THE REACTIONARY'S ROUNDUP - 21 MAY 2023
The best writing on (and off) Substack: Quantity and Quality. Bringing back global warming. Chariot warfare shapes boxing. And more!
Following up on last week’s post, welcome to Better Barbarians’ first ever roundup of the best writing on and off Substack.
of Postcards From Barsoom has, maddeningly, lapped me twice by now and dashed my hopes of being the first worthy contender to the mantle. John, if you’re reading this, do you not sleep man?I have decided that for this roundup, links will be sorted by vibe/tone rather than writer’s affiliation or any form of thematic categorisation. I will be handing out a Silver Circle Award to the best writer/post of the week, as was TWIR (long may it live) tradition.
John has decided to go the route of handing out Iron Ring Awards to the best writers/posts of the week, and you have to admit it’s a pretty badass, Conan-esque name for an accolade. Nevertheless, I guess I have no choice but to give it a crack for at least one or two weeks and hand out a couple of these babies myself.
By what authority do I claim to be worthy to hand these awards out? Well, I claim it by virtue of being one of the few people who would be foolhardy enough to try. When someone else is willing to invest the time to pull together the various strands of the DR into a single place, and is willing to do intellectual coolie labour like this for the low, low price of a cup of coffee, I will happily step down.
Postcards From Barsoom has been one of the most consistently well-written, insightful and all-round cool Substacks I have discovered in the last year. John writes with much erudition, pristine humour, and never a trace of that dreadful postmodern irony or smugness that plagues so much contemporary discourse. You should start here with his forays into weekly roundups, and when you’re done, proceed to my attempt below. What are you waiting for, a written invitation? Read, subscribe, and when you’re done go read it again.
I make no claim to being as rigorous or intelligent as the editors at Social Matter. Even so, I hope you enjoy this small labor of love. Let us proceed.
Moderns Against Modernity
is a longtime staple of the NRx/DR community, and he is a statistician to the stars. I have to hand it to the man, he has been relentless in taking a shiv to all of modern Science's sacred cows for as long as I can recall. This week I'll link three especially notable articles from him, starting with this broadside at that nebulous and quite sinister edifice of the Modern world called 'Meritocracy.'
In truth our modern efforts at establishing a meritocracy has created anything in truth an “expertocracy”, the formation of which James Burnham examined in depth in The Managerial Revolution. Scientism created a profusion of experts as we approached the late 20th century, and we have been living under their tyranny ever since.
The present author points to our societal confusion of quantity and quality for allowing us to indulge in a collective delusion that just because someone has the correct “elite” credentials, or has scored well on some standardized aptitude test designed by people who have never held a job anywhere in the real world, he is indisputably qualified to hold the levers of power on matters of finance, culture, health and public policy, among others. Who is to blame for this sorry state of affairs?
Well, Napoleon, as it so happens.
I shan’t be too unkind to the “experts.” As a class they have been taking a series of losses and public comeuppances since 2020. Dunking on them is absurd as they quite frequently set themselves up for failure. Almost like they know that point deer does not really make horse. Power is as power does. I’ll as magnanimous as I can here – every sane and stable society does everything it can to cultivate a steady supply of experts. Expertise is not the problem. It is that our experts lie, constantly, about everything, for no good reason. Though seriously, Why do they always lie?
Then, he tracks how the public definition of climate has changed over time. In fact, these changes have been so uncanny that one is sorely tempted to guess that this could not be mere coincidence but dare I say an orchestrated campaign with far-reaching ramifications.
To treat an average as a reality is to commit the intellectual sin of reification, that is, treating an abstraction as a thing. Mathematicians, understanding the limitations of averages, numbers without real meaning, are rather embarrassed by them; climatologists love them.
What is the solution to this? It’s time to bring back global warming and global cooling as terms to describe the ongoing cyclical climatic processes that are, you know, well documented in the geological record.
Only the handsome, strong, and never wrong will see the cycle of global warming & cooling for the multigenerational opportunities it represents! We will build the new world in the astonishingly mild and fertile zone of Yakutia. The overpopulated cities of the equatorial belt must sink beneath the waves like a second Atlantis so that the greater portion of mankind may LIVE. You love to see it.
One of the OGs
on supporting localism. The failure and eventual collapse of absolutely centralized nations appears to be an intractable problem to solve. E.F. Schumacher believed small is beautiful. There is a lesson here and perhaps it is time we learned it.J Smith writing at the Orthosphere has a compelling for why people in the modern West no longer live under democracy of any sort, or even an oligarchy as some claim, but rather a pornocracy.
What, pray tell, is a pornocracy?
Pornocracy means rule by pornē, which is to say prostitutes, which is to say women (and men) who use sexual desire as an economic and political tool. The word is most frequently applied to a period in the early tenth century when the Papacy was controlled by three infamous and we must suppose fascinating women. From this we may generalize that pornocracy is rule by women and childish and effeminate men.
Intriguing hypothesis, and one that merits further study. By now it should be obvious to anyone with a pulse that Western elites – and by extension, Western nations, are in the clutches of a psychosexual hysteria which in a dark mirror of the mid-20th century now seeks not to stamp out deviancy at the point of an icepick, but to enforce it.
Longtime friends and followers of this humble blog may be acquainted with the venerable John Michael Greer. This week highlights his post Quantity and Quality , in which he examines the transition from the world of Tradition to Modernity through the eponymous book by Rene Guenon. Guenon casts an interesting figure. Love him or hate him, there is so much rich meal to be found in his writings. Let’s dig in.
Guénon’s basic gimmick was the claim that he could speak for the primordial tradition, the original spiritual teaching handed down to humanity at the dawn of time. Various attempts have been made by his followers to fabricate some kind of lineage linking Guénon from his earliest years back to the “mystic East” Edward Said anatomized so trenchantly in his book Orientalism, but it’s pretty clear that this is merely window dressing. “Tradition” for Guénon meant simply the grab-bag of Asian and Western spiritual traditions he’d pieced together out of his own studies: some Hinduism here, some Sufism there, a cup of Taoism minced up fine, stir briskly with a Masonic gavel and bake in a Hermetically sealed vessel until well done.
Oof. Read the whole thing – it gets better.
It’s embarrassingly common to hear people insist nowadays that every place is a sacred space and that all times are sacred times. That’s the sort of thinking you can expect to find during what Guénon called the reign of quantity, the stage of the historical process we’re in today. To begin with, of course, if every place is sacred, “sacred space” no longer means anything at all, just as the word “blue” would have no meaning if everything was that color. Yet there’s a deeper issue here as well. The entire concept of sacred space presupposes that different places have their own distinctive qualities, that they’re not simply interchangeable cubic volumes.
In the same way, the idea of sacred days and times implies that time is not a uniform thing distinguished only by arbitrary numbers. Qualitative times have their own distinct meaning and spirit, and sacred calendars are among the ways these are mapped. Most people nowadays assume as a matter of course that all such distinctions are arbitrary, but this is simply another reflection of the reign of quantity. That time might not be a uniform commodity, to be chopped up and packaged by industrial society in any convenient manner, is unthinkable to those who can only see quantities when they look at the world.
In other words, when everything is special, nothing is. And with the loss of a connection to the divine, without organizing principles to help us see a world of Essence rather than mere inert substance, we will not be able to answer with any seriousness the question that comes up around holidays (holy-days): What makes this day special?
JMG is in fighting form as always and this post is an excellent summary of Guenon’s thesis. The long descent from the One to the Many, from Essence to Substance, from the Golden Age to Iron Age, makes up one of the main themes of my writing. I hereby award Mr Greer this week’s Honorable Mention.
Journalism Ls
As a rule of thumb we do not take kindly to journalists around here, putrid and morally bankrupt as the whole profession has become, but
still gives it a decent shout once in a while. Admirable. Here’s Lisa Selin Davis from TFP on how (American) therapists became social justice warriors.Confirming a phenomenon many of us may have observed or theorized about: therapy has become yet another victim of ideological capture. Vulnerable people put their trust in these professionals to help them regain mental health, and end up feeling healthy, sure, but also prone to seeing the world through an ideological lens that is all too happy to quickly label as toxic or deranged any critique of cancel culture or whatever political bugbear the therapist is obsessed with.
Why don't we talk about race differences? I have a couple ideas about that but in the meantime, Bo Winegard at
has a gentle reminder on five reasons why we should talk about race differences. Number 3 is of particular note. Progress in basic research has ground to a half across multiple domains because scientists have to conform to the prevailing ideology of the day, instead of performing their duty to truth and the the discovery of Reality.Fighting the Long Descent
is one of the most insightful people out there observing and commentating on the absurd paralogic of Germany's Energiewende policy. Confirming what everyone has suspected for a a long time, Germany's Greens are the logical conclusion of a society that has accepted Nominalism. These critters have not studied the hard sciences and thus fancy that Reality is optional – it is vat ve say it is! And so, tiny inconvenient causal effects such as entropy and declining EROEI do not shake their faith that we can live in a highly energy intensive civilization without relying on those nasty...brutish... energy-dense fossil fuels.
Somebody, please notify me when science has invented a self-licking popsicle. Unlike a perpetual motion device, or High-EROEI renewables, we may actually have a shot at this one.
Many of you are familiar with Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘man in the arena.’ Rather few have heard of the priest in the arena.
thinks it's time you learned. Many think it healthy that priestly types come down from their ivory towers to mingle with the plebs, but he begs to differ.Priests are always in love with their ideas, and introducing them into the public square willy-nilly opens up many avenues for theocratic capture.
Follow
. I have little doubt that many of you already are aware of the censorship-industrial complex. If you are not, it's pretty important that you learn what it is, and fast. Last week I wrote that our enemies' weapons are as much cultural and digital as they are kinetic.Censorship is the lash and the noose they want to use to impose their values, their distorted vision of reality on the rest of us.
Arts and Letters
is another good friend of the present author. His Substack is erudite, he is fast on his way to becoming one of the world's foremost scholars of Tolkien lore, and I'm sure you will agree. If you enjoy the world of LOTR, I highly recommend you give him a follow. While not a recent post, I shall post this as this is the article that revived my interest in the deep historical basis of Middle-Earth.
Agnostic of Face To Face has penned a prelude to an Americanist defence of Brutalist architecture. This might seem like a controversial take, but bear with me, Brutalism is one of America’s great contributions to the world’s architectural heritage. Liek it or leave it. He highlights the absurdity of American Trads in 2023 clamoring after le epic based Roman/Greek architecture. And I think this excerpt is valuable enough to quote in its entirety:
We can't conserve & preserve cultures that we did not create, and that we have no geographic or temporal link to. It's up to the Italians to preserve Roman culture -- or Spaniards to preserve what the Romans brought to their land. But Romans never landed in North America, so there is nothing of theirs for us to preserve. Certain aspects that can be copied and mediated, like their language and literature, we can preserve. We could even preserve images of their visual art and architecture. But most of that stuff is in Italy, not America, so we can't help them as much as they could help themselves.
Which of course fits into my contention that any serious and authentic reactionary movement needs to work from first principles and understand that there is no going back. The past is frozen in amber, forever. Retvrning to its architectural or artistic forms is, when you think hard about it, LARPing with extra steps. We are on a mission after all, and what we seek is the conservation of FIRE, not contenting ourselves with warmed over quotes from Seneca or the Athenians.
By now it should be apparent that John Carter will be taking home this week’s Silver Circle Award. On one count, for his brilliant work in getting weekly roundups up and running again, and on the second, for his post Electric Yggdrasil, a mind-bending little foray into speculative cosmology that asks (and attempts to answer) the question: What if the world-tree of Norse mythology was real? How would that look? And what might prove that what the ancients perceived was in fact more scientific than we give it credit for? Read the whole thing.
Train Everything
One of the major points of departure between the present DR and the pre-2019 NRx community would have to be a firm belief in the importance of moving beyond theory. It is later than you think, and men and women of a reality-leaning mindset can no longer afford to ignore cultivating their physical vitality.
Train the body as you train the mind and spirit.
Train everything.
Alex Vermeulen over at Countere wrote an interesting piece highlighting the similarities between chariot warfare tactics and boxing. A taste:
“The ability to utilize distance and effective range against a slower opponent meant chariots could never be caught by infantry. Bobbing and weaving in conjunction with hooks and uppercuts employs a similar intent, placing oneself just outside the opponent’s reach, throwing unanswerable hooks, uppercuts, and crosses with every step. Like the “punching” shots of the composite bow, these hooks and uppercuts could be deadly if they caught an unprepared opponent.”
Quite fascinating to see how martial arts have evolved alongside military technology.
So over the last 18 months, I put on 15 pounds of muscle. Much, if not most, of this achievement in physical transformation I can attribute to my good friend
, who writes over at . Arthur, who in addition to basically being the 21st century Hemingway, is a Muay Thai fighter and personal trainer. His retrospective on Pascha is beautifully written. I suggest you read and subscribe. You may contact him directly to learn more about crafting a personalized training program for your goals and lifestyle.There has never been a better time to be someone looking to sculpt his body into a weapon, and if you’re just starting out, or on the fence about committing to hiring a eprsonal trainer,
writes prolifically on the topic of exercise, diet and lifestyle optimization. As a currently active bodybuilder his posts are a concise and useful primer to fixing your lifestyle, nutrition and lifting for maximal gains.
Well gentle readers, that is a wrap for this reactionary roundup. I hope you enjoyed it. About half an hour ago the Substack editor reminded me that this post has exceeded the email length. Good lord, this ended up being only half as long as I had hoped it would be. It’s been a busy week and I need sleep. Work beckons and there is only so much time. With luck next week’s post will be at least 10% longer. Before that you should
Housekeeping: Quite a few of you (much more than I ever imagined) have pledged a subscription to Better Barbarians. I have not turned on paid subs for two reasons. The first is that the nature of my work makes it very difficult to finish writing my own posts, let alone roundups like this. I don’t know about you, but when I pay a monthly subscription for something, I expect it to be regular and satisfyingly substantial, neither of which I can promise. The second reason is that my work gives me enough financial freedom to not have to take anyone’s money.
My moral compass simply finds it distasteful to accept payment for something I happily do for free. I’d be much happier for now if you shared this around so all these writers got more exposure. Help the fire rise. I’d also be delighted if you explored this newsletter’s archives and give the older posts some love.
My mind is still open however, so if anyone has a compelling argument for why I should shut up and take your money, leave it in the comments.
Thank you once again for reading, and don’t forget to
Oh, great — just what I need. Even more quality Substacks to subscribe to! No worries, though. I'm enjoying it all, every word, every post. If only there were more than 24 hours in a day...
Wow, damn man, I'm honored. Many thanks for the kind words and for the award. I shall treasure it. Don't know what to say. Really made my day.
I was *just* reading the Greer piece you linked a couple days ago, it was in AmSun's Winners Losers and Links (I suspect we may have found it in the same place). I agree it was superlative, both for the insight into the birth of traditionalism in the occult milieu of the early twentieth century, and for the exposition of Guenon's thought.
Dayne's piece looked interesting, so I clicked through, realized I am already subscribed - I think Saxon Cross also mentioned him in his shout-out piece a week or so ago - then as I was realizing this, I got an email announcing Dayne's most recent piece. A synchronicity.
Edited to add: of course I sleep. Every other day, for thirty minutes before the sun rises, in between caffeine highs.