Missive #470

Neoreaction is not your grandfather’s conservatism, but the web 2.0 era marriage between modern engineering principles and classical anti-democratic thought. Its central tenet is that the Enlightenment was a mistake, and in The Dark Enlightenment, Nick Land burns progressivism to the ground, salts the earth around its ashes, and raises an altar to anti-humanism in its place.I understood about a third of this book – maybe. The author refers to Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Guy Yarvin) for many of his ideas. I may try reading some of his works.

Land explicates the main ideas of neoreaction-the Cathedral, neocameralism, formalism, etc.-always viewing democracy, liberalism, and politics in general through the lens of Darwinism. The result is something like Thomas Hobbes as ghostwritten by H. P. Lovecraft. Included in this volume is an unreleased essay by Land on the writing and impact of The Dark Enlightenment.

Absolutely none of this incendiary work has been proven wrong in the ten years since it was written. No doubt it will remain relevant for many years to come.

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%. — Thomas Jefferson

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well- armed lamb contesting the vote! — Franklin Benjamin

Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. — John Adams

Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death. — James Madison

Steve H. Hanke lays out the case authoritatively in his short essay On Democracy Versus Liberty, focused upon the American experience: Most people, including most Americans, would be surprised to learn that the word “democracy” does not appear in the Declarationof Independence (1776) or the Constitution of the United States of America (1789). They would also be shocked to learn the reason for the absence of the word democracy in the founding documents of the U.S.A. Contrary to what propaganda has led the public to believe, America’sFounding Fathers were skeptical and anxious about democracy. They were aware of the evils that accompany a tyranny of the majority. The Framers of the Constitution went to great lengths to ensure that the federal government was not based on the will of the majority and was not, therefore, democratic.
If the Framers of the Constitution did not embrace democracy, what did they adhere to? To a man, the Framers agreed that the purpose of government was to secure citizens in John Locke’s trilogy of the rights to life, liberty and property.

Democracy might begin as a defensible procedural mechanism for limiting government power, but it quickly and inexorably develops into something quite different: a culture of systematic thievery. As soon as politicians have learnt to buy political support from the “public purse” , and conditioned electorates to embrace looting and bribery, the democratic process reduces itself to the formation of (Mancur Olson’s) “distribution coalitions” electoral majorities mortared together by common interest in a collectively advantageous pattern of theft. Worse still, since people are, on average, not very bright, the scale of depredation available to the political establishment far exceeds even the demented sacking that is open to public scrutiny. Looting the future, through currency debauchment, debt accumulation, growth destruction, and techno-industrial retardation is especially easy to conceal, and thus reliably popular. Democracy is essentially tragic because it providesthe populace with a weapon to destroy itself, one that is always eagerly seized, and used. Nobody ever says “no” to free stuff. Scarcely anybody even sees that there is no free stuff. Utter cultural ruination is the necessary conclusion.

I have booted the Mint OS up more than the 4-5 times that I did after the shop in Sierra Vista fixed the problem. I also gave the Zorin a try and it did not boot. The thing that I would like to do now is get the files that are on the SSD but I can not find a way to ‘see’ them. That may be something for Bisbee Computer to do. I’ll be stopping there next week. Meanwhile I’ll keep at it like a dog with his bone.

Yesterday I prepared an iso Bootable disk with Zorin on it. I then tried to boot it from the USB and that worked fine so I installed it. I think I now have three OS on the SSD; the duel boot of Zorin and Mint are both booting up. The old Zorin I think is still out there, will not boot and that is where all my files are also. I was hoping that the reinstall of Zorin would get me the files but no such luck. It is going to be a task for Bisbee Computer – I hope he can retrieve them.