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.

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.

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.’

to the left #2

another roundup of (neo)reactionry usefulness to the Left.

two themes appeared rather consistently: the antinomy, usually in the form of (imo correct) left/right divides; and passivism (rs), which is now offered as the main strategy for reactionaries. I’ll deal with those first, then proceed to some criticism of other assorted topics. finally, i’ll shed the gems that the Right offered for our learning. persevere, there’s a great surprise at the end. indeed.

* * * * *

Antinomy

Adam Wallace:

The upright is traditionally seen as represented by the vertical “I” — the erect totem of force; that which moves, as opposed to the waters which flow, which are moved, represented by the horizontal “–“: there is a dichotomy here, as with all things. The masculine mover, the feminine moved, as per Hermetic and perennial teaching; all reality is marked by twos, by opposites, by yin and yang, up and down, and so on and so forth.

which is indeed a very able description of it. and goes on to point the interdependence of the two modern positive feedback loops, capital and the Left:

What really strikes me — and what I think I originally understood at an intuitive level — is the sheer horizontality of the modern world. The facet which seeks to bring all existence down to the lowest level; to destroy the notion of greatness, the notion of beauty, the notion of — at its core — what distinguishes hierarchy between one thing and another and the ontological level. There is a levelling, mechanised process which marks modernity.

“Mechanised” is an interesting word because it implies several things. It implies a robust and continual — thoughtless — process, something which occurs despite anything external. It implies a standardisation, a creation of the one-size-fits-all genre. It is the Leviathan; the monolithic superstructure which destroys all in its wake and path simply because it can — in fact it could do nothing else. It implies a mindlessness, a zombie-like quality of thoughtless, repeated action just for its own sake. Not the creation of anything, only the changing of something external upon which is then inflicted sheer and pure mathematics. A sort of unnatural asymmetry which churns-out the same thing again and again and again. This perfectly describes our inverted, horizontal age.

in fact, there is certainly creation (in the form of production, instead of reproduction) going on in our “inverted, horizontal age”, but it certainly ain’t monkey business. i would also substitute Cthulhu for Leviathan, as the monster “which destroys all in its wake and path simply because it can”. Leviathan was simply a controller, not a bloody murderer. we’re on the same page about the rest.

Giovanni Donnato:

Throughout history, groups have settled on something that works for the time period and then try to perpetuate it ad nauseum across milennia. Talmudic Judaism was a brilliant way to coordinate a particular Semite tribe over 2000 years ago. Islam turned out to be the right solution for quarreling Arab city states about 1300 years ago. But one of the things we immediately notice is that all these systems buy a professional suite of anti-virus software to prevent change to that successful formula, even if it’s a thousand years later.
Sadly, social technologies tend to stagnate because they only ascend to apotheosis in the first place because they have serious protection against change.
The challenge before us then is how to design a society to be both resilient and highly adaptable to new stressors, so that when the next big asteroid hits, we aren’t among the dinosaurs.

how, you ask? well, it’s understandable why a neoreactionary would be reluctant to see it, but societies also have, built in themselves, a self-improvement software. which is a little chaotic, of course. it’s called “Revolution” and implemented by the outcasts of such societies (criminals, traitors, madmen). the Left, in Western modernity, was meant to be such a thing (but shit happened). things adapt through rupture (mutation) and rearrangement (selection), Left and Right.

Nick B. Steves:

Telling everyone to “Just Go Rogue” may make for some great storytelling (or TV ads), but it is a recipe… well… for many of the disorders that are growing in Western societies, not least social isolation, hedonism, and despair. It is a recipe, potentially, for civilizational disaster. Most rogues are bad people. Most people are not equipped, materially or psychologically, to go it alone. Most people benefit from going along to get along. Because we’re humans. Human culture, with its constitutive enforced norms, is an adaptation that should not be lightly messed with.

rogues vs. cohesionists is a proxy as good as any to Left vs Right. and indeed, society cannot function without both. “civilizational disaster” was and is needed to yield yet another (better adapted) civilization. no West without the Fall of Rome, etc.

* * * * *

Passivism

On the whole Passivism thing, it seems pretty clear the reactionaries are awakening the Right to the most expedient way they can produce what they want (civilization, order, and all those manly things). It’s good and I hope this can make the Left a little more aware that running governments are not quite the best way of fighting these guys when they get their shit together. Mark Yuray spits it out:

Are Ivy League millennials really the worthiest rulers? Not by some theoretical historical standard, but if nobody has replaced them yet, then yes, they are. That is not an indictment of passivism or Moldbug’s theories. It is an indictment of our civilization. You must become worthier than our current rulers. That does not just mean personally being healthier and more virtuous than they, it means, as a group, being more capable of good government – more capable of providing order, justice, law, virtue, truth, and glory. (…) If you can provide more order, justice, law, virtue, truth, and glory than the competition, you will eventually win.

as he also states, Activism is the thing of the Left. but Google defined Acitivism (“the policy or action of using vigorous campaigning to bring about political or social change“) is way too watered down, for obvious, governmental purposes. the old Left thing could be better stated as “the action of using violent subversion to bring about social rupture“. but we’ve been to busy ruling the world to actually back up subversion consistently. subversion is not healthy for people in government. Yuray even hints at it:

What happens to a rightist [when he attempts activism]? They get beaten, arrested, jailed, imprisoned, exiled, killed—and then? They are memory-wiped from everything but horror stories. This is not even an anomalous system, this is the very nature and purpose of the state. It’s just too bad that leftists got hold of it. (my emphasis)

Towards the end of the essay, Yuray tells the Right where to look for cohesion and action: cabals. the Left has to look to the exact opposite: radical feminist organization, ELZN and narcotraffic (to the extent that this last one hasn’t become itself a cabal). criminals, traitors and madmen: if the Left ain’t those, it ain’t nothing.

A little more upset, Reactionary Future gives us also some good hints (in the middle of an otherwise rage-filled jumbled rant):

The debate on Passivism is largely pointless because next to no-one has grasped the underlying premises that inform the concept. The central point is that the left is mere anarchy; indiscriminate anarchy which has no central brain. (my emphasis)

which makes the anarchist and libertarian left the only consistent leftists. or something.

* * * * *

Critiques

Jim’s solutions to housing, health and education look pretty shitty, here are better ones:

housing , health, and education. in short, self-management and localism.

of course, it all can be criticized on the basis of “this is no feasible”, but then again, Jim’s solutions aren’t either.

* * * * *

Kristor (and supposedly Moldbug, though i’m not the one saying it) says:

Market perfection requires internalization of all externalities

yep, that’s also the whole Carsonian thing, but

and enclosure of all commons (these are two different ways of saying the same thing)

wrong.

people with property can join it in a commons, and thence internalize costs as an organization. either that or “market perfection” is the abolition of join-stock firms. which is of course absurd.

The last commons to be enclosed is the state. It must be owned, or all its operations will tend to social vitiation.

where in hell did he get the idea that the state is a commons? the operators bear no part in the investment. the modern state in special – and states as such in general – are merely machines to externalize the costs of an organization through coercion. wanna build an army and hunt your enemies down? levy taxes. world domination? taxes. so on and so forth.

the state doesn’t need owning. owning would simply obliterate its existence.

* * * * *

the Christian refusal of animality in this piece is probably the best picture lately of what the Left is meant to oppose:

Isn’t it just part of a liberal democracy to tolerate difference and to make allowances for some, even if you find them obnoxious? “Well, a society that tolerates everything is rather bad. Shouting, screaming, and intimidation? We are prepared to tolerate public vomiting, but if you use the term ‘actress’, you are a sexist. A very well-educated lady told me public vomiting is all right: ‘They can clear it up.’ This is how the elite now thinks. They are so anxious not to seem narrow-minded or bigoted, or of being ‘judgmental’. How did that word become a term of abuse?”

when we found out civilization takes too much prohibition to work, and got pissed at it. we’re mammals, for fuck’s sake.

* * * * *

Dave Hoffman compares the Left to a dying star:

I believe what we’re seeing now with the left is analogous to a dying star. More groups enter the left, it gains further power, until the day when it finally becomes unstable and collapses in on itself, though not through gravity, but from infighting.

surely, but it takes a hell of a time for a star in the main sequence to proceed to a red giant, and then some more gargantuan time for it to explode into a white dwarf burning slowly. if they ever do: critical mass having been achieved in massive big stars, they collapse into black holes. and gnon knows how big and everlasting are black holes.

so, get your analogies right. if it’s true, as Hoffman says, that “[t]he primary result would be open conflict within the left, and because the left thrives on conflict, it will be like an ouroboros feasting upon itself“, what happens is not that the house falls, but either that it grows indefinitely until it explodes into millions of other bodies (not a bad outcome in this blog’s opinion), or it reaches critical mass, so that no ideology that comes close enough will ever be able to *get out* of the Left (a little worse outcome).

in any case, the current state of the Left is to be seen as prosperous conflict-breeding after too long a time of ideological consistency.

* * * * *

Learning from the Right

Charles Tallis, at American Renaissance, presents some ironies of universalism:

Ironically, universalism is far from universal. Only whites believe in it. Every other racial group considers itself unique and puts its own interests first. A Han Chinese who proclaimed the unity of all mankind would be thought insane by other Chinese.

Another irony of universalism is that the whites who believe it most passionately are, subconsciously, thoroughgoing “racists.” They insist that all non-whites are inherently like them and need only a little assistance in order to take part in the highest expression of universalism, which is the Western Civilization of whites. The idea that everyone is the same means that anyone can become like us. Universalism does not mean whites becoming Saudi Arabian or Cambodian or Haitian. It means Muslims or Buddhists or voodoo priests becoming Americans or Frenchmen.

from this point of view, universalism has to be abandoned by the left (the post-structuralists have done some pretty good job at this), at least partially and in some contexts (such as strengthening other societies over Western civilization). but here’s why it has its uses for the objectives of the Left:

Of course, this transformation does not come easily, so universalists must lower white or Western standards in order to accommodate other groups. The entire society degenerates as academic and employment criteria are relaxed to accommodate “underrepresented” groups. (…) The dangers of universalism are sharpened by mobility and by numbers. (…) Non-whites are pouring into once-white countries. The former colonizers have convinced themselves that non-whites are the same as whites, have the same universalist perspective, and will treat whites with universalist benevolence.

* * * * *

esoterictrad bring us a neat exemple of the madness of the left that governs and are in high stands in life:

Tech workers are workers, no matter how much money they make. The investors are what’s wrong in this city,” said 24-year-old Tom Sliwowski, one of the Bay Area Movement For Bernie organizers and a PhD student at Berkeley. “Tech workers are the face of gentrification, but they’re not the cause.

No of course they can’t be the cause, you see this person wishes to align with the rest of the social justice movement. They aren’t the problem, no matter the blacks and Hispanics they displace despise them. They must be on the right side because those dreams haven’t come true.

1) Deleuze was damn right about capitalism and schizophrenia
2) “White people are odd”

* * * * *

Free Northerner points to how activism just went down the hole with “raising awareness” tatics:

The first, is that hollow signalling has combined with activism to become something called “raising awareness“. Raising awareness took hold a while back, but it was usually in support of something: a benefits concert, a charity run, a food drive, etc. The activism used to always be in addition to or in support of some form of honest signalling that at least tried to actually accomplish something, but somewhere along the line, when combined with social media, raising awareness became its own independent form of activism. Now raising awareness has infected everywhere and is often used instead of doing anything.

not only this, but the Left has been tamed to the point of using signalling as weapons (instead of using weapons proper as signalling):

Finally, and relatedly, hollow signalling is being weaponized. Rather than being a social lubricant for your social circles, it is becoming politicized. There have always been holiness spirals, but those spirals usually required some action or effort and happened over periods constrained by time and distance. Now spirals are immediate and require no effort. Activists are using this to weaponize signalling, forcing people signal properly, often through the threat of job loss..

“you’ll lose your job if you’re not a leftist” would make about as much sense to the likes of Proudhon as “you’ll be arrested for defending the King”.

* * * * *

nydwracu charges:

Progressives today believe in all sorts of prejudice: overt classism, unconscious bias, hatred of the Other, and so on. But, as that NYT comment shows, they don’t think any of that applies to them.

At least not when it comes to the people they truly hate.

and he’s right.

* * * * *

Tim Worstall has some interesting revelation that sort of bears out the (crazy) proudhonian solution (multiply possessors until equality), as well as provides some interesting mechanics for the whole thing.

Our own longer term view has been that inheritance tax hasn’t worked. The truly rich don’t pay it, using trusts and lifetime gifts and so on. It’s the less than plutocratic but still successful that do pay it. We’ve noted that old folk wisdom, clogs to clogs in three generations, and think that it has good predictive power. Even the inheritance of the grandest fortune cannot survive an inheritor truly determined to waste it and eventually, given the way genetics seems to work, one does always turn up to do such.

This might not draw nods of approval from those who would plan society but we’ve at least an urge to let people inherit as they may and leave the occasional existence of spendthrifts to deal with wealth concentration.

It has even a Tuckerite spin to it.

* * * * *

Porter tells us:

Most people harbor long-cherished delusions about exactly what elements grant territorial possession. These include silly sentiments such as…

– A piece of paper
– Lines on a map
– Values
– A flag
– Wind and soil
– Celestial beings

But I’m here to tell ya, there’s something else. What makes a place individually or collectively yours is having the capacity to defend it from encroachment.

meaning he just went full mutualist and accepted occupancy and use as the true warranty of property. welcome to anarchism!

* * * * *

Frank Hilliard presents (possibly unwittingly) a good summary of what left-wing racial politics should look like:

In this semantic and social fight, which side are you on? Are you with those who want to atomize society, remove inheritance, make babies in factories to specifications approved by a ruling elite? That’s what anti-racists are calling for, working for, demanding for us all. Consider what their ultimate goal is: a world of individuals stripped of any biological relationship, the race-mixing of all Western cultures, and thus the decimation of Europeans as a distinctive race. This is the truly horrifying end game of anti-racism.

maybe best summarized as “relentless outbreeding till equality”. that’s how Western Europeans got their liberalism the first time, that’s how the world would get it as well.

Briggs grudgingly points at another possible path:

“A team led by Yong Fan at Guangzhou Medical University in China used the gene-editing technology CRISPR–Cas9 to try to introduce a mutation that makes humans resistant to HIV infection.” Suppose this technique is perfected and HIV (in its current form) can no longer be caught. Result? Huge increase in sodomy, almost surely, along with the cultural degradation which accompanies it. (…) Even this will be seen as cruel, because abstinence “denies” desires, and why shouldn’t machines have what they desire?

precisely.

* * * * *

I’ll close with this quote, because it’s so perfect:

It’s clear that leftists like this kid want Trump to be president. They’re not really trying to prevent him from being president – they’re protesting and opposing him as if he were already president. Even when leftism is dominant, like it is now, it’s not comfortable with actually being in charge. It’s only really comfortable in opposing oppressive authority figures and being in a permanent revolutionary mode. Trump is sort of a pop culture caricature of such an oppressive authority figure, and he’s even sort of indulging them and playing the part in a campy way, which excites these people even more. They want Trump, they need Trump as president since it confirms their worldview and gives meaning to their lives as revolutionaries fighting unjust, oppressive authorities. It’s just not the same with Obama or leftists in charge, which ultimately only leads to cognitive dissonance and disillusionment.

Let here be stated the very beginning of “Leftists for Trump” banner.

“In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming”

Moldbug goes:

Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left.

and then Land

The techno-commercial critique of democratized modernity is not that too much chaos is tolerated, but that not enough is able to be shed. The problem with bad government, which is to say with defective mechanisms of selection, is an inability to follow Cthulhu far enough. It is from turbulence that all things come.

so, the Left leads producing turbulence and chaos; the Right’s supposed to follow and tractor in ordo ab chao. if the Left fails, the world stagnates in perpetual order, immovable, and nothing can any longer be changed – thus nothing can be optimized . if the Right fails, then, as Lovecraft prophesied:

The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.