Someone’s been going around asking NRx’s about utopianism and nihilism, so I’m going to write a bit on that.
Reaction is foremost about embracing reality. An objective reality exists apart whatever stories men may tell themselves. This reality is harsh and bitter as we live in a fallen world. Reality can be denied temporarily, but will always win in the end.
Utopianism is a denial of reality, the attempt to create heaven on earth. It is the belief that somehow fallen man can be perfected if we simply change societal institutions. This has been attempted numerous times and has failed every time, usually with disastrous results. Social engineering is the mechanism through which leftists attempt to implement utopianism.
Both utopianism and social engineering are inherently leftist and antithetical to reaction.
Nihilism is the rejection of meaningfulness. It is purposelessness. The core of reaction is that civilization is meaningful and worth preserving, so nihilism is inherently antithetical to reaction.
On the other hand, it is reality that we have lost. Civilization is an undending war against barbarism and chaos, and at this historical point, the latter are winning. By definition, reaction has lost, if it hadn’t lost it would be conservatism. Western civilization is, at least temporarily, mostly hopeless, mired in existential despair, and everybody knows it on a gut level. The collapse is coming.
But simply because the situation is currently hopeless doesn’t mean giving into despair or nihilism. Holding to a meaningful lost cause is itself honourable and meaningful. But beyond that, all earthly things pass, eventually the gods of the copybook heading will have had their fill. Then there will be time to rebuild. By holding on now we can at least provide future generations with an analysis of what went wrong. Maybe it will help them rebuild, maybe it will mitigate the extent of chaos, maybe they will be able to avoid or mitigate chaos in the future, we can not know. But the watchmen must watch and sound the alert.
Reaction is knowing doom approaches, but holding our values strong and sounding the alarm, so that once the doom has passed, civilziation can be rebuilt.
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* For Christians the fallen world is a result of spiritual seperation from God due to sin, for non-Christians the fallen world is a result of harsh, uncaring evolutionary forces. The practical result of both beliefs is the same, the world is harsh.
RE: Collapse. One thing to note, the post scarcity era can’t happen without vast amounts being spent on infrastructure and ample resources of well everything . The US infrastructure rates a D+ most places and is bad enough off that the mainstream media here in California duly noted it would take 300 years to repair at the current rate.
It could be done much faster but it will have to be a vast government initiative as would laying the fiber for future broadband and the electricity and all the rest of the boring low profit infrastructure that makes modern life work.
No one seems to be able to do this and the money really isn’t there.
Corporations aren’t interested at all and many of the companies in the business are divesting themselves of tangibles and would prefer to sell either services or advertising. Google might manage something and some states have done pilot projects too but we stubbornly refuse to make the investments.
There are of course also massive resource shortages, especially water to contend with. Its is for example quite possible that in less than a decade the water levels in lake Mead will fall so low Hoover Dam will be turned off and will generate no power.
These trends leave me to suggest the US at least will simply become a 3rd world economy on par with Brazil or a bit worse off. A few areas will be super nice but very few since the economy won’t work very well and security is insanely expensive in a country as heavily armed and as trained as the US is becoming.
Its quite possible, nay probable the US will go belly up like the old USSR and as such its a great time for enterprising Christians or others to forge a new society or several homogeneous and with whatever religious variant you prefer maybe with little bloodshed
Non-Christians would rather blame entropy than evolutionary forces.
Non-Christians would rather blame entropy than evolutionary forces.
One of the great flaws of the American evangelical obsession with the “end-times” is that it paints any fall into chaos as permanent and hopeless.
@Exfernal – I’m Christian, and embrace social entropy theory. I see this as perfectly in keeping with Christianity and a good explanation. I’d frame it by saying that the further away a society moves from the ‘World of Tradition’ (which is informed by the nature of the Divine Realm i.e God), the easier it becomes to continue to keep pulling out of this orbit and towards eventual annihilation.
@Miserman – I’d agree, which is why I developed a very logical way of looking at it. Suppose we are in the end-times. Great! But there’s nothing we can do about it, nothing we could do would change it nor would we want to. With this in mind, even if you could be 99% sure we are in the end-times, it would be logical to work under the assumption that the remaining 1% was actually the case, and prepare for a non-end-times related cataclysm.
Perhaps it is because I am someone with little to lose, but I welcome with open arms the death of this current order. What are we afraid of? Mass suffering that will be impact upon all people, not just Reactionaries? This is an environment in which we could actually carve out a Reactionary State. I don’t understand why one would be afraid of this. What, were people really expecting a peaceful ‘march through the institutions’ reverse-Gramsci conquering of the west?! Not a chance. This thing is going to be nasty, bloody, and unpleasant. Eventually, there is going to be a tipping point where anyone who calls themselves a Reactionary will have to actually ask themselves “is this all just a fun intellectual exercise for me, or is this my life’s purpose now, victory or death.”
That point will not be the day you see the news that the stock market has crashed into the ground and the blacks in Chicago are burning the city down. It will come before that, because the absolute certainty of a collapse will come some time before it actually happens. For now we have time. How much is anyone’s guess.
Free Northerner,
Our opponents attacked us with better leadership, better organization, outright lies, obscurant rationalism, pseudoscience, and propaganda: repeated over and over again. Most effectively by achieving by judicial activism and immigration, what could not be achieved by persuasion. And of those who could be persuaded, it was predominantly women who, like they were by Christianity in Rome, most easily fooled. And who, being fooled in large numbers, tilted votes, taught children in schools, provided income and incentives to universities as a new customer base, and staffed marketing departments and advertising agencies.
Contrary to current opinion, it is very easy to do something about it. It is merely costly, not hard. Because contemporary civilization is fragile.
But to succeed in any campaign, we must have a better idea, better articulated, better leaders, better organization, and a means of persecuting lying, deceit, pseudoscience, and propaganda. Because gossip and deceit are cheap and easily made plentiful. That is their tactic. Women evolved to use gossip to rally against alphas.
By contrast, violence and truth are expensive and hard to make plentiful. But that is both our tactic and our objective: truth and the threat of violence for those who gossip and deceive.
We require: A goal. A plan. A moral justification for violence. And the will to pay the high cost of saving our civilization from the age of lies and propaganda made possible by the introduction of women into the politics of our high trust polity under open enfranchisement representative democracy, without houses of government that represent our competing class and gender interests.
Our opponents’ strategy is purely verbal – so they need numbers. We don’t. We need a few good men willing to risk life and liberty. Because the liars have created pervasive fragility that can easily be exploited.
Once we have actionable demands, we can raise the cost of not meeting those demands by taking advantage of that fragility. Whether it be nullification, secession, revolution, or civil war, is merely a measure of the cost that the people are willing to pay to preserve their tyranny of the masses. We need a solution to post-democratic equalitarian government, the construction of immoral laws, judicial activism in order to do something other than just rebel.
Which is what I work on full time.
Thankfully, success is more possible now than it has ever been.
Liberty, truth and rule of law and natural aristocracy in our lifetime, or tyranny, deceit, propaganda, Brazil and castes in the next.
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
Kiev, Ukraine.
(You can promote this comment to a guest post if you wish.)
Free Northerner;
If you will forgive me a second comment on the same post; regarding:
—“Reaction is foremost about embracing reality. An objective reality exists apart whatever stories men may tell themselves. This reality is harsh and bitter as we live in a fallen world. Reality can be denied temporarily, but will always win in the end.”—
I thought it was a good opportunity to talk about the relationship between Reaction and Science.
(a) Reaction a criticism not a solution, and what solutions Curtis provided are afterthoughts – which is why we never talk about them seriously.
(b) Reaction provides a language – a terminology of criticism. Which is good. Not just for signaling one another, but because the terminology provides a consistent argumentative structure for ongoing development of ideas – and leaves behind a cannon of ideas easier to learn and whose meaning is easier to maintain over time. Terms frame arguments. And members of reaction have succeeded in framing the argument. To defeat an idea, we must be able to name it and discuss it. That effort was successful.
(c) But Reaction is stated in Continental (moral) and rational philosophical language. Just as the opposition relies upon Continental (moral) and rational philosophical language. It is NOT stated in scientific language free of moral loading and framing, nor is it stated in the Anglo Analytic (scientific) language. It is an argumentatively moral and rational criticism, not a legal, analytic, and scientific alternative. Criticisms are necessary because they motivate us as all good ideology should, but solutions are necessary also, because they can be stated operationally, and put into place operationally, and the rule of law can institutionalize them over long periods of, because they are ‘calculable’ statements rather than ‘interpretable’ statements.
(d) The opposition uses pseudoscience. And reaction uses science to counter their pseudoscience – thanks to the revolution started by Pinker. And that corresponds to our history: The Aristocratic Egalitarianism of our European and indo-european ancestors, manorialism as an economic and political system, conservatism as a political philosophy, are each objectively scientific processes (observation, trial, error, and reaction), using the scientific method of cooperation (rule of law, common law, property rights, independent judiciary),
(e) Conservatism as an intellectual movement failed, in no small part, because our scientific civilization was still reliant upon the rational moral language of our religious ancestors. Reaction is the first meaningful improvement in conservative (aristocratic) argument in decades.
But, ’embracing reality’ is done in the language of correspondence with reality: science and the philosophy of science: analytic philosophy. Science has evolved to become the universal language of truthfulness. In no small part because it is laundered of moral loading, framing, and justification. Morality and Rationalism are allegorical and sentimental technologies. Science and Analytic philosophy are procedural, operational, existential, and unloaded technologies. Morality may be inspiring but science is actionable. I can make a legal contract – a constitution – that is hard to break. But I cannot make a moral analogy that survives the same attacks.
(f) The next evolution of reaction must be not one of improving our loading and framing – although that is necessary for moral antagonism that encourages people to take up arms – but one of articulating the revocation of the errors of the enlightenment in actionable, scientific, analytic, and legal terms.
These scientific, analytic, LEGAL and therefore AMORAL terms, are not as inspiring as the pervasive moral indignation we can load in continental rationalism. They are not as easy to understand, either. And we will require even more new terms. But they are much more precise tools for the construction of a set of demands for a set of institutions that will restore our ancient scientific civilization to its original direction as the guiding language of mankind.
Finish the transformation of the scientific civilization to the language of science.
Liberty in our lifetimes.
Curt Doolittle,
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine.
The idea that Neo’s Reaction isn’t a purposeful attempt at social engineering, however proximate, is laughable.
THOSE IN Neo’s Reaction are the premier social engineers of our times. Literally, the high IQ “white” males behind the curtain. Simple calculations have been made. Smart work + high reward > Hard work + uncertain benefit. What this means is that the majority of “our” best and brightest merely “innovate” new forms of technologically-advanced “bread & circus.”
At this stage, the only way the WHITE MALE can motivate himself to exit the vortex of Nihilism and Utopianism is to embrace genuine white Supremacy, first as an direct affront to the forces of anti-white Supremacy and secondly to expose the radical liberals within Christianity who refuse to embrace the defining assertion.
It is not a matter of whether one can be “perfected” by those who reject Perfection. It is a matter of whether those who embrace Perfection truly have the will to do all right. This is both the white man’s personal battle AND the very thing which ALL HIS ENEMIES seek to destroy. “Our” entire Western experience boils down to the all-pervasive system of anti-white Supremacy. Everything “we” know as white males MUST BE SEEN through the lens of denying, pathologizing, criminalizing and perverting “our” desires for white Supremacy.
Neo’s reaction is inexplicably mum BECAUSE “it” is anti-white Supremacy at its core.