What unites neoreaction?

Firstly, why neoreaction, rather than reaction?

Because the principles and social organization that we want to restore are completely dead, available only in dusty old books whose language is a little bit strange. We are not reacting to the latest outrage, but to outrages that were a fait accompli a hundred years ago. Since what was an fait accompli a hundred years ago has led to the disastrous consequences predicted, the possibility now opens of reversing what was supposedly irreversible. The Neoreaction is heavily influenced by books long, long, out of print, and previously inaccessible.

Neoreactionaries, all of them, respect the past. Traditional solutions derive from Nature, or, some would say, from Nature’s God, and embody unspoken and difficult to explain wisdom. Sweeping them aside was apt to have disastrous consequences, and, in substantial part, did have disastrous consequences.

Reactionaries, all of them, are realists, seeing the real, not the official truth.

Neoreactionaries, all of them, recognize that races are different, the sexes are different, and man is a hierarchical animal.

Neoreactionaries, all of them, regard the official truth, the Cathedral as highly unlikely to have any connection to the truth, indeed as evil and insane. If all academics and the New York Times agree on X, the neoreactionary assumption is that X is likely to be a lie. The only way one would get such agreement is if it is enforced, and, if enforced, must be untrue.

That being said, what divides neoreactionaries?

Christian Traditionalists are just not all that neoreactionary, even though they are supposed to be faithful to a very ancient book. Everything the Christian Manosphere, such as Dalrock, says about trad-cons tends to be somewhat true of Christian Traditionalists. The left would imagine the Christian Traditionalists as proposing a Christian Theocracy with fire and brimstone, and that each variant of Christian Traditionalism proposed to burn each of the others at the stake, but even those who do in fact propose a Christian theocracy, such as Bruce Charleton, want a King, not a priest, at the top. They are alarmingly willing to render unto Caesar not only what is Caesar’s, but also what is God’s. Saint Paul wanted the Church practices to symbolically and socially enforce male supremacy. Women were to be silent in Church, and in Church dress in a way symbolizing modesty and submission. Today’s Christian Traditionalists, reasonably enough, shrink from such a blatant confrontation with the Cathedral. They hope for a Caesar that will permit them to be more authentically Christian, but have no great inclination to stick their heads out when today’s Caesar prohibits key parts of the New Testament.

If Bruce Charleton had his King, and the King mandated Mormonism, Bruce would gladly be a Mormon, if Greek Orthodoxy, he would be Greek Orthodox, if Restoration Anglicanism, he would be Anglican. Any King that mandated something that was not violently unchristian would be an improvement for Bruce Charleton.

Ethno-Nationalists, like Christian Traditionalists, tend to be not all that reactionary. An ethno nationalist typically believes that if we adjusted borders to get some predominantly white nations, and if our ruling elite was ethnically homogeneous, we would be fine. A neoreactionary thinks our problems are too serious to be solved in that manner.

The Ethno Nationalist correctly observes that Jewish members of the elite tend to think of themselves as non white, and hate whites. Indeed they hate whites and Christians so much that if destroying the white race and Christendom destroyed the Jewish race and Judaism, as seems rather likely, they would be fine with that. The Ethno Nationalist however fails to observe that our ruling elite has hated whites and Christendom even back when it was ethnically homogeneous and nominally Christian. Nineteenth Century Whitehall imperialism was anti colonialist, an attack on eighteenth century British colonialism. Anti colonialism goes back to the nineteenth century British gentry sneering at those that got rich in India. Until 1950 or so, there were few or no Jews in the ruling elite, yet it still hated whites and Christendom.

Thus the Ethno-Nationalist tends to say, “Let us turn the clock back to 1950”, while I say, 1800. In the great debate about whether Nazis are left or right, the answer is that Nazis are 1950s leftists. The Zietgeist has moved leftwards since then. Although as recently as 1950, our ruling elite thought of leftism as a form of Christianity, indeed as more Christian than regular Christianity, nonetheless as early as the War Between the States, the Christian left was aware that its religious beliefs differed radically from traditional Christianity, and were correspondingly hostile to traditional Christianity.

Suppose we magically got whiteopia borders – nation states that were all white, and indeed each of a single white ethnicity. And suppose government employees in powerful positions were also all of single ethnicity. (Suppose we fired all the Jews.) Government employees would still be fireproof, thus power would still be diffused. Being diffused, we get rule by consensus. Jim’s rule of large committees applies: That consensus will always wind up dominated by the evil and the insane, which is to say the left. To maintain the appearance of democracy the government needs to manufacture or import an electorate that will vote for what it is going to do anyway, which is how we lost ethnic homogeneity in the first place.

Still, turning the clock back to 1950 is a good start, and as far as I can tell most Ethno-Nationalists want to make government employees fireable at will, so my primary disagreement with them is that they underestimate the scope of the problem. Purging the civil service and the voter rolls is easier done, and more likely to be effective, than adjusting borders.

If we adjusted the borders, which is what the Ethno-Nationalists want, and ensured that the ruling elite was ethnically homogeneous, the fundamental causes that got us into this problem would still be acting. The government would still suck in pretty much the way it sucks now. On the other hand, making public servants fireable at will would go a long way to fixing things. We would then merely be stuck with an army of fatherless children and single mothers voting for handouts.

By and large, fatherlessness is a bigger problem than race. We would get more mileage making it hard for the fatherless to vote, than hard for the black to vote.

To the Christians in the neoreaction, the Masculine Reaction seems to be in favor of social decay. Heartiste claims to be a minion of Satan. But, in fact Heartiste is not in favor social decay. Rather he is against males being required to take the traditional male obligations unreciprocated in a society that is in decay, against white males attempting to carry carry the impossible burden of a society that has already collapsed. Absent socially and legally enforceable contracts, love is war. All is fair in love and war. Heartiste and company represent sex realism, as the HBD branch of the neoreaction represents race realism.

Obviously Neoreactionaries do not favor a society in which each individual pursues his best interests without regard to the costs that he imposes on others. But in sex and reproduction, we have such a society. It is possible to establish, by force of character and reckless will to power, a family with different rules, though it is a lot easier if one’s starting material is an aristocratic girl brought up in a profoundly conservative family within a profoundly conservative society. For most young men today, that is not an option. Marriage is collapsing, even among the white elite, even among those white males whose income is high enough that marriage to them is higher status than marriage to Uncle Sam the Big Pimp.

61 Responses to “What unites neoreaction?”

  1. Mr. Frosty says:

    Lost me at the whole “Nazi are the real liberals” BS.

    A hierarchical system that encourages traditional gender and class roles is not Leftist.

    Before you start screaming Socialism! Let me remind you, Nazi Germany was a war economy and all war economies are Socialist. The US war economy had rationing, price controls and nationalization of private industry.

    Franco’s fascist, National Socialist Spain de-socialized their economy after their war. No reason to believe Hitler wouldn’t have done the same. Fascism works.

    • jim says:

      Franco desocialized reluctantly and belatedly, after it became apparent that socialism was a disaster.

  2. Pat Hines says:

    Permitting women access to voting began the slide, women vote socialist over 65% of the time. One can trace approval of nearly all socialist, now hard core communist, programs to women voters. Women must not be permitted to vote in any election.

    Women pastors, ministers, and other clergy must be declared heretics and churches that have them must be declared non-churches and taxed appropriately. Women clergy are specifically prohibited Biblically.

    Closing all government schools grade 12 and below will help. Closing all schools of education, sociology, and related academic positions such as LGBTQ advocate, gender studies, negro studies, and the like must go.

    The list of corrections is much longer, but the above will be a good start.

  3. […] True recovery from today’s dystopic madness comes from looking back. […]

  4. […] and in the importance of hierarchy. However, ethno-nationalism diverges in that, in the words of one neoreactionary, ethno-nationalists underestimate the problem, meaning that they fail to realize that government is […]

  5. […] What Unites Neoreaction? […]

  6. Mori says:

    I take it a pre-requisite to being a neoreactionary is that one believes one’s self to be a member of the highest master race which would, of course, not suffer under the heel of a “traditional” hierarchy out of the darkest ages of european history.

    A fascinating study is emerging here. One feels like a fly on the wall during hushed, intense discussions in Germany that led to the formation of the Nazi movement. The Nazis did the world a favor – they taught it what to watch out for.

  7. […] James Donald wonders what unites us. […]

  8. […] realistic, has been the catalytic insight driving the development and adoption of neoreactionary alternatives, shorn of certain mythical elements inherited by the progressive clade (substantial egalitarianism […]

  9. […] 29: Jim wonders what unites […]

  10. james wilson says:

    If all the world were Caucasian, it would still be “socialists” under universal suffrage. No republic can overcome the stupefying effects of it upon discussion.

    Hayek believed all advances in civilization required a renunciation of instinct. Socialist embrace instinct. A civilized argument demands much of the citizen, the socialist argument demands nothing.

    The period of liberty which existed for a few generations before and after the American Revolution was so successful that we came to believe it was natural. Liberty is not natural. ‘Socialism” is natural, as is poverty and envy.

  11. […] be out of date as soon as it is compiled. Among the most obvious way-markers are this, this, this, this, and this. Given the need to refer to this complex succinctly, I trust that abbreviating it to […]

  12. Samson J. says:

    If Bruce Charleton had his King, and the King mandated Mormonism, Bruce would gladly be a Mormon, if Greek Orthodoxy, he would be Greek Orthodox, if Restoration Anglicanism, he would be Anglican.

    And what would you be, Jim?

    • Nick B. Steves says:

      Obviously Jim should answer himself, but he is on record with this hint

      If authority required me to believe in Leprechauns, and to get along with people that it was important to get along with required me to believe in Leprechauns, I would probably believe in leprechauns, though not in the way that I believe in rabbits, but I can see people not being equal, whereas I cannot see leprechauns not existing.

      • jim says:

        Exactly so.

        Believing that Zeus is a God, no problem.

        Believing that the emperor Augustus is a God, big problem.

  13. […] What unites neoreaction? « Jim’s Blog […]

  14. […] The discussion ratchets forwards, through acute probings of the neoreactionary triangle by Jim, Clark, and Spandrell. Dark enlightenment is arriving in waves. April 28, 2013admin 26 Comments […]

  15. […] The inimitable JIM offers the following comment on the issue: Women always want better, and men always want more. Conflict ensues. Hence the saying love is war, all is fair in love and war. The most successful strategy is to behave badly. Nice guys finish last. Good girls are losers, and respected for it, but still losers, good guys are losers, and despised for it. If young Christian males behave well, they are despised, and most despised by young Christian women. […]

  16. zhai2nan2 says:

    Jim,

    I apologize for dumping a distasteful problem on the desk of neoreaction.

    The following problem is an example of a proud cad.

    http://www.returnofkings.com/9782/why-christian-men-dont-deserve-virgins

    The writer, one Edward Thatch, is just one man, but there are many men who will imitate him unless something is done.

    Thatch challenges Christianity as follows:
    [quote]
    When men like me come around to poach your virgins…
    I. Refrain from boasting about your Godliness in an attempt to make me look like a heathen.
    II. Resist the urge to trash me.
    III. Don’t be a Frank-like dickweed Alpha/Beta/Christian/PUA/virgin hybrid mongrel with shit game.
    IV. Stop wondering why she wants a guy like me, and realize that she actually doesn’t.
    V. Don’t warn her about my past; it’ll just set me up to pass her shit tests like a champ.
    [end quote]

    I won’t publish the entire tirade, but those who aspire to study this social problem will find it of interest.

    My question to neoreactionaries – how exactly should neoreactionaries neutralize the demographic threat from cads like Edward Thatch? To what degree would it entail private action? To what degree would the state be involved? What tactics would be most effective in the long run and the short run?

    In the long run, I imagine the rules of divorce would have to be changed. In the short run, I imagine direct action on a physical level would be necessary.

    • jim says:

      Women always want better, and men always want more. Conflict ensues. Hence the saying love is war, all is fair in love and war. The most successful strategy is to behave badly. Nice guys finish last. Good girls are losers, and respected for it, but still losers, good guys are losers, and despised for it. If young Christian males behave well, they are despised, and most despised by young Christian women.

      The normal healthy solution to this problem is that society, meaning the patriarchs, enforce good behavior, restricting the choice of their daughters directly, and thus male choice indirectly. They also restrict male choice directly, through shotgun marriage, and through taking reprisals against males who fail to uphold their end of the contract. Sex is constrained to be solely within explicit contract, in which both parties make socially and legally enforceable promises to behave well. Daughter may well be attracted to bad boys, but not, however, by the prospect of being attached to the clothesline and thrashed like a rug.

      In old movies, the male protagonist is often concerned that the mere appearance of misbehavior with the love interest may provoke possibly lethal paternal violence.

      In a society where the state is the husband of last resort, Uncle Sam the Big Pimp, fathers have considerably less incentive to do this. With the state, and broadcast television, and the Church itself, systematically undermining the power of fathers, they have less power to do this. Plus, the relevant contracts just are not socially or legally enforceable any more.

      Thus the political solution, the state solution, is to abandon state support for fatherless children, permit profiling and discrimination against the fatherless, and socially and legally support the authority of fathers. Instead of a zillion shows like “Everybody loves Raymond”, a zillion shows like “Father knows best”

      Of course, you are asking about the non political solution, the individual solution, or the small group, the Church solution. Saint Paul has some words as to how the church can support male authority and socially enforce contracts, though no actual churches in the English speaking world seem to be following them. Possibly any church that implemented Saint Paul’s measures would get Wacoed.

      The Mormon church, and the Amish, seem to have had some success in socially enforcing male authority and marital contracts, though the Mormons have suffered a fair bit of state violence in consequence. Their advice would doubtless be more knowledgeable than mine.

      • Jehu says:

        The Amish solution is the Mormon solution on steroids. The Mormon solution is:
        Offer LOTS of benefits and a strong social network for all your members. Mormon mother in good standing, for instance, likely gets a built-in circle of other Mormon mothers, frequent babysitting and other aid from other Mormons, plus the Mormon social welfare system.
        But,
        If you break the rules, you’re going to be punished and possibly ostracized if you’re unrepentant or its a pattern. In that case you’re basically cut off from all of these benefits. And you can’t just go to another Mormon church and escape your infamy (although if you move you can plug right into the Mormon network in your new area if you’re in good standing).
        This is what keeps their women more in line than most Protestants, or for that matter, Catholics. Orthodox Jews do much the same. Amish do this squared or cubed.

  17. roger says:

    “If all academics and the New York Times agree on X, the neoreactionary assumption is that X is likely to be a lie. The only way one would get such agreement is if it is enforced, and, if enforced, must be untrue.”

    No. I think a good neoreactionary understands that these sources are not to be trusted. You must discern the truth in every instance. The New York Times is quite a reliable and useful teller of truth when they aren’t working at their side job (main job?) of carrying water for the left.

    Here’s a fine example:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/world/middleeast/with-air-attacks-sectarian-strife-intensifies-in-iraq.html

    The article is a neoreactionary treatise, telling us everything wrong with democracy just by reporting the facts. The Shiites are a majority and want to enslave the Sunnis, as democracy entitles them to do. The Sunnis are clearly none-too-pleased. They haven’t had a real democracy until now but more of a power-sharing agreement. But now our man in Iraq Al-Maliki is ready to graduate to actual democracy and hilarity ensues.

    The Times dutifully reports.

    • Nick B. Steves says:

      I think Jim is referring more to the unanimity of Cathedral sources being the tell. If diverse opinions were present, then at least one of them might be right. But if there is no diversity of opinion on a subject where you would naturally expect diversity to exist, then you can be certain that it is enforced opinion, which is therefore almost certainly wrong. You are right, of course, that the truth will routinely slip out of unguarded cracks–with often hilarious consequences. We should read NYT and listen to NPR in very much the same way that perceptive Russians once read Pravda and listened to Tass.

  18. […] What unites neoreaction? « Jim’s Blog […]

  19. Jake says:

    I’m not nearly as smart, nor as well read, and defiantly not as well educated as most of the people in these reactionary circles. But I think all sides of the reactionary “movement” are missing a key point: Propaganda. You all have no model to deal with the easy production and distribution of counter reactionary propaganda. If you produce limited or no propaganda for your side then the left will rise up again and consume you with words and ideas, not matter how wrong and screwed up they are. And with modern communication propaganda can change the world quickly. In fact the very thing that allowed the cathedral to conquer the world is their really excellent propaganda model. Every dirty deed was converted into an act of righteousness, every war they started was someone else stabbing them in the back, and every calculated act that condemned millions to die magically had nothing to do with them.

    Read the history of the spread of the reformation if you doubt my view of propaganda. It’s quite disturbing.

    So Jim can support arco-capitalism, others can support the return to kings, but I’m a National socialist because of the propaganda issue. I don’t think any other right wing system can counter the left. Hence why cathedral pulled all the stops to wipe it out.

    National socialism got 3 things right:
    Humans are held back by the parasites in their midst and we must consciously improve human stock.
    Each group is different and each group must be ruled in the fashion most suited to each group. There is no single system to rule them all.
    Total embracement of propaganda is needed to in order to prevent leftism. All forms of media must contain state propaganda.

    You can’t roll back the advance of propaganda. Lies and mind control are here to stay.

    • M says:

      It’s going to be hard enough changing things without telling people they need to become Nazis in order to do it. Get real, my friend.

      • anonymous says:

        Anything, anything, that the progs don’t like, they call “nazi”. So soon it will be no big deal at all

    • Big Nick Digger says:

      Jacques Ellul’s book “Propaganda” is essential reading on the central importance of propaganda to any large central state. Public opinion does not naturally arise and coalesce. It is actively driven to achieve a preordained and desired result.

      One central challenge to this whole enterprise is how to disconnect our people and especially our children from these forces. Local control of school curricula, equal time for opposing viewpoints, new environmental impact statements required before you dump refugees on a community, etc. we can begin nibbling away at the foundations by reconfiguring the very tools they used to subvert us. Create false dichotomies between psychopaths and lefties and the propose our solution as the reasonable, moderate middle ground. Use guerrilla/activist tactics would be useful such as identifying the bodyshops that illegally dump Indians on us and then challenging the companies that hire them. Create a neoreactionary IRA and a matching neoreactionary Sinn Fein as the spokesman/front man. There are so many techniques that the left has developed that can be coopted for OUR use.

  20. jim says:

    but socialist government in almost all-white places in places like New New England and Canada works at least OK.

    All move ever leftwards. Everyone says how great the Canadian banking system handled stuff, forgetting that they purchased a pile of US mortgage backed securities. When it became apparent that these were worthless, the Canadian banks wanted to unload them, which would have revealed what everyone knew and no one would admit, that they were worthless, whereupon the Canadian government forbade them to unload them, so that the US government could continue to pretend and refuse to acknowledge the financial crisis for a couple more years.

    In so far as there is any place in the world that does not suck, you can see it not sucking just by walking around the streets, particularly the streets adjacent to the sea – they are cleaner, the buildings more high tech, the doctors are more service oriented. Everything is shinier. Canada not looking shinier.

    One of the signs of decline is that art is crap. Is the art coming out of Canada any better? Yes, being relatively pure white helps, helps a lot, but the decline is effecting whitopia also.

    • Francis the talking mule says:

      Socialist governments in Canada/New England/Sweden are moving ever leftward, this is true. But the entire Western world is moving ever leftward, so this problem is not unique to those areas. The U.S. is rapidly lurching leftward as well.

      Now that the U.S. is an explicitly left wing country, “free” health care and education are starting to look better and better compared to Obamacare and debt slavery to pay for a worthless degree that is required to get a menial job that produces a lower middle class income, with an ever declining standard of what constitutes “lower middle class”. The U.S. is looking like to worst of both worlds and all that debt forces white men into the system to pay it off. They could go their own way more easily in a country like Sweden where they could come out of university debt free.

      Of course, this comes back to our less capable, more degenerate population. “Free” health care and “free” education in the U.S. would be ruthlessly exploited by the (mostly but not exclusively minority) lumpenproles; it wouldn’t work nearly as well as it did in Sweden.

      I guess it comes down to two things; stopping/reversing the leftward movement in the long term and either a) having a capable population or b) ensuring that the government is run by and for the benefit of the capable fraction of the population.

    • JG says:

      The Canadians do not have an adversarial media or blog culture. The truth is that one of the Big 5 Canadian banks failed, but you have to read the footnotes to the BoC financial statements in 2008 to figure it out.

  21. Thrasymachus says:

    Real neoreaction is pretty much Moldbug, with his love of Carlyle. I find Carlyle’s contempt for Irish peasants disturbing, even if he was right about mass democracy.

    Making these classifications is all well and good if you don’t expect too much out of them. All we know for sure is that an all-white entity is reasonably workable, whatever the formal arrangement. You say an all-white 1950 jurisdiction would still have the same problems we have today, but socialist government in almost all-white places in places like New England and Canada works at least OK. It’s not my first choice but it’s better than a neoliberal Brazil, which is what we are getting.

    The trouble with the explicit neoreactionaries like Moldbug and possibly Foseti is that they are against something, but not really for anything, except a more powerful and centralized government that would probably be run by the same people, with no pretense of democracy. Moldbug pretty much says this right out. The only thing to be for coherently is whiteness, but not all-white because a faction of whites is the cause of the whole problem. The solution would include only whites, but not all whites.

    • Carl says:

      Neoreaction is for responsible government. The key is for authority and responsibility to be held at the same time, and the diffusion of authority and complete lack of responsibility is central to what is wrong with democracy. The exact details of how to create and keep a responsible government vary among the factions and perhaps even among every single neoreactionary, but it is incorrect to say that neoreactionaries are defined purely in opposition.

  22. spandrell says:

    My definition:
    “The capitalist branch argue that asabiyyah depends on economic incentives, and smart government policy. The obvious model is Singapore. ”

    Also a focus on technological progress being a good thing. Nationalists don’t necessarily agree, Traditionalists are quite hostile.

    I’d define techno-capitalists as people who think that the problem with progressivism is that it is obstructing capitalism, and with it the advent of the singularity. You guys have no problem with income inequality, and don’t really give a shit about religion or ethnic solidarity, as long as society is functional and rationally governed.

    Shorthand is: if you like China, you’re techno-capitalist. Land and you strike me as good examples,

    • jim says:

      I’d define techno-capitalists as people who think that the problem with progressivism is that it is obstructing capitalism, and with it the advent of the singularity. You guys have no problem with income inequality, and don’t really give a shit about religion or ethnic solidarity, as long as society is functional and rationally governed.

      Obviously religion and ethnic solidarity has a lot to do with whether society is functional and rationally governed, particularly religion, but yes, I don’t see any value in them for their own sakes.

      The main problem with China is that it is vulnerable to progressive soft power. Needs more Confucianism and Han ethnic solidarity to stiffen their spines.

    • jim says:

      I don’t agree with your analysis that the plutocrats are powerful. If they were, Jon Corzine would be hanging by the neck until dead. I don’t agree with your analysis that the plutocrats are responsible for mass third world immigration. If they were, the people arriving would be here on work visas, instead of welfare.

      • Spandrell says:

        Well they aren’t the only ones with power. Let’s say that an agreement has been reached, plutocrats get cheap labor and Cathedral bees get poor people to care about and keep busy.

        You can’t say the plutocrats have no input at all. As everything, reality is always messy, responsibility is often shared.

        And of course Corzine hasn’t ruined all the plutocrats. Like all humans plutocrats care about relative wealth. They can withstand a Corzine or two.

        • fred flintstone says:

          You’re both wrong. The purpose of immigration has nothing to do with either cheap labor, nor with giving the leftards some sheep to mind.

          It is about permanently destroying whites, white culture, white religion (guess which one), white political power, white history, and ultimately the white gene pool itself, by permanently burying it under a mile-thick layer of shit-colored mud.

          Gee, who would wish such a thing? Starts with a J. Three guesses.

    • Nick B Steves says:

      I’d define techno-capitalists as people who think that the problem with progressivism is that it is obstructing capitalism, and with it the advent of the singularity. You guys have no problem with income inequality, and don’t really give a shit about religion or ethnic solidarity, as long as society is functional and rationally governed.

      That’s a fine definition of (neo)reactionary techno-capitalists. There are plenty of techno-capitalists, the vast majority probably, who are not at all reactionary, who find the problems of modernity to be minor bugs to be patched up or around. The neoreactionary sees the entire OS as the central problem, which we had better set about rewriting from the ground up with simpler, more robust primitives.

      • spandrell says:

        Perhaps, but you never get to rewrite the entire OS. It doesn’t work like that.

        • Nick B Steves says:

          It can work if you can develop, test (lather, rince, repeat) the new one while the old one is still (more or less) functioning. I see bitcoin as a (perhaps doomed) example of this. It has the potential to unseat the very concept of central banking. The bigger it gets the more potential it has to do so. So far the Cathedral has payed relatively little attention to it (yes, yes FinCEN but most bitcoin enthusiasts see the regs as more legitimizing than not). I don’t think anyone in the Cathedral is, at this moment, foreseeing the day where men in black jackets will swoop down on SF cupcake eateries for accepting bitcoin… but in order to kill it that’s probably what they’d have to do. If they wait 4 more months, will the market be 20 times larger (as much as it has grown in the past 4 months)? That’s going to be a helluva lot of cupcake makers to turn into anarcho-libertarian scofflaws… So who know (except Moldbug) how this will play out…

          But, anyhow, what you can do to central banking, i.e., bypass it with good code, why can’t we do that with federalism itself? Set up some sort of decentralized P2P network of micro-sovereignty according to some algorithm in open source SW, which appears “attractive” to potential “subjects”. Within that network then, sovereignty (whatever it is, as far as it goes) is absolutely hard, absolutely non-political, and absolutely rational (for better or worse). But all the end users remain plugged in, as far as they like or as is necessary for their own local conditions, to their traditional state-sanctioned sovereignty.

          From the outside, it just looks like club membership, but from the inside it looks more and more like a decentralized non-political state. Many micro-states may be planted, according to as many algorithms that people might find attract. The strong will survive. The weak will be gutted. When one gets big enough, you’ll have a working “OS”. Switch off the old one (the Cathedral) and the new one comes on, and most folks hardly notice the difference.

          Not sure what non-centralized P2P micro-sovereignty looks like, of course. I’ve left that as an exercise… But no matter what it looks like, it probably looks a helluva lot better than traditional state sovereignty in the DRC.

          • Nick B Steves says:

            P2P micro sovereignty is probably going to require an extremely well paid and high skilled “police force”, which will, in the as yet very real physical world, be seen as competing with existing state police forces. So at a minimum the anonymity of the micro-sovereign and its subscribers, would have to be far stronger than that of bitcoin.

          • jim says:

            Set up some sort of decentralized P2P network of micro-sovereignty according to some algorithm in open source SW, which appears “attractive” to potential “subjects”.

            That is called “the mafia”.

            One problem is that the requisite level of trust requires face to face meetings and ethnic homogeneity. Hard to modernize.

            Bell’s assassination market was an attempt to put this on a cryptographic and networked basis. Did not work.

        • jim says:

          General Monck pretty much did, while maintaining the form of constitutionality.

          Although he retained the forms of constitutionality, the army, parliament, and the entire administrative apparatus was replaced. The only remnant of the old government was Monck’s praetorian guard, now the Coldstream guards.

          To this day, the Coldstream guards are the ones that surround parliament when it opens, guard the palace, etc.

          Of course he was not doing a total rewrite, but rather booting up an old constitution that still existed in living memory.

          • James says:

            Observing the so-called “fall” of the Roman Empire, it seems clear to me that we are already undergoing an OS-replacement. The new petty kings and lordlings of Francia (and I’m sure other places, though I’m less familiar with them) were populated by the grandchildren of the Roman senate and former military leaders. Eventually, people simply stopped caring about coordinating their actions through Rome. A similar thing has happened in Japan; both the Tokugawa Shogunate and the Meiji restoration were reimagined versions of the current or former state of affairs.

            I believe that we are already running the kernel of the replacement OS at the process-level. At some point, we may see it mounted in a VM, and eventually running on its own hardware substrate. For the right players, we have “freehold”, and a sort of soft “throne”. The issue is that we need a non-dysfunctional “altar” to glue it all together.

  23. Apollo says:

    Thanks for this Jim. Really helps in understanding this space. Hadn’t seen these terms defined and explained so well.

  24. Faust says:

    Someone just posted a link to .gov site on my blog which has a listing of health related concerns for various groups. One of them is for pets and animals. There is no listing for men. When contacted about this the response is that there are more pressing matters. The government considers men worthless so much so that they value animal’s health over that of men. We all know is dying quicker and from preventable causes. If even getting a simple listing for men’s health issues isn’t possible, how do you propose to solve the problem of fatherlessness in a system which is not just male-neutral but blatantly anti-male?

    • jim says:

      Since men do all the fighting, and since an organized group of white men can pretty reliably beat organized groups of other races, it is kind of strange that we have any system other than rule by white males.

      • Faust says:

        One of the problems is that men don’t identity as men whereas women identity as women. Even if men’s issues could come to the forefront of political discussion it provides little to the politician. And if the elected official is constantly gazing toward the next election there is little benefit to him to appeal to men or fathers.

        You’re correct, white men do the fighting, they’re the military and the police and they’re still the dominant party, and yet they’re controlled by others. They’re controlled through religion. Whereas the conservatives are most of the military and police, the leftists are the academics and media. It’s through the conservative’s religious nature that they’re controlled. More specifically, through ethics. As Frank Herbert said, “religion can be summarized as ‘thou shalt and thou shalt not'” asserting that all religion is an ethical treatise. Yet the leftists make appeals to everyone because they control that moral narrative of society. Gay marriage is never treated as an issue of its functionality or longer term efficacy. It’s regarded as morally good, and because of this there is little resistance to it. Never mind the fact that if you make marriage gay men won’t do it. Never mind the fact that it destroys the contract in which marriage is structured under. Not love but the exchange of a man’s excess in labor for a woman’s excess in reproduction. Love has nothing to do with marriage.

        Knowing what we do about hypergamy and game the best way to end fatherlessness is return marriage to its original intention. Make divorce difficult. Give default custody to men. As Warren Farrell points out in his book, “the Myth of Male Power,” the children of single fathers tend to outperform those of single mothers. And teach game to young boys in sex ed class.

        Consider the birthing process. It was controlled by women for how many years? No innovation. No improvement. High mortality rates. Men took over and innovated. Changed it and made it a safe procedure. Giving women the ability to raise children is the same thing. No innovation. Basically the dark ages of child rearing. Within a generation men would figure out how to raise kids. After that women can taught what men learned just as female doctors are taught all of the techniques men developed. They perform them just fine.

        If you go into the conspiracy theory model than white men still control everything. Of course, the banker’s conspiracy is plain as day now and they are mostly white men. As I’ve said before, feminism didn’t really touch the elites too much even though that is where feminism was born, with rich white women wanting to be barristers.

        Some are predicting that after the gay marriage laws get passed feminists are going to push for polygamy in America. I’d be curious to know your opinion on this?

        • jim says:

          The intent of gay marriage is to destroy marriage, thereby moving the electorate left through increasing fatherlessness. Legalizing polygamy would not have that effect.

          • Dr. Faust says:

            Gay polygamy would allow groups to marry each other regardless of sex. It would also greatly influence the divorce courts and that is one of the thing contributing to fatherlessness. When someone thinks of polygamy they think of several women marrying one man. But that’s not how it will be applied. Polygamy will follow after gay marriage. There will be one woman marrying several men. Several women marrying each other. There could be groups of men and women agreeing to marry one another. The question is where would the absurdity stop? Would a corporation be able to require all of its employees to marry one another for a tax benefit?

            • jim says:

              When someone thinks of polygamy they think of several women marrying one man. But that’s not how it will be applied.

              That is not how progressives hope to apply it, but they will find themselves heavily outnumbered by biblical polygamists. At the sight of which they will run away screaming.

  25. spandrell says:

    Just call yourself techno-capitalist. It’s not like you’re the neoreactionary and nobody else is.

    • jim says:

      What is a techno capitalist?

      The literal meaning would be someone who attempts to make money by fostering new technologies, which is probably true enough, but not the topic of this blog.

      Perhaps it means someone who favors capitalism and technological advancement, but even the left pretend to favor capitalism and technological advancement. Indeed in a sense they actually do favor capitalism and technological advancement, it is just that they also favor things that tend to destroy capitalism and prevent technology.

      • spandrell says:

        Dude I thought you read my blog. And Nick Land’s. It’s pretty obvious you are a techno-capitalist. Nothing wrong with that, you do have the upper hand arguing on whats likely to happen.

  26. Nick B Steves says:

    By and large, fatherlessness is a bigger problem than race, and a problem far easier to remedy.

    And neither are quite as hard as firing public servants.

    Overall a tour-de-force Jim. Yes, it is essential to note, as you do, that neoreaction is not the union of Christian trads, Ethno-nationalists, and Techno-Capitalists, but more of an intersection of them. (Not that exactly either, but that would at least be closer to the truth.)

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