Nick Land is one of the most important thinkers in neoreactionary theory, and one of my favorite people to cover. In this episode, we discuss one of his most famous works, "The Dark Enlightenment," and how it relates to Curtis Yarvin and his work over at The Cathedral.
00:01:05.380However, he does say some really important things.
00:01:07.920And since he is so important to what I think is some cutting-edge right-wing political theory,
00:01:13.940I think it is important to take the time and understand him, even though he might be a little more difficult than, say, somebody like Curtis Yarvin, who is already kind of difficult.
00:01:21.500So I understand why some people might enjoy maybe having this broken down, explained a little bit in detail, going through it slowly so we can all kind of understand it together.
00:01:31.140So I'm going to start doing that in a series here.
00:01:33.160And to kick this off, I have hot off the heels of his very long and very impressive foreign policy stream, The Prudentialist.
00:05:25.700That's pretty – that one's relatively basic.
00:05:27.640But where does this kind of come from?
00:05:29.680Well, I was about to say that's a pretty straightforward, easy-to-understand definition.
00:05:35.200But I mean, dialectics kind of just comes from sort of older German philosophy, you know, and most explicitly Hegel, who is still, you know, a core tenet of a lot of leftist thinking to this day.
00:05:46.920The classical idea of, you know, thesis, antithesis, and bringing the two together to form some sort of synthesis in towards how we understand the world.
00:05:57.760If we want to interrogate a particular subject, a dialectic behind that would allow us to interrogate all aspects of it, apply counterfactuals, debate things out in real time.
00:06:08.060And a much less open forum discussion, a much less Socratic sense, but far more confrontational to bring what is true against falsehood and see what can come from it.
00:06:20.640So we're just going to go ahead and jump into our next paragraph there because I think that was a very succinct explanation from the Prudentialists.
00:06:26.520So the sublimation of Marxism into Leninism is an eventuality that is best grasped by – best grasped crudely.
00:06:36.380By forgiving a revolutionary – by forging a revolutionary communist politics of broad application almost entirely divorced from the mature material conditions or advanced social contradictions that had been previously anticipated.
00:06:53.020So that sounds complicated, but it's not as complicated as you probably think.
00:06:56.320So Marxism obviously is a very – we throw this term around a lot now, but it is a very kind of discrete philosophy, at least when we're talking kind of original Marxism.
00:07:07.940And Karl Marx had a very particular idea about how his vision would come about, the kind of conditions that it would arise in, the kind of process that would occur to kind of lead into the events that he predicted.
00:07:22.780And those things didn't really end up coming up about the way he thought.
00:07:28.540For instance, in Russia, they didn't really have late-stage capitalism or the kind of kind of capitalist contradictions that he predicted would be necessary for a communist revolution.
00:07:40.920And then one kind of happened anyway, right, Prudentialists?
00:07:43.940Well, yeah, although I think it would be important if we weren't remiss that there were some rather wealthy capitalist interests in sort of getting Lenin and those funded over there in the late Tsarist empire.
00:07:56.260But, yes, that's pretty on point so far.
00:07:59.140There was an effort to modernize leading up to – and so, yeah, so some of that obviously big thing there.
00:08:05.200But the point being is that when they're talking about Leninism, we're going to get something that's a little different from just straight-up Marxism.
00:08:13.200We're going to get something that was more designed to kind of work inside other systems here.
00:08:21.020Lenin demonstrated that dialectic tension coincided exhaustively with its politicalization.
00:08:29.340And that all reference to dialectics of nature is no more than retrospective subordination of the scientific domain to a political model.
00:08:39.500Dialectics are as real as they are made to be.
00:08:44.780So here we're seeing that the – basically what they kind of discovered was that dialectics did not have to occur only inside this, again, very specific Marx-predicted framework.
00:08:58.020That they could be created in almost kind of any situation through the right kind of political environment.
00:09:06.080In fact, if you could just make sure that, for instance, certain differences in kind of nature or science, natural limitations, or the thing against which you were agitating, then you could still kind of generate that dialectic energy.
00:09:23.320And I think that what's in parentheses here is rather important, especially when we consider, you know, the Matt Walsh documentary, like What is a Woman?, for instance.
00:09:32.600All reference to the dialectics of nature is no more than subordination of the scientific domain to a political model.
00:09:38.300And we've seen that more often than not when it comes to the issue of transgenderism.
00:09:42.180It does not matter what our view is on biological sex, that once we've divorced, you know, ourselves from, say, social contradictions like, you know, men can't be women or even the biological reality of men can't be women, as this little paragraph here denotes, then all that we're seeing is politics subsumes the actual scientific understanding of the world.
00:10:03.860And that makes it easier for you to control things, because it doesn't matter what your, you know, experiment or study proves, you know, there's a 98% scientific consensus on all issues ranging from, say, climate change to transgenderism, the need for, you know, gender affirming care, and dialectics are as real as they are made to be.
00:10:23.940So it does not matter that Dylan Mulvaney looks and talks and acts like a very flamboyant homosexual man, you know, for his instance, he is a woman.
00:10:31.780And that's really important, too, because remember, the basis of kind of classical Marxism is supposed to be dialectical materialism, right?
00:10:39.960It's supposed to be a very scientific, very realist view and understanding of the world of kind of the way that politics is structured.
00:10:49.140It is built, you know, this is, again, why I try to push people to understand the importance of managerialism.
00:10:54.820It is supposed to be kind of the most objective understanding of reality around it.
00:11:00.540But what we see here is actually the most useful part of kind of a communist advance is not that dialectical materialism, but is actually you can take that entirely out of kind of its adherence to a specifically scientific understanding of the world and still advance the dialectic.
00:11:20.580That's still work. That politicalization and that advancement still works, even if you can kind of remove it, separate it from the scientific domain, as he points out here.
00:11:30.620Yeah, absolutely. And I think you see this more times than not. Right.
00:11:34.680I mean, when Paul Ryan was still in Congress, he had famously made his point that, you know, we have spent over a trillion dollars on the war on poverty and people are still as poor as ever.
00:11:43.980And it hasn't lifted that many people out of poverty. That's a scientific reality. Right.
00:11:48.500And how can we address to, you know, fight poverty or to address, say, you know, discrepancies and differences between groups in a way that's more effective and more grounded in fact?
00:11:58.540Well, dialectically, as again, as we're talking about here, if you don't need to have it with Leninism, like classical Marxism, you don't need it to be exactly materialist.
00:12:10.020You don't need to look at the raw conditions on the ground, because if you can turn up a crowd with political rhetoric, say, like former Vice President Joe Biden saying that, you know, then presidential candidate Mitt Romney is going to put black people back in chains.
00:12:22.940It doesn't matter what great factual based argument that you have or that you're proving so hard that you're not sexist, that you have a binder full of women candidates that you want for cabinet positions.
00:12:33.020The it can be completely divorced from reality. And politically, you know, he wants to kill Big Bird and he wants to, you know, make sure that, you know, women are back in camps or whatever.
00:12:42.080Like that's the way that this works. And we've seen this throughout our modern political back and forth between the left and the right.
00:12:47.900Exactly. So the dialectic begins with political agitation and extends no further than its practical, antagonistic, factional and coalition, coalitional logic.
00:13:00.580That is the superstructure. Sorry, it is the superstructure for itself or against natural limitations.
00:13:07.840This is going to be really important here, guys.
00:13:09.900It's practically appropriating the political sphere in its broadest, broadest graspable extension as a platform for social domination.
00:13:19.880Everywhere there is an argument, there is an unresolved opportunity to rule.
00:13:25.260As you can guess, that's really important because that's what we name the stream here, right?
00:13:29.180So let's go to the beginning of this paragraph because it's so important.
00:13:31.840The dialectic begins with political agitation and extends no further than its practical, antagonistic, factional and coalitional logic.
00:13:42.400This is something I try to explain to people all the time, so much, especially conservatives all the time.
00:13:49.800Well, of course, it's wrong. It's not scientific. They told me they cared about science.
00:13:54.440Well, of course, of course, that's wrong. It doesn't make everyone equal.
00:13:58.180They told me they cared about equality. Well, of course, that's wrong.
00:14:02.400You know, that doesn't support free speech.
00:14:04.540And they told me that they cared about free speech.
00:14:07.380But no, guys, this only extends as far as it needs to, only to the edge of the coalitional logic, only enough so that it advances the power of the coalition and no further.
00:14:21.720Yeah, I mean, a really good example of this, and it's been cited before, both by conservatives and even liberals, has always been like Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.
00:14:32.280Those rules in there about, say, accusing your enemy of what you are doing or slandering about them, that is political agitation.
00:14:40.580And it's practically antagonistic to ensure that your faction wins and that the other guy gets called a racist or a bigot or whatever goal that you're trying to accomplish in order to make him look like a hypocrite.
00:14:51.720And you'll notice that that kind of only works in one particular direction.
00:14:55.840It doesn't matter if you have all the facts and logic on your side, very Ben Shapiro-style, Young Americans for Liberty kind of argument against college leftists.
00:15:03.080Those college leftists understand that they're there for political agitation, and it doesn't matter if their logic is full of scientific or realistic contradictions, because they're here for the sole purpose of changing the direction of that argument.
00:15:16.160And it doesn't matter if you have all of those great clips where you own the libs with your arguments, because for them, it illustrates that they can wear that argument down as long as it's necessary to rule over you.
00:15:29.100And I mean, this is the same way that we've seen the debates over everything ranging from same-sex marriage to even more recently now with transgenderism or even this new federal holiday that some people have off today.
00:15:42.220It doesn't matter what the logic is for. It doesn't matter if it doesn't apply to everybody.
00:15:46.060It only has to work for a small faction of people that can grasp it and then fight and punch through to get their argument on the side of victory.
00:15:53.560And that's what it means to be on the right side of history, is that you've antagonized the politics so much that your side is one, and they've been worn down, and they accept it.
00:16:02.920Exactly. And he'll go more into here as to kind of why this works much better for the left than for the right.
00:16:09.280But for those who have ever heard the phrase, Cthulhu swims slowly, but he only swims to the left, that's from Curtis Yarvin.
00:16:18.140But this is kind of land expanding on that concept in the Dark Enlightenment.
00:16:25.620Remember, this passage is a response to Curtis Yarvin.
00:16:29.160And so he's kind of breaking out and explaining in kind of a little more technical and philosophical language kind of why that observable phenomenon occurs.
00:16:39.280So it is the superstructure for itself or against natural limitations, practically appropriating the political sphere in its broadest graspable extension as a platform for social domination.
00:16:53.460All right. So for those who don't know, in Marxism, you have the base and the superstructure.
00:16:57.760And the superstructure is basically like all the justification and apparatus that kind of keeps the ruling class in power, that kind of puts itself kind of above and controls kind of what's what's going on with production and everything else.
00:17:12.640There's a lot more to it, but that's just the very quick gloss over there.
00:17:18.140So when he says when it says it's a superstructure for itself or against natural limitations, what he's saying is that basically you can you again don't need those classically Marxist conditions.
00:17:31.460You don't need those revolutionary conditions of late stage capitalism, all these contradictions, all that stuff that Marx predicted because you can literally set yourself against nature.
00:17:42.800You can literally set yourself against natural limitations.
00:17:45.860For those who are familiar with Spandrel's idea of bio-Leninism, this is kind of also gets expanded out of this.
00:17:53.320And so by setting yourself against those natural limitations, you can basically take the sphere of the political to anything because there will always be natural limitations or always be natural hierarchies.
00:18:06.780And if you're fighting against nature itself, if you're creating a revolution against nature itself, there's always a new place that your power needs to expand.
00:18:15.600There's always a new place, a new thing that you need to conquer in order to bring it under your control so you can kind of create that promise to quality or whatever your promise is here.
00:18:26.900And then this is the most important part, of course.
00:18:29.260Everywhere there is an argument, there is an unresolved opportunity to rule.
00:18:34.760And this is what Prudentialist was talking about there, right?
00:19:39.300All of a sudden, where there was no political energy, you've created political energy by kind of shattering these standard bonds, these traditional bonds, these natural bonds that were already kind of holding what would be considered maybe a right-wing understanding of the world together.
00:19:56.760And I think it's important to understand that, again, when it's separated from the material conditions, if you're not operating under late-stage capitalism, you're not looking at the actual facts on the ground of how the workers are, this means that you can abstract this to what's necessary to make your point across.
00:20:13.740So where every argument, there's an unresolved opportunity to rule, where there's an argument, there's always going to be some underlying state of exception between you and the person you're arguing with.
00:20:23.620So it doesn't matter that you don't believe in all of the left-wing things that they do, because to them, when there's an argument, you are generating a disagreement that says, this person is an existential threat to my existence, and I have to rule over them in order to not be killed.
00:20:38.100And that's sort of the logic that you're going to see out of these sort of dialectics.
00:20:41.400That's why banning transgender-affirming care by state legislatures, for us, we don't want to cast straight children.
00:20:49.180But for sides that advocate for this, you're literally advocating for transgender genocide under their argumentation.
00:20:54.780And that's where this is, is where there's an argument, there's an unresolved opportunity to rule, and for them, if their motivating idea is, well, we have to stop genocide, well, then they're going to do stop at nothing to make sure that that happens.
00:21:04.780And this is how their dialectic works.
00:21:07.680And that's why it's so important to always create tension.
00:21:10.620This is something, again, the right doesn't understand.
00:21:13.100As long as they can start, they can chip away at a monolithic understanding of something, then they've already started the process by which you will lose.
00:21:22.180This is also why I often say on Twitter, to have this debate is to lose it.
00:21:26.920Because by accepting that there is even a debate to be had, you end up opening up the door to this phenomenon.
00:21:35.760So, for instance, a lot of people right now are talking about Juneteenth in the chat, right?
00:21:40.540They're joking, you're wishing everybody a new Juneteenth.
00:21:43.180And there are a lot of conservatives who are like, okay, well, I don't like slavery, so yeah, sure, have a holiday about getting rid of slavery.
00:21:49.880What they don't understand is that's not what that holiday is for.
00:21:54.420That holiday doesn't exist so you can celebrate the end of slavery.
00:21:58.300That holiday exists, a holiday that no one really knew, maybe outside of a handful of people in Texas, nobody really knew across the nation, suddenly got elevated out of nowhere.
00:22:17.060Because once people are debating about, well, Juneteenth, is it the real, I mean, is that really when our Independence Day comes?
00:22:23.400I mean, that was independence for everybody, right?
00:22:25.220Julio IV, that was just independence for, you know, some white slaveholders.
00:22:29.380But Juneteenth is really independence for everyone.
00:22:31.740And all of a sudden, even conservatives who are like, you know, who, again, are saying, I didn't like slavery, so I'm for this.
00:22:38.640All of a sudden, they're arguing about the real meaning of Juneteenth.
00:22:41.260No, no, Juneteenth isn't about reparations.
00:22:43.700It's about, you know, celebrating Abraham Lincoln and the fight for the Emancipation Proclamation or whatever.
00:22:49.900And all of a sudden, you have a situation where this thing that did not exist beforehand is already creating tension, already creating factions, already creating that opportunity to rule once again.
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00:23:33.880Yep. I mean, that's what it's going to be down to every time.
00:23:37.780I mean, we saw this with, like, the Fox News opinion.
00:23:40.520There was an op-ed out from the American Conservative talking about what is the meaning behind Juneteenth or whatnot.
00:23:46.440And it sort of tries to play this abstraction game when what its original purpose for and has been since it was declared a federal holiday in this poor attempt.
00:23:56.160And Nick Land talks about this later on in this, in the Dark Enlightenment.
00:24:15.480Our ethnic narcissism is telling us that, no, we have to abide by this.
00:24:18.940And we're going to use it as a wedge issue to rule over us and to rule over you and to get what we want,
00:24:24.740whether that be reparations or black-only spaces at college education and putting things down on the basis of race and making it anti-white.
00:26:15.980So, yeah, what Yarvin would call the cathedral, which is typically sort of the academic media consensus, I mean, government as well.
00:26:24.820And he sort of, I think I'm going to take it to the next sentence as well, because Leninism or the operational communist dialectics, that's what they're solely operating on.
00:26:33.760There's no need to say that I'm a Leninist when all of my rhetoric, all of my political formulation is Leninist in nature.
00:26:40.520There is scarcely a fragment of the social superstructure that has escaped dialectical reconstruction, you know, through articulate antagonism, polarization, binary structuring and reversal.
00:26:51.240What he's what Land is arguing here and what I think is very observable in our political environment is, is that, you know, I don't think Barack Obama, for instance, is a Marxist.
00:27:00.740You know, maybe he touted with Marxist ideas, you know, he talks about reading Foucault to get laid in college, but he's, you know, not someone I would consider advocating for like the proletariat revolution of that day.
00:27:11.560But what he is advocating for is to realign society, because that's all that he has to do when he talks about fundamentally transforming the country, right, when he was elected.
00:27:20.700And so all of our social rules, all of our bonds, nothing has escaped to this antagonism of politics.
00:27:27.980Our definition of what a man is, has not survived dialectical reconstruction.
00:27:32.240The United States has not survived dialectical reconstruction.
00:27:42.500And so it doesn't matter that, you know, they don't need to call themselves Leninists.
00:27:46.840They don't need to even espouse Leninism or Marxism, because it's all that they recognize.
00:27:51.300That's the left entropic force that the cathedral has incarnate of.
00:27:55.740That's why Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land here kind of embodied the idea that for the left, the cathedral, the regime, whatever you want to call it, they are a force of entropy because they reconstruct everything dialectically.
00:28:07.080They're antagonistic and everything must be broken down because, again, every time that you break something down in an argument like this, you're creating more power and more opportunity to rule over the people that you deem to be your political enemies.
00:28:21.540And so when they say he says you don't need to espouse this, it's because that's the only thing that they even operate on anyway.
00:28:27.260It's the only thing that people even understand at this point because the cathedral dominates all of these media interactions.
00:28:32.580They dominate all these social interactions.
00:28:34.740They dominate all these academic interactions and, of course, government interactions.
00:28:38.560And therefore, this is what people kind of recognize as the normal social process at this point.
00:28:43.980He goes on further to say within the academia, the media, even fine arts, political supersaturation has prevailed, identifying even the most minuscule elements of apprehension with conflictual social critique and egalitarian teleology.
00:29:03.140So like the pretentious is saying, this is this penetrated everything, every sphere of society, not just the the originally political sphere, but it's moved well beyond.
00:29:12.420It's it's every interpersonal interaction, every religious interaction, everything in the the academia, every piece of media you consume, all of it is super saturated in politics.
00:29:23.420And that is because that is what allows them to reconstruct everything to to put everything on this egalitarian teleology here.
00:29:33.480Right. And that is what it basically what is what is what is what is your video game about?
00:29:38.780It's about egalitarianism. What is religion about?
00:29:41.260It's about egalitarianism. What is your politics about?
00:29:43.460It's about egalitarianism. What is your art about?
00:29:46.420What is your conversation with your friend on Friday night about?
00:29:50.220Well, it better be about egalitarianism, because otherwise he will think you're against the party because communism is the universal implication.
00:29:58.740Guys, when I talk about the total state, this is what I'm talking about.
00:30:02.500When I use that phrase, the total state, this is what I mean.
00:30:05.640Right. This is this is what Carl Schmitt predicted would happen when the political penetrates all other social spheres.
00:30:13.440This if you want to create egalitarianism, artificial equality across of outcome, across all domains of human existence, you basically have to have a totalitarian state because naturally people are different.
00:30:28.980They might be equal before God, but they are not equal individually or in groups.
00:30:33.720And that means that if you don't have a totalitarian state penetrating every single form of social interaction, controlling every single thought, action, piece of media that you consume, everything that you do, then there might be an opportunity for inequality.
00:30:52.260And so the only way to continually ensure inequality among unequal people is to have total control of the state.
00:31:02.920And again, like we take a look at the word talos, right?
00:31:05.760That Aristotelian concept of like the the final drive or what is the final cause of humanity?
00:31:11.100What is the thing that we all strive to be?
00:31:13.180I mean, that's what we mean by that egalitarian teleology there.
00:31:16.620I mean, consider how quickly we've we've seen the words equality change or even the code shift from equality to equity.
00:31:23.260And so even those older definitions about equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity, even that has been so fundamentally reconstructed by this, you know, political dialectic that we see from the left.
00:31:35.040Everything is about that, this fundamental reorganization of society.
00:31:38.220And and another and again, this is why I recommend and Oren recommends you guys read Nick Land, especially this The Dark Enlightenment or some of the Zeno Systems essays, because Nick Land sort of recognizes that people are different.
00:31:50.160The way that we approach things is going to be different based upon how what we were born into, what we were socialized with, what we're exposed to.
00:31:58.080And so when we start saying, no, everything can be equal, everything is we need to be equitable.
00:32:04.440We need to have this sort of Harrison Bergeron style way of pulling people down so that the less abled or the less opportune or whatever choices people make bad choices, they have the right opportunity.
00:32:15.560All that this does right is promote this sort of communist egalitarian.
00:33:34.000The production of public agreement only leads in one direction.
00:33:38.780And within public disagreement, such impetus already exists in embryo.
00:33:44.840It is only in the absence of agreement and of publicly articulated disagreement, which is to say, non-dialectics, non-argument, subpolitical diversity, or politically uncoordinated initiative,
00:34:03.060that the right-wing refuge of things like the economy and civil society more widely is to be found.
00:34:10.580All right, so let's go ahead and take that one from the top here.
00:34:13.260So more dialectics is more politics, and more politic means progress or social migration to the left.
00:34:20.340So again, Cthulhu only swims left as you debate these essential core questions, right?
00:34:26.200Democracy, as a lot of people understand it, is a tool of leftist kind of advantage.
00:34:34.540It will always advance leftward over time because it will always start with something that a lot of people are trying to resolve,
00:34:41.740but eventually will end up deconstructing core things about humanity, about nature, about truth, about goodness, and will leave them in ruin.
00:34:50.560Yeah, I mean, this is, again, where he says that every argument's an opportunity to rule.
00:34:58.980This is why everything is subject for debate, because once you tear up baseline what we agree on,
00:35:04.000you know, two plus two equals four, the man are men and women are women,
00:35:08.020once those things are upended, the only direction you can really go is further leftward.
00:35:15.300And that's, I think, our current year, 2023, is a perfect example of how well this has aged in terms of just proof of how we've socially migrated.
00:35:25.480And just a short period of time from 2015, so eight years from, you know, the legalization of same-sex marriage,
00:35:32.000we just want to get married, bro, to actually know we need to castrate your children,
00:35:36.500and they should be dancing in drag queens and acting like strippers in public,
00:35:41.140to a point where people photographing drag queen story hour events are told by police they cannot record
00:35:47.260because there is exposed genitals around children, and that would constitute violation of child pornography laws.
00:35:52.400That's how bad it's gotten in the last eight years. The direction only moves leftward.
00:35:56.980It's amazing. Everyone doubted the sign, but now apparently just, you know,
00:36:02.440publicly exposing yourself to children is no longer illegal in the United States.
00:36:06.160It seems to be the de facto law enforcement position now.
00:36:12.040Truly an amazing thing, but I guess entirely predictable, very sadly.
00:36:16.720So a lot of people might look at this, and they might say,
00:36:20.020all right, Oren, all right, Prudentialist, but, like, this means we can't have political arguments?
00:36:24.480Like, engaging on anything is a mistake? What does this mean?
00:36:28.300Like, how are you supposed to do any politics?
00:36:30.480So I want you guys to look at the left right now, right?
00:36:34.200So, for instance, Joe Rogan has been, like, offering hundreds of thousands of dollars
00:36:40.520to try to get, you know, significant scientists to come on and debate RFK Jr.
00:36:47.040on, you know, the pandemic and vaccines and lockdowns, all that stuff.
00:36:50.220I'm going to be very careful with our language here, because YouTube, it's still unclear
00:36:53.520what they're going to hit us for, that kind of stuff.
00:36:56.300But he's trying to get the debate going, right?
00:36:58.480And everyone on the left is like, no, no, you don't debate these people.