This was a very well-written essay, and it helped me understand Land/Yarvin better (I have not studied them very closely). However, there is one fundamental thing that strikes me as just obviously wrong about their Neoreactionary framework:

It casts capital and business interests as the aggrieved party, who are merely operating according to natural and unobjectionable market mechanisms, as against the machinations of the state and its priestly woke class, who form a network of power against capital/business.

Essentially, this school of thought appears to me as inverted Marxism. Instead of the mythologized working class (and educated liberals who identify/sympathize with them) you have a mythologized business class (and the conservatives who identify/sympathize with them). Instead of a parasitic, vampiric capitalist class and their hangers-on leeching value from productive workers, you have a parasitic, vampiric state and their hangers-on leeching value from productive businesses.

So in my view “The Dark Enlightenment” fails to challenge the Enlightenment myth of progress on a fundamental enough level. It mostly achieves the effect of seeming dark, scary and intriguing through its inversion, but all that is is a Hegelian negation that fits squarely within the box of rational Enlightenment thought. The standard Hegelian process always seeks to preserve as it seeks higher forms. The problem with this as I see it is that is starts to accumulate unnecessary baggage. Why are we committed to viewing the world in this way? Why are we carrying water for this outmoded and silly Marxist framework, which amounts to a morality play?

Zizek with his updated interpretation of Hegel would say that dialectics needs to take a shit. You can’t hold on to everything, sometimes sublation is achieved by letting go and forgetting what is no longer useful. I would think you could reach this conclusion from multiple perspectives, e.g. Deleuzian.

But I guess this framework is useful to the political right so that accounts for it, just like regular Marxism is useful for the left. It has just enough edge to seem radical and interesting but seems ultimately empty from the perspective of pure philosophy in my view (this is what I identify with in terms of Enlightenment) I am interested in reading Land at least at some point to see if I change my mind at all.