I was going to put out the answer key to my last post this week, but Imperium Press saw fit to give me a review copy of C.A. Bond’s yet-unreleased work “Nemesis”, and it turned out I had quite a lot to say on it (4500 words? holy shit). You may know Bond as Reactionary Future, a bit of a contentious figure from my knowledge, but most of the internecine conflicts in reaction are fake and gay and I really couldn’t care less about them. We will need rigid doctrinal conformity when we constitute an official priesthood. For now, a bit of diversity of thought and some healthy disagreements on a few things makes our school (I guess I’m a neoreactionary) more attractive to prospective patrons.

Anyway, Nemesis is a serious academic work of history. It’s not full of white-hot invective, and it’s not even designed to sneakily radicalize you against modernity like Moldbug. If you’re not used to reading dry academia-level texts, it might turn you off, but in that case you’re probably not the target audience anyway. It’s actually surprisingly normie-friendly, at least within academia. The biases of the author are let slip only a handful of times; it is generally written in a very even-handed objective tone. I suspect that this book is meant to find its way into the hands of living historians, political scientists, and other members of the elite. Not to turn them into reactionaries overnight, but to get them asking some interesting questions, and perhaps to get them to dig into the milieu that produced the work. Moldbug’s success in conversion was in his rhetoric and not his dialectic; it’s very sly rhetoric, but it’s in there for sure, and all the more effective on big brain nerd types for being subtle. This book, in comparison is pure dialectic. Well, almost:

“To recap, the Brown v. Board 1954 case was brought to court with elite funding of legal costs, elite organisation to find plaintiffs, as well as “science” produced by the elite with elite funding, and it was then determined by the court that the opinions of the elite (of which the court were members) were in fact “scientifically” grounded and correct.”

It’s also thankfully brief; Bond’s analysis doesn’t need a 600-page tract and despite plenty of historical examples it’s dense and everything serves a purpose, a departure from political science and history writings that are packed with superfluous filler. In terms of actual subject matter, it’s almost exclusively a commentary on Jouvenel. “High-Low versus Middle” is the simplified version of Jouvenelian conflict. The more nuanced one is that power centers- and here we mean both political i.e. coercive, and cultural i.e. status-granting centers, which are often the same but not always, are engaged in constant conflict with their own subsidiaries, said entities being institutions whether formal or informal that aid the power center in its exercise of government. Power centers, whether out of fear of being deposed, or sheer simian lust for power (Bond mostly spares us from speculation on the why), always attempt to accrue more power to themselves from their subsidiaries. Because the very low-status have little power to take, centralizing authority must take from its own lesser allies, which are sometimes not very lesser at all. To do this, Power must ally itself with other elements of the hierarchy, most often by promising those lower on the rung greater goods and status than those between it and the Power. Sometimes, as with Church and King, we have two rival Powers which are each very strong in their own rights, and a great deal of the book is devoted to both explaining the Jouvenelian model and giving plenty of historical examples.

For example, in 1250 Europe the King’s power was fairly limited. He was war-leader, diplomat, judge of last resort, but not legislator; nor did he have a private army or income independent of his own estates. By 1750, the King is far, far more powerful and this is seen as an excellent development by pretty much everyone thinking and writing. So how did the old Kings accrue all this power to themselves? Bond goes into it, step-by-step almost. But he reserves a judgement call on which is better. I won’t. Topheavy things tend to fall down when you shake ’em a bit. I’ve already gone into detail on why absolutism is bad and you can read the full version there. Seems to work for the Chinese, but then again so does eating bugs and soy.

But in short, in 1250, the shoes of the King were big enough to do the King’s job, but small enough for one man to fill. The actual occupant of these shoes tended to change a lot; Kings got stabbed in the back, and deposed in war, and so on, but the social fabric remained more or less the same throughout the entire medieval period with no negative innovations. The crown was unstable, but the trunk and the roots? Rock fucking solid. Real hard to read Chaucer and get the picture of an unstable, unnatural social order seething with tensions. In 1750, the shoes of the King (Louis XIV to be precise*) were enormous, since he was now responsible for legislation, education, maintenance of his standing army, and government of every individual province in his realm. He took all of the power possible unto himself, and found that he was an unfitting Atlas to hold up the whole of his country. So he shares the load, not with his fierce and potentially rebellious warlord nobles, but with a class of common-born civil servants he appoints himself, who he thinks in his hubris will be loyal to him. Cause Leninism, they’d be nothing without him, right? No surprise that the army of bureaucrats he hired to enact his power realize that they don’t need the King anymore to enact their Enlightenment Gnostic Utopianism. Louis XIV kicked the centralization snowball down the hill and his grandson was crushed under it, other monarchs were wise enough at least to dodge out of its way and merely become irrelevant to the levers of power.

Later on, he applies the Jouvenelian model not just to distant history, but to very recent history. He has to get through a great deal of talk about ethics, epistemology, and so forth, which I’ll get back to myself, but the most layman-friendly portion of the work is closer to the end, when he runs through, Moldbug-style, a ton of recent historical developments exposing “liberal democracy” as perhaps the most insidious totalitarian system in history. This section is meticulously sourced for those who would want to debate him, but also where his rare rhetorical killshots come in. For the normie who’s been following along, I imagine it’d be pretty disillusioning. He brings up the Soros Open Society foundation, quotes liberally from their own minutes on their creation and manipulation of Black Lives Matter, and then dismisses the “silly right-wing conspiracy theory”: Because it’s not a conspiracy, dear reader! No shadowy cabal! All of the NGOs are like this. Your entire government works like this. This is Organic Locally-Sourced American Communism, stripped bare naked.

Much of the book is focused on a refutation of individualism using the framework of Alasdair MacIntyre, which is very welcome. The observation that centralizing power always frames its appeal to its client class as increasing its freedom is certainly interesting; this dynamic is explicated very well by Spandrell’s bioleninism, which was originally just Leninism; patronage of classes who would have no or little status without your institutional support. When you tell a lower-status person that you will increase their liberty and equality, what they hear is that they are going to knock over a big apple cart and be able to snatch up a lot of free shit. Of course, individualism and totalitarian authority go hand in hand, as it is simply not possible for most client peoples of lower status to be able to practice individualism without the patronage of the powerful.

However, the alternative to individualism is not made explicit by Bond, though he hints at it. Perhaps it would make the book obscenely normie-repellent, so I will do it instead. This is a matter of finding a proper frame, one where natural order is opposed to the unnatural raising of some people’s status and the unnatural suppression of others’. His section on the historical usage of Divine Right as justifying absolutism during the closing days of the Renaissance (see James I) is instructive in this regard. He notes that the use of the phrase “Divine Right” implies that authority is unnatural and especially granted by God to increase the liberties of subject peoples and bring them closer to the divine. The claim to legitimacy by a Divine Right absolutist monarch is “men are naturally born free with XYZ rights, but I in particular need ABC powers in order to assure this”. Of course, this is also the justification of every democratic power since. (I will note that this suggests the rebirth of the Gnostic heresy that forms the spiritual basis of Leftism; “natural rights” are not very natural after all, and require a titanically coercive distortion of reality in order to actualize) In other words, all of our political thought since the 1550’s has proceeded from the assumption of the sovereign individual who then chooses to engage with society: social contract theory.

So I will propose an alternative frame based on natural law that does not presuppose individualism. I meant to bring up this concept long ago on my blog but never had a fitting chance. Basically, I want to be able to say that hierarchies are totally natural and good, that structural inequality is the state of nature and the will of God, and it’s foolish, evil, and destructive to countervene this natural order that you do not exist as an individual without. Almost everybody has forgotten about it, but in opposition to the social contract theory and individualism, I (re)introduce the Great Chain of Being. This is a medieval concept that fell out of use right around the accession of James I, and if you read this book, that’s not a coincidence. Basically, the entirety of creation is imagined as a vast physical and spiritual hierarchy, from rocks to bacteria up to animals, humans, and God at the top. Your soul can be saved, yes, and shoot up to the top of the chain to hang with God, but He did not make you equal on this Earth, oh no. The human social hierarchy is as much a part of the chain as a wolf eating a deer and the deer grazing on leaves. Sounds unfair? Live with it. That meatbag you call your body ain’t so important in the long run.

Similar to the idea of “you can’t fight GNON”, trying to upset the natural order has disasterous unintended consequences because everything is connected. The Great Chain of Being is why storms rage and horses go mad when Macbeth murders his king, why in Arthurian myth the land becomes waste and infertile when the king is impotent and sinful, and so forth. We don’t need to go so far as to say that the rocks and trees will tremble when you upset the natural order of human society, but it’s not super off the mark either. When communists overthrow the natural order, guess what? Famine and civil war stalk the earth. You really do end up with a blasted wasteland. When Louis disempowers his aristocrats, the King loses his head, and the people starve. When the state removes the father’s authority over his family, sons disobey their parents, men act like women, and wives rebel against their husbands. As a spiritual heuristic, the GCoB works, and if you go into the power mechanisms behind it, also checks out. We can thus avoid social contract theory and the notion of individualism through teleological natural law in this manner. Though I will say that the fallacy of the social contract only applies to the individual’s relation to society at large. What is the Saxon’s king’s ring-gift but a kind of willful contract creating a state? I will use the word covenant to refer to entirely legitimate promises or contracts between men or institutions of men, so that we can differentiate between this function and the “social contract” that acts as the basis of modernist political theory.

If this sounds like Divine Right rehashed, let me explain the difference. The “divine right” absolutism that Bond rails against as being centered on social contract theory has its driving telos focused downwards. God gives the King power to “ensure the rights of Man”. This unilateral telos is used precisely as Bond describes in a socially destructive Jouvenelian power game. With a GCoB understanding of the purpose of society, the telos of a peasant is different from the telos of a lord and the telos of the King; and when I say this, I speak not of individual people but of the social roles themselves, classes which take on the status of an entity in the sense of Theseus’ ship; it does not matter particularly who fills the shoes of the King that makes his role legitimate, nor do the individuals constituting the agricultural, merchant, warrior, or artisanal roles. This is tied to the concept of the “sacred vocation” which is both anti-individualist and anti-collectivist. The vocation shapes the individual and “makes” him to a far greater degree than the individual can influence the vocation; even in mastery and transcendence of a vocation, the individual can merely update the tradition for those following him. Thus the telos of every separate class entity is multidirectional, featuring both an upward purpose toward God and a massive web of particularistic and diverse obligations and rights (not in the humanistic sense but as the reverse of an obligation; something due to you) that extend in every direction in society. As a personal aside, this makes a society incredibly interesting, culturally rich, and aesthetic, but this is slightly besides the point.

I am not entirely a fan of Bond’s chapter on economics and corporations: Bond’s total rejection of social contract theory, which is entirely solid in the case of status hierarchies and participation in society, breaks down a little bit when it comes to the economic realm. His total rejection of the private/public duality (to him, everything is public) prevents him from understanding that rational or semirational covenants do rule a lot of human interaction that doesn’t directly bear on the social order. He is correct when he says that the state is not a creation of the private world, not a result of the spontaneous and rational decisions of individuals as modernity would claim. But I do not entirely reject the public/private duality. If anything, the causality is reversed and it is the private world which exists and has its form as a result of the existence and character of the state. Primitive man does not have a private realm whatsoever; it is clear that the private is contingent on the security and peace provided by Power, but that does not mean that Power should be interfering with the private realm. When Power tries to micromanage the private realm, to stick its nose behind every closed door, you get serious and disastrous effects. Again, though, he doesn’t go quite that far.

It seems that Bond loves his dichotomies; it’s hard for him to not think in black-and-white. He is correct that a corporation, or, more generally, any institution, requires the formal approval or at least the apathy of Power in order to be treated as a distinct entity. But this does not mean that there is no such thing as private life, as he seems to imply, nor does it mean that corporations are necessarily an arm of the State. He comes very close to alignment with the Jimian position, which I’ve been feeling more affinity towards, that capital does not rule, and cannot rule. Which does not preclude capital as attack dog for a priestly or militant ruling class. However, it comes off to me as slightly disingenuous to lump the university system and the medieval guild into the same category as the charter corporation and the modern publicly traded corporation. In the sense that they are all bodies (hence the name, corpus) of individuals constituting an entity with some of the powers and rights of personhood, fine. But in ignoring the class divisions, not in a Marxist sense but in the sense that some of these entities exercise a priestly role and some a merchant purpose, you get poor logic such as reasoning that because NGOs and Universities exercise political power, and NGOs and Universities are corporations, that all corporations are subsidiaries of political power. The difference is that an NGO can rule, a University can rule, but Goldman-Sachs cannot rule. Goldman-Sachs does not force the government to do anything; rather, Goldman-Sachs was forced by the government to make risky unprofitable loans to dumb minorities who stood no chance of paying them back.

He dips into generative anthropology, which is necessary to attempt to refute social contract theory, since where did Power centers come from if not originally by the consensual clustering of individuals? However, his concept of the “magical origins of power” is flawed. He entertains the idea that primitive man is ruled by spiritual forces external to even the most powerful, and thus by those who interpret the will of the spirits. But how is that different exactly than what we have now? Every society has an external in its hierarchy higher than the King, High Priest, etc. This is not exclusive to primitive peoples and does not represent a radically different social order. Priest rule lies in interpreting the will of this external power and warrior rule is to rule as its avatar (hero rule). And power is downstream of culture which is downstream of power. This has always been true: the sacrificial center of primitive Man is not appropriated by tribal chiefs but originally created by them. Man has a religious instinct, but without leadership to codify man’s relation to the divine, it does not express itself in a coherent manner. I’m actually somewhat surprised that he breaks from Jouvenelian analysis for the very origins; if all ideas follow from Power to serve a political function, how was it that primitive tribes of Man had “sacrificial centers” that were later appropriated by authorities?

Bond does not address the WQ and female emancipation other than to point out that feminism is bioleninism, that women are clients used by the centralizing structure to expand its power. Well duh, this is a work on political structure and not social issues. But I have come to believe that a sex war is being constantly fought just as the Jouvenelian conflict is constantly in motion. The feminism of Rome did not follow a standard Jouvenelian model in which theoretically oppressed women were the clients; even at its height, only a few property-owning women could participate. They weren’t a vote bank, nor was their “freedom and equality” an excuse to increase centralizing power, as both the Augustan and Christian reforms concerning women rolled back their liberties as a Jouvenelian play for the status of fathers and husbands.

The sex war, in fact, resembles a reverse Jouvenelianism in which the female as symbol is the patron and lower-status men her clients. (feminism is not alpha males freeing up women to fuck; female liberation has very little to offer Genghis Khan or similar men) Bear with me here. Women cannot physically coerce men, thus must gain male allies to enforce female power on male society. This mechanism operates through superstition, by attributing sacred powers to women and then enlisting men to either gain the benefits of these sacred powers or avoid magical punishment. Women as angelic symbols of purity and virtue in the Victorian era led to opening the door for greater liberties for women, in which case we got a lot of sluts, a lot more prostitutes, and a lot of bastard children being dumped on the doorsteps of Victorian orphanages, said orphanages never being a necessity a generation before.

Indeed we see plenty of past societies playing the game of Jouvenel without touching on women at all as a potential client base, or even by promising the subjection of women to lower-status men who had trouble keeping them in line. It seems to me that the struggle between male power and female power is orthogonal to the Jouvenelian structure and just as likely to cause ruin to a civilization if left unchecked. Men are constantly tempted to attribute sacred powers to women; at first a special class of priestesses or witches, and if left unchecked, women at large, which ruins fertility and undermines male cooperation and male religion, founded as it is on the divine order supplied by the Logos.

As a last aside, Bond’s followers already know why the nominal-Right cuckservative in US today is ineffective, but the normie who happens to pick up his book does not. I would favor an expansion of the section that describes the conservative “resistance” to centralization, with a more detailed argument as to why and how the controlled opposition of the Republican party is ineffectual and token.

Bond also goes into great detail explaining how the elite does not know that it is an elite; that the Cathedral itself is unaware that it is acting as a government and accelerating the centralizing force of states. I will add that the blissful unawareness of the Cathedral that it is engaging in cynical patronage and HLvM politics is an adaptive phenomenon. The government that does not know that it is a government is far harder to attack, and the sincere feeling of the de-facto ruler that he is actually and truly oppressed, that he is the underdog, causes him to take faster and more severe action against his phantom opponents than the one who knows he is in charge. Thus we get the holiness spiral, as the true-believing radical outmaneuvers the cynical Machiavellian.

I do not know if Bond has read Spengler or not, but Spengler preceded Jouvenel in laying bare the historical centralization processes that seem to occur in every great civilization. Spengler sees them as a natural historical phenomenon, something which captures Bond’s interest if only indirectly, for he at one point is slightly puzzled at how neither the philosopher nor the man using him seems to be aware that they are enacting the Jouvenelian dynamic. They seem to do so as a matter of destiny; and Spengler sees this in terms of actual Destiny. The City, not as entity but as physical and cultural center of power, is constantly hungry for blood and for minds. It sucks in the generative life-force of the countryside and transfigures it into the finished products of the “Become”: art, philosophy, theology, architecture, etc. In the same vein, it undermines the peasant sangre-et-terre values and modes of life that are manifest in both the peasant and the landed noble: barter is replaced by first coinage and then abstract finance, the peasant is replaced by the worker, the elite cavalry by the standing infantry, the aristocracy and its lower officers by centralized bureaucracy.

Culturally and politically, the end of this centralization is in fact the end of culture and of political power; summon to mind the terrible and chilling image of the man who could only be described as a primitive living in the ruins of Rome after the Fall; one of every five cave-houses occupied, cyclopean ruins that he has no conception of how to build or repair. It is hard to consider this fact and not view the history of a civilization as the acting-out of an inescapable destiny; it is not that the will of man has no influence, but that the will of Man is of a certain nature and quality which drives these developments. Just as a living being has a will-to-life, and we can describe its actions as such irrespective of its level of sentience, Death is also built into it on a genetic level.

I alluded to an anti-Jouvenelian structure in the GCoB section of this essay, which has turned out far longer than I planned, but it is also true that Jouvenelian power games defeated this system. (I will assert that it lasted far longer against them than most, that a Jouvenelian spiral into oriental despotism or female-power tribalism seems to be the prevailing norm) Moreover, the physical conditions of medieval society are quite different from today, so a new social order that embodies harmony with the GCoB, in a “multidirectional tapestry of duties, rights, and obligations” will look quite different from feudalism and manorialism, but the basic essences of these class entities will remain more or less the same because men and the roles men can fill remain more or less the same. This type of society forms out of the sheer necessity of brutal anarchic warfare, conditions in which defection is not adaptive to survival

in either a political or reproductive sense. We saw the beginnings of this in Rhodesia, though that good nation could not resist when it fell under the Enemy’s Sauronic eye and its full military might.

Thus the most pertinent split on the Right in my eyes (and I mean of course the actual Right) is the conflict over whether we ride the Jouvenelian tiger to enact a centralized Caesarist or Augustan Restoration, or if the only Restoration possible resembles the Carolingian, that only after collapse and decay will some barbarian aspire to the glories of the past and plant the seeds for surpassing it. I waver on this myself. If Jouvenelian, we need a patron. Caesarism is coming to the West, as the last stage before a primitive collapse, and we will need to make ourselves visible and amenable to Caesar, so that we may get more than a dictator who merely arrests the decline for a while. I see no reason why we should not do this even if we see the necessity of collapse; a real Restoration, even if a longshot, would be vastly preferable to genocidal civil war and a potentially long Dark Age.

However, I would keep Rhodesia in the back of my mind. The West’s nukes likely don’t work anymore; Navy ships staffed by brown janissaries can hardly be sailed in a straight line without crashing into something. In a world where the Cathedral’s military arm is weak and degenerate, which will not take more than a generation of decline from today, it’d only take a few hundred Rightists and a boat to knock over some brown tropical shithole and plant the seeds for future glories. This should be considered a bitter victory; it would mean most of our people, most of the West, will be killed and likely eaten in the fashion of Haiti.

Anyway, do I recommend you getting this book when it comes out? Hell yeah. I might have some pet disagreements with Bond but this is still a very important book; just look at all the thought and interpretation it just inspired in me. Put it on your bookshelf, lend it to your friends, let your sons read it when they’re old and smart enough.

P.S. I’m getting F*cebook as a referrer now. I don’t know which of you guys has the meteoric balls to be linking me on there but dude, not sure that’s wise. We should all be presenting plausibly deniable social normality if not exceptionality.

P.P.S. MMB, thanks for reaching out to me. Your email address doesn’t work or I would have responded in kind. Sadly I live too far away from you to forge a friendship, and you live too far from any of my boys I could put you in touch with. Also I didn’t find my faith in a Church but in the depths of depravity. Not that you shouldn’t go to church, and you definitely should not debase yourself to realize the existence of the Devil; your future kids will have faith even if you never do.

*To clarify, Louis XIV was the king who instituted the reforms, though the actual king in 1750 was XV and the one who got guillotined was XVI