Yes, yes, I’ve often heard that Fear is the essential conservative emotion, but I think that “conservative sentiment” and “right-wing sentiment” are very different things in this regard. Because a commited leftist/liberal (in Moldbug’s description), one who even bases their identity on “Egalitarianism” and “Fairness” and “Justice” and such abstractions, might at the same time be driven by fear a lot, be averse to change, etc. It’s just that a belief in the goodness of “Progress” is piggy-backed on top of those leftist abstractions in Western tradition. But one does not in fact imply the other at all.
Case in point: Orwell was very leftist yet very culturally and emotionally conservative, and Glenn Beck is right-wing but definitely gushes about how great “progress” (with social innovation and upheaval) would be, if only the Left released their monopoly on it.
“Progressivism is not about Progress”, as Hanson would put it. And Neo-Reaction is not the extreme branch of conservatism.
Yes, yes, I’ve often heard that Fear is the essential conservative emotion, but I think that “conservative sentiment” and “right-wing sentiment” are very different things in this regard. Because a commited leftist/liberal (in Moldbug’s description), one who even bases their identity on “Egalitarianism” and “Fairness” and “Justice” and such abstractions, might at the same time be driven by fear a lot, be averse to change, etc. It’s just that a belief in the goodness of “Progress” is piggy-backed on top of those leftist abstractions in Western tradition. But one does not in fact imply the other at all.
Case in point: Orwell was very leftist yet very culturally and emotionally conservative, and Glenn Beck is right-wing but definitely gushes about how great “progress” (with social innovation and upheaval) would be, if only the Left released their monopoly on it.
“Progressivism is not about Progress”, as Hanson would put it. And Neo-Reaction is not the extreme branch of conservatism.