Darkest Enlightenment

…the Cathedral stole Christianity…

With all due respect to Machiavelli and Dostoyevsky, it came to my attention at Foseti’s (where everything always starts) via the Reactosphere’s blogless, nameless, and most capable of anti-crypto-meta-anti-iconoclasts, Handle:

The leadership of that [post-Cathedral] society would realize that they would need to attend to the mass population’s moral needs. To create the kind of society you want to live in means doing what one can to shape the inner-motivations of behavior of the people into neighbors you’d like to live next to, employees you’d like to have, etc.

They’d take all their Dark Knowledge and conclude what Spandrell (and, to an extent, me and Peter A. Taylor, and I think Moldbug) have concluded – which is what GK Chesterton said – the brains of most people are too fertile a place for religious-like thinking. You can’t make a “less-wrong” “everybody’s a disciplined Bayesian ultra-rationalist” society. You need a substitute or alternative religion-ish thing to put in there that gets you what you want to achieve socially. A set of irrational unfalsifiable beliefs. A structure of taboos. Constant Reinforcement through social pressures and all the opinion-making institutions. And, if you’re really confident you’re doing it right – a heresy mechanism that deters people from openly questioning the system and undermining all the hard work it took to decrease social-entropy and build social-capital. A set of Platonic-Straussian noble lies (and maybe your next generation of elites will even forget that they are lies) to keep the harmony going. A line of thinking that goes back thousands of years.

Why is this the Darkest Enlightenment? Because it’s exactly what the DE Community (“The DEC”?) is complaining about with the Cathedral, and what the Cathedral was complaining about with the Church, and the Church was probably complaining about with something else, etc. Celsus lost to Origen, after all.

The real ugly truth, the real harsh reality, is that we probably can’t do away with suppressing some ugly truths and harsh realities – the very things we complain about…

So it seems… we DO need a religion after all, so that the post-Reaction® (i.e., simply sane and just) world can run smoothly again. I, for one, never doubted it. But I’ve already got one… i.e., a religion. And while it is often (sometimes justifiably) mistaken for the Bells & Incense Branch of Cathedral Central, it once was the most powerful reactionary institution on Planet Three, and I say easily can be again.

Sharlach, quickly acclimating to his new role as “Doctor of the Reaction” (the previous one having perished in a freak gardening accident), expands on this “darkest” thought. A bunch of spergy atheists cannot run the world (or a polis or an ice cream shoppe) as if it were populated by a bunch of spergy atheists. Indeed: Culture matters. And there is no culture without a cult.

So what is the rhetoric of the Dark Enlightenment? What myths can we construct from our collection of harsh facts about man, intelligence, social cohesion and entropy, and the rest of it? What do our pretty lies sound like?

I have no idea. But I can offer this consolation: they won’t be pretty lies. In its denial of nature and reality, the Cathedral mythology intersects with reality only at the best of times; the rest of the time, its myths are pure sophistry. However, given its commitment to accepting the harshest facts of existence, the Dark Enlightenment is in a less tyrannical position. Its lies will not be lies so much as sugary additives to make the bitter medicine go down easier.

And I can, more or less, give a solid “Amen” to that. But I ask here, as I did here, why all this hand-wringing over building a new religious narrative for the post-Cathedral world, when we already have a perfectly serviceable one, that most people happen (at least nominally) to believe?

The Cathedral stole Christianity…
Well let’s steal it the hell back!