Strange Ideas of Neoreactionaries

Discussion in 'Politics' started by exGOPer, Jun 2, 2022.

  1. exGOPer

    exGOPer

    Elizabeth Sandifer, I need you to help us understand this neoreactionary tendency. Can you discuss what it is?

    Sandifer
    Neoreaction is one attempt of modern far right philosophy—we can just go ahead and call it fascism—to create an intellectual basis. It was formulated by Curtis Yarvin, who writes under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, or formerly wrote.

    Robinson
    The artist formerly known as Moldbug?

    Sandifer
    These days he uses his real name Curtis Yarvin, but I still think of him as Moldbug because that’s what he was going by when I wrote about him. Yarvin has been quite influential on a number of key people. He has a demonstrably huge influence on Peter Thiel. We know he’s got influence on Blake Masters and J.D. Vance, as that Vanity Fair articlee makes clear. We have very strong evidence that he’s had influence on Steve Bannon. He’s just a guy a lot of these people look to as kind of an intellectual light. He’s been on the Tucker Carlson show, which did a fair bit to mainstream him. So a lot of people look up to him as something of an intellectual light, which is interesting if you actually read any of his work, because, well… I call him outright stupid in my book, and I’m gonna largely stand by that.

    I think that there is a long tradition of right-wing “philosophy” that’s really popular among right-wing nutters and as soon as it gets outside that little bubble, it gets absolutely shot to hell by other philosophers. And I think to describe Yarvin in terms he would probably take as a compliment—and I very much mean as an insult—he’s kind of a modern day Ayn Rand.

    So his broad philosophical idea is he’s just really obsessed with order. He thinks that order is the absolute best thing that can happen. Chaos, unruliness, rebelliousness—all these things are inherently very, very bad.

    And so his belief, as he expressed back in his Moldbug days—and he’s not really backed down off of it in any substantive way—is that basically, California should secede, become its own nation, and simply impose a CEO with monarchic, godlike powers. At the time, he suggested Steve Jobs would be a particularly good pick for the absolute monarch of California and that the purpose of owning California and running it as a corporate monarchy is explicitly for profit. That was also a part of Yarvin’s philosophical vision for what the world should do.

    I don’t want to pin him too much with the slightly satirical and deliberately over-the-top clickbait-y idea of making Steve Jobs king of California—that is him using a rhetorical device to get attention. But he does very, very much believe that rich elites should be in absolute control of everything, and people who are not landowners and do not have a ton of money should basically be thought of as the equivalent of slaves.

    https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/05/the-strange-and-terrifying-ideas-of-neoreactionaries/
     
  2. notagain

    notagain

    Bilderberg is meeting right now.
    If the system fails = high death rate even without violence.
    Lack of critical supplies and services would cause mass casualties.
     
  3. Millionaire

    Millionaire

    Test Message for @Baron: i have exGoper on my complete block list but I am able to quite easily post on his threads without ever taking him off my block list

    I cant see exGopers opening post, but i can see notagain's reply and start a conversation with notagain on this thread.

    exGoper cant see my message unless he logs out but others can reply to my message and exGoper will see those replies, although those replies will have any re-quotes from my posts censored out
     
    Last edited: Jun 3, 2022