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Hera's avatar

"That is the problem, in my opinion, with the NRx crowd. They have very good political theory but very poor philosophical insight."

Yes yes yes! I read Yarvin as a moral philosopher and I am just utterly alienated by the fact that he doesn't seem to have any mention of meta-ethics, or even really attempts at moral philosophy or metaphysics.

His essays have been fantastic in seducing me, along with WIAH's psychohistorical analysis of history deducing human nature, but I feel like if I were the me of 2 years ago--one that did not have proper philosophical justifications for right-wing reactionary axioms--I would just brush his political critiques off as insightful but not at all guiding as to what we ought to do.

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Eugenics Club Serbia's avatar

>If the right wants to win it must win over the intelligentsia

Imo, this is wrong. Curtis Yarvin makes the same mistake when he assumes that

1) The world must be ruled by nerds.

2) Nerds are mostly good people, capable of ruling, but they're doing bad things because their institutions have been corrupted by power.

Curtis Yarvin being a nerd might have something to do with his opinion. These people would never hold any significant amount of power in any previous era. What we're seeing is a huge evolutionary mismatch where people who have evolved to be intelligent slaves have become rulers (not putting Curtis in this category, he's an anomaly). By "nerds" I mostly mean "academics", people of high but not extremely high intelligence and extremely high rule-following. Nietzsche thought that a great man would be able to control them. From Will To Power (128):

>I have as yet found no reason for discouragement. Whoever has preserved, and bred in himself, a strong will, together with an ample spirit, has more favorable opportunities than ever. For the trainability of men has become very great in this democratic Europe; men who learn easily and adapt themselves easily are the rule: the herd animal, even highly intelligent, has been prepared. Whoever can command finds those who must obey: I am thinking, e.g., of Napoleon and Bismarck.

While it's possible that something like this might happen in the future, it's unlikely to happen any time soon. So what is to be done? Our elites are a reflection of our environment. Ancient Greeks weren't strong because they cared about aesthetics and true proportions. They were strong because that was very important in the environment they lived in. If we want to make a meaningful change to the world, we must change the environment. Changing the existing intelligentsia won't work.

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