Retro-Dialectics¶
Nobody familiar with contemporary Western societies can be intellectually challenged by the idea of a great dialectical resolution to the problem of liberalism. Coercion and liberty are fused in a political order that directs authority towards the maximization of choice without consequence. Stupidity is sacred, and neither tradition nor natural necessity has the right to inhibit it. Preserving the freedom to fathom the limits of dysfunction in every direction is the primary social obligation, with the full resources of Leviathan behind it. If that’s not exactly where we are, it will be soon.
Against this backdrop, Neoreaction emerges as a de-synthesizing impulse, splintering along multiple paths, but especially two. In reacting against authoritarian irresponsibility (or ‘anarcho-tyranny’) it tends to a restoration of the Old Antithesis: either hierarchical solidarity, or a ruthless dis-solidarity (and as it undoes the progressive dialectic, ‘either’ fragments into ‘both’ — separately). Only the state protected irresponsibility of resolved Left-liberalism is strictly intolerable, because that has been historically demonstrated to be an engine of degeneration. Neoreaction, initially conceived, is anything else.
As the West unravels back to the Old Antithesis, the primary argumentative polarity of Neoreaction is exposed with increasing clarity (Neoreaction is this exposure). Given that irresponsibility is not to be protected, is it to be prevented (by a new paternalism) or abandoned to its intrinsic consequences (through reversion to Social Darwinism)? In other words, is the dominant theme hierarchy or exit? Any attempt to force a rapid decision — however tempting this might be — is to trivialize the submerged grandeur of the abyss. The degenerative dialectic has at least half a millennium of heritage behind it — and perhaps at least two millennia. The Old Antithesis is far greater than either of its constituent ‘options’.
When More Right outlines its ‘Premises of Reactionary Thought’ there can be no doubt which side of the antithesis is being promoted. It thereby declares that the Left-liberal synthesis is dead, establishing itself as the articulation of a Neoreactionary stance. Its partiality, however, is overt. (Outside in advances a counter-partiality.)
If failure is — eventually — no longer to be sustained, it either has to be prevented, or intensified. Neither stop it failing nor let it fail are remotely equivalent to let it continue failing forever, but neither are coercion and neglect commensurable to each other. The Old Antithesis is going to keep us on edge during 2014. If Neoreaction can even more explicitly be the unraveling, it will go far, but it will not obviously be one thing. The ‘one thing’ is virtually dead. What comes next arrives in pieces.