SNEAK PREVIEW!

RUN UP TO THE BOOK RELEASE

The book is almost ready! Just ironing out some final tweaks. In the run up, I thought I’d share this original excerpt. The book is divided into three parts; while the third is speculatively prescriptive, the first two parts are diagnostic. The passage below is a sweeping summary of (most) key points from that diagnosis, acting as a passage into the third part. I’d considered adding links to the formational related posts on the substack, but decided against it. You can always find those posts if you want, but the whole point of the book is to have moved on, from the searching and backfilling that characterized the initial stumbling toward insight that characterized the substack iteration, toward the coherent, integrated argument of the book. So, I hope it’s of interest, and whets your appetite for the book.

The last half century or so has been filled with pithy, iconic slogans about the inexorable momentum of the left. There was William Buckley’s observation that “a conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop”; Mencius Moldbug’s that “Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left”; and Michael Malice’s that “conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit.” These all, it seems to me, are colorful expressions of Robert Conquest’s Second Law: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” If you’ve read this far, I would expect that by now not only do you understand that this is true, but even more importantly you understand not only why it is true, but why it is inevitable. At least, to a historical point.

Societies that become more successful tend to become more prosperous, reducing the harshness of Darwinian conditions. While chronological details will vary to some degree across cases, this increased prosperity reduces selection pressures against those, which I’ve called spatials, who’d have found it more difficult to survive under those harsher conditions. Such people, tending to have higher intelligence and creativity, start to nudge the momentum of society’s growing insulation from the regulation of nature’s corrective negative feedback loop toward increasingly rational planning processes. These are leveraged for their ability to optimize availability and use of resources, improving human freedom and security. Tangible expressions of human association begin to be eroded as abstracting practices of the spatials instantiate a growing bureaucratic rationality into an increasingly pervasive bureaucratem, convert the humanly scaled experience of marketplaces into abstract and impersonal markets, and gradually colonize both public and eventually even private life, eroding the conditions and bonds of familial and communal association.    

The bureaucratem and the market, in tandem, act as solvents dissolving the intermediary institutions and communities that had previously acted as buffers against an absolutist, centralized sovereignty. Deracinated, monadic individuals are left naked in the face of such sovereign power. Meanwhile the standard of living grows, even as the quality of life in the minds of temporals seems to creep into decline. And an unconstrained vision starts to spread across the land, as the society – without much fanfare – slowly shifts out of the reality-checking negative feedback loop into a reality-defying positive feedback loop. Marching, hand-in-hand, the twin promises to both dominate nature and to achieve radical, existential freedom, sleepwalks us into the iron cage of rationality.

Barely perceptible to only those who are alert to its risks, the psychorium has begun to seep through the culture, progressively infecting the minds of an ever-larger number of people. The social grounds are seeded for the age of the spiteful mutants. The human capacity to exercise god-like and nature-defying powers is ever more boldly promulgated and even believed. The promise of freedom and security is betrayed with an existential prison of stultifying conformity to whatever is proclaimed by the unconstrained vision, the mirage of prosperity revealed as an elite con job, and our very being cast into a slow-motion shattering world in which the fundamentals of reality – understood through the ages as folk wisdom or science – are not merely denied, but our obedient celebration of such reality-denial is demanded on pain of personal destruction.  

In our current instantiation, these processes are experienced as the slow triumph of the values of the French Enlightenment. This framing though is only to privilege the details of a specific turn in the spirals of history. For, what is unhinged from reality cannot continue; and what cannot continue will not continue. What we have called the left, since the French Revolution, though is better understood across the longue durée as the playing out of an ancient dance among personality structure phenotypes that probably have been at war for as long as we have been human. Over and over, again, the drama plays out – though never identically, which is why we’ve called the turns of human history spirals, rather than cycles.

At some point, though, the configuration of available resources, the extent of escalation, the context of exogenous influences, and perhaps most importantly the prevalence of persisting temporal residues, usher in the inevitable next arc. Call it a correction if you’d like. The vital question, when we come to that arc of the historical spiral, in which we transition from a gesellschaft-biased to a gemeinschaft-biased society, is how ugly will be the arc? Will we face a cataclysmic crash, such as experienced by the Roman or Mayan Empires, with decaying corpses flooding the horizon and once great temples tumbling into rubble, or might there be hope of a softer landing? And might a plea for the recovery of vergemeinschaftung tendencies, and an exploration of how such tendencies could be activated — a plea for time — contribute to such a softer landing? These are the questions pondered in the final, Third Part of this book.

If you’re keen on seeing where it all leads, and haven’t yet, please…

And if you know anyone else who is interested in these topics, please…