Nick Land's essay, The Dark Enlightenment, is a key piece of text when it comes to neo-Marxist political theory, and today we re going to be talking about race and equality. In this episode, we re looking at a passage from the essay and putting it in context.
00:00:38.140So it's been a little while, but I want to dive back into the work of the philosopher Nick Land,
00:00:44.960specifically part of his essay, The Dark Enlightenment,
00:00:48.460which is of course a core piece of text when it comes to NRX political theory.
00:00:54.300Today we're going to be talking about the issue of equality.
00:00:57.880We hear a lot about arguments between equity and equality, what all these things mean,
00:01:04.140and that these are the core disagreements between kind of the two factions in the American political system.
00:01:10.160But Nick Land delves a lot deeper into the problems of pretending that all people are indeed equal in the way that the attempt to enforce that reality into any political system can have a devastating impact when it comes to outcomes and possibly collapse the very structures of your society.
00:01:31.500So we're going to be reading a passage from The Dark Enlightenment today.
00:01:35.540But before we get into all that, guys, I do want to remind you that, of course, you know that we are ramping up into election season.
00:01:42.680And the fact that the Democrats are literally trying to imprison their primary political opponent probably clues you in that this election cycle is going to get pretty wild.
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00:01:54.020They don't want people talking about all of the terrible things that Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family have done,
00:02:01.360along with everything else that's going on with the Democrats on the left during the cycle,
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00:03:17.620When you do remember that, ultimately, this entire essay or this kind of long form, almost book, short book or long essay, depending on how you want to look at it, is in response to the writings of Curtis Yarvin.
00:03:32.020So having a basic understanding of Curtis Yarvin's work, Mitchus Mulbug's work, the work from Unqualified Reservations, you need to know terms like the cathedral and other kind of key aspects so that you're not lost with some of that.
00:03:47.740It really helps to have that before you dive in.
00:03:49.840But today we're going to read a passage that I think stands on its own.
00:03:52.780You don't really need to necessarily have that background to understand what land is talking about here.
00:04:01.500Now, to put this in context, he is writing about a lot of things that happened around kind of the Trayvon Martin shooting.
00:04:12.200If you remember, they had the Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman.
00:04:17.220And, you know, the story from the beginning is that this evil white racist just kind of shot this innocent black child who was wandering through the neighborhood with some tea and some Skittles, you know, just for no reason at all.
00:04:31.960And ultimately, this showed how dangerous it was to be a black child in the United States.
00:04:38.160And before we had George Floyd or any of these other things, it turns out that this phenomenon of kind of race riots and race baiting in response to overblown media hysteria of an event that's intentionally distorted to kind of rile up racial hatred is nothing new.
00:04:59.580It's actually a pretty common feature of the American political cycle.
00:05:03.720You can go all the way back to Rodney King and the right riots involved in L.A.
00:05:09.140You can go, obviously, to Trayvon Martin.
00:05:12.400You can go all the way up to George Floyd and BLM and all of the other different different press manufactured events that have occurred here.
00:05:23.140But but Nick Land is writing this before the events of BLM.
00:05:26.580Obviously, the things that have happened since have only magnified the truth of kind of what he says here.
00:05:32.060But that's the context to what he's replying to here.
00:05:35.760And he starts by laying out an article that the website Jezebel had put out about kind of how dangerous it is to go ahead and be a black man in the United States and how everyone is racist and everything is racist.
00:05:53.480And you have to point it all out to quote a famous video game critiquer.
00:05:57.800And so they thought it was very important, of course, you know, spell this out.
00:06:03.560And he uses this as kind of the launching point for explaining the what the progressive religion does for the revolution, the role that it plays in the revolution.
00:06:14.940Again, you might feel like you've heard this before, but it's you know, this this critique was rather fresh back when it was originally written.
00:06:23.140And I think it's worth diving into because it's still a lot of stuff that people get uncomfortable with.
00:06:32.360And I think it's important to go ahead and take a look at this, because, like I said, he lays out a lot of the ways that the progressive religion is specifically around race is used to create an eternal revolution.
00:06:47.420The Gramscian revolution was not one of economics, but one of race and sex.
00:06:55.520It was a cultural revolution, not an economic one.
00:06:58.860So let's go ahead and dive into the essay here again from The Dark Enlightenment.
00:07:15.500Jezebel best exemplifies the hectoring, vaguely hysterical tone.
00:07:18.980So originally the story, like I said, had been that Trayvon Martin was this innocent child and George Zimmerman was this horrible white Klansman who had murdered
00:07:28.780him in cold blood and it slowly started to come out that actually George Zimmerman was Hispanic.
00:07:34.440Not only was he Hispanic, his father was of some kind of Afro descent.
00:07:38.900And so actually he was part black as well.
00:07:42.520So this this idea of and so we got this idea of a white Hispanic was the was the moniker that they were using.
00:10:05.260And so, therefore, every disparity has to be a social construct.
00:10:11.640Right. And therefore, if you really believe that all people are created equal, well, then when you see and that's hilarious because most of these people hate God.
00:10:20.320But anyway, when you they hate Christianity, for sure.
00:10:22.960But when you see the drastic racial inequalities exist in the world, the only thing you could possibly conclude is this is that some external force is holding certain people back like racism.
00:11:39.700He says, does anyone really believe that people are born equal in the way that is understood here?
00:11:46.500Believe that believe that is not only that a formal expectation of equal treatment is a prerequisite for civilized interaction,
00:11:54.140but that any revealed deviation from substantially from substantial equality or outcome is an obvious, unambiguous indication of oppression.
00:12:05.300That's the only thing you could possibly conclude.
00:12:09.700So he's saying here that does anyone really believe that everyone is just born exactly the same?
00:12:17.800Now, we're not precluding here and he doesn't preclude here that all men are equal in the sight of God, that they have equal worth or equal value or that God that we are all equally sinful in the eyes of God.
00:12:30.720So, you know, we're not talking about spiritual value here.
00:12:34.580And he also says, look, there is a certain level of of treating each other as equal.
00:12:40.320That's just a prerequisite for civilized interaction.
00:12:43.760If you have a polity like we have in the United States, you've got to treat people with kindness and respect if you're going to get along.
00:12:52.620That's just the reality on the ground.
00:12:55.900So we're not precluding the idea that men are equal or are spiritually equal before God or that they are that they need to be treated equally in social situations because that's the only way you can really have a civilized society that's going to function.
00:13:14.400But does anyone really believe that there's just no differences between people because, you know, as as Jezebel says, you better you better believe that or else.
00:13:25.400Right. Back to back to Nick land here at the very at the very least, Jezebel should be congratulated for expressing the progressive faith in its purest form.
00:13:36.820Entirely uncontaminated by sensitivity to evidence or certainty of any kind or uncertainty of any kind, casually contemptuous of any relevant research, whether existent or merely conceivable and supremely confident about its own moral invincibility.
00:13:56.940If the facts are morally wrong, so much worse for the facts.
00:14:01.620That's the only position that could possibly be adopted, even if it's based upon a mixture of wishful thinking, deliberate ignorance and insulting childish lies.
00:14:13.000So he's saying from the very he says from the very beginning here, obviously, the faith, this is the faith like this is this is the spiritual core of the faith.
00:14:24.820And it is so thoroughly believed that no evidence can even enter into this.
00:14:30.560If you have any evidence to the contrary, if you notice that perhaps even for a moment, the emperor might not be clothed in the finest of regalia, but actually is naked.
00:14:42.180You're the problem. Actually, you're probably evil and you need to be removed from society or reprogrammed immediately.
00:14:49.620Let's get you to those camps, get you reeducated. Right.
00:14:52.480And no facts are allowed to enter into this discussion where we're just we're announcing this truth.
00:15:00.480It's a metaphysical truth. You know, we believe it wholly.
00:15:04.280And this is an axiom that cannot be challenged.
00:15:08.440Don't you bring any science in here? If you bring any science in here, we're not even going to conceive of the idea that the science could be available.
00:15:16.580Right. And this is the refrain you get from a lot of people.
00:15:20.280Well, you know, we we can't have any evidence. We don't want to know if people are unequal, even even if we have the ability to collect the data, even if we have the ability to research this.
00:15:28.380We shouldn't even be doing that because we we cannot we might need to know the science about everything else.
00:15:33.200Science. We may need to trust the science everywhere else.
00:15:35.760But this is the one time we don't we just we don't want to know if we do know it's wrong.
00:15:41.300It's all a lie. You know, people are equal.
00:15:44.300The end. To call the belief in a substantial human equality, a superstition is to insult superstition.
00:15:52.680It might it might be unwarranted to believe in leprechauns, but at least the person who holds such a holds to such a belief isn't watching them not exist for every waking hour of the day.
00:16:05.860Human inequality, in contrast, and in all of its abundant multiplicity, is consistently on display as people exhibit their variations in gender, ethnicity, physical attractiveness, size and shape, strength, health, agility, charm, humor, wit, industriousness and sociability among countless other features, traits, abilities and aspects of their personality.
00:16:31.760Some immediately and conspicuously, some slowly, some slowly and over time.
00:16:37.780So Land is just saying, look, this is super obvious and you have to have spent your entire life being thoroughly indoctrinated and threatened with the most severe punishments in the world to not notice that people are different.
00:16:53.960People are born with different abilities. People are born with different, you know, advantages and disadvantages, and those things have a severe impact on their lives.
00:17:06.440They have some of them are obvious. Some of them are not so obvious, but they are always there.
00:17:13.340And to deny this, he says, you know, it makes more sense to believe in a leprechaun because at least you don't spend every day in and out looking around and seeing leprechauns not existing.
00:17:25.180But you do see that with humans that there is always a difference every day.
00:17:30.440Like when kids go to school before they know they're supposed to pretend that people are all equal, they recognize that some kids are fast and some kids are slow and some kids are smart and some kids are stupid and some kids are beautiful and some kids are ugly and some kids have a high moral character.
00:17:48.380And some kids are horribly antisocial and destructive. They know all of these things. They can recognize all of these things.
00:17:57.800No one has to explain to them that these things are true. And they often sort themselves according to these things and make judgments based on these things.
00:18:05.820And it takes a whole lot of progressive brainwashing to get rid of this idea that people are indeed different and pretending like they aren't is something that is just an incredible amount of, you know, he says it's an insult to superstitions.
00:18:24.700That's how insane it is to absorb even the slightest fraction of all of this and to conclude is in the only way possible that is either nothing at all or a social construct and index of oppression is sheer Gnostic delirium, a commitment beyond all evidence to the existence of a true and good world veiled by appearance.
00:18:52.300So he's saying, look, if you, if you, if you see all of this, if you observe this day in, day out, if you live in the real world and you see this truth and you can just go ahead and just, just stack all of this under the heading of social constructs, it's all, it's all made up.
00:19:11.180It's all, you know, it's, or it's all imposed from the top down when this is literally the most natural phenomenon you can observe.
00:19:18.740Like right next to people have to eat or they die is people are different, right?
00:19:25.560Like this is one of the most basic things that you can observe about the human condition.
00:19:30.800And yet somehow people are, are entering into the sheer Gnostic delirium of, of committing themselves to this belief beyond all evidence and, and saying that the whole thing is a lie.
00:19:45.600Everything is like all data, just every, I don't even need data.
00:19:48.940I don't need to make this some kind of extreme rationalistic thing though.
00:20:05.940Their goals and achievements are not equal and nothing can make them equal.
00:20:10.900Substantial equality has no really, no relation to reality except as it's systematic negation.
00:20:20.100So he says, look, this is the only way, the only relationship this has to reality, this belief that all people are born entirely equal with all the same abilities and all the same traits.
00:20:33.380The, the only relationship this has into reality is that it negates reality is that it's the exact opposite of observable reality.
00:20:41.960That's how insane it is to invest in this myth, myth, uh, violence on a genocidal scale is required to even approximate, uh, to a practical, uh, egalitarian program.
00:20:57.180And if anything less ambitious is attempted, people get around it some more completely than others.
00:21:04.140So he says, look, if you want to, this is so obviously true and the fact that natural differences exist is so, is so obviously correct.
00:21:15.180And so baked in to reality that the only thing, the only way that you could possibly change that reality is basically to go ahead and, uh, initiate a program of what would basically be like violence on a genocidal scale.
00:21:34.320To, to, to, to hold back or reshape the world and try to make it, you know, the way that you envision it, this, this level of equality, um, this vision of equal outcomes, that that's what it would take.
00:21:48.820And if you don't do that, if you don't, if you don't impose that reality with an incredible amount of total, uh, totalitarian power and violent force, then people will get around it.
00:21:59.920They have to, right. And this is, this is communism, right? A lot of people are going to recognize what we're talking about here. It's communism. That's, that's, what's necessary.
00:22:11.540Communism is delirious, right? It is insane. You cannot make people equal. You cannot force equality onto the world. It is a violation of the human condition.
00:22:24.500And the only way you could even imagine implementing a, a, a project of this scale is complete totalitarian control and incredible violence, which is what socialism does, what communism did, right?
00:22:40.000Communist countries had to slaughter tens of millions of people. It had to control every aspect of society, every aspect of the economy, every aspect of social interaction in order to create the world that they shot that should exist. And they still fail.
00:22:58.240Even with all of that power and all of that violence and all of that control and all of that propaganda, they still fail because that it's so against nature.
00:23:08.640And what Land is saying is that the economic project that communism attempted in countries like Russia or China.
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00:23:51.920And so instead, in the United States and other Western nations, the revolution came in the form of race and sex and all these other cultural, culture war issues, right?
00:24:05.980And the same project has been attempted in those countries.
00:24:09.580The same level of denial of reality has existed in those countries.
00:24:15.200You know, we recognize that the Gramscian Revolution, you know, you'll hear, you know, Chris Ruffo, you know, he wrote a great book about this, about how the Cultural Revolution was perpetrated, how the Long March of the Institutions took place, how the ideology was enforced, right?
00:24:31.560But the reason a lot of this was able to be enforced is in many ways, the reason that the leftist revolution took hold in, not in the economic sense in the West, but in this culture war sense, in this axis of race and sex and gender and all these things.
00:24:50.120The reason it took hold is that in the West, we had kind of made this promise, right?
00:24:56.620We had said, look, all people are going to be equal.
00:24:59.760Now, on the right, a lot of people say, well, equality of opportunity and not of outcome.
00:25:05.500I actually do think there should be equality of opportunity.
00:25:08.740I think ultimately that is the way you need to operate your society.
00:25:13.100But unfortunately, when people hear equality of opportunity, they expect equality of outcome.
00:25:20.120Because as Jezebel pointed out in the Progressive Religion post earlier above, if you have equal opportunity and you don't get equal outcomes, then people are going to be looking for explanations.
00:25:33.800And the explanation they're going to accept is not going to be, well, you just generally don't perform as well.
00:25:40.620Actually, when we got free markets and we've got open and equality and all these things, actually, many people just fail and they don't do well.
00:25:51.700And they're always going to be kind of doomed to the bottom.
00:25:54.520And that's just going to be the way it is.
00:26:09.860There has to be a reason that me and many people from my community consistently perform below others.
00:26:16.660And it's definitely not going to be because, well, when it came to equal opportunity, we didn't win the race.
00:26:24.380That's not going to be an acceptable explanation.
00:26:27.760It's not going to be just work harder and figure it out.
00:26:30.140People are not going to stand for that, especially when the results keep coming back and over and over again.
00:26:35.760When the same people keep ending up in the same positions in the stack, people are going to notice patterns and they're not going to like them.
00:26:43.740And so the communist revolution in the West was oriented on race and gender.
00:26:50.420Guys like Chris Ruffo absolutely get that correct.
00:26:53.820Vocal distance, these guys, even James Lindsay, give him credit here.
00:26:57.860They're absolutely correct that that's the axis it took place on.
00:27:02.340But the reason it can take place on that axis or that axis is that we are in denial about the truth that people are unequal and that those inequalities will show up consistently in a society that does provide equal outcome or equal opportunity.
00:27:29.460They will not take that as an acceptable explanation for what has happened.
00:27:35.140And therefore, they will say, well, then I guess we need to give the government infinite power in order to make things equal.
00:27:41.440If me and my friends cannot consistently perform at the top and get the promise, the things promised to us by equal opportunity, we will manufacture equal outcomes, right?
00:27:53.660And that's what so much of the civil rights revolution and the gender revolution and the sexual revolution and everything else in the United States has been about is we were promised equal opportunity.
00:28:23.480To take only the most obvious example, anybody with more than one child knows that nobody is born equal.
00:28:29.820Monozoigic, sorry, I don't know how to, I should know how to pronounce that, but I don't, twins and clones, perhaps, perhaps accepted.
00:28:38.920Zygotic, that's what I should go with there.
00:28:40.820In fact, everyone is born different in innumerable ways.
00:28:45.600Even when, as is normally the case, the implications of these differences for life outcomes are difficult to confidently predict.
00:28:54.220So, one of the nice things, one of the problems with over-analyzing genetics is it used to be that life was a lot more of a mystery, right?
00:29:05.600That we recognized that there were many factors that went into people's successes and failures.
00:29:10.820And while there are plenty of really smart people out there, a lot of them end up, you know, doing nothing with their lives.
00:29:19.160You know, destroying themselves or throwing their lives away, getting caught up in wastes of time, not reaching their potential.
00:29:28.220So, simply having genetic advantages is insufficient, you know, in the area of IQ.
00:29:34.700And this happens to be the case with other things as well.
00:29:37.160But ultimately, you know, if you go ahead and analyze all this and map it all out for people, then there's this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy where we say, well, only these traits matter.
00:29:52.040We've created a society where only these specific traits matter.
00:29:55.720And genetically, you're predisposed to have an advantage or a disadvantage in that area.
00:30:01.300And therefore, your life story is already written for you, right?
00:30:04.580When we didn't have that, then people felt like they were far more in control of certain aspects of their life.
00:30:10.740They could win or lose in different areas.
00:30:12.980Maybe you aren't the smartest person in the world, but you're highly sociable.
00:30:16.180Maybe you're not highly sociable, but you're very strong.
00:30:23.660There are people who are just, like, sickly and awful, you know, people.
00:30:28.680And, you know, just stupid, like, they just failed on everything.
00:30:32.280They lost the genetic lottery in all areas.
00:30:35.500And also, they're just a bad character.
00:30:37.440And so, like, you know, it's not that every single person has, like, these deeply redeeming qualities.
00:30:42.060But, you know, there's much more of a sense of, you know, there are all these innumerable things that go into success.
00:30:49.580And the way they play themselves out is there's a lot of variability.
00:30:52.980And you don't feel like your whole life is locked in and wired in just because you got a certain score on a test or something.
00:30:59.580But today, because we're so hyper-specialized and because we spend so much time aggregating data and studying everything, trying to plan things out, people feel trapped by a lot of these, you know, this data.
00:31:12.440They don't feel like they are individually, independently in control of their destiny.
00:31:17.280They feel like they're locked into kind of just this aggregate of all the data coming in.
00:31:29.580Even as, in normal cases, the implications of these differences for life outcomes are difficult to confidently predict, their existence is undeniable, or at least sincerely undeniable.
00:31:42.840Of course, sincerity, or even minimal cognitive coherence, is not remotely the issue here.
00:31:48.860Jezebel's position, whilst impeccable in its political correctness, is not only factually dubious, but rather laughably absurd and actually, strictly speaking, insane.
00:32:01.860So he says, look, you know, maybe we didn't know these things.
00:32:33.980I don't think that you can just give me a paper with, you know, your IQ score and your, you know, some other functions, and all of a sudden I know everything about you.
00:32:44.080But he said, look, we knew these things still existed.
00:32:47.000We knew these factors did exist, even if we didn't have some perfect mapping.
00:32:52.660Like, even the most obvious observations from, you know, a thousand years ago about the fact that people are different would be unacceptable to Jezebel, right?
00:33:05.600That's not what they need for kind of the progressive religion.
00:33:09.180It dogmatizes a denial of reality so extreme that nobody could genuinely maintain or even entertain it, let alone plausibly explain or defend it.
00:33:20.420It's a tenet of faith that cannot be understood but only asserted or submitted to as madness made law or authoritarian religion.
00:33:31.100So what he's saying here is, look, they don't care about any facts.
00:33:34.700There's a lot of people, a lot of people on the right made this mistake in like 2015.
00:33:39.180They thought that if they brought enough facts about like differences between people, they brought enough scientific facts on this, that that would matter.
00:33:46.080It quickly became very, very obvious to them that those facts don't matter.
00:33:53.880They actually don't even put a crack in the edifice of this religion.
00:33:58.240This is something to be taken on faith.
00:34:01.040And in fact, the fact that you take enough faith is a mark of allegiance.
00:34:06.620Curtis Yarvin has this great turn of phrase, nonsense as a uniform, or as I rephrase it, clown world as a uniform, where just your belief in these absurdities is actually useful to the regime.
00:34:20.980Because anyone can believe a fact, right?
00:34:23.740Like anyone can just say, oh, the sky is blue and we all believe the sky is blue.
00:34:27.900Like there's no, you know, there's no value to that as a regime.
00:34:31.480But if a regime is trying to exercise power and it can get you to parrot back things that are obviously false, obviously a lie, like all people are equal and there are no differences between people.
00:34:42.900If they can get you to say something that is so obviously untrue, that you will embarrass yourself, you will fall, prostate before them and utter this, even though you can observe right in front of you that it's a lie, then that shows them that you are loyal.