More needs to be said of the political philosophy of the so-called alt-right*.
This is one of the most revealing things I’ve ever seen:
13 hours ago, Dustin86 said:
Every alt-rightist I have ever met also holds a Malevolent Universe Premise and has a negative view of human nature. Every one, including the non-racial-nationalist ones such as me1, although “degrees of malevolence” vary.
Now that I think about it, there may be a fundamental incompatability between Objectivists and the alt-Right, because now that I think about it, the fundamental thing that unites all of our disparate movements is what you call the “Malevolent Universe Premise”, and the related fact that we take the negative view of human nature.
What are the logical consequences of a philosophy that takes a “negative view of human nature” (a malevolent people premise)? The first thing to go will be individual rights. A negative view of human nature implies that there’s no real basis for holding the non-aggression principle: that one ought to deal with others on the basis of consent.
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Democracy sucks, the strong should rule the weak, and we could use a good old-fashioned dictator to clean up this mess.
Here is a great article by Andrea Castillo discussing the alt-right neoreactionaries:
https://theumlaut.com/2014/07/29/a-gentle-introduction-to-neoreaction-for-libertarians/
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A puckish new brand of right-wing radical subverts the postmodern power machine each day over Twitter and RSS for fun and praxis. It’s a real hoot to watch. These rudely triggering firebrands are denounced by the people who matter as wrong-thinking zealots of the most problematic variety—to the masochistic vindication (and occasional sacking) of our impish dissidents. Their freakish messages seem almost tailored to demand attention in our outrage-driven world of social media signaling. Libertarians, meet the neoreaction.
Remind you of someone?
The political philosophy of the alt-right is monarchist. If that seems weird or obscure to you, think of it in these terms: what they desire is an authoritarian strong-man to oppose the Establishment Left. That should not be an obscure idea at all, at this point.
What’s interesting is the origin of this political philosophy; quoting from Mencius Moldbug, the father of neoreactionary political philosophy:
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That leaves libertarians. Now, I love libertarians to death. My CPU practically has a permanent open socket to the Mises Institute. In my opinion, anyone who has intentionally chosen to remain ignorant of libertarian (and, in particular, Misesian-Rothbardian) thought, in an era when a couple of mouse clicks will feed you enough high-test libertarianism to drown a moose, is not an intellectually serious person. Furthermore, I am a computer programmer who has read far too much science fiction - two major risk factors for libertarianism. So I could just say, “read Rothbard,” and call it a day.
On the other hand, it is hard to avoid noticing two basic facts about the universe. One is that libertarianism is an extremely obvious idea. The other is that it has never been successfully implemented.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/04/formalist-manifesto-originally-posted.html
This is not an oddball political movement that’s come out of nowhere - the predecessor of this political philosophy is none other than the quintessentially D2 anarchocapitalism of Rothbardian libertarianism.
Think about it - what is the next logical step down the path of D2 politics? It’s the disintegration of the non-aggression principle itself on the basis of a malevolent view of human nature.
Continuing from Castillo’s article:
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Understanding Moldbug’s Cathedral is key to understanding this Dark Enlightenment. Think of it as a public-private partnership that promotes and protects the entrenched secular Puritan paradigm (long story) that neoreactionaries believe runs the world.
The “Cathedral” that Moldbug discusses in his writing is the new secular “religion” that inhabits the media, Hollywood, academia, big government leftists, etc., that propound postmodernism, feminism, egalitarianism, democracy, etc.
Note how this fits with the narrative of how the election is “rigged” against Trump, “a public-private partnership” which includes at its forefront “the media”.
Neoreactionaries see themselves as explicitly “enlightened”, and “beyond libertarianism”:
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Think of the neoreaction as an early attempt to build a kind of “meta-politics without romance.”… It extends our toolkit … beyond analyzing simple economic class to consider culture, status, and tribal political behavior… With their own broadened focus, neoreactionaries believe they see the writing on the wall that we libertarians are simply too scared or myopic to consider.
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Unrelenting democracy combined with short-term demographic trends render the libertarian political project doomed…they do not harbor our Hayekian sentimentality for the transformative promise of rigorous liberal intellectualism. Many find our unusual reverence to abstract market forces to be shallow, degrading, or even autistic.
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They will defend what even libertarians find indefensible: sexual restraint, gender specialization, temperance, ethnic exclusion, and nationalism. Our great-grandparents’ legacies, more or less.
One last thing I’ll point out from this article, quoting from the “Dark Enlightenment” writer Nick Land:
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If reaction ever became a popular movement, its few slender threads of bourgeois (or perhaps dreamily ‘aristocratic’) civility wouldn’t hold back the beast for long
Well what we see right now is reactionary political philosophy becoming a popular movement in the Trump campaign. The threat is real, and we’ve been warned: its few slender threads of civility will not hold back the beast for long.
Dismissing these people as “trolls” and attempting to silence them is extremely foolish; you are cutting yourselves off from the very people you need to be persuading.
On 10/21/2016 at 6:39 AM, Dustin86 said:
if you want to attract these people, you have to explain to them how Objectivism is going to help them. They’re not going to be “shamed away” from “collectivism” that you don’t approve of
As Peikoff identified in DIM, we’ve been on a “distintegrating” (D-type) trend in our society for quite some time, and this is the next logical evolution of D-type political philosophy. I think in light of the apparent size and popularity of this mass movement as we see in the Trump campaign, we need to be re-evaluating what was already a very dubious prediction at the end of his book, that society will devolve into the previous, unmixed “stable state” of the M2-type. On the contrary, what we are seeing right now is the progression of the D-type trend into the unmixed “stable state” of the D2-type. That is a much more credible prediction of where society is going now, and we need to be ready for it.
* the article quoted above identifies the original meaning of the term “alt-right”; it’s an umbrella term that included the “manosphere”, “neoreactionaries”, HBD (human bio-diversity), the “orthosphere”, the “Dark Enlightenment”, etc.
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This motley band of techno-futurists, traditionalists, seduction artists, funnymen, reluctant Sedevacantists, inconvenient ethnonationalists, monarchists, communitarians, general heretics, homebrewed evolutionists, and one dedicated Jacobite to guide them all is perhaps easier for libertarians to initially understand through what they commonly oppose [the “Cathedral”, as explained above] than for what they separately advocate.
