http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/04/22/a-better-art-vocabulary-part-1/#more-4945

Conflict management machine gun chatter coupled with a coy but unattractive zaniness.

I can’t argue with that. Although I do think even if the students of Berkeley/Goldsmiths did somehow survive, the conditions present would necessitate anti-egalitarian modes of living in order to regain some semblance of civilization in the ruins. They could of course cling to what their professors told them… but then they’d die. Outside of the padded confines of inexhaustible wealth and security, guys like Mark Potok just don’t make it.

Finally, the likelihood of any given scenario is to some extent irrelevant as long as people believe in it. It seems that the job of reaction is to redirect belief away from rainbow hand-holding and toward a more reasonable system. In your apocalyptic wasteland, can you imagine the horror if only the students of Berkeley/Goldsmiths had survived? Evidence notwithstanding, the belief dictates the results.

Liberals claim that human societies naturally gravitate towards equality and movement away from equality is unnatural

Reactionaries claim that human societies naturally gravitate towards hierarchy and movement away from hierarchy is unnatural

These are mutually exclusive statements. You have to either come down on one side or the other. I find that the Reactionary position has ample evidence for its case, while the Liberal has virtually none.

You make your error here.

“gives this cismale an unnatural and unearned power over the poor transnegro’”

This is incorrect, because the “cismale” as Liberals now refer to him, actually has NATURAL and often EARNED power. If you turn this on its head, the Liberal will not claim that the freak has any power whatsoever, natural or earned. The Liberal will declare that things are actually totally equal, and we are misinterpreting this equality as an upside-down-hierarchy by virtue of the fact that we are envious about our declining power. The Liberal will ALWAYS when pressed revert back to the lie of egalitarianism and equality. If he cannot maintain that, he loses even the final shreds of his intellectual credibility.

As to your critique about the ‘state of nature’ argument, again the analogy simply does not hold because such a claim is not subjective, but rather objective. It is a fact that if a nuclear bomb went off today and the world became a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where the few surviving humans lived at bare subsistence level with all preceding culture wiped out, there would be no equality and holding hands under a rainbow. If you think that this imagined scenario is just as likely as the Reactionary point of view, that of hierarchy and patriarchy prevailing, then either you are wholly ignorant of man’s nature and the nature of societies in general or are desperately clinging to the position of devil’s advocate. Error cannot be held analogous to truth. The liberal is not presenting an alternate point of view, he is simply lying.

Mr. Citadel’s post is a fine example. Just to pick out one or two things, you describe how ‘the detestable figure of the feminist on the bus has an awesome amount of power… because her representatives on high have given her a home-field advantage of a totally and obviously unnatural type.’ This is functionally identical to classic progressive cant; the trusty old ‘racist/patriarchal/elitist culture gives this cismale an unnatural and unearned power over the poor transnegro’. Additionally, the state of nature argument (‘in the absence of ideology… everyone would be Reactionary’) is a mainstay of low level leftist chatter; usually rendered as something like ‘in the absence of this evil culture everyone would hold hands under a rainbow’ and so on.

The cathedral is a useful concept, and belief in objective truth is obviously important, but the all-encompassing nature of these ideas means that often when put into practise the result is little more than a Salon article on Opposite Day.

Your “hailstorm” of bullets comment is spot on. Even in the (relatively) short time since I went to undergrad, I have seen a lot of concepts spill over from the campus into the culture at large, concepts that I originally thought were so harebrained and bizarre they would never in a million years gain traction outside the bubble of academia. But sadly I’ve been proven wrong. Strange times indeed.

Hierarchical societies are natural, egalitarian ones are not. You only need a very basic understanding of the history of civilization to realize that. One of the ideas the Reactionary must shirk is the one that sees all political opinions as equally valid in competition on a neutral playing field. No, what actually has happened is that wrong has supplanted right, evil has supplanted good, and chaos has supplanted order.

The greatest trick the Liberal ever pulled on the foolish Conservative was convincing him that Liberals are just “people like you, with a different opinion”. The Left doesn’t actually believe this and certainly don’t act as if they do, but the sentiment prevents people who in a truly competitive society would have eaten them alive a long time ago, from gaining the upper hand. This is why in Glanton’s scenario, the detestable figure of the feminist on the bus has an awesome amount of power unearned and unwarranted with which to berate the frat boy. Because her representatives on high have given her a home-field advantage of a totally and obviously unnatural type.

Reaction can however claim to be no ideology at all, because in the absence of ideology (if this is possible) everyone would be Reactionary. It is the way of the world once Enlightenment social engineering has been thrown out of the window. We can escape it briefly, take off from its ground in a little progressive aircraft, but eventually the fuel runs out and you have a choice. land gently back into its welcoming embrace, or crash and burn on its merciless solidity.

I expect that we’d see the usual sources for leftist cant (various flavors of marxist-influenced -isms, inputs from secular Jewish thinkers and from believing Christians of the egalitarian type), but who else? And how did their interpretation become the magical incantations of the day? (I have ideas (tv and films, for example), but would be interested to dig deeper to see what we can learn (and potentially use ourselves).