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Those are the parts of that essay that people always quote -- which is odd, since they're just statistical observations about what the electorate will support.
by pjscott 10y ago
Those are the parts of that essay that people always quote -- which is odd, since they're just statistical observations about what the electorate will support. The real meat of the essay is what Thiel proposes we do about it: not some political project to seize power or disenfranchise people who disagree, but a few ideas for how to sidestep politics with technology that will make freedom easier.
In the face of these realities, one would despair if one limited one’s horizon to the world of politics. I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.”
The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it. Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom.
He then goes on to talk about the internet, space colonization, and seasteading. I'm not really seeing the neoreactionary angle here. Am I missing something?
- alphonsegaston 10y agoThe part where he says giving half the population the right to vote made impossible his perverse fantasy? Substitute "blacks" or "Jews" in that statement if his fascist leanings need to be made more clear.
- mseebach 10y agoThe controversy of the quotes isn't around the statistical truth of what they say, it's that they reject the "democratist" assertion of a monotonically causal chain of more voting -> more democracy -> better. For "democratists", freedom lost to democratic decisions pretty much by definition isn't really lost. Ancient and not-so-ancient democracies have predicated the right to vote on such things as military service, land ownership, not being on welfare and other things. The idea is that voters should have a substantial stake in the republic (not saying that either predicate is a good, much less perfect, proxy for such a stake), not merely inhabiting it. Returning to that, rejecting "democratism" is the reactionary part.
- adrianratnapala 10y agoHeck man, I'm a "democratist" -- in the sense that I hold democracy to be a sacred value. But I don't beleive in that causal chain; and I probably don't beleive in the less sloppy alterntives you might think of given time. Also freedom-first thinkers like Thiel (and me for that matter) can just say: sure I believe in democracy -- and the most effective way to get it is almost alway to let people rule themselves. You can argue that that is playing with definitions -- but every republic since Athens that was worth a damn found ways to give individuals their space to do stuff that other people didn't like.
- 5040 10y agoThe concept of escape is of primary importance to neoreactionaries. For the hardcore neo-reactionaries, democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself. Fleeing it approaches an ultimate imperative. http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/ http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-b...
- pjscott 10y agoIt's of importance to anyone with a political ideology they think stands no chance of being voted in on a large scale. Again, I'm not seeing more than a superficial resemblance.