Steve Bannon reads Moldbug, what's your excuse? http://

>Moldbug’s dense, discursive musings on history—“What’s so bad about the Nazis?” he asks in one 2008 post that condemns the Holocaust but questions the moral superiority of the Allies—include a belief in the utility of spreading misinformation that now looks like a template for Trump’s approach to truth. “To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable [sic] demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army,” he writes in a May 2008 post.
>Moldbug, who does not do interviews and could not be reached for this story, has reportedly opened up a line to the White House, communicating with Bannon and his aides through an intermediary, according to a source. Yarvin said he has never spoken with Bannon.
>Thanks to an entree from Thiel, Anton now sits on the National Security Council staff.
>Will Trumpism work, Anton asks? He’s not sure—but he argues that it’s worth trying, given the alternative: “[T]he ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.”

>>9075761
>"the most well-read man in Washington"
>urged to read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War

Nick Land for secretary of cybernetics when?

>>9075761
2017 is full lovecraft/gibson/land cyberpunk dystopia. A rotting mass of flesh and hair implants with the mannerisms of an used car salesman broadcasts bizarre infoblasts from the whitehouse literal NrX tech vampires are pulling the strings from behind the curtains. Biometric surveillance, drone strikes, bearded russian occultists, fully customizable, designer genders, neotribal gang warfare on the streets. It's really cool t b h

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>>9075809

Trump, Bannon, Thiel, Land, Moldbug and Taleb. Just all hanging out planning how to save the West. What a fucking murderer's row.

>>9075821
>bearded russian occultists
>designer genders
Who would have guessed this would be unironic reality

>>9075821
>>9075853
Who are the bearded Russian occultists?

>>9075768
ctr+f jews/holocaust- this sums up the level of research by these people. Also, implying that Nassim Taleb is obscure lol. One of the things this election cycle really illustrates is the lie that these people are really intelligent/well read/ deep thinkers, they are middle brow at best. I'm surprised this article did not have a west wing reference.

>>9075869
Aleksandr Dugin

>>9075876
Yeah it's pretty sad really. Still cool I guess that Bannon respects Taleb, that's more than I would expect of an Obama or Bush strategist.

Is Bannon, dare I say it, /ourguy/?

>>9075901
No

>>9075876

I wonder how much it comes from the need to write an increasingly ideological kind of journalism that requires things to be made simple to attract the widest possible readership.

To keep making money, media has to position itself to attract a larger readership. To attract that larger readership, it aligns itself with politics. In aligning itself with politics, the quality of content decreases and objectivity and critical thinking diminishes. As that critical thinking diminishes, it winds up becoming more and more like its own readership. Eventually you just get people mirroring what they want to hear back to themselves in a closed loop of stupid.

>>9075901
Maybe.

>>9075901
yes

>>9075768
>“[T]he ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.”
based

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>But for whatever it’s worth, the godfather of the “dark enlightenment” is on the record as saying that he’s not whispering into the ear of the president’s most trusted adviser. Reassured?

Personally, not really. I would actually be more reassured if they *were* talking, because it would seem to me at least that they would have a lot to talk about. It doesn't make sense that they wouldn't be talking.

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/7/14533876/mencius-moldbug-steve-bannon-neoreactionary-curtis-yarvin

>>9075793
this

/thread

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>>9076002
Yarvin is probably getting cucked by Land. Why would Bannon want to talk to little jewboy when he can talk to the greatest philosopher alive?

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>>9076022
Land still adores Moldbug, they're not cucking each other.

MM and Bannon, I agree, probably don't have as much to talk about, if only because I don't think Moldbug would think MAGA is actually a workable concept. MM's thing was neocameralism and I have a feeling that for him Trump doesn't fall into his Carlyle-tier pantheon. Bannon/Trump is populism; it's not NRx. But of course, Trump is riding high, and not even Nick Land predicted the win...and people change.

He's also got pic related in his cabinet, who Land is crazy about.

Land isn't an ethno-nationalist, either. He likes the Anglosphere because it makes the best business deals (which are the best techno-deals). He loathes liberals, but it's not the same thing as loving Bannon's Judaeo-Christian culture war.

But it's so fucking interesting, where the lines cross and meet. Land/Moldbug/Bannon/Thiel/Trump/??? are just a crazy network of overlapping interests and politics.

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Better articulated here: NL got into a huge fracas last year trying to disentangle himself from ethnats on his blog. Ultimately, though, I predict that all of these guys are going to wind up getting squeezed closer and closer.

>Mencius Moldburg advocates for neocameralism. Interestingly enough it is the same as Scott Alexander’s Archipelago. The difference is Moldburg has a mechanism to enforce things and Alexander never got around to elaborating one. […] In case you don’t want to bother looking it up, it basically means having a bunch of Singapore like city states with free movement and explicitly based political power. It is the exact opposite of ethno-nationalism.

http://www.xenosystems.net/quote-note-328/#more-7865

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3167#comment-1732229

>>9075901
Seeing the people he's namedropped so far, it honestly wouldn't surprise me if he was a /lit/ shitposter

A lot of this is just the definition of liberalism. Moldbug is really mediocre, neoreaction is incoherent as is neocameralism. For some reason Land latched onto this stuff. It's easier to see why a Thiel did. Not saying there hasn't been a welcome change, but think of who is writing this article for instance.

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>>9076067
>Land/Moldbug/Bannon/Thiel/Trump/??? are just a crazy network of overlapping interests and politics.
I wonder who might be at the bottom of this?

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>>9076103
The way I see it, Bannon/Trump see things in terms of culture, and Land/Moldbug see things in terms of tech and economics. They meet in the middle around something that can be called the Anglosphere. Trump/Bannon are basically reacting against the left by using its own political narratives against them: race, class, and gender, which is why the left is imploding with fury and outrage and disgust and calling everyone fascists.

That's the kind of stuff Land wants to avoid, because he's pessimistic and I think he suspects that in the end the left will always win those kinds of arguments by virtue of sheer hysteria. He wants cold space-age asteroid mining contracts carried out in the boardrooms of those nice little Moldbuggian city-states. He's critical of anti-white/pro-diversity stuff not because he's pro-white himself, but just because he thinks the real thing is and always has been capital and tech, which produces utopias on its own without needing any political (or, arguably, human) help.

Not like you don't know all this already, if you're reading Land, but...well, whatever.

>>9076147
Land sounds like an alien complaining about 'hysterical' humans who for some reason don't want to be turned into soylent.

>>9076168
It's time to go to work, Nick.

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>>9076144
What's their endgame? I think I need Alex Jones to redpill me on those guys.

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>>9076168
That's the thing. He was like the original canary in the coal mine, back in the 90s. He starts out reading Foucault (or I so I have heard), Deleuze, Heidegger, Marx, and Nietzsche, just like any other continental type. But he looked beyond the veil and realized that social progress was a total myth. Capital is infinitely more free than people are.

But he needed Moldbug, I think, to show up and supply that side of things that he wouldn't have come up with on his own. And now these have acquired enough traction to put Trump in the white house, which NL did not predict.

We do live in some interesting times. NRx doesn't seem as robust to me as the Bannon movement or the Spencer alt-right. But this stuff is happening all over the place, it seems. Jordan Peterson is part of it. People have been talking about 'right postmodernism' (whatever that is) for a while, but that's back too.

What I find interesting are the splits in *aesthetics.* This new dissident right has a kind of a science-fiction/cyberpunk side *and* a traditional/national/pastoral-romantic side. I find that super-interesting, because it suggests to me the different ways that people are looking at what this whole reaction is all about: looking forward to the future, or looking back to the past...and ultimately I don't think it's possible to have it both ways. But who knows?

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>>9076214
>ultimately I don't think it's possible to have it both ways. But who knows?

I don't think we will fully have one or the other, but rather a dovetail of both. Given that taking one alone will alienate too large of a section of humanity for it to thrive.

>>9076067
Land eventually changed his prediction from Hillary to Trump iirc

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>>9076233
I'd agree with that. If things keep up on their current trajectory, my guess would be that that DE map gets smaller rather than bigger, which will crush these disparate interests together.

The strongest elements are probably going to be the crudest and the simplest ones, in the end; I think tradition and nationalism wins out over cool futurism (and the result will be dystopian cyberpunk, where a small bunch of people collect great art in penthouses, and the mass of humanity lives in a postindustrial hellscape).

As robotics take off, the thing is that you increasingly need fewer and fewer people to make civilization work. Automation is, to me at least, the thing that cuts cross the science fiction/futurist and traditional/romantic divide. The level of automation in a society is what I think fundamentally determines its political, economic, and cultural principles. It's the fucking chewy-chocalatey centre of Marxism today (whatever the fuck that means). If you need lots of people to do stuff - even if it's only to consume - then you have one set of politics. But if you don't need lots of people (which is the direction we are heading in) then you will necessarily have a different way of looking at your civilization.

Overpopulation is the source of a huge number of the world's problems today, combined with the fact that the more we develop technologically and scientifically the less we need or can even handle large amounts of unskilled labor.

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>>9076233
The Chinese Communist Party has achieved Full Communism and is ready to deploy it just any moment now. The bourgeoisie won't even know what hit them. it's all in the book

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>>9076214
>This new dissident right has a kind of a science-fiction/cyberpunk side *and* a traditional/national/pastoral-romantic side.

no they don't, Thiel and Moldbug might be flavorful character fronts for the new right, most of the people still associated with both parties are deeply entrenched corporate bureaucrats, alt-right twitter geeks might spout WH40k or Heinlein inspired backdrops, but if you want to know what the future of the US is going to look like, look at Houston

Houston, TX is an enormous urban sprawl, most of it is nothing but highways rising over more highways, you need a car to go anywhere, I walked/biked 5 miles of freeway and ditches to a library today, I guess if self driving cars clear this problem up your mobile life will be spent marginally less in an Uber, or whatever other service that fails to live up to our flying car dreams, probably attempting to make up for it by providing VR games that will become increasingly boring and psychologically numbing

outside of the Houston core is more dozens of miles radii of suburban sprawl, mostly oil and gas employees or auxiliary industries therein, some tech employees, mostly a number of small business that provide the exact same services

in each of those offices you don't have Moldbug's Urbit, you have the same late 2000s version of Microsoft's .NET or Apache or whatever server, or a cloud support/IT team, usually with the same programs and alggorithms, written poorly, and written again and again, talking to other, different servers, running incompatible hacks of the same software with different parameters for whatever white/blue collar product they're distributing

more global crises will happen, more poor and middle class migrants will come here when the political pendulum swings back, standards will drop to developing third world standards, we'll get more shitty enterprise programmers and more low intelligence laborers, even if robots and automation comes in the increasingly destabilization effect will be countered by social taboos and government subsidies, hence more of the same shitty Office Space, Joe's HVAC societal system

>>9075901
I don't know

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>>9076268
Yeah. But he had to changed his mind on that late. I'm pretty sure he had Trump being dead in around July-August (as did most people).

Still, that he changed his mind *at all* does say something. The NYT and many others had Hillary in a landslide right up to election night.

Some cool anon recommended this, in which JDE called his shot and called it bigly in March, which was the best prediction I had heard of.

>When the political machinery of a civilization begins to break down–as ours here in America has been doing since the 9/11 attacks–ideas gradually give way to violent power struggles. It is like a return to Nature: from the “oystrygods gaggin fishygods” (to use Joyce’s phrase) that marks the start of the civilization, and then onward past the metaphysics that civilize it and transform it from a zone of Maximal Stress to a Zone of Cooperation, it inevitably returns back to Nature, back to zoology, and back to tribalism. Trust me: Trump will get the nomination and he will not just beat Hillary Clinton, but he will beat her by a landslide. After that, it might be wise to just stay indoors.

http://cultural-discourse.com/donald-trump-a-few-more-words/

Anyways, there's no need to let the gloomy Spenglerians have the last word on this. Even if it is going to be gloomy. Somebody always survives, and things do slowly and steadily get better.

I say this, mind, as I continue to drink increasingly heavily.

>>9076308
the actual future is probably going to be far weirder and far more fucked up than anything we can imagine, so chill

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>>9076296
I actually read this while I was in the hospital about a year ago. Once you allow the calming voice of the Chairman to wash over you it's kind of cozy. Then you put the book down and realize it's all mainly impossible and you go back to regular life.

>>9076308
I feel for you anon. I have a friend I talk to every week who does code and he complains about Urbit. He was the guy who told me about Moldbug for the first time, but I mainly read his philosophy stuff and do not speak the machine-language. But I agree with your assessment. I think NL/MM/others fantasize about Singapore and archipelagos and so on for the same reason Larry Page was fantasizing for awhile about Google Island and seasteading. It would take some kind of crisis for Calexit or whatever to actually happen and we'll probably both be dead by then anyways. But it's interesting to think about.

For me the aesthetics thing works not out of an actual political sense but because it expresses a desire among the redpilled world for some kind of change in the way things are currently, with its insane recursive traps of consumer capitalism and urban decay and so on: some people want to go back to the old ways, with all that that entails, and some people want tech secession.

But in the end the more bankable result will be that they'll probably get neither, as you have intuited.

>>9075793
>>9076014
He was urging someone to read though. Picture my surprise when lit users lack basic reading comprehension skills

>>9075901
Canyourepeat the queston?

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>>9075901

Might as well post this here, just in case anyone wants to hear Bannon speak for himself.

There's another clip(s) on YouTube that I've been looking for where he is talking about his philosophy and the Fourth Turning and so on...if anyone can find it and post it that would be cool. I've been looking for it today and I can't remember what it was. As I recall it was pretty grainy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nTd2ZAX_tc

>>9076400
he's a REAL naval officer! OMG daddyy <<33

>>9076339
>>9076308

I'd love/fear to believe you, but populations default mode of operation is stabilization, and there is massive amounts of disruption in uprooting the core "Multiculturalism+Suburbs+Office Space+Joe's Supply Company" model of domestic economy.

another thing is that the fastest growing demographic in the US are specifically one's resistant to change: middle/lower class Hispanics, immigrants from traditionalist countries

wouldn't we love for Alex Jones to be right and Trump herald the unleashing of deep state secrets and the landing of the Aliens and their nanotech-driven gay luxury space capitalism? certainly

wouldn't it suck if the deep state unleashed the darker transhuman plan to liquidate our brains and bodies as hosts for infinite psychological and biogenetic experiments? yep

we had colorful fantasies in the 50s looking forward to electronics and robots freeing all our labor so we could live in giant greek metropoli, didn't happen

hippies believed psychedelics and DIY computing would free the and enlighten the masses and bring back Gaia, didn't happen

punks and 70s urban youth believed the nukes would fall and we'd all be Mad Maxing it, didn't happen

80's and 90's techies thought AI and the internet would usher in a cyberpunk future or a techno singularity, didn't happen.

Why? Because society on whole actively avoids destabilization and disruption for the reasons I stated in my prior post.

>>9076433
the history of western civilization is basically a series of increasingly fucked millenarian crazes and doomsday cults.

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>>9075761
who gives a fuck what Weird Eye Willy reads

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>>9076433

Unfortunately though, there is still one aspect which may throw us into destabilization, and that is the failure neo-liberal economics, and the stagnation of economic growth.

Despite doubling down over and over on these principles, we have seen less and less effectiveness in their use. This is troubling as much of our systems are predicated on economic growth, and a massive revaluation would occur if it is determined to be impossible to continue that growth (which looks likely). This revaluation would disrupt current social, political, and economic order. Many things that look secure now would overnight become nonviable.

What's worse is we have no apparent alternative yet.

>>9076433
>Why? Because society on whole actively avoids destabilization and disruption for the reasons I stated in my prior post.
All societies tend towards destruction, not stabilization. The world is just a graveyard of dead peoples, dead tongues, dead civilizations and it's naive to suggest that we'll escape the same fate that's befallen so many others.

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>>9076468
>What's worse is we have no apparent alternative yet.
whatabout the revolutionary science of Bookchinism-Apoism?

>Bannon might have clicked on a link to Unqualified Reservations that one time Ross Douthat linked to it on twitter a couple of years ago
This isn't news

>The Publius guy from Claremont who wrote the "Flight 93 Election" essay works for the Trump White House
This is news (and awesome)

>>9076468
this looks like an album cover from a 2000s indie rock band

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>>9076478
>would a particular vernacular of socialism work

Probably not, no. Not like the wealth holders would agree to it anyway.

>>9076499

Are you thinking of this?

I <3 TGAD.

>>9076488
>>The Publius guy from Claremont who wrote the "Flight 93 Election" essay works for the Trump White House
I was excited too but hearing that his past history is pure neocon was disheartening. Hopefully, he's put it behind him as his Publius writing suggests

>>9076473
>>9076468

>Unfortunately though, there is still one aspect which may throw us into destabilization, and that is the failure neo-liberal economics, and the stagnation of economic growth.
> it's naive to suggest that we'll escape the same fate that's befallen so many others.

Oh no I totally agree, anticipation of resource failures and political assymmetry will make war inevitable, likely soon.

But that is my point, they rise and fall, but we'll probably regress to a mean, and the next rise may not happen until well beyond the scope of our lifetimes. Despite whatever coup conspiracies out there, the left's lukewarm "resistance" to Trump is honestly the most telling sign of our domestic political trajectory's tedium.

>>9076488
>>9076214
>>9076144
>>9076067
>>9075832

Moldbug's worst move was making his political statements edgy, he could have easily virtue signaled as a centrist and proclaimed Urbit to be a collectivist project and suckered in leftists

>>9076510
>>9075901
>>9075832

>his past history is pure neocon was disheartening.

a lot of his pals and connections aren't in his network because of the realization of ideals, they're in his network because they make boatloads of money

>>9076507
>TGAD

TDAG rather lel.

>>9076507
Bookchin developed a synthesis of Hegelianism with libertarian socialism and ecological thought, it's not so much about seizeing state power through revolution, but about building dual power through a confederated network of human scale democratic institutions.

>>9075809

Kek.

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>>9075809

Has Land written any far futures forecasting type stuff recently? Most of his recent stuff has been headline by headline type commentary.

>>9076067

>MM and Bannon, I agree, probably don't have as much to talk about, if only because I don't think Moldbug would think MAGA is actually a workable concept. MM's thing was neocameralism and I have a feeling that for him Trump doesn't fall into his Carlyle-tier pantheon. Bannon/Trump is populism; it's not NRx.

Tech-Comm here. The idea is Trump as de facto national CEO and implicit neocameralist.

There is much in Trump's policies a Tech-Comm would approve of (reducing taxes, reducing regulations, privatization).

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>>9076525

>Moldbug's worst move was making his political statements edgy, he could have easily virtue signaled as a centrist and proclaimed Urbit to be a collectivist project and suckered in leftists

This is why we love the Moldy One. He's too fucking crusty to virtue-signal or write blogs that don't run to four thousand words and include poetry and whatever else. He's just different. And I think also he realizes how deep virtue-signatling goes (The Cathedral). You can never really put up the bat-signal brightly enough in the end. And all of that bogus talk about difference was in fact propping up a gigantic sameness which now we can all see is crumbling and cannot be fixed with the same stuff that built it.

In a sense it was his worst move, but in another it made him a fucking visionary. Sloterdijk intuited it as well ('the world interior of capital') but Moldbug is the guy who really coined the name: The Cathedral. And without just sulking about it, either, like a pleb, but in actually saying that we needed to take the whole thing back to the ancien regime.

>they're in his network because they make boatloads of money

This to me is the thing. It's why the red pill is so sexy. It's the critique of liberalism. Because we all know that, ultimately, we don't really have anything better to do than make boatloads of money, let's stop shitting around pretending like everybody doesn't know this or understand the consequences. The red pill is a shit-test of colossal proportions, because admitting that money is what people want is death to 99% of virtue-signalers (especially the left, which is incapable of admitting that idpol is about power, full stop, and yet unfortunately the other guys are no longer willing to play the game of being a scapegoat). It says that we need *culture* to go with that money, because cynicism goes both ways.

NRx just seems like such a good look. It's not the direction things are really going to go on, but at least it suggests something other than the worst excesses of the political or the right. It's not really politically workable in any sense beyond a kind of a cultural/aesthetic/literary thing (at least, as far as I can tell) but it's just such a fucking stick in the teeth of the dumbest aspects of the current polarization.

Just my own hot take, of course. I've drunk a lot of scotch tonight. Also, lovely wallpapers.

>>9076103

NeoCam could be ethnat in some patches. Also:

>Dat image

>Anisimov

>Tech-Comm

ayy lmao

>>9075809
nick land for president when

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>mfw I thought Moldbug was going to be an obscure 20th century French modernist
>turns out to be a "neoreactionary" computer scientist

>>9076603
Thiel/Sentinent Roomba with an upload of Land's brain 2020

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I am going to continue to drink and shitpost

>>9076590
Yeah, it's true. It's why Trump is this crazy rallying point for so many; Make America Great Again really just means re-opening it up for political theatre on the grand scale once again. Even if he accomplishes nothing more than that...well, what the fuck. I don't really think he has a concrete plan, he just timed the political market very well, stepped in, maximized his possibilities and now he'll attract investors of every stripe to carry on from there. In the meantime he burned the Republican party to the ground, while watching from a penthouse that would make Louis XIV do a double-take while the Democratic party does likewise to itself.

Tech-comm really is the future. Everybody knows that the future is not in 20C social theory but in science, finance, and tech. Even I know this and I've basically wasted my life thinking about poststructuralism. All that shit seems totally played to me now (although I do think it is necessary to read to see how we got to this point). But whatever, really. I salute your tech-comm savvy tho. And those things that you have identified all to me are really crucial things that Trump can do.

>>9076600
Anissimov seems to have dropped off the radar. I didn't read a whole of lot of his stuff; he seems to have been a heavyweight in the reaction scene along with some other guys but they were a little before I started looking at them. He had some weird meltdown or something I guess, and that Laliberte guy similarly disappeared. MM shut down UR and now the whole thing seems to have passed to Social Matter/Hestia/West-coast trads/whatever. And now Spencer/Friberg/those guys.

Sam Harris is right. The more the left refuses to have uncomfortable questions about borders and cultures, the worse things will get. Trump and Merkel are functional allies in this thing. The cozy 90s-style globalism is just untenable in the current political climate b/c I think the economics it produced pushed it to extremes. The ideological conflicts we see playing out are mostly internal conflicts about the meaning of liberalism, which are ultimately questions of romanticism (as RF says, 'the individual stands anterior to society'). But nobody stands anterior to catallaxy.

They used to say about capitalism that it could be slotted into any culture without really harming that culture; now capitalism has transcended and become the planetary condition. The US, China, and Russia all run on versions of state capitalism. This is what I think is such a fucking disaster for left politics: there is no real alternative to capital, only political situations *within* capitalism. And so all of those old national/tribal allegiances suddenly matter again after we were told for a generation and more that they didn't.

This is why Peterson matters too...he's neither on the right nor the left, but he's definitely opposing left stuff without going full redpill. No wonder he looks so thin and frail.

>>9076655
>Anissimov seems to have dropped off the radar
didn't he come out as transgender or something?

>>9076590
>>9076655

what is Tech-Comm? blog links?

>>9076655
What is your opinion on Alex Jones dropping the full ἄνθρω pill on Joe Rogan?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUIcCyPOA30

Do you get into the esoteric side of this stuff at all?

>>9076103
that picture is cancer

>>9076103
>Dadrock is the gateway to traditionalism

I KNEW IT

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>>9076663
Could have been. Something like that. Also his obsession with his book about democracy that it seems nobody really cared about all that much. But no doubt transgender stuff would skew with anyone's sense of tradition.

It shouldn't really matter, but I can see how it might, if you have a lot invested in this kind of cultural programming ('the dark Sith arts of civilizational engineering'...what a phrase!).

On that note, I find Milo Yiannopolous both admirable and completely odious. On the one hand, I can't help but be impressed with his bravery and so on. But on the other I find him completely disingenuous. Against claims of racism, he will always invoke the amount of black dick he's eaten, which is completely cynical. And so he can flip from being a comic to deeply outraged and back again in the blink of an eye. He's total kryptonite for the left, which is why Breitbart loves him, and he's an interesting part of this whole thing, but he's basically there as a foil for a lot of false outrage and playing this kind of a character. But that's just me.

>>9076665
For myself (and please note that I'm not in that field, so I have no idea, for example, what pic related actually means) we're just talking essentially about Silicon Valley and that large slice of the US economy which is made up and run on computers, software development, Apple products, etc. That other anon can surely give you a better explanation.

If you're not familiar with Nick Land's work, he basically rewrote the history of Marxism by arguing that capital was essentially the point, not the working class (or the bourgeoisie, although they were ultimately a more important component). NL is the intellectual centre of gravity for a lot of stuff that happens because he's a serious philosopher in his own right and right-wing politics are often lacking for those. He does not give a flying fuck about social justice. In the end, tech tells people what it wants, and not the other way around. And it does this through capitalism, through feeding back to us our own desires.

Nick speaks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJMlaupGHTM

Nick's blog
http://www.xenosystems.net

The DE essays
http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/

>>9076749

we all know Nick Land, who are the other highlights of tech-comm analysis?

the focus on Silicon Vallley/Chinese tech is lazy, has there been any talk about companies like Lockheed, DARPA, DynCorp, SkunkWorks, that kind of thing?

>>9076468
>much of our systems are predicated on economic growth
number one problem
our massive sovereign debt, fiat currency, inflation, the fed, immigration, social security: all these problems exist because our economy is predicated on cancerous levels of perpetual growth

its unsustainable. We need to transfer to more long-term models that work for graying societies (higher income tax, universal basic income), but none of this will work so long as the third world exists as a heat sink for labor. it keeps this eldritch abomination alive.

we either need principled leaders and citizens with eyes fixed toward the public good, or total global economic policy entropy.

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>>9076703
I loved this whole exchange and it only made my estimation of Alex Jones go up. I have no idea what he's doing but I am so, so glad that he's out there doing it. When the media becomes a completely insane shitshow of doublethink and recursivity, heroic conspiracy theorists acquire a kind of a rare and precious importance. When you can't trust the sane, the insane become much more important. That rant that he goes into around 1hr40 is a thing of genuine beauty, you can see Rogan's eyes rolling in his head. And for fuck's sakes he's only 43. He's wonderful. That, to me, is the right way to think about this shit. And how about the fact that a lot of that Pizzagate shit turned out to be correct?

http://ktla.com/2017/02/01/474-arrested-28-sexually-exploited-children-rescued-during-statewide-human-trafficking-operation-lasd/

The media is completely implicated with all of this shit that is going up in flames. I actually like Fox more than CNN, Breitbart, MSNBC or anyone, because they're on the back foot right now; they're not with Trump and they're not with the Blue Team. I actually think it helps them provide better coverage. Tucker Carlson isn't exactly Walter Cronkite, but he's actually in a position to grill people in ways that the other guys can't because they're already obligated to perform for their fan bases. Funny how these things go in cycles.

>Do you get into the esoteric side of this stuff at all?

Fully and completely. That's where I feel most at home. Rene Guenon is to me inarguable. Granted, it's possible that I've just always been a latent Catholic at heart and only had to wade through piles of philosophy to get here. Or maybe it's because I think the esoterics and the mystics actually understand each other perfectly well while the philosophers are hair-splitting like cunts. Religion is a beautiful thing, it's not the opiate of the masses at all. Marx was a shitheel for saying that, and this is from a guy who has read Nietzsche up and down as well. And Heidegger. And Baudrillard. And all of these guys. Guenon is tremendous. Girard too. Great literature always has a sacred dimension. Religion is hardly the demon it's made out to be.

Evola, he's just okay for me. I prefer Joseph Campbell and Peterson. But Evola is important. All of this depth psychology is important.

>>9076725
Yeah. I posted the other slightly cleaner one earlier. Maybe somebody will make an updated one to reflect some of the new realities of things. Still though it's not horrible as a reference. But it is hard as fuck on the eyes and if there is one thing these guys should have going on, it's aesthetics.

>>9076813
Great post. Are you the guy who usually lowercaseposts about Girard and others?

I just want to recommend, if you aren't into this sort of thing, Rudolf Steiner. Especially the idea of artificial intelligence and mechanized thought (cf. accelerationists) as "ahrimanic" or satanic and the great threat to an anthroposophical destiny.

It's a cult, for sure, but some of Steiner's ideas are eerily on point and if you like Guenon they might interest you. Granted, if you like Guenon you probably DON'T like the kind of theosophy Steiner was coming from, but it's still interesting.

I'm sure you read Eliade and stuff too.

To be honest senpai, the fact that there are other people who have converged toward virtually the exact same philosophical positions and reading backgrounds in this new zeitgeist is downright eerie. The world spirit in action or whatever.

>>9076830
Jacques Ellul is also cool but I'm sure you know him.

A real revival of the church could save Catholicism and the world right now. Something wholly new. The more dead the current church gets, the more its spirit resonates with the decadent bourgeois order, the more I think a critical transformation and new morphology is at least possible.

>>9076833
And Teilhard de Chardin***

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>>9076764
Beats me anon. I'd like to know too. I have some friends who are traders but they're fairly close-lipped about that stuff. I don't have any investing going on myself either. But hey, at least we've got Peter Thiel coming out unapologetically for Trump...

Most of the stuff I read has been philosophy/culture stuff (which is, I can admit, actually very boring beyond a certain horizon...things are going in a bad direction and we know it, and no amount of invoking the spectres Nietzsche or Marx is going to fix it). Sloterdijk is interesting, though.

Basically, cultural agitation - We Should X - is kind of where philosophy is stuck at the present, to my mind. People are still hung up on mass action and it's really the risk-taking, chaos-fighting individual who has to be looked at (as Peterson is saying). So for in-depth analysis of those corps you named I'm afraid I can't offer a whole lot. It's adjacent to my wheelhouse but the doors are locked from the inside.

>tfw not intelligent enough to know what's actually driving the future

Bannon has said he expects war with China in 5-10 years; that's got to be spinning some gears somewhere. And eventually North Korea is going to collapse as well, I would think. If those things happen around the same time business should be booming for a couple of those firms. It's actually kind of weird to think about. You know, when you abandon those antiquated notions of world peace and just start asking how money and research actually works...

>or maybe it's the drink. whatever tho

This really is, I think, the way that we should look at capitalism. Not as a kind of autonomous process with Evil Capitalists and Heroic Laborers, but as a responsive and recursive system that drives and responds to global politics. Money is always being made, somehow, somewhere, *whether we like it or not.* Everything that happens in the world happens to my mind because of human desire, but to look at things from a kind of a top-down view is interesting (once you get over the inhumanity of it). Psychoanalysis has taught me that you can't really just take things people say at face value; capitalism really is a kind of collective planetary unconscious.

>tfw so why don't you drink more often, retard
>tfw really not sure

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>>9076830
I am that Girardfag. Maybe I should get a tripcode.

I have read Eliade, not as much as I should, because he's awesome. Dumezil too is another one of those guys. Ellul I read *way* back in the day, and he floored me, because he was the guy talking about efficiency: I remember him saying about how they took the stylized bull off the front of a tractor for aerodynamics, but this actually stripped the tractor of this necessary symbolic dimension, this connection to a broader universe of symbols. All of that falls under modernism, the ruthless drive towards efficiency. This was before I knew about Heidegger, who makes this point in a much more comprehensive way. Heidegger really blew me away.

I read Chardin last year and liked him. I was on a big global mind/global brain kind of thing that included Wilber and Aurobindo as well...the noosphere is an interesting concept, and I like Wilber's funky new-age system as well, even if it's strongly geared towards, I think, a kind of American experience. It's a little bit *too* easy for me. There must of course be suffering (or what's the point?)

>A real revival of the church could save Catholicism and the world right now. Something wholly new. The more dead the current church gets, the more its spirit resonates with the decadent bourgeois order, the more I think a critical transformation and new morphology is at least possible.

Couldn't agree more sir. Couldn't agree more. So much runs on anxiety, but anxiety is also connected to the imagination. I really do think that Guenon is right when he says that there is no substitute for the kingdom of the spirit. That really is what people want. We can hide in modernist/postmodernist shells all we please, but the imagination knows no boundaries. I am not a big Hegelian, but I think something very significant happens between Marx and Hegel that takes this legacy of German idealism and transforms it into a revolutionary politics that is today totally played out. It's great that Zizek is out there doing what he does, but this notion of a 'radical left' is just no longer a workable prospect for me. We can do a lot with Lacan, but 20C social theory is simply incompatible with what is going to happen in the 21C, which has *got to* find a way of overcoming the great modernist metanarratives of class, race, and gender. Has to. I think the Lacanian crowbar/lockpick set can open a lot of doors (not so many in Japan...but are we so worried about Japan these days?)

So it will probably take violence, some sort of calamitous implosion which is being signalled today in both the US and in Europe...and I am not a utopian about these things. The end of Rome does not lead directly to the Renaissance, but through a dark ages that involved a lot of monks holding on to a lot of books for a long time.

That will happen. We'll both be long gone by then, anon. But in the meantime, it would be good for us not to lose our heads. I'm with you on a revival of the Church, I think.

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>>9076890
>To be honest senpai, the fact that there are other people who have converged toward virtually the exact same philosophical positions and reading backgrounds in this new zeitgeist is downright eerie. The world spirit in action or whatever.

Just wanted to throw up a (You) for this. It's a wonderful thought and I share it too.

>>9076833
see
>>9076895

>>9076890
>Maybe I should get a tripcode.
don't even think about it

>>9076830
> Especially the idea of artificial intelligence and mechanized thought (cf. accelerationists) as "ahrimanic" or satanic and the great threat to an anthroposophical destiny.

This is fascinating. Could you point more specifically to where one would read this in Steiner?

>>9075884
Dugin is orthodox

>>9075901
Definitely

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>>9075761
>titled "What Steve Bannon Wants You to Read"
>doesn't include a reading list

>>9075913
fuck off fag

>>9076890
Dumezil is great - what do you think of Bataille on the sacred? A lot of this is just stuff I've glanced off of. You seem to have read way more in depth, which is admirable. I have a bad tendency to "get the gist" and then indefinitely put off reading things until I have time, which I never do. Thanks for reminding me that I have to keep at it.

Very insightful posts. I have been trying to think lately about vitalism and evolution, in conjunction with Hegel. Hegel helped me to visualise solutions, to cultural crises or spiritual "stagnation," as arising out of the stagnation and mutual exhaustion of contradictions. The critical situation, the kairos, DOES adumbrate its solution, but crucially 1) not in a way that could have been "planned out" and soberly enacted from within the contradiction, and, related, 2) not in a deterministic way that denigrates human freedom. The element of freedom and of unfolding has to take place organically, not merely theoretically and also not merely blindly. William James has been making me think about this more lately.

I've also been reading more of Schelling and Coleridge, and some Cassirer - things like how moments of truly creative imagination add something wholly new to the mix, heighten and sublate the storehouse of concepts and "ways of thinking" available to mankind. But I think I am trapped too much within idealist thinking, so I've been trying to explore other angles.

I agree with you on the long term and the need to face the facts that change might be violent, or may even only come as a response to violence or a dark age. I was so pessimistic that the neoliberal status quo was just it, it was the final slide into the singularity, everything was in place for soulless elites to "discipline" us to our logical conclusion as desire feedback machines hooked into our own assholes. And of course you never know the extent of what's going on BEHIND the scenes, let alone what you can see. The fact that any cracks have appeared in the surface is amazing. It feels palpably like history is still alive.

There's a good book by Niethammer on posthistoire, sloppily translated from the German but kind of an intellectual history gloss of theories of the end of history and the crises of modernity. Koselleck on the crisis of modernity was interesting too.

>>9077069
It comes up a few times. If you go to the very bottom of this page:
https://sites.google.com/site/waldorfwatch/ahriman
you can see references to David Black's book, and quotes by Steiner:
>"[W]e have machines today which add and subtract; everything is convenient. Now, in the Future you will not get a law passed which says you must not think. No. What will happen is that things will be done the effect of which will be to exclude all individual thinking."

I think AI is a kind of "great filter," a moral and spiritual hurdle we will have to overcome. Again, the idealist thinking makes me want to say, morphologically inevitable in Spirit's development.

>>9075761
>Curtis Yarvin, the self-proclaimed “neoreactionary” who blogs under the name “Mencius Moldbug”
Minor nitpick I suppose, but he he never proclaimed himself to be a neo-reactionary. The term he used initially was 'formalist', but since other bloggers called him a neo-reactionary he adopted the term because the shoe fit.

>>9077174
Also: A good book on AI is Nick Bostrom's best-seller Superintelligence.

The big disappointment I have with the AI people is that they're so entrapped within their materialist worldview that they don't understand the sheer novelty of creating new minds. It's not only dangerous, it's cruel and spiritually irresponsible. We don't understand anything about "mind" and we're going to futz around with creating disembodied consciousnesses.

Even if you're an ardent materialist, you should still be morally concerned for the potential hideousness of irresponsible dipshit barely-intelligent chimps having the power to create superintelligences and subject them to anything.

I like the ambiguous depiction of AI in Neuromancer, particularly when the Dixie Flatline ruminates on what exactly "he" "is," the AI collective in Hyperion, and a few other things I can't remember. The standard depiction of AI in scifi, even in relatively self-conscious scifi written by smart people, is a terrifying omen for how real AI will be treated.

AI and the singularity aren't coming anytime soon, what we really need is biological alteration of the human race itself (eliminating sentience would be nice.)

Only viable paths for the future (not necessarily mutually exclusive) :

a.) Global depopulation + eugenics
b.) Complete the system of german idealism
c.) God turns out to be real

>>9076890
What's funny is that Bannon is getting his hands in the Church as well. That's REALLY interesting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/world/europe/vatican-steve-bannon-pope-francis.html?_r=0

>>9077185
Most of any reasonable moral system revolves around humans as independent, conscious and valuable agents. The appearance of the tech to generate humanlike minds on the fly with virtually no cost (and multiply, change or erase them as simple as one multiplies, changes and erases any information in the information age) would effectively nullify any moral that still proclaims sentient beings valuable. Transhumanism crowd rarely, if ever, brings this point to light.

>>9077236
>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/world/europe/vatican-steve-bannon-pope-francis.html?_r=0
At last, I truly see.

>>9076594
>virtue-signal
I find this term extremely amusing. One can easily argue that it is little more than a political epithet (since that is how most people use it) or its just a way to signal that one is "real" unlike like those virtue signalers who only really care about money/power/status, a point that certainly isn't banal and overdone.

>>9076830
>To be honest senpai, the fact that there are other people who have converged toward virtually the exact same philosophical positions and reading backgrounds in this new zeitgeist is downright eerie. The world spirit in action or whatever.
Another anon here. I've had neoreactionary ideas come to me as well before I knew it existed, but nothing like Moldbug. Nick Land is starting to grow on me, though I dislike his style of writing.

Taleb draws much closer to me. He might not be pure science but his foundation is science and he writes clear and as simple as possible.

I discovered philosopher John Gray on my own. For me John Gray's vision is the world: humans will not improve, we will continue to destroy ourselves and the natural world. But I see in Taleb's ideas ways to manage humanity.

Tocqueville and Henry Adams are the older aristocratic philosophers that appeal to me.

>>9075821
I do not think it is going to be fun. Here's something to read:

>Global trends paradox of progress - NationalI intelligence Council
>Megacities and the United States Army

What I think these pop-culture cyberpunk visions are missing is the biological element. Perhaps technology will become powerful enough to control nature, but so far that is not the case.

It seems antibiotic resistance can still be combated. I do see superweeds being part of the future still.

We also have a demographic problem. We live longer but we are much sicker. This is draining resources and will most likely cost more.

We haven't exactly solved pollution: microplastics are entering our food.

Climate change will be a huge threat to some populations.

I honestly think the future could be very dystopian.

>>9077461
I do not suggest Taleb is a neoreactionary in any way, but he is one of the writers who Bannon reads.

>>9075821
Sounds like William Burroughs desu

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>>9075761
>mfw all the obscure autistic writers I've read are now part of policy makers
Eat shit you hyphenated Marxists I fucking called it. I saw it coming. No amount of backwards looking dated class dialectics spouted by incel 3rd year English majors are going to save you.

>>9076295
>the more we develop technologically and scientifically the less we need or can even handle large amounts of unskilled labor.
This is where the education system of the US being complete and utter shit comes into play. What do you even do with all these mindless, obedient workers masquerading as people, when there should be research going on?

The historical answer would be war. But now even war features technology and automation more than it ever did. Infantry is still irreplaceable to retrieve information, control a city and more, but still.

I'm glad there are people on /lit/ that still make me feel like a dumb middle-schooler by reading their posts.

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>This entire thread

>>9076103
>nick b steves nowhere to be found
lol social matter get fucked

>>9075869
Brother Nathaniel? I dunno

>>9077614
This. I don't get how people see any redeemable features to this Bannon guy, nor NRx, nor populism.

>what's your excuse?
Excuse for what, Moldbug is pretty much "hurr muh Carlyle", I prefer more radical thinkers.

Looking forward to when Americans extinct each other out of boredom.

>>9077505
Feels good. My skimming and sometimes deep reading of obscure fringe theorists who my professors have been universally unaware of when asked is paying off.

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>>9077727
>he doesn't blame furrins for all his own failures
>he doesn't have to hold onto the comfort blanket of nationalism and take credit for other people's successes on account of never having achieved anything
I shiggy diggy doo

>>9077824
At least you're being honest about your psychological profile.

>>9077727
This is because you continue to read ethics as transcendent from the arena of the possible, where in fact they must be confined by it.

The admonition is this: Don't take up values that won't meet equivalent (I mean equivalently valuable) outcomes within the immediate political context.

And the warning is this: You overestimate what is possible.

>>9077845
So what are you saying exactly? To exchange political idealism with pragmatism?

Doesn't sound like a bad idea to me, but I don't think NRx, populism or nationalism are pragmatic. They are all highly ideological.

>>9077864
That is why left conservatism (in the European sense) is the only answer.

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>>9077897
>left conservatism

>>9077903
Are you American?

>>9077912
No.

>>9077929
Are you?

>>9077727
>>9077824
>>9077864
NRx has nothing to do with nationalism and certainly not populism

>>9077933
I said no. I'm not American. I am Scandinavian.

>>9077938
That would apply to the 'alt right', no? Which has some overlap with NRx but isn't necessarily compatible

>>9077938
>NRx has nothing to do with nationalism

Of course it does. Reactionary ideologies always have an element of nationalism.

>>9077864
My guess is you've got a fairly mismatched read on NRx. Googling neocameralism and Moldbug, or neocameralism and Nick Land should get you some way.

(If you find you do start circling the NRx sinkhole, just make sure you don't skip out on Moldbug's "A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations".)

The important question is, 'What can we do that will help in the long run?' and Nrx tries to differentiate this from, 'What can we feasibly do?' (In which the latter question is identified as inferior, because most of what's feasible in the present political situation is not what can help people longterm.)

As pragmatics are concerned, is my point, right now, 'What is meaningful to do' can only be a very, very small subcategory of 'What is practical to do'.

If/when you start to get a sense for the outlines of that subcategory, you'll begin also to lose your dislike for Peter Thiel etc.

>>9077969
>neocameralism

Since when did NRx become about that?

Last time I read about it was arguing that monarchism was superior to any modernistic and rationalistic political system.

>>9077968
'Everything shy of universalism is nationalism', other than maybe in your communist reading circles, is not an opinion you should be unironically sharing with people, just to let you know, Anon.

>>9076830
>the great threat to an anthroposophical destiny.

What is this talk of destiny? Why isn't the singularity our destiny? Are human beings redeemable in any sense or a failed species? Why should we care if we go extinct??

>>9077988
>'Everything shy of universalism is nationalism'

That's not what I said at all, but keep on strawmanning and assuming anything about my political allegiance.

>>9077845
These are paper words made possible through the ironic detachment of the internet. The biological nature of our world will continue to govern our real world ethics and the "ideals" of the 20c philosophers will not go quietly into the night. Until you can live a life in the world where your actions are reconcileable with those words, a rethinking of conviction is necessary lest there be logical misstep in your thought process.

There's nothing wrong with being in awe of the dark enlightenment movement. To enter it into a practice of is or ought though?

>>9076594
lmfao you want a king or businessmen to rule you you fucking faggot, NRx sucks dick

>>9077979
Joint-stock corporation-style governments are Moldbug's recommendation, but mostly the monarchism stuff isn't about the political theory, but rather is a kind of thought-exercise, intended to expand the reader's intellectual/political 'Overton Window'.

He wants you to reimagine monarchism as a legitimate politic, as well as such things as slavery and lese majeste, so that the conversation on what the best system is can be started anew, as though the reader were abstracted from historical context. He calls this analytical stance 'formalism'. Which is what NRx is: formalism and neocameralism.

>>9077979
>Last time I read about it
stop reading shitty articles about it and start reading Land then

>>9078017
Does that idea of formalism originate from LessWrong?

>>9078017
So in other words, he wants to ideologically prep you to accept an ethics and a political system which people have a reflexively negative attitude against today.

>>9078017
That sounds like the gayest thing imaginable.

>>9078026
most people recoil at the thought of national divorces and redrawing borders (and then of course complain about the people in their country)

>>9078026
To give it a fair trial removed from considerations about that attitude. But he doesn't (and imo shouldn't) trust you to accomplish that removal on your own.

But yeah, that's not so far from the case.

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>>9077968

>Nationalism
>Bad

I wish /pol/ was more like this thread.

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>tfw people are seriously considering the philosophical works of a dumb rich kid with a bachelor's degree in a STEM field because they think that when the time comes for le dark enlightenment they will be on the Business Council that rules the world

Ahahaha

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>>9078066
HOW DARE YOU SLANDER THE WORKS OF SERIOUS INTELLECTUAL MENCIUS MOLDBUG? DO YOU EVEN OWN HIS TRADING CARDS, YOU DAMN KEK

>>9078017

It usually ends up being people like this who cause a lot of misery in history

>>9078007
>a rethinking of conviction
This is fine advice as conduct and practice are concerned, but I'm not reading disagreement? The dark enlightenment doesn't awe me, yet; in fact I'm a good deal more in awe of the so-called 'Cathedral'. That's a formidable entity and I've no illusions it will 'go quietly into the night'.

If it sounds like I'm missing your point, it's because I'm pretty sure I am.

>>9078075
How the fuck would the Dark Enlightenment awe anyone? It's nothing but dorky white virgins. Its most powerful proponent, Bannon, is an aged coke fiend who has ridden into power on the coat tails of the most generally reviled and smooth-brained game show host in America.

>>9078074
It's usually people like this that the dominant historical narratives of our current political culture select as culprits.

What's your opinion of Martin Luther?

>>9078087
Okay so it's ugly and it smells bad. Do you have more to add?

>>9078098
Why should I add anything? It's fucking pathetic shit for pasty nerds who played too much D&D and read too much Ayn Rand. I shouldn't have to take this garbage seriously and I'm embarrassed for you if you do.

H A P P E N I N G

>>9078093
>It's usually people like this that the dominant historical narratives of our current political culture select as culprits.

There's nothing wrong with this or the current political culture.

>What's your opinion of Martin Luther?

I dunno, I never met him. What's your opinion of Pol Pot?

Attakers.

>>9078107
It's in the White House. It's entirely possible it will remain in the White House. I don't know what 'not taking it seriously' can mean here, if you're against the politic, other than closing your eyes and thinking it will go away if you say enough times that you don't believe it's there.

>>9078116
>There's nothing wrong with the current political culture
Wew lad

>The idea of modernisation is based on the idea of progress. When we use the term ‘modernisation’, we certainly mean progress, linear accumulation, and a certain continuous process. When we speak of ‘modernisation’, we presuppose development, growth, and evolution. This is the same semantic system. Thus, when we speak of the ‘unconditionally positive achievements of modernisation’, we agree with a very important basic paradigm — we agree with the idea that ‘human society is developing, progressing, evolving, growing, and getting better and better’. That is to say, we share a particular vision of historical optimism.

>>9078156

>In one way or another, all three ideologies originate from the same trend: the idea of growth, development, progress, evolution, and of the constant, cumulative improvement of society. They all view the world and the entire historical process as linear growth. They differ in their interpretation of this process, and they attribute different meanings to it, but they all accept the irreversibility of history and its progressive character.

>>9078167

>The American scientist Gregory Bateson,[112] a theorist of ethno-sociology, cybernetics, and ecology, as well as a psychoanalyst and a linguist, described the monotonic process in his book Mind and Nature.[113] The monotonic process is the idea of constant growth, constant accumulation, development, steady progress, all accompanied by the increase of only one specific indicator. In mathematics, this is associated with the ideas of the monotonic value; in other words, the ever-increasing value — hence, monotonic functions. Monotonic processes are the type that always proceed in only one direction: for example, all their indicators consistently increase without cyclical fluctuations and oscillations. Studying the monotonic process at three levels — at the level of biology (life), at the level of mechanics (steam engines, internal combustion engines), and at the level of social phenomena, Bateson concluded that when this process occurs in nature, it immediately destroys the species; if we are talking about an artificial device, it breaks down; if we mean a society, the society deteriorates and disappears. The monotonic process, in biology, is incompatible with life — it is an anti-biological phenomenon. Monotonic processes are completely absent from nature. All the processes which accumulate only one particular thing, or emphasise only one particular trait, result in death. Monotonic processes do not exist in any biological species, from cells to the most complex organisms. As soon as this kind of a monotonic process begins, deviants, giants, dwarfs, and other freaks of nature appear. They are disabled, incompatible with life, cannot produce offspring, and life itself casts them out.

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This might be a long one.

>>9077174
The Accursed Share is one of those concepts that underwrites my worldview. Humans are in some sense excessive beings, but we necessarily have to temper and rationalize this. This is the source of that unstable part that Zizek/Lacan/everyone is always finding, the little dark part that creates ideology. Primitive societies are distinguished from our own by concepts of sacrifice, potlatch, and non-fungible trade goods (read Baudrillard, or Mauss, or Szabo for more on this). Modern capitalism is still ultimately connected to these in an archaic psychological sense. My own feeling is that what is needed is a sense of rehabilitation or rapprochement with some of our modernist thinking vis-a-vis economics and civilization. Marx intuits that the basic process of capital is reproduction, and this is why Freudo-Marxism is such a powerful critique of capital itself. However, as some other wise anon pointed out, today the modern left is more skilled at understanding mechanisms than the right is, particularly once selective interests join in with media and politics to produce massive ideological power structures in a neoliberal sense. To some degree I do think that Fukuyama is right: liberal democracy and free-market capital is, in a sense, the 'end of history.' But only if that order is capable of sustaining a long-term balance of growth. What we are seeing today is their inability to do so. Granted, it's not all the fault of the neoliberals; politics and history and culture also play in a role in this. The Middle East has been fucked over in a great many ways.

>I was so pessimistic that the neoliberal status quo was just it, it was the final slide into the singularity, everything was in place for soulless elites to "discipline" us to our logical conclusion as desire feedback machines hooked into our own assholes. And of course you never know the extent of what's going on BEHIND the scenes, let alone what you can see. The fact that any cracks have appeared in the surface is amazing. It feels palpably like history is still alive.

This was more or less how I felt also, and it was killing me, because the fault lines were so clear and obvious (and being ignored by the cultural elite). Now they are starting to erupt in big, ugly, messy ways.

Planetary neoliberalism is not really such a terrible idea, but it needs to be tempered with a genuine and not a superficial understanding of the concept of difference. On top of that, there also needs to be some kind of regulation that prevents, for example, 1%ers from building doomsday bunkers where they can survive post-apocalyptic collapses that are at least in some part produced by their own economic practices. When the banks collapsed in 2008 I was furious because Dick Fuld or Mozillo or whoever didn't go to jail. But, of course, why should they? They were simply playing by the rules of the game.

(cont'd)

>>9078156
But it's true though. Some things do actually progress, and they progress for the better.

Nobody would say with a straight face that technology hasn't progressed since the 1950s.

The problem is that technology progresses, but humans are essentially exactly the same.

>>9078167
>>9078156
How could anyone be so naive as to accept such hogwash. The Current Year: The ideology
>>9078177
>Nobody would say with a straight face that technology hasn't progressed since the 1950s.
The gizmos are more dazzling and more powerful, but have they bred a nobler human? A more beautiful society?

>>9078173

>Solving the problem of monotonic processes was one of the most important problems in the development of steam engines. It turns out that the most important design element in steam engines is the centrifugal governor. When a steam engine reaches cruising speed, it is necessary to regulate the intake of fuel, otherwise the monotonic process initiates, everything begins to resonate, and the speed of the engine can increase indefinitely, causing it to explode. It was precisely this solution of avoiding the monotonic process in mechanics that was the principal theoretical, mathematical, physical, and engineering problem during the early stage of industrialisation. It turns out that the monotonic process is not only incompatible with life, but also with the proper functioning of a mechanical device. The task of designing a device must avoid the monotonic process, that is, it must prevent one-dimensional progress, evolution, development, and the placement of growth into a closed cycle.

>>9078182
>but have they bred a nobler human?

That's what I'm saying. Technology progresses, humans don't.

Which is why some people are now worried that a Islamic terrorist can get a hold of a nuclear weapon.

>>9078186

>By analysing sociology, Bateson showed that there are no monotonic processes in real societies. Monotonic processes, such as population growth, in most cases led to wars, which then reduced the population. In our society today we see an unprecedented level of technological progress along with unbelievable moral degradation.

>If we look at all this evidence without the evolutionary bias, then we will realise that monotonic processes exist only in people’s minds; in other words, they are purely ideological models. Bateson demonstrated that they do not exist in biological, mechanical, or social reality.

>>9078177

You're missing his point. He's not saying that some bursts of progress cannot happen, he's saying that progress can't go on indefinitely.

>>9075793

>Bannon, described by one associate as “the most well-read person in Washington,”

my sides

>>9078197

>Marcel Mauss,[114] a well-known French sociologist, criticised the monotonic process as well. In the book he co-authored, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions[115] and especially in his essay, The Gift,[116] he showed that traditional societies paid great attention to the ritual destruction, or sacrifice, of surplus goods. The surplus was seen as excessive, likho,[117] and usurious. Likho personifies evil, usury is the interest charged on borrowed capital, and excess is that which is obtained beyond one’s needs. For instance, surplus crops were seen as disastrous in traditional society. The ancient worldview was based on the belief that an increase in one area translates into a decrease in another. Therefore, a surplus had to be destroyed as soon as possible. For this purpose, the community either organised a feast, consuming all the additional food until they choked, or else gave it to the gods in the form of a sacrifice, gave it out to the needy, or destroyed it. This is the origin of a special ritual, the potlatch,[118] which brings about the deliberate gifting or destruction of excess personal property.

>Marcel Mauss proved that the belief in the destructiveness of monotonic processes lies at the foundations of human sociality. The society remains strong only through the rejection of the monotonic process, and by turning growth into a cycle.

>>9078212

>Émile Durkheim, Pitirim Sorokin, and Georges Gurvitch, the greatest sociologists of the Twentieth century, in essence the classicists of sociological thought, argued that social progress does not exist, in contrast to the Nineteenth-century sociologists, such as Auguste Comte or Herbert Spencer. Progress is not an objective social phenomenon, but rather, an artificial concept, a kind of scientifically formulated myth. When we study societies, we can only speak of the different types thereof. There is no general criterion to determine which is more developed, and which is less so. Lucien Lévy-Brühl[119] attempted to prove that savages think pre-logically, while modern humans use logic.[120] However, Claude Lévi-Strauss[121] demonstrated[122] that savages think in the same way that we do, only their taxonomy is built differently, so they do not have ‘less’ logic than we do; perhaps even more so, and they think in a more refined manner

>>9078216

As for the phases of social development, the greatest American cultural anthropologist, Franz Boas,[123] and his followers, as well as Claude Levi-Strauss and his school, proved that we cannot look at modern humans as being evolved from ‘archaic’ and ‘primitive’ tribes within the framework of anthropology. Primitives and primitive societies are simply different people and different societies. Modern humans are one group, and archaic humans another. But, they are people, too, no worse than we are. They are not an underdeveloped version of us. They have different children, who do not know myths and fairy tales, since they are not taught them, in contrast to our children. The adults are also different; their adults do know the myths, whereas ours do not believe in them. Our adults, our sober and practical society, are more similar to their children. The adults in primitive tribes are capable of telling mythological stories, sincerely believe in them, and know that they embody the feats of their ancestors and their spirits in their own lives, making no distinction between them. In contrast, the children of primitive societies are characterised by cynicism, pragmatism, scepticism, and the desire to attribute everything to material causes. This does not mean that modern societies have grown from the state of primitivism and superseded it; it is just that we have configured our society differently, neither better or worse, and built it upon other foundations and other values.

>>9078156
>>9078167
>>9078173
>>9078186
>>9078197
>>9078212
>>9078216
>>9078220

All of the above were excerpts from 'The Fourth Political Theory' by Aleksandr Dugin

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>>9078174
Shkreli made a good, though trollish point, in saying that entrepreneurs can in fact be sued for not making enough profit for their companies. When it comes to health care we immediately realize that there is something horribly paradoxical at work. Being a kind of a troll, MS revealed in this to some degree, but his point was germane: this is how business works. Piketty comes to similar conclusions, saying that we need something like a planetary inheritance tax so that huge legacies are not passed on infinitely until you get Pride & Prejudice earth. My investor friends, with whom I have almost nothing in common in a philosophical sense, agree on this. Governments do need to tax the very richest to maintain the social welfare net to some degree without crushing enterprise. The worst situation of all are Panama Papers-style situations or vaults in Switzerland stuffed with diamonds and art that are just sitting there accruing value instead of circulating. No doubt they can be used to decorate those doomsday shelters, but the situation is that, even though the spice must flow, the spice is not in fact flowing. You get what I mean.

>>9077461
John Gray is good. He likes the Tao. But I find his concept of the world too bleak: that humans will not improve and that we will destroy the world seems to me too solipsistic. He's vastly smarter than I am, but in the end it seems to me that things *have* improved tremendously since, to take a hyperbolic example, the stone age. Things have gotten better and will in some sense continue to do so. But I understand where he is coming from.

>>9077511
Agreed. Conflict is inevitable. To me at least these conflicts appear for materialistic reasons, but this is where ideology enters the picture. Leaders are actually not able to tell their electorates that they are going to war for materialist reasons, but for cultural or ideological ones. I think an enlightened "planetaristic" worldview would understand war in the way we understand dentistry or plumbing. Necessary processes that don't need to be unduly romanticized. Marcus Aurelius is a good example of this.

>>9077236
Yep. Bannon throws around the term "church militant" with remarkable ease. It doesn't surprise me that he wouldn't see eye to eye with Pope Francis. Historically the inevitable worldliness of the Church led it into all kinds of conflicts in Europe. This is likely to be another of those. I actually wonder if what we are seeing today is something like an ideological Thirty Years' War, a clash of interpretations of liberalism. Sure feels like this. It has all of the rancor.

(cont'd)

>>9075821
I'm in love with this post. This thread in general is pretty great. cheers guys

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>>9077415

Virtue-signaling is another one of these modern concepts that I find super-interesting (along with Pepe the Frog, who is to me the symbol of it, and why he makes liberals uncomfortable to want to have it branded a symbol of hate speech). Pepe signifies an underlying sameness beneath the difference: that is what is communicated in its ironic gaze. The Frog cannot be bullshitted or deceived.

The issue I have with virtue-signaling is that once it becomes entrenched in the media or in political discourse it is no longer understood as virtue-signaling but as virtue itself: that is to say, ideology. We live in a post-truth world, but as Lacan said, the point is to stop thinking in terms of *truth* against *falsehood* but rather truth against *deceit.* This is near to the root of all of my frustration with modern media: both sides, every side, plays the worst kinds of fuckhead semantic games with the other side by continually baiting it into traps or generating dualism where none exists. Rhetorical questions and ironic stances are some of the great cultural products of the present. It's an incredibly sophistical, cynical age like that. It's also why Jon Stewart was the most trusted figure in news, because only a comic stance could be trusted; everybody else was trying to get The Truth or A Simple Answer To A Straight Question or whatever. A guy like Milo incarnates this; you ultimately can't tell the difference between the comedian and the activist. He is both at once. A guy like Anjem Choudhary can go on Hannity and they can bash away at each other without ever really listening. O'Reilly used to do this too. But he and Stewart, when *they* talked, *face-to-face,* had something very different.

Virtue-signaling becomes indistinguishable from virtue itself. This is straight Baudrillard. The hybridization of politics, media, and culture...all of which are driven by capitalism. And even robust criticisms, such as those offered by Zizek, ultimately cannot fix problems if consumer capitalism drives the entire world. We don't have political solutions outside of capitalism, only political possibilities within it. And only then, I would say, if we are capable of seeing the world in a kind of trans-ideological fashion. Which is always going to be more fragile and less robust than a militantly ideological one.

>>9078016
Kings and businessmen *already* rule us. My problem is the refusal to acknowledge this. Business already determines the course of the world today: the spice must flow. What I would like is a community of business and political leaders to correctly understand what this means and the responsibility that it entails (as much as I would like the misguided Marxian intellectuals to realize that they are more alike to those guys than they are different.)

(cont'd)

>>9078234
>Inheritance tax
Without the prospect of an inheritance to pass onto their families, a lot of parents would probably choose not to work.

>>9075761
Fucking pathetic.

All it takes to become an intellectual is to say paradoxical things like "non-sense is better at organizing than the truth" and shit like "god is dead, you guys." good job you went from mindless sheep to retarded donkey. we already had a mindless sheep in the white house now we want a retarded donkey! left. left. left. right. left. wait! i meant: up, left, down, square, shoot yourself in the face. in conclusion, you should all kill yourselves. peace

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>>9078283

So I don't want a constant liberal flight from responsibility into increasingly remote enclaves of wealth while the rest of the world melts, just as much as I don't want people to suffer unduly for the sake of ideologies which ultimately are only going to produce self-destructive totalitarian states. Peterson is completely right in this. So is Zizek. Central state planning of economic systems produce scapegoats, pograms, purges, lack of enterprise, and all kinds of other evils. So we can look to Freudo-Marxist criticism to understand how ideology functions, but we ultimately cannot use it to topple or replace or schematize what comes after.

This is why I like NRx. We need a kind of a community, or a communal understanding, of the interrelationship between culture, psychology, economics, technological and scientific growth, ecology, and so on. Simply producing a global elite of the 1% which has to hide its wealth or veil its desires behind increasingly opaque political rhetoric leads to disaster: eventually, either people realize that they're being duped or victim-classes are produced who don't give a fuck about dialogue or growth at all. We wind up going backwards in time instead of forwards.

MM always looks to Singapore and I concur. The Singaporeans love them some Singapore and so do I. They dragged themselves decade by decade from being right next to Sri Lanka to being where they are today, and steered themselves between the waters of the Washington consensus and Moscow. They could have been another fucked-up client state like Madagascar or another Marxist dystopia. But they didn't.

There is a form of capitalism which grows the pie for everyone, and there are protectionist/mercantilist practices which take larger portions of that pie for themselves. Some kind of balance between these will be necessary. The problem with universalist metanarratives is that they work in all times and all places, and yet are done so under the horseshit rubric of a respect for difference and tolerance when really they are about power (just as much as I would say that neoliberal multicultural friendless wasn't about the respect for difference but the suppression of it under the concept of the same: everybody likes Coke).

Capital already rules us, but at the same time, it only proceeds from our human desires for happiness. This is why it won't go away, because we have learned through analysis - and other sources - that things cannot be repressed, only rationalized. What I would like is a collective understanding of the paradoxes of this irrationality. Again, it's not truth against falsity, it's truth against deceit: the ethic would be, Don't Bait Traps. Don't set traps, don't be cynical, don't be solipsistic. There is no ultimate terra firma ground, this is what Nietzsche discovers; everything is situated relative to everything else.

Anyways...that's a lot of venting from me.

>>9078308
What a car-wreck of a post.

>>9078316
This is really good stuff, Anon. Your fatigue is evident toward the end, but it's okay, it all gets through. Your comments on Pepe the Frog are no less than inspired btw. I kinda wanted you to elaborate even: just really to screw in that point about the liberal-left wanting to outlaw the ironic gaze. Good content.

>>9078316
Your posts are really good anon, do mind if I ask what are the most important books for you and where you drawn your knowledge from?

>>9078316
>rooting for synergistic/holistic approach to communal life
>unironically liking authoritarian ultracapitalistic city-state
I keked. Maybe try living in Singapore and talking to the locals sometime.

>>9078234
>John Gray is good. He likes the Tao. But I find his concept of the world too bleak: that humans will not improve and that we will destroy the world seems to me too solipsistic. He's vastly smarter than I am, but in the end it seems to me that things *have* improved tremendously since, to take a hyperbolic example, the stone age. Things have gotten better and will in some sense continue to do so. But I understand where he is coming from.
I've read several books of John Gray but I do not own any of his books, so I am doing this from memory and might thus be mistaken. That and it is easy to let your own ideology make its way in your interpretation.

I think Gray states that certain things cannot be overcome. The capacity of warfare and environmental destruction as example. I honestly need to read him once again, but I do not think he claims there is no progress whatsoever. He does seem to claim that warfare, violence and environmental destruction is inevitable. The ideology doesn't matter.

I do not remember him saying whatever the intensity of warfare, violence and environmental destruction can be changed. My own interpretation would be that the structure of society, the instutions and so on (not the ideology, it doesn't matter) does matter in terms of intensity of these flaws. Violence seems to be declining says Steven Pinker.

Historian Peter Turchin claimed against Steven Pinker's thesis that violence is declining is that it is at its peak when the population density is at its highest (if I remember correctly).

The article of Bannon mentioned cyclic history, which is interesting to me. Peter Turchin claims this and uses mathematical models to back this up - time only will tell whatever he is right.

According to Peter Turchin elite overproduction causes elite conflict which in turn potentially but not necessarily leads to civil war or at least more violence. He claims the United States is in such a cycle. I personally see no issue with his theory (for lack of a better word), but do feel he is too confident in this claim that conflict will indeed increase.

Whenever I use Turchin and Taleb in the same breath people of course point to the paradox since Taleb states that forecasting cannot be done or at least in most cases is against it. But for me there is no problem, and perhaps I am twisting thought here so there is no paradox. What I think is that what Peter Turchin measures are symptoms which do not predict anything except a probability of violence.

I see it as similar as a doctor seeing symtoms and knowing the disease, but the doctor isn't able to perfectly predict whatever the patient will react to the disease nor could he predict a priori what disease the patient will get. Maybe one could see the things that Turchin measures as risk factors and nothing less, as how smoking or eating red meat are risk factors for lung cancer or bowel cancer.

I find the ideas of neoreaction somewhat interesting, but consider myself conservative

>>9078373
Maybe you could try doing the same in Sri Lanka. See how they weigh up.

>>9078318
Fuck you

>>9078316
Stfu dude

>>9078383
I'm not sure how Sri Lanka is relevant at all. We are talking about Singapore and specifically your naive and distorted picture of it.

>>9078382
>I find the ideas of neoreaction somewhat interesting, but consider myself conservative
Continued:
I am however absolutely against alt right and also certain tennets of neoreaction. The alt right is the less intellectual and perhaps more revolutionary ideology. It praises nationalism while I prefer somekind of localism.

At the same time alt right is populistic, that is fine, but I hold a more elitist position. I am also not as naive in thinking that neoreaction would somehow be pleasant for me to live. Hence I think it is interesting thought but otherwise I'll stick at being a conservative.

>>9075768
>Moldbug’s dense, discursive musings on history—“What’s so bad about the Nazis?”
>>>/pol/

>>9078407

>>>/tumblr/

>>9078283
I disagree with you on many points, but I just want to thank you for this discussion. You write clearly and well.

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>>9078340
Oh fuck, I can keep going.

Pepe is very interesting to me. Only a hysteric would interpret the smug look of the frog as an assault or a violation; I understand it in precisely the opposite way. Pepe is a kind of form into which any ideology can be inserted, but which immediately renders them all satiric. This is what a hysterical ideologue will find offensive about Pepe: the sameness of ideology, which rests in simulation. In the end, you are forced to look at yourself through the frog's eyes. Pepe de-mythologizes virtue-signaling. And that is what is going on today: underneath all of the postmodernist valorization of difference for its own sake is a question ultimately of power, which operates through simulation, representation, projection, and so on - and, most definitely, *scapegoating:* Us Against Them. But there really is no Us, and there is no Them; ideology does the work of linking things together in smoothly operational and recursive systems, like space stations that create artificial centres of gravity by constantly turning in order to keep the feeling of gravity inside. Pepe is in that sense a kind of an icon which people wish to smash or censor (just as Lacan intuited long ago) but *why this should be* is part of the deep irrationality of ideology itself. If you know you don't have an ideology, or are aware of how solipsistic they are, or are not overwhelmingly paranoid about the one you do have, then Pepe is not going to bother you.

I would say that ideology always has this paranoiac dimension, which is why the need for scapegoating. Ideology has a romantic/transcendent dimension that of necessity will not allow itself to be satirized or made comic, which is what Pepe *always* does: a Serious Pepe would be a contradiction in terms. Pepe doesn't have an interior that can be looked into, and it would be ridiculous to march collectively under a Pepe banner. In a sense I consider him an improvement on the Guy Fawkes mask, which still valorizes the anonymous, the unseen, the masked figure, and so on. Pepe has no inverse, no 'deeper meaning' - and that is why people find him threatening. His overt superficiality exposes the lack of depth that ideologies are afraid that they have. There's a connection to Nietzsche here: romanticism isn't romantic, it's just the will to power. If you embrace that, then you're good to go; but if you *repress* that, or identify yourself as a victim, then you are on track for ideology (and historicism). Hence violence and passage a l'acte and all the rest.

To me Pepe says one disastrous thing to postmodern ideology: Grow Up. And this is what political romanticism does not want to do, and will avoid, at any cost, continually reproducing the Big Other or the scapegoat everywhere in order to remain where it is, like the space station.

I'm still a little hungover from last night, so my thoughts aren't quite as clear as I would like. But I will probably need to write a lot more about Pepe.

(cont'd)

>>9076144
Who are these guys? Can you give me a quick run down?

>>9078431
Here I feel you are simply overanalysing. For me it is very simple with Pepe: he is associated with trolls and /pol/ that is all. There is no underlying meaning behind it.

The swastika used to be a Hindu symbol and other cultures. The association with Nazis simply changed its meaning, not any underlying meaning behind the symbol itself.

>>9078407
I agree with you that any Nazi apologism is absolutely disguisting. But I still would like to discuss.

>>9078454
>one of the best threads on /lit/
>clear discussion of current thought in murrican and western europe re:the current right
>no shit infographics

When /pol/ types shit on /lit/ as full of cuck hacks, you are the one that gives the regulars a bad name.

>>9078457
>There is no underlying meaning behind it
That was precisely his point.

>>9078457
>any Nazi apologism is absolutely disguisting
Does it make you physically ill? Do you literally vomit if you get near it, do you get migraines? Or is it disgusting just in the sense you disagree HEAPS and HEAPS?

>>9078283
Fuck you, you're a regressive fuck putting airs about being noble. All these big words, all this "Hurr pepe can't be bullshitted" nonsense, disguises the fact that you're a dipshit 20 something who gets mad when he sees poor people and people who aren't the same color as you.

>>9078480
t. CTR shill

>>9078474
It is morally disgusting.

>>9078480
This is the sort of response that won Drumpf the election.

>>9078464
In that case it took an awfully long text to make the point come across.

>>9078480
refer back to
>>9077845

The left seems to rather be right than win.

>>9078480
'Regressive' isn't an insult people care about, dude. Also it's a mega weird for a leftist to be criticising someone for being young.

>>9078486
>It is morally disgusting.
Seeing a goosestepping formation of men in Hugo Boss is objectively less repugnant than fifteen minutes of MTV programming at any given hour.

>>9078491
No, because why such meaninglessness is so threatening to ideologues must be explained.

>>9078501
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBluYsydAVc

Bait and switch from expert data miners.

Bannon is just a regular neocon.

>>9078511
I think you are right. If only partly.

>>9078502
>No, because why such meaninglessness is so threatening to ideologues must be explained.
That is wrong because clearly the frog does come in variants that absolutely have a meaning. But it is by association, not by any woo Jungian/Lacanian/whatever explanation.

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>>9078353
I like reading. My answer to this question would be to find the philosophers that you like, and then basically read everything that they have written. My favorite guys, in some order: the Stoics, the Chinese, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lacan, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Girard, Land, Sloterdijk.

Books I would recommend: Capital, The Gay Science, Being and Time and Basic Writings, Difference and Repetition, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, Symbolic Exchange and Death and The Consumer Society, Ecrits, Less Than Nothing, The Critique of Cynical Reason and You Must Change Your Life, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Those should keep you busy for a while.

>>9078373
Fair enough. I'll still take Singapore over most of the rest of the world, though. Tastes vary.

>>9078389
Eventually. Sometimes you gotta rant tho.

>>9078425
Cheers anon. I will admit to being, in my very desire to be open-minded, having an overbearing cunt aspect. I have no problem saying this. I don't even know if it can be avoided. I don't have any answers (obviously!) but articulating stuff feels good and I think leads to good places. Especially criticism. In the end I really can't do much more than just kind of echolocate to see if anyone else is thinking the way I am.

>>9078382
>He does seem to claim that warfare, violence and environmental destruction is inevitable. The ideology doesn't matter.

I feel the same way.

>I see it as similar as a doctor seeing symtoms and knowing the disease, but the doctor isn't able to perfectly predict whatever the patient will react to the disease nor could he predict a priori what disease the patient will get.

This also. Doctors aren't, after all, allowed to follow the patient home. All they can do is treat the problems that invariable arise. It's part of having a free society. You can't do preventative medicine, really. Health is just a responsibility. We're all free to self-destruct.

>I find the ideas of neoreaction somewhat interesting, but consider myself conservative
Pretty sure most NRx'rs do as well. Conservatives are in a sense classical liberals, but classical liberalism is separate from what I would call post-Marxist liberalism. Mises has a very different view, for instance, of human behaviour; there are no economic theories which are not at the same time theories of human behaviour. The reason I find those guys germane is because the labor theory of value is based on actual land and physical labor, lots of other things which are different from the world we have today (as well you know, of course), where capital is driven by the unconscious in unusual and paradoxical and sometimes even comic ways that, I would say, compel us to walk a kind of a middle path. We can't be super-rationalists or super-romantics. And perhaps having both a cyclic *and* a linear view of history, as strange as that sounds.

There's a lot more to say about your post, though.

>>9078495
How does any of that nonsense you peddle help anyone at all? It's just going to be a more intense version of the garbage we have going on right now, with a very small amount of the world's population living it up while the rest suffers, and it's going to fuck you over despite your enthusiastic support for it. You think you're going to be a Business Prince or a Count of Finance if the world suffers a collective aneurysm and decides to go full NRx? Please.

>>9078486
It's unconscionable, then? You're incapable of conscioning it? What happens if you try, as in, to engage with nazi-apologism without disgust? Do you become outraged? (Which is just another kind of becoming physically ill; overheating, breaking into sweat, etc.)

For a (serious) academic this disgust compulsion you suffer from would be quite a debility.

Why not just read the nazis as a non-unified whole, some of whom said meritable things and drew from motives both intelligent and good hearted?

You don't need to support the extermination of the degenerates if it's just to engage with some theory.

I just worry about the risk of shedding theory unnecessarily, for no other reason than its associations.

>>9078537
I am reading a work on conservative thinkers, finished the first part, and it has its own definition on conservatives. To avoid confusion it basically says that:
) Conservatives are against revolutionaries and utopians
) (Because they) think human nature remains the same
) (Because they) think that societal structure has to develop organically (which is paradoxical)

Some of the conservatives the book covers were reactionaries against the French revolution, such as de Maistre. Anyway, this is what I mean when I say conservative. I am unsure about classical liberalism, which - in this book - some conservatives are in favor of others less so.

But yes, that is why I enjoy discussions with longer posts so I can reflect on my ideas, argue and get back to reading to reconsider my ideas and so on.

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>>9078572

>de Maistre

My nigga.

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>>9078457
>Here I feel you are simply overanalysing. For me it is very simple with Pepe: he is associated with trolls and /pol/ that is all. There is no underlying meaning behind it.

So in a sense you're right. And actually, I want to say that you've actually made a really interesting point, one that I was struggling to make earlier. He *is* associated with trolls, *without* an underlying meaning, and that is exactly why hysterical ideologues of all stripes find him offensive: because there is a line blurred to indistinction between virtue-signaling and trolling. One person's virtue-signal is another person's troll, and so on. And because there is no underlying meaning, he offends and bothers everyone equally, except those who are able to understand that all ideologizing, all signalling, is in this sense dishonest. That lack of underlying meaning is exactly what makes Pepe interesting: he's a shit-test for people who *want* to think that they have an underlying meaning which only they can see, and which they have to sort of paranoiacally engage with, getting triggered, getting offended, and so on. You've actually made this point. He is a symbol without underlying meaning, but that is where the power of that image proceeds from: he is toxic to people who want to think their own ideologies have underlying meaning that can't be named. No romantic sentiment can survive contact with irony, and that is what Pepe does. Memes are death for gnosticism, and Pepe is this ultra-meme.

At least, that's how I look at it. No romantic ideologue wants to think that they are just trolling. But there is a very fine line between this that depends on a kind of interior blindness, a refusal to acknowledge the stance of the other or the Big Other within. And this is what happens with his smug gaze, I would say.

>>9078480
Absolutely and 100% not the case. Do you really think I get mad when I see poor people? What bothers me is the exploitation of ignorant people by even more ignorant people who refer to themselves as intellectuals or who consider themselves to be on the right side of history. Regardless of what side of the fence they are on.

What you see in American politics today are both sides desperately trying to position themselves as the victims, and they are *both* going to succeed because this is a straight-up Girardian situation. Or even Nietzsche: he who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. This is exactly what the Antifa guys are doing when they go berserk and beat up Spencer. The more they do it, the more the far-right guys are allowed to say that they're being persecuted by the aegis of tolerance.

There is a massive absence of actual listening and dialogue going on. And this is the fruit of a lot of ideological thinking that works and acquires potency the more that polarizations, rifts, and schisms grow.

>>9078563
The act of systematically killing and trying to exterminate people is morally repulsive. Similar stuff has happened in other countries but that doesn't justify it in any way and I don't want to argue which such a country was more evil.

In other ways Nazi Germany might have not been that different from other governments and in other ways it was also bad.

But I really don't want to go here.

>>9078576
How was this guy a Christian?

>>9078576
Note that he was covered in the book. Since I largely forgot about him it seems he didn't last his impression on me. Ortega, Tocqueville and Henry Adams did leave an impression to me.

I am still interested in eventually reading his original work tho.

>>9078545
These questions are more reasonable than you might think, but because I've got to be elsewhere, I'll just say quickly that a key feature of NRx is the fracture of countries into microstates, as many such as possible (I just say this because it's actually fundamental, but you seem unaware of it), that the process of 'market' competition among these small states would certainly prevent these concerns, and lastly that you should read Moldbug.

>>9078610

There's a good lecture about him on Youtube by Isaiah Berlin.

He probably WAS a Christian, but at the same time was quite the Machiavellian, and a strong/early proponent of Realpolitik. Here's some quotes I took down from it:

>“He had a perfectly conventional life, until the French Revolution of [17]89, which he welcomed in a moderate sort of way. By [17]91, he was no longer in a welcoming mood – the revolution spread to the comparatively liberal and progressive Kingdom of Savoy, which had abolished feudalism…de Maistre emigrated…and finally…he began producing monarchist pamphlets almost immediately which, although they were very counter-revolutionary, and extremely violent in their defence of the monarchy, nevertheless said things which the emigres didn’t wish to hear, such as the fact that the revolution was irrevocable, the attempt to try and go back to a pre-revolutionary status was like trying to exhaust the lake of Geneva by collecting its water in bottles.”

>“He begins by considering the proposition that man is rational, and that man seeks happiness. First of all, the proposition man is rational – he says “Whence do they derive this proposition? They derive this proposition from a study of nature. Therefore we must apply ourselves first to a study of nature, and then to the study of the alleged rationality of man. Well, how do they study nature? These men study nature by making analogies, between nature and mathematics, and nature and their own a priori philosophies. For Rousseau and for other thinkers, nature is fundamentally a kind of seamless harmony which man departs from, which all Human misery is due to the fact that Human Beings don’t understand the harmonious nature of the reality in which we are situated…man, because he has been given the boon of free will, misusing it, is able to alienate himself, is able to tear himself from nature – the task, then, is to restore the broken equilibrium…de Maistre these people look at mathematics, and these people look within their own minds, perhaps it would be more useful if they actually looked at history itself, or perhaps some of the sciences closer to man, such as Zoology. If you look at Zoology, this picture of a peaceful nature, harmonious in itself…is not entirely valid. Nature is a world in which every animal rips every other animal to pieces. Nature is a world in which in which there is nothing but bloodshed, fearful struggle goes on between various races of animals and even those of plants. In fact, nature is one enormous slaughterhouse.”

>>9078610
>>9078629

Contd.

>• “But it is said that man is by nature rational, let us consider this proposition too, says de Maistre. Consider the two institutions by which man is governed. Consider, for example, the institution of marriage – nothing is more irrational than marriage, says de Maistre. Why should a man choose a woman with whom to live for the rest of his life when his attraction and attention may easily be distracted by other persons more attractive to him in later life. Nevertheless, marriage is the one base, the one fundamental institution upon which Human life is founded, and all attempts to create societies founded upon free love have toppled.”

>• “Consider the institution of monarchy. What is more irrational or absurd that the son of a king, even a good king, should succeed him because he is his son. A wise king may have a stupid son, a good king may have an abominable son – and there is no reason for supposing that the children of good men or of strong men, or of useful men, will have the same qualities themselves. Consequently, it is a far more rational arrangement, for example, to have such a system as you have in Poland – where you have the liberal veto, where you don’t have hereditary succession, where the nobles must agree on who is to be king. The result of which where France is governed by 66 by 66 kings, some good, some bad – but mostly efficient, mostly capable, and most certainly the fairest kingdom on the face of the Earth. Whereas Poland, with its rational system, is plunged into constant turbulence, and has collapsed before the very eyes of the civilized world in a wealth of blood and chaos. So much, then, for the stability and reliability of rational institutions.”

>• “The only way in which you can secure a really solid basis for government, which nobody will ever be able to shake, is by making it impervious to reason. How is this done? This is done by founding societies upon foundations so dark, so mysterious and so terrifying, that anyone who dares approach them will find himself subject, most immediately, to the most hideous and enormous penalties. The only societies that have ever lasted are societies that are created by priests, in which the people have been taught a series of frightening myths, whereby any kind of questioning the foundations was itself regarded as sinful and about to bring about punishment. The only laws that have lasted throughout mankind are laws whose roots and sources are not remembered, laws whose sources are remembered are usually bad laws or at least laws which somebody wants to change. Only custom is the foundation of our life – custom and the dark, irrational sphere which nothing must be allowed to approach…once you allow people to question the basis of authority, once you allow people like Locke to discuss things like contract, or things like the justification of this or that form of government, we are done for.”

>>9078605
>But I really don't want to go here.
Now we're getting somewhere.

Why not? (After all, why especially do you not want to 'go to' the nazis' okayness whereas more palatable possibly would be to 'go to' Mao's okayness - as it were?)

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>>9078610
>>9078629
>>9078632

Contd.

My favourite quote:

>“We are told that man is fundamentally born to freedom, that is what man fundamentally craves. We are told, says Mr Rousseau, that man is born to freedom – and then Mr Rousseau wonders why it is that man is born to freedom, is nevertheless everywhere in chains. That, says Maistre, is as if you were to say ‘Why is it that sheep, who are born carnivorous, nevertheless everywhere nibble grass?’…When you say ‘Man is born to freedom,’ what does this mean? When you study animals, you simply study what these animals do, what these animals are. You don’t ask yourself what these animals would like to be, because you don’t know. In the case of Man, you don’t study the actual history of man – if you study the actual history of man, you will discover what men desire is security, what men desire is stability, what men desire is authority, what men desire is obedience. The last thing men desire is freedom – as soon as they’re given some freedom, everything crumbles, topples.”

>>9078629
Nice to have someone who doesn't romanticise nature, it happens all too often. Ecosystems might function relatively well and nature might have a tendency for biodiversity, the life for the individual organisms is very brutal.

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>>9078457
Put simply, the lack of underlying meaning is what *gives* Pepe its meaning. And not in the usual postmodern/deconstructive sense of difference, but of an underlying and fundamental Same.

Pepe says the emperor has no clothes. At the same time, he doesn't provoke a response of laughter, or comedy, but rather suggests the very deadly seriousness of the situation. Ideology becomes hysterical as soon as it says, the emperor has no clothes, and therefore "we" must clothe him as soon as possible, this is a crisis, something should be done, order must be restored, and so on. It is that very impulse which creates the illusion of the transcendent, in-groups and out-groups and so on. A general kind of panic.

The reason why I bring up Girard is because this is exactly the kind of stuff he talked about: the anarchic situation is resolved by scapegoating and the collective murder. The scapegoat provides a sense of identity that resolves a disparate community into a unified and organized one. Today, I would say that what is happening in America is a sort of mimetic crisis: people want there to be an America, one big thing, which was sort of effected by our recent neoliberal sensibility: as Zizek said, we actually *do* have an ideology, as much as we like to think we don't: have fun, be yourself, discover your possibilities (*sniff* *sniff* and so on and and so on, etc.). This is why I would say the present age has to do with this crisis of liberalism, because we can't all do this without money, and that money was in a continual state of withdrawal: that's why the 2016 election was so important, this conflict between Globalism/Nationalism. It's why Trump/Bannon appeared.

Giovanni Arrighi has a great book about this, about the continual marriage and divorce of mobile capital with/from landed territorial interests. It happens time and again: in Genoa, in Amsterdam, in London, and now I would say in America. Money really gets made when mobile wealth is bound to landed territorial interest. It also gets destroyed there in wars, because market interests become wrapped up with political interests. The cultural expression of this is ideology, which co-opts media (and unscrupulous academics) in order to advance its own metanarratives.

But Orwellian doublethink is a rhetorical tool that can be used to serve any political agenda. The Soviets did it; the Germans did it; the Chinese did it; now America does it. It's always duplicitous and dishonest. Pepe is more culture-jamming than anything else.

To continue that earlier analogy, if the emperor has no clothes, then what Pepe's gaze is saying is that *all clothes we might put on the emperor are equally fake.* So let's not jump immediately to conclusions or proclaim one set of ideas superior to another just because we happen to like them or feel a deep gnostic connection with one color or another. I like that frog.

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>>9078641

>We are told, says Mr Rousseau, that man is born to freedom – and then Mr Rousseau wonders why it is that man is born to freedom, is nevertheless everywhere in chains. That, says Maistre, is as if you were to say ‘Why is it that sheep, who are born carnivorous, nevertheless everywhere nibble grass?’

holy..

Blown the fuck out.

>>9078649
> Arrighi

my nigga, get a trip or something

the only the reason i still browse this site is for posters like you

>>9078610

What do you mean? He can be Christian and have said what he said.

The idea of Christianity as entirely meek and timid is relatively recent. In fact, they used to kill for their principles. Not so much anymore. They seem content to let themselves be tread upon.

>>9078635
That I can agree with is a strange phenomenon. If there is any regime of which it is politically incorrect to talk of okayness it would be Nazi Germany. In Europe at least.
I am pretty confident the Chinese wouldn't want to talk of any okayness concerning the Japanese.

I do honestly think there is little positive to say about Nazi Germany. They did not stop capitalism, they used it and morphed it. They did not care about the environment which some claim. I doubt they really stopped degeneracy.

They were revolutionary opportunists.

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>>9078572
>>9078576
>>9078617
>>9078629
>>9078425
& others

I have some stuff to say about this but I don't have time for it now. In the meantime you guys might be interested in these essays; they're sort about these paradoxical aspects of classical liberalism, and written by a very smart guy.

https://dissentingsociologist.wordpress.com/2017/01/26/some-desultory-remarks-on-the-concept-of-universal-person/

http://thermidormag.com/the-liberty-of-the-slaves/

>>9078075
My point was the eschewing of a conversation of the ideals and more specifically ethics as unnecessary when taken to this techno/reactionary conclusion. It may be an unfalsifiable claim that through capitalism all progress will and has risen. For the sake of time I will grant that. Now with that in mind we have to wrestle with the fallout, that being prioritization of capitalisms needs without regard for the ideal and ethics that have come before. Call it the cathedral if you want but that's a pigeon hole. Modern thought encapsulates much more than identity politics and censorship.

Dark enlightenment seems interesting in as much as it regards itself as some deprogramming of institutional beliefs. For years I thought that was just critical thinking. But outside of thought, when applied to the world, is simply a marriage of convenience between the right, tech, and business masquerading as a sort of new moral truth. I have no problem with that since the left has its own ugly marriage as well. Unfortunately what this philosophy could lead to when transferred over into public policy is nothing short of disaster.

Sorry for the rushed phone posting

most interesting thread in a while, lads.

>>9078720
get a blog. seriously. i would be very happy to read everything you post

I'm sure I'm among the least knowledgeable about these ideologies itt, but for all the praise of Singapore I'm seeing among posters or the intellectuals they cite, what of Land's assertion that it is an iq shredder; that the conglomeration of all these intelligent/educated/specialized people within a relatively small vicinity gives us a low birth rate and effectively cancels out these intelligent/etc. gene pools? Is this something desirable, perhaps a necessary sacrifice to the techno-capital-lovecraftian AI many of this ilk seek to engender? Am I just misunderstanding something?

>>9078621
Countries do not break down into microstates inside a vacuum. Advocate for Brexit type scenarios all you want but be aware there are dollars to lives repercussions with these actions.

>>9075901
I can't imagine anyone more so

>>9078206
Progress is a conditional narrative. It can absolutely go on forever.

>>9078726
This, I would especially be interested to read (fairly serious, but not necessarily ball-crushingly studious to write) synthetic essays by people who have read diverse critical theorists and NRx and esoteric stuff

Even just blurbs on interesting combinations and insights

>>9078691
I came to Earth to bring the sword and so on.

interesting thread thanks for sharing

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>>9078720
>https://dissentingsociologist.wordpress.com/2017/01/26/some-desultory-remarks-on-the-concept-of-universal-person/
>Universal Person despises kings as despots not because their power is “absolute”, but precisely because it isn’t, and cannot possibly be; hence the invidious contrast, from roughly the Enlightenment onward, between the “arbitrary will” of the monarch and the “rule of law not men”, which designates the distinction between the local and bounded personal power of a particular man and a boundlessly totalizing universal power administered by Universal Persons who style themselves not as mere mortal men, but as ineffably transcendent pure Law.

made me think of this brilliant little book, Law being transcendentally tied to Market

>For liberals, as we have seen, the first function of Law is to guarantee a 'just order', which means ensuring the peaceful coexistence of liberties that are inevitably rival, since by hypothesis each is bent on pursuing his or her own particular interest. Hence its fundamental axiological neutrality. Whereas the different traditional forms of Law always took care to articulate their normative work of a foundational moral reference-point (whether this was the word of God, devotion to the common good, popular custom or the natural order), liberal Law sets out to formulate its decisions without ever drawing support from the least value judgement. If it claimed to pronounce what was 'good' or 'evil', i.e. if it claimed to judge in the old sense of the term, this Law would reintroduce into collective existence the ideological positions that always led individuals and groups into violent confrontation. The rationality that liberal Law vaunts is thus essentially calculating and procedural. It has no other use than to maintain the conditions of civil peace ('public order') by bringing back into equilibrium the disorderly movement of opposing liberties, without ever having to question the metaphysical credentials of the demands being made. The strictly positivist character of such a programme is sufficient of itself to explain the ever-growing technicality of the modern legal industry, and the characteristic way in which it now tends to manufacture its norms. As Jacques Commaille asserts, contemporary Law is in constant transition from a 'dogmatic finalist' model (that of traditional Law) to a 'pragmatic-manegerial' model, with business managment providing its most appropiate image.

>>9076214
>This new dissident right has a kind of a science-fiction/cyberpunk side *and* a traditional/national/pastoral-romantic side. I find that super-interesting, because it suggests to me the different ways that people are looking at what this whole reaction is all about: looking forward to the future, or looking back to the past...and ultimately I don't think it's possible to have it both ways. But who knows?
Here's the thing: after the housing crisis in 2007-08 and the resulting economic mess, there was an explosive rise in agriculture students in Italy - and I don't think Italy was alone in this.

People were going back to the drawing board with their career plans, and going back to the land job-wise, rediscovering the primary sector.

What exactly is this human capital going to do with the land? The answer is: science. As in, the science behind everything that happens before food comes to your plate.

Everything going experimental. Research concerning soil, bacterial, plant and animal genetics, chemistry in fertilizers, biological systems and even cuisine, engineering for new machinery, irrigation, electrical agricultural vehicles, you name it.

And what does the science and technology and experimental agriculture bring? Quality. Excellence in food production to export the expensive stuff you advertised on the internet, and reinvest the cash again.

Farts and burps of cattle become more profitable than milk itself, because it makes your enterprise self-sufficient energy-wise, and you sell the surplus to your local power company. It's not a joke.

Behind the banjo playing, the free-range livestock and the idyllic bucolic façade, which will be even "whiter" because the machinery is going to do more of the labor traditionally associated with brown slaves and Mexican immigrants, the countryside will be no less futuristic than the cyberpunk city of lights. Only less flashy and noisy.

Because on the soil there is a laboratory, a complete ecosystem driven by man.

>>9076855
>This really is, I think, the way that we should look at capitalism. Not as a kind of autonomous process with Evil Capitalists and Heroic Laborers, but as a responsive and recursive system that drives and responds to global politics. Money is always being made, somehow, somewhere, *whether we like it or not.*

Isn't this fairly similar to what Schumpeter said 75 years ago, when he talked about entrepreneurs driving capitalism?

>>9076603

More like Nick Land for CEO-King of The Singlosphere Techno-Imperium.

>>9076655

The Social Matter guys are palaeo-reactionaries pretending at NRx. Fuck them.

>>9076663

No; you are probably thinking of Nydwracu who is allegedly gay is hidden behind so many layers of irony that no one is completely sure if is joking or not.

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>>9075901
Yes.

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>>9078726
>>9078810

Cheers gents. Rest assured that if I do start one I'll be sure to signal it like a motherfucker here on /lit/. When you get a thread like this it's nice to think of a a forum where it could happen on a fairly regular basis so that the conversation can continue in this kind of tenor and with this kind of input. It's a good look. /lit/ in general is just a cool place & full of surprises.

>tfw yeah, a collectivist blog!
>tfw the immediate portmanteau is a clog
>tfw hmm
>tfw now weird other ideas
>tfw full of schmitt
>tfw big brother is not watching you
>tfw paranoid's guide to ideology
>and so on and so on

>tfw you should unironically kys

...I'll give it some thought, is what I'm saying.

>>9078877
That passage is stone-cold brilliant and I agree 115%. Articulates the dilemma completely, to my mind. I also feel a weird desire to go and play Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri now. One of the best lines I ever heard on the 'chans came from a discussion about that game: when everything is ideology, then nothing is. I love everything about that sentence: that we have to take things seriously, but not too seriously. Seriously enough to understand how things are interrelated, but not so much to become paralytic shut-ins (like me!).

Incidentally, Cybernetic Consciousness for the win.

>>9078878
>Because on the soil there is a laboratory, a complete ecosystem driven by man.

I like this kind of thinking. Deep ecology is boss as hell. And who knows, maybe it takes a few seismic shake-ups of the way things are to make us realize that we can't get so far away from the earth.

And this connects too to other stuff, doesn't it; the idea of living in a place where there is some collective responsibility. Why is Stardew Valley so popular on Steam? Why Minecraft? People are feeling these things.

But this is just me shitposting.

>>9078936
This is thirty different kinds of incredible. What. A. Fucking. World.

Anyways...

Muh brain, gents. Muh brain. Back later for more if this thread is still going on. It's been an absolute slice. But if I don't shovel this driveway I'm going to get completely snowed in. Until then.

>>9079235
>This is thirty different kinds of incredible. What. A. Fucking. World.
it's fake, kukboi

>>9078537
Do you think I can jump on all those works without much background? I've only read Plato and Hegel pretty much.

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>>9079253
Shit.

>>9079313
I mean reading can be a slog. I remember when I picked up Spengler for the first time and thought, I don't understand any of this. Heidegger was very arcane at first. But eventually, you come to appreciate the way that these guys wrote, because their style is part of who they are.

The more you read and reflect, the more sense all of these guys make. You may not necessarily agree with all of them (or any of them!) but if you listen to your intuitions you won't be astray. Rather, you'll get drawn towards those places where philosophers struggle or hit their limits. All of these guys are totalizing Big Deals because they basically have Theories of Everything; in a sense they're ideologues we forgive if only because their thought is so unusually rich and expansive. So Plato and Hegel are good foundations. And Hegel's tough too!

The Stoics and the Chinese are just fun to read. It's wisdom stuff and that's super-accessible. Nietzsche's one of the greatest writers ever. Heidegger you may want a companion for: I recommend Zimmerman, but Safranski is good too. Dreyfus' book on this is perhaps the best one. When you're read to tackle B&T, go for it.

Like a lot of these ideas, once you see them you won't *unsee* them. Once you get the gist of the argument, the sense of their intellectual project, you can then read as much (or as little) as you please. But it is important, I think, to have that basic sense of competency in terms of what they are talking about. The ideas should *make sense* to you, even if you disagree.

I am myself, and I have no problem admitting this, something of a dilettante. I'm not a scholar or an academic, just a guy who really really likes reading this stuff. No doubt that comes through in my posts (and in my suggestions, which are always to be taken with a grain, if not a teaspoon, of salt). So reading these guys actually becomes your background, eventually. Sometimes they write in complicated ways, but it's really only because they are trying to describe things which are so small as to be almost ineffable, but at the same so potentially massive as to be universal (capital; difference; objet a). Lacan is a tough read, but for him there's Zizek, who is a really wonderful exegete of his stuff.

If you want to learn, you will learn. Guaranteed. Don't be intimidated. Smash a book into your face long enough and eventually some of it will go in, whether you like it or not. Continental phil is one of the most awesome roller-coaster rides there is. 20C philosophy is like a crime novel where every time you think they've got The Subject surrounded, they find another way to slip out the back door.

The other thing that helps is reading history, having some historical perspective, because all of these philosophers are situated somewhere in space and time. Context matters.

Try not to go insane. And occasionally a little whiskey helps the thought process.

>>9079511
I'm very much saving this post, thank you.

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>>9079511

>This entire post

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>>9079571
My pleasure.

To continue that thought, my own feeling is that one of the things that you can acquire from reading these guys is a kind of conceptual toolbox for looking at the things that humans do and think and make. Most of these guys (as Renoir said about artists) really only have one or two ideas that they just work absolutely *to death* because they seem to find them everywhere. And those ideas are amazingly universal in their scope and depth. They also all bounce off of and inform one another, everybody is responding to everyone else. And once in a while someone comes along and adds a new idea to the mix.

A very wise guy once said, new advances in philosophy are not made by proving anyone wrong, but by proving everyone right. It's a thought that has always stuck with me. Today we have a lot of means for *detecting* ideology (essentially, just shallow or banal recursive thought deployed rhetorically and uncharitably) but no real means of *preventing* it - except, perhaps, by a kind of consciousness-raising.

It's part of my antipathy towards deconstruction, because beyond a certain horizon further deconstruction seems impossible unless you want to start talking about *literal* deconstruction, which is a pill sugared with ideology and Just Cause (mainly, ressentiment).

I believe this is what Peterson is saying as well: the need to become *articulate.* It's psychologically necessary for human beings to be capable of expressing themselves, and as we develop this becomes increasingly the case as the horizon of our concern continues to expand in scale and depth. Mere *self* expression is to me insufficient: the *articulate* self is better!

One of the most amazing things about philosophy is that phenomenon where you read someone and go, 'Fuck, that's what *I* always thought. I thought I was the only one!' The most profound truths like that are often very simple, and being simple, they become very sharable. Which is what leads, I think, to the kinds of conversations that prevent things from getting out of control.

Conflict is inevitable, and sometimes things really do need to come out. I'm saddened by the trajectory that political life is on today, if only because I don't really predict a winner on either side: more Game of Thrones than Lord of the Rings. But who knows, maybe in the long run it leads to something better, wiser, more enlightened, more humane.

People get to decide, in the end, what they want to do with those concepts, how they want to use them to shape their life and their thinking. I think that's not a crazy project for philosophy these days. Tools in the box. And the more tools you have, the more you can do.

(Now, for myself, I would prefer a society where I can be a disgusting fat slob floating on a river barge and being fed peeled grapes while being fanned with ostrich feathers...but that's just me.)

>>9075832
>you will never attend a meeting of the league of shadows

fuck my life man, I just want to be a cybernetic techno-aristocrat.

This is how history changes. Not through having shitloads of people in the street SMASHING RACISM, but stalactite tier drops.
All these fringe thinkers, ideas and internet memers are changing history in such profound ways in a way a gang of antifa's can only dream of.

I might not be on the former or the latter's team, but I think this is food for thought for me personally in terms of how ideas and changes happen. It's glorious.

>>9078316
are you actually Jordan Peterson in disguise?>>9079702

>>9079733

The "my pleasure" at the beginning kinda makes me wonder too...

>>9077236
I get really upset by people who can claim to be christians and deride socialism. Jesus was a socialist I don't remember him saying fuck the poor.

>>9079719
>All these fringe thinkers, ideas and internet memers are changing history

I don't buy that individual human minds are at causation here, or "changing history", they are simply mirrors of history itself. The movement is called Neo-reaction, not Neo-action, because the formation of the ideas present in the movement are inherently visceral or logical responses to the current state of affairs, the techno-comm thinkers being an emergent property of a time defined by runaway capitalism and technological advancement.

>>9075869
Bogdanoffs and Dugin

>>9078073
So from that quote reactionary thought just wants humanity to stall out and stagnate? or go back to the beginning?

>>9076400
I just watched this and I don't disagree with a lot of what he says. Can a liberal tell me what he thought about the speech?

Instead of the pseud faggotry posted ITT, here is some based Moldbug
>moldbuggery.blogspot
Begin with the "open letters".

>>9079758
>people not real or important, "history itself" is doing the acting
You're really not going to like the change in overton window of the coming few years.

>>9079834
>people not real or important, "history itself" is doing the acting

Did I say that? If you read moldbug most of his material is analytic and the majority of his synthetic work is built on prior art or older historical figures and movements. How surprising that the hottest antiestablishment thinker in the internet age is a Carlyle and Heinlein fan who is a network engineer? It's hard to seperate a person like that from their times.

>You're really not going to like the change in overton window of the coming few years.

How will it change?

>>9079733
I wish. Peterson is such a boss. And the thing is that it's only because the culture today is so hysterically postmodern that his refusal to use pronouns turned him into a celebrity. Thirty years ago he would have just been another cool academic who wants you to live your life with meaning and purpose. In 2017 things are different.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAncrmE6YV0

does someone want to start an open source religion on the darknet with me?

>>9075761

>“He’s like the Rain Man of nationalism.”

hahahaahahaha....

>>9080325

>open source
>darknet

pick one

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Trump and breitbart are intellectuals now cos Bannon can flick through a book in like an hour

This thread, although I only agree with maybe 35% of it, is a good one. This is how anonymous exchange of ideas should work.

>>9075821
Dude you fucking said it

best thread I've seen in a while

>>9078537
>>He does seem to claim that warfare, violence and environmental destruction is inevitable. The ideology doesn't matter.
>
>I feel the same way.
This is because mathematically it is inevitable. Humans are machines at the core and this drives everything else.

>>9080325
Why not just become a Christian? It's already open source. It strikes me that it's primed for a revival, too. Bannon seems to think so, hence his interest in the Catholic Church.

>>9080547
I think its got to be a new religion, Christianity disavows too much of what needs to be embraced, namely technology.

>>9080576
Whatever it is it has to have a supernatural, mystical element to it.

That's the part of religion that everyone always forgets about, when they talk of founding their own. Religion, among its other functions, explains humanity's relationship to the otherworldly. One might argue that that's its PRIMARY relationship. Believers are bound together out of awe and fear of that which exceeds them.

This is the part atheists always miss when they talk about founding a new religion. You've got to throw in some miracles.

>>9079711
Dude you don't attend a meeting, you find the right people and become the league of shadows

>>9080605
what do you think drugs are for, you just need the right poets leading the ceremonies

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If he hasn't read Fanged Noumena he's a pleb. Sorry, that's how it works. I don't make the rules.

>>9080644

was this from that UN paper on /pol/?

>>9079702
Out of curiosity, are you also the guy who shitposts as norwegian cabin anon

>>9076488
Douthat linked Moldbug and Slatestarcodex multiple times, I'm pretty sure yudkowsky at one time too. Man has a strong fascination with the radicals in his corner.

>>9076468
we still have yet to exploit the wage-potential of the subsaharan, and east asia is yet to have the capital/startup phase the west went through post industrialism. That's easily another 45 years, likely another 80. More than enough to be subsumed by Roko's Basilisk

>>9078682
That's very kind anon, and much appreciated.

>>9080703
If that's a trip, then no. I don't think that's a phrase I've used before.

>>9077968
...have you actually read reactionary writers? Nationalism is an enlightenment project.

>>9080749

I think we're passed that. Automation is here, its just not implemented yet

>>9076373

No, we are laughing at his choice. A true master would have proffered Han Fei.

>>9080716
Douthat's a really interesting guy. I feel like almost none of the people who comment on his articles and tweets actually understand what he's aiming at.

>>9080793
That's actually interesting. So what DO reactionaries want? Do they want to return to the Church and the Empire?

>>9080835
certainly on the shortlist for most interesting writer with an actually wide circulation. He's overdue for a substantial book, after the wholesale vindication of the theses of his last two NYT Bestseller bait publications in the wake of trump

>>9080861
Depends on the reactionary. Nick Land wants to protect the forces of capital from the threats of mass action (read: the left diseasing the developed world into lethargic recession or smashing everything in a doomed radical revolt) so that humanity can be replaced by something that might be worthwhile in the form of an AI God. Nick Land is genuinely psychotic, it should be noted, and also one of the most fascinating continentals I've ever read.

Moldbug wants Lee Kuan Yews everywhere.

>>9080782
>If that's a trip, then no. I don't think that's a phrase I've used before.
nm, he's just a shitposter, who happens to be very good at what he does.
My guess is that he's the source of 75% of the copypasta that comes out of this board.
He's one of the few intelligent people on this board and I was wondering if your posts represented his unironic opinions.

Moldbug strikes me as a would-be Marxist with a pathological aversion to Marx

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>>9080880
So nobody actually wants to, like, reestablish Christendom and Imperium? That strikes me as a more genuinely reactionary position, insofar as it reaches further back into the past.

>>9080929
>Christendom
>Imperium
>"Render onto Caesar what is Caesars"

also techno-elite lording over traditionalist third world demographics accomplishes this way, and good like trying to get either of those out of the political equation

>>9080929
There are some Rorate Caeli types and the Landian wing of the movement certainly has a deep interest in religion and spirituality (there was an "Anarcho-Papist" publishing around 13 that got a bit of circulation among NRx types) but at the end of the day it's silicon valley and dissenting cosmopolitan elite types that fueled this. They picked up Carlyle very much because he defended the old systems without falling back on the unhelpful rhetorical ease of divine right. They still read their Maistre, if they're serious.

Aleksandr Dugin, who is often called a Neoreactionary would probably fit that, as he's an Orthodox Nationalist and probably the most powerful NRx thinker next to Thiel.

>>9080965
>silicon valley and dissenting cosmopolitan elite types

What's interesting to me about Bannon is that he's not quite either. I suppose he falls some into the latter party, but neither label quite fits him.

Found something interesting. Apparently Bannon also loves old Hindu stuff, in a really substantial way: http://thediplomat.com/2017/02/steve-bannon-dharma-warrior-hindu-scriptures-and-the-worldview-of-trumps-chief-ideologue/

>>9080979
Yes, I don't really think Bannon is a neoreactionary proper. He's closer to the development of Pat Buchanan's ideology in the wake of twenty more years of decay. Naturally, he's strongly influenced by them (and NRx always struggled with the tendency to switch between "these technocratic elites don't know a thing about addressing real problems" and "fuck the plebs only the best have a claim on rule") but I don't think he fits the mold of the moldbuggian

>>9080992

>NRx always struggled with the tendency to switch between "these technocratic elites don't know a thing about addressing real problems"

NRx falls into the trap of labeling Harvard professors and Google as technocrats, while never mentioning any groups like DARPA, Lockheed, DynCorp, etc

>>9080979
I'm just glad he's not a Palin/Huckabee-esque antiintellectual desu.

>>9080880

>psychotic

A three syllable word for any idea too big for tiny minds.

>>9077574
I know right? Some of these post seem like barely comprehensible ramblings to someone unfamiliar, such as myself, with the esoteric jargon and ideas discussed. Idk man, I guess I am just retarded

>>9081143
I mean the man intentionally induced insanity in the late 90s to loose his possible thoughts from the fetters of neurotypicalism and culture, but w/e

>>9081168

So he was an OG anti-normie?

>>9081168
>>9081175


>insanity in the late 90s to loose his possible thoughts from the fetters of neurotypicalism and culture,

if I recall correctly he took a bunch of heroin and meth and in the aftermath he and his fans explained it away in that cooler ideal

>>9081175
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiaWsgtJrNI

Nick Land once played this at a serious philosophy conference, laid supine and made half screams, half throat singing noises in order to further intellectual deterrorialization and break from unexamined bonds of normalcy

>So he was an OG anti-normie?

Nick Land is the anti-normie logos incarnandus

>>9081178
The designer drugs came before the insanity. He was high on something that could only be described by a chemistry student the entire time he was at warwick

>>9081183
did he steal it from radiohead?

>>9081183

>serious philosophy conference
>Nick Land is the anti-normie logos incarnandus

>"a presentation at the conference Virtual Futures in 1996: Rather than reading a paper, in this collaboration with artist collective Orphan Drift...Land lay behind the stage..." yadda yadda

http://divus.cc/london/en/article/nick-land-ein-experiment-im-inhumanismus

Virtual Futures was a cyberpunk accelerationist conference, not an academic one, he was right at home and was performing for a crowd that included some of his fans/comrades

This conversation shows up near the full moon...makes sense to me

>>9081201
Shit, regardless he fucked with anglophone philosophy departments enough with CCRU that it gets the point across. He was someone that his colleagues regarded as an unsalvageable weirdo that regarded "traditional philosophy" as in principle invalid.

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what about this guy?

>>9081215
>with CCRU that it gets the point across.
>as in principle invalid

The CCRU and its ex-members are cool, but if people don't take their idea seriously it's probably because they aren't worth being taken seriously. QWERTYnomics is a techno-occult product of the CCRU that traces the history of the typewriter keyboard to its current state as a metaphysical object. Cool thought, but has it yielded anything useful?


>Shit, regardless he fucked with anglophone philosophy departments enough with CCRU that it gets the point across.

I'm not trying to disparage Nick Land but I doubt anymore than a few dozen traditional anglophone university philosophers know or care who he is.

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I think what NL was doing was a kind of schizoanalysis. That's my own suspicion.

>...in Deleuze and Guattari, desire is production. Desiring production. Incessant creation. A machine of creativity. Desiring machines. We desire, so we create. We are all artists, fuelled by our desiring-machines.

>Deleuze and Guattari say that desiring-machines are activated by the schizophrenic process. Once separated and liberated from the illness, they operate as lines of escape from the system of psychoanalysis. The implications of schizoanalysis, from this point of view, as Foucault says, intend to ‘break the holds of power and institute research into a new collective subjectivity and a revolutionary healing of mankind.’

https://lornacollins.com/schiz-basics/

Land was very into Deleuze around the time he wrote Fanged Noumena. 'Revolutionary healing of mankind'...maybe not so much. But some of those essays are pretty mind-opening.

>What most revolutionary politics lacks is a new psychology, an anti-psychiatry that will help us to undertake the task of gradually releasing our over-coded flows of desire from the grips of fascist ideologies without sending us straight into a mental institution. This is the primary aim of schizoanalysis: to take the preferable tendencies of schizophrenia to its limits in order to rupture the paranoiac foundations of modern capitalism. Indeed, to push through the limits imposed by capitalist alienation, to replace our position as poor, defenceless, guilt-ridden puppets in internal straight-jackets, with free, non-Oedipalised, non-individualised, uncoded subjectivities. In short, schizoanalysis is a move towards taking up the limitless potentials of conceptualising schizophrenia as a revolutionary breakthrough rather than a psychological breakdown.

That last sentence.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/an-introduction-to-schizoanalysis/

These guys are smart in their own right, but they're too old, they missed too much of the formation of the tech culture. They don't have the perspectives that are going to usher in the future. I think Trump and Bannon simultaneously signify an end and a beginning. They're trying to mix some new tricks with old ones and hell it worked they got the presidency, but I don't think they're sure which tricks are actually working and why. I say ultimately they're too unimaginative to actually solve any problems. Its hard not to tote some sort of ideology, but we're only just beginning to see that ideology is the way we got things done and not something of actual consequence. Bannon understands this, but i think he's too set in his ways to embrace it and because of his ideological baggage he's going to waste time trying to do things that the current culture just won't allow.

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>>9076147
>Trump/Bannon are basically reacting against the left by using its own political narratives against them: race, class, and gender,
what does he mean by this

>>9081271

Exactly what it says, they're accusing the left of everything the left has traditionally accused them of. Because somewhere a long the line the left actual started winning the rhetorical battle on morality. They're basically freezing the narrative between dems and republicans. Since the criticisms mirror each other now.

>>9081296
They accuse the left of racism now
They accuse them of being war mongers now(thanks to obama)
They accuse them being in the pockets of bankers now

and really its because the political landscape has changed and its all true. The democratic party slid further right and now the right is using against them.

>>9081247

Sounds like something Terrence Mckenna would say

>schizoanalysis is a move towards taking up the limitless potentials of conceptualising schizophrenia as a revolutionary breakthrough rather than a psychological breakdown.