The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 2/10

The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon

The idea of a red pill features strongly in Sandifer’s book, the concept itself having taken a detour to the neoreactionary movement before finding its natural home in a subculture of fedora-wearing programmers who watch My Little Pony and love to complain that women never invented anything important (not that there’s anything wrong in being a fedora-wearing programmer who watches My Little Pony, it’s just that the last assertion is quite trivially incorrect).

Unfortunately Sandifer’s treatment of the topic falls short of the original inspiration. While The Matrix is an extended metaphor, sprawling temptingly and brilliantly into meta-five, meta-six and onwards into as deep a recursion as a human brain is capable of and hypnotizing me with its intertextual insight pornography into a state not unlike being on acid despite being fully and legally sober, Neoreaction a Basilisk is the sort of a book that is best enjoyed with half a tab of acid, being utterly hilarious and making a massive amount of sense mostly because absolutely anything is utterly hilarious and makes a massive amount of sense on half a tab of acid. Sadly I was not on half a tab of acid while reading it (because that would’ve been illegal, drugs are bad if you live in such a jurisdiction mmmkay) so I did not have access to the state of mind where I could have just leaned back and enjoyed the ride.

Leaning back and enjoying the ride is what the book ultimately is about. It is not a sophisticated argument or an honest attempt at genuine discourse (and neither is this review, frankly, just to clarify the issue to those who haven’t picked up that obvious fact yet). It is a confused amateur ethnography on cultures that haven’t earned enough mainstream respectability that writing confused amateur ethnographies on them would be considered distasteful. In that sense it could be best compared to the works of european colonialists traveling to Africa and reporting back on the barbaric disorganized nature of the locals’ communities, because african cities were organized according to a structure europeans didn’t understand, instead of the simple cartesian system white people considered the pinnacle of civilization.

This particular type of error is one of the biggest ones underlying Sandifer’s liberal arts eschatology, and it shows up again and again. The idea that all there is to know can be known by a marxist English major, and that the world is obligated to be fundamentally comprehensible to one, leaks through constantly yet remains forever unaddressed in explicit terms, thus leading to pattern-matching and deeply unsatisfying arguments.

For example, it is quite a cliche, faithfully repeated in the book, that transhumanism is “merely” a symptom of people’s fear of death. (Nothing is “mere”, my friend, nothing is “mere”.) This is nigh-universally accepted to the degree that no justification is considered necessary. Transhumanism is unwillingness to accept death, end of discussion. Nowhere is it actually explained why unwillingness to accept death would be a bad thing. The critical reader would obviously begin to suspect that perhaps they cannot explain it. The median reader would obviously get outraged at how a fundamental part of their worldview is not accepted as obvious.

One would expect a marxist to be more sympathetic to such ideas, as marxism itself is popularly dismissed as “envy, end of discussion”. The laborer in the dark satanic steel mills asks “why exactly should Mr. Carnegie have so much money while I have so little, and why exactly should the Pinkertons be allowed to shoot us if we protest while we aren’t allowed to shoot them?” and the popular opinion answers “haha, he is just envious that Carnegie has money and he doesn’t”. Marxism starts from the assumption that maybe things should not be that way, and like any movement it ultimately devolves into a cherished set of excuses for the parts of the status quo one doesn’t want to think about too deeply. Once again the red pill remains a blue pill with an instagram filter on top.

In fact, the book’s opening reveals the deeply corrupt nature of Sandifer’s modern marxism. “Let us assume we are fucked.” says Sandifer. “Let us not.” says Marx, “Let us assume that capitalism will indeed continue to disrupt every single industry until we each are gig contractors, languishing under the iron hand of the algorithmic management of the Uber of Whatever.” (of course, Marx originally did not know about the Uber of Whatever, but translating his original observations into modern language is mostly a simple search-replace operation) “Let us consider what might be done about this.”

Marx’s answer is obviously (spoiler alert to anyone who hasn’t been alive in the last 160 years) “historical inevitabilities will result in communism”. In fact, so is Sandifer’s, with one crucial difference: “communism” gets replaced by “extinction” which is even more revealing about this liberal arts eschatology. The world is ready, the answer is written on the first line, “Let us assume we are fucked”. Everything else is commentary. One may approach the conclusion in a “decelerationist” way, or in an “accelerationist” way, or shy away from it entirely, but rejecting the inevitability of this idea altogether is on the wrong side of the event horizon of comprehensibility, and thus the shadow it casts against the accretion disk must be pattern-matched into the nearest comprehensible thing.

(Or, to be more precise, the proper analogy to catch the true magnitude of the abomination this is would be Sandifer observing ideas from inside the event horizon and seeing something that claims it will escape the superluminal gravitational pull of the inevitable future of the black hole’s singularity; rejection of the limits of the comprehensible is to the liberal arts eschatology as magnificent a violation of the laws of reality as breaking the lightspeed barrier would be to a physicist. An astute reader might notice that only one of these rules seems to be hard-coded into the universe itself, and that the rules that are hard-coded into the universe itself are barely flickering within the boundaries of the comprehensible themselves. What this says about the merits of each might as well be left as an exercise to the reader, as I do not believe a person who believes in the dogma of mandatory comprehensibility would be willing to change their mind on this topic.)

Thus, rejecting death is seen as a personal flaw for one could not comprehend a reasonable mind that might not accept death. A universal feature of such a liberal arts eschatology seems to indeed be the unsolvability of problems, at least problems that are not fundamentally social in their nature. Dramatically restructuring the entire society and economy is seen as an obvious and laudable goal, for it’s “only” social, and the universe’s unwillingness to play along is unfair and unreasonable no matter how much the means of pursuing the goals conflict with the iron laws of incentives.

Now, Marx himself seemed to be quite aware of the iron laws of incentives; his predictions about where they might lead just happened to be subtly incorrect in a hard-to-immediately-anticipate way. Indeed, this attachment to the conclusions and rejection of the methods is a fundamental characteristic of Sandifer’s marxist liberal arts eschatology, and if reanimating the dead was possible I would be willing to bet money that old man Marx would readjust his beliefs in the present day while many of his followers would be left in the somewhat embarrassing position of wanting to die on the hill their idol has withdrawn from.

Part 1: A False Manhattan

Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon

Part 3: Hubris

Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape

Part 5: The Darkening

Part 6: A Game to End All Games

Part 7: The Players of Games

Part 8: Men, Machines, Monsters

Part 9: The True Basilisk of Phil Sandifer

Part 10: Denouement

1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 16 notes · .permalink

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   Bless you.

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