Moving at the Speed of Dark

David Brin – scientist, author, hippy, and rebel scum – decided to take on the Neoreactionary movement in this post from last November, 2013.  I only recently became aware of it thanks to commenter Ramram, but nonetheless it provides a fascinating look into what qualifies as a mind, over there on the left-hand side of the aisle… the sinistra side of the aisle… as well as providing an excellent opportunity to demonstrate right-wing mental dexterity.

I first read Brin’s writing around the age of fourteen, specifically his collection of short-stories and essays titled Otherness, which he conveniently mentions in the above article.  The book’s eponymous essay is an edited transcript of a speech he gave at a Science Fiction convention years ago, and represents a stance he still clings to.  While Otherness has long since disappeared from my library, that essay in particular remains clear in my mind

Credit where credit’s due, Mr Brin: it was your left-wing braggadocio which broke me away from the multi-culti, Gene Roddenberry ideal, and led me to seriously start questioning the schizophrenic reality which you Boomers handed to my generation.

“Otherness” is Brin’s label for the Liberal multi-cult.  During his speech he praises Equality™, talking about how the Evolved Human knows that all cultures are equal – including the cultures who’d happily destroy the Otherness!  Peace and love, for the cannibals, too!  Such delicious, self-aware irony!  Even the sheer mention of the fact that Islam might not be the friendly Religion of Peace the apologists declare, rose the ire of an old-woman in the audience (whom I can only presume was a single-mother and divorcée); “How dare you criticize those irreligious moors?” she asked, “You with your Western Imperialism, you cis-gendered male!”

“But don’t you see?” he asked in delight, “You’re an Otherness too!  Diversity is our strength!”

Now lest you think my memory is failing in my dotage, or that I suffer from some childhood neuroses, I’ll quote what he had to say about Otherness in the article which we’re analyzing:

In our case, western [sic] 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.

Here we see the poisonous seed of the Leftoid mind: hatred of the normal, hatred of the Good.

Often the Left couches its attacks on the West in terms of the West failing to live up to its ideals.  We’re told that back in the 50s husbands used to beat their wives, attacking homosexuals was a team sport, and socially-approved-of child-rape ran rampant.  The Leftist arrives to soothe the burns of the Evil Patriachy, that “order of old and evil”, by rejecting the illigitimate authority wielded by men, business owners, and royalty. “Hierarchy is abuse!” they shout, implying that they’re going to bring us true noblesse oblige.

The alternative-right, the manosphere, and the neoreactionary movement – all of us Crazy Critics of the left – grew out of the careful consideration and note-comparison which the Internet has allowed. “Say, buddy,” we said, under a pseudonym on some BBS, “You ever noticed that chicks say they like nice guys, but always date the jerks?  That every problem the Liberals try and solve only gets worse?  That aside from the growth in technology, the 50s seems like a much better time to be alive?”

“The 50s?”

“I mean the 1750s, of course.”

For the past ten, twenty years we’ve been running a fine-toothed comb over the reality presented to us, and detangling the knots one by one, only to realize in retrospect that the answer had been thrown in our face at the very beginning: the Left’s foundational myth is a love a contradiction, schizophrenia, and the Great Elder Cthulu.

I’m reminded of Mencius’s essays on how Dawkins got pwned, where he demonstrates that modern Liberalism is nothing but secularized Christianity.

At the heart of Religious belief is the Divine Mystery; that thing that cannot be known, that cannot be believed in.  There is only Faith: the moral decision to choose Righteousness.  Generally this is a topic I avoid, since the state of our theological conversations have devolved to the point of Reefer Madness, but to put it simply: I completely agree with Atheists: I don’t believe in that God either (and the Spanish Inquisition nods in approval).  The Divine Mystery isn’t in snake handling, or speaking in tongues – it’s in Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem.

To vastly oversimplify it: Math has proven that Math can’t prove Math.  And if Math can’t prove Math, then nothing can prove Math.  You’re now left with a moral choice: either you choose Faith that Math is True, or you become a post-modernist arguing that “2+2=4” is a social construct.  Both are valid responses – though in the case of the latter, we might need to Draw and Quarter you.

Quite frankly, it’s probably best if you don’t think about this too much.

The Liberals, in their Secularization of Christianity, have dragged the Absolute down to the level of the Objective; instead of the Divine Mystery, they have the Objective Contradiction – and along with it, an infectious unravelling.

Brin’s Otherness approaches as a friend, offering to relieve you of the abuses which The System imposed upon you – “Hey, teachers!  Leave those kids alone!” – but far too late, you realize that you’ve fallen into another system, a system which rejects Natural Law, a system which rejects Logic, one which controls you by never admitting control.  Surrounded by a host of Starspawn birthed from Cthulu’s loins, you’re free to choose any of the choices which they’ve (conveniently) already chosen for you: destroy yourself by destroying others.  No more slavery!  Now you get to choose alienation, pornography, video games, and Equality™.

ͼ-Ѻ-ͽ

Cthulu Worshipers are a strange lot.  They embrace the most painful forms of suicide which Man can devise, leaping gladly into the bosom of torture and misery – and yet they can still feel fear.

In Brin’s case, there’s a thread of stark, existential terror in his writing – take note of the following passage:

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.

Did you see it, dear reader?  His ideology just retrogressed by almost 200 years!  A dyed-in-the-wool leftist, who supports multiculturalism, white guilt, and socialism, just wrote something that belongs on a Libertarian blog.

Don’t misunderstand, I’m not trying to attack libertarianism – us Neoreactionaries like libertarians, the same way we like it when husbands refrain from beating their wives. “Free markets?  Low taxes?  Wonderful!  Except the last time we tried it, we wound up with Obama.” Libertarianism is considered right-wing nowadays, but back around the French Revolution is was a thoroughly Left-Wing ideal – which is precisely why Brin is suddenly advocating it.

Retrogressing to childhood is a common response to terror, after all.

Ideologically, this is a desperate last salvo: “Please, can’t you guys just be conservatives?  Look, we’ll give you some tax credits – then we can keep playing this Left Vs Right game, where the left always wins!”

He’s begging us to play his game, because we’ve started playing our own.

ͼ-Ѻ-ͽ

Don’t mistake his terror for understanding; it’s purely an instinctive response.  No different from how you curled into a ball and sucked your thumb after watching The Phantom Menace.

As his essay progresses, he pats himself on the back for being such a wonderful hippy, and then chastizes us (while loving us, and promoting our diversity) for being the anti-hippy hippies that he thinks we are:

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.

…

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.

Did you think that comment about “rebel scum” at the beginning of this piece was an insult?  Brin is proud of his disloyalty!  How dare we claim to be as destructive as his generation!

Which just goes to show how little he understands us.

Us Neoreactionaries are Patriots; we’re followers of Natural Law, and we believe in order; futhermore, we are eager to rebuild what Brin’s ilk have destroyed.  The Freedom which we pursue isn’t freedom from responsibility – it’s the Freedom we find in self discipline.  Our Rights aren’t a list of positive prescriptions laid out by the UN – it’s our Right to speak the Truth, and suffer our Just Deserts joyously.

Cthulu’s Cultists might hold all the cards, but they’ve forgotten how to play.  It’s we who are building an engine…

…and it’s a fearsome engine, indeed.