Good essay on positivism and how NRx differs from other branches of the ‘alt right’:
As mentioned in my previous post the Dissident Right can be broadly divided into the “feeling Right” which is typified by the Alt-Right and the “thinking” Right which, I feel, is typified by Neoreaction.
NRx is more about ideas than the person behind them. This is in contrast to WNs, who tend to hold Nordicism as exemplar. Thinking vs. Feeling is the demarcation between the emotive ‘alt right’ and NRx, which is more cerebral.
On a related note, from Jim’s blog: In support of Roosh
Apparently some on the ‘right’ think Roosh is a traitor because of his ‘lifestyle’ or being Iranian.
If every feminist & SJW is after Roosh, he is doing something right. Online, WNs had a 20+ year head start (since the launch of Storefront in 1995 or so) to get their movement off the ground, and they have largely failed. They, the WNs, don’t want others on their turf.
What distinguishes NRx from the Alt-Right is concern for the facts. The Alt-Right has no need for facts, it wants to embrace the myths, to be on the side of the God’s and, in that way, resembles some of the worst aspects of the Left (who were on the side of the Angels in Vietnam, for instance.) For Neoreaction, empirical observations matter and NRx forms its opinions and insights from the due consideration of the them.The critique of universal democracy, for instance, is not grounded in a “preference” or bias for for other systems of government, or the myth of aristocracy, rather it comes from a considered understanding, based upon the empirical observations of the “average voter”. If Neoreaction had a motto, it would be Solzhenitsyn’s, “Live not by lies”.
This seems similar to my earlier post on centrism and how empirical evidence should be our guiding principle, not irrational hopes, dreams, and aspirations. We want to believe in change, but first we must understand.
and
-NRx takes the principal of the primacy of empirical data over theory and incorporates it into a wider data set. -NRx is a sort of fusion between traditional concepts of the scope of empirical data with the positivist insistence on the primacy of data. It’s a fusion product. This, however, puts -NRx explicitly against traditionalism, insofar as traditionalists elevate custom above the truth. This, itself is not a bad thing, given traditionalism’s utter failure to combat the Left. New approaches need to be tried.
I’m already there. On the bottom of this site, I list a bunch of ideologies and philosophies that are directly or tangentially related to NRx, and ‘positivism’ is one of them.
He also notes the ideological friction or between the traditionalists and the rationalists of the right, the latter (which this blog belongs to) elevating the empiricism above orthodoxy. It could be a cognitive dissonance to hold both as equally valid.
However, ‘theory’ need not be categorically rejected just because we embrace empiricism. Kant was able to reconcile the two through the synthetic a priori, which I discuss in detail here.