TODO_AUTHOR, (Sandifer 2017)

Summary

Thoughts

Notes

Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 4 | Location 47-50 | Added on Tuesday, June 16, 2015 6:35:28 PM

the bulk of books (and articles) on the matter so far have focused on two questions that I find relatively uninteresting. The first is how the alt-right came to happen. It’s possible to write intelligently on this history—David Neiwert’s Alt-America does an excellent job of tracing the evolution of the far-right from the mid-90s to the present day, for instance. But ultimately the question is fairly easy to answer: far-right movements arise when the established order starts to crack. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 4 | Location 54-56 | Added on Tuesday, June 16, 2015 6:36:27 PM

This does not mean, as far too many commentators have suggested, that the people at Trump rallies making Hitler salutes are motivated by “economic anxiety.” They’re motivated by racism. Duh. But their racism is emboldened by a political order that visibly has no answers, is running just to keep still, and not even managing that. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 4 | Location 59-61 | Added on Tuesday, June 16, 2015 6:36:52 PM

jaw-droppingly foolish methodology of simply reporting all of the alt-right’s self-justifications as self-evident truths so as to conclude that the real reason neo-nazis have been sweeping into power is because we’re too tolerant of trans people. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 5 | Location 63-66 | Added on Tuesday, June 16, 2015 6:46:32 PM

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

  • Your Highlight on page 5 | Location 70-71 | Added on Tuesday, June 16, 2015 6:47:01 PM

We’re not doing it, and I am to say the least skeptical that screaming “for fuck’s sake, just bash the fucking nazis’ skulls in already” for the next 350 pages would magically kickstart a mass uprising. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 5 | Location 72-77 | Added on Tuesday, June 16, 2015 6:48:21 PM

winning is off the table, what should we do instead? Because the grim reality is that things look really fucking bad. Ecological disaster is looming, the geopolitical order is paralyzed, and we’re not putting nearly enough billionaire heads on spikes to plausibly change it. What then, is left? This is not a question with straightforward answers. Straightforwardness is for victors who get statues and ballads. The defeated operate from shadows and hidden places, and the legacies they leave are cryptic and secret. This book behaves accordingly, and there are limits to what I am willing or indeed able to explain. Nevertheless, a brief overview. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 6 | Location 79-83 | Added on Tuesday, June 16, 2015 11:13:06 PM

The main essay is the title piece, and is the one I am most invested in allowing to stand on its own terms. That said, it focuses on two specific strands of thought within the alt-right: their own grappling with eschatology, and their roots in silicon valley tech culture (the latter of which is probably the thing that most distinguishes them from previous far-right movements). It takes as its starting point the work of neoreactionary thinkers Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land, along with Eliezer Yudkowsky (who is not on the alt-right but has a variety of interesting links to the topic). Its ending point is considerably more oblique. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 7 | Location 97-98 | Added on Tuesday, June 16, 2015 11:44:53 PM

I hope the book that results from juxtaposing these seven works provides some entertainment and insight while you wait for extinction. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 8 | Location 116-119 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 5:08:56 AM

From the perspective of 2017 the eschaton appears to be in exactly the wrong place, such that we’re either going to just miss it or only see the early “shitloads of people dying” bits. And even if it is imminent, there is no reason to expect most of us to engage with it differently than any other terminal diagnosis, which is to say, to minimize the amount of time we spend consciously dying. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 19 | Location 281-289 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 5:32:54 AM

Curtis Yarvin10. These days, Yarvin is best known as the founder of Urbit, a startup tech company providing, in its own words, “a secure peer-to-peer network of personal servers, built on a clean-slate system software stack.“11 Or, perhaps more accurately, he’s best known for the astonishing levels of protest that take place whenever a tech conference invites him to speak, generally based on the accusation that he believes in reinstituting slavery and thinks that black people make especially good slaves.12 The reason for this is relatively simple: he believes in reinstituting slavery and thinks that black people make especially good slaves.13 ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 20 | Location 298-309 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 5:33:21 AM

“New UR readers,” he proclaims at the start, “unfortunately, I’m lying. There is no such thing as a gentle introduction to UR. It’s like talking about a ‘mild DMT trip.’ If it was mild, it wasn’t DMT.” The appeal is obvious: Moldbug is out of his fucking skull. Listen to this shit, after he proclaims that he’s going to give readers a Matrix-like red pill (not quite the one offered by MRAs, but Moldbug’s where they got the term from14): “Our genuine red pill is not ready for the mass market. It is the size of a golf ball, though nowhere near so smooth, and halfway down it splits in half and exposes a sodium-metal core, which will sear your throat like a live coal. There will be scarring.“15 I want to be clear, with all possible sincerity, that I love the braggadocio here. I want what he is selling. Yes, Mencius, savagely tear away the veil of lies with which I cope with the abject horror that is reality and reveal to me the awful, agonizing truth of being. Give me the red pill. The problem is, once we get our golf ball-sized reality distortion pill home, put on some Laibach, and settle in for an epic bout of Thanatosian psychedelia, we discover the unfortunate truth: we’re actually just huffing paint in an unhygienic gas station bathroom. Jesus, this isn’t even bat country. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 21 | Location 312-323 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 5:33:43 AM

Generally speaking, however, the awful, searing truth with which Moldbug believes we cannot cope is that liberal democracy is pretty shit. Moldbug puts a genuine effort into selling this truth, arguing that there exists a de facto conspiracy of, as he puts it in the Open Letter, “mainstream academia, journalism and education"16 that he calls the Cathedral, as it constitutes a de facto state religion that means that democracy is secretly an Orwellian mind control process. And to be fair, Moldbug really sells it, essentially spinning a vast historical conspiracy theory in which the Roundheads of the English Civil War have secretly controlled the world for centuries via the false rhetoric of classical liberalism and the Enlightenment. But it’s hard not to notice that this is basically crap. By “crap,” of course, I do not mean “wrong.” Rather, I mean obvious, in the sense of sounding like the guy at the bar watching the news (probably Fox) and muttering about how “they’re all a bunch of crooks.” Liberal democracy a hopelessly inadequate and doomed system preserved by a system of continual indoctrination? You don’t say. Next you’ll be telling me about the way the factory farming system that stands between the world and massive famine is slowly killing itself via global warming. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 22 | Location 330-341 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 5:34:40 AM

The problem, Moldbug concludes, is one of chaos. Democracy is endlessly compromised by progressivism, which moves it eternally leftwards with its eternal mantra of change. This is chaotic; Moldbug prefers order. Indeed, he values order for its own sake. As he puts it, “The order that the rational reactionary seeks to preserve and/or restore is arbitrary. Perhaps it can be justified on some moral basis. But probably not. It is good simply because it is order, and the alternative to order is violence at worst and politics at best.“18 There are obviously plenty of problems here. Indeed, Moldbug acknowledges them, granting that authoritarian structures are hardly a sure-fire path to non-violence. But, he promises, he’s got a really great idea for how to fix it all. And it’s this, really, that defines Moldbug in all his mad, idiotic glory. How do you get a non-destructive authoritarian? “The answer: find the world’s best CEO, and give him undivided control over budget, policy and personnel.” But wait, he’s even got a suggestion as to who: “I don’t think there is any debate about it. The world’s best CEO is Steve Jobs.“19 This is literally Mencius Moldbug’s solution. Hire Steve Jobs to run the world. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 23 | Location 346-359 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 5:36:43 AM

Indeed, it’s reasonable to ask why on earth Moldbug believes Steve Jobs to be a remotely suitable governmental leader. The answer, coming when Moldbug suggests the terms on which Jobs’s governorship should be evaluated, is tremendously revealing: “We can define responsibility in financial terms. If we think of California as a profitable corporation, a capital asset whose purpose is to maximize its production of cash, we have a definition of responsibility which is not only precise and unambiguous, but indeed quantitative.“20 With this, we have a genuinely tricky moment, simply because of the sheer and unbridled number of unexamined assumptions going on here. In many ways they form a knot too thick to unpick—you can’t just isolate, for instance, the idea that a precise and unambiguous metric for how well the government is performing is a desirable concept in the first place from the bizarre and unspoken sociopathy of a view of government that’s utterly unconnected to any motive based on the well-being of its population. But to my mind the most compellingly fucked up thing here is the basic idea that turning a profit is an inherently desirable act. Actually, this underlies a lot of what’s wrong with Moldbug. It’s not that I doubt that he has answers to the obvious question of why turning a profit is a good thing; I’m sure he does. Rather, it is that he does not consider this question obvious enough to bring up and answer alongside his assertion. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 24 | Location 360-361 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 5:37:00 AM

while there are a great many obvious critiques of contemporary society, “there’s just not enough respect for profit” really doesn’t feel like one of them. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 24 | Location 367-374 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 5:39:13 AM

“Cthulhu may swim slowly,” he finally proclaims, “but he only swims left.“22 Two things are striking here. The first is that Moldbug just rewrote Martin Luther King’s “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” as Lovecraft fanfic. This is without question one of the most brazenly funny moves in the entire history of Western philosophy. The second is that Moldbug does not actually seem to realize that he’s made it. Think about it. The Cathedral is a vast and interconnected system of media and academia designed to feed the population a steady diet of blue pills and keep them from figuring out that the world is a lie. And one of its most basic narratives is idea that there has been a steady cultural progress on issues like race and gender over the course of American history. Why, then, does Moldbug uncritically accept it? ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 381-384 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 5:40:19 AM

The obvious reason to constantly and unceasingly trumpet your progress in one area, after all, is to distract from your lack of progress in another. And for all the structural inequality that’s been removed from American society in terms of race and gender, there’s one structural inequality that’s never come close to being challenged, namely the divide between the rich and powerful and everybody else. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 26 | Location 388-393 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 5:42:02 AM

Moldbug trumpets the observation that the American Revolution was not based on serious-minded ideological grievances and grotesque abuses of imperial power as though it’s a profound novelty, but the fact that the American Revolution was not really a cool rap musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda but rather a bunch of rich guys consolidating their power has actually been well remarked upon by leftist academics. Indeed, there’s actually a significant leftist intellectual tradition that can fairly legitimately claim to be completely suppressed within American culture (particularly American political culture), and that’s well-known for observing that revolutions and transitions between ideologies generally come down to people with material power protecting that power. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 26 | Location 397-399 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 5:42:53 AM

His anti-materialism is so complete that at one point he interrogates at length why it might be that the Allied Powers opposed Nazi Germany, without once considering “because they looked at a map of Europe and worked out where Hitler was going to go after Czechoslovakia” as an answer, then concludes that World War II must have been about how reactionary movements are prey to predatory progressive movements. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 27 | Location 399-401 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 5:42:58 AM

if you’re going to talk about suppressed ideologies that oppose the interests of entrenched power, you’ve really got to talk about the original red pill: Marxism. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 27 | Location 399-411 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 5:44:31 AM

if you’re going to talk about suppressed ideologies that oppose the interests of entrenched power, you’ve really got to talk about the original red pill: Marxism. After all, Marxism, especially in its good old-fashioned “a spectre is haunting Europe” revolutionary sense (which is a much larger body of work than Soviet Communism, and indeed one that contains countless scathing critiques of Leninism and Stalinism) is absolutely one of the positions most completely excluded from the Cathedral, its use in Anglophone politics restricted to a derisive term slung about in the way that “fascist” is applied to Donald Trump, only with less accuracy. Even Bernie Sanders, who aggressively positioned himself for most of his career as a splinter movement to the left of the Democratic party, only ever went so far as to use the term “socialist,” a political allegiance that remains in widespread political use in western Europe. When a politician like Jeremy Corbyn, who is at best Marxish, begins to threaten entrenched power he finds literally the entire media apparatus of Great Britain aimed against him, with even the self-professedly progressive Guardian mostly sighing mournfully about how he’s just too left-wing to ever be taken seriously. (And indeed, one of the things he’s routinely attacked for is not being sufficiently supportive of the hereditary monarchy.) Perhaps it’s true that “fascist” and “Nazi” remain more politically suicidal self-descriptors, but there’s surely no standard by which “Marxist” doesn’t round out your top three. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 28 | Location 421-427 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 5:46:46 AM

And yet at every turn in Moldbug’s argument, Marxism seems to lurk—indeed, to haunt—the text. Every argument he makes about the Cathedral’s insidious suppression of the obviously preferable alternative has, to a reader even vaguely with Marx, an immediate counterpart pointing inexorably to the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is tempting to suggest that Moldbug is a failed Marxist in the sense that Jupiter is a failed star, its mass falling tantalizingly short of the tipping point whereby nuclear fusion begins. Over and over again, Moldbug asks questions much like those that Marx asked, and his answers begin with many of the same initial observations. But inevitably, a few steps in, he makes some ridiculously broad generalization or fails to consider some obvious alternative possibility, and the train of thought fizzles into characteristic idiocy. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 32 | Location 478-485 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 5:52:52 AM

Indeed, this speaks to a larger ambiguity around Land—something both his old academic audience and his new neoreactionary one debate and speculate upon. Simply put, nobody’s quite sure if he’s serious. I mentioned earlier how every one of Moldbug’s arguments seems to have a secret Marxist double, a fact Moldbug is only dubiously aware of. Land has no such plausible deniability. His entire academic career, spent as part of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, a bunch of ’90s cyberpunks loosely affiliated with the University of Warwick, was based around subversive and postmodernist readings of texts in the spirit of writers like Gilles Deleuze. Joining a far-right Internet subculture in an Andy Kaufmanesque piece of philosophical performance art is 100% the sort of thing he’d do. If so, though, it’s one played with an unwavering deadpan and nary a wink at the audience. All the same, it’s important to understand not only that this ambiguity hangs over his work, but that Land knows it, and knows that you know it, and knows that you know that he knows it, and so on. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 30 | Location 450-453 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 5:53:29 AM

On the one hand, Land is the other pole of the neoreactionary movement proper (as opposed to the broader Rationalist movement that Yudkowsky represents)—his essay The Dark Enlightenment essentially forms a triptych of core works of the movement along with Moldbug’s Open Letter and Gentle Introduction. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 39 | Location 589-590 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 6:05:30 AM

The trick to this is one of parodic fealty—of taking premises further than their creators do, generally so as to demonstrate why they stopped where they did. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 42 | Location 638-639 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 8:07:50 AM

This is the key difference between the two pills: the red pill only needs to be taken once, whereas the blue pill must be taken again and again. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 42 | Location 643-658 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 8:11:56 AM

It would, of course, be terribly bitchy to point out that Mencius Moldbug’s verbose and multi-part blogging style is rather more resembling of the blue pill’s method of administration than the red pill’s. But then again, the fact that Moldbug hasn’t got the goods was basically the first thing we noticed about him. Still, it’s an important thing to realize: nothing about Moldbug’s supposed red pill distinguishes it from Chomsky’s. And I don’t just mean Moldbug’s verbosity, nor even the basic structure of Moldbug’s blog, which he cops to, quite reasonably pointing out that this is how blogs work. Rather it is the larger neoreactionary discourse—the myriad of blogs, subreddits, and Twitters that exist to endlessly spit out neoreactionary memes, evangelizing over and over again, generally to each other, but with especial vigor whenever they find anyone who expresses the slightest skepticism about the red pill’s effects. The tone of these engagements is brilliantly satirized by David Malki’s famed “The Terrible Sea Lion” comic, in which two women remark on how much they dislike sea lions only to be chased around by one for two days repeatedly demanding that they provide sources to back up their assertions34. This constant restatement of an idea defined by the fact that it only needs to be expressed evokes Eve Sedgwick’s observation of the conspiracy theorist’s obsession with telling and retelling the story of their preferred conspiracy, as though they believe that if only their testimony is understood by the right person everything will be OK35. (“Come on, Steve. Do you want to sell scraps of aluminum for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” one imagines Moldbug pleading.36) ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 44 | Location 665-668 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 8:14:46 AM

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

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As damning as this sounds, it’s not actually that useful as an attack on neoreaction. The problem is that neoreaction basically already knows this and is OK with it. That’s the whole point of the right to exit—a final and decisive rescue of individual liberty at all costs. But exiting requires that people stay behind; if we all go, we’ll just have to storm out again. The entire point of the project is to separate the wheat from the chaff. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 45 | Location 676-679 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 8:15:56 AM

this is clearly a definitional thing about the red pill. It doesn’t just offer the truth; it offers the searing and traumatic truth. That’s the entire point of Joe Pantoliano’s character in The Matrix, who, having taken the red pill, has decided that the Matrix was his preferred drug after all, a position that is not so much refuted as set aside when its sole proponent is impaled. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 46 | Location 695-697 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 8:24:35 AM

And suddenly the abyss gazes also. Moldbug has stared into the truth of history, seen that it is a massive pack of lies designed purely to justify the corrupt status quo, and the only thing he can think to do about it is to submit entirely to the status quo. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 47 | Location 707-711 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 8:26:30 AM

This is pretty much the exact moment that connects Moldbug to Land. And in some ways Land’s version of it is the more persuasive, even as it’s the less accessible. Moldbug got here by having too much time on his hands and self-educating on American history entirely via primary source documents while stoned. Land, on the other hand, had a complete fucking breakdown. If someone took the proper red pill, it was Land, who clearly stared into some conceptual heart of darkness and was transformed by the strange and alien light within. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 47 | Location 711-712 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 8:26:38 AM

before—what’s key about the neoreactionary right to exit is that once again we realize at the last moment that we are too scared to take it. ======== Neoreaction a Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer)

  • Your Highlight on page 59 | Location 905-905 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 8:47:54 AM

Or, to put it more bluntly, neoreactionaries are vicious little shits. ========

Bibliography

Sandifer, Elizabeth. 2017. Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and around the Alt-Right. United States: Eruditorum Press.