If you accept the criticism it makes of democracy you are already basically Neoreactionary. Only about half of them advocate monarchy as what should replace our current order, remember no one said the journalist did an excellent job reporting about us. While I can’t even speak for those who do advocate Monarchy, only for myself, here some of my reasons for finding it well worth investigating and advocating:
Good enough—You need not think it an ideal form of government, but if you look at it and conclude it is better than democracy and nearly anything else tried from time to time so far, why not advocate for it? We know it can be done with humans and can be stable. This is not the case with some of the proposed theoretical forms of government. Social engineering is dangerous, you want fail safes. If you want to be careful and small c-conservative it is hard to do better than monarchy, it is as old as civilization, an institution that can create bronze age empires or transform a feudal society into an industrial one.
Simplicity—Of the proposed other proposed alternative forms of governments it is the one most easily accurately explained to nearly anyone. Simplicity and emotional resonance are important features with many consequences. For example when Moldbuggians say society would benefit from formalization they should aim for a bare bones OS for this to be feasible. Formalization is the process where the gap between the actual and claimed functioning of a social institution is closed as much as possible in order to reduce disinformation. This is considered good because uncertainty results in politics/war. There are also costs for keeping people in positions of responsibility sane and not accidentally ending up believing in disinformation if such is common around them. Not bothering to keep them sane at all seems bad.
Agile experimentation—Social experimentation is however useful, especially since the same solutions won’t work for all kinds of societies in all situations. It is a system that can be easily adjusted for either robustness or flexibility as needed. A monarch has simple logistics to set up or allow social experiments. Futarchy, Neocameralism… why risk running a society on this OS rather than set up a more robust one and then test it within its confines? East India Companies, Free Cities, religious orders are common in the history of Western monarchy. Indeed you can look at Constitutional Monarchy in modern democratic countries as experiments that where either judged successful or an experiment that breached containment. Even in this case of breach the form of monarchy was still preserved however and might possibly be revived at a future point in time.
Responsible ideology crafting—Many Neoreactionaries think the relative political stability of the Western world of the past 70 years will not last. Historically transition from some kind of republic to military dictatorship is common. Rule by leader of victorious conquering army, has historically show successful transition to monarchy, as all dynasties where basically founded by them. Even if in itself such a change isn’t likely in the West, the unlikely situations where neoreactionary criticism of democracy would be taken seriously and guide policy, is one where the most likely victor of the social instability is not an ideal representation of a Neoreactionary CEO philosopher but a military dictator. We should try and plan social reform constrained by logistics of the likeliest outcome of our ideas becoming important, otherwise we are irresponsible. Indeed this might have been the grand crime of Communist theorists.
Low Hanging Fruit—It has been understudied by modern intellectuals who furthermore are biased against it. Compare how much modern theoretical work has been done on Democracy vs. Monarchy. See number wikipedia articles for a quick proxy. This is perhaps practical given the situation we find ourselves in but also somewhat absurd. For example as far as I’m aware no one outside reaction has in depth considered the ridiculously obvious idea of King as Schelling Point! Modern game theory, cognitive science and even sociology unleashed on studying monarchy would reveal treasures, even if we eventually decide we don’t want to implement it.
I was trying to say Neoreactionaries basically only strongly agree on these criticisms, not the particular solutions how to ameliorate such problems. I hope that is apparent from the paragraph?
Neoreactionaries basically only strongly agree on these criticisms, not the particular solutions
How are you going to distinguish them from conservo-libertatians, then? I would imagine they would also agree with much of those criticisms and will disagree as to the proposed solutions.
They don’t use the particular concepts of Neoreaction, things like the Cathedral or the idea Progressivism is the child of Protestant Christianity or why it drifts leftwards. There will be no clear line as both conservo-libertarians and anarcho capitalists are big inspirations to the neoreactionary world view and form a big part of its bedrock. It is observed many reactionaries tend to be ex-libertarians.
I was under the impression that they also tend to agree about certain social issues such as traditional gender roles (though after posting that comment I found out that Moldbug agrees with progressive views about homophobia); am I wrong?
Neoreaction is basically defined as “these particular criticism of Progressivism & Democracy”! I’m not sure you will find common agreement among neoreactionaries on anything else.
Then you either throw up your hands and go meta with secession/seasteading/etc. or try to find existing systems that neither of those systems would apply to… how about Switzerland?
I am curious why Switzerland isn’t more popular among people who want to change the political system. It has direct democracy, decades of success, few problems...
The cynical explanation is that promoting a system someone else invented and tested is not so good for signalling.
I am curious why Switzerland isn’t more popular among people who want to change the political system. It has direct democracy, decades of success, few problems...
The correct question is whether Switzerland’s success is caused by its political system. If not, emulating it won’t help.
We can at least be sure that Switzerland’s success hasn’t been prevented by its political system. This isn’t a proof that the system should be copied, but it’s at least a hint that it should be studied.
Switzerland is pretty small, and it’s not obvious to me that its political system would scale well to larger countries. But then again, it’s not obvious to me that it wouldn’t, either.
My very superficial knowledge says that Switzerland consists of relatively independent regions, which can have different tax rates, and maybe even different laws. These differences allow people to do some lower-scale experiments, and probably allow an individual to feel like a more important part of the whole (one in a few thousands feels better than one in a few millions). I would guess this division to regions is very important.
So a question is, if we wanted to “Switzerland-ize” a larger country, should we aim for the same size (population) or the same number of regions? Greater region size may reduce the effect of an individual feeling important, but greater number of regions could make the interactions among them more complicated. Or maybe the solution would be to have regions and sub-regions, but then it is not obvious (i.e. cannot be copied straightforwardly) what should be the power relationship between the regions and their sub-regions.
It would be safer to try this experiment first in a country of a similar size. Just in case some Illuminati are reading this discussion, I volunteer Slovakia for this experiment, although my countrymen might disagree. Please feel free to ignore them. :D
My very superficial knowledge says that Switzerland consists of relatively independent regions, which can have different tax rates, and maybe even different laws.
Reminds me of some large countries… in North America, I think? :-)
Then again, population-wise it’s bigger than reactionary poster children such as Singapore or Monaco and comparable to progressivist poster children such as Sweden or Denmark.
I want to emphasize again monarchy only recently gained popularity among neoreactionaries, its possible the majority of them still dream of Moldbug’s SovCorps. Anarcho-Papist for example basically believes anarcho-capitalism is best but thinks the Neoreactionary analysis of why society is so leftist is correct.
The popularity of aristocratic and monarchist stories in popular culture—Star Wars, LOTR, The Tudors, Game of Thrones, possibly Reign if its rating improve, etc. - says something about the human mind’s “comfort” with this kind of social organization. David Brin and similar nervous apologists for democracy have that working against them.
If you accept the criticism it makes of democracy you are already basically Neoreactionary. Only about half of them advocate monarchy as what should replace our current order, remember no one said the journalist did an excellent job reporting about us. While I can’t even speak for those who do advocate Monarchy, only for myself, here some of my reasons for finding it well worth investigating and advocating:
Good enough—You need not think it an ideal form of government, but if you look at it and conclude it is better than democracy and nearly anything else tried from time to time so far, why not advocate for it? We know it can be done with humans and can be stable. This is not the case with some of the proposed theoretical forms of government. Social engineering is dangerous, you want fail safes. If you want to be careful and small c-conservative it is hard to do better than monarchy, it is as old as civilization, an institution that can create bronze age empires or transform a feudal society into an industrial one.
Simplicity—Of the proposed other proposed alternative forms of governments it is the one most easily accurately explained to nearly anyone. Simplicity and emotional resonance are important features with many consequences. For example when Moldbuggians say society would benefit from formalization they should aim for a bare bones OS for this to be feasible. Formalization is the process where the gap between the actual and claimed functioning of a social institution is closed as much as possible in order to reduce disinformation. This is considered good because uncertainty results in politics/war. There are also costs for keeping people in positions of responsibility sane and not accidentally ending up believing in disinformation if such is common around them. Not bothering to keep them sane at all seems bad.
Agile experimentation—Social experimentation is however useful, especially since the same solutions won’t work for all kinds of societies in all situations. It is a system that can be easily adjusted for either robustness or flexibility as needed. A monarch has simple logistics to set up or allow social experiments. Futarchy, Neocameralism… why risk running a society on this OS rather than set up a more robust one and then test it within its confines? East India Companies, Free Cities, religious orders are common in the history of Western monarchy. Indeed you can look at Constitutional Monarchy in modern democratic countries as experiments that where either judged successful or an experiment that breached containment. Even in this case of breach the form of monarchy was still preserved however and might possibly be revived at a future point in time.
Responsible ideology crafting—Many Neoreactionaries think the relative political stability of the Western world of the past 70 years will not last. Historically transition from some kind of republic to military dictatorship is common. Rule by leader of victorious conquering army, has historically show successful transition to monarchy, as all dynasties where basically founded by them. Even if in itself such a change isn’t likely in the West, the unlikely situations where neoreactionary criticism of democracy would be taken seriously and guide policy, is one where the most likely victor of the social instability is not an ideal representation of a Neoreactionary CEO philosopher but a military dictator. We should try and plan social reform constrained by logistics of the likeliest outcome of our ideas becoming important, otherwise we are irresponsible. Indeed this might have been the grand crime of Communist theorists.
Low Hanging Fruit—It has been understudied by modern intellectuals who furthermore are biased against it. Compare how much modern theoretical work has been done on Democracy vs. Monarchy. See number wikipedia articles for a quick proxy. This is perhaps practical given the situation we find ourselves in but also somewhat absurd. For example as far as I’m aware no one outside reaction has in depth considered the ridiculously obvious idea of King as Schelling Point! Modern game theory, cognitive science and even sociology unleashed on studying monarchy would reveal treasures, even if we eventually decide we don’t want to implement it.
That sounds like a hell of a package deal fallacy to me.
I was trying to say Neoreactionaries basically only strongly agree on these criticisms, not the particular solutions how to ameliorate such problems. I hope that is apparent from the paragraph?
How are you going to distinguish them from conservo-libertatians, then? I would imagine they would also agree with much of those criticisms and will disagree as to the proposed solutions.
They don’t use the particular concepts of Neoreaction, things like the Cathedral or the idea Progressivism is the child of Protestant Christianity or why it drifts leftwards. There will be no clear line as both conservo-libertarians and anarcho capitalists are big inspirations to the neoreactionary world view and form a big part of its bedrock. It is observed many reactionaries tend to be ex-libertarians.
I was under the impression that they also tend to agree about certain social issues such as traditional gender roles (though after posting that comment I found out that Moldbug agrees with progressive views about homophobia); am I wrong?
What is the package?
Isn’t “oppose democracy for a specific set of reasons” a natural category?
Added, based on your other comment: “skepticism against Progressive Orthodoxy” is a lot weaker than opposing democracy.
Neoreaction is basically defined as “these particular criticism of Progressivism & Democracy”! I’m not sure you will find common agreement among neoreactionaries on anything else.
And if we accept the Reactionary criticisms of democracy and the Progressive criticisms of aristocracy and monarchy? What then?
Then you get to happily look down on everyone’s naive worldviews until you realize that world is fucked and go cry in a corner.
Been there, done that, realized that crying won’t make the world any less fucked, come back from the corner.
Psychosocial development of puberty in a nutshell?
Doesn’t reactionary or progressive criticism in itself if taken seriously already do this?
Then you either throw up your hands and go meta with secession/seasteading/etc. or try to find existing systems that neither of those systems would apply to… how about Switzerland?
I am curious why Switzerland isn’t more popular among people who want to change the political system. It has direct democracy, decades of success, few problems...
The cynical explanation is that promoting a system someone else invented and tested is not so good for signalling.
The correct question is whether Switzerland’s success is caused by its political system. If not, emulating it won’t help.
We can at least be sure that Switzerland’s success hasn’t been prevented by its political system. This isn’t a proof that the system should be copied, but it’s at least a hint that it should be studied.
Switzerland is pretty small, and it’s not obvious to me that its political system would scale well to larger countries. But then again, it’s not obvious to me that it wouldn’t, either.
My very superficial knowledge says that Switzerland consists of relatively independent regions, which can have different tax rates, and maybe even different laws. These differences allow people to do some lower-scale experiments, and probably allow an individual to feel like a more important part of the whole (one in a few thousands feels better than one in a few millions). I would guess this division to regions is very important.
So a question is, if we wanted to “Switzerland-ize” a larger country, should we aim for the same size (population) or the same number of regions? Greater region size may reduce the effect of an individual feeling important, but greater number of regions could make the interactions among them more complicated. Or maybe the solution would be to have regions and sub-regions, but then it is not obvious (i.e. cannot be copied straightforwardly) what should be the power relationship between the regions and their sub-regions.
It would be safer to try this experiment first in a country of a similar size. Just in case some Illuminati are reading this discussion, I volunteer Slovakia for this experiment, although my countrymen might disagree. Please feel free to ignore them. :D
Reminds me of some large countries… in North America, I think? :-)
For various levels of superficiality, yeah.
Then again, population-wise it’s bigger than reactionary poster children such as Singapore or Monaco and comparable to progressivist poster children such as Sweden or Denmark.
Always go meta. I feel like an addict saying that.
I want to emphasize again monarchy only recently gained popularity among neoreactionaries, its possible the majority of them still dream of Moldbug’s SovCorps. Anarcho-Papist for example basically believes anarcho-capitalism is best but thinks the Neoreactionary analysis of why society is so leftist is correct.
You make incremental patches and innovations in the existing setup, and keep a very close eye on the results.
Somebody’s mind explodes :-D
The popularity of aristocratic and monarchist stories in popular culture—Star Wars, LOTR, The Tudors, Game of Thrones, possibly Reign if its rating improve, etc. - says something about the human mind’s “comfort” with this kind of social organization. David Brin and similar nervous apologists for democracy have that working against them.