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Jane's taking the week off, so here's a 3000 word preview from near the middle of Neoreaction a Basilisk, which will have a Kickstarter in May

And to be clear, the vicious little shit qualities of your garden variety neoreactionary are clearly part of the point, at least for Nick Land. In part 4d of "The Dark Enlightenment" he constructs an extended metaphor around the word "cracker," in its sense "as a slur targeting poor southern whites of predominantly Celtic ancestry," describing them as "grit in the clockwork of progress," and as Qabbalistic forces of "schism or secession" based on the power of cracks "to widen, deepen, and spread." His meaning is clear: racist hicks are awesome forces of abstract horror. He tacitly reiterates this in "Phyl-Undhu," which notes, in a variety of ways, that strong tribal affiliations and hostility to outsiders is likely the soundest survival tactic in most practical eschatons.

He may well be right in this, although one gets the sense that he's rather glad not to be a part of that American culture; elsewhere in the labyrinthine Part 4 of "The Dark Enlightenment" he remarks fondly about how "there is no part of Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai, or very many other East Asian cities where it is impossible to wander, safely, late at night. Women, whether young or old, on their own or with small children, can be comfortably oblivious to the details of space and time, at least insofar as the threat of assault is concerned." Instead, it always seems as though he views the bulk of neoreactionaries as a sort of petri dish in which he can observe the spasming collapse of the technosingularity. Perhaps they are a suitable microcosm. But in this regard, at least, Moldbug has a point. In the "Gentle Introducion," he praises the 18th century loyalist Massachusetts judge Peter Oliver, essentially suggesting that reactionaries like him are better than revolutionaries like John Adams because Oliver "is a man you could have a beer with." And he notes, "you can't actually have a beer with Peter Oliver, but you can read his book." The truth is that, despite Land's evident fascination with them, the bulk of neoreactionaries are not people one would want to have a beer with, and there's not a great case for reading their books either.

But if I might be so bold as to suggest, there are other ways of saying "no" at this point in the argument that don't require hanging out with banal edgelords who get off trying to see how close to saying "Hitler was right" you can actually get without losing the ability to semi-credibly say "but I'm not a Nazi or anything" afterwards. Indeed, when it comes to recasting philosophy as horror it is safe to say that the sort of immediate lurch to the most dramatic form of negation to hand is in most regards the least interesting. The obvious truth of horror philosophy is that there's an aesthetic; one based on a tightrope balance between the initial "yes" that one is fleeing from and the eventual "yes" that interrupts the series of "nos." Tzvetan Todorov, in theorizing the genre of the Fantastic, describes a specific iteration; an extended ambiguity between the possibility that the protagonist is mad and the possibility of the supernatural. The story balances between the horrors of madness and the Other, drawing out the act of settling on one of the two available "yeses." But the specific chasms on either side are in the end less important than the awful and sustained gravity of them. That's the point of the horror story. And by just taking as hard a negation as possible, which is what the bulk of actual neoreaction amounts to, one largely fails at this aesthetic.

Let's return to the Basilisk, shall we? After all, it meets Todorov's definition perfectly. The person tormented by it is either in the thrall of a force reaching back through time or they are suffering from a fundamental error of reasoning. The former is clearly supernatural, the latter madness. More than that, however, Yudkowsky's explicit valuation of "rationality" firmly allies him with the essential qualities of a protagonist in a Todorov-style Fantastic tale. The fundamental horror of the "supernatural vs madness" tension is that both represent the failure of reason, madness in the form of its disintegration, the supernatural in the form of its inadequacy. That neither would happen was always the fundamental promise of Yudkowsky's system: Bayes's theorem was supposed to save us from error and the unknown. And so the intrusion of the Fantastic in the form of Roko's Basilisk represents an unusually poignant threat.

But in looking at Yudkowsky this