Neoreaction coined a term, “exit”—the idea is equivalent to secession, as with the Confederates. Nobody should be forced to remain within a polity—or an organisation, or a relationship—they no longer wish to be with; ideally, the discarded party should not resist the other party’s exit—it is rational to respect their withdrawal and forge a new relationship as separate entities. Hence fragmentation is healthy: let Europe, for example, splinter from a single EU into nations—and, if necessary, down into Brittany and Wales; or even down to the city-state of Brighton. The splinter process is akin to the free market—force nobody to trade this way or that, let everyone make deals (forge contracts) as they wish. The overall result, the emergent behaviour (the invisible hand), can be taken to be more rational than an attempt to rationally plan from above—as with the Soviet state. Millions of little deals, millions of little calculations—overall, high processing power. The left, in this scenario, constitutes that which will not let go: the Union, the EU, Paris. The more we fragment, the more we choose secession with our own “tribes”, so goes the theory, the less conflict there will be—diversity + proximity = conflict.
The model is anti-fragile, since it is the same as the free market just applied to states and polities—a free market in governments. The left itself is anti-fragile; and this is because anti-fragile things are connected to Mother Nature—anti-fragility is produced by the rhizome, by the root network; the free market is just one such root network—and, indeed, “exit” was based on Nick Land’s research into Deleuze and his rhizomic philosophy; as with the shore that laps the sand, everything is remade by the network—constant small pressures, as with tectonics, lead to striation and marbled plateaus. Deleuze is occult; his work is about the cosmic egg, except he reduces it down to the material—cracks it mechanically.
Here is the problem: the free market and socialism are two wings on the same bird—the free market, classical liberalism, arrives when the aristocracy and clergy have been destroyed (Adam Smith celebrated their decline, for Smith the aristocracy were lazy and priests irrational charlatans). Once the free market arrives, as Marx describes, it tends towards monopoly—it also gives rise, with aristocracy and clergy disprivileged, to secular religions, such as socialism, that demand that the lot be run by the state.
The tangled root network is vibrant at first, pulses with information signals—and then, at a certain stage, it becomes too dense; it becomes homogenous—it births a creature, a creature from Hell. “Exit” is not an answer to our contemporary problems; it merely exacerbates a problem that already exists, fragmentation, and pushes it to its highest potential. The hope, in Landian terms, is that this brutal Darwinian struggle—between, for example, micro-states—will lead to the “perfect” creation, the perfect state; it will be, in accord with Darwin’s law, the perfect killer. It will be the alien Xenomorph, per Land’s blog Xenosystems.
What is the Xenomorph? A feminist icon. Remember, the Alien films are feminist films: the male characters are killed by the Xenomorph; usually it orally rapes them with its extendable mouth—forces men to experience the “trauma” they inflict on women through fellation and so feminises them. The man is then implanted with the Xenomorph embryo and forced to give birth, just like a woman—the only force that can stop this most unnatural creature is a woman, Ripley. Yet the Xenomorph is itself sexually ambiguous—shaped like a giant penis, it only impregnates men; it is almost homosexual, if homosexuals weren’t sterile.
So, at one level, the Alien films are about a woman’s triumph over a big ambulatory penis—a lethal penis that impregnates men. Yet the Xenomorph itself is born from nature, it is the perfect product from natural selection—the perfect product from the free market, as with that other ’80s icon, Patrick Bateman. The Xenomorph comes from the rhizome, very much as with the organic artwork created by Giger to go with the Xenomorph he originated—the rhizome is the root network, the root network is the matrix (mater, mother). In the original film, the company’s computer, “Mother”, knows secrets about the company’s plans for the Xenomorph—Mother wants to kill you. So the Xenomorph is the perfect killer spawned by the Matrix, a creature from Hell—a creature from the free market, just as Land hopes AI will be.
It follows that “exit” will end in a Hell state—in Hell on earth, just as the free market ended in Stalinism. To follow this path is to sink into matter—into nature, into the matrix, into lies. Darwinian nature is a liar, it only knows how to kill—it only knows war, so it only knows deception (the first casualty...). The Xenomorph hides in the dark, then it silently descends and punches your skull in. It is not beautiful—the Xenomorph is ugly, Giger’s art work is ugly. It is pale and unhealthy, as he was; just an abortion exhibition with all those foetuses, all those failed experiments, in jars. The path of greed—Thatcherism, Reaganism—ends in socialism, ends in the woke. “There’s no such thing as society,” said Thatcher—just the individual, just choice, just exit. You do you. McDonald’s proudly supports your pronoun choice. The free market doesn’t birth the woke, but businessmen don’t want aristocrats and priests to interfere with their profits; and they are the ones to stop the woke…
What is exit? Betrayal. It is to say everything is a contract that can be torn up by one party at will—just as you can tear up your old gender identity and be remade by the surgeon. The model is America, then the Confederacy—and yet America was built on betrayal; ungrateful selfish betrayal, the Mother Country supported the colonists and then when they became greedy they cut their ties for liberty (not for the niggers, though—never for the niggers; and that is why slavery is America’s “original sin”, not its existence but the hypocrisy that went with it).
The Confederates were just very loyal to the original American dream—if I fancy it, I can walk out; just like we did with England, right? Wrong—Union says no; and that was another hypocrisy. Yet all it shows is that “exit” is betrayal—nobody wants to be Judas, nobody wants to go to the lowest circle of Hell. Total fragmentation, total competition; total acceleration, total Hell—the aspiration in Landism being to birth the anti-Messiah, super-powerful AI, the creature from Hell.
We don’t want socialism, but we don’t want the free market either—we don’t want China or Thatcher. All Thatcherism amounted to was the right to choose—to choose between gangsters and lies, between plausible Jewish businessmen like Alan Sugar with their hi-tech schemes that came to nothing and greedy materialistic working-class boys made good who plundered the aristocratic firms built on loyalty and trust.
Exit is lunar, it is the dark path—it has no beauty; it is a path for liars, so they tell you the Xenomorph is beautiful when it is not. Indeed, the whole enterprise, free market and socialism alike, represents a fall into everything that is lower. This is a philosophy that wants to let the demons free to have a holiday from Hell, celebrates the novelty found in Hell—the network, its speed of information exchange, reaches a certain density and so births novelty; just as the network density in the City of London births multimillionaires. This is to forget that Dante went into Hell, right to the centre—past a man, Judas, who made his “exit”—and then clambered down the Devil’s hair to Heaven. We do not want to embrace the creature from Hell, we want to go into Hell to go beyond it. We want the Sun—the Sun from beyond.