In earlier posts I said that our goal is to change or dissolve the government from public government to private government. That’s part of what distinguishes neoreactionaries from the broader “cultural reactionary” approach. Instead of obsessing overmuch on the negativities of modern culture, as reactionaries do, we obsess overmuch on the negativities of modern government. It’s a slight change of pace, and is actually what the original Reaction (in France) was in the first place. So, in a sense, neoreactionaries are closer to what traditional Reaction was than many who call themselves “reactionaries” are. In other, very important senses, we are not, but in that sense we are.
With this goal in mind, anything that moves us towards understanding the deficiencies of public government and the benefits of private government automatically qualifies as an accomplishment. This is already challenging to accomplish, however, since the details of government are only interesting to certain kinds of people. As so many have become so detached from civics, this is probably only 20 percent of men or less.
“Private government is better than public government” is not the kind of headline that attracts people in the direction of neoreaction. The material that attracts people, the bait, is more along the lines of what you see at blogs like Radish; passages that help people comprehend power dynamics in current events like the Baltimore riots. This is just bait, though. The core is the claim “private government is better than public government”. To many, this means the word and the concept: monarchy. To others, it is something that is operationally much closer to monarchy than democracy, but can go by different names.
Neoreaction is acknowledgment of hierarchy, neoreaction is for private government over public government, neoreaction is a lot of things. In Moldbug’s writing, a lot of the bait was providing an explanation for historical events of the 1940s-1960s in a way that matches reality better than the standard narrative. He did a fantastic job at this. But that’s just the bait. The core, again, lest I repeat it too often, is that private government is better than public government. Moldbug specifically said he is a royalist. Not a neocameralist, but a royalist.
The problem with the core being less mediagenic and pleasure-button-pushing than insight porn narratives about history is that we lose people on the lower level. Some never move past the historical narrative insight porn. At the bottom, you have the ~105 IQ reactionaries poking around the edges of neoreaction and saying it’s nothing more than a bunch of nerds who will never achieve anything. In the middle, you have the ~120 IQ neoreactionaries who love the insight porn of Moldbug, but they never internalize the fact that private government is better than public government. At the top, the core, the 130+ IQ part of neoreaction that actually matters, are people like Henry Dampier who explicitly realize that private government is superior to public government, and write material to that end.
That brings us to the accomplishment highlighted in this post: writing any material that attempts to convince people that private government is superior to public government is an accomplishment. You can write just 140 characters in a tweet, and if it might convince someone private government is superior to public government, bam, you just accomplished something. It’s that easy! You too can have an impact on the course of history!
Viewed in this light, every word written since 2009 by people inspired by Moldbug which contains arguments in favor of private government is an accomplishment. Some people have accomplished 1,000 words, others have accomplished 500,000 or more, but they are all accomplishments, worthy of praise.
In these first five posts I’ve established the categories of actions that can be viewed as “accomplishments” in the context of neoreaction. I haven’t said why these things are worth doing; I assume that the reader either already knows or knows where to find arguments to that effect. My goal here is to highlight what are accomplishments, not so much why they are.
In the next post I talk about open problems in neoreaction, which set the seed for future possible accomplishments.
morerightnotes 