New Yarvin has mostly dropped the king talk and switched to proposing an imperial president like FDR but moreso. I agree it would be extremely un-aesthetic for America to have a king (even though kings are generally aesthetically great).
Emperor comes from imperator, which is "one considered worthy of commanding Romans". It was an accolade given by the troops.
Unsurprisingly it wasn't the title most used by Augustus. He used Princeps, or "principal", i.e. the Head, or Most Important, or First. We get prince from that.
But that's dancing around the point, which is how do you have an office that gets stuff done in time but still constrain it?
The parliamentary system gives the elected party significant power when they achieve a majority and has had decent success around the globe. It just isn't fashionable amoung pseudo intellectuals.
>The parliamentary system gives the elected party significant power when they achieve a majority and has had decent success around the globe.
Agreed. While there are advantages and disadvantages to every system, the parliamentary system _does_ have the advantage of "votes of no confidence" for removing the prime minister (analogous to what Moldbug's board could do) more easily than the American system does. And parliaments actually exist, and at least sort-of work, not obviously in a worse way than other systems.
One other peripheral point: All of the discussions about factions that I've seen in the comment section for this post seem to disregard _scale_. (writing from the USA) Factions on the scale of 300,000,000 people can't really avoid being crude oversimplifications. We the people cannot possibly hear all of each others' detailed views.
A parliament (or senate) on the scale of Dunbar's number typically will still break up into factions - but at least there is a chance to _hear_ each others' views.
That is what constitutions are supposed to do. The Supreme Court makes rulings on what is or is not constitutional. In this way it "speaks" for the constitution, which cannot do so for itself being just words on paper. Courts can issue court orders, much as the president can issue presidential orders.
Suppose the Supreme Court finds some action by the president is unconstitutional and orders than it be stopped and the president decides to ignore it. Suppose the Court then ups the ante by declaring the president to be in contempt of the Constitution and orders that the president be placed under house arrest until such time as he agrees to comply. It then sends copies of the order to Sec. Def,, all the Service chiefs, Joint Chief, and the regional operational commanders calling upon them to fulfill their oaths.
The president also swore an oath to support the Constitution. That is, he acknowledged that the Constitution is his superior. An order from the Constitution thus would override the orders of any subordinate, including the president.
What I outline is a very provocative action the Court could take (I think) in the event of a constitutional crisis. I would note that this did not happen during two previous constitutional crises (the one about Indian removal when Jackson was president, and the one in 1937 when FDR threatened to neutralize the Court with his court packing scheme. In the first case the Court let the matter slide because it wasn't seen as important the other two branches were under the president's control, and he had won big majorities in his two elections.
In the second case the Court backed down with the "stitch in time that saved nine" and decided to not oppose elements of the New Deal they previously would have. Again, this was because of the enormous majorities the president had in Congress and in his election victories.
As for the present, a constitutional crisis has not yet happened. I suspect the Court will not push the issue as long as Republicans control Congress no matter how provocative Trump acts. But if the economy goes into recession and Dems win back both houses of Congress next year, then the situation changes. Democrats will hold one branch of government, an unpopular lame duck will hold another, with the Court in the deciding position. The Court in such a position might be more willing to play hardball.
The Constitution is explicit that impeaching the President is up to the House of Representatives. Not sure where this notion of the Supreme Court doing it came from.
Putting some sanction on the president for disregarding the constitution is not the same as removal from office. Impeachment is permanent and a much more extreme response to a transgression.
A contempt order is completely reversible. As soon as he acknowledges the authority of the constitution and agrees to comply with the order, the sanction is lifted. It is a much milder sanction, akin to a slap on the wrist.
If you're going to do kings, do Charles II. Moderately decadent but also moderately capable, which 21st century America seems to be. Interested in having fun, but also interested in science. And with a diverse heritage!
"... moderately capable, which 21st century America seems to be. Interested in having fun, but also interested in science. And with a diverse heritage!"
Democrats have lost all credibility and work the "high and low against the middle" game, so they seem simultaneously like a corrupt oligarchy and a bunch of whining victims. The establishment Republicans are little better. The jig is up on representative Democracy. It's now clear to all (except upper middle class striver establishment-worshippers) that the entire political class serves the financial and governmental oligarchy and not only doesn't represent the constituents but actually despises them.
The people have lost God, they have lost Church, they have lost Civil Society, they have lost Local Control. The corrupt federal government is all they have left to care about. They want, they NEED, the aesthetic of a king.
Trump is giving the people what they want. He is Golden, he is famous, he is superhuman. He is commanding, he is imperious, he is entertaining. He dresses in a uniform/costume.
Americans may not want the Title "King," but they want a King all right, and they just chose one.
Trump is Robin Hood/King Richard the Lionhearted. Democrats are Evil King John. The problem for Democrats is: 1) they don't understand that the people want a king; and 2) once they figure it out and start running more charismatic men for President, the people will correctly see those men as actors fronting for the conniving nobles.
Of course the Republican "kings" are actors fronting for the oligarchy too. But they SEEM far more kingly, and will be in power for the forseeable future.
Did you just delete my comment? I thought it was pretty good! I was agreeing with you that kings are aesthetically great and arguing that Americans want that King aesthetic more than we think they do.
The person that tried to bring kings back to Rome in his own person was assasinated for it (Ceasar), so I would posit that you do indeed neet to let that hold you back.
There is a reason that Augustus intentionally skewed the title of king. Instead calling himself "Princeps" (first citizen), and "imperator" (commander). If the title of Emperor strikes you as monarchical, that's only because that became part of its meaning over time.
If you want to introduce monarchy to a republic it is better to adopt a nominally repulican sounding title and to become a de-facto monarchy over time.
Yes, of course they would use a different title, just like North Korea calls its monarch "General Secretary of the Communist Party" (and like imperial Rome didn't like the title "Rex"), but a king by any other title is just as sweet.
One of the interesting side effects was that succession in the Roman Empire was an even nastier problem than in a normal monarchy.
They never formally abolished the republic, and a republic does not need a succession protocol, right? After all, the imperator is just "first among equals", a really capable commander and administrator...
... which also meant that people who considered themselves really capable commanders and administrators could always take the gamble and make a grab for power, and if they succeeded, they would be legitimate.
I don't know exactly wo counts as a mouse in this (Either Gracci? Marcius? Catilini?). But at the very least Sulla is one, making Augustus 3rd at best.
Not kings in name, but Americans sure do love their political dynasties, and you invest your head of government (even pre-Trump) with a whole lot more power than other democracies. American democracy just never got that big reset like e.g. Germany that allowed them to re-think everything from the ground up, and Trump II is revealing and exploiting the cracks.
Germany got at least two resets: from the Kaiser to the Weimar Republic; and from the Nazis to modern West Germany. Arguably, the second reset was bigger in terms of political institutions, because the new federal republic was deliberately designed to avoid a repeat of the fall of the Weimar Republic.
A competent Prime Minister, with a unified majority party, is often vastly more powerful than a competent US President, due to direct control of legislation. An incompetent President is more powerful than an incompetent Prime Minister though, which is the Trump problem.
Also, a unitary state's government has vastly more power than the government of a federation, by definition.
I'd assume only an American could make such a comment lumping all "other democracies" together as though they're interchangable, yet you don't seem to be one. It's quite bizarre.
> you invest your head of government (even pre-Trump) with a whole lot more power than other democracies
I don't think that's the case. The executive branch may exercise more power in America than other countries, perhaps because it's hard to change laws as a result of bicameralism, Senate filibuster, and presidential veto (another aspect of more presidential power), so administrations gets around it by changing how they interpret the laws, and Congress can't easily make the laws unambiguous that they can't do that.
But in parliamentary democracies, the prime minister is usually also the leader of the leading party in the parliament, so he usually gets his way in both the executive and the legislative branches (also because in many countries there's more party loyalty in parliament than in the US, perhaps because usually the party, rather than primary elections, decide who get to be nominated by the party for MP in the next election). So in America there's much more inertia because government is often divided, and even when it's not, the president can't easily get a filibuster-proof majority in Congress for whatever he wants.
It also seems to me that the American government contains much more independent agencies that the president can't (directly) order around.
In adulthood, one often realizes that the American instinct for why kings are bad is founded on facile propaganda. Why were the grievances of the Continental Congress King George III's fault when Parliament okay'd everything he did? What was so bad about him specifically (aside from the hemophilia, anyway)?
The Continentals would have pointed out (and did!) that they had no representation in that Parliament. So their grievance was with Empire more than Monarchy.
George and Martha's children were all Martha's by previous marriage. Even if he had wanted the job of monarch (he didn't), he was ill-suited to be the founder of a primogeniture dynasty.
The Zeitgeist for a short while was that the beef was with Parliament — America was loyal to the King but required its own legislature (having been denied representation in Parliament), sort of presaging what eventually happened with Canada and Australia among others. When that got no traction in Britain it became clear that full independence had to be the goal, and that meant the beef was transferred to the monarch.
Not until after the war, for sure. They were really eager to get help from the King of France, both for aid in the war and for trade agreements afterwards.
Sure, but that was another decade out. When our theorists (or before them, those of the Scottish Enlightenment) were talking about how protecting inalienable rights was why governments were instituted among men, I don’t think they especially argued that monarchy itself was a root problem. The Declaration’s beef with George III was very specifically laid out, and in another timestream Britain and/or George might get have been much more agreeable. (Or much worse!) As others have pointed out, the President might well have been called King, and even now is a sort of uneasy amalgam of a PM and a king.
Or maybe not. It has always struck me how comparatively minor such things as the Stamp Act and the
“Intolerable” Acts were, compared to the indignities the Federal government inflicts cats on us now. Careful reading reveals the understanding that these were seen not as terrible themselves so much as the thin end of the wedge, an attempt by Britain to demonstrate that they could do anything to us they pleased, after which they would.
When I visited the USA, I got the impression that Americans hate parliaments - at least the word, as much as they hate kings. I did a guided tour of one of the state capitols and when I asked if that room was where the parliament gathered, the guide was as horrified as if I had asked if that was the king's palace and proceeded to tell me how they have a house and a senate but no parliament.
I'd guess it doesn't particularly matter what he personally supported and what he merely signed off on (and who, thousands of miles across an ocean in the age of sail, would be able to tell the difference?). He was, by virtue of being an unelected guy on another continent bossing them around, the perfect symbol of the grievances. And symbols, particularly during a war, are important.
The (I think entirely coincidental) fact that he ascended the throne in 1760 and the taxes started in 1764 just made the symbolism overwhelming.
The taxes started in 1764 because the war whose debts they were paying off ended in 1763, so it was definitely coincidental with the start of George III's reign.
I have always wondered how satisfied Americans would have been to a response to "no taxation without representation" being "OK, here's 38 seats in the House of Commons".
38 in around 596 wouldn't be close to proportional in terms of population (there were about 2 million in the 13 colonies, and about 8 million in Great Britain, so 150-ish would be fair) but the idea of proportional allocation was not accepted in British thinking until the 1860s.
38 was chosen for a reason: it's two per colony to match the two per English county for 26, and then New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Charleston, Baltimore, and Norwalk (CT) would each be parliamentary boroughs with two MPs for another 12.
Those are all the cities with 10,000 population (at the first US census of 1790, but they were all substantial in the 1760s), i.e. a size big enough to have a restricted franchise still comprise a number of voters measured in the hundreds, ie too many to easily bribe. A smaller town/city would inevitably mean either a franchise of a tiny group of people (too easy to turn into a rotten borough) or a broadly-democratic franchise, which the aristocratic government of Britain was deadset against.
I read in A Great Improvisation that part of the dance Franklin had to do in getting aid from France was to convince them that various offers, which I gather were on the table, for Parliamentary representation and/or vaguely Dominion-like status, would not be accepted by the colonists. Or sometimes to convince them they they might be.
By 1779, sure. But that's in the "too late" category. Do it, not as a concession under duress, but because you actually want to treat Brits in America as Brits just like Brits in Britan, and make the change in 1765, and that may well be a different story.
It's only long-term workable once you have steamships and transatlantic telegraph, so the question is whether you can hold it together for 70 years until those technologies kick in.
Yeah, my point is that the Brits were making offers that at least some Brits in America were taking seriously, even after Saratoga. Americans really did think of themselves as maltreated Brits until very shortly before Lexington, maybe only a decade or so (as you say). I don't know how similar they were to your proposal (except of course for being a dozen years later), though my memory is that they were more like Dominion status. I also don't know how they would have been received by the American populace, as I assume they were addressed to Congress and probably did not get released to the press.
Adam Smith proposed political union of the United Kingdom and its colonies in Wealth of Nations (1776, months before the rupture became irreversible) -- and correctly envisioned that given the rapidly growing population in North America such an arrangement would inevitably move the imperial center of gravity westward.
Ben Franklin wrote in 1760 that whichever European power controlled the Mississippi and St. Lawrence rivers that control access to the fertile middle of North America would dominate the world by 1900.
In 1778, the Carlisle commission proposed to give the colonies representation in Parliament, but also offered some other things. Colonial legislatures would get more power in exchange for British representation in those legislatures.
Henry Laurens wrote that if this had been proposed earlier, “there can be no doubt that the People of American would have joyfully embraced the proposition.” In 1778, the United States had already declared its independence. As Laurens wrote to Carlisle:
> My Lord, you are come hither for the very modest purpose of persuading a free and independent nation to surrender their rights and privileges: You are confessedly incompetent to the business of subduing them and are therefore to proceed by what you call reasoning.
I suspect that representation in Parliament would have taken a lot of the steam out of the independence movement, but that somewhat depends on how much influence the representatives had, since as a minority they could always be outvoted.
In 1776, there were about 160 county-level units in British North America. The county-colony equivalence wouldn't have been enticing, especially for Virginia.
The fundamental grievance was a disagreement over the constitutional structure of the Empire, namely the degree to which the colonies were and should be subordinate to the central government of the United Kingdom. The Patriot position was that the colonies were semi-independent statelets in personal union with the UK, with their own separate legislatures and administrations but sharing a monarch and generally following London's lead on foreign policy, more-or-less like a Dominion in the 20th century. The Tory position was that the colonial governments were fully subordinate to the London government and could be overruled at will. Both positions had adherents on either side of the pond, hence why I'm calling them "Patriot" and "Tory" rather than "American" and "British".
The more specific procedural objection was that the laws and policies that formed the object-level grievances were being approve by the "wrong" legislatures, i.e. by the Westminster Parliament, not variously and separately by Massachusetts General Court, the Virginia General Assembly, the Pennsylvania Provincial Council, and so on.
This is also why giving the Colonies representation in Westminster wasn't an option, aside from the 6+ week travel time. The Colonies were already represented in their own legislatures, more conveniently situated and more responsive to their interests, which had been operating for some time and seemed to them perfectly serviceable to them. A relatively small number of seats in Westminster seemed a poor substitute, for similar reasons to the desire for Home Rule among many in Ireland in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In the last few years before 1776, a lot of people in the Patriot camp in the American Colonies saw Lord North, then Prime Minister, as the main villain and placed a lot of their hopes in the possibility of George III overruling North. They soured on him very hard after two attempts to petition him to intervene (in 1774 and 1775) failed and the second (the "Olive Branch Petition") was met by a proclamation by George III that the colonies were in rebellion which would be suppressed militarily.
The British government has always been averse to checks and balances. It believes in centralized power having power unlimited by anything other than the tradition that there are some things we just don't do.
I was just thinking that, at least from an European point of view, it was smart from Moldbug to talk about kings and monarchs rather than dictators, as the common European still retains the conditioning that a non-constitutional monarch is somehow different from a dictator even though the both can very well have the same powers and govern similarly.
(Sure, the monarch is supposed to be an inherited position, but considering how many dictatorial positions are inherited these days and how often monarchs were just replaced with other monarchs without inheritance due to reasons, that's a bit of a loose marker anyway.)
Then again, Moldbug is not otherwise particularly accessible to Europeans - not due to American expectionalism as such, but since the Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives opens with thought experiments like "whoah, maybe the Founding Fathers weren't all good", which are, uh, less than mind-blowing to those not conditioned with American patriotic mythology in the first place.
I was talking about monarchy in the historical sense and the specific difference between monarchy and dictatorship, not the modern constitutional monarchies.
That seems to apply to modern absolute monarchs as well. People often don’t see the monarchs of the emirates as dictators, and definitely not as bad as dictators.
You didn't ban the word, just the thing. Rome called their kings emperors for the same reason. Don't worry, I'm sure you'll find a name that makes you feel even more American than you did under the old system.
And nobody even tried to beat up Mencius Moldbug the way back during the Great Awokening, Antifa ski bums tried to beat up Charles Murray for speaking at Middlebury in Vermont and instead accidentally hospitalized the woman Middlebury professor arguing against Murray.
What's wrong with the new generation that they won't use violence to silence intellectuals?
I mean, applying incredible violence and oppression to protestors does in fact disincentivize them.
A basic facet of left-right divide can be elicited by the question 'is it worse for private citizens to coercively silence other private citizens, or for the government to coercively silence dissenters?'
The normal state of nature is the latter. Occasional bursts of extreme liberalism can make the former temporarily possible.
We have been exiting from one of those brief periods back to the norm, and whether people are excited by that or upset by it tells you most of what you need to know about their politics.
I didn't say either is good, I said, 'which is worse'?
Everyone who got shouted down by campus protestors was in some sense wronged, sure. But almost all of them have massive media presences that reach millions of people, and those shouting-down incidents only brought them more attention, it's not like their ideas were actually lost to the public consciousness or anything.
Whereas the government, with its monopoly on violence, *can* completely disappear speakers and completely outlaw ideas from the public square. To be sure, people will still circulate those ideas underground and in secret, but only at great personal risk and very low volume/fidelity. It's far more dangerous to free speech than angry college kids, or even than ideologically partisan publishers and professors.
I do believe there are policies you can take that maximize free speech under both regimes, and those are good.
What I'm talking about are the subset of policies that drive you towards one or the other of those two polls, which I think describes a lot of general measures around 'how authoritarian is your country'. For those policies, I favor being more liberal even if it means private citizens have some leeway to coerce each other with social pressure and threats, over being more authoritarian and risking the government coercing people with its absolute monopoly on violence and ability to outlaw ideas and disappear dissidents.
This is an entirely backwards take. The principle of rule of law designates the state as having a monopoly on violence, and thus the only actor with the right to coerce anything. A foundational principle of modern democracies is that citizens cannot coerce anyone else.
That's why we don't need to worry too much about private citizens coercing people, because they have extremely limited ability to do it and the government will step in if they step over the line, and if the government is slow about that we can petition them and protest and vote for people who will take care of it. Citizens coercing citizens is *bad*, but it's not *dangerous* on any large scale.
Whereas, the government has a monopoly on violence, meaning no one is above it or in a place to stop it if it starts abusing that privilege. That's why the monopoly on violence comes with stacks and stacks of regulations and limitations, starting with the Constitution and going through the law and police/military regulations and etc., and it's why we want a democratic government accountable to voters, and it's why we all have a sacred duty as citizens to monitor and reign in the government's use of violence - because if we let them slip the democratic and regulatory limitations on their use of power, there is nothing at all stopping them from doing literally anything with that power. It's a massive threat that we have to be constantly vigilant about.
Roman Catholic cardinals are not under a vow of poverty. The only priests with a vow of poverty belong to a religious order (Jesuits, Franciscans, etc.), and if any of those priests become bishops--and cardinals are typically bishops--they are typically released from that vow (since they may have to own property to run their dioceses).
Most of the cardinals weren't even religious order priests to begin with, so they never had a vow of poverty, though their salaries may have been fairly small. And the stuff they use (big houses, cars, etc.) may not necessarily belong to them personally.
It looks like I misremembered some writing I read a couple of decades ago. It must have been written by the abbot of a monastery or something then.
Basically he was contemplating the incongruity of taking a vow of poverty, but then sleeping on silk sheets or something like that.
He was writing in the 14th or 15th century if I remember correctly. Considering I thought him a Cardinal, this may not be correct. For some reason I'm thinking Borgia, but that's even less certain.
It's not really that he thought they "should". It's that he states the only way to keep the political elite from using there power to generate personal wealth was to outright ban them from owning anything at all. A lesson that modern people who talk about "keeping money out of politics" by silly things like campaign finance laws need to learn.
That's not exactly a brilliant analysis. Given a long enough time frame, you can just as easily say that tyranny inevitably devolves into democracy. Nothing lasts forever.
Yarvin's gone through phases. When he started Unqualified Reservations, he was pretty close to being an anarcho-capitalist. He did have some Platonist influences, but a lot of Platonism is in the water supply of the ancap/minarchist intellectual ecosystem, probably by way of Ayn Rand who rather liked Aristotle and Plato but rejected most post-Aristotle mainstream political and moral philosophy. The archipelago and cryptographic board of directors ideas, if I recall correctly, came from this phase of his writings and seemed like attempts to optimize and justify a Snow Crash style ancap world of corporately-governed microstates, while biting the bullet that a statelet with an autocratic CEO accountable only to a board of directors looks an awful lot like a monarchy where the King depends on support from the nobility.
A bit later on, he started citing Thomas Carlyle a bunch and shifting focus to ways to reform existing polities on a larger scale to more autocratic government rather than dissolving them, proposing new government for California or the entire United States. He carried over some ideas about exist being more important than voice and cryptographic weapons being a useful institutional tool, but the archipelago of statelets got deemphasized a lot in favor arguing that Classical Liberalism was where things fundamentally went wrong. You might think of this as his Neo-Jacobite phase, since I think this was when he was talking the most about undoing the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and restoring the Stuarts, with Prince Alois of Lichentstein being his preferred claimant. I think the Antiversity proposal came from this phase.
I haven't followed Gray Mirror, but what I've seen from skimming a couple articles there and what I've heard about it indirectly is that he's moved on to just being fascist. In hindsight, there were some signs of movement in this direction towards the tail end of UR, when he was talking more about 20th century Fascism being a failed last stand against Liberalism, in contrast to his ancap-era stance that Fascism and Soviet-style Communism were convergent failure modes of liberal democratic principles.
Haven't read yet, but I must ask; how does one get through Moldbug's insanely padded, ironic, meandering writing? Is there no one else who wrote it (or possibly, thought it) better?
At least on ACX, there's no relationship between post length and popularity - people don't noticeably prefer shorter posts, even when the long posts are very long. I'm surprised by this, but it's been confirmed again and again. Have you noticed the same?
But you write very well, so it’s a pleasure to keep going. I agree with unobserved that moldburg is hard to read, which doesn’t mean he doesn’t have good ideas. Just style.
(I’m not saying he has good ideas either but that style matters).
I imagine that bigger ideas require more words. So while long posts are harder to read, there is more of a payoff for reading them.
Admittedly plenty of writers use a lot of words to say not very much, but if we are comparing posts by a single author, I imagine that author has the same quality threshold for long and short posts, so the reward for reading remains about proportional to the investment.
...but this does not yet show that more words implies bigger ideas. There is no guarantee of a payoff to reading more words; and, indeed, Moldbug tends to use more words in order to obfuscate rather than enlighten. It's a deliberate part of his philosophy: he wants a movement built exclusively of a group of people that are not only intelligent, but also willing to slog through deliberate obfuscation, work with it, build on it, thrive in it. It is explicit gatekeeping (and he explains as much in his work): if you are not getting on with his writing, he doesn't want you anywhere near his ideas or his project. You are not a candidate for his board of CEOs; you are one of the masses who are to have no voice or input or control in the neofeudalist structure he proposes.
While that's a decent argument, it's also true that when your idea are muddy, it takes more words to say them.
I've never met anyone who called Wheeler's "Gravitation" an easy read, but those are complex ideas presented clearly. Does Moldbug meet that test? (Sorry, I'm NOT going to read him, as that's not an area of my interest, but the "meta-argument" sort of is.) (From the selected quotes his arguments don't appear to be rigorous, but that could be because he addresses the weaknesses somewhere else.)
The longer posts deserve to be longer though? At least the good ones do. There are cases where I find you kind of meander and don't seem sure yourself what you're getting at. But often it's long because that's the length needed to cross modest Inferential Distances.
I liked it when I read it originally starting in 2009, but in the late 2010s I tried to go back and reread and couldn't stand it. Not sure if I should try again.
Such as would a common skald? Nonsense. I use only Latinate words & restore to them their original syllable-lengths, therewith to embark upon a purely quantitative hexametre—like the 𝘤𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 masters, not these capering jack-napes that wander about singing for their supper & calling (𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨) themselves poets.
"....I just think you're objectively wrong that poems need to rhyme to be good."
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was built around rhyming.
The dude who wrote Gawain and the Green Knight at around the same time built his poem(s) around alliteration. To illustrate, using Tolkein's translation:
"When the siege and the assault had ceased at Troy,
and the fortress fell in flame to firebrands and ashes,
the traitor who the contrivance of treason there fashioned
was tried for his treachery, the most true upon earth"
Edit: sorry I misread what you were saying. Yes, it seems the high middle ages is when English poetry goes in for rhyme, alliteration being the older model. I forget if Tolkien mentions it ever, but I think he regards the Gawain poet as holding to an older, midlands tradition, which might be a reason Gawain uses the older style. Even if that is Tolkien's view, I don't know if it holds up under current views. I'm leaving the rest of my comment untouched just because...I dunno why? Posterity? But ignore it.
Yes, but old English poetry (Beowulf, the Wanderer, etc) is built around alliteration. My understanding is that ancient Greek poetry was more about meter: dactyllic hexameter is what characterizes epic poetry, if I recall correctly. And ancient Hebrew poetry is characterized by something even more nebulous: matching halves of a line where (usually) the second half-line intensifies and builds on the first half.
I'm not against rhyming, I love Chaucer (more for his zaniness and fart jokes than the rhymes but still...), but I'm just saying someone with an aristocratic attitude to poetry might look at non-rhyming Greek, Latin, biblical, or old English poetry as a less "popular" model than rhyme which is most well known today from pop music.
Well, it's not a requirement. T.S.Eliot wrote some quite good poetry that didn't rhyme. So did Houseman. Rhythm is equally important, and assonance is also significant. If it doesn't use those tools, though, it's prose disguised as poetry. (Which can also be good...just not good poetry.)
Most memorable poetry uses all three tools (though generally one is stressed more highly than the others).
Traditionally, poetry focused on the idea rather than the presentation, is weaker in the use of the tools, because the idea constrains the word choices more tightly.
I mean, I get what you mean about prose disguised as poetry, but I think there are real poetic traditions whose poetry doesn't rhyme, has no distinctive meter, and doesn't use much assonance or alliteration.
Biblical poetry is the example I have read at least something about. Everything I say below is from my (probably poor) memory of Robert Alter, but I think the gist is correct: Biblical poetry is more about a kind of balancing of ideas/metaphors across two halves of a line in a way that naturally grows and develops the idea across and between lines. It also has a distinctive (I forget if it's archaic) vocabulary.
As far as I can tell, biblical writers regarded this as a distinctive mode of speech and writing; I am not sure how early the biblical poems were identified as "chants" ("shirim") but there are definitely indications that these were regarded as different from prose, though obviously "poetry" and "prose" may not be concepts that perfectly map to whatever the ancient Israelites were doing.
Oh, they don't need to rhyme to be good—just to be poetry.
>Anyway, isn't "poetry should rhyme" just lowest common denominator democratic taste?<
Ever taken a poetry course? I think I was the only one there who attempted to make his output rhyme (...and also one of like three total males, though that's probably unrelated—just a little tip for my fellow ACX brohemians).
Now, you may say "but aren't people taking a poetry class at a university probably not the same as would fall under the 'lowest-common-denominator' umbrella?" Possibly, possibly; I wouldn't know—I've (fortunately) not had to rub shoulders with any lower, if such creatures there truly be.
I have not taken a poetry course, but my guess is, those people are deliberately trying to avoid sounding too pedestrian. The same reason probably no one wrote a limerick.
I think most peoples' interaction with poetry is pop song lyrics, which mostly rhyme.
I remember thinking it was the first right wing writing I'd seen that wasn't either religious nonsense or Iraq War cheerleading, so that was interesting.
By 2017 it was obvious that neoreactionary thought is just window dressing. It served the same purpose as the National Review did for flipping the south from blue to red.
Yeah, I also found him interesting as a non-religious conservative; I also found it valuable to read a conservative who *didn't* concede things like, democracy is good, the civil rights movement was good, etc. as it seemed like a lot of conservatism involved drawing (what seemed to me at the time) arbitrary distinctions about when and whether being more democratic/egalitarian was good or not, and it really made conservative ideas click for me: "oh, comparing gay marriage to interracial marriage won't convince you because you're still not sold on interracial marriage! I get it!"
Though I think Moldbug was actually pro-Iraq war; I remember the guys at My Posting Career characterizing him as a neo con
Ironic since to me he reads like someone trying to imitate your style, but without the underlying thinking. So it's just a lot of random anecdotes and analogies to obscure a basic point. I guess there's an Unsong style puzzle to be found in interpreting it
Moldbug is very easy to read. Both his and Scotts writing slip down like a spoon of ice cream going down the throat of a hungry man on a hot summers day who just did a killer workout and is desperate to replenish some glucose, water, and cool down.
No accounting for taste, but then we all have people we like to read despite their many flaws. I love reading Ayn Rand, even if I think 85% of her political views are deeply flawed.
Seriously. I couldn't even get through this post, and that's not a criticism of the post -- I'm in awe of Scott's ability to go deep. But an article that could be titled, "Autocracy not working out the way reactionary sci-fi article hoped" just doesn't feel like a topic that demands my time.
Yarvin has added his own speculation regarding how a society can avoid the competition for power, but his analysis of what the problem is appears to be based on their analysis.
I can recommend it. The ideas there have been rather influential in how academics interpret the dynamics of political power.
> Is there no one else who wrote it (or possibly, thought it) better?
Not all ideas are equally easy to express in all languages, metaphorical truth survives better in parables and rants. The apa guidelines make it hard to references dreams.
I enjoyed Moldbug's writing as much for the style as the ideas. And he was utterly hilarious. In contrast, Curtis Yarvin is boring as hell. That's further evidence he went commercial.
I think there are two major issues with Moldbug's general proposal. First, the focus on the national interest is inherently populist, so it's unsurprising he'd sell out to populists. Second, rather than actually acting according to the nation's interest, he proposes making the nation a profit-maximizing corporation, but that gives you some China/Silicon Valley/London hybrid rather than promoting the national interest.
I'm using "national interest" here to mean something like being a strong prosperous powerful nation of exactly the sort that probably has high shareholder value, in the hopes that this is most faithful to what Moldbug wants.
I'm saying that I model Moldbug as thinking that turning the country into a China/SV/London hybrid *is* in the national interest. In fact, what do you mean by national interest that's opposed to that?
Some Scandinavia/China hybrid with less immigration, less exports and more corruption taking the place of some of the credentialism would probably be in the national interest. Like a more cozy and less export-oriented society.
But the point is you shouldn't be promoting the national interest either, it's like a lower bound, not a goal.
I assumed what you were getting at was some kind of critique of post-national economic zone style governance, but fail to see how China fits into this model. For all the criticisms of China, it is still very much a Han country.
I don't think immigrants from other ethnicities *have* to be a problem, and conversely this means not getting such immigrants doesn't *have* to be a big benefit. My concern is more that China has a pretty export-oriented economy, which is promoting other nation's wants, rather than the national needs.
(Obviously it's far from purely export-oriented etc.)
I find your comment really confusing. What political program doesn't have, at least in principle, the national interest at its heart? Doesn't it just represent the collective shared interests of (at least) a majority of the population? Isn't it the motivating force for forming a nation in the first place?
Maybe I should add, more corruption because corruption is when the local decisionmakers diverge from the responsibilities the higher decisionmakers' delegated to them for personal advantage. Since higher decisionmakers are more central and know less about the local conditions, they can't really have a meaningful opinion on what's going on locally. So that's gonna give you the very conservative avoid-bad-stuff-don't-care-about-good-stuff policy.
Obviously if the corruption gets diverted into benefitting some bullies or gangsters or whatever, that's an issue. So the corruption still needs to be kind of controlled and monitored.
Why have corruption to allow deviating from the rules set at the higher levels when those don't work well for the local conditions, rather than just make less decisions at the high levels?
The more I think about the corruption thesis, the less satisfied I am with it. It's probably too dangerous to permit corruption. It was more an attempt to square various anarchist critiques of statism with the general advantages of having a state.
I don't think "just stop making decisions at the higher levels" would work. Like if you solve IRB bureaucracy by stopping enforcing research ethics from above, you're probably going to see the proliferation of all sorts of horrible things.
> what do you mean by national interest that's opposed to that?
Perhaps something a little less Moloch end-state; more human, less disneyland with no children. Something that has more "us" in its "for the good of all of us", and less of the ones who are dead.
China's Gilded Age by Yeun Yeun Ang talks about something a bit like this. He says that one of the reasons that China has been more successful than eg India is that they've had better forms of corruption. So rather than taking bribes directly to do their jobs local officials will get a cut of the profits of some new enterprise. And so they're incentives are aligned with making it profitable, rather than adding additional barriers they need to pay for. So corrupt local officials want to develop their local economies and take their cut.
The problem with this is that what is most profitable is not necessarily the same thing as what's in the best interests of your constituents. Is extremely profitable to seize everybody's land and sell it to a developer. Or to force your citizens to work for low wages. And prevent competing businesses.
I'm sure Moldbug would reply with something about the longer term perspective of a monarch meaning they're less likely to do that stuff. And he probably thinks things like workers rights and environmental protections are bad anyway. But he doesn't actually have a solution to the principal agent problem as far as I can see. Other than mumbling about crypto solutions.
In the long run, though, eminent domaining land and giving it to developers is probably in the best interest of the vast majority of your constituents. What is most profitable is not necessarily in the best interest of constituents, but it's a much better proxy than anything else I can think of, including a democratic vote.
Can you clarify your definition of “national interest”?
I expect most political groups would say they’re acting in the “national interest” despite meaning very different things. Okay, maybe not the communists. Point is that “national interest” can refer to anything from ethnonationalism to autarky to universalizing religion.
Oldbug’s formulation was surprisingly agnostic to any particular one. I’d say the current iteration is not. That’s what makes it selling out.
Perhaps Sam Altman was the real Moldbug all along. He plays the long game so that he can become World Emperor once OpenA... I mean OpenMind takes over the world (as in AI-2027 slowdown scenario), and he concluded that Trump might be right person he can manipulate in the critical moment.
A possible explanation other than "sold-out" is that Moldbug is motivated by the negative part of his philosophy ("anti-Cathedralism"), rather than the positive ("pro-reactionary") and thinks, rightly or wrongly, that MAGA is good for Cathedral-smashing.
That's what I was trying to get at with the last paragraph: "I think he feels genuine despair about the state of the country, his faux cheerfulness has finally cracked, and he’s decided it’s worth compromising his principles for a long shot at getting some of what he wants."
...but I don't think this contradicts "selling out". You always sell out for something in particular! Sometimes it's personal gain, but other times it's political.
I think the difference between "he sold out his philosophy for power a chance to smash the cathedral" and my proposal, is that I'm suggesting that his current move could be the authentic working out of his philosophy (realising that he puts more weight on the negative anti-Cathedral aspect), rather than selling out his philosophy.
In both cases we could say that he's now more or less ditched one important part of his earlier philosophy, so there may be little substantive difference on that front.
Yarvin wrote approximately 10 bazillion words saying "when you remove the wax you will be incredibly tempted to join the sirens but FOR GOD'S SAKE DO NOT UNTIE YOURSELF FROM THE MAST, DO NOT JOIN THE SIRENS" and is now proposing that we all jump overboard and swim to the pretty mermaids.
Yeah, but he could have genuinely (and correctly) come to believe that his program had literally 0% chance (yes, I know there’s no such thing, but in this case there is) and, like the rest of us, “sold out” in the sense of satisficing instead of continually crashing himself on the rocks. I get why Scott feels like trash-talking him, but honestly it just seems mean.
It just feels like if a huge part of your program is, "if you do this 1% wrong, you get Hitler", saying, " ok there's no chance of doing it right, I'll do it wrong" doesn't really count as "satisficing".
That’s the part where I say, “I get why Scott feels like trash-talking him”. And if fully-grown Democrats hadn’t been playing the Hitler card for decades, I might agree.
You sort of indicate that you agree with his despair about the state of the country. Do you have an example of anything you have written explaining why? I've never read about an earlier time in history and thought, "I'd rather live then". Like you, I wish the FDA had a better drug-approval process, for instance, but it's still the system that produces more new medical treatments than any nation in the world! It seems like our entire society is stuck on the idea that everything sucks when just about everything we can measure suggests that things are the best they've ever been. Is that where you are at as well? (I'm certainly concerned about where MAGA is trying to take us and what will happen to populist anger on both the left and right, but the solution to that obviously wouldn't be to further stoke populist anger by suggesting that the system is broken.)
I agree! It sometimes feels like the LW / rat futurist crowd starts with a techno-utopian alternative reality and then immediately getting pissed at the status who for not living up to the same standards… but as we’re seeing right now, it turns out the status quo was not that bad! Relative to the entire matrix of realistic alternatives, the status quo was actually pretty good!
And now instead of techno-futurist utopia, we have a mad populist king hell bent on tearing down the entire capitalist postwar economic order. That’s a pretty bad failure mode.
I seem to recall "the status quo is objectively way better than any time in history, actually" being one of Scott's big counter-arguments to Moldbug's claims as of the Anti-NRX FAQ.
I've always found Mencius to be a great guy and I was really devastated when his wife died a few years ago, leaving his two kids motherless.
But, I've never understood his references to "The Cathedral."
I visited Chartres cathedral in 1980 and thought it was great. When I finally visited the Harvard campus, I was disappointed by the lack of cathedral-like architecture. But I understand that Harvard was founded by very low church puritans, so it's appropriate that Harvard, Curtis's bete noire, is aesthetically boring.
I always figured it was a reference to 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar', a famous 1997 article by Eric S. Raymond advocating for open-source software development.
I think that was his primary intent, yes, with a secondary intent of drawing an analogy between the role of institutional experts (which seem to have a bit of a monoculture across a range of institutions) in modern American society and the role of the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages as being a source, coordinated by shared ideology and world view, of legitimizing stories and "neutral" policy advice that has enormous power because it's (at least partially correctly) perceived representing the consensus of well-educated experts and because it controls the main institutions with the social role of discovering and codifying truths about the world and educating the laity about its findings.
That secondary understanding is not unique or original to Moldbug. I don't think he explicitly credits it as such, but it strikes me as having a lot in common with the concept of the Superstructure from Marxist social theory. Which Moldbug is very probably familiar with, since I'm pretty sure I remember him talking about one of his parents or grandparents being a former member of CPUSA.
It's funny how neologisms that catch on tend to not be very self-evident, like "jump the shark," "motte and bailey," or "The Cathedral."
Back in the 1990s, the last page in The Atlantic Monthly would often hold a contest inviting readers to invent particular neologisms. Subscribers came up with dozens of brilliant terms that were wittily self-evident without even requiring users to sit through a lecture about the TV show "Happy Days."
To me, it evokes the complexity yet precarious nature of the structure. I'm not an architecture expert, but my understanding is that cathedrals were incredibly difficult to correctly build because of the scale of the structures compared to the engineering and material available. Like, medieval architects were incredible at geometry, but that was basically all they had to calculate how to build and hold up these massive churches and they had to constantly make these adjustments and modification to keep it from falling in on itself, and then figure out how to make those look pretty after the fact (the flying buttress being the most famous example). So you get something that's grandiose and uplifting, but when you look closely you see its upheld by a thousand little tweaks and hacks, and if any of those fail the whole thing could come collapsing in. Like modern liberalism. And of course, the other correllary is that if you were trying to build something of similar scale and scope today, you would go about it in a completely different way.
The Cathedral is supposed to be the modern replacement to the Catholic Church as an arbiter of dogma, authority, and morality. The content of their dogmas, ethics, and indeed their aesthetics are not the same.
I saw Yarvin speaking in LA a couple of years ago with Peachy Keenan and some others. He got weepy, and openly emotional wrt his wife. A side of him people don't usually see, for serious.
As someone who has read 10,000+ of the 11,000, I have to say this is very good. And I also feel the extremely strong temptation (in my home country) to roll the fascism dice as a last shot at saving it. Alas, it seems impossible civilization can be saved, and yet...
I honestly go back and forth on whether I would support some kind of best-case-scenario version of Trump who wants to purge all of the institutions in a creepy strongmannish way but is also competent, honest, and preserves a fig leaf of rule of law; luckily for my soul nobody like this seems anywhere in the cards.
I assume you're somewhere in Europe - do you understand why mainstream European parties don't turn against immigration (except in Denmark, where I hear they did this and it went very well for them)? It seems that immigration is very unpopular there, so why won't any major party touch it?
European here - and they do, and have done for a while.
Major issues are Schengen (you cant just close your borders, so people can just walk in), the Mediterranean being a tough border to defend and governments being stopped by judges citing the European Declaration of Human Rights. Elected right-wing governments do basically what they can while testing those boundaries. The Netherlands is currently copying the Danish model, so let’s see how that goes.
That said, I don’t believe for a second that solving immigration would defuse right-wing populism. There seems to be no correlation whatsoever between immigration levels and support for rw populism, both between countries and over time. I think the key drivers are commercial/social media, decay of civic participation and increased wealth.
I'm skeptical of the Schengen/Mediterranean/EDHR explanation because this dynamic seems most pronounced in Britain, where whatever Nigel Farage's party is called now is on the rise after the Brexit supporters felt like even the pro-Brexit faction of the Tories failed to decrease immigration.
Furthermore, I dont think the UK can prove or disprove anything, since Brexit and the Conservatives have broadcasted spectacular levels of fuck-up. The UK is easily the most poorly governed country of Western Europe, and cannot seem to accomplish much.
But as to my second point, do you believe “solving immigration” would pacify the right? How would you explain Slovakia, Romania, Poland?
I thought Tusk's policies against illegal migration (and recent refusal to sign the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum) looked like a classic example of the centre successfully pacifying the right?
Nope, but it's inside the Overton Window: "Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has indicated that withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) could be on the agenda if the UK’s membership frustrates policy on illegal immigration or endangers national security. This follows an ‘interim measure’ from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in June 2022, which effectively prevented the first flight carrying asylum seekers from being sent to Rwanda until the UK courts had fully considered the issue, and the UK Supreme Court’s judgment in November 2023 that the Rwanda policy is unlawful".
Treasury brain rot and terminal retardation amongst our political class, combined with the standard failure to consider second order consequences and genuine inherent liberalism in 80% of the political class. That's for Britain at least.
The political class by and large didn't see a problem with immigration up until 2016 or so, and bought the arguments that it was good for GDP figures and so on. This was largely because the immigrants they were exposed to were colleagues in Westminster, academics etc. etc. They also had much more in common with other transnational elites vs. the white underclass.
The Boriswave (~2.5m *legal* migrants over 3 years) was largely a result of this treasury brainrot on steroids (trained doctors and nurses great stuff, lets turbocharge it, we just won a massive election so obviously everything is great, UKIP are defeated, the right are ascendant). Note also that Cummings, as much as he likes to harp on about immigration now, did not oppose this at all at the time. This is again due to the default postnational liberalism and the instinct that any opposition to free movement is simply bigoted ludditism.
It turned out that actually, letting in millions of people at a time when your economy wasn't doing so well, you still had extremely generous welfare policies, you just had a massive expansion of state grants and bureaucracy due to Covid, and you refused to build any housing, might not have been such a great idea. Finally the penny dropped for lots of people in power, there was the symbolism of us having an Indian PM, everyone emerging from their lockdowns to find the streets had become even more foreign, everything was falling apart, and so the Tories were exiled and Labour came in. But Labour were just as pro-migration as the Tories (or perhaps more accurately, anti-ANTI-immigration, for warm fuzzy anti-racist reasons) and so when they came in with a huge majority (although *not* a huge number of votes) they ALSO thought they didn't have to do anything.
Anyway, everyone's now voted for Reform (who as far as I can tell aren't even themselves particularly anti-migration, see the expulsion of Lowe). Farage isn't an eth-nat at all, and I suspect he'd happily get rid of the welfare state access for migrants but keep the system liberalised and the numbers as high as the market would dictate as the good free trader that he is (which would be preferable to the current shambles I'll admit, but not what the populace wants). Cummings is in a shambles too after realising that there is simply no appetite for his techno-centrist turbo liberalism (the real centre ground in Britain is and always has been social democratic conservatism), so is now desperately retweeting stuff about the grooming gangs in a bid to stay relevant.
> Reform (who as far as I can tell aren't even themselves particularly anti-migration, see the expulsion of Lowe)
I suspect Farage thinks coming across as a moderate is the path to electoral success. Also, Farage had problems with extremists in his previous party UKIP.
As to what Farage truly believes, your guess is as good as mine.
> I suspect he'd happily get rid of the welfare state access for migrants but keep the system liberalised and the numbers as high as the market would dictate
Immigration is Reform's signature issue, so if they don't reduce it they'll never win another election.
In the UK, it's straightforwardly for economic reasons. Immigration is very unpopular, but the UK has a really tight labour market. It's also impossible to staff the NHS (state healthcare system) and care homes (largely publicly funded but privately operated) without vast quantities of minimum wage agency workers. The result is governments' options are 1) slash immigration and face some kind of inflation/default nightmare scenario, 2) slash immigration and dismantle the very popular welfare state, 3) let in vast numbers of immigrants and become unpopular, 4) let in vast numbers of immigrants and try to lie about it/distract people from it. Unsurprisingly, all governments thus far have chosen 4.
Pre-Brexit, option 5 was to use the EU to only let in Europeans while saying that due to the EU there was nothing the government can do.
In Italy, France and Germany the dynamic is very different, and the answer is Schengen (for France and Germany), and the ECHR and Refugee Convention (for all of them). Physically preventing people from entering Spain and Italy by sea is outside the Overton window (you can't build a wall, so you either sink the boats with all passengers or let them land). In the Eastern hemisphere, you then get caught up in a long boring series of legal arguments about how old people are (they all say they're children), what country they're from ("I'm a black Swahili-speaking Afghan"), whether they're gay, a political dissident or whatever and whether you can send them back to wherever without them being tortured or killed. They often simply fall off the grid while this is happening (or, in particular, move between European countries), but even if they don't the process would be slow if it wasn't hopelessly backlogged (which in all these countries it is).
It sounds weird to say the the UK and EU have completely separate immigration problems like this (the UK also has the other thing, but on a much smaller scale), you see it in the demographics though. UK immigration is heavily West African/South Asian and mostly employed. EU asylum seekers tend to be East African/Middle Eastern* and mostly not in formal employment.
*This gets heavily skewed post-2022 by the Ukraine war.
> It's also impossible to staff the NHS (state healthcare system) and care homes (largely publicly funded but privately operated) without vast quantities of minimum wage agency workers.
That’s a very bad analysis. To staff the NHS the U.K. just need visas for the NHS. To staff the care homes the U.K. needs specific visas for care homes. To staff either you don’t actually need immigration at all.
It’s pretty amazing that a year or so after all Good Thinking people believed in zero immigration the U.K. went crazy on issuing millions of visas. Of course all of this could be stopped, and therefore all of it was by design. The muh free market greed of the conservatives should kill them, and probably will.
They do that. It's the health and care (worker) visa, which during the peak in 2023 was by far the most common worker entry visa ("temporary worker" has now pulled ahead").
As for staffing the NHS without them, there aren't enough employable British proles you can actually get to do work. You can blame years of social decay, you can blame the representation of the people acts, and more plausibly you can blame social mobility and the Baumol effect for lifting the employable ones higher into the economy. But you're not going to find 400,000 employable people who'll work for >£25,000 a year hiding under a rock.
There's various ways the underlying causation, if any, could go.
I suspect relative unattractiveness of a region leads to both foreigners avoiding it as well as locals getting grumpy. (And young locals moving away, too. Especially women, which makes the men who remain even angrier.)
Sometimes I wonder whether Germany should make dealing with foreigners a thing for the states to decide instead of the federal level.
That way the places that don't want foreigners don't need to interfere with the places that don't mind or actively welcome them.
Hungary was crossed by a massive stream of mostly young male migrants in 2015 and I remember reading Hungarian comments with use of an automatic translator.
The wave of complaints of fights with police, robberies and sudden appearance of human excreta in the street or even in buses was enormous, and so was the hostility engendered by this event.
There aren't that many migrants in Hungary NOW, but that only means that the population really does not want a repeat of 2015 and that the government actually takes that wish seriously.
I hate that talking point, because it means very little. All the liberals and lefties that I know irl that are pro immigration also bring up that same talking point constantly - without realizing that they interact with just as many poor immigrants on a daily basis as the people in the countryside - zero. I would claim it's even more biased to be for immigration wholesale when all the immigrants you know personally are extremely educated, wealthy and sharing your cultural values - because no one is claiming those are the problematic ones. It's the poor, hyper conservative ones that form parallel societes and have frankly, quite often, views hostile to any pluralistic, democratic society.
"they interact with just as many poor immigrants on a daily basis as the people in the countryside - zero"
I get your point that the elites are largely segregated from the negatives of mass migration, but to say that those in the countryside and smaller cities have "zero" interaction is not accurate. Grooming gangs (who the elites were able to avoid) were all over England. And when it comes to places like Springfield, Ohio, the immigration is handled in a ham-handed fashion that, again, the elites themselves don't have to deal with. Germans in the East have good reason to question the plans of the elites.
Also note that defending the borders is the task of the given member country, mostly from its own budget. This means that countries on the south and east (e.g. Hungary, Croatia, now Romania) should protect most of the border, while practically zero of the immigration wave wants to stay in those countries.
I expect in the case of Britain there are two big reasons:
(1) Starmer knows a lot of activists within his party won't like it
(2) Starmer thinks being tough on immigration could lose him a lot of votes to the Greens and lib Dems, while people who want lower immigration will vote for Reform anyway as they will promise more than he will achieve.
For the Tories, an additional reason was that immigration lowered wages and increased house prices, both of which benefitted the rich, so what the problem?
And then there's good old incompetence, a significant factor in all case where the UK government pursues seriously suboptimal policy.
Here in the UK right wing populism is entirely driven by immigration and government doing the explicit opposite of what they've promised and said they would. At this point for over a generation, causing low trust on the issue. Further actiona by government that *looks* like they're not anti immigration in practice further fuel right wing attitudes, regardless of what the gov actually do or say, due to the low trust.
Reform and Nigel Farage are quite likely to be the next UK government in a few years time, and this would be impossible if the last 10 million foreigners had not been allowed to settle in the country (That's immigration since the early 2010s in a country of population 68m btw). Deport the foreigners and the populist right will never get elected. Stop importing over a million foreigners each year the populist right will be hamstring and very unlikely to win much in an election.
It's literally the single issue that makes the populist right seem appealing.
You should add that failing to slash immigration also causes defaults and ends welfare states, thanks to the net cost average nature of the realised actual immigrants versus the projected high skill imaginary ones. So they're stuck.
The Danes had a very good World War II, helping all almost all of their Jews escape to Sweden. So Danes feel entitled to do in the 21st Century what is in the best interests of the Danes when it comes to immigration policy.
Many other Europeans countries did not have such an admirable WWII, to say the least. So their elites feel obligated to self-destruct through immigration as compensation for the Holocaust.
Like the UK, which took a major part in beating the Nazis? Even of the others, AFAICT Germany is the only one that doesn't (rightly or wrongly) pass the blame to Germany.
For my country, the UK, the current Labour government is very hamstrung by its MPs and party members, who are extremely pro-migration. There is a somewhat sensible contingent in cabinet who know they need to do something but can't do very much. And the longer the issue is neglected the more the people want done.
More deserving of derision are the Conservative party, who were in power 2010-2024 and despite leaving the EU on what was pretty clearly an anti-immigration mandate, actually _increased_ immigration enormously from non-EU countries. Here it looks mainly like an issue of competence (see Cummings/Yarvin "the govt doesn't control the govt") with a smattering of received wisdom about substantial immigration being necessary to balance the books with an aging population.
This is my understanding but interested to hear more from other examples.
It's not that there's an obvious better way to balance the books, it's that this approach actively makes the books worse.
Most migrants (especially non-EU) are a net drain on the state, even averaged over their lifetime. NHS use, higher crime, benefits claims, remittances sent home, social housing. In addition they're likely to have more children, who in turn (for whatever reason, culture, genetics, selection effects, pick your poison) are _also_ more likely to be a net drain.
If you asked me for an alternative, I'd say they need to cut the state pension drastically (basically accepting it will eventually be phased out) and give some tax breaks/entrepreneurship breaks to young people, who are currently completely checked out. (and understandably so)
The only way that immigration can balance the books is if it is high skilled. Obviously low paid workers are already a cost, year by year, to the state if their taxes are lower than their benefits. Think housing costs here. And non working immigrants are an obvious cost. Even middle income earners - including natives - are tax loss to the government over their lifetime. As people live longer that cost will increase
Major parties in Europe have turned against immigration, slowly over the past decade, as the anti-immigration sentiment has grown from the far right fringes to >50% of the population of any major European country. The hilarious thing about this, though, is that immigration is much cheaper than pro-natalist policies at growing GDP and remaining relevant in a Europe of rapidly falling birth rates. So even parties that should be against immigration, because a crushing majority of their supporters dislike unchecked immigration, like the UK's Tories, allowed net migration numbers to reach multiple new highs across their 14-year stint at the head of the country. It's easy to make a case against immigration that grips a nation by the feels, but it's incredibly difficult to articulate why you should severely limit net migration once you get power and become accountable for economic activity (which remains, imo, the least understood part of anyone's daily life in a modern developed country, despite being arguably the most important part of anyone's daily life). The result is a European people bolstered by anti-immigration rhetoric/sentiment, some of it sensible some of it hateful, that ends up governed by pro-immigration bodies of power again and again. Inevitably a major European country will become led by a severely immigration-limiting party who goes ahead and does the economically nonsensical stuff they said they'd do, like Trump's tariffs but different. The results will make for an interesting case study.
Even if immigration does grow GDP, what's the incentive of a political party to permit it? Does it have such an obvious effect that the economy will suffer during the 5-10 year rule of a specific political party if it decreases immigration a year or two into its time in power?
In the UK, all commonwealth migrants can automatically vote in elections. Yes, hard to believe. The incentive structures (especially with already established ethnic minority constituencies and political figures) are therefore quite weird.
A semi-mythologised affair in the modern British left's history was the defeat of the British National Party in Barking and Dagenham (East London) around 2010. The standard narrative is a great ground game and hope not hate anti-fascist campaigners saw off the dastardly racists. In reality, it was simply a numbers game- the area went from 93% White (~91% British) in 1991 to 45% White in 2021 (and just 31% British). Once anti-immigration feeling reaches a tipping point in a particular area, the game becomes whether you can import the new voters you need to retain power faster than they can vote you out.
Edit: The area now has 50/51 Labour Councillors. 12 are White British, the remaining 39 ethnic minorities of some sort. A bizarre situation considering the Council had 12 nationalist MPs just 15 years ago, but I think it sheds light on the local incentive structures. Add this up enough around the country (parliamentary systems with local representation provide these kinds of incentives) and you can see why even "just stop immigration for a bit" can be put under pressure.
If I take the University of Oxford's Migration Observatory's word for it, and using theirs and ONS forecasts, net migration to the UK from 2025 to 2030 should be about 2 175 000 people, with considerable variability (with Labour at the helm, likely to the upside rather than to the downside of that figure). Since "almost half of the increase in non-EU immigration from 2019 to the year ending June 2024 resulted from those arriving for work purposes (18%) and their dependants (29%)" (source 1), and work & study immigration are roughly equal (source 2, figure 6), we can assume an influx of about 1 000 000 workers. Given the UK's labour force of 34 million people, we can make a simple assumption that net migration over the next five years will represent a 3% increase in the labor force, and the remaining 1 175 000 net migrants would represent a 3.6% increase in the non-labor force population, most of whom would be students. You can reasonably imagine that even a strongly anti-immigration party wouldn't try to reduce study visas to zero, so we can focus on the increase in the labor force.
The UK's productivity is stagnant since 2017 (source 3), so you couldn't count on your existing labor force to do more with their time. Although this warrants more research, yes, you would see an impact on the economy's growth rate pretty soon after the implementation of stringent immigration control, and because capex plans/foreign investment/bond yields/equity markets effectively "price in" the future impact of current policy decisions, you would see the impact of such policies in financial markets well before you'd see them in real life. Beyond that, you'd have labor market dislocations where net migration currently fills serious gaps (like in the health and care sectors), and the anti-immigration population would still have to deal with roughly 15% of the UK being foreign-born (source 1, figure 1), which is the main source of their troubles (in their mind). You'd have pretty rapid real consequences on the economy and extremely slow consequences on the ethnic landscape of the country. And what are voters if not impatient?
This misses the fact that the majority of migrants into the UK since ~2016 have been fiscal drags. GDP per capita (even adjusting for PPP) has been stagnant since 2019 despite record numbers over the last 6 years. This even includes the fact that state welfare, education, and health spending are all included in GDP figures. Labour market issues are mostly due to wage compression, and artificial shortages imposed in areas like training doctors. The real "rapid consequences" are high streets turning into vape and kebab shops and the aesthetic dissonance that has occurred in such a short period of time.
Interesting, I'd like to see the evidence, not because I doubt your claims (I don't!), but because I find it difficult to work with stuff like "people have been fiscal drags" without qualifying how much of a drag they have been, and how much of a drag they are projected to be. This is the difference between static and dynamic studies of the fiscal impact of immigration.
When migrants enter the UK, they typically have (or will rapidly have) a relatively high number of children dependents who are an immediate drag on state finances due to their education and impact on family benefits/tax credits. The point is that when you have a ton of people enter the country with young kids, a static view of their impact shows a clear negative cash flow for the state, while a dynamic view typically shows a positive net present value across their expected lifetime. (source 1) As legions of foreign-born children enter the workforce and start paying taxes, and also taking into account the fact that some of them will leave the country before old age (the point where the average UK resident becomes a drain, too), their collective tax revenues discounted back to present times offers a more comprehensive view of the long-term impact of immigration.
By the way I'm not suggesting the dynamic view is necessarily correct, because I haven't done the research myself and I haven't looked into the exact methodology of the calculations (a forecast necessarily implies assumptions, which are unfortunately subject to human bias). What I am suggesting, however, is that a static view of recent immigration as a drain on state finances being used as an economic argument against it is about as smart as taking the cash flow figure of a 20-year investment on year 10 and stating that the investment should be reined in because the figure is negative.
GDP per capita has been stagnant since 2019, sure, but how do you (you personally) parse the different drivers of GDP per capita since 2019? Do you know how much of it comes from the impact of immigration, how much of it comes from worker productivity (which is flat since 2017), how much of it comes from the 2022 energy crisis (and how the UK was hit worse by it than most other European countries), how much of it was impacted by inflation (and how the UK was hit worse by it than most other European countries), how much of it comes from the disastrous impact of Brexit on EEA-net migration? Personally, I don't have the exact numbers. So I'd be careful to presume immigration is a leading cause, even if it might very well be, because I'd first have to look into the data and figure out how much all the other stuff had to do with it. Even if it were, and again it might be, how much worse would the other drivers have been if net migration was much lower over the same period of time? None of these drivers exist in isolation.
As for the vape and kebab shops and the aesthetic dissonance, yeah, that's a major issue for the anti-immigration crowd.
Here it’s Mrs. Donuts, vape, check-cashing and lotto store, halal meat market, handjob (?) parlor (why did the sewer drain get stopped up with condoms though?), and fungus museum.
Meanwhile, across town, oblivious people are still talking about a walkable urban environment, with pleasant outdoor Third Places lol.
Could you see why the impact of more people migrating to the British Isles from 1997-2025 than in the entire period 1066-1997 might mean that it is a more sensitive issue than who operates the trains? And could you also maybe see why the short and medium term fiscal consequences (which it is far from clear have been positive) could be of secondary importance to other longer-term concerns? It's not like ethnic tension and the mass movements of people have ever caused any kind of conflicts in the past at all, right?
Perhaps contra cliché, it's mostly the old people. In the recent German election people over 60 made up more than 40% of the electorate. The coalition forming the new government got 60% of their vote vs only 45% in the general electorate (and 25% among under 25s). In contrast to this, the anti-immigration far right got 21% among the general electorate but only 15% among people over 60. The two coalition parties are moderately anti-immigration and moderately pro-immigration, respectively.
Demographics induced labor shortages in Germany have become very noticeable and the situation is set to escalate with the retirement of the boomer cohorts. Services are getting ever more expensive and many shops, restaurants, etc. just close down because they cannot find people. Worst hit is the welfare state and the public services it offers. Ever growing demand in health care and elderly care combined with severe labor shortage has led to rapid decline in the quality of service.
Old people are primarily consumers and the primary consumers of public services. Plus in the German pension system, the young directly pay their pensions. They want a functioning service economy where they can afford to go to a restaurant and have decent health care and they want their pension checks to keep coming. They don't care about housing shortages (they own property or have cheap grandfathered in rental contracts) or the education system or most other areas where immigration has perceived or real externalities. They may talk negatively about immigration but in the grand scheme of things, it does not really affect them and so it does not move their vote as much as the decline in the public services they consume. The one thing they strongly dislike about immigration is crime. The new government knows this and so they are going to crack down on asylum seekers but otherwise pretty much keep the strongly pro-immigration legislation of the last government intact.
In the UK, the OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) gives you a growth estimate based on the factors that generate growth, including labour migration. If a government promises to slash migration by, 80%, the OBR will revise down its growth forecasts, for obvious reasons: fewer workers means lower output, a smaller tax base, and less consumer demand, and will also calculate reduced business investment, weaker public finances etc. The OBR models all this quite mechanically.
There's pretty good recent evidence of what happens when you ignore the OBR. When Liz Truss skipped their forecasts in her 2022 mini-budget, markets revolted, the pound crashed, and the Bank of England had to step in. Investors and civil servants etc. treat OBR projections as the baseline for judging fiscal credibility, so if they downgrade growth due to lower migration, it directly constrains what government can spend or promise.
And politicians have noticed that "seeming tough on migration", and giving the illusion of control is much more important than actual migration numbers, which explains a lot of what you see in the UK and Europe - sounding tough while not actually bringing numbers down.
Also increasing GDP is an insanely low bar. Paying higher benefits increases GDP. Printing money and burying it in Keynesian bottle mines increases GDP.
Increasing immigration, especially from non-EU countries has been shown to be a net drain on state finances, which already aren't looking too peachy in Europe. And when these migrants age we'll be in an even worse state, because generally birthrate is anti-correlated with economic performance.
Eh, of course I was using GDP growth as a proxy for the kind of economic activity growth that financial markets recognize as positive for long-term investment plans, which is my "imperfect-but-a-whole-lot-better-than-a-wild-guess-and-ideologically-led-thinking" barometer for these things. We all know GDP is a flawed measure, but it can't be completely waived either because of its close relationship with actual growth.
Be careful when you use easy, common arguments to deride GDP. The "dig holes and fill them up" idea was used by Keynes to support state intervention in a recession. Milton Friedman put another spin on it in Free to Choose: "If all we want are jobs, we can create any number--for example, have people dig holes and then fill them up again, or perform other useless tasks. Work is sometimes its own reward. Mostly, however, it is the price we pay to get the things we want. Our real objective is not just jobs but productive jobs--jobs that will mean more goods and services to consume." That's exactly what I'm talking about: productive jobs are what counts, and the current data-driven financial system is pretty good at figuring out the "just jobs" from the "productive jobs".
On the topic of non-EU immigration being a net drain on state finances, we are i. living in a unique non-EU migration paradigm as of 2022 with the Ukraine refugee crisis, which has distorted short-term spending vs tax revenue trends, and ii. we know certain types of immigration are a drain while others are not, those that are a drain (refugees & asylum seekers) are the easiest type to limit, which means we have a clear path for immigration optimization in the future. Overall, the net fiscal impact of immigration is roughly zero. https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/foresight/topic/increasing-significance-migration/political-social-aspects-migration_en
> we know certain types of immigration are a drain while others are not, those that are a drain (refugees & asylum seekers) are the easiest type to limit, which means we have a clear path for immigration optimization in the future.
In eg Germany there's a really simple policy levers you can pull to make refugees less costly: allow them to work from day one.
It's much more important to look at fiscal impact than GDP for immigration (since it's ostensibly to solve the aging population shrinking tax base problem). There are very easy wins to cut out large swathes of immigrants that are obviously going to be a lifetime drain, and still keep French Mathematicians and Romanian coders.
Yes the net fiscal impact might be roughly zero, but that's because you've got a huge positive and a huge negative, and there's no need to take both at the same time!
"It's much more important to look at fiscal impact than GDP for immigration"
Migrants don't just pay tax, they consume. Actually, they consume a whole lot more than they pay tax. I'll let businesses know that the fiscal balance impact of immigration is much more important than their long-term revenue growth rates. I'll let the bond market know about that, too. They probably focus too much on GDP trend growth anyway.
A general problem is that leaders get old. Monarchism has a particular problem with aged leaders, but so does the American system lately as big shots who dine out at steak restaurants every night are less likely to drop dead of a heart attack at 67.
I'm, on the whole, a Ronald Reagan fan, but I'm also happy the Constitution retired him at age 78.
> The result was a working-age population that nearly doubled compared with other countries in western Europe. Of the 468,000 jobs created across Spain last year, roughly 409,000 were filled by migrants or people with dual nationality, many of them from Latin America, but also from across Europe and Africa. “Overall, Bank of Spain analysis suggests immigration contributed over 20% to the near 3% GDP per capita income growth during 2022-2024,” noted JPMorgan.
Spain has also a very weak welfare protection net, which means that if someone is really interested in getting a check instead of working, they immediately move northwards, to the richer pastures.
You will see a lot more loitering "diverse" youth during working hours in Paris than in Madrid, even though Madrid is closer to Africa.
I have trouble understanding being seriously tempted by that hypothetical. Setting aside AI and pandemic X risk, which I don’t think your hypothetical Uber Trump would be any stronger on, things in the USA are (well, we’re) going extremely well by world historical standards. There are plenty of annoying things and even more sub optimal things, but if you zoom out you have a very wealthy, very free society with strong rule of law. I have similar policy preferences to yours but I can’t imagine being willing to risk that stability and prosperity on an institution wrecking enlightened monarch.
This is the usual contradiction between the Pinkerite "all statistics say everything is great" perspective and the fact that everyone is pessimistic and miserable, young people feel hopeless and don't want to bring children into the world, skyrocketing rates of depression and anxiety, etc. I split the difference - I think some of it is overly pessimistic media, but some of it is genuine problems which the statistics aren't capturing. I'm mostly worried about the singularity, but if for some reason technology stays the same for thirty years, I'm worried about my children being in some kind of horrible rat race for an increasingly small number of Harvard-admissions-gated good jobs, not being able to afford a home, becoming captured by some abhorrent ideology, etc.
I also think that our current prosperity is built on philosophical foundations that both sides are trying their hardest to undermine. I don't think it'll survive another thirty years of wokeness on the left and MAGA on the right continuing to increase along the same trendline they were doing from 2010 - 2020 (I think things have calmed down a little since then - other than the Trump administration itself! - which is one reason I probably wouldn't take uber-Trump).
But also, I think a lot more is possible, and it irks me to abandon ~20% of the country to soul-crushing poverty because I'm too much of a chicken to have someone cut federal grants to Harvard or whatever.
I feel like pessimistic media and/or hyperpolarization is a sufficient and correct explanation here. You can see massive swings in polling about how hopeful people are or how they view the economy's performance at every change of political power. And prior to the last Presidential election there was a really big gap between how people said THEY were doing vs. how they thought the country in general was doing:
I do think there are some issues with things becoming overly-streamlined and not having enough slack, but even with that most people are way, way better off than they were at almost any point in history.
I think this is equally true for immigration, the issue you mentioned elsewhere, which always strikes me as one with the most media hysteria - in an environment of basically historically low crime and unemployment, tons of people freak out about immigrants doing crimes and taking jobs.
Optimism or pessimism seems to rely a lot on definitions. If your definition of human thriving is based on consumption, then things have never been better than now. If your definition includes the production and maintenance of human capital, then things are already on the downturn.
Both sides are undermining the philosophical foundations that our prosperity is built on because prioritization of prosperity over everything else is a fundamentally unsound foundation. Here's Orwell explaining it much better than I ever could https://bookmarks.reviews/george-orwells-1940-review-of-mein-kampf/
The liberal argument that everything is better than ever is falling on deaf ears because the concept that material prosperity is the measure of "better" is fundamentally wrong. I think there is a level of prosperity where the correlation is at least strong enough to make that claim, e.g. China over the last 40 years, but in the US we are well past the point where we are too rich for it to really matter.
For a consequentialist like me or Scott, "undermining the philosophical foundations that our prosperity is built on" sounds a lot like the polar opposite of "prioritization of prosperity over everything else", much as we'd recognize that others can see it differently.
You say it's wrong to say material prosperity is the measure of "better", but that's not a useful statement without saying what IS better. I think material prosperity is great, but I support pleasure, comfort (including security) and happiness, and material prosperity alone is not sufficient to achieve these.
If you've gotten this pessimistic, maybe we really are screwed.
I think the thing about capitalism is that it demands time as the fundamental thing you exchange for prosperity. Time spent away from family, time spent away from your community, time spent writing your blog.
I think wanting a dictator to fix everything for you isn't really about wanting someone with the power to cut through all the red tape, its about not wanting to have to spend the time participating in the political processes of community outreach, coalition building, vote aligning, all the small d democratic stuff that is neccessary. So we outsource all of that stuff to the professional class of politicians and then get mad when their career incentives make them choose different things than we would choose if we were directly involved in the process.
I think the counter-argument is something like "I shouldn't have to give up my career in order to save the country," but consider that if you are at the point where you are thinking of tossing democracy aside for dictatorship, maybe that's selfishness?
That's the boat I feel stuck in anyway. I'm not that smart, I'm introverted and I hate talking to people generally. If I were to go out and try to get involved in a new brand of politics outside the mainstream I wouldn't know where to begin, and the most likely outcome is that I would end up sucked into some weird niche group like the DSA whose politics match with mine, but who are so captured by in-fighting and process and ego that they are never going to spontaneously materialize into the kind of faction capable of doing the work that reaches people. And even trying means time spent not providing for my family. So I vote, and get into internet fights, and complain that everything is getting worse. But it doesn't change the fact that the actual process for fixing everything is *right* there. Its as easy as getting the majority of people to agree what is best for your town, and then your state, and then your country, at a time when half of people don't even bother to participate in the process. If you want to talk about something we used to be able to do and can't anymore, you can probably start there.
But you don't expect that a "best-case Trump" is a plausible outcome, yeah? So I think the solution in a democracy is just to find mechanisms that mitigate some of the causes of the present political disaster. My proposal for an evidence database wrapped in epistemic algorithms is one[1], and maybe you know of some others?
Seriously? It just seems so juvenile to me to fantasize about a good moral dictator coming to power and fixing everything and simply being so good and moral and all-powerful that the loss of democracy is not a concern.
As a dane, my guess is that its related to our anti immigrant party allready existed.
The Danish peoples party was started in 1995. Which might have contributed to making it less politically taboo to try and win back their voters, after they got a very strong election result in 2015.
This also means that our "new right" parties (eg Nye borgerlige (literally new right in english)) newer got particularly successful.
The story is slightly complicated by the creation of the "denmark democrats", a splinter party from the center right "liberal" party, which formed in 2022 and is also strongly anti immigrant. But is perhaps more strongly associated with caring for the interest of rural people.
I think everyone daydreams about having a competent strongman fix everything. I certainly have.
The problem is that nobody is perfect, and absolute power means their mistakes will get amplified. Then if people push back, they'll get paranoid and start persecuting anyone who says no, which leads to broken feedback cycles, sycophancy, etc. Even the best intentioned person will eventually fall to this.
As others have pointed out, mainstream European parties do turn against immigration in very many European countries, EU and otherwise. But they have a big issue: all they can do is signalling, they can't actually solve the problem.
Part of the problem is that the EU is severely dysfunctional. The EU was founded based on unanimous votes because the founding members did not want to give up too much power. Most things can only be changed unanimously. Which now, after extension to 27 members, means: it can not be changed at all. Essentially, the EU constitution is frozen in the state of ~2007 and can't be changed. (Ironic that this was caused by a fear of giving up power.)
One such frozen thing is the personal rights of refugees and the asylum laws. Even though a big majority of EU countries would like to change them, they can't be changed. That leaves countries who want to be strict on immigration with very few options:
- They can try their best at signalling, and hope that the population buys it. That's the Denmark way.
- They can grudgingly admit that the EU constitution doesn't leave them many means and go for the best means left. For example, negotiate treaties with non-EU countries so that they take back their citizens, trying to avoid the root causes for refugees, and trying to make it really hard for refugees to set one foot into EU territory. All these do help a little, but do not scale to the size of the problem.
- They can outright break the EU constitution, and hope that (secret) public support is so big that no one calls them for it. Greece has been doing this for quite a while, and most other EU countries pretend that they don't notice. This is the most effective way, but of course, some people DO call you out, and judges DO look at laws and will rule according to the law. And you risk the EU breaks apart if violating their laws so plainly has no consequences.
In practice, most EU countries do a combination of all three, with different emphasis.
This was also the biggest reason for UK to leave the EU. And for all economic reasons against the Brexit, they have regained a lot of sovereignty in rejecting refugees and limit immigration. (More irony: after Brexit the UK has chosen not to limit immigration because the damage to the economy would have been too bad. Immigration has even increased. But hey, now it's UK's free choice.)
One obvious issue pointed out already by others, is the geography, as it is very hard to controll the sea borders; and another issue is the political class. But the main issue is just legal: After World War 2, there were massive refugee waves accross the european continent; especially german speaking minorities were more or less expelled from several eastern european countries, as Hitler invaded many of them under the pretense of protecting this minorities; and people, who had fled the nazis and soviets, returned home or resettled. So many of the fundamental laws in the nationstates and in the european union, enshrined political asylum as a essential human right. But this asylum laws, well, were designed to give protection to european refugees within europe, to holocaust victims fleeing nazism and its fallout, and later political dissidents from the soviet union. (e.g. in the 1980s my own father came as a political refugee from back then soviet controlled poland to western germany and got granted political asylum, because he was an activist in the polish anti-communist resistance). The laws were not designed for a global, highly mobile world, where millions of migrants from poor third world countries try to enter europe, can just throw away their documents at the border and claim to be prosecuted in their home countries, which can kick of a year long legal due process, until its conclusion they been for so long in europe, it makes no sense anymore to expel them. And changing such fundamental constitutional things is almost impossible, especially in Germany, whose consitution more or less got designed to be almost unchangable to prevent another Hitler from taking power in the future.
It's just the rule of law ... of some highly idealistic laws, which were not designed for todays world and are not really that easy to change.
> And I also feel the extremely strong temptation (in my home country) to roll the fascism dice as a last shot at saving it.
Has that ever worked? If you are desperate, may I suggest voting with your feet?
A country is people, not some piece of dirt. If enough people vote with their feet, things change. But even if you are the only one, things will change for you.
We have exit plans, but my extended family is here, my business is here. Besides there don't seem to be many culturally similar countries that are doing much better...
We are OK in Australia! Well, apart from the cost of living and housing crisis. The unchecked immigration here is largely legal migrants from China, Vietnam and India who are culturally conservative and rarely criminal. So the effect is to increase demand for housing meaning young Australians can’t afford it, and to have nice Chinese restaurants run by first generation migrants and an increasing share of professional jobs taken by hard working second generation immigrants.
Crime is starting to become a problem, though - largely driven by African gangs. Also there are extremely high rates of family violence and child abuse among our Aboriginal/First Nations population that no one talks about because that’s “racist.”
Probably the worst thing about living in a society is that some fraction of people tend to want to solve mild dissatisfaction by rolling the extreme to horrific hardship dice
You're telling me his whole original system's lynchpin is cryptographically signed weapon locks? That's the stupidest thing I ever heard. Somebody Google the term "ghost gun" and get back to me.
It's the military. Everyone knows where they're getting their guns. If the military procurement people tried to procure one million ghost AK-47s, someone would notice. And that's not even mentioning the tanks, artillery, fighter jets, etc.
It doesn't take that many rifles to destabilize a society. By the time that you have to rely on tanks, artillery, fighter jets, etc. on your own population, you've already lost, so those don't really count.
If there's one military lesson that everyone should have learned in the latter half of the 20th century and the first half of the 21st, it is the difficulty of pacifying a restive urban population. It doesn't take that much for guerillas to be effective.
At the risk of saying "someone is wrong on the Internet" ... Yarvin is ignorant about that too.
Oh. And drones. But that's probably another reply. Guys who think this way underestimate the power of human invention.
I never understood what would prevent other monarchs in the patchwork from arming rebel factions in another state: this seems a pretty big source of weaponry in current conflicts already, and seems like a very easy way to get around cryptographic controls.
If that's truly the explanation then that's pretty pathetic; surely part of the point of the whole system is that the fluctuating passions of the people aren't influencing foreign policy!
If "your citizenry will morally object, and that will hold you accountable" is what keeps states from defecting, how is that different from democracy by a more convoluted method?!
Well, everyone knows this because the government has designated a lot of resources towards intelligence agencies whose sole job is to keep track of weapons, so I'm not sure how this applies in a corporate environment?
The other issue here is, crypto guns can prevent the rebels shooting at you, but they do much less to force your soldiers to shoot at the rebels. If the people take to the streets and stop working to demand a change in policy, what happens if the tank crews and air force pilots refuse to fire at them?
If you look at like, Tahrir square, it doesn't seem like what forced Mubarak's resignation was the prospect of violence by the demonstrators; it was that the level of violence necessary to coerce the demonstrators to give up was too large and the number of people willing to perpetrate that violence was too small.
This is a good point. Yarvin states that essentially any small number of loyalists with military equipment could defeat rebels with none. Seems a stretch to me, even if you buy the tall tale that the rebels would be unable to get their own guns.
I guess the steelman here is it’s not just guns but predator drones, tanks, icbms, etc which give even greater leverage than guns - but these have even deeper logistic chains than guns and bullets, so I’m not sure you can sustain them in uncooperative territory for long.
I don't even mean rebels like an armed faction, I mean like protestors in your capital city.
Are your drone operators really gonna fire on the encampment in front of the king's residence?
Are your generals just gonna say, "yes sir, time to massacre 10,000 civilians", or will they say, "are you sure you wouldn't rather give them this one thing, sir?"
Basically, arms will make a much smaller difference in palace coup situations, and the public can put enough pressure on the elite that they prefer a palace coup.
Seems moot to me, in that Yarvin's well-run dictatorship shouldn't produce rebels in the first place. See: Singapore.[1] If you've got armed rebels, that's a sign it's not well-run, so maybe the reactionary project isn't working well. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o7DCqciH2E
(Though if the dictatorship started in America, yeah, I expect quite a few armed rebels from day 1, orthogonal to the quality of leadership.)
If it struck me as unworkable nonsense a decade ago, and after filling that decade in and adjacent to military procurement I've steadily updated towards it being even stupider than it even seems at first glance..... is there a point where we can admit that this is less a thought-out solution and more an attempt to sweep the problem of hard power under the rug? I don't have a dozen decades to burn, but is there a point where we demote Moldbug from "all-time great" to a sophomoric navel-gazer who specialized in hiding the ball?
To emphasize - there's a technical implementation discussion we could have here, and if you were ready to cut an RFP I could get very real eyes on it fairly quickly. But I need you to realize that what's being requested is significantly harder than "I want crypto backdoors in everything that Good Guys can use and Bad Guys can't" and my response is going to either be to give the customer what they asked for and not what they wanted, or the much more likely No Bid.
If taking the philosopher's pet solution extremely seriously results in immediate backpedaling, that's a sign of how seriously I'm going to take their other "solutions".
It's very hard to imagine how you design a remote crytographic lock that would reliably work for a rifle. It's either listening for an activation code (from satellites? EDIT: Moldbug says it would use "mesh radio"), which means accidentally locking the rifle if you go underground or the battery runs out or the enemy manages to jam the signal (or if it's "mesh radio", if you get too far away from the rest of the army). Or it's listening for a kill code, which means you can defeat it by wrapping it in tin foil or taking out the battery.
What's to stop rebellious armourers assembling rifles without the lock part? Or in the US, just comandeering a load of civilian AR-15s? What's to stop rebellious soldiers replacing the lock part with a dumb mechanical equivalent?
What if the people who run the authentication system subvert it? Only the CEO/king (and presumably some trusted successor) knows the key to enable/disable all the rifles, but how does he know for sure that the broadcast system doesn't have a secret mode that will just ignore it? If all rifles require an activation code, what's to stop a rebel in Space Command turning off the 'keep-alive' signal and disabling the loyalist rifles too? If it's a kill code, what's to stop them rebroadcasting the kill code to achieve the same effect? To selectively turn off only rebel rifles, wouldn't every individual rifle have to have its own unique identity, meaning the broadcast system has huge bandwidth requirements? What if a rebel logistics unit mixes up rifles so they're not with the unit they're supposed to be with according to the army records?
At the bare minimum, you'd need to design a fully electric rifle that requires power and crypographic approval to fire at all, and is somehow EMP hardened but also able to listen for a remote signal, and seize all civilian rifles (if you're in the US)... Maybe it only needs to get the 'all-clear' signal once a day, but then you give the rebels a day to seize reliable dumb rifles.
The whole idea seems very silly. If it was limited to things like tanks and fighter jets, it's even harder to imagine that it couldn't be disabled by the maintenance crews. Let's say the CEO/king mandates that the system is added to all fighter jets. What's to stop a rebel airforce base rolling back the firmware to a previous version that doesn't check for the lock system at all?
Cryptographically locked guns sounds nonsensical, but there may be equivalents imaginable in the near future. Robot/Drone Army that only listens to the boss, some sort of weapon of last resort that the boss has access to that nobody else does (buried nukes, genetically targetted weapons).
Of course our experience of security as an arms race, rather than a static state of the world does rather imply that setting up such a system means that your state competitors have a single system (including the squishy human part) to hack that *by design* allows complete control of your country. This seems like a bad idea.
What precisely does "listen to the boss" mean? Run me through the CONOPS.
Moldbug's piece linked here references Permissive Action Links, and muses that there is nothing in principle preventing a technique applied in a few thousand units that we hope is never used to be extrapolated out to hundreds of millions of units and applied daily. This is a bracing level of naïveté, though I'm more offended by the lack of critical thinking - given your opponent has been foolish enough to implement these, how might you destroy them?
Now, there *are* instances where sensitive cryptographic encoding is regularly employed by the armed forces. Not a ton of those technical details are public, but one should not be surprised that key handling is an entire procedural discipline that has to be resilient against failures both accidental and malicious. Complicated!
But really, I'm waiting for anyone to take it seriously enough to realize that a farcically optimistic estimate of a systematic rollout would put this as a $100 billion+ effort whose immediate result is a large *reduction* in military effectiveness. Have fun getting that through the Pentagon, Your Pluripotent Imperialness.
"Only listen to the boss" seems like it's something you would need to implement with AI, rather than cryptography. Maybe Moldbug's idea would work if you could build an AI-powered robot army that was smart enough to be loyal to the CEO King (and was completely self-maintaining)... but of course we don't even know how to make current AIs loyal.
Also let's remember, the reason why these places would be so well governed (from the point of view of Joe Taxpayer) is that we're imagining a world of statelets so smalls that everyone can just "vote with their feet" and leave if they think the shareholders are being unreasonable with minimal cost and pain.
Since the world is not a corporatist utopia today, I guess Moldbug means these statelets to be really really small, a thousand of Andorras basically. Which raises the questions, even if cryptographic weapons were feasible, wouldn't such a govt be easily overrun by any determined band of pirates/revolutionaries who somehow manage to create a couple thousand rifles?
Yes, it seems like the more you lock down your state's weapons to prevent rebellion and forbid dumb weapons, the more vulnerable your state will be to outside invasion.
Many Thanks for the comment! I was very skeptical of the crypto part of Moldbug's proposal, but hadn't thought through the details. Thank you for providing them!
I don't have any particular expertise in cryptography - maybe an expert could design a nuclear launch code for every gun in the country. But I don't think so.
Many Thanks! I think the points you made about the communications needed to get any sort of enable/disable signal to every single rifle stand, independent of the details of the cryptographic system.
I guess you could posit a panopticon as a precondition here, but it seems highly plausible that the military could coup by building secret bunkers in which to manufacture or modify weapons. It’s quite hard to check up on what’s going on in Siberia.
On a technical level, “sprinkle crypto on the military” doesn’t hold water for me. Take a tank; it’s a physical machine with some control systems, and you just need to replace those control systems to override the crypto. I guess if we go far enough into the future every object is embedded with intelligence such that “replace the control system” is not viable; it probably doesn’t work today for an F-35. But I bet for the next few decades you can neutralize the complex brittle weapons if you have enough grunts with fertilizer bombs and guns.
There is also a big technical problem with the chain of trust required here. Yarvin should know better from his crypto project Urbit, but if you look at real world deployments of cryptography, such as the [Public Key Infrastructure](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_key_infrastructure) that powers the internet, you’ll find lots of operational issues with having a single root of trust. You need to sign intermediate certificates to enable your gun factory to sign guns without letting them sign nukes, but now you have lots of private keys to secure, and inevitably some will be compromised. Even ignoring spies, someone will accidentally publish the gun factory private keys on GitHub, so you need a revocation scheme to invalidate and replace compromised keys, but how does a gun update its key securely? If the gun’s Secure Enclave is writable you can load a key from a different trust root, if you burn keys into read-only chips then they need to be replaceable, and you have similar problems. This sort of system ends up being intractable for software; look up Trusted Compute. It’s even worse for hardware.
Further fun can be found in the key ceremonies involved in keeping the root keys safe, and the dependency on your weapons relying on an Internet connection to function (ECM / EMP disabling your military is something of a dealbreaker).
Have you considered another possibility, which is that Curtis Yarvin is insane and these elaborate mental constructions and didactic, meandering treatises about hobbits and dark elves don’t have much to do with the real world?
It is interesting that Y.C., for all his experience in tech, does not address the possibility of his chosen cryptographic scheme being broken in the future.
Algorithms aren't eternal (in the sense of being eternally reliable), and I don't really want to live in a world where a clever idea of some nerdy postdoc brings down the whole political safeguard structure of entire nations.
It crypto-locking weapons is load-bearing for Yarvin's scheme, then it's safe to dismiss it. The eternal lesson-learned of military weaponry is that the kit must work under the worst possible circumstances. Comms go down all the time - often deliberately to minimize signature - you will never be always-online. What about a physical key, like an RFID chip? Well, even today fighting-echelon vehicles don't have keys, so that the vehicle isn't useless if the driver gets hit by artillery on their way to dinner ["you know how to drive this thing? Good, get in."]. It's such a hand-wavy whiteboard idea, would only work in a frictionless world where nothing ever goes wrong, which is not the military.
"Apparent increases in quality of government across American history tend to follow informal regime changes, as in 1861 and 1933. It is not that the class of people in government improves, but that a new class of people comes into government, where power at once begins to corrupt them. The simple monotonic pattern, as described above, is seen more often in democracy’s foreign colonies. In any case, with government in the hands of a clerical elite, there is no prospect of any further nondestructive update."
Is there not an interpretation of post-2019 Moldbug that he sees an opportunity to a) break the clerical elite and b) execute an 1861/1933 style reset? Trump/Vance aren't exactly his ideal truth-seeking neoreactionaries*, but on the other hand the last two resets took a Civil war and then a decade long depression followed by a global conflict, so omelettes and broken eggs come to mind. Perhaps this is the closest opportunity to executing that nondestructive update and keeping the system limping on for long enough for the true neoreactionary takeover.
*Vance is clearly much closer to the ideal than Biden/Harris but neither are paragons of virtue, and Trump, despite moments of pure clarity, is largely full of shit.
Lincoln was, obviously, great. But the post Civil War federal governance was (kind of famously) pretty crap, and (also kind of famously) wildly corrupt. Seems like a weird example to pick for an uptick in good governance following regime change. Better explanation is just that Lincoln was a generational talent relative to his peers.
I see it as a win-win. Either the Great American Empire is founded, or this all comes crashing down, and something better is built from the ashes (or is simply subsumed by a superior society). The forest needs a good burning every now and then.
I once found Yarvin's contrarian and wordy takes fascinating.
But at the end of the day, they are an intellectual-sounding gloss over authoritarianism. Methods to prevent tyranny that are nigh impossible to implement in full aren't methods to prevent tyranny, full stop.
>Methods to prevent tyranny that are nigh impossible to implement in full aren't methods to prevent tyranny, full stop.
Yes, thank you for stating this succinctly.
For someone who criticizes the failures of communism, it's striking that he can't recognize the failure mode of 'my utopian political system works great on paper, surely that means it will work great in reality'.
A plan with 5 moving parts simply doesn't work in practice; the idea of 'authoritarianism plus 20 moving parts to avoid its failure modes' is just normal failure-mode authoritarianism.
Somewhat ironically, given the allusions to the cathedral and the bazaar, his proposed way to put the bazaar in charge requires an extremely brittle and perfect system where even a tiny flaw turns it into its worst enemy, unlike the technocratic elites, who rely on scientific and intellectual debate to fix the inevitable errors they make, and thus end up with fewer errors than any other system (as we see amply illustrated during Covid and the like, where the modern world had fewer errors than past pandemic situations and got a better outcome, but the people complain that there are *any* errors).
>First, the dictator will be checked by a board of directors, who can fire him if he goes crazy. Second, the board of directors (or the investors who elect them?) will be aligned because they have stock.
This sounds almost exactly like property-limited-franchise constitutional monarchy of the kind codified in my neck of the woods in 1832, by the Whigs (who are, if I recall correctly, a particular bête noir of Moldbug’s).
The electoral college as originally designed looks uncannily similar to the usual corporate structure. The problem is that electors (directors) immediately begin to be micromanaged by voters (shareholders) to elect a particular CEO, which leads to populism. Whereas the entire point is for every elector to be "unfaithful" and to provide two degrees of isolation against populism.
Somehow corporations usually avoid this sort of degeneration into politics, I wonder how exactly and if it can be replicated.
I suspect it's precisely because, as Scott pointed out, the problems that politics is designed to solve exist at a level higher than corporate governance.
If corporations were truly sovereign, accountable to no higher authority, and tasked with maintaining a monopoly on violence to assert their will, I think corporate governance would exactly become politics.
Parliaments actually bear greater resemblance to joint-stock corporations. They select a leader rather than letting the general public elect one, and they can remove a Prime Minister when they choose to.
Indeed, the Abbé Siéyès explicitly justified the property-limited-franchise constitutional monarchy as the political equivalent of shareholders in joint-stock corporations.
I think what Moldbug had in mind here was a much smaller and more select group, more "Peers of the Realm" or perhaps the Venetian Senate than mildly prosperous yeomen and artisans who got enfranchised in 1832.
Perhaps… but if the only criterion (for anything related to your neocameral state/corporation) is financial value, and a successful state/corp is going to experience economic growth, and freedom of contract is the foundation of your legal system, then I don’t see how you keep the number of shareholders so restricted. (It’s worth noticing that “economic growth => widening franchise” is pretty much exactly what happened in Britain in the period c. 1700-1832.)
Historically, franchise tends to be linked to your potential contribution to state capacity, positive or negative.
The Roman Republic had something close to free manhood suffrage, but heavily malapportioned in favor of wealthier and better educated classes, which reflected their military system of large-scale levies of free men who were responsible for their own training and equipment: almost everyone fought, but those who could afford warhorses or full heavy infantry armor were more valuable than those who could only afford skirmisher gear.
Most medieval assemblies in Western Europe had four-ish groups represented. Senior church leaders were represented because they controlled the largest and most concentrated class of educated men capable of performing administrative duties: the dual meaning of "clerical" and the close similarity of the words "cleric" and "clerk" is not a coincidence. Feudal magnates were represented because they could raise the best troops, commanded patronage networks that were essential for effective governance, and they collected land rents that could be skimmed off for royal tax revenue. Lesser landed gentry were represented for similar reasons at a smaller scale. And major urban merchants and artisans (collectively called burgesses, burgers, or bourgeoises) were represented because they provided another major concentrated source of potential tax revenue, controlled urban militias that also had military value, and were (especially later in the medieval period) increasingly a separate class of literate and educated men who could provide the government with an alternate source of administrators. England grouped these classes into two houses, burgesses and gentry ("knights of the shire") in the House of Commons and peers and bishops in the House of Lords, while France and Castille used a three-chamber system that split the peers and bishops into separate "estates".
The expansion of the franchise came from changing military technology and economic patterns increasing the relative importance to military might and state capacity first of the gentry and burgesses, then of the "middling sort" (yeomen and lesser merchants and artisans), and finally (in the 19th and early 20th centuries) the unpropertied classes.
I think Moldbug's assumption was that his cryptographic armaments system would give the holders of the crypto keys an artificial overwhelming advantage in military capacity (i.e. they have a collective absolute veto on the use of military force) and that the keys could be technologically structured so control of them can't be further subdivided. I'm dubious of both premises, and I think Moldbug was severely underestimating the importance of the people wielding the weapons (i.e. they also have a collective absolute veto since they can refuse to target the weapons or pull the trigger) as well as almost entirely neglecting other aspects of state capacity. But with all those caveats, I can see where he was coming from well enough to agree with Scott that it was a clever idea despite very probably being unworkable.
I would say that his political evolution from dogmatic neoreactionary to pseudo court philosopher of Trump 2.0 is partly a crime of opportunity (it's easy to be dogmatic as an underground blogger, and the temptation to compromise on one's values when presented an opportunity for actual influence is probably difficult to resist) and partly age-related pragmatism on the scope of his ambitions and the aperture for radical change. On the other hand, he has seemingly distanced himself from the Trump administration (recent piece about Mandarins and Businessmen), so it's also possible that the 'selling out' you refer to was more of a temporary lapse in judgement than a firm political reorientation.
Matt Yglesias wrote a post where he references the Brazilian diplomat Tiago Ribeiro dos Santos making the point that parliamentary systems have something of the corporate structure: the shareholders (citizens) elect the board (parliament) who in turn select a CEO (prime minister), who runs things until they step down/lose the confidence of the board.
I'm not sure if this analogy helps explain why parliamentary systems seem to perform better than presidential or semi-presidential ones, i.e
if a parliamentary system captures enough of the good stuff of the corporate structure that you don't actually need to get rid of democracy and all that other stuff, even if you have neocameral leanings.
The problem is that Moldbug hates humanity, so The Citizen Majority is not an "aligned" board for him. What he wants is a smaller group of people who think like he does.
But the citizens aren't the board, they're the shareholders! And their preferences are still hugely important in Patchwork-topia, since their decision of where to live is what makes the sovcorps profitable or not; just like it's Apple's (prospective) customers who ultimately determine whether Apple is a successful company. I agree Moldbug wouldn't like the idea of exactly one share per adult citizen, but I'm asking, how important is the structure of who the shareholders are? It seems to me, regardless who the shareholders are, the way the board satisfies them is by running the country in a way that appeals to the citizens--if the citizens are the shareholders that's a little more direct, but is that important?
"since their decision of where to live is what makes the sovcorps profitable or not"
Decisions on where to live have the advantage of choosing between the realized outcomes of different countries, rather than the imagined future outcomes of an election.
I guess, but I'm not sure how important this distinction truly is: are people truly better informed about the affairs in foreign countries than they are about predicting the outcomes of elections?
The fact that we have a ready-made phrase that describes the wishful thinking people apply to other circumstances (the grass is always greener...) suggests that people engage in a lot of wishful thinking and mood affiliation either way.
We already had a patchwork-topia, it was called feudalism, the people living in it were not such great fans of it and were constantly trying to escape it in favor of more liberal jurisdictions ("Stadtluft macht frei"), and pretty notably, it was gradually dismantled by force. "It failed the test of cultural evolution", as this corner of the internet would say.
You know you're arguing with someone in good faith when they ignore half the point and then act like modern opiates are the same as being physically strapped to a VR headset against your will for life and having your energy extracted into batteries.
As if you're arguing in good faith lol. Yarvin's joke about turning homeless people into biodiesel was in the context of making a point about how any and all sovereign powers can do anything they want to their citizens.
He's essentially just saying "the government could kill you if they really wanted" and you're twisting that into "Yarvin wants the government to kill you"
And that means he hates humanity? Hating humanity means simply wanting them all dead. When you love something, you want to see it be the best it could possibly be. Humanity and their societies have much room for improvement, of course, but acknowledging that doesn't mean you hate it.
I think there's an ambiguity between "humanity" as a kind of abstract expression of human potential and values and whatnot, and "humanity" as in the actual collection of human beings alive at a given time.
I think "I want to turn 90% of humans into biofuel" is compatible with loving humanity in the first sense, but not in the second sense. It used to be a criticism of left-wing do-gooders that they loved humanity more than they loved human beings. I think that's what's meant here.
The biofuel quip wasn't serious and was obviously a joke. His actual solution was to put criminals in prison and just hook them up to VR so they can enjoy themselves.
He makes it very clear who he is talking about, and it is not just criminals:
"...the problem of adults who are not productive members of society. In our little Newspeak we call them wards of the realm. A ward is any resident who is not capable of earning a living, is not accepted as a dependent by any guardian, and is not wanted by any other patch."
Why do you guys have to lie about this? If you support this man's ideas, just support him with your chest.
This was what I was thinking - you can basically get 90% of the way to moldbugism by having a parliamentary democracy except the executive posts aren't staffed by ministers directly (which is basically a hybrid with presidential systems). Which doesn't even sound that radical anymore.
I suspect to maintain the true spirit of Moldbuggism there'd be some restrictions on the franchise, or maybe more likely, that voting shares would literally be shares that you could buy and sell, but I'm truly not sure how much different that would be from a modern parliamentary democracy where the rich and powerful just use methods other than the vote to assert their will.
As only an occasional reader of both gentlemen - and a person with zero interest in the oily Cathy Young - I find the conversation stimulating, but the elephant in the room curiously invisible. Maybe Yarvin goes into depth about it in his "11,000 blogs" about civics-cum-technocracy, but maybe not. It boils down to something like this: Yes, corporations are great structures for motivating and organizing large teams of humans to pursue complex tasks, e.g. iPhones in large numbers, rockets to orbit and back, shampoo to cleanse the hairs of the world - with conditioner, too!
But corporations, notably, don't have to address the thorny, crucial, emotional aspects of Life or Liberty.
Can a corporation lock you up for 5-7 years for stealing from the packaging department? No. Can it kill you by sending you to a foreign land to fight "unincorporated" peoples? No. Is it, ultimately, pretty facile stuff to wax poetic about sci-fi governance when corporations have proven to be great at widgets, but lousy at managing India?
I don't think this is an invisible elephant. I thought I addressed it in this paragraph:
> "What prevents Tim Apple from refusing to pay dividends to Apple investors and keeping all the profit for himself? Easy question, it’s the United States government, no problem here. What prevents Donald Trump from murdering America’s five richest billionaires and taking their stuff? The police? What about the thing where Trump is the police chief’s boss’s boss’s boss’? Awkward, but that’s why we have separation of powers, checks and balances, government-of-law-and-not-of-men, all that stuff. What prevents Donald Trump from calling in the military to arrest all the other separate powers that are supposed to check and balance him? Uh, more separation of power, different checks and balances, some sort of loyalty to the Constitution. When Yarvin points out that companies thrive without separation-of-powers, that’s because they never encounter the problem that separation of powers was intended to solve...the regime he boosts today has nothing like this, so it’s facile to use the corporate comparison argument."
I'm not sure that that really addresses the concern. The issue is not "corporations are governed by a state that can prevent the CEO from being evil", the issue is "corporations are not good at many things, including managing a country's worth of people".
Obviously we don't have a huge number of case studies here, but the ones that we do have (like British India) are very clear that if you try to put a corporation in charge of a lot of people, the structure is unhelpful and works against human flourishing.
Not to mention that, if you don't like the way the CEO is running a corporation and the Board is just the CEO's frat brothers and golfing buddies who won't keep him in check, you can sue the Board or sell your shares.
Another big aspect of the difference is that when a corporation messes up its decisions badly enough, the pain that it's failure causes is relatively restricted, while a state failing can destroy wealth, life and happiness much more thoroughly.
Mea culpa for missing the posts where Moldbug details how a CEO who goes bonkers could be removed by the directors. I did conscientiously read a number of posts where he discusses the "joint-stock company" idea and didn't see anything about CEO/King removal. I did, however, see a lot of statements to the effect that the monarch's power must be absolute and there must be no authority over him, which seems to preclude a body with the authority to remove. I don't get enough hazard pay to read Moldbug's entire oeuvre.
I appreciate the info - but IMO it just adds to the contradictions, and the fact that MM has to construct absurdly elaborate scenarios for how the board with the authority of removal could exist without undercutting absolutism just illustrates (again) that he cannot be taken seriously as a political thinker.
(FWIW, I think his writing is occasionally good and even funny, in small doses. Sadly he doesn't come in small doses.)
Oh no, I didn't see it as an attack at all! I'm just frustrated with myself that I missed some stuff.
I will say, I was rather charmed by Curtis's "traditional clothing + digital/fiber optics" vision for his legitimist Europe. If he promises to bring back the 18th C upper-class male dress code, I'm in. ;-)
The joint stock thing always struck me as a very weak analogy. The thing about Apple is, if Cook does a bad job, I can sell the shares and by a competitor. How do I do that with a nation state? The only option is to leave the country and hope another will accept me.
Over longer time scales it's possible to see the payoff from that i.e. the migration of elite scientists from Germany to the US during Hitler, but at the time it was not at in any way certain the anti-Hitler alliance would win. And even that required Hitler to make the insane mistake of invading the Soviet Union..
Early in 1945 a large faction of Americans, including the Secretary of the Navy, wanted a negotiated end to the war against Japan. The contours of history look obvious in retrospect but almost never in the moment.
If you're a shareholder of a state, you'd presumably sell the shares the same way you'd sell Apple shares. If you're a consumer of the state, you'd have to move, just like in the current system, except presumably it'd be easier since they'd be city states instead of nation states.
> except presumably it'd be easier since they'd be city states instead of nation states.
Save that these are notionally city-states 'unbound by modern international law'. Free movement of people is one of those constructs of international law, and otherwise it's to a city-state's self-interest to sell residence permits to the highest bidder. (Or act as a pirate state and just mug/enslave people in the wilderness. That prohibition too is a construct of 'international law'.)
Free movement says you're allowed to move out of X country, not that you're allowed to move into Y country. From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13: "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."
In practice, the fact that ~every country restricts people from moving into it means this right is paper (to put aside the ways the communists prevented it), and presumably there's nothing to stop cartel-esque agreements to forbid movement in in the vast array of city states scenario.
City states would have more incentive to block or control immigration - being overcrowded to begin with. Also city states are hardly impregnable in history, at the very least in times of war a city state would need to feed itself. Better to have surrounding countryside.
My impression is that cartels tend to be unstable because enforcement is difficult. The states would each have a strong incentive to allow profitable individuals to immigrate, so I'd expect such individuals to have greater freedom of movement in a world where states are motivated by profit than they do in a world dominated by democracy and by nation states, for which it is natural to exclude those not belonging to the nation.
The Network State theory is where this lands. By abolishing governments and instead enabling companies to rule as city states, you can “sell your shares” by moving city states - this can be physically or logically depending on the Network State makeup. All of this seems to ignore the current geopolitical landscape as defined by governments with military spending and the rule of law.
I'm not clear on this: are there actual shares in these states, that one can buy and sell like normal shares? Or are "shares" a metaphor for living in a state; something more like being a customer? Or both?
If the shares are actual shares, are there rules about who can buy them?
If it's like a customer, how do you deal with the fact that you need another state to accept you? Or, what prevents the monarch from forbidding you from leaving? If Apple could shoot all their customers if they tried to buy Androids that might be a short term ploy to juice shareholder value, but doesn't seem like the sort of thing we want the shareholders/board to reward?
"I appreciate the info - but IMO it just adds to the contradictions, and the fact that MM has to construct absurdly elaborate scenarios for how the board with the authority of removal could exist without undercutting absolutism just illustrates (again) that he cannot be taken seriously as a political thinker."
How silly is this statement. MM is a wonderful political thinker, not for his contribution on a hypothetical political system that could replace the current regime (that's an impossible task), but for his critique on the current regime - which is a masterpiece. Imho his main contribution is articulating the split between reaction and fascism, and the criticisms by the former on the latter. Mainstream political canon has the tendency to bundle them together even though reactionaries back in the day mostly despised fascism as a cancerous outgrowth of democracy on reactionary thought.
Again, of course, the solution he proposes has immense flaws - this does not negate his accurate perception of the current state of affairs and their historical precedent.
Do you also believe that Plato cannot be taken seriously as a political thinker because his prescription to the disease of democracy was with major flaws?
Moldbug's system was designed to be perfect, but systems aiming for perfection are usually much worse than systems that allow for and accept human error and defects. Patchwork and the sovcorp just seem like they would become unworkable and easily subverted in practice (crypto locked weapons, lol). Nick Land's libertarian proposal, on the other hand, seemed just as dystopian as the worst projections of woke leftism.
He stopped blogging entirely in 2014 to run Tlon and didn't resume until 2020 when he quit Tlon. Your timeline here makes no sense whatsoever. The fact some alt-right people read his old, already defunct blog in 2016 doesn't mean he had anything to do with any of it.
I know his blogging timeline but I'm not sure what about this affects my point. My impression is that he was doing field-building and networking stuff with conservative think tanks in the middle, which is why I dated the turn from 2015 rather than when the new blog started.
I assume he did *some* networking during that period, but I'd think it was mostly with Silicon Valley people rather than conservative thinktanks and whatever, as his ideas were completely verboten back then. His time was actually primarily spent working at Tlon.
What happened is that after the NRx blogosphere was pretty much already defunct, alt-right/dissident right people online go and read that stuff and tweet about it and talk about it on podcasts and so on. Some of it gets absorbed into general online right discourse and synthesised with populism and other strains of right-wing thought. His profile grows as the online right becomes more influential and he eventually returns under his real name.
Point being, Trumpism was never his thing and he wasn't really involved until maybe the 2024 Trump run, and only obliquely. He counter-signalled Trump the entire time and afaik voted for Biden and advocated voting for Biden consistently. Now that Trump's in office he's commenting on that reality but I think it's a big stretch to tie him to MAGA and populism except insofar as some of his ideas have made it into right-wing thinking in a roundabout way.
I thought he was working pretty closely with Claremont, Michael Anton, etc.
I would describe his "commenting" on Trump as advocating for Trump to seize control of everything and declare himself dictator, which I still think is the thing that he said would never work in his original writing.
I don't think he's ever been against Trump (or even Biden) seizing control of everything and declaring himself a dictator, he just thought it wasn't possible. His position has pretty consistently been that it needs to be made possible. His post from January this year is basically "I was wrong, Trump's not as impotent as I thought. Regime change isn't possible but there's steps he can take to make it more possible in the future and he should take them."
I must not be understanding the points correctly, because "the dictator is not elected or appointed or beholden to anyone" seems to directly contradict "the dictator can be removed by the board".
If the Council of State can remove the king, then he is no king.
As to "the board can remove the dictator", how well did that work out in the case of Caesar, who staged it so that he got perpetual powers?
I'm seeing a running theme of difficult questions answered by simplistic, flawed strategies that export those flaws to under-baked novelties. The more Moldbug I read the less I think of him, which is a rough trade given his wordcount!
Agreed. Also, as I'd mentioned in my own comment, a dictator can set up whatever super-clever management structure that he can imagine; but ultimately if he pisses off enough people they're going to take him out of office with torches and pitchforks. Cryptographically locked blockchain weapons will only get you so far, because you still need your Palace Guard to wield them -- and even if they're willing, they can't fight the entire remaining population.
What did the old Yarvin think about the states run by corporations that have historically existed, like the East India Company or King Leopold's Congo?
Does he endorse them? Clearly, these companies did a lot of exploitation of the populations they ruled over. Yarvin might argue that these companies were not really part of the sort of patchwork of corporation-states he envisions. But I don't think that's the problem here.
The fact is, the population of e.g. the Congo Free State was just very unproductive. The profit maximizing way to run the place conceivably *was* to chop of the limbs of anyone not meeting their rubber quota.
According to the Architectonics posts, Yarvin is aware of the problem of such unproductive or barely "breaking even" populations. The relevant quote is:
"If our design does not provide for the existence of a larger number of human beings whose existence anywhere is not only unprofitable, but in fact a straight-up loss, to that realm, it is simply inconsistent with reality."
"The best humane alternative to genocide I can think of is not to liquidate the wards—either metaphorically or literally—but to virtualize them."
But why should a profit-maximizing corporation state incur this cost? And say it did: the VR cannot be too good either, lest marginally productive people get lured into it. So basically you get chopped of limbs for the marginally productive rubber collectors and an even worse virtual reality for the unproductive.
Beyond that Yarvin has nothing but an appeal to charity. Maybe the productive will take care of the unproductive. I would not be optimistic on that. People tend to care way less about genocides committed against the unproductive than about other groups.
Depending on the labor supply, in a patchwork of profit maximising employer states, the marginal minimum wage may well be whatever you absolutely have to pay from keeping your employees from "quitting": maybe the minimum dose of anaesthetics required to survive vivisection long enough that meaningful experiments can be performed on you.
So every patchwork of corporation states will have its heart of darkness somewhere that runs on the Congo Free State business model. Not a good outcome in a deontic sense. And given that we might all see our relative productivity levels drop precipitously rather soon, an even much worse outcome in a utilitarian sense.
In the UR post, MM indicts people who skip over the Belgian Congo between Leopold & Mobuto. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita discussed why his Belgium was better governed than his Free State in an EconTalk podcast in the '00s. I highlight the time within the podcast episode here:
You don't get it and you never will, since you're not trying: leaving you in power for <em>one more day</em> was an unacceptable risk to our children's future. The "synthesis" is that Yarvin did some growing up, saw that waiting around for a picture-perfect Reaction was going to stretch past his own children's lives and encompass various other serious risks, and acknowledged that Donald Trump, a far, far better man than any of us deserve, had actually and irreducibly delivered something hopeful despite Yarvin's continued snide dismissals of him. (I guess if in the course of 20 years you change your mind and admit that experience has proved you wrong you get to be called a sellout. Real nice.)
(For anyone who wasn't in on this post for the fun of dunking on boogieman Yarvin: in the happy scenario that we don't deserve, Trump isn't the king, he is the anointer of the king. He is old and he is not going to attempt to outlast his own powers, especially when there is a face-saving convention limiting him to two terms. Moldbug agrees: four years is not a long time, and the Reaction rocket has separate stages for taking and exercising power.)
<blockquote>Anatoli, you're afraid of [the Cathedral]. Well, you should be. Personally, I give us one chance in three.</blockquote>
The widespread belief that Republicans are better than Democrats on the economy and especially budget deficits is utterly mystifying to me. It hasn't been true in my lifetime, and I'm 56.
Wishful thinking. Any damage they've caused is superficial at best; the systems and processes of the administrative state are far too robust for the unfocused and disorganized flailing you consider an attack they've mounted against them to be of any avail.
Okay so ignoring the side marks. What's the actual scenario you're envisioning here? Trump hands over power to some king of philosopher king tbd who has none of his issues? Where would you find this person and what incentive does Trump have to give power to them? What incentive does the rest of the GOP have to agree? What prevents the vast majority of Americans who are anti kings saying fuck this and seceding or overthrowing them?
Listen, I know having like 12 trans athletes participating in sports leagues across the whole country was very annoying for you, and that your media echo chamber kept pushing your face into it every day.
But it seriously was not worth rolling the fascism dice over.
Cute how you imply that's only problem with the progressive machine.
There are those of us who think that putting a DEI figurehead under the same unaccountable bureaucracy that propped up her senile predecessor was also rolling the fascism dice.
If you seriously thought that was the motivation for "rolling the fascism dice," and you think it a minor point, why wouldn't you cede it and give them what they wanted on that front?
It's bad to let people hold the body politic hostage for minor grievances; it incentivizes people to threaten to "roll the fascism dice" for any minor concession.
So there's this absolutely secure dicator with no checks/balances but also a board that can remove him and also they "own stock" in the country. This avoids the problem of corruption since stock ownership just kinda happens and the dictator can't affect that. And nobody picks the dictator but there's this antiversity which is like the best people who never lie and then they become the government because the dictator says so. But the dictator makes sure they are all loyal because he only allows them to have cryptoguns except the guns can also be controlled by the board (not the antiversity though). 11,000 posts of this?
There are Chinese intellectuals that say that China is a democracy (where it matters) at local level and the centralised dictatorship is designed to ensure checks and balances (and expertise) up the chain, to the wise ruler on top.
Give me a break, Moldbug was always a culture war hack who believed the left was uniquely bad and ideological, that he turned out this way was entirely predictable.
I'm sorry but being quirky doth not make for a coherent word view all by itself. His writing is turgid and his ideas are derivative. The critique of democracy is as old as the Greeks, and modern versions can be better found in Machiavelli (Discorsi), de Toccqueville (L'ancien régime et la révolution) and especially, Kuehnelt-Leddihn (Liberty or equality). Or for crying out loud, Hayek and his critique of the dynamics of democratic government. Yarvin is also wrong or misreading things badly. Hitler wanted to get elected just to toss out elections and his primary idea of governance was the "Führerprinzip", the idea that each unit of society should not devolve into unaccountable democratic voting systems. All units of society ought to be led by (autocratic) leaders instead, which would be 100% committed and accountable, as the captain of a ship. And, corporate CEOs aren't autocratic leaders any more than prime ministers are. Historically, democratic government and stock corporation governance co-wvolved and stole each other's ideas. Yarvin is an intellectual mess.
I was also wondering--where's the discussion of Hobbes's Leviathan? Moldbug thinks we need an all-powerful autocratic ruler; Leviathan is the first thing I thought of. But maybe he is against contractarianism? I'm not sure. Even the Roman Empire was contractarian, as the Code of Justinian makes explicit. I agree it seems like a mess.
"The internal and external violence typical of totalitarian states is best explained, I think, by this built-in mismanagement. Dictators are violent because they have to be—they use violence as an organizing principle. The totalitarian state has no principle of legitimacy that would render it impractical for an ambitious subordinate to capture the state with a coup. European monarchs made war, sometimes they were assassinated, and there were even succession struggles, but coups in the modern sense were very rare."
This is an example of shitty logic based on gross misunderstanding of history. He makes a bunch of unsubstantiated claims that each seem like they flow together but in reality none of there cohere,
Dictators are violent because they have to be—they use violence as an organizing principle - from a libertarian perspective all states use violence but it would be relevant to compare the dictatorships of Franco, Tito, and Salazar with the East Asian dictatorships of Korea and Taiwan, with African dictatorships like Gaddafi.
The totalitarian state has no principle of legitimacy that would render it impractical for an ambitious subordinate to capture the state with a coup - how often do Totalitarian states/dictatorships have coups/violent regime change compared to other types of governments? Many dictatorships are relatively stable after they seize power until the natural death of the founder (my instinct says most but I feel you would need to do an actual analysis to evaluate).
European monarchs made war, sometimes they were assassinated, and there were even succession struggles, but coups in the modern sense were very rare. - Obvjously the words "modern sense" and "rare" make this hard to argue with but during the late Roman Empire modern coups were relatively common. Thinking through the history of England, there are multiple failed coups under William's sons, a failed coup by Henry II's sons against him, a coup by Henry IV against Richard II, the coup by Mary I against Lady Jane Grey, the English revolution and Cromwell's protectorship, and the Glorious revolution (this is not an exhaustive list just the things that come to mind that resemble modern coups). China would also provide an insane number of examples of coups although I am not including it as a rebuttal since he probably has dumb ideas about European exceptionalism.
This argument does not meet the bar I would expect out of a middle school student, it's passable for a fifth grader but after that you need to bring in actual logic and evidence.
The "old Moldbug" stuff is more interesting than the new, but it's still deranged. He seems (from your summary) to do an okay job of detecting flaws in the basic idea, but he keeps building complexity on top of complexity to try to work around those flaws, which is generally a sure sign that this thing you've designed will never work. It's intellectual masturbation of a high order and nothing more.
I’ve heard of Yarvin before but I didn’t realize his proposals were so unrealistic…between an all-powerful dictator who answers to a board of directors, magic guns only the dictator controls, countries giving away to city-states—not very realistic!
In general it’s remarkable the degree to which nearly every right of center commentator has sold out to Trumpism. Guys like Moldbug, Jordan Peterson, even people like the Catholic apologist Bishop Barron sound increasingly indistinguishable. Come to think of it, it’s not that different on the left—liberals don’t have to pretend they haven’t completely rejected everything they believed before 2016, but they all parrot the exact same talking points (and writing style) with almost no deviation.
I have seen that too...MAGA has spats every now and then but they appear to have a remarkable capacity to forgive and forget. Marco Rubio is now one of the most powerful people in the administration.
I suspect he justifies it to himself by saying that if he doesn't compromise his beliefs a little, a much worse true believer will take his place and do even more damage. I suspect Mike Pence took the same approach--and honestly he wasn't completely wrong. JD Vance seems to be a true believer for now, but I suspect he will always passionately defend positions he will shortly abandon.
Rubio always struck me as a weak clinger, an unfortunate unpopular kid who desperately wants to be in the cool kids' inner circle. Trump is a great vehicle for that: kissing Trump's ass is all that's needed for admission, you just have to go all-in on it to stand out from all the other ass-kissers (see the real kissing champion, our new FBI director, for the best example). That was Rubio's chance, and to the man's credit he took it good and hard.
I have remarked elsewhere on the tendency of certain overeducated and highly political Catholics to come up with harebrained ideas on how they can Make American A Catholic Nation when Catholics are not and never were a majority and most Catholics themselves are not too fired up the idea themselves.
To be fair, the problem isn't strictly limited to right wingers. I recall Ursula K LeGuin came up with a similar (and similarly eminently practicable) utopia in one of her stories, where an orbiting computer with superintelligence just shut down humans when they got too authoritarian for her tastes.
For that matter, anarchists in general have legitimate criticisms of the state and power, but I am yet to hear practical solutions proposed.
It's constructing a government as if it were software engineering, with systems and modules that must work in a theoretically perfectly way every time, or the entire thing collapses into a nightmare instantly.
Yeah, Moldbug and Bitcoin both seem to me to represent a related effort by 2008-era tech/libertarian types to find alternative foundations for government/money respectively in a way that doesn't rely on trusting humans; I think both have a "code is law"-ish vibe that tries to remove human beings from the loop as much as possible.
I think it's more egregious in Moldbug's case, but both I think are slightly naive beliefs that you can recreate important social institutions without, y'know, society.
>Yeah, Moldbug and Bitcoin both seem to me to represent a related effort by 2008-era tech/libertarian types to find alternative foundations for government/money respectively in a way that doesn't rely on trusting humans; I think both have a "code is law"-ish vibe that tries to remove human beings from the loop as much as possible.
Hmm... Did Moldbug ever comment about the scenario in "Colossus: The Forbin Project"?
what the fuck? why do you always spend all this time reading and engaging with these stupid fuck holes? aren't there writers who are smart like you that you can argue with instead?
Curtis Yarvin is the Lyndon LaRouche of the 21st Century.
Lyndon LaRouche was a New Deal Democrat who wrapped his ultra Keynesian big government agenda in conspiracy theories that resembled those of the John Birch Society.
Likewise, Yarvin advocated for effectively the World Economic Forum agenda but wrapped his message in walls of text calling for a new kind of monarchy.
I shamelessly stole the phrase "Rules for Reactionaries" for my 'stack. I claim it by right of conquest. Might makes right. (However I am an American reactionary. I'm working to roll the clock back to the vision of America promised in sitcoms made prior to 1970.)
This reminds me of a time in college when a friend of mine was trying to explain his ideal system of government. Whenever I found it obviously relevant I'd ask, "what's to stop your monarchical ruler from not doing that and being evil and self-serving instead?" He'd patch in some unlikely-to-work structure to try to stop it. After fifteen minutes and a dozen or so of these instances where a bad actor would immediately ruin the system I told him it sounded like his ideal system of government was essentially that he, personally, would be dictator.
I don't think a "the vibes [reality?] is worse than the stats say, since the stats say everything is the best ever, which isn't true" explanation really grapples with the thrust of the objection. However worse things may be than Pinker thinks, it is definitely a better time to be American than it was in 1863, 1917, 1929, 1939, etc. etc.
Applying a little historical context, I think you have to conclude that now is not a time so UNIQUELY miserable in American history, to say nothing of world history (Pol Pot's regime existed!) to necessitate jettisoning rule of law in order to achieve the golden age of, what, 1992? The delta is just not nearly big enough.
Further, the skew of outcomes is extremely negatively biased! Maybe we get a marginally better version of today with better economic policy and less annoying woke stuff. Or, maybe we get a succession crisis when your old man enlightened despot dies that turns into a civil war, or maybe the next guy just sucks at his job and there is no real way to check him now, maybe a socialist seizes the reigns and breaks everything right after you finish fixing it. Payoff is small, risks are enormous.
The birth rate is a real problem--but you'll notice it is a problem basically everywhere in the developed world (and in authoritarian regimes as well, like China and Russia) and nobody seems to know how to fix it other than "become Amish or a fundamentalist Muslim"--Uber Trump is not going to employ that strategy, and I doubt you want to. X risk is also (obviously) a huge problem--but again we can't really expect a Uber Trump to help; the solutions are not even obvious and it isn't a focus for him.
Depressed kids are problem. Is Uber Trump overthrowing the normal government to ban smart phones and social media? No? Well then again why expect big gains here?
Civil wars are revolutions are almost always astronomically bad. You need a MASSIVE problem that is obviously FIXED to justify even thinking about taking steps foment or risk one, which authoritarianism certainly does.
Israel is developed and has positive TFR, but it also has the ultra-orthodox as a significant chunk of its population. And apparently their norms trickle down, without themselves being influenced by less fertile groups:
I am not that convinced it's a matter of norms trickling down rather than a general shared norm that is mitigated by modernity in the case of non orthodox. I definitely don't think you can easily transfer whatever cultural difference make Israel more fertile (it would be very funny to promote conversion to Haredi judaism so that the right wing chants of "Jews will not replace us" becomes actually a valid complaint).
No mention of Carlyle, whose style of personal rule characterizes later UR, which itself is generally increasingly removed from the technocratic thought experiments of early UR. Also no mention of Urbit, his explicit attempt at a technological platform suitable for modern governance, which is designed and described as a means for amplifying the various particular governors who might employ it [0] - a consistent throughline of Formalism, present since the Manifesto.
[0] Yarvin is pathologically pacifistic, while recognizing the supreme incentive of power to secure itself, and as such invests his efforts in devising competitive arenas other than war.
He did start promoting Carlyle around the same time he decided that the German Historical School was actually correct and the Austrian economists were wrong. He started declaring that statesmen acted with "wisdom" that wasn't perceptible to any economath, just as current defenders of Trump's tariffs will proclaim it's "statecraft".
This is interesting and fun, because Classic Yarvin, the version *before* he sold out, promulgates a set of principles that are almost exactly diametrically 180 degrees the opposite of everything I believe in. To see that he broke down and sold out is somehow karmic.
I like how Moldbug develops this very complicated political philosophy that basically relies on the philosopher King that never seeks power, yet still gets it, while also making a big deal how he'd never want power, and would definitely want Hitler's job, in any circumstances. It's the same sort of "The only worthy man to be King happens to be me" philosophy espoused from Plato to every dictator.
It feels almost more like "The only worthy man to be King is the one who doesn't want it, and look how much I don't want it, nobody doesn't want it as much as me, and if you make me King, I'll complain about it a bit before being *such* a good King."
Exactly! I realize I messed up in my original comment of saying "he would definitely want Hitler's job" when I meant he said "he would definitely not want Hitler's job." Your comment better captures the point.
Plato, the philosopher who was unwilling to take leadership, happened to think the Philosopher King who was not interested in leadership was best fit to lead the nation. I just finished reading the "manifesto" of the first dictator of South Korea, and a not-insignificant part of the book was dedicated to him saying how much he didn't want the job of dictator, despite him going on to rule for nearly 2 decades.
A desire for power is suspicious, but a professed desire to not have power, despite a philosophy that says the man who doesn't want power should rule, or a justification that taking power is necessary despite not wanting it, is even moreso.
The failure mode for Moldbug's dictatorship is the same as the failure mode for Communism: we don't have perfect apolitical nontribal dispassionate rational humans to build the system out of, only the regular kind of human with ordinary human desires. They will use the system they are component parts of to their own ends, bend it to make this easier, circumvent it where they cannot; whatever we meant the system to do, this is what it does now; POSIWID - this is what it will do henceforth until destroyed. Congratulations! We tried to do better, but we got the dystopia we always get.
Concentrating more power in fewer people always has this effect. The only way to do better is to spread the power out, so that as everyone pulls towards themselves there is some balance possible in the middle. Democracy, as the saying goes, is a terrible political system, except all the others are worse.
Tbf, this is the failure mode for all political systems; it could still be true that his system performs better in the face of those difficulties than competitors; or at least, fails differently: trades off probability of failure for badness of worst case scenario, or something like that.
> trades off probability of failure for badness of worst case scenario
...except that it does nothing of the sort.
If you deliberately design your system from the ground up with the explicit assumption that it is made of ideal humble intelligent passivist humans and therefore it can never have those difficulties and need not include any means of mitigating them, you don't then get to play the "could be it performs better in the face of those difficulties" card.
Yeah, I sorry, I wasn't arguing that it does have any of those virtues, just that Moldbug might defend himself thusly.
I am mostly unconvinced both that democracy is so bad that it needs replacing, and that Moldbug's system would work as a replacement, but I think it's still at least worth asking, even with imperfect people implementing it, what does this system look like? I agree it's a bad sign that M's own answer to this question is, "Hitler", but I think he's wrong about enough else that maybe he's wrong about that too?
I recently listened to a few old podcasts with Yarvin casually chatting with people, and I think his personal attitudes towards other people are useful context to understand his writing, goals, and motivations (e.g. I don't mean this as an ad hominem attack). In short, he is a grandiose narcissist, and proud blatant racist that constantly mentions how he is superior to "mulattos," the "slave/servant class," and really anyone else that isn't him specifically or one of the tech bros he has an obsession with being ruled by- and he and possibly a few of his friends deserve liberty and freedom but nobody else does. He refers to his wife only as "his woman" and constantly interjects, even when completely inappropriate to the context, as many brags as possible about how she is often mistaken in public for a daughter, and how that proves he is a powerful man. He is about as personally awful and obnoxious as a person could possibly be.
The way to fix democracy is, the president and other elected positions are not allowed to own any money for the rest of their lives. They get free food, housing, clothes etc.
Also they are filmed for the rest of their lives, and anyone can watch them online.
These two tings make it really hard to be corrupt. Also it makes it sucky to be president, so only morally good people would want to.
(The filming things would make it tricky to have state secret for military stuff. Maybe make some exceptions for that.)
Also people should get paid to be educated.
There are 2 types of education. First stuff that is useful for the individual to learn. How to read, how to speak other languages, things you need for your career, etc.
Second stuff that it is useful for the people to know so they can make good decisions when voting. For instance how global warming work. War crimes and other immoral things your government has done. How fascism starts and how to prevent it. That religion is dangerous nonsense.
Today some people go to college for the first kind of education, and there they also maybe learn some of the second kind of education. But some people don't go to college and they don't learn the second kind. For a democracy to function well you need the the whole population to know the second kind.
But people don't have any incentive to learn the second kind, so they should get paid to learn it.
Maybe twitter is one thing, but on his blog, he has called this administration retarded, has said Trump is a fake king, not a real king, has said they need to start acting in ways that don't fit the leftist narrative about them (instead of fulfilling their worst prophecies).
But it's true Yarvin is in a bit of a Karl Haushofer situation. Haushofer was the intellectual who gave Hitler the idea of Lebensraum, among other things, but he also thought Russia and Germany were natural allies, and that together, they could dominate Eurasia.
Going to repost my response to Cathy's article, cause I think it is still relevant.
---
This post gives Yarvin too much credit. The man is simply a hypocrite, a walking embodiment of luxury beliefs.
He grew up upper middle class in a wealthy suburb of Maryland where the average household income was over 120k. He went to an Ivy League. His dad was a US diplomat! And he now lives in a house in San Francisco, a blue enclave in a blue enclave. Every part of this man’s life is dependent on the existence of the systems he claims to want destroyed.
Yarvin is the definition of ‘weak men lead to hard times’. Because he has never experienced a hard time in his life, he cannot begin to imagine the actual consequences of his actions. He writes the way a child draws on walls — innocent, even as he causes harm. He assumes that no matter what he does, the systems around him won’t fail because he’s simply too naive to imagine them failing.
If he really believed any of the things he’s saying, well, there are dozens of countries that are far more monarchical than the US. But somehow I don’t see him leaving his cushy life sipping mocktails and waxing poetic to his acolytes while overlooking the bay bridge any time soon.
As much as it is tempting to try and earnestly rebut his nonsense, I think it gives him too much play. He should be mocked, relentlessly, and never be given a seat at the table of serious people.
I think this response gives him to much credit, there are people who advocate for Theocracy and Communism while preferring to live under liberalism but his theories are at the level of the child drawing on the walls.
I think the clearest case of Moldbug disagreeing with Yarvin shows up in From Mises to Carlyle, where he says outright:
>given a binary choice between restoring the Stuarts, or sticking with the Anglo-American republican tradition, I would restore the Stuarts. At worst, an absolute President could even be elected by universal suffrage. Though, if you want a Hitler, this is how to get one.
And then went on to argue in Gray Mirror that... the President should act with absolute power and elections act as a sufficient accountability mechanism.
1. I don't know if "Sold out" has the same meaning here as "people change".
2. I recall that even Mussolini was limited (and eventually removed) by The Grand Council Of Fascism.
3. How does Moldbug/Yarvin's imaginary dictator get his legitimacy? The Grand Maximum Generalissimo and CEO For Life says "do it!" and some subject responds with "You're not my mother!"
Without legitimacy, the ruler's authority goes no further than his reach. That isn't just a problem of autocracies or similar.
> How does Moldbug/Yarvin's imaginary dictator get his legitimacy?
Step 1: get together a group of perfect humans who are geniuses and also unmotivated by base politics, personal wealth or any other mortal concern
Step 2: these humans are obviously better at everything they do than the ordinary everyday sort, so they get put in charge of everything without having to ask
Step 3: they ask Curtis Yarvin to rule over us all benevolently already. He says he doesn't want the job, but they keep pestering him until reluctantly he steps up.
...no, seriously, read his stuff if you don't believe me; it's pretty much this but wrapped up in a vast amount of padding to smuggle it past your instinctive incredulity.
This really gets at a lot of my thoughts on the subject, as someone who read Moldbug as a teenager, thought he was kind of cool, then saw him associating with/quasi-endorsing Trump and thought “wait, what the fuck?”
I think the original sin here is his aligning himself with the cultural right, causing him to warp his own values and philosophy when he saw a far-right leader have a chance at power. The far-right in America don’t want a fair-minded profit-focused elite CEO dictator. They want Hitler, or someone adjacent to him at least. Aligning yourself with them will never be a good idea. As Hanania would say, they are “Low Human Capital”.
Haven't actually read the blog but based on the snatches here and the linked Architechtonics post the whole ideology reads to me as coming from a very very frightened place - a person so concerned with safety and terrified of lawlessness that they would give up any amount of personal freedom and human flourishing in exchange for an ounce more of safety. There's a nice metaphor in the fact that political scientists test for "authoritarian personalities" by asking questions about parenting styles; authoritarians fundamentally crave to be children protected by an omnipotent (from the perspective of the child) parent.
It's always been strange to me that fascists and strong men have this manly man image when the impulse is fundamentally weak/ scared/ childlike.
Yes, it's very common for startup founders to work as CEO when they don't want to and aren't very good at it, until they can finally afford a professional CEO. Sometimes they do end up being ok at it and liking it, and stay in the role anyways. Marcus Aurelius also comes to mind, as someone that was placed in the position of emperor of Rome by the previous emperor without expressing any interest in the position, and he wrote in his journal about how much he disliked it but felt a duty to do the job well anyways.
Moldbug's ideas might sort-of work if you could actually find someone like Marcus Aurelius to be the monarch, someone brilliant, and completely driven by a sense of responsibility and ethics, without a hint of 'dark triad' personality traits. However, identifying someone like that is impossible- even Aurelius himself failed to do it, and created a disaster by leaving his awful son as his successor.
Given habitat loss and species decline, as well as the necessary abandonment of once-uncontroversial environmental goals, not to mention various other ideals, now succeeded by "techno-futuro-humanist" keyboard pundits pretending to be "contrarian" though curiously they all say the same thing, calling into question their contrariness, asserting we should build houses on national monuments (they have never visited, nor could imagine why you would do so) in the arid lands - I once likened unchecked population growth due to immigration and differing TFRs to a tumor. Actually, I didn't even do that - merely used the word "metastasize" in a comment about, I dunno, sprawl and politicians' subversion of the clear will of the American people in the 60s/70s.
Anyhoo, I wasn't thinking about cancer. I wasn't thinking about your beloved aunt or my own grandmother, or people taking over your cellular machinery. "Metastasize" was just a perfectly explanatory (if cliched) word, the sort of word that people, of somewhat hardier mental makeup, once used to describe e.g. things like the aerial views of my hometown over time.
Some kid or Russian scolded me, of course.
Interesting to see that Scott goes direct to MAGA being "cancerous" for having a rather simple goal, no particular ethnic background or jacket required - of wanting to stop runaway immigration.
As a specialist in cancer, I sometimes compare the body politic to the human body. Cancer in my view is caused by the obstruction of information within cells, the proximate cause being the mutation of the carrier of information, DNA. A cancer cell “should” be destroyed by the immune system but it evolved mechanisms to escape recognition, principally by altering the information it presents to the immune cells. (Immunotherapy, the future of cancer medicine and our greatest hope for a cancer cure, aims to reverse this process.)
To analogise to geopolitics, the free flow of information in the media is what prevents an authoritarian political faction (cancer) from gaining power. Censorship is the great enemy and free speech is the great friend. Anyone talking about the need to censor speech to counter “misinformation” should be regarded with great suspicion. Anyone encouraging healthy debate should be encouraged (that’s why I hang out here. Go Scott!)
For this reason I’m not worried at all about Trump. Media is constantly calling him a felon, dictator, authoritarian, Hitler, etc. No one gets fired for saying this! Clearly, he doesn’t control the media. Biden (or whoever was pulling the strings during his administration) much more alarming - significantly restricting free speech on social media as exposed on the Twitter files, purging Universities of wrong think, etc. It was dangerous to vocally support Trump in certain places. No longer!
Last time I checked in on Yarvin a couple years back, he was calling Trump voters "hobbits" and still suggesting rulers should appeal to the smart set not the rubes. He also suggested Zvi Mowshowitz for king on the basis of reading about half a blog post (which does roughly satisfy the criteria Moldbug laid out.) He did not have positive things to say about Trump in the NYT. I dunno, I'm not feeling the turnaround you are. I have enough exposure to have a general grasp of the different right-leaning factions, and almost none of the Trump-positive factionalists are favorably RT'ing Yarvin.
Cathy Young otoh wrote for Reason magazine and is now barely indistinguishable from the Blue Egregore.
Moldbug is a reactionary, really the first influential reactionary philosopher writing in the English language since Carlyle. If you're unfamiliar with that tradition he seems far more novel than he is. Note that fascism and conservatism are distinct strains of thought though they're often grouped together by thinkers who suffer from outgroup homogeneity. Americans are inherently anti-reactionary after two and a half centuries of anti-reactionary thought being part of its civic religion. Reactionary does not mean "very conservative" or "opposed to progressivism." It's a specific philosophical tradition that springs from a fusion of disillusioned 18th century reformists and moderate conservatives who radicalized in the face of the violence of the French Revolution. It has antecedents in things like Hobbesianism but even that is a distinct tradition that really leads more toward fascism. (This is actually one of Moldbug's bigger contributions: he has more fully articulated the reactionary/fascist split and reactionary objections to fascism.)
In that light, nothing about this is all that surprising. You had a whole spate of reactionaries semi-endorsing the French Revolution as clearing the way for reactionary restorations in Europe. Reactionaries are kind of idealists and they don't fundamentally believe that social structures are fully under human control or capable of being rationally ordered. Many also don't believe in being truthful, especially in public. Largely because they think the average person [i]should not[/i] be engaged in politics or philosophy and doesn't want to assist them in that. (This is part of why many of them write in purposefully dense or hard to read styles. It's a purposeful aesthetic.)
The reactionaries have problem. There is no chance, at all, of the United States becoming reactionary for domestic reasons. China either. Russia could theoretically if you really stretch and imagine the elite entrenching into an actual aristocracy. But that's not likely either and on the ground it's not a good legitimating ideology to the average Russian. And the Arab and Malay aristocracies, the last real aristocracies around, are Muslim which means reactionaries have a cultural hostility to them. So there's no real chance of them coming to power or even influencing that much. So instead many have become accelerationists waiting for some outside force to blow it all up. But in some ways that's philosophically comfortable for them. It's basically the Gnostic idea of a deceived world put together by a hostile force that must be escaped individually and collapsed ultimately.
Basically: Here’s this elaborate jenga tower and if it’s ever built in a way that’s not 100% like in my complicated imagination of how it should go you all now have to live under a brutal dictatorship.
Amen. Except it would be terrible even if built exactly according to specification, and that was always completely obvious to anybody with the slightest acquaintance with reality.
True freedom and liberty is being governed by an unelected and unchosen state that has no interest in your well-being, but is in power because it is right in some objective and rational sense that has no connection to the irrational desires of any person.
You can want something else, but freedom is snorting cocaine off a stripper while gambling on recreational knife fighting, deciding you are a bit bored and jumping into the ring
No, you want something else, your free to do so. When moderates use the words as the inverse with an appeal to "common sense" ,to weakness a concept, you just lose conceptual space.
If its not "freedom", what word are knife fight advocates suppose to use? Someone be trying to make knife fight advocates not exist in newspeak
Great post. Something that you've neglected, and which is probably outside of the scope of your post but reinforces your point nonetheless, is that Yarvin in both his Moldbug and Gray Mirror era has been a persuasive influence (along with, I suspect, Peter Thiel) in sanitizing right-wing populism (specifically its racialism and moral majoritarianism) by giving it the image of a yokelish indigenous rights movement.
This was the exact same mistake that the Neocons made under Reagan and which was falling apart around the time of Bush Jr. But the Neocons, for all their flaws, were old Marxists who understood how to work an ideological tool on the public. The Tech Right is playing with impulses which are alien to them, which they do not understand, and which they therefore cannot control. This is evident in the fact that they, along with their neo-trad/meme-orthodox cultural influencers, are conspicuously playing pretend.
Yarvin (along with most of his caste) does not understand the symbolic currency on which the masses operate; he just writes it off as illegitimate. But that doesn't mean it can be ignored. When it appeared in the form of Wokism, they all thought it was the end of days, and they appealed, as counterbalance, to the same impulses (arguments by insinuation, obsessions with character and moral genealogy, subordination of all societal functions to recognition of personal legitimacy) in the right, thinking that these forces would be naturally relegated to the simple and unambitious. We are now receiving the wages of that error.
I met with Yarvin several times when he visited Austin, and exchanged many emails with him. I constantly argued with him -- when I could get a single word in, that is -- regarding his whole confident philosophy of moral inversions ("just about everything you ever thought was bad is good, and vice versa, and here's a 10,000-word history lecture on why") as a giant edifice made of tissue paper. But I always regarded Yarvin as genuinely interested in ideas, and that may have been a mistake.
On reflection, what angers me the most about sellouts -- and Yarvin, as you say, *is* a sellout -- is that they make fools of all of us who try to take ideas seriously. It's like, consider the conventional leftist or SneerClubber take on Yarvin. The SneerClubber never cared in the first place that Yarvin had a complicated proposal involving cryptography for why his CEO-ruler wouldn't become a tyrant, or Hitler, as happened again and again through history. That person took one look at Yarvin, completely ignored the actual content of the ideas and arguments, and rounded down to the nearest category he or she knew: "this person sounds like an evil far-right fascist; everything else is just window dressing." So, now that Yarvin has indeed come out as MAGA's court philosopher, the SneerClubber gets to crow that he or she was right all along about everything, and we Enlightenment liberals and rationalists are laughable dupes for ever even talking to Yarvin, or caring at all about the actual content of what he said. And yet, as someone who continues to care about ideas, I continue to insist that we (sincere Enlightenment liberals) are not the ones who erred; Yarvin and the other sellouts are the ones who erred -- and Enlightenment liberals probably have better grounds to be enraged at the sellouts than anyone.
I think rats tend to be easy marks for the cleverly unscrupulous and Yarvin is quite clever. The unscrupulous part has been covered.
Rats will bend over backward to give the benefit of the doubt and listen to just about any reasonable sounding argument well past the point a more cynical observer of human nature has their bullshit detector flashing red.
Yes it’s an interesting idea, but crikey, if it sounds like a bad idea, looks like a bad idea, smells like a bad idea…
There are a lot of very good heuristics. The majority of startups fail, so if you predict a startup will fail, you're probably right. If an idea for government sounds like it admires Hitler, it's probably a horrid idea.
People who have no interest in ideas but have even just a slight awareness of some of these basic heuristics have a strong chance of being right just as often, or sometimes more often than those more thoughtful, but for those who care about ideas, the contemplation of those ideas and the personal growth attained thereby has to be it's own reward. And even more - taking on the risk of thinking through something means that you have a small chance of being involved in something beautiful that anyone who doesn't has no chance of.
There's a value to living the examined life, even beyond the pleasures of being right more often than others.
But Scott, "caring about ideas" is not itself... optimal? for a lack of a better word. Ideas are dime a dozen, everybody has ideas, they are near-worthless. One should have a strong anti-idea filter, there's not enough time in the Universe to give all ideas a fair hearing. So, in Yarvin's case:
Oh, you want a dictator? I'm down to 5 more seconds, say something.
Oh, it's a Board! Of! DIRECTORS! that is going to reign him in? I'm done, moving on.
That'd save you a lot of time and disappointment. Taleb's Fat Tony wins again.
1123581321: You do realize that I'm a professor, right? You realize that every professional success I've ever had has involved caring about ideas and taking them seriously, even when those ideas went strongly against what I believed or sounded stupid (or like something already refuted) after 5 seconds of thinking about them? Even with hindsight, it's not obvious to me that talking to Yarvin, while treating his ideas with (what turned out to be justified) extreme skepticism, was a wrong course of action.
Yes sir, I know who you are and what you do, am a lurker on your blog. I do admire your willingness to engage with ideas, but if I may, do you think your successes were helped by being able to care about / take seriously a relatively small subset of promising ideas? Some kind of a filtering mechanism has to have existed, no?
As a part of my job I participate in tech assessment, for example, when my company gets engaged with startups. Being able to quickly reject obvious non-starters is vital so that the limited resources can be dedicated to exploring things that have - maybe a slim - but nonetheless real chance of working out. Most don't, and it's fine, but without a quick filter the job would be hopeless, too many ideas, both internal and external, not enough time.
Is it possible that I rejected something potentially groundbreaking? Sure. That's the game though, there's only so many hours in a day.
Imagine that an AI writes 11000 gigantic wall-of-text rambling post throwing in tons of obscure and newly invented terminology and referencing a million different historical tidbits and structural forms, all on the same fairly limited and simple topic which an adroit human writer can sum up pretty well in one blog post.
What are the odds that an intelligent, interested, educated human forced to read all 11000 posts will end up relating to it as a linguistic ink-blot test, generating their own clever ideas and meaningful concepts as a result of being prompted by on-topic gibberish that activates all the relevant neurons? Coming away with a private sense that they have gleaned great wisdom from doggedly reading through all of this text, even though that wisdom was their own creation and not present in the mind of the author?
That's sort of what I feel like must be happening when someone smart tells me they've read all of Moldbug and find a lot of value in it, and then give me a much more coherent and reasonable summary of his 'ideas' than I've ever seen him express himself.
(To make an analogy to an equally obscure topic: the first time I encountered the Time Cube page, I experienced a primitive instinct to try to map his self-made terminology and insane ramblings onto some existing mental structure I already knew, and come up with an interpretation of his words that made some kind of sense or yielded some kind of abstruse sideways-looking insight or at least painted a coherent picture of some type of non-standard model. Ultimately that didn't work because there wasn't anything in the text sufficient to build that upon, but I think a lot of smart people shared the Timecube meme because of a similar compelling phenomenon they felt while reading it. I feel like smart people do this a lot, trying to sense-make over data sources that don't contain enough correlated information to actually create a meaningful model out of. I think this sometimes ends with smart people being overly-charitable to complete cranks and grifters who spout so many mountains of word salad in teh correct aesthetic, that the smart person can cherrypick and over-interpret it into something that points out their own, personal, good ideas that they stumbled upon while reading it.)
some of his critiques of elections i agree with and are a big reason i'm very interested in sortition: the forming of legislative bodies by random selection. other than that, he seems like a pretty slick troll.
Trust me, politicians don’t want sortition. I like the idea but I think it would work as a parliament with lawmaking powers but not as a source for an executive.
yeah, i tend to think you're right, politcians as a class are the biggest special interest. and i don't have a great suggestion on how we get from here to there, except the wild idea from AssembleAmerica.org to call a constitutional convention.
as to executive functions, i would advocate that they simply be chosen by a sortition body. a city manager, a fire chief, police chief, etc. some have suggested a sortition body vets a pool of candidates and then one is chosen randomly from among them.
7 zillion "very interesting" emails have apparently lost their charm in due course, giving way to that old two-legged ape nature. A tale as old a time.
This is great. But I think CEO-style monarchy is simply a mask for literal fascism in line with his overall political power analysis. I debated him and he discarded anything resembling monarchy almost immediately: https://www.theradicalist.com/p/totalitarian-fascism-is-bad-actually.
Scott, you rarely make errors like mixed similes and metaphors, but you’ve got a godawful one early in this piece: “a cancerous outgrowth of democracy riding the same wave of populist anger as the 20th century dictatorships.”. Cancer don’t surf, you know? Besides, if it’s a growth on Uncle Sam, where is he while his tumor is surfing? HIdden under the surfboard? Off in DC, but he's really really stretchy?
I see how you were pushed into this simile — I’m hard pressed to come up with a better one. I suppose you could call MAGA the demented offspring of democracy, and get MAGA surfing that way, but “demented offspring” doesn’t really capture all the things that “cancerous outgrowth” does.
Yeah, that's good, and what about having it do supercharged supersurfing through the lymphatic system? Uncle Sam's, I guess. Does that tick a lot of great boxes or what?
Doesn't classic Yarvin say pretty clearly that a real government has to consist of both a fake public structure and a genuine secret structure? He cites this book The Machiavellians about it, if I remember correctly.
So you would expect that, the nearer his side gets to power, the more likely he is to lie in his public writings about the structure of the government they're building.
I don't think this is actually true, I agree that he's probably succumbed to despair. I never thought his writings about the future were very serious, interesting, or realistic; he was only ever useful for occasional insights about current power structures. Despite his many blind spots.
Just putting a marker here to say that, if it turns out that the current shadow government is a Signal chat in which Yarvin, Thiel, Andreeson and BAP decide what instructions to give Stephen Miller, I won't be incredibly surprised.
I think the key point that Moldbug is missing is that *all* rulers -- even totalitarian dictators -- ultimately derive their power from the people. If the ruler pisses off enough people, they will either revolt outright (e.g. as happened with Britain's American Colonies), or simply refuse to work (e.g. as happened in the late-stage USSR). Cryptographic weapons will only get you so far, because when the torch-wielding mob shows up outside of your palace, maybe your Palace Guard will simply set aside their cryptographically signed laser-guided missile launchers, and watch quietly as the mob perforates you with their low-tech pitchforks.
So, a wise dictator will always utilize some combination of giving people what they want (e.g. free medicine or reliable trains) and brainwashing (e.g. fiery speeches, total informational lockdown, TikTok viral videos). A really good dictator will also attempt to enact policies that will make his people more productive in the long run, but this is always going to be of *secondary* concern (at best).
My opinion of Moldbug was always that his criticisms of democracy, progressivism, conservatism, and the structure of the US government were pretty sharp and incisive. His invocations of history and pre-WWII authors like Edward Bellamy and Hugo Grotius were fascinating and enlightening.
That said, his interpretations of historical events I think were in many cases highly debatable and his proposed solutions to the problems of 21st century governance were impractical, improbable, and kind of a waste of time. Maybe in the end he came to agree.
> When Yarvin points out that companies thrive without separation-of-powers, that’s because they never encounter the problem that separation of powers was intended to solve.
Corporations operate outside of the US, and often in lawless places, and it still pretty much just works. You can go to wartorn hellholes in the Congo where even soldiers dare not tread and you can get a can of coke no problem, or occasionally see a poster about how it's wrong to abuse girls.
This suggests that corporations and bluehair NGOs are both vastly more capable than 19th century style nation-states, and I would argue that the world is currently governed by NGO bluehairs and administrated by corporations, for precisely this reason.
The old nation-state governance is largely ceremonial and increasingly vestigial.
This is beside the point: Scott is talking about why you don't see literal civil wars or violent coups in corporations; if the board and the CEO disagree one doesn't execute the other, and even if they try extreme measures ultimately a (probably) US court will decide between them and enforce its ruling with, at the end of the day, the threat of violence.
Unless you're taking about corporations whose governing structures are subject to Congolese law, the fact that they operate in the DRC is completely beside the point.
"The old nation-state governance is largely ceremonial and increasingly vestigial"
I think this is... extremely untrue, and only seems true because we've lived for a long time in a period where the most immediate examples of nation states that the people on this blog are exposed to have not seen reason to exercise their full capabilities.
> if the board and the CEO disagree one doesn't execute the other, and even if they try extreme measures ultimately a (probably) US court will decide between them and enforce its ruling with, at the end of the day, the threat of violence.
Yes, exactly: the corporations do not engage in violence against each other only because they have surrendered their right to enact violence to the state. The state (kind of) holds it in escrow for them. As the result, corporations can resolve their disputes through legal arbitration and free-market competition, as opposed to e.g. blowing up each other's factories in the middle of the night. Without the state acting as the 800-lbs gorilla with a big stick, we'd see corporate violence aplenty.
Luckily, we can test this theory against reality, because there's a whole world outside of the US, including places with weak legal systems. However, we do not see corporate violence aplenty, even without your 800 lb gorilla bullying us into submission.
It could be that the gorilla's victims would simply be better off without the gorilla, and the gorillas are basically just protecting us from themselves.
Can you name an example ? Most of the world outside of the US has fairly strong legal systems (e.g. Europe and China), and thus looks relatively similar to the US. In places where the central government is weak, we typically see a rise of violent gangs that end up acting as corporate governments (e.g. Mexican drug cartels). These engage in violence against each other pretty much all the time, but usually stop short of total war (as total war would be bad for business). In places where the centralized state effectively does not exist at all, we see constant warfare and a comparative lack of economic activity (e.g. Somalia, South Africa). But perhaps I'm missing something ?
Er... yes ? I listed all the representative places I could think of (US, Europe, China, Mexico, Africa). Of course there is also Russia, South Korea, North Korea, Japan, and like, Lichtenstein or something. Are you saying that my argument is wrong because I did not enumerate every country in the world, or what ?
>nation states that the people on this blog are exposed to have not seen reason to exercise their full capabilities.
You misunderstand me. I'm merely saying that the organs of power in the nation-state are not mostly responsive to the formal governance structures, but rather, to more elusive power structures that aren't named in constitutions.
I live in Guatemala and arms of the state do crazy stuff all the time, but the official nation-state government is basically a ceremonial structure to give real power a kind of ritual legitimacy.
> Unless you're taking about corporations whose governing structures are subject to Congolese law, the fact that they operate in the DRC is completely beside the point.
It doesn't seem to matter irl - Guatemalan mining companies, Brazilian beverage companies - the lawlessness of a country nor the international jurisdiction of corporations - none of them seem to bring about this hypothetical problem of inter-corporate violence. Seems like a problem that nation-states are particularly prone to, among organizational structures.
I'll second the request for examples; Brazil doesn't seem so lawless to me that a company headquartered in Sao Paolo should be considered beyond the reach of the Brazilian government, and while I'll defer to you on the lawlessness of Guatemala, all the mining companies I found that operate there are either Canadian or Russian owned.
I think to make your point you'd need to exhibit a place where the company itself is the supreme authority (up to and including the use of violence to enforce the law, which it effectively creates) in a territory where the company rulers themselves reside.
Even the East India Company, which I think comes closest, doesn't quite make it: Hastings was impeached and Clive investigated by British Parliament: even though they were literally fighting wars and governing territory, they were still subject to the authority of a state.
The sorts of corporations that do exist entirely outside of a state's legal system tend to get called a different name like "cartel" and very much do exhibit violence as a feature in leadership disputes.
Finally, it's obviously not just nation states that are subject to this problem: cartels are already mentioned, and plenty of non-nation states like the Roman empire, Renaissance Italian city states, and medieval kingdoms faced coups, civil wars, and violence between different factions of elites for political control.
>it's obviously not just nation states that are subject to this problem
Right, but different organizational structures seem to suffer from it more than others. That's why you focus so much on equating cartels with companies, because cartels as a structure suffer from this even worse than nation-states.
Cartels don't operate within the ceremonial legal system, but the real system of state rules (ie, "real" law) very much applies to them. But you don't find these laws in a book, they're illegible, as they'd like to remain.
It's not that they sell coke, but that they create the logistical and security conditions required to make the selling of coke in a tribal warzone feasible.
Kind of like a mini-state. You're right - Coke only enforces their contracts. Nevertheless, creating the quasi-state like conditions they create (which is easier than creating a full Republic of Coke!) still vastly outstrips what the actual state in Congo manages to do - which is nothing at all, or actually worse than nothing in many cases.
My point is that when Coke actually spars with governments in flexing their administrative capacity, they almost always win. The Congolese gov can't even get clean water to these people lol
I think a big reason is that the rebel militias who control those areas don't care if Coke comes in, but they do care if the Congolese armed forces do.
Do you think Coke would be successful in selling in Gaza, if Israel followed through on its most extreme inclinations to cut off all imports? How much coke do you think makes it into North Korea? I think maybe the biggest corporations can go head to head with the weakest states, but I'm not sure the example that you've provided is one where they're *sparring*.
You'd want to find a situation where a weak state tried to keep Coke out. Actually, did ISIS allow Coke? Was there an official stance on this? If so, how good a job did Coke do selling in ISIS controlled territory regardless? A quick Google turned up nothing but maybe someone here knows.
>How much coke do you think makes it into North Korea?
Officially? None. In practice? There are a lot of fun articles about the complicated route it flows through into the country, where it's a delicacy and status symbol.
As for ISIS, there's a actually a Pepsi factory in Mosul, idk about Coke though.
>I think a big reason is that the rebel militias who control those areas don't care if Coke comes in
It's not just about armed forced, humanitarians struggle to get basic water and food aid to some of these places.
FWIW, I appreciate your earnestness here, I'm not trying to make too serious of a point, but I do think that different structures and systems do actually produce different outcomes - comparing Coke to the Sinaloa cartel is easy and lazy, but understandable.
I've never read Moldbug. I've only ever heard of him in passing. So maybe he addresses the following criticism, but based on what Scott wrote
"First, the dictator will be checked by a board of directors, who can fire him if he goes crazy"
Seems completely and obviously at odds with the idea that the dictator has to be accountable to no one. All he's done here is create an oligarchy, which will develop competing factions, and then we're right back where we started.
Imagine the poor dictator trying to appease two groups of oligarchs that are fighting against each other, each group publicly claiming that they have the majority of the cryptographic keys to the explosive on the dictator's neck.
(Also he gets anonymous letters every day claiming to be written by the *true* owners of the cryptographic keys, but he has already long ago learned to ignore those.)
Not to put to fine a point on it, but this is why I have never taken anyone more than 25 degrees right of center seriously; and think all non-con/neocon thinkers are clowns (in the traditional;, respectable sense) or larpers (this one is purely derogatory).
There is no universal principle that informs any of those political views other than AnCapism; with the unbeatable unmatchable "fuck you, I've got mine", so you end up tying yourself up in philosophical knots to explain why it's good when my guy does it but it's bad when your guy does it instead of just internalizing desire and becoming a heavenly demon.
Yarvinites love to say "you believe in democracy? that pales in comparison to my idea of implementing clever incentives to maintain aligned dictatorships" and then don't implement clever incentives to align dictatorships
“I have to say, I find the depth of your background information to be obfuscating, rather than illuminating.”
This was in response to Yarvin attempting to cite:
“Drift and Mastery” An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest — The second book by American journalist and political thinker Walter Lippmann. Published in the Fall of 1914
"Then answer the question. What’s so bad about democracy?
To make a long story short, whether you want to call Washington, Lincoln and F.D.R. “dictators,” this opprobrious word, they were basically national C.E.O.s, and they were running the government like a company from the top down.
So why is democracy so bad?
It’s not even that democracy is bad; it’s just that it’s very weak. And the fact that it’s very weak is easily seen by the fact that very unpopular policies like mass immigration persist despite strong majorities being against them. So the question of “Is democracy good or bad?” is, I think, a secondary question to “Is it what we actually have?” When you say to a New York Times reader, “Democracy is bad,” they’re a little bit shocked. But when you say to them, “Politics is bad” or even “Populism is bad,” they’re like, Of course, these are horrible things. So when you want to say democracy is not a good system of government, just bridge that immediately to saying populism is not a good system of government, and then you’ll be like, Yes, of course, actually policy and laws should be set by wise experts and people in the courts and lawyers and professors. Then you’ll realize that what you’re actually endorsing is aristocracy rather than democracy."
While Garett Jone has good arguments for 10% less democracy, this is just bullshitting with wordplay and analogies. We need a CEO dictator because a President is kind of a CEO, if people don't want majoritarianism they must endorse aristocracy. I get that the NYT needs to complete the interview but the fact that they let him get away with this and just move on is disappointing.
Yeah, the fella is pretty winding all over the map and in general verbose.
“Curtis, I feel as if I’m asking you, What did you have for breakfast? And you’re saying, Well, you know, at the dawn of man, when cereals were first cultivated”
Yarvin's biggest problem is overliberal use of the hand-waving operator, also known as magical thinking. At one point he if someone appoints the King, then they would be King. Later there is a board directors with the power to replace crazy Kings. That means the board is King and the King is the Board's Prime Minister.. And who stops he board from going all Hitler? The Market, which means the market is King. The Board is the Market's Privy Council and the Prime Minister the First Lord of the Treasury (member of the council in charge of the purse strings).
So his system is rule by the Market. But markets are sustained by the Law which comes from the State, which is run by the Market. It is fundamentally circular.
Does anyone have an update on Yarvin's imagined "Antiversity"? You'd think this crucial part of his plans would already exist by now considering it's almost been 2 decades since he first said this was the key to whatever it is he wants.
Maybe it already exists, as I imagine semi-conspiracies aren't too googleable. Maybe it exists under a name that isn't associated with Antiversity so I can't find it. Maybe that's what he was doing between the death of his first blog and his return?
Why was this so exciting to him? I got the impression it was somehow connected with his other ideas, but your description doesn't give me any sense of why that would be the case?
Also, the patchwork of city-states is naive. Each state is supposed to attract people so as to maximize profit for its shareholders. But why not just enslave the inhabitants? Yarvin seems to think this would be bad for "business" because you couldn't attract new residents and tourists. But why does he think new residents and tourists are important? Keep people poor and they'll probably have lots of children. North Korea's TFR is below replacement, but still higher than South Korea's. And why can't the city state rely on forced breeding if needed?
The "share holders" could make more money by treating their citizens better? That's debatable. The Kims and the Russian oligarchs seem to be living well enough. And in Yarvin's world, the shareholders can spend their time somewhere pleasant and live off the profits generated by their slave society, like those Russian oligarchs that (used to) spend a lot of time in London.
It's true that if every city-state operated this way then living standards would go down in an objective sense, but if you believe people seek out relative status more than objective comfort, that may not matter. And at any rate, so long as the slave-holding oligarchs can provide something of value to the more enlightened city states, the more enlightened city states have no reason to interfere.
His idea, assuming it's feasible at all (and I don't think it is), is just a recipe for a world full of little dystopian shit holes, with maybe some clean but still dystopian cities thrown in for the lucky few.
I'd hoped to get an early comment in, since this was my first time reading Moldbug in any capacity, but...my god, the profoundly purple prose literally put me to sleep, laptop still humming away. Disappointed, honestly. I'd hoped to find something excitingly taboo and intellectully stimulating (e.g. Steve Sailer-ish) behind the Forbidden Reactionary Curtain, but there's just...nothing there. Perhaps interesting as a world-building exercise for theoretical societies, I guess? This can't possibly be a serious backstop for the current political right, though. Or if it is, there sure seems to be a large inferential distance between posts and praxis. Torturing a flimsy academic cover into justification for the cause celebre du jour is a playbook I expect from the left, not the right. Cross one off the Worthy Opponents To Pay Attention To list, I guess...
(I'll hold out a bit of charity that perhaps Scott is mischaracterizing or nutpicking the source material? Not gonna wade through 11,000 ponderous blog posts myself though, if these are at all a representative sample.)
I can't take Moldbug seriously because close to the beginning of his theory, he's got an impossible board of directors. Where do you get them from? How do you make sure they're properly insulated from both the dictator and the their own possibilities for corruption?
This isn't a spherical cow, this is a hyperspherical cow made of four-sided triangles.
I've never really read Moldbug, but can someone explain to me how having a dictator who's accountable to a board of directors is substantively different from the republican democracy we were founded as? The founders were keenly aware of populist failure modes, that's why they put things like the electoral college in. Judging from this summary, Moldbug seems to be going a long way around to make the simple point that we really just need to return to our (little-r) republican roots. Is that right or do I just not understand his point?
It’s astonishing/disconcerting/[insert your favorite disbelief word] that otherwise smart people have wasted so much time and energy on this bit of incoherent nonsense.
So am I more-or-less right? I honestly have no idea what Moldbug's views are. Judging just from this they don't seem any more incoherent than AI fears, EA drivel, or various woke nonsense that plenty of people seem to enjoy exploring.
Well if I'm right then Moldbug is just advocating for a return to (maybe a tweaked version of) our foundational norms, even if he's using a bizarre framing to do so. It's not clear to me that this is insane. Is the Board of Directors that much different from the ~5% of citizens that were eligible to vote in 1789? His proposal seems to me like a stylized form of plutocracy. That's not *so* nutty.
My reading is that he’s advocating for a dictator but constrained by a BoD that had no actual power. The 5% of the voters were real power; the “dictator” also agreed to abide by their vote.
“Judging just from this they don't seem any more incoherent than AI fears, EA drivel, or various woke nonsense.”
In the spirit of not letting a good observation go to waste, yes! Exactly, and amazingly on purpose same people who seriously discuss “intelligence explosion kills all” also seriously discuss “Stalin, but with a brave Politburo this time”.
Thanks. I tend to think that all of this is the fault of the internet. It lowered the barriers to entry for punditry and so society got flooded with a bunch of bad ideas. As bad as academia can sometimes be, we really do benefit from having some form of ideological gatekeeping.
I wonder - do you think the recent politicization of Universities is somehow downstream of their loss of gatekeeping power? Maybe they felt their cultural cachet slipping away and responded with a weird kind of ideological doubling-down. Pre-internet they were liberal but still reasonable. Maybe they moved ultra-progressive in a bid to find new ideological territory to own.
Internet and more specifically the attention economy business model (thank you Mrs Sandberg, we’re all leaning in now, over the counter while bravely taking it all in). One specific thing that also messed up the units is the conversion of students into pampered customers, complete with the servants’, I mean, “teachers”, evaluation forms, God forbid little Johnny finds the class too demanding. It’s hard to keep one’s gatekeeping power when one’s salary depends on not keeping it.
Moldbug thinks the populist elements at the founding are already too populist; he thinks the slide from small-r republican roots was inevitable from the moment the founders put even a hint of democracy in the system.
I'm not sure if he'd actually endorse this specific example, but I think the closest version of the founding to his vision is if Washington became president for life, there was no Congress, and the electoral college wasn't elected but rather seats on it were for sale to the highest bidder.
Huh, ok. Thanks. Yeah that seems a little ... extreme. I wouldn't say insane though. It at least gestures towards things that are legitimate problems, even if that particular solution is a little nutty.
So does he dislike the founding version of America because it was already terrible, or because he views it as inevitable that it would *become* terrible? Like if we could have somehow kept the franchise limited to 5% of the population would he be ok with that? Or does he view any kind of representative legislature as fundamentally bad?
I'm not sure; he often writes as if even the slightest amount of democracy is basically poison, but I'm not sure if that's just because he sees it as an inevitable ratchet.
I think probably the former, but I'd defer to someone who's read his writing more recently than 12 years ago, which is the last time I paid much attention.
That is the sanewashing of his views but I think he actually just wants to be king. There is a related strain of thought that looks at Lee Kuan Yew and Deng Xioaping and imagines society would be better off if we could have a dictator like that but forgets about all of the downsides and less ideal dictators.
All these ideas are pretty dumb. I guess it's worth a little time discussing them because he's popular, but most of his ideas reveal that he has very little insight into human nature. Political parties don't fail to arm their members because those members are more useful unarmed; they do so because they follow a certain culture and belief system they were raised with, combined with a non-partisan justice system that disincentivizes them from stoking violence. Humans want to act in ways that align with their morals but also respond to incentives. Yarvin takes an overly cynical view of humans but also fails to take into account how they would realistically respond to incentives.
The idea that you could have ultimate power resting in a single person without any struggle for power is preposterous. Even if one or two generations of elites don't struggle for ultimate power, they will always be incentivized to struggle against each other. The whole premise rests on cryptographic-controlled weapons? What happens when one board member manufactures a bunch of his own weapons in secret? Why would anyone think that a system of government completely isolated from the anger of its population be more incentivized to act in their interest? Was Yarvin 12 when he wrote all this?
Nothing he suggests could possibly be better than a system of decentralized political power combined with laws that protect individual rights by due process.
Still, I appreciate the analysis for displaying the many ways that his original analysis contradicts everything MAGA believes in.
Another difference between a corporation and a state is that a corporation has a clear utility function -- to increase the value of their shares. Now, often it is hard to know beforehand which action will have the greater EV for shareholders. Disney does not need much justification about why it is not producing porn with all the IP it owns, it can simply point at its brand as a family friendly business and claim that going rule 34 with Bambi would harm its bottom line. So different companies can smuggle in non-monetary terms into their utility function and plausibly claim that these are just instrumental goals. But at the end of the day, the forces of the market judge the economic merits of these commitments -- if Disney was wrong and porn had 1000x the market size of Hollywood, then some porn company would just buy up Disney.
For a state, things are not that simple -- one of the main tasks of democracy is to judge between competing interests and either pick one side or introduce a compromise.
If Moldbug prefers that the state is owned by the board of directors and their utility function is just the total worth of the state, then exhibit A would be the "Congo Free State". It was the private property of King Leopold II. With the backing of the other European nations, he was rather secure in his position, so he did not require brutal subjugation simply to stay in charge. Instead, he decided that the best way to monetize his property was to extract rubber, and that the best way to maximize the extraction would be to terrorize the population.
Likewise, while a state run to maximize its bottom line would not genocide the Jews but try to make better use of their geniuses, there is little to stop that state from repeating Aktion T4, when the Nazis decided to murder people with mental handicaps.
Or perhaps NRX Stalin would be able to convince his board of directors that the USSR would benefit more from the industry it could buy from the grain shipments than from keeping a few millions of Ukrainians alive.
In each case, you can argue that the policy was actually inefficient, that Leopold would have gained more rubber by having fewer mutilations, or that the people killed in T4 could have been put to simple jobs which made them net-positive, or that the USSR would have benefited more from Ukrainian peasants than industry, but I very much prefer to unconditionally condemn atrocities (as well as an utilitarian can, anyhow) instead of having to find something economically sub-optimal with them.
This! All the way! One of the points of democracy, and protests, and actual participation is to have asome way (however imperfect) to try to convince other people to care about the things you care about, and to come up with a compromise on values. Having large shareholders control everything is a recipe for them completely ignoring the things that low- and non-share-owning population cares about - and often just through pure ignorance, even if they theoretically do not mind throwing the rubes a bone. I think there is some value in seeking a system that better divorces a democratic value-setting process from a technocratic/meritocratic value-maximization process, to avoid wishful thinking from influencing the actual policies too much, and to make it easier to deal with hard tradeoffs, but democratic control over the value function is essential.
He always said that the joint-stock corporate design is his ideal, but he would choose a normal hereditary absolute monarchy over what we have now. He had changed his mind about using populism and democracy long before Trump, in 2010, he wrote The True Election: A Practical Option for Real Political Change, and essentially everything he writes today about regime change can be found there. Since then he hasn't changed his views on any subject except for patchwork, actually almost everything in Gray Mirror is recycled from UR. To this day he criticizes Republicans for not "passing the tests", mainly for not designing a new government before the election, or at least afterward. He endorsed Biden because in The True Election he wrote: "When you try to defeat Democrats by electing Republicans, you’re trying to drown a fish.
It is with Democratic actors in the show, as at present, that Washington languishes and looks weak. Conclusion: if a true election is not yet possible, do your best to keep the Democrats in office."
"A few years later, [Sam Altman] gave into temptation, tried to turn [OpenAI} into a normal profit-focused company, and failed, because the structure he designed was really good."
Perhaps, but your cited link only reports that Sam Altman *claims* that he's decided to let the non-profit board control the company. And this is the Sam Altman who was fired by the *last* non-profit board, reortedly for blatantly lying to them. OK, maybe it was the previous board that was the lying liars, but I'm kind of skeptical on that and I have a strong suspicion that what Altman has established is another semi-captive board of directors which rubber-stamps the CEO" with a veneer of non-profitability.
I would, at very least, hold off on canonizing him as "one of the all-time greats" just yet.
As for Moldbug selling out, was Winston Churchill "selling out" when he supported Joseph Stalin in 1941? Pre-1941 Churchill was not at all shy about (correctly) calling out Soviet Communism for its past evils and its potential for even greater evils in the future, and while he didn't have as explicit a utopian manifesto as Mencius Moldberg I think he had a reasonably clear idea as to what good government would look like and it was Definitely Not That.
Nor did Churchill make his support for Stalin in any way conditional on the Soviet Union setting up institutional safeguards against future Stalinist evil.
It is certainly plausible that Moldbug believes that right-wing populism is Very Bad but that left-wing wokeism is Even Worse. I'm kind of on the fence on that front myself, and I don't think I am the only one. And it is also plausible that Moldbug doesn't believe that wokeism has yet been defeated, that its future defeat is contingent on continued vigorous support for the lesser evil that is presently leading the fight against the woke. Churchill didn't pull his support for Stalin after the US entry into the war, or after Stalingrad or Kursk or even Normandy.
And the strongest argument against continuing to support Trump as the "lesser evil", the one that is decisive for me, is that Donald Trump tried to openly subvert the democratic process in 2020 and 2021. To me, that is *absolutely* beyond the pale. But Moldbug is in the rare position of honestly saying he never cared about the democratic process in the first place, so there's no hypocrisy in his ignoring that now.
So I'm going with probably not a "sell-out", just wrong. And wrong in the way Moldbug has always been wrong (even if it is an interesting thought experiment).
My god, that's a lot of words without ever addressing the elephant in the room that Trump is not, in fact, a dictator. And contrary to all these turgid fantasies, unlikely to become one. I would bet a good deal of money on him being out of office in January 2029 (at the latest).
Scott's writing has taken a real downturn with this new administration. It's increasingly difficult to see what separates it now from the rest of the knee jerk hysterical left wing slop that's plastered all over Substack.
The quality of the writing is still in the top tier, sure. But the substance is increasingly generic.
Between Trump and the whole AGI Doomsday nonsense it's increasingly hard to take "rationalists" seriously when there's such an obvious inability here to think in any sort of sober manner about either of those topics.
I’d say Occam’s razor suggests Yarvin’s change is just due to mood affiliation. History has shown even the brightest and most innovative thinkers are susceptible to it. Yarvin isn’t one of the brightest and most innovative thinkers (I’m not calling him stupid, but there are many far more brilliant people who’ve fallen in line behind bad regimes for mere tribal reasons; I would never have pegged him as one of those rarefied few that is impervious to such forces).
Scott, I searched and searched this post, looking for any citations of Curtis repudiating the things you say he's repudiated. Also, he endorsed Harris in 2024, just as he endorsed Biden in 2020. You claim, without evidence, that these were tongue-in-check endorsements, but he explained his rationale straightforwardly in several podcast interviews.
So what you're saying is... true neoreaction has never been tried?
In all seriousness, I think people like Scott who are attracted to neoreaction just have very different values from the rest of us:
> But these are usually ones like Meta where the CEO has done an incredible job proving his judgment again and again
I personally wouldn't call someone that has multiple giant wikipedia articles full of controversies (including enabling a genocide) someone with incredible judgement, but hey, agree to disagree.
>someone that has multiple giant wikipedia articles full of controversies (including enabling a genocide)
My first reaction to this was to say that Mark Zuckerberg "enabled" the Rohingya genocide in the same way that whoever invented trains "enabled" the Holocaust. But on reflection, that's actually giving the accusation too much credit -- at least it's actually true that the Holocaust would probably have killed far fewer people if the Nazis had no trains. If Facebook hadn't existed, the Rohingya genocide probably wouldn't have been slowed down at all.
A piece released today that portrays Yarvin and likeminded figures as having translated the archaeofuturist ideas of Guillaume Faye, of French New Right infamy.
What do others make of that portrayal?
"Yarvin’s neocameralist blog posts never mentioned Faye—but his blueprint for post-democracy, elite rule, and managed decline echoed archeofuturism’s core."
What does this moldbug/yarvin guy do that he has so much time on his hands to come up with these d&d campaign inspired philosophies and publish them? Is he some kind of inheritance baby that doesn't work or something? I presume he's an adult with responsibilities of some kind, right?
Corporations are kept in check by people taking their money elsewhere. They are incentivized to keep their customers or lose them. At the level of the nation, exit is not as easy. And Moldbug in particular, does not believe in emigration. He sees it as theft of state property.
Without facing the consequences of the power of exit, corporations will behave badly. Nations too. Even w/ a board.
Also his love of Caesar led Rome is frankly retarded, as the Republic created the glory of Rome and the true decline and fall of the Rome begins at the Rubicon. Most if not all cultural achievements came during the republic or as the last rich vestiges of it coasting on momentum as Augustus put it to work to mythologized his power (e.g. Virgil)
I enjoyed the piece as a review, but I don’t think it is very insightful. Growing up in the 80’s thru the aughts it was possible to see the US as tolerant of a much wider range of views. Post-2020(?) publicly having ever publicly espoused an eclectic views seems to invite be the first up against the wall (or at least employment issues).
Simpleton: dictatorships are bad; Mid: actually, under unique and completely unrealistic conditions dictatorships are cool; Jedi: dictatorships are bad
Simpleton: dictatorships are bad; Mid: actually, under unique and completely unrealistic conditions dictatorships are cool; Jedi: dictatorships are bad
Personally, I'm an American, and we Americans haven't done kings for the last 249 years.
New Yarvin has mostly dropped the king talk and switched to proposing an imperial president like FDR but moreso. I agree it would be extremely un-aesthetic for America to have a king (even though kings are generally aesthetically great).
The Roman Republic didn't do kings either, that's why the 'king' of the new empire was called an emperor.
Well, that, and the fact that Rome was definitely an empire in the classic sense.
https://acoup.blog/2019/11/22/collections-why-are-there-no-empires-in-age-of-empires/
Plus, they invented the word. Therefore the Roman Empire is the type specimen of what an empire is.
Apparently they did not use the word at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_emperor
[I looked it up because I remembered that Augustus took the title of Princeps.]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperium
>The title imperator later was exclusively held by the emperor, as the commander of the armed forces.
They used "Imperium Romanum" for Roman Empire. "Empire" is derived from "imperium".
But most emperors worked with the Senate. The senatorial families had a lot of wealth and power, and most emperors couldn't afford to piss them off.
Emperor comes from imperator, which is "one considered worthy of commanding Romans". It was an accolade given by the troops.
Unsurprisingly it wasn't the title most used by Augustus. He used Princeps, or "principal", i.e. the Head, or Most Important, or First. We get prince from that.
But that's dancing around the point, which is how do you have an office that gets stuff done in time but still constrain it?
The parliamentary system gives the elected party significant power when they achieve a majority and has had decent success around the globe. It just isn't fashionable amoung pseudo intellectuals.
Yes, the general inclination of intellectuals is to postulate "If I were absolute dictator and could change human nature this is what I would do."
The other game is punditing about the ins and outs of deal-making in parliaments, but those people aren't as likely to publish manifestos.
Is saying “Yes, Minister” as obnoxious as “OK Boomer”?
>The parliamentary system gives the elected party significant power when they achieve a majority and has had decent success around the globe.
Agreed. While there are advantages and disadvantages to every system, the parliamentary system _does_ have the advantage of "votes of no confidence" for removing the prime minister (analogous to what Moldbug's board could do) more easily than the American system does. And parliaments actually exist, and at least sort-of work, not obviously in a worse way than other systems.
One other peripheral point: All of the discussions about factions that I've seen in the comment section for this post seem to disregard _scale_. (writing from the USA) Factions on the scale of 300,000,000 people can't really avoid being crude oversimplifications. We the people cannot possibly hear all of each others' detailed views.
A parliament (or senate) on the scale of Dunbar's number typically will still break up into factions - but at least there is a chance to _hear_ each others' views.
That is what constitutions are supposed to do. The Supreme Court makes rulings on what is or is not constitutional. In this way it "speaks" for the constitution, which cannot do so for itself being just words on paper. Courts can issue court orders, much as the president can issue presidential orders.
Suppose the Supreme Court finds some action by the president is unconstitutional and orders than it be stopped and the president decides to ignore it. Suppose the Court then ups the ante by declaring the president to be in contempt of the Constitution and orders that the president be placed under house arrest until such time as he agrees to comply. It then sends copies of the order to Sec. Def,, all the Service chiefs, Joint Chief, and the regional operational commanders calling upon them to fulfill their oaths.
The president also swore an oath to support the Constitution. That is, he acknowledged that the Constitution is his superior. An order from the Constitution thus would override the orders of any subordinate, including the president.
What I outline is a very provocative action the Court could take (I think) in the event of a constitutional crisis. I would note that this did not happen during two previous constitutional crises (the one about Indian removal when Jackson was president, and the one in 1937 when FDR threatened to neutralize the Court with his court packing scheme. In the first case the Court let the matter slide because it wasn't seen as important the other two branches were under the president's control, and he had won big majorities in his two elections.
In the second case the Court backed down with the "stitch in time that saved nine" and decided to not oppose elements of the New Deal they previously would have. Again, this was because of the enormous majorities the president had in Congress and in his election victories.
As for the present, a constitutional crisis has not yet happened. I suspect the Court will not push the issue as long as Republicans control Congress no matter how provocative Trump acts. But if the economy goes into recession and Dems win back both houses of Congress next year, then the situation changes. Democrats will hold one branch of government, an unpopular lame duck will hold another, with the Court in the deciding position. The Court in such a position might be more willing to play hardball.
The Constitution is explicit that impeaching the President is up to the House of Representatives. Not sure where this notion of the Supreme Court doing it came from.
Putting some sanction on the president for disregarding the constitution is not the same as removal from office. Impeachment is permanent and a much more extreme response to a transgression.
A contempt order is completely reversible. As soon as he acknowledges the authority of the constitution and agrees to comply with the order, the sanction is lifted. It is a much milder sanction, akin to a slap on the wrist.
He was called and emperor because "imperator" was the chant used by the army to endorse a leader. It was, officially, a spontaneous endorsement.
If you're going to do kings, do Charles II. Moderately decadent but also moderately capable, which 21st century America seems to be. Interested in having fun, but also interested in science. And with a diverse heritage!
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/dec/10/charles-2-art-power-queens-gallery-buckingham-palace-review
I saw that exhibition!
"... moderately capable, which 21st century America seems to be. Interested in having fun, but also interested in science. And with a diverse heritage!"
So America should appoint Musk as king?
:-)
Pot-aye-to, pot-ah-to.
The President was intended to be a constrained monarch. They even considered just calling the office "king", but decided not to.
The people want a king.
Democrats have lost all credibility and work the "high and low against the middle" game, so they seem simultaneously like a corrupt oligarchy and a bunch of whining victims. The establishment Republicans are little better. The jig is up on representative Democracy. It's now clear to all (except upper middle class striver establishment-worshippers) that the entire political class serves the financial and governmental oligarchy and not only doesn't represent the constituents but actually despises them.
The people have lost God, they have lost Church, they have lost Civil Society, they have lost Local Control. The corrupt federal government is all they have left to care about. They want, they NEED, the aesthetic of a king.
Trump is giving the people what they want. He is Golden, he is famous, he is superhuman. He is commanding, he is imperious, he is entertaining. He dresses in a uniform/costume.
Americans may not want the Title "King," but they want a King all right, and they just chose one.
Trump is Robin Hood/King Richard the Lionhearted. Democrats are Evil King John. The problem for Democrats is: 1) they don't understand that the people want a king; and 2) once they figure it out and start running more charismatic men for President, the people will correctly see those men as actors fronting for the conniving nobles.
Of course the Republican "kings" are actors fronting for the oligarchy too. But they SEEM far more kingly, and will be in power for the forseeable future.
Did you just delete my comment? I thought it was pretty good! I was agreeing with you that kings are aesthetically great and arguing that Americans want that King aesthetic more than we think they do.
His Purple Mountain Majesty doesn’t have enough of a ring to it?
Well let's see if putting enough gold shit in the Oval Office will do the trick.
Well, Rome didn't do kings for about half a millennium, so you don't need to let that hold you back.
"Rex?! I'm afraid you have me confused with someone else. I'm Princeps!"
The person that tried to bring kings back to Rome in his own person was assasinated for it (Ceasar), so I would posit that you do indeed neet to let that hold you back.
There is a reason that Augustus intentionally skewed the title of king. Instead calling himself "Princeps" (first citizen), and "imperator" (commander). If the title of Emperor strikes you as monarchical, that's only because that became part of its meaning over time.
If you want to introduce monarchy to a republic it is better to adopt a nominally repulican sounding title and to become a de-facto monarchy over time.
Yes, of course they would use a different title, just like North Korea calls its monarch "General Secretary of the Communist Party" (and like imperial Rome didn't like the title "Rex"), but a king by any other title is just as sweet.
One of the interesting side effects was that succession in the Roman Empire was an even nastier problem than in a normal monarchy.
They never formally abolished the republic, and a republic does not need a succession protocol, right? After all, the imperator is just "first among equals", a really capable commander and administrator...
... which also meant that people who considered themselves really capable commanders and administrators could always take the gamble and make a grab for power, and if they succeeded, they would be legitimate.
And this was still a problem with the Palaiologos-Komnenos rivalry when the Empire finally ended in 1453.
Yes, few of the emperors were blood descendents of previous ones.
The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese - Augustus being the proverbial second mouse in that case.
I don't know exactly wo counts as a mouse in this (Either Gracci? Marcius? Catilini?). But at the very least Sulla is one, making Augustus 3rd at best.
No, Sulla isn't one. He resigned of his own free will; he didn't want to be a permanent ruler, just somebody who got the Republic back on track.
Only after being taking the office of dictator indefinitely. He essentially got the cheese already and just let it lie after nibbling for a bit.
Not kings in name, but Americans sure do love their political dynasties, and you invest your head of government (even pre-Trump) with a whole lot more power than other democracies. American democracy just never got that big reset like e.g. Germany that allowed them to re-think everything from the ground up, and Trump II is revealing and exploiting the cracks.
Germany got at least two resets: from the Kaiser to the Weimar Republic; and from the Nazis to modern West Germany. Arguably, the second reset was bigger in terms of political institutions, because the new federal republic was deliberately designed to avoid a repeat of the fall of the Weimar Republic.
> the new federal republic was deliberately designed to repeat the fall of the Weimar Republic.
Is that some kind of POSIWID argument, or what makes you say that?
It’s more POSIWIWDF
>POSIWIWDF
Too obscure for me, please un-acronymize.
> Too obscure for me, please un-acronymize.
Well you started it.
It’s my own initialism. The purpose of the system is what it was designed for. It was deliberately designed to not produce the Nazis again.
My vaguely remembered history of how the Grundgesetz came about makes me say that.
First, the allies had some demands. Second, the Germans drafting the thing also had some ideas.
You can find a rundown of the central ideas online pretty easily. You can start with the 'constructive vote of no confidence', if you need a hint.
Edit: I realize I made a typo in the original comment. The Grundgesetz was designed to avoid a repeat.
The second reset is usually called Stunde Null, literally Hour Zero.
A competent Prime Minister, with a unified majority party, is often vastly more powerful than a competent US President, due to direct control of legislation. An incompetent President is more powerful than an incompetent Prime Minister though, which is the Trump problem.
Also, a unitary state's government has vastly more power than the government of a federation, by definition.
I'd assume only an American could make such a comment lumping all "other democracies" together as though they're interchangable, yet you don't seem to be one. It's quite bizarre.
> you invest your head of government (even pre-Trump) with a whole lot more power than other democracies
I don't think that's the case. The executive branch may exercise more power in America than other countries, perhaps because it's hard to change laws as a result of bicameralism, Senate filibuster, and presidential veto (another aspect of more presidential power), so administrations gets around it by changing how they interpret the laws, and Congress can't easily make the laws unambiguous that they can't do that.
But in parliamentary democracies, the prime minister is usually also the leader of the leading party in the parliament, so he usually gets his way in both the executive and the legislative branches (also because in many countries there's more party loyalty in parliament than in the US, perhaps because usually the party, rather than primary elections, decide who get to be nominated by the party for MP in the next election). So in America there's much more inertia because government is often divided, and even when it's not, the president can't easily get a filibuster-proof majority in Congress for whatever he wants.
It also seems to me that the American government contains much more independent agencies that the president can't (directly) order around.
In adulthood, one often realizes that the American instinct for why kings are bad is founded on facile propaganda. Why were the grievances of the Continental Congress King George III's fault when Parliament okay'd everything he did? What was so bad about him specifically (aside from the hemophilia, anyway)?
The Continentals would have pointed out (and did!) that they had no representation in that Parliament. So their grievance was with Empire more than Monarchy.
George Washington could have been a king afterwards, though. Seems like a better outcome than president Adams and Jefferson.
George and Martha's children were all Martha's by previous marriage. Even if he had wanted the job of monarch (he didn't), he was ill-suited to be the founder of a primogeniture dynasty.
What would a real monarchy be without succession disputes?
But then you run into the aforementioned "lead poisoning" problem again.
(His dentures were partly made of lead)
It was almost entirely Parliament. George III was quite constrained.
The Zeitgeist for a short while was that the beef was with Parliament — America was loyal to the King but required its own legislature (having been denied representation in Parliament), sort of presaging what eventually happened with Canada and Australia among others. When that got no traction in Britain it became clear that full independence had to be the goal, and that meant the beef was transferred to the monarch.
Seems like they were eager to transfer the beef to the entire concept of monarchs, despite it having little to do with their problems.
Not until after the war, for sure. They were really eager to get help from the King of France, both for aid in the war and for trade agreements afterwards.
I think was also a factional thing: the Jeffersonians were big supporters of the French revolution while the Federalists were absolutely horrified.
Sure, but that was another decade out. When our theorists (or before them, those of the Scottish Enlightenment) were talking about how protecting inalienable rights was why governments were instituted among men, I don’t think they especially argued that monarchy itself was a root problem. The Declaration’s beef with George III was very specifically laid out, and in another timestream Britain and/or George might get have been much more agreeable. (Or much worse!) As others have pointed out, the President might well have been called King, and even now is a sort of uneasy amalgam of a PM and a king.
Or maybe not. It has always struck me how comparatively minor such things as the Stamp Act and the
“Intolerable” Acts were, compared to the indignities the Federal government inflicts cats on us now. Careful reading reveals the understanding that these were seen not as terrible themselves so much as the thin end of the wedge, an attempt by Britain to demonstrate that they could do anything to us they pleased, after which they would.
When I visited the USA, I got the impression that Americans hate parliaments - at least the word, as much as they hate kings. I did a guided tour of one of the state capitols and when I asked if that room was where the parliament gathered, the guide was as horrified as if I had asked if that was the king's palace and proceeded to tell me how they have a house and a senate but no parliament.
I'd guess it doesn't particularly matter what he personally supported and what he merely signed off on (and who, thousands of miles across an ocean in the age of sail, would be able to tell the difference?). He was, by virtue of being an unelected guy on another continent bossing them around, the perfect symbol of the grievances. And symbols, particularly during a war, are important.
The (I think entirely coincidental) fact that he ascended the throne in 1760 and the taxes started in 1764 just made the symbolism overwhelming.
The taxes started in 1764 because the war whose debts they were paying off ended in 1763, so it was definitely coincidental with the start of George III's reign.
I have always wondered how satisfied Americans would have been to a response to "no taxation without representation" being "OK, here's 38 seats in the House of Commons".
38 in around 596 wouldn't be close to proportional in terms of population (there were about 2 million in the 13 colonies, and about 8 million in Great Britain, so 150-ish would be fair) but the idea of proportional allocation was not accepted in British thinking until the 1860s.
38 was chosen for a reason: it's two per colony to match the two per English county for 26, and then New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Charleston, Baltimore, and Norwalk (CT) would each be parliamentary boroughs with two MPs for another 12.
Those are all the cities with 10,000 population (at the first US census of 1790, but they were all substantial in the 1760s), i.e. a size big enough to have a restricted franchise still comprise a number of voters measured in the hundreds, ie too many to easily bribe. A smaller town/city would inevitably mean either a franchise of a tiny group of people (too easy to turn into a rotten borough) or a broadly-democratic franchise, which the aristocratic government of Britain was deadset against.
I read in A Great Improvisation that part of the dance Franklin had to do in getting aid from France was to convince them that various offers, which I gather were on the table, for Parliamentary representation and/or vaguely Dominion-like status, would not be accepted by the colonists. Or sometimes to convince them they they might be.
By 1779, sure. But that's in the "too late" category. Do it, not as a concession under duress, but because you actually want to treat Brits in America as Brits just like Brits in Britan, and make the change in 1765, and that may well be a different story.
It's only long-term workable once you have steamships and transatlantic telegraph, so the question is whether you can hold it together for 70 years until those technologies kick in.
Yeah, my point is that the Brits were making offers that at least some Brits in America were taking seriously, even after Saratoga. Americans really did think of themselves as maltreated Brits until very shortly before Lexington, maybe only a decade or so (as you say). I don't know how similar they were to your proposal (except of course for being a dozen years later), though my memory is that they were more like Dominion status. I also don't know how they would have been received by the American populace, as I assume they were addressed to Congress and probably did not get released to the press.
Adam Smith proposed political union of the United Kingdom and its colonies in Wealth of Nations (1776, months before the rupture became irreversible) -- and correctly envisioned that given the rapidly growing population in North America such an arrangement would inevitably move the imperial center of gravity westward.
Ben Franklin wrote in 1760 that whichever European power controlled the Mississippi and St. Lawrence rivers that control access to the fertile middle of North America would dominate the world by 1900.
In 1778, the Carlisle commission proposed to give the colonies representation in Parliament, but also offered some other things. Colonial legislatures would get more power in exchange for British representation in those legislatures.
Henry Laurens wrote that if this had been proposed earlier, “there can be no doubt that the People of American would have joyfully embraced the proposition.” In 1778, the United States had already declared its independence. As Laurens wrote to Carlisle:
> My Lord, you are come hither for the very modest purpose of persuading a free and independent nation to surrender their rights and privileges: You are confessedly incompetent to the business of subduing them and are therefore to proceed by what you call reasoning.
I suspect that representation in Parliament would have taken a lot of the steam out of the independence movement, but that somewhat depends on how much influence the representatives had, since as a minority they could always be outvoted.
https://archive.org/stream/lettersofdelegat10smit#page/124/mode/2up
In 1776, there were about 160 county-level units in British North America. The county-colony equivalence wouldn't have been enticing, especially for Virginia.
The fundamental grievance was a disagreement over the constitutional structure of the Empire, namely the degree to which the colonies were and should be subordinate to the central government of the United Kingdom. The Patriot position was that the colonies were semi-independent statelets in personal union with the UK, with their own separate legislatures and administrations but sharing a monarch and generally following London's lead on foreign policy, more-or-less like a Dominion in the 20th century. The Tory position was that the colonial governments were fully subordinate to the London government and could be overruled at will. Both positions had adherents on either side of the pond, hence why I'm calling them "Patriot" and "Tory" rather than "American" and "British".
The more specific procedural objection was that the laws and policies that formed the object-level grievances were being approve by the "wrong" legislatures, i.e. by the Westminster Parliament, not variously and separately by Massachusetts General Court, the Virginia General Assembly, the Pennsylvania Provincial Council, and so on.
This is also why giving the Colonies representation in Westminster wasn't an option, aside from the 6+ week travel time. The Colonies were already represented in their own legislatures, more conveniently situated and more responsive to their interests, which had been operating for some time and seemed to them perfectly serviceable to them. A relatively small number of seats in Westminster seemed a poor substitute, for similar reasons to the desire for Home Rule among many in Ireland in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In the last few years before 1776, a lot of people in the Patriot camp in the American Colonies saw Lord North, then Prime Minister, as the main villain and placed a lot of their hopes in the possibility of George III overruling North. They soured on him very hard after two attempts to petition him to intervene (in 1774 and 1775) failed and the second (the "Olive Branch Petition") was met by a proclamation by George III that the colonies were in rebellion which would be suppressed militarily.
The British government has always been averse to checks and balances. It believes in centralized power having power unlimited by anything other than the tradition that there are some things we just don't do.
I was just thinking that, at least from an European point of view, it was smart from Moldbug to talk about kings and monarchs rather than dictators, as the common European still retains the conditioning that a non-constitutional monarch is somehow different from a dictator even though the both can very well have the same powers and govern similarly.
(Sure, the monarch is supposed to be an inherited position, but considering how many dictatorial positions are inherited these days and how often monarchs were just replaced with other monarchs without inheritance due to reasons, that's a bit of a loose marker anyway.)
Then again, Moldbug is not otherwise particularly accessible to Europeans - not due to American expectionalism as such, but since the Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives opens with thought experiments like "whoah, maybe the Founding Fathers weren't all good", which are, uh, less than mind-blowing to those not conditioned with American patriotic mythology in the first place.
Europeans have a familarity-breeds-contempt attitude to royalty as well. We're not getting all our information on Kingship from Lord of the Rings.
I was talking about monarchy in the historical sense and the specific difference between monarchy and dictatorship, not the modern constitutional monarchies.
That seems to apply to modern absolute monarchs as well. People often don’t see the monarchs of the emirates as dictators, and definitely not as bad as dictators.
Do they not? I'm genuinely surprised to hear that. I have never heard it expressed any other way (UK).
At best it's "dictators we have to keep sweet"
Well, yiu can know about both kinds of monarchy. Dictatorship as well,if you are Spanish.
The new right is giving the left a run for its money in the game of Who Can Diss America's Founding Myths Hard Enough?
But the occasional populist smaller government strongman President is as all American as the $20 bill.
You didn't ban the word, just the thing. Rome called their kings emperors for the same reason. Don't worry, I'm sure you'll find a name that makes you feel even more American than you did under the old system.
"Cincinnatus" would be a particularly amusing title.
I thought at first your title was about the sold-out crowd at Harvard Monday evening....
And nobody even tried to beat up Mencius Moldbug the way back during the Great Awokening, Antifa ski bums tried to beat up Charles Murray for speaking at Middlebury in Vermont and instead accidentally hospitalized the woman Middlebury professor arguing against Murray.
What's wrong with the new generation that they won't use violence to silence intellectuals?
I mean, applying incredible violence and oppression to protestors does in fact disincentivize them.
A basic facet of left-right divide can be elicited by the question 'is it worse for private citizens to coercively silence other private citizens, or for the government to coercively silence dissenters?'
The normal state of nature is the latter. Occasional bursts of extreme liberalism can make the former temporarily possible.
We have been exiting from one of those brief periods back to the norm, and whether people are excited by that or upset by it tells you most of what you need to know about their politics.
Do you not believe in even the possibility of a principled defense of free speech?
I’m thinking FIRE or something similar.
Imo shouting down speakers can’t be the answer to any question worth asking. But I reject that this leads me to oppressive state control.
I didn't say either is good, I said, 'which is worse'?
Everyone who got shouted down by campus protestors was in some sense wronged, sure. But almost all of them have massive media presences that reach millions of people, and those shouting-down incidents only brought them more attention, it's not like their ideas were actually lost to the public consciousness or anything.
Whereas the government, with its monopoly on violence, *can* completely disappear speakers and completely outlaw ideas from the public square. To be sure, people will still circulate those ideas underground and in secret, but only at great personal risk and very low volume/fidelity. It's far more dangerous to free speech than angry college kids, or even than ideologically partisan publishers and professors.
I do believe there are policies you can take that maximize free speech under both regimes, and those are good.
What I'm talking about are the subset of policies that drive you towards one or the other of those two polls, which I think describes a lot of general measures around 'how authoritarian is your country'. For those policies, I favor being more liberal even if it means private citizens have some leeway to coerce each other with social pressure and threats, over being more authoritarian and risking the government coercing people with its absolute monopoly on violence and ability to outlaw ideas and disappear dissidents.
This is an entirely backwards take. The principle of rule of law designates the state as having a monopoly on violence, and thus the only actor with the right to coerce anything. A foundational principle of modern democracies is that citizens cannot coerce anyone else.
Yes, exactly!
That's why we don't need to worry too much about private citizens coercing people, because they have extremely limited ability to do it and the government will step in if they step over the line, and if the government is slow about that we can petition them and protest and vote for people who will take care of it. Citizens coercing citizens is *bad*, but it's not *dangerous* on any large scale.
Whereas, the government has a monopoly on violence, meaning no one is above it or in a place to stop it if it starts abusing that privilege. That's why the monopoly on violence comes with stacks and stacks of regulations and limitations, starting with the Constitution and going through the law and police/military regulations and etc., and it's why we want a democratic government accountable to voters, and it's why we all have a sacred duty as citizens to monitor and reign in the government's use of violence - because if we let them slip the democratic and regulatory limitations on their use of power, there is nothing at all stopping them from doing literally anything with that power. It's a massive threat that we have to be constantly vigilant about.
Isn’t old Yarvin just Platonism?
No.
OK but there’s a parallel at least because Plato said the same thing about democracy devolving into tyranny.
That's a very surface level commonality. And a claim that I would expect any intelligent opponent of democracy to make.
Plato thought the Guardians should have no personal property...that's a far cry from CEO kings.
Yes, yes, good thought.
And then you read about the Cardinals of the RC church. Vow of poverty, but live in luxury.
Or Stalin's seventh dacha.
Or how the personal worth of many Congressmen increases after being in office for a while.
The Guardians having no personal property and therefore being obligate ascetics just won't work.
Roman Catholic cardinals are not under a vow of poverty. The only priests with a vow of poverty belong to a religious order (Jesuits, Franciscans, etc.), and if any of those priests become bishops--and cardinals are typically bishops--they are typically released from that vow (since they may have to own property to run their dioceses).
Most of the cardinals weren't even religious order priests to begin with, so they never had a vow of poverty, though their salaries may have been fairly small. And the stuff they use (big houses, cars, etc.) may not necessarily belong to them personally.
It looks like I misremembered some writing I read a couple of decades ago. It must have been written by the abbot of a monastery or something then.
Basically he was contemplating the incongruity of taking a vow of poverty, but then sleeping on silk sheets or something like that.
He was writing in the 14th or 15th century if I remember correctly. Considering I thought him a Cardinal, this may not be correct. For some reason I'm thinking Borgia, but that's even less certain.
It's not really that he thought they "should". It's that he states the only way to keep the political elite from using there power to generate personal wealth was to outright ban them from owning anything at all. A lesson that modern people who talk about "keeping money out of politics" by silly things like campaign finance laws need to learn.
That's not exactly a brilliant analysis. Given a long enough time frame, you can just as easily say that tyranny inevitably devolves into democracy. Nothing lasts forever.
Yarvin's gone through phases. When he started Unqualified Reservations, he was pretty close to being an anarcho-capitalist. He did have some Platonist influences, but a lot of Platonism is in the water supply of the ancap/minarchist intellectual ecosystem, probably by way of Ayn Rand who rather liked Aristotle and Plato but rejected most post-Aristotle mainstream political and moral philosophy. The archipelago and cryptographic board of directors ideas, if I recall correctly, came from this phase of his writings and seemed like attempts to optimize and justify a Snow Crash style ancap world of corporately-governed microstates, while biting the bullet that a statelet with an autocratic CEO accountable only to a board of directors looks an awful lot like a monarchy where the King depends on support from the nobility.
A bit later on, he started citing Thomas Carlyle a bunch and shifting focus to ways to reform existing polities on a larger scale to more autocratic government rather than dissolving them, proposing new government for California or the entire United States. He carried over some ideas about exist being more important than voice and cryptographic weapons being a useful institutional tool, but the archipelago of statelets got deemphasized a lot in favor arguing that Classical Liberalism was where things fundamentally went wrong. You might think of this as his Neo-Jacobite phase, since I think this was when he was talking the most about undoing the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and restoring the Stuarts, with Prince Alois of Lichentstein being his preferred claimant. I think the Antiversity proposal came from this phase.
I haven't followed Gray Mirror, but what I've seen from skimming a couple articles there and what I've heard about it indirectly is that he's moved on to just being fascist. In hindsight, there were some signs of movement in this direction towards the tail end of UR, when he was talking more about 20th century Fascism being a failed last stand against Liberalism, in contrast to his ancap-era stance that Fascism and Soviet-style Communism were convergent failure modes of liberal democratic principles.
Haven't read yet, but I must ask; how does one get through Moldbug's insanely padded, ironic, meandering writing? Is there no one else who wrote it (or possibly, thought it) better?
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I like his writing.
How many words per minute can you read?
A whole lot, I'd guess.
At least on ACX, there's no relationship between post length and popularity - people don't noticeably prefer shorter posts, even when the long posts are very long. I'm surprised by this, but it's been confirmed again and again. Have you noticed the same?
Commenters like longer posts. It gives them more to agree with or to object to.
Lapidary writing isn't that appealing to commenters.
But you write very well, so it’s a pleasure to keep going. I agree with unobserved that moldburg is hard to read, which doesn’t mean he doesn’t have good ideas. Just style.
(I’m not saying he has good ideas either but that style matters).
I imagine that bigger ideas require more words. So while long posts are harder to read, there is more of a payoff for reading them.
Admittedly plenty of writers use a lot of words to say not very much, but if we are comparing posts by a single author, I imagine that author has the same quality threshold for long and short posts, so the reward for reading remains about proportional to the investment.
> bigger ideas require more words
...but this does not yet show that more words implies bigger ideas. There is no guarantee of a payoff to reading more words; and, indeed, Moldbug tends to use more words in order to obfuscate rather than enlighten. It's a deliberate part of his philosophy: he wants a movement built exclusively of a group of people that are not only intelligent, but also willing to slog through deliberate obfuscation, work with it, build on it, thrive in it. It is explicit gatekeeping (and he explains as much in his work): if you are not getting on with his writing, he doesn't want you anywhere near his ideas or his project. You are not a candidate for his board of CEOs; you are one of the masses who are to have no voice or input or control in the neofeudalist structure he proposes.
Compare also Urbit.
But he never gets around to creating a board of CEOs, it's just more words words words.
While that's a decent argument, it's also true that when your idea are muddy, it takes more words to say them.
I've never met anyone who called Wheeler's "Gravitation" an easy read, but those are complex ideas presented clearly. Does Moldbug meet that test? (Sorry, I'm NOT going to read him, as that's not an area of my interest, but the "meta-argument" sort of is.) (From the selected quotes his arguments don't appear to be rigorous, but that could be because he addresses the weaknesses somewhere else.)
The longer posts deserve to be longer though? At least the good ones do. There are cases where I find you kind of meander and don't seem sure yourself what you're getting at. But often it's long because that's the length needed to cross modest Inferential Distances.
I liked it when I read it originally starting in 2009, but in the late 2010s I tried to go back and reread and couldn't stand it. Not sure if I should try again.
I think I would still like his poetry though.
The poetry baffles me most of all. What's the point of being a pro-17th century modernity-hating reactionary and writing poetry that doesn't rhyme???
Rhyme is but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meter.
Ha ha! Excellent!
A real reactionary doesn't just eschew singsong rhyme, but goes full 'rum, ram, ruf' in his verse.
Such as would a common skald? Nonsense. I use only Latinate words & restore to them their original syllable-lengths, therewith to embark upon a purely quantitative hexametre—like the 𝘤𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 masters, not these capering jack-napes that wander about singing for their supper & calling (𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨) themselves poets.
Funny, but if ever there were a poet that Moldbug should hate, it's the guy who acted as Cromwell's secretary.
Haha, good point, but I just think you're objectively wrong that poems need to rhyme to be good.
Anyway, isn't "poetry should rhyme" just lowest common denominator democratic taste?
I tried to get chatgpt to write a poem that didn’t rhyme and it couldn’t do it. Perhaps this is the last creative barrier against total AI takeover?
I think poems have rhymes before the modern age.
Sure, but not uniformly; meter, alliteration and other features mark poetic mode in lots of traditions.
"....I just think you're objectively wrong that poems need to rhyme to be good."
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was built around rhyming.
The dude who wrote Gawain and the Green Knight at around the same time built his poem(s) around alliteration. To illustrate, using Tolkein's translation:
"When the siege and the assault had ceased at Troy,
and the fortress fell in flame to firebrands and ashes,
the traitor who the contrivance of treason there fashioned
was tried for his treachery, the most true upon earth"
Edit: sorry I misread what you were saying. Yes, it seems the high middle ages is when English poetry goes in for rhyme, alliteration being the older model. I forget if Tolkien mentions it ever, but I think he regards the Gawain poet as holding to an older, midlands tradition, which might be a reason Gawain uses the older style. Even if that is Tolkien's view, I don't know if it holds up under current views. I'm leaving the rest of my comment untouched just because...I dunno why? Posterity? But ignore it.
Yes, but old English poetry (Beowulf, the Wanderer, etc) is built around alliteration. My understanding is that ancient Greek poetry was more about meter: dactyllic hexameter is what characterizes epic poetry, if I recall correctly. And ancient Hebrew poetry is characterized by something even more nebulous: matching halves of a line where (usually) the second half-line intensifies and builds on the first half.
I'm not against rhyming, I love Chaucer (more for his zaniness and fart jokes than the rhymes but still...), but I'm just saying someone with an aristocratic attitude to poetry might look at non-rhyming Greek, Latin, biblical, or old English poetry as a less "popular" model than rhyme which is most well known today from pop music.
Well, it's not a requirement. T.S.Eliot wrote some quite good poetry that didn't rhyme. So did Houseman. Rhythm is equally important, and assonance is also significant. If it doesn't use those tools, though, it's prose disguised as poetry. (Which can also be good...just not good poetry.)
Most memorable poetry uses all three tools (though generally one is stressed more highly than the others).
Traditionally, poetry focused on the idea rather than the presentation, is weaker in the use of the tools, because the idea constrains the word choices more tightly.
I mean, I get what you mean about prose disguised as poetry, but I think there are real poetic traditions whose poetry doesn't rhyme, has no distinctive meter, and doesn't use much assonance or alliteration.
Biblical poetry is the example I have read at least something about. Everything I say below is from my (probably poor) memory of Robert Alter, but I think the gist is correct: Biblical poetry is more about a kind of balancing of ideas/metaphors across two halves of a line in a way that naturally grows and develops the idea across and between lines. It also has a distinctive (I forget if it's archaic) vocabulary.
As far as I can tell, biblical writers regarded this as a distinctive mode of speech and writing; I am not sure how early the biblical poems were identified as "chants" ("shirim") but there are definitely indications that these were regarded as different from prose, though obviously "poetry" and "prose" may not be concepts that perfectly map to whatever the ancient Israelites were doing.
Do you mean AE Housman? I can't think of any of his poems that don't rhyme. Do you have a link?
Oh, they don't need to rhyme to be good—just to be poetry.
>Anyway, isn't "poetry should rhyme" just lowest common denominator democratic taste?<
Ever taken a poetry course? I think I was the only one there who attempted to make his output rhyme (...and also one of like three total males, though that's probably unrelated—just a little tip for my fellow ACX brohemians).
Now, you may say "but aren't people taking a poetry class at a university probably not the same as would fall under the 'lowest-common-denominator' umbrella?" Possibly, possibly; I wouldn't know—I've (fortunately) not had to rub shoulders with any lower, if such creatures there truly be.
I have not taken a poetry course, but my guess is, those people are deliberately trying to avoid sounding too pedestrian. The same reason probably no one wrote a limerick.
I think most peoples' interaction with poetry is pop song lyrics, which mostly rhyme.
There's a meme-y Tweet that goes,
As a teacher of poetry
what I can tell you
for sure
is people want poems to rhyme.
They want poems
to rhyme
so bad.
But we won’t
give it to them
LOL
Yarvin claims mid 20th century poetry is one of the greatest cultural products of America. He's a huge Robert Lowell fan.
I remember thinking it was the first right wing writing I'd seen that wasn't either religious nonsense or Iraq War cheerleading, so that was interesting.
By 2017 it was obvious that neoreactionary thought is just window dressing. It served the same purpose as the National Review did for flipping the south from blue to red.
Yeah, I also found him interesting as a non-religious conservative; I also found it valuable to read a conservative who *didn't* concede things like, democracy is good, the civil rights movement was good, etc. as it seemed like a lot of conservatism involved drawing (what seemed to me at the time) arbitrary distinctions about when and whether being more democratic/egalitarian was good or not, and it really made conservative ideas click for me: "oh, comparing gay marriage to interracial marriage won't convince you because you're still not sold on interracial marriage! I get it!"
Though I think Moldbug was actually pro-Iraq war; I remember the guys at My Posting Career characterizing him as a neo con
He is quote enjoyable, I never got the criticism.
Ironic since to me he reads like someone trying to imitate your style, but without the underlying thinking. So it's just a lot of random anecdotes and analogies to obscure a basic point. I guess there's an Unsong style puzzle to be found in interpreting it
Moldbug is very easy to read. Both his and Scotts writing slip down like a spoon of ice cream going down the throat of a hungry man on a hot summers day who just did a killer workout and is desperate to replenish some glucose, water, and cool down.
No accounting for taste, but then we all have people we like to read despite their many flaws. I love reading Ayn Rand, even if I think 85% of her political views are deeply flawed.
You could try asking your favourite AI for summaries?
Back in the olden days, I read Moldbug by myself. Like a caveman. And I liked it.
Seriously. I couldn't even get through this post, and that's not a criticism of the post -- I'm in awe of Scott's ability to go deep. But an article that could be titled, "Autocracy not working out the way reactionary sci-fi article hoped" just doesn't feel like a topic that demands my time.
I tried to read one of his posts once. About 2000 words in I despaired of him ever getting to the point and gave up.
As far as I can tell, his theories are largely a rehash based on this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Political_Survival
Yarvin has added his own speculation regarding how a society can avoid the competition for power, but his analysis of what the problem is appears to be based on their analysis.
I can recommend it. The ideas there have been rather influential in how academics interpret the dynamics of political power.
I enjoy it
> Is there no one else who wrote it (or possibly, thought it) better?
Not all ideas are equally easy to express in all languages, metaphorical truth survives better in parables and rants. The apa guidelines make it hard to references dreams.
I enjoyed Moldbug's writing as much for the style as the ideas. And he was utterly hilarious. In contrast, Curtis Yarvin is boring as hell. That's further evidence he went commercial.
I think there are two major issues with Moldbug's general proposal. First, the focus on the national interest is inherently populist, so it's unsurprising he'd sell out to populists. Second, rather than actually acting according to the nation's interest, he proposes making the nation a profit-maximizing corporation, but that gives you some China/Silicon Valley/London hybrid rather than promoting the national interest.
I'm using "national interest" here to mean something like being a strong prosperous powerful nation of exactly the sort that probably has high shareholder value, in the hopes that this is most faithful to what Moldbug wants.
Right, and then it reduces to the China/Silicon Valley/London hybrid.
I'm saying that I model Moldbug as thinking that turning the country into a China/SV/London hybrid *is* in the national interest. In fact, what do you mean by national interest that's opposed to that?
Some Scandinavia/China hybrid with less immigration, less exports and more corruption taking the place of some of the credentialism would probably be in the national interest. Like a more cozy and less export-oriented society.
But the point is you shouldn't be promoting the national interest either, it's like a lower bound, not a goal.
I assumed what you were getting at was some kind of critique of post-national economic zone style governance, but fail to see how China fits into this model. For all the criticisms of China, it is still very much a Han country.
I don't think immigrants from other ethnicities *have* to be a problem, and conversely this means not getting such immigrants doesn't *have* to be a big benefit. My concern is more that China has a pretty export-oriented economy, which is promoting other nation's wants, rather than the national needs.
(Obviously it's far from purely export-oriented etc.)
I find your comment really confusing. What political program doesn't have, at least in principle, the national interest at its heart? Doesn't it just represent the collective shared interests of (at least) a majority of the population? Isn't it the motivating force for forming a nation in the first place?
Maybe I should add, more corruption because corruption is when the local decisionmakers diverge from the responsibilities the higher decisionmakers' delegated to them for personal advantage. Since higher decisionmakers are more central and know less about the local conditions, they can't really have a meaningful opinion on what's going on locally. So that's gonna give you the very conservative avoid-bad-stuff-don't-care-about-good-stuff policy.
Obviously if the corruption gets diverted into benefitting some bullies or gangsters or whatever, that's an issue. So the corruption still needs to be kind of controlled and monitored.
Why have corruption to allow deviating from the rules set at the higher levels when those don't work well for the local conditions, rather than just make less decisions at the high levels?
The more I think about the corruption thesis, the less satisfied I am with it. It's probably too dangerous to permit corruption. It was more an attempt to square various anarchist critiques of statism with the general advantages of having a state.
I don't think "just stop making decisions at the higher levels" would work. Like if you solve IRB bureaucracy by stopping enforcing research ethics from above, you're probably going to see the proliferation of all sorts of horrible things.
> what do you mean by national interest that's opposed to that?
Perhaps something a little less Moloch end-state; more human, less disneyland with no children. Something that has more "us" in its "for the good of all of us", and less of the ones who are dead.
A country that doesn't oppress Uigers.
China's Gilded Age by Yeun Yeun Ang talks about something a bit like this. He says that one of the reasons that China has been more successful than eg India is that they've had better forms of corruption. So rather than taking bribes directly to do their jobs local officials will get a cut of the profits of some new enterprise. And so they're incentives are aligned with making it profitable, rather than adding additional barriers they need to pay for. So corrupt local officials want to develop their local economies and take their cut.
The problem with this is that what is most profitable is not necessarily the same thing as what's in the best interests of your constituents. Is extremely profitable to seize everybody's land and sell it to a developer. Or to force your citizens to work for low wages. And prevent competing businesses.
I'm sure Moldbug would reply with something about the longer term perspective of a monarch meaning they're less likely to do that stuff. And he probably thinks things like workers rights and environmental protections are bad anyway. But he doesn't actually have a solution to the principal agent problem as far as I can see. Other than mumbling about crypto solutions.
In the long run, though, eminent domaining land and giving it to developers is probably in the best interest of the vast majority of your constituents. What is most profitable is not necessarily in the best interest of constituents, but it's a much better proxy than anything else I can think of, including a democratic vote.
Can you clarify your definition of “national interest”?
I expect most political groups would say they’re acting in the “national interest” despite meaning very different things. Okay, maybe not the communists. Point is that “national interest” can refer to anything from ethnonationalism to autarky to universalizing religion.
Oldbug’s formulation was surprisingly agnostic to any particular one. I’d say the current iteration is not. That’s what makes it selling out.
Perhaps Sam Altman was the real Moldbug all along. He plays the long game so that he can become World Emperor once OpenA... I mean OpenMind takes over the world (as in AI-2027 slowdown scenario), and he concluded that Trump might be right person he can manipulate in the critical moment.
Maybe his plan is to upload his mind and rule the universe forever. Sam is very good at becoming powerful.
So Sam Altman is the Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit at this point?
A possible explanation other than "sold-out" is that Moldbug is motivated by the negative part of his philosophy ("anti-Cathedralism"), rather than the positive ("pro-reactionary") and thinks, rightly or wrongly, that MAGA is good for Cathedral-smashing.
That's what I was trying to get at with the last paragraph: "I think he feels genuine despair about the state of the country, his faux cheerfulness has finally cracked, and he’s decided it’s worth compromising his principles for a long shot at getting some of what he wants."
...but I don't think this contradicts "selling out". You always sell out for something in particular! Sometimes it's personal gain, but other times it's political.
Thanks.
I think the difference between "he sold out his philosophy for power a chance to smash the cathedral" and my proposal, is that I'm suggesting that his current move could be the authentic working out of his philosophy (realising that he puts more weight on the negative anti-Cathedral aspect), rather than selling out his philosophy.
In both cases we could say that he's now more or less ditched one important part of his earlier philosophy, so there may be little substantive difference on that front.
Yarvin wrote approximately 10 bazillion words saying "when you remove the wax you will be incredibly tempted to join the sirens but FOR GOD'S SAKE DO NOT UNTIE YOURSELF FROM THE MAST, DO NOT JOIN THE SIRENS" and is now proposing that we all jump overboard and swim to the pretty mermaids.
Yeah, but he could have genuinely (and correctly) come to believe that his program had literally 0% chance (yes, I know there’s no such thing, but in this case there is) and, like the rest of us, “sold out” in the sense of satisficing instead of continually crashing himself on the rocks. I get why Scott feels like trash-talking him, but honestly it just seems mean.
It just feels like if a huge part of your program is, "if you do this 1% wrong, you get Hitler", saying, " ok there's no chance of doing it right, I'll do it wrong" doesn't really count as "satisficing".
That’s the part where I say, “I get why Scott feels like trash-talking him”. And if fully-grown Democrats hadn’t been playing the Hitler card for decades, I might agree.
You sort of indicate that you agree with his despair about the state of the country. Do you have an example of anything you have written explaining why? I've never read about an earlier time in history and thought, "I'd rather live then". Like you, I wish the FDA had a better drug-approval process, for instance, but it's still the system that produces more new medical treatments than any nation in the world! It seems like our entire society is stuck on the idea that everything sucks when just about everything we can measure suggests that things are the best they've ever been. Is that where you are at as well? (I'm certainly concerned about where MAGA is trying to take us and what will happen to populist anger on both the left and right, but the solution to that obviously wouldn't be to further stoke populist anger by suggesting that the system is broken.)
I agree! It sometimes feels like the LW / rat futurist crowd starts with a techno-utopian alternative reality and then immediately getting pissed at the status who for not living up to the same standards… but as we’re seeing right now, it turns out the status quo was not that bad! Relative to the entire matrix of realistic alternatives, the status quo was actually pretty good!
And now instead of techno-futurist utopia, we have a mad populist king hell bent on tearing down the entire capitalist postwar economic order. That’s a pretty bad failure mode.
I seem to recall "the status quo is objectively way better than any time in history, actually" being one of Scott's big counter-arguments to Moldbug's claims as of the Anti-NRX FAQ.
If the status quo was truly that good, then no one would have elected a 'mad populist king' to uproot it.
It's hard to know how good something is until it's gone.
If something really was good, it will invite a great deal of nostalgia when it goes.
Modern communication technology is annihilating the hearts and minds of the 21st century.
I've always found Mencius to be a great guy and I was really devastated when his wife died a few years ago, leaving his two kids motherless.
But, I've never understood his references to "The Cathedral."
I visited Chartres cathedral in 1980 and thought it was great. When I finally visited the Harvard campus, I was disappointed by the lack of cathedral-like architecture. But I understand that Harvard was founded by very low church puritans, so it's appropriate that Harvard, Curtis's bete noire, is aesthetically boring.
It’s a play on words. When the pope speaks “ex cathedra” it means he speaks with absolute authority. Ie: his word is like the word of God.
I always figured it was a reference to 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar', a famous 1997 article by Eric S. Raymond advocating for open-source software development.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
Yarvin was a GenX Silicon Valley guy after all.
Yes this is the correct answer. He explicitly references it at one point on UR.
I think that was his primary intent, yes, with a secondary intent of drawing an analogy between the role of institutional experts (which seem to have a bit of a monoculture across a range of institutions) in modern American society and the role of the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages as being a source, coordinated by shared ideology and world view, of legitimizing stories and "neutral" policy advice that has enormous power because it's (at least partially correctly) perceived representing the consensus of well-educated experts and because it controls the main institutions with the social role of discovering and codifying truths about the world and educating the laity about its findings.
That secondary understanding is not unique or original to Moldbug. I don't think he explicitly credits it as such, but it strikes me as having a lot in common with the concept of the Superstructure from Marxist social theory. Which Moldbug is very probably familiar with, since I'm pretty sure I remember him talking about one of his parents or grandparents being a former member of CPUSA.
Wow. Deep background. Thanks!
This is my first comment on any public forum, and I'm just commenting to say you are my favorite commenter of all time, Erica.
It's funny how neologisms that catch on tend to not be very self-evident, like "jump the shark," "motte and bailey," or "The Cathedral."
Back in the 1990s, the last page in The Atlantic Monthly would often hold a contest inviting readers to invent particular neologisms. Subscribers came up with dozens of brilliant terms that were wittily self-evident without even requiring users to sit through a lecture about the TV show "Happy Days."
None caught on.
I think it sticks in your head because it's so weird. You spend time trying to figure it out so you remember it.
'Jump the shark' doesn't make sense but the visual image of the guy jumping over a shark sticks in your head.
'Motte and bailey' has the castle thing, which probably appeals to D&D nerds like, everyone here.
'The Cathedral'...I dunno. Like you said, they're pretty.
To me, it evokes the complexity yet precarious nature of the structure. I'm not an architecture expert, but my understanding is that cathedrals were incredibly difficult to correctly build because of the scale of the structures compared to the engineering and material available. Like, medieval architects were incredible at geometry, but that was basically all they had to calculate how to build and hold up these massive churches and they had to constantly make these adjustments and modification to keep it from falling in on itself, and then figure out how to make those look pretty after the fact (the flying buttress being the most famous example). So you get something that's grandiose and uplifting, but when you look closely you see its upheld by a thousand little tweaks and hacks, and if any of those fail the whole thing could come collapsing in. Like modern liberalism. And of course, the other correllary is that if you were trying to build something of similar scale and scope today, you would go about it in a completely different way.
Visit Princeton. We have a beautiful chapel.
Duke University's beautiful Neo-Gothic chapel was designed by African-American architect Julian Abele.
That seems like something Americans could agree upon, if only Christian Laettner hadn't hit that shot.
The 30 for 30 on Laettner is pretty good. "I Hate Christian Laettner," I think it's called.
The Cathedral is supposed to be the modern replacement to the Catholic Church as an arbiter of dogma, authority, and morality. The content of their dogmas, ethics, and indeed their aesthetics are not the same.
Still cathedrals are nice. Bazaars are hit and miss.
As for open source the real problem with it is that it’s unpaid.
I saw Yarvin speaking in LA a couple of years ago with Peachy Keenan and some others. He got weepy, and openly emotional wrt his wife. A side of him people don't usually see, for serious.
Indeed.
As someone who has read 10,000+ of the 11,000, I have to say this is very good. And I also feel the extremely strong temptation (in my home country) to roll the fascism dice as a last shot at saving it. Alas, it seems impossible civilization can be saved, and yet...
I honestly go back and forth on whether I would support some kind of best-case-scenario version of Trump who wants to purge all of the institutions in a creepy strongmannish way but is also competent, honest, and preserves a fig leaf of rule of law; luckily for my soul nobody like this seems anywhere in the cards.
I assume you're somewhere in Europe - do you understand why mainstream European parties don't turn against immigration (except in Denmark, where I hear they did this and it went very well for them)? It seems that immigration is very unpopular there, so why won't any major party touch it?
European here - and they do, and have done for a while.
Major issues are Schengen (you cant just close your borders, so people can just walk in), the Mediterranean being a tough border to defend and governments being stopped by judges citing the European Declaration of Human Rights. Elected right-wing governments do basically what they can while testing those boundaries. The Netherlands is currently copying the Danish model, so let’s see how that goes.
That said, I don’t believe for a second that solving immigration would defuse right-wing populism. There seems to be no correlation whatsoever between immigration levels and support for rw populism, both between countries and over time. I think the key drivers are commercial/social media, decay of civic participation and increased wealth.
I'm skeptical of the Schengen/Mediterranean/EDHR explanation because this dynamic seems most pronounced in Britain, where whatever Nigel Farage's party is called now is on the rise after the Brexit supporters felt like even the pro-Brexit faction of the Tories failed to decrease immigration.
Well, the UK is still part of the ECHR..
Furthermore, I dont think the UK can prove or disprove anything, since Brexit and the Conservatives have broadcasted spectacular levels of fuck-up. The UK is easily the most poorly governed country of Western Europe, and cannot seem to accomplish much.
But as to my second point, do you believe “solving immigration” would pacify the right? How would you explain Slovakia, Romania, Poland?
I thought Tusk's policies against illegal migration (and recent refusal to sign the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum) looked like a classic example of the centre successfully pacifying the right?
The former communist countries are their own kettle of fish, but in the west immigration is for sure the main issue.
The UK is (I think) no longer a part of the ECHR since early 2024
Nope, but it's inside the Overton Window: "Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has indicated that withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) could be on the agenda if the UK’s membership frustrates policy on illegal immigration or endangers national security. This follows an ‘interim measure’ from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in June 2022, which effectively prevented the first flight carrying asylum seekers from being sent to Rwanda until the UK courts had fully considered the issue, and the UK Supreme Court’s judgment in November 2023 that the Rwanda policy is unlawful".
Treasury brain rot and terminal retardation amongst our political class, combined with the standard failure to consider second order consequences and genuine inherent liberalism in 80% of the political class. That's for Britain at least.
The political class by and large didn't see a problem with immigration up until 2016 or so, and bought the arguments that it was good for GDP figures and so on. This was largely because the immigrants they were exposed to were colleagues in Westminster, academics etc. etc. They also had much more in common with other transnational elites vs. the white underclass.
The Boriswave (~2.5m *legal* migrants over 3 years) was largely a result of this treasury brainrot on steroids (trained doctors and nurses great stuff, lets turbocharge it, we just won a massive election so obviously everything is great, UKIP are defeated, the right are ascendant). Note also that Cummings, as much as he likes to harp on about immigration now, did not oppose this at all at the time. This is again due to the default postnational liberalism and the instinct that any opposition to free movement is simply bigoted ludditism.
It turned out that actually, letting in millions of people at a time when your economy wasn't doing so well, you still had extremely generous welfare policies, you just had a massive expansion of state grants and bureaucracy due to Covid, and you refused to build any housing, might not have been such a great idea. Finally the penny dropped for lots of people in power, there was the symbolism of us having an Indian PM, everyone emerging from their lockdowns to find the streets had become even more foreign, everything was falling apart, and so the Tories were exiled and Labour came in. But Labour were just as pro-migration as the Tories (or perhaps more accurately, anti-ANTI-immigration, for warm fuzzy anti-racist reasons) and so when they came in with a huge majority (although *not* a huge number of votes) they ALSO thought they didn't have to do anything.
Anyway, everyone's now voted for Reform (who as far as I can tell aren't even themselves particularly anti-migration, see the expulsion of Lowe). Farage isn't an eth-nat at all, and I suspect he'd happily get rid of the welfare state access for migrants but keep the system liberalised and the numbers as high as the market would dictate as the good free trader that he is (which would be preferable to the current shambles I'll admit, but not what the populace wants). Cummings is in a shambles too after realising that there is simply no appetite for his techno-centrist turbo liberalism (the real centre ground in Britain is and always has been social democratic conservatism), so is now desperately retweeting stuff about the grooming gangs in a bid to stay relevant.
> Reform (who as far as I can tell aren't even themselves particularly anti-migration, see the expulsion of Lowe)
I suspect Farage thinks coming across as a moderate is the path to electoral success. Also, Farage had problems with extremists in his previous party UKIP.
As to what Farage truly believes, your guess is as good as mine.
> I suspect he'd happily get rid of the welfare state access for migrants but keep the system liberalised and the numbers as high as the market would dictate
Immigration is Reform's signature issue, so if they don't reduce it they'll never win another election.
In the UK, it's straightforwardly for economic reasons. Immigration is very unpopular, but the UK has a really tight labour market. It's also impossible to staff the NHS (state healthcare system) and care homes (largely publicly funded but privately operated) without vast quantities of minimum wage agency workers. The result is governments' options are 1) slash immigration and face some kind of inflation/default nightmare scenario, 2) slash immigration and dismantle the very popular welfare state, 3) let in vast numbers of immigrants and become unpopular, 4) let in vast numbers of immigrants and try to lie about it/distract people from it. Unsurprisingly, all governments thus far have chosen 4.
Pre-Brexit, option 5 was to use the EU to only let in Europeans while saying that due to the EU there was nothing the government can do.
In Italy, France and Germany the dynamic is very different, and the answer is Schengen (for France and Germany), and the ECHR and Refugee Convention (for all of them). Physically preventing people from entering Spain and Italy by sea is outside the Overton window (you can't build a wall, so you either sink the boats with all passengers or let them land). In the Eastern hemisphere, you then get caught up in a long boring series of legal arguments about how old people are (they all say they're children), what country they're from ("I'm a black Swahili-speaking Afghan"), whether they're gay, a political dissident or whatever and whether you can send them back to wherever without them being tortured or killed. They often simply fall off the grid while this is happening (or, in particular, move between European countries), but even if they don't the process would be slow if it wasn't hopelessly backlogged (which in all these countries it is).
It sounds weird to say the the UK and EU have completely separate immigration problems like this (the UK also has the other thing, but on a much smaller scale), you see it in the demographics though. UK immigration is heavily West African/South Asian and mostly employed. EU asylum seekers tend to be East African/Middle Eastern* and mostly not in formal employment.
*This gets heavily skewed post-2022 by the Ukraine war.
> It's also impossible to staff the NHS (state healthcare system) and care homes (largely publicly funded but privately operated) without vast quantities of minimum wage agency workers.
That’s a very bad analysis. To staff the NHS the U.K. just need visas for the NHS. To staff the care homes the U.K. needs specific visas for care homes. To staff either you don’t actually need immigration at all.
It’s pretty amazing that a year or so after all Good Thinking people believed in zero immigration the U.K. went crazy on issuing millions of visas. Of course all of this could be stopped, and therefore all of it was by design. The muh free market greed of the conservatives should kill them, and probably will.
They do that. It's the health and care (worker) visa, which during the peak in 2023 was by far the most common worker entry visa ("temporary worker" has now pulled ahead").
As for staffing the NHS without them, there aren't enough employable British proles you can actually get to do work. You can blame years of social decay, you can blame the representation of the people acts, and more plausibly you can blame social mobility and the Baumol effect for lifting the employable ones higher into the economy. But you're not going to find 400,000 employable people who'll work for >£25,000 a year hiding under a rock.
In Germany the parts with the fewest foreigners have the worst anti-immigrant views.
Just the same in Hungary (and here, fewest means practically zero).
There's various ways the underlying causation, if any, could go.
I suspect relative unattractiveness of a region leads to both foreigners avoiding it as well as locals getting grumpy. (And young locals moving away, too. Especially women, which makes the men who remain even angrier.)
Sometimes I wonder whether Germany should make dealing with foreigners a thing for the states to decide instead of the federal level.
That way the places that don't want foreigners don't need to interfere with the places that don't mind or actively welcome them.
Hungary was crossed by a massive stream of mostly young male migrants in 2015 and I remember reading Hungarian comments with use of an automatic translator.
The wave of complaints of fights with police, robberies and sudden appearance of human excreta in the street or even in buses was enormous, and so was the hostility engendered by this event.
There aren't that many migrants in Hungary NOW, but that only means that the population really does not want a repeat of 2015 and that the government actually takes that wish seriously.
I hate that talking point, because it means very little. All the liberals and lefties that I know irl that are pro immigration also bring up that same talking point constantly - without realizing that they interact with just as many poor immigrants on a daily basis as the people in the countryside - zero. I would claim it's even more biased to be for immigration wholesale when all the immigrants you know personally are extremely educated, wealthy and sharing your cultural values - because no one is claiming those are the problematic ones. It's the poor, hyper conservative ones that form parallel societes and have frankly, quite often, views hostile to any pluralistic, democratic society.
"they interact with just as many poor immigrants on a daily basis as the people in the countryside - zero"
I get your point that the elites are largely segregated from the negatives of mass migration, but to say that those in the countryside and smaller cities have "zero" interaction is not accurate. Grooming gangs (who the elites were able to avoid) were all over England. And when it comes to places like Springfield, Ohio, the immigration is handled in a ham-handed fashion that, again, the elites themselves don't have to deal with. Germans in the East have good reason to question the plans of the elites.
Also note that defending the borders is the task of the given member country, mostly from its own budget. This means that countries on the south and east (e.g. Hungary, Croatia, now Romania) should protect most of the border, while practically zero of the immigration wave wants to stay in those countries.
I expect in the case of Britain there are two big reasons:
(1) Starmer knows a lot of activists within his party won't like it
(2) Starmer thinks being tough on immigration could lose him a lot of votes to the Greens and lib Dems, while people who want lower immigration will vote for Reform anyway as they will promise more than he will achieve.
For the Tories, an additional reason was that immigration lowered wages and increased house prices, both of which benefitted the rich, so what the problem?
And then there's good old incompetence, a significant factor in all case where the UK government pursues seriously suboptimal policy.
Here in the UK right wing populism is entirely driven by immigration and government doing the explicit opposite of what they've promised and said they would. At this point for over a generation, causing low trust on the issue. Further actiona by government that *looks* like they're not anti immigration in practice further fuel right wing attitudes, regardless of what the gov actually do or say, due to the low trust.
Reform and Nigel Farage are quite likely to be the next UK government in a few years time, and this would be impossible if the last 10 million foreigners had not been allowed to settle in the country (That's immigration since the early 2010s in a country of population 68m btw). Deport the foreigners and the populist right will never get elected. Stop importing over a million foreigners each year the populist right will be hamstring and very unlikely to win much in an election.
It's literally the single issue that makes the populist right seem appealing.
You should add that failing to slash immigration also causes defaults and ends welfare states, thanks to the net cost average nature of the realised actual immigrants versus the projected high skill imaginary ones. So they're stuck.
Far-right parties aren't prospering in Denmark where their best issue, immigration policy, has been mainstreamed.
The Danes had a very good World War II, helping all almost all of their Jews escape to Sweden. So Danes feel entitled to do in the 21st Century what is in the best interests of the Danes when it comes to immigration policy.
Many other Europeans countries did not have such an admirable WWII, to say the least. So their elites feel obligated to self-destruct through immigration as compensation for the Holocaust.
"We're sorry. And we're more sorry than others!" How long does a nation's corrupt elite need to say these things?
In Germany's case, >80 years.
Like the UK, which took a major part in beating the Nazis? Even of the others, AFAICT Germany is the only one that doesn't (rightly or wrongly) pass the blame to Germany.
For my country, the UK, the current Labour government is very hamstrung by its MPs and party members, who are extremely pro-migration. There is a somewhat sensible contingent in cabinet who know they need to do something but can't do very much. And the longer the issue is neglected the more the people want done.
More deserving of derision are the Conservative party, who were in power 2010-2024 and despite leaving the EU on what was pretty clearly an anti-immigration mandate, actually _increased_ immigration enormously from non-EU countries. Here it looks mainly like an issue of competence (see Cummings/Yarvin "the govt doesn't control the govt") with a smattering of received wisdom about substantial immigration being necessary to balance the books with an aging population.
This is my understanding but interested to hear more from other examples.
I have fairly uncritically accepted that wisdom. What's the counter case in terms of alternative ways to balance the books?
It's not that there's an obvious better way to balance the books, it's that this approach actively makes the books worse.
Most migrants (especially non-EU) are a net drain on the state, even averaged over their lifetime. NHS use, higher crime, benefits claims, remittances sent home, social housing. In addition they're likely to have more children, who in turn (for whatever reason, culture, genetics, selection effects, pick your poison) are _also_ more likely to be a net drain.
If you asked me for an alternative, I'd say they need to cut the state pension drastically (basically accepting it will eventually be phased out) and give some tax breaks/entrepreneurship breaks to young people, who are currently completely checked out. (and understandably so)
The only way that immigration can balance the books is if it is high skilled. Obviously low paid workers are already a cost, year by year, to the state if their taxes are lower than their benefits. Think housing costs here. And non working immigrants are an obvious cost. Even middle income earners - including natives - are tax loss to the government over their lifetime. As people live longer that cost will increase
Major parties in Europe have turned against immigration, slowly over the past decade, as the anti-immigration sentiment has grown from the far right fringes to >50% of the population of any major European country. The hilarious thing about this, though, is that immigration is much cheaper than pro-natalist policies at growing GDP and remaining relevant in a Europe of rapidly falling birth rates. So even parties that should be against immigration, because a crushing majority of their supporters dislike unchecked immigration, like the UK's Tories, allowed net migration numbers to reach multiple new highs across their 14-year stint at the head of the country. It's easy to make a case against immigration that grips a nation by the feels, but it's incredibly difficult to articulate why you should severely limit net migration once you get power and become accountable for economic activity (which remains, imo, the least understood part of anyone's daily life in a modern developed country, despite being arguably the most important part of anyone's daily life). The result is a European people bolstered by anti-immigration rhetoric/sentiment, some of it sensible some of it hateful, that ends up governed by pro-immigration bodies of power again and again. Inevitably a major European country will become led by a severely immigration-limiting party who goes ahead and does the economically nonsensical stuff they said they'd do, like Trump's tariffs but different. The results will make for an interesting case study.
Even if immigration does grow GDP, what's the incentive of a political party to permit it? Does it have such an obvious effect that the economy will suffer during the 5-10 year rule of a specific political party if it decreases immigration a year or two into its time in power?
In the UK, all commonwealth migrants can automatically vote in elections. Yes, hard to believe. The incentive structures (especially with already established ethnic minority constituencies and political figures) are therefore quite weird.
A semi-mythologised affair in the modern British left's history was the defeat of the British National Party in Barking and Dagenham (East London) around 2010. The standard narrative is a great ground game and hope not hate anti-fascist campaigners saw off the dastardly racists. In reality, it was simply a numbers game- the area went from 93% White (~91% British) in 1991 to 45% White in 2021 (and just 31% British). Once anti-immigration feeling reaches a tipping point in a particular area, the game becomes whether you can import the new voters you need to retain power faster than they can vote you out.
Edit: The area now has 50/51 Labour Councillors. 12 are White British, the remaining 39 ethnic minorities of some sort. A bizarre situation considering the Council had 12 nationalist MPs just 15 years ago, but I think it sheds light on the local incentive structures. Add this up enough around the country (parliamentary systems with local representation provide these kinds of incentives) and you can see why even "just stop immigration for a bit" can be put under pressure.
If I take the University of Oxford's Migration Observatory's word for it, and using theirs and ONS forecasts, net migration to the UK from 2025 to 2030 should be about 2 175 000 people, with considerable variability (with Labour at the helm, likely to the upside rather than to the downside of that figure). Since "almost half of the increase in non-EU immigration from 2019 to the year ending June 2024 resulted from those arriving for work purposes (18%) and their dependants (29%)" (source 1), and work & study immigration are roughly equal (source 2, figure 6), we can assume an influx of about 1 000 000 workers. Given the UK's labour force of 34 million people, we can make a simple assumption that net migration over the next five years will represent a 3% increase in the labor force, and the remaining 1 175 000 net migrants would represent a 3.6% increase in the non-labor force population, most of whom would be students. You can reasonably imagine that even a strongly anti-immigration party wouldn't try to reduce study visas to zero, so we can focus on the increase in the labor force.
The UK's productivity is stagnant since 2017 (source 3), so you couldn't count on your existing labor force to do more with their time. Although this warrants more research, yes, you would see an impact on the economy's growth rate pretty soon after the implementation of stringent immigration control, and because capex plans/foreign investment/bond yields/equity markets effectively "price in" the future impact of current policy decisions, you would see the impact of such policies in financial markets well before you'd see them in real life. Beyond that, you'd have labor market dislocations where net migration currently fills serious gaps (like in the health and care sectors), and the anti-immigration population would still have to deal with roughly 15% of the UK being foreign-born (source 1, figure 1), which is the main source of their troubles (in their mind). You'd have pretty rapid real consequences on the economy and extremely slow consequences on the ethnic landscape of the country. And what are voters if not impatient?
1: https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/long-term-international-migration-flows-to-and-from-the-uk/
2: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/migrationstatisticsquarterlyreport/may2020
3: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity/timeseries/lzvb/prdy
This misses the fact that the majority of migrants into the UK since ~2016 have been fiscal drags. GDP per capita (even adjusting for PPP) has been stagnant since 2019 despite record numbers over the last 6 years. This even includes the fact that state welfare, education, and health spending are all included in GDP figures. Labour market issues are mostly due to wage compression, and artificial shortages imposed in areas like training doctors. The real "rapid consequences" are high streets turning into vape and kebab shops and the aesthetic dissonance that has occurred in such a short period of time.
Interesting, I'd like to see the evidence, not because I doubt your claims (I don't!), but because I find it difficult to work with stuff like "people have been fiscal drags" without qualifying how much of a drag they have been, and how much of a drag they are projected to be. This is the difference between static and dynamic studies of the fiscal impact of immigration.
When migrants enter the UK, they typically have (or will rapidly have) a relatively high number of children dependents who are an immediate drag on state finances due to their education and impact on family benefits/tax credits. The point is that when you have a ton of people enter the country with young kids, a static view of their impact shows a clear negative cash flow for the state, while a dynamic view typically shows a positive net present value across their expected lifetime. (source 1) As legions of foreign-born children enter the workforce and start paying taxes, and also taking into account the fact that some of them will leave the country before old age (the point where the average UK resident becomes a drain, too), their collective tax revenues discounted back to present times offers a more comprehensive view of the long-term impact of immigration.
By the way I'm not suggesting the dynamic view is necessarily correct, because I haven't done the research myself and I haven't looked into the exact methodology of the calculations (a forecast necessarily implies assumptions, which are unfortunately subject to human bias). What I am suggesting, however, is that a static view of recent immigration as a drain on state finances being used as an economic argument against it is about as smart as taking the cash flow figure of a 20-year investment on year 10 and stating that the investment should be reined in because the figure is negative.
GDP per capita has been stagnant since 2019, sure, but how do you (you personally) parse the different drivers of GDP per capita since 2019? Do you know how much of it comes from the impact of immigration, how much of it comes from worker productivity (which is flat since 2017), how much of it comes from the 2022 energy crisis (and how the UK was hit worse by it than most other European countries), how much of it was impacted by inflation (and how the UK was hit worse by it than most other European countries), how much of it comes from the disastrous impact of Brexit on EEA-net migration? Personally, I don't have the exact numbers. So I'd be careful to presume immigration is a leading cause, even if it might very well be, because I'd first have to look into the data and figure out how much all the other stuff had to do with it. Even if it were, and again it might be, how much worse would the other drivers have been if net migration was much lower over the same period of time? None of these drivers exist in isolation.
As for the vape and kebab shops and the aesthetic dissonance, yeah, that's a major issue for the anti-immigration crowd.
1: https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/the-fiscal-impact-of-immigration-in-the-uk/
Here it’s Mrs. Donuts, vape, check-cashing and lotto store, halal meat market, handjob (?) parlor (why did the sewer drain get stopped up with condoms though?), and fungus museum.
Meanwhile, across town, oblivious people are still talking about a walkable urban environment, with pleasant outdoor Third Places lol.
Immigration might be too hot a topic to touch and talk sanely with people.
You might get further talking to people about reversing the privatisation of British Rail.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of_British_Rail and marvel at how most graphs go from bad to better (or less bad) after the privatisation. Economists also like privatisations. However, in polls it has been perennially unpopular. Almost like immigration.
So why is no British political party campaigning on undoing the privatisation?
Could you see why the impact of more people migrating to the British Isles from 1997-2025 than in the entire period 1066-1997 might mean that it is a more sensitive issue than who operates the trains? And could you also maybe see why the short and medium term fiscal consequences (which it is far from clear have been positive) could be of secondary importance to other longer-term concerns? It's not like ethnic tension and the mass movements of people have ever caused any kind of conflicts in the past at all, right?
From you own link it seems like several parties, including labour, campaign on that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of_British_Rail#Other
Perhaps contra cliché, it's mostly the old people. In the recent German election people over 60 made up more than 40% of the electorate. The coalition forming the new government got 60% of their vote vs only 45% in the general electorate (and 25% among under 25s). In contrast to this, the anti-immigration far right got 21% among the general electorate but only 15% among people over 60. The two coalition parties are moderately anti-immigration and moderately pro-immigration, respectively.
Demographics induced labor shortages in Germany have become very noticeable and the situation is set to escalate with the retirement of the boomer cohorts. Services are getting ever more expensive and many shops, restaurants, etc. just close down because they cannot find people. Worst hit is the welfare state and the public services it offers. Ever growing demand in health care and elderly care combined with severe labor shortage has led to rapid decline in the quality of service.
Old people are primarily consumers and the primary consumers of public services. Plus in the German pension system, the young directly pay their pensions. They want a functioning service economy where they can afford to go to a restaurant and have decent health care and they want their pension checks to keep coming. They don't care about housing shortages (they own property or have cheap grandfathered in rental contracts) or the education system or most other areas where immigration has perceived or real externalities. They may talk negatively about immigration but in the grand scheme of things, it does not really affect them and so it does not move their vote as much as the decline in the public services they consume. The one thing they strongly dislike about immigration is crime. The new government knows this and so they are going to crack down on asylum seekers but otherwise pretty much keep the strongly pro-immigration legislation of the last government intact.
In the UK, the OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) gives you a growth estimate based on the factors that generate growth, including labour migration. If a government promises to slash migration by, 80%, the OBR will revise down its growth forecasts, for obvious reasons: fewer workers means lower output, a smaller tax base, and less consumer demand, and will also calculate reduced business investment, weaker public finances etc. The OBR models all this quite mechanically.
There's pretty good recent evidence of what happens when you ignore the OBR. When Liz Truss skipped their forecasts in her 2022 mini-budget, markets revolted, the pound crashed, and the Bank of England had to step in. Investors and civil servants etc. treat OBR projections as the baseline for judging fiscal credibility, so if they downgrade growth due to lower migration, it directly constrains what government can spend or promise.
And politicians have noticed that "seeming tough on migration", and giving the illusion of control is much more important than actual migration numbers, which explains a lot of what you see in the UK and Europe - sounding tough while not actually bringing numbers down.
Also increasing GDP is an insanely low bar. Paying higher benefits increases GDP. Printing money and burying it in Keynesian bottle mines increases GDP.
Increasing immigration, especially from non-EU countries has been shown to be a net drain on state finances, which already aren't looking too peachy in Europe. And when these migrants age we'll be in an even worse state, because generally birthrate is anti-correlated with economic performance.
Eh, of course I was using GDP growth as a proxy for the kind of economic activity growth that financial markets recognize as positive for long-term investment plans, which is my "imperfect-but-a-whole-lot-better-than-a-wild-guess-and-ideologically-led-thinking" barometer for these things. We all know GDP is a flawed measure, but it can't be completely waived either because of its close relationship with actual growth.
Be careful when you use easy, common arguments to deride GDP. The "dig holes and fill them up" idea was used by Keynes to support state intervention in a recession. Milton Friedman put another spin on it in Free to Choose: "If all we want are jobs, we can create any number--for example, have people dig holes and then fill them up again, or perform other useless tasks. Work is sometimes its own reward. Mostly, however, it is the price we pay to get the things we want. Our real objective is not just jobs but productive jobs--jobs that will mean more goods and services to consume." That's exactly what I'm talking about: productive jobs are what counts, and the current data-driven financial system is pretty good at figuring out the "just jobs" from the "productive jobs".
On the topic of non-EU immigration being a net drain on state finances, we are i. living in a unique non-EU migration paradigm as of 2022 with the Ukraine refugee crisis, which has distorted short-term spending vs tax revenue trends, and ii. we know certain types of immigration are a drain while others are not, those that are a drain (refugees & asylum seekers) are the easiest type to limit, which means we have a clear path for immigration optimization in the future. Overall, the net fiscal impact of immigration is roughly zero. https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/foresight/topic/increasing-significance-migration/political-social-aspects-migration_en
> we know certain types of immigration are a drain while others are not, those that are a drain (refugees & asylum seekers) are the easiest type to limit, which means we have a clear path for immigration optimization in the future.
In eg Germany there's a really simple policy levers you can pull to make refugees less costly: allow them to work from day one.
It's much more important to look at fiscal impact than GDP for immigration (since it's ostensibly to solve the aging population shrinking tax base problem). There are very easy wins to cut out large swathes of immigrants that are obviously going to be a lifetime drain, and still keep French Mathematicians and Romanian coders.
Yes the net fiscal impact might be roughly zero, but that's because you've got a huge positive and a huge negative, and there's no need to take both at the same time!
"It's much more important to look at fiscal impact than GDP for immigration"
Migrants don't just pay tax, they consume. Actually, they consume a whole lot more than they pay tax. I'll let businesses know that the fiscal balance impact of immigration is much more important than their long-term revenue growth rates. I'll let the bond market know about that, too. They probably focus too much on GDP trend growth anyway.
Hasn't GDP been stagnating even for these European countries indulging in mass migration? It certainly hasn't been going well for Canada.
They did, all over the place (especially Sweden and Germany, which were the hardest hit in 2015).
A general problem is that leaders get old. Monarchism has a particular problem with aged leaders, but so does the American system lately as big shots who dine out at steak restaurants every night are less likely to drop dead of a heart attack at 67.
I'm, on the whole, a Ronald Reagan fan, but I'm also happy the Constitution retired him at age 78.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/18/how-spains-radically-different-approach-to-migration-helped-its-economy-soar
> The result was a working-age population that nearly doubled compared with other countries in western Europe. Of the 468,000 jobs created across Spain last year, roughly 409,000 were filled by migrants or people with dual nationality, many of them from Latin America, but also from across Europe and Africa. “Overall, Bank of Spain analysis suggests immigration contributed over 20% to the near 3% GDP per capita income growth during 2022-2024,” noted JPMorgan.
Spain has also a very weak welfare protection net, which means that if someone is really interested in getting a check instead of working, they immediately move northwards, to the richer pastures.
You will see a lot more loitering "diverse" youth during working hours in Paris than in Madrid, even though Madrid is closer to Africa.
I have trouble understanding being seriously tempted by that hypothetical. Setting aside AI and pandemic X risk, which I don’t think your hypothetical Uber Trump would be any stronger on, things in the USA are (well, we’re) going extremely well by world historical standards. There are plenty of annoying things and even more sub optimal things, but if you zoom out you have a very wealthy, very free society with strong rule of law. I have similar policy preferences to yours but I can’t imagine being willing to risk that stability and prosperity on an institution wrecking enlightened monarch.
This is the usual contradiction between the Pinkerite "all statistics say everything is great" perspective and the fact that everyone is pessimistic and miserable, young people feel hopeless and don't want to bring children into the world, skyrocketing rates of depression and anxiety, etc. I split the difference - I think some of it is overly pessimistic media, but some of it is genuine problems which the statistics aren't capturing. I'm mostly worried about the singularity, but if for some reason technology stays the same for thirty years, I'm worried about my children being in some kind of horrible rat race for an increasingly small number of Harvard-admissions-gated good jobs, not being able to afford a home, becoming captured by some abhorrent ideology, etc.
I also think that our current prosperity is built on philosophical foundations that both sides are trying their hardest to undermine. I don't think it'll survive another thirty years of wokeness on the left and MAGA on the right continuing to increase along the same trendline they were doing from 2010 - 2020 (I think things have calmed down a little since then - other than the Trump administration itself! - which is one reason I probably wouldn't take uber-Trump).
But also, I think a lot more is possible, and it irks me to abandon ~20% of the country to soul-crushing poverty because I'm too much of a chicken to have someone cut federal grants to Harvard or whatever.
I feel like pessimistic media and/or hyperpolarization is a sufficient and correct explanation here. You can see massive swings in polling about how hopeful people are or how they view the economy's performance at every change of political power. And prior to the last Presidential election there was a really big gap between how people said THEY were doing vs. how they thought the country in general was doing:
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-win-for-the-vibecession-story
I do think there are some issues with things becoming overly-streamlined and not having enough slack, but even with that most people are way, way better off than they were at almost any point in history.
I think this is equally true for immigration, the issue you mentioned elsewhere, which always strikes me as one with the most media hysteria - in an environment of basically historically low crime and unemployment, tons of people freak out about immigrants doing crimes and taking jobs.
Optimism or pessimism seems to rely a lot on definitions. If your definition of human thriving is based on consumption, then things have never been better than now. If your definition includes the production and maintenance of human capital, then things are already on the downturn.
Could you elaborate on what you're pointing at?
Both sides are undermining the philosophical foundations that our prosperity is built on because prioritization of prosperity over everything else is a fundamentally unsound foundation. Here's Orwell explaining it much better than I ever could https://bookmarks.reviews/george-orwells-1940-review-of-mein-kampf/
The liberal argument that everything is better than ever is falling on deaf ears because the concept that material prosperity is the measure of "better" is fundamentally wrong. I think there is a level of prosperity where the correlation is at least strong enough to make that claim, e.g. China over the last 40 years, but in the US we are well past the point where we are too rich for it to really matter.
For a consequentialist like me or Scott, "undermining the philosophical foundations that our prosperity is built on" sounds a lot like the polar opposite of "prioritization of prosperity over everything else", much as we'd recognize that others can see it differently.
You say it's wrong to say material prosperity is the measure of "better", but that's not a useful statement without saying what IS better. I think material prosperity is great, but I support pleasure, comfort (including security) and happiness, and material prosperity alone is not sufficient to achieve these.
If you've gotten this pessimistic, maybe we really are screwed.
I think the thing about capitalism is that it demands time as the fundamental thing you exchange for prosperity. Time spent away from family, time spent away from your community, time spent writing your blog.
I think wanting a dictator to fix everything for you isn't really about wanting someone with the power to cut through all the red tape, its about not wanting to have to spend the time participating in the political processes of community outreach, coalition building, vote aligning, all the small d democratic stuff that is neccessary. So we outsource all of that stuff to the professional class of politicians and then get mad when their career incentives make them choose different things than we would choose if we were directly involved in the process.
I think the counter-argument is something like "I shouldn't have to give up my career in order to save the country," but consider that if you are at the point where you are thinking of tossing democracy aside for dictatorship, maybe that's selfishness?
That's the boat I feel stuck in anyway. I'm not that smart, I'm introverted and I hate talking to people generally. If I were to go out and try to get involved in a new brand of politics outside the mainstream I wouldn't know where to begin, and the most likely outcome is that I would end up sucked into some weird niche group like the DSA whose politics match with mine, but who are so captured by in-fighting and process and ego that they are never going to spontaneously materialize into the kind of faction capable of doing the work that reaches people. And even trying means time spent not providing for my family. So I vote, and get into internet fights, and complain that everything is getting worse. But it doesn't change the fact that the actual process for fixing everything is *right* there. Its as easy as getting the majority of people to agree what is best for your town, and then your state, and then your country, at a time when half of people don't even bother to participate in the process. If you want to talk about something we used to be able to do and can't anymore, you can probably start there.
But you don't expect that a "best-case Trump" is a plausible outcome, yeah? So I think the solution in a democracy is just to find mechanisms that mitigate some of the causes of the present political disaster. My proposal for an evidence database wrapped in epistemic algorithms is one[1], and maybe you know of some others?
[1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fNKmP2bq7NuSLpCzD/let-s-make-the-truth-easier-to-find
Seriously? It just seems so juvenile to me to fantasize about a good moral dictator coming to power and fixing everything and simply being so good and moral and all-powerful that the loss of democracy is not a concern.
There are dozens of mainstream parties in European countries that are in favour of strict immigration policy. That's why most European countries don't have much of the type of immigration that e.g. Sweden does (well, even Sweden has gotten considerably stricter lately). See e.g. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=File:First-time_asylum_applicants_per_1000_people_in_2024_v2.png
As a dane, my guess is that its related to our anti immigrant party allready existed.
The Danish peoples party was started in 1995. Which might have contributed to making it less politically taboo to try and win back their voters, after they got a very strong election result in 2015.
This also means that our "new right" parties (eg Nye borgerlige (literally new right in english)) newer got particularly successful.
The story is slightly complicated by the creation of the "denmark democrats", a splinter party from the center right "liberal" party, which formed in 2022 and is also strongly anti immigrant. But is perhaps more strongly associated with caring for the interest of rural people.
I think everyone daydreams about having a competent strongman fix everything. I certainly have.
The problem is that nobody is perfect, and absolute power means their mistakes will get amplified. Then if people push back, they'll get paranoid and start persecuting anyone who says no, which leads to broken feedback cycles, sycophancy, etc. Even the best intentioned person will eventually fall to this.
As others have pointed out, mainstream European parties do turn against immigration in very many European countries, EU and otherwise. But they have a big issue: all they can do is signalling, they can't actually solve the problem.
Part of the problem is that the EU is severely dysfunctional. The EU was founded based on unanimous votes because the founding members did not want to give up too much power. Most things can only be changed unanimously. Which now, after extension to 27 members, means: it can not be changed at all. Essentially, the EU constitution is frozen in the state of ~2007 and can't be changed. (Ironic that this was caused by a fear of giving up power.)
One such frozen thing is the personal rights of refugees and the asylum laws. Even though a big majority of EU countries would like to change them, they can't be changed. That leaves countries who want to be strict on immigration with very few options:
- They can try their best at signalling, and hope that the population buys it. That's the Denmark way.
- They can grudgingly admit that the EU constitution doesn't leave them many means and go for the best means left. For example, negotiate treaties with non-EU countries so that they take back their citizens, trying to avoid the root causes for refugees, and trying to make it really hard for refugees to set one foot into EU territory. All these do help a little, but do not scale to the size of the problem.
- They can outright break the EU constitution, and hope that (secret) public support is so big that no one calls them for it. Greece has been doing this for quite a while, and most other EU countries pretend that they don't notice. This is the most effective way, but of course, some people DO call you out, and judges DO look at laws and will rule according to the law. And you risk the EU breaks apart if violating their laws so plainly has no consequences.
In practice, most EU countries do a combination of all three, with different emphasis.
This was also the biggest reason for UK to leave the EU. And for all economic reasons against the Brexit, they have regained a lot of sovereignty in rejecting refugees and limit immigration. (More irony: after Brexit the UK has chosen not to limit immigration because the damage to the economy would have been too bad. Immigration has even increased. But hey, now it's UK's free choice.)
One obvious issue pointed out already by others, is the geography, as it is very hard to controll the sea borders; and another issue is the political class. But the main issue is just legal: After World War 2, there were massive refugee waves accross the european continent; especially german speaking minorities were more or less expelled from several eastern european countries, as Hitler invaded many of them under the pretense of protecting this minorities; and people, who had fled the nazis and soviets, returned home or resettled. So many of the fundamental laws in the nationstates and in the european union, enshrined political asylum as a essential human right. But this asylum laws, well, were designed to give protection to european refugees within europe, to holocaust victims fleeing nazism and its fallout, and later political dissidents from the soviet union. (e.g. in the 1980s my own father came as a political refugee from back then soviet controlled poland to western germany and got granted political asylum, because he was an activist in the polish anti-communist resistance). The laws were not designed for a global, highly mobile world, where millions of migrants from poor third world countries try to enter europe, can just throw away their documents at the border and claim to be prosecuted in their home countries, which can kick of a year long legal due process, until its conclusion they been for so long in europe, it makes no sense anymore to expel them. And changing such fundamental constitutional things is almost impossible, especially in Germany, whose consitution more or less got designed to be almost unchangable to prevent another Hitler from taking power in the future.
It's just the rule of law ... of some highly idealistic laws, which were not designed for todays world and are not really that easy to change.
> And I also feel the extremely strong temptation (in my home country) to roll the fascism dice as a last shot at saving it.
Has that ever worked? If you are desperate, may I suggest voting with your feet?
A country is people, not some piece of dirt. If enough people vote with their feet, things change. But even if you are the only one, things will change for you.
We have exit plans, but my extended family is here, my business is here. Besides there don't seem to be many culturally similar countries that are doing much better...
Perhaps the culture is part of the problem? I don't know.
I moved from Germany to (eventually) Singapore. I hope we have at least a few decades left in Singapore before we are also going down.
We are OK in Australia! Well, apart from the cost of living and housing crisis. The unchecked immigration here is largely legal migrants from China, Vietnam and India who are culturally conservative and rarely criminal. So the effect is to increase demand for housing meaning young Australians can’t afford it, and to have nice Chinese restaurants run by first generation migrants and an increasing share of professional jobs taken by hard working second generation immigrants.
Crime is starting to become a problem, though - largely driven by African gangs. Also there are extremely high rates of family violence and child abuse among our Aboriginal/First Nations population that no one talks about because that’s “racist.”
Probably the worst thing about living in a society is that some fraction of people tend to want to solve mild dissatisfaction by rolling the extreme to horrific hardship dice
i assume "joined x a few months ago" means "started actively using x a few months ago" because his account says "joined June 2023"
Thanks, corrected.
You're telling me his whole original system's lynchpin is cryptographically signed weapon locks? That's the stupidest thing I ever heard. Somebody Google the term "ghost gun" and get back to me.
It's the military. Everyone knows where they're getting their guns. If the military procurement people tried to procure one million ghost AK-47s, someone would notice. And that's not even mentioning the tanks, artillery, fighter jets, etc.
It doesn't take that many rifles to destabilize a society. By the time that you have to rely on tanks, artillery, fighter jets, etc. on your own population, you've already lost, so those don't really count.
If there's one military lesson that everyone should have learned in the latter half of the 20th century and the first half of the 21st, it is the difficulty of pacifying a restive urban population. It doesn't take that much for guerillas to be effective.
At the risk of saying "someone is wrong on the Internet" ... Yarvin is ignorant about that too.
Oh. And drones. But that's probably another reply. Guys who think this way underestimate the power of human invention.
I never understood what would prevent other monarchs in the patchwork from arming rebel factions in another state: this seems a pretty big source of weaponry in current conflicts already, and seems like a very easy way to get around cryptographic controls.
If that's truly the explanation then that's pretty pathetic; surely part of the point of the whole system is that the fluctuating passions of the people aren't influencing foreign policy!
If "your citizenry will morally object, and that will hold you accountable" is what keeps states from defecting, how is that different from democracy by a more convoluted method?!
I deleted my comment, apologies for making you write this
No problem; did you delete because you disavow it, i.e. you don't think that's what a Moldbuggist would say?
Well, everyone knows this because the government has designated a lot of resources towards intelligence agencies whose sole job is to keep track of weapons, so I'm not sure how this applies in a corporate environment?
The other issue here is, crypto guns can prevent the rebels shooting at you, but they do much less to force your soldiers to shoot at the rebels. If the people take to the streets and stop working to demand a change in policy, what happens if the tank crews and air force pilots refuse to fire at them?
If you look at like, Tahrir square, it doesn't seem like what forced Mubarak's resignation was the prospect of violence by the demonstrators; it was that the level of violence necessary to coerce the demonstrators to give up was too large and the number of people willing to perpetrate that violence was too small.
This is a good point. Yarvin states that essentially any small number of loyalists with military equipment could defeat rebels with none. Seems a stretch to me, even if you buy the tall tale that the rebels would be unable to get their own guns.
I guess the steelman here is it’s not just guns but predator drones, tanks, icbms, etc which give even greater leverage than guns - but these have even deeper logistic chains than guns and bullets, so I’m not sure you can sustain them in uncooperative territory for long.
I don't even mean rebels like an armed faction, I mean like protestors in your capital city.
Are your drone operators really gonna fire on the encampment in front of the king's residence?
Are your generals just gonna say, "yes sir, time to massacre 10,000 civilians", or will they say, "are you sure you wouldn't rather give them this one thing, sir?"
Basically, arms will make a much smaller difference in palace coup situations, and the public can put enough pressure on the elite that they prefer a palace coup.
Seems moot to me, in that Yarvin's well-run dictatorship shouldn't produce rebels in the first place. See: Singapore.[1] If you've got armed rebels, that's a sign it's not well-run, so maybe the reactionary project isn't working well. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o7DCqciH2E
(Though if the dictatorship started in America, yeah, I expect quite a few armed rebels from day 1, orthogonal to the quality of leadership.)
If it struck me as unworkable nonsense a decade ago, and after filling that decade in and adjacent to military procurement I've steadily updated towards it being even stupider than it even seems at first glance..... is there a point where we can admit that this is less a thought-out solution and more an attempt to sweep the problem of hard power under the rug? I don't have a dozen decades to burn, but is there a point where we demote Moldbug from "all-time great" to a sophomoric navel-gazer who specialized in hiding the ball?
To emphasize - there's a technical implementation discussion we could have here, and if you were ready to cut an RFP I could get very real eyes on it fairly quickly. But I need you to realize that what's being requested is significantly harder than "I want crypto backdoors in everything that Good Guys can use and Bad Guys can't" and my response is going to either be to give the customer what they asked for and not what they wanted, or the much more likely No Bid.
If taking the philosopher's pet solution extremely seriously results in immediate backpedaling, that's a sign of how seriously I'm going to take their other "solutions".
It's very hard to imagine how you design a remote crytographic lock that would reliably work for a rifle. It's either listening for an activation code (from satellites? EDIT: Moldbug says it would use "mesh radio"), which means accidentally locking the rifle if you go underground or the battery runs out or the enemy manages to jam the signal (or if it's "mesh radio", if you get too far away from the rest of the army). Or it's listening for a kill code, which means you can defeat it by wrapping it in tin foil or taking out the battery.
What's to stop rebellious armourers assembling rifles without the lock part? Or in the US, just comandeering a load of civilian AR-15s? What's to stop rebellious soldiers replacing the lock part with a dumb mechanical equivalent?
What if the people who run the authentication system subvert it? Only the CEO/king (and presumably some trusted successor) knows the key to enable/disable all the rifles, but how does he know for sure that the broadcast system doesn't have a secret mode that will just ignore it? If all rifles require an activation code, what's to stop a rebel in Space Command turning off the 'keep-alive' signal and disabling the loyalist rifles too? If it's a kill code, what's to stop them rebroadcasting the kill code to achieve the same effect? To selectively turn off only rebel rifles, wouldn't every individual rifle have to have its own unique identity, meaning the broadcast system has huge bandwidth requirements? What if a rebel logistics unit mixes up rifles so they're not with the unit they're supposed to be with according to the army records?
At the bare minimum, you'd need to design a fully electric rifle that requires power and crypographic approval to fire at all, and is somehow EMP hardened but also able to listen for a remote signal, and seize all civilian rifles (if you're in the US)... Maybe it only needs to get the 'all-clear' signal once a day, but then you give the rebels a day to seize reliable dumb rifles.
The whole idea seems very silly. If it was limited to things like tanks and fighter jets, it's even harder to imagine that it couldn't be disabled by the maintenance crews. Let's say the CEO/king mandates that the system is added to all fighter jets. What's to stop a rebel airforce base rolling back the firmware to a previous version that doesn't check for the lock system at all?
Wait, yeah, why has no one else attacked this on technical grounds? Crypto weapons sounds absolutely ridiculous from an engineering standpoint
I think people did in the original comments at UR, but you can only read those at the Internet Archive.
Scott actually briefly pointed out that the idea is unworkable in the Anti-Reactionary FAQ: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/The-Anti-Reactionary-FAQ#4_3_-could-a-joint-stock-corporate-state-ensure-complete-security-by-mandating-cryptographic-locks-on-all-its-weapons
I never got the appeal of Moldbug's whole CEO King idea (not that I have read much of it) but this seems like a particularly silly part of it.
Cryptographically locked guns sounds nonsensical, but there may be equivalents imaginable in the near future. Robot/Drone Army that only listens to the boss, some sort of weapon of last resort that the boss has access to that nobody else does (buried nukes, genetically targetted weapons).
Of course our experience of security as an arms race, rather than a static state of the world does rather imply that setting up such a system means that your state competitors have a single system (including the squishy human part) to hack that *by design* allows complete control of your country. This seems like a bad idea.
What precisely does "listen to the boss" mean? Run me through the CONOPS.
Moldbug's piece linked here references Permissive Action Links, and muses that there is nothing in principle preventing a technique applied in a few thousand units that we hope is never used to be extrapolated out to hundreds of millions of units and applied daily. This is a bracing level of naïveté, though I'm more offended by the lack of critical thinking - given your opponent has been foolish enough to implement these, how might you destroy them?
Now, there *are* instances where sensitive cryptographic encoding is regularly employed by the armed forces. Not a ton of those technical details are public, but one should not be surprised that key handling is an entire procedural discipline that has to be resilient against failures both accidental and malicious. Complicated!
But really, I'm waiting for anyone to take it seriously enough to realize that a farcically optimistic estimate of a systematic rollout would put this as a $100 billion+ effort whose immediate result is a large *reduction* in military effectiveness. Have fun getting that through the Pentagon, Your Pluripotent Imperialness.
"Only listen to the boss" seems like it's something you would need to implement with AI, rather than cryptography. Maybe Moldbug's idea would work if you could build an AI-powered robot army that was smart enough to be loyal to the CEO King (and was completely self-maintaining)... but of course we don't even know how to make current AIs loyal.
Sure would work, but I think ensuring your Praetorian Guard's loyalty by deploying your aligned AI is somewhat burying the lede. 😛
Also let's remember, the reason why these places would be so well governed (from the point of view of Joe Taxpayer) is that we're imagining a world of statelets so smalls that everyone can just "vote with their feet" and leave if they think the shareholders are being unreasonable with minimal cost and pain.
Since the world is not a corporatist utopia today, I guess Moldbug means these statelets to be really really small, a thousand of Andorras basically. Which raises the questions, even if cryptographic weapons were feasible, wouldn't such a govt be easily overrun by any determined band of pirates/revolutionaries who somehow manage to create a couple thousand rifles?
Yes, it seems like the more you lock down your state's weapons to prevent rebellion and forbid dumb weapons, the more vulnerable your state will be to outside invasion.
Many Thanks for the comment! I was very skeptical of the crypto part of Moldbug's proposal, but hadn't thought through the details. Thank you for providing them!
I don't have any particular expertise in cryptography - maybe an expert could design a nuclear launch code for every gun in the country. But I don't think so.
Many Thanks! I think the points you made about the communications needed to get any sort of enable/disable signal to every single rifle stand, independent of the details of the cryptographic system.
I guess you could posit a panopticon as a precondition here, but it seems highly plausible that the military could coup by building secret bunkers in which to manufacture or modify weapons. It’s quite hard to check up on what’s going on in Siberia.
On a technical level, “sprinkle crypto on the military” doesn’t hold water for me. Take a tank; it’s a physical machine with some control systems, and you just need to replace those control systems to override the crypto. I guess if we go far enough into the future every object is embedded with intelligence such that “replace the control system” is not viable; it probably doesn’t work today for an F-35. But I bet for the next few decades you can neutralize the complex brittle weapons if you have enough grunts with fertilizer bombs and guns.
There is also a big technical problem with the chain of trust required here. Yarvin should know better from his crypto project Urbit, but if you look at real world deployments of cryptography, such as the [Public Key Infrastructure](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_key_infrastructure) that powers the internet, you’ll find lots of operational issues with having a single root of trust. You need to sign intermediate certificates to enable your gun factory to sign guns without letting them sign nukes, but now you have lots of private keys to secure, and inevitably some will be compromised. Even ignoring spies, someone will accidentally publish the gun factory private keys on GitHub, so you need a revocation scheme to invalidate and replace compromised keys, but how does a gun update its key securely? If the gun’s Secure Enclave is writable you can load a key from a different trust root, if you burn keys into read-only chips then they need to be replaceable, and you have similar problems. This sort of system ends up being intractable for software; look up Trusted Compute. It’s even worse for hardware.
Further fun can be found in the key ceremonies involved in keeping the root keys safe, and the dependency on your weapons relying on an Internet connection to function (ECM / EMP disabling your military is something of a dealbreaker).
Have you considered another possibility, which is that Curtis Yarvin is insane and these elaborate mental constructions and didactic, meandering treatises about hobbits and dark elves don’t have much to do with the real world?
It is interesting that Y.C., for all his experience in tech, does not address the possibility of his chosen cryptographic scheme being broken in the future.
Algorithms aren't eternal (in the sense of being eternally reliable), and I don't really want to live in a world where a clever idea of some nerdy postdoc brings down the whole political safeguard structure of entire nations.
It crypto-locking weapons is load-bearing for Yarvin's scheme, then it's safe to dismiss it. The eternal lesson-learned of military weaponry is that the kit must work under the worst possible circumstances. Comms go down all the time - often deliberately to minimize signature - you will never be always-online. What about a physical key, like an RFID chip? Well, even today fighting-echelon vehicles don't have keys, so that the vehicle isn't useless if the driver gets hit by artillery on their way to dinner ["you know how to drive this thing? Good, get in."]. It's such a hand-wavy whiteboard idea, would only work in a frictionless world where nothing ever goes wrong, which is not the military.
"Apparent increases in quality of government across American history tend to follow informal regime changes, as in 1861 and 1933. It is not that the class of people in government improves, but that a new class of people comes into government, where power at once begins to corrupt them. The simple monotonic pattern, as described above, is seen more often in democracy’s foreign colonies. In any case, with government in the hands of a clerical elite, there is no prospect of any further nondestructive update."
Is there not an interpretation of post-2019 Moldbug that he sees an opportunity to a) break the clerical elite and b) execute an 1861/1933 style reset? Trump/Vance aren't exactly his ideal truth-seeking neoreactionaries*, but on the other hand the last two resets took a Civil war and then a decade long depression followed by a global conflict, so omelettes and broken eggs come to mind. Perhaps this is the closest opportunity to executing that nondestructive update and keeping the system limping on for long enough for the true neoreactionary takeover.
*Vance is clearly much closer to the ideal than Biden/Harris but neither are paragons of virtue, and Trump, despite moments of pure clarity, is largely full of shit.
Lincoln was, obviously, great. But the post Civil War federal governance was (kind of famously) pretty crap, and (also kind of famously) wildly corrupt. Seems like a weird example to pick for an uptick in good governance following regime change. Better explanation is just that Lincoln was a generational talent relative to his peers.
Pre-Civil War governance was pretty shit too. Jackson to Lincoln is mostly a wasteland, Polk's only remembered for the Mexican-American War.
I think there is a contrarian take that Polk was a great, uh, emperor but I mostly agree.
I see it as a win-win. Either the Great American Empire is founded, or this all comes crashing down, and something better is built from the ashes (or is simply subsumed by a superior society). The forest needs a good burning every now and then.
I once found Yarvin's contrarian and wordy takes fascinating.
But at the end of the day, they are an intellectual-sounding gloss over authoritarianism. Methods to prevent tyranny that are nigh impossible to implement in full aren't methods to prevent tyranny, full stop.
https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/clear-thinking-v-curtis-yarvin
https://thucydidesii.substack.com/p/influence-of-curtis-yarvin-peter
https://mileswilliams.substack.com/p/curtis-yarvin-is-so-wrong-about-democracy (paid)
https://iamdonnyevans.substack.com/p/curtis-yarvin-and-the-temptation
https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-red-pill-pusher
https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/am-i-supposed-to-take-curtis-yarvin
https://speterdavis.substack.com/p/frauds-in-the-wings-the-plagiarized
https://www.mind-war.com/p/eugenics-cabinet-the-hyper-racist
>Methods to prevent tyranny that are nigh impossible to implement in full aren't methods to prevent tyranny, full stop.
Yes, thank you for stating this succinctly.
For someone who criticizes the failures of communism, it's striking that he can't recognize the failure mode of 'my utopian political system works great on paper, surely that means it will work great in reality'.
A plan with 5 moving parts simply doesn't work in practice; the idea of 'authoritarianism plus 20 moving parts to avoid its failure modes' is just normal failure-mode authoritarianism.
Quite right. His theories are riddled with epicycles.
Cheers, and agreed. Even "old Yarvin"'s ideas could never work as advertised.
Somewhat ironically, given the allusions to the cathedral and the bazaar, his proposed way to put the bazaar in charge requires an extremely brittle and perfect system where even a tiny flaw turns it into its worst enemy, unlike the technocratic elites, who rely on scientific and intellectual debate to fix the inevitable errors they make, and thus end up with fewer errors than any other system (as we see amply illustrated during Covid and the like, where the modern world had fewer errors than past pandemic situations and got a better outcome, but the people complain that there are *any* errors).
Expectations are certainly higher. Thus complaints about standards of living that would have been the envy of most people who ever lived.
>First, the dictator will be checked by a board of directors, who can fire him if he goes crazy. Second, the board of directors (or the investors who elect them?) will be aligned because they have stock.
This sounds almost exactly like property-limited-franchise constitutional monarchy of the kind codified in my neck of the woods in 1832, by the Whigs (who are, if I recall correctly, a particular bête noir of Moldbug’s).
The electoral college as originally designed looks uncannily similar to the usual corporate structure. The problem is that electors (directors) immediately begin to be micromanaged by voters (shareholders) to elect a particular CEO, which leads to populism. Whereas the entire point is for every elector to be "unfaithful" and to provide two degrees of isolation against populism.
Somehow corporations usually avoid this sort of degeneration into politics, I wonder how exactly and if it can be replicated.
I suspect it's precisely because, as Scott pointed out, the problems that politics is designed to solve exist at a level higher than corporate governance.
If corporations were truly sovereign, accountable to no higher authority, and tasked with maintaining a monopoly on violence to assert their will, I think corporate governance would exactly become politics.
Parliaments actually bear greater resemblance to joint-stock corporations. They select a leader rather than letting the general public elect one, and they can remove a Prime Minister when they choose to.
They are like joint stock corporations if they worked for the employees rather than shareholders.
Rather, the employees and the shareholders are the same people.
Indeed, the Abbé Siéyès explicitly justified the property-limited-franchise constitutional monarchy as the political equivalent of shareholders in joint-stock corporations.
I think what Moldbug had in mind here was a much smaller and more select group, more "Peers of the Realm" or perhaps the Venetian Senate than mildly prosperous yeomen and artisans who got enfranchised in 1832.
Perhaps… but if the only criterion (for anything related to your neocameral state/corporation) is financial value, and a successful state/corp is going to experience economic growth, and freedom of contract is the foundation of your legal system, then I don’t see how you keep the number of shareholders so restricted. (It’s worth noticing that “economic growth => widening franchise” is pretty much exactly what happened in Britain in the period c. 1700-1832.)
Historically, franchise tends to be linked to your potential contribution to state capacity, positive or negative.
The Roman Republic had something close to free manhood suffrage, but heavily malapportioned in favor of wealthier and better educated classes, which reflected their military system of large-scale levies of free men who were responsible for their own training and equipment: almost everyone fought, but those who could afford warhorses or full heavy infantry armor were more valuable than those who could only afford skirmisher gear.
Most medieval assemblies in Western Europe had four-ish groups represented. Senior church leaders were represented because they controlled the largest and most concentrated class of educated men capable of performing administrative duties: the dual meaning of "clerical" and the close similarity of the words "cleric" and "clerk" is not a coincidence. Feudal magnates were represented because they could raise the best troops, commanded patronage networks that were essential for effective governance, and they collected land rents that could be skimmed off for royal tax revenue. Lesser landed gentry were represented for similar reasons at a smaller scale. And major urban merchants and artisans (collectively called burgesses, burgers, or bourgeoises) were represented because they provided another major concentrated source of potential tax revenue, controlled urban militias that also had military value, and were (especially later in the medieval period) increasingly a separate class of literate and educated men who could provide the government with an alternate source of administrators. England grouped these classes into two houses, burgesses and gentry ("knights of the shire") in the House of Commons and peers and bishops in the House of Lords, while France and Castille used a three-chamber system that split the peers and bishops into separate "estates".
The expansion of the franchise came from changing military technology and economic patterns increasing the relative importance to military might and state capacity first of the gentry and burgesses, then of the "middling sort" (yeomen and lesser merchants and artisans), and finally (in the 19th and early 20th centuries) the unpropertied classes.
I think Moldbug's assumption was that his cryptographic armaments system would give the holders of the crypto keys an artificial overwhelming advantage in military capacity (i.e. they have a collective absolute veto on the use of military force) and that the keys could be technologically structured so control of them can't be further subdivided. I'm dubious of both premises, and I think Moldbug was severely underestimating the importance of the people wielding the weapons (i.e. they also have a collective absolute veto since they can refuse to target the weapons or pull the trigger) as well as almost entirely neglecting other aspects of state capacity. But with all those caveats, I can see where he was coming from well enough to agree with Scott that it was a clever idea despite very probably being unworkable.
Giggled to myself for a good 10 minutes because I was reminded that Boaty McBoatface was a real thing that happened.
You are supposed to giggle. That was the point. A bit of Letterman like silliness on an official state snowplow.
Thanks, Autism McAutismface.
:) You are entirely welcome.
I would say that his political evolution from dogmatic neoreactionary to pseudo court philosopher of Trump 2.0 is partly a crime of opportunity (it's easy to be dogmatic as an underground blogger, and the temptation to compromise on one's values when presented an opportunity for actual influence is probably difficult to resist) and partly age-related pragmatism on the scope of his ambitions and the aperture for radical change. On the other hand, he has seemingly distanced himself from the Trump administration (recent piece about Mandarins and Businessmen), so it's also possible that the 'selling out' you refer to was more of a temporary lapse in judgement than a firm political reorientation.
Matt Yglesias wrote a post where he references the Brazilian diplomat Tiago Ribeiro dos Santos making the point that parliamentary systems have something of the corporate structure: the shareholders (citizens) elect the board (parliament) who in turn select a CEO (prime minister), who runs things until they step down/lose the confidence of the board.
I'm not sure if this analogy helps explain why parliamentary systems seem to perform better than presidential or semi-presidential ones, i.e
if a parliamentary system captures enough of the good stuff of the corporate structure that you don't actually need to get rid of democracy and all that other stuff, even if you have neocameral leanings.
The problem is that Moldbug hates humanity, so The Citizen Majority is not an "aligned" board for him. What he wants is a smaller group of people who think like he does.
But the citizens aren't the board, they're the shareholders! And their preferences are still hugely important in Patchwork-topia, since their decision of where to live is what makes the sovcorps profitable or not; just like it's Apple's (prospective) customers who ultimately determine whether Apple is a successful company. I agree Moldbug wouldn't like the idea of exactly one share per adult citizen, but I'm asking, how important is the structure of who the shareholders are? It seems to me, regardless who the shareholders are, the way the board satisfies them is by running the country in a way that appeals to the citizens--if the citizens are the shareholders that's a little more direct, but is that important?
"since their decision of where to live is what makes the sovcorps profitable or not"
Decisions on where to live have the advantage of choosing between the realized outcomes of different countries, rather than the imagined future outcomes of an election.
I guess, but I'm not sure how important this distinction truly is: are people truly better informed about the affairs in foreign countries than they are about predicting the outcomes of elections?
The fact that we have a ready-made phrase that describes the wishful thinking people apply to other circumstances (the grass is always greener...) suggests that people engage in a lot of wishful thinking and mood affiliation either way.
The distinction seems quite important. Everyone knows which countries are rich, but people have wildly different ideas on why and how that came to be.
Fair point
We already had a patchwork-topia, it was called feudalism, the people living in it were not such great fans of it and were constantly trying to escape it in favor of more liberal jurisdictions ("Stadtluft macht frei"), and pretty notably, it was gradually dismantled by force. "It failed the test of cultural evolution", as this corner of the internet would say.
If Moldbug hates humanity, then I'd hate to be ruled by people who like it.
He has openly stated he wants to turn undesirable humans into biofuel or keep them in some kind of perpetual matrix state.
The perpetual matrix state, like the endless torrent of social media slop, smartphones, drugs, and welfare pumped out by modern democracies. Hmm!
You know you're arguing with someone in good faith when they ignore half the point and then act like modern opiates are the same as being physically strapped to a VR headset against your will for life and having your energy extracted into batteries.
As if you're arguing in good faith lol. Yarvin's joke about turning homeless people into biodiesel was in the context of making a point about how any and all sovereign powers can do anything they want to their citizens.
He's essentially just saying "the government could kill you if they really wanted" and you're twisting that into "Yarvin wants the government to kill you"
I'm looking at the realistic ways his proposal might be made into reality. Matrix batteries are not realistic, but internet addiction is.
And that means he hates humanity? Hating humanity means simply wanting them all dead. When you love something, you want to see it be the best it could possibly be. Humanity and their societies have much room for improvement, of course, but acknowledging that doesn't mean you hate it.
I think there's an ambiguity between "humanity" as a kind of abstract expression of human potential and values and whatnot, and "humanity" as in the actual collection of human beings alive at a given time.
I think "I want to turn 90% of humans into biofuel" is compatible with loving humanity in the first sense, but not in the second sense. It used to be a criticism of left-wing do-gooders that they loved humanity more than they loved human beings. I think that's what's meant here.
Isn't it the other way around, that left-wing do-gooders care about individual lives to the detriment of the whole?
The biofuel quip wasn't serious and was obviously a joke. His actual solution was to put criminals in prison and just hook them up to VR so they can enjoy themselves.
He makes it very clear who he is talking about, and it is not just criminals:
"...the problem of adults who are not productive members of society. In our little Newspeak we call them wards of the realm. A ward is any resident who is not capable of earning a living, is not accepted as a dependent by any guardian, and is not wanted by any other patch."
Why do you guys have to lie about this? If you support this man's ideas, just support him with your chest.
This was what I was thinking - you can basically get 90% of the way to moldbugism by having a parliamentary democracy except the executive posts aren't staffed by ministers directly (which is basically a hybrid with presidential systems). Which doesn't even sound that radical anymore.
I suspect to maintain the true spirit of Moldbuggism there'd be some restrictions on the franchise, or maybe more likely, that voting shares would literally be shares that you could buy and sell, but I'm truly not sure how much different that would be from a modern parliamentary democracy where the rich and powerful just use methods other than the vote to assert their will.
As only an occasional reader of both gentlemen - and a person with zero interest in the oily Cathy Young - I find the conversation stimulating, but the elephant in the room curiously invisible. Maybe Yarvin goes into depth about it in his "11,000 blogs" about civics-cum-technocracy, but maybe not. It boils down to something like this: Yes, corporations are great structures for motivating and organizing large teams of humans to pursue complex tasks, e.g. iPhones in large numbers, rockets to orbit and back, shampoo to cleanse the hairs of the world - with conditioner, too!
But corporations, notably, don't have to address the thorny, crucial, emotional aspects of Life or Liberty.
Can a corporation lock you up for 5-7 years for stealing from the packaging department? No. Can it kill you by sending you to a foreign land to fight "unincorporated" peoples? No. Is it, ultimately, pretty facile stuff to wax poetic about sci-fi governance when corporations have proven to be great at widgets, but lousy at managing India?
I don't think this is an invisible elephant. I thought I addressed it in this paragraph:
> "What prevents Tim Apple from refusing to pay dividends to Apple investors and keeping all the profit for himself? Easy question, it’s the United States government, no problem here. What prevents Donald Trump from murdering America’s five richest billionaires and taking their stuff? The police? What about the thing where Trump is the police chief’s boss’s boss’s boss’? Awkward, but that’s why we have separation of powers, checks and balances, government-of-law-and-not-of-men, all that stuff. What prevents Donald Trump from calling in the military to arrest all the other separate powers that are supposed to check and balance him? Uh, more separation of power, different checks and balances, some sort of loyalty to the Constitution. When Yarvin points out that companies thrive without separation-of-powers, that’s because they never encounter the problem that separation of powers was intended to solve...the regime he boosts today has nothing like this, so it’s facile to use the corporate comparison argument."
I'm not sure that that really addresses the concern. The issue is not "corporations are governed by a state that can prevent the CEO from being evil", the issue is "corporations are not good at many things, including managing a country's worth of people".
Obviously we don't have a huge number of case studies here, but the ones that we do have (like British India) are very clear that if you try to put a corporation in charge of a lot of people, the structure is unhelpful and works against human flourishing.
I’m not sure India was run better or worse under the empire rather than the company. It was less racist for sure
Not to mention that, if you don't like the way the CEO is running a corporation and the Board is just the CEO's frat brothers and golfing buddies who won't keep him in check, you can sue the Board or sell your shares.
Another big aspect of the difference is that when a corporation messes up its decisions badly enough, the pain that it's failure causes is relatively restricted, while a state failing can destroy wealth, life and happiness much more thoroughly.
Editors with balls are valuable people to Big Thinkers like Mr. Yarvin and Mr. Alexander. 😉
Mea culpa for missing the posts where Moldbug details how a CEO who goes bonkers could be removed by the directors. I did conscientiously read a number of posts where he discusses the "joint-stock company" idea and didn't see anything about CEO/King removal. I did, however, see a lot of statements to the effect that the monarch's power must be absolute and there must be no authority over him, which seems to preclude a body with the authority to remove. I don't get enough hazard pay to read Moldbug's entire oeuvre.
I appreciate the info - but IMO it just adds to the contradictions, and the fact that MM has to construct absurdly elaborate scenarios for how the board with the authority of removal could exist without undercutting absolutism just illustrates (again) that he cannot be taken seriously as a political thinker.
(FWIW, I think his writing is occasionally good and even funny, in small doses. Sadly he doesn't come in small doses.)
Didn't mean to attack you; I thought your piece did a good job on the more-important task of criticizing what he's actually saying now.
Oh no, I didn't see it as an attack at all! I'm just frustrated with myself that I missed some stuff.
I will say, I was rather charmed by Curtis's "traditional clothing + digital/fiber optics" vision for his legitimist Europe. If he promises to bring back the 18th C upper-class male dress code, I'm in. ;-)
The joint stock thing always struck me as a very weak analogy. The thing about Apple is, if Cook does a bad job, I can sell the shares and by a competitor. How do I do that with a nation state? The only option is to leave the country and hope another will accept me.
Over longer time scales it's possible to see the payoff from that i.e. the migration of elite scientists from Germany to the US during Hitler, but at the time it was not at in any way certain the anti-Hitler alliance would win. And even that required Hitler to make the insane mistake of invading the Soviet Union..
Early in 1945 a large faction of Americans, including the Secretary of the Navy, wanted a negotiated end to the war against Japan. The contours of history look obvious in retrospect but almost never in the moment.
If you're a shareholder of a state, you'd presumably sell the shares the same way you'd sell Apple shares. If you're a consumer of the state, you'd have to move, just like in the current system, except presumably it'd be easier since they'd be city states instead of nation states.
> except presumably it'd be easier since they'd be city states instead of nation states.
Save that these are notionally city-states 'unbound by modern international law'. Free movement of people is one of those constructs of international law, and otherwise it's to a city-state's self-interest to sell residence permits to the highest bidder. (Or act as a pirate state and just mug/enslave people in the wilderness. That prohibition too is a construct of 'international law'.)
What international law are you referring to with regards to free movement? Because clearly e.g. most Africans aren't allowed to freely move to Spain.
Free movement says you're allowed to move out of X country, not that you're allowed to move into Y country. From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13: "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."
In practice, the fact that ~every country restricts people from moving into it means this right is paper (to put aside the ways the communists prevented it), and presumably there's nothing to stop cartel-esque agreements to forbid movement in in the vast array of city states scenario.
City states would have more incentive to block or control immigration - being overcrowded to begin with. Also city states are hardly impregnable in history, at the very least in times of war a city state would need to feed itself. Better to have surrounding countryside.
My impression is that cartels tend to be unstable because enforcement is difficult. The states would each have a strong incentive to allow profitable individuals to immigrate, so I'd expect such individuals to have greater freedom of movement in a world where states are motivated by profit than they do in a world dominated by democracy and by nation states, for which it is natural to exclude those not belonging to the nation.
The Network State theory is where this lands. By abolishing governments and instead enabling companies to rule as city states, you can “sell your shares” by moving city states - this can be physically or logically depending on the Network State makeup. All of this seems to ignore the current geopolitical landscape as defined by governments with military spending and the rule of law.
I'm not clear on this: are there actual shares in these states, that one can buy and sell like normal shares? Or are "shares" a metaphor for living in a state; something more like being a customer? Or both?
If the shares are actual shares, are there rules about who can buy them?
If it's like a customer, how do you deal with the fact that you need another state to accept you? Or, what prevents the monarch from forbidding you from leaving? If Apple could shoot all their customers if they tried to buy Androids that might be a short term ploy to juice shareholder value, but doesn't seem like the sort of thing we want the shareholders/board to reward?
I can't recall him writing about the board of directors, but I can recall him suggesting assassination as a way of removing bad monarchs.
That'll do wonders for stability and legitimacy
"I appreciate the info - but IMO it just adds to the contradictions, and the fact that MM has to construct absurdly elaborate scenarios for how the board with the authority of removal could exist without undercutting absolutism just illustrates (again) that he cannot be taken seriously as a political thinker."
How silly is this statement. MM is a wonderful political thinker, not for his contribution on a hypothetical political system that could replace the current regime (that's an impossible task), but for his critique on the current regime - which is a masterpiece. Imho his main contribution is articulating the split between reaction and fascism, and the criticisms by the former on the latter. Mainstream political canon has the tendency to bundle them together even though reactionaries back in the day mostly despised fascism as a cancerous outgrowth of democracy on reactionary thought.
Again, of course, the solution he proposes has immense flaws - this does not negate his accurate perception of the current state of affairs and their historical precedent.
Do you also believe that Plato cannot be taken seriously as a political thinker because his prescription to the disease of democracy was with major flaws?
Moldbug's system was designed to be perfect, but systems aiming for perfection are usually much worse than systems that allow for and accept human error and defects. Patchwork and the sovcorp just seem like they would become unworkable and easily subverted in practice (crypto locked weapons, lol). Nick Land's libertarian proposal, on the other hand, seemed just as dystopian as the worst projections of woke leftism.
He stopped blogging entirely in 2014 to run Tlon and didn't resume until 2020 when he quit Tlon. Your timeline here makes no sense whatsoever. The fact some alt-right people read his old, already defunct blog in 2016 doesn't mean he had anything to do with any of it.
I know his blogging timeline but I'm not sure what about this affects my point. My impression is that he was doing field-building and networking stuff with conservative think tanks in the middle, which is why I dated the turn from 2015 rather than when the new blog started.
I assume he did *some* networking during that period, but I'd think it was mostly with Silicon Valley people rather than conservative thinktanks and whatever, as his ideas were completely verboten back then. His time was actually primarily spent working at Tlon.
What happened is that after the NRx blogosphere was pretty much already defunct, alt-right/dissident right people online go and read that stuff and tweet about it and talk about it on podcasts and so on. Some of it gets absorbed into general online right discourse and synthesised with populism and other strains of right-wing thought. His profile grows as the online right becomes more influential and he eventually returns under his real name.
Point being, Trumpism was never his thing and he wasn't really involved until maybe the 2024 Trump run, and only obliquely. He counter-signalled Trump the entire time and afaik voted for Biden and advocated voting for Biden consistently. Now that Trump's in office he's commenting on that reality but I think it's a big stretch to tie him to MAGA and populism except insofar as some of his ideas have made it into right-wing thinking in a roundabout way.
Obviously he now has connections to movers and shakers in the Trump admin and periphery but I'm just saying it was never actually his thing.
I thought he was working pretty closely with Claremont, Michael Anton, etc.
I would describe his "commenting" on Trump as advocating for Trump to seize control of everything and declare himself dictator, which I still think is the thing that he said would never work in his original writing.
I don't think he's ever been against Trump (or even Biden) seizing control of everything and declaring himself a dictator, he just thought it wasn't possible. His position has pretty consistently been that it needs to be made possible. His post from January this year is basically "I was wrong, Trump's not as impotent as I thought. Regime change isn't possible but there's steps he can take to make it more possible in the future and he should take them."
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-pleasure-of-error
IIRC he attended the Thiel-organized Trump election victory party in 2016.
I must not be understanding the points correctly, because "the dictator is not elected or appointed or beholden to anyone" seems to directly contradict "the dictator can be removed by the board".
If the Council of State can remove the king, then he is no king.
As to "the board can remove the dictator", how well did that work out in the case of Caesar, who staged it so that he got perpetual powers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictator_perpetuo
A 'true' dictator is not going to be comfortable with any checks upon his power and will act to make them nugatory.
I'm seeing a running theme of difficult questions answered by simplistic, flawed strategies that export those flaws to under-baked novelties. The more Moldbug I read the less I think of him, which is a rough trade given his wordcount!
Removing isn't the same as appointing.
But it is the same is being beholden.
There's no practical difference between "appointing" and "removing until you get someone you'd appoint"
Agreed. Also, as I'd mentioned in my own comment, a dictator can set up whatever super-clever management structure that he can imagine; but ultimately if he pisses off enough people they're going to take him out of office with torches and pitchforks. Cryptographically locked blockchain weapons will only get you so far, because you still need your Palace Guard to wield them -- and even if they're willing, they can't fight the entire remaining population.
What did the old Yarvin think about the states run by corporations that have historically existed, like the East India Company or King Leopold's Congo?
Does he endorse them? Clearly, these companies did a lot of exploitation of the populations they ruled over. Yarvin might argue that these companies were not really part of the sort of patchwork of corporation-states he envisions. But I don't think that's the problem here.
The fact is, the population of e.g. the Congo Free State was just very unproductive. The profit maximizing way to run the place conceivably *was* to chop of the limbs of anyone not meeting their rubber quota.
According to the Architectonics posts, Yarvin is aware of the problem of such unproductive or barely "breaking even" populations. The relevant quote is:
"If our design does not provide for the existence of a larger number of human beings whose existence anywhere is not only unprofitable, but in fact a straight-up loss, to that realm, it is simply inconsistent with reality."
For some reason the Architectonics author thinks this will merely create a caste of homeless people when Yarvin himself is perfectly aware (https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-2-profit-strategies-for-our/) that the obvious answer is genocide. His solution:
"The best humane alternative to genocide I can think of is not to liquidate the wards—either metaphorically or literally—but to virtualize them."
But why should a profit-maximizing corporation state incur this cost? And say it did: the VR cannot be too good either, lest marginally productive people get lured into it. So basically you get chopped of limbs for the marginally productive rubber collectors and an even worse virtual reality for the unproductive.
Beyond that Yarvin has nothing but an appeal to charity. Maybe the productive will take care of the unproductive. I would not be optimistic on that. People tend to care way less about genocides committed against the unproductive than about other groups.
Depending on the labor supply, in a patchwork of profit maximising employer states, the marginal minimum wage may well be whatever you absolutely have to pay from keeping your employees from "quitting": maybe the minimum dose of anaesthetics required to survive vivisection long enough that meaningful experiments can be performed on you.
So every patchwork of corporation states will have its heart of darkness somewhere that runs on the Congo Free State business model. Not a good outcome in a deontic sense. And given that we might all see our relative productivity levels drop precipitously rather soon, an even much worse outcome in a utilitarian sense.
He discussed Leopold's Congo Free State here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20101016032834/http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/08/from-cromer-to-romer-and-back-again.html
Thanks for the reference!
And Scott addressed that very example in his Anti-Reactionary FAQ 12 years ago: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/
In the UR post, MM indicts people who skip over the Belgian Congo between Leopold & Mobuto. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita discussed why his Belgium was better governed than his Free State in an EconTalk podcast in the '00s. I highlight the time within the podcast episode here:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2008/09/13/note-to-self/
You don't get it and you never will, since you're not trying: leaving you in power for <em>one more day</em> was an unacceptable risk to our children's future. The "synthesis" is that Yarvin did some growing up, saw that waiting around for a picture-perfect Reaction was going to stretch past his own children's lives and encompass various other serious risks, and acknowledged that Donald Trump, a far, far better man than any of us deserve, had actually and irreducibly delivered something hopeful despite Yarvin's continued snide dismissals of him. (I guess if in the course of 20 years you change your mind and admit that experience has proved you wrong you get to be called a sellout. Real nice.)
(For anyone who wasn't in on this post for the fun of dunking on boogieman Yarvin: in the happy scenario that we don't deserve, Trump isn't the king, he is the anointer of the king. He is old and he is not going to attempt to outlast his own powers, especially when there is a face-saving convention limiting him to two terms. Moldbug agrees: four years is not a long time, and the Reaction rocket has separate stages for taking and exercising power.)
<blockquote>Anatoli, you're afraid of [the Cathedral]. Well, you should be. Personally, I give us one chance in three.</blockquote>
But at least there's hope.
> actually and irreducibly delivered something hopeful
What is it you think he has delivered? I see tariffs and funding cuts that will promptly be reversed after the Democrats retake office.
You're aware that Democrats always decrease the federal deficit while Republicans always increase it?
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/new-data-shows-biden-delivering-deficit-reduction-boast-rcna53965
The widespread belief that Republicans are better than Democrats on the economy and especially budget deficits is utterly mystifying to me. It hasn't been true in my lifetime, and I'm 56.
> What is it you think he has delivered?
Significant damage to systems and processes designed to prevent the US becoming a dictatorship.
Wishful thinking. Any damage they've caused is superficial at best; the systems and processes of the administrative state are far too robust for the unfocused and disorganized flailing you consider an attack they've mounted against them to be of any avail.
USAID is dead. So is Voice of America. Many long running Cold War era leftoid programs are being shuttered, not to return.
Okay so ignoring the side marks. What's the actual scenario you're envisioning here? Trump hands over power to some king of philosopher king tbd who has none of his issues? Where would you find this person and what incentive does Trump have to give power to them? What incentive does the rest of the GOP have to agree? What prevents the vast majority of Americans who are anti kings saying fuck this and seceding or overthrowing them?
Listen, I know having like 12 trans athletes participating in sports leagues across the whole country was very annoying for you, and that your media echo chamber kept pushing your face into it every day.
But it seriously was not worth rolling the fascism dice over.
Cute how you imply that's only problem with the progressive machine.
There are those of us who think that putting a DEI figurehead under the same unaccountable bureaucracy that propped up her senile predecessor was also rolling the fascism dice.
If you seriously thought that was the motivation for "rolling the fascism dice," and you think it a minor point, why wouldn't you cede it and give them what they wanted on that front?
It's bad to let people hold the body politic hostage for minor grievances; it incentivizes people to threaten to "roll the fascism dice" for any minor concession.
First they came for the trans folks.
We're on like line 3 of that poem now. It's not a long poem.
I don’t think the poem mentioned trans at all. It’s a pretty weak poem, by the way, both in morality and execution.
The point stands - why is the left aligning itself with what’s a disastrous and largely individualistic philosophy anyhow.
If you have basic survival instincts, you're not going to die. Put your head down until the fire passes, and you're going to be fine.
That wasn't what elites decided to roll the fascism dice over and you know it.
I wasn't imagining snrad to be an elite? I'm talking about voters.
Without elite support, nothing happens.
Yes, but the voters still decide which elites to listen to.
Voters decided to listen to elites who were very pissed off at the response to COVID and the resulting economic decisions made thereafter.
I think many Americans still don't understand what Trump is costing you and will cost you.
"‘America First’ Is a Lie"
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/america-first-is-a-lie-a76
"What Trump is Costing America"
https://dgardner.substack.com/p/what-trump-is-costing-america
"What Trump is Costing America: part two"
https://dgardner.substack.com/p/what-trump-is-costing-america-part
"Trump Nukes The Global Economy"
https://www.thelongmemo.com/p/trump-nukes-the-global-economy
"How Trump’s War on the “Deep State” is Turning Government into a Crime Syndicate"
https://www.thelongmemo.com/p/how-trumps-war-on-the-deep-state
"The Surrender to China"
https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-surrender-to-china
"Why Trump Immediately Surrendered to Putin and Xi"
https://researchingukraine.substack.com/p/why-trump-immediately-surrendered
"Trump's Attack on America's National Security"
https://olgalautman.substack.com/p/trumps-attack-on-americas-national
"Why has Musk gained access to our data?"
https://olgalautman.substack.com/p/why-has-musk-gained-access-to-our
"Trump is setting us up for a cyber catastrophe"
https://weaponizedspaces.substack.com/p/trump-is-setting-us-up-for-a-cyber
"The Beginning of the End of the American Defense Industrial Complex"
https://www.theconcis.com/p/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-american
"The Crypto Grifters Of DOGE"
https://cryptadamus.substack.com/p/the-crypto-grifters-of-doge
"How To Insider Trade And Influence People (With Tariffs)"
https://cryptadamus.substack.com/p/how-to-insider-trade-and-influence
What an array array of absolutely impartial, unbiased opinion pieces that have absolutely no axe to grind. Could you provide us some more?
There are plenty of facts in those pieces. Inconvenient ones for believers in Trump and reactionary ideas but facts nonetheless.
So there's this absolutely secure dicator with no checks/balances but also a board that can remove him and also they "own stock" in the country. This avoids the problem of corruption since stock ownership just kinda happens and the dictator can't affect that. And nobody picks the dictator but there's this antiversity which is like the best people who never lie and then they become the government because the dictator says so. But the dictator makes sure they are all loyal because he only allows them to have cryptoguns except the guns can also be controlled by the board (not the antiversity though). 11,000 posts of this?
About one of those sentences per post. The rest is padding with obscure historical trivia.
There are Chinese intellectuals that say that China is a democracy (where it matters) at local level and the centralised dictatorship is designed to ensure checks and balances (and expertise) up the chain, to the wise ruler on top.
Give me a break, Moldbug was always a culture war hack who believed the left was uniquely bad and ideological, that he turned out this way was entirely predictable.
I'm sorry but being quirky doth not make for a coherent word view all by itself. His writing is turgid and his ideas are derivative. The critique of democracy is as old as the Greeks, and modern versions can be better found in Machiavelli (Discorsi), de Toccqueville (L'ancien régime et la révolution) and especially, Kuehnelt-Leddihn (Liberty or equality). Or for crying out loud, Hayek and his critique of the dynamics of democratic government. Yarvin is also wrong or misreading things badly. Hitler wanted to get elected just to toss out elections and his primary idea of governance was the "Führerprinzip", the idea that each unit of society should not devolve into unaccountable democratic voting systems. All units of society ought to be led by (autocratic) leaders instead, which would be 100% committed and accountable, as the captain of a ship. And, corporate CEOs aren't autocratic leaders any more than prime ministers are. Historically, democratic government and stock corporation governance co-wvolved and stole each other's ideas. Yarvin is an intellectual mess.
I was also wondering--where's the discussion of Hobbes's Leviathan? Moldbug thinks we need an all-powerful autocratic ruler; Leviathan is the first thing I thought of. But maybe he is against contractarianism? I'm not sure. Even the Roman Empire was contractarian, as the Code of Justinian makes explicit. I agree it seems like a mess.
"The internal and external violence typical of totalitarian states is best explained, I think, by this built-in mismanagement. Dictators are violent because they have to be—they use violence as an organizing principle. The totalitarian state has no principle of legitimacy that would render it impractical for an ambitious subordinate to capture the state with a coup. European monarchs made war, sometimes they were assassinated, and there were even succession struggles, but coups in the modern sense were very rare."
This is an example of shitty logic based on gross misunderstanding of history. He makes a bunch of unsubstantiated claims that each seem like they flow together but in reality none of there cohere,
Dictators are violent because they have to be—they use violence as an organizing principle - from a libertarian perspective all states use violence but it would be relevant to compare the dictatorships of Franco, Tito, and Salazar with the East Asian dictatorships of Korea and Taiwan, with African dictatorships like Gaddafi.
The totalitarian state has no principle of legitimacy that would render it impractical for an ambitious subordinate to capture the state with a coup - how often do Totalitarian states/dictatorships have coups/violent regime change compared to other types of governments? Many dictatorships are relatively stable after they seize power until the natural death of the founder (my instinct says most but I feel you would need to do an actual analysis to evaluate).
European monarchs made war, sometimes they were assassinated, and there were even succession struggles, but coups in the modern sense were very rare. - Obvjously the words "modern sense" and "rare" make this hard to argue with but during the late Roman Empire modern coups were relatively common. Thinking through the history of England, there are multiple failed coups under William's sons, a failed coup by Henry II's sons against him, a coup by Henry IV against Richard II, the coup by Mary I against Lady Jane Grey, the English revolution and Cromwell's protectorship, and the Glorious revolution (this is not an exhaustive list just the things that come to mind that resemble modern coups). China would also provide an insane number of examples of coups although I am not including it as a rebuttal since he probably has dumb ideas about European exceptionalism.
This argument does not meet the bar I would expect out of a middle school student, it's passable for a fifth grader but after that you need to bring in actual logic and evidence.
> during the late Roman Empire modern coups were relatively common.
Well they were like modern buses, nothing for ages then 4 come at once.
The "old Moldbug" stuff is more interesting than the new, but it's still deranged. He seems (from your summary) to do an okay job of detecting flaws in the basic idea, but he keeps building complexity on top of complexity to try to work around those flaws, which is generally a sure sign that this thing you've designed will never work. It's intellectual masturbation of a high order and nothing more.
I’ve heard of Yarvin before but I didn’t realize his proposals were so unrealistic…between an all-powerful dictator who answers to a board of directors, magic guns only the dictator controls, countries giving away to city-states—not very realistic!
In general it’s remarkable the degree to which nearly every right of center commentator has sold out to Trumpism. Guys like Moldbug, Jordan Peterson, even people like the Catholic apologist Bishop Barron sound increasingly indistinguishable. Come to think of it, it’s not that different on the left—liberals don’t have to pretend they haven’t completely rejected everything they believed before 2016, but they all parrot the exact same talking points (and writing style) with almost no deviation.
My understanding is that the MAGA right is criticizing Peterson these days for saying that it's attracting psychopaths now that it's come to power.
I have seen that too...MAGA has spats every now and then but they appear to have a remarkable capacity to forgive and forget. Marco Rubio is now one of the most powerful people in the administration.
It's something you can do when there is no principle other than "Is this person currently kissing up to me".
Rubio’s transition to all in MAGA is something I will probably never understand. It’s like he was body snatched.
I suspect he justifies it to himself by saying that if he doesn't compromise his beliefs a little, a much worse true believer will take his place and do even more damage. I suspect Mike Pence took the same approach--and honestly he wasn't completely wrong. JD Vance seems to be a true believer for now, but I suspect he will always passionately defend positions he will shortly abandon.
Rubio always struck me as a weak clinger, an unfortunate unpopular kid who desperately wants to be in the cool kids' inner circle. Trump is a great vehicle for that: kissing Trump's ass is all that's needed for admission, you just have to go all-in on it to stand out from all the other ass-kissers (see the real kissing champion, our new FBI director, for the best example). That was Rubio's chance, and to the man's credit he took it good and hard.
I have remarked elsewhere on the tendency of certain overeducated and highly political Catholics to come up with harebrained ideas on how they can Make American A Catholic Nation when Catholics are not and never were a majority and most Catholics themselves are not too fired up the idea themselves.
To be fair, the problem isn't strictly limited to right wingers. I recall Ursula K LeGuin came up with a similar (and similarly eminently practicable) utopia in one of her stories, where an orbiting computer with superintelligence just shut down humans when they got too authoritarian for her tastes.
For that matter, anarchists in general have legitimate criticisms of the state and power, but I am yet to hear practical solutions proposed.
It's constructing a government as if it were software engineering, with systems and modules that must work in a theoretically perfectly way every time, or the entire thing collapses into a nightmare instantly.
Yeah, Moldbug and Bitcoin both seem to me to represent a related effort by 2008-era tech/libertarian types to find alternative foundations for government/money respectively in a way that doesn't rely on trusting humans; I think both have a "code is law"-ish vibe that tries to remove human beings from the loop as much as possible.
I think it's more egregious in Moldbug's case, but both I think are slightly naive beliefs that you can recreate important social institutions without, y'know, society.
>Yeah, Moldbug and Bitcoin both seem to me to represent a related effort by 2008-era tech/libertarian types to find alternative foundations for government/money respectively in a way that doesn't rely on trusting humans; I think both have a "code is law"-ish vibe that tries to remove human beings from the loop as much as possible.
Hmm... Did Moldbug ever comment about the scenario in "Colossus: The Forbin Project"?
what the fuck? why do you always spend all this time reading and engaging with these stupid fuck holes? aren't there writers who are smart like you that you can argue with instead?
He does spend lots of time engaging with people others believe not worth engaging with:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-kavanaugh-on-fideism
> "exclusive-members only"
I think this is a misplaced hyphen: it should read "exclusive members-only"
Curtis Yarvin is the Lyndon LaRouche of the 21st Century.
Lyndon LaRouche was a New Deal Democrat who wrapped his ultra Keynesian big government agenda in conspiracy theories that resembled those of the John Birch Society.
Likewise, Yarvin advocated for effectively the World Economic Forum agenda but wrapped his message in walls of text calling for a new kind of monarchy.
I shamelessly stole the phrase "Rules for Reactionaries" for my 'stack. I claim it by right of conquest. Might makes right. (However I am an American reactionary. I'm working to roll the clock back to the vision of America promised in sitcoms made prior to 1970.)
"Reactionary, n. One who longs for the good old days of the 50s. Not the 1950s, the 950s." Lucifer's Lexicon by L. A. Rollins.
That's back to elected kings, kings elected by the thanes and earls.
"Curtis Yarvin is the Lyndon LaRouche of the 21st Century."
That is funny. And wrapped up in all of it is the subtext that everything would be ice cream if you just let me run things!
This reminds me of a time in college when a friend of mine was trying to explain his ideal system of government. Whenever I found it obviously relevant I'd ask, "what's to stop your monarchical ruler from not doing that and being evil and self-serving instead?" He'd patch in some unlikely-to-work structure to try to stop it. After fifteen minutes and a dozen or so of these instances where a bad actor would immediately ruin the system I told him it sounded like his ideal system of government was essentially that he, personally, would be dictator.
It’s all fun and games until a figure with the amoral ruthlessness of Stalin inevitably appears.
I don't think a "the vibes [reality?] is worse than the stats say, since the stats say everything is the best ever, which isn't true" explanation really grapples with the thrust of the objection. However worse things may be than Pinker thinks, it is definitely a better time to be American than it was in 1863, 1917, 1929, 1939, etc. etc.
Applying a little historical context, I think you have to conclude that now is not a time so UNIQUELY miserable in American history, to say nothing of world history (Pol Pot's regime existed!) to necessitate jettisoning rule of law in order to achieve the golden age of, what, 1992? The delta is just not nearly big enough.
Further, the skew of outcomes is extremely negatively biased! Maybe we get a marginally better version of today with better economic policy and less annoying woke stuff. Or, maybe we get a succession crisis when your old man enlightened despot dies that turns into a civil war, or maybe the next guy just sucks at his job and there is no real way to check him now, maybe a socialist seizes the reigns and breaks everything right after you finish fixing it. Payoff is small, risks are enormous.
The birth rate is a real problem--but you'll notice it is a problem basically everywhere in the developed world (and in authoritarian regimes as well, like China and Russia) and nobody seems to know how to fix it other than "become Amish or a fundamentalist Muslim"--Uber Trump is not going to employ that strategy, and I doubt you want to. X risk is also (obviously) a huge problem--but again we can't really expect a Uber Trump to help; the solutions are not even obvious and it isn't a focus for him.
Depressed kids are problem. Is Uber Trump overthrowing the normal government to ban smart phones and social media? No? Well then again why expect big gains here?
Civil wars are revolutions are almost always astronomically bad. You need a MASSIVE problem that is obviously FIXED to justify even thinking about taking steps foment or risk one, which authoritarianism certainly does.
I just don't get it!
Israel is developed and has positive TFR, but it also has the ultra-orthodox as a significant chunk of its population. And apparently their norms trickle down, without themselves being influenced by less fertile groups:
https://nonzionism.com/p/why-is-israel-fertile
I am not that convinced it's a matter of norms trickling down rather than a general shared norm that is mitigated by modernity in the case of non orthodox. I definitely don't think you can easily transfer whatever cultural difference make Israel more fertile (it would be very funny to promote conversion to Haredi judaism so that the right wing chants of "Jews will not replace us" becomes actually a valid complaint).
+1; everything you’ve said here succinctly summarizes the problems with the Moldbug gamble.
No mention of Carlyle, whose style of personal rule characterizes later UR, which itself is generally increasingly removed from the technocratic thought experiments of early UR. Also no mention of Urbit, his explicit attempt at a technological platform suitable for modern governance, which is designed and described as a means for amplifying the various particular governors who might employ it [0] - a consistent throughline of Formalism, present since the Manifesto.
[0] Yarvin is pathologically pacifistic, while recognizing the supreme incentive of power to secure itself, and as such invests his efforts in devising competitive arenas other than war.
He did start promoting Carlyle around the same time he decided that the German Historical School was actually correct and the Austrian economists were wrong. He started declaring that statesmen acted with "wisdom" that wasn't perceptible to any economath, just as current defenders of Trump's tariffs will proclaim it's "statecraft".
This is interesting and fun, because Classic Yarvin, the version *before* he sold out, promulgates a set of principles that are almost exactly diametrically 180 degrees the opposite of everything I believe in. To see that he broke down and sold out is somehow karmic.
I like how Moldbug develops this very complicated political philosophy that basically relies on the philosopher King that never seeks power, yet still gets it, while also making a big deal how he'd never want power, and would definitely want Hitler's job, in any circumstances. It's the same sort of "The only worthy man to be King happens to be me" philosophy espoused from Plato to every dictator.
It feels almost more like "The only worthy man to be King is the one who doesn't want it, and look how much I don't want it, nobody doesn't want it as much as me, and if you make me King, I'll complain about it a bit before being *such* a good King."
Exactly! I realize I messed up in my original comment of saying "he would definitely want Hitler's job" when I meant he said "he would definitely not want Hitler's job." Your comment better captures the point.
Plato, the philosopher who was unwilling to take leadership, happened to think the Philosopher King who was not interested in leadership was best fit to lead the nation. I just finished reading the "manifesto" of the first dictator of South Korea, and a not-insignificant part of the book was dedicated to him saying how much he didn't want the job of dictator, despite him going on to rule for nearly 2 decades.
A desire for power is suspicious, but a professed desire to not have power, despite a philosophy that says the man who doesn't want power should rule, or a justification that taking power is necessary despite not wanting it, is even moreso.
The failure mode for Moldbug's dictatorship is the same as the failure mode for Communism: we don't have perfect apolitical nontribal dispassionate rational humans to build the system out of, only the regular kind of human with ordinary human desires. They will use the system they are component parts of to their own ends, bend it to make this easier, circumvent it where they cannot; whatever we meant the system to do, this is what it does now; POSIWID - this is what it will do henceforth until destroyed. Congratulations! We tried to do better, but we got the dystopia we always get.
Concentrating more power in fewer people always has this effect. The only way to do better is to spread the power out, so that as everyone pulls towards themselves there is some balance possible in the middle. Democracy, as the saying goes, is a terrible political system, except all the others are worse.
Tbf, this is the failure mode for all political systems; it could still be true that his system performs better in the face of those difficulties than competitors; or at least, fails differently: trades off probability of failure for badness of worst case scenario, or something like that.
> trades off probability of failure for badness of worst case scenario
...except that it does nothing of the sort.
If you deliberately design your system from the ground up with the explicit assumption that it is made of ideal humble intelligent passivist humans and therefore it can never have those difficulties and need not include any means of mitigating them, you don't then get to play the "could be it performs better in the face of those difficulties" card.
Yeah, I sorry, I wasn't arguing that it does have any of those virtues, just that Moldbug might defend himself thusly.
I am mostly unconvinced both that democracy is so bad that it needs replacing, and that Moldbug's system would work as a replacement, but I think it's still at least worth asking, even with imperfect people implementing it, what does this system look like? I agree it's a bad sign that M's own answer to this question is, "Hitler", but I think he's wrong about enough else that maybe he's wrong about that too?
I recently listened to a few old podcasts with Yarvin casually chatting with people, and I think his personal attitudes towards other people are useful context to understand his writing, goals, and motivations (e.g. I don't mean this as an ad hominem attack). In short, he is a grandiose narcissist, and proud blatant racist that constantly mentions how he is superior to "mulattos," the "slave/servant class," and really anyone else that isn't him specifically or one of the tech bros he has an obsession with being ruled by- and he and possibly a few of his friends deserve liberty and freedom but nobody else does. He refers to his wife only as "his woman" and constantly interjects, even when completely inappropriate to the context, as many brags as possible about how she is often mistaken in public for a daughter, and how that proves he is a powerful man. He is about as personally awful and obnoxious as a person could possibly be.
The way to fix democracy is, the president and other elected positions are not allowed to own any money for the rest of their lives. They get free food, housing, clothes etc.
Also they are filmed for the rest of their lives, and anyone can watch them online.
These two tings make it really hard to be corrupt. Also it makes it sucky to be president, so only morally good people would want to.
(The filming things would make it tricky to have state secret for military stuff. Maybe make some exceptions for that.)
Also people should get paid to be educated.
There are 2 types of education. First stuff that is useful for the individual to learn. How to read, how to speak other languages, things you need for your career, etc.
Second stuff that it is useful for the people to know so they can make good decisions when voting. For instance how global warming work. War crimes and other immoral things your government has done. How fascism starts and how to prevent it. That religion is dangerous nonsense.
Today some people go to college for the first kind of education, and there they also maybe learn some of the second kind of education. But some people don't go to college and they don't learn the second kind. For a democracy to function well you need the the whole population to know the second kind.
But people don't have any incentive to learn the second kind, so they should get paid to learn it.
Maybe twitter is one thing, but on his blog, he has called this administration retarded, has said Trump is a fake king, not a real king, has said they need to start acting in ways that don't fit the leftist narrative about them (instead of fulfilling their worst prophecies).
But it's true Yarvin is in a bit of a Karl Haushofer situation. Haushofer was the intellectual who gave Hitler the idea of Lebensraum, among other things, but he also thought Russia and Germany were natural allies, and that together, they could dominate Eurasia.
Going to repost my response to Cathy's article, cause I think it is still relevant.
---
This post gives Yarvin too much credit. The man is simply a hypocrite, a walking embodiment of luxury beliefs.
He grew up upper middle class in a wealthy suburb of Maryland where the average household income was over 120k. He went to an Ivy League. His dad was a US diplomat! And he now lives in a house in San Francisco, a blue enclave in a blue enclave. Every part of this man’s life is dependent on the existence of the systems he claims to want destroyed.
Yarvin is the definition of ‘weak men lead to hard times’. Because he has never experienced a hard time in his life, he cannot begin to imagine the actual consequences of his actions. He writes the way a child draws on walls — innocent, even as he causes harm. He assumes that no matter what he does, the systems around him won’t fail because he’s simply too naive to imagine them failing.
If he really believed any of the things he’s saying, well, there are dozens of countries that are far more monarchical than the US. But somehow I don’t see him leaving his cushy life sipping mocktails and waxing poetic to his acolytes while overlooking the bay bridge any time soon.
As much as it is tempting to try and earnestly rebut his nonsense, I think it gives him too much play. He should be mocked, relentlessly, and never be given a seat at the table of serious people.
I think this response gives him to much credit, there are people who advocate for Theocracy and Communism while preferring to live under liberalism but his theories are at the level of the child drawing on the walls.
Eswatini is only a plane ride away, after all...
I think the clearest case of Moldbug disagreeing with Yarvin shows up in From Mises to Carlyle, where he says outright:
>given a binary choice between restoring the Stuarts, or sticking with the Anglo-American republican tradition, I would restore the Stuarts. At worst, an absolute President could even be elected by universal suffrage. Though, if you want a Hitler, this is how to get one.
And then went on to argue in Gray Mirror that... the President should act with absolute power and elections act as a sufficient accountability mechanism.
1. I don't know if "Sold out" has the same meaning here as "people change".
2. I recall that even Mussolini was limited (and eventually removed) by The Grand Council Of Fascism.
3. How does Moldbug/Yarvin's imaginary dictator get his legitimacy? The Grand Maximum Generalissimo and CEO For Life says "do it!" and some subject responds with "You're not my mother!"
Without legitimacy, the ruler's authority goes no further than his reach. That isn't just a problem of autocracies or similar.
> How does Moldbug/Yarvin's imaginary dictator get his legitimacy?
Step 1: get together a group of perfect humans who are geniuses and also unmotivated by base politics, personal wealth or any other mortal concern
Step 2: these humans are obviously better at everything they do than the ordinary everyday sort, so they get put in charge of everything without having to ask
Step 3: they ask Curtis Yarvin to rule over us all benevolently already. He says he doesn't want the job, but they keep pestering him until reluctantly he steps up.
...no, seriously, read his stuff if you don't believe me; it's pretty much this but wrapped up in a vast amount of padding to smuggle it past your instinctive incredulity.
Sounds like he is channeling the Underpants Gnomes.
Step 1. Steal Underpants!
Step 2. ??
Step 3. Profit!
Sohrab Ahmari and Adrian Vermeule have similarly crackpot ideas on how the US can become a Catholic semi-theocracy.
This really gets at a lot of my thoughts on the subject, as someone who read Moldbug as a teenager, thought he was kind of cool, then saw him associating with/quasi-endorsing Trump and thought “wait, what the fuck?”
I think the original sin here is his aligning himself with the cultural right, causing him to warp his own values and philosophy when he saw a far-right leader have a chance at power. The far-right in America don’t want a fair-minded profit-focused elite CEO dictator. They want Hitler, or someone adjacent to him at least. Aligning yourself with them will never be a good idea. As Hanania would say, they are “Low Human Capital”.
Moldbug would have done better with an AI as the final check of the dictator rather than cryptographic board of directors.
Sounds like a decent novel series if done right, actually. Would be surprised if it hasn’t been written yet.
Ah, but then whoever coded the AI is king...
Haven't actually read the blog but based on the snatches here and the linked Architechtonics post the whole ideology reads to me as coming from a very very frightened place - a person so concerned with safety and terrified of lawlessness that they would give up any amount of personal freedom and human flourishing in exchange for an ounce more of safety. There's a nice metaphor in the fact that political scientists test for "authoritarian personalities" by asking questions about parenting styles; authoritarians fundamentally crave to be children protected by an omnipotent (from the perspective of the child) parent.
It's always been strange to me that fascists and strong men have this manly man image when the impulse is fundamentally weak/ scared/ childlike.
the biggest question i have after reading this post is, have any ceos ever achieved ceo-dom without expressing a desire to have that role?
Yes, it's very common for startup founders to work as CEO when they don't want to and aren't very good at it, until they can finally afford a professional CEO. Sometimes they do end up being ok at it and liking it, and stay in the role anyways. Marcus Aurelius also comes to mind, as someone that was placed in the position of emperor of Rome by the previous emperor without expressing any interest in the position, and he wrote in his journal about how much he disliked it but felt a duty to do the job well anyways.
Moldbug's ideas might sort-of work if you could actually find someone like Marcus Aurelius to be the monarch, someone brilliant, and completely driven by a sense of responsibility and ethics, without a hint of 'dark triad' personality traits. However, identifying someone like that is impossible- even Aurelius himself failed to do it, and created a disaster by leaving his awful son as his successor.
Given habitat loss and species decline, as well as the necessary abandonment of once-uncontroversial environmental goals, not to mention various other ideals, now succeeded by "techno-futuro-humanist" keyboard pundits pretending to be "contrarian" though curiously they all say the same thing, calling into question their contrariness, asserting we should build houses on national monuments (they have never visited, nor could imagine why you would do so) in the arid lands - I once likened unchecked population growth due to immigration and differing TFRs to a tumor. Actually, I didn't even do that - merely used the word "metastasize" in a comment about, I dunno, sprawl and politicians' subversion of the clear will of the American people in the 60s/70s.
Anyhoo, I wasn't thinking about cancer. I wasn't thinking about your beloved aunt or my own grandmother, or people taking over your cellular machinery. "Metastasize" was just a perfectly explanatory (if cliched) word, the sort of word that people, of somewhat hardier mental makeup, once used to describe e.g. things like the aerial views of my hometown over time.
Some kid or Russian scolded me, of course.
Interesting to see that Scott goes direct to MAGA being "cancerous" for having a rather simple goal, no particular ethnic background or jacket required - of wanting to stop runaway immigration.
As a specialist in cancer, I sometimes compare the body politic to the human body. Cancer in my view is caused by the obstruction of information within cells, the proximate cause being the mutation of the carrier of information, DNA. A cancer cell “should” be destroyed by the immune system but it evolved mechanisms to escape recognition, principally by altering the information it presents to the immune cells. (Immunotherapy, the future of cancer medicine and our greatest hope for a cancer cure, aims to reverse this process.)
To analogise to geopolitics, the free flow of information in the media is what prevents an authoritarian political faction (cancer) from gaining power. Censorship is the great enemy and free speech is the great friend. Anyone talking about the need to censor speech to counter “misinformation” should be regarded with great suspicion. Anyone encouraging healthy debate should be encouraged (that’s why I hang out here. Go Scott!)
For this reason I’m not worried at all about Trump. Media is constantly calling him a felon, dictator, authoritarian, Hitler, etc. No one gets fired for saying this! Clearly, he doesn’t control the media. Biden (or whoever was pulling the strings during his administration) much more alarming - significantly restricting free speech on social media as exposed on the Twitter files, purging Universities of wrong think, etc. It was dangerous to vocally support Trump in certain places. No longer!
Last time I checked in on Yarvin a couple years back, he was calling Trump voters "hobbits" and still suggesting rulers should appeal to the smart set not the rubes. He also suggested Zvi Mowshowitz for king on the basis of reading about half a blog post (which does roughly satisfy the criteria Moldbug laid out.) He did not have positive things to say about Trump in the NYT. I dunno, I'm not feeling the turnaround you are. I have enough exposure to have a general grasp of the different right-leaning factions, and almost none of the Trump-positive factionalists are favorably RT'ing Yarvin.
Cathy Young otoh wrote for Reason magazine and is now barely indistinguishable from the Blue Egregore.
Moldbug is a reactionary, really the first influential reactionary philosopher writing in the English language since Carlyle. If you're unfamiliar with that tradition he seems far more novel than he is. Note that fascism and conservatism are distinct strains of thought though they're often grouped together by thinkers who suffer from outgroup homogeneity. Americans are inherently anti-reactionary after two and a half centuries of anti-reactionary thought being part of its civic religion. Reactionary does not mean "very conservative" or "opposed to progressivism." It's a specific philosophical tradition that springs from a fusion of disillusioned 18th century reformists and moderate conservatives who radicalized in the face of the violence of the French Revolution. It has antecedents in things like Hobbesianism but even that is a distinct tradition that really leads more toward fascism. (This is actually one of Moldbug's bigger contributions: he has more fully articulated the reactionary/fascist split and reactionary objections to fascism.)
In that light, nothing about this is all that surprising. You had a whole spate of reactionaries semi-endorsing the French Revolution as clearing the way for reactionary restorations in Europe. Reactionaries are kind of idealists and they don't fundamentally believe that social structures are fully under human control or capable of being rationally ordered. Many also don't believe in being truthful, especially in public. Largely because they think the average person [i]should not[/i] be engaged in politics or philosophy and doesn't want to assist them in that. (This is part of why many of them write in purposefully dense or hard to read styles. It's a purposeful aesthetic.)
The reactionaries have problem. There is no chance, at all, of the United States becoming reactionary for domestic reasons. China either. Russia could theoretically if you really stretch and imagine the elite entrenching into an actual aristocracy. But that's not likely either and on the ground it's not a good legitimating ideology to the average Russian. And the Arab and Malay aristocracies, the last real aristocracies around, are Muslim which means reactionaries have a cultural hostility to them. So there's no real chance of them coming to power or even influencing that much. So instead many have become accelerationists waiting for some outside force to blow it all up. But in some ways that's philosophically comfortable for them. It's basically the Gnostic idea of a deceived world put together by a hostile force that must be escaped individually and collapsed ultimately.
Basically: Here’s this elaborate jenga tower and if it’s ever built in a way that’s not 100% like in my complicated imagination of how it should go you all now have to live under a brutal dictatorship.
I’m going to advocate for people to build it!
Amen. Except it would be terrible even if built exactly according to specification, and that was always completely obvious to anybody with the slightest acquaintance with reality.
A lot of the original Yarvin reminds me of the “German ideal of freedom” as satirized by Gerry Cohen: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ey-hYJM7B3I
True freedom and liberty is being governed by an unelected and unchosen state that has no interest in your well-being, but is in power because it is right in some objective and rational sense that has no connection to the irrational desires of any person.
The Germans are probably right on this one.
How absurd, no.
You can want something else, but freedom is snorting cocaine off a stripper while gambling on recreational knife fighting, deciding you are a bit bored and jumping into the ring
Can I put myself down for, "freedom is something in between those two?"
Among other things, the German conception really, really, *really* depends on how you fill in the "some objective sense" part.
No, you want something else, your free to do so. When moderates use the words as the inverse with an appeal to "common sense" ,to weakness a concept, you just lose conceptual space.
If its not "freedom", what word are knife fight advocates suppose to use? Someone be trying to make knife fight advocates not exist in newspeak
Yeah ok, fair, I buy that.
Great post. Something that you've neglected, and which is probably outside of the scope of your post but reinforces your point nonetheless, is that Yarvin in both his Moldbug and Gray Mirror era has been a persuasive influence (along with, I suspect, Peter Thiel) in sanitizing right-wing populism (specifically its racialism and moral majoritarianism) by giving it the image of a yokelish indigenous rights movement.
This was the exact same mistake that the Neocons made under Reagan and which was falling apart around the time of Bush Jr. But the Neocons, for all their flaws, were old Marxists who understood how to work an ideological tool on the public. The Tech Right is playing with impulses which are alien to them, which they do not understand, and which they therefore cannot control. This is evident in the fact that they, along with their neo-trad/meme-orthodox cultural influencers, are conspicuously playing pretend.
Yarvin (along with most of his caste) does not understand the symbolic currency on which the masses operate; he just writes it off as illegitimate. But that doesn't mean it can be ignored. When it appeared in the form of Wokism, they all thought it was the end of days, and they appealed, as counterbalance, to the same impulses (arguments by insinuation, obsessions with character and moral genealogy, subordination of all societal functions to recognition of personal legitimacy) in the right, thinking that these forces would be naturally relegated to the simple and unambitious. We are now receiving the wages of that error.
I met with Yarvin several times when he visited Austin, and exchanged many emails with him. I constantly argued with him -- when I could get a single word in, that is -- regarding his whole confident philosophy of moral inversions ("just about everything you ever thought was bad is good, and vice versa, and here's a 10,000-word history lecture on why") as a giant edifice made of tissue paper. But I always regarded Yarvin as genuinely interested in ideas, and that may have been a mistake.
On reflection, what angers me the most about sellouts -- and Yarvin, as you say, *is* a sellout -- is that they make fools of all of us who try to take ideas seriously. It's like, consider the conventional leftist or SneerClubber take on Yarvin. The SneerClubber never cared in the first place that Yarvin had a complicated proposal involving cryptography for why his CEO-ruler wouldn't become a tyrant, or Hitler, as happened again and again through history. That person took one look at Yarvin, completely ignored the actual content of the ideas and arguments, and rounded down to the nearest category he or she knew: "this person sounds like an evil far-right fascist; everything else is just window dressing." So, now that Yarvin has indeed come out as MAGA's court philosopher, the SneerClubber gets to crow that he or she was right all along about everything, and we Enlightenment liberals and rationalists are laughable dupes for ever even talking to Yarvin, or caring at all about the actual content of what he said. And yet, as someone who continues to care about ideas, I continue to insist that we (sincere Enlightenment liberals) are not the ones who erred; Yarvin and the other sellouts are the ones who erred -- and Enlightenment liberals probably have better grounds to be enraged at the sellouts than anyone.
I think rats tend to be easy marks for the cleverly unscrupulous and Yarvin is quite clever. The unscrupulous part has been covered.
Rats will bend over backward to give the benefit of the doubt and listen to just about any reasonable sounding argument well past the point a more cynical observer of human nature has their bullshit detector flashing red.
Yes it’s an interesting idea, but crikey, if it sounds like a bad idea, looks like a bad idea, smells like a bad idea…
There are a lot of very good heuristics. The majority of startups fail, so if you predict a startup will fail, you're probably right. If an idea for government sounds like it admires Hitler, it's probably a horrid idea.
People who have no interest in ideas but have even just a slight awareness of some of these basic heuristics have a strong chance of being right just as often, or sometimes more often than those more thoughtful, but for those who care about ideas, the contemplation of those ideas and the personal growth attained thereby has to be it's own reward. And even more - taking on the risk of thinking through something means that you have a small chance of being involved in something beautiful that anyone who doesn't has no chance of.
There's a value to living the examined life, even beyond the pleasures of being right more often than others.
But Scott, "caring about ideas" is not itself... optimal? for a lack of a better word. Ideas are dime a dozen, everybody has ideas, they are near-worthless. One should have a strong anti-idea filter, there's not enough time in the Universe to give all ideas a fair hearing. So, in Yarvin's case:
Oh, you want a dictator? I'm down to 5 more seconds, say something.
Oh, it's a Board! Of! DIRECTORS! that is going to reign him in? I'm done, moving on.
That'd save you a lot of time and disappointment. Taleb's Fat Tony wins again.
1123581321: You do realize that I'm a professor, right? You realize that every professional success I've ever had has involved caring about ideas and taking them seriously, even when those ideas went strongly against what I believed or sounded stupid (or like something already refuted) after 5 seconds of thinking about them? Even with hindsight, it's not obvious to me that talking to Yarvin, while treating his ideas with (what turned out to be justified) extreme skepticism, was a wrong course of action.
Yes sir, I know who you are and what you do, am a lurker on your blog. I do admire your willingness to engage with ideas, but if I may, do you think your successes were helped by being able to care about / take seriously a relatively small subset of promising ideas? Some kind of a filtering mechanism has to have existed, no?
As a part of my job I participate in tech assessment, for example, when my company gets engaged with startups. Being able to quickly reject obvious non-starters is vital so that the limited resources can be dedicated to exploring things that have - maybe a slim - but nonetheless real chance of working out. Most don't, and it's fine, but without a quick filter the job would be hopeless, too many ideas, both internal and external, not enough time.
Is it possible that I rejected something potentially groundbreaking? Sure. That's the game though, there's only so many hours in a day.
Imagine that an AI writes 11000 gigantic wall-of-text rambling post throwing in tons of obscure and newly invented terminology and referencing a million different historical tidbits and structural forms, all on the same fairly limited and simple topic which an adroit human writer can sum up pretty well in one blog post.
What are the odds that an intelligent, interested, educated human forced to read all 11000 posts will end up relating to it as a linguistic ink-blot test, generating their own clever ideas and meaningful concepts as a result of being prompted by on-topic gibberish that activates all the relevant neurons? Coming away with a private sense that they have gleaned great wisdom from doggedly reading through all of this text, even though that wisdom was their own creation and not present in the mind of the author?
That's sort of what I feel like must be happening when someone smart tells me they've read all of Moldbug and find a lot of value in it, and then give me a much more coherent and reasonable summary of his 'ideas' than I've ever seen him express himself.
(To make an analogy to an equally obscure topic: the first time I encountered the Time Cube page, I experienced a primitive instinct to try to map his self-made terminology and insane ramblings onto some existing mental structure I already knew, and come up with an interpretation of his words that made some kind of sense or yielded some kind of abstruse sideways-looking insight or at least painted a coherent picture of some type of non-standard model. Ultimately that didn't work because there wasn't anything in the text sufficient to build that upon, but I think a lot of smart people shared the Timecube meme because of a similar compelling phenomenon they felt while reading it. I feel like smart people do this a lot, trying to sense-make over data sources that don't contain enough correlated information to actually create a meaningful model out of. I think this sometimes ends with smart people being overly-charitable to complete cranks and grifters who spout so many mountains of word salad in teh correct aesthetic, that the smart person can cherrypick and over-interpret it into something that points out their own, personal, good ideas that they stumbled upon while reading it.)
The TimeCube guy never influenced politics like Yarvin's writing has, which is ample reason to cover it.
some of his critiques of elections i agree with and are a big reason i'm very interested in sortition: the forming of legislative bodies by random selection. other than that, he seems like a pretty slick troll.
Trust me, politicians don’t want sortition. I like the idea but I think it would work as a parliament with lawmaking powers but not as a source for an executive.
yeah, i tend to think you're right, politcians as a class are the biggest special interest. and i don't have a great suggestion on how we get from here to there, except the wild idea from AssembleAmerica.org to call a constitutional convention.
as to executive functions, i would advocate that they simply be chosen by a sortition body. a city manager, a fire chief, police chief, etc. some have suggested a sortition body vets a pool of candidates and then one is chosen randomly from among them.
Good work
7 zillion "very interesting" emails have apparently lost their charm in due course, giving way to that old two-legged ape nature. A tale as old a time.
This is great. But I think CEO-style monarchy is simply a mask for literal fascism in line with his overall political power analysis. I debated him and he discarded anything resembling monarchy almost immediately: https://www.theradicalist.com/p/totalitarian-fascism-is-bad-actually.
Scott, you rarely make errors like mixed similes and metaphors, but you’ve got a godawful one early in this piece: “a cancerous outgrowth of democracy riding the same wave of populist anger as the 20th century dictatorships.”. Cancer don’t surf, you know? Besides, if it’s a growth on Uncle Sam, where is he while his tumor is surfing? HIdden under the surfboard? Off in DC, but he's really really stretchy?
I see how you were pushed into this simile — I’m hard pressed to come up with a better one. I suppose you could call MAGA the demented offspring of democracy, and get MAGA surfing that way, but “demented offspring” doesn’t really capture all the things that “cancerous outgrowth” does.
How about "a cancerous outgrowth supercharged by the metabolites and cytokines of populist anger"?
Yeah, that's good, and what about having it do supercharged supersurfing through the lymphatic system? Uncle Sam's, I guess. Does that tick a lot of great boxes or what?
Hmm... to use a different simile, how about: "The pendulum swinging towards MAGA turned out to be a wrecking ball"?
Yeah, that's pretty good, but could we say wrecking ball-stink bomb combo?
Yup, that sounds like a good description! Many Thanks!
Doesn't classic Yarvin say pretty clearly that a real government has to consist of both a fake public structure and a genuine secret structure? He cites this book The Machiavellians about it, if I remember correctly.
So you would expect that, the nearer his side gets to power, the more likely he is to lie in his public writings about the structure of the government they're building.
I don't think this is actually true, I agree that he's probably succumbed to despair. I never thought his writings about the future were very serious, interesting, or realistic; he was only ever useful for occasional insights about current power structures. Despite his many blind spots.
Just putting a marker here to say that, if it turns out that the current shadow government is a Signal chat in which Yarvin, Thiel, Andreeson and BAP decide what instructions to give Stephen Miller, I won't be incredibly surprised.
How Yarvin got pwned
Good reference.
I think the key point that Moldbug is missing is that *all* rulers -- even totalitarian dictators -- ultimately derive their power from the people. If the ruler pisses off enough people, they will either revolt outright (e.g. as happened with Britain's American Colonies), or simply refuse to work (e.g. as happened in the late-stage USSR). Cryptographic weapons will only get you so far, because when the torch-wielding mob shows up outside of your palace, maybe your Palace Guard will simply set aside their cryptographically signed laser-guided missile launchers, and watch quietly as the mob perforates you with their low-tech pitchforks.
So, a wise dictator will always utilize some combination of giving people what they want (e.g. free medicine or reliable trains) and brainwashing (e.g. fiery speeches, total informational lockdown, TikTok viral videos). A really good dictator will also attempt to enact policies that will make his people more productive in the long run, but this is always going to be of *secondary* concern (at best).
My opinion of Moldbug was always that his criticisms of democracy, progressivism, conservatism, and the structure of the US government were pretty sharp and incisive. His invocations of history and pre-WWII authors like Edward Bellamy and Hugo Grotius were fascinating and enlightening.
That said, his interpretations of historical events I think were in many cases highly debatable and his proposed solutions to the problems of 21st century governance were impractical, improbable, and kind of a waste of time. Maybe in the end he came to agree.
Astral codex 10 would NEVER sell out 🔥🤩💪💪
Bald glasses doctor for emperor!
> When Yarvin points out that companies thrive without separation-of-powers, that’s because they never encounter the problem that separation of powers was intended to solve.
Corporations operate outside of the US, and often in lawless places, and it still pretty much just works. You can go to wartorn hellholes in the Congo where even soldiers dare not tread and you can get a can of coke no problem, or occasionally see a poster about how it's wrong to abuse girls.
This suggests that corporations and bluehair NGOs are both vastly more capable than 19th century style nation-states, and I would argue that the world is currently governed by NGO bluehairs and administrated by corporations, for precisely this reason.
The old nation-state governance is largely ceremonial and increasingly vestigial.
This is beside the point: Scott is talking about why you don't see literal civil wars or violent coups in corporations; if the board and the CEO disagree one doesn't execute the other, and even if they try extreme measures ultimately a (probably) US court will decide between them and enforce its ruling with, at the end of the day, the threat of violence.
Unless you're taking about corporations whose governing structures are subject to Congolese law, the fact that they operate in the DRC is completely beside the point.
"The old nation-state governance is largely ceremonial and increasingly vestigial"
I think this is... extremely untrue, and only seems true because we've lived for a long time in a period where the most immediate examples of nation states that the people on this blog are exposed to have not seen reason to exercise their full capabilities.
> if the board and the CEO disagree one doesn't execute the other, and even if they try extreme measures ultimately a (probably) US court will decide between them and enforce its ruling with, at the end of the day, the threat of violence.
Yes, exactly: the corporations do not engage in violence against each other only because they have surrendered their right to enact violence to the state. The state (kind of) holds it in escrow for them. As the result, corporations can resolve their disputes through legal arbitration and free-market competition, as opposed to e.g. blowing up each other's factories in the middle of the night. Without the state acting as the 800-lbs gorilla with a big stick, we'd see corporate violence aplenty.
Luckily, we can test this theory against reality, because there's a whole world outside of the US, including places with weak legal systems. However, we do not see corporate violence aplenty, even without your 800 lb gorilla bullying us into submission.
It could be that the gorilla's victims would simply be better off without the gorilla, and the gorillas are basically just protecting us from themselves.
Can you name an example ? Most of the world outside of the US has fairly strong legal systems (e.g. Europe and China), and thus looks relatively similar to the US. In places where the central government is weak, we typically see a rise of violent gangs that end up acting as corporate governments (e.g. Mexican drug cartels). These engage in violence against each other pretty much all the time, but usually stop short of total war (as total war would be bad for business). In places where the centralized state effectively does not exist at all, we see constant warfare and a comparative lack of economic activity (e.g. Somalia, South Africa). But perhaps I'm missing something ?
>Most of the world outside of the US has fairly strong legal systems (e.g. Europe and China)
"Most of the world" and then you follow it with the two of the most competently governed places on Earth lol
Er... yes ? I listed all the representative places I could think of (US, Europe, China, Mexico, Africa). Of course there is also Russia, South Korea, North Korea, Japan, and like, Lichtenstein or something. Are you saying that my argument is wrong because I did not enumerate every country in the world, or what ?
>nation states that the people on this blog are exposed to have not seen reason to exercise their full capabilities.
You misunderstand me. I'm merely saying that the organs of power in the nation-state are not mostly responsive to the formal governance structures, but rather, to more elusive power structures that aren't named in constitutions.
I live in Guatemala and arms of the state do crazy stuff all the time, but the official nation-state government is basically a ceremonial structure to give real power a kind of ritual legitimacy.
> Unless you're taking about corporations whose governing structures are subject to Congolese law, the fact that they operate in the DRC is completely beside the point.
It doesn't seem to matter irl - Guatemalan mining companies, Brazilian beverage companies - the lawlessness of a country nor the international jurisdiction of corporations - none of them seem to bring about this hypothetical problem of inter-corporate violence. Seems like a problem that nation-states are particularly prone to, among organizational structures.
I'll second the request for examples; Brazil doesn't seem so lawless to me that a company headquartered in Sao Paolo should be considered beyond the reach of the Brazilian government, and while I'll defer to you on the lawlessness of Guatemala, all the mining companies I found that operate there are either Canadian or Russian owned.
I think to make your point you'd need to exhibit a place where the company itself is the supreme authority (up to and including the use of violence to enforce the law, which it effectively creates) in a territory where the company rulers themselves reside.
Even the East India Company, which I think comes closest, doesn't quite make it: Hastings was impeached and Clive investigated by British Parliament: even though they were literally fighting wars and governing territory, they were still subject to the authority of a state.
The sorts of corporations that do exist entirely outside of a state's legal system tend to get called a different name like "cartel" and very much do exhibit violence as a feature in leadership disputes.
Finally, it's obviously not just nation states that are subject to this problem: cartels are already mentioned, and plenty of non-nation states like the Roman empire, Renaissance Italian city states, and medieval kingdoms faced coups, civil wars, and violence between different factions of elites for political control.
>it's obviously not just nation states that are subject to this problem
Right, but different organizational structures seem to suffer from it more than others. That's why you focus so much on equating cartels with companies, because cartels as a structure suffer from this even worse than nation-states.
Cartels don't operate within the ceremonial legal system, but the real system of state rules (ie, "real" law) very much applies to them. But you don't find these laws in a book, they're illegible, as they'd like to remain.
I’ll go out on a limb here and say that selling Coke is an order or magnitude less of a challenge than running a state.
It's not that they sell coke, but that they create the logistical and security conditions required to make the selling of coke in a tribal warzone feasible.
Kind of like a mini-state. You're right - Coke only enforces their contracts. Nevertheless, creating the quasi-state like conditions they create (which is easier than creating a full Republic of Coke!) still vastly outstrips what the actual state in Congo manages to do - which is nothing at all, or actually worse than nothing in many cases.
My point is that when Coke actually spars with governments in flexing their administrative capacity, they almost always win. The Congolese gov can't even get clean water to these people lol
I think a big reason is that the rebel militias who control those areas don't care if Coke comes in, but they do care if the Congolese armed forces do.
Do you think Coke would be successful in selling in Gaza, if Israel followed through on its most extreme inclinations to cut off all imports? How much coke do you think makes it into North Korea? I think maybe the biggest corporations can go head to head with the weakest states, but I'm not sure the example that you've provided is one where they're *sparring*.
You'd want to find a situation where a weak state tried to keep Coke out. Actually, did ISIS allow Coke? Was there an official stance on this? If so, how good a job did Coke do selling in ISIS controlled territory regardless? A quick Google turned up nothing but maybe someone here knows.
>How much coke do you think makes it into North Korea?
Officially? None. In practice? There are a lot of fun articles about the complicated route it flows through into the country, where it's a delicacy and status symbol.
As for ISIS, there's a actually a Pepsi factory in Mosul, idk about Coke though.
>I think a big reason is that the rebel militias who control those areas don't care if Coke comes in
It's not just about armed forced, humanitarians struggle to get basic water and food aid to some of these places.
FWIW, I appreciate your earnestness here, I'm not trying to make too serious of a point, but I do think that different structures and systems do actually produce different outcomes - comparing Coke to the Sinaloa cartel is easy and lazy, but understandable.
"Therefore, any authoritarian state that needs an official religion must have something wrong with it"
That seems like an odd take. Some (most?) dictators want power over people's hearts and minds. "He loved Big Brother" and all that.
From podcasts moldbug looked tired since the election
I think the last one I watch was a michael malice one which was a while ago, has he done the rounds at all?
I've never read Moldbug. I've only ever heard of him in passing. So maybe he addresses the following criticism, but based on what Scott wrote
"First, the dictator will be checked by a board of directors, who can fire him if he goes crazy"
Seems completely and obviously at odds with the idea that the dictator has to be accountable to no one. All he's done here is create an oligarchy, which will develop competing factions, and then we're right back where we started.
Imagine the poor dictator trying to appease two groups of oligarchs that are fighting against each other, each group publicly claiming that they have the majority of the cryptographic keys to the explosive on the dictator's neck.
(Also he gets anonymous letters every day claiming to be written by the *true* owners of the cryptographic keys, but he has already long ago learned to ignore those.)
Not to put to fine a point on it, but this is why I have never taken anyone more than 25 degrees right of center seriously; and think all non-con/neocon thinkers are clowns (in the traditional;, respectable sense) or larpers (this one is purely derogatory).
There is no universal principle that informs any of those political views other than AnCapism; with the unbeatable unmatchable "fuck you, I've got mine", so you end up tying yourself up in philosophical knots to explain why it's good when my guy does it but it's bad when your guy does it instead of just internalizing desire and becoming a heavenly demon.
So what you're saying is..
Yarvinites love to say "you believe in democracy? that pales in comparison to my idea of implementing clever incentives to maintain aligned dictatorships" and then don't implement clever incentives to align dictatorships
Unpaywalled link to the Yarvin NYT interview.
My favorite comment from the interviewer:
“I have to say, I find the depth of your background information to be obfuscating, rather than illuminating.”
This was in response to Yarvin attempting to cite:
“Drift and Mastery” An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest — The second book by American journalist and political thinker Walter Lippmann. Published in the Fall of 1914
I haven’t read that one yet either.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-interview.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FU8.YpCw.ixCYJqjpw59Z&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
"Then answer the question. What’s so bad about democracy?
To make a long story short, whether you want to call Washington, Lincoln and F.D.R. “dictators,” this opprobrious word, they were basically national C.E.O.s, and they were running the government like a company from the top down.
So why is democracy so bad?
It’s not even that democracy is bad; it’s just that it’s very weak. And the fact that it’s very weak is easily seen by the fact that very unpopular policies like mass immigration persist despite strong majorities being against them. So the question of “Is democracy good or bad?” is, I think, a secondary question to “Is it what we actually have?” When you say to a New York Times reader, “Democracy is bad,” they’re a little bit shocked. But when you say to them, “Politics is bad” or even “Populism is bad,” they’re like, Of course, these are horrible things. So when you want to say democracy is not a good system of government, just bridge that immediately to saying populism is not a good system of government, and then you’ll be like, Yes, of course, actually policy and laws should be set by wise experts and people in the courts and lawyers and professors. Then you’ll realize that what you’re actually endorsing is aristocracy rather than democracy."
While Garett Jone has good arguments for 10% less democracy, this is just bullshitting with wordplay and analogies. We need a CEO dictator because a President is kind of a CEO, if people don't want majoritarianism they must endorse aristocracy. I get that the NYT needs to complete the interview but the fact that they let him get away with this and just move on is disappointing.
Yeah, the fella is pretty winding all over the map and in general verbose.
“Curtis, I feel as if I’m asking you, What did you have for breakfast? And you’re saying, Well, you know, at the dawn of man, when cereals were first cultivated”
Yarvin's biggest problem is overliberal use of the hand-waving operator, also known as magical thinking. At one point he if someone appoints the King, then they would be King. Later there is a board directors with the power to replace crazy Kings. That means the board is King and the King is the Board's Prime Minister.. And who stops he board from going all Hitler? The Market, which means the market is King. The Board is the Market's Privy Council and the Prime Minister the First Lord of the Treasury (member of the council in charge of the purse strings).
So his system is rule by the Market. But markets are sustained by the Law which comes from the State, which is run by the Market. It is fundamentally circular.
Does anyone have an update on Yarvin's imagined "Antiversity"? You'd think this crucial part of his plans would already exist by now considering it's almost been 2 decades since he first said this was the key to whatever it is he wants.
Maybe it already exists, as I imagine semi-conspiracies aren't too googleable. Maybe it exists under a name that isn't associated with Antiversity so I can't find it. Maybe that's what he was doing between the death of his first blog and his return?
Jordan peterson has a "university", video site
Theres some new antiwoke university in texas, I think it accepted a year of students
Everyone and their dog has a cert site, but you should probably just use coursua
Experimental history has his idea of a "science house", and this turned into at least 2 blog posts
Yarvin seemed to have put most of his effort into creating Urbit. Perhaps someone will eventually use it to make an antiversity of some kind.
K, what is Urbit? I never actually understood what this was all about?
Peer to peer usenet reliant on a functional programming script.
Why was this so exciting to him? I got the impression it was somehow connected with his other ideas, but your description doesn't give me any sense of why that would be the case?
1. There is a strong barrier to entry due to the complications of setting it up and then having to use FP, filtering out the masses.
2. Peer to peer networks help evade easy censorship.
I think he imagined urbit as the internet staging ground where neoreactionaries would then build the antiversity and everything else.
Ah ok... Does any one use it?
Also, the patchwork of city-states is naive. Each state is supposed to attract people so as to maximize profit for its shareholders. But why not just enslave the inhabitants? Yarvin seems to think this would be bad for "business" because you couldn't attract new residents and tourists. But why does he think new residents and tourists are important? Keep people poor and they'll probably have lots of children. North Korea's TFR is below replacement, but still higher than South Korea's. And why can't the city state rely on forced breeding if needed?
The "share holders" could make more money by treating their citizens better? That's debatable. The Kims and the Russian oligarchs seem to be living well enough. And in Yarvin's world, the shareholders can spend their time somewhere pleasant and live off the profits generated by their slave society, like those Russian oligarchs that (used to) spend a lot of time in London.
It's true that if every city-state operated this way then living standards would go down in an objective sense, but if you believe people seek out relative status more than objective comfort, that may not matter. And at any rate, so long as the slave-holding oligarchs can provide something of value to the more enlightened city states, the more enlightened city states have no reason to interfere.
His idea, assuming it's feasible at all (and I don't think it is), is just a recipe for a world full of little dystopian shit holes, with maybe some clean but still dystopian cities thrown in for the lucky few.
I'd hoped to get an early comment in, since this was my first time reading Moldbug in any capacity, but...my god, the profoundly purple prose literally put me to sleep, laptop still humming away. Disappointed, honestly. I'd hoped to find something excitingly taboo and intellectully stimulating (e.g. Steve Sailer-ish) behind the Forbidden Reactionary Curtain, but there's just...nothing there. Perhaps interesting as a world-building exercise for theoretical societies, I guess? This can't possibly be a serious backstop for the current political right, though. Or if it is, there sure seems to be a large inferential distance between posts and praxis. Torturing a flimsy academic cover into justification for the cause celebre du jour is a playbook I expect from the left, not the right. Cross one off the Worthy Opponents To Pay Attention To list, I guess...
(I'll hold out a bit of charity that perhaps Scott is mischaracterizing or nutpicking the source material? Not gonna wade through 11,000 ponderous blog posts myself though, if these are at all a representative sample.)
I can't take Moldbug seriously because close to the beginning of his theory, he's got an impossible board of directors. Where do you get them from? How do you make sure they're properly insulated from both the dictator and the their own possibilities for corruption?
This isn't a spherical cow, this is a hyperspherical cow made of four-sided triangles.
Great post, I realize now that I failed to understand the full out line of Moldbug Thought, too distracted by the million weird details.
I've never really read Moldbug, but can someone explain to me how having a dictator who's accountable to a board of directors is substantively different from the republican democracy we were founded as? The founders were keenly aware of populist failure modes, that's why they put things like the electoral college in. Judging from this summary, Moldbug seems to be going a long way around to make the simple point that we really just need to return to our (little-r) republican roots. Is that right or do I just not understand his point?
It’s astonishing/disconcerting/[insert your favorite disbelief word] that otherwise smart people have wasted so much time and energy on this bit of incoherent nonsense.
So am I more-or-less right? I honestly have no idea what Moldbug's views are. Judging just from this they don't seem any more incoherent than AI fears, EA drivel, or various woke nonsense that plenty of people seem to enjoy exploring.
I think you are. The BoD thing is so… naive? I can’t even think of a word. Stalin had Politburo, same function, whole of a lot good that did.
And then to read serious people seriously discussing the merits of this juvenile fantasy…
Well if I'm right then Moldbug is just advocating for a return to (maybe a tweaked version of) our foundational norms, even if he's using a bizarre framing to do so. It's not clear to me that this is insane. Is the Board of Directors that much different from the ~5% of citizens that were eligible to vote in 1789? His proposal seems to me like a stylized form of plutocracy. That's not *so* nutty.
My reading is that he’s advocating for a dictator but constrained by a BoD that had no actual power. The 5% of the voters were real power; the “dictator” also agreed to abide by their vote.
LOL, really? Oh ok I agree with you, that's obviously insane.
“Judging just from this they don't seem any more incoherent than AI fears, EA drivel, or various woke nonsense.”
In the spirit of not letting a good observation go to waste, yes! Exactly, and amazingly on purpose same people who seriously discuss “intelligence explosion kills all” also seriously discuss “Stalin, but with a brave Politburo this time”.
Thanks. I tend to think that all of this is the fault of the internet. It lowered the barriers to entry for punditry and so society got flooded with a bunch of bad ideas. As bad as academia can sometimes be, we really do benefit from having some form of ideological gatekeeping.
I wonder - do you think the recent politicization of Universities is somehow downstream of their loss of gatekeeping power? Maybe they felt their cultural cachet slipping away and responded with a weird kind of ideological doubling-down. Pre-internet they were liberal but still reasonable. Maybe they moved ultra-progressive in a bid to find new ideological territory to own.
Internet and more specifically the attention economy business model (thank you Mrs Sandberg, we’re all leaning in now, over the counter while bravely taking it all in). One specific thing that also messed up the units is the conversion of students into pampered customers, complete with the servants’, I mean, “teachers”, evaluation forms, God forbid little Johnny finds the class too demanding. It’s hard to keep one’s gatekeeping power when one’s salary depends on not keeping it.
Prescription vs description.
Moldbug thinks the populist elements at the founding are already too populist; he thinks the slide from small-r republican roots was inevitable from the moment the founders put even a hint of democracy in the system.
I'm not sure if he'd actually endorse this specific example, but I think the closest version of the founding to his vision is if Washington became president for life, there was no Congress, and the electoral college wasn't elected but rather seats on it were for sale to the highest bidder.
Huh, ok. Thanks. Yeah that seems a little ... extreme. I wouldn't say insane though. It at least gestures towards things that are legitimate problems, even if that particular solution is a little nutty.
So does he dislike the founding version of America because it was already terrible, or because he views it as inevitable that it would *become* terrible? Like if we could have somehow kept the franchise limited to 5% of the population would he be ok with that? Or does he view any kind of representative legislature as fundamentally bad?
I'm not sure; he often writes as if even the slightest amount of democracy is basically poison, but I'm not sure if that's just because he sees it as an inevitable ratchet.
I think probably the former, but I'd defer to someone who's read his writing more recently than 12 years ago, which is the last time I paid much attention.
That is the sanewashing of his views but I think he actually just wants to be king. There is a related strain of thought that looks at Lee Kuan Yew and Deng Xioaping and imagines society would be better off if we could have a dictator like that but forgets about all of the downsides and less ideal dictators.
Not sure if intentional, but Apple's CEO's name is Tim Cook, not Tim Apple.
It is intentional, Tim Apple is how Trump called him once, and it has had staying power because it's a funny nickname.
All these ideas are pretty dumb. I guess it's worth a little time discussing them because he's popular, but most of his ideas reveal that he has very little insight into human nature. Political parties don't fail to arm their members because those members are more useful unarmed; they do so because they follow a certain culture and belief system they were raised with, combined with a non-partisan justice system that disincentivizes them from stoking violence. Humans want to act in ways that align with their morals but also respond to incentives. Yarvin takes an overly cynical view of humans but also fails to take into account how they would realistically respond to incentives.
The idea that you could have ultimate power resting in a single person without any struggle for power is preposterous. Even if one or two generations of elites don't struggle for ultimate power, they will always be incentivized to struggle against each other. The whole premise rests on cryptographic-controlled weapons? What happens when one board member manufactures a bunch of his own weapons in secret? Why would anyone think that a system of government completely isolated from the anger of its population be more incentivized to act in their interest? Was Yarvin 12 when he wrote all this?
Nothing he suggests could possibly be better than a system of decentralized political power combined with laws that protect individual rights by due process.
Still, I appreciate the analysis for displaying the many ways that his original analysis contradicts everything MAGA believes in.
> The reactionary party doesn't use activism, journalism, or other attempts to shape public opinion
This is on your list twice, with slightly different wording
Why do you devote so much effort to engaging idiots?
I feel weird reading about Yarvin because I think I kind of sort of see the same world he does but came to radically different conclusions.
Another difference between a corporation and a state is that a corporation has a clear utility function -- to increase the value of their shares. Now, often it is hard to know beforehand which action will have the greater EV for shareholders. Disney does not need much justification about why it is not producing porn with all the IP it owns, it can simply point at its brand as a family friendly business and claim that going rule 34 with Bambi would harm its bottom line. So different companies can smuggle in non-monetary terms into their utility function and plausibly claim that these are just instrumental goals. But at the end of the day, the forces of the market judge the economic merits of these commitments -- if Disney was wrong and porn had 1000x the market size of Hollywood, then some porn company would just buy up Disney.
For a state, things are not that simple -- one of the main tasks of democracy is to judge between competing interests and either pick one side or introduce a compromise.
If Moldbug prefers that the state is owned by the board of directors and their utility function is just the total worth of the state, then exhibit A would be the "Congo Free State". It was the private property of King Leopold II. With the backing of the other European nations, he was rather secure in his position, so he did not require brutal subjugation simply to stay in charge. Instead, he decided that the best way to monetize his property was to extract rubber, and that the best way to maximize the extraction would be to terrorize the population.
Likewise, while a state run to maximize its bottom line would not genocide the Jews but try to make better use of their geniuses, there is little to stop that state from repeating Aktion T4, when the Nazis decided to murder people with mental handicaps.
Or perhaps NRX Stalin would be able to convince his board of directors that the USSR would benefit more from the industry it could buy from the grain shipments than from keeping a few millions of Ukrainians alive.
In each case, you can argue that the policy was actually inefficient, that Leopold would have gained more rubber by having fewer mutilations, or that the people killed in T4 could have been put to simple jobs which made them net-positive, or that the USSR would have benefited more from Ukrainian peasants than industry, but I very much prefer to unconditionally condemn atrocities (as well as an utilitarian can, anyhow) instead of having to find something economically sub-optimal with them.
This! All the way! One of the points of democracy, and protests, and actual participation is to have asome way (however imperfect) to try to convince other people to care about the things you care about, and to come up with a compromise on values. Having large shareholders control everything is a recipe for them completely ignoring the things that low- and non-share-owning population cares about - and often just through pure ignorance, even if they theoretically do not mind throwing the rubes a bone. I think there is some value in seeking a system that better divorces a democratic value-setting process from a technocratic/meritocratic value-maximization process, to avoid wishful thinking from influencing the actual policies too much, and to make it easier to deal with hard tradeoffs, but democratic control over the value function is essential.
He always said that the joint-stock corporate design is his ideal, but he would choose a normal hereditary absolute monarchy over what we have now. He had changed his mind about using populism and democracy long before Trump, in 2010, he wrote The True Election: A Practical Option for Real Political Change, and essentially everything he writes today about regime change can be found there. Since then he hasn't changed his views on any subject except for patchwork, actually almost everything in Gray Mirror is recycled from UR. To this day he criticizes Republicans for not "passing the tests", mainly for not designing a new government before the election, or at least afterward. He endorsed Biden because in The True Election he wrote: "When you try to defeat Democrats by electing Republicans, you’re trying to drown a fish.
It is with Democratic actors in the show, as at present, that Washington languishes and looks weak. Conclusion: if a true election is not yet possible, do your best to keep the Democrats in office."
Just watched this recent video of Yarvin:
https://youtu.be/YIYCRwx0qtQ?si=qwUoViOMuiHTa-mn he’s bright, original but fundamentally unserious.
"A few years later, [Sam Altman] gave into temptation, tried to turn [OpenAI} into a normal profit-focused company, and failed, because the structure he designed was really good."
Perhaps, but your cited link only reports that Sam Altman *claims* that he's decided to let the non-profit board control the company. And this is the Sam Altman who was fired by the *last* non-profit board, reortedly for blatantly lying to them. OK, maybe it was the previous board that was the lying liars, but I'm kind of skeptical on that and I have a strong suspicion that what Altman has established is another semi-captive board of directors which rubber-stamps the CEO" with a veneer of non-profitability.
I would, at very least, hold off on canonizing him as "one of the all-time greats" just yet.
As for Moldbug selling out, was Winston Churchill "selling out" when he supported Joseph Stalin in 1941? Pre-1941 Churchill was not at all shy about (correctly) calling out Soviet Communism for its past evils and its potential for even greater evils in the future, and while he didn't have as explicit a utopian manifesto as Mencius Moldberg I think he had a reasonably clear idea as to what good government would look like and it was Definitely Not That.
Nor did Churchill make his support for Stalin in any way conditional on the Soviet Union setting up institutional safeguards against future Stalinist evil.
It is certainly plausible that Moldbug believes that right-wing populism is Very Bad but that left-wing wokeism is Even Worse. I'm kind of on the fence on that front myself, and I don't think I am the only one. And it is also plausible that Moldbug doesn't believe that wokeism has yet been defeated, that its future defeat is contingent on continued vigorous support for the lesser evil that is presently leading the fight against the woke. Churchill didn't pull his support for Stalin after the US entry into the war, or after Stalingrad or Kursk or even Normandy.
And the strongest argument against continuing to support Trump as the "lesser evil", the one that is decisive for me, is that Donald Trump tried to openly subvert the democratic process in 2020 and 2021. To me, that is *absolutely* beyond the pale. But Moldbug is in the rare position of honestly saying he never cared about the democratic process in the first place, so there's no hypocrisy in his ignoring that now.
So I'm going with probably not a "sell-out", just wrong. And wrong in the way Moldbug has always been wrong (even if it is an interesting thought experiment).
My god, that's a lot of words without ever addressing the elephant in the room that Trump is not, in fact, a dictator. And contrary to all these turgid fantasies, unlikely to become one. I would bet a good deal of money on him being out of office in January 2029 (at the latest).
Scott's writing has taken a real downturn with this new administration. It's increasingly difficult to see what separates it now from the rest of the knee jerk hysterical left wing slop that's plastered all over Substack.
The quality of the writing is still in the top tier, sure. But the substance is increasingly generic.
Between Trump and the whole AGI Doomsday nonsense it's increasingly hard to take "rationalists" seriously when there's such an obvious inability here to think in any sort of sober manner about either of those topics.
I’d say Occam’s razor suggests Yarvin’s change is just due to mood affiliation. History has shown even the brightest and most innovative thinkers are susceptible to it. Yarvin isn’t one of the brightest and most innovative thinkers (I’m not calling him stupid, but there are many far more brilliant people who’ve fallen in line behind bad regimes for mere tribal reasons; I would never have pegged him as one of those rarefied few that is impervious to such forces).
But have you considered that the real title of the classic 11,000 blog post series was 'Don't Create The Populist Strongman ;)'
I know this is entirely irrelevant, but the long way from Richmond to Baltimore could have taken the 81 and didn't have to go as far west as it did.
There seems a distinct lack of any mention of the rights and wellbeing of the average person in Moldbugistan.
Actually strike that - he specifically “does not trust them” and wants to totally exclude them.
Seems to me Moldbug thinks the purpose of a government is to maximise the profits of its shareholders, not maximising the wellbeing of the people.
I imagine the People would invent neo-Charterism should they find themselves in living Moldbugistan.
There have been many countries without fundamental rights written down where the people have flourished.
Scott, I searched and searched this post, looking for any citations of Curtis repudiating the things you say he's repudiated. Also, he endorsed Harris in 2024, just as he endorsed Biden in 2020. You claim, without evidence, that these were tongue-in-check endorsements, but he explained his rationale straightforwardly in several podcast interviews.
So what you're saying is... true neoreaction has never been tried?
In all seriousness, I think people like Scott who are attracted to neoreaction just have very different values from the rest of us:
> But these are usually ones like Meta where the CEO has done an incredible job proving his judgment again and again
I personally wouldn't call someone that has multiple giant wikipedia articles full of controversies (including enabling a genocide) someone with incredible judgement, but hey, agree to disagree.
>someone that has multiple giant wikipedia articles full of controversies (including enabling a genocide)
My first reaction to this was to say that Mark Zuckerberg "enabled" the Rohingya genocide in the same way that whoever invented trains "enabled" the Holocaust. But on reflection, that's actually giving the accusation too much credit -- at least it's actually true that the Holocaust would probably have killed far fewer people if the Nazis had no trains. If Facebook hadn't existed, the Rohingya genocide probably wouldn't have been slowed down at all.
The chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar stated that Facebook played a "determining role" in the Rohingya genocide: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook-idUKKCN1GO2PN/
A piece released today that portrays Yarvin and likeminded figures as having translated the archaeofuturist ideas of Guillaume Faye, of French New Right infamy.
What do others make of that portrayal?
"Yarvin’s neocameralist blog posts never mentioned Faye—but his blueprint for post-democracy, elite rule, and managed decline echoed archeofuturism’s core."
https://heyslick.substack.com/p/archeofuturism-the-secret-doctrine
Can you unblock nonZionism? You had previously said that he would be blocked for one month and he has served his time (and then some). Thank you!
What does this moldbug/yarvin guy do that he has so much time on his hands to come up with these d&d campaign inspired philosophies and publish them? Is he some kind of inheritance baby that doesn't work or something? I presume he's an adult with responsibilities of some kind, right?
Rich childhood propelled to excessive wealth by the tech boom.
One of Yarvin's most recent articles critiques Trump's trade policy
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-problem-with-trumpian-mercantilism
Corporations are kept in check by people taking their money elsewhere. They are incentivized to keep their customers or lose them. At the level of the nation, exit is not as easy. And Moldbug in particular, does not believe in emigration. He sees it as theft of state property.
Without facing the consequences of the power of exit, corporations will behave badly. Nations too. Even w/ a board.
Also his love of Caesar led Rome is frankly retarded, as the Republic created the glory of Rome and the true decline and fall of the Rome begins at the Rubicon. Most if not all cultural achievements came during the republic or as the last rich vestiges of it coasting on momentum as Augustus put it to work to mythologized his power (e.g. Virgil)
>ones like Meta where the CEO has done an incredible job proving his judgment again and again
The very name argues against this
I enjoyed the piece as a review, but I don’t think it is very insightful. Growing up in the 80’s thru the aughts it was possible to see the US as tolerant of a much wider range of views. Post-2020(?) publicly having ever publicly espoused an eclectic views seems to invite be the first up against the wall (or at least employment issues).
Imagine a bell curve
Simpleton: dictatorships are bad; Mid: actually, under unique and completely unrealistic conditions dictatorships are cool; Jedi: dictatorships are bad
Imagine a bell curve
Simpleton: dictatorships are bad; Mid: actually, under unique and completely unrealistic conditions dictatorships are cool; Jedi: dictatorships are bad