The Problem with Yarvin's Plan of "Indirect Rule"

One thing I like about Curtis Yarvin. The guy is brimming with ideas, good, bad, and indifferent. So, when you read him, you are probably going to learn something. For instance back in November 2019 I read his "Clear Pill" piece where he wrote about the concept of the "political formula" developed by Gaetano Mosca in The Ruling Class and then I blogged about it.

I ordered The Ruling Class from Amazon three days later. Some time in the summer of 2020 I started reading it, and then I decided I had to blog each chapter to make sure that I absolutely understood it: not just the "political formula" but "social type" and "moral sense" and "juridical defense" and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all.

But now in his Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince, Chapter 5, Yarvin is talking about the governance of the yeomen, the Commoners of America, and he is proposing it should be done using the Brit practice of "indirect rule" that they practiced in India and elsewhere in the Empire. His idea is that the yeomen should be pretty well self-governing in their "sections" and virtual "villages" with only a little supervision from above.

Everyone is best governed by those like them. Everyone still has to share one physical country. The national regime handles all the conflicts between sections, and all the exceptions that cross sectional boundaries.

Only, when you have read Mosca, you can see that there are multiple problems with that. Mosca's basic line starts with the notion that any country consists of the head of state and his ruling clique, plus the broader ruling class, and then the masses. The overall ruling class is a "social type," that I define, after Mosca, as:

a community of like-minded people with the same language, religion, interests, that propagates itself down the generations unless interfered with.

So, if you divide us up into four strata in The Gray Mirror, of armigeri, yeomen, lazzari, and autochthons, then each is a "social type" in Mosca's sense.

Now, Mosca notes that in the feudal era society was a multi-level affair, 

An important feature of feudalism was that local leaders were bound by loyalty to their immediate feudal superior, not to the king. So they would fight for their liege lord against the king. 

Hmm.

The whole point of the absolute monarchs was to replace this multi-level society featuring each feudal lord and his local clique running his feudal fief with a single ruling class ruling over the rest of society with no organizational level in between.

But when you have "indirect rule" are you not setting up an intermediate level? Let's look at the Brits in India. What happened was that after about a century, from 1700 to 1800, the Brits started to detect, in 1825, that the natives didn't like them. They liked their stupid corrupt local lords that had misruled them since whenever. And then came the disorganized Indian Mutiny and the subsequent organization of the Indian National Movement.

To put it bluntly, with "indirect rule" you are setting yourself up for a "head of rebellion" at some point in the future, because you are encouraging the development of a "social type" and a "social type" is a group of humans with the same "language, religion, interests" that will want to propagate itself down the generations.

Now, our liberal friends are presently the ruling class of America and their policy is clearly to bomb the yeomen or Commoners or Responsibles into human rubble. They are following the strategy of the absolute monarchs that would brook no intermediate power center between them and the masses. The only question is whether they will succeed or whether the Commoners will rise up under some Trumpian leader and take them out.

Because, the ideal strategy for a ruling class, according to Mosca, is to refresh and reinvigorate itself with infusions from the lower classes. In our world, that would mean that the ruling class of educated Gentry would not stigmatize the Commoners as bigots and Deplorables, but would gently educate them and allow them -- the best of them, of course, darling -- to rise into the Gentry and the ruling class, and maybe the Gentry would even learn a thing or two from the lower classes.

Now, maybe, the policy of "indirect rule" of the yeomen would work OK. After all, back in the 19th century the rising bourgeoisie was pretty well self-governing, and the yeomen of the era all belonged to mutual-aid societies and fraternal organizations and churches and stirred the admiration of Frenchie Alexis de Tocqueville. As Mosca wrote, the rising bourgeoisie might have decided to replace the old feudal lords, but, in Britain, did not. And as I say, the bourgeoisie was not that interested in power. It just wanted its legitimate interests to be considered by the ruling clique.

On the other hand, now that the Brits have given Scotland and Wales their own parliaments they have encouraged separation movements. Who could have seen that coming?

Or, as we see with the current COVID crisis the Democratic governors take the opportunity to raise up an opposition to Trump and Trumpism, and, oblivious to anything except the interests of the work-from-home gentry, implement shutdown after shutdown to symbolically show they are "doing something" about COVID.

On the other hand, you could say that our liberal friends, by encouraging "women and minorities hardest hit" to identify as other than American, they are, in most cases, condemning the said women and minorities to social and cultural oblivion unless they are already part of the Gentry, as BLM and AntiFa and feminists and LGBTs flying their flags from their homes certainly are.

See, I like Trump's strategy of trying to expand the Commoner class by encouraging blacks and Hispanics to think of themselves not as separate ethnic tribes but as all-American Commoners, because it blunts the strategy of our liberal friends that encourages "oppressed peoples" to experience themselves as victims of the "white oppressors" but for the saving grace of the lefty "allies."

It's not that hard to see. Trump is offering the "oppressed peoples" a way out of their victimhood by becoming proud Americans that believe in Making America Great Again. In effect, our liberal friends are proposing to the "oppressed peoples" that the only way out of their victimhood is as soldiers in the army of the left, fighting the "white oppressors" in their horrible trucks till the death of the last Mater and his Cars tow truck.

But, as the whole world of wokism and intersectionality critical race theory and White Fragility and the "1619 Project" makes clear, the whole point of today's gentry liberalism is to create Jobs For Gentry, and satisfy the Gentry's appetite for "ambition, honor, and vanity."