I’ve always been unsettled by how reactionaries seem to love revolt. In the baby lefty doxa, we tend to think about reactionaries as maniacs who love order, who repudiate any form of chaos. This is far from being as simple. Surely they have an easier time with military discipline because they do love the aesthetics of strength but why is the theme of rebellion so prominent when you analyse reactionary rhetoric?

It struck me when I heard about the liberal pro-colonial and anti-communist “leftist” writer Albert Camus. His philosophy has a deep sense of worship for the act of resisting, he sees it as an act of individual accomplishment, a way to truly live.

Sounds lefty enough at first, but it makes a lot more sense in the context of his deep anti-communism. See, the revolutionaries want to spare the effort of the revolt to the future humans. A revolution carries the hope of forgetting having to revolt, at least for a while. By creating a good system, which the Soviets had, they made revolt difficult to justify. Camus knew this since half of the French intelligencia were pro-Soviet (like the Sartre - Beauvoir couple). He hated the Soviets for making a world where individuals couldn’t accomplish their rebellious soul against an unfair system.

So there it is, I think that fundamentally, reactionaries are people who worship revolt, to the point where a system that abolishes the need to revolt scares them. Wanting to rebel for the sake of being the rebel is a fundamentally reactionary sentiment. Revolutionaries, on the contrary, promote revolt as the only path towards not having to revolt anymore.