I am not a huge supporter of this movement though I do concede the liberal democracy seems to be.

Hey everyone, after diving into Dark Enlightenment and Yarvin’s ideas, I’ve got a couple of concerns I’d like to share. While I get the appeal of rethinking democracy, I think there are some key flaws in the logic.

1. Legitimacy Without Cultural Grounding: One of my big questions is around legitimacy. Dark Enlightenment argues for a system where power is concentrated in a king or CEO, but without a strong cultural foundation, how does that leader maintain legitimacy? It feels like they’re assuming authority can be imposed without the deep-rooted cultural grounding that has historically supported monarchies or other hierarchical systems. Without that, how do you stop it from devolving into plain tyranny?

2. Lack of Checks on Power: There’s also this assumption that a king or CEO-like figure could run the government like a corporation. But where’s the mechanism for accountability? In theory, shareholders can oust a CEO, but how does that work here? What’s the real check on power to prevent abuse? In a democracy, there are at least mechanisms (even if flawed) to remove leaders. The Dark Enlightenment doesn’t seem to provide a clear way for “shareholders” (citizens) to oust the leader if things go wrong.

I think these are crucial gaps in the Dark Enlightenment’s vision of governance. The focus on efficiency and authority overlooks the need for cultural legitimacy and functional checks on power.

In his most recent video Why Do Conservatives Always Lose?, Lavader outlined the fatal flaws underlying the current trend of defeat among conservative forces in the West.

The problem he effectively outlines is a problem regarding theoretical confusion among conservative forces which constantly make them act as a sort of negation to the tide of progressivism, as opposed to its own force. As Lavader puts it, conservatives merely act to "be left alone" whereas the tide of progressivism actively strives to overwhelm the current societal order and unrelentingly does so - the conservative cause on the other hand is unable to act on the offensive but operates within the framework of the left.

Cthulhu swims left (and easily does so thanks to a theoretical confusion on the right)

Whether Lavader realizes it or not, he has practically merely talked about the concept of modern-day conservatism being a controlled opposition "Outer Party '' to a progressive-trending ("Cthulhu swims left") societal order.

As Mencius Moldbug writes in An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives:

The function of the Inner Party is to delegate all policies and decisions to the Cathedral. The function of the Outer Party is to pretend to oppose the Inner Party, while in fact posing no danger at all to it. Sometimes Outer Party functionaries are even elected, and they may even succeed in pursuing a few of their deviant policies. The entire Polygon will unite in ensuring that these policies either fail, or are perceived by the public to fail. Since the official press is part of the Polygon and has a more or less direct line into everyone’s brain, this is not difficult. The Outer Party has never even come close to damaging any part of the Polygon or Cathedral. Even McCarthy was not a real threat. He got a few people fired, most temporarily. Most of them were actually Soviet agents of one sort or another. They became martyrs and have been celebrated ever since. His goal was a purge of the State Department. He didn’t even come close. If he had somehow managed to fire every Soviet agent or sympathizer in the US government, he would not even have done any damage. As Carroll Quigley pointed out, McCarthy (and his supporters) thought he was attacking a nest of Communist spies, whereas in fact he was attacking the American Establishment. Don’t bring a toothpick to a gunfight.

Right-wingers can only be an "outer party" wherever political structures are decided in accordance to mass-electoralism: Republicans are better at demagoguery

Modern leftism, or more concretely called egalitarianism, has greately succeeded in thriving because the right has lost explicit theories of property from its previous aristocratic past but now operates on the same mass-politics basis which leftism bases itself on, and which leftism due to its appeals to expropriation and regulation of small groups will always be superior at.

Modern leftists profit greatly from the fact that most right-wingers nowadays, much like them, that there are no such things as eternal concepts of justice and consequently that each societal structure may only at best be understood as an arbitrary imposition of power, which we can merely hope to make the best of.

They love that most right-wingers operate according to their "might makes right" understanding of justice.

Whereas previous generations of right-wingers had understandings of property as first-owner acquisition and voluntary exchange acquisition and justice as the lack of violations of the rights thereof and adequate punishments thereof, modern right-wingers are toothless with this regard and have no theoretical understanding of these concepts.

In lack of these theories, leftism thrives as all that remains with a lack of them are mere demagogic appeals to "making people feel good". This is an aspect which the right, being aristocratic by its very nature, can NEVER sustainably win at. 

There will always be a lot of people who will desire the property of others. In a democratic State, these people who desire things from others will be able to be utilized by politicians to advance their agenda. Demagogues will always be able to rally people around the cause of plunder and of regulation of behaviors in the name of "the greater good". This is partially why monarcho-social democracy is inherently so disadvantageous for the monarch: the State machinery is always going to enlarge itself.

If you as a right winger who wants to defend family, property and tradition were to try to play the demagoguery game, you would always fail by the very fact that your vision is one of self-restraint: the egalitarians on the other hand base their vision on whimsical non-judgemental self-actualization, to which more and more can always be taken from "the few" to "the many" in the name of the "greater good".

You could say that following traditions is sustainable "in the long term", but the egalitarian will always be able to point to masses of people in the now who would be able to greatly self-actualize were more property transfers and regulations of actions to happen.

The appeal to a theoretical refinement: finding yet again the eternal concept of justice and its underlying concepts of property and law

Only once when the right again reconceptualized its explicit theories of property, law and justice will it be able to go on the offensive and be able to resist the egalitarian demagogic appeals to expropriation. Only when you have a theory of justice which you know is right even if 100,000,000 people think otherwise will you be equipped to resist such forces.

I also crucially urge you to dare to at least conceptualize the decentralized mindset. This mindset is the one that enabled family, property and tradition to be preserved for at least 1500 years.

It was only the introduction of the centralizing worldview after the French revolution that the aforementioned pro-demagogic worldview started to gain traction. 

It is therefore crucial that you recognize that if you think in terms of mainstream politics, you operate according to a Jacobin worldview and that the worldview which preserved family, property and tradition was the one which started to get dismantled as a consequence of the French revolution.

My recommended theoretical works for finding the concepts of justice yet again

* For a theory of property

* For a discussion regarding the nature of law

* For a comprehensive analysis of the trend of mass-electoralism and the natural order alternative

There seems to be a reclamation of Modernist views like universal morality. Traditional values, for example, appear to be accepted here as biologically emergent inevitabilities rather than relative, which leads me to believe empiricism would be an inarguable necessity here. However, I'm unaware of the Dark Enlightenment's submission to testing.

How much stake is placed on empirical testing of the theories posited by the Dark Enlightenment? Does the theory exist in a schizophrenic state of speculative fiction and realist description?

Or is it, like gender studies and identity politics, considered so obviously common sense and buttressed by untested statistics/hearsay that it doesn't require any reproducible outcomes of testing in the real world?

As seen in the excellent and well-sourced video "Everything You Were Taught About Medieval Monarchy Is Wrong", feudalism is one if not the most slandered form of governance there is. I find this very unfortunate since the feudal model has a lot of beauty - it's truly an expression of spontaneous order among men.

I have therefore compiled this document with quotes from the document such that you may copy paste from it in case that someone slanders the idea.

[How kings emerged as spontaneously excellent leaders in a kin]

While a monarch ruled over the people, the King instead was a member of his kindred. You will notice that Kings always took titles off the people rather than a geographic area titles like, King of the Franks, King of the English and so forth. The King was the head of the people, not the head of the State.

The idea of kingship began as an extension of family leadership as families grew and spread out the eldest fathers became the leaders of their tribes; these leaders, or “patriarchs”, guided the extended families through marriages and other connections; small communities formed kinships. Some members would leave and create new tribes. 

Over time these kinships created their own local customs for governance. Leadership was either passed down through family lines or chosen among the tribe’s wise Elders. These Elders, knowledgeable in the tribe's customs, served as advisers to the leader. The patriarch or King carried out duties based on the tribe's traditions: he upheld their customs, families and way of life. When a new King was crowned it was seen as the people accepting his authority. The medieval King had an obligation to serve the people and could only use his power for the kingdom's [i.e. the subjects of the king] benefit as taught by Catholic saints like Thomas Aquinas. That is the biggest difference between a monarch and a king: the king was a community member with a duty to the people limited by their customs and laws. He didn't control kinship families - they governed themselves and he served their needs [insofar as they followed The Law, which could easily be natural law]

[... The decentralized nature of feudal kings]

Bertrand de Jouvenel would even echo the sentiment: ‘A man of our time cannot conceive the lack of real power which characterized the medieval King’

This was because of the inherent decentralized structure of the vassal system which divided power among many local lords and nobles. These local lords, or ‘vassals’, controlled their own lands and had their own armies. The king might have been the most important noble but he often relied on his vassals to enforce his laws and provide troops for his wars. If a powerful vassal didn't want to follow the king's orders [such as if the act went contrary to The Law], there wasn't much the king could do about it without risking a rebellion. In essence he was a constitutional monarch but instead of the parliament you had many local noble vassals.

Historian Régine Pernoud would also write something similar: ‘Medieval kings possessed none of the attributes recognized as those of a sovereign power. He could neither decree general laws nor collect taxes on the whole of his kingdom nor levy an army’.

[... Legality/legitimacy of king’s actions as a precondition for fealty]

‘Fealty, as distinct from, obedience is reciprocal in character and contains the implicit condition that the one party owes it to the other only so long as the other keeps faith. This relationship as we have seen must not be designated simply as a contract [rather one of legitimacy/legality]. The fundamental idea is rather that ruler and ruled alike are bound to The Law; the fealty of both parties is in reality fealty to The Law. The Law is the point where the duties of both of them intersect. 

If therefore the king breaks The Law he automatically forfeits any claim to the obedience of his subjects… a man must resist his King and his judge, if he does wrong, and must hinder him in every way, even if he be his relative or feudal Lord. And he does not thereby break his fealty.

Anyone who felt himself prejudiced in his rights by the King was authorized to take the law into his own hands and win back to rights which had been denied him’ 

This means that a lord is required to serve the will of the king in so far as the king was obeying The Law of the land [which as described later in the video was not one of legislation, but customary law] himself. If the king started acting tyrannically Lords had a complete right to rebel against the king and their fealty was not broken because the fealty is in reality submission to The Law.

The way medieval society worked was a lot based on contracts on this idea of legality. It may be true that the king's powers were limited but in the instances where Kings did exercise their influence and power was true legality. If the king took an action that action would only take effect if it was seen as legitimate. For example, if a noble had to pay certain things in their vassalization contract to the king and he did not pay, the king could rally troops and other Nobles on his side and bring that noble man to heel since he was breaking his contract. The king may have had limited power but the most effective way he could have exercised it is through these complex contractual obligations 

Not only that but this position was even encouraged by the Church as they saw rebellions against tyrants as a form of obedience to God, because the most important part of a rebellion is your ability to prove that the person you are rebelling against was acting without legality like breaking a contract. Both Christian Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas ruled that an unjust law is no law at all and that the King's subjects therefore are required by law to resist him, remove him from power and take his property.

When Baldwin I was crowned as king of Jerusalem in Bethlehem, the Patriarch would announce during the ceremony: ‘A king is not elevated contrary to law he who takes up the authority that comes with a Golden Crown takes up also the honorable duty of delivering Justice… he desires to do good who desires to reign. If he does not rule justly he is not a king’. And that is the truth about how medieval kingship operated: The Law of the realm was the true king. Kings, noblemen and peasants were all equal before it and expected to carry out its will. In the feudal order the king derives his power from The Law and the community it was the source of his authority. The king could not abolish, manipulate or alter The Law [i.e., little or no legislation] since he derived his powers from it.

I can't find it anywhere, I think it was some magazine issue / blog collab.

Hello. While I am not myself a neoreactionary, I decided to ask a simple question which we can peacefully debate: What prevents the Monarch-CEO from becoming a tyrant?

I would like to have some kind of meetup / in-person book club for NRX topics in my city. When I look on Meetup there's one existing group that is more general/mainstream right wing. I'm curious if people think it's risky to engage in physical meetings for these subjects. I'm on the spectrum and I can't really tell how NRX is perceived by the public. Could attending in person meetings be career-threatening? I have a family and need to protect them, and my income. I'd really like to make some new like-minded friends but the very act of reaching out feels somewhat risky.

So I remember a story told by Mencius Moldbug between two nations that are not allowed to communicate with one another and are enemies. One is a very liberal, democratic nation, the other is an authoritarian, persecuting nation. Despite their inability to communicate with one another, Mencius Moldbug points out the the secret liberals in the authoritarian state will have even better ideas of subversion than those professors in the liberal state who indoctrinate people with their ideologies for the sake of keeping their job.

What are the two nations called again?

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UR: Banned in San Francisco

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The Honduran rebellion – or, state's invisible world revealed

Additional Short post:

Young America

In order to ensure the continuation of the network and discussion we have here, as well as just exploring new technologies and formats, the DE Community has expanded to some other platforms.

• TL;DR: Neither these platforms is particularly difficult to sign up for, and if you want to skip all this you can just go to the sites and everything is pretty intuitive. This guide has been made to give people more in-depth instructions if they need them, and serve as a future reference

Ruqqus

An anti-censorship Reddit-style scrolling thread forum.

Signup

DE Community

App (Android-only atm)

GitHub

[Matrix]

A real time, federated, secure, chat platform with lots of functionality and significant space for future expansion. Highly resistant to censorship and deplatforming.

Terms: Just a few brief definition of terms, an explanation of how things on Matrix work, since while it is not exceptionally complicated for say it is a little bit more nuanced than something like Reddit or even Discord

• Matrix: The platform itself is called Matrix. Specifically it is [The Matrix Protocol] which is an open source, decentralized, federated communications standard that was first developed in 2014. In English - it is a set of specifications and software that can be deployed on a server by anyone, and allows different nodes to communicate so long as they are using the same standard. In even simpler English - it's a communications network with a lot of configurable options, but a set of core requirements, that can be used to send a whole lot of different types of information, but at the moment is used almost entirely for the kind of messaging and media sharing that most are familiar with.

• Riot/Element: Element - formerly called "Riot" before the recent name change - is a Matrix client, but it is not itself a chat platform. It's just one program used to communicate with the Matrix Protocol. It is not the only Matrix client, but because it was the first - and is certainly by far the most well-developed, stable, and fully-featured client - it is the most popular, and overwhelmingly the one people are going to be using. (That said, anyone can write a Matrix client - even something as simple as a basic terminal interface - and many people have. If you are interested in exploring other options, a list can be found here (be aware though, that as of this writing, Riot/Element is the only one that fully supports all features natively - such as encryted messages - and for other clients you may need to use additional software to get the same functionality). It is also the closest to an "official" client.

• Home Server: Like Discord, and IRC, Matrix makes use of a network of interconnected and decentralized service - "federation" - but unlike those platforms the server is not where you actually chat, it is just where your account resides. An analogy can be made to email, where you will have a handle/address on a certain server - johnsmith@hotmail.com - but you are not limited to communicating with people on that server and can message anyone on any server that is properly connected. Matrix accounts take the format @nrxfan1:matrix.org where "@nrxfan1" is your handle and "matrix.org" is your homeserver (Your unique username is considered to be the whole thing, so multiple people can have the same handles on different Home Servers. In addition you can set a separate display name that need not bear any relation to your username, though people will be able to see the latter if they open your profile). Actual discussion takes place in a...

• Room: every interaction on Mateix aside from the settings menu will take place in a room. Rooms are fairly analogous to the IRC or Discord concept of a "channel", except they don't really "exist" anywhere - specifically they are not hosted on or owned by any one home server but are instead simply the sum total of all interactions of the users with in that room [simplification]. They cannot be "deleted", even by Home Server admins, at most they can prevent their specific users from accessing a given room. The more different Home Servers have users in a room, the harder it is for any specific note to censor it; this is at the heart of Matrix's resilience to de-platforming.

It should be noted though, to continue with the email analogy, that the admin of your Home Server does have near complete power over your account. Aside from end-to-end encrypted messages, they can – at least in theory – access all of your information, see your interactions and so on. In addition they obviously have the ability to deactivate, delete, or even acquire control of your account. Therefore it is a good idea to avoid openly hostile Home Servers (even though these are few and far between some do exist) and generally be aware of the "terms of use" or "code of conduct" if they have one. Of course, if you are even a little bit tech-savvy, or can just read basic instructions, and you are willing to register a domain and pay a small hosting fee it's not too difficult to get your own home server for your account or your friends.)

This is just a brief overview, more specific questions can be asked in the Matrix rooms themselves.

How to sign-up: getting a Matrix account is pretty straightforward.

1 • Get a client: Element/Riot has apps for every major platform as well as a browser client - Downloads - Web client access

2 • Create account: Choose server, choose account username and password, choose phone/email (if applicable)

• NOTE: The sign-up form will always have the option for phone/email, but only certain servers require it, and you can always remove it afterwards. (If you want a burner, use https://sharklasers.com or https://cock.li)

3 • Login: Once logged in you can set a display name and avatar. All version of the Element/Riot client have a dark mode that you can enable

• NOTE: When logging in for the first time (technically anytime you do a new login anywhere) you will be prompted to setup a "recovery phrase" or "recovery key" for encrypted messages. What exactly this is, whether it will increase or decrease security, etc is a bit too much to get into here, and more can be explained in the Matrix rooms, but just be aware that "skipping" it for the moment will not cause any problems.

4 • Join rooms: you can create or join a room or start a chat with anyone right out of the box (everything in Matrix happens in a room) I would recommend creating a room just with you in it for now where you can mess around and test things out. To join the official Dark Enlightenment rooms you can do this a number of ways.

• First, you can simply use what are known as alias, basically room handles (you should be able to just type these in the text field, hit send, and then they will become a clickable link within the client. If that is not working, you can just use them in conjunction with the URL format shown in option 2). Current DE Rooms are: #DEGeneral:halogen.city, #DERandom:halogen.city, #DEJokes:halogen.city, #DEMusic:halogen.city, #DEConspiracy:halogen.city, #DETechnology:halogen.city, #DEAnnouncements:halogen.city, #DEVideos:halogen.city

• Second, on the browser client just put in the full address of DE General: https://app.element.io/#/room/#DEGeneral:halogen.city

• Third, you can view the DE Community list of rooms (same procedure as aliases): +dark_enlightenment:matrix.org

NOTE: If you create an account through one of the Riot/Element clients, and do not specify a custom Home Server - as pretty much everyone will do - it will automatically put you on matrix.org. Be aware that this is not the only option or even technically the "official" server, it just happens to be the default, and the longest-running and most popular one. There are many other options, and some run by people who are more sympathetic to our principles, but it is probably sufficient for now. If this is your first time using Matrix it is recommended you just create an account there, other Home Server options can be discussed once you get to the DE Rooms

If there are any questions please ask in this thread.

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A gentle introduction to Unqualified Reservations (part 9a)

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From Cromer to Romer and back again: Colonialism for the 21st century

Additional short posts:

Kennedy

A rare public appearance

This is The Daily Moldbug post of /r/darkenlightenment where one long-form link to the founder of neoreaction, Mencius Moldbug, gets made every day, going chronologically through all Unqualified Reservations posts ever made. You can easily refer to previous Daily Moldbug posts on /r/darkenlightenment’s sister sub /r/TheDailyMoldbug. You can review more moldbug link compilations at molbuggery and the cathedral compilation.

UR is on vacation

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UR's crash course in economics

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Carlyle in the 20th century: Fascism and socialism

Additional short post:

Poem

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Why Carlyle matters