The Dark Enlightenment

by Nick Land

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.
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.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Theory, Essays, Society, Sociology

152 pages, Paperback

First published March 2, 2012

About the author

Land was a lecturer in Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick from 1987 until his resignation in 1998.
At Warwick, he and Sadie Plant co-founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), an interdisciplinary research group described by philosopher Graham Harman as "a diverse group of thinkers who experimented in conceptual production by welding together a wide variety of sources: futurism, technoscience, philosophy, mysticism, numerology, complexity theory, and science fiction, among others".
During his time at Warwick, Land participated in Virtual Futures, a series of cyber-culture conferences. Virtual Futures 96 was advertised as “an anti-disciplinary event” and “a conference in the post-humanities”. One session involved Nick Land “lying on the ground, croaking into a mic”, recalls Robin Mackay, while Mackay played jungle records in the background."

In 1992, he published The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism. Land published an abundance of shorter texts, many in the 1990s during his time with the CCRU. The majority of these articles were compiled in the retrospective collection Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, published in 2011.

Land taught at the New Centre for Research & Practice until March 2017,

One of Land's celebrated concepts is "hyperstition," a portmanteau of "superstition" and "hyper" that describes the action of successful ideas in the arena of culture. Hyperstitions are ideas that, once "downloaded" into the cultural mainframe, engender apocalyptic positive feedback cycles. Hyperstitions – by their very existence as ideas – function causally to bring about their own reality. Nick Land describes hyperstition as "the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies".

Reviews

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 2 out of 5]

The most concise articulation of Nick Land's shift to the right. Here you will encounter little or no Deleuze and Guatarri but instead classical liberalism, Curtis Yarvin and Social Darwinism. There's an impression of a once formidable concept generating machine starting to crank out weird, vaguely interesting noises. This essay lays bare Land's flirtations with political realism in the tradition of Hobbes and Schmitt, race realism, eugenics and transhumanism.

Mencius Moldbug is the pen name of Curtis Yarvin, part time silicon valley computer scientist and founder of decentralized computing platform Urbit and full time neoreactionary who advocates for a restoration of medieval style city states. His self released book Patchwork became an urtext foe the neoreaction movement. As the title suggests, Moldbug imagines a world populated by a montage of community-states where sovereignty will be kept in check form devouring the people by means of its unequivocal transubstantiation into joint-stock corporation. His solution to the totalitalizing ambition of the classical Leviathan is to multiply the Leviathans and push to extreme the logic of lobbying and vote purchase of interest groups in a not-so-progressive democracy. This radical idea of patchwork is the object of Nick Land’s essay.

In the essay, Land praises Moldbug for recognizing the Hobbesian stakes at hand, and for raising the possibility of an exit. Like Moldbug, he believes that democracy is not simply doomed to collapse, but is “doom itself”. Therefore we must turn the clock back on Enlightenment. Democracy encourages private debauchery to the point of systematic plunder and auto-cannibalization. Dark Enlightenment “[...] conceives the dynamics of democratization as fundamentally degenerative: systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption” says Land. In his view, the political agent(s) have the incentive to spoil what they cannot possibly steal, lest the resources be captured by the opponent and then utilized against them. But what is the alternative to progressive democracy?

Since the electorate is bought off anyway and the organs of communication and mass media, essential for the communicative rationality of democracy are paid for by special interest groups, Moldbug suggests we should bring these disavowed realist mechanisms out into the open by means of “formalizing” sovereignty. This entails the mapping of the whole terrain of shareholders, residents and businesses--“[...] the entire social landscape of political bribery (‘lobbying’) is exactly mapped, and the administrative, legislative, judicial, media, and academic privileges accessed by such bribes are converted into fungible shares”. Politics, purportedly a rule of and by the people that only conceals beneath its veneer of respectable ideals a dark current of social exchanges (favoritism, bribery etc) has been neutralized now that residents can pay their sovereign tax and not bother with the governing process which will be carried out by actual rulers anyways. Voice or politics is sacrificed at the altar of exit. At least on a theoretical level, this rings the death knell of politics, or specifically, a kind of mass political mobilization from which fascism draws its energy.

Dark Enlightenment is also recognizably anti-egalitarian. “The Cathedral”, by which both Land and Moldbug interpret as a broad Left cultural-ideological consensus on a global scale lashes out at anyone who dares to deviate from the egalitarian ideological line. That all human beings are born equal and that the differences can be attributed solely to cultural upbringing is, in Land’s opinion, a statement of ideology and not strictly of fact. He writes, “The central dogma of the Cathedral has been formalized as the Standard Social Scientific Model (SSSM) or blank slate theory”. But against the false choice between biological determinism, so valorized by the right, and social constructivism championed by the left, or at least as Land sees it, he opts for the third option--techno-science. According to Nick Land, we are fast approaching a bionic horizon beyond which population converges with its technics. What our being is, simply becomes an expression of what we can make happen. There is no doubt a certain dystopian ring to this idea. It comes with a hefty price tag. The ultra-wealthy will enjoy privileged access to the ripe fruits of genetic engineering and cybernetic biohacking while the rest of the human spawn will be left to fight for low-tech scraps. However, Land is not horrified by this prospect. In a sense, he believes this is quasi teleology being traced by the existing process of techno-capitalism independent of human intentionality, collective or otherwise.

While Nick Land performs a very generous and sympathetic reading of Moldbug’s essay, his vision of the future is not exhausted by the image of hundreds and thousands of sovereign joint-stock corporations. Yet they do come terrifyingly close. Any would-be ethno-nationalist or alt-righter would not be averse to the idea of the patchwork as the future of geopolitics. After all, there is nothing theoretically contradictory about sovereign joint-stock corporations building their clientele along the racial or ethnic lines. However, Land’s commitment to the impersonal process of techno-capitalism, which he recognizes as the only harbinger of absolute horizontality, means he has to instrumentalize the patchwork of Moldbug as a means to something even more fluid, fragmentative, and experimental. For example, he dismisses the alt right as “predictable (and predicted) development of mass democracy, as it enters its collapse-phase”. Accordingly, Land can only affirm the patchwork to the extent that it opens up opportunities for schizotrategic insurgencies and currents that are currently inhibited by the Cathedral to percolate up. Moldbug substitutes the Cathedral with the Hobbesian-Schmittian consensus that empty place of sovereign can only ever be displaced, not annihilated. For Land, it is apolitical indeed, but it does not go far enough from the point of view of absolute deterritorialization...

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

8.5/10.

What happens when you take an academic from the most convoluted and recondite area of philosophy, the continental vein, inflict him with a disgust for modernity, show him the relevant statistics of HBD, and add in some Hoppean reasoning against democracy? A fun read! — certainly not the simplest or best-conveyed read, but an entertaining one nonetheless.

Nick Land sees Universalism in relation to race as the enforced religion since ~1965. Its roots trace back to English dissenting Protestantism, such as the Levellers and the Puritans. Through their exodus to New England, their independence in the revolutionary war, their redefinition of "freedom" as state-enforced equality in the War for Southern Independence (the Puritans call it the Civil War), and the United States global ascendency after the world wars, this egalitarian tradition has infected the world with the mind virus of Universalism.

This new religion has many theological features. Original sin is, of course, slavery (and segregation and lynching), which we have to repent for every day for our lives. However, the Providence of history is on our side, as we march towards Equality, Multiculturalism, and Democracy (just close your eyes to the financial influences!). We are in an Eternal Postmillennial Struggle to rid our society of the evil remnants of the original sin — that is, of White Supremacy.

Who is the devil? Why, it is Hitler! If you assert democracy is bad — Hitler! Is race biological? — Hitler! Do you want to slow down immigration, or even stop it? — Hitler! Do you want to increase the size of the social welfare state? — Stalin! (Oops)

See, even though Communism killed around 100 million people in the 20th century, a large percentage of that number in peacetime — which is most assuredly many times the number of people killed by Hitler — Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot are not regularly mentioned in the media. They certainly do not appear often to the masses as demons in disguise, and we even have Communist parties throughout our colleges. The other side of the political spectrum need not apply.

Let's continue with the religion of Universalism. If you pronounce to the public that Universalism is not true, then a ritual witch hunt begins. Some examples of witch hunt victims include Charles Murray, John Derbyshire, William Shockley, Peter Brimelow, James Watson, and JP Rushton. Penalties usually include ritual humiliation, mass hysteria, and pronouncements about witches (racists) hiding in the darkness everywhere.

The only people who break out of this religion of Universalism are generally the mildly autistic, socially rough people. They love statistics and they pronounce them on everyone. They make it clear that group differences need not apply to the individual case. But most people do not have disembodied statistical minds, so they therefore immediately cry "heretic!" and, just like that, your livelihood is over. And because the new religion has gone so far, reaching its tentacles into all of the major institutions of society, most people cannot take your statistics without repelling in shock. Their natural way of perception — heuristics — combined with their imbibed religion immediately tells them that you are morally condemnable.

And in fact you may be. Your disembodied mind may have so many statistics, facts, and figures that you could win a Socratic debate, but you cannot go up to a normal human being and convince them that the end is nigh. In fact, European identitarianism may be self-destructive. Europeans are much higher than other populations in individualism which applies to morality, business, and politics. This presumably evolved because of the strict regulations against inbreeding regulated by the Catholic Church, thereby creating a distinct Western psychology of individualism because of the lack of close genetic relatives having children. The individualism may go back even further to the Goths (see MacDonald 2020), but the point is that it is there. Given this individualism, any European identitarian state will naturally tend towards universalism, heterogenous immigration, and accepting different cultures and ethnicities. The only way such a state could feasibly be created is in a massive civilizational collapse, thereby creating a bottleneck for only the ethnocentric and hardy to survive (computer simulations show that the ethnocentric group always wins as opposed to altruistic groups).

Given the incentives of democracy, it appears that we are heading speedily towards such a collapse. Democracy makes people more short-sighted because its leaders retain the current use-value of the country, but have no incentive to maximize its long-term value due to them not owning it (unlike, say, monarchy or a shareholder state). In other words, elected officials will receive no loss if they destroy their country in 50 or 100 years times. This lack of long-term consequences then leads to a massive plundering led by the elected officials in an attempt to attract voters. As can clearly be seen, most democratic politics consists in pulling together some interest group and confiscating the goods of everyone else for a special benefit. This then decreases the incentives to work and save capital because of the confiscation and uncertainty of increased future confiscation, thereby destroying civilization (which equals accumulation of capital goods which equals delayed time preferences). Government has not decreased in the US for a long time — taxes were higher by the end of Reagan's two terms than at the start!

Clearly the conservative movement has failed. It cannot fight against the Universalist religion. Its new saint is MLK (although people of his race don't seem to vote Republican . . .). MLK did not write his speeches, was a Marxist, had lots of sex with prostitutes (even the night before he was shot), and plagiarized around 33% of his doctoral dissertation. Now that's a moral family man! Furthermore, the Right keeps moving to the middle of the political spectrum, and the political spectrum keeps moving left. The total castration of the Conservative movement can been seen in the opposite coverage of race: Leftists rejoice in the castigation of "white supremacists" and have now labeled every fair skinned person as essentially innately evil; whereas the Right is scared shitless to mention interracial crime, HBD, and differential crime rates — if one of them does mention it, they are kicked out of Conservative Inc. (e.g. Derbyshire). In short: Conservatives keep apologizing, and Liberals keep biting. In fact, any free market policy can be attacked by Liberals because it will almost certainly create racial disparities in outcomes. These can then be agitated against in the Eternal Struggle to bring about the Egalitarian Millennium.

------------------

So what is the solution? Land thinks the only reasonable possibility to the Democratic and Universalist viruses is secession. But even that will likely fail (if even feasible — unlikely), as explained above. But after reading this book, I have reached the last stage of grief which is acceptance. I see my role as not directing the evolution of the species or subspecies. I love to learn and I certainly do have genetic interests. But from the look of it, there will be a storm before the calm. And even that ending calm is unpredictable. To constantly fret about the fate of my people seems like never-ending anger — which destroys its holder much more than its object.

The best we can do is to make refuges for our culture and values in good communities. Good communities can be found in the countryside, which is also where you will have the ability to survive when the collapse comes. I believe better communities can also be found outside the United States, which is certainly much more rocky than European and especially Eastern European countries. With a proper environment, you should have a family and bring forth new life into this world. Select your mate carefully and hold tight to them throughout the storm. Life is short, and the best hope we have to prolong ourselves and our kin is via procreation.

The macro trends and futurology is best left up to God, or Fate if you prefer. We must do the best we can in this life as individuals, but not purely for our individual desires. The groupish morality is best acted upon by having a family, not by socially and politically immolating yourself in the fire of Universalist heresy. Learning can be pursued for those who have a thirst for knowledge, but it must be combined with action. When you are involved in life, time goes by faster in the challenge of improving your situation. Gathering resources for provision will be a much better use of time that subsuming yourself in a deluge of woe. "Whether our people will be here 1000 years from now, I do not know. But I should not become morbid about it, for I will do my best to make my individual contribution to my group" — this should be our motto.

[Maxwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you wrote off The Dark Enlightenment because you’ve read @outsideness and thought “What a fucking idiot”, then you may want to look again. This essay is surprisingly readable, insightful and possibly even useful--especially surprising considering that the panoply of Nick Land’s absolutely risible opinions confer on this text.

It’s no secret to anyone that liberal democracy has run out of gas. Nick Land (accurately) portrays the pessimistic malaise of the ho-hum neoliberal subject,
‘disillusioned acceptance of relentless civilizational deterioration, and with the associated intellectual apprehension of capitalism as an unappetizing but ineliminable default social arrangement, which remains after all catastrophic or merely impractical alternatives have been discarded. The market economy, on this understanding, is no more than a spontaneous survival strategy that stitches itself together amidst the ruins of a politically devastated world. Things will probably just get worse forever. So it goes.’
Almost everyone I know has disclosed to me, often in secret, feelings analogous to this. Including more than a few Marxists.

We all have an implausible fantasies for how 21st century politics, these days the hopeless bureaucratization of a mephitic deluge, might be might be cured. The big rock candy mountain in question is imported from Curtis Yarvin, better known by his nom de plume (ugh) ‘Mencius Moldbug’; the idea is Neocameralism, in short, ‘a business which owns a country’. Neocameralism is puscinamillous cryptofascism--the twist being, I guess, that it's not that cryptic about it. This is the essence of its benighted appeal; The Dark Enlightenment is a sympathetic account of the execrable conditions in modernity which warmly embraces a taboo solution--an inegalitarian but benevolent corporatized tyranny--to bring global culture back to health.

This is worth reading to understand, in its own words, the groundswell of open fascism creeping into your neighborhood one cloven hoof at a time. To this end, I found that The Dark Enlightenment was a good companion to Anti-Oedipus’ discourse on tyranny & domination as a coding of desire--as the good book says, ”the masses desired fascism”. Including Nick Land unfortunately. It’s a well written samizdat summary if nothing else as Land remains a gifted stylist. I just wish he were applying his talents elsewhere--’neocameralism’ doesn’t deserve him.

[Honk Honkerson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This should be starter reading for anyone interested in understanding the counter progressive movement. It's somewhat verbose but it gets the point across very well. Here's a quote from his bloc:

As liberal decency has severed itself from intellectual integrity, and exiled harsh truths, these truths have found new allies, and become considerably harsher. The outcome is mechanically, and monotonously, predictable. Every liberal democratic ‘cause war’ strengthens and feralizes what it fights. The war on poverty creates a chronically dysfunctional underclass. The war on drugs creates crystallized super-drugs and mega-mafias. Guess what? The war on political incorrectness creates data-empowered, web-coordinated, paranoid and poly-conspiratorial werewolves, superbly positioned to take advantage of liberal democracy’s impending rendezvous with ruinous reality, and to then play their part in the unleashing of unpleasantnesses that are scarcely imaginable (except by disturbing historical analogy). When a sane, pragmatic, and fact-based negotiation of human differences is forbidden by ideological fiat, the alternative is not a reign of perpetual peace, but a festering of increasingly self-conscious and militantly defiant thoughtcrime, nourished by publicly unavowable realities, and energized by powerful, atavistic, and palpably dissident mythologies. That’s obvious, on the ‘Net.

The restoration is will not be televized.

[Otto Lehto · Rating 3 out of 5]

Land is a capable philosopher who suffers from an incurable "bad boy syndrome." He is trying a bit too hard to undermine conventional morality. We get it, you are a bad boy. This essay is a bizarre mix of provocative sociological analysis in the tradition of Nietzsche and Bataille with intolerable neo-reactionary obscurantism. Most people are justifiably turned off by Land's obscene, almost sexual flirtation with the anti-democratic politics of Hoppe and Moldbug. If read as provocation, it is edgy and exciting. If read as a serious call for action, it is rather disturbing and disgusting. In either case, it is not exactly persuasive (thankfully). Nonetheless, I think Land is worth reading for serious democrats and progressives for his "canary in the coal mine" and "court jester" privileges. What do I mean by this? Well, Land has placed himself so far outside the realm of acceptable politics and morality that, like a court jester, he manages to say some things that, while completely disproportionate and outrageous, are worth saying. In this regard, Land is a worthy successor (if there can be such) to the reactionary and fascist intelligentsia of the past centuries, including Nietzsche, Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, Gabriele D'Annunzio, and Julius Evola.

The worst part of the essay is undoubtedly his hideous flirtation with the "race realism" of white power and alt-right reactionaries. These are mostly cringe inducing and take up disproportionate space. Land probably thinks that he has hit upon some Archimedean point of the liberal democratic order but nothing that he says about race or immigration is particularly new or interesting. The best parts, on the other hand, are his provocative observations about the inherent corruption of democratic politics. Too bad Land relies heavily on bland thinkers like Hoppe and Moldbug. Similar ideas have been expressed in a more nuanced and intricate way by better political scientists.

The contents of the book would merit only two stars in an environment where anti-democratic theories were openly debated in the public space. But they are not. The recent progressive obsession with deplatforming has crippled public discourse and reduced the diversity of academic and philosophical research. The book gets a third star for interrogating and questioning our unquestionable assumptions. It is unfortunate that bad and dangerous ideas benefit from the "halo effect" and that people who espouse them automatically become intellectual "martyrs" supposedly oppressed by the system. But it is less unfortunate than the impoverishment of our intellectual discourse around these issues. We need marginal thinkers who write outside the mainstream to strengthen our resolve to improve the popularity of progressive democratic politics. If we fail to take seriously the dissatisfaction with liberal democracy, I fear the Trump-Brexit phenomenon may escalate and ultimately bring about the historical downfall of liberal democratic politics.

[Vagabond of Letters, DLitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the best book I've read on Neoreaction (discounting Moldbug's chapters on the Cathedral from 'Open Letter'), which is saying something since this book issues from the erratic pen and generally deluded mind of Warwickian Nick Land, cyberneticist and AGInsanity theorist extraordinaire. Apparently he had a right-wing phase.

[Nils · Rating 1 out of 5]

A limit case example of what Hirschman described in “The rhetoric of reaction” as “the argument of perversity,” namely any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy. There’s not much more to Land’s argument than that, except that he ascribes such perversity only to social and political efforts at improvement, not to economic ones, and provides a risible genealogy of the rise of liberalism that basic says everything went wrong starting with the Reformation, and that the evangelicals have won the global culture war.

The book (originally a set of blogposts) revolves around two key episodes in the “racial moment” of 2012, namely the festival of outraged sententiousness that attended to George Zimmerman’s slaying of Trayvon Martin, on the one hand, and the ex-communication of John Derbyshire for his public pronouncement (in response to the Martin case) of the racially inverted “talk” he gave his children (that is, to avoid black people), on the other. The first episode would give birth to BLM, the latter to the rise of the New Right’s insistence on “race realism” — of which Land would emerge as perhaps the most articulate spokesperson.

As such, the book is an instructive read as a symptom of where the New Right is headed ideologically, especially as the polycrisis deepens. Land is quite naked in his racial supremecism, even as he admits that these arguments are “ugly” (40). And he gives several chapter-length blowjobs to Curtis Yarwin’s anti-democratic arguments in favor of Hobbesian authoritarianism. He even tosses in a snarky critique of the demonization of Hitler as little more than “a religious revelation, of inverted, yet structurally familiar, Abrahamic type.” (43)

[Old Dog Diogenes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m a bit late to the party as I stumbled across the Neo-reactionary movement only last year. Being that the title of this work has come to define the movement as a whole this book is a pretty great manifesto of Neo-reactionary concepts. Many of the ideas in this book and in the movement in general are extremely compelling, although flawed. Especially in their application and resolve. Overall, i enjoyed it, and I think it is well worth reading, even if the truth is to be seen through a glass darkly.

[Owlseyes · Rating 4 out of 5]

"He [Nick Land] would tell lecture audiences, “I work in the field of The Collapse of Western Civilisation Studies. (...)
In 2013, Land wrote a long online essay about the movement, titled with typical theatricality “The Dark Enlightenment”, which has become widely seen as one of neoreraction’s founding documents. Land argues now that neoreaction, like Trump and Brexit, is something that accelerationists should support, in order to hasten the end of the status quo."

in: https://www.theguardian.com/world/201...

A long critical tour, from politics into racism and well beyond into the future. A new man, man-created, in sight? Somehow Nietzschean.

P.S. Javier Milei as a case of "authoritarian capitalism" is just one hypothesis. Mine. We'll see.

[Lucas · Rating 1 out of 5]

:clown: :clown::clown:

[Count Gravlax · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Mckinney county, Texas, conservatives that are tired to live in mainly liberal areas can hire conservative real state companies, created to serve the specific interests of conservative clients. These clients can be assured that they will either rent or buy real state from conservative landowners and live amongst conservative neighbors.

Needless to say, this experiment in self-ghettoization was a small-scale success. More people than you'd imagine were anxious to voluntarily put themselves into a homogenous community of people that thinks just like them. Crime is almost non-existent and the streets are clean.

Nick Land and I, we think this little experiment probably has not gone far enough . As free as it is, Mckinney county is still subjected to municipal political battles, as well as State ones and Federal ones. They still have to pay taxes to a dreaded series of powers. The error of McKinney county was to not go full autonomous or, at least, subjected to a federal power whose only responsibility is to guarantee that an archipelago of small autonomous counties don't kill each other.

Of course, any State considers that secession is the biggest crime to be committed against the sanctity of the nation. If you want to make your voice be heard, then you have to participate on the State. Integration is mandatory. Assimilation is the rule. And how one participates in the business of the State? Why, through the democratic process, of course.

However, we quickly see that the democratic process degenerates into tribal conflict. In Lebanon, if you are a Christian, you don't need to, but there's an awful lot of chances you'll be voting to a Christian party and if you're Shia, that you'll be voting to Hezbollah. Africa is an obvious example of political party fidelity based on ethnicity. But it's different in the Western world, right? Well, in the US the Republicans are, overwhelmingly, the party of the WASPs and the Democrats, the party of the Hispanics, Blacks, Jews and everybody else. in the UK, over 80% of the non-White Brits vote Labour. This without mentioning areas like Galicia in Spain, which consistently vote Right wing no matter what, or the Red Quadrilateral in Italy, which consistently votes Left ever since World War II.

"But"one may say "This is due to the fact that the Left is the only that cares about minorities/the Right is the only that cares about disfranchised poor white people". This is true. Nevertheless, political parties must produce frustration to win since the democratic game is a game of victory. One takes power and then plunders the population, favors their preferred social group, extracts as most of the sap of the country as possible. Political parties and their aligned factions (the media, the Academy, the pundits) shake the dialectical conflict between races and social classes. One must at the same time believe that racial discourse is anathema, and that race is the only thing one should talk about. One must believe that white people are the most powerful and intelligent group in the world, and at the same time the most disfranchised and put down. One must see itself as the victor and victim of History.

The consequence of this dispute is entrenching the democratic conflict. Nobody says no to Free stuff, and nobody says no to more power. The classic liberal idea of Liberty as negative liberty becomes the demand of entitlement. This is natural, as since the dispute of democracy becomes fiercer, the risk (or the perceived risk) or being the biggest loser aggravates itself.

Thus tyranny of the masses is not a defect of democracy, it is instilled in democracy itself. Plato knew that, Tocqueville knew that too. Democracy cannot accept the satanic* mantra of Do your own thing because 1) It means that any side will be weakened by the no-show of its allies i.e. "You're playing the game of the Right Wing" and 2) It needs full assimilation under the banner of the State. To a democratic system, every act is political not because it is its essence political but because it denotes affinity to a tribe. Political philosophy claws into every section of life and nothing corrodes anything more than politics. Next thing you know, you're threatening to kill someone over a tweet.

Faced with this milquetoast future, individuals natural instinct is to flee. Nick Land exemplifies this with the phenomenon of White Flight, but I'd rather choose two with less racist connotations: 1) Tribal societies that by mutual common accord shun Western contact2) Communities of overwhelmingly Muslim individuals in Western societies. This second group made a conscientious choice of what they want, much more sentient than almost any western. They've voted with their feet, chosen a better quality of living and a free market system WHILE maintaining their cultural sovereignty. We reject this, we shun this (the idea that not everyone wants to be Borgs i.e. Westerners). Everyone should assimilate. Why don't they assimilate? Even worse, what if they vote ? Without knowing we trapped ourselves - we have to either reject democracy and nation-building or reject the creed of egalitarianism and modernity, and to some people, this is too hard of a choice.

A solution is to do the same: vote with our feet. Create a system of competitive self-sustaining communities of voluntary association under a real social contract one, not a phony one. A constellation of Mckinney counties. Do you want to live in Naziland? Fine, sign this contract saying you won't rent your business to any minority and you're good to go. Do you want to live in Swedenland? Fine, sign this contract saying that we can keep 30% of your salary and in exchange, we offer you free healthcare and the chance of participating in the democratic process. Won't assimilate? We kick you out. Don't like the options? Go make your own. If this sounds too crazy, Somali clans do exactly the same: they voluntarily associate to other sub-clans with the promise of following their rules and under a special qualification, and if they don't like anything they are free to split and form their own sub-clans. Again, we could learn a lot with non-modern societies, but we decided we the best by proxy, and everyone else is just waiting to hear the good news.

There are some things I don't like about Land. He proposes himself a very scientific person, but when someone with more knowledge than he in Genetics proposes that the question of race and dysgenics might not be so clear cut as he desires it to be, he closes his ear and goes "La la I dont wanna know". He is grossly utilitarian, which we should mention, is an extremely Modern view of the world. As any reactionary, he has a natural aversion to criminology or mental health treatment.

Still, at least he's not openly racist like Moldbug (at least he wasn't here). His vision gives much more opportunity to freedom of movement and he is charitable enough to agree that minorities are in the current situation they are not because they dumb, but because of systematic oppression against them put them under a situation where poverty traps are hard to navigate. I believe that, even if he's not the best person around, his final vision ultimately promotes a freer society, one that believes we can transcend power and tribalism and become Super Human. He's Nietzchean as fuck, and I don't like his moral condemnation of Christianity and its values - but if something similar to the Archipelago became true, I could just associate to other individuals that value diversity, freedom, and the belief in the essential dignity of every human individual without having to bust my ass having to worry about every reactionary, tankie, and cleric of the State there is.

* As in following the Left-Hand Path.

[Griffin Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

For reactionary thought I prefer figures such as Burke, de Maistre, or Guénon. However, this seems to be one of the principle texts of the neoreactionary movement (NRx). I found the criticism of progressive mythology to be mostly accurate (at least for those leftists that lack discretion). The solution is wanting, but seems interesting. Writing style is not too high-flung or pretentious, which is nice.

[K · Rating 4 out of 5]

Combine libertarian tendencies of Moldbug with transhumanism and you've got Land's Dark Enlightment. Not really about accelerationism yet, but the springboard.

[Cameron · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Dark Enlightenment is mostly bad history, bad philosophy, and terrifying solutions. But amid the burning rubble of Deleuzian postmodernism that defines Nick Land’s work, there are a handful of genuinely subversive ideas, some of which have become more prescient since the essay's publication in 2016.

For Land, the rationalist liberalism of the Enlightenment was a fundamental mistake. The political systems that emerged from it, particularly democracy, have, in his view, led to increasing social decay. He sees “the dynamics of democratization” as inherently degenerative, systematically amplifying private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they manifest as collective criminality and comprehensive societal corruption.

In this framework, democracy is an unstable form of government run by parasitic politicians, beholden to short-term incentives, who pander to uninformed voters and erode the state by “looting the future through currency debauchment, debt accumulation, growth destruction, and techno-industrial retardation.” This grim picture is further reinforced by a decentralized network of institutions such as media, academia, and the federal bureaucracy that Land refers to as “the Cathedral.” These institutions uphold and enforce a dominant progressive ideology while suppressing dissent and alternative political models. It's hard not to agree with this take however distorted it may appear in Land's version.

Land doesn’t skip the most controversial ideas either. He argues that, contrary to liberal orthodoxy, cultural and racial differences are real, politically salient and ignored by progressive ideology to our collective peril.

His proposed solutions to all these problems, however, are dystopian and terrifying. He advocates for the full acceleration of capitalism to hasten the collapse of democracy and clear the way for a new social order—one ruled by an illiberal, authoritarian regime akin to China’s CCP.

I don’t agree with much of what Land proposes and his writing is exhausting, but it’s hard to deny that his ideas have taken on a new dimension in the wake of Trump’s first and second terms. Our political and social systems are clearly fracturing, and while his answers are too extreme for me to take seriously, the urgency of the questions he raises is hard to ignore.

[Rinstinkt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is sort of a summary of DE written by a trained and eloquent philosopher, with his own spin obviously. Although, ultimately, I think that you should read Moldbug directly to understand the background where we are coming from.

Highlighted quotes:

"In much of the Western world, in stark contrast, barbarism has been normalized. It is considered simply obvious that cities have ‘bad areas’ that are not merely impoverished, but lethally menacing to outsiders and residents alike. Visitors are warned to stay away, whilst locals do their best to transform their homes into fortresses, avoid venturing onto the streets after dark..."

"the principal role of conservatism in modern politics is to be humiliated. That is what a perpetual loyal opposition, or court jester, is for. "

"Does anyone “really believe that people are born equal,” in the way it is understood here? Believe, that is, not only that a formal expectation of equal treatment is a prerequisite for civilized interaction, but that any revealed deviation from substantial equality of outcome is an obvious, unambiguous indication of oppression? [part 4b]"

"To call the belief in substantial human equality a superstition is to insult superstition. It might be unwarranted to believe in leprechauns, but at least the person who holds to such a belief isn’t watching them not exist, for every waking hour of the day. Human inequality, in contrast, and in all of its abundant multiplicity, is constantly on display, as people exhibit their variations in gender, ethnicity, phys..."

"Perhaps the most striking feature, however, was a marked cultural tendency to settle disagreements in space, rather than time, opting for territorial schism, separatism, independence, and flight, in place of revolutionary transformation within an integrated territory. When Anglophones disagree, they have often sought to dissociate in space."

"Global modernization is re-invigorated from a new ethno-geographical core, liberated from the degenerate structures of its Eurocentric predecessor, but no doubt confronting long range trends of an equally mortuary character. This is by far the most encouraging and plausible scenario (from a pro-modernist perspective), and if China remains even approximately on its current track it will be assuredly realized."

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) ‘distributional coalitions’ – electoral majorities mortared together by common interest in a collectively advantageous pattern of theft."

"Union victory determined that the emancipatory sense of liberty would prevail, not only in America, but throughout the world, and the eventual reign of the Cathedral was assured. Nevertheless, the crushing of American’s second war of secession made a mockery of the first. If the institution of slavery de-legitimated a war of independence, what survived of 1776? ..."

[M · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have a strange soft spot for Nick Land. In a way reminiscent of Nietzsche, much of what is here would read like pretty standard (and dull) reactionary bullshit if it came from a less accomplished stylist (or less adroit mind). The truth is, there are some interesting ideas here, even if (and perhaps especially if) they're wrong.

Take Land's reading of Moldbug's Cathedral for instance. It's obviously ridiculous to say that America is a communist country/politics always moves to the left/etc but it is still fun to wonder whether the idea can be workshopped or at least mused on to see if it says something that rings true. Incidentally, if you do this for long enough, you conclude the Cathedral is just Debord's Spectacle for reactionaries.

In the end, I just wasn't that scandalised by this piece. That might be because I've seen plenty of race realist/"HBD" discourse online at this point, but I do wonder if there's something else at play here. Under the surface, Land doesn't seem all that bothered about race/nationalism/"the Dark Enlightment" here. In fact, the "point" of the essay, or at least what Land is truly interested in, is only hinted at towards the end: the Bionic horizon, I.e. The purposeful self-conscious evolution of a small elite who, within a few generations, will have outstripped common humanity as we allegedly have outstripped the apes. After several chapters discussing "racial dialectics", the Cathedral, the libertarian-nationalist pipeline, all he really wanted to do was talk about how humanity ends again. Classic Nick Land.

[Reed Schwartz · Rating 1 out of 5]

Of course this is bad for all of the obvious reasons etc—on top of that, Land fails to predict the very ecumenical white Christian nationalism that motivates alt-right politics now and a lot of the book doesn't make much sense as a result—but one thing this helped me understand: sometimes Peter Thiel will talk about the established paradigms that you aren't allowed to question in the academy (because of woke), and he normally lists climate change and Darwinism. The climate part is probably self-explanatory, but the last three pages of this are dedicated to a critique of Darwinism's failure to account for evolution in the process of evolution (I have no way of validating or falsifying this as the last time I took biology was nine years ago). I've never encountered this in any other RW context so imagine he gets it from here?

[Rhizomal Ennui · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have put off reading dark enlightenment because I knew it would be a boring text. I am sorry Land, you could have written from a south korean feminist exclusionist position and I still wouldnt have cared. None of the ideas here belong to you, they are not articulated well and no topic follows into each other. If you want to read real Nick Land with a reactionary tint read Xenosystems like a normal person instead of this overblown self propelled propaganda.

[Bismark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is collection of essays. This may seem incoherent if you don't know what Libertarianism is.

[Jacob Free · Rating 1 out of 5]

If a guy mentions this to you at a party, mace him and run.

[billyskye · Rating 2 out of 5]

Every liberal democratic ‘cause war’ strengthens and feralizes what it fights. The war on poverty creates a chronically dysfunctional underclass. The war on drugs creates crystallized super-drugs and mega-mafias. Guess what? The war on political incorrectness creates data-empowered, web-coordinated, paranoid and poly-conspiratorial werewolves, superbly positioned to take advantage of liberal democracy’s impending rendezvous with ruinous reality, and to then play their part in the unleashing of unpleasantnesses that are scarcely imaginable.

After nearly a month of hacking and slashing our way through the intellectually xenomorphic thickets of Fanged Noumena, the homies began to wonder how that ‘dangerous alt-right theorist’ we’d heard so much about would emerge out of the celebrations of Amazonian anarchists and the borderline Marxist critiques of capitalism we had encountered. Where was the American Dugin? The supposed svengali behind the svengali to the highest throne in the land? Seeking a better understanding of 2020’s roiling political climate (and, to be honest, trying to catch a moment’s respite from the delirious world of Fanged Noumena), we decided to check out Nick Land’s most notorious work: the samizdat-supreme packaged comprehensively as The Dark Enlightenment.

While I understand that his takes may have become more overtly repulsive over the intervening decade (I’m afraid I’ll have to let others investigate as this is as far down the Landian rabbit hole as I’m wont to go), readers may be surprised to find Land a rather slippery customer in this particular selection. Although he’s more than willing to interact with the ideas and language of contemporary taboo in a way that might elicit discomfort, he’s far less the partisan antagonist than he’s been typically categorized. To be sure, he has little nice to say about the ‘Cathedral’ – his collective term for the institutionalized enforcement of liberal mores through politics, culture, the media, etc – but he does not seem to think very highly of the reactionary clique either. As he ultimately concludes, "Techno-scientific auto-production specifically supplants the fixed and sacralized essence of man as a created being, amidst the greatest upheaval in the natural order since the emergence of eukaryotic life, half a billion years ago. It is not merely an evolutionary event, but the threshold of a new evolutionary phase." With this ‘bionic horizon’ in mind, the minor issues of race and culture that fuel both sides of the political divide today seem entirely trivial to Land.

One of the reasons Land is so difficult to pin down is that his writing attempts a surgical exploration of the varied systems and responses that have metastasized out of the modern condition – even the very naughty ones. You might even call it an attempt at deep empathy. He wants to explain why the ‘Cathedral’ is such a dominant force,* why this alienates certain elements of society,** why everybody has such a difficult time discussing these issues earnestly.*** His willingness to converse fluently in even the most vile ideological tongues and acknowledge the shibboleths of even the most vile ideological groups allows bits of his text to be appropriated as a cause manifesto – attracting some and understandably rendering others suspicious of his motives. While Land’s affiliations may have over time become ensnared like those of so many others by the mesmeric effects of web-native post-irony, here, I think, he displays a less sectarian agenda. Rather, behind the masks, he seems to operate from a distinctly inhuman (ahuman?) vantage point, prodding at the diseased outgrowths of modernity coldly, condescendingly, disdainfully.

The result is a strange, impressionistic form of scholarship. It is easy to see how this sort of thing might be seductive to those seeking a vaguely intellectual buttressing for their emotional response to the disorienting, disconcerting, accelerating viruses of the 21st century, but the lack of rigor was more than a little off-putting to me. Even at a pedantic level, the deficit of structural coherence renders this a fairly ineffective work. As Land careens jarringly from the ills of democracy to political culture to niche blogger dustups to race relations to techno-nihilism in his distinctively melodramatic blend of academic jargon and internet-friendly prose, it is hard to track many points that he successfully advances or much of an organizing principle at all. Often, he seems content to simply wallow about for a spell in some dodgy sludge before moving on to the next enticing mud bath he’s sniffed out.

As such, while The Dark Enlightenment does perform an uncomfortable but accurate diagnosis of some of the many maladies that riddle the American body politic, the antidotes it proffers in response are exceptionally weak. The only time Land really ever ventures far enough out on a limb to be committed to a position comes at the beginning of the document in its most famous section, which argues favorably for a political system termed ‘neo-cameralism.’ Democracy is a fundamentally venal and degenerative mechanism, he argues. It “systematically consolidat[es] and exacerbat[es] private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption. The democratic politician and the electorate are bound together by a circuit of reciprocal incitement, in which each side drives the other to ever more shameless extremities of hooting, prancing cannibalism, until the only alternative to shouting is being eaten. Where the progressive enlightenment sees political ideals, the dark enlightenment sees appetites." To save the world from the impending ‘zombie apocalypse,’ Land contends that:

It is essential to squash the democratic myth that a state ‘belongs’ to the citizenry. The point of neo-cameralism is to buy out the real stakeholders in sovereign power, not to perpetuate sentimental lies about mass enfranchisement. Unless ownership of the state is formally transferred into the hands of its actual rulers, the neo-cameral transition will simply not take place, power will remain in the shadows, and the democratic farce will continue… As with any business, [under a neo-cameralist system] the interests of the state are now precisely formalized as the maximization of long-term shareholder value. There is no longer any need for residents (clients) to take any interest in politics whatsoever. In fact, to do so would be to exhibit semi-criminal proclivities.

In this darkly envisioned future, the only human right is ‘exit.’ Authoritarian states no longer have to behave sub-optimally by catering to the whims of their citizenry. People are now better thought of as political consumers who can only influence policy with the threat of taking their business elsewhere.

Suffice to say, though diverting, this is not a very serious idea. It offers a vivid and compelling portrait of how the theoretical ambitions of democracy are corrupted on implementation but then submits a competing model that suffers defeat almost immediately upon contact with practical reality. I’m sure a globe dotted by unaccountable, rival hyper-Chinas wouldn’t be a dangerous place to live at all and would be able to collaborate to resolve pressing collective action problems. I’m sure these new states wouldn’t ruthlessly exploit their base of human fodder who have renounced all possibility of a voice. I’m sure they would respect the right to ‘exit’ even when things are going poorly. I’m sure people would always have great options of places to live, the means of getting there, and no concerns about their lack of roots. I thought these guys were all about heritage and family and tradition. What happened to that?

Obviously, it feels pretty silly to even attempt to take these over-prescribed correctives seriously, but I do think they are interesting in the way they elucidate a bit of the neo-reactionary impulse. Solutions like this are appealing because they supply a facade of elegance, order, and simplicity to an overwhelmingly complicated world. This manner of detached systematization can feel immensely comforting when all true attempts at improving the human condition are so uncertain, messy, incremental, and decidedly un-sexy. I’ve been there myself. It is so much easier to find meaning in something like this than in trying to understand the boring-ass, technical nuances required to tinker positively with the status quo – slog forward in the name of minor utopias, as Jay Winter would call them. Finally, I can’t help but note that most who embrace these synthetic futures tacitly envision themselves as the would-be kings of their preferred system and not as peons, which is probably not a great way to test utilitarian efficacy. The ‘tradcore’ folk I know seem to believe that a reversion to cultural orthodoxy would somehow apportion them some imaginary ever-faithful, servile Instagram babe as their rightful wife instead the real sort of person they could probably build a life with right now given a little humility and effort. They don’t have a compassionate vision for humanity; they just want to give the dice another roll in hopes they better land in their favor. Here too, neo-cameralism seems like a nightmarish hellscape for nearly everyone who would actually have to live under it. As Kant might contend, it is a fool’s errand to rise above our point of view and know the world independently of possible perception. If we are to design a new political system, let us not do so coldly. Whom does that serve? Let us design it for ourselves.

THC #2
------------------

* “It is almost exactly weak ethnic groupishness that makes a group ethnically modernistic, competent at ‘corporate’ (non-familial) institution building, and thus objectively privileged / advantaged within the dynamic of modernity.”

** “The regular, excruciating, soul-crushing humiliation of conservatism on the race issue should come as no surprise to anybody. After all, the principal role of conservatism in modern politics is to be humiliated… Identity politics is for losers, inherently and unalterably, due to an essentially parasitical character that only works from the left. Because inbreeding systematically contra-indicates for modern power, racial Übermenschen make no real sense.”

*** “Since (almost) everybody else is taking short-cuts, or ‘economizing’ on reason, it is only rational to react defensively to generalizations that are likely to be reified or inappropriately applied — over-riding or substituting for specific perceptions. Anybody who anticipates being pre-defined through a group identity has an expanded ego-investment in that group and the way it is perceived. A generic assessment, however objectively arrived at, will immediately become personal, under (even quite remotely) normal conditions.”

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was greatly fond of Nick Land's writings in Fanged Noumena, at least those which rigorously argued for his Bataillean reading of Kant and his revisions to Deleuze & Guattari, as well as some of his eschatological prophetic prose poems such as Meltdown; true to what he argued there, Land has in the twenty years devoted himself to cyberspace, in the form of blog- and shit-posting, and gotten himself caught up in a variety of trends that have arisen in the meantime. While, from my limited awareness, it appears that many of Land's disciples and colleagues have continued a more predictable project of academic (or adjacent thereto) writings trying to link technological accelerationism to a variety of favorite communist & intellectual subjects, Land has, very wisely, completely eschewed academia both in association and in ethos, and instead devoted himself to more obscure, Terminally Online matters.

This book is, from my awareness, a compilation of blogposts forming together a single essay from early 2012, and is his basic overview of what is now called Neo-Reactionaryism, or NrX, and is effectively in three parts. The first, and most substantial, is a summary of the works of Curtis Yarvin, then known under his pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, about the flaws of liberalism with a special focus on the inefficiency of democracy as a form of government; the main argument is that because universal suffrage permits politicians to gain power by catering to the whims of whatever coalition of voters is easiest to bribe, and maintain self-serving power by continually stringing along these demographics, all the while rarely or never actually undertaking the project of governing adequately. Yarvin's solution is what he calls neo-cameralism, often taking the form of monarchism or a more charitably revised form of illiberal fascism, where an unilateral regent or small group assumes power and governs efficiently using an intellectual power unfettered by the contortions of popular votes.

The second part is a lengthy discussion of race in the western world, which Land seems to have derived in part from Yarvin but also appears to have researched principally himself from “Race Realist” and “Neo-Nazi” blogs, illustrating the common ways that racial conflicts and disparities have defined democratic governments. Land oscillates between extremely racist characterizations of inner cities and minoritarian on political/intellectual levels, and more neutral meditations on the way that liberal governance has encouraged these scenarios (namely, by providing to minoritarian demographics campaign promises that perpetuate the crime & poverty cycles). The final part of the essay is a brief vision of the future, written more as utopian fantasy rather than political speculation, where a new type of cyber-feudalism is able to reign and transhumanist experiments resound on both the physical and cultural level.

This essay is somewhat disappointing (although it seems to have ended elliptically, in media res, as though more parts could have been written) in that it does not explicitly connect Land's new fixation with the online right to his older (and, judging from interviews, contemporaneous) larger philosophic portrait; it seems to me possible to construe Yarvin, from this perspective, as a sort of schizo-analyst in the style that Land finds appropriate, distancing himself from the “Molar” reifications of Human Rights and Universal Suffrage into a more mechanical, self-absolutizing form of governance in Neo-Cameralism, which is coherent if we are to accept the basic axiom of schizo-analysis / accelerationism that anything intellectually cogitable is arbitrary and that more functionalist & ad-hoc systems of thought should be preferred to the more illustrious & self-proclaimedly special concepts that have permeated western thought from Kant & Plato.

More difficult to reconcile with such metaphysics is the abundant joy in flagrant racism with which Land appears to have become infatuated; while I think a person wanting to seem inoffensive could make a fair stab at translating Land's arguments here into a more equitable analysis of the racial hostility sparked by the desiderative element in liberal politics (ie, exploiting the wants & anxieties of each demographic to gain power while inflaming differences), Land seems to have a different intention with these writings. While not a concept here expounded, Land has elsewhere proposed a theory entitled “hyper-racism”, which argues that the trans-humanist society of the coming singularity should try to parse away what he feels to be the “inferior” races, such that the post-biological course of an interstellar humanity can proceed more efficiently (accelerate more rapidly) without having to be slowed by the supposedly inferior intelligence of other races. This ethos seems to have made Land one of the more racist voices I've seen in the present, being totally disinterested in a rational argument for the efficacy of white supremacy but rather in a single-minded resolution to discriminate away the races he feels are lesser.

In a way, while still attempting to make arguments and develop notions, Land's accelerationist philosophy requires a necessary irrationalism and arbitrariness; his main philosophic claim is that we are near to a point where technology will rapidly inflate the scope of theoretical knowledge & structure to the extent that all concepts and distinctions will be effectively unintelligible, either to humanity, to machines, or to the indistinguishable mess floating between, and that, as such, no definitive theory of human knowledge can be furnished nor would be desireable; rather, his philosophy is effectively (and, in some writings, explicitly) a sort of messianic suicide cult, who is mostly interested in preparing humanity for the eschaton outlined in Meltdown. As such, he rides an interesting line of being necessarily indifferent to truth / cogency, and yet having a vested interest in the material circumstances that will determine the aftermath of technological singularity. Therefore, a book like this represents a perhaps-awkward synthesis of making earnest attempts at politico-cultural analysis, and yet feeling them to be inherently arbitrary and mostly important for whatever de facto effects their exhortations might inspire.

Prima facie, as here characterized, this book would therefore seem fairly stupid, as it seems exceedingly silly to think that this particular essay (that only a small number of people seem to have read in its decade since publication) would have any sort of influential impact; this book seems to serve more as a brief exposee of the movement Land feels is gesticulating. In some sense, there do appear to be firm networks of influence from Land through Yarvin through Peter Thiel through JD Vance, who appears to have a fair chance to become president of the US sometime in the next four years. I have a number of criticisms about NrX and Yarvin, and how I think this political philosophy is at heart mostly rhetorical & metaphorical, and reduces back in the ultimate analysis to something not radically different from other forms of liberal conservatism, but I will try to find some other place to espouse these ideas. The same goes, if to a lesser extent, for the claims of an imminent singularity advocated by Land and the wider varieties of schizo-analytic philosophy underpinning it, which I also want to try & write in a blog-post of their own. In general, I feel this precise book by Land is OK as an exposee of this ideology, if primarily for its shortness.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick collection of essays that are entertaining even if they aren't groundbreaking.

I would describe Nick's blog posts from the time as if they are like Moldbug, but he was edgier and also a fiction writer; almost like political philosophy written in a themepark.

The essays have verious subjects mostly on race and democracy with a overarching metaphor which is frankly, of its time and not as interesting as it likely was at the time.

Best read if interested in Land specifically, can skip if not.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this book. Nick Land and the pseudonymous "Mencius Moldbug" aka Curtis Yarvin who Land references throughout are certainly offering new perspectives. I find their blend of techno-capitalist Monarchic Transhumanist vision very odd but internally self-consistent in a way that I couldn't see prior to actually reading this book. I don't like it and I find myself disagreeing with a good 70 percent of the arguments and thesis presented, but I do think the vision they lay out may be inevitable given contemporary politics. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is open to one's interpretation. I personally think it's a bad thing, but if it is going to happen one way or another it's best to be prepared to hop on the back of the rabid beast and ride the tiger as it were.

[Gazingatshoes · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Dark Enlightenment, although written after what is often seen as his main Philosophical work, might have been the text that made Nick Land a (in)famous name in the online sphere, or at least repopularized him. The text is often portrayed by mainstream Liberal media, Marxists and fans of his former work as exemplary of his "turn to fascism". Of course, portraying the book as "fascist" betrays an extremely shallow reading of the text. For however many examples we can name of that term being misused nowadays; there is not a single author for whom the moniker "fascist" would be less ill-fitted than for Nick Land. The closely connected idea that this book somehow signifies a shift from the old, progressive, far-left Nick Land of Fanged Noumena to the new, conservative, far-right contemporary Nick Land is more understandable but likewise seems to miss the point in my humble opinion. I will get to why I think this is the case.

First let me say that this was, for me, one of the last works of Land I've gotten to, which is quite funny since, in the online circles that I frequent, it was very influential and while not as often read today, for many it was probably the only work of Land that they read. Written in 2014, TDE served as an entry text for what would later be known as NRx and the somewhat related broader alt-right scene, both now largely defunct. I was barely aware of these groups at the time, besides what one would pick up from mainstream news and I am largely retroactively reading these texts. I only became aware of Land about 3 years ago and have to admit that I became somewhat obsessed with his work during a time that most of the NRx scene had died out as had the later various accelerationist scenes, inspired by Land's earlier work (this is all very online and has little overlap with the real world but if you're on this page I'll assume you knew that already).

My interest in him baffled even myself somewhat as everyone that is somewhat familiar with Land would be able to tell you that his work is deeply anti-humanist, inhuman and perhaps even anti-human. For all my reactionary tendencies I'm nothing if not a humanist. I love humans, or at least I want to love them; I love what humanity can bring forth in the arts, in philosophy, in culture; I love large civilizations and small wholesome communities, I love actual diversity of people; I love God, my religion, theology and I absolutely despise what the modern world and it's tedious breakdown of social order, institutions and identities has done to these things.

And yet, Land's accelerationist works strangely grabbed me from the moment I came across them. I spent a lot of time these past years trying to understand the weird mix of Deleuzoguattarian and Occultist inspired written works he had left behind scattered among various blogs with names such as hyperstition and urban future and collected in Fanged Noumena and the CCRU writings. I think it's because I see Land as somewhat of an honest Satanist, who tells us exactly what ills modernity brings, even if he supports it. Because let there be no mistake about it, Nick Land, in his drive towards absolute deterritorialization wants to see it all break down, wants to see the escape, not of humanity, but of cybernetically propelled artificial intelligence.

The reason I came to this book last is because I suspected it had the least of these strangely interesting, philosophical ideas. In TDE Land writes in a - for him - remarkably clear manner. The text mainly builds on the work of Mencius Moldbug (who I have never read) and is an exposé of an anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian form of Libertarian thought which critically picks apart the notions of supposed freedom that modern society clings on to, showing how, in it's drive to protect the supposed weak, downtrodden and oppressed, society and it's structures manages to give legitimacy to an increasingly intrusive state that enforces it's will on the people and manages to stay in power while preventing actual progression. The text also serves as a support for a less tightly controlled, actually free, corporate form of government that would become known as neocameralism. This government would not be bogged down by continuous dialectics of inclusivity, identity politics and racial grievances but instead would give people the ability to freely associate, running it's territory somewhat akin to a shareholder's company.

Now, the reason I have put off reading this text for so long is that I have little interest in the above ideas. I am not a Libertarian and I think Libertarianism is simply wrong. Of course, I also am not a Landian in the sense of his more philosophical ideas, but like I said, I don't think they're necessarily wrong as I think they speak for modernity's trajectory. My main reason for reading TDE was to get a better overview of Land's intellectual evolution from his earlier work to his supposed "change". The reading confirmed what I already suspected; namely that it's not at all a strong break from Land's earlier work as much as a further development.

Land's anti-human tendencies might be somewhat less in the foreground in this text but underlying it all is still his drive for total dissolusion in the aftermath of intelligence runaway. What seems to have mainly changed is that Land realized that it was mainly the left that was keeping this from happening, as they empowered the state in it's ever further anxious reach for total control, according to Land to keep progression from happening. Thus it is the left that is a conservative force for Land and it is precisely this reason why he seems so in support of Moldbug's political ideas. Calling Land a fascist in light of this is ridiculous. The fact that he supports anti-democratic measures and freedom of association has little to do with him being a fascist as he is completely anti-state and pro-progression. Rather, he takes progressivism to it's logical conclusion and in that process foregoes the human subject as this is what progressivism ultimately leads to. He sides not with the worker but with capital - with those most capable of utilizing it to it's maximum potential (the elite or: the highest intelligence) and in the long term with the means of production.

After discussing Moldbug's ideas on the "Cathedral" Land goes on to slowly break down all of the sacred cows of the modern left, especially those pertaining to race. Utilizing HBD statistics and Leftist anxiety around the discussion of race, he describes how society turns to a form of Neo-Puritanicalism, afraid of the slightest infraction upon these sacred ideas which is exacerbated by the state in it's attempt of control through the Democratic process. One thing that seems to be new here is that his newfound love for HBD causes him to designate the Anglo as key to the process of further diversification due to their nature and who he sees as ultimately unable to do so because of the Neo-Puritanical society's insistence on the Anglo's atonement, branding them heretics if they even as much as attempt to do so.

Simultaneously he berates the conservatives for being unable to do much more then follow in line at a slightly slower pace and berating the White Identitarians and Reactionary's for dreaming of an idealized past. I agree with much of his analysis even though I find myself at the opposite end of Land and disagree with his idea that the left is a conservative force as I think (in a somewhat left-wing reading of D&G) that deterritorialization is ultimately about human emancipation. It has to be said that most of the criticisms in this book are passé by now, even if Land manages to articulate them much better then most other people including myself. From those that had been active in NRx circles I've heard that they were ground breaking at the time however. For me, the work wasn't eyeopening and I enjoyed it less than many of Land's other works but it was still worth the time if only to get a fuller picture of this mad prophet of modernity.

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Others have said most of what there is to say concerning this text. Land's critique of obnoxious reason's failure to understand stereotypes is telling. The apt phrase "cracker factory," combines an insult ('cracker') and a condition ('cracking up'):

"When Anglophones disagree, they have often sought to dissociate in space. Instead of an integral resolution (regime change), they pursue a plural irresolution (through regime division), proliferating polities, localizing power, and diversifying systems of government. Even in its present, highly attenuated form, this anti-dialectical, de-synthesizing predisposition to social disaggregation finds expression in a stubborn, sussurous hostility to globalist political projects, and in a vestigial attraction to federalism (in its fissional sense).

Splitting, or fleeing, is all exit, and (non-recuperable) anti-dialectics. It is the basic well-spring of liberty within the Anglophone tradition. If the function of a Cracker Factory is to block off all the exits, there’s only one place to build it – right here.

Like Hell, or Auschwitz, the Cracker Factory has a simple slogan inscribed upon its gate: Escape is racist."

Even if we don't accept Land's anti-dialectical conception, his observation that the "left thrives on dialectics" while "the right perishes through them" is perceptive.

***

Take two. I'm taking off a star, I no longer care that Land's style is radical. Land is undoubtedly a good writer, but it is fundamentally hypocritical to act as though patchwork undermines the Human Security System. Patchwork *is* the HSS in its current configuration. The Cathedral isn't the enemy - the young Land would have recognized that the State and Religion are dirempt, and Land's politics can be understood as an escape from the former and immanetization of the latter. There are serious problems with this Bataillean conception, eg. its incoherent dismissal of Spinoza. Nonetheless, it's infinitely better than an account where the State and Religion (taken to be an identity) are contrasted with the superior rationality of the Market. Sorry, the Market is actually really dumb, deregulating it only makes it dumber. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but... property law will never be rational. It's not designed to be rational. Property law is designed to assuage bourgeois fear. It's almost right to say "property is theft" but not quite. Better to distinguish private and personal property. Only the latter can be rational, and it requires no laws to enforce it. We don't need laws to secure my toothbrush, since there is no danger that your use of it will be incompatible with my own. If you want to borrow my toothbrush, go ahead, but there's really no reason why you should appropriate it as your own, it has my gross saliva all over it.

[zynphull · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nick Land, as most should know, is an odd duck in the libertarian scene. He ditches the rigid, purportedly-objective analytical style so typical of liberals since (at least) John Rawls for a continental-flavoured writing seemingly inspired by the likes of Deleuze. This means Dark Enlightenment is thoroughly more enjoyable a read than something like Amartya Sen. This also means he is more prone to the same kinds of sweeping, grandiose statements about history and society which some continental writers fall prey to, and which are sometimes simply impossible to falsify - but that's beside the point here.

Beneath the surface, Land is a die-hard libertarian. This means he assumes a typically classical separation between state and markets, viewing the former as the product of social, historical, techno-scientific and natural forces which inevitably lead towards societal descent into chaos and decay, parasitic over the latter, the sanctified group of enlightened (statistically mostly white) geniuses, entrepreneurs and productors, the supposed driving force of capitalism and techno-scientific progress.

If all this sounds like Ayn Rand, you're not far off - Land has inspired (and defends) secessionist ideas similar to the ones in beloved Atlas Shrugged. Still, Land has a complete life of his own, and it is this conceptual divide above, paralleled in the classic liberal quasi-metaphysical disjoint between positive and negative liberty, which bothers me the most. It is as if he has simply stopped short of reading the literature on the issues of conceptualising liberty as "lack of restraint", such as Philip Petit's Republicanist freedom as non-domination.

Instead, Land sidesteps conceptual difficulties by seeking firm ground in science, especially genetics (lo, in the west, human biodiversity studies) and economics, to claim his view as simply the result of a realist, disinterested attitude to facts. It gets old.

Still, as I said, it is a very interesting and exciting read. There are way too many good diagnoses of current politics to ignore it completely, and much of what he points out should be better understood by a good part of the left. I do recommend it, for those who have the stomach for reading NRx material.

[Jessica Orrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

*read for my thesis*

This essay is probably a good foundation/starting place for those interested in neoreaction, or the neoreactionary movement in general. I think that Land's assessment of Yarvin's idea of Universalism in this work is very interesting, and also I think probably a bit generous. Land is clearly a former academic and in his response to Yarvin, perhaps elevates Yarvin's work to an intellectually meritorious status that it doesn't necessarily deserve. That being said, I think that the idea of Universalism and the Cathedral are very interesting and shouldn't be immediately written off as "fascist" or "morally wrong."

I think Land also does a pretty good job criticizing liberalism and modernity. His critiques of the hegemonic, christian-rooted, dogmatic sides of progressive liberals are thought-provoking, if not a little crude and sometimes maybe unsupported by fact. I think we should all question the norms that we live under, and why we adhere to such strict moral policing when it comes to our politics. Great commentary on identity politics as well.

I find that this work (although this is on the opposite spectrum) maybe falls victim to the same issues that some of Foucault and Andrea Long-Chu's works also succumb to. While Land makes a (sometimes compelling) argument against egalitarianism, it begs the question as to why we have instituted a hegemonic "democracy is good," "equality is good," rhetoric in society. In the same way that Foucault critiques the "arbitrary" social norms we have, and reminiscent of Chu's drawing into question of the age of consent, we must ask ourselves if these social norms perhaps exist for a reason, and if their "overcoming," while perhaps sensical, may be dangerous.

I can definitely see the similarities to Nietzsche in Land's subtle invocation of ressentiment and the slave morality, however I will need to examine more of his works to determine if I think that he is indeed a "Nietzschean." I think it is perhaps possible that this label has been placed upon him by the uninformed mass media who has come to sadly identify Nietzsche with any other writer semi-popular among young, right-leaning, angry men. Alas.

[Keelan]

Notwithstanding the obvious disdain for democracy, it is difficult to discern exactly what this book is about. Overwhelming, it reads like an odd and incongruent mess with extremely lousy citations… until the very end. It is there where Land endorses an interpretation of evolution as a process, not a principle. That is to say, evolution itself evolves. He uses this to support his view of a post-humanist future. While the interpretation of evolution is plausible, the interpretive extrapolation bears questioning.
While I think that everyone should be aware of this anti-democratic, post-humanist current, I cannot recommend you wasting your time with this book. A summary will suffice. Additionally, there are many other thinkers, from Plato to Derrida and beyond, who offer much greater insight and far more detailed analysis into the challenges and opportunities facing humanity.

[D · Rating 2 out of 5]

Es una pena que alguien que escribió los ensayos de Fanged Noumena ahora argumente como un taringuero. Sorprendente el último capítulo, que parece apuntar a algo que nunca resuelve sobre la teoría evolutiva.