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

by Elizabeth Sandifer

In the end, though… well, his rejection still sucks. It’s not that he’s wrong in finding horror within the notion of empathy. We arrived at the concept via Thomas Ligotti, after all. But Land overplays his hand, acting as though empathy is just horror as opposed to something that is, among other things, scary. As a result, he ends up siding with a bunch of racist morons just because those are the other people who are as terrified of the outside world as him.

Yudkowsky, without really meaning to, tends to look at everyone else in the world as inefficient Eliezer Yudkowskys instead of people as such. And this proves to be a major problem when you’re proclaiming yourself a visionary genius of rationality. (Ironically, the LessWrong crowd talks at length about this sort of error, the Typical Mind Fallacy. As with many fallacies, they’re much better at identifying it than avoiding it.)

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.

But it’s arranged in a superficial parody of an actual scholarly, intellectual tradition based on an unslakable thirst for intellectual credentials giving rise to a whole ecosystem of Right-wing ‘atheists’ and ‘rationalists’, who lump feminism in with creationism as an absurd delusion, and claim to debunk feminism and other such ideas they hate using ‘logic’ and ‘reason’ and ‘facts’, etc. It’s a vast system run by imposters without a syndrome, fuelled by Dunning-Kruger. Paleo thinking, enabled by praxeo method.