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

by Elizabeth Sandifer

Let us assume that we are fucked1.

Yudkowsky really does believe this one weird trick about figuring out the relationships among probabilities constitutes the key to a fundamental realignment of human thought.

“The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.”5

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.

how can we respond to the eschaton without the arrogance of thinking that we can change its speed or trajectory?

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.

So, with the Land-Moldbug axis being the strongest link we’ve found so far, 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.

It’s more important that they’re both drugs, and thus instruments of control, than that one is calling its form of control “freedom.”

Tellingly, though, the “fun” of the red pill is based in part on its exclusivity. What’s fun is seeing reality from the outside—in other words, watching all those silly little people who aren’t clever enough to understand the red pill. Which is a fairly large problem: for the red pill to work, it requires that the neoreactionary have a ready supply of deluded people. In other words, neoreaction’s sense of legitimacy is existentially dependent on systematic public deception.

All the same, the point remains: Steve Jobs isn’t going to be dismantling the Cathedral any more than he dismantled Grand Central Station or Covent Garden when he put Apple stores in.

As he conceptualizes it, the idea is to be “political engineers” designing a backup system that will kick in when American democracy inevitably goes south.

He abandons the term “citizen” in favor of “subject,” accepting the irrevocable yoke of slavery. No wonder he’s in terrified agony.

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. Land’s argument, in effect, is that the silent cosmos is exactly that—an unmistakable message that there is something wrong with us simply by virtue of our being a civilization.

The awful interaction of these two premises comes when Roko imagines “the ominous possibility that if a positive singularity does occur, the resultant singleton may have precommitted to punish all potential donors who knew about existential risks but who didn’t give 100% of their disposable incomes to x-risk motivation.”50

For instance, in his blog post “A formalist manifesto” he declares that “you’re bound by a rule if, and only if, you agree to it. We don’t have rules that are made by the gods somewhere. What we have is actually not rules at all, but agreements.” And he follows this to a logical endpoint, saying that “if you’re a wild man and you agree to nothing—not even that you won’t just kill people randomly on the street—this is fine. Go and live in the jungle, or something. Don’t expect anyone to let you walk around on their street, any more than they would tolerate, say, a polar bear.”

The real danger is not a man who refuses to stop killing people randomly in the street, a problem that might prove challenging to excessively purist philosophical doctrines, but which societies in practice are pretty good at dealing with. No, the real danger is a man who refuses to commit to not killing people, but who is not presently actually doing so.

Moldbug, for his part, ties himself in knots to come to the conclusion that yes, sure, the Nazis were reactionaries, but they were rubbish at it and too influenced by democracy.

But in many ways this undersells the true conceptual horror of Nazi Germany, which is not merely, as Moldbug suggests, its human rights record, but the fact that Hitler was a complete fucking nutcase. The dirty little secret about Mein Kampf is that it’s relentlessly and mind-wrenchingly awful in a way that makes Moldbug look like a towering literary and intellectual genius. And he was one of the more put together Nazis; people like Goebbels and Himmler were deranged incompetents of the highest order.

The truth is that, despite Land’s evident fascination with them, the bulk of neoreactionaries are not people one would want to have a beer with, and there’s not a great case for reading their books either.

Yudkowsky isn’t just running from error; he’s running from the idea of authority. The real horror of the Basilisk is that the AI at the end of the universe is just another third grade teacher who doesn’t care if you understand the material, just if you apply the rote method being taught.

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.

Asking rhetorically what would have happened if he had not made man free, God asks, “What praise could they receive? What pleasure I from such obedience paid.”71 The choice of words is genuinely chilling: pleasure. The choice to kneel or exit is imposed for no reason other than because the sovereign desires to be obeyed. This is raw sadism.

What’s crucial about Milton’s Satan is that he is capable of masking his bestial nature in the clothing of civilization. He is monstrous, but his monstrosity is expressed in moving and beautifully written speeches.

What’s key is the contrast between this language and the description of Moldbug’s “sanitized” list—the tacit accusation that Moldbug is insufficiently willing to take the plunge into white nationalism.

This is clearly the meat of it for Land—the point at which he’s out-Moldbugged Moldbug to create something even more terrifying. Certainly it served to make him a popular figure among the audience of racist trolls that Moldbug was about to abandon.

Sure, Land, apocalypse-fetishist that he is, doesn’t actually care all that much if the racist beast gets let off his chain, but he alternates between cringing at his new friends and flopping with relief at how glad he is to be in China, away from this madness.

The answer, broadly speaking, is that he imagines there’s something useful to be found in this sewer.

Indeed, one rather suspects white centrists are about the only people happy with the “we solved racism in the 1960s so let’s stop talking about it” consensus.

The Weird, on the other hand, is not old so much as ancient—not buried but lost, forgotten, or, ideally, never really knowable in the first place. Its true nature, however, is outsideness. Hauntology comes from within us; the Weird from outside.

So we build the AI in a secure and isolated computer that can’t start taking over random systems or anything—a box, if you will. The question is this: is that safe? Yudkowsky argues that it is not, because a superintelligent AI would be able to talk its way out of the box. Or, to offer the hypothesis in his precise formulation, “I think a transhuman can take over a human mind through a text-only terminal.”92

But the perversion is clearly there, in every flaring of edgelord rebelliousness Moldbug musters. It’s what’s at the heart of his jovially taunting prose style—the genial condescension with which he addresses his imagined progressive reader. It’s at the heart of the Silicon Valley genius CEO mystique, implicit in the word “disrupt” that Moldbug’s ilk wear with such pride. It’s the perversion that’s always been at the heart of Milton’s God. Of course he enjoys Satan’s defiance. In fact, Satan’s defiance is what enables him to enjoy anything at all.

Equally, on strictly Gnon-level concerns, the experienced serial killer is probably a safer bet than the speed-addict philosopher.

Third of all, if we’re looking for examples of “temptation” and “seduction” it says something that we couldn’t actually find any within neoreaction itself.

Which is to say, Satan opens by negging Eve, accusing her of looking at him “with disdain, Displeas’d that I approach thee thus, and gaze Insatiate, I thus single, nor have feard Thy awful brow,”112 which may be the earliest instance of telling someone they have resting bitch face.

Unfortunately this attitude is not accidental, with Paradise Lost making the unequivocal claim that the fall of man was because bitches ain’t shit.

Satan argues that knowledge of Good and Evil will make doing Good easier, and that this knowledge is how God’s goodness is attained, such that defiance of God is actually a means of drawing closer to him. It’s obviously a flawed argument—that’s Milton’s point after all. But it’s got a compelling move at its heart, which is the way in which it uses the desire for holiness to create sin.

Consider God’s explanation of how he gave mankind free will so that they could freely choose obedience to him. If sin is separation from God, though, this free will is itself a form of sin.

Moldbug may not believe in the all-knowing atemporal creator God, but he believes in the existence of the inherent and indisputable authority God represents.

Unsettlingly, this line of thought jibes with the Ligottian refutations of Milton and Moldbug as well. If God’s actions are unjustifiable, best undo them. If chaos is the real good and order the real evil, best destroy it all.

even if we make the ultimate formalist analysis of power and declare that nature’s genocidal vendetta against humanity and willingness to, if it comes to it, turn the sun into a red giant and incinerate the earth means that chaos is the true good, we can’t actually short-circuit the innate sense that cleanliness is more desirable than messiness.

And let’s be clear, it would scarcely be possible to come up with a notion more loathsome to this particular breed of reactionary shithead than the right to be invaded. It’s a pathological terror within the neoreactionary community, exemplified by things like their bizarre obsession with the idea of cuckolding, including the formulation of the word “cuckservative” to describe supposedly conservative politicians who were weak on immigration and thus allowing the nation’s gene pool to be cuckolded. No, seriously, that’s a thing.

Trayvon Martin, on the other hand, was named “Trayvon” and never went a moment of his life without being identified as black. Or, to put it another way—and this was the actual issue that pushed Martin’s death into the news—if a black teenager had shot a white guy named George Zimmerman on the street he’d have been arrested without question, “stand your ground” laws or not, and everyone knew it.

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.

Simply put, it was Europe that finished the task of mapping the world. European culture became the first global and near-universally known culture; it was the first memetic global pandemic.

And this is where the right to be invaded draws its almost primal power from: the one thing Anglophone culture is unique in is never having experienced being taken over by another culture.

To be dually conscious is to endlessly predict the response of an outside observer and moderate one’s own actions to influence them.

from destruction; the means by which a relationship between the inside and outside is forged and maintained. It is also what enables invasion to be desirable; contact with the outside becomes something we are hardwired to want, and the inclination to exercise the faculty of empathy so that we can imagine things more and more alien to ourselves is as natural as the inclination to exercise our legs or mental faculties.

As with many fallacies, they’re much better at identifying it than avoiding it.)

But that’s just denying the truth. The reality is that we’re fucked, and that a vision of society based on empathy does not extend productively from late capitalism.

If one wants to engage in crude psychoanalysis, one might accuse the rank and file neoreactionaries of demonstrating the truth of this, reading their fascination with cuckolding as an ethnosexual version of the gay homophobe (and neoreaction is riddled with both gays and homophobes).