The Dark Enlightenment is coming

It's a phrase I haven't really come across before, but it's out there and it's increasing in its influence. 

"Dark Enlightenment" emerged in the late 2000s in the murkier reaches of Silicon Valley, California, and its two main "intellectual" leaders are American software engineer Curtis Yarwin and British philosopher Nick Land. It's a far-right philosophical movement that explicitly rejects most of the core principles of the 17th/18th century Enlightenment movement in Europe, including democracy, egalitarianism and universal liberty. 

Instead, it espouses hierarchical,  authoritarian systems of governance, enabled by technological innovation. Thus, according to Dark Enlightenment, a president should assume complete, monarch-like executive authority, and work to completely dismantle government systems and tear down institutions like the media, the civil service and academia. Sound faniliar?

As you might guess, then, Dark Enlightenment is seeing growing influence among certain segments of the American elite. Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, venture capitalist Marc Andreesen, US Vice President JD Vance, hard-right political strategist Steve Bannon, and, yes, Elon Musk, are all devotees. And Mr. Yarvin was a guest of honour at Donald Trump's presidential inauguration ball in January. If the Trunp administration can be said to have any kind of philosophy other than just selfishness, this, then, is it.

The name itself is interesting, isn't it, at least from a psychological perspective. Democracy is still asssociated with light and good, authoritarianism with darkness and evil. These people, though, still want to flirt with the darkness and the evil ("go over to the dark side"?), but they don't want to be seen as going full dark ("Endarkenment"? "The Darkening"?), so they end up with an oxymoron like Dark Enlightenment. Or maybe they think that's clever?

It's a pretty scary "philosophy", but expect it to be increasingly mainstream in the coming years, particularly in the USA.