I used to see people elsewhere post a lot of (intentional?) wordsalad describing detailed complex "neoreactionary" views which they admitted was purposely verbose (using more words than necessary to filter out "pseuds" or dumber people).
This seems to have filtered out in favor of a general MAGA populism (?), maybe just because it's the biggest alternative movement that's closest nearby to those views (?).
Anyway is anyone in to NRx views or is it a stale or dead meme at this point or what should we think of it?
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).
the whole movement seems vague and malleable; the author says it is not like "fascism" and yet to me it seems like it would be close to it
I suppose I would question how Social Darwinism would be different from anarcho-capitalism which would just let the market free to do its thing to weed out people; is it implied that Social Darwinism requires an authority to do culling?
My interpretation is that he is saying that Social Darwinism is self-enforcing. Humans can decide that it is too brutal, that they don't like it, and that they are going to opt out. But there is no opt out. Their non-Social Darwinist society will be dysgenic and in the fullness of time it will collapse due to dysgenics. Social Darwinism will reassert itself, all by itself. No authority is consulted or deferred to.
Perhaps one source of confusion is that Charles III offers an image of Royalty as quaint and old fashioned; talking to plants, championing traditional architecture against modern. But it wasn't always like that.
Back when the ballooning craze was taking off George III wrote to the Royal Society asking if research into 'air-globes' should be sponsored by the British Crown, or left to private individuals. He even held the string of a small hydrogen balloon launched from the terrace at Windsor Castle. Royalty has been up to date in the past, and could be again.
So naturally, some of NRx looks to retro-Kingship; quaint and old fashioned. And some is more modernist, embracing Darwinism, and new rules of succession, such as the Rotating Triple Crown.