The Dark Enlightenment in less than 500 words

Summary

The Dark Enlightenment, or neoreaction, focuses on the fundamentally flawed tenets of modern western culture.

Common ideas:

• Secular progressivism is the memetic descendant of Puritan Calvinism. Blasphemy, inquisition, indoctrination, and brainwashing still occur from the perspective of the progressive religion. Therefore, progressive culture is referred to as “the Cathedral”. The Cathedral consists of influential people in politics, journalism, academia and education acting in an uncoordinated manner to advance progressive principles in society; often deceptively. We do not imply conspiracies.
• Hierarchies are a natural consequence of innate differences and are necessary for societies to function. Stratified outcomes alone are not enough to prove discrimination or a failure of “social justice”. There is no “social justice,” only traditional justice.
• The only morality is civilization. Any belief or ideology that works against civilization is evil no matter how well-intentioned.
• Traditional values are not accidental. They are non-ideological social adaptations that provide good solutions to complex social problems. Cultures separated by vast amounts of time and geography independently converged on similar values. Values converged because cultures that implemented these values had a competitive advantage over their neighbors and became civilizations. Cultures that did not implement them failed and are forgotten.
• Modern conservatives are last century’s progressives. Many ideas held by “conservatives” today were progressive (sometimes radically so) in the past.
• Neoreactionaries acknowledge the legitimate flaws inherent to Democracies and are “predisposed, in any case, to perceive the politically awakened masses as a howling irrational mob, it conceives the dynamics of democratization as fundamentally degenerative: systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption.”
• A system of No Voice-Free Exit in large hyper-federalist states or small independent city states is the optimal political arrangement. Singapore is an imprecise example with little political voice, but massive economic freedom and high levels of prosperity. City-states would be in constant competition for minds and business and risk losing economically valuable citizens and businesses if poorly run since they can easily relocate. This creates an incentive to remain economically and socially free.
• Neoreactionaries accept human biological diversity. Individual humans and human groups differ in ability, psychological disposition, intelligence, and other traits for genetic reasons. Genetics can explain 50% or more of the differences in lifetime outcomes within and between human groups. Other factors are minor by comparison.
• Recognition of HBD necessitates the rejection of the core progressive dogma of egalitarianism. Race and gender are not social constructs and everyone personally experiences that not all men or women are created equal. It is easier to believe in Leprechauns than to believe in egalitarianism.

[Author’s note: This is the description portion of the old sidebar from /r/darkenlightenment, which was one of the first things I wrote when I became attracted to the community. Now that the sub is out of my control, and is likely to be completely gone in short order, it was time to preserve this somewhere else. It is probably one of the most efficient descriptions of neoreaction and DE available anywhere, and I have been complemented multiple times on it for that reason. It had to be efficient because there was a 5000 character limit at the time. I have gone through and updated the broken links. There weren’t too many of those, anyway, but I did find it notable that discover magazine seems to have purged the majority of Razib Khan’s old blog posts for heretical race realism. For the complete sidebar with various additional resources that is now being used for the replacement ruqqus community, please see this page.]