Monday, November 25, 2013

Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactionaries

Many of us yearn for a return to one golden age or another. But there’s a community of bloggers taking the idea to an extreme: they want to turn the dial way back to the days before the French Revolution.

Neoreactionaries believe that while technology and capitalism have advanced humanity over the past couple centuries, democracy has actually done more harm than good. They propose a return to old-fashioned gender roles, social order and monarchy.

You may have seen them crop-up on tech hangouts like Hacker News and Less Wrong, having cryptic conversations about “Moldbug” and “the Cathedral.” And though neoreactionaries aren’t exactly rampant in the tech industry, PayPal founder Peter Thiel has voiced similar ideas, and Pax Dickinson, the former CTO of Business Insider, says he’s been influenced by neoreactionary thought. It may be a small, minority world view, but it’s one that I think shines some light on the psyche of contemporary tech culture.

Enough has been written on neoreaction already to fill at least a couple of books, so if you prefer to go straight to the source, just pop a Modafinil and skip to the “Neoreaction Reading List” at the end of this post. For everyone else, I’ll do my best to summarize neoreactionary thought and why it might matter.
Read the rest here.
HT: The Anracho-Monarchist

2 comments:

lannes said...

Only you would give thanks for the
French Revolution, the biggest Pandora's box of them all.

John (Ad Orientem) said...

If you are going to write comments on my posts, please do yourself the favor of reading them first. It might save you some embarrassment. No where in this post, or anywhere on this blog, have I ever given thanks for the French Revolution. I regard the French Revolution as the greatest disaster to befall Western Civilization between the Black Death and the First World War.