How Not To Resist the Regime

Instead of getting on with his Gray Mirror book project Curtis Yarvin has been taking after Scott Alexander -- of Slate Star Codex and now Substack and others of the Silicon Valley "rationalist" school. Whatever that is. Scott Alexander has recently been drive-byed by The New York Times for something or other.

But Yarvin has a word for you would-be opponents of the regime. They are the Three Don'ts.

Don't Collaborate. You'll humiliate yourself. And that's the whole point of getting confessions from the dissidents.

Since the entire principle of dissidence is denial of the regime’s mandate of heaven, any voluntary collaboration with power, for any reason, humiliates the dissident.

Don't forget, Yarvin says, "As a dissident, you are nothing, you mean nothing and you are worth nothing." Yes, but what does that mean? How to do this? Yarvin says that "you can never again trust anyone who has cooperated with power"; they are rats.

The way to deal with rats around the house is the same: don’t have nothing they can eat, and you won’t have no rats.

Easy for you to say, Mencius!

Don't Repeat Big Brother's Lies. You'll humiliate yourself. And don't believe in the lies either. For instance you don't ever want to say that women are "less intelligent or any worse at math than men." But what do you say? Hey, women just aren't that interested in math? What is the truth? I don't know, but there are a lot more male nerds that female nerds. I wonder why? And women seem to be a lot more interested in relationships than men. I wonder why?

To refuse the frame is to never mouth power’s lies. Never accept its assumptions; never respect its authority; and above all, never speak in its accursed soixante-huitard jargon.

Hmm. I tend to do that all the time, to satirize ruling-class lies. 

Don't Confront the Ruling Class. You'll humiliate yourself. Why would you want to confront people that are more powerful than you are? In fact, you are doing them a favor, as the viking chief did in Congress on January 6.

Why does confrontation not work? Because you are confronting enemies who are far stronger than you...  

Confrontation feeds their energy because it convinces them of their favorite fantasy: that, on behalf of the weak and helpless, they are fighting an uphill battle against the evil and strong.

 Yes, well, but where does that leave us? Merely here:

You actually cannot replace a regime. You can only convince it to replace itself.

Like the Soviet Union in 1989. Yes, why did the Soviet Union decide to cancel itself? I can't remember, but cancel itself it surely did. Now, mind you, today's Russia is still ruled by the KGB; Putin was once an officer in the KGB or whatever it last called itself.

But you can at least say that the Reign of Terror aspect of the ruling class in Russia is over. Because Reigns of Terror and witch hunts and purges and Great Proletarian Cultural Revolutions just don't last. 

Obviously the Cancel Culture of the present era is not over. And I suppose that what Yarvin is saying is that you still want to be around after the end of today's ruling class hysteria.

So don't collaborate with the regime; don't believe or repeat its lies, and don't confront it.

Hmm. I just called Seattle City Councilman Dan Strauss about a truck-jacking right here in River City, in Seattle's Greenwood neighborhood. Should I have done that? Or will Dan make a special point of making my life a hell when he gets the chance.