The Bloody Basilisk Is The Bloody Dragon, You Bloody Fool

I’m really cooking with the timely selections lately. Elizabeth Sandifer’s Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right explores several of the sources of our current predicament, ranging from Rationalists, alt-right figures, Gamergate, and so on. While figures like Nick Land seem to have faded somewhat, others like Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin have continued to make all our lives amount to less than chess pieces on a board. We’re more like the cookie crumbs that are waiting to get stuck under a knight to F3. There’s an essay on Trump, another on Lizard People. It uses the word “batrachian” just because it can.

Most of the book is dominated by the first essay, covering neo-reactionaries and the Rationalist community. It, perhaps unsurprisingly, takes a very philosophical route through the discussion. Many of the references and the weighty sentences give off the vibe that the author was a Philosophy major, but it turns out (as I discovered in the appendix essay) that she’s an English major with lots of experience in postmodernism. Overall, while lightly touching a few key players like Scott Siskind, it covers a lot of central figures in the reactionary movement. Doing so in its philosophical way, however, can make getting through some sections a bit difficult. There’s an interesting digression into John Milton’s Paradise Lost and the life and work of William Blake, but the book can lose the plot occasionally.

While I enjoyed much of the writing and the digressions into areas like the Four Zoas of Blake (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, I was already familiar via a truly unhinged analysis by another internet writer), there is a fair amount of writing that a good editor could have removed by asking “do we really need this?” Sure, it’s Sandifer’s book and therefore whatever she would like it to be, but I struggle to understand who the audience is intended to be. The book doesn’t encapsulate these ideas and figures into a form that most laypeople who don’t spend their lives on certain corners of the internet could appreciate. Even for me, well-read and interested in this topic, it’s a bit…difficult. That said, I don’t know that anyone else has connected the dots with these people and how they have entered into our political sphere, both in their ideas and influence.

I’d recommend reading it, if you’re interested in one of the larger philosophical influences on our current crop of political leaders and the power structures behind them. I leave you with a link to an interview with the author and this quote from the last essay in the book:

Far from it: the essential horror of the abyss is stupidity. That’s why it’s an abyss. The unique and exquisite danger of stupidity is that by its nature, it is beyond reason. There is nothing that can be said to it, because by definition it wouldn’t understand. It is an ur-basilisk—the one terrifying possibility that haunts every single argument that has ever been made. It is a move without response, playing by no rules other than its own, which do not generally include any obligation towards consistency. It is, in its way, the only approach that can never lose an argument. And in the alt-right and its affiliates we have one of the most staggeringly vast nexuses of raw stupidity the world has ever crafted.