Restarting This Blog, maybe.

Tags

blog info, meta

This is a quick post to say the following:

1. I am distancing myself from, though not forsaking, the neoreactionaries. I think that the neoreactionary movement has been tainted by the seeds of fascism and resentment. The ascendence of the rather bizarrely horrible J. A. Donald and neoreaction’s turn against Less Wrong, as well as the fading away of the elements most capable of talking to open-minded leftists, have frustrated me. I never was impressed by the racism, which seems to have become worse.

2. I’ve changed to a more personal tumbler, and I no longer use the Dread Lord von Kalifornen personality so much. I also am going to be writing in a much more normal style.

3. I don’t expect to be blogging regularly, but I hope to transfer some medium-length stuff to this rather than Tumblr, which looses long-form stuff in the pit of time.

Reconstruction Contrasted

Tags

culture, deconstructionism, meta, neoreaction, philosophy, politics, reconstruction, reconstructionism, society, theory

1. Culture cannot be effectively altered with the usual tools of the technocrat or the revolutionary. It tends to naturally resist deliberate alteration, and the most acultural policy plans are often the most resisted.
2. Attempts to alter culture and society tend to result in societies that look very different from those which developed since time immemorial, and frequently creates very dysfunctional societies.
3. One must find a rational way of dealing with and channeling the anti-rational. Fascists and Red Revolutionaries (communists and anarchists) both have done this in destructive ways. Someone must do it for the supportive reform of society. Any plan that is to deal with all levels of society must deal with the anti-rational.
4. In modern society, national-level and traditional cultures have been disrupted by some transient, often profit-driven media cultures. This has negative consequences.
5. Destruction of culture carried out intentionally is a serious issue, and a just cause for anger and frustration.
6. Deconstructionists often vastly over-estimate their ability to forcibly change other people’s value systems, to overthrow nonfragile social systems, or win culture wars. Capitalism is not smash-able by anything less than an occupying army that is somehow above capitalism.
7. Moral progress is not something one can simply take on faith though it does appear that Europa has become more humane and accepting from 1800 to 2000.
8. The reactionary idea of stopping deconstruction and social change in its tracks is utterly futile and hopelessly naive, even when it is not bent to the will of the fascists who are its natural companions. Social change happened due to various factors, vast formless matters of economics and semiotics, and neither past nor present structures are appropriate. Furthermore reactionaries place themselves in the way of the humanization of Europa.
9. The future shall resemble the past, in that the arrangement of society, while adaptable, shall be aparently fixed and bounded. In the progress of getting from there to here, society should be rearranged into a more virtuous form.

Homophobia, Reconstructionism, and “Flaunting Your Sexuality”

From time to time, one sees conservative complaints to the effect that they wish that homosexuals and other “sexual deviants” did not flaunt their sexuality, or that they wish homosexual activists would not attack the nature of marriage, or some other attack not upon sexual deviancy itself but upon a real or perceived tendancy toward deconstructionism or deliberate mocking.

It need not be said that these arguments are usually confused and hateful, and often blatantly wrong. However, the responses to them tend to ignore matters of culture. Also, these arguments tend to be counterproductive.

An Internal Conflict in The Queer Community

These outside criticisms are mirrored by an internal conflict in queer, gay, and otherwise sexually nonconforming communities: the conflict between assimilation and non-assimilation.

Reconstructionist Commentary on Mr. Anissimov’s Premises of Reactionary Thought

Premises of Reactionary Thought

1. Right is Right and Left is Wrong.

Here it is necessary to dissolve both left and right. I strongly agree that we must be able to construct a concise value system with neither the bizarre inversion of far-leftist rebel moralities or the confused never-never-land of modern syncretic thought. I strongly agree that we must handle criticism of authority without destroying authority. Critically, I think we must be able to make authority which can reform in response to criticism. 

2.  Hierarchy is Basically a Good Idea.

I too believe in hierarchy,  but I have my doubts as to the Reactionaries. First, I find it improbable that the hierarchy they support is the correct one. (Unlike fascists, they will have the potential to search, to explore, and to compare different hierarchies, but I fear they will not take the time and the pain of knowledge to do so.) Inclusion of plurality or exit from hierarchy can make these structures much safer to implement.

I do agree that the modern intellectual Left’s tendency to go on hierarchy hunts is somewhere between a tremendous waste of resources and fuel for a disaster of Cambodian proportions in case of an actual revolution, and I add my Imperial voice to that of the poor and the subaltern who ask those professional traitors, “Is this going to be a straight up fight, or another comparison hunt?”.

This (uncommon, but still frequently seen) Leftist rebel-morality deserves some extra thought. It seems to be a form of fuherprinzip not for rulers, but for the freedom of specific classes. Usually those classes genuinely require freedom in this mis-ordered world, and yet the strongest have reacted to stigma and suppression (A stigma and suppression that might be lifted if some Lord, honorable and pure, ordered it to be lifted) by abandoning not merely morality but restraint. I remember a situation in which a white man annoyed and frustrated a black activist by throwing at her feet the abuses of her race, and she responded by most publicly embarrassing him (who was more likely a victim of ignorance than a bigoted victimizer) and then doubling down, claiming a Nizchean independence from morality when anyone questioned her.

3.  Traditional Sex Soles are Basically a Good Idea. 

Here my disagreement grows. I do agree with the basic claim that for many women, the modern, feminist gender role has merely exposed them to capitalist labor pressures (and without lifting those of men).  Yet I cannot accept the questionable evolutionary psychology, as it seems improbable that modern-era or recent-era gender roles map onto those present in that aboriginal past where humankind evolved. More importantly, I do think that feminism and its companion movements have done a great service in lifting a certain unnecessary tyranny from the world of sexuality and gender. Somewhere between five and fifteen percent of the population has significant sexual or gender deviancies (the most common being homosexuality, the most damaging when suppressed possibly being the much rarer transexuality). These people simply cannot be ignored, nor we continue the disastrous and harmful attempts at suppressing them and continue to consider ourselves rightful hierarchs of Europe.

To someone who is aware to a significant degree of the internal politics and more far-out ideas of the world of leftist gender theory and activism, gay marriage suddenly takes on a great reactionary, or more properly, reconstructionist significance and the anarchists already know this. I have often been confused by the failure of reactionaries to properly research their enemy; typically they simply are frustrated by the most popular present-day developments (which I sometimes support wholeheartedly.) Even among reactionaries, the ability to truly recognize without prejudice the new situation is rare. Consider the assimilation conflict.  What the extremist queer anarchist fears is not that the Catholic Church will suppress gay marriage, but that the Catholic Church will survive and will frequently perform gay marriages, with all the glory that its name can bring. Xe (Often he or she, but never they, and less commonly ze) knows that when the majority of gay Europeans are properly integrated into culture; when they take their place among the great lovers of history and the people of urban neighborhoods and pastoral plains, that xe will have lost them to the “racist imperialist capitalist structure of society” or whatever overly wordy name xe has given to us. There is an internal conflict in the gay community about this matter, with the wealthy, the poor, the old, the transexual, and those who are not white and therefore not robbed of racial heritage more generally adhering to the reconstructionist side while the young and bourgeoisie-bohemian are more typical of the anarchist faction, along with those with sexualities or gendersystems so unusual that no help is forthcoming for them. As long as reactionaries fail to recognize these matters, they will make the same mistake they (truly) oppose the conservatives of, of simply resisting whatever changes to society are most recent. As long as they fail to respect these people, they will simply be another obstacle that I must overcome, whether with discourse and disputes or with kinetic energy and maneuver.

I would argue that there are some genuine feminist problems that reactionaries should take an interest in; the first is the ridiculously high rates of rape which feminists have tried so hard to suppress, with only moderate effect.

My primary complaint about feminism is that in conjunction with changing capitalist pressures, it goes around breaking societal systems without replacing them with anything, as well as that it tends to confuse the reformer for the completed reform. Fortunately the contemporary form of feminism is better at this, but it also is the most atomistically individualistic to date.

4. Libertarianism is Stupid

I find myself unable to find any significant disagreements with this. Neoreactionaries disagree with libertarianism, as it is usually advocated and practiced, for many of the same reasons leftists do. So do reconstructionists, with the added complaint that libertarianism would be ineffective at affecting social structures and norms (many libertarians take offense at the idea that social power and structures can have any importance) but would also leave adverse and merely outdated structures and norms in place rather than reconstructing them.

5. Democracy is Irredeemably Flawed and we Need to do Away With It

Here too I agree although I think that many of the benefits of ending democracy could be furthered by becoming one of the factions that controls the desires of the electorate.

Entitlement, Science, and Scientific Racism

Tags

criticism, meta, neoreaction, politics, proposal, race, reaction, society

I do not know whether natural human intelligence — whether the vaunted “general intelligence” or some specific adaptedness to modern industrial civilization —  varies with race. The matter is simply too fuzzily social-scientific and too politicized for me to treat anything as strong evidence; I can make antipredictions only.

I am not one to fear the truth, or to believe that nonsense (typically advocated by those who are defended by the weapons and fed by the engines of Science) that there is no truth. And I am not particularly vested in the outcome either way; one option seems mildly attractive, another explains much, and the third would be strange and disappointing but not something I am unprepared to deal with.

But I am very worried that the claim of the more racist side of the HBD (Human Bio-Diversity, sometimes meaning “scientific racism”) faction is correct.

If they are correct, then it will almost certainly be possible to find strong, convincing evidence that they are correct. And that would be terrible.

The Sociology Problem

This matter has been done to death within leftist Social Justice communities, but analysis focuses entirely on intersectionality and privilege, and simply replaces criticism of external power differentials with internal ones in the same sordid, deconstructionist rebel-morality framework. (How similar to slave morality does rebel morality seem, when one is a utilitarian!) Most criticisms also tend to — with shocking lack of self-awareness — commit the very same error they are criticizing. Finallly, leftists often are unable to detect social ills that do not affect one of the classes they are accustomed to defending. On the other hand, surely one of us sons and daughters of power, we barons of Asgard, can exorcise this error. I don’t think that the Right has dealt with it, other than to feel like its enemies are too hard to satisfy.

The Ruling Class and the Theory Class

An awful lot of the left-wing end of the culture wars, once one gets away from brute democratic politics and into the realm of discourse, planning, and activism, operates under a bizarre inversion of Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Any simple utilitarian policy, internal or external, is invariably buried under a flurry of writings generally focusing on who that policy ignores (which is usually quite important) and what that policy or the language by which it is proposed, opposed, or defended says about the origniator’s opinions of other people (which can be telling, but is nowhere near as important.)

Cultural Pluralism and the Culture Wars

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commentary, criticism, culture, meta, pluralism, politics, proposal, reconstructionism, society, super-subculture, theory

I believe that the world might be spared a good deal of trouble if cultural pluralism could be applied to groups of equal power within the same national-level culture. If one looks at, for example, the conflict between the Left and the Right on gay marriage, one sees that on the one hand, the Right often sees gay marriage as an imposition forced upon them by the Left, and the Left can usually offer no response beyond the invocation of individual rights (along with a usually correct accusation of bigotry). It should also be clear that if the Left and the Right of America were segmented from each other, the Left would have already succeeded in having gay marriage. Yet few on the mainstream of either party, and non-one on the fringe of the Left, seems to consider that accepting pluralism of sub-society might ease both their own problems and those of their opponents.

How Foreign the Native?

Modern society is divided by many borders. Learned men and women most often discuss those such as social class, race, gendersystem, religion, language, and prior nationality. These are indeed important, and it is along these lines that some of the most recondite bigotry and brazen hatred have been wreaked by the more fortunate upon the less so. I have listened to the tales of horror of the woman, the queer, the Muslim, and the African when I returned to this earth in conquest. Many of them wept to tell them. I would have wept to listen, had I not a mighty army at my back with which to right the wrongs.

And yet these are not the only borderlines. The privileged classes have their own segmentation of society, segmentations often scarcely noticed. Along these lines, hostility oft flows in only one direction. And unfortunately, among those who control politics and those who control culture, there is neither awareness of the boundaries nor acceptance of them. From time to time, one sees an attitude of conquest and presumed cultural superiority — not the claim of a utilitarian that she can do better, but the disdain of the entitled — that in former times would have seemed more appropriate to the British lord of India than an American scholar rebuking another American.

FEMEN Among The Infidels

If there is one truly universal flaw in the human mind, it is surely the failure to see how different another culture may be. Men and women seem to jump from a point of essential similarity to seeing each other as utter aliens, from a point of sameness and clarity to a point where there will never be sameness or clarity. These errors can be the doom of empires and the bane of charities, and bring with them a certain attending level of insult and microagression. Neither myopic universalism nor alienating “othering” should survive before the eyes of Europe.

As an example, consider the young women of FEMEN. These are proper young lades of Europe (though not the Europe that I know), who were confused by the way that so many Muslim women do not chafe at the requirement of the veil, and why even those who do refuse to throw it off. They lacked the wisdom to notice when they were confused, so instead they themselves attacked Islam with condescension — and their own bare bodies. There was never any understanding in them; if they gave any heed to the criticisms of the cultural relativist they saw it only as an attempt to play one liberation against another. They assumed that because they themselves were no part of any Western army, nobody would care about the slight of the terrible West.

Reconstructionist Commentary on Mr. Anissimov’s Empirical Claims of Reaction

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commentary, neoreaction, reaction, reconstructionism

This post may be confusing to those who are not at least a little familiar with both neoreaction and my own Reconstructionism. I have read Mr. Anissimov’s Empirical Claims Of Reaction. While I think it to be a fairly good explanation of the neoreactionary mindset, I both think it contains some errors that neoreactionaries are wont to make and also is simply wrong in some cases.

 

Reconstruction

Tags

philosophy, politics, reconstructionism, theory

Note: the term ‘reconstructionism’ may already have a esoteric meaning. When I use it, I refer only to the ideas articulated in my own writings.

Humans do not live by bread alone. Perhaps some of them do, and it is them who write that everything we know today must fall. But they are not helpful to the majority. Romance — the old romance, with its loyalties and communities, with its broad set of values — has not and should not be forced to perish. Orwell was right to criticize the never-nationalist intellectuals who were “so enlightened that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions.” Science has discovered that conservatives have broader values than harm-reducing liberals — and under consequentialism, who can say that they are wrong?

Even as we throw off moral myopia, we must recognize that from the outside it is not a given that our circle grows wider. Moral progress probably exists, but should not be taken for granted.

Finally, unless you are actually an anarchist, the organizations and social structures that are at all vulnerable to attack have already fallen. Further social progress requires either conquest or reconstruction, not dynamiting.

I now make the claims for reconstruction.

What Is Deconstructionism and Why is it Bad?

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criticism, culture, deconstructionism, philosophy, politics, reconstructionism, theory

With a brief, starry-eyed idealistic suggestion of what to do about it.

Those who come to this blog seeking clear ideas based entirely on rationalism may be disappointed. Those who come to this blog expecting me to share their basic assumptions and values will be disappointed. Those who come to this blog wondering what this haughty outsider has to say about them will be intrigued. But enough with the pleasantries. The time has finally come for me to define reconstructionism, and to do that I must define deconstructionism, that which it reacts against.