"Anyone who grows up in a narrative, then learns to distrust it, will look for alternatives—and the first place to look is the villains in the narrative itself.
"If you land in this trap, you have failed to escape power’s frame. You’re still in the same movie—you have just switched characters."
Yarvin has identified a major problem here, perhaps THE problem.
Very simple question: why would detachment work any better than dissidence? The people in charge have already said that not pledging fealty to them is the same as opposing them. So, if you try to be nonpolitical, that's itself seen as a political act of a quite disreputable sort. Remember, *most* public health officials said that, *from a public health point of view*, the *best* thing to do was take part in the George Floyd protests. Consequently, insofar as you didn't protest, you were actually endangering public health.
Trying to check out is just *being* a dissident. Indeed, even if all dissidents just gave up and said we won't resist--no one ran as a Republican, no one protested even the most elaborate and radical rituals, there would just be a new way of being described as a dissident: lack of enthusiasm, for instance.
But the point is, you can't *not* have dissidents. To take an extreme example: if the powers that be said, "all white babies must be aborted" or "all wealth from white people must be expropriated and devoted to blacks as reparations", there's just no way that wouldn't cause pushback. And that's kind of the point: if you're right that dissidence helps the regime, then the regime can just up its demands until it can guarantee dissident reactions. That's just a matter of human psychology.
But: you're not right. The cathedral is not invulnerable. It's a human state of affairs. If the Chinese started using clever psy-ops against the USA, the cathedral would be kind of powerless -- it's one thing for the Russians to be the bad guys; they're white. It's quite another for the Chinese to be -- it calls to mind too many uncomfortable associations with Japanese internment camps. The Cathedral, just like the bourgeoisie, or the capitalists, or the vanguard, makes mistakes. There are market failures (e.g., the NYT has to get ever more extreme for risk of alienating its employees, but the more extreme it gets, the smaller its market share and the more opportunities it creates for competitors). There are government failures (e.g., the iron law of bureaucracy means that government officials will tend to choose advancing their own interests over the interests of the institution).
And look, you have to give a pretty good argument for thinking that history is both deterministic and teleological. Even if history is teleological, I'm highly skeptical that it's deterministically so.
tl;dr: (a) if it were true that serving power and being a dissident just serves power, then detachment would just serve power as well; and (b) it's not true that being a dissident always serves power.
I must give some stylistic feedback: All of your sentences are of the same short length which makes the writing feel very stilted. I first noticed this with your pieces in the American Mind, so it may be a result of feedback from your editors. Editors are retarded; don't listen to them. They were trained by the universities to sap the soul of the writer and create a mono-voice that prevents any connection between the author and the reader.
Editors would have scoffed at the highly stylized tone of UR and forced you to edit it down until you no longer sounded like a mischievous truth-sayer, but instead like some kind of bored journalist forced to report on a weird story that he didn't care about or understand. Make no mistake, content and aesthetics are inseparable. Vary sentence length!
Curtis - in #2b, you invoke Havel's notion that working along with the regime as an infiltrator causes one to lose the original "soul" which drives his opposition to the regime. For this reason, you disapprove of even the most impenetrable methods of infiltration of regime systems. However, Havel isn't merely talking about infiltration - he's talking about the experience of working for a regime at all, and whether a motive to accrue some kind of power is present is irrelevant.
Since the most desirable and comfortable jobs are regime-adjacent, how can anyone, including the detached, avoid falling into the trap Havel describes?
Minimally complying with the latest progressive demands over time which escalate as they go...there's a name for this. Conservatism. There is another . Appeasement. It hasn't worked out so well. I know this has not escaped your notice as you are the man who told me that Cthulhu always flies left. Mao kept fighting when it seemed hopeless and he won. Washington did the same. The only guy I can think of who won by not fighting was Fabius Maximus (or maybe Kutuzov) but even he needed Scipio to fight and win the battle. Maybe you won't win if you fight, but you'll have to show me that inaction results in anything but more losing.
Maybe I am jumping the gun here, or not understanding correctly, but if detachment is the best course of action to reduce (or at least not grow) the power of the regime, then wouldn't the detached become de-facto dissidents? What I mean by this is that a concerted effort of detachment by a significant portion of the population would result in some slowing of power acquisition by the regime, due to a lack of "fuel" (dissident thought/speech/action). Wouldn't this loss in velocity be noticed by the regime and then acted upon?
A recent example of this is the current progressive position of "white silence equals violence", basically, if you do not participate in this latest cause, then you are marked as an enemy of the regime. I believe that the intended purpose of this statement is to threaten politically uncaring individuals (those who are naturally detached) into action, but will affect those who purposefully detach as well.
I guess this then means to be detached, you must then speak up as an "anti-racist". If you do, you allow the regime to seize more power by lending your voice to the cause as an involuntary collaborator. So what is the detached position? Speaking up or finding a better hiding place? Surely you cannot run forever.
It seems like the regime is already going after those who are naturally detached. A purposeful detaching movement would undoubtedly be noticed (say if 10% of reactionaries detached) and would instantly be targeted, making just a new class of dissidents.
1. Pointing out the hypocrisy of power is pointless, I agree. But it's the same deus ex machina to then say "Eventually, things will get so crazy/bizarre that Power will collapse." This seems like another thing people assume someone has run the numbers on and haven't.
2. A good historical problem to test the strategy of passivism would be the Holodomor. Would passivism have saved anyone from being murdered or starved? It likely included thousands of people who were already honest, checked-out, non-participants in power politics.
I'm a big fan of detachment. However, as sadurni points out, I think this interpretation of Kant is arguably incorrect.
To elaborate on sadurni's 3):
The CI states that you are to “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”. This formulation makes no use of well-being, or whether acting in accordance with that maxim will bring about universal disaster. Kant is trying to a) ground morality in reason, and b)tell us what we are forbidden from doing.
To understand what the CI as written above means, we need to know what a maxim is. A maxim, for Kant, is something that states _what we are about to do_ and _why we are doing it_. An example might be 'I'm going to make some food, in order to satisfy my hunger', or 'I'm going to take a vow of celibacy and poverty to show my devotion to God' or 'I'm going to falsely promise to repay a debt in order to secure some funds'.
What the CI asks is whether we _could_ still rationally act according act according to our maxim in a world in which our maxim has become a universal law (where everyone always followed this maxim). In the case of making food, it seems like if everyone acted according to this maxim, nothing at all prevents me from achieving the goal of that maxim. However, take the case of falsely promising to repay funds. In a world in which everyone always falsely promised to repay a debt in order to secure some funds, I _would not_ be able to secure funds by doing this, because either a) no one would believe such a promise in such a world, or b) there would be no such thing as 'promising' in such a world. Whether or such a world is disastrous or not doesn't enter into the equation. This comes up when we look at the celibacy/poverty example.
It arguably _would_ be disastrous if everyone took a vow celibacy and poverty in order to show their devotion to God - it would be hard to think of a more destructive thing for the entire population of the world to stop procreating and commit themselves to a life of poverty. Nevertheless, in a world in which everyone does take such an oath, I can still achieve the goal of my maxim by doing the action described in my maxim, and so I am not forbidden from doing the act, even though disaster would result if everyone did the same thing.
At the end of essay #2a (commenting here since I can't comment there), both hyperlinks need to be fixed. Where it says "Go back to chapter 2, or forward to 2b."
This might just be my lack of understanding or self-awareness (I have a lot of problems here) - is "detachment" more of a...state of being, or an actual prescription for action? Perhaps this flew over my head. For example - I might see my local government as a more functional entity where I would be somewhat enticed to involve myself in (as a dissident, contributor, etc.), given the impact that I might have on it (and it's real impact on myself). Perhaps I don't see it as broken as the federal clown show, so I try to involve myself in it, while still being politically detached at a philosophical level.
Or, given the fact that I know I am playing with power, I might want to pick up a cause because easy - I will inevitably prefer a presidential candidate over another. I'm probably wrong (in the sense of objective results vs. subjective intent), but should I just cast a vote anyway? What's it to me? (I get a cool sticker, right?)
Anyway, perhaps just looking for a clarification, or a shoutout in the text to people like me who might not understand your intent.
The only problem with this line of reasoning is that the Cathedral is not a unified force (if it were it would be something else entirely). Politics can obstruct it, and while dissidents lose energy by acting, that doesn't mean there are no causes worth acting for. A person trapped with a limited amount of food will exhaust his resources as he eats, but he should still eat something.
It's also possible for dissident causes to have anti-regime effects which are not in line with their stated goals. For example, "pro-lifers" are suckers, they will never succeed at banning or meaningfully restricting abortion anywhere in the country. However, their movement has been successful at keeping opposition to abortion within the overton window. That isn't much for all their effort, but it's not clear how things would be any better for them if they just went home.
I know this is grandiose language, but I think Curtis is describing man’s fall from grace. Garden of Eden.
This is us eating from the tree of knowledge; this is what happens to logical inquiry when it meets human social needs; this is the mechanism of how we interact with one another, and how that interaction distorts our intelligence. This is why we are doomed. This is the fall. 
This is an inquiry into the mechanism of our human polity. A polity of two will elicit the same outcome.
For forms of government let fools contest :  whatever’s best administered is best. That’s all we got. Our human interaction reduces us to this small tight little ambition - effective administration - because we can achieve no more. We are doomed. 
From #2B:
"Anyone who grows up in a narrative, then learns to distrust it, will look for alternatives—and the first place to look is the villains in the narrative itself.
"If you land in this trap, you have failed to escape power’s frame. You’re still in the same movie—you have just switched characters."
Yarvin has identified a major problem here, perhaps THE problem.
Very simple question: why would detachment work any better than dissidence? The people in charge have already said that not pledging fealty to them is the same as opposing them. So, if you try to be nonpolitical, that's itself seen as a political act of a quite disreputable sort. Remember, *most* public health officials said that, *from a public health point of view*, the *best* thing to do was take part in the George Floyd protests. Consequently, insofar as you didn't protest, you were actually endangering public health.
Trying to check out is just *being* a dissident. Indeed, even if all dissidents just gave up and said we won't resist--no one ran as a Republican, no one protested even the most elaborate and radical rituals, there would just be a new way of being described as a dissident: lack of enthusiasm, for instance.
But the point is, you can't *not* have dissidents. To take an extreme example: if the powers that be said, "all white babies must be aborted" or "all wealth from white people must be expropriated and devoted to blacks as reparations", there's just no way that wouldn't cause pushback. And that's kind of the point: if you're right that dissidence helps the regime, then the regime can just up its demands until it can guarantee dissident reactions. That's just a matter of human psychology.
But: you're not right. The cathedral is not invulnerable. It's a human state of affairs. If the Chinese started using clever psy-ops against the USA, the cathedral would be kind of powerless -- it's one thing for the Russians to be the bad guys; they're white. It's quite another for the Chinese to be -- it calls to mind too many uncomfortable associations with Japanese internment camps. The Cathedral, just like the bourgeoisie, or the capitalists, or the vanguard, makes mistakes. There are market failures (e.g., the NYT has to get ever more extreme for risk of alienating its employees, but the more extreme it gets, the smaller its market share and the more opportunities it creates for competitors). There are government failures (e.g., the iron law of bureaucracy means that government officials will tend to choose advancing their own interests over the interests of the institution).
And look, you have to give a pretty good argument for thinking that history is both deterministic and teleological. Even if history is teleological, I'm highly skeptical that it's deterministically so.
tl;dr: (a) if it were true that serving power and being a dissident just serves power, then detachment would just serve power as well; and (b) it's not true that being a dissident always serves power.
I must give some stylistic feedback: All of your sentences are of the same short length which makes the writing feel very stilted. I first noticed this with your pieces in the American Mind, so it may be a result of feedback from your editors. Editors are retarded; don't listen to them. They were trained by the universities to sap the soul of the writer and create a mono-voice that prevents any connection between the author and the reader.
Editors would have scoffed at the highly stylized tone of UR and forced you to edit it down until you no longer sounded like a mischievous truth-sayer, but instead like some kind of bored journalist forced to report on a weird story that he didn't care about or understand. Make no mistake, content and aesthetics are inseparable. Vary sentence length!
Curtis - in #2b, you invoke Havel's notion that working along with the regime as an infiltrator causes one to lose the original "soul" which drives his opposition to the regime. For this reason, you disapprove of even the most impenetrable methods of infiltration of regime systems. However, Havel isn't merely talking about infiltration - he's talking about the experience of working for a regime at all, and whether a motive to accrue some kind of power is present is irrelevant.
Since the most desirable and comfortable jobs are regime-adjacent, how can anyone, including the detached, avoid falling into the trap Havel describes?
First
Minimally complying with the latest progressive demands over time which escalate as they go...there's a name for this. Conservatism. There is another . Appeasement. It hasn't worked out so well. I know this has not escaped your notice as you are the man who told me that Cthulhu always flies left. Mao kept fighting when it seemed hopeless and he won. Washington did the same. The only guy I can think of who won by not fighting was Fabius Maximus (or maybe Kutuzov) but even he needed Scipio to fight and win the battle. Maybe you won't win if you fight, but you'll have to show me that inaction results in anything but more losing.
Maybe I am jumping the gun here, or not understanding correctly, but if detachment is the best course of action to reduce (or at least not grow) the power of the regime, then wouldn't the detached become de-facto dissidents? What I mean by this is that a concerted effort of detachment by a significant portion of the population would result in some slowing of power acquisition by the regime, due to a lack of "fuel" (dissident thought/speech/action). Wouldn't this loss in velocity be noticed by the regime and then acted upon?
A recent example of this is the current progressive position of "white silence equals violence", basically, if you do not participate in this latest cause, then you are marked as an enemy of the regime. I believe that the intended purpose of this statement is to threaten politically uncaring individuals (those who are naturally detached) into action, but will affect those who purposefully detach as well.
I guess this then means to be detached, you must then speak up as an "anti-racist". If you do, you allow the regime to seize more power by lending your voice to the cause as an involuntary collaborator. So what is the detached position? Speaking up or finding a better hiding place? Surely you cannot run forever.
It seems like the regime is already going after those who are naturally detached. A purposeful detaching movement would undoubtedly be noticed (say if 10% of reactionaries detached) and would instantly be targeted, making just a new class of dissidents.
1. Pointing out the hypocrisy of power is pointless, I agree. But it's the same deus ex machina to then say "Eventually, things will get so crazy/bizarre that Power will collapse." This seems like another thing people assume someone has run the numbers on and haven't.
2. A good historical problem to test the strategy of passivism would be the Holodomor. Would passivism have saved anyone from being murdered or starved? It likely included thousands of people who were already honest, checked-out, non-participants in power politics.
I'm a big fan of detachment. However, as sadurni points out, I think this interpretation of Kant is arguably incorrect.
To elaborate on sadurni's 3):
The CI states that you are to “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”. This formulation makes no use of well-being, or whether acting in accordance with that maxim will bring about universal disaster. Kant is trying to a) ground morality in reason, and b)tell us what we are forbidden from doing.
To understand what the CI as written above means, we need to know what a maxim is. A maxim, for Kant, is something that states _what we are about to do_ and _why we are doing it_. An example might be 'I'm going to make some food, in order to satisfy my hunger', or 'I'm going to take a vow of celibacy and poverty to show my devotion to God' or 'I'm going to falsely promise to repay a debt in order to secure some funds'.
What the CI asks is whether we _could_ still rationally act according act according to our maxim in a world in which our maxim has become a universal law (where everyone always followed this maxim). In the case of making food, it seems like if everyone acted according to this maxim, nothing at all prevents me from achieving the goal of that maxim. However, take the case of falsely promising to repay funds. In a world in which everyone always falsely promised to repay a debt in order to secure some funds, I _would not_ be able to secure funds by doing this, because either a) no one would believe such a promise in such a world, or b) there would be no such thing as 'promising' in such a world. Whether or such a world is disastrous or not doesn't enter into the equation. This comes up when we look at the celibacy/poverty example.
It arguably _would_ be disastrous if everyone took a vow celibacy and poverty in order to show their devotion to God - it would be hard to think of a more destructive thing for the entire population of the world to stop procreating and commit themselves to a life of poverty. Nevertheless, in a world in which everyone does take such an oath, I can still achieve the goal of my maxim by doing the action described in my maxim, and so I am not forbidden from doing the act, even though disaster would result if everyone did the same thing.
The SEP has a good entry on the topic
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/#ForUniLawNat
It might be that Kant just isn't the guy for this theory.
“Do not lean into your enemies’ stereotypes of their enemies” is fantastic insight that I’ve never heard articulated before.
This deserves substantial expansion and refinement.
At the end of essay #2a (commenting here since I can't comment there), both hyperlinks need to be fixed. Where it says "Go back to chapter 2, or forward to 2b."
Here’s another simple question: why isn’t every country in the world, from 1917 on, like Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge?
This might just be my lack of understanding or self-awareness (I have a lot of problems here) - is "detachment" more of a...state of being, or an actual prescription for action? Perhaps this flew over my head. For example - I might see my local government as a more functional entity where I would be somewhat enticed to involve myself in (as a dissident, contributor, etc.), given the impact that I might have on it (and it's real impact on myself). Perhaps I don't see it as broken as the federal clown show, so I try to involve myself in it, while still being politically detached at a philosophical level.
Or, given the fact that I know I am playing with power, I might want to pick up a cause because easy - I will inevitably prefer a presidential candidate over another. I'm probably wrong (in the sense of objective results vs. subjective intent), but should I just cast a vote anyway? What's it to me? (I get a cool sticker, right?)
Anyway, perhaps just looking for a clarification, or a shoutout in the text to people like me who might not understand your intent.
Thanks!
Positive causes are vain and unaccountable. *Kanye West enters the chat*
The only problem with this line of reasoning is that the Cathedral is not a unified force (if it were it would be something else entirely). Politics can obstruct it, and while dissidents lose energy by acting, that doesn't mean there are no causes worth acting for. A person trapped with a limited amount of food will exhaust his resources as he eats, but he should still eat something.
It's also possible for dissident causes to have anti-regime effects which are not in line with their stated goals. For example, "pro-lifers" are suckers, they will never succeed at banning or meaningfully restricting abortion anywhere in the country. However, their movement has been successful at keeping opposition to abortion within the overton window. That isn't much for all their effort, but it's not clear how things would be any better for them if they just went home.
I know this is grandiose language, but I think Curtis is describing man’s fall from grace. Garden of Eden.
This is us eating from the tree of knowledge; this is what happens to logical inquiry when it meets human social needs; this is the mechanism of how we interact with one another, and how that interaction distorts our intelligence. This is why we are doomed. This is the fall. 
This is an inquiry into the mechanism of our human polity. A polity of two will elicit the same outcome.
For forms of government let fools contest :  whatever’s best administered is best. That’s all we got. Our human interaction reduces us to this small tight little ambition - effective administration - because we can achieve no more. We are doomed.