Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

by Elizabeth Sandifer

The cautionary tale in this regard is Angela Nagle’s appalling Kill All Normies, which takes the jaw-droppingly foolish methodology of simply reporting all of the alt-right’s self-justifications as self-evident truths so as to conclude that the real reason neo-nazis have been sweeping into power is because we’re too tolerant of trans people. From this spectacularly ill-advised premise Nagle makes the inevitable but even worse conclusion that the obvious thing to do is for the left to abandon all commitment to identity politics (except maybe feminism which, as a white cis woman, Nagle has at least some time for).

To an outside observer, there’s a certain absurdist demonstration to it. Yudkowsky starts from the premise that we are badly crippled by cognitive biases and then steadily lets his cognitive biases lead him to a ridiculous conclusion.

The best known—Elon Musk—is everybody’s favorite cuddly tech billionaire, splashing money on electric cars and human space flight and all that good stuff.

This didn't age well.

And yet at every turn in Moldbug’s argument, Marxism seems to lurk—indeed, to haunt—the text. Every argument he makes about the Cathedral’s insidious suppression of the obviously preferable alternative has, to a reader even vaguely with Marx, an immediate counterpart pointing inexorably to the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is tempting to suggest that Moldbug is a failed Marxist in the sense that Jupiter is a failed star, its mass falling tantalizingly short of the tipping point whereby nuclear fusion begins. Over and over again, Moldbug asks questions much like those that Marx asked, and his answers begin with many of the same initial observations. But inevitably, a few steps in, he makes some ridiculously broad generalization or fails to consider some obvious alternative possibility, and the train of thought fizzles into characteristic idiocy.

Land may be more committed to a materialist view than Moldbug, and he may do better at actually basing his conclusions on the evidence than Yudkowsky, whose literary Bayesianism leads him to equate gut intuition with actual numerical probabilities, but for all that he talks about worshiping at the black altar of undeniable reality, he’s still falling for the old philosopher’s trap of triumphantly proclaiming that he’s got one weird trick to solve everything.

Lovecraft’s sense of the Weird led him to assume a universe that was malevolently indifferent to humanity, populated by unfathomable horrors knowable only by analogies as bleak as they are oblique.

Really like this description.

At its most elemental level the problem is this: Paradise Lost repeatedly asserts that God is right and Satan is evil, and yet Satan is self-evidently the best character in it.

Fish’s argument is that Milton’s prose uses this basic structure over and over again, leading the reader down a train of thought and then, as the title suggests, surprising them by having that line of thought turn sinful, thus enacting their own Fall over and over again in the book on a sentence-to-sentence level.

In his view, consciousness is an evolutionary misstep best corrected by voluntary extinction. His central problem with consciousness is not unlike the one of language that Fish identifies in Milton: it can’t actually do its job. Just as language transgresses against God by asserting itself, consciousness exists in constant and anxious opposition to the knowledge of its own inevitable death. To be conscious of one’s existence is to have all of the biological impulses for survival common to life but to be aware that these impulses are doomed.

Actual software that exists in the world is a bewildering tangle of pragmatic compromises reached by people whose relationship with caffeine as they desperately chase deadlines is analogous to Nick Land’s relationship with amphetamines.

There is, throughout this corner of the world, a deficiency of empathy that is not merely lack or failure, but an active, conscious disdain. Moldbug, Yudkowsky, and Land don’t just “do poorly” with empathy—they represent the most visible and explicit edge of a Cathedral-scaled system of values that casts the desire to listen and try to understand people who are different from you as anathema to reason itself.

Have we halted? Is this the end? Is the Great Filter just slow collapse—an endless sequence of laps on the same ring road as we wait to finally run out of fuel without ever knowing if we had a destination? Are these ruins or buildings in which we shiver?

quasi-fascist figurehead is a job that suits, if not his talents, at least his perversions. His always shaky relationship with any kind of truth or objective reality was by this point completely devastated; he was both willing and eager to throw himself into the passionate belief of whatever bit of outright lunacy the base felt validated by just so long as they cheered for him. As a racist, sexist bully himself, he could relate to them.

Re: Trump

(as Einstein paraphrases it, “man can do what he wills but cannot will what he wills”)

In a 2010 post entitled ‘From Mises to Carlyle: my sick journey to the dark side of the force’, Moldbug declares, “Mises is almost never wrong.” Of course he isn’t. It’s easy to never be wrong if you never say anything.

What’s interesting about these concessions is that they are predicated upon the assumption that ‘the poor are always with us.’ It’s only a short step from assuming this is true to wanting to make it stays true. The praxis of praxeology, one could call it.

(It’s worth noting in passing that, despite still being held up by ideologues as an example of free market economics rescuing an economy, Pinochet’s Hayek-and-Friedman-inspired policies actually drove Chile into an economic crash. This was only alleviated by a change of policy direction—including re-nationalising loads of the industries Allende had nationalised and which Pinochet had re-privatised after taking power. It was only after this that Chile started to become the success story that the free-marketeers still take the credit for.)

Saying that without state interference the market would be free is like saying that without the soil, the vegetables you eat wouldn’t need washing. It is an entirely incoherent to reject state power from a capitalist perspective. You can’t seriously entertain anarcho-capitalist positions unless you’re… well, insane.

Rothbard bases his thinking on an ethical principle, a variety of ‘natural law’ or ‘natural rights’, inherited from Locke. Locke’s theory of property basically held that it was permissible to appropriate unused land if you used it. This is, ironically, an obvious modern precursor to the LTV, which Rothbard professes to absolutely despise, to the point of writing a scurrilous attack on Adam Smith to accuse him of plagiarism. Locke did not, of course, think that what native peoples did with their land constituted ‘use.’ Nor did he mean that the people who actually worked the land owned it; he meant the employers of those people. Once again, the premises are carefully chosen to lead to the correct conclusion. And in this case, the conclusion was the moral justification for black chattel slavery and the appropriation of land from natives by white imperialists.

As ever, you know what people are most afraid of when you identify what they make sure they don’t know.

Once you’ve uncovered the vast conspiracy to enslave the human race, it would be ethically bankrupt not to fight back against it, and sure enough Icke’s next couple of books progressively doubled down on the idea until, in 1999, he penned The Biggest Secret: The Book That Will Change The World, a book whose title is impressively un-hyperbolic, but whose subtitle is tragically optimistic.

The last time Sedgwick’s essay on paranoia came up we talked about her account of paranoia as a process of endless repetition. This comes from later in the essay, as part of a discussion of how “paranoia is characterized by placing, in practice, an extraordinary stress on the efficacy of knowledge per se—knowledge in the form of exposure,” and how “paranoia for all its vaunted suspicion acts as though its work would be accomplished if only it could finally, this time, somehow get its story truly known.”

(Indeed, one of the most idiosyncratic characteristics of Illuminati-style conspiracy theories like his—the primary activity of their secret organizations inevitably turns out to be broadcasting their existence in the mass media via symbols that the conspiracy theorists elaborately decode without ever quite managing to explain why the nominally secret societies are constantly revealing themselves like this—is

Knowledge of the pan-dimensional reptoids or the vast academic conspiracy stretching back to the English Civil War can, in practice, answer almost any question you might pose. The problem is simple: when every question has the same answer, the answer stops being useful. The homogenous sense of knowledge the conspiracy theory produces is fundamentally incapable of any sort of progress.

To pick a recent and apropos example, the knowledge that Donald Trump was an unstable and moronic crook was thoroughly exposed prior to the election. And we all know how that went. And so Icke’s suggestion that if only everybody knew that it wasn’t just ordinary human depravity but a vast conspiracy is, in a fundamental sense, wrongheaded.

the superlative mess of the present moment.

Thiel’s subsequent career is frankly no more inspiring. It’s not, after all, like any of his ostentatious moonshot investments have shown the slightest sign of paying off. MIRI should have been self-evident as a dumb idea with even a modicum of due diligence like “wait a moment, do any of you guys actually have experience making AIs?” Ambrosia, the “harvest the blood of teenagers” startup, is a classic patient-funded trial scam that played Thiel for millions with a bevy of staggeringly unjustified extrapolations from some old studies that were not so much about infusing the blood of the young as stitching an old mouse and a young mouse together so that they shared a circulatory system, an image that makes the “Peter Thiel is a vampire” jokes actually look tame in the horror monster sweepstakes. And his fascination with seasteading numbers him among the litany of people interested in micronations, which is such a rich vein of complete crackpottery that I’d hate to deprive you of the pleasure of Googling it.

The unique and exquisite danger of stupidity is that by its nature, it is beyond reason. There is nothing that can be said to it, because by definition it wouldn’t understand.

And make no mistake, it’s not dumb luck that the Hugos are where this front of the culture wars sprung up. Science fiction fandom has always been a haven for eccentrics—anyone who doubts this need only look up a few paragraphs to note that the Hugos have a historical bloc of voters opposed to film and television.

Those savvy enough to think in terms of “design” here—and see the final essay on Peter Thiel in this regard—seem to have largely seen Trump as a trial balloon useful in identifying core supporters who could be primed for a more serious far-right candidate later. Instead, on the basis of an unexpectedly effective voter suppression effort in Wisconsin and North Carolina, they’ve been rushed into production with a bug-ridden prototype that’s in no way fit for purpose.

Terrifying.