Review of the neo-reactionary Curtis Yarvin and his "An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives"
An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives—Unqualified Reservations by Mencius Moldbug is refreshing. When you read it, you have the impression of being part of an attempt to seriously reappraise the mechanical process of how to govern a country from first principles, incorporating what we have learned from thousands of years of trial and error. It is not filled with status-seeking appeals to authority, it feels like a genuine effort to figure something out.
When reading mainstream political history, endorsed by mainstream institutions, the nature of the writing, primarily representing the author’s job application for the next rung on the academic hierarchy in the system of endorsement, is palpable. Now, we need Institutions, no text—especially one opining on such a complex, abstract system as the question of political governance—can hold up to scrutiny on the basis of the grammatical arguments present in the words and characters. All writing on governance is by definition sophistry.
So, when reading this text, like when I read any political text, I did not expect to come out with the precise dogmas about a new political system. My motivations for reading it came from the simple observation that the current system is so obviously deeply flawed. The people in positions are so obviously incompetent at running projects, all too capable at retroactively justifying the reasons for their own failure. One has the impression that the incentive system for obtaining power is broken, and we are operating despite our governance system, because of the material excess afforded by our incredible technological economy, in which less than a percent of the population is involved in creating the calories we need to survive, a few percent in harvesting natural resources and another 5% are involved in manufacturing those materials into goods. What are the remaining 90% to do?
In the same way that bronze-age agricultural societies replaced hunter-gatherer societies not because they entailed a better quality of life (see Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Wikipedia), but because they could sustain larger populations, swallowing them up. Our progressive form of government seems to have replaced monarchical societies, not necessarily because they produce better government, but, with such large populations become gradually more educated, literate, more capable of organizing and critically, more free from the all-consuming physical demands of manual labour due to technological innovation, over the long march of time, they demand the illusion of government for themself.
This deep human need to feel we are part-master of our destiny, referred to as the “thymos” (or thumos) in The End of History and the Last Man - Wikipedia. But it has the effect that, in order to achieve stability, or equilibrium, rather than creating a system which optimizing for delivery of useful projects which alleviate our collective suffering (always a technological task: 2023-11-30-history-is-the-history-of-improving-technology), we create a system which optimizes for the common denominator. Democracy is ‘mob rule’.
Anyway, I wanted to read Yarvin to know how we got here, and to develop better arguments to articulate the problem we face because I care about civilization and technology.
Yarvin stops one step short here from calling the overemployment of functionally and philosophically useless workers as paid dividends for allegiance to the state.
From an accounting perspective, inessential employees are performing makework to hide the fact that they are actually receiving dividends, ie, acting as bloodsucking parasites. […] Our sociology professor jumped through quite a few hoops, none of which he invented himself, in order to receive what is probably not a very large payment. Moreover, as a sociology professor he is part of the ruling class, and the Wand of Fnargl does not last forever. Keep your friends close, as they say, and your enemies closer. He is already being paid to lie for money to support the old regime.
From Clear Pill.
Consider this cycle:
The intellectual command economy rules. Public opinion is directed by a dogmatic bureaucracy, rife with pervasive error, systematically incapable of changing its mind. An unofficial free market for truth evolves. This market cannot be poisoned by power, because it has no power. It develops a higher-quality product than the official narrative. A new epistemic elite arises. The old intellectual bureaucracy, smart enough to sense its own inferiority, hands power to the new truth market. A new golden age begins. Dogmatic bureaucracy returns. Slowly and inevitably poisoned by power, the once-vibrant civil society slowly ossifies into a dogmatic bureaucracy, evolving more and more pretty lies until pervasive error is again the norm. Western civilization has been repeating this story over and over for roughly the last half-millennium. At each step in the cycle, there is no clear way to prevent the next.