(worth repeating)

The central proposition of neo-reaction is that the enlightenment was dangerously optimistic about humans, human nature, and the state; and that as a consequence, society is just as religious as ever it was, with an official state religion of progressivism: the promise of an aristocracy of everyone. It is another “good-news” religion, telling us what we wish to hear, but about this world instead of the next.

Instead of the church teaching supernatural analogy, we have academia, public intellectuals and the state all preaching the new religion of progressivism. And this new religion, is an evil religion: pseudoscientific rather than supernatural, irrational rather than logical, dishonest rather than allegorical, consumptive and destructive rather than accumulative, dysgenic rather than evolutionary, and suicidal rather than exceptional.

And so, western philosophy didn’t go wrong four years ago, or ten years ago, or eighty years ago – but it went fundamentally and terribly wrong over three centuries ago, with the enlightenment.

We had already evolved the best form of government yet devised: a market for production of private goods and services, and a house for each of the classes to produce common goods and services we cannot produce in the market alone.

And our only significant error was to fail to grasp that the church: the representative of the common people, served as one of those houses of government, and should not have been separate from the other two: the long term interests of the martial land owners, the medium term interests of entrepreneurial banking, production and trade. Instead, we handed the aristocracy and commerce to the new church: the academy and its priesthood the public intellectuals. America is ruled by a theocracy.

The central problem of any post-hunter-gatherer society, engaged in production, is to ensure that the fecundity of the unproductive does not eradicate the increases in productivity of the creative – but that those increases are accumulated as a competitive advantage against the fecundity of not only our own relations, but of those who would replace us. Otherwise all innovation is translated into population expansion rather than advancement. Northern european civilization succeeded faster than all others, in no small part because it concentrated reproduction in its upper classes, not in expanding the burden of its lower classes.

Neo-reaction then, is an articulate and accurate criticism of the enlightenment and its evidentiary failure culminating in the late 20th century – including the rejection of the ideology by the adoption of totalitarian consumer capitalism everywhere other than the west. Propertarianism, including Aristocratic Egalitarianism, Testimonial Truth and Operationalism provide the logical and institutional solution to the problem of cooperation among competing interests we call ‘politics’, that the Enlightenment, and Neo-Reaction did not.