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

by Elizabeth Sandifer

For a philosophy supposedly based on human freedom, there is surprisingly little room here for real human agency. Individual human beings act, but they can’t direct the world—except blindly, in their own self-interest, and when themselves directed by market signals. And only some human beings’ actions are really significant anyway. But even here, the efficient managing comes down to responding to information we are fed by an impersonal and unknowable source of that might as well be God for all we can understand or influence it. The propertied will sometimes misinterpret the signals being sent. When this happens, the market will winnow out such mistakes via processes that, though often called Darwinian, are actually better described as Calvinist. As we will see, not only do Austrians consider this the best and only system, they also implicitly attach religious significance to it. Having ‘free will’ becomes all about interpreting correctly that which is revealed to us by an unseen higher power which, though essentially benevolent in effect, is actually impersonal, and ready to punish if displeased. The religiose affect is in perfect alignment with the praxeological method of revelation and scholasticism.