Luke Ford

Tyler Cowan writes:

Here is a list of propositions, noting that these are an intellectualized summary of a somewhat imagined collective doctrine, and certainly not a statement of my own views:
1. “Culturism” is in general correct, namely that some cultures are better than others. You want to make sure you are ruled by one of the better cultures. In any case, one is operating with a matrix of rule.
2. The historical ruling cultures for America and Western Europe — two very successful regions — have largely consisted of white men and have reflected the perspectives of white men. This rule and influence continues to work, however, because it is not based on either whiteness or maleness per se. There is a nominal openness to the current version of the system, which fosters competitive balance, yet at the end of the day it is still mostly about the perspectives of white men and one hopes this will continue. By the way, groups which “become white” in their outlooks can be allowed into the ruling circle.
3. Today there is a growing coalition against the power and influence of (some) white men, designed in part to lower their status and also to redistribute their wealth. This movement may not be directed against whiteness or maleness per se (in fact some of it can be interpreted as an internal coup d’etat within the world of white men), but still it is based on a kind of puking on what made the West successful. And part and parcel of this process is an ongoing increase in immigration to further build up and cement in the new coalition. Furthermore a cult of political correctness makes it very difficult to defend the nature of the old coalition without fear of being called racist; in today’s world the actual underlying principles of that coalition cannot be articulated too explicitly. Most of all, if this war against the previous ruling coalition is not stopped, it will do us in.
4. It is necessary to deconstruct and break down the current dialogue on these issues, and to defeat the cult of political correctness, so that a) traditional rule can be restored, and/or b) a new and more successful form of that rule can be introduced and extended. Along the way, we must realize that calls for egalitarianism, or for that matter democracy, are typically a power play of one potential ruling coalition against another.
5. Neo-reaction is not in love with Christianity in the abstract, and in fact it fears its radical, redistributive, and egalitarian elements. Neo-reaction is often Darwinian at heart. Nonetheless Christianity-as-we-find-it-in-the-world often has been an important part of traditional ruling coalitions, and thus the thinkers of neo-reaction are often suspicious of the move toward a more secular America, which they view as a kind of phony tolerance.
6. If you are analyzing political discourse, ask the simple question: is this person puking on the West, the history of the West, and those groups — productive white males — who did so much to make the West successful? The answer to that question is very often more important than anything else which might be said about the contributions under consideration.

…The most significant neo-reaction thinker today probably is Steve Sailer, who often comments on this blog in addition to writing his own.

COMMENTS:

* Steve Sailer: Reaction is less of a political philosophy than an art form, one conducive to creating the best satire. …
Personally, I’m a realist reformer in the tradition of Benjamin Franklin. But Franklin, while amusing, wasn’t as enduringly comic as, say, the reactionary Swift.

>Conservatism is a strain of liberalism.
Reaction is that part of conservatism that is *not* a strain of liberalism.

Sailer: That’s an interesting question: whether the right has much self-awareness except in response to the left?
Burke, for example, was mostly a little left of center Whig (e.g., wanted to reconcile with the Americans and less exploit the Hindus) until challenged by the French Revolution to define his position as a conservative.
Similarly, Conservative Judaism was a quite late innovation of the 19th Century.
The postmodernist argument that Hinduism didn’t exist as a self-aware entity until confronted by, say, Buddhism or Islam or Christianity is glib, but still interesting.

I’m not particularly inclined toward political philosophy, but I did outline citizenism a decade ago:

“It’s important to note that citizenism applies to present citizens, “to ourselves and our Posterity” as the Preamble to the Constitution says. In this, the demands of citizenism are analogous to the fiduciary duty of corporate managers.
When I was getting an MBA many years ago, I was the favorite of an acerbic old finance professor because he could count on me to blurt out all the stupid misconceptions to which overconfident students are prone. One day he asked the class: “If you were running a publicly traded company, would it be acceptable for you to create new stock and sell it for less than it was worth?”
““Sure,” I smugly announced. “Our legal duty is to maximize our stockholders’ wealth. While selling the stock for less than it’s worth would harm our present shareholders, it would benefit our new shareholders who buy the underpriced stock, so it all comes out in the wash. Right?”
““Wrong!” He thundered. “Your obligation is to your current shareholders, not to somebody who might buy the stock in the future.”
“That same logic applies to the valuable right to live in America. Just as the managers of a public company have a responsibility to the existing stockholders not to diminish the value of their shares by selling new ones too cheaply to outsiders, our politicians have a moral obligation to the current citizens and their descendants to preserve the scarcity value of their right to live in America.
“The American people’s traditional patrimony of relatively high wages and low land prices, the legacy of a lightly populated landscape, has made this a blessedly middle-class country. Uncontrolled immigration, however, by driving up the supply of labor and the demand for housing is importing Latin American levels of inequality into immigrant-inundated states such as California.”

* Steve Sailer is definitely the most prominent person on the alt right. Moldbug is really just another technocrat, while the real energies on the alt right are with questions of race, religion etc.

* “We should not oppress other races, but we should not oppress our own minds either.”
Well said.
The conventional wisdom appears to be that that’s impossible — either we must whip our minds or whip our slaves — but I’m deeply skeptical of that assumption. I think it’s quite possible to work out a win-win solution via Burkean prudence.
Obviously, however, the first step when you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging. Granted, the conventional wisdom is to dig harder, but that just seems kind of hysterical.

My impression is that the growth of a culture of individuals on the Aspergers / autism / nerdism spectrum is one of the most unexpected and significant of my lifetime, but the cause, whether nature, nurture, or merely perception, remains uncertain.