About Exit

Dragon’s Blood Tree, Socotra Island

The few days prior to this This Week in Reaction, a friend asked me via twitter DM for some neoreactionary links on Exit. Nothing specific came immediately to mind. Nick Land’s exit tag is replete with juicy and tantalizing hints about the various shapes it can take. Jordan Bloom’s Mitrailleuse devotes regular coverage to Secession Lagniappe. We are always talking about exit, but never really setting down what we mean by it, nor articulating a cohesive strategy for it. I wanted there to be one seminal post that I could point to. This will probably not be that post. But it was worth a try.

Well that week ending 2015/07/05 happened to be the week in which progressive vitriol regarding the Confederate Battle Flag reached a maximum pitch, and after which SCJ Anthony Kennedy delivered his Obergefell v. Hodges decision. Suddenly everyone was talking about exit again.

Exit is, at the most abstract level, private government. To exit is live beyond the reach or beyond the notice (or both) of prevailing, entrenched formal institutions of government. Therefore one must be prepared to build one’s own. It is agency, writ large—at the level of a social collective of some size. If you win, you’re a government. If you lose, you’re dead, along with those who cast their fortunes with yours.

In case it is not clear at this point, exit not merely secession, the orderly exchange for one set of familiar political bindings for another. Secession could be important. And it is practical. The American Empire is fading fast. America’s credibility overseas having been wasted, her client states are quietly seeking better and more fruitful relationships. And as the pile of unfunded liabilities stack up at home, the question is only when not if, the austerity imposed by the fiscal laws of physics will come due. When the empire falls a citizen of an independent Texas or Alaska, like those of Switzerland, will be far better off than a citizen of USG.

Secession is very much to be supported, even if only to hasten the demise of this evil empire. But it is not the greater part of exit, which is once far smaller and far bigger. Texas and Switzerland may not be as pozzed as USG. But they’re still pozzed.

Exit is far smaller than political secession because it begins by simply being as independent as possible upon the prevailing regime. It begins in the soul, of an individual and then in that of a community. Most power relationships—hierarchies—are informal and extra-legal. They are neither written down, nor commonly policed by more powerful governments. And while modernity is no doubt a corrosive toward all the various natural hierarchies of human society, and tho’ it drives progressives to distraction to see it, they do not yet have complete power to force people out of freely chosen hierarchical institutions like marriage and natural family, private business, and private voluntary organizations.

So for example, I am the sovereign of my own household. Nowhere, however, is there a set of bylaws for my household. I rule, so far as legal appearances go, by executive fiat. Moreover, unless someone inside the household appeals to the police for some egregious violation, an extremely unlikely event, there is no serious challenge to my exercise of sovereignty of my household. Thus it is a tiny microcosm of exit, freedom under most circumstances from the worst excesses of an exogenous and I believe evil government.

From the example of my household (which may or may not be too dissimilar from yours), we can extrapolate out. Consider a society of families that have chosen, by legal appearances voluntarily, to place themselves under the sovereignty of a board of religious elders. We have now just invented the Amish. They largely police themselves. They have not formally exited, i.e., seceded, from the United States. They still live in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin. But the Amish soul has exited. The Amish don’t particularly care about the goings on of American or Pennsylvanian politics. It doesn’t affect them. They live their own lives, keep to themselves, take care of themselves, and govern themselves. And, while the peace lasts at least, the Amish thrive.

Moreover the Amish are anti-fragile. Consider a catastrophic EMP that knocks out 95% of the earth’s electricity production for 6 months. Will the Amish suffer? Probably. Will 80-90% of them starve to death? Unlikely. Sure they’ll lose refrigeration and pasteurization on their dairy farms. But they’ll still have milk. And something tells me that, were such a day to come, the state of Pennsylvania will have more to worry about than its grateful citizens paying top dollar for unpasteurized milk.

Would the Amish survive if USG boots them off their land for the crime of Insufficient Progressivity? Perhaps not. But first USG would have to want to. And for that, USG would have to consider them a threat. Dealing with threats costs money. And USG may be insane, but it’s not stupid. Nor is it infinitely rich. They’ll prioritize their crackdowns according to threat, and the Amish will manage to stay off that list for quite a while I think.

The Amish display something that Mencius Moldbug called Passivism. (They also display pacifism, which is stupid, and might get them all killed someday. But I’m not talking about that.) Passivism is a careful indifference toward democratic politics. It forces a person’s focus for action onto himself and the things around him over which he does have power. Passivism is about Becoming Worthy… by building. Build yourself. Build your family. Build your community. Build institutions that will stand when the Potemkin villages of the current regime all fall.

Civilizations are very hard to come by. If you build it, they will come. Societies are easier to tear down than to build. Democratic politics inexorably tears down societies. People lose agency in the mad scramble of tribe against tribe, all against all, for the diminishing scraps of the commons. Don’t waste your time on it. Build something better and less fragile, however small. And in so doing you will have begun to build a path toward exit.

In this way, also, exit can be something far greater than mere secession. Exit is how societies evolve and distribute themselves around the earth, and should humanity be found so worthy, the cosmos. Invariably, technology of some sort, whether physical or social, has played a crucial role in human history as one groups set out from one another to find its own way and live by its own lights.

Humans are apes that make tools, and that make tools that make tools and so on. As well, we are apes that make and live by abstract, coherent social norms that make sense of reality and serve the common good. But as the human race devolves and grows stupider in both genetics and in its institutions, both of these processes clearly coming under threat. The trend is alarming. To exit in order to carve out a space for ones people may one day be the difference between life and death of human culture as we know it. In this way, exit may be an idea far larger than mere political secession.