What are your thoughts on Neoreaction/Dark Enlightenment - Page 2 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14811126
Addendum:

And besides, it's not exactly true that fascism has never worked in practice. Ancient Rome is an early model of fascism working just fine (although you can't just copy and paste the Roman Empire into the modern world)

Furthermore, every country with a functional military has a micro-example of fascism working in practice. Also, all of the wartime economies of the WWI and II eras were pretty good approximations to fascism.
#14811136
Saeko wrote:Addendum:

And besides, it's not exactly true that fascism has never worked in practice. Ancient Rome is an early model of fascism working just fine (although you can't just copy and paste the Roman Empire into the modern world)

Furthermore, every country with a functional military has a micro-example of fascism working in practice. Also, all of the wartime economies of the WWI and II eras were pretty good approximations to fascism.


WWII was the apex of the modern nation state. The forces of liberal capitalism have been weakening it on every front for the past 70 years. I'm not sure what minimum criteria you would specify for an ideal functioning fascist state. Certainly, emerging technology and its inherently distributist framework would seem to be working against you.
#14811192
Oxymandias wrote:That's an interesting thought. So as a final question do you believe in neoreaction or at least find it appealing?

I think it has broadly a very good chance of coming to be in this century or the next for the reason given in my last post, and I think it will be broadly a good thing for civilisation and not without its advantages for everyone who loses their political enfranchisement in the process.

On fascism

Saeko is right the neoreaction model is completely different from fascism, it is authoritarian but it is not totalitarian, really the neoreaction model is just laissez faire min-archism firmed up.

Also objectively fascism does work and we know this because in the 20th century everyone was a fascist: fascism put the first man in space, fascism built the first national healthcare system, fascism solved the great depression with a new deal. The Germans and Italians gave it a name but everyone else was doing it too and some even did it better and started doing it before them.

The roots of it began in the late 19th century with Kaiser Bill's reforms and the reason for those reforms was the rifle. As already mentioned the breech loading rifle was the battle winning weapon of the 19th century and early 20th century, its virtues were that it was a highly accurate ranged weapon with good penetration / damage output and a very decent rate of fire that most importantly was so simple to operate that just about anyone could use it effectively after a few minutes instruction and courtesy of the industrial revolution production techniques could be cheaply manufactured in vast numbers.

See like any king Kaiser Wilhelm expects to have to fight wars and as a matter of personal survival and prestige if nothing else he also intends to win them. The mere existence of the rifle and industrial production techniques offers the enticing possibility for kings of mobilising for war not just a dedicated warrior caste, not just their immediate servants and retainers, not just all men folk of reasonable fitness but everyone. Generally war is a numbers game, he who has more will win.

You have to do more to make a soldier than give him a gun you also have to ensure his loyalty, his motivation and this is where the totalitarianism comes in. The first way to make a soldier loyal is to pay him and so this is where national benefits / welfarism starts, bind your meat based rifle caddies to your cause by providing them, and making them dependant on, your education, healthcare, pensions, housing, food rations etc etc.

The second supplementary way is to make his religion for him, a religion that creates a narrative in which his service in arms to you is a holy work for a grand purpose, your purpose. This is nationalism, but the communists have their own variant which is communism.

If you fail to properly indoctrinate your soldiers then they will fall upon pragmatism as their religion and in realising their military worth demand more than benefits in return they will demand political enfranchisement, a share in political decision making, and so democracy / universal suffrage was born.

So that is totalitarianism / fascism and as you can see, in the 20th century everyone was a fascist, everyone was a totalitarian and everyone was a communist. The Anglo world which had done so exceedingly well from laissez faire in the previous century was slow to adopt some of the more aggressive fascist practices such as the inculcating of a national religion hence why it fell early to democratic impulses but even the anglos had overtly national socialist programs such as Britain's NHS.

It can be said that the 20th century was the century of democracy, the century of genocide and the century of totalitarianism but what the wise realise is that all three are intimately related to each other and to one root cause: the rifle.

Much of all that endures even today at the beginning of the 21st century but as a legacy, a legacy with an underpinning that has become obsolete. Rifles are no longer, and haven't been for some time, the battle winning weapon and wars are not won by mass mobilisations of civilians made soldier but are now won by highly technically proficient warrior caste careerists wielding enormously capital intensive doomsday devices such as cruise missiles, nuclear submarines and ICBMs.

The warriors of today don't need and can't use the run of the mill hoi-polloi for their craft and because they don't need them they don't need to share power with them. Even they will realise that sharing power with them through democracy is contrary to their interests. See modern democracies have become a brothel for civilian interests, everyone is voting themselves more and better benefits at the expense of anyone that can't muster the numbers of votes to counter it. The losers of democracy are the as yet unborn because they must eventually pay the bills run up by the voting generation but also increasingly the military as an increasingly professionalised high tech military as a voting block is trivial in comparison with single mums, OAPs, shop workers and whoever else. You can see that even as governments budgets and debt swell up to elephantine proportions the military's slice of the pie tends to diminish inch by inch..

At some point they will have enough and take back government from civilian hands and those civilian hands will not have the military potential to take it back.

So ends democracy but it will also be the end of totalitarianism because if the government does not need civilians as soldiers then they also don't need to make them materially dependant through welfarism or ideologically controlled through education they can just tax them a bit to pay for their swarms of AI piloted nano-nuke drones which will be much less work for them and much less annoying.

So laissez faire will return and all us whiny plebs demanding freebies from the government will be booted out of politics. Is that bad for us? No the good news is we can look out for ourselves, we can still do business, trade for what we want, just as we did before we were conscripted / enfranchised to politics. It may even be better for us civilians, because now our healthcare, education, pensions, work arrangements etc will be of our own creation and for our own benefit and not so arranged to be primarily useful for the national military regime.
#14811244
SolarCross wrote:
...the neoreaction model is completely different from fascism, it is authoritarian but it is not totalitarian, really the neoreaction model is just laissez faire min-archism firmed up.

Ugh.

So that is totalitarianism / fascism and as you can see, in the 20th century everyone was a fascist, everyone was a totalitarian and everyone was a communist.

Gee, thanks for narrowing it down for me.

The losers of democracy are the as yet unborn because they must eventually pay the bills run up by the voting generation but also increasingly the military as an increasingly professionalised high tech military as a voting block is trivial in comparison with single mums, OAPs, shop workers and whoever else.

No, this is not how sectoral balances work in an economy.

You can see that even as governments budgets and debt swell up to elephantine proportions the military's slice of the pie tends to diminish inch by inch.

Only it hasn't.

At some point they will have enough and take back government from civilian hands and those civilian hands will not have the military potential to take it back.

No, this is not how a military coups work. A small professional army cannot take over a large distributed population. Atom bombs, stealth fighters, and smart weapons are totally useless. Political power and large numbers of followers are what counts - just ask Erdogan.

So laissez faire will return and all us whiny plebs demanding freebies from the government will be booted out of politics. Is that bad for us? No the good news is we can look out for ourselves, we can still do business, trade for what we want, just as we did before we were conscripted / enfranchised to politics. It may even be better for us civilians, because now our healthcare, education, pensions, work arrangements etc will be of our own creation and for our own benefit and not so arranged to be primarily useful for the national military regime.

So this is fascism? You are describing Paul Ryan's vision - not my idea of dark enlightenment. Dork enlightenment, perhaps?

We don't have that many straight up fascists left in PoFo Land, but I wonder how many would buy into this.
#14811458
@Saeko

I think calling neoreaction "libertarianism for edgelords" to be an oversimplification. Neoreaction is more closer to an extreme version American conservatism than anything related to libertarianism. Neoreaction is socially conservative, it wants a modern version of feudalism, it focuses on traditional family values, it is religious (some neoreactionaires are Catholics, some transhumanists believe that superintelligent AI is God), it is exclusive, it is nationalistic, and it wants the government to control society. But it is also fiscally conservative, it loves the free market and hates government interference in the economy, it wants the government to be treated like a business and the country to be treated like the king or the CEO's property, and it wants a laissez-faire economy.

Neoreaction also is profoundly influenced by fascism both in it's ideology and it's aesthetic (which seems to be a combination of Brutalism and Romanticism) and many neoreactionaires respect the ideology.

However society is different. The military has a function, society's function is unknown and subjective. The purpose of society is philosophical and means different things to different people. To force an entire society, as complex of an organism as it is, to a specific vision without it's consent is comparable to deciding your body's entire purpose is to say, run and nothing else.

The main thing that made the WW1 and WW2 economies so good was not fascism. There was nothing totalitarian about the WW1 and WW2 economies other than the fact that there was full employment due to the influx of jobs involving technology that were created due to heavily government-funded scientific institutions with complex incentive systems and efficient money distribution. Keynesian economics also played a role. However all of these are possible now while not in wartime. Countries have the ability to implement Job Guarantees and America could always re-implement those systems and the government can fund science more like in wartime along with reintroducing the efficient money distribution of the wartime era.

@SolarCross

I never said that neoreaction was fascism. I just said it was influenced by it.
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