Neo-reactionaries, why are you neo-reactionary?

Capla

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.

Through LessWrong, I've discovered the no-reactionary movement. Servery says that there are some of you here.

Feel free to forward my questions to others or direct me towards a better forum for asking this.

If I said this is what happened with communism - that Marx developed a flawed model and Lenin tried to fit society to that flawed model - most people would probably accept that

It's not just society. It's more like he looked at Marx's (flawed, yes) model, thought "that's cool and all, but I want to feed the Tsar his yarbles now", and hit it with a wrench until it gave him some half-assed philosophical justification for starting a revolution (and later for running a totalitarian state, though not as totalitarian as Stalin would make it).

See, orthodox Marxism isn't really a blueprint for revolution. Insofar as it's even a call to revolution, it's saying -- to the industrial workers of the entire world, and that's important -- that revolution is inevitable, it's going to happen anyway, the only thing holding it back from happening is self-delusion. Instead, it's better understood as a future history: it purports to lay out the historical forces that drive large-scale social changes and to predict what the next one's going to look like.

Now, there are a number of ways you could challenge that in light of the real history that's happened in the century and a half since Marx wrote. But Lenin had bigger problems than that. By Marx's lights, Russia in 1917 wasn't ready for a communist revolution: it was at the time the least industrialized major European country (relative to its population), with most of the economy still running on a semi-feudal agrarian system. Its serfs had been emancipated less than a century before. Worse, the rest of the world looked like it wasn't going to be getting on the revolution train anytime soon. This ran completely counter to Marx's future history, but Lenin, in essence, said "fuck it, we'll do it anyway".

You are not being entirely fair to Lenin, he wrote a fair amount. They call it "Marxism/Leninism" for a reason. Lenin was a lot of things, but he was not a stupid man.

-1ChristianKl11y

You forget the Marxist idea of morality where there's a moral imperative to do things that make history progress. Starting an inevitable revolution is such a thing.

11scientism11y

Right, but it's that sort of transition from the descriptive and the prescriptive that I'm highlighting. In liberal philosophy the issue is much more subtle, but there has been a constant interchange between the descriptive and the prescriptive. So if you look at society as sovereign individuals engaged in contractual relationships with one another, that's essentially descriptive. It was intended to be descriptive. But then your model for why individuals give up some of their rights to have a state doesn't look right and the answer to that isn't to change the model but to make a prescriptive assertion: the state should be more representative of our interests. So you've gone from descriptive to prescriptive. Likewise, with feminism: under a model that emphasises individuals in voluntary relationships, women look oppressed, so you derive the prescriptive conclusion that we should alter family law, etc. Under the traditional family-oriented model of society, it's not even clear why anyone but the head of a household should vote, since people aren't 'sovereign' individuals, they're members of an institution - the family - and they play different roles within it, and the head of the household is its representative in society. From this shift to an individualist view you can derive much of the rest of modern liberal/progressive prescriptivism. It problematises the family - the status of women and children, the fairness of inheritance (wealth, status and genetics), familial obligations, etc - and it problematises the institutions of the state. It's a view of people magically appearing in the world fully formed, with their own interests, and they're shocked to learn that they have parents, that they have roles in society, that society has existed long before they were born and has its own traditions, values, etc. So they're encouraged to stomp their feet and say, "Why wasn't I consulted about any of this?"

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Neo-reactionaries, why are you neo-reactionary?

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Neo-reactionaries, why are you neo-reactionary?

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