Theory is understanding and understanding is theory. Seeing the world as a collection of bare unexplained facts is effectively the same as seeing the world as filled with magic. To suppose that somehow price controls on wages or medical treatment do not behave like price controls generally is in effect to believe in magic.
Without theory the world is a collection of magical events, something that defies understanding.
Experiments can be faulty. Experience can be faulty, and its interpretation can be faulty. There are experiments “showing” that Uri Geller is a spoon bender. A person who understands the world will know, despite the seeming evidence, that Uri Geller is a fraud. Reflect on Moldbugs demonstration that macro economics is a fraud.
But surely The Reaction is at least a little bit interested in changing the world?
Theory suggests two paths for changing the world.
The Moldbuggian path is to be worthy of power, wait for leftism to self destruct, as it has so many times before, and then when the military come looking for a priesthood, we are available.
The other, more activist, path is to form a thede, tribe, religion, religions being synthetic tribes, and proceed on the long march through the institutions of the red empire, the empire of the bases, and in due course subjugate the blue empire, the empire of the consulates. From time to time the Red Empire has blown up Blue Empire proxies, and vice versa. It would not take much for the fighting to get serious.
The reaction has engaged in a number of experiments in tribe formation. It is too soon to evaluate the results. We don’t yet have much empirical data on tribe synthesis.
Which brings us to the secular reaction’s view of religion. Which is that Religio matters, religion not so much. A religion’s unfalsifiable beliefs, its empirically neutral beliefs, are reverse engineered from its rituals, are rationalizations of its rituals, rather than the rituals being engineered from the beliefs. The unfalsifiable beliefs of Shinto are incoherent, since Shinto is a random grab bag of rituals, yet Shinto still worked quite well regardless, despite having very little in the way of beliefs for people to believe in.
A religion should be an effective tool for transmitting the wisdom of parents to teenagers, telling stupid people to do what smart people already know to do.
[…] is back after his brief hiatus, and fit as a fiddle as expected. First words out of his mouth: “The point of the dark enlightenment is to understand the world, not to change it”. Also he paints a not so pretty picture of “After White Male […]
You know exactly who I am
Where I live
Everything about me
So kill me already.
Just a hopeless mundane
Parasite cruxtoid, klippoth,
Whatever.
Send one of the Western Rifle shooters
To shoot me in the head
With a ten cent bullet.
For my “sins”
You and Noel Ignatiev are mirror images of each other.
Speaking of the major religions of the 21st Century…
https://zeitgeistsurfer.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/four-religions-of-the-21st-century-christianity-islam-secular-progressivism-and-techno-transcendentalism/
[…] enlightenment, theory and practice. Related: Focus on the <a target="_blank" […]
[…] enlightenment, theory and practice. Related: Focus on the demoralizing the progressive bourgeoisie. Related: The Benedict […]
Better idea: “form a thede, tribe or religion” and try to survive until leftism self destructs, in the understanding that this self-destruction may take a very long time.
There are already successful models out there that can be imitated.
Religion is a shortcut to natural law. I personally believe in God and Jesus but I understand a lot of people don’t, for good reason. I’m perfectly happy to join forces with any one who believes in natural law, but unfortunately even that is difficult. Lots of “conservatives” and “reactionaries” (including Moldbug) take pains to say they don’t have any problem with homosexuality as such, but homosexuality is a gross violation of natural law and must be opposed. To take the position that traditional sexual morality must be maintained is a giant leap in and of itself.
A society that tolerates homosexuality is doomed. Fred Phelps, quite by accident, discovered that pederasty was a thing not to be bothered in of all places, Topeka, Kansas. His attempts to see that the solicitation of children by homosexuals in public parks would be stopped was met with hysterical opposition- in Topeka, Kansas. Not San Francisco, people, Topeka, f***ing Kansas!!!
In an insane, evil world the only person you can save is yourself. And maybe your family. And maybe a couple people in your community. Pass by the mainline church with the fag flag out front and just pray.
On the contrary, with no support structure your lone nuclear family is at the mercy of the surrounding insane, evil world.
I tend to agree with Recusancy to some extent. The military, if it exists post-Modernity, will have no real reason to look for a priestly caste. In fact, I doubt the military would exist in that circumstance. It would dissolve along with the other institutions of note. The collapse of Modernity is not going to be some orderly transition, but rather pandemonium.
However, I see the same problems you do with the ‘long march through the institutions’ approach. This is what Anissimov seems to advocate.
On the priestly Jim, are you sure you would class yourself in that way? You seem to view the value in religion as only what societal benefits it can provide, a kind of utilitarian view. Shinto might have had incoherent elements, but its high practitioners certainly didn’t think so and were devoted to their rituals beyond the mere social benefits they provided. It seems when you have a priestly class who don’t actually view supernaturalism in what they do and who are only interested in earthly good, you end up with Unitarians wearing rainbow maniples.
As Charles the First said, “No Bishop, no King”, meaning “If no Bishop, then no King”, or “Without Bishops, the King will lose his head”
A state needs priests and armies, needs both the State Department and the Pentagon. The question however, is whether warriors will rule over priests, or priests rule over warriors. At present the State Department rules over the Pentagon, and it is a disaster.
If one state, then one state religion.
When the military come looking for a priest class, they won’t be knocking on your door.
Better solution.
1) Understand the American State Religion
2) Fix your own life, which will usually mean gaining independence from the American State Religion
3) Problem solved for you, and your family
Moving to China or Oman is one solution. Moving to Idaho, building weaponry, and earning money in a way that can’t be shut down by the government is another.
A good very post. Trying to combat lies by speaking the truth is a full time gig. No need to try to change the world. Too long, the denizens of the right have supported ‘conservative’ politicians who, because they operate on false information propagated by leftist liars, tended to be worse than useless.
Ideally, existing leaders and leaders to come, whether officially Democrat or Republican or a king, will make better decisions based on a correct understanding of the facts.
When Rudy Guiliani tells all media that would listen about the racial variance in actual commission of crime, he was doing tremendously important work without holding any official position. Eager SJWs, trying to balance out incarceration, would without understanding this information free massive numbers of criminals, collapsing hundreds of cities.
Just keep calling out lies, and keep telling the blackest and bitterest truths. SJW entryism in NRx is actually kind of easy to spot. SJWs lie because they hate bitter truth. They can’t handle it; it is too upsetting.
N.B. It’s Uri Geller, not Gellar, though of course he’s a fraud either way.
Thanks, fixed
[…] What the DE is for. NRx vs. WN. Egalitarianism ruins everything. Triggered by Western Civilization. […]
Christianity believes that reading the Bible is cool, since the 16th century. The Bible is a bunch of Jewish crap that serves to make the Jews special among foreigners. The Jews are special among foreigners: they are especially connivingly vicious.
The rituals become beliefs. So, how do we get rid of the Bible and stop making a martyr of a Jew who other Jews were hoping to lead a revolt against a White empire?
The Hindu caste system? A socio-economic basis has already been provided by Moldbug. The rituals just need to be formalised into a religion for the stupid people to understand intuitively
According to the orthodox Christian interpretation of the Bible, the Church is the new Israel. There is nothing particularly noteworthy about “the Jews” other than that they define themselves in contradistinction to Christians and as the killers of Christ. From the Christian perspective, the Jews are just another ethnic group, and “Judaism” is just another religion (one of more recent ancestry than our own).
This reminds me of Yockey, and his talk of Irrationalism as the basis for the German political milieu.
If you’ve got a magician whose tricks have worked in the past and supposedly work in the present, don’t haste to replace him. Chesterton’s Fence is there for a reason – it’s not immutable, but don’t remove it all at once, and if you do, have a workable backup plan. Religion is not only for stupid people, on the contrary, it’s smart sillies who need it most. Stupid people reproduce on their own; smart people have rationally convinced themselves to cease reproduction, citing the most up-to-date social theories to rationalize their actions. Religion, referring to absolute truth, exists to guide these positivists to the right path. Tradition is irrational – and rightly so.
Our intuitive understanding of the small and local is pretty good. Our intuitive understanding of the larger (and therefore less familiar) scale not so good.
“A reactionary is someone who, encountering a fence with no obvious purpose, electrifies it.”
I have given reasons for patriarchy, for suppressing sexual deviation, and for having different laws for different racial groups. A reactionary is someone who, encountering a fence that is alleged to have no obvious purpose, examines the world carefully to see if it does have a purpose. See for example my discussion on sluts.
Good stuff.
We need to find the way to ensure well bred grandchildren for all of us. Having children is easy. Transmitting your priorities is hard.
“Without theory the world is a collection of magical events, something that defies understanding.”
But if you already have established mechanisms for interacting with the world, which have developed organically over the course of many generations, and these mechanisms presumably work, then theory may be superfluous. Now if you believe you can improve established mechanisms, or that they do not in fact work, then you have grounds for experimentation with theory, which is what the left has been doing for millennia, and which is what neoreaction attempts to do right now.
You assume that to change the world one must first understand it, but that’s contestable: first, the world is too complex (and hence unpredictable) to really understand; second, rationales need not necessarily interfere with conduct – whether the Earth revolves around the sun, or the sun is bound by invisible chariots circling the Earth and laughing demonically, you still get melanoma just the same by excessive exposure. Magical or not, understandable or not, eventually people adapt by covering their skin. Rationalism should be confined to the laboratory; it only produces evidently useless theories when it comes to understanding society – thus, Marxism.
Marx was crap, Adam Smith was not. To reason about the larger, and thus unfamiliar, scale is tricky, but not hopeless.
marxism seduces many young physicists, but, so does the many worlds interpretation
MWI is obviously correct, but it has no implications.
Welcome back.