Notes for "The Anti-Reactionary FAQ"

Notes for "The Anti-Reactionary FAQ," by Scott S. Alexander. I was originally going to be including this in my weekly Study Notes post, but then it got really long. So here it is, early and all on its own.

While I have included some highlights, I highly encourage you to read the original document yourself.

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

Section 0

• "Neoreaction is a political ideology supporting a return to traditional ideas of government and society, especially traditional monarchy and an ethno-nationalist state. It sees itself opposed to modern ideas like democracy, human rights, multiculturalism, and secularism." 
• "The movement seems to be divided between those who want a feudal/aristocratic monarchy, those who want an absolute monarchy, and those who want some form of state-as-corporation... The difference between feudal monarchies and divine-right-of-kings monarchies seems to be sort of lost on many of them."
• "Michael [Anissimov] is also quite smart, very prolific, and best of all for my purposes unusually willing to state Reactionary theories plainly and explicitly in so many words and detail the evidence that he thinks supports them." 

Section 1: Is everything getting worse? 

• "It is a staple of Reactionary thought that everything is getting gradually worse. As traditional ideas cede to their Progressive replacements, the fabric of society tears apart on measurable ways." 
• "Nearly all Reactionaries agree that the advance of Progressivism has been a long-term affair, going on since the French Revolution if not before. If the Reactionaries can muster some data saying that something has been getting better up until 2005 but declining from 2005 to the present, that doesn't cut it. If something else was worsening from 1950 to 1980 but has been improving since then, that doesn't cut it either. I will not require a completely monotonic downward trend, but neither will I accept a blip of one or two years in a generally positive trend as proving all modern civilization is bankrupt. Likewise, if something has been getting worse in Britain but not the United States, or vice versa, that will not suffice either. Progressivism is supposed to be a worldwide movement, stronger than the vagaries of loca politics." 
• "Apparently my new job is reminding Reactionaries that they cannot blindly trust New York Times articles to give them the whole truth." 
• "A more likely scenario [for the rise in suicide rates from 1999 to 2010] is that it has something to do with the GIANT NEVER-ENDING RECESSION going on at the time." 
• "Criminologists' recommended way around this problem [of reporting bias, "definition bias within individual crimes," and "broader definition bias in what is or isn't a crime"] is to look at murder. The murder rate tends to track the crime rate in general. Murder isn't as subject to reporting bias-- if someone is killed, the police are going to want to hear about it no matter how understaffed they are. And murder is less subject to changes in definition-- dead is dead." 
• "The period ending in 1887 had the highest murder rate in American history. In any case, right now [2013] we seem to be enjoying a 50 year low... Kind of hard to square with everything getting worse and more violent all the time."
• "Normally this is where I'd start talking about how we moderns are constantly exposed to so many outrageous and terrifying stories in the media that we don't realize how good we have it. But in this case that turns out to be explaining away a nonproblem. The Victorians were absolutely terrified of crime and thought they were in the middle of a gigantic crime wave." 
• "A very large portion of Reactionary thought goes implicitly or explicitly through the argument 'Progressives have legitimized minorities, minorities cause crime, crime is destroying our society, therefor Progressivism must be destroyed.'"
• "This is a time when everything is pretty much okay. Murder and violent crime are at historic lows, and almost 90% of American men feel safe walking outside at night." 
• "In 19/26 countries, happiness has risen since 1946, and in both America and Britain, it's been rising since 1980." 
• "Time preference is a mathematical formalization of whether people live only for the moment like the proverbial grasshopper, or build for the future like the proverbial ant." 
• "This study was done entirely on Israeli Arabs and Jews, with Jews as proxy for 'individualist cultures' and Arabs as proxy for 'collectivist cultures.' Suffice it to say this is not how broad human universals are established. A similar experiment compared Western-primed Singaporeans with Eastern-primed Singaporeans to 'conclude' that Confucian cultures had a longer-term outlook' and thus a lower discount rate. This would be all nice and well except that in the main study, Canadians had a lower discount rate than Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, or Koreans. So much for Confucians." 
• "Even so, a word to defend technology. Right now I am typing a lengthy essay that will be read by a few thousand people. A couple dozen of those will discuss it in the comments. Among those will be people with whom I've had interesting discussions, friendships, and even a couple of romantic relationships. Through the ensuing debate, I will meet new people with whom I will likely keep in touch and discuss my extremely niche interests with on a near daily basis for many years to come, forming bizarre but intellectually fecund communities that will inevitably end with everyone involved moving to the Bay Area and having kids together. And we are supposed to be upset because the technology that makes this possible has cut down on the number of bowling leagues? That's like condemning butterfly metamorphosis for decreasing the number of caterpillars."
•  "The theory is that monarchies had strong international law between them that prevented or settled conflicts quickly, but that democracies have the 'sham' international law of the UN (exactly what makes it a sham is never explained) and constantly interfere in one another's business as a continuation of their own internal politics or obsession with human rights. As far as I know no Reactionary has ever dared to cite statistics that they say support this claim, which is probably for the better." 
• "The Concert of Europe [which some Reactionaries use to defend their stance that Reactionary ideas breed peace] lasted from 1815 to 1914. During that time, Europe suffered-- just counting major interstate wars involving Congress of Vienna participants-- the French Invasion of Spain, the Crimean War, the Schleswig Wars, the Wars of Italian Independence, Austro-Prussian Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, and, let's not forget, World War I. The modern equivalent of the Concert of Europe is the European Union, but built on Progressive rather than Reactionary principles. It has existed from 1951 to 2013 so far, and in those sixty-two years, major interstate wars between EU members have included... well, none. [ellipses original]" 
• "Reactionary claims that the modern world shows disappointing performance on indicators of social success turn out to be limited to one cherry-picked country or decade or else just plain made up. The very indicators Reactionaries cite turn out, on closer inspection, to provide strong evidence for things getting better. Progressives, on the other hand, can point to some amazing victories over the last fifty years, including global poverty cut in half, world hunger cut in half, world illiteracy cut in half, war grinding almost to a halt, GDP quintuple-ing, violent crime collapsing, and self-reported happiness increasing in almost all countries." 
• "If things are constantly declining, we should go into panic mode and try a radical restructuring of everything before it's too late. If things are getting better every day, we should hang tight and try to nudge forward trends that are already going on." 
• "We may perhaps separate societies into two groups, Traditional and Industrialized, admit that the transition from the first to the second caused a whole lot of problems, but be satisfied that industrialized society is gradually improving and fixing its defects." 

Section 2: Are traditional monarchies better places to live? 

• "A truly self-interested monarch, if sufficiently secure, would funnel off a small portion of taxes to himself, but otherwise do everything possible to make his country rich and peaceful."
• "'Your power can only be removed by killing you' does not actually make you more secure. It just makes security a lot more important than if insecurity meant you'd be voted out and forced to retire to your country villa." 
• "Actual monarchies are less like the Reactionaries' idealized view in which revolt is unthinkable, and more like the Greek story of Damocles-- in which a courtier remarks how nice it must be to be the king, and the king forces him to sit on the throne with a sword suspended above his head by a single thread. The king's lesson-- that monarchs are well aware of how tenuous their survival is-- is one Reactionaries would do well to learn."
• "An empire long united, must divide; an empire long divided, must unite. This has been so since antiquity." Romance of Three Kingdoms. Alternately, "Empires wax and wane; states cleave asunder and coalesce." 
• "It is true that Elizabeth did not censor the newspapers, or bludgeon them into publishing only articles favorable to her. But that is less because of her enlightened ways, and more because all newspapers were banned in England during her reign."
• "[We] might draw on a proverb of Oceania's in 1984: 'Animals and proles are free'. Anyone too weak and irrelevant to be dangerous doesn't suffer the police state's attention." 
• "Look up demotist in a dictionary-- Wiktionary will do-- and you will find it means 'one who is versed in ancient Egyptian demotic writing'. Mr. Anissimov's use is entirely idiosyncratic to Reactionaties, or, to put it bluntly, made up." 
• "As long as we can group two unlike things together using a made-up word that traps non-essential characteristics of each, we can prove any old thing."
• "Michael and Moldbug cannot bring up examples of these countries killing millions of their own people, because such examples do not exist. So they simply group them in a made-up categories that have, and then tar the entire group by association... If there were any nonmotivated reason to group these countries together-- if they were really taxonomically related-- there would already be a non-made-up word describing this fact." 
• "Louis-Philip wore the title of the King of the French... This title was in contrast to the King of France, which reflected a monarchy's power over the country, instead of a king'es rule over its people. This title reflects that the king does not take his mandate from God but from the people themselves." 
• "Reactionaries believe that monarchs are wise and benevolent rulers, and that it is only 'demotists' who engage in genocide and mass murder. But this argument is based on a con-- 'demotist' is an unnatural category they made up solely to win this debate. When we look at the governments their opponents actually support-- liberal democracies-- we find they have a much better history than monarchies. Further, the Reactionaties fail even on the terms of their own con." 
• Anissimov: "There is also a debate within the Reactionary community as to whether adoptive succession is preferable to hereditary succession." 
• "Regency councils are historically about the least stable form of government imaginable. Unless everyone has truly commendable morality, either the king kills the regent and seizes power, the regent ills the king and starts a new dynasty, or some third party kills the regent and becomes the new regent. Once again, reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms will prove instructional."
• "[Boris Godunov] was installed as regent and ruled pretty well. He did, however, eventually seize the throne-- likely because if he had not seized the throne everyone else would have killed out of suspicion that he might seize the throne." 
• Will and Ariel Durant: "[Charles II was] short, lame, epileptic, senile, and completely bald before 35, he was always on the verge of death, but repeatedly baffled Christendom by continuing to live." 
• "This is exactly the story of problem non-monarchies don't have to worry about. If Barack Obama said the entire country had to convert to Mormonism at gunpoint as part of a complicated plot for him to bone Natalie Portman, we'd just tell him no."
• "A monarch may have desires much more complicated than cash. They might, like Henry, want to marry a particular woman. They might have religious preferences. They might have moral preferences. They might be sadists. They might really like the color blue. In an ordinary citizen, those preferences are barely even interesting enough for small talk. In a monarch, they might mean everyone's forced to wear blue clothing all the time. You think that's a joke, but in 1987 the dictator of Burma made all existing bank notes illegitimate so he could print new ones that were multiple of nines. Because, you see, he liked that number... For every perfectly rational economic agent out there, there's another guy who's really into nines."
• "Imagine the US presidency as a dynasty, the Line of Washington. The Line of Washington has currently undergone forty-three dynastic successions without a single violent dispute. As far as I know this is unprecedented among dynasties-- unless it be the dynasty of Japanese Emperors, who managed the feat only after their power was made strictly ceremonial. The closest we've ever come to any kind of squabble over who should be President was Bush vs. Gore, which was decided within a month in a court case, which both sides accepted amicably."
• "If you remember nothing else about the superiority of democracies to other forms of government, remember the fact that in three years, we will have a change of leadership and almost no one is stocking up on canned goods to prepare for the inevitable war." 
• "The German Empire was a utopian project created by people who wanted to sweep away the old patchwork system of landed nobility and local traditions that formed the Holy Roman Empire and turn it into a[n] efficient modern state." 
• Garibaldi: "We need the king of leadership which, in the true tradition of medieval chivalry, would devote itself to redressing wrongs, supporting the weak, sacrificing momentary gains and material advantage for the much finer and more satisfying achievement of relieving the suffering of our fellow men."
• "Germany had been languishing under traditional feudal and aristocratic rule for centuries. As soon as the German Empire wiped away that baggage and created a modern Progressive state, it allowed the economic genius of the Germans to shine through in the form of breakneck-speed economic growth."
• "Singapore does little better than similar control countries, and the lion's share of its success is most likely due to it being a single city inhabited by hyper-capitalist Chinese and British people on a beautiful natural habor in the middle of the biggest chokepoint in the world's most important trade route."
• Saudi Arabia is "nice and stable and relatively well-off. But a cynic (or just a person with an IQ > 10) might point out that a lot of this has to do with it controlling a fifth of the world's oil supply. It's pretty easy to have a good economy when the entire world is paying you bazillions of dollars to sit there and let them extract liquid from the ground." 
• "From the Reactionary perspective, North Korea has done everything right. They've had three generations of absolute rulers. They've tried to base their social system on Confucianism. They've kept a strong military, resisted American influence, and totally excluded the feelings of the peasant class from any of their decisions. South Korea, on the other hand, ought to be a basketcase. It's replaced its native Confucian traditions with liberal Protestant sects, it's occupied by US troops, it's gone through various military coups to what the CIA calls a 'fully functioning modern democracy', and it's so culturally decadent and degraded that it managed to produce Gangnam Style. Yet I don't think there's a single person reading this who doesn't know which one ze'd rather live in." 
• Tacitus: "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." 

Section 3: What is progress?

• "Reactionaries are not the first to notice-- but may be the most obsessive in analyzing-- a certain directionality to history. That is, rather than being a random walk across the space of possible values, at least the past three hundred years or so seem to have shown a definite trend. Those who are in favor of this trend call it 'progress'. Those who opposite it call it things like moral decay'."
• Moldbug: "I prefer 'cryptocalvinism [as a name for progressivism], meaning two things: that, like Calvin and as a direct result of his intellectual heritage, cryptocalvinists are building the Kingdom of God on Earth, a political system that seeks to eradicate every form of unrighteousness; and that they prefer not to acknowledge this characterization of their mission and heritage. [brackets original]"
• Isegoria: "Modern progressivism is in fact a form of secular Quakerism, with its doctrine of the Inner Light only slightly modified." 
• "Reactionaries seem much more certain that Progressivism is religious in origin than they are which religion exactly it originates from. And the differences between Calvinism and Quakerism are not subtle." 
• "The reason Reactionaries want the Left to be religious is to disprove the contention that it is based on reason. This would presumably discredit the Left and restore preeminence to Reactionary ideas such as that people should be ruled by a king, live in strong heterosexual nuclear families, avoid sexual promiscuity, and derive their values from fixed traditions rather than modern ideas of self-expression. You know, ideas with no religious background whatsoever." 
• "The early Romans not only overthrew their kings in a popular revolution and instituted a Republic, but experienced five plebian secessions (read: giant nationwide strikes aiming at greater rights for the poor)."
• "The Empire was remarkably multicultural, even at its very highest levels. Emperor Septimus Severus was half-Libyan and some historians think his appearance might have passed for black in modern America. Amperor Maximinus Thrax was a Goth, Emperor Carausius was Gallic, and Emperor Phillip the Arab was... well, take a wild guess. [ellipses original]."
• "Although Rome did have a state religion, they were extremely supportive of the rights of minorities to continue practicing their own religions, and eventually just tried to absorb everything into a giant syncretistic mishmash that makes today's 'ecunmenialism' seem half-hearted in comparison."
• "The Romans pioneered the modern welfare state, famously memorialized by its detractors as panem et circenses-- bread and circuses. Did you know welfare reform was a major concern of Julius Caesar?"
• "At least one Roman Emperor-- Nero-- married a man. (well, married two men. One as groom and one as bride. And castrated one of them. And probably only married one of them because he was said to have an uncanny resemblance to Nero's mother. Whom Nero had previously had sex with, then murdered. I didn't say Nero was normal. Just unusually forward-thinking on the gay marriage issue.)"
• Utopianism is older than Plato. 
• "Reactionaries have to walk a fine line. They can't just say 'people consider liberal policies, decide they would be helpful, and form grassroots movements pushing for the policies they support', because that would make leftist policies sound like reasonable ideas pursued by decent people for normal human motives. But they can't just say 'There's a giant conspiracy where the heads of all the major Ivy League universities meet at midnight under the full moon', because that would sound ridiculous and tinfoillish. So they invent this strange creature, the distributed conspiracy. It's not just people being convinced of something and then supporting it, it's them conspiring to do so. Not the sort of conspiring where they talk to one another about it or coordinate. But still a conspiracy!"
• "The Roman and Persian Empires held some very Progressive ideals, all without the help of any universities or newspapers whatsoever. Parsimony suggests that whatever process pushed Rome to the left could be doing the same to the modern world." 
• "In fact, pretty much the entire developed world is further left than anywhere in the United States, New York and Boston not excepted. This does not seem an entirely recent development; for example, the Netherlands' liberalism has clear roots in the Dutch Golden Age of the 1600s."
• The tl;dr of The Cathedral is that "Harvard and the New York Times invent Progressive dogma and then shove it down the throats of a hostile country." 
• "Modern gay rights movements trace their history to Germany, a country not known for having Harvard or the New York Times, or for that matter Puritans and Quakers. Th German movement included such pioneering activists as Magnus Hirschfeld and Max Spohr, but Germany kind of dropped the ball on gay rights with the whole Nazi thing, and the emphasis shifted to elsewhere in Europe. In America, the movement finally gained steam in the 1960s with a picketing in Philadelphia and a community center in San Francisco, and finalyl the Stonewall Riots in New York." 
• "The editorials [in the New York Times of the past] are worse-- I particularly like the one warning that we need to fight increasing gay influence in the theater industry because gays cannot authentically write plays about love or relationships." 
• "Answers to value questions cluster together onto two axes: survival vs. self-expression values, and traditional vs. secular-rational values. Over time, societies tend to move from traditional and survival values to secular-rational and self-expression values. This is the more rigorous version of the 'leftward shift' described above."
• "Both within a single time period and between time periods, traditional and survival values are generally associated with poverty, low industrialization, and insecurity. Secular-rational and self-expression values are generally associated with wealth, industrial or knowledge economies, and high security."
• "The denser a county, city, or state, the more likely it is to lean Democratic." 
• "Multiculturalism is a forced adaptation to the culturally unprecedented situation of large groups of people from different cultures being forced to live and work together. This situation arises because of technology and urbanization... It's much harder to immigrate into an agrarian society where every family knows each other and farmland is at a premium than into an urban society where you can apply for the same factory job as everyone else." 
• "The welfare state is a forced adaptation to mobile and urban societies. In agrarian societies, most people owned their own means of production-- their farms-- and 'unemployment' wasn't a salient concept. It was usually possible to get what you needed through the sweat of your brow, even if that meant chopping down trees to build a log cabin, and there was little sympathy for people who didn't bother. In urban societies, people need jobs in order to support themselves, and those who cannot get them starve in full pitiful view of everyone else." 
• "Multiculturalism means that faiths no[w] are no longer immune to challenge, as Christians and Muslims and Buddhists have to live next to each other and notice how totally unconvinced outsiders are of their ideas. And the movement from closely-knit communities to sprawling cities mean that the local church... no longer ties together your entire actual and possible social network so closely that it can exert pressure on you to conform." 
• "Whig history is an approach to historical study that emphasizes how the past has been groping towards the truths and institutions of the present... There is obviously a strong meaning of the term which cannot help but be false... On the other hand, in a world where progress in areas as diverse as cars, computers, weapons and health care has been blindingly obvious, we shouldn't place too low a prior on the possibility that there has been progress in social institutions as well."
• "All evolution is evolution to a niche, the niche is different in the modern world than in the medieval world, and so modern and medieval societies are optimizing for different things." 
• "The Communist demands [of 1928] mysteriously lack points like 'workers control the means of production' or 'all property held in common', or even 'not capitalism.' They do, on the other hand, include policies like 'abolition of censorship', 'right to vote for everyone over 18', and 'paid maternity leave during pregnancy'. Rather than conclude that America is a communist country [because this platform was adopted], a better conclusion might be 'the Communist Party of 1928 wasn't especially "communist", in the sense that we use that word today.'"
• "If we check the Nazi Party platform, we find that some of the same points Free Northerner counts as Communist victories-- abolition of child labor, expansion of old age welfare-- are also Nazi Party policies at the same time. So we are, in fact, a Democratic-Republican-Commie-Nazi country." 

Section 4: Could a country be ruled as a joint-stock corporation? 

• "According to the theory, just as modern corporations like GE successfully remain dedicated to profitability, so America could be sold off in an IPO and restructured as a corporation dedicated to maximizing the value of US land. But just calling something a corporation doesn't make it start worrying about profitability. Making its shareholders worry about profitability turns out to be a surprisingly hard problem, even though these shareholders themselves would benefit from its profits."
• "We can imagine two different distributions of shares: either everyone gets one, or only a few aristocrats get one... The first possibility might be suspected of being democracy: after all, every citizen equally has one share and therefore one vote. Moldbug argues it wouldn't be: shares are transferable, and citizens have an incentive to maximize the value of their share." 
• "The only thing that giving everyone a share of American stock would do to politics in the US is allow both the Left and the Right a chance to accuse one another of being secretly in it for the money, while both continue to do what they did before." 
• "Anyway, it would take about ten minutes for poor people to sell their shares for easy cash. So this case would immediately degenerate to the second possibility-- one where only a small 'ruling class' owns all the stock certificates."
• "We observe something interesting with multibillionaires-- Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Larry Page. Thy find other things much more interesting than money... Once you're a multibillionaire, you need more money less than you need to feel like you're making some kind of wonderful contribution to the world that will make coming generations revere you." 
• "Although Reactionaries mock elected politicians for having a four-year time horizon, the average CEO stays only 6.8 years." 
• "The average investor holds the average stock for about seven months." 
• "When regular companies find they have people who aren't producing value, they 'downsize' them. It's unclear what exactly would be involved in 'downsizing' unproductive American citizens, but I'm betting it wouldn't win any Nobel Peace Prizes."
• "Moldbug wants to have his cake and eat it too. His government will be unconstrained and effective because it doesn't rule by consent of the people. But when we start examining how horrible an 'unconstrained effective government' really would be, he promises that need for the consent of the people would rein it in."
• "Our second layer of protection [in this scenario] is that the king will preserve human rights and maintain equity among persons. I wonder if the person writing this [Moldbug] has ever read Mencius Moldbug. He has some pretty interesting arguments against human rights and the equity of persons, and I'd be interested in hearing a debate between the two of them." 
• Moldbug: "All that free-market economics will tell you is that, if you prohibit self service, there will be more jobs for gas-station attendants, and gas will cost more. It cannot tell you whether this is a good thing or a bad thing." 
• "I would compare this idea to the idea of a Basic Income Guarantee. Both cost the economy the same amount of money. Yet in Moldbug's plan, the poor spend their entire day digging ditches and filling them in again. In a basic income guarantee, the poor spend their days doing whatever they want-- producing art, playing games, ro working to make themselves more productive." 
• "The sort of work that has dignity is not the sort of work where you dig ditches and fill them in again to earn a government-set paycheck." 
• "Look, Moldbug, I know you don't think you're reinventing Communism, but you are." 
• "This is, of course, a question one could ask of our own society as well as Moldbug's hypothetical. So let's stick to criticizing Reactionaries, which is more fun and less depressing." 
• "The general situation seems to be that America has a very large neighbor that speaks the same language, and has an equally developed economy, and has policies that many Americans prefer to their own country's, and isn't too hard to move to, and almost no one takes advantage of this opportunity." 
• "Even aside from the international problems of gaining citizenship, dealing with a language barrier, and adapting to a new culture, people are just rooted-- property, friends, family, jobs. The end result is that the only people who can leave their countries behind are very poor refugees with nothing to lose, and very rich jet-setters." 

Section 5: Are modern ideas about race and gender wrongheaded and dangerous? 

• Occidental Traditionalist: "Do you really want your kids coming out the same place 10 other men have gone into?" Wtf? WTF? How does that matter? On what world is that a thing that matters? 
• French survey: "Number of partners reported in the lifetime remained stable between all three surveys for men of all ages (11.8 in 1970, 11.0 in 1992, and 11.6 in 2006). For women, mean lifetime number of partners increased from 1.8 in 1970 to 3.3 in 1992 and to 4.4 in 2006." 
• "Men cannot be having more (heterosexual) sex than women, nor can the two statistics trend in different directions. The least mathematically impossible explanation is that between 1970 and 2006, women have become less likely to lie about all the sex they're having. Does that contradict common sense, which tells us everyone is really slutty nowadays but was perfectly chaste in the past? Maybe, but common sense seems to be not entirely correct. Common sense would tell us that modern young people are having much more sex than youth fifteen years ago, but according to the study 'no increase was observed between 1992 and 2006 in women under thirty; for men under thirty a decrease in the mean was seen in the most recent period."
• "It would be very strange if, the original reason for the belief having been neutralized, by coincidence the belief happens to be right anyway. Imagine that an explorer comes back from a distant jungle with a tale of a humongous monster. Everyone catches monster fever and begins speculating on how the monster may have gotten there. Then the explorer admits his tale is a hoax. Objecting 'But there could still be a monster there!' is fruitless. If the original reason anyone held the belief is invalid, it's unlikely that by coincidence the belief just happens to be correct. 
• "The reason these sorts of just-so stories about sluttiness keep popping up is the disappearance of the good historical arguments against the practice, leaving behind only a feeling of disgust in search of a justification." 
• "Women with zero or one premarital sexual partners have more stable marriages than women with two or more partners. Okay. Who gets married a virgin these days? Super-religious people. They're not going to divorce. And from the source, I gather that most of these stably married one partner women are women who had premarital sex with their future husband. Super-religious people who slipped up. Their poor self-control earns them a 15% lower likelihood of stable marriage: harsh, but fair. The people with two or more partners are the ones who we know are 'experimenting'-- having sex with at least one person other than their future husband. Among this group, likelihood of unstable marriage goes down with more partners up until you reach the 20 partner or so level-- at which point you're probably capturing prostitutes, cluster B personality disorders, and other people outside the mainstream. The data provide some evidence that an absolute commitment to purity-- no sex before marriage, or sex only with your husband-to-be-- predicts marital stability. But beyond that-- in the two to twenty partner range in which recent social change has been occurring-- there's no correlation between increasing sluttiness and decreasing marital stability." 
• "If progressive values cause divorce, how come people with more progressive values are less likely to divorce? College-educated women have about half the divorce rate of the non-college-educated. More conservative states have higher divorce rates than most liberal state. Atheists have divorce rates below the national average." 
• "Society's memetic immune system sprung into action to contain the damage through the creation of new laws, institutions, and social norms." I like that terminology. 
• "If there are still biological humans in organic bodies transmitting genes naturally much after 2100, we have much bigger problems than race on our hands."
• "Richard Lynn, who is the closest we will get to an expert on dysgenics, calculates that American society as a whole is losing 0,9 IQ points per generation. So by 2100, people will have lost on average 4 IQ points. Since it's hard to get a good intuitive graph of what 4 IQ points means, consider that IQ has been increasing by about 3 points per decade (average is still 100, but only because they recalibrate it). So absent any further Flynn Effect, losing 4 IQ points would take us back to... about as smart as we were back in 2000."
• "And what comes after 2100 doesn't matter, because even on the off chance we're still using human brains to reason at that point, it sure won't be human brains in which the genes have been left to chance. To paraphrase Keynes, in the long runs we're all either dead or cyborgs." 
• "Nowadays Reactionaries like to think of themselves as racist just because they believe the average black IQ is a standard deviation below the average white IQ. But one standard deviation implies that about a fifth of black people are smarter than the average white person. If you were to go to 1800 and tell a conference of the most extreme radical abolitionists that you thought a fifth of black people were smarter than the average white person, they would laugh and not stop laughing until they died of laughter-induced asphyxiation." 
• "Did you know there used to be a stereotype that Jews were stupid and boorish and didn't belong in polite society? A stereotype that Chinese people were dumb? A stereotype that black people were bad at sports?" 
• "Reactionaries take a bold stand against sexually suggestive displays at gay pride parades or whatever, but when it comes to why two people who love each other can't get married because they're both the same gender, they tend to be just as confused as the rest of us." 
• "In fact, if we put a Reactionary in a time machine headed backward, and made it stop when the Reactionary was just as racist, sexist, et cetera as the US population average at the time, I predict they wouldn't make it much past the 1970s." 
• "Except for Nixon and disco, the 1970s were no worse than any other period." 
• "Reactionaries insist that all Progressivism since 1600 has been part of one vast and monstrous movement-- maybe a religious cult, maybe a sinister power-play, maybe just the death throes of the western intellectual tradition-- dedicated to being wrong about everything. And that a very big part of this vast movement focused on race. And when they have to whisper 'Except we agree with 99% of what it did, right up until the past couple of decades, and in fact they got it right when everyone else was horribly, atrociously wrong', that is-- or at least should be-- kind of embarrassing." 
• "Arguing about whether a post-racial society should provide equality of opportunity or equality of results is a little like arguing about whether in the worker's paradise, everyone should have a pony or everyone should have two ponies. Right now, there is not even equality of opportunity." 
• "83% of white people agree that the poor position of blacks in society is mostly not due to discrimination. 60% of black people agree that the poor position of blacks in society is mostly not due to discrimination. So no, doubting that all racial disparities in the US are due to discrimination isn't a thought crime. It's the majority position, even among black people themselves." 
• "How come social justice people have been making so much more noise lately? My guess is changes in the media. The Internet allows small groups to form isolated bubbles and then fester away from the rest of society, becoming more and more extremist and paranoid and certain of themselves as their members feed upon each other in a vicious cycle. Of course, as Reactionaries, you wouldn't possibly know anything about that." 
• "The relative anonymity of the Internet promotes bad manners and flame wars and general trollishness. It's not just that the writer is anonymous and therefore doesn't fear punishment for what he or she says. It's that their enemy is some nameless evil, rather than a person with a face whom they will treat as a human being." 
• "I identify the worst parts of the social justice movement as basically reactionary in their outlook, even though from a coalition politics point of view they have been forced to ally with progressives. Chief in this assessment is their strong beliefs that some topics should be taboo and bowdlerized from society." 
• "The desire to ban books that promote different sexual norms than we ourselves promote hasn't changed, only the particular sexual norms we are enforcing." 
• "Real Progressivism is Enlightenment values-- like the belief that free flow of information is more important than any particular person's desire to 'cleanse' society of 'unsavory' ideas. Real Reaction is the belief that free expression isn't as important as making sure people have 'the right' values."
• "The conservative nature of social justice isn't surprising if you, like me, believe the liberal/conservative divide mirrors a self-expression/survival divide-- more simply, whether or not you feel safe. As society becomes more economically and politically secure, we expect it to become more liberal and progressive. But we also expect the subgroups of society that are least secure to remain conservative, and to continue to use conservative strategies to protect themselves in their unsafe environment." 
• "Because more liberal white people are more likely to be tolerant toward minorities and the poor, minorities and the poor are by political necessity forced to ally with liberal parties. But when we are able to separate issues out from political coalition-building and self-interest, the natural tendency of economically and physically insecure minorities to be more socially conservative shows itself. Black people are more religious, more likely to support amendments banning gay marriage, and more likely to oppose stem cell research, abortion, and out of wedlock births." 
• "The most visible parts of society, like affirmative action and conversational norms around political correctness, are biased in favor of minorities and against white people. But this is intended to counter less visible parts of society, which are biased in favor of white people and against minorities." 
• "It is certainly possible to imagine a wise and paternalistic colonial government coming in, cleaning up after native misrule, and introducing things like sanitation and industrialization. But that's not what happened. It's not fair to compare an imaginary ideal version of one policy with the real-world version of another." 
• "If Progressivism is an inevitable historical reaction to rising technology and security, rather than a meme spread by the New York Times or anyone else, then saying 'My scheme would have worked if not for the spread of Progressive ideas' is no more virtuous than saying 'My scheme would have worked if not for the conservation of matter'. Congratulations, you've found something that might have been a good idea in an alternate universe that ran on different rules." 
• "Yes, it's possible that modern progressive ideals would be able to rescue colonialism. But it's hard to imagine a nation being simultaneously progressive enough to colonize other countries wisely, but still so unprogressive that it would want to. It would have to be a country whose progressivism evolved on a path much different to our own." 
• "I apologize for the insulting tone of this FAQ entry, but I was accused of cringing in fear before old books, and being vampire-to-Bible-level afraid to study history. That hurts." 

Section 6: Any last thoughts? 

• "Compare [Neoreactionism] to communism. The people who called themselves communists had some great ideas, like shorter workweeks and racial equality. it was just that the narrative they used as a framework for that idea... were horrible. Their ability to notice problems tended to be better than their specific policy proposals which in turn tended to be better than their flights of fancy. I feel the same way about Reaction. Some Reactionaries are saying things about society that need to be said. A few even have good policy proposals. But couching them in a narrative that talks about the wonders of feudalism and the evils of the Cathedral and how we should replace democracy with an absolute monarch just discredits them entirely."
• "I like that they're honestly utopian. Their scathing attacks on everyone else for being utopian merely punctuate the fact, like the fire-and-brimstone preacher denouncing homosexuality whom everyone knows is secretly gay."
• "The Reactionaries wants [sic] to throw out the extremely carefully fine-tuned machinery of modern society which evolved over several hundred years, and replace it with a bizarre Frankenstein's Monster of modern and traditional elements that they dreamed up in an armchair, which has never been tried before and which, they say, will instantly fix all social ills like crime and poverty and war. And this is awesome. Utopianism-- trying to think up amazing political systems that lie outside the local Overton Window-- is very nearly a dead art. The failure of the Communists' utopian designs probably killed it. 
• "The more utopian ideas we have the more sources we have to draw from when trying to decide which direction our own society should go in, and the broader the discourse becomes."
• "Reactionaries are geniuses at inventing new systems that have never been tried before and some of whose components deserve serious contemplation."
• "And if there was a science fiction book set in Moldbug's Patchwork or Royal California, I would buy it." Truth. 
• "There are a few good things you can do with utopianism. 
• "You can use it as a generator for ideas that become gradually adopted into the mainstream, as mentioned above. Communism was good at this-- in the US, instead of starting a revolution, they just helped spark the modern labor movement, which eventually came to coexist with the rest of the economy and is now probably a useful part of the memetic ecosystem.
• "You can use it to start interesting intentional communities... You can start a non-communal subculture, like the polyamory movement. If you happen to have a free land, you start a country or subnational government-- it worked for the early American settlers, and it may yet work for seasteaders. The Free State Project is another noble goal along these lines. But until it works in an intentional community or something, trying to push it on everyone else seems premature and irresponsible." Experiment! Stress test your utopia, its ideals and its mechanics.
• "There are lots of extremely creative ideas for radical new forms of government that don't involve any Reactionary ideas at all. The better ones are off the right-left spectrum entirely. Futarchy is my favorite. Or we could all just go live in the Shining Garden of Kai-Raikoth."