Revisiting 'The Dark Enlightenment' in 2024

Does Nick Land's neoreaction still hold up?

A few weeks ago, a fellow Substack poster called Grug decided to do a piece revisiting the ideas in Mencius Moldbug's Unqualified Reservations. This blog spawned an entirely new current of right-wing thinking, and Grug sought to see if the ideas still held water in the 2024 political landscape. It is an important question, considering Moldbug’s/Yarvin’s influence on the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, JD Vance. I have linked Grug’s piece at the bottom of this piece if you want to check it out.

Nick Land is another important thinker in the neoreactionary tradition. His long essay, The Dark Enlightenment, is the second major touchstone in this strain of right-wing thinking. Land published the essay in 2012, and it still has a home on thedarkenlightenment.com. Nick Land is a British philosopher, former amphetamine fanatic, former CCRU member, accelerationist, and likely still a resident of Shanghai. We cannot be sure because he has likely forgotten his X password. He read the writings of Curtis Yarvin and was struck by the concept of the Cathedral. He told Justin Murphy around 2019 that he violated Cathedral orthodoxy as a test case to see if it existed.

It turns out it did exist, and Nick Land was promptly canceled. He has been a renegade philosopher ever since.

In this essay, I cover parts 1-4 of his essay. I honestly assess his ideas and introduce modern examples to the discussion to evaluate his neoreactionary thinking.

Part 1

Enlightenment is the best name that encapsulates modernity, implying a guiding light. It is a state, event, and process that emerged out of Europe. It assumes self-evident truths. Because it is light, any reactionary element is dark.

Unlike the Renaissance, the Enlightenment did not need to look back into the past. It created everything anew. Everything before was dark, but now progress is in the driving seat. Everything before is bad, everything spawned from the Enlightenment is good. Progressive and enlightenment are synonyms.

Enlightenment finds truth, and there is no going back once the truth is found. Post-enlightenment, conservatism is necessarily a paradox. The conservative only hopes for a previous stage of enlightenment. F. A. Hayek is his example, who called himself an Old Whig. An Old Whig, a classical liberal, or a conservative believes "that progress isn’t what it used to be". A conservative is a reactionary progressive, a necessary contradiction.

Any anti-democratic sentiment is immediately labeled as 'Fascism', but new ideas are beginning to crop up. Land points to the 2009 Cato discussion in which libertarians very frankly lamented that democracy seemed no longer tenable. Peter Thiel said that democracy and freedom are incompatible. Michael Lind stated that libertarianism and democracy are incompatible.

Democracy is not a system. Democracy is a vector. Growing government is baked into the nature of democracy. Democracy is indistinguishable from the expansion of the state. Land characterizes democratic elections as a simple matter of vote-buying. The informational organs of education and media can also be bought. A thrifty politician is eliminated from the political gene pool, Land says. Politicians who promise to increase government benefits will always win out in the long run. This has led libertarians to seek an exit, rather than seek to make an impact through their votes.

Democracy is doom that spirals into vice and degradation:

For the hardcore neo-reactionaries, democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself. Fleeing it approaches an ultimate imperative. The subterranean current that propels such anti-politics is recognizably Hobbesian, a coherent dark enlightenment, devoid from its beginning of any Rousseauistic enthusiasm for popular expression. Predisposed, in any case, to perceive the politically awakened masses as a howling irrational mob, it conceives the dynamics of democratization as fundamentally degenerative: systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption. The democratic politician and the electorate are bound together by a circuit of reciprocal incitement, in which each side drives the other to ever more shameless extremities of hooting, prancing cannibalism, until the only alternative to shouting is being eaten.

The Dark Enlightenment recognizes that political actors are driven by appetite, not ideals. Hans-Hermann Hoppe recognized this, making an economic argument that monarchy leads to better outcomes than democracy. The incentive structure in democracy is for the leaders to use up all the resources they can in their limited terms. Otherwise, their successors will use anything left on the table. Why do you think the United States Congress never runs a budget surplus? "Grievous social misfortune" is always welcomed, as long as it happens under someone else's watch. "Long-range techno-economic improvements" are in nobody’s interest under democratic governance.

Democracy is "as close to a precise negation of civilization as anything could be". Democracy is optimized for diminishing time-preference, accelerating the population into a relentless feeding frenzy. "Forward-thinking, prudential, human and industrial investment" is rejected in favor of "sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a 'reality television' political circus".

Conservatives find Churchill's quote that democracy is the worst system aside from all the others appealing because they have a "wry, disillusioned acceptance of relentless civilizational deterioration". They view capitalism the same way, as a "spontaneous survival strategy". Conservatives do not look for an alternative.

Libertarians imagine an alternative, but it is a silly one. Land draws on Yarvin, known still as Mencius Moldbug at the time of writing. Libertarians do not understand the Hobbesian recognition that sovereignty cannot be eliminated. The state cannot be done away with. The state is the monopoly on violence, and in the marketplace of violence, someone will necessarily win. Competition over violence within a given territory often leaves one side defeated or dead. Monopoly on violence is a libertarian term, but it is also a correct term. They are only incorrect in thinking that we can eliminate the existence of violence.

Moldbug argues that the sovereign cannot be eliminated, but it does not necessarily need to be democratic. Instead of eliminating it, we could formalize it. This alternative is called 'neo-cameralism.' Moldbug states:

To a neocameralist, a state is a business which owns a country. A state should be managed, like any other large business, by dividing logical ownership into negotiable shares, each of which yields a precise fraction of the state’s profit. (A well-run state is very profitable.) Each share has one vote, and the shareholders elect a board, which hires and fires managers.

This business’s customers are its residents. A profitably-managed neocameralist state will, like any business, serve its customers efficiently and effectively. Misgovernment equals mismanagement. (Yarvin)

In a democracy, it is a myth that citizens own the state. Stakeholders have an actual say. State ownership must be formalized to expose who is actually in power. The ruling class needs to be identified. The ruling class is not the capitalist bourgeoisie. Who do the capitalists pay to play politics for them? The entire lobbying network must be mapped. Administrative, legislative, judicial, media and academic privileges must also be mapped. This network taken together is the ruling class. Moldbug describes the ruling class as the Cathedral.

Formal political power allows for effective government. Rational corporate government can take the reigns and appoint an actual head executive. Not a president. A CEO. The purpose of "gov-corp" is to maximize shareholder value. No votes or voice. Free exit.

The closest examples to this kind of governance are Frederick the Great's enlightened absolutism, Hong Kong before 2019, Singapore, and Dubai. Moldbug argues:

These states appear to provide a very high quality of service to their citizens, with no meaningful democracy at all. They have minimal crime and high levels of personal and economic freedom. They tend to be quite prosperous. They are weak only in political freedom, and political freedom is unimportant by definition when government is stable and effective. (Yarvin)

Plato recognized democracy as a stage in the cycle of regimes. Democracy is followed by tyranny. The classical understanding of democracy is gone, replaced by a religious understanding of democracy. Moldbug says that this stems from Universalism, which comes from the English Puritan tradition. He says this Universalism is a mystery cult of power that draws its lineage back to the Protestant Reformation.

The state of Massachusetts has conquered the Earth. Governance and "the standards set by the Grievance Studies departments of New England universities" grow ever closer to one another. This is the reign of the Cathedral. Their new gospel replaces everything that came before, even the warnings of the American founding fathers against democracy. Land lists many. Jefferson called it mob rule. Adams says all democracies commit suicide. Madison said democracy is incompatible with security and property and necessarily meets a violent death. The character of democracy is tyranny, Hamilton said.

Part 2

Most seem to understand that there is a disjunction between democracy and liberty. "Democracy" does not appear in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. The government was constrained by the Bill of Rights, and the founders wanted to ensure that the governing structure defended life, liberty, and property, especially from encroachments by the state. So how did progressive democratic fervor take over so quickly?

Land seems to think, and he draws on Moldbug and Walter Russell Mead who agree, that the ideology of radical democratization conforms to ultra-protestant religious enthusiasm perfectly. A new ideology, with the teeth to flip the script entirely and uplift underclass into a position of domination, is sure to take hold rapidly. "Within just a few years of Martin Luther’s challenge to the papal establishment," Land says, "peasant insurrectionists were stringing up their class enemies all over Germany."

Democracy cannot claim the benefits the Western world has gained over the last century. Claiming that it does reverses the causal relationship. Land states that industrialization supported progressive democratization, not the other way around. The West has become advanced despite its democracy, not because of it. "Democracy consumes progress," Land says. It is "fundamentally non-productive".

It is not communicative isolation that is essential, but a functional dis-solidarization of society that tightens feedback loops and exposes people with maximum intensity to the consequences of their own actions. Social solidarity, in precise contrast, is the parasite’s friend. By cropping out all high-frequency feedback mechanisms (such as market signals), and replacing them with sluggish, infra-red loops that pass through a centralized forum of ‘general will’, a radically democratized society insulates parasitism from what it does, transforming local, painfully dysfunctional, intolerable, and thus urgently corrected behavior patterns into global, numbed, and chronic socio-political pathologies.

Gnaw off other people’s body parts and it might be hard to get a job — that’s the kind of lesson a tight-feedback, cybernetically intense, laissez-faire order would allow to be learned. It’s also exactly the kind of insensitive zombiphobic discrimination that any compassionate democracy would denounce as thought crime, whilst boosting the public budget for the vitally-challenged, undertaking consciousness raising campaigns on behalf of those suffering from involuntary cannibalistic impulse syndrome, affirming the dignity of the zombie lifestyle in higher-education curriculums, and rigorously regulating workspaces to ensure that the shuffling undead are not victimized by profit-obsessed, performance-centric, or even unreconstructed animationist employers.

The democratic zombie analogy is tremendously entertaining. It is also not an analogy. A societal structure that emphasizes consumption and vice above all else, even at the expense of others, is a vector toward zombie land. We accelerate to eat-or-be-eaten. Our healthcare system is already on this train, with normal people fitting the bill for government-enforced transgender surgeries on five-year-olds. It costs so much to go to the hospital, why do gay couples get a whole room for the photo-op with their surrogate child? Vice at the expense of others. When the food dries out, the "involuntary cannibalistic impulse syndrome" differently-able will still need their needs met, bigot! Is this insane? Yes. Is this the logic of the system? Yes.

Last decade's utter-from-the-depths-of-hell insanity is today's sacred cow.

As enlightened zombie-tolerance flourishes in the shelter of the democratic mega-parasite, a small remnant of reactionaries, attentive to the effects of real incentives, raise the formulaic question: “You do realize that these policies lead inevitably to a massive expansion of the zombie population?” The dominant vector of history presupposes that such nuisance objections are marginalized, ignored, and — wherever possible – silenced through social ostracism. The remnant either fortifies the basement, whilst stocking up on dried food, ammunition, and silver coins, or accelerates the application process for a second passport, and starts packing its bags.

Democracy functions by spreading out the consequences of individual actions across the entire system. "You decide what you do, but then vote on the consequences." Personal vice and market signals alike are muddied so people do not face accountability.

So how did we get here? Land draws on Moldbug's 'How Dawkins got pwned'. Dawkins is an atheist, he is a Puritan who holds some atheist beliefs. His thought is downstream from the Puritan revolt during the English Civil War. Puritanism was a memetic parasite from the get-go, and now it is the dominant global hegemon. Moldbug states:

However, you can’t keep a good parasite down. A community of Puritans fled to America and founded the theocratic colonies of New England. After its military victories in the American Rebellion and the War of Secession, American Puritanism was well on the way to world domination. Its victories in World War I, World War II, and the Cold War confirmed its global hegemony. All legitimate mainstream thought on Earth today is descended from the American Puritans, and through them the English Dissenters.

Dawkins believes in Darwinism and is hostile to Abrahamic monotheism. He is broadly committed to scientific rationality. Complete Redditor rationalist type. He is their patron saint. Land points out that his supposed ability for hyper-rational critical thinking turns off completely when it "might endanger a still broader commitment to hegemonic progressivism." Land continues: "Militant secularism is itself a modernized variant of the Abrahamic meta-meme, on its Anglo-Protestant, radical democratic taxonomic branch, whose specific tradition is anti-traditionalism". Progressivism requires faithfulness. Green line go up forever is eschatology.

Dawkins is known in part for his emphasis on the idea of a "meme" - a single unit of information. Moldbug discusses the concept of a mimetic virus. Dawkins would identify the belief in God as a memetic virus. As Moldbug and Land point out, though, Dawkins is infected with the "mimetic super-bug" of democratic progressivism. In this new form of Puritanism, Man has replaced God. Progressive beliefs about humanity are not believed because they are true. Even if they were provably, undoubtedly true, this is not why people believe them. Instead, "They are received as religious tenets, with all of the passionate intensity that characterizes essential items of faith". This is why there is no discourse surrounding the fundamental tenets of progressive orthodoxy. Nobody is interested in debate. In place of discourse, there is cancellation. Cancellation is only the new form of burning the heretic to death.

Racism is a religious doctrine of progressive Puritanism. In some ways, it is the religious doctrine. White privilege is the original sin.

To question the status of racism as the supreme and defining social sin, on the other hand, is to court universal condemnation from social elites, and to arouse suspicions of thought crimes that range from pro-slavery apologetics to genocide fantasies. Racism is pure or absolute evil, whose proper sphere is the infinite and the eternal, or the incendiary sinful depths of the hyper-protestant soul, rather than the mundane confines of civil interaction, social scientific realism, or efficient and proportional legality.

Sin requires atonement. The sinner is expected to make things right. You steal? You give back what you have stolen. You lie? You return and tell the truth. But to be born white... that can never be atoned for. There is no baptism to wash away this original sin. In this disordered theology (and it is theology, make no mistake), atonement for racism will never be over. You must grovel into eternity, apologizing for being white. Forever. And as soon as someone is more apologetic than you for being white, the bar has moved. You always must be the most sorry for being white. If someone is more sorry than you, you must be racist. And then you're back at square one.

Part 3

What is a Zeitgeist? Dawkins says the Zeitgeist has moved on, but what is it? Moldbug points out that Dawkins' conception of the Zeitgeist is "indistinguishable from" the "Puritan concept of Providence". Zeitgeist is progress, which is secularized Puritan providence. Dawkins' appeal to Zeitgeist is the same as Einstein's appeal that "God does not play dice". Both are outside the domain of science. Dawkins' assertion is shameless and ironic because he makes this appeal in the same book where he attacks the supposed memetic virus of belief in the Abrahamic God. This shows what Dawkins really has in his hand. He does not hold scientific-rationalist cards. He holds the cards of faith just as those he criticizes do:

The criteria of judgment owe everything to neo-puritan spiritual hygiene, and nothing whatsoever to testable reality. Scientific utterance is screened for conformity to a progressive social agenda, whose authority seems to be unaffected by its complete indifference to scientific integrity.

The Zeitgeist is God incarnate in the state for the democratic progressive. The purpose of the god-state is to enforce the egalitarian moral ideal, making everything convenient to itself by enforcing its will upon the intolerant. There is a paradox. Intolerance is intolerable, only tolerance is tolerable. "Perfect tolerance and absolute intolerance have become logically indistinguishable," Land says. Everything is permissible, except for that which dares to suggest something should not be permitted. The classical liberal idea of negative rights fades away under its offspring. In a democracy, you have a positive right to be tolerated. Land defines this democratic tolerance as:

ever more expansively as substantial entitlement, encompassing public affirmations of dignity, state-enforced guarantees of equal treatment by all agents (public and private), government protections against non-physical slights and humiliations, economic subsidies, and – ultimately – statistically proportional representation within all fields of employment, achievement, and recognition.

There will always be more grievances, always new demands on others to tolerate whatever you have done. Tolerance used to presuppose neglect, but now it stands against neglect. Land quotes George W. Bush: "When someone is hurting, government has got to move". He notes that, if this is the state of the right concerning progress, the right is in a state of advanced decomposition.

Moldbug discusses the concept of morbidity concerning tradition:

If a tradition causes its hosts to make miscalculations that compromise their personal goals, it exhibits Misesian morbidity. If it causes its hosts to act in ways that compromise their genes’ reproductive interests, it exhibits Darwinian morbidity. If subscribing to the tradition is individually advantageous or neutral (defectors are rewarded, or at least unpunished) but collectively harmful, the tradition is parasitic. If subscribing is individually disadvantageous but collectively beneficial, the tradition is altruistic. If it is both individually and collectively benign, it is symbiotic. If it is both individually and collectively harmful, it is malignant. Each of these labels can be applied to either Misesian or Darwinian morbidity. A theme that is arational, but does not exhibit either Misesian or Darwinian morbidity, is trivially morbid.

Both the Misesian and Darwinian incentive systems understand social incentive structure and the expected outcomes of said structures. Specifically, both incentive systems recognize that the maladapted to their given circumstance will perish in one way or another. This makes them 'hateful'. The concept of hate is important, Land emphasizes, for understanding the operation of the Cathedral.

He uses the example of a hate crime. The existence of this category of crime suggests there is something added by hate. Hate is a spiritual element, a negation of the Cathedral. Land states it "is an offense against the Cathedral itself, a refusal of its spiritual guidance, and a mental act of defiance against the manifest religious destiny of the world". Hate is also asymmetrical. According to Cathedral orthodoxy, only the right can hate. Applying the formal meaning of hate speech leads to unappealing outcomes from the Cathedral. Facebook attempted a colorblind campaign against hate speech on the platform but discovered that most 'hate speech' was directed against whites and males. They augmented their algorithmic protocols to treat this kind of speech as low priority because it does not fit the real meaning of hate speech. In the elite educational and media systems, protections from hate consistently enforce leftist orthodoxy.

Land characterizes grievance status as a reward for economic incompetence. ‘Stop Asian Hate’ had to be stopped because Asians were doing just fine economically, dominating Ivy League institutions and corporate sectors.

The Universalist creed, with its reflex identification of inequality with injustice, can conceive no alternative to the proposition that the lower one’s situation or status, the more compelling is one’s claim upon society, the purer and nobler one’s cause. Temporal failure is the sign of spiritual election (Marxo-Calvinism), and to dispute any of this is clearly ‘hate’.

Land emphasizes that social disadvantage does not necessarily imply incompetence. In most cases, he says, economic incompetence is a sign of misfortune. But this is not important. What we are concerned with is effective incentive structures, not justice. Justice is a separate question.

The iron law of behavioral reality: "Whatever is subsidized is promoted". As I said in my series on The Hour of Decision, this is instinctually true:

It is quite simple. When you remove the consequences of actions by removing responsibility, action will become increasingly irresponsible. This was the case for the workers as Spengler is here describing. This is also the case today for minorities today, as responsibility for actions is repeatedly taken away from them for the sake of supposed recompense for a history of slavery and oppression. This elimination of responsibility takes the form of welfare and affirmative action. I understood that taking away the consequences of actions makes people more irresponsible when I was 13 years old. This is instinctually true, and many have only come to believe that it is not due to excessive and incessant rationalizations to the contrary, usually baked into nonsensical postmodern word salad.

This obvious and instinctual truth about behavioral law cannot be escaped. It can only be wished away. Academic papers are published constantly to provide alternative justifications for negative outcomes that result from the lessening of social responsibility. Land states that this insight is doomed to inconsequence. The natural conclusion is that every progressive project will be necessarily counterproductive, only resulting in "horrible failure. No democracy could accept this, which means that every democracy will fail."

An example of the iron law of behavioral reality and Misesian-Darwinian systems of degeneration is the European social security system. Land quotes an Atlantic piece that discusses how the European social security system sowed the seeds of its demise. Generous social security incentivized Europeans to have fewer children because they could rely on government payouts in old age. As a result, however, the taxpaying population shrank in size, contributing less to social security. This resulted in a crisis of both demographics and insolvency.

Moldbug describes Universalism as a mystery cult of power. It needs the power of the state to secure the means for its replication. Its mysteriousness comes from its replacing of theistic traditions with new banal philosophical concepts, such as humanity, progress, equality, democracy, etc. None of these concepts are coherent, which is where their value lies. They "can absorb arbitrary mental energy without producing any rational thought," Moldbug says.

Part 4

Universalist democratic-egalitarian faith is a breakaway faith from a cultic tradition that can be traced through history. The emergence of Universalism can be traced through specific historical and geographical pathways. This tracing is exactly what Moldbug does. From England to New England, from the Reformation to the American Revolution, Moldbug traces the emergence of this Universalism. Land notes the irony of this Universalism. Its manifestations are scientism, rationalism, and liberal open-mindedness. But, when unmasked, it's "a pale, fervent, narrowly doctrinaire puritan, recognizably descended from the species of witch-burning zealots". When the Cathedral is met with noncompliance, it enters "inarticulate rage" and "smoldering resentment" as it tries to beat the dissenter back into the bounds of dogma. It will do this while still claiming universal rationality as its guiding star.

The assertion in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal," which is held as self-evident, comes not from science but from faith. Nonetheless, the modern leftists have abandoned the classical conception of rights for new positive rights. Rights are not protected by the state. Rather, they are granted by the state. The Cathedral must endlessly denigrate its previous iterations to move forward. Even though previous iterations of Universalism have been replaced, they are still Universalism. This is the trap conservatives fall into. They posit the PlayStation 3 as the antidote to the PlayStation 5, instead of just building a PC. "Paleo-puritanism must be derided in order for neo-puritanism to flourish," Land says.

The Cathedral contains its opposition by funneling it into caricature-like fascism and neo-nazism. Land describes this extreme far right as "paleo-fascist self-parody". It is a mechanism for controlled and limited opposition, whether purposely or not. In 2016, the media obsessed over Richard Spencer because he was an impotent receptacle for undesirables. Vulgar white nationalist neo-nazis (whatever you want to call them) were thrown into the dustbin with him. Nick Fuentes plays the same role, now touted as a conservative influencer who self-describes every bad word the regime lists. White nationalism is a maze the Cathedral plops the undesirables into, and they scuttle around in schizophrenic conspiracy land, ultimately turning into neo-nazis that blame the Jews for everything. Land describes this reality-encompassing anti-Semitism as a black hole.

Land notes that, because both neoreaction and white nationalism fit within the broad net of the dissident right, bounds in the public sphere for neoreaction would risk a breach of the containment field around white nationalism and tarnish the project. Fortunately, this does not seem to be the case, with neoreaction having reached some very influential circles while keeping a comfortable distance from the black hole.

Part of the reason the self-parody nazism spawns is because of the decent liberal avoidance of harsh truths. The white nationalists pick up the scraps and mark harsh truths much harsher. Land states: "The outcome is mechanically, and monotonously, predictable. Every liberal democratic ‘cause war’ strengthens and feralizes what it fights."

Land says that the danger of white nationalism is both overstated and understated. It is not so dangerous in reality, but there are potential dangers. As it stands, white nationalist ideology is relegated to the periphery and demonized in a ritual of neo-puritan hand-wringing. The potential danger of white nationalism stems from a scenario in which they are right about something when everyone else is wrong. An example is the increased prominence of the great replacement narrative. It is doubtlessly a true narrative. The Cathedral is very deliberately attempting to replace Western populations with foreigners. They even brag about it, and then say it is not happening in the same breath. A decade ago, replacement migration was a completely taboo subject. Now, it gets play at the Republican primary debates. And from a second-generation immigrant, no less! The danger is that as the one or two things the fringes are right about coming to the fore, so does a lot of the ugly stuff. Vulgar anti-semitism now runs rampant, with total falsehoods spouted regularly. These posts get tens of thousands of likes online. Candace Owens, who boasts a multi-million follower count, is claiming that Stalin was Jewish. He is not. This is both dangerous for potential victims of this false rhetoric and for the potential veracity of right-wing movements. If smart young people who could make an impact are filling their heads with total slop, it stunts the growth of good right-wing movements.

Moldbug and Land interrogate the difference in reactions to Hitler and Stalin. Moldbug points out that on the death count, Stalin is worse without a doubt. Yet communism is somewhat socially acceptable, and nazism is not. The hammer and sickle are somewhat socially acceptable, and the swastika is not (unless you run The Epoch Times). Hitler is a religious figure in the Cathedral. Hitler is "a historical and political figure... invested with transcendent dignity of absolute religious meaning". In the state religion, Hitler is worse than Satan. It is impossible to think of anything or anyone worse than Hitler. Hitler is a religious revelation, "an irruption of the infinite within history". Hitlerism is a new Abrahamic religion, according to Land. And this religion is ubiquitous in the West.

Insofar as progressive or programmatic history continues, this suggests that the Church of Sacred Hitlerite Abomination will eventually supplant its Abrahamic predecessors, to become the world’s triumphant ecumenical faith. How could it not? After all, unlike vanilla deism, this is a faith that fully reconciles religious enthusiasm with enlightened opinion, equally adapted, with consummate amphibious capability, to the convulsive ecstasies of popular ritual and the letter pages of the New York Times. “Absolute evil once walked amongst us, and lives still …” How is this not, already, the principal religious message of our time? All that remains unfinished is the mythological consolidation, and that has long been underway.

Conclusion

Nick Land's 'The Dark Enlightenment' essay is a meandering review of some of Mencius Moldbug's thoughts on neoreaction. This meandering review became a seminal work in the neoreactionary movement itself. I have only covered the first 4 parts of the essay. There are a few more, labeled 4a, 4b, 4c, etc., but this piece was already getting pretty long. If this piece is received well, I will happily discuss the ideas in the further sections of The Dark Enlightenment.

Originally, Land intended for his essay to focus more on neo-Malthusianism, but he left that for another time.

Land and Moldbug take many of the conclusions of Austrian economic thinking and stretch them out into the world of political dynamics. The conclusions are profoundly anti-liberal and point to the necessity for a radical restructuring of our government operating system. The Cathedral is real, and it is powerful. It shields its power under the guise of “democracy” and weaponizes anti-racism and anti-Hitlerism to enforce participation in the new civic religion and suppress opposition.

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Grug’s piece:

Returning to Yarvin in 2024