What Is The “Dark Enlightenment”?

It’s the opposite of America.

And it’s here.

A truism of Conservative thought is “ideas have consequences”. One idea making the rounds in conservative/libertarian/republican circles these days is, unfortunately, the alt-right idea of a “Dark Enlightenment”. It suggests that democracy is a chaotic waste of time, and the only way to get an ordered society is to replace countries with corporations. These corporations would answer to a board of directors and specifically not to the people who live there. As you might imagine, this idea would have significant consequences if it were implemented. But, as you might not imagine, it’s moving out of the chat rooms and reddits and into today’s real-world political arena.

The founding of Dark Enlightenment

The “Dark Enlightenment” is also often called Neoreactionism (sometimes abbreviated as NRx) in America. In Europe, it’s also called ‘European New Right’, ‘identitarianism’, ‘archeofuturism’ or ’Eurasianism’. It’s based on the writings of software engineer Curtis Yarvin, self-described “Sith Lord” of the movement, who first proposed it in 2007-2008 in his blog “Unqualified Reservations” under the name “Mencius Moldbug”. Yarvin wrote about a thousand pages work that seem to encapsulate most of the philosophy, then stopped. English philosopher Nick Land refined the ideas and coined the name “Dark Enlightenment” in his 2012 book of the same name.

Important points of Dark Enlightenment

Neoreactionism generally rejects the typical view of history

The Dark Enlightenment doesn’t see government as growing from oppressive despotism through liberty and enlightenment in a liberal democracy. Instead, it embraces systems like monarchism and especially cameralism (inspired by Prussian cameralism, in which a ‘state’ is a business which owns a country). Like most political philosophies it has gray areas, but there are several consistent characteristics:

Opposition to democracy (small ‘d’), egalitarianism, liberalism (both modern and classical), and support of autocratic rule by a group of ‘elites’.

Neoreactionaries believe that democracy is a wasteful path to chaos, or as Yarvin put it “war, tyranny, destruction, and poverty”. Michael Anissimov, another prophet of the movement thinks “Demotist systems, that is, systems ruled by the ‘People,’ such as Democracy and Communism, are less financially stable than aristocratic systems. On average, they undergo more recessions and hold more debt. They are more susceptible to market crashes. They waste more resources. Each dollar goes further towards improving standard of living for the average person in an aristocratic system than in a Democratic one.”

To replace democracy, they advocate a new patchwork of city-states in which ‘exit’ is the only ‘human right’. In his eBook ‘Unqualified Reservations’, Yarvin describes “an ideal world of thousands, preferably even tens of thousands, of neocameralist city-states and ministates, or neostates. The organizations which own and operate these neostates are for-profit sovereign corporations, or sovcorps.” “Shareholders” or “Subscribers” (large owners) of the Sovcorps would elect an executive with total power, but answerable to them as a CEO to a Corporate Board. The executive wouldn’t be constrained by the will, or even assent of the people who work for it ‘Agents’ or the people who live in it ‘Residents’ because a Sovcorp is not owned by the Residents or Agents, but by the Subscribers. They could rule efficiently much like a (hopefully benevolent) CEO-monarch.

From Yarvin, “Every patch of land on the planet has a primary owner, which is its sovcorp. Typically, these owners will be large, impersonal corporations. We call them sovcorps because they’re sovereign. You are sovereign if you have the power to render any plausible attack on your primary property, by any other sovereign power, unprofitable. In other words, you maintain general deterrence… The business of a sovcorp is to make money by deterring aggression. Since human aggression is a serious problem, preventing it should be a good business. Moreover, the existence of unprofitable governments in your vicinity is serious cause for concern, because unprofitable governments tend to have strange decision structures and do weird, dangerous things.”

Rejection of egalitarianism and ethnopluralism in favor of eugenics or “scientific racism”, specifically IQ as a racially-based gauge of potential.

It dances right up to the line, but Neoreactionism alone isn’t explicitly a white nationalist movement. As Yarvin put it so coyly in 2007, “It should be obvious that, although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff”. Unsurprisingly though, it has been seized on as a philosophical underpinning for the very white nationalist ‘alt-right’ movement. Avowed white supremacist and white nationalist Nick Fuentes said “Abortion is popular, sodomy is popular, being gay is popular, being a feminist is popular, sex out of wedlock is popular, contraceptives—it’s all popular. That’s not to say it’s good. That’s not to say I like that. Popular means that people support it, which they do. It sucks, and it is what it is, but that’s why we need a dictatorship. That’s unironically why we need to get rid of all that. We need to take control of the media or take control of the government and force the people to believe what we believe or force them to play by our rules and reshape the society.”

Active undermining promoters of democracy and equality

Yarvin calls the sum of ‘Progressive wisdom’ on any particular matter the “Synopsis”; a “public opinion” fed to the Residents and Agents. The Synopsis constantly changes, but only to become more left-wing, or the opposite of order. In his view, this slide toward entropy began with the radical Protestants (dissenters from ‘order’), which led to the Enlightenment, and then to the chaotic growth of democracies we’ve seen since.

The “Cathedral”, led by the so-called “Brahmin” social class, dominates mainstream education, journalism, media, and entertainment, to push the Synopsis. The Brahmins control the State by the Cathedral. Yarvin and the Dark Enlightenment assert that the Cathedral’s ideals of equality, democracy, and justice erodes social order.

No compromise with other ideologies

Unsurprisingly for a software engineer, Yarvin uses the metaphor of a “hard reset” or “rebooting” of politics instead of gradual shift or consensus building. But he suggests the way to achieve that is through non-engagement with the Synopsis, believing “progressivism would fail without right wing opposition”.

People who study Dark Enlightenment describe it as a cult. “It is a worship of corporate power to the extent that corporate power becomes the only power in the world,” says David Golumbia, a new media professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. “It becomes militarized, and states break down. For some reason that’s difficult to understand, they seem to think these highly weaponized feudal enclaves would be more free than the society we currently have.”

Sounds horrifying, but what’s it got to do with me?

Dark Enlightenment started as a thought experiment among tech-bro pseudo-intellectuals, and peaked about 5-10 years ago. Yarvin’s blog has been mostly inactive since 2014, and even more radical political philosophies have mostly passed it by. If it was a blip then it would be easy to ignore, but the Dark Enlightenment’s not in the rear-view mirror quite yet. Here’s just a few twitches from the Nrx corpse in the 2022 election…

Steve Bannon, who was unbelievably-but-actually an advisor to a US President, continues his on/off relationship with Curtis Yarvin.

Neoreactionary Tech investor Peter Theil, who “no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible”, gave $10 million each to two longtime associates and Senate candidates reported to share his views, making him a pivotal force in a fight for a 50-50 Senate.

In a related story, Theil went one-and-one with his handpicked candidates. You may have heard of them… JD Vance won in Ohio and Blake Masters lost in Arizona.

Yes, ideas do have consequences, and the Dark Enlightenment could have some of the darkest consequences one could imagine in a democracy. Learn more about it from the people who promote it and the people who analyze it in the Digging Deeper section below.