dark mutualism, part 1

neomutualists reach out for their weapons

mutualism started and mostly remained an open concern about progress: serialized changes with a certain dominant teleology. it investigated such series initially in the economic realms of property, labour and production. in his later life, Proudhon veered into sociological analyses of the church and war. whatever else could be said of mutualism, its notion of progress drives in a lane little related to the mainstream meaning the term acquired in political currency. the trends tracked by Proudhon and its meagre followers, both in America and Europe, talked about mechanization, labour organization, decentralization and, even at its most social, still focused on the miracle of modernity. progress was the progress of intelligence towards its ever-greater expansion, the mastering of technique. what took over the term in the latter half of the 19th century was anything but.

two facts, then, need immediate recognition. first, mutualism lost progress, even as it remained its most fundamental concern. more generally, mutualism has been forsaken to the fringe of the fringes of political radicalism. its leading names after Proudhon are known to a few thousand people worldwide, at most. its theory is not entirely clear even to adherents, and its significant works have most remained untranslated. wherever social progress has taken, it has left mutualism behind.

secondly, progressivism – as it’s currently understood – mostly definitely won over the world. the current crop, directly descending from 19th-century social reformers, holds offices everywhere in the most powerful high places of the world. even its supposedly most ardent opponents are still committed to one or another of its doctrines. there’s nowhere in the world where being anti-progress would pay high dividends socially, and nowhere an anti-progressive could be safe for sure (maybe in Russia, but who knows). doesn’t all this undeniable success mean they grasped progress way more firmly than any mutualist ever could?

the triumphant stance of Proudhon, therefore, needs revisiting and serious revision: progress isn’t what it used to be. a recuperation is pressing if mutualism is to remain at all relevant. our enemies have taken power, and they barely even know they are our enemies. acquiring some fangs would constitute a reaction from the left, and as such, it invites paradoxical commitments. the most pressing question, now, is what the hell went wrong?

how was progress lost for mutualism? naïvité. like classical mechanics (and possibly classical liberalism), Proudhon’s rationalism expected time to be linear, a simple progression from A to B. what the social turmoils since his age spelt, on the other hand, were waves, and maybe even whirlpools. up to the point where regressive progress could not only make sense but be entirely necessary to keep with the trend.

mutualism’s own "ultraviolet catastrophe" was the practical demonstration, beginning in the 1920s, that fascist-style command-economies could not only work but effectively mobilize multitudes. federated unions had no chance of autonomy if they were effectively integrated into a framework of state-managed negotiations. mutual contractual obligations could not withstand extensive state regulation. absent unbounded competition, prices could never be reduced to costs. but, perhaps most consequentially, localized organization was rendered impossible in the hysteria of neo-tribal identities. the black-body of all-for-the-state absorbed all possible light.

even Proudhon already demonstrated some scepticism concerning mass politics.

> "If monarchy is the hammer which crushes the People, democracy is the axe which divides it: the one and the other equally conclude in the death of liberty…"

so, in the wake of the 1848 revolution, his support for popular movements was hesitant. his proposals revolved around "economic" rather than "political" democracy, and the succession of events in the middle decades of 19th-century France led him ever deeper into a purely economic understanding of freedom – voluntary contracts and nothing else. still, even at his most economistic, Proudhon didn’t feel that popular movements could degenerate into state maximalism. and in the 19th century, there was possibly still reason for that.

Proudhon’s American heirs, the individualist anarchists of Boston, started from that economic view and – in what could be seen as a deviation from Stirner-style European individualism – imagined the economy unleashed from state grips as positively social. Their prolific and vibrant movement lasted a few decades, but just like proudhonism in Europe, was devoured by the rise of communistic strains of anarchism. at the dawn of the 20th century, Benjamin Tucker was hopeless and gloomy about the future of liberty.

the earlier half of the 20th saw the decimation of even the communistic side of anarchism, and the absorption of whatever remained into the capitalist/socialist duopoly. The revival of American individualists in the late 60s by Rothbard was made without any reference whatsoever to their mutualist side. it took the 21st century – and especially the Internet – for mutualism to reemerge.

the works of Shawn Wilbur and Kevin Carson finally thawed the ice that entrapped mutualism and drove into new directions: decentralized industrialism was once again out of the box, and maybe more than ever. Carson’s analysis of early 20th-century progressivism and the New Class it brought to power also provided a much-needed explanation for over 100 years of cryogenic suspended animation.

> "Twentieth-century politics was dominated by the ideology of the professional and managerial classes that ran the new large organizations. "Progressivism," especially—the direct ancestor of the mid-20th century model of liberalism that was ascendant from the New Deal to the Great Society—was the ideology of the New Middle Class. As Christopher Lasch put it, it was the ideology of the "intellectual caste," in a future which "belonged to the manager, the technician, the bureaucrat, the expert."

Carson’s analysis – inevitably limited (where did this centralist bug come from?) – dovetails nicely with those of a writer that claims no mutualist ancestry whatsoever, and that immediately justifies the "dark" appendage in the title here. Moldbug’s analysis of the Cathedral is eerily similar to Carson’s about the New Class – with one crucial difference: the Cathedral is not only a dominant class with a peculiar taste for technocratic dominion, but rather an expanded opinion-control networked system, amounting to a secular church based on the creed of egalitarian humanism:

> I am not a theist, so I don’t care much for theology. Paranormal beliefs are not beliefs about the real world, and cannot directly motivate real-world action. As a result, they are usually of no adaptive significance, tend to mutate frequently, and are a dangerous basis for classification.

> And when we look at the real-world beliefs of ultracalvinists, we see that ultracalvinism is anything but content-free. By my count, the ultracalvinist creed has four main points:

> First, ultracalvinists believe in the universal brotherhood of man. As an Ideal (an undefined universal) this might be called Equality. ("All men and women are born equal.") If we wanted to attach an "ism" to this, we could call it fraternalism.

> Second, ultracalvinists believe in the futility of violence. The corresponding ideal is of course Peace. ("Violence only causes more violence.") This is well-known as pacifism.

> Third, ultracalvinists believe in the fair distribution of goods. The ideal is Social Justice, which is a fine name as long as we remember that it has nothing to do with justice in the dictionary sense of the word, that is, the accurate application of the law. ("From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.") To avoid hot-button words, we will ride on a name and call this belief Rawlsianism.

> Fourth, ultracalvinists believe in the managed society. The ideal is Community, and a community by definition is led by benevolent experts, or public servants. ("Public servants should be professional and socially responsible.") After their counterparts east of the Himalaya, we can call this belief mandarism.

…and that is where mutualism’s ultimate Achille’s heel is located: mutualism has been so far a very egalitarian humanist endeavour, much to its own demise.

egalitarian humanism ultimately begets demotism – if all humans are holy ("ends in themselves") and fundamentally, originally equal, then it follows that only unbounded franchise is justified. if the government is made by public opinion, the wheels of power have to revolve around managed minds. the rule in the name of the People is ultimately a cryptocalvinist global theocracy.

some may object: if egalitarian humanism kills mutualism, and mutualism is from the beginning complicit with it, so much worse for mutualism, right? up till now, i cannot but give a resounding yes. But things may have begun to change.

what this series will try to show – by following the main themes of mutualism – is how this profoundly pious sect of Protestantism that dominates the world is yet another misguided idealism; how it is slowly being unravelled by the forces that mutualism began (but never quite concluded) examining; and how mutualism can only secure itself by aligning with those forces – which will inevitably imply a dark turn away from humanity and substantial equality, and towards a "crowned anarchy" of synthetic beings.

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O plano de Peter Thiel para se tornar o CEO da América

por Samuel Hammond

O infame investidor fez uma aposta de longo prazo em Trump para tornar os Estados Unidos mais parecido com uma monarquia, perturbar sua burocracia decadente e reviver o status do mito e da hierarquia na sociedade

O capitalista de risco bilionário Peter Thiel fez um monte de cabeças virarem quando se descobriu que ele seria delegado de Donald Trump. Alguns até pensaram que deveria ser um Peter Thiel diferente. A intriga apenas aumentou quando foi confirmado que ele daria um discurso endossando vigorosamente  Trump na Convenção Nacional Republicana. Então o Vale do Silício se sintonizou, buscando uma resposta. Em vez disso, ele ficaram “atordoados e confusos” pelo que ouviram, de acordo com um relato.

Aos meus olhos, o discurso de Thiel pode ter sido surreal, mas nada sobre ele foi confuso. Como alguns já notaram, Thiel claramente quer modernizar a perspectiva do GOP sobre a comunidade LGBT e mover o partido para além do Reaganismo de pequeno governo, em apoio a coisas como grandes programas de infraestrutura e P&D.

Mas esses são ambos feijõezinhos se comparados ao que eu vejo como o principal propósito (e aposta) de Thiel ao endossar Trump: Peter Thiel vê uma presidência de Trump como seu caminho para se tornar o CEO sombra dos Estados Unidos da América.

 

Perseguição e a Arte de Investir

Thiel parecia fora do personagem. Claramente nervoso, ele falava apressadamente, em vez do seu ritmo normal mais considerado, e com uma retórica bem mais grandiosa e incauta do que aquela pela qual ele é conhecido. Com olhos arregalados e ligeiramente aterrorizados, ele recapitulou sua bem conhecida visão de que o progresso tecnológico estagnou (embora sem muita indicação de como uma presidência de Trump ajudaria) e se declarou orgulhoso de ser gay e Republicano, antes de sair correndo do palco, como se tivesse algum outro lugar para estar.

Aparências de lado, por quê, de todas as pessoas, o cofundador do PayPal e notório libertário estaria lançando seu peso por trás de alguém tão controverso e volátil quanto Trump? As duas questões centrais de Trump, comércio e imigração, não são conhecidas por serem grandes preocupações de Thiel. Se qualquer coisa, Thiel, como muitos no Vale do Silício, quer dramaticamente mais imigração especializada. Thiel é, ele mesmo, de uma família imigrante. Ele já até mesmo prometeu um financiamento para um esquema que propunha dar uma volta nas cotas de imigração, hospedando criadores de tecnologia nascidos no exterior em um navio ancorado nas águas internacionais de São Francisco. Lá se vai a lei e a ordem.

Mas, antes de atribuí-la a seu contrarianismo cru, mais uma dos infames traços de caráter de Thiel, um olhar mais atento sobre suas fixações filosóficas e teoria de empreendedorismo revela um método em sua loucura. Eu admito que isso é especulativo. Mas, na tradição de Leo Strauss, Thiel vê valor em criar camadas de significado para diferentes públicos – o que lhe deixa aberto a uma interpretação mais especulativa.

Para começo de conversa, Thiel é um acólito do falecido cientista social e filósofo francês René Girard. Girard é mais famoso por sua teoria do “desejo mimético”, que afirma que os humanos invariavelmente tomam suas ideias emprestadas das outras pessoas, tanto para imitar quanto para impressionar. Longe de ser um contrariano reflexivo, a filosofia de investimento de Thiel, explicada em seu livro Zero to One, é sobre deliberadamente tentar transcender o desejo de imitação, ser o proverbial “escolhido” que pode, então, colher lucros monopolistas.

O desejo mimético se revela no “viés de desejabilidade social“, a tendência bem-fundamentada dos respondedores de pesquisas de dizer as coisas e marcar as caixas que lhes farão parece mais favoráveis ao seus pares, em vez de sua crença verdadeira e autônoma. Mas, se pessoas o suficiente se esquivam de uma ideia por causa do medo de serem julgadas ou para seguir a multidão, isso naturalmente cria uma oportunidade de lucro. O inverso também é verdade. Se conseguir um MBA ou um diploma de direito vem com bastante status social, é melhor evitar estas coisas, Thiel argumentou, porque você sacrifica uma oportunidade de verdadeira grandeza ao entrar em campo abarrotado.

Apoiar Hillary Clinton é, portanto, muito parecido com abrir um restaurante. É socialmente desejável – não é necessário olhar além das dúzias de celebridades, comediantes e músicos que participaram da Convenção Nacional Democrata. Mas endossar algo popular vem com uma escassa margem além da aprovação de seus pares e de estar no centro de um nexo social positivo. Se voz é o que você quer, Clinton já tem muitas mãos para lavar, favores para retribuir e quiproquós.

Trump, por outro lado, está faminto por apoio da elite. De fato, ele mal consegue guiar as elites dentro de seu próprio partido. Então, porque Thiel não aproveitaria uma chance única na vida de ir de zero a um, de ganhar uma influência significante sobre o potencial próximo Presidente dos EUA, ao custo de um leve constrangimento?

 

Reservas de Qualificação

Quando o New York Times relatou que Trump tentou convencer John Kasich a ser seu companheiro de chapa oferecendo-lhe controle total sobre a “política tanto interna quanto externa”, isso revelou algo sobre o estilo administrativo de Trump: Ele delega. Igualmente, não é nenhum segredo que seus filhos têm operado muito de sua campanha.

Isto ajuda a explicar o paradoxo de qualificação notado por Timothy B. Lee, que escreve que “o argumento de Peter Thiel a favor de Donald Trump não faz nenhum sentido. …É difícil ver como eleger Donald Trump – um homem pouco conhecido por sua competência gerencial ou por seu domínio dos detalhes políticos – poderia tornar o governo competente novamente”. A única explicação, de acordo com Lee, é que Thiel quer que Trump “exploda o sistema e comece de novo”.

Ainda assim, não está claro em que explodir o sistema implica, ou como isso ajuda Thiel. Mais provavelmente, Thiel mirando não apenas em ter o ouvido do Presidente, mas também em ter delegado um poder de decisão significante. Desta forma, Thiel não está votando pela competência de Trump. Ele está votando pela sua própria.

Competência sobre o que? O discurso de Thiel contém uma pista. Nele, ele argumentou que a América dos anos 50 e 60 era fundamentalmente high tech. Ela empurrava as fronteiras da ciência e integrava seu serviço público com as últimas tecnologias. O Projeto Apolo é um caso em questão. Decidimos ir à lua e, sete anos mais tarde, o fizemos. Hoje, demora sete anos só para construir uma ponte; às vezes só para lhe dar um nome.

Felizmente, sobre esses pontos Thiel parece ter algumas respostas. Através do Founders Fund, Thiel investiu dezenas de milhões de dólares na Space-X, a companhia de foguetes de Elon Musk, que está planejando uma viagem tripulada à Marte. E a Palantir, a companhia de análise de US$20 bilhões de Thiel, tem centenas de milhões de dólares em contratos do governo dos EUA para ajudar agência federais como o DHS e a CIA a integrar e estruturar dados. Como Thiel conclui, “seria generoso dizer que os softwares do governo funciona mal, porque na maior parte do tempo eles sequer funcionam”.

O fraseado é importante, já que pode ser uma referência direta ao DCGS-A, ou Distributed Common Ground System-Army (Sistema Distribuído de Terreno Comum-Exército, em tradução livre), o sistema do Exército dos EUA para integrar e disseminar inteligência, vigilância e reconhecimento por todos os níveis do Exército. O sistema é notoriamente ruim, com os comandantes de solo o descrevendo como “imanuseável e inconfiável, difícil de aprender e difícil de usar”.

Thiel quer que a Palantir substitua o DCGS-A, e por boas razões. Quando o Exército lançou mão da tecnologia da Palantir no Afeganistão como parte de uma “Avaliação Operacional Avançada” em 2012, 96% do pessoal pesquisado a descreveu como “eficaz em apoiar sua missão”. Algumas unidades continuam a usá-la numa base ad hoc. Como relatou-se um oficial dizer, “a Palantir de fato funciona. Quando o DCGS de fato funcionar, estaremos prontos para usá-lo”.

Ainda assim, o Exército gastou mais de US$6 bilhões desenvolvendo o DCGS-A e treinando os usuários em “longas e supercomplicadas instruções em sala de aula” e não quer simplesmente deixar para lá. Então, no mês passado, enquanto o Exército dos EUA solicita ofertas para uma segunda fase em seu desenvolvimento, a Palantir revelou sua intenção de processar. A Palantir alega que a solicitação do Exército é “ilegal, irracional, arbitrária e caprichosa” por não adotar seu software evidentemente superior. Como a Bloomberg reportou, em jogo “está um potencial contrato de US$206 milhões, que é a primeira porção do que provavelmente será um sistema multi-anual e multi-bilionário de coleta e visualização de dados que serviria de eixo de inteligência do Exército”.

Foi um ano duro para a Palantir, tendo perdido alguns grandes clientes como a Coca-Cola, a American Express e a Nasdaq, então é um contrato que Thiel quer desesperadamente. E um contrato que um Comandante-em-Chefe Trump poderia lhe ajudar a conseguir. Por quê? Porque Trump só se cerca dos melhores.

Feudalismo Corporativo

Encontre, em qualquer país, o Homem Mais Capaz que ali existe; eleve-o ao lugar supremo e lealmente o reverencie: você tem um governo perfeito para esse país; nenhuma urna, eloquência parlamentar, votação, construção de constituições ou outro maquinário que seja pode melhorá-lo em uma partícula que seja. Ele está no estado perfeito; um país ideal.

Estas são as palavras do ensaísta escocês do século XIX Thomas Carlyle, um outro vigoroso defensor do governo pelos melhores.

É também a passagem que o infame blogger neorreacionário, Mencius Moldbug, nome real Curtis Yarvin, publicou na ocasião da morte de Steve Jobs.

A conexão? Na visão de Yarvin, o governo é apenas uma corporação com algumas camadas adicionais de pompa e circunstância democrática. Um governo efetivo, como uma corporação efetiva, precisa de um grande CEO; um monarca esclarecido; alguém com visão, força e, de maneira importante, a capacidade de delegar. “Eu posso lhe dizer exatamente como as decisões são feitas na Apple”, escreveu Yarvin em um post de 2009. “Primeiro, a Apple encontra um homem. Contrata-o, na verdade. E tendo encontrado este homem, ela lhe diz: senhor, esta decisão é sua“.

Similarmente, quando perguntado sobre como ele consertaria o decadente governo dos EUA, Yarvin respondeu “Encontre o melhor jogador de xadrez que você puder encontrar e lhe dê o emprego”. Esse emprego sendo um CEO não eleito da América, a nação enquanto corporação de acionistas, que poderia exercer uma autoridade soberana completa para fazer com o Departamento de Educação e o DCGS-A o que Steve Jobs fez com o decadente e improdutivo Advanced Technology Group da Apple em 1997 – aposentar todos os empregados e fechá-lo.

Thiel é esse homem para Trump? Thiel certamente parece simpático às visões de Yarvin. Das aulas sobre statups de Thiel:

Uma startup é basicamente estruturada como uma monarquia. Não chamamos assim, claro. Isso pareceria estranhamente antiquado, e nada que não seja democracia deixa as pessoas desconfortáveis. Estamos enviesados em direção ao lado democrático-republicano do espectro. É a isso que estamos acostumados pelas aulas de educação cívica. Mas a verdade é que startups e fundadores se inclinam em direção ao lado ditatorial, porque essa estrutura funciona melhor para statups.

E do ensaio de Thiel no Cato Undbound:

Eu não acredito mais que a liberdade e a democracia sejam compatíveis. …Uma metáfora melhor é a de que estamos em uma corrida mortal entre a política e a tecnologia. O futuro será muito melhor ou muito pior, mas a questão do futuro continua muito aberta, de fato. Não sabemos exatamente o quão acirrada está essa corrida, mas eu suspeito que ela poder estar muito acirrada, até mesmo por um fio. Ao contrário do mundo da política, no mundo da tecnologia as escolhas de indivíduos ainda podem ser vitais. O destino de nosso mundo pode depender do esforço de uma única pessoa que construa e propague o maquinário da liberdade que torne o mundo seguro para o capitalismo.

Como suas notas de aula indicam, monarquia é o outro significado de Zero to One. Ou, como Trump colocou, a ideia é que “Só eu consigo consertá-la”.

Os especialistas têm, até agora, identificado erroneamente a subcorrente do Grande Homem em Trump e nos seus apoiadores como fascismo latente. O termo mais preciso pode ser feudalismo corporativo ou absolutismo esclarecido (Make America Frederick the Great Again), uma ideia que também anima o interesse de Thiel no Seasteading.

O feudalismo classicamente envolvia uma classe nobre de proprietários de terras conhecida como Senhores, que mantém domínio completo sobre suas faixas de terra, ou feudos. Trump, como um magnata do setor imobiliário, já tem a maioria dos adesivos da nobreza, indo tão longe quanto a dar o nome de seu filho mais moço de Barron, um sinônimo de Senhor.

Feudos são a casa de vassalos, camponeses que recebem proteções e bens básicos em troca de serviços prestados ao Senhor. Isso não é exatamente a mesma coisa de direitos humanos básicos ou direitos de propriedade, já que são contingentes e acidentais, não morais ou meritórios. Daí o conforto de Trump com um uso liberal das expropriações de terra.

Seasteading é a mesma ideia do feudalismo clássico, mas sobre plataformas no oceano. Em teoria, Senhores e CEOs tem um incentivo para produzir um governo relativamente bom, a fim de atrair acionistas e vassalos. E, uma vez que o que conta como bom governo pode variar, vassalos votam com seus pés, a fim de optar pelo feudo ou seastead que mais se alinha com seus valores.

Economistas chamam isto de classificação de Tiebout, um modelo que inspirou uma geração de libertários a um tipo de fetichismo municipal que exagerava vastamente a disposição de uma pessoa média de se mudar e subestimava vastamente o potencial para formas localizadas de tirania. E, na teoria legal, é chamada de lei policêntrica, ou devolução da lei estatutária monopolista para jurisdições concorrentes e mesmo sobrepostas.

Embora cidades-estado modernas, como Cingapura, forneçam alguma evidência de que um ditador benevolente e tecnocrático possa de fato produzir uma sociedade próspera ao longo de um modelo corporativo, e o sucesso de Hong Kong e de zonas econômicas especiais como Shenzhen e Xiamen mostrem que experimentos de devolução legal tenham muito mérito, isso arrisca um tipo de falácia do atirador de elite. A saber, enfatiza os sucessos ao passo em que ignora os muitos estados falidos e outros experimentos de ditadores menos do que benevolentes, assim como o centralismo oculto que sustenta implementações bem-sucedidas e não anárquicas de devolução legal. Abordagens mais quantitativas, em contraste, continuam a descobrir que a democracia tem um efeito pró-crescimento “robusto e considerável”.

Não obstante, o fascínio de Thiel com o feudalismo se estende da terra e do mar para o ciberespaço, com seu investimento no Urbit, um projeto de Curtis Yarvin de incorporar as teorias sociais neorreacionárias em uma camada da internet. O Urbit faz muitas coisas, mas sua função principal é criar uma cadeia descentralizada digital de títulos a endereços de rede, como endereços IP peer-to-peer comercializáveis. Uma vez que seu espaço de nomes é um recurso escasso, não muito diferente da terra, não é surpresa que ele seja modelado sobre princípios feudais, com a soberania distribuída policentricamente por entre uma constelação de comunidades rigidamente hierárquicas.

 

Reequilíbrio Global

Quer Thiel seja mesmo um neorreacionário ou não, estritamente falando, é irrelevante. O que é importante é que ele tem constantemente identificado a “liberdade” com uma versão do feudalismo corporativo em pequena escala e tem indicado ser hora de uma versão se sedimentar em nível nacional, se não internacional.

O plano de Trump para desmantelar a OTAN e reverter a política histórica dos EUA de internacionalismo faria exatamente isso e também é consistente com o apoio anterior de Thiel a céticos da OTAN, tais como Ron Paul. A política externa declarada de Trump reequilibraria o globo, saindo da hegemonia dos EUA enquanto bastião do cosmopolitismo liberal e exportador de valores democráticos, em favor dos valores autoritários da China e da Rússia.

China e Rússia já operam em versões cruas do feudalismo corporativo, com Xi Jinping e Vladmir Putin como seus respectivos CEOs. E, apesar de ambos serem antigos países comunistas, cada um exporta sistemas de valores que são bem menos igualitários do que o dos Estados Unidos – e bem menos “politicamente corretos”.

De acordo com Thiel, “Se apropriadamente entendido, o politicamente correto é nosso grande problema político”, pelo que ele quer dizer o comprometimento semi-teológico da sociedade ocidental com o igualitarismo liberal. Isto, por sua vez, levou a elite da América ao “[Diversity Myth” de que o multiculturalismo funciona, à negação de diferenças inatas de gênero ou raça nos talentos individuais, a escrúpulos em torno de qualquer coisa semelhante à eugenia e à marginalização da tradição religiosa.

Em contraste, a China, liderada por uma “Nobreza Vermelha” de pincipelhos privilegiados, tem ganhado vantagem tecnológica na engenharia genômica ao deixar de lado medos de descobertas desconfortáveis. Enquanto isso, Putin tem pressionado o renascimento de um mythos pré-soviético baseado na ideia da Rússia enquanto uma civilização oriental ortodoxa distinta que se ajoelha ao ritual, à hierarquia e aos papéis tradicionais de gênero.

Assim, quando Donald Trump alega que ele quer “Make America Great Again”, não é meramente uma nostalgia pela Era Reagan ou o último viva de uma classe trabalhadora branca que se encolhe. Antes, é que a narrativa da decadência, como ecoada nos sentimentos de Thiel sobre a modernidade e a incompetência do governo, necessariamente cria corolário narrativo de retorno e renascimento.

Como quando Putin retornou para reviver uma Rússia doente em 2000.

Ou quando Steve Jobs retornou à Apple em 1996.

Cada um deles suplantou a narrativa do declínio com um novo mito, seja ele o Cristianismo Ortodoxo ou a reputação da Apple em design. Assim, enquanto Trump assume o augusto papel de uma figura cerimonial, isso deixa Thiel e companhia preencherem o resto das chefias e perseguirem a ambiciosa tarefa de restruturar as instituições decadentes da América a partir de dentro, incluindo, talvez, a criação de um novo mito americano também.

Mas se isso não é para você, como um Seastead mal gerido, você sempre tem a opção de ir embora.

O Canadá lhe recebe de braços abertos.

Samuel Hammond é analista da Pobreza e de políticas de Bem-Estar no Niskanen Center, um think tank libertário com base em Washington, D. C. As visões expressas neste ensaio são suas. Siga-o no Twitter @hamandcheese

exitocracy anotated

Axel just published the 4th chapter of his ongoing Neocameral Future. In what can be described as the textual version of a YouTube reaction video, I’ve made commentary on his main propositions and thesis. Hopefully this will promote debate and thus strengthen his upcoming book.

* * *

On materialism vs idealism (ideology/religion)

1. Much as I agree with that “Humans are MEAT ROBOTS. Free will in an illusion“, it’s important to keep in mind that the reductions of social processes to biology are not simple and that we don’t know how to do most of them (just as we don’t know how to reduce a great many biological processes to physical processes). It’s important to restate that insofar as you keep receiving true feedback from reality (empiricism) it’s perfectly fine to postulate social mechanisms that explain certain events. Social constructivism, to the extent that it doesn’t deny other empirical findings and conform to its own facts, is also materialistic.
2. “It is only when it is corrupted with cultish notions that it becomes evil” is a good assessment of reality, indeed. But religious (ideal/ideological) thought is a natural companion of abstract investigation (and hence intelligence). You can’t make it go away by mere wish (and if you do, you are being ideological yourself). Ideological/religious thinking has to be institutionalized and driven into producing realistic feedback. Empiricism didn’t arise from mere physicalist atheists, but physicalist atheists who believed it was possible to understand reality through abstract concepts. I.e., smart (rather than communist) physicalist atheists.

On stability

1. “Stability is not actually a good argument for a political system” Indeed, if you understand “stability” to mean “remaining the same forever, no matter what”. A good argument is adaptability and it is hard to not see adaptability as stability, once you grasp the basic underlying cybernetics.

On objections to unified power

1. “Demotism is Conserved.” Nope. Although mass communication (and, more to the point, the ever greater dissipation of mass lethal power) is an ongoing fact since the dawn of modernity, and one that is unlikely to go away (short of Peak Oil or something), there is ever less a need to control the mob’s minds. The trend set in motion with the internet is much more of cultural, social and (therefore) political fragmentation than of mass maneuver of opinion. The very costs of attempting something like that are ever greater.

   So, from what I grasp of the political trends in the 21st century, demotism has its days numbered, T minus the time necessary to build safe exit options. Bit-nations contracting with luxury gated cities for free pass, and ever more nomadic elites wandering around the world. No need for mob control, except insofar as “heavier walls” is mob control.

2. “Secure Power is an Illusion.” I’ve written three pieces on that. Spandrell probably gets most of the things. No disagreement here.
3. “Monarchy is Lazy Design.” Laziest of the lazy. But also very natural to civilized humans. It builds (and wrecks down) naturally from male hierarchy, hence its commonality. Of course, it is never secure, nor absolutist (absolutism in fact is a rather characteristically French rationalist lunacy born in the early 18th century).

   A further criticism is that monarchy depends on deep ties of loyalty and a stable male hierarchy, both profoundly disturbed by the uprooting and individualism needed to run a market economy. Given market economy’s clear superiority to traditional economy in output, it should be obvious no monarchy can survive under global market conditions (except as a rather romantic honorific to a cryptographically secure CEO – which is probably how Moldbug meant it).

4. “Nukes are an Issue.” And so is its spread and ever further miniaturization. Of course, it makes it easier for city-states (and hence the Patchwork) to emerge. Which means it makes secession easier by providing leverage against centralized governments. Which in turn makes the collapse of The Cathedral inevitable rather than unrealistic. Accelerationism is simply the research program for pocket nukes.
5. “NRx will be Made Obsolete.” Possibly one the most important points in the chapter. Puts the movement in perspective. 10 years ago Moldbug was creating an account on Blogspot and Nick Land was… Gnon knows what. Ten years from now the whole thing will probably have unfolded in crazier ways than expected.

   That point made, the Cathedral – unless very unpredictable turns are taken – will die out fighting against gene editing, even if it’s for “good purposes”. Eugenics was extirpated from Progressivism 90 years ago, and it’s unlikely to get back on track before Progressivism goes away. Many progressives, on the other hand, may indeed make great use of genetic science for their purposes, while making Progress great again. It’s not hard to imagine lesbian couples producing high IQ design babies in HK in 20 years. But not in NY, that’s for sure.

6. “ It is Not a Single Monolithic Thing.” Good point. But the whole point of coining “demotism” was probably to pin down one specific kind of democracy: 1848-like universal-suffrage democracy. Decentralization is not a problem (rather it is the purported solution), bureaucratic institutions are not a problem (probably it what kept the boat from sinking so far), and even very limited voice (as in corporative boards) is fine, as long as it’s accompanied by the correlative costs. The problem is simply: universal, unqualified, “free” voice – literally mass tyranny. This is as monolithic a thing as it gets, and has been described over and over in political philosophy ever since Aristotle as a degeneration of the greatest idea: constitutions. De-enfranchise people and whatever else is left of democracy is probably OK.
7. “Reforming the cathedral is not impossible” I would phrase it as “Making the Cathedral go away without much noise is not impossible”. But I’ll be back to this when I finish the other chapters.

On the causes of Cathedral

1. “The actual cause of the Cathedral is compromise in an unsecure power structure, not the nature of unsecure power itself. COMPROMISE, not imperium in imperio, is the actual cause of left-wing power.” Another very central point of the chapter. The refusal of dialectics – living humiliated under the rule of the enemy – is not likely to be widely accepted as a central tenet of right-wing thought. Much of the reactionaries around are damn certain they don’t just want to flee to better lands, but to purge their enemies, enslave them, chain them or, at least, make them live under the “right” government. The average type on both blue and red tribes just want to vanquish the other, kill their men, rape their women and enslave their children. Monkey business at its prime.
2. On matters of division of power – imperium in imperio – I guess I made my points on the neocameralism and constitutions series (1, 2, 3). In sum: stable (adaptive) systems are those with nodes no more controlling than controlled. Much on that to come in the next months, but what is essential to the argument under consideration here is that the Cathedral thrived (at least partially) because, and not in spite, of divided powers. It was when such division was abandoned that the degenerative ratchet finally got a grip on history. Odysseus could tie himself, but only for so long. Getting him sober from siren vocal poison and making him tie himself again and better is probably the aim of any proposed new kind of republicanism. ” It is true that unsecure power tends to breed compromise as a result of a majoritarian system” is the main hint of what exactly went wrong with the US Constitution.

On Multi-Part Elections

1. “Formalism ends violence by making the outcome of a dispute known. Another way of saying this is that a process is formalized when violence is eliminated through a rule based mechanism that turns it into a game or contract of sorts.” It’s important to keep in mind that one needs an unambiguous unbreakable rule for this to work – enforcement matters. I’m saying this to make clear that the criteria for Multi-Part Elections to work is that it provides not only unambiguous rules for conflicts, but also an enforcement mechanism.
2. “People will separate themselves based on ideological lines. The separation will reinforce itself. It is precisely this separation that actually leads to stability.” Until it grows far too much. Not to get all Marxist about a market of little governments, but some will definitely get more guns than others, and once that is in play, the talk must shift to military technology systems and what they imply in terms of political organization. We didn’t get to the nation state model arbitrarily, and we won’t get out of it arbitrarily. The question is: how do you effectively defend something, without breaking the whole system? Which leads us to…
3. “Power creates ideology.” This is unconvincing, if only because ideology is itself a source of power. You seem to admit it straight away: “any different system will seem immoral to you, because you, having been indoctrinated by the current system, share its morals“. To distinguish between power and the idea of power will demand something more than mere affirmation.

   The following discussion, based on this distinction, is not so wrong as it reverses the true complication: “The ideology becomes whatever is necessary to justify the power system. In the System of systems, aka, the exitocracy, a form of “live and let live” becomes the standard. The federal government is forced to take a culturally relativist position in order to maintain military control over its territory.” Can the federal government maintain that position and have military control? What does the military believe? What is the ideology of those with military capability? Power is this ideology, what will make them pull the trigger.

4. “[T]he federal government which does ONLY military, intelligence, and security matters.” Only? If the federal government holds sway of sovereign (primary) property, what about the outside? If it’s Fnargl, what will make it turn from Cathedral usual business to “a box for every monkey”?

Maybe I’m jumping ahead right here, but these are the main questions – that remain so far largely unanswered within NRx. The whole mechanics (the rules of the system) seems very neat, but the enforcement mechanism is still vague, at best. If the counties default to Fedgov’s authority for solving their (inevitable) quibbles, what makes the Fedgov accept this whole scheme in the first place? And what about what is outside of it (because internal trade barriers will certainly hamper the Federation’s industrial ability, as the Federalist Papers already had in mind)?

neocameralism and constitutions 3

 

Three because triangles are best. Answering three responses to my last piece, as well. 333, but let’s not get all mystical just yet.

* * *

Reactionary Future’s further response is short and pungent. His latest posting is all fuzzily connected with the theme of constitutionalism and division of powers. Here, I’ll answer only to the direct answer he gave me. The questions of liberal tradition, liberal anthropology and capitalism will be dealt with elsewhere.

Preliminary throat clearing again: I don’t think Moldbug has, at any point, defended a return to medieval governance. The joint-stock corporation – his model for better government – is inherently modern (and, to provoke RF, inherently capitalist), way different from the medieval trade corporations (owing its origins to early modern royal charters).

Secondly, imperium in imperio cannot be avoided unless Great Fnargl himself descends from the sky in his Royal Flying Saucer. And that’s not happening anytime soon. For all matters human, force cannot be immediately exercised over any tract of land bigger than a square meter. Any true power, therefore, depends on the idea of power and the loyalty minds have to such an idea. The obsession with Fnargl-like absolutism is the typical phallic power-trip. “I can rule the world from my penis“. No, you can’t.

The whole counter-argument to such absolutism can be boiled down to: the deployment of power implies division of power – to wield power, through delegation, is already to trade it away. If this is so, you’d better have this formalized, and give some deep thought to such formalization, in order to get secure by producing stable arrangements.

Here’s the very first division of power implied by the very deployment of power: to give orders, things around need to believe it and follow it. So much for your imperio. It needs a imperialist religion to be very much followed, through fear or faith. No wonder the very first states were alliances between priests and warlords. Of course, you’ll also need loyal generals and armies, and piety from the host population from which you exact taxes to finance your imperio. Yet another division: if you want to an efficient army, you’ll need inventors, traders, producers of all kinds. Bullies don’t go very far without nerds.

Now, if the medieval system (and for that matter, all other civilizational social systems) has “success in producing exceptionally functional societies”, and if it was “a patchwork of internal conflict”, then we have to pay attention to what made it so. Maybe – and this is the suggestion constitutionalism makes – it was successful and functional because, and not in spite of, internal conflict. RF says it must “be avoided at all costs”, but can it? Insecure powers will fight on and on and on until they’re all dead? How the hell did medieval system even survive this for a thousand years? This seems to assume a complete lack of any rationality inherent to conflict, of any strategy. It also assumes that conflict has no cost structure and can simply go on forever in its most bloodiest form. Has it?

No, this sort of reasoning is utter nonsense and has no empirical evidence. Conflicting powers eventually come to an agreement – a formalization – in which they check each other according to rules stated in a document: a constitution. Do they try to undermine this document? Whenever they can get away with it. Do they get to do this? No, because the checks imposed there are real: other powers will smash them if they do. (Needless to say, if the checks are mere words on a piece of paper, and not in any way related to an actual distributions of power, they will remain just that: words).

RF makes a further point:

The fact of the matter is that the whole thought experiment of sovcorp is a useful training exercise for understanding this issue, with the profit motive providing a very simple and effective means of envisioning the concept of a society ordered towards a central good, thereby giving all actions within that society a context and a rational teleology towards which to direct. Is X good for the profit of the sov corp? yes – bingo you have a rudimentary Virtue Ethics in play and you have just left the liberal TRADITION in which the night watchman state is merely a baby sitter for everyone to pursue their own “good.” But this is just absolutist training wheels.

Is it? None of the people paying rent to the sovcorp, none of the managers inside of it, none of stockholders who buy and sell shares of it, are concerned with anything but their own good. Their individual interests are aligned with good governance, by virtue of the market in government thereby created, but they are all minding their own values. If this goes out of liberal tradition, it’s hard to see where. If this creates a virtue ethics out of profit motive, it’s hard to see how capitalism is not precisely the same thing.

As Moldbug himself puts it:

To prevent the emergence of politics, a stable, established neocameralist state relies on the fact that its shares are held by a widely distributed body of investors, each of whose management control is precisely proportional to the share of the profits the investor receives, and none of whom has any way to profit privately by causing the enterprise to be mismanaged. The result is a perfect alignment of interests among all shareholders, all of whom have exactly the same one-dimensional goal: maximizing the value of their shares. Experience in private corporate governance shows that such a body tends to be reasonably competent in selecting managers, and almost never succumbs to anything like politics.

Here’s your liberal tradition, if you will.

Lastly, what has cybernetics to do with all this? Well, cybernetics is quite literally control theory. A constitution is cybernetic because it draws on feedback loops to produce stable arrangements, i.e., it produces a control mechanism, just like a thermostat. Why do thermostats work? Because there’s a feedback system: the sensor tell the device “hey, it’s 77°F”, the device makes its calculations and tells the heater “turn off”, the temperature falls within the room and the sensor then says to the device the new reading. So on forever. Can the house burn down? Of course, if the heater is wrongly programmed, or is intentionally sabotaged (or, of course, if someone sets the house on fire).

RF says:

If you place formal blocks on governance, then alternative means to undermine those blocks will be used – the constitution cannot contain all eventualities.

Of course, and any constitution that does not try to create blocks that, in trying to be undermined, become stronger, is not a good constitution. Furthermore, they are amendable to adjust for new, unpredictable facts and power distributions. Sometimes, of course, it all falls down. No real system is completely fail-proof. At their best, they are fail-resistant, and can operate even when most has gone to shit. But if someone sets the house on fire, no thermostat will solve that.

Also:

” In addition, if sovereign power has checks, then those engaging the checks are sovereign – the logic is bizarre, and all the nonsense about balancing power is just that – nonsense.”

What if you make power circulate? Feedback loops are loops. A checks B, B checks C, and C checks A. Who’s sovereign, if they are all checked? It’s a stand-off where no one can neither back out, nor win, until some external interference comes into play (something, for exemple, that makes A and B cooperate with, rather than distrust and envy, each other – something like arson).

* * *

Anomaly UK seems to be way less fanatical and way more realistic about the whole absolutist thing. In general, I guess we agree on the fundamentals, and disagree on the specifics. In his first response, he begins:

“However, while dividing power is not desirable, there is no Ring of Fnargl, and power is never perfectly concentrated. A real sovereign still has to deal with forces beyond his control, most obviously those beyond his borders; the loyalty of his subjects is always a real issue. Sufficient incompetence can destroy anything.”

This is essentially my point above. Our quibbles begin with:

“The reason that division of power is undesirable is that it erodes responsibility.”

In a closed circuit as above (A checks B checks C checks A), responsibility is demanded by the previous nodes. To exercise your own power means to police the power of others. You’re not responsible to “the people”, but to the previous node (and for your own good). The design is meant to keep the whole system in place, stable. The interest of those involved is, thus, served by design. Those of outsiders are ignored, at best. This even satisfies AUK’s own criteria of “whoever has the power benefits from exercising it well and is harmed by exercising it badly” for responsible government. No second set of incentives emerges, since corporate interests are individual interests, and individuals with power are all mutually observed.

Which is not to say that an indefinitely divided power is good. The objective of constitutions is to reach cybernetic closure, which is increasingly difficult the more nodes there are. The best policy, wherever it’s possible, is secession and its formalization (through peace treaties, explicit mutual destruction assertion, etc). Wherever this is not possible, buying out and formalizing is the second best. Only when powers have come maximally concentrated within a certain bounded area need constitutions come into play, to formalize their relations. As AUK puts it: “The possibility of concentrating power sufficiently for stability is the sine qua non of independent government.” There’s no disagreeing with that.

In his next installment, AUK presents a summarizing of his previous discussion:

It is possible I could have been more concise about the prerequisites: what it really amounts to is:

• Division of power is dangerous and to be avoided
• It’s better to have less division than more
• Sometimes that isn’t possible

These three, I guess I take most issue with the first one. Division of power is inherent in power deployment, as said above, so it is as dangerous as power itself is, and as avoidable. My rendering would be: division of power, if poorly designed, won’t reach cybernetic closure and thus will degenerate power into pure force.

Of course, designing a formalized division of power must take into consideration the actual underlying distribution of power. But formalization can be made in several different ways, with different consequences. Thus, the constitution is not in fact the “actual distribution of power”, but it’s specific formalization. “Structure” is indeed a good name for the actual distribution, but identifying the structure is not the same as drawing a constitution out of it. As AUK puts it:

“A non-autocratic Structure is the the result of a peace settlement between potential or actual rivals, and a Constitution represents the terms of that peace settlement.”

The question thus is rather how should one design a constitution? The fundamental design principle here, from what I developed above on cybernetics is: close the loops. No nodes more controlling than controlled. Tyranny follows from the flaw in meeting this first principle. It is from this principle that it follows that the settlement of the constitution “will last, that those who came into the settlement with power are willing to accept it, and will be incentivised to maintain it into the future and to preserve those things that incentivise the others to maintain it into the future”.

AUK’s suggestion of internal “lines on the map” as a principle of good constitutionalism seems sensible to me. This seems to have been the fundamental guiding principle of the US Constitution, which is to date the best example of a functional constitution (in spite of its utter destruction after American Civil War – thermostats can’t stop arson). Having internal divisions that can split from the confederation as soon as possible if crap comes up, and that hold their own experiments in constitutionalism, is a good starting point.

A couple other working principles would be:

• Triangles are the best basic arrangement, since they are the simplest arrangement to produce a stable standoff among the parties;
• Bodies of transparency and deliberation *among* classes help aleviate tensions and build compromise in unpredicted cases. This is the most important lesson I take from Tocqueville’s analysis.

Which basically match AUK’s own analysis. And I certainly can’t improve on this:

“Constitutions need to resemble contracts in that they have to cover detailed interactions unambiguously, but they need to resemble peace treaties in that they need to provide for their own enforcement.”

The last problem, about amendment (or self-reference), is probably the hardest to tackle. Dynamic stability needs to be provided within the very design, in the best interest of adaptability. The super-majority criteria adopted by the US Constitution clearly wasn’t enough. Maybe separate realms of amendment, lying with each different power, and scrutinized by other power through their very action, can help. Land’s Trichotomocracy still seems to me a good overall sketch of a good constitutional order. In Land’s scheme, Ethno-Nationalists amend their security capabilities, Theonomists amend their own legislating/judging capabilities and Techno-Commercialists amend their own financing capabilities. The constitution evolves as the system develops, and changes are themselves checked and balanced. Further exploration of this mechanism is needed.

* * *

To tackle, in brief, a more concrete example, Pinapple Computer Co. should not be granted any powers by personal favor of the King, but its economic power should be recognized in the constitution, by (say) setting up a council of riches to deliberate on such things as duty-free zones. Formalizing the relation between holy law(ideology) makers and the riches would also be a good idea, so that the interference of press and law in the makings of companies are defined.

The question of legitimacy of power is also relates to such definition. As pointed above, the deployment of power needs an ideological structure behind it. The power wielded by the keepers of such ideology should be formalized within it and within the institutions it demands – much as the Catholic Church was formalized within Catholicism and within the institutions Catholicism upheld, political ones included. As we know from Moldbug, a “secular state” is shorthand for an occultation of the true state religion.

I believe both considerations made just above – a board of wealth-producers deciding over taxes and tariffs, and a legal formalization of the Cathedral and its relation with other powers – could have helped avoid the tensions that led to the Civil War. Maybe retelling the history of United States from its inception up to this day, suggesting how better formalization and other constitutional mechanisms could have help avoid such disasters as American Civil War and the New Deal is a constructive exercise in improving the neocameralist model.

neocameralism and constitutions 2

Preliminary throat clearing: I’m certainly not any specialist in Moldbug’s theories and background. I have just gone through the Open Letter and some few more texts. I’m just getting started in the Patchwork, still have to proceed to the Gentle Introduction. So I’m not pretending I know more than these guys about that. My objective in my last article was merely to elaborate on Land’s theories, which I’m more familiar with and draw (apparently selectively) on Moldbug’s cannon.

With that out of the way, the main response from both Anomaly UK and Reactionary Future was: the shareholders are sovereign (as a body), everything else is top-down delegation from them.

The meaning of sovereign here is the main question, I guess. If we follow Moldbug, it means that these men can, as a body, do whatever they want within the limits of their property, totally unchecked.

This, of course, not true. Not even great Fnargl himself can do whatever he pleases within his (now global) realm. Consequences must be taken into account (RF explicitly recognizes this, and AUK strongly suggests it). Reality rules, so power is primordially checked by it. I guess none of my critics disagree with that.

If sovereignty isn’t being able to do whatever one pleases within his realm, what is it? maybe, as RF put it, it is not being “bound by anyone, or anything but consequences”, i. e. doing whatever one pleases within his realms that is compatible with reality. Both me and Land would not disagree with such formulation.

But that, per se, doesn’t say anything about division or concentration of power. If I read my critics correctly, both of them believe that concentration works better than division, and this efficiency-in-survival criteria is their main reason to promote centralization (and not some romantic, moralistic delusion). Put differently, they believe centralization is more compatible with reality than division of power.

I also suppose I’m not wrong in assuming both of them agree that formalism is a central tenet (of not the central tenet) of civilization. With that in mind, the question arises: does the sovereign (stockholders or king) need other people to act for him to govern. if they do, his sovereignty rests on loyalty (something Moldbug arguably wants to fix with cryptographic control – although that demands that programmers are loyal as well).

Isn’t such sovereign better if they are able to recognize, promptly and formally, the powers that influence such loyalty (not the least, the press, the educational system, the formation of military, the intellectuals and religious people within his realm, etc)? And, in formally recognizing such power, is he not effectively dividing power? Is he not recognizing that such power are checks on his sovereignty? (In fact, doesn’t this reduce their sovereignty to, as Land puts it, “a strictly formal or contractual usage of ‘control’ to designate the exclusive right to free disposal or commercial alienation“?)

For instance, the estates of realm didn’t arise from nowhere, they weren’t the mere will of some enlightened relu-maker. Their formalization – as a constitution – was supposed to recognize the actual structure of power that underlay sovereignty. Once again, constitutionalism is simply this recognition and formalization of reality (and, possibly, the will to better adapt to it).

Even sovereign stockholders are better off if their power if formally checked, than if the real checks remain invisible to them. Only thus can they operate realistically on such reality and ensure loyalty is there when needed (fundamentally, constitutionalism is a cybernetic point).

So, if Moldbug in fact did not advocate for the formalization fo the division of power between stockholders, management and customers (and, as AUK points, “suppliers, neighbours, and competitors”), by his very criteria of formalism, he should have. Of course, such internal inconsistency is not what it seem from the Open Letter, where he points such formalism as the why corporations work better than governments:

Call a controller model with a single shared concept of responsibility coherent. How, with an impossibly fuzzy word like “responsibility,” can we round up a large number of intelligent individuals who share a common definition? The task seems impossible. And our whole design relies on this coherent back-end.

Actually, there’s one way to do it. We can define responsibility in financial terms. If we think of California as a profitable corporation, a capital asset whose purpose is to maximize its production of cash, we have a definition of responsibility which is not only precise and unambiguous, but indeed quantitative.

Moreover, this definition solves a second problem: how do we select the controllers? If our controllers are the parties to whom the profits are actually paid, and their voting power is proportional to the fractions they receive, they have not only a shared definition of responsibility, but an incentive to apply that definition in practice.

(…)

Think about this for a minute. Steve is responsible to his controllers, who evaluate his performance based on his stewardship of one asset: California. The value of California is the sum of the value of its shares. If one goes up or down, so does the other.

Which is worth more? California, or California infested by Jew-eating crocodiles? Which can be made to produce more revenue? The former, clearly. Jews pay taxes. Crocodile dung doesn’t. And from the perspective of either Steve or the Jews, what is the difference between crocodiles and stormtroopers? At least the former will work for free.

I’ll state it again, because it seems to be the central point of Outer (Liberal?) NRx in this regard: if the West is failing now, it is more because it has abandoned constitutionalism (and hence realism in government administration) in favor of mass politics (demotism), than because it stuck to that.

neocameralism and constitutions

so, recently I noticed a whole lotta hate for Land’s constitutionalism (surging after this came from the vast abrupt). reactionary future is not pleased with “liberal neoreaction”. anomaly UK is still not convinced either.

their contention, from what I grasped, is “sovereignty cannot be effectively divided, only distributed (exponentially)”. constitutions are bullshit, men take decisions, not algorithms (ultimately). trying to do so only generates disorder (anarchy) and parasitism. [there’s also some babbling on the “anthropological error” of individualism, but I’ll deal with that elsewhere]

obviously, not wasting their time reading such left liberal bullshit of cybernetics and spontaneous order (damn hippies!), they were interested in the morally superior works of Thomas Carlyle and DeJouvenal. only dirty leftists such as me and Mr. werewolf Land could suggest a man’s Will is not sovereign, per se.

all the arcane bullshit about the functioning of the universe and horrorism that accompanies XS’s writing are not mere musings (I mean, seriously). mythology helps us think (as this elderly French says).

“The real — free or fated — thing wears a face, as an allotted role within the world“.  remove the faces and you see the underlying processes that actually run things. Henry VI, Henry VII, Louis XV, etc are avatars, interfaces, symptoms, not causes, of material (efficient) processes. we are gene machines. computers are bit machines. machines connected to machines. machines interrupting the flows of other machines. the mouth machine and the milk machine. anus and shit.

this alone is already enough to show the whole “sovereignty conserves” thing is either misguided or misused. it’s not possible, ever, to have a man making decisions on his own, unchecked by anyone or anything else. there are faceless things hiding in reality, and they are already  machinic, algorithmic, automatic. the men involved are rather instruments in the hands (claws) of such fanged noumena than sovereign willing persons.

in such a machinic reality, power is an idea, and ideas are primordially checked by their effects. power is selected to check itself, because of its inherent economic quality: to survive, increase and improve, power needs to identify its reality with the outside. it needs to calculate its odds of survival, needs to develop an algorithm of the workings of the wolves of Gnon, before they find where it hides. intelligence optimization demands a will-to-think.

think of this as the “fundamental problem of loyalty”: “will the generals obey? will the soldiers shoot?“. from the (surely little) i know of Moldbug, neocameralism seeks to replace the old cameralist trust-demanding “loyalty to the king” with the trustless capitalist joint-stock corporation. why? because corporations work better. it survives longer, it grows and it improves on itself. it reaches cybernetic closure: no nodes more controlled than controlling. stockholders choose CEOs, thus checking them. CEOs choose marketing, checking consumers. consumers choose products, checking stockholders. corporations work because they’re checked, not in spite of it. without such checks and balances, there’s no alignment of companies and clients interests.

constitutionalism is merely a recognition of this reality. RF tells us Moldbug is obviously against constitutions:

“In reality, no sovereign can be subject to law. This is a political perpetual motion machine. Law is not law unless it is judged and enforced. And by whom? For example, if you think a supreme court with judicial review can make government subject to law, you are obviously unfamiliar with the sordid history of American constitutional jurisprudence. All your design has achieved is to make your supreme court sovereign. Indeed if the court had only one justice, a proper title for that justice would be “King.” Sorry, kid, you haven’t violated the conservation of anything.”

well, if it is so, why have stockholders at all? isn’t it “imperium in imperio”? here‘s Moldbug stating right away that sovcorps should have division of power:

“A responsible, effective government has three basic parts. One is the front end: all the people who report to Steve. Two is the middle: Steve himself. Three is the back end: the people Steve is responsible to. (…)

Call the back end the controllers. The controllers have one job: deciding whether or not Steve is managing responsibly. If not, they need to fire Steve and hire a new Steve. (Marc Andreesen, perhaps.)

This design requires a substantial number of reasonably cogent controllers, whose collective opinion is likely to be trustworthy, and who share a single concept of responsibility. (…)”

power divided not only between two, but three bodies. and not few, but a “substantial number” of controllers. so much for imperium.

why, oh why? because Moldbug is a realist. he knows that a power that does not check itself, dies:

“The CEO and the monarch owe their positions to a law which all can obey, and those who choose to obey the law are naturally a winning coalition against those who choose to break it. The dictator’s position is the result of his primacy in a pyramid of criminals. This structure is naturally unstable.”

men cannot choose at will. there is the unwritten constitution of that which functions better, and if he fails to acknowledge it, he dies an ugly death. patches in the patchwork are checked by natural selection: those that thrive, survive. power is primordially checked, by reality.

in fact, the history of the modern downfall of monarchism can be seen in this light, as a failure of absolutist kings to understand the economic nature of their power. Alexis de Tcqueville’s main thesis in his works is that the French Revolution stemmed first and foremost from the increasing centralization of power undertaken by the french monarchy. the failure to recognize and bring the power of the estates together in a balanced system is at the core of the demotic nightmare that followed.

similar points can be made about pretty much all other modern revolutions: the Glorious Revolution happened to protect the (aristocratic) parliament from being dissolved, the American Revolution happened to stop the king from not recognizing the factual economic sovereignty of the colonies, the Russian Revolution happened to show the czar that he can’t just put his brother as general without verifying if there is loyalty in the lower echelons of the army. the reverse is also true, Japanese quasi-mythical single royal lineage has always been a sham of “absolutism”, lasting mostly because of its ability to be checked. even the much heralded Chinese monarchy lasted only when the emperors were checked by palace checks that made them fulfill their duties. responsibility is difficult.

the conflation of democracy insurgence and division of power apparently happened because the kings chose to make sure the only way to check them was beheading them. a Schelling point arose in which both popular sovereignty and division of power could both be believed.  (Anomaly UK points out that the kings believed liberal demotic discourse. if only had they had someone to tell them to quit it.)

it’s important to remember as well that the Cathedral won. it consistently won over all absolutist regimes. it survived. that it is failing as of now is more a signal of its abandonment of its (very successful) doctrine of checks-and-balances than the contrary. if anyone wants to topple it, it takes – realistically – more division of power.

reality rules. and if reality selects constitutions, if they are more efficient than other options, well then, Kings are to go. let’s test it, shall we?

A Republic, If You Can Keep It

[Another piece of gold I’ve managed to save from the Void.]

by Nick Land

The interlocking achievements of Kurt Gödel, which revolutionized the rigorous understanding of logic, arithmetic, and time, are not of a nature that wins ready popular acclamation. There is nevertheless a broadly factual story about him that has attained some notable level of popularity, and it is one that connects suggestively with the core concerns of his work. At the website of the Institute for Advanced Study (where Gödel was based from 1940 until his death in 1978), Oskar Morgenstern’s recollection of the episode in question is recorded:

[Gödel] rather excitedly told me that in looking at the Constitution, to his distress, he had found some inner contradictions and that he could show how in a perfectly legal manner it would be possible for somebody to become a dictator and set up a Fascist regime never intended by those who drew up the Constitution. I told him that it was most unlikely that such events would ever occur, even assuming that he was right, which of course I doubted.

But he was persistent and so we had many talks about this particular point. I tried to persuade him that he should avoid bringing up such matters at the examination before the court in Trenton, and I also told Einstein about it: he was horrified that such an idea had occurred to Gödel, and he also told him he should not worry about these things nor discuss that matter.

Many months went by and finally the date for the examination in Trenton came. On that particular day, I picked up Gödel in my car. He sat in the back and then we went to pick up Einstein at his house on Mercer Street, and from there we drove to Trenton. While we were driving, Einstein turned around a little and said, “Now Gödel, are you really well prepared for this examination?” Of course, this remark upset Gödel tremendously, which was exactly what Einstein intended and he was greatly amused when he saw the worry on Gödel’s face.

When we came to Trenton, we were ushered into a big room, and while normally the witnesses are questioned separately from the candidate, because of Einstein’s appearance, an exception was made and all three of us were invited to sit down together, Gödel, in the center. The examiner first asked Einstein and then me whether we thought Gödel would make a good citizen. We assured him that this would certainly be the case, that he was a distinguished man, etc.

And then he turned to Gödel and said, Now, Mr. Gödel, where do you come from?

Gödel: Where I come from? Austria.

The examiner: What kind of government did you have in Austria?

Gödel: It was a republic, but the constitution was such that it finally was changed into a dictatorship.

The examiner: Oh! This is very bad. This could not happen in this country.

Gödel: Oh, yes, I can prove it.

To the great advantage of intelligence on earth, Gödel did not in the end disqualify himself from residence in the USA through this disastrously over-accurate understanding of its constitution. Evidently, despite everything that had happened by 1947, detailed attachment to the constitution had not yet become a thought-crime.

Today, emphatic attachment to the US Constitution is restricted to the decent i.e. lunatic fringe of the Outer Party, and even crankier outliers. Hardcore libertarians tend to dismiss it as a distraction, if not a malign incarnation of statist degeneracy (when compared to the less Leviathan-compatible Articles of Confederation). Reactionary realists of the Moldbug school (in all their vast multitudes) are at least as dismissive, seeing it as little more than a fetish object and evasion of the timeless practical question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? If constitutions are realistically indefensible, both in principle and as a matter of brutally demonstrated historical fact, what significance could they have to any cold-eyed analysis of power?

Since the overwhelmingly bulk of present USG activity is transparently unconstitutional, the skeptical case largely makes itself. Presidents mobilize congressional support to appoint Supreme Court justices whose principal qualification for office is willingness to conspire in the subversion of the constitution, to the deafening applause of a pork-ravening electorate and their intermediary lobbies. How could that plausibly be resisted? Perhaps that was Gödel’s point.

In fact, no one really knows what Gödel’s point was. Jeffrey Kegler, who has examined the topic carefully, leaves it open. “Apparently, the ‘inconsistency’ noted by Gödel is simply that the Constitution provides for its own amendment,” suggests a “gravely disappointed” Mark Dominus, who “had been hoping for something brilliant and subtle that only Gödel would have noticed.” Dominus draws this tentative conclusion from Peter Suber’s Paradox of Self-Amendment, where it is stated more boldly:

Kurt Gödel the Austrian logician understood that an omnipotent AC contained the risk of tyranny. Gödel studied the U.S. constitution in preparation for his oral citizenship examination in 1948. He noticed that the AC had procedural limitations but no substantive limitations; hence it could be used to overturn the democratic institutions described in the rest of the constitution.

Suber adds: “A desire to limit the amending power, or to make it more difficult — not the same thing — shows a distrust for democracy or a denial that in general the people deserve what they get.” (We’ll get back to that later.)

This is conceptually persuasive, because it harmonizes Gödel’s constitutional concerns with his central intellectual pre-occupation: the emergence of inconsistencies within self-referential formal systems. The Amending Clause (Article V, section 1) is the occasion for the constitution to talk about itself, and thus to encounter problems rigorously comparable to those familiar from Gödel’s incompleteness theorems in mathematical logic. Despite the neatness of this ‘solution’, however, there is no solid evidence to support it. Furthermore, self-referential structures can be identified at numerous other points. For instance, is not the authority of the Supreme Court respecting constitutional interpretation a similar point of reflexivity, with unlimited potential for circularity and paradox? This insight, highly-regarded among the neo-reactionaries, recognizes that the constitution allows – in principle – for a sufficiently corrupted Supreme Court to ‘interpret’ its way to absolute power (in conformity with a constitution that has sublimed into pure ‘life’). Insofar as a constitution allows for its own processing, it must – ultimately — allow anything.

Moldbug asks us to accelerate through this formal tangle, cutting the Gordian knot. “Sovereignty is conserved,” he repeats, insistently, so the occasions when power undertakes to bind itself are essentially risible. Of course the final custodian of the constitution is a constitutionally unrestrained dictator. That’s simple Schmittian sanity.

With all due contempt for argumentum ad hominem, it can probably still be agreed that Gödel was not a fool, so that his excited identification of a localized flaw in the US Constitution merits consideration as just that (rather than an excuse to bin the entire problematic). The formal resonances between his topically disparate arguments provide a further incentive to slow down.

Whether in number theory, or space-time cosmology, Gödel’s method was to advance the formalization of the system under consideration and then test it to destruction upon the ‘strange loops’ it generated (paradoxes of self-reference and time-travel). In each case, the system was shown to permit cases that it could not consistently absorb, opening it to an interminable process of revision, or technical improvement. It thus defined dynamic intelligence, or the logic of evolutionary imperfection, with an adequacy that was both sufficient and necessarily inconclusive. What it did not do was trash the very possibility of arithmetic, mathematical logic, or cosmic history — except insofar as these were falsely identified with idols of finality or closure.

On the slender evidence available, Gödel’s ‘reading’ of the US Constitution was strictly analogous. Far from excusing the abandonment of constitutionalism, it identified constitutional design as the only intellectually serious response to the problem of politics (i.e. untrammeled power). It is a subtle logical necessity that constitutions, like any formal systems of comparable complexity, cannot be perfected or consistently completed. In other words, as Benjamin Franklyn fully recognized, any republic is precarious. Nothing necessarily follows from this, but a number of things might.

Most abruptly, one might contemplate the sickly child with sadness, before abandoning it on the hillside for the wolves. Almost every interesting voice on the right seems to be heading this way. Constitutions are a grim joke.

Alternatively, constitutionalism could be elevated to a new level of cultural dignity, in keeping with its status as the sole model of republican government, or truly logical politics. This would require, first of all, that the necessity for constitutional modification was recognized only when such modification made the constitution stronger, in purely formal, or systemic terms. In the US case, the first indication of such an approach would be an amendment of Article Five itself, in order to specify that constitutional amendments are tolerated only when they satisfy criteria of formal improvement, legitimated in exact, mathematical terms, in accordance with standards of proof no different than those applicable to absolutely uncontroversial arguments (theorems). Constitutional design would be subsumed within applied mathematics as a subsection of nonlinear control theory.

Under these (unlikely) circumstances, the purpose of the constitution is to sustain itself, and thus the Republic. As a mathematical object, the constitution is maximally simple, consistent, necessarily incomplete, and interpretable as a model of natural law. Political authority is allocated solely to serve the constitution. There are no authorities which are not overseen, within nonlinear structures. Constitutional language is formally constructed to eliminate all ambiguity and to be processed algorithmically. Democratic elements, along with official discretion, and legal judgment, is incorporated reluctantly, minimized in principle, and gradually eliminated through incremental formal improvement. Argument defers to mathematical expertise. Politics is a disease that the constitution is designed to cure.

Extreme skepticism is to be anticipated not only from the Moldbuggian royalists, but from all of those educated by Public Choice theory to analyze ‘politics without romance’. How could defending the constitution become an absolute, categorical or unconditional imperative, when the only feasible defenders are people, guided by multiple incentives, few of which align neatly with objective constitutional order? Yet, how is this different from the question of mathematical or natural scientific progress? Are not mathematicians equally people, with appetites, egos, sex-driven status motivations, and deeply defective capabilities for realistic introspection? How does maths advance? (No one can seriously deny that it does.) The answer surely lies in its autonomous or impersonal criteria of excellence, combined with pluralistic institutions that facilitate Darwinian convergence. The Gödelian equivalence between mathematical logic and constitutional government indicates that such principles and mechanisms are absent from the public domain only due to defective (democratic-bureaucratic) design.

When it comes to deep realism, and to guns, is there any reason to think the military is resistant by nature to constitutional subordination? Between the sublime office of Commander in Chief, and the mere man, is it not obvious that authority should tend to gravitate to the former? It might be argued that civilization is nothing else, that is to say: the tendency of personal authority to decline towards zero. Ape-men will reject this of course. It’s what they do.

Between democracy, monarchy, anarchy, or republican government, the arguments will not end soon. They are truly ancient, and illustrated in the Odyssey, by the strategy of binding oneself against the call of the Sirens. Can Odysseus bind himself? Only republicans defend the attempt, as Gödel did. All of the others let the Sirens win. Perhaps they will.

Quibbles with Moldbug

[This post was retrieved from the InternetArchive website snapshot of That’s Magazine Shangai (now unfortunately offline). Uploading here for the preservation of a great piece.]

by Nick Land

To be a reactionary, minimally speaking, requires no more than a recognition that things are going to hell. As the source of decay is traced ever further back, and attributed to ever more deeply-rooted – and securely mainstream — sociopolitical assumptions, the reactionary attitude becomes increasingly extreme. If innovative elements are introduced into either the diagnosis or the proposed remedy, a neo-reactionary mentality is born.

As the United States, along with the world that it has built, careers into calamity, neo-reactionary extremism is embarrassingly close to becoming a vogue. If evidence is needed, consider the Vacate Movement, a rapidly growing dissident faction within the 0.0000001%. This is a development that would have been scarcely imaginable, were it not for the painstakingly crafted, yet rhetorically effervescent provocations of Mencius Moldbug.

From Moldbug, immoderate neo-reaction has learnt many essential and startling facts about the genealogy and tendency of history’s central affliction, newly baptized the Cathedral. It has been liberated from the mesmerism of ‘democratic universalism’ – or evangelical ultra-puritanism – and trained back towards honest (and thus forbidden) books. It has re-learnt class analysis, of unprecedented explanatory power. Much else could have been added, before arriving at our destination: the schematic outline for a ‘neocameral’ alternative to the manifestly perishing global political order. (On a trivial etiquette matter: Moldbug politely asks to be addressed as ‘Mencius’ — comparable requests by Plato Jiggabug and Siddhartha Moldbucket have been evaded too.)

Moldbug scrupulously distances his proposals from any hint of revolutionary agitation, or even the mildest varieties of civil disobedience. Neocameralism is not designed to antagonize, but rather to restore order to social bodies that have squandered it, by drafting a framework compatible with the long-lost art of effective government. (‘Long-lost’, that is, to the West – the Singapore example, among those of other city states and special economic zones, is never far removed.) Neocameralism would not overthrow anything, but rather arise amongst ruins. It is a solution awaiting the terminal configuration of a problem.

The neocameral program proceeds roughly as follows:

Phase-1: Constructively disciplined lamentation

Phase-2: Civilization collapses

Phase-3: Re-boot to a modernized form of absolute monarchy, in which citizens are comprehensively stripped of all historically-accumulated political rights

Despite its obvious attractions to partisans of liberty, this program is not without its dubious features, a few of which can be touched upon here whilst rehearsing the Moldbug case for Neocameral government in slightly greater detail. Stated succinctly and preliminarily, our reservations drift into focus when that guy on a white horse appears. Where exactly does he come from?

To answer ‘Carlyle’ would be easy, and not exactly inaccurate, but it would also miss the structural coherence of the issue. Moldbug refuses to call his neocameral dictator a ‘national CEO’ (which he is), preferring to describe him as a ‘monarch’ (which – as a non-dynastic executive appointee — he isn’t), for reasons both stylistic and substantial. Stylistically, royalism is a provocation, and a dramatization of reactionary allegiance. Substantially, it foregrounds the question of sovereignty.

Moldbug’s political philosophy is founded upon a revision to the conception of property, sufficient to support the assertion that sovereign power is properly understood as the owner of a country. It is only at this level of political organization that real property rights – i.e. protections – are sustained.

Property is any stable structure of monopoly control. You own something if you alone control it. Your control is stable if no one else will take it away from you. This control may be assured by your own powers of violence, or it may be delegated by a higher power. If the former, it is secondary property. If the latter, it is primary or sovereign property.

The sovereign power (sovereign corporation, or ‘sovcorp’), alone, is able to ensure its own property rights. Its might and rights are absolutely identical, and from this primary identity subordinate rights (to ‘secondary property’) cascade down through the social hierarchy. Neocameralism is nothing but the systematic, institutional recognition of this reality. (Whether it is, in fact, a ‘reality’ is a question we shall soon proceed to.)

Perhaps surprisingly, Moldbug’s conclusions can be presented in terms that recovering libertarians have found appealing:

Neocameralism is the idea that a sovereign state or primary corporation is not organizationally distinct from a secondary or private corporation. Thus we can achieve good management, and thus libertarian government, by converting sovcorps to the same management design that works well in today’s private sector – the joint-stock corporation.

One way to approach neocameralism is to see it as a refinement of royalism, an ancient system in which the sovcorp is a sort of family business. Under neocameralism, the biological quirks of royalism are eliminated and the State “goes public,” hiring the best executives regardless of their bloodline or even nationality.

Or you can just see neocameralism as part of the usual capitalist pattern in which services are optimized by aligning the interests of the service provider and the service consumer. If this works for groceries, why shouldn’t it work for government? I have a hard time in accepting the possibility that democratic constitutionalism would generate either lower prices or better produce at Safeway …

In order to take a step back from this vision, towards its foundations, it is useful to scrutinize its building blocks. When Moldbug defines property as “any stable structure of monopoly control” what is really meant by ‘control’? It might seem simple enough. To control something is to use, or make use of it — to put it to work, such that a desired outcome is in fact achieved. ‘Property’ would be glossed as exclusive right of use, or instrumental utilization, conceived with sufficient breadth to encompass consumption, and perhaps (we will come to this), donation or exchange.

Complications quickly arise. ‘Control’ in this case would involve technical competence, or the ability to make something work. If control requires that one can use something effectively, then it demands compliance with natural fact (through techno-scientific understanding and practical skills). Even consumption is a type of use. Is this historical variable – vastly distant from intuitive notions of sovereignty – actually suited to a definition of property?

It might be realistic to conceive property through control, and control through technical competence, but it would be hard to defend as an advance in formalism. Since this problem thoroughly infuses the topic of ‘might’, or operational sovereignty, it is also difficult to isolate, or parenthesize. Moldbug’s frequent, enthusiastic digressions into the practicalities of crypto-locked military apparatuses attest strongly to this. The impression begins to emerge that the very possibility of sovereign property is bound to an irreducibly fuzzy, historically dynamic, and empirically intricate investigation into the micro-mechanics of power, dissolving into an acid fog of Clauswitzean ‘friction’ (or ineliminable unpredictability).

More promising, by far – for the purposes of tractable argument — is a strictly formal or contractual usage of ‘control’ to designate the exclusive right to free disposal or commercial alienation. Defined this way, ownership is a legal category, co-original with the idea of contract, referring to those things which one has the right to trade (based on natural law). Property is essentially marketable. It cannot exist unless it can be alienated through negotiation. A prince who cannot trade away his territory does not ‘own’ it in any sense that matters.

Moldbug seems to acknowledge this, in at least three ways. Firstly, his formalization of sovereign power, through conversion into sovereign stock, commercializes it. Within the neocameral regime, power takes the form of revenue-yielding property, available for free disposal by those who wield it. That is the sole basis for the corporate analogy. If sovereign stock were not freely disposable, its ‘owners’ would be mere stewards, subject to obligations, non-alienable political responsibilities, or administrative duties that demonstrate with absolute clarity the subordination to a higher sovereignty. (That is, broadly speaking, the current situation, and inoffensively conventional political theory.)

Secondly, the neocameral state exists within a patchwork, or system of interactions, through which they compete for population, and in which peaceful (or commercial) redistributions — including takeovers and break-ups — are facilitated. Unless sovereign stock can be traded within the patchwork, it is not property at all. This in turn indicates that ‘internal’ positive legislation, as dictated by the domestic ‘sovereign’, is embedded within a far more expansive normative system, and the definition of ‘property’ cannot be exhausted by its local determination within the neocameral micro-polis. As Moldbug repeatedly notes, an introverted despotism that violated broader patchwork norms – such as those governing free exit — could be reliably expected to suffer a collapse of sovereign stock value (which implies that the substance of sovereign stock is systemically, rather than locally, determined). If the entire neocameral state is disciplined through the patchwork, how real can its local sovereignty be? This systemic disciplining or subversion of local sovereignty, it should be noted, is the sole attraction of the neocameral schema to supporters of dynamic geography (who want nothing more than for the national government to become the patchwork system’s bitch).

Thirdly (and relatedly), neocameralism is floated as a model for experimental government, driven cybernetically towards effectiveness by the same types of feedback mechanisms that control ‘secondary’ corporations. In particular, population traffic between neocameral states is conceived as a fundamental regulator, continuously measuring the functionality of government, and correcting it in the direction of attractiveness. The incentive structure of the neocameral regime – and thus its claim to practical rationality — rests entirely upon this. Once again, however, it is evidently the radical limitation of local sovereignty, rather than its unconstrained expression, which promises to make such governments work. Free exit – to take the single most important instance — is a rule imposed at a higher level than the national sovereign, operating as a natural law of the entire patchwork. Without free exit, a neocameral state is no more than a parochial despotism. The absolute sovereign of the state must choose to comply with a rule he did not legislate … something is coming unstuck here (it’s time to send that white horse to the biodiesel tanks).

Neocameralism necessarily commercializes sovereignty, and in doing so it accommodates power to natural law. Sovereign stock (‘primary property’) and ‘secondary property’ become commercially inter-changeable, dissolving the original distinction, whilst local sovereignty is rendered compliant with the wider commercial order, and thus becomes a form of constrained ‘secondary sovereignty’ relative to the primary or absolute sovereignty of the system itself. Final authority bleeds out into the catallactic ensemble, the agora, or commercium, where what can really happen is decided by natural law. It is this to which sovereign stockholders, if they are to be effective, and to prosper, must defer.

The fundamental point, and the reason why the pretender on the white horse is so misleading, is that sovereignty cannot, in principle, inhere in a particular social agent – whether individual, or group. This is best demonstrated in reference to the concept of natural law (which James Donald outlines with unsurpassed brilliance). When properly understood, or articulated, natural law cannot possibly be violated. Putting your hand into a fire, and being burnt, does not defy the natural law that temperatures beyond a certain range cause tissue damage and pain. Similarly, suppressing private property, and producing economic cataclysm, does not defy the natural law that human economic behavior is sensitive to incentives.

Positive law, as created by legislators, takes the form: do (or don’t do) this. Violations will be punished.

Natural law, as discovered by any rational being, takes the form: do what thou wilt and accept the consequences. Rewards and punishments are intrinsic to it. It cannot be defied, but only misunderstood. It is therefore absolutely sovereign (Deus sive Natura). Like any other being, governments, however powerful, can only comply with it, either through intelligent adaptation and flourishing, or through ignorance, incompetence, degeneration, and death. To God-or-Nature it matters not at all. Natural law is indistinguishable from the true sovereign power which really decides what can work, and what doesn’t, which can then – ‘secondarily’ — be learnt by rational beings, or not.

Moldbug knows this – really. He demonstrates it – to take just one highly informative example — through his insistence that a neocameral state would tend to tax at the Laffer optimum. That is to say, such a state would prove its effectiveness by maximizing the return on sovereign property in compliance with reality. It does not legislate the Laffer curve, or choose for it to exist, but instead recognizes that it has been discovered, and with it an aspect of natural law. Anything less, or other, would be inconsistent with its legitimacy as a competent protector of property. To survive, prosper, and even pretend to sovereignty, it can do nothing else. Its power is delegated by commercium.

It is surely no coincidence that Cnut the Great has been described by Norman Cantor as “the most effective king in Anglo-Saxon history.” As Wikipedia relates his story:

His accession to the Danish throne in 1018 brought the crowns of England and Denmark together. Cnut held this power-base together by uniting Danes and Englishmen under cultural bonds of wealth and custom, rather than sheer brutality.

Most importantly:

Henry of Huntingdon, the 12th-century chronicler, tells how Cnut set his throne by the sea shore and commanded the tide to halt and not wet his feet and robes. Yet “continuing to rise as usual [the tide] dashed over his feet and legs without respect to his royal person. Then the king leapt backwards, saying: ‘Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.’

paleo agorism

what has paleo-agorism to offer to the lower classes? death. swift, merciful death.

the hunter gatherer band is a democracy of nobles, of fiercely selected men and women standing in actual, effective equality and freedom.

the first and easiest critique of neoreaction is simply “you haven’t gone far enough”. if it’s true as Land says, that reaction is never regressive enough and modernity is never advanced enough, what you get, at the point where circuit closes, at doom, is nomad cyborgs. a hunter-gatherer band formed by the most fiercely selected elements of technology.

of course, the Right can never admit that there was anything of value before civilization, because civilization is arguably the very moment the possibility of a Right was made available. barbaric and nomad peoples, with few exceptions, are not hierarchical. civilization is the point where the efficiency of anti-hierarchy (the only possible equality) went far enough for the sheer amount of humans in certain places to put selective pressure on groups that could organize settled production (moving became too expensive). war, kingdoms and domination followed suit. at heart, humans are leftist because they are naturally nomads. and leftism leads to the need of rightism.

a machinery of left-right (savage nomads vs civilized settlers) is a intelligence pump. leftist dominant periods see thriving peoples multiplying courses of actions (mutation), rightist dominant periods see selective pressures piling up on populations and the weeding out of the weakest (selection) (see Alexander’s post for more details). after every new turn, intelligence builds itself through global entropy and local extropy production.

looking forward to the future, to how this machinery plays out in the digital age, we can see two fundamental trends: Völkerwanderung and geopolitical fragmentation. as developed countries stability and governance suffers from migration from undeveloped nations (mutation), new and smaller political units compete for resources and market access, diverging in their policies of reception and integration (selection). in the third world, as neopopulist and socialist political projects fail, the following redesign of institutions may provide safer heavens for fleeing populations of Europe and North America. it might be a long shot indeed, but in a 100 years more or less, we may see a very different international scenery, with smaller political units, some thriving some dying, side by side. those thriving are certainly going to have a much more clear understanding of political reality than we do, and their systems are going to be much more pragmatic and realistic then ours.

most importantly, territorial based governance is going to be much less important in most places than it is today. migration between political units and the creation of exit options are likely to push for overlays of distributed governance, with “bitnations” spread all over the world, in close relationship with local governments and giving access to specific locations.

Paleo-agorism draws on this scenario: cyber-nomads hunting for experiences and shopping for societies in a free market of governments. distributed bands variously organized, living inside selection units and flowing as pressures change.

progressive dreamland

By 2050, the County Palatine of Kenya is living a golden age – after some serious trouble during the Upheaval and subsequent transitions. Prince Barack Obama II has reigned fairly and equally for the last 30 years, leading the region to be one of the most important centers of commerce and science of the world (which isn’t hard since the world is now, except for a few very impressive regions, mostly rubble).

Government is democratic – well, not democratic by 20th century or even 19th century standards, but by the “new democratic rule” with which Obama inspired many noble minds. The state is organized around a federated electoral board of public universities, whose very diverse body of Deans elects the Prince – for life. At the Prince’s death or resignation, the Supreme Council gathers to deliberate who among them is to be the new Prince. Malia Obama is likely to win the nomination at her father’s death, becoming the first Princess of Kenya.

The Deans themselves are elected by the faculty within their universities; which are the more direct administrators of their territories. There are over 50 territories within the Palatinate, each one with their own public universities. These universities are the center for public policy in each territory. Entrance is free and universal to all, provided a certain minimum score obtained in the Scholastic Aptitude Test, which varies from one university to another.

The public administration is comprised of highly specialized scholars, with proven aptitude, expertise and experience in their own fields, and is subjected to peer review and based on good and sound science. The Citizen Constitution of the Palatinate states clearly that “the official doctrine guiding and inspiring the acts of the State is the belief in unlimited progress for all the human race and associate animals”.

The main source of revenue is a progressive single tax on land and the revenues of the much publicized national health systems, aptly named Obamacare™, which charges an individual user fee, half of which goes to the also very publicized universal basic income, called the “Georgine” by locals. The Prince’s family lives off Obamacare’s other half revenue, while the Deans and other public functionaries extract the land tax locally as funds to the universities, each one of which choose how to best allocate it.

Law is progressive. Individual liberties are sacred, and so all kinds of marriage contracts and commerce are allowed. Prostitution and drug sales are major business in the country. Safe spaces are a constitutional guarantee. Enforcement is provided by specialized divisions within universities, relying mostly on “Citizen Drones” to remove offenders. White men are not allowed to for Safe Spaces and are closely watched to avoid uncooperative behavior. Hate speech surveillance is considered a matter of personal honor, and publishable with ostracism, especially by Deans and other university staff.  Left-wing radicals are sent to the barbaric borders of the realm, under supervision of radical-leaning professors, in order to try and develop their own utopias. If they work, eventually they are incorporated into the realm of the Palatinate as an independent territory. Otherwise, radicals may join their own universities once again, or emigrate if they prefer. Criminals are treated within universities by specialists in psychology, criminology and sociology, in order to evaluate the trends and create specific public policy towards diminishing crime. They are kept in VR training and other ethically approved treatment, such as testosterone reduction, until considered safe to come to society.

Guns are strictly banned and produced solely by the government in association with high-tech enterprises. Both internal police and external defense are operated by specialist war-game strategists and robotic engineers which operate and guide armies of citizen drones, both around the border and within territories. Those are directly subordinate to the Prince. Justice is operated by a court of specialist judges with the aid of AI helpers which search the vast jurisprudence and doctrine, now mostly formalized as deductions from Constitutional Axioms.

External relations are now generally great, in spite of initial hard feelings. The Trike is the main commercial and diplomatic partner, reactionary radicals being regularly traded for progressive talents and most high-tech enterprises operating in both countries. The Confucian Republic and its surrogate states around the Palatinate are less than happy with this arrangement, which fundamentally blocks many commercial routes around East Africa, but respectful relations have been kept in the last years, mostly because of intermediation by the Trike.

Population is highly diverse, having been drawn from high-IQ graduates and undergraduates from all over the world during the Upheaval. Original African populations have been integrated, mostly through the explosive commercial and scientific boom of the late 2030’s, and now comprise the “neo-bourgeoisie” of the country. Fertility is usually around 2 children, one naturally born and another usually genetically engineered and born within universities through in-vitro fertilization. Non-university people are encouraged to settle in abandoned lands next to the borders.

The prospects are good in the foreseeable future, although the death of Prince Obama might bring complications, since the Deans have been lately aligned around two camps. Radical-leaning ones wish for a return of popular elections, less radical ones argue popular elections are unnecessary given the Prince is a mere accessory figure. If the radical party gets its way, and nominate their preferred Dean for Prince, external relations with the Trike and internal policy might be seriously affected. It doesn’t seem likely for the moment, since most radical-leaning professors have been killed in a barbaric attack to the borders last year.