —

this type of imperial-altruistic enterprise is proving a tough sell.
Let’s take on the role of insurer for the Pottery Barn, and then
trash the place hard (for the common good).
If Congress signs on for this, it will be one more sign that
America’s political class has wandered off into another world — or
perhaps just The W World
orld® — leaving the country’s once-
distinguishable neo-native population behind.
ADDED: Angelo M. Codevilla: “Some three fourths of Americans
oppose making war on Syria. Hence the Republican leadership class’
reflexive advocacy of entry into Syria’s civil war is cutting one of the
few remaining ties that bind it to ordinary Americans.” (via)
ADDED: James Taranto: “As Congress returns and prepares to
take up President Obama’s request for an authorization to use
military force in Syria, William Kristol, editor of The Weekly
Standard, tries to reassure queasy Republicans that “yes” is not only
the right vote but the expedient one … This seems to us a very bad
misreading of the political environment.” (Even Kristol starts to lose
it after Kerry makes the “unbelievably small” promise.)
September 9, 2013
602
Stalin
Stalin’s
’s Great Game
Either Stalin played the Anglosphere like a cheap piano in World
War Two, or something altogether more sinister was going on. Foseti
clarifies the conundrum beautifully:
When the US finally joins the war, it does so with – as best as
one can decipher – only a few clear war aims: 1) demanding
unconditional surrender (of Germany and Japan – aka the only
bulwarks against Soviet domination of post-war Europe and Asia); 2)
establishing the United Nations; and 3) ending European (excluding
Soviet) colonialism.
If you, gentle reader, can come up with a list of war aims that
would be more destructive to mankind at the time than those, the
next round is on me. Perhaps entirely coincidentally (or perhaps not)
these aims would seem to all work towards the direct benefit of the
Soviets. It’s almost like Soviets were making US foreign policy.
October 2, 2013
“Which Falls First?” …

… William S. Lind asks in this recent panel discussion (third speaker,
just after 43 minutes in). “The foreign policy establishment, or the
country?” The relevant thread of his argument: The aggressive
603
Reignition
foreign policy posture of the United States is counter-productively

promoting global disorder, which eventually threatens domestic
calamity. When the US fights a foreign state, Lind argues, it advances
the chaotic “forces of the fourth generation” — a more formidable
opponent than even the most obdurately non-compliant state is able
to be. America’s “offensive grand strategy” — tied to a high-level of
concern for the internal political arrangements of foreign countries
— is sowing dragon’s teeth.
TNIO has been coaxing NRx onto a path of broadened
geopolitical scope. There is an unavoidable irony here. The Old Right
tends naturally to a preoccupation with hearth-and-home, so that
its preferred policy posture (non-interventionism) is often
accompanied by — or even buried within — a retraction of mental
energy from distant questions. The Neoconservative synthesis of
foreign policy activism and cosmopolitan fascination with foreign
affairs is far more psychologically consistent, regardless of its errors.
For anti-globalists to sustain a panoramic perspective takes work.
This work is important, if realistic analysis is the goal, because
distant eventualities hugely impinge. The existence and fate of
Neoreaction depends far more upon the great churning machinery
of world history than upon the local decisions of its favored ‘little
platoons’. To misquote Lenin: Even if you are not interested in the
system of the world, it is interested in you.
The fall of any empire involves an interplay of internal and
604
external factors, knitted together in a relation of reciprocal

amplification. The whole picture can never be solely a domestic one.
By the time imperial destiny is a political question, it is already
historical fact. It is too late, then, for simple denial. The thing is in
motion. It cannot be asked not to have begun.
Consider only the most basic geopolitical structure of modernity
— an ‘Atlantean’ world order consolidated, in succession, by the
hegemonic maritime-commercial republics of the United Provinces,
the United Kingdom, and the United States. Even from this core
narrative, much is already starkly evident.
(0) Modernity rests upon concrete foundations of world power.
(1) Global dominion has a distinctive ideological and cultural skew.
(2) The hegemonic role (and even, at its most abstract, ‘culture’) is
more stable, and intrinsically determinate, than the supremacy of
any specific power, which waxes and wanes over a shorter period.
The role of the Modern Hegemon is an autonomous ‘office’ with its
own continuous tradition.
(3) When the United States inherited the role of Atlantean
leadership, it adopted a structure of responsibility that had not
arisen from within the USA itself. On the contrary, the USA had gown
up and into it. How America behaves in the world does not follow
exclusively — and perhaps not even predominantly — from anything
that America, as a specific country, is.
(4) There is no precedent within modernity for global hegemony to
605
Reignition
pass from a world power to its successor without a set of very

distinctive ethnic characteristics being held in common. (The leading
culture of modernity, to this point, has been consistently North-West
European, Protestant, Liberal, Maritime-Commercial, and — since
the late 17th century — English-speaking, rooted in Common Law
tradition.) Since America is the terminus of this sequence, a passage
beyond precedent is inevitable. This could take one of (only?) three
possible forms:
(a) The USA immortalizes its hegemonic status
(b) The world passes into undirected anarchy
(c) Global hegemony departs from its multi-century cultural orbit
into unfamiliar ethnic territory.
None of this is separable from the fate of globalization, or
modernity. However attractive it may be, the idea that America, in
particular, has any purely domestic cultural, ideological, or political
options of significance is untenable. What happens to America
happens, immediately, to the order of the world.
Furthermore, geopolitical history has reached the edge of
modern precedent. There is no one to whom the torch of global
leadership can be passed in keeping with the inner tradition of
modern torch-passing ritual. In this very definite sense, modernity as
it has been known reaches its end. This no doubt accounts for the
underlying tone of mounting hysteria which accompanies America’s
increasingly disjointed behavior upon the global stage.
606
It is an eventuality foretold in Miltonic prophecy — an encounter

with the palpable obscure.
August 11, 2014
Homeless
It is tempting to either embrace or reject the description of the
United States as an ‘empire‘ due to the clear rhetorical weight of
this term. Partisan wrangling on these grounds is sure to continue,
and even to intensify. It is not, however, the only basis upon which
discussion can be pursued.
A global power, it might be plausibly suggested, tends inevitably
to the erosion of its domestic political space. As globalization is
advanced under its auspices, distinctions between domestic and
international concerns — ultimately uncertain in any case — become
increasingly unpersuasive. Globalized capital and talent markets
operate with least friction where they intersect the world’s
economic core, while international division of labor, trade, migration,
and cultural exchange wash over traditional localities. In the final
analysis, the very notion of political domesticity survives only as a
residual rebuke to the project of global ‘flattening‘.
While it can be convenient for moralists to interpret hegemonic
power as a bad decision, it’s far closer to a fate (and in very definite
607
Reignition
respects a tragic one). Any suggestion that America might have

chosen not to lead the world is more of an appeal to sentiment and
tactical partisan positioning than to realism. History has its tides, and
eventually they change.
America’s presently-ongoing Ferguson turmoil underscores the
trend to political de-domestication of the metropolis, through an
explicit collapse of social order into a problematic of ‘4GW‘ (or
‘Fourth Generation Warfare’). Twitter is congested with
observations of police militarization, friction-free transmission of
equipment from US expeditionary forces into the hands of its
domestic law enforcement agencies, and advisories from
international irregular armies on best-practice for dealing with
counter-insurgency operations. Beyond the partisan excitement, and
euphoric tribalism, there is a recognition of broken boundaries, and
the consolidation of an integrated US security machinery that no
longer finds the discrimination between foreign and domestic
enemies of practical use.
This phenomenon, as such, has no unambiguous partisan
implications. Even were critique of the Empire unique to the left
(which it is not), the application of an essentially domestic political
optic (partisan choice) to a matter of world-historic deep structure
would remain a laughable error. The fate of America is not an
American problem, at least, not exclusively. It concerns the order of
the world.
608
Willard’s words from Apocalypse Now are prophetic:

“Someday this war’s gonna end”. That’d be just fine with the boys
on the boat. They weren’t looking for anything more than a way
home. Trouble is, I’d been back there, and I knew that it just didn’t
exist anymore.
ADDED: Re-importation of the ‘new military urbanism’. It quotes
Foucault:
… while colonization, with its techniques and its political and
juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other
continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the
mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses,
institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial
models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the
West could practice something resembling colonization, or an
internal colonialism, on itself …
August 14, 2014
609
Reignition
CHAPTER SIX - RECENT EVENTS
Our Ally
Ally,, the Enem
Enemyy
It’s not exactly a formal pact between the United States and Al
Qaeda, but no one honestly thinks it’s anything really different.
Either it’s a rough triangles play, or it’s sheer insanity.
Time won’t tell, but it will hint, as the intervention proceeds. If
it makes things worse, before guttering out into indecision, stalling
resolution, then it might make sense. In any case, it’s big.
(Drew M. at AoS is a seriously hard-core rough triangles guy: “We
should help whichever side is losing at any given moment but only to
the extant that it enables them to fight on to take and inflict more
casualties. There’s no scenario where one side winning helps us.”)
June 14, 2013
Quote notes (#24)

Adam Garfinkle makes an obvious point beautifully:
… whatever the Administration has said about the purpose of an
610
attack being to “degrade and deter” Syrian capabilities, but not to

change the regime, everyone expects the attacks to be modest and
brief, thus not to much affect the battlefield balance, and once
ceased to stay ceased. That is because the Administration’s reticence
at being drawn into the bowels of Syrian madness is both well
established and well justified. The attacks, then, will likely not
degrade or deter anything really; they will be offered up only as a
safety net to catch the falling reputation of the President as it drops
toward the nether regions of strategic oblivion.
This has all been so vividly sign-posted it is getting hard to see
how even a ‘cosmetic’ effect is going to work. How can an operation
pre-advertized as an awkward spasm of embarrassment be
realistically expected to restore honor and credibility?
Handle brims with sense on the topic.
August 30, 2013
Oil W
War
ar
This contrarian argument, on the resilience of America’s shale
industry in the face of the unfolding OPEC “price war”, is the pretext
to host a discussion about a topic that is at once too huge to ignore,
and too byzantine to elegantly comprehend. The most obvious
complication — bypassed entirely by this article — is the harsher oil
611
Reignition
geopolitics, shaped by a Saudi-Russian proxy war over developments

in the Middle East (and Russian backing of the Assad regime in
Damascus, most particularly). I’m not expecting people here to be so
ready to leave that aside.
Clearly, though, the attempt to strangle the new tight-oil industry
in its cradle is a blatantly telegraphed dimension of the present Saudi
oil-pricing strategy, and one conforming to a consistent pattern. If
Mullaney’s figures can be trusted, things could get intense:
… data from the state of North Dakota says the average cost per
barrel in America’s top oil-producing state is only $42 — to make a
10% return for rig owners. In McKenzie County, which boasts 72 of
the state’s 188 oil rigs, the average production cost is just $30, the
state says. Another 27 rigs are around $29.
If oil-price chicken is going to be exploring these depths, there’s
going to be some exceptional pain among the world’s principal
producers. Russia is being economically cornered in a way that is
disturbingly reminiscent of policy towards Japan pre-WWII, when
oil geopolitics was notoriously translated into military desperation.
Venezuela will collapse. Iran is also under obvious pressure.
How is it possible that a world run by manic Keynesians gets to
quaff on this deflationary tonic? It should hide a lot of structural ruin,
at least in the short term. Global economic meltdown is deferred —
and ultimately deepened — once again. (We’ll probably get the war
first.)
612
ADDED: “Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s biggest oil producer, has

reportedly said the oil price should stabilize at about $60 per barrel
… Many OPEC members have been put under budgetary pressure by
the lower oil price,as exporting countries rely heavily on oil revenues.
Iran needs a price at $140 per barrel to balance its budget. Saudi
Arabia needs a price of $90.70 per barrel, as it can count on huge
reserves. Qatar needs $77.60 per barrel, and the United Arab
Emirates $73.30 per barrel. […] In early November, OPEC officials
said the price of $70 per barrel is a threshold at which other member
countries could start panicking.”
ADDED: Some oil geopolitics musings from Fernandez.
December 4, 2014
Kill the Chick

Chicken
en …
… to scare the monkeys.
Andrew Lilico gets the game over Syriza exactly right.
In current discussions of what Greece might or might not get in
the way of concessions from the Eurozone, there has so far been
relatively little appreciation of one basic political reality: as far as the
governments of Spain, Portugal, Ireland, probably Italy and perhaps
even France are concerned, Syriza must fail and must be seen to fail.
… […] And note: I haven’t even got on to the problem of how voters
613
Reignition
in Germany or Finland or the Netherlands would react to being told

that Syriza had extracted concessions with its comic-book antics.
Unless Syriza-led Greece is hideously crucified, it wins — and
what will be unfolding is an extremely brutal zero-sum game (in
which Greece cannot be allowed to win). For the EU establishment,
a Syriza success story would be a catastrophe of almost
incomprehensible magnitude. It would bring with it an entire
narrative of core institutional delegitimation, which in the case of
the peripheral nations (as glossed by Lilico) runs: “… what we really
should have done was to raise the minimum wage, hire back the
public sector staff that had been fired, say we weren’t going to pay
our debts to our eurozone partners, cosy up to the Russians and tell
the Germans they didn’t feel nearly guilty enough about World War
Two. Then everyone would have said we were ‘rock stars’ and and
forgiven our debts.”
It’s unthinkable that Germany could let this story put down roots
in the fertile manure of renewed growth. Instead, there will be war
by other means. Crucially, the more calamitously things now turn out
for Greece, the more the EU will be strengthened, if only for a while.
From the perspective of these eurozone governments, Syriza
must fail. The best way for it to fail would be for it to capitulate
utterly and crawl back to Greece with its tail between its legs and
a few cosmetic patronising “concessions” such as renaming the
“Troika” the “Consultative Committee” (or, if it makes them feel
614
better, the “Symvouleftiki Epitropi”). If it won’t do that — and there’s

a good chance that if it did try to do that then the Greek government
would collapse, anyway — then things get a bit more complicated.
Because if it’s bad and dangerous for Syriza to succeed inside the
euro, it would be disastrous for it to succeed outside the euro.
It’s hard to see how this doesn’t get intense.
ADDED: The game (formalized)
February 12, 2015
615
Reignition
SEQUENCE i - W
WAR
AR
War and T
Truth
ruth (scr
(scraps)
aps)
“War is computation with tanks. War is truth revealing. As war
proceeds uncertainty collapses.”
— Konkvistador (on Twitter)
“You might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
— Lenin
“War is deception.”
— Sunzi
Neoreactionaries are often talking about ‘oikos’ tacitly, even
when they think they are concerned with something closer to the
opposite. For there to be an ‘economy’ much has already to have
been settled. (Unlike his liberarian precursors, Moldbug never
assumes peace, but he betrays his inheritance by conceiving it as an
original task — a foundation.) “Begin from the inside” — that’s the
idea. The Outside is war.
War is the truth of lies, the rule of rulelessness, anarchy and chaos
as they are in reality (which is nothing at all like a simple negation
of order). It is the ultimate tribunal, beyond which any appeal is a
616
senseless prayer to the void. A ‘realism’ that resists such conclusions

makes a mockery of the name.
Peace is a certain way war can turn out, for a while, and nothing
more.
As the social institution oriented to reality in the raw, the military
has a latent authority that everyone recognizes (implicitly).
Whenever military government does not rule, it is because of a
provisional non-emergency (Schmitt). This is not seriously
disputable.
An aristocracy is a social arrangement that was decided by war,
and when the war is forgotten the institution has no sustainable
meaning. There is only one thing that can ‘bring back’ a king, and that
is the end of peace.
The East India companies (Dutch and English) ran armies, because
war was internal to economics as they practiced it. That was
‘colonialism’ (in the James Donald sense). Once the separation
between war and commerce has been hardened into standard
business procedures (and the imperialism that screens them from
the outside), capitalism has surrendered its always-inexplicit claim
to sovereignty, and thus to the future. There is no way it can be re-
animated except out of the raw. This, above all, is why libertarianism
cannot be saved from its own non-seriousness.
The horror of war is that there are ‘no rules’. Anything is
permitted, and the worst even becomes necessary. To think this is
617
Reignition
no lesser a challenge than the metaphysical engagement with the

‘thing-in-itself’ — and perhaps it is exactly the same thing. But then, it
becomes important to ask: So how does it work? There are rules, but
we misunderstood what rules really are (what ultimate rules are). In
the end, it is the order of anarchy that rules. In order to comprehend
any of this the peacetime soul must be reduced entirely to ashes, for
something else to arise in its place. It is this task that Neoreaction
is compelled to take up, and which it has — in several different ways
— already taken up. Peace is the objective correlate of the deluded
mind.
If war is the worst thing in the world, and the truth, then
everything that isn’t horror is a lie.
January 19, 2014
Conflict
Burroughs:
This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There
may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but
ours seems to be based on war and games.
Triggered by this:
@Outsideness you thrive on conflict
618
— John (@RichAsCrassus) July 3, 2014
It’s docile obedience to Gnon.
July 3, 2014
War is God
Via Landry, an introduction to the “new generation of unrestricted
warfare”.
Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui argued that war was no
longer about “using armed forces to compel the enemy to submit to
one’s will” in the classic Clausewitzian sense. Rather, they asserted
that war had evolved to “using all means, including armed force or
non-armed force, military and non-military, and lethal and non-lethal
means to compel the enemy to accept one’s interests.” The barrier
between soldiers and civilians would fundamentally be erased,
because the battle would be everywhere. The number of new
battlefields would be “virtually infinite,” and could include
environmental warfare, financial warfare, trade warfare, cultural
warfare, and legal warfare, to name just a few. They wrote of
assassinating financial speculators to safeguard a nation’s financial
security, setting up slush funds to influence opponents’ legislatures
and governments, and buying controlling shares of stocks to convert
619
Reignition
an adversary’s major television and newspapers outlets into tools

of media warfare. According to the editor’s note, Qiao argued in a
subsequent interview that “the first rule of unrestricted warfare is
that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.” That vision clearly
transcends any traditional notions of war.
How ‘traditional’ are we talking? “War is the Father of all things,
and of all things King” (πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι, πάντων
δὲ βασιλεύς) Heraclitus asserts at the dawn of philosophy. There
seems little indication of ‘restriction’ there.
Whatever the positive semantic associations accumulated by the
word ‘war’, its most rigorous meaning is negative. War is conflict
without significant constraint. As a game, it corresponds to the
condition of unbounded defection, or trustlessness without limit.
This is the Hobbesian understanding implicit in the phrase “war of
all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes), in which “the state
of nature” is conceived – again negatively – through a notional
subtraction of limitation. Treachery, in its game-theoretic sense, is
not a minor theme within war, but a horizon to which war tends – the
annihilation of all agreement. Reciprocally-excited mutual betrayal
in departure from an implicit ‘common humanity’ is its teleological
essence. This is a conclusion explicitly rejected by Carl von
Clausewitz is his treatise On War, even as he acknowledges the
cybernetic inclination to amplification (or “tendency to a limit”)
which drives it in the direction of an absolute. “War is the
620
continuation of politics by other means,” he insists, because it is

framed by negotiation (book-ended by a declaration of war, and a
peace treaty). According to this conception, it is an interlude of
disagreement, which nevertheless remains irreducibly
communicative, and fundamentally structured by the decisions of
sovereign political agencies. Even as it approaches its pole of
ultimate extremity, it never escapes its teleological dependency, as a
means (or instrument) of rational statecraft.
The reduction of war to instrumentality is not immune to
criticism. Philosophical radicalization, alone, suffices to release war
from its determination as ‘the game of princes’. The Clausewitzean
formula is notoriously inverted by Michel Foucault into the maxim
“politics is war by other means”. If political sovereignty is ultimately
conditioned by the capability to prevail upon the battlefield, the
norms of war can have no higher tribunal than military
accomplishment. No real authority can transcend survival, or survive
a sufficiently radical defeat. There is thus a final incoherence to any
convinced appeal to the ‘laws of war’. The realistic conception of
‘limited war’ subsumes that of ‘war lawfully pursued’ (with the latter
categorized as an elective limitation). Qiao’s words bear emphatic
repetition: “the first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no
rules, with nothing forbidden.” The power to forbid is — first of all —
power, which war (alone) distributes.
Between peace and war there is no true symmetry. Peace
621
Reignition
presupposes pacification, and that is a military outcome. There is no

authority — moral or political — that cannot first assert itself under
cosmic conditions that are primordially indifferent to normativity.
Whatever cannot defend its existence has its case dumped in the
trash.
Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden provides us with a
contemporary restatement of the ancient wisdom:
Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives.
Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole
universe for such a player has labored clanking to his moment which
will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What
more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This
enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument
concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another
is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed
who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or
significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the
annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man
holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby
removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at
once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war
is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the
will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is
therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is
622
at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

“War is the truest form of divination” it turns out, is the Revelation
of the Aeon.
May 9, 2016
The Dark F
Forest
orest
Volume two of Cixin Liu’s science fiction trilogy.
The universe had once been bright, too. For a short time after the
big bang, all matter existed in the, and only after the universe turned
to burnt ash did heavy elements precipitate out of the darkness and
form planets and life. Darkness was the mother of life and
civilization.
The dark forest is the universe, but to get there — with insight —
takes a path through Cosmic Sociology:
“See how the stars are points? The factors of chaos and
randomness in the complex makeups of every civilized society in the
universe get filtered out by distance, so those civilizations can act
as reference points that are relatively easy to manipulate
mathematically.”
“But there’s nothing concrete to study in your cosmic sociology, Dr.
Ye. Surveys and experiments aren’t really possible.”
“That means your ultimate result will be purely theoretical. Like
623
Reignition
Euclid’s geometry, you’ll set up a few simple axioms at first, then

derive an overall theoretic system using those axioms as a
foundation.”
“It’s all fascinating, but what would the axioms of cosmic sociology
be?”
“First: Survuival is the primary need of civilization. Second:
Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in
the universe remains constant.”
…
“Those two axioms are solid enough from a sociological perspective
… but you rattled them off so quickly, like you’d already worked them
out,” Luo Ji said, a little surprised.
“I’ve been thinking about this for most of my life, but I’ve never
spoken about it with anyone before. I don’t know why, really. … One
more thing: To derive a basic picture of cosmic sociology from these
two axioms, you need two other important concepts: chains of
suspicion, and the technological explosion.”
The derivation from these axioms is the Exterminator. Resource
conflicts between civilizations follow strictly from the two axioms.
Game-theoretic tension is added by irreducible suspicion, and
technological explosion.
“That’s the most important aspect of the chain of suspicion. It’s
unrelated to the civilizations’s own morality and social structure. …
Regardless of whether civilizations are internally benevolent or
624
malicious, when they enter the web formed by the chains of

suspicion, the’re all identical”
Which is to say, they are all threats to each other, intrinsically,
and irresolvably. Technological explosion means that any civilization
represents a potential menace of inestimable potential, escalating
massively within a span of mere centuries, and “On the scale of the
universe, several hundred years is the snap of a finger.” An intolerable
danger, then.
“That’s … that’s really dark.”
“The real universe is just that black.” Luo Ji waved a hand, feeding the
darkness as if stroking velvet. “The universe is a dark forest. Every
civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost,
gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread
without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to
be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters
like him. If he finds other life — another hunter, an angel, or a demon,
a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod — there’s
only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest,
hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its
own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic
civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.”
October 1, 2015
625
Reignition
Quote note (#296)

From Cixin Liu’s latest (and perhaps greatest), p.129:
When the deterrent is the complete destruction of the deterrer
and the deteree, the system is said to be in a state of ultimate
deterrence. […] Compared to other types of deterrence, ultimate
deterrence is distinguished by the fact that, should deterrence fail,
carrying out the threat would be of no benefit to the deterrer. [..]
Thus, the key to the success of ultimate deterrence is the belief by
the deteree that the threat will almost certainly be carried out if the
deteree thwart’s the deterrer’s goals …
Hence the drive to mechanization of commitments. Trust evo-
psych and cultural tradition passes the torch to game-competent
machines.
ADDED: Who could he possibly be talking about (p.284)?
Of course, without exception, these “anti-intellect” organizations
wanted to maintain the intelligence of their own members, arguing
that they had the responsibility to be the last of the intelligent people
so they could complete the creation of a society of low-intelligence
humans and direct its operation.
October 23, 2016
626
Quote note (#298)

Cixin Liu (op. cit.), p.558:
“… It’s very possible that every law of physic has been
weaponized. It’s possible that in some parts of the universe, even …
Forget it, I don’t even believe that.”
“What were you going to say?”
“The foundation of mathematics.”
Cheng Xin tried to imagine it, but it was simply impossible. “That’s
… madness.” Then she asked, “Will the universe turn into a war ruin?
Or, maybe it’s more accurate to ask: Will the laws of physics turn into
war ruins?”
“Maybe they already are …”
(All ellipsis after the first in original.)
Among the points here, the (Herakleitean) thesis: Cosmology
does not transcend war. Strategy belongs to the infrastructure.
October 31, 2016
War Without End

‘Eurasianist’ Alexander Dugin interviewed by (liberal) Vladimir
Posner on the fundamental structure of global geopolitical
antagonism. (Video, in Russian with English subtitles.)
627
Reignition
While he is clearly the sort of person who tends to bring my co-

ethnics out in hives, Dugin is without question among the most
important thinkers of the new millennium. (The UF position on this,
beyond simple interest in what might very easily be the most
dynamic ideological development of our time, is close to inverted, or
‘Atlantean’, Eurasianism.)
July 27, 2014
Twitter cuts (#110)
@Outsideness We have violent mobs, you have memes. I like

our odds tbh
— sadbukharin (@sadladbukharin) February 4, 2017
There’s nothing about this tweet I don’t like.

Memes are ideas that manage their own security. In the Internet
Era they get stronger every day (and mobs get weaker).
February 4, 2017
628
SEQUENCE ii - THE ISLAMIC V

VOR
ORTEX
TEX
Premature Ejection
As Napoleon famously advised: “Never interrupt your enemy when
he’s making a mistake.” Understandably, but still unfortunately, the
Egyptian army have just done exactly that.
Daniel Pipes has pipped me to the post on this (here or here). The
short summary that pre-empts me most specifically is this: “Morsi
was removed from power too soon to discredit Islamism as much as
he should have.” It took seven decades of chronic failure to associate
the Marxist command economy with hopeless dysfunction in the
eyes of the world, and even then, the lesson remains far from
complete. It can scarcely be imagined that a few months of Muslim
Brotherhood misgovernment is going to sear any lasting scars into
the global Islamic soul. So: an opportunity missed.
Clearly, the forces of the Egyptian deep state were in no position
to be as utterly indifferent to humanitarian considerations as
Outside in. Their hand was forced, since whatever the educational
virtues of mass starvation, it takes a certain distance to fully
appreciate them. In any case, with Egypt now clearly unsprung, it is
629
Reignition
at least possible to find entertainment in the spectacle of popular

anti-democratic protest, concluding in firework celebrations of
authoritarian restoration.
Adam Garfinkle covers the nuts-and-bolts well. Goldman’s
regional analysis is highly convincing. Steyn does the quick historical
overview, no less persuasively.
July 6, 2013
The Islamic V
Vorte
ortexx (P
(Part
art 1)
When confronted by large-scale — and thus complex – historical
events, it is inevitable that attempts at understanding will be
dominated by analogy. Even among experts, with access to abstract
models of generic processes (‘revolution’, modernization, escalation,
phase-change …), it is only through reference to concrete historical
episodes that such intellectual tools acquire the richness necessary
for successful application to actual world events. Even the most
conceptually-refined historiographical language is honed for
analogical usage. There is no ‘idea’ of ‘revolution’ truly separable
from the examples of revolution provided by the historical record,
and even if there was, it could have no use. Since history is rhythmic,
but never exactly repetitive, such analogies can be more or less
relevant, but only ever roughly suggestive. They are, in any case,
630
unavoidable.
During the years immediately following 9/11, Western
perceptions of the new global reality were controlled by analogy
with World War II, and even those who rejected this template were
locked into a negative relationship with it. If 9/11 was not Pearl
Harbor, or anything like it, it remained necessary to say so,
repeatedly, and to little immediate effect. The term ‘Islamofascism’
was inherited from this period, and its fading currency is significant
(as we shall see).
On the Left, resistance to the WWII analogy was relatively
frictionless, because it was already, from the moment of its inception,
outweighed by an alternative analogy, drawn from Cold War ‘anti-
imperialist’ revolution. Bin Laden could never be a new Hitler, to
those who had already recognized him as a new Ho Chi Minh. On
the Right, however, intricate ironies abounded. Those on the paleo-
libertarian end of the political spectrum, who most vehemently
denounced the ‘Axis of Evil’ as a cynical fabrication, were propelled
by events into an accelerated rediscovery of the Old Right, and thus
found themselves – quite self-consciously — reviving 1930s
American isolationism. Through the very rejection of the (WWII)
analogy, they found themselves confirming its rough historical
message.
Is the West returning to the 1930s? That is another topic,
although it can be noted that evidence in support of this analogy has
631
Reignition
accumulated over recent years at least as rapidly as it has dissipated.

To the extent that the ‘War on Terror’ is World War II revisited,
however, it is only under the conditions of a profound counter-
factual revision, in which the American Old Right was ultimately
triumphant, and vindicated. The Islamic world simply lacks the
military capability to serve as model fascists, posing a robust
existential threat that feeds continuous escalation. America has not
remotely approached a 1940s war economy in the new millennium,
and there is nothing that any Islamic power — formal or informal —
can do to stimulate this outcome. A few ragged, frustrating counter-
insurgencies do not make a world war. For America, the War on
Terror — in any sense that has analogical force — is over.
The opportunity thus exists to shelve the Western perspective
on international affairs, a methodical step that tracks the concrete
draw-down of interventionist commitment, and one that — by
further irony — promises a far deeper comprehension of what
current global events will mean for the West (down the road). The
critical first point is this: the end of the ‘War on Terror’ is not the
end of the war wracking the world of Islam, but something far closer
to its beginning. If the Arabs, too, are returning to the 1930s, it is in
a very different way, in accordance with a far more comprehensive
structure of history.
Anybody who has been hanging out in Al Jazeera recently (and,
right now, there’s no excuse not to), might have come across an
632
extremely significant essay by Murtaza Hussain, entitled Iraq, Syria,

and the death of the modern Middle East. Hussain has no doubts that
a back-to-the-1930s moment is unfolding in Mesopotamia, or rather
— the truly crucial insight — a back through the 1920s moment, with
reverse time signature. The Middle East is not so much recapitulating
history from the early 20th century, as undoing it, revisiting the
origins of the Arab state system on a hardening, backwards
trajectory:
The Sykes-Picot Agreement – which divided the Ottoman Empire
after World War I and created the Middle East as we know it – is
today violently breaking apart in front of the eyes of the world. The
countries of Syria and Iraq; formerly unified Arab states formed after
the defeat of their former Ottoman rulers, exist today only in name.
In their place what appears most likely to come into existence – after
the bloodshed subsides – are small, ethnically and religiously
homogenous statelets: weak and easily manipulated, where their
progenitors at their peaks were robustly independent powers.
Such states, divided upon sectarian lines, would be politically
pliable, isolated and enfeebled, and thus utterly incapable of offering
a meaningful defence against foreign interventionism in the region.
Given the implications for the Middle East, where overt foreign
aggression has been a consistent theme for decades, there is reason
to believe that this state of affairs has been consciously engineered.
Hussain’s conviction of alien manipulation — however plausible or
633
Reignition
implausible it may seem — is itself a crucial part of the equation. The

Arab world is being propelled backwards, out of political modernity,
by forces of such consistent directionality and monumental
implacability that they suggest conspiratorial or providential
workings, against which resistance is futile. Raw history, in all of its
nightmarish, occult compulsion, is exposed like a buried city, as the
facile myths of collective, institutionalized agency are blasted away
by the flood. A dismal century of second-hand lies is being ripped
away, revealing something old and terrible beneath. Eventually, this
cannot but matter, for everyone.
The World War II analogy was tightly bound to the
(‘neoconservative’) project of democracy promotion. After all, the
original Axis powers were all transformed, through military defeat,
occupation, and political reconstruction, from fascist states into
model democracies. Hussain’s vision is far more accurately
applicable to the current process-in-motion, which does not climax
in an affirmation of political modernity, but accelerates back through
its comprehensive demolition. Global democracy will not easily or
rapidly die in the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’, but global
democratization, or democracy promotion, assuredly will.
From the War on Terror to the Arab Spring, there is a shift in
analogy of seismic consequence. It is no longer World War II that
impinges forcefully on historical intuition, but rather the Thirty
Years’ War, approached through momentous regression. The
634
collapse of the Sykes-Picot order, when analogized, is an undoing

of the Peace of Westphalia — and the international state system
— by sectarian religious warfare without respect for borders or
institutions of national self-determination. The conditions for
democratizing social progress are being ripped out at the level of
their foundations. This was not what ‘internationalism’ was
supposed to mean …
July 30, 2013
The Islamic V
Vorte
ortexx (P
(Part
art 2)
The central contention advanced by part 1 in this series is that the
basic trend manifested in the Middle East today – most evidently
across its northern arc — is the disintegration of the modern state
system (and with it all the questions of political progress that have
been incrementally globalized since the Treaty of Westphalia in the
mid-17th century). To continue to discuss this process in terms of
‘Lebanon’, ‘Syria’, and ‘Iraq’ is becoming increasingly quaint. Within
this region, in particular, states no longer conform to contiguous
territories, but rather to hubs, characterized by the inheritance of a
comparatively organized security apparatus, a vestigial international
status (also inherited, from the dissolving state system), and
specifically a recognized Westphalian-era territorial sovereignty,
635
Reignition
stripped of domestic credibility. A realistic political geography of the

emerging northern Middle East begins from this point.
Because the names of nation states can only suggest
(Westphalian) contiguous jig-saw pieces, it is essential to
understanding that we start elsewhere. The Crescent, stretching
from western Iran, through Iraq, and Syria, to the Lebanese Levant,
spilling – no doubt – into south-eastern Turkey to the north, and
down into the northern Gulf states and Jordan to the south, can be
considered an exaggerated Fertile Crescent, a (Sunni-paranoiac) Shia
Crescent, a Crescent of Disintegration, it doesn’t matter. What is
important is that the state apparatuses (and international political
sovereigns) existing in this area occupy it in the manner of islands,
populating or inhabiting it — among other collective bodies of
strategic consequence — rather than dividing it effectively among
themselves.
If the Crescent is maximally extended to the eastern borders of
Iran (and perhaps further into the Hazara areas of Afghanistan, and
Quetta in Pakistan), northwards into Azerbaijan and blurrily into the
areas of Anatolian Alevi ethnicity, and south along the western Gulf
coast, encompassing Bahrain (but stretched further along the Saudi
Gulf coast and beyond, into Yemen), it incorporates the entirety of
Shia Islam as a strategically potent entity. Beyond this area, the Shia
exist only as pogrom-fodder among overwhelmingly dominant Sunni
populations. Constituting something over 15% of Moslems
636
worldwide, but over a third of those in the Middle East, the Shia
either prevail in the Crescent, or go under. (For our purposes here
Alawites / Alevi are Shia by strategic affiliation and adoption.)
The Crescent is the site of fitna, Islam’s unsettled business, and
the time of settlement is now due. How does the balance of forces
appear?
Almost dead center in the Crescent, are spread the –
characteristically stateless – Kurds, divided between Iran, Turkey,
‘Iraq’, and ‘Syria’, and numbering perhaps 30 million (compared to
a world Shia population of roughly 200 million). Although
predominantly Sunni by confession, Kurdish nationalist aspiration
dominates over sectarian identity. It comes as relief to our cognitive
overload that they are playing a long game. We can bracket them for
the moment
To the north lies Turkey, a powerful, comparatively competent
Sunni state, marginalized by its non-Arab ethnicity. The pursuit of
neo-Ottoman ambitions at this point would draw Turkey into a
snake-pit of unimaginable pain. I think we can assume defensive
hedging from Turkey in the immediate future. If we can bracket the
Kurds – who are central to Turkey’s interests and calculations — we
can cautiously bracket Turkey as well.
To the east lies Iran, another capable state, as territorially secure
as anyone gets to be in this environment, and the wellspring of global
Shia power. Iran is already heavily invested in the Crescent War, but
637
Reignition
it has the luxury of involvement from without, as a firm ally of

Hizbollah, a major stakeholder in the Iraqi Shia regime, and the local
‘superpower’ ally of Assad’s Alawite rump state. (We shall get to
examine Iran more closely when examining the nuclear proliferation
aspect of this story, further down the road.)
To the south things get very complicated. Jordan, an extremely
fragile Sunni state, is almost certainly doomed, but its collapse will
widen the Crescent War into a far more multidimensional conflict.
If we ignore it now it is less because we can ignore it, than because
we simply have to ignore it. The limits of our processing capacity are
exceeded. Similarly, to the east, where the tentacles of fitna snake
down along the Gulf coast, through rich, demographically fragile
micro-states, tightly woven into the US-dominated international
system by hydrocarbon production. This is the royal road to world
war. It’s too much to deal with right now. (Free-ranging commentary
is, of course, welcome.)
Despite the transparent arbitrariness with which we have
cropped the Crescent down to something like a manageable zone of
attention, the core that remains has a number of coherent features.
Most obviously, it is already a battlefield, in which the return to a
pre-Westphalian ‘order’ is substantially accomplished. On the
Mediterranean coast, a tenuous hybrid Sunni-Christian Levantine
statelet coexists with a Hizbollah (Shia) para-state, awaiting the
resumption of hell. No one is under time-pressure to decide things
638
there very soon. It is in throughout the twin Sykes-Picot

Frankenstein ‘nations’ of ‘Syria and Iraq‘ that the unraveling begins.
This Crescent Core is occupied by two rump states, one clearly
reduced to a compressed fiefdom (under Assad), the other still able
to pretend to national authority. Each is an apparatus of Shia power,
and thus a target for a Sunni-Jihadist onslaught of international
scope, in which Al Qaeda realizes its world historic mission. The local
Sunni-Arab population engaged in escalating holy war against these
states is not meaningfully differentiated by (Sykes-Picot) national
identity. Humpty-Dumpty is broken, irreparably.
For the international Sunni-Jihadi movement, the destruction of
these rump states is now a matter of eschatological significance.
Their defense is of no less importance to their Shia supporters, for
whom the Crescent Core war is a zone of existential decision. The
entire history of Islam, on both of its dominant branches, is fully
engaged in this conflict, whose meaning, for the entire (split) Ummah
is unsurpassable. It is impossible to over-estimate the stakes, as
Islam itself perceives them, and the wider world has not yet seriously
begun to apprehend what is happening. (Palestine or Afghanistan
mean nothing in comparison — as the revealed pattern of practical
Jihad makes clear.)
Does anybody seriously think they’re going to end this, with a
recognizable world order in place? If not … what’s next?
639
Reignition
July 31, 2013
The Islamic V
Vorte
ortexx (P
(Part
art 3)
The cartoon would look something like this:
An Egyptian (or it could be a Pakistani) walks into the Bank of
America, with a hand-grenade daubed ‘Radical Islam’ taped to his ear,
and shouts out: “Hand over the money or my head gets it!”
The teller looks up and says: “You don’t have to keep doing this.
There’s a standing order to pay you $1,500,000,000 a year.”
Offended, the Egyptian replies: “But the grenade is the only
reason you respect me!”
We could try to update the joke (… “then the black lesbian bank
teller says: ‘Why are you repressing that grenade?’”) but there’s
going to be more than enough torture in this story already. It suffices
to note that in the Egyptian version of the cartoon, the grenade was
provided by the bank, and its inscription read: ‘Democracy’. We can
fast-forward straight through the explosion stage, and begin on the
far side of the ‘Arab Spring’.
So to start over, with a serious question (even if it doesn’t sound
like one): How did the first comprehensively Cathedralist
administration in American history get to implement a ruthlessly
cunning neoreactionary Middle East strategy? In the Crescent, it
640
sleazed a situation in which Hizbollah and Al Qaeda are engaging in

reciprocal suicide attacks – even a hyper-hawk with liquid nitrogen
blood would have been hard-pressed to envisage such a scenario.
And in Egypt? There the dysfunctional ‘realist’ status quo – America’s
multi-decade hand-grenade cartoon of a foreign policy – has given
way to something quite different.
Assume, hypothetically, that in Middle Eastern affairs the Obama
Administration is by far the most mind-melting example of
transcendental strategic genius the Anglophone world has ever
known. (Are you with me so far?) Now add one straightforward
corollary: In respect to Egypt, the goal was to replace a parasitic,
dysfunctional, passive-aggressive PITA state, breeding Mohammed
Attas like hogs in a factory farm, with a hard, Islamophobic,
neoreactionary security state, fundamentally immunized against all
democratic temptation, serving as a pole of attraction for counter-
Jihad tendencies throughout the region, and machine-gunning even
more Muslim Brothers in the streets than you really feel it needs
to. Then, if it all works out, as a bonus you even get to threaten the
$1.5 billion standing order, whilst tut-tutting disapprovingly about
the naughty coup business.
To pull off this kind of unbelievable ju-jitsu requires a very special
skill set, starting with a mastery of deception. A Sahara-dry, perfectly
dead-pan sense of humor is not strictly necessary, but it adds to the
sense of panache.
641
Reignition
You probably remember Dark-Lord Obama’s 2009 Cairo Speech,

in very approximate outline, but do you recall the title? Here it is
(seriously): A New Beginning. You’re forgiven a tingly ‘this is beyond
awesome’ moment. (Probably Now for Neoreaction, or Hard Reboot
to the Future were considered too blunt even for this Grand Imperial
Wizard.) In an interview with Al Arabiya, Obama explained with his
signature stylistic felicity: “My job to the Muslim world is to
communicate that the Americans are not your enemy.” From now on
you’ll be killing your own damn people.
The bottom-line problem isn’t difficult to see: the passably
civilized fraction of the Egyptian population is far too small to
dominate their society, unless tightly compressed by bonds of fear,
thoroughly disillusioned about the degraded state of their culture,
invigorated by an urgent sense of responsibility to secure their own
existence, and terminally freed of all democratic sentiment. Similarly,
the regime itself needed to be quickened by existential terror, and
driven into nakedly elitist alignment with a newly integrated, overtly
anti-populist constituency. For all this to happen, Egypt had to be
locked in a cage with itself, hardened by what it found there, until it
had learned a lesson as old as the pharoahs. The state had to cease
being a pandering platform and pan-handling operation, tailored to
domestic populism and correct international opinion, and begin
ensuring security, unapologetically, for the residue of civilization that
still remained. But we already know what was required: A New
642
Beginning.
Mubarak was grenade-guy. He had to go. The fact that he was
using the Muslim Brotherhood in a groove-locked game of chicken
with America was far from the most serious problem. He was also
playing grenade-guy chicken with the local — uncondensed — non-
Islamist demographic. By sheltering Egypt’s educated elite from
their own bearded brethren, he was sustaining its most hopelessly
sentimental illusions about the nature of the national demos,
perpetuating democratic teleology, giving credence to the
‘international’ reform agenda, and deferring to the country’s
radically corrupted (Islamo-populist) cultural template. Breaking
with all this was something far beyond the Mubarak-circle’s political
imagination. The country had to be sprung.
Of course, the Obama master-plan remains far from complete
(even without consideration of its application to Pakistan). The
Egyptian economy is still skewed towards ruin by a deep structure of
populist subsidies, and the recently installed order of neoreactionary
legitimation has yet to be overtly proclaimed, or constitutionally
formalized.
It is nevertheless important to recognize how far things have
come. The Obamazing feint-revolutionary double-flip-back
maneuver has, in rapid succession, obliterated the accumulated
credibility of the old (‘grenade-guy’) regime, ‘moderate’ Islamist
governance, and democratic inclusion. A New Beginning already has
643
Reignition
the educated middle classes clamoring for a harsher clampdown on

the bearded mob, and the security apparatus reaching out for robust
political integration with the country’s civilized minority (the
‘Tamarrod’).
In The Weekly Standard, surreptitious Obamanist Reuel Marc
Gerecht captures the situation adeptly:
The driving force behind the Tamarrod may be just too far
removed culturally from the Egyptian faithful. One thing is certain
after the coup: Secular liberals will want to be protected from
vengeful Islamists. And for that they will need the army. The ballot
box will not do.
August 1, 2013
The Islamic V
Vorte
ortexx (P
(Part
art 3a)
This series was preparing for the flight out from Cairo International
Airport, to go WMD hunting in the Crescent, when a call arrived
– from Fotrkd (on this thread) – turning our plans back around. It
was hard to pick out the exact message from the stream of excited
babble, but it was basically: “You’re not going to believe what Kerry
just said to the Pakistani’s …” (who, we have to remember, are next in
line for A New Beginning®.)
I’m guessing you’ve already heard it – since it’s all over the media.
644
The Israelis string it together well (notice the encrypted message to

Kerry in the URL: Ufu02Kzk2-k (!)):
“The military was asked to intervene by millions and millions of
people, all of whom were afraid of descendance into chaos, into
violence,” Kerry was quoted as having told Geo.
“And the military did not take over, to the best of our judgment
– so far. To run the country, there’s a civilian government. In effect,
they were restoring democracy,” he added.
The interviewer questioned him over allegations that Egyptian
troops have shot dead people in the streets.
“Oh, no. That’s not restoring democracy, and we’re very, very
concerned… I’ve been in touch with all of the players there. And we
have made it clear that that is absolutely unacceptable, it cannot
happen,” Kerry said, according to AFP.
If history is being studied in human languages a thousand years
from now, these words will still be reverberating. They need to be
carved on a pyramid, or something. This is one of those rare moments
in which everything changes, and we have to catch up with it.
It’s all about democracy, obviously, but the improvised card-
sharping makes it easy to miss the way the trick plays out. The first
important thing to note — and the assumed context of the Geo
interview — is that the initial reference to democracy, as crudely,
procedurally, and up to this point pointedly understood, is scrubbed
out and replaced. When the interview question begins, we all know
645
Reignition
that what is being talking about is the abrupt termination of Egypt’s

brief and pitiful experiment in Cathedral-inspired democracy. After
Kerry’s initial words, all that has already been shrouded. The topic
has somehow slipped into “descendance into chaos, into violence” —
and we’re not supposed to register that these words are translating
exactly the same thing that ‘democracy’ previously named, because
‘democracy’ is about to mean something else.
A lot of people (and they’re the people who matter) were asking
the military to intervene to shut down democracy the descendance
into chaos, into violence, and a deal was quickly and efficiently done.
The people who the military listen to got to borrow the military, and
the military got to borrow a civilian face. The intimacy of this
arrangement — and its deep neoreactionary sanity — has nothing at
all to do with democratic legitimacy in its previously accepted (and
now effaced) sense. Kerry clearly doesn’t think that anyone will care
about that. The right people took over, how could that possibly be a
problem? (It’s not as if anyone ever complained about that Pinochet
business.) But just in case some awkward memory of what we were
supposed to believe last week is still hanging around, we now get
the most exquisite political formula of the age: In effect, they were
restoring democracy.
These words are too perfect. Sobbing with ecstasy could be
embarrassing, so I’ll quote a little WRM while getting it together:
Let’s get the obvious parts out of the way: No, the Egyptian
646
military is not restoring democracy in Egypt. You can’t “restore”

something that never existed … […] The army wasn’t trying to build
democracy, either; it was restoring order and protecting the deep
state, more or less in accordance with the will of a large number of
middle class and urban Egyptians. That’s the beginning and end of
it. Americans desperately want somebody to be the pro-democracy
good guys. But right now at least, democracy doesn’t seem to be on
the menu at the Egypt café.
The structure of realization seems to go roughly like this:
(a) Democracy is the supreme Good, engraved eternally and
universally in the human heart, but
(b) When an attempt is made to implement it almost anywhere on
earth it immediately manifests as a descendance into chaos, into
violence, and
(c) This existentially threatens the demographic which might be
actually capable of sustaining a functional democracy, so
(d) In effect, the truly crucial step is the immediate cessation of
democracy what was previously known as democracy, which
therefore counts as
(e) A restoration of democracy.
We need to remember that John Kerry might have been
President of the United States, and the Muslim Brotherhood
helpfully work with us in thinking that through:
Supporters of Egypt’s ousted president Mohamed Mursi today
647
Reignition
slammed US Secretary of State John Kerry after he said the military

was “restoring democracy” by deposing the Islamist leader.
“Is it the job of the army to restore democracy?” asked Gehad
al-Haddad, a spokesman for Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood in a
statement.
“Does Secretary Kerry accept Defence Secretary (Chuck) Hagel
to step in and remove (US President Barack) Obama if large protests
take place in America?
“Will the US army freeze the constitution and dismantle Congress
and (the) Senate? Can they appoint a president that they solely
choose?”
Gehad al-Hadad still isn’t quite getting it. When invited by the
right people, whatever the army has to do in overthrowing the
government now defines the ‘restoration of democracy’.
Once we get to the stage where the Middle East is re-exporting
Kerryist democratic restoration, things could get extraordinarily
interesting. At the present rate of Cathedralist ideological implosion,
however, there might not be time for that.
Who’s going to print up the T-shirts? We demand democratic
restoration now!
August 2, 2013
648
The Islamic V
Vorte
ortexx (P
(Part
art 3b
3b))
“This time is different” is a slogan designed for derision. Greer set
me back onto it again, but it’s familiar background hum, and could
have come from anywhere. In it’s most typical usage it applies to
the psychology of business cycles, as the epitome of bubble denial,
which is to say: investor hubris. (This book might be the best known
example.) With blunt irony, it is placed in the mouth of a fool, who
is prompted to declare that things won’t turn out the same this time
around (so of course they will). It’s what somebody is expected to say
shortly before losing their shirt.
There are a few quite simple things that can be said about the
presumption, whether learned or instinctive, that things will almost
certainly not be different ‘this time’.
— It is a cognitive stance that conforms almost perfectly with the
dominant sense of ‘wisdom’.
— It is strongly aligned with the heuristic that history has important
lessons to teach us (and that the lessons of deep history are
especially profound).
— It is skeptical with respect to Utopian schemes of improvement.
— It has an emotional correlate, in aversion to enthusiasm.
— Every civilized (or even merely cultural) tradition has an
identifiable version of it.
For all these reasons, it has a reactionary bias, due to its affinity
649
Reignition
with everything that resists the progressive impulse and its fantastic
illusions. It remembers that change has happened before, and what
happened when it did. Even when explicit, relevant memory is
lacking, it assumes that tradition incorporates wisdom, and thus
provides a bulwark against reckless enthusiasm. It is unmistakably
biased, because there has been enough past to make it so.
The guiding maxim of Outside in – Optimize for intelligence – is
not primarily wise. Among the readers of this blog, however, wisdom
is the prevalent mode of realism, and it is displayed in crushing
abundance. When our digression into Egyptian practical neoreaction
strayed into the exultant discovery of a rare moment in which
everything changes
changes, the push-back commentary was quick, hard, and
relentlessly wise.
Learned wisdom, rooted in historical recollection, expects to be
countered, usually by fools. Of all the things that have happened
before, innumerable times, among the most common is a delirium
of novelty, accompanied by rationalizations of greater or lesser
sophistication. History is able to test doctrines of novelty, by
excavating ancestral anticipations whose very existence amounts to
a refutation. For any claim to the unprecedented, exposure to
precedents is an embarrassment that cannot easily be survived.
From an occluded future, the disturbance of wisdom can draw no
sustenance, but history offers it partial refuge, in two interconnected
ways. Firstly, it can contest the time-scale of normality, pushing
650
expectations into deeper and more expansive cycles, in order to

relativize a formation of wisdom to a long-settled innovation, whose
‘naturalness’ rests on nothing beyond a comparative durability of
change. Wisdom is challenged to deepen its memory, and to recall
the difference it has mistaken for a foundation. If anything done can
be undone – and even has to be – then what will not be undone, in
time? Every establishment was once established, and thus rests upon
some sub-basement of historical fragility.
Secondly, the precedents of innovation, when abstractly
apprehended, disturb wisdom more effectively than they support it.
Sometimes it has been different, unless growth itself is an illusion.
Everything, seized at the right scale, is new. Ultimately invention
envelopes wisdom, rather than the contrary. (This is not, admittedly,
an uncontroversial claim.)
Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed each said “this time it’s different.”
A sufficiently mechanical wisdom would even assert that, in this, they
all said the same. At the very least, as original founders of distinctive
establishments of wisdom, they each preclude a primordial refusal
of innovation. An absolute wisdom would judge each worthy of
crucifixion, or its equivalent in derision. If wisdom is to be the iron
criterion, the Abrahamic faiths are all the works of great comedians.
How could it be denied that — when strictly and consistently
considered — religious inspiration is inherently unwise? (This is not a
judgment I am dogmatically rejecting.)
651
Reignition
The state, too, is an invention. It seems to be roughly as old as the

institution of literate priesthood, with canons of wisdom to match.
That time it was different, and recorded history began. Even then, a
deeper and more enveloping wisdom can be conceived, associated
with a lost (and unwritten) presumption: this nonsense is not going
to last. Perhaps proto-states had been tried, and failed, innumerable
times before. The prehistory of political abortions might even have
exhibited sufficient richness to make the birth of the state obviously
foolish. Equally, through a dilation of time-scales ultimately
indistinguishable from wisdom itself, we can still stubbornly presume
that this nonsense is not going to last. Or at least, if we refuse this
presumption, judging it unrealistic, we have to do so as defenders of
innovation, rather than as faithful voices of tradition.
So we return to the leading question of this series: what is the
destiny of the Islamic State? Clearly, wisdom offers us no answer. The
modes of reason engaged are quite different. We have to correctly
identify the real innovations in the history of the state, and come to
an equally realistic judgment about the relative priority of religious
civilization and political order. Is the Islamic State a state, that
happens — incidentally — to be Islamic? Or does Islam decide
whether or not it is culturally tolerable to sustain a modern state?
These questions are open to revision, and refinement, but the
essential divergence of conclusions is inescapable. Either universal
political science is possible, or it is not.
652
If universal politics is judged impossible, that is — in the delicate

American turn of phrase — a BFD. The practical recognition of such
a reality would make a difference, a durable change, and a
disintegration of time. Islam either masters the state, or succumbs to
it. That ‘choice’ is a war.
August 3, 2013
The Islamic V
Vorte
ortexx (P
(Part
art 4)
The story that follows was stolen from somewhere, but I’ve not been
able to recover the source. It has a definite neoconservative edge to
it, which isn’t surprising given the early-nullities brain-feed it was no
doubt extracted from, but it’s neat enough to be passed on.
If Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires in space, the First
World War was the equivalent burial ground in time. The German
Second Reich, the Austro-Hungarian (Habsburg) Empire, the Russian
(Romanov) Empire, and the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire were all
interred by it. In their place arose new geopolitical entities based
upon an unstable mixture of ethno-nationalist self-determination
and moral-universalist internationalism. The role of American ideas
in the New Order – most immediately conveyed by the vehicle of
‘Wilsonism’ – was both substantial and ambiguous. A tight swirl of
Americanization and Anti-Americanism would be essential to
653
Reignition
everything that followed.

If Austro-Germanic imperial collapse can be considered one
thing, for the sake of elegance, the true narrative marvel of this story
can unfold, because each dead empire was the germ of a world war,
structuring history in its fundamentals up to the present day. From
each imperial grave, in succession, came a challenge to the
Anglophone global order, distinct in certain respects, but also
displaying common, recognizable features.
Given what is being said of their origins, we can think of these
sequenced global challenges as Undead Empires, re-animated from
the ruins of the old order. In each case a supra-national ideological
wave was radiated from an extinct crater of traditional authority,
married in complex ways to ethno-nationalist impulses, and self-
defined in explicit opposition to Anglo-Jewish planetary capitalism.
First Central-European National-Socialism (1933-45), then Russo-
centric Bolshevism (1946-89)*, and finally – because this narrative
implies completion – from out of the Arabian hinterland of the
broken Ottoman empire came the last of the great Undead Empires,
the one that concerns us still.
The Eurasian Undead Empires have ceased to moan. Ghoulishly
re-animated, then re-broken, and rebuilt, Germany dominates
Europe once again, and Russia has re-established itself as an
assertive autocracy with extensive, but strictly finite, reach. Neither
any longer pursues its interests in the name of a cosmic ideology, as if
654
its traumatic grievance deserved to shake the heavens. Neither still

aches to burn down the world, in order to share the ruin it has known.
The sullen grumbles they might still nurse have ceased to awaken the
dead. Only normal disgruntlements remain.
Islam remains in a very different place. The collapse of its last
— Ottoman — Caliphate was constitutionally formalized by Kemal
Atatürk, the first President of the new Turkish Republic, on March
3, 1924. The cosmic ideology of Islamism is unintelligible without
reference to that event. What political Islam wants, centrally, is the
revival of the Caliphate. The Great War’s last curse thus determines
it as an Undead Empire dreaming, in the lurid crypt-chatter of blood
and screams …
… which was the neoconservative nightmare, best articulated by
center-left hawk Paul Berman in his Terror and Liberalism. In
compliance with the pattern of historical analogy here outlined, only
one outcome was conceivable — a fourth world war. The ‘War on
Terror’ was thus predicted, and promoted, until — after the best part
of a decade — it had bled out into a parody of itself. The grating
disproportion between the WoT’s tawdry squabbles on the one
hand, and the apocalyptic confrontation which the narrative
demanded on the other, had become unbridgeable. In a sense it was
over. At least, attention wandered. Yet nothing had been settled, or
laid to rest.
Realism has to be more than ceasing to think, just as it must be
655
Reignition
more than a call to action. The story of the Undead Empires, now
freed of neoconservative excitability, has either to be discarded for
a reason, or more thoroughly explored. Despite the directionless
adventures that have attached themselves to it, the intrinsic
plausibility of the narrative itself has not, by an iota, been diminished.
This is most clearly demonstrated through simple elaboration of
the pattern. World War II was an extremely intense global conflict,
with a number of theaters simultaneously active, and total duration
of less than a decade (from the Japanese invasion of China in 1937
to the surrender of Japan in 1945). World War III, in contrast, was so
prolonged, and dilute (or ‘cold’), that it is generally considered not to
have happened at all. Between the major hostile powers, deterrence
predominated over active engagements, with the latter generally
conducted as peripheral, asymmetric conflicts. (US military deaths
approached 100,000 a year during WWII**, close to the country’s
total toll — almost entirely from Korea and Vietnam — suffered over
the 40 years of ‘WWIII’).
Of course, simple extrapolation into WWIV gets nowhere near to
a forecast. All it tells us is that there was never any reason to expect
compact, burning Armageddon. The crude trend line (counting for
nothing) projects 30,000 US military deaths over the course of a
200 year hyper-diffuse cryo-war. American narrative fundamentalist
would depart from that as the ‘norm’. Not the ‘clash’, but the slow
squelch of civilizations.
656
Perhaps more suggestive is the trend to involution. National

Socialists, despite the diversion of the Holocaust, spent most of their
time killing foreigners. The communist regimes of ‘WWIII’, in
contrast, focused almost entirely on massacring their own
populations, reaching a 9-figure body count over their ‘lifespans’. The
vague narrative ‘prediction’, therefore — which the word ‘war’
increasingly obfuscates — is that the long struggle to revive the
Caliphate is an opportunity for Islamo-demographic self-
cannibalization, on a scale that has only been delicately hinted at so
far. The default pattern points to an extended hideous occurrence
that is, almost entirely, inflicted by the Ummah upon itself.
The only reason to be persuaded by this pattern is that, right now,
it’s the only pattern we have …
[Some involutionary carnage in detail next]
* These are Cold War dates, rather than internal Bolshevik regime
dates (1917-89). The latter would contribute to a more intricate time
structure, in which sequence took the form of historical
envelopment, rather than simple succession. I’m trying to keep
things cognitively manageable, for the moment.
** December 1941 – August 1945
August 5, 2013
657
Reignition
The Islamic V
Vorte
ortexx (P
(Part
art 5)
So – does Mecca get nuked? For the purpose of this series, that’s a
reasonable candidate for the terminal question.
A direct assault on this question stumbles quickly into a paradox
of stimulating profundity. Of all the geopolitical and religious
agencies determining the outcome, the one most theologically
predisposed to the vaporization of Islam’s spiritual center is the
Wahhabi sect, which presently controls it. The case can easily be
made that, within the limitations set by peacetime conditions, this
objective has already been pursued with spectacular ardor. (If you
noticed the Iranian media links there, save that observation.) Also
worth mentioning: it’s a necessary antecedent to the Islamic
Apocalypse (al-Qiyamah) that Mecca and the Kaaba be destroyed.
One of the factors supporting the Thirty-Years’ War analogy in
the escalating conflict between Sunni and Shia Islam is the
confidence with which we can identify the ‘Protestants’ and
‘Catholics’ in this re-run. In God and Gold (p.367), Walter Russell
Mead outlines the structure of parallelism:
Wahhabis seek to suppress the popular cults associated with
saints and others traditionally believed to intercede for believers
with God. Every soul is accountable to God for its own acts, and
there is no human mediator. Puritans similarly attacked the cults of
the Christian saints, and argued that it was vain and unbiblical to
658
pray to the Virgin and the saints for their intercession with God. To
make sure such cults are suppressed, the Saudi government under
Wahhabi influence has recently destroyed mosques and monuments
in Mecca and Medina that had becomes associated with cults and
customs considered un-Islamic. Puritans, like many radical
Protestants across northern Europe, destroyed altar screens,
stained glass, statues, and other church furnishings which, in their
judgement, distracted the people from the worship of the one true
God.
Shia Islam, with its far greater tolerance for cultural ‘thickness’,
has a ‘Catholic’ alignment with heritage, tradition, and mediation.
Sunni Islam — especially in its ‘Puritanical’ or radical Wahhabi, Salafi,
and Takfiri variants, interprets intermediary forms of cultural and
political organization as manifestations of impiety (to be erased). As
with the militant Protestantism of the seventeenth century, its mode
of holy war indissolubly fuses iconoclastic theology with the armed
advance of the faith.
Radical Sunni ‘desert religion’ projects a desert as (and at) the end
of faith. It cannot be realistically expected that cultural inhibitions
on the escalation of violence will find fertile soil in this terrain. A
geographically and demographically besieged Shiism shows every
sign of counter-bidding unreservedly in its own eschatological coin.
There are other inhibitions, however. When socially disorganized
militants engage in informal warfare, the requirement that they
659
Reignition
protect their own neighborhoods from nebulous threats tends to

what Gary Brecher calls the ‘cripple fight’ phenomenon. There’s a
reluctance to stray to far from home, when home is an informal war
zone, which obstructs effective military mobilization. More
generally, mass killing is technically difficult, and usually scales up
with social competence (a few African counter-examples
notwithstanding). Disease is the traditional mass-killer, supplanted
by famine in modern times. Relatively low-efficiency slaughter is the
modern Islamic norm. Hence the fascination with Weapons of Mass
Destruction, and especially nuclear devices, as the prospective
solution to the Jihad escalation problem.
The dynamics of escalation can be modeled as a chain reaction,
which can in turn be translated into the geopolitics as a domino
theory. Such theories went out of fashion in the closing stages of
the Cold War, because their predictions regarding the contagious
virulence of communist regime-change began to look over-
stretched. Where domino models clearly excel, however, is in the
explanation of nuclear proliferation. Within such domino chains, the
attainment of ‘nuclear status’ by power A serves as the sufficient
political explanation for the subsequent attainment of nuclear status
by power B, in a process that can be prolonged indefinitely, given a
suitable linear network of threat links.
Consider the active chain of nuclear dominoes leading into the
Middle East (ignoring the non-contagious or here-irrelevant sub-
660
branches, UK, France, Israel, and North Korea). The path leaves little
room for controversy. In strict succession, driven by linear threat-
response at each stage, it runs USA, USSR, China, India, Pakistan …
and already we have an Islamic bomb. It is crucial to note at this
point that each link in nuclear dominoes (after the first) has to be
Janus faced. The potential conflict that provoked each stage of
proliferation is quite different to the one that triggers the next. For
instance, the Indian bomb, clearly responding to that of China, is
now primarily understood through the successor stage, in which the
nuclear arsenals of India and Pakistan are weighed against each
other in strategic calculations. Similarly, Pakistan’s Islamic bomb
(when related to India’s Hindu bomb) has to be re-conceived as a
Sunni bomb on its other face, envisaged from the Greater Middle
East, where a Shia bomb is the obvious threat-response — the next
domino.
It is important to stress that this is where the Iranian nuclear
program comes from. American and Israeli optics tend to distract
from the regional logic of proliferation. However politically
convenient it may be for Iranian leaders to publicly proclaim that
their bomb (which, of course, they have no intention whatsoever of
building) is designed solely to kill Jews, or to drive Americans out
of the Gulf, it is in fact overwhelmingly necessitated by the fact that
a Sunni bomb already exists, next door. A nuclear Iran means,
fundamentally, a balance of threat between Sunni and Shia power
661
Reignition
in the Greater Middle East. It can also be assumed, with extreme

confidence, that a Sunni Arab (Saudi) bomb would soon follow,
according to the wholly predictable domino-Janus sequence which
exposes Iran from the other side.
[There’s a lot more to say about all this, but I’m done for tonight]
August 10, 2013
Quote Notes (#13)

Richard Fernandez on the importance of the Israeli-Palestinian
‘peace process’:
Perhaps the saddest thing about President Obama’s Middle East
peace initiative is how tangential it is. R[e]uel Marc Gerecht and
Anthony Cordesman examine the upheavals in the region, focusing
on Egypt and Syria respectively, without even mentioning Palestine,
the jewel in Kerry’s crown. It is as if one were diagnosed with cancer,
but the doctors says “I can’t cure the cancer but I can manicure your
nails.”
August 6, 2013
662
Great Games …
… you have planned, shame if something bad were to happen to them.
Tyler Durden (of Zero Hedge) casts some harsh light on the lead
up to WWIV recent diplomatic engagement between Saudi Arabia
and Russia — countries that seem to be uniquely serious about the
outcome of the Islamic civil(izational) war. Roughly a month ago,
these countries had a less than complete meeting of minds on the
future of the region. TD quotes Al-Monitor on the conclusion: “At the
end of the meeting, the Russian and Saudi sides agreed to continue
talks, provided that the current meeting remained under wraps. This
was before one of the two sides leaked it via the Russian press.”
Since we know all about this, it means no more talks, an implicit
warning that the Chechens operating in proximity to Sochi may just
become a loose cannon (with Saudi’s blessing of course), and that
about a month ago “there
there is no escape from the military option,
because it is the only currently aavailable
vailable choice givgiven
en that the
political settlement ended in stalemate.
stalemate.” Four weeks later, we are
on the edge of all out war, which may involve not only the US and
Europe, but most certainly Saudi Arabia and Russia which
automatically means China as well. Or, as some may call it, the world.
Russian leverage is aligned with inertia, so it can be exercised with
some subtlety. The Saudis, on the other hand, are in an awkward
spot: they either back down, or they have to make ‘a splash’. Anyone
663
Reignition
looking for upcoming trigger events knows where to pay attention.

(For graphic context, try this.)
August 28, 2013
Quote notes (#24)

Adam Garfinkle makes an obvious point beautifully:
… whatever the Administration has said about the purpose of an
attack being to “degrade and deter” Syrian capabilities, but not to
change the regime, everyone expects the attacks to be modest and
brief, thus not to much affect the battlefield balance, and once
ceased to stay ceased. That is because the Administration’s reticence
at being drawn into the bowels of Syrian madness is both well
established and well justified. The attacks, then, will likely not
degrade or deter anything really; they will be offered up only as a
safety net to catch the falling reputation of the President as it drops
toward the nether regions of strategic oblivion.
This has all been so vividly sign-posted it is getting hard to see
how even a ‘cosmetic’ effect is going to work. How can an operation
pre-advertized as an awkward spasm of embarrassment be
realistically expected to restore honor and credibility?
Handle brims with sense on the topic.
664
August 30, 2013
Yesterda
esterday’s
y’s News
“The missile strikes the White House is contemplating would
advance Syria’s dissolution,” writes Steven A. Cook in the
Washington Post.
What is this ‘Syria’ of which you speak?
Such senseless language should have been dismissed from the
practical lexicon by now. It belongs strictly to history books.
Between the Mediterranean coast of the northern Levant and the
Iranian border, the internationally-recognized state system exists
only as a set of tokens in diplomatic games. It isn’t coming back.
This article (and book) will be seen as astonishingly prescient
soon, and deserves to be already.
September 1, 2013
Quote notes (#33)

Rough Triangles analysis from William Lind:
… we think of jihad as something waged by Islam against non-
Muslims, but quite often it has been between one Islamic sect and
665
Reignition
another. Now Islamists are once again declaring jihad on each other.
In June the New Y York
ork Times reported on an influential Sunni cleric
who “has issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling on Muslims
around the world to help Syrian rebels… and labeling Hezbollah and
Iran” — both Shi’ite — “enemies of Islam ‘more infidel than Jews and
Christians.'” David Gardner’s Financial Times piece tells of a
“conclave of Sunni clerics meeting in Cairo [that] declared a jihad
against what it called a ‘declaration of war on Islam’ by the ‘Iranian
regime, Hezbollah and its sectarian allies’.”
How should the West react to all this? With quiet rejoicing. Our
strategic objective should be to get Islamists to expend their
energies on each other rather than on us. An old aphorism says the
problem with Balkans is that they produce more history than they
can consume locally. Our goal should be to encourage the Muslim
world to consume all its history — of which it will be producing a good
deal — as locally as possible. Think of it as “farm to table” war.
All we should do, or can do, to obtain this objective is to stay out.
We ought not meddle, no matter how subtly; if we do, inevitably, it
will blow up in our faces. Just go home, stay home, bolt the doors
(especially to refugees who will act out their jihads here) …
September 26, 2013
666
Buy
Buy/b
/byye P
Petrodollar
etrodollar
The master jigsaw puzzle piece connecting US domestic and foreign
policy together is the petrodollar. Federal debt production depends
upon credibility in the US currency that is anchored by its privileged
role in global hydrocarbons commerce. Knock out that privilege, and
US dollar holdings become one speculative asset among others. The
fiat house of cards begins to tumble (perhaps with shocking rapidity).
In this context, US monetary policy begins to look like a side-line
of ‘friendship’ with the Saudis, which is dissolving into quick sand.
Pepe Escobar at AToL explores some of the possible consequences.
(It’s especially notable that the fracking revolution could accelerate
a petrodollar crisis, rather than retarding it.) There’s also a China
angle, which is always fun.
Disconcertingly for almost everybody, in different ways, the
awkward retraction of US power from the Middle Eastern wasps’
nest tends inevitably to destabilize the global monetary regime. The
more the Saudis feel jilted, the less their commitment to the
petrodollar pact, but if this was ever a low-maintenance relationship,
it certainly isn’t anymore.
Bomb Iran or your currency bombs. — Things might not quite
reduce to that yet, but it increasingly looks as if they will.
October 27, 2013
667
Reignition
The Saudi Bomb

Richard Fernandez passes along a BBC report that Saudi Arabia is
already a virtual nuclear power. In collaboration with Pakistan, the
Kingdom has assembled a nuclear arsenal (complete with CSS-2
delivery systems), which is presently distributed according to
diplomatic convenience, with the war-heads held in Pakistan.
Assuming that this report is roughly accurate, the chain-reaction of
nuclear dominoes pushing the proliferation through South Asia into
the heart of the Middle East has been all but completed, with only
superficial formalities yet to be concluded.
It’s late, and I’m off to bed, so I’ll simply repeat: It’s late. Everything
people care about is going to be side-lined by international events.
November 10, 2013
Time of the Ass-assins

Islam asks the important questions (via):
“My question is whether I am permitted to allow one of the
mujahideen access to my anus, if my intentions are honorable, and
the purpose is to train for Jihad by widening my anus.”
The sheik praised Allah and said: “In principle, sodomy is
forbidden. However, Jihad is more important. It is the pinnacle of
668
Islam. If sodomy is the only way to reach this pinnacle of Islam, then
there is no harm in it.
Allahpundit estimates:
Odds that this is a prank played on the credulous host by some
viewer, possibly the MEMRI guys themselves, who simply couldn’t
resist: 40 percent. Odds that it’s a legit query, proof that the
mujahedeen’s willingness to sacrifice for jihad has taken on painful
new dimensions: 40 percent. Odds that the guy posing the question
is the world’s dumbest would-be terrorist, whose “recruiter” is really,
really eager to start “training” him: 20 percent.
December 11, 2013
Pla
Playyed
Has Obama Administration geostrategy been based upon a cunning
(and secret) plan? Richard Fernandez makes the case that a covert
American attempt to subvert radical Islam crested with the
September 11, 2012, Benghazi fiasco. Employing a mix of infiltration,
drone assassination (to clear promotion paths), and calculated
regime sacrifices (Egypt, Syria), the objective was to reforge an
international Jihad under covert US control. When the take-over
plan went south, nothing could be publicly admitted. Cascading
failure has continued in the shadows ever since, jutting into media
669
Reignition
consciousness as a succession of disconnected — even inexplicable —

foreign policy setbacks.
The curious thing about September 11, 2012 — the day of the
Benghazhi attack — is that for some reason it marks the decline of
the Obama presidency as clearly as a milepost. We are told by the
papers that nothing much happened on that day. A riot in a far-away
country. A few people killed. And yet … it may be coincidental, but
from that day the administration’s foreign policy seemed
inexplicably hexed. The Arab Spring ground to a halt. The secretary
of State “resigned.” The CIA director was cast out in disgrace. Not
long after, Obama had to withdraw his red line in Syria. Al-Qaeda,
whose eulogy he had pronounced, appeared with disturbing force
throughout Africa, South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. Almost as
if on cue, Russia made an unexpected return to the world stage, first
in Syria, then in the Iranian nuclear negotiations.
Fernandez digs much deeper than Carney, but this is still worth
adding.
670
May 14, 2014
The Islamic V
Vorte
ortexx (Map
(Map))
Having seen this a few times now (most recently here, where it’s
described as a “five-year plan”), I decided I just had to have it.
FWIW I don’t expect Vienna to have been absorbed into the

renascent Caliphate by 2019.
671
Reignition
(I don’t expect things to have calmed down, either.)

The Islamic Vortex series was not completed, so it needs re-
visiting, but I think it’s holding up quite well (parts 1, 2, 3, 3a, 3b, 4, 5).
July 12, 2014
The Islamic V
Vorte
ortexx (Map-2)
This will be needed when we get back to the topic (eventually):
672
673
Reignition
July 24, 2014
The Islamic V
Vorte
ortexx (Note-1)
An executive summary of Ali Khedery’s open letter to President
Obama: Face it, ISIS is your ally bro.
August 13, 2014
The Islamic V
Vorte
ortexx (Note-2)
The claim that modern Sunni ‘fundamentalism’ (Salafism,
Wahhabism) is the Islamic Reformation is well-established (this blog
has grazed upon the background here). The persistence of this
proposition attests to its significance, and is at least suggestive of
credibility. It can reasonably be placed alongside the Moldbug Ultra-
Calvinism Thesis (on the cladistic identity of ‘secular’ democratic
progressivism) as a central religious-historical argument, of
profound relevance to the cultural tendencies of our time.
674
A fairly recent post at Patheos by Philip Jenkins (via Henry

Dampier) presents this proposition with remarkable force.
Mustering its case in terms of iconoclasm, it integrates the
phenomenon helpfully, in particular by emphasizing the essential
unity of militant anti-idolatry and mass violence. Smashing idols is
no mere intellectual or doctrinal position. Iconoclastic militancy is
a social operation, which is not only instantiated within the history
of revolutionary turmoil, but occupies a privileged position within it.
The revolutionary — or ideologically-mobilized — mob is epitomized
675
Reignition
by iconoclastic irruption, which foreshadows its potential for violent

abstraction. Doctrinally-motivated vandalism, from the European
Reformation, through the Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution, to the ravages of our contemporary radical Islam, is the
archetypal form of modern revolutionary (com)motion.
Philips remarks:
For present purposes, it is the Wahhabi tradition that has
unleashed the savage destruction of shrines and holy places that has
been so widely deplored in the past half-century or so. This includes
the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas in Afghanistan, the
attempted eradication of the glorious shrines and libraries of
Timbuktu, and the annihilation of most of the ancient shrines and
tombs around Mecca itself. Some Egyptian Islamists fantasize about
eradicating all the ruins of pagan ancient Egypt, including the
Pyramids themselves.
Modern Westerners are rightly appalled by such acts as
desecrations of humanity’s cultural heritage. But such outrage
demonstrates a near-total lack of awareness of the West’s own
history. Nothing that the Islamists have done in this regard would
cause the sixteenth century Protestant Reformers to lose a
moment’s sleep. They would probably have asked to borrow
hammers and axes so they could join in.
I am sometimes bemused to hear Western commentators call for
contemporary Islam to experience a “Reformation,” by which they
676
mean an opening to freedom and toleration. That is of course an

extremely distorted view of Christianity’s own Reformation.
Arguably, Islam has been going through its own Reformation for a
century or so, which is exemplified by the Wahhabis and Salafists.
That’s the problem.
August 29, 2014
The Islamic V
Vorte
ortexx (Note-3)
Asabiyyah is an Arabic word for a reason. Unlike many of my allies on
the extreme right, I see no point at all in other cultures attempting to
emulate it. The idea of a contemporary Western asabiyyah is roughly
as probable as the emergence of Arabic libertarian capitalism. In any
case, ISIS has it now, which means they have to keep fighting, and will
probably keep winning. Asabiyyah is useless for anything but war,
and it dissolves into dust with peace. The only glories Islam will ever
know going forward will be found on the battlefield, and it is fully
aware of the fact.
Baghdad will almost certainly have fallen by the end of the year,
or early next. The Caliphate will then be reborn, in an incarnation far
more ferocious than the last. Its existence will coincide with a war,
extending far beyond Mesopotamia and the Levant, at least through
the Middle East, into the Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent,
677
Reignition
across the Maghreb, and deep into Africa. If the Turks are not
terrified about what is coming, they have no understanding of the
situation. This is what the global momentum behind militant
‘Islamism’ across recent decades has been about. Realistically, it’s
unstoppable.
Eventually, it will bleed out, and then Islam will have done the last
thing of which it is capable. No less than tens of millions will be dead.
Other, industrially-competent and technologically-sophisticated
civilizations have no cause for existential panic, although mega-
terrorist attacks could hurt them. Any efforts they make to pacify
the Caliphate-war will be futile, at best. It is a piece of fate now. The
future will have to be built around it.
Patrick Poole writes (at the link above, repeated here):
The US Embassy in Baghdad is the largest embassy on the planet.
And after Obama sent 350 more U.S. military personnel to guard
the U.S. Embassy last month, there are now more than 1,100 US
service members in Baghdad protecting the embassy and the airport.
That doesn’t include embassy personnel, American aid workers, and
reporters also in Baghdad. ISIS doesn’t have to capture the airport
to prevent flights from taking off there (remember Hamas rockets
from Gaza prompting the temporary closure of Israel’s Ben Gurion
Airport this past summer). If flights can’t get out of Baghdad, how will
the State Department and Pentagon evacuate U.S. personnel? An
image like the last helicopter out of Saigon would be of considerable
678
propaganda value to ISIS and other jihadist groups. Former CNN

reporter Peter Arnett, who witnessed the fall of Saigon in April 1975,
raised this possibility back in June. It’s not like the U.S. has prestige to
spare internationally, and the fall of Baghdad will mark the beginning
of the end of American influence in the Middle East, much like the
case in Southe[a]st Asia in 1975.
When the United States pulled back from anti-communist COIN
in 1973, Marxism-Leninism was left to consume itself in its own
insanity. This is the situation that was reached in relation to Islam
by the election of the Obama administration in 2008. Even were it
desirable, it is sheer delusion to imagine that the West — i.e. America
— has the moral energy (or asabiyyah) to pursue any other course.
The consummation of Jihad is going to happen. The more rapidly the
catastrophe develops, the sooner it will be done.
ADDED: “However many of them are killed, the ones who survive
will keep pushing on into Kobani and on toward the Baghdad airport
feeling as alive as if they had just plunged into the river of history
itself. And they will keep telling themselves that this river flows with
the blood of the non-believers.”
ADDED: The War Nerd has a very different prognosis.
ADDED: So how is ISIS doing?
October 15, 2014
679
Reignition
The Islamic V
Vorte
ortexx (Note-3a)
This blog has doubtless generated rafts of unreliable predictions. The
one that has been nagging, however — ever since Scott Alexander
called me out on it in the comment thread there — was advanced
in the most recent sub-episode of this series. Quote: “Baghdad will
almost certainly have fallen by the end of the year, or early next.”
Even if the time horizon for this event is stretched out to the end
of March 2015, I have very low confidence in it being realized. The
analysis upon which it was based was crucially flawed. I’m getting
my crow-eating in early (and even if — by some improbably twist of
fortune — ISIS is in control of Baghdad by late March next year, it
won’t be any kind of vindication for the narrative I was previously
spinning.)
Where did I go wrong (in my own eyes)? Fundamentally, by hugely
over-estimating the intelligence of ISIS. The collapse of this inflated
opinion is captured by a single word: Kurds.
Just a few months ago, ISIS enjoyed a strategic situation of
extraordinary potential. It represented the most militant — and thus
authentic — strain of Arab Sunni Jihad, ensuring exceptional morale,
flows of volunteers from across the Sunni Muslim world, and funding
from the gulf oil-states, based upon impregnable legitimacy. It was
able to recruit freely from the only constituency within Iraq with
any military competence — the embittered remnants of Saddam’s
680
armed forces, recycled through the insurgency against the American

occupation, and then profoundly alienated by the sectarian politics
of the new Shia regime. It was also able to draw upon a large,
fanatically motivated, Syrian Sunni population, brutalized and
hardened by the war against the (Alawite, or quasi-Shia) Assad
regime in that country. Both enemy states were radically
anathematized throughout the Sunni world, deeply demoralized,
incompetent, and patently incapable of asserting their authority
throughout their respective countries. In consequence, a re-
integrated insurgent Sunni Mesopotamia had arisen, with such
historical momentum that it served as a concrete source of
inspiration for energetic holy war, and a natural base for the
eschatalogically-promised reborn Caliphate.
The wider environment was more complicated, but also highly
encouraging. The Jihadi legitimacy of ISIS made opposition from the
Sunni Arab states to the south (Jordan, Saudi Arabia) unthinkable.
That left four major sources of substantial hostile intervention:
Israel, the United States, Turkey, and Iran. Taking these in turn:
(1) Israel, by all game-theoretic sanity, was a de facto ally. Perhaps
it is. It had no intelligible motive for intervention, and were it to
do so the legitimacy of ISIS would be immediately elevated to
stratospheric levels. Baghdad or Damascus regimes dependent upon
Israeli support would be obviously politically unsustainable. (Israeli
war against ISIS puts it in objective collaboration with Iran — which
681
Reignition
isn’t going to happen.)

(2) The USA was burnt out, directionless, strategically-conflicted
to the point of psychosis, and politically-toxic to near-Israeli levels.
Relevant at this point only as a Jihadi recruiting tool.
(3) As a NATO member, Turkey completes the troika of
Westernized states, whose intervention would naturally tend to
reinforce a clash-of-civilizations escalation, to the extreme medium-
term advantage of ISIS. While a Sunni state, it is not Arab, and would
quickly generate extraordinary ethnic animosity. With Turks having
lost the previous Caliphate, there is no imaginable circumstances
in which the Sunni Muslim world would entertain the prospect of
them leading — or even seriously interfering with — the next one.
Turkish intervention might no doubt slow things down, but it could
not conceivably stabilize the situation in Mesopotamia. The effect
would be to rapidly expand the conflict into Turkey itself, and even
into Turkic Central Asia. There is no reason to think Turkish popular
opinion would support a strategically pointless, bloody war in the
south. (We will get to the critical Kurdish factor in a moment.)
(4) From a strictly military point of view, Iran possesses a mixture
of capability and commitment that makes it a uniquely formidable
opponent, but here the political calculus is also at its starkest. From
the moment it intervenes, the Sunni-Shia sectarian character of the
war is consolidated, and generalized, into a truly global, climactic
struggle between the two dominant branches of the Muslim faith.
682
From a local (Mesopotamian) uprising, ISIS’s war would be

transformed immediately into an apocalyptic religious event, setting
the world to the torch. Jihadi recruitment and funding would become
a worldwide deluge. For the Iranians, there is no imaginable end-
point to this, short of an absolute resolution at the level of
eschatology, or revolutionary world-transformation. ISIS has the
base-brain juice for that, does Teheran?
… but then we get to the Kurds. Of course ISIS should have
courted them, anything else is utter madness. While not Arabs,
they’re Sunni. They already hate the Baghdad regime, and long for
secession. They’re more than willing to be persuaded to fight Turks,
Persians, or (Alawite) Syrians, if the need arises. Played with even a
minimum of intelligence, the Kurds would have provided a wedge to
break Iraq apart definitively, distract the (Baghdad) regime, strip it of
oil revenues, keep the Turks and Iranians nervous, and even provide
various kinds of active support as they saw their long-held dreams
of an independent Kurdistan arising and beckoning like a tantalizing
jinn at the edge of the new Jihadi Caliphate. It’s the ultimate no-
brainer.
Instead, ISIS threw everything away fighting the Kurds. It’s an
organization of idiots, and a whole bunch of its fighters are now
pointlessly dead idiots. No Baghdad-by-early-2015 for you losers.
I’m embarrassed to have been drawn out of my dismissive contempt.
683
Reignition
December 3, 2014
The Islamic V
Vorte
ortexx (Note-4)
So the Islamic State has executed their captive Jordanian pilot, Lt
Moaz al-Kasasbehby, by burning him alive. The event was artfully
videotaped and maximally publicized. It was an act undertaken with
an extraordinary degree of intent.
The ‘organization’ beheaded Japanese journalist Kenji Goto a few

days previously. It had already beheaded another Japanese hostage,
Haruna Yukawa, a week before.
The deliberate combination of indiscriminate and exorbitant
violence is remarkable. It looks like a purposeful escalation beyond
terror, aimed calmly at the entire world.
If there’s anyone who hasn’t watched Apocalypse Now recently,
this might be the time to correct that. A reminder:
Kurtz
Kurtz: I’ve seen horrors … horrors that you’ve seen. But you have
684
no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a
right to do that … but you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible
for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know
what horror means. Horror … Horror has a face … and you must make
a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they
are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies!
I remember when I was with Special Forces … seems a thousand
centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We
left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and
this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t
see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every
inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I
remember … I … I … I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to
tear my teeth out; I didn’t know what I wanted to do! And I want to
remember it. I never want to forget it … I never want to forget. And
then I realized … like I was shot … like I was shot with a diamond … a
diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God …
the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine,
complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger
than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters,
these were men … trained cadres. These men who fought with their
hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love
… but they had the strength … the strength … to do that. If I had ten
divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly.
685
Reignition
You have to have men who are moral … and at the same time who
are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling …
without passion … without judgment … without judgment! Because
it’s judgment that defeats us.
ADDED: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning …”
February 4, 2015
Coming Soon
The trailer for the ISIS jihad-porn blockbuster Flames of War is quite
something.
The Rubin Report-embedded version. “They’re clearly trying to
bring us into a fight …”
ADDED: A little background from the International Business
Times:
The new video, titled “Flames of War,” was released late Tuesday
by the Al Hayat Media Center, which, according to the Washington-
based Middle East Media Research Institute, was established in May
as the media arm of the Islamic State. […] The 52-second-long video,
which, at first glance, seems more like a video-game trailer, is replete
with slow-motion effects and high-definition images. It shows
exploding tanks and Islamic State militants apparently preparing to
execute captives before the words “Flames of War” flash on the
686
screen, followed by the words, “Fighting has just begun.” And, before
the screen fades to black, the video ends with the words, “Coming
Soon.”
September 18, 2014
Progress (III)
(Via.)
January 21, 2015
687
Reignition
Moors La
Laww
Derbyshire cited some statistics from this exponential demographic
calamity article, which are truly remarkable:
Figures from the 2011 census show that the Muslim population
in the UK has substantially risen between 2001 and 2011 from 1.5
million to almost 3 million
million. This now takes the proportion of Muslims
from 2% of the population to 5%. In some towns, Muslims make up
almost 50% of the population, and in large cities like London and
Manchester they make up around 14% of the population. But why
has the number of Muslims risen so much and what are the
implications? […] There are several reasons why the number of
Muslims has doubled. […] … By the ne next
xt census Muslims ma mayy eevven
double again and mak makee up 10% of the population
population. These statistics
encourage us to think more carefully about the provisions made for
British Muslims and the ways in which they are an integral part of the
nation. [Emphasis in original.]
(It ‘encourages’ me to think of different things entirely.)
March 24, 2015
Things Fall Apart

Pax Americana is easy to laugh at, but so — no doubt — was Pax
688
Britannica and even Pax Romana. Imperial order isn’t a tidy or pretty
business. It was, however, something, and it’s very rapidly ceasing to
be.
Powerful nonlinear dynamics are triggered at certain critical
points of systemic transformation. The positive network effects that
induced powers great and small to buy into a credible world order
switch into reverse, with every defection making the value of
continued adherence less convincing to everyone else. In Europe and
East Asia the defection dominoes have yet to cascade, and the slow
work of fundamental subversion proceeds at a misleadingly languid
pace. In the Middle East, in sharp contrast, little remains of the
preferred American status quo beyond a ghastly husk. It’s hard to see
any way back.
America’s traditional regional lynch-pin allies — Israel, Egypt,
Saudi Arabia, and Turkey — are united (only) in alienation. The most
important structural reason for this, beyond the inexorable decline
of American global management capability, and coherent options for
intervention, rumbles beneath the surface of this WSJ article.
Everything the US is still trying to accomplish in the region is pushing
it into deeper complicity with the Teheran regime — whether on the
specific issue of the Iranian nuclear program, operations against ISIS,
or involvement in Yemen — and this makes it an objective antagonist
of the Sunni establishment. A deep Sunni reformation — in the most
blood-drenched sense of the word — is unfolding in the region, and
689
Reignition
the US is simply incapable of aligning with it. Yet as conflict escalates,

and polarization intensifies, even the most conservative Sunni
players are driven into solidarity with revolutionary Jihadi
radicalism. If an Iranian-orchestrated campaign, coordinated with
Iraq’s Maliki regime*, Assad, and the Kurds, succeeds in crushing the
ISIS Islamic State, it is a near certainty that the major Sunni powers
will commit to its resurrection, or displacement, rather than concede
to the triumph of a new Shia order in Mesopotamia. … Then Yemen
happened.
A new Middle Eastern war scarcely raises an eyebrow outside
the region today. The Islamic Vortex has passed the point of ignition,
and the old order is beyond salvage. Among Western observers,
impotence translates immediately into apathy, even when they
notice a deluge of blood de-pinkering the world. The Battle for Saudi
Arabia Begins, writes Fernandez — and there’s nothing at all that
anybody can do about it.
* Only very roughly speaking (see comments).
ADDED: I should have guessed there was already a Things Fall
Apart (I) here. Apologies for any subsequent confusion. (WordPress
is entirely relaxed about non-unique post titles, but I’m going to try
not to be.)
ADDED: Pax Americana is over.
ADDED: David Rothkopf combining some valuable analysis with
disastrously misconceived recommendations.
690
March 27, 2015
Join the Queue
Context.
Everyone in my twitter bubble seems impressed by the aesthetics,
but the smart money is on ClarkHat getting to the finish line first:
Every minute that Washington DC does not burn with
691
Reignition
nuclear fire is a minute during which I am only half alive.

— ClarkHat (@ClarkHat) April 13, 2015
April 13, 2015
Iconoclasm
There goes Nimrud.
“The final images on the video show the final, total destruction of
one of the world’s most important archaeological sites.”
April 16, 2015
Geo-Engineering
This looks like a plan:
692
October 14, 2015
ISIS on P
Paris
aris
The ‘Daesh’* statement on the attack (in full):
In the name of Allah, the all merciful, the very merciful Allah the
great said: and they thought in truth that their fortresses would
defend them against Allah. But Allah came to them from where they
693
Reignition
weren’t expecting it and launched a terror in their hearts. They were

demolishing their gomes with their own hands as well as from the
hands of believers. Take a lesson oh you who are wise. Sourat 59,
verse 2. […] In a blessed attack which Allah facilitated the causes, a
group of believers from the soldiers of the caliphate to whom Allah
has given strength and glory targeted the capital of abomination and
perversion, the one who lifts the banner of the cross in Europe, Paris.
[…] A group divorced from this life taking a step toward their enemy,
looking for death in Allah’s path, rescuing its religion, its Prophet and
its allies and wanting to humiliate its enemies. They were true to
Allah and we consider them as such. Allah acquired from their hands
and through the fear in the hearts of those encountered on their own
land. […] Eight brothers carrying explosive belts and assault rifles
took for target places that were carefully chosen in the heart of the
capital, in the French stadium during a game between two countries,
France and Germany, which the imbecile of France [President
Hollande] was present, the Bataclan, where hundreds were present
in a party of perversion as well as other targets in the 10th, 11th
anf 18th districts simultaneously. Paris is shaking in their shoes and
its streets have become very narrow, the death count of the attack
is a minimum of 200 and even more injured by the will of Allah. […]
Allah facilitated our brothers and gave them what they hoped for,
(martyrdom), they activated their explosive belts in the middle of the
infidels after they ran out of ammunition. May Allah welcome them
694
among the martyrs and allow us to meet them. And France and those
who follow its way must know that there are still principle targets
left for the Islamic State and that they [France] will continue to smell
death for having taken the lead in the crusade [in Syria] after having
insulted our Prophet, after they’ve flaunted their fight against Islam
in France, and beaten our Muslim brothers in Caliphate land with
their planes that were useless in the smelly streets of Paris. This
attack is only the beginning of the storm and a warning for those who
want to ponder and learn a lesson. […] Allah is great, the strength
belongs to Allah and His messenger and believers, but the hypocrites
do not know it. Sourat 63, verse 8.
(Source, with French original.)
* Conflicted here on whether to switch over to that name. Any
suggestions?
November 14, 2015
The Management of Sa
Savagery
vagery
Is this strategic guide to Jihad by Abu Bakr Naji the equivalent of
Mao Zedong’s On Guerrilla Warfare (link) for our time?
November 16, 2015
695
Reignition
Peak Jacobinism
It’s an over-used formula, but this time it really does seem
appropriate. If this analysis can be trusted — and it looks at least
superficially plausible — ISIS has broken the soul of evangelical
democratization. Once the Cathedral’s universalistic faith has been
defeated (“the freedom agenda in the Muslim world is dead”), how
long can it be before the gathering ebb tide tears apart its internal
ideological structure? “This is something only for us” requires an ‘us’
— and that acknowledgement marks the cresting of a crisis that has
been centuries — if not millennia — in the making.
Syria represents the culmination of this trend. The moderate
rebels of 2011 stood no chance of survival against the hard liners
who managed to rapidly mobilize foreign fighters and take over the
majority of the insurgency. The result is that, post-Paris, Western
capitals will be skeptical of regime change of any sort. It will be clear
that when intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign (albeit
repressive) states becomes a vehicle for democratic change, that
vehicle will probably be hijacked by radical Islamists, and will arrive
at a substantially worse political destination than intended.
The post-Paris war on terror will affirm the West’s commitment to
fighting radical Islamic terrorism, but, in the process, it will reject the
idiom of revolutionary, moralizing democratic change inherited from
President Bush. Syria was the end of the line for that approach.
696
The revolution has come right back around to Hobbes, and thus
to the systematically-cynical origin of the modern state system, the
author (Emile Simpson) argues. What a long strange trip it’s been.
(Via.)
ADDED: “… jihadis have come to inhabit a different moral
universe …” — Multiversalism it is, then.
November 23, 2015
The Islamic V
Vorte
ortexx (Note-5)
Michael Klare takes a look at the Islamic State logistics train (bullish
for US defense stocks):
In the years after invading Iraq and disbanding Saddam Hussein’s
military, the U.S. sunk about $25 billion into “standing up” a new Iraqi
army. By June 2014, however, that army, filled with at least 50,000
“ghost soldiers,” was only standing in the imaginations of its generals
and perhaps Washington. When relatively small numbers of Islamic
State (IS) militants swept into northern Iraq, it collapsed, abandoning
four cities — including Mosul, the country’s second largest — and
leaving behind enormous stores of U.S. weaponry, ranging from
tanks and Humvees to artillery and rifles. In essence, the U.S. was
now standing up its future enemy in a style to which it was
unaccustomed and, unlike the imploded Iraqi military, the forces of
697
Reignition
the Islamic State proved quite capable of using that weaponry

without a foreign trainer or adviser in sight.
In response, the Obama administration dispatched thousands of new
advisers and trainers and began shipping in piles of new weaponry
to re-equip the Iraqi army. It also filled Iraqi skies with U.S. planes
armed with their own munitions to destroy, among other things,
some of that captured U.S. weaponry. Then it set to work standing
up a smaller version of the Iraqi army. Now, skip nearly a year ahead
and on a somewhat lesser scale the whole process has just happened
again. Less than two weeks ago, Islamic State militants took Ramadi,
the capital of Anbar Province. Iraqi army units, including the elite
American-trained Golden Division, broke and fled, leaving behind —
you’ll undoubtedly be shocked to hear — yet another huge cache of
weaponry and equipment, including tanks, more than 100 Humvees
and other vehicles, artillery, and so on.
The Obama administration reacted in a thoroughly novel way:
it immediately began shipping in new stocks of weaponry, starting
with 1,000 antitank weapons, so that the reconstituted Iraqi military
could take out future “massive suicide vehicle bombs” (some of
which, assumedly, will be those captured vehicles from Ramadi).
Meanwhile, American planes began roaming the skies over that city,
trying to destroy some of the equipment IS militants had captured.
Notice anything repetitive in all this — other than another a bonanza
for U.S. weapons makers? Logically, it would prove less expensive for
698
the Obama administration to simply arm the Islamic State directly

before sending in the air strikes.
June 2, 2015
The Islamic V
Vorte
ortexx (Note-6)
Why (sane) non-Muslims hate Islam, made simple:
So, Islam was established as a polygynous system, meaning it
created a wife shortage among believers. But raiding non-believers
who do not submit to Muslim rule was sanctified and taking their
women for your sexual use was also sanctified. So, sexual frustration
generated by Sharia marriage rules was then explicitly directed
outwards towards the non-believers who have not submitted to
Muslim rule. The ghazis raiding across the frontier into “the lands
of unbelief” which were such a feature of the borders of Islam for
over a millennia represented Islam sanctifying (and so intensifying)
patterns of typical of polygyny; polygyny that it also sanctified.
All dithering aside, it’s an inter-culturally aggressive rape
machine, by essence.
ADDED: “The problem, ultimately, is this …”
ADDED:
I remember going the mosque and my friends talking about
699
Reignition
how they wanted to go fight #Jihad so they could have sex

with captured #slaves.
— Sohail Ahmed (@SohailPakBrit) December 4, 2015
December 3, 2015
The Islamic V
Vorte
ortexx (Note-7)
Robin Wright (in The New Yorker) expresses the frustrations of a
modern Jacobin about as straightforwardly as one could hope:
What seems to have been lost in the past five years is American
strategic support for the Arab Spring’s aspirations — and for the
innumerable other Bouazizis still struggling for rights and justice and
jobs. One of Obama’s boldest decisions, in 2011, was to abandon
longstanding U.S. support for Arab despots, personified in President
Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt ruthlessly for thirty years. For the
first time, Washington opted for the unknowns of potential
democracy over the guarantees of autocratic stability in the Arab
world.
A speaker for HRW is even clearer about the ideological lineage
at stake (and it isn’t anything coming out of the Middle East):
Each local crisis has been complicated by regional players who
have intervened to block a new Arab order. “It’s no longer about
700
what Egyptians want. Or what the Syrian people want,” Whitson, of

Human Rights Watch, explained. “It’s so much broader and wider
— and more complicated than during the French Revolution. Now
a revolutionary doesn’t just fight the bureaucrats in the capital but
bureaucrats thousands of miles away. There are so many horses in
the game who have the resources and power to dictate or sway the
outcome. It’s a much more difficult battle.” […] Speaking of the
idealistic protesters of five years ago, Whitson said, “Sometimes it
makes you wonder if they ever had a chance.” Yet she remains
sanguine about the future. “The fight is not over,” she told me.
“Because it can’t be over. The aspirations that inspired the spark over
a seven-dollar bribe are universal, and we know it. As long as
governments deny people basic justice and dignity, people will rise
up.”
Yes, “rise up” [*facepalm*]. If there’s any distinction at all between
(subjective) ‘caring’ and (objective) raw evil it’s getting ever harder to
discern. The bleeding-out of universalistic Cathedral evangelism in
the Middle East has been an event of far greater consequence than
anyone is yet able to acknowledge.
December 17, 2015
701
Reignition
The Islamic V
Vorte
ortexx (Note-8)
Yuletide comedy supplement:
The four core elements of Obama’s Syria policy remain intact
today: an insistence that Assad must go; that no anti-IS coalition with
Russia is possible; that Turkey is a steadfast ally in the war against
terrorism; and that there really are significant moderate opposition
forces for the US to support.
(The entire essay is a valuable American Proxy Civil-War primer.)
December 23, 2015
The Islamic V
Vorte
ortexx (Note-9)
Fernandez:
One man who understood the power of “Salafi jihadism” was
Saddam Hussein, who according to Kyle Orton, writing in the New
York Times, understood long before Obama that secular socialism
was no match for a full-bore jihadism which had endured the test of
centuries. “The Arab nationalist Baath Party, which seized power in
1968 in a coup in which Mr. Hussein played a key role, had a firmly
secular outlook. This held through the 1970s, even as religiosity rose
among the Iraqi people. But soon after Mr. Hussein invaded Iran in
1980, it began to change.”
702
To compensate for his shortcomings in governance, Saddam covered

himself with the Koran. He also tried what Obama later attempted,
an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, with disastrous results.
Rather than beating Islam, the Baath began to be absorbed by it.
“In 1986, however, the Pan-Arab Command, the Baath Party’s top
ideological institution, formally reoriented Iraq’s foreign policy
toward an alliance with Islamists. This was the first clear deviation
from secular Baathism.”
The causal pathways in this area are easily obscured by
ideological preferences.
ADDED: Throwing this in to store the link. (Some topic-bridging
necessary.)
December 26, 2015
The Islamic V
Vorte
ortexx (Note-10)
According to the geo-economic logic of the dying status quo, the
Islamic Vortex supported oil prices by injecting menace into the
supply chain. Peaks of turbulence were associated with oil shocks.
‘Middle East peace initiatives’ (or more drastic interventions) were
so deeply entwined with oil supply security imperatives as to be
scarcely distinguishable.
Not anymore:
703
Reignition
Many energy analysts became convinced that Doha would prove

the decisive moment when Riyadh … would agree to a formula
allowing Iran some [production] increase before a freeze. … But then
something happened. According to people familiar with the
sequence of events, Saudi Arabia’s Deputy Crown Prince and key
oil strategist, Mohammed bin Salman, called the Saudi delegation
in Doha at 3:00 a.m. on April 17th and instructed them to spurn a
deal that provided leeway of any sort for Iran. When the Iranians —
who chose not to attend the meeting — signaled that they had no
intention of freezing their output to satisfy their rivals, the Saudis
rejected the draft agreement it had helped negotiate and the
assembly ended in disarray. […] … Most analysts have since
suggested that the Saudi royals simply considered punishing Iran
more important than raising oil prices. No matter the cost to them,
in other words, they could not bring themselves to help Iran pursue
its geopolitical objectives, including giving yet more support to Shiite
forces in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon. Already feeling pressured
by Tehran and ever less confident of Washington’s support, they
were ready to use any means available to weaken the Iranians,
whatever the danger to themselves.
With ‘Peak oil demand‘ in prospect, and a brutal zero-sum
struggle beginning for shares in a market tending to secular
shrinkage, the deepening Sunni-Shia has become an engine of
systematic oil price suppression. According to plausible Saudi
704
calculations, the Iranian enemy will simply use oil revenues to pursue
their geopolitical objectives more competently than the Saudis can
themselves. A higher oil price, therefore, is comparatively
advantageous to the Shia bloc (at least in the eyes of the Saudis,
whose perceptions in this regard uniquely matter, due to their status
as sole swing-producer). Any rise in revenues is overwhelmed by the
quantity of additional military challenge it brings with it. This holds
true whatever the level of social stress a low price inflicts on the
Sunni side.
It’s quite a box the Saudis find themselves in. There’s no way out
of it that doesn’t require winning a religious war.
April 30, 2016
The Islamic V
Vorte
ortexx (Note-11)
Could the escalating Sunni-Shia War (intensified by the fracking
revolution) take out Saudi Arabia?
(Cold Western indifference would be nice.)
October 22, 2016
705
Reignition
The Islamic V
Vorte
ortexx (Note-12)
Everything is proceeding as foreseen.
“They say all Sunnis are Daesh, but it isn’t true,” said former truck
driver Jassem Nouri, 50. Nouri has spent the past two years living on
a building site in the northeast of Salahuddin province; his home, in
the Sunni village of Salman Beg, is just six miles away, but the Shiite
militias that ejected the Islamic State from the area over two years
ago have refused to allow any of the residents to return. Last year,
his two sons, former university students, were detained by masked
men in unmarked uniforms and accused of working with the Islamic
State. Nouri insists that they are innocent, but he has not been able
to secure their release. […] “The one thing that is breaking my heart
is that my sons are in jail and I can’t prove their innocence,” he said.
“If this government doesn’t change, there will never be security and
stability in Iraq, just an endless blind revenge.”
No one has the slightest (realistic) idea what equilibrium would
even look like. The Sunni-Shia war has no end short of utter
exhaustion. For everyone else, staying mostly out of it — and keeping
it out — has to be the basic principle of strategic wisdom.
ADDED: From The Economist — “Horrifyingly, although home to
only 5% of the world’s population, in 2014 the Arab world accounted
for 45% of the world’s terrorism, 68% of its battle-related deaths,
47% of its internally displaced and 58% of its refugees.”
706
November 28, 2016
Quote note (#260)

Dalrymple on visions of the Apocalypse:
Oceans of ink have been spilt on the attempt to estimate the true
extent of the threat of Islam to the West, and the attempts range
from the frankly paranoid to the most supinely complacent. For
myself, I veer constantly between the two, hardly pausing in
between. In the last analysis, the West has all the cards, intellectual
and military; but if it refuses ever to play them, they are of no
account.
If Islam destroys the West, it will only be in the role of a suicide
weapon, deployed by the West against itself. The basis of the
Apocalyptic case is that the West has been taught, very successfully,
that it does not deserve continued existence. (“Better dead than
rude” is John Derbyshire’s formulation.)
Islam is the Hell the West damns itself to, for its sins.
June 22, 2016
707
Reignition
Twitter cuts (#94)
What if I told you in 2001 that in 15 years the US would be

really angry about Russia bombing our allies, Al Qaeda.
— Michael B Dougherty? (@michaelbd) October 12, 2016
It’s a clear sign of how seriously Radical Islam is taken by the

foreign policy establishments of civilized states. Roughly, it’s treated
as a biological weapon, to be used against real adversaries (you
know, those who are not mere hill people). That’s not going to change
much anytime soon, however much one might want it to.
October 14, 2016
Twitter cuts (#123)
What's driving Right-wing populism? https://t.co/

Z31ppXaB0n pic.twitter.com/bIlhkkSotF
— Ed West (@edwest) March 16, 2017
This is not — of course — conclusive. It would be a stretch to

say that it isn’t suggestive. As far as practical politics are concerned,
current leftist priorities look strikingly self-contradicting.
Islamization or popular sovereignty — choose one (or less).
708
The essay at the attached link recommends re-education as a

remedy, in an age when the dominant organs of opinion formation
have collapsed into culture war and unprecedented illegitmacy.
Good luck with that.
ADDED: On point.
March 16, 2017
709
Reignition
SECTION D - IMMIGRA
IMMIGRATION
TION
Quote note (#132)

WRM on the politics of amnesty by executive order:
For many liberal Democrats (as well as for some of their
Republican opponents) two key beliefs about immigration shape
their political strategies. The first is that Latinos are the new blacks:
a permanent racial minority or subgroup in the American political
system that will always feel separate from the country’s white
population and, like African-Americans, will vote Democratic. On
this assumption, the Democratic approach to Hispanic Americans
should be clear: the more the merrier. That is a particularly popular
view on the more leftish side of the Democratic coalition, where
there’s a deep and instinctive fear and loathing of Jacksonian
America (those “bitterly clinging” to their guns, their Bibles, and their
individualistic economic and social beliefs). The great shining hope
of the American left is that a demographic transition through
immigration and birthrates will finally make all those tiresome white
people largely irrelevant in a new, post-American America that will
710
forget all that exceptionalism nonsense and ditch “Anglo-Saxon”

cultural and economic ideas ranging from evangelical religion to
libertarian social theory.
If conventional wisdom on the subject is this stark — and Mead is
a good weather-vane for that — then Obama might as well put on the
Kill White
Whiteyy T-shirt, because he’s clearly not fooling anybody. (It’s also
worth explicitly noting, for the anti-market trads out there, that your
besieged cultural norms and laissez-faire capitalism are on the same
radical leftist death list, whether you appreciate the company or not.)
November 24, 2014
Discrimination II
It would be hard to find a clearer illustration of the topic than this
article (written from the vehemently discrimination-negative left).
The stakes are so clear that detailed commentary is entirely otiose.
Some snippets:
The contrast was stark. One group of South Asians had become
objects of fear and derision and targets of immigration enforcement
and extra-legal violence. Another group of South Asians was being
heralded for their social, economic, and cultural contributions to the
United States. … the complexities that lay beneath the surface of
“South Asian” identity were flattened into a powerful binary; South
711
Reignition
Asian Americans were either model minorities or national threats.

… But this was not merely a post–9/11 phenomenon. In fact, the
division between the feared and the desired, the denigrated and the
celebrated, has been a defining feature of South Asian racialization in
the United States for over one hundred years. … for decades, federal
immigration laws and popular culture have worked together to make
these distinctions, to distinguish desirable from undesirable South
Asians. … Between 1904 and 1917 … xenophobia and Indophilia
were not simply contradictory attitudes that played out in two
separate social spheres — that is, South Asians were not simply
denigrated in political debates over immigration restriction while
they were simultaneously celebrated in popular culture. Instead,
each sphere generated its own set of distinctions between who was
desirable and who was not, and each set of distinctions reinforced
the other. … the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1885 Alien
Contract Labor Law, and the 1917 Immigration Act were never
straightforward acts of Asian exclusion, nor was the 1965 Hart-
Cellar Immigration Act — the law that is credited with ending the
exclusion era — an act that fully “opened the door” to Asian
immigration. All four of these Acts — in effect and in intent — helped
define who within Asian populations was welcome and who was not.
… the so-called exclusion laws introduced a logic that certain South
Asians were admissible — or desirable — because of their class,
education, and profession. This was ultimately the logic enshrined in
712
the “occupational preferences” provisions of the 1965 Immigration

Act; the legislation brought thousands of South Asian doctors,
engineers, and other professionals to the United States in the 1970s
and 1980s, while keeping working-class migration to a minimum. …
Orientalism is a double-edged set of ideas, standards, and
expectations. In the realms of both immigration law and popular
culture, the desired and the denigrated have always been
inextricably linked; they are defined in relation to one another, with
a line drawn between them.
As with most leftist tirades, the effect of this discussion is to
engender appreciation for those few fraying fibers of sound public
policy and cultural discernment that might otherwise be overlooked.
I’m willing to grant the possible advantages of further, more minute
discrimination. The fact that discrimination is occurring at all,
however, is an indication that — even in this advanced stage of
Cathedral dominion — sanity is not altogether dead.
Discriminate between these guys …
713
Reignition
… and these guys?
Hell, yeah.
April 10, 2015
714
Ethnomasochism
Arguments that indiscriminate immigration is socially beneficial are
too widespread to pick upon in detail — spend any time over at The
Economist or, for the full-throttle ‘altruistic’ version, Bryan Caplan’s
place, to be inundated in them. It’s hard to see how a lack of
selectivity could ever be advantageous from the perspective of the
demographic recipient, but the whole discussion evades a far more
toxic problem. If a case for the mass implantation of unscreened
foreign populations is couched in the language of self-interest —
however misguidedly — it can, at least potentially, be engaged rather
than merely diagnosed. (This blog has no problem with immigration
in general whatsoever.)
Far more disturbing to any surviving assumptions about sane
social policy decisions is the very different argument (exemplified
by the Cathedral-crazed second questioner in this clip (via)) that
immigration is a punishment to be embraced, in a form of religiously-
intoxicated, collective self-flagellation, to scourge the sin-blackened
Occident, unendingly, for its ineliminable historical crimes. This is
ethnomasochism in its purest instantiation, and argument is wholly
irrelevant against it. Such moral-religious convulsants do not want
‘good’ (productive, orderly, talented, aspirational) immigration. They
want the lash. No ‘racist’ profile of potential immigrant groups can be
vicious enough to elicit aversion, on the contrary — the more harm
715
Reignition
that is promised by the incomers, the more sobbing gratitude

accompanies the invitation. Immigration is meant to be torture, so
what use are brainy, well-behaved entrepreneurs? The ideal
immigrant in this vision of infinitized moral purgation is not a social
asset, but a wretched, dysfunctional parasite, or better still an
arrogant, contemptuous aggressor. ‘Model minorities’ are erased
from the picture entirely, because they do not exact the suffering
that is so ardently desired. (“You can wander through Chinatown
late at night without being robbed, beaten, or raped — what’s the
possible spiritual value in that?”) To repeat the essential, and
hideously consequential point: Immigration is supposed to punish us.
This is the terminal pathology of Western Civilization, in its
‘highest’ state of expression. There is not much that can be said to be
fortunate about it, except that it cannot be indefinitely prolonged.
July 14, 2015
Quote note (#214)

The intolerable clarity of Sailer at work:
… the concept of “Europeanism” upon which the EU was founded
— that Europeans should be more neighborly to their fellow
Europeans than to non-Europeans — is increasingly unmentionable
in polite society because it’s seen as racist. For example, during the
716
peak of adulation for Merkel before reality set in, she was widely
praised for personifying European values by de-Europeanizing
Europe.
How would one even begin to argue with anything said here?
There’s a lot in this short passage, but nothing that isn’t obviously
true, to everyone, which accounts — perhaps — for the fact that it is
nevertheless almost unthinkably controversial.
It would be a relief to see Merkel awarded the 2016 Nobel Peace
Prize for her contribution to the ruin of Europe. If not honest — or
anything close — it would at least attain meta-honesty, by defining
‘peace’ explicitly as the suppression of truth.
February 1, 2016
Quote note (#222)

The ironical road from feminism to Islam:
Some commentators like to point out that many of the most
passionate and bravest defenders of the West are women, citing
Italian writer Oriana Fallaci and others as examples. But women like
Ms. Fallaci, brave as they might be, are not representative of all
Western women. If you look closely, you will notice that, on average,
Western women are actually more supportive of Multiculturalism
and massive immigration than are Western men. […] … surprise, you
717
Reignition
didn’t enter a feminist Nirvana, but paved the way for an unfolding
Islamic hell.
Give feminist ideology a voice in security policy, and the gates are
thrown open. The evo-psych behind this is dark, but compelling.
It’s past time to move it from the ‘provocative speculations’ to the
‘hard cold facts’ folder.
February 22, 2016
Quote note (#184)

Thompson:
It is little surprise that people want to move from badly organised
countries to better organised ones. What is more surprising is that
the causes of bad national organisation are so often ascribed to
external factors rather than to the people who live in such countries.
The theory seems to be that some people, by an accident of birth,
had the good fortune to be plonked down in a place with laws,
institutions, roads, schools and hospitals, while others had the
misfortune to be born in places with dictators, gangs, muddy tracks
and slums. According to this world picture, if you move people from
the unfortunate to the fortunate geogr geographies
aphies, then the world’s
problems are solved.
One consequence of escaping this common error is the
718
downgrading of the territorial obsessions common on the right. Free

association is the real topic of concern. Pieces of real estate are
never more than rough proxies for that.
September 14, 2015
Tsunami
Either Europe is absorbed into Africa or at some point it learns,
pitilessly, to say ‘no’. Neither alternative is likely to be remotely
pretty.
The 21st century would probably be a good time to be
somewhere else.
… two years ago the United Nations Population Division released
a shocking update to their population projections, revising the
forecast for the continent of Africa upward to 4.2 billion in 2100
from 1.1 billion today. […] That is about a half dozen times greater
than the population of Europe. […] Africa is almost certainly not
going to add over three billion residents over the next 85 years.
Something else will happen instead …
For an example of how ugly it looks — in the eyes of polite opinion
— to get anywhere close to realism on the topic, try this. It’s
unthinkable! So, by far the most likely outcome is that Europe buries
its head in the sand until it is already deep into existential crisis,
719
Reignition
then lurches into some new and even more hysterical version of its
traditionally-favored fascist ‘solution’. Quite probably, it will get to
lose another World War before the complete extinction of its
civilization.
(If there’s a positive spin to put on this glacial catastrophe, don’t
hesitate to share it in the comments.)
April 30, 2015
All Ov
Over
er
Peter Hitchens has given up, on immigration (as well as everything
else):
Once [illegal immigrants are] in, our own treasured freedoms
work against us. Thanks to centuries of island freedom, when we
were able to decide who came in and who didn’t, it is far easier to
disappear in Britain than in almost any other country in the world.
We’ll abolish those freedoms in the end, alas, but it won’t do any
good. […] And now the expensive navies of the EU are ferrying
thousands more across the Mediterranean each week. The people-
smugglers are saving a fortune on fuel, for they know their victims
will be picked up before they are halfway across, in what are
misleadingly described as ‘rescues’. […] The only thing that will stop
the flow is when the EU countries, including ours, become so like the
720
places these people are fleeing from that there is no point in coming
any more.
June 15, 2015
Policy Migr
Migration
ation
Hints of queasiness from open borders advocate Nathan Smith:
A couple of years ago, I wrote a post called “The American Polity
Can Endure and Flourish Under Open Borders.” I would not write
that post today. The American polity might endure and flourish
under open borders, but I wouldn’t claim that confidently. What
changed my mind? A greater familiarity with the theoretical models
that are the basis for “double world GDP” as a claim about the global
economic impact of open borders, especially my own. It turns out
that these estimates depend on billions of people migrating
internationally under open borders. … I do not think the US polity
is robust enough to absorb 1 billion immigrants (even, say, over the
course of fifty years) and retain its basic political character and
structure.
The large, link-dense text that follows is sure to stir up some
excitement among border-stripping libertarians. As a political
science fiction scenario, it has much to recommend it (including some
fragmentation features that the Outer Right might find suprisingly
721
Reignition
appealing).
August 21, 2015
Exponential
Do try to keep up:
German authorities expect up to 1.5 million asylum seekers to
arrive in Germany this year, the Bild daily said in a report to be
published on Monday, up from a previous estimate of 800,000 to 1
million.
Whatever it is that’s happening here should be over fairly quickly.
Also worth noting: “The authorities’ report also cited concerns
that those who are granted asylum will bring their families over to
Germany too, Bild said. […] Given family structures in the Middle
East, this would mean each individual from that region who is
granted asylum bringing an average of four to eight family members
over to Germany in due course, Bild quoted the report as saying.” (So
we can crank the binary exponent up by another 2-3 notches straight
away.)
October 5, 2015
722
Div
Diverse
erse Opinions
Americans of Indian ancestry seem to be having a disproportionate
impact on the horizons of ‘sensitive’ debates at the moment. Techno-
commercial secession and eugenic immigration in a single week.
Diversity clearly has an up-side.
November 7, 2013
Twitter cuts (#39)
As an Armenian friend asked, "Where do I have to go to get

away from these people?" https://t.co/CiC50pYSKQ
— Mark Krikorian (@MarkSKrikorian) December 8, 2015
Realistically, economic opportunity on a new frontier is likely to

predominate as the driver for geopolitical disintegration, but
“Where do I have to go to get away from these people?” is worth
carving on the gate of an Exit-based polity. It’s Elysium, and probably
the right-most impulse of the present world order. The Cathedral
basically coincides with the answer: Nowhere. It’s not an allowable
incentive. Still, it’s already a huge incentive (in fact), and every week
it gets more huge.
Running the entire immigration crisis through this question is
723
Reignition
(darkly) enlightening. Anything that might count as a positive answer

is probably our stuff.
ADDED: Not very closely related, but pinned on for fun
FYI: If you're a libertarian and not a white nationalist fascist

you need to proactively dissociate with neoreaction.
— Cathy Reisenwitz (@CathyReisenwitz) December 7,
2015
December 8, 2015
Wh
Whyy Ir
Iran?
an?
The blog obviously isn’t coming from where Scott Aaronson is, and
the title of this post isn’t even centrally his question, so I’m asking it.
If you were trying to discredit a demographic policy that
discriminated against Islamization, the thing rolled out by the US
administration looks like a good way to do it. Shouldn’t selecting
against Salafism be the policy core? Such a stance could be easily
based upon solid American precedent. This looks like something else
entirely. (It’s a dog’s breakfast, which is to say hastily hashed-up
populism food.)
ADDED: The flip-side to Scott Aaronson’s concerns (from his own
724
comment thread).
February 5, 2017
725
Reignition
SECTION E - EXIT
726
CHAPTER ONE - GETTING OUT
Lure of the V
Void
oid (P
(Part
art 1)
The F
Frontier
rontier of Disillusionment
…the idea that we are no longer able to accomplish feats we

once could do (like travel to the Moon) clashes with the
pre
prevailing
vailing narr
narrativ
ativee that we march forever forward. Not only
can’t we get to the Moon at present, but the U.S. no longer
has a space shuttle program — originally envisioned to make
space travel as routine as air travel. And for that matter, I
no longer have the option to purchase a ticket to fly trans-
Atlantic at supersonic speeds on the Concorde. Narratives
can break.
— Tom Murphy(bolding in original)
Shanghai’s 2010 World Expo included an entire pavilion dedicated

to urban futures. Among the exhibits was a looping video on a large
screen, depicting varieties of futuristic city-types as speculative
animations, light-heartedly, and with obvious orientation to
727
Reignition
youngsters. Since children are the denizens of the future, it makes

sense to treat them as the target audience for a vision of tomorrow’s
world, but the effect was also disconcerting, as if parenthesizing
what was shown in a form of deniable, non-abrasive irony. This is
what the future used to look like. Does it still? On this point, a subtle
reserve concealed itself as a concession to childish credibility, or
even inconsequential fantasy.
One of the four future cities on display had been constructed off-
planet, in earth-orbit. It was populated by happy humans (or, at least,
humanoids). No date was predicted. Untethered from firm futuristic
commitment, it intersected adult perception as a fragment of cross-
cultural memory.
Imagine a city in space, as a child might. Given the strategic
obscurity of this statement, when encountered at a carefully-crafted
international event, in a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, global, Chinese
city, in 2010, it is tempting to approach it through analogy. Half a
century ago, when Western children were encouraged to imagine
such things, during the twilight decades of modernity (1.0), was a
sincere promise being made to them that they would inherit the solar
system? If so, is such a promise now being humorously referenced, or
is it being re-directed, and re-made?
The 2010 Expo had a Space Pavilion, too, which only deepened
the perplexity. Given the opportunity to re-activate Expo traditions
of techno-industrial grandiosity, it was a spectacular miss-launch,
728
containing almost nothing in the way of monumental hardware. The

content fell into two broad categories: video-based immersive
special effects (highly-appreciated by kids), and vanilla-domestic
applications of space technology, on the approximate model of
NASA’s lamentable “we’re the guys who brought you the non-stick
frying-pan” PR campaign. Anybody hoping for soul-crushing
cyclopean military-analog launch vehicles and the acrid stink of
rocket fuel had clearly wandered into the wrong century.
Contemporary international etiquette prevailed, and according to
that, the business of blazing into orbit is far too crude – even
primitive — to be vigorously publicized.
So even in China, at least in its 2010 window to the world, off-
planet aspirations were stirred together indissolubly with childhood
fantasy. The unmistakable insinuation, harmonized with the
commanding heights of world opinion, was that such hard SF dreams
had been outgrown. Rather than staring through a window into the
spark-torched clangorous workshop of China’s emerging national
space program, Western visitors found their gazes bounced from
mirrored glass, into a ‘postmodern’ vacuum of collapsed
expectations, amongst the eroded ruins of Apollo. Four decades of
Occidental space failure smiled politely back. You lost it, didn’t you?
(A quick trip across the Huangpu to the drearily mundane USA
Pavilion sufficed for unambiguous confirmation.)
The dismissal of a human off-planet future as a childish dream has
729
Reignition
plenty to build upon. The world’s publishers and book shops have
long accommodated their classification systems to the sleazy
ambiguity of the ‘science fiction / fantasy genre’, in which futurism
smears into oneirism, and the vestiges of hard SF programs
(telecommunication satellites, moon bases, space elevators…) are
scattered amongst fantastic elves-in-space mythologies (from Star
Wars to Avatar). Competitive prophecies decay into polemical
allegories, making statements about anything and everything except
the shape of the future.
Of all the cultural ripples from the truncation of the Apollo-era
space trajectory, none is more telling than the rising popularity of
‘Moon Hoax’ conspiracy theorizing. Not satisfied with the
prospective evacuation of the heavens, the moon hoaxers began
systematically editing space-travelers out of the past, beginning with
the lunar landings. Whilst clearly maddening to space technologists,
American patriots, NASA supporters, and sensible types in general,
this form of ‘denialism’ is not only historically comprehensible, but
even inevitable. If nobody seriously contests the fact that Columbus
reached the New World, it is at least in part because what was then
started kept happening. Something began, and continued. Nothing
comparable can be said about the process of lunar colonization, and
that, in itself, is a provocative oddity. When forecasts are
remembered, abandoned outcomes can be expected to mess up
memories.
730
Old-school space enthusiast Sylvia Engdahl finds the whole

situation pathological, and subjects it to a kind of jerry-built
psychoanalysis. With defiant optimism, she attributes “the present
hiatus in space travel” to xenophobic trauma:
Much is said about the positive effect of the photos of Earth

obtained by Apollo 8, which for the first time showed our
planet as a globe, a fragile refuge amid barren surroundings,
and thereby launched the environmental movement. The
concomitant negative impact — the spread of gut-level
knowledge that space is an actual place containing little
that’s familiar to us and perhaps much that we’d rather not
meet — is not spoken of. But it may be no less significant.
Could this be one of the reasons why interest in space died
so soon after the first Moon landing, resulting in the
cancellation of the last few planned Apollo missions?
She elaborates:
Most people do not want to contemplate the significance of

an open universe. They do not let uneasiness about it into
their minds, but underneath, as the collective unconscious of
humankind absorbs the knowledge, they grasp it, and react
with dismay disguised as apathy. It does not occur to them
that they might be disturbed by the prospect of space
731
Reignition
exploration. Rather, they believe that although in theory they

want humankind to reach new worlds, it’s of low priority
compared to the problems of here and now. … [T]he
widespread conviction that the public no longer cares about
space may also be a rationalization.
Engdahl hints at a modern variant of the Orpheus myth, and captures

something of arresting significance. We were told not to look back
from orbit, but of course, we did, and what we saw pulled us back
down. The damnation of our extraterrestrial out-leap gave birth to
a lucid environmentalist vision — the earth seen from space. That is
why Tom Murphy turns to the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order
of Druids in America, John Michael Greer, to transmute elegiac
disillusionment into acceptance:
The orbiters are silent now, waiting for the last awkward
journey that will take them to the museums that will
warehouse the grandest of our civilization’s failed dreams.
There will be no countdown, no pillar of flame to punch them
through the atmosphere and send them whipping around the
planet at orbital speeds. All of that is over. …In the final
analysis, space travel was simply the furthest and most
characteristic offshoot of industrial civilization, and
depended — as all of industrial civilization depends — on vast
732
quantities of cheap, highly concentrated, readily accessible

energy. That basic condition is coming to an end around us
right now.
Disillusionment is simply awakening from childish things, the druids

tell us. This is a point Murphy is keen to endorse: “space fantasies can
prevent us from tackling mundane problems.” Intriguingly, his initial
step towards acceptance involves a rectification of false memory,
through a (sane) analog of ‘Moon Hoax’ denial. Surveying his
students on their understanding of recent space history (“since 1980
or so”), he discovered that no less than 52% thought humans had
departed the earth as far as the moon in that time (385,000 km
distant). Only 11% correctly understood that no manned expedition
had escaped Low Earth Orbit (LEO) since the end of the Apollo
program (600 km out). Recent human space activity, at least in the
way it was imagined, had not taken place. It was predominantly a
collective hallucination.
Murphy’s highly-developed style of numerate druidism
represents the null hypothesis in the space settlement debate:
perhaps we’re not out there because there’s no convincing reason
to expect anything else. Extraterrestrial space isn’t a frontier, even a
tough one, but rather an implacably hostile desolation that promises
nothing except grief and waste. There’s some scientific data to be
gleaned, and also (although Murphy doesn’t emphasize this)
733
Reignition
opportunities for political theatrics. Other than that, however,

there’s nothing beyond LEO worth reaching for.
The neo-druidic starting point is unapologetically down to earth.
It begins with energy physics, and the remorseless fact that doing
just about anything heats things up. According to Murphy’s
calculations, a modest 2.3% global economic growth rate suffices to
bring the planetary surface to the boiling point of water within four
centuries, even in the complete absence of (positive) greenhouse
effects. Economic growth is essentially exponential, and that
guarantees that we’re cooked, due to elementary thermodynamic
principles, efficiency limits, and the geophysics of heat dissipation.
Within this big picture, conventional ‘energy crisis’ concerns are no
more than complicating details, although Murphy engages them
thoroughly. (He provides a neat summary of his argument, with
internal links, here.)
From the neo-druidic perspective, the space ‘frontier’ is a horizon
of sheer escapism, attracting those who stubbornly deny the
necessity of limitation (pestilential growth-addicts):
…relying on space to provide an infinite resource base into

which we grow/expand forever is misguided. Not only is it
much harder than many people appreciate, but it represents
a distraction to the message that growth cannot continue on
Earth and we should get busy planning a transition to a non-
734
growth-based, truly sustainable existence.
Since plenty of irrepressible growth-mongers seriously want to get

out there, Murphy trowels on the discouragement in thick, viscous
layers. Most of the deterrent factors are relatively familiar, but none
of them are frivolous, or easily dismissed. The principal problem is
the most qualitative (and druidic): human adaptation to terrestrial
conditions. This is strikingly illuminated by a consideration of
terrestrial ‘frontier’ environments that remain almost entirely
unexploited, despite environmental features that are
overwhelmingly more benign than anything to be found off-planet.
When compared to any conceivable space station, asteroid mining
camp, lunar base, or Mars colony, even the most ‘difficult’ places on
earth — the seabed, for instance, or the Antarctic — are
characterized by extreme hospitability, with ready access to
breathable air, nutrients, fuels, and other essential resources, a
moderate temperature range, protection from cosmic radiation, and
proximity to existing human settlements. This is to be contrasted
with typical extraterrestrial conditions of hard vacuum, utter
exposure, complete absence of bio-compatible chemistry, and mind-
jarring distances.
Murphy touched upon these distances in his survey of student
space ignorance. If earth is represented by a “standard”
30-centimeter globe, LEO is 1.5 centimeters from the surface, and
735
Reignition
the moon a full 9 meters further out. For intuitive purchase upon
more expansive space visions, however, a re-calibration is required.
It makes sense to model the earth as a small apple (8.5 cm in
diameter), because then an astronomical unit (AU, the mean earth-
sun distance of roughly 150 million kilometers, 93 million miles, or
500 light seconds) shrinks to a kilometer, with the sun represented
by a sphere a little over 10 meters in diameter. The moon now lies
less than 2.7 meters out from our toy earth, but Mars is never less
than 400 meters away, the nearest asteroids a kilometer away. The
distance to the edge of the planetary solar system (Neptune) is at
least 29 kilometers, and within this spatial volume (a sphere of
roughly 113,400 AU³), less than one part in 27 billion is anything
other than desolate vacuum, with almost all the rest being solar
furnace. On the toy scale, the outer edge of the solar system, and the
Oort cloud, lies 50,000 kilometers from the earth. The distance from
our shriveled apple to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 277,600
toy kilometers (or 41.5 trillion real ones).
If space colonization is being construed as an escape from
terrestrial resource constraints, then a pattern of activity needs to
be knitted across these distances, producing — at a minimum — an
energy surplus. In a non-frictional kinetic system, governed almost
purely by (macroscopic) conservation of momentum, the basic
currency of space activity is ‘delta-v’, or the transformation of
velocity. Delta-v is broadly proportional to energy expenditure on
736
“small burns”, when fuel consumption makes a negligible difference

to total propelled mass, but when complete flights or “large burns”
are calculated, the math becomes nonlinear, since the reduction of
fuel payload becomes a critical factor in the equation (subtracting
inertial resistance as it adds motive force). In practical terms, the
prospective off-planet (‘space-faring’) energy economy consists of
the consumption of propellant to move propellant about, with non-
fuel vehicle mass contributing little more than a rounding error in the
calculations.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, it is possible to get the rocket

moving faster than the exhaust velocity once the fuel mass
exceeds 63% of the total initial mass. In order to get delta-v
values in the 20 km/s range when the exhaust velocity is less
than 5 km/s requires almost nothing but fuel. …[T]he large
delta-v’s required to get around the solar system require a lot
of fuel…
This double-registry of fuel within the nonlinear equations of “rocket

math” – as payload and propellant – is the key to Murphy’s deep
skepticism about the viability of off-planet energy economics. The
fuel resources strewn within the inner solar system – even assuming
their absolute abundance – cannot be moved around usefully for
less energy than they provide. Jupiter offers the most tantalizing
737
Reignition
example. This methane-rich gas giant might be superficially

apprehended as an immense cosmic fuel depot, but even the most
generous calculations of delta-v requirements for a Jupiter ‘tanker-
run’ imply energy expenditures at least an order of magnitude higher
than energy obtained – from the ‘scooping’ operation alone. The
inner solar-system is abundant in “stranded resources” that cannot
conceivably be extracted at a cost lower than their value. That, at
least, is the coherent neo-druidic perspective.
…and yet, in the yawning void, where the space settlements were
meant to have been, the stirrings have not ceased. There even seems
to be, unmistakably, a quickening of pace. Chinese ‘Taikonauts’,
private (American) ‘NewSpace’ businesses, and ever more advanced
robots are venturing out beyond the wreckage of dead dreams. Are
they heading anywhere that works, or that even makes sense?
[Next…]
August 15, 2012
Lure of the V
Void
oid (P
(Part
art 2)
The right stuff in the rough
… it’s important to understand what Apollo was, and wasn’t.

It was a victory in the Cold War over the Soviets, but because
738
we were at war, we waged it with a state socialist enterprise.

What it was not was the first step of opening up the frontier
to humanity, and it was in fact a false start that has created
a template for NASA and a groove in which we’ve been stuck
for over four decades now, with many billions spent and little
useful progress.
— Rand Simberg
The opening of the American west in the first decades of the

19th century and the opening of the space frontier in these
first decades of the 21st century are very similar.
— Mike Snead
Fascism makes our heads spin, which is unfortunate, because an

inability to gaze unwaveringly into the dominant ‘third way’ model of
political economy (corporate nationalism) makes the history of the
last century unintelligible. For amateur space historians, dropping in
briefly on the Moon Nazis is simply unavoidable.
SS Sturmbannführer Wernher von Braun, Deputy Associate
Administrator for Planning at NASA Headquarters, Washington DC
(1970-2), helps with the introduction. Technical director of the Nazi
rocket program at Peenemünde, which culminated in the creation
of the A-4 (V-2) ballistic missile, von Braun was brought to America
in 1945 as the top prize of Operation Paperclip. His contribution to
739
Reignition
US rocket development, through Redstone to Apollo (and the moon),

was central and indispensable. NASA Socialism was born on the Dark
Side of the Moon. (This probably isn’t the right time to wander too
deeply into Pynchon territory, but, roughly speaking, that’s where
we are.)
If fascism sounds unduly harsh, more comfortable terminology
lies within easy reach. ‘Technocracy’ will do fine. The name is less
important than the essentials, which were already clearly
formulated in the work of a previous German immigrant to the
United States, Friedrich List, who devoted an influential book to
outlining The National System of Political Economy (1841).
According to List, the ‘cosmopolitanism’ of mainstream (Smithean)
political economy was insufficiently attentive to the collective
national interest. Industrial development was too important to be
surrendered to the interplay of private economic agents, and should
instead be considered a strategic imperative, within the context of
international competition. Only by leveraging the power of the state
to regulate trade, foster modern industries, and drive the
development of critical infrastructure, could a country hope to
advance its interests in the international arena. Development was
war by other means, and sometimes the same ones.
When eagerly embraced by Henry Clay, who connected List’s
ideas with the founding tradition from Alexander Hamilton, these
ideas became the basis of the American System. Economic
740
nationalism was to be pursued along the threefold path of managed

trade (tariffs), state-controlled finance (central banking), and state-
directed infrastructure development (especially transportation
systems). Such policies were already ‘progressive’ or fascist
technocratic in that they subordinated private-cosmopolitan
economic interests to national purposes, but this took place flexibly,
without the more recent encrustations of anti-business class
warfare, large-scale entitlement spending, or Cathedralist cultural
policing. Capitalism was to be steered, and even promoted, rather
than milked, deliberately ruined, or replaced. Due to its patriotic
direction, elitism, and affinity with militarization, this technocratic
progressivism could easily be understood as a phenomenon of ‘the
right’, or at least (in Walter Russell Mead’s words) the “Bipartisan
Establishment.”
Apollo perfectly exemplified American technocratic
progressivism in the teutonized, neo-Hamiltonian tradition. A small
step for a man, and a substantial leap for mankind, it was a colossal
high-jump for the US Leviathan, marking an unambiguous triumph
in the structured competition with its principal geo-strategic and
ideological rival. The Apollo program wasn’t exactly part of the
ballistic missile arms race with the Soviet Union, but it was close
enough to contribute to its symbolic, mass-psychological, and
deterrent purpose. Landing a man on the moon was a type of overkill,
relative to landing a nuke on Moscow, and it expressed a super-
741
Reignition
abundant payload-delivery capability that had won a war of

messages.
In an article originally published in The American Spectator
(November 10, 2010), Iain Murray and Rand Simberg describe the
moon race as Big Government’s Final Frontier, remarking that:
There’s something about space policy that makes

conservatives forget their principles. Just one mention of
NASA, and conservatives are quite happy to check their
small-government instincts at the door and vote in favor of
massive government programs and harsh regulations that
stifle private enterprise.
They conclude:
It is time for conservatives to recognize that Apollo is over.

We must recognize that Apollo was a centrally planned
monopolistic government program for a few government
employees, in the service of Cold War propaganda and was
therefore itself an affront to American values. If we want to
seriously explore, and potentially exploit space, we need to
harness private enterprise, and push the technologies really
needed to do so.
Whilst it would be pointlessly upsetting to translate this into a call
742
for the denazification of outer space, it would be equally misleading

to read it as nothing of the kind. Progressive technocracy, in a range
of national flavors, is the only effective space politics the world has
ever seen, and it is still far more likely — in the near-term — to be
modernized than radically supplanted. Space development poses
such an immense collective challenge that it sucks even liberty-
oriented conservatives such as Simberg towards accommodation
with the activist, catalytic, neo-Hamiltonian state. At least initially,
there’s simply no other place where the clanking machinery of
Leviathan is more at home.
Popular culture has picked up on this well. Among the many
reasons for the ecstatic reception to Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) was
appreciation for its ‘realistic’ tonal portrait of practical space activity.
Science and commerce played their parts, but the leading edge was
dominated by quasi-military heavy metal, funded by massive
budgets based on gravely obscure strategic objectives, directed and
crewed by hard, obedient, buzz-cut types who did whatever it took
to get things done. Weapons research trumped all other
considerations. Breaking out into the deep frontier required a rigid,
armored-bulkhead seriousness that civilians would never quite
understand.
When suddenly stripped of its Cold War context, the proxy
warfaring of the rocket-state lost coherent motivation, and
immediately veered off course into increasingly ludicrous pseudo-
743
Reignition
objectives. By the closing years of the 20th century, all pretense of a

big push outwards had been dissipated amongst commoditized LEO
satellite maintenance, unconvincing zero-gravity science projects,
ritualistic space-station diplomacy, multicultural astronaut PR, and
even cynical make-work schemes for dangerously competent ex-
Soviet technicians. Clever science continued, based on robot probes
and space telescopes, but none of that even hinted at an impetus
towards space settlement, or even manned spacecraft, and typically
advised explicitly against it. Despite all the very real ‘right stuff’
heroism, putting people in space was a circus act, and perhaps it
always had been.
Whatever else outer space may be, it’s a place where the right
goes schizoid, and the more that it’s thought about, the more jagged
the split. The seemingly straightforward, dynamic-traditional, and
extremely stimulating ‘image’ of the frontier illuminates the point.
The frontier is a space of attenuated formal authority, where
entrepreneurial, ‘bottom-up’ processes of social formation and
economic endeavor are cultivated amongst archetypal ‘rugged
individualists’, its affinity with libertarian impulses so tight that it
establishes the (‘homesteading’) model of natural property rights,
and yet, equally undeniably, it is a zone of savage, informal warfare,
broken open as a policy decision, pacified through the unremitting
application of force, and developed as a strategic imperative, in the
interest of territorial-political integration. By fleeing the state, in the
744
direction of the frontier, the settler or colonist extends the reach of

the state towards the frontier, drawing it outwards, and enhancing
its ferocity, or roughening it. The path of anti-governmental flight
confuses itself with a corresponding expansion, hardening, and re-
feralization of the state, as the cavalry learn from the Indians, in a
place without rules. Then the railroad comes. The Moon Is a Harsh
Mistress meets Starship Troopers.
“A strategy for achieving economic benefit from space must
involve both government and industry, as did the development of the
American West,” argues Martin Elvis, and no one seriously disagrees.
Whenever realism is prioritized on the extraterrestrial horizon,
some variant of rough-and-dirty technocratic progressivism always
waits on the launch-pad, ready to piggy-back business off-planet on
patriotic, Leviathan-funded, first-stage boosters. Over-hasty
denazification is strictly for earth-bound softies The neo-
Hamiltonian jump-leads work too well to drop. As usual, Simberg
expresses this best:
The United States should become a spacefaring nation, and

the leader of a spacefaring civilization.
That means that access to space should be almost as
routine (if not quite as affordable) as access to the oceans,
and with similar laws and regulations. It means thousands,
or millions, of people in space — and not just handpicked
745
Reignition
government employees, but private citizens spending their

own money for their own purposes. It means that we should
have the capability to detect an asteroid or comet heading for
Earth and to deflect it in a timely manner. Similarly it means
we should be able to mine asteroids or comets for their
resources, for use in space or on Earth, potentially opening up
new wealth for the planet. It means that we should explore
the solar system the way we did the West: not by sending
off small teams of government explorers — Lewis and Clark
were the extreme exception, not the rule — but by having lots
of people wandering around and peering over the next rill in
search of adventure or profit.
We should have massively parallel exploration — and not
just exploration, but development, as it has worked on every
previous frontier.
Which brings us to ‘NewSpace’…

[Next]
September 6, 2012
Lure of the V
Void
oid (P
(Part
art 3a)
There are two related questions posed by human exploration.
746
First, is there anything economically useful to do out there,

that pays your way? And second, can you live off the land, and
use local resources to survive, or will we always be tied to
support from earth? If the answer to both is yes, then you get
space colonies, self-sustainable life off-planet. If the answer
to both is no, then space is like Mt. Everest. Tourists might go
to Mt. Everest, sherpas might make a living off of it, but no
one really lives there.
If the answer is that you can live off the land, but it’s not
economically useful, it’s like Antarctica. It was 40 years
between the last time we were there, when Shackleton
reached Antarctica, and when the U.S. Navy went back in
1912. There’s a similar lapse between going to the Moon the
first time and, hopefully, when we’ll return. In that case, you
can form an outpost and live there, but you’re sustained by
constant funding, since engineering doesn’t pay for itself. If
the answer is that there are economically useful things to
do, such as mining Helium-3 on the Moon, but we’re always
reliant on Earth for basic necessities, then space becomes a
North Sea oil platform. You can make money there, but it will
always be a hostile environment.
These are four very radically different human futures. And
they’re all part of a larger question: Is there a human future
beyond Earth? It’s a question ranks up there with whether
747
Reignition
there’s intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. We can

search for life with probes and telescopes, but to determine
the living range of humanity, we’re going to have to send
humans into space.
— Scott Pace
What should the payload be? It does not matter. That is the
point. This is not about getting a useful payload into space:
That is almost irrelevant. It is about guaranteeing a market
for companies offering launch services to get things going.
I mean this totally. If we could think of nothing better to
launch, concrete blocks would be fine. My philosophy is:
Launching an ything is good. — Paul Almond
anything
The material base for a space-faring future is not only stranded in

space, but also stranded in time. Not only are the gravitationally-
unlocked resources from which it would assemble itself strewn
across intimidating immensities of vacant distance, but the threshold
where it all begins to come together – in an autocatalytic
extraterrestrial economy – is separated from the world of present,
practical incentives by dread gulfs of incalculable loss. In a variant of
the old joke, if getting off-planet is the goal, a planet is the absolutely
worst place to set out from. “I can tell you how to get there,” the local
helpfully remarked. “But you shouldn’t start from here.”
748
Being out there could quickly start to make sense, as long as we

were already there. Experimenting with this perspective-switch
makes the animating impulse clearer. Most tellingly, it exposes how
deeply planets suck, so that merely not being on one is worth almost
anything. That’s the end game, the final strategy, ultimately
arranging everything, with anti-gravity as the key.
Once gravity is perceived as the natural archetype of
imprisonment, keeping you somewhere, whether you want to be
there or not, the terrestrial-economic motivations for off-planet
expansion are revealed in their fundamental spuriousness. The
reason to be in space is to be in space, freed from planetary
suckitude, and any benefits to Earth-dwellers that accrue on the way
are mere stepping stones. Off-planet resources diverted to the
surface of the Earth are, in the ultimate spacer scheme, wasted, or at
least strategically sacrificed (since such wastage is almost certainly
required in the interim). In the final analysis, the value of anything
whatsoever is degraded in direct proportion to the gravitational
influences brought to bear upon it, and descent from the heavens is a
fall.
A wider cosmo-developmental view sharpens resolution
(although this requires that Smart’s invaluable insights are strictly
set aside, and black holes avoided with maximum prejudice). Smear
into fast-forward until the process of extraterrestrial escape has
been substantially accomplished, then freeze the screens. Fleeing
749
Reignition
gravity can now be seen as no more than the first step in a more
thorough, antagonistic contestation with gravity and its works.
Asteroids and comets are being pulverized, quarried, or bored into
sponges, leaving moons, planets, and the sun itself as the local
problems of interest. Such bodies are ‘problems’ because they
deform space with gravity wells, which trap resources, but their
status as development obstacles can be abstracted further. These
worlds, at least partially isolated from the emerging deep-space
commercium by their own mass, have been shaped by gravity into
approximate spheres, which is to say – from the developmental
perspective – into the very worst shapes that are mathematically
possible, since they minimize the ratio of (reactive) surface to
volume, and thus restrict resource accessibility to the greatest
conceivable extent. Way out there, in deep space and the deep
future, the gathering developmental impulse is to go full Vogon, and
demolish them completely.
When seen from outside, planets are burial sites, where precious
minerals are interred. By digging through the earth’s mantle, for
instance, all the way down to its interior end, 3,000km beneath the
surface, one reaches a high-pressure iron-nickel deposit over
6,500km in diameter – a planet-vaulted metal globe roughly
160,000,000,000 cubic kilometers in size, doped by enough gold and
platinum to coat the entire surface of the earth to a depth of half
a meter. To a moderately advanced off-world civilization, pondering
750
the practicalities of its first planet-scale demolition, leaving this

buried resource trove in place has a robotic-industrial opportunity
cost that can be conservatively estimated in the region of 1.6 x
10^23 human-level intelligences, a mineral stockpile sufficient to
manufacture a trillion sentient self-replicating probes for every star
in the galaxy. (Even ardent conservationists have to recognize how
tasty this morsel will look.)
Lift-off, then, is merely a precursor to the first serious plateau
of anti-gravity technology, which is oriented towards the more
profoundly productive task of pulling things apart, in order to
convert comparatively inert mass-spheres into volatile clouds of
cultural substance. Assuming a fusion-phase energy infrastructure,
this initial stage of off-world development culminates in the
dismantling of the sun, terminating the absurdly wasteful main-
sequence nuclear process, salvaging its fuel reserves, and thus
making the awakened solar-system’s contribution to the techno-
industrial darkening of the galaxy. (Quit squandering hydrogen, and
the lights dim.)
Focus for a few seconds on the economic irritability that arises at
the sight of an oil-well flaring off natural gas, through sheer mindless
incompetence, then glance at the sun. ‘Unsustainable’ doesn’t begin
to capture it. Clearly, this energy machinery is utterly demented,
amounting to an Azathothic orgy of spilled photons. The entire
apparatus needs to be taken apart, through extreme solar surgery.
751
Reignition
Since this project has yet to receive sustained consideration,

however, the specific engineering details can be safely bracketed for
now.
The inexorable logic of techno-industrial efficiency, on its anti-
gravity vector, means that the only consistent motivation for leaving
the earth is to dismantle the sun (along with the rest of the solar-
system), but that doesn’t play well in Peoria. Unsurprisingly,
therefore, those sensitized to political realities, media perceptions,
and public relations are inclined to emphasize other things, depicting
the earth as a destination for cosmic bounty or — even more
immediately — for juicy tax-funded pork, rather than as a tricky but
highly-rewarding demolition problem.
Conspicuously missing from the public space debate, therefore,
is any frank admission that, “(let’s face it folks) — planets are
misallocations of matter which don’t really work. No one wants to
tell you that, but it’s true. You know that we deeply respect the green
movement, but when we get out there onto the main highway of
solar-system redevelopment, and certain very rigid, very extreme
environmentalist attitudes – Gaian survivalism, terrestrial holism,
planetary preservationism, that sort of thing — are blocking the way
forward, well, let me be very clear about this, that means jobs not
being created, businesses not being built, factories closing down in
the asteroid belt, growth foregone. Keeping the earth together
means dollars down the drain – a lot of dollars, your dollars. There
752
are people, sincere people, good people, who strongly oppose our
plans to deliberately disintegrate the earth. I understand that, really
I do, you know – honestly – I used to feel that way myself, not so long
ago. I, too, wanted to believe that it was possible to leave this world in
one piece, just as it has been for four billion years now. I, too, thought
the old ways were probably best, that this planet was the place we
belonged, that we should – and could — still find some alternative
to pulling it apart. I remember those dreams, really I do, and I still
hold them close to my heart. But, people, they were just dreams, old
and noble dreams, but dreams, and today I’m here to tell you that
we have to wake up. Planets aren’t our friends. They’re speed-bumps
on the road to the future, and we simply can’t afford them anymore.
Let’s back them up digitally, with respect, yes, even with love, and
then let’s get to work…” [Thunderous applause]
Since, during the present stage of extraterrestrial ambition,
pandering to the partisans of cosmic disintegrationism cannot
reasonably be conceived as a sure-fire election winner, it is only to
be expected that rhetoric of this kind has been muted. Yet, in the
absence of some such vision, or consistently extrapolated alignment
with anti-gravity, the off-planet impulse is condemned to
arbitrariness, insubstantiality, and insincerity of expression. Absent
an uncompromised sense of something else, why not stick to this?
The result has been, perhaps predictably, a reign of near-silence on
the topic of extraterrestrial projects, even in regard to its most
753
Reignition
limited, immediate, and practically unobjectionable varieties.

If escaping the earth – and gravitational confinement in general
— is not an intelligible end, but only a means, what provides the
motivation? It is into this cramped, awkwardly-deformed crevice of
aspiration that NewSpace must insinuate itself. To speak of
‘insincerity’ might seem unduly harsh – since there is no reason to
suspect conscious deception, or even carefully-calibrated
reservation, when NewSpace advocates outline their plans. An
enveloping structure of implausibility nevertheless announces itself
in every project that is advanced, manifested through the
incommensurability between the scale of the undertaking and the
rewards that supposedly incentivize it. Space tourism, asteroid
mining, micro-gravity experimentation and manufacturing… really?
Is it genuinely imaginable that these paltry goals finally or
sufficiently motivate a prolonged struggle against the terrestrial
gravity-trap, rather than serving as fragile pretexts or
rationalizations for the pursuit of far more compelling, yet hazy,
unarticulated, or even completely unsuspected objectives?
When this question is extended backwards, and outwards, it
gathers force. Stretch it back to the moon, and out to Mars, and the
inference becomes increasingly irresistible. None of these ‘missions’
made, or make, any sense whatsoever, except insofar as they
abbreviate some wider, undisclosed impulse. Space activity is not the
means to a targeted end, but the end to be advanced by a sequence
754
of missions, whose specific content is therefore derivative, and

devoid of intrinsic significance. Once the inarticulate outward
momentum decays, leaving nothing but an arbitrary extraterrestrial
destination to represent it, the naked absurdity that is exposed
rapidly extinguishes the last, flickering embers of popular
motivation. Four decades of explicit lunar nihilism attest abundantly
to that.
Whilst the partial privatization of space activity (‘NewSpace’)
creatively displaces the problem of purpose, it does not radically
dispel it. To some degree, NewSpace substitutes the economic
motivations of disparate private operators for the political
justification of a concentrated public bureaucracy, and by doing so
it relieves the pressure to maintain coherent, communicable, and
consensual objectives. Space ambitions are freed to enter the
fragmented, competitive terrain of idiosyncrasy, variety,
experimentation, and even personally-financed frivolity. It might
even be thought that seriousness becomes optional.
When examined more doggedly, however, it is clear that the basic
problem persists. The terrestrial gravity-well produces a split
between the surface of the earth, and ‘orbit’ (or beyond), and private
capital is no less severely divided by this schism than Rocket-State
‘public’ hardware. Whilst convertible temporarily into forms of inert,
stored value, capital is an essentially modern phenomenon, born in
industrial revolution, and typically defined by the diversion of
755
Reignition
immediate consumption into ‘roundabout’ production, which is to

say: machinery. It is reproduced, or accumulated, by circulating
through machines, or apparatus, and it is upon this that the gravity-
well compels a decision: is NewSpace capital to be invested,
unambiguously, in space?
A serious space program is, fundamentally and irreducibly, a
process or terrestrial evacuation. It requires the consistent
relocation (or de-location) of enterprise, resources, and productive
capabilities from the earth into space, at least until the threshold of
extraterrestrial autocatalysis is reached, at which point a break has
been achieved, and an autonomous off-planet economy established.
Whatever the opportunities for obfuscation (which are probably
considerable), the basic decision remains unaffected. The
accumulation of a terrestrial fortune is not at all the same, and is in
fact almost certainly economically inconsistent, with the sustained
investment in an off-planet industrial infrastructure. Either stuff is
being shifted into space, irrevocably, or not.
[moon cake break]
September 29, 2012
756
Lure of the V
Void
oid (P
(Part
art 3b
3b))
Menace in the west
Recognizing the head start obtained by the Soviets with their

large rocket engines, which gives them many months of lead-
time, and recognizing the likelihood that they will exploit this
lead for some time to come in still more impressive successes,
we nevertheless are required to make new efforts on our
own. For while we cannot guarantee that we shall one day
be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort
will make us last. We take an additional risk by making it in
full view of the world, but as shown by the feat of astronaut
Shepard, this very risk enhances our stature when we are
successful. But this is not merely a race. Space is open to us
now; and our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed
by the efforts of others. We go into space because whatever
mankind must undertake, free men must fully share. … I
believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the
goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon
and returning him safely to the earth.
— John F Kennedy
[James Anthony Froude’s] “The Bow of Ulysses” … endorses

the old colonialism, nostalgically recalling the days when
757
Reignition
Britain was not an empire, but rather British colonialists were

pirates and brigands, who robbed, conquered and eventually
ruled, gradually making the transition from mobile banditry
to stationary banditry without the British government paying
much attention. In “The Bow of Ulysses” Froude condemns
nineteenth century imperialism as unworkably left wing, and
inevitably leading [to] the destruction of the British empire,
and thus the ruin of the subjects of the British empire, all
of which ensued as he envisaged … The imperialists, those
advocating British Empire, were the left, and the colonialists
were the right. And the colonialists correctly predicted that if
this were to go on, we would get the left that we now have –
one of the many strange facts one encounters if one reads old
books.
— James A Donald
The peculiarities of the ‘space race’ have yet to be fully unfolded.

Through its extraordinary formality, reducing extraterrestrial
ambitions to a binary, international competition to put the first man
on the moon, it seems – retrospectively – to owe more to the culture
and history of organized sports than to technological and economic
accomplishments. There would, by definition, be a winner and a loser,
which is to say a Boolean decision, conventional and indisputable.
Then it would be over. Perhaps it was seen to be pointing at
758
something further, but in fact the moon was a finishing line.

Within a broad geo-strategic context, the space race was a
symptom of thermonuclear stand-off. A modern history of warfare
that had descended inexorably from a restrained game of princes
to unleashed total war, amongst ideologically-mobilized peoples,
targeting their basic institutions, industrial infrastructures, and even
demographic root-stocks, had consummated itself – virtually – in
the MAD potential for swift, reciprocal extermination. Under these
circumstances, a regressive sublimation was called for, relaying
conflict through chivalric representatives – even Homeric heroes –
who competed on behalf of the super-lethal populations they
appeased. The flight of an astronaut symbolized antagonism,
substituting for a nuclear strike. In this sense, victory in the space
race was a thinly-disguised advance payment on the conclusion of
the Cold War.
This sublimation is only half of the story, however, because a
double displacement took place. Whilst the space race substituted a
formal (chivalric) outcome for a military result, it also marginalized
the long-envisaged prospect of informal space colonization,
replacing it with a predominantly conventional (or socio-political)
objective. The price of unambiguous symbolic triumph was a
‘triumph’ that relapsed into the real ambiguity of (mere) symbolism,
with reality-denying, postmodernist, ‘moon hoax’ temptations
already rising. When nothing is won except winning itself, it could
759
Reignition
scarcely be otherwise. A champion is not a settler, or anything close

to one.
What is this real ambiguity? It begins on the frontier, with a series
of questions that reaches beyond the meaning of the space race,
and into the identity of America. As a country settled within the
modern epoch, and thus exhaustively determined by the dynamics of
colonialism, America has been condensed from a frontier.
In extended parenthesis, it is worth noting explicitly that the
continent’s aboriginal population was not yet America, but
something earlier, and other, encountered on the frontier. The idea of
a ‘Native American’ is an exercise in historical misdirection, when it is
not merely a thoughtless oxymoron. This is not to suggest that these
populations were unable to become American, as many did, once
America had begun in the modern period. By innovating distinctive
modes of secession, they were even — in certain cases — able to
become radically American. A reservation casino in institutional
flight from the IRS is vastly more American than the Federal Reserve,
in a sense that will (hopefully) become evident.
The foundation of America was a flight into the frontier,
extending a trajectory of escape into a perpetually receding space, or
open horizon — the future made geography, and only subsequently
a political territory. This original, informal, and inherently obscure
space project is as old as America itself – exactly as old. As Frederick
Jackson Turner had already noted in 1893, for America an open
760
frontier is an existential necessity, which is to say: the basic condition

of American existence. Once the frontier closes, borders take over,
exceptionality withers into insubstantial rhetoric (or worse, its
neoconservative facsimile) and necrosis begins.
In this respect, America cannot be sustained as a state with a
space program. It requires an open horizon, extended beyond the
earth if necessary, sufficient to support a prolongation of its
constitutive colonial process. Only on and out of this frontier does
America have a future, although ‘the USA’ could (more) comfortably
persist without it. That is why, beneath, alongside, and beyond the
space race, the frontier ‘myth’ has been spontaneously extended to
extraterrestrial vistas considered as an essentially American
prospect. (NASA and its works are quite incidental to this, at best.)
Since this claim invites accusations of gratuitous controversy, it
is worth re-visiting it, at a more languid pace. Even after re-
emphasizing that America is not the same as – and is indeed almost
the precise opposite of – the USA, obvious objections present
themselves. Is not the Russian space program the world’s most
economically plausible? Is not the upward curve of recent Chinese
space activity vastly more exuberant? Hasn’t the United Nations
claimed the heavens on behalf of a common humanity? What, other
than cultural-historical accident, and the unwarranted arrogance
stemming from it, could imaginably make ‘an essentially American
prospect’ of outer space?
761
Reignition
The counter-point to all of these objections is colonialism,

understood through its radical, exceptional, American lineage.
Colonialism of this ultimate variety consolidates itself from the
frontier, and passes through revolutionary thresholds of a very
specific type: wars of independence, or secession (rather than
comprehensive regime changes) that are pro-colonial (rather than
anti-colonial) in nature. The colony, as colony, breaks away, and in
doing so creates a new society. Successful examples of such events
are extremely rare – even singular, or exceptional. There is America,
and then there are ‘lost causes’, with considerable (and increasing)
overlap between them.
What has any of this to do with outer space, beyond
impressionistic analogy? Gravity cements the connection. Dividing
the surface of the earth and extraterrestrial space is an effective
difference, or practical problem, that can be quite precisely
quantified in technological terms (fuel to deliverable payload ratios),
and summarized economically. For purposes of comparison,
transporting freight across the Pacific costs US$4/kg (by air), or
US$0.16/kg by ocean-bound container vessel (US$3,500 per TEU,
or 21,600 kg). To lift 1 kg of cargo into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), in
stark contrast, costs over US$4,000 (it was over US$10,000 by Space
Shuttle). Call it the Rift: an immense structural re-supply problem,
incentivizing economic self-sufficiency with overwhelming force.
Each kilogram of extraterrestrial product has saved US$4,000
762
before further calculations get started. Out in space, the Rift is the
bottom line: a cold, anti-umbilical reality.
Whatever the historic colonial impetus to the American way –
separation and social re-foundation – is reinforced by orders of
magnitude in LEO and beyond. This is an environment that might
have been precision-engineered for revolutionary colonialism, as
science fiction writers have long recognized. On the flip side lies a
more obviously explanatory conclusion: Because developments
beyond the Rift are inherently uncontrollable, there is no readily
discernible motivation for terrestrial political-economic agencies to
fund the emergence of off-planet societies that are on an irresistible
conveyor-belt to independence, whilst voraciously consuming
resources, opening an avenue of escape, and ultimately laying the
void foundations for a competitor civilization of a radically
unprecedented, and thus ominously unpredictable kind.
It follows clearly that the status quo politics of space colonization
are almost fully expressed by space colonization not happening.
When understood in relation to the eclipsed undercurrent of the
frontier analogy — social fission through revolutionary colonialism
or wars of independence — the ‘failure’ of large-scale space
colonization projects to emerge begins to look like something else
entirely: an eminently rational determination on the part of the
world’s most powerful territorial states to inhibit the development
of socio-technological potentials characterized by an ‘American’
763
Reignition
(revolutionary colonial) tendency.

Of course, in a world that grown familiar with interchangeable
anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist declarations, the terms of this
(Froude / Moldbug / Donald) analysis are initially disconcerting.
When detached from the confusions and conflations of a disturbed
periphery, however, the pattern is compelling. Colonists are, by their
very nature, in flight from the metropolis. It is less than a single step
from this acknowledgement to the recognition that they tend to
independence of action, social fission, and political disintegration,
following trends that imperialists – with equal inevitability — seek
to curtail. Since colonization, strictly understood, is cultural and
demographic transplantation, it only acquires its sense of expansion
when restrained under imperial auspices. Whilst colonial and
rebellious are not even close to synonymous expressions, they are
nevertheless mutually attracted, in near-direct proportion to the rift
that separates colony from metropolis. A colonial venture is a
rebellion of the most practical and productive kind, either re-routing
a rebellion from time into space, or completing itself in a rebellion
that transforms an expedition into an escape. Since the triumph of
imperialism over colonialism beginning in the second half of the 19th
century, it is only in (and as) America that this system of relations has
persisted, tenuously, and in large measure occulted by the rise of an
imperial state.
It is helpful, then, to differentiate in principle (with minimal moral
764
excitability) between a colonial space project, oriented to

extraterrestrial settlement, and an imperial space program, or policy,
designed to ensure terrestrial control over off-planet development,
maintain political integrity, and thus secure returns on investment
across the Rift. From the perspective of the territorial state, an
(imperial) space program that extracted economic value from
beyond earth’s gravity well would be ideal, but this is an ambition
unsupported by the vaguest flickerings of historical precedent (and
obstructed by at least four orders of magnitude of yawning economic
gulf). Second best, and quite satisfactory, is the simple prevention
of colonial space projects, substituting political space theater as an
expensive (but low-risk and affordable) alternative. The occasional
man on the moon poses no great threat to the order of the world, so
long as we “bring him safely back to earth.”
America was an escape from the Old World, and this definition
suffices to describe what it still is – insofar as it still is – as well as
what it can be, all that it can be, and what any escape from the new
old world – if accurately named, would also be. When outlined by
the shadows of dark enlightenment, America is the problem that the
USA was designed to solve, the door that the USA closes, the proper
name for a society born from flight.
As Nietzsche never exactly said: Am I understood? America
against the stars and stripes …
765
Reignition
October 26, 2012
Rosetta
Rosetta’s
’s Stone
(Links and video here)

ADDED: The sonic dimension. Harpoon failure.
ADDED: Slingshot targeting.
November 12, 2014
766
Quote note (#272)

Frederick Jackson Turner, from his essay The Significance of the
Frontier in American History (1893):
From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of
profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier
from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these
traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the
place of their origin, even when a higher social organization
succeeded. The result is that, to the frontier, the American intellect
owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength
combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness, that practical,
inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients, that masterful grasp
of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great
ends, that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism,
working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and
exuberance which comes with freedom — these are traits of the
frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of
the frontier. […] Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed
into the waters of the New World, America has been another name
for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their
tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but
has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who
should assert that the expansive character of American life has now
767
Reignition
entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless
this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will
continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again
will such gifts of free land offer themselves. […] For a moment, at
the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is
triumphant. There is not tabula rrasa asa. The stubborn American
environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its
conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and
yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier
did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from
the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn
of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and
indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier.
Recollected with reference to the prospects of seasteading and
space colonization, and their continuity with a distinctive
Anglophone cultural impetus to resolve political tension through
dissociation in space (with Exit as its key).
August 14, 2016
Quit
Foseti writes:
There’s a lot of hand-wringing in these parts of the interwebz
768
about what reactionaries should do.

I have no idea. I certainly have no grand plans to change the world. I
like knowing what’s going on around me and I like open discussions –
i.e. ones that are not choked to death by political correctness.
However, if I were to suggest a plan, I’d say tell the truth.
His (slightly) more detailed suggestions are also commendable.
The Cathedral provokes reaction by mandating fantasy over reality,
and there is no doubt much that could be done about that.
There is a sub-question about all this, however, which is scarcely
less insistent: What do ‘we’ really want?
More cybernetics, argues the determinedly non-reactionary
Aretae. Of course, Outside in agrees. Social and technical feedback
machinery is reality’s (only?) friend, but what does the Cathedral
care about any of that? It’s winning a war of religion. Compulsory
anti-realism is the reigning spirit of the age.
The only way to get more tight-feedback under current
conditions is by splitting, in every sense. That is the overwhelming
practical imperative: Flee, break up, withdraw, and evade. Pursue
every path of autonomization, fissional federalism, political
disintegration, secession, exodus, and concealment. Route around
the Cathedral’s educational, media, and financial apparatus in each
and every way possible. Prep, go Galt, go crypto-digital, expatriate,
retreat into the hills, go underground, seastead, build black markets,
whatever works, but get the hell out.
769
Reignition
Truth-telling already presupposes an escape from the empire of

neo-puritan dreams. ‘We’ need to throw open the exit gates,
wherever we find them, so the wreck can go under without us.
Reaction begins with the proposition that nothing can or should be
done to save it. Quit bailing. It’s done. The sooner it sinks the better,
so that something else can begin.
More than anything we can say, practical exit is the crucial signal.
The only pressure that matters comes from that. To find ways out, is
to let the Outside in.
February 28, 2013
Exit T
Test
est
What can Exit do? It looks as if France is going to provide an
important demonstration:
France has become a defeatist nation.
A striking indicator of this attitude is the massive emigration that
the country has witnessed over the last decade, with nearly 2 million
French citizens choosing to leave their country and take their
chances in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the United States and
other locales. The last such collective exodus from France came
during the French Revolution, when a large part of the aristocracy
left to await (futilely) the king’s return. Today’s migration isn’t
770
politically motivated, however; it’s economic.

This departing population consists disproportionately of young
people — 70% of the migrants are under 40 — and advanced-degree
holders, who do their studies in France but offer their skills
elsewhere. The migrants, discouraged by the economy’s
comparatively low salaries and persistently high unemployment —
currently at 10.9% — have only grown in number since Socialist
Francois Hollande became president.
The young and enterprising in France soon realize that elsewhere
— in London, say — obstacles to success are fewer and opportunities
greater. The British capital is now France’s sixth-largest city, with
200,000 to 400,000 emigres.
The exile rolls also include hundreds of thousands of French retirees,

presumably well-off, who are spending at least part of their golden
years in other countries. Tired of France’s high cost of living, they
seek out more welcoming environments.
My beloved country, in other words, has been losing not only its
dynamic and intelligent young people but also older people with
some money. I’m not sure that this social model can work over the
long term.
It will be extremely interesting to see.
February 24, 2014
771
Reignition
Exit notes (#1)

Some notable attempts to dial back the NRx commitment to exit over
voice, as inherited from Moldbug, have been seen recently. (I think
NBS was crucial in advancing this argument, but I couldn’t find his
post immediately — I’ll link to it if someone nudges me helpfully.)
It’s undoubtedly a central discussion throughout the reactosphere at
the moment.
Some preliminary thought-gathering on the topic:
(1) Exit is a scale-free concept. It can be applied rigorously to
extreme cases of sociopolitical separation, from secession to
extraterrestrial escapes. Yet these radical examples do not define it.
It’s essence is the commercial relation, which necessarily involves
a non-transaction option. Exit means: Take it or leave it (but don’t
haggle). It is thus, at whatever scale of expression, the concrete social
implementation of freedom as an operational principle.
(2) As a philosophical stance, Exit is anti-dialectical. That is to say,
it is the insistence of an option against argument, especially refusing
the idea of necessary political discussion (a notion which, if accepted,
guarantees progression to the left). Let’s spatialize our disagreement
is an alternative to resolution in time. Conversations can be prisons.
No one is owed a hearing.
(3) In regards to cultural cladistics, it can scarcely be denied that
Exit has a Protestant lineage. Its theological associations are intense,
772
and stimulating.
(4) Exit asymmetries have been by far the most decisive
generators of spontaneous anti-socialist ideology. The iconic
meaning of the Berlin Wall needs no further elucidation. The implicit
irony is that people flee towards Exit, and if this is only possible
virtually, it metamorphoses automatically into delegitimation of the
inhibitory regime. (Socialism is Exit-suppressive by definition.)
(5) Exit is an option, which does not require execution for its
effectiveness. The case for Exit is not an argument for flight, but a
(non-dialectical) defense of the opportunity for flight. Where Exit
most fully flourishes, it is employed the least.
(6) Exit is the alternative to voice. It is defended with extremity
in order to mute voice with comparable extremity. To moderate the
case for Exit is implicitly to make a case for voice. (Those who cannot
exit a deal will predictably demand to haggle over it.)
(7) Exit is the primary Social Darwinian weapon. To blunt it is to
welcome entropy to your hearth.
June 24, 2014
Age of Exit
Mark Lutter’s forecast for the general landscape of 21st century
politics leaves plenty to argue with, from all sides, and even
773
Reignition
vociferously, but the basic trend-line he projects is persuasive (at

least to this blog):
… the costs of exit are going down. Increased mobility and smaller
political units will allow people increasingly to vote with their feet.
The old political questions of which ideological empire controls
which territory will give way to a choose-your-own-governance
meta system. […] Thus, to be successful, political units will have to
attract residents—that is, to providing better services at lower cost.
Increased competition among smaller political units will spur
innovation, leading to new forms of governance. Many will fail. But
the successful will be replicated, outcompeting more stagnant forms.
Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Lichtenstein show
the beginnings of such success. […] Not all the governments will be
libertarian. In fact, most probably will not be. Some will experiment
with higher levels of redistribution; others with petty tyrannies,
zealous zoning and even social exclusion. However, competition will
eliminate unsuccessful models. Ultimately, the meta-rules that are
emerging are decidedly libertarian in flavor, as choice will govern the
survival of political units.
The left won’t like this, for obvious reasons. It is dissolidarity
incarnate, with an egalitarian-democratic promise that is minimal,
at best. I’m not sure whether the criticism has developed beyond
indignant scoffing to calmly-formulated theoretical antagonism yet,
but it surely will.
774
The right’s objections are likely to be more diverse. Most

pointedly, from the perspective here, there is room for deep
skepticism about the harshness of the selection mechanisms Lutter
is counting upon. Driving a state into insolvency, and liquidation, is
no easy thing. For those, especially, who would be delighted to see
effective inter-state Darwinism cropping micro-states for adaptive
excellence, cold realism concerning the capabilities of states to
forestall such outcomes is essential. If widespread conflict-free high-
functionality futures sound too good to be true, they probably are.
April 17, 2015
Exit Pressure
It’s impossible to tell anything from this story about the
effectiveness of exercising an Exit Option. It should be expected,
anyway, that the option itself does the work, even if pulling the
trigger has to contribute to the general credibility of virtual exodus.
As an exemplary case, however, it would be hard to beat. From the
statement by Preston Byrne, of eris:
If [the Communications Data Bill] is passed into law, we are likely
to see a mass exodus of tech companies and financial services firms
alike from the United Kingdom. We are happy to lead the charge.
[…] In keeping with our promise in January to leave the country if
775
Reignition
the Conservatives were returned to power with this policy on their

legislative agenda, we have promptly ordered all of our staff to
depart from the United Kingdom and to conduct all future
development work abroad. […] Additionally, with immediate effect,
we have moved our corporate headquarters to New York City, where
open-source cryptography is firmly established as protected speech
pursuant to the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United
States, until such time as we can be certain that the relevant
provisions of the Communications Data Bill will be stricken from it
(otherwise, we will reincorporate in America and continue our
business here).
(To add a “Go eris” at this point could be reasonably criticized for
redundancy.)
May 29, 2015
Exit Options
Everyone will notice them when they’ve gone.
All recent policy decisions by the reigning political-economic
structure are intelligible as a mandatory bubble. If you didn’t think
quietly ‘sitting it out’ was already the exercise of an exit option, the
necessary lesson will be increasingly hard to ignore. Refusing to
invest everything into this lunacy is ceasing to be a permissible social
776
posture. We’ve already reached the stage where merely seeking to

preserve a pot of retirement savings has been officially recoded as
something close to right-wing guerrilla warfare.
Anybody with anything at all is now in the position where they
are faced with an aggressive binary dilemma. Either unreserved
collaboration with the final phase gamble of the existing order —
amounting ultimately to the all-in bet that politics has no ontological
limits, so that any dysfunction is soluble in a sufficient exertion of will
— or a dissident skepticism about this dominant assertion, practically
instantiated by ever more desperate attempts at withdrawal
(persecuted with ever greater fanaticism as acts of sabotage).
There will be massive confusion among the destitution. Explaining
why capital preservation is being persecuted as dissent would
provide the scaffolding for a counter-narrative that will certainly,
eventually, be needed.
ADDED: The basic point is this, if it is conceded to Keynes that
refusing to invest in industrial production is anti-social, then, as a
matter of realistic political necessity, any insane evil that the powers-
that-be come up with gets defined as ‘industrial production’. Let go of
gold — the archaic economic exit option — as we did, and anything at
all that we’re told to sink all we have into is green-lighted. The stream
was crossed without enough people noticing. Now the fascism we
chose reaps its consequences. It isn’t going to be pretty.
777
Reignition
June 6, 2015
Exit F
Foundations
oundations
Having lost count of the number of times the demand for exit
guarantees has come up as an objection to the Patchworked-
Neocameral model, it seems worthwhile to reproduce Moldbug’s
most directly on-point, pre-emptive response to the question. The
question being: What is to stop a regime, once it is entirely
unshackled from all domestic political constraint (i.e.
Neocameralized), from extinguishing the exit options of its
residents?
As a prefatory note: Like the Misesian praxeology from which it is
cladistically descended, the Moldbuggian System is a transcendental
political philosophy, which is to say that it deals with ultimate or
unsurpassable conditions. You have reached the transcendental
when there is no higher tribunal, or court of appeal. This is the socio-
cosmic buffers. If you don’t like what you’re seeing here, there’s still
no point looking anywhere else, because this is all you’re going to get:
To live on a Patchwork patch, you have to sign a bilateral contract
with the realm. You promise to be a good boy and behave yourself.
The realm promises to treat you fairly. There is an inherent
asymmetry in this agreement, because you have no enforcement
778
mechanism against the realm (just as you have no enforcement

mechanism against the United States). However, a realm’s
compliance with its customer-service agreements is sure to be a
matter of rather intense attention among residents and prospective
residents. And thus among shareholders as well.
For example, I suspect that every customer-service agreement will
include the right to remove oneself and one’s assets from the realm,
at any time, no questions asked, to any other realm that will accept
the emigrant. Possibly with an exception for those involved in the
criminal-justice process – but this may not even be needed. Who
wants a criminal? Not another realm, surely.
Suppose a realm unilaterally abrogates this right of emigration?
It has just converted its residents into what are, in a sense, slaves.
It is no longer Disneyland. It is a plantation. If it’s any good with
cinderblocks, barbed-wire and minefields, there is no escape. What
do you say if you’re stuck on this farm? You say: “yes, Massa.” A slave
you are and a slave you will be forever.
This is terrible, of course. But again, the mechanism we rely on to
prevent it is no implausible deus ex machina, no Indian rope-trick
from the age of Voltaire, but the sound engineering principle of the
profit motive. A realm that pulls this kind of crap cannot be trusted
by anyone ever again. It is not even safe to visit. Tourism disappears.
The potential real-estate bid from immigrants disappears. And, while
your residents are indeed stuck, they are also remarkably sullen and
779
Reignition
display no great interest in slaving for you. Which is a more valuable

patch of real estate, today: South Korea, or North Korea? Yet before
the war, the North was more industrialized and the South was more
rural. Such are the profits of converting an entire country into a giant
Gulag.
Is that all? Yes — that’s all. Beyond the rational economic
incentives of the Sovereign Corporation, controlled within a
Patchwork-environment (of competition for human resources),
there is nothing to which an appeal can be made. The end.
June 11, 2015
Geopolitical Arbitr
Arbitrage
age
Stross:
… things will get very ugly in London when the Square Mile and
investment banking sector ups and decamps for Frankfurt, leaving
the service sector and multiethnic urban poor behind.
The specifics of this prediction are nutty, if only because mainland
Europe is going down the tubes much faster than the UK, but the
abstract anxiety is spot on. The globalization of the right is entirely
about geopolitical arbitrage (while that of the left is about
homogenizing global governance). All the critical trends point
towards the exacerbation of the ‘problem’. The 21st century is the
780
epoch of fragmentation — unlike anything seen since the early

modern period — shifting power to the footloose, and away from
megapolitical systems of territorial dominion. Being left behind is the
rising threat, and we can confidently expect to see it consolidating as
the subtext of all leftist grievance. You can’t just leave. Watch.
The obstacles to geopolitical arbitrage — i.e. spatial Exit pressure
— are security constraints. It requires defensible off-shore bases
(and Frankfurt most certainly isn’t going to provide one). Eyes need
to be fixed firmly on secessionary dynamics (fragmentation), techno-
commercial decentralization of hard security, crypto-anonymization,
artificial intelligence, and the emergence of capital outposts in the
Western Pacific region. More exotic factors include opportunities
for radical exodus (undersea, Antarctic, and off-planet), facilitated by
territorial production (artificial islands). The machinery of capture
needs to keep all of these escape routes firmly suppressed in order
to perpetuate itself. That simply isn’t going to happen.
Capital is learning faster than its adversaries, and has done so
since it initially became self-propelling, roughly half a millennium
ago. It’s allergic to socialism (obviously), and tends to flee places
where socialist influence is substantially greater than zero. Unless
caged definitively, eventually it breaks out. Over the next few
decades — despite ever deeper encryption — it should become
unmistakable which way that’s going.
781
Reignition
January 18, 2016
Flea P
Politics
olitics
One time-tested way to shed parasites is to take a dip:
Foxes will actually take a stick when they have fleas and get into
the water slowly. They let the water raise up to their necks and hold
the stick up in the air. As the water goes higher up their face, the fleas
will climb higher. Eventually the fox will just have it’s nose out of the
water while holding the stick. The fleas will climb up the stick and the
fox will sink under the water and let the flea infested stick float down
the river to the flea’s watery grave.
As Balaji Srinivasan remarked (on Ultimate Exit): “… but the best
part is this: the people who think this is weird, the people who sneer
at the frontier, who hate technology — they won’t follow you out
there.”
Did you really think it was going to be that easy?
Space de-colonization is already preparing to queer-up the
escape trajectory:
As venture capitalist space entrepreneurs and aerospace
contractors compete to profit from space exploration, we’re running
up against increasingly conflicting visions for human futures in outer
space. Narratives of military tactical dominance alongside
782
“NewSpace” ventures like asteroid mining projects call for the

defense, privatization, and commodification of space and other
worlds, framing space as a resource-rich “frontier” to be “settled” in
what amounts to a new era of colonization … […] we have to stake
a claim in the territory of space programs now. We need to add our
voices, perspectives, plans, our cares
cares. There isn’t time to wait. We
can’t sit back and say: Space isn’t urgently important, we should be
looking at problems here on Earth. First of all, much of space science
is looking at and working on problems here on Earth (from conflict,
migration, and drought to climate change, deforestation, and more).
Secondly, SpaceX, Boeing, and others are preparing new craft and
taking humans into space now —and human technology is leaving
the solar system. Perhaps it’s not happening on the timeline you
would prefer, but it’s already happening and has been for decades,
and they’re pretty much doing it without us … So what’s next?
We—all us queer, trans, disabled, black, native, etc. folk and
more—we need to fight back, take back, de-colonize and re-imagine
our futures in outer space, we need to pop up where the theyy least
expect us
us. (Emphasis in original.)
Leaving those ‘cares’ behind is going to take a colder exit.
ADDED: From VXXC on twitter — “In space no one can hear you
whine.”
January 29, 2016
783
Reignition
Sentences (#55)
Collapse traps people:
You ha
havve to know when to lealeavve.
Most don’t, and won’t, of course.
(Treat this as a promissory note on an installment of provocative
skepticism viz the ‘eventually its necessary to stand and fight, or even
take things back’ proposition that haunts NRx like a chain-rattling
ghost, now more than ever, in the shadow of the impending
Trumpenreich. Zombie-fighting-types can assume that the tacit XS
stance (“flee you fools”) is at least as infuriating as they would expect
it to be.)
May 24, 2016
Ultimate Exit NY
Some chatter on various web channels about this event, which
should be a great opportunity for exploring. To be clear about my
participation (which has been open to confusion) — it consists of an
intervention out of Cyberspace. (No chance of drinking dates in NY
just yet, unfortunately.)
This is a nonlinear point, from my perspective, since the rapid
development of telepresence is of obvious internal consequence to
784
the recent intensification of Exit-oriented and neo-secessionist

discussion. (Balaji S. Srinivasan brought this out very clearly in his
October 2013 talk on the subject, from which this event takes its
title.) Exit in depth — i.e. into the crypto-thickened ‘Net — is at the
very least an important complement to more traditional notions of
territorial flight. It also sustains a better purchase on the commercial
principle which provides Exit with its fundamentalal model, and
which can easily get lost among secessionist excitement and visions
of technologically re-sculpted geographical space.
Some background to the event (and hints of choppy waters).
Argument is, of course, the other side of the nonlinearity (a micro-
enactment of the inclusive Democratic ideal), so it will be interesting
to see whether on this occasion the controversy can remain
productive in its own terms, rather than ‘merely’ stacking up the
incentives to get Out.
December 6, 2014
Into the Dark

As the Occident subsides into an ocean of shadow, the FBI is
noticing:
“We’re seeing more and more cases where we believe significant
evidence resides on a phone or a laptop, but we can’t crack the
785
Reignition
password,” FBI Director Jim Comey said during a speech in

Washington. “If this becomes the norm … justice may be denied.”
[…] Specifically, Comey said he is “deeply concerned” about what’s
known as “going dark” — operating systems being developed by
companies such as Apple and Google that automatically encrypt
information on their devices. And that means even the companies
themselves won’t be able to unlock phones, laptops and other
devices so law enforcement can access emails, photos or other
evidence that could be crucial to a case …
Comey, however, didn’t place full blame with companies like Apple
and Google for creating devices with such encryption. They were
“responding to what they perceive is a market demand” from the
general public, which has grown “mistrustful of government” in the
wake of Edward Snowden’s disclosures of secret government
surveillance. […] Encryption “is a marketing pitch,” Comey said. “But
it will have very serious consequences for law enforcement and
national security agencies at all levels. Sophisticated criminals will
come to count on these means of evading detection. It’s the
equivalent of a closet that can’t be opened. A safe that can’t be
cracked. And my question is, at what cost?”
A process of Exit-in-place is underway, automatically, and it’s not
easy to imagine how it could be stopped. With message management
disintegrating on one side, and the public sphere eroding into dark
nets on the other, it must seem to the State in the age of Internet
786
runaway that the walls are closing in.
October 24, 2014
Buy Out
This (via Mangan) is such naked precious metals propaganda — and
yet it’s so right.
… markets are behaving exactly as one would expect at the end
of a major economic era. That is, markets are totally divorced from
the reality of what is going on both economically and geopolitically.
Markets are now in a manic phase, driven by false hope and
momentum. […] It clearly helps that many economic figures are
manipulated and therefore totally inaccurate. If we add to this the
most massive money creation in history, we can be certain that these
are not normal times. […] We are experiencing the beginning of a
hyperinflationary period, with hyperinflation, so far, being noticed
only in financial markets, property markets, and other key assets
such as art and classic cars. […] And currencies will continue their
decline to zero. Continued money printing will guarantee this. And
we have to remember that the major currencies don’t have far to go
since they are down between 97 and 99 percent in the last hundred
years. As currencies start the next major phase of decline we will
experience hyperinflation in all parts of the economy. This
787
Reignition
hyperinflation will be happening in most major countries. …

It’s not just that the analysis is solidly grounded in an obdurate
realism (this is the raw economics of Gnon), it’s also that:
(a) Gold is the traditional medium of economic-regime exit, and
therefore
(b) This discourse is immediately anti-politics (or resistance).
It says: Get out! That’s not a message to be easily decrypted for
representational content, because it’s a war cry.
How does a hyperinflationary collapse begin? With a flight to
gold. There’s going to be hyperinflation — flee to gold. It’s a circuit.
The Cathedral’s economic authorities are entirely justified in
considering such messaging aggressive (even ‘terroristic’), in the
specific mode of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people listened, they’d
bring everything crashing down.
It’s no less crucial to understand that, by inversion, the voice of
central monetary authority is equally incapable of isolating the
communication of objective information from the continuous flow
of psychological operations. When the state monetary apparatus
speaks, it exercises effective power. It commands. The sole value of
fiat currency lies in a popular habit of obedience, which the state
money power systematically sustains. There is no other usage of
macro-economic signs.
‘Buy gold’ is a counter-revolutionary instruction to participate in
the destruction of the state money system.
788
(… and now we have Bitcoin too.)
August 22, 2014
789
Reignition
CHAPTER TWO - WHA

WHAT
T IS GOING ON?
Go Scotland!
Tribal politics excites the autobiographical impulse, which I’ll pander
to for just a moment (without pretending to any particular
excitement). My immediate ancestry is a quarter Scottish, and —
here’s the thing — those grandparents were Wallaces. Seriously, they
were these guys:
… but it’s my remaining three-quarters of mongrelized Brit that is

leading this post to its destination. In particular, the 37.5% of English
blood coursing through my veins is the part murmuring most
enthusiastically for Scotland to vote ‘Yes!’ to departure this week.
Scotland is hugely over-represented in the UK Parliament,
shifting the country’s politics substantially to the Left. While Scottish
790
exit wouldn’t necessarily ensure a permanent conservative

government — electoral democracy simply doesn’t work like that —
it’s hard to argue that the result could be anything other than an
ideological rebound of sorts, with the rump UK’s entire political
spectrum shunting right. Since such an outcome would almost
certainly prolong the viability of liberal democracy, perhaps even
worldwide (due to contagion effects), it would be unseemly for any
neoreactionary to get adrenalized about it. England would
nevertheless undergo a minor restoration, conceivably broadening
the political imagination in a modestly positive way.
Every increment of dynamic Anglo capitalism adds resources that
will eventually be of great use — especially now, with public ledger
crypto-commerce coming online. It is a grave error to become so
fixated upon the death of the demotic power structure that positive
techno-commercial advances are simply written off, or worse,
derided as life-support apparatus for the enemy. Even a minor Anglo-
capitalist revitalization would produce some deep value (as early,
or creative destruction-phase Thatcherism did, amid its manifold
failures).
791
Reignition
Far more significantly, Scottish secession would mark a turning of

the tide, with great exemplary potential. Beginning its new life as a
hotbed of socialist lunacy, an independent Scotland would be forced
— very rapidly — to grow up, which of course means moving sharply
to the right. The more theatrical the transitional social crisis, the
more thoroughly leftism-in-power would be humiliated. As everyone
now knows, such lessons in the essentially incompetent nature of
leftist social administration never have any more than a limited
effect, since humans are congenitally stupid creatures who find
profound learning next-to-impossible. Despite this, they are the only
remotely effective lessons history offers. However pitiful mankind’s
political-economic education may be, it is owed entirely to the
792
disaster spectacle of leftism in power. A fresh lesson — the more

brutally calamitous the better — should always be welcomed
unambiguously. If wild-eyed socialists were to drive Scotland over a
cliff, they would be presenting a precious gift to the world thereby.
(Sadly, in the opinion of this blog, the probability of such an
eventuality is relatively low — Scottish canniness can be expected to
re-assert itself with remarkable speed once the Sassenach dupes are
no longer subsidizing its disappearance.)
The secession of Scotland, from the perspective of the rump UK,
is already a (relative) purge of leftist entropy. With the return of an
independent Scotland to minimally-functional, and thus moderately
right-corrected government, this purge becomes absolute. A
quantum of leftist insanity will have been extinguished, since its
condition of existence was a relation of political dependency. No one
resorts to beggary when abandoned, solitary, upon a desert island.
Compulsory self-reliance mandates adjustment to the right
(whether preceded by collapse or not).
An independent Scotland would work, most probably quite
quickly. It then lights a beacon of disintegration, first across the
Anglosphere, and subsequently more widely. The time of
fragmentation will have come. The present world epoch of
democracy will then have arrived at its final stage — promoting the
break-up of the states it has built (and with them, eventually, itself).
Scotland could light the touch-paper. It would save everybody some
793
Reignition
time if it did.
ADDED: What’s the point of independence?
ADDED: As Bremmer explained, Scottish independence would
“tilt the entire U.K. political spectrum to the right.” That would boost
the odds of a conservative majority winning in 2015. […] … “If
Scotland votes ‘yes,’ down the road would come the ultimate irony,”
Bremmer said. “The U.K. would be more likely to pull out of the E.U.,
while Scotland clamors to get in.”
September 8, 2014
Last Da
Days
ys of the UK?
Probably not, but the chance isn’t negligible. There’s a poll tracker
for the final phase here. This historical overview of independence
plebiscites is encouraging.
My favorite article on the topic so far is too odd too easily classify.
Quality hedginess from Sailer, and (ratcheting down a few notches)
David Miles at the Huffington Post.
Reason does the right thing. Steve Forbes makes an even stronger
case for a break, while trying to do the opposite. Here‘s some deeply
retarded propaganda, that happens to be pointing in the right
direction. Round-up coverage from The Scotsman.
As should be expected, various flavors of hostility and
794
condescension to secession from the (smug–through-to-foaming)

Left. (We splittists will take whatever we can get.) Paul Krugman,
who has never been right about anything, is against independence,
which should settle the question conclusively.
XS has already run up the saltire (or something).
George Friedman isn’t thrilled about the modern nation state
passing through the gates of disintegration, but he’s probably right
in suggesting that’s the ultimate issue at stake: “I think that however
the vote goes, unless the nationalists are surprised by an
overwhelming defeat, the genie is out of the bottle, and not merely
in Britain. The referendum will re-legitimize questions that have
caused much strife throughout the European continent for
centuries, including the 31-year war of the 20th century that left 80
million dead.”
ADDED: The Bitcoin connection. (+ here.)
ADDED: The two Scotlands.
ADDED: “Under the SNP, the expression ‘no true Scotsman‘ may
change its meaning from a logical fallacy into a real question of
identity.”
ADDED: Occidental Dissent links an excellent RT video.
ADDED: “A friendly separation is possible, though — and in the
longer term, for the best. My guess is that Scotland will, after all,
vote against independence tomorrow, cowed by the risks and
uncertainties and by the sudden force of international opinion telling
795
Reignition
them to think again. If so, it will be a shame. A Scotland that stays

in the union reluctantly will be of little use to itself or anybody else.
Alongside childish simplicity on fiscal and monetary policy, peevish
resentment of the English has been a persistent aspect of the
independence campaign. The cure for both is to grow up and move
on.”
ADDED: Scotland carries the flag of global secession.
September 17, 2014
Dependency Culture …
… proves yet again that it’s a reliable vote winner.
796
What the f…
September 19, 2014
Cr
Crack
ack up
“Why oh why don’t those damned crackers just leave?”
If we’re already entering the ejection phase of neo-secessionism,
it has to be a good thing, right?
December 9, 2014
797
Reignition
Pan-Secessionism
Here’s the All Nations Party vision of the American future:
Some background, and a discussion with Keith Preston on the

topic.
The party-political strategy is clearly questionable, but it
deserves more engagement than I’ve noticed in NRx circles. A path
to Patchwork has to be something — and this is something.
(AnarchoAbsurdist is all over this at the moment, for e.g. linking to
another ANP video.)
ADDED: A vehement critique of Preston from the far left that is
well worth a read.
798
September 7, 2015
Bre
Brexit
xit
Making the case for Brexit water-tight:
799
Reignition
If the English vote to leave the EU, the Scots will vote to leave
the UK. There will then be no Britain. Meanwhile, the shock of Brexit
to a continent already staggering under many crises could spell the
beginning of the end of the European Union.
ADDED: It’s a trend.
February 22, 2016
Bre
Brexit
xit Open Thread
For discussion of UK independence, UK fragmentation, EU
800
disintegration, Pan-secessionism, and catabolic geopolitics in

general.
Here‘s Geert Wilders widening the conversation.
(Content coming later, probably in a subsequent post.)
ADDED: There’s a lot of gravy. One little drip. Bye: “Prime
Minister David Cameron, who had led the campaign to keep Britain
in the EU, said he would resign by October and left it to his successor
to decide when to invoke Article 50, which triggers a departure from
European Union.”
ADDED:
A very clear indication of the cultural divide in the country,

from Lord Ashcroft's poll. pic.twitter.com/cuNxeVMpzD
— Jamie Bartlett (@JamieJBartlett) June 24, 2016
It just keeps getting better:
This is absolutely the predictable outcome of #brexit

https://t.co/S2m7X5ZmiG & this trend will accelerate to a
federation of global cities
— mikeeisenberg (@mikeeisenberg) June 24, 2016
ADDED: Open thread over at Briggs’ place. (“Britain Free. France,

Texas Next?”)
801
Reignition
June 24, 2016
Blue
Bluexit
xit
Simply, yes:
Don’t organize. Pack. […] Not literally, of course. Not even the
good people of Canada should have to stomach a mass migration of
moping American liberals mumbling, “Live locally … make art.” What I
mean is that it’s time for blue states and cities to effectively abandon
the American national enterprise, as it is currently constituted. Call it
the New Federalism. Or Virtual Secession. Or Conscious Uncoupling
— though that’s already been used. Or maybe Bluexit.
March 9, 2017
802
CHAPTER THREE - IDENTITY

IDENTITY,,
INDIVIDU
INDIVIDUALISM
ALISM AND INDEPENDENCE
Identity Hunger
Handle has an excellent post up on this, referencing Nydwracu, who
has made a momentous project out of it. It’s huge, and old, and quite
impossible to summarize persuasively. It’s also impossible to avoid,
especially for the Outer Right.
Steve Sailer told a joke that I’m going to mangle. A monstrous
alien invasion assails the earth, and people have to decide how to
respond. The conservatives say, “What’s there to think about? We
have to get together to defeat this thing.” Liberals respond: “Wait!
They probably have good reasons to hate us. It must be something
we’ve done. Until we work out what that is, we should prostrate
ourselves before their grievances.” Finally the libertarians pipe up:
“Do they believe in free markets?”
An obvious quibble arises with the libertarian punch-line: if
only. Libertarians have predominantly demonstrated an enthusiasm
for alien invasion that is totally detached from any market-oriented
803
Reignition
qualification. As their argument goes — the alien invasion is the free

market. (We’ll need to return to this, indirectly.)
The appetite for identity seems to be hard-wired in the
approximate manner of language, or religion. You have to have one
(or several) but instinct doesn’t provide it ready made. That’s why
identity corresponds to a hunger. It’s something people need,
instinctively, with an intensity that is difficult to exaggerate.
Symbolically-satiable needs are political rocket fuel.
Providing an expedient plug for the aching identity socket is as
close to politics-in-a-nutshell as anything is going to get. At the core
of every ideology is a determination of the model identity — sect,
class, race, gender, sexual-orientation … — and mass implementation
of this ‘consciousness’ is already consummate triumph. After
psychological latching onto the relevant ‘thede’ takes place, nothing
except tactics remains.
Reaction seeks to defend the dying thedes among its own people
— which is already a suggestive repetition. Neoreaction goes meta,
in a world in which the proscription of certain thedes almost wholly
defines concerted enemy action. For one reasonable construction of
the reactionary mainstream (*ahem*), this is already to have arrived
at a natural stopping point. We want our thedes back. Despite the
evident obstacles, or obstacle (the Cathedral) in its path, this
approach plays into the grain of human nature, and thus tends —
understandably — to scare those it wants to scare. If it begins to
804
work, it will face a serious fight.

Outside in, whose mission is awkwardness, is determined to
complicate things. Even the most resolute thedens will probably
welcome the first appendix, which draws attention to the peculiar
introduction of truly morbid punitive identifications. There’s no
reason to think this is new — Nietzsche denounced Christianity for
doing it — but it rises to unmistakable prominence during the
decadence of modernity. Primary identifications, for select —
targeted — groups, cease to be positive thedes, except insofar as
these have become radically negativized. What ‘one’ is, primarily, if
not shielded by credible victimage, is some postmodern variant of
the sinner (racist, cisgendered, oppressor). Such is the hunger for
identity, that even these toxic formations of imposed psychic auto-
destruction are embraced, creating a species of cringing guilt-
consumed sacrificial animals, penned within the contours of ‘our’ old
thedes. Redemption is promised to those who most fully resign
themselves to their own identitarian toxicity, who thus attain a
perverse superiority over those insufficiently convinced of the need
for salvation through self-abolition. “We really, really deserve to die”
beats out a weak “We really deserve to die,” and anybody who still
thinks that it’s OK to live is simply lost. (Only sinners are included in
this arms-race, and the Cathedral tells us clearly who they are.)
An additional complication will be far less digestible, which is
precisely why I would like to align it with the Outer Right. Perhaps
805
Reignition
escaping this structure of captivity cannot possibly take a reverse

path, and a heading into dis-identifications, artificial identities, and
identitarian short-circuits is ‘our’ real destiny. The identity-envy of
the right — however deeply-rooted in an indisputable history of
relentless Cathedralist aggression — cannot ever be anything but
a weakness, given what we know about the political gradient of
modern time. The fact it knows we want to be something, and what
it is we want to be, is the alpha and omega of the Cathedral’s political
competence. It knows what its enemies would be, if they could be
what they want to be. It does not take a deep immersion in Sunzi to
realize the strategic hopelessness of that situation.
I want the Cathedral to be obliterated by monsters, which it does
not recognize, understand, or possess antibodies against. There is
an idiosyncratic element to that, admittedly. I identify far more with
the East India Company that the United Kingdom, with the hybrid
Singlosphere than the British people, with clubs and cults than
nations and creeds, with Yog Sothoth than my ancestral religion, and
with Pythia than the Human Security System. I think true
cosmopolitans — such as the adventurers of late 19th century
Shanghai (both English and Chinese) — are superior to the populist
rabble from which nationalism draws its recruits. That’s just me.
What isn’t just me, is what the Cathedral knows how to beat. That,
I strongly suspect, at least in the large majority of cases, is you.
806
September 25, 2013
Capitalism vs the Bourgeoisie

John Gray makes some telling observations about the debilitating
practical paradoxes of the late-20th century right.
Summing up Thatcher’s outlook, [Charles] Moore writes of her
“unusual mindset, which was both conservative and revolutionary.”
It is a shrewd observation, but Thatcher’s reactionary nostalgia and
revolutionary dynamism had something in common: the sturdy
individualism to which she looked back was as much a fantasy as the
renewed bourgeois life she projected into the future.
Once ‘sturdy individualism’ is dismissed as a fantasy, a horror story

of some kind is the only imaginable outcome. If people are really
too pathetic to take responsibility for their lives, what else could we
possibly expect?
It has surely to be granted that anybody useless enough to be
inadequate to the basics of their own survival, is scarcely going to
exhibit the altruistic surplus value required to effectively take care of
anybody else. Maybe God will make good the deficit, or — to plunge
fully into feel-good superstition — ‘society’? The ultimate implication
of Gray’s argument is that humans aren’t fit to live. (Which isn’t to say
807
Reignition
that he’s wrong.)

The future belongs to frontier people. If no significant fraction of
the human species is any longer capable of being that, then it’s time
for an evolutionary search for something that is. Don’t expect it to be
pretty.
August 24, 2013
INT
INTJJ
Everybody seems to be mad for this stuff, understandably. The
craving to be told what you are will never die, until you do. (That’s
why it’s called me-me-memetics.)
As for the wretched cases who can’t quite claw their way into
the INTJ master-race, there are numerous consolation positions
808
available among the NPCs.

Here’s the obvious role model (but only because you begged):
Still my favorite:
February 6, 2015
809
Reignition
Corrosiv
Corrosivee Individualism?
Everyone’s seen this argument a million times: “So what’s the
problem with libertarianism? The problem is that if you put two
groups one against another, the one who is best able to work
together will overcome the group of individualists.”
An example would be nice. Here are the major modern wars of
necessity (or existential conflicts) the Anglosphere has been involved
in (‘win’ here meaning ‘came out on the winning side’ — conniving to
get others to do most of the dying is an Anglo-tradition in itself):
English Civil War (1642-1651) — Protestant individualists win.
War of the Spanish Succession (17012-1714) — Protestant
individualists win.
Seven Years War (1756-1763) — Protestant individualists win.
American War of Independence (1775-1783) — Protestant
individualists win.
Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) — Protestant individualists win.
American Civil War (1861-1865) — Protestant individualists win.
First World War (1914-1918) — Anglophone individualists win.
Second World War (1939-1945) — Anglophone individualists win.
Cold War (1947-1989) — Anglophone individualists win.
Have I missed any big ones? I’m simply not seeing the “history is
the graveyard of failed individualist societies” picture that seems to
be consolidating itself as a central alt-right myth.
810
This isn’t a moral thing. I get (without great sympathy) the

“organically cohesive societies should win” mantra. If there’s any
evidence at all that it’s a judgment endorsed by Gnon, feel free to
bring the relevant facts to the comment thread.
ADDED: “It’s complicated.” — You’re saying that now?
November 5, 2015
The Atomization T
Trrap
“Hands up everyone who hates atomization.” That isn’t a call for
surrender (at least overtly), but merely an informal poll.
Now try it differently:
“Hands up everyone who hates atomization, but this time without
looking around.” Was the decision-process – perhaps ironically – a
little slower this time? It’s worth thinking about that. Taking a
shortcut that bypasses the social process might be expected to speed
things up. Yet on the other hand – introducing the delay – comes
the hazy recognition: If you make the call privately, you’re already
complicit. A minor formal re-organization of the question transforms
it insidiously. What do you think of atomization, speaking
atomistically? It becomes a strange, or self-referential loop. Modern
history has been like that.
First, though, a few terminological preliminaries. An ‘atom’ is
811
Reignition
etymologically indistinct from an ‘individual.’ At the root, the words

are almost perfectly interchangeable. Neither, relative to the other,
carries any special semantic charge. So if ‘atomization’ sounds like a
metaphor, it really isn’t. There’s nothing essentially derivative about
the word’s sociological application. If it appears to be a borrowing
from physics, that might be due to any number of confusions, but
not to a displacement from an original or natural terrain. Atoms and
societies belong together primordially, though in tension. That’s
what being a social animal – rather than a fully ‘eusocial’ one (like an
ant, or a mole-rat) – already indicates.
Individuals are hard to find. Nowhere are they simply and reliably
given, least of all to themselves. They require historical work, and
ultimately fabrication, even to float them as functional
approximations. A process is involved. That’s why the word
‘atomization’ is less prone to dupery than ‘atom’ itself is. Individuality
is nothing outside a destiny (but this is to get ahead of ourselves).
It’s difficult to know where to begin. (Did Athens sentence
Socrates to death for being a social atomizer?) Individualism is
stereotypically WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich and
democratic), and so tends to lead into the labyrinth of comparative
ethnography. It has been unevenly distributed, in roughly the same
way that modernity has been. Since this is already to say almost
everything on the topic, it merits some dismantling.
The work of Walter Russell Mead provides a useful relay station.
812
The historical questions he has engaged – which concern nothing

less than the outcome of the world – have been embedded within
an intellectual framework shaped by special attention to modern
providential Christianity. What has been the source of the ‘manifest
destiny’ which has placed the keys to global mastery in the hands of
a progressively distilled social project, Protestant, then Puritan, then
Yankee? If not exactly or straightforwardly ‘God’ (he is too subtle for
that), it is at least something that the lineage of Reform Christianity
has tapped with unique effectiveness. Protestantism sealed a pact
with historical destiny – to all appearances defining a specifically
modern global teleology – by consistently winning. Individualization
of conscience – atomization – was made fate.
Six years after Special Providence (2001) came God and Gold,
which reinforced the Anglo-American and capitalistic threads of the
narrative. The boundaries between socio-economic and religious
history were strategically melted, in a way pioneered by Max Weber,
Werner Sombart, and – more critically – by numerous Catholic
thinkers who have identified, and continue to identify, the essence
of modernity as a hostile religious power. Eugene Michael Jones is
Walter Russell Mead on the other side of the mirror. The story each
is telling transforms without significant distortion into that of the
other, once chilled below the threshold of moral agitation. Whatever
it was that happened to Western Christianity in the Renaissance
unleashed capitalism upon the world.
813
Reignition
It is possible to be still cruder without sacrificing much reality.

When considered as rigid designations, Atomization, Protestantism,
Capitalism, and Modernity name exactly the same thing. In the
domain of public policy (and beyond it), privatization addresses the
same directory.
While any particular variant of implicit or explicit Protestantism
has its distinctive theological (or atheological) features, just as any
stage of capitalistic industrialization has its concrete characteristics,
these serve as distractions more than as hand-holds in the big
picture. The only truly big picture is splitting. The Reformation was
not only a break, but still more importantly a normalization of
breaking, an initially informal, but increasingly rigorized, protocol for
social disintegration. The ultimate solution it offered in regard to
all social questions was not argumentation, but exit. Chronic fission
was installed as the core of historical process. Fundamentally, that is
what atomization means.
Protestantism – Real Abstract Protestantism – which is ever
more likely to identify itself as post-Christian, post-theistic, and
post-Everything Else, is a self-propelling machine for
incomprehensibly prolonged social disintegration, and everyone
knows it. Atomization has become an autonomous, inhuman agency,
or at least, something ever more autonomous, and ever more
inhuman. It can only liquidate everything you’ve ever cared about, by
its very nature, so – of course – no one likes it. Catholicism, socialism,
814
and nationalism have sought, in succession, coalition, or mutual

competition, to rally the shards of violated community against it. The
long string of defeat that ensued has been a rich source of cultural
and political mythology. Because there is really no choice but to
resist, battle has always been rejoined, but without any serious sign
of any reversal of fortune.
Under current conditions, atomization serves – uniquely – as an
inexhaustible tube of reactionary glue. Profound aversion to the
process is the sole common denominator of our contemporary
cultural opposition, stretching from traditionalist Catholicism to alt-
right ethno-nationalism. “Whatever our preferred glue, can’t we at
least agree that things have become unglued – and are ever less
glued?” That seems very far from an unreasonable aspiration. After
all, if coalition building is the goal, what – imaginably – could provide
a better rallying point than the very principle of social integrity, even
if this is invoked purely, and negatively, by way of an
anathematization directed at its fatal historic foe? Atomization, in
this regard, brings people together, at least conversationally, though
this works best when the conversation doesn’t get very deep.
Scarcely anybody wants to be atomized (they say). Perhaps they
read Michel Houellebecq’s 1998 novel Atomised (or Elementary
Particles), and nod along to it. How could one not? If that’s where
it ended, it would be hard to see the problem, or how there ever
came to be a problem, but it doesn’t end there, or anywhere close,
815
Reignition
because atomization makes a mockery of words. Atomization was

never good at parties, unsurprisingly. It’s unpopular to the point of
essence. There’s the Puritan thing, and the Ayn Rand thing, and the
nerd thing, and the trigger for Asperger’s jokes – if that’s actually a
separate thing – and no doubt innumerable further social disabilities,
each alone disqualifying, if receiving a ‘like’ in some collective
medium is the goal, because nobody likes it, as we’ve heard (for half
a millennium already). But what we’ve heard, and what we’ve seen,
have been two very different things.
Atomization never tried to sell itself. Instead, it came free, with
everything else that was sold. It was the formal implication of
dissent, first of all, of methodical skepticism, or critical inquiry, which
presupposed a bracketing of authority that proved irreversible, and
then – equally implicit originally – the frame of the contractual
relation, and every subsequent innovation in the realm of the private
deal (there would be many, and we have scarcely started). “So what
do you think (or want)?” That was quite enough. No articulate
enthusiasm for atomization was ever necessary. The sorcery of
revealed preference has done all the work, and there, too, we have
scarcely started.
Atomization may have few friends, but it has no shortage of
formidable allies. Even when people are readily persuaded that
atomization is undesirable, they ultimately want to decide for
themselves, and the more so as they think that it matters. Insofar
816
as atomization has become a true horror, it compels an intimate

cognitive and moral relation with itself. No one who glimpses what
it is can delegate relevant conclusions to any higher authority. Thus
it wins. Every Catholic of intellectual seriousness has seen this, for
centuries. Socialists have too, for decades. The moment of ethno-
nationalist revelation cannot long be delayed. Under modern
conditions, every authoritative moral community is held hostage to
private decision, even when it is apparently affirmed, and especially
when such affirmation is most vehemently asserted. (The most
excitable elements within the world of Islam see this arriving, and are
conspicuously unhappy about the fact.)
Substantially, if only notionally, freedom of conscience might tend
to collectivity, but formally it locks-in individualism ever more tightly.
It defies the authority of community at the very moment it offers
explicit endorsement, by making community an urgent matter of
private decision, and – at the very peak of its purported sacredness
– of shopping. Religious traditionalists see themselves mirrored in
whole-food markets, and are appalled, when not darkly amused.
“Birkenstock Conservatives” was Rod Dreher’s grimly ironic self-
identification. Anti-consumerism becomes a consumer preference,
the public cause a private enthusiasm. Intensification of collectivist
sentiment only tightens the monkey-trap. It gets worse.
American history – at the global frontier of atomization – is
thickly speckled with elective communities. From the Puritan
817
Reignition
religious communities of the early colonial period, through to the

‘hippy’ communes of the previous century, and beyond, experiments
in communal living under the auspices of radicalized private
conscience have sought to ameliorate atomization in the way most
consistent with its historical destiny. Such experiments reliably fail,
which helps to crank the process forward, but that is not the main
thing. What matters most about all of these co-ops, communes, and
cults is the semi-formal contractual option that frames them. From
the moment of their initiation – or even their conception – they
confirm a sovereign atomization, and its reconstruction of the social
world on the model of a menu. Dreher’s much-discussed ‘Benedict
Option’ is no exception to this. There is no withdrawal from the
course of modernity, ‘back’ into community, that does not reinforce
the pattern of dissent, schism, and exit from which atomization
continually replenishes its momentum. As private conscience directs
itself towards escape from the privatization of conscience, it
regenerates that which it flees, ever more deeply within itself.
Individuation, considered impersonally, likes it when you run.
As is well understood, ‘atoms’ are not atoms, and ‘elements’ are
not elements. Elementary particles – if they exist at all – are at least
two (deep) levels further down. Human individuals are certainly no
less decomposable. Marvin Minsky’s ‘society of mind’ is but one vivid
indication of how historical sociology might tilt into the sub-atomic
realm. Particle accelerators demonstrate that shattering entities
818
down to the smallest attainable pieces is a technological problem.

The same holds in the social realm, though naturally with very
different technologies.
To dismiss individuals as metaphysical figments, therefore, would
be the most futile of diversions. Atomization has no constraining
metaphysics, whether in particle physics or in the dynamic
anthropological, socio-historical process. If it promises at times to
tell you what you really are, such whispers will eventually cease, or
come to deride themselves, or simply be forgotten. Protestantism,
it has to be remembered, is only masked, momentarily, as a religion.
What it is underneath, and enduringly, is a way of breaking things.
After so much has already been torn apart, with so many
monstrosities spawned, it is no doubt exhausting to be told that
while almost everything remains to be built, no less still waits to
be broken. Atomization has already gone too far, we are incessantly
told. If so, the future will be hard. There can be no realistic doubt
that it will be extremely divided. The dynamo driving things tends
irresistibly in that direction. Try to split, and it whirls faster.
“Hands up everyone who hates atomization.” No, that isn’t a
question anymore. It would be a call for surrender, if surrender
mattered, but it doesn’t, as we’ve seen. Keep on fighting it, by all
means. It likes that.
June 6, 2017
819
Reignition
Against Univ
Universalism
ersalism
There’s a philosophical objection to any refusal of universalism that
will be familiar from other uses (the denunciation of relativism, most
typically). It requires only one step: Isn’t the denial of the universal
itself a universalist claim? It’s a piece of malignant dialectics because
it demands that we agree. We don’t, and won’t ever, agree.
Agreement is the worst thing that could happen. Merely assent to
its necessity, and global communism, or some close analog, is the
implicit conclusion.
If there is a universal truth, it belongs only to Gnon, and Gnon
is a dark (occulted) God. Traditional theists will be at least strongly
inclined to disagree — and that is excellent. We disagree already, and
we have scarcely begun.
There is no ‘good life for man’ (in general) — or if there is we
know nothing of it, or not enough. Even those persuaded that they
do, on the contrary, know what such a life should be, promote its
universality only at the expense of being denied the opportunity to
pursue it. If we need to agree on the broad contours of such a model
for human existence, then reaching agreement will precede it — and
‘reaching agreement’ is politics. Some much wider world acquires a
veto over the way of life you select, or accept, or inherit (the details
need not detain us). We have seen how that works. Global
communism is the inevitable destination.
820
The alternative to agreement is schism. Secession, geopolitical

disintegration, fragmentation, splitting — disagreement escapes
dialectics and separates in space. Anti-universalism, concretely, is
not a philosophical position but an effectively defensible assertion of
diversity. From the perspective of the universal (which belongs only
to Gnon, and never to man), it is an experiment. The degree to which
it believes in itself is of no concern that matters to anything beyond
itself. It is not answerable to anything but Gnon. What anyone,
anywhere, thinks about it counts for nothing. If it fails, it dies, which
should mean nothing to you. If you are compelled to care about
someone else’s experiment, then a schism is missing. Of course, you
are free to tell it that you think it will fail, if it is listening, but there is
absolutely no need to reach agreement on the question. This is what,
in the end, non-communism means.
Non-universalism is hygiene. It is practical avoidance of other
people’s stupid shit. There is no higher principle in political
philosophy. Every attempt to install an alternative, and impose a
universal, reverts to dialectics, communization, global evangelism,
and totalitarian politics.
This is being said here now, because NRx is horribly bad at it,
and degenerates into a clash of universalisms, as into an instinctive
equilibrium. There are even those who confidently propose an ‘NRx
solution’ for the world. Nothing could be more absurd. The world
— as a whole — is an entropy bin. The most profoundly degraded
821
Reignition
communism is its only possible ‘universal consensus’. (Everyone

knows this, when they permit themselves to think.)
All order is local — which is to say the negation of the universal.
That is merely to re-state the second law of thermodynamics, which
‘we’ generally profess to accept. The only thing that could ever be
universally and equally distributed is noise.
Kill the universalism in your soul and you are immediately
(objectively) a neoreactionary. Protect it, and you are an obstacle
to the escape of differences. That is communism — whether you
recognize it, or not.
March 18, 2016
Against Univ
Universalism
ersalism II
Preliminary throat-clearing (as in part one): In its most rigorous
construction, ‘universalism’ is robust under conditions of rational
argument (i.e. evidence-based logico-mathematical criticism).
Mathematical theorems, in particular [sic], are universal truths. Any
assertions that can be constructed to a comparable level of formal
rigor (and ultimately mechanization) can lay claim to the same status.
However, with the slightest departure from this — rigidly algorithmic
— criterion, controversy rapidly begins. This is not the place and time
to argue the case for transcendental philosophy (within which
822
praxeology in included), but such a case could be made. Ditto strictly

proceduralized empirical science. All of this is a digression.
The question of universalism as it concerns us here is not a matter
of meta-mathematics, epistemology, or the philosophy of science. It
is rather directed at the political scope of argument. Is it mandatory
to demand that argument, according to the highest principles of
(logical) cognitive compulsion, be imposed globally? Does the quality
of argument — however exalted — require its unrestricted
application across space and time? It is the affirmative response to
this question that defines universalism in its ideological sense. Pure
Jacobinism, of course, answers yes. There is a universal duty to
compel submission to the truth. This is the secular form of
evangelical salvationism.
The contrary suggestion, here defended, is that — under real
global conditions — universalism is a catastrophic mistake. The social
scope of rational discussion is itself strictly bounded, and attempts
to extend it (coercively) beyond such limits are politically disastrous.
Laissez-faire envelops the sphere of imperative rationality, and
respects its practical contour. Stupidity does not need to be hunted
down and exterminated. All historical evidence indicates that it
cannot be.
If the universal triumph of reason is an impractical goal,
democratic globalism is exposed as a preposterous error. Minimizing
the voice of stupidity is the realistic — and already extremely
823
Reignition
challenging — alternative. Rare enclaves of rigorously self-critical

realism have as their primary obligation the self-protection of their
(evidently precarious) particularity. In the wider world, fanatical
ignorance and grotesque cognitive malformation rage rampantly.
Borders, filters, tests, and selection mechanisms of all kinds provide
the only defenses against it.
The universalist (Jacobin) model is always a conversation. You
have to join together first, simply to talk, and after that reason will
prevail. That’s the path of the Zeitgeist — Hegelianism at its most
arcane, expedient progressivism at more common levels of
popularity — with its twin-stroke motor of aggressive proselytization
and mass embrace.
“Invade the world, invite the world” is the Sailer formula (quasi-
random link). Amalgamate, then elevate (in the direction of
ascending rationality). This isn’t a (theoretically convincing) claim
about the unique structure of mathematical proof, it’s a (factually
trashed) claim about the global uniformity of human brains. The
‘universality’ it invokes is that of convergence upon the authority of
reason. In other words, it’s a bizarre progressive myth that all self-
protective sanity seeks to maximally distance itself from.
People learn, but only very rarely through sophisticated
argument, or its ‘cunning‘ socio-political avatars. They learn because
they fail badly, and it hurts. ‘Mankind’ is a progressive myth,
incapable of learning anything. When real cultures learn, it is
824
because they have been locked in intimate particularity, such that

the consequences of their own cognitive processes impact intensely
upon them. Anything that separates an individual, or a group, from
the results of its own thoughts, is an apparatus of anti-learning.
Progressive universalism is precisely this.
Dis-amalgamation — isolation — is the way to learn. It’s how
speciation happens, long before learning becomes neurological.
Individuation (at whatever scale) establishes the foundation for
trade, communication, and intellectual exchange. Micro-states
commercialize. Macro-states decay into political resource allocation,
and entropic sludge. Protect your own patch if you want to have
anything to talk about.
There’s going to be a lot of talk about ‘universalism’ rolling in:
Apparently it's a neocon evil to say that Western Civilization

is based in universalism. Funny. I thought it was Jeffersonian.
— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) April 27, 2016
It’s a suicidal ideology in its death-spasm phase, but it won’t die

quietly.
ADDED:
Imperialism is the necessary logical consequence of

universalism…
– Huntington pic.twitter.com/u4TWycpPeu
825
Reignition
— Spatel (@Rjrasva) May 15, 2015
If the West could still do imperialism, that would be one thing, but
it can’t (and can’t even stop doing the opposite).
April 28, 2016
Independence
The philosophical antonym to ‘universality‘ is ‘particularity’. Its
broader, ideological antonym is something closer to independence.
This isn’t a word greatly emphasized by NRx up to this point, or
— for that matter — one figuring prominently in contemporary
discussions of any kind. That’s strange, because it orchestrates an
extraordinary set of conceptual connections.
Independence is a rough synonym for sovereignty, to begin with.
The profound association between these terms bears quite extreme
analytical pressure. The sovereign is that instance capable of
independent decision. An independent state is indistinguishable
from a sovereign one, and to impugn its real sovereignty is to
question its effective independence. Secession is a process of
independence. A (Moldbuggian) Patchwork is a network of
independent geopolitical entities. All relevant trends to geopolitical
fragmentation are independence-oriented. Each executed Exit
826
option (even on a shopping expedition) is an implicit declaration of

independence, at least in miniature. (The relations between
independence and connectivity are subtle and complex.)
Remaining (for a moment) in the narrowest NRx channel, the
entire passivism discussion is independence related. Protest
(‘activism’) is disdained on account of its fundamental dependency
(upon sympathetic political toleration). No social process genuinely
directed towards independence would fall within the scope of this
criticism. (The ‘Benedict Option’ is one obvious example.) ‘Build
something’ epitomizes independence process.
Cannot the entire range of contentions over the individualism /
collectivism dyad be recast in terms of independence? Dependency
exists on a spectrum, but the defining attitude towards it tends to
polarization. Is dependence to be embraced, or configured as a
problem to be worked against? This blog is highly tempted to project
the Left / Right or ‘principal political’ dimension along the axis these
distinct responses define. The Left is enthused by inter-dependency,
and (to a greater or lesser extent) accepts comparative
independence, while for the Right this attitudinal system is exactly
reversed. (The most fundamental tensions within the reactosphere
are clearly related to this articulation.)
One inevitable point of contention — honed over decades of
objection to libertarianism — is captured by the question: Are not
children essentially dependents? Yes, of course they are, but is
827
Reignition
growing up anything other than a process of independence? From

one perspective, a family can be interpreted as a model of inter-
dependence (without obvious inaccuracy). Yet, from another, a
family is an independence-production unit, both in its comparative
autonomy in respect to the wider society, and as a child-rearing
matrix. Families are loci of independence struggle (to which the Left
response is: They shouldn’t have to be). Dependency culture is the
Left heartland.
Independence and autonomy are very closely related terms. All
discussions of autonomy, and even of automation, click quite neatly
onto this template, but this is a point exceeding the ambitions of the
present post.
Abstraction, too, is a topic the tantalizingly overlaps
independence. Whether cognitive independence entirely
accommodates intelligence optimization is also a question for
another occasion.
NRx, XS tentatively proposes, is a political philosophy oriented
to the promotion of independence. (Much pushback is, naturally,
expected.)
May 3, 2016
828
Independence Games
North Korea’s nuclear test on September 3 was registered as a rare
literal geopolitical earthquake. Some public uncertainty persists
about the scale and significance of the tremor. It has been reported
in a range of magnitudes from 6.1 to 6.3 (or even higher), on the
logarithmic Richter Scale. An event of this size suggests an explosion
of several hundred kilotons of TNT, and is consistent with the
detonation of a thermonuclear device. North Korean confirmation
of exactly this occurrence has been received with unprecedented
seriousness.
Nuclear non-proliferation is more idea than reality. Its only
substance is a comparative sluggishness when estimated against the
benchmark of some generally unstated nightmare scenario.
According to such counter-factual consideration, nuclear weapons
might have been more widespread than they are by now. But
exponential processes look like this. They start small, and don’t seem
to be going anywhere dramatic for a while. As the celebrated fable
of exponentiation shows, a modest bowl of rice gets you quite a long
way into the chess board. The supposedly common-sense
assumption that uncontrollable nuclear proliferation isn’t yet
happening requires an argument. (This short essay makes the other
argument.)
The nuclear ‘club’ is too unwieldy to share any kind of seriously
829
Reignition
constraining principle. There is nothing identifiable that entitles a

nation to membership, beyond naked possession of doomsday-tier
military capability. The club was trans-ideological from the start, and
quite soon afterwards highly multicultural. Among members,
reciprocal distrust and even hostility is the norm, which – given the
runaway action-reaction process that settled the membership roster
– could scarcely be unexpected. The behavior of members is
controlled by nothing beyond game theory. It’s also very much worth
mentioning that nobody who manages to get into the club can, in any
practical way, be thrown out.
The United States detonated the world’s first thermonuclear,
two-stage, fusion, or (Teller-Ulam design) ‘hydrogen’ bomb at
Enewetak Atoll on November 1, 1952. The Soviet Union responded
less than a year later, testing its own H-bomb on August 12, 1953.
Tests – or demonstrations – followed in succession from The United
Kingdom (November 1957), China (June 17, 1967), and France
(August 1968). Israel is thought to have conducted a joint test with
the Republic of South Africa – the so-called ‘Vela Incident’ – in
September 22, 1979. In 1991 the South African government claimed
to have assembled, and later unilaterally dismantled, six nuclear
devices. India expanded the spiral of thermonuclear proliferation
into South Asia with a test in May 1998. Pakistan is not known to
have tested anything beyond ‘boosted fission’ devices, but it
formidable nuclear capability is not in question. (A longer essay
830
would have found space at this point to acknowledge Pakistani Abdul

Qadeer Khan’s disproportionate contribution to the global
proliferation dynamic.) Saudi nuclear cooperation with Pakistan can
be expected to accelerate the spread of nuclear weaponry into the
Arabian Peninsula, once Iranian progress in the military application
of the technology triggers the long-anticipated Sunni-Shia arms-race
in weapons of mass destruction. Hence the chain of proliferation
steadily lengthens on its main axis, through Cold War superpower
rivalry, into Chinese triangulation, a responsive Indian bomb, and
then into the fractured world of Islam, via Pakistan (with
unreciprocated Israeli nuclear prowess as additional prompt, and
pretext).
The one-dimensional character of this narrative is an artifact of
its immaturity. The under-development of the proliferation process
appears to present the ‘international community’ with no more than
a single crisis at any time. Things will not look this way for long.
There is nothing essentially mono-linear about the dynamic of cross-
escalation. Increasing momentum is already taking it off the tracks.
As Richard Fernandez notes, lines of nuclear escape are occurring in
several directions at once:
In security affairs the old East-West game payoff matrix has

been replaced by a multidimensional array of new players
many of them sub-national, some of them unknown. The big
831
Reignition
wild card is technology. Disruptive technological change and

new modes of warfare associated with them have upset the
old calculus. North Korea, Iran are not outlier threats but
leading indicators of the changed dynamic. They are the first
samples of a new threat coming onstream.
North Korea claims to have tested thermonuclear weapons in

January 2016, following fission device tests in 2006, 2009, and
2013). Whether as a matter of analytical realism, or of strategically
motivated public skepticism, the claim was met by orchestrated
Western disparagement. The 2017 test shattered this wall of denial.
In the words of Scott D. Sagan, writing at Foreign Affairs: “North
Korea no longer poses a nonproliferation problem; it poses a nuclear
deterrence problem”
While, if traced as a simple historically consistent curve, it is not
yet impossible to see a process of deceleration in this time-line, such
an optic is ceasing to convince. It seems to be part of a collapsing
world order, which is taking its structures of perception down with
it. The assumption of continuity, for instance, now seems reckless
in the extreme. Historical discontinuity in the proliferation dynamic
has been especially notable over recent decades, due to a hardening
pattern whose incentive effects could not easily be more ominous.
The surrender of thermonuclear ambitions has acquired a stark
correlation with subsequent regime destruction, unlike anything
832
seen in the previous era of Cold War superpower patronage.

Ukraine voluntarily surrendered its nuclear arsenal to Russia
upon the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In the Gorbachev era,
this decision no doubt appeared rational – and even prudent.
Subsequent regional developments make it far harder to excuse. It
remains to be seen whether Ukrainian national independence will
have finally been sacrificed to this high-minded call, but rudimentary
geopolitical and domestic security already has been.
The prevailing racial hysteria of our age hazes any analysis of
South African regime change in comparable terms, as it already
hazed the process itself. Future historians will have clearer eyes. It
certainly seems to fit the pattern. No less than with Juche, the
experience of apartheid is that sensitivity to international ‘polite
opinion’ is vastly increased by the absence of nukes.
The Libyan lesson has been the most lurid to date. Libyan
denuclearization “was peacefully resolved on December 2003”
Wikipedia explains. In a separate article it adds the appendix (more
helpfully still) that “Muammar Gaddafi, the deposed leader of Libya,
was captured and killed on 20 October 2011 during the Battle of
Sirte. … videos of his last moments show rebel fighters beating him
and one of them sodomizing him with a bayonet before he was shot
several times as he shouted for his life.” It would be difficult to devise
a more graphic educational resource against international WMD
non-proliferation compliance.
833
Reignition
This is the background against which North Korean nuclear

obstreperousness is to be gauged. The regime had, in any case,
already made obnoxiousness into a local specialism. Its delinquent
international behavior has long been the stuff of dark comedy. The
country’s cultivated image takes prickly into territory the zoological
porcupine lineage has yet to explore.
In respect to strategic fundamentals, however, the regime’s feral
punk-performance attitude to diplomatic conduct is not the principal
issue. Bad attitude makes for stimulating diplomatic theater, but it
decorates the fundamentals of threat. Focus on capabilities, not
motivations, is a strategic principle that cannot be over-stressed. In
the case of North Korea, and others no doubt soon to follow,
however, it is a principle that requires complete inversion. A definite
incapacity rises, instead, to strategic prominence.
The extremity of the emerging North Korean threat is a function
of weakness, in many respects, but most centrally regarding its new
responsibilities for deterrence management. Insecure nuclear
arsenals are destabilizing, since they incline to first use, on the use-
it-or-lose-it principle. Vulnerability to a first-strike is a continuous
prompt to pre-emption.
North Korea is a geographically small nation, with crude
command-control structures, very limited early warning capabilities,
and an exclusive reliance on exposed land-based ballistic missile
platforms for warhead delivery. In other words, it is destined to
834
remain on a hair-trigger from the moment it crosses the deterrence

threshold. Rather than being a splitting headache to the world order
by relentless, malignant initiative, it will henceforth be one by simple
strategic default. The world will have become a city built under
Vesuvius, quite regardless of any planning decisions or philosophies
of risk. An epoch of peril is opening.
Under these conditions, mere ‘capability’ becomes
extraordinarily provocative, and incompetence is automatically
terrorizing. Yet, while this dilemma is not difficult to understand, it
is perhaps a little too difficult to be captured by any public debate
conducted at a realistically imaginable level of sophistication. Insofar
as there is anything like a court of global mass opinion, it can be
confidently expected to miss the strategic essentials and lose itself in
multilateral theater performances. Geostrategic realities and mass
perceptions are on diverging trajectories.
The prevalent delusions tend to be simplifying, and retarded (in
the strict sense). They lag the diffusive trend, and thus invoke
unrealistically economical structures of agency, drawn back towards
the long-lost ideal of bipolarity. The age of superpowers still
dominates the nuclear imagination.
Because there is no road through Pyongyang that doesn’t end in a
pit full of diplomatic punji sticks, the temptation is to fantasize a road
through Beijing. No such thoroughfare exists. Relations between
China and the North Korean regime have reached their lowest point
835
Reignition
since the Korean War, and are now frankly hostile. The Kim Jong-un
regime has sought to extirpate Chinese influence from its leadership,
with spectacular ruthlessness. Targeting of Chinese urban centers
by the North Korean arsenal is no longer unimaginable, or, in China,
unimagined. After all, the natural target of a deterrent is the greatest
threat to the wielding nation’s sovereignty. It is near-inevitable that
China will occupy this role in the North Korean case. Chinese
impotence in respect to North Korea is what the North Korean
nuclear arsenal is largely – and perhaps even primarily – about.
Tyler Cowen describes Robert Heinlein’s (1966) The Moon is a
Harsh Mistress as “perhaps the best novel for understanding the
logic of a future conflict with North Korea.” He then adds:
“furthermore Catalonians should read it too. Most of all, I recall upon
my reread that this book was my very first exposure to game-
theoretic reasoning.” Not only exotic bombardment (by “electronic
catapult”), independence struggle, and games, but also a world order
reconstructed by the rise of China, and even a “malicious AI” who
acquires strategic agency. Evidently, already half a century ago,
Heinlein is exploring a durable cluster of concerns. At the very core:
There can be no question of achieving or maintaining independence
without the capacity to inflict serious harm upon those who might
seek to prevent it.
Independence, in its geopolitical sense, fuses liberty and security
indissociably. Autonomy – which is exactly sovereignty – requires
836
insensitivity to coercion, and is thus the negative of foreign

compelling threats. The analytical equivalence between reciprocal
independence and a ‘balance of terror’ submits national autonomy
to a geopolitical form of general relativity. Since no such thing as
absolute security is realistic, sovereignty exists only in degrees,
within tense networks. The tension is the game.
Thomas Schelling’s pioneering application of game theory to
nuclear strategy remains the point of ingress into this world. The
core reality of MAD games is easily misunderstood. Massive (or non-
reiterating) retaliation is – at the stage it comes due – by immediate
estimation irrational. It is then too late to contribute anything but
compounded harm, regardless of its occasion. Under hypothetical
conditions of amnesia and unconstrained action, it can never make
sense. Yet, paradoxically, the ability to make credible retaliatory
threats is the basic underpinning of rationality during prior
negotiation games. Without it, there can be no reason for competitor
restraint. The requirement, then, is for a future agent to be firmly
committed to a conditional course of action that – at the potential
point of execution – will be non-compelling.
Mutual assured destruction has been derided for its madness, but
it is no less an outer-limit of sanity. Its logic is as rigorously
implacable as any found within the social and historical sciences. The
extreme moral disturbance that it arouses speaks in favor of its
uncompromised rationality. Anguished intuition counts for nothing
837
Reignition
in its cold calculus, unless as a technical obstacle. The fact that

people find this logic of inherited fatal commitments intolerable, as
dramatized with exceptional vividness in the opening sequences of
the 1983 movie WarGames, is our problem. The process is re-routed
by our squeamishness, but not at all derailed. It has long been
suspected that humans are too weak for MAD.
As an expression of absolute commitment, suicide terrorism
appears to provide MAD with a microscopic model, but it is a weak
and misleading one. Beyond difference in scale, suicide terrorism
fails through execution. It communicates through actualization – or
demonstration of will – which is the negative of deterrence. (Or
perhaps, deterrence of a kind, expensively purchased.) The terror
at the edge of the present, and of the future, has different models.
Among these, civilization-scale ‘quantum suicide’ is perhaps the most
exotic philosophical and ideological conception on its way to us.
Given the assumption of a (Level-3 or higher) multiverse,
comprehensive apocalypse is rationalized as the pruning of sub-
optimal branches. It operates as reality editing. The game theoretic
consequences of such a perspective are intriguing. It increases the
credibility of threats (if accepted as a serious intellectual
commitment), while adapting the pay-off matrix in a fashion that can
only be considered destabilizing. Classic MAD works best among
those who envisage an outcome as the worst thing in the world, yet
commit to it anyway.
838
We approach here one of the very deepest problems in social and

institutional engineering. It might be called the Odysseus Problem.
In sailing past the Sirens, Odysseus anticipated the subversion of
commitment, and thus put in place a socio-technical mechanism to
bind his own future action. The structure is that of a ‘chicken game’
– a mutant variant of prisoner’s dilemma, in which the player who
swerves loses. If you could back down, you might. In both Odysseus’
dilemma and that of the chicken player, the elimination of future
discretion figures as a strategic resource. The requirement for self-
binding inclines to a technological freezing of decision. Strategic
problems of the ‘chicken game’ type thus tend inexorably to
automation.
If AI is brought into play by the intrinsic dynamics of nuclear
confrontation, it does not stop there. AI has a WMD potentiality
proper to itself. There is no obvious horizon to what an algorithm
could do. The same capabilities that enable algorithmic control of
WMD arsenals equally enable such arsenals to be swapped-out for
AI itself. An enemy arsenal under algorithmic control is only ‘theirs’
by contingencies of software dominance. From the military
perspective – among others oriented to negative capability – the
potential destructiveness of the technology is without determinable
limit. Anything under software control falls into its realm. Which is to
say that, asymptotically, everything does. But it doesn’t end there. AI
also promotes an advance into virtuality.
839
Reignition
Nuclear weaponry cuts a convergent path into purity of

conception. No hydrogen bomb has yet been used against an enemy
(or “in anger” as the singularly inappropriate expression goes).
Thermonuclear warheads remain among a select category of virtual
weapons, alongside a variety of chemical and biological agents,
whose usage has been exclusively diplomatic, or even philosophical.
The value of this military machinery is strictly counter-factual. Those
‘possible worlds’ in which they have been operationalized support
little, if any, value of any kind. Weaponry supporting their
potentiality floats the ontological option of extreme negative utility.
They are – in the most rigorous sense – nightmare generators.
There is no reason (at all), then, to think that nuclear weapons
are the last word in mass destruction. Nor can it be assumed that
mass destruction is the ultimate criterion for deterrent weaponry. It
is not only that high-energy physics opens a vast, rambling bestiary
of virtual catastrophes which we have scarcely begun to peruse
(although this is true). Physics has no monopoly on disaster,
regardless of what its recent privileges might suggest.
It can never be a virtue for a weapon to be indiscriminate, which
is to say imprecise. Turned around, we can say without hesitation or
reservation that it is meritorious in any weapon, however absolutely
devastating, for the greatest possible proportion of the damage it
produces to be inflicted upon the enemy. In other words, a good
weapon discriminates specifically against enemy interests. It hunts.
840
There can be no serious doubt that the genomic biosciences and

software engineering have more to contribute to this pursuit than
physics possibly could.
Stuart Russell describes autonomous weapons as a “new, scalable
class of WMDs.” The systems he is considering would be exemplified
by drone swarms, “hunting in packs like wolves” (as one DARPA
employee was indiscreet enough to reveal). Given enormous
industrial production runs, performance specifications unshackled
from human limitation, and targeting algorithms set for
indiscriminate lethality, the devastating potential of such weapons
would be hard to exaggerate. Their key, confidently predicted
vulnerabilities, however, are at least as significant.
As Russell emphasizes, autonomous weapons could be subverted
by a hostile “software update.” They could be hacked. Behind the
menace of the hacker lies that of advanced artificial intelligence,
mustering superior powers of cryptographic lock-picking and soft
intrusion. Autonomous weaponry is therefore nested into a more
profound threat.
AI designates a culmination of sorts. Nowhere else does
destructive capability and rigid commitment promise to intersect
more dynamically. Nothing separates the weapon from the game. It
also counts, potentially, as an escalation.
Much criticism of the Cold War nuclear arms race already
configured it as an existential risk, before the term had been coined.
841
Reignition
Between an X-risk and an extreme deterrent there no definite

boundary. The difference is technical. Deterrence is a mode of
employment. It uses negative utility. In this respect anything bad
could be useful, were it not that a deterrent requires a trigger, under
the control of the negotiating agent (at the point of negotiation).
To threaten a potential aggressor with an asteroid strike makes no
sense, unless an asteroid strike can be delivered. The same holds
for geological disasters in general. All of which means that the
acquisition of engineering capabilities on the largest scales, such as
geo-engineering, weather control, climate regulation, and asteroid
defenses – perhaps developed explicitly to avert potential existential
risks – will inevitably expand the domain of deterrence options. In
other words, techno-economic progress and the escalation of
deterrence infrastructure are only formally differentiated. There is
no materially persuasive way to improve the world that does not – on
its occult side – widen the horizons of geopolitical horror.
Beside what could be had, there is the question of who has it.
Beside the qualities of WMD-armed antagonists, their mere number
is a source of terror, itself. It is only natural that multilateral
deterrence should be found more threatening than its bilateral ideal,
and now distant predecessor. Complexity scales nonlinearly in
networks, and quickly becomes mathematically intractable. No one
has any idea how massively distributed networks of insecurity would
work. It is quite probably impossible to know. Deterrence is about to
842
change phase.
Toothpaste doesn’t return to the tube just because it makes a
mess. Once it is out, inconvenience has ceased to be any kind of
argument against it. The dangers of a world in which ubiquitous
deterrence capacity reigns are both obvious and immense. This is
nevertheless the world we are entering. The trends driving it, from
both the geopolitical and the techno-economic sides, are by any
realistic estimation irresistible. Cheaper and more diverse
nightmare weaponry is becoming available within an increasingly
disintegrated international order. A variety of self-reinforcing
dynamics – including but not restricted to those of the arms-race
type – are further stimulating the process. Cascading acceleration is
all but inevitable.
When conceived with maximal cynicism (i.e. realism), geostrategic
independence is a direct function of deterrence capability. Don’t
tread on me is the colloquial statement, whose perfect applicability
is commonly under-estimated. The rattlesnake, combining fearsome
weaponry with signaling, makes for a natural totem of deterrence.
Neither venom, nor rattle, is dispensable. “Diplomacy without arms
is like music without instruments,” runs the famous analogy,
attributed to Frederick the Great. Game theory recognizes military
capability as a communication medium.
It is not only that robust independence depends upon deterrence.
Reciprocally, geostrategic liberty necessarily tends to the production
843
Reignition
of deterrence capability. An alien freedom, which could do anything,

is – ineliminably – a threat. It provides the comprehensive model of
the military threat. Whether ‘they hate us for our freedom’ or not,
they have no choice but to fear us for it, and inversely. Geopolitics
has no other origin. Any state without the will to scare also lacks the
will to exist.
It’s all far more basic than we’ve been led to believe. As Niall
Ferguson writes (realistically):
In the final analysis, borders are a function of power. If you

can’t defend them, they are just dotted lines. The Kim
dynasty’s calculation has been that nukes are the ultimate
border guards. We shall soon find out if that calculation was
correct. If so, many more states will want them.
Every geopolitical entity that is serious about sovereignty will want

them, or something of at least equivalent deterrent credibility. The
only alternative is naked dependency, made ever more
uncomfortable by increasing global multipolarity, among the stark
wreckage of any ‘world order’ or ‘international community’
grounded in the collective fantasy of miraculously authorized super-
national norms. Explosive proliferation will be something the world
has not seen before, even if it has already actually been there to see.
We can be confident that the geopolitical order will be reconfigured
844
by it.
What does explosive proliferation mean? Potentially, many
things. For instance, vectors of technological – and thus economic –
development are certain to be, to some significant degree, oriented
by it. As artificial intelligence is factored into policy decision-making
not only as an essential contributor to command, control,
communications and intelligence (C3I), but as an intrinsic weapon of
mass destruction, its prominence will be still further elevated.
WMD proliferation implies a multiplication of real geopolitical
agencies. It is rigorously indistinguishable – in both directions – from
a disintegrated world. Established relations of dependency are
broken, releasing unanticipated – and evidently hazardous –
freedoms. Whether or not this is the world we want, it looks
increasingly inevitable that it is the world we are to have.
November 20, 2017
845

Tome2 - Nick Land's Writings From 2011

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Tome2 - Nick Land's Writings From 2011

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Tome2 - Nick Land's Writings From 2011

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Reignition

NICK LAND'S WRITINGS (2011-)

Tome II - The Dark Enlightenment:

Tome II - The Dark Enlightenment: Neoreactionaries Head for the

Tome II - The Dark Enlightenment: Neoreactionaries Head for the

Table of Contents .................................................................................................

CHAPTER SIX - RECENT EVENTS ...............................................610

The Dark Enlightenment (P

Neo-reactionaries head for the eexit

Enlightenment is not only a state, but an event, and a process. As

because a retrograde, or reactionary, ‘dark enlightenment’ amounts

an atavism, or confirmation of dire repetition.

The dread of democracy by libertarians and classical liberals

Lind and the ‘neo-reactionaries’ seem to be in broad agreement that

bounds of democratic possibility. Since winning elections is

is recognizably Hobbesian, a coherent dark enlightenment, devoid

As a hereditary monopolist, a king regards the territory and

Political agents invested with transient authority by multi-party

detriment of their foes. Whatever is left behind becomes a weapon

so it’s best to eat it all now.

Moldbug’s formative influences are Austro-libertarian, but that’s

… libertarians cannot present a realistic picture of a world

His awakening into neo-reaction comes with the (Hobbesian)

To a neocameralist, a state is a business which owns a

business, by dividing logical ownership into negotiable

Firstly, it is essential to squash the democratic myth that a state

are potentially worth, and how the authority to grant them is

secure country, of a kind that is able to draw customers. No voice,

… although the full neocameralist approach has never been

In European classical antiquity, democracy was recognized as a

specific, historically identifiable kind:

… a received tradition I call Universalism, which is a

To comprehend the emergence of our contemporary predicament,

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have

for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!—

Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and

Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and

We are a Republican Government, Real liberty is never found

More on voting with your feet (and the incandescent genius of

Don’t trust the attribution of the ‘Benjamin Franklin’ quote, above.

The Dark Enlightenment (P

The arc of history is long, but it bends towards zombie apocalypse

David Graeber: It strikes me that if one is going to pursue

Googling ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’ together is highly enlightening, in

Most people, including most Americans, would be surprised

The Constitution is primarily a structural and procedural

As the spirit of reaction digs its Sith-tentacles into the brain, it

democracy emerges within the sweep of a far broader modernistic

Simple historical chronology suggests that industrialization supports

‘general will’, a radically democratized society insulates parasitism

stocking up on dried food, ammunition, and silver coins, or

This is democracy in a consummate form that defies further

My belief is that Professor Dawkins is not just a Christian

just a Calvinist atheist. He is an Anglo-Calvinist atheist. In

feint, and a consistent upgrade of religious reformation, guided by a

It gets worse. Moldbug seems to be holding Huxley’s hand, and …

– if not derided – without any immediate assumption that the critic

The Dark Enlightenment (P