An Unstable World: Part III: Tyranny's Logic and the Dilemma of "Reasonable Men"

Continuing our discussion of recent global crises from Parts I and II, I want to say a few words about the current ISIS-Crisis.  But -- typically -- I will get to the "new caliphate" only after taking an intellectual detour!  

Starting with a look at a couple of brilliantly dark explorations of the human potential for tyranny. Then distinguishing among many types of "reasonable" and "unreasonable" men.

== Food for thought ==

Let's start with a fascinating quotation from George Orwell's classic "Nineteen Eighty-Four" -- 

"...it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction — indeed, in some sense was the destruction — of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. 

"It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance..."

I've always found Orwell fascinating. In this case, yes, he's right... sort-of. Any degree of broad empowerment is, indeed, what would-be lords fear most. The trend after World War II to create a diamond-shaped society, with an empowered and educated middle and working class so large that it outnumbers the poor and politically dominates the rich... this was key to every piece of good news since civilization's nadir in 1943. It led to all fine things, from science and moon landings to the plummets in world poverty and (per capita average) violence that Steven Pinker documents in his book that I cite below.

It would lead, eventually, to Star Trek and to a society in which a person might get rich... through smithian competition over new goods or services... but there would be no way for such creative capitalists to pass on to their children the kind of obligate-unearned lordship that was the fiercely obsessive goal of every generation of brutal men, during all of the millennia leading to our Enlightenment Experiment. 

It cannot be allowed to happen again! The pyramid is not only a proven attractor state but most-likely the "natural" (99% of the time) human condition.It will also lead, inevitably, to the logic that Orwell described (above) and to the calamity that Robert Oppenheimer predicted (that we'll get to, below.) Orwell gave us a graphic warning, one that might indeed become a "self-preventing prophecy"... if we gird ourselves to protect the experiment that is humanity's only hope.

== An argument over tyrannical method ==

And yet, let's pause and note that Orwell was crude in his interpretation of method. War, as a means of keeping society pyramidal, instead of diamond-shaped? Well, sure... but over time war is a chaotic, unreliable, destructive method, especially when an educated populace - if even 5% of it truly understands - will have the technological means to shatter everything. In other words, Orwell's villainous oligarchies are brutal and predictably fit the standard human pattern. But they are also deeply stupid men.

No... here is the fellow who got it right. The one who will win their old argument over tyrannical methodology. Aldous Huxley. As illustrated chillingly in Brave New World, future despots who want to last, will use a velvet glove and not an iron boot. If such rulers truly are smart, they will fool the majority into thinking they are still in charge. Distracting them not with pain, but with pleasure. 

Was Orwell right about war being used as a distraction to keep the masses stupid? It happens. And without any doubt we should all have skeptical hackles, whenever a president or politician raises a clamor for combat. Indeed, elsewhere I have carefully parsed the differences between democrats and republicans in HOW they wage war, a stunningly opposite matter of style and effectiveness.

In other words (as I portray in Existence) even callously pragmatic oligarchs will fashion their dominance very differently, depending upon whether they are short-sighted lunatics, crudely rational, or at least bent on genuine, long term self-interest.

In fact, I'd like to now dive deeper. For Orwell's thoughts about the inevitability of oligarchy-driven war mirrored another debate that was going on, about the same time that he wrote his epic.  And this one, also, revolved around the whole notion of "reasonable" leadership.

== The saint vs the madman ==

If you do not know about it, immerse yourself in the debates that swirled in and around the scientific community, at the end of WWII, over what to do about the atom bomb.  (There have been several excellent movies and books.) 

On one side was a spectrum of sad-cynics and idealists, ranging from those wanting a total, worldwide ban on nuclear weapons to those -- like Robert Oppenheimer -- who urged putting them under some kind of international control. Steeped in knowledge about history (most scientists are vastly better-read than anyone would expect), they had just witnessed humanity plunge into its deepest nadir of horror. Their cynical view was deeply rooted in reality. 

Oppenheimer -- deeply respected by all who met him -- felt guilt-wracked over having been forced (by Hitler) to hand such instruments of potential devastation over to men who seemed much more reasonable (than Hitler). Oh, indeed, reasonable men (e.g. Marshall, Acheson, Truman and Eisenhower) were vastly better than monsters! But they were still men. And men had never been known to show restraint, at any point in our gruesomely impulsive past. There were no examples of men not using a new weapon, once it was offered to them.

On the other side of the debate was a staggeringly smart but zany "mad Hungarian" with spectacular eyebrows, Edward Teller. The George Soros of his day, Teller was fanatically anti-communist, which may have propelled his eagerness to invent the hydrogen bomb. But completely aside from all that, he also had an interesting hypothesis... that "this time is different."  That the Bomb would shake up reasonable men... and even moderately unreasonable ones... forcing them to ratchet up their powers of prefrontal contemplation, especially realization of the obvious, that it was time to make a change. To get past history's pre-adolescent reflexes and start doing things better. If for no other reason, because they were looking death in the eyes.

Put less colorfully, Teller maintained that reciprocal fear would accomplish this miracle.  That Mutual-Assured Destruction (MAD) might cause the Soviet and American empires to tamp their rivalry below the normal level of ignition into full-scale holocaust. That deterrence would suffice to bring into being an era of (relative) peace.

Where would you have put your money, way back in 1948? On such a blatantly mad fanatic? Or the blatantly brilliant and saintly Oppenheimer, and nearly all of his equally brilliant and history-wise associates? Would you have bet on the endlessly repeated pattern of human behavior, across all of our annals? Or upon a new notion, that "this time is different?" (A phrase that nearly always gets the speaker into terrible trouble.)

Consider your almost-daily habit of expressing cynical contempt for humanity and its institutions.  Yes, I mean you. It is so common a reflex that I am pretty safe in assuming you - dear reader - engage in it almost relentlessly. I examine this elsewhere, in many places, and how unproductive, but personally satisfying the reflex can be! No doubt you deem my tentative and surprised optimism to be just as mad as Edward Teller.

I do know this, however -- that the image of the mushroom cloud has to have been the most effective work of art ever, across all of the last 40,000 years. For it persuaded hundreds of millions, visually and almost without argument, that something had to change! 

Supporting artworks like Dr. Strangelove and On The Beach helped with this transformation, by providing explicit self-preventing prophecies that stirred great efforts to prevent some Accident from triggering the Unthinkable.

But the main effect of the mushroom cloud lay in redefining what terms "reasonable" and "unreasonable" were to mean, in the second half of the 20th Century.

(Note, as I've said often, the second great visual artwork to come out of physics was the image of Earth, as a lonely oasis in the desert of space, provided by Apollo 8 at the very end of that awful year, 1968... a picture that also transformed our hearts and our behaviors, perhaps even just enough to save us.)

== Was Teller right? ==

For the West it meant continuing to spend, as if we were in a real war. Because it would have gone hot the instant we let up. We are now told, explicitly, by ex-Soviet generals that they were always poised to strike, and intended to, if the West ever let down its technological and military advantages. 

And hence (as I've said many times and will reiterate next time), there must be a limit to the complaints of any living human against Pax Americana. Yes, like all Pax imperiums, it committed crimes (though less deliberately and persistently and with a higher ratio of compensating good deeds than any other people who were tempted by such power; name one counter-example.) We must learn from those crimes, though!  

Moreover, our agenda must be to create a new world that does NOT depend on any "pax" power to keep the peace, a peace we should maintain ourselves, as planetary citizens!  Nevertheless, if you are currently alive, and know anything at all about our species history, then you'd be a hypocrite to deny any need for gratitude.

But I'll go farther in swimming contrary to modern habit. Shall we all pay homage to Saint Bomb? The greatest invention for peace ever made? Oh, sure, we might see those long-delayed mushroom clouds tomorrow. But my generation of males would have all died on World War III battlefields, if not for the unprecedented peace that Steven Pinker so well documents in The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Even if it turns out to have been a temporary reprieve, it lasted an entire human lifetime. So Teller was right. Things were different. At least... it had become so for reasonable humans, confronting others who -- while unreasonable -- at least lived in a logic of cause and effect.

And so, you can see the segue coming, to discussing world problems that are currently being caused not by reasonable folks, or even logical-unreasonable ones like our old Soviet adversaries. Rather, recent news forces us to pay heed to the far more common types that Robert Oppenheimer saw in the pages of history books. Those who would never refuse a weapon or pause for a moment before using it. Those who -- like all of our insatiably unreasonable ancestors -- will concoct any excuse to prevent their own citizens from offering up criticism...

...as so many of you are leaping to your keyboards right now, in order to criticize me for calling our own civilization "reasonable"! Pounding keys, as free women and men, exercising a right of upward and lateral criticism that you take for granted, but that none of our ancestors... nor the poor folks living in Russia or under ISIS... could ever do. A habit -- the habit -- that has kept us at least a little bit "reasonable."

Sorry boys and girls. If you are doing that, without once pausing to consider the irony, then yes, alas, we have fallen since the days of giants like Teller and Oppie, or Marshall and Ike, or Gandhi and King.

But I've gone on too long.  So we'll hang fire a bit, on ISIS and Ebola and such. Don't worry.  These things aren't about to go away. Not yet. So much for an "end of history."

== Continue to Part IV: Pax Americana

or Return to Part I: An Unstable World: Russia

"Neo-Reactionaries" drop all pretense: End democracy and bring back lords!

Following up on my previous posting, about the rationalizations of the new aristocracy, this time I plan to reveal to you a pernicious trend among some of society's best and brightest.  But first, will you indulge me with a riff of background?

In Existence,  I portray a grand conference, held in the Alps around the year 2045.  The secret meeting has been called by a consortium of "trillies," or trillionaire families, with the objective of commencing a new, world-wide era of Aristocratic Rule.  But their goal is not just to re-institute the ancient pyramid of privileged domination, but this time to start off on the correct foot. To get it right.

Painfully aware of how gruesomely awful such pyramid-shaped societies were at governance, across the last many-thousands of years -- how fraught with violence, delusion, waste and error -- the trillie families are nevertheless unable to step back from the approaching time of takeover that their parents had conspired for, all the way back even to the Twentieth Century.  Giving in to human nature, they nurse rationalizations about the failure of democratic systems, and their hired boffins supply them with plenty of incantations to support the coming putsch.  And yet --

Yet, I also describe this particular lordly cartel as smarter than average. They know that the vast, educated middle class has access to powerful technologies that, should they become enraged, could make the guillotine look like louffa. Hence, they take their coming transition to rulership seriously, much as the Medici dukes of Florence did, during the Renaissance. Amid that alpine conclave, I show them calling on their hired intellectuals and house savants to take up the role of Machiavelli. To study and report what went wrong with past eras of oligarchy and feudalism, innovating ways to do it better, this time.

These are deeply cynical scenes!  But still, they also contain my patented brand of optimistic faith in reason: in this case positing that a cabal of trillionaires would have enough honesty and self-awareness to know how badly their favored system worked, in 99% of past human cultures. That they would hire the brightest people they could find (among those who could be trusted to help them end democracy) and ask those boffins to develop modified approaches to aristocracy,  based on lessons from both history and science.

For example, how to avoid catastrophic in-breeding and instead use meritocratic systems to invite the very best commoners upward to join their elite families via marriage and other alliances, at the top. Solving the illusion of superiority by making it -- gradually -- completely real.

== Fictional wishful-thinking? ==

Do I expect such calm and measured sobriety from the New Lords who are -- even now -- making their moves to restore the ancient social order?  Replacing the middle class, enlightenment, diamond-shaped social order with a traditional pyramid of owner-lord privilege?

Of course not.

For every Lorenzo de Medici or Heny Plantagenet there were hundreds, thousands of fools who let flatterers talk them into believing ego-stroking stories -- that they were lords because of their own genius, or inherent superiority, or God-given right.

As I have said many times, this is human nature.  We are all descended from the harems of guys who pulled off this trick. Voluptuous delusions run through our veins, so strongly that it's amazing the Enlightenment Miracle was ever tried at all, let alone that it lasted as long as it has.

== The rise of the Neo-Reactionaries ==

Till now, the Enlightenment had several things going for it: like the fact that it works.

For three hundred years, in realms as diverse as science, wealth-creation, error-avoidance, innovation, justice and happiness, it has outperformed all previous societies combined. But that is not the secret sauce. Its key trick, above all, was a very strong mythology of egalitarianism, individualism, pragmatism and liberality --

-- the ideal of a level and fair playing field, in which good ideas should win out over bad ones, without interference by stodgy or biased authorities. Adam Smith taught us -- and the American Founders instituted -- ways to benefit from arenas of competition in which no single person's (or narrow cabal's) delusions may reign -- but instead products, policies, theories and justice are wrangled, tested and refined in four great arenas -- markets, democracy, science and courts -- where avoidance of criticism or error-discovery is difficult, even impossible over the long run.

They never worked perfectly and were always under attack by cheaters.  Still, these accountability arenas are the only systems that ever penetrated our species's penchant for delusion in any systematic way.  

Leftists who despise competition in principle are fools who ignore both human nature and a cornucopia of positive-sum outcomes from the four competitive arenas.

Rightists who believe competition works well without careful tuning, regulation, research, opportunity-enhancement, shared investment in infrastructure, and (above all) relentless prevention-of-cheating are even worse fools who ignore all our past.

Even that most-solipsistic of clades, the libertarians, used to declare fealty to Adam Smith's process, albeit grudgingly. But you had only to look at their favorite books and stories to detect an undercurrent and foretell that it would emerge openly, someday, into betrayal of Smith. Idolatry of the Nietzschean ubermensch or superman -- the figure every geek supposes himself to be -- oppressed and kept from his natural place on-top by jealous mobs of bullies, like those who oppressed him on the playground.  Where every young nerd (myself included) muttered: "just you wait till I come into my powers!"

From Ayn Rand to Harry Potter to Star Wars to Orson Scott Card, how many mythologies have catered to that fantasy, in all its voluptuous, masturbatory solipsism?  In contrast, can you count any mythic systems -- other than Star Trek -- that encouraged a different view? Recognition that "I am a member of a civilization"? One that made million miracles possible? Not by unleashing a few demigods, but by stimulating the collaborative and competitive efforts of whole scads of bright folks who are merely way-above-average?

Well, the pretense may be over, fellas and gals.  Welcome to Nietzsche World.

Welcome to the Rapture of the Ingrates.

It is called the "Neo-Reactionary Movement"  -- a quasi-new cult that yearns for the ancien régime of monarchy and feudal rule. One that rejects Adam Smith and Franklin and the entire Enlightenment.  And above all -- democracy.

== Yearning for the "Return of the King." ==

I'll let Klint Finley describe this movement for you, in a few paragraphs clipped from his excellent article on the subject: Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neo-Reactionaries:

"Neoreactionaries believe that while technology and capitalism have advanced humanity over the past couple centuries, democracy has actually done more harm than good. They propose a return to old-fashioned gender roles, social order and monarchy."

Finley continues:  "Perhaps the one thing uniting all neoreactionaries is a critique of modernity that centers on opposition to democracy in all its forms. Many are former libertarians who decided that freedom and democracy were incompatible."

“Demotist systems, that is, systems ruled by the ‘People,’ such as Democracy and Communism, are predictably less financially stable than aristocratic systems,” a leading light of this movement, Michael Anissimov writes. (And note how he slips in the Trojan Horse axiom that communism is a categorical cousin to democracy - the sly rogue!) “On average, they undergo more recessions and hold more debt. They are more susceptible to market crashes. They waste more resources. Each dollar goes further towards improving standard of living for the average person in an aristocratic system than in a Democratic one.”

There it is, the assertion that autarchies "get more done" than flighty, self-indulgent, bourgeoise polities. Is this just a fluke? No, the movement has been long-simmering. It reminds me of a statement made by Star Wars impresario George Lucas in an infamous 1999 New York Times interview. 

"Not that we need a king, but there's a reason why kings built large palaces, sat on thrones and wore rubies all over. There's a whole social need for that, not to oppress the masses, but to impress the masses and make them proud and allow them to feel good about their culture, their government and their ruler so that they are left feeling that a ruler has the right to rule over them, so that they feel good rather than disgusted about being ruled. In the past, the media basically worked for the state and was there to build the culture. Now, obviously, in some cases it got used in a wrong way and you ended up with the whole balance of power out of whack. But there's probably no better form of government than a good despot."  

Every time I read that, it leaves me breathless. Stunned. I appraised that perspective - and its toxic lesson - in Star Wars on Trial.  Indeed, I have elsewhere explored the emotional underpinnings of all this:

"Wouldn’t life seem richer, finer if we still had kings? If the guardians of wisdom kept their wonders locked up in high wizard towers, instead of rushing onto PBS the way our unseemly “scientists” do today? Weren’t miracles more exciting when they were doled out by a precious few, instead of being commercialized, bottled and marketed to the masses for $1.95? Didn’t we stop going to the moon because it had become boring?"

The temptation to wallow in romance -- in fiction -- is understandable.  To prescribe feudalism for real life, though?

Oh, where to begin on this grotesque -- and  poisonously romantic -- wrongheadedness?   Shall we start with the way that these fellows erect edifices of assertions that, when examined, prove to be not only untrue, but spectacularly and diametrically opposite to true?

Like maintaining that Hitler and Stalin were epiphenomena of democracy, and not absolutist-oligarchist reactions to democracy -- attempts to throttle it to death, erecting new elites, complete with harems, along ancient patterns? Or that despotic Spartans ever held a candle to the Athenian polis, even in martial accomplishments? Or the way no ancient autarchy ever "got done" even a scintilla's percentage of the accomplishments of any modern democracy.

The list of staggering rationalizations is too long for me to even ponder addressing, from ignoring Adam Smith's denunciations of aristocracy as the core enemy of enterprise, to the bizarre belief that you can have economic freedom without any of the political kind, or that the clearly nasty and stupid rulership pattern of 6000 years should ever, ever again be trusted with anything more than a burnt match. Or that Communism was somehow a version of democracy, instead of a quasi-feudal theocratic cult that relentlessly spewed hatred at "bourgeoise democracy." Or the way they rail against the Hayekian sin of "too few allocators and deciders" when it is committed by civil servants, yet justify narrow cliques of conniving group-think lords who do the same thing, just because they are "private."

Above all, the hoary and utterly disproved nostrum that bourgeois citizens are fiscally less prudent than kings and lords, a slander that is as counterfactual as claiming day is night.

Fortunately, I do not have to refute this nonsense in detail, myself. Finley links to Anissimov's manifestos -- and many others' -- against modernity, democracy and enlightenment… so go ahead and give their own words a fair shake. Read the incantations! I have faith in you.

Then head over to a marvelous, point-by-point refutation provided by Scott Alexander showing, among other things, how neo-reactionaries overestimate by many orders of magnitude the stability or governing aptitude of monarchies.  Alexander recently published an Anti-Reactionary FAQ, a massive document examining and refuting the claims of neoreactionaries.

Seriously, it is huge but painstakingly detailed, accurate and devastating. You need to give it a look. Alexander writes very well, entertainingly, and this vote of confidence in YOU needs to circulate as widely as possible.

== Disproof by example ==

Let me clip just one short part of Mr. Alexander's devastating refutation of those who contend that absolute monarchy, following ancient principles, will outperform democracy, equal rights and all that decadent western crap. He starts by suggesting the simplest and most fair experimental test of rhe neo-reactionary assertion.  That we take a very homogeneous country and split it in half.

"One side gets a hereditary absolute monarch, whose rule is law and who is succeeded by his son and by his son's son. The population is inculcated with neo-Confucian values of respect for authority, respect for the family, strict gender roles and cultural solidarity, but these values are supplemented by a religious ideal honoring the monarch as a near-god and the country as a specially chosen holy land. American cultural influence is banned on penalty of death; all media must be produced in-country, and missionaries are shot on site. The country’s policies are put in the hands of a group of technocratic nobles hand-picked by the king.

"The other side gets flooded with American missionaries preaching weird sects of Protestantism, and at the point of American guns is transformed into a parliamentary democracy. Its economy – again at the behest of American influence – becomes market capitalism, regulated by democracy and bureaucracy. It institutes a hundred billion dollar project to protect the environment, passes the strictest gun control laws in the world, develops a thriving gay culture, and elects a woman as President.

"Turns out this perfect controlled experiment actually happened. Let’s see how it turned out!"

Alexander then provides an image that speaks ten thousand words.

Some of you know the experiment to which he refers.  North and South Korea.

Oh, but read this section.  Read the rest.  And marvel that bright males (almost no women, of course) are able to talk themselves into believing factually-opposite, example-free, history-ignoring, human nature-ignoring and cosmically stupid incantations, just because it flatters their playground-traumatized imaginations to imagine that -- in a world of far more limited opportunities and justice -- they would somehow get to be the ones with harems.

== We generate our own, home-grown enemies ==

It is said that every generation is invaded by a fresh spate of invaders -- their children. In our case, western civilization has raised many generations steeped in memes of suspicion of authority and questioning the home-and-familiar, one of the most unusual things that any culture ever preached to its own offspring!  I appraise this reflex favorably in my essay and book Otherness.  These memes are what led to so many successive self-improvement campaigns, from constitutionalism to elimination of slavery. They led us hippies - for example - to march against horrid assumptions that all other generations took for granted -- wasteful and inherently impractical superstitions like racism, sexism and environmental blindness.  They also guarantee that new immunal rejection reflexes will be applied against the Boomers' assumption sets by even-newer generations!  So be it.

To an extent, this is a core element of the Enlightenment's healthy process of advancement and renewal. Heaven forbid that the young stop getting in their elders' faces, confronting their mistakes.  But T-cells that go screeching through the body looking for mistakes are not always right! And many a sanctimonious twit of both right and left conveys more heat than light.  More noise than value.

In this case of the neo-reactionaries, you have a cult of ingratitude that should incur at least a burden of scholarly proof. Certainly not being allowed to get away with blithe assertions and bald-faced lies. For example, I have again and again pointed out recent evidence -- such as Steven Pinker's book on declining world violence -- that we have good news to build upon.  Open and reciprocal criticism helped to make the violence decline happen!  Along with steep plummets in world (per capita) poverty and so on.  That's a lot of accomplishment to overcome, in claiming that kings could do better.

In fact, I know -- and rather enjoy -- some of the fellows in this general community, such as Anissimov and Peter Thiel, whose other accomplishments are respect-worthy and whose lively, vivid minds make up for abstract disagreements. There are areas of common ground! Like the long range goal of a world that overflows with empowered and sovereign individuals, needing little in the way of regulation or constraint, a shared dream, even if we part company over how to get there.

Let me emphasize that there is diversity in this melange, and lumping can give unfair impressions. Not all of them ascribe - for example - to the vaguely racist insinuations of the Human Bio-Diversity (HBD) sub-grouping. There is some overlap with the Singularity-Transhumanist movement -- warranting wariness and care, when you attend those gatherings. Indeed, this general horizon of nerd-dom is an eclectic scattering… and I like that!

 Indeed, some of the brightest - like Thiel - have legitimate complaints -- in the nitty gritty of the details of running a complex, democratic civilization. Fine.  Want to propose alternatives? Experiments? Deregulations? Criticism is a feature, not a flaw of demotic life, part of the completely unique ferment that generally keeps us moving forward. (For example, I have no objections -- only questions - regarding Thiel's endeavor to create new sovereignties out at sea.) You want to offer innovations and solutions and evidence, along with those wild-eyed assertions? Well, you know...

...we'd all love to see your plan.

== We are still the revolution ==

Alas though, they tend not to view things that way. Here I am speculating: but I believe that some of these fellows have swung in this bizarre direction because they are too smart to be fooled any longer by the undead thing that has hijacked American conservatism, sending poor Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley spinning so fast that Arizona and New York draw electricity from their graves.  Having driven off all the nation's scientists, teachers, doctors and every other clade of "smartypants" professionals, the New GOP could hardly hold on to brainiac Silicon Valley libertarians, who can see the unalloyed record of catastrophic governance and universally bad outcomes from the Bush years.

But what's the alternative? Smarmy, compromising-consensualist and preachy-progressivist liberalism?  Never.

Let's give them points for imagination, then, finding a new -- or rather, ancient -- direction to call their own.  Even though Neo-Reaction winds up as delusional as any dogma issued by the House of Ailes.

Rather than picturing themselves as part of Adam Smith's flat and open competitive churn,  Neo-Reactionaries prefer to envision a kind of uprising or counter-reformation. An up-ending and reversal of what they see as a decadent experiment in mob rule, gone wrong, demanding that we return to the beastly way of life that oppressed and limited and cauterized all of our ancestors (including the lords!) -- only getting it right, this time. 

 A way of life that (I admit) is the natural human attractor state! One that caters to every romantic impulse behind the popularity of fantasy tales of Martin, Lucas or Tolkien. One that is darwinistically so compelling and natural that it probably snared most intelligent races in our galaxy -- a top potential explanation for the Fermi Paradox. An attractor state called feudalism.

An attractor that is yanking hard on us now, as would-be lords deliberately instigate a fresh phase of Civil War to cripple American pragmatism and institutions, throwing into imbalance all four of those great, positive-sum accountability arenas upon which our Great Experiment relies.  

But it won't work.

They do not get to call themselves rebels!  We and our Enlightenment are the revolutionaries, still, beating down the repeated, clawing assaults of oligarchists from all sides, some of whom called themselves "communists," but always prescribing the same, boring pyramid of power.

These guys face a steep burden of proof that we should reject the social contract that brought them to their high status, and all of us the comfort and means to debate this in a world-spanning agora. A civilization that may -- in just two generations -- embark upon interstellar adventures, bringing light, at last, to the galaxy.

Amid the Rapture of the Ingrates, they are welcome to contend (it's a free country) that we'd all be far better off if the west had not followed the advice of Locke and Montesquieu and Franklin and Smith and all the other heroes -- the greatest our species ever produced -- who rebelled against oligarchic rule, giving us one chance -- perhaps only this one -- to try something else.

They are free to offer that assertion. But I am (nodding thanks to all those heroes) equally empowered to say bullshit.

========================

ADDENDA:

1.  Long time member of this community Larry Hart suggested a term "endarkenment" to apply to those who have chosen to oppose the Enlightenment Experiment.  I find it quite tasty.  

2. Personally, I do not feel anger toward the oligarchs who are conniving and bribing and undermining in order to sabotage the experiment, as much as toward the intellectual "boffins" who take the money and concoct rationalizations like "neo-reaction."  The former are only acting out of quasi-animal reflex. Puppets of Darwin, they are only doing what harem-builders have done ever since humans developed metal implements and agricultural division of labor -- steal other men's women and wheat and then hire priests to tell everyone this is a good thing.  They must be thwarted in achieving this traditional and deeply human goal, or our destiny as a species will be spoiled -- and there are "good billionaires" who know this.  Indeed, those rich dudes who are tempted by the old reflexes, yet choose to stay on our side -- the Gates/Buffett types -- are our greatest hope.  Recalling the wisdom of Andrew Carnegie, they know their kids will never starve… and will do better if they have to work, a little, alongside us.

No, it is the smart aleck boffins who provide the priestly rationalizations who should know better.  They are the ones who… if their plan truly succeeds… should be remembered and held to account by the inevitable Resistance.  So let it be written.  So let it be done.

3. Throw this into their faces relentlessly.  They decry the fallacy of limited decision-making castes in commerce and science… and use that concept to attack "big government" for allocating based upon limited knowledge sets, removed from the critical feedback loops of markets.  Then they turn around and praise rulership by tiny, insular clades of aristocrats or kings, allocating almost entirely on the basis of whim. ("Okay everybody, we're gonna spend 50% of the national GDP on a pyramid!  Or Versailles. Or conquering everyone in sight.") It is beyond hypocrisy.  It is incantation.  

4. The fundamental flaw, though, is succession.  Find for me one example (other than Plantagenets) in which three direct generations of kingship did not include at least one maniac or complete fool, whose whims brought devastation down upon the house and the nation.

5. Down below in comments, one fellow claimed that the success stories of Hong Kong, Singapore and China show that political freedom is unnecessary in order to improve the lives of the people through economic advancement.  This is by far the strongest counter-attack by the neo-reactionaries and at first sight it does seem to advance their position on one small sector (though no others.) It caused me to make a bold - supportable - counter assertion that these mercantilist-predatory trading nations… along with the more democratic Japan and South Korea… in fact deserve far less credit for their development "miracles" than they claim.   Consider How little of their success was based upon internal inventiveness and how much depended on maintaining a huge balance of payments trade surplus with the United States.  

This system of uplift-development through trade ("foreign aid through WalMart") has been the greatest force raising standards of living around the globe… and it was permitted, indulgently, by trade systems imposed by Pax Americana after 1945.  No other pax imperium ever did such a thing.  Indeed, Gandhi's #2 complaint about Pax Brittanica was its home-favoring, mercantilist trade rules.  But under Marshall, Acheson and Truman and Ike, we did the exact opposite, and never turned back.

Dig this well, it was a great democracy's CHOICE of a purely optional policy, allowing factory jobs to follow cheap labor and allowing predatory mercantilist behavior to go unpunished while jobs flowed around the world, that led to development in all of those countries.  Yes, they had decent leadership and hard-working people! But the core process was entirely a western innovation originating in a democracy that was so creative and inventive that it could afford 60 years of uplifting trade deficits that dsaved the world. And democracies that even now choose to continue that far-sighted plan.  

In other words, again, the NR boys are blathering nonsense that is diametrically opposite to any sense at all. …and anon...