Years before I read any Moldbug, I became fascinated with the way that sacredness affects social life and cognition even in ostensibly non-religious groups. Since my work challenged the sacredness of life, I was able to notice how that particular sacredness was (non-rationally) socially supported against challenges, and this helped me to see the same patterns in other areas of thought. Human cognition and behavior only make sense when analyzed religiously, and the neoreactionary idea of "The Cathedral" is one of several fruitful analyses along those lines, along with, say, the ideas of Emile Durkheim, Jonathan Haidt, and Roy Baumeister. Human institutions and behavior must be analyzed religiously and folklorically. I'm more interested in human flourishing, ritual, and cultural evolution than regular politics, but the neoreactosphere has been extremely friendly to these kinds of discussions.
My family and most of my friends are extremely liberal and I was a good liberal for most of my life.
If you don't mind my asking, when you ask "what led you to accept the basic premises of the movement," what do you see as its basic premises, and what causes you to describe it as a "movement"?
So what's the problem with the Cathedral...that it's not dealing with sacredness enough? Too much? It's making the wrong things sacred?
Through LessWrong, I've discovered the no-reactionary movement. Servery says that there are some of you here.
I'm curious, what lead you to accept the basic premises of the movement? What is the story of your personal "conversion"? Was there some particular insight or information that was important in convincing you? Was it something that just "clicked" for you or that you had always felt in a vague way? Were any of you "raised in it"?
Feel free to forward my questions to others or direct me towards a better forum for asking this.
I hope that this is in no way demeaning or insulting. I'm genuinely curious and my questioning is value free. If you point me towards compelling evidence of the neo-reactionary premise, I'll update on it.