Curtis Yarvin's Gray Mirror is a modest project to imagine a politics for the 21st century. In his previously published chapters he proposed the emptiness of political action, for if your political action supports the regime it is merely serves to prop up the regime and if your political action opposes the regime its certain failure props up the regime.
And I have been analyzing it, step by step, mostly so I could understand what Yarvin is writing.
Now, in Chapter 3, the Descriptive Constitution of the Modern Regime, Yarvin sets out to show the difference between our formal constitution and the real, unwritten constitution, the "System" we live under.
The form of government that the Constitution’s text prescribes, that its initial leaders created, and that its citizens emotionally believe in today, is an elected monarchy. The Republic in one sentence: the voters elect the chief executive of the government, who holds power for four years.
In fact we are not ruled by our elected monarch, nor by the electors, the demos. We are ruled by the System, as follows:
We divide the System into four great organs: in ascending order of power, the Castle, the Factory, the Bureau and the Cathedral. (Later, we will add a fifth: the Show.)
Castle is the military and the police. Factory is "production of goods and services: all companies, trade and finance, mining and agriculture." Bureau is "administration, the professional civil service." Cathedral is "information: truth, philosophy, ethics, narrative, art and intelligence."
Now, if we are are not a monarchy, for the elected president does not have much power, and if we are not a democracy, for the people cannot rule, we must have oligarchy.
There are four forms of oligarchy: hereditary oligarchy (rule of nobles), military oligarchy (rule of soldiers), commercial oligarchy (rule of the wealthy), and clerical oligarchy (rule of thinkers). The System is a clerical oligarchy.
But, but, but. Surely we are supposed to have a separation of church and state? Well, not if you understand religion in a broader sense than understood by your average bear. For me, religion is all human energy devoted to the question of "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." Here is the composition of our clerical oligarchy.
Its inner circle, the Brain and the Voice, includes all professors, journalists, serious artists, published authors, etc. Its outer ring, the Conversation, is the whole upper social class. Its funding division, the Foundation, is the whole upper economic class. Its teaching division, the School, gets to indoctrinate almost everyone for over a decade. And its doctrine, the Dream, defines good and evil for all decent people.
And, you might add, its Inquisition is the corps of eager beavers that runs the "cancel culture" on social media.
The central fact of the Cathedral, the center of power in our System, is its "monopoly on legitimacy." It works like this:
Prestigious information passes from Brain to Voice, and Voice to Conversation. This process is subtle enough, and its product is of high enough quality, for the Conversation to believe it is actually making up its own mind—from filtered inputs. The Conversation—all of legitimate public opinion—always admires the System. It thinks of this as a completely voluntary and spontaneous critical assessment.
In other words, all the folks with their Black Lives Matter and #WeBelieve signs think that they are spontaneously critiquing the bad people. But in fact they are just repeating-after-me the "prestigious information," the articulation of the Dream, that has proceeded from Brain to Voice to Conversation.
And the Conversation, which is the discourse of the upper social class, is always the discourse of fashion. For the nobility (rich or broke), fashionable ideas are de rigueur.
Yeah, fashionable ideas. Boy, do we have fashionable ideas in our modern world. And don't you dare criticize fashionable ideas, pal.
Notice that Yarvin's idea that the Cathedral is in charge is completely vindicated in the current cancel culture. Where is the bureaucracy, the Bureau? It is busily conducting critical race seminars. Where is business, the Factory? It is busily getting down with Black Lives Matter. Where is the military, the Castle? The generals are down with the movement with women fighter pilots. The police? Oh yeah. There is a bit of a problem, because the police are still beating up on the helpless spawn of the welfare state, the wild young men that never had a father.
So the Cathedral runs the whole System; everyone who is anyone takes his cue from the Conversation on the street decreed by the Brain of the Cathedral. It is infallible, because there is no appeal. But what if the Cathedral is wrong?
[T]he Cathedral is either marching faster toward utopia or sliding deeper into mania. Wherever it goes, the System follows; wherever the System follows, the country follows. To answer this question is to read the future.
And what the Cathedral promulgates is the Dream.
The Dream is the ideal future of the noblest, most fashionable people in the world. It really is a nice Dream. The problem with the Dream is not that it is evil, but that it is impossible. From that error (also a sin: the sin of vanity), all the evil it does proceeds.
For, when the Cathedral needs an Inquisition to enforce its Dream, then you know that something is going wrong.
Yes, but couldn't we elect a president who would sidestep the Cathedral and actually reform something? Not really, because the President is not really chief executive, but "chief oracle." Most of his job is not directing traffic but making decisions on issues that bubble up from the Bureau, the bureaucracy, where he gets to choose between three options. So when we elect a president nothing changes.
Yes, but couldn't we elect a new Congress that would actually reform something for a change? Not really. First, people do not care about congressional elections the way they care about presidential elections. Second, there are no real local notables and celebrities to act as symbolic representatives of the people. Third, we elect congress-critters, in effect, for life. Some do get defeated, occasionally. But not often. Fourth, a newly elected congress-critter is a nobody, with no power to change anything. (Except AOC, but she is the mouthpiece of the Cathedral, so that's different.) In fact, Congress is driven by the lobbyists and the activists. Period.
The point is that to change anything, through a presidential election or a congressional election, would require a level of energy orders of magnitude greater than the current levels of political energy we experience from day to day.
Yes, Americans can still elect a new regime—but they have to really, really want one, and they all have to want the same one, and it has to be one that can actually work. The distance from here to any such regime change can hardly be exaggerated.
And let's face, it. Today, very few people "really, really want" a new regime. The only people pretending are the BLM/Antifa folks, and they are merely the stooges of the System, play-acting revolution.
The problem with the System is that its director, the Cathedral, is corrupted. In a perfect world, its Brain, the thinkers, would be like mathematicians working away like squirrels on their equations, and only equations that worked would become agreed-upon mathematics. But, for the Brainiacs, there is the problem of power. And "power corrupts ideas."
A marketplace of ideas, like any Darwinian system, evolves for whatever it selects for. If it is selecting for power—for “impact,” for “changing the world"—it will evolve powerful doctrines: ethical justifications for wielding power.
Which is exactly what we have today. And if you want to escape the poisonous killing fields of power you are going to have to be doing Brainiac things where your ideas are not going to make you famous or powerful or encourage you to believe you are "changing the world."
But what would that look like? Ah yes...
Be sure to watch next week's exciting episode.
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