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

by Elizabeth Sandifer

And yet in the end the same preposterous and futile arrogance that fuels Yudkowsky and Moldbug is in full effect. 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. Sure, his question is “How do we destroy the world?” instead of “How do we save it?” and that does deserve points for style, but let’s face it: the claim that the bunch of racist dingbats that make up the neoreactionary scene are the fastest ticket to capitalist apotheosis is scarcely better than King Jobs. This sort of “the world can be saved if only everyone listens to me” narcissism belongs in the genre of fiction, where it can accomplish something, and not in the visionary manifesto, where it only reveals its own impotence.