NRx: Against Platonic Rationalism

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I cordially invite you to read this post at its new home at
https://poseidonawoke.wordpress.com/2014/11/29/nrx-against-platonic-rationalism/

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I have been studying Curt Doolittle and his formulation of Propertarianism. Doolittle refers to the Misesian formulation (what we now call Libertarianism) as pseudoscientific, and refers to the 20th century as A Century of Mysticism. It is important for Neoreactionaries to understand why.

Nick Land recently asserted that Neoreaction is Neocameralism. Then Bryce Laliberte, who wrote a book entitled What is Neoreaction, noticed that his book does not even contain the word Neocameralism. That is a problem.

Laliberte writes:

However, I suspect that’s not where he’s coming from, and really does intend to specify, in some manner, that neoreaction begins and ends with neocameralism; the rest is but window dressing, essential theory to the end of developing this particular political philosophy.

And that’s why I find it so jarring, this identification. Given the particularism of neoreaction, at least as it has been articulated by everyone including Land up to this point, there’s no feasible way to make the identification of neoreaction with a single political philosophy, no matter how coherent it is of itself, without intending the scuttling of all the background ideological separation from modernism. But then, Land did tell me once he takes a difference over my use of modernism, so perhaps an elucidation that front may help. If Land is right here, that would require a serious recalibration of my efforts to articulate a coherent ideological worldview.

I believe that Land has the same intuition as CD. The difference between Land's assertion and Laliberte's view is functional. To say that Neoreaction is Neocameralism is to say that the project of Neoreaction is to build functional government. Laliberte is attempting to build a logically consistent political philosophy.

In my piece on Operational Property, I attempt to make what I perceive as CD's case against Libertarianism (a political philosophy). The case is basically the Operationalist case against Platonic Rationalism. CD refers to the 20th century as a century of mysticism, because Marxism, Freudianism and Libertarianism are pseudosciences. They are pseudosciences because they rely on unproven, untestable self-evident axioms. This is the problem with all political philosophy. It is rationalist in nature:

In epistemology, rationalism is the view that "regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge"^[1] or "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification".^[2] More formally, rationalism is defined as a methodology or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive".^[3]

When building a political philosophy, one reasons from axioms. Within this framework, something is true if it is logically consistent, when it is rational, when it can be shown to follow a line of reason. The problem occurs when the fundamental axioms themselves are divorced from reality. This is the operationalist criticism: if someone cannot provide an existence proof, then no-one really has any idea if that person is talking about something that is real, or something that is purely imaginary.

The Dark Enlightenment itself is founded in reality, in observable truth. Real science is founded on observable phenomenon (proven through repeatable experiments), while rationalist truth, though logically consistent, is pseudoscientific because it is divorced from observation and measurement. In the pseudosciences, there is no existence proof that we are talking about something real. In Platonic Rationalism, truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive.

Political philosophies are logically consistent walled gardens, in which the walls are formed by self-evident axioms. Basically, they are tautological. I use the image of a garden, though often I see political philosophies as prisons of words. As long as one is content to play within the walled garden, everything will be logically consistent and make sense. The problem is that Gnon demands proof. If the political philosophy does not yield real world benefits, then it will land in the ash-heap of history.

I believe that the Dark Enlightenment is the realization that we are currently governed by pseudosciences, which were created out of the Enlightenment exuberance for the human ability to reason (rationalize). What the children of the Enlightenment did not understand was the limits of human cognition and the laundry list of cognitive biases that humans have. As such, we cannot simply think our way forward, deducing from first principles… we have to actually measure and experiment. We have to measure our mental models against the real world. Today, the pseudosciences assume that they are correct because they are logically consistent, but when the real-world outcomes to not match their imaginary models, it is because of some witchcraft (some evil crimethinker), rather than the fact that the imaginary model is not founded on observable truth.


Which leads us back to Neocameralism. The idea here is functional government, scientific government. Perhaps Neocameralism is nothing more than one conception of how a functional government might function. In order for a system to be functional, we must understand the operation of its constituent components. This is what science is for, to discover how the universe functions and to manipulate it to our own ends. The important question about the universe is How does it operate? Functional systems must be based on human observation and operations.

Is the project of Neoreaction to build functional government? To build something that, you know, actually works? Or is the project of Neoreaction to build a logically consistent political philosophy? I believe that Land is asserting the former. Gnon demands results. I believe that many in Neoreaction think it is the latter, which is why so many pragmatists quickly get exasperated with NRx. Are we engaged in real science here, or not? I don't think that we need to build another pseudoscience. Break down the prison of words. Neoreaction should be concerned with the real world.

I think that Doolittle is on the right track. If we want to actually create something functional, then we must base ourselves in observable truth, in Operationalism. I am currently attempting to understand and relay Doolittles work over at the Propertarian forum. To get a sense of the fundamental paradigm shift the Operationalist view offers Neoreaction, read Operational Property. I don't know where this will lead. I am learning. Come learn with me. Let's build something that works.

Leftism vs Liberalism

I've been trying to tease apart Leftism and Liberalism, and I think I've found a formulation that is a pretty good predictor of Leftist positions: the Leftist drive is to destroy all hierarchy, which is the natural shape of human organization. Leftism is rebellion against Gnon.

This is in contrast to the Rightist or Reactionary position as illustrated in Nick B. Steves' Reactionary Consensus, item 1:

“ Hierarchy

Reactionaries affirm that hierarchy is not only natural, but almost purely beneficial to group success. Hierarchy is not merely not evil, but an enabling trait of civilization. Since hierarchy is adaptively advantageous, it is easy to see why reactionaries believe it to be part of the law of nature or nature’s god or both. Public policies that ignore hierarchy as fundamental to human nature, or worse attempt to subvert it by artificial means of social leveling are foolish at best and likely to be catastrophic for human flourishing.

Liberals are those who advocate for Liberty. Capitalism is primarily a liberal system, because a fundamental aspect of it is the ‘spontaneous order’ of the market: for spontaneous order (self-order) to occur, then that presupposes that external order is not being forced upon it. Freedom of speech is a liberal value, as are freedom of association and gun ownership. Because America has always been a liberal project, Leftists have used the tactic of exploiting Liberal values that advance Leftist ideology.

Leftists want to attack, dismantle and destroy established orders; to ‘free’ the masses from hierarchical order imposed on them from the upper classes; to flatten hierarchies. To them, order and hierarchy is oppression, and it is… when viewed from the perspective of the Left. Civilization is the systematic suppression of animal drives, barring behaviors which have negative effects on group fitness. Capitalism is the suppression of involuntary transfers of property (parasitism/theft). Even in a liberal order, such as a Capitalist society, hierarchy does emerge because humans are fundamentally un-equal and will self-sort into hierarchies. In a liberal order, given a choice, most people will fall into that order willingly, understanding that the hierarchies that are formed are to their benefit. Leftists want to destroy these orders and impose anti-Liberal (totalitarian) economic and social policies.

To be fair, neither the Left or the Right holds ‘civil liberties’ in very high regard, though the Rightist drive to succeed and prosper makes the Right tend align with Liberal ideologies such as Capitalism, which appears to function better with open communications or free speech and meritocracy. Although a productive Capitalist implementation does not require a completely Liberal order. Capitalism succeeded demonstrably under Kings, see 'The British Empire'. The Left doesn't care about real world outcomes and will destroy the goose that lays the golden egg happily as a sacrifice to Moloch.

I see the Left as rebellion against Gnon, and the Right as submission to Gnon. This is the basic Left/Right spectrum on the X-axis. Then Liberty/Authority is mapped as a spectrum onto the Y-axis. It can be very difficult to discern if a particular position held within the Left-Liberal quadrant of the map is driven there by a Leftist or Liberal vector. I think it is important to do so, because Liberal drives, which allow enough freedom for spontaneous orders to emerge are important in creating flexible, adaptable and dominant social orders. Gnon demands fruitfulness. But Leftist drives, which lead to death and infertility, must at a minimum be ostracized.

One can think of the Leftist project as the destruction of hierarchy (forcible implementation of a flat order) and the Liberal project as the formation of self-ordering hierarchies. It can be difficult to tease apart a Leftist from a Liberal position, because Leftists cheat and pretend to be Liberals when it suits them. Here are a couple of key quotes lifted from the brilliant RadishMag's Free Speech issue which display that Leftists are not Liberals, that they do not hold Liberal values such as free speech in any high regard, but merely pretend to do so in order to gain power:

“Roger Nash Baldwin, director and co-founder of the ACLU (1934):

“I believe in non-violent methods of struggle as most effective in the long run for building up successful working class power. Where they cannot be followed or where they are not even permitted by the ruling class, obviously only violent tactics remain. I champion civil liberty as the best of the non-violent means of building the power on which workers’ rule must be based. If I aid the reactionaries to get free speech now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight against censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties. The class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental.

When that power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever. Dictatorship is the obvious means in a world of enemies, at home and abroad. I dislike it in principle as dangerous to its own objects. But the Soviet Union has already created liberties far greater than exist elsewhere in the world. […] While I have some reservations about party policy in relation to internal democracy, and some criticisms of the unnecessary persecution of political opponents, the fundamentals of liberty are firmly fixed in the USSR. And they are fixed on the only ground on which liberty really matters — economic. No class to exploit the workers and peasants; wide sharing of control in the economic organizations; and the wealth produced is common property.”

Another quote about the suppression of free speech from Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School, in 1965:

“The whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger. Consequently, true pacification requires the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture. Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger. I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs. Different opinions and ‘philosophies’ can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds: the ‘marketplace of ideas’ is organized and delimited by those who determine the national and the individual interest. In this society, for which the ideologists have proclaimed the ‘end of ideology,’ the false consciousness has become the general consciousness — from the government down to its last objects. The small and powerless minorities which struggle against the false consciousness and its beneficiaries must be helped: their continued existence is more important than the preservation of abused rights and liberties which grant constitutional powers to those who oppress these minorities. It should be evident by now that the exercise of civil rights by those who don’t have them presupposes the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise, and that liberation of the Damned of the Earth presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters.”

For example, we now regularly see Leftists calling to limit free speech on the internet. That is an anti-Liberal position. Currently, the Left is in charge in America and in the Democratic party, and the goal is to limit 'hate speech' (any speech which offends Leftist sensibilities) so that is a Leftist drive; to further the Leftist ideology at the expense of Liberty. A Liberal will argue for free speech against Leftist impositions.

Here is another Left vs Liberal example using the case of persons who are ‘transgender’.

The Liberal view is that the trannie should be allowed to be openly trans and to talk about being trans and to form alliances with other pro-trans people. This is allowing the basic Liberties or free speech and association to trannies. A Liberal will allow pro-trans and anti-trans schools of thought to both exist. A Liberal will trust that in the ‘open marketplace of ideas’ that the best ideas will win.

A Leftist will claim that the very order imposed by nature, the ‘gender binary’ is an oppression and will demand that gender be removed from all public places and that children should be taught that they can choose their gender and forced to watch pro-transgender propaganda in school. They will fight anyone who takes the anti-trans position, the position that accepts the natural (or God-given) order of ‘gender binary’.

The Liberal and Leftists positions can look very similar, but you can tell the Leftist position because it is the totalitarian one: only the pro-trans position is allowable, which is why currently all other positions are ‘hate’ or ‘hate speech’. When not openly totalitarian, it will be the position in opposition to a natural (gender) or spontaneous (meritocracy) order.

An interesting conundrum is the prevalence of Leftist support for Islam and Muslims, when Islam is obviously an anti-Liberal and anti-Leftist religion. I think that the Baldwin quote above is instructive, especially the line "The class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental." The dominant order of the world is Western civilization, which is White and Christian in origin. Muslims are demonstrably a lower class: an empirical evaluation of their civilization in comparison to Western civilization yields this result. Leftists make this same evaluation, though they would deny it until their dying breath, and come to the conclusion that Muslims are allies in the class struggle to overthrow the dominant White and Christian order. This is also the reason for the alliance between Africans and the Left.

It is similarly interesting to look at the attacks on prominent Atheists Bill Mahr, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, all of whom are devout Liberals, and who have taken reasonable and rational positions against the Islam due to its anti-Liberal nature and in logical parallel to their attacks on Christianity. The Left is hounding all three. You see, attacks on Christianity are not bigoted or racist because the dominant order is Christian. The Left loves when these Atheists attack Christians, but the moment Atheists begin to attack comrades in the class struggle (Muslims), then the Left returns fire. Obviously, none of the three Atheists really understands this, because they don't grok the difference between Leftism and Liberalism. Their bewilderment is amusing as they sit dumbfounded trying to figure out why they are under attack for being rational and consistent.

Liberals want Liberty. Leftists want to destroy natural orders. Teasing their positions apart can be tricky, but is best exposed by evaluating their positions which are both Leftist and anti-Liberal. To the Left, Atheism is a tool in the class struggle and nothing more. Just as Free Speech is a tool in the class struggle and nothing more. The Left will use anti-Liberal means to squash free speech from Atheists or anyone else who goes outside the class struggle, the central struggle, which is the destruction of hierarchies and spontaneous or natural orders. The Left is rebellion against Gnon.