The anti-reaction FAQ describes it as “Neoreaction is a political ideology supporting a return to traditional ideas of government and society, especially traditional monarchy and an ethno-nationalist state. It sees itself opposed to modern ideas like democracy, human rights, multiculturalism, and secularism. ” As far as I’m aware, neoreactioaries do not object to that description.
I feel this is a stupid question, but I’d rather ask it than not knowing: Why would anyone want that? I can understand opposing things like: democracy, secularism and multiculturalism, but replacing them with a traditional monarchy just doesn’t seem right. And I don’t mean morally, I just don’t see how it could create a working society.
I can fully understand opposing certain ideas, but if you’re against democracy because it doesn’t work, why go to a system of governance that has previously shown not to work?
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.
I can fully understand opposing certain ideas, but if you’re against democracy because it doesn’t work, why go to a system of governance that has previously shown not to work?
The obvious question here is, why do you think monarchy has been “shown not to work”? Is it because monarchies have had a tendency to turn into democracies? Or perhaps because historical monarchies didn’t have the same level of technology that modern liberal democracies enjoy?
That question is kinda obvious. Thanks for pointing it out.
From what I remember from my History classes, monarchies worked pretty okay with an enlightened autocrat who made benefiting the state and the populace as his or her prime goal. But the problem there was that they didn’t stay in power and they had no real way of making absolutely sure their children had the same values. All it takes to mess things up is one oldest son (or daughter if you do away with the Salic law) who cares more about their own lives than those of the population.
So I don’t think technology level plays a decisive factor. It probably will improve things for the monarchy, since famines are a good way to start a revolution, but giving absolute power to people without a good fail-safe when you’ve got a bad ruler seems like a good way to rot a system from the inside.
I was in a Chinese university around Geoge W. Bush’s second election and afterwards, which didn’t make it easy to convince Chinese students that Democracy was a particularly good system for picking competent leaders (Chinese leaders are often graduates from prestigious universities like Tsinghua (where I was), which is more like MIT than like Yale, and they are generally very serious and competent, though not particularly telegenic). On the other hand, the Chinese system gets you people like Mao.
I don’t think Mao could exactly be said to be a product of the Chinese system, seeing as unless you construe the “Chinese system” to include revolutions, it necessarily postdates him.
I’m not necessarily saying that democracy is the best thing ever. I just have issues jumping from “democracies aren’t really as good as you’re supposed to believe” to “and therefore a monarchy is better.”
I feel I should point out the Chinese system was not what got Mao into power. Instituting the Chinese system is what got him into power. And this system saw massive reform since then.
Bullets 5 and 6 of this MoreRight article point out some reactionary ideas to assuage your concerns. Like Mr. Anissimov notes, it is necessary not only to consider the harm such a failure mode might cause, but also to compare it to failure modes that are likely to arise in demotist systems. Reactionary thought also includes the idea that good systems of government align their incentives such that the well-being of their ruler coincides with that of their people, so a perfectly selfish son should not be nearly as much of a concern as an stupid or evil one.
Picture an alternative Earth Prime where monarchies dominated the political landscape and democracies were seen as inconsequential political curiosities. In this Earth Prime, can you not imagine that textbooks and teachers might instead point out equally plausible-sounding problems with democracy, such as the fact that politicians face selection pressures to cut off their time horizons around the time of their next election? Can you not imagine pointing to small democracies in their world with failures analogous to failures of democracies in our world, and declaring “Q.E.D.”? How sure are you that what you are taught is a complete and unbiased analysis of political history, carried out by sufficiently smart and rational people that massive errors of interpretation are unlikely, and transmitted to you with high fidelity?
How sure are you that what you are taught is a complete and unbiased analysis of political history, carried out by sufficiently smart and rational people that massive errors of interpretation are unlikely, and transmitted to you with high fidelity?
I don’t think you have to be (certainly I am not,) not to put much credence in Reaction. From the premise that political history is conventionally taught in a biased and flawed manner, it does not follow that Reaction is unbiased or correct.
The tendency to see society as being in a constant state of decline, descending from some golden age, is positively ancient, and seems to be capable of arising even in cases where there is no real golden age to look back on, unless society really started going downhill with the invention of writing. There is no shortage of compelling biases to motivate individuals to adopt a Reactionary viewpoint, so for someone attempting to judge how likely the narrative is to be correct, they need to look, not for whether there are arguments for Reaction at all, but whether those arguments are significantly stronger than they would have predicted given a knowledge of how well people tend to support other ideologies outside the mainstream.
I don’t think you have to be (certainly I am not,) not to put much credence in Reaction. From the premise that political history is conventionally taught in a biased and flawed manner, it does not follow that Reaction is unbiased or correct.
Of course not; even if you reject the current conventional narrative, it still takes a lot of evidence to pinpoint Reaction as a plausible alternative (nevermind a substantially correct one). But Mathias was basically saying that the models and case studies of monarchy he studied in his history classes provided him with such a high prior probability that monarchy “doesn’t work” that he couldn’t imagine why anybody could possibly be a monarchist in this day and age. I was arguing that the evidence he received therein might not have been quite as strong as he felt it to be.
Or perhaps because historical monarchies didn’t have the same level of technology that modern liberal democracies enjoy?
At the given time, they were replaced by democracies with the same technology level they had.
The argument could be constructed that for different levels of technology, different form of government is optimal. Which sound plausible. For a very low technology level, living in a tribe was the best way of life. For higher level, it was a theocracy or monarchy. For yet higher level, it was a democracy (and this is why the old monarchies are gone). And for even higher level (today in the first world), it is monarchy again.
It’s a bit suspicious that the monarchy is the optimal form of government twice, but not impossible. (Although it is better to have opinions because most evidence points towards them, not merely because they are not completely impossible.)
Or perhaps because historical monarchies didn’t have the same level of technology that modern liberal democracies enjoy?
At the given time, they were replaced by democracies with the same technology level they had.
That response is nonsense, an unfair reading. Jaime already offered your hypothesis immediately preceding:
Is it because monarchies have had a tendency to turn into democracies?
He explicitly says that means something completely different.
I imagine that he means, quite correctly, that many comparisons between democracies and monarchies fail to compare examples at the same technology level.
As to the other point, I doubt Jaime thinks that monarchies turning into democracies is a very good argument in favor of democracies, just that it is a common implicit argument. I doubt that there are many people who think that monarchy is a good form of government at two technological levels, separated by democracy. Generally people who condemn democracy think that it was a mistake, perhaps historically contingent, or perhaps a natural tendency of technology, but one to be fought. Some reactionaries hold that this is a good time to pursue non-democracies, but usually because democracy is finally self-destructing, not because technological pressures have reversed course.
But monarchies turning into democracies is evidence against the stability of monarchies, and some reactionaries do implicitly make the argument that technology favors monarchy in two different periods.
why go to a system of governance that has previously shown not to work?
Because you are so incredibly smart that today you will get everything right, and those old mistakes done by lesser minds are completely irrelevant...?
Maybe it’s not about people really wanting to live under some majesty’s rule, but about an irresistable opportunity to say that you are smarter than everyone else, and you have already found a solution for all humanity’s problems.
(This was originally my observation of Communists of the smarter type, but it seems to apply to Neoreactionaries as well.)
Even before reading it, I already agree that democracy does not work the way people originally thought it would, and some pretend it works even today. (People voting to get money from their neighbors’ pockets. Idiots who know nothing and want to learn nothing, but their vote is just as important as Einstein’s. Media ownership being the critical factor in elections.)
That just doesn’t give me enough confidence that my solution would be better. Let’s say it would avoid some specific problems of democracy successfully. How about new problems? (Or merely repetition of the old ones, enhanced by the modern technology.)
Einstein was a physicist. He probably had more sense about politics than random inattentive person who votes on the basis of emotion, but I’m going to hope that people who actually know something about politics get influence by writing and/or politicking. Their influence isn’t limited to their vote.
To quote myself on what I consider is plausibly better than democracy:
Futarchy for starters. Neocameralism proposed by Mencius Moldbug might work better but is risky. City state oligarchies. Anarchy-Capitalism if you can get it. A Republic with limited franchise if you can keep it. A properly set up monarchy. Even democratic technocracy, where democratic element would have about as much role in governance as the Monarchy part does in the Constitutional Monarchy of the United Kingdom. Arguably we are nearly there anyway.
Neocameralism in paritcular is something that is possibly still more popular among Neoreactionaries than democracy. Here I briefly explain it:
Neocameralism by Moldbug which is basically to have the state be guided by the profit motive and have such overwhelming military force that uses crypto lock technology to enforce it has no reason to brainwash its citizens since they don’t have the military force to matter politically. They can’t seize the government/companies assets. The profit motive together with the corporate structure keeps most of them from being hijacked by its CEO as well as keeps most of them nice to its customers (citizens). You can make sure it will be nice by give stock options to specialized efficient charities. Basically divide the state between the rent extracting part and the goodness generating part people expect, min-max both, pair them up in a single adventuring party and enjoy your munchkinized society. Obviously it kind of sucks if you discover things people really really like spending money on but hurt them, but hey democracy would collapse at that too.
Well, the neoreactionaries claim that strong monarchies will be more stable, and less subject to needing to satisfy the fickle whims of the population. There is some validity to at least part of the argument: long-term projects may do better in dictatorships. Look for example at the US space program: there’s an argument that part of why it has stalled is that each President, desiring to have a long-lasting legacy, makes major changes to the program’s long-term goals, so every few years a lot of work in progress is scrapped. Certainly that’s happened with the last three Presidents. And the only President whose project really stayed beyond his office was JFK, who had the convenience of being a martyr and having a VP who then cared a lot about the space program’s goals.
However, the more general notion that monarchies are more stable as a whole is empirically false, as discussed in the anti-reaction FAQ.
What I suspect may be happening here is a general love for what is seen as old, from when things were better. Neoreaction may have as its core motivation a combination of cynicism for the modern with romanticism about the past.
If you do read any of the pro-reaction stuff linked to by K (or the steelman of reaction by Yvain) I suggest you then read Yvain’s anti-reaction FAQ which provides a large amount of actual data.
Thank you. I’ll read the FAQ, it seems exhaustive and informative.
And as I hope I made clear, I can certainly understand the notion that “democracy isn’t awesome”. But I don’t get the jump from there to “a monarchy will be better.”
Yvain’s anti-reaction FAQ shows nothing of the sort. It cherry-picks a few examples. To compare the stability of democracies and monarchies, a much broader historical comparison is needed. I’m working on one now, but people should really read their history. Few of those who confidently claim monarchies are unstable have more than a smidgen of serious reading on Renaissance Europe under their belts.
Considering that your response relies heavily on deciding who is or isn’t “demotist”, it might help to address Yvain’s criticism that the idea isn’t a well-defined one. The issue of monarchs who claim to speak for the people is a serious one. Simply labeling dictators one doesn’t like a demotist doesn’t really do much. Similarly, your response also apparently ignores Yvain’s discussion of the British monarchy.
Napoleon was a populist Revolutionary leader. That should be well-understood.
I’m not convinced that this is a meaningful category. It is similarly connected to how you blame assassins and other issues on the populist revolutions: if historically monarchies lead to these repeatedly, then there’s a definite problem in saying that that’s the fault of the demotist tendencies, when the same things have not by and large happens in democracies once they’ve been around for a few years.
Also, while Napoleon styled himself as a populist revolutionary leader, he came to power from the coup of 18 Brumaire, through military strength, not reliance on the common people. In fact, many historians see that event as the end of the French Revolution.
While I understand that responding to everything Yvain has to say is difficult, I’d rather read a complete and persuasive response three months from now than an unpersuasive one right now. By all means, feel free to take your time if you need it.
All of these have issues, I like Nick Land’s one best, Moldbug is probably easier to read if you are used to the writing style here, Scott’s is the best writer of the three, but deficient and makes subtle mistakes since he isn’t reactionary.
My own summary of some points that are often made would be:
If you build a society based on consent, don’t be surprised if consent factories come to dominate your society. What reactionaries call the Cathedral is machinery that naturally arises when the best way to power is hacking opinions of masses of people to consent to whatever you have in store for them. We claim the beliefs this machine produces has no consistent relation to reality and is just stuck in a feedback loop of giving itself more and more power over society. Power in society thus truly lies with the civil service, academia and journalists not elected officials, who have very little to do with actual governing. This can be shown by interesting examples like the EU repeating referendums until they achieve the desired results or Belgium’s 589 days without elected government. Their nongovernment managed to have little difficulty doing things with important political implications like nationalizing a major bank.
Moral Progress hasn’t happened. Moral change has, we rationalize the latter as progress. Whig history is bunk.
The modern world allows only a very small window of allowed policy experimentation. Things like seasteading, charter cities are ideas we like but think will not be allowed to blossom if they should breach the narrow window of experimentation allowed among current Western nations.
Democracy is overvalued, monarchy is undervalued. This translates to some advocating monarchy and others dreaming up new systems of government that take this into account.
McCarthy was basically right about the extent of Communist influence in the United States of America after the 1940s. We have weird things like the Harvard Crimson magazine endorsing the Khmer Rouge in the 70s! or FDR’s main negotiator at Yalta being a Soviet spy cropping up constantly when we examine the strange and alien 20th century. McCarthy used some ethically questionable methods against Communists (and yes most of his targets where actual Communists), but if you check them out in detail you will see they are no more extreme or questionable than the ones we have for nearly 80 years now routinely used against Fascists. Why do we live in a Brown scare society while the short second Red scare is by many treated like one of the gravest threats against liberal democracy ever? Why where western intellectuals consistently deluded on Communism from at least the 1920s to as late as the 1980s if they are as trustworthy as they claim?
Psychological differences exist between ethnic groups and between the sexes and these should have implications for into issues like women in combat, affirmative action or immigration.
The horror show of the aftermath of decolonization in some Third World countries was a preventable disaster on the scale of Communist atrocities.
The first three are meta arguments, that contribute to the last four which are object level assessments, that you can make without resorting to the meta arguments.
The claim that the morality of a society doesn’t steadily, generally, and inexorably increase over time is not the same as the claim that there will be no examples of things that can be reasonably explained as increases in societal morality. If morality is an aggregate of bounded random walks, you’d still expect some of those walks to go up.
To return to the case at hand: the decline of lynching may be an improvement in one area, but you have to weigh it against the explosions in the imprisonment and illegitimacy rates, the total societal collapse of a demographic that makes up over a tenth of the population, drug abuse, knockout games, and so on.
To return to the case at hand: the decline of lynching may be an improvement in one area, but you have to weigh it against the explosions in the imprisonment and illegitimacy rates, the total societal collapse of a demographic that makes up over a tenth of the population, drug abuse, knockout games, and so on.
Do you think there’s a causal connection between the decline of lynching and the various ills you’ve listed?
How is causality relevant? The absence of continuous general increase is enough to falsify the Whig-history hypothesis, given that the Whig-history hypothesis is nothing more than the hypothesis of continuous general increase—unless we add to the hypothesis the possibility of ‘counterrevolutionary’ periods where immoral, anti-Whig groups take power and immorality increases, but expressing concern over things like illegitimacy rates, knockout games, and inner-city dysfunction is an outgroup marker for Whigs.
Demonstrating causality would be doing more work than is necessary. To argue against the hypothesis that the values of A, B, C, … are all increasing, you don’t need to show that an increase in the value of A leads to decreases in any of B, C, …; you just need to demonstrate that the value of at least one of A, B, C, … is not increasing.
(To avert the negative connotations the above paragraph would likely otherwise have: no, I don’t think the decline of lynching caused those various ills.)
To return to the case at hand: the decline of lynching (A) may be an improvement in one area, but you have to weigh it against the explosions in the imprisonment (B) and illegitimacy rates (C), the total societal collapse of a demographic that makes up over a tenth of the population (D), drug abuse (E), knockout games (???), and so on.
(parentheticals added).
You were originally arguing that some weighted sum of A, B, C… was increasing. NancyLebovitz was pointing out that A has clearly decreased, and so for the sum to increase on average, there has to be a correlation between A decreasing and B, C, … increasing. Then she asked if you thought this correlation was causal.
In response, you punted and changed the argument to:
The absence of continuous general increase is enough to falsify the Whig-history hypothesis, given that the Whig-history hypothesis is nothing more than the hypothesis of continuous general increase
which was a really nice tautological argument.
So while showing causality is “more work than is necessary” for disproving the straw-Whiggery of your previous comment, it doesn’t mean anything for the point NancyLebovitz was raising.
I think people not being assaulted and killed by an angry crowd is good. Vigilantism is a sign of a deficient justice system and insufficient pacification of the population, thus poor governance. I’m happy at the reduction of lynching, but I’m unhappy at the increase of other indicators of depacification and deficient justice systems that seem to have grown worse in Western society.
As a side note this is still a disturbingly common phenomena of mob violence from Nigeria to Madagascar, not to mention Southern Asia and some Latin American countries. I’m also sadly quite unconvinced no lynchings occur in Western states for that matter.
If you build a society based on consent, don’t be surprised if consent factories come to dominate your society.
That isn’t an argument amounting to right is right, since the left has its own version...see Chomskys manufactured consent.
What’s more,manufactured consent existed in societies that didn’t run on consent., in the form of actual sermons preached in actual churches and actual cathdrals.
My own attempt at a limited view of moral progress has the following features:
Economic growth, largely driven by secular trends in technology, has resulted in greater surpluses that may be directed towards non-survival goals (c/f Yvain’s “Strive/survive” theorising), some of which form the prerequisites of higher forms of civilisation, and some of which are effectively moral window-dressing.
As per the Cathedral hypothesis, with officially sanctioned knowledge only being related to reality through the likely perverse incentives of the consent factory, this surplus has also been directed towards orthogonal or outright maladaptive goals (in cyclical views of history, Decadence itself).
We no longer have to rationalise the privations of older, poorer societies. This is the sense in which linear moral progress is the most genuine (c/f CEV).
The interaction between the dynamics of holier-than-thou moralising and the anticipatory experience of no longer having to rationalise poverty is complicated. Examination of history reveals the drive for levelling and equalisation to be omnipresent, if not consistently exploitable.
What is neoreactionaryism?
The anti-reaction FAQ describes it as “Neoreaction is a political ideology supporting a return to traditional ideas of government and society, especially traditional monarchy and an ethno-nationalist state. It sees itself opposed to modern ideas like democracy, human rights, multiculturalism, and secularism. ” As far as I’m aware, neoreactioaries do not object to that description.
I feel this is a stupid question, but I’d rather ask it than not knowing: Why would anyone want that? I can understand opposing things like: democracy, secularism and multiculturalism, but replacing them with a traditional monarchy just doesn’t seem right. And I don’t mean morally, I just don’t see how it could create a working society.
I can fully understand opposing certain ideas, but if you’re against democracy because it doesn’t work, why go to a system of governance that has previously shown not to work?
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.
The obvious question here is, why do you think monarchy has been “shown not to work”? Is it because monarchies have had a tendency to turn into democracies? Or perhaps because historical monarchies didn’t have the same level of technology that modern liberal democracies enjoy?
That question is kinda obvious. Thanks for pointing it out.
From what I remember from my History classes, monarchies worked pretty okay with an enlightened autocrat who made benefiting the state and the populace as his or her prime goal. But the problem there was that they didn’t stay in power and they had no real way of making absolutely sure their children had the same values. All it takes to mess things up is one oldest son (or daughter if you do away with the Salic law) who cares more about their own lives than those of the population.
So I don’t think technology level plays a decisive factor. It probably will improve things for the monarchy, since famines are a good way to start a revolution, but giving absolute power to people without a good fail-safe when you’ve got a bad ruler seems like a good way to rot a system from the inside.
I was in a Chinese university around Geoge W. Bush’s second election and afterwards, which didn’t make it easy to convince Chinese students that Democracy was a particularly good system for picking competent leaders (Chinese leaders are often graduates from prestigious universities like Tsinghua (where I was), which is more like MIT than like Yale, and they are generally very serious and competent, though not particularly telegenic). On the other hand, the Chinese system gets you people like Mao.
I don’t think Mao could exactly be said to be a product of the Chinese system, seeing as unless you construe the “Chinese system” to include revolutions, it necessarily postdates him.
I totally agree, and in addition, Mao is the kind of leader that could get elected in a democracy.
However, a democracy may be getting rid of someone like Mao than China was (provided the democracy stats).
I’m not necessarily saying that democracy is the best thing ever. I just have issues jumping from “democracies aren’t really as good as you’re supposed to believe” to “and therefore a monarchy is better.”
I feel I should point out the Chinese system was not what got Mao into power. Instituting the Chinese system is what got him into power. And this system saw massive reform since then.
Bullets 5 and 6 of this MoreRight article point out some reactionary ideas to assuage your concerns. Like Mr. Anissimov notes, it is necessary not only to consider the harm such a failure mode might cause, but also to compare it to failure modes that are likely to arise in demotist systems. Reactionary thought also includes the idea that good systems of government align their incentives such that the well-being of their ruler coincides with that of their people, so a perfectly selfish son should not be nearly as much of a concern as an stupid or evil one.
Picture an alternative Earth Prime where monarchies dominated the political landscape and democracies were seen as inconsequential political curiosities. In this Earth Prime, can you not imagine that textbooks and teachers might instead point out equally plausible-sounding problems with democracy, such as the fact that politicians face selection pressures to cut off their time horizons around the time of their next election? Can you not imagine pointing to small democracies in their world with failures analogous to failures of democracies in our world, and declaring “Q.E.D.”? How sure are you that what you are taught is a complete and unbiased analysis of political history, carried out by sufficiently smart and rational people that massive errors of interpretation are unlikely, and transmitted to you with high fidelity?
I don’t think you have to be (certainly I am not,) not to put much credence in Reaction. From the premise that political history is conventionally taught in a biased and flawed manner, it does not follow that Reaction is unbiased or correct.
The tendency to see society as being in a constant state of decline, descending from some golden age, is positively ancient, and seems to be capable of arising even in cases where there is no real golden age to look back on, unless society really started going downhill with the invention of writing. There is no shortage of compelling biases to motivate individuals to adopt a Reactionary viewpoint, so for someone attempting to judge how likely the narrative is to be correct, they need to look, not for whether there are arguments for Reaction at all, but whether those arguments are significantly stronger than they would have predicted given a knowledge of how well people tend to support other ideologies outside the mainstream.
Of course not; even if you reject the current conventional narrative, it still takes a lot of evidence to pinpoint Reaction as a plausible alternative (nevermind a substantially correct one). But Mathias was basically saying that the models and case studies of monarchy he studied in his history classes provided him with such a high prior probability that monarchy “doesn’t work” that he couldn’t imagine why anybody could possibly be a monarchist in this day and age. I was arguing that the evidence he received therein might not have been quite as strong as he felt it to be.
At the given time, they were replaced by democracies with the same technology level they had.
The argument could be constructed that for different levels of technology, different form of government is optimal. Which sound plausible. For a very low technology level, living in a tribe was the best way of life. For higher level, it was a theocracy or monarchy. For yet higher level, it was a democracy (and this is why the old monarchies are gone). And for even higher level (today in the first world), it is monarchy again.
It’s a bit suspicious that the monarchy is the optimal form of government twice, but not impossible. (Although it is better to have opinions because most evidence points towards them, not merely because they are not completely impossible.)
That response is nonsense, an unfair reading. Jaime already offered your hypothesis immediately preceding:
He explicitly says that means something completely different.
I imagine that he means, quite correctly, that many comparisons between democracies and monarchies fail to compare examples at the same technology level.
As to the other point, I doubt Jaime thinks that monarchies turning into democracies is a very good argument in favor of democracies, just that it is a common implicit argument. I doubt that there are many people who think that monarchy is a good form of government at two technological levels, separated by democracy. Generally people who condemn democracy think that it was a mistake, perhaps historically contingent, or perhaps a natural tendency of technology, but one to be fought. Some reactionaries hold that this is a good time to pursue non-democracies, but usually because democracy is finally self-destructing, not because technological pressures have reversed course.
But monarchies turning into democracies is evidence against the stability of monarchies, and some reactionaries do implicitly make the argument that technology favors monarchy in two different periods.
Because you are so incredibly smart that today you will get everything right, and those old mistakes done by lesser minds are completely irrelevant...?
Maybe it’s not about people really wanting to live under some majesty’s rule, but about an irresistable opportunity to say that you are smarter than everyone else, and you have already found a solution for all humanity’s problems.
(This was originally my observation of Communists of the smarter type, but it seems to apply to Neoreactionaries as well.)
Read ten pages of “Democracy: the God That Failed” and see if you still feel that there’s so little substance to what we believe.
Even before reading it, I already agree that democracy does not work the way people originally thought it would, and some pretend it works even today. (People voting to get money from their neighbors’ pockets. Idiots who know nothing and want to learn nothing, but their vote is just as important as Einstein’s. Media ownership being the critical factor in elections.)
That just doesn’t give me enough confidence that my solution would be better. Let’s say it would avoid some specific problems of democracy successfully. How about new problems? (Or merely repetition of the old ones, enhanced by the modern technology.)
Einstein was a physicist. He probably had more sense about politics than random inattentive person who votes on the basis of emotion, but I’m going to hope that people who actually know something about politics get influence by writing and/or politicking. Their influence isn’t limited to their vote.
In fact, Einstein was pretty politically active and influential, largely as a socialist, pacifist, and mild Zionist.
To quote myself on what I consider is plausibly better than democracy:
Neocameralism in paritcular is something that is possibly still more popular among Neoreactionaries than democracy. Here I briefly explain it:
Well, the neoreactionaries claim that strong monarchies will be more stable, and less subject to needing to satisfy the fickle whims of the population. There is some validity to at least part of the argument: long-term projects may do better in dictatorships. Look for example at the US space program: there’s an argument that part of why it has stalled is that each President, desiring to have a long-lasting legacy, makes major changes to the program’s long-term goals, so every few years a lot of work in progress is scrapped. Certainly that’s happened with the last three Presidents. And the only President whose project really stayed beyond his office was JFK, who had the convenience of being a martyr and having a VP who then cared a lot about the space program’s goals.
However, the more general notion that monarchies are more stable as a whole is empirically false, as discussed in the anti-reaction FAQ.
What I suspect may be happening here is a general love for what is seen as old, from when things were better. Neoreaction may have as its core motivation a combination of cynicism for the modern with romanticism about the past.
If you do read any of the pro-reaction stuff linked to by K (or the steelman of reaction by Yvain) I suggest you then read Yvain’s anti-reaction FAQ which provides a large amount of actual data.
Thank you. I’ll read the FAQ, it seems exhaustive and informative.
And as I hope I made clear, I can certainly understand the notion that “democracy isn’t awesome”. But I don’t get the jump from there to “a monarchy will be better.”
Read “Democracy: The God That Failed” and “Liberty or Equality” for some basic arguments.
I object to that piece being called a “Steelman of reaction” despite Yvain’s claims in his later piece.
Do you mean that the piece does not do the best case possible, or do you mean that was it is steelmanning is not neoreaction?
Until some certified reactionary can do better....
Yvain’s anti-reaction FAQ shows nothing of the sort. It cherry-picks a few examples. To compare the stability of democracies and monarchies, a much broader historical comparison is needed. I’m working on one now, but people should really read their history. Few of those who confidently claim monarchies are unstable have more than a smidgen of serious reading on Renaissance Europe under their belts.
I look forward to you response when it is published. As of right now, that’s an assertion without data.
Here: Response to Yvain on “Anti-Reactionary FAQ”: Lightning Round, Part 2 — Austrian Edition.
Considering that your response relies heavily on deciding who is or isn’t “demotist”, it might help to address Yvain’s criticism that the idea isn’t a well-defined one. The issue of monarchs who claim to speak for the people is a serious one. Simply labeling dictators one doesn’t like a demotist doesn’t really do much. Similarly, your response also apparently ignores Yvain’s discussion of the British monarchy.
It’s just a small slice of a response, I can’t respond to everything at once...
Napoleon was a populist Revolutionary leader. That should be well-understood.
For something more substantial, try “Democracy: the God That Failed” by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
I’m not convinced that this is a meaningful category. It is similarly connected to how you blame assassins and other issues on the populist revolutions: if historically monarchies lead to these repeatedly, then there’s a definite problem in saying that that’s the fault of the demotist tendencies, when the same things have not by and large happens in democracies once they’ve been around for a few years.
Also, while Napoleon styled himself as a populist revolutionary leader, he came to power from the coup of 18 Brumaire, through military strength, not reliance on the common people. In fact, many historians see that event as the end of the French Revolution.
While I understand that responding to everything Yvain has to say is difficult, I’d rather read a complete and persuasive response three months from now than an unpersuasive one right now. By all means, feel free to take your time if you need it.
There are three decent starting points:
The Dark Enlightenment (The Complete Series) by the British philosopher Land, 28k word count
The open letter to open minded Progressives series by Mencius Moldbug, 120k word count
Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell by Scott Alexander aka Yvain, 16k word count
All of these have issues, I like Nick Land’s one best, Moldbug is probably easier to read if you are used to the writing style here, Scott’s is the best writer of the three, but deficient and makes subtle mistakes since he isn’t reactionary.
My own summary of some points that are often made would be:
If you build a society based on consent, don’t be surprised if consent factories come to dominate your society. What reactionaries call the Cathedral is machinery that naturally arises when the best way to power is hacking opinions of masses of people to consent to whatever you have in store for them. We claim the beliefs this machine produces has no consistent relation to reality and is just stuck in a feedback loop of giving itself more and more power over society. Power in society thus truly lies with the civil service, academia and journalists not elected officials, who have very little to do with actual governing. This can be shown by interesting examples like the EU repeating referendums until they achieve the desired results or Belgium’s 589 days without elected government. Their nongovernment managed to have little difficulty doing things with important political implications like nationalizing a major bank.
Moral Progress hasn’t happened. Moral change has, we rationalize the latter as progress. Whig history is bunk.
The modern world allows only a very small window of allowed policy experimentation. Things like seasteading, charter cities are ideas we like but think will not be allowed to blossom if they should breach the narrow window of experimentation allowed among current Western nations.
Democracy is overvalued, monarchy is undervalued. This translates to some advocating monarchy and others dreaming up new systems of government that take this into account.
McCarthy was basically right about the extent of Communist influence in the United States of America after the 1940s. We have weird things like the Harvard Crimson magazine endorsing the Khmer Rouge in the 70s! or FDR’s main negotiator at Yalta being a Soviet spy cropping up constantly when we examine the strange and alien 20th century. McCarthy used some ethically questionable methods against Communists (and yes most of his targets where actual Communists), but if you check them out in detail you will see they are no more extreme or questionable than the ones we have for nearly 80 years now routinely used against Fascists. Why do we live in a Brown scare society while the short second Red scare is by many treated like one of the gravest threats against liberal democracy ever? Why where western intellectuals consistently deluded on Communism from at least the 1920s to as late as the 1980s if they are as trustworthy as they claim?
Psychological differences exist between ethnic groups and between the sexes and these should have implications for into issues like women in combat, affirmative action or immigration.
The horror show of the aftermath of decolonization in some Third World countries was a preventable disaster on the scale of Communist atrocities.
The first three are meta arguments, that contribute to the last four which are object level assessments, that you can make without resorting to the meta arguments.
Do you think the decline of lynching is mere change rather than progress?
The claim that the morality of a society doesn’t steadily, generally, and inexorably increase over time is not the same as the claim that there will be no examples of things that can be reasonably explained as increases in societal morality. If morality is an aggregate of bounded random walks, you’d still expect some of those walks to go up.
To return to the case at hand: the decline of lynching may be an improvement in one area, but you have to weigh it against the explosions in the imprisonment and illegitimacy rates, the total societal collapse of a demographic that makes up over a tenth of the population, drug abuse, knockout games, and so on.
Do you think there’s a causal connection between the decline of lynching and the various ills you’ve listed?
How is causality relevant? The absence of continuous general increase is enough to falsify the Whig-history hypothesis, given that the Whig-history hypothesis is nothing more than the hypothesis of continuous general increase—unless we add to the hypothesis the possibility of ‘counterrevolutionary’ periods where immoral, anti-Whig groups take power and immorality increases, but expressing concern over things like illegitimacy rates, knockout games, and inner-city dysfunction is an outgroup marker for Whigs.
You need evidence actual decline to justify reaction. Othewise, why reverse random drift?
This is always a bad sign in an argument. If causality doesn’t matter, what does?
Demonstrating causality would be doing more work than is necessary. To argue against the hypothesis that the values of A, B, C, … are all increasing, you don’t need to show that an increase in the value of A leads to decreases in any of B, C, …; you just need to demonstrate that the value of at least one of A, B, C, … is not increasing.
(To avert the negative connotations the above paragraph would likely otherwise have: no, I don’t think the decline of lynching caused those various ills.)
(parentheticals added).
You were originally arguing that some weighted sum of A, B, C… was increasing. NancyLebovitz was pointing out that A has clearly decreased, and so for the sum to increase on average, there has to be a correlation between A decreasing and B, C, … increasing. Then she asked if you thought this correlation was causal.
In response, you punted and changed the argument to:
which was a really nice tautological argument.
So while showing causality is “more work than is necessary” for disproving the straw-Whiggery of your previous comment, it doesn’t mean anything for the point NancyLebovitz was raising.
I think people not being assaulted and killed by an angry crowd is good. Vigilantism is a sign of a deficient justice system and insufficient pacification of the population, thus poor governance. I’m happy at the reduction of lynching, but I’m unhappy at the increase of other indicators of depacification and deficient justice systems that seem to have grown worse in Western society.
As a side note this is still a disturbingly common phenomena of mob violence from Nigeria to Madagascar, not to mention Southern Asia and some Latin American countries. I’m also sadly quite unconvinced no lynchings occur in Western states for that matter.
Here is a recent example.
That isn’t an argument amounting to right is right, since the left has its own version...see Chomskys manufactured consent.
What’s more,manufactured consent existed in societies that didn’t run on consent., in the form of actual sermons preached in actual churches and actual cathdrals.
My own attempt at a limited view of moral progress has the following features:
Economic growth, largely driven by secular trends in technology, has resulted in greater surpluses that may be directed towards non-survival goals (c/f Yvain’s “Strive/survive” theorising), some of which form the prerequisites of higher forms of civilisation, and some of which are effectively moral window-dressing.
As per the Cathedral hypothesis, with officially sanctioned knowledge only being related to reality through the likely perverse incentives of the consent factory, this surplus has also been directed towards orthogonal or outright maladaptive goals (in cyclical views of history, Decadence itself).
We no longer have to rationalise the privations of older, poorer societies. This is the sense in which linear moral progress is the most genuine (c/f CEV).
The interaction between the dynamics of holier-than-thou moralising and the anticipatory experience of no longer having to rationalise poverty is complicated. Examination of history reveals the drive for levelling and equalisation to be omnipresent, if not consistently exploitable.
Word counts: Yvain 16k; Land 28k; Moldbug 120k.
I counted Moldbug from this complete copy.
Useful info, thank you! This reinforces my primary recommendation of Land.