This video is going to be a little introduction to a certain group of philosophers and political thinkers that are too reactionary in their beliefs to be considered a part of the intellectual dark web. Instead, they refer to themselves as the dark enlightenment or just near reactionary. But before I will list their beliefs as well as explain their core concept and ideas, it is important to understand how they got there in the first place.
The most influential philosopher of the Dark Enlightenment, as well as the person who came up with the necessary concepts and ideas behind it that other philosophers are continuing to use nowadays, is named Curtis Yarvin, popularly known as Manchest Moldbug. Cortes has conceded to the left's post-hoc reasoning of history, where the left would constantly win battles against the rather losing conservative side in their march of history. Essentially, using Hegelian dialectics, Cortes came to the conclusion that the left was the conclusion that history always marches in one direction, that is a lefty progressive direction. However, his interpretation of progress is not fully positive nor it is negative. He identifies the left to be antinomian, meaning being anti-societal laws or anti-customs, as opposed to pronomion, which are the conservatives, or even those who will be against polyamorous marriages, for instance.
Antinomians are degenerating social bonds and deconstructing society step by step, he argues, while pronomians are the ones who would slow down the process of deconstruction and degeneration, or even attempt to reinforce societal laws or customs, but they barely ever succeed. Does it ring a bell for the fans of his work? It certainly does, because they constantly apply this critique to modern Western and American democracies in particular, but more on that later. Instead, what is important to remember for now is that this whole theory is based on one important assumption.
that is, a linear view of history, when progress always marches left. I, for instance, would disagree with that, because not all egalitarian values that became popular in the West are leftist values. I would not equate egalitarianism to leftism, and I would also argue that it is particularly a Western phenomenon, since other societies progress in directions that support the dominant values of their cultures.
Finally, the left does not equal progress, nor do they have a monopoly to call themselves progressive. But at the end of the day, that is just me. Some people may be blackpilled if they wish to, I don't want to prove them otherwise. And before I proceed any further, I consider it necessary to introduce you to another important concept coined by Curtis Yarvin that you may have already heard somewhere before, because it gained a certain amount of attention.
attention even in the academia as well as outside the circle of people who are associated with the dark enlightenment. That concept is called the cathedral, sounds like a secret conspiracy organization associated with religion and if you thought so too, you're not far from the truth, because Curtis as an edgy atheist believes that Christianity is a myth. evolved in such a way that gave birth to antinomian sentiments to take power in the west that are now referred to as the cathedral, because they not only evolved from Christianity according to him, but also happened to have a lot of dogmas.
as well as share a lot of myths of their own that are constantly reinforced within the cathedral itself. Let me be more clear and elaborate on it even further. You see, a cathedral is not a person or a specific institution, nor it is even a place.
The cathedral is the current lefty consensus on how a society is ought to be run. Its power is supranational, which evades borders and exists within all spheres of culture and institutions. They are that leftist cultural hegemony that I sometimes talk in my videos. To expose or identify the cathedral, it is enough for one to take a hypothetical survey of the current sentiments and ideas that are circulating in the media, popular culture, entertainment industry, academia and other institutions, especially the newer ideas that would be quickly picked by lefty progressivists. And those would represent the cathedral.
Now, going back to democracy and and the Dark Enlightenment's critics of it. Democracy is essentially fake. I bet you never heard that one before.
However, they add something new to it. They see the American democracy operating within the realms of the cathedral, where on one hand you have the antinomial democratic party that they call the inner party and on the other hand you have the anti-democratic party that they call the inner party. You have the pronominal Republican Party, which is the outer party They argue that the differences in policy between those two parties are very insignificant and eventually The other party will come to represent the inner party from 10 to 20 years before The goals of the other party are pretty simple Slow down the progress in order to avoid panic as well as to provide the public with a sense of choice the other goal of the other party is to mobilize the left by portraying the other party as a threat to progress, creating a feeling of menace that the right might reassert themselves and take all of your rights away if you're not a straight white male. Just refresh your memory and remember what they said about Trump's plans when he will take office or some other conservative candidate.
They face the same backlash every time. The cathedral over-exaggerates the power of the other party, while in reality, the outer party has its hands tied up and would never dare to reverse the March of History, because it has as much power as the Queen of England. Now, I think it's time to introduce you to another thing from the Dark Enlightenment, which, although was written by a person from the outside, was highly influential in shaping the thinking of the Dark Enlightenment philosophers, that is the three laws of politics by a historian of the Soviet Union Robert Conquest. The first law indicates that everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
And it is a universal law applicable to any political opinion and institution, regardless whether it is left or right. And if you are confused with a communist intersectional feminist fury being a conservative, don't worry, they are conservative only with respect to being a communist intersectional feminist fury. Hopefully that cleared it up for you, so we could move on to the next law, which states the following.
Any organization, not explicitly right-wing, sooner or later becomes left-wing. And this can be observed by the actions of one-time neutral and apolitical institutions or corporations taking leftist political stances. In the realm of corporations and businesses, this phenomenon is also called the woke capital. meaning an economical entity that became an actor for the cathedral.
Finally, the third law states that the simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies. If you read the context, he implies that any bureaucracy starts off as a distinct and unique organization, but over time will do everything besides its original function. Think of the universities, for example.
Now, although mostly his second law is often referenced in their discourse, especially when arguing about the left's inevitable progress, I have decided to mention the first and third laws nonetheless. There is also one unique way in which the people of the Dark Enlightenment view political discourse. In some posts by Nick Land, he identified the central forces that are dissatisfied with most of the current leftist modernity.
He identified them to be techno-commercialists who are primarily concerned with the rights of capital and innovation, theonomists who are primarily concerned with tradition and divine law, and the ethnicists and nationalists who are concerned with ethnic consciousness and group solidarity. Now, that should ring a bell for you if you have studied the medieval history of Europe of course because that essentially is the description of the three estates that has slightly changed over time the clergy the commoners and the nobles to be exact now all those three categories in our present time have their own hierarchies that intersect with other categories ensuring society's equilibrium by supplementing one another just like in the good old days they argued Unfortunately, as the neo-reactionaries like to argue, the clergy was sabotaged by the cathedral, which created an imbalance of the three elements that otherwise would work uniformly and mutually. Now, I don't particularly buy the trichotomy, as it is called, because it seems to be overtly constructed, as well as it gives me some spiritual vibes, but I still hear it being repeated often, so I have decided to include it here as well. Besides the cathedral, the recently discussed trichotomy and Robert Conquest's three laws of politics, you may have recently heard of another term being thrown around in the near reactionary circles, more specifically, bio-Leninism.
Bio-Leninism is a method by which the cathedral, through the inner party, secures popular support among certain demographics. It's named after Leninism, as you can tell. which secured popular support and appealed to Jews, peasants, low-class workers, certain ethnic and sexual minorities in Russia during the early 20th century, as opposed to the previous ruling group who secured their support amongst the capitalists, the aristocracy, Christians and the Russian majority.
Does it ring a bell? Personally, I have my bell broken from too much ringing. Biological Leninism as explained by Charlemagne A dark enlightenment youtuber is a form of Leninism spawned from the evolutionary process of a multitude of persons individually realizing the potential to incrementally gain power by exploiting the absence of a cohesive ruling class. And by ruling class he implies the other end of the intersectionality axis.
The goal of the inner party here or for any lefty progressive movement will be to provide the weak a sense of high status through intersectionality in exchange for loyalty. This is why many would argue that the support for the inner party amongst any minority group is so high. Knowing well that without special recognition and artificial status boosting they would be outcompeted in the natural world, the weak rely on the cathedral and the inner party for high status in exchange for loyalty.
which allows the inner party within the cathedral to maximize its power, potentially turning into a one-party state, as they have done in California, New York and Detroit. It is often said that once the inner party has reached one-party domination, any further progress is not required, since those were the means and the ends were just power. Proof of that could be seen while looking at any socialist revolution and the inevitable stagnation that followed it.
The best example of that would be the Lenin-Stalin dynamics. Now, and here is where it gets more interesting, especially if you remember that those neo-reactionaries are Hegelian. You have probably already seen this image multiple times in your life being spread around the internet. This narrative is not particularly new, it existed in many countries, it was even the foundation behind the Chinese Mandate of Heaven and the explanation behind the fall of Rome, and was popularized even further by Oswald Spengler, Nikolai Danielewski, and Paul Kennedy.
Cyclical view of history still exists to this day and often applied to politics as in the case of Joshua Goldstein and demographics as in the case of those Russian gentlemen. Moreover, even the most widely accepted view of population growth is rather cyclical itself. And the reason I bring it now is that just like after Lenin there was a Stalin, there will eventually be a reaction to this constant march towards global Homo, as some of the dark enlightenment people refer to the state to which we are moving forwards to. Although they view future as pessimistic, they disagree to what kind of reaction there should be. Some argue for an acceleration of the global Homo, hoping that it will provoke enough resentment so that reactionary forces could seize control and build a community of strength.
Or a meritocracy, which is similar to what old Marxists thought about capitalism, let it crush and undermine itself so that the workers could rise and build the promised utopia. Some people reject Hegelian dialectics entirely and argue for a pronomian revival using the trichotomy. However, the most popular approach to dealing with the cathedral is called pacifism, which is not to say giving up entirely, but to refuse to play against the cathedral within the cathedral's territory due to power imbalance, in which the anti-cathedral forces would find themselves always on the losing side. Instead, passivity or pacifism implies creating alternative power structures and if you are very attentive then the first thing that should come to your mind would be something like Pichu. Shoot, Subscribe Star, Telegram or even the alt-right.
In his open letter to open-minded progressives, Curtis Yarvin included the anti-versity as an alternative example to a cathedral-controlled university, which will be designed for academic exploration and inquiry of topics that are being shunned by the cathedral. It is through this process new communities of knowledge will be formed, who will be able to challenge the cathedral in the future. future when there will be enough anti-cathedral people.
Not to mention that those alternatives would never lean to the left because of the second law of politics. The important lesson one could learn here is that the second law of politics is the one that is most important. is the following.
Imagine that at some point the alternative will overthrow the cathedral and take precedence over the societal consensus. Then if that happens, it will have the privilege of the cathedral to control progress and view itself as the progressive force due to ad hoc reasoning, therefore potentially having the luxury of calling the remnants of the cathedral as well as leftist ideology that were overthrown reactionaries because they are the remnants. remnants of the past at the end of the day. Think what a privilege it can be when the main justification behind your political beliefs is the inevitable march of history or rather the association of your ideology with progress, because as Margaret Thatcher was saying, there is no alternative. To summarize the Dark Enlightenment rather shortly, it was heavily influenced by libertarian poor structural and hegelian philosophy, as well as it was formed in opposition to the left's current intersectionality and the overreaching power of the cathedral.
If you want a clear list of what they believe in, there is a well summary taken from Occam Razor's block of their main underlying characteristics, in the case if I did a bad job at explaining their main ideas. I like their criticism of the contemporary politics nonetheless. I think they are similar to Marxists who did a well critique of capitalism yet did not offer anything better that would replace it. However, I did like the strategy of pacifism and I think that I will use the term cathedral more often.
I apologize if I did not include all of their main thinkers and talked about all of their concepts because there were far too many of them. However, it doesn't mean that you can't do this on your own. Hence, that was just an introduction video on thinking. I recommend you reading the Open Letter to Open-minded Progressives because it is their foundational text and will cover way more concepts that I had the time to cover here as well as it will do it in more depth. Anyhow, that was all for today.
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