I have long believed that there are many different types of thinkers. Isaiah Berlin famously identified just two: the hedgehog and the fox. The hedgehog sees the world through one lens, a single-defining idea, while the foxes draw on a much wider variety of experiences. While there is a great deal of truth to this, I feel as if it does not go far enough. For example, Gaetano Mosca seems a fox by nature, his view of history is poly-causal, he always takes into account a wide variety of factors in his analysis. However, he was a monomaniac, which is to say, he had an almost pathological obsession with a single idea, his thesis of The Ruling Class. Vilfredo Pareto, on the other hand, was much more of a hedgehog, a system-builder, but was also a polymath who not only basically invented modern sociology, but also was a world-famous economist who founded his own school. In other words, Mosca had a fox-like approach to the world but focused on just a single thing, while Pareto had a hedgehog-like approach but focused on many different things.
Thus, based on no evidence at all beyond my own observations, I have devised a different way of categorising thinkers into six basic archetypes. Let me outline these six categories:
The Architect is similar to Berlin’s hedgehog. This is a thinker who devises a grand vision which at once explains all things and provides the solution to all things: the further we move from the vision, the worse things get and the closer we move to it, the better things get. Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard were both architects of this sort whose grand vision was of the free market. René Guénon was an architect whose grand vision was of the ancient world of transcendence as against the modern materialist world that cannot comprehend the spiritual.
The Archivist is a researcher who has a special area of interest and who ferrets out all details about that topic. Often lacking the vision to make these details cohere into any form of narrative or thesis, they nonetheless will know more about their area of interest than practically anyone else on earth. At the top level, since they will often be the first people in the world to gather such information, they will naturally develop their own theories about that information.
The Disciple is simply an ardent follower of another thinker, most usually of The Architect type. An example would be Joe Salerno at the Mises Institute who is a disciple of Rothbard. The ‘true believer’ disciple should not be dismissed as mere lackey. In many cases, their pedantic devotion to the thinker in question and their cause will lead them to be more thoroughgoing and clear-sighted even than the master. This was undoubtedly the case with Leonard Peikoff who was a disciple of Ayn Rand and with too many Marxists to name here.
The Prophet is a special mode of thinker – think Thomas Carlyle or Oswald Spengler or at his best even Peter Hitchens – who is somehow able to look back into the past as well as forward into the future and see things most others in their time could not. I believe that Morgoth’s Review, the Poet of the North, is a prophet of this type.
The Surveyor is someone who reads widely across a field and can catalogue and summarise the work done in that field. They will be able to identify various camps, points of dispute, and provide the ‘10,000-feet view’ from high on the mountain. While sometimes lacking in originality, this sort of thinker – a mere dealer in second-hand ideas – can be very useful to others who are trying to get acquainted with the field in question.
The Synthesiser is someone who takes the ideas of others and combines them and adds to them in some way. Robert Michels was said to be a ‘synthesiser’ of Mosca and Pareto, for example. In many respects, Julius Evola was a great synthesiser, taking disparate elements from Guénon and, say, Otto Weininger to create his unique blend of esoteric rightwingery. I would argue likewise that Thomas Sowell was a synthesiser.
I believe that these six categories give us a fuller picture than Berlin’s two. But so what? Can these be of use to us? First, one can ask immediately, ‘what sort of thinker am I?’ I know I am not an architect or archivist or disciple or prophet – my strengths are chiefly as surveyor and synthesiser. As a surveyor I can provide a panoramic view that most cannot and most of my work online to date has been in this vein. However, this also allows me to spot points of crossover and synergy that many others would not see – which gives the flavour of a certain originality – and hence I can work adeptly as a synthesiser too. This brings me to the second utility of the categories, which is that they are not mutually exclusive. In fact, most researchers will have some level in each of the six categories. For example, I am an adept archivist who can collect data with the best of them and were this some weird scholarly RPG I would say I would be a 7 or an 8 out of 10 in that category, but it is not my top trump. Likewise, especially when getting to know a thinker, I can act as disciple but only for a short period – lifelong devotion to a single thing is simply not in my dilettante nature – so I’d be about a 4 in that. Having this sort of knowledge of your own strengths and weaknesses can be a boon especially if you are, in effect, a network of researchers which is what many dissident online content creators have become. The six types of thinkers can play off each other in many fruitful ways if all is working well. Finally, there is utility in such an act of introspection. Not everyone is a thinker, some people’s strengths are in other fields entirely. In fact, we over-index in thinkers and we need people of a different stripe: managers, organizers, foot soldiers, doers, creatives, artists, business brains, and many others. At present, ‘thinkers’ are only to the fore because the movement is still in its nascent phases, and this is the sort of content that can readily be made by talented researchers.
One thing we do not need, however, are entertainers. I am talking about the Tim Pool character who simply reacts to the news and tells the audience some reflection of what they want to hear or feel. Tim Pool is a sensationalist and in many ways the powers that be did the dissident right a service when they purged many smaller such ‘entertainers’ – of the SJWS PWNED variety – from the space. We need people to make art and culture but we do not need clowns. I do not believe regular viewers of my shows would ever say I am overly serious or dour, but entertainment should always be seen as secondary to education. Memes serve a utility as efficient and effective propaganda but no one should ever mistake them as the reason to be around these sorts of circles. If you’re ‘in it for the memes’ alone, you’re not a serious person. There is a balance to be struck between giving your comrades a dose of light relief and much-needed morale and just revelling in clownery. A movement which is primarily political cannot and should not substitute for a friendship group, although I do encourage people to make friends in real life. Alright get out.
Almost all "right-wing" content from my two decades of being a normie consisted of one thing: pointing at something and saying how ridiculous it was. Never figuring out how to defeat or stop it. Just years and years of shaking your head and saying "total clownworld am I right?" as if Cthulhu swimming left was just as out of our control as the weather or the movements of the planets. They're not. Everything that has happened since Anno Domini MCMXLV (and earlier if Moldbug is to believed, and much much earlier if Evola is to believed) has been purposely created, in whole and/or in part, by an accumulation of actual human beings. They don't want us to realize everything we despise about modernity is caused by people (who have names and addresses) not by pieces of paper, not vague "movements" or "the zeitgeist". As the saying goes: if it can bleed, we can kill it.
I’m a disciple to AA given the fact that to be any other thinker would require me to read more. Either that or I’m not a thinker at all.