He then follows up this teardown with a buildup of a reactionary perspective. I think he does an awful job of showing this perspective as any less arbitrary than the one he just broke down, and has very little real justification.
Moldbug as political philosopher is far too libertarian to be useful. Moldbug as historian is capable of at least presenting a broad outline.
I’m disappointed that neoreaction hasn’t done very much to fill in the details beyond the 20th century (and it was Moldbug and Foseti who did most of that), but philosophy is always more attractive than history.
Moldbug’s political philosophy is useful to Nick Land, who avoids the defects of it by supporting them entirely: he seems to see capitalism as the only institutional intelligence capable of doing anything. I’m not sure how he squares that with HBD (especially given the role of the Catholic Church in their historical narrative) and cyclical history—it seems to me that the economic consequences of the decline of the West should propagate outward. (There might be room for historical studies here—what happened to trade after the fall of Rome? -- but there are obvious differences there. Transportation distance, interlinking of systems, and so on.)
That the throne-and-altar types have accepted Moldbug seems strange, since the Jacobite stuff is mostly trolling.
Moldbug as political philosopher is far too libertarian to be useful. Moldbug as historian is capable of at least presenting a broad outline.
I’m disappointed that neoreaction hasn’t done very much to fill in the details beyond the 20th century (and it was Moldbug and Foseti who did most of that), but philosophy is always more attractive than history.
Moldbug’s political philosophy is useful to Nick Land, who avoids the defects of it by supporting them entirely: he seems to see capitalism as the only institutional intelligence capable of doing anything. I’m not sure how he squares that with HBD (especially given the role of the Catholic Church in their historical narrative) and cyclical history—it seems to me that the economic consequences of the decline of the West should propagate outward. (There might be room for historical studies here—what happened to trade after the fall of Rome? -- but there are obvious differences there. Transportation distance, interlinking of systems, and so on.)
That the throne-and-altar types have accepted Moldbug seems strange, since the Jacobite stuff is mostly trolling.