Neoreaction as we know it, a social group full of people interacting daily with the entirety of one another (on Twitter) and not just the comments section on Unqualified Reservations and Foseti, dates to December 2012. The term was tossed around a bit in 2011 and 2012, but it wasn’t until December 2012 that it was adopted and took off. The so-called “Cambrian Explosion” of neoreactionary blogs occurred throughout April and May of 2013. In November 2013, TechCrunch acknowledged the rise of neoreactionaries in their “Geeks for Monarchy” article.
What is the point of neoreaction? Not action. It began as a group of people discussing political theory on blogs. That still determines the core flavor.
As is the case with any growing movement, neoreaction has begun attracting the attention of people closer to the mean. The average IQ of the founding neoreactionary bloggers may have been around 135, whereas as neoreaction has attracted more attention, the IQ of the average commentator has fallen to maybe 105. This is inevitable for any growing movement pushing ideas relevant to society as a whole.
These new commentators approach neoreaction, wonder what all the fuss is about, then ask smugly, “Well, what are these nerds actually doing?” The honest answer is this: “Nothing, from your perspective, since you lack the intelligence to understand what we are actually doing.”
Then, the smarter person, who gives the honest answer, is portrayed by the inferior parties as condescending and dismissive. They are right, the smarter people are being condescending and dismissive. They have every right to be. Without this dismissal, the concentration of intelligent people is not possible.
Great feats in intellectual domains are only possible by concentrating intelligent people. Thus, exclusion is a must. Some people’s feelings will be hurt by this exclusion. But in the objective sense, it is the people doing the excluding who are in the right, and the people complaining about being excluded who are in the wrong. Concentrating intelligent people is an absolute precondition to getting any serious intellectual work done. If that bothers you, you know what to do.
Does serious intellectual work need to be done? Absolutely yes. It’s intellectual work that brought all of us together in the first place. It’s because of intellectual work that you’re reading this. Intellectual work is everything. It must precede action, and any serious action depends on it. This is axiomatic. Anyone who disagrees with this doesn’t have an appreciation for how political change works.
Viewed in this light, the accomplishments of neoreaction since late 2012 (as a social group) and early 2009 (as a circle of thoughtful blogs) have been significant. When stupid people think of “real accomplishments, real action”, they only think of physical actions, they do not acknowledge the importance of intellectual achievements. If neoreaction is to be judged by what it has accomplished “in the real world”, it has accomplished absolutely nothing. If neoreaction is to be judged by what it has accomplished in the intellectual world, is has achieved quite a lot.
The reason why some are skeptical of the intellectual world is that it is entirely possible to produce intellectual content that has no impact. But some significant subset of intellectual content will have a disproportionate impact that exceeds the impact of “real world actions” many times over. Also consider that “real life actions” also have a significant chance at having no impact, so in that sense “real world pursuits” are little better or worse than intellectual pursuits vis-a-vis maximizing the end impact.
In the next post I’ll list some of what neoreaction has actually accomplished.
