> The Cathedral holds everyone in the System responsible. It is responsible to no one. It has to be perfect. A helicopter has one nut, the “Jesus nut,” which holds the blades on and the bird in the air. The Cathedral is the Jesus nut of the System’s sanity, and ours.
It should be perfectly obvious to all that if The Cathedral is feeding our decision makers bad information, the System is fucked. But is The Cathedral spitting out bad information?
> A noble's life purpose is the highest stage on the pyramid of needs: self-actualization. The most obvious way to be self-actualized is to be important, so nobles crave power and importance. So the top social class, and everyone who aspires to join them—with a few stubborn exceptions, everyone—is intellectually tide-locked to the latest truth from the Brain, and the latest story from the Voice.
And here we have The Cathedral's core failure mechanism: tidal locking and the failure of the marketplace of ideas.
I differ from Curtis in where I believe faith in The Cathedral comes from. In my experience, the "left" (but really nearly everyone intelligent on the right or left) that the infallibility of The Cathedral comes from Science. Science is a method, The Cathedral follows The Scientific Method, and thereby achieves infallibility. Destroying faith in The Cathedral requires either 1) convincing people that The Cathedral is not practicing true Science at all (the Protestant approach) or 2) convincing people that the concept of Science is a farce to begin with (the Atheistic approach).
Personally I am an atheist with respect to Science. There is no method that is necessary or sufficient for performing Science. "Science" makes many statements that cannot be tested yet are believed to be true for good reasons. Just as effective governance cannot be reduced to a set of procedures, nor can the task of truth-seeking. It requires intelligence and good judgement. Feyerabend's "Against Method" is probably the strongest work in favor of this view, though it is hardly sufficient on its own to make its case. For that, it is necessary to study the many failures not of the social sciences, but of Physics itself in the post-FDR era. "Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy" by Roger Penrose is a good place to start, and very much expands on this "tidal locking" idea. Penrose goes through and shows how promising ideas turned into mere
The impending failure of the Dark Matter theory, which The Cathedral holds with the deepest religious conviction, will be an amazing case study 30 years from now. I strongly recommend "A Philosophical Approach to MOND" by David Merrit for this. It is actually unbelievable how ridiculously stupid and unsupported our current cosmological theories are. These are the "Fantasy" referred to by Penrose. Sir Roger Penrose, one of the greatest living physicists, believes an entire scientific field is fantasy! "Lambda CDM Considered Retarded" would be an excellent blog post, yet even this title isn't strong enough. The laughability of even our post-war "apolitical" sciences is enough to convince one that Harvard and the like should be nuked from orbit. In theoretical adjacent to physics, everything after the Standard Model has been basically a complete and utter failure. "Mavericks" like Penrose or the blogger Sabine Hossenfelder ("Lost in Math") are way too nice in their beliefs that The Cathedral is just a little off, but can be easily repaired but adhering to the prescriptions of the god Science more closely.
Perhaps for this reason, the Protestant approach is somewhat easier. It leverages the preexisting faith in Science, and exposes that the Science the Cathedral practices is not the true Science. Convincing a people that their god is false is far more difficult than convincing them that the weird man over there in white robe/lab coat is a false prophet. The salience of this approach is revealed by events such as the Sokal Squared scandal.
Indeed, it allows for the moral high ground. "I am not a Science denier, I believe in Science so deeply that it forces me to denounce these liars as anti-falsificationist frauds! They (or at least, their PhDs) should be burned at the stake for crimes against Science!" But of course, it will never work from the right. Right wing Protestantism could have never succeeded. The only way it could work is by outflanking The Cathedral from the left.
Indeed, this is currently being attempted. Modern Scientists can never be trusted, you see, because they are not truly objective. Rather, they view the world from the perspective of White Supremacy. When they study the uterus, they study the white woman's uterus, and the result is excess infant mortality among BIPOCs (which stands for bisexual people of color, or something). The only way this can be cured is by injecting more bisexuals into the system to achieve True Science.
So the whole approach of Protestant Science seems destined for failure. Only the rejection of the false god of Science can break the Cathedrals grip. That's not to say we shouldn't have what we currently refer to as "scientists," rather, it must be acknowledged that the god Science cannot be relied on for judgement, rather, scientists must be held accountable by man; in practice, they must be held accountable by government. Frauds and ideologues do not get to keep their PhDs. They get sent to work in the coal mines, I mean Starbucks (or more likely, put on UBI and stripped of the privileges associated with the few capable of performing non-automated tasks).
The problem with the science angle is that they have an arsenal of methods that allow them to deny science without denying it, for example simply not providing grants to researchers who try to look into the designated forbidden areas or killing their research in peer review. Just recently a scientist looking into the possible genetic component of Covid infectivity got deplatformed from Twitter, just for posting legitimate peer-reviewed research.
The modern addiction to Science is quite simple. Science is just a synonym of “Catholicism,” “the will of Zeus,” “the path of Huitzilopochtli,” except it’s atheistic. It’s a meaningless standin for Morality, which is assumed to be the same as Reality. Except, as has happened throughout all of human history, when Reality diverges from Morality the whole system starts to fall apart. There is no other meaning to Science beyond nontheistic religion.
“There is no other meaning to Science beyond nontheistic religion.”
When Jill Biden says “Vote for Science” she is using the word in the way you have defined. One of the hubristic conceits of the “enlightenment” has been that human societies can function well under an atheistic materialist reductionist ethics. Some few individuals perhaps can- the majority can’t. They need systems of meaning. They need a Narrative of Good and Bad. They need a moral structure that actually helps to bind people together. They need to actually be instructed in Virtue, not in parasitic virtue signaling.
If the older system is attacked and largely destroyed by elites (Christianity) then people will invent a new one out of the wreckage of the old. The vast majority of new religions are crappy and don’t survive.
We can design an amazing new Regime, but without a religious revival of a Lindy religion that actually works (unlike these Communist/Marxist/Equality religions), or perhaps the growth of a new religion that is adaptive and somehow beats the odds—it ain’t going to work.
One of the brilliancies of the Cathedral is that it has presented Science as the only way in which outside information can be incoperated into the System. This lures Protestant science devotees into a power trap---if only their science can be accepted as Science, then maybe something can change! Of course, this is a trap, the Cathedral has strong veto power over any and all scientific results. Many people note a turning point in 1970 where all subsequent science has been useless, but the ultimate causes of this uselessness (the reaserch grant system, the heralding of science as a public good, etc) was definitely in the 40s during the founding of the System.
Another brilliancy is the Cathedral's insistence on Science's atheism. Science is objective, Science is critical, no other system has been found to be more reliable, etc. And the scary fact is that it is true in one important sense: Science only opresses new information, it does not create new information (https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Distributed_Idea_Suppression_Complex_(The_DISC)).
So the Cathedral has very solid defences against both atheist and protestant scientists. What about its defences against dogmatic othodox science? I am imagining small, tightly knit cult-like institutions performing their own science behind closed doors, mideval alchemist style, selectively advertising their best ideas only to new recruits/devotees. And of course, a healthy but viscious distain for Science. I claim that the Cathedral is so focused on defending against atheism and protestantisim that othodoxy can easily slip through the cracks. I have met some of these groups both inside and outside academia. The key difference from normal academic Science is an absolute insistence by a strong, charismatic leader upon a specific set of principles that guide reaserch in their area (it is very domain specific). And this insistence, rather than following the pressures of peer review or "citability" makes all the difference between useful and useless reaserch.
There's one open question for me. Does the System actually know that the Republic is a shell and that they're the ones actually running things?
Let's posit that the president has 5% as much power as most people think he does. The Voice is part of the System, i.e. where the real power is. If this is all basically a show, if none of it really matters, this fact seems not to have occurred to anyone in any newsroom in America.
The absolute hysterics coming from the media are a bit too real. It doesn't seem like people thinking, "this is all just a distraction." And while I'm sure the Bureau knew there was nothing to this Russian Collusion story, if the Voice was not convinced this was going to be the end of Trump, the might have hedged a bit more than they did.
The last four years have been awful, but not because of anything Trump has done or hasn't done. More that he's caused something like a really bad autoimmune response in the System.
The reason I'm concerned about this is, it seems that the people actually running the country are using their actual power to put a stop to a meaningless figurehead. In the process, they might end up completely wrecking everything, ironically including the System itself.
I'm all for detachment, but I still have to live here.
So like, is the end game here Elon, Barack, and Ivanka form a triumvirate after the 2030s hyperinflationary global depression and we kick off the new millennium with a neo Roman American tech empire where everyone gets a self driving tractor? Is that like, the last chapter?
Can you do a little essay on turning the common law method of argumentation into a group-edited argument map instead of essay-style written opinions? Brilliant, but you only mentioned it one time very briefly long ago.
Anything about automating/futurizing the legal system please.
Also can you talk a little bit about what we can do to stop China from assuming global hegemony?
Excellent read, thank you. I can accept that USG runs more efficiently when Deputies who play ball are at the helm, and that all Vandals can realistically hope to do is retard that inevitable march to some degree. Now more than ever, it seems as though that march, like the pied piper, is leading to a dangerous future predicated on utopian thinking that is increasingly divorced from reality.
Having read this post, and many of Curtis' others at UR, I'm still left with the question: given that efficient progress along this slide seems to be making matters worse, and acknowledging full well that the Vandal cause is hopeless, wouldn't we still be better off voting for Vandals in elections? Wouldn't it be better to *decrease* the efficiency of USG, if only for a little while?
Or does Curtis believe that accelerating the inevitable path is preferable in that it would at least open the door for what comes next, despite the risks?
Honestly, I think way too much energy is devoted to this question. If you agree with the analysis here, it really doesn't matter who you vote for.
If you want to vote for Trump, go ahead. Just know the career and social risks associated with making your intentions public and also know that the impact is - at best - minimal. Trump, or whoever, may want to do things that you want done, but no president can make them happen in the System.
The best argument for voting for Democrats across the board is that you won't fool yourself into thinking you're doing something by voting Republican. If you want to vote Republican, remember that is has virtually no impact.
Vote however you want, but recognize that the dial on the voting meter is set at almost precisely zero.
This is something I was thinking as well. Just because you can't beat your adversary outright doesn't mean you can't increase their operational costs. In fact there are many safe, easy and legal ways to make it just a little bit harder for the Cathedral to operate. I am not sure I'm in favor of voting though because it essentially gives them even more legitimacy.
This makes sense in theory: the loss of a battle may galvanize the Cathedral and they may more than compensate for that setback over the course of the war, so to speak. In practice, that seems to be the case during the current administration. I wonder if that's a hard and fast rule though, or if in some cases, Vandal administrations represent real friction for that march of 'progress'. The Reagan administration seemed to have a different, perhaps less galvanizing effect than Trump's, for example. Or at the very least, the core tenets of the Cathedral were pushed much further back into the Brain, sticking to Curtis' terminology.
Another key piece of context with the Reagan era is that the loudest parts of the Cathedral and Voice were strongly united against the Soviet Union. Reagan was a champion for the economic liberals, while the cultural liberals had finally quit their affections for the Soviets after decades of evidence that they were never going to usher in the hoped for workers Utopia. And by that point, the Soviet Union was blatantly drab and ugly, and not a sexy cause at all. Also, of course, the US economy was strong, the economic liberals hadn’t yet shipped all the manufacturing to China.
Having a strong enemy also does wonders for social cohesion via the Rally Round The Flag principle. It is perhaps the strongest force that provides ingroup cultural glue for societies larger in scale than kin-related tribes. (I put Girard’s important scapegoat thesis a notch below.)
A key requirement for the energy of the Left is struggle. They need to feel like they are struggling against evil. The greater the evil that they can somewhat plausibly claim they are fighting, the more energy they have.
They have spent four years desperately trying to convince themselves that Trump is Hitler. If he wins, they will ramp it up way beyond 11.
If Trump had shown any effectiveness at protecting Americans from struggle sessions, housing discrimination, or from simple harassment, then we would have some rationale for voting. But under his watch and GOP control, struggle sessions spread even throughout federal agencies. Sure, he just signed some executive order. Let’s see what happens when the HR folks just ignore it or it goes to the courts.
He did literally nothing to reign in social media companies who were actively opposed to him and were censoring and financially blacklisting his supporters. He was so stupid, he has continued to use Twitter, instead of boosting some alternative non-monopolistic non-Silicon Valley social media company.
Twitter can censor and cut him off at will. And if they do during a tense and closely contested election, what will the GOP do? They will say some Very Strident Words. Because muh private companies. Or something.
Sorry Mihai for just parroting your point on the left’s energy as a function of the perceived power of their Enemy, waste of words. It would be nice to have an editing function.
Trump might still pass a revision of Article 230. Even in the worst case scenario, this would make the US far less appealing as a hosting location. If more people start hosting their content elsewhere, it suddenly becomes quite a bit harder for the Cathedral to push their propaganda on the whole world 24/365. Best case scenario - we get our first step towards widespread 'sovereign internets', which in the long term would fuck the Cathedral even harder.
If Trump had merely switched his Tweeting to an alternative social media company- whether Gab, or Minds, or something else- he would have had a major impact in supporting the growth of the enclave you describe, and all without any government regulation.
I support the free market and minimal regulation of business where it doesn’t infringe on the Commons. That’s the key blind spot of classical Libertarian theory. We need government regulations to reign in and punish the now-Chinese owned massive pork factories that repeatedly dump their waste in the local watershed and destroy the ecosystem. (As an aside, its totally super logical that we let our biggest geopolitical competitor have significant control over one of our domestic food supply chains.)
Likewise, we need government regulation of the information ecology. We can’t allow a monopoly like Google to have such enormous power over our information ecosystem to be able to quietly blacklist certain political terms, etc. It is far too much power to be held by one entity. Theodore Roosevelt and Adam Smith understood this. Monopolies are poison in a free market system.
Granted, as soon as the Deputies are back in official power, we are guaranteed to see regulation of Silicon Valley centered around “hate speech.” That is the mission of the NGO started last year in a joint effort by the Soros and Koch brothers foundations. The “regulation” is coming. Of course, it’s going to be top down censorship of anything opposing key tenets of the Ideology.
Yes, in the near term, we should support alternatives to the monopolies. And you and Yarvin are likely correct that today’s President couldn’t do anything about SV monopolies if he wanted to. One thing he could do is work to embarrass and oust the GOP members who support the status quo, such as Mike Lee from Utah. But asking for effective and intelligent action from Trump is futile. We have four years of evidence.
"The Factory is an herbivore, not a carnivore. It is inherently impotent because sheep do not rule over wolves, even if every now and then some ram gets in a good headbutt. It can also be found bribing Congress; but only with legal bribes; and only for its own economic interests, not to contend for power."
Mastercard/Visa started denying service to dissidents before experiencing any media pressure to do so. It's hard to see how this furthered their economic interests.
Arkansas, I agree that corporate america is taking some Woke actions that hurt their pocketbook, and I think it’s an important point. The NBA and NFL are examples.
Western Elite consensus is presently unifying around Woke Religion. I’m guessing the public relations employees of the NFL and NBA is telling the old rich owners they *must* parrot woke ideology in their product or the world will end.
I also think that these examples put the lie to the Libertarian myth of companies always doing whatever they do just for money. It’s clearly not the case- companies are run by ideologically driven humans, and right now the ideology is pointing in one direction.
My opinion is that Yarvin is painting a sketch here that’s not going to be perfect in all dimensions. Perhaps he would suggest that corporations are in general so afraid of getting negative attention from the Voice that they are willing to take a smaller short term hit rather than a perceived possible long term hit.
I also think we shouldn’t ignore the probability that a lot of rich elites are high on religion right now.
Aurelius, perfectly judged. The one thing I would add is that corporatism, late stage capitalism, has created such a vast power and wealth that these people are more like Royalty than CEOs, money is trifling.
In the start you talked about watching baboon people with a system like ours kinda like in the open letter, but didn’t really follow through with observing the system through that lense so I don’t thing it was necessary to bring it up in the first place.
Yeah. It was powerful imagery. We’re paying $10 a month for drafts of future chapters, here. There’s gonna be some organizational errors. It doesn’t matter to me. I’ve been reading politics essays for years and Yarvin’s first drafts are more true and insightful and original (original even though a lot of this is rehashed from Open Letter to Open Minded Progressives and Gentle Introduction to UR) than anything you can read anywhere else on similar topics.
Why not try and strengthen the Factory, like Nick Land seems to suggest? It appears tightly regulated, yes, but the body that regulates it has a much lower upper bound of the total power it can have. It's also external - so at the very least it can get as 'big' as the Cathedral - at least in theory.
Very interesting how this is a refutation of some of MM's older work. I remember a rather prominent quote about "electing a President who promises to cancel the Constitution," or something along those lines. The focus on Congress this time around was quite refreshing.
The Castle isn't a very prominent feature in most Americans' lives, but I think the intent was merely to describe all existing nexuses of power starting with the weakest ones, and I suppose that all regimes must have a security apparatus. Interesting how consistently it's as a "red-state" institution, though-- can it last for long?
I don't really see this as a refutation. "Electing the president who promises to cancel the constitution" was mentioned on UR, yes, but "absolutely don't do elections unless you have a strict plan on how to rule" was present back then too.
The earlier plan to institute neocameralism was to build an Antiveristy (truth service) which was so demonstrably smart that power would just be given to it once the powerful were convinced of their own incompetence and of the antiversity’s capability. Maybe he’s gonna advocate that more in Ch. 4 tho.
So we have 2 descriptive constitutions mentioned here: Bagehot's English Constitution, and Yarvin's "Descriptive constitution of the modern regime". Does anyone know of any other descriptive constitutions from any other period of history?
holy lord
Two excerpts that really stood out to me:
> The Cathedral holds everyone in the System responsible. It is responsible to no one. It has to be perfect. A helicopter has one nut, the “Jesus nut,” which holds the blades on and the bird in the air. The Cathedral is the Jesus nut of the System’s sanity, and ours.
It should be perfectly obvious to all that if The Cathedral is feeding our decision makers bad information, the System is fucked. But is The Cathedral spitting out bad information?
> A noble's life purpose is the highest stage on the pyramid of needs: self-actualization. The most obvious way to be self-actualized is to be important, so nobles crave power and importance. So the top social class, and everyone who aspires to join them—with a few stubborn exceptions, everyone—is intellectually tide-locked to the latest truth from the Brain, and the latest story from the Voice.
And here we have The Cathedral's core failure mechanism: tidal locking and the failure of the marketplace of ideas.
I differ from Curtis in where I believe faith in The Cathedral comes from. In my experience, the "left" (but really nearly everyone intelligent on the right or left) that the infallibility of The Cathedral comes from Science. Science is a method, The Cathedral follows The Scientific Method, and thereby achieves infallibility. Destroying faith in The Cathedral requires either 1) convincing people that The Cathedral is not practicing true Science at all (the Protestant approach) or 2) convincing people that the concept of Science is a farce to begin with (the Atheistic approach).
Personally I am an atheist with respect to Science. There is no method that is necessary or sufficient for performing Science. "Science" makes many statements that cannot be tested yet are believed to be true for good reasons. Just as effective governance cannot be reduced to a set of procedures, nor can the task of truth-seeking. It requires intelligence and good judgement. Feyerabend's "Against Method" is probably the strongest work in favor of this view, though it is hardly sufficient on its own to make its case. For that, it is necessary to study the many failures not of the social sciences, but of Physics itself in the post-FDR era. "Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy" by Roger Penrose is a good place to start, and very much expands on this "tidal locking" idea. Penrose goes through and shows how promising ideas turned into mere
The impending failure of the Dark Matter theory, which The Cathedral holds with the deepest religious conviction, will be an amazing case study 30 years from now. I strongly recommend "A Philosophical Approach to MOND" by David Merrit for this. It is actually unbelievable how ridiculously stupid and unsupported our current cosmological theories are. These are the "Fantasy" referred to by Penrose. Sir Roger Penrose, one of the greatest living physicists, believes an entire scientific field is fantasy! "Lambda CDM Considered Retarded" would be an excellent blog post, yet even this title isn't strong enough. The laughability of even our post-war "apolitical" sciences is enough to convince one that Harvard and the like should be nuked from orbit. In theoretical adjacent to physics, everything after the Standard Model has been basically a complete and utter failure. "Mavericks" like Penrose or the blogger Sabine Hossenfelder ("Lost in Math") are way too nice in their beliefs that The Cathedral is just a little off, but can be easily repaired but adhering to the prescriptions of the god Science more closely.
Perhaps for this reason, the Protestant approach is somewhat easier. It leverages the preexisting faith in Science, and exposes that the Science the Cathedral practices is not the true Science. Convincing a people that their god is false is far more difficult than convincing them that the weird man over there in white robe/lab coat is a false prophet. The salience of this approach is revealed by events such as the Sokal Squared scandal.
Indeed, it allows for the moral high ground. "I am not a Science denier, I believe in Science so deeply that it forces me to denounce these liars as anti-falsificationist frauds! They (or at least, their PhDs) should be burned at the stake for crimes against Science!" But of course, it will never work from the right. Right wing Protestantism could have never succeeded. The only way it could work is by outflanking The Cathedral from the left.
Indeed, this is currently being attempted. Modern Scientists can never be trusted, you see, because they are not truly objective. Rather, they view the world from the perspective of White Supremacy. When they study the uterus, they study the white woman's uterus, and the result is excess infant mortality among BIPOCs (which stands for bisexual people of color, or something). The only way this can be cured is by injecting more bisexuals into the system to achieve True Science.
So the whole approach of Protestant Science seems destined for failure. Only the rejection of the false god of Science can break the Cathedrals grip. That's not to say we shouldn't have what we currently refer to as "scientists," rather, it must be acknowledged that the god Science cannot be relied on for judgement, rather, scientists must be held accountable by man; in practice, they must be held accountable by government. Frauds and ideologues do not get to keep their PhDs. They get sent to work in the coal mines, I mean Starbucks (or more likely, put on UBI and stripped of the privileges associated with the few capable of performing non-automated tasks).
The problem with the science angle is that they have an arsenal of methods that allow them to deny science without denying it, for example simply not providing grants to researchers who try to look into the designated forbidden areas or killing their research in peer review. Just recently a scientist looking into the possible genetic component of Covid infectivity got deplatformed from Twitter, just for posting legitimate peer-reviewed research.
The modern addiction to Science is quite simple. Science is just a synonym of “Catholicism,” “the will of Zeus,” “the path of Huitzilopochtli,” except it’s atheistic. It’s a meaningless standin for Morality, which is assumed to be the same as Reality. Except, as has happened throughout all of human history, when Reality diverges from Morality the whole system starts to fall apart. There is no other meaning to Science beyond nontheistic religion.
“There is no other meaning to Science beyond nontheistic religion.”
When Jill Biden says “Vote for Science” she is using the word in the way you have defined. One of the hubristic conceits of the “enlightenment” has been that human societies can function well under an atheistic materialist reductionist ethics. Some few individuals perhaps can- the majority can’t. They need systems of meaning. They need a Narrative of Good and Bad. They need a moral structure that actually helps to bind people together. They need to actually be instructed in Virtue, not in parasitic virtue signaling.
If the older system is attacked and largely destroyed by elites (Christianity) then people will invent a new one out of the wreckage of the old. The vast majority of new religions are crappy and don’t survive.
We can design an amazing new Regime, but without a religious revival of a Lindy religion that actually works (unlike these Communist/Marxist/Equality religions), or perhaps the growth of a new religion that is adaptive and somehow beats the odds—it ain’t going to work.
One of the brilliancies of the Cathedral is that it has presented Science as the only way in which outside information can be incoperated into the System. This lures Protestant science devotees into a power trap---if only their science can be accepted as Science, then maybe something can change! Of course, this is a trap, the Cathedral has strong veto power over any and all scientific results. Many people note a turning point in 1970 where all subsequent science has been useless, but the ultimate causes of this uselessness (the reaserch grant system, the heralding of science as a public good, etc) was definitely in the 40s during the founding of the System.
Another brilliancy is the Cathedral's insistence on Science's atheism. Science is objective, Science is critical, no other system has been found to be more reliable, etc. And the scary fact is that it is true in one important sense: Science only opresses new information, it does not create new information (https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Distributed_Idea_Suppression_Complex_(The_DISC)).
So the Cathedral has very solid defences against both atheist and protestant scientists. What about its defences against dogmatic othodox science? I am imagining small, tightly knit cult-like institutions performing their own science behind closed doors, mideval alchemist style, selectively advertising their best ideas only to new recruits/devotees. And of course, a healthy but viscious distain for Science. I claim that the Cathedral is so focused on defending against atheism and protestantisim that othodoxy can easily slip through the cracks. I have met some of these groups both inside and outside academia. The key difference from normal academic Science is an absolute insistence by a strong, charismatic leader upon a specific set of principles that guide reaserch in their area (it is very domain specific). And this insistence, rather than following the pressures of peer review or "citability" makes all the difference between useful and useless reaserch.
They have been outflanked by the Left for a century, see 2020 for example.
Only the Democrats miscalculations can destroy them - and they may just have miscalculated on race.
I feel like I'm reading Goldstein's book in "1984". That didn't go so well for Winston.
There's one open question for me. Does the System actually know that the Republic is a shell and that they're the ones actually running things?
Let's posit that the president has 5% as much power as most people think he does. The Voice is part of the System, i.e. where the real power is. If this is all basically a show, if none of it really matters, this fact seems not to have occurred to anyone in any newsroom in America.
The absolute hysterics coming from the media are a bit too real. It doesn't seem like people thinking, "this is all just a distraction." And while I'm sure the Bureau knew there was nothing to this Russian Collusion story, if the Voice was not convinced this was going to be the end of Trump, the might have hedged a bit more than they did.
The last four years have been awful, but not because of anything Trump has done or hasn't done. More that he's caused something like a really bad autoimmune response in the System.
The reason I'm concerned about this is, it seems that the people actually running the country are using their actual power to put a stop to a meaningless figurehead. In the process, they might end up completely wrecking everything, ironically including the System itself.
I'm all for detachment, but I still have to live here.
can't wait for chapter 4.
So like, is the end game here Elon, Barack, and Ivanka form a triumvirate after the 2030s hyperinflationary global depression and we kick off the new millennium with a neo Roman American tech empire where everyone gets a self driving tractor? Is that like, the last chapter?
Can you do a little essay on turning the common law method of argumentation into a group-edited argument map instead of essay-style written opinions? Brilliant, but you only mentioned it one time very briefly long ago.
Anything about automating/futurizing the legal system please.
Also can you talk a little bit about what we can do to stop China from assuming global hegemony?
thanks, again
Excellent read, thank you. I can accept that USG runs more efficiently when Deputies who play ball are at the helm, and that all Vandals can realistically hope to do is retard that inevitable march to some degree. Now more than ever, it seems as though that march, like the pied piper, is leading to a dangerous future predicated on utopian thinking that is increasingly divorced from reality.
Having read this post, and many of Curtis' others at UR, I'm still left with the question: given that efficient progress along this slide seems to be making matters worse, and acknowledging full well that the Vandal cause is hopeless, wouldn't we still be better off voting for Vandals in elections? Wouldn't it be better to *decrease* the efficiency of USG, if only for a little while?
Or does Curtis believe that accelerating the inevitable path is preferable in that it would at least open the door for what comes next, despite the risks?
Honestly, I think way too much energy is devoted to this question. If you agree with the analysis here, it really doesn't matter who you vote for.
If you want to vote for Trump, go ahead. Just know the career and social risks associated with making your intentions public and also know that the impact is - at best - minimal. Trump, or whoever, may want to do things that you want done, but no president can make them happen in the System.
The best argument for voting for Democrats across the board is that you won't fool yourself into thinking you're doing something by voting Republican. If you want to vote Republican, remember that is has virtually no impact.
Vote however you want, but recognize that the dial on the voting meter is set at almost precisely zero.
Correct, but Trump for me brings the joy of watching their derangement.
I don't have anything to add here, but I wanted to say that it's good to see you again Foseti. I hope you're doing well.
This is something I was thinking as well. Just because you can't beat your adversary outright doesn't mean you can't increase their operational costs. In fact there are many safe, easy and legal ways to make it just a little bit harder for the Cathedral to operate. I am not sure I'm in favor of voting though because it essentially gives them even more legitimacy.
This last sentence is the essential point. When no one is voting anyway, neocameralism begins to make a lot more sense to normies.
To be clear, I know Curtis typically argues for abstinence, but I don't know why that's preferable, given the above.
Deputies in power means their failures more and more become only their fault.
This makes sense in theory: the loss of a battle may galvanize the Cathedral and they may more than compensate for that setback over the course of the war, so to speak. In practice, that seems to be the case during the current administration. I wonder if that's a hard and fast rule though, or if in some cases, Vandal administrations represent real friction for that march of 'progress'. The Reagan administration seemed to have a different, perhaps less galvanizing effect than Trump's, for example. Or at the very least, the core tenets of the Cathedral were pushed much further back into the Brain, sticking to Curtis' terminology.
Another key piece of context with the Reagan era is that the loudest parts of the Cathedral and Voice were strongly united against the Soviet Union. Reagan was a champion for the economic liberals, while the cultural liberals had finally quit their affections for the Soviets after decades of evidence that they were never going to usher in the hoped for workers Utopia. And by that point, the Soviet Union was blatantly drab and ugly, and not a sexy cause at all. Also, of course, the US economy was strong, the economic liberals hadn’t yet shipped all the manufacturing to China.
Having a strong enemy also does wonders for social cohesion via the Rally Round The Flag principle. It is perhaps the strongest force that provides ingroup cultural glue for societies larger in scale than kin-related tribes. (I put Girard’s important scapegoat thesis a notch below.)
A key requirement for the energy of the Left is struggle. They need to feel like they are struggling against evil. The greater the evil that they can somewhat plausibly claim they are fighting, the more energy they have.
They have spent four years desperately trying to convince themselves that Trump is Hitler. If he wins, they will ramp it up way beyond 11.
If Trump had shown any effectiveness at protecting Americans from struggle sessions, housing discrimination, or from simple harassment, then we would have some rationale for voting. But under his watch and GOP control, struggle sessions spread even throughout federal agencies. Sure, he just signed some executive order. Let’s see what happens when the HR folks just ignore it or it goes to the courts.
He did literally nothing to reign in social media companies who were actively opposed to him and were censoring and financially blacklisting his supporters. He was so stupid, he has continued to use Twitter, instead of boosting some alternative non-monopolistic non-Silicon Valley social media company.
Twitter can censor and cut him off at will. And if they do during a tense and closely contested election, what will the GOP do? They will say some Very Strident Words. Because muh private companies. Or something.
Sorry Mihai for just parroting your point on the left’s energy as a function of the perceived power of their Enemy, waste of words. It would be nice to have an editing function.
Trump might still pass a revision of Article 230. Even in the worst case scenario, this would make the US far less appealing as a hosting location. If more people start hosting their content elsewhere, it suddenly becomes quite a bit harder for the Cathedral to push their propaganda on the whole world 24/365. Best case scenario - we get our first step towards widespread 'sovereign internets', which in the long term would fuck the Cathedral even harder.
If Trump had merely switched his Tweeting to an alternative social media company- whether Gab, or Minds, or something else- he would have had a major impact in supporting the growth of the enclave you describe, and all without any government regulation.
I support the free market and minimal regulation of business where it doesn’t infringe on the Commons. That’s the key blind spot of classical Libertarian theory. We need government regulations to reign in and punish the now-Chinese owned massive pork factories that repeatedly dump their waste in the local watershed and destroy the ecosystem. (As an aside, its totally super logical that we let our biggest geopolitical competitor have significant control over one of our domestic food supply chains.)
Likewise, we need government regulation of the information ecology. We can’t allow a monopoly like Google to have such enormous power over our information ecosystem to be able to quietly blacklist certain political terms, etc. It is far too much power to be held by one entity. Theodore Roosevelt and Adam Smith understood this. Monopolies are poison in a free market system.
Granted, as soon as the Deputies are back in official power, we are guaranteed to see regulation of Silicon Valley centered around “hate speech.” That is the mission of the NGO started last year in a joint effort by the Soros and Koch brothers foundations. The “regulation” is coming. Of course, it’s going to be top down censorship of anything opposing key tenets of the Ideology.
Yes, in the near term, we should support alternatives to the monopolies. And you and Yarvin are likely correct that today’s President couldn’t do anything about SV monopolies if he wanted to. One thing he could do is work to embarrass and oust the GOP members who support the status quo, such as Mike Lee from Utah. But asking for effective and intelligent action from Trump is futile. We have four years of evidence.
"The Factory is an herbivore, not a carnivore. It is inherently impotent because sheep do not rule over wolves, even if every now and then some ram gets in a good headbutt. It can also be found bribing Congress; but only with legal bribes; and only for its own economic interests, not to contend for power."
Mastercard/Visa started denying service to dissidents before experiencing any media pressure to do so. It's hard to see how this furthered their economic interests.
Arkansas, I agree that corporate america is taking some Woke actions that hurt their pocketbook, and I think it’s an important point. The NBA and NFL are examples.
Western Elite consensus is presently unifying around Woke Religion. I’m guessing the public relations employees of the NFL and NBA is telling the old rich owners they *must* parrot woke ideology in their product or the world will end.
I also think that these examples put the lie to the Libertarian myth of companies always doing whatever they do just for money. It’s clearly not the case- companies are run by ideologically driven humans, and right now the ideology is pointing in one direction.
My opinion is that Yarvin is painting a sketch here that’s not going to be perfect in all dimensions. Perhaps he would suggest that corporations are in general so afraid of getting negative attention from the Voice that they are willing to take a smaller short term hit rather than a perceived possible long term hit.
I also think we shouldn’t ignore the probability that a lot of rich elites are high on religion right now.
I suspect true belief to be a bigger factor than fear in many cases. A lot of big companies go woke with little to no prompting from the Voice.
I agree with you. It’s what the Western Aristocracy is pushing, and a fundamental drive of homo sapiens is the mimicry of Power.
Aurelius, perfectly judged. The one thing I would add is that corporatism, late stage capitalism, has created such a vast power and wealth that these people are more like Royalty than CEOs, money is trifling.
any news re: audio/podcast versions of these?
Great Chapter!
In the start you talked about watching baboon people with a system like ours kinda like in the open letter, but didn’t really follow through with observing the system through that lense so I don’t thing it was necessary to bring it up in the first place.
Yeah. It was powerful imagery. We’re paying $10 a month for drafts of future chapters, here. There’s gonna be some organizational errors. It doesn’t matter to me. I’ve been reading politics essays for years and Yarvin’s first drafts are more true and insightful and original (original even though a lot of this is rehashed from Open Letter to Open Minded Progressives and Gentle Introduction to UR) than anything you can read anywhere else on similar topics.
Do you have any comment on the education of children under the Cathedral? Especially, for non globalists? (Not hooked up to the Brain)
Why not try and strengthen the Factory, like Nick Land seems to suggest? It appears tightly regulated, yes, but the body that regulates it has a much lower upper bound of the total power it can have. It's also external - so at the very least it can get as 'big' as the Cathedral - at least in theory.
How? Honestly at this point, changing Congress seems easier than making large companies less pozzed
Very interesting how this is a refutation of some of MM's older work. I remember a rather prominent quote about "electing a President who promises to cancel the Constitution," or something along those lines. The focus on Congress this time around was quite refreshing.
The Castle isn't a very prominent feature in most Americans' lives, but I think the intent was merely to describe all existing nexuses of power starting with the weakest ones, and I suppose that all regimes must have a security apparatus. Interesting how consistently it's as a "red-state" institution, though-- can it last for long?
I don't really see this as a refutation. "Electing the president who promises to cancel the constitution" was mentioned on UR, yes, but "absolutely don't do elections unless you have a strict plan on how to rule" was present back then too.
Looking back on this comment I see I couldn’t even anticipate how quickly the military would be co-opted.
The earlier plan to institute neocameralism was to build an Antiveristy (truth service) which was so demonstrably smart that power would just be given to it once the powerful were convinced of their own incompetence and of the antiversity’s capability. Maybe he’s gonna advocate that more in Ch. 4 tho.
There's no refutation. This chapter argues that the Constitution is already cancelled.
This has been a long time coming sir, thank you. The poetry, was nice though. Can’t have too much poetry.
So we have 2 descriptive constitutions mentioned here: Bagehot's English Constitution, and Yarvin's "Descriptive constitution of the modern regime". Does anyone know of any other descriptive constitutions from any other period of history?