Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Neoreaction and Political Action

Commenter Ollie writes:

I have no complaint against the assertion that men are given to sacrifice, and I also find no objection to the idea that when channeled properly, this tendency can be very beneficial. The ability and will to sacrifice is often one of the primary sources of a civilization’s achievements.

However, I would make the case that the dynamo of noble sacrifice is neither a first cause, nor an inexhaustible resource. Something must exist to spark it and maintain it. I would posit that this will to sacrifice is catalyzed by a precious few types of macro and micro-cultural phenomena, including beauty, kinship, tradition, identity, and trust.

Without the elements on that list, the inborn capacity for determination and sacrifice lies dormant. I suspect those pushing the buttons on the establishment conservative propaganda machine are cognizant of this, but refuse to acknowledge it because it would give away too much – namely that they are working with the establishment left to actively undermine those elements. Instead of managing and sustainably harnessing the capacity for sacrifice, they appear to wringing out what they can from what little remains. It’s like watching someone intentionally drive a car (into oblivion) while refusing to provide it necessary oil changes and other maintenance.

Moving to the next issue you pointed out, NRx may be an elitist movement at heart, but support from a significant part of the general population is an indispensable part of any political movement’s power and viability.

The Tea Party and Occupy movements, as many populist revolts do, suffered from a lack of ideological coherence, and were accordingly divided and dispersed because of this. Exactly as you have said, they didn’t like the New Right’s (NRx’s) suggestions of what to supplant the current power structure with, likely because they are both still wedded to the egalitarian mythos underpinning that current power structure. The problem for Tea Party and Occupy however, is that while they disliked NRx’s suggestions, they hadn’t truly formulated any workable plans of their own.

In retrospect, I should have rephrased the question at the end of my previous comment. Both the out of touch nature of TPTB and the decreasing trust of the masses are readily apparent and almost one in the same when you think about it.

The real question is one of: Just how receptive is at least a physically and electorally significant portion of the general population to the ideas of NRx?

With higher general discontent and lower trust in established institutions, that receptivity grows, but is it enough to establish a functional power base?

If there is not enough support, NRx must remain an ideological backwater, subtly nudging the next generation of conservative leaders toward its ideals. If there is enough support, NRx can push to the forefront of political debate. This puts it in a dangerous but potentially advantageous position, where it will have to clarify and possibly re-conceptualize its platform for wider consumption.

Certainly the failure of the Tea Party and Occupy movements cannot be chalked up to the issues that created them simply going away. That pool of popular resentment has definitely increased. Leaders who see the value in the NRx platform will have to find a way of harnessing that reservoir without destroying the functionality of NRx concepts in the process.

First, a slight correction: the European New Right is distinctly different from neoreaction. There are some similar tendencies, but I think that the publishers who cluster around the ‘New Right’ term would like to maintain the distinction.

I would say that a large portion of the population would have trouble comprehending the ideas. A large proportion would be amenable to a return to European cultural normalcy, but most don’t understand what it would require. Most people aren’t ideological, shouldn’t be ideological, and ideology is not what moves most people. I’m not even particularly ideological, although I know what it’s like to be an ideologue.

In terms of national electoral success, that would be unlikely, and shouldn’t be given much thought at all. Pursuing that strategy misunderstands the nature of the Federal government and its inability to reform. Instead of trying to win over a political structure that has no desire to be won over or reformed, you change the shape and composition of the country instead.

Assuming that debate will carry the day is a fundamental mistake.

There was no debating the Jacobins. They had their debating partners murdered or run out of the country. The mistake that those people made was that in assessing the growing conflict as a debate and not a civil war. They brought their oratory and some money besides on the part of the aristocracy to a gunfight. Bringing words to a gunfight is not a good idea. We know that it was a revolutionary civil war, but they didn’t know that, which is why they did not act more forcefully when it could have made a difference.

Similarly, it’s pointless to debate today’s Jacobins, or to assume that condition of internal war are not coming. Instead of wasting resources on debate, instead it’s better to make explicit and covert appeals to wavering elites and sub-elites who are concerned about the instability in the American government and the increasingly erratic and hazardous nature of the American culture. Debating them just wastes time and results in your party being shot on a riverbank somewhere or near a ditch.

To the extent that debate is useful is the extent to which it persuades a sufficient number of leadership caliber people to defect from the progressive stairway to Heaven, which is really upside-down, because it leads straight to Hell.

To the extent that there is a political goal, it is to bring about successful secession. If that can’t be achieved, then it is to organize an exile on good terms.

Americans tend to identify politics with electioneering, but that’s just a tiny aspect of political action which is by no means the most important one. Since it’d be sort of zany for anti-democrats to focus entirely on building democratic consensus for anti-democracy, it’s better to seek other areas and methods.

Being small and badly-funded, the strategic approach has to be to seek and use points of leverage to achieve out-sized results relative to the input. High end people provide high leverage. Ordinary people, as important as they are in the scheme of things, are unlikely to be able to provide leveraged results. That is, unless some decide to rise to the occasion as ordinary men sometimes do.

Seek unfair advantages and exploit them as hard as possible. Press strengths against weaknesses and maneuver weak points away from the strengths of the opposition.

Populist groups like the ‘Tea Party’ tend to match weakness to strength and strength to weakness, thinking that mimicking the strategy of the opposition is the way to success. They think that they can become strong by imitating the strength of the opponent (hence all the Tea Party types who quote Alinsky and seek to use his methods for conservative political ends).

That can’t possibly result in success. That would be like the Germans building a second, crappier imitation Maginot Line to defeat the French Maginot Line. The way the Germans defeated the Maginot Line was to send something at it that could not be anticipated using a method that was thought to be impossible.

That reservoir of resentment of which Ollie speaks can be used for various ends, both good and ill.

Populist movements were more politically effective when mass military action was more effective. Masses and mobs are now politically and militarily ineffective. Employing out-dated political means that confer no advantage is a sure way to defeat.

Instead of attempting to set up a symmetrical conflict, it’s much better to develop a set of asymmetrical advantages, and then push them as far as they’ll go. People tend to think excessively in ludic terms, but nature is an open field, and unequal contests which are over in an eyeblink are the rule. Equal conflicts have to be contrived.

There’s a tendency for American conservatives to try to assemble equal, fair conflicts — which they lose, each time — and then they complain that it was unfair, appealing to the rule-book, as if there’s a referee who will call a penalty.

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Are Smart People Being Inappropriately Excluded?

Via Bryce Laliberte comes a compelling article which argues that high IQ people are being systematically discriminated against within corporate bureaucracies and other institutions:

 In other words, a significant percentage of people with IQs over 140 are being systematically and, most likely inappropriately, excluded from the population that addresses the biggest problems of our time or who are responsible for assuring the efficient operation of social, scientific, political and economic institutions.  This benefits neither the excluded group nor society in general. For society, it is a horrendous waste of a very valuable resource.  For the high IQ person it is a personal tragedy commonly resulting in unrealized social, educational and productive potential.

The very limited research that has been done on this phenomenon has focused on possible flaws in high IQ people that might explain the exclusion.  However, the evidence that exists suggests that it is the result of inappropriate educational and productive environments within which the high IQ person must strive to succeed. Consequently, remediation should focus on creating more appropriate environments.

The data point he uses to draw this larger conclusion seems flawed (assuming that under-representation in what he calls the elite professions is evidence of exclusion), but anecdotally, it rings true for me, even though I’m at the bottom rung of the scale — perhaps even a bit under it — that he’s talking about, which probably helps to explain why I have an easy time relating to a range going from the slightly above average to the highly intelligent, but have a lot of trouble comprehending people on the normal area of the scale and below.

Erik von Kuenelt-Leddihn makes similar points in his books about the social nature of leftism in “Leftism Revisited” (p. 19):

The nonconforming person or group sinning against the sacred principle of sameness will always be treated as a traitor, and if he is not a traitor the envious majority will push him in that direction… Thus to be different will be treated as or made into treason. And even if the formula Nonconformist-Traitor will not always be promulgated with such clarity, it lurks at the back of modern man’s mind only too often, whether he openly embraces totalitarianism or no.

The American nation has a purpose, and that overriding purpose is equality. People who threaten that goal are excluded, because they can’t help but deflate the pretense that it’s possible.

If you find yourself excluded because of intelligence, you might want to adopt a more taciturn personality around people on the lower end of the scale. Yes, it may be unjust, but it’ll help you adapt to the situation. Don’t show your cards. People can sniff out high intelligence no matter how hard you try to hide it, and you want to avoid obvious flourish unless you’re in a secure position. It’s rude, otherwise.

People with high intelligence will often find greater success outside of bureaucracies, also. Instead of complaining that bureaucracy treats you poorly, find a way to secure a position without relying on conforming socially to a dysfunctional, egalitarian society.

You might even want to pretend to be an affable idiot, like an actor playing a part.

Since the late 1960s and 1970s, a cultural stereotype emerged — the ‘nerd’ — which didn’t really exist to the extent that it once did. The intelligent were trained, rather than instructed to embrace the Aristotelian mean, that the highly intelligent were physically weak, socially maladroit, obsessed with fantasies, and low status.

Many unfortunate young men chose to embrace this ‘identity group’ — and identity is an attempt to achieve sameness, even if that identity group is one of being an outsider from the herd — in part because their existence threatened the egalitarian dream espoused by the new socialists.

The popular image of ‘scientist’ went from the suave, confident Richard Feynman to the popular portrayal of scientists today as effeminate hysterics on the sitcom ‘Big Bang Theory.’

Leftism by its nature is both narcissistic and herd-oriented. With a functional social hierarchy, the intelligent and capable can be put to work for the benefit of a given country or other broader social group which is internally diverse in terms of intellectual capability. When the herd principle dominates, the normal man tends to see the capable man as an active threat to his position, and works to displace him. They will clip the tall poppies to make the mediocre appear to be better and more valuable than they really are.

This tends to be the case in the majority of human societies. The majority of human societies are semi-functional, impoverished, and prone to routine catastrophe, causing mass death. The civilizations which value and reward excellence are rare and unusual.

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Flanking Republicans from the Right

In fracturing countries, extremists tend to consume the moderates.

When the population and the various power-factions are generally satisfied with the course of things, moderation, or at least tolerance mixed with complaining, tends to do well.

When dissatisfaction is common, extremism finds the waters to be more hospitable than they were previously.

The left singularity accelerates when leftist factions flank one another from the left until the usual starvation and civil conflict follow.

Flanking maneuvers work so well on the human animal because our eyes are plopped on the flat fronts of our faces. We’re vulnerable from the back and the side. We can only focus on one or two things at a time. The mainstream left is mostly focused on keeping the mainstream right contained, and the mainstream right also performs that function, because it’s really just a mislabeled faction of the left.

While the focus of those factions is on training the Amerikaners in what is acceptable to say and believe, the same controlled opposition can be hit from the right. The easiest opening  get this started is to demoralize the people who manufacture the American conservative identity group, and otherwise run interference on their attempts to keep right-leaning professionals and others in line.

Professionals are especially sensitive to events like the Brenden Eich purging, because it means that when they achieve their career ambitions, there’s a solid chance that they will lose much of what they’ve worked for in life owing to their anodyne associations with mainstream conservative opinion. If mainstream conservatives can’t even protect a prominent technical executive like Eich from being fired, they’re worse than useless and deserve no money or support.

They deserve derision and destruction, instead.

At an even higher level than the professional classes which make up the subscriber bases of niche conservative magazines are the donors and attendees to conferences of the higher class right-leaning foundations. These foundations, too, are useless to their donors, and these facts should be made completely clear to the men who lard their coffers to no effect.

Given that the left is becoming more aggressive, and will continue to become so, the reaction emerges as an attempt at creating a countervailing force. This is one of the reasons why it tends to intimidate and occasionally panic leftists, whereas they see conservatives as mostly safe punching-bags who will back down whenever they’re directly challenged.

Attacking the GOP through the primary process has been attempted, and it has failed. That attempt is the ‘Tea Party.’ It was easy for the GOP to absorb that attack — it even gained from it, because it temporarily revitalized the enthusiasm of the party base, giving them hope that they would gain some real power from it.

The better way to think about it is that voting is to power as pornography is to sex. Power over territory is what the Amerikaners want — seek that, instead of the cheap substitute which lacks the substance. The democratic process is all about providing the vicarious fantasy of power to the average man. The real thing is better.

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