>I was therefore delighted (intellectually, that is) to learn recently of a fringe Silicon Valley movement called neoreactionism or “Dark Enlightenment”, funded by Peter Thiel.

AFAIK Thiel's sole, extremely tenuous connection to the Dark Enlightenment is thinking libertarianism and democracy are incompatible. He certainly hasn't funded any of its leading lights. This is less accurate than the belief that the Koch brothers control the Tea Party. (They did have a large impact on its early growth.)

>These guys (few women would join that openly sexist, openly autistic movement)

Ableist. If you want an example of a woman who's been involved (more than periphally but not as an identified adherent) look up Justine Tunney. If you're transphobic then she doesn't count as a woman, ableist.

>are probably all former libertarians that have discovered that there is no such thing as freedom from power, and now openly call for a tyranny.

That's one branch of the trichotomy in case you're interested.

http://www.xenosystems.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/reacti...

http://www.xenosystems.net/trichotomy/

>As someone who’d studied medieval history in graduate school (though I have never obtained my doctorate) I was delighted to see the movement’s leader, a programmer by the name of Curtis Yarvin, analyze some historical document and call for the return of feudalism (he complains that those documents are not studied by historians, which is true for the simple reason that they are false accounts).

This is a massive misreading of Yarvin, a.ka. Mencius Moldbug. He's got a hard on for absolute monarchy, not for feudalism. The two are very, very different. Feudalism was basically a Western European phenomenom, Ottoman depotism, Russian autocracy or France during the reign of the Sun King are more his thing.

What false accounts are you referring to? Could you provide some links to the deceptive documents among Yarvin's output?

>The problem with the return to feudalism — even if you were to believe the false accounts of how life was good then (it by no means was) — is that the power structure back then was at least held in check by technology, that is, lack thereof. With the invention of mass media and fast transportation, power can be more concentrated than ever before, which is why the greatest invention of Western civilization was the central government, which rose to contain and manage power (of course, this only made conflicts among those governments more violent than ever before, but that fear of annihilation reduced the number of conflicts considerably).

Autocracy, not feudalism.

> Feudalism combined with modern technology has only been tried — to the best of my knowledge — once, in nineteenth century America.

This is so ridiculous that it makes me question your claims of having studied history at a graduate level. Have you ever heard of the Bolsheviks? They had a successful revolution in the Russian Empire in 1917 and founded and ruled the Soviet Union until its dissolution. They arose in a state that attempted to combine autocratic government with modern technology.

>The US at the time had a very weak federal government with almost no regulation. The result was a period of extremely fast economic expansion but at great social cost: a large portion of the American population was enslaved in all by name by a very small number of slave-owners-in-all-by-name known as the Robber Barons (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Stanford, JP Morgan, Frick, et al.).

Are you aware that the USA has been among the richest societies on Earth for its entire existence? People were poor because there was so little to go around, not because people were hoarding for the sake of it. You occasionally say lucid and intelligent things but the US economy was growing insanely fast by any historic standards more or less from settlement by Europeans to around 1970. It's still growing insanely fast but the trend has slowed down. economic growth in North America was labour limited for a long, long time. Things were much, much better in North America than anywhere else on Earth, all this while having large inflows of migrants from much poorer nations, i.e. the entire rest of the planet.

>All options were taken from them — they couldn’t migrate (they were sometimes paid in company-issued currency, that was useless anywhere else) and couldn’t organize to concentrate power to improve their lot (in fact, they did organize, but the robber barons had private armies that killed the rabble rousers and intimidated everyone else). The people cried for help, and Theodore Roosevelt rescued them by creating federal regulation.

Did you study under Howard Zinn[0] or something? Everywhere else was worse. The Pinkertons were awful but the USA has never been a weak enough state to allow private armies anywhere on its territory. It was probably the friendliest country on Earth for labour organising for the period in question.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People%27s_History_of_the_Uni...