The Cusp of the Next Revolution
Understanding modern "neo-reactionary" politics
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The Cusp of the Next Revolution
Recently, I’ve been head down into the work of Nick Land. For those unfamiliar with Land’s work, he is an “underground” philosopher who—to very little fanfare or recognition—pioneered many of the ideas associated with Accelerationism; an apolitical philosophical movement advocating political, cultural, and economic change through exponential technological growth.
Over time, Land’s philosophy shifted towards what we’d describe as “Neo-reactionary”. For brevity’s sake, I won’t attempt to tease out the numerous definitions or descriptions of what this movement means, or attempts to mean. Rather, I’ll present one concise sentence that Land used as a tent to house the numerous Neo-reactionary (NRx) ideas and factions: Hostility to coercive egalitarianism and a general sense that Western civilization is going to hell.
Land, like Curtis Yarvin, Steve Sailer, and Venture Capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, stands in fundamental opposition to the central tenets of both progressive and enlightenment liberal thought. In short:
Enlightenment Liberalism has created a machine that eats its own tail and has no mechanisms to slow down bureaucratic control.
Sets of laws, court decrees, and institutional change are not reflections of an increase of personal sovereignty, but rather, they reflect philosophical pronouncements that create a direct in-group control mechanism that ostracizes free thought.
“Democracy” is the marketing strategy used by an entrenched and elite “cathedral” class that cannot diminish its power
To you or I—who have grown up with and may continue to hold tightly onto the idea of the “American Promise”—the complexity of what these ideas mean in practice, is diminished under the philosophical anxiety that they initially cause.
We’re all familiar with the radical leftist who dreams of institutional collapse for the sake of implementing an even more dysfunctional and murderous form of bureaucratic control. But few of us, on both political spectrums, can grasp the idea that, perhaps, our system of government is on an inevitable crash course of implosion.
For Land, Yarvin, and other thinkers associated with NRx thought, their ideas still orbit far outside any sense of reasonable normalcy. These are high-IQ spergs, not owners of muffler shops, teachers, or software engineers. Most of us—myself included—struggle to adopt the theoretical into the tangible. But the case that Land and others make is impossible to ignore. We are between two epochs, straddling the bridge between what came before, and what comes again in the future, and NRx thought (like all emerging political philosophies) is naturally segmented. We have yet to see a coalition form. There are no equivalents to Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and Social Revolutionaries, jostling yet in the decaying halls of power. But conversations are happening, factions are forming, and they are all united under the same internal and external sense that whatever we’ve built is unsustainable and broken.