red-ice-interviews-170515-the-dark-enlightenment-neoreaction-and-modernity-pt1

and we are back welcome ladies and gentlemen thank you for tuning in my name is hendrik This is Red Ice Radio, and you can find more stuff that we do on Red Ice.tv. We do videos, live TV shows, we do public live streams. We have this radio show, we have 3.14, and we're adding on new segments all the time to the roosters of contributors.

Today on the show, we're going to speak with Nick Land. He is a leading theorist of the dark enlightenment and neoreactionary philosophy. He, together with Mencius Moldbug, is up there as founders of neoreactionary slash dark enlightenment thought. In regards to his background, he is credited with pioneering the genre known as theory fiction. He is a co-founder of the 1990s collective Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. His work has been tied to the development of accelerationism and speculative realism. realism. So at the core of the philosophy of the dark enlightenment or near reactionary thought is the opposition to egalitarianism. It is loosely connected with some of the ideas on the alt-right,

some more so, other less so. But for those that are new to some of this stuff, some of the basics, some of the basic stance is anti-enlightenment, it's anti-liberalism, it is pro-hierarchy, It has a more pro-capitalist and libertarian stance with a strain of being supportive of monarchy. There's a lot of things to say about this. We've touched on the topic with some previous guests, and we're actually going to dive in kind of a little bit more on the deeper side of the pool this time with Nick Land and not go through the same in terms of the basic and the background. So this is a really interesting conversation. I hope you enjoy it. There's a lot to be learned. The second hour was just magnificent, excellent stuff. So let's go over to our guest and let's get this show on the road.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Thank you for tuning in. My name is Henrik. This is Red Ice Radio. It's good to have you here. We have with us today on the line Nick Land. He is a pioneer in the genre known as theory fiction. He, of course, also is one of the, I guess, main gentlemen behind the dark enlightenment and the neo-reactionary philosophy. We're going to get into this, of course, in more detail and a whole lot of slew of topics today lined up to discuss. This is going to be interesting. Thank you for coming on the show, Nick. It's good to have you here. Yes, I'm delighted to be here. Thank you. Very good. So if you don't mind, tell us a little bit about yourself here in the beginning and kind of introduce yourself to the audience a bit for those who might not have come across some of your work yet. Well, I mean, I think it might be, it's hazy to me, so I think it will be hazy to other people.

But I suspect that the kind of lineage of most relevance to our conversation today is really coming out of, I think, broadly the libertarian and particularly obviously ripe libertarian tradition. And I think most of the thoughts from my end that we might want to be talking about are really tied up with mutations of that tradition. I think everything that is put under the label of near reaction, for sure, is a certain kind of radical mutation that occurs within the libertarian tradition under conditions of extreme stress, as we have seen.

Why don't you tell us how you got into this first? How did you get interested in some of the ideas? And I guess as usual, of course, this is an evolution. It's a process. You evolve as you go. you learn a lot of things and a kind of a theory or an ideology develops as you go but tell us about that path for you if you will um well yes it's it's interesting i sort of i mean i could be deluding myself in saying this but i suspect actually that my path is quite typical, at least within this tiny little niche that is kind of labelled near reaction, in the sense that

it really began with the sort of canonical figures with the Austrian economists, with the kind of spin-off ideas from that, anarcho-capitalism, David Friedman's work um and um the convulsive event um which has sort of thrown all of that into into a kind of tumult i i would say that it's been a a creative tumult generally um is is encounter with the work of men's just mold bug um and uh i suspect we're we're bound to get onto that at some point in conversation yeah but but i think he just redirects a lot of those concerns and questions and

interests and addresses the the the the bad conscience of that tradition in the sense of it's it's it's kind of addiction to failure and and hopelessness uh that it has been in denial about and and instead i sort of opened up a way of looking at some of the same concerns and the same sort of um agenda considerations in a way that that is is less structurally doomed to uh to to defeat um so i think you know libertarianism in general this is this is a kind of a much wider problem on the on the on the distant right but it tends to have a kind of unconscious as attachment to this lost cause romanticism, you know, where it basically has, you know,

at some very deep level of its thinking, it's like, we know that this is not going to work. We know this is doomed. You know, everything we want is being crushed and destroyed. Things are going completely in the wrong direction. And we just can't do anything about it. And all we can really hope for is some kind of heroic last stand on a hill somewhere. before it all goes under, you know, and I think that's very widespread. It certainly goes beyond libertarianism, and I think it was the general psychological stance of everything to the right of compassionate conservatism or whatever you want to call it. There are ruder words for it that are floating around recently.

And I think that what we've seen, certainly in the last decade, and actually in probably the last five years or less, is a breakout from that kind of quite pathological romanticism of defeat into a much more open and interesting kind of terrain. that it's still very confused, very chaotic, very turbulent, but isn't any longer bound to this sense of absolute implacable, inevitable defeat. It's finding its way in different shapes and forms right now. It's navigating, trying to figure out what works and whatever. I want to get into that later. It's pretty interesting. But of course, just for those who don't know, you wrote an essay, The Dark Enlightenment.

I think it's, along with Moldbug's blog, kind of sets the foundation for near reactionary thought or the dark enlightenment. And of course, there's a lot of interesting things in there. But can you, as a kind of an overview, can you diagnose, you did that a little bit already, but diagnose the problem for us a little bit. Describe how you see the issues of concern. I mean, we talked about it a little bit before we began here in terms of, of course, the kind of censorship that we're seeing, the free speech issues. Much of this has come out of the environment of the internet, because finally we can share ideas freely, and there's kind of an acceleration in the trajectory of ideas and thoughts as a consequence of this. And I think the establishment is trying to seek to kind of clamp down on that in some capacity, if you will.

But how would you describe the issues that you see of the world to a new listener that's just tuning in? Okay, well, this is obviously a big question. I suspect that it's going to spill out over a back and forth, really, because I don't think I can sort of put everything into a nutshell all in one go here. Let me start in one place that might later seem a little bit arbitrary, but it's where certainly I was beginning from. and I think in some sense it's where this whole lineage was beginning from which is really the question of how do you constrain the state

that I think you know to get back to this just question of ultimate despair that really was the undertow of the dissident right very recently there's a name for it which is this which is called Wagner's law and which is basically the claim that under conditions of mature social democracy there is simply an inexorable growth of the state it's something that just is unstoppable that what there's there's no political process that can be grasped that that can put it into

reverse it can as we saw in the uh thatcher reagan episode you can perhaps to some very limited degree temporarily arrest it and then you know there's no serious reversal and another big wave comes along and and all your gains are destroyed and the state just uh cancerizes out by another by another level and i mean everyone knows of course libertarians don't like that um there is a very sad phenomenon now on certain strands of kind of uh what call themselves a like bleeding heart libertarians to just accommodate themselves to it and say look we've just been mistaken we should

just we should somehow make uh remain libertarians while simply accepting that the state is just going get bigger and bigger and bigger and the shrinking it is impossible but but leaving aside that kind of very very kind of sad pathological side of the thing i i think that the the the tendency was to sort of basically push people into just wishful thinking or just these into these completely uh unanchored um unanchored type of wishful thinking of just saying sorry not wishful thing i think it's more helpful to say just um imperative statements like you know we should we should get rid of the state we you know we we express dislike of the state uh make

rude remarks about the state um wouldn't it be great if there was a was a smaller government etc etc um that has just lost that had lost all connection whatsoever with anything like a plausible program they it was just simply expressions of disgust at what was happening that that that no longer had any kind of plausible analytic uh content to it and so the the big the big transition that i think happens and and to my mind initiates a near reaction is the basic thought that, you know, first of all, the diagnosis that, like, we've been doing this wrong, we got lost, we've been doing this wrong.

If you want to end up with a civil society, civil law society is Hop's term, with kind of vastly smaller government, you can't just wish away the government. You've got to do something with the government. And I think what mold bugs work very cunningly and subtly and round the back, so to speak, in a roundabout fashion. And I think in using that kind of language, we're already getting into the kind of way the internet works. he says no you've got to instead commercialize the government

the government has to be has to be swallowed up into a dynamic competitive commercial sphere and it's far more you're far more likely to get there by actually proliferating government than dreaming about simply dismissing or expelling or removing government. If you want to actually digest government into these commercial dynamics that are the one thing in the world that's working and that's competitive and it improves products and experiments and finds new ways of doing things, if that's the goal, you really have to get rid of the idea

that government is going to go away and instead you have to find a way instead of of uh subsuming government into those processes and then using the dynamics of that system as your control system and so sorry i won't uh we will get back to this i'm sure so i'll stop uh babbling about it except to say that the crucial flip side of this analysis is obviously then an analysis that I think is very influential about what type of machinery of controlling government has manifestly failed. And this is where this language of the cathedral comes in.

The cathedral is the perverse outcome of a completely mistaken attempt to place government under some kind of control. what the meaning of the cathedral is, it's almost a joke of saying this massive bloated mind control machine is actually, which has actually come out of your attempt to place the government under control. And instead you have this crazed monster eating the world. And we really have to take a radically alternative path to these very reasonable, traditional liberal goals of placing constraint on government.

And so tell us, obviously we're on that path now and the situation is very dire in many regards, despite kind of a new counterculture kind of arising at the moment. If it's going to be able to salvage things quickly enough or if it's going to be a remedy, that remains to be seen. But you mentioned previously that we have to, first of all, foresee the realism of the situation, not get into these just utopian ideas or whatever. But at the same time, there is clearly better ways of solving the issues that we have, you know, and running government, running our societies overall. But what is it that you see is at stake here, if I can put it that way?

What are some of the main areas of concern for you when you look at, let's just talk about the Western civilization, where things are going there right now? What are you seeing is being destroyed? well i mean yes the the immensity of the destruction is obviously quite uh mind-boggling um and i i find it frankly very difficult to to not slip into into massive pessimism about i mean this is this is another topic that um i am sure we're going to get into it's that you know that The impacts of the internet is one side of this, and the other side of it is the rise of the East, which is this huge context of everything we're talking about.

And it would be very easy to have a story, I mean very easy, in which simply we're seeing this big historical rhythm happening, you know, like some kind of weird reciprocating engine over millennia. China in particular and European civilization have been in this kind of alternating up and down motion and we're just seeing a huge reversal of the tides of that dynamic that is of such historical magnitude that it's simply unrealistic to imagine that it could be seriously interfered with or adjusted or prevented the big switch that we're seeing.

And I definitely think that's one plausible story. But to get back specifically to what is being lost, I would say particularly what is being lost is the liberal tradition in the old sense. You know, obviously not liberal in this actually quite repulsive sense that is that is now sort of dominant and has come out of the American political dialectic. dialectic but but liberalism in the in the in the old sense in the sense that probably peaked in the in the 19th century um and which is has been inextricable from the rise of europe over the

last 500 years to do with freedom of inquiry uh the ability for people to pursue scientific and technological initiatives without ideological control, the idea to shop around between sovereignties and jurisdictions in order to find convenient places to do stuff, in order to engage in kind of industrial and commercial activity with minimal interference and therefore experiment and come up with previously unanticipated solutions to all kinds of problems. That fundamental matrix of social progress in the real sense, I think is the thing that is going under horribly in the 20th century.

And the trend is still basically very bad on that basic axis. And that's obviously connected with the previous point in the sense that, you know, the death of that kind of liberal tradition is a civilizational suicide note. I mean, if there is simply no way that the West is not going to go completely underwater and become a kind of just peripheral, sad backwater and lesson of what not to do for a rising East, if that kind of tendency is to continue.

Yeah, we're losing a tremendous amount right now in Europe, of course, America, around the West, around the European diaspora, as it were. Our societies are being reformed radically. Why do you think we have this clampdown, the deplatforming, the accusations and the lies from the mainstream cultural narrative, the media as well, but education and everything else? What are they so afraid of? Is it this leadership that's potentially realizing that they could be toppled by competing ideas? Or is there something else at the heart of this?

Well, I think the way that you put it is very accurate. I mean, there's a very crude analogy, and I'm slightly put off a little bit by how crude it seems, but on the other hand, it becomes more and more convincing to me as this basic framework, which is the comparison of the Internet era with the Gutenberg era. and you know previous to the to the printing press and obviously a set of associated technological and social innovations but i but i think that for our purposes we can just concentrate on the on the media on the mediascape you know there was a kind of confident at least

western europe hegemonic ideological structure kind of represented by the catholic church and And the ideas wildly at variance with what was kind of considered, you know, at least approximately orthodox by that hegemony were just considered unthinkable, unacceptable. They could simply be suppressed. They could be dismissed as heresy or whatever. And then, you know, you have the printing press. You have the birth of the pamphlet. Eventually, you always have Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the door of the cathedral.

And you have this challenge to the fact that there is this generally assumed way of running places and doing things and thinking and organizing societies and thinking about social problems that in a very small number of decades, I guess, maybe even years, just crumbled into chaos and disorder. And of course, the resulting panic and hysteria and not to say also like rage and, you know, other intense emotions associated with that is obviously vast. And I just think we're seeing something extremely similar to that.

You know, we've had this what's what's described as a globalist ideology. I mean, this is language that I think would be interesting to come back to. But certainly the notion that there is one preferred way of doing it, you know, you have the parodic form of this in this like Fukuyama, end of history type of model of the world, that we're basically very close on realizing it, that there should be something like a world government based on kind of consensual principles, that everyone will simply have to fall into line, that the superiority of the ideas driving this process is so self-evident that there was not going to be any kind of serious problem of heresy attached to them. And then the internet explodes,

and all of this dream is crashing into ruins around people's ears, and it produces a really extreme hysterical reaction. I mean, I do think that the establishment, I will use that term momentarily, just thinks they were so close. You know, they were so close to winning it all and suddenly all of this horrible stuff from their point of view is happening. All of these horrible ideas that they thought had been removed forever or were simply so far beyond the bounds of the thinkable that they hadn't even been entertained. Questions about basic institutional arrangements

and basic senses about the vector and direction of history and assumptions about the nature of mankind and its destiny. All of these things are collapsing around us. And, of course, there is just massive, just not confusion, fury, an attempt to just crudely stamp things out in a way that is no more realistic for these guys than it was for the European Catholic establishment in the 15th and 16th century. I remember after the Brexit win, I think it was CNN or something like that, it was a couple of media pundits talking about that this was a failure for the liberal world order, right? That's what they called it.

And of course, this has been the various ideas that come partially out of the West, well, primarily out of the West, but it's the idea of exporting the democratic values violently, of course, in some regards. Much of this in the recent times have been, of course, by the neoconservative guard, et cetera, and the invasion of certain countries and everything else. But still, this is seen from, I guess, from a mainstream perspective, this is still seen as, you know, we're bringing good values to these people in these backward countries, right? we're exporting democracy, we're doing the best we can, we're going to help these people clamp down on tyrannical governments and everything else. Do you think that that line of thinking was an inevitable destiny of democracy itself?

Well, I don't know. I think that is a very interesting question. And I guess I would be tempted to answer positively on that. I mean, obviously, I'm very influenced in the basic construction that comes out of Moldbug's work on this, which what we're talking about on a deeper level is the destiny, the history of Western Christianity. and that i mean this is a hugely i think hugely interesting topic and people have have you know hardly begun still to really dig down into it in in its contemporary relevance but

i see more and more people beginning to look at things in this way and and you know when you're looking at quite mainstream descriptions of certain phenomena you get people saying oh it's just like a religion oh you know this is people are just acting like religious zealots you know and and it will often go beyond that very facile rhetoric and go into you know they have certain rituals they have certain kind of ways of of maintaining orthodoxy and punishing heretics um you know they have certain uh very distinct notions of kind of spiritual purity and cleansing and election and and i think generally people are beginning to see that religious heritage

is is a deep thing you know and there's been a very facile notion uh you know in basically the last century that somehow westerners in particular have just become so modern and so sophisticated and so cosmopolitan in their attitude that they have simply escaped completely their indigenous traditions. Yeah. You know, and it just would be, you know, from this point of view, well, why are you even talking about Christianity? You know, that's some funny thing that we left behind a century before or whatever. But I think that, you know,

just like in the early wave of the age of exploration and the colonial epoch, the encounter of Europeans with radically different cultures, and in particular, obviously radically different structures of religious belief, made them see that actually, you know, ideas that they in a very sort of facile and unthinking, unreflective way were just assuming to be universal were in fact highly culturally specific and i think plausibly this that dynamic that recoil of comparative ethnography and comparative religion that comes out of the european encounter with the rest of the world it's very plausibly seen as being a major

factor in the decline of christianity in europe obviously in particular to to america is is on a slightly belated timeline like this and i think again the same thing is very much happening today i mean i think because we we we can now see uh the globalization has reached the point that you can see societies organizing themselves in a way that is deeply unrecognizable. And the first temptation is to say, oh, this is just, you know, they're imperfect versions of something that we've perfected. You know, they're kind of backward aberrations that are slowly going to converge upon what we're trying to do.

But as the successes of these societies becomes more and more clear, And as people maybe see them on the expanded, high-bandwidth mediascape that we have now, or of course visit and make their way through, for instance, Western Pacific Rim cities and see that crime problems and problems of sort of massive social deterioration that in the West we just see as being absolutely inevitable are in fact our own cultural pathologies. You know, you can organize, at least other people have been able to organize urban environments that are just nothing like the train crashes that we're used to in Western societies now.

And I think it has the same effect. Things that we saw as just being universal truths that we happen to have the purest version of are instead being seen as being our own local, even parochial cultural assumptions. Interesting. So do you think as these ideas came into the West or manifested themselves in the West, the Enlightenment, classic liberalism, kind of an anti-hierarchical structure was set in place, a kind of a universalism, obviously. Did this have an assault or was this like an assault on our prior traditions and way of life?

Do you think we lost something when these things were brought in? Because, I mean, if these modern values, if we can call them that, when they were implemented, that was not done, of course, without bloodshed and tremendous trauma, right? Yes. I mean, look, this is a great and interesting question. And you've put your finger, I think, right on the, maybe I could even say fault line that I think cuts across a big chunk of the dissident right. You know, these are arguments and discussions that I think people have only just really started to have. And I think that there is, you know, as kind of suggested in your amount, I think that there is a getting to a certain threshold of questioning about what's been happening on the trajectory of Western civilization.

You get to a certain threshold of skepticism and raising certain questions about this that previously have not been done. And one response is something that is kind of maybe like a neo-medievalism or, you know, a full-blown reactionary sensibility that just says that modernity was a disastrous mistake. We want to go back to things that we had before. And there's a lot of this thinking around, and I'm very far from wanting to dismiss it as uninteresting or, you know, to be worthy of simple derision of some kind. but it's certainly not where i would tend to go with this because i think

i think that the process of modernity is something that is so so much the destiny of uh of the west you know it has dominated the whole historical process of the west for 500 years and it's just not something that can be that can be thrown out it's not something that we can just back out of it's it's something that is just absolutely part of uh who we are now um and so i think that this question about rediscovering the ethnic specificities of things that had previously been uh previously been in a very facile way

portrayed as as as universal to my mind does not commit one to this full full scale cascade back into pre-modern pre-modern societies i just think that that is not a that is not a door that is open to us even if we wanted to take care and if i could just say let me let me just say one more thing about this because a massive amount of the way that i see these things honestly is it's like i'm living in china i'm very much now looking back on europe i mean i'm part of the kind of western english language cyberspace it's not that i that i'm i'm not native to that but but My geographical location now is in Shanghai.

I sort of go out wandering around the city without the prospect of being kind of mugged or greeted by some kind of enraged process of social collapse in the streets. And you did in England, right? Well, you know, my experience of what it is to live in London and my experience of all Western cities is you need a map. You know, if you don't know the place, you're likely to wander into death zones. You know, I mean, in America, absolutely, literally death zones. You go to a new American city. you have to say the first thing you have to do is go to a hotel get a map and you say to the guy in the hotel look where should i not go and he will know exactly what you mean i mean it's not like

there's any mystery about this he will say for god's sake don't cross this road you know on foot you know or even in a car if you think there's any chance it's going to break down or you know you're not coming out again yeah um and this is something that westerns just take as being normal that is extremely dysfunctional. And, you know, as I say, I've not been in a Chinese or even East Asian city where anything like this has been true. You know, anything, there is nothing like that phenomenon where there were just these zones of social death where your life is endangered if you crossed a line that you didn't know about.

It's just not something that happens here at all. But sorry, I'm slightly being diverted. No, this is actually an interesting point, I must say. I mean, because yet many of them, of course, they flee. Flee is the correct term. But they jump on the opportunity of the West's open-door policy to come and have a better life for themselves. In many cases, it might not be as the current things are lined up. Because as you say, we lie to ourselves that, you know, these values that we have, they are the best in the world. We are the best, you know, system. This is very true, I think, for Sweden in particular, my country where I'm from. And, you know, they have this immense titanic nationalism, as the term has developed now, where they basically, it's a sinking ship.

But there they're pausing the brass, thinking this ship will never go down. It's the best thing ever, right? And in terms of the demographic question, we have just completely opened the door and we're letting in all these incompatible cultures while everyone is looking the opposite way and think that this is not happening. I mean, it's a, God, it's an immense, as you said before, mind control, not experiment, but it's an implementation of a way of life where we have to, we're forced to lie to ourselves, to convince ourselves that this is the greatest thing ever while avoiding, as you say, certain scenarios, certain places, certain situations, because we know it wouldn't end well for us, right? Right, exactly. I mean, this obviously, this is a huge thing, and the inability to keep this topic under wraps is obviously the basis of more hysteria than any single thing we could be talking about.

And it's obviously the flip side of your earlier point about this evangelical kind of imperialistic notion of spreading what are seen as these perfected Western values to every corner of the world. I mean, you know, it's this obviously, I think, quite rightly celebrated Steve Saylor little maxim of invade the world, invite the world. That's right. You know, those are two, they're flip sides of the same thing. And what that same thing is, is this notion that human beings are completely fungible. You know, that you just, there's not even any interesting questions to ask other than just numbers of people.

You take 10,000 people here and you put them there and you find 10,000 people over there and you move them around or you switch their ideas or you integrate them. The notion that there is just this absolute, completely interchangeable set of hominid units that are everything that you need to do realistic social calculations with. And it's very understandable to me that this would be understood to be some predictable outcome of our native religious tradition. You know, this notion of the kind of essential equality of the human soul, which obviously underlies all these evangelical efforts.

You know, if you want to find 100,000 new converts, and it doesn't matter if you find them, you know, in the Amazon basin or in Siam or in the Alps. I mean, there are just 100,000 souls to be added to your religious brotherhood. And obviously this notion becomes, if anything, even more extreme when it's stripped of its kind of overt religious trappings and presents itself comically as if it is part of some kind of secularized, even scientific mindset. Yeah, that's right.

And the absolute incompatibility of this basically absolutely dogmatic and I would have thought, you know, coming at it as a Martian, simply bizarre idea that there is just this kind of uniform human units of which no further questions can be asked. The incompatibility of that kind of massively central element of religious dogma on the one hand, and the spirit of scientific inquiry and empirical realism, and, you know, all of these modern attempts to actually look at the world coldly and without prejudice and to actually work out how it is rather than how you might want it to be.

the tension between these two things is driving people completely nuts for sure um i mean i keep saying look i keep saying this is this is the big one this is the thing that's driving people nuts but you know we get we're spiraling into it and i i think really we are we are there now because once you say very modestly i think modestly skeptically empirically you know without any particularly strong agenda you simply were saying well look maybe people are different you know maybe people have different i naturally inclined to different modes of social organization they they naturally inclined to uh forms of life that that might not be hugely compatible with each

other they have different talents and competencies they're likely to be represented in different proportions in various different fields of life these kind of just acknowledgement of the possibility of human difference is considered to be utterly utterly taboo um yeah and at the same time that wall is crashing down it's just simply that as a defensive line is completely unsustainable and And I mean, I think I see this in people who I know are absolutely committed to the defense of that line. And yet at the same time, at some level, realize that it just is not defensible.

It just makes no sense. There's nothing you can appeal to other than pure dogmatic rigor and persecution of heresy to hold that line. You know, there's no facts you can draw on. There's no sociological data. There's no biological data. There's no ethnographical data. International comparisons between societies don't support it. Everything that's being found out in the genomic revolution doesn't support it. the internal sociological factors of specific societies uh multicultural societies doesn't support nothing supports that um except the fact that it is a it is considered as a a a element of religious dogma that is utterly essential to the way western civilization has conceived itself

So this, let me put it this way, this kind of clean and cold, also unspiritual, and at the same time then what we believe is a scientific view, or so-called scientific view, you know, that the mainstream is holding right now in the West. I mean, in a way I see it as an outcrop of this Calvinist thought. In a way it is a religious thought. I've said this many times before on the shows, regulars have heard this before, but I see that a very initially violent Catholicism that set into Europe had a more, I guess to a certain extent, it had more in common with the paganism than the following Protestant Reformation did to a certain extent. But in that Catholicism, we had a multitude of saints, we had decorative temples of worship, etc.

As these reformations came through, we've ended up with fewer and fewer saints and decorations, and I always make the comparison that eventually the Lutheran Reformation or the Lutheran faith was basically at the end of it, it was a black cross on a white wall. That was just that that remained, right? It was, in a way, a clean, modern, you know, it's like this Ikea version of religion, I guess, to a certain extent, right? Yes, yes. Cuboid, it's just very cold. But there is a scientific, you know, kind of strain that came with all of this too, which I personally see has been tremendously detrimental. I think the quest has been honest. The quest has been from the beginning to find God, which is in a way to me the same way as saying we want to understand nature.

We want to understand what this is. And in that process, we've gone deeper and deeper into the atomic state and trying to find the core of what is this, right? What is it that makes things up here? But in that searching process, it's almost like we've forgotten something. We've let something go. There's no, the cleanliness of it, the clean way has been, I don't know how to put it. It's just has, it's dropped us off at a place where we no longer believe anything. There's, I mean, in a weird kind of way, I don't know if I'm going too far here or just go off on a tangent, but in a weird kind of way with all this quantum mechanics and like observable variations, right? It's only up to the observer.

Is it a particle? Is it a wave? Reality doesn't exist until the observer is there. Do you see what I'm saying? It's like a very... What we've found at the end of all of this is like nothingness. I don't know how else to put it. Yeah. No, I mean, look, I can definitely see how it can be described that way. And I think there's a lot of elements to what you're saying. I think all of them are interesting. I mean, I think the much greater conformity with Europe's kind of pre-modern Catholic, Western Europe's pre-modern Catholic culture to the pagan traditions, I think is totally right. this association of protestant reformation with this increasing uh austerity or intellectual

austerity and therefore it's it becomes in a way more linguistic it becomes more um abstract it becomes more ideological i think all of these all of these things are right and it and it builds the modern world for better or worse the construction of modernity is a catastrophic painful wrenching process and there's absolutely no uh doubt about that um but and and and it's partly it's partly because other people could see that that they didn't want it you know like in the in whatever 17th 18th century when when when china and the west are kind of uh making contact

on western terms obviously to a large extent um and you know there's a very early stage of it there's a very definite chinese decision look we don't want anything to do with this you know it's it's a kind of exotic it's a foreign version of this same thing we're seeing among our own contemporary reactionaries is to say no you know why would you want this thing it's it's crazy it's hyper dynamic it's alienating uh it it strips you of everything that you that you had it it hurls you into the void i mean this is something that i think was very much being seen uh by those societies that wanted to say no to modernity um but i think that we can just say

at least that you don't get to say no to modernity. I mean, China's later tortured history in the 19th and early 20th century is because it finally has no choice but to reconcile itself to modernity, to become modern as much in its own terms as possible. And I think this is our situation, too. You know, I don't think there is, I mean, look, this is a controversial thing, as we agree. This is a controversial thing, I'm saying, even in our own eccentric niche on the outer right, to say this.

And so I'm not speaking, I'm not trying to speak, you know, generally for some larger constituency in saying this. But I would definitely maintain that modernity is not an option. It makes itself, once it's ignited, it has this dynamic, self-empowering, self-amplifying, self-improving process associated with it. It is that process. And there's just no getting off that bus without catastrophic injury. Right. Yeah. But, sorry, just one more thing about what you're saying. Because I think that your diagnosis of this, I would say, specifically Protestant process is completely right.

And in the sense that it has these two mutually annihilating elements to it. You know, everything that the whole, this kind of evangelical, universalistic, egalitarian monstrosity that is, you know, still trying to keep a grip on the world right now has obviously come out of this process. But so has the technology, the skepticism, the process of inquiry, the empiricism, the modes of cold analysis, the detachment. All of these weapons that are presently being used to pull this thing down have also come out of this same tradition.

Nietzsche obviously called it the history of European nihilism. You know, it's the two sides. It's the thing that falls and the thing that does the pushing. And both of them are coming out of the same parochial religious tradition that has hit in the early modern period. It hit this singularity, it hit this ignition threshold and became something so powerful and so weird and so strange that the world is still shuddering from it. Yeah, yeah. Well, what I want to talk about after the break here then is obviously what we need to do to, you know, restore the glory to the West, as it were, get us back into a cutting edge exploration and discovery mode again. And basically the betterment, how do we get ourselves out of this rut?

I want to hear more about your ideas of what you propose, what the neoreactionary solution, if you will, to some of this actually is. But before we take a break, Nick, do you mind telling us a little bit about where people can find more of your work, where they can go to, I guess, follow you and where they can just read more about the material you have? Well, I've got a kind of fragmented series of platforms, but I think the best gateway, even though it's a bit sleepy at the moment, is my outside-in blog, which the web address is xenosystems.net. and that has attached that that sort of i think ultimately links links into um everything else

so uh that's as a as a one-stop as a one-stop uh visiting place i i i would recommend it excellent uh yeah definitely i'm on it right now folks we'll have it linked up xenosystems.net and from there you can i think your twitter is uh linked up from there too outsideness yes i hope i hope so yeah yes it should be there yeah uh if not of course if you do want to follow me on twitter it's outside you know twitter.com forward slash outsideness we'll have that linked up to a lot of good stuff we'll also link to the uh to that um essay the way that i mentioned earlier in the beginning the dark enlightenment by nick land it's in uh uh for uh Well, I guess it's more than that. It's really like 10, 11 parts.

It's long, really good, really sets the backdrop. We didn't really go through kind of some of the basic here for the newcomers, really. We kind of jumped right into the deeper end of the pool, I think, which is okay. I do appreciate that, actually. That's good. So if you do want to get some of the background, check that essay. We'll link that up. But we might just kind of backtrack a bit and go over some of the big picture stuff in the second segment, too. But very good. So, yeah, we're going to take just a short break here. So do stay tuned. Thank you.

Thank you.