This (Thanksgiving) Week in Reaction (2015/11/29)

Harold Lee brings us important notes on The Confucian heuristic. This ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ begins with useful notes on Whack-a-Mole Inequality™:

If you suppress all sources of inequality that you can, often you end up just increasing the importance of things you can’t touch. Knock down aristocracy, and you simply get meritocracy that privileges diligent, politically savvy nerds instead. And while we’ve developed some social technology to at least channel selfish impulses in prosocial ways, we haven’t yet invented the analogue of capitalism that channels height inequality into prosocial behavior.

[…]This leveling frees up the new elites – the winners in the new “emergent inequality,” to deny that they’re in fact elites. They’re just average Joes like anyone else, and feel therefore feel no sense of obligation towards the losers of society. And when they’re in competition with the weak, they see it as a contest between equals and have no compunction about using their strengths to exploit them, all cloaked in egalitarianism.

Confucius bypasses these pathologies by admitting reality: the inequality you will always have with you.

So he spends a lot of time talking about rights and responsibilities in different kinds of relationships, and promoting rites – think “etiquette” – to make it clear that the weak respect the strong, and that the strong have obligations to the weak. If you’re going to be king, you’d better protect your people. If you’re going to be a mom, the kids have to obey you and take care of you in your old age, but you’d better raise them well. No weaseling out.

This Week in Reaction (2015/11/22)

My apologies for being so late this week. Will attempt to catch up over this long week-end… It was a tremendous week this week in the sphere. Fantastic articles, some of which you may have missed. If so, I am here to help…

Jim describes How to deport eleven million people. If Australia’s modest successes along these lines form any sort of pattern, it’s not as hard as you might think. I love especially his construction: “the merely elected government”, which no one much notices until it’s aims conflict with the real (unelected) government. This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. Also here are some videos showing Yes, all Muslims are like that. Or at least enough like that for exceptions to prove the rule.

Neocolonial pulls up notes on Taxation as Relationship.

The question at the heart of this is whether taxation based upon a notion of slavery, upon coercion, upon serfdom, upon scheduled pillaging, can ever be moral.

His point being that each of those sounds evil under a purely institutional relationship, but more or less acceptable under a personal one. And the personal relationship is precisely the sort of thing that the West has spend the last 400 years or so trying to banish. Another ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

This Week in Reaction (2015/11/15)

This goes on top. This in a week of outstanding articles throughout the Greater Reactosphere® In light of the Islamicist Paris Attacks, an anonymous contributor to Social Matter addresses an open Letter to France from America. In it, he outlines the procedure and plan of neoreaction to return France to its former glory as a sovereign nation. Strong medicine to restore national health, not a prescription for an already healthy patient. RTWT.

This Week in Reaction (2015/11/08)

Meta Week this week in This Week in Reaction…

Never one to pass a cleavage line without notice, nor fail to set up a drilling rig on the site, Nick Land wonders aloud about Corrosive Individualism. As usual, the real meat lies in the comments. (Especially Hurlock’s.) Because of its importance to #NRx internal culture and pathfinding, Land earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for that one. More on that topic here. To wit:

Free societies are a product of deeper things, all feedback complexities aside, but they are — from the perspective of techno-economic functionality — an evidently desirable one.

Also by way of Land: We told ya so.

This Week in Reaction (2015/11/01)

Neocolonial maps out Enlightened Idiocy.

• Liberty is not the base virtue. It is the crowning flower that appears when virtue is possessed. The drive to the possession of virtue over generations within Western Civilisation resulted in increasing liberty.

That is supremely well put;

This Week in Reaction (2015/10/25)

Malcolm Pollack spots a convergence of Second Laws. Nick Land notices the noticing. Are all Second Laws like that?

Nick Land catches Steve Sailer in an, even for him, rather poignant interrogative Sentence.

This Week in Reaction (2015/10/18)

Sydney Trads have up the 2015 Symposium of the Sydney Traditionalist Forum. I haven’t read it all, but it appears to be fantastic. It has contributions from well-known American conservatives Paul Gottfried and Thomas Bertonneau, as well as our own Aussie Neoreactionary Alastair Hermann who dropped a lot of Menciism in The Abbott Aberration, an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀:

[U]nder democracy, a pause in societal decay is the best possible outcome. The failure of Abbott to provide anything more than a pause in the continuing decline of Western civilisation is a perfect illustration of our core contentions. Under democracy, the ‘outer party’ — the Liberals in Australia — exist purely to give the populace time and space to accept the degradation of their culture as and when it again becomes possible. It is as though democracy sets in motion a ponderous cultural decay that is connected to reality by a spring, resistance to which simply builds up the tension required to overcome that resistance. Thus, even the pause that Abbott has brought about serves the left; it sets a new resistance mark for the right, and empowers the left to drive further degradation of civilisation.

In other news…

This Week in Reaction (2015/10/11)

With spring in full swing Down Under, our antipodal brothers have been busy. Social Pathologist has a nice article up on Facial Aesthetics: Implications for Art.

Sydney Trads have a nice quote up this week from Luke Torrisi on the nature of conservatism. A snippet:

Order is important to a conservative because if you have this notion of an inherent moral order, you don’t need some all pervasive government injecting it into you. The inherent moral order and freedom are closely linked for a conservative […] You will note though, that when we talk about an enduring moral order, democracy isn’t a feature. This modern worship of democracy need not apply. It’s a fad, democracy.