tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post7207977683471964928..comments2023-12-14T20:02:51.470-06:00Comments on The Heavy Anglophile Orthodox: Alt-right? All ‘lite’Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-70714829378662923192017-09-02T01:41:42.656-05:002017-09-02T01:41:42.656-05:00Hello, Maximos!
Having read your comment in full ...Hello, Maximos!<br /><br />Having read your comment in full twice over, I feel sadly compelled to agree. The American conservative movement in the United States has unfortunately petered out into a mere knee-jerk defence of certain inequities as 'natural', regardless of whether or not they actually are.<br /><br />This is one of the reasons why I tend to think the rejection of Kirk did not portend any good. Kirk at least had the intellectual acuity, imagination and self-awareness to understand that, beg pardon for the many levels of irony, not all privileges are created equal. There's an ugly kind of levelling implicit in the idea that all hierarchies are equally just.Matthew Franklin Cooperhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-63116209320965485812017-08-21T15:26:43.990-05:002017-08-21T15:26:43.990-05:00Apropos of the philosophical thrashing in the shal...Apropos of the philosophical thrashing in the shallows of these pseuds, I recall that, until his doxxing, Mencius Moldbug, eg., Curtis Yarvin, was quite the vogue amongst the Right, and not only the alt-Right and neo-reactionaries, but among more than a few more intellectually inclined right-wingers. Nonetheless - and this is indicative of the great intellectual poverty of conservatism itself - all of Yarvin's logorrhea could be distilled down to the following proposition: The corporate form of organization, most especially the plenary power of the CEO, may be transposed to society as a whole, and governance reconceptualized, and reconfigured, as the rule of a CEO-god-king endeavouring the maximize the exchange-value (ie., profit) generated by that society, which is essentially a megacorporation. Any want of performance would be registered via the Magic Market Mechanisms, and his board, other titans of Capital, would vote him out - depose him - and replace him. This category error was ringed about by countless baroque historical references and allusions, by which Yarvin attempted to persuade his readers that his so-called neocameralism had something in common with pre-Enlightenment absolutist traditions; moreover, the sheer torrent of verbiage, and the mock-prophetic style of his prose, tended to produce an impression of the oracular, the profound, the epiphanic, as though the accumulated muck of two-thousand years of egalitarian thought would be consumed by the refulgent splendour of the god-capitalist, wielding the legal instruments of both state and business - a parody, intentional or not, of the old imperial double-eagles. <br /><br />For, in the end, Yarvin was promulgating nothing more than an ideal of the corporate/totalitarian rule of the Silicon Valley singularity fetishist, heaping up great piles of words in order to obscure the fundamental silliness of his conception. Conservatives, though, want to be so deceived, because few of them really believe in anything so concrete as the local, the particular, and the familiar. Rather, most of them believe in the great abstractions Hierarchy and Inequality, which they have posited against the barely-understood tenets of (what they take to be) Leftist thought. Conservatism, in the span of a century and a half (if we assume that it ever existed in the United States, which is perhaps doubtful), has degenerated from valorizing accepted local ways to valorizing hierarchy and inequality in themselves, for themselves, almost without regard for the substantive content of any particular hierarchy. One might wish for them to spend some time, if they must be right-wingers, with the collected works of Voegelin, for example, not least because his first several works treat of the absurdities of modernist race doctrine; but even this would be too much, for their concerns do not touch upon matters of the spirit, merely upon certain relations with their fellow men, which they have falsely spiritualized (roughly inspired by readings of Nietzsche): the pathos of class distance. <br /><br />That, I think, is the pathology of modern conservatism in a nutshell: the whole of its spiritual energies have come to be concentrated upon the boring, and base, material end of preserving and extending class hierarchies - the greater their depth and number, the better. And no amount of florid rhetoric can disguise the banality of that. Maximoshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10567066185775678231noreply@blogger.com