RAGE is a collective that offers a Promethean and accelerationist worldview currently expressing itself primarily through an online magazine.
Objective RAGE proposes a unique worldview, which aims to rethink the meaning of life and the role of humans in the universe, in the world, and in their community. Our writings aim to analyze the current sometimes undesirable situation while outlining the contours of a desirable future for France, Europe, the West, and Humanity.
In doing so, we hope to restore optimism to our readers and instill confidence in the future by considering humanity’s journey so far. More importantly, we want to inspire a love for Western civilization, characterized by its momentum, so that they may want to be part of its story and become “truly modern,” as Pierre Manent puts it, by accelerating processes intrinsic to modernity while critically evaluating its detrimental aspects.
“What are the unique features of Western history? What is, so to speak, its formula? I have stressed the modern movement, the movement character of modernity, a movement that never manages to find its endpoint, its resting place. There are great civilizations outside the West, and much happens there, but they have overlooked the movement, the historical movement – they had chronicles, not history – at least until the pressure or aggression of the West made them enter history. In the West, there is a unique principle of movement, and that’s its primary characteristic. […] We have been modern for several centuries now. We are and we want to be. This willpower guides all aspects of our societies in the West. While many criticize certain aspects of modernization and even modernity itself, conservative efforts at best have only slowed the movement, while reactionary efforts have generally accelerated it. Thus, we want to be modern. We mandate ourselves to be modern. But if this will has been at work for centuries, if this mandate has been in place for as long, it means we have not yet truly become modern; the endpoint we thought we saw multiple times turned out to be an illusion, a sort of mirage.”
Pierre Manent, The Metamorphoses of the City
“Some might object to such reasoning due to its theoretical nature. They might say that, in a purely logical sense, each culture is incapable of truly judging another since a culture can’t escape its own confines and its evaluation is trapped within inevitable relativism. But look around you; pay attention to what’s been happening in the world for the past century, and all your speculations will crumble. Far from remaining isolated, one by one, all civilizations are acknowledging the superiority of one among them: Western civilization. Don’t we see the entire world gradually borrowing its techniques, way of life, entertainment, and even its clothing?”
Claude Levi-Strauss, Race and History
But what is the guiding thread of Western history? What do ancient Greeks and Romans, medieval Christians, and often atheist Moderns have in common? Isn’t there a clear opposition between them? What connects the West throughout the ages is twofold. The most evident is lineage. The latest genetic advancements show that Europeans haven’t undergone significant change since the Yamnaya invasion 4500 years ago. The second is the metaphysical question of being, which began with the Presocratics and is found in every era.
“Is being merely a term, and its significance a vapor, or is it the spiritual destiny of the West?”
Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics
For us, “being” is the destiny of the West, and it finds its fulfillment in modernity and its often-criticized mathematization of the world, through understanding being as information and cybernetics as a means of constructing information. Constructing information is merely what the Greeks referred to as the “unveiling of being”, which they saw as the essence of technology. Consequently, we are pro-technology.
Why Prometheus?
In Greek mythology, Prometheus is the brother of Epimetheus, a Titan responsible for distributing abilities among animals. Intent on creating a functional ecosystem, he endowed each species with the qualities necessary for harmonious coexistence. Regrettably, he forgot humans, leaving them vulnerable, naked, and prey to predators. Yet they were also free, having no predetermined role in this ecosystem. This potential freedom turned into actual freedom when Prometheus, pitying them, stole fire from Olympus for their sake.
The fire symbolizes reason and technology – hence progress – which will empower humans to become more autonomous. Nietzsche saw Prometheus as the foundational myth of Europeans. Thus, he is also a symbol of our identity. That’s why RAGE’s triptych is Freedom-Progress-Identity. Like Prometheus, we love humanity and are committed to nurturing it and leading it to uncharted territories. Inspired by prominent figures of our civilization, starting with the Presocratics, we see Archilochus of Paros as the first Promethean. Yet, being thoroughly contemporary, we hold this admiration even for Elon Musk, whom we view as the greatest Promethean the Earth has ever produced and the current greatest benefactor of humanity.
Editorial line
Lovers of Western civilization, we defend the principles of modernity that gave birth to the “Free World”, such as the scientific method, objective reality, technoscience, liberalism, and the free market. For us, these areas serve life understood as a dissipative structure, whose role in the universe is the dissipation of energy. This does not mean that we cannot be critical of modernity. Our ideological references include, but are not limited to, Ayn Rand, Isaac Asimov, Norbert Wiener, Ludwig Von Mises, Hans Herman Hoppe, François Roddier, David Reich, Joseph Henrich, Richard Dawkins, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Robert Sapolsky, Raymond Aron, Alexis de Tocqueville, Peter Thiel, Charles Murray, Ray Kurzweil, Philipp K. Dick, Nick Land, Curtis Yarvin, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Freedom-Progress-Identity For us, progress is the fight against entropy. Both individuals and human societies are merely dissipative structures whose role is to dissipate energy according to the second law of thermodynamics. To do this, they need information about their environment. Progress is thus the increase in information captured from the environment to optimize energy dissipation. This naturally involves intelligence. Like an organism, human societies need both malleability and stability to best fulfill their role. They then organize themselves following the principles of a cybernetic system made up of positive and negative loops. We speak of negative feedback when a system engages in a damping process to counter changes and return to equilibrium, like a thermostat that maintains temperature; we speak of positive feedback when a system accelerates changes and moves away from equilibrium, like a chain reaction in a nuclear explosion.
“Messages themselves form a pattern, an organization. Indeed, it is possible to consider series of messages as having entropy concerning series of states of the external world. Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information provided by a series of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, one can interpret the information provided by a message as essentially the negative value of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it provides. Clichés or commonplaces, for example, enlighten less than great poems.”
Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics and Society
Freedom will then be necessary to provide the malleability needed for the emergence of positive loops. Identity, on the other hand, appears to us as the result of negative loops, a guarantee of stability, also required. For us, it is based both on biology and culture without being something fixed. It is constantly in motion, between being and becoming, reinventing itself to ensure its perseverance in its being and the optimization of energy dissipation. Genes and culture are ways of storing information about the environment to maximize energy dissipation individually and collectively. This information is identity. Therefore, for us, transhumanism is only the logical next step in the history of humanity.
Themes
The main themes addressed by RAGE are: Video Games, Cinema, Literature, Social Issues, Humanities, Social Sciences, Simplified Hard Sciences, Geopolitics, and Philosophy.
Authors
The authors of RAGE do not share a monolithic worldview; some place more emphasis on freedom, others on identity, and we are proud to allow different ways of thinking to express themselves. Our authors range from non-socialist progressives to non-reactionary conservatives, passing through classical liberals, but they all converge on a valued conception of technology.
Contact
You can contact us at the following address: rageculturemagazine@gmail.com, and we will try to respond as promptly as possible. We consider every article proposal submitted to us. We take the time to discuss it and provide feedback to the author. If we decline the article, we explain in detail why. If certain points in our articles offend your sensibilities, perhaps you have misunderstood them. Please don’t hesitate to ask for clarification in the comments, and we will do our best to respond.