It's been two months, but now the next chapter in Curtis Yarvin's Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince is out. This time he is talking about what his nihilist prince is going to be doing about the various people in his new princedom: the land, its people and their dogs.
The physical security of the princedom is assured:
From the USG, [the new regime] inherits a complex and historical structure of foreign relationships for which it has no real need. No major power can molest it, or even shares a hemisphere with it. Domestically, there are areas of serious insecurity and informal organized violence, mostly in some parts of older cities, but they are localized and not difficult to avoid.
Instead let's talk economics.
When economics is solved, everyone has work that fits their talents and pays for a reasonably comfortable life. Most people feel secure. They find satisfying, stable professions. They fit well into a community that fits well into a civilization. They are taught and embrace values and ideas that guide them well for their whole lives.
Yarvin proposes a new kind of economics: diseconomics for an illiberal regime. Why? Because the illiberal prince is interested in maximizing the human capital of his princedom, not the physical capital. Yarvin wants to prioritize "public well-being" as the supreme law instead of the current "public luxury" as the supreme law. The idea is to avoid the Venezuela trap.
Oil lets six people stick a pipe in the ground and light up all of Venezuela. Tech lets six people write a messaging app and connect all of Venezuela. If there are still more than twelve people in Venezuela—now no one needs the rest of them.
Yes, but, Curtis old chap. The way we figure capital these days, as per the World Bank's "Changing Wealth of Nations," is thisaway:
| Country | Wealth in 2000 per-capita | Natural Wealth | Produced wealth | Intangible wealth |
| Venezuela | $45,196 | 60% | 30% | 10% |
| United States | $512,612 | 3% | 16% | 82% |
Yep. Venezuela has a lot of natural wealth, and so it has a dreadful government that lets the people starve, because the people don't matter. But in the US, the people matter because "intangible wealth" is the kind of wealth inside people's brains. In other words "human capital." The US is already nothing without its human capital.
But I get the idea of "public well-being." We humans need to be challenged, or we go all soft and corrupted in a hundred different ways like the scions of the aristocracy in Brideshead Revisited. The prince should be concerned not with improving the luxurious living of his people but is sending them to life boot-camp so they get to be flourishing human beings, not gubmint beneficiaries.
OK, so what kind of people are living in this princely land?
Across human history we see four different ways of living. Let’s label these varieties of social existence cosmopolitan, traditional, deracinated, and ancestral. For variety, we’ll pair these adjectives with synonymous nouns which almost no one knows: armigers, yeomen, lazzari, and autochthons. To dodge yet more landmines, these groups are strata.
Naughty boy! I thought we had the whole world figured out with Three Layers. However, Yarvin is mostly concerned with the armigers and the yeomen.
An armiger (rhymes with “integer”) is anyone entitled to a coat of arms. A little leap of metaphor turns medieval heraldry into modern education. The world of the armiger is the world of legitimate credentials. The armigerate, as a social stratum, is defined as everyone who holds an academic degree or would be socially expected to.
Across eras we can define the purpose of the armiger as “self-actualization,” or Bildung as the Germans say. The armiger’s life is meant to be a self-crafted work of human art.
Or, as I would say, the armiger is my People of the Creative Self. "The old regime was an armigerous oligarchy. It aggravated the lazzari and repressed the yeomen." In the new regime we will rescue them "from their awful power addictions." Aren't we special!
But enough about the armigeri. Let's talk about the yeoman, "the normal civilized person."
A yeoman’s tradition shapes the course of his life, with ceremonies for every occasion. It can tell him what to think, what to say, what to read and watch and listen to, what to eat and drink, what to wear and whom to marry—even what technologies he may use. Since the yeoman does not design his life, someone else has to design it for him.
Now Yarvin puts together a complicated system to govern the yeomen. He wants their religions and sects overseen by foundations with the prince overseeing the foundations, and a three-level system of "indirect rule" over the yeomen, at the village level, the "section" level and the regime level. What is the "section" level of governance? Yarvin proposes the pre-1960 Catholic Church as an example.
"Indirect rule" is how the Brits governed their empire, leaving the native religion and culture and political structure in place as much as possible. Of course, the Brits also taught, e.g., the Indians, all about nationalism, indirectly, so there's that.
If Yarvin's system is really just about making sure that everything is copacetic with the yeomen, I'm all for it. But in the details I kinda feel he wants more than a little direct supervision, as in making sure that every yeoman has a good job as an "artisan." Although I understand the point about protectionism, about defending American jobs, there is the overall fact that the economy moves on, and people need to move with it, or molder away, dying of despair.
Plus, of course, the yeomen had a pretty good system back in the nineteenth century with their fraternal associations and their mutual-aid societies, that worked not just at the village level but in the city, where yeomen basically put together "virtual villages" and "imaginary brotherhoods" where brotherhood expanded beyond blood brotherhood to the brotherhood of people like me. That got destroyed by the administrative state in the 20th century.
Plus, there is the little problem of the clash with Mosca's The Ruling Class. Mosca imagines the state as a ruling clique presiding over a ruling class, and the ruling class as a whole presiding over the "masses." Yarvin's plan seems to propose to cut out the current ruling class, his armigeri, and replace it with the ruling clique of the new prince. And then there would be the new ruling class below the ruling clique. Hmm. But who would all those folks be?
Yes, I get that he is proposing a Gedankenexperiment in the good old German manner of the German Turn. But while it is important to imagine the future public policy, all that means nothing unless we have disposed of the current ruling clique, the swamp, and the lower level of the ruling class, the educated liberal gentry. And I don't see where that new ruling class is coming from. Certainly not from the yeomen, because the point about the yeomen and the bourgeoisie from back in the 19th century and before is that the yeomen are not that interested in power. Whereas the educated gentry, the People of the Creative Self, the armigeri, are interested in power.
And that is our national, and indeed our global problem. How do we neutralize the power hungry, status hungry, creativity hungry, credential hungry global educated ruling class and tell them that they have failed, they are fools and knaves, and they need to just go away and stop bothering us with their adolescent follies?
Because before we can imagine a new regime we have to discredit the old regime.
And Yarvin tells us to forget a rebellion against the regime, because it is a fantasy. Yes, but how do we get to regime change?
And beyond that there is the Breitbart proviso, that politics is downstream from culture, and which I have expanded to be
politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
I don't see our current ruling class of educated gentry going anywhere, so the problem is to get them off their power trip. I guess that the only way to do that is repeated humiliation. Something like Trump followed by Trump followed by Trump.
But I'm all in favor of Curtis Yarvin letting his imagination soar.
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