Barbarians Within the Gates

Neoreaction is a young movement. Moreover, it’s a movement that emerged in a rather unprecedented way. Few if any political movements in history have begun with theoretical work by a loose connection of bloggers.

Early in the history of the movement, it was small and attracted only people of genuine conviction (or at least open curiosity) and exceptionally high intelligence. As the movement grows, however, we will attract, and have already begun to attract, all manner of people we either dont want around or dont want representing us. There are entryists. There are idiots. There are boors and there are trolls.

Until now we haven’t had to deal with this. We’ve been very accepting of anyone who wants to join in on neoreaction, and this has worked out all right. However, recent events have shown that this is no longer the case. We have people on the outside asking us polite questions and we ought to be answering them, trying to raise awareness and bring people in. Some of us, however, see trolls under every bridge and respond in distinctly non-constructive ways.

These people need to be kept under control if neoreaction is to get anywhere. The image we present is important, and recruiting new people is important. If we are overly suspicious and hostile to the curious outsider we will only become an insular club with little development of thought and zero action.

All of this is to say that those of us who are intelligent, serious, and well-established need a way to regulate the neoreactionary masses, and perhaps even each other. We need a self-regulating hierarchy.

The idea of a neoreactionary wiki has been floated several times before, but as far as I know it has never actually been established. I think it should be, and could be with minimal cost and work. The wiki would include contributions from all the major neoreactionary thinkers (and probably many of the minor ones) and therefore would acquire a greater authority than any individual’s blog.

From there, we could set up a directory of sorts for the neoreaction: a list of people recognised by the community as leaders and representatives of the best in our movement. Those people would then have the discretion to expand the list, something they should do very sparingly. We could also keep the list of banned wiki editors public.

The creation of this neoreactionary wiki would thus set up four tiers in the neoreaction:

1. Directory members. These are the authorities on the subject, the people outsiders should read first and the people whose opinions should be given the most weight.

2. Wiki editors. These are people who make contributions of various levels of significance to neoreactionary thought, and who are known and (at least tentatively) accepted.

3. Banned editors. These people have, for whatever reason, earned the disapproval of the community or the leaders. Obviously we dont have the power to finally silence them but they do not represent us.

4. The wild cards: people who dont have an account at the wiki and never have. Over time, as the wiki grows in prominence (if it’s a success), these people should probably be purged, unless they’re indubitably writers of the first order. It wont be that hard to set up an account and having the wiki will be a huge boon to the movement as a whole. That said, we cant expect everyone to be on board right away, and in the beginning this category will be large.

This wiki would give us a way to deal with the barbarians within the gates who threaten to destroy Rome from the inside. Of course, it would only work if it gained the approval of most of the current influential neoreactionaries. I hope it will and I’m prepared to have the idea critiqued and refined. I am of course willing to be heavily involved in the creation of the wiki but I dont think I have the clout to establish it all on my own.

I welcome comments, especially from the bigger NRx thinkers, and I remain

your obedient servant,

Arthur Richard Harrison

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The Necessity of a Neoreactionary Doctrine

The Necessity of a Neoreactionary Doctrine

By Arthur Richard Harrison

In the early days, neoreaction did not need an articulated set of doctrinal premises: we all knew each other (again, at least as much as anyone can know anyone else online), and we knew who was who. We knew who was in and who was out. And there was no one, really, who wanted to be ‘in’ but was rejected by a significant percentage of us.

Now, however, our movement numbers in the hundreds at least (gauging by my number of Twitter followers; it’s possible there are many more that I am not aware of) and we dont, and indeed cant, all know each other on anything like a personal level. Moreover, we are not all going to get along, realistically speaking. It wouldn’t be beneficial in any way to name names or talk about specifics, but I can assure all my readers, from experience, that there are already people in the neoreaction who have all kinds of personal problems with each other.

If our movement, then, is to remain a meaningful, purposeful school of thought or even broad collection of schools, we need some kind of doctrinal agreement. Social bonds are not enough to hold together a group of this size. And if we dont have anything in common in terms of goals and/or methods we’re not a meaningful grouping.

Now, we must avoid stating this doctrine too narrowly. I would not claim, for example, that one must be a traditional monarchist to be a neoreactionary. However, one certainly cannot be a democrat and be a neoreactionary. If neoreaction is allowed to be transformed into a pro-democracy movement, a great deal of work will have been for nought.

I dont intend to attempt to articulate the definitive neoreactionary doctrine here; a great deal of work has been done on that already by Michael Anissimov. Also, it’s not quite the same thing, but some related work has been done by Bryce LaLiberte in his ‘Neoreactionary Canon’.

Rather, my point here is to underscore the need for those of us who are established voices in the neoreactionary world to agree on at least a few of the basic doctrines that distinguish us from the other ideologies now circulating. Let us learn from the history of American traditionalist conservatism. Against the Communist threat, traditionalists made a deal with the neoconservative/libertarian devil under Reagan. They were absorbed into ‘movement conservatism’, and have never recovered. A similar phenomenon occurred in the UK under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Something similar could very easily happen to neoreaction. There are a number of ways it could go, but here’s one possibility: A socially-leftish ancap reads a little Moldbug. He then decides to import his ideas of ‘anti-racism’, ‘anti-sexism’, ‘anti-transphobia’, and the like into the general framework of something like Moldbug’s Patchwork (which, after all, bears some resemblance to Ancapistan.) He talks a lot about ‘exit’ and he emphasises the ‘CEO’ model of rulership over the royal model. \ He then sells this ‘new neoreaction’ as the ‘moderate’ or ‘rational’ form of the ideology, more palatable to progressives as it is to a great extent either compatible with their own ideas or impotent to oppose them. As a result, genuine neoreactionaries are marginalised and dismissed as ‘extremists’ even within neoreaction.

Make no mistake: this will be attempted. Something very like this is happening as we speak. And unless we can clearly identify, to each other and the world, who is and is not a neoreactionary, we will be incredibly vulnerable to all manner of entryism and subversion. The only way to mark our borders is with a shared doctrinal core. I may attempt to contribute to that core at some point in the future, but for now I think Anissimov has done a decent job identifying the main points, and I hope that I have done a decent job explaining why it’s necessary.

Progressives As Witches

It is generally believed in the reactosphere, largely under the influence of Moldbug, that progressivism is a religion. Certainly there is ample basis for this claim. Progressivism indeed seems to have its unquestionable dogmas, its priests, its sacraments, and its empirically untestable metaphysical assumptions. However, I contend that there is a subtle distinction at play here, which the nonreligious are likely to overlook. That is the distinction between religion and witchcraft.

What, precisely, is the distinction between magic and witchcraft? It is this: the religionist deals with the supernatural as something above himself, something superior to himself, and something which he must submit to. Whether it is a Christian who believes he must obey God, or a Buddhist who believes that he must follow the teachings of the Buddha to escape the cycle of reincarnation, the religionist sees reality on the supernatural level as ironclad, and he has no choice but to obey. The witch, on the other hand, is concerned with manipulating reality. C.S. Lewis said in The Magician’s Nephew that witches ‘are not interested in people or things unless they can use them; they are terribly practical.’ Witches see the supernatural realm as something that can be manipulated, controlled, bent to their will. Words in particular take on, in the witch’s world, an immense significance, as they can, according to the witch’s worldview, reshape reality itself. The witch is essentially a reverser of hierarchy.

How does this compare to progressives? Well, first of all, to understand what I am about to say, you should be familiar with Moldbug’s work in Why Do Atheists Believe in Religion? You should then note that whether a person claims a particular word has a particular power ‘because it’s magic’ or ‘because it reinforces institutional racism and white privilege’ is utterly irrelevant to those of us who believe neither in magic nor in institutional racism, nor in white privilege. It amounts to the same thing; for reasons that are apparently irreducible and have no discernible relationship to physical reality, a particular word is claimed to create harmful effects in the real world. For the witches, it’s a spell; for progressives, it’s ‘nigger’ for example. I must be prevented from saying ‘nigger’ for the same reason that I must be prevented from putting a curse on their crops; because these words have power.

C.S. Lewis turns out to be helpful here again. In The Screwtape Letters he writes:

I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy. The ‘Life Force’, the worship of sex, and some aspects of Psychoanalysis, may here prove useful. If once we can produce our perfect work—the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls ‘Forces’ while denying the existence of ‘spirits’—then the end of the war will be in sight.

The Materialist Magician. C.S. Lewis predicted him, and now he is here. Lewis has his Materialist Magicians ‘not using, but veritably worshipping’ these ‘Forces’. This may be a mistake, and yet perhaps not. Certainly it seems that progressives believe in ‘forces’ that can be used; ‘forces’ like ‘white privilege’. And yet, these ‘forces’ always seem to be in the hands of the enemy. The forces on the progressives’ ‘good side’, forces such as ‘equality’ and ‘human rights’ are not used, but worshipped. What the progressive attempts to do is clear out the black magic of privilege blocking the god of Equality from imposing his will.

You see, the progressive’s magic (the magic of ‘gender-neutral language’, for example), is really quite weak, at least in his own mind. If there exists anywhere one dark wizard speaking the way normal human beings speak, maintaining the old spells, Equality will not be able to prevail. Reality must be reshaped with a new language, but everyone must participate.

Thus Lewis was partially right; some forces are indeed worshipped and ascribed supernatural significance, despite their being no empirical evidence that they are even real, while at the same time superstitious beliefs about the power of certain groups and their words recall the witch’s attempts to control reality with language.

This is why language is so important. We cannot allow ourselves to fall into the trap of attempting to express our ideas in their terms. Their whole lexicon is perfectly fitted to impede the understanding of reality and the communication of sound thought, because its purpose is not to describe, but to alter reality. You must not ask your doctor what your baby’s ‘gender’ is to be, because ‘gender’ is not simply a collection of sounds that has taken on the meaning previously assigned to the word ‘sex’; rather, ‘gender’, as applied to living things, is an inherently liberal concept, created to drive a wedge between unchosen biological reality and personal identity, the latter of which, according to the liberal, must be freely chosen by the individual.

‘Gender’ and words like it are a spell. Dont cast the spell. Cast the counterspell. Use real language. If you speak Newspeak, you will develop a Newspeak weltanschauung. There is no way around it. But the liberal magic is weak. They cant rest easy as long as there are a few people speaking in a religious way; naming, describing, and submitting to reality as it presents itself.