Although I have some sympathy with neoreaction I need to add this: the next paradigm will have nothing to do with politics. Because the power shifted from the political to the corporations when I was a young man as an inadvertent consequence of the Neo-liberal (Neo-conservative in US terms) economic revolution and globalization. The next paradigm will be not as much to do with titles or structures or leadership, but with morality. You can see the first parts of the coming struggle on twitter and tumbler, as the social justice warriors collide with the Gamers and Sad Puppies. (You used to see it on Reddit, but Reddit is now gone corporate, and thus moronic). Brahmins are the priests, the elite, vaisyas the cast that builds things and grows food.
NRx has a constituency: disaffected brahmins and intelligent vaisyas. At this point we don’t need numbers, the Frankfurt School never did, we need influence. Numbers follow influence. Also, neoreaction does not despise nationalism. Almost everyone in it is a nationalist of some sort and degree (except maybe Land). We despise stupid nationalism and ineffective nationalism, but the emphasis is on the adjectives not the noun. Finally, neoreaction does not look down on proles. I’m of prole stock myself and have never taken even the tiniest amount of shit for it. NRx is pro-vaisya and always has been. (We do disdain lumpenprols though, but lumpenprols are worthy of disdain).
In this we are moving back to a pre-modern time, where the scholar and philosopher matter, and self control, self improvement and independance are revered. For the mass movements of last century, turning everything into some form of politics, have failed. As one would expect. And at this time we need to act and be different, but without reaching to the theatrical displays of excess or aestheticism that repel. Infowarrior is reposting Seneca for a reason.
I commend you and rejoice in the fact that you are persistent in your studies, and that, putting all else aside, you make it each day your endeavor to become a better man. I do not merely exhort you to keep at it; I actually beg you to do so. I warn you, however, not to act after the fashion of those who desire to be conspicuous rather than to improve, by doing things which will rouse comment as regards your dress or general way of living. Repellent attire, unkempt hair, slovenly beard, open scorn of silver dishes, a couch on the bare earth, and any other perverted forms of self-display, are to be avoided. The mere name of philosophy, however quietly pursued, is an object of sufficient scorn; and what would happen if we should begin to separate ourselves from the customs of our fellow-men? Inwardly, we ought to be different in all respects, but our exterior should conform to society. Do not wear too fine, nor yet too frowzy, a toga. One needs no silver plate, encrusted and embossed in solid gold; but we should not believe the lack of silver and gold to be proof of the simple life. Let us try to maintain a higher standard of life than that of the multitude, but not a contrary standard; otherwise, we shall frighten away and repel the very persons whom we are trying to improve. We also bring it about that they are unwilling to imitate us in anything, because they are afraid lest they might be compelled to imitate us in everything.
We can learn from the Stoics much. But not all. For they failed: they saw no way forward, and for them, death was a release. There is nothing wrong in taking wisdome from such, and using it: wisdom is not jealous. The sythesis of Classical virtue and Christian charity was well done by the time Augustine was writing four hundred years after Seneca. Instead we need to live not as the elite, but as the faithful. For the elite are as surely our enemy as Nero was to Seneca and his school.
(Can I note that the Brilliant controversial people who talked about the death of the unbaptized were part of the counter-reformation? Us reformed have had our errors, but that was not one of them).
And it is true that the mercy of God is at the heart of this faith. And it was really important to warn Catholics of the need to emphasize mercy … back in the 17th century.
At that time, the most powerful threats to the Faith came from brilliant, apostolic Calvinists and Jansenists, who thundered about the fewness of the saved and almost exulted in the damnation of unbaptized infants. But how many people now are crippled by an excessive fear of God? Is this really the threat we face?
Or do we face increasingly intolerant secular governments that are redefining marriage and punishing Christians who dissent; potent elites who teach our children that “gender” is a social construct subject to surgery; multi-billion-dollar organizations that are trying to spread abortion to every land on earth; totalitarian Islamists who cut the heads off priests and burn down churches; vast countries still ruled by Communist governments which persecute the Church? Do I really need to go on?
There is quite a long list of churches that show no “obsession” with the less-popular parts of the Christian moral message. Instead, for the past 40 years they’ve been preaching mercy, inclusion, tolerance, and a leftist/statist vision of social justice. From the Anglican communion to the United Methodist Church, from the mainline Lutherans to the mainline Presbyterians, every single one of these churches is fading into irrelevance. The Episcopal church (like some shrinking, liberal Catholic religious orders) is right on track to becoming a real estate holding company. Why should we think this universally failed strategy would win not just smiles but souls?
Worst of all, inside the Church, many Catholics are still subject to the power of bitter, dead-ender dissidents, who reject fundamental teachings on faith and morals, and use the institutional power of the Church to impose their views on others. (As feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether once admitted, she stayed inside the Church because it had “the Xerox machines,” and you need Xerox machines to make a revolution.) Such people still control rich religious orders, prestigious universities with billion-dollar endowments, theology departments and seminaries. Is Pope Francis under the impression that liberal Catholics are tolerant? He should talk to faithful priests who endured the vicious regimes of Cardinal Mahony in Los Angeles, or Bernadin in Chicago. He will get an earful, and it will be every bit as ugly as the worst horror stories to emerge from the wackiest rad-trad coffee hour.
We are not living in fascist Argentina. The Culture of Death does not answer to men like General Galtieri, but to the likes of George Soros and Barack Obama. The bitterest traditionalists are not serving as tools of a grasping government which seeks to impose an anti-Christian ideology. Angry conservatives are not the cat’s paws of a potent political movement that seeks to marginalize the Church. The mass murder occurring throughout the West is not happening with the connivance of the Catholic right, but of the Catholic left, which pretends a moral equivalence between fundamental issues like abortion and prudential disputes over poverty programs and immigration totals, as a pretext for supporting candidates who oppose the natural law and the sanctity of life.
The gospel is not politics. The time of the nation-state has ended: the corporate state is the current paradigm, and the corporate state tends fascist economically and worse than fascist morally. The next movement will be about small things, but the small things are greater than what we consider big. The military historians call this fourth generation warfare (4GW) because the large armies of the nation states are made powerless by the movements they face: it is not a nation they are fighting but an ideal.
Bush I and Bush II could easily conquer Iraq. But Iraq is not Islamism, and Obama has lost that war, and is suing for peace with a nation that sponsors it (Iran) while being the lickspittle of the other nation that sponsors the spread of Islam (Saudi Arabia). The moral is now not about motivating privates: it is the war, for wars are lost when peoples are defeated.
Apple stock plummets for a fifth straight day http://t.co/GFrWwPKnmP
— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) August 5, 2015
And this is the appropriate battle ground. For one soul is worth more than all the shares in Apple, Google, or AliBaba. For each soul is eternal.
