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The German Ideology (1845/46)
Die Deutsche Ideologie by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
Vol. I, Part 1.
For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere ofactivity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, ora critical critic and must remain so if he does not wish to lose his means of livelihood; while in communistsociety, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branchhe wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing todayand another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize afterdinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.
Vol. 1, Part 1.
The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.
Volume I; Part 1; "Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook"; Section A, "Idealism and Materialism
The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically,and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production. The social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they appear in their own or other people's imagination, but as they really are; i.e. as they are effective, produce materially, and are active under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.
The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of the politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics of a people.Men are the producers of their conception, ideas, etc. — real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process. Where speculation ends — in real life — there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of activity loses its medium of existence. At the best, its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afforda recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history. On the contrary, our difficulties begin only when we set about the observation and the arrangement — the real depiction — of our historical material, whether of a past epoch or of the present. Vol. I, Part 1, [The Materialist Conception of History].
Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals. Its organisation is, therefore, essentially economic, the material production of the conditions of this unity; it turns existing conditions into conditions of unity. The reality, which communism is creating, is precisely the true basis for rendering it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals, insofar as reality is only a product of the preceding intercourse of individuals themselves.
Vol. I, Part 4.
Nicht das Bewußtsein bestimmt das Leben, sondern das Leben bestimmt das Bewußtsein.
It is in fact not the consciousness dominating life but the very life dominating consciousness. Vol. III, 27.
Sprache entsteht, wie das Bewußtsein, erst aus dem Bedürfnis, der Notdurft des Verkehrs mit anderen Menschen.
Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other humans. Vol. III, 30
Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.
The German Ideology, International Publishers, ed. Chris Arthur, p. 103
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by XENOBUDDHISM
In their latest post Nishiki Prestige gives what could be the most concise and condensed primer on U/acc. The post opens by explicitly stating the relationship between accelerationism and politics:
If accelerationism is true then it is also apolitical. It is a conceptual framework for understanding the nature of reality, not an ideology. Assuming the fundamentals are correct, ACC is no more political than chemistry, physics, etc.
If accelerationism is a descriptor of the cybernetics of capital then it is as politically neutral as any other aspect of reality that scientific discourse is able to describe. Just as the content of physics – ie. its laws and abstract mathematics – aren’t political but an partial, incomplete, but essentially accurate body of knowledge about how the world actually is independent of human biases, preferences, or ideologies. I’m reminded of the quip made by Richard Dawkins against what he diagnosed as cultural relativism and that is probably more than a little familiar to people overexposed to applications of post-structuralist philosophies in the mountains of “the social construction of…” books and articles. Dawkins said, ‘Show me a relativist a 30,000 feet and I’ll show you are hypocrite,’ the obvious point being that entrusting your body to an aircraft, believing you’ll arrive unscathed at your destination, is to place your trust or faith in the technical expertise of a fleet of engineers, designers, air traffic controllers, mechanics, engineers, automated systems, the communication relays that go between them, and, ultimately, the bodies of scientific knowledge that make the construction, design, maintenance and coordination of your flight possible. Whatever the cool relativist says, their revealed preferences indicated that at the very least they’ve suspended their own relativism while onboard. A cool theoretical attitude is defeated by a more potent pragmatic investment in epistemic realism. In a very basic sense this would render accelerationism apolitical.
From this Nihishiki extracts the point that L/acc and R/acc should be read as leftists who accept accelerationism and rightists who accept accelerationism. This draws on the traditional way of making a broad ideological distinction that doesn’t accord to Nick Land’s method for defining left and right – ie. left = compensatory mechanism; right = catalytic explosive. From this Nishiki points out that U/acc has the capacity to ‘resolve this politicization issue.’ The name lingers on the idea of the unconditioned and the unconditional, something I’ve wanted to address for a while but have only felt the urge to after reading Nishiki’s post.
Left and right can be thought of as basic nominations for (at least) minimally distinct ideological polarities. The ideological distinction operates within the political in the same way the ontological difference does in a certain brand of ontology. For Heidegger the ontological difference is the name for that demarcation that separates questions of Being from beings, the divinely ontological from the merely ontic, and therefore the authenticity of the sacred from the fallenness of the profane. Of course Heidegger intends Being to reveal itself as the Being of beings so that the ontotheological accusation shouldn’t ever arise, but the failure of this move is no small part of the history of Western philosophy. The ontological difference demarcates questions of fact (realism) from questions of meaning (normativity), and Heidegger uses it to dismiss the history of thought as the onticization of Being. His project announced in Being and Time will return Dasein to that question that is fundamental to its Being and that it has nonetheless forgotten in the fog of onticization. Heidegger dream of returning human thought to the dignity of a thought of the Why of Being that overcomes its being sunk in the banality of the That. This is a manoeuvre that closes off the Outside by subsuming ontology within epistemology in the particular sense that Being is always a question posed and answered by humanity. The positioning of the question of Being makes Being a mystery that is fundamentally soluble to thought, or at least Heidegger hopes so. It is considerations of this flavour that lead Heidegger to posit the fundamental question of metaphysics as being: Why is there something rather than nothing? In Heidegger the question is existential. It is the question of being-there that is the destiny of the human being to ask after.
What does this have to do with the ideological distinction? In truth, ideological distinctions, orthodoxies and orthopraxies that encounter one another according to the logic of the friend/enemy distinction, is potentially fractal. That is to say, they can be discovered anywhere, and, indeed, part of the current political catastrophe is the systematic proliferation of distinctions. For those involved, for those invested, sunk in, these ideological compete with one another as existential incompatibilities, a situation that peaks in the most extreme forms of violence. While primarily latent or otherwise channelised into ritualised forms and display behaviours, the psychopathology of ideological attachment remains a consistently active, if unconscious, libidinal current. Ideologies are worldviews that operate as defensive shields and bunkers and justifications for the deployment of escalating combative tactics, the latter required to secure the former, the bunkers themselves necessary for maintaining a semblance of an impossible ontological security. Viewed in this light ideological distinction is nothing less than a species of ordinary psychoses that imprisons schizophrenia within a barely perceived will to survive. But this still doesn’t answer how ideological distinction is akin to ontological difference. The answer lies in the proximity of the one to the other when they are read through each other. The ontological difference reveals that distinction between beings and Being, the Being of beings, that is a question for that being called Dasein, the being that is able to confront Being in and as the primary problem, the fundamental question: Why do I exist, instead of being nothing? The human being will most obviously confront this problem in its burgeoning and insidiously ever-present awareness of the immanence of death to life, the void at the heart of the Being of being. The problem of death, really just a subordinate symptom of the problem of the Void – secondary thanatophobia a symptom of primary kenophobia – demands the development of elaborate coping mechanisms – ideologies, worldviews, and, in their full complexity, cultures. Thus the fundamental question of metaphysics induces what we can call the fundamental question of politics: “What is to be done?” From here the development of the ideological distinctions is obvious. In this formula left and right become different degrees of coping whilst remaining basically of the same kind. Just as their spatial origins suggest the left and right are ultimately orientations. Orientation is the act of being oriented, implying locating one’s own position relative to some broader context. This can be the simple orientation of one’s body in relation to the environment that defines coordinates and locations, or it can be as complex an operation as navigating proliferating sexual orientations, or, in a mode already more pertinent to the political, it can be the subordination of the existential to the utility of purposes, goals, and projects. For now though, I want to think about orientation through its psychiatric deployment as orientation to person, place, and time. This is a standard assessment in dealing with acute psychoses and deleriums, as well as advancing dementias or (what are thought of as more truly) neurological conditions. Is the patient under assessment aware of who they are, where they are, and when they are? It is an assessment that seeks to localise the patient according to identity, territory, and linear temporality. I am I, I am here, I am now.
Disorientation, the breakdown of this tripartite structure of ontological securitisation, is often accompanied by confusion, delirium, delusions, hallucinations, defensive confabulations, aimless wandering and agitation, persistent anxiety rising to acute attacks of fear, and, accosted by experiences that escape categorisation, the potential for the nervous collapse of catatonic withdrawal, or the irrational lashing out of a pure animal violence. The purpose of orientation is to ward of disorientation, the left and the right being orientations that orient by providing ready-made identities, maps, histories, a sense of place and time, a sense of coordinated activity coupled to purposefulness, a sense that this is familiar, known, manageable. I am I, I am here, I am now, I know what’s going on, and I can cope with it.
L/acc and R/acc are the polarities of oriented accelerationism. Franco Berardi had spoken about senility as a trope for exit from the market, an outdated term associated with the slow but inexorable cognitive decline in age related dementia. Following this, we could consider L/ and R/acc as related to traumatic disorientation, the equivalent to a significant head injury. Oriented accelerationism is any attempt to cope with the catastrophic disorientation of acceleration. This doesn’t mean that U/acc is just a willful embrace of disorientation, although the acephalic dimension of it are appealing. Rather, it is the cultivation of the non-oriented. By this I mean to allude to Adam Lovasz’s concept of non-oriented ontology, a schizophrenic ontological dissolution of anything that could be taken for substance, being, or Being. The non-oriented ontology reveals an objectless world and worldless non-objects, a total corrosion that corrodes nothing because it is impossible to corrode absence, to drill holes in holes, and that suspends the fundamental metaphysical question revealing it as a bleeding laceration in the opening of a primordial wound, a woundless wound, and that silently replies to the pomposity of that fundamental question with its own intemperate fundamentalism: there is nothing in the midst of nothing at the heart of nothing, and that nothing is not something, is not-is, is isness, thusness, whatness, an all enveloping flower of emptiness, a continuous and consummate nothingness, colourless and dimensionless, and therefore all colours and all dimensions, because there is neither object nor partial object, neither body nor organ, nor body without organs, no entities that can be and no entities that cannot be.
Xenobuddhism is entirely at home with this. Indeed, Lovasz assimilates the anti-metaphysical Mahayana philosopher Chandrakirti into the non-oriented ontological voidscape (cf. System of Absentology, 219). Chandrakirti’s Entry into the Middleway is probably the most crucial text to the development of Madhyamaka Buddhism outside of Nargarjuna, and therefore on the development of all subsequent dharma-forms. The Madhyamaka is the highest expression given to emptiness (shunyata) in all dharma-forms. A proper account of the Madhyamaka is beyond the scope of this post but suffice it to say that the ontology of emptiness is entirely consistent with that which Lovasz defines as the non-oriented:
We define as “non-oriented” anything that pertains to an immanent negativity, any event, be it a singularity or a process, that leads to an increase in entropy, leading, ultimately, to an apotheosis that explicates the givenness of Emptiness (Tracing the Inoperative, 6).
In the Madhyamaka system of Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti emptiness explicitly empties any concept of emptiness that it is possible to develop. The entire philosophical structure of the Madhyamaka is an autocatabolic systems that necessitates its own internal self-dissolution, its dissolution as an interiority or conceptual refuge, that could posit anything for the discriminative mind to cling to. Discussing Chandrakirti in his seminal The Emptiness of Emptiness C.W Huntington Jr. writes that
The Madhyamaka is radically deconstructive, pragmatic philosophy, designed to be used for exposing, defusing, and dismantling, the reifying tendencies inherent in language and conceptual thought… this philosophy offers no answers. All it does is dissolve the old questions… (Huntington, 136).
The non-oriented can be understood as the unleashing of this radical dissolution that dissolves nothing because there is only voidness, only emptiness, only immanent negativities, within the occidental theoretical attitude. Like Cioran and Bataille have suggested in their own ways, the occidental mind is incapable of subsisting in the lucidity of oriental mysticism. Instead the western mind is pulled towards intensity, towards violence, perturbation, decay, laceration, seizure, intoxication. If oriented accelerationism relates to orientation as a mean for coping with traumatic disorientation, nonoriented accelerationism gives itself to the disorientation of being intoxicated by emptiness. There is no sadness in this, and no misery either, only an intoxication with the immanence of emptiness as it is unfolded in history. Acceleration names the processes of dissolution, and accelerationism traces those cold cybernetics of capital understood as the creative destruction of that immanent negativity, that negating immanence that is voidness.
Realism is digested in the empty stomach of emptiness. Science belongs to the world that is not a world and that does not disappear just because we’ve dropped the reifications of metaphysics. Of course you trust the aircraft at 30,000 feet, that doesn’t mean there is any aircraft to be trusted – and that doesn’t mean there isn’t there either. Accelerationism is apolitical in the same way that the mathematics of quantum physics is. But it is more than that. It is also profoundly anti-political. It is anti-political because it is non-oriented, being the non-orientation of politics, and this is another way to understand the idea of anti-praxis. The initiatory ritual of U/acc necessitates a dying to the world of politics. This allows a rebirth into the same world of politics, seen now for what it is. What is left is to make art and study for fun, says Nishiki, and perhaps to realize oneself as negativity in resonance with negativity, as an expression of that negativity, as the nothing in nothing… detaching, attuning to thusness, to intoxication, to the intensity, the red thread of desire… … and if accelerationism is a lie, who – or rather what – is telling it? … what is it that’s accelerating?… I’m not sure how best to end this, so i’ll just let it trail into nothing…
taken from:
by edmundberger
In the earlier post Mixed Bag, I mentioned briefly Land’s argument that long-term cyberpositive trends – that is, cybernetic excitation or positive feedback unfolding primarily through technomic cycling – is continually dampened by a compensatory mechanism. Perhaps we can think of being similar to the importance of frequency compensation in electrical engineering, particularly in the case of amplifiers, which deploy negative feedback mechanisms in order to pull back the wild oscillations and distortion engender by the lock-in to a positive feedback loop. Slotting this into the historical drift of technomic escalation, however, changes this a bit: the positive feedback process remains in the primary position, and dampening can only be secondary. Paradoxically – and this is where things get truly loopy – is that this secondary becomes a conduit through which the primary expresses itself. Consider the three forms of cybernetic circuits that cut across cyberpositive and cybernegative tendencies, as described by Land in his CCRU-era essay “Circuitries”:
These forms can be further related to the cybernetic model of history cultivated by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, where development unfolds through the coding, territorialization, decoding, and deterritorialization of flows, and the modulation of these forms through mechanisms that ward off mutagenic shocks to each historical stage. The primitive socius carried out a dual-warding suspended between the figure of the warrior and the shaman; the former, as Clastres demonstrated, played a role in preventing the formation of the State through the use of constant warfare, while the latter capture deterritorializing flows that threatened to return the socius to the biocosmic ocean. In the age of the despotic State, it was the body of the despot itself that capture these flows, which in the age of the Civilized Capitalist Machine passed to the capitalist state (as the force of anti-production that is subordinated to, yet aids, capitalist production) and Oedipus itself. For the despotic State, warding-off the impending flux of capital was paramount; for the Civilized Capitalist Machine, it is the pull of capital itself towards the edge of the edge, where everything gives way to burning, cosmic schizophrenia. Schizo-Marketization.
The long arc that bends towards this future apocalypse is the long-range positive feedback process, and the mechanisms for warding-off and capture constitute stabilization mechanisms. In each case the slippage towards what is warded off can be deferred for a while, but can never be absolute. It happens despite all attempts to halt it. What does tend to get churned out, however, are those explosions of short-range positive feedback.
In the parlance of Land’s more contemporary work, the stabilization mechanism of the capitalist epoch is precisely what Moldbug described as the Cathedral. To return to Re-accelerationism:
…the Cathedral acquires its teleological definition from its emergent function as the cancellation of capitalism: what it has to become is the more-or-less precise negative of historical primary process, such that it composes — together with the ever more wide-flung society-in-liquidation it parasitizes — a metastatic cybernetic megasystem, or super-social trap. ‘Progress’ in its overt, mature, ideological incarnation is the anti-trend required to bring history to a halt. Conceive what is needed to prevent acceleration into techno-commercial Singularity, and the Cathedral is what it will be. In a great post on this same topic, Uri the Cyborg Nomad drops this excellent diagram of the dampening effects of the Cathedral on technomic cyberpositivity. Hopefully he won’t mind it being reproduced here: 
This may seem different from the usual image of the Cathedral offered by neoreactionaries, which often seems to be a stand-in for progressive policies they don’t like. This isn’t to say that it doesn’t encompass that – the opposite, in fact! Far from being a particular mode of politics, the Cathedral defines totality of the political machine, which is intrinsically bound to self-replication (far from being stupid, politics wants more of itself), self-preservation, profit-seeking, hegemonic functioning, and – as a result from each of these – an inclination towards universalism in increasingly more managerial modes. It is for this reason that Land describes a Left Singularity that is locked into a doomed conflict with an impending future Right Singularity –
[Many will immediately jump on this point and point out that this framing of singularities along a Left – Right line doesn’t quite gel with the muddied (and frankly nonsensical) history of these terms. I know, I know. To ward off in advance the endless quagmire of debate over what these terms means, consider the way in which Land is using them here: taken most generally, Left here designates the political, and Right designates anti-politics. Consider that what is being called unconditional accelerationism was, originally, called right accelerationism by Land:
a framework which would slot both the left accelerarionism and right accelerationism critiqued by unconditional accelerationism into the the framework of the Left. U/Acc, however, moves in a different direction by referring to the political in terms of a grand Left, but a mutually reinforcing secondary circuit in which left and right self-excite one another through reinforcement, antagonism, and constructive blurring. Clear as mud? Cool.]
Something that I’ve been interested in is how Land sees Neoreaction itself fitting into this schema. It designates something still internal to the Age of the Civilized Capitalist Machine – the encounter with the Dweller on the Threshold is still a ways off yet – but past the Cathedral proper, which is anticipated to be shattered into countless, fractioning polities. The death of politics, by way of the insane multiplication? Such a maneuver would constitute the annihilation of the universalist stabilization mechanisms, though it would – in the patchwork model, at least – make possible all sorts of localized, dynamic, and variable stabilization mechanisms available. This flips back to an argument posed on this blog before: that what Land designates the Cathedral and Fisher assessed as “capitalist realism” are, in fact, the same thing (once we separate capitalism from cyberpositive capital, and approach capitalist realism via the former), and that breaking through to the other side of these immense blockages opens into a plane of differentiation: micro-scaled units rising up like a nano-swarm. But, Land argues, and yet this is ultimately as doomed as the Cathedral itself, as is made clear by the brief comments on the ultimate fate of neoreaction at the end of Dark Techno-Commercialism:
Dark Techno-Commercialism — provisionally summarized — is the suspicion that the ‘Right Singularity’ is destined to occur in surreptitious and antagonistic relation to finalistic political institutions, that the Cathedral culminates in the Human Security System, outmatched and defeated from the Outside, and that all hopes that these ultimate historical potentialities will be harnessed for politically intelligible ends are vain. It is, therefore, the comprehension of capitalism ‘in-itself’ as an outsider that will never know — or need — political representation. Instead, as the ultimate enemy, it will envelop the entirety of political philosophy —including anything neoreaction can contribute to the genre — as the futile strategic initiatives (or death spasms) of its prey. (emphasis added)
There’s a rabbit hole to tumble down here, full of numogrammatic, Deleuzeguattarian, and Thelemaic resonances that are best left for future investigation – though it’s worth considering how the above relates to the neoreactionary Trichotomy. This triad model is used to survey the terrain of NRx in a way that, on one hand, illustrates its opposition to the Cathedral, and on the other illustrates its own internal oppositions. By sketching all of these out, the Trike reveals an intended motor of fragmentation, where the pieces can never really fit into a higher unity synthesis, and can only ever proceed through ongoing shattering. The three sides are: Theonomy, Ethnonationalism, and Techno-commercialism. The first finds itself into opposition to the treatment of religion under progressivist universalism, and is resolutely opposed to ethnonationalism and techno-commercialism; the second rejects political integration and the demand for multiculturalism, and is opposed to theonomy and techno-commercialism; and techno-commercialism clashes with the technomic dampening of the stabilization mechanisms, and can only ever be structurally opposed to theonomy and ethnonationalism (it’s clear that this latter force is intrinsically linked to the primary accelerating process, hence the identification of a dark techno-commercialism that rides beyond NRx into the unutterable void of futurity).
Behind the Neoreactionary Trichotomy is a second, more esoteric triadic formation that maps not the political, but fate itself: the Horrorist Trichotomy. Each point is rendered as that which cannot be escaped from: Providence, Heredity, and Catallaxy. If the Neoreactionary Trike is ecumenonical, the Horrorist Trike serves as the planomenon. The alignments are clear: Theonomy to Providence, Ethnonationalism to Heredity, and Catallaxy to Techno-commercialism.
What relevance does this strange architecture, twisting as it does through the political and arcane materialism, have to these questions of compensation and accelerating trendlines (or: why this deep dive into the far end of NRx theory)? The answer to this follows the introduction of yet another triadic formulation, one that clearly anticipates the Neoreactionary Trichotomy: the “Golden Meme” introduced by Walter Russell Mead, and discussed by Land in an ancient post from waaay back in 2011 titled “Reign of the Tripod”(reign indeed!). In Mead’s historiography, the Golden Meme (i.e. the concept of the invisible hand) is the formula that produced the two centuries of “Anglosphere hegemony” – or what ensured the long-term stability of the British empire and the United States. Three points of a triangle: “Newtonian celestial mechanics” (serving as the modernization of “the religious idea of providence”), “Smithian political economy”, and “Darwinian evolutionary biology. Again, the alignments are clear, though at the same time they cannot put fracture a little. Both Newtonian celestial mechanics and theonomy derive from providence, but one charts a secularizing path whilst the other stakes out a religious one. Something is shifting here.
Land writes that opposition that cannot be reconciled via synthesis becomes institutionalized in a power balance. In other words, the Golden Meme functioned because the three points checked one another. A compensatory dynamo is generated, one capable of pressing down on short-term burnouts that could arise from each triangle tip. Yet what stabilizes also sows the seeds for fracture:
Cultural hegemony follows from a semi-deliberate fatalization, as the sovereign center is displaced by a substantially automated social process, which no social agent is able to master or entirely impede. Each major faction steps back into its position in the triangle, from which it can strategically engage the others, but never fully dominate or eradicate them. The triangle as a whole constitutes a social and historical motor, without adequate representation at any identifiable point.
By placing the three Trichotomies in alignment, we arrive at a picture of ecumenonic consolidation and subsequent fragmentation, both shot through with the concealed Horrorist diagram of fat:
[Providence] :: Newtonian point of the Golden Meme –> Theonomy
[Heredity] :: Darwinian point of the Golden Meme –> Ethnonationalism [Catallaxy] :: Smithian point of the Golden Meme –> Techno-commercialism
This picture is clearly a messy one and needs further work into integrating it into a more cohesive model, but it reveals a certain insight into neoreaction itself (or at least the form that Land is sifting through, which seems to go far beyond the work of many of his interlocutors). If the Golden Meme is the production and governing protocols for the Anglospherical compensatory mechanism, then it is what produces the Cathedral itself, which would as the Atlantean summit of this development. It follows, then, that if the NRx Trike etches a cartography of fragmentation that proceeds from this, then NRx is not simply an opposition to the Cathedral (as an activist movement for politico-cultural restoration would be, for example); it is the dynamical fall-out of the Cathedral’s fracturing in itself.
This is the very position staked out by Land in a post titled “Crypto-Brahmins”: The Brahmin priest caste, like the digital elite, specializes in signs, but they are signs of exhortation, rather than of intrinsic efficiency. Is not the Cathedral precisely a name for that apparatus of signs — (non-STEM) academia, media, bureaucracy, politics … — which cannot in principle ever compile? The Cathedral is a secular religion, which has to preach because it does not work. When NRx insists upon a division within ‘progress’ between techno-economics (which works) and socio-politics (which decays), it opens a rift that splits the Brahmins, rather than further separating them from social inferiors. NRx, at its core, is a ‘Brahmin’ civil war. There’s much more to be said here, especially in light of how US democracy promotion exercises export Cathedral-capitalist realist-style governing protocols around the world through a model of capture that relies on keeping elite power balanced between multiple competitive fractions – not to mention the analysis offered by Peter Turchin on the relationship between elite overproduction and political fragmentation. But best to leave these thoughts for another post!
Some excellent recent posts that are swimming in similar waters:
Xenobuddhism: Non-Oriented Accelerationism Xenogoth: Nationalist Realism
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