The Dark Enlightenment and the end of democracy: a humanist critique

By William van Zwanenberg

The Dark Enlightenment is not simply an intellectual fad. It is a serious threat to democratic ethics and humanist values. It is being trialled—not as theory, but as practice—by some of the most powerful people on Earth. It must be resisted. William is a strategist, analyst and legal researcher and a member of Brighton Humanists.

Glossary of terms used in this article

• Accelerationism is the idea that instead of resisting capitalism, technological change, or social upheaval, we should speed it up — even push it to extremes — in order to bring about a radical transformation of society.

• Cyber-authoritarianism refers to the use of digital technologies by authoritarian regimes to monitor, control, and manipulate populations. This includes tactics such as mass surveillance, online censorship, propaganda, internet shutdowns, and AI-driven repression—all aimed at maintaining power and stifling dissent.

• Cybernetics is the study of systems of control and communication in animals, machines, and organizations.

• Dark Enlightenment is a reactionary intellectual movement that critiques modern egalitarianism, democracy and liberal values, advocating instead for hierarchy, technocracy and even neo-monarchism. Coined by philosopher Nick Land, it argues that Enlightenment ideals have led to social decay and should be replaced with more authoritarian, order-focused systems—often driven by elite control and technology.

• Libertarianism is a political philosophy that emphasises individual liberty, limited government and free markets.

• Neocameralism, proposed by Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug), is a political theory that reimagines government as a joint-stock corporation. In this model, the state is run by a CEO (like a monarch), accountable to shareholders rather than voters.

• Neo-reaction is an alternative term for the Dark Enlightenment, abbreviated NRx

• Post-structuralism is the idea that meaning is unstable, language is fluid, and truth is always shaped by power, culture and context. It challenges fixed interpretations and emphasises the ambiguity, contradictions, and multiplicity of meanings in texts and social life.

• Reactionary politics is a political stance that seeks to return society to a previous state or order—often idealising the past and resisting modern reforms or progressive change. It is typically opposed to liberalism, socialism, or progressive ideologies, and may advocate for the restoration of traditional hierarchies, values or institutions.

• Transhumanism is a philosophical and scientific movement that advocates using advanced technology to enhance the human condition—physically, mentally, and even morally. It envisions overcoming biological limitations, including ageing, disease, and potentially even death, through innovations such as AI, genetic engineering, and cybernetics.

What is the Dark Enlightenment?

Top: Nick Land (Image: A Critique of Nick Land and Accelerationism (Medium); Bottom: Curtis Yarvin (Image: Curtis Yarvin on how oligarchies function in America - YouTube screen grab)

The concept of the Dark Enlightenment (also known as neo-reaction or NRx) emerged in the early 2000s from libertarian, transhumanist, and accelerationist subcultures. It was named by Nick Land, a British philosopher who fused cybernetics, post-structuralism, and reactionary politics into a theory of elite governance through technological control. Land's writings rejected the Enlightenment legacy of equality and rational progress, advocating instead for a form of Darwinian cyber-authoritarianism. The political framework of NRx, however, was most fully developed by Curtis Yarvin, an American software engineer who wrote under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin’s core idea is “neocameralism”: a system in which states are run like corporations, with sovereign CEOs at the helm and citizens reimagined as customers. He advocates for the dissolution of democratic structures in favour of “patchwork” city-states, governed independently by technocratic or autocratic elites. Yarvin also introduced the concept of “The Cathedral”—a conspiratorial idea describing an alliance of universities, media and bureaucracy that enforces left-liberal ideology under the guise of neutrality. According to NRx, the Cathedral ensures that all mainstream discourse reinforces democracy, equality and human rights—values that, in the Neoreactionary view, are naïve at best and actively harmful at worst.

The core claims of Neoreaction

The central claims of Neoreaction can be summarised as follows:

• Democracy is a failure. It promotes mediocrity, fosters instability, and cannot sustain high-functioning civilisational order.

• Equality is a myth. Human beings are not equal in ability, character or worth. Pretending otherwise leads to decline.

• Hierarchy is natural and necessary. Governance should be stratified, with competent elites exercising sovereign authority.

• Politics should be managerial. The state should function like a company, governed by technocratic executives, not citizens.

• Exit over voice. The future lies not in reforming broken systems but in escaping them—by creating alternative regimes outside democratic norms.

This ideology is, in essence, a reversion to pre-Enlightenment political structures, updated with the language of modern technocracy.

A growing influence: from theory to implementation

Once confined to obscure blogs and philosophical manifestos, NRx has begun to influence public life through powerful intermediaries. Donald Trump, though not intellectually aligned with Neoreaction, became a political expression of its core instinct: the delegitimation of democratic institutions, the undermining of consent, and the glorification of strongman rule. His disdain for procedural norms and the civic ethos of compromise mirrors the NRx conviction that democracy is a façade.

Elon Musk, with his control of X (formerly Twitter), increasingly embodies the Neoreactionary principle of exit and elite governance. His attempt to turn a global public square into a privately owned domain of speech, governed by fiat and guided by his own values, represents a practical expression of Yarvin’s ideas. His public admiration for Yarvin and willingness to platform Neoreactionary voices are no coincidence.

Mark Zuckerberg, through Meta and Facebook, has created an architecture of informational control whose algorithms shape the political awareness and emotional landscape of billions. While Zuckerberg does not publicly embrace Neoreactionary thought, his empire functions according to a deeply Neoreactionary logic: the centralisation of speech, opaque algorithmic governance, and the belief that a private platform can determine what populations see, say and believe—without democratic oversight. Nowhere was this more clearly illustrated than in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which revealed how Facebook data was harvested and exploited to micro-target voters with politically manipulative content—often without their knowledge or consent. Although Facebook denied wrongdoing, it was forced to admit that it had enabled a third party to weaponise its platform in order to influence democratic elections across multiple countries. This was not merely a case of corporate negligence. It exposed a deeper, more chilling truth: that platforms such as Facebook now function as unaccountable arbiters of political reality, shaping public understanding not through deliberation, but through data science, psychological profiling and behavioural manipulation. The citizen is not empowered, but studied and nudged. The ballot box remains—but the informational ecosystem surrounding it has already been captured. Such a system does not need to declare itself Neoreactionary. It enacts the Neoreactionary worldview in practice: democracy without truth, consent without comprehension, participation without power.

Sergey Brin and the leadership of Google have embedded technocratic systems of governance within the digital lives of citizens. Their deployment of artificial intelligence, behavioural data mining, and opaque optimisation reflects a managerial ideology with no place for deliberative ethics. Democracy, in this framework, is at best a formality—and at worst, an obstacle. None of these men call themselves Neoreactionaries. But they are absorbing and implementing its instincts: control without accountability, hierarchy without moral justification, and governance without participation.

Why democracy still matters: the axiom of legitimacy

Humanists must not fall into the trap of defending democracy purely on instrumental grounds. Democracy is not good because it is always efficient, nor because it always produces the best results. It is good because it rests on an axiom: that all people possess equal moral worth, and therefore no one has the natural right to rule over another without consent. This axiom is the foundation of legitimacy. Without it, governance becomes domination. Whether by kings, algorithms or CEOs, power exercised without consent—without equality—is tyranny, however benevolent or efficient it may appear. All systems of governance are flawed. Democracy is no exception. But it is the only system that contains within it the tools for self-correction, ethical renewal, and the peaceful redress of injustice. It is the only system that recognises fallibility as intrinsic to human nature, and therefore builds safeguards—debate, scrutiny, rights, dissent—into its architecture.

A humanist rebuttal

Neoreaction must be confronted not merely as a wrong idea, but as a morally corrupt one. It denies the humanist principles of dignity, empathy, shared responsibility, and universal moral agency. It replaces citizens with clients, neighbours with competitors, and moral bonds with technocratic calculus. It is not only elitist, but deeply cynical. It does not seek to uplift the human condition, but to manage it—without love, without solidarity, and without hope. Against this, humanism affirms that each person, regardless of status or ability, has intrinsic value. That power must answer to principle, not merely to outcomes. And that freedom and justice are not indulgences—they are the preconditions of a good society.

Conclusion: speak now or surrender later

The Dark Enlightenment is not simply an intellectual fad. It is a serious threat to democratic ethics and humanist values. It is being trialled—not as theory, but as practice—by some of the most powerful people on Earth. We must respond. Not with nostalgia, but with conviction. Not with fear, but with argument. Let us reaffirm the axiom of moral equality. Let us defend democracy—not because it is perfect, but because it alone treats people as ends, not means. And let us be clear: any system that places efficiency above dignity, control above consent, and hierarchy above justice, is not progress. It is a regression. And it must be resisted.