In fact, if we were to go really historic on this topic, absolute monarchies leaked power like a motherfucker.
It is in fact the leakage of power of absolute monarchies that ended up birthing absolute democracies and their constituent bureaucracies. The process, (as described by Jouvenel, with which you are familiar) goes something like this:
The King wants to do King shit. But he is limited by the influence of those pesky Aristocrats, in essence mini-kings in the Pyramidal hierarchy of the Feudal System. These guys are lame, because they want to limit Power. They want to limit it, because they don't have all of it. And they can limit it, because they have some of it. Separation of Power is actually a thing - but only if you literally split the kingdom in a lot of actual mini-kingdoms. Derp Montesquieu.
Anyways, at one point the King figures out how to circumvent the pesky Aristocracy. The solution, it turns out, is simple - he will start leaking power to the lower classes. If he leaks power to the plebs he can create a brand new class of loyal followers, whom he can use to staff his own government. They are loyal, because yesterday they were plebs. They know they are nothing without this willful power leakage by the King. So the King can be pretty sure he will not get fucked by them. For now.
So the King uses the new loyal class to staff his government and replace all the aristocrats who previously occupied these positions by the right of blood. This new way is better, the King says. The right of blood sometimes selects people who are retarded. Genetics can be quite random, unfortunately. In this new way, the King, in all his kingly wisdom, can select only the *best* men for the job. Or so he says. We will call this new selection mechanism "meritocracy" - selection by merit, not by birth! Or so he claims. Of course, he simply selects for what expands his Power.
So the King has effectively created a new class. And not just any new class, a new class which has the potential to exercise Power. The king has thus expanded the scope of the elite from which the ruling class is staffed. In Mosca's terms, the ruling class is no longer purely Aristocratic in its selection mechanism. It is now also Democratic. What shall we call this new section of the elite class? Maybe pick some fancy-sounding french word?
I am maybe getting carried away. By now it is obvious where I am going with this. Eventually, the bourgeoise, being elite products of a new selection mechanism and being capable of logical thought realize that the elite products of the old selection mechanism - the aristocracy - are its enemies. Enemies, which would definitely kill them if they could, or would promptly turn them back into poor and powerless plebs. Because they are competition. And "competition is for losers" - Peter Thiel. Aristocratiam delenda est, concludes the bourgeoise. So they invent the guillotine. But wait, isn't our gracious King also an Aristocrat? Oui. Unfortunately, his head also has to go. The King, in his thirst for power, has knighted his own executioners. But Power is a blind instinct.
ANY monarchy has an incentive to leak power. No, scratch that. ANY regime has an incentive to leak power. Because Power wants to expand. Leaking power allows to expand the scope of power beyond its formalized borders. And expansion is the only thing that Power wants. Hell it is the only thing it knows. It doesn't want to do anything else. Is it possible for a regime to exist, which doesn't have an incentive to leak power? I don't think so. Maybe at first it doesn't leak, but eventually entropy gets a hold of everything...is this possibly what the ominous "for a while..." inserts stand for?
Curtis, just an FYI, links to graymirror.substack.com are shadow-banned on Hacker News. I did an Ask HN: post about the ban just now, and some mod deleted it after a few minutes.
Presumably, Substack (aren't they funded by Y Combinator?) should be made aware that one of their popular authors are being banned.
> So the new, free Mundana is run by its unbiased liberal intellectuals. Things are looking up in Mundana! And they’ll keep getting better—for a while…
"For a while" ... ominous.
The dominant and recessive power myopia concept is cute, but let's go full Darwin: The power leakage is like an incontinence gene (with different alleles of severity) introduced by a virus through reverse transcriptase. That virus? Government itself. The effect? Low T.
"For a while" because even the best prince, drenched in tactical nihilism and forged, commands a system that has AIDS.
All of this monarchy stuff is so old and boring. Start playing with the CRISPR-Cas9 toolkit of anarcho-capitalism and excise those viral genes. The only ecological stability is created by private property. Competition is the only balancing force in nature.
Re climate change, I think the above scheme gets the do-nothing/do-something reversed. The "dominant" idea is "the climate is changing; therefore we need to have wave after wave of moral hysteria, the population is very wicked. Its wicked Sin is causing the climate to change." The non-dominant idea is "the climate is changing; here are some ideas about how to deal lost coastline, shifting precipitation patterns, altered aquifers, etc., when that happens; here's a Manhattan Project for fusion and solar panelization of buildings--which btw we should want anyway, regardless of climate." The latter grouping is the do-something view and is marginal.
"So in the furtive, candle-lit garrets of dissident Mundana, the ideas that win are just the best ideas; the intellectuals that win are just the best thinkers. In Mundana, the only selective advantage an idea can have is its mere truth and/or beauty. The life of a Mundanan dissident is terrible, but diamond-hard and extremely pure."
The analysis of how power corrupts truth is correct, but power isn't the only thing that can corrupt. The dissidents might profess e.g. that they're saved by faith alone, or that sexual libertinism is the sign of an enlightened mind. Such ideas appeal to people's baser natures and will have a selective advantage in any society where they're not vigorously repressed.
Generally cycling through the Platonic-Aristotelian ring of polity types has had a trad method: an ugly one.
What you may really need to flesh out isn't so much a descriptive operational manual of the next regime, but a more formal and fully described means of operating the cycle. One that will stand the test of time. Yes, you've said what should and shouldn't (pyramids of former regime toady skulls) be done. And sketched out means (remove them. Oh, problem solved! Like in that Bugs Bunny episode where he tells Fudd that if only Elmer will invent gunpowder, the gun will follow. But that really isn't an instruction manual). Otherwise the "Shortest End" will always seem the surest. Dead men tell no tales (problem is the river of blood and the fact that someone, or many someones, will want to avenge them - talking like a pure pragmatist here, a Sternerite, if you will, to maintain the frame of positivism. We're all mid-20th-century social-science positivists here! Amirite? How could that - the Harvard of 1951 - possibly go wrong?).
I discovered Curtis Yarvin on Tucker Carlson today. I have since heard some older interviews of Yarvin and ordered three Yarvin recommended books, so far.
In this cathedral column, the ending take of Mutopia seems like a good description of the current Biden stolen Presidency, mostly, but Biden does not seem to be doing this for the good of the USA, rather for the good of countries who hate the USA. China benefits from the lack of interest in making the CCP pay reparations to the world for COVID-19, and it only costs the CCP millions USD to the Biden family, instead of trillions to the countries of the world in 2021. Trump was a danger to this situation, indeed. Then Beijing Biden frees the contained Middle East Terror network via Afghanistan, in an embarrassing and disloyal departure, encouraging and paying USD to our Tolly Bon enemies while leaving our Afghan allies and fucking USA citizens to live or due under the whims of terrorists, while Biden claims victory for getting out.
Will Biden hand eventually hand over the entire USA to the control of the CCP, the same way he carelessly left Afghanistan? If you wanted to destroy the USA in 2021, you would be doing what Biden has been doing in 2021. How does the cathedral apply now? How do you like Mao in the USA?
A brief explanation of the cathedral
Good post overall.
But monarchies leak power too.
In fact, if we were to go really historic on this topic, absolute monarchies leaked power like a motherfucker.
It is in fact the leakage of power of absolute monarchies that ended up birthing absolute democracies and their constituent bureaucracies. The process, (as described by Jouvenel, with which you are familiar) goes something like this:
The King wants to do King shit. But he is limited by the influence of those pesky Aristocrats, in essence mini-kings in the Pyramidal hierarchy of the Feudal System. These guys are lame, because they want to limit Power. They want to limit it, because they don't have all of it. And they can limit it, because they have some of it. Separation of Power is actually a thing - but only if you literally split the kingdom in a lot of actual mini-kingdoms. Derp Montesquieu.
Anyways, at one point the King figures out how to circumvent the pesky Aristocracy. The solution, it turns out, is simple - he will start leaking power to the lower classes. If he leaks power to the plebs he can create a brand new class of loyal followers, whom he can use to staff his own government. They are loyal, because yesterday they were plebs. They know they are nothing without this willful power leakage by the King. So the King can be pretty sure he will not get fucked by them. For now.
So the King uses the new loyal class to staff his government and replace all the aristocrats who previously occupied these positions by the right of blood. This new way is better, the King says. The right of blood sometimes selects people who are retarded. Genetics can be quite random, unfortunately. In this new way, the King, in all his kingly wisdom, can select only the *best* men for the job. Or so he says. We will call this new selection mechanism "meritocracy" - selection by merit, not by birth! Or so he claims. Of course, he simply selects for what expands his Power.
So the King has effectively created a new class. And not just any new class, a new class which has the potential to exercise Power. The king has thus expanded the scope of the elite from which the ruling class is staffed. In Mosca's terms, the ruling class is no longer purely Aristocratic in its selection mechanism. It is now also Democratic. What shall we call this new section of the elite class? Maybe pick some fancy-sounding french word?
I am maybe getting carried away. By now it is obvious where I am going with this. Eventually, the bourgeoise, being elite products of a new selection mechanism and being capable of logical thought realize that the elite products of the old selection mechanism - the aristocracy - are its enemies. Enemies, which would definitely kill them if they could, or would promptly turn them back into poor and powerless plebs. Because they are competition. And "competition is for losers" - Peter Thiel. Aristocratiam delenda est, concludes the bourgeoise. So they invent the guillotine. But wait, isn't our gracious King also an Aristocrat? Oui. Unfortunately, his head also has to go. The King, in his thirst for power, has knighted his own executioners. But Power is a blind instinct.
ANY monarchy has an incentive to leak power. No, scratch that. ANY regime has an incentive to leak power. Because Power wants to expand. Leaking power allows to expand the scope of power beyond its formalized borders. And expansion is the only thing that Power wants. Hell it is the only thing it knows. It doesn't want to do anything else. Is it possible for a regime to exist, which doesn't have an incentive to leak power? I don't think so. Maybe at first it doesn't leak, but eventually entropy gets a hold of everything...is this possibly what the ominous "for a while..." inserts stand for?
Nice references to Elon lol
Curtis, just an FYI, links to graymirror.substack.com are shadow-banned on Hacker News. I did an Ask HN: post about the ban just now, and some mod deleted it after a few minutes.
Presumably, Substack (aren't they funded by Y Combinator?) should be made aware that one of their popular authors are being banned.
I'll just check if yarvin has a new article before I go to bed.... every time.
> So the new, free Mundana is run by its unbiased liberal intellectuals. Things are looking up in Mundana! And they’ll keep getting better—for a while…
"For a while" ... ominous.
The dominant and recessive power myopia concept is cute, but let's go full Darwin: The power leakage is like an incontinence gene (with different alleles of severity) introduced by a virus through reverse transcriptase. That virus? Government itself. The effect? Low T.
"For a while" because even the best prince, drenched in tactical nihilism and forged, commands a system that has AIDS.
All of this monarchy stuff is so old and boring. Start playing with the CRISPR-Cas9 toolkit of anarcho-capitalism and excise those viral genes. The only ecological stability is created by private property. Competition is the only balancing force in nature.
Re climate change, I think the above scheme gets the do-nothing/do-something reversed. The "dominant" idea is "the climate is changing; therefore we need to have wave after wave of moral hysteria, the population is very wicked. Its wicked Sin is causing the climate to change." The non-dominant idea is "the climate is changing; here are some ideas about how to deal lost coastline, shifting precipitation patterns, altered aquifers, etc., when that happens; here's a Manhattan Project for fusion and solar panelization of buildings--which btw we should want anyway, regardless of climate." The latter grouping is the do-something view and is marginal.
"So in the furtive, candle-lit garrets of dissident Mundana, the ideas that win are just the best ideas; the intellectuals that win are just the best thinkers. In Mundana, the only selective advantage an idea can have is its mere truth and/or beauty. The life of a Mundanan dissident is terrible, but diamond-hard and extremely pure."
The analysis of how power corrupts truth is correct, but power isn't the only thing that can corrupt. The dissidents might profess e.g. that they're saved by faith alone, or that sexual libertinism is the sign of an enlightened mind. Such ideas appeal to people's baser natures and will have a selective advantage in any society where they're not vigorously repressed.
So we’re trapped in this endless cycle, hoping to be born and to live in the “for a while..." times? Nihilism ftw!
Generally cycling through the Platonic-Aristotelian ring of polity types has had a trad method: an ugly one.
What you may really need to flesh out isn't so much a descriptive operational manual of the next regime, but a more formal and fully described means of operating the cycle. One that will stand the test of time. Yes, you've said what should and shouldn't (pyramids of former regime toady skulls) be done. And sketched out means (remove them. Oh, problem solved! Like in that Bugs Bunny episode where he tells Fudd that if only Elmer will invent gunpowder, the gun will follow. But that really isn't an instruction manual). Otherwise the "Shortest End" will always seem the surest. Dead men tell no tales (problem is the river of blood and the fact that someone, or many someones, will want to avenge them - talking like a pure pragmatist here, a Sternerite, if you will, to maintain the frame of positivism. We're all mid-20th-century social-science positivists here! Amirite? How could that - the Harvard of 1951 - possibly go wrong?).
Actually the Deep State Sorcerers just installed a pair of fetching puppets.
We’re in Green Zone govt, soon enough Red Zone USA.
Because the Sorcerers are long dead, the Deep State now are apprentices.
Curtis please stop trying to get Great Leader killed, thank you
I discovered Curtis Yarvin on Tucker Carlson today. I have since heard some older interviews of Yarvin and ordered three Yarvin recommended books, so far.
In this cathedral column, the ending take of Mutopia seems like a good description of the current Biden stolen Presidency, mostly, but Biden does not seem to be doing this for the good of the USA, rather for the good of countries who hate the USA. China benefits from the lack of interest in making the CCP pay reparations to the world for COVID-19, and it only costs the CCP millions USD to the Biden family, instead of trillions to the countries of the world in 2021. Trump was a danger to this situation, indeed. Then Beijing Biden frees the contained Middle East Terror network via Afghanistan, in an embarrassing and disloyal departure, encouraging and paying USD to our Tolly Bon enemies while leaving our Afghan allies and fucking USA citizens to live or due under the whims of terrorists, while Biden claims victory for getting out.
Will Biden hand eventually hand over the entire USA to the control of the CCP, the same way he carelessly left Afghanistan? If you wanted to destroy the USA in 2021, you would be doing what Biden has been doing in 2021. How does the cathedral apply now? How do you like Mao in the USA?
Pin this post for the newcomers :)
Old Mu proverb: the branches of Mundanan saplings taste like carrots, the Mutopian carrot grown too long becomes a stick.
"The cathedral awaits future generations, who are fortunately worthy to capture its meaning."
(Auguste Rodin)
Rodin (1840 - 1917) spoke of course about the cathedral of Chartres, France.
You will want to read this Gelernter essay if you haven't already: https://www.aei.org/articles/the-gothic-vision/