Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

418 Pages·2017·2.72 MB·English

by  Philip Sandifer

Neoreaction a Basilisk
Essays On and Around the Alt-Right

Philip Sandifer
Copyright © 2017 Philip Sandifer
“No Laws for the Lion and Many Laws for the Oxen is Liberty” © 2017 Philip Sandifer and Jack Graham
Published by Eruditorum Press
All rights reserved.
All images are either public domain or used under the principle of fair use.
To the ghosts and the witches
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, this book would not exist were it not for David Gerard,
to whom it was basically serialized in e-mail as I wrote it, and who performed
the original copyedit on the manuscript (Alison Jane Campbell has done a
second pass since). David was an invaluable resource in pointing me towards the
sources I needed to make the argument, hone the jokes, and generally making
this entire mad caper work.
Thanks also to Jack, Sam, Jane, and Alex for podcasting about the book
with me and giving me a variety of insights that helped in fine-tuning it, and to
Veronica for her helpful comments on some of the early sections. Also thanks to
Emily Stewart for her help on “My Vagina is Haunted,” and to James Taylor for
his usual brilliance on the cover.
The book was also improved and refined (as well as promoted) by the many
people who reviewed and talked about the manuscript during the Kickstarter,
some sympathetically, some not so much. Particular thanks to both Nick Land
and Eliezer Yudkowsky, who fell on opposite sides of that divide.
Speaking of whom, although many of the sources that shaped the book are
obvious from reading it, one important one is not. A major push in writing it was
Park MacDougald’s fine essay “The Darkness Before the Right,” which
introduced me to the bewildering rabbit hole that is Nick Land. A nod also to
Kieron Gillen, who linked MacDougald’s piece on Twitter; this is all technically
his fault.
Finally, my profound thanks to the 708 Kickstarter backers who made this
book possible. My gratitude is immense, and I hope it lives up to your
expectations.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Neoreaction a Basilisk
The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate
Theses on a President
No Law for the Lions and Many Laws for the Oxen is Liberty: A Subjective
Calculation of the Value of the Austrian School
Lizard People, Dear Reader
My Vagina is Haunted: Notes on TERFs
Zero to Zero: A Final Spin Around the Shuddering Abyss at the Heart of All
Things
Introduction
When I started this book, it was fun. An opportunity to connect some
philosophical ideas I’d been playing with, using some very silly rightwing
nutjobs who were nevertheless kind of interesting in a pathological way. The
book came in a joyful burst of late-night writing sessions, holed up in a candle-
lit room tapping away on my laptop, letting it all pour out of some strange and
liminal space I still don’t entirely understand.
Then everything went to shit, and suddenly a book about far-right nutjobs
stopped being quite as much fun and became somewhat more important.
This is not the first book on the alt-right to come out, although the main
essay was finished in May of 2016 and distributed to Kickstarter backers shortly
thereafter. But the bulk of books (and articles) on the matter so far have focused
on two questions that I admit to finding relatively uninteresting. The first is how
the alt-right came to happen. It’s possible to write intelligently on this topic as a
matter of history—David Neiwert’s Alt-America does an excellent job of tracing
the precise evolution of the far-right from the mid-90s to the present day, for
instance. But ultimately the question is fairly easy to answer: far-right
movements arise when the established order starts to crack. (This is also a good
time to weigh in on the terminology “alt-right,” which some have, not without
reason, criticized as masking the fact that we’re talking about a neo-nazi
movement. This is true, but equally, no iteration of far-right uprisings is entirely
like another, and while historical comparison is essential, so is having a specific
term for the enemy we’re fighting today. Alt-right has become the consensus
term, and there are higher priorities than complaining that we should have
picked a better one.) This does not mean, as far too many commentators have
suggested, that the people at Trump rallies making Hitler salutes are motivated
by “economic anxiety.” They’re motivated by racism. Duh. But their racism is
emboldened by a political order that visibly has no answers, is running just to
keep still, and not even managing that. The path to the mainstream that this
particular batch of racists took is worth documenting as a matter of historical
record, but the question invites missing the forest for the trees.
The cautionary tale in this regard is Angela Nagle’s appalling Kill All
Normies, which takes the jaw-droppingly foolish methodology of simply
reporting all of the alt-right’s self-justifications as self-evident truths so as to
conclude that the real reason neo-nazis have been sweeping into power is
because we’re too tolerant of trans people. From this spectacularly ill-advised
premise Nagle makes the inevitable but even worse conclusion that the obvious
thing to do is for the left to abandon all commitment to identity politics (except
maybe feminism which, as a white cis woman, Nagle has at least some time for).
This brings us to our second relatively uninteresting question, which is what
to do about the alt-right. In this case the answer is even easier and more obvious
than the first: you smash their bases of power, with violent resistance if
necessary. If you want a more general solution that also takes care of the factors
that led to a bunch of idiot racists being emboldened in the first place you drag
all the billionaires out of their houses and put their heads on spikes.
But the ease of answer reveals the deeper problem with “what’s to be done”
as an angle on the alt-right. We all know what’s to be done. Nazis have been the
go-to example for people arguing why sometimes violent resistance is necessary
for decades. But in the absence of a credible resistance that consists of more than
hashtags and an inexplicable propensity to take Louise Mensch seriously the
knowledge of what we should do is fairly useless. We’re not doing it, and I am
to say the least skeptical that screaming “for fuck’s sake, just bash the fucking
nazis’ skulls in already” for the next 350 pages would magically kickstart a mass
uprising.
Instead this book asks a different question: if winning is off the table, what
should we do instead? Because the grim reality is that things look really fucking
bad. Ecological disaster is looming, the geopolitical order is paralyzed, and
we’re not putting nearly enough billionaire heads on spikes to plausibly change
it. What then, is left?
This is not a question with straightforward answers. Straightforwardness is
for victors who get statues and ballads. The defeated operate from shadows and
hidden places, and the legacies they leave are cryptic and secret. This book
behaves accordingly, and there are limits to what I am willing or indeed able to
explain. Nevertheless, a brief overview.
There are seven essays in this book. They do not directly build on one
another or trace a single argument, and are united more by approach and
philosophical concerns than by topic per se. The main essay is the title piece, and
is the one I am most invested in allowing to stand on its own terms. That said, it
focuses on two specific strands of thought within the alt-right: their own
grappling with eschatology, and their roots in silicon valley tech culture (the
latter of which is probably the thing that most distinguishes them from previous
far-right movements). It takes as its starting point the work of neoreactionary
thinkers Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land, along with Eliezer Yudkowsky (who
is not on the alt-right but has a variety of interesting links to the topic). Its
ending point is considerably more oblique.
“The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate” moves the focus from the
philosophical and intellectual aspects of the alt-right to its blunt and practical
end of vicious online harassment campaigns, looking at, as the title suggests,
Gamergate, which in hindsight is increasingly clear as a watershed moment in
their ascent.
“Theses on a President” tackles the obvious topic. It does not analyze
Trump primarily in terms of the alt-right, but rather takes a psychogeographic
approach to him, treating him as a pathological condition of New York City. I
should note that it was written before the 2016 election, although the final three
theses have been revised in light of the outcome.
“No Law for the Lions and Many Laws for the Oxen is Liberty” is first and
foremost an opportunity for me to finally collaborate with my dear friend and
colleague at Eruditorum Press, Jack Graham. It offers a more historically rooted
perspective on it, looking at its long roots, both intellectual and material, the
Austrian School of economics.
The next two essays—“Lizard People, Dear Readers” and “My Vagina is
Haunted”—are not about the alt-right per se, but instead offer insights about the
phenomenon by looking at topics that are, in their own way, analogous. The
former looks at the conspiracy theories of David Icke to muse on the value of
crackpots and nutjobs. The latter looks at TERFs, a group of nominal feminists
whose activism focuses largely on objecting to the existence of transgender
women, and offers the book’s most direct answer to the question “what do we
do?”
Finally there is “Zero to Zero,” which returns to the concerns of the first
essay to look at Peter Thiel, the moneyman behind both Eliezer Yudkowsky and
Mencius Moldbug, seeking to come to some final insight about our onrushing
doom. I hope the book that results from juxtaposing these seven works provides
some entertainment and insight while you wait for extinction.
-Phil Sandifer, November 26, 2017
Neoreaction a Basilisk
I.
“Do you know that every time you turn another page, you not only get us closer to the monster at the end of
this book, but you make a terrible mess?”—Grover, The Monster at the End of This Book
Let us assume that we are fucked1. The particular nature of our doom is up
for any amount of debate, but the basic fact of it seems largely inevitable. My
personal guess is that millennials will probably live long enough to see the
second Great Depression, which will blur inexorably with the full brunt of
climate change to lead to a massive human dieback, if not quite an outright
extinction. But maybe it’ll just be a rogue AI and a grey goo scenario2. You
never know.
There are several reactions we might have to this realization, and many of
us have more than one. The largest class of these reactions are, if not
uninteresting, at least relatively simple, falling under some category of self-
delusion or cognitive dissonance. From the perspective of 2017 the eschaton
appears to be in exactly the wrong place, such that we’re either going to just
miss it or only see the early “shitloads of people dying” bits. And even if it is
imminent, there is no reason to expect most of us to engage with it differently
than any other terminal diagnosis, which is to say, to minimize the amount of
time we spend consciously dying. Indeed, my polite authorial recommendation
would be to do exactly that if you are capable, probably starting by simply not
reading this.
Hmm. Well, no one to blame but yourself, I suppose. A second category,
marginally more interesting, is what we might call “decelerationist” approaches.
(The name is a back formation from the accelerationists, more about whom
later.) These amount to attempts to stave off the inevitable as best as possible,
perhaps by attempting to reduce carbon emissions and engage in conservation
efforts to minimize the impact of the anthropocene extinction or by writing
fanfic to conjure the AI Singularity or something. These efforts are often
compatible with active self-delusion, and in most regards the current political
system is a broad-based coalition of these two approaches. But the
decelerationist is at least engaged in a basic project of good. I tend to think the
project is doomed (although being wrong about that would be lovely), however,
and this work is on the whole aimed at those who similarly feel somewhat
unsatisfied with decelerationism.
From this point the numbering of categories becomes increasingly