Month: September 2018

On Sartorial Correctness, or The Ties That Blind

Dearest friends,

I must admit to a deep and enduring flaw.

I cannot properly tie a tie. It’s really knot my forte. Windsors, Italians, Orientals, Hanovers – the technique escapes me. It seems that I will exist in a permanent state of scruffy dishevelment. True, true, I could practice for quite a while, and perhaps I’d get it. But if my younger self, with a juicier, more plastic brain, could not manage the task, then why should I suspect I’d be more able now?

So I won’t do it! Bah, to hell with practice.

Anyways. On to a more pleasant and easy topic. Let’s talk about class signals. Signalling is a topic near and dear to my heart, but it may be a hard cell for you. Still, humor my mad ramblings and accept that this behavior is generally true. Even then, a few behaviors would seem not to trickle down in the same way our black and white cells change color. Namely, we would expect the middle class to be the most fervent and reliable signaler of the ideology.

Why would I say this?

The middle class is plagued by its own anxious gentility. A strict adherence to the party line, the dominant signals of the day, can be considered essentially risk-averse. No one ever lost their job for expressing too much rightthink. Therefore, someone without any sort of independent power and who very much wants to hold on to their job will signal correctly. And cognitive dissonance being a painful thing, many of them will come to believe it. However, this does not explain why the middle class should be *especially* correct in its signalling. Wouldn’t higher classes also have an incentive to signal correctly to preserve their own status?

Yes, they do. But the strict adherence of the middle class to the perfect version of the signal creates its own opportunity to signal. Namely, if the middle class deploys a polished, well-rehearsed 100% signal, then the upper-middle class ought to deploy a sloppy, half-assed version of said signal. Why? Because signalling in that way shows that one is not afraid of the consequences of failure. If an upper-middle class person is fired – so what? What’s the big deal? He’ll retire to his estate to play Extremely Irate Birds on his iPhone XXX, perhaps listening to the lewd noises of the Pornograph and awaiting the next e-telegram from his fellows. A half-assed adherence to the norms of the day becomes, in and of itself, a signal of independent wealth or power.

Only the middle class, bless them, would do a foolish thing like go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt for a useless piece of paper. We’ve got to follow the party line, after all.

It is relatively popular in the Manosphere and the Reactosphere to come up with all sorts of biological or cultural explanations for why women vote and act more reliably left-wing than men. They’re wired to love invaders, or kidnappers, or despise the ingroup, or have too much empathy.

And these explanations sound quite plausible. The problem? In the Weimar Republic, women were far more right-wing than men. If only women voted in Weimar, Hindenburg would have won the first round, and Hitler could have won an outright majority, or at least close to one. The same held true in France. It was a good long while before women won the right to vote in France – lest their irrational, reactionary natures strangle baby democracy in its cradle. And when they did, they confirmed the fears of the menfolk, voting right-wing 25% more than men.

So much for the left-wing nature of women.

Let’s consider class behaviors as emergent properties of g, that little blob of wisp we call intelligence. Women are middling in many respects. The standard deviation of their intelligence is lower, so you will see them cluster around an acceptable, but often not exceptional point. Many women go to college, but women geniuses are rare. Many women could play chess, but they do not number among the grandmasters. At the Most Selective institutions, these shining beacons of reasonableness and respectability, men outnumber women. And the women there are like the howling terrain of Dzungaria or the wind-swept prairies of Kansas – plain.

Women are the middle class of genders.

What does this mean for a would-be purveyor of ideology?

The Rationalist community is a pleasant place for debate. People constrain themselves with certain norms, thus ensuring constructive conversations and learning for all. It is polite. It is learned. It is elegant. What a wonderful place. Why can’t the world be more Rational, like the Rationalist community? And ideology architects have such lovely arguments for why their solution would be so much more efficient and orderly and well-run than the present state of affairs. The best part is is that they are often correct, and that their explanations and solutions are exceedingly simple. Simple is good and correct is better.

If you lived in an elite community governed by the norms of the Cathedral, you would believe it was heaven on earth. And though you might search and search for any imperfection, you would be unable to find one. Move over, Rasselas, your quest is at an end. This is the Happy Valley perfected. And it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the virtues of the Cathedral.

As it turns out, if you give a bunch of IQ140 geniuses with relatively high conscientiousness *anything*, *anything at all*, as a blueprint, they will probably make it work and look damn good in the process. But the problem is that it has nothing to do with the merits of the ideology, and everything to do with them. The architects of ideology are usually of the upper-middle class, and if they are not, their high intelligence has allowed some of its behaviors to independently emerge, and so the unspoken caveat to every prescription is “except in cases where doing this would make no goddamn sense”. Take that privileging of logic and debate to a population more representative of the general populace, and you don’t get the Rationalist community. You get Reddit. And Reddit is a terrible, terrible place, full of all manner of trolls, scoundrels, circlejerkers, snobs, and plain idiots. Worse still, this probably represents a high estimate of privileged reason, not a low one, since there is reason to suspect Reddit is still somewhat more intelligent than the real average America. That beautiful ideology you designed as 100% Neo-Reaction? Remove all the implicit slack and take everything to its logical but retarded conclusion. Now you have 120% Hyper-Reaction and it doesn’t really work very well at all. Or swap for your favorite flavor of Neoliberalism, your own new infallible version of Communism (this one will work), Anarchism, etc.

You may object and say you’ve built some wiggle room in to account for the foibles of man. Wise, very wise. But unfortunately, this is not a one-and-done process. Who teaches the next generation? Teachers. And teachers are terribly female and terribly middle class. So even if 120% Neoreaction is fine, what about 140%? 160%? 180%? Sooner or later, your ideology will reach a breaking point where its solutions stop making any goddamn sense. This is how you start with the well-reasoned, eminently sensible writings of Saints and Church Fathers and end, through aeons of church ladies, with the dog-and-pony show absurdity of modern American Protestantism.

Imagine two principals. Both are issued a zero-tolerance policy regarding violent acts. One day, Count-Principal Maximilian Howe IV, clad in half-askew tie, notices two schoolchildren playing a rather rough game of Cowboys and Elizabeth Warrens. Now, the letter of the law would demand he crack down. On the other hand, he uses his expandingbrain.jpg and correctly assess this as not really a threat and not quite what the policy is meant to curtail and leaves it be. The other principal, Bob Smith, sees this and shuts it down. It’s in violation of the policy, even if it is a natural expression of the need of boys to play. Now, you might protest this is unfair to Mr. Smith – I’m not giving him the same intelligence as our dear Count-Principal. But suppose I do. Mr. Smith sees this play for what it is, something healthy and harmless. Then what? If he is found in violation, that’s the end of his fine career in education. For the Count-Principal, this is a non-issue. He didn’t need the job, as it was a passion project to begin with. He’ll retire to his estate to play 5 dimension hyperbilliards. But Mr. Smith? That’s his ass. That’s a foreclosure on his house. That’s a car payment going unpaid. So he’s going to crack down, even knowing in his gut that he’s wrong to. After all, he’s only following orders…

Only a perfectly fault-tolerant ideology would be immune. Let me know how formulating that goes.

I’ll be here.

Or… or…

I balanced some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish take out of their stomachs; then thought I, “if you eat one another, I don’t see when we mayn’t eat you.” So I dined upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

– Rucka Rucka Ali

Yours in shabbiness,
Monsieur le Baron

And Yesterday was the Same as Tomorrow, or The Importance of Not Being Very Earnest At All

Dearest friends,

Here is an excellent post by an excellent man.

Here is another!

When Monsieur le Baron was a small child, he learned great tales of princes and kings, warlords and scholars, empires and barbarians. It was all quite lovely. Then Monsieur le Baron grew a little larger and discarded such things as moonbeams and fantasies. Then, even later, Monsieur le Baron found out it was all mostly true.

Still later, Monsieur le Baron was delighted to find his peers were similar, all with their own storied lineages and ancient histories. Now, the neoreactionaries among you may be wondering how one can reconcile an observed reality of most everyone of talent being blueblooded with an ideological claim of human equality.

It’s simple – the peasants were kept down and remain kept down by cisheteroviolent patriarchal oligocapitalist oppression. To free them so that a thousand blossoms may bloom, we must smash the System, man.

One might wonder how such a silly boy could believe such a silly thing.

It’s really quite simple!

Everyone believed it!

Now, a digression.

When the Revolution came to Russia, as it always does and always will come to every country, the nobles rolled out literal red flags and ribbons and the metaphorical red carpet. And while most of the Romanovs either died or fled, one, Natalia Romanov of the Iskander branch, outlived the Revolution, outlived Lenin, outlived Stalin, and ultimately, outlived the entire Soviet Union.

Of all groups, one might expect the nobility to be most resistant to signalling. Their social position is almost as high as it can possibly be. Their wealth is, if not infinite, then usually enough. And if anyone has the clout to tell USG to fuck off, it is those who are independently powerful. Life is pretty good. One might expect these people to put up a resistance, however tepid, to the leftward swim of Cthulhu, since any gain in someone else’s SP must come at their cost. Yet, everywhere one looks, it is highborn sons of illustrious families atop the Cathedral. It is Otto von Habsburg leading the charge of the Eurocrats.

What motivates a nobility?

Some might say power. Some might say the maximization of profit, paid in delicious golden shekels. Some might say social status. And all these things are pretty true.

But I am a natural craven, so I propose yet another answer: first and foremost, they are concerned with the preservation of their own miserable hides. Power is a strange thing in that it must constantly be maintained against others. If one is not growing in strength, one is weakening. This is true of nations, corporations, and ultimately, even individuals. The only security lies in true absolute power, and the only respite from danger is to constantly grow. A shark has to keep swimming or it suffocates. States do not remain in little patchworks but agglomerate into larger and larger empires. Companies devour or crush their rivals by hook and by crook. And nobles? Nobles scheme relentlessly.

To scheme is to speak the language of power. That language is leftism. It is popular to divide the world into Kshatriya and Brahmin, one being hard-nosed realists born to rule and the other being a detached, unworldly priestly class. But in reality, to remain Kshatriya, to remain regnant, one must speak the argot of the day’s leftists – one must be Brahmin as well.  Otherwise, someone else will – and they’ll slit your throat. There are no prizes for dying with dignity. However, he remains tied to certain realities by the Gods of the Copybook Headings and by Gnon. We might call these realities Kshatriya realities. Thus, the true nobleman is two-faced, singing Brahmin lies from one mouth and whispering Kshatriya truths with the other. He is Janus, straddling the line between barbarism and civilization. And it is he that is the true fist of the Revolution.

Looked at this way, most leftists need not be sociopathic status-maximizers at all. They need only be powerful and fearful. There don’t even have to be many or even any sociopathic status maximizers in the modern population – generation N can signal leftism creating the environment which drives generation N+1 to signal leftism to survive which drives generation N+2 to signal leftism etc etc.

Let’s face it, if Bioleninism and its predecessors were only championed by the dregs of society, there would have never been a single Revolution, let alone an eternal and unstoppable leftward Cthulhu swim. These people are dregs for a *reason*. People who can’t even reliably put cheese on a hamburger patty certainly can’t reliably overthrow a government. At least not on their own.

Dennis the Menace, meet Janus the Manus.

So what’s the lesson of the Russian Revolution? It’s bad to be a conservative. It’s okay to be a liberal. It’s good to be a socialist. It’s even better to be a communist.

And best of all is to be NKVD, carrying out the will of the Red Tsar. That is beautiful Natalia’s little magic trick to outlive an entire regime.

This is how you end up with a Cathedral full of heretics. Even in its decay, the organ pipes of the Cathedral sing a terrible and beautiful melody, the sublime musical cacophony of a thousand artillery shells, thermite bombs, and automatic rifles ringing out in unity, the undulating growl of countless treasure ships laden heavy with tribute bound for the Throne, upon which sits, by the Grace of Our Lord, God-Emperor Trump, flanked by legions of Kshatriya-Brahmin, the perfected thoroughbreds of centuries of eugenic breeding, heretic-evangelists who have pledged their lives and sovereign honor to the Empire and its Cathedral, the mightiest and most prosperous the world has ever known. There is much virtue even in a dying empire.

And sure, each generation will see fewer and fewer Warrior-Brahmin and more and more evil fat black ladies as the tension between Cathedral ideology and lived reality continues to grind. But this is a slow fall, and it may go unnoticed until one day a hollow-eyed Odoacer wanders the ruins of a once great empire.

But! But! But, you might object, Monsieur le Baron, isn’t it the case that these less leftist governments were much, much better at the business of government? If all of the elite could come together and repudiate this insane nonsense (and it is insane nonsense, because that’s better to signal loyalty), or at least 50% of it, everyone would be better off. Great! Wonderful! Bring on the Restoration.

I have even taken the liberty of preparing a letter for you announcing the Restoration. Here:

Dear Peasants,

You are all zoosmells and the ugly. We, the upper middle class, hereby renounce that wretched republican name and resume our glorious existence as the divine aristocracy, doer of all good things. Please report to your nearest liquidation center for dysgenic counteraction. There will be free food and refreshments, followed by death.

By order of,
Louis LXIV, the Super Mario Sunshine King

If people prioritized the collective good over individual rationality, Communism might have actually stood a chance of working.

Political catallaxy is the phenomena by which humans spontaneously arrange themselves into organizations which make everyone involved miserable.

Sure, a powerful king can arrest such signalling spirals. But those guys are few and far between. Court politics was known as treacherous for a reason.

Lest we idealize the past, my problems were my grandfather’s problems and my grandfather’s grandfather’s problems. And at the end of the day, my grandfather was shot.

Although, there was less shit on the streets.

And the wine was better.

In unfortunate sobriety,
Monsieur le Baron

An Introduction, or Churls of the World Unite

Dearest friends,

Come in, come in.

Your presence is welcome and appreciated.

What is this little corner about?

Well, do permit me to tell you a tale – it’ll only take a moment of your time.

Like many of you, in years past, I went to a reasonably respectable school. And in this school, I had reasonably respectable opinions. And I went about my reasonable and respectable business, stopping only to go to my classes a reasonable amount of the time or to eat a respectable meal at a reasonable price.

In my classes, I learned many reasonable things using the power of my reason, all in the service of giving me respectable work so that I might be a respectable fellow. I rather respected this goal, as I wished nothing more than to walk the same path my forebears had walked for a hundred generations. This was, I thought, a very reasonable wish.

Now, in this respectable school, there was a certain set of rules, rules which everyone felt reasonably reasonable. After all, they spoke of little but respect and the importance of respecting others, all of whom were, of course, also very respectable persons to begin with. And yet… something felt very faintly unreasonable about the reasonable rules. Yours truly, being a passable student as well as a strapping young lad, knew very well that curiosity killed cat and man alike. But, regardless, I decided to satisfy this urge – after all, wasn’t the university a place to slake such thirsts? A reasonable thing to think.

So I asked around. Immediately, I found someone else who agreed. While one man might easily be crazy, it was a rarer thing for two fellows to independently come to the same lunacy. A comfort indeed. This could have been the end of it.

But it wasn’t.

Nevertheless, he persisted.

I asked more people. And the more people I asked, the more it seems no one really believed the reasonable code was very reasonable at all. In this crowd of priests was not one believer, even though, being student officials, they were often the ones tasked with enforcing the reasonable code. What was merely curious now became intensely curious.

I must admit that this was the beginning of my descent into being the churlish fellow I am now.

If you value your dignity, turn back now.

Yours Unhappily,
Monsieur le Baron