Generation Reaction

Cthulu Swims Left: The Clear Pill, The New Sincerity, and Neoreaction

This is part two of a three part series. Part 3 will be on The Dark Enlightenment

Part 1 can be found here:

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The Clear Pill

The clearpill is Yarvins prescription for dealing with the disorienting effects of hypermodern politics, and it can again be likened to a sort of Taoist or stoic stance with regard to the torrent of world events that one seems helpless in the face of. The oak tress breaks in the storm, but the blade of grass only bends. The bluepilled vote democrat as they eat the steak, or maybe a better example would be a soy-based meat substitute, while the redpilled gear up to do battle with Agent Smith. Yarvin says everyone from pickup artists to Neo-Nazis adopted the “red pill,” and perhaps he wrote his clearpill manifesto to counter some of the reaction he’s seeing online, to sort of disavow these disparate groups who’ve taken up his imagery. Either way, many on the right are clamoring for action, for ideological purity insists everyone stick to a list of pre-approved opinions, and of course each niche political faction has its own separate list. According to Yarvin, this list is created in response to the belief in a particular narrative of history and how we got to Now. He says the clearpill is narrative neutrality, and this is probably the most offensive thing he can possibly say to true believers of any stripe.

Yarvin argues for strategic victory over a tactical one, and this position of neutrality is the only way to achieve that. Both Yarvin and Land repeatedly make it a point to characterize conservatives and the right as losers and clowns, among other things, and it’s because of this insistence on action in pursuit of a tactical victory. He characterizes a tactical victory as one that “gets the actors what they want,” but a strategic victory as one that “makes the next battle easier.” Political action fortifies the enemy, familiarizes them with your tactics, and “field tests” new tools of repression – just like an immune system exposed to novel pathogens. Yarvins advice, both for your own sanity and emotional well-being as well as the viability of any counter cultural movement, is to remove yourself from the story you tell yourself about who and where you are. Doing so will allow you to refrain from acting and further destabilizing the system. The fourth leading cause of death in the United States is medical accidents or malpractice, depending on how you look at it (it was the third until Covid-19 supplanted it). Sometimes trying to treat the patient only hastens their demise, leading of course to further interventions which only demand still more, exponentially increasing your risk for an “accident.”

In this way we can see how acceleration is a negative feedback loop: further acts upon the cycles of history only cause the current regime to clamp down harder when the organism is still viable, or topple and take countless innocent bystanders with it when its ready to fall. But even without the pathogenic political ideologies the cycle is careening down the mountains of history in a spectacular crash landing. The clear pilled neoreactionary knows that the plane is controlled not by people on a suicide mission but that it *already* crash landed and this is the long, dramatic skid to a stop. Taking the clearpill is akin to bracing for impact and hoping to be one of the survivors when its finally over. The plane certainly has been hijacked, not by terrorists but inconceivably incompetent pilots who got through pilot school by other means. They sincerely believe in the superiority of their flight skills as they steer the careening fuselage to avoid trees and rocky outcroppings – and of course smashing through each one as they pass. Any attempt to jump out an emergency exit door prompts the flight attendants to add another lock, and trying to take control of the helm will prompt them to machine gun every single passenger on board.

Taking the clear pill is a bit more sophisticated of a move than might appear at first glance. It’s not simply giving up in the face of two equally catastrophic choices, surely it’s a middle path of compromise, the way of least resistance but not exactly the cowardly one, just the non-suicidal one. Lets say the crash landing is deep in the Andes, and all the radios are destroyed. While other members of the crew black pill about their terrible fate, and some hatch a doomed plan to take control of the bridge, the clear-pilled neoreactionary straps into the safety harness, applies his crash helmet, and calculates how many days rations he has to locate the nearest fresh water source and build a base camp from whence to strategize survival. Any other survivors in this scenario will be his “subjects,” to whom he dictates a survival strategy and gets them out of the crisis and back to stability without resorting to cannibalism.

The thing that makes Yarvin a prophet, in my opinion, is that he recognized the internet as a resource to facilitate a population ready to create a culture antithetical to the dominant order, a clean and abundant water source to nourish the survivors long enough to build structures and find food. But we would need more than just a resource, we need to access it to maximize its potential as a multifaceted bearer of information and power. Without the proper people to wield it, a resource or tool will be neglected potentially forever. How long did the Chinese have gunpowder without ever using it to propel balls of lead through the air and pierce their opponents flesh and armaments? The true genius of Moldbug is that he both perceived the tool and that the population was ready to wield it. And THIS is what truly brings the reactionary element into his ideas.

THE NEW SINCERITY

David Foster Wallace, in his excellent and landmark essay “E Unibus Pulram: Television and US Fiction,” noted that irony was poisoning culture, and that the irony of television and advertising had neutralized the novel as a source of critique and satire. The novel once caricatured, satirized, or in other ways mocked and denounced American mainstream culture, providing both a critique of and an antidote to the prescribed ways of life set out for the youth by the establishment. This kept the medium vibrant and staved off cultural stagnation, opening lines of flight for creatives to express alternative forms of art and ways of life to the mandates of their elders and the mainstream. People like Kerouac and Hunter S Thompson became examples of how to live on your own terms while writers like Barth, Gaddis, and DeLillo did the same for the form of the novel itself. In one fell swoop, however, television became the medium of irony with late night talk shows, self-aware commercials, and sitcoms like Married…with Children and The Simpsons parodying everyday American life. Television had supplanted the novel as the vessel for irony and turned it back on its intended target, wielding it to amplify commercialism and conformity.

Suddenly, according to Wallace, the novel became sapped of its power and any irony found therein would be taken up by the dominant mood of the era, one of nihilism in which any attempt at meaning itself would be mocked, satirized, and parodied like everything else in American life. In order to keep the novel viable as a cultural force and a creative medium, writers would have to adopt a new stance toward life and the expression thereof. Wallace called this a “new sincerity,” and said the “rebels” of the future would have to eschew irony and embrace honestly -- even naively -- held convictions and express them sincerely through their art. This, according to Wallace, was the only way to counter the nihilism of the day and simultaneously reinvigorate the novel as a source of creative inspiration. Wallace of course was echoing the same prescription Dostoyevsky put in the mouth of Alyosha at the very end of The Brothers Karamazov, though Dostoyevsky’s antidote was religion. Nevertheless, Alyosha entreated his audience, and the reader, with calls to retain the sincerely held emotions one had as a child and not to let life make us cynical and smile ironically at “what is kind and good.”  

This new generation of sincerity emerged right around the time Yarvin began writing Unqualified Reservations (2007-2009) and blossomed in 2016, by which time they had their hands in all facets of culture and now, in 2022, they have complete control. Film, literature, politics, television, corporate advertising and even corporate leadership have taken up sincerity to a degree that dwarfs anything Wallace saw with irony in the 90’s. In her book “Kill All Normies,” Angela Nagle tries to make a case that the online battles that emerged during gamergate and came to a full-scale online war during the 2016 election was between a cynical faction and a sincere faction. She delineates the pro-gamer chan memers as the cynics and the tumblr feminists as the sincere. The cynics endorsed Trump, and won, while the sincere endorsed Hilary Clinton. While things are not quite as simple as she makes them, she does correctly identify a powerful faction of the electorate and the wider culture in the tumblr feminists, and I would argue these people are the New Sincerity Wallace predicted, even called for. We now know these people as the “Woke,” and subsequent recent history has them as the victors, at least for the moment. Things are not as simple, as I said, because the memers are not as cynical as they might appear, and I would argue that in fact a New Sincerity has swept the country and taken up many more political factions than just the woke.

While the chan posters and twitter memers do employ irony as a tool in their meme toolkit, it’s quite hard to get to the bottom of what some of them really believe, and it’s probably a waste of time to try. While there’s probably a faction of true believing Nazis in America, how many of the Hitler memes are just a troll? An attempt to upset the sensibilities of the fragile normies? Probably quite a lot of them. However this, I would argue, obfuscates sincerely held beliefs at the core of these memes. The easiest case to make is with gamergate, which everyone agrees catalyzed the online right and turned them into a force for trump. While its unclear whether or not they were decisive in his election victory, they certainly bolstered the wider Maga movement. But what one cannot deny is that these people sincerely harbored strong feelings for their video games; that the irony and cynicism they used to attack progressivism were just tools they were willing to deploy in the defense of something they loved and held dear.

Familiarity with the online right reveals several other sincerely held convictions, not only with regard to beliefs but also with their own identities. These identities are not at all like the aloof, hip, and detached archetype of the 90’s “cool guy;” Vince Vega with his mocking smirk, Tyler Durdens above it all manhood, and the ultimate 90’s figure, Neo with his ubiquitous shades and placid stare. To allow one more 90’s reference (I am Gen X, after all), the baggy clothes and lack of direction for the characters of Kids conveys a now dead and buried total disengagement from any identity or convictions in either political direction. This disposition is exactly what Wallace railed against, and while his essay was an invocation, it reads now like a prophecy. American culture has eschewed nihilism for what a century earlier Yeats referred to as “passionate intensity” (though remember, those people were “the worst”). If someone attacks a liberal conviction online, they can expect to be met with at the very least a torrent of weepy and resentful accusations of “racism,” “sexism,” and “transphobia,” and at worst a maddening swarm of attacks that result in mass harassment. These events have very real world consequences and counterparts, in which actual mobs tear down statues or twitter swarms get people fired and alters the contents of books.

My argument is that many of these right-wing identities, rather than being cynics out purely to mock the woke, are in fact the right-wing version of these mobilized progressives. Furthermore, it’s exactly these people who attack and denounce NrX because NrX does not embody or endorse their pet convictions. The woke mobs have their right-wing equivalent, and their swarms usually appear to attack *other* right wingers. These niche groups typically subscribe to a traditionalist or racial ideology, colloquially known as “trads” or “wignats” (traditional Catholics and white nationalists, respectively), these folks propound some sort of racist worldview or endorse, and wish to enforce, traditional morality. If someone on the right promotes sexual licentiousness, embraces people of color in some way – commonly “castizo futurism,” which accepts Latino-Americans – or is in some way friendly or supportive or even adjacent to anyone Jewish, they can expect to find mass-confrontation with these two sub-groups. The third, though much smaller group, are the incels or “involuntary celibates” who turn up to pile on along with either of these camps. Watch out for twitter accounts with anime profile pics. These swarms are not made up of a generation of people who are “over it.”

It should already be obvious why or how these groups come into conflict with NrX, which was founded by a Jewish man, denounces Hitler and fascism on a few different fronts and, perhaps worst of all, does not blame Jews for every single one of Americas problems. These groups, and others, also denounce and attack ACC for its lack of convictions, and both ACC and NrX are blamed for upholding or even endorsing the current progressive moral status quo. Neither camp really calls for a renunciation of materialism, denounces technology, condemns sexual depravity, wants to disenfranchise non-whites on racial bases, or has any use for religion whatsoever. In other words, it’s precisely for their lack of sincerity that these conservative camps attack and denounce them.     

So as we see, the new sincerity is itself not any sort of movement, but rather the dominant social condition of current American culture. Sadly, this move towards sincerity demanded a seemingly ubiquitous engagement in politics and political ideology. Even the term “normie” is a denunciation of those who choose to engage in culture but ignore the political significance of the way culture is depicted. A normie trying to enjoy whatever is popular with the mainstream, who doesn’t decry the lack of representation - or the over-representation - of marginalized groups in the media they consume is just as subject to attack or derision by the woke or the right as is a political person who isn’t sufficiently extreme enough in either direction. Unfortunately, this is the milieu created by a cultural turn to sincerity.

NEOREACTION

            If Generation X can be defined by irony, aloofness, and apoliticism, while Millenials are defined by wokeness, conviction, sincerity, and engagement across the political spectrum, then perhaps we can see the later generation as a reaction against the former. In the push and pull of generational priorities, the hippies gave way to the yuppies which gave way to Gen. X: the back to nature rejection of materialism and conformity spawned a generation of indulgence and flash, and it all came tumbling down in a rejection of embracing *anything.* If hippie music expressed optimism and comradery, and 80’s music was distilled over-produced pop commercialism, grunge rebelled against both and embraced pessimism and an abrasive, sloppy sound, with grating vocals and sludgy guitar. In other words, rejection of conviction, optimism, morals, polish, and professionalism was “cool.” Pure rejections for rejections sake. And where hedonism was once liberatory it became nihilistic and escapist by the 90’s. These folks weren’t the trailblazers who pushed for the legalization of abortion, found their sexuality with the invention of the pill, or discovered with wonder the mind-opening and artistically enhancing powers of drugs. No, Generation X lived in the wake of these things, and by the early 2000’s, with the advent of the opioid epidemic, school shootings, and broken marriages and childless relationships, the consequence of pure rejection began to rear its ugly head.

            This, of course, ushered in the new sincerity. An entire generation embraced the convictions of progressive boomers, and using the lingo they learned from their aging radical Marxist professors in college, Millennials burst upon the scene invigorated by the ideals that were sneered at by their older siblings and cousins. Suddenly, being “cool” didn’t matter, what mattered was conviction and moral superiority. And with this rediscovered itinerary of social justice issues, they cheered as Obama and the courts normalized one after another of their convictions: gay marriage was legalized, gays were allowed to be open and women fully integrated into the military, marijuana and drug reform took major steps forward, and the relationship between black men and police were made front and center issues. In other words, leftist and progressive values achieved central prominence in American life, and any opposition to them – like the homophobic bakery – was put on blast by the media and roundly criticized by the culture at large. The Obama administration and the new sincerity were interdependent upon one another, and it created the social conditions that led not only to Trump, but also the “new right.”

            And the New Right were the Neoreactionaries Moldbug foresaw. Part of why Neoreaction is so poorly understood by both the broader public and the right wing is because a group of readers of UR took up his specific diagnoses and prescriptions for liberal society and dubbed themselves the Neoreactionaries and adopted the logo “NrX.” ™ If you listen to Moldbugs interviews and read his work however, both from UR and Grey Mirror, this was never what Moldbug was doing. In fact he specifically rejects using the logo “NrX” and UR wasn’t the creation of a new political party. Rather, it was a prediction and an observation of where things might go and how they might get there: a CEO president inaugurated on a tech-savy wave of young conservative artists and intellectuals. Certainly he called for the “building of parallel institutions,” but back then he was just getting started, it was merely a suggestion rather than a rallying cry, for there wasn’t anyone to rally. Yet.

Yarvin was dubbed a Neoreactionary by someone else, a neologism used to distinguish the difference between his world-view and that of the Neoconservatives of the previous generation. Some readers, most important among them Nick Land, read UR and thought “wow, this is a good idea, lets do this.” But perhaps the most important thing to understand about Yarvin’s work is that his predictions are not limited to a the faction of people reading it and bringing it into being (yes, this is happening and yes, Yarvin is involved, but if this were the full extent of his vision then his relevancy would be far less than it is). Rather, Yarvin set out an empty vessel, cleared a new space in the crowded American intellectual environment, a sort of guide for what should and a prediction for what would fill that space. The subsequent New Right are the flow of culture into that vessel, like Sims building this new community on Yarvins software. You don’t have to like Yarvin, or even know who he is, to use it, but Yarvin was the first to foresee that the coming generation was ready for a change, and that the internet would be the tool they used to make that change.

            With every generation, “cool” is redefined, and as we’ve shown, it’s defined in contrast to what the previous generation found cool.  Yarvin’s basic premise with Neoreaction, how he got it right, was exactly the same way David Foster Wallace foresaw the New Sincerity. Yarvin says explicitly that for a new generation, the liberal progressive values of the woke will someday be the boring, corny, and out-of-touch values of your parents or your aunt and uncle.  Someday, the Millenials will be to a new age what the Boomers are today, and your liberal uncle will be the annoying guy at Thanksgiving, embarrassing you and starting fights about the need for gay rights and complaining about the over-policing of black neighborhoods.  This is only natural, but there is a crucial difference between this generation of conservatives and the preceding generation. Reaction is typically a phenomenon that arises among people who were alive to remember what the previous world was like, and they’re reacting to changing morals and norms *as they’re taking place.* Often they harken to a future world that these changes will usher in, but haven’t yet. It’s easy for younger generations to oppose this line of argumentation of course, because these dire warnings often don’t match the mission statements of the progressives, and look nothing like the conditions in which they’re living. When I was with my two-year-old and walked past a group of young men at the Ft. Lauderdale airport smoking marijuana in front of the entrance at 8 o’clock in the morning, I immediately remembered Bill O’Reilly, in the early 2000’s, ranting that the progressives want to create a world in which its ok for strangers to blow marijuana smoke in your child’s face. And we all thought he was crazy, of course, because no one was advocating for that.

            The future dystopia the reactionaries of the past forewarned of is the reality of the present. And the new group of reactionaries that Moldbug foresaw are growing up in that world, they know no other. But they know that *something* is wrong. These are the new reactionaries, not the old men decrying the modern world and making appeals to how things were back in his day, this generation is revolting against the modern world and encouraging people to “RETVRN” to an older way that hasn’t existed for a long time. And while we’ve already seen the ACC argument against this, these people don’t *really* want a Ted Kaczynski future anyway. They love their smartphones and video games and the interconnectivity of the internet, to them traditionalism is an ideal they get to hold in their minds eye as some crystallized perfection of a world they’re forever cut off from, an Atlantis that may never even have existed. Many will never admit it, but without the digitized world, their precious identity is nothing, it literally wouldn’t exist without the online milieu of a new generation of conservatives propounding the ideologies of long buried thinkers of a century or more ago who, in their day, were the new reactionaries.

            What these older thinkers were reacting to was democracy and the democratization of the world. The present was fought over, in the past, by communists, liberals, and fascists, and the liberals won. While we can never go back, despite what some people tell themselves, what we *can* do is order the future on some of the principles of the past. At base, what NrX and much of the online right sees in pre-democratic societies that they want to regain is order and stability. The current era, call it hyper-modernity (a term Yarvin recently employed) comes in the wake of post modernity, which was characterized by the breakdown of metanarratives. Imagine civilization as a carefully constructed, immaculately detailed stained-glass window. During post modernity, the crew tasked with installing it dropped it to the floor, where it shattered into kaleidoscopic, scintillating chaos. Hypermodernity is the Cathedral with a gaping hole and a dangerous mess on its floor. Quite a number of people are happy with the pretty colors, and some even argue that its better this way, while others argue about the best way to salvage the wreckage. Yarvin and NrX are like a dedicated team of artists and thinkers who want to piece the shards back together into a mosaic: something totally new built from the pieces of the old, a sort of digital Tikkun olam. 

            What we would need to make this happen though, is a skilled professional foreman, who can organize everyone in spite of their differences to work together to build this mosaic, someone with managerial expertise as well as the gravitas to override the factionalism. After about 50 years of arguing over the splintered glass, it’s become painfully obvious that democracy is not up to the task. But that’s all we’ve had in America for 250 years, our entire tradition has been building upon the tenets of liberalism – that’s what The Cathedral *is.* The internet, then, is in part an intellectual medal detector that amateur researchers like Moldbug use to comb through the sands of information and pull out valuable relics of thought that’ve been buried under decades of ideological drivel. While Moldbug wasn’t the only person doing this, he was one of the earliest and most prominent. While he helped to revive Schmidt, Spengler, and his favorite, Carlyle (among many other more obscure thinkers), the right more broadly has revived people from the past like Julius Evola and Rene Guenon, who both enjoy widespread reverence and reference by all facets of the online right. What these people share in common is a total rejection of liberalism and democracy as a viable way to carry civilization into the future, and many of them spend pages upon pages warning, in effect, that their going to drop the stained glass. And for this new group of conservatives and reactionaries, the writings of these men reads like a prophecy, and the last 100 years a bearing out of their predictions. Certainly this process of what we earlier referred to as deteritorrialization had already begun in their time, but the key factor for the new reactionaries is that they’ve begun to get the sense, and feel they’ve found proof, that they’ve been lied to about the benevolence and capability of liberalism.

            These thinkers present an alternative to the current political order that is decidedly illiberal, that does not endorse democracy and individual freedoms as the foundation of civil society. This new generation of reactionaries is forced to live with the consequences of liberalism, the slide away from order and stability into chaos and decadence. They see it in the decline of the nuclear family, the decline of art, the decline of our cities, the tyranny of feminism, and far worse things like spree killings, adolescent genital mutilation, grooming, and the age of consent debate. Regardless of one’s opinion on these features of 21st century American life, every single one of them is facilitated by some liberty or other granted by the constitution or the courts or by democratically elected officials. Liberalism isn’t seen merely as a failed recourse to modern problems, it’s now viewed as the *cause* of modern problems. The old conservative, libertarian argument that the way out of this mess is more freedom is falling on an increasingly larger number of deaf ears. So while this generation of reactionaries might want to return to a previous way of life, they want a new form of politics to get them there. This is one of the few things the entire New Right agrees on: politics has ended, voting doesn’t do anything, and democracy is never going to result in the world they want to bring into being.

            Yarvin characterizes this decline as Cthulu swimming left. Society is tethered to a great underwater beast that pulls it in a certain direction, that beast is the Cathedral, and that direction is ever leftward. And of course Cthulu is bent on destruction. But why does he swim left? Why is the arc of history – at least the history of Modernity – one of progress and progressive values? One way to understand it is to say that as institutions ossify, traditions become irrelevant. In an earlier phase of civilizational development, traditions like the family and sexual norms were crucial for the emergence of culture, culture was too weak to stand on its own while its bones and muscles and neurological system developed, and traditions were what nursed it and held it until it could walk on its own. Once it finally reached a point where it didn’t need its traditions to survive, civilization had no use for them anymore. Its life no longer dependent on them in any real sense, and they become something, in the mind of the left, that has been overcome, rather than something that facilitated its growth.

            The lefts reliance upon the liberal institutions at the expense of tradition, however, while fun and even sustainable for a time, becomes unstable and chaotic. The institutions become filled with people totally cut off from the patient work of generations that it took to build and maintain them, and they become watered down with amateurs who don’t know what they’re doing, and of course have an agenda. This speeds up the leftward travel while The Cathedral is populated by peoples whose liberal agenda gets more radical over time and they actively begin to cannibalize the very institutions they’re attempting to take over. Instead of inheriting the academy, they use #metoo to excommunicate apostates, instead of reforming the police to improve the conditions in our inner cities, they hog-tie them and threaten to defund them. Suddenly, no one is in charge, the quality of education plummets and the crime rate sky rockets. Meanwhile, all of the tax revenue allocated for these and other institutions continues to flow despite the radical downgrade in return on the investment.

            This phenomenon has been happening for at least twenty years throughout every facet of our society; socially, economically, and politically. As these problems intensify, the leadership class is captured by its priestly obligations to venerate Cthulu, and more and more social capital is dedicated to the rites and sacraments demanded of this insatiable demi-god. The new generation of reactionaries sees democracy and political engagement as nothing more than the bolstering of this priestly class, any energy they put into its perpetuation will be captured and redirected as a sacrifice to Cthulu. They no longer want to hear the utilitarian arguments for why these increasingly sickening sacrifices of our children and of inner city youth, among others, are necessary to feed this great beast. The populace sees now, despite the insistence of the republicans, the libertarians, and the classical liberals, that they have no recourse to science, reason, rationality, or compromise when dealing with these fanatical acolytes of this newly reawakened God. Enlightenment values have reached their terminal point, and the only hope we have, according to the new right, to salvage this once-great civilization is a Dark Enlightenment. An absolute monarch must emerge, for he is the only one willing and strong enough to sever the bonds Cthulu has clamped to the West and steer the ship, alone, into the future.