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.
Over at Sydney Trads, Frank Salter shows there is a right way and a wrong way to be anti-anti-racist.
In other Aussie news… Neocolonial goes Meta on Neoreaction in Greater Realities. This was an☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Slumlord takes Niall Ferguson to task for uncharacteristically silly remarks in the wake of the Paris Attacks. Slumlord’s vignette about opportunistic diseases is alone worth the price of admission. If some brown monotheists of middling achievements pose a threat to your “secular empire”, then you might consider whether secularism might itself be a big part of the problem. France has many challenges. Devout monotheism per se hardly seems one of them.
Antidem is not exactly shedding a tear for Playboy’s decision to stop featuring nude models, but even the degeneracy of the former era seems rather refined compared to its equivalents today.
Nick Land notices The Fear coming from the mainstream Left about Trump. On the one hand, I’m tempted to say, “If only…” Trump is no fascist. No more so than a Bloomberg or Giuliani. On the other hand, extreme right populism is pretty much what neoreaction was designed to avoid. Happily, Trump will not be what the Professional Left fears. Sadly, Trump will not be what the Professional Left fears. He could throw a wrench in America’s imminent collapse. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Nydwracu has a brief thought experiment about induced death rates: Crime beyond the numbers. They don’t necessarily tell the whole story. Also a modest proposal made to a medical researcher in prion disease.
E. Antony Gray had enough time to write a very short poem this week: A View to a Kill. And also a longer one: The Rectification of Names—a subject very near to the neoreactionary heart.
And over on The Continent, Carlos Esteban writes in En defensa de la discriminación, which is to say in defense of thought itself.
La lucha contra la discriminación es, a la larga, una lucha contra la reflexión, es pedirnos que consideremos igual ocho que ochenta e imbuirnos la noción de que la realidad es un magma gris donde las distinciones son una ilusión que hay que desterrar.
Filed under They Really Are Inhuman, Bald-faced Shills… Free Northerner reports on the Democratic Party’s efforts to help the faithful score zingers against their Trump-supporting GOP uncles over Thanksgiving dinner. Because, after all, what could be more important than slinging correct political opinions among friends and family for the holidays?
Butch Leghorn comes on Propertarian Forum to wonder: Is Modernity Anti-White? Not so much anti-white as anti-masculine ergo anti-white. Butch does the ‘splainin.
Burke was very clear about what a European statesman was duty-bound to conserve: the institutions, customs, manners, and prejudices that helped the European people preserve their faith in our Common Hope. All changes in government must be changes to preserve the foundations of a Christian government, just as you would shore up a sacred monument with mortar and plaster, rather than tear it down and put up a new monument. Burke denounced the French Revolution with Shakespearean eloquence and passion, because he saw that the French Revolution was a radical break with the customs, manners, and prejudices of the European people who had believed, for over 1,500 years, in our Common Hope.
Such a schism was present too in the American Revolution I think. But perhaps harder to see, gilt as it was with famous Anglo (relatively speaking) Moderation®. “Niceness” has evolved as the fatal bigotry of expecting the whole world to be as fairminded as you.
This Week in Jim Donald
Jim was a busy beaver this week, and therefore deserves his own <h5> Section Heading. First, he makes mincemeat of recent hangwringing about recent restrictions of “freedom of speech” in academia. “Bollocks,” says he.
Academics have been terrified, servile, docile, and submissive since the middle of the nineteenth century.
See deer, say horse
The purpose of political correctness is to humiliate and degrade by demanding that people accept an obvious lie, thus demonstrating who has the power and who shall submit.
Every so often a new act of submission is demanded to show submission to new masters, and all of academia absolutely without a single exception turns on a dime and endorses the new obvious lie, just as it endorsed all of the old obvious lies, for nearly two hundred years.
This is nothing new. What is new is that the lies are coming faster and faster, indicating greater and greater instability within the ruling elite – but they have been coming every faster for nearly two hundred years. This is a sign of decline, but decline has been happening for quite a while, ever faster.
A lie can be a better coordination mechanism than the truth. It’s 指鹿為馬 all the way down.
Altruism is seldom the game theoretic solution. When it is the solution, it’s a result of a highly successful culture that is fragile. The Dark Enlightenment talks about high trust equilibrium a lot. High trust equilibria are rare and hard to maintain. Underestimating both the value and difficulty involved in creating high trust equilibria is the major failing of progressivism and modern Christianity. A few centuries ago, we were a lot better at it. Old type Christianity was a lot better at it.
The natural equilibrium is defect defect, and the trick is to break out of that natural equilibrium, to get a cooperate cooperate equilibrium. Following a high trust strategy in a low trust environment is a failure mode. However, part of switching from a low trust to a high trust environment involves someone deciding to follow a high trust strategy despite the risk of being in a low trust environment.
Such opportunities are naturally rare. But one such opportunity occurred when a Samaritan, soon to become famous as “Good”, happened upon an unfortunate Jew who had been beaten up and robbed on his way down to Jericho.
In a more obviously threatening world, Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan is unlikely to suffer radical scope inflation, but safe and coddled as the cuckservative is, he doesn’t translate the parable into “I’ll get a mexican I find lying near-dead by the road to a hospital,” but rather, “I’ll save the WHOLE WIDE WORLD one adoption at a time.” So in the more materially trying times that are historically typical, 3) sets a standard the average congregant only hopes to approximate. But in these unusually prosperous times, the cuckservative instead sees a bar to be cleared by as wide a margin as he can muster. He wants to outdo Jesus, and he’s under the delusion that he can.
The Starving Children of Africa are not good Samaritans. Given half a chance they will cut your throat for a nickel. And if you think that they are good Samaritans, you are holier than Jesus. Recollect my recommended procedure for those that claim authority on the basis that they are holier than Jesus. A large part of the reason that so many black African children are starving is that black Africa is stuck in a severe defect/defect equilibrium, and cannot get out of it except that white men with whips take charge of them.
I’ve already quoted way too much. Jim blows most of us out of the water even when he’s not at his best. This is Jim very much at his best. This is a brilliant bit of synthesis using strands of neoreactionary thought, and an absolutely seminal contribrution to Neoreactionary Theory, hands down winner of the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀. Go RTWT.
This Week at Social Matter
Ryan Landry’s Sunday article is Hidden, Subtle Underclass Coddling. Underneath the pathologies of the permanent under-class there is a large constituency of mandarins for whom it pays the bills. Few vices go unrewarded, nor many virtues unpunished. For example:
There is a Furniture Bank of Central Ohio. This helps the poor get free furniture to furnish their apartments and homes (rent paid for by you with Section 8 and welfare). Furniture is donated, so there is no money on the government ledger. This actually is not for the poor. This is for the poor that have social workers and case managers. These can be parolees, recovering addicts, and even people in the child protective services (CPS) web. Yes, you or your partner beat your kid to a pulp but get furniture if you promise not to do it again! A case manager refers a person in a “difficult situation,” and said person can pick up 14-16 items for their home. One has to be part of the system to reap the benefits of the system. Employed college graduates with mountains of debt do not reap this benefit. There is no starter apartment for them.
David Grant brings us Love And Hate, Part 2 in coverage of the war between Islam and what remains of the West. Some particularly well put bon mots along the way:
Leftism as an ideology is grounded in, as Schmitt would put it, the denial of the political. Universalism is one way to describe this principle; anti-thedism is another; the upshot is inversion of the in-group/out-group dichotomy, the privileging of the Other over one’s own people, the forming of a new identity through conscious rejection of one’s natural identity. It is not hard to see why a society ruled by Leftists is incapable of self-defense: they can only gin up hostility against their own people, not against outsiders.
Ryan returns on Wednesday with his pilot episode of Weimerica Weekly, where he gets to talk about whatever he wants, and what he wants to talk about is degeneracy… but not often in the obvious places. From the show’s we can expect this to be the first of many more to come.
This Week in 28 Sherman
On Monday, Grerp takes the reins over at 28 Sherman to talk about The Rise of Obesity and Anorexia. The triumphal rise of both of these disorders is certainly yet another sign that Nature has prepared us poorly for modernity. Her theory focuses on gut bacteria.
In some experiments, researchers introduced gut bacteria from obese women into the gut bacteria of thin mice, and the result was that the thin mice grew fatter than the control group despite eating the same diet. Certainly there are a number of factors at work here, but that to me is fascinating. If we could recreate the living conditions that people had, say, prior to 1930, and instead of sending people to inpatient therapy, drug rehab, or America’s Biggest Loser, we sent them to work on a farm doing regular exhausting manual labor, living a good portion of the day outside, and eating simple foods, including fermented ones like sauerkraut, would that work better? Would they be happier and less neurotic? Would they be thinner and healthier overall?
Because we assiduously forget all lessons absorbed prior to last Tuesday, western society now beavers away at its foundations under the blithe assumption our cherished ideologies will simply levitate in their absence. Many cheeks will moisten upon learning the truth.
It has been explained often to the congenitally obtuse that neither conservatism nor libertarianism can survive the demographic defenestration of their constituents. Both ideologies are carried exclusively by whites, with no others remotely interested in shouldering the load. Colorblind conservative is an epitaph.
And while it may seem counterintuitive–though it shouldn’t–liberalism also rests upon the premise of a large white majority. It is just another ideology after all. And one that, like all the others, collapses when attention turns to baser instincts. That attention is already on lurid display among liberalism’s many disparate and overtly tribal factions. As the movement continues to progress in retrograde, the only remnant of principled ideology will be in its name.
Systems of ideas tend to be the playthings of the wealthy, which wealth is quickly drying up in The West. But look on the bright side: At least everyone will get a trophy! For his outstanding effort here, Porter takes home an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Moar Croatian Reaction this week: Ekonomska kalkulacija i izbjeglička kriza. “Economic calculation and refugee crisis” if the Google Chrome is to be believed. Some things do not have a price.
Evolutionist X says History is meaningless without narrative—or so they say. In seriousness, that seems true so far as it goes. But some narratives take better accounts of facts than others.
One of the few of her favorite things is Indian DNA. American Indian DNA that is, and the story it tells of repeated near genocides long before Europeans ever brought the rule of law. And here’s moar on those genocidal cannibals that columbus didn’t feel too bad about enslaving.
Speaking of conquering this continent, here are Evolutionist X’s thoughts on Thanksgiving, and the important role of myths and rituals in public life.
She has Cathedral Round Up #4. This is an important series. Amply fisked. For example:
I have to interrupt here. Who the fuck thinks that our ideas about race have been lying dormant for centuries? WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN? Were there no Civil Rights marches in the 1950s? Did no one in the 60s and 70s ever mention race? Did we never celebrate Martin Luther King Day in school? Are there no streets named in his honor? People talk constantly about race, but for some strange reason keep claiming that we have not been talking about race.
There are three little old ladies in Duluth who have not been talking about race. But other than, she’s right. Oh, did I mention the ranting? She’s got that too:
The world does not need more scientists, engineers, or people who build complicated systems for the delivery of electricity or removal of waste. The world needs more vaguely black-looking poets and gender studies professors. Those are the folks who will bring us the next set of civilization-building innovations!
Brett Stevens finds Thanksgiving a time a to reflect on Collectivism versus Capitalism. They aren’t necessarily opposed to each other, but both are perverted by leftist ideologies. Also this was good: How to end terrorism. You first recognize that it is 4GW, a war whose primary front is in the media on the field of public opinion.
I find that I can’t mourn the comic stories of my youth, because I have grown to dislike them. The very idea of a class of people who go around clobbering villains in the name of “justice”, as if human beings were so cleanly divided into good and evil, has become hateful to me. If there really were a Superman, I’m sure I’d be one of the people he’d be beating up and throwing into jail each week. Him and the whole Social Justice League of America. It’s the Manichean worldview that seems so characteristic to me of the Jewish imagination. One might protest that superheroes can be imagined in a conservative way. Capturing criminals is a way to defend the social order; aren’t superheroes just glorified policemen? Well, it’s the fact that it’s unglorified that makes police work an honest job. Police don’t enforce Justice; they maintain an admittedly imperfect social system where people are allowed to be imperfectly liberal.
Hey Bonald, ya gotta smack down for (((((Marvel)))))? You bet:
X-Men is a Marvel comic, cartoon, and movie series about a bunch of mutants with superpowers who suffer prejudice from regular people. The must writers always insist that it’s irrational fear, because otherwise viewers would notice that anyone in his right mind would have rational fear of these mutants. Half of them are evil, and most of the other half don’t control their powers well or have powers that are inherently dangerous to be around. You’d have to be insane to be willing to have a mutant in your child’s classroom. To a certain type of imagination, the goyim majority must always be evil, even when their actions are rationally justified.
He contrasts this with Frozen, in which superpower—i.e., magic—is done rightly. And while we’re on the subject, Bonald digs up another one from the philosophical deep: Grace and Pelagianism in movies. For the pair of articles, Bonald gets a well-deserved ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
A timeless essay over at Imaginative Conservative: The Dangers of Egalitarianism in a Democracy. Or IOW, “The Dangers of Egalitarianism in Egalitarianism”. Also an interesting quote from Will Durant’s Story of Civilization about the constructive nature of chaos. Not sure I totally buy that, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
Giovanni Dannato has an interesting bit about Diving Under the Antarctic Ice Sheet. 10 people have been born in Antarctica since 1978. Native-born Antarcticans. I did not know that.
From the Iron Legion: Meditating on Death. I’ve often thought of Cosmic Divorce being The Principal Problem of modernity—divorce not only between husbands and wives, but between parents and children, between employers and employees, governors and citizens, arts and sciences, philosophy and politics, justice and mercy, God and Nature, and life and death. This was good commentary on that last one.
West Coast Reactionaries present a compelling case to Go Into the Trades. At least as a default direction for the vast majority of men.
The AltLeft tries to explain how it’s different than national socialism. I’m not sure it helps. So not “left” (egalitarian socialism) then. But “liberal”? Racially aware liberal?? Race realist libertarian??? If the failure to recognize race realism were responsible for more than 10% of our current woes, I might be inclined to agree with them. But every human born before 1930 was race realist and we still got progressivism. Like I said from the beginning, I wish them luck. The Alt Left will get folks questioning the Approved Narrative™. Hopefully, they’ll just question it moar.
Well only two days late this week. That’s an improvement over last week. I’ll take it. Keep on reactin’! Til next week, TRP… Over and out!!
commenter at Orthosphere claiming Black Lives Matter is not a burn-it-to-the-ground! organization. *rolls eyes* If there was ever justification for the term ‘rampaging dindus’, these guys fit the bill. As University antics show, they’ve snapped the leash and are eating some of the low-tier brahmins. Poetic justice.
Briggs also appeared on Michael Savage’s radio show. Okay, they only talked global warming, but what a great way to draw people into this tangled web. He has a huge audience.
Thanks for the link. I like the phrase ‘Cosmic Divorce’ and it is an apt description of modernity. Indeed, it was not death but becoming a father which inspired that particular post.
Thanks for the mention. We live in exciting times. As the false old gods fall, new ones arise from among the even older gods.
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commenter at Orthosphere claiming Black Lives Matter is not a burn-it-to-the-ground! organization. *rolls eyes* If there was ever justification for the term ‘rampaging dindus’, these guys fit the bill. As University antics show, they’ve snapped the leash and are eating some of the low-tier brahmins. Poetic justice.
Briggs also appeared on Michael Savage’s radio show. Okay, they only talked global warming, but what a great way to draw people into this tangled web. He has a huge audience.
Thanks for the linkage, Nick.
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Thanks for the link. I like the phrase ‘Cosmic Divorce’ and it is an apt description of modernity. Indeed, it was not death but becoming a father which inspired that particular post.
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Thanks for visiting Mr. Wolfe. And congratulations on that milestone!!
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