Amerika

What made Neuromancer, the 1984 sci-fi book by William Gibson, stand out was its ability to visualize what a network-enabled world might look like. Despite some anachronisms, the book showed us how it would look if people were cruising around cyberspace, and launched a whole flotilla of imitators.

In the same way, it is important that we are able to visualize what a Reactionary — for the sake of clarity, let us put together philosophies that are more similar than they are different: Reaction, Alternative Right, Neoreaction, New Right, Paleoconservative — society might look like.

A good start can be found in my distillation of the Right, or at least of the non-Leftists out there who tend toward realism, with the four pillars:

1. Rule by culture. Government and police are inferior methods compared to citizens who view society as a cooperative endeavor toward a goal, according to principles held in common. These are a product of culture. To defend culture, all who are not of the ethnic group must be excluded; this is a principle called Nationalism. With nationalism, government is deprecated and day-to-day order is kept through use of shame, ostracism and exclusion to keep outsiders and saboteurs at bay.
2. Hierarchy and excellence. Society can either take its rich and powerful and assume they are good, or find those among its people who are excellent — superior in ability, leadership, intelligence and moral insight — and give them the wealth and power to use well. 99% of humanity will make these decisions wrong, and all people in groups will choose to avoid facing real issues. We need those who do the opposite to have power and wealth to ensure that it is used well, much as (in theory) we entrust nuclear weapons only to those of excellent character.
3. Positive reward systems. Again we face a primary division: we either force everyone to conform and look for anomalies to punish, or we diligently reward those who do well so that they ascend to positions of leadership. A heroic culture does some of this, but on a more practical level, so does capitalism: it rewards those who find opportunity and meet needs, as kept in check by culture and hierarchy.
4. A transcendental goal. No healthy society has merely material goals. It aims to achieve the impossible so that it can constantly improve, such as the motives of ancient societies to achieve balance, harmony, equilibrium and excellence. Religion is part of this, but not the whole. We must collaborate toward a goal again and have it be more than tangible, but eternal.

But what would this look like to an average person? In my upcoming book, Parallelism, I describe more, but here is a basic illustration:

America has become a nation again; all those who were not Western European in blood, or who could not pass for that and demonstrate a majority of Western heritage, were repatriated with reparations to their home continents. Ireland in particular was thankful for the reverse in its population crash and new blood of the many German-Irish hybrids sent back.

The big cities suffered crashes as a result. This provided a convenient excuse to gut them and relocate their populations to a network of smaller cities, each under fifty thousand people. These are separated by extensive farmland and wild land, with the proviso that 50% of all land must be kept in a natural state, unvisited by humans except for maintenance purposes.

A network of aristocrats has cropped up, with most serving as local lords. These positions go to lower aristocrats, and the young of higher aristocrats, so that they may learn how to lead. These local lords serve as judge and jury, leader and advisor in their communities, both telling people what to do and making helpful suggestions.

They are aided by, in each town, a team of wise elders. These men have survived into old age and also are valued for their judgment, so now, they convene every afternoon to advise their local neighborhoods, villages and quadrants of cities. They have the ability to dispense payment of some funds, and to exile people.

Beyond that, there is not much law enforcement. Those who transgress are exiled instead of being jailed. This means that some people lose their citizenship for something as simple as smoking a joint or getting drunk and beating on a wife. The wise elders and lords know that Darwin is still with us, and in a healthy Darwinian cycle, much of each new generation is pared off because it does not meet quality control standards.

In this society, “Good is the enemy of perfect,” and the leaders fear most of all that they will unwittingly enact a half-solution and let problems ferment under cover of time. As a result, despite their merciful nature, they tend to be free with their demands for exile, sending away the foolish, retarded, criminal, incontinent, unchaste, corrupt and parasitic. Perhaps a fifth of each generation is sent to the lands to the South, for nature to remix their DNA into the third world brew and stabilize it.

Unlike previous societies, this society idealizes laziness and pleasure. Its goal is to get through its required tasks with as little fuss as possible and to then spend most of the day in enjoying life. This way, people do not live for false goals such as ideologies and trends, but see life itself as timeless and participate as a means of being excellent versions of what they were born to be.

Jobs have been scaled down. Each person has a social rank based on what roles their ancestors serve, and they serve those same roles. Apprenticeships take care of most education except for the upper castes, who hire private tutors, as do small groups of people who want their children to have formal education. This provides essentially unlimited labor for any college graduate. There is no public education; apprenticeships, journeymen, homeschooling, and private education have taken over. Similarly, there are no “rules” about jobs. People are offered work and can take it or not. The rest is up to them.

Laws are almost nonexistent. The courts and lawyers cost too much for any normal person to get justice, inverting their own function. Now all cases are heard in front of a lord and, if a local lord fails too many times, his fellow lords may intervene. Sometimes they do not, recognizing that all but a few complaints are individuals projecting their failure onto whoever is in power at the time.

As a result however life is more relaxed. With countless legal costs and expenses from government regulation cleared aside, living is far cheaper, as is food. Most people work a few hours a day, then come home to spend their time with family, books, games, loafing and playing instruments. There is no desire for novelty or uniqueness because these things failed with the collapse of the last regime.

Lords can order executions. A murderer is normally ordered to pay restitution to the family of his victim, and will spend the rest of his life doing so; if he fails, a posse is summoned and they take him to a place of execution and kill him in the traditional way with a spear through the eye. No one much cares, because to get to that stage you have to really screw-up, and this society is more focused on defense of the healthy normal than the screw-ups.

Local business exists in pretty much the same form as now. Grocery stores and other vital suppliers maintain the techniques that made them highly efficient but, in the absence of regulation, are able to lower costs. They also fear less for the ability to hire and fire at will because the employees have no recourse, but in a cheaper society, have a few months to cruise if they just save a little money. Charities exist in a private sense only, and churches routinely help those who encounter life’s little speed bumps.

The Lords tend to divide people into three groups: contributors, destroyers and grey people. Contributors are those who have since an early age shown a pattern of doing good, or at least attempting it, in the mundane sense that gets no reward but is noticed by others. When another contributor testifies for an individual, he is seen as a contributor as well, and if he fails, the one who testified for him will experience doubt regarding his contributor status.

Contributors will find their interests defended. A grocer whose store is vandalized will be attended to. Other types of business have disappeared because none will defend them. For example, a strip club that burns to the ground will find no contributors willing to vouch for it, and so no one opens strip clubs. Similarly hair salons and manicure shops find themselves without defenders, and quickly fade away.

At the edges of the civilization are anarchy zones, where there are no rules and decent people refuse to set foot if they can help it. Many exiles end up here, but generally, these communities are unstable and frequently break out in violence and disorder. As a result, they are not permitted near the rest of civilization, nor is backflow allowed. What happens in anarchy zone stays in anarchy zone, as does everyone involved.

America has its first monarchs, and they tend to be descended from the Anglo-Saxon tribes. At the top of the pyramid of aristocrats are those who could be in line for the monarchy, and they choose among themselves who will attain that role. Most of them hope to heck they never have to do it, because it is a job with zero vacation, zero hours that are truly off, and a term for life plus penalty of death if the nation fails.

Technology persists and its results are everywhere, but on a slower scale, because people realize that greater efficiency leads to greater control, and that it is usually better to be slightly less-efficient and to have more relaxed lives. A cultural revolution has occurred where people no longer look to external social factors for guidance, but have turned within, to look to what they can know so that they may understand the world in a transcendental method. This is a more religious society, without an official religion.

This has changed what people value. Where in the past, they thought of themselves, now they think of where they fit in an order, including that above material and beyond our world. People seek to improve themselves, and this is seen as the activity of life, in addition to just mucking around and having a good time. Life moves slowly and people find themselves, against what they thought would be the case, more fulfilled and less neurotic.

Critics of the Reactionary society said that it would never work, but what they really meant was that it would not work for them, and so many of them have voluntarily relocated to “free” societies in the third world. The rest are focused on the activities of humanity for time immemorial: learning, growing, enjoying, appreciating family and knowledge, and being active outside. As a result, a great relaxation has set in where people are content to simply be themselves.

Perhaps at the end of all of this experience what humans have learned is that humanity itself is a prison. Our drive to control, perfect, make uniform and refine leads us to self-destruct, and it did in every society on earth but ours. Instead, we stopped doing what “everyone” agreed was right, and struck out for what we could verify in reality was good for us. It has made all the difference.

Tags: alternative right, integralism, monarchism, nationalism, neoreaction, new right, reaction