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The Dark Enlightenment, also called the neo-reactionary movement (sometimes abbreviated to NRx), is an anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, [1] reactionary philosophical and political movement. The term "Dark Enlightenment" is a reaction to the Age of Enlightenment and apologia for the public view of the "Dark Ages".
The ideology generally rejects Whig historiography [2] —the concept that history shows an inevitable progression towards greater liberty and enlightenment, culminating in liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy [2] —in favor of a return to traditional societal constructs and forms of government, including absolute monarchism and other older forms of leadership such as cameralism. [3]
Neo-reactionaries are an informal community of bloggers and political theorists who have been active since the 2000s. Steve Sailer is a contemporary forerunner of the ideology, which also draws influence from philosophers such as Thomas Carlyle and Julius Evola. [4]
In 2007 and 2008, software engineer Curtis Yarvin, writing under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, articulated what would develop into Dark Enlightenment thinking. Yarvin's theories were elaborated and expanded by philosopher Nick Land, who first coined the term Dark Enlightenment in his essay of the same name. [4] [5]
When approached by The Atlantic political affairs reporter Rosie Gray, Yarvin attempted to troll her on Twitter, and blogger Nick B. Steves said that her IQ was inadequate to the task of interviewing him and that, as a journalist, she was "the enemy". [3] By mid-2017, NRx had moved to forums such as the Social Matter online forum, the Hestia Society, and Thermidor Magazine. In 2021, Yarvin appeared on Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Today", where he discussed the United States' withdrawal from Afghanistan and his concept of the "Cathedral", which he claims to be the current aggregation of political power and influential institutions that is controlling the country. [6]
Central to Nick Land's ideas is a belief in freedom's incompatibility with democracy. Land drew inspiration from libertarians such as Peter Thiel, as indicated in his essay The Dark Enlightenment. [7] [ non-primary source needed ] The Dark Enlightenment has been described by journalists and commentators as alt-right and neo-fascist. [2] [8] A 2016 article in New York magazine notes that "Neoreaction has a number of different strains, but perhaps the most important is a form of post-libertarian futurism that, realizing that libertarians aren't likely to win any elections, argues against democracy in favor of authoritarian forms of government." [9]
Andy Beckett stated that "NRx" supporters "believe in the replacement of modern nation-states, democracy and government bureaucracies by authoritarian city states, which on neoreaction blogs sound as much like idealised medieval kingdoms as they do modern enclaves such as Singapore." [10]
According to criminal justice professor George Michael, neoreaction seeks to save its ideal of Western civilization through adoption of a monarchical, or CEO model of government to replace democracy. It also embraces the notion of "acceleration", first articulated by Vladimir Lenin as "worse is better", but in the neoreaction version, the creation and promotion of ever more societal crises hastens the adoption of the neoreactive state instead of a communist one. [11]
Other focuses of neoreaction often include an idealization of physical fitness; a rationalist or utilitarian justification for social stratification based on intelligence, based on either heredity or meritocracy; an embrace of Classical philosophy, and traditional gender roles.[ citation needed ]
Some consider the Dark Enlightenment part of the alt-right, representing its theoretical branch. [2] [12] The Dark Enlightenment has been labelled by some as neo-fascist, [2] and by University of Chichester professor Benjamin Noys [2] as "an acceleration of capitalism to a fascist point." Land disputes the similarity between his ideas and fascism, claiming that "Fascism is a mass anti-capitalist movement," [2] whereas he prefers that "[capitalist] corporate power should become the organizing force in society." [2]
Journalist and pundit James Kirchick states that "although neo-reactionary thinkers disdain the masses and claim to despise populism and people more generally, what ties them to the rest of the alt-right is their unapologetically racist element, their shared misanthropy and their resentment of mismanagement by the ruling elites." [13]
Scholar Andrew Jones, in a 2019 article, postulated that the Dark Enlightenment (i.e. the NeoReactionary Movement) is "key to understanding the Alt-Right" political ideology. [14] "The use of affect theory, postmodern critiques of modernity, and a fixation on critiquing regimes of truth," Jones remarks, "are fundamental to NeoReaction (NRx) and what separates it from other Far-Right theory". [14] Moreover, Jones argues that Dark Enlightenment's fixation on aesthetics, history, and philosophy, as opposed to the traditional empirical approach, distinguishes it from related far-right ideologies.
Historian Joe Mulhall, writing for The Guardian , described Nick Land as "propagating very far-right ideas." [15] Despite neoreaction's limited online audience, Mulhall considers the ideology to have "acted as both a tributary into the alt-right and as a key constituent part [of the alt-right]." [15]
Journalist Andrew Sullivan argues that neoreaction's pessimistic appraisal of democracy dismisses many advances that have been made and that global manufacturing patterns also limit the economic independence that sovereign states can have from one another. [16]
In an article for The Sociological Review , after an examination of neoreaction's core tenets, Roger Burrows deplores the ideology as "hyper-neoliberal, technologically deterministic, anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, pro-eugenicist, racist and, likely, fascist", and ridicules the entire accelerationist framework as a faulty attempt at "mainstreaming... misogynist, racist and fascist discourses." [17] He criticizes neoreaction's racial principles and for their brazen "disavowal of any discourses" advocating for socio-economic equality and, accordingly, considers it a "eugenic philosophy" in favor of what Land deems "hyper-racism". [17]
In political science, a reactionary or a reactionist is a person who holds political views that favor a return to the status quo ante—the previous political state of society—which the person believes possessed positive characteristics that are absent from contemporary society. As a descriptor term, reactionary derives from the ideological context of the left–right political spectrum. As an adjective, the word reactionary describes points of view and policies meant to restore a status quo ante.
Paleoconservatism is a political philosophy and strain of conservatism in the United States stressing American nationalism, Christian ethics, regionalism, traditionalist conservatism, and non-interventionism. Paleoconservatism's concerns overlap with those of the Old Right that opposed the New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s as well as with paleolibertarianism and right-wing populism. By the start of the 21st century, the movement had begun to focus more on issues of race.
Paul Edward Gottfried is an American paleoconservative political philosopher, historian, and writer. He is a former Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He is editor-in-chief of the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles. He is an associated scholar at the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, and the US correspondent of Nouvelle École, a Nouvelle Droite journal.
Paleolibertarianism is a libertarian political activism strategy aimed at uniting libertarians and paleoconservatives. It was developed by American anarcho-capitalist theorists Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell in the American political context after the end of the Cold War. From 1989 to 1995, they sought to communicate libertarian notions of opposition to government intervention by using messages accessible to the working class and middle-class people of the time. They combined libertarian free market views with the cultural conservatism of Paleoconservatism, while also opposing protectionism. The strategy also embraced the paleoconservative reverence for tradition and religion. This approach, usually identified as right-wing populism, was intended to radicalize citizens against the state. The name they chose for this style of activism evoked the roots of modern libertarianism, hence the prefix paleo. That founding movement was American classical liberalism, which shared the anti-war and anti-New Deal sentiments of the Old Right in the first half of the 20th century. Paleolibertarianism is generally seen as a right-wing ideology.
Libertarianism is a political philosophy that upholds liberty as a core value. Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and political freedom, emphasizing equality before the law and civil rights to freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of choice. Libertarians are often skeptical of or opposed to authority, state power, warfare, militarism and nationalism, but some libertarians diverge on the scope of their opposition to existing economic and political systems. Various schools of libertarian thought offer a range of views regarding the legitimate functions of state and private power. Different categorizations have been used to distinguish various forms of Libertarianism. Scholars distinguish libertarian views on the nature of property and capital, usually along left–right or socialist–capitalist lines. Libertarians of various schools were influenced by liberal ideas.
Right-libertarianism, also known as libertarian capitalism, or right-wing libertarianism, is a libertarian political philosophy that supports capitalist property rights and defends market distribution of natural resources and private property. The term right-libertarianism is used to distinguish this class of views on the nature of property and capital from left-libertarianism, a type of libertarianism that combines self-ownership with an egalitarian approach to property and income. In contrast to socialist libertarianism, right-libertarianism supports free-market capitalism. Like most forms of libertarianism, it supports civil liberties, especially natural law, negative rights, the non-aggression principle, and a major reversal of the modern welfare state.
Articles in social and political philosophy include:
Nick Land is an English philosopher, who has been described as "the Godfather of accelerationism". His work has been tied to the development of speculative realism. He was a leader of the 1990s "theory-fiction" collective Cybernetic Culture Research Unit after its original founder cyberfeminist theorist Sadie Plant departed from it. His work departs from the formal conventions of academic writing and embraces a wide range of influences, as well as exploring unorthodox and "dark" philosophical interests.
Reactionary modernism is a term first coined by Jeffrey Herf in the 1980s to describe the mixture of "great enthusiasm for modern technology with a rejection of the Enlightenment and the values and institutions of liberal democracy" that was characteristic of the German Conservative Revolutionary movement and Nazism. In turn, this ideology of reactionary modernism was closely linked to the original, positive view of the Sonderweg, which saw Germany as the great Central European power, neither of the West nor of the East.
LessWrong is a community blog and forum focused on discussion of cognitive biases, philosophy, psychology, economics, rationality, and artificial intelligence, among other topics.
The Identitarian movement or Identitarianism is a pan-European, ethno-nationalist, far-right political ideology asserting the right of European ethnic groups and white peoples to Western culture and territories claimed to belong exclusively to them. Originating in France as Les Identitaires, with its youth wing Generation Identity (GI), the movement expanded to other European countries during the early 21st century. Its ideology was formulated from the 1960s onward by essayists such as Alain de Benoist, Dominique Venner, Guillaume Faye and Renaud Camus, who are considered the main ideological sources of the movement.
Accelerationism is a range of revolutionary and reactionary ideas in left-wing and right-wing ideologies that call for the drastic intensification of capitalist growth, technological change, infrastructure sabotage and other processes of social change to destabilize existing systems and create radical social transformations, otherwise referred to as "acceleration". It has been regarded as an ideological spectrum divided into mutually contradictory left-wing and right-wing variants, both of which support the indefinite intensification of capitalism and its structures as well as the conditions for a technological singularity, a hypothetical point in time where technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible.
Curtis Guy Yarvin, also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American blogger. He is known, along with philosopher Nick Land, for founding the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic philosophical movement known as the Dark Enlightenment or neoreactionary movement (NRx).
The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was an experimental cultural theorist collective formed in late 1995 at Warwick University, England and gradually separated from academia until it dissolved in 2003. It garnered reputation for its idiosyncratic and surreal "theory-fiction" which incorporated cyberpunk and Gothic horror, and its work has since had an online cult following related to the rise in popularity of accelerationism. The CCRU are strongly associated with their former leading members, Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher and Nick Land.
The alt-right is a far-right, white nationalist movement. A largely online phenomenon, the alt-right originated in the United States during the late 2000s before increasing in popularity and establishing a presence in other countries during the mid-2010s, and has been declining since 2017. The term is ill-defined and has been used in different ways by academics, journalists, media commentators, and alt-right members themselves.
The intellectual dark web (IDW) is a term used to describe some commentators who oppose identity politics, political correctness, and cancel culture in higher education and the news media within Western countries.
Bronze Age Pervert, also known as BAP, is a pseudonymous far-right Internet personality, associated with the manosphere. The media have identified Costin Vlad Alamariu, a Romanian-American, as the person behind the pseudonym.
Chiangism, also known as the Political Philosophy of Chiang Kai-shek, or Chiang Kai-shek Thought, is the political philosophy of President Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who used it during his rule in China under the Kuomintang on both the mainland and Taiwan. It is a right-wing authoritarian nationalist political ideology which is based on mostly Confucian and Tridemist ideologies, and was used in the New Life Movement in China and the Chinese Cultural Renaissance movement in Taiwan. It is a syncretic mix of many political ideologies, including revolutionary nationalism, Tridemism, socialism, militarism, Confucianism, state capitalism, constitutionalism, fascism, authoritarian capitalism, and paternalistic conservatism, as well as Chiang's Methodist Christian beliefs.
The alt-right pipeline is a proposed conceptual model regarding internet radicalization toward the alt-right movement. It describes a phenomenon in which consuming provocative right-wing political content, such as antifeminist or anti-SJW ideas, gradually increases exposure to the alt-right or similar far-right politics. It posits that this interaction takes place due to the interconnected nature of political commentators and online communities, allowing members of one audience or community to discover more extreme groups. This process is most commonly associated with and has been documented on the video platform YouTube, and is largely faceted by the method in which algorithms on various social media platforms function through the process recommending content that is similar to what users engage with, but can quickly lead users down rabbit-holes.