Yarvin: Trump Never Had a Chance; Plus He's Incompetent

Now that Trump is returned to Florida, Curtis Yarvin reminds us that Trump's job as president was to be a King. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the skills and attributes to be a king.

Trump has never shown any particular gift for management or delegation, and he has the attention span of a rabid chipmunk. 

Nor did any of his people know how to be a king and actually run the government.

But then, Yarvin continues, what authority does the president have anyway? Practically none, especially if he is going up against the System and its bureaucracy.

With regard to the System he references a 900-person Zoom call of all the lefties where they coordinated the street action -- or lack of street action -- after the election. Wow. I get that the lefties all somehow coordinate like a flock of birds.

With regard to the bureaucracy he notes the case of Trump and a Pennsylvania lawmaker getting together, in a "Plot" with a mid-level Justice Department appointee to maybe get a bit of investigating on the Big Steal. But the other bureaucrats shut it down.

So, in fact, the left's Activist Central decides what goes down, or does not go down in the streets, and the permanent bureaucracy decides what goes down in the actual government. Presidents need not apply.

Who knew?

So, the benefit of Trump is that he did get to do some pro-Commoner stuff for four years, and in the aftermath the lefty Activism Central were part of the System, and the bureaucrats showed their teeth.

If we didn't know how the System worked before, we do now.

Bottom line is, of course, that the current System of the ruling class ain't going down until it runs out of money and thus can't keep all its bureaucrats and its activists on-side.

So of course the Biden administration is executive-ordering the agenda of the lefty Activism Culture. In particular because, since President Biden is in mental decline he really lacks the horsepower to moderate his lefty crazies.

And of course the bureaucracy is not going to apply the law to its own and to the lefty activists that break the law.

Says Yarvin about Trump's real achievement.

[The left] has succeeded brilliantly in pretending to be the underdog. Thanks to Trump, and to its response to Trump, this charade seems no longer viable.

So now the left will have to be upfront about power: that it has the power, that it believes in power, and that you'd better behave because power.

It's a start. 

Zuck and @jack Have No Power, Because...

So now Curtis Yarvin has exploded another test nuclear device. "Big tech has no power at all," says he.

What does he mean? He means that, for Zuckerberg and the rest of the tech lords, the easy way out is to defer to the "press" and cancel anyone the press wants canceled. 

Zuck doesn’t want to do any of this. Nor do his users particularly want it. Rather, he is doing it because he is under pressure from the press. Duh.

Perfectly true. Only, I would add, the Breitbart Downstream Principle applies:

The press is downstream from activism is downstream from the Cathedral is downstream from the political formula.

For "activism" you can substitute "wokies" if you prefer.

The maxim above is merely a restatement of the Breibart Extended Downstream Principle I have inscribed among my Maxims:

Politics is downstream from culture (Breitbart) is downstream from religion (Wright) is downstream from “the meaning of life, the universe, and everything” (Chantrill). 

For those of you that aren't yet in the know, the Cathedral is the combination of all the people who are good and right and that have the right values.

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.

To clarify things further, Yarvin argues that: 

There are three forms of regime: monarchy (rule of one), oligarchy (rule of a minority), and democracy (rule of a majority). The System is an 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.

The Political Formula is the ruling class's moral and legal basis for its power. I described the political formula of our ruling class today at American Thinker.

The U.S. formula used to be that government existed to protect “the little guy.” The formula was celebrated in anthems like It’s a Wonderful Life, with the little guy homeowners of Bailey Park protected by St. George Bailey from the rapacious dragon Mr. Potter.

In our day government exists to fight systemic racism, and it is celebrated in anthems like the woke “oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors” narrative. If it weren’t for the “allies,” little kiddies are carefully taught from K thru Activism School, the world would collapse into a “literally Hitler” oppression of the oppressed peoples by the white oppressors. Sign here to become an “ally.”

Am I right, or am I right?

And what is poor old Zuck going to do standing up against the priests of the Cathedral and against the sacred principles decreed in the regime's political formula? He's gonna stand up against all that is good and true and anti-racist? He ain't, and neither is @jack at Twitter. 

So what do we do about it? Well, the answer is right there in my Downstream maxim. We gotta come up with a new "meaning of life, the universe, and everything." Which, of course, I have done in my "Vision of the Good Life."

So, what are we waiting for?

Direct Censorship, Reign of Terror

So, we've officially entered the Woke Reign of Terror, where you are not allowed to disagree with the regime. Curtis Yarvin:

As a student of history, I know what burden the System has taken on by this step. Such an escalation is a ratchet. Once you enter the mindset of the Eastern bloc and declare the revolution as a permanent axiom, which makes anyone who opposes or even doubts the revolution into a potentially violent criminal, there is no way back.

This "mode of direct censorship... works." But there is a problem. It takes a lot of energy. You gotta have your two minutes hate every day. Of course, you have to amp it up, as the French did, and the Bolsheviks did. The Jacobins guillotined their tens of thousands, the Bolsheviks executed and starved their tens of millions. And then the whole thing dies of exhaustion. I suppose that our Wok-eviks will just deplatform the top conservatives and Qanon guys and get thousands named and shamed and fired. And then one day it will die. Because, as Crane Brinton says in Anatomy of Revolution, people cannot live forever in the fever of revolution. And then comes the Thermidorean Reaction.

Because, you see, any regime that has to break the glass and go for direct censorship has admitted that their revolution has already failed. If things were really copacetic, and heaven on Earth were just around the corner, the regime wouldn't need censorship. The facts would speak for themselves with just a little nudge from regime supporters.

The whole thing also reminds us -- as if we need telling -- that the regime is actually scared of the Trump voters and the Commoners in general. Which means that, deep down, they know instinctively that they have visited monstrous injustice on the ordinary Commoners of America.

For the truth is that the Commoners, like the bourgeoisie, are not that interested in power. They just want to get on with their lives. Only, as Trotsky said, "you may not be interested in power, but power is interested in you." 

Now I would say that this is new. Back in the agricultural age there were more like just two classes: the landlords and the peasants; landlords had the power and peasants sucked up to power. The idea of people just going about their business, trusting trustworthy people, is new and revolutionary and utterly confusing to the people interested in power.

The question for our time is whether the Commoners that are not that interested in power can ever get a ruling class that respects them and lets them get on with their lives.

We know at least that the current ruling class down not respect us, and is damned if it will let us just live our lives in peace.

Woe to the Conquered, writes Curtis Yarvin

It doesn't matter that the ruling class cheated in the late election, writes Curtis Yarvin in "Vae Victis." A ruling class worth its salt is always going to apply the force needed to maintain its power -- and also remind the ruled who is boss.

The Supreme Court has sent a clear and lovely Schmittian message. No court or other official authority will ever consider the substance of Republican allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 elections. All will be rejected on procedural grounds by the courts, and mocked with maximal hauteur in the legitimate press.

And we know that the Supreme Court choked because we have unofficial reports of Chief Justice Roberts more or less wailing like a woman to get the rest of the court to reject Texas's complaint against the cheating "battleground" states.

What does he mean by "Schmittian message?" Merely this: "the sovereign is he who decides the exception." But, but, but! I thought that the current Supreme Court doctrine was the "living constitution," that the Supreme Court gets to interpret the Constitution any way it wants to. Er, no. Not quite. The Supreme Court gets to interpret the Constitution any way the ruling class wants it to. So, gay marriage: yes. Free and fair elections: sorry, pal.

You don't like an election decided by skulduggery? Well, too bad. Elections are like water polo. All free and fair above water, but no holds -- or kicks -- barred below the waterline. So at least the Dems have taught us a lesson: two can play at that game.

You don't like to read that? Then stop reading because it is going to get worse.

Let's talk about the media. Think of it and its pals in the ruling class as a kind of Gigaphone, and the volume, in the month of October and thereafter was turned up to 11. On a scale of 1 to 10.

We learned something else about the real constitution of America: that it is the press, not the courts, with the sacred power to inscribe official reality. The Fourth Estate is the highest estate, not the lowest—and always has been.

That is what the Supreme Court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, just told us. Really it is good to know. Every ruling class needed a Ministry of Truth. But it is much better if the truth ministry is not an official government bureaucracy, but a volunteer corps of ruling-class suck-ups. 

But really, I'd say, the media is not a Ministry of Truth. It is the Holy Temple of Truth, and the media suck-ups are the Priests and Bishops of Truth.

Then Yarvin speaks truth to the post-Reagan conservative movement. It is not pretty, so I won't comment.

But then Yarvin tells us that the whole Trump phenomenon, from beginning to end, is an Act of God.

Trump had no way to succeed, so the sooner he failed the better. God made him fail. God hacked the voting machines. God performed the experiment. God got the results. And God sacrificed the animal. 

But the Trump phenomenon, thanks to God, was not a waste. "The world-historic purpose of Trump was to validate the market for dreampolitik."

With Trump as his instrument, God has taught us beyond any doubt that, f*cked as America may be, f*cked as America is, we still have a market for dreams. Indeed we are so f*cked that only dreams can save us. We’re going to need better dreams, though.

He means this, from my Maxims:

Politics is downstream from culture (Breitbart) is downstream from religion (Wright) is downstream from “the meaning of life, the universe, and everything” (Chantrill).

Did I mention that I have written such a dream? It is in my series on "A Vision of the Good Life Better than the Left." My basic argument is that the left's celebration of the political activist is a celebration of the Ego Hero, he who worships at the Shrine of Power. This is an error, because the real hero down the ages -- that appears again and again in myth and religion -- is the Sacrificial Hero, that dies on the border of Order and Chaos so that the rest of us may live.

And, I wrote on Election Day in "Donald Trump, the Sacrificial Hero," that if Trump were reelected he would go down as just another two-term president. But if he were thrown out, then he would become a Sacrificial Hero, and become a great American myth for the ages. In his Maps of Meaning, Jordan B. Peterson writes about the "hostile brothers."

Or, to use Yarvin's way of thinking, Trump defeated becomes part of the New American Dream.

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."

Reducing Yarvin's Four Strata to Three Layers

Back in the day Curtis Yarvin had a nice sensible Three Layer theory of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients. But now he has revised it into four strata, as follows:

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.

Only, then he goes and adds another stratum on the bottom end: the "human rubble of the old regime’s failed experiments." For human rubble, you could also substitute "white trash," which, according to Nancy Isenberg in White Trash, has been a thing in the Anglo-American world for hundreds of years. Back in 1500, the Brits had a law to deal with "vagabonds and beggars." Nothing new on the human rubble front.

Now, by lazzari Yarvin refers to the "name for the Neapolitan underclass in the Bourbon era," and he includes the gang members in this classification. By saying that they are deracinated he means that they are uprooted -- uprooted yeoman that just need to be re-yeomanized. I don't think so. I agree that the lazzari are uprooted, but I don't agree that they were previously yeomen.

By autochthons Yarvin means pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers, the "original inhabitants" of a place. They really cannot fit in today's society because they never learned to be bored, boring farmers sitting in one place watching the corn grow. Various commentators have noted that these pre-agricultural people tend to extinction when confronted by the modern world, as in native Americans, Australians aboriginals, and Amazon tribes.

Now I think that Yarvin has muddied the waters with his new strata. I like his armigers, or, as I would prefer, armigeri, just to make it sophisticated and Italian. But I think that yeomen is not a good fit. This is because I feel that to make it in the city you cannot be a yeoman right off the farm. You have to transform yourself into a bourgeois, a burgher, a townie. That's why I like Yarvin's Commoner from his Three Layer theory and my Responsible from my reductive Three Peoples theory. If you look at the heroes of Thomas Hardy and George Eliot novels, these agricultural yeomen had to transform themselves to make it in the new world of the nineteenth century. And they did.

See, I look at the lazzari, the autochthons, and the human rubble as "misfits." They do not fit in the modern world of the city, the employment at will, the hegemony of the market, the need to upgrade skills to keep yourself employable in the city economy. Moreover, they are people that do not really "get" how life operates in the city. They are Subordinate people that expect to live as a subordinate to someone who will make all the decisions and tell them what to do.

There are a ton of people that inhabit this Subordinate realm. The whole arc of labor unions, wage-hour laws, government pension systems and government health care are really manifestations of the fact that a lot of people don't want to be free burghers. They want to be taken care of. The only problem is that, as Yarvin says above, they tend to become "human rubble," the detritus from the latest wizard wheeze dei armigeri. I call them Little Darlings, because their descent is usually assisted by the armigeri enlisting them as special people in their political army, for their votes, and then abandoning them by the side of the road when they are no longer politically useful. As in white working class.

Now we like, with our modern conceit, to sneer at the old world of serfs and slaves. But you tell me what a corporate employee with life-time employment is, other than a serf. You tell me what a welfare recipient is, who goes to the government for money to live on, other than a slave. Oh yes, back in the day you could apply to become a slave to your local feudal lord. Slaves weren't all conquest slaves, or sold to the highest bidder in West African slave ports.

But I think it is nicer to call the misfits, the serfs, the slaves, as Subordinates. They are people that don't have the spirit, the chops, the cultural preparation to be Commoners in the city: not yet, maybe not ever. And that's OK

But let us at least admit that the lazzari, the autochthons, the "human rubble" are all "misfits," people that have not found a place in today's rapidly post-industrializing society.

And, by the way, suppose they never do find a place in today's society. Do we put them all on "reservations" where they can drink themselves to death? Or do we let them molder away in the countryside blacking out with OxyContin, like the white working class that is "dying of despair?"

Or do we make everyone go through post-industrial boot-camp? I mean, if it was copacetic to put a whole generation of young men through boot camp in World War II and then the GI Bill to beat the Nazis and make the kids into good Fifties factory workers and suburbanites, why not do it again?

Only, of course, I wouldn't trust i nostri amati armigeri to do it right. With their record, they would probably create a whole new category of "human rubble."

Ch5: How to Protect the Yeomen

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. 

Ch4: But How Does a New Regime Come into Being?

Now that Curtis Yarvin is well into his Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince I think I am ready to start making a critique.

And I think my basic problem is the idea that the Nihilist Prince could actually know what he is doing. As I understand Macchiavelli's The Prince I believe that his notion was to teach princes how to maintain and hold power: what worked and what didn't.

But Yarvin is going deeper. For instance in his Chapter 4 on Principles of the Next Regime he is getting into religious and cultural matters: should the new ruler be running a zoo for humans, a video game to let people get off on their natural aggression, or putting people to work doing satisfying work?

But this assumes an almost totalitarian concern for peoples' moral welfare as well as physical welfare.

And I would say that the lesson of the 20th century is that governments that get into the details of welfare, whether physical or cultural or moral, are setting themselves up for failure because the scale of the job is too big for a top-down social structure. The regime just doesn't have the bandwidth.

Yarvin writes about the "Cathedral" and its top-down structure of moral and cultural control:

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.

But I think that, as with the physical medieval cathedrals, the ruling class builds the structure of the Cathedral after it has gained religious and cultural power. The Cathedral is the method of maintaining power.

But when putting together a new regime? What does anyone know, except that the old regime has to go?

And in the old regime, what does anyone in the Brain or the Voice know except that any new regime would be worse -- especially for the rulers and their supporters. For in the old regime, the Brain is not really thinking but only defending the orthodoxy, the correct opinion, of the existing regime.

And this is as it should be. Nobody goes out looking for new knowledge unless there is a problem, a glitch in the Matrix.

In normal times the ruling class and its Cathedral are unopposed. Everything is working as it should be: God is in His Heaven and the King is on his throne and the people prosper.

But if things seem to be going wrong: defeat in war, bad harvests, financial crises, mobs in the street; why, then people start to ask what is wrong and What Is To Be Done. But only a very few people.

Moreover, I suggest that the "very few people" are regarded by all sensible people as complete idiots, not really worth taking seriously. Why? Because for all sensible people everything is still working as it should. No glitch in the Matrix here, no sir.

But what if the Cathedral detects dangerous heresy and the Brain and the Voice and the Conversation swing into action to destroy it? 

I wonder. I wonder if, usually, the hierarchs and heretic hunters will really understand that, if there is a problem, it is probably not that the heretics are evil monsters, but that the apparent smooth surface of the glorious ruling class doctrine and its Cathedral and Cathedral spires are all an illusion. That there is, in fact, corruption and decay, and the foundations are undermined.

We see this is the current situation in the United States. Our ruling class and its educated Gentry cannot see that it is producing less than optimal results for great numbers of the people. That's because the whole job of the Cathedral is to demonstrate to the world that everything about the regime is all for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

So when the American Committees of Correspondence started talking to each other in the decade leading up to 1776 dear old King George and his courtiers didn't really take them seriously. And anyway, did the Committees really know what they wanted?

Or in the run-up to the French Revolution, did the chaps in the cafés at the Palais Royal really know what they wanted and why, and did Louis XVI's courtiers really have a firm grasp on the problem? Life was good under the old regime, according to Talleyrand:

He who has not lived in the eighteenth century before the Revolution does not know the sweetness of life and can not imagine that there can be happiness in life. 

Look at the current situation in the US. In the debate on September 29, 2020 candidate Joe Biden railed against the white supremacist Proud Boys but said that AntiFa was "just an idea." But President Trump said of the Proud Boys that basically there was nothing to see here, while AntiFa was a problem.

So the two main political parties can't agree on who the current "peaceful protesters" and/or rioters are, who is behind them, and how significant each group is. But each party agrees that the people in the streets identified with the Other party are clearly a menace.

So what is the solution to the problem of the Next Regime?

Well, I would say that it starts with religion, with people that find the current moral framework ill-adapted for the needs, the meaning of life for people like them. So they start bumbling around trying to create a new religion.

Then there is the broader cultural question of a general moral framework, in which, I would say, the great mass of educated and suburban women establish their expectations of each other and the men that protect them.

And then this cultural framework starts to influence the politics.

And the beginning of wisdom, I believe, is for the folks developing new religions and moral frameworks to recognize that different people need and respond to different religions and moral frameworks; there is no one size fits all.

And the beginning of wisdom in our current left-liberal Cathedral is to understand that its Religion of Creativity doesn't really work for the rest of society. In my reductive Three Peoples theory this means that the religion of the Creative People looks like evil to the Responsible People. And vice versa.

And if the Creative People keep ramming their religion down the throats of the Responsible People they are cruising for a bruising.

Just sayin'.

First Principles of Yarvin's Next Regime

After telling us all about the "System" and the "Cathedral" political philosopher Curtis Yarvin wants us to think about what the Next Regime is going to be all about.

Today, "In 2020, we are all nihilists." Because, whatever we have inherited from the 20th century, "almost none of us has any significant positive belief in it."

What does that mean? I suppose we can say that it means that almost everyone is extremely dissatisfied with the political status quo. Only, we all believe that it is the Other guy's fault.

But nihilism, for Yarvin, involves both detachment and absolutism. What on earth is that all about?

Detachment... means disengaging, detaching, withdrawing or resigning from every form of power, or ambition for power, influence or relevance, under the present regime. 

This is, if nothing else, practical, because it reduces the likelihood that the regime will come hunting for you. It has other fish to fry.

Absolutism... means thinking ex nihilo: from scratch, from first principles, not relative to any specific past or present reality.

OK. Fine. So what's that when it's at home? Well, it recognizes that, while anyone trying to develop new knowledge is standing on the shoulders of giants, we have to recognize that a lot of knowledge these days is baloney, and if we carelessly accept it, we will be standing on the shoulders of ogres instead. So we have to climb down and step back and reevaluate all the knowledge extant to determine what is good giant stock and what is useless ogre stock.

For instance, suppose we had to choose between "government of the people" and government for the people," what should we choose? Yarvin says government for the people is a necessity, while government of the people is a luxury.

Government for the people ideally means an overlord that makes the "justest laws and enforces them efficiently and impartially".

Government by the people could easily mean "chaos and anarchy, in which we are bullied, assaulted, extorted, beaten" by our crazy cousins.

Simply put, Yarvin is arguing that no-one has a moral right to political power. In fact the world is full of Hamlets, Prince of Denmark, that imagine that they are born to rule. Hello wokies!

Our modern system is based on the notion of vox populi, vox dei that the people are the voice of God. Only, of course it doesn't quite work that way in practice. Our real ruling principle is "the people are always right, if rightly educated." That way, of course, the powerful only have to deal with the teachers, rather than the people. And if the rulers have all the teachers, professors, journalists, bureaucrats on their side...

So what we have is an oligarchy, with the Cathedral of moral teachers defining orthodoxy and using Karl Popper's "paradox of tolerance," "So we tolerate everyone, except the intolerant." That, of course was the argument of Herbert Marcuse in his doctrine of "repressive tolerance." Says Yarvin:

Popper’s advice is pure Machiavelli. Its message to any regime is: take and hold the levers which control public opinion, before someone else does.

And that is what our Wokie cancel cultists are all about. Fire the heretics before they do any more damage.

But what the "if rightly educated" hierarchs are really doing is handing out goodies to the people: the greatest good to the greatest number? Utilitarianism. Only, it ends up as luxury. It makes sense when we humans are scrabbling around for basic necessities, but not when we are, like the Crazy Rich Asians, engaged in an orgy of  name-brand luxury. Luxury, in the hands of Kevin Kwan, becomes a major motion picture joke.

A political system devoted to delivering luxury is not government for the people.

If we now examine the Latin tag Salus populi, suprema lex, or "the health of the people is the supreme law" we see we are dealing with the luxury problem. But it ain't that simple for "while the health of a body can be quantified, sort of, the health of a soul is a qualitative and aesthetic judgment."

OK, so if we have a government for the people that is truly devoted to the health of the people what would it look like?

Would it be like a zoo, with a worthy zookeeper devoted to the health of the people in it? Not really, because in a zoo, the lions are not really living as lions, dealing with "the real challenges of being a lion."

Would it be like a video game? Well, the experience of video games is that what gamers want is a game of total intensity, and that means "virtual worlds with only violence." That might be too much of a good thing. We could put individuals into video game pods, and harness their energy to do stuff in the real world. Or we could combine people into village pods.

But we still have a situation where the video game producer is directing traffic according to his own notion of what people should be doing.

Maybe we should reimagine the economy and throw away all the cheap plastic toys and put everyone to work making good old-fashioned wooden toys. That way people could once more become artisans rather than mere industrial labor. But that gets awfully close to Bastiat's notion of creating work for glaziers by breaking windows.

But that, it appears are Yarvin's three options to make human health, physical and spiritual, the purpose of government for the people: Put humans in a zoo; put them in a video game; put them to work making toys by hand.

But I would say that if this is the three possible modes of "absolutism" then Yarvin is missing the point, for he is assuming the one thing we do not know, and that is "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." In every generation, in every era, we cobble together some religious and cultural and political answer to this eternal question, but we never get close to answering it.

And he seems to be imagining a closed system: that is what a zoo, or a video game, or a toy manufacturing program is all about.

And I would say that the truth of existence is that it is an open system. We men all thirst for challenge and adventure, which we used to get from defending the border, and more recently in global world wars. But there are alternatives, like exploration. We men had a grand old time between 1500 and 1900 exploring and colonizing the world. The 20th century has taught us that the exploration game is over. No doubt that is why tech billionaires are planning the exploration of the solar system.

And then there is the question of women. Oh yeah. Because the point of men defending the border is to provide a safe place for women to have babies, and the food-growing land to produce the food to feed the babies until they are full grown.

And in the last 200 years we have converted the energies of men from fighting on the border to fighting for market share, or fighting to supply the consumers with the best products. I think that the future of politics and governance and culture and religion and economy is to find something for men to fight about that, like fighting for market share, actually benefits mankind.

Women, as ever, will do exactly what they are carefully taught while simultaneously manipulating the world of men to supply them with the protection and the support they need to bear and nurture the future of humankind.

For me, I don't believe in going back to first principles. That is the error of the whole progressive project. As Yarvin says, each of us live by standing on the shoulders of giants, and hoping to avoid getting tangled up with ogres. The task before us is to tag the ogres and build upon what we already have been given by the giants.

We all start from where we are: in this age, this decade, this day, this moment. We never get to start over.

Politics Can't Change Anything, Unless...

In his description of the "System," the combination of military, business, bureaucracy, and "Cathedral" that rules over us, Curtis Yarvin is at pains to note that there is no way to for political elections to countermand the orthodoxy of the "Cathedral" -- the Brain, Voice, and Conversation among the elite -- that defines the "Dream," the orthodoxy of what fashionable people of the "upper social class" think. (Or rather not think, but fashionably repeat, imagining themselves as clever and wise).

Simply put, there is no way to  promote a heresy against the orthodox view without getting eaten for lunch. Especially at times like this when the "Cathedral" feels embattled and is openly conducts a Holy Inquisition to deal with the heretics with its cancel culture.

Except.

Except whatabout the Protestant revolution? The fact is that the Protestants -- Luther, Calvin, and the rest -- changed the Cathedral, and changed the Dream, the "doctrine... [that] defines good and evil for all decent people."

But why did it work for Luther and Calvin and Co.?

I guess because the Gutenberg printing revolution made it possible for the idea guys to get their ideas out there so that their ideas could become part of the "Conversation." Before Gutenberg this rebellious distribution of ideas just couldn't have taken place, because hand-copied manuscripts were too expensive for broad distribution.

And, of course, the burgeoning cities and trade of Europe in 1500 had created a "bourgeoisie" in the cities of Europe ready for a new ideological Dream, a new notion of good and evil for all decent people to believe. A new notion that was better aligned with their need for a meaning of life.

And then, in due course, the Protestant Cathedral and its Dream got replaced by the current System, run by an educated Gentry with its professor ideologist Brains in the university, its fake-news Voice in the media, its Conversation among the educated upper class that fashionably imagines itself the "allies" of the "oppressed peoples" fighting against the "white oppressors."

As in, I don't think so. Listen pal. If you are the political elite, whether eevil feudal lords or robber barons "the rich" or noble "allies," then you are the oppressors, not some bitter-clinger Trump supporters in a Trump Car Parade.

So yeah. Politics doesn't change anything, but ideology does. 

And wouldn't you know, in our generation we have another publishing revolution, the Internet, that allows Brains with new ideas to have a Voice without necessarily getting the fake news media on board to spread the word and get the word out into the Conversation.

Of course, whatever happens, it ain't gonna be easy. The current ruling class is pulling out all the stops to prevent the rebels from talking to each other and getting into the Conversation. But then the Protestant Revolution wasn't easy either.

But here's the point. If the new wave of ideologists, brainiacs like Curtis Yarvin, come out with ideas that seem to answer the questions that today's people have about "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything" then those ideas will tend to get in the Conversation in spite of the Woke Holy Inquisition that is traveling the world busily stamping out every heretic it can lay its hands on.

Now my notion is that the key to the future is to understand that there are Three Peoples, and each of the Three Peoples needs its own religion, or Dream, the answer to the question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything that appeals to people like them.

That is what my Three Peoples Religion notion is all about. We must understand that in our modern world we need to create not one but three Dreams, because the Dream of good and evil for Creative People, the Gentry, is going to be different from the Dream of good and evil for Responsible People, the Commoners, and different again from the Dream of good and evil for Subordinate People, the Clients.

So I say that if you want to persuade the world, you need a sophisticated Dream that understands the world not just for people like you but for all the other people in the world too. Is that so hard?

Notice that our wokey friends, with their "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors," notion have a Dream that is basically tailored to the interests of the allies. The allies decide who is oppressed, who is oppressor, and who is an approved ally. The allies, needless to say, are the best people in the world. And the rest of you can go pound sand.

And another thing. The big thing about the Trump Effect, I would say, is that Trump is encouraging the bitter-clinger deplorables towards self-consciousness. And if you listen to the Trump Rallies, it is clear to me that President Trump is reciting a Dream, a narrative of what it means to be an American. Same thing about his speech at Mount Rushmore. Same thing with his appearance in California pinning medals on the helicopter crews that rescued people from the fires.

But what do I know?

Ch3: America's Real Constitution: The "System"

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. 

So You Want a Revolution

Curtis Yarvin is churning out more stuff on his Gray Mirror book. Yesterday he wrote about revolution, "Persuasion and the Mensheviks." Not the play-acting at revolution of our lefty activist friends, but real revolution: how to change the regime.

But first to identify the players. The wokies, according to Yarvin are the kiddies, the "youth militia of happy, hopeful teenage volunteers" in the Czar's religious police. And then there are the Mensheviks.

[All over], people are being busted all over the place for their long-past mindcrimes, which were not even crimes when they thought them, or which were misdemeanors but have become major felonies.  Our Mensheviks are against this—as they should be.

Only, of course, our Mensheviks, the good old centrist liberals like Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan, are being canceled too. But "we" are Bolsheviks. What does that mean?

It means we need to be "reactionaries," by which Yarvin means people who can see beyond the horizon of the present, one who "has taken his passport as a citizen of history." And let's learn from that genius of revolution, Lenin.

Revolution is not an ideology, it is a strategy, and Yarvin calls it Lenin's Rule, the first law of revolution.

The essence of revolution is not that a new class shall govern with the old government machinery, but that it shall smash up the existing machinery and govern with a new machine.

"It is easier to replace than reform an old government," says Yarvin: as with software, and he should know. But we modern "techno-Bolsheviks" are not monsters like Lenin & Co. Ours must not be a violent revolution, but rather a "cosy" revolution.  How do you do that?

Here is an easy test: in any truly cozy sovereign transition, even the officials of the old government machinery must wind up with better, happier, and more fulfilling lives.

Call that the second law of revolution: "the new regime must not punish anyone for good service to the old regime."

It ain't gonna be easy, because of our chimp-like tendency to "maim any falling power on the way down." But it is not a hopeless cause: Lenin was into butchery, but not Caesar and Napoleon, and not the post-war Germans. Guess what happened to the average SS man and Stasi veteran? They got new careers and new lives. But not generally in the new regime.

Obviously there is no law to cover replacement of the regime, so our "cozy revolution" must pass through a "legal singularity,"

The singularity, while inherently above law, must be as quick and smooth as possible.

Then there's the third law of revolution: "surgery not butchery."

Any revolution requires a process of "expropriation and sequestration." In the singularity the new regime will need the power of expropriation. That's because the billionaires need to be humbled. But not humiliated.

Did you know, for instance, that our Constitution provides for the suspension of habeas corpus?

But do we have to be so mean to the billionaires? Well, yes, says Yarvin, because money is power, and "No regime is safe with a super-plutocratic class of questionable loyalty." But maybe, says Mr. Softy here, only a couple of billionaires need to be expropriated pour encourager les autres. Why do billionaires suck up to the current lefties? Because they know which side their bread is buttered.

Then there is "sequestration." Any revolution needs to separate the "critical human nodes" from the levers of power. They need to be sent on luxurious vacations to various tropical islands, the kind that feature in the NYT travel section.

Such is the sharp edge of 21st-century Bolshevism: a wealth tax on a few zillionaires, involuntary swank vacations for a few VIPs. Is this too much? Red Terror run wild? Must we refuse to countenance such naked violations of the non-aggression policy?

Surgery not butchery means separating the functionaries of the old regime from their power, but not from their lives. 

Had enough yet? Yarvin's not quite through. 

The fourth law of revolution is that "any new regime must be an unconditional and accountable monarchy." Yes, that means an absolute monarchy. Yarvin wrote a lot about the benefits of monarchy in his Unqualified Reservations blog.

The fifth law of revolution is that "any new regime must be universal. It cannot govern as the regime of a faction—cultural, ideological, religious, racial, linguistic, economic, or geographic."

Well, that is pretty obvious, because the reason for the need for revolution is that our current regime is indeed the regime of a faction, the globalist, leftist educated Gentry faction that believes in a religion of political power as a path to justice. The trick for the new regime is to bury the enmities that led to the crisis: in our case the educated Gentry against the Commoners. That means that the new regime has to honor Gentry as Gentry, and Commoners as Commoners, because all "communities" deserve equal respect.

Do you think this is all a bit too much, "going too far" in the words of George Eliot's Mr. Brooke? Most people usually do, says Yarvin. But,

For any malady of state, there are three possible solutions: do nothing; repair the government; or replace the government. 

And usually repairing the government doesn't work. That's because of my Fourth Law, that government programs cannot work because you can never reform them. But if we are going to succeed in our replacement strategy we will have to get the support of the Mensheviks, the good centrists that right now are not ready for extreme action

What is a Menshevik? A Menshevik is a small and good person—an intellectual hobbit. This small and good person is naturally attracted to small and good ideas.

And then Yarvin goes into a long disquisition about the fatuously useless resistance to the "cancel culture" by the centrists like Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan and the Harper's Wet-Noodle Manifesto and a new Substack blog called "Persuasion."

Obviously those guys are not going to free us from the the clinking fist of the Czar's cultural police. And yet we need them on our side. How do we do it? Yarvin doesn't tell us. Not yet.

Ch2b: The Frivolity of Opposing the Regime

In his "Gray Mirror" Curtis Yarvin argues against political involvement, because all political action ends up supporting the regime. In "#2b: negative causes are frivolous and doomed" he argues that dissident activity just ends up making the regime more powerful.

OK, so we are agreed that "people who volunteer for positive causes tend to be signing up to stroke their own vanity by serving unaccountable power." But whatabout noble dissidents? We are trying to #Resist! Right?

On the contrary, says Yarvin. "Resistance is useless—at best. In fact, you probably do more for the regime as a dissident than a volunteer." That's because the opponent of a regime almost always plays a cartoon villain. A regime has its narrative, and if you are opposing it you will almost certainly become its "stage villain." The example Yarvin proposes is:

It’s as you lived in 15th-century Paris and thought the Church was very corrupt and bad—but there was no alternative. You couldn’t be a cool Enlightenment philosophe or at least just a Protestant. Because it was the 15th century. And there weren’t even words for these things.

Back then, if you opposed "God, King and Church" there was only one role for you: Satan. Oops. The right thing to do would be to "invent Calvin or Voltaire," which would be something orthogonal to the regime narrative. Hey kids! Nothing to it!

So now Yarvin goes into the tall grass illustrating the three kinds of roles that dissidents play, and why they don't work.

Voyeur/Consumer This kind of person is like the sports fan watching TV. You can yell and scream all you like, but it doesn't make any difference. In fact, you are a consumer of political pornography, and pornography is a craft, not an art. You can get off on it, but it doesn't produce any children.

And this illustrates the difference between engagement and detachment. If you are detached you can appreciate the skill of the political porn craftsmen: how they stimulate the emotions.

Sucker/Saboteur This is the guy whose action has the opposite effect from the intended effect. The sucker is the guy that gets to play the stage villain in the regime morality play. Obviously, he is serving the regime, because he is proving to the multitude the truth of the regime's narrative. And so he is a saboteur, harming the cause of opposing the regime, because it is very hard to oppose the regime without becoming part of its morality play and playing the villain. And you know what always happens to the villain...

Player/Operator Here's the problem. If you decide to oppose the regime from outside you are helping the regime, because a regime needs enemies. Only when it is low on enemies does it resort to making them up, like "imaginary conspiracies, unstable teenagers, straight-out madmen, etc." Not to mention far-right white supremacists! So if you organize a cell to oppose the regime, you are doing it a favor. Hey, the regime should be paying you to oppose it! (Hmm. Doesn't the regime more or less "pay" BLM to oppose it?)

Then, of course you can infiltrate the regime and try to destroy it from within. But that doesn't work either. Yarvin quotes Vaclav Havel to the effect that once an opponent infiltrates the regime enough to do some damage he will either

be ejected by the power structure like a foreign organism, or he will be compelled to resign his individuality gradually, once again blending with the automatism and becoming its servant.

 In other words, the regime, like any organism, is programmed to keep itself alive. It detects foreign organisms and either kills them or neutralizes them. Which makes sense.

I suppose that what Curtis Yarvin is saying is that if you want to change the world you can't be playing the regime's game of power. You have to be playing another game. That, I think, is what Yarvin means by "detachment."

But whatabout successful revolutions? I suppose the main thing about them is that they happen when the regime runs out of money. As in France in 1789. As in Russia in 1917. As in Germany in the hyperinflation after World War I. And our regime hasn't run out of money. Not really close.

But then, I look at our present situation, and I'd say that the question of who is the regime and who isn't is a good question. Yes, you could say that the media, education, Hollywood, mega-corporations are all united. And they can cancel you at will. But, how powerful are they? Because they are involved in a game to fool the American people into thinking that down is up, that advocating for helpless victims is more than just the rulers dealing themselves a big helping of power, and not helping the victims one bit. When President Trump invokes our national heroes carved into the rock of Mount Rushmore, and making the Democrats and the media into cartoon villains, which is up and which is down?

And here's the thing that I come back to. All the great changes of the last 200 years have been effects of nobodies inventing new stuff that changed the world, completely orthogonal to the regime, and that took the regime by surprise. Maybe that is what Yarvin is talking about. If you are an Elon Musk building rockets to go to Mars, or Curtis Yarvin inventing a new software environment with his Urbit, there is no telling what the outcome might be.

And the politicians and regime supporters will be the last to know.

Ch2a: The Emptiness of Supporting Political Causes

In his "Gray Mirror" Curtis Yarvin argues against political involvement, because all political action ends up supporting the regime. In "#2a: positive causes are vain and unaccountable" he argues against  the nuts and bolts of pro-regime politics.

Let's put the three points down in order. Yarvin says that "[P]ositive causes that become popular tend to be" 

1. unaccountable (not selected for plausibility), 
2. vain (selected for creating a sense of power and importance), and 
3. sycophantic (reinforcing the regime).

Obviously, the nearest-to-hand example of this is climate change. For instance, if global warming is a problem we might fix it with "global carbon emissions control" at a cost of $50 trillion versus a program of "geo-engineering" that would cost $50 billion. Obviously, global carbon emissions control wins in a landslide because it is "elegant... expensive... and more popular" than a boring old cloud-seeding program.

And nobody would know if the program would work, anyway. But the attraction of carbon control is clear.

Obviously, when you say we should emit less carbon, what you objectively mean is that you support power in forcing everyone to emit less carbon.

Clearly, the attraction of climate change policy is that it is a fantastic ego trip, just like a big war. Wow! Imagine converting the whole economy to fighting carbon! It's almost as cool as FDR sending the Greatest Generation all across the world to fight Nazis and Japs.

And, of course, such a program is unaccountable. A better word would be to use Karl Popper's notion of a good scientific theory being "falsifiable." Climate change politics fails this test; it is unfalsifiable. It only asks you to believe. This would be rather like blaming witches because the milk turns sour. And suppose you kill half the women in the nation as witches and the milk is still sour? When do you decide that your politics isn't solving the problem?

Or, maybe higher temperatures are a good thing: "higher agricultural yields; better weather up north; insurance against the next ice age…" But really, where is the excitement in "higher agricultural yields." Who is going to peacefully protest for "higher agricultural yields?"

I'd say that all political causes are unaccountable, and that's probably the best argument for limited government. We are always being asked to buy a pig in a poke. Which form of government is best? Which program will work? Doesn't matter what it is, the advocates will continue to argue for it forever and the opponents will argue against it forever, and there will never be true evaluation of its benefits. Or,

As I write, exuberant volunteers are trashing historical monuments (X) to help protect the underclass (Y).

What could go wrong?

And we should be unsurprised, when we see these complex chains between X and Y, to find that X also has some more immediate effect Z—which expresses power. Z often involves punishing, humiliating, or otherwise chastising the enemies of the regime.

Yep. That is always the funnest part of politics. Chastising the enemies of the regime. Until the shoe is on the other foot, of course.

And that's the problem with a guy like me. I really don't want to teach those nice liberal ladies up the street a lesson. OK, I might like to show them how the statement "Science is Real" shows a lamentable ignorance about science.

But if everything comes down in the end to punishing the enemies of the regime, then ordinary people might wonder what use the regime is to them. I mean, if you are not into punishing, either on the front end or the back end, what is the point of politics and the power of the regime?

Maybe the best in life is to go off into a corner and invent a fusion-powered spaceship to fly to Mars. That wouldn't be unaccountable, because it would either work or not; it wouldn't be vain -- well, just a little bit; and it wouldn't be sycophantic to the regime -- why it might help people escape the regime. 

Ch2: The Emptiness of Political Action, For and Against the Regime

In the first chapter of his "Gray Mirror" Curtis Yarvin "marketed" his idea of "detachment." Now he's going to "argue" it, in "#2: The Action Imperative."

Kant, he says. The Categorical Imperative: that "everyone should act as if their actions formed a universal rule whose results are best for everyone." Early game theory. But suppose Kant was wrong?

Well, not exactly wrong. 

By default, you should still give up on politics, power, and even persuasion—because there is no obvious and realistic Kantian action...

You’re done trying to change the world. You quit that job. It didn’t seem to be working, anyway.

So what Yarvin is saying is that there is no action in politics that could form a universal rule whose results are the best for everyone. If that is true, then what?

Detachment. That's what.

Suppose you want to change the world, and you come up with an idea to change the world and you start to implement it. But there's a problem. There is no check and balance to make sure that you will actually change the world for the better. You idea is unaccountable. That is Bug One.

In fact, the way that politics works, the only ideas to change the world that get implemented are ideas that flatter the ambition and vanity and increase the power of the regime. And they have to be exciting. Who ever heard of a successful political idea that wasn't exciting? That's Bug Two.

So, the only useful ways to change the world are ideas that don't "generate power."

But whatabout an idea that "involves resisting an evil regime?" Problem is that you will almost certainly end up failing and adding to the power of the regime. This is called, in software development, "thrashing," trying to solve a bug without a strategy for solving it.

Actually, once you feel yourself thrashing, the right thing to do is always to step away from the keyboard—then lift or surf or run or something. There’s at least half a chance you’ll solve the problem before you get back.

I agree. Whether it's software or ideas. The best thing is to step away. Sooner or later your unconscious will solve the problem.

And, as a dissident, what is the point of adding to the power of the regime?

OK, let's put the arguments down in black and white:

On side A, we assert that positive causes are (a) unaccountable—not selected to be capable of achieving their ultimate goals; (b) vain—selected to maximize expression of power, real or apparent.

On side B, we assert that negative causes are (a) doomed—almost never capable of achieving even their proximate goals; (b) frivolous—selected to maximize their sense of excitement. 

Do you see why "detachment" is the answer? 

Ch1: Curtis Yarvin's "Gray Mirror" Project

The polymath Curtis Yarvin, smart Jewish kid that blogged for years as Mencius Moldbug and created Urbit, a new software environment, is at it again. He is writing "Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince" that proposes a politics for the 21st century.

But Yarvin is writing his book online, using Substack, "a place for independent writing." So you get to read the first two chapters of Gray Mirror on Substack for free. And then you can pay $22 for a subscription, or wait until the book comes out. I paid my $22 because I am fascinated by Yarvin, and think his ideas, right or wrong, should make you think. He certainly makes me think.

But Yarvin issues a dire warning. If you subscribe, he says, he'll send the fragments of his book to you by email. But:

If you forward them, kittens will die. If I violate the sanctity of your email, my kittens will die.

Oh no!

However, I assume that it is OK to analyze and discuss what Yarvin has written. So here goes on the first installment, "#1. A General Theory of Collaboration."

Back in the day, maybe, people could just hide from the world. But now in 2020 "everyone is relevant" and "everyone is either a collaborator or a dissident." with respect to political power.

Everything is about power. Everything has to have a side. Everyone knows what side they should pick. Pick it—and you're a collaborator. Reject it—a dissident.

It's a "total state" where everything is about power and everybody has to care. But if, as Yarvin proposes, the current regime is "broken, cannot be fixed, and merits neither your fealty nor your odium," and you should be neither collaborator or dissident, then what?

"Detachment," that's what. It's the strategy of Czech dissident Vaclav Havel. The strategy for people who wish to be free of their enslavement, as collaborators or dissidents in the total state, is this:

First, they must teach themselves to be powerless. They must fully inhabit their private irrelevance. Above all, they must stop trying to change the world.

So, in this, Yarvin is congruent with me, for I say that the important thing to understand about the modern world is that power is no longer that important, because wealth is no longer in land, but in peoples' minds, and you can't loot and plunder minds like you can good food-growing land. In fact, if you want to enjoy the fruits of peoples' minds you would want to fertilize and water those minds rather than plunder them.

Now it is time for a Three Phase history. Pre-civilized societies were total states, says Yarvin, because everyone was relevant. But then came pre-modern civilization:

[These] were partial states, in which power only concerned a small set of rulers, or regime. Everyone else was a subject[.]

But now, since Gutenberg and especially since the Internet, everyone is connected, everyone is relevant. And everyone has to love the regime: back to the future.

But power is insecure. That is why it wants us to love it. And the worse it gets the more it wants us to love it. "The closer a regime feels itself to death, the worse its behavior must become."

Sound familiar?

Our big problem in the current moment, says Yarvin, is the power leak, that "confers sovereign power on an individual or institution not formally entrusted with it." It is all around us, with lobbyists, corporations, non-profit groups that have power without responsibility. Unaccountable power is evil.

The point is, if I get it, that in any society beyond a hunter-gatherer band, there must be a regime and subjects, because the society is too big for everyone to be totally relevant like they are in a prehistoric society. In other words, ours is a society with "power leaks" in which people get to feel good because they have appropriated power from the regime. In fact we merely contribute to the gathering incompetence of the regime. Like right now.

So Yarvin wants an "ultramodern partial state" where we honestly admit to having officials with power and subjects without it -- and no power leaks. But that's OK, because

There are two principal advantages of a well-designed partial state. First: it tends to work much better. Second: its subjects, since their opinions don’t matter at all, can think and say what they want.

But what if the officials oppress the subjects? You mean like right now? Exactly. what could be worse than the current dysfunctional regime and its general incompetence? And if power is not really that important anyway, and not something that really benefits anyone, well, why not be "detached" and get on with life? 

For instance, you could spend five years on a disquisition about politics and power, in Unqualified Reservations, then invent a whole new software universe, like Urbit, and when you have got Urbit pretty well up and running, you take off and write a book about the new ultramodern partial state that is to come.

Interestingly, Yarvin is proposing what the Zman is writing about today, about people being unplatformed. Zman says: Don't fight back. "When you engage with them, you are giving them oxygen."

The way forward is to reduce the number of contacts between them and us.

In other words, "detachment." 

Gray Mirror -- Table of Contents

An Analysis of Curtis Yarvin's Gray Mirror.

1. Ch1: Curtis Yarvin's Gray Mirror Project
It could produce a "third story" to upend the Gentry

2. Ch2: The Emptiness of Political Action, For and Against the Regime

Either way, you prop up the regime

3. Ch2a: The Emptiness of Supporting Political Causes

You just increase the power of the ruling class

4. Ch2b: The Frivolity of Opposing the Regime

You just make the regime look stronger

5. So You Want a Revolution

How to have a revolution without a butcher's bill

6. Ch3: America's Real Constution: The "System"

And the System is run by the Cathedral

7. Politics Can't Change Anything, Unless...

8. First Principles of Yarvin's Next Regime

9. Ch4: But How Does a New Regime Come Into Being?

10. Ch5: How to Protect the Yeomen

11. Reducing Yarvin's Four Strata to Three Layers

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