War and Truth (scraps)¶
“War is computation with tanks. War is truth revealing. As war
proceeds uncertainty collapses.”
— Konkvistador (on Twitter)
“You might not be interested in war, but war is interested in
you.”
— Lenin
“War is deception.”
— Sunzi
Neoreactionaries are often talking about ‘oikos’ tacitly, even when they think they are concerned with something closer to the opposite. For there to be an ‘economy’ much has already to have been settled. (Unlike his liberarian precursors, Moldbug never assumes peace, but he betrays his inheritance by conceiving it as an original task — a foundation.) “Begin from the inside” — that’s the idea. The Outside is war.
War is the truth of lies, the rule of rulelessness, anarchy and chaos as they are in reality (which is nothing at all like a simple negation of order). It is the ultimate tribunal, beyond which any appeal is a senseless prayer to the void. A ‘realism’ that resists such conclusions makes a mockery of the name.
Peace is a certain way war can turn out, for a while, and nothing more.
As the social institution oriented to reality in the raw, the military has a latent authority that everyone recognizes (implicitly). Whenever military government does not rule, it is because of a provisional non-emergency (Schmitt). This is not seriously disputable.
An aristocracy is a social arrangement that was decided by war, and when the war is forgotten the institution has no sustainable meaning. There is only one thing that can ‘bring back’ a king, and that is the end of peace.
The East India companies (Dutch and English) ran armies, because war was internal to economics as they practiced it. That was ‘colonialism’ (in the James Donald sense). Once the separation between war and commerce has been hardened into standard business procedures (and the imperialism that screens them from the outside), capitalism has surrendered its always-inexplicit claim to sovereignty, and thus to the future. There is no way it can be re-animated except out of the raw. This, above all, is why libertarianism cannot be saved from its own non-seriousness.
The horror of war is that there are ‘no rules’. Anything is permitted, and the worst even becomes necessary. To think this is no lesser a challenge than the metaphysical engagement with the ‘thing-in-itself’ — and perhaps it is exactly the same thing. But then, it becomes important to ask: So how does it work? There are rules, but we misunderstood what rules really are (what ultimate rules are). In the end, it is the order of anarchy that rules. In order to comprehend any of this the peacetime soul must be reduced entirely to ashes, for something else to arise in its place. It is this task that Neoreaction is compelled to take up, and which it has — in several different ways — already taken up. Peace is the objective correlate of the deluded mind.
If war is the worst thing in the world, and the truth, then everything that isn’t horror is a lie.