Neoreaction, cladistically located, is a Cryptocalvinist splinter.
-- Nick Land 30n13
History[]
The Dark Enlightenment began one day in 2007 while Mencius Moldbug was tinkering around in his garage and decided to build a new ideology. He called that ideology “Formalism”. In spite of Moldbug’s computer geekery, rationalism, and post-libertarian influences, this “ideology” was in many respects reactionary and drew upon anti-liberal, anti-progressive sources of the past.
A small ecosystem of extremely erudite reactionary bloggers and commentators arose around Moldbug’s blog: including Foseti, Jim, Spandrell, Isegoria, and Handle. These were distinguished from the broader extant Human Biodiversity sphere by the fact that they took on all of the red pills, not just concerning race, but of sex differences, cultural traditionalism, national coherence and representative democracy itself. Many of the prescriptions were as old and dusty as de Maistre, but the style and the reliance upon scientific research were new. And edgy.
Arnold Kling famously called Moldbug and his cohort “neoreactionaries” in 2010, and the name stuck.
Nick Land ran into Moldbug's Formalism somewhere along the line, and in the Fall of 2012 penned the epoch-making essay The Dark Enlightenment. By the Spring of 2013, much of the activity in the sphere had coalesced around Land’s Xenosystems blog. A few heretics from Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Less Wrong rationalist cult had spun off the More Right group blog around that same time. (That More Right link is down at this time of writing, because the hosting bills are not always paid in a timely manner. Check back in a weeks or two.) My own blog was part of this expansion, what Nick Land dubbed a neoreactionary Cambrian Explosion.
Branching[]
Reaction; Right-wing; Conservatism
See conversely: Revolution