Neoreaction, Plato, and the Latter Day Philosopher Kings: Or, Why Can’t Justine Tunney Be the Empress of the World?

(full disclosure: this is part of a chapter I’m working on for my dissertation, but summarized for blog purposes)

Arthur Chu has written, pretty extensively, about the strange case of Justine Tunney, formerly a homeless transgender activist who was influential in the early days of the Occupy Wall Street movement, now Silicon Valley technologist and ally of the strange movement known as “neoreaction,” which really can’t make up its mind how to feel about her. On one hand, Tunney is one of the more visible advocates for the strange, yet popular in Silicon Valley, philosophy that advocates for embracing the wonders of modern technology but rejecting the values of modern ethics and political theory in favor of monarchism. On the other, she is, in the words of Michael Anissimov (another neoreactionary thought leader), a man who “dresses up and pretends” to be female and seeks genital mutilation.

This might seem like a simple case where someone who is a member of a minority group joins a movement that otherwise doesn’t have much truck with their particular minority, and faces the expected pushback - but I actually think that Anissimov is closer to right than Tunney in that neoreaction is a fundamentally male, heterosexual sort of philosophy, and that by espousing it as someone who is not only not male, but who is perceived as having abandoned or moved away from masculinity or maleness by choice (that’s not actually a claim I’m making about how folks “become” trans, but it’s how neoreactionaries would see it) illustrates some tensions in the philosophy itself. I’m interested, first, in the kind of mindset that would lead Tunney to choose a movement which, to be blunt, consists of people who are going to choose to dislike her for who she is, and second, in why that movement is not just incidentally bigoted but is in fact deeply grounded in the very heterosexual (and cisgender) male supremacy that Anissimov and other reactionaries who opposed Tunney’s participation cite. The spoiler/payoff here is that I think that neoreactionaries, for all that they love to talk about Hobbes and Locke and other early modern luminaries, are really closet Platonists: they’re telling us the very same story that Plato did when he talked about his mentor Socrates being forced to drink hemlock for bringing the truth to the Athenian masses.

So, why exactly did Tunney switch from radical leftist, anti-capitalist organizing, to allying and fundamentally identifying herself with the “1%” she opposed so iconically? It’s likely that part of it was simply that she changed who she was hanging out with, from Central Park radicals to Silicon Valley nerds. But plenty of folks make a career change, or even move up a few tax brackets, without experiencing the kind of fundamental ideological shift that Tunney did. I think the answer is that neoreaction is part of the same geek-identity narrative that is driving #GamerGate, and that really stems from the stories and imagery that go all the way back to Socrates of the persecuted intellectual who prioritizes his ability to know truth over social niceties and emotions. Socrates pooh-poohed rhetoric and the Sophists, the public speaking teachers of his day, because all they were fundamentally doing was dressing up words to look nicer, while philosophers were concerned with what was actually true. You wouldn’t think a doctor was better based on his bedside manner - Socrates says, although today we know that we actually do judge doctors more on how they say things than on what they know - so why do we elect politicians to make decisions for us based on how eloquent they are?

Similarly, the Silicon Valley nerds of today dismiss the liberal arts and social theory - think about #GamerGate and the bad kind of New Atheist, and “reals not feels.” Of course, Socrates was doing rhetoric even as he was blasting it, and the neoreactionaries are heading off into their own, very complex, rhetorical structure - but they have still packaged a really sexy image for people like Tunney and honestly, myself. “You are special, because you have technical skills. You’re smart. You know how to make stuff happen. But you’re unpopular because people want to care about the stuff that doesn’t really matter. You deserve to be in charge - but society won’t let that happen.” Tunney has said things like “nerds have it worse than chattel slaves” and described technology workers as the most exploited class - and yet neoreaction says that they’re also the only people who know what the hell’s going on and how to make stuff happen. It’s understandable, therefore, that this ideology is becoming popular in Silicon Valley.

But it, as Admiral Ackbar famously said, is a trap - and I very intentionally use that metaphor to reference the other, offensive “trap” meme, the one that refers to transgender women like Tunney as myself as traps for straight men. The thing is that I don’t think Tunney is just unlucky in that she’s wandered into an ideology that would benefit her, as a “nerd/geek,” but that’s full of troglodytes without a clue about gender and sexuality. I think that the masculine hegemony and bigotry expressed by attitudes like Anissimov is part and parcel with this Platonic, nerds-as-marginalized-kings mindset. Here’s the thing: Plato has a particular view of gender which frames the feminine as receptive, passive, the material from which the masculine “forms” that make up ultimate reality construct things. Feminists have a complex relationship with Plato - in some ways, he’s less explicitly sexist than his student Aristotle, who famously was all about empiricism and science, but nevertheless used logic to deduce the wrong conclusion about how many teeth women have. But this image of the feminine as lesser because it makes up the material world, and men as owning and fundamentally being the natural inhabitants of the world of ideas, is historically the root of a lot of misogyny. One of the points that Simone de Beauvoir makes in The Second Sex is that women get cursed with physicality - judged on our appearance, on the fact that (some of us) can bear children, on menstrual bleeding. Men, on the other hand, are mind over matter - masculinity is seen as about giving form and structure to things and conquering the material. “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter!” Yoda says.

The neoreactionary view of reality references early modern thinkers like Locke and Rosseau - who himself was certainly no progressive on gender - but it’s not really “scientific” or “empirical” in the way that folks on sites like LessWrong trumpet, not really. It bears a lot more resemblance to Plato’s theory of the forms in its dismissal of the social. Something that’s interesting about neoreaction is that it’s not, as one might expect from something that did begin on forums dedicated to materialist rationality like LessWrong, fundamentally atheist: Mencius Moldbug, probably the most important neoreactionary (or “formalist”), is a conservative Catholic. Neoreaction is basically split between Christians and atheists, but the compatibility with religion illustrates the way in which its notion of reality is more Platonic than empirical: what makes “nerds and geeks” ideal rulers is that their skills are closer to the absolute nature of truth. Anyone who’s actually studied natural sciences or even engineering will tell you that the everyday work of science is less “aha! At last my death laser shall be complete, and the natural world will bend to my whim!” and more “I completed surveys 1, 2, and 3, and the results are inconclusive, we need to do better regressions on this data,” etc. Simplistic canards like “reals not feels,” often used to dismiss things like transgender identity, don’t actually offer terribly helpful guidance when it comes to actually doing science, because it turns out that “reals” and “feels” aren’t things you can operationalize very easily.

But neoreaction’s not about variable operationalization or survey design or any of that stuff that actual scientists care about. It’s about Truth, with a capital-T, and that truth is, again, modeled on a gendered dynamic. Women are lesser in Platonism because to have a female body is to have a body that is of the world. A woman’s body can give life, but ultimately that life is nothing compared to the infinite intellectual mysteries that men can contemplate. There are no women in Plato’s dialogues, and of course we know that Socrates even preferred the sexual companionship of other men, as did many of the men in his society (that didn’t, as Foucault points out, make them “homosexual,” because they still had wives for the purposes of reproduction). This was because women weren’t afforded a status as intellectual equals, and so ultimately would have bored someone like Socrates. Whether or not you’re actually more physically attracted to women, you couldn’t have a deep intellectual discussion with someone who, socially, isn’t afforded the right to participate in intellectual conversations and is expected to be a homemaker and an aid for reproduction. Women are physical, men are mental (and spiritual.) This mindset pervades neoreaction, not as an explicit statement but as an underlying assumption.

Think about “geeks are persecuted,” a claim Justine Tunney makes frequently. Bundled with the understanding that geeks are persecuted is the understanding that geeks can do really cool stuff! Geeks make computers and airplanes and all sorts of cool stuff! But despite this, geeks have it, Justine tells us, pretty rough - worse than chattel slaves! People want to exploit them. They like the computer programs geeks write, but they don’t like that geeks are better at writing programs than at navigating the complexities of social organization. It’s just like, as I’ve often talked about, the canard my dad told me when I was getting bullied in high school for, among other things, “being a faggot who likes Star Wars.” “Those guys,” my dad told his son, “will be washing your car someday.” But right now, they could beat me up, keep me from getting dates, make me feel alone and isolated, because I was better at computer gaming than I was at navigating the complex and confusing world of getting along with people. (Tunney has also, in a tweet which is protected along with the rest of her Twitter account, made the case that bigotry against geeks is really about bigotry against people on the autism spectrum, a common claim among neoreactionaries.) Ultimately, if this is true, it sucks that geeks are persecuted, because what we can do is ultimately the most valuable thing - but we’re expected to be good at all this tangential stuff, this window dressing. The thing is that the window dressing has historically been linked with the feminine, and I think this categorization is still really deeply linked in there.

Think about #GamerGate, another movement that talks about “geek persecution.” It’s about hating women, and that’s been extensively demonstrated with example after example. It’s also about geeks who legitimately, really do believe they are persecuted! The reason that this persecution falls along such sharply divided gender lines, and has allowed misogyny to fester in #GamerGate as it does in neoreaction, is at least in part because we know how to conceptualize what it is to be a “geek,” or an intellectual like Socrates, in terms of this being a male sort of thing to be. Geeks, people with tech skills, philosophers - they don’t need the essentially feminine (in the Platonic view) characteristics of a womb, or breasts, or the ability to grow or nurture life. They interact with and shape the material world, but they are not themselves acted upon or shaped - that’s what women are there for.

Now think about why, in the mindset of the typical neoreactionary geek, it’s bad to be a trans woman like Justine Tunney or like me. Anissimov says a lot of the usual conservative Christian stuff about undermining the reproductive purpose of the family unit - which, again, frames women specifically as the necessary receptive component of the sexual relationship - but let’s go back to the “trap” meme. The real issue is that we’re gross. We’re really men, in these folks’ eyes, but we creep out straight guys if we pass. “A guy’s worst nightmare is to find out that the hot chick he slept with is really a man.” At the same time, this isn’t a jealousy view, even though you could imagine a twisted sort of mindset in which tricking straight men into desiring you was fun. The guys don’t want to be the “trap,” even if they could pull it off. That’s because ultimately it’s not rational in this mindset to want to be a woman. Everything about women is about being desired, being shaped, being molded - all the things that great philosophers, that geeks, view as superfluous. This line of thinking is a very well-documented one in feminist, and to be blunt it leads to basically viewing women as mobile cum dumpsters - a viewpoint which is honestly not uncommon among this kind of geek.

The thing is that by adopting this mindset which is not really scientific epistemology but is rather a very simplistic, and gendered, reading of Absolute Truth, neoreactionaries don’t just pick a mindset which is convenient for men. They pick a mindset that is fundamentally built on viewing the feminine as a physical thing, a sexual thing, a thing which is secondary to the great intellectual issues. To be a woman and adopt this mindset is certainly possible - you simply have to find a way to frame yourself as a woman who has somehow transcended her womanhood, as plenty of women have throughout history (she’s “one of the guys.”) Trans women, of course, don’t get to do this nearly as easily, and that’s why Tunney’s existence as a transgender person in the neoreaction movement has proven so troublesome. If womanhood has to be sought, and acquired, how can you ever transcend it? I think it fundamentally puts Tunney in a fairly untenable position, and it’s one where I feel a not insubstantial amount of pity for her.

I think that neoreaction is an ideological canary in the coal mine for technology/geek culture. Are most people going to become monarchists like Tunney? Probably not. But I don’t think it’s an accident that neoreaction exists on the margins of the same space that, in a much more mainstream way, includes #GamerGate and stories like Ender’s Game. It’s a story that is told by groups of men about why they are excluded from dominant stories about masculinity, a story about why they should be in charge. I don’t think it’s an accident or just a function of the time he was writing that Plato was sexist - there were less sexist philosophers writing at the same time as him (and more sexist; Aristotle was worse.) The philosophy Plato espoused through Socrates is one about a particular kind of manhood overshadowing a particular kind of womanhood, and I think contemporary geek culture appropriates it through neoreaction. We can’t just buy into it without accepting the gender premises - or, at least, that’s my suggestion for why Tunney has faced the pushback she has.