As many of you know, I wrote reactionary work elsewhere before founding this blog. Then I started up here and created the content you see before you.
At the moment, though, I find myself running out of worthwhile things to say. I think I’m rehashing and preaching to the choir. This has contributed to my spending more time on Twitter, which I think has had an unfortunate effect on my thought patterns as well, making me think in Tweets and making it harder to complete a well-thought-out blog post.
At the same time, I think the Christian reactosphere, and especially this blog, needs to deepen its roots. We have plenty of legitimate complaints about modernity and liberalism, and we can point to numerous ways traditional societies were better. We’ve built and are continuing to build social networks for sharing our thought. Now it’s time to develop the new (or rather the old) political science and philosophy. That means reading extensively in the old reactionaries: Kuehnelt-Leddihn, de Maistre, [the original] Bonald, the whole bunch. It also means reading the works of our opponents, starting with the original liberals: the Lockeans, and offering a thorough critique and a plausible alternative theory. In short, it means putting real intellectual force and work behind our ideas, a lot of which are now more or less unformed. Moldbug has done pretty well in this department, but I for one need some work.
To that end, I’m going to try to move the tone of this blog more toward lengthy philosophical posts for a while. This will necessarily mean that the posts will come more rarely, but I hope they’ll be of better quality. The first thing I’m going to do is commence my series Problems of Liberty, which will be an attempt to persuade natural-rights libertarians to accept reaction. To that end, I have started reading John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government; when I’m finished I’ll begin work on the first post in the Problems of Liberty series.
Also, I think it’s time for us to organise and connect to some degree, rather than acting as lone wolves. My two most recent projects, the Golden Circle and La Mano Roja Y Vengadora, each in its own way, attempt to do just that. So a fair amount of my blogging time will be devoted to those efforts going forward.
Finally, I think we have need of a viable alternative culture as reactionaries. We need our own fiction, our own art, and eventually our own communities and movies. As my primary vocation, as near as I can tell, will be to write fiction, I’ll be contributing to that as much as I can, starting with the alternate history novel I’m working on. The title has yet to be determined but the working name of the timeline is Southern Fealty. It’s important, though, that we not produce ‘ideological art’; my novels are not, and the rising reactionary art should not be, proselytising tools per se. Rather, it is simply art, created by reactionaries, and thus naturally reflecting our values. Great art is not message-centred; but it is message-laden nonetheless. Reactionaries need to be influencing people on a pre-rational level. Besides all which, modern art is simply atrocious and someone has to offer something better. The only ones who can do that are those who believe in Beauty, and those who believe in Beauty are reactionary to some degree.
In sum, that’s where my energies will be focused for a while. I’ll be trying to spend less time on Twitter (though I wont be cutting it out entirely), and my original-content posts will be fewer, longer, and more serious. I’ll also be devoting my time to connecting reactionaries through the Golden Circle and the translated works at La Mano Roja. And last but not least I’ll be trying to dedicate more time to my fiction, which has been sadly neglected of late. I’ll also try to start posting a Reading List Update every two weeks or so, partially to let you know I’m still active and partially because I’ll mostly be reading the kind of stuff I want to promote.
I hope you’ll all stay tuned for the Problems Of Liberty series. Until then, I remain
Your Humble Servant,
The Avenging Red Hand
