Technological progress masks societal decline. For neoreactionaries, the principal question is not: Who will build the roads? but rather: Who will design and implement the social technology? Material conditions change. Social technology is slow to catch up, and even slower as creative destruction increases churn. Entrepreneurs in the traditional, commonplace sense exist in order to instigate changes in material conditions, but the absence of social entrepreneurs developing social technology to bring into equilibrium material conditions with social tech is ubiquitous—so ubiquitous we don’t even think about it. “We need more marriage, we need more marriage?” Saying it won’t do it. […]

The real problem with capital-P progress arguments is that they’re less a matter of serious philosophy and more of over-indulgence in a trumped up, empirically suspect notion of winning that most of the time is non-falsifiable, due to ad hoc conditions postulated. That’s a little complicated. What I mean is that they’ll first stipulate that Progress has won completely and totally, and then for every counterexample brought to bear in response, they’ll find some cockeyed way to sweep it under the table. “We’re just not advanced enough, yet,” “They just haven’t been educated enough, yet,” “They’re defective,” “They’re mentally ill,” […]

The Dark Enlightenment has trading cards, but so do progressives. Progressive Trading Cards have been in development for much longer—true to the progressivist spirit, the cards represent not individual heroes, but groups of afflicted minorities. The powers the cards have are more advanced: descriptive, yet with actual quantities assigned for calculation purposes. After all, we need to know who beats whom, why and when. But it’s not a regular trading card game. You’ll note that I’ve left out a few groups: whites, males, straights, Christians, and crimethinkers. When all the cards are dealt, one person in particular has one card: […]

Elliot Rodgers. The Story of Elliot Rodger. Or: Don’t Tell Me Details About What I Can’t Have. Or: How Not To Be Antifragile. The interesting part of the Elliot Rodger story is that it’s not quite so simple to dismiss him as some dimwitted, basement-dwelling lunatic—and his manifesto/autobiography/memoir doesn’t read that way. It’s erudite, albeit entirely narcissistic and self-indulgent. My Shoot Up Is Worth Not Just A Manifesto But A Memoir For I Have Accomplished Much Worth Writing About, And You Should All Pay Attention To the Injustices I Have Suffered. In the meantime, most outlets have seized onto the […]

One morning I woke up and wrote down what an ideologically-bizarro world would look like: the communists would writhe about centralizing the means of production, the libertarians would welcome big government, and the anarchists would violently tear down peer-to-peer ridesharing services that remove the exploitative middleman from the picture. Turns out, unlike the desperate last move of tired, spent Hollywood scriptwriters, this wasn’t just a dream. Seattle Anarchists don’t like Uber. Counterforce, one of the groups responsible for violent reaction, calls Uber “one of the most disgusting tech companies in existence.” Read the post. It’s seething with hysterical rhetoric and […]

Mises was wrong. About a lot of things. In economics, and especially in philosophy—which just means especially in economics. First, to be reasonable, you try and get away with saying that Mises was a good economist, but a terrible philosopher. Folks who style themselves as intellectuals almost automatically concede this—as a form of gut reaction. If it’s not his speciality, the tendency is to want to avoid going out on a limb and defending the undefendable. After all, everyone knows that non-specialists never have anything interesting to say. Or even if it is interesting, it’s wrong. That’s where the priors […]

Ideologies are vulnerable to outside subversion—inside subversion, too, but the focus here is on threats from the outside. Let’s take the practical case of entryism. It’s not hard to come up with a half decent definition: whether consciously or unconsciously executed, the paradigmatic example of entryism is where one group is watered down and subverted by the ‘entry’ of others who pass through the gates in Trojan Horse. Ideological Trojan Horses aren’t physical, animal-like structures. Beware Greeks bearing gifts, or beware entryists signaling ingroup affiliation using linguistic tools invented or used by the ingroup. I’m definitely patting myself on the […]