What is Neoreaction: Ideology, Social-Historical Evolution, and the Phenomena of Civilization Kindle Edition

Laliberte left the neoreactionary movement because his sexuality was questioned; no joke, look this up. Nonetheless, such should not have much bearing on the content of his work prior to his outing. Still, this is not a work of high quality. It has dense prose that doesn't lead to any greater insight. The totality of Laliberte's strand of neoreaction is just re-purposed Aristotle and Catholicism.

This book tells of the Catholic, anarchy-capitalism, and nationalism of neo-reaction. Laliberte talks of these three items and how they relate to his thought. He mentions Mencius Moldbug only in passing, and despite what he says, this could be a first exposure to neo-reaction for some.

It’s hard to exaggerate the comprehensive awfulness of this book. There are editing errors on nearly every other page, not only is the logic faulty, but the arguments are simplistic and ironically shortsighted, and the writing style is not only ineloquent in the extreme, but is also pointlessly obtuse and circuitous. It’s almost as if it were written by someone who’s native tongue is not English. In any language though, this would be a bad book. The observations would still be off, the logical reasoning would still be terrible, and narrative structure would still be a complete mess. Even his understanding of the nature of modernity is inadequate. This book is with redeeming quality in any language.

Neoreaction: doesn’t it just roll off the tongue?

I don’t know who coined it, but it’s a nice all-encompassing term for the ideology of this part of the Internet, or at least one that doesn’t make me cringe. I realize that Heartiste was trying to be cheeky with “Dark Enlightenment,” but apparently none of the nerds who picked that phrase up got the subtext. Now it sounds like something that a 15-year old goth would come up with while browsing the discount rack at Hot Topic. “Ooooh, look at me! Look how DARK and EVIL I am!” For the rest of us, we’re just neoreactionaries.

But what is neoreaction? Anarcho Papist author Bryce Laliberte answers the question in this debut book, an absolute must-buy for anyone interested in the predominant ideology of the ‘sphere. I don’t recommend it for absolute beginners, as Laliberte’s book assumes some basic familiarity with the writings of Mencius Moldbug and other major thinkers, but if you’ve already gotten your feet wet, Neoreaction will help you better understand how the world works.

Don’t be fooled by the book’s short length; this is a dense work that requires careful thought and a re-read or two. Laliberte begins by defining ideology itself, its purposes and how it sustains itself. From this, he carefully explains not only why neoreaction is right, but what fundamentally separates it from other ideologies; namely, the fact that it doesn’t rely on popular consensus to function, nor can it.

Laliberte’s prose is similar to his blog posts; very formal and intellectual without being showy. It won’t win any awards, but he conveys his ideas and beliefs in an erudite way. Additionally, Neoreaction is largely free of the jargon that characterizes this part of the Internet (such as “Cathedral” or “Brahmin”), giving it a greater professionality than the usual fare.

From the introduction, Laliberte moves on to define neoreaction as the only ideology capable of sustaining a civilization. As he points out, organized society is no accident; in particular, he credits the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages for setting the stage for later European glory by forbidding inbreeding and encouraging exogamous marriage. He coins the term “biopolitics” (fortunately unrelated to that fraud Foucault and his nonsense idea of “biopower”) to describe the eugenic and demographic trends that make civilization possible.

Laliberte lays the blame for modernism at the feet of the Protestant Reformation (or as he calls it, the “Protestant Formation”), not exactly an original assertion, but he cuts to the heart of why Protestantism was so corrosive to European culture; it represented the destruction of hierarchy. Martin Luther’s assertion of salvation through faith alone and assertion that laymen could interpret Scripture for themselves annihilated the hierarchy of the old Catholic Church. It is from this that we come to the radical egalitarianism of modern leftists, in which all races are equal, men and women are interchangeable, and no one is better than anyone else. Even so-called conservatives and libertarians are afflicted with this disease; as Laliberte points out in his critiques of libertarianism, they assume an egalitarianism of opportunity flying in the face of racial and gender differences.

Despite Laliberte’s religious biases, his later arguments in favor of neoreaction spring from entirely logical and sensible foundations. For example, he provides a secular justification for patriarchy based in the biological realities of masculinity and femininity. Patriarchy is the only system in which both the strengths of men—risk-taking and courage—and women—child-rearing and nurturing—are used to their fullest benefit, while feminism blunts both. All of this is a massive oversimplification of Laliberte’s ideas, by the way. Get the book for the full flavor.

If there’s one thing I’d criticize What is Neoreaction? for, it’s that it feels incomplete. While Laliberte explicitly states in the opening paragraphs that his book is not intended to be an introductory text, it could have easily become one—and thus a more valuable book—had he lengthened it by just a couple of chapters.

Still, these are all minor dings. What is Neoreaction? is absolutely worth checking out if you’ve been reading up on neoreaction and want to fully understand it or if you’re a neoreactionary who wants to better clarify your ideas.

Well argued but not well edited. There were some glaring grammatical errors. And, for a document that's supposed to be for the already initiated, it still presented much of whats already well established among NRx as new information.