Consume Product

Never heard of it. Is it basically the “ACCELERATE” meme?

I was really into it when it came out but the writing has slowed to nothing and the blogs have been shutting off.

I hope that more people take the "Human all Too Human Pill"

I regard being purposely verbose as a tactical error.
 
Example of Neo-reaction written briefly: http://alan.sdf-eu.org/rotating-triple-crown.html
 
Example of Dark Enlightenment thought written briefly: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/baw4uq/open_borders_the_science_and_ethics_of/ekf15el/
 
What is wrong with the 18th Century Enlightenment? That is a big question. I want to highlight two points.
 
First, the 18th Century Enlightenment preceded Darwinism. Kant makes a big thing of the synthetic a priori. But he is basically talking about instinct, except that without natural selection he has no idea why instinctive knowledge should be true, so it all gets vague and muddled.
 
Without Darwinism, the Utopianism of Enlightenment thinking is self-defeating. A society that lasts needs to embody an evolutionary stable strategy. If you want the lights to stay on and the potholes filled, long term, then the women had better be choosing the kind of men who fill the potholes and engineer the electricity as the fathers of the next generation.
 
Second, the 18th Century Enlightenment preceded von Neumann and Game Theory. So Enlightenment thinkers knew that self-interest would lead to a wretched world, but talked of *enlightened* self-interest. Stick in a treasure word, and hope that nobody notices that the problem is still there, unsolved.
 
Perhaps the most important text is Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action. To oversimplify, an action can be in the best interest of a large group of people, but end up not getting taken because every-one is waiting for some-one else to go first (planning to free ride and not have to bother themselves). Olson realizes that making society happen requires violent coercion at certain key points.
 
18th Century Enlightenment ideas need to be rethought in the light of Darwinism and Game Theory. Does that lead to Enlightenment-2.0 ? No.
 
Look at my two examples. Both are suffused by the spirit of mechanism design. People cannot be closely supervised (who would do it? who would supervise them?). The best you can hope for is rules that rig the incentives. People do what is best for themselves individually (which includes sticking to the rules, provided that there are sufficiently few rules that they can actually be enforced) and cunningly contrived incentives may, perhaps lead to good outcomes, (think "Adam Smith's invisible hand").
 
Rethinking the Enlightenment in the light of Darwinism and Game Theory is rather dispiriting. Ordinary people don't really understand the notion of designing social mechanisms. Introduce universal suffrage and the ordinary people will change the laws, break the mechanisms and doom themselves. Clever people don't understand any better. What about Very Clever People? Put them in charge of social mechanisms and they will rig things in their own favor. Neither clever people nor ordinary people will understand the details of how they are being cheated, but they can still get really angry and kill all the Very Clever People.
 
The bleakness of the analysis blows out the light; hence Dark Enlightenment.
 
To sum up briefly: The 18th Century Enlightenment was rather utopian. It shared the flaw of all utopian thinking, that it was under-theorized. How would it work? In detail? Nobody knew. But the Enlightenment was intellectual. Various strands of thought aimed to fill in the missing details of the theory. Marx, Keynes, Hayek,...
 
Along come Darwin and von Neumann. We start to see the full difficulty of the challenge. Utopia must be evolutionary stable and incentive compatible. People are not clever enough to engineer that. Whoops!

One important NRx/DarkEnlightenment text: https://web.archive.org/web/20200203215527/http://www.xenosystems.net/hell-baked/
 
It is only 790 words, I might as well paste the whole thing.
 
 
 
 
There’s a potential prologue to this post that I’m reluctant to be distracted by. It’s introvertedly about NRx, as a cultural mutation, and the way this is defined by a strategic — or merely ornery — indifference to deeply-settled modes of ethico-political condemnation. Terms designed as pathblockers — ‘fascist’ or ‘racist’ most obviously — are stepped over, perhaps laughed at, but in any case, and most importantly, exposed as bearers of a religious terror. They are signs of a control regime, marking the unthinkable wastes where be dragons, effective precisely insofar as they cannot be entertained. ‘Satanic’ was once such a word (before it became a joke). These words cannot be understood except as invocations of the sacred, in its negative, or limitative role.
 
Is NRx in fact fascist? Not remotely. It is probably, in reality rather than self-estimation, the least fascistic current of political philosophy presently in existence, although this requires a minimal comprehension of what fascism actually is, which the word itself in its contemporary usage is designed to obstruct. Is NRx racist? Probably. The term is so entirely plastic in the service of those who utilize it that it is difficult, with any real clarity, to say.
 
What NRx most definitely is, at least in the firm opinion of this blog, is Social Darwinist. When this term is hurled at NRx as a negative epithet, it is nor a cause for stoic resignation, stiffened by humor, but rather for grim delight. Of course, this term is culturally processed — thought through — no more competently than those previously noted. It is our task to do this.
 
If ‘Social Darwinism’ is in any way an unfortunate term, it is only because it is merely Darwinism, and more exactly consistent Darwinism. It is equivalent to the proposition that Darwinian processes have no limits relevant to us. Darwinism is something we are inside. No part of what it is to be human can ever judge its Darwinian inheritance from a position of transcendent leverage, as if accessing principles of moral estimation with some alternative genesis, or criterion.
 
This is easy to say. As far as this blog is concerned, it is also — beyond all reasonable question — true. While very far from a dominant global opinion, it is not uncommonly held — if only nominally — by a considerable fraction of those among the educated segment of the world’s high-IQ populations. It is also, however, scarcely bearable to think.
 
The logical consequence of Social Darwinism is that everything of value has been built in Hell.
 
It is only due to a predominance of influences that are not only entirely morally indifferent, but indeed — from a human perspective — indescribably cruel, that nature has been capable of constructive action. Specifically, it is solely by way of the relentless, brutal culling of populations that any complex or adaptive traits have been sieved — with torturous inefficiency — from the chaos of natural existence. All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.)
 
Crucially, any attempt to escape this fatality — or, more realistically, any mere accidental and temporary reprieve from it — leads inexorably to the undoing of its work. Malthusian relaxation is the whole of mercy, and it is the greatest engine of destruction our universe is able to bring about. To the precise extent that we are spared, even for a moment, we degenerate — and this Iron Law applies to every dimension and scale of existence: phylogenetic and ontogenetic, individual, social, and institutional, genomic, cellular, organic, and cultural. There is no machinery extant, or even rigorously imaginable, that can sustain a single iota of attained value outside the forges of Hell.
 
What is it that Neoreaction — perhaps I should say The Dark Enlightenment — has to offer the world, if all goes optimally (which, of course, it won’t)? Really, the honest answer to this question is: Eternal Hell. It’s not an easy marketing brief. We could perhaps try: But it could be worse (and almost certainly will be).