# Dark Enlightenment

The Dark Enlightenment, also called the neo-reactionary movement (sometimes abbreviated to NRx), is an anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, and reactionary philosophical and political movement. The term "Dark Enlightenment" is a reaction to the Age of Enlightenment and an apologia for the popular conception of the Dark Ages.
The ideology generally rejects Whig historiography, the concept that history shows an inevitable progression towards greater liberty and enlightenment, culminating in liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy, in favor of a return to traditional societal constructs and forms of government, including absolute monarchism and other older forms of leadership like cameralism.

## History

Neo-reactionaries are an informal community of bloggers and political theorists who have been active since the 2000s. Steve Sailer is a contemporary forerunner of the ideology, which also draws influence from philosophers such as Thomas Carlyle and Julius Evola.
In 2007 and 2008, software engineer Curtis Yarvin, writing under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, articulated what would develop into Dark Enlightenment thinking. Yarvin's theories were elaborated and expanded by philosopher Nick Land, who first coined the term Dark Enlightenment in his essay of the same name.
By mid-2017, NRx had moved to forums such as the Social Matter online forum, the Hestia Society, and Thermidor Magazine. In 2021, Yarvin appeared on Fox News' Tucker Carlson Today, where he discussed the United States' withdrawal from Afghanistan and his concept of the "Cathedral", which he claims to be the current aggregation of political power and influential institutions that is controlling the country.
Several prominent Silicon Valley investors and Republican politicians have expressed their influence from the philosophy, with venture capitalist Peter Thiel describing Yarvin as his "most important connection". Political strategist Steve Bannon has read and admired his work, and there have been allegations that he has communicated with Yarvin which Yarvin has denied. U.S. Vice President JD Vance has cited Yarvin as an influence. Michael Anton, the State Department Director of Policy Planning during Trump's second presidency, has also discussed Yarvin's ideas. In January 2025, Yarvin attended a Trump inaugural gala in Washington; Politico reported he was "an informal guest of honor" due to his "outsize influence over the Trumpian right."

## Beliefs

Central to Nick Land's ideas is a belief in freedom's incompatibility with democracy, having stated "Democracy tends to fascism". Land drew inspiration from libertarians such as Peter Thiel, particularly Thiel's claim that "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible", in his essay The Dark Enlightenment. The Dark Enlightenment has been described by journalists and commentators as alt-right and neo-fascist. A 2016 article in New York magazine notes that "Neoreaction has a number of different strains, but perhaps the most important is a form of post-libertarian futurism that, realizing that libertarians aren't likely to win any elections, argues against democracy in favor of authoritarian forms of government."
Andy Beckett stated that "NRx" supporters "believe in the replacement of modern nation-states, democracy and government bureaucracies by authoritarian city states, which on neoreaction blogs sound as much like idealised medieval kingdoms as they do modern enclaves such as Singapore." The modern solution devised by Yarvin in "A Formalist Manifesto" advocates for a form of neocameralism in which small, authoritarian "gov-corps" coexist and compete with each other, an idea anticipated by Hans Herman-Hoppe. He claims freedom under the system would be guaranteed by the ability to "vote with your feet", whereby residents could leave for another gov-corp if they felt it would provide a higher quality of life, thus forcing competition. Nick Land reiterates this with the political idea "No Voice, Free Exit", taken from Albert Hirschman's ideas of voice being democratic and exit being departure to another society:
   "If gov-corp doesn’t deliver acceptable value for its taxes (sovereign rent), [citizens] can notify its customer service function, and if necessary take their custom elsewhere. Gov-corp would concentrate upon running an efficient, attractive, vital, clean, and secure country, of a kind that is able to draw customers."
Ana Teixeira Pinto describes the political ideology of the gov-corp model as a form of classical libertarianism: "they do not want to limit the power of the state, they want to privatise it." According to criminal justice professor George Michael, neoreaction seeks to save its ideal of Western civilization through adoption of a monarchical, or CEO model of government to replace democracy.
Yarvin has described himself as a royalist, monarchist, and Jacobite. He and Land refer to contemporary liberal society which they oppose as "the Cathedral" in association with the Puritan church, and its goals of egalitarianism and democracy as "the Synopsis". Neoreactionaries endorse race realism, referring to it as "human biodiversity". Land coined the term "hyperracism" to refer to his views on race; he believes that socioeconomic status is "a strong proxy for IQ" rather than race specifically (though he acknowledges a correlation between race and socioeconomic status), and that meritocracy, particularly space colonization, will "function as a highly-selective genetic filter" that propagates mostly (but not strictly) Whites and Asians. Yarvin has stated “Although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff", and has endorsed arguments for Black racial inferiority and claimed they are being suppressed by members of the Cathedral such as Ivy League schools, The New York Times, and Hollywood.
Neoreaction also functions as a means to achieve accelerationism, the use of capitalism and technology to destabilize existing systems and create radical change. Land views democratic and egalitarian policies as only slowing down acceleration and a technocapital singularity, stating "Beside the speed machine, or industrial capitalism, there is an ever more perfectly weighted decelerator [...] comically, the fabrication of this braking mechanism is proclaimed as progress. It is the Great Work of the Left.” Vox characterized such views as having come from Land living in China's "techno-authoritarian political system" and his admiration for Deng Xiaoping and Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, with Land calling Lee an "autocratic enabler of freedom" and Yarvin also praising Lee. Land has advocated for accelerationists to support the neoreactionary movement, though many have distanced themselves from him in response to his views on race.

## Relation to the alt-right

Some consider the Dark Enlightenment part of the alt-right, representing its theoretical branch. The Dark Enlightenment has been labelled by some as neo-fascist, and by University of Chichester professor Benjamin Noys as "an acceleration of capitalism to a fascist point". Nick Land disputes the similarity between his ideas and fascism, claiming that "Fascism is a mass anti-capitalist movement," whereas he prefers that "[capitalist] corporate power should become the organizing force in society."
Journalist and pundit James Kirchick states that "although neo-reactionary thinkers disdain the masses and claim to despise populism and people more generally, what ties them to the rest of the alt-right is their unapologetically racist element, their shared misanthropy and their resentment of mismanagement by the ruling elites."
Scholar Andrew Jones, in a 2019 article, postulated that the Dark Enlightenment (i.e. the NeoReactionary Movement) is "key to understanding the Alt-Right" political ideology. "The use of affect theory, postmodern critiques of modernity, and a fixation on critiquing regimes of truth", Jones remarks, "are fundamental to NeoReaction (NRx) and what separates it from other Far-Right theory". Moreover, Jones argues that Dark Enlightenment's fixation on aesthetics, history, and philosophy, as opposed to the traditional empirical approach, distinguishes it from related far-right ideologies.
Historian Joe Mulhall, writing for The Guardian, described Nick Land as "propagating very far-right ideas." Despite neoreaction's limited online audience, Mulhall considers the ideology to have "acted as both a tributary into the alt-right and as a key constituent part [of the alt-right]."
Historians Angela Dimitrakaki and Harry Weeks tie Dark Enlightenment to neofascism via Nick Land's "capitalist eschatology" which they describe as supported by the supremacist theories of fascism. Dimitrakaki and Weeks say of Land that his book Dark Enlightenment was "infusing theoretical jargon into Yarvin/Moldbug's blog "Unqualified Reservations".
Describing the impact of Dark Enlightenment theories upon the contemporary art world, art historian Sven Lütticken says that the popularity of Nick Land's concepts have made certain art centers in New York and London hospitable to trendy fascism.
Nick Land's technocapitalist ideas of accelerationism have been re-interpreted into the use of racial conflict to cause societal collapse and the building of white ethnostates, linked to a number of white nationalist terrorist attacks such as the 2019 Christchurch mosque massacres. Vox pointed to Land's shift towards neoreactionarism as the likely connection point with far-right racial accelerationism, citing a 2018 Southern Poverty Law Center investigation which found users on the neo-Nazi blog The Right Stuff who cited neoreactionarism as an influence. Land himself has called the neoreactionary movement "a prophetic warning about the rise of the Alt-Right".

## Critiques

Journalist Andrew Sullivan argues that neoreaction's pessimistic appraisal of democracy dismisses many advances that have been made and that global manufacturing patterns also limit the economic independence that sovereign states can have from one another.
In an article for The Sociological Review, after an examination of neoreaction's core tenets, Roger Burrows deplores the ideology as "hyper-neoliberal, technologically deterministic, anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, pro-eugenicist, racist and, likely, fascist", and ridicules the entire accelerationist framework as a faulty attempt at "mainstreaming... misogynist, racist and fascist discourses." He criticizes neoreaction's racial principles and their brazen "disavowal of any discourses" advocating for socio-economic equality and, accordingly, considers it a "eugenic philosophy" in favor of what Nick Land deems "hyper-racism".