A smart friend whom I consider to be familiar with neoreaction recently asked, “What is the neoreactionary position on Tibet? Are you for or against Tibetan sovereignty?”

This baffled me, because neoreaction is just fundamentally not about that kind of thinking at all. We obviously need to clarify some things:

Neoreaction doesn’t care about Tibetan sovereignty, which is an internal political issue in someone else’s empire, on the other side of the world. There is no conceivable way in which taking a “position” on such an issue could affect it, nor could that issue affect us. We are not the CCP brass or the Dalai Lama or the Tibetan people, and Tibetan sovereignty is between them and no one else. Taking such a position would only be useful to signal how hip we are with some crowd or other—to build yet another nebulous coalition of fools role-playing as world leaders.

If neoreaction is for or against anything, it is against that entire paradigm of pseudopolitics. Neoreaction is not just another label for a grab-bag of “positions” on current “issues” that autonomous “citizens” sample and take if they are to their liking. If you want that, see conservatism, liberalism, democratic socialism, libertarianism, environmentalism, etc. That way of thinking only really makes sense within the current world of democratic “political freedom,” and then only just barely. That way of thinking has failed to do anything but legitimize decay for hundreds of years.

While we’re at it, we are not for or against Donald Trump’s campaign for presidency either, except insofar as he is likely to actually clean house and lead a Restoration.

In other words, is Trump likely to cancel the constitution, declare martial law, declare himself emperor to be succeeded by his children, nationalize the banks and media, hang some of the worst criminal bankers, call the National Guard to roll tanks into Harvard Yard, place all communists and other anti-American elements under house arrest, retire all government employees, replace the USG with the Trump Organization, and begin actually rebuilding America and Western civilization?

Short of that, he is simply another phenomenon within the arcane workings of the system, as worthy of support as the ebb and flow of the tides. Surely, the unprecedented nature of his campaign warrants excited interest as a historical case-study and promising fore-shock of a true restoration, but he is not the king, and we have a ways to go yet.

The general idea here is that to the neoreactionary, who thinks of himself not as a citizen, but rather as a subject, the internal politics of the system is simply not our business. But where does that leave us? If neoreaction refuses politics-as-usual, then what does it accept, and what’s the point? How does all that extremism about Emperor Trump, martial law, and hanging bankers fit into this idea of ignoring politics?

The thing is, paying no attention to the decaying demobureaucratic superstructure does not stem from apathy or contentment or acceptance, but from total disillusionment, followed by total disgust for having anything to do with it. We have decided that the superstructure is fundamentally broken, and any interaction with it prior to full replacement, whether that be an attempt to fight or fix it, is strategically barren. The only way out is for the system to sink itself into oblivion, and be replaced by something new built outside its bounds. A total reboot.

But if the system collapsed today, if the elites decided they were done and wanted to surrender and let someone else deal with it all, we would not be any better off, because there is no one else ready to deal with it. It would just be further chaos and disorder. Exactly the thing we are worried about. Like it or not, there is no worthy alternative to surrender to. The system is all we get until someone builds something better. This is another reason that even if we could tear down the system immediately, we shouldn’t.

So, the only way forward, then, is to build. Become worthy, as we say, so that exasperated elites have an eject button—someone more competent to surrender to on good terms. Until someone does that, our only possible avenue, and duty, is to provide some light on the horizon by building the foundation of that worthiness.

In summary, neoreaction does not care about normal politics, and does not have political positions as such, because we proceed from a basis of total disillusionment with that entire pseudopolitical paradigm. Neoreaction is not a label for a particular set of political positions; it is a project to build the intellectual underpinnings of a new structure worthy enough for the current elites to surrender to. The only thing we are “against” is the entire superstructure and its involvement in the decline of western civilization. The only thing we are “for” is a total reboot and restoration, so that our descendants can inherit the stars, instead of the mud.