Posted on by Bonald

Continuing my investigation of the relatively greater vigor of the neoreactionaries compared to the orthospherians.

Let us consider how we gauge success in blogging. Now, you may say truly that it is a greater thing to bring one soul to Christ than having a large following who are not spiritually helped in any significant way by your writings. But we are talking here about visible blogging success.

The increasing levels of success, as I see them:

People read your posts. People comment on your posts. Other bloggers link to your posts. Your posts trigger conversations among other bloggers. Your posts introduce new ideas or arguments that are then developed or applied by other bloggers and by online journals.

(As Bruce Charlton has pointed out, the purpose of media is to generate more media. This applies as much to reactionary media as to any other kind.) Notice that the three highest levels of success pretty much require one to be part of some sort of blogging community. I conclude that neoreactionaries are at present a better community for a blogger to belong to than any comparable group in the religious reactionary Right. It’s easier to make a splash on the internet–that is, to write blog posts that inspire other people to write blog posts–as a neoreactionary speaking to other neoreactionaries.

Not that you can’t have this success as an Orthosphere-style religious reactionary. See Bruce, whether he likes it or not, achieving this “success” in the previous paragraph. Another example: Larry Auster and the concept of unprincipled exceptions. You can do it, but you have to be very good.

So why then do we generate fewer multi-post, multi-author conversations than some other internet groups? That I don’t know.

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