My understanding of NRx

NRx = Neoreaction. If you've heard of Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug, that's what he (ostensibly) is. A lot of people think he started it, but I don't think he thinks so. 

I got curious about it and fount it to be a thoroughly maligned ideology, if you can call it an ideology. For one thing, it's a lot less structured than its critics seem to believe. I think that rather confounds them.

I've seen such confused critiques of NRx as to claim that every thinker going back to Aristotle is NRx, and also to claim that NRx is right-wing postmodernism. I think both of those claims, and many more like them, are so facially absurd that the critics lobbing them have no idea what they're talking about. But Steve Bannon reportedly read something by an allegedly NRx author, so obviously NRx is just the worst. 

Milder critics express concern that NRx would scrap liberalism. I'll address that concern more thoroughly in a moment, but let it not go unstated that it was liberals who scrapped liberalism first. 

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The thrust of NRx, as I understand it so far, is that it believes (for good reason) that the present society is destined to collapse, maybe soon, and they want to give it something to collapse into.

NRx is vague about what they'd replace things with, not it's because they're unsure, but because they're not locked in on any particulars. No, there is no grand design on toppling society and reestablishing an old order. Yes, they'd be fine with religious monarchy, but they'd be fine with a number of other arrangements.

NRx aims to keep modernity from collapsing back to the stone age. Yes, they seem to be eyeing the middle ages because, well, wouldn't that be better than falling all the way back to the stone age? Also, the middle ages present a well-documented model of culture(s) rebuilding after a major social collapse.

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By no means to I think I have a full grasp on NRx at this point, nor do I think am I NRx. There may be specific proposals about what to replace a collapsed society with out there, but I haven't seen them yet. So far, it seems to me that the idea is preserve alternatives, not so much to pick one.

To attempt to illustrate, while a revolutionary movement would say, "Tear down the library and build a Chuck E Cheese!" the NRx movement says, "Let's quietly squirrel away some of these books before those idiots tear down the library. Don't worry about the fines."

If you ask NRx, "How do we rebuild the library after it's destroyed?" NRx will reply, "Save the architecture books." For another example, if you ask NRx, "How do we preserve religion and morality?" NRx replies, "Don't burn religious texts."

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Certainly one cannot deny there are a few racial essentialists under the umbrella. There are a few racial essentialists under most umbrellas—and more than a few under certain umbrellas that are dead set against NRx. (I'm talking about neo-racist woke-scolds, if you don't know already.) That's because racial essentialism is disallowed an umbrella of its own. Finding them under a different umbrella says nothing about that umbrella, in itself. 

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I'm kinda sorting this as I go, but it seems like NRx takes an almost opposite approach to your typical slippery-slope doom-crier. Instead of saying, "Stop this before it starts!" NRx says, "Stop this before it ends."

But that's just my observation. An actual NRx probably has several points of disagreement.

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I found a thing: a 6-point summary of NRx from a hostile source that, I think, captures it pretty closely. The points are reproduced here. 

1. “Culturism” is in general correct, namely that some cultures are better than others.  You want to make sure you are ruled by one of the better cultures.  In any case, one is operating with a matrix of rule.

2. The historical ruling cultures for America and Western Europe — two very successful regions — have largely consisted of white men and have reflected the perspectives of white men.  This rule and influence continues to work, however, because it is not based on either whiteness or maleness per se.  There is a nominal openness to the current version of the system, which fosters competitive balance, yet at the end of the day it is still mostly about the perspectives of white men and one hopes this will continue.  By the way, groups which “become white” in their outlooks can be allowed into the ruling circle.

3. Today there is a growing coalition against the power and influence of (some) white men, designed in part to lower their status and also to redistribute their wealth.  This movement may not be directed against whiteness or maleness per se (in fact some of it can be interpreted as an internal coup d’etat within the world of white men), but still it is based on a kind of puking on what made the West successful.  And part and parcel of this process is an ongoing increase in immigration to further build up and cement in the new coalition.  Furthermore a cult of political correctness makes it very difficult to defend the nature of the old coalition without fear of being called racist; in today’s world the actual underlying principles of that coalition cannot be articulated too explicitly.  Most of all, if this war against the previous ruling coalition is not stopped, it will do us in.

4. It is necessary to deconstruct and break down the current dialogue on these issues, and to defeat the cult of political correctness, so that a) traditional rule can be restored, and/or b) a new and more successful form of that rule can be introduced and extended.  Along the way, we must realize that calls for egalitarianism, or for that matter democracy, are typically a power play of one potential ruling coalition against another.

5. Neo-reaction is not in love with Christianity in the abstract, and in fact it fears its radical, redistributive, and egalitarian elements.  Neo-reaction is often Darwinian at heart.  Nonetheless Christianity-as-we-find-it-in-the-world often has been an important part of traditional ruling coalitions, and thus the thinkers of neo-reaction are often suspicious of the move toward a more secular America, which they view as a kind of phony tolerance.

6. If you are analyzing political discourse, ask the simple question: is this person puking on the West, the history of the West, and those groups — productive white males — who did so much to make the West successful?  The answer to that question is very often more important than anything else which might be said about the contributions under consideration.

I found these here but I don't believe the poster wrote them because the criticism that follows is a non-sequitur from the first sentence.