NEOREACTION FOR PERENNIALISTS

by James Lawrence

As the Trump Train crashes and burns, the Qopers and Blumpf-bashers are fighting over the question of who was Right All Along, and it's all so tiresome. Especially as both sides are clueless.

 

The Qopers are clueless because they have been strung along for three years (probably by a lone Trumpist in the intelligence agencies), on a string of backstage tidbits that made them feel so flattered and informed that they ignored the reality in front of everyone's eyes. And the Blumpf-bashers are clueless because they still haven't figured out that the US President is not really in charge, and that there are bigger constraints on his action than cuckservative sympathies and sinister Jewish relatives.

And who are not clueless? The normie conservatives. The people who think that Trump wanted to do good things, but was dragged under by the 'deep state'. This is a little crude and understated, but it certainly isn't wrong. Somehow, the people are finally moving in the right direction, but their self-described ideological vanguard has made so many wrong turns as to wind up at the back end of nowhere.

Once it becomes clear that Trump is out of commission, and that the fantasies of secessionists and other larpers cannot take his place, a space for true leadership will open up at the head of this dissident multitude. But this space should be kept open. We should not try to occupy it; rather, we should bully and expose and ridicule anyone else who tries, until the space is approached by someone who cannot be driven away by these methods.

We have tried suppressing our natural inclination to do this. We have tried trusting every plan, following anyone who shows up to lead us, and assuming that it is always better to do something than to do nothing. Well, look where it got us. If the last four years have taught us anything, it is that conservatism is a racket and that right-wing activism is a useless cargo-cult. This means that anyone whose life plans involve grifting his way into conservatism, or starting the next big right-wing activist movement, has no honourable option but to cancel those plans and devote himself to something else.

This logic should not spare the 'thought-leader' peddling the next big right-wing cult. Dissidents already have the right ideas: liberty, morality, nationhood. We have no need to choose between absolute ideologies, such as liberalism, moralism, and nationalism. Instead of searching for the magic string of numbers to key into the vending-machine of democratic politics, we need to stop dropping coins in the slot and kick out the plug as we walk away. Until we find a worthy leader who has the power to actualise our ideas, we should define our position by the pure negation of democratic politics.

In the last couple of posts, I've been sketching out the theory and practice of this negation. 

 

Building on the work of Mencius Moldbug (who really deserves the title of Right All Along), I showed that modern democracy divides its citizens from its subjects just like ancient Athens. The ruling triad of scholar-priests, bureaucrats and political classes are the true demos in democracy; everyone else belongs to the subject people. 

 

The demos has acquired a habit of conflating itself with the people, and likes to confuse matters further by extending patronage to client groups within it. But let's just say that if you live in the US, and you feel that the last four years of #Resistance against Trump (including the stolen election) has decreased your power rather than increased it, you can be assured that you belong to the people and not the demos. "Do you feel in charge?"

This understanding leads us to a strategy: the #NoVote movement. We cannot escape the rule of the demos – at least not yet – but we can stop voting for it. The conservative protection racket is the only part of the system that we plebs hold the power to destroy. And we should not fear the consequences of using that power. By ceasing to vote, we can annihilate the value of the client groups to the state, and enable counterrevolutionary forces to take shape outside the kabuki show of democratic politics.

So far, so good. But there's still something missing here.

Let's say that everything turns out as an impassive anti-democrat would wish. Trump is thrown under the bus by the GOPniks and conservative judges, and later prosecuted for making little brown children cry during his time in office. The con party tries to return to business as usual, but millions of people have seen behind the curtain and start to boycott the vote. Over time, this boycott becomes a true spiritual exodus from democracy, which sucks in most conservative voters and a huge number of leftists as well. By the time voting is made compulsory, the illusion of choice is dead in the water, and the majority of people understand the suffrage to be a ritual of homage to a one-party state. 

The demos and its clients have won a Pyrrhic victory. On the one hand, the revolution has total power, and can impose the forces of chaos on an unlimited scale. On the other hand, the forces of order are perennial, and they are no longer being contained by the conservative ghetto and its do-nothing ideology. Once total power falls into their hands – as it did in Republican France, Soviet Russia and Communist China – they can impose reaction right back.

And so, sooner or later, a tyrant comes to power. Perhaps he is a military strongman; perhaps he is an old-style socialist; perhaps he is a progressive who no longer needs progressivism; or perhaps he is a dissident who infiltrated the one-party state after the destruction of the con party. Perhaps he zigzags between revolution and reaction, like Stalin; perhaps he promotes revolution like Mao, and is succeeded by a reactionary like Deng; perhaps (if we are lucky), he is a reactionary from the beginning, like Napoleon. 

 

I won't bullshit you on this point. Tyranny will not be pleasant for America and the West, and we can only hope that it will not last long. But the logic of state power will finally be on our side of the ledger. No tyrant can afford to do away with the productive classes, many of whom will be well out of his way in the countryside anyway. By contrast, most of the leftist client groups – and certainly the most objectionable ones – will be useless to the state once they can no longer serve as votebanks. 

 

Moreover, tyrants tend to brutalise those immediately below them in the pecking order. So, while the tyranny of the demos has been the misfortune of the people, the tyranny of a tyrant will be the misfortune of the demos. Of course, the demos turns every pathetic challenge to its power into an object lesson in the horrors of tyranny; whereas the consequences of its own anarcho-tyranny, such as the ethnic cleansing of whites from cities and the punishment of prisoners by homosexual rape, are occasions for euphemism or even humour. So the tyrant's name is bound to go down in blackest infamy among the literati, but folk memory may be a little more ambivalent.

However, the office of a tyrant is not permanent. He cannot hope to dodge the sword of Damocles indefinitely, and this goes double for his successors. So the natural end of tyranny, whether it takes a few months or a few decades, is the establishment of a stable regime based on some formula for legitimate rule. 

 

And here we come to the missing piece of our puzzle.

At present, the modern West has no formula for legitimate rule other than democracy. And this means that our tyrant, if he wants stability, is bound to restore democracy. Even most dissidents just want a return to democracy, minus some or other blemish of the modern regime: the oversized state, the huge dependent underclass, the immigration invasion, the vile empowered wimmin, or the anti-traditional secular religion.

This attitude is misguided. Up until the mid-twentieth century, the West was able to have its democratic cake without being forced to eat it. Democracy was important, as it legitimised the state. But it did so in the essentially religious form of popular sovereignty, which was put into practice only now and again when the people voted in elections. Actual rule was exercised by parliaments and presidents, i.e. elective oligarchies and elective monarchs. This arrangement rested on the truism that Athenian-style direct democracy could not be practiced in a large territorial state.

The Chinese knew better than to
hand total power to scholar-bureaucrats.

And this held true, as long as no multitude of people – not the gentry, not the bourgeoisie, and not the whole voting public – could hope to run the state directly without dragging it into anarchy. But in the modern state, the scholar-bureaucracy can and has become the core of a ruling demos. Its members do not have to assemble in person, as they can communicate by letters. And they need not drag the state into anarchy, because they rule through a triad of central institutions: the Cathedral (academia and media), the Bureau (civil service and quangos), and the Show (electoral politics). 

None of these institutions rules in its own right. Like the Assembly, Council and Courts of ancient Athenian democracy, they are distinct outlets for the collective rule of the demos. The Cathedral constructs 'truth' by academic peer-review, and propagates it by competitive journalism; the Bureau exercises a distributed despotism; and the Show allows deliberation by ritual civil war between two political factions. Only the last of these brings the people into play – and then only in the subject capacity of foot-soldiers, whose leaders are more directly influenced by the other two political demes, the Front (activists) and Shop (lobbyists).

So direct democracy is back with a vengeance. It is the political cancer behind all those surface blemishes on the modern regime. And the old electoral ritual of solve et coagula – in which power was dissipated out to the people, and then reunited into oligarchies or monarchies – simply cannot work with this massive wrench in its gears. 

 

Even if our tyrant were to decimate the demos before restoring the old constitution, the constant leakage of power from elective government would be sucked up by scholar-bureaucrats until the demos had reconstructed itself. And then the new demos would do as its predecessor did: rule in the most wasteful and directionless way imaginable, and start a race to the bottom in clientage, repurposing the electoral structure to filter power down to the people in ways that serve the demos.

No race to the bottom – whether in warfare, or in capitalism, or in clientage – is good for the ordinary people who have to do the running. And note that the second and third of these examples are just civilised variants on the first one. War is the perennial archetype of unrestrained competition, and it admits of a perennial solution: the unification of political power. Not coincidentally, this would also solve the other great defect of democracy (which is as evident today as it was in ancient Athens): the inability of a ruling mob to respond to a crisis with anything resembling practical wisdom. 

 

It is the strong, unified state – and not the weak, divided one – that can grant freedom to the people, by keeping an iron grip on the scholar-bureaucracy. And yet, as I've said, permanent arbitrary tyranny is neither desirable nor possible. So we dissidents must come up with an alternative vision: a blueprint for a stable, legitimate regime that is neither democracy nor tyranny. If our theory is the bow, and our strategy the arrow, then this vision is to be the target.

Here, too, we must begin with the work of Moldbug. There is no other choice, because he is the only one who has dared to break this ground. Others have offered policy suggestions for the God-Emperor of the future, or pointed to examples of good goverment from the past. But only Moldbug has made a detailed and coherent attempt to imagine a post-democratic regime that could be built in the present day.

And that's a bit of a problem. Because much of what Moldbug has written is almost enough to make the average reader feel warm and fuzzy about democracy. Here's a sample (emphasis mine):

"Let’s start with my ideal world – the world of thousands, preferably even tens of thousands, of neocameralist city-states and ministates, or neostates. The organizations which own and operate these neostates are for-profit sovereign corporations, or sovcorps."

And here's a closer look at what this entails:

"The Delegate exercises undivided sovereign authority, as in divine-right monarchy. ... This fragile-looking design can succeed at the sovereign layer because, and only because, modern encryption technology makes it feasible. The proprietors use a secret-sharing scheme to control a root key that must regularly reauthorize the Delegate, and thus in turn the command hierarchy of the security forces, in a pyramid leading down to cryptographic locks on individual weapons....

 

"And who are the proprietors? Anyone. They are anonymous shareholders. It may be desirable, though, for a realm to enjoin its residents from holding its shares. It is not normally necessary for a company to refrain from serving its shareholders as customers, but a sovereign realm is not a normal company... We’ll also assume....that realms exist in a competitive market in which residents can easily take their business elsewhere if they don’t like the service...

 

"One way to see internal security in a Patchwork realm is as a compromise between two sorts of Orwellianism. In the sense that the realm is (effectively) omniscient and omnipotent, it would fit most peoples’ definition of "Orwellian." In return for its Orwellian powers of observation and action, however, Friscorp has no interest at all in the other half of Orwellianism: the psychological manipulation of public opinion as a device for regime stabilization. The realm cares what its residents do. It does not care what they think."

So this is Moldbug's vision. Sovereign power is to be divided up into a patchwork of private corporations, each of which holds absolute power over the people living in its territory. These corporations will be run on neocameralist principles: as joint-stock companies (absolute states), owned by shareholders (global oligarchs), and ruled by CEOs (elective monarchs). They will be protected by crypto-locked weaponry, allowing them to rely on private security (mercenaries) without fear of coups d'état. Thus holding power securely, they will be free to let their customers (subjects) think what they want and do most of what they want.

They will also be free to do the opposite, of course. But they will be conditioned by the incentive structures of an open market in government, in which the subjects customers will be able to shop around. So if we were to ask Moldbug why his sovcorps should not tax us to death, deny us burial in order to reduce expense, and grind our bones to make expensive aphrodisiacs for Chinese billionaires, he'd tell us that it wouldn't be good for business. And why, then, should the sovcorps not close their borders? Because lack of competition wouldn't be in the interests of the shareholders. Trust the market, bro!

Now, bear in mind that these posts (this one and this one) date from the early years of Moldbug's old blog. In later posts (e.g. this one, this one and this one) he smooths over the sharper edges of his stainless-steel corporate utopia, and scattered comments elsewhere suggest that he may have gone back on more of it than most people realise. (Note: I'm going to be throwing in a lot of links to Moldbug, but I suggest you read at your own leisure, as he is notoriously long-winded.)

Neocameralism, a.k.a. "Universal Dubai

Even so, Moldbug has never repudiated this stuff. These early posts on neocameralism still constitute the clearest iteration of his vision. And this vision, as I've said, is still the only one out there that makes a serious attempt to deal with the realities of power. Everything else – from liberalism, to moralism, to nationalism – is just a fantasy of a better future, designed to seduce normal people on the assumption that they can vote it into reality.

Admittedly, there is so much wishful thinking in the neocameralist vision as to make this distinction less than obvious. At least one ex-NRx writer seems to think that it is just one dream among others – albeit one contaminated by the cosmopolitan elitism of a nerdy half-Jewish bureau-brat. Before I acquired the conviction that Moldbug was Right All Along, and went back to take a second look at his blog, I would've said much the same thing.

 

In this post, I propose to defend his vision, not by prettifying it but by taking a scalpel to it. What emerges from this treatment, I hope, will be the perennialist kernel of neocameralism. By perennialist, I do not mean 'aesthetically traditionalist', but 'concerned with essential realities as opposed to transient conditions and personal preferences'.

Let's start at the beginning: Moldbug's first blog post, dated to mid-2007, in which he introduces the concept of formalism. Here's the meat of that sausage:

"The basic idea of formalism is just that the main problem in human affairs is violence. The goal is to design a way for humans to interact, on a planet of remarkably limited size, without violence...

 

"[V]iolence equals conflict plus uncertainty. While there are wallets in the world, conflict will exist. But if we can eliminate uncertainty – if there is an unambiguous, unbreakable rule that tells us, in advance, who gets the wallet – I have no reason to sneak my hand into your pocket, and you have no reason to run after me shooting wildly into the air...

"Formalism says: let’s figure out exactly who has what, now, and give them a fancy little certificate. Let’s not get into who should have what. Because, like it or not, this is simply a recipe for more violence."

Formalism is one-part political honesty, one-part social amor fati, and one-part conflict resolution. At first, it seems to conjure up an anarcho-capitalist world, in which everything is parcelled out to private owners and traded around by contractual consent. But then Moldbug applies formalist principles to the United States government. It controls territory, and taxes people, ergo it owns that territory and those people. The democratic religion that says otherwise (and is believed by libertarians) is just so much informalism – political dishonesty, social fantasy, and conflict promotion.

 

Moldbug embraces this conclusion:

 

"So this is the formalist manifesto: that the US is just a corporation. It is not a mystic trust consigned to us by the generations... It is just an big old company that holds a huge pile of assets... To a formalist, the way to fix the US is to dispense with the ancient mystical horseradish, the corporate prayers and war chants, figure out who owns this monstrosity, and let them decide what in the heck they are going to do with it...

 

"Whether we’re talking about the US, Baltimore, or your wallet, a formalist is only happy when ownership and control are one and the same. To reformalize, therefore, we need to figure out who has actual power in the US, and assign shares in such a way as to reproduce this distribution as closely as possible."

 

Let's stop here, before Moldbug smuggles the whole barrel of assumptions past our watch. Why say that the US government is "just a corporation",  and discard its state religion (i.e. democracy) on this basis? To a perennialist, it makes more sense to say that a corporation is a special case of a state. It is, of course, a subordinate and dependent type of state – which is why it doesn't have corporate prayers, or war chants, or any other residue of sacral kingship and civic religion. Sacralised government, however, would seem to be Lindy for any state that has to worry about legitimacy and self-defence.

But let's leave that thread hanging for the moment, while we pick up a shorter one. Formalism, Moldbug says, demands the unity of ownership and control. But why should we pursue this by assigning shares on the basis of political power – with the implication, confirmed in a later post, that this will end up at the normal corporate structure in which the shareholders delegate management to a CEO?

Why not, instead, decentralise power by handing it directly to the shareholders? Why not parcel out political jurisdictions as property rights, as in mediaeval England? And if this seems unworkable in an age of centralised government, why not enroll the shareholders in a legal register of citizens – in other words, formalise the demos? They could dress up as ancient Greeks, make pompous speeches, tattle on each other, and maybe find a way to virtue-signal that does not involve upending the lives of their serfs.

These alternatives are compatible with formalism. But they are overridden by a second Moldbuggian principle, which is named much later on (in this post) as archism. As the name suggests, archism is the opposite of anarchism, and the gist of it is that the concentration of power is good for life, liberty and happiness.

Archism is one-part descriptive theory and one-part prescriptive ideal. As description, archism states that human beings do not organise themselves freely, laterally and spontaneously, à la social contract theory. Man is not "born free", as Rousseau lied in The Social Contract. He is born into dependency on his superiors, and this basic patronage relationship recurs throughout all human societies – including, of course, the democratic society in which it must disguise its nature.

 

So the 'freedom' of anarchy is, in truth, the freedom of various patrons and political factions to struggle for power at everyone else's expense. This brings us to the archist prescription: bind power up in a single institution so that it can keep the peace. The most obvious application is to a country at civil war (and the aftertaste of such a war explains why Hobbes' Leviathan was prescriptively archist, despite being descriptively anarchist). But the same logic extends to liberal constitutions based on competitive parties and separated powers. They are recipes for constant low-level civil war, which causes the various parts of the state to swell up in order to compensate for their insecurity.

Hobbes' Leviathan: an archist political prescription
from an anarchist description of society

Why, then, should we not seek the ultimate fulfilment of archism in the rule of a tyrant? Well, we might – if humans could be ruled by an immortal, invulnerable tyrant interested solely in collecting our taxes. But tyrants are humans too, ergo they are mortal, insecure and unpredictable. And this is why tyranny ends up in another form of civil war: the tyrant vs. everyone who might conceivably thwart his plans or take his power. What is needed for a stable order is a permanent ruling institution and a temporary human power-wielder.

This is what Moldbug hopes to achieve through the corporate model of governance. The body of shareholders will not exercise power directly, and they will be kept on the same page by the common interest in high dividends. The CEO (or delegate, or dictator, or elective king or whatever) will be responsible to the shareholders, and will have no reason to secure his position by tyrannical methods. Thus, power struggle will be reduced to an absolute minimum. You've got to admit he's thought things through.

Having established all this, we can approach what looks like a bug in the mold. 

 

Contra dissident hysterics, not everyone who holds power today is some sort of reprobate. But the demos is collectively responsible for all sorts of crimes: the ethnic cleansing of whites, the destruction of the family, the worldwide tide of revolutionary chaos, etc. By the eve of regime change, all these 'conspiracy theories' will be out in the open, and the demos will probably have lengthened its rap sheet in the course of trying to suppress them. If its members deserve 'dividends' from the new regime, they ought to be measured in lashes, and yet Moldbug proposes to pay them out of the taxes of the people. This is repugnant to the moral sense of most people on the Right.

Moldbug, you see, does not expect neocameralism to be midwifed by a tyrant. He wants a velvet coup, preferably achieved through a popular vote with an absolute minimum of violence. Because the people will not have the power to depose the demos by force, it will have to be persuaded into stepping aside. Hence the wisdom of buying off as many power-holders as possible, by allowing them to become shareholders in the new regime.

As peaceweaving and realpolitik, this is all very well. But it frequently crosses the line into pure naivety, driven by Moldbug's genuine horror of violence. In one (otherwise brilliant) post, he says that his coup would retire the whole Bureau on full pay, while refusing to reward anyone involved in bringing about the coup. Later, he advocates similar treatment for the Cathedral: dissolve its institutions, retire their employees (presumably on full pay again), but allow them to network and speak freely in exile.

 

I have to say these passages are indefensible. Does Moldbug expect people to pull off a coup at great personal risk, only to go back to the fields and toil for the leisure of the old ruling class? And does he think these old-regimers will not use their freedom to scheme against the new regime, which has just decreed their 'work' to be so much worse than useless that they would better serve society as idlers? What he is proposing might be called a Samnite compromise: humilating enemies without harming them, and thus ensuring that they will take revenge at the next available opportunity.

 

When we set up the new regime, we will be formalising the structure of power as it exists on the last day of the old regime. But if this power structure has not changed at all in the course of the coup, then regime change will not even be on the cards. To change it in a favourable way, without bloodshed, we will have to buy off certain key institutions: the military, the police, and the core parts of the bureaucracy, media, and political class. Divide et impera has worked on the people; why should we not use it on the demos? 

 

Note that the usefulness of these elites roughly dovetails with their moral standing (which is what would be suggested by the classical definition of virtue). We may have to co-opt the odd reprobate; but for the most part, those whom prudence dictates we turn into shareholders will also be the most deserving. As for the rabble of the demos – the quangocrats, the activists, the journo-inquisitors, the worthless revolutionary academics – we cannot easily co-opt them and we have no reason to try. Better to give the people a one-off bonanza after prying these leeches from their berths. They will think themselves lucky if we let them find pleb jobs in peace, and do not indenture them to Third World parvenus so that they can work off their colonial guilt.

 

This is the real way to minimise violence, by ensuring that the coup does not fail and devolve into civil war. Of course, I still reckon my blackpilled tyranny scenario is more realistic. Even if we were not swimming against a propaganda tide, there would be untold difficulties in getting people to vote for a regime in which they will never vote again. 

But political irrelevance is not a bad deal for the people. Those who cannot defend themselves against the sword of Damocles should not try to sit on the throne. It is that sword that has decimated white populations, handicapped the productive, and emasculated men, by motivating the state to patronise foreigners, lumpenproles and women in the quest for dependent votebanks. This, in turn, causes general misery by enforcing the dominance of the unworthy. Take away the vote, and the state goes back to prizing the virtuous – or, at least, ceasing to actively subvert the order of the people.

More importantly, shareholding is not a good deal for the demos. Moldbug speaks of uniting ownership and control, but neocameralism would do no such thing. The ultimate authority of ownership would be in the hands of the shareholders, but day-to-day control would be in the hands of the elected managers. In political terms, the shareholders would have sovereignty and the managers would exercise government. Under old-time democratic republicanism, the electorate had sovereignty and the politicians and bureaucrats did government, and we all know how that turned out.

But even if the shareholding rump of the demos could hold onto political power, it would still lose something no less important: religious authority.

I mentioned that Moldbug's statement, "the US is just a corporation", doesn't really make sense because a corporation is a special case of a state. But this is like complaining that a Zen koan doesn't work as a logical syllogism. By using the desacralised language of the corporation on the democratic state, Moldbug is wielding political tools to fight on religious ground. He is redpilling us – jolting us out of our mindless devotion to the democratic religion, by asking why it insists on a model of governance that would be laughed out of any corporate board meeting.

Moldbug's red pill, which inspired
all sorts of counterfeits.

The redpill works because it gets to exploit a number of contradictions in the Matrix. The demos wants to hold religious authority as well as political power, but would rather do so by reducing religion to political dogmas than by subordinating politics to religious dogmas. Worse, it wants to sanctify the sclerotic government created by its dogmas, while relying for production on what are basically miniature absolute monarchies. By the time Moldbug gets around to telling us how the dogmas of democracy were recycled from bastardised forms of Christianity, we don't need any more convincing that the whole thing is an ignoble lie.

However, this line of thought can only take us so far. No spiritual religion can suffer fundamental damage from a secular critique, because its main object of belief is well beyond reach. Conversely, low-level cults of the state – mythologised founders, national symbolism, civic ceremonies and so on – can suffer only limited damage, because their claims do not stray too far beyond earthly reality. The ancient Athenians did not need a redpill, despite their habit of imagining Demos as a demigod. But had they been monotheists, and felt compelled to dispense with Zeus so that they could address sole worship to Demos, then they would have needed a redpill.

Moldbug's redpill works because the religion of democracy is false. It is a degenerate bastard of profanated monotheism on the one hand, and the civic idealism of popular sovereignty on the other. As such, it lays claim to moral absolutes that it can only justify by brute force, and does not so much sacralise everyday reality as distort it outright. It is, in short, just what it claims every other religion to be: a convenient collective delusion, maintained largely for the sake of power.

But Moldbug doesn't see things in this way. When he traces the descent of progressive ideology from the Puritans, he doesn't speak of degeneration. He just sees an ongoing mutation of various irrational beliefs, and their spread into more and more areas of rational thought – like a benign tumour turning cancerous and invasive. To disestablish democracy, only to go back to a spiritual religion like Christianity, would be like curing the cancer and sparing the tumour.

This leads Moldbug to propose something very ambitious (and not very perennialist): the founding of the neocameralist order on pure political power, without reference to religious authority. To do this, all the political benefits of religious authority – which, properly understood, extend to most forms of 'soft power' – must be substituted by various sticks and carrots. Crypto-locked weaponry must stand in for human loyalty; the profit motive must take the place of benevolent governance; and the inter-state patchwork must fill the void of collective purpose.

It is bold, it is grimly utopian, and it is doomed to failure.

Let's start with the crypto-locked weapons. Although I suspect that such locks would be easily jammed or removed, I'm not going to dispute tech with Curtis Yarvin. What I will say is that he seems to be engaging in wishful thinking. In an unusually idealistic post – which argues that deception of the masses should be the sole criterion for regime change – he purports to explain why the stability that comes from crypto-locks is good, and the stability that comes from brainwashing every citizen is bad (emphasis mine): 

 

"When lawful authority is married to digital security, as it is today with the nuclear football, coups become impossible. Loyal forces will find that their weapons operate. Disloyal units might as well be wielding Super Soakers.

 

"And, again, once military loyalty is assured, crowd control is a trivial problem. The era of mob rule is over. It just doesn’t know it yet.

 

"...[P]erhaps most important, propaganda (pseudohistory and pseudoscience) is an epiphenomenon of 19C and 20C information technology, which gave strong advantages to broadcast designs. Broadcast propaganda works...[but p]seudohistory and pseudoscience, when forced to confront reason on a level playing field, tend to lose. ... A few reasonable people can defeat a giant horde of brainwashed flacks. The latter, again, might as well be armed with Super Soakers.

 

"If you accept the proposition...that pseudohistory and pseudoscience are widespread in the present Western institutions of education and journalism, the appearance of a level playing field—peer-to-peer packet networking, aka this little thing called “the Internet”—creates an impressive disequilibrium." 

Bear in mind, this is from 2007. Thirteen years later, in the age of mass deplatforming and algorithm-fiddling, the naivety is jarring. As we're beginning to understand, the internet can act as a level playing field, but it can also act as another rigged Matrix in which the demos gets anarchy and everyone else gets tyranny. In the same way, crypto-locked weaponry could uphold an oligo-monarchy, but it could also open up new vistas of democratic degeneracy. If the demos got hold of (say) a crypto-locked robot horde that could defend it in a full-scale war, it would probably purge the army and police and end up even more reliant on brainwashing for basic public order.

 

Just as a tool does the bidding of its wielder, modern technology is subordinate to perennial power structures. We should make use of it as best we can, but we should not seek salvation in it – especially not by expecting it to promote anarchism in one context, and archism in another. Moldbug, contrary to popular misconceptions, does not worship at the altar of technology. So why does he fall into wishful thinking on this point? Because he's a nerd and not a jock, a priest and not a warrior, etc., and so he would naturally prefer to live in a world that restrains the body while liberating the mind.

 

Unfortunately, an oligo-monarchy requires more stability than a democracy, in which every sociopathic status-seeker can be found a place at the trough. And even if crypto-locked weapons could provide it, a government aiming at permanent stability cannot rely on a modern innovation that might be obsolete tomorrow. The new state will rest ultimately on human loyalty, and so would not dispense with the normal cultic ties that bind the rulers to the ruled: a ban on sedition, a shared interest in public morals, a patriotism imbued with national feeling, a noble class that lives in the country (and, one would hope, shows some nobility), and probably a new or old state religion.

Aside from this, I agree with Moldbug that state power should be made as secure as possible. And while loyalty may be indispensable, mass activist politics is a bad joke that ought to be put out of its misery. So the new state will have national patriotism, and a ban on sedition, and a shared religion, but it will not permit sociopaths and hysterics to mobilise witch-hunts in the name of these things. And archist logic holds up nicely on 'free speech', that perfect enemy of the good. It is much easier for people to observe a taboo on lèse-majesté than to navigate the ever-growing minefield of lèse-démocratie.

So let's move onto the idea of government-for-profit. 

 

As a rule, all states are interested in prosperity, because they tax the wealth of their subjects. The perennial exception is the state at civil war, in which the power-holders will gladly flood the country with mercenaries and despoil the fields of their enemies for the most trivial advantage. As we have established, the main reason why the demos is more interested in clientage than prosperity is that Western democracy is based on constant ritual civil war. By restoring a stable order, we can restore the natural state interest in prosperity (which will generally be good for the kulaks, bad for the votebanks, etc.).

But this can only go so far. A sovereign state – armed with all the tools of coercion, and enjoying the ultimate natural monopoly – simply does not relate to its subjects in the same way that a business corporation relates to its customers. Nor can it live by the pure economic ethos of the corporation, which is conditioned by subordination to the state and specialisation for the market. To pretend otherwise is to conjure up another deceptive fantasy-world, albeit one much less attractive and compelling than the eighteenth-century larp of electoral politics.

Chartalism for intellectuals

Let's also not forget that the modern state prints its own money, and is not likely to give up this level of control over its economy. Moldbug thinks the new regime will return to the gold standard, because spontaneous market forces will choose gold over fiat money. But this is a weird anarchist lacuna in his thought. A more consistent application of Moldbuggery to the modern economy would give us something like chartalism, and lead us to expect that the shareholders will be paid in the state's own scrip – which, according to Moldbug, act as a sort of sovereign corporate equity. This may not affect the shareholders much, but it further destroys the illusion of their independence.

 

It is best to speak plainly, and call the shareholders what they are: a noble oligarchy, formed from the co-opted elite of the old regime, electing a monarchical government in return for a constant flow of money. They should not only live within the state, but also form some sort of senatorial class, perhaps after a period of free trading in shares has eliminated smaller and less serious shareholders. Even if their sole function were to elect a monarch for life, Papal-style, this would be immensely valuable because it would disconnect those monarchs from the power base of the new managerial bureaucracy. Perhaps this system would eventually degrade into hereditary monarchy; but this is always preferable to civil war, tyranny, democracy, etc.

 

Finally, we come to Moldbug's patchwork vision (mainly outlined here and here). In these posts, neocameralism catches a nasty idealist bug, and rebels against its conceptual parents – formalism and archism. It's not so much a lacuna as a black hole swallowing up the rest of Moldbug's worldview.

First, Moldbug abandons his "chilly, Machiavellian cynicism", and embarks on an idealistic quest for political division (emphasis mine in all quotations):

 

"The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions. If residents don't like their government, they can and should move...
 

"The essential inspiration for Patchwork is the observation that the periods in which human civilization has flowered are the periods in which it has been most politically divided. Ancient Greece, medieval Italy, Europe until 1914, China in the Spring and Autumn Period, and so on."

 

Unfortunately, these periods of history also produce war and populism, two things that Moldbug professes to hate. Not to worry: his patchwork states will only compete economically. So they will be subordinated to a higher power, as per archism? Well, no:

"Between realms, our goal is to achieve the same or nearly the same level of stability, without building anything like a centralized authority that would impose it. A centralized or federalized authority with the power of judgment or enforcement is itself the government—and if you try to split judgment and enforcement into competing agencies, you are just asking for trouble.

 

"Patchwork has no central authority or community of realms. It has conventions, such as rules protecting shared resources (the atmosphere, the oceans and the fish in them, orbital space, etc.) from any abuse that would be collectively uneconomic. Sometimes people need to get together and update these rules...but they are only occasional delegates and do not constitute any sort of permanent organization. Sometimes realms must vote on these changes, but this is a rare event indeed. Turning the entire system into One Big State is a failure mode, not a goal."

The usual pattern (as you'll see if you click that last link) is for divided states to unify themselves at a massive price in bloodshed, which tend to drag mob politics and popular government in its train. Only under the condition that this outcome will be absolutely forestalled should reactionaries embark on the dangerous experiment of breaking up an empire. Here's what Moldbug offers:

"Ideally, politics is at a complete end, as is war as a means of political endeavor. Except through free and peaceful transfers of shares, there should be no further changes in power. Each realm in each patch should last forever. Frankly, if this isn’t world peace, I don’t know what is...

 

"(Transfers of shares that constitute a merger into bigger and bigger patches, eventually ending in a one-patch world, should be blocked in some way. Since realms do not control their shares, this cannot be done by restricting share transfers. However, it can be done by including a promise of independent ownership in the realm’s resident covenant. Like any other item in the covenant, it can be violated, but usually not profitably.)

 

"The basic secret of inter-realm relations in Patchwork is that it is much, much easier to construct rules for a community of rational or orderly sovereigns than for a community of irrational ones. Therefore, even in a world which contains both rational and irrational sovereigns, it is rational for rational sovereigns to have different rules for other rational sovereigns....

 

"Orderly sovereigns deal with each other in a very different way, because orderly sovereigns are sovereigns for whom deterrence always works [Moldbug's emphasis]. Therefore, it is extremely easy to discourage predation: it can be deterred either (a) through collective disapproval—which might become quite costly, especially if the disapproval of other realms leads to the disapproval of one’s present residents, as it almost certainly would; or (b), all else failing, military retaliation.

 

"Military retaliation is important because, in real life, it is rather hard to make war profitable, and rather easy to make it unprofitable. While there is no shortage of rational sovereigns in history, history’s profitable wars are often best explained in terms of irrationality....

 

"Among rational sovereigns, the theoretical military confrontations which would otherwise occur between Patchwork realms, and which there is no authority to prevent, will just not happen. Armaments will be gradually de-escalated...and security forces will revert to police forces.

 

"Of course, this process of complete de-escalation can only happen in an all-Patchwork world... Against the rest of the world, Patchwork is at least expected to stick together, possibly even forming joint security institutions—which are temporary, of course, based on the specific threat."

"It can be violated, but usually not profitably."

I don't like to quote Moldbug at such length, only to dump on him, but it's necessary to show just how far these posts deviate from the rest of his work. In the highlighted passages, he reverts to all the generic backstops of prescriptive anarchism: inviolable constitutions, right reason, and public opinion, all dressed up in a slightly alien language. Those who value Moldbug's critique of democracy, and yet take his patchwork seriously, have somehow contrived to swallow the pill and spit out the red stuff. 

In Moldbug's defence, the true archist key to patchwork is provided elsewhere in his work. But we would be forgiven for not finding it. Here it is (from the comments):

"[A single sovereign empire] has no reason at all to administer the entire planet as a single giant country. In fact it will recognize that different people have many different preferences, and that large administrative structures are topheavy.

"Therefore it is very likely to decentralize itself into a layer of city-states which are administratively independent, but which compete for tenants and pay rent back to [the central imperial government]."

Once power at the top is secure, decentralisation at the bottom can be granted. Unlike anarchist patchwork, this theory works in practice. We can see something like it in China, where the state no longer has to justify its rule by forcing communism down everyone's throats, and is happy to let some regions embrace capitalism while others rely on a state-run economy. On the other hand, China is not so keen to see Hong Kong mutate into a rat's nest of exiled plutocrats and Western shills, so there are obvious political limits.

In my view, any sane attempt at regime change must work with the reality of Western empire. So if the new regime is designed on corporate lines, then its obvious model would be a conglomerate in which the structure of the parent company (central government) is reproduced in its subsidiaries (provinces and municipalities). Decentralisation, in such a state, would be less a concession than a practical necessity to avoid a return to anarchic bureaucracy. And it could create something like patchwork, by having subsidiaries compete for subjects, although Moldbug's dream of a capitalist race to the bottom would be mitigated by the state's interest in stability.

At this point, we could even throw democracy back into the mix. Simply allow certain towns and cities to make local decisions by direct democracy of the citizens, as long as they keep paying their taxes to the central government. By adding this pièce de résistance, we can contain democracy in the neocameralist state, in much the same way as elections and parliaments contain monarchy and oligarchy in the democratic state. The difference is that low-level direct democracy – however constrained – is true democracy for the people, whereas elections and parliaments are frauds by which the people are vicariously invested in the rule of the demos. Game, set and match to us.

So this is our neocameralist kernel. We have discarded Moldbug's attempts to do without religious authority. At the same time, we have preserved the majority of his proposals for political power. The result is that we now have a vision to go with our theory and practice.

Our vision of government is viable because the joint-stock corporation is modern, traditional and perennial. It is modern because it is found everywhere in the modern world, and indeed may be the only thing preventing the modern West from going the way of the Soviet Union. It is traditional because it is has been tried and tested by history (unlike, say, crypto-locked weapons or anarchist patchwork). And it is perennial because it is a special case of elective monarchy – a form of government that recurs throughout history and likely predates hereditary monarchy.

 

Of course, the fact that neocameralism cannot abolish religious authority introduces a note of uncertainty into the vision. What will the new regime be like? The answer to this question depends largely on the religious content that the new regime is bound to absorb after coming to power, just as any mass of rock lifted into the position of the moon is bound to reflect the light of the sun. 

The neocameralist state might end up as the Third Roman Empire, with a caesaropapist monarchy and an ecclesiastical shareholder-senate. Or it might venerate Moldbug and Hobbes as its founding fathers, appoint Schopenhauer as its prophet, and make a serious effort to live by pure nihilist principles. It might continue hypocritically venerating democracy, and occasionally offering up a sacrifice at its altar. Or it might adopt a religion much more degenerate and sinister than democracy.

On the whole, I think there are reasons for optimism. From a religious perspective, a democracy of scholar-bureaucrats is perhaps the worst political system, because it enables the unlimited corruption of religion by power. To correct Western religion, on any large scale, we must first correct the structure of political power in the West. Trying to do things the other way around, by ginning up new moral revivals and civic cults and infusing them into democratic politics, will only lead to more corruption. It is like trying to teach the ways of virtue to a schizophrenic.

Then again, right-wingers will try anything, as long as they can feel like they're doing something. In 2021, as the waters close over the delusions of the last four years, more and more of them will start wondering whether it is really such a good idea to keep listening to the same old quacks and popping the same old fakepills. Either they will seek out real redpills, or they won't. All we need do is keep an open line to the supplier – even if we reserve the right to flagrantly pirate his formula.