Neoreactionaries And Conferences

[matt_arnold]

I wish I were exaggerating when I say the objective of the Neoreactionary movement is the reversal of democracy and human rights, and an intention to install a monarch CEO over America. Alas, that is how they describe their stance in their own words

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[autopope]

Disclaimer: I know the person behind Mencius Moldbug. I have known him via the internet for most of three decades. He's a smart cookie. Also somewhat trollish in his younger days. And quite Californian. A comp sci geek, needless to say, which is probably why his view of the humanities is somewhat ... skewed.

He has some interesting ideas, if you don't take them too literally. One point he makes is that we are all living in the fallout from the French Revolution and its invention of left/right politics as we know it: like fish, we tend to be blind to the water we swim in, so a lot of what we take for granted is actually quite revolutionary compared to the equillibrium state throughout most of human history prior to the 1770s. Actually, a chunk of this goes back further (to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the 1640s, or maybe the 30 Years War at roughly the same time -- which in turn were fallout from the Reformation). But not that much further in its modern form.

Where things go off the rails is, I think, that we're looking at the non-Extropian silicon valley response to (a) unquestioning absorption of the message of capitalism as the only way to live, combined with (b) the problem that we seem to be heading into an era of increasing automation, with jobs (as source of life validation, if not revenue) only available for an elite. Moreover there's the other question of what's going to happen if The Great Acceleration (in technology and the sciences) that kicked off circa 1700 is finally slowing to a halt with no Singularity in sight, or even possible: if we're coming through to the other side of a rupture, a punctuation mark in the equilibrium of human history. How do you build a human civilization for the future if we've burned all the oil and there are no magic wands? And if by "the future" we're taking the longevity of Dynastic Egypt (circa 3-4000 years) as a lower bound?

I personally think the whole feudal thing the neoreactionaries are on is stupid. The feudal era only lasted about 400 years (1066 through 1485, classically, in England) and was unstable -- as a result of dynastic marriages it tended to concentrate power in a few royal-connected noble families until the whole system went Game of Thrones in a big way. Moldbug would do better to focus on Ancient Egypt and look for stability measured in kiloyears, and contemplate ways to support that without requiring genetic engineering of a long-lived over-caste. (Hint: forcibly suppressing the legacy of revelatory/apocalyptic middle eastern Dead God cults worldwide might be a necessary precondition for this.)

But anyway. It's the conference's call as to whether they want to invite a controversial speaker. My point is that he's controversial for the wrong reasons.