Amateur Applications of Anti-Oedipal Thinking

After a long and difficult journey, I finished Anti-Oedipus the other day. I might, might write a kind of book review of it in a while, but I thought it worth throwing a few thoughts out there (partly because I'm desperately trying to blog more often) following reading an essay of Nick Land's: 'Making It With Death: Remarks on Thanatos and Desiring Production', about Deleuze & Guattari. I decided to have a crack at it as I made the obvious mistake before of trying to read an essay about Deleuze & (to a lesser extent) Guattari without having actually read any Deleuze & Guattari. And, although it will require some closer reading at some point, the most potent remarks came towards the end, in which Land looks at the shift in emphasis in DeleuzoGuattarian thought away from the absolute, raw deterritorialisation of Anti-Oedipus in its follow-up: A Thousand Plateaus. In a word, Deleuze & Guattari fear that ripping up all the strata of moralising repression may result in the release of the sheer suicidal horror that is Nazism (which is contrasted with, one might say, in borrowing D & G's terminology [which is borrowed from Marx in this case, I believe] the relative Asiatic coolness of the Fascist State). Speaking purely for myself, I would certainly sympathise with that line of thinking, but at present that is neither here nor there.

This is perhaps all a little difficult to follow. From what I understand, the fear grows in D & G's hearts and minds that the call for a radical, radical freedom of identity and discovery that decoding and deterritorialisation issues forth, one that would rid of us what Nietzsche calls 'moralic acid', has the awful potential of becoming the shrieking nightmare of civilisation. That is, there is nothing to restrain the decoded flows from recombining into the racialist, paranoiac-reactionary mechanisms of an Nth Reich. This tendency, this possibility of pushing deterritorialisation too far, is something that needs to be routed, and justifies the rigorous policing of thought.

Some further background for all this.

I have a piece vaguely planned, the working title of which is 'Is Nietzsche's Hammer Left-Handed?' Emphasis on 'working title' there. Anyway, it will be a probably quite superficial discussion about the loss of vitality in the Left, but it's a hell of a long way away as I want to actually try and put some real effort into it. But the thought that accompanies it is, essentially, that there is a puritanical streak in a lot of Leftist thinking, the example par excellence being Social Justice, that strikes me as being not-at-all-dissimilar to the anti-life that Nietzsche diagnosis in Christianity (not a position I entirely agree with, though he certainly latched onto something of enormous importance which I don't believe Christianity has ever made a wholly successful rebuttal to). It is possessed of an obsession with moral purity, in contrast with the evil false-morality of its opponents on the right, typically as exemplified in the nebulous notion of 'privilege'. 'Privilege' implies preference, bias, difference, hierarchy, as opposed to equality and fairness. As has been well-documented, this often includes fanatical attempts at self-policing, at attempts at expunging all trace of 'privilege' from its ranks, including from the souls of its constituent members.

From the above mentioned essay of the good Mr Land's, I present the following observations:

'[Leftist m]orality has become the complacent whisper of a triumphant priest: you'd better keep the lid pressed down on desire, because what you really want is genocide. Once this is accepted there is no limit to the resurrection of prescriptive neoarchaisms that come creeping back as a bulwark against the jack-booted unconscious: liberal humanism, watered-down paganism, and even stinking relics of Judaeo-Christian moralism. Anything is welcome, as long as it hates desire and shores up the cop in everyone's head.' [Fanged Noumena, Urbanomic, 2014, p. 280]

And...

'Trying not to be a Nazi approximates one to Nazism far more radically than any irresponsible impatience in destratification.' [p. 285]

And...

'...Nazism is morality itself, heir to Europe's respectable history: that of witch-burnings, inquisitions, and pogroms. To want to be in the right is the common substratum of morality and genocidal reaction...' [Ibid.]

That is, if I've read this correctly: the Left's obsession with ideologico-spiritual-moral purity is of course NOT identifiable with the Nazi obsession with racial purity, but its attempts at policing itself and expunging all tendency that can be classed as a manifestation of 'privilege' is a suicidal tendency, one that will transform the liberating, revolutionary potential of the Left into nothing more than a paranoiac-reactionary mechanism that will do nothing but replace one system of domination and control with another. The pseudo-Christian theology of Original Sin that SJ seems to deploy against itself, as well as vicious processes of public-shaming and condemnation, all stink of these resurrected 'prescriptive neoarchaisms.' Love and equality and fairness are all very well for us, but as for them...

It is, of course, lazy and inaccurate reasoning to compare the Left with the Nazis, but that is not the point Land is making (if he is, well, it's not the point that I'm making). It should be clear from the fact that Land identifies his 'Nazis' (who are, of course, not the historical Nazis, or at least not entirely) with the 'moralic acid' that the DeulezoGuattarian revolutionary motion is attempting to rid itself of, that the Left's attempts at purifying itself are and will be futile. Its desire to rid itself of impurity (preference, hierarchy, control) makes it little different from what it combats. To paraphrase Nietzsche, it has become what it is battling. Attempting to purge 'Nazi' elements makes nothing but 'Nazis'.

This is an old, old song that I'm singing. It's not an original insight (Land called this in the 90s), but it's one that's worth making. D & G make several passing remarks at how, when one attempts to determine where the Russian Revolution or psychoanalysis went 'bad,' that is, became about control and not liberation, one always ends up going back further and further and further... When did the Left end up like this? When did it become about making us all more afraid, more poor, less happy, less free?

I'm reminded of the old joke:

The Communist Party Central Committee are having a meeting. The General Secretary stands up and says 'Comrades, when the revolution comes, there will be strawberries and cream for everyone!' All his comrades cheer, except for one who says 'But, comrade, I don't like strawberries and cream.'

'Ah,' says the General Secretary, 'that's the beauty of it. When the revolution comes, you will like strawberries and cream.'

*

For the sake of fairness, it should be observed that this is obviously present in Neoreaction. Putting aside the 'Darkside Deleuzianism' of the techno-commercialist current of Neoreaction, with its rampant desire to overthrow regulation of the capital flows and all that can limit the processes of the market, we find something very puritanical and controlling. A lot of Neoreaction is terrified of entryism, and disgusted at the thought of being co-opted by disaffected Cathedral loyalists (the most obvious example being the almost comical response some have at the popularity of Justine Tunney, a transwoman, who is sometimes taken as a kind of unofficial spokesperson for post-Moldbug thought). How about monarchism, neofeudalism, ethno-nationalism and traditionalist Catholicism as 'neoarchaisms' that are terrified at what has been unleashed by the deterritorialising tendencies of modernity?

Deleuze and Guattari's most important observation has already been mentioned above: when one fights, one resembles one's opponent. I'm not a Neoreactionary, but I certainly sympathise with the desire for Exit a lot these days. 

In Defence of Moderation and Reasonableness

ADDED: the link to The Federalist below contains a transphobic remark. I don't endorse this remotely, as I'm not a transphobe (and I don't mean that in a wish-washy libertarian way either, I actively endorse gender-transition as a legitimate response to one's socially determined gender identity). Just wanted to make that clear.

With the general election only a few days away now, I think it prudent to talk a little about the value of talking. A friend of mine is a Catholic, and at university we often talked about our conflicting opinions on religion, the Church, spirituality and so on. Well, I say 'talked'. Often he'd be irritatingly moderate and reasonable (title drop!) while I'd try and turn him into a kind of socially-conservative straw-man I could then try and rip apart. Try, and usually fail. Again: damn moderate, damn reasonable.

In particular, when same-sex marriage was being debated in Parliament a couple of years ago I was somewhat insistent that it probably wasn't something that we could really discuss, on grounds (call it lazy Wittgenstein-ism) that we inhabited two very different worlds and our definitions of marriage would basically just pass one another by. He, however, would have none of that, and held that there was no good reason at all to try and shut down discussion of the matter just because we came from different religions traditions (I was brought up in a mainline Protestant church and now attend an Anglo-Catholic church, somewhat ironically). And, of course, he was right and I was wrong. There was never any reason to avoid having a serious, moderate and reasonable discussion about what legal redefinition of marriage might entail, for good or ill. 

But there is a worryingly noticeable trend in politics these days that seems hostile towards discussion, towards dialogue. This often feels particularly true of the Left. Indeed, it almost feels as if the Left considers having to explain itself to be an imposition. One sometimes observes almost religious horror when the Left encounters different opinions, as if only monsters could posses them. None of this is exclusive to the Left, of course, there has been much character assassination courtesy of the right too. But I do definitely feel that the single greatest failing of the modern Left is its refusal to feel uncomfortable, its refusal to consider potential flaws in its own arguments. The title of this article from The Federalist says it all- The Paradox of Dogma: How the Left is Crippling Itself. 

Of course, the tone of both the pieces I've linked to suffers from the same problem- they both are, to a greater or lesser extent, attempts to rubbish the Left by accusing it of profound irrationality and intellectual cowardice. They are, of course, wrong to suggest that this is a universal quality of Leftism, but they are right to acknowledge that the tendency is present and, in my experience, the Left is not doing enough to combat this plea for silence rather than conversation. All attempting to avoid dialogue does is miss the opportunity to examine how water-tight one's principles are. If one's principles do not survive their encounter with an opponent in debate, how do you expect them to survive their first brush with reality?

I am picking on the Left here, though. What I am talking about is true of of the Right as well. I just tend to notice it more on the Left, probably because I'm looking out for it and, frankly, because I don't know many conservatives. It does worry me, though, that many people I know who are around my age and come from the same background as I do are Left-wing almost as a matter of course. Another friend of mine, when I was telling him once about Neoreaction, asked me how I could tolerate 'those people'...

Accepting dogmatic Left-wing principles simply because they are in opposition to conservative thought is an act of un-thinking, and nothing more. And, again, this does obviously apply to the Right as well. One wonders if this would have happened if the Right had been more willing to reflect upon its own received wisdom, rather than merely shaking its fist at modernity because it is different.

*

Some final, hopefully both moderate and reasonable points. 

None of the following should ever be considered synonymous with 'Left-wing', 'Right-wing', 'conservative' or 'progressive':

• Stupid
• Intelligent
• Good
• Evil
• Always correct
• Always incorrect
• So obviously correct we don't need to discuss it
• So obviously wrong we don't need to discuss it

To refuse to enter into dialogue with your opponent is rarely a sign of intellectual virtue. 

In Review: Putin vs Putin by Alexander Dugin

In a rather strange twist of fate, it turns out I went to university with someone who now works at Arktos Media. A while ago, I got a message from her asking if I'd be interested in reviewing the new Dugin book, Putin vs Putin. Alexander Dugin is someone I was, of course, very much aware of, and I approached the opportunity to delve a little into his world with curiosity and, to be honest, trepidation.

What an odd, odd book this was to read. It is constructed from several years of work assembled thematically (I assume). As these individual papers were often written years apart, the experience of reading the book is a very disjointed one. Further to that, Dugin has written much of it with the (understandable as these were all originally published in Russian) assumption that the reader will already be largely aware of most of the events and individuals he's discussing. To the credit of the fine folk responsible for editing and translation, the copious footnotes are able to resolve this, but having to work through long lists of Russian names at the bottom of almost every page to figure out who Dugin is attacking or praising is a laborious task.

It was not a fun read. Indeed, considering its short length, it took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to read it, with many pauses in which I fled to read more accessible books, or made serious in roads into equally strange but somewhat more palatable books. A serious problem was that it was consistently substantially more interesting when it wasn't actually talking about Vladimir Putin. The digressions Dugin takes to discuss the various competing schools of radical conservatism, his geopolitcal theories, his defence of Russian Christian nationalism and, of course, his robust assertions of Tradition and the Fourth Political Theory are all compelling and fascinating (though I think it a good idea to state at this point, just to avoid any ambiguity, I do not agree with him), while his long discussions on what Putin's actions mean, what the people around the President want, and so on, and so on, became rather tedious. This tedium was likely more to do with, as I've said above, the unfamiliarity the reader is likely to have with many of the individuals that Dugin devotes his attention to. Only a student of contemporary Russian politics is likely to be able to follow the paths that Dugin takes around these people and events.

However, the single biggest problem with the book is that it simply shouldn't exist in the format it does. Like I said, this is put together from over a decades worth of separately written pieces of work. As such, this book should have been compiled in one of two ways, either as an anthology of these pieces with notes on the context of the writing of each one (perhaps with Dugin's comments on whether or not he still agrees with the position presented in each piece), arranged chronologically, or thematically maybe; or, these original texts should have been taken as the substance for a new, original work, in which Dugin would chart how his opinions on Putin and the Russian situation have shifted over the years. In so writing, the repetitions and contradictions could have been easily resolved through simple editorship and contextualisation. It seems that (I imagine this is the fault of the editors or publishers of the original Russian edition) the book is attempting to be the latter, but this wasn't properly or fully executed.

As to whether or not it's worth reading: with hesitation, I would say 'yes'. How much the reader's life is likely to be enriched by the experience, I cannot say. Probably reasonably little. This being said, the book is a valuable reminder that the liberal order is not as secure as many of us, myself included, would like to believe. A substantial number of very powerful people consider our paradise to be their hell. That is the hard lesson of the 21st Century for the West, and Dugin seems to almost delight in it.

Some final words. Dugin's shifting portraits of Putin are confounding, as the picture blurs frequently into something new, but that is indeed exactly the point. Putin, Dugin concludes, is a sheer pragmatist. He is the ultimate postmodern politician, he is a liberal and reformer and a moderniser and an imperialist and a patriot and defender of Christendom, all at once, depending on the time of day. This pseudo (super?) position is emphasised by the apparent lack of personality of the man. What can we say about Putin's character? Nothing. All we can speak of are his deeds, which are rarely enough to satisfy Dugin's vision of a new, masculine and sacred Russia, a vision it is by no means clear Putin shares any more than it is politically expedient for him to share. Because of this emptiness, Putin can become Dugin's almost-messiah and the West's monster without necessarily really being either.

Despite all this, I could not ever quite shake the thought from my head that Dugin failed to entertain one important possibility: is Putin maybe simply in it for himself?

For some, power is an ends in itself.

Not a Hiatus, Just Laziness

Hello. I'm still here. Busy being a lackey of capitalism, and I've not thought of anything particularly interesting to write since...well, my last post on here.

I'll pull my finger out and try and scribble something down sooner rather than later, hopefully. Though, be warned, I might just end up 'analysing' a Nine Inch Nails music video or something just to get back in to the habit of writing (i.e. it'll be superficial crap dressed up as if it were profound).

But, hopefully, it'll be entertaining.

Stay tuned...

Lovecraft Country, UK

A few years ago now, I introduce a friend to a couple of films: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Exorcist. The latter is...perhaps not best described as one of my 'favourite' films, but it is a film that I admire enormously. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, on the other hand, is a film that I appreciate somewhat less. Very good, of course, especially in its build up of atmosphere, its creation of an otherworldly-ness without appeal to the supernatural, but...I don't know. It leaves me a little cold.

My friend shared this view, along with an interesting observation: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not as scary as The Exorcist because it happens in, well, Texas, a very specific and localised zone. It has to happen there and not here. Its horror, its monsters, are rooted in a particular geography, a particular context. The Exorcist, on the other hand, could occur here. The monster, the demon, is not tied down to a particular locale. The preamble suggests its origins in the Middle East, out of very distant history. It manifests itself in the United States, in the possession of a young girl far, far removed from where the force emerges from. It doesn't matter where it happens, it can happen anywhere.

It could happen here, in our home.

I heard somewhere that, back in the 80s during the 'Video Nasty' panic, one of the arguments made for strict regulation of home videos went along these lines: it is one thing to go to a cinema to see a violent movie, but quite another to experience that in your own home. Going to the cinema removes the film from the homestead, but bringing it into the home, into the place where one is meant to be safe, that has potential for great danger. The danger is that experiencing something horrific in one's own home undermines its feeling of security, its safety, its very homeliness.

However, I want to discuss another kind of horror. The realisation that the homely was, in fact, never homely at all.

*

Regular readers of this blog will know that I'm fond of my walks. Last weekend, I departed from my usual route and found this:

I knew that this monument existed but I wasn't expecting something so...cinematic. Things only got better, however:

This was spooky. Very spooky. This is what I want to explore in this post, a feeling of horror in the home that is not that of the intruder. It is, rather, the recognition of the unhomeliness of the homely. That is, discovering that one's home, the familiar, contains and always has contained an unfamiliar, unsafe dimension. Not that something foreign has entered and changed things, but rather discovering that home was always foreign. This is the feeling so well expressed in David Lynch's Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet. The hidden-yet-always-present wrongness of the homely.

That was the feeling I had when I came across this site. This wasn't Texas, this was home. And in home, my home, there was something scary, something wrong, something unfamiliar. You might think that that's a lot to read into a disused farming structure, but the atmosphere, the setting sun, the cold, the silence, the remoteness, the strangeness of it made for a powerful experience.

I live on the outskirts of the city, and as such I'm treated to an unusual environment where, on one side, there is the city and modernity, and on the other side I can walk for miles and meet less than a dozen people. I can simply venture out and walk, and see where I end up. As such, there has always been a feeling of living on a border, that beyond there lies...the outside. There is the rational realisation that this is not the case, that there lie suburbs and towns and villages and roads and pylons, but that isn't how it feels.

I digress.

This is the feeling that Lovecraft is able to conjure. That the horror does not reside far away, it is close, it is near, it is here and always has been. The Old Ones are not a foreign element, they have been here far longer than we have. Our homes where never our homes, they were always unhomely. To notice something that has always been unnoticed, and yet always present, that is so deeply uncomfortable that it is difficult to articulate the sensation.

I think that this is part of the special frisson that the conspiracy theory is able to produce. I treat conspiracy theories as a kind of myth-making, an elaborate, world-structuring fiction whose fictitiousness is not known to those who possess them. Perhaps the appeal is the same appeal as that of a Lovecraft or a Ligotti: beneath the surface of the familiar is something utterly unfamiliar. Familiar things that, nominally, guarantee our security and freedom are, in fact, undermining and robbing us of both these things. Worse than that: these are things we never possessed. The familiar was always other. The government is not and has never been corrupt, it has always been the Illuminati and that is that.

The planes overhead are leaving something in the air...

The schools, the universities, they're brainwashing the youth...

President Kennedy wasn't assassinated, he was sacrificed...

The successful conspiracy theory functions on the same level as a successful horror story.

*

I had a dream recently.

I dreamt that near where I live, there was an installation, scientific-military. It was an array of large satellite dishes, angled skywards. Everyone knew, and had always known, that these were not innocent, that they were there for a reason that was not being admitted publicly. That they weren't right. 

It wasn't a dark night. The sky was a pale blue, as if it were lit up by a full moon. A kind of not-night. And I am there, near this array which is there for a reason we can only guess at, and there is a man with me. He points to the sky, the clear not-night sky, and I can see around the stars a rippling, like a heat haze. The man says: 'You see that? If you look closely, you can see HAARP at work!'

Reads of 2014

In order to prove I am still alive and am still writing, I have decided to perform the relatively simple act of Writing About Things I Have Read. I set myself two rules when constructing this list: I can't count books I've not finished, including anthologies (meaning I have to ignore One Hundred Years of Solitude, Fanged Noumena and House of Leaves). Blogs don't count, but individual pieces on blogs do. The absolute best book I read last year was The Kindly Ones, which I've already written about.

These aren't in any particular order.

Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood

Disturbing, shocking, moving, DEFINITELY NOT SCIENCE FICTION, and only the second Atwood novel I've read, Oryx & Crake was a superb read. A frightening vision of the future as it very well could turn out, and an equally frightening reflection on the uncomfortable contingency of human domination of the world, and even on the need for something that at least does the job of religion, I cannot recommend this book enough.

The book follows the same character along two narrative lines, one set after the (initially nameless) apocalypse, the other winding its way to the events that leave humanity virtually extinct. As such, we know from the beginning that things aren't going to turn out exactly happily ever after. Depressing, yes, but also oddly, though quietly, hopeful. Not read the sequels yet, though I think I'll make them my next read.


The Rediscovery of Man by Cordwainer Smith

A potent reminder of how imaginative science fiction can be, the criminally under-appreciated Cordwainer Smith (seriously, check out the Wiki. His godfather was Sun Yat-Sen, he was an advisor to President Kennedy and he literally wrote the book on psychological warfare) was a force to be reckoned with. Combining prose that borders on the mythic with an almost uncomfortably heart-felt moral conviction, rooted in his adopted Anglican Christianity, Smith's science fiction is unlike anything I've come across before.

An anthology all set in the same universe, The Rediscovery of Man is reminiscent of Dune with its far-future humanity wracked with decadence and ennui, reliant on the life-extending Santaclara drug, also called 'Stroon', which is found on only one planet in the known universe. The comparisons more or less end there. Humanity is governed by the Instrumentality of Mankind, almost God-like human beings that guard and guide the destiny of the species, defending it from threats that the rest of humanity do not even know exist. There are also the Underpeople, animals radically altered to resemble and think like humans who are used as slaves; the plight of the Underpeople and their struggle for civil rights is one of the major moral, religious and political themes of Smith's stories.

It is very difficult to put in to words how imaginative Smith was. The first story, 'Scanners Live in Vain,' features a caste of modified human beings designed to pilot the great space craft of the Instrumentality, but at the cost of having no sensory perceptions other than sight, meaning they can only communicate by lip-reading and semaphore, and can only tell if they've been damaged by checking the instruments implanted in their chest.

Another story also has a psychic death-ray powered by psychopathic kittens.

Smith was weird, glorious and deserves your attention.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

I wasn't expecting to enjoy Neuromancer quite as much as I did. It gets a lot of bad press for being badly written, though conceptually brilliant. I just really liked it. I approached it with a sense of duty, of having to read this book in order to appreciate its impact, and realised that...it's actually quite well written. Yeah, it's a pulp novel at heart, but it's on the better end of the pulp spectrum. Better than a lot of Lovecraft, even. Some of it isn't as well executed as it could have been, but a lot of it really is.

Creepy, uncomfortable, clever. One of the most accurate (thematically at least) predictions of the future in science fiction to date, forgiving him the absence of mobile phones. Powerful and important, its biggest problem for the modern reader is the fact of its impact. So much of it seems utterly clichéd now that it only becomes bearable when one remembers that this was the first example in fiction of so much that is now genre convention.

There's little else to say: read it, but don't bother with the sequels.

The Dark Enlightenment by Nick Land

I remember...I remember that once there was...sunshine...and bird song...and laughter...during the...before the...

*inhuman shrieking*

The Difference Engine by William Gibson & Bruce Sterling

Suffering from a similar fate as Neuromancer in that the scope of its influence somewhat overshadows its own merits as a novel, the saving grace of The Difference Engine is that, on its own, it is much, much better than Neuromancer. A seminal work of alternative history in general, and steampunk generally, depicting a Victorian Britain were Babbage's clockwork computers have brought about sweeping social change. Neither substance nor style overshadow one another, nor do we have to wade through clumsy exposition. The world that Gibson and Sterling have created is one that they only show us glimpses of, hinting at a wider picture without offering us too many details. Frustrating, yes, but the right kind of frustrating.

Forgiving it the narrative laziness of relying on a MacGuffin (the pay off isn't quite worth it, but the coda that follows certainly is), the book's greatest strengths lie in the ideas being presented to the reader. How culture and contingency effects ideology; the relationship between technology, environment and human development; the question of whether or not technology has really made us any more free or simply locked us into a more subtle slavery. The imagery is evocative, the characters a little lacking, perhaps, but the style, concepts and language are excellent, truly excellent throughout.

*

Bringing this to a close, a few other great books I read last year were: The Children of Men by the late Baroness James, The Sadean Woman by the even-later Angela Carter, Accelerando by Charles Stross (number 6 on Noah's list) and the provincial, apocalyptic joy that is John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids. 

I will happily accept recommendations for further reading in the comments.

NRx Talk at The Catalyst Club 08/01/15

The following was delivered to The Catalyst Club on 8th January, 2015. The audience response was very positive, I'm pleased to say. Readers who are already familiar with NRx will probably notice that this talk was, arguably, less about NRx than Neocameralism, though I do throw in some stuff about The Cathedral and hint at Gnon. 

Biggest lacuna: not mentioning HBD. 

There is a difference between being interested in an idea, in entertaining an idea, and agreeing with that idea. Wanting to discuss an idea, and being curious about its ramifications if put into practice, does not equate advocating that idea. What I am going to be talking about tonight are not necessarily things that I believe or disbelieve in, they are simply things that I am interested in. Tonight, I am going to talk to you about something called ‘Neoreaction.’ You may have heard of it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t. It is somewhat obscure, and it haunts areas of thinking that most normal, healthy folk prefer to leave unthought.

Fortunately for you, I am not one of those normal, healthy folk. I’m of the grim variety, preferring to dress in black and listen to 80s electro and pretend I’m in a cyberpunk movie. Early last year, a series of coincidences lead to me coming across a most unusual bunch on the Internet. They were drawn from many strange and diverse backgrounds, and seemingly didn’t have much in common: they included traditionalist Catholics, neo-Pagans, ultra-libertarians and even a few with this funny idea about bringing back feudalism. Indeed, it seemed that these peculiar people were better defined by what they didn’t believe in than by what they believed in.

They have a name for the ideas they disagree with, and the institutions that perpetuate them: The Cathedral. They have a name for themselves too: they are Neoreactionaries.

Now, to make a few things clear before we continue:

There is not a Neoreactionary ‘movement.’ Neoreaction is, what I like to call, a meta-movement. It is more like Marxism than a Communist Party. It is a web of ideas and theories, discussed and promoted and held by a web of individuals. There is no Central Committee, though there are big names who hold more influence than others. It exists pretty much exclusively online, primarily in the form of blogs (I’ll provide a list of links to anyone who’s interested).

The Cathedral is why the western world (and by hegemonic extension, most of the rest of the world) is how it is. The Cathedral is not the Illuminati, it is not a conspiracy. It’s more like, to use an example from the blogger Scott Alexander, what feminists call ‘The Patriarchy.’ The Cathedral’s foundations are attitudes and beliefs, its spires and buttresses the institutions and individuals who hold and promote these attitudes and beliefs. These institutions include the media, the universities, and governments. The people are typically middle-class and well educated, commanding a great deal of moral authority, even if they have little directly obvious political sway. What The Cathedral does is form public opinion, both on the left and the mainstream right (although the right accepts Cathedralist ideas with much more hesitation than the left). The Cathedral is like an ideological feedback loop: it generates ideas that it already considers to be correct, and presents them as self-evident, criticising dissenting ideas, institutions and individuals accordingly.

The ideas that form The Cathedral are of a distinctly Enlightenment feel, emphasising the notion that the world can be regulated or ordered systematically, that historical progress is real, that things can (and will) only get better. The Cathedral, according to Neoreaction, is probably where more-or-less all of your ideas about politics and history come from.

The Cathedral is why you believe that there is no better form of government than democracy.

The Cathedral is why you believe that human beings are equal.

The Cathedral is why you believe that everyone, deep down, is a member of one great big human family.

The Cathedral, says Neoreaction, is wrong.

The Cathedral as a concept was outlined by the infamous blogger ‘Mencius Moldbug.’ The Cathedral is the name he gives to the institutions that promote the ideals of Modernity, in particular the notions of democracy, equality and universalism, and the idea that history is a clear progress from a worse way of life to a better one. The standard narrative The Cathedral holds is that we can see a clear line of progress throughout recent history. Beginning with the monarchies of feudal Europe, we see, in The Enlightenment, the gradual (or in some places rapid) seizure of power by the educated and mercantile classes and the decay of the authority of the Church, allowing for the rise of modern science and technology, the establishment of democratic government and the recognition of the essential equality and fraternity of humanity. This is presented as a clear progression from an evil, irrational way of organising things to a good and rational way.

Moldbug questions this narrative. I shan’t go into details about Moldbug’s theories about where these ideas come from, but it is suffice to say that he considers them to be historically contingent and, ultimately, arbitrary products of the environment that produced them. As such, they’re not necessarily good ways of organising society. Indeed, Moldbug and Neoreaction think they’re pretty darn stupid ways of doing it.

This is because they deny reality.

Neoreaction has a vast number of internal divisions and disagreements, but a few ideas are held broadly in common: that human beings are in no sense (except, possibly, a spiritual sense) equal; that human populations are not ‘fungible’, but unique and distinct; and that democracy is not an efficient way of ordering a society. As such, Neoreactionaries typically favour the notion of a hierarchical, even autocratic society, or at least one with dramatically limited suffrage. Because I am short on time, I am going to focus on the democratic question.

The chief democratic flaw is the following: the assumption that a population, when taken as a whole, is capable of choosing a government that will actually be good at governing. Why do we think that an election results in good government? Because those elected know that if they do too bad a job of running the country, they’ll get booted out in the coming election. Except, of course, it isn’t as simple as that. A democratically elected government consists of people, and people are self-interested. The people that form a democratically elected government know that, even if they keep winning elections, they’re only there for a little while, a few years at the most. As well as this, even a government that is doing what in the long run would have turned out to be good decisions can still loose an election because of the unpopularity of short-term policies, regardless of the fact that these policies may have major long-term benefits if implemented and maintained. As such, the promises that they tend to make to the electorate are simply those that make them likely to win. And when in power, why not simply favour policies that will have an immediate, short-term benefit for those making the policies? They’ll be out of a job sooner or later, why not simply steal everything out of the office stationary cupboard before they go?

As well as this, Neoreactionaries don’t believe democracy to be particularly democratic anyway. It was put somewhere that in a society where theoretical power is held by the people, real power is held by those who form public opinion, which for Neoreaction is The Cathedral. As such, it is really The Cathedral that holds power in the West, albeit mostly indirectly.

It is important here to note the major libertarian influence on Neoreaction. There has been an attitude among some right-libertarians, or anarcho-capitalists, for a long time now that, to paraphrase Peter Thiel: democracy and liberty are not compatible. It is felt by Neoreactionaries that democracy, as a cultural force, can only lead to the growth of government, its increased intrusion into the lives of its people, and the continual mismanagement of the country, often under the guise of a utopian, typically socialist or otherwise populist or nationalist spirit (again, The Cathedral). What, then, ought to be done about it?

Well, if we begin by accepting that governments are made of people and people are self-interested, and go on to recognise that democratic government is so organised that what is to the advantage of those with power is not to the advantage of those ruled over, the only effective option is to create another kind of power-structure, either outside of or instead of the prevailing democracies, a power-structure where there is not such a conflict of interest.

In other words: replace the democratic state with a joint-stock corporation.

Or, as some Neoreactionaries prefer: a king. Literally, a king. A hereditary monarchy and feudal aristocracy.

The latter suggestion is the one most people who have heard of Neoreaction associate with it, but it is the former that I’m more interested in. As such, what follows shouldn’t be taken as ‘the official Neoreactionary position,’ and there are a sizeable group of Neoreactionaries who reject the notion of corporate government in its totality.

The theory of corporate government goes something like this: if the country, or city-state or whatever, is governed by a corporation that delivers services like- guaranteed safety in public places, guaranteed neutral arbitration of contracts and efficient public transport, and charges residents a fee for these services, and (very importantly) guarantees the right to leave with one’s family and property if one chooses- so long as the corporation delivers on its guarantees, why complain you don’t get to choose the CEO? You can’t choose the CEO of any of the other businesses you have anything to do with, so why would you expect to choose the CEO of this business? Even better, if there are numerous, competing corporate-states, each one can tailor itself to a particular market, attempt to outdo the others with exclusive lifestyle offers (like to get high? I’d bet that BrightonCorp would like to make you an offer…). The wonderful thing about this is that the corporation isn’t answerable to its customers, except through consumer choice, and it is in the direct financial advantage of the rulers to rule well, that is, to satisfy its customer’s demands for personal freedom and security.

Of course, The Cathedral stands in the way of this. The Cathedral has such faith in its ideals that it does not even attempt to justify them. Why, for example, are we so insistent that it is always a good thing when a country becomes more ‘democratic’? What if some cultures flourish better under an authoritarian government?

Typically, Neoreaction does not seek to overthrow the prevailing system of government in a traditional sense (revolutions are far too populist, and Neoreaction is defiantly elitist), though there are exceptions who praise the growing illiberalism of Russia and Hungary, even going as far as to describe Russia as a potential Neoreactionary nation-state. The particular current of Neoreaction I have been discussing, the post-libertarian, typically describes its position as secessionist, valuing the right to exit over the right to have a voice. They don’t want to change the society they live in: they simply want to Get Out.

The desire to Get Out is informed also by a fear that as The Cathedral is a simply unsustainable model of living, when it collapses things will get a little messy. One of the most popular sayings in Neoreactionary circles is ‘Winter is coming.’ That is: once The Cathedral finally falls, if we haven’t Gotten Out it will take us all with it. The crisis in Ukraine, the rise of Islamic State, the growing support of extreme right and left political parties are all interpreted by Neoreaction as omens that the myths The Cathedral has being feeding us (that we’re all one great big happy human family, and that, deep down, human beings really just want to co-operate and so on) are starting to lose ground, and that the harshness of reality, Kipling’s Gods of the Copybook Headings, are preparing to return with ‘terror and slaughter.’ That Cthulhu is finally stirring… And, as The Cathedral cannot be directly opposed, what other option is there other than to run?

Bringing this to a close, I’m going to briefly address why I find Neoreaction so fascinating.

I graduated last year, and after three years of experiencing student politics, the only variations of which tend to be complete indifference or half-arsed communism, encountering a lot of clearly clever people who were right-wing was an exceptionally novel experience. In particular, I find their speculation about alternative ways of ordering society to better maximise freedom and stability very compelling. There is certainly something almost romantic about the secessionist impulse, the desire to cut oneself off from the modern world and go and do things very differently. I want to see a patchwork of corporate states set up simply to see what would happen. And, if I’m being honest, the sheer pessimism they have about the future appeals to the horror fan inside me. If nothing else, Neoreaction provides us with a platform for criticism. In a similar way to how Marxism acts more as a source of critique than a source of solutions, Neoreaction gives us a narrative alternative to the prevailing one. There is value to it simply in that. Most importantly, I feel, is that Neoreaction calls on us to question the role those who inform us play, to question the assumptions that they work under and present us with, and to question the agenda that they may or may not have. Regardless of the answer we may get, there is value simply to the questioning.