The Spandrellian trichotomy


Technology capitalism: libertarianism






Similarly libertarians believe, that since all races are supposedly equal, unlimited brown immigration will not make white countries any less capitalist and less wealthy.  On the contrary, those brown people are not going to live on welfare and crime, but are supposedly going to replace the missing grandchildren and work hard to support white people in their childless old age. Supposedly, mass third world immigration will have exactly the same outcomes as mass white immigration did, and the fact that mass white immigration had those outcomes proves it. And if you have a problem with this proof, you are raaaaciiiissst.

Libertarianism tries to be left on everything except markets and property rights, but it fails.  Inferior people cannot be permitted the same freedom as superior people, because if you try it, you wind up with a nanny state for all rather than liberty for all.

A free society cannot function without sobriety and family values, so Libertarianism in practice winds up supporting a high-tax welfare-prison state to cope with all the human wreckage caused by excessive liberty. Welfarist libertarians try to hang on to some faint shred of libertarianism by proposing a guaranteed income in place of welfare, but they all know perfectly well that most of the poor remain poor no matter how much money you give them, so a guaranteed income would just be yet another addition to welfare, not a replacement.

Tradition Patriarchy:  Religion.

The religious want to go back to an idealized religious society, where a common faith provides asabiyyah . Not working.  The thrones are all vacant, the altars all desecrated.   Progressivism is well on the way to digesting what few remnants remain of the old religions.

Those who go to worship at desecrated altars wind up worshiping demons.  Reactionaries convert to Catholicism, notice that their Pope is a leftist, wind up rationalizing that racism is big problem and a huge sin, and that Saint Paul did not say what he said about the relationship of men and women. Bruce Charleton explains Saint Paul on women as a metaphor for the relation of Church and Christ.

This, of course, is the wrong way around.  The patriarchal family provides necessary psychological support for faith in the patriarchal god.  Matrilineal societies slide down the religious scale to primitive Zoism.

By and large, neoreactionaries who convert to Christianity wind up turning intellectual somersaults, because Christianity has been so thoroughly assimilated into progressivism that there are few genuinely Christian communities left.  God is dead. Being a Christian in today’s west is like trying to be a pagan in fourth century Rome.  It did not work for Julian the Apostate, and it is not working for us.  After Darwin, hard to have a religion of the creator God.  Absent patriarchy, not going to have a religion of a patriarchal God.

Even if a supposedly neoreactionary Christian does not himself wind up helping the invasion on the US Southern border, he will tell you that the Christians who are assisting are wonderful.

Orthodox Judaism is going down the progressive digestive tract slower than Christianity, because progressives are embarrassed to arrest Jews for imposing Jewish roles on women, while they are not at all embarrassed to arrest Christians for imposing Christian roles on women, but it has been swallowed, and the digestive juices are starting to dissolve it.  Orthodox Jews still retain the rituals that remind them that in the Old Testament, women are property, but deny that those rituals mean what they mean.

Ethno Nationalism:  National Socialism

And similarly, too late for a monoethnic state.  One cannot make fish soup back into fish.  One can, however, have empire, one ethnic group more or less humanely ruling the others, giving each their own laws and respecting the customs of each.

Given the white tendency to theocracy, a more practical solution is that to get government employment, public office or go to the most prestigious universities (from which senior members of the government are recruited) one has to subscribe to the official religion, and the official religion is primarily white.  We kind of have this system already, in that to go to a prestigious university you have to submit essays showing your adherence in minute detail to progressivism, and your past activity in progressive activist groups – though this tends to select Jews at the expense of the main ethnicity, which undermines the intended cohesion.

A lot of ethnonationalists want a state that in which everyone within the borders is one ethnicity, and everyone within the borders votes and receives welfare. Creating such a state is likely to be horrifyingly bloody.  Further, being necessarily a process resembling total war, such a state is likely to wind up socialist, and socialism fails economically for reasons explained by Hayek and Mises, and colorfully dramatized by Ayn Rand.

And, supposing we created such a state, and supposing elections continued, the politicians would still have an incentive to bring in cheap voters to live on welfare.

Monoethnic government is lot easier and more workable.  Since in practice we somehow always wind up with monoreligious government, let us have an official belief system that in each country is primarily identified with one ethnicity, the major ethnicity of the better class of people in that country.


95 Responses to “The Spandrellian trichotomy”

  1. How about a technological capitalist that appropriates elements of conservatism such as controlling entitlement spending and support of free market capitalism, as well as believing in HBD & biological determinism in addition to supporting the fed, limited crony capitalism, and eugenics? Not all market libertarians are social libertarians. The system we have today is one of a free market with some govt. intervention for too big to fail, which is a pretty good compromise to an extreme or no government or no private enterprise. Sometimes crony capitalism could be justified if government investment represents an optimal allocation of capital that would not have otherwise occurred, such as as the super-effective 2008 bank bailouts that quickly stemmed the financial panic. Even Milton Friedman acknowledged some government was necessary to protect private rights and national security.

    • Chris B says:

      “super-effective 2008 bank bailouts that quickly stemmed the financial panic” LOL

      • jim says:

        A sufficient reply.

      • Kgaard says:

        Grey enlightenment is correct on the wisdom of the 2008 bank bailouts. Without them a second Great Depression would have ensued. The first Great Depression could have been forestalled had they done in 1931 what Bernanke et al did in 2008-09. Of course, the larger issue is why it was necessary in the first place. And the answer is basically … crony capitalism. The banks were running with WAY too much leverage because they knew the Fed would have to bail them out.

        • Red says:

          We’ve only put off the second great depression and day by day we’re making sure that it’s going to be much worse when the debt bubble pops a second time.

          The great depression was a slow grinding deflation of the debts run up in the 1920s. It took as long as it did because we’d didn’t purge the bad debt. Today we have a slow grinding reduction in wages (23% since 2008) along with higher prices, with fewer and fewer people working while the debt bubble grows bigger and bigger. We’re looking at 35%+ loss of GDP when it finally pops. We haven’t avoided, we’ve just pumped it into the biggest bubble in history. When it pops the American middle class will be toast and probably won’t be seen again outside of government workers for generations.

          • Kgaard says:

            Nah … not gonna pop. You should check out the market monetarists and NGDP targeters. They have the right take on this. Bernanke did the right thing, and Yellen is as well. You can always print enough money to offset a foregoing error — but you don’t have to print so much that you cause hyperinflation. We are enjoying a happy medium right now. That’s why the stock market is up and 10-year bonds yield 2.4%.

          • red says:

            All bubles pop. You can’t fight mathamatics. But you can rob the public while pump the bubble bigger and bigger. To be dramaric, The middle and lower classes will be eating out of garbage cans with another 5 years of your happy medium. 9% a year inflation with 4% wage reductions is how you turn a first world nation into a 3ed world nation.

          • Kgaard says:

            Of course … the last two times Americans were eating out of garbage dumps — the 1870s and the 1930s — it was the result of DE-flationary errors. If you base your worldview on the expectation of an inflationary meltdown in the US it will throw off your thinking on just about every other matter. (One of the things that drew me to neoreaction in the first place was that so many people GOT this. Lot of dudes reading Scott Sumner, etc.)
            The reason Europe is in so much trouble is that the ECB is printing too little money — not too much …

          • red says:

            I’m not talking about hyper inflation. I have no idea if we’ll see a such an event as such events are usally politcal in nature.

            What I am talking about is debt bubbles and the sudden deflationly crashes that come from failing to purge bad debts. The other half of the eqation is the feds intentional inflation that is robbing average people through off the books inflation and reduced wages so that they can continue increasing the size of the debt bubble and even reinflate the housing bubble. Americans get poorer, the middle class dies, and more and more debt is needed just to keep the bubble growing and prevent the crash needed to clear the debt.

            The bigger and longer the debt bubble continues the bigger and more painful the adjustment will be. China’s going to crash as well but they got a lot infrastructure and factories out of their debt bubble. We got nothing but transfer payments and lots of workers without worthwhile skills.

        • jim says:


          I really think I know more about the 2007 banking crisis than most people. It was actually the 2005 Banking crisis, and I became aware of it in 2005.

          The bailouts were an utter disaster, the result of utterly disastrous government interventions taken in 2006.

          Supposing them to be necessary, which is not true (deposit insurance would have sufficed), they were made necessary by the government preventing bankers from using mortgage criteria that had disparate impact – the politicians looted the banks in order to make handouts to voter blocks, then, starting in 2005 they looted other parts of the financial system to keep the banks afloat, and then in 2008 there was nothing left to loot, hence the bailout.

          Had there been no bailout, the lesson would have been that next time politicians loot the banks, the banks should scream blue murder.

          • Kgaard says:

            Yeah … if the original sins had not been committed, the bailouts would not have been needed. And forcing banks to lend money to bad credit risks was high on the list of sins.

        • Michael says:

          maybe another great depression would have helped thing like all the mexicans going home and making the us 90% white again

  2. J says:

    Jim, Have heard that the Caliphate has been kidnapping hundreds of yazidi women and girls and selling them to their followers for a few dollars? What am I saying, has been? I read it on the BBC yesterday. THEY believe in and practice patriarchy. Boko Haram was a pathbreaker. I presume that the Islamic State will force Al Qaida, Saudi Arabia Ikhwan and other moderate Muslims to follow its example. By the fenomenal success of ISIS (the Caliphate) we see that people likes it. And it is attracting many Westerners. Soon in your city.

  3. soapjackal says:

    Thoroughly enjoyable.

    I really dig my interactions with NRx but beyond slight community tinkering I havent run the gauntlet to really be comfortable (or even worthy but that does make for some weird views on nrx) with attaching said label. I personally have tendencies towards the development of my tribe, applying virtue in my everyday life, and seeking paths towards positive disintegration and general holistic improvement. My search for continual ways to make myself well aware of my general ignorance has led me to some intriguing observations of nrx.

    Primarily that many parts of this disassembly you present contain quite a bit of merit. Moreover that the more intriguing parts of nrx, past the obvious tweaking (i wouldnt say breaking since alot of time is spent obsessing over progs) of the overton window, really come from synthesis of elements of all 3 areas. The areas where the synthesis does not occur lead to the interesting results of regression and fission.

    Regression being that almost everyone who becomes part of the nrx discussion really just take a few nuggets of insight porn and regress back to prior ideological stances. The actual causation of this is sorta fuzzy on my end. It could be that nrx doesnt actually offer a perch ideologically speaking to function well in that position. It could be that nrx doesnt do more than just exacerbate confirmation biases that said individuals have been making their whole lives. Its plausible that theyre not really breaking any chains in Plato’s Cave and just drawing funny pictures on a small part of the wall with a bit of chalk they found when they looked down. Theres also the odd thought that nrx really is just reliant on modernity to an extent no one is really comfortable in admitting. Regardless of why this happens everyone ends up standing up for the major tenets, even if they are more foundational and specific than many of the adherents of those ideologies really care to think about, they generally were standing up for back in the day.

    Fission. It seems to be a few things. Its growing pains in the development of newer and shinier insights. Its also tribal politics at work that become more exacerbated when people with no leadership skills try to take the reigns and where most of the people don’t really want to think to terribly hard about how hard it is for something to development if it isnt guided in some manner. Then there’s the how all the separate parts of the trichotomy when regressed really don’t care for the full application of thoughts from the other branches. Fission is really spurned on, and simultaneously pushed back, by how vague and meta the whole affair is especially when most attention towards the ‘movement’ is usually quite inaccurate and actually encouraging to those who like thought crime.

    I can’t say that I’m really that experienced in strategy, group dynamics, or even effective political action beyond personal leadership experience and my limited observational capacity. However I have a thought that I hope others can either viciously critique or add upon.

    stop the meta or go the distance.

    Don’t concern oneself with trying to play the metapolitical game if all youre going to do either regress, whole sale react to modernity (and get trapped in the overton window), or become really reliant on insight porn. I am in no way denigrating the fine work of reactionaries or traditionalists. If you want to go down the avenues presented in your regression or reactionary tendencies then just go down those routes and apply critical thought to them to improve it in the best way you can. There is not much wrong with this and just associating these groups together as some new form of reaction (entomologically thats all neoreaction really signifies any way) is not anything more than just opening discourse between the different threads of the alternative right.

    Believe you me I really do appreciate those who do such things like steve sailer as well as jim himself. There are plenty of great things to learn and even the anti-democracy stance doesnt even need to be altered. Accept it and take pride in it.

    Or you could go all the way. Expand down into strange tangents of history and philosophy. Start a project like the freisian school:

    or synthesize something new from the trends that are generally being regressed to. Expand to all great thinkers. Critically examine the enlightenment or play around with weird projects (debunking HBD from a non-prog stance). Take record numbers of hallucinogens and really delve into what meta politics really represents. Stop worrying about signalling and love the bomb.

    Apologies for the exceedingly long comment but this post really got the gears going. Thanks.

  4. Thrasymachus says:

    -There are two kinds of “neo-reactionaries”- those who have Golden Dawn t-shirts, and those who don’t. Pretty sure Jim doesn’t have a GD t-shirt.

    -Libertarianism seemed to be an answer to Great Society socialism, but once progressives became explicitly pro-capitalist in the 90’s it lost all relevance. Progressives have always been pro-capitalist but as long as they were not explicit about it there was room for an explicitly pro-capitalist party. All the Republicans have left is traditional morality, which is a big seller but they don’t even believe in it themselves.

    -Official Christianity is totally subverted, but you don’t have to be an official Christian, you can just read the book. I recommend the Richmond Lattimore New Testament. An official religion that depends heavily on individual mystical experience is probably not a good basis for government though.

    -Ethno-nationalism is simply the insight that the people matter more than the system. A country is going to be a reflection of the people who live there. Norway is going to be Norwegian as long as Norwegians live there. Communist, capitalist, social democrat, fascist, it will be Norwegian more than anything else.

    -Rule as an empire by one ethnic and religious group is more or less what we have now, and it is evil, because the group in charge constantly plays other groups off against one another to maintain power. It relies more on a low but constant level of fear than open violence and intimidation- although it uses those frequently enough, as we see in St. Louis- but still it relies on violence, humiliation, degradation and debasement that is overall much worse that what non-whites were subjected to pre-civil rights era.

    • Kgaard says:

      “You don’t have to be an official Christian, you can just read the book. An official religion that depends heavily on individual mystical experience is probably not a good basis for government though.”

      Are you sure this actually works? Individual mystical experience is tough to conjure up on a dime. That’s why church services were created in the first place. It’s like division of labor: They create the ambiance, environment and ritual in which mystical communion can happen (i.e. church service), you roll out of bed, grab a coffee, drive to the church and give them some $$$.

      If we all lived in the mountains and were experiencing medium-level mystical union all the time, there would be less need for this division of labor. But since most of us live in cities, it seems pretty necessary to have a group of people to keep the rituals going …

  5. spandrell says:

    Good stuff. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

    The problem is that that middle ground may very well out turn out to be empty. Or have some massive anti-gravity stuff going on that makes it really hard to get into.

  6. pwyll says:

    I’m one of the “reactionaries who converted to Catholiciscm” that you mention. Just one data point, but I categorically DO NOT “wind up rationalizing that racism is big problem and a huge sin”, nor have I wound up”helping the invasion on the US Southern border.”

    I’m in agreement that the modern catholic church is corrupt and dysfunctional in many ways, but I joined it regardless; I believe that as an institution it still has worth despite the corruption and dysfunction.

    • Kgaard says:

      I hear you … but how do you get around Jim’s critique? Every time you give $50 to the Catholic Church, some of that is going to help the invasion of America. Christian teaching takes no account of race. How could it? That would undermine the whole point.

      • pwyll says:

        It’s a valid point, but on the other hand every time I pay my taxes FedGov uses some of it to help the invastion of America, and I haven’t yet emigrated to Singapore. Dealing with mixed bags isn’t straightforward, and YMMV.

    • Dan Kurt says:

      re: pwyll: “I’m one of the “reactionaries who converted to Catholiciscm”

      My wife, a Ph.D. from an Ivy in a hard science, during her 60s essentially did the same but in her case it was a rediscovery of Catholicism as she was raised a Catholic and fell away for 4+ decades. (I, lacking grace, remain a fallen Catholic.)

      pwyll, since you converted you owe it to yourself to investigate the Society of St. Pius X which is a Traditional Catholic organization growing by leaps and bounds around the world. The Society, with the Latin Mass and pre-Vatican II teaching of Catholic Tradition, is anti-modernist. According to my wife the Society preaches salvation of the soul not the social gospel of the current edition of the Pope’s Catholic Church. Visit: http://www[DOT]fsspx[DOT]org/en/

    • As am I, and also I understand that the Church is not its leadership.

      • jim says:

        Well, if the Church is not its leadership, if the Church is two or three Christians gathered together, then you are a protestant.

        Which is better than believing what the Pope believes.

        • Matthew says:

          Ekklesia means “called out”. Almost cognate to “elect”. Nothing to do with gathering.

  7. Van Phauc says:

    “And similarly, too late for a monoethnic state. One cannot make fish soup back into fish.”

    I notice that ISIS was able to get rid of unwanted ethno-religious groups like the Christians and the Yezidis quite quickly and easily. What’s impossible for whites is very possible for Muslims, because they have the will to do it.

    It wasn’t even that bloody (assuming the Yezidis make it to Kurdistan) because after they killed a few the rest left on their own.

    And while ISIS may not have gained much by getting rid of those groups, some groups are so violent and/or disruptive that driving them out would save lives and resources in the long run.

  8. peppermint says:

    This was answered conclusively in .

    There is now a new trichotomy:

    (1) anti-Semitism. To what degree is die Juden sind unser unglück? Could the US 1960s Civil Rights Act and Immigration Act have happened without the shape-shifting Jew? Did the British government do anything but help the Jew in any way possible during the 20th century? Is breaking Jewish power to be our top priority?

    (2) Monarchism. To what degree is the problem the rise of the Mass Man and his crass vulgarity? To what degree is the solution to disenfranchise him and shut down his media and education? To what degree is his enfranchisement the result of the introduction of muskets and rifles and radio transmitters and videocameras, and his disenfranchisement can be effected by introducing drones and blogs?

    (3) Christianity. To what degree did all of this happen because man had forgotten God? To what degree should our top priority be the restoration of moral authority?

    This is the trichotomy I am interested in right now.

    • Van Phauc says:

      Pretty good trichotomy, but your link is dead. Anyone got a mirror or cached version?

    • spandrell says:

      Trichotomy comes from dichotomy, which means to cut in half. It’s about conflict.

      What you have there is a triad. And a pretty lame one at that.

    • B says:

      There is a word, my dear brony, which I would like to introduce to you: chutzpah. That is, the quality being exhibited by a man who’s murdered both his parents and begs clemency on the grounds that he’s an orphan.

      To be more specific-I am now in a midwestern college town on a business trip. There are many Jews here who have been seduced by you people generations ago, who don’t know anything about Judaism, who intermarry casually, who are faithful high-IQ servants of the system that American whites built and believe in its tenets as fervently as any other high-IQ Cathedral servants. There is nothing inherently Jewish in those tenets-Carl Shurz and John Brown were hardly hooknosed Yidn. Quite the opposite. And those of my brethren who’ve bought into this belief system, which your people invented, are reproducing at rates similar to you-in other words, headed for extinction.

      So when you preach antisemitism, you are preaching attacking the conversos for taking your propaganda seriously, and making them the scapegoats for your failures.

      • Jake says:

        “Smashing Jewish power” is pointless. The Jews of Europe have never recovered from the Holocaust. More American Jews marry Christians than other Jews. Israel will be the center of world Jewry once again in a couple generations.

  9. I’m not sure why subjecting a 2000 year old institution to the same standards of time as a government which isn’t even 250 years old makes sense. Yes, Francis is a leftist, we reactionary and neoreactionary Catholics admit that. But nothing ever promised wonderful Popes. In the long run, i.e. a timescale appropriate for looking at the Church, we have no proof that leftism will remain even an accidental part. In terms of theological fashion, it’s scarcely even a fad. It doesn’t even approach sincerity to reject Catholicism because the Pope is a leftist.

    • Brian says:

      What is your take on Rene Girard?

      He seems to imply that leftism is created by Christianity’s critique of victimization; yet the left fails to understand the importance of the pattern of mimetic rivalry — exposed and rejected by Christianity’s founder — that creates victims.

    • red says:

      Have you seen an institution once capitured by leftists ever become right wing again, baring a bloodlly civilwar? You’ve ether have purge the leftists by force or you yourself will be purged.

      • Brian says:

        You’re overlooking the fact that the left and the right are fundamentally different.

        Leftists infiltrate right-wing institutions because right-wing institutions are grounded in reality – and thus produce things worth taking.

        Doesn’t go both ways, though.

        Because left-wing institutions are not grounded in reality, and are inherently perverse, they create nothing of value. Once an institution is captured by leftists, there’s nothing, um, left.

    • jim says:

      You have had popes that had mistresses and were succeeded by their sons (which I think is an excellent system that you should have retained), but you have not had popes as heretical as this one. Further, he is one of a stream of popes, tending to greater and greater heresy.

      • Alex says:

        Perhaps, but a dismal collapse into official apostasy has been reported by Catholic seers since the very beginning. It’s in the script. Whether or not one takes that as evidence of Catholicism’s truth, it’s at the very least interesting.

        • jim says:

          Whenever a Catholic says “Well, we have had bad popes before”, he brings up some excellent popes who were succeeded by their sons.

          • Alex says:

            “Rome will lose the faith and become the seat of Antichrist.”

            – Our Lady of La Salette (Church-approved apparition)

    • Reakcionar says:

      I think this argument is fundamentally wrong. It’s basically rationalization of the fact that things look horribly grim, like a family of a dying drunk comforting themselves that he’s been like this for 60 years, he’s just a little hung over, he’ll be fine tomorrow. I’m not saying that Catholicism will not survive, I’m just emphasizing bad logic – just because it survived before does not automatically mean it has to survive again.

      Please tell me, was there ever a time in the history of the Catholic Church when someone like this could go around unpunished:
      (It’s an honest question, if you know a historical example, I’d love to hear it)

      • Korth says:

        I was going to mention Juan de Mariana or maybe Luis de León, but then I read the last line in the article:

        “The Roman Catholic church, which is my church, is misogynist and patriarchal in its structure. That needs to be changed as quickly as possible.”

        Wow. Just wow.

  10. I’m curious if you have any data/links to back up your claim that entry to elite Uni’s now requires abject and explicit kowtowing to Progressivism.

    • Steve Johnson says:

      1) Of course there isn’t hard data – elite Unis work very hard to make sure that the exact criteria for admissions are opaque for lots of reasons (ostensibly so no one can game the criteria – more cynically so that connected people can game the criteria and that the non-connected don’t know enough to do so).

      2) Ron Unz showed that, holding other factors equal, things like BSA and 4H actually decreased the chances of admission for the members – and that the chances of admission declined more for people in leadership roles. Pure ideological filtering.

      • jim says:

        Ron Unz failed to control for selection on religious grounds, by which I mean faith in progressivism, not faith in Judaism.

    • jim says:

      You would, perhaps, like a peer reviewed study?

      This is well known among students at elite high schools, who manufacture fake progressive extra curricular activities in order to get into elite universities.

      • The beliefs of students at elite high schools may be superstitious rather than justified.

        In any case, your claim that explicit kowtowing is necessary is quite a bit stronger than your and Steve’s arguments seem to support. I would conjecture that liberal kowtowing helps in borderline cases, but that top focused academics with athletic abilities and the like could still get into elite schools while staying away from the dogmas of Progressivism.
        However, I could well believe that explicit kowtowing is necessary, I was hoping you actually had data or at least specific anecdotes to distinguish.

        • peppermint says:

          I only know what I wrote in my admissions essay and where I got into with it. And that’s the most anyone knows for sure, because the process is deliberately opaque, but everyone knows exactly what you need to put in your essay, does it because they’re bright eyed young people with no real-world experience and concern for their future in the form of what kinds of ideas make you sound cool, and thereby gets in.

          And if they’re lucky, they graduate with a degree in whatever and go working for a company surrounded by somewhat less diversity than is featured in the admissions packets but still a respectable level of diversity, and they never think a hatethought, much less hold onto a hatefact, much less say any hatespeech. Hatespeech is for proles and disreputable people. But they still marry a White person and have White kids, because that’s who they’re attracted to, and people have an inalienable right to be attracted to whoever they are attracted to.

          If they’re unlucky, however, they might accidentally believe what they are told out loud about questioning authority and the scientific process, and start to wonder about some things. The government really needs to do something serious about online hatespeech; it’s just sad to watch good kids getting exposed to hate.

        • jim says:

          Most people explicitly kowtow to the most holy faith. Every young person I know that got in to an elite institution explicitly kowtowed to the most holy faith. And if he cynically disbelieved in the most holy faith, he nonetheless manufactured the appearance of a pile of extra curricular activity saving the whales, supporting the poor, et cetera.

          If their belief is superstitious, you need to disprove it rather than me needing to prove it. Produce an essay and extra curriculars of someone who got in in the last decade or so without explicitly kowtowing to the most holy faith

          • I don’t have any data whatsoever. But apparently you guys don’t either have an explicit example of somebody who clearly should have gotten in on grades and such, but didn’t because he wrote an essay confronting Progressivism;
            let alone an example of somebody who clearly should have gotten in but didn’t because he avoided the subjects dear to Progressivism altogether.

            Your claim that “I need to disprove it” is some kind of troll or rhetorical device, but its not very relevant to discovering whether the elite universities do in fact impose kowtowing. As a matter of simple logic, if the kids believe it and are confused on the subject, then you are also confused on the subject, whether I disprove it or not.

            I’m interested in understanding what the situation is with some provenance I can have confidence in, not in scoring some kind of rhetorical point. I don’t have a dog in this fight.

            • jim says:



              We know that the people selected by elite universities are far from being top in grades, SAT, and LSAT. So very large numbers of people who should have gotten in on grades, SAT, and LSAT, do not in fact get in.

              Probably the great majority of people who should have gotten in on SAT and LSAT fail to get in.

              So the question to be answered is: What are these people examples of?

              I would say they are examples of people whose enthusiastic paens of glory to the wonderful glories of progressivism subtly failed to ring sufficiently true.

              Because so many people are quite mysteriously not accepted to elite institutions, it is difficult to draw conclusions from any one individual who is not included.

              It is, however, easy to draw conclusions from people who are included. If one single person who identified in his entrance essay as not progressive was included, that would tell us that that non progressives were allowed into elite universities and high status government jobs.

              In contrast, one cannot conclude anything from one very smart person not included, since so many very smart people, the great majority of very smart people, are not included, even though all of them cry to the heavens as to how progressive they are.


            Probably the great majority of people who should have gotten in on SAT and LSAT fail to get in.**

            Now we are getting somewhere closer to a claim of data. I don’t know these things. Do you have some source for these claims?
            (I’m assuming you have some claim that wouldn’t be explained by controlling for race. Without that it may be perfectly demonstrable, but not suggest anything about other Progressive litmus tests.)

            • jim says:

              If I say all crows are black, it is not my job to produce the absence of non black crows. I cannot produce an absence. It is the job of those who claim there are white crows to produce a white crow.

              That elite universities require applicants to subscribe to progressivism is something everyone knows, the conventional wisdom among those who hope to enter an elite institution. It is hard to prove, easy to disprove. Since easy to disprove, the burden should lie on those that claim it is not true to disprove it.

              Since elite universities are secretive and evasive about the criteria they use to select students, students hoping for entry resort to vigorous tea leaf reading. And one of the things they have read in the tea leaves is that you have to swear loyalty to progressivism. So they all swear loyalty to progressivism.

          • Dan Kurt says:

            re: “Every young person I know that got in to an elite institution explicitly kowtowed to the most holy faith.” Jim

            1) When I got in an Ivy, in the early 60s two types of students were selected: merit admits and legacies. There were many,many legacies and legacies usually had had superb prep school training, not many were dull.

            2) The SATs have been dumbed down a number of times since when I took them so the high scoring pie is larger and thus the selection for “brains” allows corruption: a 750 in Verbal today would not have been a 750 in 1964 but well below 700 (only the college board knows for sure) thanks to recentering many times as well a dropping of the IQ related parts.

            3) Ten years ago my much younger sister’s boy failed to get into Harvard in spite of his SATs being 800 verbal, 800 math, and a A on his essay. He had been chief editor of his Prep School newspaper which was a competitive position but he lacked the “community outreach” participation and had no “sport” history even though he was 6 ft 2 in and built like a horse. The boy was crushed as well as his parents in that he was wait listed for Harvard. My sister knew of other top, top students who also failed to gain entrance to Harvard that year and much less bright get accepted.

            4) Another point, Harvard has not grown hardly at all in size over the last 75 years to keep pace with the increasing demand to get in. I believe that is true with all of the Ivys unlike,for example, the University of California System.

            Dan Kurt

            • jim says:


              I said “every young person” meaning every person who is now young. Things have changed since the sixties.

              but he lacked the “community outreach”

              Needless to say, community outreach in certain organizations will fail to advance your chances, or actively harm them. Community outreach of course means participation in left wing activities – which young people today routinely fake.

          • What you are saying about young people doesn’t even accord with my experience. I haven’t checked in a year or two, but I think there are lots of young people who don’t kowtow to Progressivism and do apply to elite schools. The ones I know (but we’re not talking data within the last 5 years) got into the schools their grades and scores probably entitled to.
            I know out and out unrepentant reactionaries who got into Harvard 5 years ago, One of whom managed to publish debunking of Progressive illusions in the Crimson.

            You should consider the possibility that part of the reason you seem to hold more extreme views about things than many people do may be that you subscribe to a low evidentiary standard and occasionally firmly believe conclusions that in actuality are false.

            • jim says:


              Do you know how they depicted themselves in their application?


              In the sense that grades and scores are increasingly irrelevant, no one gets into the schools the their grades and scores entitle them to.

          • I didn’t see the applications, but I would be shocked if they included kowtowing. It would have been totally out of character. And, as I said, once in Harvard one of them continued to sin against Progressivist dogmas, and even succeeded in publishing some of this stuff at the Crimson (showing thus no sense of kowtowing for his future plans). Another went so far as to join the army (for med school).

            • jim says:

              I, on the other hand, having actually talked to a reactionary kid about his college application, would be completely and utterly unshocked. The attitude is that everyone else lies about his politics on the college application form, and it is a test in lying so creatively as to be persuasive. Even if you are a genuine lefty, you have to be even lefter, and you have to outdo all the people who are not genuine lefties, but are lying, and the guy screening the applications takes it for granted that everyone is lying, so everyone, even the genuine lefties, perhaps especially the genuine lefties, lies.

              The attitude is “Everyone lies about their politics on their college application, and even the lefties are stretching it about how activist they are, so I am not going to be the one kid that tells the truth”

              So bottom line is I have one direct data point consistent with what everyone believes to be true, and you have zero direct data points contradicting what everyone believes to be true.

          • Everyone does not believe it to be true. Me for example. I was somewhat willing to be more open to the idea, but its become apparent you have exactly zero data on how the colleges behave, and don’t realize your data on how applicants feel about it is localized to your left coast relatives. It also seems to be the case that you don’t care about what’s true, scoring rhetorical points seems to be your goal.

            I rather imagine some capable kids avoid the subject of progressivism, which would make sense. If I didn’t think you would make it on the merits, however, I might be inclined to get in the Prog admission’s officers faces and show them some negs.
            Frankly, I suspect kowtowing on Progressivism is about as likely to get you into Harvard as kowtowing to a 10 is to get you in her panties.

            • jim says:


              OK. To restate more precisely. Kids at elite high schools that have a high rate of getting into elite universities, the people who put a lot of energy and effort into reverse engineering college entrance criteria, believe that they need to look very left on their college applications.

              And proceed to do so.

              Even the ones that actually are very left proceed to fake up that they are much more dedicated to leftism than they actually are.

              I rather imagine some capable kids avoid the subject of progressivism,

              You imagine this, and you imagine they get in to elite universities.

          • Come to think of it, kowtowing to 10’s is the usual approach taken by most guys to try to get into their panties.
            So if the highschool kids are mostly adopting the kowtowing strategy for elite schools, they might be just as well informed as the average beta.

      • Brian says:

        My question: do students who attend a Catholic school do worse than peers at public schools who have similar grades and test scores?

  11. scientism says:

    We need our own Confucianism. A quasi-religious patriarchal political system that’s centred on the family as the basic unit.

  12. Alan J. Perrick says:

    Now that you’ve excused your laziness in church attendance, “Jim”, I wonder what is the next trick you’ll pull out of your hat?


  13. I thought prior to 1998 student loans were bankruptable. The very next year a long-dormant student protest movement came back from from the dead, filling a much-needed gap in political discourse. The non-bankruptable nature of student loans is a recent and regrettable innovation. It’s not a traditional feature of capitalism.

    A question about “elite” universities: Is the BDS movement an attempt to dump Jews by making Jewish applicants sign loyalty oaths?

  14. […] returns to NRx systematics, with a piece of stick for all […]

  15. […] Land as the Dark Enlightenment guy, or perhaps a main pillar of the Techno-Capitalist mode of the Trichotomy Loop (trigger warning: infinity). Some of you, googled. Perhaps you’ve read the items below; if […]

  16. RJ Moore II says:

    This is something like a recapitulation of Aryan caste societies, with non-whites and non-dominant-religion groups winding up as the Shudra or Thralls, appendices of native contingents too big or too different to assimilate into the existing tripartite structure. Aside from that resemblance, I think a rather wide variety of potential military and social structures exist outside the modern bureaucratic state and its conjoined twin in the corporation; classical joint stock companies and private property empires are markedly different. I think a lot of NRx and Alt-Right types tend to take too literally the example of ‘really existing capitalism’ and the permanacy of particular forms of government management, especially since we know the current bureo-theocracy is at least regressive if not entirely unsustainable. ‘Empire’ has many meanings.

  17. […] civilization. It is the project of Neoreaction to analyze and categorize those ideas. So far, the Spandrellian Trichcotomy appears to be the best aggregation. AnomalyUK helpfully […]

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