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[PLEASUREMAN]

More Snark Enlightenment news:

The Dark Enlightenment: The Creepy Internet Movement You’d Better Take Seriously

Sidebar:

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[ WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT? ]

Matt Sigl will host a live Twitter chat Wednesday, December 4th at 1 p.m. EST to answer any questions readers have on the Dark Enlightenment movement. Join him at @Vocativ.

  Too bad we missed this, but who all is having Twatter chats at one in the afternoon on a Wednesday?

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Blossoming on the Internet like a fetid rose, a mysterious new political movement has generated a serious and not un-terrifying critique of modern society. Its members are loud and growing in number, and they demand nothing less than the elimination of the democratic system. Mostly white, male and angry, they lie in wait for the imminent collapse of civilization.

Eldritch blog posts...antediluvian comments...cyclopean Internet careers...what drove me to this madness?  The Dank Enlightenment!

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What is the Dark Enlightenment? As the term suggests, the Dark Enlightenment is an ideological analysis of modern democracy that harshly rejects the vision of the 18th century European Enlightenment—a period punctuated by the development of empirical science, the rise of humanist values and the first outburst of revolutionary democratic reform. In contrast, the Dark Enlightenment advocates an autocratic and neo-monarchical society. Its belief system is unapologetically reactionary, almost feudal.

I'm not one for book larnin, but didn't we have empirical science before the 17th century?  Oh well, it's more or less the schtick of a lot of alt right bloggers.  Here you get a peek into liberal anxiety--liberals assume, much like Dank Enlightenmentarians do, that political systems are chosen, therefore democracy can be unchosen.  Such sociological naivete seems especially prevalent among Internet people who constantly fret about ideological enemies.

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Why pay attention to a niche movement of political extremists who pine for the good old days of European feudalism? Because these guys mean business. The Dark Enlightenment’s desire to raze the democratic edifice of modern civilization opens the movement to darker and more subversive views. Nowhere is this more evident than its focus on human biodiversity, or HBD in insider parlance.

What is HBD? Human biodiversity is the rejection of the “blank state” of human nature. Creepily obsessed with statistics that demonstrate IQ differences between the races, the darkly enlightened see social hierarchies as determined not by culture or opportunity but by the cold, hard destiny embedded in DNA. One blogger calls it “The Voldemort View” (adding Harry Potter to the Star Wars/Matrix mix), claiming that, “mean differences in group IQs are the most likely explanation for the academic achievement gap in racial and SES [socioeconomic status] groups.”

Cue the adherents of The Bell Curve, eugenics enthusiasts, believers in white supremacy and sympathizers of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In the Dark Enlightenment, we seem to have stumbled across a place where pseudo-intellectually grounded racism is flourishing in a way it hasn’t since before World War II.

  Well good luck with your project to turn naggers into brain surgeons and computer hackers like in the retarded TV shows you watch.  It's all culture--it's just interesting how black culture produces sub-moronic rap grunting and white culture produces faggy SWPLs who stress out about pre-pre-school.  Whatever!

But even shitlibs can be right about something, and the Dank Enlightenment's spergy obsession with IQ is an indication of their lack of sophistication.  HBDers like to keep things nice and simple, with a handful of races and a table of regional IQ averages substituting for more complicated evolutionary-cultural ecology.  But it's still not as dumb as looking at Africa and saying we're all the same, it's just that Africa was raised wifout he daddy.

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Is this fascism? Desire for genetically determined ruling classes, distrust of popular democratic reform, distaste for the aesthetic standards of mass culture, and nausea over the political correctness of modern life—the Dark Enlightenment does have all the markings of a true neo-fascist movement. It’s here that the dangers of the Dark Enlightenment are hard to dismiss.

I asked Land the fascism question, specifically. His response was illuminating: “The Dark Enlightenment is the only cultural space promising an intelligent discussion of fascism today. Even though this discussion remains very germinal, the best fascist and anti-fascist arguments are to be found within its environs.” But he adds, “Speaking entirely personally, I think the DE is the only coherent antidote to fascist thinking presently available.” While he didn’t articulate how an anti-democratic, racially charged, anti-modern, authoritarian political movement could be, in any way, anti-fascist, he’s a bright enough guy. I’m sure he has an answer.

Well if you don't know the first thing about fascism, it is going to be even harder to control your paranoid fears about a few dozen Dank Englightenment bloggers who pine for a world where people wouldn't pick on them.

More seriously, anti-democratic, racially charged, and authoritarian are just as apt descriptors for modern progressive politics, which have abandoned traditional liberalism almost entirely and now concern themselves with dividing political spoils among their preferred fiefdoms (preferably silly ones like nogs, gays, and trannies).  I honestly don't know how you listen to Martin Bashir meltdown about Sarah Palin because she compared deficit spending to enslaving children and not realize your own side has some serious rage and sanity issues (in fact I'm pretty sure right wing madman Walter Mondale made the same comparison in 1984).  But as usual the left hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing because it's too bothered about the right one.

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What is their blind spot? My immersion into the hermetic truths of the Sith Lords left me wondering  what exactly they saw as so disastrous about modern society. The world is richer, healthier, less poor, less violent, and able to access more information than ever before. Even in the developed West, in America, the very Vatican of The Cathedral, poverty and economic turbulence cause less death and suffering than they did only decades ago. And Europe, despite its recent near-economic collapse and massive unemployment, looks more like a comfortable, retired continent than a truly suffering one. None of which is to deny or minimize the problems of modern society. It’s only to suggest that the solution may not be a return to monarchy and rigid racial castes. Anyone read much about how great things were in 14th century Europe?

This is typical babbling--what is so disastrous about modern society, despite near-economic collapse, massive unemployment, or, uh, other problems of modern society?  Environmental crises, overpopulation, overconsumption of resources, demographic instability, lower trust and cohesion, massively concentrated wealth?  Whatever!  You can see where the abandonment of liberal principles occurs.  These people watch too many movies where the world is engulfed in disaster and Brad Pitt figures out a solution to it all just in the nick of time.  They are so overwrought about what ideological enemies are thinking that they think the stakes are just a little exciting tension before some messiah figure like Obama saves them.

Of course the Dank Enlightenment has little idea what is really going on either, obsessed with the idea of hitting the undo button a trillion times and making a few different choices about democracy and then restarting the debugger.  It is equally obsessed with what its ideological enemies think.  It just doesn't write panicky blog entries about them because from its point of view the damage was done four or five centuries ago.

The blog entry collapses into banality at the end (right before advertising its next thrilling installment, something about "the knockout game" being a hoax--never change, shitlibs!):

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What’s the verdict? In the end, the Dark Enlightenment should be taken seriously at least by anyone interested in contemporary political thought; its beliefs are reasonably argued and its leading writers can be an engrossing read. And it is becoming increasingly evident that major structural reform, maybe radical in nature, could be what America requires if it is to continue to flourish in the 21st century.

Still, something essential is always left out of the neoreactionary equation. Universal equality and classical democracy are not synonymous with an all-purpose, lowest-common-denominator leveling of mankind. Rather, they speak only to an existential fairness in which each of us has the right to value, direct and make meaning of our own lives.

Completely incoherent waffling to justify the waste of time that both writing and reading this article is.  The schizophrenic breakdown of progressive thought is succinctly put:  life only really has meaning on the level of individual wants and drives, which are best obtained via the rational choices of solipsists.  This is in its way the crude devolution/fulfillment of Enlightenment liberalism.  We finally have a fusion of left-right ideologies of selfishness, now misnamed progressivism and conservatism (a kind of Coke vs. Pepsi struggle).  It is also a denial of the creeping insanity of the modern age, but you can't expect an inmate to diagnose himself.

By the way, wasn't this nagger just saying WHAT PROBLEMS?  Adjust your eyes two inches down from that and he is talking about radical structural reform being needed.  Whatever!

Source: http://www.vocativ.c...espeed=noscript

[Taxi Commander]

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the Dank Enlightenment's spergy obsession with IQ is an indication of their lack of sophistication.  HBDers like to keep things nice and simple, with a handful of races and a table of regional IQ averages substituting for more complicated evolutionary-cultural ecology.

Yes, and Windows is superior to all other operating systems because it finds the sweet spot between style and usability for the great mass of users, etc.  I've seen this pernicious attitude before, and though it may play well to the peanut gallery, it's not like there's really a future in it, especially for those seeking effective solutions to current problems beyond 'make your peace with the rulers of the present age.'

I realize that you're trying to position yourself as the moderate voice of reason here, but "Both sides are far too nerdy and unsophisticated to see the big picture" is for a forum with people of far lower IQ and intellectual curiosity than here.  Play that game in blog posts, or on a much more heavily moderated forum, if you must.  Or play it on the front page of Something Awful, your original muse.  They certainly don't lack for people willing to find the rhetorical sweet spot that both downplays society's current problems and blames its victims by association in the most artful method possible.

Be "fairly frickin outraged," I guess, but don't actually DO anything.  Makes you an easy target, man!  Having any core beliefs you'll fight and die for is a sign of a lack of sophistication, and long ambigous words requiring tomes of pre-education like "environmental crises, overpopulation, overconsumption of resources, demographic instability, lower trust and cohesion, massively concentrated wealth" are the coin of the sophisticated realm.  Position yourself in the best position to take no positions and you're set for life!

Whatever, man.  IQ might be a nerd obsession, but that's because it remains broadly predictive, which ambiguous pronouncements are most assuredly not, even if they may be occasionally comforting.

But if you could hit a few reset buttons on your intellectual development and write as well as, say, Scott Locklin concerning science and its descent into popular nerd faggotry (he describes the virtues of the small town, the foolishness of scale, and names the Jew inside NASA for good measure!) that would be great.

[PLEASUREMAN]

Maybe we'll import millions of bindis and chinks like Bryan Caplan wants and you'll have your ideal high IQ society.

[squatoyevsky]

comment from twitter sums up the formula of these recent snark enlightenment pieces



It starts with pretend openmindedness that ultimately leads to moral dodges like "white supremacy"

Edited by cold russian, 05 December 2013 - 03:06 PM.

[PLEASUREMAN]

I'm mildly curious why liberals are into Dank Enlightenment debunking right now but it's probably just boredom/fashion and those risible playing card mockups getting around.  The thing is it really does need to be made fun of and I fear shitlibs horning in on this will produce the kind of defensive reaction you can see above.  I'm not circling a wagon around Moldbug's inane Cathedral metaphor, his Carlyle worship, or any of his other fetishes.

It's not productive because very little of this alt right grandfather larping leads anywhere and it will never in a million years convince anyone beyond a tiny niche of Internet alt rightists.  A practical experiment for any of you who don't believe me:  try talking to your family over the Christmas holidays about how this democracy thing is flawed to begin with and we should go back to having inbred royalty.

[Who Runs Barter Town?!?]

inbred royalty is f**king weird but I do see more and more people realtalking about genetic differences between the sexes and races.  It seems that the left can only play The Emperor Wears No Clothes game so much with that before even normal people start to realize it's bullshit.

[Ricin Beans]

It's kind of like feminist's talking about MRA's:  it has a lot more importance in their imagination than in reality because it's precisely the kind of enemy they would like to be fighting.

[Chrome]

HBD nerds are kind of understandable, since the left is so aggressive in their deranged attempts to close THE GAP between races that it actually is important to keep the factoids about race and IQ alive. That doesn't justify the sperginess, but I'm glad there are relatively normal people like Steve Sailer and Razib Khan out there.

When Dark Enlightenment types get into how awesome divine-right monarchy is, they just seem unhinged. First of all, it wasn't awesome. Kings were selfish and even the capable kings would let their drooling, inbred sons take over the kingdom when they died. Second, it's also oddly anachronistic. People in the middle ages weren't loyal to their king because they believed in monarchy in some abstract sense, but because they thought the Lancasters were relatively responsible compared to the Yorks (or whatever). It was about personal loyalty rather than abstract legal contract theory.

[Legs McDuck]

Cromer, on 05 December 2013 - 04:48 PM, said:

It was about personal loyalty rather than abstract legal contract theory.

Well that's just it, isn't it? Talk about monarchy seems mostly like just a stalking horse against the idea that America is just some 'proposition nation.'

[GhostfaceCracka]

Or talk to them about how the ideal form of government is a shareholder autocracy with all citizens possessing firearms with sophisticated cyber locks that prevents their misuse, or something.

[Probably Not Posting Here Anymore]

There's a certain bait-and-switch which Moldbug makes use of, and his followers tend to do the same. For instance, he'll cry up something like Robert Filmer and his theory of kingship. Well, Locke was a contemporary of Filmer and he devoted his whole first Treatise of Government to attacking him. But instead of looking at what Locke has to say - which might actually get interesting if you want to take Filmer's side - he'll bring in some faggy devolved version of American democracy to oppose it. Then our option seems to be either Filmer was right about kings or gay marriage and tranny rights uber alles. It's clever and rhetorically effective but really it's just jacking off.

[Who Runs Barter Town?!?]

Only let literal caucasian land owners vote.  Problems solved.  (white does not include jews)

[PLEASUREMAN]

Dank Enlightenment is a good name for them because of their basement mustiness.  The thinking is inbred--Moldbug and his tomes, all those blogs rambling about what Aristotle or Carlyle said about this, the general sense that they prefer to think of people in the aggregate (less eye contact).  Moldbug seems convinced the s**t someone wrote a few centuries ago is going to be dispositive on any and all topics in any and all eras.  All he does is go through his subterranean library looking for more proof of liberal democracy's patient zero.

Apart from the trading cards it's also marred by a lot of self-indulgence, such as discussions of whether they should refer to themselves as "Dark Enlightenment" (no normal person would need to ask, it's a stupid and nerdy label).

Example, Nick Land:

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I was intending to paraphrase your remarks, rather than ‘warn’ you of anything. There’s a serious point to be excavated about popularity though, if still undeveloped.
Are we looking for popularity? Can it be earned without losing the last charred remnants of our souls? A significant attraction of the neoreactionary stance, from my point of view, has been its thoroughgoing abandonment of the demotic criterion. Doesn’t any public relations compromise risk taking us back to that?

Indeed, Nick, at what point do we become the same as the jocks?  f**k the demotic criterion.

This is how people talk when they secretly want to be losers.  

Here is an excerpt from the blog Occam's Razor about what Dark Enlightment ideology is:

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- A rejection of sociological universalism, and a preference for particularism.

- An acceptance of human biodiversity.

- An acceptance of Darwinian evolution, shunning egalitarian political correctness both from the left and from the Trotskyite right.

- On religion, if not agnostic or atheistic, then a preference for ancestral neopaganism or a form of Christianity that is ethnocentric and particularist.

- An acceptance of science and futurism as a means to improve at least some peoples’ lives while not rejecting one’s ancestral folkways (i.e. archeofuturism).  And a recognition that ‘progress’ will be available only to some, and not the entire human population.

- A rejection of The Cathedral (or whatever other names it goes by, such as Universalism or Political Correctness).

- The recognition that there is no single best political order.  As Aristotle notes in the Politics, some ethnies are better suited for monarchy; others, for aristocracy; others, for a limited form of politea.

- Skepticism about mass Third World immigration and the realization that human populations are not fungible but unique.

- A realization that liberty is incompatible with democracy, and that democracy leads to mediocrity.

-  A realization that terms like ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ and ‘feminist’ are beyond their expiration date.

- A concern with bio-politics, oriented to a particular people’s biological and demographic imperatives.

- A rejection of egalitarianism.

This is all over the place and just reinforces the idea that these are basement reactionaries who don't get any sunlight (this makes them look pale, not like Darth Vader or Morpheus).  If you cannot tell that someone who calls himself a neopagan is mentally ill, you are just way too desperate to make friends.  To the extent that there is a theme, the theme is of identifying as some abstract or non-existent ethny and otherwise reverting to individualism (invoking liberty and denouncing egalitarianism).  Then of course there is the misapplication of labels that one has by now gotten used to, such as "Trotskyite right".  Doesn't Andrew Sullivan get royalties for that kind of thing?

I could have named this thread "Who's Your Daddy?" because these people all seem to crave a stern authoritarian presence in their lives, they must have all had weak fathers.

Source:  http://occamsrazorma...-enlightenment/

[Multi-Ureter High-Definition Induction Kineconvert]

i dont understand monarchists... is it just a politically correct way of saying they yearn for dictatorship?

how do they propose we choose our king (and bloodline to rule forever)? Lottery? Wait for the pope to announce who has been ordained by God? Let the queen of england send over a monarch?

somehow i get the impression most of them think theyd be some level of nobility in such instances

[Ricin Beans]

Any monarch chosen by today's elites would be far more heinous than the worst that democracy foists upon us.

[Black Mischief]

Well I’m new here, so maybe it’s a bit presumptuous of me to be making a big idea post, but bear with me through the 888.

It seems to me that the point of this forum is to articulate arguments or advance discussions that ultimately call for a reduction of scale with respect to the federal government (I may be wrong here Pman, so feel free to correct me). Clearly we all know that liberal Managerialism is increasingly inept at dealing with the problems and complexities that arise out of multicultural utopias, and HBD/sociobiology are important, maybe even central concepts to our reasoning in this regard (at least in terms of framing our opinions on scientific or intellectual grounding). Furthermore, from a policy standpoint, I’m assuming that many of the commentators here have sympathies that lie with Burkean communitarianism – essentially advocating for a shift from our current Gesellschaft manner of societal organization towards the more local, community oriented Gemeinschaft approach. Practically speaking (and pathetic pleas for neo-monarchism aside), I suppose this would manifest stateside as a return to more anti-federalist inclined strategies (Roissy’s recent suggestion about state’s controlling their own immigration struck me as something that, while obviously idealistic, certainly would find encouragement here).

This brings me to my next point.

Obviously everyone on here has deeply felt beliefs about where our countries are heading in the face of the disastrous implementation of modern Liberalism, and as such, some of us (such as Enriquedon showed above), might have tendencies to downplay the ridiculous hero-worship trading cards and theatrical/aspie language of the Dark Enlightenment spergs and think of them as allies in a struggle against the shitlib masses; yet this train of thought strikes me a mistake.
More on this in a second.

Maybe Pman likes to think of himself as a kid just shooting spitballs at all the nerdy goons in the front of the class (in a manner perhaps not too dissimilar from a certain big nose over at Comedy Central), but I personally find the type of conversation here to be of significantly higher quality and grounded in more realtalk than that present in most of the other conservative circles on the web. That doesn’t mean, however, that the snark or the shaming are uncalled for. Rather, I tend to think exactly the opposite.

Connecting back to what I was mentioning earlier, if we really want to affect change, then before we can take on the leftists the first order of business would be setting the perimeters of the broader conservative dialog – basically achieving intellectual hegemony in the Gramscian sense over competing conservative strains such as say the neocons or the Dark Enlightenment fags. Probably the easiest way of doing this would be by taking a tactic out of the liberal playbook and mocking them in a manner so that they never really enter the debate in the first place.

Of course that all sounds jewy and Alinsky-esque and maybe even dips into a bit of rah rah power-tripping fantasies, but it seems to me that it shouldn’t be too hard to employ some straight talk populism and outmaneuver a bunch of autistic virgins and an otherwise incompetent GOP.

Just my two cents.

[Dr. Hasslein]

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i dont understand monarchists... is it just a politically correct way of saying they yearn for dictatorship?

I think it's that they perceive monarchies to be a stable conservative form of government, which is the sort of thing you can believe by only looking at history from 30,000 ft.  I mean, yes, for tens of thousands of years, human society was largely governed by hereditary monarchies of one form or another, and that's fairly constant, but when you zoom in to any monarchy, there's a lot more change and turmoil involved.  For example, we think of the English monarchy as quite stable, and it was compared to other nations.  However, when you take a closer look at English history from 1066 up until the Glorious Revolution (so called :spit take:), you see a continuous series of uprising, civil wars, and religious dispute.  Even before Henry VIII or the War of the Roses, for that matter.

[Dr. Hasslein]

Ricin Beans, on 05 December 2013 - 07:17 PM, said:

Any monarch chosen by today's elites would be far more heinous than the worst that democracy foists upon us.

You mean you wouldn't want to serve "Lady Gaga"?  Bow and scrap before SIR Elton John?

[PLEASUREMAN]

Black Mischief, on 05 December 2013 - 08:11 PM, said:

It seems to me that the point of this forum is to articulate arguments or advance discussions that ultimately call for a reduction of scale with respect to the federal government (I may be wrong here Pman, so feel free to correct me). Clearly we all know that liberal Managerialism is increasingly inept at dealing with the problems and complexities that arise out of multicultural utopias, and HBD/sociobiology are important, maybe even central concepts to our reasoning in this regard (at least in terms of framing our opinions on scientific or intellectual grounding). Furthermore, from a policy standpoint, I’m assuming that many of the commentators here have sympathies that lie with Burkean communitarianism – essentially advocating for a shift from our current Gesellschaft manner of societal organization towards the more local, community oriented Gemeinschaft approach. Practically speaking (and pathetic pleas for neo-monarchism aside), I suppose this would manifest stateside as a return to more anti-federalist inclined strategies (Roissy’s recent suggestion about state’s controlling their own immigration struck me as something that, while obviously idealistic, certainly would find encouragement here).

You provided a good summary of the general mood here.  While it's possible to keep a Gesellschaft (urban, cosmopolitan) society going for awhile, the nature of large scale society makes it very vulnerable to sudden accelerating changes that endanger the whole of society.  But the bigger problem is that it results in a large increase in impersonal or anonymous interactions and reduces the number of personal, meaningful ones.  As far as I can tell the neoreactionaries address none of this.  They also seem to think you can have a globalized mass society which somehow functions according to the Gemeinschaft stereotype.  This seems to be the dream of those who harbor fascist or syndicalist sympathies.

[Eternal_Return]

The Knapsack of White Privilege, on 05 December 2013 - 08:31 PM, said:

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i dont understand monarchists... is it just a politically correct way of saying they yearn for dictatorship?

I think it's that they perceive monarchies to be a stable conservative form of government, which is the sort of thing you can believe by only looking at history from 30,000 ft.  I mean, yes, for tens of thousands of years, human society was largely governed by hereditary monarchies of one form or another, and that's fairly constant, but when you zoom in to any monarchy, there's a lot more change and turmoil involved.  For example, we think of the English monarchy as quite stable, and it was compared to other nations.  However, when you take a closer look at English history from 1066 up until the Glorious Revolution (so called :spit take:), you see a continuous series of uprising, civil wars, and religious dispute.  Even before Henry VIII or the War of the Roses, for that matter.

All of that had nothing directly to do with Monarchy though.



Anyways, I think we can all agree that modern democracy is pure poz, and I am not even a huge fan of the idea of democracy itself to be honest. At least in its current form. Make it so that only white males can vote? Now you're talking my language. But democracy as it is now isn't for white people anymore.


I suppose a bigger question is this: Monarchy isn't coming back. Neither is fascism in any big way (smaller groups like the golden dawn and casa pound may increase but only in small numbers). Democracy is a giant joke and leaders on both sides are willing to sell out whites at every turn. So what system do we even turn to anymore? What will benefit whites in the long-run?

Edited by Eternal_Return, 06 December 2013 - 01:43 AM.