I've previously mentioned Moldbug around Urbit, since Curtis Yarvin (who uses the pseudonym/pen name Mencius Moldbug in his now well known — at least in some circles anyway, political essays and blog posts.. oh, and just curiously, here is where Mencius comes from/refers to) is also the founder/creator of Urbit which he started in 2002. But his political philosophy and essays are no less fascinating, provocative, original, refreshing, entertaining, delightful, cynical, weird, erudite... well, in a word, really worthwhile, regardless of whether or not you agree with certain things and are shocked and repulsed by others, find the whole thing insane and unacceptable or resonate with all aspects of it. His body of work (blog) is really what started the so-called neo-reactionary movement, also known as the Dark Enlightenment (combining the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment), as Nick Land later coined the term in his dedicated essay on Moldbug's corpus of work and views (and which, as Land goes, seems — to me anyway — a lot more pretentious, pompous, exaggerated, unoriginal, provocative and shocking for the sake of shock and provocation and, well, you know — Nick Land, after all...)

Anyway, while I am at it I thought I'd give you the short versions of two of his publications I've already read ("A Formalist Manifesto" in a second post) — the things, paragraphs and excerpts I've copied and saved, basically, which capture the essence of what's there and which I generally intend to use soon elsewhere in a more exhaustive essay/post/article about the subject matter. So, anyway:

 

PATCHWORK: A POLITICAL SYSTEM FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

CHAPTER 1: A POSITIVE VISION

MENCIUS MOLDBUG · NOVEMBER 13, 2008

To start the hype machine, let’s just say that if anyone can build anything like Patchwork, even a tiny, crude, Third World ripoff of Patchwork, it is all over for the democratic regimes. It’ll be like East Germany competing with West Germany. (Funnily enough, the financial relationship between the US and the Gulf/East Asia, the most Patchwork-like part of the world at present, is oddly reminiscent of that between the OECD and the Warsaw Pact: the latter borrow from the former to buy cheap consumer goods, supplied by the former, for the latter’s serfs.)

 

Children growing up in the Patchwork era will learn a new name and a new history of the democratic past. They will date the period to the Dutch invasion of England (1688), which ended the span of legitimate continuity in English government that began with William the Conqueror, replacing it with eternal, degenerate Whiggery and the quisling, “constitutional” or ceremonial Hanover princes. And they will surely call it something cool, like the Anglo-American Interregnum. Insulting it with the name of “democracy” will be coarse and over-the-top.

 

Said Interregnum, which we are of course still in, has been a period of global monotonic decline in official authority. As in the late Roman period, declining official authority, declining personal morality, and increasing public bureaucracy are observed in synchrony. This is not in any way a coincidence. The combination is an infallible symptom of the great terminal disease of the polity — leftism. Leftism is cancer. At least in its present adult, sclerotic and non-fulminating form, it is extremely slow in its progress, but the end is not in doubt.

 

This does not mean there are no leftists in the country; in a well-governed country which is at peace, people can think or say whatever they damned well please. It just means that, if there are for some reason leftists, their views are completely without influence on government policy. So people laugh at them, and call them names.

 

(Isn’t this a lovely vision? A Lennonesque feat of delirious, constructive imagination? A world without leftism? Imagine! It’s hard to imagine only if you have trouble imagining a Nazi John Lennon—a feat which taxes my imagination not at all. But maybe I’ve been reading too much Hitler. It really is a tough call to say who was more coherent, Lennon or Hitler.)

 

The basic goal of UR, I don’t mind admitting, is to convince people who are now progressives to abandon their delusions. Since progressives equate those who accept the reactionary narrative of recent history with acolytes of the Great Goat-Lord Abaddon, one must tread carefully. And if you must come as an Abaddonite, the only way to set your quarry at ease is to constantly confess your vileness. That way the progressive might even just clasp you to his heart—along with all the satanic murderers he is so keen to embrace.

 

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 design is all “exit,” no “voice.”

 

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. Burckhardt once observed that Europe was safe so long as she was not unified, and now that she is we can see exactly what he meant.

 

So how, exactly, did all these Obamaniacs, these whiterpeople, these Burning Man regulars, these young, hip progressives, convince themselves that when it comes to government, bigger is better? That in fact we need a world government, toot sweet? That international public opinion is all that really matters in the world, that America should lead the world, feed the world, and be governed by the world?

 

This paradox is just one more stimulus for a complete replacement of the State. We have had enough. We are done with the present system of government. We want a reboot. And, anarchy being both impossible and un-reactionary, we can’t even talk about a reboot until we’ve specified what operating system to boot next.

So we can think of Patchwork as a new operating system for the world. Of course, it does not have to be installed across the entire world, although it is certainly designed to scale. But, it is easier and much more prudent to start small. Innovations in sovereignty are dangerous.

 

A patchwork — please feel free to drop the capital—is any network consisting of a large number of small but independent states. To be precise, each state’s real estate is its patch; the sovereign corporate owner, i.e., government, of the patch is its realm. At least initially, each realm holds one and only one patch. In practice this may change with time, but the realm–patch structure is at least designed to be stable.

 

To be a reactionary is not to say we must reinstall the exact political structure of the fourteenth century tomorrow, although that would surely be an improvement on what we have now. To be a reactionary is to borrow freely across time as well as space, incorporating political designs and experience from wherever and whenever. As Nick Szabo has observed, the most interesting, detailed and elegant European forms are found in the period we call feudal, and thus it is only natural that a reactionary design for future government will have a somewhat feudal feel.

 

These kinds of descriptions apply to the kind of patch I would like to live in. They may or may not seem intriguing or attractive to anyone else. You may prefer to live in a gritty, urban patch which is corrupt, dirty, dangerous, and generally difficult to live in. If there are enough people like you, there will be a market for this lifestyle. If not—not. I suspect, however, that you are outnumbered. And I imagine the new management of Manhattan would take the distance from Dinkins to Giuliani and multiply it by ten or twenty. There would surely be no such thing as a “bad neighborhood,” at least in the sense of an unsafe one. Oh, no. Absolutely impossible.

 

Anyway. Enough anecdotes and generalities. Let’s take a harder engineering look at the anatomy of Patchwork. The basic engineering problem is: while one can fantasize ad libitum about the way in which this system should be governed, how will it actually be governed?

 

This entire problem can be described as one of security. We postulate some structure of authority for the Patchwork. It sounds good. If the above propaganda is not appealing to you, all I can say is that we have very different tastes and perspectives. But is the result stable? If we set it up in some state, will it remain in that state? Stability and security are the same thing: if the structure of authority changes in any authorized way, it is not really changing at all.

 

Anything like a patchwork can merge into a single centralized state. It can degenerate into an asymmetric form in which one state dominates the others. It can split into two factions which fight a civil war for the world. Individual states can turn evil and try to turn others evil. Etc. History tells us that all kinds of awful stuff can happen, and probably will.

 

Because of these dangers, Patchwork’s philosophy of security is simple and draconian. It is built around the following axioms, which strike me as too self-evident to debate.

 

First, security is a monotonic desideratum. There is no such thing as “too secure.” An encryption algorithm cannot be too strong, a fence cannot be too high, a bullet cannot be too lethal.

Second, security and liberty do not conflict. Security always wins. As Robert Peel put it, the absence of crime and disorder is the test of public safety, and in anything like the modern state the risk of private infringement on private liberties far exceeds the risk of public infringement. No cop ever stole my bicycle. And this will be far more true in the Patchwork, in which realms actually compete for business on the basis of customer service.

Third, security and complexity are opposites. A secure authority structure is as simple as possible, so that it is as difficult as possible to pervert it to unanticipated ends.

 

But how should realms be administered? The answer is simple: a realm is a corporation. A sovereign corporation, granted, but a corporation nonetheless. In the 21st century, the art of corporate design is not a mystery. The corporation is owned and controlled by its anonymous shareholders (if you’ve ever wondered what the letters SA stand for in the name of a French or Spanish company, they mean “anonymous society”), whose interests in maximizing corporate performance are perfectly aligned. The shareholders select a chief executive, to whom all employees report, and whose decisions are final. In no cases do they make management decisions directly.

 

Rather, I think the best way to think of a realm or sovereign corporation is as a modified version of monarchy. A royal family is to an ordinary family business as a Patchwork realm is to an ordinary, nonsovereign, public corporation. Joint-stock realms thus solve the primary historical problem of monarchical government: the vagaries of the biological process. In other words, they assure that the overall direction of the realm will always be both strong and responsible—at least, responsible in a financial sense.

 

A joint-stock realm simply cannot have anything comparable to a weak monarch of the classical era. Realms will certainly recruit their executives from the same talent pool large companies now draw from. How many Fortune 500 CEOs today are regularly bullied and led by coalitions of their nominal subordinates, as (for just one example) the French monarchy so often was? Zero is probably too easy an answer, but at least an approximation.

 

Note, however, that we are not considering anything like the watered-down “constitutional” (i.e., again, ceremonial) monarchies of the democratic period. If the joint-stock realm is like a monarchy, it is like a true, “absolute” or (most pejoratively) “divine-right monarchy.”

 

What makes a king a king? Why should the king be the king? Why can’t I be the king, or at least my cousin Ricky? Do we even need a king? And so on. People have strong emotional feelings about these questions to this day—at least, they have a strong emotional feeling about the last one. Not answering them is certainly not acceptable.

 

But Filmer, and the divine-right monarchist in general, comes as close as possible to not answering. Moreover, his reasoning is impeccable for the orthodox:

"If it please God, for the correction of the prince or punishment of the people, to suffer princes to be removed and others to be placed in their rooms, either by the factions of the nobility or rebellion of the people, in all such cases the judgment of God, who hath power to give and to take away kingdoms, is most just; yet the ministry of men who execute God’s judgments without commission is sinful and damnable. God doth but use and turn men’s unrighteous acts to the performance of His righteous decrees."

 

Note that this is basically a 17th-century way of saying: “Shit happens.” God being omnipotent, etc., if Dickweed over there is King, it is obviously because God wanted Dickweed to be King. And who are you to disagree with God?

 

But an atheist, such as myself, has a simpler way of getting to the same result. Really, what Filmer is saying, is: if you want stable government, accept the status quo as the verdict of history. There is no reason at all to inquire as to why the Bourbons are the Kings of France. The rule is arbitrary. Nonetheless, it is to the benefit of all that this arbitrary rule exists, because obedience to the rightful king is a Schelling point of nonviolent agreement. And better yet, there is no way for a political force to steer the outcome of succession—at least, nothing comparable to the role of the educational authorities in a democracy.

 

In other words, to put it in Patchwork terms, the relationship between realm and patch is no more, and no less, than a property right. A patch is a sovereign property, that is, one whose proprietor has no defender but itself. Nonetheless, in moral terms, we may ask: why does this realm hold that patch? And the answer, as it always is with in any system of strong property rights, will be not “because it deserves to,” but “because it does.” Note that whatever the theology, Filmer’s model of government captures the property-right approach perfectly.

 

These political three-card monte tricks, in which sovereign authority is in some way divided, “limited” (obviously, no sovereign can limit itself), or otherwise weakened, in all cases for the purported purpose of securing liberty, have no more place in a Patchwork realm than they do at, say, Apple. They are spurious artifacts of the Interregnum. Their effect on both a realm and its residents is purely counterproductive. Begone with them.

 

One of the most common errors in understanding the premodern era is the confusion of monarchy with tyranny. Nothing like Stalinism, for example, is recorded in the history of the European aristocratic era. Why? Because Stalin had to murder to stay in power. Anyone, certainly any of the Old Bolsheviks, could have taken his place. The killing machine took on a life of its own. The tyrant, the mafia boss, stands at the apex of a pyramid of power, each block in which is a person who hopes to someday kill the boss and take his job. In a tyranny, murder and madness become part of the fabric of the State. In a monarchy, however, the succession is clear, and if by some accident of law and fate there are multiple candidates, they are at least each others’ relatives. This rules out neither murder nor madness, but they are the exception and not the rule.

 

Obviously, a joint-stock realm faces completely different problems in maintaining internal security. Internal security can be defined as the protection of the shareholders’ property against all internal threats—including both residents and employees, up to and certainly including the chief executive. If the shareholders cannot dismiss the CEO of the realm by voting according to proper corporate procedures, a total security failure has occurred.

 

The standard Patchwork remedy for this problem is the cryptographic chain of command. Ultimately, power over the realm truly rests with the shareholders, because they use a secret sharing or similar cryptographic algorithm to maintain control over its root keys. Authority is then delegated to the board (if any), the CEO and other officers, and thence down into the military or other security forces. At the leaves of the tree are computerized weapons, which will not fire without cryptographic authorization.

 

CHAPTER 2: PROFIT STRATEGIES FOR OUR NEW CORPORATE OVERLORDS

But unfortunately for those who are bored with these warm, gaseous exhalations, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is simply not possible to get into the meat of a UR post without a fresh introduction to the anti-democratic, and frankly authoritarian, philosophy of government for which we are so notorious. (You do know that just reading this blog makes you a bad person, don’t you?)

 

Swallowing the red pill, departing the Matrix and donning our alien-detecting Ray-Bans, we realize at once that no government can limit itself. Limited government is a perpetual-motion machine: a product axiomatically fraudulent by definition. In any human organization, final authority rests with some person or persons, not with any rule, process or procedure.

 

What we call the “rule of law” is a good thing. But if you have an efficient engine, there is no point in marketing it as an infinitely efficient engine. The noble ideal of “limited government” or “rule of law” is a piece of political camouflage, behind which lurks a useful and effective, but certainly imperfect and not even slightly divine, corporate design: that of judicial supremacy. In a sentence: juridical supremacy is judicial supremacy.

 

Judicial supremacy is a management design in which ultimate sovereign authority rests with committees of arbitrators who are experts in proper government procedure. The design certainly has its merits. If implemented well, for example, it can reduce personal graft among employees to negligible levels. Hardly a high standard, but I am happy to be governed by a regime which has achieved it. But ultimately, judicial supremacy can become arbitrarily evil—all it takes is arbitrarily evil judges.

 

Is it possible to design a structure of government which will be stable and predictable? Hopefully, of course, stably and predictably benign? History affords no evidence of it. But history affords no evidence of semiconductors, either. There is always room for something new.

 

In reality, while your government can certainly promise to do X or not to do Y, there is no power that can hold it to this promise. Or if there is, it is that power which is your real government. Your whining should be addressed to it.

 

The neo-cameralist structure of Patchwork realms, which are sovereign joint-stock companies, creates a different kind of should. This is the profitable should. We can say that a realm should do X rather than Y, because X is more profitable than Y. Since sovereign means sovereign, nothing can compel the realm to do X and not Y. But, with an anonymous capital structure, we can expect administrators to be generally responsible and not make obvious stupid mistakes.

 

Another way to say this is that a realm is financially responsible. The general observation here is that, to paraphrase Tolstoy, financially responsible organizations are all alike. By definition, they do not waste money. By definition, their irresponsible counterparts do, and by definition there are an infinite number of ways to waste money. Think of a rope: a financially responsible organization is a tight rope. It only has one shape. But if there is slack in the rope, it can flap around in all kinds of crazy ways.

 

Given the choice between financial responsibility and moral responsibility, I will take the latter every time. If it were possible to write a set of rules on paper and require one’s children and one’s children’s children to comply with this bible, all sorts of eternal principles for good government and healthy living could be set out.

 

But we cannot construct a political structure that will enforce moral responsibility. We can construct a political structure that will enforce financial responsibility. Thus neo-cameralism. We might say that financial responsibility is the raw material of moral responsibility. The two are not by any means identical, but they are surprisingly similar, and the gap seems bridgeable.

 

When we use the profitable should, therefore, we are in the corporate strategy department. We ask: how should a Patchwork realm, or any financially responsible government, be designed to maximize the return on its capital?

 

For our overall realm design, let’s simplify the Anglo-American corporate model slightly. We’ll have direct shareholder sovereignty, with no board of directors. The board layer strikes me as a bit of an anachronism, and it is certainly one place stuff can go wrong. Deleted. And I also dislike the term CEO, which seems a bit vainglorious for a sovereign organization. A softer word with a pleasant Quaker feel is delegate, although we will compromise on a capital. And we can call the logical holder of each share its proprietor.

 

Therefore: a Patchwork realm is governed by a Delegate, who is the proxy of the proprietors, and can be replaced by a majority of them at any time and for any reason. The Delegate exercises undivided sovereign authority, as in divine-right monarchy. I.e., in English: total power. (The Delegate is always Jewish.)

 

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. If the Delegate turns on the proprietors, they may have to wait a day to authorize the replacement, and another day or two before the new Delegate can organize the forces needed to have her predecessor captured and shot. Fiduciary responsibility has its price.

 

First, let’s enumerate the basic principles of sovereign corporate management.

Principle one: the proprietors’ sovereignty is absolute. Securing it against all enemies, foreign and domestic, is the primary fiduciary responsibility of the Delegate. Lose the patch and the realm is worthless, and so are the shares. Everything else, even profit, comes after security.

Principle two: a realm is a business, not a charity. Its goal is to maximize its discounted return on investment. If Delegate and proprietors alike somehow manage to forget this, in the long run their realm will deteriorate, develop red-giant syndrome, and become gigantic, corrupt and foul. It may even turn into a democracy.

Principle three: except in cases where it conflicts with the first or second principles, “Don’t be evil” is always good business. Think of your realm as a hotel. As Mark Twain once put it: “All saints can do miracles, but few of them can keep hotel.” And while many hotelkeepers can do miracles, few indeed are saints. But all are nice to the customers—at least, the 99.999% of customers who feel no need to start torching the drapery.

 

The fundamental diagnosis of libertarianism—that today’s democratic governments are much larger and much more intrusive than they should be—is obviously correct. The remedy proposed, however, does not have anything like a track record of success.

 

In fact, I believe the libertarian opposition to sovereignty, dating back to Locke, is a major cause of modern big government.

 

So we may ask: why does the post office suck? Not because it is sovereign, but because it is not financially responsible. Its freedom to be wasteful and inefficient is what gives it that familiar Aeroflot feel. (The bankrupt airlines, such as United, feel more like Aeroflot every year.) When we postulate a sovereign authority which is financially responsible, like a Patchwork realm, we have no reason to expect it to display these pathologies of government.

 

CHAPTER 3: WHAT WE HAVE AND WHAT’S SO BAD ABOUT IT

 

Neocameralism informs the surrounding neural tissue that the best mechanism for producing responsibility in government is for governments to be administered as sovereign joint-stock corporations, controlled absolutely by their shareholders, who hold the master encryption keys for the government’s invincible robot armies. At some risk of oxymoronism, this could be even be described as private government. It creates quite a different form of responsibility — financial responsibility.

 

After 2008, no one can possibly accuse constitutional democracy of being a financially responsible form of government. Likewise, the neocameralist state is amoral by definition.

 

The constitutional democratic state is an apparently immortal, monotonically expanding, and nontrivially morbid mass of personnel which proclaims itself the instrument of a single purpose: to inflict good upon the world. For traditional countries this affliction was at least limited to specified borders, but in the case of United States Government since 1945 it knows no bound. Washington operates on the principle of universal benevolence. Its ultimate aim is to benefit all people, anywhere and for all time.

 

A joint-stock sovereign is a clean, lean and mean revenue-extracting machine. Its goal: loot. Any well-run Patchwork realm is congenitally dedicated to the good old Marxist ideal of exploitation. It has no intrinsic sympathy for the aged, the crippled, the deformed, the useless. Into the biodiesel vats with them! Gold coins literally wrung from the hides of the unfortunate will cascade into the piggybanks of our obese, cigar-chomping shareholders.

 

The outermost mechanism is mere PR. “Don’t be evil” is the automatic slogan of every private government. At the sovereign level, Google’s motto would not even be a winner, because to even mention evil is suspicious—like a sign outside a restaurant, promising an absence of rats.

 

Sovereignty, as we saw in Chapter 2, is not sovereignty unless it is above the law. In any organization we can identify the summum imperium, or power of final decision. At least at a civilian level, this is generally held by either an individual or a small committee. For example, in the United States, this committee is called the “Supreme Court.” In the Soviet Union it was called the “Politburo.” Of course these two institutions had very little else in common, but they both held the summum imperium.

 

Despite all protests to the contrary, constitutional democracy has neither squared the circle nor solved the old Roman problem of ipsos custodes. Whatever the names and rituals, real power in the state can always be tracked.

 

Ergo, the military in all countries and at all times enjoys the summum imperium. In a state in which normal civil–military relations pertain, the military is completely passive, and delegates its authority completely. In a few less-devolved states, such as modern Turkey, it still exercises genuine reserve power, and may have some influence on civil decisions. (Sadly, the fabled deep state may be on the decline since the Ergenekon purge.)

 

There are basically three ways in which American voters — or voters anywhere in the world, for that matter — conceptualize their participation in democracy. From the bottom up, we can label these modes tribal, populist, and institutionalist.

 

Tribal voters vote on the basis of ethnic and familial identity. In one very legitimate sense, they are the most rational voters around. A tribal voter is acting collectively to benefit his or her tribe. This group can be hereditary, adoptive, occupational, etc., as long as it feels some sort of collective cohesion or asabiyya.

 

In a civilized, stable democracy, only a minority of voters can be tribal. If you want to see a democracy with a tribal majority, I give you South Africa. As a minority, tribal voting blocs generally serve as vote banks for more dominant players. The tribal bloc or blocs become clients of whichever party is strong enough to buy their votes. This can be done as straight-out, lawless graft, or by steering various benefits—payments, loans, jobs, etc.—to members and/or leaders of the tribe.

 

Our second group of voters is the populist group. When populists vote, they are trying to compel the government to act in accordance with their own beliefs, generally derived from a mixture of common sense, tradition and personal experience, of what is right for a government to do.

 

Populists voters are people who genuinely believe in democracy. They believe that the way Washington works is that the people elect a President, who “runs the country.” I once had an email exchange with a very successful, and quite erudite, populist political blogger who did not understand that President Bush cannot fire a State Department employee just because that employee is openly trying to sabotage White House initiatives.

 

This is an excellent example of the level of complete structural misconception that a populist voter can entertain when attempting to vote. If populists had any idea at all of how Washington actually works, they would not continue to participate in the increasingly farcical elections by which they repeatedly endorse it.

 

At present, the primary distinction between the EU and the late Soviet Union is that the latter was much more Russian, thus exhibiting a mixture of incompetence and brutality that is hard to duplicate west of the Elbe. But give it a few years.

 

The basic advantage of populism is that, if the claimed virtues of democracy are anywhere, they are here. Common sense and plain thinking, in a reasonably intelligent brain, are remarkably immune to the ethereal delusions that so easily infect the brilliant and educated. However, common sense cannot exist without tradition. The best traditions of the American populist voter are steadily being eroded by an educational system that populists do not control, and his worst traditions are steadily being exacerbated by churches and talk-radio networks that populists do control.

 

The entire political structure of the American populist tradition is set up to select for ignorance and stupidity, and select against organization and cohesion. Thus it is simultaneously undesirable and ineffective, and even those of us who like myself sympathize with it to a considerable degree are often slightly relieved to see it lose, as it always does.

 

And finally we come to our ruling class, the institutionalists. Institutionalism, as previously mentioned, is an essentially aristocratic belief system. The institutionalist voter votes not because she believes government policies should be decided at the ballot box, but because she believes they shouldn’t.

 

Rather, she believes that government policies should be determined by a set of official and quasiofficial agencies which have earned her trust permanently and completely, the way a good Catholic trusts the Vatican. Following the analogy, here at UR we refer to this meta-institution as the Cathedral. The Cathedral consists of the educational organs: public schools, the universities and the press.

 

It is not that the institutionalist voter does not believe in democracy. She does believe in democracy. She believes passionately in democracy. But her democracy is very different from the democracy of her mortal enemy, the populist.

 

To the institutionalist, the way democracy works is that democracy depends on the educated voter. The voter is to be educated by institutionalists, of course, because institutionalists are right. Some level of ignorance and recalcitrance can be expected, and there will always be dissent, but through this cycle of education and election we are always advancing into the future. The reason we have elected officials is not so that they can manage the government, a task which must of course be left to the experts (who are institutionalists, of course).

 

Note the function of populist and tribal voters in the institutionalist’s mind. The populist electorate supplies the bogeyman. The fear of a populist takeover, which is theoretically always a possibility and has even happened once or twice in history (e.g., Nazi Germany), can keep even the most jaded of institutionalist voters coming back to the polls. Even though it never seems to actually happen. Moreover, the populists are barraged by a flood of institutionalist messages more or less from birth to death. They are naturally resistant, but the programming wears them down over time.

 

Meanwhile, the tribals, who are votes for rent, will always support the institutionalist bloc (and may even make up a majority of their support, though at a certain level this becomes dangerous). Their votes are guaranteed in exchange for permanent government programs, administered by institutionalists, that render them dependent on the Cathedral’s rule for their lives and livelihoods.

 

As for the institution itself—the Cathedral—it is, except in its majestic extent and intricacy, not unusual by any historical standard. The Cathedral is a selective aristocracy, which is more or less the way China was run for about 2500 years. It is also the way the Soviet Union was run, the way the Catholic Church was run, the way China today is run, and the way Nazi Germany probably would have been run if we still had a Nazi Germany to kick around. As in all these institutions, rank and place in it is in high demand, and those who rise to the top are men and women of no mean capacity.

 

However, there is just one little problem: the Cathedral is not responsible. At least, if it is responsible, we cannot detect any mechanism by which it is responsible.

 

Thus, there is no responsibility. The chain of guardians stretches up to Harvard, where it is tied to nothing and is guarded by itself. Consider the possibility, for example, that the people we call “economists” in fact know nothing at all about economics. Is this farfetched? After October 2008, can we call this farfetched? And if it isn’t, what other worms are in your brain?

CHAPTER 4: A REACTIONARY THEORY OF WORLD PEACE

History records quite a few previous attempts at world peace, some of which even worked pretty well in practice. For example, one was called the “Roman Empire,” another was called the “Qing Dynasty,” a third was called the “British Empire.” All three being extinct, and therefore not entirely successful. But there’s no denying that in their day they turned out quite a bit of peace.

 

But the world of 2008 has its own theory of world peace. Which everyone believes, as usual. This theory, which needless to say I think is utter crap, owes most of its arguments to Kant’s essay on Perpetual Peace. In practice it more deserves its most parochial name: Pax Americana. (For an amusing personal history of the mapping from Kant to Turtle Bay, try my fellow Brown alumnus Michael Soussan.)

 

So our theory of peace is a little different. It is reactionary rather than progressive, which means that it is designed to work with hominids not as they should be, angels without wings, but as they are: bipedal land apes.

 

Kant reasons: people are generally reasonable. As they are—except when unreasonable. If you entrust them with the power of government, you create an easy exploitation target for an oligarchy that controls the State by directing the opinions of the people. Such oligarchies come in two categories: conscious cults and conspiracies, in which at least some top echelons of believers is insincere and consciously malicious, and true religions, in which everyone can be sincere. The former are bad, and the latter are worse.

 

Before we get into reactionary world peace, let’s try and figure out this Pax Americana.

 

Kant had no trouble in describing the obvious principle its name suggests:

"Nevertheless it is the desire of every state, or of its ruler, to attain to a permanent condition of peace in this very way; that is to say, by subjecting the whole world as far as possible to its sway."

 

Amen. The great fraud of our current “international community” is its preposterous disguise as a Kantian federation of equals. In reality, the “international community” is Washington and her clients—at least, when it is in proper working order. It sometimes approaches such order, but never seems to quite reach it.

 

The agencies in foreign capitals which we call “governments” are fascinating entities in many ways. Each is different, but in general what they are is clear. There is no accepted English term for the relationship, although “client” or even “puppet” state is close.

 

We do see something like sovereignty in the post-Communist world: Russia, China, plus the Iran–Syria–Venezuela axis. Russia and China treat each other as sovereigns, and they are clearly intent on preserving some of their sovereign independence, although the imbalanced financial relationships with the Western world that they find themselves in are clear no-nos. Nonetheless, they are generally quite submissive toward the US, an approach which is probably prudent. Iran, Syria and Venezuela are in the position of perpetual hostility that Russia occupied in the heyday of the Cold War, one which is arguably inconsistent with true sovereignty (since the hostile regimes are so dependent on the continuation of the conflict), but one which certainly separates them from the rest of America’s sheep.

 

As for the rest of these “governments”? In many ways, these agencies really do resemble actual sovereign authorities. This is certainly their formal status. However, if you were to describe them as locally-staffed branches of the State Department, you would be also be grasping at a truth.

 

This is all very confusing. What, exactly, is the difference between supervising and advising? Is Washington supposed to be running the world, or isn’t it? Please allow me to explain.

 

Perhaps you’ve wondered how a perspective that considers “imperialism” and “American exceptionalism” taboos reminiscent of the Big H himself can produce phrases such as:

"The possible decline in America’s power does not mean that the United States would not remain powerful. This country can and must continue to lead."

 

Is Washington supposed to be ruling the world? Is Washington supposed to be leading the world? Is there a difference between “leading” and “ruling?” If you replace “lead” with “rule” above—a new dawn of American rule is at hand—you definitely don’t have a line that either the President or the Times could be imagined uttering.

 

So there must be some difference. But what is it?

 

Clearly, if America “leads,” its relationship with those it is leading must be anything but equal. Neither the Times nor President Obama will tell us that, while America should “lead” Europe, Europe should also “lead” America. Not even such scoundrels can torture English so.

 

Any unequal relationship between any two parties, be they sovereigns, colleagues or family members, must involve some combination of two models of control. Call them authority and dependence.

 

A holds authority over B if B must obey A’s instructions. Authority is executive control, as practiced in the workplace, in the (traditional) family, and of course in the military chain of command. Recall from Chapter 3 the Latin translation: imperium.

 

B is dependent on A if A is gratuitously assisting B. And why would A do that? The relationship is the ancient one of patronage, of course. A is the patron, B is the client. This is one of the oldest forms of alliance in the book—I’m pretty sure chimpanzees practice it.

 

The analogy suggests the unusual nature of dependence without authority. Ordinarily, if A is rational, A will insist on authority along with the dependence. No authority, no gratuities. Can this break down with the thirteen-year-old? Absolutely, but a complete breakdown requires fairly bad parenting as well as, of course, a bad child.

 

But what we see in the Pax Americana—at least, its mainstream or Barackian form, not its renegade, crypto-imperialist Bushitler morph—is exactly that. For example, Pakistan is dependent on Washington, and yet Washington cannot say: get rid of Lakshar-e-Taiba and the like. Washington can certainly not say: clean up your streets, get rid of the madrassas, seal the border, etc., etc., etc., and in general start behaving as if the Raj was back on.

 

Because Pakistan is sovereign. At least, it is supposed to be sovereign. Yet if the US cut off the flow of dollars, Lord only knows what the country would turn into. Whatever that is, it surely has nothing to do with what Pakistan is now.

 

So why doesn’t Washington simply tell it: obey, or no more dollars? Well, the answer is not simple. The answer has to do with the internals of Washington, the structural conflict between Pentagon and State, the history of Pakistan and of the British Empire, etc., etc., etc. We could be at this for some time. But note, again, the analogy to the thirteen-year-old. Why won’t your daughter obey? Why don’t you make her? Well, it’s complicated. It is always complicated.

 

Suffice it to say that American citizens gain nothing at all from this bizarre pseudo-empire. It might be useful to have all these “allies,” perhaps, if we were in a war against somebody. And also if they would fight, and stuff. Neither of these things seems to be true. We do trade with them, but this does not require us to manage their governments, or in fact care at all how they are managed internally.

 

Conclusion: American foreign policy for the last sixty years has produced neither security nor anything else for Americans. Nor, I believe, has it been particularly good for the rest of the world, which would otherwise have to defend itself and behave responsibly as an independent sovereign.

 

Washington cannot actually administer its conquered territories, much less derive revenue from them. And their governments degrade, because they are neither sovereign nor supervised. Their job is to implement policies designed at Harvard and approved in Washington. Except in countries with strong traditions of historical probity in state service, the civil servants steal. They have nothing else to do, and there is no prospect of the state becoming a genuine, independent authority.

 

What does Washington get out of this? Two things. One, the privilege of feeling like a big stud. Of course this applies only to a few people who work inside the Beltway, or who are influential enough in policy studies that their policies actually get adopted.

 

This is the purpose of America’s pseudo-empire of patronage, in which the money always flows outward and the Mohamed Attas flow only inward: to provide a large number of unnecessary jobs to America’s ruling class, the smartest and most sophisticated people in the country, and those most able to obtain alternative employment. And also to gain the set of votes that are needed to keep the policy running, as well as to sustain other policies aligned with it. In short, like most of what Washington is today: a self-licking ice-cream cone.

 

But because of the multiple frauds essential to this forgery, Washington’s “sway” is peculiarly insidious as compared to its Roman, Chinese or British predecessors, who when they ruled a conquered land ruled it honestly, making no attempt to disguise the nature of the relationship.

 

America’s client states, especially outside the core European and Asian dominions (i.e., in the “Third World,” a term whose inventors did not predict its present connotations), deliver quality-of-government metrics that would have shocked any Roman procurator, Chinese mandarin or British district commissioner. Even when these possessions are at “peace,” graft, banditry, and sheer incompetence are the rule rather than the exception. And “peace” is not always the rule.

 

This is the current system of the world: a disaster. Absurd in every detail. It lives, it works in a sense, it even is mostly peaceful, but it is held together by chewing-gum and I don’t trust it to last another decade.

 

The reactionary theory of world peace states that peace is best defined as security. That’s all. We are just equating two words. And we can add a third: order. Peace, security, and order are all the same thing.

 

The peaceful, reactionary world of Patchwork is a world populated entirely by rational absolute sovereigns: states which are managed competently and coherently for financial benefit alone.

 

Turning the entire system into One Big State is a failure mode, not a goal.

 

So, for example, let’s say a coalition of demented realms are taken over by administrations which, for some reason, are affrighted with the perils of global warming. (Stipulating that global warming is a pile of nonsense — if not, substitute something else which is.) They round up a majority and manage to change the rules for the atmosphere, imposing carbon credits or some such absurdity.

 

Is that something that could happen in an Patchwork world? Sure. What should the realms in the minority do? Go along with it, I’m afraid. This is the level of imperfection I think is acceptable in a design that remains basically peaceful—it is aggression in a sense, but of an inherently unprofitable form.

 

What we don’t want to see is a situation in which we get civil war, we get predation by some patches on other patches, we get standing internal alliances, we get patron–client relationships, etc., etc., and all the nasty structures that arose under the old international order. A bit of overzealous pollution control is a strain the system can handle.

 

You gotta admit, it does bring quite a bit on the table, this modernly Hobbesian/Schmittian political theology or whatever you want to call it. And it's funny how it is this which subsequently led to and inspired the alt-right. Either way, it raises a lot of questions, no doubt, and I really, really like how he defines/captures the essence of power in what he refers to as the Cathedral. A lot of the ideas also remind me of those found in the concept of polycentric law that I've also written about in earlier posts. And, of course, I've learned quite a bit from reading Moldbug's blog posts and essays, for example, I hadn't a clue before about the nine Peelian principles which define an ethical police force, as applied and followed the the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zeland (which explains a lot!). And in any case, all of us also need to start thinking about these things and these issues — of how are we to re-define, re-structure and re-build our governance, state, social, legal and other institutions for the world to come (as the ones currently in place are obviously insufficient, dysfunctional, corrupt, etc.)