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

by Elizabeth Sandifer

This brings us to our second relatively uninteresting question, which is what to do about the alt-right. In this case the answer is even easier and more obvious than the first: you smash their bases of power, with violent resistance if necessary. If you want a more general solution that also takes care of the factors that led to a bunch of idiot racists being emboldened in the first place you drag all the billionaires out of their houses and put their heads on spikes.

Let us assume that we are fucked1.

Thiel is the second-best known of the so-called PayPal Mafia, the initial founders of the now-ubiquitous online payment system who have subsequently become billionaire investors.

These days, Yarvin is best known as the founder of Urbit, a startup tech company providing, in its own words, “a secure peer-to-peer network of personal servers, built on a clean-slate system software stack.”11 Or, perhaps more accurately, he’s best known for the astonishing levels of protest that take place whenever a tech conference invites him to speak, generally based on the accusation that he believes in reinstituting slavery and thinks that black people make especially good slaves.12 The reason for this is relatively simple: he believes in reinstituting slavery and thinks that black people make especially good slaves.13

The appeal is obvious: Moldbug is out of his fucking skull.

The problem is, once we get our golf ball-sized reality distortion pill home, put on some Laibach, and settle in for an epic bout of Thanatosian psychedelia, we discover the unfortunate truth: we’re actually just huffing paint in an unhygienic gas station bathroom. Jesus, this isn’t even bat country.

Two things are striking here. The first is that Moldbug just rewrote Martin Luther King’s “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” as Lovecraft fanfic. This is without question one of the most brazenly funny moves in the entire history of Western philosophy.

The manifesto differs from the plan in that it is oppositional. A plan is what you’re going to do—a manifesto is what you’re going to ignore to your peril. It shouts from the outside, demanding that key principles of the world be inverted. It is always motivated by the fact that everything you know is wrong.

This is, ultimately, what Land argues that Moldbug does with the western liberal tradition, reducing the idea of individual liberty down to its purest form, a right to scream back “no” at the world,

let’s ask what the monstrous offspring of neoreaction might look like. Or, to use a classical leftist slogan, it’s time to fuck fascism.

what’s really striking is Moldbug’s repeated insistence on the “agony of ingestion.” While a fair description of his writing style, it’s rather hard to see what he actually intends it to refer to in terms of neoreaction.

And suddenly the abyss gazes also.

Moldbug got here by having too much time on his hands and self-educating on American history entirely via primary source documents while stoned. Land, on the other hand, had a complete fucking breakdown.

The latter of these may seem deeply improbable given that a superintelligent AI is by definition a profoundly alien being that does not think like humans, but remember that we only got here because of a ridiculously inflated sense of our own rationality.

Yes, it’s clear that Yudkowsky is, at times, one of the most singularly punchable people in the entire history of the species, and to be fair, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is unequivocal about the fact that Harry is.

Never mind being a crypto-Tory, Milton’s a crypto-neoreactionary. There’s only one teensy little problem: Milton’s God is a dick.

Especially because, let’s face it, Moldbug’s beloved English monarchy was exactly what it was designed to be a legitimizing myth for. God and the King look the same for a reason, and it’s not because Henry VIII was Yahweh’s problematic fave.

Milton’s Devil is one of the greatest characters in English literature, but he’s still a straw man set up so that Milton’s dick God can triumph over him.

I mean, this was always Moldbug’s basic problem: he wants to be an edgy rebel, and he’s just not.

Land becomes a neoreactionary in the sense of coming out to his previous academic audience. And it reads like one. He only gets around to bringing up these new friends he’s been hanging around with a few paragraphs in, and he doesn’t actually mention the boyfriend for another ten or so.

Being Moldbug, he approaches this in preposterously Manichean terms: “When we see two populations of memes in conflict, we know both cannot be healthy, because a healthy meme is true by definition and the truth cannot conflict with itself.”89 Which, hahahaha, no.

This is not to deny the existence of racism even on the progressive left, nor to say that progressive racism is not just as much of a long-term danger. Rather, it’s to point out the practical scariness of white nationalists: their presence ensures that an intelligent or productive discussion of race is always going to be poisoned by a bunch of dipshits chiming in to rant about human biodiversity.