The biggest losers in all this are the libs themselves. As a deeply closeted lib I can attest. Libs, like everyone, are great when they're in their proper role and context. Placed at the top of the hierarchy, the lib thrusts and gyrates wildly, grasping at boundaries that aren't there. The lib _requires_ a step dad to glare at angrily while listening to Linkin Park. The lib cannot be step dad, it does not compute, it short circuits the brain. Power over their enemies absolutely _destroys_ libs. It's like how opium ravaged noble China. I've watched so many fellow libs seduced and consumed by the most insignificant hits of power over this past decade. They (or their children or children's children) will eventually put down the pipe, and they will bear witness to the monsters they have become --- don't fear the lib, pity him. Once sober, the libs will have a better understanding of the lows they sank to, of the potential they failed to achieve, of the sheer indignity of their power trip, than any con could possibly imagine.
It's like the goth kids --- they do their thing, they don't bother anyone. They have the best band in high school. They get in spats with the jocks, but school keeps running. The last thing anyone wants is to promote the goth kids to school admin. The goth kids hate it, they just want to sing Cure songs. The jocks hate it, they are constant victims of institutional nerd vengeance. Everyone hates wearing the new uniforms from Hot Topic. The goths no longer feel special, so they engage in stranger and stranger contortions to capture the feeling of rebellion they used to feel when they could write poetry while skipping class. They will never recapture that feeling. Inversion school's performance plummets. Students are graded on esoteric goth values no employer cares about. Attempted suicides are sky rocketing. Parents are pulling their kids out left and right.
For God's sake, give the libs back their step dad! We saw how desperately they cried out for it under Trump --- the mere suggestion that this painted orange ghost who looks a bit like step dad from the right angle and in the the right light --- the mere hope that this might be step dad, finally back from the corner store with his cigs, ready to take out his belt and lay down corporal justice if need be --- this mere echo of flutter of a gossamer ripple of authority had libs from NYC to LA drenching their pantaloons --- even while Trump paraded around in the LGBT flag exporting gender studies to devout Muslims while preaching emancipation --- still the libs hoped against hope, still they donned their headphones and desperately blasted Numb on repeat, still they clung to the delusion that this might, could it possibly be, step dad finally back, finally here to lift all this pressure from their shoulders, finally someone to _react_ when they snuck out and got a tattoo, finally a real reason to sit in the corner and write _real_ poetry again.
This was a good thing to write -- a thoughtful, carefully-constructed fantasy. I believe that "Concerned G" recently suggested that Curtis write a novel in which his proposals are developed in a pictorial way. That's a good idea, but another way to achieve the same thing would be to imagine a thematic history of the USA from say 2020 to 2220 written by a future historian.
> And why should they mind being isolated in their own lib bubble, away from pocs and cons?
...because minding their own damn business in not in lib DNA.
"Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
--H.L. Mencken
Why should Boston mind what happens in Charleston?
-saving children from traditional gender norms
-abolishing the grilling of meat
-ending slavery
These are all intoxicating moral crusades for the libs.
You're going to need physical distance, information blackouts (an insurmountable language barrier would be nice), space lasers, and strong drugs to curb the lib will-to-power.
Giving them a hard dollar would do more to contain them than even the hardest beating. They want control over the press. They never want to give it up.
One could make any number of practical reasons that this won't work, but upon reflection, I think a lot of them boil down to one basic reason that it can't work. The problem isn't merely the existence of a useless gentry class. Useless gentry classes seem a permanent part of any civilization worthy of the name. Often they do little enough harm that things can continue in this vein seemingly indefinitely, or, at least, if things do end badly it's for some other reason than their uselessness bringing down the entire society.
I think our problem is that we've got a useless gentry class that's massively too big. Overproduction of elites, as it were. If we assume that the pareto distribution of both money and prestige is inevitable, we really can't afford to have more than 5-10% of the population aiming to be in the top 5-10% of either. As it is, we've got more like 25-30% of the population. More, if we include "pocs" who are actively aligned with the DNC rather than those who merely happen to live in Blue areas.
So then, question for you: what exactly do we mean by "libs," and just exactly how many of them do you think there are? Similarly, what criteria are used to determine who counts as "con" and who counts as a "lib," and who gets to make that decision on an individual basis? It can't be the presumptive god-emperor, because he's got a bloody country to run and hasn't the time to make millions of individual rulings.
This whole essay is just criticism of Grover Norquist.
More seriously, there seems to me to be a tension in the essay. The first theme, roughly, is: if you have power, you always want more. E.g., libs can't stop with just having the most power: instead, they want to *change* those over whom they rule. Thus, if you have two groups in a conflict, one that says, "do this!" and the other that says, "leave me alone!", the do-this!-types will inevitably win, because the leave-me-alone types are, at best, just stalling for time.
The second theme, roughly, is: cons should take control of the society, let the libs have a playground, and leave them alone. But if cons have power, won't they want to change the libs? Why would cons, once in power, remain leave-us-alone!-types?
There are probably ways to navigate this tension. Maybe you could say that the reason the libs want to keep changing cons is that the structure of their own governing order is hidden from themselves, whereas if cons got into power in the way Yarvin wants, they would make their own approach to governance transparent, which would curtail their engaging in ceaseless attempts to CONonize the libs (amazing pun, I know). But if that's the response--and I doubt it, because I just thought of it off the top of my head--, then I'm skeptical, because of Conquest's law. That is, while Conquest's law says that everything not explicitly right-wing eventually becomes left-wing, I don't know that that's intrinsic to leftism. I think if the cons rules, you could have a reverse Conquest's law. (Here, I'm siding with Hanania against Alexander, in that I don't think elites are always intrinsically leftist.)
Does Curtis even say that the successor regime is run by cons? I didn't get that impression at all, I was assuming some sort of 'above it all' elite that is neither con nor lib.
Doesn't he imagine the dictator and his crew as made up of Scott-Alexandrine "rationalists" -- kind of like Curtis himself, but bossier? He seems to see tech billionaires as SA-rationalists at heart, so they'd be the right rulers because they're SA-rationalistic but bossy.
I think that it was addressed to his "typical reader," whom he thinks of as a rationalistically reformed liberal-nobleman. The "cons" would be the people who go to church and say "Well, I never!" about trannies and urban criminality.
Well, let's remember something I forgot (and thereby derailed the conversation a bit): for Yarvin, libs promote or love--I forget--chaos, and cons promote/love order. So, if we retain this definition, the ruler would have to be a con, rationalist or no.
But: wouldn't that mean that libs won't be satisfied with a province? Wouldn't that be too orderly? I suspect that if libs are the way Yarvin thinks they are, then they'll always be unruly, and will always insist on two things: (1) everyone's morals need to conform to their own ("injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere!"), and (2) as soon as non-libs' morals conform to the libs', the libs' morals need to change (I'm assuming James Simpson's logic of permanent revolution idea, that libs constantly repudiate their own prior norms).
So, I'm thinking that there is no deal that libs will ever accept permanently. I mean, they will accept it, but since they don't understand themselves--or maybe they understand themselves too well--they literally can't accept any offer for long. That said, if you keep them among themselves, their circular-firing-squad/revolution-eats-its-own dynamic may keep them constantly underpowered.
power is like a muscle, but you can flex it in more ways than converting or killing your enemies. just because someone is conquered doesnt mean they now have to worship your gods. that's what the libs have done and it's been a cultural disaster for planet earth.
seeing the libs tamed would fulfill the same power process for the next regime as seeing your mids turn trans does for the current regime. when people think about the next regime they should all be honest. they should see that the regime turned race-law-procecutors into Mediterranean craftsmen, and they're better for it.
It seemed like in this essay Yarvin was using "libs," "cons," and "pocs" to stand in for the upper, middle, and lower class trichotomy he likes to use, but renames from essay to essay (e.g. he had brahmins, vaisya, and helots one time, "nobles", and "deracinated" another). This also makes sense of the "pocs" in this essay, which otherwise seemed like it wasn't central to the argument.
Why would the yeoman farmer be concerned about the day to day operations and politics of the metropolis? Liberals constantly are manufacturing a perfect reality, simultaneously in their minds, and in reality. Liberals are designers who are not constrained by practical limits of time, space, material. In consequence, yeoman farmer is an astute engineer, knowing which pieces of the framework are structural and which are needless aesthetic distractions, and economizing appropriately.
This is just a very specific framing of a patchwork, one based on cultural/political affiliation. Libs will gladly link up together, look at every major metro area in the west. Cons will absolutely leave them alone to pursue a life theat is specific to their particular values. The Amish don't care about trans kids, they only have the political economy to care about their kids. When your lifestyle doesn't afford you time to ponder on the lifestyles of others, it's very hard to really care about what "Burning Man on hill 7345 in Cali is really doing."
Why do you think that the cons in power wouldn't want to change the libs?
Think about it like this: during the Civil War, the north looked at the south and thought, "these people are part of our country, and they're committing moral atrocities. We should stop them." Why wouldn't cons look at city libs the same way? Especially if cons came to dominate the brains of the cathedral?
Liberal is short for neoliberal. Conservative is NOT shorthand for the disgusting Evangelical right, nor is it shorthand the disgusting neocons, who are really Scoob-Doo villian liberals who wear a Reagan mask. The liberal draws attention of leviathan to sweep aside anything out of his vision for society, to the contrary of the Conservative, which seeks to AVOID leviathan, for he is the tastiest morsel the beast can find.
Not the evangelical right, not the neocons. So: who are the true Conservatives? The libertarians? Paleoconservatives? Neoreactionaries? I mean ... regardless of your answer to this question, I don't see why power wouldn't corrupt them too.
A yeoman farmer won't care what happens in San Francisco, but a conservative emperor certainly would. Perhaps a right-postmodernist emperor who believes in critical theory but applies it to liberalism too could refrain from caring, but such a ruler would have basically no chance of passing his worldview on to his kids.
The trouble is that this piece ignores the truth of downstreamism, that politics is downstream of culture is downstream of religion is downstream, I say, of declaring the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."
The new monarch and his trusty "ruling clique" must have a clear vision of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." And one of the visions will be a proper role for the former lib nobility.
One of the critical things in any new vision will be to define what the ruler and his clique are against. And I say it is the religion of the libs, the educated gentry, which is "creativity." And in this narrative the highest and best thing is to be a Creative Hero, an Activist Hero.
I say, following Jung & Co., that this is nothing but an Ego Hero, a self-obsessed prideful monster. The real hero is the Sacrificial Hero, of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey or Jordan Peterson's hero that dies on the border of Order and Chaos.
Once we have established the notion of the Sacrificial Hero, then we can go downstream and start inventing religions and cultures and politics, and put the libs into a nice comfortable zoo.
True creative heroes such as Shelley, Whitman, and Iggy Pop probably would have been happy as mystical monks but didn't have a socially stabilized religious framework within which it would have been possible for them to make the kind of felt connection with deep reality that they were looking for without hastening the disintegration of necessary human life-patterns.
That politics is downstream of culture is a *bold*, idealist, thesis. Just as bold would be to the materialist thesis, that culture is downstream from politics. Why should I believe either materialism or idealism? Why not believe that they both culture and politics affect each other, sometimes predictably, sometimes surprisingly?
Culture is downstream from politics, which is downstream from religion. It just happens that the first and third (seen as “progress”) are usually equalized in century 21 culture wars.
Maybe libs mainly want to be appreciated for their technical expertise, so in order to make them happy without creating huge bureaucracies for them to staff you'd have to find some non-bureaucratic environment for them in which they could be admirably technical. Church-monasteries probably served that function in the Western past.
I believe that Curtis envisions them as governing semi-autonomous cities under the dictator's watchful eye. Would it be okay if they functioned in local bureaucracies, then? The bureaucracies of different cities could compete in various ways -- building extremely tall towers or delightful parks and malls. More adventurous groups of libs could create Antarctic or sub-oceanic (or Martian or Venusian-atmospheric) colonies.
Perhaps this has been covered elsewhere, but there is a need to distinguish among the cons, the libs, and the POC tribes. Loyalty to the king would be an appropriate vehicle. Cons swear loyalty directly to the king. They are the king’s men. Tribal peoples swear loyalty through their tribe to the king. Libs do not swear loyalty.
Normal tribes would be akin to the Indian tribes in Latin America or the Phyles of Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age. They would work out special arrangements with the king to govern taxes, imports, exports, and any other important issues. Intra-tribal issues would be handled by the tribe. Inter-tribal issues would be handled by the king. Children are born either the king’s men or into a tribe. Once they are of age, they can choose their fate (much like the Amish).
The Libs are an abnormal tribe subject to more restrictions than normal tribes. They would have a higher tax burden, limited freedom of movement, no military contribution, and all cultural output would be prohibited. I expect that the libs would fracture into multiple abnormal tribes, making it easier to control them. Tribal deceit (an abnormal tribe claiming to be a normal tribe) would be dealt with harshly. Over time, some lib tribes would die away (like the Shakers) or take the oath, making them normal tribes. Only the most die hard lib tribes would remain after a few generations.
Caesar and Augustus were notable for letting their defeated enemies be self-governing and taking pains to make sure they were self-fulfilled.
"One other way that traditional cultures preserve themselves in the modern world is valves—systems that expel people who are just misfits, for all kinds of psychological reasons. Generally, these people are actually libs, and should transfer to that culture."
Kabul International Airport seems like a model valve right now.
I think the most crucial part of this is the lib-poc relationship. I think yarvin simplifies it a bit. In California especially, libs of poc heritage (libpocs) won’t be so willing to go quietly into the Tuscan lib colony. A major part of their self actualization is using their poc heritage to impress other libs, it will be very difficult to do this when they are disconnected from their genetic community. Look at the identity crisis among those libpocs who attend burning man or other art festivals. They are constantly calling attention to their oppression and how much they hate it there. Seems unlikely they will want to permanently live in a lib colony...
The starting thesis of this essay is refuted by the current situation in Afghanistan. The U.S. and its allies occupied it with the goal of transforming it into a generic smartphones-and-pride-flags Western democracy. The Taliban seems to have a more *specific* vision for the country...and presumably have little interest in governing the U.S. Yet those with the generic plan-for-rule seem to have been bested by partisans of exit. What am I missing?
But I think I can reverse the polarity here. In Afghanistan, the US never really knew what the hell it wanted to do (unless it was shovel billions of dollars to cronies, foreign and domestic, which case, mission accomplished indeed). The establishment really seemed to assume that the Taliban would just. . . stop being the Taliban? There was never any meaningful consensus about what would have constituted a meaningful set of victory conditions, much less any serious effort to accomplish such.
The Taliban, on the other hand, had very clear ideas about what constituted victory for them--kicking the US the hell out--and they ruthlessly and tirelessly pursued it.
Seen that way, the US starts to look a lot more like the old Confederacy. Yes, both the US in Afghanistan and the Confederates in the Civil War won early victories. But there didn't seem to be any follow-through towards any goal that would have ended the war. Just the hope that the other side would quit. Such plans can work, at least in theory, but only if the other side cooperates by quitting when convenient. If the other side refuses to concede, defeat seems inevitable.
The Taliban also have the background-thought of being part of an Islamic world-conquest. Maybe the USA's rulers think of liberalism as the default-condition of mankind rather than as a movement of conquest, and therefore think of themselves as politely assisting people's return to their default-condition. So, the Taliban would be mentally like the North in the US Civil War, the USA's rulers more like the South.
If the USA's rulers had thought of themselves as conquering the world for liberalism, then maybe they would have been willing to destroy the Taliban. A Warhammer-liberalism might be more successful (and fun) then a Wormtongue-liberalism.
Our rulers had a limited vision in that case, though, just as the South in the Civil War had the limited vision of going on in the old way -- while the Taliban can be seen as ultimately participating in the unlimited Islamic vision of world-conquest, just as the North in the Civil War was supposedly motivated by an unlimited vision of liberal world-conquest.
The problem is that America tried to turn the people of Afghanistan into libs. This was always bound to fail. The libs cannot even turn the cons into libs, and the cons are already libs compared to Afghans.
Early on after the invasion of Afghanistan, there was widespread support for restoring the monarchy that had fallen in a 1973. The king that was deposed back then by his scheming brother was still alive. He was reasonably well-regarded across the political spectrum because his rule was remembered fondly compared to the chaos that has been present ever since. He was willing to take back the throne.
If the Americans were smart, they would have tried to go with a constitutional monarchy style of government rather than a presidential system. If they were smart and actually gave a shit (aka if they weren't libs), they would have just given the king the country back on the condition that he cooperate to destroy Al Qaeda. History is fickle, but I have a hard time believing that this wouldn't have worked out much better. Monarchy is a natural government to that part of the world. Indeed, it is a natural government to everywhere that hasn't contracted the lib virus.
Maybe it's a natural government for Western societies because of the Christian church-state distinction but not so natural for societies such as Islamic ones and the Jewish one in which God is thought of as having laid down the details of civil law -- unless the king's a Caliph or the Messiah.
Monarchy is naturally suitable to Islam. Arguably even more so than Christianity, as the history of Europe demonstrates.
Of course the king has to be an Islamic king and govern in an Islamic way, but this is always true. Monarchy has never been absolute in the sense that the monarch had the power to radically overturn the cultural framework that legitimizes their rule.
You can lead a horse to water, but have to sacrifice the lives of foreign invaders to legitimize Democracy. Afghanistan is a perfect example of isolation induced localism, thanks to its topography, kind of similar to Switzerland. Instead of watches, chocolate and abundant banking options, you get poppies, and religious fervor.
Plan for rule is a squaring of a circle, and the accuracy of your tools to measure the right fit is completely dictated by the local population. The local population of Afghanistan suffered from the State Department's determined, optimistic Exceptionalism. They suffered even more greatly from inept DoD adventurism. Can we please just agree to leave them alone? Their actions have asked for this, we need to heed their request.
Here’s Curtis’s latest poem with line-breaks removed and the big letters at the beginnings of lines changed to small letters unless they start a sentence. I think that the Italian is the first line from Dante’s comic book about a trip through hell, purgatory, and heaven – the first bit would be the fragment "In the middle of the journey" and the second bit the complete "In the middle of the journey of my life." (Curtis's poems are kind of like "Guess what I'm thinking!" games, and the line-breaks make the the puzzle harder than it needs to be.)
---
The sun is an orange ball, a Japanese flag. The hills barely visible; never mind the mountain. Nel mezzo del cammin… In a recent quarrel over a lady my daughter shouted at me, not entirely without reason – she was the better judge in the end – “I’m Hamlet! You’re treating me like Hamlet.” Which stung, but imperfectly, in the manner of the teenage taunt, almost-stabbing to the heart. No, my child, the case is clear: the bag you hold is Miranda. “These speculations sour in the sun.” If only I could wave my staff and whiff this smoke away… My island burns like a bitch but the fire is far over the mountain; a refugee, a hated man, a man who has rowed and may row again from any Milan he is found in, Nel mezzo del cammin di mi vita I find myself surrounded, choked and homebound, sunset and heavy-troubled by the ash of my old state, ash of my old lives: for “Like a beast, with his horn,” I have gone through one or three – (Nor does this displease me; who has reached such isles? I had all the luck in Milan) – it has unnaturally aged me. And old men are all pyros, impatient with a rotted world. Senility makes it easy to see the worm in every tree – the reason it needed to burn. What even is wood, but smoke begging to be set free? The air smells good – the smoke of sacred sacrifice; of the ram that was offered and delivered – what God burns was meant from the morning it was born to burn.
The biggest losers in all this are the libs themselves. As a deeply closeted lib I can attest. Libs, like everyone, are great when they're in their proper role and context. Placed at the top of the hierarchy, the lib thrusts and gyrates wildly, grasping at boundaries that aren't there. The lib _requires_ a step dad to glare at angrily while listening to Linkin Park. The lib cannot be step dad, it does not compute, it short circuits the brain. Power over their enemies absolutely _destroys_ libs. It's like how opium ravaged noble China. I've watched so many fellow libs seduced and consumed by the most insignificant hits of power over this past decade. They (or their children or children's children) will eventually put down the pipe, and they will bear witness to the monsters they have become --- don't fear the lib, pity him. Once sober, the libs will have a better understanding of the lows they sank to, of the potential they failed to achieve, of the sheer indignity of their power trip, than any con could possibly imagine.
It's like the goth kids --- they do their thing, they don't bother anyone. They have the best band in high school. They get in spats with the jocks, but school keeps running. The last thing anyone wants is to promote the goth kids to school admin. The goth kids hate it, they just want to sing Cure songs. The jocks hate it, they are constant victims of institutional nerd vengeance. Everyone hates wearing the new uniforms from Hot Topic. The goths no longer feel special, so they engage in stranger and stranger contortions to capture the feeling of rebellion they used to feel when they could write poetry while skipping class. They will never recapture that feeling. Inversion school's performance plummets. Students are graded on esoteric goth values no employer cares about. Attempted suicides are sky rocketing. Parents are pulling their kids out left and right.
For God's sake, give the libs back their step dad! We saw how desperately they cried out for it under Trump --- the mere suggestion that this painted orange ghost who looks a bit like step dad from the right angle and in the the right light --- the mere hope that this might be step dad, finally back from the corner store with his cigs, ready to take out his belt and lay down corporal justice if need be --- this mere echo of flutter of a gossamer ripple of authority had libs from NYC to LA drenching their pantaloons --- even while Trump paraded around in the LGBT flag exporting gender studies to devout Muslims while preaching emancipation --- still the libs hoped against hope, still they donned their headphones and desperately blasted Numb on repeat, still they clung to the delusion that this might, could it possibly be, step dad finally back, finally here to lift all this pressure from their shoulders, finally someone to _react_ when they snuck out and got a tattoo, finally a real reason to sit in the corner and write _real_ poetry again.
Curtis Yarvin GOVERNS the libs epic style.
WATCH: Ceasar EMPATHIZES with Brutus in massive FORGIVENESS
This was a good thing to write -- a thoughtful, carefully-constructed fantasy. I believe that "Concerned G" recently suggested that Curtis write a novel in which his proposals are developed in a pictorial way. That's a good idea, but another way to achieve the same thing would be to imagine a thematic history of the USA from say 2020 to 2220 written by a future historian.
reverse houellebecq?
"We have the 20th century to remind us of what happens when they try"
Perfect
> And why should they mind being isolated in their own lib bubble, away from pocs and cons?
...because minding their own damn business in not in lib DNA.
"Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
--H.L. Mencken
Why should Boston mind what happens in Charleston?
-saving children from traditional gender norms
-abolishing the grilling of meat
-ending slavery
These are all intoxicating moral crusades for the libs.
You're going to need physical distance, information blackouts (an insurmountable language barrier would be nice), space lasers, and strong drugs to curb the lib will-to-power.
Giving them a hard dollar would do more to contain them than even the hardest beating. They want control over the press. They never want to give it up.
One could make any number of practical reasons that this won't work, but upon reflection, I think a lot of them boil down to one basic reason that it can't work. The problem isn't merely the existence of a useless gentry class. Useless gentry classes seem a permanent part of any civilization worthy of the name. Often they do little enough harm that things can continue in this vein seemingly indefinitely, or, at least, if things do end badly it's for some other reason than their uselessness bringing down the entire society.
I think our problem is that we've got a useless gentry class that's massively too big. Overproduction of elites, as it were. If we assume that the pareto distribution of both money and prestige is inevitable, we really can't afford to have more than 5-10% of the population aiming to be in the top 5-10% of either. As it is, we've got more like 25-30% of the population. More, if we include "pocs" who are actively aligned with the DNC rather than those who merely happen to live in Blue areas.
So then, question for you: what exactly do we mean by "libs," and just exactly how many of them do you think there are? Similarly, what criteria are used to determine who counts as "con" and who counts as a "lib," and who gets to make that decision on an individual basis? It can't be the presumptive god-emperor, because he's got a bloody country to run and hasn't the time to make millions of individual rulings.
This whole essay is just criticism of Grover Norquist.
More seriously, there seems to me to be a tension in the essay. The first theme, roughly, is: if you have power, you always want more. E.g., libs can't stop with just having the most power: instead, they want to *change* those over whom they rule. Thus, if you have two groups in a conflict, one that says, "do this!" and the other that says, "leave me alone!", the do-this!-types will inevitably win, because the leave-me-alone types are, at best, just stalling for time.
The second theme, roughly, is: cons should take control of the society, let the libs have a playground, and leave them alone. But if cons have power, won't they want to change the libs? Why would cons, once in power, remain leave-us-alone!-types?
There are probably ways to navigate this tension. Maybe you could say that the reason the libs want to keep changing cons is that the structure of their own governing order is hidden from themselves, whereas if cons got into power in the way Yarvin wants, they would make their own approach to governance transparent, which would curtail their engaging in ceaseless attempts to CONonize the libs (amazing pun, I know). But if that's the response--and I doubt it, because I just thought of it off the top of my head--, then I'm skeptical, because of Conquest's law. That is, while Conquest's law says that everything not explicitly right-wing eventually becomes left-wing, I don't know that that's intrinsic to leftism. I think if the cons rules, you could have a reverse Conquest's law. (Here, I'm siding with Hanania against Alexander, in that I don't think elites are always intrinsically leftist.)
Does Curtis even say that the successor regime is run by cons? I didn't get that impression at all, I was assuming some sort of 'above it all' elite that is neither con nor lib.
Doesn't he imagine the dictator and his crew as made up of Scott-Alexandrine "rationalists" -- kind of like Curtis himself, but bossier? He seems to see tech billionaires as SA-rationalists at heart, so they'd be the right rulers because they're SA-rationalistic but bossy.
I don’t think he does say that; but wasn’t the essay addressed to cons?
I think that it was addressed to his "typical reader," whom he thinks of as a rationalistically reformed liberal-nobleman. The "cons" would be the people who go to church and say "Well, I never!" about trannies and urban criminality.
Well, let's remember something I forgot (and thereby derailed the conversation a bit): for Yarvin, libs promote or love--I forget--chaos, and cons promote/love order. So, if we retain this definition, the ruler would have to be a con, rationalist or no.
But: wouldn't that mean that libs won't be satisfied with a province? Wouldn't that be too orderly? I suspect that if libs are the way Yarvin thinks they are, then they'll always be unruly, and will always insist on two things: (1) everyone's morals need to conform to their own ("injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere!"), and (2) as soon as non-libs' morals conform to the libs', the libs' morals need to change (I'm assuming James Simpson's logic of permanent revolution idea, that libs constantly repudiate their own prior norms).
So, I'm thinking that there is no deal that libs will ever accept permanently. I mean, they will accept it, but since they don't understand themselves--or maybe they understand themselves too well--they literally can't accept any offer for long. That said, if you keep them among themselves, their circular-firing-squad/revolution-eats-its-own dynamic may keep them constantly underpowered.
power is like a muscle, but you can flex it in more ways than converting or killing your enemies. just because someone is conquered doesnt mean they now have to worship your gods. that's what the libs have done and it's been a cultural disaster for planet earth.
seeing the libs tamed would fulfill the same power process for the next regime as seeing your mids turn trans does for the current regime. when people think about the next regime they should all be honest. they should see that the regime turned race-law-procecutors into Mediterranean craftsmen, and they're better for it.
It seemed like in this essay Yarvin was using "libs," "cons," and "pocs" to stand in for the upper, middle, and lower class trichotomy he likes to use, but renames from essay to essay (e.g. he had brahmins, vaisya, and helots one time, "nobles", and "deracinated" another). This also makes sense of the "pocs" in this essay, which otherwise seemed like it wasn't central to the argument.
Why would the yeoman farmer be concerned about the day to day operations and politics of the metropolis? Liberals constantly are manufacturing a perfect reality, simultaneously in their minds, and in reality. Liberals are designers who are not constrained by practical limits of time, space, material. In consequence, yeoman farmer is an astute engineer, knowing which pieces of the framework are structural and which are needless aesthetic distractions, and economizing appropriately.
This is just a very specific framing of a patchwork, one based on cultural/political affiliation. Libs will gladly link up together, look at every major metro area in the west. Cons will absolutely leave them alone to pursue a life theat is specific to their particular values. The Amish don't care about trans kids, they only have the political economy to care about their kids. When your lifestyle doesn't afford you time to ponder on the lifestyles of others, it's very hard to really care about what "Burning Man on hill 7345 in Cali is really doing."
Why do you think that the cons in power wouldn't want to change the libs?
Think about it like this: during the Civil War, the north looked at the south and thought, "these people are part of our country, and they're committing moral atrocities. We should stop them." Why wouldn't cons look at city libs the same way? Especially if cons came to dominate the brains of the cathedral?
Liberal is short for neoliberal. Conservative is NOT shorthand for the disgusting Evangelical right, nor is it shorthand the disgusting neocons, who are really Scoob-Doo villian liberals who wear a Reagan mask. The liberal draws attention of leviathan to sweep aside anything out of his vision for society, to the contrary of the Conservative, which seeks to AVOID leviathan, for he is the tastiest morsel the beast can find.
Not the evangelical right, not the neocons. So: who are the true Conservatives? The libertarians? Paleoconservatives? Neoreactionaries? I mean ... regardless of your answer to this question, I don't see why power wouldn't corrupt them too.
A yeoman farmer won't care what happens in San Francisco, but a conservative emperor certainly would. Perhaps a right-postmodernist emperor who believes in critical theory but applies it to liberalism too could refrain from caring, but such a ruler would have basically no chance of passing his worldview on to his kids.
“Leave them alone” is not “leave me alone”
CAN they govern themselves though?
Putting them out the pasture seems incredibly cruel, like letting children run around with knifes.
Also how many of the libs are not just people bowing to the biggest power?
So let them bow to the new regime. Give them new wheels to spin in.
If not in their hearts then at least with their mouth.
The trouble is that this piece ignores the truth of downstreamism, that politics is downstream of culture is downstream of religion is downstream, I say, of declaring the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."
The new monarch and his trusty "ruling clique" must have a clear vision of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." And one of the visions will be a proper role for the former lib nobility.
One of the critical things in any new vision will be to define what the ruler and his clique are against. And I say it is the religion of the libs, the educated gentry, which is "creativity." And in this narrative the highest and best thing is to be a Creative Hero, an Activist Hero.
I say, following Jung & Co., that this is nothing but an Ego Hero, a self-obsessed prideful monster. The real hero is the Sacrificial Hero, of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey or Jordan Peterson's hero that dies on the border of Order and Chaos.
Once we have established the notion of the Sacrificial Hero, then we can go downstream and start inventing religions and cultures and politics, and put the libs into a nice comfortable zoo.
True creative heroes such as Shelley, Whitman, and Iggy Pop probably would have been happy as mystical monks but didn't have a socially stabilized religious framework within which it would have been possible for them to make the kind of felt connection with deep reality that they were looking for without hastening the disintegration of necessary human life-patterns.
That politics is downstream of culture is a *bold*, idealist, thesis. Just as bold would be to the materialist thesis, that culture is downstream from politics. Why should I believe either materialism or idealism? Why not believe that they both culture and politics affect each other, sometimes predictably, sometimes surprisingly?
Culture is downstream from politics, which is downstream from religion. It just happens that the first and third (seen as “progress”) are usually equalized in century 21 culture wars.
Oh, I understood the claim. I just don't know why I should believe it.
Maybe libs mainly want to be appreciated for their technical expertise, so in order to make them happy without creating huge bureaucracies for them to staff you'd have to find some non-bureaucratic environment for them in which they could be admirably technical. Church-monasteries probably served that function in the Western past.
I believe that Curtis envisions them as governing semi-autonomous cities under the dictator's watchful eye. Would it be okay if they functioned in local bureaucracies, then? The bureaucracies of different cities could compete in various ways -- building extremely tall towers or delightful parks and malls. More adventurous groups of libs could create Antarctic or sub-oceanic (or Martian or Venusian-atmospheric) colonies.
Perhaps this has been covered elsewhere, but there is a need to distinguish among the cons, the libs, and the POC tribes. Loyalty to the king would be an appropriate vehicle. Cons swear loyalty directly to the king. They are the king’s men. Tribal peoples swear loyalty through their tribe to the king. Libs do not swear loyalty.
Normal tribes would be akin to the Indian tribes in Latin America or the Phyles of Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age. They would work out special arrangements with the king to govern taxes, imports, exports, and any other important issues. Intra-tribal issues would be handled by the tribe. Inter-tribal issues would be handled by the king. Children are born either the king’s men or into a tribe. Once they are of age, they can choose their fate (much like the Amish).
The Libs are an abnormal tribe subject to more restrictions than normal tribes. They would have a higher tax burden, limited freedom of movement, no military contribution, and all cultural output would be prohibited. I expect that the libs would fracture into multiple abnormal tribes, making it easier to control them. Tribal deceit (an abnormal tribe claiming to be a normal tribe) would be dealt with harshly. Over time, some lib tribes would die away (like the Shakers) or take the oath, making them normal tribes. Only the most die hard lib tribes would remain after a few generations.
Caesar and Augustus were notable for letting their defeated enemies be self-governing and taking pains to make sure they were self-fulfilled.
"One other way that traditional cultures preserve themselves in the modern world is valves—systems that expel people who are just misfits, for all kinds of psychological reasons. Generally, these people are actually libs, and should transfer to that culture."
Kabul International Airport seems like a model valve right now.
I think the most crucial part of this is the lib-poc relationship. I think yarvin simplifies it a bit. In California especially, libs of poc heritage (libpocs) won’t be so willing to go quietly into the Tuscan lib colony. A major part of their self actualization is using their poc heritage to impress other libs, it will be very difficult to do this when they are disconnected from their genetic community. Look at the identity crisis among those libpocs who attend burning man or other art festivals. They are constantly calling attention to their oppression and how much they hate it there. Seems unlikely they will want to permanently live in a lib colony...
He would say, this is just a specific defect of our current political structure. Change the structure and it goes away.
I don't think we're talking about a subset which has a lot of difficulty adapting.
It’s not that they can’t adapt, it’s that I’m not sure they will be as easily seduced as the white libs. Libpocs will require an extra incentive...
See also the behavior of libpocs at Ivy League schools. Many such cases!
The starting thesis of this essay is refuted by the current situation in Afghanistan. The U.S. and its allies occupied it with the goal of transforming it into a generic smartphones-and-pride-flags Western democracy. The Taliban seems to have a more *specific* vision for the country...and presumably have little interest in governing the U.S. Yet those with the generic plan-for-rule seem to have been bested by partisans of exit. What am I missing?
Eh. I see what you're saying here.
But I think I can reverse the polarity here. In Afghanistan, the US never really knew what the hell it wanted to do (unless it was shovel billions of dollars to cronies, foreign and domestic, which case, mission accomplished indeed). The establishment really seemed to assume that the Taliban would just. . . stop being the Taliban? There was never any meaningful consensus about what would have constituted a meaningful set of victory conditions, much less any serious effort to accomplish such.
The Taliban, on the other hand, had very clear ideas about what constituted victory for them--kicking the US the hell out--and they ruthlessly and tirelessly pursued it.
Seen that way, the US starts to look a lot more like the old Confederacy. Yes, both the US in Afghanistan and the Confederates in the Civil War won early victories. But there didn't seem to be any follow-through towards any goal that would have ended the war. Just the hope that the other side would quit. Such plans can work, at least in theory, but only if the other side cooperates by quitting when convenient. If the other side refuses to concede, defeat seems inevitable.
The Taliban also have the background-thought of being part of an Islamic world-conquest. Maybe the USA's rulers think of liberalism as the default-condition of mankind rather than as a movement of conquest, and therefore think of themselves as politely assisting people's return to their default-condition. So, the Taliban would be mentally like the North in the US Civil War, the USA's rulers more like the South.
If the USA's rulers had thought of themselves as conquering the world for liberalism, then maybe they would have been willing to destroy the Taliban. A Warhammer-liberalism might be more successful (and fun) then a Wormtongue-liberalism.
Our rulers had a limited vision in that case, though, just as the South in the Civil War had the limited vision of going on in the old way -- while the Taliban can be seen as ultimately participating in the unlimited Islamic vision of world-conquest, just as the North in the Civil War was supposedly motivated by an unlimited vision of liberal world-conquest.
The problem is that America tried to turn the people of Afghanistan into libs. This was always bound to fail. The libs cannot even turn the cons into libs, and the cons are already libs compared to Afghans.
Early on after the invasion of Afghanistan, there was widespread support for restoring the monarchy that had fallen in a 1973. The king that was deposed back then by his scheming brother was still alive. He was reasonably well-regarded across the political spectrum because his rule was remembered fondly compared to the chaos that has been present ever since. He was willing to take back the throne.
If the Americans were smart, they would have tried to go with a constitutional monarchy style of government rather than a presidential system. If they were smart and actually gave a shit (aka if they weren't libs), they would have just given the king the country back on the condition that he cooperate to destroy Al Qaeda. History is fickle, but I have a hard time believing that this wouldn't have worked out much better. Monarchy is a natural government to that part of the world. Indeed, it is a natural government to everywhere that hasn't contracted the lib virus.
Maybe it's a natural government for Western societies because of the Christian church-state distinction but not so natural for societies such as Islamic ones and the Jewish one in which God is thought of as having laid down the details of civil law -- unless the king's a Caliph or the Messiah.
Monarchy is naturally suitable to Islam. Arguably even more so than Christianity, as the history of Europe demonstrates.
Of course the king has to be an Islamic king and govern in an Islamic way, but this is always true. Monarchy has never been absolute in the sense that the monarch had the power to radically overturn the cultural framework that legitimizes their rule.
You can lead a horse to water, but have to sacrifice the lives of foreign invaders to legitimize Democracy. Afghanistan is a perfect example of isolation induced localism, thanks to its topography, kind of similar to Switzerland. Instead of watches, chocolate and abundant banking options, you get poppies, and religious fervor.
Plan for rule is a squaring of a circle, and the accuracy of your tools to measure the right fit is completely dictated by the local population. The local population of Afghanistan suffered from the State Department's determined, optimistic Exceptionalism. They suffered even more greatly from inept DoD adventurism. Can we please just agree to leave them alone? Their actions have asked for this, we need to heed their request.
Here’s Curtis’s latest poem with line-breaks removed and the big letters at the beginnings of lines changed to small letters unless they start a sentence. I think that the Italian is the first line from Dante’s comic book about a trip through hell, purgatory, and heaven – the first bit would be the fragment "In the middle of the journey" and the second bit the complete "In the middle of the journey of my life." (Curtis's poems are kind of like "Guess what I'm thinking!" games, and the line-breaks make the the puzzle harder than it needs to be.)
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The sun is an orange ball, a Japanese flag. The hills barely visible; never mind the mountain. Nel mezzo del cammin… In a recent quarrel over a lady my daughter shouted at me, not entirely without reason – she was the better judge in the end – “I’m Hamlet! You’re treating me like Hamlet.” Which stung, but imperfectly, in the manner of the teenage taunt, almost-stabbing to the heart. No, my child, the case is clear: the bag you hold is Miranda. “These speculations sour in the sun.” If only I could wave my staff and whiff this smoke away… My island burns like a bitch but the fire is far over the mountain; a refugee, a hated man, a man who has rowed and may row again from any Milan he is found in, Nel mezzo del cammin di mi vita I find myself surrounded, choked and homebound, sunset and heavy-troubled by the ash of my old state, ash of my old lives: for “Like a beast, with his horn,” I have gone through one or three – (Nor does this displease me; who has reached such isles? I had all the luck in Milan) – it has unnaturally aged me. And old men are all pyros, impatient with a rotted world. Senility makes it easy to see the worm in every tree – the reason it needed to burn. What even is wood, but smoke begging to be set free? The air smells good – the smoke of sacred sacrifice; of the ram that was offered and delivered – what God burns was meant from the morning it was born to burn.
Libtown sounds a bit like a Mustapha Mond-style Alpha Island.
This little essay is the exact contrapositive of the 20th century: it starts slowly, but picks up steam and ends very nicely.