Theory is understanding and understanding is theory. Seeing the world as a collection of bare unexplained facts is effectively the same as seeing the world as filled with magic. To suppose that somehow price controls on wages or medical treatment do not behave like price controls generally is in effect to believe in magic.

Without theory the world is a collection of magical events, something that defies understanding.

Experiments can be faulty. Experience can be faulty, and its interpretation can be faulty. There are experiments “showing” that Uri Geller is a spoon bender. A person who understands the world will know, despite the seeming evidence, that Uri Geller is a fraud. Reflect on Moldbugs demonstration that macro economics is a fraud.

But surely The Reaction is at least a little bit interested in changing the world?

Theory suggests two paths for changing the world.

The Moldbuggian path is to be worthy of power, wait for leftism to self destruct, as it has so many times before, and then when the military come looking for a priesthood, we are available.

The other, more activist, path is to form a thede, tribe, religion, religions being synthetic tribes, and proceed on the long march through the institutions of the red empire, the empire of the bases, and in due course subjugate the blue empire, the empire of the consulates. From time to time the Red Empire has blown up Blue Empire proxies, and vice versa. It would not take much for the fighting to get serious.

The reaction has engaged in a number of experiments in tribe formation. It is too soon to evaluate the results. We don’t yet have much empirical data on tribe synthesis.

Which brings us to the secular reaction’s view of religion. Which is that Religio matters, religion not so much. A religion’s unfalsifiable beliefs, its empirically neutral beliefs, are reverse engineered from its rituals, are rationalizations of its rituals, rather than the rituals being engineered from the beliefs. The unfalsifiable beliefs of Shinto are incoherent, since Shinto is a random grab bag of rituals, yet Shinto still worked quite well regardless, despite having very little in the way of beliefs for people to believe in.

A religion should be an effective tool for transmitting the wisdom of parents to teenagers, telling stupid people to do what smart people already know to do.