Zeno Systems. This is Nick Land's book. And reading Nick Land is a joy, a treat. It's something that will challenge you. I spent most of my time while reading this book, copying and pasting entire paragraphs or multiple paragraphs and putting them into Grok with the prompt, WTF is Nick Land trying to say here.
and then it unpacks it. Land is one of the most dense writers that I've ever had the pleasure of
reading and this book is an absolute joy. It's not, I won't say it's like an easy read
because he does write so dense. However, it's the kind of read that you want to chew on for a long
time. And you want to really think about the things that he's saying because land is not fighting in
the trenches that everyone else is. He's not arguing the merits of Democrats versus Republicans
or democracy versus communism. He is far zoomed out and talking about things at a higher level,
a higher dimension than we're typically used to.
And Bitcoin is such a core part of the things that he talks about.
Yeah.
So he's in the trenches.
What I would say is like a concentric circle of trenches
that's far back from the front, further back from the front lines.
So Xenosystems is a collection of,
a curated collection of entries from his blog of the same name,
I believe from 2012 to 2017, it's kind of roughly centered around this idea of neo-reaction.
So you're right that neo-reaction as like a political philosophy is kind of, we'll talk
about this, a meta-politics.
So it's beyond the front lines.
If you're in the trenches, Democrat, Republican, even conservative, liberal, there's a row
behind that of increasing abstraction about what it even means to have a political view.
And that's kind of where neo-reaction situates it.
as a framework for views.
And I want to say it's the concentric circle of trenches
because when he was writing this blog,
it was a time of 2012, 2017,
hashing out this idea of neo-reaction.
Now it's kind of in the air.
You hear Nick Land mentioned in the same breath
as a lot of modern politics with,
you would say, the rise of the alt-right.
But this is prefiguring a lot of that.
This comes before Trump,
but a lot of people use it to explain
a lot of what Trump was able to piggyback on.
But this is not basically...
And he exclusively distances himself from the alt-right.
Yes, he does.
Yes, yeah.
Very, very vehemently.
Explicitly, yeah.
In those terms, a distancing, definitely.
It's a populist movement to neo-reaction,
which is like an anti-populist movement.
It's against, we're going to see a critique of democracy here
because it is anti-populist.
Yeah, like alt-right could be a populist expression
may be of some of the same sources of discontent that motivate neoreaction,
but they're divergent stances.
Yeah.
No, it is.
You're totally right.
There's a density to it that he's a philosopher by training, continental philosophy.
So that's like a certain trend, a certain school of philosophy that within the realm
of philosophy, we might say there's analytic and continental.
And analytic is the type that maybe a lot of people are used to where it's all about, like, be as clear as you can and proceed through, like, to clarify a concept, kind of through a, like, maybe a Socratic ring of, like, increasing movement towards a notion where you subtract away all the inessential.
Whereas he's going to talk about his view of philosophy here, which is more of a stimulus to thought as a way to get us thinking.
and and i just wanted to also know that this is his most accessible work too that he was writing
for the blog he was writing for somewhat of a popular audience at least trying to have dialogue
with people who were incredibly intelligent um curtis yarvin michael anisimov these other people
but they weren't um you know like they weren't in the same strand of philosophy that he was he kind
of pulls back i think this is very if you want to get into nick land this is where you start i think
Xena systems.
Yeah.
So you're going to start.
Are there terms that we should, I mean, because like reading through like cybernetic and the
cathedral and these things.
So cybernetics, I wasn't, as far as terms though, I think that's how we're going to
structure this conversation.
This is again, kind of a curation of blog entries.
Lomaz, the editor through Passage Press does a fantastic job of, it's not pure, it's not
pure chronology of blog entries.
There's a cumulative nature where you learn concepts as you go along that are employed in later blog entries.
And Lomez has taken the effort to kind of put in the forefront, kind of at the beginning essays that if you read through it chronologically, if you read the book chronologically, you're going to learn vocab that's going to help out.
And this whole thing, land creates a vocabulary because you're going to talk about a new thing and you use the old words.
You're going to be captured in a sense by old ways of thinking.
And so land is going to rebuild up a vocabulary and not just him, the people he's in dialogue with.
We'll talk about the cathedral, what that means.
This was a notion that Curtis Yarvin, as Menchus Boldbug, created, and it's one that land employs.
He addresses that very explicitly, the language, in that language is not sufficient to convey ideas that are – I mean, like there are – the English language lacks the ability to communicate certain types of things and other languages lack those abilities.
And he mentions that like, you know, mathematics quickly gets rid of language and devolves into symbols that are, I guess, more universal or something.
But like, I remember having a discussion with somebody, a Chinese person who was saying like in Chinese, there's like, I don't know, there's like 15 different ways to say love.
And each of them means like a different thing, you know.
Um, and there's like, I mean, you can have like love for an object, love for a family member, romantic love, all this stuff. And so, um, it's from that place that we're starting this conversation, which is that we're using language to describe something that language is not sufficient for. And so we're, we're fighting against the current to begin with, I think.
Yeah. And trying to. The more I read this, the more it is just constantly reminding yourself to remove yourself from the box. You're in a system. You need to be outside of the system to analyze the system.
So here's a couple of quotes on language. I sent you one over on Twitter as we were discussing this. That one is language is not a neutral conveyor of infinite communicative possibility, but an intelligence box. It is to be counted among the traps to be escaped.
and then in that vein
language is good
only for language games
and among these trust games
are the most irredeemably stupid
so it's like language is going to put us
it's going to be an intelligence box
it's going to box us into a place
and we're not going to be able to go further
and we need to go further toward the outside
which we're going to talk about too
as a place of possibility
and darkness
a place beyond language
but a place that also is going to be an ultimate refuge from a lot of the traps that we're going
to find you mentioned the word cybernetics i didn't have that as a separate topic he kind of
that's one of the words he uses as presumed knowledge and cybernetics was this study i take
it of like a feedback system so cybernetics is the way that a system maintains itself in stability
like imagine a stable system all of the flows within that system that regulate each other so
the system stays the same or there's two ways that a system breaks down he says it either becomes an
explosion or a trap the cybernetic system either has some sort of reinforcement feedback mechanism
that causes it to accelerate out of control or it gets caught in a sort of stagnant stability and
degenerates. Key to this is that it's positive feedback, right? Because I think he makes the
distinction that there's a difference between negative and positive feedback and that cybernetics
is a positive feedback system. And that I feel like I read, and maybe I'm imagining it, but I
feel like I read this in one of the blogs that was like cybernetics specifically deals with
positive feedback, which is basically that you are basically like you do something and you get
an empirical result. And that result is either, oh, this is good. I do more of it, or this is bad.
I do something else. And so the only outcome is positive. Either you move further in the
direction that you want to go, or you start moving in the direction that you want to go,
because the thing that you were doing was moving you in a different direction.
And so I don't really know. I was kind of hoping you could explain that to me.
Let's just jump in with the first concept, because it is a,
I think cybernetic dynamic. And again, if you characterize these things as positive or negative,
you're already building in a value judgment. And I think that's one of the things that land
philosophy does is a lot of the reason why people will say that land is nihilist is because
they think that there's an endorsement in certain parts of it rather than simply a description of
reality. I think what land is doing a lot of times is using a very kind of brilliant and
distinctive prose style to describe reality in a new sort of way to make it apparent because
reality is always everywhere about us we become inured to it it becomes invisible
if you don't re-describe it in a way that makes it salient then it just it it fades into the
background and i think a lot of what he's doing is just describing dynamics in a way that that
makes them notable to us again that reality is incredibly strange what's going on is incredibly
strange if we tend to reality as it is the dynamics and don't turn away from certain kind
of fearful truths then you're going to see things operating at a level that may be concerning some
will call it nihilist again others are simply going to call it like looking reality straight
in the jaws but so this first one of the first concepts we get is the degenerative ratchet
and so what's a ratchet ratchet is a tool that gives you leverage to uh turn something i guess
To like tighten or loosen.
Yeah.
But the nature of a ratchet, though, is it clicks easily in one direction.
You turn a ratchet.
It only goes one direction.
You try to flip it.
It's like it catches then.
Each time you move forward, it's a click.
You try to move it back.
It doesn't go further.
But it moves easily forward to the next click.
And so a degenerative ratchet then, so reversal becomes impossible.
It's going to be the state through democratic institutions becomes a degenerative ratchet in which you only have the growth of the state.
state. You can always move forward easily to another click in the growth of Leviathan. You
can never move backwards. Things like the expansive franchise. Once you extend the vote, you can't
then rescind the vote to a new population. They're going to keep on voting. If we move the vote down
to the 16-year-olds have it, it would be tough to then disenfranchise 16-year-olds. Whether it was
good or bad to enfranchise them in the first place, you know, that's beside the point. It's just a
ratchet. It moves forward easily, but doesn't move backwards. The welfare state is that same
way. You extend an entitlement, it becomes very difficult to resend an entitlement. People expect
it becomes the thing that if you take away an entitlement, it's to a like, you cruel,
incompassionate person, what are you doing taking away this thing that we're owed?
Yeah, there's nothing more temporary, nothing more permanent than a temporary government program.
Exactly. It's a degenerative ratchet. Makes backward movement impossible. Keep going forward
until the system breaks.
That's maybe that cybernetic explosion,
that dynamic of a feedback
where you always can easily go in one direction,
you can't go backwards.
Progressivism, then, writ large,
is a degenerative ratchet.
Democratization, again, once you democratize,
you can't go back.
Welfare systems, immigration.
Once you have a bunch of mass immigration,
it becomes, as we're seeing,
very difficult politically, socially,
to then deport a bunch of people.
You can't go backward. You can only slow immigration flows or maybe stop them periodically.
You can never really go backwards once you've had an explosive immigration flow.
It's a degenerative ratchet.
One that Bitcoiners will be familiar with, macroeconomic politicized money to, quote, land.
Easing is easy. Tightening is terrifying.
Rollback unattempted since Jackson in the mid-19th century.
So quantitative easing is easy. Everybody loves the new money.
tightening the periods of austerity. Nobody wants that, right? And so all neoreactionary
problems are going to go back in a sense to this degenerative ratchet. It is the problem where
progressivism is the easiest thing to do in the world through increased immigration flows,
increased entitlement programs, increased and more loose democratization, increase of the money
supply. All these things are very easy to do, but to try to pull that ratchet backwards,
you can't do it yeah so that's the first concept it's going to be at the core of a lot of this
the negative or just the way that neoreaction is looking at the world it's going to look at a lot
of systems as degenerative ratchets degenerative ratchets okay so basically you start moving in a
direction you can never go back if that yeah that direction um being the progressive expansion
of the state yeah so this again like all of this is a dialogue that nick land is having with other
blogs at the time about new reaction it's fun because there's not a lot of like political
philosophy maybe is something that happens in the ivory halls of academia or it's something that
happened in the distant past. We read like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and about our forefathers
in the Federalist paper having these dialogues. The cool thing about ZenoSystems is this was a
public dialogue happening about political philosophy. Anybody could contribute and help
in developing this idea. It's kind of similar to when we read one of the Natalie Smolenski's
essay on the
towards an anthropological theory of money.
She has that Twitter exchange
between David Graeber and
Nick Szabo
and some others. And we saw the same
thing, you know, due to the
decentralized nature of our communication
systems now, public
philosophizing happens in
public. You know, this thinking happens in public.
Anybody can contribute and it becomes
a record of accumulated
thought. And in real time.
In real time.
You don't have to wait for somebody to publish a book and stuff like that.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
There's no peer review interposing itself between what is said.
Someone has a thought and they say it.
There's no intermediating institution.
So the next idea then is the trichotomy.
This is really cool because so we're going to I haven't just given a neat definition of what new reaction is.
We're not going to give a neat definition throughout XenoSystems.
a system was we're going to get again land is thinking in public at this time trying to build
up what is neo reaction it's like you have a name for an idea you have an idea but you don't yet know
the parameters or boundaries of your idea and as he's talking he's kind of the way i see it
you know it reflecting on this reading his blog entries is he has kind of the intellectual
discipline to see from a distance even the debate that's happening in the moment to begin to
categorize it and to say, okay, we have this school of thought within Neo-Reaction saying
this thing, we have this school of thought saying this other thing, what's the unifying
thread, how do they stand in relation to each other?
And so there were three dominant threads that he found.
He calls it the trichotomy, three branches of Neo-Reaction.
Religious traditionalist is the first one, ethnic nationalist is the second one, and
then capitalist.
So theonomists.
Theonomists.
Nazis and money grubbers.
You can give negative appellations to all of them.
Yeah.
The theonomists, ethno-nationalists, and then techno-commercialists, which Land really counts himself in that third strand, techno-commercialists.
As a techno-commercialist.
Yeah.
One of the things that I think was interesting, you framed this really well, is that he's not, because he was doing this in real time, he doesn't just come out and say, this is what neoreactionary is.
It's more like it's almost like we're watching somebody create a sculpture in front of us with a hammer and a chisel and chip away and go, I don't know what it is, but I know it's not this.
And I know it's not this.
And he's just moving around and really addressing all of these edge cases that pop up as the discussion takes place in real time.
And seeing what's essential as you take away a chip from the sculpture, you've taken away something that's not essential and you've revealed something that you can't take away.
Okay, now the face is emerging, the brow is here.
That's essential to the sculpture.
And one of the things that is essential in these three branches, every one of them is a form of spontaneous order.
And every one of them also has a relationship to fate.
It's a sort of deterministic, fatalistic strand or way of thinking.
For example, theonomists, those that believe in God and have an order around God as the principle of operation, providence within that, that's a spontaneous ordering outside of your control.
God's will, people can have this passivity to them.
It's all unfolding according to God's will.
It's also fatalist.
No matter what happens, the truly religious person in most traditions is going to say, that's fine.
The bigger picture is we're moving towards a future that I know is ordained by a principle of faith that I call providence, the will of God, something like that.
For ethno-nationalists, that's genetics and heredity.
Evolution, in a word, is like a way of spontaneously ordering.
We start as disorganized matter and we become these organisms, humans, right?
We've evolved through time, increasing order, derived simply through the operation of the laws of evolution, selection and fitness, these types of things have generated an order through a certain sort of providence or fate.
There were like laws or rules that led to an outcome that nobody controlled.
So you have a spontaneous order arising through evolution in the same way that the religious person says spontaneous order happens due to the will of God, something like that.
And then third, technocommercialists. There's a word here that's kind of jargony, but catalaxy. And that's just the spontaneous order that happens from free market choices. Within a free market, you have spontaneous orders emerge. I mean, that's how free market systems organize.
Nobody says the price of this good is going to be this certain price.
That price is converged upon through all of these different free agents, free market actors, wheeling and dealing in the market.
That's how corporations arise.
That's how products are made.
There is some design that happens, you know, by the corporation.
But the larger market structure is just this thing of creative destruction where whole industries are destroyed.
New ones arise outside of anyone's conscious choosing.
And catalaxy is a more accurate term for what we commonly, where we commonly say economy, right? I think he makes that.
We can say that, yeah.
He says that, which is like economy is derived more from the idea of responsible household management or responsible economics is like derived from like this idea of responsible household management.
Yeah.
But catalaxy is truly what we're thinking of when we think of the economy or we think of like the global market or something like that.
It is that – it's just a better word to use, I guess, for that.
It's more descriptive of what's actually happening.
Yeah, and more focusing on – when you think of an economy, you might – some people's idea might be that the government controls the economy.
They minister it.
And they set the price of goods.
And if there wasn't for the government to structure it, nothing would happen or something like that.
But Cadillacs is really the idea that that's not necessary, that, again, markets are self-ordering.
And so the government needs to step aside to truly allow the flourishing of whatever is to come through the market, whatever is to arise because of it.
The term techno-commercialism I think is interesting because – not because – but I heard Jack Mallers on an interview.
when I was driving back here, I heard him say that humans are basically like tool makers who
have figured out how to commercialize sunshine. Like, because everything, literally everything
we have derived somehow of either an asteroid impacting, which is a very small, but everything
else is like sun, sun derived, all of the, like, even like, you know, an animal is, is
derived from the sun because without the sun, the animal wouldn't exist.
It's really interesting, I think, to think like, again, this is just going back to how,
how land is just, he's just so zoomed out.
He's just so, like you say, he's, he's in one of the more, he's in the outside, outside
circle of all these concentric circles, I guess.
Yeah.
Or maybe he's in the inside.
No.
So his Twitter handle at the time was called Outsideness and the Outside, capital O, we're going to talk about what that is.
But it like it not just one of the concentric circles It once you get out of the circles and there are no circles it a place of I would say like chaos But it funny that you say the sun
like everything dries from the sun. Is that what Mahler was saying?
Yeah. Or sunlight.
Sunlight. One of Land's earlier books was called The Thirst for Annihilation on Virulent Nihilism,
something like that. It was a monograph on George Bataille, who's a philosopher,
And his idea was that preceding the real economy or the economy that we have was the solar economy based on absolute excess.
Like the sun is always splashing down on us, this energy which we can only use a fraction of, and that that's the true economy.
So it's all of the, like, Land's intellectual genealogy is incredibly interesting.
We're talking about Neoreaction.
reaction, it's maybe coming out as if we're talking about like a right wing view. Wing is not
the right word. You know, I don't think he rejected the phrase right accelerationism,
which is what some people kind of situated it as. But again, right only to the extent that that
is one of the ways you're going to capture a certain set of views that are about the description
of reality rather than the subjugation of reality to our view of what reality should be,
which is what progressivism is.
It's like our belief of the way things should be predominates over the way that things are.
We live in that fantasy.
He talks about it as like imposing morals over intelligence, I think.
Yeah, that type of thing.
Yeah, for sure.
Where it's like, you know, if we were to do the thing that is the smart thing or we would
let just catalaxy have its way yeah um then we would just let it be but because we're moral
and we have you know subjectively defined this is the fairness that we want fairness and that's
like such a now you now you have to think about what that means yeah like fairness really the way
that it's used is meant to, um, say redistribution. Like we're gonna, we're gonna take either
resources or wealth or opportunity or, um, you know, something from someone who in the
catalaxy, in the order that we have has reached it and we're going to take it and we're going to
give it to somebody else. So we're going to make it harder for them to get it and easier for somebody
else get it so um yeah that's uh it's really interesting because we we end up getting to this
idea of how um the morals like all of this stuff is a break on capitalism which is this like
alien system that is just marching towards this inevitable um inevitable place where it leaves
humanity behind and becomes artificial, intelligent, robotic, autonomous capital, and we're pets.
Yeah.
Stuff like that.
So, sorry, I apologize if I, like, walked over some of the things that you're going to talk about.
No, no.
I mean, it's a good summary of what we've already talked about.
But, again, each of the three strands, the trichotomy of neoreaction, these three subcurrents
within theonomy, ethno-nationalism,
techno-commercialism,
each built on an idea of fate or destiny.
And underlying all of that is the idea
that capital is autonomous
and seeking its own expression,
and we are a break on it,
and we are a monkey that it is feeding
to get us to do what it wants.
To get, like,
he has a whole essay called Monkey Business
that talks about this that we'll get to,
but the idea is that, you know,
capital is some sort of thing
that we don't truly understand a dynamic all its own,
and it's giving the monkeys a banana so that we'll build it.
Yeah.
I mean, that's, yeah.
Yeah, capitalism, it's fascinating the way you talk.
Like, I've never heard of the term capital be described the way he is
because he's not talking about it as a term.
He's like, we think of capital as like, oh, it's a bank account
or it's a building or, you know, something like that.
And he's like, no, no, no, like capital, like you say, it's this it's it's its own like intelligence that is that is seeking expression.
And all of the things that we are doing as humanity, where we are imposing our morals is that we are just slowing capitalism from reaching its expression.
Slowing, but also unnecessary bootstrap, like the monkeys were needed to birth the thing that goes beyond the monkeys.
Yeah. So we talked about neoreaction as a critique of democracy. And so let's pull that together here. Democracy is supposedly like a positive feedback mechanism where the populace observes the government functioning and then evaluates them and say, I like the way that this administration is working.
They're efficiently doing things. They're getting done what needs to be done. And so then people render a vote on the system as it is to either say, keep going, guys, you're doing great, or to pull back and get new leaders.
So that's like the positive vision of democracy, where people evaluate the results of the administration and then say yay or nay to readjust the system as needed.
But Land's point is that the feedback mechanism is corrupted. Instead of measuring public opinion, it modifies or creates that which it seeks to measure. That's how democracy actually functions.
once you begin once you design a system to achieve a result you begin then to corrupt it so that the
result um the system doesn't it's kind of like if you have a thermostat that's trying to measure
how warm the environment is but instead of um actually measuring it it just becomes it just
perverts or corrupts that it begins to convince you that it's warm or it's cold instead of actually
measuring what it is it like just the number changes but the temperature doesn't yeah kind
of thing it ceases to be it ceases to be a reality sensor and becomes a reality creator yeah it
becomes within democracy um public opinion is a reality that is formed and managed not something
that is measured yeah yeah he talks about how the word propaganda was taken um and just changed to
public relations and that like we think of propaganda as oh that's something other people
do or like now i think we kind of like recognize that it's actively happening within within our
sphere but everybody's also so into their own corner that they believe most times they believe
their propaganda over the other side's propaganda and then if you can take the time to move into the
middle you look to both and you're like this is absolutely ridiculous but he like so democracy
it's doomed to fail because it matures by distancing itself from feedback as it continues
to refine its ability to do public relations or do propaganda so the to create the feedback it
wants yeah the party that achieves success is the one that most effectively tells the people
it is doing their wishes after defining for them the wishes it wants done.
And there was another.
Land says, if you want the government to listen to you, then you have to expect to tell you what to say.
That's it. Yeah, that's exactly. Yeah. That was the one that I was going to find.
If you want the government to listen to you, then you have to expect it to tell you what to say.
Yeah.
That's like. And so so this is where, you know, again, just reading this book, I had so many times where I just stopped.
And I was like, I want to keep reading because I wanted to get through it. But then I was like, I have to think about this for a while because this is the point where he's starting to help us understand that democracy and communism, socialism, like they are not two sides.
They're not different.
They are just different on the spectrum.
They are, they're not, they're just kind of like different versions of each other.
It's not like one or the other are, that they're completely separate.
Like they're just breaks upon capitalism and they're ways of achieving those breaks in different ways.
Yeah.
Yep.
democracy
as you begin to
so if you corrupt the feedback mechanism
if you go from being a reality
censor to a reality creator
and it's not difficult to imagine
why this happens right
if in a democracy a party comes to power
they see that their power
depends on getting a positive vote
in the polls so they have like two options
they can do a really good job
and get people to vote for them,
or they can just make people think
that they're doing a good job
or define the result that they achieve,
whatever it is, as a good job,
create a new reality.
So it's like the feedback mechanism,
the sensor becomes the thing
that creates the reality that it senses
because it determines that's an easier thing to do
than trying to actually do a good job
is to create the perception of a good job
to mold everybody's reality
so that they're like,
this is how things should be.
I feel good.
I, you know, I'm going to be a renter in my house and tell them in my 60s I'm not going to have a family.
But things seem pretty good because they're telling me things seem pretty good.
I'm going to eat poison food and I'm going to wear poison clothing and I'm not going to go into the sun.
And I'm going to. Yeah. There's another one.
Democracy is thus, strictly speaking, a production of collective insanity or disassociation from reality.
And this is another where some people are going to, you could, if you came into this with like emotions, you could like get upset at this or take offense to this or whatever.
But what Land is trying to do is he's trying to say, this is actually like, you know, like I hand you a plate and I tell you that it's a plate, but you don't speak my language.
And so I have to describe what that thing does. And so he is, even though we speak the same language, he is describing to us what democracy does because we don't understand it.
Like what democracy really does is it doesn't take the will of the people and put it into power and create this representative government.
What it takes is it takes this giving of power to people who then trade resources for popularity.
They then trade wealth for popularity.
Oftentimes, most of the time they trade other people's wealth for popularity.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's a really good documentary called Century of the Self by the name escapes me right now. It's free on Twitter. It's about Edward Bernays and the rise after World War II of public relations as a field of study, a science, a practice, whatever. And it's all about that, about how opinion is consensus is manufactured and how the reality, again, that the system says that it's trying to measure something it's actually creating.
Yeah, Edward Bernays is the reason why women smoke Virginia Slims.
Freedom torches.
And freedom, yeah, torches of freedom.
Torches of freedom, yeah.
And I can't remember what else, but yeah, I heard.
So what are some of the consequences of this?
So one is that quality of government suffers.
To quote Land, lacking feedback from anything but its own experiments in mind control, quality of government collapses.
Again, the government's not trying to measure if it's actually doing a good job.
It's trying to convince everybody that it is.
And so you have a degenerative ratchet that occurs. You have a degeneration of good politics and governance into bad. Also, culture is corrupted. Everything is now politicized. Everything is something that the government, if you want to stay in power in a democracy, you have to control public opinions. Everything is a parameter that needs to be controlled. Art becomes politicized. Culture becomes politicized.
to quote land any thought is now dissent if it is not positively aligned with society's leading
political direction to think outside the propaganda apparatus the cathedral we're going to talk about
that next to think outside of that is to attack the government culture is then destroyed all
thoughts have to be in line with how the government is defining reality their picture their definition
of reality has to be complete and total if you have a thought that is different than that is
inherently dissent and something that needs to be controlled and managed.
This is something that I understand. I can feel it. But I was trying to, I was struggling to
connect the dots between how government or democracy destroys culture. But I think you've
done a good job of spelling it out, which is basically that, and we're getting into this with
the cathedral where we're starting to kind of understand this as in almost like a religious
type of sense and that anything that does not align with the religion yeah um is therefore
sacrilege yeah and cannot be included and so um you know america used to be chevys and apple pie
and baseball. And now those things I feel like are treated as part of like this nostalgic
past that we are supposed to feel apologetic for in, in, in some way. Um, because, you know,
during that time there were injustices, uh, that, that, uh, and so anytime that there's any sort of
injustice that's going on. It like kind of like invalidates whatever was being believed in at that
time. And so now the only thing that you can believe in is whatever is on the whatever here
at the present. And because it is because it is part of that degenerative racket, ratchet. Yeah.
It's a racket, too. For sure. You never get it back. So you can only move further in the direction
of this religiosity, which means that more and more things, and now I'm starting to relate this
to Marc Andreessen's definition of the woke agenda, which is that it just like hates its way
out of existence. Like more and more things are disincluded because fewer and fewer things can
be included. So I don't know if I'm getting that right. Yeah, but I definitely, and this quote,
I have a quote here, in fact, that ties it all together about democracy as provided over by a state religion.
But before I read it, though, I just want to say even that America of apple pies, though, I think that falls within the age of control of public opinion.
That in itself is another picture.
I would assume.
Yeah, and the creation of the mass consumer as this thing we now needed to have in order to drive the economy after World War II.
We needed people to consume.
You have all of the engines of war shut down.
You have all this excess productive capacity.
We need to supply it to someone so we create the mass consumer.
Everybody needs to have the house, the apple pies, and this picture of the car in the garage and everything.
This quote, though, I think summarizes what we've been talking about very well.
Democracy is a ratchet mechanism that successively distances the political realm from feedback sensitivity due to its character as a closed loop or state church sensitive only to a public opinion it has itself manufactured.
Which we've been talking about.
So, yeah, this up to this point, though, it's not to say that it's a critique of democracy, but it's not to say yet there's something better than democracy.
Again, we're describing what land is doing in a lot of things is describing reality.
It could be that this is the best thing we could have hoped for, too.
The cleanest.
And as we will say, like, democracy is the best system, except for every or what is it?
It's the worst system.
It's the worst system, except for all the other ones.
Except for all the other ones.
Or like the, I've heard the quote, like money is a terrible way to measure a man's worth.
It's just better than all.
It's the only one we have.
Yeah.
So this critique of democracy, if you feel like disgusted, if you've been, we've all
been indoctrinated into the faith of democracy.
I mean, take this critique as what it is, which is just a good faith description of one
person's perception of how things have been operating.
But I mentioned the cathedral, this state church.
The cathedral is a term that land gets from Menchus Moldbug or Curtis Yarvin.
And the idea is the cathedral is the opinion creation apparatus that is what is creating or manufacturing that reality within a democratic system so that the system is then measuring a reality that it creates.
The cathedral is what creates that reality.
It is the identification, as we've been talking about, of government governance with public relations. The political response to the crisis, the public perception of the crisis is now the crisis itself.
If you've ever, you know, you get the sense sometimes that when something bad happens, the government is scrambling not to address the underlying causes, but to cover it up or to describe it to us in terms to misdirect our angst away from our anger away from the causes of it into something that they can control or that, you know, is going to re-describe the crisis in another way for those in power to keep and maintain their power.
The crisis is not the crisis. The crisis is that people notice. And that's what they manage is that they manage that people are perceiving a crisis and the solution is not to resolve the crisis. The solution is to change the perception.
How dare you notice? Exactly. That type of thing, too. And even sometimes it's in as vulgar as that, like political correctness is a way to, oh, you're using the wrong terms to talk about something. You're noticing a dynamic that makes you a racist, a sexist, a bigot or an anti-democratic fascist. If you just describe a critique of democracy and you become a fascist, right? You can close down the whole debate through the public relations of calling something by a bad name.
It's Walter in The Big Lebowski. You're not wrong. You're just an asshole. It's like, hold on. The important part here is that you're not wrong.
Yeah. So it's called the cathedral because it is the state church promoting the state religion, the state faith, which is democracy in the West, which is certain progressive values. It operates primarily through the media. We've all seen the way that mainstream media operates. That's not a critique that needs to be elaborated, I don't think.
academia the way that and even just education more broadly speaking the way that it is designed
to inculcate people in the state faith i mean we even talk about it nakedly as such a civic
education right we want people to believe and feel certain things so we design our curricula
to make them have certain faith principles held as unquestionable because why else would you die
for the country yeah why else would you fight for it yeah yeah um so i already mentioned this
the cathedral works in part through things like political correctness fascist and racist race
fascist and racist then become terms designated as kind of path blockers to get people from going
down a certain following a certain light of inquiry developing certain notions or policies
How dare you notice.
Yeah, they mark, Land puts it, they mark unthinkable wastes. They're invocations of the sacred in its negative or limiting sense. I thought that was an interesting even reflection on the sacred. When you call something sacred, you're also saying you can't do certain things in relation to it, that it's heresy or sacrilege, right?
Yeah.
And so if you define something as sacred, then it becomes something that you can't do certain things in relation to without being burnt at the stake.
Yeah. Yeah. Because it would be sacrilege.
Yes.
I want to read the cathedral is an information system, even an intelligence system, that is characterized through supreme irony by a structural inability to learn.
So that's what the cathedral is.
It's an information system that cannot learn.
The minimal requirement is that it displays a radical deficiency of significant feedback links to the control core.
Every apparatus of information gathering occupies a strictly subordinate position relative to the cathedral layer.
The cathedral is a structure of read-only memory.
It is essentially write-protected.
The whole of its power and also its vulnerability is inextricable from this feature.
It is pure cultural genetics and zero pragmatics.
I just thought that was a cool.
Read that last part again.
The last line is, or the last two, the whole of its power and also its vulnerability is inextricable from its feature, the feature of being right protected, that it's read only, that you cannot put new ideas into it, that it does not take feedback.
And the last line is, it is pure cultural genetics.
Yeah.
And zero pragmatics.
Right. And so, like, again, that's what this all boils down to for me. Zero pragmatics, zero focus on the reality of the situation and all focus on culture, something that humans can create, ideology, religion, all these things.
We focus on what we can control and mold instead of the thing that we're terrified of, which is reality itself, which is imbued with certain principles of spontaneous generation of orders that might not be amenable to what we want or what certain people in power may want.
For example, like, again, the trichotomy, you have principles either of providence, genetics, and evolution, or Cadillac. So you have these generative principles which are going to pragmatically cause a reality.
And so the only thing that the cathedral can do is scramble and work with kind of the medium it has which is the generation of culture to shame us out of certain outcomes or by certain mental control just like make us unable to perceive them as such
I guess.
To put them just completely off limits where you just like,
it knows that these are the things that will kill it.
And therefore it precludes you from accessing them.
You can't talk about one race being more intelligent than the other,
even though it's like that's measurable.
Like, and we also like we have no problem like,
oh, this one race is more, this one race is taller.
This one race has bigger penises.
This one race is better athletes.
And so, but it's like you just,
there's one thing you can't apply.
And so like that thing or like the, you know,
the idea that one religion may be better than the others
or that maybe no religion is better.
And it's not even like better.
It's just like more suited to certain outcomes.
For example, some religions are going to be,
have different relationships to science, for example.
Like maybe it might be the case
that we have our modern notion of science
due to certain cultural or religious traits
that allowed a relationship to the truth
to flourish in a certain geographic place at a certain time
and then generates modern science.
Yeah.
We're in a plane going down
and there are parachutes that we're not allowed to access.
And the reason we're not allowed to access,
and he talks about this,
is that the only way to escape this is through exit.
That voice doesn't work because of the degenerative.
Yeah.
And, you know, and Lucas, you mentioned race.
As soon as you begin to talk about that,
you know, you begin, like, the word racist is the path blocker.
When we say race,
if we say certain races tend to have certain characteristics,
again, this is over like a bell curve distribution.
distribution. It's not to say one person, if you are of this race, you are therefore smarter than
everybody of another race. It's to say, no, maybe we can, again, over a bell curve distribution
measure that certain have like a standard deviation or whatever, you know. And it's not
something like, I mean, of course, now we have to qualify, but it's like, it's not something I
believe. Like, I truly believe that we all came from probably the first two people. And so we're
all related we're all from the same cloth and so even though there are differences it's it's like
environmental yeah you know it's environmental and cultural differences has nothing to do with
your genes and in fact it's just environment you know it's like these these places have valued
things differently we're all bony fish in land's terms he talks about this in cladistics where
evolution proceeds like you have a trunk and then it branches out you can also trace us all back to
that same trunk yeah and we're all still holding within us our evolutionary heritage we're all we
all came from bony fish ugly bags of water i heard humans described as today bags of water yeah i like
that um so the cathedral then is about deceit which is something that we saw in samson's book
our tribal future and also in soft war the humans really aren't evolved to deal with deceit um
There's one of the problems guiding, one of the things guiding human evolution was the problem of who we can trust, that once we get beyond our family, out to friends, and then out to tribes, we have to find ways to trust people who have reason to deceive us and manipulate us.
And so we're really not built for the society where we live in, where we can simply be lied to.
To quote, land, there is no precedent for an intolerant, precisely coded system of belief trending to a totalitarian form while presenting itself as inevitable progress towards general disillusionment.
disillusionment this cathedral the state religion it's not something that we evolved to imagine to
like be able to resist right that there could be something that we are downstream of as far as
eating the culture that it creates in living within the kind of the reality that it generates
what it does is it divorces getting what you want from the feeling of getting what you want
so if you can create the feeling create in people the feeling that they got what they want then they
don't actually have to get what they want and the analogy or the he uses the phrase wireheading
wireheading is this philosophical experiment that it's like being in the matrix if you can put a
wire into someone's head and generate all the sensations they would have um you can just give
them the sensation that they want without giving them the thing you don't have to be eating a real
delicious steak, you can just wire head into somebody the sensation that they're eating
the delicious steak.
And that's kind of what the cathedral does as a form of mind control.
It wire heads into you the perception that you're getting what you want.
It's that the deceit is that kind of essential and foundational.
And he, I mean, to bring this back to Bitcoin realm to something we understand from that
perspective, he, the, one of the initial points of this was the demetalization of money, a
pure signal of wealth entirely disconnected from the extravagance of physical reality.
Once you can remove the underlying gold that backs something, then you can just have pure
signal of wealth.
Which can be wireheaded wealth.
We can be wireheaded wealth.
Like that's what fiat is.
It wireheads into us credit, like credit expansion, wireheads into us the feeling that we're getting
wealthier without the underlying reality that we're actually generating, you know, underlying
productivity or something like that.
So, yeah, Keynesianism or Keynesianism, however you pronounce it, in its essence is wirehead economics, to quote Land, focusing on the policy question, how do we best deliver the stim?
Best the stimulation.
The stim.
He says the stim, but like stimulus and that's like also the stim is you imagine it kind of as like a stimulant.
Yeah.
That's kind of how Keynesians think, right?
Okay.
Yeah.
So then you mentioned this.
The next point then, exit over voice.
so public opinion we've seen the democracy utilizes the cathedral to manage and create
a reality rather than to respond to reality as it is public opinion in this way doesn't provide
feedback in a democracy because it is modifiable exit then is what matters if we imagine that
there's exit voice and loyalty i think this is the framework of albert hirschman at least as
describe a Bology. I was going to say, I only know it from Bology. And I was going to ask you.
So to say, and I say, I think it's exit voice and loyalty is the Hirschman framework. It might
have been, he might've had a more, he certainly did a more complex framework. But since then,
I think it's kind of been bastardized down into one of those within a political system,
you can either exercise voice. You can like speak up and try to change things.
You can exercise loyalty. You can just be loyal to the system regardless,
or you can exercise exit and just leave the system.
And so Neo reaction is about exit over voice.
And Land doesn't mention loyalty,
but I think that actually the framework works better
if you say exit voice or loyalty.
Because sometimes people do say,
I know my voice doesn't matter.
I'm not going to leave though.
I have a sense of patriotism or a sense of fealty.
And this can be a very pure sentiment too.
I don't discount this as bad
because I feel this way about like where I'm from.
Yeah, you would feel that way, but you don't know that you would feel that way devoid of your civic programming, do you?
No, and you can't ever consider—
Like, there's not—it's not testable.
I wouldn't even be a human without civic programming.
Yeah.
Like, the narratives that we're a part of constitute our world, and you're never going to have an absence of a narrative that you didn't choose.
I mean, this is Alistair MacIntyre's, Nick Land and Alistair MacIntyre are kind of the two poles of philosophy that I really draw from.
MacIntyre is more an explicit ethicist, and Nick Land just kind of goes around ethics to describe, more broadly speaking, how reality is and embraces the consequences.
Coldness be my God.
Like, he's just going to say, this is the way the world is.
These are dynamics under which we operate.
And so within that, so Alistair McIntyre, just to summarize his philosophy in a sentence, if you want to know what you should do in life, you need to ask yourself, what stories am I a part of?
The stories always precede who we are, and we don't generate our own stories. We can participate in their authorship, but you always are in the world in media res. You always enter a system that was already there, and you have to operate within that.
And I like loyalty, the notion of loyalty, because, you know, at a certain self-reflective level, you begin to look at your narratives and sort amongst them.
And certain of them you have to decide are worthy of loyalty.
Certain of your stories are stories you're like, I didn't choose to be a protagonist in this particular story.
I didn't choose to be like maybe a son or, you know, these like familiar relations with these specific people.
I didn't choose to have these coworkers or these people I grew up with who are now kind of people I know really well.
But you still have to determine your relationship to your past.
And loyalty, I think, is a response, a valid response that people can have.
Or you can exit voice, try to change things, especially with thinking about political systems, that story, or exit and leave those things.
But just to get back to your reaction then, exit over voice.
the land is really dismissive of all activism and protest to quote land angry antagonism has
no useful place on the largest scale evil is best punished by abandonment so again if the system is
bad enough you don't try to engage with it because what you're engaging with is something that's
creating opinion not listening it's not a feedback mechanism you can argue with and give your feedback
too, it is telling you what feedback it wants. And if you don't give it that feedback, it doesn't
matter to it. That's the way the cathedral operates. That's the way that democracy as a
degenerative ratchet operates. It kind of makes the point that all activism, that like activism
is only allowed if it's within the box of what the cathedral wants to hear. If it's a performance
of the feedback that it wants. Yeah, absolutely. Activism is a form of dependence. It depends on
sympathetic political toleration in order to exist and for change to occur.
If you're thinking that your protest led to a political change, that's the change that
was preordained, that the system already wanted, and the protest was allowed to blossom or
created.
Think about what happened after the summer of Floyd and the summer of love there, all
those protests and the burning and the rioting and whatnot.
That was allowed to happen because the cathedral wanted the result that that would lead to.
Yeah. So the protest wasn't an organic thing. It was only organic in the sense that it was allowed to grow. People kind of set loose and, you know, we want the result this is going to lead to. So here's the theater. Now go act it out. Here's your script.
Yeah, there's more than enough evidence, I think, to point to that that was not necessarily a, it was certainly not organic. Maybe it started organically, but the proliferation of it was definitely not.
I have a friend who has video showing the riots in New York City.
And he said, like, it was just so organized, like big box trucks driving up, guys in charge standing in the back.
You know, like they brought the people there.
And they had, like, certain stores that they would go to.
Like, you know, it was just like it was not this utter chaos.
And I'm sure that there were instances that it was.
But, like, within that, there were either people driving it or they maybe were just opportunists that were really prepared.
But that had, you know, they had a map and a game plan.
Yeah.
You know, so.
Yeah.
And it just doesn't even have, maybe it was that program that controlled, but it doesn't even have to be that controlled.
It can just be that we know that people are going to act in a certain way, and so we're going to let them act in a certain way because we want this result that we know the way that they act is going to lead to.
So exit, though, then is anti-dialectical.
It is an option against argument.
So if you can't argue with the cathedral, then what you have to do is leave.
And so to quote Land, let's spatialize our disagreement is an alternative to resolution in time.
If you can't solve an argument dialectically, then you spatialize your disagreement. One side goes to one place, the other side goes to another place, and then the disagreement then is embodied in reality as a thing existing and another thing existing instead of the two things trying to resolve themselves into a conclusion that they're never going to come to.
Yeah. Yeah.
And he – it helps like he gives this – like we think of progressivism. We think of this idea of progressivism as like, oh, this is the thing that makes things better. This is the thing that –
Progress, right.
It's progress. Yeah. Progressivism is escalators over stairs and stuff like that. But he defines it as progressivism is placing morals above intelligence, above intelligence, virtues over facts. It really emphasizes victimhood.
And this is not a direct quote. This is something that I paraphrase. But guilt is like just guilt. Think about guilt. Guilt is basically like a white people thing.
It's it. He kind of defined like the way that we think about this in terms of like victimhood. It's ethnomasochism. You know, like I hate myself. And the more I hate the more I hate myself, the better of a person I am. This Puritan cleansing of all of the sins of, you know, of my forefathers and stuff.
But it was there because he brings up the Hajinal line west of the Hajinal. I think I'm saying that right. Hajinal line in Europe. That's where this progressivism came out of. And it was in that region that feudalism arose, feudal agriculture, manorial manor agriculture, where things are spread out and you had to take care of the other people around you.
And so there's developed this like developed this like kind of like obligation to take care of other people that is not like it.
It's great. We think it's great. We think it's a great thing to be like, oh, I feel obliged to help other people.
But when you instantiate that into your government, that becomes it becomes victimhood and it becomes taking from one from one and giving to the other.
Um, and, and it had all of these interesting, especially to like what, uh, David Sampson
talked about, like, um, with like kind of the de-evolution of our culture is that people
in these systems, they, they marry later, they had fewer kinship connections, they have
fewer children, and they were more likely to have the, the nuclear family, which again
is something that we, I think have been maybe programmed to think of as good.
But the way Samson describes it is that nuclear is like it's too small to live.
Like the nuclear family cannot live.
You have to have, you know, your camp.
You have to have your 17 people or whatever it is minimum in order to push about the world and move forward.
Yeah.
An interesting thing on that, what you're saying about the Hashnall line or whatever.
There's a very funny essay in here.
you know it's like with a lot of land um it's half tongue-in-cheek i think and half really
trying to say something important and he kind of imagines critical whiteness studies he's like why
they're so if you're scared of white nationalism just realize a white nationalism is a contradiction
because white privilege is a white idea right yeah like that's ethnomasochism is an expression
of whiteness in a sense like philosophically and he has he has a quote from alice and bailey who is a
like a feminist leftist philosopher discussing how western philosophy is permeated by universalism
and but that universalism is the kind of exactly the set the thing that generates
like the the whiteness that she associates or the universalism that she associates with whiteness
It's exactly the thing that generates white ethelmasochism, like white privilege, like the universalization of white guilt as this thing over the whole white race or whatever.
So, like, white nationalism is a contradiction because it is whiteness that has led to the hatred of whiteness as a thing.
Kind of this, like, weird.
Hating white people is pretty much of an exclusively white thing.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
That's funny.
Yeah.
And not wrong.
So, you know, we don't expect any other race to become self-hating in the way, you know, you have someone said, I forget who says this.
You have like Chicano studies.
What's that about?
You know, like about the good things that the Hispanic people have done or black study.
It's about the good things that black people have done or whatever.
White studies.
Is that all about slavery?
All about slavery.
Feeding wives.
The list of things, the list of horrors that white people have done.
Grabbing asses.
Yeah, that type of thing.
Yep.
So basic tenets that have neo-reaction.
This is kind of where we've got so far, I think.
So first, democracy is unable to control government. It's not a feedback reading mechanism, but a feedback creating mechanism. It leads to degenerative ratchets.
Egalitarianism is incompatible with liberty is another thing that he mentions.
Define egalitarianism because I know it, but I know a lot of people don't. So basically, it's just like the opportunity for everybody to have the same result.
It's just the belief that everybody's equal.
Yeah.
And so if you hear that, you're like, well, of course everybody's equal. I mean, obviously everybody's not equal. That's the most, if you can't just see that in reality, and there's in a sense nothing more that can be said to you.
If you don't just automatically see that we're not the same height, we're not the same inherent ability to do everything, to play a musical instrument, to play a sport.
You know, we're not the same level of attractiveness physically.
We don't have the same dulcet tone to our voice.
People, humans are inherently unequal.
And egalitarianism, to the extent that it's just the statement that we are all equal, that becomes incompatible with liberty because you then have to get rid of liberty in order to make sure that people are equal.
Like you have to get rid of the expressions of inequality that comes from letting people act freely in a free market.
You got to say, yeah.
There's two examples of this I think people can relate to, or at least they're the ones that are most prominent in my life, which is there are good looking people.
And then there are people that when they're in public, other people stare and they're like, are you?
I mean, you're like, you know, it's like, oh, you know, everybody's like, oh, there's zeros to tens.
And they're like, and then there's whatever this is, you know.
And then the other thing is athletes.
Like I played sports, you played sports, reasonably fit, you're reasonably fit.
I've been around athletes.
Right.
And when I'm around an athlete, I'm like, oh, you're a different breed.
You're something else.
You're not me.
Yeah.
It's so, it's so, I tried out for a minor league baseball team or like an independent league baseball team, which would be like the lowest, lowest rung of minor leagues.
and I was like a decent high school athlete.
I was not great, but I was decent.
I was better.
I was the best baseball player in a couple counties,
probably small counties.
And I got up there and I started throwing
and then this other guy steps up.
And remember, like we're both trying to get a job
that probably pays as much as bagging groceries.
Like this is literally the lowest rung, right?
and he's 6'5", 230 pounds and just rocketing the ball.
I'm like, oh.
I saw him throw one pitch and I was like, I'm going home.
What's the point of me being here?
Until you put yourself up against truly different him.
And intelligence is the same way.
Sitting next to Bology and talking with Bology,
it's so clear how much smarter this person is than me.
Yeah, maybe they got more RAM, more throughput,
whatever parameter mentally they have.
It's just different.
Yeah.
And you're like, ah, it's kind of like, you know, kind of like I, where I don't want to
play games with Michael, you know, I don't want to play basketball with Michael Jordan.
It's like, you don't want to have a debate with Bology.
Like, you know, you don't want to be in a beauty contest with Shakira or whoever.
Yeah.
So anyway, sorry.
That's a digression.
I mean, that's a good explanation of why egalitarianism is a religious sentiment.
And it's explicitly a religious sentiment.
I mean, that's, there's, and there's, in a sense, there's nothing quote unquote wrong
with it if you understand it as a religious sentiment like christian is a full christianity
is a form of egalitarianism we each have a soul we're each possessed of an inherent moral dignity
and worth everyone's deserving of love something like that yeah and so it's just you need to
understand it as a religious sentiment and in our modern world we tend not to we tend to be both
atheist and egalitarian which is i mean that's just not compatible like atheism is not compatible
with egalitarianism you have to accept it on religious faith that we're equal or you you're
just making up or you're trying to again control that equality or dictate it by removing liberty
or there's the what does equity mean that that famous image of like the three people watching the
the um baseball game of different heights you know and if you want to have the same outcome
you really need to re reality right yeah um give take from the people because it always the case that if you want egalitarianism you can not only bring up the people that are at the bottom you can pull down the people that are at the top right And you can make people feel ashamed for excelling even or prevent them from excelling So democracy is unable to control government Egalitarian is incompatible with liberty
And then the third principle or basic tentative neoreaction is neoreaction is the socio-political solutions offered by it are ultimately based on exit.
Again, we just talked about that.
Not about engagement with the system, but spatializing your disagreement.
If you're in disagreement with the system, you leave the system.
To quote Land, it is the outside working through fragmentation that rules and no other authority has any standing.
Yeah, change is not possible within the cathedral of democracy. The only solution is secession slash exit.
You can't because of the – like we keep – it's great. I think it's great how you've structured this because we're able to keep drawing lines back to the degenerative ratchet and giving examples.
Yeah. And again, this is all playing with the idea of neoreaction in different ways to playing with it as based on different strands around what spontaneous or different principles of spontaneous order or different names we give to spontaneous order.
Again, is it God? Is it evolution? Is it catalaxy? I'm talking about it as an exit from a system rather than engagement with a system.
another way is kind of just looking at the word itself land at one point breaks down neo reaction
neo and reaction so you have like neo new towards the future reaction some sort of response to the
past a focus on the past and he breaks down reaction progressivism and conservatism so
reaction then is the future in the past aligned against the present you're looking at the past
as a way that things maybe were before they degenerated into the present and the future
as a way that things could be if principles of spontaneous order were allowed to generate
reality instead of us trying to mold reality.
That's reaction.
Progressivism is the present and the future against the past.
The progressives want to say the past was ruin and racism, bigotry, all these horrible
things were in the past.
The present is good to the extent that it's oriented towards the future, towards an idea of progress.
And then conservatism is the present and the past against the future.
To quote Buckley, he has a famous quote, the conservative stands athwart history and says stop, something like that.
They're kind of romantic, nostalgic.
They're looking towards the past, towards make America great again, that type of sentiment.
But again, how it's different conservatism than neo-reaction is the neo-reactionary, so to speak, is looking at the past and seeing that, you know, if before you have these different types of degenerative ratchets, things were better in that sense.
But also looking towards the future, not trying to be like the conservative and saying, no, we can turn back the ratchet.
The neo-reactionary says the nature of the ratchet is that you can't turn it backwards.
We can't reverse history.
We can only go towards the future.
And that becomes a task of understanding the strands of faith that are going to lead us there, whether providence, catalaxy, or evolution, heredity, something like that.
So the main difference between conservatism and conservatism, I guess, writ large.
Yeah. And neo-reactionism is that conservatism believes that they can change the system and neo-reactionism.
Change it to bring it towards the past, to realign with what was good in the past.
Yeah. And lost.
Yeah. And neo-reactionism says that change cannot occur, that you must start anew.
I would say it's that we need to understand that change will occur regardless of what we do. And we need to understand the dynamics, the underlying principles of spontaneous generation that will lead to the future. I almost see Neo Reaction again, not as a normative view about what the future should be. It's Land saying this is what the future is going to be.
Correct. Yeah, this is very nothing stops this train is.
Exactly. That's the thing. And on all of this, I have no idea. It's just me thinking through ZenoSystems. I don't want to say that I'm representing Land's view as if it is Land's view, right? It's this whole book is an exercise in the stimulation of thought and read it, get your own ideas. It will give you many.
It will give you nightmares.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, last night I laid in.
To the extent you understand that it should.
Yeah, last night I laid in bed and I started uploading a bunch of stuff to Grok and then I turned it on to voice mode.
And I just started having a conversation with it.
Yeah.
You know, and it was hilarious because I just kept like, it's basically like trying to convince me that things are going to be okay, even though things are not going to be okay.
Yeah.
It's like, oh, come on, man.
You know, it'll, I mean, it might not work out that way.
I was like, what are the odds?
And it's like, ah, 5% maybe.
Shit.
That's the most Landian way to engage with this essay is to do it with an AI partner talking to them.
Nice, I did it right.
And see the comfort from them, yeah.
I did it right.
No, man, when I first read Land 2012.
Did you go into like a depressive funk for six months?
In a sense, because I actually, at the time, I had dropped out of the practice of law and I was teaching philosophy.
So I went really deep into just different thought tunnels, Warrens, like the rabbit hole and the broad sense of like, no, I'm going to rethink things.
And land at the time represented a form of nihilism that was like, it was difficult to see how it was not going to pan out according to the vision that he laid out.
And I spent probably two to three years plotting my own reaction to land. And I wrote an essay called Insideness. His handle was Outsideness. And the whole idea was like, if the outside is this reservoir of kind of uncontained chaos that we're spinning towards, it's reality unmediated by human perception.
And that reality is grotesque and only mediated in its abstraction by our ideas of horror, as we're going to talk about later.
Like, what resources do we have against that?
And I was pulling from, at the time, a lot of young and, like, things that were about movements inward and about how you can find through different types of practices, meaning within a purely human framework.
But again, yeah, I think anybody reading Land, if you read it diligently and kind of open yourself up to it, you're going to have a reaction and you're going to try to find a way to insulate yourself from the conclusions.
Because he's not he's actually not nihilist.
He is right.
I mean, he's not necessarily nihilist.
He's just trying to say, look, this is what is.
Yes. And and I'm not going to impose my thoughts on that or I'm just going to try to show you what the clearest look of this is.
Yeah. And anyway, yeah, to jump to the end, it's like the idea that AI with robotics is going to pair with Bitcoin and reach and capitalism is going to reach escape velocity velocity when it achieves autonomous capital, which means that we just don't need to be involved in the system anymore.
And he's pointing out that we are the ghosts in the machine, that we are the errors that need removed and need corrected.
And by the way, I think a perfect example of this is you could not find a person less nihilistic than Jeff Booth, who we just interviewed.
And this is what Jeff says.
Like, look, humans are the errors in the system.
They will be removed from the system.
and out of that will be something that he believes is beautiful and wonderful and, you know,
and abundance and everything. And so, um, yeah, I just like, I got stuck on it, um, for a little
bit because I was like, oh, I'm bummed out. Like, I don't know if humans are going to be pets or
we're just not going to be around. Everybody's going to mold with computers. We're going to have
Neuralinks. I don't know. Maybe that's better. Maybe it's not. I have no, no idea. Like we're
just so trained as humans to believe that whatever we are now is the best we could be.
And that's just truly not the case.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
I mean, it's trying to stand in the middle of the river that is time, that is evolution,
that is whatever principle of spontaneous order and trying to say, stop, this is the
end of history.
Like, that's what we want to do as humans.
We want to be safe and say, we've arrived at a point, I want no further change.
And, like, that's what the cathedral is kind of designed to do.
You'll only get changed, but it's going to be in the form of, like, cool shit you can buy.
It's not going to be something that will change you and maybe get rid of you or show that you're not necessary in your current form in a certain sense.
And we also have this thing we do as humans, which is to assume that wherever we are in the present moment, that we're dealing with the sum total of all the knowledge that we'll ever be and that the best theories that we have now are the best theories that we'll ever be.
Yeah. And and so that's why if you can remember that, you know, we used to bleed people with leeches and we used to drill holes in people's heads and, you know.
Maybe we burned some witches or who knows, maybe we checked if they floated, all this other stuff that.
We're probably not at the end of understanding things.
And so just like a just like, I guess, like a caveat or a warning to anybody who who gets into this and they like I do, got a little bummed out for a bit.
That's how I got myself out of it was I realized that, oh, we're not at the end of human anything.
And that this actually may be the best that we have right now.
Maybe it's not.
But we're moving somewhere.
And I think one thing we've realized as humans is that we do have the capacity for change and we can always change it.
Maybe this says that we don't, but who knows?
Yeah.
And one positive thing in Neoreaction I'll say is he makes this point, which I had not thought about before.
So Neoreaction believes in.
Neoreaction describes a reality that is based on spontaneous ordering, which we can describe as fate or destiny.
and which can be a negative thing because once you take away human agency from the picture like
what world do we serve we can't change the future it's preordained by either providence evolution
or catalaxy right it's out of our the keys are not in our hands but then like that also once the
keys are not in our hands that takes away political violence from the picture because terrorism is a
resort to violence by people whose ideas are losing traction and the neo-reactionary doesn't
seek popular support they're not trying to put policies into place in any way they're anti-democratic
right and so they have no reason to become violent or terrorists um they're not trying to get the
populace to believe a certain thing it's almost a way you can say if somebody descends into violence
based on reading something like this then you can almost be assured that they've misunderstood it
correct and that they're not um neo-reactionaries or whatever other word you might give to describe
somebody who pulls to a consummation all the strands of Nick Glantz thought.
Yeah, he's just saying, this party sucks, I'm leaving.
Yeah, that's right.
X over voice, leave the party.
Neoreactionary, here's another strand.
Neoreaction is social Darwinism.
It's an insistence that Darwinism has no limits.
It is something we are inside.
To quote Landz, no part of what it is to be human can ever judge its Darwinian inheritance
from a position of transcendent leverage
as if accessing principles of estimation
with some alternative genesis or criterion.
The implication of this, he says,
is that everything of value,
and this is the way that Land talks and writes,
everything of value has been built in hell.
Nature uses incredible cruelty to create.
I mean, imagine the way that evolution works.
It works by, I'll just quote Land,
all health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace
has been teased from a vast butcher's yard of unbounded carnage requiring incalculable
eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest advantages. That's the way that evolution works,
right? Like the stuff that doesn't survive goes in the trash in the history. It's extinct, right?
It's extinct. It's no longer here.
And the reason that we're healthy right now is because that health has been forged
through a process of selection over many thousands of years to make us
best suited for our environment. All of our virtues are owed to people who
survived because they had those virtues and those that died off because they did not and did not
reproduce. Therefore, yeah, this is an interesting one because conservatism is the one that says we
should try to go back to the way that things were. But the progressive would be the one that is
trying to resurrect dinosaurs to go back to the way that things are. I would think I think that's
I think that's how I'm thinking.
I don't know.
In my head, this seems like a contradiction or it seems like something that's.
Yeah.
Which part seems contradictory?
Because the position of the conservative is to go back to the way the things were.
But with the specifics of like protecting endangered species and resurrecting extinct
species um these are like i feel like these are like primarily liberal progressive um things which
is uh returns the way that things work um so anyways i'm just i don't know why that was probably
i think you know i think you're right and like one of the strands of progressivism is it that um
wanting to freeze in place certain things about the way that reality are rather than letting
unleashing forms of spontaneously generated order like the progressive does want to freeze reality
in a certain sense,
the parts of reality
that are not comfortable to it.
Like the cathedral, again,
wants to just re-describe reality
in a certain way
and live in that re-described reality
because it's too uncomfortable
to think of capitalism
achieving escape velocity
and what that might mean.
Yeah, yeah.
We're just like a,
kind of a quick note.
We're probably about halfway
through your notes, right?
Eight of 25, so, yeah.
Can we, can we do a summary
and, you know,
then start a second episode?
We sure can.
We kind of hit the most political aspects of Neo Reaction,
talking about what the notion of a degenerative ratchet
as a sort of feedback or a sort of reversal being impossible,
like a ratchet moves forward, clicks, but it can't move backwards.
We just talked about what those were.
The welfare state, immigration, expansive franchise,
these are forms of degenerative ratchets.
We learned about the different three strands of Neo Reaction,
The theonomist, the religious strand, the ethno-nationalist, kind of the ethnic genetic strand, and then the techno-commercial strand.
Clarify, techno-commercial is different from capitalist, how?
No, they're not.
It's not.
So it's the capitalist strand.
Okay, it's the capitalist strand.
Right.
There's a religious, the ethnic, and the capitalist strand of neoreaction.
um we got the critique of democracy as something whose feedback mechanism is corrupted and the
cathedral is the thing that corrupts that feedback mechanism it generates the reality that it wants
to measure rather than measuring the reality as it actually is it creates the feedback it desires
yeah yeah um we talked about exit over voice new reaction is about spatializing disagreement
leaving a system instead of pulling yourself into a dialectical engagement with a cathedral
that's not interested in any sort of feedback other than what it's preordained and created.
It's not interested in what you have to say, because if it was interested in what you have
to say, it would tell you what you had to say.
You got to love that honesty, that directness right there.
Yeah, those are the main strands.
And something we've been teasing out, too, that I really like about this is that each
of the three strands has an idea.
Each of the trichotomy, the three strands of new reaction, embeds an idea of fate, which is also an idea of spontaneous generation of order.
For the religious people, it's providence, the will of God.
For nationalists, ethnic nationalists, people like that, it's evolution, heredity generates the future.
And for capitalists, it's catalaxy or self-organizing market systems, something like that.
So nothing stops this train.
Yeah.
This train either kills us all or it takes us to a place where life is not recognizable from what we think it is now, from what we feel like it is now.
That's where we haven't gotten yet.
We haven't gotten to accelerate neoreaction and accelerationism and kind of intelligence optimization and, you know, artificial intelligence as super intelligence.
That's where we're going.
So I jumped again a little bit.
But there are there's three strands of people that want to get off that want to leave this party because this party sucks. It's religious people, racist people and money people, capitalists.
Yeah, yeah.
People who are prevented from speaking essentially within the cathedral because forms of political correctness serve as path blockers.
If you're a religious person, you're a theocrat, you're irrational.
You want to just, you know, use the will of God as some surrogate for your own desire to control other people.
If you're an ethno-nationalist, you're a racist, as you said.
And if you're a capitalist, technoporationalist.
Which, by the way, is half of the world.
I looked this up.
Over half of the population of the world lives in a country that is 85% or more one ethnicity.
Yeah.
So, yeah, it's one of those things that it's like you can only be racist in play.
Yeah, this is Andrew Huberman once said that you can't be an alcoholic on an island that has no alcohol.
Like you have to have access to the thing.
and uh by the same token like you can't be a racist in a place that has no other races
you know so if you're chinese like you're just chinese dude you know like it's funny that you
can only be in a you can only be racist in places that have other races um it's exclusively reserved
to those places by the way so luckily you can still if you're a bigot be inegalitarian you can
still even amongst the chinese someone's going to be taller than someone else someone's going to be
better singer so yeah that's true that's true that's good okay um uh and then uh yeah and so
and then the cathedral and the cathedral is the cathedral is the matrix and because like he refers
to it especially as when you think about the movie the matrix um he says that the cathedral is read
only it's right protected and the people that are living in the matrix until they take the um until
they take the pill. Is it the red pill or the blue pill?
Red pill is the one that exposes you to
all of reality. Yeah, the red pill gets you out.
The red pill exposes you to reality.
So until you, like, being red-pilled
gives you access to write
or at least access
to go to a different program, I guess.
But being within the matrix,
you're in
read-only. So cathedral, matrix,
same thing, basically.
Yeah.
Nice. All right. Cool.
Yeah.
That's good. We will continue this right away. But I just want to have like a good place to split the episode because I think we did a really good job of laying the groundwork here.
And I want to, like, I truly want to give justice to this book. Like, this is, these are deep thoughts. These are things that are not easy to think about. And it takes courage to consider these things because a lot of these things that we are talking about are within the realm of those which are designated as verboten by the cathedral. And therefore, we're not supposed to talk about that.
And it is a act of terrorism or it is a act of courage to even brave your way into the idea of not participating in it.
Yeah. Even having a minor fourth tier podcast to talk about race in any sense on it's terrifying because, you know, I mean, we're kind of.
Fourth tier. Who are we? We have made leaps, my friend.
I know. There's like how many tiers of how many circles of hell are there?
I was thinking we were double digits.
Dante's Inferno.
Like, it's all a hellish landscape out there if you do it.
So, but no, even to talk about race in any sense, it's even kind of pseudo-public.
We kind of escaped the worst of cancel culture for the point being.
But you just have to have, like, a level of precision in your language, a number of asterisks and qualifications that you feel you need to get out to say anything.
and we trip over ourselves and we just stay quiet because we're afraid that we might say something in the wrong way
where we haven't expressed the correct qualification about statistical probabilities and stuff like that.
Yeah, you know, it's like you're being – there was this experiment done with people in a lobby
and they put people in a lobby and they start pumping smoke and the smell of like something burning into the room.
And they find that the more people are in the room, the longer it takes anybody to stand up and say something.
You know, to the point where it's like people are like keeling over.
You can't see across the room.
And nobody has yet said, hey, something's wrong.
Like we should do something.
It takes a hero to yell fire in a crowded theater.
It really does.
Yeah.
And so that's the thing is like we've been so bred to be like, again, like the crisis is not the crisis.
The crisis is noticing the crisis and it takes courage to notice the crisis.
So, yeah.
All right.
We're going to press pause.
We're going to get back and we're going to start another one.
Thank you for joining us for the first round of our talk on Nick Land's Zeno Systems.
Grant, you look handsome today.
Thank you, sir.
Nice work.
All right.
I'm going to piss.